The only living witness...

Depressing as it is to read speculations about China one day launching electromagnetic pulse bomb attacks against the United States, I suppose at least this pic offers a salutary reminder that things could be even worse if a omnicidal maniac ever had the means at their disposal to deliver destruction on an even larger scale. So don't tell me that this blog never looks on the sunny side of life, right?

There's no way for me to be sure of course, but I'm constantly amazed at the numbers of requests for help I've noticed editors get from Chinese students looking to get into MIT and the like to study computer science. Many of the applicants refer to their interest in hacking/security issues, so I can't help wondering if the ulterior motive is sometimes to later use this knowledge for cyberwar (including accessing the knowledge bases of foreign corporations to learn how they make their products, so their Chinese competitors can attempt to copy and improve them).

I don't want to make this sound like Sinophobia though, not least because I think the political  science and computer science departments of any university in the West you can name are in all likelihood equally complicit in state security issues. With regard to political science, for example, one need only consider the critiques of South East Asian Studies as being too closely aligned to the objectives of the U.S. State Department, given its downplaying of the significance of revolution as a developmental logic in this region, in the interest of emphasizing functionalist systems theory instead.

Having said that, the fact remains that China's comparatively low ranking on the Press Freedom Index indicates it is inherently more difficult for its Fourth Estate to "witness" and thereby preempt the kind of realpolitik I've referred to in this post.

Competitive Liminality

Daniel Bell died recently, so by way of a tribute, I thought it might be appropriate to touch base with some strands of cultural sociology that reflect the concerns expressed in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Bernice Martin, for example, considered the effects of the "expressive revolution" of the 1960s in terms of its challenge to the English tradition of "the gentleman amateur". According to her, aesthetic cultivation had long been the exclusive preserve of  upper class, young leisured gentlemen:

"Thus we see two forms of individualism in education, the meritocratic/instrumental and the romantic/expressive. The latter is strong in the arts and humanities, in the universities and the professional upper middle class (especially all the communicators). The former is the tradition by which the vast economic costs of the education industry were usually legitimated and was strong among the commercial middle class, politicians and the non humanistic middle ranks of the teaching profession. It also found a natural home among most of the working classes who valued book learning, if they valued it at all, as the source of marketable skills and qualifications. The important, small minority of the working class which held a view of education close to that of classical humanism was Robert Roberts's self-educated and politically articulate proletarian intellectuals who valued learning for the truth, the social prophecy and the self-development which it held out to them."

A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change progressively argues that rock music shook up these cross class tensions: the contradictions did work as a symbiosis and united working and middle class wings of youth culture, the Underground and rock into a powerful cultural force. She sees the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP as marking a turning point, after which pop and youth culture disintegrated-- returning to class homogeneous markets or groupings-- having successfully shifted the accepted attitudes on many issues, especially concerning sex and authority. Middle class prog rock then went about deconstructing rock to the point where it became more indistinguishable from "serious" avant garde music.

Martins's narrative has the ring of truth to it. I would add though that record executives responded by panicking- urging their signed acts to tour incessantly in an attempt to stop them sinking with barely a ripple into a small, specialized, albeit appreciative, loyal fanbase. Indeed, most of the British prog acts did not play at home for years because they were always touring America. A potential irony of the situation was that the increasing sophistication of home hifi equipment threatened to make live music less appealing, if not entirely redundant. This is a bit like the recent turn to 3D by the movie studios, who are obviously concerned about the popularity of home theater systems and downloading movies. But I digress. The prog acts, along with the likes of David Bowie (the latter masquerading as an alien being in his Ziggy persona), deliberately compensated by putting on spectacular stadium shows that utilized all manner of gigantic, theatrical props. Afterall, who otherwise would be content with trying to make out the ant-sized performers as a virtuoso solo is been played on a distant stage, when they could instead choose to relax with the live album at home?

Unsurprisingly, the dreaded "roadshow" syndrome gradually set in as rock star personas assumed a greater sense of imperial remoteness that was as far from the ideal of "Woodstock Nation" as could be imagined. The art of Guy Peellaert is clearly a product of this era. 

