Archive 81 is an American horror streaming television series developed by Rebecca Sonnenshine. The series is based on the podcast of the same name, about researchers cataloging the video archive of a missing filmmaker. It stars Mamoudou Athie and Dina Shihabi in leading roles. The series was released on January 14, 2022 on Netflix. (wiki)
Tag: science & technology
2027 -The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan (book 2017)
I very recently (this year) discovered the following study and this discovery has made me very happy – indeed it has brought me back full circle to other pursuits I have followed these last years. It has been a daunting but also incredibly satisfying and slow-moving adventure to unravel Whitehead’s organic philosophy year by year. I have read ANW in German, English and Romanian and I am grateful to these translators and editors and popularizers of his works. I am thankful for all those that have listened to and communicated on the margins my continuing yet uneven advances – Gabi, Julia, Nae, Felix, Akira, amongst others. This post deals only in its end section with the above mentioned book in trying to add more context to A N Whitehead’s process philosophy and panpsychism. In the end I point out why I think The Outward Mind adds (for me) a few important missing ingredients that allow for much larger historical width.
check the original on Goodreads blog
Historical Gradient
There is a sense A N Whitehead is always historically aware of the philosophical precedents of what he coins ‘organic philosophy’ (be is Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza or Hume and Kant) authors he mentions repeatedly and often quotes, even as he makes clear one has to read them against their own conclusions and their (later) systematized traditions.
Whitehead makes sure he can always rescue and scavenge significant bits – odd turns of phrases that he transforms into something significant against the intentions of their authors. He picks up on strange discontinuities, missteps or non-systematic intuitions in the well known works of all these named predecessors which are not actually his direct predecessors in fact, nor is he a direct succesor. In Science in the Modern World (1925) he jumps directly to a phrase from the founder of scientific method – Francis Bacon(1561 – 1626). These remote references are indirectly shaping up his own organic philosophy almost by what they are not saying, and only because he makes something else out of them and spells out what they could have said but aren’t saying.
He takes great care that he carefully weaves his own elaborate metaphysical reconstructions in a patient way, twisting and upgrading a jagged intellectual continuum. ANW almost always appreciates the unorganized side of major thinkers, appreciates their incipient striving and lacunae more than what they would have ever admit.
He picks as important – certain odd tidbits or whatever did not make it into the ‘final draft’ or settled into a recognizable and canonical Tractatus. With this patient, only slightly pedantic nit-picking, ANW makes sure that he and us (his possible readers) are in constant contact with others and kept involved with their inherited list of ideas developed under a very different and disjunct historical period (somehow detached fron his or his immediate predecessors). The impact of several Western authors is felt at a distance and without their accord, it feels. The result is that what does not get mentioned or lies outside of their conclusion – feels much more important.
He is hailed as the only modern philosopher that has developed with insistence and detail the most complex metaphysical project to date – responsive to the most relevant scientific theories of his day (relativity theory and quantum mechanics).
I am wondering about the atmosphere that has shaped such interests – the “penumbral” historical background that sustained and nurtured ANW’s mature metaphysics – outside the range of names he dutifully mentions in his key books (Process & Reality or Science and the Modern World, etc) and the philosophical idiom he uses.
One of the best things in reading him is that one is not dragged down by genuflection in front of such a heavyweight philosophical inheritance (or lack of reading all these fundamental texts). No jungle of footnotes, nor lengthy, winded polemics.
His polemics (if they exist) are not so much with authors, but with certain aporias of Western thinking. His engagement is a long shot wrestling with meta-theories of mindmatter or directions of research. Even when he is always mentioning what organic philosophy is not, he skips dense webs of references – and this is an integral part of his low profile tone and no name-dropping style.
Yet I am left with all these residual questions – of why Aesthetics is the philosophia prima for him? How come there is this easy (and surprisingly contemporary) involvement with en-minding matter or the building blocks of reality? Why is mind or experience so central to his cosmology? Why does he find this en-minding of matter as fundamental to our understanding the most recent theories of physics? These are important questions and I am always feeling a nuub in relation to ANW – but somehow they are related to him.
What I appreciate is his evolutionary and bottom-up or rather the bottom is tbe new up perspective. Where does his non-anthropocentrism or his physiological interest stem from?
