On Decybernation

The suggestively titled ‘On Decybernation’ is the name of a report written by the British management cybernetician Stafford Beer, as part of Project Cybersyn (1971-1973). This has been the subject of previous posts on the blog. Cybersyn was one of Beer’s biggest claims to fame, a cybernetic initiative to manage the national economy of Chile. The aim was to build and implement a system to boost economic production, while also maximising self-regulation at the level of factories and workers. The history of Cybersyn is extensively chronicled in Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. The Decybernation report has never been published, so I went with a colleague to view it in the Stafford Beer archive (at Liverpool John Moores University) last April. 

The report was written in April 1973 at a key turning point in the project (the Chilean President Salvador Allende would be overthrown by a military coup the following September). The report details Beer’s frustration that the technology his team had developed was not being used as he’d originally envisaged. Beer believed in the power of cybernetics to change the organisation of government but, perhaps unsurprisingly, others were more interested in how the technical components of Cybersyn could be used to support existing structures. 

‘On Decybernation’ muses on the relative successes and failures of Cybersyn, highlighting the need to understand the project as an instrument of revolution; beyond changing systems of economic production, Beer outlines his ambition for Cybersyn to change the very organisation of society, beginning with government institutions. Without this level of change, he concludes, ‘we do not get a new system of government, but an old system of government with some new tools’. 

I thought it might be interesting to reproduce a few passages from the report here, for those interested in Beer’s cybernetic theory of government: 

If we want a new system of government, we have to change the organization of the established order. All my proposals as to how this should be done have been discarded as ‘politically unrealistic’. Maybe they were. In that case it was for others of our group to make alternative proposals. For without any practical proposals for changing organization in the established order, we cannot have a new system of government.

[…] 

If what we wanted to do was to meet the objectives listed for Project Cyberstride and Project Cybersyn, then we have succeeded. Those were technical objectives, and meeting them may count as success to some people. 

If what we wanted to do was to display the technical achievement in management action, then we may yet succeed. This is the technocratic objective, and meeting it may count as success to some people. 

If we wanted to ‘help the people’, this was a social objective, and the outcome is ambiguous. For if the invention is dismantled, and the tools used are the tools we made, they could become instruments of oppression. This would count as failure. 

If we wanted a new system of government, then it seems that we are not going to get it, This too must count as failure. 

Any one person who has worked on this team may have a complex motivation, in which the technical, technocratic, social and political objectives are mixed in unique proportions and constitute his own ‘objective functional’. 

This would explain the confusion, and the disagreement about success. 

While, at first look Cybersyn reads as a classic science fictional case of techno-utopianism, Beer’s perspective shows a genuine belief in the project as an instrument of social change and dismay to see that potential going to waste. The fascinating reference to ‘decybernation’ encapsulates this sense of a critical threat to the dream of cybernetic revolution he saw in Cybersyn and its socio-technical possibilities.

Computing Utopia

[The following is a draft excerpt from an article written with Jo Lindsay Walton called 'Computing Utopia: The Horizons of Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction', which appeared in this month's issue of Science Fiction Studies]

In speculative and science fiction, computation is often represented as morally ambiguous, at odds with human concerns or not entirely explicable within human frames of reason. One notable example can be found in the trope of the supercomputer, wherein anxieties about artificial intelligence and automation combine to produce an entity capable of superseding or displacing humankind. For example, Kendell Foster Crossen’s Year of Consent (1954) features the totalitarian supercomputer SOCIAC, who manipulates the “consenting” population via forms of social control. Likewise, Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘The Last Question’ (1956) centres on the human-created supercomputer Multivac (and its successors) and their obsession with the question of how to reverse entropy. They work on the answer over a hundred billion years, long after the end of humankind and the universe itself. 

The imaginary of the supercomputer, then, is entangled with both positive and negative impulses. These impulses crystallize in the tension between computational utopia’s promise of superior knowledge and reason, and the threat of an oppressive and dystopian calculative order. The history of cybernetics is laden with comparable tensions. In popular culture, cybernetics has frequently been conflated with robotics or computer science, an association that was formed through early media reactions to it. The 1948 publication of Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, one of the originators of the field, gained enormous press attention and led to response articles such as ‘Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?’ (American Monthly 1953) and ‘Man Viewed as a Machine’ (Scientific American 1955). 

In fact, cybernetics refers to a far broader set of concerns, which can be glossed as the study of systems governance, including organic, machinic, and socio-economic systems. It also includes the study of self-governance: how systems constitute and stabilize themselves, how they adapt to changes in their environments and how they survive or fail to survive damage or the introduction of new elements. It is the study of communication, feedback and control that came to define cybernetics as a field of inquiry. 

