The series is about a young black man who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his fictional tales. (wiki)
I cannot add much the excellent review by Lauren Michele Jackson in the New Yorker. In spite of my own initial enthusiasm for the new takes on Lovecraft’s inheritance – I was dumbfounded by both what she aptly signals (the lack of melodrama, the lack of tension and of bi-dimensional characters), as well as the sensation (sensed by others as well it seems) that everything has to be spelled out, and that we are made an unwitting participant in a prestige piece that takes all historical struggles either as a clear given or that tries to dispel all ambiguity and supply all the answers. All the ideological problems are already marked as finished, explained or to be check-boxed. It is as if Lovecraft’s perverted sense of inchoate slimy materialism, both formless, as well as degenerative and racist, gushes out to over-write, over-describe, literally to suffocate and overload all that could be said or shown about power or class relations. It is as if the desire to actually finally film and remake black history in a more just way, and the urgency of this nowadays, ends up over-labeling and indexing all historical settings and severely limiting all outcomes, circumscribing all relationships of this series, beyond the actual segregation and racial apartheid into some sort of finished, vacuum proof product.
This said, I liked the portrayal of racist occult cop KKK cabal – and how the Lovecraftian monsters were turned against the racist cops, one thing that I badly miss happening in reality. The cabal of rich white immortalist Southerners is a good addition, but then again they all feel incredibly bi-dimensional and out of a right-wing Satanist plot proliferrated today by QAnon. That itself, might be a good lead, yet it remains undeveloped and rudimentary. A much better (comics this time) example I have in Saladin Ahmed’s and Sami Kivelä Abbot by Boom Comics – the villain being much more tangible upper class white old dude academic or even a dark web intellectual (IDW) that uses brutal occult forces to recruit and transformed the black characters into monsters. The battle over Lovecraftian Necronomicon manuscripts and the high seats of academia is much more engaging. I am not sure if flop is a good term, just because season 2 was cancelled in 2021, or because it definitely has somehow closed down some interesting and very important Lovecraftian – systemic-racism venues.
I speak thus with a certain deeper and bitter dissatisfaction, but who am I to say. Although there was so much production effort, good vfx, CGI galore, good action science, and ample classic era pulp exaggerations and body horror ontological excess – it still left a vacuum. Body swapping is an important feature of this series and it really shows the corpo-reality of it, the pain and difficulty of such a metamorphosis which I also found does not get representation in movies. The creature and monster design is just wow, and yet i am still left with the “Sundown” pilot episode as setting the scene, and being actually the best of the entire series (especially the Shoggoth design).
I feel it could well have stayed a long feature movie. There is also an attempt at K- and J-horror “Meet Me in Daegu”, with finally an impartial portrayal of the Communist side during the Korean War that is not being dehumanized or instantly relegated to the enemy side. There is also another intriguing eps with the multiverse branchings (“I am” eps), portal jumping trough a larger multiverse with various highlights of black history from Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturist imaginings, places and other times where black lives matter. This was finally one funky adventure with a black middle aged woman in the role of inter-dimensional Hippolyta – at its center!
I liked a lot of over the topness of it, the kitsch, the way everything is carnal as well as magical, the way racism is more horrific than the most horrific of Lovecraftian entities, at the same time like Michele in her review, felt actors skills and characters got reduced to just anti-racist Ghostbusters. I like the queering of it and the actors effort, yet I am left craving for something else, maybe miss a touch of that good weird fiction that has resulted in such good literary and aesthetically interesting materials (dunno why the prose of Sofia Samatar Monster Potraits comes to mind).
First much appreciation for both Phil Ford and J F Martel. I do not manage to listen to them as often as I could, but when I do, it is always a blast. That is why one needs friends (not friends-bosses or friend-unfriend dynamics as talked about in this piece. Friends to recommend and catch one looses trough a web cast to widely.
What I appreciate about their heady mix is first the way they never belittle and be dissmissive with their subjects, their topics (and their public) their humility and modesty in front of such vast subjects.
No matter how diverse or dispersed things are and rabbit holes go – they always manage to follow a certain waveform, play on certain motifs. They can combine high theory (Deleuze), avant-garde (Burroughs) with the most harrowing examples of heroin addict descriptions. They can both make a sociology of taste, follow on the strictures of Bourdieu, while at the same time catching a strong whiff of spirituality in Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, while at the same time finding religious (initial sin) groundings of Marxist critique of commodification, ideology and cultural superstructure. They can talk about the merits of secular society, while at the same time pointing towards the commodification behind new religions, prosperity gospel, as well as the sort of spiritualized practices, anthropotechnical hacks that are everywhere – from Silicon Valley to self-actualization corporate seminars. They decry the anxiety of cultural appropriation, its totalizing and too large terrain – while at the same time they weigh in on all the decontextualized, fetishized spiritualism, that leaves all the burden, the suffering out. They take the critique of Buddhism by Zizek, the Buddhist apparent integration of human universal suffering, while at the same time warning about the free style of new ironic class, the distinction proffered by hipster irony-non-irony thin line and the constant hard to learn code switching. One of my favorites is the part about friends – about Buddhas (and especially Osho’s speech on friendship!) sermon about the future master transforming into friend, never so true as in today’s corporate culture. Societies of control complete changed the rule of the game that went hand in hand with a changed definition of friendship, removed from the one inherited from Aristotle.
