Cyborgs are "Proximate and Contingent." Pass it on.

Let me explain what I mean when I say that cyborg relations are always proximate and contingent.

First let me give some examples of cyborgian relations:

An athlete on steroids.
An athlete on blood pressure meds.
An accident
survivor with an artificial leg.
A wheelchair bound news reporter.
A commuter.
The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s.

Numbers 3 and 4 are perhaps the most obvious, and 1 and 2 are a logical extension, since they merely entail a different form of advanced technology. Let me focus on the last two.

The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s was an odd conflagration of old lefties from the 30’s (Pete Seeger’s friends), MLK and his followers, the NAACP and their members, black radicals and their followers, Jews, and middle-class white kids who believed in the idealism of the GI generation, i.e., their parents. The poster children for this has always been Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, three young civil rights workers, two Jewish, one Black, who were murdered in 1964. The story of discrimination waged against Jews is very different from that waged against Blacks, but there existed a clear commonality of interest in opposing all forms of discrimination.

What happened to this coalition? The Arab/Isreali war of 1967, for one. As a group, Ameican Jews backed Isreal in great numbers. African Americans—owing in part to the Nation of Islam movement, but not only—were much more likely to see Isreal as an aggressive, imperialistic force.

I don’t know if this schism could have been avoided. I do know that the coalition was proximate and contingent, not forged around a “naturalized” identity.

By contrast, when black women, in the seventies and eighties, often began to see that their interests didn’t always rest in supporting the political/social/economic interests of black men or white women, they were criticized, ostracized (and critical OF) those groups, precisely because they weren’t backing their “natural” allies. No identity has been more technologically created than that of “Black American,” to the extent that it is often considered as a “natural” identity.

Most commuter’s probably don’t see themselves as cyborgs. I do.

This year, 2007, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that book which celebrated the power of the automobile, by featuring a new American archetype, the cyborgian centaur--half man, half car. “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” the post WWII generation was told, and we did!-- Or they did, I wasn't there. You want to be in Denver instead of NYC? In four days you’re there. Mexico City? No problem. San Francisco? Three more days.

“It’s not just your car, it’s your freedom,” my generation was told, and not without honesty. Thanks to my car, I live in a small, rural area surrounded by farms, though my work has nothing to do with farming. I have almost 1.5 acres, and next to me is a tiny, tiny pond that attracts all kinds of pleasant wildlife.

Thanks to our cars, millions of Americans live miles from their work, to a notable increase in their individual quality of life. This is a fulfillment of the man/technology promise. And the blowback has been incalculable.

 Every ten years, our roads kill a population roughly that of Miami, Florida, or Oakland, CA.
 The infrastructure of our cities has been neglected.
 Public transportation is woefully neglected.
 The infrastructure of our country is decaying. It is simply too large to maintain; witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota. Bridges collapse every week.
 We are a nation addicted to gas and oil.
 Are foreign policy adventures as a nation have been driven by the need to secure access to oil.

I haven’t mentioned carbon emissions, the loss of farmland that has been paved over, or the steady decline of songbirds to feral cats who follow humans to the country, but you get my point, or. It is not population growth that has presented these problems. It is the lack of population density, and lack of planning. Without cheap abundant automobiles, some of these problems never raise to the level of problem (though obviously others would rise up).

For the majority of Americans, owning a car is preferable to not owning one. Progress is measurable! For a society as a whole, though, some lesser reliance on the personal automobile would have clear advantages.


***
One of the sillier ideas on the “quiz” that I responded to in my last post was the idea of transferring human consciousness into a machine.

Let’s consider for a moment what in the real world that might mean..

Let’s say we created a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” What would this mean? That we have a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” When you IM with it, you can’t tell if you’re talking to a machine or teenager.

Let’s further suppose that the software exists to make it mimic me or mimic you, or mimic John Wayne in terms of thought. What have really done? We’ve created a machine that can mimic you or me or John Wayne, in some way.

The illusion wouldn’t have to be very deep to be convincing. A few phrases would do it.

