I’m a sentimental mook. When a writer dies, I often read
something of theirs as a form of commemoration – a remembering together with
the dead person, whose memory is, as far as we known, no more. A remembering
together with those who have read this person, the invisible community of
writer and reader.
So I thought: time to read Archaeologies of the Future. The book that is generally considered a turning point in … in the general consideration, the career, of Fredric Jameson as writer and critic. The turn to science fiction.
Jameson’s approach is through the utopian. My approach to science fiction is through the more marginal science fiction texts, like Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Benjamin Labatut’s When we cease to Understand the World and The Maniac. In Calvino’s case, the Utopian is derived, I think from Nietzsche – specifically, the Nietzsche of The Gay Science, the first book of which opens with the harshest summary of the “truth” of the science of man – that the individual is nothing, the species all – which is a reprise of a certain nineteenth century interpretation of Darwin – and then runs with that dictum like it was a Marx brothers routine. Nietzsche deals with a dialectic that every person must, once in their lives, stumble upon: the amazing difference between one’s non-importance, one’s absolute nullity in the universe, and one’s importance to one thing in that universe: oneself. Dialectic, or comedy routine? This is Nietzsche standup in that first mini-essay, which asks whether there is a future for laughter, a utopian future for laughter, even, against the utopian impulse. Laughter, here, is not an argument – it is a tabooed event, that which, in the absolute, as it is conceived by the moralist, cannot be allowed to have a future, or even a present:
“That drive, which rules in the most superior and most common people alike, the drive of preserving the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and the passion of the mind; it then goes about in a glorious entourage of reasons will, with every violence, make us forget that it is fundamentally drive, instinct, foolishness, groundlessness. Life must be loved, then! Man must care for his neightbor, then. And we will call them musts and thens, even in the future! Thereby that which is necessary and forever and happens by itself, from now on will appear as directed towards a goal, and will illuminate men as reason and the last commandment – for this is what the ethical teachers represent, as the teachers of the goal of existence. And thus they invent a second and other existence and elevate by means of their new mechanics this old common existence, unhinge it from its common hinges. Yes – and the teacher will absolutely not permit us to laugh about existence, or even, and also, about ourselves – nor about him; for him, One is always One, something first and last and enormous, for him there is no type, no sum, no nothings.”
Benjamin Labutet’s When we cease to understand the world was published a decade after Jameson’s book. Some might hesitate to call it science fiction – rather, it is fiction about real scientists. But I think it is in the vein that goes back to Swift’s Island of Laputa, and really to Aristophanes cloud cuckoo land, and is part of the Jameson’s plat, his vision of science fiction. While Calvino’s plunges into the science as a sort of Dada project, with Nietzschian references. For instance, this, from the story, The Meteorites:
“According to the most recent theories, the Earth was originally a tiny, cold body which later increased in size through the incorporation of meteorites and meteor dust.
At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean – old Qfwfq said – since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different, there’s the atmosphere; you look at the sky and say: ‘Oh, how clear it is, how pure!’ But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder white as mothballs, which deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.”
So I thought: time to read Archaeologies of the Future. The book that is generally considered a turning point in … in the general consideration, the career, of Fredric Jameson as writer and critic. The turn to science fiction.
Jameson’s approach is through the utopian. My approach to science fiction is through the more marginal science fiction texts, like Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Benjamin Labatut’s When we cease to Understand the World and The Maniac. In Calvino’s case, the Utopian is derived, I think from Nietzsche – specifically, the Nietzsche of The Gay Science, the first book of which opens with the harshest summary of the “truth” of the science of man – that the individual is nothing, the species all – which is a reprise of a certain nineteenth century interpretation of Darwin – and then runs with that dictum like it was a Marx brothers routine. Nietzsche deals with a dialectic that every person must, once in their lives, stumble upon: the amazing difference between one’s non-importance, one’s absolute nullity in the universe, and one’s importance to one thing in that universe: oneself. Dialectic, or comedy routine? This is Nietzsche standup in that first mini-essay, which asks whether there is a future for laughter, a utopian future for laughter, even, against the utopian impulse. Laughter, here, is not an argument – it is a tabooed event, that which, in the absolute, as it is conceived by the moralist, cannot be allowed to have a future, or even a present:
“That drive, which rules in the most superior and most common people alike, the drive of preserving the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and the passion of the mind; it then goes about in a glorious entourage of reasons will, with every violence, make us forget that it is fundamentally drive, instinct, foolishness, groundlessness. Life must be loved, then! Man must care for his neightbor, then. And we will call them musts and thens, even in the future! Thereby that which is necessary and forever and happens by itself, from now on will appear as directed towards a goal, and will illuminate men as reason and the last commandment – for this is what the ethical teachers represent, as the teachers of the goal of existence. And thus they invent a second and other existence and elevate by means of their new mechanics this old common existence, unhinge it from its common hinges. Yes – and the teacher will absolutely not permit us to laugh about existence, or even, and also, about ourselves – nor about him; for him, One is always One, something first and last and enormous, for him there is no type, no sum, no nothings.”
Benjamin Labutet’s When we cease to understand the world was published a decade after Jameson’s book. Some might hesitate to call it science fiction – rather, it is fiction about real scientists. But I think it is in the vein that goes back to Swift’s Island of Laputa, and really to Aristophanes cloud cuckoo land, and is part of the Jameson’s plat, his vision of science fiction. While Calvino’s plunges into the science as a sort of Dada project, with Nietzschian references. For instance, this, from the story, The Meteorites:
“According to the most recent theories, the Earth was originally a tiny, cold body which later increased in size through the incorporation of meteorites and meteor dust.
At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean – old Qfwfq said – since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different, there’s the atmosphere; you look at the sky and say: ‘Oh, how clear it is, how pure!’ But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder white as mothballs, which deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.”
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