Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Testing elephants.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it—

—Justice Potter Stewart

A solid essay from David Campbell on the prickly troubles baked into the term “disaster porn” (or “development porn” or “poverty porn” or “ruin porn” or “war porn” or “famine porn” or hell just plain “porn”) when used to refer to depictions or representations of atrocity and suffering:

[Carolyn] Dean calls “porn” a promiscuous term, and when we consider the wide range of conditions it attaches itself to, this pun is more than justified. As a signifier of responses to bodily suffering, “pornography” has come to mean the violation of dignity, cultural degradation, taking things out of context, exploitation, objectification, putting misery and horror on display, the encouragement of voyeurism, the construction of desire, unacceptable sexuality, moral and political perversion, and a fair number more.

Furthermore, this litany of possible conditions named by “pornography” is replete with contradictory relations between the elements. Excesses mark some of the conditions while others involve shortages. Critics, Dean argues, are also confused about whether “pornography” is the cause or effect of these conditions.

The upshot is that a term with a complex history, a licentious character and an uncertain mode of operation fails to offer an argument or a framework for understanding the work images do. It is at one and the same time too broad and too empty, applied to so much yet explaining so little. As a result, Dean concludes that “pornography”

functions primarily as an aesthetic or moral judgement that precludes an investigation of traumatic response and arguably diverts us from the more explicitly posed question: how to forge a critical use of empathy? (emphasis added)

That’s the trouble with “porn” as a critical term: it’s been pwned by the pejorative.

For some reason the same day I got pointed at Campbell’s piece I thought of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” for the first time in years.

Bruce Cockburn wrote the song in 1984, shaken by a visit to a Guatemalan refugee camp; apparently, it was his first explicitly political single. —A helicopter flies overhead, everyone scatters, and he wishes he had a rocket launcher: “I’d make somebody pay,” he sings, and then “I would retaliate,” and then, “I would not hesitate,” and finally, “Some sonofabitch would die.”

Canadian radio apparently used to fade out just before that last line.

Anyway, I’d never seen the video before:

And while I’d never call it pornography, and I don’t for a moment think it in any way creates an incurable distance between subject and viewer or leads to compassion fatigue nor do I see it at all as a threat to empathy or as something to dull our moral senses nonetheless: there is something unpleasant going on in that video and what it’s doing, what it did.

Disaster tourism, maybe? Atrocity holiday? —Oh to his credit Cockburn himself insists the song is “not a call to arms. This is, this is a cry…” And the video does indeed highlight—well. His impotence? His frustration? His embarrassment? As it keeps cutting back to him, singing with a vaguely pained expression in those theatrically smoking ruins. Goddamn I wish I could do something. Man if I had a rocket launcher. What fury I would wreak to help you all. Would that I could.

And I just keep thinking of what it was the Editors said: oh but you paid your taxes. Would that you had not. —Oh but Mr. Cockburn’s a Canadian. And that’s an American-made helicopter in that opening lyric, isn’t it.

If I had to functionally describe pornography, this elephant in the rhetoric? —Well. I’d always thought I’d copped it from Kim Stanley Robinson, but damned if I can find the passage in Gold Coast where I thought he’d laid it out. But: any work that stimulates an appetite without directly satisfying it, that tacitly but openly acknowledges that’s just what it has set out to do, that fulfills an agreement between artist and audience to appeal to this metaneed, to satisfy the need to need to be satisfied. And there’s achingly gorgeous effects to be wrought with this stuff and sublimities galore, and dizzying pushme-pullyou games of surrogacies and vicarosities to be played, and squinting at the elephant this way lets us get at some of them while dodging the worst of the pejorations: we can speak of food porn, and designer porn, and book porn, and furniture porn, and we all know what it means; we’ve seen it. —Catalogs and lifestyle magazines: some of the most pornographic work we make.

