Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

“Goddess Remembered”: Playing God

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Attest to your goddess. In this form, she is the energy of life and creation embodied. She waits for you to realise that which you have always known about yourself.

Normally I write these at night. I’m a bit of a night owl by habit already, and I find that, when doing creative work, I perform far better at night. I’m much more focused during the evenings, whereas I tend to get distracted far too easily by the business and hustle-and-bustle of diurnal life. Today though I am breaking habit and writing this during the morning, but it seems to feel right. I am, after all, also very much a day person: Sunshine is a vital and fundamental part of my existence and I need to be around it and in it constantly or I get depressed. I am of the Sun and the Moon equally, which makes things annoying when I need to find time to sleep. I could say the same thing about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine-This is a show that uses a great deal of dark cinematography and colouring, and it’s of course a space-based science fiction series. And yet a sizable majority of my memories of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine evoke feelings of openness, brightness and warmth because, as I’ll discuss in further detail in following chapters, much of my experience of it came through comic books and magazines, including most, if not all, of this season. I have extremely vivid place-memories of reading about this year’s stories in such magazines beneath the warm and welcoming summer sunshine.

It’s news to nobody that Jadzia Dax is my favourite character on this show. It is, in fact, typically a three-way race between her, Tasha Yar and Geordi La Forge for my favourite character in all of Star Trek. But of those three, it’s no contest who has the most consistent and unforgettable personality. Jadzia Dax is a goddess-woman, a divine avatar who exists in the space between worlds beckoning us to join her. And this is her definitive story. Jadzia is “Playing God”, that is, playing at being a god, but not in the expected Robert Oppenheimer sense. Though diegetically mortal, Jadzia Dax is dressed in the trappings of the divine, her initiate Arjin also her prospective pupil and the play’s stand-in for us. Jadzia plays a goddess of fertility, love and lust: Wild and vivacious, she tries to make Arjin get over himself in order to make peace with and accept himself. Because only someone conscious and mature enough to do that will be able to accept cosmic love and light into themselves. It’s in that moment of ego death where we find clarity and gain the power to channel our own truest selves. True confidence and identity lies in the moment where we shed the anxieties and self-consciousness of youth while retaining its vive.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 16th, 2016)

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The Super Nintendo Project is back on Monday! I’m excited at least. The first two entries are really fun, and I’ve high hopes for the rest of the run. It’ll be going through the 1994 games, which I think there are five of total (the list’s on the other computer), then probably doing another Cultural Marxism or two, then back to Brief Treatise. 

Anyway, the first two entries are posted to Patreon. Which is about $2 a week away from me reviewing “The Red Woman” next weekend, incidentally. So, you know, never a better time to start backing and all.

Also this week we’ll have the first of five excerpts from Neoreaction a Basilisk that we’ll be running to promote its upcoming Kickstarter. You can seem, um, some of the response it’s been getting over at Nick Land’s blog. (The Tweets aren’t his, to be clear.) And I pop into the comments on that one too. And soon I’ll be recording the first of a couple of podcasts I’ll be doing on the book, talking with a couple people who have gotten to review the manuscript. 

Now I just need to finish the backmatter essay for this Last War in Albion chapter and see if I can get Chapter Six to actually follow the week after Chapter Five ends.

So, what’re your bets on how the Hugos will turn out?…

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Mind That Until Now Thought of Continuity, Our Torch, Then Saw It Flicker (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Thirty-One: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The War was revealed to have certain similarities to the life and work of William Blake, whose mythology was built around the dualism of the creator Los and the tyrannical geometer Urizen.

Figure 954: Los recoils in horror from his work as Urizen’s body assembles itself. (By William Blake, from The Book of Urizen Copy G, written 1794, printed 1818)

As Blake’s dualism suggests, his instinctive mode of resistance to Urizen, both within himself and without, was creation. Specifically, in Blake’s case, the creation of art. As The Book of Urizen itself makes clear by depicting Los’s failure, the point is not that this resistance will “stop” or “defeat” Urizen, or indeed any other figure one wishes to inveigh against. Indeed, the point is often simply a matter of need or compulsion. Much like Watchmen is simply not a thing one writes if one is capable of avoiding doing so, the ornately realized illuminated prophecies that Blake creates – especially the late career ones such as the fifty page Milton a Poem and the hundred page Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion – are not works that people create incidentally. In many ways, this is far more true for Blake than for Moore. Moore, after all, may not have been capable of stopping himself from writing Watchmen, but equally, he wouldn’t have written it were it not for the existence of a major comics company that wanted him to do a prestige project. It was a lucrative gig and, for all Moore’s eventual misgivings about it, a savvily chosen project. Blake’s work, on the other hand, was ostentatiously non-commercial. The illuminated prophecies used printing techniques of his own devising, not fitting into any existing market or practice. After an early flirtation with the relatively sellable notion of a children’s book of poetry in the form of Songs of Innocence, his illuminated work moved quickly and decisively towards the obscure and difficult. His insistence that each copy must be unique and of his hand severely limited sales. In short, Blake’s illuminated prophecies eschewed essentially every form of commercial sense known to man.

