Pas de Place

Mars Trilogoy Post, pt. 2

2009-04-13T18:49:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been listening to the second half as an audio book, so I don't have page numbers to reference. One thing that I want to say before beginning a close reading of a specific passage is that I was not completely off when I claimed that the first 100 were moving towards communism. Apparently, the people back on earth had that view of them also - living as a community with a very limited economy, working towards the common good of all the people on Mars, which they thought would happen by cutting their connections with UNOMA and Earth.

This exchange between John Boone and Hiroko presents an interesting problem when discussing the whether the people of Mars are becoming posthuman - in one sense they have already discarded "humanity" in favor of "Martianity." But, this is a way of examining what it means to be human, a social being.

"What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?" John asked. "To make our children without asking us-to run away and hide in the first place-why? Why?"

Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. "We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn't going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life-"

and later

"You're needed every day!" John said flatly. "That's how social life works. You've made a mistake, Hiroko."

What we get from this passage is the development of a sort of eugenic practice in which Hiroko and her cohort has created her own life through science. While this is not exaclty what posthuman theorists see as posthumanity, the process that Hiroko used to nuture those chilren connects to Katherine Hayle's assertion that we have always been posthuman, in the sense that we have always used tools to navigate the world. Here, Hiroko is using the scientific tools that she has at her disposal to create life. Since the children are still created through slicing two genetic codes (female and male), they would still be considered "human." Those children, as John informs Hiroko, still need to interact with other human beings since, as Kenneth Burke tells us, humans require interaction with other humans. In the sense that the people on Mars cannot live without their tools, they are all posthuman, according to Halyes, but this is contrasted with the descriptions of robots and thier uses on Mars, specifically in constructing the elevator.

As Robinson writes from Frank's perspective, "offloading the elevator cars and getting the stuff on trains. Robots were supposed to do it, but it was surprising how much labor remained in the process for human muscle. Heavy-equipment operators, robot programmers, machine repairmen, waldo dwarves, construction workers." These robots would not even be considered "posthuman" beings because they lack consciousness. As Bostrom and Marovec have explained, the move towards posthumanity requires that there is a mixture between the human body and the technological body, and to some extent, a cybernetic being that develops a level of consciousness that is equivalent or exceeds human consciousness. Since all of the people on Mars retain their consciousness, which is altered by their existence on Mars, they still do not constitute posthumans beyond what we and they already are before reaching Mars.

Marred Mars

2009-04-06T19:53:00.000-07:00

Over an email, Elisa explained that my presentation on (post)human would still be next week and told me that the presentation would fit in well with the question of whether the characters we see become (post)human. Well, in part, they have always been more than human. [In fact, K. Hayles has convinced me, rather easily, that we have always been (post)human.] Still, this is not the time for this conversation. Rather, I want set up one part of the population's (post)humanity as a point of departure for the rest of this post - specifically, social construction and its resistance to "reality."

Jameson explains, through Marx, that "Behind the theory of social construction...lies praxis and human production itself, which makes a mockery of realism's staged mystery stories, its fictive astonishment at encountering the 'resistance' of a reality it has itself cooked up in another avatar" (400). The key word, for Red Mars, is "praxis" (practice). After the "First Hundred" arrive at Mars, the continue the practices they have learned during their time on Mars. Frank, however, continues to attempt to break away from the governmental structures that others continue to advocate - claiming sections of land for each "country." Instead, he suggest that these new arrivals (to Mars) start something new, practice a mockery of the "realism" they have been indoctrinated to on Earth. In a very structured way, Jameson's use of Marx is very appropriate for my reading of Frank because what Frank calls for is a communist Mars, where these "First Hundred" live as a community of reciprocity, always working towards the common good. Still, Frank is torn between two physical worlds. As we approach the middle of Red Mars, our narrator kindly informs us that "Frank had managed to keep his position as the American department head no through three administrations, even though it was a cabinet post - a remarkable feat, even without considering his distance from Washington. And so he was now overseeing the introduction of investment by the American-based transnationals, a responsibility that made him manic with overwork and puffed up with power..." (278). Even while Frank attempts "to inspire people on the planet to figure out a way to forget history, to build a functioning society. To create a scientific system designed for Mars, designed to their specifications, fair and just and rational and all those good things" (283), he remains irrevocably a member of the history he attempts to shirk. This point is not lost on Jameson: "The Mars Trilogy then experimentally extends the lives of its viewers and participants in order to make them coeval with their own history, at the same time that it projects an original collectivity..." (396).

John Boone, who we will lose later (to an "accident" that Frank orchestrates out of jealousy for Maya), is stuck in a similar situation. He has asked Maya to marry him (which she sidesteps by laughing it off and saying "something like that" when John continues to push the question), but he also feels "the thisness of the moment [on Mars, not marriage] like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment" (293). Marriage is also a construction of the "realism" that Jameson describes. If we look to psychology and to Freud as a philosopher (and now we have come full circle this semester :)) "human" nature does not include marriage (a religious practice that seeks to retain an element of "purity" between two people). Psychology, as well as our cultural artifacts, tells us that men have an instinctual desire to "mate" (I use this word purposefully - for animalistic connotation) with as many partners as possible. And yet, John feels that Mars, a place where these cultural artifacts are not present, is where he was meant to be. In other words, he continues to carry parts of the old modes (morals, appropriateness) of being while feeling that the location where those modes arose are no longer cultural is the place he feels he was meant to be.

Still, we get this from most the main character. They are living in two different worlds, one intellectual and the other physical. Managing these two worlds while creating something new seems to be what both John and Frank advocate, but they rely on their perceptions of the past to move them to those locations. There is animosity there also, which revolves around nationality (Russian/American), and Maya, despite the similar goals that both have - creating a new way living and coexisting on Mars. Why is this? Accoding to Hayles, because they have always been posthuman, and according to Latour (We Have Never Been Modern) we have always been hybrids (non-modern). While you may be having a gut reaction to this and saying "this doesn't make me posthuman," "human," for Hayles refers to a purity (also present in Modernism) that has never existed. The ways that Frank and John are (post)human (among the other characts) serve as exemplars of demonstrating the lack of purity within "humanity." We have always-already been hybrids. We have always existed with tools and used those tools to navigate our ways of being in the world. In relation to last week's discussion, this is the problem that Heidegger faces when he looks for the essential, primordial character of Dasien (which I have defined elsewhere). In beginning, he writes that we cannot concieve of Being without the conception of the world and how we manage ourselves in/with-the-world. From the development of the first external tool to manage this being, for Hayles, we became (post)human. As for what is post(post)human, take a look at some of the robotics work by Moravec and Bostrom - advocates for technological implants, like those you find in THE BORG from Star Trek (this is for you Randy).

