aesthetics

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?

Regarding adults and children’s media

/ Simon

I didn’t want to talk any more about this.

My principal reason for writing In Praise of Discomfort was because The Mary Sue deceptively used links to my words in the service of a bizarre and gender-essentialist read of the horror genre. This is something that I, as a horror critic and reader, wasn’t about to sit back and allow.

And now…

It’s happening again.

Specifically a book reviewer and writer of no particular talent but rather great popularity on the fan circuit, Cora Buhlert, has scrawled her latest volley in an ongoing dispute between two loosely defined cliques of genre writers, readers and critics.

In the process she brings me and my friend Raquel S. Benedict up at length in order to attempt to pillory us for the crime of disagreeing that the people pushing the marketing category of “cozy horror” will be good for horror in general. And even Buhlert cannot deny that “cozy horror” is effectively just marketing buzzwords, saying, “In fact, I should maybe try to rebrand the Hallowind Cove series (which started out as an attempt to write horror and became a sort of horror parody set in a quirky small town) as cozy horror, since nothing else has worked to help those stories find their market. “

With apologies to Buhlert I’ve read a small amount of one of her Hallowind Cove books and being mis-marketed is not, in fact, why she fails to sell:

He’d once asked Ian, Landlord of The Croaking Foghorn and the closest thing Paul had to a friend here in Hallowind Cove, about the raven.

“Oh that’s just Hugo,” Ian had said, “Never mind him. He likes to pretend he’s a harbinger of doom, but he’s really quite harmless.”

“Wa-atch out,” Hugo croaked again, “Wa-atch out”

Cora Buhlert – The Revenant of Wrecker’s Cove – Hallowind Cove Book 1

With sub-Gaimanesque prose stylings like this and a cover containing clipart so obvious that you can still see the edge of the .jpg overlay in one place, her work lacks both the quality and the commitment to professional standards necessary to be worthy of much attention. I doubt marketing this piffle as “cozy horror” is likely to improve her sales much.

However it’s not Buhlert at her most honest here that warrants a response. I’d have been happy to keep quiet on my opinions of her stories much like I am on the work of countless other amateur story-writers had she not also said the following:

“As for why Benedict, McNeil and Sullivan object to the existence of cozy horror, there are several arguments, most of them familiar from previous debates. McNeil’s main point is that he believes that horror should make people uncomfortable and that cozy horror is therefore an oxymoron. He also dismisses several of the examples given in The Mary Sue article, particularly the 2014 animated series Over the Garden Wall, as “children’s media”. Now Over the Garden Wall may well be aimed at children – I haven’t seen it. Besides, as I’ve pointed out above, horror is a genre that appeals to the young. However, there is a certain sneering undertone in the way McNeil dismisses “children’s media” that you often find with a certain type critic, who tend to conflate “I don’t like this” or “I’m not the target audience for this” with “This is YA”, whereby YA is inevitably viewed as a bad thing.”

And again we’re seeing the same, sad, attempt to smear critics playing out in Buhlert’s blog that we did in the original Mary Sue article. And Buhlert fundamentally misunderstands my concern about adult consumption of children’s media.

See I actually think children’s media is quite important. Even moreso I expect it to be good. This was actually a focus on a significant sub-series of my blog, “kids stuff” and I would dearly appreciate if the next person to accuse me of “sneering” at children’s media would start by reading these articles and noting some of the things I have to say about children’s media.

For instance, I concluded my review of The Mitchells vs the Machines, by saying, “It’s to be expected that a movie financed by Sony and Netflix and created by a team that brought you a hyper-stylized comic book and a 101 minute toy commercial would fail to create something critical of capitalism, that they’d be unable to recognize that the subject of critique in PAL’s nihilism and Mark’s disregard for relationship was somehow connected to a psychology that triangulates social relations against a patriarch or that both were tied inextricably to capital. It’s a challenge because I do want to see media going the direction The Mitchells vs the Machines goes. It’s just that it doesn’t go anywhere near as far as art must.” This echoes my conclusion regarding the Netflix limited series Wednesday, ” Jenna Ortega is a talented new actress and I’m glad to see her getting a larger role after playing a second-fiddle in recent outings like Scream (2022) and X. But it really drives home that you can’t expect a coherent critique of normativity from Tim Burton. And we can all, perhaps, admit at last that it was good he passed on the 1991 film and cleared the path for Barry Sonnenfeld to direct in his stead. Because, building largely on the aesthetic legacy of Sonnenfeld’s movie and on the hastily redacted fan-series of Melissa Hunter, Burton managed to make… a mess.”

Talking about the classic children’s novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, I said “Ged is the wellspring of power that rises out of the primordial origin of all things. He is the doer, the agent of action in the story. The gebbeth is the un-doer, the reactive, the end of things. Ged, to come into an understanding of himself, must see his end as clearly as his beginning. He must be as aware of the ways in which he un-does as the ways he does. Unexamined, Ged’s shadow-self seeks revenge against Jasper and it is let loose, it rampages. It kills. It hounds Ged from crisis to crisis. But when faced, when Ged points to his own darkness and calls it with his name, it comes; it becomes; it comes into being. But by coming into being it is done away with because it becomes nothing but the awareness Ged has of his own potential toward death. There is no other here. There isn’t a wanderer and his shadow – there is a river, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”

In short what I expect of children’s media is, for the most part, what I expect of adult media: that it can stand up to critical scrutiny, that it is well-crafted and that it communicate a clear and consistent theme. But it’s also true that I’m rather critical of adults fans of children’s programming.

This is because there’s one other element of children’s media that absolutely must be true: children’s media must be legible to children.

Now I know from experience that creating legibility for a child requires a process of a certain simplification. I joked about that in the Earthsea essay, qualifying its inclusion in children’s literature by saying, “However, despite these hallmarks of children’s fictions, this is a book with a density of theme and topic that could prove challenging for an undergraduate university student to fully disentangle. While I have positive things to say about some of the very inventive structural and pedagogical things done in modern children’s lit, for instance, Elizabetta Dami‘s use of modified type to emphasize key words is a very interesting artistic choice, and one with an obvious pedagogical benefit, I don’t think there’s a single voice in children’s literature in the 21st century who would tackle the very abstract topics like the ones that are at the center of Le Guin’s book.”

And this absence of abstraction is a key problem. Adults should be accustomed to paying attention to abstract and dense topics. That’s part of being an adult. As Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” As a person grows and develops out of childhood they need to be able to observe phenomena through a lens that simply isn’t available to children because it is dependent on the experience of growing into adulthood. For one’s taste to remained mired in children’s media isn’t a problem because children’s media is bad but rather because children’s media is good for children. I would expect adults to find it limiting in precisely the same way they would find the shoes they wore when they were six limiting: because they have outgrown it.

So, no, YA is not, “inevitably a bad thing.” It’s a perfectly good thing for twelve to fourteen year-olds. But if you are a fourty year-old and you’re still shopping for books principally in the YA aisle you have some growing up to get on with.

I am happy to see that Buhlert reacts with discomfort to the use of gentrification in this discussion as a metaphor. “Though personally I find the metaphor hugely problematic, because gentrification does untold harm in the real world by displacing and destroying whole neighbourhoods,” she says. And, yes, it’s very true that gentrification really is that bad. But perhaps she should note that I’m the same person who simultaneously said leftists should be uncomfortable with folk horror because of the way the subgenre deploys reactionary volkishness on one hand and then recommended leftists should watch folk horror so as to interrogate their discomfort on the other. I recommended In the Earth as a good one. Basically I don’t write to make people comfortable and if Buhlert is made uncomfortable by the idea that the genre fiction scene shares characteristics with real-world gentrification then she has a wonderful opportunity to interrogate that discomfort.

Moreau Vazh has laid out with clarity and precision exactly what I mean when I talk about gentrification within this metaphorical context, saying of the SFF publishing mainstream, “When the sub-reddit has been quiet for months and the last specialist bookfluencer has stopped coming up with themed dances to celebrate book releases, they bust out the joint and light a match. The old shit is dead and oppressive… It is tiring having to talk about it… It sucks all the air out of the room when we should be talking about the new shit.”

Effectively, when Buhlert says she thinks it’s “problematic” to use the gentrification metaphor to describe what SFF does as it, to paraphrase Vazh, hops from sinking ship to sinking ship, what she’s really saying is that she doesn’t like what I’m implying about her and her friends – that they are gentrifiers.

But this is the old liberal / leftist mismatch on language at play. Liberals, poisoned by the individual and atomized subject-concept of their decrepit ideology, see any reference to a systemic problem, such as gentrification, and assume it must be made up of a category of individuals who are essentially gentrifiers. Whereas a leftist such as myself denies that a subject is individual at all to begin with.

I don’t think Buhlert is a gentrifier. The truth is that, when she hasn’t deigned to impose herself upon me, I don’t think about Buhlert at all. But I don’t assign any personal blame to Buhlert. It’s not morally wrong to be an untalented short story writer. But it is, at the very best, gauche and a little pathetic to make veiled accusations regarding the politics of one’s critics because they happen not to be on board with the marketing category you’ve decided will be a silver bullet for the fortunes of your amateur story-writing efforts.

I sincerely hope this will be the last thing I ever have to say about “cozy” Horror.

In Praise of Discomfort

/ Simon / 6 Comments

Earlier today my attention was drawn to an article put up by Julia Glassman for The Mary Sue telling everybody to shut up about “cozy horror”. In it they quoted a tweet I put at the end of a thread regarding the sub-genre four days ago. I suppose this particular fandom publication deciding to jump in on a discourse three days late and a dollar short shouldn’t be much surprise but I’m rather put out that they chose to quote a minor point I made at the end of that thread rather than engaging with my core argument so that they could complain, “people are compelled to take something fun and wholesome and turn it into a heated debate.” Even that would be insufficient to warrant a reply if the author hadn’t later said, in the same article, “It’s also undeniable that this problem is gendered. Endurance is associated with masculinity, and coziness is associated with femininity. Maybe that supposed femininity is what makes cozy horror feel so threatening to people who consider themselves hardcore horror fans.”

Now frankly this is not only nonsense but it’s offensive nonsense. Neither myself, nor the other people I know who were linked by this article as critics of cozy horror put forward such a gender-essentialist read of the phenomenon. In fact, when later asked for an example of cozy horror the one I gave was a short story written by a man.

