COMM620 SF/Class notes

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Science Fiction __as__ Media Theory

  • Henry Jenkins
  • ASCJ 230
  • W 2-4:50pm

Contents

August 24

SF: genre that speculation, extrapulation

  • Same use we have for theory
  • Set of meaningful generalizations we make about the world
  • Emerges from direct observation
  • Moving to modes of speculation, extrapulation

SF as a mode of theorizing

  • Filling in gaps

What if theory is a mode of SF?

  • Describing a world that we could live in
  • Mode of imagining society

Observing interdependence of theory and SF

Designing new things, modeling on SF

  • "Science fiction prototyping"
  • "Design fiction"

Shouldn't that happen in the world of designing media theory?

Can we produce different modes of scholarship?

Reviewing syllabus

Weekly Bboard post

  • Due Tuesday PM

Brian David Johnson

  • Went to New School (in part because of Toffler)
  • Self-described "Futurist" at Intel Corp.
  • Building models of 10-15 years out b/c chip design process is 10 yr turnaround
  • Principle Engineer, maker
  • SF writer, filmmaker, design
  • "Science fiction prototyping"
    • A way to think about technology's effect on ppl
    • Used with Intel engineers to help them build new tech
    • Assigns SF to engineers
  • "Science fiction" / "Science fact"
  • AI, biotech, secruity

John Underkoffler

  • Media Lab alum (7 year PhD)
  • http://oblong.com/
  • Science, tech advisor to Minority Report, Ang Lee's Hulk, Aeon Flux, Iron Man I, etc.
  • Founder of Oblong Industries
    • Building the prototype that was conceived for Minority Report

Discussion

Starting with Minority Report

  • Dick's short story describes punch cards, bureaucracy as a technology
  • "Skeletal"
  • Only interested in tech insofar as it fails

When will new tech be "mundane"?

  • Mundane is found in everyday mistakes
    • e.g. trying to scratch your nose and the thing goes haywire
  • Screw ups are human moments?

Contrast: believability, realism

  • Predictive policing isn't about psychics but algorithms+bigdata

Changing the tech in adaptation, shifting the social meanings

  • Punch cards suggest bureaucracy, dehumanization
  • Gestural tech suggests freedom, liberation, "humanized"

John Underkoffler

a corner of the luminous room

  • "Let the pixels go everywhere in the room"

World-building; the "bible" ("atlas" a better term?)

  • World for the film to inhabit
  • Bible solves some narrative problems not anticipated

Adaptation of world elements

  • Big government becomes Big business (advertising)
  • Both require surveillance

Brian David Johnson

Engineers (at intel?) are happy to have convos about exciting, positive stuff

  • Less likely to voluntarily jump into the scarier, trickier scenarios

Coming up with visions ... and building them

What does it mean "to be" or "to do" futurism?

  • Background in scenario planning, "extreme scenario planning", Rand Corp.
  • Big turn toward "experience architecture"
    • Not just designing "The Kindle" but a whole experience/arc/context related to

Futurecasting

  • Starting with social science moving to CS, engineering
  • "This is the experience we think ppl will have with technology..."
  • This approach was a shift from earlier modes: economic models, etc.

Tensions around SF

  • Fearful that bringing SF into the conversation would have caused disruption, rejection
  • SF was "held at arm's length" by earlier scenarios/futurism
  • But it was in the private/personal lives of participants
  • "Science fiction prototyping" is making it into a methodology which can be brought back in

Questions of morality aren't "smuggled in"

BDJ is able to commission SF from ppl who do not like Intel

When is the work about people interacting with tech

  • And people interacting with people via tech or near tech...

Futurism for BDJ is "very pragmatic"

  • Working for a "manufacturing company"

Important to express the future in multiple ways

  • Not just engineering, making

Intel solicited SF stories about the science that it in progress

  • Did not keep copyright
  • They hoped to "simply facilitate the conversations"
  • Based on BDJ conducting interviews with research scientists

SF and legitimacy

  • It was "genre fiction" - not widely respected
  • "Dude where's my jetpack?"
  • "Weren't we supposed to ..."
  • Does this work for or against SF as legitimate?

Now there is a business reason to have a futurist on staff...


Jump offs

What is the SF making practice of security people who come up with nightmare scenarios and present them at hacker cons?

Aug 31 Technological utopianism

Segal's original book is from 1985 but the edition we read was in 2005.

Segal's outlay:

  • Pre-utopia
  • Utopia
  • Anti-utopia

Utopian writing best through comparison, a future that "might be"

  • Reading it through the reality in which we are reading it
  • As much critique as projection

Different approaches but all of the components are at play

  • Bellamy describes the 1887 life
  • Burdekin is looking backward

Etymology: utopia as "no place"

  • Duncombe makes a lot of this idea
  • Shouldn't read it was literal but a rhetorical act of comparison
  • Imagine a no-place that couldn't possibly exist
  • Duncombe's example: Mock NYT (art), Yes Men
  • Reading the utopian lit as complete, literal may be the wrong mode
    • Plausibility may be the wrong question to ask

Utopian text identifies what the goals are

  • Vision work
  • On what categories will change take place

Reflexive work

  • Is this society adequate?
  • Who is excluded? What is left?

A different move is to identify a utopia and decide to try and enact it

  • Bellamy's book might have been a thought-experiment but others took it up as a political project
  • Writers were not necessarily part of the political movements to follow
  • Bellamy's influence on New Deal policy

Immutable human nature in Bellamy

  • Realizing an ideal humanity that is at the pinnacle of evolution
  • What is the motivation toward self-improvement amid "perfection"? What could be better?

Bellamy: the protagonist is a man of total idleness, privilege

  • Finds himself in a society framed entirely by work
    • Aristocratic to meritocratic; "Harvard to MIT"?

"Peaceful transition"

  • Zhan says it is "the most incredible claim"
  • People universally decide that this is the best way

Literary "sleight of hand"

  • Time travel, Rip Van Winkle, peaceful transition, the "spell" of efficiency

Millenarian, Rapture, religious links to Utopia

  • All or nothing, absolute, total
  • What is in common among "Monotheism, Christianity, Marxism"?

Tension is purely rational and unpredictably emotional

  • Expressed as human/Vulcan
  • Artist/Technocrat
  • Debates on the Enterprise are not rooted in race/class but in rationality
    • Always-moving utopia, no-place going where no-man-has-ever-gone-before

Role of imagined audiences...

  • Bellamy: elite Bostonian of 1887

"What butterfly cares about its dead chrysalis hanging on a branch?" (Burdekin, 14)

Visit from Nicholas Coll

Talking about Just Imagine (film)

  • DeSilva, Brown, & Henderson
  • Wrote a number of hit songs for African-American singers as well as minstrel performers: "Sweet Georgia Brown", "Keep your sunnyside up"
  • Conceived as a follow up to Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Not written by people involved with SF

  • But lyric writers of Broadway who were "dragged into film" by Fox
    • Set designers from Broadway as well
  • They were comfortable working in fantasy

By the 1970s, the film was a legend

  • People read about it, saw stills, read reviews but had never SEEN it
  • First big-budget SF film
  • People were shocked to finally SEE it
  • Humorous, musical, not conceived as part of a genre

In the course of the film,

  • The scientists manage to revive a corpse from 1930 and it turns out to be a Swedish comedian who stows away on a rocket to Mars
    • 1930s Borat in Space!
  • Fortunately, NY cops are still Irish in 1980s

What does this film tell us about the time that it was made?

  • What can we learn about the SF genre?

