We have covered here the Sino-Soviet Split, Soviet Science Fiction, Tetris, 1990s shock therapy that led to Putin’s Russia (Lenin is according to Putin latest speech the complete anti-hero), and Big Computer Socialism. Now it is time to watch a social realist movie from the early Soviet period about a young teacher Yelena Kuz’mina who is sent to Siberia, or more exactly the Altai mountains to introduce socialism and to alphabetize the local population (which is evidently non-Russian speaking, altough they all seem to speak the same language). Empowerment of women, alphabetization, and education were key elements of the young Soviet state. The movie also depicts three ‘hot’ political topics at the time (or even today?!): education, technology, and the elimination of the kulaks.
Why watch this movie?
I take my cues mainly for watching this movie from the analysis of Bogdan Popa’s De-centering queer studies: Communist Sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War (Manchester University Press 2021). It is important to watch these movies that are freely available online, of course, playing them from YT still offers the platform ways to monetize, and streaming still contributes to the climate crisis we are currently in, but considering that Alone is such a low-definition, non-HD movie, I would still follow Bogdan Popa here basically echoing Boris Groys – perhaps the greatest contemporary theoretician of Soviet and post-Soviet art and theory: “Currently, socialist realism and its objects function as an aesthetic avant-garde because they are outside a circuit of cultural incorporation, or so Groys argues”. The ‘sexomarist’ detournement of Stalinist era Alone – is one of my favorite pieces from the book (before I had never seen this movie).
(The most common example of price scissors is from the Soviet Union: agricultural prices continued to fall while industrial goods prices rose)
To me, Alone is also a movie that reflects the whole dialectic and division between the countryside and the city, or of how the growth of industry and new productive forces were paid for by the peasants (in a classic Price scissors case), something that will early be a point of contention between the Soviets and their Chinese counterparts, even if initially the Chinese followed the Soviet example.
I would also recommend watching this movie in today’s context of current degrowth eco-socialism and solarpunk aesthetics that should openly embrace a communist and anti-capitalist outlook. While there is an inner debate between the eco-modernists (roughly those who still embrace the amenities of modernity for all, but are still tributary to a sort of limitless cornucopian idea of growth) and degrowth socialists (those who roughly question how Global North lifestyles are easily translatable to the Global South and also ask for a climate justice and climate reparations) this movie gives scope to what it means to actually confront the material realities and political contour to the experience of leaving the city and moving to the countryside. Many sent-down youths in China already did this, and some willingly, some forced, but in total this experience left a long impression and brought together people from different milieus, and made them face and address China’s problems, poverty and country/city divisions and make the first steps towards economic reform.
The movie critiques the residues of the market economy (NEP – New Economic Policy) in the Soviet Union that were part of the Leninist rebuild of the economy during the early days of the young Soviet state. We meet Kuz’mina, the young teacher in Moscow in an ideological setting that the socialists denounced: living alone in a single in Moscow, sleeping in a laced nightgown, easily enchanted by the symbols of comfort, window shopping or eyeing the glittering commodities. The kitchenware shop (think IKEA) is the place where one is seduced by the materiality of consumer objects. Luxury items are part of the exchange economy. >>”Like her the viewer is placed in a position of “refusing the sensory pleasure of a haptic encounter with the material” because they are encouraged to live in a different economy of [socialist] affects.>>
In Altai, Kuz’mina enters another world because she becomes a producer of things and just a consumer. In the Soviet imaginary, the local Shamanist indigenous people are shown to be “close to the labor production and the material world of objects. This tactile sensuous materiality -this involvement with actually existing communism, its programmatic productivism in terms of bodies or experiences is being bypassed in a lot of recent radical thought (see Frederic Lordon’s communism realism).
“The book [Figures] can also be cursory verging on the cavalier in its stated decision to do without any but the most oblique discussion of ‘actually-existing communism’ – which, whether we’re thinking of workers’ councils, Cuban experiments with medicine, socialist planning, or what have you, certainly harbours pertinent lessons and materials for present debate.” (Alberto Toscano’s review of Lordon’s books)
That is why it is intersting to see how in Aline the Easterners (while being fully aware of what the East holds for both Imperial and Revolutionary historiography) “grasp, cut and rub wool, and live in a world where they are part of the natural life”. Emma Widdis (from the volume below) “argues that Kuz’mina develops a different sensory relationship to objects when she moves to Altai, which is the springboard for her becoming a communist.” In a sense, Kuz’mina gets educated first, in a more fundamental way leaving back her bourgeois, individualist self, before educating the children of the region.