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Country. The series, which details the establishment of a spiritual community founded by Bhagwan Rajneesh (later called Osho) and its religious and political conflicts with its Christian neighbors, provides a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of spirituality and religion. What emerges are surprising ties between the “spiritual, not religious” attitude and class, cultural commodification, and the culture of control that pervades modern society. But they also uncover the true “wild” card at the heart of existence that spiritual movements like that of Rajneesh can never fully control, no matter how hard they try.
“The arc of black history shares an uncanny resemblance to the plot points of classic sci-fi including ‘alien’ abduction, enslavement and rebellion. It’s this unlikely relationship that provides the inspiration for Afrofuturism, the broad cultural trend that encompasses works by Jean-Michel Basquiat to Grace Jones, Solange Knowles and Sun Ra. In this film, we meet, see and hear from artists across three continents who each, in their own way, explore the Afrofuture to look at the horrors of the black past and imagine alternative futures.
The mysterious yet influential Detroit techno duo, Drexciya, take the Atlantic Ocean, a site of death and destruction during the African slave trade and reclaim it as a place of creation and beauty. Through a series of releases from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, they envisage the unborn children of enslaved pregnant women, thrown overboard during the Middle Passage to the Americas, adapting to breathe under water and thrive in a Black Atlantis. The mythos is vividly brought to life by the Drexciyan collaborator and graphic artist Abdul Qadim Haqq as a thriving, technological undersea world.
A. Qadim Haqq and Dai Satō The Book of Drexciya: Volume One
Visual artist Ellen Gallagher similarly transforms the violence of the ocean into rebirth and renewal. Her film Osedax, made with Edgar Cleijne, is an imaginative retelling of how the skeletal remains of dead whales sustain new life in the curious form of the bone-devouring worm of the title. Whereas for artist Hew Locke, as well as the ocean itself, it’s the Atlantic’s coastal fringes that inspire his world of bricolage phantoms, plucked from the ghost stories of a Guyanese childhood.
Sun Ra
The Afrofuture is perhaps most commonly imagined through the rubric of outer space, thanks in no small part to avant-garde jazz musician and poet Sun Ra. Born in the southern US in the early 20th century, Ra underwent an interplanetary conversion, claiming to have been teleported to Saturn. As with funk pioneer, George Clinton, who describes a similar close encounter with extraterrestrials, Ra’s identification with an alien presence can be read as more than simple escapism. It’s also a biting satire on the alienating experience of being black in America. For Ra, space is also an alternate destiny for black people, as the title of his 1973 Afrofuturist feature film Space is the Place insists.
Reaching beyond these fictional ‘Afronauts’ is the conceptual artist Tavares Strachan. His performance piece, Star City, Training in Six Parts, sees Strachan visit the famous Russian space centre to undergo the same rigorous – and often tortuous – training of the Cosmonauts. Strachan likens one of the exercises, which measures our capacity to withstand disorientation and gravitational stress, to his impoverished upbringing in The Bahamas.
The film concludes with an exploration of the idea of double consciousness. Coined in the early 20th century by WEB Du Bois, the influential African American sociologist, double-consciousness describes how black people in western societies see themselves twice over. Through their lived experience but also how they’re perceived within a dominant white culture.
Curator and writer Ekow Eshun traces uses of the idea through Ralph Ellison’s lauded mid-20th-century novel Invisible Man, and painter Kerry James Marshall’s image of the same title, right up to the Black Lives Matter movement. Predicated upon recordings of anti-black violence often captured through digital tech, Eshun argues these ‘expose’ a double consciousness at work, the world as experienced and seen through black eyes, laid bare for all to witness.
Other artists and commentators featured in the programme include Nuotama Frances Bodomo, Aria Dean, Ayesha Hameed, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Shabaka Hutchings, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Cauleen Smith and Greg Tate.” (watch on BBC 4 page)
spacetime coordinates: somewhere in near-future Germany
Transfer is a 2010 German science fiction/drama film directed by Damir Lukacevic.
