Making-Of as a Kind of Writing

Is there some way of blogging about my own fiction that doesn’t immediately cross over the event horizon into black-hole solipsism? I could emit the brayings of the self-promoter or the advice columnist, but I’m not in the mood for the one and I’m ill-equipped for the other. I don’t believe that I’d be trying to elicit advice from readers, or analysis, or critique, though of course like everyone else I’m often acting under the influence of motivating factors outside of my own awareness, and certainly I am as much an attention whore as the next guy.

Occasionally someone will ask me what I do. Sometimes there’s even a follow-up question: What are your books about? That’s always a stumper for me. Maybe some day, if I work through a self-reflexive reading of my own fictions, I can answer with aplomb and precision. Sure, I understand: most people who pose the question want me to name my genre or, at most, to give them a one-sentence summary, so writing blog posts in response is surely overkill. If I’m going to shop the books to agents/publishers I’ll have to come up with pithy and intriguing descriptions. But why craft these spiels in a public space, rather than in my private notebook? Maybe I imagine a fictional milieu in which the readers of the blog have asked me The Question and really want to know the answer, or want to discuss the possible alternative answers, even if it takes hours, days, weeks…

I could do a “making-of,” offering wry little observations about why I included this little detail in the text or made that particular wording decision. But why would anyone care about how something was made if they haven’t already seen what was made?

Ah to hell with it. I didn’t give much forethought to launching this blog in the first place, or to putting it on pause for the past few months. I’ve often thought that, if I saw the books I’ve written in the New Fiction section of the local bookstore, I would want to read them. So I’m going to do just that. Maybe I can make observations about them not just as writer but also as reader. In offering my remarks in a public forum I will need to take into account that practically no one who reads them will have read the books — a “making-of” without access to the “made.” So maybe I’ll need to use my already-written texts as “prompts” for exploring, and possibly discussing, matters that aren’t actually written in those texts, matters that might have wider import or interest.

I’ll start tomorrow, first novel, first chapter, and see how it goes.

La Sorcière Noire

It’s a good thing we’re moving away, since the Black Witch moth is regarded as a harbinger of death, if not worse, by most of the cultures it visits. I’d never seen one before; usually they don’t stray so far north. This one, six inches across, was sitting on our deck chair this morning. Now he’s gone.

Accelerating the Float

[In light of ongoing blog discussions of Accelerationism, I thought I’d post the chapter that I’ve been editing this morning. It’s one of several “news reports from the future” interspersed through the novel. Suggested augmentations are welcome.]

TAHITI – The first three of fourteen floating tax-free islands being built in the South Pacific are ready for occupancy. Some two thousand of the wealthiest individuals and families in the world have commissioned the construction of the artificial archipelago as a residential and financial paradise. Together the islands will comprise a new nation-corporation, with citizenship granted to anyone paying one billion dollars into the archipelago’s development trust. According to domestic and international law, the floating nation will constitute a tax-free haven for the global earnings of each citizen.

The floating islands, located in the open sea twelve hundred miles east of Tahiti, represent a significant advance in large-scale artificial land technology. Each island is assembled from enormous modules that are themselves being constructed at a Peruvian offshore assembly facility and towed into position. Layered with topsoil, the artificial surface can support most varieties of the lush plant life and exotic bird species native to the South Seas habitat. The islands are convex, a hundred feet above sea level at the center and sloping gradually toward the ocean, where a layer of sand will be maintained as an artificial beach. Each citizen is deeded a wedge of property extending from the island’s apex to the shore. Residences, constructed from strong ultralight material, are limited to a single storey and will be built at least forty feet above sea level as protection against tropical storms and the high waves they can generate. Citizens are also permitted to erect beachside cabanas. An area of each island will be set aside for establishing a small village of sturdy, attractive huts that will be assigned to servants and nannies and other personnel supporting the citizens’ households.

Automobiles are prohibited, so residents will use bicycles and motorboats to get around. A limited number of cafés and small shops will be built on the islands. Groceries, clothing, and other bulkier commodities will be sold from ships that travel from island to island, ferrying customers back and forth from their homes. A small, fully outfitted cruise ship will house’s the archipelago’s schools. Teachers, support staff, and boarded students will live in the luxurious on-board suites, while day pupils take the hydroplane “bus” to and from school. Electricians, plumbers, police, and other maintenance personnel will make “house calls” to the islands from their motorboats. The service marina will thus comprise another sort of floating community within the perimeter of the artificial archipelago. A decommissioned aircraft carrier will function as the local airport, with commercial flights scheduled to and from Tahiti and Pago Pago. Citizens will also have the opportunity to purchase private craft hangar space on the carrier.

The islands are kept afloat by enormous bulkheads that sink half a mile beneath the surface. The bulkheads are automatically maintained at the optimal level of inflation by computerized pumps and pipelines mounted on low, subtly-landscaped platforms positioned a mile offshore of each island. Instead of being anchored to the seafloor, the islands are stabilized by means of a network of enormous underwater buoys submerged at varying, precisely calibrated depths. The buoys are automatically raised or lowered to adjust for variations in tides, currents, and temperature. On the surface, the islands are buffered against trade winds and waves by a circular system of levees, also anchored to underwater stabilizers, that completely surround the archipelago.