Portrait of Bob Dylan

I should mention though that there is another wrinkle in this story which goes unremarked in Martin's book. However, I don't see that it does any damage to her basic thesis. Simon Frith in Art Into Pop, and Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again both do an admirable job in documenting the explosion of creativity from Britain's art schools, which in part was a reaction against the strictures of punk, if not quite marking a return to the lengthy extemporizations characteristic of their prog predecessors.  No doubt, it would be appealing to read these developments as a reconstitution of the kind of "powerful force" Martin described. Part of the problem with this institutional base though was there from the beginning. The art schools taught commercial, socially "useful" graphic design skills, which offered advance warning of how any politics of modernism would have to reckon with its rapid recuperation by the advertising industry. As Reynolds shows particularly well, this was starting to become apparent as early as the mid 80s, when post-punk bands were already starting to more self-consciously portray themselves as corporate entities as part of their marketing strategy. Therefore, it can hardly be coincidental that Frankie Goes To Hollywood took their name from a Guy Peelaert painting of Frank Sinatra.

But I don't want to lay too much blame at the feet of the musicians. Sure, there was something very appealing about the democratization of access to the means of musical production that helped a thousand flowers to bloom. By the same token though, the shame of it all is that even more great electronic music may have been possible, were it not for the way the schisms of the British class system had earlier played out in the 1970s. Peter Zinovieff's famous Electronic Music Studios never managed to transcend their aristocratic origins. As Trevor Pinch has argued in Analog Days,  the upshot of this was that there was no room for "trade" there (i.e. engineering and manufacturing). That was all done elsewhere, whereas in the States there was a much closer interaction between engineers and musicians. The former were cognizant of the fact that the latter wanted a keyboard performance synth, which duly arrived in the form of the Moog. I just can't help thinking that a greater ready availability of the Moog and the VCS3 synthesizer in Britain in the 70s and 80s could have facilitated innovation by been more affordable, were they obliged to directly compete with each other. 

This post has cast a backwards glance, so I suppose there's a danger that Bernice Martin and everything else I've discussed comes off sounding nostalgic and irrelevant to what's happening on the contemporary scene. I plead innocent, so hear me out please! One facet of Martin's argument will have to suffice to prove my point. When she describes "competitive liminality" Martin is drawing attention to how performers commonly feel obliged to pursue increasingly rarefied thresholds of difference. This cycle keeps repeating itself, to the point where the individual risks living in a permanent liminal state of anomie unmediated by "limits". Although highly distressing on a subjective level, she argues, some attempts have been made to accommodate this condition, which explains the appeal, for example, of the Maharishi's philosophy for the Beatles. Adorno speaks in like terms of "moments" of atavistic subjectivity intended to escape society in an individual experience of transcendent intensity, as does Bell, in his descriptions of the pursuit of ecstasy.

The most dangerous variant of this strategy, notes Martin, is what Kenneth Burke calls the principle of entelechy. Basically, this means each symbolic item of a classification system must engage in the task of destroying its own alter ego as part of a kind of aesthetic permanent revolution. Hence, for example, disorder must become an absolute value which denies order per se; individualism must extirpate the collective. Martin continues:

"If the strategy is successful, the possibility of communication is destroyed. The preferred symbol becomes literally incomprehensible; language reverts to babel; music becomes meaningless noise."

I note with interest that recent Adornian style aesthetic critiques in effect describe Kurt Cobain from Nirvana in remarkably similar terms to what Martin has to say here. It follows that I was particularly taken by the claim that for Cobain, "Endless, Nameless" suggests "we must confront the possibility that the utopian dimension of Grunge music might have been inseparable from its “suicidal” character". 




Kurt Cobain leaving no doubts about his intentions



Evidently then, Cobain still exerts a real hold on the popular imagination, so if Martin's work can be applied to him as well, I take it as read that she is not somehow outdated. We shouldn't be misled by carelessly slapping the "postmodern" label on Cobain either, or we'll lose sight of this fact. I'd even venture a further claim. How's this for an explanation of the "purity" by which the genre of "black metal" music originally was originally defined by some?:

"What usually happens, of course, is less drastic- there is simply an extension and amplification of the symbols of disorder and anti-structure, which then becomes the symbolic focus of belonging, the sacred language of identity for a new, purified community which stands over against unregenerate society, a new spiritual elite set apart from the children of darkness. Students of millenarianism will be familiar with the syndrome."