In that sense? Then maybe? This commercial for a pop song skirts that border of the pornographic: a thirst for justice, an appetite for outrage stoked but explicitly, openly left unsated. —Oh but then we see the problem’s not the numbing, not at all: it’s the transference, the metaneed, the outrage pellet, the thing called up and bodied forth only to satisfy something else entirely, something inevitably smaller. The pornography of politics, the smut of Twitter revolutions, the whoredoms of Facebook petitions—

Good Lord. The trouble with the elephant isn’t that it’s hard to describe. It’s that when it gets up a head of steam it tramples everything in its path.

Cockburn, who has made 30 albums and has had countless hits, visited another war zone this week: Afghanistan. And the conflict involves a member of his own family. His brother, Capt. John Cockburn, is a doctor serving with the Canadian Forces at Kandahar Airfield.

[…]

Cockburn drew wild applause when he sang “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” which prompted the commander of Task Force Kandahar, Gen. Jonathan Vance, to temporarily present him with a rocket launcher.

“I was kind of hoping he would let me keep it. Can you see Canada Customs? I don’t think so,” Cockburn said, laughing.

—Filed 5334 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

In Soviet criticism, terms come to you!

Catherynne Valente went on a mild tear about “speculative fiction” which itself went and garnered just about a hundred comments in the first hour of its existence. Apparently, people like jawing over jargon! Who knew?

What’s interesting, about the rant and its responses, is how subtly different everyone’s idea of speculative fiction is. Which, granted, is true of almost all genera, by definition (if people remembered the same they would not be different people; think and dream are the same in French). —Valente (and some, if not most) sees it as a failed attempt at a big tent, a fantastika whose clinical air of technical specificity (these fictions, and their speculations) renders it incapable of embracing the messy, ugly, gloriously squishy numinosity of fantasy as she is wrote. —Others, including, well, me, see it as—and maybe it’s the folk etymology I’ve concocted in my own head? See, when the New Wave came along, people started casting about for something to call the stuff that was inarguably in the same basic arena as science fiction but wasn’t, how you say, strictly scientific, was insufficiently hard, and so some folks started to call it sci-fi as a way of making the allegiance clear while downplaying the whole science aspect of it, but then Harlan Ellison threatened to punch them, so they had to call it something else instead, and they settled on speculative fiction. Which is fine enough at what it does, but what it does is kinda wishy-washy, has no convictions to lend it courage, and lets people like Margaret Atwood reify their own takes on McCarty’s Error (“To label The Sparrow science fiction,” he said in his age-old review, “is an injustice and downright wrong”) with their hairsplitting games of science fiction and speculative fiction: it’s the travesty of porn and erotica all over again. —Any genre distinctions that hinge on de gustibus questions of “quality” are worse than useless.

Anyway, there’s a lot of people unhappy with “speculative fiction” as a term, almost as many as are unhappy with “graphic novel” (and luckily speculative fiction even after all these years isn’t nearly so firmly rooted as that other ugly compound). But there’s still the question of what to call the stuff that’s obviously “science fiction” but that isn’t strictly speaking sciencey; how do those of us who do not wish to be punched by Harlan Ellison meaningfully name and situate something like Star Trek without drowning in eye-rolling trolls who simply cannot resist pointing out how wrong it is to have sound in space? —Well, you wear the original term down further: from scientifiction to science fiction to sci-fi to SF, which (sigh) is an acronym, and leads to ugly coinages like “SFnal,” but has the signal advantages of: being immediately recognizable; not insisting on science; not being “speculative fiction.”

So I mentioned as much, over on the Twitter, my preference for SF, and @catvalente immediately pointed out the silent F therein. —Which brought me up short; I’d never thought of speculative fiction as kitchen-sinking fantasy qua the phantastick: fables and myths and the very best magic aren’t speculations, they’re demands; not games of WHAT IF, but DAMN WELL IS. So I see no problem replacing speculative fiction with SF; they do roughly the same job for me; that silent F wasn’t silent but always ever elsewhere. —Yet of course there are going to be those who do try to make the term as inclusive as it pretends to want to be on the tin, and will be caught up short by its shortcomings. And so.

(Once more, I’m driven to mock an old XKCD strip:

(Hard sciences? Ha! Working with objectively measurable quanta is easy.)

