Author: Steven Shaviro

 Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man is a stupendous text, a pornographic fantasy and a philosophical meditation at once. I reread it because I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I had said about it in my previous post on porn.

Delany calls the book (in his opening “Disclaimer”) a “pornutopic fantasy: a set of people, incidents, places, and relations among them that never happened and could not happen for any number of surely self-evident reasons”; he adds that the book is “specifically… about various sexual acts whose status as vectors of HIV contagion we have no hard-edged knowledge of…” Anid indeed, there is no anal sex in the course of this narrative of sexual relations between men; but the book contains copious, epic descriptions of cocksucking, piss-drinking (and occasional shit-eating) together with oceanic spurts of semen (as well as piss)erupting from truly gigantic cocks. Various sorts of fetishism are also on display, especially involving racial stereotyping, and the narrator’s idealization of homeless men. (Delany also remarks in his “Disclaimer” that a novel that truly focused on the homeless “would have to be substantially darker than this one”).

But I also said that The Mad Man is a philosophical meditation. Quite literally: the narrator, John Marr, a gay black man in his 20s, coping with the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s, is a graduate student in philosophy, investigating the life and works of a (fictional) great philosopher, Timothy Hasler, a Korean-American thinker who was murdered, at age 29, in a gay hustler’s bar, almost a generation before (in 1973, post-Stonewall, but pre-AIDS).

Marr reconstructs Hasler’s life even as he comes to terms with his work, which involves the relation between “formal” and “informal” systems: the way that the logic of description abstracts from, and thereby simplifies, an initially chaotic and complex intermingling of multiple particulars. Hasler reverses the traditional assumptions of classical empiricism and 20th-century positivist and analytic thought. For those traditions, i.e. for thinkers from Locke to the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the world is analyzable into a set of discrete, atomic, entities (“ideas” or “facts”), and complexity results from the ways that, on a higher level, these entities interact, interfere with one another, form into intertwined combinations: “the first three quarters of our [20th] century has been dominated by the unquestioned conviction… that reality was built up of atomic perceptions, that language was built up from the meanings and grammatical potentials associated with individual words. Only when things got too complicated — in the interaction of system on top of system, system against system — did the appearance of systematicity break down.”

But Hasler argues pretty much the opposite: he argues that “large-scale, messy, informal systems are necessary in order to develop, on top of them, precise, hard-edged, tractable systems… the human mind, and possibly nature herself, master generalized, messy pointing, inexact indication, and flailing well before they learn to individuate and count.” And more, “the messy is what provides the energy which holds any system within it coherent and stable.” In this way, Hasler is closer to the later Wittgenstein, and to Whitehead, than he is to the mainstream of Anglo-American logical and linguistic analysis. (I mention these thinkers, rather than Derrida and Deleuze, because it’s important that Delany represents Hasler as coming out of — and deviating from, or radicalizing — the analytic tradition, rather than participating in “continental” thought).

The question, of course, is what to make of a book in which passages like the one I have just quoted alternate with lengthy descriptions of golden showers night at the Mineshaft, or orgies in the narrator’s apartment that end with cum, piss, and shit smeared over everything, and suffusing the space with their pungent odor. Is the book based upon the notorious Cartesian split between mind and body, as between philosophical asceticism and the corporeal pursuit of pleasure? To the contrary, it is evident that the “informal system” of sexual energy that the book depicts is necessary to the emergence of any “formal system,” any logic and order, of the sort that the novel’s philosophical passages explore. Delany has long written about the ways that “paraliterary” genres can accommodate possibilities foreclosed in more mainstream and “proper” forms of literature. Delany accomplishes this with pornography in The Mad Man, just as he did with science fiction and fantasy in many of his earlier writings. (Hasler himself alternated his philosophical publications with a series of science fiction stories, which are described as pulpy space operas — pre-1960s SF New Wave in content — that nonetheless embody his philosophical themes).