Collectively, the fourteen islands and their citizen-owners will comprise the floating nation-corporation. It is anticipated that, once formed, the archipelago’s government will rapidly establish the country as a tax-free, unregulated offshore financial center. It has been proposed that multinational corporations and partnerships of which island citizens own at least twenty percent will be granted tax-free status by the archipelago. Not surprisingly, financial institutions, shipping firms, and other companies desirous of taking advantage of the islands’ attractive business climate have begun wooing potential citizen-investors by means of designer low-price stock offerings, limited-liability partnerships, and hedge funds.

If the floating nation-corporation proves successful, the owner-citizens may consider expanding the territory, constructing additional islands within the protected perimeter or even extending territorial boundaries farther into the open seas. While citizenship presently costs a cool billion dollars, the sticker price might well go up in future offerings. Other wealthy consortia are forming to explore the possibility of launching their own start-up floating nations that would demand less up-front outlay.

The wealthiest one percent of the world’s population controls more than sixty percent of the world’s wealth; soon most of that wealth might be sailing out to sea. Traditional land-based countries, watching their tax revenues floating away, are rapidly lowering their tax rates in order to compete.

Dark Flavors

Usually in the summertime I prefer light tastes: sherbet to ice cream, chicken to beef, lettuce to eggplant. This week, though it was hot outside, my cooking seemed to gravitate toward the dark side of the palate.

Granola. Lately the store-brand oatmeal has been tasting too earthy when prepared in the traditional way, so the other morning I turned it into granola. Heat some butter and peanut oil in a big skillet; dump in the oats with some raisins and broken-up pecans; season with cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg; near the end add a little brown sugar and maple syrup. The complex toasty aroma filled the house, reminding me of something I couldn’t quite place. I left the granola in the pan to cool, so it kept cooking for awhile unattended. It was delicious of course, but also darker in color and in flavor than when I’d turned off the stove, and darker certainly than the usual store-bought version. Not quite scorched, but with a subtle back note of bitterness joining the grainy nutty sweetness — sort of like Guinness.

Dinner. The night before last I thawed a chicken breast, as usual expecting that by dinnertime I’d figure out something to do with it. In the cupboard that afternoon I spotted a jar of artichoke hearts, which got me thinking about cooler-weather flavors. I sliced mushrooms, strips of red bell pepper, purple onion, and garlic, sautéing them with walnut pieces and plenty of black pepper in some of the duck fat I had reserved from the duck breasts I’d cooked at Christmas. Later I added half of the artichoke hearts with a splash of the liquid, capers, and some infused oil from a container of olives and garlic I’d gotten at the deli counter. In another pan I cooked some asparagus in butter and beef broth with a little salt and sugar. When both vegetable dishes were done I put them in a warm oven while I made myself a mint julep: mint leaves fresh from the garden muddled in the glass with sugar and whiskey and topped with crushed ice. I set a pot of water on to boil for some flat noodles, then I sliced and seasoned the chicken breast and sautéed it in butter. The cooked chicken I topped with grated parmesan and swiss, placing it in the warm oven where the cheese melted without bubbling. The sauce: pan drippings, homemade chicken stock, cream, dry sherry, white wine, fresh sage, thyme, and oregano. The chicken, the mixed veggies, and the noodles fill the plate, blurring into each other a bit; across the top the asparagus spears recline, bisecting the plate; sauce is poured generously over the noodles and the chicken. It’s an elegant, somewhat casual presentation, reminding K of a fashion model slouching along a runway. It is served with chardonnay, although if I’d remembered the bottle of dry French rosé in the fridge it would have been perfect. The aftertastes are subtly of black pepper and sherry.

Tiramisù. I’d made this dish recently, but on request I reprised it last night. Espresso, dark rum, grated unsweetened chocolate…

Tuesday Morning Walk

17 MAY UPDATE — Yesterday afternoon I finished writing the first draft of the book.

*****

Almost as soon as I began walking I realized that yesterday I’d gone too fast. I’d been rushing into the Apocalypse, fourteen catastrophes strung end to end: global warming, a massive meteor strike event, zones of zero gravity, the Yankees winning their sixteenth consecutive World Series… There is nothing left to be done: that was the last bead on the string. But I was going too fast, trying to finish by Thursday, behind a bit now because last Friday’s task had extended through the weekend all the way till noon yesterday. Afterward I’d had lunch, dawdled awhile trying to clear my head, gone for a run along the trail, watching the prairie dogs watching me, weaving through the cattle to the creek and back again. Then I had tried to do a whole day’s work starting at three in the afternoon. I didn’t give myself time to sink into it, just hurtled into the Apocalypse like there was no tomorrow. Or actually, like tomorrow I had to do tomorrow’s work, not the rest of today’s, if I was going to finish the whole project by Thursday.

I woke up at two this morning, something that doesn’t happen very often any more. Maybe it was the heat, the first really warm night of the spring. Maybe the afternoon’s rushed Apocalypse was coming back at me, letting me know that I’d cheated it. In that day, the prophet would warn, craggy finger pointing toward the end. And who are you, O son of man, to give it a scant three hours, just because you had to drink your glass of beer, had to fry the porterhouse and the potatoes and make the salad, just because you were fully booked for each of the three post-Apocalyptic days?

What did I read when I got up at two? The chapter in the brain science book just didn’t register. A chapter of DeLillo: I felt like I’d been there too recently, or no: that I was there most of the day every day. In Pynchon the brigadier was subjecting himself to the dominatrix: that proved best for a hot mid-May four in the morning; I could go back to sleep after that. I wrote something too, between the brain science and the DeLillo. As an ordinary Joe I don’t harbor ambitions to become something other than human — not posthuman, or transhuman, or post-traumatic zombie, or non-conscious swarm drive, or schizophrenic rhizome, or theotic transcender. I think that ordinary language does describe real things in the world rather than separating humans from the Real. I don’t see any point in accelerating into sociopathy as the expression of a protean will to power. I don’t believe that bioengineering merged with AI will spawn a new hybrid post-human species. That’s what I wrote at three a.m.