This interest in feedback, and the maintenance of equilibrium through feedback mechanisms is also the thing that most clearly connects cybernetics with economics. In particular, there are links between cybernetics and neoclassical models of markets and economies as self-governing systems, entities which accomplish an optimum distribution of resources through the self-stabilizing interactions of supply and demand. These principles were at the heart of what came to be known as the “Chicago school” of economics through figures such as George Stigler and Milton Friedman. Both worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG), funded by the US National Defense Research Committee during World War II, and links have been traced between cybernetic experiments in defense systems carried out in the SRG and Friedman’s later work (Mirowski, 205-206). Mike Featherstone foregrounds this link in his study of the underpinnings of contemporary capitalist thought: 

Friedman’s free market economics presented a computational vision of freedom and social relations, which transformed economy into an apolitical closed space defined by machinic interactions, cold strategic decision making, militarised risk assessment and management, and a complete lack of empathy for the other who was similarly imagined through the lens of cybernetics. (94) 

The characterization of “machinic interactions” is central to Featherstone’s argument that “it is possible to understand the development of late capitalism through its embrace of techno-science and specifically cybernetic theory over the course of the 20th century” (82). This view, while valid, rests on a partial interpretation of the cybernetic field. Historian Ronald R. Kline has argued for the disunity of cybernetics, not only in its multiple meanings, but also with regard to “the different paths cybernetics took in different countries” (7). To some extent, these histories have been obscured by dominant narratives, which inform ideas – in both science fiction and contemporary politics – about the inseparability of cybernetic theory from capitalism. Yet the uptake of cybernetics in countries with distinct social and political trajectories presents a challenge to such ideas. 

An important, if unrealized, project that marks a chapter in the diverse history of cybernetics is Project Cybersyn (or Proyecto Synco in Spanish), a Chilean initiative funded under the socialist government of Salvador Allende between 1971 and 1973. Cybersyn was directed towards the development of a cybernetic system to manage the economy and communicate with factories that had come under government control as part of Allende’s nationalization efforts. The project was a collaboration between Chilean technical experts and Stafford Beer, a British research scientist in management cybernetics. Beer was interested in cybernetics as “the science of effective organization” and how it could be applied to the field of industrial management (Beer, Decision and Control, 425). 

Project Cybersyn was intended to manage economic production using the feedback of data from the factories. Statistical software programs were designed to model factory performance scenarios, based on analysis of the data, enabling the Chilean government to regulate production and pre-empt crises with effective action (Medina, 6). Despite limited technological resources, consisting of one central computer and a network of telex machines, the project went some way towards developing this system (Pickering, 250). The main objectives of Cybersyn were to maximize economic production while also facilitating self-regulation of the factories. It thus represented an attempt to incorporate devolved decision-making and worker autonomy into a cybernetic management system. For Beer, the design constituted “a weapon against state bureaucracy” (see Medina, 170). 

Cybersyn control room

A comprehensive history of Project Cybersyn is the subject of a 2011 book by Eden Medina. Her study focuses on the relationship between computer technology and politics, and the difficulty of embedding political values in systems design. In the case of Cybersyn, she argues that this can be seen in the frequent mischaracterization of the project as a tool for centralized government control of the economy, despite its outwardly decentralized approach. Indeed, in January 1973, when The Observer broke the news of Cybersyn to the English-speaking public, the headline simply ran “Chile run by computer.” In an allusion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cybersyn, the “first computer system designed to control an entire economy” had allegedly been “assembled in some secrecy so as to avoid opposition charges of ‘Big Brother’ tactics.” Later that year, Allende’s government was overthrown by a military coup and Project Cybersyn was never completed. Under the subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, economic policy was remodelled by a group of Chilean neoliberal economists called the Chicago Boys, some of whom trained under Friedman. In the decades that followed, information technology became increasingly integrated into global finance and financial markets were rapidly expanded, deregulated, and diversified. 

In his novel Synco (2008), the Chilean SF writer Jorge Baradit offers an alternative history of Project Cybersyn. It opens six years after the coup of 1973 which, in a parallel version of events, is dismantled with the assistance of Pinochet. The completion of Synco – “the hidden leviathan [...] the mechanical eye of socialist Chile” (Baradit, 29-30) – has transformed Chile into a fully-fledged cybernetic state. The country’s capital of Santiago provides the backdrop for the main action of the story and it is here that the protagonist Martina returns after some years in Venezuela. She is startled at the changes wrought by Synco but she soon becomes disquieted after witnessing the full extent of its political influence and surveillance. While the circumstances that lead to this totalitarian regime are never fully explained, it is implied that a cybernetic model of government is inextricable from centralized state control, and the collaboration between Pinochet and Allende serves to bolster the system. Synco’s power grows and by the end of the novel its network begins to effect changes in the language and geography of Chile. In the final scenes, as Martina is flown out of the country, she sees military jets heading the other way for a final showdown with this “god made of wires” (230). 

The novel’s bleak view assumes the inevitability of Cybersyn’s techno-totalitarian trajectory. The actual project, by contrast, was fragile and fledgling. Its computing resources were minimal. Devoted to a broadly “decentralizing, worker-participative and anti-bureaucratic” form of economic management (Beer, Brain of the Firm, 257), it was tantalizingly poised between a model and the thing itself. Along these lines, Medina maintains that “there is historical value in studying innovative technological systems, even if they are never fully realized” (Medina, 10). The recognition that systems like Cybersyn cannot be measured only by the logic of ‘what happened’ is an important one and highlights the question of making visible alternatives to dystopian economic computation.

