A Wild Surmise About A Perk

“Talyn…STARBURST.”

…

That’s Farscape, Bloggers, and I’ve spoken of it before…but unfortunately the link is busted since Google wrapped up for me its poison pill. Never mind, I can fill you in on the content of that post what I once wrote, since I was (after all) there: basically what I was trying to say there is that Farscape was an amazingly good show…well, after all it was an O’Bannon joint, wasn’t it?…and that this moment in it, when the stupefyingly excellent Lani Tupu makes his final pronouncement, is so incredibly charged with feeling, so massively well-acted, that it almost makes you forget…

…That it has absolutely nothing to do with your own life.

So…

Shall we take a moment, and discuss the phenomenon called irony?

As I’ve said before, my favourite definition of irony is the one contained in Fowler’s: the utterance meant for two separate hearers, and it matters not if one of those hearers dwells secretly inside the skull of the other, but just the double-hearing however it happens is the thing. And if the Fowler Bros. had lived long enough, I’m sure they would’ve seen that this science fiction, this byblow of genre, this illegitimate inheritor of just some qualities and not others, as our most ironic literature according to their definition…indeed, as a literature almost entirely concerned with irony, and concentrating on it in such a way that has never been seen before: a truly new thing, under the sun.

But without the preexistence of the thing called genre, SF is impossible…so let’s get into genre a bit, just as preamble.

In my humble opinion genre has one goal, and one only: to create a dynamical arc to the reader’s experience of theme, that leads off into defamiliarization, and thence back into refamiliarization. And in this effort, we might do worse than to call it essentially “musical”, if by saying so we mean to point out that Mozart and Beethoven and Bach got there long before H.G. Wells did, much less Hugo Gernsback! But musicality is a big part of SF too, because music also commands the ironic…in fact in SF’s earliest days, and especially its most corrupted days, the days more Gernsback than Wells, the literary ambitions of the form were practically nonexistent: but instead its musical ambitions were paramount. Later on, in the New Wave, we get literary ambition out the wah-woh — and all those people in the 50s and 60s and 70s (and 80s!) arguing so passionately not about what makes science fiction different from fantasy but what makes it better, and insisting that a hard line must be maintained between the two…when actually in the 30s and 40s the question hardly comes up with such intensity and fervour, because SF then is just so science-y, even if the science is usually pretty questionable until the John W. Campbell crowd comes along…and even then, even then — but the passion perhaps indicates that the arguments were less about what SF might gain, than about what it might lose. For, what giant confusions were here! Henry Kuttner, supposed as a non-lyrical writer, or Harlan Ellison — HARLAN ELLISON!! — averring that it’s the science in SF that makes it a non-degraded form of literature…?

And he hated Vonnegut too, but of course it doesn’t matter what Harlan said, because Harlan’s great gift is to be almost always wrong — artfully wrong, and that’s why we mysteriously continue to love the miserable little shit! — but what Harlan meant is a bit important, I think, because…

…Somehow, in some way, at that particular time the literary ambition seemed to have gotten stacked up against the musical one. Which is kinda crazy, isn’t it? Because I take genre’s defamiliarizing/refamiliarizing power to lie in the vigour, not the rigour…and so, for my money, to imagine that what SF primarily does is create total novelty for the reader is perhaps to get things completely ass-backwards. Because, is there anything really new under the sun, except new ways to look at the stuff that’s already there? The general arc of genre is always the same, and nothing very special, but it’s the specific play with the details of the journey that enlivens (and thus transfigures) the inevitable destination, and so the accent is really what it’s all about, not the language. In the detective story, for example, the reader is taken out into a subculture at the fringes of society where moral calculations matter differently, and takes that knowledge back with him down the other side of the wheel back to Origin…but not to rule wisely, or refresh society, or indeed anything else that may have to do with thousand-faced heroes! Because all that changes is how the protagonist sees; all there is to learn, is what was already known. Thus the magic: to everyone else, the world is no different than it ever was…

Or, take the thriller; where the same thing occurs, the protagonist is changed, but changed in relation to…?

Hey: this is music, really.

Because it’s only the listener who is changed, by hearing the symphony…

…Right?

So what I’m saying is what I’ve already said I’m saying: SF is our most ironical literature. But, what I’m really saying is…

It didn’t get that way by accident.

“Talyn…STARBURST“. It’s a good example of a phrase essentially meaningless, gibberish, utterly unconnected to real life, such as one finds all the time in SF…or, for that matter, fantasy. Even the situation and the actions it contains don’t so easily find a correspondent — your relationship with your boss? Your home life? We rarely come across examples of such a particular sort of sacrifice, and indeed if we did the whole thing would be overcast with implications that made it morally-dubious. No Criminal Minds episode can feature such a sacrifice, if we’re going into mass media escapism in a realistic or quasi-realistic vein…no sports match can offer such a psychological breakthrough in its various otherwise-quite-subtle sublimations. Because the situations are NOT REAL, and not even partly or immediately-analogically real…because they’re of the species of dream, and therefore primarily efficacious when it comes to seeing how the same motives and impulses and imperatives play out in an environment where all the features and feedbacks are different from our own…and yet, paralogically, still recognizable…if one only can see one’s way to realizing it. Just the other day, David Golding nailed this effect down for me as “theoretical processes, unchained from the world-that-is-the-case”, and I think it’s a very neat description…because Western, detective story, space-opera, high fantasy, or superhero comic, they all have tropes, but genre isn’t in the tropes but in how they twist: twist to, eventually, show their underwear on the outside. SF is fundamentally ironical, in a pointed way, because it sails itself right up alongside “realistic” settings and portrayals…only they are only realistic because they are imaginable as allowable possibilities — anxious possibilities, one might say — I’m trying very hard to choose my words carefully, can you tell? Is it making it all sound really weird? — that reflect with great accuracy the current state of affairs in “real life” chiefly by the device of attaching our real-life emotions to objects that real life strenuously disincludes, or at best mediates the hell out of. And, so…fantasy is great, but one doesn’t see this device working nearly so hard nearly so much in it, because fantasy doesn’t have to lean so heavily on irony as this: feminism in Camelot (for example) may be salutary, but it’s by no means necessary, because the virtue of realism and external plausibility is something you’ve already left at the door when you walked in. Fantasy has nothing in it that real life strenuously disincludes, because nothing, so to speak, creates the strain — real life doesn’t exactly have to work hard to restrain the theoretical processes of elvish magic, because the world-that-is-the-case doesn’t contain these anyway, therefore to have them at all means the unchaining’s already happened, and it unchained something different anyhow. Likewise, in the Western we might expect to see the present’s mirror in the past looking an awful lot like something genuinely historic, and thus with a freedom to eschew irony that I’d say makes it tremendously more convincing than SF, more convincing just by standing there…as the commentary on the present that historical fiction includes can stand perfectly tall on virtually the same ground as history itself. Thus the ability of historical fiction, biography not unincluded, to prosyletize and propagandize is something SF can only envy…

And often, as a consequence: seek to copy, as just another sort of winking verisimilitude. The “future history” proves nothing, not even as much as Leviathan or The Social Contract, but rather it imagines them differently…not only using the template of historical conjecture, but also explicitly and consciously referencing its craziness as part of a weird atemporal leela. So any past history is more respectable than any future history — economics in SF, for example, is so much tidier than real economics that most of it isn’t even there — but even your most stubbornly mediocre future history has an element of wit in its ludic untethering of effect from cause…not supplying imaginary causes to real effects in an effort to reverse-engineer contingent explanations, but instead creating imaginary effects from real causes via contingent explanations, and then having the nerve to say it all, somehow, “happened”. And it isn’t hard to tell that SF understands this most critical value, of the inherent worthlessness of the future history…I mean, why else would it populate its future spaces with such absurd in-jokes and mugging reflections? In the end, I think it inarguable that history is where we find the best other planets and the best aliens, not just the ones that look exactly like us but with lobster-tails on our foreheads but the ones that are stranger in their core…the Romans, the Indians, the Incans, the Zimbabweans, more opaque than any Star Trek analogue of modern nation-state dwellers…yet far more deeply and sensitively connected to us as well, than if there were a planet of TV junkies or a planet of basketball players, or a planet of Nazis or a planet of Marxist-Leninists. Because the tale of an analogous present need not be utterly superficial (as any decent novel will show), but could be as deeply complex as our own present really is…

EXCEPT!

SF always knows what kind of rock it’s skipping, and over what kind of abyssal plain of fact, so it mostly avoids the really really high ambition of making up any truly new world. It does happen on occasion! But in unsubtle hands, it’s all too apparent that to fully embrace novel creation is to actually move away from the “realistic”, and toward the “merely” fantastic. Indeed, the grip of the future history’s imaginary justification is so tight that many SF authors find themselves defending it in the real world, as part of the real world! Walking around in public spaces like a kind of TED talk come to hideous life, aggressively believing impossible things not in evidence, imagining that theoretical processes are really all there ever was, and that they’ve never been chained in the first place. But for SF writers who have not gone completely around the bend, the clever consciousness of where they came from and what they can mine it for is still maintained. The Western, for example, always lies behind SF in conception…because SF is never unconscious of the historical game of the Western, never unheeding of the tropey raw material it offers. For what’s been twisted once, may be twisted again! And why on earth would you pass up that chance? It’s just the same with the detective story: as Isaac Asimov merely gives us Poirot plus Newton, to create a kind of anti-Father Brown, but it sets the stage for a million later performances of more ambitious kind…and so is indeed laudable as a ludic innovation. Well, so are they all, all ludically-laudable innovations! But note that when it comes to the real Celts and the real Carthaginians, these most brilliant of raw materials are reserved for SF’s time-travels and not its First Contacts…because…

Because they’re too complex to be abstracted. To fake them, yes…that’s fine, and better than fine! But to have them as themselves, you need some historical scaffolding around them, to bear the weight of their complexity. People often say that SF isn’t about the future but the present, and that’s true…it’s true because the scaffolding of the present is all around us at every moment, and we can’t make ourselves unaware of, nor uninfluenced by, its web of contingency. So the scaffolding supports much, indeed much we aren’t even aware of it supporting, and therefore all the aliens we meet are wonderfully ourselves, as Jung says all the figures in a dream are…

As the other people that we meet are…well, Other.

At least, if they’re people then they’re Other.

This will all, in Harlan’s words, come together like spit on a griddle. It really will. But just at the moment, I find myself wanting to zoom off in another direction…to zoom off in another direction, and talk about…

Sports.

Yes, sports, and the need for something actually important: is this the real root of escapism, is this what we escape to, and from? The escape from freedom and responsibility is something that is very easy to have in the real world, though I don’t say no one seeks to escape from it in genre fiction either…nor that some short-sighted or unscrupulous author might not seek to make a tidy genre home out of it for stressed-out and sometimes even desperate people…but, you can have it in the real world, with no great effort. But how much harder is it, to satisfyingly lay one’s hands on its opposite? There’s a paradox here that sports comprehends: sometimes importance and freedom and responsibility are themselves their own opposites, and ironic traducers of the state of moral tedium known popularly as “evil” — which, as we all know, is characterized with such frictionless ease by its banality. So genre is very interesting, really…a tool for de- and then re-familiarization, and the twisting of tropes into sympathy or self-recognition or even social insight…but also at the same time, a tool for twisting things the other way. Much as sports themselves: promoting tribalism, jingoism, xenophobia on the one hand with inarguable efficacy…yet on the other, also capable of producing a soul less anaesthetized and more stirred, less conformist and more thoughtful. Not for nothing is sports fandom rife with debate and controversy! And not just of the “who was the greatest General” type, either; but sometimes of the “was Cyprus really preparing to attack” type, too. Of course, much cleverer people than I have examined spectator sports and found nothing but a rage-pump designed to distract the masses, an instrument of social control…but then again, even food (and food imagery) can be an instrument of social control. And between these two things lies the why, or more accurately the how, of social control: like fiction, at its core it always trades on something real. So, anthropologically, food is linked to family, and thence to group belonging…and your basic spectator sport is linked to the hunt, thence to war. However, such powerful associations will always cut more than one way: food is also a repository of culture, a kind of record of, perhaps even recipe for, associations that work against the aims of state or corporate social control…and the hunt produces leaders, sources of informal authority, that are not necessary beholden to political or economic power structures. Well, in fact they logically precede them, even if chronologically they come after. Which is perhaps why you don’t find a lot of pop music superstars or legendary sports heroes in, say, China.

I can’t remember who said it…maybe you Bloggers could help me out…it was a while ago, and it was about China, and it was by a famous writer, and the line went…

“Where do they hide their sexuality?”

Speaking of the Maoist culture of the Chinese, and hmm, damn if I can find it in me to recapture that perhaps-racist point of view…that asks where, when the answer to “where” is quite obvious: they hide it where it won’t be observed, that’s all. Yet in another way they hide it in plain sight: for in Maoist China a safe refuge for intelligence was found precisely in Fowler’s irony, a safe refuge for libido was found precisely in Revolutionary “brightness”: the game of evading an enforced conformity by playing up to it. Mao was a cheap sort of Confucius, a Confucius with power…Plato with a death ray…so in either case not too bright, not as bright as a farmer’s daughter or a fisherman’s son, and so even though so many MANY died, those that were left sometimes learned a strange lingo that enabled them to survive, and feel joy privately, and sometimes even show it openly…but for fuck’s sake, “where do they hide their sexuality”, well they hide it in sublimation, right in front of your gwai loh face, obviously!

That you don’t notice it, means it’s fucking working properly!

But anyway. Where was I?

“Talyn…STARBURST.” Every person, every society, in Farscape is a well-trodden SF cliche: that’s what Farscape is about, the subversion of cliches, so it has to have them in there. It has to make the old present seem like a new present. Defamiliarization, then refamiliarization. Music. As I said once before, so long ago now: this show’s about the music. There are nifty ideas in it too, to be sure…but…

Though this kind of SF is for sure not the only kind of SF there is, still what it accomplishes is what even the new-idea SF aims at: the thoroughly-defamiliarized heart, the go-to-hell principled stances that make no sense, the relationships that though they’re based on our own, are not recognizable as our own,

And so a sacrifice that really means nothing to us, in language that just sounds silly to us, in an arbitrary setting on an arbitrary day, in an arbitrary solar system for an arbitrary reason…

Well, it doesn’t matter. The acting is what sells it. Such an unbelievable situation! Such a moronically-trite collection of syllables!

None of it should make us care at all!

Except, you see…we hear it twice.

…

We’re lucky, we genre-folk. And especially we SF folk. Our whole lives, we grow up hearing doubled, layered statements, essentially because the listener is an actor too, and cannot turn that action off. When we’re young, perhaps we don’t understand this ironical hearing — maybe it confuses us, or even frightens us. Maybe, even, we are seized with a profound sense of not knowing what to do, that paralyzes us. Paralysis is really the worst, isn’t it?

But when we get older, this same thing gives us access to a truly wonderful world. A world that actually looks just like this one, though superficial forms might deceive…a world in which there are thoughts to think, and actions to take, and even sacrifices to make, that one is ordinarily supposed to experience only in the concert hall. And maybe if we were of a different age, we would always feel some lack in that way…the inability to bring our transcendent experiences down into everyday life. But! Being born at the right time, when genre literature has existed…a debasement of high ideals, a mere entertainment without any soul, a ghetto for the mind…

…Eventually it puts forth, as a sub-issue, SF. Which actually gets a lot of things said about the world, which would be otherwise impossible to say.

HOWEVER.

We’re also subtly unlucky, to be born into this time. Remember what I said up there about how an analogous SF present could be as complexly-constructed as our own, but usually isn’t? The scaffolding of the present is all around us, easing the weight of how much complexity is required to make up an unchained scenario that reflects our present time…yet simultaneously that scaffolding is rather less supportive than it seems, just because it is a scaffold of the present, a scaffold by for and of the present, and it strenuously disincludes genuine historical context in the way (again) any decent mainstream novel doesn’t. And, I admit that to a degree I am just playing with words here — what’s the scaffold of meaning in the present-day, well obviously the past is what renders our present context, there’s nothing very eye-opening about me saying that — but I’m not only playing with words, because I do have a point to make that precedes the wordplay, and the point is that we also have this alternative structure, this, er, call it present-ist structure, that replaces real historical context with mere contemporary texture. All that passes in our world, we are familiar with and can recognize! But though we can understand its workings well enough, we’re not so good at comprehending its reasons. Which is just a matter of being habituated, as we all are, to momentary pressing needs, but it perhaps explains the weird streak of conservatism that frequently is found running through SF…that one encounters even among SF people who are not all bonkers and TED-talky, as they seem incapable of perceiving, shall we call them, the real odds of things happening…or the real fuzzy and indeterminate state of affairs that among sensible people precludes definite pronouncements about things being this way or that way or some other way but just those three ways, yes it definitely has to be one of them and can be no other. But in the alternative and present-ist scaffolding that’s all true, you see…!

…

Ohhhh, this is not coming together like spit on a griddle at all, is it? My apologies, Bloggers. And Harlan. Wait, let me just try again…where was I…

See, the thing is…the way that theoretical processes are restrained also restrains us, and though in practical terms that’s a Very Good Thing most of the time (not to mention: the essence of science), in emotional terms it tends to present problems that desperately need solving. Historical fiction, and the historical perspective, is good at describing the problems but doesn’t always render those solutions…but SF, which more often than not is shitty at describing the problems, nonetheless has the wondrous power to provide solutions that are of a far higher quality than its problem-descriptions. I mean, the descriptions really should be better, and in fact I’m tempted to say I judge SF mostly by how assiduously it sets up the problems it will later attempt to solve…but sometimes the solutions are excellent despite that shortfall, and I think that highly unusual state of affairs comes about for a particular, and rather interesting, reason.

Because of the irony. To find a solution to a pressing problem in a fiction full of largely-irrelevant situations is in itself a neat little ironic exercise for the reader, and this actually happens all the time with all kinds of fiction, but SF goes a layer deeper into self-referentiality by giving its characters that very same experience of finding “unreal” solutions to their problems…the stardrive, the time machine, the self-aware computer, the mechanical man, all of these are really answers, but they’re answers of a very specific kind: answers that reconstruct the problem and re-pose the question, at another layer within the philosophical onion of the story. And this is SF’s great economy of method, the perk it delivers to its readership for their forbearance with its excessively fiddly approach to its otherwise-quite-ordinary goals — that the realism isn’t really “realism” at all, but just a kind of self-conscious play with realism, a nesting of material issues one inside the other, until once you reach the centre there is an eversion that pops you out at the surface of the shell again. You never really left the present! You never really left any of its assumptions. But, somehow…

…They seem now to assume different things.

So the surface manages to teach us something about the depths after all. As improbable as that may seem.

But of course…once you’ve eliminated the impossible…

Then what, for heaven’s sake, is left?

If not this.

Technology And The Void

It’s all Andrew‘s fault.

He has a blog, and people sometimes comment on it. And sometimes I think about the comments, and get an idea…and then sometimes it also occurs to me that Tom Bondurant is lurking out there somewhere, like Star Trek Rorschach…

And so for me it comes down to this, insofar as Star Trek goes: what enables people to make war anyway? Back in the days of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock — in other words, back when Star Trek was a science-fiction show — technology might have been extreme but it also in some sense made its users brave: or at any rate forced them to be brave on occasion, because there were many things that technology could, self-evidently, not do. Every story really begins, in the insufficiency of their technology! Thus scarcity was everywhere, because even though everyone had enough to eat (sure, you ate orange pyramids and blue cubes, but you ate), they nevertheless lived very close indeed to the shadow-line of irretrievable disaster: because if there’s one thing extreme technology is ludicrously effective at, it’s taking you to its own limits…which of course are already way past your own. So one wrong move, one loose screw, and the ship is sunk! One tiny clerical error and you perish forever in the black of space! Well, and isn’t this also perfectly true in our own, arguably non-science-fictional world? Some form of scarcity was always at the root of the Cold War stories, just as it was at the root of the Man vs. Machine stories (hint: they were all man vs. machine stories); for strategic advantage is the scarcest thing there is, generally coeval with the evidence for human freedom.

But that was in the before-time, when the Void was comprehensible as mere space, and sometimes time.

Now, it’s different.

Consider Star Trek: The Next Generation, and its replicators. Don’t even bother with the holodecks or the transporters, though all express the same technological super-plenitude as variations on a theoretical theme: just focus on the replicators. Moving through space and time at superluminal speeds is just a minor marvel, compared to the great leap forward these so-quotidian gizmos represent. In the world of ST: TNG, the cornucopia has been pulled so very wide open that even the days of blue-cube food are gone: no one need want for anything, ever, no matter who or where they are. Limitless 3D printing at your fingertips; a Philosopher’s Stone. Yet is even this enough to make a utopia? Well…

We’ll come back to that in a minute. But for now: the focus. Those replicators can make anything a person needs, can supply them with anything they want. And every starfaring culture in the Star Trek universe has them, it’s absolutely trivial technology, it’s like everyone having a pair of shoes or a pair of pants, it’s nothing-at-all, it’s the air you breathe. So…

Why do they make war?

Or, more to the point, how can they make war? Everybody has everything. Every star-empire is loaded with planets, that are all quite sufficient to the requirements of human life. Throwaway planets: they waste some on prison colonies, waste others on nature preserves. Sanitoria. Brothels. They’re all under-inhabited by Earth standards, these worlds, and Earth itself is no different. There’s lots of elbow room. And the Klingons aren’t Mongolians anymore, neither are the Romulans all U-boat commanders; even the Cardassians have stopped being Space-Nazis, as the Bajorans have moved through being Space-Palestinians, to being Space-Jews, to being Space-Christians. The whole geopolitics-mirror thing isn’t supportable anymore, at all, to the point where after ST: TNG managed one more kick at the can with its Gorbachev episode, it had nowhere else to go. Geopolitics? They were lucky to get mere newspaper-headline topicality after a while — Vietnam vets, that one where Worf had breast implants, the highly-regrettable episode in which the Enterprise found itself pitted against — yes — the Planet of the Space-Retards…

…

What?

You think I made that up?