At seven I woke up for real, the Tuesday before the Thursday. While drinking my first coffee and eating a donut I came across a video of a debate between Foucault and Chomsky. This must have been in the seventies: Chomsky looked like a prototypical seventies MIT prof, a slightly nerdy corporate engineer type, while Foucault, with his shaved head and stern disposition, appeared menacing and severe. This was no debate: the headliners were talking past each other, addressing the audience in different languages about different topics, barely grazing each other. I wondered, not for the first time, if Foucault’s and Deleuze’s and Lacan’s paranoia about being boxed in by language was an artifact of being French, having been taught to write French by French teachers in French schools. In her early American years our daughter had attended what might be deemed a Chomskyan school: express yourself creatively, and the rules of grammar and spelling will take care of themselves. In France we immersed her in structure: formal instruction in parts of speech and conjugations, recitation of poems par cœur, get creative once you’ve grown accustomed to the apparatus. Some of the American parents couldn’t stand it: they had to take their kids back home, or enroll them in American international schools. Happily for our daughter the French primaire proved to be good cross-training. Now she writes Paradise Lost fan fiction.

That’s one reason why I want to be finished by Thursday: we leave on Friday to pick her up from school for the summer. Last week my wife found a poem called “Iowa City to Boulder,” by William Matthews. With that poem Matthews marked off the route, 80 to 76, as a pilgrimage trail for his readers to follow. But of course Kerouac had already made that run years before. I take most of the drive by night, Matthews wrote: I wonder if it’s true, or if the poem is a kind of short story, a flash fiction they might call it these days, semi-constrained in the poetic structure. Maybe he drove it in the daytime but decided that night driving would be more poetic. It’s free verse as far as I can tell, no predefined rhyme or meter or line length to constrain the drive. A Chomskyan poem.

But now it’s eight o’clock Tuesday morning and I’m walking past the upper pasture, watching the bull as he begins his workday, paying his morning visits to the ladies, and I’m thinking post-Apocalyptically. If I go back in time can I stage it differently? The Book of Revelation is a kind of linguistic apocalypse, a description of something that’s beyond description, signifiers flying off the signifieds, the whole structure of the language being pulled apart in the cosmic upheaval. In his ecstasy John points his craggy finger beyond that day, past the end to the new heavens and new earth. He’s left his body, left the earth, surging beyond structural constraints, embarking upon a visitation to a Deleuzian linguistic afterlife, one among perhaps a multitude of afterlives, where language is free to do whatever on earth or in heaven it desires.

So I’m thinking about going back to yesterday and sketching out an alternative end of the world. a linguistic Apocalypse that does not point beyond itself to the linguistic Millennium. A report comes in from one of the time-traveling reconnaissance agents: there’s been a catastrophic and widespread rupture between signifiers and signifieds. Now – that is in the Apocalyptic future – whenever anyone tells you anything, you have no idea what the speaker intends to convey. You can no longer assume that what people are saying corresponds in any way to events in the world, or even in the imagination – events that they’re purporting to describe in language. Plus you, the listener – you too have lost the connections. You hear the words and you understand them, but you can’t find the correspondences anymore between the nouns and the things to which they point with their craggy fingers, between the verbs and the actions. And of course in that day the recon report too becomes suspect.

But now it’s Tuesday and I’m on the clock. Yesterday was the Apocalypse, and the Friday drive to Iowa is only three days off. No looking back; let today take care of itself. I can smell the barn and I’m heading straight for it, no more distractions.

I’ve made the turn, crossing the little bridge over the drainage ditch. The electrical control box beside the bridge has been encased inside a hollow plastic boulder: is it for aesthetic purposes, or to thwart terrorists using satellite surveillance to identify targets for knocking us off the grid? There’s water flowing in the ditch for a change: snowmelt, followed by two days of rain. The grass is green and dandelions are everywhere. In a month all of this would be brown and crisp if the terrorists blew up the electrical and the sprinkler system wouldn’t run.

Next to the fake boulder a block of glass about two feet square is embedded in the ground. I don’t remember seeing it before: probably it’s part of the electrical system. There seems to be a yellowish-orange light flickering down there below the glass. I can’t make it out though, because the glass is thick, uneven in consistency, and partially opaque. Maybe it’s just a reflection from the morning sun. Walking on, I greet the old Central European man who walks his Chow Chow along this path every morning around this time, a dog that, cliché be damned, does in fact bear a striking facial resemblance to the man holding the leash.

*****

Here’s the poem:

Iowa City to Boulder, by William Matthews

I take most of the drive by night.
It’s cool and in the dark my lapsed
inspection can’t be seen.
I sing and make myself promises.

By dawn on the high plains
I’m driving tired and cagey.
Red-winged blackbirds
on the mileposts, like candle flames,
flare their wings for balance
in the blasts of truck wakes.

The dust of not sleeping
drifts in my mouth, and five or six
miles slur by uncounted.
I say I hate long-distance

drives but I love them.
The flat light stains the foothills
pale and I speed up the canyon
to sleep until the little lull
the insects take at dusk before
they say their names all night in the loud field.

