SFitze issue 03 2022
-newsplatter by ST-
[issue 03 2022]
Thank you for reading the SFitze newsletter. If you’re interested in more SFitze issues please subscribe below or share with others. There is a lot to pack: from Russian Cyberhospital on wheels, Techno-Orientalist SF archetypes (Robots/Clones/Aliens) to forgotten Futurians and bric-à-brac bricoleurs.
BRICOLEUR AS WORLD-BODY-BUILDER
Found the above illustration in a compendium of Soviet space exploration graphics & designs, archived from the popular science magazine collection of the Moscow Design Museum. In issue #10 of Technology for the Youth magazine from 1956, N. Kolchitsky illustrates a “Flying Disc”, based on a blueprint by Romanian inventor Henri Coandă. In another forgotten episode of the Cold War era a Canadian company (3rd largest Canadian corporation by 1958) Avro Canada was apparently planning to manufacture an aircraft based on these bizarre UFO-like designs by an engineer from the East and put them to use outside of Toronto. I decided to pick this illustration, one easy to classify as crackpot popular mechanics. Just another example of a retro-futurist bygone era, made up of slowly flaking futures that never came to be. Easily another example to remind us of “the slow cancellation of the future”(M. Fisher) and why Flying Cars contribute both to the Declining Rate of Profit (David Graeber) and to aviation pollution. I want to depart from Coandă the inventor/engineer as the central hero figure of both SF narratives, official Romanian science history or of gloriefied (mostly Western) linear progress.
Fragile, exhausted and nearly broken worlds do not need just the expert hands of watchmakers (blind or not) or the touted ‘solutionism’ of technocrats. And I am saying this knowing that expertocracy has been tried hard during the COVID-19. Biomedical expertise seemed to arrive uncoordinated and much too late, weakened and hampered down either by existing North-South disparities or distorted by the lens of platform monopoly capitalism (FB & al) catering to the highest QAnon bidder. Economic imperatives seemed to ramp up a kind of social Darwinism eager to eugenically divide everybody into essential and non-essential workers. Expertise and rapid deployment came filtered down through vaccine inequality, with powerful and rich EU-states stashing up on vaccines while staunchly resisting a waiver on vaccine patents for those who needed it most, thus at a key moment of the 21st c deciding to support corporate Pharma interests and the private sector, instead of the people. Maybe everything is dwarfed by this reality, yet I feel there is a need for a different, divergent image of the interplanetary caretaker or barefoot doctor - someone more in tune with the fragility and instability of worlds that seem ready to collapse, fragilized by austerity politics, rust belts and bottom lines, ready to give away any minute, and far from being up for N. Fedorov’s common task.
Again the bricoleur is called for instead of the engineer, based on a distinction made by anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). There is a need to revisit, reevaluate or invent works where the mender takes center stage. In Eastern Europe, before and after 1989, the bricoleur still is an almost legendary figure, even if open to ridicule, inferiority complexes, and bouts of local humor. The bricoleur (RO: meşter, depanator, dibaci, reparator, bun-la-toate, cârpaci etc ) is almost like a shadow figure of the engineer. The engineer being this poster-child of progress, a much more esteemed or even feared and respected figure, enshrined in the local pantheon and much more closer to the Promethean ideals and ethos of Socialism and Progressivism. I collate this bricoleur with something like the Eastern European body-builder, training outside Euro-American fitness culture. Here is a weight-lifting and muscle-sculpting exercise not at the luxury-end California gym but within the scrap metal yard full of heavy-space era industrialism leftovers either in the Kachalka outdoor gym of Kyiv (that I managed to pass by visiting my partner Julia and her friends) or Timiryazevsky Park workout in Moscow. Body-building is not necessarily as famous as being a cosmonaut or a kolkhoznik. Yet this activity in ex-Soviet and Eastern Europe remains a site of active recycling and using in a creative way all that scrap iron to make workable body-training machines that interact with what is available. I remember artist friend Simion Cernica also sporting a recycled pair of weights made out of car tires and metal poles back at his flat in Bucharest before moving to LA.
