New Genre Wednesdays: Polarspunk

 From Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future:

"I'll give it to you, if you want"

Van Lear was a coal town in Johnson County, Kentucky in the early part of the 20th century, belonging to the Consolidation Coal Company (now Consol Energy). James Ward's family moved to Van Lear in 1925 when he was four. He later became a miner himself.

James C. Ward interviewed by Glenna Graves, 1988, November 18. Interview by G. Graves. Appalachia: Family and Gender in the Coal Community Oral History Project. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington. 

Did you hear any of the women complaining about prices at the company store? Do you think they were fair?

I never did hear anything said about the prices. The thing is, they just didn't hardly have any money to buy it with. They'd go to the store, and if their husband that day had loaded some cars, some coal, and they'd been weighed, then he'd have some credit in the store. They'd send that word down. They'd come in. They had what you called scrip, you know, company money. And they'd go up to the window. 'Could I get two dollars?' 'I'll let you have one dollar, maybe.'

Are you saying a woman would go to the store, to buy bacon for instance, or coffee. To buy coffee. They couldn't just figure on getting coffee. They'd have to check to see that very day how much --

See if there was any credit in the store that day.

That seems so ... I would hate to go to Kroger's store, and before I start shopping, ask somebody how much my husband worked that day to see if I could get two boxes of Cheerios or one box of Cheerios. 

Well, that's what you did at the company store.

Day by day.

They'd go to the scrip office, and find out if they -- there's plenty of times they wouldn't be able to get a thing to eat. "There's no credit. He's not got any coal left." And so on. "There's no credit here." Lots of times, many times, plenty of times [inaudible] draw any money. They'd call -- what they call overdraft. They'd maybe leave owing the company something. They'd take out insurance, and what they call smithing. That's to sharpen their picks and augers, whether they need them sharpened that month or not, they'd still take the money out for it. [Inaudible]. You had to have your coal and everything, your Monabell, your shooting stuff, you bought --

What was that?

Monabell, they call it. That's what you shoot coal with. That was the old mining.

Like little bits of dynamite?

Like dynamite, same thing, except little.

Could you spell it? Monabell?

I found one of those old coins, that says 'Monabell' coins. I think I can find it for you in a few minutes. I'll get it for you. I'll give it to you, if you want. That's what you got to give to get the Monabell with. Sold you the sticks. Of course, a little later on, after I went to work, they didn't do so much of the hand loading. Some sections did, but then they were mostly starting with the machinery and mechanical loading.

But you're saying that half a shift's gone -- say it's noon. Half a shift's gone, and the check layman has picked a few checks off of coal cars. Say your coal car -- or say your dad's coal car. Somehow he'd report that down to the story at one o'clock, and your mom could go down there at one thirty, and she could only get the four hours worth, or the four loads of coal worth of groceries?

Well, whatever amount it added up to. Maybe not even get that much out of coal. Maybe those four car loads of coal -- [inaudible] might be but two or three dollars clear, maybe a couple dollars clear. You know, maybe not even that. Maybe he already owed for it, when you take out for all the different overheads, you know, you might say.

So a smithy overhead, even though a person's auger tools might not need it done?

Might not need sharpening that ...

Couldn't a miner sharpen his own tools anyway?

Yep. You still had to pay for it. They'd treat you just the same. My dad did do that. We had a blacksmith's shop, my dad sharpened his own tools.

[Recording interrupted]

You're saying your dad had a blacksmith's shop, and would sharpen tools for other people. Would he charge other people?

No, he didn't charge them. He would do a good job. In other words, he could sharpen these augers [inaudible] the coal with them. Seemed like the [mine's] blacksmiths really didn't care or wasn't very good at it. It'd be hard -- they wouldn't sharpen them with the right turn, they wouldn't cut the coal real good.

You mean the company one, blacksmiths?

Uh-huh. He'd sharpen a lot of fella's augers just as friendship. Out of friendship for them. He was good at it, he could make them good.

Now he's a miner, living in a town, but he has hogs on the hill and --

No, we had the hogs on out of the corporation now. We couldn't have them inside the corporation.

Oh.

But the corporation reached right down here, the town did. We had a cousin. My cousin lived on down there, so we could raise hogs down on his property. But we did have cattle. We had cows.

In the corporation land?

Uh-huh.

And the blacksmith place -- I know it wasn't a shop, it couldn't be a big shop.

A little room in a barn. [Inaudible] He had the tools and so forth.

Now that's a favor, sharpening somebody's augers and stuff. Did anybody in town do any kind of favor for him in turn?

Not that I ever remember. 

But if somebody mining a lot of coal, and not well off, but maybe comfortable, would he maybe take a little money to sharpen their auger?

I never did know him charging any money to sharpen his auger. I never did.

Science Fiction, Technology, Technoscience, Innovation: Some Quotations

Percy Bysshe Shelley, preface to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818):

[...] the novelty of the situations which it develops, and however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield [...]

Félix Bodin, preface to Novel of the Future (1834):

Si jamais quelqu’un réussit à faire le roman, l’épopée de l’avenir, il aura puisé à une vaste source de merveilleux et d’un merveilleux tout vraisemblable, s’il se peut dire, qui enorgueillira la raison au lieu de la choquer ou de la ravaler comme l’ont fait toutes les machines à merveilleux épique, qu’il a été convenu de mettre en jeu jusqu’à présent. En offrant la perfectibilité sous la forme pittoresque, narrative et dramatique, il aura trouvé un moyen de saisir, de remuer les imaginations, et de hâter les progrès de l’humanité, bien autrement puissant que les meilleurs exposés de systèmes, fussent-ils présentés avec la plus haute éloquence. 

If ever anyone succeeds in creating the novel, the epic of the future, he will have tapped a vast source of the marvelous, and of a marvelous entirely in accord with verisimilitude [...] which will dignify reason instead of shocking or deprecating it as all the marvelous epic machinery conventionally employed up to now has done. In suggesting perfectibility through a narrative and dramatic picturesque form, he will have found a method of seizing, of moving the imagination, and of hastening the progress of humanity in a manner very much more effective than the best expositions of systems presented with even the highest eloquence.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. 

Joseph Brodsky:

By its fullness, the future is propaganda.

