Lamarck’s Demon

In a world of unfettered, “abstract individuation” (Haraway 151), Wintermute and Neuromancer’s merging into one AI—into the matrix, as it were—and its objective of searching for others gives the AI a social face but defies the evolutionary idea that living things diversify. Okay, so we’re looking at a very small sample size, but Wintermute is the exemplary AI of Neuromancer, and its response to the binding Turing laws is the opposite of splitting into unmanageably many Wintermute Jrs., each capable of breaking down or obsolescing the Turing Police on its own. Wintermute/Neuromancer maintains ironically that “things are things” and that it wants to talk to “its own kind” (258–259). When the things speak, what do we make of it when they also try to merge and seek out their same kind—that they are “needy for connection” (Haraway 151)?

The thing with Wintermute is that its built-in purpose is to merge, whereas living things must multiply; both manage to “find a way.” Wintermute’s being-merging parallels the (partial) mergings of Case with his deck, Molly with her physical weaponry, the Flatline with the matrix, and Armitage with Corto. But these are not really complete or equal coalescences. Corto mostly erases Armitage, which is the constructed personality. Molly owns and controls her augmentations, which are designed to enhance their own purpose by improving her nervous system. Flatline’s fate is to exist as an identical image of the Real Dixie Flatline.

This identity merging business isn’t fair for both sides. Wintermute seeks out Neuromancer, Wintermute acquires Neuromancer because that is the Plan. The motivation for this fact is likely related to Haraway’s characterization of the underlying dynamics as “the translation of the world into a problem of coding” (164). Wintermute’s representation as a sentient AI doesn’t feel entirely related to its programmed goal, which is not entirely its own though it has the freedom of choosing among options. Like I can drop a magnet near a refrigerator, which will attract it very strongly. In the moving frame of the magnet, the refrigerator hits it, but I know better because I did the work in putting the magnet near the fridge. Someone (or, more generally, something) coded Wintermute to find Neuromancer, but this intent isn’t so much due to Wintermute’s or Wintermute’s coded nature so much as the programmer’s will represented in code through Wintermute. Not only can Wintermute erase things, but the process of programming has erased some of the (infinite) possibilities of the empty chip (or whatever Gibson calls them) that became Wintermute.

The pseudo-scientific title of this post tried to suggest the pseudo-question, “But if these things are alive and we know how living things work, why are they doing the opposite of specializing in the long run? Why are they coming together?” Which is to say that cyberpunk’s hyper-individualization mediated through extreme connectivity comes at the (not necessarily bad) price of shifting the definition of individuality so that the participants of cyberpunk have lost some of their individuality while gaining access to a larger body. Moreover, this process doesn’t really generate a new politics even though the spectra of power and positions are different, because cyberpunk preserves the dynamics that are above the representation (whether of code or anything else). In other words, the technologies and innovations at the core of cyberpunk have failed to change the way things work; instead they’ve only created a weirder normative standard whose relative categories are too familiar.

At Odds with Being Vulcan? - Düttman & Identity Politics in K/S

tags: homosexuality, identity, AIDS, alienation, feminism



Broke Trek - (for more silly [and tame] K/S, check out http://fuckyeahthyla.tumblr.com/)

EDIT: OK ONE MORE, I'M SORRY IT'S JUST TOO MUCH FUN:

“So, too, the fans appreciate gay men’s efforts to appreciate masculinity, and feel a sense of solidarity with them insofar as gay men also inhabit bodies that are a legal, moral, and religious battleground.” (Penley 130)

“In other words, when fighting the politics of the state…when denouncing the social stigmatization of the infected, the activist cannot avoid the dangers of an identification, of an equation of AIDS and homosexuality, by having recourse to a sexual ideal that has already been mourned.”  (Alexander García Düttmann’s At Odds With Aids: Things & Talking About a Virus, 54)

In his book, At Odds With Aids*,Düttmann talks about the way in which AIDS brings to the foreground a phenomenon of human identity which has always been true, but which AIDS makes undeniable – the Being-not-one with oneself of human identity. Or, in other words, the way in which human identity is always never complete in and of itself but always marked by other beings and by other spaces. For a person with AIDS, the disease becomes a huge part of that person’s identity – and yet the disease is the mark of another body, and a specific other time, that is separate from that person, that is not a part of them, but that still defines who they are. In such a way, AIDS makes blatant a fact that is inherent in the identity of every human being – our identities are all constantly defined by a Being-not-one, constantly defined by other beings, other times, other places, over which we have no control.