Another unusual convergence allows him to share these preoccupations with various philosophers of mind. Whiteheadian panpsychism (the most developed modern panpsychism we have probably) needs engagement whatever they might say. Yet it is very rare that he ever gets a mention in recent books on the subject of consciousness or the ‘hard problem of consciousness (apart from William Seager or David Ray Griffin). The same thing happens with other authors – Galen Strawson, whose mentalistic physicalism comes close to Whitehead (but rarely mentions him) reviewing a book (Philip Goff’s -Galileo’s Error) by fellow panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff and chiding them over not mentioning a larger and more complete list of processors beside Arthur Eddington and Betrand Russell. A list that according to Galen Strawson should perforce include: W K Clifford, CA Strong and Durant Drake.
It is almost as if this amnesia about Whitehead helps their own project along and keeps them free of what Thomas Nagel has called (in 1986): “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”.
What I am trying to say is that everyone is allowed to have favorite genealogies or mention his own chosen predecessors, yet when it concerns panpsychism – the ‘pan’ is historically eliminativist, always tends to choose certain authors over others.
Whitehead’s is a difficult inheritance. One can get lost mired in his verbiage or become outright dismissive of his entire metaphysical edifice. If mentioning him one might risk attracting the wrong attention, loose face, loose readers, respectability etc what do I know – it seems.
What if one’s own carefully thought-out theories of mind would get doomed by mentioning him repeatedly or giving him due credit. Maybe it is the usual academic risk or careful tip-toeing , a normal fear of being convicted as guilty by association or of being treated as (dangerously) ‘speculative’ or even (damning) humbug.
I will pick up on A. Nagel’s (pejorative) mention of the “metaphysical laboratory” and its slight air of slight superiority. Yes, maybe it is good to cut straight to the chase, yet I consider the problem exactly the opposite. It is not a problem of clear-cutting, but of allowing more largesse. Otherwise, everything feels like miraculous birth – and we might miss a certain underlying commonality or an impetus from a completly different set of theories.
In fact, I do miss this laboratory feeling, that there was a certain vaguely related but varied and diverse range of authors that could have prepared A N Whitehead’s arguments at a distance and up close.
I think that his particular and quite original approach suffers from this lack of historical density or having a wider range of domains (outside the strictly philosophical) to chose from. A dialogue that is not primarily even between philosophers and so does not enter the canonic mind philosophy list.
For me Whitehead is the tip of an unseen iceberg of largely ignored or only alluded to free speculation anchored in embodied research. It smells of a long term involvement with mindmatter, enlivened materialism, transmissible, diffuse and active affect, “sensuous knowledge” (like in Adorno or Ranciere). Instead of ignoring the body and objects it sees them as affecting and being affected, prolonging scientific and artistic interests with low-end organisms and non-human emotions. Let’s say this could range from Darwin’s letting his kids play music to worms or feeding carnivorous plants in his hothouse or William James’s (he gets ample mention in Whitehead) interest in empiricism, physiology, embodiment, nervous tissues and a graded/gradual evolutionary view of mind.
Whitehead is eminently a dispositional thinker even if when he talks about the intrinsic nature of things – because he puts you in a certain mood, and partakes of a certain disposition (perspective) of inquiring mind towards the possibility of other minds existing inside yet also outside the preferred bipedal cranial boxes.
Consider this: in order to make you sensitive to certain things that would have left you indifferent, he takes on the perspective of an elementary particle (also recently discovered) electron – what is it like to be an electron? Does this sound so different from Einstein trying to imagine what it is like to be traveling like a photon on his bike?
Yet this ability of inhabiting the elementary should point us towards non-scarcity in regard to AWN complex ideas since his own system does this on a regular basis. It searches for this granularity, this gradient – something that is not miraculous, exceptional, nothing special but usual, ‘mere’ and primary.
Consciousness or higher-level faculties of the mind are not isolated, insular or put on a pedestal. They are just a special case out of a much more varied non-special, available readiness for experiencing of the world by the world. He is very keen on making sure that we accept this pervasiveness of mind and explore under-explored semi conscious avenues of feeling and becoming.
Let’s apply this pervasive gradient-thinking approach to his own system, as a system that is being nourished by other domains. It interested with the new, becose it is growing out of or exploding the bounds of a much larger epochal context (in tune with his cosmic epochs there is this larger missing history).