Walter Benjamin, "On Scheebart" (written 1940-ish; in Selected Writings 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott):

Scheerbart's great discovery was that the stars could be used to plead the cause of creation before an audience of humans. He had already used the voices of animals to plead this cause. The fact that a poet is enlisting heavenly bodies to speak on behalf of creation bears witness to a very powerful emotion.

Herbert Marcuse, 'Karl Popper and the Problem of Historical Laws' (1972):

Moreover, ideas and efforts which once were 'Utopian' have been playing an increasingly decisive part in the conquest of nature and society, and there is awareness of the tremendous forces which may be released and utilized through the encouragement of 'Utopian' thought. In the Soviet Union, science fiction writers are being taken to task for lagging behind science in their dreams and phantasies and they are told to 'get their imagination off the ground' (New York Times, 9 July 1958). Political interest in maintaining the status quo rather than logical or scientific impossibility today makes real possibilities appear as Utopian. 

Don Ihde, Existential Technics (1983):

Only now interpretation of a text across past temporal distance cannot remain the only direction for contemporary hermeneutics. It must also turn to the 'possible worlds' of the future. Such an exploration in a radical sense, of the imaginative hopes and possibilities of humankind -- and particularly those becoming horizontal in technological society -- is called for as a prospect for hermeneutics. I am calling for not only interpretation across the past, but across the future, in which one concrete and necessary task is the 'science fiction' of a possible hermeneutic. In short, the projective hermeneutics is one which looks at 'texts' across possible futures, the futures made available in technological culture.

Sheila Jasanoff, Science and Public Reason:

To facilitate the commercialization of biotechnology, the United States, and the European Community and several of its member states, adopted laws and regulations to control not only laboratory research with genetically engineered organisms but also their purposeful release into the environment. [...] Risks that once were considered speculative and wholly unmanageable [...]  came to be regarded as amenable to rational assessment in accordance with sound scientific principles. Apocalyptic visions and the rhetoric of science fi ction yielded to the weightier discourse of expert advice and bureaucratic practice. The research community coalesced to persuade the public that the risks of biotechnology could be assessed in a reasonable way and that earlier fears of ecological disaster were mostly unfounded.  

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':

Technological innovation often follows on the heels of science fiction, lagging authorial imagination by decades or longer.

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Imagined and Invented Worlds':

Imaginaries, as we have argued throughout this volume, occupy a hybrid zone between the mental and the material, between individual free will and group habitus (Bourdieu 1990), between the fertility of ideas and the fixity of things. Most importantly, however, sociotechnical imaginaries can become integrated into the discourses and practices of governance, and thereby structure the life worlds of larger groups, including entire nations and even transnational communities.

[...]

Science fiction, I suggested in the introduction, is a repository of sociotechnical imaginaries, visions that integrate futures of growing knowledge and technological mastery with normative assessments of what such futures could and should mean for present-day societies. Utopic or dystopic, these fictions underscore the self-evident truth that technologically enabled futures are also value-laden futures. Science fiction stories express fears and yearnings that are rooted in current discontents, either signaling possible escape routes or painting in morbid colors the horrific consequences of heedlessness in the present. They thus offer a deeper look into-possibly even predictions of-what harms societies are most desperate to avoid and what good they may achieve through foresight and imagination [...]

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time III (2010):

We have been considering adoption as a process of protean interiorization by which I can affectively adopt/interiorize a cat, a child, a father, or in a moral sense a maxim, religiously a belief, technically a tool, socially a lifestyle, politically an idea of a We, epistemologically the understanding of a rule-adopting/interiorizing here means exteriorizing: my emotional affect, my moral behavior, my religious practices, my technical gestures, my way of life, my convictions, my actions, the carrying out of a rule as the concept synthesizing a diversity. 

Becoming is not future, I might say with regard to the question of adoption, which is also necessarily fabulation. This means that adoption is not adaptation, since it is invention. An adoption without invention is the failure and the enticement that engenders deception and malaise, as reactions compensating for a flawed action. 

The fact of becoming is today essentially a technological fact. In the human domain, becoming always has something to do with the technical fact that preceded genetic origins of humankind, and that is in fact as old as the cosmos. If it is true that becoming consists of a group of changing states linked by cause/effect relationships, there can hardly be any doubt that the totality of these sensory changes defined as "beings we are ourselves" is today largely and manifestly determined by changing technological states. If the to-come is not the future, there is no future without the to-come, but there is a to-come without future. 

The to-come without future is called the mechanical; the confusion of to-come and future is called the mechanism. 

The to-come, which is today in its broadest tendencies the fact of technology, is subsumed to technoscience as an activity conceiving, in an ever-narrowing relationship with marketing, the evolution of technology-while submitting to the systematic dimensions of technology as they emerge from a technical system as it becomes mnemotechnical. 

This to-come is what today is not being thought, not only because technics, as the dynamic process of individuation, is still largely ignored (despite the work from which Technics and Time, I and 2 tries to draw lessons), but because technoscience itself is not it, even while it is an instance of the effective implementation of retentional criteria. 

This un-thought is not un-identified in the sense in which something forgotten is not thought: it is largely thought and felt to be unthinkable, and this is why as such it forms the very core of the anguish of malaise, closing perspectives to knowledge while enclosing them within the agitated know-how of a badly thought technology. The opposition between technology and subjectivity still today inhabits the banal framework in which anguish and malaise are expressed in the form of increasingly invasive and anguished chatter. It can only be thought beyond, passing by Husserl and Heidegger in their difficult relationship to Kant, while coming slowly back to us through Nietzsche. In "subjectivity," we must come to understand-beyond representation as conceived since Descartes and beyond the banal, poor opposition to objectivity that must be transcended-the will to which we hold beyond this subjectivity. 

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time III:

Technics has not found its role in the metaphysical cinema: it does not exist, as such, in any rigorous sense; it is nothing more than a correlative of theoretical philosophy. [...] But today it has become inconceivable not to take actions with quite revolutionary consequences (in the sense of the "Copernican Revolution") as a result of the fact that science, formerly the domain of pure theoretical reason, now having become technoscience, calls out daily for "practical" outcomes (in the Kantian-that is, moral-sense): its porosity between theory and practice is perpetually mcreasmg. 

It nonetheless remains entirely unthought. 

