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. At the level of its basic constituents, Miéville’s world is fragmented and mashed up. There’s no hierarchical order, indeed there’s no order of proper discrete entities at all; everything is a mixture and a mixture of which there is no telling what, if anything, are the original constituents (this is why I like to think of Perdido Street Station as a novelization of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature). In Perdido Street Station, this is most apparent in the species of the characters, the insect-like khepri and the weirdly aquatic vodyanoi, which suggest the strangeness of convergent evolution, as well as the Remade, humans who are intentionally aggregated with machines and animals at the whims of the legal system. In The Scar, the scale of this fragmentation increases markedly, with the suggestion that the whole world is the result of a series of vast cosmological collisions (which leave the ontological scar of the book’s title). My favorite example, though, is emphasized in Iron Council, with its treatment of fantasy’s personifications of the material, elementals and golems. Where Dungeons & Dragons interprets elemental creatures as manifestations of a small set of primary, elemental forces (earth, wind, fire, water), Miéville imagines them as real abstractions, in which any force or category can realize itself in this way, presenting us with the image of an attack of flesh elementals, or motion elementals running alongside a train, snapping at its wheels.

This fragmentation and restlessness has an uneasy relationship with another aspect of modernity, in which the lack of fundamental principles, this constant change, is itself made a fundamental principle, the principle of progress. Progress, and its various valences, are the main theme of Iron Council, in particular in one of its most unpleasant forms, expansive imperialism. The story concerns the construction of a railroad, which destroys the lives of those in its path as well as those employed (or enslaved) in its construction. The construction of the railroad is presented by one of the characters, in a messianic mode, as progress, and the book doesn’t exactly demure from this characterization, but it suggests alternative ways of understanding “progress.” The construction of the railroad is, at first, progressive in a very literal sense, proceeding along a predetermined path, and leaving behind a fixed manifestation of this process. However, after a revolt of the railroad workers establishes the Iron Council of the title, the railroad veers off course – but it continues going, becoming a “perpetual train,” which puts down rails in front of itself only to immediately pull them back up after it has traveled over them. It is, in the end, a very literal manifestation of the fractured ontology of Miéville’s world, the metaphysically deranged region called the  “cacotopos,” that allows this perpetual train to makes its escape.

The end of the book provides an ambiguous but intriguing payoff in terms of revolutionary theory for this ontological construction, as the Iron Council returns to its starting point, the city of New Crobuzon, in a possibly doomed attempt to bring revolution to the city. Before it can get there, one of the main characters makes the train’s progress itself into a real abstraction, making it the body of a time golem; the train is now perpetually to come, but never arrives. Henry Farrell describes this as an example of Benjaminian messianism, in which the past is “exploded out of the continuum of history,” but I think this is exactly the wrong way round. The time in which the revolutionary train is always about to arrive and never arriving is the time of social democratic progress, which is “unending” and “unstoppable” progress through a “homogenous and empty time.” This is historicism, which, as Benjamin puts it “depicts the ‘eternal’ picture of the past.” The Benjaminian explosion out of the continuum of history is just the opposite of this, when a moment of the past is re-activated and suddenly seems contemporary, when we “take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” And it is this which makes the past no longer appear as the track of progress which stretches off, predetermined, into the distance.

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

The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling.

Isn’t this kind of narcissistic? We’re not, really, considering the lobster at all – we’re considering how Wallace sees himself or wants to see himself, and he seems not to give any thought to the possibility of the reader approaching the question from any other angle, either. Wallace addresses this narcissism somewhat more directly in a commencement speech he gave:

Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way….

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do….

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible.

When I read this, I didn’t know what to make of Wallace’s presentation of this kind of basic empathy as revelatory, as something “hard” that “takes will and effort.” Isn’t this obvious, isn’t this what everyone does all of the time? Not, sadly, Wallace, I guess (and it is sad – as Wallace says, it makes him “pissed and miserable” all the time). But it explains, I think, a lot of what is so bad about his essays. Narcissism manifests itself in the style of Wallace’s prose, in the prissiness which desires to set up and control complex arrangements of language.