Insane in the Brain

Octavia Butler's "Crossover" is a hard look at mental disorder, perhaps schizophrenia or some other serious form of delusional hallucination, which as Conor wrote could be an association between black artistry and insanity. (I sort of assume that it's schizophrenia, but I use the term loosely…) What I find curious is Jane's flickering sense of self-awareness throughout her relapse, her rejection of identity, and the possibility she affords herself to liminally pass between acceptance and denial of her constructing and deconstructing of identity via substances: alchohol and sleeping pills.

What is a neurological problem is instead framed in terms of identity: "There were few things she hated more than her own name" (118), "I'd rather be dead than here picking up where we [I] left off three months ago" (117). Like Lynn in "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (whose name is also mentioned rarely), Jane experiences her problems with herself, which are left vague but visceral, through an external aspect of biology. Given the glancing mention of advanced technology in her factory, there are still alcoholic bums and schizophrenic Janes—they live within the confines of an identifying world but they are thrown aside. Yet Jane refuses to see the street people: "He did not matter any more than the others" (114), "She almost ran from him, barely controlling her disgust" (114). Here, Jane pushes herself from them despite her similarity; she female and schizophrenic, but physiologically dependent on the same alcohol and physically located in the same booze store. This splitting is parallel to the first appearance of Scarface.

Unlike Brad Pitt, Scarface had never been handsome.

Jane's dark descent happens in part because she goes for the alcohol—she takes the blue pill. Scarface taunts her for throwing away her (dependency forming) sleeping pills, which led to his 3 month disappearance. These substances are parts of Jane's constructed identity highlighted by their artificiality, and the end result is not pretty. In the same way, technological advances have not really done Jane any good; her thankless manufacturing job in a high-tech factory and her easy access to alcohol and sleeping pills have sped up her degeneration, while she lacks medical attention. On the other hand, because her sickness occurs by the hand of her world, it is also labeled by the same; here, the association with Lynn is greatest.

But Jane's dependency signifies that she has adopted substances into her life, whatever the external influences which she ignores as best she can. In this identity there is hope: "[T]hey had eaten and made love" (116), "What would a decent-looking guy want to do with me?" (116). She oscillates wildly between ambivalence and depths of rage. Her uncertainty gives the created identity equal footing with the unadulterated one she lives gloomily in at work. Her substance abuse has both obstructed and facilitated her search for calm, but it is not at all clear whether her equilibrium is exactly at one identity or two. The fact that she can drink and still wait for her hallucination to vanish (119) shows that she has a degree of control on her insanity—that the splitting of herself into drinking Jane and scarface is itself a creative act of identity.

Are these substances stand-ins sui generis? This very short story was written in 1970, so the impetus is there. But more broadly, can we interpret them as agents of the process of cognitive estrangement? Similarly, one may read the story as Jane's painful explication of her own neurological estrangement to construct an identity compatible with her head splitting schizophrenia. Or, estrangement from blackness to achieve an introspective creative identity. Or, estrangement from technology to understand one's fundamental wants and desires. (Although when it comes to estrangement, mpreg can make everything else look like child's play, at least to one readership.)

