World-building: a genealogical approach

/ Simon / 1 Comment

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Jorge Luis Borges – On Exactitude in Science

There has recently been a surge of interest in Vajra Chandrasekera’s 2023 essay The Lone and Level Sands.

Chandrasekera is largely arguing from a position contra Jason Kehe in Wired regarding the quality of Brandon Sanderson. “Kehe—who is obviously a fan, who else could read 17 to 20 novels by any given author and be familiar enough with the lore to claim bona fides—takes the criticism of Sanderson as a poor writer of prose to a very familiar place: story over sentences, worlds over writing,” he says.

Chandrasekera ends his essay calling for, “a place where the sentences matter, and are the whole of the matter,” arguing for prose quality over the encyclopedic tendency of the world builder. However, with the recent resurfacing of this essay there has been some discussion regarding the vagaries of the definition. Simply put, it seems that for some world-building means any construction of setting; for others world-building is the insertion of setting that is extraneous to the utility of the story; for others world-building is a specific method of systematic de-mystification which seeks to provide an authoritative claim as to the truth of the setting.

How one feels about world-building thus becomes multi-varied based on two questions: which definition of world-building does a person adhere to and how do they feel about that?

The earliest approaches to the idea of world-building refer to the construction of simplified “worlds” for the use in scientific thought-experiment. In the 1920 work Space Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, Arthur Eddington says, “The reader will easily see that a being confined to the surface of a sphere and not cognisant of a third dimension, will, so to speak, lose one of his dimensions altogether when he watches things occurring at a point 90° away. He regains it if he visits the spot and so adapts himself to the two dimensions which prevail there.

“It might seem that this kind of fantastic world-building can have little to do with practical problems. But that is not quite certain. May we not be able actually to observe the slowing down of natural phenomena at great distances from us?”

For Eddington there is a pedagogical and epistemological purpose to the built world – to provide a setting in which a difference allows for the exploration of the consequences of the laws of physics. Another of Eddingon’s examples involves the movement of light through an impossibly vast and free-floating body of water in space. The difference between the “absolute world” that Eddington describes and these simplified possible worlds is a useful tool to explicate how similar functions interact with difference – meanwhile their simplification creates a sort of scientific parsimony wherein the built world contains only those elements necessary for the thought experiment. The body of water is only water. It doesn’t contain land or creatures, there is no passing debris beyond light swallowed by it. It’s water because water contains the qualities necessary to make transparent how gravitation effects light in this case.

An oft-cited early essay on literary world-building is Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories from 1939. Now this is an interesting inclusion considering the extent to which Tolkien argues against rationalization in it, saying, ” I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.” Tolkien argues against treating “fairy” to narrowly – to signify fairies or elves as the subjects of stories – and, instead argues that fairy stories are stories about the condition of faerie – a totalizing setting that contains the creatures of faerie, their lived environments and their metaphysical bounds. This is critical because, for Tolkien, fairy stories should be true in a metaphysical sense of the world and that truth depends not on a rationalization but rather on a mystification of the audience.

In fact Tolkien is quite critical of the scientific urge within literature, saying of anthropologists and folklorists that they are, “people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. ” Tolkien believes that folklorists tend to flatten stories: “We read that Beowulf “is only a version of Dat Erdmänneken”; that “The Black Bull of Norroway is Beauty and the Beast,” or “is the same story as Eros and Psyche”; that the Norse Mastermaid (or the Gaelic Battle of the Birds and its many congeners and variants) is “the same story as the Greek tale of Jason and Medea.””

Ultimately Tolkien seeks to create a form of belief in the audience and argues that creating a mode in which an audience can believe the truth of a fairy story is the ideal mode for the creation of those things that are valuable in a fairy story. Tolkien sets up the author as a demiurge, the secondary-world is the creation of the author just as the world is the creation of God. We should create a world crammed full of all the things in existence when creating a world. We aren’t seeking the parsimonious model of Eddington’s scientific worlds but rather to create a reflection of divine Truth. And this must mean that the world of the story is even vaster than what the author sets to the page. For Tolkien a fairy story must exist in an unbounded world: “Endings of this sort suit fairy-stories, because such tales have a greater sense and grasp of the endlessness of the World of Story than most modern “realistic” stories, already hemmed within the narrow confines of their own small time. A sharp cut in the endless tapestry is not unfittingly marked by a formula, even a grotesque or comic one. It was an irresistible development of modern illustration (so largely photographic) that borders should be abandoned and the “picture” end only with the paper.”

Richard Lupoff’s description of Edgar Rice Burroughs, in 1965, is interesting in how it fuses together these seemingly incompossible forms of worldbuilding. He says, “In short, Burroughs had created a fully-visualized hero – thirty years in apparent age but actually ageless, a professional soldier, an adventurer – and had transported him to a fully visualized alien world, the planet Barsoom, which we call Mars. Barsoom was fully equipped, far beyond even VanArnam’s description, with geography, history, mythology, flora and fauna, human and inhuman inhabitants, science, politics, religion, architecture, law, and every other institution to be expected in a fully developed world.”

For Lupoff the question of building a world was a matter of craft. That genre fiction is replete with fantastical settings is a given. Instead it is a question of how an author goes about realizing this world such that an audience will enjoy reading stories set within it. These, then, help us to see how our different definitions of world building arise: genre fiction has often shared a readership with scientific non-fiction where the construction of simple and parsimonious worlds was, even in the early 20th century, a well-established method for considering problems. Tolkien, held in the highest esteem created an argument not for parsimony in constructing worlds but rather in a kind of lush overabundance of detail designed to help an audience suspend disbelief and experience the demiurgic creation as a form of truth. These two strains then filter into practical craft considerations: put in a lot of setting detail so that we have a world that can be believed in. But, being rational Men of Science, we had best make sure that these worlds are systematic and consistent; the irrational might be disbelieved.

Hilariously this chimera would likely have Tolkien and Eddington both rolling in their respective graves. But this is all rather old news. Lupoff’s book about Edgar Rice Burroughs was published in 1965. Surely we’ve progressed the discourse subsequently.

In 2007 M. John Harrison approached the subject – arguing ultimately that world-building was unnecessary. “It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study.” It’s Borges’ map that was a perfect replica of its territory. But if Harrison sees world-building as Sisyphean then the question arises as to why he’s so specifically critical of this Sisyphean task over any of the other Sisyphean tasks in writing. For Harrison this is a matter that what he calls worldbuilding fiction, “becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one.”

“This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake,” Harrison says, bringing into the conversation the Barthean idea that fiction doesn’t consist of an active authority and a passive audience but exists in the discursive interplay between author and audience. The author, putting too much labour into world-building, is subordinating the audience too much to their authority.

The author chokes out the possibility of imaginative agency for the audience by grounding the fiction too much in the detail of the world. Harrison is concerned with the ideology surrounding this chimerical world-building, calling it, “It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker.” It’s interesting that this criticism functions poorly for the openly theological ideas of Tolkien’s essay specifically because Tolkien did not view fairy stories as watches. Tolkien believes that fairy stories end with just-so vagaries in order to demonstrate that the world of the story necessarily extended out beyond the bounds of the page. However it works well against the successors to Tolkien who, taking a page from Lupoff, have bonded the parsimony of scientific world building to the pursuit of Truth in Tolkien’s. Though Harrison is happy to leave this mess at Tolkien’s feet it does, in fact, depend on a much more protestant religiosity than Tolkien could ever possess. There is a desire in the SFF idea of world building to create a rationally realized world rather than one that feels True. But I sometimes question whether SF fans even notice the difference. Harrison does hit the nail on the head toward the end of his essay when he treats this form of world-building as a remnant of a “fossilised remains of the postmodern paradigm.” Of course the separate world-building concepts of Eddington and Tolkien were themselves very modernist – each attempted to present a grand an unifying narrative about the world: Eddington’s was scientific and Tolkien’s religious. However the syncretic desire to merge these two together is, certainly, a postmodern affectation.

In 2014 Michael Moorcock spoke with John Picacio from Locus Magazine about his then-forthcoming novel The Whispering Swarm. In that article, Moorcock argued he dislikes being called a world-builder because he believed it, as a notion, belied a “failure of literary sophistication.” Moorcock, with characteristic bluntness, calls worldbuilding “anti-romantic rationalization” and lays blame at the feet of John W. Campbell. He also says, “I’m not trying to convince you this is going to be real. I’m trying to convince you these ideas have to be considered, that what’s going on in the world has to be thought about.” And so we can see that Moorcock shares Harrison’s concern regarding the tendency of an over-sufficiency of authorial instruction to limit the avenues for audience imagination. Campbell, who demanded the stow-away die at the end of the Cold Equations, could be something of a perfect vector for the protestant syncretization of parsimonious scientific modeling and a Christian pursuit of Truth via secondary creation. It would certainly fit with the John W. Campbell who assisted L. Ron Hubbard in the founding of Dianetics after all. However, as has been pointed out by the blogger who operates under the “heresiarch” pseudonym, Moorcock’s demand for the necessity of character is no less vulnerable to historicization than the world-builders focus on setting is. They argue stridently, and convincingly, against the idea of necessity as appropriate to any discussion of literature. Effectively nothing in literature is strictly needed.

They also say, “To condemn all of worldbuilding, you ought to be going after the strongest cases: this IMO means Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, a book which sadly no one has read,” and this is interesting specifically because of what Always Coming Home is: it’s a work of speculative science.

Specifically, Le Guin constructed an ethnography for a possible future people of California. It does all the things ethnographies do – it analyzes their writing, explores the structure of their myth and poetry, it interrogates how their folkways interface with their material culture. Always Coming Home is hardly a novel although it is certainly an excellent work of literature. But, rather, it’s attacking Tolkien from the opposite end, so to speak, and giving the anthropologists and folklorists their due, telling Tolkien that his search for an idealized Truth via the whole-cloth construction of myth missed the point of considering what a myth, in its specificity, might be for when not for the construction of an English national identity.

Le Guin’s work plays well both to problematize Tolkien and to knock some of the wind out of Moorcock’s sails by demonstrating that literature need not be a character study to be, well, literary. However I don’t think that Le Guin works well to particularly problematize Harrison except in as far as her work demonstrates that there are other ways to get at building a world and reasons to do so beyond reifying a protestant ideological mode of treating the world as a watchmaker’s product. But I think one would be a fool to fail to situate Le Guin, especially, within the postmodern mode that Harrison criticizes in his essay.

In 2020 Helen Marshall interrogated Harrison’s critique of world-building along with some of the critiques of it. She cites Charles Stross who says, “The implicit construction of an artificial but plausible world is what distinguishes a work of science fiction from any other form of literature. It’s an alternative type of underpinning to actually-existing reality, which is generally more substantial (and less plausible – reality is under no compulsion to make sense.)”

Marshall points out that, “If, as he says, reality is under no compulsion to make sense, how can art ever produce a plausible and coherent yet realistic world? In fact Stross wants the opposite of this sort of messy, inexplicable real-realism. Instead he turns to fiction because ‘worldbuilding provides a set of behavioural constraints that make it easier to understand the character of my fictional protagonists.”‘

She claims that Stross is openly advocating for the construction of hyperrealities, the very thing that Harrison critiqued previously, because it it allows Stross to make-visible those things that were invisible before.

In short Marshall points back to Eddington and his massive globe of water and says, “you’re just doing this again.”

But if what Stross is doing is simply a fictional version of Eddington’s thought exercise then how can we take his claim seriously that science fiction is unique in all forms of literature from doing so? Philosophy and science have been eating science fiction’s lunch for a few hundred years now in that regard. And this is the problem with trying to disentangle this chimera. Without Tolkien’s idealism, without his explicitly theological search for Truth, then all that is left of world-building is the thought experiment. Without the thought experiment we’re just still writing fairy stories. In either case the encyclopedic impulse of the world-builder becomes a bit of fannish silliness forced upon the audience by an author who won’t get out of the way of their own text.

Marshall argues that this is largely an economic activity, Echoing several prior authors she notes that market conditions prefer “encyclopedic, extendible, franchisable, consumable” art. Authors simply follow suit. This mirrors Chandrasekera’s argument that much of Brandon Sanderson’s tendency toward world-building is tied into his position as a business-person, as a start-up founder more than as an author. Sanderson has a financial incentive to be interested in a consistent ecosystem of products that locks in readers. If a reader is conditioned to expect the systematics of a Cosmere book they might look askance at Mordew or Ambergris.

Marshall argues that what Harrison is seeking is, “a mode of attack that would destabilize and unsettle, that would reveal the world as incoherent and painful rather than unified and offering the possibility of choice.”

She chronicles Harrison as having a nearly Brechtian desire to demystify fantasy for material reasons – “We learn to run away from fantasy and into the world, write fantasies at the heart of which by some twist lies the very thing we fantasise against,” she quotes him as saying. She places Harrison into a lineage including Mervyn Peake and China Mieville, citing Jeff and Ann VanderMeer regarding the foundation of the New Weird movement.

Ultimately Marshall proposes three solutions to Harrison’s attack on world-building. The first is to, like China Mieville, double-down on world-building, and use it to allow the creation of a fantasy that “interrogates the relationship between belief and reality.”

The second is to operate within the mode of Jeff VanderMeer and, as he suggested in Wonderbook to argue for “sufficient mystery and unexplored vistas, consistent inconsistency, multicultural representation, extended, literalised metaphors, multiple operational realities, collective and individual memory and imperfect comprehension.” The third is to follow Timothy Morton’s path into speculative realism. I have explored the relationship between VanderMeer and Morton previously and found this argument of particular interest.

She argues that Harrison ultimately rejects the idea that readers should believe (or even enjoy) built worlds as if they were real.

And so what we have is a story of a century of progression through modernity and into the postmodern followed by the recognition that the postmodern condition has reached its limits. World-building is a postmodern chimera of modernist rationalism and equally modernist reaction against rationalism. It paradoxically demands a multitudinous panoply of detail in order to make transparent problem-worlds fit for solving problems.

If we express skepticism for world-building it should be clear to an audience that this is not a matter of being skeptical of the power of setting. However we must not make the error of Stross and believe that setting only exists within the confines of genre, or that any setting is more or less artificial than another.

