criticism

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?

Taxonomies

/ Simon

Recent discussions in genre have had one central question at their heart: how coherent is a category? There is a camp of critics who feel that it is the duty of their compatriots to provide clarity with regard to categorizations. To do otherwise is to invite sloppy thinking and the risk of error. On her essay, “How To Define a New Subgenre/Trend: The Speculative Epic and an Addendum to the “Squeecore” Debate” Cora Buhlert, a veteran SFF blogger and critic, sets out very specific criteria for how to go about identifying an artistic phenomenon citing the example of Lincoln Michel as an exemplar.

Buhlert defines very carefully what she sees as the correct method to approach this topic, saying, “I have identified a trend and here are some examples of people who have noticed it, too, as well as some examples of works that fit into that trend. I propose this name for it (a name that’s not derogatory) and it has this characteristics. It’s also part of a larger trend towards genre-bending fiction.”

She also provides a guide to what is absent from Michel’s work and which she thinks other critics should avoid saying, “What this article notably does not include is snarky asides against authors and books that Lincoln Michel does not like, buzzwords like “neoliberal” and issues that are worth addressing but have nothing to do with the subgenre in question. Also, Michel offers solid criteria for defining speculative epics and not criteria that are so vague that they apply hundreds of things up to and including Shakespeare.”

Buhlert tips her hand saying that she is very interested in, “literary trends, subgenre formation and genre taxonomy.” Now quite a lot could be said about Buhlert’s declaration of “neoliberalism” to be a buzzword as “buzzword” tends to imply a fuzziness in definition that allows a word or phrase to be used in a broad and inexact manner. The general sense I get from Buhlert is that she isn’t particularly fond of the broad and the inexact. But beyond that it’s worth noting that the word that gets Buhlert’s goat, in particular, is reference to a pervasive political ideology. It’s certainly the case that many people use “neoliberalism” inexactly. But considering that the impact of neoliberalism, with a very careful delineation of what is meant by such, is a principal concern of this blog I’d suggest that what concerns Buhlert is the idea of the political invading the dispassionate work of the taxonomer. Taxonomy is ultimately an attempt to objectively categorize a thing and define its relationship with all other things. If you care about a fixed taxonomy then the politicization of it certainly is a problem. Categorizing works in the past based on their political use in the present screws taxonomy all up.

I don’t mean to pick on Buhlert especially. I cite her as an example because she is an experienced critic with a long-standing and prolific output on genre literature however her position is indicative of a broad general sentiment within genre fiction readership that a taxonomy of fiction is something of value. And it’s critical to note, for this discussion, two things: first that science fiction includes among its readership many people with a particularly close relationship to taxonomies of fiction relative other readerships and second that this is not at all a phenomenon that arose in response to the Squeecore debate which serves as the inciting motivation behind Buhlert’s call for renewed taxonomic precision.

The Classics of Science Fiction blog attempted a taxonomy of genre fiction even going so far as to cite Linnaeus in 2019. The author of this blog, James Wallace Harris, is another long-established science fiction critic who shares some of Buhlert’s concerns regarding the politicizing of genre categorization. “To be told what my favorites should be is incredibly insulting. To me, that’s far more offensive than the Sad Puppies pushing their political agenda at the Hugos.” Harris, in particular, has a very long-standing relationship to the construction of taxa for fiction.

Jacob Ross and Jeoffrey Thane at Latter-Day Saint Philosopher also spend some effort on a taxonomy of science fiction but provide effectively no argument as to why they would do so (unlike the superior work of Buhlert and Harris) so I will only note it as being yet another example and move on from here.

I will provide a final example somewhat more useful than the LDS Phlosopher article from Clare McBride. Notwithstanding some unusual choices in categorization what makes her article about literary taxonomy interesting is in her recognition of the inadequacies of taxonomy, saying, “once we get to speculative fiction, everything gets a lot soupier.” She admits that these taxonomic exercises are somewhat subjective, saying, “But there are some foggy bits between them, of course–quite technically, I should classify Harry Potter and The Mists of Avalon as supernatural fiction, but I don’t. In Harry Potter’s case, it’s the fullness of the magical world, which probably could function quite separately from the Muggle world, and, in The Mists of Avalon, it’s simply because medieval Europe is the generic fantasy setting to the extent I can’t see past it. If it was set in medieval China, would I still file it under fantasy? Perhaps–I don’t know.”

