Author: Steven Shaviro

Woken Furies is Richard Morgan‘s fourth novel, and the third in his “Takeshi Kovacs” series (following Altered Carbon and Broken Angels). (I wrote about Altered Carbon here, Broken Angels here, and about Morgan’s one non-Takeshi Kovacs novel, Market Forces, here).

Like its predecessors, Woken Furies is a combination of high-octane action/violence/thriller and science fiction. Morgan is so good at the former — machinating action with loads of unexpected twists and turns, and delivering really intense and visceral scenes of violence (“the grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball and tugged it out on the optic nerve… He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood…”) — that he’d probably be a lot more famous if he set his books, Robert Ludlum- or Tom Clancy-like, in the present. But of course it’s the science fiction aspect that really makes these novels so interesting and disturbing.

In Woken Furies, we have the staples of the earlier Kovacs novels — the technology of “sleeves,” new bodies in which your consciousness can be inserted, provided that you have preserved a physical backup of that consciousness (the “cortical stack”); the enhancement of those sleeves by all sorts of neurochemical enhancements and digital prostheses; and the special training Takeshi Kovacs has received as an Envoy (a former member of the elite UN corps that brutally suppresses rebellion and revolution anywhere in the sphere of human-inhabited planets), which makes him both superhuman and somewhat inhuman. In this volume, Kovacs returns to his home planet, Harlan’s World, and finds himself having to deal with yakuza, religious fundamentalists, out-of-control military AI killing systems, a brutal ruling class, and especially the legacy of Quellcrist Falconer, the legendary socialist-revolutionary theorist/activist whose words Kovacs had often quoted in the previous novels, but who now seems to have returned from the dead.

Kodwo Eshun has remarked on how Morgan’s novels seem to take a sort of morbid, macho pleasure — what used to be called a morose delectation — in reveling in the horrific excesses of capitalism at its most brutal and barbaric. The absolute cynicism of power, and the delight in exercising it as sadistically as possible, are constants in these novels, which simultaneously present them as inescapable and inevitable, regardless of the social arrangement, and rage against the politico-economic privilege that makes them possible. Not only Kovacs-as-narrator, but Morgan himself as well, seem to combine an utterly Hobbesian view of human nature with a Marx-like level of outrage at exploitation and oppression.

Woken Furies pushes this to almost schizophrenic levels. While the action here is not quite as all-out brutal as that of the military/corporate interventions in the hellish Broken Angels, here the drive to see the worst, and almost revel in it, is more deeply than ever before embedded in Kovacs’ character. Kovacs is consumed with loathing and self-loathing, though (as narrator) he never entirely ‘fesses up to it. Kovacs is offended beyond endurance by the exploitation, torture, and murder that are continually being inflicted on Harlan’s World (and all the other human-inhabited planets) for reasons of economic gain, or self-righteous religious dogma.Yet he clearly gets off on his own frequent opportunities to torture and kill, and scorns the politically idealistic values of the revolutionaries among whom he finds himself as either self-delusion or self-interested hypocrisy.

Woken Furies is an action-packed book, yet the action is often enough suspended for Kovacs’ rants against religious fundamentalists (one of the chief religions in the novel, the New Revelation, seems to combine all the most patriarchal and misogynistic aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as well as for dialogues/debates between Kovacs and other characters on the nature of power and the prospects for meaningful political change. Nihilistic cynicism and revolutionary “optimism of the will” dance cautiously around each other, trading insults while at the same time measuring possibilities, in a world in which bio- and informational technologies have at once extended human prospects to an almost utopian extent (the “sleeves” allow for enhanced physical well-being, enhanced mental abilities, and a life indefinitely extended in multiple bodies), and given new footholds for power (new opportunities for surveillance and control, for the extraction of surplus value, and for the opportunity to torture as well as kill).

