Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

 
While it goes without saying that it is the mark of a pride for any reasonable person to disagree with Roger Scuton on any conceivable subject, I did think this article was not entirely without interest:

"Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong—like communism—to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. . . . Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e., unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions... Krier presents the first principle of architecture as a deduction from Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim that we can will as a universal law. You must, Krier says, "build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure." Krier suggests that modernists themselves follow this dictum—in private. Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster—between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities—live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience. Instead of Bernard Mandeville’s famous principle of "private vices, public benefits," it seems that they follow the law of private benefits, public vice—the private benefit of a charming location paid for by the public vice of tearing our cities apart. Rogers in particular is famous for creating buildings that have no relation to their surroundings, that cannot easily change their use, that are extremely expensive to maintain, and that destroy the character of their neighborhoods.

Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: separating load-bearing and outward-facing parts. Once buildings become curtains hung on invisible frames, all of the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings lose out. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical facade, it is a pretend facade, with only a blank expression. Usually, however, it is a sheet of glass or concrete panels, without intelligible apertures. The building itself is hidden, and its posture as a member of the city, standing among neighbors and resting its weight upon their common ground, is meaningless because unobservable. All relation to neighboring structures, to the street, and to the sky, is lost. The form conveys nothing beyond the starkness of its geometry...

The lack of vocabulary explains the alienating effect of a modern airport, such as Newark or Heathrow. Unlike the classical railway station, which guides the traveler securely and reassuringly to the ticket office, to the platform, and to the public concourse, the typical airport is a mass of written signs, all competing for attention, all amplifying the sense of urgency, yet nowhere offering a point of visual repose."


There's a great deal I have sympathy with here. I've long felt that modern architecture is a form of engineering rather than a branch of aesthetics, leading to the situation whereby one can wonder around the City of London at a weekend and find a deserted ghost town filled with modern skyscrapers whose weekday workers would never dream of living in anything that even remotely resembled them. Whereas early modernism led to the construction of private villas as well as public buildings, I'm not aware there is any significant private analogue for the Lloyds or Swiss Re buildings. On the other hand, this is all far from persuading me to endorse the tepid pastiche of Krier's Poundbury, Barratt Homes with a royal warrant, which is surely as unpleasant a form of utopianism as anything Corbusier dreamt up. Poundbury does have the rather unpleasant air of being a middle class commune.

Update: a defence of modernism from Jonathan Meades:

"Gordon was a Brutalist, probably the greatest (as well as unquestionably the youngest) of the English Brutalists and thus a ready target for indolent bien-pensants whose antipathy to the architecture of the 1960s is as drearily predictable, as dismally unseeing, as was their parents’ and grandparents’ to that of the 1860s. These people fail to differentiate between the many strains of Modernism and, more importantly, between what was good and what bad. Nor, in their arrogance, do they realise that tastes change. Today Brutalism is admired by a new generation of aesthetes as opposed to the clichéd, knee-jerk calumnisation of "concrete monstrosity", as John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster were to "Victorian monstrosity".

The word Brutalism was coined by the architectural theorist Reyner Banham. It is a bilingual pun on the French beton brut (raw concrete) and art brut (Dubuffet’s word for outsider art) and the all too plain English word brutal. If only Professor Banham had failed to commit it to paper and had dreamt up a less loaded term, the fate of buildings in this idiom might have been happier, for their opponents, apprised only of the English component, would not have had the ammunition of what seems like a nomenclatural admission of culpable aggression.

On the other hand they might still have abhorred it, for Brutalism committed the grossest of sins in English eyes. It abjured the picturesque in favour of the sublime. It scorned prettiness. "It put on," as John Vanbrugh, a brutalist avant la lettre, had it, "a masculine show". A show which did not preclude a strangely butch delicacy, a steely effeminacy. Gordon might have worked in concrete but he made it sing. His buildings were articulated rather than monolithic. More than any other English Brutalist he had looked at Constructivism. Gordon’s professed aim was to create an architecture that was "raw, dramatic, sculptural". At the Tricorn in Portsmouth and Trinity Square in Gateshead he succeeded on a vast scale, unparalleled in Europe. These buildings were indeed extraordinarily sculptural, their silhouettes were audacious and poetic, jagged and rhetorical. They were thrilling structures that seem to be forces of nature, like fortresses in Castille which grow from the earth. "


It generally seems to me that the English vice isn't so much for prettiness as for puritanism (as with England favouring palladianism instead of rococo) and my objection to modernism tends to be that it panders to that vice, producing stark, geometric buildings that are essentially functional or utilitarian in character. They work well in a corporate or government context because they appeal to a sense of grandiosity while remaining sufficiently minimalist as to be comparatively low cost. I'm equally unsure as to why 'prettiness' and sublimity have to be opposed.