I can't see that a musician such as Burzum would have too many problems assenting to this statement (as even a cursory glance at his blog will confirm), even if we need to modify it a bit to show that it is the "children of darkness" who in the case of black metal regard themselves as the elite set apart from the unregenerate society.

Corpse paint and anti-Christian sentiments are standard fare for black metal musicians

Another reason these examples are interesting is that they cannot be simply described in the usual sociological terms as byproducts of the anomie that follows secularization. In Cobain's case this is obvious in the name of his band, Nirvana, along with his recorded personal beliefs (Jainism, Buddhism). Furthermore, few would deny that Norse paganism exerted a formative influence on Norway's black metal scene. Klaus Eder has argued that it was never proper to speak of secularization in reference to the United States, so any attempt to theoretically contextualize Cobain should probably be mindful of this fact. Eder instead limits secularization to Europe, but makes greater allowance for the post secularization thesis in more recent years. 

This begs the question though, where have Martin's interests taken her of late? Well, it seems she is part of the post secularization research group. I see no evidence that she has thrown in her lot with the radical orthodoxies of John Milbank, who are set on punishing sociology for adhering to the secularization thesis for so long. Inevitably, there will be those who will want to question the motivations of some of the company Martin is keeping here. Is this fellow an example of the kind of gentleman amateur we hoped to consign to the past, a traditional humanist scholar, or is he exploring comparable possibilities?:

  That’s because democracy and capitalism have each become compulsory and fundamental. They ground everything we do, including religious practice—so we can only get outside them through the kind of postsecular leap of faith that I am talking about. That realization is one of the things that is important about Alain Badiou’s thought. Such leaps may also be relevant to situations in which we encounter secularism’s limits—when secularism can’t contain the ethical and epistemological demands we make of it...The example I have chosen is literary, and only a tiny (and declining) sector of the population is open to literature’s postsecular intensities. Of course, somewhat equivalent intensities can happen in other cultural domains, like art and film and dance and theater and video. None of these offers what Christianity and Islam can: the possibility of a collective life organized around the promise of salvation. But, of course, to be educated into modernity is, by and large, to lose the ability to believe in salvation.

Another thing that interests me right now is the possibility of reading other people who have been influenced by Martin, such as Eduardo de la Fuente, in combination with those more concerned with Marx, such as Michel Cloucard and  Jean-Claude Michea (partially as a way of getting around the annoyance I feel with Eduardo for publishing in a conservative magazine such as Quadrant; bringing to mind Bell's contemporaries who later gravitated to neoconservatism, as featured in the documentary Arguing the World). Notwithstanding their respective differences, I feel that if there is a basis for common ground, it has to do with the subjective conditions that might eventuate from a neoliberal resolution of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Consider Cloucard's chilling diagnosis: "Neofascism will be the ultimate expression of libertarian social liberalism". 

With a critical eye on the future then, one can see this principle of entelechy launching putropias, such as Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman's libertarian "seasteading" project. Seasteading offers a frightening glimpse of how "competitive liminality" strives to liquidate the collective. I am just praying that this does not expand into outerspace. As astrofuturist Kilgore once noted of the paintings of Don Davis, a model of a multitude of colonies that one could elect to join is about intolerance as much as it is freedom. It is a model of true imperial remoteness that brings this post full circle, insofar as Guy Peellaer's more critical work could also be used to reflect on Don Davis's featured model Americans basking in 24 hour Californian sun.

The banality of evil?

Or, as Sardar and Cubbitt have remarked:


 "Science fiction shows us not the plasticity but the paucity of the human imagination that has become quagmired in the scientist industrial technological, cultural-socio-psycho babble of a single civilizational paradigm. Science fiction is the fiction of mortgaged futures".


In this post I have attempted to demonstrate the relevance of cultural sociology. While certainly not agreeing with everything either Daniel Bell or Bernice Martin have to say, I firmly believe they offer some useful tools to help us learn from our past mistakes, and thereby preventing the inheritance of a mortgaged future.

'The Sheep Look Up'

Recently reading John Brunner's excellent dystopic/ecological disaster novel (written in 1974), "The Sheep Look Up', I was struck by its continuing contemporary resonance, particularly, regarding corporate interest and the failure of government to properly challenge this self-interest (something we have recently witnessed in Australian politics, for example, with the Emissions Trading Scheme and mining tax). Take the following small extract:

Page: ...Most people have the impression that since the passage of the Environment Acts things have taken a turn for for the better.