In fact, we can abandon Baudrillard’s anxiety in favor of a Deleuzian recognition of the powers of the false. We may not agree with Tolkien that there is any Truth to be found in an act of demiurgic creation but we can recognize how both Tolkien’s unbounded abundance and Eddington’s careful parsimony create a false image of the world – and that their capacity for action depends on that falsity. As Marshall points out, a built world cannot be as inherently contradictory as reality. There’s too much of the watchmaker’s stink upon any setting. And heresiarch is quite correct to point out that the watchmaker’s simplification applies as much to the inner setting of character as to the external setting of mise en scène.

But, just as this is the case, a built world allows us to highlight contradiction and inconsistency. VanderMeer’s ideas of consistent inconsistency, the blending of extended literalised metaphor into the assumed real stratum of a story and Morton’s use of the hauntological and the eschatological allow us to interrogate socio-cultural problems with the same sort of transparent clarity that Eddington sought for the mathematical problems of special relativity. Always Coming Home provides an excellent precedent for this sort of an operation, showing how a focus on setting can allow us to interrogate our own relationship between folkway and material culture as if we were anthropologists in the future.

Perhaps what sits so hard in the mouth of many critics regarding Brandon Sanderson’s school of world-building is that it becomes too systematic for its own sake without doing much of interest with it. Sanderson is not a talented enough writer to really tell us anything about his characters but his fantasy worlds are ultimately derivative enough that they don’t have much to say about our world. They become floating escapist signifiers that exist principally to entrap an audience in a labyrinth of rules and sour them on anything that doesn’t adhere to these arbitrary laws.

This is, however, not a critique of world-building qua world-building. It’s a critique of Sanderson’s prioritization of business over art.

As Harrison rightly points out, world-building is inherently political. But Marshall is right to problematize this by demonstrating how any given politic within fiction can be subverted by a cunning enough writer. As such we would, perhaps, be wise not to condemn world-building entirely but rather to guide artists to consider what their worlds are for. When you decide what is consistent and what is inconsistent, when you decide what to show and what to hide, whether to write about trees or whales or the layout of fantastical cities, ask yourself why. Ask yourself not whether the world will convince an audience of its truth but rather what it can do with its falsehood. What games are you playing with the audience and to what end?

The Terror of Psychosexual Development under Patriarchy: A review of Poor Things

/ Simon

I don’t know how to start this review. There’s a challenge to introducing a thing so singularly odd as the 2023 film Poor Things. This movie, directed by the esteemed Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, with cinematography by Robbie Ryan (who previously worked with Lanthimos on The Favourite), costume design by Holly Waddington and with art direction by Géza Kerti is a visual feast. With a setting in an alternate 1888 (estimated on state of Eiffel tower construction) in which Europe is bedecked in a baroque style reminiscent of the steampunk aesthetic at its best, the film balances on a line between German Expressionism and the French Fantastique in style. It’s as if the dream-like intrusion of the unnatural in Fantastique has forced its way into an Expressionist stage play.

The sets and costumes eschew realism; Bela’s dresses, in particular, are cloud-like confections of knit wool and silk while, for all the characters, there is a kind of heightened reality of late 19th century styles on display.

Continuing with expressionist elements we must address the performances. This will likely be a career-defining performance for Emma Stone; it has certainly been one of her most controversial both for the extensive position of sex in her performance and also for the questions regarding the realism of her “toddler” scenes.

I think those people who have criticized Stone for these earlier parts of the performance have missed that literally nobody in the film is trying for realism – these are expressionist performances top to bottom. I was, honestly, shocked by how effectively Mark Ruffalo chewed the scenery in his performance as the cad Duncan Wedderburn. He delivers the best performance of a weird little creep of a man I’ve seen since Brad Dourif stepped into the role of Grima Wormtongue. Taken together with Willem Dafoe in the same fine form as we might recall from his performance in The Lighthouse and even smaller roles like Kathryn Hunter as Swiney and we see a picture of a film where any sort of “realism” or verisimilitude in performance was hardly the point to begin with.

And honestly should we expect realism from the performance of an infant mind suddenly thrust into the body of an adult woman in the first place? All in all, Stone’s remarkable performance in this film has me curious to see The Favourite which she was also in.

But, continuing with influences, I do believe that this film has been mis-categorized as a sci-fi comedy or a comedy-drama by a lot of reviewers. I think, rather, it should be treated as a horror comedy. Now I should note that Ashley Darrow and Jonathan Greenaway of Horror Vanguard fame have talked a lot about the proximity of comedy and horror. Both are modes of cinema that aspire to do something to the body of the audience. So we can treat as a given that there is slippage between comedy and horror most of the time.

However, looking at this from a cinematographic perspective, I couldn’t help but note how the shot selection, with its preference for low-angle photography, fish-eye lenses and a pinhole camera effect, reflected a horror-cinema specific visual construction. There is a kind of embodied voyeurism to the camera that suggests not only somebody looking in on the action but, specifically, somebody looking in who should not be. Think Black Christmas. We are constantly treated to a perspective extremity – the camera shows us too much or too little. Contemporary Hollywood often pursues a kind of full-coverage sufficiency where the audience is asked to forget that there is a camera mediating the experience of the film. This is not the case here and it works to excellent, if occasionally alienating, effect. This contributes to the pervasive sense of discomfort that marks this film. I’ve said before that horror is the art of discomfort. If so then we have to recognize the horror present in Poor Things. Now this would not be Ryan’s first attempt at horror if we treat it that way, he previously worked on Isolation and I Am Not a Serial Killer while Lanthimos has previously worked in the genre via The Killing of a Sacred Deer so it’s not an absurd proposition that this team would work within a horror mode. But situating this film as a horror film still might challenge how it’s been received by much of the film press.

Additional evidence exists in the form of Ryan’s comments regarding key cinematographic referents. Because, according to Ryan, the most significant film that influenced the lighting and shot selection of Poor Things was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which Lanthimos reportedly asked the crew to refer back to regularly throughout the production of the film. Shot like a horror film indeed. Considering the extent to which Poor Things serves as a callback to Frankenstein, in particular, it is also interesting that a Dracula movie, tied as it is to the same milieu of the 19th century British Gothic, would be selected.

Certainly expressionism has played an outsized influence in horror performance with stand-outs like the Evil Dead series and Mandy being particularly relevant. However horror, as a form of cinema, goes beyond shot selection, body reaction and an eschewing of verisimilitude in performance. But most horror contains something to be afraid of, generally a monster of either the literal or metaphorical varieties, and has something to say about fear or abjection.

This is also something very true about Poor Things.

Poor Things is, in fact, singularly fascinated with the figure of the monster. One of the first things we hear about Godwin Baxter is that he is a monster. Baxter, who presents as a cold and amoral man of science for most of the film’s runtime, is a grotesquerie. Covered in scars, Baxter was subjected to cruel medical experimentation by his father. Unable to produce his own gastric juices as a result of his father’s surgeries, Godwin must connect himself to a contraption in order to eat. a side-effect of this is that he loudly belches bubbles which drift about the room at mealtimes. Godwin’s amorality is very nearly secondary to his monstrosity as grotesquerie but this becomes something he seems sincerely proud of. Not only is he quite open about his gastronomic (and other) disabilities, cheerfully describing the circumstances that led to his disfigurement, but he also surrounds himself with grotesqueries: dogs with the grafted heads of geese, chickens with the grafted heads of dogs and other such chimera wander about his property. And then there are Bella and Felicity who are not grotesque in form but both of whom become grotesque via their behaviour.

This idea of the grotesque is also partially explored through Swiney – the heavily tattooed madam who occasionally becomes so overcome by her desire for youth and beauty that she will bite – literally trying to consume the beauty of others.

Bella will, eventually, also be called a monster, particularly by Duncan, because of his inability to control her and his unfounded belief that she is the author of his misfortune. A third figure of the monster arises via Alfie, an aristocrat and a military man so hated by the servants he casually abuses that he’s taken to carrying a revolver with him everywhere he goes, a man who drove his wife to suicide but cannot let go of her even in death, a grasping anti-moral being whose existence is marked entirely by his desire to subjugate, command and, ultimately, own other people.

This creates an interesting dichotomy surrounding what we consider monstrous: is the monster the grotesque? Is the monster the thing from outside that cannot be commanded or is the monster the thing from within that demands to command?

It’s interesting to note, however, that the monsters in Poor Things are not, generally, the source of terror in the film. Grotesque Dr. Baxter dies smiling, surrounded by people who care for him. He doesn’t stand in Bella’s way in any of her attempts to forge a sense of self and he is rewarded with her love in the end. Swiney, too, lets Bella go without a struggle and all the grotesques of Baxter’s home become either family or pets.

Duncan’s accusations of monstrosity toward Bella are almost immediately obvious as bad-faith. Duncan may believe, in some way, that Bella is the author of his misfortune but the film has established, ahead of time, that the man is entirely to blame for the things that befall him. He’s a lawyer who can’t spell, a drunk, a gambler and a scoundrel. For all his claims toward a rakish libertinism, he cannot tolerate the idea of a woman exercising the very freedom he starts by advocating and so we can add hypocrite to his plethora of character defects. He’s a small Wormtongue of a man. And by the time he calls Bella a monster the audience knows this all too well to be taken in.

We could possibly see Alfie as a source of terror if not for how readily Bella resolves him as a challenge. Alfie isn’t so much a source of terror for Bella as he is a final test of her commitment to self-development.

But this isn’t to say that there isn’t terror in the film. The terror, instead, comes from the question of individuation and how it ties into a very Freudian model of psychosexual development. Here is where the central conceit of Bella’s creation becomes useful, and how it plays games with the Frankensteinian notion of tabula rasa.

Because Bella is, of course, an infant mind implanted into the body of an adult woman. The conceit is that this specific mind (and with the very different development of Felicity it is clear that there is a clear specificity at play here) is developing toward adulthood at an accelerated rate. And throughout her development we see a clear progression of classical Freudian developmental stages at play.

Except for one very specific difference: Bella, throughout her development, insists upon her own agency. She forcefully asserts that she will be the author of every one of her decisions, the master of her ship, from her first stumbling steps to the moment she cuts out Alfie’s brain and replaces it with that of a goat. This leads to an interesting challenge to Freud here. Bella may experience the anal and phallic stages of development but she refuses to submit to Oedipus.

Deleuze and Guattari describe Oedipus and its impact on individuation, saying “With the same movement the Oedipus complex inserts desire into triangulation, and prohibits desire from satisfying itself with the terms of the triangulation. It forces desire to take as its object the differentiated parental persons, and, brandishing the threats of the undifferentiated, prohibits the correlative ego from satisfying its desires with these persons, in the name of the same requirements of differentiation.”

But Bella is, bluntly, her own mother. Her existence collapses the differentiation between differentiated global people such as “mother,” and “father” and the undifferentiated threat through the way in which she hacks at its basis.

She may call Dr. Baxter her father but she is not beholden to him. She leaves his side and he stands aside and lets her go. He attempts to arrange a marriage for her and she, instead, runs off with a rake so she can learn about the world. But this is not framed as a violation of parental law; instead it’s the great howling void of absolute freedom being embraced with gusto.

“Oedipus says to us: either you will internalize the differential functions that rule over the exclusive
disjunctions, and thereby “resolve” Oedipus, or you will fall into the neurotic night of imaginary identifications.” But Bella does neither. Instead she individuates. She forges an identity that is not Dr. Baxter nor is it a rejection of him. She does not fall into neurosis, far from it, she forges a fully structured and functional frame of being entirely on her own terms.

In fact, Bella’s development is almost messianic thanks to the second text that lurks in the background of Poor Things, adjacent Frankenstein: Siddhartha. In some sense this is tied to the very Buddhist realization of the nature of suffering that Bella experiences on the cruise ship. Her discovery of the slums and her subsequent renunciation of wealth fits cleanly into the Buddhist story of the Four Sights but, rather than becoming an ascetic following this renunciation, Bella becomes a prostitute. This fits closely together with Hess’ argument in Siddhartha, “I saw a man, Siddhartha thought, a single man, before whom I would have to lower my glance. I do not want to lower my glance before any other, not before any other.”

And, of course, this leads Bella to the heights of moral development: socialism. It’s delightful that Bella’s full development into adulthood happens in a Paris winter during which her girlfriend invites her to a Socialist reading group. There’s a wonderful balance present here wherein a rejection of ascetic renunciation of individuality gives way to an enlightened sense of the collective value of humanity.

““I know it,” said Siddhartha; his smile shone golden. “I know it, Govinda. And behold, with this we are right in the middle of the thicket of opinions, in the dispute about words. For I cannot deny, my words of love are in a contradiction, a seeming contradiction with Gotama’s words. For this very reason, I distrust in words so much, for I know, this contradiction is a deception.”

Bella recognizes fully well, as an individuated subject, that a socialist liberation of humanity is a condition that can allow people to develop themselves. And she wants this so clearly and so forcefully that she will exercise extreme violence to protect this, destroying Alfie entirely rather than submitting to him.

Again, the contradiction is a deception. Bella takes away any hint of Alfie’s agency and reduces him to a goat munching grass in her yard specifically to protect the agency of herself, of Alfie’s beleaguered servants and as an attack upon the patriarchal systems that can produce Alfie to begin with. Bella’s story ends showing us that she is the owner of every one of her mistakes and every one of her triumphs but that, simultaneously, she does so via the community she is a part of. She honors the betrothal to Max that Dr. Baxter arranged but simultaneously insists on bringing Toinette into her family life as an equal partner. Max, for his part, freely accepts that to be husband to Bella means to freely accept her freedom. Many horrors and reversals befall Bella, almost all of them she is the author of. She freely goes with Alfie to his mansion. She could have refused. And when he tries to subjugate her, to shape her body to be the vessel of his will, she destroys him just as freely.

There is a terror in the tension between the clarity of which the film accepts a Freudian account of development and the way in which Bella refuses to succumb to it. But, in the end, the contradiction is the deception. Frankenstein is the monster and so is her maker but if Bella is the monstrous tabula rasa then she is the revelation that only by being a monstrous tabula rasa can one accept the burden of one’s own freedom.