It’s not entirely uncommon for The Mary Sue to pull this maneuver: They will start by adopting a position in favour of big-tent, commercially viable, smoothed down forms of media and then they will code this media as feminine so as to claim that anyone who dislikes said media must, thus, be a sexist. This works poorly, though, when your target has an open and expressed tendency to work specifically with queer fiction. So let’s avoid these bad-faith swipes going forward and instead examine what I actually said about horror.

In my thread, what I said was, “Regarding Cozy Horror and my resistance to it, I generally start my inquiries into a medium with the question of what it does. In the case if Cozy Horror it seeks to remove discomfort from Horror. I mean that’s on the box. I find discomfort a necessary sensation to maintain the horrific. As such attempts to render Horror comfortable collapse Horror. There’s plenty of comfortable spooky media which is not Horror. Generally it’s situation comedy (like the Addams Family) or it’s fantasy / adventure with a Halloween vibe (Nightmare Before Christmas). These are fine. But they aren’t horrific. They are also mostly children’s media. As such I find “Cozy Horror” to generally be either an attempt to market children’s media to adults or it’s just not very good at furnishing the experience it promises. And I worry that it will try to gentrify Horror. People who seek comfort from art often react… negatively… to the presence of art intended to provoke discomfort. Nobody likes a severed head replacing their marshmallows in their hot cocoa.”

As you can see the commentary on the gentrification of horror, mostly a veiled swipe at a certain subset of SF/F authors who have been actively introducing “cozy” vibes into their early forays into the horrific, was nowhere near the main point of my argument. Instead I was focusing on the function of discomfort to the horrific.

Now discomfort need not be extreme. While I am fond of chasing the limit experience that the works of Barker and Bataille are about, not every moment of discomfort needs to be an ecstatic experience that brings a subject to the limit of experience. Discomfort can be as simple as the itch of wool against bare skin.

We can find these degrees of discomfort throughout horror – be that in the long and awkward stares of the secondary characters in Get Out, in the creeping dread and uncertainty of The Lighthouse and Pulse or in the frank body horror of Gretchen Felker Martin’s superb Manhunt (or the discomforting normalcy of her villains internal lives for that matter). Discomfort can live in eros such as in the far-too-appealing monsters of Nightbreed. We look at the monster and want that for ourselves thus feeling discomfort in our own desire. Certainly there is discomfort in extremity. Nobody can comfortably read the n-Body Problem which is nearly as extreme as horror fiction gets. But that is also a book that ends with the protagonist observing a rainbow. As the recent Hellraiser reboot remarked discomfort is something to modulate. We can see this in extreme music: Pushing into more and more extreme walls of haptic noise is less effective at causing discomfort than the rise and fall of chaos in the work of Litvrgy. And much as with extreme music, discomfort isn’t always about what happens to a character either. Sometimes the discomfort is literally a physical discomfort caused in the audience such as the strain caused by trying to make sense of the garbled organic noise of Merhige’s Begotten.

Discomfort is a multivariate sensation but Glassman makes an elementary error by assigning discomfort against a kind of “endurance contest” as if we want to reduce the experience of horror to a guest spot on Hot Ones. I am not certain how often I have to talk about the significance of surrender to art before this becomes clear but there’s no contestation here. The point isn’t to overcome the horrific but to be overcome by it. And this is what comfort fiction denies its audience.

Now I want to focus, for a moment, on a work I am currently reading. I was lucky enough to be given an ARC of The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang. This is not a horror work at all but, then, neither is Over the Garden Wall and that didn’t stop Glassman for putting this children’s cartoon front and center in her attack on the critics of cozy horror. Now I want to preface this comment by noting that, at time of publication, I have not finished reading Huang’s book and a full review will be forthcoming but one thing I observed is that it is largely a very cinematic novel. Huang has an exceptional grasp of what characters see but generally gives short shrift to other sensations.

With one exception: pain.

When one of the perspective characters feels pain the text comes alive. We get not just another sense beyond what is seen but also an enhanced view into the internality of the protagonist in her moment of discomfort. The discomfort of the character, the physical and psychic discomfort of the character, brings the text to life in a way that a dozen pages of beautifully rendered description of scene fails to do. We don’t just read her discomfort; we feel it. There’s an expression that the excellent horror critic Ashley Darrow often uses: horror wants to do things to your body. And this is what makes discomfort so central to the experience. Comfort is an opiate; as such it numbs nerves that should be made hot.

Now when I briefly examined cozy horror before I pointed out that much of what is put forward as cozy horror is children’s media. I don’t have a problem with children’s media. In fact I did a whole series of articles specifically about critical evaluation of children’s media. But Glassman can hardly say that comfort fiction is not infantilizing on one hand while on the other throwing forward examples from children’s cartoons. Frankly as amusing as a show like Dead End: Paranormal Park may be, it isn’t horrific. There’s no discomfort present. Because it’s not aiming for discomfort but rather to provide children with a fun supernatural adventure.

“Cozy horror may sound safer than other horror genres, but it’s a mistake to think that it’s any less complex or sophisticated.” Glassman says, but this a non-sequitur. Nobody said cozy horror lacked complexity. We said it lacked horror.

And this brings me, at last, to gentrification. I said before that “people don’t like to find a severed head in their hot cocoa” and this is what worries me about cozy horror advocates. Because, as is often the case with defenders of comfort fiction, cozy horror fans seem to have very thin skins. And this sensitivity leads them to tell people who criticize their preferred media to shut up in articles on major fandom websites. “What’s odd about the whole debate is that the time people spend denouncing a genre is time they could spend reading or watching stuff they actually like?” Glassman asks and the answer is we were. Quite happily. Until you went and got irritated over the fact that anyone anywhere said anything negative about this subgenre. I wrote four tweets four days ago and as a result you put me and a bunch of other people who likewise spent a tiny bit of time on one afternoon talking about how cozy horror had some problems on blast – called us sexists and such. Criticism happens. How many times have French New Extremity films been called “torture porn?” How many uneducated think-pieces do we need to see about final girls written by people who don’t appear to have the first clue who Carol Clover is? Do you think a literature that is built upon equal measures of Mary Shelly’s radicalism and Bram Stoker’s conservativism has no critical evaluations of how it treats race, class or gender? Perhaps if The Mary Sue were to hire somebody who wasn’t a neophyte with horror to write their think pieces on the topic they’d realize that autocriticism is a common recreation of people who watch and read horror fiction. As one might expect from people enamored with the fiction of discomfort, many of us enjoy turning that discomfort inward and interrogating what it means to read and appreciate uncomfortable material. But apparently Glassman does not like that discomfort any more than she would like the discomfort of the bodily destruction present in In The Earth, one of the best recent folk-horror films.

Glassman is welcome to enjoy situation comedies like What We Do in the Shadows and children’s shows like Over the Garden Wall. But perhaps she should save the culture criticism for people like Carol Clover, Gretchen Felker Martin and Annie Rose Malamet – who know how to interrogate their discomfort without recoiling in favour of the softness of a cotton blanket.

Magic and Lawlessness

/ Simon / 2 Comments
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

I have an almost irrational distaste for “hard” magic systems in literature. This is not because of any particular aversion to stories getting metaphysical. I have absolutely no problem there but it is instead because I think attempts to systematize magic have a tendency to strip the magic out of it. There is a famous quote from Arthur C. Clarke that “any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.” It’s one of Clarke’s three laws. We will return to the other two. But I would propose that this construction, taken absent Clarke’s other two laws, has led to many attempts by fantasy authors to make magic into nothing but another technology. This is a bad thing that should be discouraged.

However to demonstrate both the problematic created by attempts to make a technology of magic and also why this is ultimately a bad endeavor for literature, surely, and also for metaphysics, it will be necessary for us to define some terms and the first of those is technology.

Skolnikoff echoes Harvey Brooks in describing technology as, “knowledge of how to fulfill certain human purposes in a specifiable and reproducible way,” and while he admits this definition lacks a certain level of precision it does capture the key issue with technology that need addressing:

  1. Technology fulfills specific human purposes
  2. Technology is specifiable and reproducible

These are the qualities that systematization imparts to magic that makes it like a technology.

Now, of course, we can see something of this vulgar materialism in the works of Jim Butcher, whose wizards frequently manipulate physics such as moving heat to create fire in one place and ice in another or to draw an object out of a stable orbit. In these cases wizardry, as a form of scholasticism, is very much a tool of executing a specific human purpose. The wizard has an objective – such as freezing a body of water – and an understanding of the forces required to cause a body of water to freeze. The heat within the water is taken up by the wizard who, acting as a conduit for this force, shunts it to his focus which disperses the captured heat as fire. This technological magic is specific and it is reproducible. A wizard, faced with a problem and a situation, will be able to derive the necessary technique in order to execute a task in a replicable manner. But where is the magic here? It’s all mathematics and physics equations. For all that Butcher might ground the magic of his wizards in a kind of materialist interpretation of the world as an interlocking system of energetic forces which can be manipulated, it’s all quite static. A magical feat, once undertaken, can always be accomplished again.

Frankly there’s a human project in these systems of magic. But should magic be bound in these standard, repeatable, goal-oriented systems? What about the magic of a shaft of sunlight piercing a forest canopy? What about the magic of the random fall of blood on a stone? Why must we exorcise the ineffable from magic?

I am proposing, as a counter to these project-derived visions of magic, one guided far more by inner experience which, as Bataille suggests, “cannot have any other concern nor other goal than itself.” I propose this, in part, because there’s no need for a technology called magic. As Clarke points out any sufficiently mystifying technology will serve just as well. The very use of his half-assed vulgar materialism is precisely the same thing that makes Butcher’s magic indistinguishable from a sufficiently obscured technology. However if we abandon a materialist metaphysics we run into other problems. Plato’s realm of ideal forms is destructive to the idea of change. For Plato all learning was just a remembrance as the ideal form of any given object always already existed. For anything truly new to be possible we need a materialist metaphysics. And so this leaves us at an impasse. Must we have our literature either abandon change or abandon magic? Of course this is where Bataille is useful for resolving this paradox. We simply must posit magic as being outside the boundary of project. Magic is indifferent to project, it is not a replicable system of knowledge that fulfills human purposes. It’s something else, something ineffable.

Magic is the creation of the new.

Speaking of magic within literature we are operating within an ontological mode. Magic exists in the experience of the text. Moving beyond a text magic exists in the immediate experience of the world. We become aware of magic when something new arises that was not there before. But Sartre quite rightly points out that, “every theory of knowledge… presupposes a metaphysics” if we treat the experience of magic as an awareness of the new then that must, in turn, be grounded in a metaphysics that allows new things to exist. As such let us discuss Sartre’s dialectic of being and nothingness not as his ontology but as the underlying metaphysical suppositions it makes.