Is it possible, then, to ignore the fact that technoscience is also the means by which science becomes science fiction, i.e., becomes a cinema, a science bursting with images, models, and simulations that have become real-we might call them chimaeras--ontological lures that must also be perceived through doxa as teratological and diabolical realities? This question of the devil, of chimaeras, and of science fiction is all the more pressing in that it is also the question-and its desired response-of the industrialization of tertiary retentions in the culture industry's production of symbols.

John Locke:

For should the Soul of a Prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the Prince’s past Life, enter and inform the Body of a Cobler, as soon as deserted by his own Soul, every one sees, he would be the same Person with the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s Actions: But who would say it was the same Man?

Avital Ronell, The Test Drive:

If Nietzsche had discovered something like the essence of a future science, it may well be the case that exposed itself to him in the way great discoveries are made, namely, when thought 'catches it in flight without really knowing what it has caught' [...] In other words, Nietzsche continually offers a model for cognition that cannot simply account for itself or maintain its results within the assumed certitudes of a controlled system of knowledge.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun:

Cyberspace as disembodied representation rehearses themes of Oriental exoticism and Western penetration. [...] Cyberspace opens up, flowers for him -- a "fluid neon origami trick."

Langdon Winner:

But the failure of technocracy in one definition -- the definition suggested by the theory of elites -- does not mean that the power and position of technically trained persons in political life ceases to be a problem. That there is apparently little solidarity or common purpose among such persons does not in itself speak to the issues raised above about participation, representation, or limited government . It merely denies one possibly way that technology and political power might be connected. The elite conception of technocracy is, it seems to me, a good example of a case in which "a picture held us captive." [...] The idea here is that of a cohesive group based on the knowledge it holds rising to power and authority. in science fiction and political theory both, there is a tendency to dramatize the upward thrust, hence the titles "new brahmins," "new mandarins," "new priesthood," and "new utopians." And if one sees society in terms of strata or class levels, the strongest being on "top" and the weakest at the "bottom," then one begins to expect that those who hold new social power will move "upward" and like mountain climbers at the top of Everest be somehow visible up there [...]

John W. Campbell, 'Non-Escape Literature,' editorial in Astounding (Feb 1959):

It happens that science fiction's core is just about the only non-escape literature available to the general public today [...]

E.M., 'Preface' to The Man in the Moone (1638):

To the Ingenious Reader. Thou hast here an essay of Fancy, where Invention is shewed with Judgment. It was not the Author’s intention (I presume) to discourse thee into a beliefe of each particular circumstance. Tis fit thou allow him a liberty of conceite where thou takest to thy selfe a liberty of judgment. In substance thou hast here a new discovery of a new world, which perchance may finde little better entertainment in thy opinion, than that of Columbus at first, in the esteeme of all men. Yet his then but poore espiall of America, betray’d unto knowledge soe much as hath since encreast into a vast plantation. And the then unknowne, to be now of as large extent as all other the knowne world. That there should be Antipodes was once thought as great a Paradox as now that the Moon should bee habitable. But the knowledge of this may seeme more properly reserv’d for this our discovering age: In which our Galilaeusses, can by advantage of their spectacles gaze the Sunne into spots, & descry mountaines in the Moon. But this, and more in the ensuing discourse I leave to thy candid censure, & the faithful relation of the little eye-witnesse, our great discoverer.

Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, Fighting Theory: 

Science, in brief, enfolds at once the scientific method, natural philosophy, and the work of poetry. It invents an ever-surprising relation to the world. Sometimes literature itself finds a new stylistic figure for which science then goes on to get a patent.

Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, Fighting Theory: 

William Gibson, who writes cyber-punk novels, invented virtual reality. It's now a tool of warfare in addition to its other qualities and uses, but this invention first appeared in science fiction. Although this may seem bizarre and very 'American' to the French, we have to recognize that science fiction has been the site of considerable inventions; the fiction, literature, cinema,, and poetry of the scientific method are imagined before our eyes, as in the film classics The Matrix or Total Recall, where mutants appear and stake out their territories. Science, for the most part, now goes it alone, often subordinated to the destructive needs of war, of institutionalized hostilities. Nietzsche reminds us that science was connected, in the beginning, to astrologers, sorcerers, and music, and so science, when it still belonged to the realm of the imaginary, made promises, and it promised too much. In astrology there is an excess of promise, a hypercomprehension that always surpasses the knowledge base from which it stems.

Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, Fighting Theory: 

When science was not yet working for corporations, governments, states, it knew how to inflate the rhetoric of promise, and this was very important for our Dasein, according to Nietzsche -- he doesn't yet say Dasein, but he's almost there. 

Hannah Arendt, 'The Archimedean Point':

Moreover, the enormous technological consequences which finally gave testimony to the immense power increase of men in the modern age were predicted by no one, neither by the scientists themselves -- who even today, I am told -- still have an inclination to look down upon engineers as mere plumbers -- nor by the historians. (The only predictions came from people like Jules Verne, that is, the predecessors of science fiction.) But, if anyone else should have predicted them, or should have foreseen them, is it not likely that he would have concluded that the increase in human power would be accompanied by an increase in the stature and the pride of man? This, however, has not been the case.

Paul Virilio:

As we knew already, speed is the old age of the World.

The Mountain Goats:

New dreams for the Rat Queen!

The Mountain Goats: 

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow [...]

Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency:

[...] in the spirit of eschatology one may ask: Is this completion of humanity a revelation or a catastrophic becoming? We are asking this question, as most of the sci-fi movies do, since we are living in an epoch of technological uncertainty and instability. Cybernetics, the accomplishment of metaphysics, is the force unifying 'humanity' through globalization and neocolonization. In other words, we can use the vocabulary of Gestalt fpsychology in claiming that technology becomes the ground instead of the figure. The noosphere becomes the most dominating sphere on earth, overriding the biosphere. [...] Any future philosophy that ignores the question of system is fundamentally deficient.

Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (1985):

[...] there mere knowledge of possibilities, though certainly insufficient for cogent prediction, is fully adequate for the purposes of a heuristic casuistry that is to help in the spotting of ethical principles [...] [In a thought experiment, the perceived possibility] can now take the place of the actual occasion; and reflection on the possible, fully unfolded in the imagination, gives access to new moral truth. But this truth belongs to the sphere of ideas, that is, it is just as much a matter of philosophical knowledge as is the truth of that grounding first principle we have yet to supply. Accordingly, its certainty is not dependent upon the degree of certainty of the factual, scientific projections which provided paradigmatic material for it. Whatever the ultimate accreditation for this kind of truth -- be it the self-evidence of reason, an a priori of faith, or a metaphysical decision of the will -- its pronouncements are apodictic, whereas those of the hypothetical thought experiments can at best be probabilistic. This is enough where they are meant to serve not as proofs but as illustrations. What is here contemplated, therefore, is a casuistry of the imagination which, unlike the customary casuistries of law and morality that serve the trying out of principles already known, assists in the tracking and discovering of principles still unknown. The serious side of science fiction lies precisely in its performing such well-informed thought experiments, whose vivid imaginary results may assume the heuristic function here proposed. 

