Reading Stars: Nova by Samuel R. Delaney
Gareth Powell mentioned that he’s moderating a book club discussion of Samuel R. Delaney’s brilliant space opera, Nova over at SFX Magazine and asked me for my take. I’m grading essays just now but wasn’t sufficiently wise to resist, so here it is:
Samuel Delany’s writing has always fascinated me. On the one hand he’s an extraordinarily sensual writer. Reading Nova or his short story ‘The Star Pit’ is like taking a hit from a subcutaneous intoxicant. His futures jangle your nerves. In the ‘Star Pit’ you feel his narrator’s dejection at being confined within a mere galaxy – a galaxy!
But Delaney has also retooled SF to explore identity, language and social ontology. In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand he portrays an interstellar civilization in which gender is differently coded from ours by shifting the functions of the masculine and feminine pronouns. In this post-gender world everyone is ‘she’ or ‘a woman’ regardless of sex. ‘He’ is reserved for any human/alien object of sexual desire. Reading Stars helps you think of gender as a mutable cultural virus rather than as destiny or “nature” . Delany thus re-engineers theories about the way language mediates thought current in Critical Theory and Poststructuralism and bodies them in an alien flesh we can regard as our own. With his path breaking exploration of queer identity this suffices to make him one of the most important (and underrated) political writers of our time.
It’s been a long time since my first adolescent reading of Nova. I remember being utterly seduced by the sensory detail and complexity of its star-faring future. I didn’t get the sophisticated games with language then, but the colour and difficulty of his world was unlike anything in the ascetic utopias of Asimov or Clark. Also Delany’s work had none of the hideous Oxbridge-Male ennui that spoilt even the greatest of British New Wavers. It was hard SF with Starships, alien skies and cyborgs reconstructed for a poly-sexual heterotopia. Without Delaney, there’d be no Gibson, Sterling and no Iain M. Banks. He could be more important than all of those figures.
Levi on “Hominid Ecology”
Levi Bryant has a great post over at Larval Subjects championing the neologism ’hominid ecology’ over traditional terms like ‘society’ or ‘culture’. This is motivated by the claim that modernity has erected an unwarranted chasm between the realm of nature governed by causal necessity and a realm of society/culture governed by norms, beliefs, meanings and social practices.
The problem with this viewpoint, Levi argues, is that it privileges the mediating role of meanings and institutions while ignoring the mediating roles of things: “[You] seldom hear an analysis in the social sciences but especially in the humanities of how the layout of roads alone in a particular city bring certain people together and keeps certain people elsewhere.” Bruno Latour’s analysis of the efficacy with which the cumbersome weights attached to European hotel keys translate the prescription Leave your hotel keys ! into a more or less unconscious habit provides a vivid, if modest, example of the co-dependence of social agency and material capacity.
Moreover, the ontological distinction between blind material processes and the kingdom of autonomous agents governed by inter-subjectively recognizable principles ignores the sources of normativity and autonomy in self-organizing material systems – human and nonhuman alike – and thus, as Levi suggests, is based on an outmoded form of materialism. A system can be regarded as autonomous – in this wider sense – if it actively replicates the conditions for its own persistence (e.g. by maintaining the non-equilibrium conditions for a chemical metabolism or by using an immune system to target pathogens – See, for example, Christensen 2012; Collier 2002). Autonomy is not merely an ontological fact but provides a basis for considering the capacities and entitlements of complex living systems, as Martha Nussbaum argues (Nussbaum 2004).
I’m sympathetic to both these claims. In my own work on the posthuman I’ve argued that an adequate consideration of human distinctiveness needs to look at the imbrication of biological humans into a complex socio-technical network which I refer to as “The Wide Human”. In my forthcoming piece in the Singularity Hypothesis I write:
the emergence of biological humans has been one aspect of the technogenesis of a planet-wide assemblage composed of biological humans locked into networks of increasingly “lively” and “autonomous” technical artefacts… It is this wider, interlocking system, and not bare-brained biological humans, that would furnish the conditions for the emergence of posthumans. Were the emergence of posthumans to occur, it would thus be a historical rupture in the development of this extended socio-technical network (Roden 2012).
The full expression of human nature – if we insist on using this term – requires a social and technological infrastructure. A humanly distinctive capacity for language acquisition lies inert without exposure to a linguistic environment, for example.
However, the dependence runs the other way – both with respect to technological artefacts and, increasingly, among the planet’s non-hominid ecologies. Biological humans are obligatory components of socio-technical systems like air-carrier groups and cities. If every human being on the Earth were to disappear these constructions would effectively cease to exist while their nonhuman carapaces would rapidly degrade. Hypothetical posthumans would be distinguished from other nonhumans by: a) their technical genesis; b) their capacity to operate with appreciable independence of the Wide Human.