In his new book Archaeologies of the Future (which I am currently reading, and will write about when I am done), Fredric Jameson explores the utopian impulse as it manifests itself in science fiction, working through this impulse’s multiple contradictions and impediments, and suggesting how the thrust toward radical otherness in science fiction is a way to keep the possibility of alternatives to capitalism open, precisely when we are being told endlessly that the market is everything, and that there is no alternative to the current reign of global capital. Morgan is scarcely utopian, in any sense of the word, but the very way that cynicism and rage work in Woken Furies lead to something of the same effect that Jameson finds in utopian SF texts by LeGuin and others. (And this is so precisely because Morgan is about as un-LeGuin-like an SF writer as could possibly be imagined). Though cynicism is often an alibi for acquiescence in the existing order (‘I know it sucks, but there’s no hope of anything better, so we might as well shrug our shoulders and get on with it’), the nihilist vehemence of Kovacs’ cynicism (and Morgan’s staging of it) prohibits any such resignation. And the technology of the novel’s world is just “estranging” enough (that is to say, strange in the very way it amplifies and extends what we recognize of ourselves today, so that that recognition is twisted as in a funhouse mirror) that a displacement of the deadlock of cynical power we find ourselves in today becomes just barely visible.

The novel ends, not just with Kovacs’ survival against vast odds (as was also contrived in the previous two volumes), but even with a muted sense of political and personal hope — one that also deliberately and creatively elides the traditional binary opposition between reform and revolution, between gradual change and radical rupture. (This latter seems to me to be crucially important: we need to get away both from the tepid reformism that in fact leaves structures of oppression unchanged, and the revolutionist gestures that romantically fantasize about starting over with a clean slate: both of these alternatives have proved themselves to be calamitous in the world we live in today. Neither of these all-too-familiar alternatives works to grasp the “seeds of futurity” — Deleuzian “lines of flight” or Whiteheadian “creative advance” — that exist as unactualized potentialities in the real world).

The price Morgan pays for this conclusion, however, is an almost literal deus ex machina. All three Kovacs novels are framed with the relics of the Martians, a now-extinct inhuman race (they are more like giant, intelligent, bats or raptors) whose abandoned technologies have been scavenged by human beings, and have indeed provided human beings with those very technological advances which have made the world of the novel (colonization of multiple planets, faster-than-light information transfer, cortical stacks and sleeves) possible in the first place. In all three novels, the Martian relics imply a sort of limit to capitalism, because they embody a degree of invention and creativity of which humanity — or capitalism — itself is incapable, and which it can only secondarily scavenge and appropriate. (Though the extinction of the Martians implies that their own society was far from being utopian or unproblematic either). But at the end of Woken Furies, the Martian technology is something more: its intervention from the depths of a dead and distant past, and at the same time from an incomprehensibly advanced future, provides the very sense of possibility that Morgan and his novels cannot imagine in the present: neither in the writerly present of the early 21st century, nor in the fictional present of the 25th. What are we to make of this intervention of otherness? How balance radical otherness (which cannot help seeming almost theological) and the potential, within capitalism, of altering and abolishing it from within?

Warren Ellis‘ new comic book series Fell — the first issue of which came out last week — is grim, downbeat, and quite powerful. Here there is none of the high-tech futurism Ellis played with so gleefully and cleverly in Transmetropolitan and Global Frequency. Instead, the main character is a homicide cop, Richard Fell, who’s been assigned to work in Snowtown, a totally depressed and decrepit and ruined city “over the bridge” from anyplace that is economically prosperous or technologically advantaged. Moving from high-tech-land to Snowtown is like moving from yuppified and WiFi’ed Seattle to rust-belt-depressed Detroit (as I did a bit more than a year ago), only more so. Snowtown is one of what Manuel Castells calls the “black holes of informational capitalism,” a place that has been disconnected from the grid or the network, yet whose misery remains a counter-effect of the global system it cannot access. Everything is shabby and broken down in Snowtown; and, at least in the first issue, it always seems to be night. Ben Templesmith‘s drawing is just blurry and sketchy and monochromatically gray (for the most part) enough to suggest a collapse of the comfortable outlines and boundaries we take for granted, but without suggesting the hope of anything supernatural breaking through. Fell gives us violence and drugs and detritus, but without any of the glamorization or hipness such things took on, for instance, in the cyberpunk novels of the 1980s. Rather, Ellis and Templesmith suggest a relentlessness, a repetitiveness, that continually gives us unpleasant surprises (even when we thought things couldn’t get any worse) without offering the prospect of escape.