Comedy routines are intended to be intrinsically funny

  • Not necessarily arising out of the SF elements
  • Not making fun of the SF genre
    • Not aware enough to do so!
  • SF setting generates some amusing situations
  • Some of the names are puns
    • "MT-3" is kinda "empty"

Primary humor / argument in this film is alcohol

  • Film is making fun of the idea that Prohibition continues into the future
  • e.g. Official links the crazy marriage law to Prohibition by calling it a "noble law"

Secondary humor is about gender relations

  • Changing roles of men, women
  • Characters in 1980s look back nostalgically on "old fashioned girls"
    • Imagining the most radical, progressive girls of 1930

Also some jokes about American racial politics of the 1930

  • Henry Ford was involved in racist and anti-semitic policies
  • In the future, all the cars have Jewish names - a jab at Ford
    • But the future America is all-white

Art direction

  • Borrowed images from Hugh Ferris, Metropolis of tomorrow
  • Harvey Corbett, 1929
    • Drawing on Italian Futurism
  • Visual connections to pulpy SF magazines: Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories
    • No wonder it is remember largely as still
  • Same designer as Lost Horizon (film)
  • Some of these designers may have later worked at the military and advertising/Madison Ave.

Marketing

  • The film is entirely marketed around sexuality
  • "Youth on wings, making love in the skies"
  • "Do you blush easily?"
  • The future is about exceedingly short skirts

Censors chop some scenes, songs from the film

  • Including a humorous gay romance

Cull entered the Fox legal archives

  • And found evidence of a string of plagiarism accusations
  • David Halperin sued Fox for $50k over Twilight Gables, a screenplay he claims to have written earlier
    • Unique details: "alien girls in skimpy costumes"
  • All of the lawsuits were successful dismissed
  • Writers were not sure what was genre and what was "original"
  • Similar issues in 1930s slapstick

Fox makes outtakes of Just Imagine available

  • Outtakes and props used in Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon
  • Afterlife in a material contribution to the televised/filmed genre
  • Many of these things would have been beyond the budget of a low-budget serial

Why doesn't SF take off as a mainstream genre in 1930?

  • It does OK financially but there is a myth that it is "box office" poison
  • Financial records don't bear out this "poison" idea
  • But fantasy persists (e.g. Wizard of Oz)
  • Not until the 1950s that there is anything like a stable SF genre in film
    • Though other forms of SF are thriving (pulp, etc.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote an adaptation of Forbidden Planet

  • Uses terms like "blasters", "hyperdrive", Asimov's laws of robotics to flesh out an existing genre

Looking down on the future

  • 1939 World's Fair
  • West's first view of New Boston in Bellamy
  • Airplanes flying over NYC in Just Imagine
  • Balconies and 1920 art deco -- also present in the 2nd episode of (new) Star Wars

Burdekin

Feminist writer published under a male pseudonym in 1933

  • People knew it was a pen name and speculated that it was a famous writer

"Proud man"

Perspective

Early SF as "travel narrative"

  • Exploring a world, "spatial stories"
  • Rather than narratives with connective events

"Protagonist enters the world via the psyche rather than the panorama"

  • Freudian psychoanalysis shapes Burdekin's theorization of the world
  • Peoples' internal struggles shape the world

Her politics are not "contemporary perfect"

  • But she uses the term "privilege" to discuss hierarchal conflicts

Reproduction

  • Self-replication
  • When do you feel worthy to reproduce?

Protagonist lives for the first half as a woman and transitions to a man for the second half

"Without sex... no evil no good either" (192)

  • "There is no need for you to be so passionate about this"
  • Passion accompanies sex diversity

Homosocial, homosexual

  • Eve Sedgewick

Some extropians are "repulsed" by the body

Extropian society at MIT

  • Sent letter to all women and non-white students saying that they don't belong
  • Signed Col. Graff (of Ender's Game)
  • Orson Scott Card came to campus and ripped into people

Burdekin

  • Re: José Muñoz queer utopias as "critical utopias"

Comparison of

  • Berdekin's privilege on multiple vectors
  • Bellamy's "coach" metaphor, defined primarily around axes of class

How does this fit into larger feminist SF?

  • Comparison with 19th. c. anthropology

Biological utopian?

  • Bio-technological utopian?
  • Technological mastery of nature and the production of human beings

Francis Galton, cousin of Darwin, godfather of eugenics

  • Wrote utopian fiction about creating the perfect race
  • SF was a popular genre in the Nazis
  • Albert Speer explicitly adapted the "white city"

Octavia Butler

  • Exogenesis series
  • Embrace of the fushion of species, races
  • Celebrating transhuman potential

Bio-punk


Underground

Life and after-life, rest, renewal, liminality

  • Catacombs in Metropolis
  • Zion in Matrix

In Metropolis, there is little attention to the middle, the transition

  • Pleasure garden at the top
  • Catacombs at the bottom
  • But what is the intermediate space?

Convex world

What about this MIDDLE?

  • Neither urban nor rural
  • Neither high nor low
  • Neither above nor below

Is it always transition?

Who lives there?

Is this the middle class?





Jump offs

Rushkoff's Program or be programmed

William Morris Views from nowhere

  • Pastoral utopia

Moore's Utopia

H. G. Wells Things to come

  • The key companion text to Bellamy (esp. for film scholars)

Martha in Dr. Who Season 11

Kindred, Octavia Butler

  • Mixed race couple (white man/ black woman) transported to antebellum South

Jenny Agutter

Tiptree participated in fandom as a man

Olaf Stapledon

Nancy Kress - overcoming the human need of sleep

Queer universes

Twilight Zone episode in which everyone gets plastic surgery to meet a certain ideal

Sept 7

Returning to Looking Backward for future of music

Perfecting music, "professional music"

  • "Musical service"
  • Telephone transmission of remote, live performance
  • Convergence of radio, telephone, phonograph

For Bellamy's contemporaries, this indicates a move away from home playing/singing

  • Imagining the steps beyond the player piano

Music is what professionals produce

  • To learn the piano or train the voice is self-improvement but not music making

Canned v. simultaneous communication (Uricchio)

  • Early representations of live tv outnumber "canned" film
  • Frequently imagining ovals

Radio News (edited by Gernsback)

  • Representing radio/phone+images on covers in the 1920s

Scrambles accepted relationships

  • Telephone not yet private
  • Gramaphone not yet musical

Gernsback

Background in radio

  • Participatory medium
  • Two-way, transmit/receive

SF publications were spin-offs from hobbyist mags

Underlying pulp tradition is a fluidity among genres

  • Same writers submit stories to multiple publications with subtle shifts in setting, names, terms

Campbell

Background in science

  • Flunked out of MIT
  • Finished degree at Duke

Succeeded Gernsback as editor of Amazing Stories

Social role of science

Participatory culture

  • Gentleman scientist

Gernsback is resisting the institutionalization

  • Elite, expert, removed from popular/democratic society

Gap between engineering and science

  • Gernsback draws them together
  • Heroic stories of engineers + scientists
  • Claims science for engineers

Commercialization

Not necessarily contradiction to popular science

In fact, maybe a thriving market for popular science publications/kits is the achievement?

Especially among working class and immigrant groups

  • Can't afford to be "pure"
  • Entrepreneurship is important, uplifting
  • Carving out a niche FOR your ethnic peer group
    • Raising up your young men into professional/middle class milieu
  • Upward mobility for the engineer
    • Fandom as "training ground"

Role of patents?

  • Was the patent process more popular?