Quarrey: I'm afraid this seems to be - uh - an optical illusion, so to speak. For one thing, the Acts don't have enough teeth. One can apply for all kinds of postponements, exemptions, stays of execution, and of course companies which would have their profits shaved by complying with the new regulations use every possible means to evade them. And the other point is that we aren't being as watchful as we used to be. There was a brief flurry of anxiety a few years ago, and the Environment Acts were introduced, as you said, and ever since then we have been sitting back assuming the situation was being taken care of, although it isn't...

p. 32., Brunner, Arrow Edition, 1984

Dystopian Worlds

Listen here to how we might protect the planet and evade the state today and in a possible dystopian future

The Venus Project

My eyes are burning like 2 pissholes in the snow, after tracking the flood of trillionstars.com videos that have emerged in the last week or so. I'm hoping to post something about them in the next few days, time permitting.

I couldn't resist putting up something about a more collectivist utopian vision as a partial reply, but I advise extreme caution as I think The Venus Project is also moving towards loopy extremes. I started out by looking at Confessions of an Economic Hitman, then moved to Zeitgeist Addendum. Hence I'll be tagging this post with reference to "conspiracy theories" to signal my suspicions. To be sure, I like the sci-fi like design, somewhat reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller's arcologies, but I vow to reserve judgement pending academic verification......

Alternative History and 'Turning Point: Fall of Liberty'

At the moment, I'm keen to play the newish (its been out for several months now) game 'Turning Point: Fall of History,' which presents an alternative history in the form of a successful Nazi invasion of the USA in the 1950s. While some of the games' images look stunning, of equal interest will be the degree to which its themes, perhaps, accord with those raised in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's excellent book, 'The World Hitler Never Made'. Rosenfeld offers a comparative cultural history of allohistorical treatments of the Nazi period found in a broad range of mediums extending from academic essays to popular cultural representations in television programmes, film, and novels. Through these, Rosenfeld examines to what degree the Nazi era, Hitler and the Holocaust have been 'normalized,' and what these various treatments suggest(ed) about different national identities, memory, and past and current politics. In this sense, I wonder what 'Turning Point' might point to (i.e, in a celebratory or self-critical manner) re America's actual participation in WW2 , how it views itself today, and its role in the post 9/11 world?

Derridata update

Derridata, I hope you don't mind me crossposting this stuff you sent me, but I thought I should archive it here as I haven't yet had time to digest all of the content. I also figured they might be of interest to our fellow blog team members. Feel free to whup me upside the head Sunday week if I've misjudged you (lol).

Craven New World
Tom Jennings

A refreshing class-analysis of recently screened British sci-fi films - Taking Liberties, Faceless, Children of Men, The Last Enemy, Exodus, Polly II - where Jennings "seeks signs of hope in ... dystopian visions that reflect prevailing trends in biopolitical divide and rule."

http://www.variant.randomstate.org/pdfs/issue32/Jennings32.pdf
http://www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
here's a few more morsels to digest.I followed this from the Very Public Sociologist blog.If yesterday's lecture was about the possibility of green politics, then today's session was about its possible end. Ingolfur Bluhdorn's paper, 'The Politics of Unsustainability' was a pretty gloomy (Luhmann-inspired) account of socio-cultural barriers to progressive, environmentally sustainable social change. Therefore he argued that one cannot understand environmental politics without explaining the structures, cultures, patterns of identity construction etc. of advanced industrial societies. Environmental problems are simultaneously 'objective' facts and the outcome of the system's dialectical relationship with the natural world. You cannot get to grips with this without recourse to social theory.
http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2008/07/end-of-green-politics.htmlhttp://people.bath.ac.uk/mlsib/
The 2008 collection The Politics of Unsustainability that's edited by Ingolfur Blühdorn is from a 2007 issue of Environmental Politics. Also, the latest issue of Angelaki has an article by Cary Wolfe in it.
We talked about this before, but I'm putting this here as well for later reference, in light of its cultural studies focused discussion of Raymond Williams and deconstruction. It fits in nicely as well with my previous post of Cary Wolfe's posthumanist article, because Gary Hall is talking about the "monstrous" future of theory:
http://freespace.virgin.net/j.zylinska/g.hall/g%20c%20in%20bits.htm
And speaking of Cary Wolfe, he has a pretty sophisticated homepage going, which features video lectures and such, along with his original critique of bioethics:
http://www.carywolfe.com/online.html