References

Asimov, Isaac. “The Last Question.” Science Fiction Quarterly (November 1956): 6-15. 

Baradit, Jorge. Synco. Madrid and Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008.

Beer, Stafford. Decision and Control. London: Wiley, 1966. 

---. The Brain of the Firm. London: Allen Lane, 1972. 

Crossen, Kendall Foster. Year of Consent. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1954. 

Featherstone, Mike. Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2017. 

Fliegers, Serge. “Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?” American Monthly. 76 (1953): 53-61. 

Hawkes, Nigel. “Chile Run by Computer.” The Observer, 7 Jan 1973. 

Kemeny, John G. “Man Viewed as a Machine.” Scientific American. 192 (April 1955): 58-67. 

Kline, Ronald R. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 

Medina, Eden. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 

Mirowski, Philip. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Computer Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949. 

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches Of Another Future. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. 

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948.

Tributes to Ursula K. Le Guin

It was only a couple of months ago that The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin was featured on this blog - not for the first time - in my post about planetary physics and inter-world relations in SF. Le Guin's double planet system is rendered to brilliant effect in her exploration of power and freedom in the societies of capitalist Urras and anarchist Anarres, and this contrast provides the framework for the ambiguous utopian currents that run through the novel.

It is often these themes - of living and being otherwise - that have come to the fore in the tributes to Le Guin, following her death on the 22 January. Here, I'd like to give a round-up of those that struck me the most, alongside some interesting interviews and sources that I've come across during the last few years.

Among the more comprehensive and interesting obituaries of Le Guin are those published by the Guardian, the New Yorker and the New York Times. The novelist Julie Phillips, who's currently working on a biography of Le Guin, writes in the New Yorker, 'Le Guin never stopped insisting on the beauty and subversive power of the imagination. Fantasy and speculation weren’t only about invention; they were about challenging the established order'. Meanwhile, SF critics John Clute (Guardian) and Gerald Jonas (New York Times) draw attention to her distinctive narrative style. Jonas writes, 'the conflicts (her characters) face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles'.

Fellow writers have also paid tribute and, in some cases, shared their recollections of Le Guin; Indian SF writer Vandana Singh knew the author over a number of years and quotes the famous line from The Dispossessed, 'True journey is return', in the title to her blog post. She also recalls of their correspondence, 'our exchanges, though infrequent, were always interesting. We talked about writing, but also about our mutual interest in non-human others [...] We discussed the tendency of modern humans to succumb to the techno-fix, even for complex issues like climate change. I think it was clearer to her than to most people that technology by itself can never solve anything if the underlying paradigm remains unchanged'. In Neil Gaiman's piece, 'A Magic of True Speaking', he remembers reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time, and writes that the book 'opened my head and made me view gender differently - not as something fixed, nor even as something important, but as something mutable and less pertinent than what kind of person you are; the trilogy made me look at the world in a new way, imbued everything with a magic that was so much deeper than the magic I’d encountered before then'.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

What better way to end this post than to hear from the author herself. Some links to Le Guin's wonderful and thought-provoking public speeches and interviews include:

The BBC radio programme 'Ursula Le Guin at 85', featuring commentators including Neil Gaiman, in which Le Guin speaks about her upbringing and her early encounters with other worlds through her Father's anthropological work with Ishi, the last known member of the Native American Yahi people.

A clip from Arwen Curry's 2018 feature documentary film about Le Guin called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. In this clip, Le Guin talks about the creation of the Earthsea novels: 'I start pretty much with place, and then the people grow up in the place'.

Transcript of Le Guin's 'Left-handed commencement address' to the 1983 graduating class of Mills College (Liberal Arts women's college in Oakland, California): 'Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man, the only respectable god is male, the only direction is up. So that’s their country; let’s explore our own [...] I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is'.

Le Guin's speech, upon receiving the National Book Awards' Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. She says, 'I rejoice in accepting (the award) for and sharing it with all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long - my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction'.

Le Guin writing on the competing forces - or the yin and yang - of utopia, published on the Electric Literature site. In this piece, she suggests, 'my guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival [...] involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth'.

Earth-sized Planets Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star

It was around this time last year, when I posted about exoplanets and the possibility of habitable life beyond Earth. Perhaps, then, a year on, is an apt time to revisit this theme and one of my favourite space stories from 2017 – the discovery of exoplanets found orbiting Trappist-1. Trappist-1 is a red dwarf star, located 39 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. As such, it is one of our nearest neighbours in the Milky Way.

2015 was the year of the first discovery of Earth-sized planets orbiting Trappist-1 but, early in 2017, astronomers announced the news of additional exoplanets around the star, seven in total. The Guardian first published a story on the discovery in February, with follow-up stories in May and August.

The seven planets are, to date, the largest number of exoplanets found orbiting a neighbouring star, raising hopes that the search for alien life might be within reach using the next generation of astronomical telescopes. Trappist-1 shines with a light 2000 times fainter than our sun, meaning that the planets are more likely to hold liquid water and surface life. Researchers hope to obtain this information within the next decade.