It is interesting to note that McBride prefaces her 2010 essay by discussing the then-current discourse between Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood over what constituted science fiction. Atwood was, at the time, quite reticent to treat her many science fictional works as being within the genre as they didn’t include ray guns and rocket ships. Le Guin rather disagreed with her taxonomic criteria.

What I find most interesting is that McBride was the only one of these critics who seemed interested in what a taxonomy might be for at all. Buhlert and Harris provide taxonomies because they enjoy it. Both of these critics seems invested in the idea that precise categorization is a result of precise thought and that precise thought is good.

This should be unsurprising as both Buhlert and Harris are first and foremost science fiction critics and what is science but a treatment of precise thought as a good? It should not surprise that critics of the fiction of science should aspire to a scientific objectivity and clarity in their critique.

But this raises the question of what art criticism is, philosophy, science or art?

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari attempt to define the boundaries between philosophy, science and art, saying of science that, “The object of science is not concepts but rather functions that are presented as propositions in discursive systems. The elements of functions are called functives. A scientific notion is defined not by concepts but by functions or propositions,” while philosophy is taken with the creation of concepts – something which they previously define at length. Art meanwhile operates to preserve, “a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.” Now of course in proper Deleuzo-Guattarian fashion we can immediately disrupt these neat categorizations by pointing out how art criticism acts as both an art – preserving percepts and affects in the form of the responsive essay and as philosophy – creating concepts with regard to art, developing novel ways to think about art, and that these novel concepts might even include the possibility of a scientific or pseudo-scientific taxonomy of the arts. The lesson that Deleuze and Guattari teach us best is that the best, and most amusing, thing to do with a category is to destabilize it, to pick at the corners and kick at the edges until the whole damn thing falls apart. Their own categories are, of course, not immune to this loving destruction.

So what use then is a scientific notion of art? We can’t just immediately discard it by suggesting that art is intrinsically different from science when a critic might be very interested in presenting functions of literature in a discursive system. But a discursive system implies a test. So if a taxonomy is testing something then what is being tested and why?

Buhlert is very explicit that what is being tested is simply this, “is artwork A part of group X?” Buhlert is very clear that group X needs to be defined such that an intelligible distinction between within group X and without group X can be made – if a category is so broad that anything can be within group X then it’s useless for saying anything about the text.

What all of the critics cited above except for McBride elide is what can actually be said about a work of art by distinguishing it as part of a category. For McBride the question becomes one of establishing parameters for art discourse. We need to know what is within speculative fiction because we cannot otherwise have a productive discussion of the qualities of speculative fiction. However this becomes something of a circular argument: we cannot discuss the qualities of speculative fiction without defining the qualities of speculative fiction but why do we want to discuss the the qualities of speculative fiction? Because they are necessary to identify what is within speculative fiction.

However the particularity of works of art operates against this. Ultimately each artwork is a unique thing. This is why mechanical reproduction is corrosive to artistic quality – each work of art preserves within itself a unique set of percepts and affects. Take, for example, Junji Ito’s adaptation of Frankenstein. It is simultaneously a horror comic, a science fiction story, a gothic, a work in translation, a literary classic and also something quite modern. Placing this adaptation even in a taxonomy of Frankenstein adaptations might be difficult enough. Was Ito more affected by James Wale, Terrence Fisher or Kenneth Branagh? Can we ignore the multitudinous cinematic adaptations he might have seen between when Shelly wrote her book and when he penned his adaptation?

And so our first obstacle to taxonomizing art is that the uniqueness of any given artwork pushes against clearly delineated categorization at all. The second is that taxonomy forces a specific shape upon the history of artwork. Taxonomies are made out of lines and breaks. You trace a line to a point and say, “here the line divides.” Working in reverse you should be able to trace a taxonomy back to the first thing within the set. In the beginning there were single celled life-forms. Then they began to differentiate. We can cut here where fish emerge, here birds, here mammals.

