Monday, August 25, 2008

Steam-Punked

Regarding the Steampunk Backlash over at io9: I am both a fan and a critic of steam punk. It's fun and it's clever, but it's also sort of endlessly repetitive and pointless. It's a style that can only do one thing, and as a creative anachronism it can't really stretch. As soon as you try to push the envelope a little, they call it something else: diesel punk, sandal punk, elf punk. Is The Willows weird fiction, nostalgia, or tentacle punk? After a while it starts to get a little stupid.

From 60s era Time Machine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and T.V.'s Wild Wild West and Doctor Who, to the interactive mysteries and world-building of Myst and Riven, to Alan Moore's all-encompassing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and even Pynchon's epic Western Sci-Fi Historical extravaganza Against the Day, steam punk has been a huge part of everything I like about sci-fi. It's a kitschy blend of the technical and the domestic; gears and steam engines with comfy overstuffed chairs, brandy, and fireside philosophizing. It celebrates both the extraordinary and the quotidian with its eccentric scientists laboring in garage laboratories and boy geniuses inventing things in their rooms. In this regard, it's firmly in the tradition of all boy's fiction from Jules Verne to Sherlock Holmes to Back to the Future to Encyclopedia Brown to Spider-Man. You can run away, have an adventure, and still go to sleep with a full tummy, a soft bed, and a warm dog.

The problem with it right now is that it is a fad, and as a fad it doesn't really mean anything. It's just a style, once choice among many. It's very flat, and all the rough edges are worn away by the repetition of the same costumes and the same modded out computers. Worse yet, it isn't really fashion. It's dress-up. It's play. And too often this sort of play fails to make the leap from the personal and the fanciful, to the level of pure imagination (in the Coleridgian sense). In other words the meaning of steam punk fails to make the imaginative leap beyond its internet micro-culture to have a larger meaning in society. It's just another weird, creepy, sad hobby like gun collecting, or civil war re-enacting, or fantasy football.

For me, the deeper theme has something to do with the problematic rise and expansion of Capitalism and Imperialism during the Victorian era. Just as British military might was conquering the world, its people, its wealth, and its resources, industrialization was conquering the countryside, restructuring labor, worklife, homelife, and the family. Great advances, built on the backs of human suffering. Great adventures of exploration at the cost of colonial slaughter and subjugation. It's that sense of dislocation, contradiction, revolution, and change that steam punk has the potential to capture. You can see signs of it in the 60s version of steam punk in the way the stories reacted to the cold war, the space race, our friend the atom, and the rapid suburbanization of the cities. What else is Mad Men but a googie-punk version of the same idea and fascination? And today it serves as an outlet for all of our 21st century anxieties over American decline: globalization, the information age, ex-urbanization, systems of surveillance, economic uncertainity, global warming, the energy crisis and world wide terrorism.

It's not all brass goggles and zeppelins, after all. Steam punk is about systems of power and exploitation (steam driven turbines), and the ability of individuals to subvert and undo those systems in the name of the dispossesed (politically subversive punks). In steam punk, the individual is the champion of his preterite community standing against the plutocrats and the elect. Moreover it is where the logic and control of science and commerce meets the non-rational and chaotic forces of life and art. Or, as Henry Adams observed in the "Dynamo and the Virgin,"
This problem in dynamics gravely perplexed an American historian. The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed. Every one, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction -- the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. Singularly enough, not one of Adams's many schools of education had ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin: --
"Quae quondam rerum naturam sola gubernas."

The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools: --

"Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanto vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua disianza vuol volar senz' ali."

All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

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At Chartres -- perhaps at Lourdes -- possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles -- but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power -- only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

What's wanted is not just sci-fi gadgetry, but a deeper understanding of our own natures. The dyanamo is a sexless scientific artifact that hides within it the power and fecundity of chthonic nature. For thousands of years, in religion, in art, in symbol, the virgin as goddess had been the organizing principle for humanity; the driving force behind all human action. What then in the age of the steam engine and all the scientific discoveries to follow. What then is the nature of human existence? How does he organize himself? What of his relationships, society, love, marriage and the rest? How does he interact with his creations, as master or servant? What mysteries does life hold if one has access to infinite power without infinite wisdom?

If steam punk can ever rise to this level of understanding, then it will become something better than a fad.