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posted by Richard 7:36 pm

Saturday, October 27, 2007

 
The tone of petulant annoyance that the right-wing can adopt utopian ideas similar in kind to his own in China Mieville's article on a floating libertarian tax haven, the freedom ship, is amusing to say the least, but the article does make some rather good points:

"It is one of countless recent dreams of a tax-free life on the ocean wave: advocates of "seasteading" are disproportionately adherents of "libertarianism," that peculiarly American philosophy of venal petty-bourgeois dissidence.... Of course, visions of floating state evasion cannot always be explained by a hankering for tax evasion. There have been other precursors. Ships have allowed groups ranging from cheerfully illicit pirate radio stations to socially committed abortion providers, like Women On Waves, to avoid local laws. Not surprisingly, this use for ships has been enthusiastically adopted by businesses, such as SeaCode, which promotes locating outsourced foreign software engineers three miles off the coast of Los Angeles to avoid pesky immigration and labor laws.

It is the less instrumentalist iterations that inspire the imagination. Occasionally, in a spirit of can-do contrarianism, some offshore spit or rig has been designated an independent country, such as Sealand, a sea-tower-based nation with no permanent inhabitants on Britain’s Suffolk coast. The startling notion of coagulated ship-city has unsurprisingly been featured in fiction, as in Lloyd Kropp's Sargasso-based The Drift and Neal Stephenson's "The Raft," in Snow Crash.

Utopianism has always had two, usually though not always contradictory, aesthetic and avant-gardist gravitational pulls: toward a hallucinatory baroque or, alternately, a post-Corbusier functionalism. In seasteading, these iterations are represented by Tsui's hallucinatory organicism on one hand and Buckminster Fuller's extraordinary, floating, ziggurat-like Triton City on the other.

The libertarian seasteaders are heirs to this visionary tradition but degrade it with their class politics. They almost make one nostalgic for more grandiose enemy dreams. The uncompromising monoliths of fascist and Stalinist architecture expressed their paymasters’ monstrous ambitions. The wildest of the libertarian seasteaders, New Utopia, manages to crossfertilize its drab Miami-ism with enough candy floss Las Vegaries to keep a crippled baroque distantly in sight. Freedom Ship, however, is a floating shopping mall, a buoyant block of midrange Mediterranean hotels. This failure of utopian imagination is nowhere clearer than in the floating city of the long defunct but still influential Atlantis Project.

This is no ruling class vision: it is the plaintive daydream of a petty bourgeoisie, whose sulky solution to perceived social problems is to run away—set sail into a tax-free sunset. None of this is surprising. Libertarianism is not a ruling-class theory... untempered by the realpolitik of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the anti-statism of "pure" libertarianism is worse than useless to the ruling class. Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy."


I tend to think that libertarianism is probably best described as right-wing anarchism, a philosophy that assumes that dissolving the state in favour of free market arrangements will remove distorting influences that impede economic development. As with conventional anarchism, it goes without saying that its record of being sucessfully implemented is decidedly scant, with the closest to it in ideological terms, those of Reagan and Thatcher, invariably having left office having substantially extended the power of the state. Some of this ineffective character can also be seen in the rather less than succesful attempts of the Free State Project to persuade sufficient believers to move to New Hampshire in order to sway the outcome of that state's elections (collective action clearly has not been their forte, if one is to judge from the rather low number of people to take up this offer). On the other hand, it should also go without saying that being accused of being political irrelevance by a committed Marxist is essentially akin to being accused of ignorance of geography by a member of the flat Earth society. If nothing else, projects like the data havens at Sealand do have a reasonable business model.