The idea of uploading your consciousness into a supercomputer is absurd. Your thoughts are embodied. They exist in you, in your brain, in your body. With a few drugs, though, I could easily convince you that you are having an out of body experience. Give me 30 million, and I’ll build a machine that can talk just like you and promise to keep it alive. Think about the possibilities! I’ll have your estate paying me in perpetuity!


AT&T will probably start up a business offerering this service, then sell it to a European conglomerate. Apple will have the public trust, but Dell will offer a cheaper service. An entirely new arm of the FCC will grow up and later be merged departments from health, and human services and the FDA.

And it will all be a sham, regulations designed to promote the illusion that there is a legitimate service there to be regulated. But of course, you’ll be dead. All I have to do is keep a program running, and convince the courts that “it” “is” “you.”

What is a Cyborg Citizen?

I finally got ahold of James Hughes' Cyborg Citizen saturday. Barely began reading it when I came across his references to the Cyborg Democracy Blog. "Wow, they're way ahead of me!" I thought.

Briefly.

There is a sophisticated, thoughtful, and, so far as I have analyzed it, accurate map of the views of biopolitics across the spectrum. There is a rah-rah spirit I find incomplete.

But here's a paragraph from an essay by Hughes, Democratic Transhumanism 2.0 , posted on their site, which I like a Lot:

Today most bioethicists, informed by and contributing to the growing Luddite orientation in left-leaning arts and humanities faculties, start from the assumption that new biotechnologies are being developed in unethical ways by a rapacious medical-industrial complex, and will have myriad unpleasant consequences for society, especially for women and the powerless. Rather than emphasizing the liberty and autonomy of individuals who may want to adopt new technologies, or arguing for increased equitable access to new biotechnologies, balancing attention to the “right from” technology with attention to the “right to” technology, most bioethicists see it as their responsibility to slow the adoption of biotechnology altogether.

"Luddism" he accurately goes on to say, "is a political dead-end for progressive politics. Progressives must revive the techno-optimist tradition if they want to achieve the goals of furthering liberty, equality and solidarity."

Even so, I find the lingering belief in "humanism" and "progress" in this essay and on this site to be untheorized. Let me quote from a quiz they print, and my somewhat cranky responses:

Are you a "democratic transhumanist?"


Do you expect human progress to result from human accomplishment rather than divine intervention, grace, or redemption?
Either/or fallacy. Also argumentative mush. The belief in "human accomplishment" may be the problem. Certainly, "human progress" can only be a proximate measure.

Do you think it would be a good thing if people could live for hundreds of years or longer?
Can’t say. I would like to live 100+ years, but who can judge the "good"?

Do you believe that people have a right to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives?
Yes

Do you think it would be a good thing if people could become many times more intelligent than they currently are?
How are you going to measure "intelligent"? What is some types of intelligence are counter-indicated with each other?

Would you consider having your mind uploaded to computers if it was the only way you could continue as a conscious person?
I would. I would also object to many people I know being so uploaded. And I do not consider that such an upload would continue "me" or do much other than to assuage my mortal fear of death. Basically, this is the Christian view of heaven reborn in with a techno-halo.

Do you think that by being generally open and embracing of new technology we have a better chance of turning it to our advantage than if we try to ban or prohibit it?
A somehwhat more sophisticated either/or fallacy.

Does your ethical code advocate the well-being of all sentient beings, whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non- human animals?
Yes!

Should parents be able to have children through cloning once the technology is safe?
Assuming facts not in evidence. Cloning technology will be developed, I assume, and it will probably create some blowback that we don't now see.

Do you believe women should have the right to terminate their pregnancies?
Yes.

Do you DISAGREE with the idea that human genetic engineering is wrong because it is "playing God"?
"Playing God" is not a good idea. Human genetic engineering may or may not be.

Do you already consider yourself a "transhumanist?"
Never thought of it.

Yeses
Score your transhumanism
7-10
You are a transhumanist. Join the World Transhumanist Association and go forth to share the memes.
5-6
You are probably a transhumanist. Join the World Transhumanist Association and explore the memes.
2-4
You have some (trans)humanist tendencies. See transhumanism.org to nurture them.
0-1
You are not a transhumanist yet. But we can help. Consult transhumanism.org frequently.