Sturgeon, "Microscopic God"

"I'm not going to get all political on you"

  • Huntington wrote an essay about this story and took Sturgeon's claim at face value
  • Disarming opening statement, a wink
  • Revealing a debate about politics in the SF community

Kidder is a citizen scientist

  • "free-floating genius living on an island"

He doesn't create ideas from nothing

  • Builds on ideas available to him
  • Creates the Neoterics so that there are more creatures around to teach him things

What are the ethics of the production of knowledge?

  • Kidder relationship to the microscopic people
  • Kidder to the banker
  • Kidder to humanity (what does he owe the public?)

Power plant raises the question of the ends of science

  • Kidder believes the power planet will be of benefit to humanity
  • But the banker corrupts it, turns it into a weapon

Asocial scientist is easy exploited

  • A cautionary tale
  • No space for neutrality in science

Microscopic God == Old Testament God

  • Does it cause us to rethink the motivations of God?

Invoking Edison regarding exploitation (122)

  • Credit, labor
  • Kidder's a god, Edison is just a boss

Thesis statements?

  • "Conant and money were like Kidder and knowledge."
  • "Conant's one great fear was that Kidder would some day take an interest in world events and begin to become opinionated." (125)

How does this story compare with the current financial crisis?

  • Boys at play

Underlying the story is a concern about exploitation of labor

  • Marx, labor, history/production of science/knowledge

Re: Kandor

  • Piece of Superman's home world stored in a jar
  • Braniac kept a collection of tiny cities

Plot secondary to description

In "Twilight", loose plot about a time-traveling hitchhiker enables the description of a futuristic spectacle

Poor characterisation as an expression of value

  • Suspicious of psychology and individualism
  • Character psych is not a high priority (for writer or reader)
  • Humans are carriers of knowledge, parts of a social system
  • Not messy emotional beings

DeCerteau says that all stories are travel narratives

  • Struggle over space

Do stories like "Twilight" represent a particular kind of travel stories that are especially focused on struggles over space?

Weiner open letter, A Scientist Rebels

In response to bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  • Threatening to withhold scientific information
  • "To provide scientific information is not an innocent act"
  • "Interchange of idea ... certain limitations when scientist is the arbiter of life and death"

Realization that signing up to beat the Nazis was not temporary or limited to the war

  • Government came to own science
  • "Iron Triangle" of government-academy-industry

Emergence of "Top Secret" scientific knowledge

  • Gernsback indicates that science was not flowing very freely before (to working class)
  • But now it is even more locked down
  • Not to mention that Nazi scientists are being hired by US military

Religious terminology used to describe relationship to technology

  • Burning incense, brass cow, idol
  • Worship, sacrifice

Hypothetical subjugation of real humans to machines:

  • Full automation of factories during wartime
  • Troops return home and their jobs are lost to robots
  • A familiar trope to SF

No social reforms during war

  • All checks are removed
  • Full steam ahead
  • No control on where science is taking us

And no control after war

  • Everything you make is commodified and sold

Vannevar Bush on the Memex

Was Bush's isolated / individual design of the Memex a response to the closed discourse of professional science?

Memex as a scientific myth

  • Major influence on thinkers of early hypertext (Engelbart, Nelson)

Absolutely a piece of speculative fiction

  • Grounded in existing technology
  • Extending into a postwar future

Campbell, "Twilight"

Mind withers away, not the body

  • Response to a trope in SF: body withers and heads grow large

Also an answer to perfection/utopia

  • They lose their curiosity and drive

Human relationship to nature

  • Human mastery over nature eventually eradicates all other life (plant, animal)
    • Lastly with dogs, who evolve into compatible companion species (tool using! car driving!)
  • Beginnings of an environmental consciousness in SF
  • Unexpected destructive outcomes to mastery

Turing, Turing test

Starts with a game involving gender

  • Biographical lens suggests his own struggles with gender, sexuality
  • Gendered notion of technology, machine

Refining the notion of machines thinking

  • Machine merely needs to present a convincing performance of thinking

Also a speculative article

Tracing a debate

  • Anticipating push-back and FAQs

Geek machismo

  • Denial of the body as a constraint but also as an asset
  • Transcending the body, all-nighters, bad health
  • Erasure of the body for the mind

Consideration of Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP)

  • Included in his essay without much hedging
  • Totally within the realm of possible science
  • Actually dominant idea in postwar science
  • McLuhan also writes about telepathy
    • Global Village achieved by telepathic links
    • Later rationalized and used as metaphor for computer-mediated communication
  • Also related to rise of Scientology
    • Divided many in the community
    • Some rejected Scientology on basis of rationality
    • Others accepted Scientology as they also accepted telepathy

del Rey, "Helen O'Loy"

Machine has a female subjectivity

  • Something mysterious?
  • Crafting an electric endocrinology
    • "Heterones" are electric hormones

Endocrinologist can't fix Helen but he can fix flesh+blood humans

Helen commits suicide when Dave dies naturally

  • She is emotionally dependent on him though she can live forever
  • Her choice to die is a final act that seems more human
  • Soap narratives teach her to die with a loved one?

Entertainment of the far future is pure abstraction, no narrative or representation

  • 20th c. man can't even understand it

Helen "passing" as a human

  • Dave forgets her robot roots

Can you "reprogram" a human with hormones?

Jump offs

  • Gitelman on phonograph

Gernsback publications

  • Modern Electrics
  • Wireless Electrical Cyclopedia
  • Short Wave Craft
  • Radio News
  • The Electric Importing Co

Was Gernsback part of a vocal opposition to regulation?

  • Was there an existing discourse against commercialization?

Connecting Gernsback to Rushkoff

  • Populace holds science accountable

Conflict with religious institutions?

  • Among different immigrant groups?

Max Headroom said SF is "20 minutes in the future"

Sept 14

Pre/postwar dystopias

  • Brave New World, 1931
  • But the rest of the readings is 40s-60s

Two minutes of hate

Takes 5 minutes to represent in this film

Mass media in Orwell, etc.

Oscillating rapidly from severe to nonchalant

  • Linger effects of having experienced that momentary intensity
  • Catharsis? Expulsion of emotion?
  • Or internalization of emotion? Re-normalizing extremity.

Irresistible emotional drama

  • Compelled by those around him
  • But in the prose, we learn that he is feeling the appropriate, expected affect

Juxtaposition of images, Goldstein/Machinegunner

  • Sequencing, editing
  • Montage, Soviet propaganda - object of study for Orwell
  • Theory of "imprinting", blurry emotional boundaries
  • Making sense of the world through metaphor

Concerns: not just sedation (Lazersfeld) but working people up, hysteria (Plato)

  • What is "just right" for the public emotional state? Engaged -- but rational?
  • Ideal engagement for democracy: not totally pacified (apathetic), nor struck by emotional contagion
  • "Concerned" but "thinking"

Postwar theorists were drawing on images of public address that stirred up emotion toward mutual destruction: Nazi, Soviet

  • Could it happen anywhere in the world?

What is an appropriate democratic affect?

Anxiety about the mass

  • Loses track of individual concerns, interests
  • Easily out of control, stampede
  • All emotional, irrational
  • Conformity, destroys capacity for individual thought, discrimination

Imagery of Big Brother/ 1984 recycled endlessly

  • Obama-Clinton, McCain-Obama, etc.
  • What is lost in the repetition?

Surveillance, privacy, panopticon

  • One lived with the assumption that every sound and move is heard and seen
  • Self-regulating and social regulating
  • This two-way character is missing...