I have seen this SF movie back when it came out. I somehow think it is still an important genre movie, and one woefully ignored I think. I did not see many reviews or many reactions to it. Maybe it is because it dealt quite early with some very difficult and sensitive areas: corpo-reality (Manuela Rossini), class, race, gender, refugees, rising inequality, poverty, and a rapidly aging population, things that are getting more traction outside of the immortalist/transhumanist frame etc
As in the best of SF – it is not just a riff on existing technologies, it takes actually existing tendencies and latent conflicts (even philosophical body mind issues), social tensions and pushes them further to their limits and beyond. Claire Colebrook has been one of the most incisive critique of the posthuman turn, or the new ultrahumanism of transhumanism and why the ‘Anthropocene’ starts from a rather parochial ‘anthropos’ where humanity is actually just standing for “an affluent, urban, Western lifestyle.” Kathryn Hayles has identified how key values of liberal-humanist ideology have survived the transhumanist transfer – and how such a technologically empowered ‘uber-humanism’, a kind of evil twin to ‘enlightened’ critical posthumanism. There is the blaring fact of power fantasies of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity theory that express an upgraded neo-Cartesian desire to transcend the body – the common trope of uploaded minds perhaps exemplified best in Transcendence (2017) movie. The durability of the technological forms of embodiment are always made at the expense of relegating “the vulnerable physical body […] [to the] allienum.”
I have seen Transfer quite a while ago, so it is not very fresh in my mind, but it struck a chord back then, and I don’t want risk forgetting or ignoring its role. The possibility to transfer a part of you – a mental of you that somehow gets neurally transferred into another (younger, more ‘alive’) body is a long been a staple of SF, in cyberpunk and in particular in biopunk’s more biotechnological or neuropolitical iterations of dystopia. Mind transfer was explored at large in the 2002 Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (as well as in the eponymous series loosely based on it), as well as the follow-ups to that – Broken Angels and Woken Furies who feature the same Takeshi Lev Kovacs, an ex-mercenary recruited to solve a series of crimes and abuses by the rich of the 26th century. Altered Carbon takes this transfer into new bodies called ‘sleeves’ using cortical stacks implanted in their vertebral column to record their consciousness. More importantly this sleeving or even storage of minds and experiences is not neutral, and the body is not just a residue, a supplement. This is turn makes possible that re-sleeving, using this prior backup is always quite complicated not just a one off clean process. There is also the possibility of torture at the level unforseen by mere one time one body identities. Once technologically stored, a future prisoner can be kept for an indefinite period, as well as tortured possibility in this digital virtual world. without bodily endurance limits.
The dream of upraded transfer is familiar to most transhumanist versions of Californian ideology type of Singularity, with the possibility of mind upload as one of the most salient or expected beneficial results of such a technological rapture. The way ‘mind uploads’ are presented and described by Singularitarians or their futuristic brethren is quite naive and almost a direct extension of their constant talk about extending a ‘faster’ capitalist neo-liberal (their business model obsession) into the future. Such post-Singularity and its VC proponents seems to promise a technological revolution, while at the same time being socially, economically and even philosophically quite drab and regressive. It literally is a badly thought out SF, a very un-reflexive and vengeful-nerd attitude to it, leaving everybody (who pissed you off) back and especially those cannot afford the transfer – being condemned to ’embodiment’ and ‘matter’. For Altered Carbon as well as for Damir Lukacevic’s Transfer the ability to jump bodies is not just a technological fix or a result in current advances of neuro- surgery, neural networks, cognitive sciences, but primarily a question of resources, or demand and offer and rigged economic systems. In Transfer African refugees Sarah and Apolain have their own agendas, and they stake their bodies and their minds as temporary storage – in the hope of making a better life for themselves or their children, or even just briefly escaping the horrors and violence of back home.
There is the constant reminder that these mind uploads and mind transfers do not come easy but at a price or a primium price, and that the technoscientific has fused completly with the corporate
What becomes more clear by the day is that a lot of former state life support system, such as health care and welfare (pension funds), even in the rare cases they did not get dismantled (as in the former East) or privatized by neoliberal shock therapy, have been heavily invested in some of the ecological, climatic and military disasters the world is full of. Maybe a generations ago, one would completely ignore such webs of interrelations and co-depedencies. In the UK for exemple, council worker pensions were heavily invested in military-industrial complex arm dealer and supplying the conflicts of this world. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was also partially involved in getting badly needed ‘hard currency’ by any means – sometimes joining the world market of art and arms deals. Even more biological products (one would say cybergothic or biopunk!) such as the blood supply of their own citizens where exchanged for hard cash from their Western enemies in the 1980s, during the last years of actually existing Socialism. Apparently blood trade was the most important source of revenue of unscheduled foreign currency for the health sector in East Germany.