If you are a transhumanist, let's see how politically progressive you are:
Do support these movements?

environmental protection
The burden of proof lies with those who don’t.

social democracy
Yes
"fair trade" (vs. neo-liberal globalization)
This is a faddish phrase I am slightly in favor of.

universal health care access through government provided insurance
Don’t get me started. Yes

workplace democracy, coops, trade union movement
Yes.

anti-racism
C'mon! Who today would admit to supporting racism?

world federalism, world government

Two different ideas. Both unproven. Probably bad.

feminism
I support!

gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender rights
I support!

strong social welfare state or guaranteed basic income
I wish the conditions existed to discuss this fully and accurately!

Add 1 point for each yes
# # #

Maybe they just lost me with the talk of "progress," but the history of that word when applied to human conditions usually means that hunter gatherers are "primitive," farms represent "cultured," and factories are "advanced." Basically, it comes with baggage, and without that baggage, it's meaningless.

My own take is that cyborg relationships are always contingent and proximate. So is progress. What appears to be progress from one perspective may later be seen as undoing, and vice versa.

I am not arguing for a radical relativism, but for a radical failable-ism. When the good is perceived, we need to pursue it, but with knowledge that it almost certainly was not God who revealed it.

Society of S: A Vampire Novel with Teeth (sans fangs)

Ever notice how little horror there is in most horror novels? Stephen King and Anne Rice both can creep me out, but Rice does it with the eroticism of her blood drinking scenes, and King does it by patiently launching me into the familiar, and but then reminding me of how frightening the familiar really is. At his best –Hearts in Atlantis, Carrie– it’s the familiar world (the sheer anger between Bobby and his single mother) that is most frightening.

Susan Hubbard’s Society of S is not a horror novel, though it is a vampire novel. Instead, it is a coming of age story, of a girl who also happens to be a vampire.

Every teenager at some point must have felt that she is a monster, or that members of her family are. What if it were true? This novel is a contemporary search for personal identity. Ariella Montero is a post-modern teenager who comes to suspect that her father may be a vampire;–but if he is, what does that make her? Like any contemporary teenager, she turns to the internet for answers, which of course open up new questions.
Ari’s relationship with her father is at the heart of the first part of this novel, and it’s a relationship that has been imagined fully and uniquely, so we get the sense of sitting in on someone’s living room. It is fun to listen in on Ariella and her father discussing the greats, as for instance Ariella goes from dismissing Poe to seeing depth in his writing, and then coming to believe that Poe himself may have been a vampire.

The writing throughout is terse, but suggestive of a wider world, like some of the best young adult fiction. (This is a compliment. Good YA writing is usually terse but emotionally resonant, suggestive of detail rather than fully described. There is none of the "fat" I have learned to expect in vampire novels. Every novel I’ve read by King or Rice would have profited from an editor willing to consign half of it to the eternal hellfire of delete.)

After her best (and only) friend is killed and reanimated as a vampire (who her father sends back to the grave), Ari leaves home in shock and heads south in search of her mother, who seems to have been the free spirit her father is not. When she has to defend herself on the road, she does so in a way that ends any question about her true nature.

The "Society of S" turns out to refer to one particular group of vampires, Sanguinists, who believe in living in harmony with humans. Her father is one such, and he lives on a blood substitute while he works on a biotech solution that will ease the craving. Tut the narrative suggests that there are many other sects, each with a different view of the proper moral and ethical codes for dealing with humans and other blood suckers, including those who, like the vamps in Blade, believe that humans should be grown as chattel. Ari’s father has been working for a company trying to find a biotech solution to the need for blood; her mother, when she shows up, has been searching for a naturalpathic direction. There is a lot of territory available a follow up, and maybe two or three after that.

