quarta-feira, 25 de setembro de 2013

Under the Shadow of Stanisław Lem -“Polish Social Science Fiction” (“Polska Fantastyka Socjologiczna. Poetyka i Myślenie Utopijne” by Mariusz M. Leś for Urania)

Polish dystopian fiction of the 80′s was usually described as a diagnosis of the totalitarian system and a reservoir of political allusions. I attempted to look at the subgenre from a different perspective, tracking in the footsteps of utopia as a way of thinking, a courage of combining intellectual rigor with imagination. The book “Polish social science fiction” (“Polska fantastyka socjologiczna. Poetyka i myślenie utopijne”, 2008) can be thus seen as a sequel to my 1998 book “Stanislaw Lem and utopia” (“Stanisław Lem wobec utopii”), which proposed a new perspective on Lem’s works, leading to a conclusion that utopia is a means of discovering and organizing values and ideas.

In “Polish social SF” I tried to prove that the cognitive charge carried by them reaches far beyond equations of allegory, which means, it transgresses the popular encryption of the political situation connected with the martial law in Poland (December 1981 - July 1983), and remains more than just a satire on the mechanisms of totalitarianism in Polish reality of the 1970s and 1980s.  Works of Marek Oramus, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński, Maciej Parowski, Janusz A. Zajdel and others, embed strong allusions though, but they are mostly local. This is partly because of censorship. An analysis contained in my book is meant to show undermining and overwhelming tradition of utopian thinking in works usually interpreted as unambiguous dystopias. This is the foundation, which cannot be reduced to negative experience of totalitarianism. Both utopia and its dystopian counterpart are embedded in a greater meaningful environment of utopian thinking. My view of utopian thinking doesn’t focus on (suppressed and subversive) political activity, but nevertheless it keeps this activity in intentionally radical, intentionally fictitious limbo. Utopianism is interpreted here then as deeply and etymologically rooted in (science) fiction and evaluative cognitive activity, involving knowledge of economics, information technology, the science of control (cybernetics and systems theory), and ethics. A way of understanding our reality rather than social criticism.




The characteristic features of utopian thinking - seen as a conventionally fictitious writing/reading activity - include: complexity, paranoid imagination, apocalyptic imagination and subversion. They are stuck in the genetic equipment of science fiction genre, which can be put to good use in the works manifesting its potential power, but often - sadly - it is wasted. Just as Lem saw it.


Complexity should be associated with the need to construct the framework of fiction different from the empirical world, but potentially coherent, and at the same time not immune to basic assumptions rationalization. It is this assumption to see the legacy of utopia, but you can also see the debt of this kind of fiction to science and scientific hypotheses requirements. However, as the utopia is in the self-conscious play with entrenched ideologies (as 'non-place'), so science fiction has developed the courage to operate conventional fiction and potential states of affairs. Utopia goes thus above and beyond, while creating its own dystopian contradiction, but also goes beyond politics and futurology by putting a priority mark to possibility, not necessity.


Paranoid imagination. Following in the footsteps of the dynamics of utopianism and dystopian fiction, it should be noted that in utopian fiction looking for consequences of basic assumptions simultaneously designate the boundaries, either in restraining the temptation of crossing, or by manifesting transgressiveness. Science fiction with ease - often excessive - launches a global perspective of change and (meta)history. Science fiction instead of fear of irrational manifests a fear of hyperrational system, inscrutable plan, something that - at first glance - seems to be chaotic, but after shifting to a higher plan could possibly (or in fictional fact) infect a perverse complexity. Consistency is always suspicious, never satisfactorily self-explaining, consequently always projects a higher plane or an overwhelming authority.

Apocalyptic narrative is born inside the consciousness of crisis, nourished by the prospect of radical change, as Kermode once wrote. Quite easily it forces a manipulation with our understanding of the past and with our image of the future. With these frictions science fiction, equipped with an apocalyptic dimension so conceived, constantly returns to the flesh. What is particularly interesting to determine the specificity of utopian thinking, is that abstract category of "omniscience" can be embodied in a science-fictional narrative, and often is in Polish social SF. So, apocalyptic imagination means a “fleshy” co-existence of conventionally perceived utopia and dystopia, thanks to a big charge of “the-the-end-is-nigh” obsession.