Oh, don’t you know I only wish I had, but never mind that now, because the name of the game is FOCUS. Why would anyone in the ST: TNG universe make war? What possible reason could they have for doing so? All the elbow room they could ever need, they have; all the material resources they could ever need, they’ve basically got too much of. If the Romulans and the Klingons ever shared a planet — and why wouldn’t they do so one day, except only for the fact that planets are in limitless supply — they would either not care about it, or they would be cool about it; for as much as is made of the appallingly minor cultural differences that any given Hollywood screenwriter can apparently steel himself to think up, it’s still no substitute for sublimated geopolitics and the even more sublimated racialism that animates it: the twin engines that drive SF wars successfully forward. TNG’s dry, schematic comprehension of “difference” is too distant and too easy, without the surge of blood and conscience behind it: its idealism just too darned ideal in its character, to be easily situated in the dangerous middle-ground where the rationale for conflict, both inner and outer, is grown. The old Star Trek traded rather heavily on both racist ideology and the seductive racialist pseudoscience that is its enabler, by pointing the stuff out specifically to argue against it: the Klingons weren’t fractious because it was built into their genes, the Romulans weren’t devious because they had a devious biological character, but these were institutional problems! And therefore problems that it was the business of individuals to struggle with: problems that only individuals could potentially overcome. But even as the New Trek took this principle even further, it watered it down most shamefully — even the Borg could be rehabilitated from their institutional conditions with relative ease, with nothing more than the sensitive application of a little Sense Of Wonder and some touchy-feely crap that (if you think about it) back in the 60s wasn’t even enough to liberate Mr. Spock…! So in the original Star Trek, there was never any guarantee that the individual would triumph over their institutional reality; but in its successor-series, there’s never any doubt…

Which is not necessarily the worst thing in the world, even though it makes for frankly lousy drama. I mean, it is a bit shameful to simply brush aside the main problematizing element of living in an institutional reality, but it isn’t the most terrible thing in the world to uphold the idea that individuals can triumph over their cultural backgrounds! So at least it isn’t cynical, say that for it anyway.

However it does mean that the idea of Klingons and Romulans living together in peace isn’t at all a crazy one, unless their warlike character is biologically-determined — which it isn’t — because their cultural differences are slight to say the least: we’re not even talking about Greeks and Turks here, it’s more like New Yorkers and Californians. Therefore, in answer to the question “why would such races make war”, given that we can only deal with what we’ve been given to reason on, we can only be justified in saying:

Because it doesn’t matter.

Which, if you think about it, makes a certain degree of sense. After all, how likely is it that the Federation, the Klingon and Romulan Empires, and every other two-bit temporary dominion that may exist, are constantly running over one another’s tracks? Space is BIIIIIIIG, even with warp-drive; the Federation, anyway, is constantly discovering unknown worlds. And so can the Klingons and Romulans be doing anything else?

How is it, that you can even begin to divide up a galaxy into Yours and Mine portions anyway?

Do you do it in big polygons?

How do you get people to agree on the big polygons?

How do you possibly arrange for the big polygons to be fought over, if they’re so big?

We’ll get back to that in a minute too, because just like the transporter and the holodeck and the replicators it’s just one principle that lies in the throat of these problems…and that’s exactly what is the problem…

…With space and time and scarcity, none of which really “exist” anymore in the Star Trek universe. A slight digression, if you would: if I were asked to think of an interesting-if-fannish Star Trek story, I’d probably offer the tale of the person who invented the Replicator Application, and smuggled it out to all the different star-travelling societies in a bid to put an end to their conflicts once and for all…and, parenthetically, I’d investigate the origins of the Transporter technology that it’s built on. Everybody has this: a technology that no less an authority than Gary Seven tells us is still in its infancy, and with that technology in hand it seems as though it wasn’t just steam-engine time for replicators somewhere between Kirk and Picard (I think that’s supposed to be about eighty years?), but it’s steam-engine time at the same time, all over the galaxy, even among peoples who don’t talk to one another and whose scientists don’t enjoy any intellectual commerce. So, given that either my notional tech-smuggler got the stuff out there, or that having the Transporter just automatically leads to the development of replicators in something of a tearing hurry, then if the tech-smuggler guy isn’t there the natural question simply falls back one more step: where’d they all get the Transporter from, then?

Uh…

Whoops!

FOCUS, of course…I’m forgetting my focus. Of course there are no “natural” questions to be asked in Star Trek, which is the major thing that fan-fic efforts of all stripes (even my own) carefully choose to forget…just like the Mirror Universe makes no sense unless the people in it are all just “evil”, right? Because it isn’t a divergent universe made of quantum branching, it’s just a philosophical postulate, a literary device. And therefore gussying it up with reasons only robs it of its simple, wonderful force. Sure, it could be a universe in which Khan and his eugenical supermen won, and that would explain a fair bit of the conceit in “scientific” terms — humans with extra aggression built into them would be something the rest of the galaxy’s races would be forced to adapt to (especially if they stumbled across a technological advantage like, oh I don’t know, a starship from the future), and even the logical Vulcans wouldn’t particularly care if their geopolitical situation was a nasty one because of that…would they? But then we’re back to biological determinism, the very explanation that Star Trek has always meant to repudiate, and even though you could force a dialectic here — the Mirror Universe is what we’d have if people were subject to a stricter biological determinism — it still isn’t as though the Mirror Universe really exists, but it’s still a literary device meant to operate on the setting and characters of Star Trek, and therefore it still must have the same point as it ever did…

To wit: that biological determinism is bunk wherever you may find it, even in hypothetical Opposite-Lands where the continuity of scientific/historical explanations is purposely (and purposefully!) overturned…and anyway even if it weren’t, surely the whole thing is still a bit beggared by Wall-E or McHugh or whatever the wet-lipped Borg kid’s name was, because if he can be deprogrammed just by looking at pictures of puppies or whatever, then why couldn’t anyone? And then, it seems to me, once we accept that then we are no longer talking about whole organisms being biologically-determined in a simple way, then rather we must be talking about conflict between different modules of biological determinism within organisms — everybody has a “good” part, everybody has a “bad” part, and the question is which one will dominate the whole organism’s behaviour — which means pretty soon we’d be back to where we are right now anyway, where “local” motivations may be in constant contention but the superordinate “global” consciousness this contention produces may also feed back into it, and play Solomon to all the selfish little modules that compose it. So you see, it’s kind of counterproductive to go to the “natural” questions of Star Trek, because all they do is eject you once again into the fact that nothing in Star Trek is naturally-occurring: there are merely things in it that it is about, and things in it that it isn’t about. Like how come all the different species all have the Transporter etc. etc…I mean if you wanted to solve that inconsistency I think you’d probably have to say something like “the Transporter is itself an application of the warp drive technology”, but then that assumes you see an inconsistency in the overall design of the Star Trek universe, and honestly if you’re seeing that I don’t believe you’re paying enough attention. Because the inconsistencies come after, you know?

It isn’t the original series that tells us Khan’s supertribe is innately hyperaggressive, after all!

But that’s just a contemporary innovation, more to do with flattering our current neomaterialist bias than with creating drama. Just as seeking an origin for the Transporter would take me back to the warp drive, and then the warp drive would take me back God-knows-where…because is the warp drive explained, either? No; it’s just axiomatic in the Star Trek universe that there is such a thing as “progress”, and that societies can be graded by what level of progress — what pre-existing level of progress, note! — that they’ve attained. So a “warp-class” civilization is also a “transporter-class” civilization, and above them are the “pure energy”-class civilizations and below them are the (ugh) Space-Retards who can’t be trusted with warp-class tech because they are not developmentally prepared to enter the galactic milieu…

…Where of course everyone is perfectly nice and peaceful, because they’re “smart”?

Except obviously they’re not, because that isn’t the kind of progress we’re supposed to be talking about. The original Star Trek universe is all about progress because it finds its conflict in “progress”: the question of “what will Man become?” always implicated in his technological capability…

…Under the shadow of the Bomb, of course, since that was the number one fixation and concern and anxiety of the times, and it was what made it all go. No mention of Space-Retards in the original series, because if they existed they were us…! But in a post-1989 world we got anxious about other things, didn’t we? Destabilization…chaos…a loss of meaning coincident with the loss of the rulebook…which is, perhaps, another way of saying: the loss of control…

But again, that is a thing we will get back to shortly. Because first we have to bring ourselves up from 1989 to now? Well, we don’t have to really, but it helps my little hack-job thesis if we do…because our primary concerns and fixations and anxieties have changed since then too, and that’s what explains the current problem — my current unease — with the device of the replicators in the Star Trek universe. Aha, the replicators, I bet you thought I’d forgotten all about them! But don’t worry, we haven’t gone off-topic yet…I’m just getting to where the problem lies, the problem that stayed subliminal to my awareness for all these years since ST: TNG went on the air, but which has now mysteriously become something I can think about, because the changing times have brought me up to it at last. Different concerns: you know, I was blathering a bit about this on Twitter (sadly, a service I shall soon have to leave forever), that the focus of our contemporary televisual dramas is on how character itself is the main threat to characters — tension arising out of the fact that self-actualization isn’t only complicated, but also something that inspires a kind of dread. Call it mind-control-in-reverse! Where there exists an inner, “true” personality under the skin of an outer “false” one…and the true one will get out, so how are you going to deal with it once it does? How will you keep the inner self from killing the outer one, as it must surely long to do? We’ve seen rather a lot of this kind of thing over the last couple of decades, and now we’re practically tripping over it…and it can be done well just as easily as it’s done poorly, and in a way it is (of course!) nothing new…any stroll through the Psychology section of your local bookstore will tell you that, and it isn’t like science-fiction writers haven’t long been obsessed with literalizing a “dual” character in their protagonists…but the accent is different these days. That dread, it’s something specific to the times. “What if the enemy is inside, what if I myself am the enemy?” It’s a communal nightmare we’ve explored a great deal in our fiction over a very long period of time, but post-1989 and post-2001 I think we must add:

“What if I myself, in my own authentic self, am the enemy?”

Because that’s the really modern kicker, isn’t it? Well beyond Freud and Jung and all of their self-help successors, that’s a new sort of paranoia for writers to grapple with, and not just SF writers either! Not too long ago, I mentioned in passing that the superhero always wins his or her four-colour fights because unlike the supervillain he or she is capable of honest self-expression…which is the only thing sufficient to creating the passage of time in such stories, and the reason they are not merely and entirely repetitive in character. But what if the self-expression isn’t good, in anything but a therapeutic sense?

What if the totalization of the Self, the integration of all its fractious bits, isn’t healthy for anyone?

And yet it still must be a Good, right?

I mean…can we really live without it being a Good? Can we? Or doesn’t that overturn something much more basic than the existence of Progress, and in a much more arbitrary way than any mirror-universe-where-people-are-bad-because-they’re-bad ever could?

…Okay, and so maybe I did lose focus there, a little. Well, so back to the replicators! Which are, like Khan’s inbuilt hyperaggression, a modern embroidery on Star Trek’s otherwise-clear historical thesis about how technology and humanity must interact…and like a lot of things in our real lives, it’s a minor logical convenience that conceals in its principle of operation a great potential for abuse — a potential, indeed, to unravel the very fabric it’s been embroidered onto. Whyever would the spacefaring races of Star Trek wish to make war, when they have so much space available to them that the very concept of “elbow room” ought not to be one they can grasp in the first place, because they have no need of it? Without any lack of resources, what logic can lie behind the adoption of the zero-sum expansionism they all seem so fanatically engaged in? During the Cold War there was a pretty solid subtextual reason for it all, but now the Cold War’s gone and the Singularity’s here instead, so there’s little to justify it all with: the Borg are the only antagonists that even make sense anymore as antagonists, aren’t they? And if you recall, the only reason they became antagonists in the first place…

…Is because Q wanted to scare Picard, which he did by catapulting the TNG crew into a far-flung region of space they couldn’t otherwise have reached. New space, you see, is the terror that Q brandished in front of the Enterprise senior staff…the terror of being linked into it, suddenly a part of it, in desperate need of processing it…and please don’t think it was accidental, that this was the face terror wore! Because, as I said up top a little ways…

Space no longer really “exists” for the Enterprise crew or any of their traditional antagonists, and neither does scarcity, within their little bubble of friendly, accessible trade-routes and space-lanes and diplomatic demarcations. Everything’s part of a plenum, a smooth and ultimately non-terrifying expanse within which all the rules are known and all the playing-fields are level, even if there is sometimes danger and not every single little thing has been thoroughly explored. Indeed the lack of a truly comprehensive exploration of the space-already-known is what preserves the plenum’s capacity to draw all interest to itself in the first place: as any writer may retroactively insert any amount of hidden, “archaeological” texture into it, and thus make sure the universe of Picard & Co. continues to sacrifice breadth, for depth. The bubble of lawfulness and pattern can be made so interesting, in other words, that they never think about the larger Void that enwraps their continuum (for that’s what it is!), the shield of uncrossable distance that separates them from the awful necessity of having to take new and more chaotic things on board in a hurry. And for this reason, to them, “space” is just another word for “context”…a context that Q’s action is intended to shake violently, and of course it does precisely that: Picard, so complacent when it comes to “final-frontier-ism”, has the frontier shoved in his face and must rapidly change his spots. But…

The fact remains that this injection of terrifying new space into the continuum is something brought about only by Q’s omnipotent and apparently peevish intervention; and really Picard is quite right to be complacent, given only that Q stays his omnipotent hand. Eventually the Federation would encounter the Borg, but in that “eventually” might they not increase their capabilities to the point where the Borg are not too discomposing to their context? Their insulating Void is nibbled away from the inward edge, so they never really see it: they only see the context it decomposes into, bit by bit, as a product and a meaning, as a product known as meaning..as a meaning worthy of being treated as “product”. And even when Q pulls that curtain away to shock them, they still do not really see it, or they see it only in a momentary flash, before — even in their terrifying state of unpreparedness! — they do after all beat the Borg, and gain the time they need to work out how to master them. For just one moment, all the windows to other possible versions of the continuum are thrown open, and the babble of terror breaks through! The Borg, as the principle of assimilation made literal, cannot themselves be assimilated!

The Borg, as Modernity’s ultimate skyscraper, cannot be modernized any further!

Cannot be de-modernized!

Because they are the logical conclusion, of a valid argument. However…

…It’s all only for a moment, before the brave Captain and his microcosmic crew manage to assert (admittedly, with more force) what they always assert: the value of the limited self, the self as a thing with boundaries and edges and the power to distinguish itself against the things it is not. The Borg claim that they’ll take the Federation’s distinctiveness and add it to their own, but they don’t actually show a whole lot of distinctiveness whether it’s their own or anyone else’s, and their ship founders on the old contradiction of Being and Becoming, until soon — very soon! — it sinks below the sea…

And then that’s that! And we’re back to Klingons and Romulans again, aren’t we? And the Void enwraps all, like a nice cozy blanket.

And yet they still make war. Even though there’s no reason for it. Because once again there is no space, there is no scarcity, there is nothing to go to war over…and therefore, somewhat paradoxically, my conclusion is that they’re making war over the scarcity of space. The scarcity of scarcity?

I admit it sounds just stupid at first blush. The scarcity of space as a casus belli? Well, how isn’t that a way of saying “elbow room”? Aha, but that isn’t quite how I mean it, just as the modern accent of the “enemy within” doesn’t mean, straightforwardly, the war between Id and Superego. Every culture in the ST: TNG universe wants to maintain its separation from all the others, its distinctiveness…for the very reason that the distinctiveness is slight. Just as they fight bitterly over territory, because their territory is actually in very little danger. They actually need nothing, so they are willing to contest anything and everything…because the only space that remains real, in all this wide galaxy, is the relatively small space that exists between warships when they’ve got a phaser lock on each other. Because it is the one remaining instance in which well-known and widely-used space can be reconstituted as Void: not a trade route, not an orbital path, not a medium of communication, not a medium of anything…not a “linked-in” part of the plenum, but a gap, a chasm. An emptiness. The planets are just excuses; the Empires are completely arbitrary in their scope. How do you get people to establish the frontiers of all those Big Polygons, and maintain them? The truth must be that you don’t even bother; the truth must be that you don’t even really care. The technology is godlike, fail-proof, self-maintaining. One person could fly a starship. Starships could be flown without people.

Starships, really, don’t necessarily need to be flown at all.

And if you wanted war, you could just model it mathematically.

But, as Captain Kirk might say, what would be the point? Consider what Kirk does in “A Taste Of Armageddon”, when confronted by the virtualization of war: he gives a big speech against biological determinism and then he destroys the enabling technology, thus bringing the scarcity of time and space back into the previously-computerized conflict and forcing the issue that had previously been so adroitly skated over. Kirk the Wrecker! Kirk the Doom-Bringer! But as impressively Alexandrian as his solution is, it still isn’t a solution that can be transported (pardon me) to the later developmental stage of his own milieu…not once those replicators have made the scene, creeping up on all the old justifications and stabbing them in the neck! Because it really is a utopian set-up, at that point, and the world simply won’t bend to give anyone a good reason to fight…

And so it becomes necessary to make one up. Because not just a taste, but a full banquet of Armageddon, is what’s on the menu here! When a perfect technological sufficiency removes all the old differences that used to matter — all the old distinctiveness wherein free actions were situated bleeds away, as utopia enforces that implacable logic which is all its own. So irresistible, so inevitable, that even wishing for peace is an exercise in futility!

Even wanting things is pointless!

And so scarcity itself becomes the most valuable thing there is. The flip side of adventure and possibility! The origin-point of drama and purpose! Oh, how they search for it — tirelessly, tirelessly, everywhere they go. Hunting the elusive Void, that separates objects from one another, in every tiny inch of space-that-is-not-space, space that connects rather than dividing. Chasing the bravery dragon in range-to-target reaches, hidden dimensions that need devious uncurling: hell, it’s a wonder they’re not all more bellicose, you know? For better a real and genuine final frontier — an real and genuine undiscovered country! — than a mere final resting-place. So the Void of an armed standoff (no matter how it gets resolved, although let’s face it in TNG it’s usually resolved without violence) is the escape-hatch, from oppressive utopia…the trapdoor to a higher and freer plane…

But, only because it all doesn’t really matter anymore? Otherwise, everything is all perfectly congealed into an impeccable stability?

Well…

Not really. Because does not the limitless cornucopia itself, betoken the presence of a sort of Void? Fights in space are all very well, but distinctly pre-replicator thinking…to the point where they may make the most sense, simply as psychological evasions: let’s not look at this new gaping hole in reality, that gets bigger every second, but let’s concentrate instead on the old one that’s getting harder and harder to find, harder and harder to squeeze into. If one is truly interested in final frontiers, then this is probably not really the way to go; in fact it seems to me that the only reason you would go that way, is if a final frontier was the very last thing you were interested in. Q knows it: the Federation is complacent as hell because it feels entitled to its complacency, it is willing to spend all its energies on complacency, and therefore that complacency is itself a very great existential danger. Because what is it, that the cornucopia can not provide?

Here’s where the Andrew part comes in. How can a society exercise control over the potential of its technology? All very well to talk about safety protocols, administered and enforced by computer, ringed around with the magic spells of access codes and command authority — one presumes that on board the Enterprise only Picard can order up high explosives from the replicators — but the problem with potential is that it’s…well, it’s potential, which means it’s all that which doesn’t currently exist as a known and charted list of possibilities. You don’t even need to reprogram the computer, to figure out how to replicate things you shouldn’t: the computer doesn’t know everything all by itself, right? So every superpower you haven’t thought of, that’s the superpower Wesley Crusher has when he’s sitting in his room with the replicator right there, even if the bottle containing the djinn has got a child-proof cap on it…

Or…

Hell, especially if it’s got a child-proof cap on it. Because if “potential” is your biggest worry, then guarding against all-that-isn’t-potential is like stacking sandbags in the wrong place: like stacking sandbags on a mountaintop, really. All the destructive stuff you know about, is stuff you’ve already got just lying around…isn’t it? So there’s no point asking the replicator to make you a phaser rifle or an antimatter bomb, when there’s already one sitting in a locker down the hall, protected by no more than a magic spell, a string of words spoken in a sufficiently deep voice, and if you’re already messing around with magic spells anyway then why bother to go down the hall? How trivial is technology you already know about, for heaven’s sake, in a world of such super-plenitude as this? Ashby and Godel look on and cluck their tongues at the reactionary urge — that urge made reactionary in the very moment of its conception! — to codify all in a great Principia, to enclose all in a great fence of Known Continuum wherein every action is subject to mitigation; knowing everyone should know better, but it’s just so easy, you know? So easy to think about the organism as an imaginary whole, instead of a thing with many synchronized parts that has a neat way of hanging together. Simple names are just so seductive, you see! They’re so readily put in order; they make everything so tidy. In my neck of the woods, now, that tidyness is best evidenced by statements like:

“I’m provisionally in favour of the Northern Gateway pipeline, so long as we’ve got the appropriate environmental protections in place.”

Where “appropriate environmental protections” means “magic formula of spoken words that will allow the oil to flow without people getting upset”, and NOT NECESSARILY ANYTHING OTHER THAN THAT…because of course there are no “appropriate environmental protections” in terms of actual instrumentalities, that will save our fisheries when (and not if!) a big spill comes, but somewhere out there is indeed a magic hypnotic spell that will allow the pipeline to built despite the inevitable disastrous consequences, if only someone can successfully locate the necessary “appropriateness” in linguistic space…

(Though more on “linguistic space” on some Later Day, and anyway as long as I have a body to be thrown in jail that pipeline will not be built…!)

…But on Star Trek, you find the tidyness coming out in theorems like “safety interlocks” and “modulation of the shield harmonics” and other assertions of postmodernity that are enlightening on the one hand, and occlusive on the other, but since you get to pick which is which you’re always in the money as far as stability is concerned…

Until, that is…you’re not.

So…

Yes, there is another Void, that technology addresses, and TNG-era Star Trek’s enormous (if subliminal, and maybe even subconscious) interest in it is precisely what makes it not exactly a science-fiction show as its illustrious predecessor was, but instead a curious hybrid of fiction and thought-experiment that is less about allegorical drama and more about the counterposition of philosophical theses…which is the very thing that leads me to think my aimless musings about its post-scarcity politics of Void might be considered legitimate, even though as a fiction it continues to have no “natural” questions in it that are available to be asked. Well, but perhaps there are such things as “unnatural” questions, whose asking may prove more fruitful? The TNG-era universe of Star Trek is pretty much not for me, I confess — I like my drama a bit more dramatic, if you know what I mean — but any show which is so much about the ordered arrangement of propositions in a hierarchy can’t help but appeal to the philosopher in me, whether or not I think any of its specific arguments are any good. I’ve often said that I think the best TNG-era shows must have been the ones about “how computers work” — your ship-in-a-bottle, your homing-pigeon android story — unless they were the ones about how an essentially dull and static status quo contains within it many overlapping ghosts of alternative meaning, shows that might have been building up a laminate of Star Treks we never saw, that all the TNG-era products exist on top of as a kind of conceptual sheen…

Which is to say: the other Void is the one we find in language.

