Service

As I think about Teju Cole’s Every Day is the Day for the Thief, I am reminded of Ben Lerner’s work in trying to ferret out the subjective vs. objective narrator (Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04). I’m not even sure that this critique is a thing, and I’ll talk about Cole’s amazing novel more in another post, but the conversation prompted me to think about the commodified nature of service, something that seems to happen a lot in my professional life.

I can’t help but go back to Marx, and I thank wikipedia for allowing me to not have to type this out:

As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I ^[3]

As a culture, we talk about a lot about being service-oriented in all that we do – we fetishize military service (there are other more academic sources, but I don’t have access to my list at the moment), corporate cultures talk incessantly about ways in which their employees can better serve all kinds of folks, and an entire cottage industry has arisen out of figuring out how Piketty understands service in contemporary economics. Marx I think provides us a way to look at that service orientation as a ‘fantastic form of a relation between things,’ one that puts what is essentially a dollar value – and a ‘misty’ one at that – on what on another level could simply be an interaction between people.

The problem, though, is that this move to a service orientation should be great stuff, right? Service should be something that we value, a way to orient ourselves in a corporatist culture that reifies relationships between people as only being possible in commodity terms. It enables us to recognize our privilege, and to ameliorate its harmful effects in ways that help other people materially and spiritually.

And yet, as I hear endless praise of the idea of service, and I do my own volunteer work and attempt to serve others from my position of financial, racial, and cis-gendered privilege, I wonder about the systems that my devotion to this type of practice, well, serve. Am I countering or critiquing or simply confirming that these systems are in place, that they are intractable and maybe irreversible? Do the contradictions and binaries overwhelm my attempts at action? Am I inherently compromised, and is that even a thing?

My own readerly expectations become part of this equation. I originally read Lerner from the perspective of a reader of a lot of what now seem to be fluffy, ridiculous novels in the 80’s that were barely disguised hagiographies to the authors’ younger selves, faux attempts at critique that were mildly nauseating and incredibly self-indulgent. I kept reading Lerner with that lens, forgetting Audre Lorde’s claim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (her wikipedia entry), an argument that always makes me want to say “but surely you can” and yet trail off into ellipses of regret and apology. Maybe what writers as gifted as Lerner and Cole are doing is just that – using tools of narrative to dismantle the master narratives that solidify as real and natural the commodified relationships that are now called service – in ways that directly challenge Lourde’s argument. If we only think of interacting with each other in these terms, are we simply serving forces that clearly oppress others? Is service our corporatist answer to questions of how we relate to each other in a relatively civil and mass commodified way?

I think back to how quickly I grew frustrated with punk rock attempts to be truly democratic, a use of the word true that will probably frustrate the rhetorician in me. “Who cares how far the damned van seat is moved back, anyway – we’re going to be late for the show!”  The patience and language and what then felt like self-indulgence and lack of humility required to argue that long over the ramifications of a very simple act in a very complex world were characteristics I didn’t possess.

In the vein of using the masters’ tools, then, I think that what Lerner and Cole are attempting is possible, even with Lorde’s wise words hanging in the air. Lerner and Cole do not portray themselves as heroes in any sense – Cole’s narrator makes the unheroic decision to return to the U.S. despite being immersed in the subsystems in Nigeria that are fighting the corruption and oppression, and Lerner’s narrators’ constant self-deprecation and calling attention to his own self-indulgent artist persona is hardly flattering. And yet for me as a reader I constantly struggle with seeing outside my own ur-tropes, the expectations that I bring to story-telling that seem to be some sort of binary between realism and hope for the Grand Disruption, or as William Gibson describes in Neuromancer, the moment ‘when-it-all-changed.’ The use of service as a masters’ tool might be something that feels impossible, but perhaps I’m just not thinking of the ways in which we can truly fight back.

Can we parse out these message(s) in ways that make sense for our own lives? I have hope…

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Rethinking Fantasy

I’m gaining a new appreciation for Joe Abercrombie’s work after reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen, and I’ve compiled a list of some aspects of fantasy that I need to rethink:

• Divinity – I tend to think of the divine in a sort of UUish way, tying together some vague concept of the divine and sacred from themes like human dignity and the amelioration of pain and the need for humility and living a balanced life and valuing the beauty of both nature and the trials and struggles of getting out into a much different, more physically- and less consumption-based lifestyle and the joys of watching humans create and collaborate and be empathetic and the sorrows of watching humans do the opposite.
  • MBOTF’s ideas about divinity are rooted entirely in notions of power, and there’s a pretty solid argument for that foundation. The power doesn’t necessarily came strictly from ego – it’s much more complicated than that. Still, it’s not concerned in the slightest with human dignity (although Erikson offers us a bit of a different example in Bugg, an Elder God posing as a servant). More on this later, of course…
• Heroism – I’ll write a lot more on this later, because these novels are merging with more recent reads on my part of Kentucky Route Zero, The Detail, and The Expanse, among others…but the heroes in MBOTF are beyond flawed – Iscarium, Karsa Orlong, and others…
• Readerly expectations – this has become a fascination of mine, and it translates to games as well, which are laden with genre conformities, anxieties, and cultural work.
  • Because I so enjoyed GRRM’s willingness to kill off major characters, for instance, I sort of wanted and expected other new fantasy series to do the same, especially if I wanted them to claim the same territory as ASOIAF. I’m starting to understand that simple willingness to kill off characters was a necessary first step, and one that can also became a generic expectation.
  • And this obsession goes to science fiction as well – I was a bit peeved that the first book of the Expanse series *only* ended with an alien weapon being diverted as it hurtled toward Earth, until I started to think about what that first novel brought to hard science fiction in general. I had become infatuated with Peter Watts and his depressing-but-accurate-in-a-corporatist-world rifters trilogy, so hard science fiction that started off grim but ended up hopeful, with growth in characters, felt insincere somehow. This is something I think I need to work on, to somehow lessen the impact of my expectations and perhaps simply observe (and maintain some sort of scholarly objectivity).
  • In MBOTF, for instance, I found myself rooting for Adjunct Tavore and Kalam Mekor, who are flawed humans at best. Finding myself rooting for characters messed with my desire for academic objectivity…a bit…
  • I also wanted the emphasis in these novels (a want I think that began with Abercrombie) to be on attaining balance, but I’m trying to impose what I think are GRRM’s wants onto a different series, because no sort of grand metaphysical concepts or constructs seem to be privileged over any other. Erikson hints at how he thinks humans should live, but he doesn’t seem to have the go back to the origins and rethink our development subtext that GRRM seems to feel.
  • As far as looking for simple binaries – good vs. evil, chaos vs. order, etc. – MBOTF also fucks with my expectations in unexpected ways, and right from the beginning. We have battle mages who essentially cancel each other out, and the first scene features a huge floating structure that looks impregnable but is actually defeated, and about which we find out much more later.
    • The binary that first struck me, though, was the need for ’empire’ to be a bad word. Erikson unabashedly shows the Malazan empire as a far different sort of entity, one that brings a bit of justice, rule of law, and care for the dignity of those below us to a chaotic, brutal, and uncaring world. This care is couched in all kinds of ways, but we spend so much time with soldiers at the most basic level, and so much time listening to them express their love for each other in gruff, sarcastic, and very funny ways that I felt a sense that this sort of life is about the best that can be expected in this world, and utopian world re-making projects of the sort that I hope GRRM is doing in ASOIAF are not viable or effective ways to reimagine ourselves in fantasy. They counter chaos in some ways…
      • GRRM’s utopian impulses are, I think, at the heart of fantasy, which after all seeks to in some ways remake the European middle ages into an ordered, righteous, prelapsarian paradise.

This seems appropriate now…

• Meta-commentaries -I’ll comment more about these as well in another post (this is getting way too long), but I found myself at first nodding in agreement at the insertion of a meta-narrative that reeked of cynicism into the text, spoken by one character to a group of others, until I worried that maybe Erikson’s point was not nearly this simple. Hell, Tolkien added a meta-narrative into LOTR (Sam’s musing about whether or not he and Frodo would be in a story as they made their way into Mordor), so this is not a new thing, and GRRM studiously avoided any such meta-narrative in his fantastic take on the War of the Roses, instead telling readers about these sorts of outside-the-text concerns in interviews.
  • Erikson is doing something far different, and my realization of this made me faintly uneasy, feeling more innocent than the characters, which troubles me to even type.
  • The unease goes greater as I realize that I’m attracted to GRRM’s attempts to build worlds. I *want* to be part of that project, to fix all this bad shit. Erikson’s goal is much more limited but much loftier in some ways – let’s just figure out how to live here, and now…

Malazan and Identity

As many brain cells as I’m wasting trying to understand where the Malazan Book of the Fallen series falls on some sort of timeline, I think the most interesting feature of the series might be the multitude of races it has. I’m not smart enough to be a scientist, but I count twelve either species or sub-species in Erikson’s world, although that definition might be off because at least some of them are capable of procreating with each other.