For Those Interested

2009-04-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

All, this is a preliminary post to keep a record of something that I thought was interesting. At least interesting to those of us who are reading and working with theories of posthumanity and what it means to be human. So, for those of you who are:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/16/japans-hrp-4c----unveiled-already-harassed/

and

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2009/04/cb2-baby-robot-developing-social-skills/

Project 2

2009-03-31T06:25:00.001-07:00

Elisa,

I just wanted to let you know that I would like to do a remix video for the second project. Specifically, I plan to use the Matrix, A.I., Minority Report, Hackers, Bladerunner and maybe some other movies for a project exploring the way that "humanity" and "posthumanity" (cyborgs, robots, etc...) are presented in each and how that lines up with some of the theoretical perspectives of "posthuman" perspectives and thought. I have a preliminary outline and I've been doing research for the presentation in two weeks. I hope that I can use this for the second paper and that I can use the video in the posthuman presentation. Last night, I finished the 5 Summaries/annotated biblio and I'll turn that in tonight. I plan to pull a bit from this for the second paper, the presentation, and the final paper. I know that this seems like I am trying to work in the same area a lot, but I just want to learn about posthumanity - I'm having a difficult time understanding exactly how it is different from what is already being done, even after doing this research. If you could let me know if this is okay with you, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Sergio

P.S. Below is the post I wrote for this week's readings - this is not the post for tonight's class.

The Human-esque Condition - Dwelling as the Basic Character of Being

2009-03-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

Heidegger is a transient 'cat' (I've been listening to some Louis Armstrong lately, and the jazz "cat" is stuck in my head - I know this is a Sammy Davis Jr. thing, but it is still there - I'm dwelling in my jazz locale). :)

So let's start with Heidegger, then move to Garrard and see how this all ties in with A Door Into Ocean (Slonczewski = Slo from here on).

In "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger begins by redefining our understandings of what it means to dwell, build and how this affects our thinking (yet again). I'm reading through my copy of Basic Writings, which is marked up a bit, and I'm not sure what I was thinking (pun intended) when I first read this article. On page 348, he associates "dwelling" with 'the ends' and building with 'the means.' Later, he claims (seemingly obvious) that "we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers" (350). What does he mean? Well, a human beings existences precedes the building of buildings (architecturally). In other words, to be alive is to dwell within a space which is not separate from our dwelling (what he calls being-in-the-world). [Later, this will be an interesting way to look into ADIO.] Moving on, taking our space with us, our essential Being (capitalized in translation), our dwelling develops from how we interact in the world and with the other "mortals" in the world - in Being and Time, he also claims that to say that we exist by any other means than our existence in the world does not help us to understand what Being is. Fast-forward our dwelling with Heidegger - "Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation, instead of listening to the other.... They are able to listen if both belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice" (362). Put more simply (as far as I understand), our experiences in the world (our dwellings) cannot be separated from the spaces that we shape or from how we think when we exist/experience (in) those spaces.

Next, we have Garrard. First, he use a different Heidegger. There is one section that I want to pull from - I think the most concise purpose of this essay. Garrard set out to argue that "'Dwelling' is not a transient state; rather, it implies the long term imbricating of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, life and work" (108). While this is not contrary to Heidegger's claims, he does go on to argue against Heidegger's "On the Origin of the Work of Art," basing the argument on Heidegger's Nazi affiliation and support of the political party (ad hominem, anyone). I understand that Heidegger's Nazi affiliation is uncool (I think it's a permanent scar on his record), but this argument implies that all of Heidegger's work should hold no valididty because he was a Nazi. In addition, Garrard doesn't even mention the "Building Dwelling Thinking" article. I'm not sure how you can write an essay on Dwelling and not see this article. Anyway, moving beyond this research problem. I think that, based on the Heidegger we read, Heidegger would agree with Garrard's claim that "dwelling" is not a transient state - remember, H say it is "the basic character of Being" (362; original emphasis). This may come out as a personal attack, but Garrard's lack of reference to this H article suggests Garrard does not want to be associated with Heidegger's thought. Garrard's claim that "dwelling is not a transient state" seems to echo H's claim that dwelling is "the basic character of Being." Hmm... Despite G's argument against H, the two claims line up really well. So how does this apply to A Door Into Ocean? [This title reminds me of Heilien's A Door Into Summer, which I really enjoyed when I read it about 13 years ago.]

Shora, the moon/planet is the place where our main characters (Merwen, Spinel, Lystra, Realgar, etc.) dwell. The natives of Shora have apparently evolved from "catfish" (5) and have webbed hands and feet. There is a large portion of the novel (dispersed throughout) devoted to the question of what is "human," which the population of Valedon don't think applies to the inhabitants of Shora. Throughout the novel, the characters (the Sharers and Valans) keep asking the question of "what is human?" The Valans, living on land (on Valedon) do not think the Sharers are human because of thier bodies. The Shares do not think the Valans are huma because of thier focus on war. Let's take a look at some passages close to the end: "Humans are animals, with animal needs." "Humans are that, and more. Humans are aware of the universe, and self-aware." And later, Slo writes, through Merwen, "If we kill, we lose out will to chose, our shared protection of Shora, our ability to shape life. Our humanity would slip away, beyond ever your own" (354; to Realgar). Both of these races consider themselves "human" and according to Heidegger, they are both right: They are both beings for whom their being is an issue (Dasien; mortals). Slo writes earlier: "Who would believe that any creature could willfully force the door of a mind? That was to violate the very soul of a human, never mind one's physical shell. It was to deny Shora Herself, for ever soul is a part of Shora" (256). I don't know much (read: anything) about Slo's other work, but this section seems to parallel Heidegger's and Garrard's claims that dwelling in a space cannot be understood as separate, but must be understood jointly. Additionally, this excerpt returns us to the old debate of what is human: the Descartean cogito ergo sum and the physical body. What Slo and Heidegger suggest is that this dichotomy is a false understanding of what it means to be "human"; rather, to understand "human," the body and the mind cannot be separated from each other. Kathrine Hayles, among others, suggest that what the "post" of posthuman is not a limit to free will but "there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will" (4). What Heidegger tells us, and what Slo suggests, is that there is never an a priori way to distinguish the two forms of wills. Rather, we are always in the world (mind and body) and our wills are always identified in (and define by) the time that we exist. Choice seems to be defining characteristic of humanity, according to Slo and H. But our choices are always dictated by our dwellings in the world and the time that exist within. Have we always been posthuman? In Hayles terms, our a priori self-will is what makes us human. Yet, this self-will is never a priori - we are nutured in a time and builing (a world that has existed before us). This nurturing, as we see with the Valans and the Sharers, is a sort of programming we receive from being-in-the-world. There is more to "humanity" than this self-will. For Slo, humanity seems to be that which makes choices with the available means (building) towards our ends (dwelling) and not depriving other humans the same choices - which could be what posthuman means: having control of other human life.

24 March 2009

2009-03-24T14:05:00.000-07:00

Second Paper Due: April 3rd

5 Summaries: April 10th
___________________

Neuromancer - "New Romance"? - From Elisa

PostHuman works: A.I. , Minority Report, Star Trek (Data; the Borg), The Matrix (what happens in the matrix to Neo, affects his body outside of the matrix)

the action takes place in the "brain case" not in the "screen case" - through the trodes he has in his head.
- it is Case's imagination
-

2009-03-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

Whenever i hear the word Zion, as in NEUROMANCER, I hearken back to Sublime's cover of Bob Marley's "Rivers of Babylon." The lyrics read: "For the wicked, carry us away/ Captivity require from us a song/ How can we sing King Alpha's song in a strange land?"

