Re-Post: My Proposed Hugo Voting System

Note: This was the system I proposed, tongue-in-cheek (I missed), last year for the Hugos (for the noms process, not the actual vote). It's the basis for what we've ended up doing with the Sputniks, although it's a little different.

Each nominator gets four slots in each category. They're not ranked, exactly, but they are classed. It might be:

BEST NOVEL
Hedgehog: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. witch
Dalek: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. hedgehog
Witch: 25 HP, +5 damage vs. dalek
Mithril Mech: 30 HP, begins in herald slot

... so for best novel, my ballot might look like this:

Hedgehog: Jeff VanderMeer, Southern Reach
Dalek: Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem
Witch: Adam Roberts, Bete
MM: Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword

With each round of voting, each party is randomly paired with another. If the heralds are the same (i.e. in round one, if my ballot encounters another Ancillary Sword mithril mech) then both ballots survive intact and unchanged into the next round. Otherwise, a champion is randomly selected from the non-herald party members of each ballot. 

Then:

(1) if the champions happen to be the same (e.g. my Southern Reach bumps into another Southern Reach) then the champions move into the heralds slots, but no damage is inflicted, and both ballots survive otherwise unaltered into the next round.

(2) otherwise, both nominations take damage according to their class. For example, say my Southern Reach hedgehog gets paired against a John Scalzi Lock In dalek. My nomination loses fifteen Hit Points, and the Lock In nomination loses ten (my quills aren't much use against the dalek's armour plating and selfie-stick).

Nominations that have fallen to zero Hit Points are eliminated, and a new round begins.

The cycle continues until all except five novels have been eliminated, comprising the short list.

Each nominator also receives an automated personalised chronicle of their ballot's encounters and deeds. Nominators may also opt to make their ballot non-anonymous, so that their names come up in the battle reports of other nominators with whom they have friendly or warlike encounters. ("I literally met Hoyt in the fourth round! Her Correia Witch kicked my Leckie Dalek's ass.")

Earlier: full post.

PR under FPTP

Any Member of Parliament could be elected on the following manifesto:

1. "In Parliament, and in all my work with the public, and before public scrutiny, I will remain a spokesperson for my party. I will show the greatest sympathy to my party line, although I will of course take care to refine it, and to constructively criticize it, whenever my intelligence and my conscience suggest that that is necessary."
2. "However, in any parliamentary vote, I will always vote according to the wishes of the majority of my constituents. Sometimes -- even often -- that may require me to vote against my better judgment. But I will do so, respecting the higher principle that I am my constituents' delegate in Parliament."

In constructing such a covenant for voters, the details are important. In particular, the details of how the MP would seek to know their constituents' wishes. The core mechanism would be secure and accessible online polling. But provision would have to be made for constituents who didn't have reliable internet access, or who couldn't figure out their phones. Some provision could also be made for constituents who were too beaten down, busy and/or jaded to actively involve themselves.

The covenant would also have to set precise thresholds which, if not met, would permit the MP a degree of discretion. At least two kinds of threshold would be involved. Ideally these should be interlinked, although there are also good reasons to avoid making the covenant too complex.

1. A support threshold. The higher the proportion of constituents who support a particular vote, the more binding it should be on the MP. A very evenly split constituency should give the MP (or the MP's Whips' Office) the chance to exercise discretion. (For instance the covenant might include some provision like this: if fewer than 40% support a particular Bill, the MP must vote no, if it is 40%-47%, the MP may choose between no and abstention; if it is 48%-52%, the MP may choose between aye, no, and abstention; if it is 53%-60%, the MP may choose between aye and abstention, and if it above 60% the MP must vote aye).
2. A quorum threshold. If very few constituents are interested in a particular poll, it may provide a skewed result. 

The covenant should also have a legal contractual form, so that constituents would have the option of pressuring a rogue MP through the courts.

At the present moment, the approach I have described might appeal to any single-issue independent candidate without a great chance of winning. It could potentially appeal to Liberal Democrat or even the Green candidates in some of their most hopeless-looking seats, and perhaps to Labour and the Conservatives in Scotland. At first it would have to varnish wonkishness with hope. If the approach were successful in winning a seat, or even in a startling gain for an outlier, it would no doubt be adopted by others at the next election.

As I see it, there are two main kinds of danger.

1. New forms of voter intimidation, treating, and misinformation, new patterns of exclusion and disenfranchisement, and in particular, the rise of canny MPs who learn to filter and manipulate polling to produce whatever mandates they want. What if, after a few successful iterations, an MP "refines" this democratic practice, by introducing a short quiz prior to each vote, just to make sure that only "properly" informed constituents have their voices listened to?
2. The public getting its way.