Darko Suvin needs no introduction probably. Altough SF authors and writers in general (no intention of dissing them as a group) tend to ignore the theory of SF studies, Darko Suvin, an ex-Yugoslav who emigrated in 1967 has been probably the single most important person responsible for getting Science Fiction recognized in Academia. After he started teaching at McGill University in Canada – others like Frederic Jameson also started taking a vivid theoretical interest in a previously disdained and minor literature (in Deleuze’s sense), so much so that the entire academic field of Utopia Studies and SF was more or less shaped by these two important Marxist critics and theoreticians. I appreciate Professor Darko Suvin’s position since he is straddling both Western and Eastern Marxist traditions in a way and also because Yugoslavia was such a special case being actually open to various directions of thought. In a sense this valuable bibliography of Soviet SF, of cosmicity starting with the post-Stalinist era and ending with the onset of the long decline and disenchantment of the 1970s and 1980s is a twilight full of starry sky and extra-planetary possibilities. Maybe even the possibility that the most precious things such as communism or socialism might be temporary, exceptional moments and that all that was more fragile than its capitalist opponents presupposed, a transient system that in our part of the world gave way to today’s “contemporary political subject is plunged into a miserable combination of neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-nationalism (not to say neofascism)” in the words of philosopher Max Penzin, and maybe “able to produce both a calming and an invigorating effect” like Evald Ilyenkov’s speculative cosmology. Some are probably not yet translated but I hope they will find a way to future readers.
There is a sense in which we are still catching up to the various deletions – schools of critical thinking and what used to be Eastern European Marxism (from the former East bloc, especially the particularly neglected array of SF authors from the former Soviet Union, that would help us explore other venues taken than the usual liberal Western canon (see the emergence of an alternative epistemology).
I do not have much to add to what Zimbabwean writer, filmmaker, and leftwing cultural critic Charles Mudede noted in his The Stranger column (this is how I basically found out about it) titled “What Is More Surreal, Boots Riley’s I’m a Virgo or Capitalism?”. Read it!
Boots Riley is another one of those directors that straddles the divide btw musical video and cinema, smuggling technologies from one media into the other with various visual styles, animation and practical effects. A the same time I wonder if it actually manages to play with instances of what Steven Shaviro has calledpost-cinematic affect a while ago. In short:
Post-Cinematic Affect is about what it feels like to live in the affluent West in the early 21st century. Specifically, it explores the structure of feeling that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities.
Post-Cinematic Affect, 2010
DIVIDE AND REBRAND
What can we add after more than 10 years? And why bother in 2023 with the “affluent West” that doesn’t give a hoot about the vast majority living on the planet (especially read Dean Baker’s recent sanguine article “The Chinese Need to Stay Poor because the United States Has Done So Much to Destroy the Planet“? Why make MARXsplaing a superpower in a world where knowledge about exploitation and anti-unionization by the Big Tech is not novelty nor is it chains: it is all widely available. I enjoyed this series like I never enjoyed any other lately, but I am also puzzled by how little it expresses of the wider concerns of a world in which we today. Is it just me or is Oakland, and California in particular – left as the only microcosm of everything everywhere? This is why I need to look what is missing or what does not fit into this patchwork.
Today it is easy to think the Euroatlantic as one single bloc (precisely because of Sweden and Finland joining NATO) but lines of demarcation are becoming clearer and clearer. The funny shitty thing is that Romania (together with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined this military alliance in 2004. This was the reinvention of this military alliance – having the former East join not just EU but a Cold War relict. The East was happy and willing. Nowadys this “security measure” does not fare well at the moment. We know that the US is awash in guns and that violence and the militarization of the police. After 9/11 War Come Home is here to stay. But now Ukraine and the whole region is bound to become a sort of Texas awash in cluster bombs, mines and weaponry. In a sense NATO was in need of a facelift, either expansion or going to the history’s “dustbin of history”. My point is that what is happening with NATO nowadays is also happening with the Big Tech nowadays. They are in bad need of a rebrading to prove their worth to their shareholders.