Only recently, Norwegian government’s pension fund (the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund!) sold its last investments in fossil fuel companies. There is a non-metaphoric quite perverse and quite hard to follow financial trail between the investments in a profitable future of an ageing Western (or global North) population and fueling the instability of the Global South as well as the larger ecological depredations and diminution of their children’s or grandchildren’s future. The bad dystopian quality of such news – makes the Western technological civilization responsible for dealing in the most profitable things: fossil fuels and arms deals at the expense of all others. Extinction and future security be damned – lets just secure the shareholder investments! Such security of funds – is now directly and causally efficient in a larger insecurity and lack of resources of a future that is denied to a majority of others. Few SF movies have addressed this directly at the levels of bodies and Transfer is one of those few. Mind transfer are from the start very unequal, or as unequal as the financial flows of investments. Mind transfers follow lets say other flows of abstract, ‘immaterial’ resources that are backed by exploitation and environmental depredation. It is important to understand how such transfer are also about time, about calculated lived time and how this gets curtailed under current capitalist efficiency metrics and ability to quantify aspects that where previously out of the range of capital.
An availability of black African bodies or refugee bodies – makes them prey to biomedical interests or Big Pharma experimentation, even if for mostly benign of circumstances, let’s say with even the best of old, sick white clients. The white couple’s minds that temporarily inhabit these black bodies for 20 h out of 24 h are somehow lost in their own memories and nostalgia and somehow their mental lives preclude or have precedence over the minds (and affects) of their hosts. Their African hosts have just 4 h at their disposal to be themselves. This is a very literal example of LTV (labour theory of value), yet here the ncessary time is just the necessary time that you are you and have one’s own body at disposal. The body is staked and becomes borrowed by well to do owners of minds that can afford in their old age such transfers and are motivated enough by their personal histories, class and cultural background, ethics, attachments etc to even start considering inhabiting these ‘fresh others’. Life is not being sucked out vampirically from these available black bodies, yet they are diurnal vehicles of two Western minds, of a literalized ‘double consciousness’. Their own and their masters (employers) consciousness is located in the same body, quite close to what W. E. Burghardt Du Bois had in mind in his anticipative critique, even before such technologies where dreamt of. Also we are taking about some form of renewable energy – not the old lifeforce, but the lived experience of these people. Black bodies have also been an image of white ‘lust’, quite differently invested with libidinal energies. These is also made pulp – clear (somehow much to clear and spelled out) in the recent Lovecraft Country series where there is a back and forth shape-shifting (as well as gender shifting) from white women into white men and from black women bodies to white women bodies. We are not talking about the right-wing misgenation narratives of degeneracy and eugenics, but of black refugee bodies as the salvation of a Western aging world. Black bodies are presented iconically and in advertising as fit, sporty, wild, etc as a place of Western projection, white desires and fears. Black Marxism has been key in giving due importance to this transaltlanic trade, its vertebral centrality at the core of incipient Agricultural and Industrial Revolution. The Transatlantic Slave Trade – has been violently and forcefully already physically transferring bodies of already debased or abjected (non)humanity. Biopunk’s transference of minds or renewal of bodies has to always deal with this history that is so present in Afrofuturist SF. The transatlantic Trade was a first Atlantic transfer – that reduced and commodified these enslaved populations trough a brutal regime of free trade transfers and circulation by effectively transforming them into disposable things and mere disposable bodies (many have died being transported under horrific conditions and then thrown overboard). The massive tragedy of the refugee crisis, transiting under terrible, inhuman conditions Mediterranean also speaks about transfers and bodily displacement and annihilation. Only this year more than 1000 people have died trying to reach European shores and this is also a continuation and a reminder that high-tech technological “transfer” is only one side of the coin, that cannot detach other forms of bodily exploitation from their underlying historical factors.
This is also the pitfall of an easy – occupation, especially in a situation of inequality, where all purpose, all intentionally is somehow subsumed to the Western individualized, monadic and agential technosubject. Such total apathy and total occupation is always impossible. The total dream of perfect transfer is based on the fallacy that a person would reside just in one’s own dead, brain or be defined only as a narrow yet ruling consciousness. To restrict interior experience only to conscious experience is blaring mistake and one that has been repeatedly made in the history of Western philosophy from Descartes to Kant. The privileging of mind over matter has been slowly collapsing in the face of a “strange or weird sort of realism”(Levy Bryant) that admits the radical unkownability of things and way every entity, from human bodies to insect swarms to bacteria to comets exists regardless of whether one bothers to think about them or not. Consciousness is indeed something quite peculiar and special, but in no way essential (as in the ‘hard problem of consciousness‘). Consciousness is differing from many other, more diffuse, and more graded non-human sentient experiences and is just one of widely distributed modes of thought and feeling developed and existing all around us. It is important to emphasize that the difference is only in degree, not in kind. A proper evolutionary account of human consciousness has to take this wide spectrum of sentience seriously. Transfer is not neutral to its substrate, nor is it about the perfectibility of transfer. It gathers momentum after a slow burn for the possibility that cross-overs of all sorts are happening, nothing staying the same or isolated (as just body or minds). Consciousness, POW, perspectives get changed as they get transferred, expanded and dilated by these literal in’s and out’s of each other’s embodied experiences.