Since that’s what latter-day Star Trek — in my view, anyway — is really about. Well, and in a world of godlike technology, isn’t the programming language of it all just…language? The things language can do, and not do; the limits that language can take you to, and what you can do without it when it drops you there, at the bleeding edge. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit it, but I can’t find the link right now to my own post on Star Trek’s most revealing moment: the Voyager episode containing the war in the Q Continuum. Aha, and right away you ought to be thinking “shit, so they have one too?!” Oh, indeed they do, indeed…as Janeway finds out when she is transported (sorry) there, to see it all looking exactly like the American Civil War, with muskets and manor houses and Q telling her “this is all just how your tiny mind interprets it, so the reality of it doesn’t drive you insane.” So someone shoots at Q as he stands near the mantelpiece, but instead of hitting him they hit a clock or something and they blow it to bits…because he ducks…and I think…

Well, what was the clock, then? That Janeway’s puny human mind merely “interpreted” as a clock on the mantel?

And what are the “bits“, that it was blown to?

And: what is “ducking“?

And when the Voyager crew arrive to rescue her, and escape the Q notice by hiding behind trees…

Well, and what the hell are the “trees“?

And what’s the “dirt” they get on their faces, and what is the “wood” that’s thrown into the “fire”, and the “bandages” that staunch the “blood” caused by “bullet holes”…and what’s “nightfall” and what’s “sunrise”, and on and on, and you’ll forgive me for repeating myself, but really I do no more than the episode itself because the principle really does go on and on and on…and all the while it is all about technology, and all the while it is all about the Void, and endlessly the Voyager’s crew traverses the edge of enlightenment and/or occlusion…as Q rants on metaphorically, about what you’re not seeing.

And what you will never see.

I mean…forget the Klingons and the Romulans, but why do the Q make war? You know? If there’s one territory we’re not in, anymore, it’s for sure the geopolitical…or allegorical…heck, I am not sure it’s even really the metaphorical, at all, at all…

For what metaphor can really stand to be stood for, by another metaphor? Is it possible to have a metaphor for a metaphor?

Back to Wesley Crusher standing in front of the replicator. Loss of meaning. It’s present at every stage of the TNG-era’s, uhrr…development, because meaning is a product of control, which is given by technology, which is held up by “progress”, but the edifice is not secure because it’s built entirely out of two-edged swords. And you can ignore that fact for a long time — if you work at it really hard and really desperately, even longer! — but eventually the knowledge of instability must seep in no matter what you do. Technology, designed to shelter you from the Void, can’t help but bring you closer to it at the same time, because every time it closes a door it also opens a window. The whole post-TNG world is constantly lurching towards the brink of collapse, of utter dissolution, of the desynchronization of its parts…and even exploration isn’t enough to keep blowing up the bubble. Only war, good old reactionary war, can keep you distracted from it all. Good old war, the reasonless thing! At least you can always count on it.

Until, that is…you can’t.

“Because it doesn’t matter”, I said, and you know what…it really doesn’t matter, does it? The Federation and the Klingons and the Romulans, they aren’t competitors but partners; they’re all in the same boat, and they’re almost the same people, and pretty soon they will be the same people, so in a way it already doesn’t matter, because if they’re almost the same and they’re getting more the same and soon they’ll be the same then we might as well just hurry up and say Sameness Has Arrived, even if no one is yet willing to see it. So who is going to war, that may be looked on as a poorly-formed question…the who doesn’t matter, because “who-ness” doesn’t need to be applied — when it’s the conflict that entrains the identities, not the identities that cause the conflict. It’s the Void that makes those technologies do what they do, which in turn places the fingers of individuals on the trigger, magically moving the people all into place so they may be contrasted with one another, though they may think it’s all their own idea. Just as it isn’t Wesley Crusher’s staring into the replicator that conceives the terrifying new technology of actualized potential, but the replicator that gazes also makes that thing happen. Has already made it happen. It will happen. And once it starts, it won’t stop.

And clearly it’s this, that concerns Q. Oh, very old stuff, none of it “original”, you know! But the accent is new.

Even if the words are the same, and the tune.

Universe Part Eight: Bonfire Of The Novelties

Or:  “Superhero Sex:  Skypeing With The Devil”

…

Everytime I think I’m out, I keep pulling me back in.

Best of the midwinter season to you, Bloggers — or as we call it for some reason, the beginning of winter — and though I should really be wrapping presents [EDIT: or returning them, it being a few days later now] [EDIT EDIT: or not even thinking about them at all, it now being the middle of February and thus well into the New Year], I find myself with (somehow) more to say about teh sex and teh superhero comics. But, I thought I’d covered it all already?

So, why is there suddenly more to say?

Perhaps because the topic is a more general one than I’d first thought. You see, it isn’t just about how one can write oneself into a story in many different ways, nor merely about how the value of an escapist fantasy is dependent on what one specifically wishes to escape to or from, but it’s also about the larger systems of the real world that give all escapist fantasies their general context: their general applicability to any potential reader who happens to be trapped in a world he never made. Thus all incoherent rambling about art as pedagogy must eventually find its other half (its secret identity?) in a clever Marxist analysis of art as industrial relations…and then together wind their way back to the Lawrentian root of art as psychotherapy…

Which brings us to Doctor Doom, and libertarianism. Not that I’m saying old Victor, everybody’s favourite metalhead, is himself a libertarian — heck no, he’s a monarchist! — though some libertarians, hmm, are also monarchists really if you peel away the bullshit — but to the extent that a deep seam of libertarianism runs through the political perspective of the comics cliffside in general, he is every day in more and more danger of becoming a libertarian icon. Which, I have to think, is not a very good look for him…

And perhaps more unfortunately, it isn’t a very good look for libertarianism, either. You see, the problem is that this word “libertarian” is a hotly-contested one in this current cultural moment: outside of conversation with the Noam Chomskys among us, it really has no functional definition beyond its feeling definition — is really just a convenient label for a bundle of feelings (“strength through feelings!”), an “-ism”ness that seems to put those feelings into an historical, perhaps even developmental perspective, while really taking them further and further away from any meaning at all save what happens to be found on the skin of the bubble of the present moment. Bertrand Russell’s dictum that all memory of the past is just the artificial construction of the present is here revealed as more than a mere observation: now becoming a politically-charged tool of the propagandist, who like Raymond de Seze seeks to tunnel through sophistry to an unassailably retroactive triumph of pure, implicit logic equal in effect to God saying “dude, it’s okay, I’ve got this”. And not to get too far off topic too fast, but if you want to think of this kind of thing in terms of mathematics then you wouldn’t exactly miss the target…because strange loops, as any time-traveller would tell you, can do anything at all, that’s possible to be imagined: they can make the only possible theological proofs of the existence of God, simply by invoking the paradoxical nature of His inarguable unprovability; they can stop the catalogue of total knowledge from ever being assembled, simply by reading it; they can make new things by making new words for things; they can cause even the deadest and driest list of facts to become infused with a sudden lively humour that cannot be predicted or accounted for. Heck, they can even write the plots of superhero comics, AND WHAT’S MORE…!!

…They can write computer code, too, but we’re not quite there yet. We’ll get there, but not yet! When for now all we’re dwelling on is the fact that “Mathematics” may not itself be the description of this deep principle of thought-orderliness, but mathematics is certainly the thing we’ve invented to describe it, and it describes it very well indeed…and thus even though math isn’t itself the thing it was created to describe, it is nonetheless uniquely situated within it as part of it, in such a manner as to be able to affect it in its own strange loop…the model changing the thing it models which in turn creates a model for itself…

And where we are going to get to — uh, in theory anyway! — is the place where that unique feedback is exposed as something whose specific efficiencies also are conditioned by a more general context that lies outside their ambit of comprehension…in “the real world”, as it were…

BUT!!

Thankfully, we’re not there yet. We’re just talking about the word “libertarian”, remember?

And about comics.

Speaking of which…

Some comics people on the Internet have this real serious thing about Doctor Doom, have you noticed? That great, iconic villain with the puffed-up ego…they identify with him a little more strongly, these days, than perhaps can be accounted for by his beautiful design and long history of character development. Doctor Doom is a putz, of course: a walking inferiority complex wedded to a sad genius, a tragedy of lost human potential. Everyone is better than him, largely because he wants to know if they are…but he avoids changing by living in a fantasy world in which none of that matters, in which he isn’t like that and doesn’t have that flaw, and so doesn’t have to admit a thing about a thing. A quote from Simone Weil comes to mind here, courtesy of our old pal Harvey Jerkwater:

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Imaginative literature, therefore, is either boring or immoral or a mixture of both.”

And perhaps that may be a bit harsh for lovers of imaginative literature like you and me, but it certainly describes the problem of the supervillains: never satisfied because never satisfiable, more than anything else in the world they need their heroic antagonists to keep their illusions of proper and dignified selfhood afloat. EXCEPT!

Doctor Doom has gone beyond this, into a fugue state so complete that every action of his at once composes its own justification. Absolutely and permanently enveloped by his brilliant armour, everything he touches turns to totalitarianism, that -ism so wonderfully enabled by technocracy…but, he doesn’t see it. Because he doesn’t have to. Because he doesn’t need honesty as his credential, all he needs is his “personal code of honour”. Doctor Doom reeks of malevolence and evil, petty vindictiveness and disgusting Satanic pride…but, he’s got that “honour” thing going for him, and you have to give him that.

Don’t you?

Well…I dunno about that, frankly. The thing prevalent among young men in my culture that I call Bullshit Honour is just so damned cheap, so ephemeral and so filled with hypocrisy, that it kills thousands on the roads each year…bearing the same relation to the real thing “honour” as the false repute of “celebrity” does to actual fame, and oh wow how vain, without the merit, is the name! So many lines in so much sand, so hurriedly drawn with whatever stick happens to be most handy! Honestly, dude, you should not drive home, you should crash on the couch instead…

But to those who have nothing else, Bullshit Honour is the most precious thing in the world, even as the positions it produces are the most precarious: I am respectable, I am good, observe me as I don the armour of my character, see how it gleams. And don’t judge me by the things I do or say…!

But judge me fairly, by my history.

Though of course history is always in flux, as any time-traveller would tell you. So, the intersection of Doctor Doom with the libertarian ideal of modern times and antiquated thoughts: a self-interested actor who can call himself good by his own lights simply because he possesses motivations, that perhaps are really not much different in nature from those the good people possess too…smart, superbly capable in his own milieu, and terribly misunderstood by the sheep around him because they can’t fathom the superior poignancy of his struggle, he is the romance of imaginary evil personified. Who is better and finer? Who could possibly have more just cause, for taking any given action? The thing proves itself, at every instant: Doom is the best.

Doom is the best.

But…we didn’t used to think that, did we?

Didn’t we used to think of Doom as the worst?

Wasn’t that, in fact, what was so great about him?

Here’s that quote again, from Blue Box #1:

“Bulliet has a theory that posits comic books as keenly accurate depictions of the inner lives and imaginations of the teenage boys of that particular era. “What distinguished the comic book industry of the 1960s and ’70s from the book publishing industry was that it was more demand-driven than supply-driven,” he says. “Stores were very cautious about what they stocked. Owners knew their stock very well, and they paid attention to what boys were buying.” The output of the industry became totally reflective of the desires, fears, and dreams of the boys who were fueling it. “You can watch, in the comics of the era, the evolution of a sensibility that is specific to a demographic,” continues Bulliet. In Bulliet’s view, comics provide a window onto an otherwise undocumented history.”

Bullshit Honour is on occasion the best honour, because unlike its non-bullshit other half it doesn’t actually require principle, or hardship. It certainly generates hardship, by using principle…! But it doesn’t require these, if you see what I mean. All it requires is a certain amount of very specific cleverness, which is good news indeed if such cleverness is the only stock you’ve really got to trade. Romance? This is not the mid-twentieth century, when everything seemed pretty well on the upswing after an unimaginable disaster had finally been gotten through, so we bloody well need romance…the strange families that dotted the television dial throughout the postwar era, and filled the pulps and the comics as well, were born from the ruin of chaos and the abyss of lost time — all those sitcoms are about survivors, people! — but they also live in a time of mass reinvention because of that, a time of (if I may say so) “mass possibility”. But not so, the survivor-fictions of today! In which the only loss figured is the loss of reputation…

But mind you, that’s not an unserious type of loss either. It’s more abstract, sure; but it also hits at the heart of human social sensitivity. We’re pretty robust creatures, and can thrive even under tremendous environmental variations and enormous physical setbacks, but there are still a few problems we have no answers for. Wars and storms, we can sometimes get out from under; but endocrine imbalances and loss of public respect drive us to our knees every time. And it’s that second one that’s the kicker currently under review, of course: peacetime anxiety, that admits of no solution but medication. Even if that medication is a bar fight. Or, on the other hand…

…You can cheat. Libertarianism. In its current feeling-form, it’s a kind of ethical fugue — these problems are too hard, so we must make them less hard. These responsibilities weigh too heavily, we must make them lighter. When Rousseau did it, it was called “conjectural history”, but today we just call it Glenn Beck’s America. And comics people love it, in an odd conjunction with dotcom billionaires who somehow managed to fail up more spectacularly than any other people who have ever lived…comics people and software billionaires both, they feel the access of a greater and cleaner world banging shutters in back rooms in their heads, calling out to them down the back hallways, promising to break through the dimensional barriers into reality, through the wardrobe’s doors and into real life, bigger on the inside, the glove simply turned inside-out. All we have to do is fix it, all we have to do is do this thing, all we have to believe is a belief without seams and flaws…a better belief, a perfect belief. All we have to accomplish is perfection.

Hey, how hard could it be?

It’s a curious age, this early part of the twenty-first century. It has a lot of uncertainty in it, bubbling away beneath the surface. So it shouldn’t be too surprising if smart people, superb in their metier, whose personal poignancy is subjectively superior to the poignancy of others around them, find themselves going Frank Miller one better: and not wanting to use identification with the villain to interfere the more strongly with the hero, and through the hero the text, but instead wanting to identify with the villain as the actual mirror of the reader, and frankly the text can get lost. I mean, Brian Bendis and Mark Millar were fine for the early oughts, but their beats seem a bit tired now, you know? Be the villain you want to see fucking the hero in this world, and all that…in 2012, it’s almost naive. Heck, even rape has gotten passe; even anthropophagic sex is still, y’know, sex. And we’re running up against the limits of how to sublimate it. Oh novelty, novelty, all is novelty! So make a bonfire of all your novelties. Once upon a time, in the superhero world, jolly and harmless violence tapped the root of libido, and by marvellous chemical transformations (aqua regia!) accomplished remarkable alchemical ends: mercury vapour transmuted into mere steam, exiting the reaction harmlessly. Even: fruitfully. Then, later, the sordid and grim sexual escapades of the superheroes reversed the equation: where once all violence coded for sex, now all sex coded for violence, and it was all very far from “harmless escapism”, like finding a way to mix milk and eggs and chocolate and sugar in such a way as to produce plutonium. I won’t say it wasn’t fascinating at first! Since it delivered a unique frisson: in the wake of postmodern appropriation of everyday instructional texts, and even more everyday para-instructional texts, superhero comics discovered a novelty that like magic itself only worked within the bounds of the fantasy kingdom, the Narnia map — as they appropriated themselves, “by their bootstraps” as it were. And, I consider it an open question…

Was this truly a “postmodern” exercise?

Well, it could’ve been, obviously: pedagogical plutonium porn, a handbook for misery that reverses the aspirational quality of existentialism. How to torture, how to sicken, how to cheat, why the superheroes have never faced a menace like this before…! And indeed I think one could argue that this has occasionally been tried on, and that it’s even worked pretty well from time to time. Er…

While literature was giving us “Tintin And The Real World”, superhero comics were giving us “The Filth”?

Regardless, in superhero comics at any rate the prime directive is that the Neovore must be fed, so quite-exactly-postmodern or not the feeding bloody well got done, and for a while the beast was satiated. But then like a Risen Doomsday it got hungry again, and not for the same old crap it had last time. So? When postmodern sex doesn’t work anymore? Doesn’t give up the same thrills? The answer was, as Grant Morrison might well have predicted, highly ritualized masturbation. Not that I’m saying that’s the kind of comics that he writes! Though I’m not not saying it, either, but the point is…

Sometimes it’s magic — partaking of the freedom of magic! — and sometimes it’s just more organized religion.

And therefore, partaking of the organization of organized religion.

You know?

Through the looking-glass, I suppose we are through the looking-glass here people…this is going to be a digressive one, almost as digressive as a Universe one, hell I should make it a Universe one, why this bloody well will be James Bond! Because magic and theology share a root, or perhaps more accurately I might say they share an intersection…and have you not noticed how the unique genius of Christianity is that it stubbornly makes every connotation a denotation? Jesus went up, up in the sky…hell, not even Levy-Bruhl’s “primitive” people believed shit like that, eh? And in fact not even Christians believe, not even the flippin’ Pope believes, in the literal Ascension, yet…

…There it is, and we can’t seem to get rid of it. So let’s return to time-travel, which is a fancy way of saying let’s return to mathematics…and the age-old problem of whether God can make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it, and then can he lift it anyway. Ask a rabbi and you’ll get sighed at: “so, you want to tell God what to do, eh? So why ask me, how is it my business that you disapprove of God’s lifestyle?” Judaism, like most religions, is “realistic”, you see: connotations and denotations maintain separate residences until marriage, because otherwise the cousins get confused. And to be fair to the Catholic Church, on the level of the ground troops it does a most square-jawed and manful job of keeping the latrine separate from the mess hall, for such individual parishioners as may be (understandably) perplexed from time to time. Because there still are wider principles that master the incestuous possibility created by rogue axioms, you see, and in mathematics as in nuclear chemistry there are “forbidden” transactions, that are forbidden mostly because they’re just plain forbidden, but also which are forbidden because they’re, as my old Phil. of Sci. teacher had it, “scientifically possible but philosophically absurd”. Just so de Seze’s argument, that if there is no divine right but the sufferance of the People, then it goes against democracy itself to remove Louis…is a valid theorem anyway, but one that even Hobbes might balk at, not for its callback to Leviathan but for the way it outrages what he himself described as the essential character of science: “the dependence of one fact upon another.” All these centuries later, it’s still the one thing Hobbes said that’s the hardest to argue with, and perhaps as good a description of science as any we will ever have — since it neatly encapsulates the nature of science that we continue to struggle with today: that knowledge has limits which can’t be broadened just because we stand there and wish at them to be broadened, yet those limits can’t be made any narrower by any amount of wishing either. Don’t expect us to stop being puzzled anytime soon, by how the social construction of science manages to coexist with science’s goal of objective truth-seeking! Because it might be a relief of a sort if we could figure out how to say that even facts are socially-constructed, but they still are not; and yet if we attempt to cure the problem the other way, by saying that science has no social dimension to it, then we go against the findings of science itself, and look like damn fools into the bargain. Science is done in communities, and done imperfectly because of that: politics and presumption begging every question they can get their hands on, because there are wishes and wishes, and they all act together untraceably to produce the indispensible context of facts that is called theory. Yet every theory still has to deal with the reality of the world as it is somewhere along the line, and that reality is fairly wish-impervious; a thrilling argument can be made for anything, and perhaps it thrills even more when it’s so radical as to argue specifically against the need for reconciliation with reality, but in the end there is still Fact’s windowpane, that Wish’s nose must contend with one way or another, or you don’t have a model of anything but your model. Every fact is dependent on some other fact, and in the end even a “perfect” belief is no more than a belief…

…Even if it’s essential to divining what the facts are, or may be, and of course this is one of the things we use time-travel stories to explore: what are the limits, that lie outside logic? Can God make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it? The rabbi would perhaps say “You mean might he make such a stone, and so I’m here to tell you: no, he won’t.” Can anything go faster than the speed of light? Sure, lots of things can do that; they just don’t.

But, if we imagine that they sometimes do…then Elsewhere becomes available to us in our time machine, and so we can try a great many arguments out, just to see — hypothetically — what they would look like if they didn’t already happen to be impossible. What would they look like, and what would they imply, and what structural necessities (if any) would obtain once the question has been freed from the uselessness of being asked? What new or more basic reality would remain, in the hypothetical crucible that has burned the old arbitrary reality of “forbidden” things away? As it turns out, what this looks like, and what is left, is a thing not 100% divorced from what’s left in similar stories one finds in different cultures; yet at the same time there is some novelty here too, that’s quite suitable for bonfire-making, for on some deep level the modern exercise of science is bound up with a Christian worldview that tolerates the manufacture of paradox — the multiplication of entities! — as other worldviews do not, and thus it is one in which only a paradox can adequately answer another paradox, the crucial dependence of facts one upon the other still remaining even when factuality itself has been insulted, and emptied-out as a category. Consider Doctor Doom, for example, and his attempt to get his hands on the magic jewels of Blackbeard by sending the Fantastic Four back in time to steal the pirate’s chest. Well, we already know it won’t work out for him, not just because Reed Richards is smarter than he is, but because (as it turns out) no time-travel story that takes this form of argument ever survives its own arguing….in whatever culture it is found, however the unique “Western” accent here is one wherein you’re not simply barred from plundering the past because the superior mathematics of Zeus will stop you, but the reason you can’t plunder the past is that by entering it you make it as active a place as the present, indeed you can’t enter it with plunder in mind without making it active actually as the present…and thus open to the fresh sting of Necessity that can only occur where multiple outcomes are possible. And so the Fates no longer have anything to do with it; there simply becomes here, and here there, as the line of cause and effect becomes unstuck from its customary placement. So it isn’t like visiting Ajax in the Underworld! But instead the tale has rather a different moral than simply “the monkey’s paw will claw you in the end”, for that matter has a different one even than “the infinitesimal calculus has demonstrated why it is that Xeno’s arrow will indeed hit its target”: as it reminds us instead that this is not, can never be, the best of all possible worlds even in potential, no not even with time machines and magic jewels and everything…!

Which is surely, I think you’ll agree, a moral befitting the unspeakable niftiness of modernity…

But it doesn’t even stop there, you see. Because, moral or not, as long as you continue to have a time machine in this story…

…Then you can even flee that nifty modern moral in search of a niftier and even more modern one, and then flee that one too, and the next one, and the next after that, and essentially you may keep on fighting Necessity as you like pretty much “forever”, because when present and past are this sheerly promiscuous then the future matters so little that it barely exists at all. And therefore it can’t be better, as it can where there aren’t any time machines: where things in the past stay where they’re put.

