Of Engines and Monsters:

A New Materialist Reading of Materialities in

William Gibson and ’s The Difference Engine

and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

by

Zafeiroula Kavvadia

A dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture,

School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

NOVEMBER 2017 Of Engines and Monsters:

A New Materialist Reading of Steampunk Materialities in

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine

and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

by Zafeiroula Kavvadia

Has Been Approved February 2018

APPROVED: Supervisor: Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou

Examiners: Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi Dr. Michail Kokkonis TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………………..... i

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………… iii

INTRODUCTION ……………………...…………………………………………………….…1

CHAPTER ONE: Ghosts and Machines: Material Objects, Technological Progress, and

Human Primacy in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The

Difference Engine

1. An Alternative Steam-Revolution ………………………………………….... 20

1.1. Back To The : The Difference Engine and Steampunk

Ideologies…………………………………………………………...... … 23

1.2. Matter With a Vengeance: A New Materialist Reading of Objects and

Settings ………………………………….……..…………….…..…..…. 28

CHAPTER TWO: “Half-Things and Neither-Nors”: Embodied Materiality, Difference,

and Subjectivity in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

2. The Promises of Monstrous Flesh ………………………………………...…. 50

2.1. The Weird and the Weirder: China Miéville’s Tales of Darkness and

Resistance ……………………………………………………..….…..… 52

2.2. “Dreamed up in bone and brick”: A New Materialist Reading of

Embodied Matter ……………………………………………….…….… 56

CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………………….…. 81

WORKS CITED ………………………………………………………………………...….… 87 Kavvadia i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis took much, much longer to complete than anticipated. A lot happened in the course of the one year and a half between completing the required coursework and the submission of this work. In this torrent of change, it is one of the most rewarding moments one could hope for to see this project completed.

It has been more than eight years since I was a first-year student at the School of English.

Since then, I have learnt more things than I could have imagined, I have been challenged intellectually, and I have grown as a person (mostly for the better, I hope). This is why this place will always feel like more than home, and finishing is a pleasant and at the same time sad occasion.

I want to thank all the teachers I have worked with throughout the years, and specifically those who worked with us during the master’s: Dr. Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Dr. Yannis Kanarakis,

Dr. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, and Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi. Special thanks go to Dr. Anastasia

Stefanidou for teaching us the value of mistakes in and out of the class.

The most heartfelt and warmest acknowledgment has to be for Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou who, apart from being a wonderful teacher, was the most supportive and inspiring supervisor any student could hope for. This project would have never been completed without her patient guidance and uplifting comments pertaining to academic efforts, but not limited to them.

Kleoniki Skoularika and Foteini Stavrou, our school’s librarians, also deserve a special shout-out and I am deeply grateful to them not only for being helpful sources of information, but also for being lenient with my mostly harmless yet habitual lack of punctuality in my shifts at the library. Kavvadia ii

Of course, the program would be only half as awesome as it was without my classmates.

Thank you Ada, Christina, Dimitris, Elli, Iliana, Ioanna, Katerina, Kristen, Maritina, Ria, and

Stella for being actual friends. With all of you as companions, the journey was made not only easier, but fun and rewarding beyond expectation. Extra kudos for all those days and nights of fun, food, drinking, talking, and dreaming, and here’s to more of them.

Finally, special thanks for their presence, as well as their emotional and material support, to all of my beloved, non-academic people, my family and friends, and especially Adrian,

Aggeliki, Ano, Chara, Dimitris, Elissavet, George, my parents and grandmother, and most of all, my grandfather.

This one is for him. Kavvadia iii

ABSTRACT

The present thesis examines two works widely cited as representative examples of steampunk fiction, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) and China Miéville’s

Perdido Street Station (2000), with special attention paid to the theories of new materialism and how they can be applied to the two novels. Starting with The Difference Engine, a decidedly postmodernist work with metafictional elements, the first chapter highlights the ways in which material objects seem to guide social progress in the novel and alternately challenge as well as affirm human primacy, resulting in an ambivalent but ultimately pessimistic outcome for humanity. Continuing with Perdido Street Station, a gritty example of , the second chapter focuses on the positive political potential that derives from the representations of hybrid embodied materialities when they interact with discourses of knowledge. The aim of this thesis is thus twofold: on the one hand, it attempts to show how malleable steampunk is, while on the other hand, it argues for new materialism as a promising critical and philosophical approach for the study of . Using a range of different sources, the present thesis attempts to explore how material bodies and material objects interact with one another as well as with the discourses of progress and knowledge as these appear in the primary sources under examination, and how the re-conceptualization of our relationship to matter can lead to a more sustainable social and political future.

Keywords: new materialism, steampunk, matter, technology, neo-Victorianism, hybrid, anthropocentricism Kavvadia 1

INTRODUCTION “The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.” —Paul Valéry, “Our Destiny and Literature” (1937)

The world of steampunk, which has become increasingly more popular, more diverse, and, for these reasons, more demanding of systematic critical attention, takes us back in time putting us alongside major geniuses whose inventions have changed the course of history as we know it. In the pages that follow, I will first attempt to provide an overview of steampunk as a cultural phenomenon, both in its literary and material manifestations, and then connect it to the political potential of steampunk speculative fiction that has been produced on the two sides of the Atlantic by focusing on the case of two specific writers. In particular, I will concentrate on two examples of literary texts identified with the steampunk aesthetic,

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) and China Miéville’s

Perdido Street Station (2000). The focus of the analysis will be the representation of matter and materiality in relation to structures of power and technology, and especially the possibilities of resistance offered by the fictional encounters between technology and matter as evidenced in the novels under consideration, but also the ways in which problematic and/or negative ideas about matter and its position in modern human societies are reproduced.

The steampunk aesthetic in these novels serves as the medium through which a reworked relationship of the human subject with materiality is examined, a relationship with the potential to upset given categories of subjectivity, difference, and change. For this reason,

I want to suggest that the two works can be viewed as variations of steampunk fiction that co- exist but not necessarily overlap. In this formulation, steampunk is not unequivocally radical or conservative, but rather a malleable narrative framework within which contradictory political positions may be expressed. What I would like to propose in the current thesis is that the two texts to be examined here express important shifts in the popular technological imaginary in its relation to the material world, and that they are linked to the different cultural Kavvadia 2 environments their authors work from: Gibson and Sterling’s novel springs right from 1980s technofetishism and the dystopian impulse of postmodern , while

Miéville’s work is influenced by the multicultural 1990s and the pressing need for a positive relationship to difference and change. The novels were published in the beginning and at the end of the 1990s in the U.S. and the U.K. respectively. The first was written by two eminent authors of science fiction literature in North America, Gibson and Sterling, while the second by one of the representative authors of the New Weird and the British science fiction Boom,

Miéville.1 Thus, apart from the employment of the steampunk aesthetic, the two novels are wholly dissimilar: one could say that they ask the same questions, but do so in different ways and come up with different answers.

The present choice is thus motivated by what I perceive as the points of contact between the two texts as well as by the individual trajectories they follow. If speculative fiction in general, and steampunk in particular, is a thought experiment in contingency, I am interested in exploring what exactly it is that makes a narrative produce certain representations and avoid others. More specifically, steampunk presents us with an opportunity to displace time and space in distinctively complex ways and thus create alternative loci for sociopolitical experimentation. Thus, the two texts in question can be used to trace the ways in which steampunk and hence, speculative fiction, has grappled with the problematics of the institutionalization of scientific knowledge, the conservative/radical possibilities offered by technology and science, and the ramifications of technoscientific progress on humans and the societies in which they live, all the while looking at how these

1 The British science fiction Boom is the name critics, publishers, and writers in the early 2000s used to describe the flux of British science fiction that started in the early 1990s. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. writes in the editorial introduction of the Nov. 2003 issue of that a “Boom is not a movement, it is a moment. It is not intended, it happens. It happens at the moment it is widely recognized that an unusually large number of like-minded, mutually supporting, contingently connected writers and thinkers are producing work of high value. This energy is then shaped into a creative field by publishers, critics, journalists, and ministries of culture, who may of course also inflate and manipulate the constellation of energies for their narrow interests” (353). Andrew M. Bould succinctly summarizes the critical and popular discourse on the Boom in his survey article “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom” (2003). Kavvadia 3 issues interact with the notions of embodiment and materiality in an increasingly complicated everyday reality. Unlike the vast majority of works currently thought of as belonging to the category of steampunk fiction, both of these novels are openly political to varying degrees without being reductionist, and for this reason they are interesting cases for examination.

Starting from Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine, which constitutes Chapter

One of the thesis, I will trace the mutations that the narrative structure of this particular work registers in relation to the conception of matter, and more specifically, the way that matter is implicated in the changing position of humanity within a rapidly technologized world. By looking at the way the characters interact with material objects and the scientific discourse and knowledge that surrounds those as well as at the narrative strategies that the authors employ, I will argue that in The Difference Engine the steampunk aesthetic is combined with a reserved attitude towards political change and agency which, despite the presence of subversive elements, results into a largely dystopian imagined past and future. The emergence of the Information Society projected onto a Victorian time and space gives the reader the opportunity to rethink the ways in which knowledge has been used and abused by centers of power in order to dominate the natural world and the body, while setting the stage for more politically progressive steampunk.

Moving onto the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, I will examine

Miéville’s Perdido Street Station in Chapter Two of the thesis as an example of overtly political speculative fiction, which by virtue of blending science fiction, , and the steampunk aesthetic, opens up different possibilities for the treatment of materiality within a sociopolitical environment immersed in technoscience. Choices pertaining to world-building and manner of characterization will be commented upon as well as the ways in which language is used to bring together conflicting images of the organic and the inorganic and thus create enriched spaces of identification beyond superficial binarisms. I argue that the Kavvadia 4 way that the novel combines science and the supernatural, and its challenge to anthropocentricism, inject the steampunk aesthetic that it employs with a radical potential.

Through explicit attention to different forms of embodied materiality, Perdido Street Station poses a more optimistic view of sociopolitical engagement that distinguishes it from the far darker examples of earlier postmodernist speculative fiction.2

What I aim to suggest here is that the two novels realize the potentialities of steampunk in distinctive ways by incorporating the literary and social influences of their cultural environment, a feature that leads to the diversification of steampunk itself.

Admittedly, some of my conclusions will be based on broad observations and they could definitely be argued against. To support this case, I will make use of the new materialist approach in philosophy and critical theory, specifically as it has been developed by scholars like Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, and Karen Barad, in addition to the monistic philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the posthumanist socialist feminism of

Donna J. Haraway. I will combine these theoretical perspectives with those originating from steampunk studies, and especially from contemporary scholars of steampunk such as Mike D.

Perschon and Jess Nevins. This combination results in a theoretical framework that is unavoidably eclectic, but I would like to think of this as a strength rather than a limitation; one could call it a kind of steampunked theory.

The rest of this introduction will thus have a two-fold aim: first, to lay out some of the dominant definitions of steampunk and to provide more information as to its origins and cultural context, and second, to delineate some of the basic features and tenets of new materialism as it pertains to the present analysis. Taking into account limitations of time and space, I am attempting to be as concise as possible, by elaborating further on the issues to be raised in the following chapters.

2 For example, the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s-1970s and the 1980s emergence of cyberpunk consisted largely of works in which post-apocalyptic, dystopian, and socially critical themes appeared in reaction to earlier utopian renditions of science fiction. Kavvadia 5

As a basic premise, I start from the assertion that steampunk may best be thought of as an aesthetic applicable to a range of texts and practices, rather than as a genre or sub- genre.3 According to Mike D. Perschon, the steampunk aesthetic can be conceived as a

“design sensibility,” summed up to a “surface style” which works as an interface between

Victorian and contemporary technology (The Steampunk Aesthetic 5). It is applied across the board to adventures, “gas-lamp romances,” semi-historical fantasy fiction and more, a fact which supports its conceptualization as an aesthetic. Moreover, the validity of Perschon’s argument can again be confirmed if one studies the corpus of writing on steampunk by scholars, fans, and practitioners, from which it is apparent that steampunk is and has been appropriated by multiple audiences with contradictory beliefs as to its features and purposes.

From those who see it as a radical intervention to the mindless and limiting consumerism of our times, which makes us all slaves to highly specialized technology, to those who find it to be only a re-iteration of a colonialist, imperialist, and sexist gaze that uses a mock version of rationality to hide its true colors, steampunk seems to trigger enthusiastic debates on all sides.

But all of this emotion and intellect, either for or against steampunk, has as its pivot the concept of materiality, since steampunk is always necessarily about making, using, and reusing different kinds of matter. The various uses and positionalities of matter is in fact what differentiates the many renditions of the aesthetic from one another, as I hope to show in the rest of this work.

Simply put, steampunk refers to literature (fiction, film, graphic novels, perhaps TV, if one is generous with their definitions) that employs a spatial and/or temporal setting identified with or inspired by the Victorian or the Edwardian era. Herbert Sussman characterizes steampunk as

an extensive contemporary sub-culture whose verbal, visual, cinematic, and

3 For this conceptualization of steampunk as an aesthetic I am indebted to Mike Dieter Perschon’s thesis The Steampunk Aesthetic: Technofantasies in a Neo-Victorian Retrofuture (2012). Kavvadia 6

material forms are grounded in an alternative history of the Victorians. In this

neo-Victorian vision, technological change stopped with the development of

steam power, hence the first half of the name. The second industrial revolution

of electricity, the internal-combustion engine, and wireless radio has not taken

place. But rather than being Luddite in its attitude, steampunk imagines

sophisticated innovations employing steam power and the Babbage proto-

computer. (“STEAMPUNK AT OXFORD” 278)

Often placed under the neo-Victorian umbrella,4 steampunk does share some features with the neo-Victorian mode, but departs from it thematically due to its focus on technoscience as a . In Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s study of neo-Victorianism, neo-

Victorian literature is defined as “self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation,

(re)discovery, and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (4, italics in original). Steampunk does perform all of these functions, as it is evidenced by its popular identification with the genre of in which entirely different historical timelines are extrapolated from the hypothetical outcome of an event or the insertion of a character from a different era (or from fiction) into a setting they do not belong. When Michael Moorcock imagines an ever- expanding and imposing British empire well into the 1970s in The Warlord of the Air (1971) and puts a Chinese man hostile to colonial powers in the place of the protagonist, one can safely assume that some attempt at revisiting the colonial history of Britain is made.

But steampunk goes beyond extrapolation of events, valuable as that might be for the re-interpretation of the recent past, because its thematic focus is decidedly postmodern. Its glance towards the past is carried out with a specific focus, and that is the possibilities for progress created by technology, denoted by the appearance of gadgets, weapons, and objects with a stylishly dated surface-style but very modern capabilities. Its explicit focus on

4 Admittedly, this categorization is mostly embraced by academic scholars, as it is evidenced by the appearance of the 2010 special issue on steampunk in the journal Neo-Victorian Studies. Kavvadia 7 technology and materiality as defining features of the narrative allow the blending of past and future in its setting, making it a tool for the examination of the contemporary problematics of human identity, difference, and knowledge. Steampunk thus relies on its Victorian roots and the cultural ruptures that technology brought about in the nineteenth century in an attempt to create parallels between the end of the Victorian era and our own liminal moment, as this is evidenced in our transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.

The most widely-cited origin story of steampunk and, consequently, of one of its most well-known definitions begins with the coinage of its name, commonly attributed to science fiction writer K. W. Jeter: “Personally, I think Victorian are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective for [Tim] Powers, [James] Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like ‘,’ perhaps....” (qtd. in Prucher 221).Writing a letter to Locus magazine in 1987 in response to a review of his book Morlock Night (1979), Jeter comes up with the word as a play on cyberpunk which, at the time, was storming through science fiction publication catalogues, changing popular culture forever. What is intended by Jeter to be a joking stab at the popularity of cyberpunk catches on and becomes a cultural sensation, the ramifications of which are still felt in contemporary realizations of the steampunk aesthetic. Part of the reason might be that there simply is no other word to describe fiction that exploits Victorian settings in order to formulate technofantasies that are based on “technological anachronism”

(McAuley and Clute n.pag.). The appearance of the moniker has come to define not only works written in the 1970s and after but, according to Cynthia J. Miller and Julie Anne

Taddeo, it is also “retrofitted” (xv) to refer to texts that go as far back as H.G. Wells and Jules

Vernes. In their attempt to consolidate the features and character of what has quickly become a subculture, steampunks begin producing a history of steampunk by claiming and appropriating lauded representatives of the literary canon in a move which on the one hand Kavvadia 8 could afford steampunk with respectability, while on the other hand it would establish steampunk as a medium through which technoscientific attitudes and biases could be absorbed and explored.5

Steampunk is indeed one of the relatively few modern subcultures that have been influenced by literature, as opposed to music or art, both being more common origins of fan culture. At the same time, it is interesting to consider that, as VanderMeer and Chambers write, “[s]teampunk could only gain true popularity by moving away from its roots in fiction and becoming part of the broader world. Indeed, many of the people who today call themselves steampunks have not read the literature, taking cues instead from history, visual media, and the original fashionistas who sparked the culture in the 1990s” (13). This is a significant aspect of steampunk, as it again testifies to its undeniable ties to material practices, but also to its fluid character. The definition provided by one of the most vocal venues for the steampunk community, the SteamPunk Magazine (2006 -), addresses these issues further: “First and foremost, steampunk is a non-luddite critique of technology. It rejects the ultra-hip dystopia of the - black rain and nihilistic posturing - while simultaneously forfeiting the ‘noble savage’ fantasy of the pre-technological era. It revels in the concrete reality of technology instead of the over-analytical abstractness of cybernetics”

(Catastrophone Orchestra 4).6 The focus on materiality, as it is situated within the practices and discourses of technology, is here even more pronounced and showcases exactly how

5 For example, Jules Vernes' “armchair voyages” work to establish the ideological content of the emerging science fiction genre in an ethos resting on adventure and high-spiritedness, an interest in rationality over superstition, and an investment in human progress through reason. The purpose of these ideas has been “to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format that is [Verne's] own, the history of the universe” (Hetzel qtd. in Evans 17). Early scientific romances are thought of as literature with a social function, aiming at educating the public and countering technophobia. Later, H.G. Wells focuses more on the exploration of rationality and on how science interacts with society (Evans 21). In his work, science is ascribed a secondary role and is seen as a medium to examine sociopolitical and psychological issues. The focus on technoscience, distinctive for science fiction, is thus also apparent in Wells, but with a more universal or humanistic goal in mind, that of the employment of story-telling as a thought experiment with the purpose of probing into social issues. This legacy is part of the complicated relationship steampunk has with the canon and with the clashing ideologies of conservatism and radicalism. 6 This professed rejection of cyberpunk should be taken with a pinch of salt since, in the very same issue of SteamPunk magazine, other contributors seem to express steampunk's alignment to it (see Killjoy). Kavvadia 9 steampunk reconfigures technology to mean not only the modern wonders of the digital era but also the entire spectrum of human creativity as it is applied to matter across time. What is even more interesting, however, is the direct reference to a counter-culture that points to steampunk’s desire to re-invent aspects of the dominant culture. This quite postmodern impulse for revision and re-interpretation is usually accompanied by the desire to challenge institutional inequalities, acquire visibility for marginal identities and histories, and create a more nuanced picture of individuals and communities through time and space – in other words, revision is usually thought to be employed against the status quo and towards inclusivity, justice, and positive change. This is the reason why many fans and creators have given special weight to the suffix “punk” in steampunk, identifying the ideological core of the aesthetic with radical leftist and anarchist politics, as well as post-structuralist cultural and social theories, all accentuated by a peculiar brand of optimistic technophilia.