Ella Parker, Compact #1, March 1963:

After much thought I decided to come out into the open and approach the Housing Manager, what an imposing title that is. I went into some detail about what I’d been told by one of his men, and please, is it true? I really piled on the agony. I found it an absorbing hobby, which I do, but I neglected to tell him of the life of ease I oould enjoy if he really did forbid me to continue publishing, he wrote back, asking what kind of equipment I had; he assumed I used the usual type home printing apparatus, and, please, could he have a copy of my magazine to show at a council meeting when they discussed my case? I did some soul searching, I can tell you. I toyed with the idea of letting him assume what he liked, in case he should disapprove of what I was actually using and with-hold his permission, but, clear thinking won the day. If I lied, and later there were complaints about the noise, they could, and would be justified, in chucking us out of the flat. I didn’t want this to happen, as those of you who have visited the old. Pen will understand. I told him the truth, that I have an electric Gestetner, I also sent him a copy of ORION #28. I heard nothing more for months.

Bishop John Wilkins: 

And here, one that had a strong fancy, were better able to set forth the great benefit and pleasure to be had by such a journey. And that whether you consider the strangeness of the persons, language, arts, policy, religion of those inhabitants, together with the new traffique that might be brought thence. In briefe, doe but consider the pleasure and profit, of those later discoveries in America, and wee must needs conclude this to be inconceiveably beyond it. 

David Russen:

But the Title that the Translator gives it (when he calls it a Comical History) seems to be too full of Levity, and unbecoming that Gravity which a Treatise of so serious matter doth require. For though it be interlaced with much Matter of Mirth, Wit and Invention, of things even doubtful, or meerly feigned, and so in some sense may be ranked with Sir Thomas Moor’s Utopia, Don Quixot’s Romantick Whymseys, or Poor Robin’s Description of Lubbardland; yet it is throughout carried on with that strength of Argument, force of Reason, and solidity of Judgment in the Demonstration of things probable, that it may not be unbecoming the Gravity of Cato, the Seriousness of Seneca, or the Strictness of the most rigid Peripatetick or Cartesian; and instead of Comical, may deserve the Epithete of the most Rational History of the Government of the Moon.

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':

Belying the label "science fiction," however, works in this genre are also fabulations of social worlds, both utopic and dystopic. Shelley's lab-generated monster turns murderous because he is excluded from society by his abnormal birth and hence is denied the blessings of companionship and social life enjoyed by his creator. Jules Verne's Nemo, a dispossessed Indian prince driven by hatred of the British colonialists who exploited his land and destroyed his family, seeks freedom and scientific enlightenment in the ocean depths. Biopower runs amok in Aldous Huxley's imagined world, overwhelming human dignity and autonomy in the name of collective needs under authoritarian rule. Equally concerned with the interplay of social and material innovation, but reversing the emotional gears, Edward Bellamy's look backward from an imagined 2000 offers, first, an optimistic account of a new social order and only secondarily a foray into technological unknowns. And as a dystopic counterpoint, George Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a world of totalitarian thought control overseen by a technologically advanced, all-seeing, all-knowing, 24/7 surveillance state-whose real-life counterpart Edward Snowden, the whistleblowing, twenty-first-century American contractor, famously revealed in the US National Security Agency. Oddly, though, many nonfictional accounts of how technology develops still treat the material apart from the social, as if the design of tools and machines, cars and computers, pharmaceutical drugs and nuclear weapons were not in constant interplay with the social arrangements that inspire and sustain their production.

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':

Bringing social thickness and complexity back into the appreciation of technological systems has been a central aim of the field of science and technology studies (STS). Historians and social analysts of technology have worked in tandem to remind us that there can be no machines without humans to make them and powerful institutions to decide which technologies are worth our investment (Winner 1986). This literature resists the temptation to construe technology as deterministic. STS scholars tend to bristle at the evolutionary economist's language of strict path dependence (David 1985; Arthur 1994). STS accounts recognize that history matters, as indeed it must, but reject the notion of rigid lock-ins in favor of a more open sense of agency and contingency in society's charting of technological possibilities. Many aspects of the presenting face of technological systems are socially constructed (Bijker et al. 1987). The stamp of conscious or unconscious human choice and user preference marks the design of objects, their weighting of risks and benefits, and the behaviors they encourage, exclude, or seek to regulate (Calion 1987; Jasanoff 2006). Less frequently encountered in the STS literature, however, are conceptual frameworks that situate technologies within the integrated material, moral, and social landscapes that science fiction offers up in such abundance. To be sure, the normative dimensions of science and technology do not fall wholly outside the scope of STS analysis. STS scholarship acknowledges that science and technology do not unidirectionally shape our values and norms. Rather, and symmetrically, our sense of how we ought to organize and govern ourselves profoundly influences what we make of nature, society, and the "real world."

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Restoring reason: Causal narratives and political culture'

The tragic open-endedness of the Bhopal case so many years later speaks to features of public knowledge making in India that we will return to later in this chapter. For now, let us flag chiefly the lack of anything approaching a defi nitive epistemological resolution: a time and place when all the major participants came together to agree on a common understanding of what had actually happened and what should be done on the basis of that shared knowledge. In the absence of such a moment of truth, multiple narratives of responsibility and blame continue to fl ourish in Bhopal, on the look-out for new external audiences or events to legitimate them. Yet this very lack of resolution can be seen as a form of learning – not the kind that necessarily leads to regulatory change or institutional reform, though both did happen in the disaster’s wake (Jasanoff 1994), but rather the kind that, through its very incompleteness, reveals the impossibility of taming a cataclysmic event through necessarily imperfect managerial solutions. The open-endedness of learning at Bhopal offers in this sense its own redemption, by negating the possibility of forgetfulness.

[...]