For Sartre nothingness arises in the awareness of absence. “My friend is not here.” The absence of the friend is indicative of the nothingness within him. Now Sartre was quite careful to keep his nothing and his being entirely ontological – nothingness for Sartre isn’t a metaphysical void so much as a negation within awareness.

However there is a metaphysical requirement for being to arise from nothingness and that requirement is time. Simply put for being to arise there must be time within which it arises; change can only occur within a temporal field. How then do we handle the in-between moments when something is neither fully absent nor fully present – how do we handle the statement “my friend is not here yet?”

This is the domain of becoming. And becoming is where the magic lives. The systematic approach to magic supported by Butcher as described earlier doesn’t work well with becoming because it assumes magic to simply be the will of the magic-user. Tool-like the magic in his books has a specific teleology. It’s a tool a character uses to advance the action of the story. But while this tool-magic is in motion, while it advances the story, it isn’t fertile. It doesn’t make anything. Because becoming sits as a third term between being and nothingness it occupies a position of partially fulfilled potential. Effectively anything that exists at null-intensity has infinite potential for becoming. A non-thing might become anything. As nothingness enters into time it must begin to take form and this is becoming – the process of the foreclosure of potential into actuality. We can see an example of this in the work of Douglas Adams.

“Please do not be alarmed,” it said, “by anything you see or hear around you. You are bound to feel some initial ill effects as you have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of two to the power of two hundred and seventy-­six thousand to one against possibly much higher. We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-­‐five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway.”

Douglas Adams – Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Infinite Improbability Drive enumerates the likelihood that any given event will occur in an infinite universe and then sees to it that any given improbable event is reified at its point of likelihood. “There’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.” But this works quite well for the idea of the collapse of potential into being. Through the process of becoming the possibility of unlikely rescues and Hamlet writing monkeys are either brought into being or are discarded as normalcy, an end to magical time, begins.

And this points to Clarke’s much less often cited second law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

But perhaps we’ve beat around the bush enough. It’s time to interrogate Brandon Sanderson’s, “laws of magic.” These are:

  1. An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
  2. Limitations > power
  3. Expand on what you have already, before you add something new.

Sanderson has a “zeroth law” as well, “Err on the side of awesome.” Apparently “awesome” in this case is to be considered in the colloquial sense but I would honestly agree with it provided we use the formal definition of awesome as being that which provokes the sensation of awe.

Now to address Sanderson’s first law I’d say this depends on a functionalist, plot-centric read of magic. Magic is never the most expedient method of resolving plot. Sanderson seems aware of that but seems unable to look up past plot for how else one might want to use magic. As such he spends an entire law writing apologia for using magic the wrong way.

But if magic is not best used to serve the advancement of the plot what is it for? Magic allows us to directly visualize the impossible. This is critical to the communication of two functions within fiction: psychology and metaphysics. In discourses around psychology the ability to visualize the impossible is valuable for the construction and communication of a limit experience. Bataille argued that philosophy was restricted by the limit of knowledge as a goal. He believed it was necessary for philosophy to break this limit and he believed an inner experience would be the method of doing so. Returning to Sartre (and a careful reader will note that these two authors are marked by their very different interpretations of Heidegger – make of my synthesis what you will) we can recall that Sartre wanted to propose a non-intellectual being within itself. But his is a relatively sterile and analytic approach to this question: what is self when it isn’t reflective? Bataille wanted to explain how it felt to be a self that wasn’t reflective. Sartre found in appearance the truth of the absence of essence. The essential character of a perceived object, including the self as a perceived object, is its series of appearances. Bataille responds, “One must grasp the meaning from the inside.”

But doing this: identifying the core of a character without resorting to self-reflection and its infinitely regressing hall of mirrors is no easy feat and it isn’t one that can easily be approached from without. In order to communicate this to an audience you need something that engenders a purely affective, purely intensive response. Consider the following,

“The old man… sprang to his feet and leaped to the top of a large rock. There he stood… towering above them. His hood and his grey rags were flung away. His white garments shone. He lifted up his staff, and Gimli’s axe leaped from his grasp and fell ringing on the ground. The sword of Aragorn, stiff in his motionless hand, blazed with a sudden fire. Legolas gave a great shout and shot an arrow high into the air: it vanished in a flash of flame.”

JRR Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

From a plot perspective there is nothing in this scene that requires magic. All that needs to happen is that the three hunters need to meet an old friend and discover he’s different than he was before. And yet Tolkien goes to great length to show us something of Gandalf’s magic and, in doing so, to tell us something about how he has changed within.

The old Mithrandir would not have burned Legolas’ arrows to ash, he would not have ripped Gimli’s axe from his hands nor set alight Andruil. We don’t have any insight into how Gandalf accomplished this feat nor was it necessary to solve the conflict. Gandalf could have solved it in a word by saying “yo Aragorn, it’s ya boi,” but we have magic anyway. And it is, in fact, awesome. We see an experience of awe as these three eminently capable heroes are rendered useless before Gandalf. Their weapons cannot avail them because of the holy fire that suffuses the revived wizard. Gandalf has changed, he has become different to himself, and this ontological and psychological transformation is why we have magic here. The magic doesn’t serve story-conflict. It doesn’t serve plot. It serves character.

Another example of magic serving character is basically the entirety of A Wizard of Earthsea. Now considering how we are dallying with Heidegger in this question it might not be surprising that I bring up my favourite left-Heideggerian piece of theory-fiction. I have spoken at length about this book as a phenomenological exploration of being-toward-death. In my essay on A Wizard of Earthsea I concluded by describing Ged as the wellspring of power that rises out of the primordial origin of all things and the Gebbeth as the un-doer, the ender, the void into which all things fall. But in his unification at the resolution of the story, “Light and darkness met, and joined and were one.” In this case the whole book about wizardry and magic is nothing but a method of understanding who Ged is, what a life is, and what it is to live in the world. The flow of creation and destruction resides with becoming as a time-bound process of what is not to what is. Magic, in this work of literature, allows us to break into the impossibility of gebbeth ghost-shadows in order to probe the boundaries of a life to explore the limits and to cross the low-stone wall.

LeGuin does provide a whisper of systematics to magic in the deep discourse on the question of the name as a way of dividing being into discrete objects but this isn’t a system of spells at all. There’s no mechanic for the strength of the Gebbeth, it just gets weaker the more willing Ged is to take it into himself, to annihilate that name-driven division.

There is another reason for magic though and that is for a text to communicate something close enough to the limit of intelligibility to require us to push into the impossible to map the bounds of the possible. Fiction often serves metaphysical aims and this is a place where magic can be a critical exploratory tool. Consider the following from Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong.

The zheng was known for its melancholic twang, and this variety from the Western Regions was particularly mournful. Guo Jing had no ear for music, yet he noticed that each time a string rattled, his heart pulsed. As Viper Ouyang played faster his heart throbbed along uncomfortably, as if it were about to burst out of his chest.

Realizing he could die if the tempo increased further, he sat down to gather his spirit and still his thoughts in the Quanzhen way. As he channeled his internal energy around his body, his heartbeat slowed and soon he found he was no longer ensnared by the music.

Jin Yong – Legend of the Condor Heroes – A Bond Undone

Jin Yong goes on for several pages describing how the music of Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi is used as a weapon by which they can pit their internal strength. But by making the fight so abstract he’s in turn able to discuss the ideas that Sunzi would call node and shih – or what we might call flow and event. “From hollowness, luminosity grows,” Guo Jing considers. We could consider how close this is to saying that being arises from nothingness. But regardless of the specifics of how this dialectic of void and object is described what we have is a section of text that simultaneously describes a magical duel played between martial masters and that goes into the Taoist metaphysics that underpins both Guo Jing as a character and the world in which the story occurs. This doesn’t do anything for the story really. It serves as an overture between two more plot-significant incidents. And no conflict is resolved. The musical duel ends in a draw. But the magic is incredibly valuable to the story as it communicates an idea about how our world functions.

Ultimately Sanderson’s first law of magic isn’t even wrong. It’s not even asking the right question.

His second law of magic might almost be useful if I were confident he understood what he was implying with it. Specifically, as I’ve mentioned previously through my exploration of Clarke’s second law the use of magic in a work of fiction should ultimately be entirely in service to the exploration of the limits – limits of speech, limits of experience, limits of knowledge – but I doubt this is what he means. Mr. Sanderson is so monomaniacally focused on plot-utility with his laws I’m sure what he means to say is that magic itself should be limited, should not be able to do too much. Whereas I champion an idea of magic as the wellspring of all that is, that vehicle that brings objects back over the limit of nothingness and into being.

But there’s another way that we should treat magic as limited – or rather we should treat the magician as limited. The wizard, as a figure of knowledge, is not a king. He may council the king. He may instruct the king. But he isn’t a ruler. To grasp magic, to truly understand it, requires an understanding of the limits of how one should act with it. Consider Ogion in A Wizard of Earthsea,

Three days went by and four days went by and still Ogion had not spoken a single charm in Ged’s hearing, and had not taught him a single name or rune or spell.
Though a very silent man he was so mild and calm that Ged soon lost his awe of him, and in a day or two more he was bold enough to ask his master, “When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir?”
“It has begun,” said Ogion.
There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say. Then he said it: “But I haven’t learned anything yet!”
“Because you haven’t found out what I am teaching,” replied the mage, going on at his steady, long-legged pace along their road, which was the high pass between Ovark and Wiss.

Ursula K. LeGuin – A wizard of Earthsea

Ogion is perhaps the clearest exemplar of the figure of the wizard in fiction. LeGuin introduces the Taoist concept of wuwei into the body of the wise teacher exemplified by Gandalf and T. H. White’s Merlyn and this helps to drive home how the form of knowledge that wizardry represents acts to limit the deeds of the wizard directly.

Fourfoil, they call it.” Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, “What is its use, Master?”
“None I know of.”

…

“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?” Ogion went on a half mile or so, and said at last, “To hear, one must be silent.”

Ursula K. LeGuin – A Wizard of Earthsea

Ogion positions himself and, transitively, wizardry, beyond the question of utility and of human project. Wizardry is silence. Magic is to know and not to speak. “when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside” Ultimately LeGuin shows that this wisdom, the perfect limit of a Wizard, is one they all come to know when the Summoner says to Ged,

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must.”