At the same time that steampunk invests in contemporary progressive politics, it is also enveloped with nostalgia for the past. As Brigid Cherry and Maria Mellins note, “the pleasures of steampunk lifestyle are associated with the rejection of contemporary lifestyles and social mores, and a return to ingenuity, craftsmanship and invention, and a real-world acting out of imagined histories” (5). Its adherents are known to cosplay (i.e. costume-play) in fanciful costumes, sometimes adopt archaic names and personae, attend conventions, and patronize establishments decorated in a manner that recalls Victorian aesthetics paired with revisionist technology elements (VanderMeer and Chambers 14). The costumes, one of the most recognizable and decidedly material features of steampunk, bear many elements of traditional Victorian garb, such as corsets and frock coats, but they are enhanced with gears and goggles: this is Victorianism restyled through the lens of an imagined culture shaped by steam technology, yet it is the past in the way the future imagines it. These costumes are in fact quite essential to participation in the steampunk subculture; though one can be a fan of Kavvadia 10 the literary genre while clad in casual and modern day-wear, one would certainly be visually marked. These anachronistic garments, together with the objects that steampunks all around the world design and create, bespeak the aesthetic’s double pull towards the future and the past alike. Indeed, as Diana M. Pho maintains, the mixed temporality that steampunk operates in, as is expressed through its myriad objects, is the key to its political promise, because it highlights the “compatibilities” between different epochs, while it materializes a fusion between different viewpoints (196-97).

As it is, the mixture and hybridization of seemingly stable categories is one of the pre- eminent features of the steampunk aesthetic and it is in fact encapsulated in the idea of

“upcycling,” a compound of the words “upsetting” and “recycling” (Barber and Hale n.pag.).

The term reflects the steampunk ethos of sustainability combined with disruption. Academics studying the subculture systematically reiterate the concept. But what does it mean when such a practice enters the mainstream and big retail stores sell steampunk laptop cases and phones?

When the upcycled materials of the past mingle with those of the present, even with the best intentions, can we predict their sociopolitical impact? Rachel Bowser and Brian Croxall, in their introduction to the special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on steampunk, claim that

“[t]he only definition [of steampunk] that seems adequate is one that pivots on partiality [. . .] steampunk is more about instability than any other single characteristic. It resists fixedness by unsettling the categories from which it cribs” (29-30). Partiality is the term that most interests me here, as I think it encapsulates a central concern for anyone who attempts to deal with steampunk critically.

To define steampunk as hinged on partiality seems to signal towards a contradiction, in other words an instability within an instability. In a way, steampunk has the ability to express the coming-together of apparent opposites and the disavowal of the dominance of a unique style or viewpoint or value over another. However, Bowser and Croxall’s definition Kavvadia 11 testifies to the latent features that constitute steampunk and undoes itself as it asserts its own validity. On the one hand, steampunk is a celebratory mix of art and science, objectivity and subjectivity, past and present. On the other hand, and due to the richness of its features, steampunk is wrought with elements that occupy marked positions in the social and cultural matrix. The preoccupation with progress and innovation, the focus on material objects, the attraction towards the Victorian era and the colonial milieu of Britain and the U.S. cannot be merely regarded as random ingredients in a postmodern mix. Their presence in it is functional and it connects to the ideological implications of steampunk as a literary and cultural phenomenon. If, as John Rieder claims in his study of colonialism and science fiction,

“[u]sing conventional material always involves taking a position towards it” (21), then the steampunk recycling of colonial history, Victorian styles and themes, and postmodernist approaches to technoscience must necessarily lead one to interpret steampunk texts as hovering between the reproduction of dominant ideology and resistance to it.

The partiality of steampunk could in fact be linked to another kind of partiality, the one spoken of by Haraway in her description of the creature that could define the coming century: “The is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (150). This commitment to partiality, both in Haraway’s appraisal of the technological hybrids of our world and in steampunk’s desire for mixture and as well as crossing of boundaries leads me to the second part of this introduction that is devoted to laying down the basics of new materialism. As a collection of perspectives, positions, and proposals, new materialism is the conceptual filter through which I will attempt to examine the two texts in question and the different ways through which they realize the aspiration to partiality inscribed in steampunk.7

For the last fifty years, and following the eruption of social, political, and economic

7 This very brief survey will necessarily be preceded by an equally brief timeline of other social and theoretical developments which have contributed to the emergence of the new materialist approach, however they will not be investigated in depth and they are provided only for contextualization. Kavvadia 12 restructuring in the West after WWII and the radical 1960s, literature and criticism have been walking on the tightrope of an ambiguous yet fruitful comradeship. The continuation of the democratization of knowledge and education brought about by industrialization has become a fact of Western life following the tumultuous 1940s, and has given rise to increasing financial security, relative political stability, and a prolonged period of apparent peace in most First-

World countries. However, historical developments such as the civil rights movements in

Europe and America have shown this stability to be superficial, by pointing out and reacting against the pressing inequalities and the amassment of contradictions inherent in liberal democracies like the U.S., which has professed liberties for its citizens while raging war in

Vietnam and other areas of the developing world. The people involved in these political movements did not of course act in a vacuum: political activism has been spurred by artists and thinkers, frequently from Marxist and other materialist backgrounds, which would fall out of favor following the failures of actually existing socialism. In turn, these philosophical and political perspectives were followed and challenged by developments in social and political criticism that have culminated in what is now recognized as the cultural/linguistic turn in philosophy and criticism.

One of the most defining moments for the emergence of this theoretical sensibility can be traced back to the idea of social constructionism as expressed by Peter L. Berger and

Thomas Luckmann in their seminal work The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966). Being widely credited with fueling postmodernist anti- essentialist thought in the humanities and the social sciences, they claim that “[s]ocial order is not part of the ‘nature of things,’ and it cannot be derived from the ‘laws of nature.’ Social order exists only as a product of human activity” (52, italics in original). From this follows that all areas of human life are objects to habituation and institutionalization through language that constructs artifacts of knowledge which turn subjective experience to shared Kavvadia 13 reality.8

Additionally, the proclamation of “the death of the author” (316) by Roland Barthes in his synonymous essay further enhanced, in literature and criticism, the notions of reader’s autonomy, subjective meaning-making, and distrust of interpretative authority. The

“incredulity toward meta-narratives” (xxiv), as expressed by postmodernist philosophers like

Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), made the claim to all-encompassing theoretical frameworks for the understanding of human life and the interpretation of art seem suspect. The response of authors has been varied, but a number of distinctive features has been shared by postmodernist literary works, such as narrative fragmentation, non-linear plots, intertextual references, parody and mixing of genre material, and an increased interest in technology, hyperreality, and pop culture. The end result has been, in Brian McHale’s formulation, a literature with an “ontological dominant,” seeking to articulate questions concerning the world of the text, the reader, and the author, and the way these are constructed, experienced, and combined (10).

However, many have seen the emergence of this sensibility with reservations. For example, scholars working in feminist and postcolonial studies, even though in many ways favourable to postmodern deconstructive theories,9 voiced their concerns about the fluidity and ambiguity these theories espoused, especially since it was becoming apparent that these features rendered them vulnerable to capitalist, sexist, and racist ideologies. One prominent example of such critique came from film theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha who, in her essay

“Difference: A Special Third World Women’s Issue” (1989) (Trinh), grappled with the

8 This idea of social reality as ultimately constructed through language was complemented by French continental philosophy, especially Jacques Derrida’s textual deconstructionism and Michel Foucault’s conception of discursive regimes. Earlier materialist approaches, and mostly those identified with Marxist dialectical materialism, were subsequently seen as fixated on deterministic notions of nature and culture that stifles the potential to overthrow authoritative and oppressive ways of thinking and acting. 9 As evidenced by the immense influence it has had on renowned theorists like Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others who, even though working within different theoretical fields and traditions, share a distrust towards and a desire to resist what they see as the restrictive and exclusive dominance of essentialist theories of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Kavvadia 14 problematic adoption of a deconstructive model of gender difference by Western white scholars such as Julia Kristeva, which seemed to neglect how the immediate economic and cultural environments of non-Western underprivileged women structure and affect their lives, and collapsed the particulars of womanhood into a bland “female identity enclosure” ultimately predicated on traditionally male models of subjectivity (95-96). Finally, one of the most sober and useful critiques comes from pragmatist philosopher Jürgen Habermas who, while supporting the idea of context-bound and socially-situated analyses of human societies in the vein of post-structuralist genealogies, nevertheless accuses thinkers like Foucault and

Derrida of turning philosophy and criticism into a rhetorical game, which cancels itself by making claims to its own truth while negating the possibility of truth itself. In The

Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Habermas claims of Derrida’s deconstruction of argumentative reason that “[w]hoever transposes the radical critique of reason into the domain of rhetoric in order to blunt the paradox of self-referentiality, also dulls the sword of the critique of reason itself” (160). What is at stake in this defense of reason is not to uphold the notorious autonomous rational subject and its frequently biased positionalities, but to protect the possibility and enhance the effectiveness of constructive “communicative action,” defined as “an orientation towards reaching mutual understanding” and as a “means of social integration” (Fultner 56).

While I agree with the concerns raised here, I do not want to claim that postmodernism and post-structuralism should be disposed of in favor of some totalizing theory or other; to deny the significance of the insights achieved by postmodernist theory would be a step backward. However, I believe that new materialist perspectives on the study of human subjectivity, technology, and social progress offer the possibility to address some of the problems that the application of postmodernist theory has created in the study of literature, and I want to propose the reading of steampunk fiction from these perspectives, as Kavvadia 15 an example of how a focus on the complex networks of materiality can offer fresh takes on these problems. In this case, the use and development of new materialism should not be seen merely as a linear movement forward in terms of the theories and methodologies of cultural analysis; rather, it should be seen as complementing and reshaping the tools which structural and post-structural theory and criticism have provided us with.

The numerous ties of new materialism, similarly to postmodernism or the steampunk aesthetic earlier mentioned earlier, with different critical and philosophical frameworks, and its eclectic applications to topics ranging from policy making to scientific ethics and to political economy, make it a challenging theoretical approach. Political scientist William E.

Connolly refers to new materialism as follows:

The “new materialism” is the most common name given to a series of

movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink

subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human,

emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore

dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the

sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more

actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics. (399)

In very simple terms, new materialism offers a philosophical perspective towards a rethinking of subjectivity and social life. Matter, in this framework, is manifold and ubiquitous: it is our physical bodies moving in the world, interacting with such conventionally natural forces like winds, flows of water, and light waves as well as with other embodied creatures inhabiting the non-human- and the human-made environments alike, buildings and objects we place in our richly structured urban spaces, but also the forces between subatomic particles, and the products we exchange over state borders. In a materialist philosophy, and specifically in new materialism, matter is the part and parcel of human and non-human existence. Kavvadia 16

New materialism offers a monist philosophical outlook, or a “philosophy of immanence” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism 85), which posits that one concept or substance, in this case matter, is at the basis of all things. There are various different flavors of monism, but new materialism starts from a material kind of monism that considers the material reality to be the key to understanding human existence.10 This is not to say that new materialism neglects the effects of social and political factors, nor does it mean that new materialism implies a kind of return to a primitivist state of careless physicalism that rejects rationality. It means, rather, a reconfiguration of contemporary philosophy and theory in order to “give matter its due” (Coole and Frost 5). There is a sense among new materialists that linguistic constructionism as expressed in postmodernist theory has elevated language and discourse to be the orthodoxy of criticism, to the detriment of more materially-based perspectives. Indeed, Karen Barad, one of the most prominent critics working from a new materialist perspective, has argued that “[l]anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’ – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation” (801). Even though there are voices which rightly warn against the demonization of discourse in new materialism, arguing that perhaps it is predicated on a view of matter that becomes in its own way idealistic and essentialist,11 I find the thesis that we should not let discourse alone dominate our criticism to be correct.

Broadly speaking, new materialism asserts that discourse-based criticism has not done much to disrupt the arrogant and ultimately damaging dualistic conceptualization of humanity and its relationship with materiality, as it had promised it would. An example would be the critique of gender and sex in the work of Judith Butler, which is at least partly inspired by the

10 The approach has ties to the philosophies of, among others, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza (see Coole and Frost, Introduction). 11 See for example Cheah’s essay entitled “Non-Dialectical Materialism” in Coole and Frost for some ideas on the function of matter in new materialism. Kavvadia 17 linguistic use of performative language (e.g. speech acts), and which posits that gender is a perpetual imitation of a non-existent original, a performance of masculinity and femininity which lacks real essence and must be performed in order to be realized. Gender becomes the cultural equivalent of sex, considered to be biological, thus material. Butler decouples sex from gender, and relishes in the free play of multiple gender identities, now liberated from the constraints of crude sexual biologism.12 Admittedly, this makes sense: women have been diachronichally equated with a physicality that is looked down upon, in their role as nurturers and child-bearers, so that to uphold a performative and multiplicitous idea of gender beyond biology is certainly an interesting and positive idea. However, there are problems with this approach to the gendered material body, and this is where the kind of intervention that new materialism hopes to make becomes apparent. Among others, sociologist Mariam Fraser claimed that Butler’s handling of materiality as it emerges from her theory of gendered bodies and identities renders the body in particular, and matter in general, an unknowable site, a referent from which language and referentiality spring from, but one that is itself inaccessible through them (613); in this sense, Butler’s materiality is a representative example of a postmodernist reading of matter which closes off the possibility of knowing something more about materiality other than “the negativity associated with the vicissitudes of signification and iteration” (Cheah, “Mattering” 119). In this formulation, the deconstruction of the sexed body and its immersion in language is seen as doing nothing to counter the very real issues that occur from the embeddedness of bodies in the material world, and culture becomes a framework as limiting as nature is thought to be; the binary still reigns supreme.

If this situation is to be changed, the most important contribution of a new

12 For example, Butler claims that “one way that gender gets naturalized is through being constructed as an inner psychic or physical necessity” (267), one that is attached as a prerequisite on specific formations of biological sex. She has elaborated on these ideas in Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993), and Undoing Gender (2004). Kavvadia 18 materialism is the attempt to deconstruct what it sees as the false opposition between sentient embodiment and non-sentient matter, and by extension, the oppressive primacy of the human over the rest of existence. In trying to do this, new materialism goes beyond the linguistic branch of post-structuralist thought. Of course, it cannot simply be separated from it; if new materialism is a theory of immanence, spatial expansion, and complex formation, then we cannot discuss it within a linear model of succession. Rather, it should be considered as one more point in a thread of ongoing philosophical thinking about matter.

For example, one of the most prominent cases of materialist thought is the historical materialism developed on the basis of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ work on class relations and the material basis of life in capitalist societies, but materialism is also related to the vitalist13 philosophical tradition of assigning an innate vital force to sentient beings, contrary to mechanistic conceptions of existence brought forward by René Descartes.14 It is of course this binary conception of matter and sentience that would influence Western ideas of materiality up to the present, and which structures the entire discourse around materialism in culture and politics. The Cartesian duality of a mechanistic body animated by an immaterial consciousness cuts through modern assumptions about human subjects ever at war with themselves, trying to tame the body through the mind. As Diana Coole and Samantha

Frost note, it was Descartes’ conception of matter as “uniform and inert,” and material objects as “discrete” and only mobile when acted upon by an agent in a cause-and-effect fashion (7) that paved the way for modern science. This is evident in its concurrent development during the Enlightenment together with the idea of the rational subject that is defined through its

13 A more detailed analysis of the undercurrents of Marxist and Cartesian philosophy and thought is outside the scope of this thesis, but more information can be found in Shlomo Avineri’s The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (1970) and John Cottingham’s Descartes (1998). 14 Vitalism flourished from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, by which time it was completely rejected as a valid theory, especially in the life sciences, in which it was supported by scientists as prominent as Louis Pasteur (Normandin and Wolfe 8). Even though vitalism is heavily criticized to this day, it can be said to enjoy some more positive exposure in its appearance in the work of political scientist Jane Bennett, who describes her notion of “vibrant matter and lively things” in terms of a vital materialism (Bennett vii). Kavvadia 19 ability to inquire. In the domain of politics, humanism and its implications of individual rights, identities, and progress is thus always predicated upon an “understanding of matter

[which] thereby yields a conceptual and practical domination of nature as well as a specifically modern attitude or ethos of subjectivist potency” (Coole and Frost 8).

The newness of new materialism then, resides in its rejection of binary oppositions on the one hand, but also its reconfiguration of a traditionally deterministic concept such as matter on the other, in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of freedom, agency, and subjectivity. As this thesis will try to show, it looks at matter not as the passive domain of humanity, but as an actor itself, with whom we must co-operate if we are going to build better . Kavvadia 20

CHAPTER ONE Ghosts and Machines: Material Objects, Technological Progress, and Human Primacy in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine

1. An Alternative Steam-Revolution “Gods have become like us, ergo, we have become like gods. And to you, my unknown planetary readers, we will come to you, to make your life as divinely rational and exact as ours.” —Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1924) The Difference Engine, written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling15 in 1990, is widely credited with being the most representative example of steampunk fiction, as well as with setting in motion the steampunk subculture of today. The novel envisions an alternative history in which many of the cultural shifts occurring through the technological revolution of the computer’s invention occurred much earlier than they did in our own timeline, with the successful development of the analytical engine by Charles Babbage in fact taking place in the early nineteenth century. The novel traces through this alternative history, drawing on notable real-life figures and re-envisioning the roles of Japan, Britain, France, and the United

States as world superpowers, while at the same time focusing on the social repercussions of rapidly changing technologies. Of particular interest in this text is the role of aestheticism, and especially the ways in which material objects are presented and perceived both by the novel’s characters and the novel’s readers. Gibson and Sterling’s work interrogates the relationship between the material and the human, in the authors’ effort to examine how both are mediated through technoscientific progress and its products. The products of technology mingle with the characters in the novel, serving as alternatives to the anthropocentric, racist,

15 William Gibson is an American writer born in the U.S. in 1948 but living in Canada since 1967. He is most famously associated with cyberpunk through his seminal novel Neuromancer (1984). His works have not only been significant for late twentieth-century science fiction, but they have also influenced contemporary ways of viewing and speaking about technology (e.g. through the coinage of the terms “matrix” and “cyberspace”). Bruce Sterling is another defining American writer born in 1954, well-known for his work on the Mirrorshades cyberpunk anthology (1986). He is a frequent commentator on issues of futurism and technoscience and habitually publishes on those (e.g. on his blog Beyond the Beyond), and he is also the creator of various cultural and literary neologisms such as slipstream (referring to fiction that combines features of science fiction, fantasy, and horror). For more information on Gibson, see Tatiani G. Rapatzikou’s study and his non-fiction collection Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012). For more information on Sterling, see his interview with Mike Godwin and his own blog. Kavvadia 21 and sexist model of knowledge and social organization prevalent in the Victorian era, during which the novel takes place, but ultimately reiterating it. Through the lens of new materialist theory, this chapter will attempt to show the way in which The Difference Engine challenges the centrality afforded to human experience as well as the nature of the relationship of that human experience to the material world.