The father-daughter relationship suggests comparison to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. That’s unfortunate. I came away from each chapter of Kostova’s compelling novel thinking, "Wow, this writer had a really good liberal arts education!" It’s a fully re-imagined tour-de-force reworking of the Dracula story. S has no such ambition. The novels it reminded me of more were Octavia Butler’s last novel, Fledgling and Charlaine Harris’s first Stookie Stackhouse novel, Dead until Dark, in that it’s the story of slowly awakening to a sense of self-in-the-world. This is the novel of a young person discovering herself for the first time, and I enjoyed discovering it with her.

Though I enjoyed this novel, I wasn’t going to blog about it at first, because I didn’t see the connection to the Post-Human. At its core, as I said above, "it is a coming of age story, of a girl... vampire."

Think about that.

The coming of age plot is a quintessentially humanistic plot. But of a vampire? And what about having to survive on a biotech solution? Or viewing humanity as farm animals? These are questions of posthumanity, of rethinking the nature of "human nature," of relying on prosthetic blood, of facing questions of extended life verging on immortality. I was involved by the "humanity" of the writing –a young person learning about art, herself, and society-- that I overlooked these themes.

Having seen them, I now want to see how the writer will develop the "can’t we all get along?" questions that come up when it becomes clear that Ari and her family were separated by and are united against social forces about human/vampire. (Note: In an interview at Burried. com, the author said that she was already working on the sequel, which would develop darker political themes. I’ll be watching.)

Are superheroes "posthuman"?

You would think so, wouldn’t you? I’m using "posthuman" to indicate a sensibility which accepts the artificial, inorganic, even the repugnant. Hopefully, it does not completely disdain the aesthetics of humanism–grace, depth, proportion, perspective, etc.–but it does not fetishize theses qualities when it encounters them, and it recognizes the explosive potential of their opposites –awkwardness, surface, obsession.

Superman–the superman I knew as a kid, who was not so different from superman of the 1940's–is, as I reckon, very much caught up in the discourse of the human, this despite being conceived of explicitly as "the man of tomorrow." He is fundamentally a man who fights to maintain order when is threatened; whose invulnerable body epitomizes an Apollonian ideal of manhood. Though an alien to this world, he is in no way alienated from it; born out of the despair of the depression, a time when many in America were touting the advantages of benign dictatorship, he is the aristocratic shadow of the blue collar Clark Kent, defending his land in the tradition of noblesse oblige. His project is fundamentally hygenic; as crime in a monarchy is an injury against the body of the king, so Superman extends the invulnerability of his body to protect social body. So yes, he certainly represents a version of the posthuman, but an elite, delimiting one.

Batman I’m not so sure of. The patrician Batman lampooned in the TV show of the 60's was, well, campy. Camp changes everything. His metamorphosis into "The Dark Knight" of the 1980's–machine gun wielding wildman–is almost certainly at least a symptom of the posthuman.

Wolverine certainly is an embodiment of the posthuman. His body, able to withstand virtually any bleeding, trauma, or opening, implicitly defies the connection between inner and outer; it represents a kind Dionysian ideal. Because of this genetic superpower, he has another one: the "adamantium" skeleton laced throughout his body, including retactable claws. He is a cyborg.

These and other like thoughts came to me as I reading Austin Grossman’s Soon I will be Invincible, a book I picked up for entertainment value, but which actually got me to thinking less than a third of the way through. Written in alternating chapters between a supervillain, Doctor Impossible, and Fatale, a new-to- the-superhero- game female cyborg created by a supersecret corporation (which turns out to have been one of Doctor Impossible’s front corporations that he forgot about for a time), Invincible is surprisingly true to the superhero/supervillain drama. Grossman himself is a graduate student (comp. lit, at Berkeley), and he manages to enliven his villain with the angst of a graduate student.

I’m reasonably sure the author is as aware as I am of Donna Haraway’s take on the Cyborg archetype. This made me look for added depth in the character of Fatale, which while not completely missing, is not really the point–she is the one serves as the reader’s reliable narrator, questions such as "what is a human?" and "what is a woman?" register on her consciousness, and she is very much a supporter of the idea of coalescing around shared interests that is at the core of Haraway’s social extension of the cyborg image. Nonethess, she is not the character who captures the reader’s attention. Dr. Impossible is.