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posted by Richard 1:17 pm

Sunday, October 07, 2007

 
This article touches on so many of the themes I've commented on here, it's difficult not to want to quote more of it:

"In that case, one could look at the remnants of the avant-garde project that litter the former USSR as the detritus left by the Martians: the incomprehensible, incommensurable ruins of a strictly temporary visitation by creatures not like ourselves. The Strugatsky Brothers' tremendous 1972 novel Roadside Picnic depicts just such a visitation. A city that has been 'visited' is left with the Zone in the area where the visitation took place: a fenced-off, contaminated and ruined area, marked by scatterings of bizarre and technologically fantastic objects left by the alien visitors. The Zone is a dangerous, melancholy place, an industrial district where the chimneys no longer give off smoke, visited by strange climactic phenomena, with a stretched sense of time. Within it, however, is quite literally the answer to all human wishes, something which in the last instance holds the promise of eternal happiness for all humanity.

Filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 as Stalker, the Zone is visualised as a Chernobyl-like scarred, postindustrial landscape of ruins, waste, rubbish, of the remnants of industrial civilisation corroded, dilapidated and rapidly being reclaimed by nature . Tarkovsky's version of the Zone has gradually, over the last thirty years, become the foundation of an entire aesthetic. If Modernity, or Modernism, is our Antiquity, then its ruins have become every bit as fascinating, poignant and morbid as those of the Greeks or Romans were to the 18th century. Tarkovsky’s Zone is in some ways specific to the former USSR and a few locations in Estonia, yet practically every industrial or post-industrial country, has something resembling the Zone within it. Such an area would be, for instance, the remnants of industrial districts of East London. Beckton, Woolwich, Stratford, outposts marked by the cyclopean remains of silos, gasometers, factories. These are the places that inspired the Modernists of the 1920s: every manifesto from Le Corbusier's Vers d'une Architecture to Moisei Ginzburg's Constructivist response Style and Epoch had their lovingly photographed silos and power stations. Appropriately, also in the Zone can be found the bastard children of the Modernists, the scatterings of overambitious social housing, with their crumbling highrises and streets in the sky. These are remnants of something as alien and incomprehensible to the seamless mallscape of 21st century Capital, or the heritage Disneyland of European Urbanism, as Shklovsky’s Futurist Martians were to their contemporaries: only here without any of the insurrectionary promise of a new world, merely the ruins of a defunct future...

So we have here, via these two models of alien visitations in the imagination of Russian Modernists, whether of the 20s or the 70s, two competing models of Modernity. On the one hand, the advancing, gleaming, ruthless aesthetics of Futurism, particularly, for our purposes here its mutation into the more humanist, politicised Constructivism. On the other, an aesthetic of disintegration, of the aforementioned Futurist world's gradual descent into an overgrown, poisoned wasteland....

In contemplating these images however, one is reminded of the interesting element to Albert Speer's otherwise utterly banal 'Theory of Ruin Value'. Not the bit about the impressiveness of ancient ruins, and the need to leave similarly imposing remains. Rather, the psychotic, suicidal notion of building with the ruins already in mind: a death-drive architecture, where posterity's opinion is internalised to such a ludicrous degree that, in a sense, the corpse has been designed before the living body...

Today, the aesthetics of everyday life are provided by ultra-conservative developers (the likes of Barratt Homes in the UK) and the aesthetics of Art or Commerce by the avant-garde of a few decades ago (from Foster to Koolhaas). The remarkable thing about Constructivism, something that can still be seen as a shadow in Pare's work, is that the everyday was so frequently the area for experiment. A much-used Russian term here was Byt, translated usually as Everyday Life, specifically in its most habituated, domestic sense. So most of the projects here were applications of the aesthetic that would be branded 'alien' by the Stalinists to the most basic architectural elements of society. That is, housing, public leisure facilities, schools. Equally frequently, there were administrative or industrial buildings. Although even these were often in the poorer quarters of cities and towns, the growing nomenklatura’s presence is unavoidable.