In the course of the novel, as Marr traces Hasler’s life, he also finds himself in effect replicating or repeating it — despite the vast difference between Hasler’s experience as a gay man in the post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS era, and the more circumscribed conditions that Marr faces living in the midst of the epidemic. Hasler and Marr share, among other things, an attraction to homeless men; they each fall in love with one such man; and Marr finally finds himself unwittingly recreating the situation that led to Hasler’s murder; only this time, a homeless man is killed, as Marr fails to substitute himself (as Hasler, it turns out, did, in a true act of love) for the intended victim. Marr’s growing identification with Hasler makes possible the traditional pornographic pattern of a series of sexual scenes or episodes, almost detachable from the surrounding narrative, and yet increasing in intensity as one moves through that narrative, with a culminating orgy that  provides a sort of emotional climax to the narrative as a whole. I don’t know how many readers will really get off on the pornographic scenarios that make so large a part of the novel (I have to admit that it didn’t do much for me in that regard); but it’s crucial to note that Delany does not endeavor to “redeem” or “transcend” pornography, to turn it into something “higher.” He insists on the aim of physically arousing the reader: which of course is what makes pornography a “low” and scandalous genre; in polite society, rhetorical effects are supposed to work only on the mind, not on the body. Thus again, the philosophical themes of the novel are energized and given form by the pornographic depictions, rather than standing in opposition to them.

What’s truly radical about Delany’s pornography — as I have noted several times before (e.g. here, here, here, and here) — is that its intensities are never presented as transgressive; the entire tradition of pornographic transgression, which stretches from Sade to Bataille and beyond, and which is often echoed in the naively liberationist rhetoric of much commercial porn — holds no interest for Delany, and in fact is something that his books explicitly critique. Even the great piss- and shit-stained orgy that is the culminating sexual scene of the book (that is followed by the murder that Marr unwittingly sets the stage for, and that replicates an orgy in Hasler’s apartment, 18 years earlier, that had taken place just before Hasler’s own murder) is depicted (I’m not sure that I can say this the right way) in naturalistic terms rather than lurid ones. By which I do not mean that its intent is not to arouse — since clearly it is — but that it presents such arousal in a continuum with all the other aspects of life (the narrator’s, the writer’s, and the reader’s) rather than as some sort of rupture with them. There’s a bit of comedy, even, as Marr has to explain away the remnants of the scene to his straight-laced, hetero academic advisor (who unexpectedly pops by for a visit the next day); but the whole point is that this embarrassment is a function of the advisor’s narrowminded-bigotry-clothed-in-liberal-goodwill, rather than any intrinsic aspect of the scene itself.

To say that Delany’s view and account of sex, and his “pornutopic fantasy,” have nothing to do with transgression is to say that they cannot be comprehended in the terms of any dialectic of contradiction, or even of any post-Kantian questioning of limits. Sexual exchanges — and there is a lot here, which I lack the space and energy to get into, about the logic of sexual exchange, and how it relates to, and potentially differs from, the ubiquity of market exchange — in fact this difference is the key to Hasler’s murder, and to that of Marr’s homeless friend — are for Delany a form of civility and collectivity, as well as a series of pleasures, or improvements of sensual enjoyment. This doesn’t mean that such sexual exchanges are tame or limited. The point is, rather, that there is no limit — no boundary to be transgressed, or that would mark a zero point, a void or lack, an encounter with death. The Mad Man is a novel quite cognizant of, and continually haunted by, death: in the form of Hasler’s death which is the starting-point of the narrative, and the homeless man’s death which is its conclusion, and more generally in the ever-present reality of AIDS in the world of its narrator. But this death is in no way intrinsic to or carried by the sexual acts that the narrative describes; rather, death always comes from outside (to use or abuse a phrase from Deleuze). Death arrives in The Mad Man, and the book thereby takes on a fully tragic dimension. But although death is inevitable, for we are all mortal, and it is more of a danger for gay man than for many other groups of people (because of the sort of society we live in), nonetheless death is also inessential. It is not a constituent and motor of sexual desire. One cannot imagine a greater contrast to the transgressive — Kantian or Hegelian — logics of Sade, Bataille, and so many others.