Learning from disaster emerges out of these stories as a complex, ambiguous process – conditioned by culture, yet not easily forced into univocal, totalizing, national narratives. It is in the raggedness of accounting for tragic experience that the possibility of cultural reinvention ultimately resides.

Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature:

In the environmental arena, both fact and fiction lent credence to worries about human error and lack of foresight.

Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature:

If Frankenstein played on primal fears of supplanting divine order with man’s imperfect understanding, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World broached themes more suited to the midcentury’s secular, totalitarian experiments. This was a world of graded, standardized, and denatured human beings, manufactured like the orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasies to meet the needs of an all-powerful state. Turned into instruments of others’ interest, people were deprived of uniqueness, autonomy, and free will. Yet the eugenic ideas that found nightmarish expression in Huxley’s novel were enthusiastically embraced by Western progressives and intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Just five years before the publication of Brave New World, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a giant of American jurisprudence, wrote in Buck v. Bell: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” [...] Eugenic theories motivated the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which discriminated against Jews and people of southern Mediterranean origin. Not until the excesses of Nazi eugenics, culminating in the Holocaust, were these ideas substantially discredited as a basis for policy. [...] Indeed, in socialist Sweden, a forty-year program of forced sterilization based on eugenic principles ended only in 1976. Meanwhile, seemingly untouched by the Nazi experience, U.S. biomedical researchers’ desire for knowledge ran ahead of ethical concerns for the protection of human subjects right into the 1960s.

Paul Feyerabend, Putnam on Incommensurability:

English does not cease to be English when new words are introduced or old words given a new sense. Every philologist, anthropologist, sociologist who presents an archaic (primitive, exotic, etc.) world view, every popular science writer who wants to explain unusual scientific ideas in ordinary English, every surrealist, dadaist, teller of fairy tales, ghost stories, science fiction novels, every translator of the poetry of different ages and nations knows how first to construct, out of English words, an English sounding model of the pattern of usage he needs and then to adopt the pattern and to 'speak' it. [...] I should add that incommensurability is a difficulty for philosophers, not for scientists. Philosophers insist on stability of meaning throughout an argument while scientists, being aware that 'speaking a language or explaining a situation means both following rules and changing them' [...] are experts in the art of arguing across lines some philosophers regard as insuperable boundaries of discourse. 

Stretchers #19: I Can I Did Candid

This is a piece I wrote for Hilson Hilson: The Poetry of Jeff Hilson (Crater, 2020), edited by Richard Parker. It is mostly about a poem in Jeff's book Stretchers (Reality Street, 2006), and also a bit about Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House, 2017).

 

Stretchers #19: I Can I Did Candid

“As a poet, I knew to be gentle.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’
“Show the ferret to the egg.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’

I.

 
Imagine we’re off swimming in the river or, even better, down by the creek.

 
Now imagine today everybody wants to be a good egg, with infinite wanting. So if you shout, “Last one in’s a good egg!” exactly zero of us get in. We sort of start Zeno’s paradoxing into our Speedos etc. One wants the others to enter the water earlier than oneself so that, heh heh heh, one can be that egg.

 
So in this way “Last one in’s a good egg!” could be a good example of perverse incentive design. Or it might just be deceptive incentive design: it strongly seems to be trying to do something, and that very seeming is what makes it do something else.

 
But then, at the other extreme, imagine the more familiar scenario, a day of broad consensus that being a rotten egg is as bad as it gets. On such a day, a single yell of “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” and in we all splash, not so much as stopping to take off our socks and shoes. So that’s good, transparent incentive design, even if the results are again quite homogenous across the group. More about our socks and shoes in a moment. What we see in both examples is the power of naming, or more specifically the power of labelling within a hierarchy, to steer action and shape subjectivity. As the poet Timothy Thornton writes:

eggs haribo
eggs boxset
eggs poirot
eggs amagansett

eggs powerful
eggs underfunded
eggs sporcle
eggs countermanded 

(Facebook post, 15 April 2020)

It’s probably this power of naming that tempts poets to cultivate wriggly, creaturely poems that seem to perhaps articulate forms of social organisation different to those the poets have experienced and, in some sense, different to those they can imagine. What if instead of (say) laws or economies or bureaucracies, we had sonnets or stretchers?

The thing is, between these idealised extremes of infinite appetite and infinite aversion, there stretches a vast possibility space of diverse leaderboards (and leaderlessboards) where diverse armoured and storied embryos vye to define us, shape us, steer us, and bring us together while also keeping us apart. “Third one in’s an eggs toxteth,” etc. “Penultimate one in’s an eggs liar’s paradox,” etc. I think most of these floating ascriptions have a quality that first two earlier examples don’t have. These ones filter and sort. In a very basic model, they filter according to a pre-existing distribution of desire and aversion, merely revealed in our response to the yell. We discover in what proportions each of us wishes to be or to not be which egg. In a more nuanced model, albeit with the energy of neoclassical economics, these ascriptions filter first on that basis, and then on the basis of revised desire and aversion reflecting the various skinny-dippers’ updated theories about one another’s mental states and intentions, and then again, and then again, and so on, probably accommodating ‘strategic’ action, and probably converging on various Splash equilibria. I’m not sure yet, but I think you could probably rig a Turing machine out of skinny-dippers moving to and fro hesitantly, craftily, hungrily, imploringly at the edge of the limpid plunge-pool in strategic search of their preferred egg statuses, implying that with enough time and energy you could run an entire universe filled with conscious life by shouting just the right set of egg opportunities, say, “4th one in is a rotten egg, 3rd one in is a good egg, 6.022×1023th one in is an egg amagansett!” etc. to just the right gang, just the right that one summer that seemed to last forever. Eggs nihilo: something comes from nothing when it is egged on. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch though.

Jaden: “I don't got the time to put you on the stretcher (stretcher) I am here and I'm still flexing (flexing).”