Nothing could be more bizarre as this picnic that seems to get closer to Get Out, although getting out is actually always linked with someone other getting in
Unintended pregnancies are some of the worst cases of breeder culture SF, where everybody stumbles into it accidentally, especially in places where it is widely available. Such accident always feel scripted. Apart from this emplotment fluke that is not a fluke, there is also the possibility that the older white women actually enjoys her surrogate bodies pregnancy. Sarah the real cum surrogate mom realizes that she will be just a ‘womb’ and somehow giving her baby to adoption is the only choice. Although it is just starting, here the terms of appropriation are all biocultural – in a patriarchal capitalist society where women’s bodies from the Global South are already carrying out this reproductive labour in the name of white ‘low natality’ rich others. Full Surrogacy Now! starts with the current situation but asks for reproductive equality and justice. Cultural appropriation (ex white rap) somehow precludes the fact that identity politics goes and in hand with a rapid commodification (like in the nativist Nike logos) of the ‘native’ or or the ‘indigenous’. Indigenous knownledges that gets deleted at the same time as more material, biological forms of biocapital get indexed and turned into ‘green gold’. In biopunk such as Paolo Bacigalupi Wind Up Girl – follows these constant and hard to represent transfer of seeds, cultivars, genes, bodies, hybrids – mined and escaping from the agroindustry biotech labs. as well as traded by biohackers that are in a constant search for seeds, breeds and long lost or potentially valuable and forgotten heirlooms cultivars.
Bodies and their feelings (good or bad) also get rapidly appropriated in this biopunk world of genetic copyrighting and bio hunting. This is why movies such as Transfer are needed in order to follow up on those consequences and think the unthinkable of unlivable situations. Not sure how the movie ends, I would have to see it one more time, yet according to other reviewers, it appears to be another bad deal in the sense that the African parents are actually remunerated with just 1% for their troubles.
spacetime coordinates: in the not too distant-future of a devastated Earth
Tides (also known as The Colony) is a 2021 German-Swiss science fictionthriller film directed and written by Tim Fehlbaum. In the not too-distant future: after a global catastrophe has wiped out nearly all of humanity on Earth, Blake, an elite astronaut from Space Colony Kepler. must make a decision that will seal the fate of the people on both planets.(wiki)
Tides is a small independent European SF – that I have seen together with the recently released Settlers. Very different from Settlers that plays on a future biodome Mars that feels like a Marstern (?) that tips it hat over to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, rather than Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star. Nevertheless they both exbit a contemporary preoccupation, not to say anxiety around what Dominic Pettman has termed Peak Libido or what Rebekah Sheldon identified as a common thread in recent SF as “The Child to Come” of Generation Anthropocene.
Demographic fears, low fertility etc are part of contemporary ‘breeder culture’ baggage that sees to be hailed along movies as different as Interstellar (2014) and Children of Men (2006). It is also part of the usual pro-Family values propaganda of an unlikely alliance between free market warriors and traditionalists. I am not saying they endorse this way of thinking, although breeder culture is to be found everywhere from Ikea adverts to political campaigns. SF does what it does best if it keeps receiving all of these vibrations yet it splits the spectrum, trying out other outcomes, changing conclusions, sometimes against the premises or the initial (even unspecified) presuppositions.
Demographic fears coupled with anti-immigrant sentiments, homophobia, transphobia and ethno-politics, has become a familiar tune that seems to afflict and flare up nationalistic fervor diverting attention from unsolved wide income disparties, lack of opportunities, dissatisfaction with working conditions. unemployment or climate change. Restarting or jumping back into productivity mood has been difficult for many after having their time back after so much lack of time and probably old fears and insecurities abound. Again I want to emphasize, I do not dismiss the reality of these concerns and fears, considering just that they do not go wide enough, or comprehensive enough. ‘Replacement’ fears and discussions online are easy to ridicule or to join into, there virality is demonstrated, what is more difficult to grasp is their underlying, unspoken larger concerns or what is left out of them. There is a sense in which it is good to take seriously the idea that the planet has an “expiration date”. The simple, banal, very basic observation, that translates from products onto planetary matters and towards our overall growing obsolescence is far from being just cursory or trivial matter. Yet the conjunction btw commodities, unstoppable productivity, climate trouble, job making and job killing, entire failed cities, genomic-capitalist intertwining etc seems to escape our SF imaginary, only then entering only once it is SF entering the bounds of what cannot happen yet happens.