Impossible’s story (we never learn his full name) draws mostly from Dr. Doom, with a little bit of the pathos of Lex Luthor. A science nerd, a sufferer of "malign hypercognition disorder" (brilliant touch!), he competed as an undergraduate with a football jock who somehow always managed to keep up with him in class, he designed an experiment with exotic energies that went horribly wrong. The result was the creation of CoreFire, who basically has the powers and mentality of Superman. Impossible himself gained some limited strength and reduced vulnerability, but nothing comparable. His raison d’etre is to humble CoreFire, a man he resents even for his ability to resist gravity "as if the rest of us had just buckled under."

The central premise of the novel is that CoreFire has disappeared. Following the Superman parallel, this suggests a land disowned by God or the King or both; a Justice League-like group of superheroes has reunited to find him, convinced that Impossible must be behind it. He wasn’t, but the interrogation of him gives him the opening to escape and try once more to take over the world.

This time, he’s convinced it will work, precisely as a gambling addict approaching an array of one-armed bandits must be convinced that this time will be different. The author treats the world domination commonplace of supervillainy with a degree of psychological depth, accepting the compulsion on its own terms. Doctor Impossible is smart enough to understand the frustrations that entail if he actually succeeded in ruling the universe, but he’s going to try. His elementary school teacher once told him he was a genius, and he’s still driven to prove that judgement right, to prove himself against the natural aristocrats of the world. In a drama peopled by an elite posthumanity, he is the voice of the marginalized human.

Even in his moment of triumph, as he is beating the re-emergent CoreFire senseless with a weapon he has rescued from a deceased supervillain, one of two he considered a friend, he triumph goes unacknowledged. He unmasks himself, to CoreFire’s complete bewilderment, before CoreFire’s super friends escape from their cages to beat him senseless. His victory goes almost completely unremarked.

I kept thinking as I read this is that it was not so different from reading the novelization of a real comic book. Better written, more depth, more background, but not significantly better than the best superhero comics; not quite on the level as something by Neil Gaiman, but that’s the neighborhood. This is no knock against him, rather an acknowledgement that the genre has grown up some.

Yes, I think superheroes are posthuman. But the posthuman is not necessarily "better." It IS a position of relative strength, but this novel reminds one of the pathos of the human.

Only slightly about Sookie Stackhouse...

I’ve read five of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery series, so there must be a lot in them I find compelling and likeable and there is. If I mainly wanted to comment on them in this post, I would point out that Shreveport and the surrounding area is 40%+ African-American, but that none of the major recurring characters in the series are. Off the top of my head, the most important African American character I can think of is the black man whose death in the second book, Dead in Dallas, gets going one of the two major plot lines (having to do with a private sex club). I would acknowledge that this represents the segregated reality of the rural south, in which neighborhood bars, such as Merlottes, tend to cater primarily to either a white or a black clientelle, but that the segregation is not all that complete. I would also acknowledge that white writers often have to tread carefully, because of the abysmal history American letters have in imagining the Africanistic resident, but that I think her novels would be richer if she would give it an earnest try.

I have no intention of stopping there, however. Give me a moment to get my cyberpodium out of my flash drive.

In the best and worst tradition of literary criticism, I’m going to throw out discussion of everything I like about the Sookie Stackhouse books–Sookie herself, her struggle with the hypermasculine subcultures that thrive in the rural south, the character Sam, and the dry, wry wit that infuses these novels–to focus a sec to look at a marginal consideration in her novels: race.

Right off the bat, I feel two immediate responses forming:

1. One is the sort of roll my eyes "there you go again" response. Geez, not everything is about race. It’s easy to complain about what a writer doesn’t do. No writer can do everything, especially while working in a genre related field. Why not look at what she does do?
2. But she does deal with figures of race, but she denaturalizes them. There are vampires, fairies, werecritters, and less common other supernaturals, who form coalitions and subcultures very much analogous to race.

From a critical perspective, the second is more compelling, since an argument that says "for once, would you just focus on the positive?" is unproductive. That is not to say it’s more or less correct. It is important to note, though, that the two arguments are mutually exclusive. If I want to argue that she deals inventively with race, why should I as a reader want to excuse the lack of a fully realized Africanistic presence in the day to day world? Why can’t the novels do both?