MUSKISM AND TOY FOUNDERS
We live in a world of founders. They dominate our mediaspace, our news, even the most extra-terrestrial spaces. They are the biggest polluters on the planet, wrecker of civilizations, SF fans and longtermism sponsors. What to make of the recent baptizing of Google into Alphabet, and Facebook into Meta or Twitter into X. Are they tired or bored with themselves?
On a larger scale, there is talk about trade wars, about decoupling and moving SC manufacturing back from ASia and dressing up evrything as “de-risking”. In the liberalized, privatized and fragmented East, in the meantime, the questioning of so-called Western values did not come out of nowhere. The East has been leading the far right and Euroskepticism wave, adopting anti-immigration policies, anti-abortion ethno-politics with Poland and Hungary being the closests examples and this should also be seen as part of the economic globalization and financialization of the planet. This brings the East closer to the US, but not primarily because of NATO integration or via military bases & black sites, but by joining the right wing culture wars from across the Altantic and their anti-woke measures.
Clearly the East is not sticking to the rules, or to the role it has been dealt by recent history. Instead of being this pacified, at the Portal of Balkans, the Milk and Honey (in a Karl May turn-of-speech) region where freedom and pacifism follows automatically from free markets, it is now producing havoc on the world markets and famine in Africa. it is bombarding its own people. It is split in a hundred nationalisms. It still does not want to get compared with the Near East, with the Syrian War or the Lybian post-Ghadafi warlordism, altough Eastern Europe (specifically Eastern Ukraine) makes everything look like a unsuccessful series of Orange Revolutions.
What is hard to accept is that the East stopped being the orphan street child glue sniffer or the problem-child of Transition years – and now appears in the Western media as either the bombarded, abused, victimized of war-crimes or the criminal hoodlum. Is the East affluent? Not really but it is a place where the ner-equivalent of the Big Tech founder is the oligarch (or the seller of SHIT in Triangle of Saddness movie), that most despicable of the plutocrats, basically the nouveau riche to the West’s old money. Yes, the CEO figure founder is also one of the most memorable villains in recent history, and he a Bezos and Musk turned vigilante, or Batman being the good capitalist. But in the end all of them are Mattel CEOs – toy figure, precious collectibles that is actually completely absurdly concentrating immense wealth and power.
BLACKOUTS IN THE WEST AND EAST
When I’m a Virgo speaks to Eastern Europes it speaks in fast foods. It is not the place of where the poor eat shitty unhealthy food, but places of luxury. After 1989 the MacDonalds and Burger Kings where received like Kings and ambassadors in the East, people of the rising middle classes enjoyed having a burger there. It was American Living – the highest standard of living in the world no?
Meanwhile the wheels have turned and the fragmented East pays back the US, inspiring the anti-woke US conservatives and crack-up capitalists. Boots Riley cannot address these things, yet we can ask why they ring closer to home? In the 1980s, basically my teenie years, in Socialist Romania, severe austerity measures where imposed in order to pay out the external debt incurred by the state in the 1970s. Blackouts where part of this and using candles or not having heating became normalized. There is a grim kind of blackout solidarity, of course not addressed by the series, but a very familiar to me and others.
After the 1989 revolutions, blackouts continued, and they even affected entire hoods at the time. They where also part and parcel of a decaying public infrastructure that could not keep up with the demand. What was evident to me at that time was that the new malls and their parking lots had electricity during the blackouts. The Blackout did not have to do with an energy crisis, with green transition or rising prices but had to do with development in some part and unequal and simultaneous underdevelopment in many others. The distribution of the blackout followed a strange map drawn by the market economy and the way infrastructures responded to various stresses.
Like Cootie, in Eastern Europe we have been fed on US goods since early childhood and have been using all sorts of clothes, mostly recycled from the West (Germany, US, Italy etc.) in my case. Nothing fits, and nothing seemed to fit for a long time. Everything had to be adopted, changes. Everything had to be refitted and customized, and the effect is often hilarious or embarassing. People where drawing their own versions of superheroes in the early 1990s (like a comics from the mountain city of Brashow with Bravman as a local hero). T-shirt with band names such as AC/DC got drawn by hand and worn because everyone secretly wanted to be part of the sports or music culture of the US. This ended up with various mismeasures, and while this whole series is about black bodies and the systemic racism of today, it is also about the feeling like a contemporary Alice in a US Capitalalaand.