—Where was I? Oh. Musing that maybe I shouldn’t be quite so sloppy with terminology when throwing these words about. —Not that I’m likely to get less sloppy, but I should at least point to the pier’s mission statement (or mission essay, we don’t really go in for pith in this sort of thing) in this regard, “Ludafisk”: critical definitions of such things as genres can never be necessary or sufficient; are, like tools, highly situational; therefore, like tools, are to be put down and taken up again as needed. I could, I suppose, be a little more clear when I’m switching from flat-head to Phillips, say. Try to be, anyway.

(I keep kicking around a classification or hierarchy of terms, of modes, say, for SF and fantasy and horror considered as part of the triskelion; of idioms, referring to SF furniture or fantasy furniture, working with ray-guns-and-rocket-ships or rings-and-swords-and-cloaks, of genres being those contractual obligations such as steampunk or urban fantasy. But I keep resisting. So pretend I said nothing.)

—I would be remiss to those of you who follow along via RSS if I didn’t point out that in earlier entries in this occasional series old friend of the pier Charles S has been doing a yeoman’s job of chiding and chivvying and generally teasing the most interesting bits out for further consideration. So.

—Filed 5341 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [2].

Truth in Typesetting Department:

Ordinarily, the first sentence of this Talking Points Memo article—

We already told you how True the Vote, the anti-voter fraud effort launched by a Texas Tea Party group, had lined up two of the biggest stars on the anti-voter fraud circuit for their upcoming national convention.

—would spawn a mini-rant on the proper use of hyphens and en-dashes when hyphenating an adjectival phrase whose components are themselves hyphenates: “anti-voter–fraud circuit,” it should be.

But, as most right-wing allegations of voter fraud are themselves fraudulent, and as the steps they take to remediate this non-existent fraud are overwhelmingly anti-voter? —Well. In this particular instance, I have no complaints.

—Filed 5342 days ago to Squawkbox; Comment.

Extispicy.

From various browser tabs, left open after a morning’s desultory surf—

The American Society of Magazine Editors has this yearly conference where they all get together and jerk off and talk about where they are and where the culture is. So they invited me down a few years ago and asked me to talk about the Esquire covers and tell everybody to stop doing terrible covers, or something like that. I was like, “So you want me to come down and bust balls? Okay.” Just about every editor and publisher in America was there, and I just ripped their eyeballs out. Every magazine except maybe Vanity Fair and the New Yorker was complicit in the Iraq war. I gave them the whole thing about weapons of mass destruction and said, “Every one of you sons of bitches is complicit in what’s going on over there.” They were all, “Oooohhhh.” Ten minutes later I did a little bit more of it [mimes clapping his hands together to demonstrate their applause], and then half an hour later I really ripped into them about the war and I got a standing ovation. All the while I’m talking about why they can’t do good covers, and I’m showing mine at the same time.

And in the end?
Afterward there was a line—about 200 of them—waiting to talk to me. I’m signing stuff, and it’s all bullshit! They all keep doing the same crap. They’re not even trying. It’s so ignorant. Why would you want your magazine to look like the other guys’ magazines? It doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t you want to run a cover image that rips your lungs out?

—Vice, the George Lois interview

Reader Gary P sent me an e-mail about a Planet Money list of “must read” economics books. I had toyed with posting on it, held off because I have a wee conflict of interest as an an author of a book decidedly critical of mainstream economics, but the biases evident in the NPR piece have been nagging at me.

If nothing else, this tally should dispel any idea that NPR is left-leaning.

—Yves Smith, “NPR’s ‘Must Read,’ As in Orthodoxy-Promoting, Economics Books”

Lewis’ need to anchor his tale in personalities results in a skewed misreading of the subprime crisis and why and how it got as bad as it did. The group of short sellers he celebrates were minor-leaguers compared to the likes of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and John Paulson. But no one on the short side of these trades, large or small, should be seen as any kind of a stalwart hero and defender of capitalism. Circumstances converged to create a perfect storm of folly on the buy side, beginning with essentially fraudulent mortgage originations at ground level, which the short-sellers—whether trading at the multimillion or multibillion dollars level—took advantage of. That they walked away with large profits may be enviable, but there was nothing valiant about it. In the end, Main Street, having been desolated by a mortgage-driven housing bust, now found itself the buyer of last resort of Wall Street’s garbage.