This is just getting absurd: Hugo 2023 fallout

/ Simon / 1 Comment

Where do I even start?

A brief chronology:

  • On January 21 Ada Palmer published a blog post on the topic of self-censorship. This became relevant to subsequent discourse.
  • On February 7, File 770 and Jason Sandford’s blog co-published a report derived from Diane Lacey’s now-public comments regarding her role in censoring the Hugo Awards. The report surfaced two important details that had previously been left to speculation: first that the English speaking members of the concom, apparently without any feedback from the Chinese members of the concom had assembled dossiers on people who they suspected might be upsetting to the Chinese government. Some of these people (notably Paul Weimer, Xiran Jay Zhao and R. F. Kuang) were subsequently determined to be ineligible, again by the Western contingent of the concom on the basis of these dossiers. In many cases the texts declared ineligible were not read by the people assembling the dossiers. Second that this act of censorship was in concert with a decision, apparently made by Dave McCarty in specific, to exclude several works of Chinese fiction from consideration on the basis that he believed them to have been slated. Many of these works would have likely been finalists in their respective categories, making it highly questionable that the English language works that eventually won those categories would have even made the ballot if not for this intercession.
  • On February 19, Meg Frank stated that Dave McCarty had been “emotionally abusive, generally manipulative, and has sexually harassed myself and numerous others,” and that they’d previously made code of conduct complaints against him that had failed to gain traction due to his history of community service and concomitant popularity in the Worldcon set.
  • Also on February 19, Cheryl Morgan announced her resignation from the Hugo Award Marketing Committee and expressed fears that she, and others who had volunteered for the Hugo Awards may have become open to threat of lawsuit in the United States due to the handling of the trademark by the Chengdu concom.
  • Still on February 19, Xiran Jay Zhao stated they’d been contacted by a representative of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. This led to speculation among various Worldcon adjacent people that the United States might be considering punitive action against Worldcon on the basis that China Telecom, a sanctioned company in the United States, made financial contributions to Worldcon which subsequently may have donated money to the Mark Protection Committee or Worldcon Intellectual Property. According to these speculations, this might be interpreted as laundering money into a US organization from a sanctioned company – which is not an entirely dissimilar state of affairs to what led to the Meng Wanzhou diplomatic incident.

Needless to say, it has been an eventful month.

So let’s begin with self-censorship. Starting with largely around the time the February 7 report came out the discourse from within fandom was to say, “OK so maybe McCarty was principally involved in the exclusions but it was self-censorship because China is so censorious he felt he had to. This is largely in keeping with Palmer’s argument that a line cannot be drawn “between state censorship and private or civilian censorship.”

However this approach ignores an important question: if we assume that a censorious regime is imposing power such that the English speaking members of the concom self-censor, which censorious regime is it? The obvious answer is that they did it based on their beliefs of what might be problematic to the Chinese state. However this raises a second, very important question, where did the concom’s ideas of what would or would not upset the Chinese state come from?

This points back to my question surrounding the exclusion of Kuang’s book from my last Hugo piece. R.F. Kuang has a book deal in China. The book that was censored says nothing bad about China and instead principally addresses questions about English colonialism. Contending that the Chinese state is censorious the next question is why somebody would think, knowing what the Chinese state tends to censor, that this book would be likely to face censure. First we must consider who was doing the censoring. Based on the leaked emails reported on by Barkley and Sanford the vetting subcommittee was hand-picked by Dave McCarty and excluded all Chinese concom members. In a leaked email from June 6, regarding Babel, Kat Jones said Babel, “has a lot about China. I haven’t read it, and am not up on Chinese politics, so cannot say whether it would be viewed as ‘negatives of China.’”

Note that she had not read the book. It was excluded because Jones understood, somehow, that the book spoke at length about China. This must be contextualized together with Dave McCarty’s decision (seemingly alone) to invalidate votes for Chinese language work that appeared on recommended reading lists produced by the publisher Qidian and by the world’s largest science fiction magazine, Science Fiction World.

The ultimate result of this censorship was the systematic exclusion of Chinese and Chinese diaspora authors from the Hugo ballot, ultimately favoring many of the same fandom-proximate figures who have become Hugo perennials. It ended up with a remarkably white set of Hugo awards. Can we really suggest that a person with first-hand knowledge of Chinese censorship practices would respond by removing all the Chinese people from the ballot? So if this constitutes self-censorship (which depends on a narrow read of self-censorship as any form of censorship undertaken by a private party at the assumed behest of a state) what was the state who was being appeased? Because it seems like this censorship does more to reify the general American misconceptions of China than anything from within China. If we call this self-censorship then it’s as valid to say the censorious regime was the US State Department as it is to say it was the CCP. After all, many of these fantasies about China come, ultimately from there.

This is categorically not something that China would want. In fact a quick perusal of Chinese media reveals that about all that was of concern within China regarding Worldcon was the presence of Chinese authors. The wrap-up article in the China Daily contained a single line regarding the (English language) winner of Best Novel before devoting a paragraph to Hai Ya and then shorter writeups for every other Chinese national who won their category. Zhao Enzhe gets a significant quotation, saying, “I always recommend the style of Chinese ancient paintings, graceful and full of vitality,” and “ancient Chinese culture provides the best style for sci-fi and with my efforts, I hope I can bring more sci-fi artworks with Chinese philosophical thinking to foreign audiences.” South China Morning Post also published a glowing feature on Hai Ya. This should tell western audiences the direction of Chinese propaganda surrounding this event. Excluding Chinese nationals from the ballot was something explicitly contrary to these aims. Notably there is nothing published in Chinese state affiliated media subsequent to the revelation of the irregularities. But considering how the profiles of Hai Ya and Zhao Enzhe contained superlative statements regarding the significance and prestige of the Hugo awards I’d suspect that nobody in the Chinese propaganda apparatus is too happy with the western members of the concom right now.

All this is to say that if self-censorship is to be brought forward as affecting the concom’s aims and if we should tie this directly to the power of the state, per Palmer’s argument, we must interrogate which state’s power was being projected by ensuring the international audience that, even at an award ceremony held in China, American literature remained dominant.

We should also consider the possibility that this is not the first Hugo award to have faced irregularities. Mary Robinette Kowal has said that Dave McCarty created proprietary software for Hugo vote tabulation this software gives him scrutiny over which people voted for which finalists but he will not show anybody the code underlying it. Considering the preponderance of sources suggesting that McCarty was the leader of the censorship effort at Chengdu it raises the question of how many other votes may have had his finger on the scales. From what I can see McCarty’s was modelling voting data as early as 2016; this could potentially call into question every Hugo finalist since the start of the EPH process. And considering the known irregularities that led to the adoption of EPH this could, in turn, suggest there hasn’t been a single Hugo Award since 2013 that is above suspicion of tampering either by the antics of the reactionary Sad Puppies or by the so-called SMOFs of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) putting their fingers on the scale.

Now this is where it’s relevant to bring up the accusations of harassment against Dave McCarty. These have been going around fandom for some time. As Meg Frank said, McCarty is not a missing stair. Rather he’s a man who was protected from the consequences of his actions. Complaints of groping and other abusive behaviour surfaced at 2011 SMOFCON and were largely brushed off. Meg Frank has reported that this is a pattern of behaviour demonstrated by McCarty and his enablers.

What is concerning is that treating these irregularities as solely the Dave McCarty screw-up is letting too many others off the hook. This one man didn’t amass such influence and immunity without a score of friends and helpers. If we can look at Chengdu and call it Dave McCarty’s fiefdom it’s only because of the many people who called him friend and helped him establish it. This man should have been asked to leave in 2011. Here we are, 13 years later, reaping the consequence of his enablement. And this is where we should pivot to a discussion of the byzantine finances of WSFS and its affiliated bodies.

If we look at Cheryl Morgan’s public statement following her resignation from the Hugo Award Marketing Committee we can note a rather anomalous point where she says, “Having seen legal advice on the subject, I am confident that the contracts I issued from Wizard’s Tower Press are structured in such a way that no one suing me, either individually or as an officer of WSFS, will be able to obtain the rights to any of the works published by Wizard’s Tower.” And at the time I thought this quite odd as I couldn’t think of any good reason why anyone would sue Morgan over her rather tangential involvement.

So I asked her. And she provided me with some answers which I took to a few other people. And from what I can put together Morgan had said on social media some time previous that it would be pointless to sue WSFS because WSFS barely exists as an organization and has no money. Whereupon a legal academic informed her that a litigant could always sue the membership in such a case as US law has stipulations for suits against non-incorporated entities like WSFS. And this apparently alarmed Morgan sufficient to make her want to distance herself from any element of WSFS quite vociferously to avoid ending up party to a lawsuit for something she had absolutely nothing to do with aside from managing a webpage.

Now neither Morgan nor myself are Americans and while I cannot speak for her I would never pretend to be a legal expert even within the bounds of Canadian law. I cannot adjudicate the level of actual risk Morgan faced.

It’s at this point we must turn to address Worldcon finances. During the debacle surrounding Discon III I actually tried to dig into Worldcon finances and what I found was a disorganized mess that took me down a few blind alleys and ultimately led nowhere. Frankly, from publicly available sources, it was impossible for me to figure out where Discon III money had gone. At the time I set it aside as largely irrelevant to my point surrounding the ethics of allowing an arms manufacturer as a sponsor of a literary event. Although this was not originally a particular focus of this piece it ultimately sent me down a remarkable rabbit hole due to the non-standardized and difficult to balance nature of Worldcon financial reporting year over year.

See WSFS is non-incorporated and consists of the voting membership of WSFS in any given year. That’s true. But there is a non-profit organization called Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP) which exists to, according to Kevin Standlee, “pursue registration of marks outside the United States.” According to information compiled by Jay Blanc, the Worldcon Marks Protection Committee (MPC) seems to have unilaterally determined that the MPC would take ownership of Worldcon related trademarks within the USA as they came up for renewal. It is worth noting that the initial board of the MPC in 2015, when these decisions were made included Dave McCarty, Kevin Standlee and Ben Yalow, among others. Blanc’s investigation points out both that this appears to have been structured specifically to keep both the MPC and WIP not legally responsible for WSFS but in such a manner that it would normally require that 33% of its annual income be taken from individual small donors. Blanc asserts that WIP’s income is taken in the form of a single grant from the yearly Worldcon. According to the most recently published financial statement for WIP, WIP earned $3,100 before September 11, 2023. $3,000 from Chicon 8 and $100 listed as “Deposit, Misc.” According to minutes published in December 3, 2023 for a special meeting of the Mark Protection Committee, “There are no dues outstanding since we just received nearly $3,000 from Chengdu” A footnote indicates, “The money from Chengdu is not part of the $18,800 noted as our bank balance, since it had just been received.” It is unclear whether this means the money had yet to be deposited into WIP accounts or whether it means the money had yet to be accounted for. There is no mention of a near-$3,000 expense item in the agenda of the Worldcon Business Meeting from Chengdu dated October 19-22. Which likely indicates the payment happened after October 22 and before December 3 however there’s no audit trail I can find for it at that time.

And I want to note that this is not a Chengdu-specific problem. However it’s worth noting that it’s not uncommon for there to be a remarkably low level of granularity in financial reports from Worldcons. For instance: the Discon III financial report from September 9 2023 includes an expense item of “Art Sales Reimbursements | $30,698.78” with no immediate context as to why these reimbursements occurred. There is no references to art sales reimbursements in the minutes of either the business meeting minutes for Discon III or Chicon 8. I would expect that a reimbursement of that size would at least warrant some discussion at a business meeting or at least some explication on the financial documentation.

However such vagaries are somewhat par for the course among Worldcons. Also a challenge is that most conventions (with the exception of Chengdu) report their finances in local currency and little detail goes into describing money conversion among pass-along funds. This makes an independent third-party balancing of Worldcon finances difficult year over year.

The difficulty of transferring money in and out of China only compounded this problem. The solution that was arrived at by the conrunners was to create a separate business entity – a 501c3 incorporated in Wyoming and headquartered at the residence of one of its board members – called the Development Center for Chengdu Worldcon (DCCW) whose responsibility it was to handle US finances for Worldcon. However, it should be noted, the articles of incorporation don’t mention that as the mission of the DCCW – instead saying that its mission is to “Facilitate the education and study of literary works internationally and in the United States.”

This caused several issues. First: the delays in allowing for registration in Chengdu Worldcon proved vexatious for some attendees. Allen Tipper went so far as to call for censure of the concom, though they were prohibited by meeting rules at Chicon8 from elaborating on the minuted records, telling me, “their skirting of the rules with regards to allowing memberships to be purchased was making me lose confidence in their ability to run a Worldcon. I would have specifically noted that I could buy a membership for Glasgow before I could buy one for Chengdu.”

Based on my research of the timeline surrounding the creation of DCCW, this was likely the root cause of this issue.

The administrators of DCCW seem to have been hard-pressed to keep up with the requirements of running the charitable organization. Wyoming state records indicate that the 501c3 became delinquent in its filings on August 2, 2023 and were administratively dissolved on October 9, 2023. This state of affairs was not rectified until February 2, 2024, when their annual report to the state was filed and their status was restored.

It seems somewhat alarming that this entity was in a legally tenuous position throughout the period of the convention itself, especially considering how finances were handled between the DCCW and the Chengdu Worldcon organization (which appears to have been the legal structure of the convention within China).

Now I will admit that what follows here is something of a guess. But the financial report for the Chengdu Worldcon contains a column for China funds and overseas funds before providing a total across both categories. The China funds are reported both in CNY and in USD while overseas funds are reported only in USD. It should note that this is actually somewhat better detail than most conventions financial reports provide.

As of August 31, the date on the financial report given at the October Worldcon, income in China funds totals to $279,704.43 while overseas income comes to $236,359.60. Expenses in China funds: $94,799.14 and in the overseas funds column it is $46,844.07. This leads to a reported net income of $184,905.29 in China funds and $189,515.53 in overseas funds. What’s interesting is when we look at the reported bank balances we see that the 2032 Chengdu Worldcon bank account is listed at $184,905.29 and the bank balance reported for the DCCW is listed at $189,515.53. This would seem to indicate, although I cannot be entirely sure, that the China funds column refers to income and expenses incurred by Chengdu Worldcon while the overseas fund column refers to income and expenses incurred by DCCW.