[Note: "In Rastafarian terms, the title 'King Alpha' refers to Emperor Haile Selassie (identified with the Almighty God Jah Rastafari), and is often used in conjunction with the name 'Queen Omega' referring to the Emperor's consort Empress Woizero Menen Asfaw." - Link]

My focus in this post will be on (post)humanism, cyberpunk, cyborgs and, in part, Neuromancer, possibly with an anarchic perspective, but fully human nonetheless. I find it interesting, however, that I will be talking about technology and the integration of technology to the human body using technology. This seems like a meta-post. There is something highly unsettling about engaging with this machine as I write about how machines are not human. Still, engaging with machines does not necessarily mean that it changes my body or my un/consciousness. I already see the ways in which this post can be addressed - "You're hypocrite." Alas... using the machine is not the same as being machine. Additionally, having a part of me machine does not make me all machine. However, for Case, that is not necessarily the case (no pun intended).

[meta-comment: A short detour in writing this post...for Heidegger, Dinner, and Hair Cutting.]

Let's start with Davidson's article: "Riviera's Golem, Haraway's Cyborg." She writes of Case: "Case is from the beginning strictly a technician, a whiz at learning codes of operating systems.... The machines Case operates perform the work that until recently would be performed by the specular, discursive imagination" (189). What does this mean? Well, Davidson claims that it means "While Case is spectacularly adept at what he does, his very adeptness is hardly dependent on a discursive ability to create in the old artistic way; it is entirely dependent on his sense of timing, his ability to execute the correct code at the correct time" (189). What does "the old artistic way" mean? I'm not entirely sure. In a way, Case is dependent on that discursive ability to create in that artistic way. It is a different environment and a different culture, but that does not indicate an overturning of those traditional ways of discourse. If his discursive ability lies in his ability to manipulate and (re)present a part of the code for a new meaning, isn't that part of the old artistic way. From Egyptian times, artists took parts of their environment and presented them in a new way, but always in a familiar context. Isn't that what Case is doing with the code (discourse language) and the operating system (context/environment)? It seems quite odd to make this claim without looking towards the analogous connections. In this view, Case engages in the political elements that develops a society, a society within the matrix. Ansleme Bellagarrigue, in his article "Manifesto of Anarchy" (published in 1850), writes: "Society is the inevitable consequence of the forced aggregation of individuals and the collective interest is, as a providential and fatal deduction of private interests." (Please allow some slack here - I understand that writing a manifesto about why there should be no government rule is a political and governmental proposition.) If we look at Case through Bellagarrigues lens, Case may be an anarchist in the sense that he is working against the social order for a new order that underscores the social order in favor of a less intrusive order, which is not an organized order - more like the order of Shevek's society. Perhaps Case is an anarchist. But he is all cyborg (I'm not sure if we were supposed to get the image of Neo and Trinity, from the Matrix movies, here or if this was something different - this was a very visual book with, in my opinion, little coherence in what the world looks like, either from Gibson's view or from my own reader-response perspective). Anyway, as Haraway defines "cyborg," Case is a cyborg. He has a human body, but he is also partly machine. His discursive abilities with the machine suggests that he is a part of a society with the machines and the matrix. It's like being an academic - the better you understand a discourse, the more you become a part of that community (i.e., the Burkean Parlor metaphor). In other words, Case, instead of being-in-the-world, is a being that is in-the-machine/with-the-machine.

In some discourse communities, Case would be seen as a posthuman (see Kathrine Hayles). Benjamin Fair, in "Stepping Razor in Orbit," suggests that Case transforms into a posthumanist paradigm because he "sheds the humanist ideal of disembodiment in favor of a posthumanist affirmation of embodiment" (93). Language, discourse escapes Fair. He uses Hayles term "posthuman" to describe this transformation, but what does (post)human mean? Well, according to the literature (theory literature, not Neuromancer), being posthuman means a change in bodily appearance by way of accepted and sought-after alterations, mainly technological, but not always. (Post)human seems to build on the move towards (post)moderninsm, (post)structuralism, (post)criticism, etc. But there is a schism here. Each of the latter terms are theoretical. "Human" is not theoretical, it is corporeal, but it is much more than the body. Case maintains his body, but he enters the discourse of the machine. This seems much more like a place where the word "cyborg" would be more appropriate. Additionally, a person with a mechanical body, but an undeterminate consciousness (as in The Sheep Look Up's Hoppy Harrington) is also cyborgian. The division seems to be far less clear than Hayles makes it and Fair echoes. Fair continues to say that "Once Case realizes his body is a data system and accepts his intimate connection with it, he finds alternate means for identity" (101). If Case was (post)human, a machine-being, why would he need to identify and what would he need to identify with? Genuinely, I have no idea and I can't claim to have an idea - my body and mind are so interlinked that I don't know what it's like. Still, to assume "human" means the body is to devalue the other parts of humanity that makes us who we are, such as love, empathy, sympathy, anger, frustration, compassion, etc. and modes of thinking that are not prescribed by an operating system (if we can assume that our operating systems of "appropriateness" and such are not coded into our environment - that does not mean it would not be anarchic, but it is not a requirement of the environment). If we are (post)human, what are we? If we look at the theory of evolution, have we ever refered to "human" as (post)ape? Not to my knowledge. Those are apes; We are humans. So, we are humans; they are what? Case is human with a new discourse community. He has a human body, but a dog without a tale is no less a dog, as a dog with no tale and an electonic collar is not a (post)dog. Perhaps Case can be seen as "superhuman" ("an entity with intelligence or abilities exceeding normal human standards" - thanks wiki), but I suggest a more (re)presentative term to avoid the connotations of the "super": HyperHuman - to build on the technological terms "hypermedia" and "hypertext."

Ok, well, let's finish this up: Latham's review of the Cyberpunk = Gibson = Neuromance book was interesting and what caught my eye was towards the end: "The explosion of information in electronic culture, which amounts to an epochal challenge to the capacities of human memory, has generated two sorts of 'digital narratives': the 'postmnemotechnic'... and the 'antimnemotechnic'" (271), with a focus on memory. Case does not fit into either category. He still has human memory, but engages with the machine. It is not synthetic and it is not skeptical of memory "altogether."

Finally, McCaffery's article on Cyberpunk. First, as a person who was/is a part of a punk scene, I don't like this term, but I'll deal with it. Anway, the question that McCaffery suggest at the base of cyberpunk (and to a more specifc level in punk - the individual): "In a sense, all cyberpunk asks the same questions - " it mean to be human in today's world? stayed the same and changed? And what does all this suggest about the future we will in habit?" (8). Let me suggest an answer similar to Louis Armstrong's response to the question "what is jazz?": If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Re/Vised Major Project Proposal

2009-03-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

Elisa,

Here is my revised abstract with bibliography. Also, I've tried to send you and email about meeting when we get back from San Fransisco. Have your received the emails? I can meet any time during Spring Break. Please let me know as soon as you have a chance. Thanks.