For Frankfurt, consumerism/mass media looks like fascism

  • Moral equivalency
  • Similar bandwagon effects
  • Mass consumer conformity susceptible to capture and redirecting toward fascism

Orwell - different cultural diet of the classes (proles, party members) in 1984

  • Party members are committed but
  • Proles are disinterested, in a state of distraction

In 1984, the stories and songs of popular culture are formulaic

  • Constructed by machines owned/operated by the state
    • Though the proles believe they are acquiring samizdat porno, it's actually state porn
    • Popular songs are released only once-in-a-while to ensure that it is beloved
    • State wants to produce nostalgia, sentiment
  • Mirroring Adorno's complaint
  • Also the transformation among pulp genre fiction
  • Doesn't require reading, evokes emotion with little conscious thought: simplicity

Intent, the state in 1984 intends to numb and pacify the proles

  • But in Frankfurt's critique of Hollywood, it is an anonymous force - not clear if it is conscious, intent is not central
  • No conspiracy theory though the conclusion is there

Memory, proles can be surrounded by memory, history, nostalgia

  • Old man trying to order a "pint" of beer - bartender says, "it's always only been sold as a liter"
  • But party members are more isolated, confused
  • Winston visits a thrift shop, purchases a trinket
  • Winston's job is to (re)write history

Goldstein persists as an eternal enemy with name, face, voice

  • Other enemies disappear from present, future, and history
  • Inoculation theory: injects a small amount of revolutionary rhetoric, framing it as enemy
  • Takes it out of circulation but making it visible
    • Foucault, repressive hypothesis
    • Forced to speak + listen

Totalizing system: acknowledges resistance

  • Recalls debate structure/agency
  • There is agency but it always draws you back into the structure
  • Makes use of resistance as social control

Orwell and political speech

On "democracy", "fascism", etc.

  • So many meanings that they are meaningless
  • Used in "consciously dishonest" way

"Political speech is the defense of the indefensible..."

Must stay cloudy & confusing

  • Euphemism

"Multi-literacies", creates insiders, outsiders

  • "Designed to impress as much as express"

In defense of the post-structuralists: obfuscated prose requires readers to think hard

Language without ambiguity, logic

  • No room for misinterpretation
  • Something to do with Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein
  • Code? Mathematics?
  • SF fans might take this up: Esperanto

Brave new world ( + revisited )

"Revisited" is a non-fiction essay, media theory

  • Returning to the themes of BNW

Common themes to post-war concerns about mass media / propaganda

  • Advertising + selling built into fear about propaganda

Fahrenheit 451

Gendering of mass culture: soap opera (and women's culture) as distracted, duplicitous

  • Soap operas are criticized as particularly empty, vapid form of entertainment

Direct address, drawing the audience into the narrative

  • Infantilization of adult women
  • Pseudo interactivity, illusion of participation
  • Truffaut
  • Para-social relationships

Interactive kids TV

  • Romper Room - "David" had a special day today
  • Winky Dink hang paper over the screen - MAGIC WINDOW
  • Picture Pages

When can the TV look back?

Discipline, close-up and demand for response is scary, she is anxious

  • "The Family" on TV takes precedent over the immediate family

Lack of true/false content in soaps: truthiness

  • Seem true, effecting truth, suggesting truth
  • Truth-like

What happens to masculine interests in a moment when the mass media is fully-feminized?

  • The all-comics newspaper?
  • What does a typical man *do*? Enables us to exempt men from mass culture.

Books are not sufficient, they require a context, mindset

  • Government policy reflects a general shift in culture wrt print
  • Books are divisive, enabling conflict

Preservationist underground: oral/ memorization

  • Ong tells us that this is quite different from a print culture
  • The book is forever lost - even if the story is preserved in some form
  • Yet bowlderizing (censoring) a book is as bad as burning it - how will they be precise?

Revival of Fahrenheit 451 since 9-11

Bradbury is a defender of book culture and the public library

  • Wrote F 451 in the basement of the UCLA Library on rented typewriter
  • Democratizing force of the book, social mobility

Taste hierarchies are maintained

  • People had "bad taste" all along - it wasn't new media that brought it to them

The "Feelies" in Brave New World

Erotic imagery, immersion in a highly-sensory, tactile environment

  • Gendered imagery: woman on the bear skin rug

Feelies are available to all social classes

  • Universal medium, affecting on a pre-rational, tactile level

"Feelings" : both emotion and physical sensation

  • "Bizarre mix of pornography and musical"

Feelings are exciting because they are stunning re-presentations of the world?

  • Or is it because they are actually numbing, hypnotizing?

Points to different role of sex in 1984 / BNW

  • Sex in 1984 is absent except to reproduce the Party
  • Sex in BNW is purely about pleasure, monogamy is perversion, reproduction is vulgar
    • Mechanization of entertainment and eros

What is the deal with sex?

Present in all the readings to different extents

  • 1984, stigma
  • BNW, stigma is monogamy - destruction of individuality

The Reader

  • Winston is the reader out of view
  • Montag hides a book under his bed
  • The Savage goes home to read instead of having sex

Of course, these are books for readers of books by writers of books

  • Setting up the book as the highest form of intellectual achievement


Jump offs

Eisenstein, "October", 1928

Apple, "1984", Superbowl Ad

le Carré, J. The spy who came in from the cold, 1963

The Prisoner TV show

  • Numerous false paths reassert authority of the system

Star Trek "Dharma" about language, incomprehensible outside of the culture

"Mass culture is a woman: Modernist's other"

  • Misogyny connected to anxiety about inappropriate taste

Busby Berkeley

Sept 21

To the heart of 1950s advertising

  • Context for Pohl, Kornbluth

George Washington Hill

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Hill
  • He hired public relations expert Edward Bernays to reverse the taboo against women smoking in public, which he did successfully by his advertisement campaigns.
  • Represents pre-WW2 advertising
  • "Old model"
  • Example: L.S./M.F.T. - Lucky Strike Makes Fine Tobacco
    • Beginning of hidden meanings in advertising: "firmly packed"

The Hucksters (film)

What is the "theory of mind" underlying advertising?

  • Hill's model is a behaviorist model: omnipresent, attention-grabbing, unforgettable, annoying, intense lingering impression, repetition, repetition
  • Crisis of faith in this model at the end of WW2:
    • Is it going to work / continue working?
    • People are scared of the authoritative / fascistic implications
    • Similar concern as the Frankfurt school: social control, behavior modification

Expansion of brands and industry

  • How to differentiate and hold a market?

In the Hucksters, Gable's character indicates...

  • Knowing your consumer, demographics, social science + psychology
    • Who are they? What do they value? What is their taste?

By the late 1950s-1960s, "depth model" is firmly in place

Cigarette ads as a useful tools

  • Because they don't exist today, they are useful for contrast
  • "What cigarette brand do you smoke, Doctor?"

Things to look for:

  • Repetition pattern
  • Song
  • Length (:15? :30? :60? Longer?)

Example: Don Draper Kodak Carousel pitch

  • New theory of mind: from behaviorism to psychoanalytic
  • Deep desires, fantasies, pain, fear that might be accessed by advertising
  • Creates an "itch", product is a salve
  • Don arrives at this pitch through introspection, intuition
    • But it might have been suggested by science as well
  • Also, anthropological: what functions does this obj serve in our culture?
    • Ritual weight?
    • Iconic moments in the cycle of the family
  • Move from "wheel" to "carousel" carries symbolic meaning, nostalgia, childhood

Resistance and delusion

  • Effectiveness of an ad even when audience can consciously dismiss it
  • Others say this is baloney, advertising is far more uncertain than the post-WW2 social science would have you believe
  • Mutual fear among all stakeholders to continue advertising - whether or not it actually works
  • Sense that consumer is increasingly pushing back against advertising
    • Also, data mining indicates weaknesses, lack of effectiveness

"Happy Birthday Dear Jesus" brings advertising into parity with Christianity

  • Taken for granted songs, rituals, symbology
  • Christmas is not just a "selling holiday" but not the same religious holiday
  • Is this "social science fiction"?
    • None of the trappings of Gernsback-era science/technology
    • Rhetorical and speculative features of SF
  • Other stories talk about consumerism, governmentality
  • More "what if...?" based on certain practices - a thought experiment
    • How would a society work if you were made to feel guilty for not consuming enough?
    • Terrorists win if you don't go shopping tomorrow

What is happening after WW2 that these stories resonate with readers?