There is even a HERO FACTORY (2008) video work by Ciprian Homorodean ridiculing “the ideal masculine model” inspired by US male role-models from the VHS era (Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Lee) but training in DIY gym improvised in a non-idyllic countryside setting. It almost reminds me of the Zambian Space Programme training grounds where Edward Makuka Nkoloso established the National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy in the 1960s. Here is a short trailer to the documentary directed by Irish filmmaker Gar O’Rourke on Kachalka workout (thanks to Rares M. for sharing this one):
So, in contrast with the engineer, the bricoleur takes the blame for not having the ‘proper’ tools, or the ‘proper’ work conditions, mostly because his work feels always improvised, makeshift, patchy, make-do with a provisory status. Yet what the bricoleur makes and does is not out of glory, profit, or out of innovation bravado - but mostly out of a certain curiosity with what is at hand having to face up an extreme situation. Adjusting not because he has to adapt but because there’s a feeling the situation or site-specific conditions are unavoidable and should therefore not be ignored. A bricoleur is getting down and dirty, having to intervene under ‘improper’ dire circumstances, suffering under a severe lack of means or even more importantly - under a general devaluation of all means, where only the ends (of Man) count as important to the logistics of capital. The bricoleur is a figure that has to make do with what is NOT at hand. Not in the sense that he has to adapt or accept any situation, as so much is required of everyone nowadays, but of transforming an improper tool into a viable and not indifferent means, even a metallic kitchen cauldron into a possible UFO signage. The bricoleur deals with impossibilities, with what already exists and is ignored or devalued by the system. That is why I consider such current world-building closer to the repairmen or plumber of worlds in a science-fiction context than say the traditional inventor, the mad genius or the Professor.
EXHIBITION REVIEW
Here is a recently published extended review of the New Temporealities: The Xenogeneses of SF show from last year written by Ionuţ Sociu with photos by Claudiu Popescu. Ionuţ Sociu is guided by his avowedly realist literary orientation (he was apparently never attracted by sci-fi nor does he identify as a science fiction fan) while letting himself open to a “sense of wonder” that this encounter might supply for both aficionados and total newcomers. One of my favorite sweet bits is when he picks up from our SF club map of Romania - a certain SF called Soul - (Cenaclul Suflet) situated in his home city of Botoşani in the NE of the country. This and a missing sense under increased military tensions and new Cold War fears (+ lack of united action the face of both health/climate crisis) of what could be a new sense of ‘blue marble’ planetarity based on solidarity and mutual help.
For more check here (only in Romanian)
SHOW OPENING: Extr-Activism: De-colonizing Space Mining
A much-awaited show has just opened at WUK in Vienna. If you are around please consider visiting. While on Earth Extractivism is getting out of fashion, mining is being moved to outer space beltalowda! This is an unsual and timely exhibition curated by Saskia Vermeylen. Below is one work by Nuotama Bodomo (2014) presented in this context. Sergiu Sas and Vlad Cadar are also part of the show. I am not supposed to tell or anticipate - but is seems that Indecis art space from Timisoara will kindly host the next 2022 Cozzzmonautica (where Saskia V. also had a lecture).
The exhibition EXTR-Activism is in response to these challenges and presents an artistic and activist reflection about the new commercial space race for mineral extractivism in outer space. This exhibition interrogates how Euro-American positivist law has played a role in governing mining and extractivism across time and space, pushing resource frontiers across the globe and now beyond. To visualise and reflect upon the connection between old colonial extractivism on planet earth and new colonial extractivism in outer space, the exhibition brings together artists from the global North and the global South.
The artworks selected for this exhibition explore the notions of extractivism and neo-colonialism of the commercial space era against the background of African countries developing their own space programme (most notably South Africa and Nigeria). The juxtaposition of the old space powers’ renewed interest in space colonies on Mars and mining resources through private entrepreneurs against the widening of the space programme provides the ideal background to curate artworks questioning our current dilemma whether to protect outer space from further colonisation or to open up this new frontier to further exploitation and environmental destruction - a new colonial scramble for natural resources.