Sergio

Abstract:

Warren Ellis' comic book series Transmetropolitan presents a dystopian view of the future that follows the main protagonist, Spider Jerusalem, on his journalistic journey throughout the world. In the fist collection (Back on the Street) and in the ninth collection (The Cure) we encounter a former friend of Jerusalem named Fred Christ who leads a movement of transhuman beings towards political and social acceptance. However, the more that we see of Fred Christ and his interactions with Jerusalem, we get a much different view of his intentions and his goals. While we only encounter Fred a few times in the series, his role in the comics series provides an interesting view of posthumanism/transhumanism in future societies. Fred seeks to legitimize the existence of "transients" (his term for transhumans) through revolutionary action and by attempting to begin a "transient" religion for himself and his followers. Jerusalem acts as a protagonist (in various ways) that investigates Fred's role in the political atmosphere in this future. Building on Robert Pepperell's work on Posthumanism, Nick Bostrom's work on Transhumanism, and Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," this paper looks to explore the presentation of posthumans in Ellis' Transmetropolitan. Further, this paper will explore in what ways the representation of transhumans in the comics series parallels the Bostrom's work with World Transhumanist Association.

Bibliography:

Bostrom, Nick. "A History of Transhumanist Thought." Jornal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (April 2005):
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
Ellis, Warren. Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street. Vertigo; New York; 1998.
Ellis, Warren. Transmetropolitan: The Cure. Vertigo; New York; 2003.
Pepperell, Robert. "Post Human Manifesto: Contents." Robert Pepperell. 8 Mar. 2009 .
World Transhumanist Association. "Humanity+." Humanity+. 8 Mar. 2009 .

Tiptree

2009-03-02T17:01:00.000-08:00

I'm not really sure what to do with the Larbelestier article about Bradley's life and the stories revolving around her identity. The only connection I can make to the stories are that she seems to enjoy being ambiguous and concealing her identity (and here I am specifically referring to "Houston Houston").

However, the connection that I want to explore a bit inthis blog post has to do with Jameson's chapter on "The Alien Body" and why he bring in Blade Runner and some of the ties in with Haraway's "A Cybord Manifesto" (the Delaney article on Haraway wasn't in the folder and the Haraway article on Tiptree was missing also).

Towards the end of "Houston Houston," our compatriots from Sunbird One spaceship seem to echo some of the same anti-feminist themes that we saw in Herland, supplemented with selection from the Christian Bible (Corinthians, Revelations). Also, the culture of the world/space suggests that they have moved beyond those anti-feminist themes with a homogenous culture. I know that I seem to be harping on homogeniety through this class, but it seems that the main themes in the novels that represent a form of utopia have two main modes: 1) an undesireable culture where someone (some group) is subjegated; and 2) a society without differences. I don't agree that this is the only way to achieve utopia and I tried to explain that in the last blog post.

Homogeniety in "Houston Houston" is represented through a cyborgian social atmosphere that seems to build on Huxley (growing babies), Piercy (an adrongynous society) and Gilman (three explores entering unexplored territory). A lot like Herland, the production of children is tightly controlled and the only reason that the men have been allowed to survive is to introduce a new genetic strands into the society. Connie, on the other hand, faces a different problem - she has the choice to take an an "antidote" and join the society, or she will not survive like her fellow male astronauts.

Jameson writes that Bladerunner "singals the passage from the classic or exotic alien to the representation of the other as the same, namely the android, whose differenctiation from the earlier robot secures a necessarily humanoid form" (141). To an extent, "Houston Houston" represents a similar change from the three novels mentioned above. The marker that suggests this differentiation is the way that the women allowed one of the men to rape her in order to add another 'genotype' into the social fabric. Why the integration of another genotype? TO diversify, but only through the technology that they have developed. This may not be the exact definition that Haraway presents for a cyborg, it may still be an applicable to the world "human beings" presented in "houston Houston." Haraway writes: "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine an organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is live social relations, our more important political construction, a world-changing fiction" and that "Liberatoin rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility" (149). But I find myself wondering whether this is the case in "Houston Houston." It seems that the use of technology has not liberated the culture, but indoctrinated through social control, a la The Dispossessed (in part). In Bladerunner, the androids attempt to move beyond the social control to become "human" - as I think about the presentation on "post-human" for the end of the semester, the question I am asking myself is whether "human" can be defined as merely that Being for whom Being is an issue (Heidegger), which includes androids or whether "human" refers to the physical and intellectual aspects of humanity. Maybe view of "liberation" isn't the same thing as Haraway, but being a cyborg does not seem to indicate liberation. Using a machine requires some sort of interaction, a being in-the-world, a being with-the-world. Machines are a part of the world. But I don't think that machines can necessarily liberate us, but that they create a thing, an object, that removes an essential element of humanity: emotion. The women in "Houston Houston" are devoid of emotion - a loving touch, a moment of anger, etc... The androids in Bladerunner present an interesting problem - they are cyborgs that do seek emotion, but they are programmed, for emotion and for life. Is a programmed emotion the same as an emotion that builds through nurture? Questions Questions Questions.

Piercy and Time

2009-02-22T11:26:00.000-08:00

To orient my reading of Marge Piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, I feel that I need to say that I kept thinking of TIME COP with Jean-Claude Van Damme as soon as the book started talking about alternate futures and the possible 'concurrent' universes. So, keep in mind that this post might show tinges of that movie and my readings of both.

The question I had of both stories, in relation to the theoretical readings and BEING AND TIME, is: What is time?

We don't get a clear definition of what Piercy thinks about time other than that the future can contact the past. There are two quotes that I want to pull out of WOMAN...:

"Maybe. Yours is a crux-time. Alternate universes coexist. Probabilities clash and possibilities wink out forever" (170);
"We could put it: at certain cruxes of history... forces are in conflict. Technology is imbalanced. Too few have too much power. Alternate futures are equally or almost equally probable... and that affects the... shape of time" (189).

This last quote is one that Moylan takes out and explicates a bit more in the ‘organizing and violence’ section with a quote from Luciente: “Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future” (138).

Moylan works with this idea of time and utopia throughout chapter 6 of the book. Later in the chapter, he writes something similar to L's words: “The future is never certain. Utopia is never fixed once and for all” (148).

Ferns the same point: "[Piercy] shows the future as conditional, rather than perfect” (465).

However, the point that I think is most significant is from Jones’ article: “Like the future world, Connie is struggling to exist” (124). The significance has to do the question that I began with: What is time?

Heidegger tells us that we are always in a state of Being-in-the-world and Being-with-the-world. In other words, we can’t extract our conception of the world from how we perceive the world… and here is where we get to TIME COP.

In TIME COP, Damme’s character travels into the past to save his current world’s make-up from changing through the actions of a guy who wants to take over the world by making significant investments as a younger version of himself. (And here we are ignoring any indication of whether we believe time travel is possible – how can we conceptualize time travel without understanding what we mean by time). What Damme’s character discovers is that the slightest change or involvement by one person in the past completely alters the future - not mere act of traveling, but his actions in the past. I’m wondering why Luciente’s character, or her world, did not change with her interaction with Connie. I wonder how much this interaction changed - apparently not much since L runs through the novel. Well, if Connie is in a clinic for the mentally-ill, her actions are not taken seriously and she may have problems working towards any change in the larger cultural or social sphere - but thinking that this novel is about a insane woman (for whatever reason: the abortion, her lover, etc... She does have mental problems, but that doesn't mean she is unreliable. See Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic.) seems to be a cop-out to the larger issue of time.