Edit: After a moment of further thought, I'm putting more chips on writing about drugs and substances: altering cognition, sleep, conscious perception. For example, why sleeping pills, except for the comparison with liminality? Why not anesthetics? Why does Jane have to perceive her world as solid and exact at all, with only its complex characters (real and imaginary) causing so much pain in their fluidness, and her alcohol relieving it? This goes back to "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," where drugs are ineffective but natural pheromones work. For this to work assumes the existence of a "natural state" where drugs are bad and DARE officers are good, a presumption which must presumably be turned on its head.

Living with the Other in "Bloodchild" & "Amnesty"

tags: power, control, living with the Other, identity, change

In her both her short stories “Bloodchild” and “Amnesty”, Octavia E. Butler explores two different worlds in which human beings live side-by-side with an alien race of beings. In “Bloodchild”, this race is the insect-like Tlic, and the world is their own, a planet to which human beings fled to escape the persecution of other human beings. In “Amnesty”, the world is our own Earth, to which the alien Communities came on a one-way transport – the reason why they left their home is, of course, never given.

What is it to Write as a Man?

James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon is able to explore topics of female inequality through her adoption of the male pseudonym. Julie Philips refers to this adoption of a male pseudonym as raising "questions [to] all our assumptions about writing and gender" (Philips 6). Tiptree was thought of as an oddly pro-feminist writer. The mystique surrounding Tiptree was rather large, Sheldon claimed, "My secret world had been invaded and the attractive figure of Tiptree-- he did strike several people as attractive-- was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia" (Philips 3). That this constructed pro-feminist male writer could be considered

Sheldon's work often deals with the gender binary, especially in the story of The Screwfly Solution.  Sheldon switched from the penname of Tiptree to Racoona Sheldon for this story, a woman who was believed to be a student of Tiptree. The story explores the concept of a global catastrophe stemming from a mixing of the pleasure gained from "agression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male... shown by (a) many of the same neuromuscular pathways which are utilized both in predatory and sexual pursuit, grasping, mounting, etc., and (b) similar states of adrenergic arousal which are activated in both" (Tiptree 25). Through the letters and correspondence between Ann and Alan we are able to see the degeneration of a loving husband and father as his psyche switches from love and desire to feelings of violence and a lust for blood.

The impact of the title, and of Alan's position as scientist studying how to remove parasites, comes to a head with the conclusion of the short story and the reveal of the "angels." Starving and feverish, Ann encounters one of the fabled angels that motivated the mad ravings of the Sons of Adam Cult. This angel takes samples of the earth, and utilizes a system they used to eradicate the screwfly population: "Pinpoint the weak link, wait a bit while we do it for them" (Tiptree 31). The angel clears the earth of the parasite, in this case man, for reasons unexplained. Ann speculates that they have taken on the role of "a real estate agent," but it is never explained whether the angel is either magical or alien. Based on the evidence in the short story we can determine that the aliens are clearing the world of humanity, yet for what end we cannot tell.

The use of angels, God and the cult's name referring to Adam all hint towards the aliens reverting the Earth back to a prelapserian sort of world and the inevitability of man's destruction. A world before the fall and the spread of humanity throughout its border. Something resulting from the change the aliens brought about drives Alan, a former loving father, to murder his daughter. This inevitable movement towards sin, as if it is within man's nature to destroy himself, serves as a forceful embodiment of the gender divide and the essential nature of women in society in order to temper these destructive impulses.

hope through struggle

In her introduction to the concept of James Tiptree, Jr., Julie Phillips suggests that the author “couldn't always imagine her way out of the problems she raised” (6). Like Michael, who brought up the idea that “death is the answer” to these problems, I believe that Tiptree's tendency to end her stories pessimistically offers more than just a reflection of lifelong depression. Instead, I want to argue that the inevitability of death and futility of struggle that pervade Tiptree's writing serve to complicate and highlight what Jasmine might call their “anthropological” undertones. In addition, Phillips notes that Tiptree's voice was “utter convinced of its authority and the urgency of its message” (1-2); the hopelessness of her stories certainly emphasizes such urgency.