What I felt was missing from both Whitehead’s account of his own ideas as well as from others mentioning their own Whiteheadian engagements is this relevant and disconsidered (till now) historical background noise. I appreciate this dim largely experimental aesthetic background radiation because it puts things in contrast and proves to be a laboratory of philosophical ideas & stimulants.
Here I place this recently discovered wonderful study – with a role in filling in these gaps. This book by Benjamin Morgan is called The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.
Again, Benjamin M does not mention ANW directly, because ANW is somehow outside of the scope of this historical study of experimental and materialistic aesthetics, but at the same time, ANW is one of those that have enjoyed and absorbed & engaged with a lot of what The Outward Mind aims to be about.
This book, I think, reconstructs a missing historical Gedankenkollectiv that offers many other gradations, graded ways in which the late Victorian era (I get more and more convinced this is so) has transmitted disparate and conflicting(even paradoxical) interests with developments from the physical sciences, mathematics etc or concerns with the naturalization of mental processes. Heidegger for me is a key philosopher and contemporary of ANW that somehow willingly obscures this Victorian background noise. He is closer to the Critical Idiom in his refusal to engage with these scientific pursuits, since he often openly disparaged technology and science. In a sense his own anti-scientific stance manages to produce a tabula rasa in regard to all these previously very rich cross-overs and intellectual climates that (according to Benjamin Morgan) characterized experimental or laboratory aesthetics in both Germany (since Helmholtz) and Great Britain (US and France and other places?!). Looking fwd to reading this book.
Benjamin Morgan Introduction sums up numerous such cases in order to show us that there was much more appetite from the 1850s on for this sort of hybrid preoccupations that seem to dwindle afterward or get lost with the two cultures split (arts vs sciences). This externalization of mind, this en-minding of matter, or the generalization of the feeling process across the vastness of a newly discovered universe is very similar to what Whitehead is keeping alive and reinforcing with new ardor. All these necessarily fresh additions have been osmotically traveling across the scientific membrane into art theory. One such example is the lecture “What Patterns Do to Us” by Scottish art theorist Clementina “Kit” Caroline Anstruther-Thomson (1857–1921).
2025 – Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a 2021 American supernatural comedy film that was directed by Jason Reitman. The film, which stars Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Bokeem Woodbine, Paul Rudd, Logan Kim, and Celeste O’Connor, is the sequel to Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters II (1989), and the fourth film in the Ghostbusters franchise.
Thirty-two years after the events of Ghostbusters II, the Ghostbusters have disbanded and their legacy is mostly forgotten. After a single mother and her children move to an Oklahoma farm they inherited from her estranged father, whom they discover was once a Ghostbuster who went on a mission to prevent an apocalypse. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and Sigourney Weaver appear in supporting roles, reprising their characters from the earlier films. The film is posthumously dedicated to Harold Ramis, who is commemorated in the closing credits. (wiki)
2023 – The Expanse (TV series 2015-2022)
timespace coordinates: 200 years into the future where humanity is spread over the whole solar system and on the brink of interplanetary war
The Expanse is an American science fiction television series developed by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, based on the series of novels of the same name by James S. A. Corey. The series is set in a future where humanity has colonized the Solar System. It follows a disparate band of protagonists—United Nations Security Council member Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), police detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), ship’s officer James Holden (Steven Strait) and his crew—as they unwittingly unravel and place themselves at the center of a conspiracy that threatens the system’s fragile state of cold war, while dealing with existential crises brought forth by newly discovered alien technology.
The Expanse has received critical acclaim, with particular praise for its visuals, character development and political narrative. (wiki)
There is no denying The Expanse (now in its 6th and final season) has marked and will continue to mark the recent history of SF world-building – as a new phase in the development of the genre, especially in its socially aware forms.
Divergence 1
This it has done in two ways – by finally catching up with his literary material – the works of James S. A. Corey (none of which I have read) and the current world affairs. Most of the current blockbuster big-epic production of current SF (last year’s Foundation series and Dune by Denis Villeneuve are prime examples) have a nearly 60 years cinematic delay in regard with their original works. Besides what we could term the certain ‘neo-feudal’ or ‘techno-feudal’ (after Yanis Varoufakis) traits of both Foundation and Dune adaptations, including cloned emperors, barons, warring ruling families, there might be high time to look beyond the generally universally accepted and canonical. It is for the first time Earthers are not imbued with nostalgia – but with a sort of general reproach (both from Martian society and the Belters) as a planet of wasted resources and exploitative catabolic collapse civilizations. While antagonism remain in place even in peace, there is a lingering emotional involvement with all of the three branches of humanity. The Corvette-class light frigate Rocinante rag-tag team of Belters (humans from the Asteroid Belt), Earthers and Martians (humans on Mars) and their winded stories along the course of 6 seasons (which is a long time for today’s streaming) encourage the viewer away to avoid latching onto the good/bad dualist divisions that have characterized previous space operas.