One of the most exciting aspects of the story – alongside the possibility of discovering aliens, or a planet capable of supporting human life – was the incredible orbits of the planets and the prospect of the Trappist-1 star looming large in the sky from the planets’ surface (see illustration below). Because the planets are so much closer to the cool Trappist-1 star, each of their orbits is more compact than those of the planets orbiting our sun – the closest with a very short orbit of one and a half days, the furthest away taking 20 days.

Illustration of the view of Trappist-1 from the fifth planet by Nasa/JPL-Caltech.

These phenomena put me in mind of SF narratives that hinge on inter-world relationships, and the planetary astrophysics underpinning such stories. A famous example is Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, a 1941 short story, later adapted into a novel with Robert Silverberg. The action takes place on Lagash, a planet located in a multiple star system with six suns, which keeps it constantly illuminated. The coming of an eclipse is a cause for concern for the planet's scientists, who fear that the general population will be unable to cope with the darkness. However, ultimately, it is the discovery of other stars and planets, which become visible during the eclipse, that sends Lagash's inhabitants into a frenzy.

The double planet (or binary planet) system of Urras and Anarres in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is another memorable example, in which the juxtaposition of capitalist Urras and anarchist Anarres functions as a device for Le Guin’s exploration of ‘ambiguous’ utopias. In a variation of this theme, the planet Solaris, in the novel of the same name, orbits a binary star system with one red-coloured and one blue-coloured sun.

Geographies of the double planet system Urras and Anarres.

Finally, returning to our solar system, the Twilight Zone episode, ‘Midnight Sun’, imagines a scenario in which the Earth's orbit has been disturbed, causing it to move slowly towards the sun. In the end, it transpires that this was only a fever dream experienced by the protagonist Norma, and the Earth is in fact, inexplicably, moving further away from the sun.

SF experimentation with different star systems and planetary configurations adds to the other-worldliness of the stories, even while often offering a critical lens on real world issues. The Trappist-1 discovery begins to shed light on just how distant or close such other worlds may be.

Esperanto and SF: A Potted History

Esperanto was invented as an international secondary language by Ludwig Zamenhof, who published his first book on Esperanto in 1887. He believed that a common mode of communication between people would eliminate the problems and misunderstandings of translation and ultimately lead to a more harmonious world system.

Zamenhof was not the first to come up with the idea of an international language. Like many others, he was motivated by the utopian impulse to create a better world, a universal vision that could, through language, overcome the divisions created by humankind. Esperanto is, however, perhaps one of the most famous – or infamous – of such languages, partly because of its widespread uptake and partly because it has been the subject of various parodies and criticisms. For example, it is believed that Esperanto provided the inspiration for Newspeak in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the introduction of a simplified universal language operates as a form of social control to restrict thought.

This leads me on to the topic of this month’s post: Esperanto and SF. While Orwell was sceptical about the implications of a language like Esperanto, many other SF writers have been fascinated by the positive reconfiguration of the world it might bring about, or the kinds of societies that might be amenable to a shared secondary language.

Philip José Farmer's Riverworld novels are perhaps among the most famous works to make use of Esperanto – in the second volume it is the language of the peaceful religion of the Church of the Second Chance. Likewise, the stories of lesser known writers such as Mack Reynolds explore issues of universal basic income and universal religion and language. In his 1974 novel Looking Backward From the Year 2000, a re-writing of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 work, the protagonist finds himself in a future where the revolution in communications and transportation has led to the large-scale adoption of Esperanto as an interlingua.

Morojo with Ackerman in costume in 1939

SF fanzines also have their notable Esperantists. Myrtle Douglas, known by her Esperanto name ‘Morojo’, was a fanzine editor from Los Angeles, who was active between the years 1939 and 1958. From 1939 until 1947, Morojo co-edited the fanzine Voice of the Imagi-Nation with the SF writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who she met at an Esperanto gathering. With Ackerman, she also attended the first World Science Fiction Convention (1939), for which they wore matching futuristic costumes (see image). From 1941 until 1958, Morojo published the zine Guteto, which promoted Esperanto among science fiction fans. After her death, Ackerman wrote of her, ‘she was an expert Esperantist’ and ‘a real science fiction fan’.

These examples reflect the overlap between the imaginary communities explored in the works of SF writers and the radical aspirations for Esperanto as a means of achieving societal transformation. Such experiments in invented language have been sporadic and, at best, only partially successful. However, like language, SF works to both represent and translate cultures, echoing the hopes and fears of the societies from which it is produced.

More information about the inclusion of Esperanto in literary works can be found in the online book The Esperanto Book by Don Harlow.

Utopia: Crafting the Ideal Book - Online Exhibition for 2017

Utopia by Thomas More (Kelmscott Press)

Continuing in the vein of my recent utopia post, next year will see the launch of a new digital exhibition for the University of Leeds Library's Special Collections - Utopia: Crafting the Ideal Book.

The centrepiece of the exhibition comprises two significant copies of Thomas More's Utopia, held in Special Collections. The first is an early edition, published in 1518 by the famous printer and publisher Johann Froben. The second is an 1893 edition, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in a limited edition of 300 (see image right).