Now it is somewhat alarming that, at the time the report was produced the DCCW was delinquent in its filings with Wyoming and by the time the report was delivered to the membership of WSSF the DCCW had been dissolved. There is no mention of this dissolution within the agenda and I have been unable to find the minutes for the business meeting although they have apparently been published. However there are other challenges that arise from my interpretation of this report in this way.

For instance pass-along payments from CoNZealand and Discon3 are split between the two organizations. The split for CoNZealand was 75% / 25% – $37,500 went to Chengdu Worldcon while $12,500 went to DCCW. On the other hand the split for Discon 3 was 70% / 30% – of $28,528 passed along $19,928 went to Chengdu Worldcon and $8,600 went to DCCW. It’s unclear why these were handled differently.

Also unclear is the $57,428 Chicon 8 Pass-along waiver expense against Chengdu Worldcon that does not touch DCCW finances at all. I tried to find references to the pass-along waiver in the minutes of Chicon 8 and was unsuccessful. The pass-along waiver does appear as income on the Chicon 8 budget as of August 31, 2023. Again it’s unclear why this decision was made.

Another oddity is how small the amount of money was spent by either organization on international travel. DCCW paid $34,173.05 on international travel. Of that $26,522.45 was for an all-staff meeting in June. The remaining $7,650.60 was paid to convention guests. This is odd considering the number of accounts that have come out of convention panelists being comped flights and or accommodation. Tied to this oddity is the presence of only two corporate sponsors on the Chengdu financial document: Chengdu Technology Innovation New City Investment and Development Co., Ltd. – which appears to be a property development concern – and Chengdu Media Group – a media production company which also seems involved in the redevelopment efforts of the former company to some extent.

However reviewing the programming book for the Chengdu Worldcon reveals several other sponsors. Notably China Telecom, a company currently under US sanctions, was listed as a “2023 Chengdu Worldcon Starseeker” tier sponsor. Huawei, another telecommunications company under US sanctions, meanwhile does not appear as a sponsor but is an exhibitor, hosted an event attended by Worldcon panelists, and gave awards to participants (entirely distinct from the Hugos). This discrepancy is explained by statements made by Ben Yalow at Smofcon 40, previously reported by File 770, “None of that appears on our financial report because we didn’t get any money out of the deal. The convention never saw that money. What the convention saw was Hugo finalists who would show up and their plane ticket was taken care of and their hotel room was taken care of. It means that our financial report is completely accurate and totally misleading.” If I am parsing Yalow’s statement correctly this means that many of the line items that appeared remarkably low on the Chengdu budget were so because sponsors provided contributions in kind. While I will not profess to have any particular knowledge of US law regarding 501c3 reporting requirements I will say, as someone with prior experience in the not-for-profit sector, that it is not best-practice to exclude contributions in kind from financial records. You end up with “totally misleading” financial statements that way.

What makes this somewhat disconcerting is that there does not appear to be any sort of impermeability between DCCW and Chengdu Worldcon finances. Payments were divided between the two and it is unclear from the records I have access to why these payment decisions were handled in this way. If it were simply a matter of handling payments from the United States, why were pass-along payments split? If there is a good reason for this then why was the ratio of these splits different for each line item?

When we include an event that included participation of companies on US sanctions lists it would have been wise to maintain books that clearly indicated that no China Telecom or Huawei contributions entered the accounting of DCCW. As they were left entirely off the books this is opaque to me.

What I really want to highlight here is that this is a culmination of a series of decisions that significantly predate the Chengdu Worldcon. The absence of a unified financial reporting model is present for the same reason as the absence of any overarching formal guiding body for the WSFS. An old libertarian drive to resist incorporation has blocked any sort of year-to-year consistency surrounding standards and practices since ~1953. Hilariously a key fear appears to have been that incorporation would provide a method for incompetent volunteers to remain in positions of authority of for various cliques to exercise out-sized influence. Of course, now, this simply happens informally as many perennial volunteers, of various levels of competence, reoccur year over year and, in fact, decade over decade.

In fact, the Chengdu financial reports are more detailed than many other Worldcons. The financial report of Worldcon 76 has no entry for legal expenses despite a $4,000 settlement to Jon Del Arroz. Worldcon 79 has no line item for charitable donation expenses despite their board having publicly said they would do so.

NASFiC 15 provided a four-line financial statement claiming both a deficit of $24,468 and a cash balance of $5,964.27. Their notes include that they expect additional income and expenses but aside from statements regarding an application for a tourism grant they provide no real detail on how they will close this deficit gap. Nor is it clear, with how WSFS is structured, who would be responsible for paying the deficit if they cannot balance their accounts. Probably Cansmof.

Finally there is the involvement of the office of Representative Mike Gallagher. Xiran Jay Zhao says that a representative of his office contacted them saying that Gallagher was interested in this situation. This isn’t entirely surprising. Gallagher is described as a “China watchdog” and probably apprehended the existence of this issue from early reporting that suggested the big story here was CCP censorship of an international literary award. Gallagher is the chair of the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party – a republican-led committee which lacks any Chinese diaspora members and that tends to issue inflammatory rhetoric and little else. Gallagher also has prior history of being interested in nerd shit having issued a strongly worded letter to Activision Blizzard over their rather shameful behaviour during the Hong Kong protests of 2019.

However Gallagher is in a tight position over his recent refusal to vote to impeach the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The end result is that Gallagher will not be seeking re-election. This is to say that this is an ineffective politician from an ineffective subcommittee. I would suggest the likelihood of a congressional star-chamber for members of the concom is vanishingly small. The fact that he contacted Zhao is telling. Xiran Jay Zhao is a celebrity. They’re well-known, have a large online platform via Tik Tok and have been vociferous with their criticism of the CCP. If we treat Gallagher as a propagandist, which we honestly should, then they’re pretty much perfect for his purposes. But I doubt he has the influence in Congress, as it is currently composed, to do much beyond write another strongly worded letter. Frankly Zhao is, at best, a peripheral person to this whole mess. The people who would be best situated to answer questions about what the heck the concom were thinking are a collection of volunteer conrunners scattered across the United States, not a Canadian Tik Tok star.

I will note that there is a small silver lining here as two of the Hugo winners, Samantha Mills and Adrian Tchaikovsky, have renounced their Hugo wins from 2023 on the basis of the blanket exclusion of Chinese authors. I didn’t personally like Rabbit Test much on aesthetic and structural grounds but I do want to say that Mills, who was the first Hugo winner to make this move, deserves recognition for her strong ethics. I hope more of the Hugo winning authors will follow the example set by Mills and Tchaikovsky.

The hilarious truth is that of all the broad assortment of people and organizations involved in this bizarre story one of the most blameless is the CCP. Dave McCarty actually seems to have foiled the main CCP objective of the Chengdu Worldcon by excising Chinese authors so thoroughly from the ballot. Instead we see the American SMOF contingent at the heart of year-over-year conrunning struggling to adapt the calcified traditions of an 85 year-old institution that has aggressively resisted means and standards to an international context that desperately requires means and standards.

Please don’t take this to mean I am bringing forth the shadow of WSFS Inc. once more. Because the truth is that I don’t believe there’s anything of value left to Worldcon. As a vehicle of international connection it’s a failure: the immediate response of the Worldcon core audience to irregularities was to blame foreigners when the call was coming from inside the house. As a vehicle for a prestigious award it’s a failure: there is no good reason to believe that there has been a clean Hugo award in the last decade. I have alluded to this previously but the only period, in the history of the Hugo Awards, in which non-white authors won for Best Novel was between 2015 and 2018; it seems like the interest in honoring diverse authors dropped off sharply once the Sad Puppies were safely vanquished back to the margins. I’m sure many of the voters who gave N.K. Jemisin three Hugos in a row and then never awarded another Black author would have also voted for Obama a third time if they could.

Worldcon is a millstone around the neck of the genre community. Genre authors should not seek its awards. The WSFS should wrap itself up and any bank balances remaining on its various threadbare books should be donated to charities that can persist more than a year without falling into delinquency. Should some other international Science Fiction gathering present itself, perhaps one not so intrinsically tied to a late-1930s schism between libertarians from New Jersey and New York communists, then there could potentially be a successor to Worldcon in the future. But not as Worldcon. It’s a year-over-year embarrassment. Let it die.

Chengdu 2023 – the least important front of the new Cold War

/ Simon / 1 Comment

Stop the presses! There have been voter irregularities involving second and third placing Hugo award finalists at Chengdu! The stakes have never been higher!

I don’t have any great respect for the Hugo Awards. What little respect I had for them was fully torpedoed after the incident where a Washington DC Worldcon, at which a lot of people got COVID, was sponsored by Raytheon. For anybody in my readership who isn’t familiar, the Hugo Awards are a fan-administered award for science fiction and fantasy genre material voted for by the voting membership of Worldcon – an annually cycling science fiction convention that is put together by the unincorporated literary society the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). Anybody who can put together $50 and has sufficient interest can buy a voting membership, which allows them both the option to vote on site bids for future Worldcons and also to nominate and vote for Hugo Award winners.

While, historically, the Hugo Awards have been awarded to some excellent works of SF such as Neuromancer, Dune and The Dispossessed, the truth is that they generally go to whichever works of science fiction (and while fantasy is awarded these awards do skew toward science fiction) happens to be popular at that time which leads to embarrassing incidents such as the year that a Harry Potter book or Robert Sawyer’s forgettable Hominids novel won the award.

Due to the lack of any sort of jury and the low barrier to entry it’s not uncommon for people to attempt to game the Hugo system. An early example of this was in 1987 when the founder of the Scientology new-religious movement, L. Ron Hubbard, was placed posthumously onto the best novel shortlist via the concerted efforts of his religious adherents. Another would be the extended Sad Puppy fiasco. Part of the reason the Hugos should not be taken seriously is because they have no consistent aesthetic or political aim and generally just award whatever the most people feel passionate enough about to waste $50 over.

However, for the people who regularly vote in the Hugos, both those for whom Worldcon is a regular vacation destination and those who just pay their annual $50 dues, the Hugo Awards are assigned a grandiose purpose, referred to as being part of the triple-crown of Science Fiction awards along with the Nebula awards, voted upon by the members of the American professional association Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Philip K. Dick award, a juried award managed by the Philip K. Dick Trust and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. An astute reader might notice that these awards skew toward the specific taste of American Science Fiction readers. 60 of the 84 Worldcons were also hosted in the United States, with an additional five of the remainder next-door to the US in Canada. Worldcon has been hosted in Asia twice, once in Yokohama in 2007 and most recently in Chengdu in 2023. This has proven deeply controversial to the principal American audience. Worldcon has never been held in Africa, the Caribbean or in Latin America.

A seed of the grandiosity that affects the Hugo voters can be seen in a picture of the world that is mostly the United States with occasional visits to its closest (white) neighbor, to Europe and Australia and a vague nod toward the existence of Asia as a place where people live. While one person recently pointed out that, should a site selection be approved, Worldcon could be hosted on Alpha Centauri, this disregards that the majority of the usual voters of Worldcon come from the United States, the majority of the very small number of people who care about Worldcon (with winning bids requiring a few thousand votes at most) are in the United States. Worldcon is, effectively, an American event held mostly by and always for Americans.

Until 2023.

Science fiction is very popular in China. Chinese people read a lot of science fiction. There is a very large domestic market for domestically produced science fiction. A lot of Chinese TV plays with science fiction tropes and the Chinese movie market includes a lot of science fiction films. It’s a big deal. So it wasn’t unsurprising that, eventually, some people in China decided to bid on Worldcon. In this case the bid came from Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan in Western China, a well-known tourist destination, well-known for its progressivism, welcoming of LGBT people and with excellent cuisine, Chengdu made perfect sense as a Chinese Worldcon site. Now, please keep in mind, that when we talk about tourism in China the Chinese market is a principal market. China will take in tourists from other countries but tourism, in China, is, perhaps even to a greater extent than in the United States, built around getting people from one part of the country to visit another part of the country.

So, in a way, it’s easy enough to understand why many Americans felt like Worldcon was being “stolen” – after all, this American event, generally set up to serve American tourists, was being transported to a city where English was not even the second-most frequently spoken language, in a country they see as a rival power, and which had a tourist market that was unconcerned with catering to American interests or tastes as foreign tourism is a secondary draw to domestic tourism.

There were efforts to prevent this from happening with the rival Winnipeg organizing committee trying to get online ballots from China thrown out due to absent address lines which they claimed were evidence of ballot box stuffing. This belies the first of several misunderstandings of China as many people live in narrow alleys that may not have a street address as precise as North Americans are accustomed to. The honest truth is that the address-line question is neither evidence for, nor against, ballot stuffing. But as Worldcon has been set up so that anybody with $50 to spend can buy a vote in these matters the people who were upset over this vagary had nobody to blame but themselves.

After Chengdu’s site selection was confirmed there were, of course, inevitable calls for boycotts. The Xinjiang conflict was cited. People made claims about lack of safety for LGBTQ+ attendees which disregard the reality that Chengdu is far friendlier to queer people than Miami. People claimed that their freedom of speech would be curtailed and that there’d be secret police combing the hotel to rendition dissident voices. It was, frankly, unhinged.

But, despite all the Sturm und Drang, the Chengdu Worldcon proceeded apace. Frankly there was no real mechanism to strip Chengdu of the winning bid due to the amateur design of the Worldcon constitution and the ephemeral character of the WSFS as a body. Calls for a boycott could be easily ignored if one considers that the foreign tourism market was a secondary concern. Chengdu would be happy to host a Worldcon to a principally Chinese audience.

Of course considering how well American SFF did on the final ballot I think a lot of Americans didn’t boycott anyway and dutifully doled out their $50. Best novel went to the American author T. Kingfisher, Best Novella to Seanan McGuire, a perennial Hugo favorite, best short story went to Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills, a didactic piece of Americana, very particular to the current American political moment, and precisely the sort of short story well liked by Hugo voters and few others. Best Semiprozine went to Uncanny. Again. And the Astounding Award went to Travis Baldree in his first year of eligibility, hot on the heels of his successful pivot of Legends & Lattes from self-pub to Tor. I find it safe to conclude that the majority of people voting for the Hugo Awards were Americans and, despite the ambiguity to follow, their will was reasonably reflected. These are precisely the people one would expect to see winning Hugo Awards in Winnipeg or Washington DC.