The plot of The Difference Engine is set in 1855 England, and it is concerned with an alternative historical past in which inventor Charles Babbage realizes the design of his analytical engine.16 This single event, causing at the time monumental cultural and political shifts in the British Empire and the world, results in a history that is significantly different from our own. Of primary concern is the class war between the working-class Luddites, in the novel represented by a rebel group lead by a hustler called Captain Swing, who considers technological progress to be at the root of social and economic inequality, and the Industrial

Radical party and its various supporters who are in favor of maximizing the development and use of technology in all areas of life. At the actual time of the narration, the Radicals have become the ruling party after Babbage has managed to propel them into power by beating the

Duke of Wellington in the British elections of 1830. After an unsuccessful comeback by

Wellington, backed by the Luddites, the Radical Party manages to secure absolute political and social influence, as it is now led by the famous Lord Byron, who in this time-line has survived his involvement in the Greek War of Independence and has become a supporter of national prosperity through technological progress. As a result, the society described in the text is primarily a technologically-driven one, quite different from actual Victorian Britain, though retaining many of its sensibilities and historical elements. The novel is framed

16 Indeed, the titular difference engine was also invented by Babbage in the actual year of 1833, but it was basically only a rather simple calculating machine (Jagoda 49). The difference engines described in the text as proto-computers are in fact based on Babbage's much more elaborate analytical engine, which remained only an idea during his lifetime. The project Plan 28, headed by John Graham-Cumming, is at the time of this writing campaigning to secure funding in order to construct a working prototype of the analytical engine, based on Babbage's notes archived at the Science Museum in London (Graham-Cumming n. pag). A working prototype of the difference engine was built at the same museum in 1991, exclusively using materials and methods that would have been available to Babbage in the nineteenth century. Kavvadia 22 through the point of view of a number of characters and centers on the acquisition of a set of engine punch-cards said to contain what is the era’s equivalent of a hacking program. This sequence would allow any clacker, which is how /programmers of the novel’s steam- powered and noisy computers are known as, to tamper with the workings of the engines used in gambling, basically making it impossible for them to lose. This so-called modus sequence that is materialized in the elusive punch-cards moves physically from person to person and conceptually through the thread of the narrative, becoming the device that connects the plot’s disparate elements together.

The novel is divided into five chapters or “iterations” and one “modus,” basically paralleling the narration of the story to the process of a computer running a program. Each one of the iterations begins and ends with the description of an object, but the story is told through a character’s point of view. Throughout the course of the narrative, material objects bring out the importance of the human relationship to materiality, and especially the ways that the latter is caught up in the practices and narratives of scientific knowledge and technological progress. Since the Radicals seem to win in the end, it seems that the novel confirms the significance of the technoscientific treatment of matter for the progress of humanity, while at the same time revealing its negative impact. The most interesting and decidedly material consequence of this in the world of the text is the creation of an artificial intelligence based on the modus sequence. The existence of this order of being within the alternative history of The Difference Engine connects the novel to actual contemporary history by pointing to the modern anxiety of technological progress and the place of the human vs. the non-human.

In terms of its writing style, Gibson and Sterling’s work is a pastiche of different modes of writing and, in this sense, a fairly representative example of postmodernist experimentation with form. However, what constitutes it a very interesting example of Kavvadia 23 postmodernist fiction in general, and steampunk fiction in particular is the way in which it revamps Victorian literary writing17 by injecting it with neologisms employed here to describe what Suzanne Barber and Matt Hale call instances of “atemporality” or anachronism. These displaced instances of linguistic use allow for “reassessment and critique of abandoned forms from the past from the vantage of the present while transforming the past into a vista from which to assess the present” (Barber and Hale 176). The text attempts to take a critical stand not only with regards to past forms of literary expression, but also with the political implications these may carry, even though it ultimately reproduces at least some of them.

Through its semi-ironic focus on the verbose language of the nineteenth-century novel, and the juxtaposition of this language to the stylistically disjointed passages starting and ending each iteration, the novel creates a tension that highlights the unstable position of human identity in its relationship to materiality on the one hand, and the malleability of the politics of the steampunk aesthetic on the other.

1.1. Back To The Future: The Difference Engine and Steampunk Ideologies

Published in 1990, The Difference Engine emerged from a cultural milieu facing rapid technological advancement, which has equally been the cause of intrigue and apprehension ever since. It incorporates and reworks the earlier critical visions of technology and society found in the decade’s speculative fiction, but also opens up the way for new thematic and stylistic considerations which culminate into the hybrid works and genres of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In many ways The Difference Engine is a tipping point between cyberpunk

17 The presence of these Victorianisms in the text is due to the fact that, according to the authors, large portions of it in fact originate from Victorian literature. Using a technique they called “literary sampling,” Gibson says that “a great deal of the intimate texture of this book derives from the fact that it’s an enormous collage of little pieces of forgotten Victorian textual material which we lifted from Victorian journalism, from Victorian pulp literature. We lifted a lot of sensation novels [. . .] Virtually all of the interior descriptions, the descriptions of furnishings, are simply descriptive sections lifted from Victorian literature” (Fischlin et al. n.pag.). This practice adds an extra layer of intertextual meaning to it and can be said to mirror the plot of the novel as well, since it is the processing and rewriting of Victorian material that leads to the emergence of the artificial intelligence at the end of the book. Kavvadia 24 and steampunk, and this is most strongly expressed in its focus on matter and materiality.

Interestingly, both the novel’s authors are widely credited with establishing the literary movement of cyberpunk, the cultural mode of expression that has been characterized most extensively as dealing with the effects of future shock on the contemporary world.

William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and Rudy Rucker are just a few of the authors identified with this groundbreaking literary movement, which is considered to have originated from the “New Wave” of science fiction in the 1960s and the 1970s. In cyberpunk’s representation of dark cityscapes, evil corporate conglomerates, and streetwise hackers, the encroaching effect of cybernetic and digital technologies started taking shape. If cyberfiction “presents visions of the future based on the extensive application of the idea of cyberspace” (Cavallaro 14), then its conceptualization of humanity’s engagement with technology is certainly a rather bleak one. Even though it has opened up science fiction to the exploration of subjectivities enmeshed with digital technologies and new communications, while it allowed for the representation of the changing relationship of human beings to time, space, and progress, cyberpunk has offered a glimpse of “the dark side of the human condition and human nature by employing the machine metaphor and relying mainly on the depiction of the dark side of the machine” (Rapatzikou 17).18 Indeed, “classic” cyberpunk such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) or Pat Cadigan’s Mindplayers (1987), with its focus on the detrimental effects of technological enhancement of the human body, the rise of corporate capitalism, and the commodification of scientific achievement, seems to imply that for all our hope for the better, our imagined futures do not allow for much optimism. In the words of Stephen H. Segal, the former editor of the famous Weird Tales magazine, “we were expecting and we got Blade Runner” (n.pag.).

18 To be fair, cyberpunk is not wholly pessimistic about technological impact on human societies. Tatiani G. Rapatzikou proposed in her study of Gothic motifs in William Gibson's work that “cyberfiction becomes the medium in which human imagination and machine power come together in an attempt to rehumanize and reconstruct one another” (16). This is an honorable goal which many cyberpunk texts achieve and one that steampunk as well has inherited from its literary cousin. Kavvadia 25

Upon first examination, steampunk has nothing to do with the dark visions of cyberpunk. If one only believes the conference posters and the zines, steampunk is all about creativity, re-invention, and a positive relationship to technology that focuses on community and production, not individualism and consumption; the attitude is well-captured in the steampunk motto “Love the machine, hate the factory” (Esser n.pag.). There are of course those who consider steampunk to be pretty much cyberpunk but in brass goggles in the place of mirrorshades (Killjoy). I do not however believe that it is only its particular flavor of anachronistic technology that differentiates steampunk from cyberpunk, but in the vein of

Mike Perschon’s analysis, its fluidity as an aesthetic with multiple applications. There is certainly common ground between the two, especially with regards to their interest in the impact of science and technology on the human body and environment; yet I believe that they start from virtually reverse premises. In cyberpunk, there is deep anxiety registered about the effects of bioengineering, digitization of communications, and mass commodification of all areas of life, and it is most strongly depicted in the meshing of the human and the machine through the computer and the urbanization of the landscape. Steampunk, on the other hand, continues to view technology with optimism, hinged as it is on nineteenth-century ideas of progress, because it does not focus primarily on the hybridization between organic and inorganic matter, nor on the eradication of the natural environment, but more on the use of accessible technology and on a holistic view of materiality with regard to its relationship to the human. Admittedly, these suggestions may appear to be general, but I believe that they are key to understanding the way that The Difference Engine could have appeared in the exact moment that it did, created by two authors widely known for their interest in futuristic fiction, and yet remaining a staple text despite its idiosyncratic form and at times dense content.19

19 A representative example from a reviewer reads: “The Difference Engine is a well researched, fascinating book, but there are many sections - particularly in the middle - I struggled through. I’m glad I persevered through to the end, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book. Some, no doubt, will adore it, but the novel won’t appeal to everyone’s taste” (“Gibson and Sterling's Alternative History” n.pag.). Kavvadia 26

The novel has had in fact a significant impact on popular culture, propelling steampunk into mainstream audiences and setting the stage for the transformation of steampunk from a primarily literary phenomenon into a lived fan culture. In its aesthetics, which is arguably the most salient aspect of the subculture, and in the juxtaposition of this with its focus on human potentiality, steampunk seems to reflect the anxiety about materiality seen in Gibson and Sterling’s novel. For example, The Difference Engine’s inclusion of real life historical figures and the blending of actual historical facts with fictionalized elements, serves as a reminder of the impact that material objects have on the intellectual and social lives of humans. One such instance is the difference engine, about which there have been complaints that it actually appears very little in the course of the narrative. This is only true though if one interprets the novel strictly on the basis of its actual content; if, however, one looks at its thematic concerns more closely, it becomes obvious that the centrality of the engine has to do with its influence on the life of the imagined Victorian era, or rather, as

Perschon in his review of the novel aptly puts it, “[e]verything about the setting and events is dominated by the ubiquity of the difference made by the Difference Engine” (“The

Difference Engine” n.pag.). The engine serves as a material reminder of the way in which technological innovations and advancements result in significant sociopolitical and historical changes; as the novel also tries to remind its readers, humans do not always control the technology they create. This lack of control is reflected not only in the final revelation that the primary narrator of the text is an Engine that attains sentience, but also in the grappling for that particular technology between the characters, turning the engine as an object of technology into the central focus of the novel’s action. In the end, access to the sequence contained in the punch-cards will not significantly increase human control over the material impact of the engines, for the technology is independent of humans in a way that the characters could not have anticipated. Kavvadia 27

Gibson and Sterling do in fact reflect this sentiment about unpredictability in their ideas about the future, progress, and technology. In an interview from 1991, following soon after the launch of The Difference Engine, Gibson says that the novel is about “contingency leading to us” (Fischlin et al. n.pag.). It is significant that Gibson does not say that the novel is about the future, but focuses, more structurally, on the idea of contingency, on the often random possibilities created by the complex routes of history. The entire text could very well be considered as a thought-experiment in the idea of potentialities that renews the way in which history is treated as a linear narrative of marching towards some inevitably positive endpoint. As the black servant and member of Captain Swing’s Luddite rebel group says to

Mallory, “You were right, sir, and [Swing] was quite wrong. There is nothing to history. No progress, no justice. There is nothing but random horror” (The Difference Engine 272).20 Far from treating this opening up of possibilities as a wholly positive thing, however, the text seems to center on the detrimental effects of unchecked progress, realized in the horrors of colonialism, sexism, and capitalism.

For this reason, I have chosen to investigate The Difference Engine with the help of a new materialist framework that will allow me to highlight the ambiguities and promises of the text and the steampunk aesthetic it embodies. Beginning with a brief survey of critiques of embodiment and human superiority from a posthumanist and new materialist perspective, in the rest of the chapter will focus on the commentary from select passages from the novel.

20 All subsequent references to The Difference Engine will be to the same edition (see works cited list) and will be indicated only by page number. Kavvadia 28

1.2. Matter With a Vengeance: A New Materialist Reading of Objects and Settings

In a fashion similar to that of the steampunks who attempted to unearth a projected history of the aesthetic based on retroactive appropriation of earlier works, scholars interested in new renditions of materialism also had to go back in search for predecessors. However different the latter’s aim and rationale, which is more focused on establishing intra-active 21 relations between ideas across time and space, it is worth noting that fundamental features of what is now known as new materialism were articulated gradually and perhaps discontinuously throughout the twentieth century, pointing to a long-standing interest in materiality and its intricacies in critical thought.

One of the first appearances of the term is recorded in James K. Feibleman’s 1970 monograph entitled The New Materialism, in which he proposed that “[a] wholly new theory of matter has been advanced in the last half century by modern physics, but there has been no new theory of materialism to match it” (n.pag.). Feibleman was an American author and philosopher, interested in the idea of objective material reality through the responsible application of science. Writing during the decade of civil unrest and social change, and having the opportunity to experience the revolutionary changes in science and technology in the first half of the twentieth century, when physicists like Albert Einstein, Werner

Heisenberg and Max Planck completely changed the consensus on the nature of the material world, Feibleman believed that science and philosophy must work together so as to capture the immense shifts in our time’s perspectives. Like new materialists in the present, he was interested in the intersections of the humanities and the natural sciences, and wanted to build a philosophical framework in which scientific inquiry could be used as evidence, and not as dogma, in the construction of ideas about the world. More interestingly, he claimed that 21 Intra-action is a concept coined by Karen Barad, one of the most well-known new materialist theorists, to denote a process of entanglement “in which what we take to be the 'past' and what we take to be the ‘present’ and the ‘future’ are entangled with one another” (qtd. in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, Interviews 66). Drawing from quantum physics, Barad has proposed intra-action as a way to renew the necessarily linear and hierarchical order of cause and effect, and imagine it as process which brings together different temporalities, objects, and agents. Kavvadia 29

“[c]ulture consists in the working over of materials in order to bring out their desirable potentialities, making actual certain of the possibilities of materials by transforming them”

(Feibleman 103), and gave the example of a classical music concert in which paper and ink, wood and glue, come together to actualize a set of their potentialities in the shape of sheet music and musical instruments.

What Feibleman also claims though, when it comes to such an actualization as regards matter’s potential, and where the point of departure with contemporary new materialism would perhaps be, is the absolute necessity for an agent who will act on matter. Of course, it would be ridiculous to argue that matter has a completely autonomous and self-regulating existence, and thankfully, most new materialists do not make that claim.22 In my understanding of the crux of this theoretical position, it is the weight and significance that one places on the impact of materiality on human reality that is at issue, and more especially on materialities that have usually been seen as secondary or comfortably embedded into primary ones, as is for example the role of micro-organisms in human biology, or the influence of the relative availability of specific raw materials in national economies. From a new materialist perspective, all of these entities do not necessarily act as agents in the way a sentient creature would, but enter into complex interactions with human and non-human animals, objects, and spaces to the point where they actively define lived reality.

It can be said that The Difference Engine sheds light on an array of potential outcomes that can derive from such complex interactions via the intervention of the narrator that

Gibson and Sterling call a “narratron” (Fischlin et al. n.pag.). At the very end of the novel, it is hinted that the narrator has been all along an early computer, a sentient engine. This is allegedly possible due to the use of the modus, a program contained in punch-cards and invented by Lady Ada Lovelace. This observation, revealed for the reader only at the end of

22 Jane Bennett, for example, has indeed spoken of, among others, rubbish and electrical grids as possessing some degree of agency which goes beyond human will (Coole and Frost 9). I find this proposition exaggerated at best, and I take it as an attempt at vivid illustration rather than as a literal claim. Kavvadia 30 the text, influences any possible reading of the novel as a simple tale of witty anachronism, and frames my discussion of it as a steampunk artwork. What should be underlined is that all representations offered in the text are in fact meta-representations, mediated through the subconscious of a machine that uses them in order to come into existence. This challenges the relationship between human and machine, possibility and actuality, representation and reality.

Specifically, the way that each chapter in the novel is structured around a material object quite literally confirms the power of objects in shaping reality, while it also underscores the ambiguous dedication of the text to providing a critique of traditional views on materiality.

One such case is presented in The Difference Engine from the get-go, and concerns the infamous punch-cards used to run the Engines. In the first iteration of the novel, told from the point of view of Sybil Gerard,23 we witness the first appearance of the cards and one of the few instances in which they are actually present rather than talked about: during dinner at a hotel, Mick Radley shows Sybil a portmanteau out of which he pulls a wooden box containing a set of white, laminated, perforated cards. We follow Sybil’s childlike wonder at this sight as well as her simplistic conclusion that they must be playing cards; the scene is replete with a sense of significance, even though Sybil does not seem to grasp it. At this point, she is oblivious to the fact that the cards, who Radley himself only cryptically describes as “quite extraordinarily dear” (31), will change her life and her surrounding world.

