Long Sunday

the stakes of simulation

At the risk of drawing overly simplistic lines between the ritual or pagan and the modern world, one might say that Shakespeare scholar, controversial thinker and Catholic philosopher René Girard* identifies a crucial lack in our contemporary relation to an apocalyptic horizon. There has arguably always been such a relation, and perhaps necessarily so, but whereas before entire social groups participated in organized ritual re-enactments of 'the worst', today we are left with, well, CNN and FOX, or an endlessly thematized and sensationalized, yet ultimately hollow and unsatisfying, disembodied simulation of such stakes.

Yet simulation of any kind is never without its concomitant dangers, specifically the danger to inspire real violence. This would seem a precarious line. And although the lines separating the ritual from the real have never been pure, today in this age increasingly permeated by the so-called hyperreal, and combined with an unsustainable market which is forever (and with some serious help) in denial of its own mounting internal fragility, the stakes of such danger is arguably unprecedented. As marketably successful as his theory may be, one wishes that Baudrillard (though others would defend him) sometimes took more pains to emphasize the severity of these risks. In any case, I think Girard is an important thinker, and so I have reproduced in part an intriguing interview–more revealing perhaps than the LeMonde one on"9/11"–below.

* Significantly perhaps, Girard is one of those philosophers who claims that philosophy is over, to be replaced by a new science and a return to religion.

'Anti-trilogy': The China Miéville interview, part three

In the long-awaited third and final part of our interview, we discuss the disaster in the southern U.S., blogging, fantasy vs. realism vs. magical realism and the value for progressives of international law.
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ALPHONSE VAN WORDEN: You're blogging at Lenin's Tomb! I want to know how you're enjoying it.

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Well, it's nice to have an outlet for the occasional rant. I admit though that it i) gives me performance anxiety, and ii) creates a sense of obligation and guilt. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying. I'm going to try to do one tonight, in fact.

AvW: What's your topic?

CM: It's a follow-up on Hurricane Katrina. Nothing very surprising - this is one of the problems of blogging, I rarely think I'm saying anything the readers haven't thought of - but I'm just obsessed with this story, can't leave it alone.

JOHN PISTELLI: Well, it's just a catastrophe. It's such sorry proof of the mess we're in.

CM: It's beyond belief. I find it more shocking than 9/11. It's shaping up to be a major crisis for Bush.

AvW: Do you feel it is a bit empowering though? Blogging? Contributing to the instant pool of reaction?

'That alienation from the everyday': The China Miéville interview, part two

In the second part of our interview (first part here), Mr. Miéville discusses his prose style, contemporary comic books, the politics of narrative and his work on international law.

(N.B. See also Bionic Octopus for China's essay on the London bombings.)
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JOHN PISTELLI: Where does the question of prose style come in for you? You have a distinctive one, willingness to use jargons, to employ a wide vocabularly based on real or invented sciences as well as a penchant for the “high style” (longer detail-packed sentences, sonorous rhythms) that have earned you comparisons to Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, etc. Could you theorise after the fact about your style?

CHINA MIÉVILLE: There's more than one thing going on there. I'm tempted - as you say, theorising post facto - to think it's a triangulation of two things. On the one hand it's a predilection for the high pulp style that is, intriguingly, shared across genres. Lovecraft of course is its neurotically overblown high priest, but you see the same kind of somewhat overwrought prose in, say, Zane Grey. The fact that 'minimalist' prose in various iterations has been designated the official aesthetic form of acceptable bourgeois fiction, especially its newer hipster versions, is I think the triumph of a rather fatuous notion of a playful text, and it gives a silly but enjoyable radical pulp chic to not playing by those rules. Not that I've any objection to all precise prose, at all - M John Harrison is one of my outstanding literary heroes, and he is a prose scalpel-wielder - but the idea that that is 'how you do it' is absurd. The irony is that this reaction against a certain subset of boojy fiction is _also_ a reaction against a certain tendency in genre. Because a lamentable antipathy to Modernism and formal experimentation has taken some root in sf/f/h. You hear readers say things like 'I'm not bothered so much about the language, I just like to find out what happens.' There's an embedded, mostly untheorised notion that prose should be a window, through which you see, as clearly as possible, that it should be as nearly invisible as possible, to let us get to the content. Not only do I think that's sadly philistine, but it's also, in some sense, a betrayal of what makes fantasy fantasy. That alienation from the everyday can be achieved through form as well as content. So by playing with form like this, you get to link to your pulp heritage as opposed to trying to play by 'mainstream' rules, and paradoxically at the same time distance yourself from the failures of much genre. From Ben Watson, 'Fantasy and Judgement', in Historical Materialism 10, 4: 'The use of a transparent medium for the depiction of 'wonders' and 'ideals' - ... the flat efficiency of the prose of run-of-the-mill romance, horror, porn and fantasy fiction - betrays the fantastic subject-matter.' As not infrequently, I think Ben maybe veers toward the excessively prescriptive, but here I think he's very, very onto something.