In this way, Delany’s pornography leads us to think — forces us to think — in ways that are so far from our cultural norms as to be virtually unimaginable. We don’t have the language — outside of the language provided in Delany’s own writing — to conceptualize what he is proposing to us. (It is something that the late-period Foucault pointed towards, with his ideas about “bodies and pleasures” replacing the transgressive logic of sexuality;  but I think Delany points us much further in this direction than Foucault did). Delany breaks with the utopian, 60s idea of sex as redemptive; but he also breaks, I think, even with the anti-redemptive arguments offered by such queer theorists as Leo Bersani and (more recently) Lee Edelman. Another way to put this is to say that Delany’s pornographic vision — the way bodies and pleasures are intensified to a point of impersonality and anonymity — cannot be described in terms of the Freudian/Lacanian “death drive.” It’s hard for me to express this as clearly or theoretically as I would like; but it has something to do with the way in which “extreme” sexual acts are described both — and simultaneously — as attaining a point where the ego, or the limits between one self and another, are dissolved, so that the experience of sheer intensity is all that remains, and as being experiences of intimacy, ease, togetherness, and (dare I say it?) even a certain homely coziness. This sense suffuses even, and especially, the one passage in the novel where the narrator cites both Sade and Marx (!) in order to explain “all the combinations and permutations of everyone hooking up with everyone else” in the culminating orgy scene. In the logistics of the orgy, we get the intertwining of Hasler’s informal and formal systems, as we get both a push to the point of physical exhaustion, and a sense of free and easy comraderie, one in which the odors of sweat, piss, and cum feel “familiar and comfortable,” and the exchange of bodily fluids are the nicest and sweetest thing one human being can do with another. Sexuality for Delany is a kind of communism, where anonymous relations with multiple others coexist with the exclusivity and special passion of (romantic?) love for one particular other person. As the narrator himself announces quite explicitly, The Mad Man is finally a love story. The pornutopian dimension of the novel has to do with the fact that it is, in the special sense I have been describing, a “communist” love story.

That The Mad Man is inadmissible in just about any discursive or social context one could imagine today is not a fact about the book, but a fact about the our society and its grim deficiencies.

I read Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road just as soon as it came out, which is now more than a month ago. But I’ve hesitated to write about it, because I felt that I didn’t have anything to say. It seems to me that the book actively repels commentary; it is so utterly self-contained, so hermetically sealed unto itself, that anything anybody does say about it is at once both superfluous and wrong.

I mean this both with regard to the novel’s content, and with regard to its form, or its prose. It’s a harsh and powerful book, depicting a post-apocalyptic landscape so severe, so totally ravaged, and so enclosed, that it offers no escape. It’s a world in which there are no resources left. The utter lucidity and precision with which McCarthy describes the characters’ careful scavenging of whatever pitiful remnants of food, clothing, shelter, tools, etc., that they can find leads to a sort of exhaustion. I love sentences like this one, referring to the main character, the father, who, together with his son is endlessly on the road: “Mostly, he worried about their shoes.” This, finite and limited material, material always in short supply, in deficit with regard to human needs, is all there is. Once it is gone, there will not be any more, since civilization of any sort, or economic production of any kind, has long ceased to function. The rest is just lifeless ruin, or else cruelty and cannibalistic horror.

The prose is polished to a point of minimalist perfection; blinding in its clarity and yet (or, I should say, and therefore) almost devoid of metaphorical or metaphysical resonance. There’s no splendor here; echoes are muffled, even as the sky is a perpetual gray. The few hints of metaphysics that manage to penetrate the murk entirely confirm my old friend Leo Daugherty’s assertion (in an article available here) that McCarthy’s vision is basically a gnostic one. The semi-miraculous ending to the book is itself only intelligible in such terms; salvation is not of this world, but is radically other, and is a matter of “carrying the fire” (the phrase that comes up again and again in The Road) in a world that is utterly hostile to it, and that continually threatens to blow it out.

