"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
…some days, you just need to wake up for two hours, then decide to throw the towel in and go right back to sleep. I consider this a brief break from sleeping, to make it even sweeter when I do return to it, oh, now…
“Science Fiction as the Reflection of a Dystopic Present”
A common perception of science fiction is that it functions as a cautionary tale of dystopic futures. For instance, if we are too reliant on computers, they will take over and use us as batteries, or if we continue to tamper with biotechnology a plague will be released on the world. A closer look at major shifts in plots and themes, however, indicates something else: Science fiction dystopias are less reflective of the future and more relevant to current dangers. For example, when Philip K. Dick writes The Simulacra, he’s reflecting the current trend towards time-shared computing, the miniaturization of technology, and the apparently disembodied quality of communication over ARPAnet. In the 1980s, William Gibson writes Neuromancer at the same time Apple and Microsoft ship the Macintosh and Windows, and personal networking allows computers to go virtual. These authors aren’t portraying a dystopic, distant future, they’re writing about the present, presenting a dystopic mirror to the promise of new technology.
This paper will use the work of Niklas Luhmann, Maturana and Varela, Katherine Hayles and others to show how cultural resonance influences technological inventions at the same time it inspires science fiction authors. It is not coincidence that major and influential works of science fiction occur at the same time as these technological advances. Science fiction novels are a reflection of our fears, not of the dystopic future, but the dystopic present, technology, and how it impacts our humanity.
Thanking consists in receiving with embracing hands what is given, holding it together, and showing it to, sharing it with, others. Speaking and writing about what one has seen, and experienced – what one has been given – can be thoughtful, can be thankful. Thoughtful speaking and writing put forth the overall design and inner force of the data – the given – detailing their aspects and inner relationships for view, sharing them with others.
Thoughtfulness begins in opening one’s heart to what is given. It involves vulnerability and risk. Truth means seeing what exceeds the possibility of seeing, what is intolerable to see, what exceeds the possibility of thinking, Georges Bataille wrote. “And I would not know what is, what happens, if I did not know extreme pleasure, if I did not know extreme pain!”
In speaking one can put onself forth, to counteract one’s sense of vulnerability. But in thoughtful speech one instead seeks only to offer to others what one has been given to see. In thoughtful writing one loses sight of onself, and one writes not for a distinct person but for anyone. For a reader I am only a self-effaced one who offers what has been given to see and to celebrate or suffer.
But gratitude – thoughtfulness – can also silence all talk.
-Alphonso Lingis, Trust, “Reticence” pp 193
Trimpin gave a lecture this evening at the Henry, to accompany the opening of Phfft, a musical installation piece that allows the viewer to manipulate dials to change the pitch and tone of notes, or to press a button to listen to preprogrammed pieces. During the exhibit exploration, I found myself very hands on and focused. It was the sitting and listening to the lecture that the problems cropped up. Watching slides of prior exhibits go by, something, some picture and description, came up and the thought floated to the surface of my brain: you would like this.
Blink. Blink. There is no “you” anymore, and the subconscios training of looking for things that you would like needs to stop. But it goes further than that; a simple thought and I suddenly chase backwards among the others and the rest of the day, and wonder: did I actually enjoy the exhibit? Have I actually been enjoying the slides I’ve been watching? Or am I just conditioned to look for and then integrate the things you would like, because it was always easier than standing up for and trying to discuss that which I liked and found interesting. How much of me and what I find interesting belongs to me, and what is just artifact, shadow?
Perhaps more importantly, if this is really me and what I find interesting, so closely tied to you, how do I then move beyond when bits of me remind me of you?
Beyond this wasteland, I could see the dunes of Giza and the pyramids. The next day I went there. Everyone has seen them so often, in pictures in books, in fillms, in news broadcasts, in cigarette adsl the images and impressions colected on the surface of my eyes, ears, and skin while wandering among them had already all been projected there many times already. Beyond these images and impressions, I tried to sense what the pyramids are. In grade school and in the books I now read they were identified as tombs of kings who had divinized themselves – the colossal monuments of a monstrous excrescence of egoism. Which is to view them as did the barbarian grave robbers (not the last of these barbarian chieftans was Howard Carter, who sold half the plunder from Pharaod Tutankhamen to the New York Metropolitan Museum for fourteen thousand pounds sterling). One could just as well describe a medieval castle as a maesoleum for a lord bishop or king on the argument that their tombs are found in them.
-Alphonso Lingis, Trust, “Breakout” pp 189 – 190