Sybil is a dollymop, a London prostitute who relies on relationships with steady clients to make a living. Radley is one such client, assistant of the Texian politician Sam Houston, who has arrived in London to seek support from the British. Radley is an aspiring clacker who at least pretends to understand the political and social importance of the Engines. Like a proper social climber, he focuses on making the most of the Engine hype, so he uses his position as a

23 Sybil Gerard is in fact an intertextual reference to Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845 novel Sybil, or The Two Nations which is concerned with the lives of the working class in Victorian England. The connection to fictional characters from our world, and to Disraeli, also a character in The Difference Engine, underlines the playful metafictional impulse of steampunk fiction. For more information, see Braun. Kavvadia 31 technician for Houston’s political campaign that is enhanced through the use of kinotropy, the novel’s equivalent to audiovisual technology, to acquire the cards. When asked by Sybil, it is obvious that not even he fully comprehends what the cards can do; Radley admits that his

“best guess is that nobody knows quite what it would mean to run this little stack. It would demonstrate a certain matter, prove a certain nested series of mathematical hypotheses […]

All matters quite arcane. And, by the by, it would make the name of Michael Radley shine like the very heavens in the clacking confraternity” (31). This is the first instance in the novel of this shallow attraction to technology and obsession with objects people do not fully understand. The punch-cards here, even though manipulated by Radley, Houston, and other actors in the political game, are in essence impenetrable and by extension more powerful than their owners.

One of the functions of this episode is also to show how the cards highlight the differential impact matter has on different subjects. Sybil, for example, is more interested in her immediate survival than in Radley’s schemes. She remains virtually unaffected by the supposed significance of the punch-cards and develops a personal interest in them only after she witnesses the murder of Radley and the attempted murder of Houston for their sake. As readers, we are led to believe that Sybil is simply not knowledgeable enough to appreciate the potentialities of this new technological artifact. I suggest that the novel reproduces ideas of

Victorian sexism by making us believe that it is Sybil’s womanhood that renders her immune to objects’ attractiveness. To begin with, since in the dominant gender ideology of the

Victorian era life revolved around the famous separate spheres of action, women are thought to belong to the private sphere of home-making, child-rearing, and religious education, while men are destined to inhabit the public sphere of politics, higher education, commerce, and law. Such a separation is based on the supposed inherent characteristics of each sex as they were expressed in their biological make-up.24 This is strictly speaking a material view of

24 George Man Burrows, an English physician specializing in mental illness and insanity, believed that Kavvadia 32 gender, but one that pivots around an essentialist concept of biological sex as the sole factor that defines an individual’s identity. Additionally, it is worth noting that the separation of the public and the private spheres, as well as the concomitant dichotomy of gender it supported, were applicable mostly to the middle class, whereas working-class women and men were expected to and in fact did share in more aspects of everyday living. As a prostitute, Sybil occupies an even more marked position than that of an impoverished woman of the working class, being the quintessential fallen woman, whose wretchedness does not in any way allow for grace or intelligence.

Is this then the reason why she does not care about the punch-cards, unless they are a medium for her benefit, as they become when she attempts to steal them? The novel, while in general maintains a critical attitude on issues of inequality, seems strangely complacent when it comes to the double standards of gender. For Mick Radley, just like Sybil, treats the cards as a vehicle for social mobility, and he is in fact ready to betray his employer in order to exploit them for fame; however, he is portrayed under a generally more favorable light, and is given more of a voice in the narrative than her. Sybil is not given the chance to play an active role in the narrative, but she is only a tool in Radley’s hands when he uses her during

Houston’s speech to incite public sympathy for the politician when he makes her steal things on his behalf or simply for sexual pleasure. Sybil is not even given narrative time in the plot of the novel, since she appears only in the first iteration and then once more in the last, through the accounts of Laurence Oliphant, a spy. She has survived the ordeal of stealing the cards that contain the modus, has moved to France, and has lived a comfortable life after having sold the diamonds she stole from Houston together with the cards. The struggle for this kind of technological artifact shows, in Sybil’s case, how objects, when imbued with

“physically, man is more robust, and has less sensibility, or as the physiologist would have it, irritability, than woman” (qtd. in Martin 36). In the case of women, it was believed that their reproductive organs, through the function of “reflex irritation,” or sympathy (Bassuk 145), were able to influence and dominate over all other physiological and mental functions. Kavvadia 33 significance, can influence subjects depending on the latter’s position in the social matrix.

This is especially apparent if one compares the representation of Sybil to that of Ada as will be shown next.

Lady Ada Byron is the daughter of Lord Byron, the Radical PM of Britain. Her portrayal in the novel is definitely based on reality, as the historical Ada was herself a mathematician, who worked together with Charles Babbage and maintained a close relationship with him till the end of her life.25 Being the offspring of Byron’s only marriage,

Ada was born in 1815 and died in 1852, after struggling with the exclusions and obstacles that the era’s gender ideology had placed on female scientists. In The Difference Engine, she proves herself to be as intelligent and inquisitive as any man, but she also maintains her status as nobility as her title “Queen of Engines” reveals. Despite the rumors around her name, involving an addiction to gambling and a general aloofness towards reality,26 Ada is still viewed not only as a respectable woman, but also as a formidable intellectual. Mallory, the paleontologist in the center of the novel’s action who accidentally becomes the protector of the punch-cards containing Ada’s modus, considers her to be “a great savant [. . .] a great genius” (173). Judging from his interactions with Hetty, another prostitute and old friend of

Sybil’s, as well as his reminisces about the Indian women he had met during his travels,

Mallory cannot quite view a woman as a true equal, and yet he regards Ada in the most positive way that he is possibly able to view women.

A lot can be said of course about the exact manner in which she is treated in the text, and how she is used to quite literally re-affirm the virgin-whore dichotomy between women

25 The book about Ada’s life The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter (1999) by Benjamin Woolley mentions that her mother, Annabella Milbanke, sought to distance her from what she thought to be her father’s sentimental disposition by prohibiting her from studying art and raising her on a steady diet of mathematics and science. In The Difference Engine, if she has taken the same measures, they seem to have failed miserably. Interestingly, the same book mentions that Byron had given Milbanke the nickname “Princess of Parallelograms” (Park 74). 26 For example, Fraser, the policeman working to protect her, says with contempt that “'She’s pursued that clackers’ phantom [the modus] for years now, and rubbed shoulders with very ugly company - sharpers, low clackers, loan-makers, and worse. She’s amassed gambling-debts, to the point of open scandal!'”(172). Kavvadia 34 considered pure and respectable and those considered contaminated and unworthy. The limited exposure Ada, Sybil, and the rest of the admittedly few female characters receive in the text affirm Elizabeth Grosz’s assertion that “the question of freedom for women, or for any oppressed social group, is never simply a question of expanding the range of available option so much as it is about transforming the quality and activity of the subjects who choose and make themselves through how and what they do” (151). In Sybil’s case, even though she is an assertive and adaptable person, she is still defined in the pages of the novel through her supposed lack of intellect and her supposedly shameful profession.27 Ada on the other hand is exclusively defined by her intelligence, which ends up in a negation of her status as a human being. In order to redeem her of the supposed shame that is associated with female physicality, Ada is denied her embodiment itself, when, for example, Mallory refuses to imagine her having sex: “He knew that Lady Ada had her gallants, but the thought that she let men have her, that there was shoving and spending, prick and cunt in the mathematical bed of the Queen of Engines… Best not to think about it” (211). The only way for a woman to be able to exist as more than a sexual body in this formulation is to shed her embodied self altogether, as there is no way for her to be sexual and intelligent at the same time. This troubling conflation seems to point to an attitude within some strains of postmodern and even posthumanist thought with regards to matter, which seeks to transcend physicality in favor of disembodiment through the use of technoscientific knowledge.

In particular, posthumanist theory is an immense body of scholarship and critical thought in its own right, but for the purposes of the present work it could generally be defined as a perspective concerned with the changing ideas of human essence and ontology.28

Posthumanism, as much a child of postmodernity as of the Enlightenment, is about the idea

27 Radley chastises her for “thinking like a trollop” (26), and Houston's murderer sarcastically tells her that “You’re a whore, that's all. You ain’t the first whore I ever seen” (63). 28 For more information, see Neil Badmington’s “Theorizing Posthumanism” (2003) and Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? (2010). Kavvadia 35 of surpassing the present limits of human existence through the use of reason and invention.

It is fundamentally based on the humanist conception of progress that places the human at the center of the universe and aspires, in the words of Robert Pepperell, “to rationalize the totality of natural phenomena through the tool of science” (40). The prefix “post” in posthumanism denotes the ascension of the human to a new state of being free from disease, exploitation, and hardship. At its best, it does not only mean going beyond bodily limitations, but coming to a new awareness of existence and to a new ontology which, in contrast to the humanist one, does not preserve hierarchies by using the human as the absolute criterion.

Perhaps one of the most seminal texts in posthumanist theory is Donna Haraway’s essay “The

Cyborg Manifesto,” first appearing in 1984, and defining scholarship at the intersection of gender and science, technology and society studies. Working from a feminist and socialist perspective, Haraway argues that in the twentieth century the advancement of science and technology has led to the fusion of the human, the animal, and the machine with vast and unpredictable outcomes, especially for marginal subjects like women and ethnic and racial others. The figure in which this fusion is consolidated is the cyborg, in which biology and technology intersect, created and represented as an antithesis to human primacy and white male privilege, and by extension to essentialist ontologies which seek to limit possibilities of existence into dualist categories.

If however, as Haraway claims, “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are ” (150), and if human existence has become so intertwined with machinery, that the delineation between human and machine is blurred, what is the implication for humans as embodied beings? Definitely, theories like Haraway’s challenge humanism and its inherent power differentials, fundamentally built around the creation, management and destruction of matter either it is organic or inorganic: Kavvadia 36

In the traditions of Western science and politics - the tradition of racist, male

dominance capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the

appropriation of nature as a resource for the productions of culture; the

tradition of reproduction of the south from the reflections of the other - the

relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in

the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and

imagination. (150)

These observations are particularly pertinent for a discussion of new materialism, since posthumanist thinking, and specifically its post-anthropocentric strand, has been part and parcel of the re-conceptualization of matter promoted in this excerpt. However, this should not and could not mean a disavowal of the flesh and the world of matter, as this would only lead to a re-iteration of essentialism by other means. In decentralizing the importance of the essentialist human subject, one should also challenge the historical method of that subject’s construction, predicated on ideas of unwavering progress, ruthless antagonism, exploitation on the basis of gender, race, and class, and destruction of the natural environment, all of which are enhanced by the unchallenged prevalence of a rigid distinction between nature and culture. For the above reasons, perspectives starting from a posthumanist premise have been the subject of critique and viewed with some suspicion.

For instance, in her 1999 publication, How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine

Hayles writes that

embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased in the cybernetic

construction of the posthuman in ways that have not occurred in other

critiques of the liberal humanist subject, especially in feminist and

postcolonial theories. Indeed, one could argue that the erasure of embodiment

is a feature common to both the liberal human subject and the cybernetic Kavvadia 37

posthuman identified with a rational mind. The liberal subject possessed a

body but was not usually represented as being a body. Only because the body

is not identified with a self is it possible to claim for the liberal subject its

notorious universality, a claim that depends on erasing markers of bodily

difference, including sex, race, and ethnicity. (4-5)

Such claims evidently pose a challenge to a posthumanist view that seeks to attribute meaning to materiality, and especially embodied materiality, exclusively based on social constructionism. This view would seek to place embodiment as secondary to the mind, prioritizing the second as a realm of order and homogeneity that eventually leads to freedom and agency as opposed to the body as a place of disorder and difference that leads to limitations for the individual. To erase embodied difference in such a way is an ineffective way to resolve the power dynamics built upon it, and is very much a function of social and political privilege. Since for many individuals around the world, such understandings of embodiment and materiality would not be useful in making sense of their reality, new materialism is a move towards better calibrating theory to lived experience.

The Difference Engine does participate in this conversation about the shifting meanings of materiality and embodiment first of all by constructing the narrator as a disembodied artificial intelligence. The abstract nature of the narratron, which only takes shape through the representation of the data that it has acquired through time, is a marker of the instabilities and challenges that the novel inscribes in the domain of materiality in the present time. Specifically, the refusal of Ada’s physicality finds its counterpart in the bodiless machinic intelligence that has arisen from the application of her scientific discoveries. At the end of the third iteration of the novel, and after London has already started feeling the combined effects of ecological and political instability29 due to its being covered in smog and

29 The writers manage to bring these two states of crisis together in a passage of great visual resonance that describes the threatening atmosphere of London: “Outside the Palace, the London sky was a canopy of yellow haze. It hung above the city in gloomy grandeur, like some storm-fleshed jellied man-o’-war. Its tentacles, the Kavvadia 38 in the initial stages of a riot, the writing is once again disrupted to offer us one more object that connects Ada and the narrator, while at the same time comments ambiguously on the contemporary dangers of abstract technology. The “document under analysis is a holographic letter” (197) written by Edward Mallory to Ada. In the letter, he explains that he has hidden the guttapercha tube given to him by her in the skull of the Brontosaurus exhibited at the

Museum of Practical Geology. Certainly, the object that she has handed to him is believed to be a gambling modus, but in actuality it is the cards containing the programming sequence of the Engine that narrates the novel. These cards also pose the central conflict in the novel as the Luddite revolutionaries, led by Captain Swing, seek to obtain them by turning against the

British government. At the same time, they also represent the now sentient computer tracing its own story throughout the text, an autobiography of a machine told through the actions of the humans surrounding it. The programming cards as palpable objects, meaning the material of the machine’s mind, and the mind itself possessed by the computer, are presented as being separate, but this is a separation that is dependent on human taxonomic categories which do not necessarily correspond to the multiple realities of materiality. Thus, by bringing together creator and creation, Ada and the machine both equally disembodied, the text renders them both equally vulnerable to the oppressive dominance of strict divisions and hierarchies. The narratron cannot exist apart from human-made categories, powerful as it is, and its existence is mediated through an object that is itself the product of human rationality.

From this construction, the reader is lead to replicate an activity of reification, as they are forced to make use of the pre-existing categories of human vs. non-human, material vs. immaterial so as to make sense of the distinction between the artificial intelligence and the sentient humans. The concept of reification has been used widely across a variety of

uprising filth of the city’s smokestacks, twisted and fluted like candle-smoke in utter stillness, to splash against a lidded ceiling of glowering cloud. The invisible sun cast a drowned and watery light” (164). The claustrophobic sense of imminent danger from the increasing social unrest finds its counterpart in the suffocating environment of urban pollution and heat. Kavvadia 39 disciplines, from computer science and statistics to psychology and linguistics, but perhaps it is its use in Marxist theory which has been the occasion for it to enter the vocabulary of the new materialist approach. In Marxist thinking, reification commonly refers to the ways in which, under the conditions of capitalism, “a particular (historical) set of social relations comes to be identified with the natural properties of physical objects, thereby acquiring an appearance of naturalness or inevitability – a fact which contributes, in turn, to the reproduction of existing social relations” (Burris 2). By acting in the world, we constantly turn historically-specific relations and ideas into naturalized ones, through imprinting them on specific objects (e.g. the essentialist idea of gender reified in separate restroom installations, or the essentialist idea of ethnicity coded on specific beverages, foods, or clothes). This becomes clear if we take into consideration for example the work of Manuel

DeLanda who makes use of an eclectic mix of materialist perspectives influenced by Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, architecture, and physics, in order to extend the concept of reification and comment on the way in which humans resort to essentialism to create taxonomic categories. DeLanda points out that human understanding, as represented through the practice of classification, requires examining “finished products (different chemical or biological species), discover[ing] through logical analysis the enduring properties that characterize those products, and then mak[ing] these sets of properties into a defining essence

(or set of necessary and sufficient conditions to belong to a natural kind)” (28). This is a flawed approach, as it relies on deconstructing a complex entity comprised of various parts, and remaking it while cognitively unmaking it in such a way as to confirm human systems of understanding. This is the process that DeLanda labels as “reifying,” meaning the creation of a repetition that serves to confirm what is already constructed as a given. He writes that “[t]o avoid reification, we must instead focus on the historical processes that produce those products, with the term historical referring to cosmological and evolutionary history in Kavvadia 40 addition to human history” (DeLanda 28). In other words, systems of meaning that privilege human understanding must make way for other structures that are not controlled by or centered on human perception.

From this view, we can conclude that in the case of Gibson and Sterling’s text, human primacy is challenged, yet finally safeguarded; the categories of human vs. non-human are reified through the technological objects, cards and engines one sees in the novel. For all its omnipresence and vast knowledge, the narratron is only the product of human intellect applied and reproduced through a set of laminated cards running through brass with the help of steam-powered pistons. The hierarchy of agent over object is underlined in the last lines of the second iteration where the following statements conclude the description of a reproduction of a formal photograph of Ada and Lady Mary Somerville:30 “Ada is the mother./Her thoughts are closed” (93). The two short and factual sentences, sitting on top of one another instead of next to each other, perform effectively the shift in tone that marks the voice of the narratron. As it attempts to decode the image as input, the machine cannot see within Ada’s mind as it habitually does with the other characters, since her mind is the source of the narratron’s existence. This is one of the smallest and subtlest clues to the identity of the narrator, and testifies to the impenetrability and ultimate perceived superiority of the creator over the creation.

Nevertheless, this double pull towards challenge and reconfirmation bespeaks the anxiety of obsoleteness that the novel communicates. The Difference Engine is a text full of antagonisms, while one of the most ruthless enemies in it is made to be the passage of time itself and its contingencies, materially inscribed in various objects that the characters have to deal with. The object on which these fears and aspirations are most vividly projected is the

30 Mary Somerville (1780-1872) was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer, who became the first woman to join the Royal Astronomical Society. She wrote widely on the natural sciences and was in fact tutor to young Ada. In The Difference Engine, the relationship is reproduced and Somerville is presented as Lady Ada's “soi- distant chaperone” (93, italicized in original). Kavvadia 41

Zephyr, the steam-driven gurney designed by Godwin, Mallory’s engineer friend. We first come across the Zephyr when Mallory visits Godwin’s workshop, where one of his younger brothers works as an apprentice. The spotlight is immediately drawn onto the peculiarity of the vehicle that is so different from what is expected for the era’s technology and expertise:

[. . .] a queer shape threw off highlights from curves of enamelled tin. He took

the thing for a boat, in the first instant of his surprise, its scarlet hull absurdly

suspended between a pair of great wheels. Driving-wheels, he saw, stepping

closer; the burnished piston-brasses vanished into smoothly flared openings in

the insubstantial-looking shell or hull. Not a boat; it resembled a teardrop,

rather, or a great tadpole. A third wheel, quite small and vaguely comical, was

swivel-mounted at the end of the long tapered tail. (74)

The first discrepancy in this passage can be located in the tension that is created between its form and content. The language that is employed here is richly descriptive, full of adjectives and long sentences focusing on the gurney’s external surface, while including the dated usage of words like “queer.” Compared to the newness of the object it describes, the style brings to mind lush descriptions of Victorian Gothic.31 The use of the adverb “absurdly” to comment on Zephyr’s design highlights on the one hand the author’s acknowledgement of their paradoxical description, and on the other the way that the vehicle disrupts the era’s technoscientific expectations. Indeed, Mallory is completely mesmerized by the object and cannot seem to trust that it can actually move, let alone win a race with the rest of the tested and trusted machines. His reaction can be understood if one takes into consideration

Mallory’s status as an elite academic and as a representative of the scientific community of his time.

