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.

My Idea of Horror

Horror as a genre no longer possesses the philosophic or psychological power it once did in the age of Poe or of Lovecraft. Bereft of meaning, it can no longer scare us or bring out cosmic terrors from the hidden corners of our psyche. Now, there is only shock and revulsion packaged as entertainments.

It's easy to complain, but what are we complaining about? Of all the major genres, horror is the least popular and the least successful, so you can't really say that corners are being cut in the name of quick profit. If people are making money on this stuff it's not on a Disney scale. No, this is a genre created by fans for fans, dominated by zines and small presses, b-movies and foreign DVDs, and the worst aspects of the genre represent the most potent desires of the intended audience. Torture and gore is what they want, yet I can find no one who can clearly articulate this fact and explain it. Condemn it, yes, but explain it, no.

So instead I've turned to postmodern literary criticism, that great explainer and problematizer, to help me. Here's the late Elizabeth Young writing on Dennis Cooper's repellent novel Frisk:

It might be asked in what way do Cooper's most gruesome passages differ from the so-called "Splatterpunk" writers in the horror genre, authors like Wayne Allen Sallee or J.S. Russell? The answer is probably very little in the case of the best writers and as, [Susan] Sontag points out, there are always a few first-rate books in any sub-genre. Much of this type of horror is concerned with transgressing that ultimate taboo, the interior of the body.

In truth, the events described in Frisk (and similar works like American Psycho) are far worse than Splatterpunk because they are so firmly grounded in the realist literary tradition and offer none of the psychological distance that even the most sensitive reader can level against pulpy genre fiction. She continues,

Films of this type, "Splatter" films - one of Alex's interests in "Closer" - are sometimes repulsively referred to as "moist" films, and indeed Baudrillard talks of the "excessive wetness" of the obscene, the "spectral lubricity" of the obscene simulation which is always too visceral, too sticky, too wet. Cooper's work however has many other intentions beyond this transgression of basic bodily taboos. He wishes to chart the postmodern sensibility as it engages with extreme taboo and thus conjoin the mediatized personality and erotic literary history (Shopping In Space, pg. 259)

In postmodern terms, the problem in transgressive literature is not its awful subject matter, or even the presence of extreme gore and violence in general, but its representation. The violent acts presented on the page and on the screen are not actual events, but simulations of events (even within the framework of the story). They attempt to bring to life that which cannot and should not be expressed. These are things that however horrific are presented, for better and for worse as fantasy. At one level, such nightmares serve as commodities to be consumed and integrated into our mediated sense of self identity. With transgressive literature these fictions ca also operate as ruptures in the fabric of consumer desire, and provide ways of breaking and resisting the control of simulated experience. Mediated desires give way to fragmented flashes of attraction and repulsion as a source of political inspiration. Postmodern transgression exists to alert us to and destabilize power relationships.

The genre version on the other hand is far less powerful, and can only panic when confronted with the fragments of modern life. Indeed, the gore and violence of modern horror are meaningless and obscene precisely for their lack of imagination. They (image and author) are at a very deep psychotic level unable to imagine not being able to see everything. The body is violated, invaded, and dismembered not by action but by the mind (and the eye) and the viewer is compelled to objectify the flesh of the body with the mad insistence that at least we are not that. It is a sort of reverse narcissism expressed as alienation and entitlement; a means of protecting our subjective selves, floating disembodied somewhere behind our eyes, from the truth of our soulless, dying bodies.

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Listening to: Modest Mouse - Blame It On The Tetons
via FoxyTunes

Genes for Individuals, Memes for Groups?

An interesting response to Dawkins's book that actually moves the discussion beyond the religion good/bad argument. Here's what's interesting to me in David Sloan Wilson's discussion:

Consider genetic evolution by itself. When a new mutation arises, the total population consists of one group with a single mutant and many groups with no mutants. There is not much variation among groups in this scenario for group selection to act upon. Now imagine a species that has the ability to socially transmit information. A new cultural mutation can rapidly spread to everyone in the same group, resulting in one group that is very different from the other groups in the total population. This is one way that culture can radically shift the balance between levels of selection in favor of group selection. Add to this the ability to monitor the behavior of others, communicate social transgressions through gossip, and easily punish or exclude transgressors at low cost to the punishers, and it becomes clear that human evolution represents a whole new ball game as far as group selection is concerned.

With culture, mutations can be shared and advantageous new things can benefit everyone and not just the owner. It's like the internet. One computer is useful, a computer attached to other computers on the net is exponentially more powerful. From this perspective, religion is just another word for culture: a way of ordering, structuring, and transmitting the core information that is shared amongst a group of human beings. Basically, memes. Or the blogosphere.

What's missing from Wilson's discussion is that Dawkins considered memes to be just as selfish as genes. Some transmit more easily than others regardless of their usefulness or wisdom. He also ignores the fact a lot of the information that is socially transmitted is just plain bogus, superstitious or wrong. It's also not clear what distinguishes religious beliefs from more useful information like how to hunt, when its good to plant crops, etc. Nor does it explain how societies organize themselves into castes and cliques that determine shares of the wealth or is allowed to marry whom.

In the end religion is reduced to just those things that exist beyond human beings like nature and the after-life, or as a moralistic police force designed to keep the peasants in-line. It's Nietzschean resentment where the weak use memes to rule the strong, and choose the void for their purpose rather than being void of purpose.

Now that I've thought it through a little, the article really begs more questions than it answers. And, as has been said before, we don't need biology to explain how social transmission works. We already have Austen and Tolstoy.