—Yves Smith, “Debunking Michael Smith’s Subprime Short Hagiography”

The last week has seen an endless discussion, within the political blogosphere, about the meaning of rhetoric, extremism, and what is acceptable discourse. I’m on break now, so I’ve been more attentive than usual. I find I can barely express what a profound failure, on balance, the conversation has been. Bloggers fail to have this conversation honestly because they are incapable of seeing or unwilling to admit that the political discourse, in our punditry, lacks a left wing.

—Freddie deBoer, “the blindspot”

When the police start killing random citizens out of spite, and then a newly revolutionary army goes a head and deputizes everyone with a knife or stick, it really brings out the worst and best in people.

There was one drunken fat man, whose breath smelled of liquor who was wielding dual butcher knives. He kept threatening other volunteers and vandalizing things and eventually people made him leave.

Most of the people were extremely inspirational and there were some people who took it upon themselves to be sort of leaders or messengers and ran from corner to corner, letting people know what was up. In my neighborhood the people who were doing this were two old men, and (implausibly) one young woman.

The young woman, named Leila spoke some English. She said “you are in our country, in our revolution” I started to say “I just don’t want anyone taking my shit or shooting at my house” but she cut me off “you should get citizenship here, like Che in Cuba.”

My motives are far from revolutionary, and she was totally busting my balls, but it still felt nice.

—methalif, “Next Morning”

For the media dissemination of the uprising, yes, the Internet has replaced the media. The Tunisians have become the reporters on the social networks. Five years ago, without Facebook and Twitter, the same uprising would have been smothered.

The demands of the people: down with Internet censorship, freedom of expression… down with the corrupt regime.

—S, from Karin Kosina vka kyrah’s “The role of the Internet in the revolutionary uprising in Tunisia: a conversation with someone who was there”

As with most nationalist parties resisting colonial rule in the Middle East, the leadership of the Neo-Destour was initially comprised of a small section of the intelligentsia, university graduates who resented the colonial jackboot and the Tunis-based grand familles who connived with the colonists. These educated elites were offspring of the emerging Sahel bourgeoisie, who needed to mobilise the peasantry and the emerging proletariat, without fundamentally altering the relations of subjection and exploitation in which the latter were held. As usual, there was an emphasis on regenerating national culture, and modernising the better to resist colonial domination. But, there was also the particular element of hatred for the crusading policy of the French Catholic church under Cardinal Lavigerie, the French empire’s supernal advocate. Thus, the Neo-Destours emphasised the protection of Islamic traditions, attempting to mobilise them as elements of the national identity they sought to “restore.”

—lenin, “The rise and fall of Tunisia’s Ceauşescu”

“Tastemakers beware,” the subhead warns, “the audience is no longer interested in your opinion.”

What? Say it ain’t so! Mr. Gabler begins with the assertion that, “as anyone who has ever wiggled in his seat at a classical music concert or stared in disbelief at a work of conceptual art can attest, culture in America has usually been imposed from the top down.” And what about the vastly larger segment of the population who avoid such egghead pastimes altogether? They are the heroes of Mr. Gabler’s article, which is about how an anonymous band of “democrats” overthrew the forces of “official” culture as embodied by “media executives, academics, elite tastemakers and of course critics.”

These people, also characterized as “cultural imperialists” and “commissars,” have conducted a long and tireless campaign to force everyone else to look at conceptual art and go to classical music. “For over 200 years,” Mr. Gabler writes, “normal Americans have longed to exercise their independence and free themselves form the tyranny of the elitists.” And now, apparently, that nightmare of oppression is over.

—A.O. Scott, “Defy the Elite! Wait, Which Elite?”

They can’t be human, but they look so human.

—Christopher Higgs, “Notes on Frans Zwatjes’s Living (1971)”

According to the Inglipnomicon, the rise of Inglip and his faith began on January 8th, 2011, with the following events.