Mariusz M. Leś, September, 2013 

Science fiction and digital humanities researcher at the University of Białystok

http://blog.scoop.it/2012/01/04/lord-of-curation-series-mariusz-m-les/


terça-feira, 24 de setembro de 2013

Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Non considero niente di più feroce della banalissima televisione”


[…] Secondo me la televisione è più forte di tutto questo: e la sua mediazione, ho paura che finirà per essere tutto: il Potere vuole che si parli in un dato modo […] ed è in quel modo che parlano gli operai, appena abbandonano il mondo quotidiano, famigliare o dialettale, in estinzione. In tutto il mondo ciò che viene dall’alto è più forte di ciò che si vuole dal basso…Non c’è parola che un operaio pronunzi in un intervento che non sia “voluta” dall’alto. Ciò che resta originario nell’operaio è ciò che non è verbale: per esempio la sua fisicità, la sua voce, il suo corpo.

[…] La ferocia era terribile e all’antica (i campi di concentramento nell’Urss, la schiavitù delle “democrazie” orientali, l’Algeria). Questa ferocia all’antica, naturalmente, permane… Ma oltre a questa vecchia ferocia c’è la nuova ferocia che consiste nei nuovi strumenti del Potere: una ferocia così ambigua, ineffabile, abile, da far sì che ben poco di buono resti in ciò che cade sotto la sua sfera. Lo dico sinceramente: non considero niente di più feroce della banalissima televisione.


[…] Io, da telespettatore, la sera prima e un’ infinità di sere prima - le mie sere di malato - ho visto sfilare, in quel video in cui essi erano ora […] un’infinità di personaggi: la corte dei miracoli d’Italia - e si tratta di uomini politici di primo piano… Ebbene, la televisione faceva e fa, di tutti loro, dei buffoni: riassume i loro discorsi facendoli passare per idioti -col loro sempre tacito beneplacito ?- oppure, anziché esprimere le loro idee, legge i loro interminabili telegrammi: non riassunti, evidentemente, ma ugualmente idioti: idioti come ogni espressione ufficiale. Il video è una terribile gabbia che tiene prigioniera dell’Opinione Pubblica -servilmente servita per ottenere il totale servilismo- l’intera classe dirigente italiana.

[…] Tutto viene presentato come dentro un involucro protettore, col distacco e il tono didascalico con cui si discute di qualcosa già accaduta, da poco magari, ma accaduta, con l’occhio del saggio -o chi per lui- contempla nella sua rassicurante oggettività, nel meccanismo che, quasi serenamente e senza difficoltà reali, l’ha prodotta.


[…] In realtà nulla di sostanziale divide i “comunicati” della televisione da quelli dell’analoga comunicazione radiofonica fascista. L’importante è una sola cosa: che non trapeli nulla di men che rassicurante. L’ideale piccolo-borghese di vita tranquilla e perbene (le famiglie giuste non devono avere disgrazie) si proietta come una specie di film implacabile in tutti i programmi televisivi e in ogni piega di essi. Tutto ciò esclude i telespettatori da ogni partecipazione politica - come al tempo fascista: c’è chi pensa per loro, e si tratta di uomini senza macchia, senza paura, e senza difficoltà neanche casuali e corporee. Da tutto ciò nasce un clima di Terrore. Io vedo chiaramente il terrore negli occhi degli annunciatori e degli intervistati ufficiali: non va pronunciata una parola di scandalo, praticamente non può essere pronunciata una parola in qualche modo vera.


— Pasolini, da “La Voce di Pasolini” di Mario Sesti e Matteo Cerami.

 

There’s no Help in Truth

“How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there’s no help in truth.”


― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 

"Ich muss es wissen!" ("I need to know!")

“Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht.”

“I am the spirit that negates.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
'Twere better nothing would begin.
Thus everything that that your terms, sin,
Destruction, evil represent—
That is my proper element."

― Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust

Georg Cantor


Ludwig Boltzmann


Kurt Godel


Alan Turing








Dangerous Knowledge is a BBC documentary presented by David Malone, looking at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide. The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. Cantor believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Godel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death. Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

Dangerous Knowledge 1of 2



Dangerous Knowledge 2of 2


segunda-feira, 16 de setembro de 2013

Theodor W. Adorno's Last Disciple: Die Verschwundenen/The Vanished By Hans Magnus Enzensberger

For Nelly Sachs

It wasn't the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air? 
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They've been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,

like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.

They don't make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.

Without the absent ones, there would be nothing.
Without the fugitives, nothing is firm.
Without the forgotten, nothing for certain.

The vanished are just.
That's how we'll fade, too.


* * * 

Für Nelly Sachs 

Nicht die Erde hat sie verschluckt. War es die Luft?
Wie der Sand sind sie zahlreich, doch nicht zu Sand 
sind sie geworden, sondern zu nichte. In Scharen
sind sie vergessen. Häufig und Hand in Hand,

wie die Minuten. Mehr als wir,
doch ohne Andenken. Nicht verzeichnet,
nicht abzulesen im Staub, sondern verschwunden
sind ihre Namen, Löffel und Sohlen.

Sie reuen uns nicht. Es kann sich niemand
auf sie besinnen: Sind sie geboren,
geflohen, gestorben? Vermißt
sind sie nicht worden. Lückenlos
ist die Welt, doch zusammengehalten
von dem was sie nicht behaust,
von den Verschwundenen. Sie sind überall.

Ohne die Abwesenden wäre nichts da.
Ohne die Flüchtigen wäre nichts fest.
Ohne die Vergessenen nichts gewiß.

Die Verschwundenen sind gerecht.
So verschallen wir auch.


Translated By Rita Dove and Fred Viebahn  
Source: Poetry (October 1998).

sábado, 7 de setembro de 2013

Energy is Eternal Delight: The Political Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Willian Blake's Cosmological Enlightenment

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call'd the Devil or Satan and his children are call'd Sin & Death.
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call'd Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties.
It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.


"London"

I wander thro’ each charter’d street, 
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every black’ning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse





Harvard's Professor Leo Damrosch masterful remarks on Blake 's political and spiritual revolutionary horizon


sexta-feira, 6 de setembro de 2013

The United States of Paranoia by Jesse Walker

Americans have always feared secret cabals.

In three successive decades in the mid-20th century, a “Brown Scare” swept through this country, followed by a “Red Scare,” and finally a “Lavender Scare,” Jesse Walker tells us in his bold and thought-provoking new book, “The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory.”

Americans heard so many stories that described Nazis, communists and homosexuals nefariously trying to take over our government, our minds and our bodies, they began to see them everywhere. In an earlier era, they feared murderous slaves and libidinous Native American kidnappers. And more recently: UFOs and satanic nursery schools.

“This is a book about America’s demons,” Walker writes. “Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it ...”

Walker wrote “Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America” and is an editor at Reason magazine. He doesn’t debunk conspiracy theories per se in this book. He doesn’t weigh in on the Kennedy assassination, for example, and he takes it for granted that you believe President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is genuine: “Birthers” make only the briefest of cameos in his book.

Giving the reader an “exhaustive” history of all conspiracy theories is not Walker’s mission. Instead, “The United States of Paranoia” is an oddly entertaining exploration of the roots of “paranoid” thinking across several centuries of American history.

Not only do Americans believe conspiracy theories, they also believe their fellow citizens are more susceptible to conspiracies and manipulation by “elites” than they really are, Walker writes. Take, for example, the myth surrounding Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” In the years after Welles’ broadcast, a few writers spread the idea that it had induced a mass panic.