I suppose that this extreme closure, this more-than-granite hardness and power, is one definition of the sublime. But for me, it is something that ultimately limits the novel. I read the book with avidity and intense attention; but once I finished, it almost entirely slipped from my mind. I do not brood over it, the way I have brooded for years over Blood Meridian. That was a book of almost infinite resonance and depth, one that will not leave me alone and that I am impelled to reread every couple of years. Blood Meridian is filled with horror, and that horror reveals something powerful and true about America, and the way that its claims to both exceptionalism and universality are drenched and rooted in blood. Blood Meridian offers no release from negativity, no sense of an ending no matter how total the destruction. In contrast, I do not think that I will every read The Road again. It doesn’t have the same affective power, the same ability to insinuate itself into my dreams. Instead, it feels like a dead end; even the horror is finally dampened down into entropy.

Peter Watts’ new book Blindsight is the best SF novel I have read in quite some time. It’s a space opera, and a First Contact novel, and a vampire novel — and also a philosophical novel about the nature of consciousness. [The usual warning applies: this review unavoidably contains SPOILERS).

Watts is a hardcore sociobiologist, in outlook. Which is often something that drives me up a wall. But he has enough conceptual audacity that he makes it work, chillingly and powerfully, in Blindsight.

To explain about sociobiology: I despise it when those “evolutionary psychology”‘ types tell us that women are “hardwired” to be attracted to older, wealthier men; or that “criminality” (a word or concept left carefully undefined) is significantly genetic, since children of “criminal” parents adopted into “non-criminal” families are (supposedly) much more likely to become “criminals” themselves than children of “non-criminal” parents adopted into “criminal” families. (Both these assertions come up, for instance, in Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene, which I recently had my students read). Such blatant projections of contemporary social prejudice and unequal conditions into “nature” are beneath contempt, not even worthy of the energy it would take to refute them. On the other hand, I admire the audacity of Richard Dawkins, when he starts to sound a lot like William Burroughs, suggesting that we are lumbering robots struggling to escape the control of having been programmed by ruthlessly “selfish genes,” and that our most cherished ideas are viral infections that have taken over our bodies and minds (“memes”).

Now, Watts is sociobiological in this latter, audacious and scary, sense. He knows that we live in a “war universe” (as Burroughs would puts it) — all the more so in that this condition is the result, not of some active, Manichean malice (as it seems to be, for instance, for Cormac McCarthy), but simply of the blind forces of natural selection. For Watts, natural selection is no benevolent “invisible hand,” automatically producing “optimal” outcomes — which is how the current fashion for drawing parallels between Darwinian evolution and Adam Smith’s vision of “perfect competition” would have it. Rather, natural selection is nasty, brutish, and short — and it frequently leads to messed-up results, not only for those individuals and groups that “lose” out in Darwinian competition, but also for the “winners,” who may well have developed the way they did either because of random genetic drift, or because they were (temporarily) lucky enough to develop without encountering the changed conditions that, in the long run, will wipe them out. That’s what happened to the dinosaurs, and it’s also what may well happen to us sooner or later.

Watts’ sensibility is, not cynical exactly: since cynicism implies a kind of apologia for, or complicity with, things as they are, on the grounds that we can at least be certain of the worst, and anyone with illusions to the contrary is dismissed with a smirking “what did you expect?” That isn’t really Watts’ tone. Rather, he is downbeat and grim, looking into the abyss with the full consciousness that the abyss looks back at us. Reading Watts is always quite bracing, as was the case for his previous works of SF, the Rifters trilogy — which I wrote about here, here, and here. But I think that, in Blindsight, he has surpassed himself.

Start with the people we encounter in the novel. Watts’ characters are quite memorably drawn; they are nearly all sociopaths to one extent or another, as well as being thoroughly “posthuman.” In the year 2082, most human beings have become redundant, because — whatever skills they have — computers can perform their tasks better than they can. Lots of people have checked out entirely, putting their bodies in storage and letting their minds wander freely in Heaven, a virtual reality space of blandly narcissistic wish-fulfillment. The others have loads of genetic and neural tweaks, and prosthetic enhancements to their bodies and their senses; they tend to remain as much as possible in physical isolation, using VR for messy things like sex. It’s just safer (both physically and emotionally) than coming into actual physical contact. There’s always the danger of terrorism by the Realists, a faction that objects to this “posthuman” condition: they specialize in nasty retroviral attacks.