Richard Fell is doggedly persistent, has his own severe code of ethics, and is observant and prescient enough to be good at what he does, which is ferret out secrets and catch people. His motto is that “everybody’s hiding something,” and he clearly (as another character suggests to him) gets off, at least a little on the power that ferreting out those secrets gives him. Centered around this character, Fell is genre fiction that gives us genre satisfactions, but with odd little twists that we don’t expect. I mean that it’s like the best of 40s/50s film noir — but like those films were when they were first made, not like they are now with a half-century of resonance and reputation that makes us feel so self-congratulatory about liking them.

Fell is also an experiment, both formally and commercially. Each issue is 18 pages, instead of the industry-standard 24, and sells for $1.99 instead of the industry-standard $2.99. Each issue is also entirely self-contained in terms of narrative: Ellis says that there will be no multi-issue story arcs. This leads to a harshly compressed sort of storytelling. Every detail counts, and the narrative is tight and powerful, even though story per se is less important than character and atmosphere. Designing an ongoing comic on this basis is a risky thing to do: both because the dramatic intensity is hard to sustain, and because it is economically difficult to sell comic books at such a low price point (if sales can’t be sustained issue to issue, the book will go under). There’s probably more to be said about how a comic like this negotiates both formal and commercial demands, how it fully acknowledges its own commodity status, while at the same time retaining that deep negativity that Adorno believed popular-art commodities to be incapable of.

Bret Easton Ellis‘ Lunar Park is — let me just say this to begin with — the best novel I have read all summer (new books by Cormac McCarthy and John Crowley notwithstanding). Like Ellis’ previous books it has been released with great fanfare and expensive publicity, as a result of which it has sold fairly well (it is ranked #121 in current sales on amazon.com as I write this), despite receiving mostly negative reviews. One never reads novels in a vacuum, and it’s impossible to read and think about Ellis without noting the strange combination of his celebrity on the one hand, and the disdain and incomprehension with which the literary establishment regards him on the other. Or to put the same paradox in a different way: Ellis is an extraordinarily literary and writerly writer, and yet few artists of any sort have gone as far as he has in exploring and reflecting upon our current post-literary, multimedia culture. This situation is one of the things that Lunar Park is about.

Lunar Park is a surprising book, in many ways. Ellis’ previous books have been largely devoid of interiority. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers have narrators and characters who drift through in a continual haze of drugs and expensive commodities and meaningless sex. Patrick Bateman of American Psycho shows no passion as he recounts the details of his murders in the same detached tone as he does the details of what everybody was wearing, or of what bizarre nouvelle cuisine meals he ate at various overpriced yuppie restaurants. And Victor Ward of Glamorama is chronically clueless, constantly strung out on Xanax, and incapable even of grasping simple metaphors. Ellis’ tone in these novels is generally flat; his language is often minimal and repetitive. All in all, Ellis’ writing has been seen as the quintessence of postmodern affectlessness and insistence on surfaces; most often it’s been criticized and scorned for this, and at best it’s received the backhanded complement of being regarded as a “satire” of pomo blankness (a reading that Ellis himself has sometimes encouraged).

But Lunar Park, unlike anything Ellis has written before, is a novel of interiority. All of Ellis’ novels have one or several first-person narrators, but this is the first book in which the narrator is self-reflective, highly self-conscious, and concerned more with his own inner states of being than with outward appearances (coolness, celebrity, the media, expensive clothes and food). Indeed, Lunar Park is pseudo-autobiographical: the narrator/protagonist is one Bret Easton Ellis, a novelist famous and controversial for his high life at fashionable nightclubs, as much as for such books as Less Than Zero and especially the notorious American Psycho. Ellis cannibalizes his own life history to set up the story of a writer who is trying go straight, leave behind his own past excesses with drugs and celebrity, and start a new life as a family man, a husband and father, in the suburbs. The first chapter is a tour de force in Ellis’ old style, only more self-lacerating than before because of its confessional mode. It’s a description of Ellis’ (real and fictional) career, filled with huge advances that are spent before the books are even written, cocaine binges, celebrity gossip, public collapses into incoherence, and even dinner with George W. Bush at the White House. But then it becomes the (entirely fictional) story of Ellis’ marriage to celebrity actress Jayne Dennis, of whose twelve-year-old son Ellis has been proven by DNA testing to be the father; together with an account of Ellis’ attempt to come to terms with the death and the horrific legacy of his own (actual) father, who he claims was the model for serial-killer Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. The narrative digs into various kinds of reckonings, about fathers and sons, about love and family, and about the moral responsibilities that need to be faced by writers of immoral or amoral fiction.