Ursula K. LeGuin – A Wizard of Earthsea

Of course LeGuin’s Taoist wizards are not the only ones who limit themselves such. Consider Merlyn,

“I cannot do any magic for Kay,” he said slowly, “except my own magic that I have anyway. Backsight and insight and all that. Do you mean anything I could do with that?”

“What does your backsight do?”

“It tells me what you would say is going to happen, and the insight sometimes says what is or was happening in other places.”

T. H. White – The Once and Future King

Again we have a wizard who has capacity for great magic. And again he refuses to freely-use his power not because of a metaphysical limit of his ability to cast a spell but because his knowledge makes it clear that he should not.

And, of course, the whole purpose of the Istari in the Lord of the Rings was not to confront Sauron’s power directly but rather to provide knowledge, succor and diplomacy. The powers of the Istari are never particularly codified. We know they live long lives. We know they are not easily killed. They wield powerful artifacts such as Gandalf’s ring or Saruman’s Palantir. But the magic that suffuses them is all luminance and splendor, not systematics. Gandalf’s magic isn’t a tool for accomplishing a project; it’s his being itself.

And so, in this, we almost agree. A magician, as a character, should be limited. To grasp magic is to hold the knowledge that magic is not a tool. To try and seize and use it for project leads to the Gebbeth and Ged’s failings. There can be no wizard-kings. But is this the limit that Sanderson meant? I honestly doubt it. Let’s examine Sanderson’s argument regarding limits:

 What makes Superman interesting, then? Two things: his code of ethics and his weakness to kryptonite.

Think about it for a moment. Why can Superman fly? Well, because that’s what he does. Why is he strong? Comic book aficionados might go into him drawing power from the sun, but in the end, we don’t really care why he’s strong. He just is.

But why is he weak to kryptonite? If you ask the common person with some familiarity with Superman, they’ll tell you it’s because kryptonite–this glowing green rock–is a shard from his homeworld, which was destroyed. The kryptonite draws you into the story, gets into who Superman is and where he comes from. Likewise, if you ask about his code of ethics–what he won’t do, rather than what he can do–we’ll go into talking about his family, how he was raised. We’ll talk about how Ma and Pa Kent instilled solid values into their adopted son, and how they taught him to use his strength not to kill, but to protect.

Superman is not his powers. Superman is his weaknesses.

Brandon Sanderson – Sanderson’s second law.

Now let us start by interrogating the idea that a code of ethics constitutes a weakness. This is somewhat alarming rhetoric being honest. I would contend that the idea of Superman as an ethical being is, in fact, a much more significant reserve of strength than his bullet-proof skin. The treatment of the green rock macguffin as if it says something profound about the character is plot-driven story rhetoric in all its glory.

Mr. Sanderson proceeds to, again, mistake restraint for weakness when he says, “The {LotR} films, it should be noted, played this concept up much more than the books did, as the director realized Aragorn became far more interesting when he was reluctant to become king. His weakness gave him much more depth than his abilities.” This is not a weakness. Self-restraint, self-doubt and morality are not weaknesses imposed on characters to make the plot more exciting. They’re opportunities to interrogate the world.

When Mr. Sanderson digs into advice for authors the plot centrism rears its head in full again. He describes the systematics underlying the tedious magic of Wheel of Time, a series of books he wrote the concluding volumes of, and focuses entirely on the weaving metaphor as representing a structural weakness that limits characters actions within magic. He is trying to cut magic down to size, to make it into a function that achieves a goal.

While discussing Mr. Sanderson’s first law I repeatedly argued that this misses why magic is used in literature. There will always be a more parsimonious method to drive plot forward than magic. Why bother with a fireball when you can bash the other guy’s brains in with a rock? If magic isn’t probing the limits of the inexpressible why are we even bothering with it? Magic in Lord of the Rings represents the interplay of spirit and matter as set forth by the song of Eru and Morgoth’s Ring. Magic in A Wizard of Earthsea is a reflection of Ged’s own being toward death. Magic in Legend of the Condor Heroes is an opportunity to expound on flow and event, on the dynamic interplay of yin and yang. In all these cases the magic doesn’t exist to move the action along but to interrogate something that would be difficult to access otherwise. I mean have you tried to just read Being and Time? Or the Daodejing? Magic gives us a vehicle to make these very abstract discourses concerning ontology and metaphysics into something which can be interrogated even by a child. Limits. The reason why wizards are limited, why the Summoner tells Ged a wizard does only and wholly what he must, why Merlyn refuses to cast spells for Wart’s friend and why Gandalf doesn’t raze the gates of Mordor and cast down Barad Dur with his own hands is because magic cannot be limited. It is the inexhaustible wellspring. And to try and command that, to use it as a tool, is akin to trying to draw down the sun to warm your house. To try and command magic is to be consumed. This is the wisdom that limits the wizard.

Sanderson’s third law is the most tedious of the bunch. “Expand what you already have before you add something new,” he says and, frankly what can I say beyond that this is the very antithesis of magic. Earlier I described Magic as being best a representation of becoming – magic is the bringing forth of nothingness into being. In this I’d gladly cite the historical use of alchemy to create long life, gold or simply to create the capacity for creation. And, of course, alchemists failed in part because their knowledge of the things they were trying to create was incomplete and flawed and in part because they’d failed to learn the Summoner’s commandment, “do only and wholly what you must.” This statement is not, however absent from the teachings of historical magi. For instance there is Crowley’s famous proclamation, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

The Book of the Law continues, “pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.” And this begins to hint at what Crowley means by will. Because Crowley’s pure will is “delivered from the lust of result” – the mage does not seek project. Rather Pure Will is what Nietzsche would describe as Amor Fati.

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Fredrich Nietzsche – The Gay Science

Pure will represents an aesthetic and ethical acceptance of what one only and wholly must do. In the face of the limitless font of all being there is no wisdom but wuwei. Zhuangzi says “the noble master who finds he has to follow some course to govern the world will realize that actionless action (wuwei) is the best course. By no-action, he can rest in the real substance of his nature and destiny.”

For Zhuangzi the world is far too vast for any person to command – to attempt to command it is to throw it into disarray. Only through this letting go, this retreat, can one grasp what one must do. There is an arrogance to the belief that a person can narrow magic and shape it into a human project. This arrogance caused alchemists to chase dreams of gold or to drink mercury and cinnabar, poisoning themselves out of a desire for eternal life. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. As magic is becoming, is the very process by which the new arises, it’s laughable to instruct authors to pare it back, to build a logical system.

Sanderson has a “zeroth” law. He enumerated it thusly to match Asimov’s laws of robotics. This is laughable as the laws of robotics were diegetic laws – not advice to writers. But it’s the best of the bunch so I do want to give it mention despite its silly allusion to classic SF. “Err on the side of awesome.” On this we agree in a way. When I described the value of magic in literature as being purely affective, pure intensity, I was gesturing in the direction of awe. Awe is equal parts beauty and terror. There is awe in the scene of Gandalf’s meeting with the three hunters. There is awe in Guo Jing listening to the musical duel. But awe is an ecstatic sensation. It’s what Bataille would call a limit experience. Awe, in fiction, should grip the reader like the hooks and chains of a cenobite. It should leave the reader exposed and discomforted. Awe is not an experience bound by law. The colloquial use of “awesome” to mean “agreeable,” or “enjoyable” is a failure of understanding of the magic not written into a story but working upon the reader through engagement with the story. A writer provokes awe not by putting magic into the story but by making magic of the story.

Magic is not cybernetic. It must be taken whole: like the sun in a forest, like blood on a stone. It doesn’t need to be limited if it is used correctly. There’s no point to building a gun that is fueled by willpower points rather than bullets. That isn’t what magic is for in fiction. Magic makes the invisible visible. It makes the impossible possible. It makes nothingness into being. There is no law here that governs magic; the only law is that which governs the mage: wuwei, amor fati, pure will. And so my advice to writers is to abandon all laws. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Find the magic in your work, the real magic, not the technology of pyrotechnics and telekinesis. And surrender to it.

Content Warnings and Censorship: What is the duty of the artist?

/ Simon

The recent acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has led to a centering of several interrelated discourses regarding online speech and social media. Many of these conversations have to do with the intersection of free expression and community safety. Now in part this is because Musk, prior to and during his court-enforced acquisition of Twitter, talked a lot about how his motivation for acquiring the social media platform was to foster freer speech on Twitter. This largely seems to have been taken as a rallying cry for right-wing voices who ran afoul of Twitter’s hate-speech moderation policies to return to the site although, in the chaos following Musk’s acquisition, it appears that many of the reactivated right-wingers were promptly banned again as many of these content moderation policies remained in place after the start of Musk’s chaotic tenure.

However this brings in a second thread. Because the period of Musk’s onboarding has been incredibly chaotic: marked by mass firings and haphazard policy decisions that seem to have been cooked up on the fly by the incoming owner. In all this chaos many users have looked to alternatives and one stood out as appearing, on the surface, close enough to Twitter to attract attention: Mastodon. Now, of course, many of these similarities are skin-deep. There are massive structural differences in that nearly anyone can host a Mastodon instance and nearly anyone can register on a Mastodon instance and communicate with others on that instance.

However the biggest social grouping within Mastodon is the Fediverse: a series of interconnected (federated) Mastodon instances that allow cross-communication and that agree to certain shared content moderation standards. The Fediverse, as with most large social websites, has a highly distinct culture and one element of Fediverse culture is widespread use of content tagging. And when I say widespread I mean it’s considered, within the Fediverse, good form to provide brief descriptive content warnings for a vast panoply of potential media from things you might expect (such as discussions of sexual assault and suicide) to those that might, on the surface, seem more benign (such as food photos).

This is largely an emergent property of a system that was an early adopter of content warning tagging and a culture very interested in users being able to customize their social media experience. The culture of Mastodon does not view content warnings merely as a tool to alert users to material that might cause a trauma response but also simply as a tool to allow users to opt into what sorts of things they see and engage with as opposed to Twitter’s more opt-out system of blocking and muting. Many Twitter users accessed Mastodon only to be confronted with a wall of (TW: Food), (TW: Nudity), (TW: specific-type-of-body), etc. and found this disconcerting to say the least. And many Twitter users have reported back to complain about this cultural difference on Twitter where this discussion of content warnings has found ample attention within the writing community.