And of course that’s not the only moral philosophy we farm via time-travel story in the West. But as for Doctor Doom, he’s never tried anything else but fixating on the past’s putative changeability, so…we should pity the guy, perhaps, almost. He can’t see what’s in front of his face…but he might. There’s something wrong in him, but it could be fixed; he doesn’t have to be this way! However in his distinctly Onanistic (yes!) pride, he also won’t be anything else. Why should he ever change his mind? Why should he ever condescend to acquiesce to the world, when it’s never done the same for him? Who does that damn Reed Richards think he is, the blasted boy scout? Second-rater, when did he ever invent a time machine…?!

But in a way, and naturally enough…he doesn’t have to invent one, because he already lives inside one. Because in a way, a superhero comic book is like a time machine, or anyway it can be. The planes of story, neatly-clippable into squares and rectangles, form just the sort of universe that can be ably presided-over by puzzle-piecing Intellect, by story-building Narrative, yet there’s more to this as well; for to read a comic book is to be once again catapulted into the time when one first read a comic book: the endlessly-serial storylines, the endlessly-reconfigurable postures of characters. What if, the imagination says, the Silver Surfer fought the Son of Satan? Then those scenes might be these ones. What if, the Original X-Men fought The Invaders? Or what if red fought blue, or green fought white. Part of the jouissance of superhero comics is in imagining what other set-pieces might lie behind the ones one is currently considering: what does the Thor vs. Hulk fight imply for all the other fights? What does it imply for me? The mind of the comics reader is deeply embroiled with the card-values of each of the characters confined inside the square and rectangular arenas of his seeing, rolling out the fabric of the present moment as the values multiply, and providing a pleasing alter-reality analogous to the past while still not being at one with it: eternally re-livable and re-playable, and as a consequence not binding on the reader but instead freeing. What if, Julius Caesar fought Hannibal? There’s a transgressive air to the putting-together of conflict here, a weird untethering of cause, to produce ever-more thrilling effect. Call it trash culture, not to say rap-battle, not to say promiscuous imagining: what if, Napoleon fought Einstein? Or what if the Jack of Spades fought the Jack of Hearts. In the square or rectangular windows to a time not here and a place not now, these infinitely-stackable symbolic wagers are our news bulletins and weather reports, these are our personality quizzes and Rorschach tests, this is all polymorphous eventuation not yet cemented, an alternative historicity waiting to be born…but, the significant point for our purposes is that it is nevertheless not born. Limitless potential values in the hand, tales shuffled into being at random out of the deck! But it’s all, ultimately…

…Solitaire, as the reader writes and reads his own readings and writings. Immersion in the comic book is thrilling because it is a private experience, somewhat illicit as it’s temporarily rule-free. We sport with possible fates! Things we might do! Or not do. But for the ordinary reader in the ordinary pedagogical scheme, this is primarily rehearsal — “what kind of hero do you want to be, when you join the larger social game?” — rather than advanced retrospective. The time machine that is the comic book isn’t a tool for fixing what’s gone wrong, because although it obeys its own internal logic it is not compelled to obey the larger logic of the outside world: “realistic” details of cause and effect within a comic book are confined by authorial intention instead of Fate, and possibilities and necessities external to authorial intention do not in truth “exist” to be speculated upon. Even the time machine within the story can only do so much! And of course this is just as it should be, because one is not supposed to get stuck in the comic book’s balancing act of force vs. force; one is not supposed to become attached to its re-enactments for the power they quite plainly don’t have. That the hero wins, by expressing himself or herself openly, is the only way the arrow of time gets printed on the pages, because it’s the only arrow of time that matters; it isn’t about Dr. Doom.

Except that, strangely at the current time, for some people, it sort of is.

And that’s a most curious development, don’t you think?

Well, I blame irresponsible storytelling, but I did say we were going to get back to mathematics, so let’s get back to it. What is it, that encourages so many people who work with it all day to embrace the nouveau-libertarianism of the American right wing? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of prolonged exposure to conceptual shorthand: from inside mathematics (as from inside Science in general), it’s a time-saver to concentrate on the romantic rather than the real…to treat the romance as though it were real. Terms and operations become objects and relationships, and it all works on its own level: understanding is the same thing as doing, and doing is understanding. The mysteries of the really-real world — the substrate, you could call it — do not answer very readily to the powers of logic, having no particular allegiance to it: even time and space are abstractions, and the nature of matter especially is a prey hunted eternally but never caught. Don’t expect us to stop being puzzled anytime soon, by how the abstractions of our thought relate to the objects of truth we aim to find in the world! For the whole business falls into the gap between reality and romance, between model and thing-being-modelled. And, on some level that’s just getting way too complicated, isn’t it?

Because: can’t the thing just be itself?

All very well to insist that the past is merely the product of the skin of the present’s bubble, but how are we supposed to operate that way? It definitely ain’t easy, to be stuck asking questions that aren’t even proper questions, all to get answers that cannot be proper answers, and it’s all made even harder by the fact that there just isn’t any alternative…

…Unless, that is, you cheat. Because who’s to say there is a reality outside the romance? Mathematics lets you make fortunes and atomic bombs with equal facility, seems to be the only useful handle one can get on the world anyway, so what possible logical reason is there to conclude any “substrate” exists at all, except a simpler and more elegantly abstracted one that more closely adheres to the approved method of looking at it? Why can’t mathematics, indeed, just be “Mathematics”, if indeed it looks and walks and quacks like Mathematics, eh? And who cares about when Newton said that no mathematical description could every quite match the evanescent curve of reality?

Of all things, even religions, Science is the best at making reactionaries. Strange loops, you see? They produce results — they’re the only things we know of, that produce them so damned efficiently! – and the results all have a certain soothing quality of self-similarity to them, fractal patterns pointed all the way down, fractal pattern pointed all the way up, and Man is the measure…and, look, here’s the thing about the libertarian comics people and the libertarian tech billionaires, okay? They are flip sides of the same coin largely because of what the coin is made of. Peter Thiel and his damaged Randian ilk imagine impossible moments of triumph brought about by the manipulation of belief, in the standard Doctor-Doom-sized package of pure engineering…the Singularity calls to them with its promise of ultimate convergence, all knowledge joined into one point of infinite computability, a portal to Elsewhere that leads away from the necessitous confinements of ordinary time and space. But, as I think I’ve mentioned before, the Singularity is really just a fictional inversion of where the world is really heading…i.e. not to the ideational Big Bang but to the ideational heat-death, the dissolution of Theory in the ionizing light of constantly-improving technical prowess. The more we find out, the less we know! The more we observe, the less we understand! At least for now, for now…and sure, we’ll catch up eventually…

But that’s the really-real reality that the Singularity indicates to us: something not the Singularity, something antithetical to it, where instead of things self-organizing themselves until they fall right into our hands, we get them in our hands first and find it’s all too damn much to organize and hold at the same time. I mentioned before, too, that science fiction is our most ironic literature? Well, we’ll get back to that too, but Not Today…for today I’ll just point out another instance of SF’s ironic inversions (as, again, I think I’ve done before) in the 90s SF tales of genetic superbabies conceived of CEOs and oil barons, better than your own progeny in every way, because you of the underclass can’t afford the services of the high-powered neo-natal engineers they employ. Because of course this is just a dream as well, isn’t it? There aren’t any genetic superbabies, and there aren’t gonna be any, because biology doesn’t answer to politics: we don’t know what a “super” baby would even look like, we wouldn’t know how to “make” one if we did, our polarized and self-satisfying opinions about what qualities people have are ones that nature has never heard of, doesn’t understand, and thinks are too silly to waste any time on. A “better” person…well what’s that? A “smart” person, a “superior” person…

Who’s ever heard of such a thing?

But just because the idea of genetic superbabies is irrelevant, doesn’t mean the tales of genetic superbabies were (or are) similarly irrelevant…because that same technology the story uses to do its impossible neo-natal engineering, in the real world we use for neo-natal testing, and neo-natal testing on a large scale promises social upheaval and moral confusion far more profound than what a handful of upper-crust superpeople could possibly generate. It’s genetic engineering, all right, but it’s pointed down toward the bottom of the feedback loop; hey, we won’t make superbabies, but we’ll sure be able to weed out un-super ones…!

And that’s the reality that such SF tales inversely indicate, which is the reality we all must live in. Unless, that is…

…We cheat, and find reasons to believe in the inversion rather than the thing it indicates. And people who work in Silicon Valley, whose failures make fortunes, excel at this…as do comics folk whose successes make no changes to the world at all but symbolic ones, and even those more utterly fleeting than just about any other symbolic changes that can be imagined. The comics industry in North America, at least the superhero stuff and its accessory products, is dying faster-than-fast, and the wagons are all circling…and Ayn Rand is not gonna ride over the ridge with her libertarian cavalry. It’s a pretty brutal reality, for a field of such light and reassuring fantasy! Wherever the heroes are, they’re not here…!

And down in Silicon Valley, is it so very different? At some point the realization must become unavoidable, that all this is the product of merest chance…that you aren’t better and smarter than those around you, nor even (if we put down the bank statement for a minute) more successful, and all your victories go only as deep as the skin on the bubble of time-travelling memory. Well, naturally enough! After all, do we really expect billionaire twentysomethings who eat ramen over the sink to discover new social realities by anything but accident? In the Marvel Universe where Doctor Doom lives, even anthropologists can build giant self-aware robots…but that doesn’t mean the real world supports software engineers who can do world-class anthropology! We’ve had bubbles before, and they’ve burst, but all we need is another carefully-narrativized illusion to conveniently forget it…hey, for that matter, remember when the Dow was just going to keep climbing and climbing forever, after having passed through some veil of possibility that ensured scarcity was left behind in another, smaller dimension? The Financial Singularity, how well I remember it! We were like angels then!

Just: not angels on the winning side, as you might expect when our leaders are all people who read 1984 and came away thrilled with the utopian promise of really cool interactive TV; when what they took from Huxley was the joy of being able to scientize Plato’s Republic. So what of the bottomless concurcopia that is social media, what of the endless celestial procession of apps that all our phones-that-are-not-phones promise? Every time Doctor Doom makes a plan he is convinced that it is the best plan, but it turns out really to be the worst…then he makes another “best” plan and it fails too. But is he to be judged by this? Of course not; after all…

…His history’s not finished being written.

And he has his Personal Code Of Honour.

And, damn it, he thinks he’s going to win!

But, we might ask…why does he think he’s going to win? What makes him so sure? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that he lives inside a universe that’s in a constant boil of possibilization, where the liberating power of magic’s ability to let Lesser affect Greater is always at hand. In a fictional world, to figure out a different way to say something is to make that something differently-actual, and so comic-book science always has an answer for everything. Mathematics! The lines between the model and the thing it’s modelling are so thoroughly, fatally blurred that mere genius becomes an Archimedean lever, sufficient to any task! Doctor Doom never repeats himself, so never learns from any of his mistakes; but then why would he, when all is novelty where he lives? Meanwhile up here, all is repetition…or so it must seem, to Weil’s “real” evil…and even the allure of magic becomes not so much about freedom but about order. Oh, if there was only a bit of order to our lives!

Oh, if only wonderful, marvellous ME could be set loose from these chaotic constraints imposed by the irrationality of others…!

And yet that isn’t the way the world works, as we continue to discover. The structure of spacetime masters all, establishes all basic symmetries, creates both Number and Relation and — yes — forbids the impossible, in some strange way that acts to drag us down from the lonely mountain of identity outside the world, into the messy archipelago of complexly-interpenetrated substances. Consciousness chops continua into antinomial categories, but the only thing that’s “natural” about such chopping is that it’s consciousness that does it…the categories themselves only tenuously bound to the substrate of the really-real world, and at constant risk of breaking loose and becoming conceptual flotsam, drifting aimlessly to-and-fro across…

What else?

The surface of the present moment.

So what “window onto an otherwise undocumented history” are comics providing us with today? In these swirling 21st century times, our escapist fantasies have become like counters in a public game, that we used to play alone…belief in what’s inside the pages has gained a peculiar resonance it never had before, even as the enterprise producing the pages spirals ever closer to the drain. Different notions of escape — who escapes, and from what, and into what — become more important as clues to the external factors that condition the “need” for escapist fantasy in the first place, and the morals of the stories become more weirdly transportable to the outside world as their kinds proliferate…it’s not about learning how to build a crystal radio set anymore! Nor is it about becoming acquainted with the general atmosphere of a technosocial culture, and (sadly) it isn’t even about how sex is the opposite of death. All that stuff’s been emptied out, it seems: its factuality insulted even as the abstract necessity of factual relations — let’s call ‘em pseudofactual relations, eh? — maintains its insistent force. So what’s left? Well, I guess when you take away the instructional aspect of these odd little four-colour dreams (did you know that we use dreams to rehearse waking actions that the brain figures are necessary to our survival?) (it’s true!) (but that’s Not For Today either), what you’re left with is an instructional format without any significant instructional content, and so…

The reader just has to supply that out of their own pocket. “Doctor Doom works in secret, and talks to no one!”, Steve Englehart once declared from second-person caption-space…

Doctor Doom, alone in his castle with the apparatus of masturbation all around him. Only faithful Boris to make sure he keeps his annual appointment with the Devil. And to the Devil, might not all these annual meetings seem as just one? The same meeting, over and over, in temporally-detached higher (or lower) space?

…

You know, I take it all back: maybe “libertarian icon” is a good look for him!

Hal Jordan Isn’t Just A River In Egypt

or, “The Mirror Has Two Reflections”

or, “Sex And The Single Superhero, Take Two”

Hola, Bloggers. Well, wouldn’t you know it, as is my wont I went around and around and around the topic but failed to strike to the heart of it! As the saying goes, “as I at length debate and beat the bush, there step in other men to catch the birds…”

Though for such a bird as this, I can’t really say I envy them, you know?

Universe Part Seven: Curse Of The Ruby Slippers

Or: Welcome Back, Dollhouse.

Listen, Bloggers: can you hear that? Out of the West, here it comes, the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse…

…TIME!

Boy, have I ever been losing time lately. And I think I’ve got to chalk some of that up to Twitter, you know? I mean, I’ve been kinda logy around the keyboard for a while anyway, I start but I can’t finish, I’ve looked but I just can’t find…but just as my friends might tell you that my usual torrent of e-mails dwindled to a trickle #torturedphrasing as soon as I got a blog, I think I must tell you that since I started abusing Twitter my level of blog-posting’s gone down for exactly the same reason the e-mails got drier and drier. Because you can’t leap to the keyboard over something the same way twice, can you? Posts used to boil up in me, I would see things and be shaken but not necessarily moved, I’d itch but I wouldn’t scratch, for as long as I could, but then…some final piece of the puzzle would come along to break the camel’s back, some phase-shift would crop up #badlymixedmetaphor #methodtomymadness to turn a string of random annoyances into an arrangement of facets on a crystal of complaint…and then, BOOM!

Just like that!

A turgid three thousand words would be born.

Twitter tends to inhibit that sort of accumulation, though; or at least, that’s how it works for me. Strands of thought that might’ve knit themselves into cloth, are so easily plucked away one-by-one, and given over to the volatile world of Fast Diaristic Slippage…instead of Slow Diaristic Slippage, obviously, because SDS can’t really tolerate twenty-word installments, not that anyone knows much about such a new form but I think we can at least know that: that there is such a thing as a post that’s too short to publish. Which is a somewhat odd thought, I believe, but then it just shows how we’re not really thinking this thing through very well, as though deep down we’re just convinced, all evidence to the contrary, that we already have all the answers.  But maybe it’s time, finally, to wake up from that particular dream? Oh, who was it who said it, Toto? What was it? “The Internet is the first thing that human beings have made, that human beings do not understand”, I think that was it. I actually think I got that off an endnote from a Criminal Minds episode, which…

…Which by the way, have you noticed that show is made by people who devoured Claremont/Byrne X-Men comics when they were younger? I mean look at it, it couldn’t be more Eighties X-Men if it tried, Thomas Gibson’s portrayal of Cyclops is like Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, absolutely indelible, and there’s a Kitty Pryde, there’s a Wolverine, there’s a Storm, there’s a Professor X…hell, Jean even dies, you know? And not to mention that they fight evil mutants. Who are all basically serial killers anyway, let’s be honest…and how do you get serial killers?

Well, you screw up the natural pattern of their development, don’t you?

And this may not be immediately apparent, but it’s actually a very interesting sort of line to take, this Criminal Minds one. Bold, even. Because you see the study of psychopathy can be, as so many other things, roughly divided into two camps: nature and nurture. This is either something that happened to you, or this is something that you are…and in our contemporary climate of neo-materialism, the latter controls most interpretations both fictional and academic: the horror of the monstrous child is an irruption out of some primal vein of chaos, the warped human being himself emblematic of the limits of human control…of helpless frailty in the face of vast chthonic forces. Which is an oddly religious posture for materialism to drape itself across, huh?

But then it’s as Lucretius said: all man’s religions begin in the fear of lightning.

But although we see this peculiar, reactionary, really oh-so-Eighties interpretation of psychopathy over and over and over again in our popular entertainment, we actually do not see it in Criminal Minds…and yet, we don’t see its opposite either. The terrible, soul-chilling responsibility of every village for every child, even the monstrous ones…the frighteningly-contingent nature of human sanity…the awfulness of the reaping and the sowing, well that’s all not quite here either, because the rough division of the study of psychology into two camps really is rough, and not actually real: but just a simplification, in service to a viewpoint.

Which is, not to go off on too long of a rant, the viewpoint previously identified as the controlling one, the Manichaean world of the materialist in which the dirtiest word isn’t soul but transactionalism…ah, transactionalism, the process-driven high ground of the filthy hippies of the twentieth century, and not just the seventeenth, which necessarily sucks a host of other issues into its complicated, perhaps ultimately unresolvable, philosophy…and is harder to attack, too. Sure, there are “good” mutations and there are “bad” mutations, but it isn’t Moses that defines those qualities — no, it’s Gaia, and furthermore for all we talk about the X-Men as a story about minority oppression, from the very beginning that was only the secondary kick: because the first metaphor was environmental, all about damage and remediation, destruction or salvation, thin idealistic hopes versus waxing threats of practical comeuppance.

Wasn’t it?

And so of course the first lesson of ecology is that ecology itself is a throwback to nineteenth-century science: where the truest of all subject-object dichotomies is found in the observation that objects only exist in the mind, not in the world. Hey, I really should point out that you folks don’t have to just take my word for it all, you know? Because that the twentieth century’s conceptual bias has been to look for Plato in the garden instead of the mirror is eminently look-up-able! But nevertheless this is not actually the first lesson of ecology, that this twentieth-century bias is in fact a bias…no. That’s not what I mean to say.

Because the meaning of ecology’s first lesson is that objects exist only in the mind, only because everything outside it is a subject.

A thought you can easily locate in Plato too…obviously, since it’s only in the twentieth century that anyone ever thought the world was primarily quantitative, instead of qualitative. So neo-materialism isn’t such a particularly good word for it really, since the materialism of today is harder than that of yesterday in much the same way that Barack Obama is a much more conservative politician than Barry Goldwater ever was…and we simply don’t notice it, or if we notice it we don’t think about it, or if we do think about it then we still try not to, because who wants to have to notice that the baseline of the graph is curving upwards at an accelerating rate?  It isn’t, you understand, that it’s a ladder to Heaven we’re climbing…it isn’t that Moore’s Law is bending all spatial dimensions into alignment with the dimension of time, so that we fall up into a black hole of angelic perfection …that’s just another one of our friendly symbols for how frightening all this real acceleration is. And…so am I saying you can find another of these friendly symbols in the deceptive Claremontese of Criminal Minds? If you look at it the right way, it’s Neuromancer: the sins of the father are visited on the child, but the child doesn’t know it because the father’s long gone; the tragedy of the commons is also the tragedy of twisted human individuals, but they can’t see they’re twisted. They can only feel it. Sure, it’s just another cop show, and the good guys with the badges always win their standard Pyrrhic victories — it’s an inherently-conservative pinhole camera view of life, meant to be anodyne in its narrowness, and it shields us from the true facts as well as any thing-made-of-convention does. But…

Hey, did I ever tell you that story about The Commish, and how his son wanted to get an earring to impress a girl in his class? So the Commish sits him down and tells him the story of how once there was a little Susie in his class at school, and he wanted to impress her by getting a tattoo, and BLAH BLAH BLAH STANDARD SITCOM BOILERPLATE…and that’s when I realized it, Bloggers!

That the Commish’s advice to his son was totally wrong!!

Let the cry fly ’round Shropshire, the Commish is not attuned to modern methods!

Because of course eventually all the old boilerplate goes out of date, and this is where the one-about-the-tattoo foundered, because it certainly didn’t matter in nineteen-ninety-five or whatever if little Bobby got an earring before he turned sixteen, right? And anyway an earring’s not like a tattoo, you can take it out…and anyway the tattoo thing isn’t even that big a deal anymore. So the Commish was wrong, but what was interesting about that was of course that it wasn’t him that was wrong, but whoever was writing him. Or…

Was it, really? Because all these conventions are just conventions, and writers don’t make ‘em, they just have to live with ‘em. But: slippage. Because as all genre fans know, it’s just when the conventions are strictest that the nature of all their -versions becomes more -sub, and whatever has the awful power to centralize also has the same power to decentralize…because you have to hang the human interest in story on something in the end, don’t you? And ultimately it can only be on what human interest is interested in, so inevitably all the poisons that lurk in the mud must hatch out. Everything in real life that gets excluded from what the conventions permit discussion of, comes out anyway sooner or later, even if it’s just in the case of wise father suddenly looking like a bit of a reactionary blackmailer, someone who has the power and thinks he uses it wisely…but doesn’t, and so it’s not too surprising that things go perversely wrong or sideways or uncomfortably close even in such a commercial product as Criminal Minds, because it really is an ecological fable above all, because that’s what people want to know about above all, whatever they may say when queried by an agent of the government…and after all, there’s nothing so new about this, either! I mean I dunno if Plato ever thought too much about it, but the questions of soil and growth and gardening have always been buried deep in the urban context of the American Crime Drama, as indeed they were buried deep in the context of its precursor the American Western, and the whole thing is just pretty inescapable really, and so honestly it just must come out from time to time, even in the unlikeliest places. Or maybe, especially there? Which is pretty much the real reason why you can’t find a cop show today that doesn’t slow down and get a bit lugubrious about the little matter of why the cop became the cop, which is largely a very silly thing because it largely doesn’t matter at all…except if the cop is Jeff Goldblum…oh, Raines, how I miss you still…

But in Criminal Minds, you see, this question not only matters, but it really matters. Where did these good mutants come from, what kind of homes did they have before they made it to Xavier’s? These teasingly-elliptical matters are as important to this show as they are unimportant to Star Trek: TMZ…

…Oh, you know that one, right? Starfucker Kirk, Black Dreads Spock, Surfer-Dude Worf, Snide Blonde Uhura? Off-Colour-Joke Geordie, Frosted Tips Chekov, Combative Guinan?