  • Great Depression folks were considered "total hoarders", scarcity
  • During WW2, full employment (military-related), expanded production capacity of manufacturing
    • People are on ration books so there is still scarcity
  • After WW2, there is surplus! Need record consumption to match record production.
  • Madison Ave is a key player in this new economy
    • Mediating the consumption/production cycle
    • Creating a rationale/shift about consumption
  • Mystique about this era of advertising is because people don't understand
    • Anxiety about persuasion

In Space Merchants, it's not a government-controlled world like 1984 / Brave New World.

  • It's a world in which government is controlled by corporations

Pohl, Kornbluth, and Kuttner were both "Futurians"

  • Taking on more of a progressive, political EDGE
  • Pohl now denies being a part of this movement because of lingering McCarthyist self-policing?

Kuttner is a pen-name for 2 people

  • C. L. Moore is a woman. Found out she was paid half for her stories as Henry.
  • Many of the stories written by Henry Kuttner were actually written by Moore.
    • At this point, it's not known exactly which is which
    • At least some of them were the result of collaborations

Pohl was an editor at Bantam books

  • Recruited politically-motivated SF of the 1970s
  • Pohl was also copy-writer along with his SF work

What are some of the concerns that Pohl / Kornbluth pick up on?

  • Fears of a corporate-controlled culture?
  • Experience of the Met
    • Lumps together the "pre-commercial era" with the "classics"

Famous "classics" in advertising industry are known to people inside

  • Even if they are not known outside
  • e.g. Maidenform bra "I dreamed..." campaign, what if we supported and sculpted the brests(s)
    • Last multiple decades even as women's role in society changed...
  • Part of the Maidenform woman is restlessness: Goes anywhere, does everything (in her MF bra)
  • Packed with meaning - even if it is not a great work of "art in the conventional sense

Advertising isn't just selling nothingness metaphorically

  • In these stories, advertising sells oblivion

In Pohl, early strands of Silent Spring critique of corporate domination

  • Natural artifacts are rare, incredibly valuable
  • Synthetic materials suggest that it doesn't matter if trees die, we'll make more with something better/cheaper
  • Abusing nature, industrial farming, industrial food production (Chicken little)

Also deals with addiction

  • Literally can't stop once you pop
  • Nicotine, (caffeine, sugars, etc...)
  • Renaming High Fructose Corn Syrup

"Educational ABCs of Industry"

Companies gave toys to day care centers to ensure that kids were exposed to certain brands early in their life

  • Brand loyalty
  • Also, canned/prepared food was re-branded and distributed to children through public school lunch
  • Shifts in the structures of family: children become key to consumer choices of the family

"Permissive era" of parenting

  • Dr. Spock, Margaret Mead
  • "I can't change my family -", "TRUE - but you can change your floor wax"
    • Children dominate the home

"the powerful transistorized dick tracy wrist radio is a real electronic instrument"

  • "wherever... AMERICAN toys are sold"

Lack of parental control

  • Kids are more and more ruling the house and the neighborhood
  • Kids' foods create a world in which you need to court kids to eat well
  • Parent activities are designed to ensure that they don't interfere with kids
    • Stay-at-home-mom is particularly subordinte to mom

Compare this to computers sold to schools in the 1980s

  • Entre to the digital world is through certain brands (Apple, esp.)

Jules Henry

Narrative of cult studies often starts with the Birmingham school being re-introduced into the US

But Jules Henry was doing what cultural studies intends to do: apply anthropology (ethnographic tools) to ask questions about culture

  • Create popular discourse to get people to think critically about the world of consumption

Margaret Mead crosses over around the same time to write about people in US

  • Initially in comparison but eventually more focused

Vance Packard wrote a lot of popular texts shaping how Americans understood their own culture

  • Paved the way for American acceptance of cultural studies
  • John Hartley has a book on American cultural studies that traces back to the new journalists in the 1960s

Most of the Marxist writers only have critique

  • SF authors have to provide a vivid alternative
  • Accepting this is space for resistence

Most critical theory doesn't have

  • How do we step outside?
  • How do we transform?

Studying SF = how do we build this back in?

  • Possibilities
  • Other ways of living

Invasion films

  • Martians v Communists

"Married a Monster from Outer Space"

  • Aliens take over all the men in society
  • Women realize what is up because of failures in society
  • At the time, men + women lived in very different social circles
  • They didn't know each other very well before being married - estranged (alienated) within the home

"Invaders from Mars"

Advertising as an invasion of private life

  • Threatening stability
  • Alienation
  • Takes totally serious the rhetoric of Madison Ave...

Business school does consumer research

  • Similar methodologies, similar questions
  • Alternative view on advertising

Russian formalist: "de-familiarization"

  • "Making strange"
  • S.I. dérive
  • SF as a genre makes theory tangible, concrete enough to "feel its texture"
  • Russian formalist: "restore the roughness of the rock"
  • See something you took for granted in a brand new way

Mad Magazine

  • Taking aims at Mad(ison) Avenue
  • Locate the hidden bits and make them obvious
  • Doing same work as media literacy? "Revealing" the mechanisms
  • Requires audience to reverse engineer, imagine the "depth approach"
  • Existed alongside Pohl
  • Is Mad a "dead" publication today?
    • When parents started buying it for their kids...

Does Daily Show / Colbert take up the project of Mad Magazine?

  • Approaching news media

Next week:

  • Two Skypers
  • Ellison, Jenkins

Sept 28

SF archive in U. of Kansas

Cordwainer Smith

Lindbarger

  • PhD at 21
  • Biographer is not done -- book in progress for 15 years
  • Son of a diplomat
  • Grew up in China, Japan, DE, FR, US
    • In Chinese, his name sounds vaguely like "Forest of incandescent bliss"
  • They wanted him to be born in the US so they flew to Hawaii so he could have the opportunity to become president
  • Lost vision in one eye - left him out of military
  • Married twice
    • 2nd wife was his student, she owns all copyright to his work, finished some of his later works
  • Deliberately did not let his pseudonym be known
    • Didn't attend conventions
  • Lots and lots of revisions of the same stories
    • Arduous
  • Wrote by dictaphone + transcription by secretary

Inspiration, desperation

  • Drawing on Joan of Arc, Inferno, Rimbaud
    • "Englishing of Rimbaud"
  • Known for adopting Chinese storytelling styles
    • But KH hasn't encountered evidence of this...
    • Gap among American SF / East Asian lit studies
    • Mojito Nomura

Religion

  • Transcendence
  • Episcopalian

In context, this is the period in which SF is moving from short fiction to novels

(Edward)

Making strange

  • Unusual terminology
  • Making strange

Commonalities across the stories, books

  • Figures, elements of the stories that have yet to be written

Worldmaking occured over his entire life

  • Evidence of the nascent universe in his adolescent writing

Non-SF books also feature disconnection, relationship to a different culture

  • Distance

Psychological Warfare

  • Not a living book today
  • Used as a textbook in the military and Comm programs of the time
  • Patriotic in its origins but there is a certain skepticism
  • Changing minds, persuasion