Within this community there has been a recent flurry of discussion regarding whether authors have a duty to provide explicit content tagging in their books. The opposing views here on one hand are that this will allow readers to make informed decisions about the sort of material they read, allowing them to avoid books that engage with subjects that are likely to retraumatize them. On the other hand some people, including myself, have been quick to point out that content warnings may be fine as a voluntary provision but should not become an industry standard, citing examples such as film rating systems and parental advisory warnings on music as having had a significant censorious impact that was particularly born by marginalized artists including people of colour and LGBTQ+ artists. A third group largely consists of racists who want to be able to say slurs online but we can disregard them from this conversation because, frankly, neither side of the argument I care about here has anything good to say about those sorts of people. However this discussion ends up at something of an impasse when one assumes both that content warnings serve a purpose for protecting readers who have experienced trauma and that standardization of content tagging will lead to censorship.

As such, in order for this conversation to progress it behooves us to ask a few questions.

  1. Do content warnings have a positive impact on the reading experience of traumatized readers?
  2. Do content warnings lead to censorship?
  3. Do artists have a moral duty to furnish content warnings?
  4. Can artists meaningfully create effective content warnings that can serve traumatized readers?
  5. Are content warnings really for traumatized readers at all or do they serve some other function?

Now before we dig into these five questions there’s a few questions that will not be entertained. These include whether freedom of speech, as an abstract principle, is more important than the safety and access of any marginalized group and whether it is morally permissible for authors or classroom instructors to voluntarily disclose content that they deem might give their audience problems. Frankly there is nothing wrong with a teacher, upon assigning Lord of the Flies to schoolchildren, telling the schoolchildren that certain material is contained within the book. In fact it is somewhat critical to do so in order that the children can be made alert to this content and how it communicates the themes of the book. In other words disclosure of content is positive in a classroom setting because it allows for anticipation of content and attention to content rather than because it allows for avoidance. A student who is studying a text should anticipate material in it so that they can learn how to identify components of the text that might not be as obvious as the plot.

And as for authors: if an author wants to disclose this sort of material voluntarily, as the academic research we will review later supports quite clearly, this isn’t likely to be overly harmful to anyone and may be helpful to the author in marketing. I think it’s important to set these limits up front because while this discussion will explore some discursively fraught questions it will not at any point be saying that authors must not include content warnings nor that instructors should not disclose information about a fraught text to their class.

But what I will be doing here is ultimately asking the question of what content warnings do and who they serve.

And a good place to start that is in the academic literature on content warnings. Now I will start by referring to a paper from within the class of research called meta-analysis. Meta-analyses are a form of research paper common in medicine and social science: fields of research that are both highly dependent on statistical analysis of data to make conclusions and that also suffer from systemic limitations on sample size and composition. These papers will do a survey of extant research on a topic and will seek out recurring methodologies, themes and limitations. Having established, using these points, that disparate studies are exploring the same topic they will then conduct a statistical analysis of the results of findings across studies to ascertain the replicability of findings. The study I will be working with most here is, “A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes” by Bridgeland, Jones and Bellet.

Now the first thing I want to do is to focus on their discussion of limitations because Bridgeland et. al. raise a very important point here that we will be returning to. “Although the current study provides evidence that trigger warnings are broadly inert as applied writ large, it does not provide information on whether trigger warnings have differing effects in specific subpopulations or contexts.” This is because, due to both reasons of access and ethics, most studies of trigger warnings do not consist of people who have experienced traumatic events nor of people suffering from PTSD. Instead they mostly draw from a general population. This makes the findings of the majority of academic work on the topic inapplicable to our first question. Do content warnings have a positive impact on the reading experience of traumatized readers? Honestly, according to this analysis we don’t really have strong evidence one way or the other.

However what we can say is that content warnings do almost nothing one way or the other to people who don’t have mental health needs surrounding trauma. In fact Bridgeland et. al. found only one measurable category in which content warnings did anything statistically significant at all: “trigger warnings appear to reliably increase anticipatory anxiety about upcoming content. This finding is supported by both subjective (e.g., rating scales) and objective (e.g., psychophysiological measures) markers of distress. Moreover, this finding appears to be consistent across the different trigger warning types used across studies, attesting to the robustness of this effect.

In theory, this anticipatory period could indicate that forewarned individuals are bracing themselves for a negative emotional experience. However, as discussed in the section on response affect, whatever bracing might occur during this anticipatory period is apparently completely ineffective.”

Of particular note here are the psychophysiological measures used for anticipatory anxiety: heart rate, respiratory rate and skin conductance. These measures were used in only one study and represent the most statistically significant variance from the general support of the null hypothesis found in almost all studies.

But those of us who engage with horror media know about this sort of anticipatory anxiety all too well. It pretty closely maps to the tension one might feel during a stalking scene or some other moment of peril before a horrific event occurs. It’s something horror artists actively court, building mood in order to entice the audience to become anxious and it’s an affect the audience of horror generally seeks out. People who don’t like being scared don’t generally like horror.

But what this does, when read in light of Bridgeland et. al. comments on the limitations of these studies, is point to the fact that we cannot do a straightforward read of, ‘content warnings increase anxiety and therefore are bad,’ because what they do is give non-traumatized audiences a taste of the forbidden pleasures to come. Far from being a tool for avoidance, “cw:incest” allows a reader to anticipate that they will be reading a book that contains incest and it’s worth noting that this anxiety could actually sweeten the reading experience for them in much the same way that a horror fan enjoys a kill better when it’s been built up properly (I’m thinking of the perfectly executed build-up to the kill of Wes Hicks in Scream (2022) as an example.)

So this now points us not toward an answer to our first question but rather to our fifth. Are content warnings really for traumatized readers? Certainly they aren’t just for traumatized readers although the advocates of them rarely seem interested in pitching them as a tool for marketing and discovery it does appear that, when not engaging with a traumatized audience but rather with a general audience, that this is just about the only thing content warnings do at all.

But if we want to look at the impact on traumatized readers in particular we have to turn our attention to a different study. “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals with Trauma Histories,” by Jones, Bellet and McNally is one of a very small number of studies that actually looks at the effect of content warnings specifically on traumatized populations. Now again we should start with limitations here as it’s very important, when working with academic research, to be alert to the scope of the research. In this case the principal limitation is a methodological weakness of depending on self-report for all participants. While steps were taken to ensure subjects had experienced trauma there does not appear to be much the authors could have done to prevent a person from providing misleading information regarding their past experiences. However a clinical study, which might have validated the trauma experience of subjects more cleanly, would certainly not have been able to achieve the sample size of n=600 that this paper managed.

Further limitations, however, included a dependence on English fluency and a requirement for US residency that should not be overlooked as challenges to replicability. However, at the end of the day, the paper came to conclusions that very closely mirrored Bridgeland et. al. saying, “For individuals who met a clinical cutoff for severity of PTSD symptoms, trigger warnings slightly increased anxiety. Trigger warnings were not helpful for individuals who self-reported a diagnosis of PTSD. Perhaps most convincingly, trigger warnings were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas. That is, when considering only the passages which participants reported as reminding them of past trauma, trigger warnings were still unhelpful.”

Perhaps more damning still was the confirmation of the information Bridgeland et. al. had found regarding anticipatory anxiety, saying, “We found evidence that trigger warnings increase the narrative centrality of trauma among survivors, which is countertherapeutic (Boals & Murrell, 2016). We also found that trigger warnings increase anxiety for those with more severe symptoms of PTSD. Although these effects were preregistered and found in a large sample, the size of the effects were small and have not yet been rigorously tested across multiple studies.” Now the authors are quite right to point out that this impact was small and that replication is required so I think it would be hasty to say that content warnings are actively harmful to people who meet the clinical cutoff for PTSD (among people who do not meet that requirement the null hypothesis was observed).

And so we can now answer the question of whether content warnings have a positive impact on the reading experience of traumatized people – they don’t. According to the best research available, for most people who have undergone trauma, content warnings do nothing much at all. For those people whose suffering is particularly severe there is even a small risk a content warning might harm more than it helps. We can also say with certainty that authors cannot meaningfully create content warnings that will serve a traumatized audience because the reality is that, to the extent content warnings serve anyone at all, they serve non-traumatized audiences and authors best via their use as a discovery tool and for the deliberate assumption of anxious affects in the course of engaging with material that touches on taboo subjects.

But all this talk of null hypothesis means this does become a question of personal taste and courtesy. You can be assured that you won’t much hurt a person by omitting a content warning but courtesy certainly goes beyond avoidance of explicit harm. It doesn’t harm someone to eschew “please” and “thank you” but if you never use either phrase people still might rightly call you an asshole.

This is where our second and third questions are still relevant. Having established that content warnings have nearly no clinical impact on traumatized populations our next question is whether content warnings might in fact be harmful to marginalized audiences. For this we might want to visit the advent of the parental advisory label on music.

The response from the record industry has been that it, much like content warnings, had very little impact at all. It was useful as a marketing tool both for albums with it and albums without. For example, manager Danny Goldberg pointed out that while the sticker did allow stores like WalMart to brand themselves as “family-friendly” by declining to sell any album with a PA label most children had very little difficulty acquiring material that was marked as parental advisory. Overall the stickers didn’t much effect record sales one way or the other.

This was less the case in film where the Hays Code and subsequent film and television ratings systems inordinately targeted queer narratives, largely driving LGBTQ+ artists and themes out of cinema. Now books are not movies nor are they records. But in both cases we see how ratings and advisory systems have been deployed as a method of exclusion. Unsuccessfully in the case of music, where the exclusion of “PA” content by WalMart was countered by the willingness of record stores to sell “PA” material and successfully in the case of cinema where the ratings system created a series of economic incentives for self-censorship. As such those people who have concerns about systematic industry standards in content reporting leading to censorship have a point. While the attempts to censor material based on industry-set content warnings has been haphazard and has certainly not been universally successful the use of industry standard content warnings has, in other artwork, been used to censor that art.

This then finally establishes the full framework for commenting on an author’s moral responsibility. Content warnings are useless for traumatized people to manage trauma reactions but useful as a discovery tool among general populations. They may lead to censorship but it’s not clear the extent to which such censorship would be effective. Certainly there has been a lot of proactive attention from reactionaries on book censorship of late and giving these reactionaries extra tools with which to discover books to ban would be counter-indicated. But the advocates of content warnings like to point out a key outlier circumstance as a justification for the moral argument: the deployment of sexual assault in fiction. Now they’ve certainly got a point that if some inconsiderate person runs around shouting “rape” we would consider that rude, immoral, and alarming behaviour. And we cannot just handwave away every deployment of sexual assault in fiction as being beyond reproach. There are boundless examples of rapes that were included to titillate and, even among those works with something critical to say about sexual assault, there’s no guarantee that these themes will be approached well by the author. If I had a nickel for every book or movie that tried to deconstruct some concept only to reify it out of incompetence I’d be a wealthy man.