31 The description of the Zephyr can be considered to be an example of the use of the Victorian grotesque, which brings together images of nature and artificiality in order to comment on contemporary technofetishism (Rapatzikou 153). This is affected by connecting the Victorian fixation on design and engineering to its modern equivalent. Kavvadia 42

The final victory of the Zephyr against all odds, and Mallory’s change of fortune by betting on it and becoming rich overnight, is a bittersweet moment in the novel’s treatment of materiality. As it has crossed the finishing line, Mallory watches as “the other gurneys laboured painfully across the finish-line. By the time they arrived, they seemed to have aged centuries. They were, Mallory realized, relics” (92). His observation seems to hold as much for the bulky vehicles as for the audience watching them as well as for the entire Victorian society of the time. The Zephyr encapsulates the seismic shift that takes place in technoscientific knowledge as presented in the pages of the novel, anticipating the changes that are about to occur in the early twentieth century.32 The qualitative change that led to the gurney’s improved design is expressed in Godwin’s assertion when Mallory questions the efficacy of the Zephyr’s shape: “Form emerges from function, as you so often told us” (75).

Even when he directly profits from radical change, as is the case with the derby races,

Mallory cannot quite seem to accept that in the new technologized world the old principles of science and mechanics as he knows them do not necessarily hold.

Critics have connected the representation of the rapid change in the state of knowledge that the text identifies with the invention of the early computer to both a dystopian and a utopian view of scientific progress and its impact on society. Herbert Sussman, for example, claims that The Difference Engine counters what is known as the “deterministic disciplinary narrative of technoculture in several ways – by subverting one narrative, the antitechnological Victorian story of industry, and by substituting another, a liberationist, even utopian, story of technological revolution” (“Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage” 7).

Sussman believes that by rewriting Victorian literary sources, such as Benjamin Disraeli’s

Sybil, Gibson and Sterling have managed to counterpose a narrative of positive technological potentialities, in the place of the much more common view of the rise of technology as an

32 For example, the theorization of Turing machines in the 1930s, the development of cybernetics in the 1940s, and most importantly, network computing in the 1960s (Jagoda 58). Kavvadia 43 instrument of power in the hands of the state. To this view, Jagoda poses a counter-argument that not only paints the products of progress as oppressive, but also goes beyond the representation of a surveillance state so as to comment on what according to Deleuze could be termed a “system of ‘control’” or what Alexander Galloway would call a “network driven by ‘protocol’” (qtd. in Jagoda 56). In this last formulation, society would be seen as functioning through “a set of recommendations and rules that outline specific technical standards” (qtd. in Jagoda 68). This society would mirror the very objects which have given rise to it, the Engines which according to Ada’s lecture at the end of the novel, have evolved from “Conjectures [that] will transcend the limits of abstract concept and enter the living world” (377). The repercussions of the materialization of these ideas lead of course to the birth of the artificial intelligence that serves as the narrative voice in the novel.

In particular, the appearance of the narratron at the final pages of the novel as a new form of life suddenly introduced into the known order of the universe poses an ontological challenge to its characters that exacerbates the fear of outdatedness that dominates the setting of the text. Even so, it is foreshadowed during a number of different incidents in the story, all of them tied to specific objects or spatial settings. Mallory’s specialty as a paleontologist and his rise to academic fame through the discovery of the “Land Leviathan” fossil constitute the most direct commentaries that Gibson and Sterling provide on the subject; during an expedition in America, Mallory discovers the remains of a gigantic dinosaur, almost perfectly preserved inside the ground. During the time of the narration, he is back in London to reap the fruits of his labor, yet due to the climate of sociopolitical unrest the city finds itself in,

Mallory almost becomes susceptible to superstition. When he visits the Central Statistics

Bureau to consult the Engines about the mystery of Ada’s box of punch-cards, he makes an unlikely connection between the sterile labyrinthine hall of the machines and the movements of the worms in the soil: “A vision came to him of earthworms churning in catastrophic Kavvadia 44 frenzy, ‘til the soil roiled and bubbled like a witches’ brew. In years, mere months perhaps, all the monuments of slower aeons would sink shipwrecked to primaeval bedrock...” (120). The writers construct this passage as a direct reference to Darwinism, since Darwin himself is mentioned as a friendly acquaintance of Mallory’s and as the source of the earthworm imagery. Inside the Engines’ own domain, the threat that the worms pose to human superiority materializes for Mallory in the form of a vision of all human achievements sinking under the ground, much like the remains he is specialized at finding because of his profession.

The entire spatial setting of The Difference Engine could be said to reflect this sense of imminent danger that Mallory feels when he is at the presence of the Engines. One of the earliest examples of this appears during Sybil’s own narration when she comments as she sits in a train in the London underground that “[i]t was a queer business, the underground, when you thought about it, racketing along at such speeds, through the darkness under London, where the navvies had come upon lead water-pipes of the Romans, and coins, mosaics, and archways, elephant’s teeth a thousand years old...” (49). Here the technological meets the primordial, and in the movement of the train through the literal remnants of the past we see the will to progress being contrasted to what is seen as its destructive results if one considers what is it leads to: remains and relics. The imagery of the entire city seems to echo this sentiment, with “[t]he cobbles of London vanishing month by month” (49) and being replaced by tar, a material mark of engineering and infrastructural progress with ties to the development of trade and finance, and with the Central Statistics Bureau that Mallory visits, which is described as “vaguely pyramidal in form and excessively Egyptianate in its ornamental detail” (117). The establishment here of an indirect connection between the

British Empire and Ancient Egypt sheds light on their common fate of grandeur and collapse, accentuated by the smog which covers London and seems to affect the inhabitants of the city Kavvadia 45 almost supernaturally.

Gibson and Sterling actually make use of an actual historical event known as “The

Great Stink” that took place in London 1858. Due to the enormous amount of waste that was dropped in the Thames, the summer of that year saw the British metropolis in the midst of an ecological catastrophe. In fact, as The Times wrote on their June 18th 1858 issue, the combination of high temperatures and smells was so awful that “[t]he intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings which overlook the river” (qtd. in

Halliday n.pag.). The sewage system, extremely underdeveloped for the needs of Victorian

London’s bustling population, was ultimately modernized by the engineer Sir Joseph

Bazalgette, who is hailed as an icon of the positive impact of technical and technological progress in Halliday’s study. In The Difference Engine, we do not get to read how the Stink was dealt with but we witness the catalytic role it played in the feud between the Luddite rebels and the Radical supporters, as the former take it as an opportunity to instigate a wholesale riot in the city. What we observe here, from a new materialist perspective, is the interplay of meteorological phenomena, geological features, and sociopolitical circumstances, all coming together to constitute a more-than-human world which we must learn to navigate

(Barad 37). In the case of Captain Swing and his cohorts, this means a chance to change societal hierarchies.

Admittedly, there seems to be no particular program to their opposition, no specific set of aims other than to “own London, the modern Babylon herself! [. . .] own futurity!”

(264). Florence Bartlett, one of the Luddite agitators, claims that their aim is to start a revolution in the likes of the Communist uprising, which in this timeline has already taken place in Manhattan rather than in Russia, led by Karl Marx in exile:

“Read your history, friend!” the Marquess retorted. “Wat Tyler did it.

Cromwell did it. Byron himself did it!” He laughed. “The People Risen have Kavvadia 46

seized City! The working-people rule Manhattan as we walk and

speak here! They have liquidated the rich. They have burned Trinity! They

have seized the means of information and production. ” (264)

The class-based character of the rebellion, as presented here, is exposed due to the reference to the concept of “means of information” that appears next to the means of production. With the advent of the early computers, knowledge becomes a commodity while one must challenge the state’s monopoly of power over it if one wants to secure autonomy. The revolutionary subject evoked here, the Luddite, is painted in less than flattering colors and ends up losing to the mightiness of bourgeois technocracy, as the novel shows us in the end.

However, as Thomas Pynchon points out in his essay, “Is It OK to Be A Luddite”? (1984) there are clear identifications between Luddism and revolutionary consciousness, because the difference that the Industrial Revolution made in the world does not translate simply to more technology but to technology in the hands of the economic and social elites (n.pag.); thus to oppose its uncontrollable use is to oppose the free rein of power of the dominant few. Given the opportunity to make a radical point about ownership and freedom, the novel ultimately seems to re-iterate the dominance of the elite in the knowledge economy.

Nevertheless, there is one last instance where this dominance is called into question, this being the sequence of Mallory’s death. In this sequence, all previous concerns addressed in the text seem to come together, evident not only in terms of content but also of form. This is the closing of the fourth iteration, but there is no specific object described this time:

“Envision Edward Mallory in the scholarly office of his palatial Cambridge home” (288). We are asked to imagine Mallory ourselves, a request which becomes apparent in the bold narrative voice that Gibson and Sterling utilize here. We are transported some decades into the future when Mallory is old and distinguished. The bad publicity he has suffered from his involvement with the Luddites and the punch-cards has all but faded together with the Kavvadia 47 revolutionaries themselves. What this section confronts us with has to do with the fundamental connection between understanding, scientific advancement, and being. The old

Mallory, a dinosaur himself, cannot seen to fathom the plurality of unknown truths being discovered, and when he sees the plates containing the images of strange microscopic invertebrates found in an expedition, “a rush of blood and wonder mounts within Mallory’s skull. A vortex of implications begins to sort itself within him, mounting step by step to a strange and numinous glow, an ecstatic rush toward utter comprehension ever brighter, ever clearer, ever closer—” (290). At this moment, Mallory dies, and the description shifts from an emphasis on what is happening in his mind to the slumping of his physical form. Stylistically, the passage contains more lush language than others which are spoken by the sentient machine, lending truth to the fact that it is becoming increasingly able to identify with the objects of its input.

It is telling from what has been mentioned so far that it is the new and unexpected knowledge that pushes Mallory out of existence. The improbability of the creatures that seem to defy taxonomic classification, results in the irrelevance of Mallory, whose livelihood and understanding of the world has relied upon it. Despite their minuscule size and insignificance, they are able to affect him irreversibly, and together with him the entire Victorian world of science and knowledge as it features in the text. This incident may in fact represent a version of Bennett’s sought-for “materialism in which matter is an active principle and, though it inhabits us and our inventions, also acts as an outside or alien power” (47). In Mallory’s case, his displacement is ontological and epistemological, which reflects the need for a view of knowledge and technology that avoids the traps of reification when it attempts to deal with the material world.

The object that provides the finale of the novel is a map, and it points to such a direction, even if the outcome is ultimately ambiguous. At the end of the fifth and final Kavvadia 48 iteration, the last lines read:

Recede.

Reiterate.

Rise above these black patterns of wheel-tracks,

These snow-swept streets,

Into the great map of London,

forgetting. (449)

The map of London is significant here since it reduces a physical plane to the conceptual, transferring the material into the domain of the mind. At the same time, it serves as the only access that the narratron would presumably have to the world outside, since it is not in possession of a physical body. This reference in the last part of the novel triggers the association with the cartographical impulse of new materialism that is the investment in building and designing ontologies and epistemologies not according to a linear and hierarchical model akin to a pyramid but to a spatial, distributed, and collective one, akin to a map. Moreover, on the basis of this approach, the reference to “the great map of London” prepares the readers for surprises, misunderstandings, and long journeys, a stance that stands in opposition to strict categorical thinking. The existence of the disembodied and sentient being of the narratron, the product of human intelligence and design, seems to challenge our tendency to simplify information for our ease of comprehension.

Ultimately, The Difference Engine interrogates the relationship between the human mind and the material world, demonstrating the complexities of the role of matter in the perception of reality. Historical ways of navigating the world through taxonomy and a human-based understanding of existence are challenged through the novel’s re-envisioning of the Victorian era, its intertextual references to our historical reality and to other literary works, and its ambivalent embrace of new ways of relating to materiality. Nevertheless, its Kavvadia 49 treatment of issues of difference and equality leave something to be desired. For this reason, I will now turn to Perdido Street Station, to investigate how a different application of the steampunk aesthetic, influenced by different social and cultural factors, delivers different results. What is crucial in this comparison and contrast of the two novels is not the use of the steampunk aesthetic per se, but the ways in which it facilitates different kinds of literary and political representations. Kavvadia 50

CHAPTER TWO

“Half-Things and Neither-Nors”: Embodied Materiality, Difference, and Subjectivity in

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

2. The Promises of Monstrous Flesh

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)

In this chapter, I will continue my examination of how steampunk deals with materiality through renditions of characters and settings in China Miéville’s33 Perdido Street

Station (2000), in an attempt to present it as yet another variation on the stylistic and thematic features of steampunk. With materiality playing a central part in the novel, I will focus on the objects and bodies featuring in its pages and the way they are refashioned in order to comment on the material changes brought about by contemporary technoscientific progress.

What I will try to argue that is that what makes steampunk meaningful is the palpable quality of its aesthetic, mediated through technological objects interacting with embodied physicalities.

Perdido Street Station draws from a number of different literary traditions, such as fantasy, science fiction, horror, the Weird, and a pinch of steampunk sensibility, in terms of world-building as well as ambiance. The physical setting of the novel, identified with the fictional city of New Crobuzon, serves as the medium through which oppression as well as resistance is registered. The novel treats urban space as a product of technological progress

33 China Miéville is an English writer born in 1972, closely associated with New Weird fiction. He is a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction and publishes regularly on contemporary politics, Marxism, and popular culture. For more information, see his blog rejectamentalist manifesto, and his interview with Joan Gordon. Kavvadia 51 and capitalist accumulation, and assigns it an important role in the mobilization of its plot.

Seen through the eyes of Yagharek, a first-person narrator, as well as through third person narrators, the city and its workings attains a political significance that ties with the author’s materialist vision. Conceptualized as non-human matter, New Crobuzon architecture, cartography, and even environmental phenomena, all become points through which one is encouraged to rethink materiality.

Moreover, the marked interest in technological and cultural artifacts and their enmeshment with social and political change places the novel within the framework of steampunk, as it was previously argued, but also within the milieu of contemporary works of speculative fiction concerned with our changing conditions of living. It is through an examination of how technoscience and its practitioners interact with other cultural discourses and practices, and what this means in material terms, that makes Perdido Street Station truly progressive and politically promising. For example, Yagharek’s commissioning of Isaac’s research in flight, the government-sanctioned drugs circulating in the underworld of the city,

Lin’s magnum opus as an organic and material reflection of Mr. Motley’s riddle of a body, are all instances in which the material practices of technology and art, broadly perceived as practices of knowledge production and dissemination, impact the material world of the novel and alert us to possible parallels with our own world for better or for worse.

In his attempt to revitalize the tradition of fantasy in more radical ways, Miéville pays particular attention to character typology in Perdido Street Station. The novel’s world is populated by a score of sentient races and other creatures with their own physiologies, social customs, histories, and agendas. Miéville’s beings are humanoid cacti, insect-like hybrids, and conglomerations of discarded but conscious domestic . Their improbability and their pronounced difference from one another is yet another tool for the realization of the novel’s political potential, and points to the need for fiction with actual materialist concerns, Kavvadia 52 as it departs from a simple affirmation of difference in the framework of identity politics, while it seeks to find ways in which difference can turn into solidarity. The centrality of the human, even in this exuberant formulation of a fantastical world, is undeniable. And yet, it does not go unchallenged. Miéville then can be said to simultaneously expand as well as depart from earlier ideas of human agency and reason as he challenges the uniqueness of human sentience and, at the same time, expands it to other species.

The multiplicity of perspectives, embodiments, and representations in the novel makes it suitable for a new materialist reading, which is what I will attempt to do in the remainder of this chapter. More specifically, I will employ a new materialist framework in my reading of the novel in order to bring out what I see as its radical understanding of materiality and the position of technology and science in relation to social change. To this end, I will use new materialist perspectives as they have been expressed and developed in the Deleuzian- inspired work of Rosi Braidotti, Steven Shaviro, Karen Barad and several other scholars in the field of new materialist philosophies. If steampunk has anything to offer in the form of political engagement, it will be through the intensive and manifold analysis of its material aspects, where this potential can be located. Perdido Street Station is an effective example of such promising steampunk materiality. By offering intense and meaningful political commentary alongside narrative pleasure and immersion, this text is an example in which the application of the popular steampunk aesthetic actually leads to socially progressive representations.

2.1. The Weird and the Weirder: China Miéville’s Tales of Darkness and Resistance

Miéville is by all accounts an impressive case among contemporary writers: a trained scholar of international human-rights law and anthropology, a committed Marxist who has run for the U.K. House of Commons with the Socialist alliance in 2001, a writer-in-residence and university instructor, and a freelance illustrator and RPG enthusiast. Between all of this, Kavvadia 53 one would assume it unlikely that he would squeeze fiction writing in as well – yet his great record of literary awards and favorable reviews in addition to his devoted fan-base suggests that he is a force to be acknowledged in contemporary fantasy, or more broadly, speculative fiction.

Miéville is one of the leading figures of the New Weird, a body of work mostly identified with himself, Jeff VanderMeer, Kristen J. Bishop, Felix Gilman and others.

According to Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer in their introduction to the anthology

The New Weird (2008), they argue that this genre is “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy” (xvi). New Weird fiction has undeniable links to weird fiction, which is in turn defined as “a rather breathless and generally slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring non-traditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)” (Miéville, “Weird

Fiction” 510); it is associated most strongly with the works of, among others, H. P. Lovecraft,

Algernon Blackwood, Robert Bloch, and Arthur Machen as well as generally with the fiction published in the Weird Tales magazine (1923 -) (510).

The consideration of both definitions is helpful for describing Miéville’s fiction to those unfamiliar with it. Undoubtedly, Perdido Street Station possesses a dark and atmospheric quality especially in moments of danger and tension, while it features a large share of unusual creatures, both being characteristic features of weird fiction. The New

Weird’s focus on real-world conditions for its setting is also in agreement with the author’s own admission about his attempt to avoid what he sees as “consolatory” and escapist in most strands of fantasy. The main proponent and most representative writer of this sort of fantasy is considered to be J.R.R. Tolkien, who argues in his essay “On Fairy Stories” (1947) in favor Kavvadia 54 of fantasy narratives culminating in “eucatastrophe,” a narrative scheme that provides final closure and satisfaction for the protagonists. Miéville believes that such narratives perform in their content and form a reactionary nostalgia that affirms the status quo by longing for or achieving its return; to this, he constructs narratives which “try to undermine straightforward closure” and refuse to “posit societies as internally coherent, consistent, bounded, and essentially safe. They are fractured and dangerous. The dynamics tearing them apart (the dynamics that lead to narrative) are intrinsic” (Miéville, “Reveling” n.pag.). The most potent tool he uses in order to highlight this intrinsic fragmentation and darkness of the real world is the image of the city of New Crobuzon, the city found in the throes of capitalist production.