However the voting statistics for the Hugo Awards were delayed until the last minute they should be published per the Worldcon constitution and when they came out there were notable irregularities. Some of these appeared to be misunderstandings of handling the Hugo’s rather byzantine transferrable ballot process. But more alarming were a few exclusions of mid-ballot finalists. Xiran Jay Zhao was disqualified for the Astounding Award; Paul Weimer was disqualified from the fanwriter category; an episode of the Netflix TV show Sandman was disqualified from dramatic presentation, short form, and most glaringly, Babel by R. F. Kuang was disqualified from the best novel category.

For most of these reasonable explanations could conceivably exist, however the person from the concom to communicate out on these, Dave McCarty, has been loath to explain the reasoning for disqualifying them, instead, quite vaguely, and with some hostility, saying he followed the rules in these decisions. We could easily speculate that Zhao’s exclusion was due to misinterpretations of Astounding Award second-year eligibility criteria. As of writing they have two books published, a third on the way and one translated into Spanish. They should have been eligible for a second year as a “new author” but it’s reasonable to suggest that their exclusion was due to mistake rather than malice. The Sandman show had been disqualified from Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, on the basis that it was appropriately in the Short Form category and then disqualified from short form for unknown reasons. I’ve seen half of Sandman, including the disqualified episode, (I lost interest shortly thereafter as it is a very dull TV series) and there’s nothing in there that I expect would bother Chinese TV censors at all. With this in mind I think it’s likely this was a plain and simple fuck-up and that McCarty is loath to say to Neil Gaiman that he screwed the pooch on the eligibility criteria for the episode. It’s unlikely we’ll ever find out why.

In the case of Paul Weimer a few possibilities exist. He is a participant on the podcast Skiffy and Fanty which was nominated separately from him and qualified but didn’t make the cut for the final ballot. So they may have thought that excluded him from the Fanwriter category. It’s possible that the concom simply didn’t see the relevance. Most of his SF blogging is on Patreon and, if the concom didn’t look there they might have just seen his photography website.

Alternatively the concom might have seen Weimer’s writing about the Chengdu worldcon, where he once said, “it may already be ‘too late’ if there are, and its dollars to donuts that there are, fans of SF within the CCP. The CCP may not be content with just the already horrible prospect of monitoring the 2023 Worldcon closely. What if they decide to, say, sponsor the Hugo Awards a la Raytheon and Google? Or some other aspect of the con? Chengdu is not going to be able to say no. It is literally an offer they can’t refuse. I feel bad for my fellow fans in Chengu. I do not envy their position in trying to put on a Worldcon in such a country, such an environment, with such a looming shadow.”

Frankly, if somebody said that about an event I was hosting in my home town you can damn well bet he wouldn’t be getting any special honours at that event. This patronizing and, in my opinion, unhinged fantasy is, sadly the shallow end of the yellow-peril handwringing that went on surrounding Chengdu.

The strangest, most inexplicable, and most suspicious exclusion was that of Babel by R. F. Kuang. Kuang’s previous work touched on contemporary Chinese history quite a lot, using a fantasy setting to relate the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War but, far from being a censored topic, this historical event is a favourite of mainland fiction writers and TV producers. Kuang’s books centered the fantasy stand-in of mainland Chinese protagonists as heroes and allies of other colonized people. Babel continues with her theme of exploration of empire and colonization with a specific look at the role of the British academia in colonization. Far from being topics that would be excluded from a Chinese discourse on science fiction, Kuang’s books are almost precisely the sort of fiction I would expect mainland China to celebrate. The exclusion of Kuang from consideration did not get a Chinese author onto the ballot for best novel, which ultimately contained four Americans, one New Zealander and a Canadian.

Kuang’s book was placed third in the nominations, behind Legends & Lattes and eventual winner Nettle & Bone but not so distantly (810 nominations compared to 831 and 815 respectively for the other two) that we could discount it might have won the Hugo, unlike most of the others on this list. There’s no explicable why either the Chinese state or even the concom as an organization would want to put their fingers so obviously on the scale here. Furthermore the end result, possibly clearing the path for T. Kingfisher to win or slipping Silvia Moreno Garcia onto the ballot also simply don’t make sense as motives. Babel was obviously an eligible work – first year of publication, definitely a novel, definitely SFF. It makes no sense.

Some people have dreamed up conspiracist scenarios that Kuang was being blackballed by China because her grandfather served under Chiang Kai-Shek but this disregards the modern condition of the KMT.

There are now two Kuomintang parties. The first, the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang holds 65 of the CPPCC seats and is the largest of the “minor parties” in Chinese national politics. The second is presently the opposition party of Taiwan and is marked by its position that Taiwan should reunify with Mainland China in a manner that retains its unique cultural and democratic character. Both of these parties are political allies of the CCP. Kuang’s family history here is simply not something that would matter in the slightest to the Chinese government.

But this whole issue also belies how badly westerners understand the political structure of nominatively socialist countries. Now first off we could have a whole digression regarding conceptions of mass democracy via Cuban localist political action or through the Maoist conception of the mass line. However that would be something of a rhetorical cul-de-sac as neither Cuban localism nor mass line politics are really practiced by the Chinese government today. However there is a general principle to Socialist organizing that is very much in play in China which is that power tends to devolve to be closer to the people.

In practical terms this means that municipal governments often have quite a lot more influence than their counterparts in North America. Provincial governments then direct municipalities regarding national planning with the national government being largely hands-off unless something goes terribly wrong. The real hard truth is that, contrary to the view of a totalizing and ever-present party with its fingers in the lives of every citizen, the CCP and the government of China, was, probably not even aware of Worldcon. The government of Sichuan may have rubber-stamped approvals for Chengdu but it’s hardly likely they had any interest in the itinerary of the event. Sichuan is a province with a population of 83 million people. A book convention in Chongqing attended by a few thousand people barely rises to the level of administrative notice. Proportionally it’d be like asking Justin Trudeau for his opinion on Toronto FanExpo except that Sichuan has a population nearly twice that of Canada. And Chinese cities have far more autonomy than Toronto does.

At the municipal level we know that Wang Fengchao was quite aware of the event. He arranged busses to assist the tourists there in doing additional sight-seeing. He showed up for a grip-and-grin. So I suppose one could ask the question of why the mayor of Chengdu might have decided to exclude one innocuous fantasy author whose past works portrayed China in a favorable light and whose current work was critical of England, a country with which China has a particularly fraught history from an award ceremony hosted at a Chengdu hotel. But I suspect it’s unlikely he had anything to do with it. My personal opinion, based on my knowledge of Kuang’s public persona, of the nature of Worldcon and the nature of Chinese politics is that whatever led to Kuang’s exclusion on the ballot was a decision made entirely by one or more members of the concom.

Now Dave McCarthy quite flatly said, regarding the exclusion of the excluded works in general (not of Kuang’s work in specific), “Nobody has ordered me to do anything. Nobody is changing decisions I have made… There was no communication between the Hugo administration and the Chinese government in any manner… I’ve done this job four times now and assisted a few more times. The rules I followed this time are the same as the rules I followed the others….and the same as every Hugo administrator ever has followed.”

Regarding the Sandman episode McCarthy was even more specific that he was a decision-making authority saying “it was a judgment call on my part whether to list both the same way or note that per the WSFS constitution, only one could be considered. I thought it more appropriate to do it the way it appears.”

Plenty of people are speculating that McCarthy was bribed, blackmailed, that he’s protecting somebody else on the Worldcon team who may be vulnerable or all kinds of other reasons for his standoffish, oblique and stubborn responses. I don’t see that. My personal opinion is that he looks like a petty asshole protecting his fiefdom. He tells us he’s done it a lot. He tells us that he is an expert. He tells us explicitly he made decisions regarding Sandman. The Hugo Awards weren’t built for consistency or accountability. Who knows? Maybe McCarthy is as ignorant of Chinese politics as he is of social graces. Maybe McCarthy believed that Kuang’s work would upset Chinese censors and he decided on his own to remove it. It’s more likely than a shadowy government conspiracy predicated on no discernable political or aesthetic aim. Let us recall Occam’s Razor: Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.

We have an entity who says, “I did this along with the concom because I thought it was the correct choice.” We don’t need to drag Wang Fengchao, Huang Qiang (the governor of Sichuan) or Xi Jinping into this mess. We don’t need to imagine CCP agents lurking in shadowy corners since the issue of Kuang’s exclusion from the ballot is fully explicable by a guy named Dave, who believes himself an expert in Hugo awards, deciding she was ineligible with the full knowledge that literally nobody can do anything about it. It might be nice to know why but it’s not necessary to know a motive to put forward this as the most likely root cause of this problem.

Now, with all this said, and looking beyond the yellow-peril racism of American fans bitter at becoming the marginal audience to their own party for one year, there is the kernel of an interesting thing happening here. And because the stakes are so remarkably low it’s almost a useful case study for assessing how people think about these things. Because the Hugo Awards have become a discursive territory for discussing the nature of democracy.

Cheryl Morgan addresses these points pretty clearly in her blog post titled “How did we get here?“, in which she says, “Democracy only works if we are constantly vigilant and prevent it being subverted.

But then there are people who say that it can never work because the wrong people will always get elected. That’s much more of a Libertarian viewpoint: all government is bad, because anyone who gets to be in government is bad.”

Now, again, I want to stress that we’re talking about an award for science fiction books with an electorate counted in a handful of thousands of people at the most. In some categories, such as fanwriter, a person can reach the final ballot with fewer than one hundred nominations. This is hardly mass-democracy.

And I might note that it’s somewhat pernicious to call anything democracy when it requires you to spend $50 to vote. Poll taxes are rather un-democratic on their face. However I think there’s also a mistake in associating democracy so directly with governmentality. Because, of course, there is another viewpoint that is critical of government beyond the right-libertarian one. And that’s the Anarchist perspective that says the problem is not that people make decisions together but that they should need to be governed to do so. In this manner Anarchists and Marxists share some common ground, power should rest closest to the masses. People should have as close as possible to direct control of their own lives. The truth is that this is a key political perspective of both Anarchists and of Marxist states. The question then becomes in defining what “as close as possible” means. Anarchists would argue that people should have a direct grasp of the power that affects their lives while the Marxist state believes it’s necessary there be some form of authority and the question becomes how to use that authority to give voice to the authentic will of the masses. The disconnect between liberal representative democracy and the Marxist state is that the Marxist states operate from the perspective that liberal democracies serve only very specific classes of people (the bourgeoisie) and fail to ever become truly democratic in the first place. But, of course, the anarchist response is that this is true also of the Marxist states even if the people they purport to serve may not be precisely the same class as the liberal democracies.

Now here is where I make my pitch for what is called destituent communism. This form of socialist organizing, conceived by Marcello Tari, drawing from Marxism and Anarchism in near equal measures, argues that the problem with power isn’t its movement or concentration into any given set of hands but rather its tendency to form into institutions. Power as potential is concentrated in order to achieve an aim, this is all well and good. The problem is that, after that aim has been achieved, the concentrated power perpetuates itself and holds onto power. As such the most critical mass power in order to empower revolutionary change is the power to take down extant structures regardless of their replacements.

For Tari, the perfect exemplar of destituent power was Subcommante Marcos of the Zapatistas. This anonymous spokesperson of the movement and, in fact the movement for which he spoke, have constantly shifted and changed so that the people they represent can be served, not governed. When Marcos was not needed Marcos, as an authority, was voided and the commander disappeared into anonymity. The Zapatistas are well represented by the statement, “Here the people command and the government obeys.”

So what would this look for in the context of the Hugos?

Well first, despite the silly Libertarian history underlying the resistance of the WSFS to incorporation it’s probably for the best they never did. Because the best thing to do would probably be just to get rid of the Hugos.

The Hugo awards, as an institution of authority regarding the zeitgeist of science fiction, have long outlived their usefulness. Worldcon, as a body, has only ever represented an American distortion of the world, one where most of the world is America, Asia is a distant other and the global south is best ignored altogether. The little personal fiefdoms of guys named Dave and the various hangers on of the Worldcon scene have no power or significance in the world.

In fact this is the principal source of my skepticism that the CCP had their thumb on the Hugo scales. The Hugo awards simply don’t matter. They’re irrelevant. There is nearly no power invested in the Hugo awards but it’s clear that power has only been wielded to perpetuate itself for a very long time now so best to do away with it. Allow other people with other methods to hold the third gem of the “triple crown.” I’ve heard good things about the Ignyte Awards. Is it good what happened in Chengdu? No. It sucks. But it sucks for the same petty, grandiose, self-important, self-satisfied reasons that the Hugo awards have sucked for a very long time now.

A lot of people have been saying that now the Hugo awards have lost their credibility. But the Hugo awards lost credibility when their red carpet was sponsored by a bomb maker. They lost credibility when a bitter conservative author brigaded the nominations using a slate because he thought it was his turn for the participation trophy. They lost credibility when they said Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the best SFF novel of 2001 rather than A Storm of Swords or Midnight Robber. They lost credibility when they included the second volume of L Ron Hubbard’s manifesto in the form of a 10-volume posthumous SF series on the short-list. As of the time of writing the Hugo Award for best novel has been awarded to only two non-white authors: N. K. Jemisin and Liu Cixin (as translated by Ken Liu) in a brief run from 2015-2018 – this is not the actions of a credible award. The Hugo awards have never been credible.

Let’s just end them here.

The Monster Is Not Nice

/ Simon

Earlier this month Alexander Chee wrote an article for Guernica Magazine about Dracula which proposed that some of the evil of Dracula was the sublimated eroticism that Stoker felt toward Walt Whitman. This article principally focused on the monster as a figure for interrogating evil and, midway through the article Chee recommends that his readers, ” Ask yourself what you might really fear, and why.”