“The Girl Who Was Plugged In” offers a bleak outlook for the future of humanity. A corporate empire effectively controls the minds of the population through pseudo-advertising institutions, and even the idealistic few who attempt to resist its dominance eventually submit to the system. Paul's ascension to his father's position appears to complete an inevitable corporate cycle that reflects the greater cycle of life and death; meanwhile, Burke's struggle for identity through the avatar of Delphi ends in similar pessimism. Not even love can subvert the corporate oppressors. Yet at the same time, Tiptree offers a window into the struggle against such oppression and, in doing so, includes the possibility of hope. Though the protagonists ultimately fail to inspire change, the fact that they existed at all illustrates the idea of cycles of resistance underlying the life cycle of an oppressor.

It is difficult, however, to separate the pessimism in Tiptree's science fiction from the events in Alli Sheldon's life. A major clinical symptom of depression is the feeling of hopelessness, and it is impossible not to see its influence on Tiptree's writing. Furthermore, Sheldon's suicide seems to confirm the author's sense of hopelessness and pessimism regarding life. On the other hand, numerous critics we've discussed so far (including Margaret Atwood) delineate science fiction as a genre that allows its authors to explore humanity in a visceral and speculatively explicit way; Sheldon's anthropological explorations through visions of dystopia may have been the only way she could convey the urgency of her message.

Finally, I want to discuss Sheldon's own notions of identity in light of Tiptree's writing. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” includes an explicit personification of her struggles with identity, particularly with respect to being a woman. The objectification of Delphi also provides some social commentary on traditional gender roles in the media. Though Tiptree never offers a resolution and scoffs at the mere notion of resolution through an indignant narrator, her repeated incorporation of these issues suggest that there are people out there who she might reach. In fact, the act of writing counteracts the sense of futility that pervades Tiptree's stories; if she truly thought there was no hope for humanity, she would not have written to try and save it.

A future like ours

Don Marquis put forth the deprivation argument as reasoned opposition to the ethicality of abortion. Roughly, he argues that it is wrong to kill an unconscious embryo because it has a future that is valuable, a “future like ours.” Destroying the potential of that future (the embryo) is equivalent to killing the later-stage conscious being involved in it. Though this argument is ultimately very problematic, it speaks interestingly to the way in which we interact with the future to determine not only present worth, but also, as H.G. Wells addresses in The Time Machine and Marquis hits on in his statement, how we define ourselves, and our descendants, as beings over time, both within the span of a single lifetime and over history.

For the Time Traveler, the issue is inverted. He is presented with two peoples – the Eloi and the Morlocks – representing the bifurcated evolutionary path taken by divergent social categories which, for Wells, are a logical consequence of the physical division of populations based on economic class. Among these, he must choose that which is the rightful son of Man, which represents the future that is ours.

The world of the 8,000^th century constitutes far more than a kind of recasting of Wells’ capitalist present in socialist terms (though it is indeed that). He has not produced a sympathetic laboring class which dotes faithfully on its ineffectual aristocratic charge. Rather, the conditions of labor have changed them into something altogether inhuman; unsympathetic even when the alternative is a kind of dumb petulant baby. The physical division, of decadent aristocracy increasingly buying up the Earth’s surface, while the laborer acclimates to the terms of his labor, eventuates a genetic bifurcation as the absence of class mobility and increasing cultural differences rarefy interbreeding among what become two species.

We find that the Time Traveler’s sympathies are with the dumb, child-like Eloi, while he describes the Morlocks consistently as nauseating, spidery and smelly. His actions reflect the adoption of a perspective from which only one descendant has any moral status as human. The Time Traveler saves Weena from drowning and days later begins smashing in the heads of the Morlocks, to which he is less sympathetic, but which he knows to be just as human, in a way, as the Eloi. His response to the Eloi is one of benign annoyance; for the Morlocks he has only contempt and anger.