You’ve seen that one, haven’t you?

So you know it doesn’t matter where they’re from; they’re from anywhere they need to be. They’re from the backstory. They’re actors who play actors — the guy from Georgia plays the guy from Ohio, who came to Hollywood just like he did, but got a different job. It’s the madness of the Method, the tree with two trunks, and one branch…

…And we’ll get back to it in a minute, but first: diaristic slippage. Have you ever wondered why it must be, that there must be so much of it in our online lives? I’ve mentioned it before, in occasional slight lamentation: the wealth of brilliant (truly brilliant!) comments that this blog has accumulated, that probably no one but me will ever see again, and even I don’t look at them all the time. Blogs are great, but the slippage is real, and no matter how we turn the sidebar links to our own Greatest Hits purposes it will never be anything more than a kludge. Hmm, but maybe this is not the time or the place, to get deeply stuck into Big Media Theories? And anyway I’ll tellya, I’ve been living with this one Big Media Theory for about a year now, and it’s grown to include so much I’m not sure it even really is a Theory anymore…honestly, it’s just gotten way too big. I could dramatize it, maybe; but I’m not sure I could ever just explain it, at this point. Well, maybe I’ll just have to get around to that one day! However in the meantime, diaristic slippage doth make unnoticed victims of us all, because there is just no adequate way to constellate all the stuff we put up on the Internet, whether it’s on free blogs or properly-rented sites…we can make feeds, but that’s about it, and that isn’t enough. We haven’t yet found a way to use a screen as a setting for informational content that grows increasingly deep and detailed; like the five hundred channels, you can have them but you can’t easily know them. Sure, you can search for them or link to them, but who even looks at blogrolls now anyway? When it is beginning to become apparent that the only links that really work are the ones that live INSIDE POSTS…the only search-strategies that are at all effective are the search-strategies of the writer, not the reader.

Which, as you may now notice, was pretty much exactly not the way they told us it would be?

And not really what it was ostensibly designed for, this World Wide Web of ours. But the hell with all of that for now, can we please get back to the point, Bloggers? I mean: pretty please? So Twitter is a slow reverse-IV-drip vampire that sucks away my impulse to write, well that doesn’t even “suck” it but simply allows it to seep…because it is a good thing, of course, in that it delivers a way to leap to the keyboard and see instant results from ordinarily-inadequate input! It’s just that, unfortunately, it delivers this way, at the occasional cost of the other way. For those of you not on Twitter (and I would never ask you to be on it unless you strongly felt the urge, because it may well become really horribly evil at some point in the future, and besides it is the first thing the Internet has made, that the Internet does not understand!…) I can tell you that it’s a fine way to connect with friends, it’s an unusually egalitarian way of starting conversations, it’s a frankly superior news-feed to what I can get on TV, radio, or indeed most of the regular web on an average day…but then I guess I might also tell you that the only reason I’m still using it is because I found a third-party Twitter client that was designed for people with visual disabilities? Because Twitter has — already! – gone and got itself all fucked-up, due to its makers’ tremendously un-self-perceived Judy-Garland-ism. Well, it is perhaps one day going to be axiomatic that social-media websites will always choose features over functions, because their designers don’t see any difference between these two things — and because they are in a bit of a panic, you see. They made technological applications that succeeded by accident, and so naturally they wish to consolidate the gains accident made for them, before accident takes those gains away again out on the tide. So they can’t stop fucking with something that already works, you know? Me, I’m lucky enough to be an aging curmudgeon at the right time, so I’ve kept my Twitter feed spare and lean and seen the benefits mount in inverse proportion to the rate of growth of my personal network…

But then again, that’s only because the people in my personal network have let their networks grow and grow…

And so, finally, at long last…let’s get to the point.

Let’s talk about Dollhouse.

You may recall that I was very disappointed in Dollhouse, the Chalkeresque show from Joss Whedon about blank-minded personality-transfer subjects hired out on black ops that ranged from espionage to prostitution (if by “ranged from” I mean “mostly prostitution”) for wealthy clients who could afford to hire the software of a human individual without bothering much about what hardware it was running on. And I thought that when Joss Whedon made this show he had experienced a creative renaissance by making some pretty adventurous X-Men comics for a while, and letting that record of comics successes and comics failures come into his TV-making mind, and decided YOU KNOW WHAT: NO! I’m going to push my own envelope a little, here. Working in comics has taught me that you always have to be chasing new techniques and new ideas, you can’t play it safe! I won’t lie, I thought Joss was going to take a hard look at his involvement with nostalgia and his evident skill with the obsolete form known as the teleplay, and make something both tough, and truly imaginative. I thought, as I said, that Dollhouse was going to be the 21st century version of The Questor Tapes. But…

This is where this post gets complicated, Bloggers. Where do I begin?

Always at the same place.  In perhaps Dollhouse‘s best moment, Patton Oswalt’s software billionaire looks at the male lead and with a sigh tells him “the toughest part of my business, is getting people to accept the change that’s already happened.” On the surface, he’s talking about incredibly poorly-worked-out mind-control technology. One level down, he’s talking about computers: digital automation, and its unstoppable centralizing/decentralizing power. And then one more floor and the elevator opens on a fairly exact replication of Neuromancer‘s chief irony, emblematized for us in this most aggressively normal of men, who’s nevertheless utterly failed at normality and consequently must purchase its seeming from somebody else. Or, is “seeming” all it ever really was? It is, of course, that new favourite of community-college Philosophy courses: the Transporter Problem, from Star Trek. Is Captain Kirk killed each time he’s beamed-down to a planet’s surface, and more importantly is that really any different from what happens to him at every moment anyway when he isn’t being beamed-down? Just sitting in his chair, turning from one thing to another. Well, we know what Patton thinks about it, and it’s a certain shade of heartbreak hearing him tell it, it is in fact the amazing opposite of Gene Roddenberry’s positive-if-querulous odd-couple story of android and human…and as you might expect (except if you’re like me you foolishly dared not to), Joss sells it out so far down the river that it ends up in the middle of the sea by the time he’s done with it, and it develops that I guess writing X-Men comics didn’t really make him want to push his boundaries at all, because actually it gets pretty incredibly anodyne by the end, why it’s such scheiss it makes MEDICINE taste nice…

But…

One more level down from that…

He’s talking about phones.

Not that he intended to, probably, at least not quite so specifically. But in the end, that thing he wanted to analogize, that he knew-not-where it would land…that turned out to be phones, actually. Because we like to think we understand phones, because we’ve always understood them up ’til now. What they are. What they do. What they’re for. We like to think we already have all these answers.

However, that we probably don’t is — finally — the essence of the change that’s already happened, that we haven’t yet decided whether or not to accept. The Internet is like a quantum seed in a classical system, you see: you can have fun exploiting its weirdness to cheat time and space for just about as long as you can get away with it…but then no longer, because when it finally bites you in the ass it doesn’t ask you what you think about it beforehand. Because you can’t stop a snowball from rolling when it’s already at the bottom of its hill! And in fact you can’t stop it in the middle of the hill either. Hell, you can’t even necessarily stop it at the top, but you have to stop it before it starts rolling. But we don’t see this, basically because we don’t want to: hey, they’re just phones, relax. You know phones. Ah, but they’re not just phones. Because nothing subject to the fey contamination of Internet Time is “just” anything. Bit by bit, it insinuates itself into our tissues…we no longer have fully non-Internet time, things don’t just speed up and slow down, but their clocks speed up and slow down, and that’s quite a different thing even if it looks the same. The world is ever-more mediated by this alien praxis, this…visitation. Internet space spores drift lightly down, landing on the tree, the rock, the car, the job, the date night, the shopping spree, the sidewalk outside the theatre and the ceiling in the dentist’s office. The bus stop. The mountaintop. The old curiosity shop.

And yes, it’s all very science-fictional in the way I put it, here. But just as in the Transporter Problem, it is not the technology that makes it that way: because things were already that way. The indispensible Fowler’s gives my favourite definition of irony, as the condition of an utterance that is intended for two audiences…whether or not the second audience dwells within or without the skull of the first hearer, which rather neatly makes science fiction our most ironic literature, since nothing in it fails of a duplex meaning. That’s right: one branch, two trunks. I’ve talked about this before, but I’ve been thinking about more examples of it lately…one I’d nearly forgotten about was that common Nineties artifact, the story about genetically-engineered superbabies. Such a clever thing, that was…because of course it really is not about the genetically-engineered superbabies at all, is it? Because we’re not going to have genetically-engineered superbabies: it’s just not going to happen. Income inequality just isn’t going to produce a subspecies of ubermenschen whose financial advantages are transmuted to physical ones, because, well…

We wouldn’t know how to do it!

And I mean that quite literally. Because it isn’t just that we don’t have the technical skill (although we don’t), isn’t even that we don’t have sufficient knowledge to predict the effectiveness of the technical skill we may develop (we don’t have that either!), but it really comes down to the unalterable and epistemic fact that we just aren’t ever going to have an unambiguous and non-contingent definition of “superness” anyhow, anyway, anytime, no matter what we do. And this is science right here, you understand: this is science itself that’s telling us that we’re never going to have that. For example, in ecology, the organism is part of the environment that shapes its development, and shapes it in turn. It’s a feedback loop, or rather several feedback loops…or rather, an uncountable number of feedback loops all meshed together. Context is everything, even content…and context is a content too. I mean, we can’t even agree on the merits of IQ tests, we can’t even agree on the measurability of the merits of IQ tests, we don’t even know if tests are good for determining intelligence, due to the fact that we do not have a good working definition of what intelligence is in the first place. So, genetic superbabies? Not going to happen, and even if it were there’s an easier way to do it: just get a few billion human beings together and make reproduction easy to do, eventually you’ll get some Einsteins out of it. Of course you won’t know if you’ve got any Einsteins unless they do something kind of…I don’t know, “Einsteinny”? Whatever that means, anyway but if you just kind of decide that some kind of “good Einsteinniness” can be demonstrated by an increase in some other metric, like…hmm, maybe “happiness”?

Uh…

“Standard of living”?

You know what, let’s not overthink the design. Let’s just get the human beings together and see what happens. Focus on making it popular, worry about monetizing it later…

So: superbabies are out. Which is why it’s shocking to hear people, even apparently people with the job title “philosopher”, still discussing it as though it were a Thing, an issue in ethics like: what are the social implications for having all these genetically-engineered superbabies running around in the boardrooms of multi-billion dollar corporations? When, as SF writers of the Nineties know very well, that just isn’t the philosophical issue at hand. There is a philosophical issue at hand, and the superbaby stories do in fact point it up very well, but it isn’t the issue of what to do about the ubermenschen…

But rather, of course, it’s…what to do about the untermenschen.

That irony, yeah: she’s a harsh mistress. As long as we’re talking about bulletproof Einsteinian Rockefellers, things are nice and safe and anodyne; but if we just flip this thing inside-out, we’re in serious fucking trouble all of a sudden. Because suppose we take the technical skills we already have, and just remove the barriers to access that money represents? Give free pre-natal assays to every pregnant woman on Earth, and suddenly the future just comes rushin’ at ya…

And so you have science fiction in a nutshell. The utterance intended for the double audience, it’s everywhere. Even in Atlas Shrugged, where for all Ayn Rand’s total ideological commitment she just couldn’t shake off the duplex nature of the form…and so Atlas Shrugged actually makes a darned good recipe for the revolution, I mean just look at this Peter Thiel guy, he’s clearly never been more than thirty feet from shore on a rainy day, with his fellow libertarian software billionaires he’s somehow managed to read every cautionary tale written for the last hundred years and more and somehow miss the cautionary part of it all…and this is the guy you’ve got driving your Internet for you, by the way, so…basically as soon as I get a little extra money in hand I’m going to donate it to him for his seasteading cause, you know? Because if I learned nothing else from Atlas Shrugged, I learned that putting guys like him on an ice floe with a bucket of caviar and pushing it out to sea can result in nothing but bliss, pure bliss…

Even though this was the exact opposite of what Ayn Rand wanted me to learn from it all, but then I guess that goes to show you can’t escape science fiction’s ironic character even with a tiger in your tank, you can’t bury it even with a shovelful of speed, nor certainty. Because the poisons that lurk in the mud will hatch out, you can’t control them, you can’t build enough fences to block all the avenues of freedom nor grow enough tentacles to catch all the subversives. Which turns out to be a darned interesting fact-of-life for Joss Whedon and his Dollhouse, actually! Because although that show sucked, it sucked for a reason…a “Commish reason”, if I may make so bold as to call it that? Or, a Criminal Minds reason? Which is to say…

An interesting reason. PHONES, people. Because we don’t really need the Transporter, if we have the Communicator. The Transporter is superfluous, just a symbol, an ironic misdirection, an absurd inflation…the Communicator is the thing to think about. And the world of Dollhouse is a world wherein that thought is succesfully thunk, even if it’s imperfect in its thinkitude when all’s said and done. It wasn’t too long ago that I was thinking of how the next George Romero zombie movie ought to give up bloody brain-eating shopaholics in favour of slowly-starving ultra-preoccupied street-crossers who’ve never tasted brain in their unlives…because I could poke an iPhone user in the eye at a crosswalk and be three blocks gone before he even noticed, right? And the “fast” zombies, those are just slow zombies in cars, who can’t react fast enough not to mow anybody down…

But Joss Whedon was well ahead of me at that point, and my imaginary George Romero too. Because if you’ve got the phones already, then the zombie thing’s just superfluous. Irrelevant. No point in adding it in there. That wouldn’t even be the scary part, that the cell-phone users were zombies; the scary part comes in when they’re not zombies. To have them be zombies is a pinhole solution, anodyne, and not really what the whole thing is about. “The toughest part of my business, is getting people to accept the change that’s already happened.” The real story’s with what happens to the people, when identity is made fungible but awareness is not erased by zombiehood. Remorse and doubt in a world where the self is an illusion that’s terrible because it’s necessary — where the self is a prison, because objects can only exist within the mind, and never outside it. The world a-boil with nothing but subject…so if The Questor Tapes’ concern was with how to get the individual out from under a strict definition of “humanity”, and what to do with that freedom once you found it, then Dollhouse‘s concern was to show the terror of that freedom made absolute, the same in every direction and always the same distance away, choiceless and formless and perfectly isotropic. Someone’s been quoting Adorno on it, recently: closeness is the death of intimacy. Pattern grows in the parts of the net that aren’t connected, and dies when there are no such parts — isolation is as easily achieved by universal linking, as by no linking at all. Society becomes a hot plasma, a quark soup: no more people but just bits of people, people busted up into packets and routed down different wires to their temporary destination. Everywhere: the present. The end of history. The other side of history. The skin of the bubble, expanding forever, accelerating out into blackness.

And it’s happening now. Is, in fact, comin’ at ya. So Dollhouse itself may have been crap, but the doomsday scenario it presented was prescient, and all its utterances were impeccably ironic: it starts so easily, you see. You think nothing of it at first; it’s just convenient. Guilt-free prostitutes, well who wouldn’t want that? It’s a human, but it’s not a person; heck it isn’t even a robot with feelings; so there’s just nothing difficult to deal with, and nobody gets hurt. Your regular boon to mankind, but it’s just a app, it’s only a toy, it isn’t like it’s gonna destroy the world or anything…and indeed when the nightmare finally lands and the mind control goes portable and viral, when the fungibility of souls is taken to the logical end of its implications, the world is not destroyed: only replaced.

By a surveillance state. That’s what the Dollhouse technology’s quantum seed is finally about, you see: surveillance that alters what it touches. Active surveillance, where to observe is to change, where to know something you must take it completely apart into its constituent particles. They say Modernism is like a tall, tall building: a skyscraper, a structure that would be as alien in scale a million years from now, as it would’ve been a million years ago. So it’s natural that one day this monolith should come crashing down and be broken into bits by its own horror, but after the moment of modernity there can also be no going back to a pre-modern way of looking at form and function, so everything made afterwards is cobbled together out of the stuff in the collapsed building’s footprint, and the art becomes how to do the collage, how to put the pastiches together, to create a post-modern way of living through which the powerful urge to be un-alien to oneself can be safely channelled. And yet the thing to remember is that Modernism is not dead just because this happens — the skycraper still towers in the imagination, a ghostly finger accusing the sky — because the moment of modernity was still real in a way that the stitched-together world that follows it never can be, and thus it too is but a pigment on the palette of Art, because it must be. Because it happened. And in the acceptance of that fact is, perhaps, finally a reconciliation…

But we’re not there yet. PHONES. We still haven’t recognized what they’ve become. We know about the surveillance now, because of Wikileaks, but it isn’t like we didn’t suspect it before…it was just that we didn’t want to hear about it. Because it would make us all sound like conspiracy nuts to confess our suspicions in the open, wouldn’t it? But perhaps this will be Wikileaks’ greatest contribution, that it will make it so we can openly confess our belief without worrying about whether it will get us cast out of society. I was having dinner with my father the other day, and I told him I was nervous about feeling like he and I now lived in two completely different worlds. He gets his news from the TV and the newspaper, and I now get it from Twitter, so in a way we were being made silent antagonists, warring embodiments of viewpoint and belief, just by sitting there…but only I knew it. He had not even heard of the riots in Oakland at that time, thought the Occupy movement was in a mere half-dozen cities worldwide…meanwhile I felt like I was taking crazy pills, stalking the streets of my hometown like a shade, disconnected from the earth. I showed him a graphic from the Guardian online, pockets of protest squeezed into the map of Canada, and the world, like seeds in a pomegranate. He was astonished. Astonished. Because he had simply not been told, you see. No one had thought the matter important enough to mention to him. He was out of the loop; unaware even that things had changed, because someone else in charge of his newsfeed hadn’t wished to accept it, because someone higher-up from them wished to continue profiting by (and, undoubtedly, from) that state of complacency.

So the Internet worked pretty well there, as a decentralizing power…but my point here today is: that doesn’t mean any kind of war’s been won. Far from it. Hell, we haven’t even made it onto the battlefield yet, because what my Dad learned about how “classical” media work today is a lesson not yet taken up by people like me living with (dare I call it) “quantum” media…and that’s not good news, because it’s here that the war will be fought. It’s here, that surveillance will get active; the methods of control that worked well on my father were fairly passive ones, and so they were fairly innocuous, but against you and me much bigger guns are about to be trained. Are being trained, even as we speak. Or what do you think it means, that you are now being invited to blog from Twitter, tweet from Facebook, and if you want to find something then just Google YouTube? I freely admit that I sound just like the Establishment oldsters in the Sixties and Seventies, lobbing crude derision across the Generation Gap at their revolutionary offspring: you talk about how silly they sound, you call them clownish, and you try to keep it all from happening…first you ignore them, then you laugh at them, then you fight them, and then they win. So okay, I know how it sounds. But these recombinatory Internet trans-platform acts aren’t actually part of any youth revolution; they’re not meant to open things up, but to shut them down. It’s the centralizing power of automation in action that we’re seeing there, not its beautiful other face: and every time someone wants you to Yelp from Klout, they want to own you, not set you free. The Internet is too big and too useful to be successfully transformed into a fully-corporatized space, but if its callow Western users can be encouraged to access it through intensively-corporatized portals, then the wider fields can be hidden from them effectively enough. Which all sounds…I don’t know, maybe just a little like conspiracy-nut talk?

Or it would…if not for Wikileaks.

Because now we know, really factually know, about the surveillance industry that surrounds us. Not long ago, I was unlucky enough to stumble on the transcript of a computer security talk given by a senior editor at Wired Magazine to a roomful of powerful CIOs…like Ganymede bringing Zeus another daiquiri, said editor made much of the scary prospect of data falling into the unauthorized hands of cyber-thieves. Which made me laugh, because…really, O Ganymede? You think the very great danger of the 21st century will be personal data falling into the hands of unauthorized people? And also we should watch out for dinosaurs lurking in the bushes, I presume. Oh, he had a lot of quaint ideas, this guy. I mean, he even thinks that young people answer calls on their cell phones, why can you imagine? So if there’s a dinosaur lurking in the bushes, he’s it: trying with all his might not to notice the flying saucers in the clearing. Until as far as he’s concerned, the safest thing in the whole world is that home is never more than three clicks away on the ruby slippers…!

And so he doesn’t know, doesn’t suspect, that the world has already come and gone while he stood there.

When fears become facts, that’s when we’ll finally move past them: the modern moment just another colour on the palette. We’re not there yet, but we will be. Mind you, until we are, things will only get scarier and scarier, sheets of lightning falling down around the mouth of the cave. Really, the double shame of Dollhouse is that it not only failed at being an update of The Questor Tapes but also at being a much-needed update of They Live…all that intel-led policing, “threat-assessment” security models being applied even in a whorehouse…I mean, it’s crazy, right? It’s spookily suggestive, of something else going on…something nasty curling around the edges of the broadsheet. This shit looks harmless. But it’s not. You thought you were in love!

But it was really just Stockholm Syndrome.

The toughest part of the job, is getting people to accept the change that’s already happened. Okay, so let’s say we’ve made that particular psychological breakthrough, pushed through the veil of that denial. So then what? What’s the next step after that?

And so we return, and begin again.  The world doesn’t end, it just changes when we start to think differently about it. Accept how things are, then see who that makes you; then figure out what your job ought to be. A lot of our popular entertainment is awfully slack about this sort of thing, I’m talking “Commish-with-the-earring” slack, and so things get twisty around the edges sometimes, but shouldn’t they eventually have the chance to come out, too? I could talk about comics here, just as easily as movies and TV: mainstream comics are pinholes too, now, failing spectacularly to be about what they’re about, even when “what they’re about” isn’t exactly any exalted literary aim. I mean, these are the genre literatures, this is the slop-bucket, this is about the only place in the world where they’re not watching…you think maybe we could manage something, it doesn’t have to be terribly earthshaking, but at least something honest? I mean, something past how Dr. Strange sleeps with co-eds now? This is a bit of a tangent (aren’t they all), but if you want to know something fairly radical, that superhero comics can still achieve, after reading our old friend P-Tor  discussing once again how disappointing modern reboots of Dr. Strange are, I think I feel a bit moved to tell you. And this may sound a little bit like an odd noise, when you hear it from inside the tent of modern storytelling, but I think it’s worth thinking about…

That you don’t have to be able to identify with every single character you see.