This is not to say that Blake lacked all business sense. He supplemented his work as a prophet with more conventional commercial illustration, thus generally managing to make ends meet, although it was at times a bitterly narrow thing. But Blake often resented this work, and the degree to which he was constantly haunted by paranoia about his friends and associates made things harder for him. As a result, he could turn on his employers, as he did with his patron at the start of the 19th century, William Hayley, who gave him lodging in a cottage at Felpham and a series of portrait commissions that kept him busy and well paid. He found the work deadening, however, eventually coming to describe Hayley as “an enemy of my spiritual life” and moving back to London, where he quickly started work on Milton and Jerusalem.…

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“The Face You Wear”: Masks

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Does a mask hide a person’s identity or bring it out? Perhaps it does a little of both; emphasizing certain states of being while keeping others hidden.

We all wear masks. We switch between them every day as we go about our lives, putting on different face and playing a different role for everybody we meet. Rarely, if ever, do we find someone with whom we can share the full multiplicity of people inside us. Instead, we wear the mask appropriate to the encounter. I’m wearing a mask right now for you all: This is the mask of Vaka Rangi, which has come to symbolize certain familiar behaviour traits and tropish signifiers that you have come to expect following this blog for a number of years. As personal as I try to get in my writings, Vaka Rangi is not, has never been and cannot ever be a complete encapsulation of my feelings and my identities for many different reasons. It’s a caricatured facsimile meant to stand for specific aspects of it I felt were appropriate and workable enough to weave into a multi-threaded series of narratives.

(This is not, it should be stressed, by definition a bad thing: We always want to evoke different parts of our personalities in different contexts because we all have different skills, talents and experiences that are relevant to different situations. This is ultimately just a more roundabout way of explaining how we call upon and mobilize our positionalities when it’s fitting to do so. In this world, not everybody needs to know everything about everybody else all of the time. Think about me however you need to in order to help you get through your day.)

Deanna Troi claims Data is suffering from “android multiple personality disorder”. But she’s a psychologist and is trained to view things in terms of diagnoses and disorders. But Deanna Troi is also an artist, as is Data, which is an important point worth returning to. Either way, what Data is experiencing is something far more profound than what the medical terminology would have us believe. In many cultures, masks play a ritual shamanic role: The mask is supposed to embody the essence of a god, spirit or ancestor, so when a shaman adopts the mask he or she is attempting to contact the deity it represents, either through channeling, invocation or direct communication. As in all such rituals, there is a strong performative element-For the duration of mask ceremonies of this type, the shaman “becomes” the deity through a combination of staged artifice (they’re literally playing a role) and through magickal, spiritual identification and association. And who better to give a role like this than to Data, our “imitation man” who is defined by the way in which he self-consciously takes on different roles, and is himself played by impressionist Brent Spiner? Indeed, this episode is likely the defining moment where Spiner and Data are finally allowed to meld their respective skills in a way that naturalistically furthers the story’s themes.…

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Tricky Dicky, Part 6: Dress Modern

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We are now in an odd, reversed position when it comes to William Shakespeare and Richard III: all of a sudden, and for the first time, we seem to know where Richard III’s head is, but not where to find Shakespeare’s.

I’ve written in previous instalments of this series about the relationship between Richard III (the man), Richard III (the play), William Shakespeare, and history. 