“The truth was more mundane but also more interesting,” Walker points out. In fact, only a few people truly believed aliens had invaded the East Coast. A famous Life magazine cover photo of a farmer with a pitchfork ready to fight the aliens was staged. Walker argues that the story of the purported “panic” fed the notion that Americans could easily be manipulated, that they were a many-headed “robot” easily controlled by skillful artists using the mass media.

Americans fear mobs: They are the dark force lurking inside “Enemy Below” conspiracy theories, one of several categories of “primal myths” Walker explores. Over time, blacks, immigrant laborers and Jewish radicals have all been the protagonists in imagined “Enemy Below” conspiracy theories. A mythical group of black intellectuals called “The Organization” was said to be behind the 1965 Watts riots, Walker writes.

In his influential 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter contended that it was social outsiders or “marginal” movements that most often embraced this kind of conspiratorial thinking. Walker quickly demolishes that argument. It wasn’t true in the 18th century, when Federalist leaders and their Jeffersonian rivals both spread conspiracy theories, he says. And it certainly isn’t true in the modern age, when the mainstream media and political leaders in both parties have spread paranoid narratives.

The book argues convincingly that the mainstream media, following the lead of groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, exaggerated the threat of right-wing militias after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 – even though neither bomber Timothy McVeigh nor his accomplice, Terry Nichols, was ever a member of a militia. Of course, with the radical right also embracing conspiracy theories of its own – “Enemy Above” myths about “the One-World Government” and the like – it became easier to portray them as dangerous wackos plotting a coup d’etat.

All those images of militia men began to seep into America’s collective subconscious. Something similar happened after the 9/11 attacks, when Americans were “semiotically aroused,” Walker writes, quoting a phrase coined by historian Richard Landes.

To be “semiotically aroused” is to fall under the influence of signs and symbols. A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the constant broadcast of images of Islamic extremists caused such a spell to overcome several otherwise rational people in Tyler, Texas, according to Walker. An object made with wires and duct tape was found in a mailbox. Believing it was a weapon of mass destruction, the authorities called in the bomb squad. An entire neighborhood was evacuated. The object turned out to be an 8-year-old boy’s homemade flashlight, built for his science class.

“The most prevalent form of paranoia after 9/11 was the mindset that allowed officials to mistake a harmless school project for a jihad,” writes Walker.

It’s all too rare to come upon a writer willing to attack the sacred cows of the right and left with equal amounts of intelligence and flair. Walker is, thankfully, that kind of writer and a tireless and thorough researcher to boot. He also states an obvious fact many skeptics are unwilling to accept: Behind just about every conspiracy theory there is also, more often than not, a grain of truth.

Yes, al-Qaida staged the 9/11 attacks. But in a “paranoid” retelling after the attacks, the al-Qaida movement became a centralized organization controlled by one man, a fact contradicted by most intelligence reports. In the American imagination, al-Qaida became something akin to “the global networks of mayhem found in James Bond movies,” Walker writes.

Instead, years later, when American forces actually reached Osama bin Laden’s last hideout, they found not a “Goldfinger” or a “Dr. No” but instead a pathetic and lonely man who colored his beard. He didn’t even have cable TV or a cellphone.

It was a truth that was more mundane but also more interesting.

by Hector Tobar

Los Angeles Time, September 01, 2013

segunda-feira, 2 de setembro de 2013

And All the Children Are Insane: Horror Has a Face, and You Must Make a Friend of Horror.

Kurtz: I've seen the horror. Horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me . It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies t o be feared. They are truly enemies.


I remember when I was with Special Forces--it seems a thousand centuries ago--we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile--a pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out, I didn't know what I wanted to do.


And I want to remember it, I never want to forget. And then I realized--like I was shot...like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, "My God, the genius of that, the genius, the will to do that." Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they could stand that--these were not monsters, these were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love--that they had this strength, the strength to do that.


If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time were able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment--without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us. I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be, and if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything you saw, because there's nothing that I detest more than t he stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you...you will do this for me.