The theme of utopia will be explored through its dialogue with More’s text, addressed directly by Morris in the foreword to the Kelmscott Press edition, and by drawing attention to the production methods and collection histories of both.

For example, the re-printing of Utopia by the Kelmscott Press reflects Morris’s interest in the book as a work of art and his belief in the transformative role of art and culture in social life. In the short essay, ‘The Ideal Book’, he wrote:

The picture-book is not, perhaps, absolutely necessary to man's life, but it gives us such endless pleasure, and is so intimately connected with the other absolutely necessary art of imaginative literature that it must remain one of the very worthiest things towards the production of which reasonable men should strive.

Update: the exhibition was launched in 2018 and is now hosted on the Leeds University Library website.

500th Anniversary of More's Utopia - Connected Communities Festival

I've written on the blog before about Utopia and the early printed and Kelsmcott Press editions of Thomas More's work in the Brotherton Library's Special Collections. The name Utopia refers to the island counter-world to which the characters of the story travel, and can be read as both the good place (eutopia) and no place (outopia). While More's island reflected the expanding geographical knowledge of sixteenth century Europe, during the eighteenth century the spatial utopia gradually gave way to a temporal model and utopian narratives became aligned with the idea of a better or alternative future.

Originally published in Latin in 1516, this year sees the 500th anniversary of Utopia, and a number of projects and special events to celebrate the occasion. Among these was the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Connected Communities Festival 2016; this year’s Festival theme was Community Futures and Utopia. I've been involved with the Festival as part of the project team for My Future York. Inspired by work with York Libraries and Archives and the York Past and Present Facebook group, the project explores the potential of utopian thinking for heritage in York and focuses on how these debates can be harnessed in important ways for local democracy. It encompasses a range of temporal perspectives; from thinking about housing plans that didn’t happen to inviting ideas for the future development of the city.

Utopia logo

More's island of utopia

The Festival was in partnership with The Somerset House Trust’s 'Utopia 2016: a year of Imagination and Possibility'. The designs for the 'Utopia 2016' season (see flag above) were created by Jeremy Deller and Fraser Muggeridge studio. They are inspired by Thomas More’s 22-letter Utopian alphabet, which appears in early editions of Utopia with the Latin translation underneath. You can download a copy of the Utopia alphabet here.

To read more about heritage utopias and the My Future York project, visit http://myfutureyork.org/futures-utopias/

Do Communists Dream of Electric Shepherds?

In spite of much sci-fi being inspired by leftist politics, the influence is not obviously mutual. The utopian visions of the future so common among 19th century socialists have been rolled back by successive generations of dour ‘scientific’ pragmatists who have accommodated the dreams for the future to the demands of the moment. Today, with the far left generally unable to influence the tenor of political life and a technologically driven ecological disaster beckoning, it is perhaps unsurprising that faith in the future and of human beings’ capacity to use technology for the benefit of all is at a low point.

Rallying against this state of affairs, and following on from the accelerationist manifesto, lefty ‘media platform’ Novara Media has begun to take seriously the question of what the future might look like. So far, the group’s weekly video slot, IMOBastani, has proffered two dystopian visions of how capital might reproduce itself in the future (clue: it’d be bad) and one socialistic alternative predicated on the use of automation to largely eliminate the need for alienated labour. This has inspired a self-consciously sci-fi response, reflecting on the post-capitalist universe depicted in Star Trek. As far as I can see, no critique of the Novara perspective from a curmudgeonly ultra-left yet loveably tweedy medievalist perspective has emerged in the month or so since these pieces were published, so here’s one from 1889. In sci-fi, socialism, as in life: nothing changes and nothing stays the same.

Red Star Gazing and the Inevitability of Full Space Communism

Part Two

Under Stalin, what remained of the Soviet communist dream turned into a nightmare of international proportions. Nevertheless, many people outside of the USSR in the 30s, even anti-Stalinist communists who managed to avoid being murdered by the GPU, went along with Trotsky’s formulation in 1936 that 'socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface-not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity'. In other words, the productive capacity of the supposedly socialist Soviet Union was sufficient justification for its existence. When this system was belatedly mobilised for the fight against Nazism, those who still dreamed of a communist future were further comforted that there remained something to be said for the USSR’s 'socialism'. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate provide novelistic depictions of how believers in very different contexts convinced themselves that the sacrifices required by this system were worthwhile.

The twin shocks of Khrushchev’s 'secret speech' and the bloody suppression of the Hungary uprising in 1956 put paid to such illusions in the West and gave birth to the so-called New Left. This created a space for a questioning of the determinist Marxism that had until then been given a free pass on the left (except in isolated and disparate cases), and which held that technological advance = progress = creating the conditions for socialism. This led to a re-evaluation (particularly among English new-left historians) of such awkwardly un-scientific tendencies as 19th century utopian socialism, 17th century millenarian proto-communism and Luddism. However, while the de-Stalinisation of the left in the West led, in many cases, to a rejection of technological determinism and laid the ground for the rise of CND and the green movement, this historical conjuncture gave technological determinism a new lease of life in the Soviet Union. In an echo of Trotsky’s logic, the Soviet Union would have to justify the horrors of the Stalinist era by delivering on the techno-utopian dream that had seemingly been side-lined along with constructivism and the abandonment of the revolution’s internationalism.