And here’s the Deleuze-Chomsky debate, trilingual with English subtitles, courtesy of dmfant in a comment on the most recent Noir Realism thread:

Here’s One

[I mentioned in a comment on the prior thread that, approaching the end of the novel I’m just finishing up, I’ve been writing a chapter consisting of monologues from 14 significant characters in the series. Each of the 14 monologues is 14 lines long, with 14 syllables per line. Prose poems, I suppose is what they are. I just wrote this one, which elaborates on a minor narrative detail in an incident from a prior book that reads like this: “Why am I here?” the Dancer responded to the Ceramicist’s inquisitive look. She scooped up a smooth milky stone from the edge of the road and juggled it in her left hand as she spoke…]

*****

Jessa

Walking to the Cantina that time, past the two mile mark,
my glance landed on a small stone at the edge of the road.
We had opened the vault of photos, the gallery of
the dead at the two mile shrine. Red rocks edging a red road,
the border of the shrine marked off a world of memory
and loss. Recognizing none, I remembered every one.
Though small, the stone beside the road kept a hidden meaning:
milky white and smooth, it was alien to the redness,
left perhaps by another Pilgrim from another place.
A name was written on that stone, a name I did not know.
I wanted to return to that place; I wanted to bring
my own stone, a name written on it that no one would know
but the one who had received it. Then I would add my stone
to the one I’d found beside the road, a two stone barrow.

*****

[The bit about the name written on the stone is an allusion to Revelation 2:17. One more monologue to write, then four more chapters to go after this one and the first draft is done, hopefully on Thursday.]

Nobel-Level Self-Assurance

“This is not the place to go into detail about how the brain gives rise to consciousness. I have done that in several books, which may be consulted.”

– Gerald Edelman, Second Nature (2006)

Fictional Fiction Writers at Work

[Yesterday the new fiction surpassed 80,000 words, and now I can smell the barn, as they say in horse country. If I keep up the pace I should have a first draft finished in two weeks. Here’s a short chapter I drafted last Tuesday. In this interlude, two unidentified writers are inventing a story together, a story about a character — the bathrobed man — who has an ongoing role in the larger story. I’ve written dialogue for these two storytellers before, in earlier episodes. Every time it’s been fun, fast, freeing to distance myself from my own fiction by handing my job off to these two guys.]

*****

The bathrobed man bundles up his twenty-one birthday installments, plus maybe whatever’s left of his money as part of his legacy. He sends the parcel to his designated under-the-radar courier, along with instructions and mailing address. Obviously the unborn child has no name yet, so the bathrobed man can’t write Dear Jimmy or Dear Susie at the top. But he can still sign as Dad at the bottom.

Perhaps the instructions include sending each year’s installment from a different location, again protecting against the possibility of discovery by the enemies.

Good idea, but that’s going to set the courier back financially.

Perhaps the bathrobed man includes in the parcel…

…Includes in the parcel some money to defray his courier’s expenses over the next twenty-one years.

Yes. And we presume also that the courier is a loyal and trusted person. He will feel duty-bound to honor what may be the last wishes of his doomed friend, even after all of the money has been spent.

Great, that’s it then.

Excuse me, but I have a question. We are presuming that the bathrobed man is about to be killed by his enemies. Imagine that, through his resourcefulness, he manages to survive this seemingly fatal ordeal. Would he then retrieve the first parcel from the lawyer, as well as the second one from the courier?

Or would he lay low?

Remaining undercover for a month, a year, twenty-one years, until at last he emerges from seclusion. What changes would have been wrought in him? From some underground control center would he have masterminded the implementation of his hermetic scheme? Would he have teetered over the edge into paranoia, into madness, remaining forever in seclusion, perhaps taking his own life?

But how could he have escaped? The thugs have him cornered, his house is surrounded. They’re professionals, and in their profession the consequences of failure are dire. The bathrobed man isn’t the sort of guy to break out the windows and start shooting.

And he is alone, our bathrobed hero. An amateur, alone, pits himself against several hired guns? Even in a B Hollywood gangster film this one-man stand cannot succeed. One thug keeps him occupied by returning fire through the front window, while two of his associates calmly walk around to the back door. A locked door? These are hired killers. The bathrobed man is a duck in a shooting gallery.

Booby traps?

Are you suggesting perhaps the noose around the ankle ploy, hoisting the thug into the air, suspended from the stout branch of a nearby tree? Or perhaps the patch of leaves disguising a pit into which the gangsters who tread upon it will drop? Or do you recommend something more lethal, in which explosives are involved?

Do I hear sarcasm?

Indeed. Simply put, our bathrobed man is not the sort of fellow who goes in for violence. He is an engineer; his genius is conceptual, systemic.

So couldn’t he engineer devices to ward off the thugs? He is at his own house after all, plenty of time to set things up, work out the bugs. And he is motivated, wanting to protect his mysterious invention, his Icon, even if it turns out to be just a crackpot scheme after all. And he is paranoid, maintaining constant vigilance against those who would steal it for nefarious purposes or financial gain. Why wouldn’t he booby-trap his house?

Yes, I concede that these are valid points which you are making now.

Okay then.

But.

But?

Even without the booby traps, the boobies will make a great deal of commotion, no? They will fire their guns at the bathrobed man. If he is prepared to take violent means into his hands, he will return their fire. The neighbors will hear, they will telephone the police, the squad cars will soon surround the house. Our bathrobed man will be taken into custody. He will be required to reveal information about his Icon. No, none of this is permissible for him.