FUTURIANS
Maybe some of you have been watching the new Apple+ The Foundation series based on the famous works by Isaac Asimov. While watching the lavish visuals and hieratic Imperial splendor of the new series one might be inclined to forget that a lot of Isaac Asimov’s ideas (including his initial Foundation cycle) stemmed out of a particular milieu associated with the Golden Age SF futurism. The Foundation was born out of a social and politically bubbling context that openly endorsed certain progressive aims and radical visions that came to be associated with one of the most politically engaged early groups of science fiction fans. Alas, there is not much information on them overall.
Recently a friend showed me a video of Romanian black Friday 2020 advertising for a local mega-retailer -the Romanian version of Amazon’s online shopping platform. This monster CGI stoked advertising was basically using epic -Roland Emmerich- kind of Independence Day FX effects to celebrate getting prepared for X degree Dependence. What is this X-degree invasion about? Buying and consuming other planets no less. Black Friday is presented as a grotesque SF end-of-the-world super sale (invasion of cheap offers!) This is SF nowadays in its most aggressive-advertising sense selling you more of the same. This (to the chagrin of the Futurians I am sure) is SF as a bold apocalyptic shopping spree, the main turbine of a futurist-fascist acceleration engine and vehicle for xenoforming the Earth.
(members of the initial Futurians: Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl and John Michel in 1938, and participants at the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia)
So, even if forgotten I think that the Futurians should be kept in mind during these trying times that look very much like the dark side of the 1930s. Following ideological differences, Donald A. Wollheim as a member of the Greater New York Science Fiction Club split off founding the Futurians - and pushing for a more left-wing orientation and a certain political ideal (Mutate or Die!). They changed club names several times before finally settling for the Futurians and they were avowedly communist, scientistic and anti-fascist, especially in view of Italian Futurists becoming more and more enmeshed with the nascent fascist state.
I just read a timely, well-documented article about what the Futurians were all about and why they matter to us today. It sure helps us understand how the 1930s galvanized and catalyzed many of the most important struggles for rights and equality, including SF short term and long-termist visions (that align Isaac Asimov’s Foundation with the aims of the Long Now Foundation). These are things that reverberated into the latter part of the 20th century and early 21th c.
Here is the text by Sean Guynes for the LARB - Mutate or Die: Eighty Years of the Futurians’ Vision.
ROBOTS CLONES ALIENS
I will not comment much on this film essay by Michelle H Huang since it is probably one of the most timely and direct examples of why speculative fiction or science fiction, no matter how remote, xeno-, beyond - (beyond human experience etc.) and even beyond the scope of current or future science, can also deal with very proximate social problems and recurring economic contradictions. Asians and ‘oriental’-sounding characters, persons or brands abound in SF from Takeshi Kovac to Tianzhu Enterprise. There has been a lot of groundwork studies about - Techno-Orientalism - especially in the wake of Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (an essay collection edited by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta A. Niu) in 2015. There is numerous other key critical articles available online (including books I have mentioned in SFitze #1). In the wake of current racist anti-Asian sentiment, anti-immigration rhetoric and constant warmongering paranoia, such detailed, clear-headed research and evocative videos are more and more valuable. We need to historicize and dialectically approach pop-cultural icons and memes based on a range of recent SF successful movies (including Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas, Arrival etc). She also includes various other examples including works that combine gender, love, intrigue, Chinese mythology and fighting against oppression (Salt Fish Girl). American race formation is a historical formation, in the sense that it does not stop with the early Chinese migrants building the transcontinental railway in the US or the with the internment of Japanese Americans but also necessitates the constant debunking of the myth of Asian Americans as “model minority” used in the past as a racial wedge. This interchangeability, survivability, and seriality that Michelle N. Huang identifies includes now the image of investment bankers, tech entrepreneurs or say biomedicine/precision medicine professionals within a whole new range of representations, biases and compliance pressures. Thanks to Felix P for sharing his Vimeo collections.