So let’s try to compare these two stories briefly and see what happens (bad-pun intended). If the goal that Luciente sets out to accomplish is to affect change through Connie, in order to create the androgynous society in 2137, it seems that that society would be an alteration of what Luciente knows – unless this has already happened in a parallel universe. For TIME COP, Max Walker (Damme’s character) set out to maintain the world he knows and understands, despite his unhappiness with that world (his wife and child were killed about 10 years earlier). Well, through his actions to maintain the status of that world ten years in the future, he inadvertently changes the future. (Let’s avoid looking at BACK TO THE FUTURE here.) In other words, it is difficult to believe that Luciente’s actions don’t intentionally destroy her and her world.

Further, ‘time travel’ seems to be much more complicated that Piercy presents in WET. How can we experience the future, through Connie, without understanding what it means to time travel. We only see “one possible future,” ‘a future that is not certain,’ a future that ‘struggles to exist,’ and that future is one that focuses on an androgynous society similar to the one we find in HERLAND. The level of control that we see in HERLAND connects to the level of control in Connie’s ward and the world of that Luciente introduces to Connie.

Finally, let’s go back to Moylan: “Utopia is never fixed once and for all” and neither is time (148). Then, is utopia a temporal experiment, an experiment that shifts and adjusts to how we conceive of time? If so, why Luciente’s focus on maintaining her world, why Walker’s?

Well, Walker (TIME COP) shows us in the last scene of the movie. Utopia is not time, but what you do with that time, how we are with-the-world, in Heideggerian terms. Walker tells his self-driving car to take him home (to his crappy apartment). Yet, when the car reaches it’s programmed destination, it pulls up to a 3 story house with a large yard and trees and clean-cut grass on a sunny morning. He steps out of the car and his wife and child approach him with large smiles and an aura of joy. Time has changed, his family has not been killed and he is happy, no longer depressed about the world he lives in – strange connections with Connie’s abortion and loss of a child.

Moylan’s quote then may suggest a different understanding of how we create a utopia within time and our Being-with-the-world: Utopia is not a grand conceptualized world or society in which everyone is happy. As a ‘no-place,’ utopias exist in time and individual uses of that time. Walker’s character (and Connie’s to an extent) is not unhappy with the world as it is, but with their position in the world and how they experience the world. Luciente may be happy with her world and the androgynous social order, but it seems to be such an insincere utopia – there is no love, only social acceptance and social roles. (Note: I don’t mean physical love.) Post-human? Depends on how you define human – for Heidegger, Dasein is the term he uses: ‘The Being for whom Being is an issue.’ Connie and Walker are both Daseins through their desires to understand their roles in the world. However, Luciente seems to ignore what it means to ‘be.’ She does not seek anything other than maintaining her world. She likes her society. Walker on the other hand does not like his world and Being is an issue for him - in his Being-with-the-world. The question of utopia, then, is not what is the “perfect world.’ Rather, the question of utopia seems to be based in time and how we make use of that time with our own questions of what it means to be in-the-world.

Piercy’s WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, I believe, is her own exploration of what it means to exist in-the-world – her own search and expression of what it means to ‘be.’ Revolution, a theme we’ve seen in the last few novels, for Connie seems to be a way to make the world what she wants it to be and her own desire to lead the world into a utopia. However, what she seems to disregard is that that version of utopia, that future-yet-to-come, is her own construction through Luciente (whether L is an hallucination or not). Perhaps, the criticism of the novel avoids this question: is the goal of a broad social utopia a form of illusion, one that Luciente presents to Connie and the reader? Further, even if Connie is schizophrenic, perhaps the desire for a social utopia is one that reflects a desire to collapse her 3 names/personalities into one coherent world. The problem with revolution is that the revolt-ers eventually become the oppressors, they become the leaders, the make the world over in their own image.

Is this anarchic? Most likely, but I’m okay with that. But not an anarchy in the sense of no order. Rather, an anarchy more like the one we see in The Dispossessed. A mixture of collectivist anarchism and individualistic anarchism. There exists a social order, but an order that adjusts to the progress and benefit of the people. As we see in Lessig's Free Culture, the laws do not always represent the people and the social order. They become antiquated and the beauracracy to change the laws is too much to deal with. In other words, any form of government that does not reflect the desires of the people, one that does not seek to deconstruct the social and economic heirarchies that oppress the people will never be equal and will never achieve the utopian visions we see in WET. Rather, the utopian vision we see in The Dispossessed seems to be the most reflective of what we can achieve and remain Daseins - homogeneity breeds complasence.

Shevek, Heterotopias and Academia

2009-02-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure what to say about Le Guin’s DISPOSSESSED in relation to the theoretical readings, but I feel an obligation to do so. I feel a bit limited to discussing this work in relation to heterotopia(s) and the schism between fantasy and SF. Perhaps Jameson’s claim that “the principle of world reduction” as becoming “an instrument in the conscious elaboration of a utopia” comes closest to what I found to be a central theme in the novel. Still, the novel’s focus on Shevek’s journey into a world without a government, where people (human or posthuman) govern themselves through ridiculing, insulting and beating the crap out of each other, seems the most compelling and interesting aspect in the story.

Most of the novel seems to describe what Deleuze called the ‘society of control.’ We see this same concept in another way in Le Guin: “Surely freedom lay rather in openness than in secrecy, and freedom is always worth the risk” (109). What is the risk? That Shevek will be ostracized if he goes beyond the social norm, the socialism that turns into the ‘society of control.’ A man given a name by a computer, a man who social signature was determined by a computational chance. Still, he recognizes himself as an individual (and we learn that noone alive will ever have the same name on Odo). However, his individuality on Annares is trumped by the social and cultural organization: “We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no soldiers, no wars” (300). But this is a false description, as we see with Shevek’s tutor: Sabul. As a commentary on “intellectual property,” this novel sets up a dichotomy that we seem to value in academia – free knowledge. What we learn is public, published in journal, presented at conference, found on databases. Yet, anyone who wants that knowledge needs to have access to the library or to money to access that knowledge.

Foucault’s description of utopias seems more connected to this world Le Guin presents: “Utopias are sites with no real place.” Shevek contrasts his view of freedom when he says that his “society is also an idea. I made it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human solidarity, an important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the other. I am letting the propertarians by the truth from me” (345). Shevek juxtaposes “a single real place” with “several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” The same sort of thing, I think, applies to our work in academia – we produce ideas and work from ideas to produce knowledge, knowledge that feeds into the ‘propertarian’ outside. We teach students that are going out into the world to buy house, large screen TVs, etc. The grounding that Shevek has in the institution is not very different from us as graduate students. We are trying to build our freedom through our idea and our integration into the academic culture. The question that develops from this: How do we manage the desire for liberation when the social and cultural forces manage our work for the ‘propertarians’?

Shevek's Virginity is Stolen (Literally? Literarily?)