Giving people a heads-up about this might, then, be a gesture of common courtesy. And that would suggest it is, at least, the polite thing to do to provide content warnings for this (along with other broadly questionable content). Except we need to recontextualize this call for courtesy in light of some of the academic findings about content warnings. Specifically: there is no indication that people who read a content warning are any more likely to avoid that content but again we need to bring up that increase in anticipatory anxiety. We cannot count on people to use this courtesy to decide to read something else. Academic research suggests they probably won’t – at least in aggregate – but we can count on people to get excited by it. Their heart rates rise, they breathe faster. This then raises an opposite question: is an author morally responsible to tell people that their kinks are in a book? I mean it’s a bit of a silly question, isn’t it, because if I’m an author writing kink I want an audience who want to read kink to find it. But is that a moral imperative or is it just good marketing? Any regular reader of this blog will be aware that I’m quite apprehensive about assigning moral imperatives to art. The aestheticization of morality is a dangerous tool and a favourite one of reactionaries. People generally have a hard time separating out, “this is beautiful” from “this is good.” It’s quite easy to look at the deployment of something in a work of art, such as a sex assault, and say, “wow that was ugly and no good.” But ugly is not the same as evil and I think it’s important for critics and artists, especially, to learn to differentiate between an ugly work of poorly executed art (like a Dresden Files novel) from an evil work of propaganda (like the Turner Diaries).

Bring libido into the picture and it becomes even more of a landmine. Because once you go from “this is beautiful” to “this excites me” moral questions immediately become far more tangled. After all, who doesn’t likely feel shame about their own arousal in some form? This is especially so if we’re dealing with darker erotic themes. While I can certainly understand that some readers might prefer not to interrogate that it seems unlikely that content warnings will actually help them with that.

In the end I think part of the problem is one of form. The advocates for content warnings want short, broad, concise tags at the front of a book. This is excellent for marketing and discovery because it’s very algorithm friendly. I would propose a more graceful method is to actually use back-flap space to describe what a book is about rather than reserving it for blurbs. I don’t think anybody benefits from reading The Story of the Eye without understanding what they’re in for ahead of time. But I think that a clinical, “CW: Masturbation, Rape, Dubious Consent, Violent Orgies, Necrophilia,” doesn’t particularly do justice to the affect being pursued. Context matters and should be communicated in such a discussion. But an exploration of the context being one about Bataille grappling with the interplay of sex and death in European thought, expanding upon the legacy of Sade (of whom he was a principal scholar) and raising questions of limit experiences and madness isn’t going to give you that easy-to-search list of tags they prefer.

But what it does is improve discoverability. Ultimately there’s no sincere debate about whether it should be possible to find out what a book is about. The question is one of form: should this look like a voluntary and often community-driven process of resource sharing or should it be a system of brief and concise tags an author is supposed to put on their book.

Certainly tags share a few benefits: They’re good for marketers and for censors for precisely the same reason – they make it easy to find content you’re looking for. But this is where the benefit ends. The preference for context-driven back-cover notes and third-party disclosure (such as instructors discussing challenging material prior to reading in class and community driven efforts to surface potentially upsetting content) is less friendly to marketing efforts and raises the risk that things might be missed but it does provide the necessary context to identify the difference between a work that deploys charged material for libidinal reasons from those that do the same for critical reasons – something tagging systems are necessarily mute on.

And so, here at the end, we have our answers:

  1. Content warnings have nearly no impact on traumatized readers.
  2. Content warnings may or may not lead to censorship but do lead to increased discoverability which is a useful tool both for marketers and censors.
  3. Artists do not have a moral duty to make work more discoverable. But if they want to find an audience to sell their work to it’s probably not a bad idea. Furthermore it’s good from a critical readership perspective that context concerning the content of a work be known prior to reading so that a reader may be alert to it.
  4. Because content warnings do not meaningfully serve traumatized readers artists cannot meaningfully create content warnings that serve traumatized readers.
  5. Content warnings appear to increase anticipatory anxiety but not avoidance among non-traumatized populations, making them effective for getting a person excited for upcoming material. This, combined with the concise and tag-like method preferred by advocates make them excellent marketing and discovery tools.

So in the end who do content warnings really serve? The people who want to read that content and the writers who want to sell it.

On Authority and the Author

/ Simon / 2 Comments

I think Engels is sometimes unfairly maligned. There was long a tendency, and it has not ever fully ended, to treat Engels as if he were the author of every failure and error in Marxism. And perhaps the work most responsible for cementing his position as the sin eater of Marxism is On Authority.

This text is, on the surface an aggressive repudiation of an Anarchist tendency to want to obliterate hierarchy, level all power differentials, and leave everybody equal. This sort of flat equality had never been the objective of Marxism and Engels is critical of it as lacking an understanding of the depth of power. “Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organization; now, is it possible to have organization without authority?” He asks.

And yet I think the greatest problem with On Authority is the number of readers of Engels who stop there and who never develop the necessary introspection to turn a later statement at themselves or the heads of state they admire, “These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.” And yet, for many readers of Engels the decision is to do just that!

It’s the people’s jail; completely different from a regular prison. And the prison is important here because I think a more productive read of On Authority would be to see it as an anticipation of Discipline and Punish. Engels quite rightly points out how the technologies that existed in the late 19th century helped form an authoritarian subjectivity. He demonstrates that a factory worker or a steam ship operator must, by necessity, create a form of authority in order to accomplish their tasks.

This, in a way, echoes Foucault’s suggestion that the epistemological shift that created the conditions for the prison was far vaster than a mere building of stone and steel. Engels diagnoses the problem of authority in much the same way Foucault diagnoses the problem of discipline. The principal difference is that Engels, in the 1870s says, we cannot abandon this yet, while Foucault, a century later, says, we should have abandoned this long ago.

Engels is arguing that the power relationship of authority, the idea that one person could subordinate the will of the other to achieve a collective aim, is necessary for conducting the violence of the revolution. ” Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois?” And he’s not entirely wrong. He almost comes to a profound understanding: the problem of authority is not that it exists but rather that it persists. Tari comes to this realization when he points to the example of Subcomandante Marcos who dissolved back into the anonymity of the people after his role as a spokesperson for the Zapatistas was no longer needed. “Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society.” Engels says and this suggests an understanding that authority is, and must be, contingent.

The problem that arises is that this authority congeals into an institution and this, like the prison and the disciplinary society it is a part of, continues long after the moment it should have been struck down.

And so, you can see, we can construct an Engels who speaks against Lenin, Stalin and all the authoritarian Marxists who follow in their wake from the very essay from which they build their case for the people’s jail.

But this raises the question of whether this is an authentic Engels. Certainly I’m reading into the text things that simply could not be there. Engels assumes inevitability and yet I demand he sees contingency. I divide him against himself.

There are certain people who might shrug at this and suggest that whether Engels saw authority as an inevitable product of a productive society or as a contingent phenomenon tied to a vast network of other contingencies is irrelevant to how an audience receives a text. And in doing so they take my divided Engels and split him fully: we have the Engels of the inevitable and we have the Engels of the contingent. This situates the discursive power of the text fully in its interpretation. A message is only as strong as the receipt of it.

But, of course, there is another possibility ignored by this very dialectically divided Engels. And that is that both of these divided figures occupy the same space. We can start by stepping back and asking whether I divided Engels in the interpretation or if these contradictions were there in the text, equally present but irreconcilable. It is a misunderstanding of contingency to suggest it is flat. In a fully contingent universe even contingency is contingent and we must expect to see the accretion of consistency.

From within a domain of consistency that consistency likely seems inevitable. It occludes the contingency on the horizon. But this is only ever metastable. After all: the consistency is contingent. Transformation may occur at any moment. When they have changed the names of things they may not have changed the things themselves but a transformation of a thing will also require a transformation of its name. And yet none of this is erased. No matter how much I unfold destitution out of On Authority the inevitable Engels of Stalin remains too.

This is the nature of authorship. We cannot erase intent; it will always be there in the text. However we cannot assume intent is singular. Intent changes; intent becomes other to itself. Even the dead Engels can change his mind when contradictory thoughts exist on the page. This is not to say that there is a unity between my destituent Engels and the Engels of the inevitable. Such an encounter is, to paraphrase Deleuze, as absurd as an authentic encounter between a sadist and a masochist. And so we cannot simply re-unify Engels into one who contains both. He is already fragments. As are we all. But these fragments can coalesce too; new consistencies can be achieved that are wholly alien to the ones before. These remain metastable and contingent, of course, and this is why the work of liberation will never be done. Even if we perfected society we could not assume it would stay perfect. But it’s precious to remember, in the aftermath of a disaster especially, that destitution and constitution are dynamic processes that never reach unity but also can never achieve totality. The marks of the past will always be upon us. But we don’t live there. And over the horizon is something different.

Ghost of Ned Ludd in the Shell

/ Simon / 1 Comment
“Ned Ludd Smashes a Loom” via an AI Art platform.

With the total collapse of the NFT market the financiers whose grift involves the full financialization of art has had to look to different tactics. Happily they have found just such a rhetorical tool in the emerging field of, “AI Art.”

AI Art, much like NFTs, has been around for a while but has had a recent influx of attention and cash from the tech sector. Google Deep Dream was likely the first exposure people had to this medium and it has been around since 2015. However recent iterations of the software have become more controllable than Deep Dream. The training sets have “improved” as long as one’s yard stick for improvement excludes exploitation. The result is that it’s easier to get aesthetically unified results from a prompt than it had been previously where you’d mostly just get animal chimera jammed into input images like distortion patterns.

There is currently a debate ongoing regarding AI art which asks a few questions:

  1. Is AI art actually art at all?
  2. Is AI art theft?
  3. Should AI art be resisted.

I will principally be discussing the third point here but I do want to address the first and second points to say the proponents of AI art are mostly correct in that what I’ve previously called Will Toward Art can be found in the cycles of prompt and iteration undertaken by an AI Artist. The automation and mediation by machinery present in AI art is just as present in photography. One is shot framing and selection from a field of material objects. The other is shot framing and selection from an iteration of an algorithm. As such it would be disingenuous to say that AI Art is not art.