Survival horror: the machine dreams of late capitalism

A complementary thesis: "machine dreams" (how economics became a cyborg science), a book previously featured on this blog, and Jameson's postmodern waning of affect as a symptom of late capitalism. What is the most obviously successful cultural exemplar? I would argue it is the video and computer game industry, and this relationship awaits consideration in the field of ludology. My previous "machine dreams" post referenced the "fuck you buddy" ethos as descended from gaming theory, so it follows that a transition to a related commodity form would become conventional.

To be sure, discussion could have just as easily focused on recent horror films such as Saw, whose horror is entirely reliant on the assumption that people, when placed in any critical situation equating to the prisoner's dilemma game, will behave predictably in the most self-interested, reactionary manner. But nowhere is it more explicitly articulated than in the pronouncements of game designers who base their "survival horror" on the dynamics of small group relationships, comprised of minimal selves, by drawing on a limited repertoire of texts in a serial fashion; think of the treatment of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing as a confirmatory authority by the designers of upcoming titles such as Dead Island and Left 4 Dead. Antecedents in the culture industry can, of course, be traced even further back, to the dynamic traced by Marx, when he described Robinson Crusoe as the perfect embodiment of economic man (a kind of minimal self who adapts by learning how to rationally make use of his limited resources in the most efficient manner).

As Bauman has also observed, apocalyptic fantasies of lone survivors afford a glimpse of what death must look like, and this assessment is apt insofar as looking is foregrounded more than feeling per se. So, the waning of affect described by Jameson, when translated into Raymond Williams's lexicon, becomes an emergent structure of non-feeling.

This paradoxical effect has been traced to some extent in Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand piece in the June 2008 issue of Body & Society, "Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body and as Trope":

"They show, too, what is perhaps the most devastating aspect of zombie as metaphor for the current economy: there is no (evident) way out. Your only option, when faced with the zombie menace, is to kill or be killed. Either way you’re screwed, because you are dead, or you have become what you fear. The act of violence that removes the horror and threat of the zombie reconstructs me, the human, as zombie – a being that is only body, without empathy, without respect for life: very like the marketplace, in fact".

The "solution" therefore amounts to little more than a zero sum game (i.e. the logic of "fuck you buddy"). By the same token, this might explain the recent focus on creativity amongst many social theorists, say the turn to Castoriadis, who are less interested in following their cultural theoretical cousins, some of whom appear more preoccupied with unearthing emancipatory content in populist forms. I think it fair to say though that all fear a situation in which we would have no alternative other than sharing the same "machine dreams".

Other than the upcoming game, Earth No More, some imagery of which I've posted here, I will try to track down the film Equilibrium, which might be construed as a commentary on both the normotic Left and Right. But remember Barry Schwartz's point about "free choice" too in my earlier tedtalks post: opportunity costs are the price paid under more reflexive conditions because it makes us more disatisfied with what we had previously enjoyed. This gradually leads to a profound sense of disappointment with more attractive successor versions, whereby a self learns to withhold feeling from the world, because nothing is able to encompass the totality of what a "free" self is. It seems then that the culture industry has finally acknowledged this logic by turning an opportunity cost into a niche market. Hence cynicism can be repackaged as ironic postmodern sophistication once opportunity costs themselves are transformed into the cultural icon of the zombie (paralleling the flattened affect experienced by the consumer.

"Telepresence": Robert Ballard's exploration & exploitation of new frontiers

More on the theme of underwater dystopia, the regeneration of the frontier mythos, and the articulation with the spirit of entrepreneurship, putting a mind into "reset mode" as explorer Robert Ballard enthusiastically puts it in this eloquent piece of self promotion:

By perfecting "telepresence"- the ability to see beyond the confines of the body, as in exploration of the Titanic, Ballard hoped to offer greater therapeutic benefits than movies or tv...This was the logic of Reagan era political economy: that everybody benefitted from the energies of the liberated entrepreneur; that what mattered most of all, as Ballard said of telepresence and the discovery of Titanic, was "to make people feel good"; that images were reality.