The rapid and growing aging population and what is seen as a failure to reproduce (reproduction of the rapidly obsoleted workforce!) seems to take precedence as a major obsession all around the so-called developed world. Increased technological prowess, high living standards and higher education is coupled with lower reproduction rates and thus becomes always an easy propaganda tool banded about or inserted into conspiracy materials that energize right-wing ‘replacement’ paranoia. QAnon pedophilia rings built on older antisemitic conspiracy memes derived from a poor understanding of kosher traditions as well as blood symbolism add to that. Children are being suddenly invested with this double sacrificial value and also hope for a confiscated future. Children become the ultimate object of vulnerability and globalist abuse. What is evident is that they are suddenly in opposition with older interests, with entire generation that seem to have spent the future’s chances beforehand. Not only reproduction is at stake, but children constant status as sacrificial lambs, as the primary target of satanist plots and elite perversion. It is intersting this shift from the 1970s fear that we are eating our old (in 1973 Soylent Green) to the current children being the hidden cost behind what we see around (just think of 2013 Snowpiercer). In a sense we seem to have reverted to the Victorian fears about the early workforce that did not magically disappear but was moved out of sight in sweatshops all over the world. This also obsession with satanist rings pastes over some of the most demonic and atrocious attempts at forced urbanization, brutal nation-making and colonial education projects, including the criminal ineptitude and squalor of modern civilizing projects in the ‘New World’ that targeted mostly indigenous children. What is also new is also China’s joining the aging trend, and the associated demographic fears from this powerhouse of the world, made it life its One Child Policy and start pushing cash for families with more kids.
Firstly a few things on the aesthetics of Tides – it is quite a beautiful cinematography, a sort blueish extended beach world (North Sea? Reminded me of Kiel or Gdansk?). Earth is seen mostly as abandoned harbors, inundated coast. Imagine all the hubs of international maritime trade and supply chains of today being now derelict places populated by the newly formed societies that have reverted to small, scattered, scavenger gatherer-fishermen tribalism. My only critique is that somehow these maritime folk do not really appear plausible in the movie. Where is the whole range of adaptations of real Sea Nomands or Sea Gypsy austronesian, Han or Indian etc people? These existing people together exhibit an incredible much more diverse range of architectures, lives and a much more tight connection with water that is far more convincing somehow (see Man on the Rim 1988). The mudflats like the mangrove are a very specific and hugely important route of migration for contemporary maritime populations as well as for older prehistoric peoples. Yet, I appreciate the effort in building and suggesting such a clific future post-climate change world.
That being said, the vast horizon, the light and the misty, rusty musty atmosphere of the place transports you out there among the new tribalism of future Earth. These tribes find themselves in a neo-colonial situation – as the technologically advanced returnees from the elite ruling class colonies return to Earth, take over and start educating and ‘civilizing’ the remains of woman/mankind. This top down attitude never worked out. Earth seems to miraculously bring back their fertility and so secretly the elite explorers start siring their own offspring in relative secrecy before giving information back to their home colony. This brings to me several recent scandals, as the 2018 Oxfam sex exploitation scandals in Haiti after the devastating earthquake and a dark history of international aid charities. The capitalist charitable spirit is also plagued by a certain Malthusian preference and bias in practice. Availability to contraception methods is vital all over the world, yet Population Bomb fears generally end up in targeted population controls, state-sponsored forced sterilization campaigns and skewed family planning (aptly described by Mytheli Sreenivas), that contrary to the Western ‘replacement’ conspiracies, do not target the Global North, but take underdeveloped and unprotected areas of the world as their terrain for clinical trials or as lop-sided charitable action.
The transhumanist elites that settled on an off-world colony become sterile and cannot reproduce (mysteriously) after some sort of Peak Libido, seemingly also because they have been using some dubious eugenics or genetic screening methods. Negative biopolitics is a boring staple of SF dystopia (Brave New World, GATTACA etc), yet here the elites have to deal with the limits of their technology (bodies?) and with material consequences of their action. Having a small gene pool was never a good idea and a presumably grooming for an elite genome speaks about how intimately genomics has been subsumed into the abstractions of capital (as detailed by Eugene Thacker in Global Genome).
The expedition on Earth crash lands and the surviving female pilot gets trapped into local power plays and skirmishes that turn out to be not conflicts over resources but conflicts over demographic politics,kidnapping children and abusing (or at least trying to control) ‘native’ terrestrial women. The colonist men’s access and ultimate dependence on local women’s reproductive cycles seems to drive a lot of current right-wing pro-Family propaganda. So this SF, in its small wy is trying to think trough some of these questions. Tides strives for honesty and non-masculinist take on things, outing the hypocrisy behind such selfish concerns, uncovering a masculinist dogma that somehow got embedded into the laws and cultural customs of Maid’s Tale as well (and similar real-life examples). That is whenever women get reduced to just ‘mobile wombs’. Extinction and X-Risk as such, and as more probable and calculable risk is an absent topic somehow, seemingly drowned by the movie’s Elites own self-preservationist and classist modus.
Tides also combines something like the old The Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now by Joseph Conrad with It Is Hard to Be a God concerns over interventionism by Strugatsky Brothers, yet it is still an interesting mix, managing to steer as along a difficult return to future Earth.
This week’s podcast is “Objects and Values of Labor in Socialist Hungary,” the second in REEES Fall Series Socialism: Past, Present, and Future.