Beyond what I believe it to be an explicit interest in material conditions of existence in terms of content, Miéville exhibits the same kind of preoccupation in his handling of form.

In Perdido Street Station, and in most of his fiction, one can detect “a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects” (VanderMeer and VanderMeer xvi). To get a sense of Miéville’s use of language, one may think of flamboyant Lovecraftian prose with its use of adjective after adjective and its intense quality, but this time even more grotesque due to its emphasis on material squalor and bodily aberration. Consider, for example, this passage:

The thing unfolded. The sense was of a blossoming. An expansion after being

enclosed, like a man or woman standing and spreading their arms wide after

huddling foetally, but multiplied and made vast. As if the thing’s indistinct

limbs could bend a thousand times, so that it unhinged like a paper sculpture,

standing and spreading arms or legs or tentacles or tails that opened and

opened. (Perdido 219)34

This is the first appearance of the monstrous slake-moth. The writing here has an internal

34 All subsequent references to Perdido Street Station will be to the same edition (see works cited list) and will be indicated only by page number. Kavvadia 55 rhythm that seems to be leading to some kind of verbal explosion so as to capture the moth’s nightmarish form. Miéville often contrasts short paratactic sentences to long multi-clause ones, and the effect is a text that reads like prose poetry. The use of the word “thing” to describe the slake-moth is also important as it is part of an arsenal of word choices that focus on the overlapping materiality of beings, objects, and places.

Partly due to its popularity with steampunk aficionados and partly because New

Weird fiction is so vaguely defined, Perdido Street Station has often been dubbed a steampunk or rather “steampunkish” novel. After all, it was published around the time when steampunk was enjoying its own creative and commercial burst,35 and seemed to share a lot of its characteristics, at least when it came to its subject matter and the texture of its setting, that being an endless industrialized urban space, with a repressive government and a dark underbelly. Miéville’s urbanity does not feature steampunk-favorite London, or perhaps it does by way of allusion, contributing in this way to the rich literature which explores the

English metropolis;36 in Miéville’s own words, “the city of New Crobuzon is clearly analogous to a chaos-fucked Victorian London” with a mixture of “magic/surreal/acid” added to it (“Reveling” n.pag.). In this sense, the novel does make use of steampunk’s neo-Victorian atmosphere of evoking the nineteenth century and, more specifically, the literary representations of the Victorian city and Empire.

The two remaining characteristics of the steampunk aesthetic as described by

Perschon, namely technofantasy and retrofuturism (5), are also present in Miéville’s text, although to varying degrees. From the perspective of Jess Nevin’s idea as presented in his article on steampunk as a spectrum (517), it is perfectly legitimate for a work not to embody all the features uniformly. In our case, science and technology do enjoy a privileged place in 35 According to Mike Perschon’s survey of steampunk works, there was an “expansion of steampunk into its divergent expressions beginning in 1999 and reaching a critical mass somewhere between 2005-2007” (73). 36 The book The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature (2011) by Sebastian Groes features a fascinating array of essays on literary representations of the British urban centre, including one focusing on a writer closely associated with steampunk, Michael Moorcock, and his treatment of London in his novels Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000) (see Groes). Kavvadia 56

Miéville’s text, since they are the driving forces behind the structure and progression of the plot. For example, it is scientific experimentation that leads to the release as well as the final extermination of the slake-moths. They also define the textual world’s own inner logic through the representation and examination of the sociopolitical effects of rapid technological change. Inasmuch as Miéville’s practice of “thaumaturgy” seems to draw from both science and magic, it falls well within standard steampunk configurations of technofantasy, a merging of the appearance of scientific fidelity with the miraculous effects of the occult. Moreover, the retrofuturism of Perdido Street Station also fits with a socially aware, rather than merely anachronistic, strand of steampunk that attempts to provide rectifications to and alternative formulations of the problematic historical and textual subject matter it makes use of. In the novel, there is no shortage of critique of the capitalist structures of hierarchy, colonial and post-colonial systems of oppression, and the interplay of power and free will in a highly complex world. It is, however, the sharp focus on matter itself that distinguishes the text from other examples of the steampunk aesthetic, even those being sensitive to social inequality.37

Because of its commitment to the representation of a world as complex, fragmented, and varying as our own, Perdido Street Station succeeds in offering an alternative to reductive and very often detached examples of steampunk fiction. What the novel attempts and manages to do is to recast the relationship of humanity with its immediate environment, be it social or geographical, animate or inanimate. For an appreciation of the implications of this attempt, I will move on in the next section with the implementation of various new materialism theoretical perspectives in the reading of the text.

2.2. “Dreamed up in bone and brick”: A New Materialist Reading of Embodied Matter

In the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and

37 Examples would be Ted Chiang’s short story of Victorian bio-engineering “Seventy-Two Letters” (2002), which looks at the effects of biotechnology on our concept of the human, or Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series (2009-2013), set in the American South and exploring gender and racial injustice. Kavvadia 57

Theater (2016), Fran Mason names Perdido Street Station as one of the numerous renditions of steampunk in fiction, alongside “clockwork imaginings set in the Renaissance” and set in the inter-war period; Miéville’s novel is described as an “alternative-world fantasy” which combines “Gothic magic and steampunk technology” (Mason 430).

Moreover, since Mason defines steampunk as embodying the metafictional impulse and pastiche quality of postmodernist literature, and goes on to detect these elements in Miéville’s novel as well. Admittedly, steampunk does play with self-referentiality,38 parody and intertextuality between real-life and textual references. The extent to which each work complies to this list of characteristics is the rationale behind the spectrum of the steampunk aesthetic as proposed by Nevins, and is partly the inspiration behind the present thesis. Since

Perdido Street Station incorporates these features one way or another, but is largely dissimilar to most well-known steampunk works of fiction, I believe that assigning the steampunk label on the novel says more about the aesthetic than about the work itself. Nevertheless, by looking at this novel through the lens of new materialism, I hope in this section to be able to show that steampunk is a much more varied literally framework than it is generally assumed in addition to highlighting the promising political and literary features of the novel in relation to a non-dualistic conception of matter.

What I have noticed whenever I have tried to summarize the contents of Perdido

Street Station for someone that has not read it, is that reduced to single units of plot the novel does not sound extremely original. This is a novel with quite a clear quest narrative, or to be exact, a number of quest narratives drawn together and impacting one another. It starts by introducing us to a mysterious narrator, a newcomer to the city of New Crobuzon, who relates his entrance to the city. This is Yagharek, an admittedly tragic character, who has been

38 For example, a pleasantly surprising instance of steampunk self-referentiality could be found in the work of Professor Elemental (Paul Alborough), chap hop musician and writer, who creates conceptual music albums with narratives starring various characteristic steampunk personae from literature and real life (see Ridenhour). Kavvadia 58 punished by his community for an unspoken crime he has committed and lives as an exile. In the following chapters in the novel, we find out that he wants to hire a scientist in order to help him reverse the physical punishment that has been inflicted on him by his own people.

The scientist in question is a maverick by the name of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a connoisseur of the kind of scientific magic practiced in New Crobuzon called thaumaturgy.

Isaac accepts the commission and what follows is yet again a more or less recognizable plot in which scientific research leads to the unleashing of the slake-moths, a species of insectoid psychic vampires, and a band of adventurers being summoned to save the city and restore its order. This is the kind of story often provided in epic fantasy narratives, which most often ends with a sense of catharsis and acknowledgement of the distinct natures of good and evil in the world. If this is the case, what makes Miéville’s story so compelling and ultimately so original?

Parallel with these lines of plot, we also follow Lin, a sculptor and Isaac’s lover, accepting a commission of her own. Through the shady networks of petty criminals, drug dealers, and hustlers of the gritty urban center, she is approached by a mysterious man called

Mr. Motley, a mob leader, who asks her to build his sculpture. Lin, belonging to one of the non-human races of the city, does not refuse the offer since she sees this as her opportunity for a possible breakthrough; the New Crobuzonian society, even though multicultural, does not offer so many chances to the so-called xenians. The commission she accepts for the creation of this statue is however complicated not only because Mr. Motley’s physical form is extremely unusual, but also because he is directly involved in the breeding of the predatory creatures that Isaac’s research sets free. In a way, Lin’s story is also a quest but a failed one, enabling the narrative to shed light on the tension between art and science, and the very material responsibilities of anyone participating in their discourses and practices.

As I argued earlier, the re-invention of character typology is one of the features that Kavvadia 59 results in Perdido Street Station being as powerful a text as it is. For this reason, I will start by looking at how the novel treats the bodily materiality of some of its characters. In fact, the first chapter of the novel introduces two of its main characters, Lin and Isaac, through a poignant scene of embodied experience: a couple waking up together, eating, and making love. Interestingly, the scene starts not from the room or the bed, but externally, from the marketplace outside Lin’s home. She sends a basket down the window with a written note requesting some goods from a merchant and we get the opportunity to witness the colorful plurality of the urban market in which “all distinctions [break] down” and ancient textbooks co-existed with rare spices and flea-powder (7). The marketplace is a space of disparate materialities which represents a city’s material needs and aspirations.

With reference to the dangling basket, the point of view of the narration is transferred from the public market to the private space of the house. As Isaac wakes up and sits to eat together with Lin, he realizes that the merchant who sold pork to her has written her back a note insinuating that he is aware of the sexual company in her house. The incident is of great importance for the development of the narrative, since our characters are in what could be described as a mixed-race relationship: while Isaac is a human, Lin is a khepri, one of the so- called xenian races of New Crobuzon, recognizable by the dark red skin of their human bodies and their scarab heads. In this socially and culturally stratified city, “to cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted” (12). Isaac sees himself as an uncompromising scientist, but despite that, he is aware that he needs to maintain at least a veneer of propriety to ensure his access to scholarly work. As he contemplates the ways he is allowed to promote a persona of intellectual unconventionality within Lin’s artistic social environment, the novel offers one of its first representations of otherness, expressed in the obvious bodily difference between them. Isaac finds Lin’s world of art and culture to be much more open and welcoming to such Kavvadia 60 supposedly illicit affairs such as theirs in comparison to his university colleagues; through a clever use of the third person narration, we are able to get a glimpse of how difference, and especially when it is inscribed on bodies, will be treated in this book. As Isaac looks at Lin sitting opposite him on the table, he is “conscious of their pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would make a beautiful, strange print, he thought” (11). At this point, the narrative voice performs an extremely subtle self-referential turn, twisting back on itself and pointing to the readers themselves. We are challenged to look at the scene as Isaac thinks we would if we were outsiders; of course the catch is that we are. What is revealed through this exercise in perspective is the novel’s approach towards the perception of difference as well as the difference of/in perception. Isaac believes that his bulky, human, and male appearance would create an idyllic kind of image next to the “slight woman’s body” and “chitinous” (11) head of Lin’s khepri form. What are the kinds of difference playing out in this proposition? I would start by the sexual difference expressed through the tension between the word “slight” and the word “big” in the respective description of the heterosexual couple. Definitely, the novel here seems to be expressing the traditional dichotomy of gendered physicality, and one would be right to assume it even embraces it. However, I propose that Miéville has chosen to include as many different examples of gendered relations in the novel as possibly as to be able to underline the problematic manner in which we treat difference in general and arguably the most fundamental kind of it, sexual and gender difference. As the example of Yagharek and his crime against Kar'uchai, his female garuda companion shows, Perdido Street Station does not shy away from the implications of sexist representations of gendered difference, in its attempt to acknowledge the power dynamics of gender differences.

Yagharek is in fact one of the focal points for the unraveling of the plot as well as one of the most important conduits for the treatment of matter in Perdido Street Station. Yagharek belongs to the race of the garuda, an avian species with eagle-like characteristics. The garuda Kavvadia 61 live a nomadic life in the Cymek desert, being considerably removed from the politics and morality of New Crobuzon. They are a deeply egalitarian hunter-society with a communal code of ethics aiming at the maximization of personal choice. That might seem like a contradiction in terms, as very often in contemporary political economy the maximization of choice for one group or individual means the limitation of choice for other such groups or individuals. It is indeed evident from Yagharek’s case that the garudan society itself cannot guarantee ultimate freedom of choice for its members, needing to resort to harsh punishment so as to maintain its order. However, it is worth looking at the societal structure depicted in the representation of the garuda as well as the ultimate excision of Yagharek from his community and his forced insertion into New Crobuzon exactly because they express the contradictions and promises of a new-materialist approach to technological and social change. Yagharek arrives in New Crobuzon weak and lonely, a stranger among strangers, and our initial impression of the city is colored by his own commentary:

The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped

on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like

bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship

this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of

two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys

retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which

pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. (1, italics in original)

The use of the first person point of view here immediately creates a bond of intimacy between this particular character and the readers – no other character in the novel, not even the generally likable Isaac, has been created with so much potential for empathy and identification in this novel. Yagharek looks at the city with a mixture of awe and disgust, much like a punitive god. The city is “stamped” and “silted into existence,” a product of Kavvadia 62 industry and technology that overwhelms the natural environment. In this encounter with the city, Yagharek feels debased exactly because New Crobuzon stands for everything his own socialization has fought against: pollution, massive depersonalization, and societal oppression. New Crobuzon is a “carceral city [. . .] an extension of the panoptical prison to the entire fabric of urban space” (Elder-Aviram 268); and inasmuch as Yagharek comes from a place of collectivized protection of individuality, we can observe in his reactions the clash of two world-views.

This is especially evident in the manner in which Yagharek, together with the garudan society on the one hand, and Isaac, as a member of New Crobuzonian society on the other hand, view his crime and punishment. After his initial dark introduction to New Crobuzon,

Yagharek arrives at Isaac’s workshop and requires his assistance to reverse a particularly harsh punishment: the cutting of his wings. The scene in which the garuda lets his cloak slip down and reveal the wooden contraption he has strapped on his back to create the illusion of wings is telling. Isaac, upon seeing the twisted and scarred flesh on Yagharek’s back,

“wrinkled with empathy” (42). Isaac, even though he still exoticizes Yagharek’s race and place of origin as foreign and wild, is shocked at the garuda’s anguish. Even though non- human, and decidedly removed from the dominant culture, Yagharek is human-like enough to foster the creation of empathetic links to Isaac and ultimately to the reader; in Braidotti’s new-materialist formulation of post-anthropocentricism, Yagharek is a subject of post- anthropocentric neo-humanism or, as she also terms it, “compensatory humanism” (The

Posthuman 76- 81).39 As to the exact nature of his crime, it is only in the last few pages that we get a clearer idea of what exactly the act that Yagharek has committed is, this being a

39 Braidotti offers an analysis of the post-anthropocentric predicament in new-materialist posthumanist theory through the example of primatologist Frans De Waal, who has argued for the value of empathy as “emotionally mediated communication” (The Posthuman 78) between primates. Even as she commends this view as promoting a less strictly rationalistic view of subjectivity, and a materialist rather than transcendentalist conceptualization of reason, Braidotti still rightly expresses doubt as to whether we should be satisfied or even comfortable with merely extending anthropomorphic characteristics to non-human animals, without examining with a serious critical eye what membership to the human species itself means. Kavvadia 63 narrative choice that seems deliberate on the part of the author in order to highlight the vast differences between the moral imperatives of the garudas’ quasi-socialist society and the proto-capitalist New Crobuzon.

After the city has been saved from the slake-moth menace, with the main characters on the run from the government, Isaac receives a visit from Kar'uchai, the garuda who has been wronged by Yagharek. Kar’uchai demands from Isaac to respect the laws of the garuda and not reverse the punishment that has been bestowed on a convicted criminal. When asked, she explains that in the moral code recognizable by human laws Yagharek attempted to rape her. Admittedly, this is an issue of extreme importance and sensitivity, and there have been concerns as to how Miéville, a white male author, has treated it.40 On the one hand, we have the heinous act of rape. However, as Miéville himself points out, when Isaac chooses not to help Yagharek, he does it because he considers his crime to be rape in the way human societies and moralities see it, as an act of humiliation and subordination immersed in intense and clear-cut gender dynamics. This is exactly contrary to what Kar’uchai asks him to do and to what Yagharek himself tries to explain to Isaac when he describes his crime as “choice- theft in the second degree […] with utter disrespect” (43).41 By refusing to help Yagharek,

Isaac does what we rightly expect of him, yet for the wrong reasons. His dilemma, and the tension between “abstract” and “concrete” individualities, sits at the heart of the new- materialist approach that I believe the novel partakes in. Miéville may seem dubious in his claim that this ending is about “judgmentalism, constructed around a deep moral dilemma,

40 See Miri’s piece entitled “‘You Would Call It Rape’: Sexual Assault in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.” 41 In his initial forays into understanding garudan justice, Isaac asks Gedrecsechet, a devoted scholar of universal knowledge and follower of Palgolak, the god of learning, what “choice-theft” could mean. Gedrecsechet explains that it is their focus on individuality in a “concrete” manner that makes the garuda truly equal between themselves. They are “egalitarian because they respect the individual so much, right? And you can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly” (63). Kavvadia 64 and a query about our culture’s faintly fetishistic critique of rape” (“Reveling” n.pag.); yet I find his claim extremely useful if we want to speak about literature that tries to overcome simplistic moral binaries and to offer new ways of thinking about our place in the world.

Rape is a gendered crime not only because its victims are most often women, but also because the interpretations of its moral impact on both perpetrator and victim are colored by a sexist view of physicality, which renders the female body impure and forever tainted by male aggression. This in turn means that as a culture we have accepted the symbolic power of male physical domination to transform the female body on a whim. The extremely visceral nature of Yagharek’s crime speaks to the need for attention to the body, its fragility and positionality within networks of power and especially within the structural frameworks of patriarchy, racism, and human domination. But it also begs the question as to how we should perhaps rethink our engagement with change and morality, moving away from the ethical frameworks created by transcendental reason in the context of capitalism, and towards more materialistic, polyvalent, and interconnected conceptions of individuality, community, and responsibility. In this sense, Yagharek’s crime and his punishment, both expressed through bodily affect, highlight the importance of embodiment for radical politics as well as for progressive literature. In a work espousing emancipatory materialist politics, rape as a crime of “choice- theft” is a more promising representation than rape simply as a sexual/gendered act of violence, because it highlights the importance of agency in the making and unmaking of bodily materiality.42 A new materialist reading of such a representation brings renewed focus onto freedom and agency, especially of gendered and non-human subjects by underlining the material core of these concepts. Reading Yagharek’s act through new materialist theories is an

“attempt to theorize freedom without tethering it either to deterministic or libertarian notions 42 Kar’uchai herself explains to Isaac the difference it makes for her status as an individual to think of her rape as an action of disrespect expressed through the body, rather than as a state of being inscribed on the body: “I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb’lin. I am not abused or defiled … or ravished or spoiled [...] The actions vary: the crime … is the theft of choice. Your magisters and laws … that sexualize and sacralize ... for whom individuals are defined abstract … their matrix-nature ignored … where context is a distraction … cannot grasp that” (609-10, italics in original). Kavvadia 65 of the human subject. Rather, they insistently challenge the forms of subjectivity that foreclose freedom” (Van Wert 66). The individual here must be seen as enmeshed in actual concrete relationships of affect and influence rather than as a theorized subject constructed either only through discourse or through a transcendental natural origin.