So he needs to escape. Now we’re back to where we started. He’s surrounded so he can’t escape, and he’s not prepared to call attention to his grand scheme through gunplay and explosives. He’s dispatched the parcels, one to his childhood lawyer friend, the others to his trusted courier friend. And so now he dies to protect his secret schemes.

Perhaps taking his own life to avoid being the subject of so-called extreme interrogation tactics, by means of which the thugs would attempt to extract the truth from him.

So why aren’t we satisfied to leave it at that? It’s a good story the way it is. It’s as if we’ve gotten too attached to the bathrobed man, like he’s calling on us to save him from his fate.

And it is a fate that was sealed twenty-one years ago when the bathrobed man sealed the secret parcels. Now we have moved on in the story, far into the future. The thugs have perhaps discovered the lawyer friend, the son or daughter has gone in search of the father. The future becomes the present. This is where we must concentrate our attention.

Wait a minute…

Of course. After twenty-one years of waiting, what is another minute?

No, listen. The Icon. Bathrobed man designed the Icon, this awesome system linking everyone and everything together across vast distances. Okay great. So listen. Bathrobed man sent off his drawings and documentations. But didn’t he also start building this thing, this Icon? We’ve already said that he has associates, that he had financiers backing his work. The written documentation is a backup, we said. There’s also an oral tradition, a means of communication propagated among a cadre of operatives, associates of the bathrobed man who are secretly building the Icon according to his prior verbal instructions.

Yes…

Maybe the Icon has bootstrapping potentials that help with the implementation. For example, maybe some module of the system enables an unspoken means of communication, letting the Icon-builders communicate with each other without leaving a paper trail, or an electronic one.

Yes, and perhaps the Icon, as gradually it is taking form and substance, enables the secret cadre to identify others who could join them, others whom the bathrobed man never met, others whose behavior patterns or brain waves conform to a certain profile that identifies them as promising co-conspirators.

Fine. Now, the Icon links people and things together across vast distances.What about across time? Across long spans of time? Does the Icon make temporal linkages?

Yes, perhaps also the dimensionality of time is built into his grandiose schematics. The likelihood is high, I think now. So the bathrobed man anticipates that the Icon will gradually be assembled over the years after his demise at the hands of the gangsters.

And he set it in motion across time, this gradual assembly. Built by his associates, by new co-conspirators…

Eventually achieving the ability to assemble itself.

Yes, that’s great.

Even if the bathrobed man did not know how to design this autopoietic capability of his Icon, he set it on the course toward its eventual emergence as a self-generating device.

And perhaps also self-regenerating, the ability to diagnose and repair its own breakdowns.

And self-replicating.

Yes. So the bathrobed man envisions the gradual self-creation of the Icon as something like an organism, or even a new species of organisms capable of reproduction. It extends across vast tracts of space, across multitudes of people, across long spans of time. Now, does the Icon also extend itself backward in time?

Oh God. You wish now for the Icon to turn itself into a time machine?

Why not? It does everything else.

What does it do precisely?

Hell, I don’t know. It does everything. And if it does everything, then surely it ought to be able to manage time travel.

But have you not yet seen enough such stories of time travel? Must we be doomed to repeating the time travel trope, as though stuck in a time loop that repeats itself again and again, never to be surpassed?

You mean like Groundhog Day?

I’m sorry – like what now?

Never mind. But look, this is how we rescue the bathrobed man from his imminent and inevitable demise.

The Icon returns from the future to save its master, its creator, its father?

Exactly.

 Oh my God. The tears will be flowing down the aisles. Or perhaps they already flowed. Have flowed? Have been flowing? These verb tenses…

But yes, suppose we do that. We have the what, now we need the how. How will the Icon save the bathrobed man, twenty-one years in the past?

I don’t know. No, yes I do. It is already happening. We are the instruments, the vessels of the Icon as it performs its heroic time-traveling mission into the past. This is what the Icon will do. It will invade our minds so that we will write a scenario that saves its father, twenty-one years in the past. But of course it is the past only in diagetic time. In narrative time the rescue remains, happily, poised as a future unfolding of the story. Is invading our minds? Has been invading?

Zizek’s Post-Traumatic Speculative Fiction

The past two days I’ve participated in a lively thread about post-traumatic subjectivity at the Attempts at Living blog. In the course of the discussion I became aware of an essay by Slavoj Zizek entitled “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject.” [The Abstract and a link to the PDF of the paper  can be found here.] Having read Zizek’s essay, I’m not sure what value there is in writing a post about it. I once did a lot of PTSD counseling and might do so again in the future. Does Zizek offer practical therapeutic advice? No. Does he reframe post-trauma in a way that has psychoanalytic value? That question might be worth considering, although I regard Zizek’s frame as a constraint to break rather than a context to step into. Does he reposition post-trauma politically? He does, and that’s what I find most objectionable about the essay. Is Zizek claiming that what he writes is true? If so, I don’t see any evidence supporting his truth claims. Alternatively, is Zizek telling a story, writing a kind of fiction, an alternative reality in which characters can act and events can be staged? Previously I’ve concluded that I get the most personal value out of metaphysical speculation if I regard it as a fictional genre. Do I find value in Zizek’s speculative “short story” about the post-traumatic subject? I do. In fact, I think I can adapt it for a chapter in my own fiction that I expect to write next week. So I’ll write this post about Zizek not as a critique but as a kind of summary description of a fictional world, an oppressive apocalyptic vision.

