Long Sunday: "stands still and has come to a stop"

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"stands still and has come to a stop"

It is helpful, if also a bit unnerving, when media culture generates near proofs, direct materializations, of theses that you've already been walking around feeling smugly smart about. The thesis that I'm thinking about right now isn't exactly mine, but it is one that has held my attention for a little while now. And I think I can localize the origin of this line of thought down to a single passage from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, a passage that clues us in to the significance of the novel's title.

"Of course," he says, "we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition." (Clipped from here)

It is an argument about science fiction that is also an argument about the experience of time at present, or vice versa. And it is in an excellent description of the state of speculative films today. In one of the DVD extras for Children of Men (unfortunately not available on line) the set-designers and stylists discuss the fact that Cuaron wanted everything in the film to look like stuff from today, only older and more weathered, which is exactly what we get. The future as present-less-infrastructural investment. Disaster movies set themselves in a next year that looks a lot like last year, while Al Gore's apocalyptic infomercial confusedly quivers between easy futural solutions (buy carbon indulgences!) and a deeper, more convincing sense that we are always already fucked.

Newsmagazine features on future stuff has morphed into special issues on What Is About to Happen, and What Are They Doing to Stop It. From this...

to this...

(Survival Guide???? See what I mean...)

What set me to writing this post (the "near proof" mentioned above) was the trailer for a new PKD film-adaptation, reportedly quite terrible: Next.

A PKD symptomatic in with the protagonist can only see into the proximate future - a future that apparently climaxes with the detonation (or do they stop it???) of a nuclear device in an American shipyard. Right. It is tough to think of a premise that comes closer to exactly mimesis of the dominant temporal strategy of the first four years of the Bush administration, which I was only half-gulible enough to half-take serious, as I anxiously sort-of awaited the truck bombing of the synagogue and the two cop cars constantly parked in front of it at the end of my street in Brooklyn.

The progression of PKD films over the past quarter-century is vividly emblematic of the recision of the future; with each iteration, we draw closer to the present, and even drop at times back into the past. First, there's Blade Runner, with its replicants and super-huge video screens and so forth, even if things are dusty and noirish. Then there's Total Recall with the robot drivers and Mars Today and tennis sim that Sharon Stone practices with. But A Scanner Darkly is a retro future, set in a Californicated past of stoners and beautiful losers, no matter where (when) it thinks it is. (I know I'm leaving a few out, but bear with me....) And then there's Here.

When I teach utopian / dystopian fiction from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to my undergraduates, I usually start by taking them on a little mental journey back to a time when the question future was actually up for argument, and then bring them back to the here and now to ask them what, if anything, they can imagine significantly changing during the course of their lives. More and better video games, older and older people, fewer and fewer good jobs. But, of course, no fundamental alteration in the political or culture organization of things - their kids, if they have them, will live in the same sort of world as they do. Maybe someone will cure cancer, perhaps there will be free tv on the internets, but mostly things will rest as they are.

The first time I used this ploy, I actually waited to hear what they thought the future might look like. I have since learned to lecture straight through the socratic counter-point. They don't answer; they've never, it turns out, even considered the question - at least the vocal ones haven't. It is all entirely new to them...

It is tough, though, to know exactly what to make of this development - the foreshortening of the future from way, way out there to quite soon to almost now down toward in selben Augenblick. On the one hand, of course, it marks a foreclosure of the concept that the world might be radically otherwise, as there will never be any time for it to radically change. On the other hand, the whole scenario calls to mind Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and its resistance to the Social Democratic concept of progress as a "progression through a homogenous, empty time" in favor of a "notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop."

At any rate, perhaps this sort of issue is exactly the sort of thing that the present day literature department should take up as a task. We English professors love the conjunction of the aesthetic and the political. But something has happened that makes it nearly impossible (save through pseudo-blog) to make this argument publically.

By CR | April 24, 2007 in Benjamin | Permalink

Comments

I like what you talk about!!! Keep it up!

Posted by: M | Apr 24, 2007 2:32:31 PM

I have little time to write at the moment, but there's a little bit of possible overdetermination in taking SF as illustration of this idea -- it's part of an ideological arc in SF, from PKD to New Wave to cyberpunk to Mundane, each wavelet starting "closer to shore" and cresting at the same place.

