Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow!

Seagram's whiskey predicted the world we live in today.

The Future as Literary Category

The earlier post about Mamatas, Kunkel, Wood, etc., got me thinking about the role of the individual in the artistic enterprise. In the Kunkel/Wood view of things High Realist fiction is about the psychological realism of well drawn characters. High Modernism is also about the individual, but it takes a fragmented stream of consciousness approach where psychology is less stable and more flowing. Post-modernism works against the idea of the individual to show how social forces shape circumstances. But like modernism it uses strategies of fragmentation and disconnection to show how things fall apart, and anarchist miracles and coincidence to show how they come back together. What then would a truly collectivist, coherent literature look like? It would look like myth or religion where the emphasis is on the transcendent and the apotheosis of meaning. So for lack of a better term, I'll call this pre-modernism.

In summary:

• Realism: Individualistic, Coherent - Psychology
• Modernism: Individualistic, Fragmented - Stream of Consciousness
• Pre-Modernism: Collectivist, Coherent - Transcendental
  
• Post-Modernism: Collectivist, Fragmented - Post-human

So if sci-fi is related to post-modernism, and PoMo is collectivist and fragmented, then the organizing principles that will define The Future, will also be collectivist and fragmented. Anarcho-Socialism, or something like that. Everyone working for the common good, but in a highly unregulated, decentralized way. Once the scarcity problem is solved, we'll all live in The Culture.

The Problem of the Problem of the Future

Or, Science Fiction, What is it Good For?

I don't agree with everything Nick Mamatas has to say about Benjamin Kunkel (I tend to be about 40/60 with regard to his highly enjoyable blog anyway), but this is a pretty interesting line of argument:

SF, or the SF worth writing about anyway, also problematizes politics and love and whatnot. And unlike literary novels, these books often manage to proselytize. Thus, all those ugly people who nonetheless have a dozen lovers at a time thanks to Heinlein, or the Freeze Your Body types, Sea-Steading Libertarians, folks who just don't shower because it's selling out to society's rules not to smell like landfill somehow, or even that wag whose novel for young boys detailed the plans for making an atom bomb out of household goods and mail-order uranium. Everything is historicized in SF: morality, love, what it means to be human (and thus a human character) and often these things are not historicized in a way amenable to the politics of the middle-class social democrat, especially not one terrified of both socialism and democracy.

The Singularity of the novel Kunkel is discussing is an issue primarily for the sort of novel he wrote, and those he mentioned in his essay. The novel, the "literary" novel anyway, is still the venue of choice for the emergent middle class and the thing about middle classes is that they generally have it pretty good until someone rolls out a guillotine. As Thomas Disch pointed out long ago, SF has a different audience and serves a different function. SF appealed to historically (and still does today), the self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer, or more of a meritocracy, or better appreciated the subtleties of the slide-rule and the pun. Now that the present has caught up to the future though, a few of these techno-nuts have managed to become crazy zillionaires, while the Kunkels of the world have been demoted to talking about wine and the semiotics of thongs. SF is still the house organ of Technocracy as Charles Stross has pointed out, and though Technocracy has failed so too has pre-postmodern-double-reverse-Enlightenment thought of the Dissent crowd. But SF people know how to reboot Windows. Kunkel knows how to pitch an essay over drinks.

What I like is the characterization of the ideal Sci Fi reader as that "self-taught weirdo who would be middle class were a world a bit fairer" which is perhaps the way many genre writers see themselves sometimes, and the majority of their readers as well. But where he sees an emergent Technocracy, I just see the same old tiresome Libertarians, Randian Objectivists, and loosely identifed right-wing para-militarist reactionaries. Moreover, there is no "Dissent" crowd beyond the popular straw man of said Libertarians, Objectivists, and Reactionaries. Either way, not my crowd.

And its sort of striking that Mamatas finds fault with Kunkel's argument where they should agree the most. That is, Mamatas sees sci-fi readers as highly individualistic, and Kunkel argues that great literature is about complex highly individualized characters. Kunkel's complaint is that dystopic novels are always about clones, zombies, or characters stripped of their individuality. In his view (and this is problematic in itself) there is no social, moral, or political argument without the fully-formed individual perspective. There can be no future without the idea of the heroic individual to inhabit it. I'm not sure I agree with this either (this argument echoes those over Gladwell's Outliers - do great men make history, or do historic moments make men great?. It seems sort of old-fashioned and overly dependendent on James Wood's ideas regarding the great Tolstoyan Realist Novel. There's no room for postmodernism - and the entire history of literary sci-fi mash-ups - in Kunkel's view, much less post-humanism).

Mamatas's complaint seems to be that Kunkel is an entitled little bitch who should just shut up. EOS:

Literary writers of the sort Kunkel discusses in his essay can't handle the future very well, so they end up falling into the pop culture traps of televised SF. (Thus Kunkel's conflation of the two is correct, but not self-aware.) More interesting SF takes swings at the centrality of the individual subject in a way which smells to Kunkel and his fellow travelers as the liquidation of the middle class. The new world to be born is absolutely terrifying—it's the killing fields, run!— and thus Kunkel did what Kunkels always do—he wrote a long essay in a minor left journal.

The whole thing falls apart with the ax-gridingly annoying reference to "fellow travelers" (whoever they are), but he's right about Science Fiction's capacity for asking the big po-mo questions.

