Fantasies - Reality - Where Do I Go?

 Isaac Ariail Reed's Space Travel and the Cold War Fantastic: The Case of Robert Sheckley raises some interesting points for me. Yes, I read science fiction - well, more like read since I do not seem to have time for reading books right now. Alternate history was one genre I kept reading when I stopped doing much reading - it kept me on my toes by making me think about what had led to the change. Different perspectives - that is what fiction is supposed to give us, right? Science fiction provides this different perspective in spades. But this essay seems to me to give us an entirely different perspective on American life.

Science fiction has always been didactic, and its critics have long noted that its cognitive estrangement from the world-as-it-is makes it an ideal candidate for the role of a theology for the modern age. But which fantasies should its didacticism provide? This is, of course, a question one could ask of all art. But in science fiction, a literature that only really came into its own in a recognizable way with the advent of industrial society, the contradictions of the modern are pulled so taut that one learns quickly how the world can break.

This is where Sheckley’s stories help us. In his writing, social dilemmas and political conflicts are never just a matter of collective struggles for power or ideological adherence. They pose existential questions that demand an answer and expose human desires that demand satisfaction. Our late-modern condition features not only the dangerously volatile vicissitudes of doing politics in a technological age severed from traditional authorities (as we learn from Arendt), but also those dangers attendant upon the sublimation of desire—sublimation that is guided, ordered, and rendered legible to others in society via the fantasies on offer in the culture at large.

Sheckley participated in the making of these fantasies, but he also reflected deeply and critically on them in his stories, and in a way that went beyond politics. He showed Americans the strangeness of their own everyday lives not by projecting a previously better world (in a conservative way) or by looking underneath ideology to find social truth (in a progressive way), or even by affirming the basic principles of the postwar order in the American republic (the liberal way). Instead, he did so by putting a question to the reader: Can you think of a better fantasy to live by than the one in this story?

The problem for our moment, in other words, is not just the problem of the loss of meaning. It is the problem of creating new fantasies, new projections, and thereby projects that are worthy of our emotional investment. That we are struggling, as a collective, to articulate what the American project is or should be is exemplified by the recent blockbuster movie Dune: Part Two. Itself based on Frank Herbert’s classic Cold War allegory, published in 1965, the film is notoriously ambivalent about the fantasies it projects so masterfully on the screen. A white savior of the brown masses? The story runs that way, but it reminds its audience repeatedly that this is not a great look. A religious sect whose far-sighted view of leadership seeks to guarantee order? These wise guardian mothers might just be scheming women in a sex cult. Environmental destruction as primary threat to all of humanity? For sure, but space travel is cool. The film also travels through a stunning list of visual citations, factual and fictional, from the American archive: the mujahideen taking on the Soviet Empire in Afghanistan; the ancient Roman Empire as model for modern fascism; the family politics of good and evil in Star Wars. Denis Villeneuve’s visual vocabulary is still the Cold War Fantastic. It is a stunning and impressive film. But it is also characteristic of our age in its return to themes from an era when there was still a clear and distinct American project, however one wishes to judge it and however suffused it may have been by dangerous fantasy. One imagines Sheckley asking Hollywood: Can you not come up with something new, or are we all lotus-eaters?

Which brought to mind Ted Gioia's Nine Observations on the Avant-Garde.

But my feeling about the avant-garde is more like Churchill’s quip about democracy. Democracy is the worst system, he admitted, except for all the others. My version would be: The only thing worse than the avant-garde is a world without the avant-garde.

Recycling ideas without imagination seems like gargling dust. Recycling is not bad in and of itself - Shakespeare did more than enough of his own recycling. If I am stuck in this hall of mirrors, reflecting the same old ideas of everyone else, then why am I working on my fiction?

sch 8/9