Formally, then, the book would seem to be a kind of palinode — an apology and recantation — both for Ellis’ real-life and writerly excesses, and for his aesthetics (his espousal of postmodern nihilism). Except that — the palinode is a parody, and the interiority that the novel so powerfully suggests is just as powerfully, indeed quite savagely and gleefully, deconstructed. It’s not just — and not even mostly — that Ellis’ quest for redemption is played for comedy (though it is to a certain extent, as Ellis downs enormous quantities of vodka and Klonopin, together with various controlled substances, to master the anxiety of living up to the demands of respectable married existence). But mostly because the book’s very self-reflexiveness, and the narrator’s own self-reflectiveness leads into a hall of mirrors, a mise en abime that defies any resolution. The techniques that mainstream novels, from the 19th century to today, have used in order to constuct the appearance of interiority are pirated by Ellis to suggest instead that everything is an appearance, a performance, a writerly imposture. The narrator’s introspection reveals only that he has no depths and no center, and that everything he does is driven by outside forces and superficial motives. The novel is filled with sincere moments of longing and confession and reform, with moments of the desire to go straight, “to get back to basics” (4), “to concentrate only on our family now [because] it was the only thing that meant anything to me” (199), to affirm the fact “that a family — if you allow it — gives you joy, which in turn gives you hope” (304); but each of these moments ends up being framed as a theatrical performance, being suspended “in quotation marks,” being revealed as an expression of social conformism, of what you are supposed to feel, even if nobody ever actually does. “I no longer had the hard-on for her that I once did, and tried to soothe her with vague generalities I’d picked up on Oprah” (85): Lunar Park is relentless in the way it picks up on feelings of panic, anxiety, need, depression, loneliness, helpless caring, and regard — and dissolves them into exercises in psychobabble, or maudlin literary conceits. Lots of American novels of the past fifty years have dealt with the emptiness and vapidity of suburbia, with the hopeless alcoholism and passionless adultery behind the facade of the great affluent American dream; but Ellis treats this vision as itself nothing more than a tired and unimaginative cliche, a situation people live out because it is what is expected of them.

In short, literary interiority — or, more precisely, a brilliant simulation thereof — does the same work in Lunar Park that was done by media images and glittering commodified surfaces in Ellis’ previous novels. Victor Ward in Glamorama lives his life with a soundtrack of pop songs, and he is always being followed around by film crews which turn his life into a reality show (though the novel was written, prophetically, before the current vogue for reality TV). It starts out being a crew from MTV that is chronicling his efforts to open a new club in Manhattan; but further into the novel, the film crews are orchestrating Victor’s sex life, and forcing retakes of the terrorist actions in which he finds himself being implicated. In Lunar Park, instead of postmodern media we have the more traditionally modernist theme of Ellis as a writer, and the self-referential crossovers between real life and literary fiction. The first line of the novel reads: “You do an awfully good impression of yourself.” The next several paragraphs go on to analyze this opening line, by comparison with the opening passages of Ellis’ other books. Not only is Lunar Park an act of self-impersonation; as such, it is also a futile attempt to remake the author’s life by rewriting his fiction. Similar gambits of increasing complexity go on throughout the novel. Fiction crosses over into actuality, as somebody starts to carry out Patrick Bateman’s murders in real life. And actuality dissolves into fiction, as adolescent boys in the upscale, anonymous suburb where the novel is set start disappearing: it turns out that they haven’t been abducted or killed, but have abandoned the shopping malls and nuclear-family homes for something like Peter Pan’s Neverneverland. The narrator assures us early on in the novel that “all of it really happened, every word is true” (30); but by the end, nearly everything in the narrative has revealed its sources in Ellis’ earlier fiction.