After 1989, in the East (and not he East Coast) but in Eastern Europe, everything was made to feel Pantagruelic and not only in the sense of Bakthin. We started riding huge SUV, Jeeps and HUMMER cars. Cars that where bigger than our badly maintained streets. Bigger than the available parking lots, and mostly pushing a lifestyle dependent on a fossil economy that prioritised car culture over public transport, highways over biking or pedestrian walking. I also remember basketball truly arriving at our shool and breakbeat. It also arrived with the “popular kid” pressure – being popular started being important in the early 1990s and the most popular kids in the class where vying for Chicago Bulls vs LA Lakers (they also had the T-shirts). Everything started being upside down, oversized or undersized. You went to Pizza Hut to celebrate with mom and dad. Houses started being built up for luxury real estate reasons not for housing purposes. It got important to have luxurious facades, luxury elevators in run-down communist bloc trying to attract the “proper” clientelle. This brings me back to entire buildings go up and down while the CEO does not move an inch. The CEO figure in the East is actually someone who is allied with the American-Romanian University.
That being said, in order to make sense of the world we live in, maybe there is less and less sense in taking refuge from in Marvel superhero blockbuster (where you might end up being the villain), but find some sort of communal hysteria living beside and with the wacky, the mindfucked and the mad surreal absurdist wokers of Sorry To Bother You (2018) that manage to make a parody of a parody. All certitudes are left behind in this unhinged and normal abnormal world of bullshit jobs and false consciousness we live in. Including the sense and the remaingin fact that Amazon Prime has made I’m A Virgo another toy in its toy collection, an inhabitant of Amazon (sub)Prime-land that togheting with Netflix, Apple+ Disney+ making it more difficult for all of us to inhabit the world.
Here’s an incredibly – well invaluable resource (for me as a non-professional interested in philosophy and its twists & turns) that I recently discovered. It is a collaboration of researchers from two institutions: King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.
I suggest starting with the episodes on the Indian influence on Islamic and European thought as an introduction to this entire section and I will detail below why I think one should start here at the end rather than at the beginning. Even if one does not have any interests in philosophy or any prior knowledge in the Western tradition of philosophical thought – from this eps one can at least gather how stunted this reception of Indian philosophy was (and partially still is) in the West.
For good or for worse (Theofil Simenschy, M Eliade) Romanian intelligentsia has shown along the years a certain appetite for Indian philosophy, so there is a lot of various translations – even pulp and trashy ones, adapted versions and pocket versions. All this is proof of a widespread interest in extra European philosophical traditions and a diversified pop cultural exchange btw India & Romania. At the same time one should not profess any innocence in regards to this Indophilia, and regard with a certain suspicion all claims about a Romanian-Indian continuum, especially in view of the usual right-wing nativist or aryanist tendencies. That said, before 1989 and after as well, so-called anti-sectarian perspectives where banishes, a position maintained by the majority Romanian orthodox church. This is a tendency to discredit evert hing associated with Indian practices or yogic knowledge. Gurus or anything close to New Age religions is regarded as potentially harmful or condemned as ‘perversions’. Not saying there are no exceptions to the rule, yet suffice to say, nodaways in Romania (as elsewhere) – there is a thoroughly hyper-commercialized mindfulness industry catering to the needsof those afflicted by generalized burnout under capitalism. I consider quite fruitful thw para-academic come & go tracing such pop cultural influences and there’s much interest in exploring weird deviations & non orthodox practices. My bes example is Bogdan Lyphkhanu – poet friend and also a consummate collector and investigator of such spiritual Romanian- Indian (and also Spiritualist, Taoist, Tantric, Occult, including unclassifiable etc) hybrids.
For various reasons, I abstain from discussing Islamicate – Indian philosophy relations. Many Islamic authors, since the very beginning, have drawn parallels btw Sufi Islamic mystical traditions and Indian philosophical schools. Importantly, many Western impressions on Indian philosophy are much indebted to previous Persian or Arab translations (listen to this podcast).
I am ignoring this at the moment to focus on the plethora of sometimes very specialized knowledge and updates commentaries on Indian (or specifically Buddhist/Jainist sources here), sources relevant to the current debates animating much of today’s mind philosophy (mind body dualism/hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism/pancosmism, eliminativism etc).
