China Miéville has written frequently, critically about Tolkien’s reactionary politics, but one of the things that Miéville’s books do is demonstrate, by contrast, that Tolkien is reactionary at an ontological level. It’s not, that is, that Tolkien simply describes or praises a world with a feudal political organization; rather, Tolkien’s world is feudal at its most basic level of organization. Tolkien’s world has a fundamental, hierarchical and static organization. This manifests itself geographically (with civilization in the north west and savagery in the east and south), and biologically (in the fixity of the different species) before it appears politically. Exceptions to these orderings are presented as aberrations: the marriage of an elf and a human caused such a crisis that godlike beings had to step in and force the children of this pairing to chose to be one species or the other, and the evil of Sauron and, later, Saruman consists of a disruption of nature which involves, among other things, the construction of a class of workers and soldiers with no family lineage or ties of place: the orcs.

This is all such a cliché of fantasy that it is easy not to notice it, but Miéville’s Bas-Lag books (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) bring it into focus because their own ontology is, in contrast, strikingly modern. Read more↴

I’ve never read any of David Foster Wallace’s fiction, but I’ve read some of his essays and I dislike them rather a lot. I was reminded of this by reading an article about Wallace in The Exile which, unsurprisingly for an article from The Exile, was harshly critical. The article’s analysis of the hipster-protestantism of McSweeney’s is astute (and the description of Eggers as “a sneering, leathery vampire utterly dependent on the plasma of African children to survive” is the kind of vitriol that makes reading The Exile worthwhile), but the criticism of Wallace specifically really focuses on Infinite Jest, so I don’t know how accurate it is, and it doesn’t really help me in understanding what I dislike about Wallace’s non-fiction.

So I reread “Consider the Lobster,” and got as far as: Read more↴

DeLillo in White Noise is both funny and astute about the physical embodiment of academic specialization:

The chancellor had advised me, back in 1968, to do something about my name and appearance if I wanted to be taken seriously as a Hitler innovator…. We finally agreed that I should invent an extra initial and call myself J. A. K. Gladney, a tag I wore like a borrowed suit.

The chancellor warned against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of myself. He strongly suggested that I gain weight. He wanted me to “grow out” into Hitler…. I had the advantage of substantial height, big hands, big feet, but badly needed bulk, or so he believed—an air of unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness.

Which makes me wonder, how should I shape my physical appearance to be appropriate to the kind of academic career I want? Or, have I already, by my sartorial choices, sealed my academic destiny? A troubling thought.

Which brings me to this article discouraging people from doing PhDs (via). Read more↴

I’ve been meaning to scan and upload The Weather Underground’s Prairie Fire for some time. It’s a fascinating book, written in 1974, just as the transition from the crisis of Keynesianism to the ascent of neoliberalism was taking place, and it’s a fine attempt to understand this change and how economic change, alongside the dissolution of the movements of the sixties, would effect forthcoming political activity. Not that they got everything right; their prediction of a revolutionary upsurge was sadly inaccurate and, given that, it turns out that they overestimated the role that would be played by armed struggle in the rest of the decade. On a more theoretical, rather than strategic, level, they did much better, however; it’s particularly interesting to read their materialist sketch of the intersections between capitalism, race, and gender, although it is a little depressing to realize how little influence this kind of analysis has had since then, with so many accounts of intersectionality tending towards the idealist and post-Marxist.

A while back, I was re-reading Isaac Asimov’s series of novels about robots. There’s something faintly uneasy about them, which I’d meant to blog about at the time. The underlying theme of the books is the effect of robot labor on society; and the key thing which distinguishes robots from other types mechanization is that they are sentient, which makes the situation uncomfortable like slavery, a similarity which is always present in the books, but is not dealt with explicitly. This does raise a question for cybernetic communism, though: the usual assumption is that mechanization will abolish, or at least minimize, necessary labor, but what if this depends on an unjustified humanism, an assumption that we can simply farm our work off onto dumb machines? But shouldn’t a sufficiently complex assemblage of machines have some kind of say in its own future? Read more↴

k-punk:

Everyone thinks they know what Freud says, it’s all about sex. Freud says the opposite of course. For humans, there is no sex, in the ‘biological’ sense.

Dorothy L Sayers:

“It’s no use saying vaguely that sex is at the bottom of all these phenomena—that’s about as helpful as saying that human nature is at the bottom of them. Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself. It’s usually found attached to a person of some sort.”

“That’s rather obvious.”

“Well, let’s have a look at the obvious. The biggest crime of these blasted psychologists is to have obscured the obvious.… Do all these facts taken together suggest nothing to you beyond a general notion of sex repression?”

— Gaudy Night