Eh?

Dr. Strange doesn’t have to be just like you, except with magic, and his job just like yours except with Dormammu. You know? It isn’t necessary. You don’t need that constant level of validation and comfort in your life, that everything you see needs to shout your pop culture back at you. Because actually, these entertainment artifacts with the incongruous pop references in them, they’re supposed to be critiques, right?

Uh…right?

…Okay, never mind. That’s probably better left for a different post, since this one’s getting too long for tangents now anyway, and do you know I have yet to get to the payoff of it all? As in: so what do you do, once you return and begin again, and accept the change that’s already happened?

What stories are relevant to that reality?

Well, here’s one, and this one kind of is the update of The Questor Tapes that I’ve been waiting for all this time. Or did you think all that business about the skyscraper of modernity falling into its own footprint was just for show? You know we say it all the time: “the world changed, after 9/11″.

But do we ever really think about that, when we’re sitting down to catch up with what our old entertainment media’s been doing this week? Ten years ago: the end of history. We don’t have much insight to show for it, though. I mean, we have to live here now, so why aren’t we telling more stories about what it’s like to live here?

Well…

There is Person Of Interest. And you know, it’s perfectly okay to look at it as “just a show”; although I don’t know the last time I saw a show that was actually made properly, and professionally, as this one is. Why do you know I was beginning to think we’d forgotten how to make ordinarily decent television shows? The TV people of today take the wrong lessons from cinema, as the comics writers of today take the wrong lessons from Watchmen: it’s supposed to be about seeing, not sweating. Everything strives for tactility, now, like an advertisement does — how close it gets, is what’s deemed to matter. How enveloped you are in it. Perhaps it is, again, a sort of misplaced zeal for identification? If we can just get people in through this portal, we can tune what they’re interested in, so they never even think of wanting to look for any wild fields outside this enclosure. And I really don’t want to conflate too much, here; but Christ our TV is boring as shit most of the time, isn’t it? And even the mainstream, full-network stuff should not be quite so boring, I think. Do we really need this many pinholes, is nature vs. nurture really still such a hot-button issue, is this really knowledge? For real, is this what passes for it now? Dollhouse may have started badly and ended badly, and been pretty frankly for shit in the middle, but at least the idea was beautiful…and at least there was an idea there, whether it was beautiful or not.

But this idea’s a little more up-to-date. Mr. Finch’s machine sees everything, everywhere, but keeps the vast bulk of all that seeing to itself, like Google’s search algorithms. The algorithms know everything about all of us, you know? But they assemble all that data for a very simple purpose. They’re not gods, they’re not aspects of Fate, they’re not even SF’s old superintelligent computers…they’re just simple forces, set loose to interact automatically and bring back what they’re told to. What hidden processes and interactions and exchanges are involved in the wish the djinn grants? We don’t get to know that, because we haven’t asked to know it. How many steps really lie between one node of the system and another? We let the daemons worry about that, so we don’t have to. In the old days of SF, sometimes when the Total World Government put everybody on punchcards, the hero would be the one left out of that database — and indeed, the “man who does not exist” became so much of a thing that they even (senselessly!) used it for Knight Rider, right? — so all this is nothing particularly new, but consider the inflection of it: when the database is the only one that knows about the hero, but it doesn’t matter because no one even realizes the Total World Government is here. Well, it sort of is, you know…I mean, a Total World Government is just a sort of machine, that’s the whole point of it. So…”government”, perhaps not, but there is a machine out there, of the requisite size?

And now that it’s there, it’s all too obvious that Ashby’s Law applies to it, too. You couldn’t make a government out of the Internet, see? Oh, sure, once we imagined such a thing, but that we didn’t imagine it unironically is quite easy to see now…because that machine turns out to be too big to treat as “just a machine”. That machine’s too big to be anything but an ecology of its own. Of course: and those stories were never about how one day we would have control; they were always about how we never would. The Internet is the first thing that human beings have made, that human beings do not understand. It never was about artificial intelligence, or even artificial life, anymore than today’s tales of the Singularity are about uploading consciousnesses into angelic machines. Similarly, Person Of Interest is not about tapping into the Machine’s power to perform superhuman and Fate-defying feats…but rather it’s about…

Diaristic slippage.  The river rushes on, and we can’t stop it; that is not something that can be fixed. And the operation of the Machine for its intended purpose may cause great wrong, great harm! In fact we know it does cause great wrong, and great harm…! But that’s not the issue. The issue isn’t whether it will cause some harm, or even much harm, but whether it can cause any good. Because it isn’t the machine’s role, that we’re debating.

Heck, we’re not even wondering how to fight against the machine!

Those days are over, John Conner.

And you’ll have to come with us this time, if you want to live.

Because Carthage is defeated.

And so I should probably stop talking about it.

…

1 2 3 4 5 6

And sometimes Y.

On Strike For Comics Creators

Hello, everyone — no, I’m not shutting the blog down.  Technically I’m not even really “on strike”.

It’s more of a boycott.  Call it a boycott?

Actually it isn’t really a boycott either.  After all I’m not looking to negotiate.  I don’t have any demands.  All I’ve got, are consequences.  And maybe they’re not even big ones.  We’ll see.

Call it a PR disaster.  I gave up buying all Marvel and most DC comics because I stopped liking them.  But I bought trades, I saw movies, I reviewed stuff, I spread word of mouth…you know?  I’m all my friends’ local comics geek, I’m always being asked about comic-book movies.  That’s not going to change.

But my answers are going to change.  “That movie can rot in hell for all I care, Marvel and DC are such goddamn unethical companies and always have been, and I’m finally just plain sick to death of it.”  That’s gonna be about how it goes.  Not gonna go to the movie theatre, not gonna go to the video store, not gonna buy the comics, not gonna review any of the above.  Marvel and DC have both had plenty of chances to become more progressive organizations.  Marvel and DC have both had plenty of chances to do the right thing.  Marvel and DC have had a good long run of me not altering my buying habits because of their more odious business practises.  But as I think I may have mentioned before, you can’t rely on spin forever.  Eventually the apathy you’ve thought to make friends with will be something you need people to cast aside.

And that “eventually” could certainly be now.  Marvel’s making movies all the time, even making new movies from old movies, “relaunching” franchises.  DC is about to relaunch their entire line, a dicey proposition even under the best of circumstances.  And so these things could fail.  At least:  these things could underperform.  You know?  That might happen anyway.  That’s always a risk.  Will people sit still for another Spider-Man movie, or for an Avengers movie?  For another crappy Superman movie?  Is New New Teen Titans a lock to sell well?  All this would be up in the air anyway.

But now…at least as far as I’m concerned…it’s not just up in the air, it’s out of the atmosphere.  I will tell you a funny thing about unions, that I happen to know.  Well, two funny things:  one being that comics creators don’t have one, obviously.  But the second thing is that unions are, by and large, pretty good for business.  For one thing, the existence of CBAs preserves labour peace.  For another, it prevents PR disasters like the one that has just snapped the lid shut for me on Big Two-related products.  Hey, and where I find it convenient to cut out Time-Warner and Disney I won’t mind doing that either!  Which maybe, you might say, is an unreasonable overreaction, but then if that’s what you think then you should also probably realize that unreasonable overreactions are exactly what PR disasters create, and that’s why corporations have to watch out for them.  Why should DC suffer just because I’m mad at Marvel?  Aren’t they competitors, anyway?

No.  Not in this, they’re not.  And let me remind you that since I am the mob I don’t have to care about stuff like that anyway.  Hey, if there was a CBA in place this would totally have been avoided, right?  Complicity could’ve been nicely bounded, and excuses could’ve been nicely floated.  But Marvel and DC have always had a choice about that.  Comics creators have never had a choice about that.  So, who should be blamed, for PR disasters such as these?

Is there one of us who is cool about, say, the way Jerry Siegel’s wife was treated?

Boy I’ll tell ya, it would’ve been a treat to read some of those comics, see some of those movies.  But there are plenty of creator-owned comics out there, so don’t worry about me, I’ll be JUST FINE without DC and Marvel.  All that will really change is that I’ll save a bit of money, and have less to say.

But, having put it that way, let me also put it another way:  what if we all, suddenly, had less to say?

No more questions for Didio, Quesada, Brevoort.  For even a small amount of time.  Say a month?  For me it’ll be longer, but let’s say a month.  A month without online reviews of Big Two Product.  A month without interviews about them.  A month without coverage.  Would it make a difference?  Think about it…

…Would it?

We don’t really know if it would, do we?  How do we know what kind of influence these informal “lettercolumns” of ours have, anyway?  If the Big Two know, they’ll certainly never say…and anyway how could they even get the numbers?  How do retailers know how many people are coming into their shops because of some recommendation they got online?  Well, one fairly easy way to find out (because all the other ways are difficult!) would be to stop providing that coverage.  Just give the tree a kick, is what I’m suggesting, and see if the branches move.  It’s not like the Big Two are paying us to talk about them, after all!

That’s more like the other way around.  We pay, and then we talk.  Sometimes, then, others pay.  And then…?

It all stops here for me now, until and unless some day comes when I feel like Marvel and DC are worth going back to.  Right now, though…

I wouldn’t waste my breath on them.  And I won’t.

This is my five hundredth post on this blog, and I don’t think I could be much happier with it.

The Kirby Decision

Hmm…so…

Maybe it’s time.

In a way I can hardly believe I’m saying it.  I mean, where have I been?  But I think it’d be foolish to call this anything but a difficult, we might call it a hard-to-get-to, decision, so I guess if I want to be let off the hook for it, what I’m saying is that I still think I can be.

But, being let off the hook of the hook?

I’m not sure that one works anymore.

Let me explain what I mean.  Because I’m not a lawyer, I know I’m incredibly handicapped as far as…well, handicapping the Kirbys’ legal battle with Marvel.  You know?  I mean, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with assessing just how out-of-touch my attempted handicapping would be.  All I know is what everybody else knows, or ought to know:

It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

That’s pretty much why we don’t call it over before it’s over, right?  Because it still isn’t over.  So of course I continue to hold out hope that the Kirbys might make a successful appeal, I hope they can afford to go to the Supreme Court if necessary, why if I had any money I’d be very happy to donate to their war chest.  But maybe it’s because I don’t have that money, that I feel the cognitive dissonance starting to set in.  To hold out hope, you see, is in the same gesture to hold off conclusion:  at least in my experience it is.  And the more you feel like you’re doing on the one hand, the more easily you can balance what’s going on with the other hand.  Because sometimes feeling virtuous isn’t so great a feeling that you can’t afford to live without it, if you have other and more pressing needs.  Because sometime’s virtue’s greatest value is balance…

But don’t let me get ahead of myself.  Here’s the thing:  I’ve seen a lot of these movies.  I’ve bought a lot of these comic books.  And I think you’d have to be hard-hearted indeed to say that all of them must count as ethical black marks against me.  After all when I was a kid I didn’t know who Jack Kirby was, or Steve Ditko for that matter…and it took me years to find out that they may have been mistreated.  And the same is true for Siegel and Shuster — why I couldn’t even identify them as readily as Kirby and Ditko.  By the time I’d heard of Jerry Robinson, which was a few years after I’d heard of Bill Finger, which was a few years after I’d heard of Bob Kane, I still didn’t know about their mistreatment, or at any rate hadn’t taken the idea of that mistreatment inward to my own reckoning of things.  And you know, even after that, maybe sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop.  And then after that too, you find yourself curious about whether it always lands butter-side-down, or if that’s just a perceptual illusion.

What I’m saying is…it can take a long time.  And I have felt deeply invested in these comic-book things for most of my life, honestly.  The story of Kirby’s unreturned artwork was something I first made out in terms of what it meant to me — the story of Ditko’s departure I knew, even as I bought re-issues of his Dr. Strange.  I know I am losing some people right away, here, and so to those people I would like to say:  HEY!  DON’T GET LOST!  Because I’m just like you.  I saw TDK.  I saw Spider-Man 2.  I knew all about Kirby’s story with Marvel when I rented that extended-version DVD of the Fantastic Four movie…which by the way was totally worth it for that Kirby mini-doc in the Special Features, because seeing Len Wein and Marv Wolfman reminisce about visiting Jack at his home in California probably changed the way I see comics forever, seeing Mike Royer talk about inking Jack probably changed it the same way again, seeing some of the sketches he did for fans actually changed my conception of the “rules” of illustration…seriously I am not different from you.  I loved the Iron Man movie too, you know?

And let’s not forget, even if I was thoroughly disposed to be virtuous for its own sake (which I’m not) I would still be conflicted about that Captain America movie, right?  After all, Joe Simon liked it.  JOE SIMON!  And what am I supposed to do, not take Joe’s satisfaction into account?  Hell, I saw the crappy Superman Returns movie I think within a couple months anyway of walking around for two days beaming about the Siegel decision — and I didn’t have any problem with it, and it wasn’t even much good!  Meanwhile the Cap movie is supposed to be awesome!

I’m just like you.  Really.  I have my own needs, about the things I care about.  Just like you.

And I’m predisposed to hold off on making a decision just like you, too.  The Siegels, it seems to me, are NOT GOING ANYWHERE — eventually their fair share of the money I spent on that crappy Superman movie will make its way to them.  Which is good:  because they’re entitled to it.  Warner Bros. is behaving badly, but the Siegels have the law on their side.  I don’t have to take a stand right now.  I don’t even have to think about what kind of stand I would take.  I don’t even have to think — right now! — about there ever even eventually being such a thing as a stand, that I might take one way or another.

And just one more pause, please, for a further butter-side-down complication.  Because what about my beloved Gerber Defenders?  Dr. Strange was in that, and the Hulk too.  And it wasn’t just Dr. Strange and the Hulk, nor even the Sub-Mariner and Silver Surfer neither…it was Nighthawk, Valkyrie, Luke Cage.  And who remembers who created them?  In a way, though we have no say in court proceedings, we are more unlucky than lawyers or judges or even the jurors that we potentially might be…in that we have no institutionalized roles we are responsible to, that must morally constrain our actions…

…But there I’m getting ahead of myself as well.  Because this is an open letter to anyone who’s ever been conflicted, even a little bit, even one way or the other, by being so invested in beloved stories or characters that it’s uncomfortable to contemplate your responsibilities to their creators…as in:  contemplating whether you even have such responsibilities, or can be said to have them.  You know it’s funny, originally this was going to be a blog-post touting a Marvel comic.  Such a strange thing, for me to be doing!  I don’t buy Marvel comics anymore, mostly.  But I really liked this one.  And I wanted to talk about it.

But the question now comes up:  how much am I inconvenienced, genuinely, by simply not talking about it?

The problem is, that it really is the tiniest thing in my life.  Whether or not to say “hey, this was good!”  So how much do I really need my in-between ethical state, that I might rebel against not refraining from commenting on it, and comment on it anyway?  Steve Bissette, an artist I greatly respect, has put it right before me about the Kirbys, and whether you agree with him or not (oh, those weasel words!) you must admit it is a legitimate question he brings up.

“What are you willing to do?”

It’s a question I think I’ve been avoiding answering for quite a long time now.  And if you’re like me, it’s a question you feel like you ought to be allowed to still avoid answering.  I don’t have to answer Mr. Bissette’s question.  He can’t make me answer it.  I can simply turn away from it, if I want to.  I don’t have to think about the Siegels, even if I have hopes for them.  I don’t have to think about the Kirbys, even if my same hopes for them are a bit more vexed.  The Kirbys haven’t even succeeded in court as the Siegels have;  moreover, the Kirbys have a hope the Siegels don’t have, that I can hope along with them:  the hope that they’ll succeed later.

So I don’t have to answer Mr. Bissette’s question.

However — and I think this is true — I think I cannot avoid answering the question of whether or not I will answer his question.  Which is a much smaller thing.  But also — perhaps — a much tougher one?

Because as I said:  as “unofficial” people, people not acting within the constraints of some vested authority…

…There is nothing out there to restrict the scope of our self-questioning.  Will I talk about the Marvel comic I so enjoyed?  What does it cost me, not to talk about it?

And more importantly…

…Is it possible for me, at this smallest of scales, to choose to “not choose” about it?

And I don’t want to lose anyone still:  but to choose that is to choose, isn’t it.

I mean it is just so small a decision, that it’s un-unmakeable…and yet in making it, a host of other decisions are implied, and must flow therefrom.  The court cases are just about the Siegels and the Kirbys…but we are not the jurors, we are the public.  And so nothing protects us from our own logic, one way or another.  Who created Venom?  Who created Wolverine?  Or Lana Lang?  Or Steve Lombard?  OR BULLSEYE.  OR THE JOKER.  I asked how I could go against Joe Simon, but I’ll never know him any better than I know Jack Kirby, even though Joe is alive and Jack is dead, and so…can I consult what Joe would want me to do, a purely theoretical matter, without consulting what Jack would want as well, which is only an equally theoretical one?  What if they made a movie of The Eternals, and what if Jack’s family were to get paid for it, but they wouldn’t get paid for any Hulks or X-Men…would he want that?  I mean I would go with what his children wanted, but that isn’t the point.  There’s no website out there saying “Kirbys say THIS ONE’S OKAY!”  And it’s no easier for me than it is for you.  We seek and we seek for logical cordons, conceptual divisions that will protect each of our enthusiasms from the other.  They are just not there, once that hull has been breached.  You can’t stand off any longer from cutting into the balloon, once the tiniest incision’s been made.  And what about all the other families, of all the other creators, who will never have a chance to attract such attention?  They are getting older, and they’ll need proper health care too.  Their families will need them to have proper health care.  And maybe the Kirbys would want that.  You know it’s funny how Grant Morrison is, once again, ahead of the curve in all this.  Wasn’t it just a little while ago that this guy, whose entire schtick is that the superheroes are modern mythological figures that therefore have (in echo of Kirby, and for want of a better word) a “real” aspect in the world, was handed a loaded question by a fan-friendly site’s interviewer, and asked to put it to his head?  “What about Siegel and Shuster?” he was pretty much asked.  “If Superman belongs to the world, he can’t very well belong to them, can he?”

Grant Morrison, in other words…

…Was asked the same question you and I are being asked.  Right now.  And not by me.  And not even by the estimable Steve Bissette.  But by pure necessity.

“What are you willing to do?”

It is hard to answer this question.  I think it’s probably damned hard.  But maybe it’s time.

This industry will never fix itself.  And it will just get sicker and sicker until it dies for good.  Jack Kirby created about 90% of all the Marvel characters, mostly in the pages of the Fantastic Four.  All of them are potential movie deals.  All of them represent big money.  There will never be this kind of leverage again.  Christ, I hate making this decision.

But it’s my decision that Steve Bissette doesn’t go far enough, for me.

And so I call for a GENERAL STRIKE.

Movies, comics, action figures, everything.  Even reviews.  For God’s sake, especially reviews!  After all that’s what the blogosphere brings to the table, isn’t it?!

And God but I’m sick of this in-between life.  Aren’t you?

So like the man said:  let’s change the way the future goes.

If we can help it.

Well, let’s just see if we can.

Interlude: Hieros Gamos Out The Yin-Yang

We’re getting there.

But first we go back here:

So what’s an “holistic cause”?  It’s a strategy for

“…Exploring relationships in the bigger system, and even effecting changes in them. But we have to get our heads around this: what does it mean, to try to operate a system that we can never know everything about? That we can never even know how much we don’t know about? The small system gives us little mental consoles where all the causal relationships are drawn together. Picture yourself standing at it: it’s pretty big, but you can see that if you just bash away randomly at the buttons there is some possibility of getting something right, because anyway you are standing in front of it, you know where all the key activators are, even if you don’t know what they do. And one way or another there are only so many of them, which means that even if that number is quite large all the connections the number governs are still internal to the console.

Except…

What if it is so large that it covers every inch of the room you’re standing in, floor ceiling and walls?

What if it covers every inch of the whole building, that contains the room?”

But having said all that, I admit it…it’s reaching a bit, right?  I mean the idea is that I start with some system and say its workings aren’t reducible, so we have to operate it “holistically”, and that’s all fine but what does it mean?  How does one do it?  And what could ever serve as a nice neat convincing example of such a system anyway, I mean this business of “pretend you couldn’t know”, that isn’t exactly the real pure Socrates…why not just pretend you can know, wouldn’t that make things easier?  And cost half as much?  You cannot give me a concrete example of operating a system “holistically”, that isn’t just a cheap superstition easily replaced by actual, real, tangible, and effective scientific knowledge…!

Oh…

Can’t I?

Let us suppose, just to see what we can knock out of it, that the studies showing married people live longer are not just a bunch of crap.  Of course, they may be:  they might be riddled with selection bias, they could be totally untrustworthy…but then so might studies showing that grandmothers like to drink tea, so let’s just say we’re willing to believe them, and then see if we can zero in on a reason to believe them.  I mean, this is actually not too hard to do:  if you spend half your life sleeping next to the same person, it seems pretty reasonable to say that they might notice when you have a massive stroke in the middle of the night, and so in the ordinary course of things might call an ambulance for you.  So in this light, saying that married people live longer isn’t any more controversial than saying hikers using the buddy system die less frequently than those who don’t…although really that isn’t what we’re measuring, it bears pointing out:  we’re actually measuring with what greater frequency non-buddy-system hikers die, right?…and the rest is just conjecture…

But acceptable conjecture considering the plain and immediate fact that saving a person’s life is easy, because sometimes all you have to do is be around.  And then we could go on from there, you see, once having got that all sorted, and maybe also say:  well, being long-lived actually means living longer into old age, doesn’t it, so maybe if you crunched the numbers a bit more you would find that it’s being married when you’re ninety that increases your odds of extending your lifespan, and being married when you’re thirty is actually pretty irrelevant to the statistical pattern.  So it isn’t “being married” that even does the trick then, is it?  Because studies would probably show that old people in nursing homes tend to live longer than old people who live in garbage dumps, too!   So, okay, maybe “being married” isn’t even a thing, causally-speaking — it’s just proximity to other people that counts, and the lifespan it adds is like a year, two, five, basically however lucky you get that’s how many years it adds, and these aren’t even the good years so it isn’t the statistician’s fault if it just so happens married people spend more time around other human-shaped objects than unmarried ones do.  Right?