Superficially, these buildings might seem similar to corresponding Western models: social housing, working men's clubs and so forth. So it's the differences that are especially key here. This was frequently a teleological architecture, one could even say a Pavlovian one: particular social affects were intended to be produced. Although a socialist state power of some sort was claimed (rightly or wrongly) to be in place by 1922, its leaders were well aware that old habitus died hard: religion, patriarchy and 'petty bourgeois' attitudes still pervaded. In 1924, Leon Trotsky, a few years before his expulsion, published a book called Problems of Everyday Life. Here there was a cautious endorsement of 'Byt reform'--the experiments in living being carried out at the time by communes and co-operatives--and the particular material forms that might house them. 'Public laundries, public restaurants, public workshops' would take the place of all that used to take place in the kitchen, thus abolishing 'household slavery'. A poster from around this time shows a dingy, cramped kitchen being opened up to a glittering, glassy new world of futuristic structures and open space, and this was what was, tentatively, being constructed at the time. "


I've written before about ruin value, noting that the interest of modernist architecture here lies precisely with its status as a forgotten future (particularly given that many of the architectural projects referenced above where essentially futile attempts to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was not being left behind economically by the United States by seeking to rival the likes of the Empire State Building), but this is something I'm nonetheless much less able to relate to than the author of this piece. I don't especially feel any nostalgia for the failure of either communism or architectural modernism, both seeming to be essentially utopian projects that sought to reform humanity by deforming it. To my mind, Tatlin's tower can comfortably remain in the same category as Speer's New Berlin. By coincidence, I've also recently comes across this article, which serves as an interesting contrast (albeit one that is often rather too conservative for my taste):

"Much of the left was and remains "anti-anti-communist." This is what accounts for what Ferdinand Mount calls the "asymmetry of indulgence" afforded communistic and fascistic state-sponsored murders... On walking into the first room of the exhibition, the visitor was greeted by a sign asking "What is Modernism?" and answering as follows: "The Iconic Objects in this room...were created by practitioners who believed that their art could help bring about Utopia within their lifetimes." This belief was expressed in all kinds of ways, as the exhibition shows, from calisthenics to kitchen design, from the cantilevered chair of Mies van der Rohe to the colorful rectilinear paintings of Piet Mondrian...

Beginning with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Futurists before the First World War and continuing with Die Stijl and Bauhaus after it, there was always a strong element of political radicalism associated with Modernism. Particularly in the 1920s and 1930s when it was in its heyday, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and others envisaged a sweeping architectural revolution—more or less explicitly as a complement to the political ones that were projected or actual at the time—to provide for simple, efficient, undecorated "workers' housing" and do away with luxury, sentimentality, ornament and other "bourgeois" values. Tradition had to be cleared away along with traditional images and traditional architectures in order for ideological and architectural engineers to build a new civilization from the ground up.... As the title of Nathan Glazer's new book puts it, Modernism has gone From a Cause to a Style. The rags of a failed utopianism still hang from it long after it became routine for banks to commission for their headquarters Mies-style glass towers or for reproductions of Picasso and Matisse—the originals, are of course, only available to the very richest—to decorate the "living rooms" of the haute bourgeoisie. We may not be conscious utopians ourselves anymore, but we still believe that those who are (or were) are entitled to full credit and even a certain veneration merely for the goodness and the nobility of their intentions."


I find myself much more drawn to two quotations offered late on in the piece, of Stoppad's descriptions of Herzen; "He came to the conclusion that there was no abstract formula at work on our history. There was nothing going on that was inevitable. The big bond between me and him is that he found an appalling arrogance in the way that people might construct an abstract narrative of our society and subordinate the individual life to it. He found that morally repellent." Although it was Schoenberg who formed the central protagonist in Mann's depiction of the culpability of German romanticism in Nazism (incidentally, this piece has an interesting observation on how Schoenberg's descriptions of tonality decaying through "inbreeding and incest" mirror those of racist politicians of the time), I do wonder if an equivalent narrative might not assign similar roles to figures like Corbusier.

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posted by Richard 9:55 am

Sunday, December 10, 2006

 
Having previously written about anti-utopianism, I wanted to write about its analogue, dystopianism. If modern literature tends not to feature utopian themes of the kind promulgated by William Morris then it similarly seems not to feature dystopian themes of the kind familiar from Huxley and Orwell, even if many of the predictions made in those novels are increasingly being fulfilled.

