images for the future

This morning I read H.J.A. Hofland’s friday column in NRC-Handelsblad. In it he called for new scenarios for the future. 1984, Brave New World and the likes are anti-utopias from the cold war, Hofland argues. “So far,” he continues, “the triumph of the free market has, as far as I am aware, not inspired writers to sketch an undesirable future. Instead, science fiction has flourished.” And he then takes Wells’ War of the Worlds (from 1898!) as an example of what he calls ‘socially disengaged’ imagination (aliens, monsters, natural disasters, fires etc.), which Hofland sees as the predominant form of imagination after the fall of the Berlin wall. And this form, apparently, no longer fits the post 9/11 era—hence the call for new (anti)utopias.

Apart form the fact that the changing but nevertheless eternal war of 1984 and its ‘double speak’ seem perfectly suitable for the present era of the ‘War on Terror’, Hofland's view of science fiction as socially disengaged seems erroneous to me. Seeing War of the Worlds as a novel on an alien invasion disregards the allegorical meaning often attributed to the novel which would make it a critique of colonialism. When I limit myself to post-Cold War literature, or even to post-9/11 literature, I could point to at least a handful of novels that I've read recently read in which 'science fiction' (broadly defined) and (socially engaged) dystopias go hand in hand: Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, Michel Houellebecq's Possibility of an Island, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

What, if anything, is to be learned from these contemporary dystopias? Most importantly, they further develop (each in their own way) the binding of the themes of (bio)technological advancement and a barren, desintegrated, anarchistic world which replaces the cultivated world as we know it—a theme which is not uncommon in post-apocalyptic science fiction. In the future terrorism seems hardly to be significant in itself and is only part of a larger context of conflict and destruction. A greater 'threat' seems to come from our mastering of genetic manipulation.

Recently I came across an interesting analysis of this 'threat' in the work of the American art-historian W.J.T. Mitchell. In his 2004 lecture Cloning Terror Mitchell turns to what he calls the peculiar nexus in the discourse of biopolitics: the convergence of cloning and terrorism (the major global image of conflict of this moment) as cultural icons of the principal techno-scientific anxieties of our times. He informs us that the lead story of the New York Times on September 11, 2001 was (and had been for two months) the controversy over stem cell research and human cloning. The terrorist and clone, he argues, unite in the stereotype of the mindless automaton whose individuality has been eliminated.

Mitchell also points at the metaphorical convergence of the two concepts in that cloning is somehow the apt image of the process by which terrorist 'cells' breed and clone themselves. The comparison of terrorism to a virus or sleeper cells hidden inside the body waiting to strike and of course the Biblical predictions of plague and pestilence in the last days, all converge with the prospect of literal bioterrorism to make this a potent and inevitable icon in the collective imagination.

Mitchell, the fiction writer, also pars these two images together: in his near future sketch of Korea human clones are slaves in an unappeasable consumer/coroprate capitalism, a dead-end system which collapses into primitive, tribal anarchy after a series of wars and (non-natural) disasters. I believe that indeed these two images, (bio)technology and global conflict, separately or in conjunction will play important roles in the shaping of our future and that the phenomenon of terrorism as it is presently represented as someting outside of 'normal' warfare, will prove to be of marginal historical importance. That is not to say that the role of 'religion', which is, transversally, albeit more rhetorically than essentially, connected to both cloning and terrorism is slowly but steadilly to be overtaken by 'reason'. In Mitchell's novel an image of a rebelling clone becomes a deity in the ruined world.

It is not only for this almost casual comment that I believe that Cloud Atlas is more pertinent than the other two novels. They all offer, in their different ways, a message of hope, but it is in Mitchell's novel that this is molded into a call for action. To quote from the final pages of this beautiful book:

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world (…) if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitable, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.
A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

Upon the protagonist's return to San Fransisco (this part of the book is set in the 1850s) he intends to pledge himself to the Abolitionist cause. For me action lies in an ongoing criticism of the nexus of pictural and democratic representation: how do images, the imagination, simulacra, discourses --physical or metaphysical-- influence, delimit, or increase freedom, agency, justice, and thought and vice versa?

Berlin and everything after

In the train back home from Berlin, yesterday, it dawned on me that a thick fog was hanging over the world not unlike the mist that was covering the German landscape that I was traveling through. The simile makes me think of the Deleuzian image of the fold of which I was reminded a few days earlier while reading Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Chronicle in which he writes the following about Proust:

What Proust began so playfully became awesomely serious. He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside.