It is exactly this distinction between abstraction and concreteness found in the law of the garuda that makes Yagharek an important character for a new materialist approach to matter, and especially matter as it is situated in the interrelation between society and technology. Yagharek, in his wish to change his body back to its previous form, and in the ultimate impossibility of this undertaking, ties well with the philosophy of the steampunk aesthetic employed in Perdido Street Station. Yagharek is characterized by a wish to return to a previous, natural state, in which he could perceive himself as whole, as is evident by his claim that “[f]light is not a luxury. It is what makes me garuda. My skin crawls when I look up at roofs that trap me” (41). And yet, the means through which he seeks this reversal can be considered decidedly artificial, since technology is habitually thought of as, if not as opposite of nature, then definitely as external to it. In this sense, Yagharek expresses a sensibility often found in steampunk texts, encapsulated in the desire for progress or change together with a deep nostalgia for a supposedly wholesome past.43 The tension between essentialism and constructionism is here apparent, and I believe eased if considered through a new materialist perspective.

Perschon, in his study of the steampunk aesthetic, describes steampunk works of fiction as examples of what Brian McHale has called the postmodernist “poaching” of genres

(25). By this, Perschon refers to the tendency for appropriation of writing styles, literary figures, and modes of genre that is characteristic of postmodernist fiction and he

43 The plots involving British explorers in mystical Asian and African landscapes are numerous, but I think this call for author submissions for the anthology entitled Steampunk Cthulhu (2014), asking for stories with “Victorian globetrotting adventurers and wild technologies in the Wild West,” shows the standard tendency to romanticize and yearn for a supposedly fulfilling past. Kavvadia 66 differentiates between appropriation spurred by nostalgia, as opposed to appropriation spurred by regret (103-05). A great majority of steampunk writing is indeed characterized by a nostalgically conservative appropriation of the past and its supposed virtues, even though the last decade has seen some works looking at the past with “radical ‘regret’” (Perschon

105), attempting to rethink the representations they exploit. Drawing from this premise,

Miéville offers through Yagharek’s character a critique of this conservative undercurrent of steampunk by having Yagharek fail in his quest for a return to his previous bodily state. As it is a quest not “for fulfilment but for dissolution” (173, italics in original) due to guilt and shame for his crime, it is very significant for the portrayal of his nomadic, embodied subjectivity that he paradoxically must abandon his burning desire in order to somehow fulfill it. The fact that his desire is to be facilitated by technoscience through Isaac’s invention is even more important because it points to the intersection between science and regressive materialist politics, while it opens up space for new materialism.

Braidotti, whose work has focused on feminism and body politics through an engagement with the materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, has spoken about technology and its relation to a posthumanist and new materialist politics. In her book

The Posthuman (2013), she claims that “the technological is a site of post-anthropocentric becoming, or the threshold to many possible worlds” (94), in the sense that technology and science have become so embedded in the practices and processes of life that questions of individuality, freedom, and change must necessarily be thought through them. She makes use of the term “becoming,” which in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings is defined as

the pure movement evident in changes between particular events. This is not

to say that becoming represents a phase between two states, or a range of

terms or states through which something might pass on its journey to another

state. Rather than a product, final or interim, becoming is the very dynamism Kavvadia 67

of change, situated between heterogeneous terms and tending towards no

particular goal or end-state. (Stagoll 26)

In the Deleuzian philosophical universe, “becoming” is a foundational concept which, affixed on a series of other terms, creates notions such as “becoming-machine” and “becoming- animal.” The most important observation about “becoming,” as a new-materialist theoretical tool, is that it aims to reject the oppressive focus on being and subjectivity; instead,

“becoming” is about the repetition of immanent patterns of change. In the words of Deleuze,

“becoming isn’t part of history; history indicates only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new”

(Negotiations 171). Deleuzian “becoming” is thus an inextricable feature of Braidotti’s

“radical neo-materialism” (Patterns of Dissonance n.pag.), as well as a key component of her own conceptualization of nomadic subjectivity that is applicable to Yagharek’s quest for fulfillment through the flesh.

If one thinks of Yagharek as a nomadic subject of desire, fruitful ways of engaging with matter in general and embodied matter in particular become available. Nomadism first appears in the writings of Deleuze in his 1968 work Difference and Repetition, but only partly refers to the practice of nomadic living;44 nomadism refers to a strategy of subject- formation, what in the Deleuzian framework would be called a “territorialization,” in which the subject constructs spaces in which “there is no longer a division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves” (Deleuze,

Difference and Repetition 46). As a product of the garudan law, in which only concrete individuality can guarantee someone participation in the community, Yagharek goes through

44 Young describes the basic meaning of nomadism as “the resistance to distributions and divisions of limited space which are hierarchical [. . .] rather, the distribution within unlimited space which divides and multiplies positions within space itself (such that space is created rather than enclosed proprietarily)” (220). This can be said to have an application on the interpretation of actual nomadic life, but it is of course as idiosyncratic as anything Deleuze and Guattari have produced. Specifically, they have used historian Arnold Toynbee's work on nomads as representatives of static cultures, and they have extracted from it the figure of the nomad as producer of the space he or she perpetually traverses. This has interesting connotations for new materialism, and especially for the study of the production of living space. Kavvadia 68 a literal process of nomadic mobilization, as he moves from his desert homeland to the city.45

His movement starts as a quest, with the clear goal of regaining his wings with the help of a scientist. Yet, it is his fervent desire to fly again that leads him to the realization that he does not need to restore his body to some essentialist ideal in order to rebuild himself – the movement across the land, the realization that he has shed all aspects of his personality in order to become what he once was, paradoxically becomes subversive through its fixation on essence. It is this desire that turns him into a nomadic subject, and the pivot around which

Yagharek’s revision of his identity revolves. Such desire can be conceived, according to

Deleuze and Guattari, as direct and unmediated. In their words, “[d]esire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression” (Deleuze &

Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 26).46 For a new-materialist conception of embodied matter, this relation to desire is fundamental, since it allows for a positive re-articulation of physicality and subjectivity that does not need to depend on pre-given norms of gender, race, and even species.

What Yagharek achieves when he is able to fully accept the loss/lack of his wings, is not practically a rebirth but a rediscovery of his subjectivity that had been effaced due to the oppressive need to belong to the garuda through an unspoilt body. In fact, the most poignant gesture that confirms his new-found identity, and which qualifies him to be a nomadic subject, is the plucking out of his feathers from his entire body as he looks down from a rooftop and contemplates: “I am not the earthbound garuda any more. That one is dead. This is a new life. I am not a half-thing, a failed neither-nor” (623, italics in original). As he

45 The passage between the second and the third part of the novel, relating the chronicle of Yagharek’s journey from his homeland to New Crobuzon is interestingly constructed in a reverse chronological order, with the last lines reading: “I set out across the continent to become whole. The desert came with me” (173, italics in original). This structure underlines the impossibility and final failure of his quest, predicated as it is on a process of going back to pre-given origins. 46 This is their response to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical model of desire based on lack, in which “Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack in the experience of desire” (224). Kavvadia 69 imagines the long lost sensation of flying, Yagharek re-invents himself not by rejecting but by embracing his damaged and transformed body. Yagharek is metaphorically and literally a nomadic subject, because through a process of mobilization across space he has attained a sense of self based not on the stability and essence of bodily matter but on its transformation and fluidity.

Yagharek’s journey to self-redefinition also gives rise to questions about the validity and significance precisely of those “half-things,” the hybrid neither/nors, which in Perdido

Street Station are closely identified with the marginal class of the Remade. Indeed, it is telling that Yagharek himself arrives to an acceptance of his new subjectivity after he rejects the offer made by Jack Half-a-Prayer, the Remade vigilante, to join his gang of rebels who oppose New Crobuzonian law and order. The Remade themselves have understandably taken aggressive action against the city-state of New Crobuzon, since they are the products of its punitive system of justice, its “[p]risons and torture-chambers and workshops, and their bastard hybrids, the punishment factories, where the condemned were Remade” (17). In their story, the issue of the intersection of technology with hierarchical structures of oppression, and the manner in which power shapes matter through knowledge, finds its most pertinent expression.

In the setting of Perdido Street Station, a flavor of magic that could be paralleled to alchemy, called “thaumaturgy,” exists on a continuum along with the natural sciences and philosophy. This is definitely not a first in speculative fiction, and especially in recent steampunk-inflected fiction; for example Phillip Pullman in His Dark Materials trilogy

(1995-2000) is comfortable placing his characters in an alternate where witches and talking animals co-exist with a peculiar kind of quantum physics, and Stephen Hunt includes “mechomancers” and sorcerers in his Jackelian series (2007-2012). This combination results in the defining steampunk feature of technofantasy through which the Kavvadia 70 aesthetic maintains its adherence to the rationalistic appeal of science rather than to what is seen as the “frivolous […] ambient magic” (Perschon 9) of fantasy fiction. Steampunk this way validates the relative significance of scientific discourse over the supernatural and the inexplicable. The mixing of the fantastic and the scientific in terms of the aesthetic mode of steampunk corresponds, on the narrative level, to the concept of thaumaturgy, which in

Perdido Street Station, has both liberating and oppressive potential.

It is through Yagharek’s wish for flight that we are given the opportunity to learn more about the duplicitous nature of thaumaturgy, when Isaac confesses to be “glad to say I don’t know any Remakers [. . .] they’re usually more interested in humiliation, industrial power or aesthetics than in something as intricate as flight” (142). Remaking is an applied science based on thaumaturgy, which is a practice of bending living flesh according to the practitioner’s will, and merging it with non-organic matter while keeping it functional.

Despite the admittedly exciting implications such a practice could have, in New Crobuzon it is mainly used as punishment for heinous crimes. In the dialogue between Isaac and Derkhan, a radicalized activist and journalist, Miéville’s grotesque prose comes on the surface as he describes the sentences that citizens are given when they are turned into Remade:

I’ve seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they

retreat into at night. Snail-women. I’ve seen them with big squid tentacles

where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers

underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for the gladiatorial

shows...! Not that they admit that’s what they’re for… (82)

Two aspects of the Remade, equally important for the present analysis, emerge here: the merging of human and animal matter as well as the harnessing of biopower by the state through the use of technoscientific knowledge. These two sets of concerns come together to form a multifarious view of technology and materiality that is best approached through new Kavvadia 71 materialism. One of the pivotal concerns in the theories broadly defined as new materialist is exactly the ways in which science and technology in general, but biotechnologies most specifically, interact with structures of power and different materialities. Diana Coole and

Samantha Frost, in their introduction to the collection of essays New Materialisms: Ontology,

Agency, Politics (2010), note how the different approaches under the umbrella of new materialism form a response precisely to this intersection between the bustling technologies of life and materiality in “the blurring of clear boundaries or distinctions between bodies, objects, and contexts [that] is evident in the myriad biotechnological and digital technological developments that are changing the landscape of the living” (16). Drawing from the work of

Braidotti and Steven Shaviro, I would like to suggest that Miéville’s representation of the

Remade as an underclass created through state employment of “biothaumaturgy”/ biotechnology speaks to the anxiety borne of the blurring of boundaries between object and subject, animal and human, while it constructs the potential for a positive and ultimately revolutionary employment of knowledge that could counter systemic abuse of power as well as binary thinking.

The character most suitable to highlight these concerns is Jack Half-a-Prayer, the

Remade vigilante, half human and half-praying mantis. Jack is a shadowy figure throughout the entire text, rarely appearing to be the focus of the narration and most usually presented through urban hearsay filtered through the perception of the third-person omniscient narrator, or mentioned in passing during conversations between characters. As readers, we never have the chance to know Jack intimately; we learn of his violent acts of murder and his ambiguous appeal in the populace of the city through slogans painted on walls of the underprivileged neighborhoods: “Half-a-Prayer’s coming!” (13, italics in original). It is worth noting the matter-of-fact tone of Miéville’s voice when describing Half-a-Prayer’s acts, exhibiting neither shock nor endorsement, but a sense that they were expected: Kavvadia 72

In the outskirts of Nigh Sump a woman died of massive puncture wounds to

both sides of her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge

serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was scattered with

documents which proved her to be a colonel-informer in the militia. The word

went out. Jack Half-a-Prayer had struck. In the gutters and the slums, his

victim was not mourned. (179)

There are numerous references to such political killings throughout the text that serve to highlight the highly erratic social situation of the city, caught up in the transition from feudalism to proto-capitalism. If Half-a-Prayer only speaks through murder and never through words, we observe at once a troubling yet also promising implication for radical politics depicted in his characterization: himself a product of the convergence of science and the law, Half-a-Prayer embodies the destructive potential of this combination in his physical form altered without his consent. However, his remade physicality becomes an agent of change against the status quo, as he chooses to use his body not to serve the city-state’s elite but to murder it. Resistance, even though extremely violent, is presented here as a deeply material issue that cuts through, literally and figuratively, bodies, landscapes, and objects.

If resistance is to be rethought as a material concern, then bodies in the physical world become central, but in a way that is more nuanced than what either biological essentialism or social constructionism allow for. Braidotti in her analysis of posthumanist post- anthropocentricism argues for a new materialist, or as she terms it, vitalist materialist conception of embodiment as existing on a spectrum with all other materialities, organic, inorganic, human, and non-human.47 Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, who in turn draw from Spinoza, Braidotti conceives of matter as vital and self-organizing, meaning

47 Braidotti argues for the situatedness and materiality of identity when she writes that the “definition o f a person’s identity takes place in between nature-technology, male-female, black-white, in the spaces that flow and connect in between. We live in permanent processes o f transition, hybridization and nomadization, and these in-between states and stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation” (Metamorphoses 2). Kavvadia 73 independent of humans’ perception of it and able to construct webs of influences and interrelations without recourse to human will. This approach to matter can be detected in the novel in the portrayal and function of the fReemade, as well as the slake-moths. This theoretical perspective, according to Braidotti, in its rejection of transcendentalist, binary difference, presents instead “a complex process of differing which is framed by both internal and external forces and is based on the centrality of the relation to multiple others” (The

Posthuman 56). More specifically, in late capitalist societies, these others are defined on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality as well as ability status and even species. Indeed, the species question is particularly interesting for new materialist theories, because ontologically, the centrality of the human is based on its dominant position over other species. Human exceptionalism has been preserved through the ideology of humanism propped up by the rationality of the Enlightenment and its machinery of progress; to start relating to others, and especially non-human others, in a way that respects difference as an inherent component of life, is to challenge the authority of human experience over all others. Braidotti calls this holistic conception of life as pluralistic and autonomous “zoe,” to differentiate it from “bios,” the organic and discursive domain of human life exclusively (The Posthuman 60); her vitalist materialism blurs the boundary between these two conceptions of life, allowing for hybridity and heterogeneity to emerge.

The physicality of the Remade is an example of this merging of the species in its most literal form and showcases the tension, central in discussions of new materialism, between the radicalism of the politics of a post-anthropocentric and vitalist view of matter, and the conservatism of a binarist and humanist conception of matter. The invasive procedure of remaking on the body of the city’s populace, which turns a criminal into a worker through the coming-together of human, animal, and machine, testifies to the novel’s investment in politically subversive materiality. Specifically, the Remade in general and Jack Half-a-Prayer Kavvadia 74 in particular, reflect Braidotti’s assertion that contemporary global capitalism has enacted a shift from population control on the national level through categorization, regulation, and homogenization of its citizenry, to a more pervasive, planetary form of “capitalization of living matter” connecting all materialities through their shared vulnerability in the face of a global economy that is “post-anthropocentric in that it ultimately unifies all species under the imperative of the market and its excesses” (Braidotti, The Posthuman 61, 63). It is then telling that Half-a-Prayer is the leader of a terrorist group calling themselves “fReemade,” a renegade circle of Remade ex-convicts who oppose New Crobuzon’s economic and social elite through organized violence. If the Remade are the most underprivileged class in the city, the fReemade take it upon themselves to become the most feared one. They originate from the punishment factories where the government places the Remade criminals in to extract their labor, from the gladiatorial shows semi-secretly taking place in slums and respected neighborhoods alike, and from the brothels catering to the more specialized of tastes.48 In the figures of the Remade and their rebellious faction, the fReemade, Miéville constructs an exemplary, for its literalism, image of embodied matter shaped by the external forces of technological progress and state capitalism, yet with the potential for productive even if extreme resistance.49

The employment of an imaginative kind of realism, as opposed to allegory, is in fact one of the features in Perdido Street Station that makes it suitable for a new materialist reading, one also aligned with the approach of speculative realism as it has been specifically expressed by film scholar and philosopher Steven Shaviro.50 As a form of new materialism,

48 Describing a visit to a Remade brothel by Isaac’s colleague David, the writing style highlights the squalor but also the morbid attractiveness of these exploited Remade bodies. The setting is described as “a nightmare garden” with every room containing “some unique flesh-flower, blossom of torture”; the effect of these gruesome bodies reaches outward, rendering the brothel itself a space in which “[t]ime was stretched out and sickly [. . .] like rancid treacle” (297). 49 In both subsequent novels set in the same universe, The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004), the Remade have managed to acquire an equally respected societal status as the non-Remade creatures. Importantly, this has not taken place in New Crobuzon, but only in the floating megacity of Armada in The Scar, and the mobile society of the Iron Council, or Perpetual Train, in Iron Council. 50 Speculative realism, influenced by the works of Alfred North Whitehead and Henri-Louis Bergson, is Kavvadia 75 speculative realism ties well with an inquiry into the political potential of Miéville’s text, and can be useful in discerning the manner in which the author maintains the imaginative wealth of his fantasy world, while at the same time staying true to a politically progressive representation of matter and materialities. Shaviro’s take on speculative realism is by now habitually referenced alongside the rest of the spectrum of the new materialisms, since it is concerned with the nature of objects and consciousness within material reality. In his essay

“Capitalist Monsters” (2002), Shaviro connects the seemingly horrific with the mundane, arguing that zombies and vampires are in fact the literalized expression of late capitalism’s normal functioning, magnified for dramatic effect; in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, “the only modern myth is the myth of zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason” (Anti-Oedipus 335). In Shaviro’s analysis, monsters can hardly be said to just stand for capitalism; instead, they are fully realized, actualized51 threats to the livelihood of the characters and the world they inhabit.