Yes, I get why there is all this accumulated historical pressure or emotional investment built upon investment in SF sagas. Yes, I appreciate the ongoing interest of big production in established franchises and foundational SF cycles. Yet when will some current contemporary classics hit the big (or home) screen? Do we have to hope that someday, some huge Big Tech brother or geek entrepreneur (akin to Amazon Bezos or Apple+ or Disney+?), after light-years of lobbying might deem it worthwhile? There is signs that in reality, a broad-based and devoted new fandom can play its hand in the lobbying for the continuation of favorite SF series. Amazon Prime has taken up on The Expanse reviving the series, picking it up from Syfy channel after it was canceled.
So apart from giants like Asimov and Herbert, what else is there new old? Why not dig into 1930s masterpieces by Olaf Stapeldon like Star Maker or the 1960s ‘Instrumentality’ of Cordwainer Smith or say Professor Jameson by Neil R. Jones? They are the example that something does not have to be actual or timely, and that even ‘forgotten’ works might still offer some welcome surprise. Why not expand into other directions?
The Expanse (uniquely and encouragingly so) has a certain breath, an outward expansion that emboldens us to think about our current tribulations, and that keeps on addressing current topics via a careful (never carefree) world-building effort. I call it divergent in this particular sense that it did not have to grow-up, ‘mature’ over decades to finally get released. The Expanse finally is catch up with current concerns, implications and irreducible complexities of now. One can say all the other big space adventures have tried their hand at such a cosmic scope (both Hollywood ones – ST and SW), at the same time The Expanse does not have to try, because it just feels timely and involved.
Divergence 2
Second divergence with the Expanse is its exploration that works from a different premise (a situational and consequential SF) than say the usual cycles of either placidly mythic (timeless) space opera material (in G. Lucas’s Star Wars universe), or what might strike one as totalizing & bland promoters of a blind (absolute) tech- progressivism (say in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek). My bet is that the Expanse achieves this by being socially acute in its diagnosis – class struggle does not end on Earth, it will be carried in space. Both exploitation and emancipation will not evaporate once our spaceships will start mining and settling other worlds, no matter what the early Russians cosmist said that lack of gravity will unshackle humanity (of economic, racist or patriarchal status quo). For the first time post-cinematically at least, in recent memory, space exploration is not a romanticized ‘final frontier’, the bland off-world advertisment – but a timespace continuum full of consequences and warps that merit our full attention. The Expanse nurtures an attentive concern for what it might mean to insure a more equal (fair!?) re-distribution of resources and consequences in space (where they count most) as well in spite of all war-mongering enterprises, try hard to solve conflicts via diplomatic means.
Terrorism does not equal anarchism
There is already a Reddit dedicated to discussing why the traditional anarchist symbol is associated to the OPA sign during the later seasons of The Expanse (season 5). Why is this symbol present during Marco Inaros speech? Some have seen here the usual association of violence and destruction that gets instantly blamed on anarchism from James Bond villains to Batman. At the same time, the visible nationalist tint of Marco Inaros’s cause (according to Chris Nunn) makes it hard to fit under a black-red flag.
