StephenStephen Zepke Zepke Head in the Stars HeadEssays on Science Fiction in the Stars Essays on Science Fiction Skhole 05 First edition published by Multimedijalni institut © 2020 by Stephen Zepke Stephen Zepke Multimedijalni institut ISBN 978-953-7372-67-5 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National and Head in University Library in Zagreb under 001072705. — Skhole is a program-segment within the flagship Dopolavoro (Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture) the Stars Essays on Science Fiction Zagreb, August 2020 For my Father, Nick Zepke, with love. ‘I hold out my hand to the future.’ Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis. Contents acknowledgments — 8 Introduction. Science Fiction, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future — 13 1. Beyond Cognitive Estrangement, The Future in Dystopian Science Fiction Cinema — 23 2. Interface Aesthetics, Science Fiction Film in the Age of Biopolitics — 65 3. Alien Arrival and Alain Badiou’s Philosophy of the Event — 101 4. Against Nihilism, Nietzsche and Kubrick on the Future of Man — 133 5. Peace and Love (and Fuck) as the Foundation of the World, Spinoza’s Ethics in Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders — 183 bibliography — 223 filmography — 230 notes — 233 Many thanks to all those who have shared my love of Acknowledgments science fiction over the years. In particular I’d like to thank Nick Zepke, Arturo Silva, Georg Wasner, Yves Mettler, Nicolas Kolonias, Kat Válastur and Michael Frickh for the energy and ideas you have contributed to this book. All of the chapters in this book began life as essays published in books or journals. They have all been polished and updated, and in some cases completely rewritten for this volume. Chapter 1 was first published in NECSUS, The European Journal of Media Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2012. Chapter 2 condenses material from the course Exploring the interface through science fiction cinemathat I taught at the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb in the summer semester 2010. An essay based on this material was published in Responsibility for Things Seen, edited by Petar Milat, and published in conjunction with BADco.’s participation in the Croatian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2011. A different version of the essay was published as ‘Art and the Aesthetics of the Interface; Autonomy, Sensation and Biopolitics’, in Down by law: Revisiting normativity with Deleuze/nomadic thought, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters. London: Continuum, 2012. Chapter 3 includes material published in a series of essays; ‘Alien Badiou: Towards an Ethics of Universal Justice,’ in the web journal Natural Selection, No. 5, Summer 2006; ‘Between an Ethics of the Alien and the Morality of the Monster: Badiou and The Blob,’ in RR_02*, No. 8, January 2005; ‘Between an Ethics of the Alien and the Morality of the Monster, Part Two: Badiou and It Came From Outer Space,’ in Univers, No. 9, December 2005; and most significantly 9 ‘Towards an Ethics of the Alien: Alain Badiou and 1950s group BADco. These people became my Zagreb family ‘Arrival’ Films,’ in the exhibition catalogue Kino wie when I taught a semester at the Academy of Fine Art in noch nie, edited by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki. Zagreb in 2010, which would go on, via BADco’s appearance Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2006. I also participated at the Venice Biennale, to become chapter 2. Over the in this exhibition as an artist, showing a 5 channel video intervening years I have continued to speak at MaMa, and installation composed from edited fragments of hundreds remain an enthusiastic fan of BADco. In fact, there is an of science fiction films. Chapter 4 began life as the paper essay on their work and science-fiction that threatened to ‘2001: Towards a Philosophy of the Future,’ given on the be written for this book, but which must unfortunately 22nd of October, 2004 at MaMa, Zagreb, Croatia. This wait for another occasion. This would be a tribute to the was then published as ‘2001, A Space Odyssey: Prelude to influence Badco has had on me, and in particular their a Philosophy of the Future,’ in the book Visual Collegium commitment to a modernist aesthetics channeled through Reader/Zbornik Vizualnog kolegija, edited by Tanja Vrvilo contemporary theory and forms, a type of alchemy I also try and Petar Milat. Zagreb: Multimedia Institute, 2008. A to practice. I have been very influenced by all these people, different version of this essay also came out as ‘Against and by Zagreb, the city where they live. Given this history Nihilism, Nietzsche and Kubrick on the Future of Man,’ in it was not surprising that I rather shamelessly asked Petar Journal of French Philosophy: Bulletin de la Société Américaine if MaMa would be interested in publishing this collection. de Philosophie de Langue Française, Volume 17, Number 2, I’m still surprised, and very grateful, that he