Down with the Old Canoe: a Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster by Steven Biel (page 216)

Ocean colony mirrors Bioshock dystopia

I am still laughing at this, as it not only proves the point about the commodification/recuperation of critical impulses, in my previous "Running Man" post, but does so, again with no irony, by striving to realise the world of "Bioshock", previously posted here.

Given that "Bioshock" was an Ayn Rand inspired dystopia, it is only fitting that a relative of Milton Friedman has his bloody fingerprints all over this. The last time I remember reading about this latest link in the Chicago School dynasty, he was extolling the virtues of a "back to the future philosophy", to rationalise his involvement in assorted medieval recreation societies (high tech feudalism, how appropriate). How fatuous do you have to be to criticise democracy because it is not always "innovating", especially when it is obvious that the end results of your own preferences are actually regressive?:

True to his libertarian leanings, Friedman looks at the situation in market terms: the institute's modular spar platforms, he argues, would allow for the creation of far cheaper new countries out on the high-seas, driving innovation.

"Government is an industry with a really high barrier to entry," he said. "You basically need to win an election or a revolution to try a new one. That's a ridiculous barrier to entry. And it's got enormous customer lock-in. People complain about their cellphone plans that are like two years, but think of the effort that it takes to change your citizenship."

Friedman estimates that it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a seastead for a few thousand people. With costs that low, Friedman can see constellations of cities springing up, giving people a variety of governmental choices. If misguided policies arose, citizens could simply motor to a new nation.

What is also scary is involvement of a Google developer, and the founder of PayPal. This suggests the Californian cult of the self is getting too carried away again by generalising the application of ICT metaphors taken from neoliberal economics.

I have no problem with ballardian.com possibly developing other angles on this story, in keeping with its earlier feature on "micronations". I would agree it is easy to imagine such rarefied environments becoming "zones of exception", as in "Super Cannes", where the bored, spoilt inhabitants end up killing each other for sport. But I haven't been diligent enough lately to check if this discussion is already taking place, either there, on in other forums such as in the journal "Island Studies".

For a less commodified vision of the "temporary autonomous zone", albeit saddled with its own dubious ethical associations rooted in common libertarian soil (such as pederasty), one could take a (bewildered) look at the prospective ideal of "pirate utopias":

http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakim_Bey

Finally, here is the link to the piece in Wired on the Seasteading Institute:

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/05/seasteading?currentPage=all

Lurker in the Lobby

I never thought that bounded rationality (to use Herbert Simon's appropriate concept) would force my blogging habits to become more like something on Twitter, but I don't have any other choice for the next 7 months or so.

Be this as it may, ahuthnance alerted me to the above title, and, lo and behold, it features an interview with none other than Dan O'Bannon!!! I was chuffed because this would seem to provide some evidence for the hypothesis I advanced in my earlier post about a particular Clark Ashton Smith story acting as a formative influence on O'Bannon's screenplay for Alien. Afterall, in this interview, O'Bannon emphasises how much he has always loved Lovecraft, and so as an avid reader of Weird Tales, it is very difficult to believe he would not have encountered Smith as well. I think part of the reason this has not been widely brought out before, other than a need to maybe hide a really obvious influence, is that there is not, unlike with Lovecraft, any cult of Smith sizeable enough to have banged on about this detail in a loud enough voice for anyone else to hear outside of their own circles (and perhaps the connection has never been uncovered anyway, which is my present operating assumption).

In a not entirely unrelated vein, I've also come across some interesting recent discussion of Darko Suvin's work on science fiction ("cognitive estrangement" as a defining element and so forth). I'm posting a reference here in the hope that I can find time to get to them later. Be sure to check out the links within the following piece:

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/03/18/distant-suns/#more-5824

Battleship Earth: The Weaponisation of Geoengineering

I've almost finished reading Green Mars, so I was astonished to come across the following article, which matches Kim Stanley Robinson's insights into the strategic importance of terraforming. Unlike some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories regarding climate change, this piece is scrupulous in its attentiveness to scientific credentials, i.e how it could work, as well as the asymetrical distributions of power that would make such an abuse of the technology an attractive option for some (I took the liberty though of slightly modifying the title of the original piece so as to more explicitly reflect this blog's interest in biotechnological matters).