Blindsight takes place, however, among a small group of people who are stuck in close physical proximity on a spaceship that goes out to the Kuiper belt to make contact with, or at least to study, aliens who have apparently arrived from another solar system, and who may or may not pose a threat to humankind. The commander of the spaceship is a vampire (and Watts provides a brilliant account of vampires as a near-human subspecies, different from “baseline” Homo sapiens in a few crucial genetic and physiological respects). The crew includes a linguist with (technologically generated) multiple personality syndrome, a biologist who has had nearly all his senses overlain with extensive prosthetics so that his proprioceptive feelings — his feelings of self — reside much more in long-range mechanical extensions than they do in his own flesh; and a military officer whose sensorium similarly extends into a whole range of killing machines that she manipulates by remote control. And the (unreliable) narrator has had one of his two brain hemispheres removed and replaced by machinery; he is constitutionally incapable of any sort of empathy.

All that is the baseline condition the novel starts with. Things get seriously weird when we encounter the aliens, who turn out to be quite beyond human understanding. I will skip over their biophysiology, though Watts is amazingly inventive in this respect (he is helped by his background as a marine biologist, who is therefore with all sorts of weird invertebrates). What really distinguishes the aliens is that they are zombies: not in the George Romero, living dead sense, but in the sense that the term has been used by cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. A zombie is a being who acts just as you or I do, who shows clear signs of language, intelligence, and so on; but who is inwardly devoid of sentience or consciousness. It’s the old Cartesian/solipsist dilemma: I know that I have consciousness, interiority, and a sense of self; but how do I know that you have all these things? For all I know — since all I really know (according to Descartes) comes from introspection, everyone else in the world may well be a machine, or an automoton, only simulating consciousness.

Now, most philosophers don’t take this paranoid fantasy very seriously. Turing, Wittgenstein, and Dennett all suggest, pretty much, that if something (someone?) acts intelligent and conscious, we should assume that he/she/it is intelligent and conscious. The hypothesis that zombies could exist is –even when just floated as a possibility, and not pushed to the point of solipsist paranoia — is predicated on the idea that some precious internal essence of consciousness is not captured by behavioral criteria, so a zombie who behaved like a conscious person is at least conceivable. But if you reject this sense of transcendent interiority as a mystifcation — as Turing, Wittgenstein, and Dennett all do — then you will reject the zombie hypothesis as well. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc…

It nonetheless seems to be true that people who are usually conscious can nonetheless perform cognitively complex acts while in a state of unconsciousness: this is what happens, presumably, when people sleepwalk or when they are under deep hypnosis. There’s also the phenomenon of blindsight — which is the title of Watts’ novel because it is his main conceptual metaphor throughout the book — where people claim to be blind — they cannot consciously see — and yet, when asked (or forced in situations when a quick reaction is necessary) to guess where something is in the visual field, do so with a high degree of accuracy. This suggests that they in fact can see, at least on a certain level — even though they do not know that they can see.

Zombies would then be possessed of blindsight, not only where vision is concerned, but for all sensory and cognitive modalities. And this turns out to be the case with the aliens in Blindsight. By any possible measure they are vastly more intelligent, and more technologically advanced, than human beings (and even than prosthetically enhanced human beings). Yet they are entirely devoid of consciousness or sentience. They simply do not know that they know; they know not what they do; yet their knowing and doing is all the more effective and efficient for all that. Indeed, the novel suggests that consciousness is an evolutionary accident. We’ve developed conscious minds because we have been lucky enough (for a while) to develop in a sort of evolutionary backwater, without meeting competition from intelligent, non-conscious organisms. But consciousness is an ultimate disadvantage in the struggle for survival, and Watts suggests that it could well be weeded out, even in the future course of our own development. Sociopaths are already half the way to zombiehood; and sociopathy — which allows for competitiveness without the hindrances of empathy, remorse, or self-consciousness — is (as Watts acerbically notes) already being actively selected for, today, in the higher realms of corporate culture. Blindsight is a brilliant, and chilling, thought experiement about the possibilities of non-sentient intelligence, a prospect that is likely to come up for us in the future as a consequence of robotics (and of corporate culture), even if we never actually enounter non-sentient intelligent aliens.