Some thoughts:

• If this series is truly Erikson’s critique of fantasy, then his use of races and racial identity is a key element. We have gotten POVs from all of the races except the Forkrul Assail and the K’Chain Che’Malle (I think he uses apostrophes just to piss me off), and they range from expected (solemn tones from non-humans, smart ass by humans) to the unexpected (demons are pretty funny, as well as being savage powers from another world capable of devouring entire horses).
• Part of the critique, perhaps, shows itself in my obsession with making equivalencies with other fantasy series (and with human history in general). I keep getting bogged down by trying to equate Malazan world events with ones I know. The presence of four founding ‘races’ – one of which is a huge fucking lizard that is technologically and magically adept enough to create enormous floating planets.
• How, then, does race work in the series?  Skin color is a determinant, as is size, as are features such as tusks and pointed ears. No race is dominant.
  • There are, however, some types of cultural traits that mark each. None is as obvious as elven poetry or dwarven metalworking or orc cruelty (!), and we don’t get origin stories like the Silmarillion to locate these traits in the primal ether. Does that mean that racial traits emerge from local experiences and practices?
    • That’s too easy – at least two of the races come from long before humans, and in fact humans evolve from the founding races, at least the Jaghut.
• I think, then, that the interrogation of race in this series identifies the eugenicism at the heart of the Lord of the Rings (and the others that blindly followed the dwarf-goblin-elf-human racial divisions). If one is not careful then the paradigm quickly becomes a chart…dwarf = craft, technician, male, elf = idealized self, poetry and art, self-sacrifice, female, gobling = cruelty, cowardice, love of torture, human = all of the above (in LOTR, of course, it’s pretty much only humans who jump racial stereotypes).
  • Malazan attributes actual motives to each race, even while blurring lines. In ASOIAF, there are definitely evil humans, but they’re evil for the reasons good progressives hate – they’re slavers, they’re racists, they’re abusers or assaulters, they’re power-mad. And Martin has characters run on all sides of these moral lines…

Nostalgia and the Visual Arts

I’m not sure that we can call some of the latest Netflix shows art, necessarily, but then I’m not quite so hung up on that label or marker or validation as some folks are. In my hosuse we’ve been enjoying Jessica Jones, Stranger Things, and Daredevil, and have plowed through them all, and I’m interested in how these series that feel as if they come from a New York of the dangerous 70s (they don’t – these comics all came out in the early aughts) play in a culture that clearly obsesses about crime more than it is affected by it. The popularity of these series now in a sense, I think, add yet another qualifier here, reifies a sense of danger that has to come from somewhere (right?).

 

I’m fairly certain that the appearance of these series at this time isn’t a coincidence.  All of these series pay homage to tried-and-true pulp tropes, but they pride themselves I’m guessing on the generic tweaks and cultural examinations that they utilize, amidst the pounding fists and blood. As I think I’ve said in another post, the Marvel-based series all use the teevee version of the comic book as a basis for examinations of other topics –  Jessica Jones and issues of privacy and personal boundaries, Daredevil and loneliness, and Stranger Things comes directly from 80s mainstream Hollywood films and plays with that line that 80s films loved to tinker with, evil adults being faced down by kids.

Here’s to looking at where that danger comes from, and how nostalgia figures into this equation, in subsequent posts.

Clarity

About this article found here…

A couple of thoughts…

• the essay (by James Miller) builds on Judith Butler’s anger at being chosen for a bad writing award, as expressed in an op-ed piece she wrote for the New York Times. She argues (clearly, or as Miller puts it, “defiantly lucid”) for the power of difficult prose as a radical challenge to standard prose forms, among other points.
• Miller uses Butler’s point (and her citing of Adorno’s Minima Moralia) as a jumping off point to  look at the twin poles of the argument on political writing on the left. Adorno argues specifically for the use of technical terms and complicated prose that might not be understandable by the lay person as means to challenge capitalist orthodoxies, while Orwell believed in the use of facts as a means of countering political and economic oppression.
  • Miller goes through the strengths and weaknesses of each argument, fairly I think, although he comes down on Orwell’s side at the end by noting the long-lasting impact of some of Orwell’s language – hatecrime being perhaps the best example.
• This essay caught my attention because it seems a particularly salient point that comes from a discussion that doesn’t seem to end. I caught it again in this article from the Awl (and if you’re not reading the Awl you should be). And this debate keeps happening in academia, and I keep thinking about as I wonder whether to send students to academic journals, and wonder which ones to read myself.
  • The question, of course, is about the specialization of the field, but it also highlights the difficulty in my mind of justifying intellectual work that does not have direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives. I understand the need to be creative and challenging, but the immense privilege of simply being able to think for a living is one that I think points to a position perhaps outside of both Adorno and Orwell (and shows the difficulty of the binary, I think, in that it characterizes political activity or lack thereof in a very limited light).
  • If we become this highly specialized, then we must be providing some sort of analysis of the sort that cannot be done elsewhere.

The analysis, I’m hoping, is where we in the humanities become important. Communicating the findings that we come up with, clearly, cogently, challengingly, will be the next part of that battle…

Blue

I’m going to try to describe a scene that I often visit in my dreams. If I could draw that would be a better way to do this, but I can’t…

I always approach it from the water, usually a river. I often start above the scene, on a ridge or hilltop, but I always descend to the river and arrive in a boat or swimming. (I seem to swim a lot in my dreams – selkie fantasies anyone?)