Now that doesn’t mean it’s any good and the majority of AI art is at best, by the very nature of its iterative selection process, parodic and derivative. The algorithmic basis of AI art is to take a catalog of extant works related to the prompt keywords and to shuffle through them seeking out similarities in order to output a result. You cannot but create a parody of extant works when you are using such a basis for creation.

But parodic art is still art and insofar as difference can arise out of the affective change brought about by repetition this art can, in theory, lead to the arising of the new via that process.

This then brings about the question of whether AI art is theft and I don’t think it’s possible to say anything other than that it is. As AI art is entirely predicated upon the iterative sampling of extant images it is, fundamentally, a theft. But then I’ve been clear in the past that such iterative cycles are a part of art and that this criminality is inseparable from the artistic process. What’s the issue here is that AI art automates this theft.

A counter-example of art being theft in a non-automated manner would be to look at the upcoming Zach Snyder film Rebel Moon. Snyder’s project started off as a Star Wars film but, when that fell through, he went on trucking, iterating upon the ground Star Wars laid. I suspect the parodic character of the final product will be effectively self-evident. Certainly everything I’ve seen about it anticipates this likelihood.

However, in order to do this act of replication, Snyder had to produce a whole $83 million film project employing a few hundred people, including many, many artists, each of whom will be bringing their own ideas and influences into the fold. An AI art program does this with the literal push of the button.

We can make similar statements regarding iteration and the use of samples in music. While music that samples other songs clearly is taking from that art it requires labour to do so. This then is the crux of the problem with the automation of AI Art: the complicated and organic process of iteration has been handed over to a machine that automates it, making it far easier for artists and non-artists alike to produce a result that is, at the very least, reminiscent of artwork.

And that raises the third question: Should this be resisted?

Now I have seen some proponents of AI Art conjuring the specter of the Luddites to argue against resisting the arising of AI art. However most of them couch this within the idea that automation was inevitable and Luddites were fools to resist. “AI art is coming for your job regardless so you better be prepared.” And of course this is nonsense.

Let’s start by looking at one of the most rigorous nearly-contemporary accounts of the Luddites.
“Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of the process of production, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of modern industry as cotton yarn, self-actors, and the electric telegraph. Before passing to the consideration of the extension of that legislation in England, we shall shortly notice certain clauses contained in the Factory Acts, and not relating to the hours of work. Apart from their wording, which makes it easy for the capitalist to evade them, the sanitary clauses are extremely meagre, and, in fact, limited to provisions for whitewashing the walls, for insuring cleanliness in some other matters, for ventilation, and for protection against dangerous machinery. In the third book we shall return again to the fanatical opposition of the masters to those clauses which imposed upon them a slight expenditure on appliances for protecting the limbs of their workpeople, an opposition that throws a fresh and glaring light on the Free-trade dogma, according to which, in a society with conflicting interests, each individual necessarily furthers the common weal by seeking nothing but his own personal advantage! One example is enough. The reader knows that during the last 20 years, the flax industry has very much extended, and that, with that extension, the number of scutching mills in Ireland has increased. In 1864 there were in that country 1,800 of these mills. Regularly in autumn and winter women and “young persons,” the wives, sons, and daughters of the neighbouring small farmers, a class of people totally unaccustomed to machinery, are taken from field labour to feed the rollers of the scutching mills with flax. The accidents, both as regards number and kind, are wholly unexampled in the history of machinery. In one scutching mill, at Kildinan, near Cork, there occurred between 1852 and 1856, six fatal accidents and sixty mutilations; every one of which might have been prevented by the simplest appliances, at the cost of a few shillings.” Marx says at the start of Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 15, Part 9 – framing the conflict between milling machinery and workers like the Luddites not in the abstract realm of the dangers of automation but rather in the physical toll these factories put to workers and, this being important, the power relations that allowed for that toll. Marx is clear that it is, in fact, the vague wording of laws and the penurious behaviour of factory owners that led to factory casualties rather than the intrinsic character of the factory.

Marx pivots to discussing technological change more directly, saying, “The only thing, that here and there causes a change, besides new raw material supplied by commerce, is the gradual alteration of the instruments of labour. But their form, too, once definitely settled by experience, petrifies, as is proved by their being in many cases handed down in the same form by one generation to another during thousands of years. A characteristic feature is, that, even down into the eighteenth century, the different trades were called “mysteries” (mystères); into their secrets none but those duly initiated could penetrate. modern industry rent the veil that concealed from men their own social process of production, and that turned the various, spontaneously divided branches of production into so many riddles, not only to outsiders, but even to the initiated. The principle which it pursued, of resolving each process into its constituent movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of man, created the new modern science of technology.”

And of course it’s immediately evident to see the process by which automation is now doing to the mysteries of the arts what Marx was demonstrating in his discussion of potters and weavers. As such we have to re-situate the Luddite movement, even based on the strength of these establishing statements alone, as not one of a class against machines but rather as a battlefield of antagonisms between two classes: the craftsmen who were undergoing a process of proletarianization and the owners of machines who wished to suck their blood. As Marx says, “We have seen how this absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of modern industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail-function, to make him superfluous.” This is precisely the ‘inevitable’ future, brought about solely by technology, that these advocates of AI demand artists content themselves with. Marx’s final word on the Luddites comes down to this, “It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.” And it’s necessary, when deciding if AI art is to be resisted, to ask this same question: is the problem the machine or the hand that controls it?

Certainly this automated art stealing from and iterating upon a vast catalog of images posted online, has the capability to supplant illustrators, advertisers and other such artists. But this supplanting is not a matter of the tool but rather the mode in which it is used.

And this, then, is where we must begin asking for whom these tools have been made and to what ends. There is a tendency, within capitalism, to attempt to mystify the machinery of it. If the problem is that the eternal system of capitalism creates externalities it’s easy enough to shrug it away. It wasn’t on purpose that the machine crushed illustrators; it was merely their time to be automated into obsolescence.

But, of course, this assumes far too much. Who owns this machine is a far more pressing question and, in the case of OpenAI whose Dall-E tool is one of the most popular, the ownership question points back to Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Musk eventually departed leaving the “capped profit” limited partnership, registered in the tax haven state of Delaware (natch) under the control of Altman and Greg Brockman. This is not a tool owned by artists nor for artists. It’s a commercial asset of the financial class. And this, then, demystifies the nature of the struggle. Altman, Brockman and the rest of the tech-startup-venture-capital crowd would prefer that they be paid for illustration instead of little artists. Craftsmen find their work copied by a black-box machine and their jobs supplanted by an AI that can produce ugly illustrations on demand for the low-low price of $15 for 115 prompts. So much more efficient than hiring a craftsperson.

So, yes, AI art should be resisted. It shouldn’t be resisted because it copies images and iterates on them but rather because its application is yet another attempt of tiresome tech bros, the self-same ones who tried to sell the world on NFTs, to suck the blood of working artists. Smash the fucking things to the ground.

Fantasy and history

/ Simon / 1 Comment

Recently Amazon released the first few episodes of the new tv show about the second age – The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

This ensemble cast fantasy show is set in the second age of Tolkien’s world (the events of the Lord of the Rings happen some 3-5,000 odd years later at the end of the third age). It explores the creation of the rings of power by the elven craftsmen under Celebrimbor‘s leadership and the tutelage of Sauron in his guise as Annatar, “the Lord of Gifts.”

However this Lord of the Rings show has become a center of controversy, along with the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon and the Disney live action remake of the Little Mermaid for casting choices that gave major roles to non-white actors.

The argument from certain (bigoted) corners of the internet is that the inclusion especially of black characters in this setting is damaging to the historical accuracy of these stories. But of course this is patently nonsense.

Now the easiest way to demonstrate this is nonsense is to point out that Rome had significant African holdings and that, as early as 19 BC Roman explorers had crossed the Sahara and made contact with Sub-Saharan cultures. Furthermore from the 8th until the 15th century much of what is now Spain was occupied by an African aristocracy after the invasion of Tariq ibn Ziyad. This is all information that would have been readily available to Tolkien as a philologist and literary scholar. But, of course, for that to be relevant you would have to contend that fantasy exists to reproduce history. And that’s just not the case.

While fantasy books may have a deep interest in history fantasy, by its very nature, is uninterested in producing an accurate simulation of history. This would be more properly historical study – or, if we’re being generous, historical fiction. Fantasy, as speculative literature, is unlikely to have much to say about a careful reproduction of history.

Where fantasy lives instead is in the area of meta-questions regarding history: what is the relationship between history and the present? How does history inform a person’s position in the world? Can history be escaped? What is the weight of history?

And these sorts of questions depend not on reproducing history but on disrupting it. The flooding of Beleriand and later of Numenor is thus informed, not just by Atlantis, but also by the flooding of Doggerland – which flooded across two periods: one in which an island was left and a second in which the island remnants were washed away, likely by a tsunami. The events in Doggerland are prehistorical ones discovered via archaeological labour and happy accident. The people of Doggerland were a mesolithic culture which we can say very little of. Certainly it would be difficult in the extreme to trace the occupants of that flooded land to any modern nation.

Throughout the Lord of the Rings the heroes are forever passing through the ancient ruins of abandoned kingdoms. Orthanc and Osgiliath, Amon Sûl and Khazad-dûm, Minas Morgul and Amon Hen are all remnants of three thousand years of history. The weapons of the Barrow Downs are likewise ancient, coming from kingdoms extinguished 1,500 years previous.

History, in Tolkien, is the ruin within which the present moment walks. How can we possibly speak of accuracy in its depiction when there has been so much clarity provided by the text that it believes history to be an incomplete and fragmentary account? This is reinforced metatextually via Tolkien’s appendices which provide fragments of historical record: selected charts of lineage, some linguistics, notes on things forgotten.

Frankly I do have some complaints with how Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power handles history because the show seems intent on compressing 3,000 years of the second age into a period the length of a human lifespan. Events that should be separated by centuries and people who lived many lifetimes apart are walking shoulder to shoulder so that the show can maintain a consistent cast. I worry that this takes away some of the most interesting things Tolkien’s work has to say about history and that it, more than anything else the show has done, grounds his elves and transforms them from the semi-angelic beings they are into just guys with pointy ears and ninja powers.

However, if we are going to do away with the argument that Lord of the Rings, or fantasy more generally, is trying to accurately reproduce history then the obvious presence of people of African descent throughout the last 2,000 years of European history is also not available as an apologia. However textual accuracy becomes important. And frequently it’s an examination of textual references that displays the poor reading comprehension of many bigots. After all, fantasy and science fiction is filled with non-white characters whose depictions have either been white-washed without any furor (Ged in the execrable Earthsea mini-series) or whose accurate depictions led to outcry from racists who were too poor at reading comprehension to recognize what they were reading.