In some realities, what the subject fears is the inability to attain desires. In that sort of reality, trauma is the definitive obstacle to the fulfillment of desire. Trauma maims or kills you so that you cannot pursue your desire. Trauma removes that which you desire from the field of possibility, making further pursuit pointless — learned helplessness. The post-traumatic subject becomes passive, psychically numb, alienated, zombified, reduced to brain and body without a heart and soul. Trauma permanently severs the link between desire and fulfillment. Post-trauma, desire dies because it cannot possibly be fulfilled.

But that’s not how Zizek’s alternate reality works. Zizek begins his story by rehearsing (his version of) the Freudian-Lacanian fiction about trauma: that the victim actually wants to be traumatized.

For Freud (and Lacan), every external trauma is “sublated,” internalized, owing its impact to the way a pre-existing Real of the “psychic reality” is aroused through it. Even the most violent intrusions of the external real — say, the shocking effect on the victims of bomb-explosions of war — owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse masochism, the death-drive, in unconscious guilt-feeling, etc.

In ZizekWorld, what one fears is what one desires. And what one desires is to be hurt, to be victimized by the sadist, to be punished, to be dead. I desire what I fear: some might regard this construction as a delusional phantasm, a subjective fiction. Trauma, when it comes, could be regarded as the irruption of the Real, destroying the fantasy, clearing the way for the individual who was previously immersed in a fictional delusion to get a little more real, to start becoming a real subject. But that’s not Zizek’s story. In ZizekWorld, not only does the subjectively Real incorporate the phantasm of imagined trauma: the image of the trauma is central to the subject’s reality.

Why? In Zizek’s fictional universe, as in many other parallel universes, the human subject is activated by desire. But here’s the twist in ZizekWorld: if the subject’s desire is ever fulfilled, then the subject loses the prime motivation to do anything. The object that someone desires is never really the cause of desire; if the object is attained, then desire must shift to some other object, some other potential source of fulfillment that must be pursued. At some unconscious level the person occupying Zizek’s fictional world understands this to be the case: if ever my desire is truly fulfilled, then I have nothing left to motivate me, no emotional engagement in the world.

In ZizekWorld, then, it’s not the permanent impossibility of fulfillment that kills desire. What kills desire is the fulfillment of desire. And so in effect the subject desires that which would kill desire, which would in effect kill the subject. The subjects in ZizekWorld are animated not by libido versus death drive, but by libido intertwined with death drive. And it is trauma that, catastrophically, fulfills the subject’s desire. In trauma, the phantasmatic image of desire held at a distance by the subject suddenly and uncontrollably closes the gap — between subject and object, between desire and fulfillment, between libido and death. Trauma destroys the object of desire because the object was always just a stand-in for death. And now death has come upon the subject, killing the object of desire. And trauma kills the subject of desire too, because the subject is intrinsically organized around desire.

But in ZizekWorld, killing the subject of desire doesn’t kill the subject altogether.

All different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbolic…), lead to the same result — a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity: after the shock, literally, a new subject emerges. Its features are well-known from numerous descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment — it is a subject who is no longer “in-the-world” in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a new form of life — his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement; and this holds for henchmen no less than for his victims.

The resurrected undead zombie subject is born again, its desire fulfilled. Should we feel sorry for the post-traumatic subject, and angry at the perpetrator of the trauma? Not in ZizekWorld.

What if we surmise that the cold indifferent disengaged subjects are NOT suffering at all, that, once their old persona is erased, they enter a blessed state of indifference, that they only appear to us caught in unbearable suffering?

The post-traumatic subject feels no pain because pain, like all feeling, is a product of a subjectivity fueled by desire, and the desiring-subject is dead. What then do trauma and its consequences mean in ZizekWorld? They mean nothing, since meaning is another product of the desiring-subject, a story that the subject tells itself about what it desires and why, how it goes about pursing its desires, why it is thwarted, etc.

In ZizekWorld the post-traumatic subject lives on, without desire, continually repeating the same meaningless sequences of actions again and again, the death drive decoupled from libidinal investment. And who are these “degree zero” subjects, these shells without substance, these “autistic monsters” that populate ZizekWorld? They are the “new proletariat”:

the exploited worker whose product is taken away from him, so that he is reduced to subjectivity without substance, to the void of pure subjective potentiality whose actualization in work process equals its de-realization.

Presumably in ZizekWorld the new proletarian masochistically wants to be exploited, feels he deserves it as punishment for his guilt, wants to be reduced to performing repetitive meaningless tasks. Who else are the post-traumatic subjects occupying ZizekWorld? Those cold-blooded killers, terrorists, and suicide bombers, those mindless followers of orders dictated by their authoritarian leaders, the Muslims:

When one looks an autistic subject (or a “Muslim”) into the eye, one also has the feeling that “there is nobody home.”

I could go on to discuss Zizek’s negate-the-negation shtick, whereby trauma ironically doubles the original primal trauma of symbolic castration from the Mother by the Father, a trauma that creates the subject in the first place. But this is enough I think: I’ve got my own fiction to write. We can certainly envision a Leader in ZizekWorld who organizes the zombified new proletariat in order to accomplish a violent revolution. Even if they’re killed or maimed in the battle it doesn’t mean anything, because they’re already dead, beyond meaning, beyond suffering. Or the ruling class can simply continue to exploit their undead workers, who don’t feel it anymore, who don’t care about anything anymore. Or the Muslims can be bombed into oblivion, since they’re already undead zombies. I can use these fantastic totalitarian speculations of Zizek’s for my own sinister fictional insurgencies…

I Like My Similes Like I Like My Metaphors

[I’m about two-thirds of the way through the current book. This excerpt comes from the immediately preceding one.]