Monstrosity is a threat. When I wrote about the desire to be monstrous in Cabal I said that the Nightbreed dance along the edge of the indescribable because they are everything that we can not bear to be. The monster is tied to the Jungian idea of the shadow – the idea that we, collectively as a culture, have parts of ourselves we can’t bear to look at. Even without the blood and the frenzy of the Nightbreed (who we should remember do, in fact, eat people) the very repression of the Nightbreed is a threat. They reveal what we all wish to conceal by their being.

The monster is not simply the inhuman. A chicken is inhuman. A rock is inhuman but neither chickens nor rocks are threats to humanity. We might sympathize with the chicken, kept caged, surrendering its young or being force-fed into a premature adolescence and slaughtered for food. But there is nothing of the monster about the chicken. Monstrosity is not simply being outcast or othered. While a monster is an othered figure this is a simplification of the monster. In No Future, Lee Edelman introduces his text to say, “Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it.” This negativity he describes is much like the Shadow in that it is grounded in rejection – a rejection of futurity itself.

Certain other critics have engaged with Chee’s work and seem to misunderstand it somewhat by proposing that Chee’s description of the “literary gossip” of a meeting between Stoker, Whitman and Wilde that never happened is the root of the homophobia of Dracula. In fact Chee alludes to the homoeroticism of Dracula by pointing out that, while Stoker and Wilde met Whitman separately, Stoker’s correspondence with Whitman was deeply homoerotic. If we are to treat Dracula as a homophobic text we should situate the monstrosity of the Count in this form of the Jungian shadow – a negation that fears to look at the monstrosity that lurks within the subject, the threat of the self as a self-subversion.

To the extent that Edelman invites the queer subject to embrace the monster it is not to reach out to the liberal majority and seek empathy. It’s to make, of a political body, an explicit threat: we want no future like this. You cannot cow us with the threat to some imagined child.

Sympathy and identification with the monster is complicated when we begin to treat people as being dividual. In Men, Women and Chainsaws, Carol Clover is very careful with the idea of identification, saying, of identification with a character that it is fluid: “competing figures resonate with competing parts of the viewer’s psyche.” A person might identify both with the slasher-killer and the final girl. As Chee points out it’s not uncommon to root for the monster and yet we still feel satisfaction when he is dispatched. We enjoy watching Freddy dispatch teens in increasingly absurd ways and we enjoy watching Nancy overcome him in the end. Both the part that delights in Freddy’s sadism and in Nancy’s flagellant heroism are elements of the psyche of the audience.

When examining the figure of the monster and the question of sympathy we might be well-advised to consider Frankenstein. There is that old joke that first you realize that Frankenstein is the doctor and not the monster but then you realize that the doctor is, in fact, the monster of the story, and that’s true. Doctor Frankenstein is a monstrous figure. But his creation, in full awareness of his senses, murders William and blames Justine. He murders Elizabeth, he kills and he glories in his kills. Frankenstein’s creature is the victim of Frankenstein’s promethean hubris, he is a subject with whom we can easily sympathize. He is also a hot-blooded killer who enjoys killing.

We don’t seek out identification with the monster for the purpose of comfort. Another key example is Knife + Heart. There is a scene at a burlesque in which an elderly woman begs a monster to couple with her and the monster warns her that in the throes of passion it will consume her. She pleads the monster to do so and the monster rips her apart. This relationship of monstrous attraction is highly reflective of the bitter, collapsing and abusive relationship between the protagonist Anne and her ex-lover Loïs. Anne, watching the woman circle the monster, beg for her death in ecstasy and passion, sees herself as the monster and Loïs as the victim who cannot separate herself and, in doing so, gives herself a kind of justification for her own abusiveness. But there is another monster in Knife + Heart – the revenant-like killer who stalks the gay porn scene of 1979 Paris. And he, too, is a victim whose story demands sympathy. He was a gay man maimed and possibly murdered by a homophobic father; he watched his lover burned to death in front of him. There is a demand for sympathy just to understand his murders. But in the end we cannot help but also feel sympathy for the patrons of a porno theater who cut him down.

Monsters aren’t nice.

The idea of the identity of the monster, the shadow-self that is rejected by society, is a critical lens for understanding the subaltern. But monsters have claws and fangs. Monsters do terrible things. As both Lee Edelman and Karl Marx remind us, when it is our turn we will make no apologies for the terror. The Nightbreed of Midian want no integration into the human community and they still eat flesh and drink blood. When we want monstrosity we must want to be monsters not because they are subaltern but because they are a threat. There is no need to invoke the monster simply to sympathize with the subaltern. All you need for that is a functioning heart. The monster is a reminder that some forms of minority are subaltern because they threaten to overturn an old order and replace it with nothing that can be recognized.

Happy Halloween.

A short reflection on September 11 and economic hegemony

/ Simon

Throughout 2000 my university plans and activism were very settled. I would be focusing on economic globalization academically and on the “alter globalization” movement – the organized and powerful mass-movement that sought to push back against this key process of neoliberal extractivism. But by early 2003 it was evident that our goose was cooked. 9/11 era security laws gave police unprecedented powers and many of the activists who had successfully disrupted international trade conferences previously were being scooped up as terrorists.

This process had begun before 9/11 – police shot Carlos Giuliani and ran over him with their car at the G8 summit in Genoa on July 20, 2001. Police dabbed his blood on a rock and tried to blame protesters for the death despite the bullet wounds. Susan Bendotti was killed a day later, struck by a vehicle whilst waiting at a bus stop. To my knowledge her killer was never identified.

But while explicit murder-by-police was already a threat that those of us fighting this fight had to face before September 11th, the paranoia and surveillance laws of the post 9/11 era made disruptions of international trade talks effectively impossible. The security net was impenetrable and the violence extreme.

Combined with the ramp-up to the Iraq war I saw the writing on the wall and realized, quite correctly that the peace movement would necessarily leech support away from these more violent economic clashes. Our battle against neoliberal out-sourcing of manufacture to the global south would be abandoned in the name of trying to stop a war. That the peace movement fit within the neoliberal hegemonic moral order more than economic protests meant, too, that the full fury of police violence was less likely. Simply put, if a police officer murdered an anarchist at a police riot most people didn’t stop to ask why there was a police riot going on. But cops murdering avowed pacifists calling for non-violence was less photogenic domination. If you lived in Canada or even the United States it was far safer to be a peace activist than it was to fight against global trade deals.

All this is to help explain why leftists of a certain age, that being those of us old enough to have got tear gassed in Quebec City in 2000 or to have got assaulted in Genoa in 2001 or to have been arrested for terrorism in the middle of a forest in Kannanaskis in 2002 or to have been thrown off a bridge by police on the frontier between France and Switzerland in 2003 have an especially high level of cynicism for saber-rattling among the creaky ranks of the hegemons. China didn’t do anything to deserve a war footing any more than Iraq did.

It’s just that the rulers of the global north learned 20 years ago that a war can derail any resistance to their economic order while granting them the extraordinary powers (the state of exception) necessary to do anything to anyone in the name of security. It is a moral good to refuse to participate in wars on foreign shore. But we must remember that our enemies within our own state, our REAL enemies, will instrumentalize resistance to war in service of their domestic aims. Despite the danger it’s important for the left in the imperial core to keep our eyes on the domestic fight: union struggles, dismantling of police powers and pushing back on resurgent fascism must not be abandoned in 2023 the way that the struggle against industrial out-sourcing was abandoned in 2003. But also we must crush the movement to create new external enemies because this will be used to sap our most active away from the local fights and to spread rumours of foreign influence to smear the reputations of the just.

This time, 20 years on, we must do both.

The Scold

/ Simon

This comes as an additional reflection arising from, not so much the Neiman book from yesterday’s review, as the media campaign that originally brought it to my attention. See Neiman was interviewed by CBC and the interview, which led me to expect the typical centrist hand-wringing over “Wokeness” was largely focused not around Neiman’s impassioned defense of Kant nor her burning hatred of Foucault but rather of a theme that only really arises briefly in her introduction and conclusion: the idea that there exists a “radical” or “woke” left who can be meaningfully juxtaposed against more reasonable leftist elements.

This is a statement I’ve always rather vehemently denied but the reasons why I deny that this is a meaningful phenomenon of “the left” are neither a no-true-Scotsman approach where I’m excluding these types from “the left” nor do I treat the subject of the scold, who will be the principal target of this discussion as being a good thing or as being a delusion of the right.

But while Neiman’s book is, honestly, almost entirely mute on the figure of the scold some of my private conversations yesterday with friends and colleagues have circled back to this subject. And so I felt it would be prudent to lay out a piece addressing a few questions:

  1. What do I mean when I talk about the left?
  2. Why do I say that the scold is not a left-wing phenomenon?
  3. What, if anything, must the left do about the scold?

So let’s start by defining our terms. I have a very clear and specific definition of the left. The left is composed of non-liberal political actors who are against capitalism and for global liberation. As such the principle contingent of the left is built from various forms of socialist, anarchist and communist. Now note that I see these phrases as being broadly overlapping. I regularly call myself a Marxist and a search through this website to references to Marx will bring up many hits. I also often call myself an Anarchist as I am anti-statist and see the “socialism in one state” model as being against the goal of liberation. I don’t call myself a Leninist but, while I have little patience for Stalinists and none for red-browns, I am quite generally open to the positions of Maoists, Leninists and Trotskyists and have read political writing by all three.

I often joke that the only reasonable political center is that between Anarchism and Marxism-Leninism and, being honest, I’m not really joking. This, then, is the constellation of ideologies and tendencies I see as the left. It’s a fractious group which contains very different views on the tactical approach to overthrowing capitalism and forwarding the objective of liberation so I don’t see the left as a unified ideological clique. Rather it is a collection of several disparate and sometimes conflicting political ideologies and tendencies that happen to share two key strategic aims. Notably this definition excludes certain tendencies like Anarcho-Capitalism, which doesn’t seek to overthrow capitalism, Dengism (for the same reason), and progressive liberalism.

So now that we’ve established what I mean by “the left” the next question is to treat the figure of the scold with similar rigor. The scold is principally (although not entirely) an online phenomenon. This figure is someone who has spent enough time in online discourses to learn some academic terminology but, through inexperience, disinterest or malice, does not understand how to use that language well. Frequently this leads to scolds going so far as to invert the intrinsic meaning behind academic terminology. I will provide a few examples:

In 1989 Dr. Peggy McIntosh, a very senior humanities professor who has worked in English, Women’s Studies and Pedagogy condensed a prior work on the topic of “privilege” down to a briefer work called White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. It’s very important to historicize this work in the context of her founding position at the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum IE: privilege, in her work, is explicitly a pedagogical tool designed to close epistemological and ontological gaps.

McIntosh saw this as being a positive pedagogical problem. Privilege wasn’t merely a matter of blind spots but of having been taught in specific ways: “I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.” She says that there is an intentionality surrounding the invisibility of privilege but this intentionality is not a deliberate blindness on the part of the privileged subject – it’s a matter of having been instructed. Social reproduction creates the invisibility of privilege and, as a matter of pedagogy, it is a situation that can be corrected.

“I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will,” McIntosh writes, establishing that this view is incorrect. This is something which I personally agree on although my (Deleuzean) tendency to shatter the “individual” and show how easily the subject can be divided may not be what she was aiming for. I suspect McIntosh was more pointing toward collective modes of subjectivation. This is, of course, a non-liberal viewpoint that reaches toward the goal of global liberation. This situates McIntosh as being one “destroy Capitalism” away from achieving my definition of leftist. McIntosh then enumerates a list of conditions she can expect, on account of her whiteness, that she has recognized are unavailable to black people.

In her essay McIntosh seems to stumble across the idea that was previously elucidated by Antonio Gramsci of hegemony – that there is a dominant cultural force operating superstructurally upon subjects which shapes their subjectivities. But it’s interesting to note that McIntosh sees privilege of consisting of two categories: privileges that should rightly be enjoyed by all and privileges that should be enjoyed by nobody. She is also quite clear that this systemic process of domination is corrosive to all the subjects within it saying, “In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they {privileges} actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity.”

Now McIntosh made a small error here in that there certainly is a category of Americans who see “whiteness” as a racial identity – white supremacists – but the awareness of white supremacists that they can openly dominate is less her aim here than those people who have been instructed by white supremacist systems to ignore the system they live within. “In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.”

Ultimately what McIntosh wanted to do was to make subjects that were taboo matters for open conversation. She wanted to close the epistemic gap between subjugated and dominating subjects within a hegemonic social milieu and to use privilege as a method of creating a clearer compassion and empathy for dominated people among the privileged classes. She ends her paper by saying that, while she was uncertain this would work, she wanted those people who had been conferred power via privilege to use said power to break it down.

However in the hands of the scold this is inverted. Privilege becomes a matter of epistemic closure. ‘You cannot understand this experience because you have privilege,’ the scold says. ‘You should not speak because you have privilege,’ the scold says. Privilege is taken from a recognition of systemic collective hegemony and turned into a personal failing. To have privilege is, in the hands of the scold, to be personally evil. I’ve joked that people should not use “privilege” in online discourse if they don’t know who McIntosh is and this is because McIntosh is a white woman, highly educated and slightly too old to count as a member of the baby boom. McIntosh is, by her assessment in 1989 and by the standards of privilege as a received discursive tool, a privileged subject and that the origin of privilege comes from privilege is context its author makes clear as significant. She wants to change how privileged subjects are educated such that they can recognize hegemony and work to dismantle it.

Effectively the scold, in the context of left-discourses, is a person, generally but not always a progressive liberal, who hasn’t done the readings. As such they’ve missed key contexts (treatment of privilege as a pedagogical tool to bridge epistemic gaps, privilege as a systemic issue rather than an individual one, the necessity for collective action to level privilege by both extending privilege to subjugated people and by withdrawing perverse privileges from all, privilege as a method for furthering understanding and compassion) and instead use the term inexactly and in manners that forward the objective of excluding people who annoy them online.