Francis Spufford takes this post-Stalin Soviet panorama as the backdrop of his novelised history book Red Plenty. In it, he has Khrushchev musing on the current situation of the USSR: 'fortunately, the hard part of the task was nearly done. They had almost completed the heavy lifting, they had heaved and shoved and (yes) driven people on with kicks and curses, and they had built the basis for the good life, their very own horn of plenty', and translates him as claiming in 1959 that 'in our day, the dreams mankind cherished for ages, dreams expressed in fairytales which seemed sheer fantasy, are being translated into fantasy by man’s own hands'. Of course, the utopian dreams of the planned economy were rather more prosaic than the electrifying explosion of creativity that might have been heralded by world soviet revolution in 1917-21. Nevertheless, in the context of the space race, they did provide a boost to the Soviet sci-fi imagination, as the the Soviet images featured on io9 and Dark Roasted Blend attest.

From Tekhnika Molodezhi journal

While the illustrations here don’t have the eerie parallel universe feel that art and sci-fi had in the Russian Revolution’s heroic period, they still pack a punch, particularly the depiction of the communal living space under the surface of the moon from the journal Tekhnika Molodezhi, whose on-line archive is available here: http://zhurnalko.net/journal-2

The Political Unconscious: Kadare's Palace of Dreams

I recently read a translation (from French) of The Palace of Dreams (Nëpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave) by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare with my book group at the University of Leeds Library. Whether it's SF is up for debate, but the events of the novel are certainly dystopian and understood to be informed by Kadare's experiences living under state totalitarianism in Albania during the 1970s and 1980s.

In it, we are presented with the central character of Mark-Alem, a member of the powerful but inauspicious Quprili family. This ancient Albanian dynasty have a long and fractious history within the Bulkan empire, sporadically falling out of favour with the ruling Sultans. Nevertheless, soon after the story begins Mark-Alem is selected to work in the prestigious Tabir Sarrail (The Palace of Dreams). Widely known as the state’s most secretive organisation, the workers select and interpret the dreams of the country’s citizens, which are gathered on horseback from all corners of the empire. Each week a Master Dream is selected and presented to the Sultan, as a means of anticipating plots to overthrow the authorities. 

Mark-Alem quickly and inexplicably rises through the ranks of the Palace but is often disorientated navigating his way through the labyrinthine corridors of the Tabir Sarrail, and constantly baffled as to why he is distinguished from his peers. Part of the clue lies in a quote that featured on the front cover of my edition of the book:

And so that the bridge might endure, a man was sacrificed in its building, walled up in its foundations. And although so much time had gone by since, the traces of his blood had come down to the present generation. So that the Quprilis might endure...

The Quprili family name means 'bridge', so the suggestion is that Mark-Alem sacrifices himself in order to ensure the family's continued influence. By having an agent in one of the state's most powerful institutions, the Quprilis can ward off potential conspiracies against them. There is also a nod to one of Kadare's earlier stories in this reference to the bridge, The Three-Arched Bridge (Ura Me Tri Harqe).

What I find so interesting about the story is the idea of the Palace of Dreams itself. In this system, the consciousness of the people is at the mercy of its government and the motif of the dream, which can often be associated positively with the capacity to imagine (utopian) alternatives, is presented in a scenario that allows for no alternatives, and actively precludes them. Lenin's quote from Pisarev on the importance of dreams, that 'if there some connection between dreams and life then all is well', is turned on its head here. As Mark-Alem's uncle, the Vizier, tells him towards the end of the novel:

Some people [...] think it's the world of anxieties and dreams - your world, in short - that governs this one. I myself think it's from this world that everything is governed. I think it's this world that selects what it wants from the abyss.

My reference to Fredric Jameson's study in the title captures the sense in which the so-called unconscious is deliberately put to work serving the political ends of a totalitarian regime. In Jameson, this relationship is figured differently; Ian Buchanan's commentary of Jameson's criticism and his uptake of utopia as a critical method offers an insightful summary:

Utopia is figured as the repressed; its conspicuous absence in most cultural texts is thus a symptom of a deep resistance. Of course the fact that texts are actually cast as symptomatic means this particular repressed is, thankfully, irrepressible, that is to say, insistently returning. The larger goal of Jameson’s criticism, then, is to diagnose the source of this censorship, and, in the same gesture, perform a kind of cultural “talking cure” by bringing into the open the repressed idea of Utopia as it exist in popular and other texts.

In The Palace of Dreams, then, the idea of utopia is repressed in the manipulation of the people's dreams. The novel's ending is ambiguous, is there a hope of return, of the resurgence of alternatives? Or is Mark-Alem irrevocably in thrall to the sinister dream-world, through which the state exercises its control?

Structures of Soviet Science Fiction (I)

“... an avant-gardist long after the days of the avant-garde who dreams the dream of the avant-garde one last time in the seclusion of his own room.”