Clearly interested in political change, power transfer

Dead lady of clown town

  • Civic disobedience, tactics, change
  • Connections to civic rights movement

Letter to his dead servant, 1964

  • 17 years during which time he was called "Master", she was called "Slave"
  • What does this mean about the Underpeople?
  • Echoes in The Ballad of Lost C'mell

Borders in these relationships

Touching minds, touching bodies

  • Enables transcendence of the rigid social boundaries (251)

Government ("Instrumentality")

Role of media in social change

The dead lady of clown town (275-276)

Anticipating theory of viral media, metaphor of mutated germs

  • Snow Crash as another articulation in SF

Documentary media, the knowability of history

  • How do people know the story?
  • Sense of the inadequacies of documentary/artist representation of events

"The scence is familiar yet we will never understand it" (275)

  • Inadequacy of the prose
  • Drawing together different media representations
  • "Overwhelmingly self-conscious move"

Mythologization

  • No one knows how their story will be remembered or reimagined by future generations
  • How does history get made?

In the dead lady, the only people who could give an account have had their memories wiped

  • Only way to access the truth is through a few channels
  • "You already know the ending..." (teleology)
  • Construction, attempting truth knowing that truth claims are meaningless in the absence of eyewitness accounts

Sensorium is disrupted, no reliable way to assess time

  • Everything is mediated through a device, technology, external source

Mediation causes distance as well as intimacy

Role of psychology/psychotherapy in the fiction

  • Fictions have a stronger, other element of manipulation going on

Three different version of propaganda

  • One version: "friendly fire" on the home front
  • Military would have us believe that propaganda only what we do to others
  • Connect to PR/ public relations

In Scanners, the scanners believe that they are elite

  • Position in the structure of society
  • This is one place that the psychological warfare comes into play
  • Peer regulation: manipulating the heart box
  • Alluding to island of dr moreau

Luxury in using your senses

  • Altered relationship to body, sense organs
  • Biographical? Lost some of his own sensory ability (glass eye)
  • Would have preferred physical labor in military (to intelligence)
    • Would have preferred local, intimate social life rather than his gregarious number of weak links
  • Wife making the food beautiful to make up for his lack of taste/smell/touch

What about the actual dead lady in Clown Town?

  • Body is a machine, consciousness is of a specific individual
  • Machine experiences the world differently from other people
  • Prejudices fade away because she is outside of her human body
  • Layers and layers of mediation, re-mediation

A planet named Shayol

  • Where do the screams come from if not another planet?
  • Happy ending depends on complicity in the culture re-writing what happened
    • Purposeful forgetting
  • Post-war feeling, remembering, "never forget"

Letter written on the stone (440)

  • Someone who has lost his humanity trying to speak
  • "Curiosity had died among them long ago" (440)
  • Why has the letter been left here? Spectacle by the state?
  • Camus on Sysiphus: is there joy?
    • Episcopalian: just bc something doesn't hold personal joy, doesn't make it meaningless
  • A "frozen now", senseless ever-present present
    • Half-man attempts to measure time by visits of the B'dikkat

What is the alternative presented here by Smith?

  • Better to remain human in pain than to turn nonhuman in pleasure/torment eternity

Jump offs

Night fall

  • Footage of Dachau

Don Houston

  • GIs in psych hospitals
  • Traumas that can't be spoken about

"Juvenalia"

Oct 5

Friedan + Zoline

Reading together:

  • Friedan, "The problem that has no name"
  • Zoline, "Heat death of the universe"

The problem has no name because...

  • Flies in the face of dominant representation, authority, psychoanalysis
  • Sexualization of a problem that is political, economic

Treated with...

  • Psychoanalysis, emphasis on sexual satisfaction
  • Psychiatric drugs, tranquilizers

Friedan's project questions medical expertise...

  • Questioning institutional power

SF is a site for critiquing science + scientistic discourses

  • Especially because women are not largely represented in this field

Rising female voice...

  • Definitional debate, genre closes ranks
  • Being told that it is not SF
  • Treated with hostility, harassment
  • Especially by guys who had narrow interest in techie stories

Star Trek fandom provided a new space for women

  • Wasn't male dominated from the beginning
  • Male SF fans derided them as "Trekkies"/groupies
    • Trekkies was an offensive term
  • Star Trek isn't "real" SF
  • Female SF fans called themselves "Trekkers"

Sarah Ahmed

  • Liberation of housework may conceal the extent to which labor is shifted onto others / women of color?

Women of color caught in the middle of 2nd wave feminism, black power

  • Masked by the writing of this period

Tiptree

Species / gender

  • Previous stories we've seen have used species/aliens to talk about race

"Dropping out" of the system

  • Heading to outer space

Infiltration tactic

  • Narrator is familiar to classic adventure pulps
  • Slow build in the story seems like a set-up, aliens don't show up til the very end

If there are women that men don't see...

  • Who are the women that men DO see?

Visibility, focus emerges through comparison

  • Details - even names - don't show up for pages + pages
  • Second line, "double female blur"

Apocalyptic solution to gender

  • Disease that will take "999 out of 1000" men

Wilhelm, "Baby you were great"

Emotion divorced from cognition

  • Mind - Body - Affect splits

Re: Truman Show?

  • HJ dissatisfaction w end of Truman Show, knowing power of his media exposure - he does nothing, doesn't take advantage of the system to transmit critique, system is indifferent to content

Zoline, Heat Death of the Universe

Particularly vexing to SF audiences resisting this feminist turn

Lab report on the domestic life

  • Is she the object of science?
  • Or is she the scientist preparing and ordering observations?

SF genre elements/icons: rocket ship, lil green men

  • Are naturalized into the environment
  • Same iconography, different epistemology, narrative

Image of motherhood

  • Aliens, parasites

Re: Stepford Wives

  • As a metaphor for women + white middle class privilege

Butler, Blood child

Bringing masculine pride to the pregnancy

  • Competitiveness

Merging feelings of affection and fear

Tranquilizing power of eggs, stinger

  • Comparison to getting knocked out, C-section
  • Extends the lives of the Terran people but also allows them to accommodate pregnancy

Racial meanings overdetermined in her writing

  • Strongly informed by Black history

What happens when your body is not your own?

  • Pregnant women lose their bodies to their babies
  • Purpose of the male hosts here is limited to baby production

Taboo, secrecy around the physical transformations

  • Horror of men's birth, cutting them open

In Alien Nation, male birth is a beautiful event

  • Rare to see male birth as not a horror

Context of these works ...

Contemporary moves to explode what SF has been...

  • Moorcock reviving New Worlds
  • Ellison, Dangerous Visions

How were R Crumb and underground comics doing the same thing?

Jump off

Frontiers, a feminist journal

Oct 19 Cyberpunk / Cyborg Feminism

Guest speaker: Anne Balsamo

Technologies of the gendered body, 1991

  • Gendered implications of new bio-technologies
  • In-roads: female body-building, male stripping, reproductive technologies (IVF, etc.)
    • Started with male strippers, male body was seldom on display in the U.S.
  • But totally hijacked by cyberpunk and anxiety about bodies
  • Not a fan study per se but using cyberpunk to address these other questions
    • A "narrative lens" to read a cultural scene
  • Working in pre-internet era
    • Scrapbooking, ephemera, Beta tapes of SF films
    • USENET/e-mail at U of Illinois

Reading against the grain

SF is an "imaginative resources" to aid cultural analysis

Technologists inventing the future

  • Were reading SF and inventing the futures that they had read

Pat Cadigan

One of the few women in the cyberpunk genre

  • One of the few that is give respect by the dominant male authors

Synners

  • Meditation on bodies and bodies that are differently marked

Joanna Russ

Russ, Joanna. How to suppress women's writing

Systematic suppression of systematic writing

  • Picks up Woolf's "Room of her own"

Why is women's writing constantly gendered, classified, modified?