These podcasts are definite proof that we have moved away from the various misinterpretations. A that seem in retrospect quite rudimentary, completely biased and misinformed, never able to grasp the diversity of Indian philosophical schools or engage with the conclusions of their main representatives (their historical debates, the diversity of their examples, multiplicity of perspectives, a rich and evolving conceptual vocabulary and most of all their sheer diversity). The Western reception is biased from the beginning. No matter where it hails from, we get the sense we’re being served an impoverished and caricatural version of it. Beyond the mind philosophy relevance discussed above – there is also a new interest for the idealist resources of Indian philosophy as today’s idealist philosophy gathers pace or even with those attempts to seek out a bridge between the continental and the analytic Western philosophy. There are countless other aspects including those offering a new appreciation of Indian epistemology (in the Buddhist philosophy) and so on.
With the possible exception of Gottfried W. Leibniz, almost all mentioned in this podcast (Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc) show a combination of either uncritical admiration or outright disdain for Indian philosophy (particularly its cosmology or cosmogony as in the example with the elephant sitting on top of the turtle). If they were very attentive in their analysis of ultimate questions about experience, perception, truth and limits of knowledge, or avidly debating current scientific worldviews, western philosophers were less careful about other traditions, throwing around careless generalizations. Sadly they almos constantly ignore actually existing ‘Indian philosophy’, and make their statements based on hearsay or by taking Indian philosophy as a unified stock, a single corpus, a monolithic non differentiated block. One should first recognize if possible these initial widespread positions held by practitioners of Western philosophy, so that one can appreciate its further refinement or even complete revision of what we thought we knew about Indian philosophy.
That being said – this is just just an entry point, so pls consider listening the whole section from 43 Buddhist and Jains (or earlier) to 62 Kit Patrick. Each eps has short and up-to-date Bibliography on the subjects being discussed for those interested.
there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book
I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.
I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.
Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one. Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm. Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference. The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.
In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless). We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such. He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:
Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.
Since I had the pleasure to be a small part of the Science Fiction & Communism Congress in the month of May at the American University in Blagoevgrad Bulgaria with Ion Dumitrescu (Pre, Fractalia 2019). I am thankful to Dr. Emilia Karaboeva, Ralitsa Konstantinova, and Prof. Emilia Zankina to have made it all possible. In retrospect, that year presented me with an interesting parallax (to use Karatani’s Marxist twist), before my cancer diagnosis and surgery and just after co-curating Cozzzmonautica in Yogyakarta at Lifepatch I took part in this Science Fiction congress. On one busy and tremendously (for us newcomers at least) dense Congress day, there came a moment where the voice of Darko Suvin disembodied (via Skype) spoke to us. Although there was no sight of him (he was literally unable to attend in person), he encouragingly spurned us to keep on looking ahead, to help build a healthy SF in Eastern Europe and keep wading the dark, heavy clouds of destructo-capitalism. He, as one of the foremost scholars of science fiction studies (the guy who got Jameson to read SF – as one Serbian friend said) and research into utopia and utopianism – has influenced the field as no other, giving the genre critical purpose and focus. This voice was what I remembered. Welcoming words and the whole prepping up that followed. Here are Darko Suvin’s transcribed “Theses”. A testament to his lucidity and sharpness. I managed to read them only these wintery days.
In a scathing indictment of today’s ontological supremacy (things are as they are) and for a more humble epistemology (an evolving critical knowledge), one can read his “theses” that supply us with many pathways to address current Disneyfication (Marvel-Dísney-Lucas conglomerate beast), ‘Time is Money’, Eastern Europe, militant anti-utopia and a thorough reworking and further criticism of this notion of novum – as well as of cognitive estrangement that he derived from Brecht’s theatrical (German) Verfremdungseffekt and Shlovsky’s more literary formalist perceptual-aesthetic ostranenie. Especially noteworthy are his mythical vs critical estrangement as follows:
However, epistemologically, which today means also politically, estrangement has two poles, the mythical and the critical.