In modernist novels, this sort of self-referentiality is utopian; it points back to the creative power of the author, or the supremacy of the imagination, that permeates and transforms reality. In certain stereotypically postmodern novels, such self-referentiality is instead either a tired display of virtuosity, or the assertion that everything is language, everything is text. In Lunar Park, however, the self-referential fictiveness of the text works rather differently. It presents a kind of collapse, an involution, but more into the boredom and horror of the everyday, and into the multiple mirrors of the movie-video-internet-entertainment complex (from which literary writing cannot ultimately be distinguished) than into the abysses of textuality. Ellis is not suggesting that there are only surfaces, or only texts, so that anything that would seem to float beyond them is an illusion; but rather that selves and desires are precisely effects of surfaces, real in the same way that mirror images are real: we do objectively see them, and they do tell us things about ourselves and about the world (of which we and they are part).

This is why, in the latter part of the novel, the narrator splits into an “I” — Bret — on the one hand, and an inner voice he calls “the writer” on the other. The two are in continual dialogue. The writer imagines scenes that Bret can’t, or won’t. The writer loves chaos and disorder (I can’t find the page reference for this at the moment); he is the one who got off on the kinky violence of American Psycho and Glamorama, in a way that made these books more than just satire. The writer pushes Bret out of the ‘normality’ in which he would like to take refuge, makes him look for extreme, disturbing possibilities. The writer is therefore the part of the narrator who invents horrors (like Patrick Bateman) that then manifest themselves in the real world — which the novel, on one level, is trying to exorcize. But the writer is also the voice that forces the trauma of the Real (as Lacan and Zizek might say) or of the Outside (as Blanchot might say) upon Bret, that dislodges him from his solipsistic fantasy life, and compels him to confront what he is perpetually fleeing from, what he refuses, or is afraid, to recognize.

This means that Lunar Park tends to show us how selves and desires are social fictions. Existentially, we are thrown back on these images and effects, these mirror reflections, and it is as foolish to dismiss them as phony as it is to invest them with mystical qualities, as if they were deeper and more resonant than they actually are. Politically, however, these effects and images have a lot to do with the social positions that we inhabit. Ellis has always written almost exclusively about affluent and privileged WASPs, and he never lets us forget it. The world of Lunar Park is a world of expensive malls and elite private schools and children hypermedicated on Ritalin and Prozac and whatever else can prevent them from being too curious, too manic, too afraid, or too divergent from the responsibilities and powers of the class they have been born into. The wealthy suburbs are safety zones, where scared white people hunker down in isolation (or so they hope) from a post-9/11 America which is not only inhabited by poor people and people of color, but in which, also, in Ellis’ fictive account, terrorist attacks in big cities have become a monthly occurrence. Yet this means, of course, that the affluent suburbs end up mirroring whatever they have armed themselves against. One brilliant passage recounts a national malaise, as reported in the media, in which “damage had ‘unwittingly’ been done. There were ‘feared lapses’… Situations had ‘deteriorated’… The populace was confounded, yet didn’t care… the survival of mankind didn’t seem very important in the long run” (55 — I’ve left out most of the paragraph of hilariously cliched, utterly indistinct abstractions).

In its last third, Lunar Park metamorphoses into a suburban horror novel, as the narrator’s home is haunted by demonic dolls, ghastly images from his past, and other psychic monstrosities. In interviews, Ellis has described this aspect of the novel as a homage to Stephen King — in much the same way, he adds, that the supermodels-as-conspiratorial-terrorists plot of Glamorama was a homage to Robert Ludlum. Many reviewers, even if they liked the earlier portions of the novel, have been critical of the supernatural latter portion. But to my mind, this seeming fall (from affective intensity to shlock horror) is a crucial part of the novel’s brilliance. Ellis’ insight here is that mass-market horror fiction is precisely the flip side of the high-art novel of self-conscious interiority. Stephen King is really Henry James turned inside-out (an assertion that would not at all shock or surprise the author of The Turn of the Screw). Horror projects inward anguish outward into the material and social world (the haunted psyche becomes the haunted house), and in doing so reveals that that inwardness was in fact itself first produced, and projected inward, by the outside world. (This argument is starting to sound a lot more Hegelian than I intended; but I can’t help it, strange things do happen in horror fiction). And so, Ellis gives us scary monsters, glimpsed for mere seconds, in prose the equal of King’s (which I do not despise the way severe high-culture types might). But one of these horrors turns out to be a figure from a story that Ellis (the real one? or just the fictional one?) wrote at age 12, and whose obvious Freudian overtones are easily mocked (251); while another is described as follows: “the only reason I did not immediately turn away was because it seemed fake, like something I had seen in a movie” (272). Horror is yet another arena for the self-referential collapse I mentioned earlier, one in which the banality of the everyday and the traumatic force of what the Lacanians call the Real are entirely conjoined, and both are theorized as effects (in the sense both of “cause and effect,” and of “special effects”) of the media, or more broadly of postmodern, informational capitalism.