The nearest example of a dystopian writer is JG Ballard. Ballard's work tends to depict artificial communities existing in a society characterised by alienation and anomie, where violence becomes the only means of release from this paralysing conformity. " While Ballard's fiction has become increasingly 'realistic,' it's not difficult to see how this would relate to novels like Brave New World. Nontheless, it's difficult to see Ballard as the heir of a politically engaged aspect of science fiction, not least due to the zeal with which his characters reach towards the dystopian future. The violence within novels from Crash to Super Cannes serves as both a rebellion against society and as an integral component of it, while the violence itself is both an innate psychopathology and a product of modern society. As Ballard puts it, "I’m frightened that the possibilities of a genuine dystopia may be much more appealing than any utopian project that people can come up with." To take the example of Millennium People, rebellion ("an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.") is both a rejection of society and a product of it, as much as sexual tourism ("thrill seekers with a taste for random violence.. a deep need for meaningless action, the more violent the better"). The difference from previous Ballard novels lies in the inherent absurdity of a middle-class revolution; "we're trying to rescue them from heaven.. I want to be brainwashed." Not only this, but the novel suggests that any such rebellion is effectively assimilated, as with Kay Churchill becoming a TV presenter; "far from being on the fringe, these groups were now part of the country's civic traditions."

The question in Ballard's novels has always been whether the suburbanisation of the soul simply creates frustrations (the "new vices" referred to) that lead to a release of primitive impulses (a model that would be congruent with Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents. In Super Cannes, Ballard notes that "Homo Sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites... these criminal activities have helped them rediscover themselves. An atropied moral sensibility is alive agin.") or whether it actively creates an entirely modern form of psychopathy "the old morality belonged to a cruder stage of human development... since they couldn't rely on self control they needed ethical taboos." The question is this; are the violent executives in the novel, as Penrose suggests, really no different from figures like Gilles De Rais? One of the hallmarks of Ballard's surrealist approach to the novel is that these events are seen via a number of distorting mirrors. The perspective continually shifts, leaving the answers to those questions unclear. For example, Penrose comments that "she's a rebel, but she doesn't realise that Eden Olympia is the biggest rebellion of all," when he has previously been at pains to portray Eden Olympia as a form of social evolution; "perverse behaviours were once potentially dangerous. Societies weren't strong enough to allow them to flourish." In this, Ballard's surrealism is particularly adept; by distorting the events through the eyes of a multiple overlapping statements and perspectives the reader is exposed to the same form of disorientation as the characters. The most obvious device for this is his customary device of a heavily biased narrator, where we are invited to determine whether his own psychopathy is any different to that promoted by Penrose.

Another example worth considering is Michel Houellebecq, whose shares with Ballard an idea of how the consumer society and the sexual revolution alike have commoditised emotion. To Houellebecq alienation is not a lifestyle; it is something determined by the fragmentation of social being; "just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation." Atomised features a discussion of Brave New World as a utopian novel based on the ideas advanced in Julian Huxley's 1931 What Dare I Think?:

"Everyone says that Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that's hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against ageing, the leisure society. This is precisely the world we have tried - and so far failed - to create."


Atomised itself is certainly an utopian novel advancing extropian ideas that rather recall HG Wells. However, his more recent novel The Possibility of an Island is much closer to the dystopian tradition, aligning it to apocalytic novels like those of Wyndham and the early Ballard. Houellebecq assumes a series of environmental catastrophes leading to the destruction of society, but differs from earlier novels by applauding the demise of the human species allowing as it does for the rise of a genetically modified race as a replacement. The Elohminite movement depicted in the novel itself rests upon a number of internal contradictions, particularly in the way it depends on a consumer society that turns youth into a commodity that can be indefinitely preserved only for this expectation to be inevitably disappointed. Its force depends entirely on what it opposes, just as Daniel's career depends on the sensibilities it deliberately provokes and outrages; "if the fluidification of forms of behaviour required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalogue of restrained conduct, it was perfectly suited to a celebration of the will and ego". The consequence of this ambiguity is that the new species of neohumans find themselves leaving the calm of their habitations and exploring a post-nuclear wasteland inhabited by savage humans for whom the collapse of civilisation has been total and complete. The neohumans are both revolted by these creatures (the culture of the mind being impossible in a society locked into struggles for existence) while remaining unsatisfied by their own lack of will and consequent stagnation. As a species they achieve nothing and their lack of suffering effectively leaves them as an evolutionary dead-end.