—Susana Polo, “Praise Lord Inglip, From Whom All Blessings Flow”

—Filed 5351 days ago to Poprocks; Comment.

You can add up the parts;
you won’t have the sum.

So you can anyway imagine the grin on my face when I tripped over Mendlesohn’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law:

Any sufficiently immersive fantasy is indistinguishable from science fiction.

Problem being she’s talking about immersive fantasy, and she classes or tends to class urban fantasy, the thing we’re pointing to, as intrusion.

—I’m gonna have to get into this, aren’t I.

Farah Mendlesohn sat down to grapple with the rhetorics of fantasy; she stood up with a taxonomy for organizing all of fantastic fiction, every last drop of it, based on the narrative strategies, the rhetorics used to establish the relationship between the normal, the disputable here of us, and the numinous, the ineluctable there beyond the fields we know—a sound basis for a system of describing (and not prescribing) fantasy as she is wrote, you’ll agree. (—What else is there?) —Her taxonomy, then, proposes four means whereby this relationship is inscribed, interrogated, upended and maintained:

• the portal/quest, in which we go from here to there;
• the immersive, in which there is no here but there;
• the intrusive, in which there comes here and must return;
• the liminal, in which there was here all along.

So. Four. (With yes an implied fifth, and an obvious sixth. —But for now, four.) —Why only four? Why these four? —Well.

A while back I found myself idly toying with ways to structure and organize sexual imagery, energy, symbols and roles, flows of power and expectation, something a step or two beyond the brutally stupid dichotomy we’re mostly stuck with, the masculine, the feminine, which all too often boils down to the merely phallic. —Why, even Freud, who thought long and hard about this sort of thing, once said,

if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.

And not all the handwaving footnotes in the world can keep me, even here in the comfortable lap of 21st century cisgendered heteronormative privilege, from calling that out as the most specious of bullshit, a definition desperately trying to maintain the worldview in which it’s relevant. —Nonetheless, he did, and it did, and look where it’s all gotten us: bros before hos, amirite?

Anyway. At about the same time I was re-reading Red Mars, and so once again got caught in the seductive grip of the Greimas semantic square:

Proposition S; the opposite of S; the negation of S; the negation of the opposite of S. No simple dichotomy, this! (And it’s just the first stage.) —What I ended up with, then, looked something like:

I tried to go with terms at once as suggestive and yet sex- (and gender-) inspecific as possible—wait, you’re saying, the four, what on earth does all this—with the penetrating, and the enveloping, I mean, any of us, male, female, straight or gay or polymorphously whichever, cis or trans or not at all partaking, any of us—fantasy, you’re saying, urban fantasy, what does this have to do with—we can all identify with penetrating, or enveloping (I almost went with swallowing, but that’s a bit too too, you know?), with being enveloped, with being penetrated; we can all see them as valid stances, as desires, as starting points each as proper as the other, right? —Seriously, you’re saying, what does this have to do with the urban fantasy as SF and that taxonomy you were, and I’m saying patience, watch, count it off, do the math, look at them over there, they figured it out—

It’s a trifle, is what it is, a toy. I mean, I trust it demonstrates how easily the brutally stupid dichotomy can be disrupted, but Christ, anyone who thinks about it half a moment can see that. —And yet it keeps coming back, doesn’t it? Men do this. Women want that. Way of the fucking world. —I mean look where little ol’ cisgendered mostly heteronormative masculine me put the penetrative end of things, huh? Proposition S. Look how everything else gets othered by that placement, with all the opposing and the negating. —“The power involved in desire is so great,” says Delany, responding to (among other things) that Freud quote above,

that when caught in an actual rhetorical manifestation of desire—a particular sex act, say—it is sometimes all but impossible to untangle the complex webs of power that shoot through it from various directions, the power relations that are the act and that constitute it.