  • "A feminist work of SF" rather than a "work of SF"

Uses the tropes of SF to analyze and expand the way women's work gets gendered

Other useful references

Fiction

  • Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
  • Bruce Sterling,
  • Octavia Butler, Dawn
    • What happens when we get salvaged by genetic salvagers

Bibliography

Non-Fiction

  • Semiotext(e) "SF"
    • Teledildonics penis pumping as a flipbook in the pages

Comics

"Cyberpunk" (Innovation)

  • Neo-Noir
  • "Street tech"
  • Multinationals
  • Ubicomp, via "deck" terminal

"If I could just be pure consciousness ... I could be happy"

  • "Meat" body is unnecessary to supersede
  • Denigrating the physical body

"Signal to Noise", Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

  • Nothingness of cyberspace
  • Visual representations (tropes) of cyberspace

TV

Wild Palms

Max Headroom

(High) Art

Laurie Anderson

Gaming

GURPS "Cyberpunk" (Steve Jackson Games)

"Hackers" & "Crackers"

Counter-cultural heroes

  • Kevin Mitnick
  • Demonstrating weaknesses of existing computing infrastructure

Typical hack

  • Making Vest's office disappear
  • Hack as a "service" rather than a malicious outcome
  • Owning space, access to space

The term "hack" is a metaphor from physical pranks to computing activities

  • Sliding back to the physical: "lifehack"

Is cyberpunk a subculture?

Corporation is dominant culture

  • Hacker protagonist is the resistant subculture

But it lacks a consistent, shared identity

  • Fear of the collective (vs individual)
  • Anarcho-capitalist, libertarian
  • One person can subvert the entire power structure

Bionic hero ideal

  • Cowboy

Spoof in Mondo 2000, "R.U. a cyberpunk?"

Mondo 2000

Outgrowth of 2600 and Reality Hackers

"A user's guide to the new edge" (Mondo 2000)

  • Domesticated version of cyberpunk subculture
  • Guide to the rest of the country that's not in on the scene

Illuminati imagery

Adopting McLuhan just as McLuhan was falling off the curriculum

  • Because of his association with the popular
    • Total paperback
  • MIT Press reprints very aca versions

Assumption "media" is the key way of understanding "the new edge"

  • The human sensorium: body-based
    • Drugs, VR, implants, etc.

"Zoning out, Temporarily", Hakim Bey & Genesis P-Orridge by John Perry Barlow

Design is very David Carson, 90s

  • Accessibility of desktop publishing
  • Stretched text, many typefaces
  • Layers over lap
  • Ray-traced 3D images

"Body-less" sex that does not involve the "messy" exchange of bodily fluids

  • Connection to the AIDS epidemic

Body as password

  • Synners: Code is embedded in tattoos
  • Authentication is biological, biometrics

Representing cyberspace

Where are you when you are in cyberspace?

  • Especially challenging in text-based interfaces (pre-web)

Time magazine "cyberpunk" cover image

"Innerspace" of the mind

  • Connection of mind to cyberspace

Visual metaphors:

  • GTE: dew on a spider's web
  • GTE: dandelion seeds
  • CompuServe: "The ultimate guidance system for personal investing" (1989)
    • Fighter pilot/ biz man

Time magazine, Machine of the Year, Personal Computer, 1983, January 3.

  • Computer moving into our homes, bodies, selves

Virtual Reality (VR)

Moving from the metaphors, SF to real technology

Immersive experience Data glove Helmet

Scott Fisher, interactive media division at USC, 1988

VR explosion in popular culture, 1990

  • Magazine: Omni, Discover, Time

1992: Dactyl Nightmare, Battletech

AB was following USENET newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk, alt.virtualworlds

  • CS was "appalled" by popular culture usage, "more PR than VR"

"I am a cyberpunk" post to alt.cyberpunk

Pro-capitalism, change from the inside

  • "Punk by night, neo-YUPpie by day"

Active social life

  • Rave, TAZ/flash mob

Passionate music fans

Cyberspace ("c-space") is just one part of it

Skin is extremely white but he wears all black and self-describes as "dark"

Drugs/drinking?

  • Tesuji says he does not drink/drug and that fewer than 50% of cyberpunks do
  • Smart drugs: mda, speed, anti-depressants
  • Designer drugs: "Solstice"

CGI suggested VR would soon be extremely vivid, tangible

  • Lawnmower Man liquid sex scene
  • Liquid Terminator

CGI bred an impatience

  • VR wasn't going to be funded
  • Demos totally failed to meet the expectations built by movies, etc.

Timothy Leary, Eric Gullichsen (Autodesk)

  • VR is the LSD of the 90s
  • Autodesk builds a CAD system with VR walkthrough
    • AB says it's physically nauseating
  • "Snake oil" sales tour across the country

Wired

Wired knocked off Mondo 2000

  • Cyberpunk is dead
  • Covering a more popular scene

Post-cyberpunk

What do you do after the critique if you want it to be different?

Become more interested in the design of new technologies

Prosthesis

Asymmetries

  • Able-bodied people benefit from better designed technologies
  • But people living with disabilities do not...

Problem is market-based

  • No market

Projects are grant-funded

  • Prototypes extremely expensive
  • Linger unproduced until parts come down in price, new markets appear

Voluntary prosthesis as enhancement

  • Versus repair

Body obsolescence

How is body obsolescence not available to all people?

HCI

Jump offs

Margaret Atwood, Handmaid's Tale

  • Discussed widely among feminist critics - not just feminist SF critics

Kathy Archer

  • Reworks Neuromancer with feminist take

Jaron Lanier poached from Marc Bolas, Scott Fisher

Nov 2 Posthumanism

Starting with Hayles (22-23)

How does the culture accept and negotiate with a new technology?

Erasure of bodies that are different in online spaces

"Polyvocal bodies"

Disembodied, disembrained

Not only new voices in the text but new voices in the audience

  • Narrative democratizes processes of judgement
  • Takes debate out of the abstract

Kurzweil as another Speculative Non-Fiction writer like Nelson

  • Should include in my literature review
  • "Chronicle" rather than a story
    • Series of events that doesn't personify into different agents, doesn't attempt to address causality

Narrative requires causality, arc

  • Agency, beginning-middle-end
  • Agent of history in Kurzweil is the irreversible trend of technological development

r

  • Particular kinds of bodies

In Rainbow's End

  • Vinge deals with generational narratives
  • Digital natives / Digital immigrants
  • Young people embrace technology, grow more rapidly

Kurzweil as "Being above the fray"

  • Stepping outside and making comment

Inevitability

  • Resistance is futile

McLuhan-esque

  • Longue durée of tool use
  • "Extending our reach with a stick"
  • Re: 2001: A Space Odyssey
    • Possible to imagine/depict the ape-human transformation
    • Impossible to imagine/depict the human-starchild transformation

Media abstracted from its materiality

  • Purely functional
  • Abstract informational
  • That there is no difference between a stick and a cyborg implant

Using familiar spaces, compressed time - don't have to jump 1000s of years in the future to tell a fantastical story

  • Vinge: UCSD
  • Doctorow: Disneyland

To what extent is Vinge describing a singularity in Rainbow's End

Vinge: human is only animal to "outsource cognition"

Lévy, collective intelligence

  • How does the insect metaphor work here?
  • This use of swarms/hives/etc. is part of what draws in Parikka
  • Re: Resnick's book on termites, small agents making moves based on predictable patterns
    • What constitutes thought or coordination?