The stance adopted in this case differs as well from that of the fundamentalist environmentalist characters in Robinson's book. Its operating premise is not that geoengineering should be opposed in all forms, but rather that binding prescriptions for appropriate use need to be established. As per Robinson, space is also left for redressing the aforementioned socioeconomic dimensions of power that play a constitutive, and not merely an after the event role, in the questionable actions of both state and non-state actors. Such instances might amount to another manifestation of the [cynically opportunistic] "disaster capitalism" Naomi Klein has warned against. As such, it is feasible that they will also feature in future critical studies in the field of crisis management.

After pasting the reference below, along with a short excerpt, I've also linked to the author's blog, which is worthy of future monitoring.

In the early 1970s, the Pentagon’s Project Popeye attempted to use cloud seeding to increase the strength of monsoons and bog down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1996, a group of Air Force and Army officers working with the Air Force 2025 program produced a document titled “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” (it never went anywhere). The Soviet Union reputedly had similar projects underway. But although the idea of a geoengineering arms race may superficially parallel this line of thinking, it’s actually a very different concept. Unlike “weather warfare,” geoengineering would be subtle and long term, more a strategic project than a tactical weapon; moreover, unlike weather control, we know it can work, since we’ve been unintentionally changing the climate for decades.

Jamais Cascio is an environmental futurist and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He blogs at Open the Future.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4146

Diary of the Dead

Robin Wood was raving about this film in Cineaste. Like some other critics, he expressed reservations about its predecessor, "Land of the Dead", but he is really going all out in his praise of this latest instalment. He admires Romero's unconventional technique, at such a late stage of his career, which he describes as almost avant garde in tone. Wood also claims the characterisation was so good it almost brought him to tears. He is even willing to place "Diary of the Dead" at the pinnacle of Romero's achievements, which is really saying something in light of his appreciative remarks in "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan."
The official trailer has whet my appetite even further; feast on this cold, dead flesh....

Bioshock

Derridata, remarkable coincidence your post on Heidegger, in light of the fact that I've been playing Bioshock a lot lately. It occurred to me that Andrew Ryan, the creator of the underwater libertarian paradise known as "Rapture", manifests many of the same tendencies, albeit shorn of Heidegger's anti-technological animus. I wonder then if we will start to see ludologists and scholars of thanatourism speaking to each other across disciplinary boundaries. And what of the possible ramifications for virtual "island studies", here referencing the new journal cited in my previous post?

Thematically, the game is distinguished by the complexity of the moral choices faced by the player. By considering these, we can avoid the simplistic analysis of Ken Wark that, "ever get the feeling that all of life is becoming like a game?" No, not really Ken. It seems more to be the case that in either environment, the player, or the tourist, is presented with moral choices, that they can choose to act on. As per the Hobbesian Leviathan, the debauched farangs foregrounded in my posts on Thailand's "zones of indistinction", Andrew Ryan pitches the appeal of his paradise in a very thin liberal conception of citizenship. I say this because liberalism in a sense must remain radically anti-utopian, in that too much of a prescriptive approach to "the good life" is seen as imperilling the freedom of the individual to come together in their own fashion and realise their desires through market interactions. Unsurprisingly then, Ryan is more interested in offering a rationale for Rapture that says more about what it is not, rather than what it is:

"I am Andrew Ryan and I'm here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of h is brow? No, says the man in Washington, it belongs to the poor. No, says the man in the Vatican, it belongs to God. No, says the man in Moscow, it belongs to everyone. I rejected those answers. I chose something different. I chose the impossible- I chose Rapture- a city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can be your city as well".

Suffice to say, things quickly go pear shaped in Rapture. Set in 1959, the game cannily anticipates the failure of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, witness the widesperad disenchantment and rebellion against neoliberal commodification. Rapture has degenerated into a world where mutated children roam the streets, harvesting genetic material from corpses. Assorted other mutations, some of whom are known as "Lead Heads, in what is probably an acknowledgement of the "Chicken Heads" in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", are also encountered at various points. Some espouse bizarre litanies in a desperate attempt at salvation, only to then break into random acts of violence. There are also those who have undergone grotesque mutation through gene splicing, and wear vaguely A Clockwork Orange style masks in an attempt to disguise their misshapen features.

In fact, the retro futurist architecture and character design are so exquisitely detailed, an exhaustive description remains beyond my capacity. I've chosen a few choice pics instead. Unsurprisingly, the New York Times have described Bioshock as "one of the greatest games ever made".