accepted. Fall 2007. Chapter 5 was published in the book Immanent Thank you Petar, and all my friends in Zagreb, you are in Expressions: Literature and the Encounter with Immanence, these pages. edited by Brynnar Swenson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2016. There is a submerged history in these references that leads us to the present volume. Leonardo Kovačević invited me to Zagreb to speak at MaMa in 2004, and I ended up talking about 2001. It was then that I had the pleasure and privilege of meeting Petar Milat and Tom Medak, the directors of the research center (and so much else) MaMa. Petar and Tom invited me back to MaMa on numerous occasions, and along with Leonardo became my friends. Through them I met Ivana Ivković, and Nikolina and Sergej Pristaš, along with the rest of the amazing performance 10 11 Introduction Science Fiction, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future When I was eleven years old my Dad took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. What I remember most vividly is coming out of the cinema, looking up at my father and asking “What did it mean?” My father, slightly frustrated, replied, “I don’t know”. This was a significant moment that marked both the beginning of my love of science fiction and my first inkling that my father didn’t know everything! From now on science fiction would be indelibly stained with the thrill of the unknown. Science fiction concerns the future, of course, this being its simple, organising essence. But science fiction wants to do more than just be in the future, it wants to predict the future, to reveal its horrors and beauty, its similarities and difference, and more importantly, tell us about all the cool stuff. This means that the ‘future’ science fiction explores has changed a lot over the years, and has a fascinating past, one with a twistier time-line than a Phillip K. Dick story (so while the genre is often said to begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Adam Roberts argues for an ‘Ancient Greek SF’ (2016 26)). But this book is not a history of science fiction, because although historical context plays a part – the Cold War from which alien arrival films emerge, or our biopolitical present in which interface films become symptomatic – this book is most concerned with science fiction futures that crack history open, allowing something unaccountable to emerge, something singular and new. As a result, this book sees the ‘new’ and its ‘future’ in science fiction in a very different way from Darko Suvin and Frederic Jameson, whose astoundingly influential theory sees science fiction futures as forms of ‘cognitive 15 estrangement’ that seek to reflect on the present that interpretation seems more correct than I perhaps realised, produces them. On their account, science fiction offers because the meaning of the monolith is found precisely in us (its readers and viewers) a future that is recognisably its radical silence, its utter impermeability as to its intent or extrapolated from the present (this is its cognitive or purpose, and it is this unknowable essence that produces scientific aspect), but nevertheless gives us enough distance the remarkable journey leading humanity to its miraculous for critical reflection (this is the fictional part allowing re-birth as the Starchild. Each time the monolith appears estrangement – in Jameson’s Structuralist inflected criticism life’s conditions are exceeded, history is blasted open, the terms map onto each other; cognitive estrangement = and chronological time is put out of joint by a force that science fiction). Suvin attributes this distancing to what operates according to a totally alien logic. This genetic he calls a ‘novum’ (a term he takes from Ernst Bloch’s ‘event’ has both philosophical and political significance, monumental The Principle of Hope), or the utopian element because it explains, as Michel Foucault put it in his of a story that is identifiably ‘new’ (whether thing, ability, delightfully deadpan manner, ‘how that which is might no or belief). For both Jameson and Suvin then, the condition longer be that which is’ (1998 450). One does not have to of the ‘new’ is the present that creates it, and the future is read much Foucault to realise that what he’s talking about is always relative to it. ‘Born in history and judged in history,’ revolution. Suvin writes, ‘the novum has an ineluctably historical Jameson, on the other hand, believes science fiction character. So has the correlative fictional reality or possible always reveals our ‘constitutional failure’ to imagine the world which, for all its displacements and disguises, always ‘otherness and radical difference’ of the future, but it is corresponds to the wish-dreams of a specific sociocultural precisely this failure that succeeds in making us critically class or implied addressees.’ (1988 76) For both Suvin and aware of the ‘cultural and ideological closure’ constituting Jameson, science fiction is always ‘about’ the present, and our ‘absolute limits’ (2005 289).