Thought experiment

  • What if each person in China were to act as one of the neurons in the brain? Could China be a brain?
  • Argument against materialism

Shifts in social structures rather than just technological affordances

  • Lévy's collective intelligence is social and cultural, collective knowledge, not just about augmenting human intelligence

Parikka, "assemblage"

Relationship of Media Lab and SF

  • Relationship with Vinge in particular (Minsky wrote foreward to Vinge's book)
  • Attempting to work 20 years in the future

Privacy in Rainbow's End?

  • Data mining
  • Certificate and hierarchy
    • There are private transactions
    • It is not an absolute publicity
    • Some systems enable private communication

Insects in SF

  • Bug-eyed monster
  • Beyond reptilian, enlarged insects
  • Buggers in Ender's Game
  • Insectoids in Starship Troopers
  • The alien in Alien

Wasps, bees, ants, termites

Spiders in 2011? They don't swarm...

  • Spider in industry travels among locations, corporations
  • Spiders "crawl" the web

Books in Rainbow's End?

  • Ripping, copying/digitizing libraries
  • Destruction, transformation
  • Questioning the assumption: to save books we must destroy them
  • Anxiety: younger generation doesn't understand why older cabal is upset about the destruction of libraries
  • No model for the survival of libraries
  • In Vinge, library is like the amusement park and librarian is part of the fantasy world, chief imagineer
  • Search and increasingly sophisticated searching techniques are a curriculum in primary school
    • College remains organized around subject matter, literatures
  • Anxiety(?) around moving from knowledge to skills
    • Schools don't come out particularly badly in RE
    • Still teachers, some integration of edu activities and real world

Nov 9

Housekeeping

Last day of class: oral presentation of the project

  • ~3 weeks from today
  • 13+1 students + 15 people
  • Trying to hold on to the room for extra hour

Oral presentations

  • 10 minutes + 5 min QA
  • Long feedback that can be incorporated into the final paper

Challenges keeping up with reading

  • Can we focus on the non-fiction reading for next week?
  • If you can do the novel, do the novel...

Last Angel of History

Blues as technology

SF moving from a literary genre to music genre

"Data thief" / connecting to trickster figure

  • re: HLG signifying monkey
  • "Black History: Lost, Stolen Forgotten"

"Pure funk" v. other discourses about purity

George Clinton recalls that the spaceship is not a place Black people are expected

  • re: to Star Trek
  • MLK Jr. talking to Nichelle Nichols about the symbolism of her presence on the bridge, she is in the future

The Lieutenant, Gene Rodenberry show predating Star Trek

  • Nichelle Nichols had a more fully-fleshed out character

Clinton comparing the spaceship to the Cadillac (a pronounced racial sterotype)

Sun Ra (an alien), Clinton (constructed as space funk)

"Not of this world"

  • Layers of reality
  • "Extraterrestrial", "supraterrestrial"
  • "Not of the [first, second, third] world"? "Out of this world"?
  • "Far out!"
  • Alien = Access to other sources/forms of knowledge

Sun Ra / Stargate

  • Von donnegan theory, "alien astronauts"
  • Origin myth for human knowledge grounded in africa

Metaphor of abduction

Using SF to (re)write, (re)visit history?

History as a resource to understand the present and the future

Displacement Discussions of the history in the future

Nalo Hopkinson

  • Starts with ideas goes to the scientists
  • Surprising how often she comes up with plausible science in SF thinking
  • "You're going to mess up..."
    • Speaking against a situation where good people don't mention or notice race

Stereotypes are a shorthand, how do you avoid them without having to do a lot of extra labor?

  • Especially in popular fiction

"Notice" as a verb

  • Not about living, being, feeling race
  • Noticing as a glance

Can you really understand a story without being able to embody another?

  • Griots of the Galaxy; Tradewinds
  • Mission of collecting stories
  • Taking over another's body in order to capture their point of view
    • Bodily invasion
  • Ascend/descend and stay locked into the story

Griots alongside Geertz/ Thick description

  • Taking over the body only when they are at the point of death, revitalizing the body

Moving away from anthrocentrism

  • Trees, dogs have stories to share

Does Avatar have postcolonial narrative?

  • Compare to Griots?

Tradition of the white messiah

  • Dances with Smurfs

Sleep Dealer

  • Part documentary, part nightmare
  • Battle over the future, who controls it...
  • SF "thinking about the future ... on a societal level"
  • Global south "has no future in (on?) film"
  • Life of a drone pilot, "step forward?"
    • "Very dramatic, surreal, reality"
  • Migrant workers in remote factory, "la trabaja sin los trabajadores"
  • War over water
  • Machine that sells empathetic experiences

SF as a medium for discussing Mexico/US border

Produced a spoof YouTube video advertising undocumented drone labor

Starting with a short and the producing a feature

  • Sleep Dealer, District 9

Panic Attack (Ataqué del Panico)

  • Fede Álvarez, Montevideo
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataque_de_P%C3%A1nico!
  • Some of the excitement is that he produced crazy fx for only a few grand
  • Fits easily into the look, politics of Hollywood
  • How might the story be different?
  • Setting aside, the story of the short seems very familiar

Monsters

  • Little is spent on the monsters
  • Compared to the context in which they arrive

A Day Without a Mexican

  • Calls attention to the "alien" metaphor
  • Comical send up with the sombrero matches up with the UFO
  • Defamiliarizes the given

Attack the Block

  • No one outside of the block will ever know the story
  • Aliens are drawn down on them because they commit a random act of aggression

SF being taken up as a medium in new film hubs

Endhiran

Nov 16

VT Rough Cut

"Rebecca Onion's argument put to film..."

History and revisionist history

No texts at the center of the culture

Is it uncritical?

"Steam without coal"

  • Metaphor for other absences?

Framing via period references

  • Jules Verne linking Oscar Wilde

Pre difference engine

  • kkw jeeter
  • tim powers
  • blaylock

Fantasy, gentleman adventurer

  • In the Robert Louis Stevenson, gentleman scientist/adventurer mode

Does steampunk insist on its own innocence?

  • Fun is a recurring theme

Bellamy hoped to escape the Victorian period to visit the future

  • Critiquing the soot of the factory town
  • Present day steampunks trying the inverse?

All utopianism has explicit dystopian dimension

Wide open time period blurs a lot of change

Cyberpunk - Steampunk

What if any is the connection here?

Cyberpunks: leaving the (wet) body (meat) behind

Is the body a technology?

Steampunk: material technologies, transparency about how they work

Eyewear:

  • Mirrorshades
  • Goggles

Individual expression, eccentricity

  • Personal autonomy

Do steampunks imagine themselves as "members" more than other groups?

  • More inclusive than cyberpunk

-punk as all-purpose suffix for revolution (difference from -core?)

  • More of a "middle finger" in cyberpunk? Leading towards more closed ranks?

Steampunk, not about a revolution but a parallel society?


Jump offs =

Susan Stewart, nostalgia a branch of the utopic imagination

  • Holding the present against an impossible set of standards

Beyond Victoriana

Retrieved from "http://www.kevindriscoll.org/wiki/COMM620_SF/Class_notes"
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