Head in the Stars Headessays on Science Fiction in the Stars Essays on Science Fiction
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StephenStephen Zepke Zepke Head in the Stars HeadEssays on Science Fiction in the Stars Essays on Science Fiction Skhole 05 First edition published by Multimedijalni institut © 2020 by Stephen Zepke Multimedijalni institut ISBN 978-953-7372-67-5 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National and University Library in Zagreb under 001072705. — Skhole is a program-segment within the flagship Dopolavoro (Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture) Zagreb, August 2020 Stephen Zepke Head in the Stars Essays on Science Fiction For my Father, Nick Zepke, with love. ‘I hold out my hand to the future.’ Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis. Contents acknowledgments — 8 Introduction. Science Fiction, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future — 13 1. Beyond Cognitive Estrangement, The Future in Dystopian Science Fiction Cinema — 23 2. Interface Aesthetics, Science Fiction Film in the Age of Biopolitics — 65 3. Alien Arrival and Alain Badiou’s Philosophy of the Event — 101 4. Against Nihilism, Nietzsche and Kubrick on the Future of Man — 133 5. Peace and Love (and Fuck) as the Foundation of the World, Spinoza’s Ethics in Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders — 183 bibliography — 223 filmography — 230 notes — 233 Acknowledgments Many thanks to all those who have shared my love of science fiction over the years. In particular I’d like to thank Nick Zepke, Arturo Silva, Georg Wasner, Yves Mettler, Nicolas Kolonias, Kat Válastur and Michael Frickh for the energy and ideas you have contributed to this book. All of the chapters in this book began life as essays published in books or journals. They have all been polished and updated, and in some cases completely rewritten for this volume. Chapter 1 was first published in NECSUS, The European Journal of Media Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2012. Chapter 2 condenses material from the course Exploring the interface through science fiction cinemathat I taught at the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb in the summer semester 2010. An essay based on this material was published in Responsibility for Things Seen, edited by Petar Milat, and published in conjunction with BADco.’s participation in the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2011. A different version of the essay was published as ‘Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics’, in Down by law: Revisiting normativity with Deleuze/nomadic thought, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters. London: Continuum, 2012. Chapter 3 includes material published in a series of essays; ‘Alien Badiou: Towards an Ethics of Universal Justice,’ in the web journal Natural Selection, No. 5, Summer 2006; ‘Between an Ethics of the Alien and the Morality of the Monster: Badiou and The Blob,’ in RR_02*, No. 8, January 2005; ‘Between an Ethics of the Alien and the Morality of the Monster, Part Two: Badiou and It Came From Outer Space,’ in Univers, No. 9, December 2005; and most significantly 9 ‘Towards an Ethics of the Alien: Alain Badiou and 1950s ‘Arrival’ Films,’ in the exhibition catalogue Kino wie noch nie, edited by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki. Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2006. I also participated in this exhibition as an artist, showing a 5 channel video installation composed from edited fragments of hundreds of science fiction films. Chapter 4 began life as the paper ‘2001: Towards a Philosophy of the Future,’ given on the 22nd of October, 2004 at MaMa, Zagreb, Croatia. This was then published as ‘2001, A Space Odyssey: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,’ in the book Visual Collegium Reader/Zbornik Vizualnog kolegija, edited by Tanja Vrvilo and Petar Milat. Zagreb: Multimedia Institute, 2008. A different version of this essay also came out as ‘Against Nihilism, Nietzsche and Kubrick on the Future of Man,’ in Journal of French Philosophy: Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française, Volume 17, Number 2, Fall 2007. Chapter 5 was published in the book Immanent Expressions: Literature and the Encounter with Immanence, edited by Brynnar Swenson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2016. There is a submerged history in these references that leads us to the present volume. Leonardo Kovačević invited me to Zagreb to speak at MaMa in 2004, and I ended up talking about 2001. It was then that I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting Petar Milat and Tom Medak, the directors of the research center (and so much else) MaMa. Petar and Tom invited me back to MaMa on numerous occasions, and along with Leonardo became my friends. Through them I met Ivana Ivković, and Nikolina and Sergej Pristaš, along with the rest of the amazing performance 10 group BADco. These people became my Zagreb family when I taught a semester at