Guest:
Martha Lampland is a Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She’s the author of two books The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary and The Value of Labor. The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956 both published by the University of Chicago Press.
In short, i found extremely valuable this granular analysis of ways to calculate, measure and valorize labor in Hungary, altough I do not agree on all accounts, I consider this anthropological study of longue duree agrarian trends very enlightening. Thanks to the anonymous suggestion of DS for their generous link sharing. Beside her field work in and around the transitional period towards market economy from planned economy in Hungary, her emphasis on the processual as different from merely historical approach I found fundamental. Answering the Why by How and finding out not just how things come to pass, but how things transform into something else. She links two very different transition points – the move towards Stalinism in late 40s Hungary and the transition towards market economy after 1989. None where quick, none where clean brakes and she makes them part of a larger modernist project of rationalization and efficiency that crosses ideological barriers or theories of labour. She traces such increasing commodification to the early big landowners, their increasing entry into world markets where they had to start measuring closer and closer how could be optimized in order to stay competitive. These developments get hauled during collectivization and scientific management technics that ironically are easier to study in the former East than West. Socialism is still an integral part of the modernist project. She also talks about ‘caloric money’, or food intake that is payed during the war in relation to the calculated amount of labour. The factories dossiers in Chicago or Detroit are much harder to research since they are private institutions, so the way scientific management was implemented remains opaque.
Value and labour theory of value (Marxist ltv) are separate things that I am wrapping my head around. Value theory or importance is central to William James, as well as Whitehead if I get that, although they have a different, more naturalistic, situational (with cosmological implications) understanding of value that does not get resumed under human economic systems. Yet value inside the organismic thought is deeply relational, is a result of webs of interactions happening in time like in Marxism (what Marx called socially necessary labor time). The two cultural and social necessary labor time should be separated and usually social turns out to be cultural on certain accounts. The radical empiricism of James, his contribution to philosophy entails a very different value theory, a non-calculative value, where entire organisms (think of leaves, flowers etc) are expressions of valuation or expressions of processes of valorization, of what is of importance for that plant, mushroom, bug, of what is important for that particular organism at that particular moment in time, without necessarily accounting or closing in on it. In fact Whitehead’s theory of value (he as a professional mathematician) is situational it depends and is part and partial to the concreteness of an unfolding situation. In his metaphysics value occupies a central place – both in ethics and aesthetics (of which ethics is just a small subset). For him ‘intensity’ is most probably the only one variable that we can gauge experience with.
Martha Lampland also mentions a book – about labor value in different European schools of thought (see below). In fact she traces the genealogy of LTV to a specific German strain and further to Betriebswissenschaftlehre a particular culturally defined way in which labour was valorized in German speaking countries as opposed to the English or American school of commodifying or measuring labour. In fact this cultural analysis of conceptual context traces Marx’s understanding to the German way of understanding or measuring labour in terms of energy, of thermodynamics which brings me to the Natural Philosophers and the way dynamic powers are foregrounded. Inversely in other traditions of valorizing labor such as the Anglo-American, labour is a product, it is focused on the finite product, the finite objects. Even if they had the same technologies or competed in the same markets, these two departures show how important various (national) cultural context are in shaping economic concepts or the very categories of economic life.
Gibney’s style is quite gonzo, yet also influenced by the Bunuel The Exterminating Angel approach that refuses a reductionist, simple analytical perspective and offers a more experiential one. I am tempted to say that pain -and tremendous suffering cannot be just measured – especially when it’s about the left behind & especially since it exists as such a vast scale. Pain has been coupled with blackouts with all those images of unknown worn-out people that rescuers just try to revive or try to inject in order activate their bodies again and again. It is impossibly sad but also important to face this reality. Probably this will be the definitive documentary on Big Pharma and specifically the so-called pain epidemic in the US. It is really a close look at how things got out of hand and how the slow creep of ever more powerful and addictive pills got legally distributed, prescribed and paid by health insurance companies producing some of the most successful IPOs at the stock market and undoubtedly the profitable businesses on this planet. One cannot ever ever imagine the level of craziness and impetus of pushing (better said dealing as in drug dealing) that 21st century Pharma has revved up. There is infinite growth and there is infinite painkiller growth.