The key, though, is that this SF is consciously neither utopian nor dystopian. It's not apocalyptic. For contemporary SF concerned with utopian ideas you want to go to the British socialist line (say, post-New Wave Moorcock, Alasdair Gray, Iain M. Banks.)

Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 24, 2007 6:01:22 PM

but there's a little bit of possible overdetermination in taking SF as illustration of this idea

Why is it overdetermination, Rich? Why can't it be both a thesis and evidence from the same source, SF? Please do explain.

And with the "utopian" bit - true to Benjamin, the issue at hand is temporal and formal and not necessarily thematic. I.e. a work could have a politically / phenomenologically suggestive form without necessarily heading into something obviously parallel thematically. A dystopian work with a utopian form - it's dialectical...

Or maybe I'm getting you wrong. Feel free to explain further when you have more time.

M: Thanks!

Posted by: CR | Apr 24, 2007 11:52:37 PM

Read Harold Innis, "A Plea For Time," and "The Problem of Space" in The Bias of Communication.

Posted by: Cornchops | Apr 25, 2007 12:12:22 AM

A little more explanation, Cornchops, before I dash to the library?

Posted by: CR | Apr 25, 2007 12:18:19 AM

I am not sure that the set of 'Children of Men' looking like older stuff of today is evidence of a foreshortening of the future. Perhaps, the films of the past focused more on the new technologies of the future. Utopias delivered by amazing machines; dystopias at the mercy of monsterous machines. In my view, Children of Men reflects a loss of faith in technology, development, and progress. The future is characterized not by changes in 'stuff', but by changes in human relations. It is a strong vision of a far-off, but imaginable future. The anxieties of increased competition, of the swell of the 'Other', and the inability to reproduce the 'i'...The focus of the film - saving this rare infant - speaks to the new reproductive (as opposed to 'productive') crises of the future and a return to the building blocks of life.

Posted by: Polly Jones | Apr 25, 2007 12:53:57 AM

Interesting, Polly. I think that all I meant in the passage that you're referring to was that Children of Men doesn't in fact focus on a "far-off, but imaginable future" but rather something closer to "the day after tomorrow..." The world of the film isn't radically different from today, other than the catastrophe, and even the catastrophe doesn't really seem to have all that much of an effect on the day to day functioning of the world. People still go to Starbucks, they surf the web at work, and in particular, the social order is almost entirely only an intensification of the one we live with today (the security state, the internment camp, etc...) Cuaron was very intent, it seems, on incessantly "quoting" imagery that is all to familiar to us right now. Abu Ghraib, London bombings, Iraq War footage, and the like...

In short, true to Gibson, the future is now in Children of Men.

Relatedly, do you get the sense that the public at large is busily imagining "changes in human relations"? I don't. This was, in part, what I was trying to say in this post: that the dream factories have run out of ideas when it comes to real futurity and the difference that it needs to constitute itself.

Or am I missing your point?

Posted by: CR | Apr 25, 2007 1:11:21 AM

I'll try to unpack what I dashed off above, which on re-reading doesn't seem to make much sense.

I'll take PKD as the beginning of a particular arc or tendency in SF, since you refer to him. PKD, as the blurb for his just-released early book insists, wrote proletarian novels before he started writing SF. A lot of the strength of his SF is that it is set in worlds in which the characters are, recognizeably, contemporary ordinary people.

The movements within SF that are, in some way, related to or taking off from PKD and similar writers (New Wave, cyberpunk, Mundane) share an interest in the depiction of how people were reacting to the future within something like contemporary society. This allows ordinary-protagonist viewpoint instead of all of those tiresome SF heroes or cardboard members of future societies, and also allows SF to be more about what might be called cultural studies and less about technofiction.

Therefore, the writing from these groupings necessarily is concerned with late capitalism. The lack of a depiction of fundamental change is an artistic choice, not something that necessarily says that our ability to imagine fundamental change has suffered. Other writers make different choices.

But even within these works, fundamentally different futures are often seen in their beginnings. For instance, even a cyberpunk writer like Bruce Sterling -- who I chose for this example because I remember that you don't like him as a public intellectual -- often has books in which capitalism is in the process of being replaced. For instance, Islands in the Net is shot through with Bob Blackian anti-work movements, Holy Fire is a world in which capital is locked down for the purpose of social stability, Schismatrix envisions anarchistic fragmentation.