2009-02-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

I have now reached the section where Shevek 'erupts' onto Vea's skirt. From what I understood, he was changing and becoming a part of the culture of Annares. This reminded me of a song by The (International) Noise Consiparcy called: "Capitalism Stole my Virginity." The following are the lyrics:

Nowhere is untouched by the shame
Who said we could get by with our childhood games
Days of innocence are all long gone
Avoid the shock honey and try to live on

Woke up all paralyzed
All dreams corrupted in front of our eyes
Cause on every forehead of every little whore
There's a sign that says, 'baby don't come back no more'

Distasteful ugly and cheap
That is how you make me feel, I said
Capitalism stole my virginity
Capitalism stole, capitalism stole
Capitalism stole my virginity

Robbed out of our bleeding hearts
Smashed our illusions, tore them all apart
Now we are unsentimental and unafraid
To destroy this culture that we hate

Sort of tired of being nothing
When, when we should be everything
On every forehead of every little whore
There's a sign that says, 'baby we're all born to die'

Distasteful ugly and cheap
That is how you make me feel, I said
Capitalism stole my virginity

We are all sluts, cheap products
In someone else's notebook

Environmental Dystopia

2009-02-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

About 2 hours ago, I got home from reading The Sheep Look Up at JJs and started to make dinner. As it is, I live alone and watch the news while I eat. Well, as I finish making breakfast for dinner, CNN had on two individuals arguing over global warming and how to start working towards a solution (no actual solutions were brought up in this "debate"). So, I finish up, clean the dishes, using as little water as possible and try to recycle what I can. Then, I head into the back of the apartment, sit at the desk and open up Carson's Silent Spring which starts with an introduction from Vice President Al Gore - my mind shifts to:

Garrard then brings the first line of Carson's "A Fable for Tomorrow" in chapter 1 of Ecofeminism. He writes of the first line: "Concentrating on images of natural beauty and emphasizing the 'harmony' of humanity and nature that 'once' existed, the fable at first presents us with a picture of essential changelessness, which human activity scarcely disturbs, and which the annual round of seasons only reinforces" (1). Which brings us to de Certeau's claim that the act of walking is a constant change. If 'harmony' can only take place without change, as Garrard interprets Carson's fable, de Certeau's claim that any interaction and movement on the part of wo/men is a move towards a dystopia, such as the one we see in The Sheep Look Up.

Brunner's on page 323, however, presents a contrast to Carson (more specifically Garrard's reading of Carson): "Observers are comparing this to the aftermath of war to give an idea of the scale of it, but that doesn't tell you much. The catastrophe has struck from nowhere, and no one knows what the hell is going on..." (323). And this, I know, is a stretch, but the observers here are not in harmony with their surroundings. In the video above, we see a visual representation of what Brunner describes in this "newscast" report (as he's done now and again throughout the novel). Brunner and Gore and Carson seem to be working with what Garrard terms "Apocalypse rhetoric." (93), a seemingly 'tragic drama' (86-7). Garrard cites Buell as arguing that 'Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal' (93). Tragedies create fear (and if we believe Yoda, fear leads to anger; and anger leads to the dark side :)).

It is interesting to compare this world with the worlds we see in the previous novels. In Herland, we get a culture that cherishes the land and seems to work for the benefit of the people in that land. In Brave New World, we see a controlled world with a constructed environment that also seems to work well - but will they fall into an apocolypse like in TSLU? (This question is yet to be answered.) Dr. Bloodmoney, however, is much more similar to TSLU in that the environment in both worlds are toxic - in DB, it is the result of actions taken by man. However, in TSLU, it is the lack of action that causes the environmental apocalypse.

3 Feb 2009

2009-02-03T14:04:00.000-08:00

Phillip K. Dick
- Kipple is the crap of left over from consumerist culture (everything moves towards entropy)

Dr. Bloodmoney
- Bill, Eddies brother, is a fetus still in her body (where the fetus did not develop fully. - it is not a spirit that entered her body.
- for Dick, evil is a lack of empathy
- We want an I/Thou relationship with everything (for PH Dick)
- for DIck to continue to grow he moved from woman to woman (maybe)
- Bill and Bluthgeld use language to connect; Hoppy uses object to connect
-

Does DR. BLOODMONEY Fit?

2009-01-29T07:38:00.000-08:00

After a 1/4 of the way through the book, I kept thinking whether Dr. Bloodmoney fits in with this course on topias and science fiction. I'm not sure that it does when we start to deal with the characters Harry Hopington and "Mr. Tree." They both claim to have supernatural powers and nothing in the book really contradicts that perception from the readers' perspective. Why does Dangerfield on feel poorly/ill when he goes over the northeast part of America in the satellite? Because someone is transmitting negative airwaves at him from Earth? That seems to be the implication and the conclusion that Dangerfield comes up with. Still, we can't get away from psychoanalysis that is in the book and that Dr. Stockstill utilizes in the book. So, is part of Dangerfield's illness, a mental condition caused by his wife's suicide that is triggered flying over the northeast? Maybe...? One allusion that Brunner may be making is that psychoanalysis may be a form of magic.

As we have talked about, science fiction starts moving towards fantasy when aspect of "magic" and "supernatural" abilities start making their way into the story. This is where I think that the book goes astray in the genre of SF. For example, Jameson ("After Armageddon") writes:

"This power of Hoppy's to project bodies into the air like soccer balls later becomes lethal (the death of Bluthgeld), but it suggests a kinesthetic affinity for Dangerfield's fate as well - the live being housed in a cylindrical unit rolling through empty space. And when it is remembered that this plot line reaches its climax in Hoppy's attempt to substitute himself, through his own voice and powers of mimicry, for the ailing Dangerfield, the analogy between the two positions becomes unmistakable" (352).

And there are two comments that I want to making in relation to this quote from Jameson: 1) This power of being able to telepathically control people (like robots) made me think of the ethical position of Dr. Xavier (from X-Men) for not engaging in the practice of using his own telepathic powers to control people even if it benefits the "greater good." Still, Xavier may be considered in a weird location because, even though he doesn't control people, he always seems to read the minds of the people in his general vicinity and is smart enough to use his rhetorical moves to influence those other people. 2) Hoppy has a similar position even though it is not a supernatural power - his rhetorical skills place him in a position where he can take over Dangerfield's position as a radio host. His impersonations allow him to test his ability to persuade people that he is another person if those people do not see him (remember the stage performances in the barn(?) where he begins to impersonate Dangerfield - I think he even mentions, at one point, that the purpose of those performances is to test his own skills of persuasion). But even before testing those skills, his ability to bring people together and listen to him seems kind of supernatural since he was not looked upon favorably before the bomb.

At least in X-Men, there was a genetic mutation that cause the evolution of certain individuals to have supernatural powers as a survival mechanism. But where the hell did these supernatural powers come from in Dr. Bloodmoney? I don't think that we can claim it was a result of the bomb and the radiation. Hoppy was using his supernatural powers to fix a radio early on in the novel - the bomb didn't create that power.

I'm not convinced that Dr. Bloodmoney is within the science fiction tradition, at least as it has been explained up to this point in the class. I mean, I see the science in the book and I see the fiction in the book, but when combined, the term "science fiction" means something completely different.