Brecht provides one “ideal type” of the critical method. In it plotting proceeds by fits and starts, akin to what Eisenstein called a montage of attractions. The intervals tend to destroy illusion and to paralyze the audience’s readiness to empathize. Their purpose is to enable the spectator to adopt a critical attitude both towards the represented behavior of the play’s agents and towards the way in which this behavior is represented. It is therefore also a permanent self-criticism. This means there is in Brecht’s plays no suspense as to whether and how a goal will be reached, but instead a convergence towards increased clarification as to the nature and causes of the conditions uncovered and seen afresh; the goal is implicitly presupposed and subtending the events. To the suspense of illusionistic theatre or media this opposes astonishment at many ensuing events and the human condition they delineate, differing from the humanizing goal and ideal.
The other pole is best represented in fascist ideologies: Knut Hamsun, Ernst Jünger or Ezra Pound practiced an estrangement wedded to various proto-fascist myths, rightly identifying liberal ideologies as hypocritical and wrongly arguing for a return to simplified brutality. To take a poetically pertinent example, Ezra Pound’s powerful invocation and condemnation of usura in the Pisan Cantos is a major semantic shift or estrangement of those aspects of capitalism that the “Left” fascists were sincerely (though quite inconsequentially) spurning. However, as all such fixations on a supposed hierarchical Gemeinschaft [Community, Gr. a term that has a tradition and is generally a counterpart to Gesselschaft Gr Society] it is a cognitively sterile — or even actively misleading — estrangement: It does not make for a permanent critique and renewal but leads back to as dogmatic and pernicious certainties as in the most hidebound epochs, in a way worse than the conservative certainties it was rejecting. It spurns self-criticism as bloodless intellectualism; protofascism or full fascism is always dead certain.
Since cca 1997 Prof Darko Suvin has radically revised and revisited both his take on the history of science and of the complicit role of the novum in technoscience – which he suspects is maybe involved in labour exploitation at the core, strip-mining humans reduced (reified) to ‘human resources’ and new ways of surplus extraction. Powerful words by Suvin that also may describe our Green Transition adagio (altough ‘transition’ in Eastern Europe has the traumatic connotation of transition to capitalism/consumer society) when the car has become a liability and the global fight for the EV market is a sign of geopolitical strife:
Further, perhaps a labor-saving and nature-saving eutopian society would also need novums, but just how many? Might we not rather wish, as William Morris did, for the true novum of “an epoch of rest”? Philosophically speaking, should we not take another look at the despised Aristotelian final cause? Politically speaking, what if science is a more and more powerful engine in the irrational system of cars and highways with capitalism in the driving seat heading for a crash with all of us unwilling passengers — what are then the novums in car power and design? How can we focus on anti-gravity, or at least rolling roads, or at the very least electrical and communally shared cars —which could have existed in 1918 if the patents had not been bought up and suppressed by the automotive industry? How can we constitute a power system able to decide that there can be no freedom for suppressing people’s freedom?
He also helps one to better distinguish, in today’s “Copernican Counter-Revolution” what eutopia means, and what separates dystopia from anti-utopia:
To generalize: the ideal-type eutopia does not know the categories of profit or servitude, dystopia shows them as crazy and inhuman, anti-utopia argues how to get more profit through servitude.
And there follows a listing of traits that further define anti-utopia as almost a lack or absence and a differing genealogy of thinkers. There is an active desertification of options and possibilities enacted by mathematical instruments of financial speculation. Imagination is precluded and pre-empted (see Brian Massumi’s definition preemption) by an automated, operative logic ‘self-driven’ and feeding off conflicts:
This is an all-pervasive absence, it determines all defining traits of anti-utopia: not only the usual fake novums foreclosing radical ones, but also quantity instead of quality, closure instead of openness, fake ontology instead of modest epistemology, point-like inescapability instead of fertile traffic between past present and future, monologism instead of contradictoriness, impotent horror instead of intervening hope and indignation, cynicism instead of belief, vertical leadership and horizontal identities instead of polymorphic diversity with recall democracy, Mussolini, Carl Schmitt, and Ludwig von Mises as great ancestors instead of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J.S. Mill, and Marx.
Gloss: as seen above, the Blagoevgrad theses of Darko Suvin from 2018 require both a missing more “humble epistemology” as well as belief. He equates epistemology with politics, pointing out to what he terms the slide from (human?) critical understanding, i.e. and the conditions of this knowledge (critical philosophy) towards an ontology that looks more and more like a Social Darwinistic ‘just-so’, reducing everything (including our disposition for understanding) to a matter of bare survival. In this situation, eutopias and dystopias become a matter of “life and death”.