So I'm not sure about the "thesis and evidence from the same source, SF." There is certainly a lot SF-ish adaptation out there that supports the thesis, but it's not clear to me whether this is because the adaptation is into media that are necessarily less subtle than the source.

Gibson, by the way, is especially difficult for this kind of thing, because he's really a sort of archaicist. OVer and over in his books you see the replacement of a corrupt human personality with a standard corporation as a kind of cleansing; he's replaying the transition into late capitalism. And underlying that, there's what I think are best described as alchemist themes; all of those completions of the personality through merging with the special other, all of those mystics who recognize artistic quality because they just have a gift. Gibson doesn't envision any real change past what is now instantly recogneable as a Gibsonian future, that is true -- but I think that's a quality of his particular work.

Was that any better, or did I lose track of the point?

Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 25, 2007 8:34:18 AM

Oh, right, there's one prominent British socialist writer who I didn't mention in my first list, China Mieville. I didn't mention him because his in my opinion best work so far, Iron Council, explicitly backs off from depicting social change; in fact, he has a theory that since we can't imagine what life will be like after the socialist revolution, we can't really depict it fictionally. That sort of supports your point, but not for the reason that no change is imagined.

Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 25, 2007 8:47:53 AM

I've always assumed that modern images of the future as 'the present, but dirtier and more capitalist' were a sort of... recognition of likely failure, more than anything else. When you grow up reading older scifi you're immediately aware of how much it reflects the era in which it is written, especially in little unconscious assumptions. So if you explicitly make your version of the future an extrapolation of the present there's less chance of giving yourself away (all reflections of contemporary bias etc become intentional). As if they were saying 'since we can't successfully imagine what life will be like in the future - since we will always be proven wrong about something - we might as well not try to make the leap, or decide at the outset in what way we shall be wrong and thus forestall any criticism.' Which is similar to China Mieville's theory, I suppose, but perhaps less charitable.

Posted by: cns | Apr 25, 2007 10:01:07 AM

Rich,

Yes, this is all very interesting. But let me just underscore a response to this:

SF-ish adaptation out there that supports the thesis, but it's not clear to me whether this is because the adaptation is into media that are necessarily less subtle than the source.

But it is the adaptations of the PKD (and other stuff) that I am interested in right here, not so much the novels themselves. There is a decision that is made, obviously, about rendering the "futurity" of these pieces. Of course they are less subtle, the screen versions - but that is why, here, I am interested in them. They are reflections of market-demand crossed with complex aesthetic agency. They reveal something different about ourselves and our relation to our world than the novels themselves.

(This is especially clear with Cuaron vs. PD James - it's actually quite amazing to me that he made what he did out of that source... Very, very different works...)

he has a theory that since we can't imagine what life will be like after the socialist revolution, we can't really depict it fictionally.

Right. And this is in a sense the photographic negative of the Benjamin bit from my post above. And there is some real value to a statement like that. But also a very real danger. That's clear, right? The two side of the sword?

Posted by: CR | Apr 25, 2007 2:23:49 PM

CR,

I'm not challenging your general thesis; I would likely agree that the public at large is not focused on the future. In fact an essay titled 'The Existential Divide' in last month's issue of Adbusters cited the following: "while 79% of university students in 1970 said their goal in life was to develop 'a meaningful philosophy of life,' by 2005, 75% defined their life's objective as 'being very well off financially.'"

I continue, however, to feel that Children of Men is not an instance of a failing to conceive of a radically different future. I certainly hope that an inability to reproduce is not the future of tomorrow. Instead, the futuristic themes are radically different from what we are used to. I think it is also interesting to consider that, perhaps, part of the reason that people are not able to envision the future is that it may very well involve a sort of regression and a return to ways of the past.

Posted by: Polly Jones | Apr 25, 2007 3:10:37 PM

"But it is the adaptations of the PKD (and other stuff) that I am interested in right here, not so much the novels themselves."

Oh, OK. I didn't understand that -- I thought that you were treating the adaptations as being stand-ins for the novels.

With regard to China Mieville's theory, I agree that it's dangerous, and I tend to interpret it as a sign of exhaustion -- socialists have never before been hesitant to depict life after the revolution. But if I get started on that there's another 10 paragraphs or so to go, so best not.

Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Apr 25, 2007 3:21:30 PM

Polly:

I'd be interesting in hearing more about what this radically different future conceived by C of M might be? I could imagine some possibilities, yes...