Underappreciated Authors

Underappreciated authors: over at SF Signal, some interesting-sounding leads to chase up. I'm stunned-not-stunned nobody mentioned the great Steve Aylett, who makes "impervious to popularity" his USP. Also, Cheryl Morgan's Eurocon recommended reading includes a lot of names new to me.

It is probably true that genre readership has a top-heavy structure: there's way too much attention, desire, intelligence and resourcefulness, focused on a few superauthors. Some of that stock of fervent, sentient energy could be more justly housed in the accomplishments of midlisters and weirdos.

What if there were no underappreciated authors, no underrated authors? What if everyone were appreciated just the amount they deserved? Would there be a downside?

One of the unique virtues of genre fiction -- in particular, of science fiction (and its quasi-realist concomitants like design fiction and some YA) -- is a capability which relies on a certain amount of top-heaviness, a certain superficially excessive focus on a small number of writers and texts. I think the downside would be diffusion, and an associated degradation of this capability which is peculiar to genre fiction.

It is the capability of second-order extrapolation. It seems impossible to get anywhere significant in the imagination with only one extrapalatory leap: no matter how ingenious you are with your leap, no matter how you twist and contort in the air, there's simply nowhere interesting within range. That is a fact about the historical moment we're living through.

But when you have a gigantic readership who are periodically funneled together through the bottlenecks, such as avidly devouring a superauthor's Latest Awesomeness, or such as reading all the works nominated for a particular award, then you get the possibility of creating a special kind of public. It's a public that periodically naturalises the novum. That is, there's a regular cycle of absorbing a set of extrapolations (and other cognitive estrangements) and codifying them as genre literacy, something which can now be taken for granted ... perhaps opening the way for other authors (or the same authors) to build on the baseline!

In other words, having underappreciated authors is part of what gives genre fiction its real avant-garde potential (assuming the only avant-garde worth bothering with is actually the avant-avant-garde).

Of course, that theory does rather rely on the superauthors and the prize nominees occupying an avant-garde and/or marginal position in the first place, rather than just being adept centrist synthesizers, which isn't usually how they Rowl ...

(Get it, like JK Rowling?)

(jk)

The Ends of Humanity

"Now, with the death of communism and social democracy's struggle to sustain its postwar gains, the idea of the whole of humanity as a potential political subject barely exists. Socialism is dead, and its death — as Nietzsche observed of God’s — has had unexpected effects. One of the less happy consequences of the end of socialism as a mass ideology is the end of humanity as an imagined community. This has consequences in our real communities; the rise of far-right parties across Europe is one of them." Ken MacLeod on socialism and transhumanism at Aeon.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

But, on the other hand, the other is whoever or whatever has a power over me without reciprocity. This is demonstrated in Spectres of Marx, for instance, by the analysis of the visor effect or helmet effect. The ghost or the thing looks at us in a way that rules out any symmetry. We cannot cross its gaze. Derrida adds that it is from that visor effect that we first receive the law—not justice but the law, the justice of which is tantamount to our ignorance, to our incapacity to check the truth of its words: “The one who says ‘I am thy Father’s spirit’ can only be taken at his word. An essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of his origin: this is a first obedience to the injunction. It will condition all the others.” In order to understand what is at stake in that matter of obedience, we must have in mind another scene between father and son for which the confrontation between Hamlet and the ghost has obviously been substituted. Hamlet is in the place of Abraham, and the ghost in the place of the God who orders him to kill his son. As Derrida puts it in Rogues, when emphasizing the principle of heteronomy that is at the heart of this relationship: “It is a question . . . of a heteronomy, of a law come from the other, of a responsibility and decision of the other—of the other in me, an other greater and older than I am.”

At this point, Derrida offers us, with the help of Kierkegaard, a theoretical coup de theatre: the God who commands Abraham to kill Isaac does ask him to obey his order. As Derrida puts it in Donner la mort, he says: you have to obey me unconditionally. But what he wants Abraham to understand is you have to choose unconditionally between betraying your wife and son or betraying me, and you have no reason to choose me rather than Sarah and Isaac. Sacrifice only means choice, and the choice between the absolute Other and the member of the family is no different than the choice I have to make whenever I enter a relation with any other, which obliges me to sacrifice all the others.

