Category: Books

My new book, Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society, is now in print! (Amazon.com doesn’t seem to have it yet, but I have received my own copies, and they now have it at my campus bookstore). It’s a book about cyberculture and globalization, in which I use science fiction novels as my main sources of social theory. The book discusses all sorts of things from copyright piracy to psychedelic drugs to evolutionary psychology to ubiquitous surveillance and corporate control to the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.
I am hoping at some point to have the entire text of the book available online; I’m still negotiating with my press, which is willing to let me do this in principle, but would like for me to wait until the book has been for sale for six months or a year.

The short stories in Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown are eerie, and creepy, and sometimes strangely affecting. This is science fiction, set on another world, with many sentient species in addition to human beings; but with an emotional tone that is closer to horror. (The author’s note at the back of the book defines Thomas’ genre as “emotive dark fantasy”). Tone and feeling are more important than plot; the stories’ moods range from gentle melancholy to outright disgust and self-loathing on the part of the protagonists. Not all the stories in the volume are equally powerful, but the best ones are genuinely disturbing: such as “The Reflections of Ghosts,” about an artist whose medium consists of mentally crippled clones of himself that he sells to rich patrons to be tortured and killed, and “The Library of Shadows,” about a cop who has a chip in his brain that preserves all his memories in perfect and complete detail, so that he cannot stop remembering all the grotesque and sickening murders he has investigated. Strong stuff, all the more so in that Thomas does not revel in the horrors he invents, the way Poe and Lovecraft arguably did.

A Place So Foreign, Cory Doctorow‘s new collection of short stories, is always charming, and sometimes profound. In these stories as in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I blogged previously), Doctorow achieves a breezy and low-affect style that nonetheless turns out to be sneakily incisive, making points or suggesting emotional implications which almost sneak by you before you notice them. Some of the stories are simply entertainments, but several of them have real power. My favorites were: “Return to Pleasure Island,” which combines Doctorow’s Disney/theme park obsession with a strange updating of Pinocchio in a way that was both creepily disturbing and rather moving; “To Market, To Market:,” a satricial piece in which 11-year-olds, have marketing strategies and use branding and product endorsements to secure their status in the school playground; and “0wnz0red,” which takes the privatization of “intellectual property” to its logical conclusion. I also had a warm spot for “The Super Man and the Bugout,” which imagines a somewhat hapless Jewish Superman with left-wing sympathies.

“The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th Century.” In his new novel Millennium People (available in the UK only), J. G. Ballard continues his provocative exploration of the pathologies of late capitalism. Ballard has been publishing fiction for over forty years, and in all this time he has remained consistent in his vision of the violence and willful perversity that underly normative consumer culture. (Violence and psychopathology are not really transgressive in Ballard’s fiction; they always end up reinforcing the very order whose laws they seem to contest). There’s scarcely any writer alive who seems so stuck inside his own head, so trapped in his own peculiar and utterly private obsessions as Ballard is; yet there’s also scarcely any writer alive whose vision resonates so powerfully with the larger social and economic forces that are shaping the planet today. This is the mysterious key to Ballard’s greatness as a writer (and, I would add, as a social theorist). All his books are in certain ways precisely the same: they all feature the same clinical prose, the same detached fascination with destruction, the same focus on creepy charismatic figures. Yet Ballard’s writing has also changed radically in certain ways, as the society around him has changed; his last two novels before this one, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes were among his best ever, as he explored the sacrificial logic of the 1990s economic boom (which is something very different from the visions of entropy and detritus that dominated many of Ballard’s earlier books).
Millennium People veers off in another direction, yet again, as it tells the story of two failed “revolutions.” The first one is a revolt of the normally orderly and obedient British middle class, “a small revolution… so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed,” as we are told on the book’s first page. The other is a more sinister rebellion, indulging in meaningless violence for its own sake, a violence that its (equally middle-class) proponents see as redemptive precisely to the extent that it has no meanings or motivations, and accomplishes nothing. “Violence… should always be gratuitous, and no serious revolution should ever achieve its aims.” A complex irony is at work here. The novel’s professional-class rebels see themselves as the “new proletariat,” exploited because their substantial disposable income is eaten away in condo fees and bills for their children’s private schools. They rebel against consumer society, by trashing their own cars and houses, and vandalizing video stores and art galleries. But of course these people cannot really give up their Range Rovers and cappuccinos, so the rebellion fizzles out and bourgeois propriety is restored. Meanwhile, under cover of this mild disorder, a smaller, more serious group of nihilists is bombing airport lounges and murdering random minor celebrities. They seem to take seriously Andre Breton’s dictum that the ultimate surrealist act is to shoot a revolver into a crowd (Breton himself, of course, did not take his own dictum seriously; for all his radical rhetoric, he never fired a gun into a crowd, and in fact is the last person one could ever imagine doing so). But this second rebellion also ends up a failure, though it partly seduces the novel’s stolid narrator. Meaninglessness and surrealist nonsense fail to prove themselves redemptive, and instead are all too easily reabsorbed, like everything else, within the fabric of bourgeois life. Ballard himself seems to wistfully admire the idea of nihilistic violence and directionless rebellion, even as he slyly suggests that such romantic revolt is itself part of what seduces us into accepting consumer society with its relentless fetishes of status and comfort.

