Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpect- edly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of dan- I ger.
Creating narratives about the individual saving the day rather than collective efforts to reinforce the messiah complex.
The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.
With our view of history, we in the current moment are expected to redeem humanity, and historical materialists prey on this messianic complex.
Misled by this racist imaginary, the international aid response—coordinated, to widespread criticism, by that imperial agency par excellence, the United States military—focused on security over support, landing thousands of troops on the island while diverting international aid flights and before allowing a single food drop from the air
See also welfare queens when this isn't happening in a crisis. All those breathless stories about foodstamps fraud when it's usually either a recipient giving them away to help a loved one to survive or selling them for essential items not eligible for purchase using foodstamps like menstrual hygiene products.
I figured, What would they do, these crazy black people who think they’ve been oppressed for all these years by white people? I mean if they’re capable of shooting at somebody, why are they not capable of raping them or, or, you know, dismembering them? What’s to prevent them from doing tilings like that?”
yikes
I call his “case against helping the poor” zombie ethics.
compare the kindness is weakness narratives of zombies to Parable of the Sower's empathy as strength
The biopolitical state—inverting the sovereign power to make dead or let live in its power to make live or let die (241)—needs to create this sort of racial imaginary in order to retain its power to kill. Under biopower those who are imagined to threaten the population as a whole become not merely a danger but a kind of anti-life that must be sequestered from (white) life at any cost. Any contact with a zombie, after all, might lead to infection, just as the racial Other must be disciplined and quarantined to prevent “intermingling.
(Spoilers for I Am Legend) Thing thing I like about the plot twist in Richard Matheson's novel is the way it flips this narrative. Throughout the book, you follow the protagonist, Robert Neville, as he survives day to day on his own killing zombie-like vampires and looking for a cure to the pandemic. It seems like standard survival horror stuff. But then, at the end, he discovers that the vampires he's been murdering in their sleep are as intelligent and human as he is, and that he has basically become this new society's boogyman.
we first must come to terms with the historical and ongoing colonial violence of which the zombie has always ever been only the thinnest sublimation.
Remember that they originated in Haiti. I think another aspect of this racialized fear of the zombie also stems from the way that voodoo, a real religion, is portrayed in popular culture. For example, check out White Zombie (1932) starring a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi.
The zombie’s mutilation is not one that we easily imagine for “ourselves,” however that “we” is ultimately constituted; the zombie is rather the toxic infection that must alwaysbe kept at arm's length.1 Because zombies mark the demarcation between life (that is worth living) and unlife (that needs killing), the evocation of the zombie conjures not solidarity but racial panic.
We don't identify with zombies, we identify with humans, creating an us versus them dynamic and cementing tribalism both within the narrative and without.
The “monsters” in this picture are not the resurrected dead, though they are people who have lost their rational senses
One aspect of the zombie that hasn't really been discussed is the theme that humans are the true monsters. While zombies mindlessly consume, humans in zombie media tend to commit atrocities with premeditation (see Shane from TWD as an example).
The individual under capitalism is often characterized as a zombie
Dawn of the Dead takes place in a shopping mall.
In its origins and in its folkloric incarnations, the zombi is quite literally a slave, raised by Voodoo priests to labor in the fields, but the zombie metaphor also reveals to us our own enslavement to our finite and fragile bodies.
Google Clairvius Narcisse
“Conventional warfare is useless against these creatures, as is conventional thought. The science of ending life, developed and perfected since the beginning of our existence, cannot protect us from an enemy that has no ‘life’ to end.
Anyone else remember the zombie trend and find it a little weird how eager everyone seemed at the possibility of having to kill your neighbors/family members?
the historical
one interesting thing about zombies is that the modern version have a lot more to do with folkloric vampires--the kind older than Dracula, Carmilla, and Varney. The folkloric type were rotting, unintelligent, undead things that fed on family and neighbors with no thought or reason, just a desire to consume. While vampires had begun to change in the popular consciousness to what we picture now, it wasn't until Night of the Living Dead that zombies started gaining these traits. One interesting example of the beginnings of this shift is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, which reads like a classic zombie survival narrative of a disease wiping out the human population and turning them into the seemingly mindless undead, except that Matheson calls them vampires.