To obey the law of the absolute Other is to feel the equivalence of any other with any other. Tout autre est tout autre (any other is wholly other): this is the formula of the identity of contraries, the formula of the identity between absolute inequality and absolute equality. Anyone can play the part of the any other that is wholly other.

Thanks to the God of Abraham, anyone can play the role of the God of Abraham.

So the formula of radical heteronomy turns out to be equivalent to the formula of political equality; the ethical anyone is equivalent to the political anyone. 

But it is so only by the self-negation or self-betrayal of the ethical law of heteronomy, which means, in my view, that the whole construction of ethical heteronomy has to be self-cancelled in order to make a politics of the anyone possible.

As stated earlier, I am not willing to say that my notion of democracy is more appropriate than Derrida’s democracy. I am just trying to outline the difference between an aesthetic and an ethical understanding of politics. And Derrida’s democracy to come is all the more significant in this respect since it makes the radical difference between the two approaches appear in the closest proximity, at the very limit of the indiscernible.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

As usual, my emphases / underlinings / paragraphs.

Democracy to come thus cannot be a community of substitutable persons. In other words, what the democracy to come can oppose to the practice of nation-states is not the action of political subjects playing the part of the anyone.

It is the commitment to an absolute other, an other that can never become the same as us, that cannot be substituted— or, we can add, an other that cannot stage his or her otherness, that cannot stage the relationship between his or her inclusion and his or her exclusion.

Democracy to come is a democracy without a demos, with no possibility for a subject to perform the kratos of the demos.

Such a democracy implies another status of the heteron: the heteron as the outside, the distant, the asymmetric, the nonsubstitutable. Derrida’s notion of hospitality implies much more than the obligation to overstep the borders of nation-states in order to deal with what he calls the “ten
plagues” of the International Order. What the hospes goes beyond is above all the border that allows reciprocity or substitutability.

In this sense, the hospes is the strict opposite of the demos. The character of the hospes opens up an irreconcilable gap between the stage of the possible or the calculable and the stage of the unconditional, the impossible, or the incalculable.

What this precludes is the aesthetic performance of the as if. The hospes erases the heterotopy of the demos as he creates a radical gap between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional, between the calculable of the law and the incalculable of justice.

What is dismissed by this opposition is the performance of those who play the part of the demos that they are not. When protesters say in the streets that “this is just” or “this is unjust,” their “is” is not the deployment of a determinant concept subsuming its object. It is the clash of two justices, the clash of two worlds. This is what a political dissensus or heterotopy means.

But it is the kind of justice that Derrida rules out. In his view there can only be either the normal, consensual application of the rule operating as a machine or the law of unconditional justice. This is what the “to come” means.

The ethical to come is the opposite of the aesthetic as if. It means that democracy cannot be presented, even in the dissensual figure of the demos, that is, of the subject that acts as if it were the demos.

There can be no substitution of the whole by the part, no subject performing the equivalence between sameness and otherness. The heterotopy of the demos is substituted by two forms of irreducible heterogeneity: the temporal heterogeneity of the to come and the spatial heterogeneity of the hospes.

These two forms are combined in the figure of the first-comer and the newcomer. The hospes or the newcomer is the other that cannot come to the place of the same, the other whose part cannot be played by an other. 

This dissymmetry is clearly spelled out by Derrida in Rogues when he identifies the anyone that is at the heart of the democracy to come. This anyone is not the subject of a dissensus, the subject who affirms the capacity of those who have no capacity. It is the object of a concern. Derrida gives to the “first to happen by [le premier venu],” a term he borrows from Jean Paulhan, a quite significant meaning; it is, he says, “anyone, no matter who, at the permeable limit between ‘who’ and ‘what,’ the living being, the cadaver, and the ghost.”

The anyone thus becomes the exact contrary of what appeared first; it is the absolute singularity of the figure that Aristotle conjured up at the beginning of Politics, the being that is less or more than the human being—less insofar as it is the animal, the cadaver, or the ghost that is entrusted to our care (a` revoir). The other, in that sense, is whoever or whatever that requires that I answer for him, her, or it. This is what responsibility is: the commitment to an other that is entrusted to me, for whom or for which I must answer.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

Some consequences can be drawn from this regarding the mode of existence of the demos. On the one hand, the power of the demos is nothing but the inner difference that both legitimizes and delegitimizes any state institution or practice of power.

As such it is a vanishing difference that is ceaselessly annulled by the oligarchic functioning of institutions.

This is why, on the other hand, this power must be continuously reenacted by political subjects. A political subject is a subject constituted through a process of enunciation and manifestation that plays the part of the demos.