I was also, coincidentally, reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which, in retrospect, seems terribly fortuitous for the time and place (we visited both the new holocaust memorial near the Brandenburger Tor and the house of the Wannsee Conference). “History,” Roth writes, “harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” The disappearance of the Berlin wall seems so inevitable today from the perspective of a Fukuyamian hindsight. But similarly inevitable seems today’s new dialectical opposition, the one between “democracy” and Islamic fundamentalism—which seems to be both the consequence of and the rebuttal of Fukuyama’s thesis. Roth’s book, which sketches the coming of age of the little Philip in a time of growing anti-Semitism in an isolationist America under Republican president Lindbergh—ousting Roosevelt from office after his second term, shows many parallels with today’s anti-Islamism.

Upon homecoming the news was all about violent demonstrations in Islamic countries targeting Denmark for its ostensible disrespect for the prophet Muhammad. In the Friday books-section of NRC-Handelsblad an essay by Sjoerd de Jong discussed two books critical of leftist dogmas: Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists and Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels, both of them written on the North-American continent. No longer, they both seem to propound, are we to fight the military-capitalist complex or the system which orders us to become ‘one-dimensional’ consumers in a mass-mediated world. We are to take concrete political action rather than “hide in postmodern jargon”. But what these books seem to forget (and I write seem because I rely wholly on De Jong’s essay) is that if anything is to be learned from the events in recent years, is that the military-capitalist complex is more alive than ever and the syndicated media are issuing highly subjective versions of the ‘truth’—both on ‘our’ side, as on the side of the ‘Islamic’ world. The practical political engagement in the case of Berman leads to a ‘third way’ chimera which applauds the Iraq-invasion on the basis of a liberal anti-totalitarianism which is morally superior to the neoconservatives’ motives. The struggle against Islamic totalitarianism, he says, is analogous to a progressive agenda: supporting political freedom, emancipation of women and self-determination. Here Berman seems to be the victim of a ‘system’ whose existence he denies, a system of ‘reality-production’, reality-machines, or I would say, fog-machines, which amalgamated ‘Sadam’ with terror, terrorism, immanent threat, and Islam. In fact Sadam Hussein was anything but a supporter of the Islam.

One can see this ‘fact’ as minor to the fact that the Ba’athist regime was excessively brutal, which do not contradict. One can also gloss over the fact that this ‘just war’ was started under false pretences, just as one can denounce as irrelevant the historical complicity of the West (with America as its figurehead) in the empowerment of ‘Sadam’. One must, however, acknowledge the present results of the ‘liberation’ of Iraq which is not perceived as such in Islamic countries, blurred in their vision, just like ‘us’, by a fog-machines amalgamating ‘America’ with repression, humiliation, human rights violations, Imperialist machinations, and a Jewish plot against the Islam; affiliating democracy and freedom of speech with anti-Islamism and insult to the prophet Muhammad—hence the eruptions of violence over the weekend, producing and emanating the images of zealous mobs with no respect for ‘our’ freedom, producing more and more fog.

The invasion of Iraq can be applauded from a dogmatic humanitarian-leftist perspective, but might in the long run raise human suffering. It seems, for now at least, to promote the radical Islam rather than a liberal ‘enlightened’ Islam (The exhibition on terror currently displayed at the ifa-gallery in Berlin supports this point.). And this radical Islam and its (threat of) terror, in its turn, heightens racial tensions and broadens the dialectical fissure. I would favour therefore a pragmatic humanitarian-leftist stance susceptible to the ‘system’ which blurs our vision, or shall we say, susceptible to the notion that every discourse (neoconservative, leftist-humanist, radical Islamic, etc.) can and should be deconstructed. To quote Benjamin again:

No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows even mightier.

It is this pragmatic action of deconstruction which could have convinced Berman that, while his take on the situation might be morally superiour, the practical consequences of a war in Iraq would not be a stable democracy, but an explosive mix of small frustrations, antipathies, and predudices which grow mightier every day. Which is not to say that intervention is per definition 'wrong'. In Berlin we met Martin who has worked in Kosovo for a few years and is convinced of the righteousness of NATO's campaign against Serbia. It just seems to depend on context, and this too is a lesson that 'postmodernism' has learned us.