Thanks to wikipedia's entry on "Science Fiction," we can contrast this book with some sci-fi writers' definitions of SF:

"According to science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, "a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."[10] Rod Serling's definition is "fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible."[11] Lester Del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado– or fan- has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is", and that the reason for there not being a "full satisfactory definition" is that "there are no easily delineated limits to science fiction."[12]"

27 Jan. 2009 Notes

2009-01-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

Brave New World (Huxley), "The Machine Stops"(Forester), "Wilderness" (Garrard)

Forester and Huxley were involved with the "Bloomsbury Group"
Forester was homosexual
Huxley was so blind he did not get drafted into WW I - signed as a CO (Conscientious Objector)
POSITIVISM (etymology): (from etymonline.com) L. positivus "settled by arbitrary agreement, positive" (opposed to naturalis "natural"), from positus, pp. of ponere "put, place."
Huxley and Racism: http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=55
Huxley's view, nurture v. nature?
Huxley might be trying to show us that John Savage is just as controlled through his nurturing as Linda and Bernard. Yet, Savage is self-taught, not socially controlled.

The Production of an Ex-Wilderness

2009-01-23T17:15:00.000-08:00

"It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace. This dichotomy is not an invention of the twentieth century, yet it is this century that the most striking examples of the phenomena have appeared. Never before has man pursued global harmony more vocally while amassing stockpiles of weapons so devastating in their effect. The second world war - we were told - was The War To End Wars. The development of the atomic bomb is the Weapon to End Wars.

And yet the wars continue."

-- Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, The Watchmen

___________
As I got about a quarter of the way through "Plan of the Present Work" I kept thinking, what does any of this have to do with Wilderness and in what ways can this be applicable to Brave New World, "The Machine Stops," and Herland. And honestly, I'm still working my way through it. But here's what I've come up with.

The similarities in each of the stories is this theme of hegemony. While each culture is different, they each require that the individuals in that culture give themselves to the social sphere and do not have any personal traits that can cause problems. In Herland, it was bred out of the culture by asking the women who had undesireable qualities to not have children. Still, the women who did have children were not allowed to take care of their own children or educate them. They were given up to the social sphere where that personal bond between mother-child was broken. In Brave New World, we get children without reproduction. These children don't even have a genetic connection in this world. Then we get Forester's "The Machine Stops" - here there is a genetic connection, but one that is broken through a separation, similar to the separation in Herland. The major differnce with Forester, however, is that there is not social aspect to the story. The only time that we encounter any social interaction, Kuno's mother becomes irritated at the phone call because it interupts her production of ideas - TMS tries to enforce, socially, isolation. Why? I don't understand the need for isolation. Isolation = production? What are they producing? But this is similar to Huxley's BNW - why do they need to produce? In Herland, it seems that the production is to support and enhance the lives of the children and having children gives meaning to life. But I don't understand the meaning of life in the other two stories. Which is where I'd like to get back into this idea of hegenomy - it is a departure from Garrard's chapter on Wilderness. Wilderness as a connection to nature and this idea of being undomesticated.

If we take Snyder's claim (in Garrard 83) as accurate, the further these stories remove us from nature and our interactions with nature, the less "wild" we become, the less human we become - human in the sense of having the ability to interact. The isolation of "The Machine Stops" is an example of this domestication and something we seem to be moving towards more and more in the US. Under Bush, Jr. we were told to keep consuming, help the economy move - see the "stimulus" package. Under Obama, we are seeing the same thing. We need to keep the economy moving, so let's try another "stimulus" package. Additionally, Obama's move towards more government spending in renewable energy sources further complicates the issue. As an example, this move towards creating the renewable will benefit the wilderness/nature (i.e. trees, grass, mountains, etc...), but it will further isolate the US from the world through our focus on economic development. [I understand and think that it is necessary to maintain the US role in the world, but I'm not sure we can escape this move away from the wilderness.]

Let me try to make this a bit more succinct: The novels/stories seem to suggest that the more we move towards production and economic development, the more we become domesticated into the culture and we lose this sense of "natural" being. The more we move away from wilderness, the more isolated we become from it and the more domesticated we become until we enter a place world where the only interaction we have with each other and the wilderness around us is artificial - and frustrating to the point of removing us from the culture. We need ideas, but ideas for what? If the only production is idea, where is the use in having those ideas? Survival is no longer a concern - the concern, at least in the way the stories suggest, is production and consumation to keep the system moving.

I don't know if that made sense, but let me try to tie it together with Lefebvre.

Lefebvre talks about social space and what happens in the cosolidation of power within a state on page 23 of the article. He writes: "It enforces a logic that puts an end to conflicts and contradictions. It neutralizes whatever resists it by castration or crushing." It seems that the idea of domestication is what helps to create utopias - which seem a lot like dystopias to me. But in this domesticazation of people and the growth of hegemony, the person(ality) is lost.

Extending Huxley's novel, in order to have a utopia, control is require and freedom need to be lost. It seems like putting a huge contraceptive on human nature and turning the characters into machines. I think a story that ties this in together is Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," which is be adapted into a short film called 2081: http://www.finallyequal.com/trailer-small.html.

20 Jan. 2009 Notes

2009-01-20T13:59:00.000-08:00

Approaches to Teaching... Series - check them out for teaching approaches - MLA Series
Gilman focused more on work than relationships - she said she "didn't know how to make the two compatible"
Men belonged in the public sphere and women belonged in the private sphere
People used to pay to see a woman speak in public, it was so out of the ordinary
Relinquished child to her husband after having moved with the child (happened after she separated from him) - she was bashed in the media for being "unnatural" for giving up her child
wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" about her views on her doctor's treatment of her Postpartum Depression
supported herself by writing and she wrote constantly
1860-1935 (Gilman's lifespan)

HERLAND

Having to climb up to Herland, symbolizing 'superiority'
bottom of page 12 - 'open spaces' - the symbolism of the land can be seen as: Earth is Woman (as in the body/sex organ)
female is to male as nature is to culture (author?)
ecofeminism - about hyperseparation (Garrard 25) between female and male
Technology of Orgasm (interesting book title)
Note: Could she be arguing that Profession(al) work does not remove a woman's desire to be a mother because that is the essence of a woman (according to the administrators in Herland)
annoyingness of how quickly the three men acquiesce to the women (when they present the evidence to the men) - except for Terry, who is disregarded as an "asshole" (Curtis)
Men's idealism (Jeff) can corrupt a woman's independece - why did they get married (the women) if not necessary - integrating the outside world's culture even though they saw faults in the outside culture.
true utopian vision: that there is a mutual respect in a marital paradigm?
Gilman's nature is a park - not the wilderness
Herland as factory/farm (Randy/Anthony)
eugenes (from Gk. eu "good" and genos "birth")
141: Van as "queer"
Link to "Birth Control, Religion, and the Unfit" from The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective, Chapter XXII
Scientism of Van and the Nature of Motherhood
lack of desire to explore on the side of the women
anti-patriarchy, pro-matriarchy
Gilman has to find a replacement for the profit-system - socialism is the replacement
eu-genics is the basis of their economy
the body has no place and there is no need for sexual pleasure - the body has no place, but the body is punished for nonconformity (not allowed to have children). If it is the desire that begins inception, how can that be removed for the rebellious.