I think this points to a problem with current discussions on race. Let me draw this out for a moment, and then explain how it relates to the post-human.

Race and Humanism: A Digression
Race, as such, is in part a creation of the humanistic enterprise. To understand this, look at Thomas Jefferson, a founder of American humanism (he edited a version of the New Testament to cut all the miracles out of it, making less a religious than a humanist document). What does EVERYONE know about Jefferson these days?

1. He wrote the declaration of Indepence, which gave voice to the spirit of liberty that would find a home in the abolitionist movement: "All men are created equal..."
2. He kept slaves, believed in Negro inferiority, and tried to prove it in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

How can both things be true? Because the same spirit that wanted to improve humanity also saw it as important to recognize gradations of difference in quality between human communities. Humanism is in part a project of social hygiene.

To put this another way, the basis for racism and the opposition to it share a cultural ancestry. Now lets flashforward to the future. Two responses to the historical and continuing discourse on race in America.
1. Race is a myth, with no biological reality. We would all do well to ignore it.
2. Race is a social reality, silently embedded, throughout most of American history, in the concept of "American." We need to discuss race, because avoiding discussions of race devalues the experience of black Americans. (W.E.B. Dubois said it well a century ago, talking about growing up in a majority white culture: "One always feels this twoness, two warring souls, black and American, in one dark body...")
Deny the first, you open the door to fascism. Deny the second, you get policies whose effect (sometimes by design) is to limit economic and educational mobility to black people (I’m thinking of the June 2007 Supreme Court cases which seem to disallow considerations of race in the college admission process.)

Class: A Digression Digresses
In practical, political terms, one response (one I hope most colleges will be using) is to focus less on race than on class. If the goal is economic mobility, than we consider factors such as high performance in a low performing school, and relative performance compared against families of similar income levels. Offer help to enough poor people, and a disproportionate percent of the people helped are going to be African American. As a strategic response, I completely support this.

But what does this move signify? We are at the end of a 400 year period which sought to "naturalize" race lines. At the same time, class alignment has always been downplayed. In these terms, a coming together of diverse groups along shared class interests is a "cyborgian" construction.

Pointing out the shared affinity of folks along class lines is always interesting in American culture, in part because class is less visible in America than, for instance, race or gender. But I am unwilling to replace one kind of essentialism with another. But to "naturalize" it would to an extent to "essentialize" it.

(By the way, even assuming that colleges follow this route, I'll await some evidence that the students who are so recruited recognized in each other a sense of shared class interest. )

Enter the Cyborg.
I’ve covered this before on this blog. but Donna Haraway’s pre-eminent example of the social cyborg was the definition "Women of Color," one which cut across class and race lines to identify a common interest in reforming American institutions to be more inclusive.

Enter the Posthuman.
The human being is defined in humanistic discourse by his organic unity, his reflective nature, his progressive maturity. I could support this by citing Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, but believe me, that would get tedious. –Maybe another day.
The posthuman is artificial, inorganic; he or she or it interupts the organic unity of the social body or social text.
Sookie Stackhouse is Posthuman
in her "freakish" abilities to violate the unity of other individuals; she is not a self-contained, unified entity; parts of those around her "leak" into her.
Vampires are Posthuman
at leasst in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and most contemporary vampire novels, for mostly the same reasons as Sookie is. (Dracula is not post-human; he’s just an aristocratic monster.)

Here’s the point (and I do have one)....

The Posthuman (as I’m using it) is not utopian or essentialist. It is improvisatory, and provisional. It respects the idea of science and progress, but is as likely to lead to error, because it has no stranglehold on the truth. It allows for the recognition of class, sex, and race distinctions, devalues rigid alignment along these lines. This is a perspective we need to discuss race intelligently these days.

Therefore...
The Sookie Stackhouse series is not leading the way towards the posthuman, but it is participating in the evolution of same. Assuming a posthuman perspective (which believe me, does NOT come naturally to me) gives me a way of seeing what I like, and why, though I like Harris’ figures of race (vampirism, lycanthropy, etc.), I want more.