I could say a lot more — and cite a lot more — but this posting has gone on too long already. All in all, Lunar Park resonates with a very tricky and profound sort of affect. It’s an emotionally intense novel, and at the same time an extraordinarily distanced one, with a strong dose of absurdism. I’ve often written about how postmodern irony and flippancy, the placing of all feelings in ridiculous “quotation marks,” in fact works as an emotional intensifier (this is the mechanism, for instance, in the films of both David Lynch and Guy Maddin). But Ellis is onto something even stranger here — in the way his novel is always teetering on the edges of cliche, on the edges of sincerity, on the edges of wistful longing, without ever falling completely into any of these; and in the way that, the more confessional and inward-looking the narrative gets, the more generic and impersonal it also gets, so that it offhandedly, subtly corrodes our most cherished feelings about personhood and privacy. Ellis is at the same time exorcizing his private demons, and demonstrating to us the illusiveness of any such gesture; he’s projecting an emotionally powerful, but ultimately wishful fantasy about fathers and sons and reconciliation and making up somehow for the irreversibility of time (what Nietzsche called the tyranny of the “it was”), and at the same time pointing up the fictiveness of this wishful fantasy, and the way it plays into, and is even generated by, the media-entertainment complex within which we cannot choose but to live.

Bret Easton Ellis on the experience of bourgeois parenting, from page 43 of his marvellous new novel Lunar Park (which I am currently reading, and which I will discuss at greater length once I am done):

Well, being married’s okay — but the dad thing’s a little tougher… ‘Daddy, can I have some juice?’ ‘How about some water, honey?’ ‘Daddy?’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Can I have some juice?’ ‘How about some water instead, honey?’ ‘Daddy, can I have some juice?’ ‘Okay, honey, you want some juice?’ ‘No, its okay, I’ll just have some water.’ It’s like some fucking Beckett play that we’re rehearsing constantly.

Mario Perniola’s The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic is one of those books that comes upon you unawares (rather than one’s coming upon it) , and that is so beautiful, so singular and unexpected, that it just blows you away. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic is a philosophy book, and it is about a certain sort of extreme experience that, or so the author claims, philosophy and sexuality share. Perniola invents a new ontological category, that of the “thing that feels”: something that is utterly apart from the duality of subjectivity (which we usually equate with sentience) on the one hand, and of insentient objects on the other. The thing that feels “has” a certain sort of intense experience, but this experience is not a subjective one, not anything that is experienced by a subject. This has something to do with the impersonal affect described by Blanchot and by Deleuze, though neither of these authors is cited in Perniola’s text. The experience of the thing that feels is a sexual one: it is sexual contact, touching, caressing, licking, penetrating, and so on: but without orgasm, without a climax, without any release of tension, without any return at the end to a satiated self. The experience of the thing that feels is organs and orifices that are no longer felt as parts of larger wholes, bodily surfaces and depths in such intimate contact that one cannot be separated from the other, feelings cannot be attributed to one rather than the other, and yet this intimacy does not result in fusion either, because that would imply a larger unitary entity into which the two lovers, or more accurately the multiple parts and orifices and organs, would have merged. The experience of the thing that feels is a kind of utter abandonment: I desubjectify myself, detach myself from myself and turn myself into a mere thing, give myself (my body, my organs and orifices, my feelings) — give all this over to the other person to do with me what they will (and vice versa, though the two self-abandonments do not quite form a mutual and symmetrical pattern of reciprocity, because both these self-abandonments are limitless, formless, and cannot be measured).