But there is no one first work of art. At best there is the first work of art still preserved but there is ample evidence that art emerges wherever there are people. Art isn’t arborescent. There isn’t any singular source of all art that we could trace back with to find, eventually, a complete category of all things that are art. It’s certainly true that art is in discourse with the past of art but it’s in discourse with the entire past of art. Art doesn’t operate as a tree but as a geology. Some art may occupy a valley, carved out from erosion, and its artists can see the strata of past artworks displayed on its boundaries but this doesn’t make for a full categorization of all art, just for a categorization of historic breaks within this valley. Across the hill may be something completely different. Like a geology the past, present and future of art are jammed together. The past of art might explode like a volcano and leave a new future that occludes what came before. Likewise the new might wash away parts of what came before and expose hidden truths about fiction. The history of art is not like a tree: it is far too dynamic. And categorizing objects within dynamic systems is a messy and inexact business.

When we look at cyberpunk how do we define what is in and out of it? We can set up taxonomies but if every urban science fiction where an information network and massively powerful corporations are major elements of story action is a cyberpunk novel then the Mass Effect trilogy is a cyberpunk video game rather than space opera. After all the whole Noveria plot of Mass Effect 1 is corporate intrigue, the action of Mass Effect is centered around urban hubs like the Citadel and Omega and the extranet is a pervasive story element, as are VR visualizations of data, particularly during the Geth story lines of Mass Effect 2 and 3.

Of course this is an absurd categorization. And yet.

Perhaps the problem is the urge to categorization. But of course this raises a central problem of identification. There has to be some difference qua difference for objects to exist at all. It’s an easy short circuit to make the difference a negation: it is science fiction if it is not any of the things that are not science fiction. However this gloss of science is a straight-jacket for a critic. Why would I want to talk about Jin Yong while eliding Dumas? And if we’re talking about Dumas how can we but talk about Scott and Hugo both?

But how much of The Hunchback of Notre Dame could we possibly find in The Book and the Sword? Genres and subgenres are territories on a map but they’re not mutually exclusive territories. And, of course, a territory isn’t the same thing as its boundaries – in fact a territory comprises everything that is not the boundary of it. This is to say that it is fully possible to identify that a territory exists without understanding, let alone articulating, its outline. We can see the stuff that is the territory quite clearly even if we don’t think like a state and demand a clear line be drawn around it.

Furthermore, since art criticism is an artistic response to art and since art is the preservation of affects and perceptions we cannot have an objective criticism that ignores the affective character of art. As such any identification of a territory within art will include within it affective judgments. This art fits here in part because it made me feel this way; even SF critics understood this when they valorized sense of wonder which is a fully affective reaction to a genre. And this means that, yes, some categorizations of art will be derisive in character. They are those artworks that made the critic feel derision. But this means an objective measure of art is missing the entire point. Art is that which we cannot possibly be objective about.

In the end I don’t think taxonomy is a productive use of a critics time. Our first order of business should be the creation of art – the preservation of percepts and affects, the direct artistic response to another work of art. Our second order of business should be the creation of artistic concepts – creating new ways to think about art.

This careful sorting of art into delineated categories is neither.

It is definitely good for a critic to refer to specific work. After all a percept or an affect is best preserved by being present. Zizek’s review of the Matrix Resurrections, which he did not see, is a perfect example of how this can be simultaneously reified and also destabilized. It does preserve his affect toward the film even in the process of declining to watch it, a truly artistic response to a work of art but one dependent upon reference to the artwork nonetheless. But when creating concepts it’s unnecessary to do so with exhaustive scientific precision. This philosophical mode of criticism is not science nor should critics aspire to be scientists. It’s enough for a critic to say I saw it here and here and here. There is no impetus within the form of criticism to say, “it cannot possibly arise here. It is bounded by this line.”

On the artist – critic relationship, a response to “On Fanfiction, Fandom, and Why Criticism Is Healthy,” by Stitch

/ Simon / 1 Comment

This letter serves as a brief response to the excellent editorial recently brought forward by Stitch at Teen Vogue, “On Fanfiction, Fandom and Why Criticism is Healthy.” In it, Stitch puts forward an argument for why there should be space for criticism within fanfiction communities, and I do agree with the general broad strokes of their assertion.

Stitch explores, in much the same vein that I did, how fannishness leans into a sense of enthusiasm that precludes other emotional responses to art being seen as valid and proposes that, again as I have in the past, that critique of an artform represents a legitimate form of art enjoyment. A critic enjoys the act of criticism. However I do have a small dispute with some of Stich’s framing, which I hope they will take in good faith.