In the case of Perdido Street Station, the face of literal vampiric exploitation belongs to the slake-moths, the otherworldly, gigantic moths that are released in New Crobuzon. The slake-moths, after they have flaunted their hypnotizing wings to stun their victim, use their elongated tongues to suck not on their blood, “their meat-calories,” but on the “fine wine of sapience and sentience itself” (326), leaving them in a zombie-like state. For this reason, they choose only sentient prey, namely all the races of New Crobuzon, human and xenian, but no animals. There are definitely anthropocentric implications in this choice, but the most

the philosophical belief not merely in the existence of a “reality independent of our perceptions, thoughts, and opinions regarding this reality, but rather the much more provocative claim that this reality provokes speculation” (Bell n.pag.). 51 Deleuze has developed a useful re-conceptualization of the opposition between the real and the possible, by recasting the two terms as actual and virtual respectively. According to Ian Buchanan, “both the actual and the virtual are fully real - the former has concrete existence, while the latter does not, but it is no less real for that fact. The importance of this distinction can readily be seen by giving thought to the state of being of an idea: it may only exist in our heads, or on paper, but its effects are fully real and may also be fully actual too” (n.pag.). This scheme provides a solution to the philosophical conundrum of why all that is possible is not already real, or why all that is not (yet) real is not by definition impossible, and it is especially useful in considerations of speculative fiction. Kavvadia 76 significant observation has to do with the manner in which the text manages to blend the recognizable iconography of the vampire and the zombie to comment on the effects of structural capitalism on modern societies. Bred through the marriage of technoscience, represented through Isaac, and the state represented through Vermishank, the high-rank bio- thaumaturge, and facilitated by the underworld figure of the mobster Mr. Motley, the slake- moths become “an expression, or better an exudation, of the self-valorising movements of capital” (Shaviro, “Capitalist Monsters” 287), connecting all sectors of society overtly and covertly. The slake-moths, in their love of “the peculiar brew that results from self-reflexive thought, when the instincts and needs and desires and intuitions are folded in on themselves, and we reflect on our thoughts and then reflect on the reflection, endlessly” (326), reflect the material consequences that societies suffer individually and collectively when technoscientific knowledge is used for unchecked profit. These monsters go beyond allusion, as they are described literally consuming as food the thoughts and dreams of every intelligent being, and they highlight Miéville’s evocative writing style, but also the novel’s investment in conceiving matter as a fundamental force of existence. As a new materialist, speculative realist take on materiality, the slake-moths’ consumption and excretion of people’s emotions and thoughts52 underlines the ultimately material basis of rationality and sentimentality alike, and the conviction that thought and matter, in all their myriad forms, are indivisible even if conceptually discrete; it also shows the unstable and fluid state of our modern ontologies of objectivity and subjectivity, as the slake-moths are able to transform subjects into objects by extracting their victims’ brain matter. Matter is thus vulnerable, yet fundamental; it is interconnected, but possesses the potential to influence reality in ways that do not necessarily call for humans as agents (Shaviro, The Universe of Things 49).

The instability of the dichotomy between subject and object is one of the tenets of the

52 The slake-moths digest the products of the conscious and the unconscious, and excrete them as a peculiar kind of faeces. This is sold as a very expensive hallucinatory drug called “dreamshit” by Mr. Motley, who breeds the slake-moths while the government turns a blind eye. Kavvadia 77 new materialisms, and in Perdido Street Station it can be elaborated upon through an examination of Mr. Motley’s bodily representation and Lin’s attempt to produce a sculpture of it. Mr. Motley approaches Lin through an acquaintance by the name of Lucky Gazid, a drug addict and hustler, and asks her to work on his real-life size sculpture, in total secrecy and for a brave sum of money. The reason why Motley is so cryptic becomes apparent when he reveals himself: “Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded” (38). The passage is a celebration of hybrid materiality full of color and movement.

Mr. Motley’s physique is an embodied treatise on vital matter where the animate and inanimate seem to collide and become alive. This “mongrel physiognomy” (37), as he himself calls it, is one step further from the hybrid beings native to this universe; it is the result of remaking, a copious project of absorbing in one body a multitude of possible others. Mr.

Motley’s physicality is, in the vitalist philosophical language of Deleuze and Guattari, an example of an assemblage, an assortment of heterogeneous components, functions, and individuals that lacks rational organization and can bring about any kind of effect; the fact that it has been made possible through biothaumaturgy points to a different aspect of technoscientific knowledge, its use in art. In the case of Mr. Motley, remaking becomes itself an artistic practice. Through the embedding of animal and mechanical parts on his physicality, Motley’s assemblage of a body writes on its own surface the complex interminglings of materiality and offers an example of the ways that the manipulation of matter for aesthetic effect influences the very processes of subject-formation.

Mr. Motley’s project of aestheticized self-objectification goes even deeper, touching on the problematic but interesting overlap between subject and object that the new Kavvadia 78 materialisms celebrate. In her essay on matter and the body, Diana Coole makes use of

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to argue in defense of a material ontology that treats bodies as situated in and connected with nature through shared agency. Agency in this formulation is not defined as the privilege of the rational subject, nor of “some vital force, but as those contingent capacities for reflexivity, creative disclosure, and transformation that emerge hazardously within the folds and reversals of material/meaningful flesh” (Coole 113).

As mentioned above, the networks and flows of today’s technological and financial power connect all matter under the predicament of vulnerability and objectification. New materialism complicates the question of objectification by turning it on its head: instead of arguing, in a Cartesian fashion, that everything outside the sentient is an inert object, the new materialisms support a view of all matter as partaking in a “complex relational field that emerges in an intercorporeal, intersubjective 'between'” (Coole 113). In a way, instead of attempting to do away with the subject/object distinction altogether, new materialism urges us to think what it would mean if we extended agential subjectivity to more of our planetary co- habitants.

However, through Mr. Motley’s obsession with sculpting his skin and having his skin made into a sculpture, we are afforded the opportunity to think about the power dynamics at play in this process of dismantling hierarchies. The fact that Motley desires to see his already objectified physicality in sculpted form can be considered to be a mirroring of the process of de-subjectification that he has already undergone through the use of remaking/technology.

When Motley finds out that Isaac is responsible for the release of the slake-moths which the gangster so carefully raised for his drug-dealing business, he imprisons Lin inside his headquarters until she finishes the sculpture. The pressure on the artist to produce and the abuse she endures at the hands of the mobster/businessman highlight the ways in which art is perpetually interwoven within unequal and even shadowy economic relations, and very often Kavvadia 79 coerced by force from those who produce it. Miéville’s Marxist allegiances are here apparent as well, as this is perhaps a textbook case of alienation of the worker/artist from the products of their labor. The fact that the material Lin uses to sculpt is basically her own khepri spit, excreted from the glands of her headscarab, underlines once more the bodily nature of creativity and also of exploitation. The relationship between the criminal/employer and the artist/employee is predicated upon the ontological homology between both, the materiality of their bodies and the sculpture, as well as the practices of remaking and sculpting. As in the case of the slake-moths and their victims, this is an example of another loop, an ecosystem of interdependencies, for Motley needs Lin to feed his ego as much as Lin needs Motley’s money and influence. Thus, art and science emerge as practices of making and influencing matter, but also as practices with a material basis that affect the relative position of the agents partaking in them. Ultimately, the common material ground between them does not guarantee either freedom or equality for those oppressed by hierarchical binaries.

This is perhaps a less than optimistic way of closing this chapter; after all, I have tried to argue for the political potential of a new materialist conception of matter in its interrelationship with technology, and I have tried to show how this appears in a politically- conscious novel. Is it self-defeating to admit that the tenets of the new materialism do not necessarily entail effective change, in the sociopolitical and/or the literary sphere? I do not think so, and I will conclude this chapter by referring to another conclusion, that of

Braidotti’s Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002). In this book,

Braidotti proposes the revision of our concept of subjectivity from being static being to becoming active. Drawing from Deleuze and Luce Irigaray, she proposes the model of the

“non-unitary, nomadic subject” as the “prerequisite for an ethics of complex but sustainable subjectivity” (Metamorphoses 265). This subjectivity is predicated on the rejection of posthumanist disembodiment and the embrace of an anti-essentialism rooted on the body; it Kavvadia 80 brings together human, animal, and machine, not through the predatory relations of capital accumulation, but through a relentless gratuitousness that “eroticizes interconnectedness, by emphasizing the role of passions, empathy and desire as non-self-aggrandizing modes of relation to one’s social and human habitat” (Metamorphoses 266). Nomadic subjectivity respects sexual difference by recognizing the asymmetrical balance of power between the sexes and by attempting to recast it as a positive becoming; it does not ignore racial, ethnic, class-based, and ability-status difference, but embeds it in its flows and networks of influence and interconnection. Most importantly, a nomadic subjectivity is not exclusionary, but inclusive of different experiences and modes of being.

I firmly believe that Perdido Street Station manages to point to such examples of a nomadic immanent subjectivity through its attention to matter and its importance in contemporary individual and collective lives. As an example of a steampunk work of speculative fiction, the novel embodies in its characters and its language the need and the potential for a more productive and ethical relationship to materiality, one not guided by profit and blind adherence to technologism and scientism, but by a sense of responsibility to those disadvantaged by past and present structures of power and oppression. By bringing side by side different forms of materiality and placing them in a richly detailed imaginary setting, the novel itself becomes a successful example of materialized resistance and political engagement through literature. Kavvadia 81

CONCLUSION “Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly – all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.” — Clive Barker, Galilee (1998) This thesis has attempted to investigate how two examples of steampunk fiction,

Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, present materiality in its relation to technoscientific knowledge. A new materialist approach has been used to examine characters and objects interacting with the discourses of knowledge and progress as these have been used in the two novels so as to indicate the ways in which each work reiterates or departs from binary conceptions of matter and materiality. The aim in the present project has been two-fold: on the one hand, to examine how the two works reflect changes in the cultural and literary landscape pertaining to the position of the human within an increasingly technologized material reality, and on the other hand, to situate the two texts within the spectrum of the steampunk aesthetic in order to interrogate the latter’s political efficacy.

In Gibson and Sterling’s text, the presence of a distant third-person narrator, who is revealed to be a disembodied artificial intelligence known as a narratron that comes to life as it narrates the story, presents an opportunity to challenge the primacy of human experience.

Emerging from a set of punch-cards and Ada Lovelace’s theorems, the narratron encapsulates the ambiguities of the novel’s treatment of matter as it could either be perceived as omniscient and able to influence history, or as merely a reification of humanity’s arrogant tendency for hierarchical divisions and taxonomic thinking. This tendency is also apparent in the manner in which characters like Sybil, a marked subject in the novel due to her supposed impure femininity, and Ada, a representative of the social and scientific elite, are variously affected by their interactions with the punch-cards. The scarce presence of Sybil’s voice in Kavvadia 82 the narrative and the bland way in which she is depicted in the quest for the modus testify to the novel’s problematic reproduction of sexist assumptions of femininity and physicality. At the same time, the representation of Ada only marginally compensates for this since she is also tied to a rationalistic disavowal of embodiment that ultimately does not leave room for a renewed relationship to sentient and non-sentient matter. Finally, the entire narrative seems to revolve around the human anxiety of outdatedness that is best reflected in Mallory’s grappling to come to terms with the shifts in the social and scientific realities depicted in the text. These are projected onto material objects like cars, themselves iconic signs of progress, and on images of the urban environment itself. Although the novel underlines the need for a rethinking of human primacy and of an instrumental relationship to material reality, for instance in the depiction of the Luddite rebellion, it still falls on the more politically conservative side of the steampunk spectrum.

Perdido Street Station provides some rectifications to this situation by featuring a versatile cast of characters in an alternative/parallel reality reminiscent of a supernatural version of our own eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through Yagharek’s quest to regain his bodily wholeness after enduring punishment for his horrible crime, the text opens up a space for an anti-essentialist view of embodied matter as a “becoming,” and a re-appraisal of gendered difference as it hinges on the physical body and partakes in networks and exchanges of power and oppression. The steampunk impulse for revision takes here a more politically progressive twist through the inclusion of the fReemade and Jack Half-a-Prayer, who display the damaging material effects of the collusion of state power and technoscientific knowledge, as well as the possibilities for overturning these effects by using the tools of oppression at the service of subversion. At the same time, another illicit connection, this time between the state and the underworld, offers another opportunity to present a fundamentally materialist take on exploitation and to highlight the ways in which capitalism objectifies the products of human Kavvadia 83 knowledge for profit, as it is the case with the illegal breeding and commodification of the slake-moths by Mr. Motley and the government. The slake-moths upset categories of subject and object in their depiction as well as their function in the narrative, even though in the end their perceived threat seems to celebrate once again the uniqueness of embodied sentience.

Finally, the novel offers a literalized example of the blurring of subjectivity and objectivity in the figure of Mr. Motley and his sculpture, drawing attention to the blind-spots of merely celebrating hybridity without placing it in its proper political and social contexts.

The two novels originate from different historical and cultural circumstances which explains their varying attention to different issues. The Difference Engine is a novel with direct ties to the legacy of cyberpunk that appeared in the mid-1980s, and certainly carries along the latter’s darker atmosphere and comparably more pessimistic mood as to the impact of technology on contemporary societies. At the time of its writing, the burning issue for the

New Wave of science fiction was definitely the future-shock that was beginning to affect the

Western world. Gibson and Sterling respond to this paradigmatic change by creatively turning the problem of the future on its head: “It’s our disease projected onto a lab animal of the 19th century. Watch what happens to them, watch the course of symptoms, which will help us to understand what’s happening to us” (Sterling qtd. in Fischlin et al. n.pag.). The authors are aware of the problematic aspects of their present, and they turn to a reconstruction of the past in order to piece together possible explanations or solutions for their own world. I argue that they are successful only up to an extent, and that what the novel seems to lack in political vision, namely attention to and positive depiction of material differences between different subjectivities, is a result of the specific cultural environment of its creation, namely the U.S. of the 1980s. During that time, the political climate characterized by the extensive civil rights struggles of the 1960s-70s, facilitated by the prosperous American post-war economy, started giving way to the financial instability and social conservatism of the Reagan Era, a condition Kavvadia 84 that perhaps explains the hesitation of the authors to propose representations more groundbreaking than expected in the decade’s cultural atmosphere. Nevertheless, the novel does suggest promising openings for speculative fiction, especially with reference to its narrative premise and form.

As for Perdido Street Station, written in the late 1990s, it is also the byproduct of turbulent times. This was the period during which Britain and the rest of Europe was sensing the consequences of sociocultural intolerance and political irresponsibility, vividly captured in their involvement in the Gulf War and then in the various altercations in the Balkan peninsula from the beginning of the decade up to 1999. The need to actually acknowledge the detrimental effects of capitalist accumulation of wealth, nationalist expediencies, and economic inequality, now magnified through the globalized reach of digital communications and technological applications, provided the push for renewed attention to material existence and its intricacies. Influenced by multiculturalism and the critical interest in hybridity, this new current of speculative fiction incorporates elements of fantasy, science fiction, historical literature, horror, and even the realist novel in order to provide a more complex representation of the challenges and promises of highly complex times.

Concomitant with this development in speculative writing is the flourishing of new materialism, a potent analytical tool for the exploration of speculative fiction in general and steampunk in particular. The monistic outlook of new materialism, which ties all materialities together under the common auspices of vulnerability and responsibility, has proven to be an invaluable source of inspiration for the current study since it enhances in terms of critical outlook and thinking both the earlier materialist approaches and the later post-structuralist ones, with a balanced attention to the palpable and material basis of subject-formation, knowledge-production, and power-dynamics. In both texts, the posthumanist and post- anthropocentric perspective and the investment on multiplicity and positive difference in Kavvadia 85 addition to the rejection of simplistic binarisms have been brought forward through the application of the new materialist lens.

At the same time, steampunk itself has been proven to be not a genre, nor even a specific literary mode, as it has been previously suggested, but a wide-reaching aesthetic that lends its powers of allusion and expression to an endless variety of mediums, practices, and artifacts. Ideologically, this is perhaps uncomfortable for the trailblazers of steampunk as a necessarily punk phenomenon, but convenient for those who would rather think of literature as mere entertainment without real-world implications. The most sensible option is neither to abandon nor to unreservedly embrace steampunk or any other cultural and literary framework, but to keep our critical reflexes sharp, as readers, writers, and scholars.

Although the present study has attempted to participate in the conversation regarding the problematics of ideology within steampunk and to address the emergence of new materialism as a critical tool, it could not provide an evaluation of all the theoretical tenets involved due to the word constraints of the current project. For example, a crucial aspect of steampunk scholarship that could be explored is the colonialist roots of its aesthetic, as well as its ties to late-capitalist consumerist culture, an issue at stake with all movements and subcultures that practice re-appropriation.53 With regards to new materialism, there have been debates as to the practical validity of its all-inclusive viewpoints as well as to its risk of creating an opposition between language and matter. As Sara Ahmed notes, “[b]y turning matter into an object or theoretical category, in this way, the new materialism reintroduces the binarism between materiality and culture that much work in science studies has helped to challenge” (35). This is a valid critique that needs to be addressed coherently,54 but I do not support the claim that this is proof to new materialism’s ultimate complicity with

53 For a detailed account of these lines of inquiry, see Elizabeth Ho's monograph Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (2012). 54 Noela Davis, for example, has provided a sober response in her article addressing Ahmed's argumentation (see Davis). Kavvadia 86 essentialism. As any philosophical and critical framework, new materialism necessarily has its dead-ends, but it remains one of the most complete and sensible responses to today’s social and political circumstances.

From this perspective, I believe that a new materialist approach to reading literature can and will be able to open up new critical and theoretical viewpoints, even more so in the case of speculative literature such as science fiction and fantasy, which has always been at the intersection of the philosophical dilemma of realism vs. idealism. My research within the context of the present project has indicated that new materialism has in fact so far only incidentally been applied to the study of literature. A new materialist approach is able to reconcile these two strands of human thinking and theorizing, both equally necessary if we are to move forward from the present historical conditions with some kind of positive future outcome.

I hope that the present thesis has been able to highlight some of the possibilities in this theoretical perspective. At the same time, I also hope it has shown how steampunk in general, despite its shortcomings, has been a fascinating framework of cultural expression, and how the two novels in question have realized its potential, contributing with their form and content to the re-imagining of our place in the world. Kavvadia 87

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