Dennett argues that the possibility of zombies is self-contradictory and incoherent, because its proponents are simultaneously positing a difference (we are conscious, they are not) and positing that this difference is empirically undetectable (in every possible respect, zombies appear to be exactly like us). But then, Dennett doesn’t think much of the existence of interiority and consciousness in the first place. (In this respect, Dennett lines up with Rorty; though I would argue that both of them are misreading Wittgenstein. But that is a matter for a different post). However, Watts is approaching the question from a somewhat different angle. If we take it for granted that consciousness does exist, at least in us — Watts asks — then what evolutionary purpose could it serve, that makes up for its (pragmatic and cognitive) inefficiency? What is our consciousness good for? In suggesting that “we” are conscious, whereas the aliens, vampires, and CEOs of Blindsight are not, Watts poses that the difference between conscious beings and zombies matters, in some sense, and that therefore it is empirically detectable. The difference is extremely subtle, yet it is ultimately apprehensible (at least, it is by we who are conscious).

By the end of the novel, the difference between conscious beings and zombies seems to be that only conscious beings possess aesthetics. The aliens in the novel are a bit like logical positivists: they have no aesthetic sensibility, and find aesthetic and affective statements to be, strictly speaking, meaningless. They can carry on complex conversations, despite not “understanding” what the words mean; but they can only regard non-functional expressions as a sort of spam. In this way, Watts’ Darwinism ends up confirming Kant: the defining attribute of the aesthetic is that it is unavoidably “disinterested,” that its purposiveness of structure serves no actual (empirical or utilitarian) purpose. In other words, an aesthetic sensibility — which at this point we can pretty much equate with consciousness tout court — is not an evolutionary adaptation, but mere nonadaptive byproduct.

And this brings us back to the arguments about sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The opponents of the sociobiological approach, like Richard Lewontin and the late Stephen Jay Gould, argued that many important features of our existence are in fact not in themselves adaptive, and only arose as byproducts of other processes. This is why cultural variability matters, and why not all aspects of human existence are biologically fixed, “hardwired,” and “in our genes.” To the contrary, hardcore sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists — like Steven Pinker — argue that nearly every feature of human existence and human nature, to an extremely high degree of specificity, is biologically universal and not culturally variable, because it is directly adaptive (if not for us, then at least for our ancestors in the Pleistocene). Indeed, nearly the only aspect of human life that Pinker will concede to be a mere, nonadaptive byproduct, rather than a “hardwired” trait of evolutionary significance, is precisely… art and aesthetics. Of course, this is just Pinker’s way of saying that art and aesthetics are trivial and of no worth or importance whatsoever. However, I’m inclined to think that Pinker thus expresses, unbeknownst to himself and in inverted form, the Kantian insight that aesthetics is non-utilitarian, non-cognitive, and hence disinterested; which is why aesthetic judgment is the key to any sensibility whatsoever. By equating an aesthetic sensibility with sentience itself, and relegating both to evolutionary dysfunctionality, Watts pushes this line of thought in a startling direction. It sounds fatuous to claim that aesthetics is what makes us “human”; doubtless Watts would reject my turning this assertion into the “theme” of his novel. Nonetheless, this seems to me to be the unavoidable correlate of his radical dystopianism. Consciousness is little more than a fugitive, wavering doubling of what happens (cognitively and affectively) in the depths of our bodies. But in this way, consciousness, aesthetics, and unadaptiveness or dysfunctionality go hand in hand in our species — and this, rather than any supposed goodness or nobility, is what distinguishes and defines human life…