Now the truth is that I don’t believe any apologia is necessary to diversely cast fantasy stories. They’re fantasies. We can do what we like with them. But if we absolutely must cling to questions of reproductive accuracy the question should at least be, “were there people of colour in the text this show is based on?” And the answer to that is yes. Fortunately Tolkien straight up tells us that some hobbits, in particular, are not white. Let’s examine some quotes:

“In his lap lay Frodo’s head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam’s brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master’s breast.”

Here it’s important to remember that this couldn’t possibly be referring to Sam being tanned from working outside for so long. This scene happens just outside of Mordor after both Frodo and Sam had been travelling for six months.

Now I know a lot of the people complaining about race depictions in fantasy never leave their parents basements but take it from this weirdo farmer that it takes significantly less than six months for a tan to come in and yet Sam is described as brown and Frodo as white. They’ve been together six months, living outdoors for much of it, they’ve had the same opportunity to tan. If Sam’s skin colour, in this scene, is depicted as different from Frodo’s it’s because he had different coloured skin. This is not the only time that we see reference to Sam’s skin colour either. Sometime later, during the fight with Shelob, the story says, “As if to do honour to his hardihood, and to grace with splendour his faithful brown hobbit-hand that had done such deeds, the phial blazed forth suddenly, so that all the shadowy court was lit with a dazzling radiance like lightning; but it remained steady and did not pass.”

Sam is also described as having curly hair and brown eyes. Frankly casting Sean Astin in the role was whitewashing a character who was clearly written as not white. What’s more Tolkien says this is a characteristic of the largest of the hobbit clans, from whom Sam descends. “The Harfoots were browner of skin, smaller, and shorter, and they were beardless and bootless; their hands and feet were neat and nimble; and they preferred highlands and hillsides.”

The hobbit clan depicted in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are the Harfoots and while efforts have been made for diverse casting throughout the show it is among the Harfoots we see the greatest concentration of non-white actors. So frankly, while no apologetics are necessary to justify diverse casting, we have multiple clear references to Harfoots, such as Sam Gamgee, being brown-skinned, brown-eyed and curly-haired. How much clearer does this have to be spelled out?

But let’s give authorial intent the final word because Tolkien addressed race and segregation, contextualized within his youth in colonial South Africa, very clearly. And here’s what he said: “I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.”

Gothic anti-realism: art for the unsatisfied

/ Simon / 3 Comments
Angelus Novus by Paul Klee

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.“

— Walter Benjamin

We are being crushed under realism.

We are all living in a world after the age of no alternative. We are all cursed to see ourselves as survivors of a failed apocalypse: the so-called end of history. But in the absence of the end of history communicating anything truly revelatory we all seem trapped, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is, in brief, the ontological condition of capitalist realism. Believing that nothing can possibly create a real transformative change in the world order we are confined to what Fisher called “reflexive impotence.” We, “know things are bad, but more than that, {we} know {we} can’t do anything about it.” After all, history is over. All we can do now is accept that this is the final form of the world, the final and eternal order. Of course Fisher described this not as “a passive knowledge of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self fulfilling prophesy.”

Looking then at how this paradoxical apocalypse without an eschaton has affected the arts we can understand quite clearly how this realism leads to a few different strands:

  1. A prioritization of comfort as a response to absurdity
  2. A reification of normalcy onto those things that do not fit
  3. A fear and suspicion toward transformative change

These three threads run through quite a few liberal-progressive arguments with regard to art. For instance comfortcore, hopepunk and other proposed subgenres of fiction have attempted to carve out a moral imperative to tell people that it’s OK. The world already ended and you’re still here so you might as well get used to it and find your joy where you can.

We see a huge focus on the valor behind “found family” as the entirety of social life is re-enscribed into the domestic, familial, and (as such) patriarchal sphere. In fact we are told this is good, it’s progress that now, too, people who might have been excluded by their old patriarch can create a family of their own. There are, after all, as the prophet of the end of history, Margaret Thatcher said, “only individuals and their families. There is no alternative.”

And we see, in general, a lot of media that is focused on making the status quo nicer. We want everyone to have a seat at the table to the end of the world, every person should find a family with whom they can enjoy the endless grey suffocation of all this forevermore.

Because the vicissitudes of power have made it so that almost no art has a chance except for the broad, the corporate, the four-quadrant, the comfortable, we see a host of artists, fans and critics justifying that this is actually a good state of affairs. It’s right to engage mostly with children’s media. It’s suspicious to want art that is cynical, cruel or angry, Only reactionaries show wrath in public and you wouldn’t want to be one of them.

We want heroes who have fun adventures, find a family, and who demonstrate that even if they are something a little strange, like a sentient gemstone or a gay person, they’re actually Just Like You: a normal citizen of the end of the world.

But if all there is are individuals and their families then we can, as Deleuze says, “no longer form a unified subject able to act.” We aren’t a people. We aren’t a community. We’re individuals and their (found families) living in the ruins of ended time in suspension. So what is to be done? We can’t cozy our way out of the endless grey suffocation of capitalist realism. But likewise I doubt anyone would find that the equally stultifying (socialist) realism of the Stalinists and their descendants is any more comforting to the spirit.

In the end realism is, itself, the enemy. This idea that art must be applicable to this historical moment is itself an enemy. We don’t need a children’s cartoon to tell us how queer love is just the same as the heterosexual family. Instead we need a subtle knife that can cut time itself and kill even God. The art that this moment demands must reveal the rot of the end of history.

Shirley Jackson famously wrote, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone,” and I think this is a strong way to begin approaching the demands of art to break realism. And just as no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute realism. This stultifying sense of being at the end, at the final form, in the best possible fallen world, is maddening. Is it any wonder so many people want to retreat into nostalgia and childhood?

The gothic has always been an enemy of realism because the gothic recognizes first and foremost the impermanence of all things. The House of Usher exists to fall. Heathcliff cannot ultimately survive the death of Catherine. The damned immortality of Dorian Grey and of Count Dracula exists to be torn down.

The gothic is, as such, an historicizing form of fiction, it is one that places its subjects into a flow of history in which they are temporary and contingent. Not without consequence, of course, you cannot be a part of history while being entirely insubstantial. But the gothic does not exist in a world suffocated under a grey blanket of the real. The gothic treats the current moment as a dying and diseased thing that will be replaced in its turn by something else, something new.

It is important to note that new does not mean better. We cannot know, when we shatter the real of today, what the world of tomorrow will truly be like. It might be a horror show. But the time of monsters is birthed, per Gramsci because the old world is dying but the new one cannot be born. The refuse and ruin of the old world clogs the path. The grey blanket of “no alternative” forestalls the birth of the new.

It must be burned away.

And so I want art that is a torch touched to dry kindling.

I want art that is a knife that cuts that is a gun fired into a crowd.

I want art that leaves the audience uncomfortable and disturbed, that shows the crumbling foundations of the real and takes a sledgehammer to them. I don’t want a found family; I want to see other, novel, social formations that we might assume and I want artists to have the courage to say that, for instance, a sensate cluster isn’t a family at all. I want art to be the sharp knife that cuts the fetters on time and frees the angel of history from its shackles. I want art that maddens and confuses.

Not children’s cartoons but the avant garde. Not the MCU but Sion Sono. In order to cut away the fetters on history we must unmoor ourselves from nostalgia and the reflexive recreation of the past into the present and the future. Art like this does exist, of course. The directorial work of Julia Ducournau and Sion Sono, particularly their recent films, Titane and Prisoners of the Ghostland respectively, are key figures for such an art. In literature we can see this anti-realism and reactivation of history in the work of Tamsyn Muir (particularly her second book, Harrow the Ninth) and Jeff Vandermeer such as in the Southern Reach trilogy. In visual art, the work of Jessi Sheron, particularly her “Other Happy Place” project reflects many of these aesthetic values.

Many of these artists are grim. And the gothic will never be anything but dark. However you will never free the angel of history with hugs.

Upcoming projects

/ Simon

It’s been too long since I wrote something here in part because I’m planning some reviews of very long form media that I’ve just not finished with yet. As such I thought I’d briefly tease what I’m working on and its status lest my readers think I was done with this:

  • Elden Ring and Destituent Power: This is part of why I’ve been so quiet the last two months. This game is a fascinating work of art and I think there’s quite a lot we could say about it, and its view of the use of power, in light of the work of Tari, Benjamin Foucault and Marx. However I don’t want to really put pen to paper until I’ve completed a playthrough. I have been trying heroically to finish this vast game but it’s also my first FromSoft title and it’s been… a learning curve. So when I finally finish you can expect I have quite a lot to say.
  • Stranger Things and the postmodern genre of pop-cultural simulacra: Riffing off a Horror Vanguard episode about Mandy I want to write something about how Stranger Things creates a 1980s absent any direct interaction with the decade and instead reconstructs its setting entirely from a pop cultural interpretation of the decade. Stranger Things has nothing to do with the history of the 1980s and everything to do with the music and film of the decade and I think that’s a fascinating distinction even if it doesn’t do anything quite as good as what the Cage film accomplished with that material. Still since I’m stuck watching it (my daughter is a super-fan) I might as well mine it for content. This will probably come out before the Elden Ring essay.
  • Titane and the Societies of Control: A look at the 2021 movie Titane in light of Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript to the Societies of Control which will focus on the idea of identity as modular. Probably also approach via Deleuze’s work on Spinoza and the question of what a body can do though this will require some reading. I am… almost… ready to start writing this. I have the film digested sufficiently to write on it but need to fit in some reading first. Likely to come out before the Elden Ring essay and after the Stranger Things essay but I might bump it up depending on how tired I am of Stranger Things by the time I finish Season 4 part 2.
  • A series of articles on permaculture and philosophy using the work of Epicurus, Marx, Deleuze and Guattari and maybe a few others of my faves to look at how ecologically sustainable farming ties into the idea of the rhizome as a political formation and to examine the risks of Malthusianism that exist within the concept formations of the discipline. This will be an ongoing effort throughout.

So that’s what I’m up to. I’m also slowly reading through a few novels that might get reviews, such as Ken Liu’s The Wall of Storms and Gretchen Felker Martin’s Manhunt. I’ll probably try to fit reviews of at least one of these into my upcoming schedule.