Now it’s important to note that annoying a scold does not make a person good any more than coming from a privileged class makes a person bad. Frankly the other hallmark of the scold, beyond their tendency to mis-apply academic language they clearly don’t understand, is how easily they are annoyed. It is harmful to tell a scold they should read if they wish to be a good writer. This is flattened to being of the same class of problem as making bigoted statements. Either might cause the scold to lash out. It’s quite clear that these expressions contain a moral difference. But the moral certainty and the moral flattening of the scold also undermines their ability to argue their case well. Because the scold replaces a clear grasp of the concepts they use with moral fury and righteousness a single scold becomes very easy to discount and scolds in aggregate become just… annoying.

But, while the tendency to treat privilege as an individual failing rather than a hegemonic construction of the social superstructure tends to situate that particular class of scold among progressive liberals there can certainly be scolds among other ideologies including leftists. The problem isn’t one of ideological viewpoint – it’s one of a combination of incomplete education and extreme discursive sensitivity. As such we also see scolds very frequently among the right.

In fact the principal difference between liberal and leftist scolds on one hand and conservative scolds on the other is that liberal and leftist scolds are mostly nobodies. They might amass clout on social media platforms but this isn’t really any more of an accomplishment than being particularly good at a video game.

Right wing scolds get money and political power.

Look, for example, at Jordan Peterson. This man is treated as a clinical psychologist (although perhaps not for much longer) and his notoriety comes from his purported expertise as a Jungian scholar and analyst. And yet his self-help work demonstrates a remarkably poor grasp of key Jungian terms such as archetypes.

First off Peterson tends to inflate the importance of the conscious ego over the unconscious. This isn’t surprising since it’s hard to sell self-help books that treat the self as an ocean of concepts and affects over which the ego is a little boat floating around the top of. But also Peterson tends to flatten the Jungian unconscious of archetypes down to only those which are useful. He writes a lot about the shadow but never about the animus and anima.

After all an area of repression where the parts of the self the ego is afraid to look at is useful to his reactionary political project while the idea that there exists a feminine image in the psyche of every man and a masculine image within the psyche of every woman upsets the gender binary he cares so deeply for.

Peterson is, thus, poorly educated and regularly uses academic language he clearly doesn’t understand. It is an indictment of the Canadian educational system that this man was ever allowed to teach students but it appears his years of failing to understand the requirements of his own profession are catching up to him. It’s unfortunate that this will do little to tamp down his notoriety or his influence since neither are, at this point, tied to his membership in a professional organization.

Peterson is also incredibly sensitive to discursive offense and flattens all responses down to a uniform kind of harm. “Up yours woke moralists!” may be his most famous utterance but it’s equally evident in his participation in lawsuits over curricular restrictions placed upon TAs.

And so when I say that scolds aren’t a problem for the left it’s because scolds are a problem more generally of online culture. Part of the issue is that academics are some of the most terminally online people and academic language, both social justice language, therapy language and other specialized language regularly filters outward from academics to those for whom ‘doing the reading’ largely meant seeing a word on Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. I still persist in arguing that scolds are, in fact, less common on the actual far-left than in other spaces with their pervasiveness and influence growing the more conservative the audience although, again, I qualify this to say there are plenty of leftist scolds. In fact the left has something of a different problem with scolds from the right in that much of the language of social justice – one of the favourite categories of misappropriated language among non-conservative scolds – is widely used correctly by leftists. Separating out people talking about privilege as a method of articulating hegemony in pedagogical spaces from those using it as a cudgel for shouting down annoying people on Twitter is thus somewhat more fraught than in other discursive spaces.

And this acts to get at my third question: what should we do about scolds.

Frankly we should encourage them to do the readings. Here Gramsci is useful again. Gramsci argued for a proletarian education by and for proletarians. He saw these as taking the forms of reading groups and discussion circles. One of the best way to inure us against scolds without falling down the rabbit hole of “the left has gone mad” reactionary types is to help people discover how to make appropriate use of this specialized language.

This blog was largely intended for a similar purpose – I wanted to introduce a body of philosophical and critical work into the discourses surrounding genre criticism – and it has been a very successful project among leftists in genre spaces. (It has also made me deeply unpopular with liberals in genre.) Pedagogy is important and, for those of us who want to take on such a role, it can be good to read pedagogical and epistemological work so that we can develop effective strategies for disseminating a clear understanding of not just the words behind social justice but the appropriate use of those words.

This also requires us to rein in our worst impulses. A Gramscian perspective on education by and for the proletariat requires us to enter discursive spaces prepared to both speak and to listen. In McIntosh’s reflection her objective was to correct deficiencies in the education of fellow white people but this required of her a fair bit of autocriticism. And there is an important lesson there in that McIntosh didn’t see her white privilege concept as being a tool to educate marginalized subjects (notwithstanding her recognition of intersectional marginalization) but to make visible the invisible to normative subjects so that the would seek to change that state of affairs.

We should not start by engaging with scolds. This way lies the sort of almost ressentimental frustration that leads to the penning of very bad books. But also we should all probably be less online in general. One of the big problems with the scold as a figure is how they flatten out discourses into simple binaries – generally ethical binaries where there is a clear good side and a clear bad side. However the structure of social media websites also flattens discourse. A look at how Twitter has allowed conspiracy theories about the forest fires in Hawaii to proliferate is a perfect example of this discursive flattening in action. A post from a literal fascist promoting fascism and a post from an annoying person being a nuisance both look effectively the same: a small rectangle of text perhaps with a link and an image. Even by the standards of textual communication the post is incredibly homogenous and this structural homogeneity makes it far too easy to treat the message of a post as homogenous.

I am very critical of McLuhan’s “medium is the message idea” in that I find the contents of a container more relevant than the form of the container but this doesn’t mean the form of the container is irrelevant and the flat homogeneity of the post as a container is something that tends to flatten an audience reception of a post. When a sensitive person sees, in aggregate, a dozen posts from scolds and two dozen that correctly identify an issue with their rhetoric they will likely just see three dozen scolds.

So what should the left do to combat scolds? We should use tactics such as those proposed by McIntosh and Gramsci to make more leftists. And we should all get the fuck off Twitter.

Mirror-Universe Foucault in a land without Marx: The bizarre phantasmagoria of Left is Not Woke by Susan Neiman

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This book is not what I expected.

When I initially opened the cover and was confronted by the statement that, “Except as occasional targets, they {‘leftist’ ideas of universalism, justice and belief in the possibility of progress} are hard to find in contemporary discourse. This has led a number of my friends in several countries to conclude, morosely, that they no longer belong to the left. Despite lifetimes of commitment to social justice, they’re estranged by developments on what’s called the woke left, or the far left, or the radical left.” I assumed this was the tired Sam Harris style grift whereby a centrist liberal declares themselves the real left and, glancing at progressive liberals, declares them the far left, ignoring entirely the existence of communists, socialists and anarchists.

That’s not this book though. Instead the book is far stranger than that. This isn’t to say that the book is good. It is perhaps the second-worst work of pop-philosophy I’ve ever read (the worst being the absolutely execrable How To Be Perfect by TV producer Michael Schur). Where it differs, and how it ultimately exceeds the worst-of-the worst is in the clear breadth of Neiman’s reading. However this makes some of the remarkable exclusions in the text even more baffling. Things I could pass off as ignorance on the part of Schur are burdened with significance in Neiman’s book.

Now, since I’ve said the book is not a typical right-reframing of the Overton window a-la Sam Harris or his sad ilk the question should be raised as to what exactly the book is. And this book actually has a laser-sharp focus which is elided by its unfortunate, and overly-broad, title. This book is an attempt by Neiman to accuse Michel Foucault of smuggling Naziism into leftist philosophy. There is a secondary objective of this book – and that is to reestablish the primacy of Immanuel Kant as the champion of progress and to defend him from accusations of racism.

This comes together in her essay when Neiman makes the absurd proposition that Enlightenment philosophers can be distinguished from “practitioners of theory” in that these later “practitioners of theory” write in impenetrable jargon while the enlightenment philosophers “wrote clearly, without jargon, in the interest of reaching the widest number of readers. (Even Kant, the most difficult of Enlightenment philosophers , wrote fifteen perfectly intelligible essays for a general audience.)”

As somebody who has read both Discipline and Punish and the Critique of Pure Reason about the only thing I can say about such a claim is ‘LOL; LMAO.’

However this is ultimately a bit of a misleading passage for what follows as it becomes clear that Neiman has read both Foucault and a sufficient number of his critics to recognize that he wrote essays that were quite clear and accessible to a general audience. Rather she’s concerned that Foucault’s work depends on a method whereby it “hypnotizes” the audience rather than depending on rational argumentation.

For the first half of the book Neiman cannot mention Foucault (and she mentions Foucault quite a lot) without also bringing up the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and although she’s never quite bold enough to say so openly it really does seem like what Neiman wants her audience to believe about Foucault is that he was some sort of secret Nazi. She certainly doesn’t hesitate to call the concept of Power-knowledge reactionary.

But I do believe a lot of the disconnect in Neiman’s very unsympathetic reading of Foucault boils down to the old idealist / materialist split. For Neiman there are three fundamental elements to the left wing project, three precepts, that she believes Foucault’s work violates:

  1. Universalism
  2. Justice
  3. Progress

Now with progress, Neiman has a very careful and specific definition which she applies. Unfortunately she reserves defining this term to the conclusion of the book which is a poor structural choice as her failure to properly define progress at the outset significantly weakens her argument.

“It’s a matter of changing direction: Rather than thinking of progress as directed to a particular goal it can be useful to think of progress from a problematic situation to one that is less constrained.” Now this is very close to Beauvoir’s idea from The Ethics of Ambiguity regarding the movement toward an open future as the objective of a Left-wing ethic. It’s a real shame that Neiman never thinks to cite Beauvoir. Although Kantians ignoring Beauvoir’s ethic is something of a perennial complaint of mine it’s remarkable how this specific Kantian manages to arrive at some of Beauvoir’s conclusions without giving her predecessor even the most cursory recognition. However what Neiman fails to do at all is demonstrate how Foucault violates this revised precept of progress.

Certainly Foucault is critical of readings of history as progressive. His project examines how power changes form in relationship to changing epistemologies and how politics acts as a form of open warfare between parties. But Neiman takes from Foucault’s historicism that his writing makes it “hard to avoid concluding that any attempt to improve things will only make them worse.” This is a wild reading of Foucault to say the least.

At one of her most charitable episodes Neiman compares Foucault’s critique to that of Rousseau but argues that after Rousseau constructed his critique he spent the rest of his life trying to fix the world.

However this appears to be Neiman treating both of these writers as their texts alone. Certainly Foucault’s academic work remained diagnostic rather than prescriptive but it could be argued just as easily that Rousseau’s diagnosis was incomplete when he abandoned it in favour of spinning off a bunch of proposals that history demonstrated failed to lead to mass liberation. Meanwhile Foucault worked hard toward prison abolition.

Neiman briefly addresses Foucault’s abolitionism but only to suggest that Foucault’s motivations for doing so were amoral and that this means these activist activities somehow didn’t count. She loves going on about the supposed moral void of Foucault’s work, citing Chomsky calling him evil, citing Améry calling him problematic. But she fails to contend with the idea that Foucault limited his academic work pretty specifically to epistemology and never pretended to be writing an ethic; not everything has to be an ethic to be useful.

Despite Neiman’s relatively nuanced perspective on progress she still falls into the broad progressivist trap of seeing an arc of history bending inexorably toward justice, saying of the Kennedy administration’s record on civil rights in the United States that, “A world where all citizens have equal rights to eat, ride and study where they want to is better than a world where they do not, and no amount of dialectical sophistication would lead a black Southerner who lived through segregation to deny it.” There are, of course, two issues with such valorizations of incremental progress. The first is that Neiman is choosing to look at a specific change in a specific historical moment and to weigh it ethically as being “more good than what immediately preceded it” but in doing so fails to contend with the possibility of reversals throughout the history prior. This is unsurprising. Neiman believes that focusing “too much” on history blocks the path to progress.

The other problem is that Neiman seems unable to believe that anyone would write a philosophical text that explicitly avoids ethical statements and keeps trying to read an ethic back into Foucault where there is none. When she succeeds she calls this ethic perverse. When she fails she decries him as amoral. Using these two positions she characterizes the extra-academic actions Foucault took which have an ethical dimension as being perverse and amoral even when he was actively fighting for liberation.

On progress Neiman frequently raises and explores the question of the State of Nature. Much of this is to defend enlightenment thinkers from accusations of racism or colonialism. Neiman is careful to cite African philosophers regularly and I will say makes a convincing argument that she is on the right side of history when it comes to black liberation. This makes her blind spots concerning Indigenous North Americans all the more bizarre. Neiman insists on talking about “tribalism” and “tribes” throughout the book, saying that she prefers the word because it conjures the idea of barbarism. She openly admits that somebody (possibly a sensitivity reader) told her she shouldn’t say that but she did it anyway. And yet, for all of this, there are only two citations to anthropologists: David Graeber, who she is dismissive of, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who she treats as having tried to test Rousseau’s state of nature hypotheses.

She certainly fails to address the writings of anyone of the ilk of Pierre Clastres – whose work helped to scientifically repudiate the racist idea of a progression from savagery to civilization. In fact between her vehement defense of Kant against charges of racism and her insistence of tribalism, I described the first half of this book, excluding the critique of Foucault thus: someone called Kant racist and she called them a tribalist and then that same someone said that’s racist and she got so mad she wrote a whole book about it. Of course Neiman cites no Indigenous sources.

Before departing from the topic of the state of nature I will say that some of the best material in this book is a thorough, vicious and insightful critique of Richard Dawkins and of Evolutionary Psychology. She easily recognizes the misogyny at the heart of evo-psych and she pulls no punches. More strangely she claims that evo-psych is broadly accepted as settled science by left and right alike (this is news to me) and she makes a weak attempt to tie this abortion of pseudoscience back to Foucault. Foucault was, of course, quite hostile to the idea of human nature as such. This makes attempts to blame him for some of the worst of the “just human nature” crowd rather absurd. To her marginal credit it seems even Neiman recognizes she’s stretching here and so we end up with a third of a chapter mostly about how Foucault is a secret Nazi that diverges into a good critique of a contemporary reactionary movement without much connection to the rest of her thesis.