I don’t know that that’s necessarily true; I’ve read SF since I was about twelve years old and I know a lot of black people who read it. Also, in comic-book fandom, which is certainly a related field, 25 percent of the readership is black, which is pretty high. Denys Cowan’s New York-based Milestone Media, the first company formed by black comic book artists, writers, and editors, has just come out with four comic books featuring black superheroes.
One nice thing about the advent of the internet is that it allows marginalized writers to find their audiences more easily, allowing for greater overall diversity. It obviously isn't perfect, but there are definitely more options for circumventing the gatekeepers now than when it was written.
Having said that, there’s a good deal o f vague, unstated, publishing anxiety about gay SF, however, having to do with a fear that “ it won’t be commercial,” which is code for a fear that, in the endless chain o f middlemen who have to decide, before the fact (in our wonderful free-market economy), if something w ill sell or not in order to invest in it,
The more things change... Seriously, though, I think this fear of whether or not something will be commercial is a part of the reason why there is such a majority of white cishet men in mainstream scifi. I hear from creatives in all field about how, when they propose stories with queer, female, and/or nonwhite protagonists, they're often stymied by gatekeepers because it "won't sell". Hell, my dad used to make that argument with me when I complained about the lack of female led superhero movies (a theory which was quickly debunked when Wonder Woman made a bajillion dollars at the box office)
Of course this deployment of crisis is often explicitly and intentionally a redefinitional tactic, a distorting or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event because as a structural or predictable condition it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis seems already to have called for.20
This sounds really familiar in our current moment. While Corona Virus is a flash point, it was years of weakening social safety nets, medical infrastructure, and firing our pandemic response team that partly makes it so bad right now
overidentifies the similarity of self-controltosovereign performativity and state control over geographical boundaries.
cowboys and rugged individualists
The difficulties faced by African writers of dystopian fiction are representative of those faced by African novelists in general, who must often strain against the generic characteristics of the fundamentally bourgeois form within which they write.
A challenging dichotomy of form versus message. Books are purchased largely by the upper classes, so it has to be revolutionary, but not too revolutionary so as not to alienate the largest purchasers of them. It reminds me of Lindsay Ellis's video on Rent and how subversive storytelling on Broadway cannot be too subversive or else it will alienate the predominantly upper class, white purchasers of Broadway tickets.
For some time now, for a good dozen years at least, it has been dear that the essential question in the development of the prohlematic of the penal domain, in the way in which it is reflected as well as in the way it is practiced, is one of security.
punishments in the name of "security"
The third form is not typical of the legal code or the discipli-nary mechanism, but of the apparatus ( dispositif) of security,5 that is to say, of the set of those phenomena that I now want to study. Putting it in a still absolutely general way, the apparatus of security inserts the phenomenon in question, namely theft, within a series of probable events.
punishment rooted in legality versus security
The general question basically will be how to keep a type of criminality, theft for instance, within socially and economically acceptable limits and around an average that will be considered as optimal for a given social functioning
What is crime? How and when should it be punished?
If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockagec;.