HERLAND & Some EcoFeminism

2009-01-15T19:40:00.000-08:00

It all began as a betrayal of trust. In the final chapter ("Expelled"), Van, our narrator, agrees that it would be unwise to disclose the location of Herland until given permission by the ‘administrators (??). Yet, at the beginning ("A Not Unnatural Enterprise"), he writes: "I haven't said where it was for fear some self-appointed missionaries, or traders, or land-greedy expansionists, will take it upon themselves to push in. They will not be wanted, I can them that, and will fare work than we did if they do find it." Perhaps this is entirely conjecture (from Latin - to throw together; a guess), but these sentences at the beginning of the book seem to indicate that the women of Herland don't want anyone to find them. Where they had felt isolated from the rest of the world after interviewing the men, returning to the beginning, it seems that the story begins with a desire to remain isolated, a lack of desire to explore. Now we seem to move into a new discourse in the novel - can Herland really be seen as a utopia (as Arnold writes: "It is desire, as Ruth Levitas asserts in The Concept of Utopia, that is the defining element in Utopian literature (7). This act is necessary in order to achieve Utopia" (300)).

In three ways, I'm not sure that we can view Herland as a utopia: 1) it is restrictive and limiting (i.e., not all of the women are allowed to have children); 2) in EcoFeminism (see Deegan), the culture seeks to conquer and oppress through a Matriarchy (rather than a Patriarchy, which seems merely to reverse roles, not actually resolve the problem of equality that 3rd wave feminism attempts to address [by the way, I think that the use of the work feminism is inappropriate for a field that focuses on Humanism – we are our names, our nomos, but that discussion doesn’t fit in here fully]); and 3) the grounding of the story does not escape the current world (Arnold 2). Garrard’s comment on page 50, when he is discussing Thoreau’s Walden is interesting in relation to the connectivity between Herland and the outside world – he quotes Thoreau: “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odours all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, or coral reefs, and Indian oceans” (Garrard 50). Both Thoreau and Gilman seem to present similar images of utopias – utopias need to have a reference point from which to judge their society and culture – which the cultural education that the three male explores provide represent.

This last point is one that I want to discuss a bit more in-depth. And I don’t mean that the story maps the world that the men come from. I want to go meta here – Gilman is writing a story about a world where the Patriarchal system has not existed for hundreds of years and yet, she works from the position that the highest calling a woman can achieve, even when outside of a patriarchy, is Motherhood. Now, I’m not sure what this means about Gilman’s ideologies, but I’m also unsure of whether we can accept the ethnographic approach to the novel from an unreliable narrator. The narrator seems to have, at the beginning, discarded his promise to not discuss Herland with the “current” world. Our only way to know the story comes from the patriarchal system through Van. Arnold’s article even suggests that Van is not as objective as he presents himself: “Van is the most balanced of the three men” (301). Still, he isn’t completely balanced. Reading the novel with the trust we have in the author clouds our understanding of the work being done in the book. Yes, Herland seems to be utopic, but only so far as creating a community of acceptance and restriction – they are happy, but only as happy as the culture allows, if that makes sense. What I find interesting also is that the highest goal that Gilman conceives of for the women in this female-only society is Motherhood (the collectivist, not the individualistic).

[Awkward Transition into Other Thoughts]

I’m not really sure how to broach this subject, so I’m going to attempt to tread very lightly. Gilman provides the reader with three men and each represent Freud’s Id (Terry), Ego (Van), Super Ego (Jeff). I’m sure that you can see the connects, especially through Arnold’s discussion of each male character on pages 301-302. As the representation of the Ego in the novel, Van’s narration seeks objectivity, which he seems to shirk at the beginning of the novel, by presenting the story as a sort of ethnographic descriptive analysis. By presenting the story in this way, the story fails to reach a climax (at least in my reading of the novel) – it seems to navigate through the story as descriptive. What I’m wondering now, however, is more than about the effectiveness of this strategy. From the literature on Herland and ecofeminist criticism, if we extend this literature-studies word (climax) into a Freudian analysis, is the ethnographic study approach of storytelling in Herland, reflective of the patriarchal society in which Gilman lived? As much as I know about the time she was alive (1860-1935), a focus on a woman’s sexual gratification was not a significant aspect of that era. In lacking a climactic point in the story, can Gilman’s social constructions/understandings about women be a reflection of the patriarchal that she seeks to escape in Herland. Overall, the novel seems problematic as a utopia and as a feminist novel. Even ecologically, the book doesn’t seem to work – why did they get rid of all of the undesired animals? Even the interaction that the women in Herland had with nature could only work in the society by excluding the natural – cows, dogs, etc. It’s all a bit much…

13 Jan 2009 Class Notes

2009-01-13T16:11:00.000-08:00

Topias:
Josh, from Victor: "The past is coming to us from the future."

Some Definitions:
eu- : from Greek eu meaning "good" (eutopia - "ideal place")
u- : from Greek ou meaning "not" (utopia - "no place")
dys- : from Greek meaning "bad, ill" (dystopia - "imaginary bad place")

Science Fiction (deals with science or psuedo-science) - according to Vonnegut, SF occurs in the past, not the future
Fantasy (deals with magic)

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

Class Expectations

2009-01-06T06:42:00.000-08:00

Topias, coming from the Greek topos (place) refers to "a field." The similarity of the word to topoi ("commonplaces"), I think, cannot be disregarded in this class. These places, fields and commonplaces lead me to think of kairos and how we exist in a specific times and places. Further, I'm not sure if the novels that we will be reading seek to present future possibilities OR if they work as hyperbolic (cautionary?) stories.

I'm thinking specifically of Brave New World and Herland - do these stories suggest that "perfection"/homogeneity problemitizes the value of the differences we encounter in life. (Here I'm thinking of Latour's paraphrase of Neitzsche: "...the big problems were like cold baths: you have to get out as fast as you got in" (12).)

But I write too much already. Overall, I'm not sure what to expect from this course. Science Fiction is not a topia that I am very familiar with. Still, I am interested in learning more about the field and how it fits into the general RCID curriculum and emphasis (in 'knowing, making and doing'). Moreover, one expectation that I assume most the second-years have is to develop an understanding of how "Topias" will aid us in developing our prospecti through the semester in VV's studio and developing as scholars in the field of rhetorics.

Beyond that, since I am not familiar with "Topias," I am not sure what to expect from the course.

Defining "Utopia"

2009-01-01T19:47:00.000-08:00

1551, from Mod.L. Utopia, lit. "nowhere," coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying perfect legal, social, and political systems), from Gk. ou "not" + topos "place." Extended to "any perfect place," 1613. Utopian originally meant "having no known location" (1609); sense of "impossibly visionary, ideal" is from 1621; as a noun meaning "visionary idealist" it is first recorded c.1873 (earlier in this sense was utopiast, 1854).

[courtesy of etymonline.com]

More on Course expectations to follow in the next blog...

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