In this sense, Houellebecq's novel follows in the line of Margaret Atwood's (whose The Handmaid's Tale is the closest modern novel written in the vein of Orwell and Huxley) Oryx and Crake where a society based around social inequality and gates communities falls victim to a genetically engineered plague that allows for the rise of a new species that lacks the worst traits of humanity (though in both cases, it is suggested that the posthumans are far from being what is intended, with Houellebecq's species walking out onto the ruined earth in search of what is left of their ancestors). it would be perfectly possible to read Oryx and Crake as a dystopian text where Crake, a Faust-figure like Nemo, Moreau or Frankenstein, pursues dangerous technologies without thought for the consequences, unintended (such as the Craker's development of symbolic thought and religion) or otherwise (the success of the engineered virus). On the other hand, most dystopian novels, including Brave New World, 1984 and We deal with the suppression of biological imperatives rather than their alteration. But comparisons with other Atwood novels suggest otherwise. Surfacing is full of similar dystopian theories concerning an American invasion of Canada for its oil reserves, and sees its protagonist retreat from civilisation into nature (feeling a guilt at being human and expressing a desire for humanity to disappear); similarly, throughout Oryx and Crake mankind is viewed as an aggressive species that consumes resources indiscriminately (essentially, as Easter Island writ large); the Crakers represent a similar retreat to nature, allowing Crake to take on the mantle of an almost heroic figure instead. Oryx and Crake's overall depiction is more ambiguous than Surfacing since the damage is largely done by environmentalist characters rather than corporate strategy.

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posted by Richard 7:41 pm

Sunday, June 11, 2006

 
I have to admit that the subject of utopian communities holds more than a certain morbid fascination for me. Coleridge and Southey once proposed to build such a community to further the ideals of the French Revoluton without drawback of the Terror. Entitled pantisocracy it was to be founded in the New World, by the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, on land bought by the radical Joseph Priestley after his exile from England. Fourier had devised a similar concept, a self-contained community called a phalanstery (as at Brook Farm), several of which were founded in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, figures like Ruskin experimented with such communities (in his case, the ill-fated Guild of St George set out to create agrarian communities were the dignity of labour need not resort ot mechanised techniques), but the advent of such social experiments as communism and fascism has tended, with the exception of some projects like Christiania or the Kibbutzim, to reduce the enthusiasm for such projects. So I was interested to come across this:

"From this flowered Evans’s belief that humans were no longer living in the kind of society that suited them: “We evolved over three million years — we spent 99.9 per cent of that time living in small hunter-gatherer bands with minimal technology, such as bows and arrows.”

Then, 10,000 years ago, came farming and an explosion in food production, which could suddenly sustain huge populations and fuel progress: “The dominant view is that our current lifestyle is indisputably better,” Evans says. “I’m beginning to think it’s not indisputable — in fact, our modern lifestyle is something we’re extremely badly adapted to. No society has more leisure time than the hunter gatherers. On average they spend two hours a day gathering, preparing and cooking food. The rest of the time they sleep a lot, play a lot, make love, and tell stories. The concept of working to survive is unknown, as is the concept of hierarchy.” Primitive cultures, he says, report lower rates of mental disorders, and have more control over their lives.

Evans compares human beings to animals that have been taken out of their natural habitat and reared in captivity. The result is high rates of stress, disease and psychological suffering. “I think of this (the Utopia experiment) as gradually ‘re-wilding’ people,” he laughs. "


I should confess immediately that my morbid interest in such experiments notwithstanding, my instinctive reaction is to presume that this experiment will go the same way as phlansteries and pantisocracies (particularly since much of this experiment in primitivism appears to use solar power, the Internet, modern medicine and sundry other accoutrements of a technological civilisation). The obvious criticism remains that primitivism leads to an existence that can be best described as 'nasty, brutish and short.' Nor does it help that Evans himself compares his project to Alex Garland's The Beach, which rather does the work of satirising his project without any external assistance being required. Finally, the desire to remove modern technological and social progress can easily be viewed as conservative rather than counter-cultural, in the same spirit as my previous post on Luddism and futurism.

Nonetheless, it does seem to me that such experiments can be important and worthwhile (particularly since more modest experiments like New Lanark and Port Sunlight arguably did achieve much in reshaping society for the better). I might not have high expectations for such projects and am certainly not going to take part but I'm nonetheless rather glad that they still exist. Finally, having noted this story through Butterflies and Wheels, I have to make a final admission, namely that this does confirm many of my prejudices regarding certain strains of conservative thought within evolutionary psychology. Certainly, the above dislike for all technoligical and social experimentation doesn't strike me as being all that far removed from Steven Pinker's abhorrence for artistic experimentation.