Perniola does not only invoke the mysterious being of the thing that feels: he describes it, quite systematically, according to a series of cultural and philosophical coordinates. He compares it to, and carefully differentiates it from, sadism, masochism, fetishism, vampirism, and other “perversions” and “transgressions” that have been the obsessions of 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century modernity. He shows the way that the sexual experience of the thing that feels resonates with various contemporary aesthetic states and expressions, with a quite amazing list that includes prog rock (!), cybersex, avant-garde fashion, deconstructive architecture, installation art, and the novels of Georges Perec.

And furthermore — since he claims that the experience of the thing that feels is a philosophical one as well as a sexual one — Perniola gives it a metaphysical genealogy as well, in a trajectory that runs through Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Perniola seeks, like many thinkers before him, to get rid of the mind/body dualism that has so long structured Western thought and culture. But he finds the vitalism of Nietzsche and other anti-Cartesian body theorists as unacceptable as the spiritualism of Descartes and all his idealist descendents; for Perniola, these are just two sides of the same coin. Descartes, in the cogito, defines himself as “a thing that thinks”; he failed thereby to conceive the non-subjective thing that feels; so it was the “think” part, rather than the “thing” part that was Descartes’ big error. Reification and alienation are good things for Perniola; one can never be alienated and reified enough; it is only through them that one can become — or more accurately, that one can be, a thing that thinks. Perniola therefore scorns those thinkers (Nietzsche explicitly, Bergson implicitly) who claim to undo that reification, and return us to some lived experience of the body.

In contrast, Perniola finds clues to the thing that feels in Kant’s ethics above all, with its rejection of subjective good will as inherently “pathological,” and its deeply paradoxical equation of freedom with the state of the “thing in itself” (it is highly significant that Kant’s realm of noumena is a realm of Things). Perniola also finds clues to the thing that feels in certain moments that Hegel denounces as inauthentic, but describes with incomparable rigor; in certain moments that are intimated, but then foreclosed, in Heidegger; and in the late Wittgenstein’s enigmatic discussions of “seeing as” and of the puzzling grammar of expressions of pain.

What this summary of The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic leaves out is the extent to which the book’s power and beauty is largely an effect of style. Perniola’s writing (as far as I can tell from the translation, which occasionally trips itself up with expressions that seem to be literal translations from the Italian in ways that come out sounding unidiomatic in English) is lucid, and concise, finely chiseled yet without suggesting any hardness or harshness. Nothing is argued or deduced; but everything is set forth calmly, clearly, and in a carefully structured order. Rarely has a call for excess and extremity been set forth with such classical care and restraint. In this respect, Perniola joins a small circle of “postmodern” writers who are starting to interrogate limits, push thought to extremes, and approach affect outside of the cognitive straightjacket, without any recourse to the tired 20th-century category of “transgression.”

Justina Robson‘s SF novel Natural History is a brilliant exploration of what it might mean to be posthuman.

In the future world of Robson’s novel, “Unevolved” human beings live side-by-side with the “Forged,” genetically-altered, enhanced, and engineered beings who combine human characteristics with those of other organisms and with machines. There are Forged in the form of birds, of jellyfish, of weapons of mass destruction, and of spaceships. The Forged are adapted for tasks that Unevolved human beings could not easily perform, and for environments (deep space, the bottom of the sea, the atmosphere of Jupiter) where the Unevolved could not easily live. The Forged all have recognizably human minds — in terms of language, rationality, and emotion — even though they differ greatly from the Unevolved, and from one another, in terms of life history and body-experience. Their biggest problem is that they have all been designed for specific tasks — their Form is determined by their Function — which means that their lives are constrained in ways that those of ordinary Unevolved human beings are not, even though their imaginations and senses of selfhood and freedom are as extensive as those of the Unevolved. Robson’s greatest accomplishment in Natural History is to make the Forged come alive as speakers and characters, so that their emotions and neuroses and desires and political activities make as much sense (are as unique, and at the same time as recognizable) as those of the Unevolved characters. The Forged are neither alien (radically other, utterly outside our experience) nor “the same” (belonging to some universal, essential, unchanging category of humanness, just as “we” allegedly do). No one is a “blank slate,” independent of the predispositions that have been built into them; but also, no one is determined by these predispositions. Will and imagination play too strong a role for these posthumans, just as they do for us.