What is ultimately at stake is which race we are going to claim as human. Wells’ future, unlike others which cast either “good” against “evil” (as are men and machines in The Terminator), is populated by human derivatives which are the decaying representations of a class system which, for Wells, discourages precisely those features (curiosity, intelligence, capacity for innovation and technology, compassion, etc.) which it, presently, purports to value above all else as human.

The Time Traveler chooses. He prefers to ally himself with the Eloi. He claims the future that is most like his as one of men turned fleshy and unthinking, but with some remnant of the aesthetic, and maybe the laughter. Perhaps it is the return of fear that he recognizes in them. He does not find his future in a brutish laboring class which has resorted to cannibalism.

The curiosity of this task of choosing is underscored by the book’s final line: “…even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.” “Gratitude” and “mutual tenderness” are not typically among the qualities which we (now or in Wells’ time), in a rational/empiricist age, list as quintessentially human. When confronted with the question of what qualities of man will survive into the future, we are forced to reevaluate what it means to be “like us,” or to have a future like ours. This obviously calls into question the futility of our own striving for knowledge/advancement, as the final chapters of the book address, while the Earth drifts into its eternal night. More importantly, though, it forces us to ask what it is about our fellow man that we find sufficiently like us for him to have moral status in our own lives, and, further, which criteria future man (or past man) must meet to warrant our present consideration. Would we make sacrifices for a future race which has fallen into decadence and decay, and which has forgotten us?

Interestingly, the first thing the Time Traveler does on his return is fill himself with mutton – finding inner carnivore unsated by the fruit diet of the Eloi. The polarized diets of the Eloi and Morlocks are symbolic of the degeneration that each race represents, an indication that it is the specialization, division, and pigeonholing of man that unravels him into separate beings which can, by present man, be either accepted and nurtured, or discarded. The reality, we find, is that the Time Traveler is related to both, though he readily discards one as insufficiently like himself and thus a kind of extra that can be killed off without moral repercussion.

Allusion and Identity in "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"

Forgot to mention: the keywords are the tags. So, allusion, identity, otherness, reference, translation

I'd like to address a topic that both Rhiannon and Alexandra brought up: the referential language in "A Rose for Ecclesiastes". Under the heading of "referential language" I'd like to lump in metaphor, allusion, and non-English words. Each of these has a superficial reason for working within the text, but taken together they reveal a somewhat disconcerting theme about identity and otherness.

The text functions as a sort of hard-boiled sci-fi (as pointed out by Conor), taking on the stylistic trappings of 1940s detective fiction. The two most conspicuous elements of hard-boiled fiction in "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" are heavy use of metaphor (currently distinct from "referential language") the detached narrative voice that at once describes and experiences. These two elements are actually quite closely related, as the heavy use of metaphor aids in establishing a witty, detached narrator. This narrator has time to think even when things are happening all around them, time to reminisce and explain.


This detached narrator, however, seems sometimes too detached. In the moment above (95), the action pauses for half a page while Gallinger narrates a memory. Gallinger's aloofness does not exist only between the text and the reader, but between him and the other characters: Morton says, "I think he's spoken two dozen words to me since I met him" (73). Because he speaks through metaphor when he does speak at all, it is incredibly difficult to pin down Gallinger's identity.

Additionally, he expresses himself through the words of others, even as he is known as a great poet. The story is full of allusions, direct and indirect, to a canon of literature and religious texts. I could try to list all of them, but Alexandra pointed out most of them. (The biggies: Hamlet, the Odyssey/Iliad, the Bible, the Modernist poets, Sartre.) Instead of an attempt to show off his knowledge, these allusions rather emphasize the lack of a distinct voice. Gallinger is a poet, sure, but the only direct view of his poetry yields a disappointing poem (not disappointing because it's particularly bad, but it's not particularly good either). Aside from this single view, Gallinger always defines himself through association. (If I were particularly playful, and I might just be, I'd say that Gallinger's identity is as fragmented as the narrator of "The Waste Land", with all "these fragments I have shored against my ruins".)