Who commands the future? And who will inherit it?
"Inhuman Figures" is the distillation of Michelle N. Huang's (Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University) research into a film essay that excavates three popular sci-fi archetypes—the robot, clone, and alien—to reveal how racialized futurity is produced from the way America has always regarded Asian Americans as tireless workers, indistinguishable copies, and forever foreigners.
The best books on Science Fiction and Philosophy
recommended by Eric Schwitzgebel
The idea behind this newsletter is to combine - or better weld the common-sensical domain of speculative “what if” (pop empirical appeal) of mundanity familiar to all of us with the most irregular manifestations, unsupported impossibilities and incommensurate values that is typical to so much good SF. One should enjoy, love and entertain both, so here is why I included Eric Schwitzgebel’s interview. Why you can read SF as stand alone on its own or SF as philosophy. He talks very passionately and very seriously about this pluralism of directions, metaphysics, thought experiments, voices, and styles out there and the epistemic complementarity this allows anyone who indulges in it even briefly. Eric’s list is a close one of just 5, and one could include many many more. In short, it is one of the best and most satisfying texts I read recently by a philosopher that happens to be also a science fiction writer. That I appreciate and cherish from afar. I truly think SF makes you see and taste why it is so important to appreciate somebody else’s values etc. no matter how odd, strange, dissimilar, divergent or difficult that might seem in practice. That said, I am also happy with keeping SF distinct. If SF is pushing things to their ultimate ramification (of what it would be like if) we sure can contrast it with both philosophy (foundational, systematic) and science (repeatable, testable, predictable) as defined by Steven Shaviro in his Introduction to Fictions and Fabulations of Sentience. My gut feeling is that one can well read it the other way around - reading good philosophy as smuggled material, as undercover- science fiction. Even in the most abstruse, difficult, delirious and abstract of schemes (say Hegel’s Science of Logic) you can experience something like those black monolith inflections and reflections - feeling dangerously exposed to incoming extraterrestrial knowledge downloads. Big recommendation for anyone to read this interview.
Eric Schwitzgebel is a philosophy professor at UC Riverside and the author of A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.
But in science fiction-type thought experiments you can wonder, okay, what would happen if you took someone’s mind, just to put it crudely, and put it in someone else’s body? Would it be the same person? Would the person follow the mind or would they follow the body? What if you stepped into a machine and two duplicates of you walked out? What if you lived 800 years, gradually acquiring a new personality every century and entirely forgetting your past? You can separate the pieces, considering what really matters about a person’s identity. You can decouple what ordinarily goes together, aiming to find the essence of the matter in the way that philosophers characteristically like to do.
КИБЕРБОЛЬНИЦА | RUSSIAN CYBERHOSPITAL
In the end, I know you will enjoy this video (like I did) by birchpunk Productions churning out another short viral motion graphics/CGI gem (feel free to subscribe to their YT channel, it is well worth it!). Birchpunk defines itself (on YT) as a “daring futuristic dystopian project that ironically shows the Russian future”. There is not much information online about them - but their videos do not need any haphazard introduction. Birchpunk is what is sounds like - a local post-Soviet intensely funny, silly, Kin-dza-dza mad and self-deprecating version of cyberpunk oiled with generous amounts of Russian birch tar oil. It turns stereotypes of Eastern European/Eurasian “backwardness” on their head and presents an original mix of Cyberian survivalist lotek living and demented automation. Hospitals all over the former East suffer under defunding and people generally speaking will do anything to avoid being hospitalized. To me, the birchpunk version of the future seems more viable and in tune with our darkly post-apocalyptic salvagepunk than any neo- or post- cyberpunk to come out of the West recently (taking into account that a lot of gaming & VFX are outsourced to the former East). Russian Cyberhospital is a 2 part biomedical SF splatter where a special nano-ambulance has to save lives and open up blood clots using some heavy artillery (thanks V. Leac for sharing). Enjoy!