'A truly monstrous thing to do': The China Miéville interview, part one

China Miéville, superstar fantasy novelist, author of King Rat, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council, as well as a thoughtful theorist and noted Marxist, was kind enough to sit for this interview conducted (via chat session) by myself and Alphonse van Worden. (We interviewers have previously mused upon China's work; see here and here.) In part one, we discuss genre, revolution and Jane Eyre.
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JOHN PISTELLI: First, a question about genre. Not only do the Bas-Lag books belong to the genre of fantasy, but the narrative logic of each proceeds according to the logic of another dominant genre: horror in Perdido Street Station, nautical adventure in The Scar and the western in Iron Council. You've discussed in several interviews and essays the revolutionary potential of fantasy and it seems as though you're exploring the latent radicalism of these other genres by imbuing them with a conscious of the material reality that underlies the narratives they generate. In each novel, economic relations give rise to the plot: in PSS a deal between government and organized crime to maximize the profits and the capacity for social control of each results in the horror of the slake-moths, while in TS it's a mercantile economy that inspires the Lovers' quest and in IC the massive capital investment in territorial and market expansion that is the railroad is the dramatic premise. It would seem to imply that genres are what you make of them politically - you can employ them in a politically progressive and constructive way just as you can use them in the reactionary manner so evident in much popular culture. Is this your view of genre or is it more complicated than that?

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Any answer I give has to be understood as theorising after the facts. I grew up reading genre, and though I've become really interested in it at a theoretical level, at a gut basis I'm interested in genre because that's what was formative for me, as a reader. I think that what tends to interest me is the unexamined political assumptions of genre - or to be fair I should say 'usually' unexamined, because there's plenty of self-conscious revisionist genre out there, so there's a relatively easy radical chic to be accrued - and not unimportant just becuase it's easy! - by pointing out, problematising and ideology-critiquing those assumptions. One of the things therefore that I've tended to do is point out the economics that would tend to impinge on 'traditional' pulp or generic plots, like the quest narrative. So in The Scar for example - and with a warning to any readers that this discussion will of necessity include massive spoilers - there's a whole interrogation of the logic of exchange that makes for a 'real' sensible quest, and the frankly psychotic logic that would underly a 'traditional' fairy-tale-type quest. What I wanted to do there was traditional revisionism, with maybe the added twist that it wasn't just 'this is how it really is/was', but that the debate between that revisionist reality and the 'fantasy' assumptions *actually get played out* in the fantasy. So you have one character who really *is* on a fantasy quest, and she's a dangerous lunatic. That kind of game you can play endlessly. In Iron Council, during one of the western sequences, The Cavalry Ride To The Rescue. Of course their motives turn out not to be what they should be in proper white-hat cowboyism, but they *do also actually ride to the rescue*... however revisionist the reasons. At a more general level, I'd shy away from considering genre to contain 'latent radicalism'. I think it does contain perhaps a latent bacchanal, a carnivalesque in what I suppose is a vaguely Bakhtinian way and that is I suppose perhaps latently radical but also potentially reactionary. I think you can make a case that the fantastic aesthetic has a radical core. I'm not sure I'd say the same for genre, which strikes me as more of a tool, usable for various ends of various political stamps.

The MS (Emis?) Found On Charlotte Street

Jodi Dean, I Cite: Why an alias?

Mark B. Kaplan, Charlotte Street: Well, the assumed name is an imprimatur. I am rather a costive perfectionist when it comes to writing and would be reluctant to put my name to much that appears on the blog. The Proper Name is often the ego’s little representative and can therefore brook no disagreement. And the censorship exercised by one’s own name is what the pseudonym gets round.

But isn’t anonymity also one of the definitive pleasures of writing? The 'I' on the page discloses no age, gender etc. All those things which, by our speech, 'place' us within a system of social differences have been shed. To write is to escape these markers and confront one another perhaps more equally.

The name Kaplan, as you’ll probably know comes from North by Northwest. It’s an empty name, a decoy name, which is mistakenly attached to a real individual, Roger O. Thornhill. Thornhill, however, somehow answers the challenge of this Name. It’s a Symbolic contrivance that enters his soul and opens up the space for a certain freedom. (The Zed lodged in his own name represents the possibility for this space).

Thornhill thus ultimately welcomes being uncoupled from his name, his Fatal primal baptism is replaced by a baptism of Chance.