Another way of labelling the same topic is the governance of the commons. The diversification and spread of digital social architectures in the 2000s and 2010s has probably both enriched but also colonised the social imaginary of the governance of the commons -- the recipes Marx scorned to write because, as he perpetually pointed out, he didn’t yet even know about microwave ovens or for example activated charcoal -- or at least it has colonised the more abstract, ethereal regions of that imaginary. In the simplest version, you just add “social” or “networked” or “crowd” to some older aspiration. Let’s simply crowdseize the means of production, etc. Crowdone in’s a crowdegg. Uber, Twitter, and all the virtual valorisation machines of the internet are still very much capital, capital more human than ever in its capacity to absorb and co-ordinate human and more-than-human investments of affect and cognition, in its capacity to twist a buncha-jewels-inna-bucket like it’s a kaleidoscope of crystalline personality godhead, or in other words, its capacity to make Wogan economies out of Wonga economies. The evolving interest in virality and permutability of several of Jeff Hilson’s Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House 2017) is inflected by the voice of specifically digital algorithmic curation and suggestion. So the recommendation “You might like” becomes “You might liken” or “You might not liken,” spreading across the page like the proliferation and crumbling of fungi and algae / cyanobacteria symbiotic composite organisms, like likens. Similarly, ‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ is a witchy eco-poem, a little redolent of Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via: 48 Dante Variations,’ and an extended meditation on Google’s “did you mean to search for.” That said, I don’t really think it is Google’s “did you mean to search for”: it’s a broader exploration of the concept of being asked if you meant to want what you did not quite manage to want. Part of what is exciting about these poems is that they often manage to not be about the internet at all.

… & on the twenty sixth day I was up with the lark to root out the scottish dock I didnt find it instead I found a red star thistle I rubbed myself with which withered me to a stalk & on the twenty seventh day ...

‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ 

I was searching for an egg and “I didnt find it.” There isn’t actually an egg in Stretchers poem number nineteen, ‘... smile your in candid trench,’ but there is an eggs conspicuously missing. The line in ‘... smile your in candid trench’ is “the last one in is a thistle.” One of the ways that Stretchers often feels sort of curiously generous and inclusive is that even when it leaves things out, it keeps them in. The ‘correct’ versions of the idioms, proverbs, collocations, scraps of nursery rhyme etc. faintly accompany their morphed and mutated versions. These unspoken words can be sinister presences too. The egg is missing, and so is the shell: “I’ve some blonde / bombs” implies the word “bombshell” and puts into interplay the objectification of femme bodies with the objectification of the enemy, the target to be neutralised. And the poem begins “smile your in candid trench”: it begins, in other words, not only with a warzone, but with a hidden “camera.” The candid trench could well be the stretcher itself. And of course a camera and a stanza share the etymological metaphor of being a room, perhaps a room stretched to capacity.

This failure-to-appear also appears in later writing. The Incredible String Band are a British psychedelic folk band formed by Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron in Edinburgh in 1966. In Latanoprost Variations, what is missing from the title of ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’ is ‘String Band.’ It is obviously a poem about how music can, like a room, bring people together. Music brings people together, for example, in the sort of somatic or subter-songfulness of language and of all semantic interaction; in dancing; in a kind of affective commoning where we mosh and/or emosh together in tandem; in dismissive, gatekeeping interactions like “Oh, you say love your daughter? Name her first four albums”; and in Spotify’s recommendations and the broader patterns of digital persuasion architecture and surveillance capitalism in which they participate. It is a poem, in other words, like a lot of Jeff Hilson’s poems, interested in how societies (or assemblages or networks or bands of individuals or dividuals) are put together or how they might be put together. If we read it as a utopian poem, then the “incredible strings” become the amazing and currently slightly implausible linkages that bind together utopian society. String Theory helps these implied ligatures to feel vaguely angelic and ectoplasmic. But these incredible strings are not there, they are only implied, they do not make us a band, we did not form a band. “I didnt find it.”

Instead, there is the word ‘Canterbury’: maybe recalling the Knight, Squire, Franklin, Summoner, Pardoner, Manciple, Canon et al. of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while the invisibility of ‘String Band’ also allows an implied ‘Shrinking Man’ to scuttle in or ‘Hulk’ to smash in, along with the superhero genre generally, and its often flamboyant celebration of well-divided labour: cf. e.g. Marvel’s Eggs-Men, this one scrambles brainwaves, this one fries you alive, etc. In this poem the gesture toward an estranged or detourned or evolved or utopian together-yet-apartness is (I think) quite a broad gestural sweep. Think of buying a song as a 1 and not buying a song as a 0. Given enough time and energy, and an immortal listener, I think you could run an entire universe filled with conscious life on a Spotify playlist equipped with just the right recommendations algorithm.

if you liken the incredible string band try hatfield and the north you listened to aphex twins heres an album you might not liken you listened to supertramp and kate bush you might not liken this song you listened to swell maps this week liken to try the wilde flowers?

(‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’)

Egging your MP is like detonating a small material symbol of a bomb. It activates associations of assassination. It also activates associations of what Chantal Mouffe, back in the days of high third way neoliberalism, quite reasonably theorised as agonistic democracy, politics as a real fight with real stakes but with the violence magicked away. But whether you’re shouting “Fuck you, here, the egg” or “Seventh one in is an eggs candid” or “Third one in is an eggs floaters,” or whether you are shouting, “The first tranche of pool-divers are gold eggs, the second are silver eggs, and the third are bronze eggs,” the cultural form of the hierarchy will never be a neutral frame, but always an active agent. In other words, earlier on I had to clarify that in our made-up scenario, everybody actually wanted to be a good egg. That’s because if you just shouted, “Last one in’s a good egg!” where norms of individualist striving prevail, the meaning of “last one” would overwhelm the meaning of “good egg,” and everyone would assume eggs good were the new eggs anathema. Nice eggs finish last. 

And on the other hand, if you just shouted “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” where norms of solidarity prevail, the meaning of “last one” would probably overwhelm the meaning of “rotten egg,” with everyone assuming eggs rotten were the new eggs non-contributory assistance. And again, it’s in the middle territory stretching between these two idealisations where the precise force of the hierarchy (or leaderboard, procession, parade, queue, race, or something else) is various and probably unpredictable. It is somewhere in that vast stretch where you get the weird forms of commons governance suitable to the leavings of advanced industrial colonial capitalism, the weird forms of equity that are not just inert negations of hierarchy, which are not just “horizontal organization” that are really the same old vertical hierarchies lying on stretchers. Where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and stuff like that.

II.  

When you say someone is a ‘terrible liar,’ it can be a sort of autoantonym, meaning two distinct somewhat opposite things. The worst liars are often the best liars. There is an essay at the back of Stretchers (Reality Street 2006), “Why I Wrote Stretchers,” that talks about that title Stretchers. The preoccupation with virality and the fractal is here too. “Each stretcher tells a story and each story contains many other stories.” But do they really tell stories? Or is this a lie? Are some of them just nonsense? A stretcher is where you lie when you are hurt. It’s that old paradox: how far can you trust a liar sharing their lying practice?