Boris Groys, Ilya Kabakov: The man who flew into space from his apartment (London: Afterall, 2006)

The Strange City is the title of a current exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, by Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov and his wife, Emilia. It takes the form of a journey through the ‘strange city’, comprising related installations which variously suggest notions of dream, the labyrinth, time-and-space, utopia; reviewing the exhibition, Matilda Bathurst found it “haunted by whispers of J.G. Ballard and Jorge Luis Borges.” The Kabakovs’ previous exhibits in the UK include pieces for Star City: The Future Under Communism (2010) at Nottingham Contemporary, and a recent installation, ‘The Happiest Man’ in London, at the University of Westminster’s Ambika P3 gallery (2013). Critic Boris Groys traces the connections in the Kabakovs’ work between Soviet revolutionary propaganda and the subsequent ‘space heroism’ of Yuri Gagarin and his fellow cosmonauts, summarising that:

“The official Soviet cult of space exploration... [was] a blatant misuse of the cosmic utopia of unlimited free movement... [with] an ideological excess of parades, rituals and ceremonies... the Communist project was originally a global, cosmic project.”

Image from The Strange City, 2014

The Kabakovs consciously reference a tradition in Russian philosophical and scientific thought expounded by Nikolai Fedorov (1828/29-1903), author of Philosophy of the Common Task, rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and ‘Cosmist’ Aleksandr Chizhevsky (1897-1964), whose overlapping theories of cosmic conquest, resurrection, space travel and the perfectibility of man were adapted, sometimes uncomfortably, to fit an early-Soviet Utopian vision. Philosophy of the Common Task, posthumously published by friends and followers of Fedorov, was a key text in this respect, roughly summarised by its translator Elisabeth Koutaissoff as a  “utopian vision of universal human kinship”, where man’s great ‘task’, or duty, is “to regulate the forces of nature, to defeat death and bring ancestors back to life.” The fusion of belief in science and technology to improve mankind with mystical, even occult, ideas was not outlandish in pre-Revolutionary Russia; the two were compatible and these historical precedents of ‘scientific mysticism’ were carried forward into early Communist thinking, and informed the art and theory of Constructivism.

This latest exhibition makes those links explicit, as the visitor is guided around the large-scale installations which make up The Strange City, variously titled ‘The Empty Museum’ or ‘The Centre of Cosmic Energy’, where the work of Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) on the Noosphere[1] – itself an extension of Fedorov's belief in humanity’s ability to shape “the course of evolution and the fate of the planet” – and the grand Soviet Utopian projects such as Tatlin’s Tower are juxtaposed with fragments of propaganda posters, praising “the courage, labour, and reason of the Soviet people!”. The grim reality of that illusory dream of earthly paradise and cosmic unity, evidenced by famine, the GULag, the purges and decades of totalitarian rule, are unspoken, but undeniably present. This is another strand in what curator Robert Storr calls “Kabakov’s project of recreating the jerry-rigged workers’ paradise... [recalling] barely remembered nightmares.”



Model of Tatlin's Tower, 1919

A visit to Moscow’s Space Museum, explored in Part Two, reinforces the disjuncture between the Utopian vision and the Soviet reality, and provides another example of “the collapse of socialist dreams.”

---

[1] Wikipedia: the “sphere of human thought”... “the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life).”

More's Utopia: Historically Bound

A tradition of utopian writing, in which an ideal state or ‘other worlds’ are portrayed in order to cast a light on contemporary society, runs through English and European literature. The idea of utopia can be traced back to around 380 BC and Plato’s Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system, and discusses the concept of ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ worlds. The word recurs in a modern context in Sir Thomas More’s 1516 work Utopia, where he too sets out a vision of an ideal society. The meaning of utopia - literally ‘no place’ - indicates that the perfect state may be an unattainable goal, and it is often depicted via satire and parody. There are two notable editions of More's Utopia in the Brotherton Library's Special Collections; the first is a 1893 edition, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in a limited edition of 300 (see image), the second is an early edition, published in 1518 by the famous printer and publisher Johann Froben.

Utopia by Thomas More (Kelsmcott Press)

This second copy of Utopia forms part of the Howard de Walden Collection. The Roundhay Hall catalogue shows that by 1926, Lord Brotherton had purchased 117 volumes from the library of Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis VIII, Baron Howard de Walden (1880-1946) for his own collection, which he later bequeathed to the Library. While the works themselves were published between 1471 and 1889 (although most date from the 16th and 17th centuries), many of the collection were bound early in the 20th century with Rivière bindings. These sought to recreate binding styles that were contemporary with the period of the printed work, in-keeping with the fashion at the time. The firm of Rivière, active in London between 1840 and 1939, was famous for the quality of their workmanship, and their work was prized by collectors. However, although the subject requires further research, it has come to light that the techniques used were not always accurate so that in some cases the binding reveals more about the binders' knowledge of historic binding than about the binding styles themselves.

Perhaps, then, the ideal of the perfect binding, much like the ideal of the perfect society envisaged by More's Utopia, remains elusive and ultimately unrealisable. The mixing of memory and desire, quoted famously in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (see also the Memory-Technology-Utopia post on this blog), reflects that impulse to delve into the past in the hope of creating something perfect for the future, even if a sense of history becomes distorted the effort.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

Memory-Technology-Utopia

Or, Can We Salvage the Future?