Sex and sexuality, desire and power, it’s all too terribly complicated for simple logical constructs to contain. The models are all wrong and useless. You start to feel like Two-Face in the Grant Morrison – Dave McKean Arkham Asylum, weaned by well-meaning psychotherapists from the binary limitations of his ghastly decisive coin to the six-fold options of a die, multiplying the ramifications of every choice he makes up to the paralyzing forest of possibilities in a decision-making system based on the fall of a pack of Tarot cards—he pisses himself, unable to decide which way to turn. No wonder the brutally stupid dichotomy keeps coming back! It’s wrong, but at least it gets things done!

But: if we replace the sex with rhetoric—

Two sides, normal and numinous, here and there; the membrane between them (for how else could we tell the two sides apart, or that there were two at all? —Remember: the rhetorics each in their own way inscribe and maintain the relationship between the two, which depends upon that difference); the crack within the membrane (for how else could the light get in? how else would it all be storyable?)—just adjust which is where as you go and oh do let’s be blunt about it: we (along with the protagonist) set out from the normal through a portal on a quest to penetrate the numinous; we (along with the protagonist) are utterly immersed in the numinous as it envelops us; we (along with the protagonist) are intruded upon by the numinous as it penetrates our normal world; we (along with the protagonist) find the numinous enveloped within us, a tremulous limen within our grasp. —Take the portal/quest, the ur-fantasy for most of us, and set it in the role of proposition S; the rest, oppositions and negations, fall neatly into place.

Now one of the reasons I like arranging Mendlesohn’s taxonomy this way is it helps to visualize the pitiless logic of here and there that underlies it all (oh, but be careful! Such logic is seductive, and narcissistic: in love with itself it ignores anything that isn’t, and always risks turning brutal and stupid. There is an implied fifth, of course: everything else. And also the obvious sixth: none at all. But for now let’s stay in the square). But also: there’s the rhetorics primarily associated with each type:

• the portal/quest, as previously discussed, depends upon the didactic to tell the world as it is to its protagonist, and us;
• the immersive plays with ironic mimesis, its po-faced protagonist taking for granted things we’d find most extraordinary;
• the intrusive pushes and pulls its protagonist (and us), depending on latency (for irruptions must always prove short sharp shocks);
• the liminal eschews its protagonist and reaches up to us direct, through the dialectic between the reader and the work.

Take these, hang them about the square, and lift it all up to the next stage (I did warn you that the square was but the first move we could make):

And we start to see some of the moves hinted at in the taxonomy, the ways the sets can fuzz, and not: that the didactic of the portal/quest can shade to ironic mimesis, as its protagonist learns the ways of the world, and can reach even for an archly knowing dialectic with the reader, but can’t except in the very opening pages do much with latency—there is a door and we will go through it in this scheme of things. Why wait? —That the ironic mimesis of the immersive can always go didactic to drop some (forgive the term) science on us, or play with the latency of the wonders it cannot admit it delivers, but can never reach for that dialectic which breaks the seals between its there and our here, threatening the illusion of immersion. —That the latency of intrusion can use both ironic mimesis and a knowing dialectic in its arsenal of pushes and pulls, but can never come right out and and say what’s happening, flatly, and expect to pull it off. —That the liminal can use—must use—both latency and the didactic to keep us at once engaged and at bay, but would (ironically) find ironic mimesis too open and direct an admission of the wonders it’s always on the edge of revealing.

As, I mean, a for instance. Don’t take my word for it. I’m just fucking around at this point. —Christ, I haven’t even gotten into how this all does and doesn’t work with the Cluthian triskelion. —Mostly what I need for you to understand before we take our next step is this: that Mendlesohn sees the immersive school as having the most in common with the “closed” worlds of SF, which is what her corollary means, and why my grin’s provisional at best; that she classes urban fantasy as intrusion, as stories of push-me–pull-you latency, and thus not SF at all, at least not in that sense.

But—

As Mendlesohn herself notes (citing among other works Perdido Street Station,) an immersive fantasy can host an intrusion.

I’d argue in turn that an intrusion not successfully beaten back must then become an immersion.

Thus as to how it is that urban fantasy must necessarily be SF, you see—

—Filed 5353 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment [10].

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