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posted by Richard 12:47 pm

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

 
It's apparently a rather old piece, but I've just stumbled across Pynchon's article 'Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?', and its suggestion that science fiction is underpinned by a luddite impulse opposed to science and technology. Needless to add, as someone who thinks abandoning the quill pen in favour of the Gutenberg press was probably not a sensible idea, I was rather taken by it:

"If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best... The craze for Gothic fiction after "The Castle of Otranto" was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel... Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion."


Certainly, if we look at the utopian fictions of the nineteenth century, the role of technology and progress is uncertain. William Morris in News from Nowhere advocated a more decentralised, rural society that had left the cities behind. Morris had believed firmly in the dignity of craftmanship against mass production but nonetheless the novel pronounces that "All work which it would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery." Equally, novels like Gilman's Herland balance the notion that that society has fared better without industrialisation with the inhabitants curiousity about science. Erewhon's polemic about the threat of machine consciousness evolving is partly satirical and points to the backwardness of that society, but nonetheless remains a concept Butler seems to have cleaved to. Similarly, Wells delineates a socialist critique of science in The Time Machine (as opposed to the depiction of science in The Island of Dr. Moreau, which extends back to Frankenstein), suggesting that technology will concentrate power to the ruling Morlock class, while the otherwise utopian existence of the Eloi (one that recalls that of Erewhon or Herland) is characterised as a form of disenfranchisement. Utopia depends on access to the means of production (though equally a counter argument can be made resting on the resemblance of the Morlocks to working class laboureres; "even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?").

However, by the second half of the twentieth century, when Sartre had declared that it was no longer to adhere to the concept of scientific progress, matters become more difficult. Wells marked a turning point and from hereon it is the dystopian novel that has become the cornerstone of the more literary branches of science fiction. For example, Wyndham's novels were more unambiguous in depicting the results of genetic manipulation (Day of the Triffids) and nuclear warfare (The Chrysalids), though the latter is also forthright in depicting a new primitivism as forming the basis of a coercive and repressive society. JG Ballard's novels begin in the Wyndhamite vein, especially The Wind from Nowhere and The Drowned World (depicting a world where global warming has left London a flooded city that is as inhospitable as the Amazon). However, where Wyndham's protagnosts are all practical men of action who strive against their times, Ballard's are largely passive and come to embrace them as fulfilling a repressing instinct. Later, Rushing to Paradise comes to critique environmentalism as a form of pyschopathology, a resurgence of civilisation's discontents.

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posted by Richard 7:57 pm

Thursday, December 01, 2005

 
I've found myself particular fascinated by this article on the subject of literary utopias:

"During the Cold War - thanks to Stalinism and the success of such dystopian fables as Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World" and George Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-Four" - all radical programs promising social transformation became suspect. Speaking for his fellow chastened liberals at a Partisan Review symposium in 1952, for example, the theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed what he called the utopianism of the 1930s as ''an adolescent embarrassment."

Niebuhr and other influential anti-utopians of mid-century - Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper - had a point. From Plato's ''Republic" to Thomas More's 1517 traveler's tale ''Utopia" (the title of which became a generic term), to the idealistic communism of Rousseau and other pre- and post-French Revolution thinkers, to Bellamy's ''Looking Backward" itself, utopian narratives have often shared a naive and unseemly eagerness to force square pegs into round holes via thought control and coercion. By the end of the 20th century, most utopian projects did look proto-totalitarian.

The question... is how to revive the spirit of utopia - the current enfeeblement of which, Jameson claims, ''saps our political options and tends to leave us all in the helpless position of passive accomplices and impotent handwringers"... Is the thought of a noncapitalist utopia even possible after Stalinism, after decades of anticommunist polemic on the part of brilliant and morally engaged intellectuals? Or are we all convinced, in a politically paralyzing way, that Margaret Thatcher had it right when she crowed that ''there is no alternative" to free-market capitalism?

Borrowing Sartre's slogan, coined after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, about being neither communist nor anticommunist but ''anti-anticommunist," Jameson suggests we give ''anti-anti-utopianism" a try."


It's a point that reminds me of Derrrida's Spectres of Marx, where the denial of alternative social structures, such as with Fukuyama's End of History, represented a denial of pluralism and democracy. For myself, when I think of Utopian narratives, I think of William Morris and News From Nowhere or Samuel Butler and Erewhon; while critiquing the existing state of society these authors also drew strength from a social context that believed human ingenuity was capable of refashioning itself in the most fundamental manners (whether through a benevolent alliance of technology and commerce or through completely overthrowing the existing state of things). Such an imagination was as evident in the works of Carlyle, Arnold, Fourier and Owen as it was in Marx and Engels.

