Tag: Phoenix Alexander

Torque Control 300

The bitterness and the spark  

I am sixteen, in a secondary school ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ class, and I am learning of Solipsism for the first time. For the uninitiated and/or the non-skeptics, the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy defines it as follows, at least in its most radical iteration:

[Solipsism posits that] one’s own immediate experience has a fundamental, self-certifying reality and that comparable knowledge of ‘physical’ or ‘public’ items is unobtainable. (Honderich, ed., 1995, p.218).

I am terrified, as any introvert often overwhelmed by the intensity of their inner life would be terrified. The ‘physical’ and the ‘public’ instantly became concepts of doubt, and objects of fallibility. Such concepts are of course cliché in the world of SF: a genre that has, for decades, explored the paradoxes of the self, and the strange new worlds that could exist at the limits of our perception. Drugs, religion, virtual reality, dimensional travel, mind-transference: these are just some avenues via which the self may be expanded—and sometimes even obliterated—in service of access to a greater, or somehow ‘truer,’ experience.

…Of course: you know I don’t romanticize my beloved genre that easily.

SF narratives don’t always elicit the oohs and aahs of cosmic collectivity, as often as we might wish them to. For every astral reunion through realities separated as breath between lips, there are genocidal boys’ stories of colonial derring-do that exterminate entire alien societies; for every mind-altering encounter with an astral god, or any other form of divinity, there is invoked the (laughable) threat of enforced homosexuality, used as a foil to ‘prove’ the degeneracy of human civilization across time. I could go on. For its touted expansiveness and offerings of pleasurable escape, science fiction, as I always tell my students, is perhaps the most nakedly political of all literary genres.

But when we read or watch ‘escapist’ stories, what, exactly, is it that we wish to escape from? It seems to me that to seek escape from something implies at least implicit awareness of one’s guilt. For what reason should we feel guilty? For what, and for whom, should we feel?

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker opens with arguably one of the loveliest lines in science fiction: “One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out onto the hill” (Stapledon, 1987, p.1). This ‘bitter’ sensation has spoiled the “decade and a half”-long relationship with the narrator’s wife, and even the births of their two children, in spite (or perhaps because of?) the ghost of divinity, something transcendent in their pairing, in contrast with the banal coziness of their existence together: “There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life, than either alone” (Stapledon, p.2). Star Maker’s narrator has done everything right: made a home, borne children, become something larger than himself, his relationship, the quartet of ‘I’s’ that form the core of his world. And yet: recalcitrance, unease, even “horror,” lingers.

After traveling through the cosmos and encountering a bewildering array of nonhuman lives, the narrator meets the titular Star Maker—the grand dreamer of the whole universe—and finds, among the love, that there is cruelty, and sympathy, and passion, all “contemplated” by some vast and inscrutable mind. The being is beyond ethics, somehow, having witnessed myriad forms of sentience (including bird-like telepaths that wheel in huge flocks across a planet’s skies), and offers, I suggest, an answer to the question I asked earlier: for what, and for whom, should we feel? 

Everything, and everyone. 

But the narrator is dissatisfied. Afraid, even. It is perhaps too much to bear witness to, and certainly too much to ask of a human organism.

Talking of fear: I am thirty-seven, and too sad to be concerned by ‘dead internet theory’ that suggests that, in the en-shittified 21st-century internet, the majority of content is produced and consumed by bots ‘speaking’ to one another. The promise of a vast ‘web’ of human consciousness—akin to the multitudes of sentient lives held in Stapledon’s narrative—doesn’t even provide human dross anymore, only dross; language is ingested, hacked up, repeated and linked and relinked to nothingness, speaking of nothing, only making-the-motions-of.

I am thirty-seven, and too amused to be terrified at the Tesla-unveiled robotic companions that may or may not be voiced remotely by an operator responding to vocal inputs, becoming nothing more than humanoid cyberpunk telephones.

I want to be overwhelmed by the conviction of other minds, and their assurance that everything will be alright in the end—and even if it won’t be, I want another human being to tell me that.

This is, of course, a classic philosophical problem—and each of the authors in this landmark issue explore, in their own ways, how knowledge of and connection with others is obtainable. Can reading give us irrefutable access to other minds, and even generate empathy? Is the idea of generating empathy for (especially marginalized) others in fact a “grotesque dynamic,” after Namwali Serpell (The New York Review, 2019)? Do capitalist-alternative video games hold insights into how we can exist without exploiting one another? How does a necktie consolidate community history? What can the horror genre offer to allay (or amplify) our anxieties, and what monstrosities can it bring to light in a Freudian excision of the fears of the id?