Well…

But maybe not, of course.  Because is it not a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of the good fortune to have gotten himself a wife shall be in want of a glass of whole milk from time to time, and unable to find anything but skim in the fridge?  So although we probably can’t prove a whole lot about how this person or that person is failing to die because their eating habits got slightly modified a half-century earlier, we can probably allow as how more people with crap diets fall before the scythe at younger ages in general, than ones who get the right amount of, let’s say, at least Vitamin C.  So these statistics work from youth up as well as age down, inevitably…even though at first glance it may not look like it…and also I mean there are statistics, but then there are also specific facts that are facts:  like you should take care of yourself better, get some exercise for God’s sake, stop eating deep-fried Coca-Cola for breakfast.  Because no one denies that it’s superstitious nonsense to say walking under a ladder is bad luck, you know?  But if you keep making a point of walking under those goddamn ladders, pretty soon you’re going to find out that there are worse things than bad luck, and that one of ‘em is being a bloody fool.

So…maybe diet?

Sure:  diet.  Why not.  Diet, and proximity to people and phones.  See, we’re making progress.  We don’t need to talk about “being married” as though it could lengthen your life…we don’t even have to talk about it as something that really, so to speak, “exists”!  If all we have to do is make a list of what changes about your life when you get married, then we can call those things factors in your longevity and just let ‘em stand on their own.  Right?

So what does change about your life when you get married?

Well…

For one thing, you’re fucking MARRIED, aren’tcha?  I think the married guys in the crowd know what I’m talkin’ about, amirite guys?  Marriage?  It’s sort of a lot like being married?  Not too much like not being married?  And what changes about your life is pretty much everything.  Everything in it.  Where you go, what you do.  What you think about.  How you eat, sleep, and generally carry on.  Taxes.  Public transportation.  Toothpastes.  Spending patterns.  Legal arrangements.  Contents of spice racks.  Location of spice racks.  Sometimes, existence of spice racks.  Relative preference for things made out of stainless steel.  Exposure to different kinds of varnishes.  Holiday destinations.  Familiarity with soy products.  How much change in jars you have lying around.  Frequency of minor colds and flus.  Skill with deploying eyedroppers.  Knowledge about articles of clothing.  Colour.  General likelihood of arguments about dinosaurs.  Reading material.  I’m not being sexist here, even though I started out talked about married men, nor am I being hetero-elitist or something, the fact is that the difference between being married and not being married is just that over here was a whole big EVERYTHING when you were not actually completely sharing your life with another person, and then over on this side over here you totally ARE, so the everything is DIFFERENT.  It’s a different everything altogether.  So…wanna take a shot at living longer?

Find a nice significant other, and settle down.

But of course, if you want to take a shot at living less long…

Uh…

Find a horrible significant other, and settle down?

At a certain point the whole thing is very very hard to reduce.  Find love, and live longer?  Well, okay, maybe…but you can find love and still have a hellstorm of a marriage, can’t you?  I mean, “love”, what’s that?  It’s not a real well-defined concept.  And anyway maybe love is just a long, long laundry list just like marriage itself, something that isn’t really anything…”sleep beside” “prepare food for” “bandage” “listen to” “remember quirks of”…seriously, how long could you make that list, if you wanted to, and still never include a non-essential item on it?  Love as the comic-book character who has every superpower you haven’t thought of…

“Recount violent dreams about boss to”, “deeply mistrust old boyfriends of”?

Uh…

“Make live longer”?

Okay, we can’t spread the net that wide, or pretty soon we won’t be talking about anything.  So maybe the thing to do is to separate out the “make live longer” stuff (whatever it may be) from our overly-simplistic (or should that be “overly-complicated”?) love-laundry list.  Surely there are notionally longevity-prolonging aspects of a massively changed routine that we can categorize generally, even if we can’t necessarily specify them as the ones we’re looking for, the ones belonging to the “good for longevity if married to” subcategory, the “good” ones, the “right” ones.  And if they go along with certain people rather than with certain other people, then we could call those people the “right” ones…so…

Find the “right one” to love, and live longer?

Well, okay…as a general principle, all right, though it doesn’t bring us any closer to being able to say anything useful…but then suppose you do find some mysterious “right one”, then what if they die or something and you end up throwing yourself off a bridge?  Okay, well then you have to be the right person too, maybe…someone who will be capable of carrying on if they…

Or…?

Don’t walk under any…?

Pah!  This is hopeless!

Every new subcategory just creates a new list of necessary factors that can’t be identified without creating another subcategory, with more new factors!  If we can’t define the TOP layer any better, how can we possibly define any of the ones beneath it?  We don’t even know what we’re looking for!

What the hell is marriage?  BECAUSE IF IT ISN’T COMPOSED OF ANYTHING DEFINITE, THEN NEITHER CAN BE ANY OF THE LISTS OF THE FACTORS IT YOKES!

And yet we know those factors exist, because we know the statistical pattern exists.  Worse yet, we know we can have a reason to think it means something.

“You want a shot at living longer, find the right significant other and settle down.”  It does seem, on the face of it, that it would probably work, right?

But to follow that instruction to the letter is impossible, without attending primarily to its spirit;  and the kicker there is that the only way to attend to the spirit of the instruction is to adhere strictly to its letter.  So where we at.  Where we at.  For God’s sake where we at.

We are back at the beginning.  Where Cosmic Eros (not the little fellow with the bow) encourages Earth and Sky to separate.  And why?

Well, so they can get back together, of course!

Holistic causes?

Consider that if we took on board the above reductionist bias (I just made that up, and fully expect to get yelled at) (for God’s sake, I sound like an old hippie lady enthusing about crystal healing) we would I think be forced to conclude that betting people in a game of Long-Lived Marriage is at best like betting on Red or Black at the roulette wheel when the “0″ slot has been taken out.  There is no good reason for picking either one over the other.  You can’t know where the ball is going to land.  You can “feel lucky” all you want, but most people only feel lucky when they are lucky, which is to say only when they have been lucky, because who feels lucky when they’re losing?  And all else being equal, finding “the right one”, not to mention also being “the right one”, just seems like…

…I mean if we cook all the above down, don’t we get into a situation where the only sensible thing to do is not clump people into categories of “right” or “wrong” or “almost”, or any other category we can think up, but instead just to treat the whole thing sheerly as a numbers game?!  Each person is JUST ANOTHER PERSON, you cannot really know them, you cannot really predict them!  Love can be a mistaken intuition!  Circumstances are not fated, but random!  The more you bet, the more you stand to lose!  “If you want a shot at lengthening your life, pick the right person and settle down” is bullshit advice!  Like saying “if you want to win, bet at the table instead of putting your money in the bank.”  I mean, can’t you change your own life, can’t you replicate the Massive Routine Shift of marriage without actually having to get married?

Yeah, well…

Sure you can!  Like I said, I’ve known many people who’ve desperately wanted to change their lives, and who took action on it.  And they all started by not having the faintest clue how to do it.  And they all ended by not having the faintest clue how to do it.  And to be perfectly truthful it really doesn’t seem that hard a business.  Married or not.

But there is still that statistical study, isn’t there?  And at a certain point it does seem as though playing the music is more than just striking all the correct notes in their correct order.  But…

What more it actually is, I really couldn’t say.

Can you?

And so we are back at the beginning.  And maybe we had a bit of a selection bias ourselves?  After all, if it’s all about a failure of description at the TOP level…

…Then what was it, exactly, that we failed to describe?  “Studies show that married people live longer.”  Well they do.  They do!

The studies, I mean.

…

Okay, come back.  That’s enough for today.

I think you’re getting the hang of it.

Enquiry Concerning Superhuman Understanding

Hello there, Bloggers!  I think we must just take a short break from this whole “bunch of stuff I should be writing that hopefully hangs together half-decently except when I’m driven to just totally interrupt it” stuff, because today (as I’d nearly forgotten) is of course the very most perfect day for talking about the problem with Daredevil.

What?

Well, didn’t you know that there was a problem with Daredevil?

Let me just say it up front, that I was an avid reader of Miller’s DD, but after his tenure ol’ Horn-Head became a lot less interesting to me.  I won’t blame Ann Nocenti for it — that’d be as silly as me blaming Mary Jo Duffy for me being less interested in PM/IF than I thought I was going to be — and I won’t say that I wasn’t interested in the Bendis/Maleev or Brubaker/Lark DD either, although after a while I confess it did all start to pale, a bit.  But I think I can blame Miller and his collaborators themselves, for it!  Because their performances were so indelible, and so amazingly reconstructive — after they left, it was still “their” Daredevil everyone had to work with.  And it still is.  And, rightly so.

But, I miss my Daredevil.  Daredevil the Rationalist…not Daredevil the Religionist.  That first guy really appealed to me, you see.  “When young David Hume was struck by radioactive chemicals, he lost his sight, but his other senses became SHARPER…!“  Yes, of course:  but what a recipe for disorientation, when the senses are precisely what we can’t trust, eh?  We’re all blind, in that sense:  lost in the synaptic gulf between world and self, perception and action, existence and non-existence…

“…They became sharper, but still it DIDN’T HELP…!”

And so the problem with Daredevil is that this May 7th of 2011 is David Hume’s tercentenary, and yet the writers of superhero comics — of all people! — seem to have forgotten all about him.  SHOCKER! I know;  and yet what other conclusion can we draw, but that they’ve forgotten about him?  God help me, I almost feel like I need to put in a link, here…to the historical philosopher I probably most resemble…

…So that we may revisit once again the marvellous world of superhero pedagogy.

Daredevil is a funny old bird;  as I’ve mentioned before, somewhere around here, he has the most cleverly-vexed secret identity problem of any superhero:  when he’s being DD, he’s in deadly danger of revealing the secret fact that he’s actually just a blind man in a fancy suit, and when he’s Matt Murdock he’s in deadly danger of revealing the secret fact that he’s not just a blind man in a fancy suit.  And yet in both cases he is, in fact, a blind man…and as a result of this, as a result of his superpower lying in his disability, his world is under constant, fantastic, paranoiac tension.  This isn’t like Superman having to pretend to be a coward.  This is somebody who has to remember to keep bumping into things.  And once the suit goes on he also has to remember to make everything he’s really doing look like something else.  So in a manner of speaking he’s like Clark Kent both ways — he’s Clark when he puts the glasses on, and when he takes them off he’s Clark once more.  In place of the amazing world of Krypton and a rocket ship he’s got a boxer Dad with a cauliflower ear who can’t make the hydro payments, and a promise to study hard and do well in school…in place of Perry White and Lois Lane he’s got Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, and so why go on with the comparisons then?  What’s the point?  If inside most superheroes is a chewy centre of freedom, wish-fulfillment, the pretense of magically-easeful adulthood that is childhood’s greatest privilege, inside Daredevil is the sheer difficulty of negotiating with the adult world that children above all are most familiar with…and also, shadowing it, the difficulty of negotiating with the adult world that adults are most familiar with.  Both ways, see?  Daredevil’s always getting it both ways.  Matt Murdock’s that terrific rarity in superhero comics, the genuine grown-up in his civilian identity who is returned to childhood when he puts on his suit…but the child’s world is hard to navigate too, when one is just pretending.  And hardest of all is the way the link between those two states makes it clear — after a while — that it is all just pretending:  Matt Murdock dominates his world so completely that he actually holds it up, maintains it, and without him it would just collapse into pieces.  He is the spine of the thing, and everything in it refers back to him;  he doesn’t fit into a larger society and he doesn’t have people like pillars holding the house of his life up for him, the exterior existence of things doesn’t reflect back on him to make his contexts cheerfully solid, and the things that determine him do not lie outside him, but he himself is the determiner of things.  And all this puts a rather edifying strain on the character of Daredevil, that would remain subliminal until Miller et. al. chose to finally have him snap…and when religion entered the picture all was made straight and clear, the uncomfortable dualism given a familiar shape and name:  concentrations that were reliable in part because they were stereotypical.  Solid, of course.  That DD lives a lie instead of merely having a secret is something we always sort of knew anyway:  after Miller, the lie has walls and a ceiling, and most importantly a floor.  You can see how Matt Murdock moves around in it, counting steps:  his most intimately familiar ground, his ultimate fortress of solitude.

But once — let me tell you — it was all another way.

If you don’t know David Hume, I’m not going to hold it against you.  There’s so much of him to know, after all, and I’ve forgotten most of what I knew about him anyway, so I couldn’t help you out too much even if you wanted me to, which you probably don’t.  And you’re probably right not to want that.  But the quick rundown’s easy enough:  what we think of as certainties are ususally just pretty flimsy probabilities;  and what we think of as “probable” is more usually unprovable by the means we employ to assess it.  We can have knowledge and we can be empirical, but in this as so much else, man is the measure:  knowledge of the world and knowledge of the nature of man is the same knowledge.  The world is more shadowy than we think it, causes are doubtful ghosts, reason stems from different sources than we think it does, and the continuity of our world and of ourselves alike is only an assumption we make.

But…where does the assumption come from, then?

That’s a darn good question, so it deserves a darn good answer, but the answer we’re going to use is a bit rougher and readier than that:  the assumption comes built-in to us.  Why do we assume that the world keeps its shape when we’re not looking at it?  Why do we perceive in ourselves a continuity of person?  Why on earth do we trust our senses, and why would we ever exalt our powers of reason above them?  Hey, I’m not even going to get into the way the Romans managed their inheritance laws!  But we could learn a lot from the Romans, actually:  they had gods for everything, only because they took nothing for granted.  Everything around them was imbued with a character, and every social relationship implied a mathematics;  causes and effects were descended from divinity just as people were.  Oh, the crazy Romans:  they didn’t have gods of numinous qualities, they had gods with jobs.  Gods for washing the windows and gods for mowing the lawn, gods to get hungry and gods to get thirsty, gods to go to sleep at night!  Gods of keeping yourself neat and tidy so you don’t embarrass your mother when you go outside!  And if they’re not boring enough for you, how about the Greeks?  Who above the gods set the facts, and went so far as to have causes cause themselves by partaking of causality.  Dostoyevsky gets to this later on in The Brothers Karamazov:  “and God said let there be light, and there was light.”

“But where did the light come from?”

SMACK TO THE HEAD!  “That’s where the light came from, all right?  Bit clearer on it now, or do you need a bit more of this theology I’ve got for you right here?”

As far as Hume’s concerned, there’s a lot there to reckon with, if we can just figure out how to reckon with it.  But to do that, we have to know what kind of a measure man really is.  What kind of registration can we achieve with this instrument, what is it made for?  But, you know…all that, you can get anywhere, and for Hume’s 300th birthday I really ought to try doing something a little bit different from the stuff you can get anywhere…not to mention the stuff that almost anyone will be able to do better than me.  A more personal note will make me look less like a putz, maybe…and maybe it’ll even not be bad, for a minute or two.

So, you wonder if there really is a link between David Hume, and Matthew Murdock?

I wouldn’t bet against the reading habits of comic-book creators, if I were you.  Look, here is a big problem of Hume’s day, and a problem of our own, that I don’t actually hear people talking about very much, which is:  once you embark on a Cartesian project of skepticism, where the hell do you go next, and how the hell are you supposed to know where to stop?  Doubt can’t swallow the cogito, but that ultimate reduction is what it is precisely because doubt can swallow everything outside it!  Inside the chocolatey coating of the superhero is the chewy centre of pretense, but inside the sweet fruit of ontology is a stone, and whether you pick it out or eat around it it’s still a stone.  Fine for regular living?  Fine for regular living, but if one wants to do some useful philosophizing the problem of knowledge is always there, for Plato as for Descartes as for you.  So in Hume’s time there was something like (let’s call it) a Roman-style longing for practicality that was making itself felt, in Scotland particularly:  moderation, compromise, balance, the limits of the problem of limits.  How does one go about looking for them?  Can the search be justified by anything less than a discovery?  Because a mere solution just won’t do, if you see what I mean:  this thing everyone wants, it’s too tempting to just say “oh, here it is, why it was here the whole time, okay that’s lunch everybody…!”  When people deceive themselves all the time, you know, you’ve got to admit the possibility they might be doing because they like it.  So what you have to find is some sort of principle that frees you from like-based conclusions.  But maybe that’s okay, eh?  I mean, maybe this is how the whole problem of the limits of knowledge came about anyway, by not realizing it’s getting too big for its britches!  Go back to Descartes:  existence exists, anyway.  We know that much.

But if it exists…then it must also be something, mustn’t it?

So if figuring out what that is can be a task, then it can also be a positive task.  Skeptical empiricism need not be entirely concerned with finding ultimate reductions of pure logic and reason like the cogito;  the mind is not all that there is, nor even all there is to find stuff out with.  A big task?  It’s a big task, indeed, and it all but makes the entire Scottish Enlightenment come into being.  What did Voltaire and Mandeville alike miss?  Hume is interested in the question, and will not have anyone tell him it is not a question.  It costs him his job, his girl, and his home, but his question remains, and even succeeds.  Three hundred years after his birth (um…give or take an hour or two, sorry Our Dave) we can only stop and stare at the vision of a non-Humean world zooming by us to the vanishing point, philosophy grown too compactly crystalline to allow anything but a conclusion.  I am not saying the Scottish Enlightenment had no radicals in it;  indeed Hume was its chief radical!  But he was a more sober one than Voltaire, a more sober one than Hobbes too…like Rousseau (uh, in my opinion I guess), he saw that even limits must have limits.  We can talk all we want about divinity, we can be fer it or agin’ it…but it doesn’t really matter either way, because God is not really the issue at hand.  And Hume proved that, you know.

Everybody else thought about it, but he actually went and did it!

At least, according to me he did.  But then you can’t necessarily go by me, because I am also saying that Daredevil did it.  There’s a thing we don’t see too much anymore in DD comics, partly because of the abandonment of thought-balloons (so necessary for this superhero, of all superheroes!  Yea, even unto Spider-Man!) but also partly because of Matt Murdock’s post-Millerian religious background.  I mean, yes DD was getting a little pointless before Frank injected that stuff, but in typical Frank style reinvigoration for the Batman of Hell’s Kitchen came at the cost of the existing mythological programme’s subtleties.  When Matt Murdock was Daredevil, he used to be the closest thing to a “happy-go-lucky” hero Marvel ever had:  the schismatic nature of his identity was (paradoxically?) intact, and the nightly escape into renascence worked…at any rate, far better than it ever had for Peter Parker.  But since Miller everything about the character is unified in a way it wasn’t before.  Look at that movie they made of it, Ben Affleck crunching handfuls of painkillers each evening.  Hey, I do understand it — hey, I do!  Remember, I liked it!  But maybe if you’ll remember that you’ll also remember my main artistic complaint about the DD movie:  that Matt never smiles when he’s under the hood.  And he should smile.  Heck, he should grind down those Tylenols while grinning.  Because it’s the only way to recall, even (though I prefer it as an irruption of unexpectedness into character) to recontextualize, that old happy-go-lucky stuff that used to be such part-and-parcel with Daredevil’s underlying grimness and seriousness in the pre-Miller days.  Hmm, and I guess I should also make a note to myself here, to remember to hunt up the relevant links:  Zom’s wonderful Miller/Mazzuchelli posts, my own revisitations of the Affleck movie, wherever the heck David Brothers hid that first “Ann Nocenti’s DD is all about how violence is stupid” thing…

…But it’s getting pretty late now for a David Hume tercentenary commemoration, and I’m getting goddamn sleepy, so I guess I’ll just have to do all that tomorrow.  And use this time instead, to return once more to the thing we never see in DD stories too much anymore:  Matt’s own point of view.  Remember that?  The silhouetted horns, the radar-circles, and the shadows they show up to his perception…my God what fantastic use was once made of such devices!  Dude cannot see.  What we would see, what in fact we do see there on the printed page, with all the contextualizing assumptions trailing in that sight’s wake, Matt doesn’t even know is there.  So he can’t put it all together as we do:  immediately, easily, soothingly.  He has to fight his way through Humean “connexion” even to get to the point of recognizing other superheroes who’ve got their own books, and even when he does get there, there is still…strangeness.  Look away from the world and then look back, are you really that sure it will be the same?  Are you really that sure all the logical consistency will hold?  Daredevil may see in every direction all at once (well he does, you know), but he is always surprised by the world and what’s in it.  The other Marvel characters are even weirder to him, then they are to us!  Because we are closer to their contextualized reality than he is.  All the other characters can see what we see, see as we see, even if it’s only us that know we’re holding a comic book in our hands.  But Daredevil reminds us that assumptions, even the assumptions that make up “suspension of disbelief”, are reasonably hard work.  And hey, I know it verges on the dumb to go that metatextual with it all, I really do:  Daredevil represents a different reading that lies under the text, which is a basic perplexity that we as readers share with him even if we can delight in the play of its contradictions and he can’t, yes yes, I know that’s all very airy-fairy and very far-off from the point — indeed the act — of reading these things in the first place…I mean what am I really saying there, that can’t be said more elegantly and more truthfully by simply noting that Daredevil is a superhero with a disability that occurs in the real world?  Not gamma-poisoning, not supercharged spider-bites, not mutations that make you look and function like a neat-o Jack Kirby drawing meant to tell a story but blindness or something.  But is even that phrasing entirely honest?  Is Matt Murdock really a representative of diversity in superhero comics, automatically because somewhere between Stan Lee and Bill Everett there grew an “oh wow cool” moment made up of the words “what if he were blind?“  No one credits Iron Man with opening peoples’ eyes to the reality of heart-disease sufferers, so why should Daredevil receive any similar credit?  After all — and you knew I was going to say this, of course — if you actually are blind like Matt Murdock is, you can’t feel he is speaking there on your behalf, as your lawyer if you’ll allow me that, if you can’t actually read the comic.  Can you?

No, of course you can’t.  Even his problems with not being able to piece together a rationale for the presence of other superheroes in his world (I mean superheroes, who believes in those, they don’t make any sen…oops here is one!) are only educational in the sense that they put before sighted kids some narrative uses of blindness…maybe a bold thing for superheroes at the time, to use Matt’s blindness as a psychodramatic inflection of superhero action, but then again the superheroey-ness of it all makes him kind of not really blind, too…so…

Where’s the real diversity, here?