This narcissistic desire for control occurs, too, at a larger scale, because, despite the tone of much of  the essay, the last thing Wallace wants to do in it is make anyone uncomfortable, least of all Wallace himself, to unsettle anything in a way that would require thought rather than a well put-together phrase. A minor, but rather striking, example is the way in which, when Wallace gets to the rather crucial point about the distinctiveness of the lobsters nervous system, detail is suddenly not provided: “In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that the analogy between frogs and lobsters turns out not to hold,” is all we get, in an essay that is perfectly happy to open with three pointless and boring paragraphs dumping on us irrelevant information about the taxonomy, etymology, and biology of lobsters.

And again, at the end of the essay, Wallace puts a stop to anything that might be unsettling:

These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.

To go beyond the simplistic sketches of philosophy that Wallace engages in in the article, to even broach “hard-core philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics,” gets us into “deep and treacherous waters,” unsuitable for public discussion? There’s something really anti-intellectual here (made worse by the patronizing tone, which suggests to us that Wallace knows plenty of hard-core philosophy, enough to warn us off it), a fear of thinking in case, the moment it is examined, the way he sees himself will unravel.

My dislike of Wallace’s non-fiction has made me wary of reading his fiction, but now I’ve figured out what it is that I dislike about the non-fiction, I’m more inclined to look at the fiction. The narcissism which shuts down the non-fiction might well be an interesting place from which to start a fictional exploration.

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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). There’s something of a cottage industry in this kind of article, and they’ve always annoyed me for some reason. There are, I think, two interrelated problems. One is the academic exceptionalism, the suggestion that academic work is completely different from other sorts of work; to say that academic work is uniquely awful is still a way of maintaining that academic work is special. The second problem follows from this attempt to exempt academia from the rules that shape the rest of the world, because it suggests that you can avoid the problems of academia simply by avoiding academia. But, really, that’s bullshit. Of course academia is unique, like everything; but competition, insecurity, and exploitation are hardly unknown outside of academic work. Maintaining the fantasy that one could simply opt out of the problems of academic work encourages people not to struggle to improve the situation within universities, something that’s particularly unpleasant when the person making the complaints is a tenured professor, someone with at least a small level of power.

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I was reminded of this recently while listening to Janelle Monaé, who addresses the connection between robots and slaves from a rather more subversive angle, in an album based around an extended analogy treating Black people in the US as cyborgs (including the track from which the title of this post is taken). It’s a neat reversal of the racist trope that Black people are more “natural” than Europeans (shading into animalistic, subhuman). Because there’s clearly a sense in which African Americans are artificial, constructed by the explicit intervention of the slave trade; Monaé is great in turning this artificiality into a kind of futuristic transhumanism. On a first listen to the record, I was rather disappointed that this conceptual futurism isn’t accompanied by musical invention. But I’ve warmed to the record, which is a kind of eerily precise re-creation of an earlier Black futurism, in much the same way as some Outkast stuff is (and, indeed, Andre 3000 is involved in some way, although I’m not exactly clear on his role). It’s appropriately… artificial.

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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

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If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramaphone, hearing more virtuosos by radion, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desparate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never before paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria—a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy—a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts, from the Thrifty Housewife providing a Grand Family Meal for Fourpence with the aid of Dairyfields Butter Beans in Margarine, to the Typist capturing the affections of Prince Charming by a liberal use of Muggins’s Magnolia Face Cream.

I’m not sure if Walter Benjamin ever read Sayers (although he did like detective stories, I understand); but this reminds me a great deal of his discussion of the utopian possibilities of advertising, and in particular the Surrealists who, he said, “treat words like trade names, and their texts are, at bottom, a form of prospectus for enterprises not yet off the ground.”

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