Essentially, my argument is that William Shakespeare was, for various reasons to do with his class position, his family, his career, and the historical moment and social milieu in which he found himself, peculiarly well placed to dramatise social energies, feelings, anxieties, and vertigos, which still speak to us today.  He was writing at the dawn of modernity, during the years immediately following the end of the medieval, in the immediate aftermath of the English Reformation… all of which is related to the fundamental fact that he was writing during the transition from feudalism as the dominant economic form of English society to capitalism.  We still live with the energies and dystrophies of modernity, since we still live in capitalist society.  Indeed, Shakespeare has in some ways only become more relevant as capitalism has become more predominant.  He dramatises some of its foundational myths, legends, conflicts, and anxieties.  He offers a still relevant interrogation of much foundational bourgeois ideology that has gone on, in mutant form, to become hegemonic.  His drama is based on people torn apart in social struggles, and though feudalism is long dead in Western Europe, we still today understand the feeling of being pulled between the imperatives of capitalist society and other non-capitalist instincts.  As I said before, I don’t claim that any of this constitutes any particularly original insight on my part… though I may be slightly original in claiming that part of why we continue to find Shakespeare compelling is because he wrote about life during the phase of ‘primitive accumulation’ and, at least according to David Harvey drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, primitive accumulation has never quite gone away.   Capitalism has always accumulated primitively, and this has only become more noticeable in the Western world with the rise of neoliberalism, which has cannibalised social wealth built up during the years of social democracy.  Moreover, Shakespeare is embraced and performed in many other parts in the world than Europe, including places wracked by even more violent and rapacious forms of present-day primitive accumulation, usually practiced via Western economic and/or military imperialism, and/or corporate extortion.

One of the ways in which theatrical performances attempt to express, mediate, or emphasize Shakespeare’s continued ‘relevance’ is through modern dress productions.  There’s an interesting irony about modern dress productions.  They are almost the rule rather than the exception these days, and yet you still hear people say they dislike them.  And yet it would be fair enough to describe what Shakespeare and his company did on stage at the Globe and the Blackfriars as modern dress productions.  It appears that they did not generally try to present the past as looking much different. …

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Comics Reviews (April 13th, 2016)

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A very Marvel-heavy week in which I consider the merits of further trimming my pulls.

Guardians of the Galaxy #7

Possibly the best issue of the relaunched run – Rocket Racoon and Ben Grimm are a lovely pairing, and Bendis writes a particularly good Grimm. But look, this is still the weakest issue of the week, and it’s the book’s best face, and that means I’m done here, I think.

Code: FCMHIQL6NR8M

A-Force #4

A perfectly competent ending to the first arc, but absolutely nothing special. Edges out Guardians mainly on the strength of the line about Medusa’s prehensile hair. Will probably keep this one more issue to see what it’s like under just Thompson, but I’m pretty skeptical that this is going to ever be anything more than a bog-standard Marvel book with a better cast than it deserves.

Code: FCMBTCPS1HTW

Silver Surfer #3

As with the previous issue, a lovely homage to the long history of the character, but unfortunately also one that makes me more inclined to go dig up some classic Surfer tales than to read this. The ending is dramatic but almost entirely unearned, with Slott and Allred’s style simply being unsuited to any sort of personal turmoil on the Surfer’s part. Some lovely touches – Ms. Marvel’s cameo is sublime. But also some muddy storytelling – the Thing’s face turn is basically off-panel, for instance. All told, fine, and I’ll probably keep up with this until it throws up an issue that actively annoys me again, but I continue to think the Slott/Allred approach has run its course. 

Code: FCMGM790JJYK

Mercury Heat #9

The doldroms period of the arc, where its major ideas have been deployed but the payoff is nowhere in sight. Good, competent action of the sort that Mercury Heat exists to provide, and an issue with no major flaws as such, but without anything that compels it higher in the list.

Spider-Gwen #7

It says so much about my ambivalence towards Marvel right now that my reaction to this issue is so mixed with the glum dread of knowing it’s going to come unglued like every other crossover in recent memory. But two issues into Spider-Women… I like it! These are still a good trio of characters, and the decision to just separate them from the Spider-Men for a story and let them romp through the world on their own terms is great. Love Reed Richards, in particular. 

Code: FCMRQ992TYVH

Darth Vader #19

Gillen pays off absolutely fucking everything in this arc in a barnstorming issue that just goes from strength to strength. Love the interaction with Aolin and Morit, love all the stuff between Vader and Trios, love the final page. Love the decision to do a four-issue arc so that this moved fast and hard. This is just a flat-out well-designed issue. 

Code: FCMQTD8V1SLM…

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Pex Lives 31: Terror of the Autons

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Comics reviews this evening, but for now, a new episode of Pex Lives in which the boys are joined by author Kit Power to talk about Terror of the Autons. And apparently there’s some Stephen King stuff, although the description gives me no clue what that entails in any way, shape, or form. But evidently it’s a thing. So there you go. Listen here.…

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“Maya”: Shadowplay

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A holographic little girl discusses the nature of imaginal reality with a formless being and a goddess. This is an interesting one.