It actually could be in Hume.  Because Daredevil’s blindness gives him a recurring problem to deal with, but it probably would be a stretch to say that the problem is only logistical, or that it only refers to the Superman-style secret identity business, when beyond doubt there is an existential problem here as well.  It isn’t that super-hearing is just another modality for story explication.  Until Steve Gerber comes along DD’s non-sighted-ness won’t be made explicitly Phildickian, but then again up until Gerber there is still the paranoia this particular secret identity engenders, and even Gerber’s capacious bookshelf can’t find any improvement on the absence of God that permeates a world where Matt Murdock is the defining character, the orienting character, the one-and-only pole of his own milieu’s tent, that holds it up…and yet is still a work of many hands, necessarily schizoid, changeable, I mean who is Matt Murdock, really?  Until Frank Miller and his local geniuses come along, the question will go forever unanswered…after they come along, it will go forever darn well answered.  But our old friend (I hope by now you will consider him a friend) David Hume would say, much as Marvin Minsky or the Buddha, that there is no self, that the self’s solidity undergoes transpiration as soon as it is looked at carefully, rises slowly up from the lotus pond into the golden cloud of the atmosphere, and then is seen no more.  In other words:  the mirror turns into mist, and diffuses away.  Of course all the Enlightenment thinkers, Hume not least, would probably remind us that Newton already showed each tiny water-droplet to be a prism in its own right (hey, maybe Morrison should write DD?) (that’d be cool!), but that doesn’t exactly do much more to tether “selfhood” to earth, does it?  But rather makes it a thing essentially dispersible anyway.  Naturally if God is in the picture all the water-droplets turn to iron and fall right to the solid ground, even find a magnet to cluster around:  and we call that “character” today, that sort of clustering…

But once — let me tell you! — it was all another way.

A way in which neither the senses nor the reason could be fully trusted, and yet we were still not ever relieved of the burden of having to try to understand.  So…yeah:  I guess it isn’t that Daredevil has a problem I wish could be solved, it’s that the problem of Daredevil is what I miss about Daredevil.  Hey, so:  Romans, I come not to bury Daredevil but to praise him…!

And maybe that seems like a bit of a weak ending, here?  After all it is easy for me to plug in all this stuff after the fact, and make a pattern of comprehension where maybe none ever really existed.  But that pattern made a big difference to me as a young comic-book reader, and so I’m not willing to say it never really existed at all…

Only to say, perhaps, that if I have seemed to see further in this case than can be seen, it’s only because I have swung across the rooftops of giants…!

And so further, deponent saith not.

And anyway it’s time for bed.

Happy Birthday to David Hume, and to all the ships at sea!  There was a three-hour delay on this one, but then they do say no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Universe Part Five: The Invention Of Boats

Now, I am not actually promising it will all be straightforwardly additive, but…

Let’s give it a whirl anyway. And start with my friend Jack, who tells me that the computer model of human consciousness is poorly-founded basically because thought precedes logic; because as useful as logic is, it’s not the foundation of thought but instead merely one of thought’s tools. This is the view from poetry and mathematics, if you like.

But what’s really interesting about that, is its curious similarity to the view from physics and biology: in that trying to answer a simple question like “well, what about dogs, cats, mice, spiders…do they think?” rather necessitates having some idea to proceed from of what constitutes “thinking” in the first place, and it just isn’t that easy an idea to get hold of. Seriously, how do we know what to call by that name, and what doesn’t merit the name? It’s a much tougher nut to crack than it seems at first glance, since we only have the one real-life definite instance of thinking to consider (that being: us) and our thinking is not just one thing but instead a whole multifarious netting of things…in other words we provide ourselves with an example of “thinking” right enough, but it is very hard to find an example of “simple” thinking in our heads: just these absurdly complex tangles. One hardly knows why we should believe they should submit to any easy classification in the first place, or admit of any reduction. And indeed from a strictly (I should perhaps say “aggressively”) logical perspective they do not — as the biological “computer” in our heads is more an evolutionary midden than an edifice. How does the whole “brain” thing work, how does it function, what rules does it follow? The answer is: we don’t really know. It’s very hard to know. The brain is a very ancient structure, made of accident piled on accident, a trillion dead ends collected by many species besides our own, and then handed over to us for further messing-up. And the very oddness of the thing is most apparent in comparisons with the digital computers we make ourselves…in the image of the logic we similarly invented, in the exercise of that profoundly strange and exotic brainwork: those machines being astonishingly good at crunching numbers in a way that, for all our complexity, we find utterly impossible…and yet still, despite that sheer numerical firepower of theirs, failing miserably at tasks we consider absolutely everyday. To the point where, as the good Dr. Hopfield pointed out, if you build a digital computer that’s as good as we are at recognizing human faces then you’ve probably built it wrong.

And then he also pointed out something else: Gay-Lussac’s law.

Which is an interesting and elegant result of human scientific thinking, that digital computers simply have no need of taking into account. Right? Since the “computer” way of finding out the same thing is much less macro and much more micro: you just have to count and label every molecule in a gas, do a bunch of complicated mathematical operations at the speed of light…and out pops the answer, laws need not apply. It’s just all differential equations. So complicated is simple, and simple is complicated. This is, perhaps, where many adherents of the computer model of consciousness goof up by coming at Turing’s famous test questions from the wrong angle — since answering them is not just a matter of running a million Jeopardy computers, is it? Because no amount of simulation, no matter how perfectly transparent its great speed allows it to be, is enough to qualify as “this is probably a human being” in our estimation. As I think I said somewhere else around here (or will say in very short order someplace else), thinking is surely still thinking whether it is fast or slow, and the computer just keeps getting faster and still keeps not thinking, until at a certain point you just have to ask how fast it does need to run simulations of us, to be one of us…or even close enough as makes no difference to us…

But in any case, all philosophy aside, the fact is that the Gay-Lussac thing is in our authentic style because it suits and attends to our authentic intellectual capabilities, and even computers that could “beat” the Turing test would not need to know it….especially if they beat it by doing what computers do best, only unimaginably better.

Controversial enough for you?

We’re just getting started. Time to talk about sex. No! Music…

…No!

Boats.

In my crazy countryman Farley Mowat’s delightfully insane piece of outsider art called The Farfarers, he imagines the invention of boats. And Farley being Farley, of course he lays it at the feet of the Scots: one day a man’s walrus-hide tent blows away into the water, lands upside-down like a coracle, and the man thinks…

“Och, that’s a bonny wee…!”

No no no. Absurd, Farley! Rather, he thinks:

“Hey, I betcha I could get into that thing and float around!”

Yes; might make the whole “I hunt walrus for a living” thing a bit easier, at that! Sheesh. And so “floating around in stuff” is born, but of course not really, because (as I hope anyone can see) human beings didn’t invent boats anymore than we invented our immune system. Rather, just as the immune system, boats are something we inherited. “Floating on stuff”, that isn’t a thing one sits down and thinks up by putting one’s chin in one’s hand, that’s no Newton-and-the-apple moment, that’s something prior to epiphany right there: in other words it just is. One doesn’t need to get all Rousseau with it. It doesn’t have an origin that makes any sense to talk about. In the version of history that seeks a logical (aha!) ordering of cause and effect (as if there could be any other kind!), the invention of boats is a piece that just won’t fit into the puzzle. Boats, like the brain, are bigger than us and older too; boats are something we are inside, as logic is inside thought.

And the whole thing is wrapped inside something much bigger than boats or the brain, which is, of course, as promised, sex. How old is sex? Answer: older than just about anything biological, that we’re part of. Sex is beyond Rousseau; sex is Stapledon, a story billions of years old. Which is probably why we just cannot figure out a good way to talk about it at all. You see, I really am suggesting that there are two systems involved in your average human being’s daily existence: a little one, that runs tirelessly on logic and generates vastly productive insights, and a bigger one, that runs on…?

We can’t be sure what it runs on. But that’s the one where all the sex-stuff lives, I figure. Along with the communication stuff…you know, the thing about human communication is that we are never going to fully enumerate all the modes of it, are we? Probably we will never even be able to guess at the number of them. How many tests would we have to come up with, to figure them all out? You could probably spend a lifetime just testing the eyebrow. There could be something to do with elbow twitches, for all we know. Forearm muscles. Feet. Sniffing. How in the world could we ever hope to catalogue all these things? Surely our imagination would run out before our bodies did, and maybe (for all we know) there is no end to the signals that our bodies can produce (or for that matter the complexity of even those sensations we think we know all about)…like the particles you can knock out of the proton, or like the embedding of clauses in Chomsky’s syntactical structures, the universe just keeps on bringing finer and finer details as we zoom in on it. So just calling it all “body language” really won’t do, obviously; that’s like talking about “instinct”, it’s just a crap excuse for a category, you can’t use it for anything! Hmm, except poetry…lovely, lovely poetry…

…Which as may recall is good for quite a lot, but is it really much good for logical dissection? Certainly the logic of poetry’s form is very beautiful, but I’m not sure that’s enough to make it actually a scientific endeavour. So maybe poetry represents an odd intersection of the two systems, straddling the line between them, existing partly on one side of that membrane and partly on the other? After all, poetry does just a dandy job of talking about sex…

…Which, as I said, is really not as easy as it looks. Recently I had occasion to talk to someone who was contemplating doing some research into “queerspace” in Vancouver, and as we talked around and around it we finally got to a topic I might as well call “Historical Homosexuality”. A Rousseau-style conjectural history of human sexuality? But the thing is, you see, it can’t be brought off. Human sexual freedom is always being retroactively contextualized according to contemporary bias. There’s a story somewhere, I wish I could remember where I came across it, about what kind of terminology was used in America in the 1950s, well before the drafting of the word “gay” sparked an interest in “gayness”…gayness as a thing, you see: as something that can be logically, scientifically investigated. But in the Fifties we did not know of “gayness” yet, and the nomenclature of the Fifties would not accept what we know of it now…or what we think we know. The story, you see, made it clear that the operative word for a gay man at that particular coordinate point in spacetime was fairy, and talked a bit about how gay-bashing incidents in those days were often concluded by the gang-leader raping the victim…but the rapist was not considered a “fairy” himself, for doing it! I know I’m always going back to Achilles dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, but I think in this case it’s a particularly apposite comparison: the victim is made more a “fairy” by the brutal act intended to bestow violent shame on him, and the one who commits it on him is made more a “man’s man” because of it too. Of course today we would not characterize it all that way — we would say it was an act of self-loathing and self-repression and fear on the part of the rapist, that seeking to produce an image of oneself as a victor by finding some unsettling reflection of your human foibles to turn into a victim is an act born of a psychological sickness, a twisting of self-medication with self-harm that dives into the criminal, into the vicious and the shameful itself, and that doesn’t get to ask for forgiveness…

…But then of course we would, because “gay” is our word. Our concept, our context. And we don’t have any difficulty applying it as a valid term and valid concept to any period throughout history…I know I don’t have any trouble with that, myself…and yet it isn’t really scientific, is it? Because perhaps the science goes something like this: Nature doesn’t care about the psychological dimensions of human sexual freedom. In nature there is no distinction of that kind between sexual actors, there are organisms and they engage in sexual behaviours and that’s all there is. It’s a blunderbuss approach — lots of sex gets had, as a result a lot of reproduction gets done as well, therefore the system works perfectly and what else could there possibly be to say about it all? It’s all just polymorphous, I’m a part of it and so are you and therefore the individual variations in preference don’t matter…these distinctions exist nowhere at all but in the psychological depths. To ask about the History Of Homosexuality is really at a certain point to ask what gayness is, why it exists, what causes it…but perhaps it is not caused, because perhaps it is not real. Not real in that sense, I mean…though certainly the adoption of “gayness” has created a wonderful kind of culture, a wonderful spread of communities! And some freedom too, yeah. But to Nature it is still all just sex. And you know, it often reminds me of good old Emily Noether and the explanation of the principle of inertia that can be drawn from her symmetries: i.e. maybe inertia is nicely explained simply by isotropy, and nothing else is needed! With the universe the same in every direction, there’s no reason for inertia not to exist, is there? So in that case we could think of inertia as the name for a nothing…you’d have to add something strange to the universe, to not have it. Because the word isn’t positively attached, to any thing.

It is not quite a satisfying description — in fact I think there’s much more to say about it even without allowing (as we probably must) inertia’s “positive existence”! — but it’s a satisfying enough illustration, I think: after all, many things we have names for don’t (strictly speaking) exist in Nature’s eyes, but do mark regularities, do indicate connections. And very often this results in a bit of confusion, both linguistic and cognitive — we could argue over these words, concepts, contexts, if they fail to admit of a nice clean one-to-one representation in reality, with hard edges. In the physics that Noether revolutionized one of the words we argue over is mass; well after all it’s only the most basic thing! Heck, why wouldn’t we argue over it? It’s only the thing everybody can see and touch and understand extremely well from the mere experience of living! Pshaw, like we’re not gonna fight over that! Ha ha. Why it is to laugh. Laugh, I say…!

And from there on up, it all just gets crazier. Science and philosophy are all about logic and words and ordered definitions, which is a pretty great thing for them to be about, but on the small system they run into Godelian implications, Wittgeinsteinian failures of perspicuity…limits. The problem of knowledge; practically the most ancient thing that system has. How do we know what we know?

Well…how do we?

The thing I’m fond of calling “high history” is in many ways the greatest example of the small system’s fascinating ability to create models inside itself, that may correspond to things on the outside: it probably happened this way, sort of. But of course as fascinating as it is, it is still just a model, and it has the strengths and weaknesses of all models. Historical causation is something we will never be able to grasp in any real sense, because there are too many untraceable influences (hee hee), too many actual occurrences we will never know of, too much tangle in general…too much detail, even if one believes the knowledge-system solid and its discoveries immutable. “How did human beings begin to practise homosexual behaviour” is probably a good example of question-begging in any scheme of knowledge, but even if one accepts that there was such a time when some factual change in behaviour occurred (which of course there wasn’t, but we are just saying), then the theory necessary to explain it gets too big too fast anyway…there’s too much to know in terms of antecedent causes, things become thermodynamical…the rules start falling apart, and in the end there’s no such thing as time-travel. The deep causes of the past are actually bottomless, the fossils in the swamp just go on and on, and down and down. Human sexual freedom is inexplicable in these terms, like inertia and like mass — all you can do is create models, but some models are no good. Some are not even good or bad.

Because sex is probably too big for worded description, as human communication is too big for comprehensive enumeration…as consciousness is too big for logical organization. Just too big for the small system to comprehend, no matter its brightness and quickness. But…

There is another way. The way of the Gay-Lussac law; the way of elegance, and evolutionary agglomeration of interreacting skills, if indeed those two things are substantially different one from the other. “Holistic” causes, I think we might somewhat fairly call them: strategies for exploring relationships in the bigger system, and even effecting changes in them. But we have to get our heads around this: what does it mean, to try to operate a system that we can never know everything about? That we can never even know how much we don’t know about? The small system gives us little mental consoles where all the causal relationships are drawn together. Picture yourself standing at it: it’s pretty big, but you can see that if you just bash away randomly at the buttons there is some possibility of getting something right, because anyway you are standing in front of it, you know where all the key activators are, even if you don’t know what they do. And one way or another there are only so many of them, which means that even if that number is quite large all the connections the number governs are still internal to the console.

Except…

What if it is so large that it covers every inch of the room you’re standing in, floor ceiling and walls?

What if it covers every inch of the whole building, that contains the room?

Pretty soon there starts not to be a situation in which you can claim the switches are all “inside” something after all…when the whole world may be “console”, and you just wandering around inside it like Ant-Man. But we don’t actually need to take things that far, to get this sense of realization! All we really have to do is imagine that we can’t quite see the console’s borders. Make them fuzzy, let them bleed off into the peripheral…imagine just that you can’t see them, like you’re a dog wearing one of those protective cones. It’s a much more fun way to do the Allegory Of The Cave, right? Or the Blind Men And The Elephant, for that matter: okay, so you’re a dog standing in front of a computer, with one of those cones on your head…and as you move down the computer’s face, a bunch of monkeys gleefully take the part of it you were just looking at, and stack it up against the part you’re going to be looking at. So to you, the computer just seems to go on and on forever — you’ll never come to the end of it.

Or, will you?

We could do it with the dog being a pirate and the monkeys being ninjas (oh, Internet), but any way we do it the rude facts are the same: you have to make an accomodation with the limits of your knowledge, and accept that you may never know the nature of the system you are trying to operate. You may even get it backwards, or I guess more properly get it inverted… But for me — as long as we’re talking about inversions anyway — I like the idea of two systems, you know? Two states to flip, with the occasional function straddling their boundary…

Like music, perhaps. Man, haven’t you ever wondered just what in the hell is music? Why on earth does it exist, why on earth do we subjectively perceive it in the way we do? Is there some cosmic principle of musicality operating within us, all around us, and everywhere? I’ve asked it before:

Do birds know their song is sweet?

It’s like a little Zen koan. Of course on one level music is just math: mathematical proportion. But, that doesn’t really explain anything. Because math is the new mass, eh? We’ll always be arguing about it. However the key thing about music probably isn’t its mass so much as its energy: it does something to us, it’s a mood-altering drug (just look at how people regulate their intake of it! LIKE CIGARETTES), it’s a time machine, it’s consciousness fuel. Everywhere we look, there it is, in some form or another…musicality…but also everywhere we see it we are affected by it. “Elegance”, now there’s a word that starts fights too…mathematicians talk about it all the time, it’s their Muse, but not a one of them can pin down just what it is, or how to recognize it. It can certainly be created, though: as Rudy Rucker once had it, maybe human beings have just a slight “mathematical sense”, maybe our minds jut out with just a bit of higher-dimensional “thickness” into a much larger space than the one that answers to our eyes and fingers and tastebuds. Or else how would we know mathematics, how would we know “elegance”? It’s a bit like the old saw, perhaps: “whatever is possible to be believed, must contain some measure of truth”…

…But maybe that saying also could be flipped, as Wittgenstein might flip it, to show that the relationship it describes is not the one we’re looking for, or even at. That it is, in fact, a dead end. “The ‘foundations’ of maths? They are no more foundations of maths than the painted rock is the support of the painted tower.” After all, we were talking about Holism, not Hippie. Weren’t we?

And so here is the math, if you like.

Kinda spooky, huh?

In the end, we may know nothing of the bigger system…at least, nothing logical. “I mean mathematics is NOT logic. It’s almost as if one tried to say that cabinet-making consisted in glueing!” But Chopin is still Chopin either way, isn’t he? And yet how can he possibly know how to make music, and how can we possibly know how to hear it? Where on earth could the tendency come from? Why would he do it?

Why would he care?

And how would he even know to care. Look out, here comes the music! Now, can you feel that? Can you feel that doing something to you? All over the world, human beings make music. There are no human beings who don’t make music. And are we alone? Does the bird know about its song?

Do the stars know about their own?

We have no way of knowing. We will never know. We’re inside the console, pulling out wires and plugging them back in: we don’t know what evidence of our actions may be showing up on the monitor, wherever it is, if it even exists. If there’s a God, if it even makes sense to speak of there being a God in the slightest, then he has to be the God of Descartes, of Leibniz, of Einstein…right? A God without an objective frame of his own that we can logically apprehend, a God that defies simple cogitation…a God of paradoxes. And yet what do paradoxes tell us, apart from the fact we’ve posed the wrong questions? Music is a different matter, though…music, at any rate, is something that we can’t help but know exists.

Even if it seems, to me at any rate, fabulously unlikely that we invented it. Because it does not really seem that we can understand it, does it?

However, that may not be the main thing. We don’t understand the brain either, after all — but we certainly use it. We don’t seem to understand sex very well, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t of it. And even if we were to stop believing in boats, it seems very unlikely that they would ever go away. We can use all these things, lucky for us, and apparently even use them quite well: even if we can’t understand their workings. The changes in the computer feed back into the computer, somehow or other. Though we may be blind to the details of that feedback, it doesn’t mean we aren’t touched by its movement. What is it the Sufis say?

“A student is always eager to understand the workings of the teaching, when in reality he is in desperate need of its benefits. Without receiving its benefits he will never understand its workings.”

And also:

“Until you have real knowledge, your belief is mere coalesced opinion, however it may seem to you.”

And so…I know what you’re thinking, Plato…

…What does all this have to do with quitting smoking?

Well, maybe nothing.

But then again maybe a lot. How do we do it, beyond theories and rulebooks and useless crutches that only lend support to the limp? When you want it all the time, and it’s everywhere, how do you stop wanting it? The answer is surely that you actually don’t want it all the time, but you don’t understand the difference between wanting and not-wanting. You don’t make that distinction. Well, why should you? Nobody else does, either. They always say you have to replace the smoking with something else you enjoy, but what does that mean? What kind of crazy console-fixing is that?

“Holistic causes”. It’s a rather silly construction, that. Isn’t it? After all, what in the world is an “holistic” cause? There are things we know, and things we don’t know…there are always correlations we observe that go unexplained for a time, but with increasing knowledge their causal mechanisms are inevitably revealed. Holistic causes must just be what we would call reductive causes, if we only knew just a little more about them. Once we know the system, we understand what it makes and how…we know how to intervene in it, interpose ourselves in it. We see what the real cause was, all along. What the real relationships were.

Yeah, okay.

But what if we never do get to know the system fully? As long as we don’t, we might as well be dealing with one that can’t be known, right? Just like we can’t tell acceleration from gravity in General Relativity; an unknown system, a system known as yet only partly, is indistinguishable by us from a system that can’t ever be fully known. Isn’t it?

And yet: Chopin. And, y’know: love.

So as Point Number Seven in my little fun list of possible stop-smoking tips, I guess I’d say: try different things. It doesn’t matter what they are. Science may discover their rationale later on or it may not, but hindsight isn’t where success is located, here. Maybe you start with tai chi, eh? You don’t even bother quitting smoking for it. Or maybe you might try showering a half-hour earlier in the evening, or eating more radishes in your salad. Any of these might work, but before you do any of them you will want to know why you should do them…why tai chi? Why radishes? What’s with the showering? But maybe you are more in need of their benefits, than of the knowledge of their workings. Why tai chi, hmm, that’s a good one, I have no idea if that even would be a good idea, but let’s suppose it is…in which case…

Maybe tai chi is cheap?

Maybe anyone can do tai chi?

And these are not complicated things, you will notice, but then again I am not convinced they need to be. Radishes, for example, have a very strong taste, almost laughably strong…I mean, why would anyone just sit there and eat radishes, who didn’t like them? I could also suggest bathing in apple cider vinegar and dried thyme for a cold, it works, but it won’t work if I tell you why it works. Showering, let’s just say it screws with your internal smoke-clock or something. Lets your pores exhale? Sharpens your sense of smell, maybe. Who knows?

Does it matter?

Have you ever known anyone who was just determined to change their lives? Have you ever watched to see just how they bring the trick off? They always start in exactly the same way: by having no idea.

And perhaps this is the only way to do it, really.

Well, anyway it’s gotta be better than chewing the damn gum.