There is no mistake that the black-bloc as well as antifa during the Trump presidency have been depicted in mainstream media predominantly as terrorists and trouble makers, while far-right terrorism has been historically been played down. Now that neoreaction and nationalism is globally on the rise, even mainstream channels have had to acknowledge (especially after the Washington Jan 6 failed coup) that far-right plots historically outnumber left-wing ones or even outweigh the concerns about the called Islamist ‘threat’. Romania, pretty much a satellite state of the US, has upped the ante with such overly exaggerated responses in its rabid media response tothose that might feebly oppose the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. Overwhelmingly the mainstream media has been blaming all disruption on the ‘anarchist’ element (in RO always a ‘necessarily foreign’ element), because the locals are all honey and milk, while local destructo-capitalism is left to roam free. So this is how The Expanse – arrives at its weakest point, although I might also add that we should always follow the women of this universe. There is a gender critique at work here, and in fact one can see women being much more capable than men overall in difficult situations, and men, especially rebel leaders tend to make fools of themselves. At the same time I do not want to let US off the hook nor rush in with labeling it US progapanda akin to the usual contras or anti-Cuban sentiment in Florida. Even in space and even with such an incredible series at the Expanse it is good to be on the lookout. I am keen to see how this villainous image of the Belter rebel hero evolves – although it feels blocked in the egotistic militaristic and violent maniac mode.
Scavenger Technologies
Technologies – are for the first time not just stolen gifts from the Gods nor magick laser swords that can accomplish just about anything. Alien, Martian or Belter tech – no matter their true source or mysterious origin, stealth tech, they are all socially embedded in their uses and misuses, in social and economic systems and pliable only up to a point to our bidding and utilitarian aims. The Ring gate portals allow a new access towards various unknown exoplanets. These Ring portals are not just places of transit, they always seem to be responsive, always gauged and feeding on and off their ‘simple’ transit function. They are as much alien as the protomolecule, both carriers of historically -materialistic pronoucements, as well places of immigration, full of hope and danger, yet entirely prone to military-industrial exploitation. These are not easy pickings, not just appliances that await their capable human users. Beside the usual corporate vested interests, there is also scientific interest and genuine concern with using the protomolecule tech for pacific means (as there is today a drive for developeing patent-free SARS vaccines!). These incoming technologies (be it the Ring gates or the protomolecule research) get rapidly enmeshed in wider Sol system politics, most of the he times exacerbating already existing inequalities and conflicts. In the latest seasons, the protomolecule gets in the background and human factionalism and tribalism tend to take over. Each eps of the 6th season of The Expanse gets an intro from a parallel storyline on a distant world (Laconia) where a daughter of the colonists learns to use the resurrection powers of the local dog-like social creatures that are able to bring organisms (both local and foreign) back to life. Again – even if their is an unspecified sinister air to all of these ressurections (the creatures, including human ones are changed when they get back), nothing is developed – and we get the sense that human colonists are also very resistant to these changed and to difference in general.
I would actually say that the protomolecule in the Expanse is not so much about an alien tech – but about matter as such, the protean, in-itself, intrinsique qualities of a physical universe that is pretty large and full of suprises. Here I think that both The Expanse and its protomolecule and the last Star Trek (Discovery) cosmic mycelial networks – tend to integrate this enlivened scientific and speculative perspectives (one might even say a sort of pan-experientialist or recently popular panpsychist) on what was considered inert, passive matter. Life technosciences implicily work up from this new ‘animatedness’ of basic matter building blocks. In the Alien franchise, corporations where interested only in sampling alien organisms and developing them as bioweapons. In the Expanse, in tune with current technoscience developements, there is a further expansion into the very building blocks of matter. It is almost like this thourougly privatized endeavour has finally the means to try and retro-engineer (very like the methods of Synthetic biology) and unleash the hidden potentials of inoquous alien bits of matter. Today’s biocapitalism is being exploitated in a similarly retro-enginering way – pushed by both biomedical advenaces and corporate biotech vested interests that try to mine historical (non-human or inhuman) capacities that have arisen during millions of years of coevolutionary existence between bacterial cells and viruses let’s say (like the CRISPR-Cas system used in editing genes and believed to have evolved out of bacteria-bacteriophage interactions).
Cosmic Solidarity
Rocinante – and its crew is a diverse cast of characters that enacts all those conflicts as well as building up an unexpected solidarity. Initially, it was hard to dig for them. They all seemed quite uncharismatic or bland. It was much more easy to be enthusiastic for the detectivistic hard boiled characters and the strange realism of labour relations that get depicted right from the very start. Embodiment and alien-human or transformative space life hybridisation is important and with numerous after affects in the Expanse universe. Nobody is indifferent or impervious to the effects of long term-living under low gravitation or in dependency from supply chains. We see how this effects are being felt – experienced – along the whole lenght of the series seasons. Complete limb regrowth is possible, yet it is painful. Endocrine mods are possible yet, but even if they convey super human speeds they might be deadly on the long term.