First importantly to understand that initially what seemed a good solution – a transition from traditional very brutal mental health therapy in the 1950s – shock treatment and lobotomy regulars in asylums at the time to a more humane, chemical (also say alchemical in tune with the Alchemical Cookbook movie) had much to offer. What started as finding a viable & more effective pain relief for terminal cancer patients that suffered from chronic (or constant) pain – that lead to some groundbreaking discoveries such as long release/extended release medicine ended up being readily available pipeline for anyone ache or no ache, with terrible consequences for the everbody. The 4h long investigation details the way regulatory institutions and a few health professionals strove without much success to warn everybody, shut down producers and try and bring health justice to the people that have been overwhelmingly blamed (the fault lies with you the patient, the addict, the lab rat). Many died because of this readily available and very profitable pill production. Since the developement of anestethics, there has been huge resistance, generally unjustified since doctors really believed patients should suffer or that bodies get purged by suffering – yet the current sitution is at the opposite pole. Pain has been transformed into No 1 enemy, entire clinics, methodologies, pain scale assesssments and pain lecture circuits (including lobbies & pain clinics) have been mushrooming. The result was exponential, the more available the more potent these pills became. Also big ignorance, or willful ignorance to what was happening not only in the private industry labs but also on the streets, the way ppl started circumventing, trafficking and how addicts in turn organizing their own DIY rings and local networks. The reality is much worse than the largely dystopian and conservative vision of Brave New World – in that pharmocracy is still largely highly patented full of patent trolls with no R&D investment.Oxy and the rest did encourage a maintenance of status quo, yet with no equilibrium steady state in view but a continuous disequilibrium, of heaped vulnerabilities latched on and gamed by systems that rarely recompose or manage to protect a majority smashed by decades of neoliberal depredation and legislative loopholes.
What is important is that is also makes clear that this is just one sequence of the story – of opiates and traditional opiate derivatives from poppy that was grown since antiquity. Once industrialized and processed opium became a weapon to open up new markets and balance out imperial trade deficits, most famously and disastrously (for China) during the Opium Wars it became an essential part of modern medicine. Those wars that European imperial powers forced on others in order to make them accept the very lucrative opium traffic in exchange for silver bullion had huge consequences. Generally when the Opioid crisis is mentioned, there is a sort of amnesia regarding the laissez faire economics and open door policies that basically got millions of Chinese addicted to opium traded by the British from the Indian Raj. China tried to fight and destroy these shippments of drugs, but the result was war and gunboat politics as well as territorial concessions by the Chinese, a shameful situation that lasted till 1990s in the case of HK.
One memorable aspect is the whole sales aspect of Pharma (Perdue or otherwise), in my experience one of the most surreal and most brash examples of marketing anywhere, in any industry, including tobacco or arms deals. There is this sequence of training videos for internal use – tactics destined for sales reps ob hip hop rap lyrics, aimed at those that are supposed to convince doctors trough any means (including honey traps or regular bribes etc) that they should continue over-prescribing or increase the dosage. It almost reminded me of Bulgakov based movie Morphineby Aleksei Balabanov with the slowly depedent provincial doctor in Siberia increasing his dosage in order to keep others supplied and face the horrible situation. This in turn has been feeding other more potent drugs in a feedback loop that also ramped up heroin use addiction. The whole is just the alchemy of hell that somehow manages to inundate all sectors, all ages and all problems, especially the Mid West section, former mining towns, rust belt, Appalachia etc
Nothing is a conspiracy because, as always legislation seems to be written in collusion with the makers, where Pharma representatives meet in restaurants with FDA to draft laws around the distribution and safety of these medication. Emails and papers made public speak volumes, yet they always arrive too late. There is also the important art collecting and philantropic aspect of the Sackler family (sponsors of Tate, Smithsonia, Museum of Natural History etc Guggenheim), that denied all responsibility. What I like about Gibney that he does not focus or zoom in just on the founders, of the particular details of the Sackler clan, but takes a broad look into lots of other corners and examples that are not so easy to tie down. Interestingly (for me) is the emphasis on “passion”- in the sense that it truly seems to be a some sort of addiction going on with the founders or CEOs as well. It is easy to demonize Pfizer and just latch onto colorful vaxxer imagination, but it is harder to represent or imagine the vast legal production and pill mill explosion that does not need a virus or an epidemic, or CDC approval, only just incentives by vast amounts of in-flowing money and expansion from cancer patients into new territories and unfettered free access to new bodies.
Everything what they make is with “passion”, and the quote from Sackler Sr about Art and Medicine I find magical in its imbecile purity and mantra like appearance. It has lots of insiders talking, sales reps that where scapegoated and somehow spilled over all that information about whole logic (dare I call it corporate philosophy), of how things actually worked in practice not just on paper. How did this long term persuasion exercise continue and how distributed it got till the end or how hard it is to actually separate state institutions from private interests. Gibney does not exculpate the Sacklers, yet he zooms in order to widen the net and this I appreciate. Revolving doors, people joining the enemy camp happen all the time, at the same time, there is also some sort of permanent watchdogs of the industry, there is also enduring scrutiny by people who are not anti-science or anti-medicine or anti- pills per se, but regular almost barfoot (like the Chinese countryside dr) health soldiers, local family doctors or ex DEA employees on a crusade against Big Pharma. Like always corporation prefer to settle out of court, pay fines (that are merely symbolic in most cases) and never admit wrongdoing.
TimeSpace Warps 