“Hey Lois,” he shouted out the open office door as he veered toward the flipchart. “Go get us a round of beers if you would.” He studied the top sheet for a few seconds before ripping it from the pad and tossing it to the floor. Uncapping the black marker he began writing something at the top of the page. The marker was nearly out of ink and Karas flung it across the room, its tip making a short grey smudge on the wall between two of the taped-up sheets before caroming onto the hardwood. He snatched up the red marker and began again:

MAN  –> NEPHILIM –> ELOHIM

“This is the progression, yes?” But Karas wasn’t waiting for the Courier to keep up with him now. “We’ve always thought – I’ve always thought about the progression in individual terms. A man becomes a mighty man becomes a god. Pilgrimage as decisive and extreme movement away from the norm, from the collective. The outlier becomes a double outlier, and maybe finally a triple outlier. Instead of waiting for the one in a million to come along we would accelerate the difference engines, turbocharge the thrusters, propel more of the exceptional people out of orbit. Some of them might shoot out of sight altogether, never to be heard from again. But others – well, instead of launching one revolution at a time they might catalyze simultaneous cascades, multiple singularities in art, science, economics, warfare…

“Still, there has always been the statistical underpinning. Difference relative to the norm, stretch out the axes of deviation. We’ve always speculated that a society of outliers might emerge, reticulated through the Portals via some unknown and perhaps unprecedented mechanisms exceeding mere empathy and cooperation. We didn’t want the Stations to be seen as anything more than termini linking the Trails, transient nexuses for Pilgrims passing through as each by each they pursued their separate trajectories into exceptionalism.

“But now we face the empirical facts: most of the Pilgrims are going nowhere fast. Money, power, sex, prestige – the vectors and endpoints are all so fucking predictable. Sure there are exceptions, and exceptions are what we prize above all. Maybe our project is doomed from the start, but we wanted to establish the preconditions and the apparatus and the impetus for cultivating a whole host of exceptions. Hey, we should make that our new motto.” Karas turned back to the flipchart and printed in large block letters, filling the sheet:

EXCEPTION IS THE RULE

Lois brought in two tall tapered glasses of cloudy beer with a skim at the top. “Belgian blond lambic,” she announced as she placed one of the glasses on the conference table in front of the Courier.

“I like my beer like I like my women,” Karas insinuated archly as Lois handed him the other glass.

“Cold and flat and murky?”

Karas watched Lois walk back out to the antechamber.

I’m Shocked, Shocked

…to find that US hospitals make more money by fucking up than by doing it right. From this NYTimes article:

Hospitals make money from their own mistakes because insurers pay them for the longer stays and extra care that patients need to treat surgical complications that could have been prevented, a new study finds. Changing the payment system, to stop rewarding poor care, may help to bring down surgical complication rates, the researchers say. If the system does not change, hospitals have little incentive to improve: in fact, some will wind up losing money if they take better care of patients…

The study is based on a detailed analysis of the records of 34,256 people who had surgery in 2010 at one of 12 hospitals run by Texas Health Resources. Of those patients, 1,820 had one or more complications that could have been prevented, like blood clots, pneumonia or infected incisions. The median length of stay for those patients quadrupled to 14 days, and hospital revenue averaged $30,500 more than for patients without complications ($49,400 versus $18,900). Private insurers paid far more for complications than did Medicare or Medicaid, or patients who paid out of pocket.

The authors said in an interview that they were not suggesting that hospitals were trying to make money by deliberately causing complications or refusing to address the problem. “Absolutely not,” said David Sadoff, a managing director of the Boston Consulting Group. “We don’t believe that is happening at all.” But, he said, the current payment system makes it difficult for hospitals to perform better because improvements can wind up costing them money.

Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for American Health Insurance Plans, a trade group for insurance companies, said in an interview that the study illustrated that the entire health care system needed to move away from what she called “the perverse incentives of the old fee-for-service system that emphasized quantity over quality, and toward methods of payment that reward better care.”

…Dr. Barry Rosenberg, an author and a managing director of Boston Consulting, said the study came about because his firm was working with Texas Health Resources to find ways to reduce its hospitals’ surgical complication rates, which, at 5.3 percent, were in line with those reported by similar hospitals. Part of that work involved analyzing the costs, and he said the team was stunned to realize that lowering the complication rates would actually cost the hospital money. “We said, ‘Whoa, we’re working our tails off trying to lower complications, and the prize we’re going to get is a reduction in profits,’ ” Dr. Rosenberg said in an interview…

In an editorial, Uwe E. Reinhardt, an expert on medical economics from Princeton University, called the study’s findings “troublesome but not surprising.” He called the current payment system “untoward,” adding that it “can tempt otherwise admirable people into dubious conduct.”

Springtime for the Homeless

UPDATE: The Shelter just announced that it’s going to stay open tonight and tomorrow night before closing for the season. Maybe my post helped in shaming management into it.

Winter Sheltering services are available from October 15 through April 15 for any adult in need.

That’s what it says on the website of the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless. It’s not true: any “adult in need” who has already spent 90 nights at the Shelter during the current “warming season” cannot spend another night there. And capacity isn’t nearly adequate: while the Shelter sleeps 160,  another 100 people spend their nights sleeping on the floors of churches and synagogues that have agreed to provide “overflow” shelter during bad weather.