Things to like (or not) about Masters of SF.

Two things to like about Masters of Science Fiction, which premiered last night:
1) It reminds millions of TV viewers that SF is a written genre. It is not just about blowing up CGI robots onscreen; it can also be about blowing up cities on the page.
2) It returns the anthology format to the small screen.

One thing to like about the first episode, "A Clean Escape," which debuted last night: Judy Davis looks great at 50something. Perhaps a trifle too great to be a dying of cancer, but I’m almost willing to give them a pass on that. They DID try to show her as over-stressed and frayed, which is perhaps a television producer's understanding of "dying of late stage terminal cancer."

It’s been years since I read the story by John Kessel that it was based on. I remember it as being more elemental, focusing on the drama between doctor and patient, without the filler they threw in to stretch it out, and I’m almost certain there was no breakdown moment in which the amnesiac character played by Sam Waterston has a breakthrough moment, which he subsequently forgets.

(If this is a part of the original story, I repressed it, because it makes no sense. People who have suffered a brain trauma leading to loss of short term memory don’t suddenly retrieve lost memories only to forget them again.)

Normally, I think it’s not only unfair but downright silly to denigrate a work for not following its source material. TV, short stories, and movies are different genres. (Robert B. Parker once complained of the producers of Spencer for Hire turning down one of his scripts because it wasn’t about "their" Spencer, but they were right to do so.) By calling themselves Masters of Science Fiction, the producers created a problem for themselves, putting front and center that this is material adapted from "masters." Still, let’s pretend that this an episode called "A Doctor and a Patient In Search of Rod Serling or something Like Him," and judge it on its own merits.

I still don’t like the patient’s "breakthrough," in which he suddenly remembers who he is. Worse, I don’t like why they did it. This moment of regret, and the speech they gave Waterston, was in line with a few other changes they made to highlight the "relevance" of this story to the Bush pre-emptive war strategy and insensitivity to climate change.

Why did they make these changes? Because they think we’re all blithering idiots who wouldn’t "get it" if they didn’t spell it out in small words.

Seems to me that if that’s their attitude they should have played out the final therapy scene as a chase scene around the compound. Maybe they could have staged on it on Segway scooters! Judy Davis on her scooter, Waterston on his, while she fires shots. "How do you feel about your wife?" she shouts, then Blam! Then, when he hits his head, which everyone knows is how you cure amnesia on TV, she would stand over him and laugh maniacally. "I have you now! You thought you escaped. Ha, ha, ha." Then, Blam!, she shoots herself.

Only a slight improvement, but it might have helped.

I will tune in next week, just like I used to watch Space: 1999, because it wasn’t REALLY as bad as it could have been. A "D" is still passing.

Let me make a short attempt to relate this to the topic of this blog, post-humanism. One of humanism’s great themes is restoration of a lost self. That’s the return-to-Eden theme which is at the heart of psychoanalysis. This episode, "A Clean Escape," is about a loss that is irreparable. Unable to face that, it gives us a moment of restoration, to satisfy its humanist soul. Let me put this another way: this show is basically a drama about the complete loss of humanity, an irrevocable transition to new state of being. Our good doctor, Judy Davis, is absolutely unwilling to accept this loss. The president’s breakdown is summoned not by the logic of the therapy, which would disallow it, but by the logic of her own need for it (and the Hollywood desire for such a moment by George Bush). It also becomes the moment of her death: having enforced a return to a humanistic framework for one moment, she is unable and unwilling to accept its loss; ergo, her suicide, which in this case can be seen as an assertion of self over the circumstances of the world. Basically, this is an unwitting drama about humanism as nostalgic, resentful wish fulfillment.

Sookie Stackhouse and the Post-human thing.