So Robson imagines what it would be like to be, for instance, a sentient spaceship, gendered female, whose body includes a nuclear engine, whose senses involve what for us could only be readouts on various monitors, whose reaction times can be measured in femtoseconds, and whose sexual feelings are almost entirely auto-affective, focused upon her own bodily sensations. And who is driven by rage, fanaticism, vulnerability, ambition, neediness, and revolutionary fervor, and who is capable of sarcasm, irony, reserve, and manipulativeness — much as a human mind/body of any other shape might be. Actually, what it is like to be a sentient spaceship is not far different from what it is like to talk to one: for language is not only how one talks to others, it is also how one talks to oneself. Robson insists on distinguishing between living and speaking other-sentience, and mere artificial intelligence, which in the world of Natural History can calculate, and use and respond appropriately to language, but which cannot be creative or self-reflective, which cannot talk to itself, which does not express any sort of will, and which does not seek after higher Meaning nor regret its absence (307-308). In positioning consciousness in this way, Robson rejects the strong-AI position (that there is no difference between human mentality and what machines are capable of), but in a more nuanced and sophisticated way than John Searle (for instance) does. That is to say, Robson explores how consciousness could be different, or other, from our “common” experience; but she does this without reducing mentality to computation (as cognitivists are always prone to do).

The future society depicted in Natural History is one of immanent differences. There is no unity between the Unevolved and the Forged, nor among the Forged themselves. Also, the Forged have access — but the Unevolved do not — to a full-immersion virtual reality in which they can change their environments and body forms at will, interact with other Forged and have sex with them, and generally escape the limitations of their Form and Function. There are thus multiple perspectives which cannot be reconciled; and none of which can claim to transcend or overcode the others. This leads to a fractious politics: the Forged, spread out across the solar system, form unions and independence movements, fighting and negotiating both among themselves and with the Unevolved authorities on Earth. Here Robson explores the possibilities and impasses of what might be called a network-society, “post-globalization” politics, one where the traditional orders of States and territories play little role, and where traditional ideological myths of unification have ceased to function, but where questions of “identity,” together with economic power and the unequally distributed possession of military strength and of the tools of surveillance, continue to play major roles.

The plot of Natural History doesn’t resolve any of these issues — Robson suggests that, for all practical intents and purposes, they are simply not resolvable — but instead does an end run around them. The book narrates the encounter of its vividly imagined world with something truly alien, truly Other: a technology that entirely transcends the immanent differences among Unevolved and Forged, and that therefore seems to promise infinite power, magically driven by Will alone. Of course, things turn out to be much more complicated than that, and there are some wonderful passages where Zephyr Duquense, the most prominent Unevolved character in the novel, explores an alien architecture that is clearly the product of intelligence, but just as clearly uninterpretable in human terms. The social-emotional play of immanent differences, which cannot coincide but which are open to negotiation and mutual reflection, is here contrasted to a kind of absolute Difference, a limit in relation to which we face the alternative of either only getting our own expectations and presuppositions reflected back to us, or else of gaining access to this Otherness at the price of ceasing to be ourselves, of being irrevocably changed by what we encounter, and indeed absorbed into what we encounter. At certain moments, Robson presents this latter alternative (somewhat unfortunately) as a kind of New Agey mystical oneness, cosmic consciousness, oceanic feeling, with almost absolute power to affect the physical universe — but this is balanced out at other moments by a continuing harsh skepticism. At the end, you can retain your individuality against this alien, totalizing encounter by killing yourself before you are absorbed — suicide is not exactly an attractive or life-affirming option, but at least it does remain an option, a via negativa resisting an otherwise relentless dialectic.

So I wasn’t entirely happy with the conclusion of Natural History, but I liked the way that Robson at least in part resisted her own conclusion. Robson’s novel is not really about my current overwhelming preoccupation — the ubiquitous culture and circulation of capital — but its passionate intelligence is a sterling example of how science fiction, at its best, works today as an experimental laboratory of embodied social and philosophical thought.