But today is April 16 and according to the Shelter’s calendar the season is now over: the Shelter is closed tonight and every other night until October 15. Presumably in the warm weather homeless people are not “in need” of an indoor place to sleep, even though it is illegal to sleep outdoors in Boulder. Here’s what Boulder looks like today, April 16, out my back window:

Today’s local forecast: Moderating temperatures will change morning scattered snow showers to rain showers by late day. Patchy freezing drizzle possible. High around 45F, low of 31F. Winds SE at 15 to 25 mph. [Currently it’s 25F, so the meteorologists were being a bit optimistic about the low.]

Tomorrow: Cloudy with snow showers becoming a steady accumulating snow later on. Cold. High 36F, low 19F. Winds N at 15 to 25 mph. 1 to 3 inches of snow expected.

Undead Text

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.”

That’s the first line of The Shadow of the Wind, a 2004 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón that I’ve been reading. Yesterday I was searching my document files — my private cemetery of forgotten texts — for a fragment I remember having written, thinking that I might be able to splice it into the fiction I’m presently writing. I never did find what I was looking for, but I did come across a document from 2004 that read like a Ktismatics blog post before Ktismatics even existed. Better late than never, I figured, so I reformatted the document as a post. I titled it “Wallace Stevens, Bond Man.” While proofing it I was remembering a couple of other posts I’d previously written about Wallace Stevens. So I googled myself: it turns out that I had already turned this same text into a Ktismatics post. It’s called On Keeping Your Day Job, posted in August 2007. So it was three years after having written the text that I turned it into a blog post, but that post is nearly six years old now and I’d forgotten all about it. Sometimes even the resurrected texts find their way back into the crypt.

Wherein I Recall My Prior Life as a Mad Scientist

If the glass is half full, that means it’s also half empty.

After finishing my doctorate I did a postdoc in an AI lab. These were the early, heady days of expert systems, a technology predicated on making explicit the tacit knowledge of human experts, converting the heuristics of human decision-making into conceptual objects and rules for manipulating them that could be run on computers. Our core group consisted of cognitive psychologists and computer scientists, and in building systems we would collaborate with “domain experts” in medicine, business, law, engineering, and other practical disciplines. A standard division of labor was established: the domain experts provided the expertise; the psychologists did the “knowledge engineering,” which consisted of making explicit what the experts knew and how they used that knowledge; the computer scientists designed and built the computer systems encoding the engineered expert knowledge.

Early on I came to a sobering realization: human experts aren’t nearly as good as computers at using knowledge. Humans have limited processing capacity, and so they can’t remember very many things at once, can’t pay attention to very many features of the task in front of them, can’t deal with very many variables at the same time. To compensate for their limitations, humans take various short-cuts and work-arounds in solving complex problems. Computers have limitations too, especially in their ability to acquire new knowledge, but in their ability to process lots of information they vastly outperform humans. Equipped with knowledge already learned by human experts, computers can manipulate this knowledge more efficiently, and more accurately, than can the human experts.

I remember giving a talk in DC to a gathering of all the AI postdocs funded under the same national grant program, working in labs at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, U. of Minnesota, UC San Diego, maybe others (my memory has degraded since then). Most of the talks were about AI work in progress. I talked about the differences between human and computer decision-making. Instead of fancy slides I drew overheads by hand with a black marker. I drew out a simple binary decision tree that went maybe 7 layers deep, pointing out ways in which knowledge and logic interact in actual decision-making tasks, describing how computers are not vulnerable to the same sorts of biases as humans in working through even a fairly simple decision. I remember one of the colleagues at my university telling me afterward that he thought my talk sucked. But I also remember discussing the implications of my presentation with the overall head of the grant program nationwide and one of the pioneering figures in expert systems. It turned out that his group was moving away from having computers imitate human heuristic knowledge toward more reliance on what computers are best at: manipulating numerical information via quantitative algorithms.

While I did some work on a pediatric cardiology expert system, I spent most of my time as a postdoc doing knowledge engineering on two other projects. One was a system for designing so-called fractional factorial experiments, where the domain expert was a statistics professor in the business school. The other was a system for making credit decisions, the domain expert being a professional credit analyst in the insurance industry. In both cases, through conversation and observation, I was gradually able to identify the information the experts looked for in the “task domain” and the ways in which they used this information to render decisions. As had been the case in other domains, these experts used short-cuts and rules of thumb to compensate for human processing limitations. I put together alternative “inference engines” for both of these task domains, with decision-making processes predicated on the heavy number-crunching capacity of computers. I also went ahead and did the programming on both of these systems.

The results should have been predictable. Both the experimental design system and the credit rating system were excellent at performing their respective tasks. Where it was possible to evaluate their decisions in comparison with the “right” answers, the computer systems outperformed the human experts. The human experts acknowledged their machinic doubles’ excellence, even at times conceding their superiority. But they didn’t trust these hybrid expert systems, using their own human knowledge but processing it algorithmically rather than heuristically. They couldn’t understand how these systems thought, how they arrived at their decisions. The systems’ reasoning procedures, more efficient, more consistent, and arguably more accurate than their own, were too opaque, too alien for the human experts to grasp. I concluded that the only way systems like the ones I built would ever be used in real-world decision-making would be if the human experts weren’t sitting around looking over the expert systems’ shoulders second-guessing their decisions. You would need lower-level human technicians to feed the computer systems with data, to read the output, and to enact the systems’ decisions without constantly grousing about robots ruling the world and all the rest of the tedious all-too-human resentment my systems seemed to provoke.