John Horgan is my favorite science writer. His books The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind were both valuable for their lucid explanations, and their hard-headed skepticism and debunking of hype. The former book cast doubt upon scientific claims to be on the verge of discovering a “theory of everything”: the latter suggested that current research programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and artificial intelligence were far from probing adequately the mysteries of the mind, In his latest latest book, Rational Mysticism, Horgan turns his attention to “the border between science and spirituality.” Specifically, he looks into explorations of mysticism made by a variety of researchers, from religious scholars to neuroscientists to psychologists to self-experimenters (a category that overlaps with the others). The emphasis is mostly on mystical states of consciousness: their physiology, their relation to other forms of experience, and the kinds of (extra-scientific) truths they may convey. This also involves detours into (briefly) parapsychology and (more extensively) psychedelic drugs. Any discussion of spirituality and mysticism quickly turns into a morass, but Horgan is very careful in avoiding both mystical dismissals of scientific rationality, and reductivistic scientific dismissals of spiritual experience as rubbish. He is rightly skeptical of New Age claims to transcendent truth; but this is in pretty much the same way that he is skeptical, in his previous books, of scientific theories that make extreme claims about the nature of being, life, and the mind on the basis of very slender empirical evidence. Horgan (again, rightly, to my mind) finds much to admire in such figures as Susan Blackmore (who combines a Buddhist perspective with a refusal to be taken in by vapid claims for parapsychology and the like) and the late Terence McKenna (of whom Horgan gives an affectionate portrait, bringing out the humor and irony that underlay McKenna’s often extravagant theories). The book’s conclusion, with which I can only agree, is that neither mysticism nor science can explain (or explain away) the mysteriousness and sheer weirdness (as McKenna liked to insist) of being; but they can both lead us to appreciate these qualities more. Personally, I found the parts of the book where Horgan deals with psychedelic drugs the most interesting, because of my own psychedelic experiences when I was younger. On the other hand, I seem to be utterly devoid of any craving for a larger truth, or for a consolation for the pains of existence, that most often drives the mystical quest, and that Horgan admits to feeling himself. The only form of “spirituality” discussed in the book that has any emotional appeal for me is (again) McKenna’s quest, not for God or nirvana or some sort of ultimate enlightenment, but for novelty. (The question of “how is newness possible?”, which McKenna addressed in his own wacky way, is of course the same question that animates the philosophies of Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze).

Shelley Jackson has announced a “mortal work of art”: a text written by her, to be tattooed on peoples’ bodies, one word per person. The work will not be published in any other form, and “the full text will be known only to participants, who may, but need not choose to establish communication with one another.” (Via Die, Puny Humans). The participants ” are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments.” Consequently, the work will not be immortal, but will perish as the people whose bodies bear it pass away.
I’ve long admired Jackson’s prose, both her hypertext works (like Patchwork Girl and My Body) and her printed volume of short stories, The Melancholy of Anatomy.
But this new project is so beautiful it takes my breath away.

I have continued my exploration of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead by reading Science and the Modern World (1925), together with the first half of Isabelle Stengers’ commentary…
Continue reading “Whitehead (continued)”

The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is one of my all-time favorite writers, so I was glad to come across Three Novellas that had not previously been translated into English. Bernhard’s fiction usually consists of long paragraphs consisting of fragmentary sentences just piled on, one after another; the sentences are usually made of multiple layers of indirect discourse, speakers reporting on other speakers reporting on other speakers. Thus in the third and best of these three novellas, Walking, the narrator recounts to the reader what his friend Oehler recounts to him about what he said to the psychiatrist Scherrer about what Karrer, who has gone insane, said to him (Oehler). These convolutions in the narrative voice are accompanied by convolutions in the events narrated, as the multiply layered narrators circle around what they cannot directly describe, mixing anecdotes, rants, digressions, and obsessive repetitions. The overall effect is at once gruesome and hilarious: the narrators insist that life is unbearable, that suicide is the best and only way out, that Austria in particular is a nasty and unlivable country, filled with Nazis and charlatans and ignorant vulgar bullies with a violent, resentful enmity against true and original thought. But these monologues are comic more than tragic because they are so obsessive and so over-the-top. Reading Bernhard is exhilarating, and makes me laugh out loud, even though at the same time his fiction more than confirms my most negative, doom-ridden, and misanthropic feelings and thoughts. Bernhard’s books work because they implicate their narrators, and their readers, in everything they are ranting against: finally they are about the incapacity of thought – or of writing – to realize itself, to cohere with itself, to coincide with itself. Consciousness is always riddled with otherness: the otherness of the body, and of language, as well as of other people and society and nature. This makes thought a painful process, the more excruciatingly painful the more exacerbatedly turned back upon itself; but it always does turn back upon itself, like an itch that one cannot help scratching, even though this only makes it itch more in the long run. So Bernhard’s fiction, beyond its critique of the falseness and superficiality of Austrian culture, dramatizes the impossibility of mastering thought, of mastering one’s own discourse, of being triumphantly masterful and creative, which is what the myth of art and creativity in modern society comes down to. And yet Bernhard’s fiction is itself wonderfully creative, precisely by expressing, and wallowing in, this abject impossibility. Reading Bernhard means inoculating oneself against the nauseating myths of creativity, genius, mastery, moral uplift, etc. – one has to reject these myths, not because art is worthless and meaningless, but precisely because art matters, and Bernhard gives us an account of how and why it matters. The exhilarating laughter of excruciating pain and disgust.