Maybe what is less well acknowledged is how leaky and spready that Liar’s Paradox is. Everything that is said about lying is a bit suspect, because whoever is saying it is thinking about lying. And is there a kind of listening, adjacent to misinterpretation, that can also generate lies? If so then everything that is said about lying is doubly suspect, because whoever is listening is thinking about lying. Stretching and lying strongly imply yoga. Also, utopia: the thing the genre (if that’s what it is) has been stuck on since More’s Utopia is the enclave form. Who’s the last one in before the gate slams? Who is outside? The ones who walk away, the ones who were not born in time, the ones who would tear it to shreds, etc.? The sleeper woken, the time traveller? What makes any utopia better than a billionaire’s gated climate fastness? Is utopia constitutively stretched, always managing to include more than it reasonably should? The title of Stretchers comes from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

A bit of a stretch. Entertaining ideas just over the edge of feasibility. Allowing things to work that shouldn’t or don’t really. Epistemologically, there may be an “OK just this once” aspect to anything that is a bit of a stretch: let it slide, but don’t update your deeper convictions on the basis of what just slid by. Don’t learn from it. When you stretch a piece of fabric, sometimes you control its translucency. If there are words or imagery printed on it, they may mingle with the imagery of the world below. Stretching an image can also reveal an infrastructure of threads, a sort of secret lattice or honeycomb shape bound together with the shape of the ink.

There is an experiment you can do where you hold your fingers in front of your face, and then keeping your gaze fixed forward, gradually draw your fingers apart. Eventually you’ll come to a point where your fingers are in the ‘shadows’ and you’re not sure if you can see them or not. Or, you can see them, but what you can see isn’t the sort of phenomenon that stereotypically characterises the constituents of vision. Or they are neither “in” or “out” of the enclave of your visual field. Bataille writes in The Story of the Egg, “She played gaily with words, speaking about breaking eggs, and then breaking eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.” In Dublin in 2008, a woman named Ann Dooley was blinded in one eye by an egg thrown by eighteen-year-old David Morgan. Before I got glasses, in order to bring distant objects into focus, I used to curl up my forefinger and look through the pinprick ‘lens,’ or more often just manually distort my eyeballs with my fingers. It was fine, we’ve all been brainwashed by Big Optometry. And when an eyeball is stretched wrong, the visual field degrades. There is an essay at the back of Latanoprost Variations, “On ‘Latanoprost Variations.’” Latanoprost is topical eye drop used to treat open-angle glaucoma. Glaucoma is becoming besieged by ‘shadows.’ They bunch around the periphery of your visual field and march inward. Latanoprost relieves pressure. “Latanoprost” was printed on a pen found by the poet under a bed. Something astonishing I’ve noticed is that darkness is literally not black. When I shut my eyes in the sun, of course I see a sort of taupe orange. But even in the middle of the night, I don’t think what fills my visual field can be described as blackness. It’s a flock of colour or colour-like qualia, and there is black, I think, but there is also at least as much silver and grey. We live in a world where darkness is literally not black.

Does ‘... smile your in candid trench’ tell a story that contains many other stories? It might be a time travel story. I am writing in 2020. A day ago Matt Hancock tweeted: “Thanks to the nation’s resolve, horseracing is back from Monday. Wonderful news for our wonderful sport.” A bit of a stretch. There are also questions of elasticity: that is, whether these poems unpinned from the page would snap back into another shape. If something has been stretched, energy was involved in deformation, and that energy may be stored in a specific pattern suitable to a specific agency. Winding a clock is just one familiar example. Anything can be interpreted in this way.

Sometimes stretching the truth can be boasting. Is poetry a kind of boasting? British people supposedly don’t like boasting. Walt Whitman contained multitudes: did ye aye? Then again, where’s the counterexample? Which people really say: “We love boasting, come round to ours and boast? Big boasters us.” The USA? Cape Verde, Egypt, Ghana, Iran, Mozambique? I kind of don’t think any do. If Stretchers are boasts, they are mostly very gentle and self-effacing boasts. More like the kind of naturally occurring boast when someone is very tired or drunk or high or just forgetful and they keep repeating themselves, and the repetition is actually a kind of odd (almost extra-linguistic) cognitive sharing, a kind of telepathy, insofar as it gives you a special kind of peek deep into their skull, behind many of the usually intervening layers of potential guile. Or like a toddler who runs into a room and shouts something strange. Or like when someone keeps repeating themselves. If a boast is a way of valuing yourself too highly, what is its ethical status within a system where value is systematically misascribed?

If it tells a story, it might be a time travel story, partly because I am writing about it after almost twenty years. Partly because it raises the possibility of disordered or reordered time with hysteron proteron, the rhetorical trope where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, as in “I put on my shoes and socks” or “I took off my socks and shoes.” How can the time traveler who visited utopia in a temporally disordered fashion avoid accusations of boastfulness upon their return? How can utopia be communicated through the particularity of any less-than-universal subjectivity? The rich man is the eye of the needle, and entry into heaven is as tricky as threading the needle through itself. And / or if everyone has to see for themselves, is the utopian economy heavily reliant on tourism? How’s the beach ecosystem? And / or, is it a poem about the kinds of things that can only ever be true retrospectively, that can never be true at the time? The poem is queer-gently gender-jiggling: “your it ling-boy who / fingered his walnut for sunny / delight.” In the game of tag, when you’re “it” you chase everybody. They fle from me that sometyme did, they fle from me that sometyme will me seke. When you are “it,” everyone who is “them,” who are they, he, she, etc., flee from you. Maybe you are the last one in before there is a first one in. Maybe you are the expletive subject, the “it” of “it’s raining.” If reality absolutely consistently fled shrieking from a vacuum, would it be indistinguishable from its flowing shrieking into that vacuum to fill it? Last one in is named, last one in is “it,” last one in doesn’t really exist. When a game of tag ends, and you were the last it, you feel weird about that.