By contrast, today tends to see evolutionary pyschology used as a means of suggesting that social arrangements (typically the sort of arrangements preferred by free-market conservatives) are literally hard-wired and not susceptible to any form of amendment or alteration; as the addage has it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a change to capitalism. Certainly, dystopian narratives that do depict such a calamity, such as those of Margaret Atwood continue to persist, while Houellebecq's extropian narrative in Platform is one of the few counter-examples that springs to mind (where genetic engineering resumes the sort of transformative character it held for HG Wells and his contemporary Fabians).

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posted by Richard 8:05 pm

Thursday, June 09, 2005

 
It's often been observed that the nineteenth century was the age of utopianism, from the politics of Owen and Marx to novels like News From Nowhere, Herland and Erewhon. Equally, it's often observed that the twentieth century was the age of dystopianism, from the politics of Stalin and Hitler to novels like Brave New World, 1984 and We. What then would the present age be recalled for?

Apocalyptic fiction of a religious bent has apparently been popular in the United States, but it has secular counterparts aplenty from The Clash of Civilisations to novels like Snowcrash or Oryx and Crake. Although some modern novels like The Handmaid's Tale could still be labelled dystopian, we no longer seem to believe in the possibility of society being decisively shaped, for good or ill. Although science continues to make advances, we no long seem to see them as controllable forces. Accordingly, I've been thinking about what possibilities fiction might consider in this category;

Climate change. Certainly the possibility to have gripped the popular imagination to the greatest extent; sea levels rise endangering countries like the Netherlands and any other low-lying coastal regions. The shift of the gulf stream leaves Britain with the same climate as Alaska, and countries like Portugal and Tunisia find themselves swamped by refugees from Britain and Scandinavia. Drought affects other regions, such as China, and war erupts over water.

The Rise of fundamentalisms. Perhaps the most obvious possibility, as this is already evident in many respects. The collapse of traditions in the face of economic pressures and globalisation produce backlashes, both in the Muslim Middle-East and in Christian America. The ensuing violence leads to the further decay of concepts of liberty and privacy in favour of surveillance.

Economic inequality. The trend towards sacrificing social cohesion and equality for economic growth currently shows every sign of continuing, the likely result being increased crime and social unrest, counterparted with the rise gated communities and private security forces.

Changing economic patterns. In historical terms, the two largest economies were India and China. With these two countries increasingly able to draw on the same skills and resources as Western nations but at lower costs, a shift in 'economic gravity' from America and Europe back to India and China, with the economies of the former countries undergoing a partial collapse.

Dwindling oil supplies. As oil supplies either dwindle or fail to increase in line with burgeoning demand, the costs of transportation, energy generation and the production of plastics become increasingly impratical. The forces that have driven economic growth for the last century begin to falter, with few viable alternatives waiting in the wings. Access to remaining oil supplies increasingly defines government's military and foreign policies.

Genetic modification and eugenics. The ability to engineer forms of life is matched with the likelihood of the genetic changes becoming naturalised, opening up new prospects for ecosystems to be unbalanced, similar to the introduction of the cane toad into Australia. Genetic modification of people begins to further entrench social inequalities. On a related note, there is the rise of antibiotic resistant diseases suggests the possibility of new pandemics, while rising sea levels and global warming would also give additional impetuses to diseases like malaria.

Artificial lifeforms. Computing technologies become sufficiently advanced for the creation of sentient lifeforms that are entirely artificial. Since such technologies are used for functional reasons, issues of the rights of artificial lifeforms begin to emerge, creating the possibility for conflict.

Update: One idea that I hadn't considered in my introductory paragraph was whether or not utopian and dystopian fiction would survive themselves. These genres are in many respects products of rationalism, a belief in man's ability to order the world. Morris and Gilman held such views in the same manner that Marx and Owen did. Much of dystopian fiction rests upon the assumption that man is a blank slate that can be rewritten by totalitarian forces, just as the Sovet Union sought to create a form of new man that was not bound by tradition and history. By contrast, the present age is one where science has been increasingly questioned and fundamentalisms appear resurgent.

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posted by Richard 5:20 pm