On justice she believes Foucault to be of an accord with Schmitt that there is none. She’s aghast at Foucault’s account of juridicalism and is deeply discomforted by the contents of Discipline and Punish. But there’s an odd dance Neiman often does in her critique of that book whereby she will complain about some position Foucault took there, then will generalize it to the entirety of his being, constructing an essential Foucault, then justify that essential Foucault with quotations from Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.

However it’s worth also noting that Neiman has a view of justice that is both vulgarly-progressive (she believes society has become more just over time) and that is very much in the Kantian idealist mode whereby justice is a noumen of which any given application of justice is a phenomenon reaching (necessarily) imperfectly toward it. As such she excuses contemporary injustice as a work in progress while insisting both that the prison is preferable to the gallows and also that Foucault thought the opposite. She is poorly equipped to handle a materialist view of justice as a historically-bound system of power relations.

And here is where we must address the glaring omission in the heart of Neiman’s book because she has penned an entire book about “the left” that mentions “Marxists” twice (neither complimentary), Engels once and Marx never at all. She cites Fanon a lot but of him she says, “Fanon was a universalist who sought justice and believe in the possibility of progress.” This is made even more baffling by her vague assertion that ‘the Left’ has abandoned Diderot along with the rest of the enlightenment. Diderot is brought up in her text in close proximity to Fanon.

Now it’s notable that Karl Marx, who Fanon studied with care, was very fond of Diderot. As such there is actually a philosophical lineage that can be drawn directly between Fanon and Diderot. It’s just that, for this to be intelligible, you have to admit that Karl Marx existed.

On universalism Neiman is on the weakest ground. She realizes that the colonial project of civilizing the savage was a product of universalist thought and repeatedly argues, passionately and at length, that colonial powers misappropriated enlightenment thought that was critical of their project. Again there is an idealism here that wants to separate out what a thought is in itself from how it is used. Kant criticized colonialism so the use of his work by colonial powers is irrelevant. He’s not to blame for how his work was used.

It seems like Neiman cannot imagine a molecular justice or progress. She insists the left, to have a meaningful project, must pursue the same outcome (justice and progress) for all people everywhere. What makes this absurd is that she might be much more capable of making this argument if she abandoned Kant even briefly and spoke in Marxist terms. While many contemporary Marxists (such as myself) have read enough Deleuze to recognize the value of the micropolitical and the local on praxis there is a wealth of thoroughly universalist Marxist writing she could have drawn from. I mean Trotsky is right there. As a result Neiman’s deep loyalty to Kant ultimately severely hamstrings her ability to claim that universalism is a good. She’s far too concerned with defending the reputations of Kant (especially Kant), Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Diderot to succeed in creating a persuasive argument for the necessity of universalism on the left.

I think I understand Neiman’s hesitance around Marx though and it’s because I don’t actually believe Foucault was the real target of her critique. Frankly Neiman’s Foucault is a straw man among straw men. Anyone with even a basic grounding in Foucault can either dismantle or brush away most of her criticisms without difficulty. Foucault was amoral? So what? Does that make his epistemology incorrect? But what’s going on here is that Neiman has a deep distrust of historical materialism.

Historical materialism is a demystifying way of looking at the world as a set of contingent material conditions where progress is not assured, where justice is described in non-moral terms and where universality is ultimately impossible. If you accept a view of history as a series of conflicts between classes then the progress toward justice rapidly becomes the playing out of conflicting powers rather than reason fumbling toward a nouminous good. “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror,” Marx said and this was a recognition that the proletarian struggle was not one of seeking progress toward an ideal. It was a threat, “we are coming for you.”

But as much as Neiman is obviously uncomfortable with the lack of idealism in Marx she cannot bring herself to attack him. It becomes clear in her conclusion that, despite some boomerish language, her preferred political project is far too close to socialism to openly attack Marx. As I mentioned before her idea of progress is incredibly close to Beauvoir’s (Marxist) idea of freedom. To openly disavow Marx would be to destroy the basis for her own project.

And I do think Neiman constitutes a leftist, even if one with some troubling unexamined baggage around Indigenous North Americans. So I don’t think she wants to undermine that basis. Instead she has produced this remarkably bad book. She sets up a caricature of Foucault for demolition and, in his place she raises up Kant as the father of the Left. Neiman acts as if Marx never existed and as if his students and friends hardly did either (excepting Fanon whose tie to Marx she elides) and, having erased him from history she rebuilds social democracy from a basis of the categorical imperative.

Neiman’s book is thorough and, on those rare occasions she isn’t talking about Foucault, it’s logical. But the problem is that it seems to have been written from a mirror universe with significant differences from ours. Now I’ve seen enough American radlibs who know the words to liberation but who don’t understand the beat, the sort of people who will say that it’s actually doing fascist work to de-platform a fascist if, in the process of that de-platforming, a marginalized person might come to harm. But it’s absurd to call these failures of education the far-left. That is still composed principally of Marxists and Anarchists who are usually more sensible. And it’s even more absurd to suggest such frivolous appropriations of the language of social justice are the fault of Michel Foucault. Hopefully this book will be forgotten by the history whose interrogation its author fears.

Zhuangzi in Carcosa – a review of The Wingspan of Severed Hands by Joe Koch

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I’ve been wanting to get my hands on this one for ages. The Wingspan of Severed Hands is a 2020 novella written by Joe Koch and I was aware of it since before its release but after its initial publication I struggled to find a print copy for purchase in Canada. Weirdpunk Books recently issued a second print run of the book and this seems to have broken the digital-only barrier I was facing as I was able to finally buy a copy and I’m very glad I did because The Wingspan of Severed Hands is one of the most fascinating works of weird fiction I’ve ever read, a perfect example of avant-garde literature that challenges its reader both with the complexity of its imagery and the artfulness of its themes.

This book is a weird fiction story which gestures directly toward the work of Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers but it is also a startling interrogation of the question of what it means to be sane and of the ancient Taoist question of whether one can differentiate between objects.

We might start by interrogating a genealogy, or perhaps an archaeology, of Carcosa. This storied city appears first in Bierce’s An Inhabitant of Carcosa in which it is an ancient and ghostly ruin. I say ghostly rather specifically because Bierce’s story is an interrogation of death and the persistence of the spirit, chronicling the revelation that an ailing man is, in fact, a ghost, long dead, who has approached his own grave and in doing so come to the revelation of his spectral nature. Bierce’s story opens with a quote, accredited to “Hali” (likely derived from one of two Arabic alchemists) which proposes different permutations of death as a phenomenon:

“For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God’s will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey—which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.”

Ambrose Bierce – An Inhabitant of Carcosa – 1886

The affective character of this silent and ruined city under the red disc of a darkening sun, ripe with the psychopompic significance of the owl and the lynx was then appropriated by Chambers for The King in Yellow and it’s from Chambers that much of the shared weird-fiction motifs that surround Carcosa – the idea of it as an alien landscape as opposed to (or in addition to) it being a spirit realm, the King in Yellow as the monarch of the ruined city, the eponymous play about the king which brings madness, and the Yellow Sign – derive. In the story The Yellow Sign the model Tessie says, of the awful man who upsets the narrator, “‘he reminds me of a dream,—an awful dream I once had. Or,’ she mused, looking down at her shapely shoes, ‘was it a dream after all?'”

This short story treats these semiotic markers of Carcosa – the play, the sign – as occupying a liminal space between life and death. The agent of the King in Yellow who comes to recover the amulet marked by the Yellow Sign is a cemetery watchman long-dead, the same man who haunted the dreams of Tessie and the narrator. And as such it’s via Cambers that we begin to see Carcosa as a place of questioning boundaries – the boundary between waking and dream, the boundary between life and death.

In the second chapter of the Zhuangzi is one of the philosopher’s most famous fragments:

The Outline said to the Shadow, “First you are on the move then you are standing still; you sit down and then you stand up. Why can’t you make up your mind?”

Shadow replied, “Do I have to look to something else to be what I am? Does this something else itself not have to rely on yet anther something? Do I have to depend upon the scales of the snake or the wings of a cicada? How can I tell how things are? How can I tell how things are not?

Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamed that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no iea I was Zhuangzi. Then suddenly I woke up and was Zhuangzi again. But I could not tell, had I been Zhuangzi dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was Zhuangzi? However, there must be some sort of difference between Zhuangzi and a butterfly! We call this the transformation of things.

The Book of Zhuangzi – Translated by Martin Palmer (with minor alterations) – 1996 (original text ~300 BCE)

The simplest interpretation of this is to treat it as a question of boundaries and this is so, to a certain extent. It’s true that Zhuangzi calls into question the division between waking and dreaming. But more to the point Zhuangzi calls into question the existence of discrete objects. The Shadow treats itself as an object and points out that its constant fluctuations, first standing still, then sitting down, then standing up should not be tied to a single cause because all causes are interdependent. This prefaces Zhuangzi’s argument that to dream of being otherwise is to be transformed. Instead of discrete objects we see a universe of motion wherein forms are contingent and disruptive change ever-present.

This provides with a basis for grappling with Koch’s challenging text.

The Wingspan of Severed Hands focuses on, perhaps, three interconnected beings. The first is Adira – a daughter of a harsh and controlling mother, someone raised with too much religion and not enough money. The second is Director Bennet – a scientist leading an initiative to rescue civilization from an epidemic of madness brought about by the semiotic contagion of the Yellow Sign. The third is the Weapon – possibly an angel, possibly a butterfly and possibly a god – the weapon is Bennet’s vehicle of global deliverance and Adira’s vehicle of personal deliverance.

The stories of Adira and Bennett begin seeming like disconnected views of the same global phenomenon. Bennet shelters in her bunker building plans to rescue the world from the cultic calamity that Adira lives within. Her mother raises her with the judgmental furor of an evangelical Christian but as the story progresses it becomes clear that her’s mothers theological convictions are not so simple.

Looming over this is the Queen in Yellow – a dead or dying mother god, the monarch of Carcosa, our liminal city where dream and lucidity, death and life, madness and sanity collide in a shattering of dialectical poles.

However as the story progresses the boundaries between these characters become indistinct. We discover that Director Bennet is properly named Adira Bennet and many aspects of her personal history align with those of Adira’s present. Adira suffers a series of shocking mortifications and transformations that harken back to Bierce’s claim that sometimes the spirit, “dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay”

This progression, and the dual nature of the Weapon as Bennet’s project and Adira’s guardian angel, come about to a climax which is effectively a textual approach to semiotic collapse as the groundings of formal unities are cut out from under the audience one after another. The entire book occupies “the last waking moment between the blackness of sleep and the lucidity of dreaming,” while also taking place as a giant butterfly built of steel and flesh dreams the death of a mad goddess and while also chronicling an abused woman escaping from an ailing but domineering mother for whom she will never be good enough.

It’s not the right question to ask if Adira and Bennet are the same person. Nor is it right to ask whether Adira and Bennet are acting at the same time. It’s even more futile to ask whether Adira is cut to pieces by a mad cult in a disused school pool building only to be resurrected in the bowels of a cosmic hound. This book defies an easy division between the action of the text and the metaphor by which the action is described. These semiotic structures of fiction collapse under the power of Koch’s vision.

I think one of the delightful challenges of this book is the way that it obliterates the idea of narrative fiction as existing within time. If everything is in a constant state of flux and change then time itself must be seen as contingent. Certainly this metastable conception of material law is a thread in philosophy that runs from Zhuangzi to Meillassoux, intrinsically tied to various iterations of dialetheism and I think this provides a lens for looking at the truth of this book. The Wingspan of Severed Hands contradicts itself constantly while simultaneously reifying its own unity. Adira is the history of Bennet. Adira is the ally of Bennet. She is one person, she is not the same person. Carcosa has always been a liminal space and in this book it exists at the boundary between being and the void. It both is and is not; there is a chronological thread: The weapon is made. The weapon gestates. The weapon is unleashed and flies to Carcosa. But simultaneously the weapon appears on Adira’s wedding day, born of her severed hands. It’s made of flesh and metal and language. The weapon is not a tulpa, it is no mere thought-form but it is a thought-form and an angel and a machine. This (non)contradiction is what makes this brief text such a challenging read and I do want to note that this is not an easy book to read. I found myself rereading passages in this as often as I do when picking my way through complicated metaphysical monographs to make sure I understood what I was reading on a scene to scene level. And yet this difficulty is not from any sort of sloppiness. Koch is a powerfully controlled writer with an exceptional grasp of language both as a tool for communicating metaphor and as a sound-based artform: “Shamed by the mirror, by her mother’s hand, hot and damp with uncontrollable, anxious sweat, in the dress so tight it doubled every flaw, flowers in her hair, flowers in her eyes, no time to cry. the teal church carpet reddened Adira’s slapped cheek. She was a ruddy sow marched to slaughter.”

Furthermore Koch has mastered a skill I wish more genre authors would – using all of the senses within his work. The sensory data of this book is like a stack overflow. It’s so abundant that the mind struggles to contain the (non)contradictory sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings of the world. Koch tells us to take it all in but what it all is, is madness. And yet for all of this jumble of metaphor and reality, for all that this book is a work of asynchronous subversion of time and identity, it remains a taught thriller about trying to save the world from madness.

But can the world be rescued from madness or only be driven further into it? Is the Yellow Sign a sigil from beyond the stars or the random adornment on the side of an empty journal? It is both. It is neither. And so we have a world that is (not)saved. We have a protagonist who is (not)unified in her own identity.

The Wingspan of Severed Hands is a masterwork of literature. It is as insufficient to call this book weird fiction as it would be to call An Inhabitant of Carcosa weird fiction. It is certainly weird in the Fisherian sense of an overabundance of presence but this is an insufficient description of it. It is such a singular text that the only way to describe it would be to repeat the entirety of it verbatim and so, in the end, I can only say that the only way to grasp this book, let alone to understand it, is to read it. I would encourage people to do so.

Note regarding the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes

/ Simon

After listening to both SAG members and other members of the critical community I have decided that I will withhold reviews for any film currently released by a struck studio. This means that while I will continue to review movies from independent studios that are outside the bounds of the current strike action any planned reviews of films from struck studios will not be released until after the conclusion of the strike.

Please donate to WGA and SAG/AFTRA and show solidarity with striking workers worldwide.