the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb in 2010, which would go on, via BADco’s appearance at the Venice Biennale, to become chapter 2. Over the intervening years I have continued to speak at MaMa, and remain an enthusiastic fan of BADco. In fact, there is an essay on their work and science-fiction that threatened to be written for this book, but which must unfortunately wait for another occasion. This would be a tribute to the influence Badco has had on me, and in particular their commitment to a modernist aesthetics channeled through contemporary theory and forms, a type of alchemy I also try to practice. I have been very influenced by all these people, and by Zagreb, the city where they live. Given this history it was not surprising that I rather shamelessly asked Petar if MaMa would be interested in publishing this collection. I’m still surprised, and very grateful, that he accepted. Thank you Petar, and all my friends in Zagreb, you are in these pages. 11 Introduction Science Fiction, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future When I was eleven years old my Dad took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. What I remember most vividly is coming out of the cinema, looking up at my father and asking “What did it mean?” My father, slightly frustrated, replied, “I don’t know”. This was a significant moment that marked both the beginning of my love of science fiction and my first inkling that my father didn’t know everything! From now on science fiction would be indelibly stained with the thrill of the unknown. Science fiction concerns the future, of course, this being its simple, organising essence. But science fiction wants to do more than just be in the future, it wants to predict the future, to reveal its horrors and beauty, its similarities and difference, and more importantly, tell us about all the cool stuff. This means that the ‘future’ science fiction explores has changed a lot over the years, and has a fascinating past, one with a twistier time-line than a Phillip K. Dick story (so while the genre is often said to begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Adam Roberts argues for an ‘Ancient Greek SF’ (2016 26)). But this book is not a history of science fiction, because although historical context plays a part – the Cold War from which alien arrival films emerge, or our biopolitical present in which interface films become symptomatic – this book is most concerned with science fiction futures that crack history open, allowing something unaccountable to emerge, something singular and new. As a result, this book sees the ‘new’ and its ‘future’ in science fiction in a very different way from Darko Suvin and Frederic Jameson, whose astoundingly influential theory sees science fiction futures as forms of ‘cognitive 15 estrangement’ that seek to reflect on the present that produces them. On their account, science fiction offers us (its readers and viewers) a future that is recognisably extrapolated from the present (this is its cognitive or scientific aspect), but nevertheless gives us enough distance for critical reflection (this is the fictional part allowing estrangement – in Jameson’s Structuralist inflected criticism the terms map onto each other; cognitive estrangement = science fiction). Suvin attributes this distancing to what he calls a ‘novum’ (a term he takes from Ernst Bloch’s monumental The Principle of Hope), or the utopian element of a story that is identifiably ‘new’ (whether thing, ability, or belief). For both Jameson and Suvin then, the condition of the ‘new’ is the present that creates it, and the future is always relative to it. ‘Born in history and judged in history,’ Suvin writes, ‘the novum has an ineluctably historical character. So has the correlative fictional reality or possible world which, for all its displacements and disguises, always corresponds to the wish-dreams of a specific sociocultural class or implied addressees.’ (1988 76) For both Suvin and Jameson, science fiction is always ‘about’ the present, and the ‘future’ or ‘new’ is merely a genre device allowing texts a critical distance on their conditions of emergence. To me this view on the future in science fiction, while no doubt correct in most cases, nevertheless seems a bit disappointing and limited, not least because it completely contradicts my pre-teen experience of 2001. Back then Kubrick’s film struck me as wonderfully opaque, its mysteries undoubtedly liberating, given that my father was dumbstruck as to their meaning. In hindsight my 16 interpretation seems more correct than I perhaps realised, because the meaning of the monolith is found precisely in its radical silence, its utter impermeability as to its intent or purpose, and it is this unknowable essence that produces the remarkable journey leading humanity to its miraculous re-birth as the Starchild. Each time the monolith appears life’s conditions are exceeded, history is blasted open, and chronological time is put out of joint by a force that operates according to a totally alien logic.