He's not going for anything instructive here, but there will be some ideas of imperatives
basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strat..-gy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modem Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.
gaining power through biological needs and features
Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century,the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend itsentire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality
power in blood and genetics. It's still kind of a thing, even if we abhor eugenics now. Look at Star Wars and the importance of bloodlines in determining who is and is not force sensitive and/or a main character cough Rey Palpatine cough Am I saying that Star Wars is pro eugenics? No. It's just that these attitudes of genes determining destiny is just super ingrained in out society
a symbolics of blood to ananalytics of sexuality.
blood and death as power to sex and reproduction as power
Hence capital punishment could not bemaintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crimeitself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility,and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill thosewho represented a kind of biological danger to others
capital punishment cannot occur without dehumanization
Wars are no longer waged inthe name of a sovereign who must be defended; they arewaged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter inthe name of life necessity: massacres have become vital
us versus them
Power in this instance wasessentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, andultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seizehold of life in order to suppress it
sovereignty over life as a perk of being powerful, especially under the patriarchy
we are in danger of quite a different kind of world, the centralised slave state, ruled over by a small clique who are in effect a new ruling class, though they might be adoptive rather than hereditary. Such a state would not be hedonistic, on the contrary its dynamic would come from some kind of rabid nationalism and leader-worship
Throw in some theocracy and that sums up Gilead pretty well
here seemed to be no alternative to this dismal choice between possible human fates, 'unless a planned economy can be somehow combined with freedom of the individual, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is r_estored to politics'
paradox of utopia
The corruption of the intelligentsia by the lust for power, then, remains the central and most compelling theme of Orwell's chief work, and one which we have seen was clearly foreshadowed in his major writings from the mid-193os onwards
Think about who is allowed to read in Handmaid's Tale. Access to information is power
The grotesquely simple and blatantly unapologetic dishonesty of the regime stands out for many commentators as the grand theme of the work; one of Orwell's greatest concerns about totalitarianism was that it attacked the concept of objective truth
Oof this is too real right now
The object of war is thus to maintain the ruling structures of the three regimes, hence the truthfulness of the apparent paradox, 'War is Peace.'
sound familiar?
This resistance to what Bernard Crick has referred to as 'Fordification' ,39 a combination of mass-production techni ues centric aest etlc, was to remam an enauring theme. Orwell's growing concern was particularly with the totalitanan t1isrega1d for historical truth, as well as the possibility that mass propaganda could produce a population who no longer loved liberty. Increasingly he feared the destruction of the ideal of the 'autonomous individual',
loss of autonomy as a part of totalitarianism--Orwell through tech and Atwood through reproduction
Totalitarian regimes assumed seven main
compare Umberto Eco's 14 features of fascism
Orwell's fear, evident from the mid-r93os onwards, that intellectuals in the socialist movement had been corrupted by power-worship, and hence would not function as capable or morally honest leaders in any new socialist society
When asked if Handmaid's Tale is anti-religious, she makes a point of saying that no, it's criticizing how religion can be used to abuse power--not saying that religion is evil
Orwell's dy stopian world-state is blunt, stark a';;d pitiless. Consent rests and fear rather than the mani ulation of pl�
More akin to Gilead--just the worship of the state rather than a theocracy
It permitted immersion in 'the sub-human world of crowd em · n'. which was the most effective tota itarian tool.
The worship of anything can lead to totalitarianism, be it God, man, or state
problem is still collective somnambulism
"Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the Consitution, we didn't wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."--Handmaid's Tale TV Show Okay, so I know this is from the show and not the book, but she basically said the same thing there too, and it applies here.
Degeneration into uniformitythrough loss of the sense of freedom is thus still a key theme. But is religionstill an antidote? To an impressive degree, Huxley now opted for freedomof information as the key to withstanding mass manipulation and an explicitly capitalist ethos of cond1t10ned consumption. 'Democracy', in the se�seof collective, consc10us self-government, was how more specifically pittedagainst capitalist hedonism
The answer to the Brave New World is not the asceticism of Gilead but rather a true democracy of free information
Hux ey's chief concern, then, is much more with how servitude becomesattr�itis'Wifh science or technology as sur;h
freedom of versus freedom to
Th�a' of Brave New World, Huxley once said, was that if you could iron eo ,. a kind of uniformity, if you were able to manipu ate their genetic background ... if you had a government sufficiently u�rupulous you could do these things without any doubt'
One notable aspect of the Handmaid's Tale is that Gilead attempts a stratified, yet uniform society. The wives wear blue, the handmaids red, and the Marthas green, but, even with the white supremacist society, it fails, because people want to assert their identities, even if it is as simple as saying a former name
Fordism' re1',resents the subordmat1on of humanity to the machine and to the scientific ideal as such
a common theme in early dystopia is humanity versus machines, with governments failing to recognize that people are not automatons, no matter how much they wish it so. Also seen in the Handmaid's Tale, but in a different way. The government expects complete chastity and piety, but no one actually follows the rules in private. Like I said in class--humans gonna human
Wells thus initially epitomizes what we have here termed the 'second dystopian turn', but also the outpouring of late nineteenth-century utopian sentiment, oft;n in taking up the very same themes, notably authority, leadership and the advancement (or threat) of science and technology.