Nothin is just instant future medical magic but a lengthy process that can go wrong and involve difficult and precarious decisions. Pilots can die during dangerous in-flight High G maneuvers, and gravitation affects each and everyone, yet some more than others. The threat from militarism is everywhere in the Expanse and there is the feeling that the industrial-military complex is always a constant threat to any terraforming activities and the balance of future beneficial living. No none is immune and all are united under these dire future circumstances.
Solidarity – seems to have at least one wellspring from these harsh general conditions but also from the way the Inners and especially Earthers have exploited and denied Belter (workin class) autonomy and equal rights. Beside the linguistic and cultural specificities (what one might call ethnic, racial or cultural element) and internal affinities of Belters (that have their own Idiom that reminds one of Creole or Caribbean English), there is also the economic class solidarity of the Belters. The common plight of asteroid miners, mechanics, labor migrants of the larger Asteroid Belt that have always suffered for generations as cheap and disposable labour pool for the ‘Inners’ (inner planet Earth and Mars) is a strong undercurrent in the series. I can only say that I can see a certain direct concern here with the growing number of actual climate migrants or migrant workers and displaced persons everywhere – in my case, the reality of this East European migrant pool after 1989 and the real inequalities (both economic and symbolic) exacerbated within the European Union (or Sol system unity in the case of The Expanse) highlighted by political scientist Eszter Kováts in a recent article. This is not just a case of hard scifi getting the science right or solving material contradictions – it is also about less easy to quantify traumatic effects, the scars of radiation sickness or severe trauma endured during prolonged exposure to the space vacuum that seems to afflict Belters more than everyone else. Earth in the Expanse series, even if united under a world governement and no blocs (something that feels very far from the current UN influence in the newly antagonistic US/China world) is itself a place of climate crisis immigration, growing inequality, raptorial capitalism, prisons and joblessness.
High G Emotions
I found myself completely swayed by this series which from the very beginning was not about ‘pew-pew’ but about step by step complex developments and negotiations in almost impossible situations and for further than your planetary or asteroid mining – goals. From the first scenes, wearing magnetic boots – gravity and outer space life has felt palpable. I am usually get very emotionally involved with movies, but it has been a long time since I have been as much affected by a series (to tears). The Expanse has managed to do that for me. Some have commented on the pessimistic tone – of the later 6th season (just being screened). While I am feeling pretty harsh about Amazon Corp picking up from Syfy channel and making it theirs and also pushing this Belter terrorist Red-Brigade-RAF platitude to the max, I also trust J S A Corey’s friendly but firm grip on it:
It is not a SF ‘weepy’ (which I would gladly watch) – there is a lot of hearfelt encounters that feel very close now to early conditions now that much of solidarity is done online, and much of what comes from climate summits is really disheartening and ludicrous (no concerted action and ineffectual politicians). There is a lot to be learn just following Chrisjen Avasarala (magnificently played by Shohreh Aghdashloo – also known for her roles in Abbas Kiarostami’s films), Secretary-General of the United Nations. As on and off Secretary-General she serves as the head of state and government of Earth and chief executive of the United Nations (UN). I find her development arc more interesting than let’s say Filip- Marco Inaro’s son. She basically starts like your run-of-the-mill War on Terror – CIA operative organizing black site type Gravity torture or Obama drone warfare support against revolting Belters. In politics and in contrast with a lot of recent US presidents, Avasarala is definitely not a war hawk. I refuse to see The Expanse as Games of Thrones in space, since this would again push a neo-feudal outlook, and what I prefer is a historically grounded development not these supposedly ‘human nature’ – or ‘eternal concers’. She, i think also changes during the series, and ends up preferring negotiations, opening channels and is always in a sort of counter-intelligence war with her own military arm, that seems to try and escalate and retaliate on each occasion.
Another incredible character is Camina Drummer (played by Canadian actress Cara Gee) that comes trough as a very tough and incredible determined Belter that is torn between her allegiance to the emancipatory cause of the Belters and the OPA and her vengeful actions towards testo male leader Marco Inaros. She is one of the most enduring and critical characters of the whole – she is always potrayed in a complex way that makes her (for me) a sort of emblem of the whole series.
imdb
2022 – The Silent Sea (TV Series 2021–)
spacetime coordinates: dystopian near future (2070s) Republic of Korea, the planet suffers from a lack of water and food caused by desertification. / abandoned lunar research station
The Silent Sea (Korean: 고요의 바다; RR: Goyo-eui bada) is a 2021 South Korean sci-fi mystery thriller streaming television series starring Bae Doona, Gong Yoo and Lee Joon.