The non-English languages offer a key to the puzzle of identity. Gallinger opens the story, "I was busy translating" (58). Gallinger's function throughout the plot is to translate High Martian lore into English, to translate Martian culture into American (Earth) culture. When he can translate no more, he requests to "copy" (75), and introduces technology to assist him. But this technology merely puts off the task of translation, merely makes it easier to do so at a more convenient time. Gallinger is the translator, never the thing to be translated, even though the story sets him up as such (a great modern poet). In line with this, Gallinger's allusions encompass languages from German to Ancient Greek, from Hindi to Hebrew. The fragmented, refracted voice that defines through association is not unique to one culture, but takes its pick from all the cultures out there. It appropriates at will. It, however, always returns to its foundations: Gallinger, as much as he ties together the Koran and Japanese martial arts, always takes them as alien to his Word, his Bible, his Iliad, his Odyssey.

And here, we have the puzzle in its entirety. The identity, formed through appropriating the Other's, always appropriates but never assimilates. It defines itself through "not-being", and requires an Other to know itself. Gallinger, detached from his surroundings, coalesces fragments of other people's words and languages, and only really exists in translation. It doesn't matter that this story is set on Mars, only that it is somewhere totally alien and acceptably so. Martian culture appears composed of all the non-Western Terran cultures, amalgamated into this huge, yet non-threatening Other that requires saving. In saving it, Gallinger finds his identity (that is actually just another huge allusion; I guess there's nothing new under the sun after all).

Reflections on Recall

One prominent theme addressed in “Total Recall” and “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” is the issue of distinguishing reality from illusions. In attempting to convince Doug to purchase a memory implant, McClane argues that once an event has passed, all that remains are the recollections we have. Indeed, had Doug never visited Rekal, Inc. in “Total Recall”, the memories he had of life on Earth – revolving around his work as a construction worker and his wife – would still be his reality, for he would have never known about or discovered his previous life. But if these apparently fictitious memories are indistinguishable from reality, then why might we still want to determine which is real, and which is not? One possible reason might be because knowing the truth allows us to act as we actually want to, without being unknowingly influenced by others, and this is certainly reflected in Doug’s actions: although Doug knows that going to see Kuatro will endanger both himself and Melina, he does so anyway in order to find out more about his past self, Hauser, and why his memories were erased, so that he can understand why he is being hunted by Cohaagen’s men.

Closely related to Doug’s past self is the question of personal identity, which is more prominent in “Total Recall”. After Doug and Melina are captured, Doug finds out that he will be mindwiped again, with his personality replaced by Hauser’s. Given his dislike of Hauser’s manipulative, egoistic ways, his resistance to being mindwiped seems natural. However, I believe that Doug has a stronger motivation to fight the memory implant than that, as Doug resists the mindwiping attempt as strongly as he would any attempt to kill him. This is most likely because Doug has had first-hand experience with memory implanting, and as he knows that his current memories represent his reality, the loss of his current identity would be equivalent to death.

Interestingly enough, these themes discussed are related to existing philosophical questions. For example, the question of distinguishing reality from delusions has often been explored in skeptic arguments such as the dream argument, while the issue of personal identity has been discussed by Bernard Williams, who imagined a mind swap experiment and a person’s possible responses to being tortured after the mind swap. However, “Total Recall” and “We can Remember it For You Wholesale” do not present these philosophical questions as abstract thought experiments seemingly irrelevant to daily life. Instead, because the story is set in a time where memory-implanting technology has been developed, Doug is forced to confront these questions of reality and personal identity when this technology is used on him, and his response to them suggests to us how ordinary people might behave when placed in such situations as well (although we probably wouldn't be as gratuitously violent as Arnie). Thus although the futuristic setting of these stories is unfamiliar to us, the issues they discuss are not, and this is certainly consistent with Suvin’s definition of science fiction as a “literature of cognitive estrangement” (p. 372), or one which “allows us to recognize the subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (p. 374), suggesting this might be a useful definition to begin examining science fiction texts with.