I agree, and yet I think this happens also because both cognition, criticism and the human bodily unknown (say your own eye movements while reading this text, etc.) are being scraped by algorithms into data points (“point like inescapability”) enriching “information profiteers”. Surveillance capitalism is the same as what in the 1990s was called “the knowledge economy” (scientific papers, patents including patenting organisms and medicine etc.), but all these unknowns that get datafied and mathematised (“quantified”) into (financial) models that strive to encompass the unknowable.
Estrangement itself like a lot of the modernist arsenal is defanged in the current weaponized climate of right-wing trolling. Of course, there is the “mythical pole” of estrangement (liberal hypocrisy being stripped down by the Fischerian right-wing realist-capitalism), but somehow all modernist devices (including good old catharsis) are now part of the shock troops of consumerism. They do not produce detachment but more and more reattachments to the ontological. This scarcity of reflexivity or the absence of self-critical and analytical thinking in our 21st c actuality is actively produced using these same modernist devices it seems. Maybe it is the second pole mentioned above, maybe it is some inherent blind spot. The present moment of fragility points toward larger “extinction” fears – like Darko Suvin’s comparison btw the complete novum of the Yucatan dinosaur extinction to the dark linings of an utterly predictable and knowable anti-utopia produced by fake novums. X-Risk opens the possibility of irremediable disappearance – both a thermodynamic as well as a socio-political way to frame why both ’emancipation and cognition’ suddenly appear as pockets to be nurtured during cooling and increasingly unfriendly global conditions, especially in the face how financial capital repackages (or denies) uncertainty while acting with total impunity and deadly certitude. At the same time “risk” should not be defined solely as uncertainty repackaged as risk (financial capitalism), but also as how Lucien Goldmann (originator of “genetic structuralism”) does in a more humanistic strain, as a “possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition”. Establishing the certainty of human survival over millions of years (like thelongtermists tend to self-employ themseleves) is what utterly condemns or subjugates the present to future needs or procreative futurism. True, uncertainty was so important for John Maynard Keynes, the originator of the modern Western welfare state, in large part as a buffer response to the anti-capitalist Soviet State, the 1917 revolution. His belief was a rising trust in pacifism after post-Imperial WWI conflagrations. In the meantime, anti-colonialism had to fight a close battle while Western welfare was somehow feeding on Global South under-development. When welfare and certainity started cracking – after a period of Keynesian militarism and warmongering, speculative finance took flight and almost triumphed spreading uncertainity all around.
Yet, not to minimize or deviate from the Blagoevgrad these, I want to point out that science fiction has been able to explore recently venues that have been closed to ‘mere’ cognition (or human minds after the Kantian catastrophe). That rare bird called human intelligence or sapience has been questioned, and discussions about sentience or the limits of sentience abound. In this movement of emancipation, there are perhaps larger and larger stakes because we have ceased to be just an insular mode of thought, but have become a part of a larger, more-than-cognitive solidarity. I take my hints from a variety of sources (pop science to even recent Star Trek series). Barring Super Intelligence revolution (fears) which are mostly renewed Cold War hype and fake novums, intelligence seems to abound for once. Most interesting authors or critical works (Adrian Tchaikovsky, Sue Burke etc) take into account what a search for an artificial ‘general intellect’ singularity seems to obscure. No singularity, but a plurality (a “polymorphic diversity”?) that grades into a more plebeian and democratic view of mental processes from the entire spectrum of possibilities and species being. This could mean either – speculating or fabulating about non-human intelligence (see Discognition by Steven Shaviro) or thinking about machines that lack consciousness, raising questions about brainless organisms such as humble slime molds, sea squirts or all the research that was done under the guise of unconventional computing. Yes, we can suffer under the realization of dwindling (under the current capitalist enclosure and ecocidal surge) cosmic pockets (islands or refuges) of cognition – yet SF is currently busy enriching and exploring an extended multiplicity of various modes of thought, emotion and sensoria, from extraterrestrial versions of speculative thinking bamboo species on other planets (Semiosis by Sue Burke) to the most bizarre and most horrifying application of eliminativist ideas or the instrumental use of certain cognitive technologies that enable one to test such theories or enact what they preach using living (definitely unwilling) human thinking subjects (such as in Neuropath by Scott R Baker).
TimeSpace Warps 