The series is an adaptation from the 2014 short film The Sea of Tranquility written and directed by Choi Hang-yong who will also direct the series. It premiered on Netflix on December 24, 2021. (wiki)
2003 – Radioactive (2019)
spacetime coordinates: Paris 1893 – 1914
Radioactive is a 2020 British biographical drama film directed by Marjane Satrapi and starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie. The film is based on the 2010 graphic novel Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss.
Although the film is actually based on a 2010 graphic novel, it is marketed as a “biopic” on Marie Curie. Geraldine McGinty of Cornell University severely criticised the film not just for altering many historical events for dramatic effect, but for misrepresenting her character and that of her husband, McGinty said that its misleading analogies, misrepresentation of principal characters, and inappropriate nudity and violence, all make it unsuitable as an educational or biographical source. (wiki)
1996 – On Communism, Science Fiction, and Utopia: The Blagoevgrad Theses by Darko Suvin (2018)
[Metmorphoses of Science Fiction was first published by Yale University Press in 1979]
by Darko Suvin
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. Altough there was no sight of him, he encouragingly spurned us to keep on look ahead, to help built 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 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.
>>Here they are published by the Mediations Journal.
In a scathing indictment of today’s ontological supremacy (things are as they are) and for a more humble epistemology (evolving critical knowledge), one can read his “theses” that supply many paths including Disneyfication, ‘Time is Money’, Eastern Europe, anti-utopia and a thourough 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 estrangment 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 Darki 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:
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:
Eventually they slopped over also into narrative form as the subgenre of anti-utopia, written to warn against utopias, not (as in dystopia) against the existing status quo, and culminating perhaps in Ayn Rand’s [book] Anthem. Anti-utopianism is an embattled adoption of the point of view and value-system of globally ruling capitalism and the class — or congeries of classes — supporting it. The anti-utopia is a targeted and openly political use of a closed horizon to refute, ridicule, and render unthinkable both the eutopia of a better possible world and the dystopia as awful warning about the writer’s and readers’ present situation, to stifle the right to dream and the right to dissent, to dismantle any possibility of plebeian democracy.
[….]
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 follow 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 darwinist ‘just-so’, reducing everything (including understand) to matter of 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 enriching “information profiteers”. Surveillance capitalism is not just what in the 1990s was called “knowledge economy” (scientific papers, patents including patenting organisms and medicine etc.), but all these unknowns tat get datafied and mathematised 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 right wing realist capitalism), but somehow all modernist devices (beside 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 analytical thinking in our 21st c actuality is actively produced using these same modernist devices it seems. The present moment of fragility points toward larger extinction fears – 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 of how financial capital completely 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”. 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 1917 revolution and with a rising belief in pacifism after post-Imperial WWI conflagrations. In the meantime, welfare has disappeared and militarism and warmongering and speculative finance has almost triumphed.
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 that rare bird called human intelligence or sapience. In this movement of emancipation, there are perhaps larger and larger stakes because we are just an insular mode of thought, 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) and not just from the Super Intelligence revolution (fears) which is mostly renewd Cold War hype and fake novum. Most interesting autors or critical works take into account a more ‘general intellect’ grades into a more plebeian and democratic view of mental processes from the entire spectrum of possibilities. This could mean either – speculating or fabulating about non-human intelligence (see Discognition by Steven Shaviro) or thinking machines that lack consciousness, raising questions about brainless organisms such as humble slime molds or research was done under the guise of unconventional computing. Yes, we suffer under dwindling (under the current capitalist enclosure and ecocidal surge) cosmic pockets (islands or refuges) of cognition – yet SF is currently busy exploring an extended multiplicity of various modes of thought and sensoria, from extraterrestrial versions of speculative thinking bamboo species on other planets (Semiosis by Sue Burke) to the most bizarre and most horrifying instrumental use of certain cognitive technologies that enable one to test theories or enact what they preach using living (definitely unwilling) thinking subjects (such as in Neuropath by Scott R Baker).
TimeSpace Warps 