Rich:

But if I get started on that there's another 10 paragraphs or so to go, so best not.

Yes, that's a big topic, isn't it...

Posted by: CR | Apr 25, 2007 10:24:43 PM

This paper may be of interest to you. It has a good bibliography on this subject. Also, this article talks about the disappearance of futurity from recent sci-fi.

Posted by: Wade | Apr 26, 2007 2:41:20 AM

I am skeptical about how well this analysis works. Setting aside the matter of whether or not the state of science fiction (or bad movie adaptations of otherwise perfectly respectable works of fiction) is a good measure of our collective sense of the future, there is a more critical problem: the Enlightenment notion of progress is dead. That’s critical insofar as that notion (or some remnant of it) animated the hopes (or fears) of the nineteenth century for the future. Man’s conquest of nature and capacity to “improve” were taken as givens; it was seen as only a matter of time before all of the maladies that historically hounded the human race would be put to bed. Of course, two great wars, a few genocides, and a nuclear age later, and most of us—left or right—are not so sure “progress” is all it is cracked up to be. I admit that the issue is a bit more complicated than that, so pardon me for painting in broad strokes; but distinguishing between the assumed vision of the previous two centuries and our own is a critical first step to take when trying to make pronouncements about the “foreshortening of the future.”

As for change in our society or the world at large, there is a strong case to be made that the world has never changed quicker than it has in the last three centuries. That goes for politics as much as it goes for technology. Of course, those who are perpetually disgruntled with anything less than their pneumapathological dreamlands are obvious displeased that history hasn’t brought us a full reconfiguration of reality, but that’s hardly an argument that people—any people—can’t see a world different from our in ten, twenty, or a hundred years. Just because that vision may not include some dangerously deceptive utopian landscape doesn’t make it limited.

Raising the fact that we live in a time where we don’t believe the world will be “radically ortherwise” raises the question, “Is that a bad thing?” And, maybe more fundamentally, “Has there ever been a time when humanity on a whole (as opposed to those infatuated with their “Gnostic” myths) has thought the world would be radically otherwise?” Certainly Christianity believes the world will be “radically otherwise” after the end of history and no doubt this conception has held (with various points of severe destabilization) over the course of the last 2,000 years. Before that, you had cosmological societies where the world could not possibly be otherwise than it is. Now, I suspect, we don’t have much of anything—remnants of the Christian view that are slowly fading coupled with a pervasive uncertainty brought on by a number of factors I won’t go into here.

Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez | Apr 26, 2007 12:13:37 PM

“Has there ever been a time when humanity on a whole (as opposed to those infatuated with their “Gnostic” myths) has thought the world would be radically otherwise?”

Um, yes. The world as a whole? That's a very large sample set. But yes, there were large section of the world at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century who felt this way, to some degree or another, and with different amounts of hope and despair, sure.

And in fact I'd argue that most late-century Americans grew up with a lingering sense that things might change in one direction or another. Perhaps this sensibility came to a critical head during the late 90s (when qualitative change morphed into quantative change...) and the boats were going to rise on a vast ocean of intercontinental trade and digital innovation.

Raising the fact that we live in a time where we don’t believe the world will be “radically ortherwise” raises the question, “Is that a bad thing?”

Short answer: yes, this is a bad thing. But for reasons both simple and complex.

Thanks for your contribution, though...

Posted by: CR | Apr 26, 2007 1:32:24 PM

I addressed this already, didn't I? Those who were seeking the "radical otherwise" were indeed bound up with their myths of a reordered reality; Marxism is perhaps the best case illustration. Certainly an ideology like that should be distinguished in some respects from liberal/Enlightenment notions which saw progress, but certainly not one that was going to climax in a new reality altogether. If anything, they were looking for the culmination of the Enlightenment's promise, not something beyond the Enlightenment itself.

Short answer: yes, this is a bad thing. But for reasons both simple and complex.

It's only bad if the state of the world now is bad and perhaps (though I'm not sure I'm the one to argue this point) it isn't that bad; in fact, maybe it is the "best" it has ever been and we should be content with that fact. Also, calling for the world to be "radically otherwise" or, at least, dreaming that it be so does not mean hoping that this "radically otherwise" vision conforms with that of whatever philosopher happens to be fashionable around the campus water cooler. One can just as easily imagine a "radically otherwise" Europe under the domination of an Islamic theocracy--is that a good thing? Ah, heck, what about a "radically otherwise" West re-Christianized to circa 1200 A.D.? Or are these off limits to the daydream because we've "been there, done that"?

Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez | Apr 26, 2007 3:45:35 PM

Gabriel,

I've argued with you before, haven't I? I think I remember now that everything with you resolves down to this sort of question: "Life: Better Now or in the Middle Ages? Now? QED."

We're not going to go there, sorry. That sort of thing may play with your buddies at school, but sorry, I don't have the time to do dorm room libertarian wrestling match with you, no...

Posted by: CR | Apr 26, 2007 10:29:35 PM

CR,

Have we? I forget. Unless you were in that crowd parroting the bad interpretations of Carl Schmitt lifted from the pages of Telos, probably not. And I'm not sure how accurate your "boil down" question is since if there is anything thematic in my thinking, its that longing for past social orders is as much a mythical escape from reality as dreaming of restructured futures. But, absent an effective showing on your part of how I seem to go there, I suppose I'll just assume you're mistaking me for someone else.

I wonder: What do you have time for? I mean, you had time to post a questionable analysis of the "foreshortening of the future" that you don't appear capable of defending against casual scrutiny. Do you do this with your students as well? No wonder they don't talk...

Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez | Apr 27, 2007 10:45:56 AM

CR,

Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez | Apr 27, 2007 10:45:58 AM

Unless you were in that crowd parroting the bad interpretations of Carl Schmitt lifted from the pages of Telos, probably not.

Nope. That wasn't it. Something else.

And I'm not sure how accurate your "boil down" question is since if there is anything thematic in my thinking, its that longing for past social orders is as much a mythical escape from reality as dreaming of restructured futures.

You can call it "mythical escape," I could call it planning, anticipation, organization, whatever. To conceive of something being, in the future, different from what it is now is not necessarily mythical thinking, unless, say, architecture, engineering, just about everything is. Is building a bridge a mystical act? If it appears in blueprint, scale model, does that imply mystical thinking?

(There is a thread of mysticism in the Benjamin. But that's not quite the part that I'm interested in above... Or if so, very complexly. If you'd like to talk about Benjamin's mysticism, sure, we can talk about that... Go ahead... Or, for a further parallel discussion of the aspect of Benjamin I'm interested in here, you can go read Jameson's article on utopia from the New Left Review a few years ago. At any rate, my mind's not made up on this score, as indicated in the ambivalence of the paragraph in which I mention Benjamin...)

I mean, you had time to post a questionable analysis of the "foreshortening of the future" that you don't appear capable of defending against casual scrutiny.

Yes, the scrutiny was indeed casual. What were your claims? That the present is good, no need to change it. That people do anticipate a different future, just not in the way that I want it to be (though you don't at all explain what they are anticipating - just say that they do...) You throw out some very silly stuff about the "Enlightenment..."

Certainly an ideology like that should be distinguished in some respects from liberal/Enlightenment notions which saw progress, but certainly not one that was going to climax in a new reality altogether. If anything, they were looking for the culmination of the Enlightenment's promise, not something beyond the Enlightenment itself.

I'm sorry, where did I say "new reality altogether" in my post? I said "significantly changing during the course of their lives" and "fundamental alteration in the political or culture organization of things." A different economc structure... A different mode of cultural organization... How is this any different from that grand old Enlightenment project of, say, the French Revolution? Did that Enlightenment project not anticipate and then bring into existence a "significant change" in the status quo? A "fundamental alteration in the political or culture organization"?

The very fact that you instantly translate my political direction into desire for a mystical fantasy land - this is something that you do, not me - proves my point, right?

But this is sillly. I don't really like making arguments ex-French Revolution. Dorm room stuff, as I said before. There's something to pick on with the Benjamin, if you'd like to go there, but I doubt you have the chops (hint: I'm right now finishing a book that, in a certain light, is an indirect critique and/or contextualization of that passage, so tread carefullly...)

So, there are things we can talk about. But I will not have an argument with you about whether the world is as good as it can be (it is not), whether it is better than it was before, whether progress is good or bad. Sorry. Focus your arguments properly and we can talk.

Posted by: CR | Apr 27, 2007 1:09:51 PM

"stands still and has come to a stop"

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