I’ve become a big fan of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery series written by Charlaine Harris; I’ve read five of them, including the most recent All Together Dead I appreciate the down-homeliness of them. They are set in small town Louisiana (Shreveport is the nearby big town they talk about, and NewOrleans is the nearby big city most of the characters have been to). At the center of the novels is Sookie herself, a young, idealistic telepath who works in a bar, Merlotts. Bright but uneducated, she has the mixture of primness and sexual longing, self-sufficiency and boyfriend-centicity, curiosity and lack of education that seems very familiar. Whether or not I know anyone very much like Sookie in these respects, Harris makes me believe I do, because Sookie is real. Her brother Jason, a sulky, headstrong, adult stuck in adolescence (he goes through brief meaningless affairs throughout most of the novels, then abruptly marries at the start of All Together Dead) also has a mixture of traits which make him familiar.

As an telepath working in a bar, Sookie has a less than idealized view of her fellow man. When she meets the vampire Bill Compton, she finds that she can’t read the minds of vampires, and that alone provides reason for her to fall for him. A civil war veteran who became a vampire shortly after the war, her attraction to him is initially explained because she finds his silent mind to be such a relief, but it seems to be more than that: here at last is a man whose inner life isn’t completely open to her, who she can wonder about and even fantasize about Bill’s local "sheriff," Eric, a centuries old viking warrior who still looks like a young man. They both are subjects of the Queen of Louisiana.

The way the two are developed in the early books, we’re invited to like Bill and distrust Eric, and for the most part I do. It has bothered me over the course of the series to see Eric playing a larger role in the novels and in Sookie’s life than Bill, but I understand the reasons why, I think. Bill was created against type, as a down to earth southern guy who happens to be a vampire. Take away all that brooding from Anne Rice’s Louis (a ridiculous thought, I know, but bear with me), and you’d have someone close to Bill, in that his take on the world is essentially humanistic. Such characters are hard to develop over the course of a series. Eric, by contrast, is a Nordic Lestat, someone who has a sense of honor about dealing with humans, but whose view of the world is basically vampire-centric.

Nonetheless, at their core, these novels are the bildungsroman of a twenty-something woman discovering herself and the world. Sookie time and again resists the lure of the vampire world, hates it even, but keeps getting drawn into it.

The southern setting works for this series in part because Harris slowly unfolds meaningful analogs between her "supes" (as vampires, werewolves, werepanthers, and fairies are collectively know) and the social landscape of the south. Aren’t the old vampires, with their pomp, self-importance, and fierce defense of the same, more than a bit like the old money which still controls much of the land, and remains ridiculously caste-conscious in its worldview?
The weres, with their pack mentality, are based loosely on biker culture; they have their own bars, their own packs, tight social rules, and once a month, they go roaming together.

For my specific concerns, looking at the "post-human,"there are several interesting things. By focusing on these alternative forms of social definition, her vampires and weres provide a mirror which implicitly (though never directly) calls into question the usefulness and universality of the existing class, race divisions in the south–this against a social setting that has spilled untold money and blood toward the end of presenting its stratifications as right and good and natural. –This ain’t nothing.

Then there’s the case of Sookie herself. Early in the series, she sees her telepathy as a kind of disability; that’s the force it has had in her life (in terms of her inability to enjoy easy socialization) and in the way people treat her. She’s considered a bit of a freak. Even as she learns to control it, he power of telepathy moves her away from mainstream society and deeper into small, rigid subcultures with their own rules and mores, none of whom fully welcome her. This is interesting stuff.

The character Quinn is a late addition who has played a major role in the last two novels, and though he’s an interesting character, he’s a bit too much like a traditional romantic hero in a romance novel. Strong, assertive, physically perfect, Quinn is a were with a dark past as (we learn in All Together Dead) a gladiator of sorts in games the supes used to sponsor.
Creating a character who offers an alternative to the Bill / Sookie / Eric triangle (her boss and a few others have also expressed interest), that’s good. But, jimini!, did she have to create a part for Fabio?
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Speaking of which, the Southern Vampire series is being adapted as "True Blood" for cable by Alan Ball, the man behind "Six-Feet Under." I’ll follow on DVD. Already cast is Anna Paquin as Sookie. She is probably best known as Rogue from the X-Men movies, but in fact, thought she is still in her twenties, she has been an Oscar Winner for half her life, thanks to a supporting part in "The Piano."