Specifically, Stitch does something very common in discussion of “fan” phenomena and imagines fandom as a territory or space. Fandom, in such a structure, is the terrain in which artists responding to a work, critics dissecting it and enthusiasts of an artwork congregate and share their thoughts. The conflict that thus arises is one of belonging. Fans are people who like a thing which is why it seems like critics must fight for a space within fandom. The critical impulse to reveal a piece of media’s secret contours and to, as Lyotard might put it, “work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass,” often seems at odds with the enthusiasm of the fan in much the same way that the enthusiasm of a butcher might seem out of place at a meeting of a pot-bellied pig fancier’s club.

I do think this is a mistake – fandom isn’t a place you are so much as a face you present. What’s more, people are dividual and may present different faces at different places and different times. So when I talk about the contradictions between these faces of response to art, please don’t think I’m totalizing any given person to just one of these identities that they must choose like some team. Rather I’m talking about the tensions that occur when engaging with art.

I tend to treat response to art as having three principal faces with the third divided into two sub-modes. The first is indifference. The indifferent response to art could be mild amusement or even strong revulsion but it is a reaction that desires to disengage from the art. It doesn’t find the art something it wants to respond to. The indifferent has no interest in any form of communication with the art.

The second face is the fannish face. This is representative of the person who wants to express enthusiasm for the art. It is something of a limited opposite to the indifferent face except that enthusiasm is the only allowable mode of response. People presenting a fannish face, defined by their absolute enthusiasm for a work, frequently act as gatekeepers and norm-setters. I dislike the extent to which this face has been given precedence in discourse surrounding art, including the extent to which the idea of the “fan” has come to subsume the final face which is that of the artist/critic.

I am uncomfortable with the categories of the fan-artist, the fan-critic or the fan-critic-of-fan-artist. This is because, while there is vast overlap between the revelations of the artist or critic, I find both of these responses to art to be mutually exclusive from fannish totalizing enthusiasm. A fan polices the boundaries of spoilers because the being in the know is one of the perimeters that delineates who may authentically wear the fan face.

An artist authentically presents the face of the artist by doing art. A critic authentically presents the face of the critic by doing critique. Neither of these play nicely with fannish territoriality. Now, again, people are dividual. A person can be a fan and be an artist both. But thy cannot be a fan in the moment they go about creating art. The “fanfiction writer” is thus a misnomer. There’s no fan in their fiction. They are an artist responding to art.

Enter the critic. If we treat (fan)fiction as a form of responsive art, a transformative repetition that takes the familiar elements of the art and creates something new from it, then we approach that non-productive boundary of undifferentiation from which production arises. The artist destroys to create. But this destruction is not uncontrolled. The process of disassembling art, revealing its secrets, spreading out its parts, “like smooth sleeping dolphins,” is the act of critique, which, Lyotard also reminds us, is a form of religious act. I would say it becomes something of a ritual sacrifice, ending the old artwork in a manner that makes space for new growth. While, for some artists, the critique – the moment of sacrifice where the work upon the altar is cut apart and its secrets revealed – is the end, artists must also be critics to create art. They must come to know the secrets of a work to transform it.

Artists are sometimes tricked into believing their passion is equivalent to fannish enthusiasm. Blake understood this intimately when he said, “the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Milton’s fannish enthusiasm for God rings hollow next to the damning critique of the Devil. This is because, as Blake says, Milton was a true poet; and a true artist is also a critic in their nature rather than a fan.

I believe (fan)fiction writers would be well served to remember that they are also critics. If their work creates critique all this means is that the art has broken the barrier of the indifferent face and inspired another person to engage authentically with it. Enthusiasm is a childish aim in the appreciation of art next to the sacred sacrifice of critique and the promethean act of creation. The territory of fandom is an imagined place. The police on the borders are children who, by the act of showing only enthusiasm for art, cannot defend it.

Where there are artists there are also critics. The face of the critic is indivisible from the face of the artist. An artist enjoys their art and so too does a critic enjoy their critique. I derive as much passion, as much joie de vivre from savaging a truly awful art as I do from gushing about a true masterpiece. Excluding the more frightening passions of the critic ultimately only harms artists. (Fan)fiction writers, embrace the satanic critic. You are of our party anyhow.