This is issue 300 of Vector, on the theme of Community! It should be a celebration! And make no mistake—it is a celebration of that. Community. The people who make, and made, literary life-worlds. It is also a lament at the relentless change that follows us across the years: change that sees friendships cement and fall apart, that sees creative idols shape entire generations and then fall in disgrace, that sees spaces—both physical and ideological—inched open by cracks and then blown open, wide, seemingly overnight, and precious groups forming and falling apart as their members age and pass. It is younger generations struggling to keep alive the physical meeting spaces of conferences and conventions when expenses are so high, and wages are so low. It is a yearning for persistent physicality, because despite the hours we spend straining our eyes ‘connecting’ with others on screens we realize, profoundly, that the screen is not enough.

So: out with it! Let’s have the pages. We are three hundred issues of scholarly inquiry, of impassioned creation and reviews and conversations. (We have the screens, of course, too, as our lively blog attests to). I hope we will be three hundred more issues.

We celebrate community. We celebrate the joy we can bring to each other even as we hold, in our other hand/s, the damage we can do to one another: the bitterness and the spark. I’ll leave you with Stapledon, again, this time with words from his moving novel Death Into Life (Stapledon, 1946, p.48):

“As centers of awareness we remain eternally distinct; but in participation in our ‘we,’ each ‘I’ awakens to be an ampler, richer ‘I,’ whose treasure is not ‘myself,’ but ‘we.’”

Warmth and light,

Phoenix

References

Honderich, T. (1995) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA.

Serpell, N. (2020) The banality of empathy. http://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/.

Stapledon, O. (1987) Star Maker. J P Tarcher.

Stapledon, O. (1946) Death Into Life.

Mikhail Karikis: Activism and audiotopia

Phoenix Alexander interviews Mikhail Karikis

All images are part of No Ordinary Protest project, with permission from Mikhail Karikis.

Please briefly introduce yourself.

I am a Greek-born artist based in London and Lisbon. I work mostly in moving image, sound and performance. I develop projects through collaborations with individuals, collectivities and communities that are often located beyond the circles of contemporary art. In recent years, I have been working extensively with children, teenagers, young adults and people with disabilities. 

Since the early stages of my practice, the politics and materiality of the voice have been key concerns, while at the same time engaging with themes that give voice to different ways humans relate to the environment. There has been an instinctive journey that I began with films exploring voicing conditions of labour in the context of extractivist practices. This moved forward by looking at models of sustainability and eco-feminism, and more recently eco-activism and emerging forms of labour that service nature. 

I would say that my works prompt an activist imaginary and rouse the potential to imagine possible audiotopias (i.e. speculative places invoked through sound) and desired futures. I employ listening as an artistic strategy to help determine the content of my projects with the aim to highlight alternative modes of human action and solidarity, and to nurture critical attention and tenderness.

To what extent do you consider your work and practice to be ‘science fictional,’ if at all? Do you actively think about genre in your work, or do the labels come after the fact? (Surrealism, social realism, performance etc.)

I find science fiction and fantasy literature inspiring, but I do not think of my own artistic work through the lens of a specific genre. Perhaps where some science fiction literature and my art practice align is the way I employ my work to imagine and propose different worlds. I often start projects by embedding myself in different community contexts, and as such, social realism is always my starting point. Reflection, imagination and fantasy play an important role as I develop the themes and the projects mature and take shape. A decade ago and after I’d spent several years producing work that was furious and acutely critical, I took the decision to go further and invest my energy and imagination to proposing ‘better’ alternatives. My use of the word ‘better’ here implies a world with social and environmental justice, egalitarianism and practices of care. 

Sounds plays a central role in much of your work. Can you say a little bit more about how you see the relationship between the sonic and visual aspects of a new project?

I am currently developing a project which explores our relationship to weather phenomena. I am approaching it from three sonic perspectives: folk songs that call out to the elements, capture and transmit traditional knowledge about seasonal change and meteorology; a second angle is that of music instruments that imitate the sounds of weather and bring the environment into the concert hall through sound, like, for example, wind machines and thunder sheets; and a third perspective is the acoustics of resistance generated through eco-activism and protest. I am working with folk singers, professional experimental musicians and young school children on this project to bring together these three different forms of auditory culture that are testimony to our profound connection and entanglement with the weather. As is common in my work, the performance of these different forms of sound will determine the visual dimension of the project. Be it on a macroscopic or microscopic dimension, all my films capture acts of communal sound-making, resonance and vibration, and document the power sound has to set into motion the material universe, activate our sentiments and mobilise political thinking and action. 

Are there any works of science or speculative fiction (in any medium!) that have particularly inspired you?

Every child and teenager should read The Iron Woman by Ted Hughes for its environmental focus, for empowering children heroes with activist ecological thinking and rebelling against adults, and for the central role listening and noise play in the story as superpowers that activate empathy toward more than human beings. The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin is a book everyone ought to read for its acute reflections on capitalism, gender politics and anarcho-communism.