Wells's oeuvre has both the utopian and dystopian impulse. Themes of advancement of technology, and authority are found in both genres, just in mirror images of one another. Utopia uses nukes for renewable engery. Dystopia uses nukes as bombs.
?wen�sm produced little in the way of literary utopianism, and correspondmgly little by way of anti-or dystopian satire. Two developments shape the clearer and more.traditionally identified 'turn' towards dystopia in the closing�ecades of the nmeteenth century: eugenics and socialism
Eugenics and socialism led to the second dystopian turn--the idea that negative traits could be bred out, creating an "ideal" society and the idea that socialism is the only way to advance. Dystopia looks at the drawbacks of these ideas.
But it is only with the French Revolution that we witness a dialectical relationship emerging between three elements: utopian thoughl, here some of the underlying principles of the Revolution; the creation of fictional utopias;and a fictional anti-or d stopian response.
The idealism and failures to live up to the ideals of the French Revolution led to both utopian and dystopian thought
Secondly, we should 11ote that just as the seminal political moment definitive of modernity was the French Revolutio.n,
Dystopian literature first emerged during the French Revolution
On the one hand, logically, it assumes that utopianism seeks perfectibility, and thus, incapable of accepting less, must punish whatever falls below this standard. Most utopias however do not demand or anticipate perfection as such, but accept considerably improved behaviour as an attainable norm.
blueprint utopias versus progressive utopias
reductio ad absurdam
reduction to the absurd--taking the drawbacks of a society and showing it in its extremity
Dystopia' is often used interchangeably with 'anti-utopia' or 'negative utopia', by contrast to utopia or 'eutopia' (good place), to describe a fictional portrayal of a society in which evil, or negative social and political developments, have the upper hand, or as a satire of utopian aspirations which attempts to show up their fallacies, or which demonstrate, in B. F. Skinner's words, 'ways of life we must be sure to avoid
Dystopias as contrasts and warnings
Like most other parts of terra utopus, however, the concept of dystopia has been much contested, many eutopias or ideal societies having dystopic elements and vice versa
One person's utopia is another's dystopia
powerfully symbolized by the grotesque slaughter of the First World War. Enlightenment o timism res ectin the pro ress of reason a�d science was, now displaced bv a sense of the incapacity of humanity to restrain its new� ri:eated destructive powers
Dystopia grew out of the horrors of war. The Industrial Revolution was a period of optimism where everything seemed to be solvable by technology. The first World War was a reminder that tech can also be used for evil.
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction.
How many cameras do we pass on a day to day basis?
It’s the prison that serves as the analogical mode
Factory labor is similar to prison in disciplinary societies, according to Foucault, because both have a particular set of rules one must abide by, or face the consequences.
In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.
The space that we live in is formed by an infinite number of forces beyond our control and ken. Nothing exists in a complete vacuum.
Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other—that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history
So correct me if I'm wrong, but what I think he's saying here is that structuralism is a way of trying to establish a timeline of history through juxtaposition to create something that resembles a coherent narrative, i.e. European desire for Asian goods leading to the discovery of the "New World" and colonialism.