For me, the larger point is that we shouldn't confuse the problem of how we think about the future with arguments over genre fiction vs. literary fiction, or autodicats vs. ivy leaguers, or cyber punks vs. cyper preps, because at this stage of the game we're all on the same side. We're all on the outside looking in. And what's really screwed up is that there is no longer a center. There is no longer a middle class. There is no power structure against which we struggle. Our entire society has been hollowed out and emptied. What we're up against (and boy are we up against it) is not a common enemy or some sort of mystic elite, but mass inertia. Mass incompetence. Mass irresponsibility. We're bogged down by everything that is douchy and infantile in our society. Consumerism. Christianism. Celebritism. It's this whole self-centered soup of entertainment that's keeping us from thinking or writing intelligently about anything, much less the future: the waste and detritus of the never-ending now.

So when we do think of the future it is no real future at all. These dystopic futures are a blending of Horror and Science Fiction. We become steampunks or retro-futurists, because we are haunted by the past, seduced by its glamour, burdened by its nightmarish history. Science Fiction becomes not a literature for technocrats but a system of nostalgic associations, signs and countersigns, to which we always return. In this way Science Fiction cedes its most defining feature, cool logic and reason, to the irrationality of horror fiction, where we are free to revisit that which is repressed and painful or to relieve our broken-hearted selves through the romantically and Romantically doomed. As a result, the future is given over to apocalypse, pestilence, zombies, war, and sometimes, the return of ancient squidlike gods. The future is punk (or punk'd) and there is no future, no future for you.

Horror, as a genre, is the literature of despair. It is the literature of an obsessive engagement with the pain of the past that refuses healing. If the goal of art is transformation, if its purpose is to take the past and make something new, or as David Milch says, to transform the pain of the past, in its pastness, into the future tense of joy, then what horror and dystopic science fiction gives us instead is a frozen vision of postponement, deferral, and refusal. The pain always remains, the future does not arrive. It's Lovecraftian and Beckettian.

What I think is missing from our fictions, or has been lost, or abandoned, or has become unfashionable is this ability to imagine joy. Optimism. Utopia. Tomorrowland. Not technocracy, but faith or something like it. This is perhaps where individuality and character intercede.

Self-Powered Gadgets

At least someone is working on useful things for the future. Teeny-tiny power supplies that convert pressure waves into energy:

The field behind this innovation is "piezoelectrics," which aims to develop self-powering electronics, eliminating the need for replaceable power supplies, such as batteries. Piezoelectrics are actually materials, such as crystals or ceramics, which generate a significant amount of voltage when a form of mechanical stress is applied, such as a push.

The concept isn’t new. It was used in sonar devices during World War I, and is applied today in car cigarette lighters. Pressing down the lighter button causes impact on a piezoelectric crystal that in turn produces enough voltage to create a spark and ignite the gas.

Can't wait for the piezoelectric ride at Tomorrowland.

Where are the Neo-Futurists?

I usually can't stand P.J. O'Rourke's brand of smug National Review-style "humourism", but this article on Disney's House of the Future II is awesome.

Back when Walt was alive Tomorrowland has an honest and optimistic attempt to envision a Utopian and decidedly American future. If anything, the problem with Tomorrowland was that it couldn't quite keep up with all the washing machines, automatic transmissions, plastics, and transistor radios that were actually being produced. Still, from the retro-futurist designs to the rapid-transit systems there wasn't anything about Walt's prototype city of tomorrow that wasn't inspiring.

Apparently HoF II is the latest in a long line of FAILURES on the part of DisneyCorp to repurpose Walt's visions. These include the steam punk-lite redo of Tomorrowland (O'Rourke calls it Jules Vernacular), the entire breathtakingly lame history of Epcot, and the hilarious demolition of the original HoF.

He writes:

Denigration of the future has become an intellectual prop over the past 40 years. Looking forward went out of fashion about the time that Buckminster Fuller’s audacious geodesic domes, meant to cover entire cities, wound up as hippie-height, wobbling, tent-sized structures on Mendocino County pot communes.

Bruce Handy, writing in Time about Disney’s reopening of a deliberately out-of-date Tomorrowland in 1998, began his essay with the sentence, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” He went on, “It’s not a novel observation to point out that our culture has become increasingly backward looking.”

Well, given the future envisioned in Disney’s House of the Future, who can blame us for looking the other way?

Disney’s Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative. This isn’t the fault of the “Disney culture”; it is the fault of our culture. We seem to have entered a deeply unimaginative era.

And we're back to the culture wars, and I remember why I dislike O'Rourke so much.

Otherwise, I agree. We as a society need to be more imaginative about the future. No more kitsch. No more nostalgia. No more prequels. No more reimaginings. (I'm looking at you J.J. Abram's Star Trek). Instead of Bailouts for old technologies and retro businesses (cough, GM, cough), how about a few billion for undersea farmers, jet pack-ateers, high-speed magnetic trains, and jetson style houses in the sky?

See also, Paleo-Future's Disney blog posts.

Public Transit of the Future

If you ask me, and no one ever will, the best thing to do with gas prices right now is to jack up the tax to $10 per gallon and use the surplus to start rebuilding our entire infrastructure. From neighborhoods, to local roads, to freeways, to interstates, the whole concept of how we move goods and people around this country needs to be redrawn from scratch. What we need now is not gas-tax holidays or more offshore drilling, but people with the ability to think big, absurd, techno utopian dreams. Namely, I want to go to work in a people mover. Somebody ought to make it happen.

Prometeus Unbound

This is a pretty cool video (via Table of Malcontents):