[The following is an excerpt from a longer piece of writing, which forms part of my PhD research]

‘Why are there no utopias today?’ is Judith Shklar’s opening gambit in her essay, ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’,  a question that assumes the utopian project to be a thing of the past, a historical artefact. This view forms part of a broader narrative of utopia, dominant since the late 1960s, which attributes its disappearance to the decline of modernist narratives of collective progress and improvement. So, where did these utopian visions go? Were they banished to the convenient ‘no place’ of the word’s Greek origins? Was the unfashionable and deterministic idea of progress responsible for their fall from grace? And what, if anything, stood in their (no)place? One version of events is that by the 1970s, the unifying drive of utopia was no longer up to the task of reconciling the competing claims of minority groups in a world with increasingly global perspectives.  As the utopian project waned, the concept of collective memory began to emerge in academic discourse, with all its evocative, recuperative and inclusive potential. Offering a means of coming to terms with the events of the past in order to move forward, memory seemed like an antidote to the perceived authoritarian strain in historical narratives. The past, then, having achieved a healthy distance from the present, was once again close and familiar, no longer a foreign country, but the vehicle for societies’ shared inheritance.  This temporal manoeuvre is well documented, whereby the past, through a discourse of social remembering, is shaped and interpreted according to the present situation.  However, there is something in the latest incarnation which, under the banner of memory, speaks of a particular anxiety about the future. The renewed impetus to remember, memorialise and pass on a legacy, particularly in the sphere of culture, is underpinned by the fear that a failure to do so will perpetuate the already pervasive spectre of cultural amnesia.   Consequently, stories, sites and monuments of the past were never so popular, as much for what they represent as for what they are. But the question of what they represent now is critical; do they memorialise the glories of the past or hold the promise of the future? Is there something faintly utopian about the new and oft cited memory boom?

I want to explore this possibility further and to argue for a theory of utopia that goes beyond its status as an artefact of the modernist era. So rather than asking, as Skhlar does, ‘why are there no utopias today?’, I will not foreclose the question of utopia because it seems to me to be intimately linked to the contemporary concern with memory, borne out of a desire for the future. There is, of course, a well-established precedent for locating the utopian impulse within the realms of memory, for example, in the figure Walter Benjamin's angel of history,  or in the mixing of ‘memory and desire’  in T.S. Eliot’s opening to The Waste Land. Theodor Adorno gave a succinct expression of this relationship in Aesthetic Theory, writing ‘ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance’.  Here, memory appears as the anchor for utopia, opening up the space from which it emerges. The anchoring function of memory is significant in an age where temporal boundaries are being increasingly challenged, effecting a sense of displacement that has been noted by several cultural theorists. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman comments that, ‘due to the ‘pendulum-like’ trajectory of historical sequences a close proximity of forward and backward or ‘utopia’ and ‘nostalgia’ pregnant with confusion is virtually inevitable’.  In this regard, utopia is peculiarly relevant to my study, where the museum, that shrine to the past, is explored in its relation to digital technologies, the current symbol of the future par excellence. Furthermore, my focus is on memory, specifically the discourse of collective memory, and its uptake in discussions about preserving cultural heritage digitally. The question of digital technology is not insignificant, since it potentially re-defines the transmission of culture as the flow of information. Nor is memory a politically benign concept in the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal. The central proposition is that a loss of memory is what is at stake in a failure to digitise. Yet there is an irony in making claims, in the name of memory, for a technology which, arguably, changes the nature of how we experience time. As Andreas Huyssen, claims ‘the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete’.  The study of memorial forms also entails the study of the history of communication technologies; Paul Ricoeur’s observation that ‘what is peculiar to a history of memory is the history of the modes of its transmission’  highlights the extent to which they are inter-related. Developing this thought, Patrick Hutton adapts Walter J. Ong’s theory of media communications to broadly distinguish four modes of mnemonic representation. He links ‘orality with the reiteration of living memory; manuscript literacy with the recovery of lost wisdom; print literacy with the reconstruction of a distinct past; and media literacy with the deconstruction of the forms with which past images are composed’.  In its latest phase, the opportunities for a more reflexive engagement with memory are both obstructed and enabled by technology. While the capacity to access and interact with heritage collections are greatly increased by their presence online, the process of digitisation potentially disrupts the conventional sequence of past, present and future events, since cultural memory (that sense of the past defined through human actions or social phenomena), is not applicable to the digital archive, which has a time-based element internal to the workings of technical media.  The attendant concern is that in an environment of instant messaging and real-time updates, temporal categories will be swallowed up by an all-pervasive present. 

However, rather than allowing that this situation precludes the emergence of utopian visions, I want to examine how the utopian project is manifested in the wake of temporal crisis. Contra Huyssen who concludes that ‘there can be no utopia in cyberspace, because there is no there there from which a utopia could emerge’,  I will suggest that there is a viable account of memory, technology and utopia beyond the narrative of ‘techno-utopianism’ critiqued by many contemporary commentators.