The confessions of ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might unfold in a kind of peri-urban locus amoenus where eggs shy leap forward and lazily windmill arms and legs over Edenic plunge-pool-cum-thirst traps, clothing tugged funny, or else folded behind them on the rocks like gossamer idling on the wanton summer air and watched over by eggs brave. And / or ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might be a kind of pubescent sexual boast. This is one of the stretchers that first appeared in a chapbook in the early Naughties, the era of teen sex comedy box office dominance: There’s Something About Mary came out in 1998, and the second Stretchers chapbook itself fills the gap between American Pie 2 (2001) and American Wedding (2003). The American Pie franchise (continuing in 2020 with Girls Rules) springs from a virginity-losing pact of the hetero penetrative phallocentric kind: it’s a movie about “the last one in.” They are also movies about reasonable expectations of privacy being constantly confounded, about bodies brought shamefully into the light in ways that are somehow worse than anything the inspected figure could have possibly predicted, and yet not so bad. About becoming it, and it being fine.

The poem seems to end with a kind of biiig gesture toward polysemy, really a bit of a breakdown of meaning through multiplication of meaning. It is a candle burning at one fuse. Vowel variants are letters or pairs of letters that can make the same sound, and we’re told elsewhere that all mis-spellings in these poems are intentional. So here there’s a possibility here that every word is actually pronounced like a different word. Maybe “peel” is pronounced “pale,” and so on:

… vowel
& variants all frail peel them
like each other with our pen-
tricks move along or you
will lose it with that zee …

“[S]o shoot me” -- that’s what you say when you’ve done something bad, but not as bad as your interlocutor is making out. And/or to downplay something really bad you’ve done. The play on a photo shoot is elaborated throughout the poem: on the one hand, violence as epistemologically generative, producing knowledge and/or things to be known, and on the other hand, observation and image-making as violent processes. The trench of “smile your in candid trench,” especially so close to “some blonde / bombs” and “every good girl deserve,” could be read as public space transformed into a theatre of war by misogynist gaze, expectation, and imperative (“smile”). In camera: what a strange way to say in private. Later, “hop hop has lost his lean his / wife could eat no floaters” is a reference to an old rhyme about a gendered division of labour (and / or dietary requirements: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat / His wife could eat no lean, / But, together both, they licked the platter clean”), altered to remove his name as well as hers, and perhaps to include suggestions of ‘hopping to it,’ of the collapse of individualist “lean-in” feminism, and of an inability to flash the shit-eating grins, or to let daily microaggressions be water off a duck’s back, left behind in the workplace when you go home for the night (“splashing off / sallys night feathers”). “Sally” is one of those names that feels plucked from folklore. It suggests a little attack, of course: so “sallys” is again one of those femme military puns. But it’s also again about mutualistic swarming behaviours -- ways of being together -- and about the division of roles within collectives, insofar as mixed-species flocks often divide into sallying species and gleaning species.

Rivers, roads, trenches, are said to stretch, which is strange because they don’t. Could it be a kind of weird metonymy, insofar as what stretches is the person who goes from one end to the other? Stretches their legs, maybe, but stretches their self, definitely, the elastic distortion of the self at the origin to the self at the end. The poem’s interest in things being out of order could be understood as a provocation about lived experience, about how the legitimacy of any voice of lived experience, whether it is the self speaking to the self or the self speaking to others, is stretched and transformed by temporal distances from the experiences of which it speaks. XYZ. The “zee” is, within British English, the less likely, the less canonical, the surprise ending.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” you might shout, and then it’s you. One thing about “last one in is a” as a model of surveillance is that you’re not confident that anybody will actually be watching who the last one in is. Everybody will be in mid-air with arms and legs windmilling. “[L]ast one in is a” has the aura of the last evaluation before the revaluation of values, or the apocalypse. Not the Final Judgment, more like the opposite: the judgment that is made when it is too late for it to trigger any process. The very last time somebody pays for something with money. A moment later, through the membrane, they receive their purchase as a gift. The need to “move along” or you will “lose it with that zee” raises the idea of staying put too long, and getting cross, giving up on that surprise ending.

Is there such a thing as the ‘baseline avant-garde’? That statistically inevitable presence in whatever you are doing or experiencing of traces of things that will by sheer chance be more widespread and/or significant in the future. Maybe poets cling to that sheer surface or hammer things into it. What if these poems, lurking in the heart of a Liar’s Paradox, haven’t been stretched at all? What if they’ve been hammered dense? Just like “your” could be the final state that “you’re” approaches, after only half the hammer blows. The blurring of the possessive “your” with the contracted pronoun and copula “you’re” suggests reification, becoming blurred with the things that you own, or alienation, being unable to be identical with the things that you are. The hammering-dense can be seen in the tendency for the end of one phrase to flow into the start of the next: “that time at that time,” which untangles to “that time at” (a stroll down memory lane) and “at that time” (some historical context). Nostalgia has an affinity with fascism -- golden ages, decline and degeneration, purifying fire -- but when society grows more fascist than it was, there’s got to be such a thing as antifa nostalgia too. Which is like saying they don’t make they don’t make nostalgia like they used to like they used to.

Is there such a thing as a ‘degenerative avant-garde,’ associated with the collapse of possibility and the closing down of potential? As political possibilities fall, as the eye, or whatever it is, stretches, as the ‘shadows’ march in from the edges, different sets of objects begin to welter and flicker and give up secrets. I’m not necessarily saying this is happening now, any of it. And I’m not really talking about immiseration. I don’t think I’m talking about disaster communism either, or building things back better for all. I’m talking about something probably a bit more trivial, about quite good things becoming estranged through their wrecks and ruins, and for a moment conveying visions of even better things. By seeing x decay into not-x, we might discover the why and zee. Of course, on one level, e.g. Johnson might make May ‘look good in comparison,’ May might make us ‘miss David Cameron,’ algorithmically governed fake news ecosystems might tempt us to ‘long’ for earlier more analogue phases of media ideology, the next phase of deepfake stretchers might tempt us to ‘long’ for the epistemological larks of 2020, etc. I don’t think that’s what I mean either. But perhaps that process is mixed in ambiguously with the other one, the one where objects crumpling and distorting reveal their never-before-seen facets. And maybe these two processes are not really distinguishable after all.

The series BoJack Horseman is built around the never directly acknowledged pun, “Why the long face?” BoJack Horseman, on the home stretch of BoJack Horseman, is contacted by an old acquaintance. “You’re tall. I need you to reach something for me.”

OK, now you’re just reaching.