Until the advent of posthumans, however, the nonhumans composing the Wide Human will asymmetrically depend on narrow humans. Without narrow humans most would just cease to exist (though domestic cats might well buck this trend according to Channel 4 documentary embedded above!). By the same token, until posthumans arrive, the functions of the technological components of the Wide Human will depend on the inter-subjective agency of humans. While autonomy and agency are widely distributed outside the narrow human, the collective agency of biologically human organisms fixes the purposes of other Wide Humans – this is what determines membership or non-membership of the Wide Human. Thus recognition of the dependence of social relations on nonhumans should be tempered with recognition of the asymmetries which structure the Wide Human and which may increasingly characterize other ecosystems on the planet as the anthropocene progresses.
Christensen, Wayne (2012). Natural sources of normativity. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 43 (1):104-112.
John Collier (2002). What is autonomy?
Nussbaum, Martha (2004) ’Beyond “Compassion and Humanity”: Justice for Nonhuman Animals’. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. Oxford University Press.
Roden, David 2012 ‘The Disconnection Thesis’. The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Technological Assessment. Edited by Amnon Eden, Johnny Søraker, Jim Moor, and Eric Steinhart. Springer Frontiers Collection.
Posthuman Ecology
Work is being produced at the interface of the bioscience, plastic and visual art, architecture and philosophy that reimagines ecology as a technique of relational technogenesis rather than as the search for a pre-lapsarian presence or balance. Practitioners of this speculative engineering frequently employ Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage and Haraway’s figure of the cyborg – “creatures simultaneously animal and machine who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” – as ways of thinking about emergent but decomposable wholes whose parts are not defined by their origin in proprietary regions such as “nature” or “culture”, “the human” or “the nonhuman”.
Rachel Armstrong – protocell engineer, architect and theorist – is one of the leading thinkers and makers in this interdisciplinary field. Her article “The Ecological Human” on the NextNature site offers an appropriately roomy synthesis of emergentist metaphysics, singulatarianism, and slime aesthetics. Armstrong also links to a preview of this evidently great work of Dada-Cyber-Erotica by filmmaker Hans Scheirl. Enjoy.
Medieval Posthumanism
The inaugural issue of the journal Postmedieval is devoted to premodern posthumanity. Looks interesting.
Wave functions represent physical reality shock
Well, according to this phys.org abstract they do.
Richard Lewontin on Gene, Organism and Environment
Jeremy Trombley at Struggle Forever has posted a fascinating lecture by biologist Richard Lewontin here. He argues that the naive conception of genes as instruction tables for organisms fails to account for epigenetic factors like gene-environment interaction, developmental noise and organism’s construction of its environment. He proposes that we see genes not as programs but regulatory components within processes of development and heredity. Finally, since environments are a) organism-relative and b) co-evolving with organisms, there is no such as an environment which can be preserved in aspic for all time. Environmental politics should cannot retard environmental change but can only re-direct it in more beneficial ways.
Here’s the blurb:
The standard metaphors used to describe DNA and development are examined, including the claim that DNA “makes” protein, that DNA is “self-replicating” and the organisms “adapt” to their environments. In this lecture by distinguished evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, he explains that DNA is manufactured by the cell machinery, that proteins are folded by rules that are not related to DNA sequence and that organisms, rather than adapting to their environment, are actively engaging in constructing their own environments, so that organisms and environments co-evolve.
Lindblom on Land
Jon Lindblom has written a very lucid and helpful summary of Nick Land’s career and his influence on important speculative thinkers like Grant and Brassier here. Well worth a read.
Krapp Alaska
Saw Krapp and A Kind of Alaska in the Bristol Old Vic’s Pinter-Beckett double bill. Alaska sounds a Liggotiish note of transcendent horror below the familiar beats of alienation and subjection – more terrifying even because the “sleepy sickness” (Encephalitis lethargica) which deprives its central character of her life is just a whim of nature. Krapp ends the evening on a high: reminding us that there’s a much to be said for the word “spool”, bananas and an efficient bowel movement.
Reality Chunking
A pre-publication draft of my review of Manuel Delanda’s Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason
PhilSim_Review_F_WEB.
Kundera on Xenakis
Milan Kundera perfectly encapsulates what is great about Xenakis:
Even being a “prophet of unfeelingness,” Joyce was able to remain a novelist; Xenakis, on the other hand, had to leave music. His innovation was different in nature from that of Debussy or of Schoenberg. Those two never lost their ties to the history of music, they could always “go back” (and they often did). For Xenakis, the bridges had been burned. Olivier Mesian said as much: Xenakis’s music is “not radically new but radically other.” Xenakis does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all European music, from the whole of its legacy. He locates his starting point somewhere else: not in the artificial sound of note separated from nature in order to express human subjectivity, but in the noise of the world, in a “mass of sound” that does not rise from inside the heart but instead comes to us from the outside, like the fall of the rain, the racket of a factory, or the shouts of a mob.
His experiments on sounds and noises that lie beyond notes and scales – can they become the basis of a new period in music history? Will his music live for long in music lovers’ memory? Not very likely. What will remain is the act of enormous rejection: for the first time someone dared to tell European music that it can all be abandoned. Forgotten. (Is it only chance that in his youth, Xenakis saw human nature as no other composer ever did? Living through the massacres of a civil war, being sentenced to death, having his handsome face forever scared by a wound…) And I think of the necessity, of the deep meaning of this necessity, that led Xenakis to side with the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul’s subjectivity.