We should begin with the personal identity theory and problem of self themes which naturally always crop up in any story like this. As one might expect from this show, particularly this show this season, the problem is addressed and dealt with rather easily. As a direct thematic follow-up to both “Inheritance” and “Whispers”, it’s never portrayed as ambiguous whether or not the colonists really are sentient beings. That is, if you discount Odo. Odo’s apparent uncertainty over this fact is a reflection of his own inner nature, not necessarily a statement of judgment: He’s accompanied Dax to the Gamma Quadrant to look for clues about his history and identity, and he wants hard and clear answers. Of course, Dax has helped him in this regard before, earlier in the season in “The Alternate”. But seeing “The Alternate” is not a necessary prerequisite for enjoying this episode.

Odo is a neoplatonist here, out searching for an objective reality he can define himself in accordance with. He’s also a detective, heavily invested in solving mysteries and getting to the bottom of a capital-T Truth he sees as being wrongfully withheld from him. It’s of little surprise that the mask he crafts for himself involves serving as a constable, an elected law-enforcement officer with changeably defined responsibilities. This is, of course, and always has been, the key to understanding who Odo is: The naturally fluid and amorphous shapeshifter yearns for form and rigidity because of his own reflexive questions and self-conscious insecurities. Odo likes hard facts and hard truths, things he can hold onto and be absolutely sure of. So naturally he’s going to be less than thrilled with the colony of holograms whose holographic nature is being hidden from them. To him, this is a willful Obfuscation of The Truth, a crime being committed that someone must be held accountable for.

Except Taya tells Odo that shapeshifters aren’t real. Which means, by definition, Odo isn’t real either. And things suddenly got all “Ship in a Bottle” up in here. Although then Taya says she wants to be a shapeshifter, because that would mean she could be anything and everyone would want to be with her. And maybe the better analogy is Promethea…

Taya and the rest of her people are real because Rurigan treats them as if they’re real. He designed them to be exact duplicates of his deceased family and friends on his homeworld and loved them the same way, which means the holographic villagers have become them. This is personal identity theory working on the plane of the imaginal: Not only the psychical continuity of one person, but an entire world kept alive through one person’s perspective of it. The imaginal is dynamically formless: Shaped by positionality, it can also influence it in turn. Gods inarguably exist in the realm of the imaginal, and gods can reshape themselves into new identities through mythopoeia.…

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Cultural Marxism III: Use of Weapons

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Use of Weapons marks a clear transition in Banks’s career; it is the last of the Culture novels to have been revised from a pre-existing manuscript. It also serves as a temporary endpoint to the Culture series, which Banks put down for six years, penning two of his three non-Culture sci-fi novels in the gap. And it provides a conceptual culmination to the line of thought explored in the three of Banks’s science fiction novels looked at thus far (although by any reasonable standard Walking on Glass and The Bridge are also science fiction novels). It is unsurprising, perhaps, to find that this is the oldest of Banks’s pre-Wasp Factory manuscripts, and the book he first developed the Culture for; a fact that offers an easy narrative whereby Banks wiped out on the overly ambitious premise and structure of this book, spent a couple of books playing with its themes in other contexts, and finally, with a crucial assist from Ken McLeod, reattempted the magnum opus and got it right.

Certainly the book echoes the three previous books discussed in distinct ways. The Wasp Factory is perhaps the subtlest, as it’s easy to miss that it uses the same basic narrative structure as Use of Weapons. Much of this is because Use of Weapons is so ostentatious in its structure, with its two sets of chapters, one of which is numbered backwards so as to scream “we are working our way through a series of flashbacks towards some climactic reveal about the character’s origin” as loudly as possible. But The Wasp Factory uses the same approach of alternating between a forward-moving timeline and a chain of flashback revelations about the past – it just doesn’t separate the flashbacks into their own chapters. (And much like The Wasp Factory, Use of Weapons’s best reading is the second one in which the reader is free to focus on how the novel is constructed around the information revealed at the end.)

The similarities with Consider Phlebas are more straightforward; like Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons has a main character who is a mercenary not of the Culture itself. Unlike Horza, Cherardenine Zakalwe works for the Culture instead of their enemies, but he still has a distinct distance from them, actively declining to settle down within the Culture in favor of continuing to take soldiering jobs for them. In essentially every regard Use of Weapons is the smarter, subtler book here – readers interested in seeing how Banks developed as a writer could scarcely do better than reading these two and looking at two very similar protagonists who end up coming out very differently. But the pattern is largely the same.

You could easily argue that Gurgeh in Player of Games is another example of the pattern – as, indeed, is Frank, in that all of them are very much people who have been carefully shaped and designed for circumstances, even if only Horza and Cherardenine are weapons as such. And it’s true, this is a pronounced theme in the four Banks works discussed on this blog over the past year and change.…

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