spacetime coordinates: centuries in the future after robots of Panga gained self-awareness laid down their tools, and wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.
read here an article about hopepunk and the works of Becky Chambers in Wired from 2021
There should always be room for works that inspire a glimmer of hope in dark times and also philosophical works that work out an important distance from the usual collapsology that radically compresses everything into an endless present.
That said, there is nothing more obnoxious than the constant appeals to some overrated kind of ‘hope’ as a panacea for all the world’s troublesor the on the thing that saves the day. The recent Star Wars movies have been constantly bombarding everything with ‘keeping up the hope’ and keeping hopeful no matter what. The inverse of suffering under this imposed hopefulness (Laurent Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’) is also allowing the thought that things might go awfully wrong. Being hopeless is almost like a double blow – it stigmatizes and blames those that do not jump or do not give full support in the name of cause (any cause) plus they get labeled as hopeless themselves. Your no hope is responsible for your own ensuing failures – according to a logic that also blames the poor for being poor. Relentless and required hope animates much of ‘positive thinking’ mind over matter dualism in the US. Initially, a very important movement of the 19th and 20th century that was associated with many other good ideas actionist, a motivational credo (without the toxic baggage of today) is meant self-improvment, self-determination, the example, propaganda of the deed, women’s rights, the self-education of workers clubs into the new natural sciences and a new body and new health consciousness and imminent liberation. Some of these visions also came pre-packaged with fears of a ‘degenerationist’ Western imaginary that somehow railed under the ills of civilisation and the fear of assertive others, mostly of non-white, non-European, formerly subjugated or colonial. This belief in a hopeful, more humane world was not reserved or limited to the Western world in any sense. The voluntaristic strain of the 20th c took many forms and we could even include the mid- century Maoist momentum during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. A history that is not over. Even if some of the Maoist excess took the form of a so-called war on nature – with disastrous effects, while it persecuted and killed many and while have horrific experiences – even in its failures it mediated a a re-calibrated China, it was historically shaped its aversions, debates and future gradual te ‘opening’ towards.
It is essential that many important critics and theoreticians of capital – such as Ernst Bloch have carefully elaborated all their lives around concepts of utopia, of the not-yet-here, of the unfinished, the still-to-be-achieved emancipatory reality. This is because in some fundamental way – in the major works of Marx and Engels there is no detailed description (other than classless society). Some of the most important theoreticians of science fiction (Frederic Jameson and Darko Suvin) always returned to Utopia in their theorizations of this genre, and how that is bound to a liveable and better world. Others have taken other paths (such a as Guy Lardreau which I am currently reading).
One should consider Becky Chamber and the hopepunk subgenre as an interesting and important addition to this continuing dialogue that builds on an already existing utopian corpus, one that is not just about technophile visions and ‘rapture of the nerds‘ (as Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross put it). At the same time as good friend Otaku Bogdan told me – there is Kogonada’s film After Yang (adapted from a story by A Weinstein) about technobeings and cloning, and and its subtle way of embedding ‘beauty’ everywhere and even a hint of techno-fascism. In complete contrast with how Terminator movies imagined our future, the fact is that today’s techno-capitalism does not show its horrific face but is bending, mutating oppression with a streamlined smooth ‘smart’ wireless coating. At the same time – in spite of this eternal present IKEA anti-utopia (it can never get better than this), one should understand that every age and every culture on the planet had its dreams of a better world, and that includes the world of plenty in Neolithic peasant utopias, or the religious schismatic and urban philosophical utopias and eventually the social utopias. So it is no wonder Becky Chamber dwelves with great care into the Zen tradition and particularly the highly developed and ritualized tea ceremony as this also speaks to a certain way about today’s cracked and fragile world (she is also a lover of all sorts of teas from what I understand and this is reflected in her books). I also appreciate the fact that she published her work with no DRM restrictions.
TimeSpace Warps 