The scene is drenched in blue, varying shades but all dim. I occasionally see a light in a window or on a porch, but not always.

The approach is barely above the water line (and sometimes the bottom porch dips into the water, from ill repair or general decrepitude or perhaps just rising water levels.  The structure is clearly made of wood, and seems to consist of a lot of separate apartments, evenly spread among four or five (or six) floors. The building is rectangular (almost square), and even though the edges feel eroded or corrupt its adherence to that geometric shape seems consistent/standardized/coherent.

As I approach there are poles sticking from the water. They’re probably more accurately piles, as they are big enough to build a platform on. They might have had a platform on them at one time, even another apartment structure, but they are far past having the capability to carry weight now. Still, they’re an integral part of the scene.

There is also very little sky. The building/structure is surrounded by vague, ill-formed forest, casting the structure in shadow. The shadows behind the porches are simply deeper variations of the overall dimness.

It’s hard not to describe this structure in Gothic terms, a crutch I’m trying not to use.

I either climb from the water or step onto the porch from my boat. If there was a buffer between the building and the water (a deck, or a platform, or even a staircase or landing) it’s been gone for a long time. As I walk along the porch I can see into the various apartments, none of which have ever been occupied in this dream.

More on the Malazan Book of the Fallen

I’m still obsessing about this series, and I’m starting to piece together why. I’ll make a few brief notes here…

• All fantasy series involve lots of walking. It’s one of the easiest and best jokes to make about the heroes…day 98, they’re still walking…guess what, they’re walking…and so on. In ASOIAF GRRM turned that trope on its head a bit by identifying the pain of refugee status, even when nobles are the refugees. In MBotF the walking is much more directed – hunting or being hunted, running or pursuing, and so on. It’s also much more physical – we see camps and the problems of logistics and the mind-numbing fatigue and boredom that the walkers face.
• The vast number of deaths also make me wonder if this series is designed to make up for previous fantasy series’ failures to acknowledge that people died, but I actually more directly think that Erikson is writing about genocide. If a common cultural anxiety expressed in fantasy is for a return to prelapsarian, perhaps agrarian, definitely perceived as peaceful days, then Erikson’s series reminds us that maybe life was cheap.
  • I’m not happy with that cultural anxiety, as I think in a lot of ways it’s too easy.
  • Instead, I’m going to try to write some observations…

I’ll repeat some of my earlier observations (and here and here) a bit, but I’ll try not to go too crazy with that…

• As I noted in the earlier post, I keep trying to ground this series in something that I recognize.
  • Erikson creates so many races in this series that I can’t help but want to place it in some far-future universe (unlike ASOIAF, which feels like an alternative earth, one that allows Martin to explore what he seems to feel is our relationship with the planet being thrown off track by the rapaciousness of humans).
  • I wonder if Erikson might be mocking my own (and I’m guessing shared) obsession with the idea of grounding a series at all. I’ll blame Robert Silverberg, as he is the first author that I read who deliberately messed with readerly expectations of a set, easily-locatable narrative chronology. I keep wanting to place it, but every time I do I realize how difficult that objective is, and I start to wonder if being unable to place it is the point.
    • In that sense, then, maybe MBotF is a series set in a game. Some evidence for that might be Erikson’s comfort with keeping characters alive from book to book (Abercrombie does this too, and I got frustrated with him as well, but maybe that’s part of the point). After ASOIAF I became enamored with GRRM’s willingness to kill off main characters, and I started to think that maybe, just maybe, that’s what’s makes a fantasy series worth reading now.
    • How does a series get set in a game world? The standard way to do that, of course, is to make money off an already-existing franchise, but Erikson and his partner didn’t create the game, make a bunch of money off it, and then start writing the novels. They approached this world from the other direction.
    • In some ways doing this makes the series less interesting, I guess? Subverting games has been part of the genre since its beginning (I’m thinking of DOOM and the BFG as a prime example), but I’m assuming that Erikson wants to subvert something – that’s a safe assumption with GRRM, but maybe not so much here.
  • As I get further along in the series, Erikson tries much different approaches with his voices, although they have started to sort themselves out. In the first four books he was pretty consistent with the tone of his character’s dialogues – the non-recognizable humans were pretty straightforward without much sense of humor (although Karsa Orlong can be funny at times), while the humans, esp. the Malazan imperial soldiers, are witty in a grim and aggressive way (one that made me chuckle a bunch, and that I’m guessing Erikson wants to portray as very similar to show how language forms in a culture, even one that is a sub-culture like a military unit).
  • Genocide, realism in fantasy, depictions of demons and dinosaurs and dragons as interior desires manifest physically
  • Erikson gives us some hints here…