What does it mean to play the part of the demos? It means to challenge the distribution of parts, places, and competences by linking a particular wrong done to a specific group with the wrong done to anyone by the police distribution—the police’s denial of the capacity of the anyone.

This is what a political dissensus means. A dissensus puts two worlds—two heterogeneous logics—on the same stage, in the same world. It is a commensurability of incommensurables.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

To understand dissensus from an aesthetic point of view is to understand it from a point of view that neutralizes the ethical rule of the distribution of power. As I mentioned earlier the ethical rule is actually doubled; the common property is doubled by alternative capacities. According to this rule, power is the exercising of a certain qualification of some over those who don’t possess it; those who exercise power are entitled to do so because they are the priests of God, the descendants of the founders, the eldest, the best of kin, the wisest, the most virtuous, and so on. This is what I have called the circle of the arkhe`, the logic according to which the exercise of power is anticipated in the capacity to exercise it, and this capacity in turn is verified by its exercise. I have claimed that the democratic supplement is the neutralization of that logic, the dismissal of any dissymmetry of positions.

This is what the notion of a power of the demos means. The demos is not the population. Nor is it the majority or the lower classes. It is made up of those who have no particular qualification, no aptitude attached to their location or occupation, no aptitude to rule rather than be ruled, no reason to be ruled rather than to rule.

Democracy is this astounding principle: those who rule do so on the grounds that there is no reason why some persons should rule over others except for the fact that there is no reason.

This is the anarchic principle of democracy, which is the disjunctive junction of power and the demos. The paradox is that that anarchic principle of democracy turns out to be the only ground for the existence of something like a political community and political power.

There are a variety of ethical powers that work at the level of the social: in families, tribes, schools, workshops, and so on; parents over children, the older over the younger, the rich over the poor, teachers over pupils, and so on. But as long as the community is made from the conjunction of those powers and as long as it is ruled on the whole according to one or a combination of those powers it is not yet political.

In order for any community to be a political one there must be one more principle, one more entitlement, that grounds all of the others. But there is only one principle in excess of all the others: the democratic principle or entitlement, the qualification of those who have no qualification.

This is my understanding of the democratic supplement: the demos is a supplement to the collection of social differentiations. It is the supplementary part made of those who have no qualification, who are not counted as units in its count.

I have called it the part of those without part, which does not mean the underdogs but means anyone. The power of the demos is the power of whoever. It is the principle of infinite substitutability or indifference to difference, of the denial of any principle of dissymmetry as the ground of the community. 

The demos is the subject of politics inasmuch as it is heterogeneous to the count of the parts of a society. It is a heteron, but a heteron of a specific kind since its heterogeneity is tantamount to substitutability.

Its specific difference is the indifference to difference, the indifference to the multiplicity of differences—which means inequalities—that make up a social order. Democratic heterogeneity means the disjunctive junction of two logics. What is usually designated as the political is made of two antagonistic logics. On the one hand, there are men who rule over others because they are—or they play the part of—the older, the richer, the wiser, and so on because they are entitled to rule over those who do not have their status or competence.  There are patterns and procedures of rule predicated on a certain distribution of place and competence. This is what I call the rule of the police.

But, on the other hand, that power has to be supplemented by an additional power. To the extent that a power is political, the rulers rule on the ultimate ground that there is no reason why they should rule. Their power rests on its own absence of legitimacy. This is what the power of the people means: the democratic supplement is that which makes politics exist as such.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

This brief analysis brings us to what I call the aesthetics of politics. Here too the alternative is between an ethical and an aesthetic perspective. The reason for the alternative is simple: politics is not primarily a matter of laws and constitutions. Rather, it is a matter of configuring the sensible texture of the community for which those laws and constitutions make sense.

What objects are common? What subjects are included in the community? Which subjects are able to see and voice what is common? What arguments and practices are considered political arguments and practices? And so on.

Let us consider the most common political notion in our world, the notion of democracy. There is a consensual ethical view of democracy. It is the view of democracy as a system of government grounded in a form of life, the form of freedom determined by the free market.

The view that sees a correspondence between a form of economic life, a system of institutions, and a set of values has been favored as long as democracy has been opposed to totalitarianism.

As we know, that favor has drastically decreased over the last decade. On the one hand, governments and statesmen complain that democracy is ungovernable, that it is threatened by an enemy that is none other than democracy itself. At the same time, intellectuals complain that democracy is the power of individual consumers indifferent to the common good, a power that not only threatens good government but civilization and human filiation more generally.

We are not obliged to take those contentions at face value. What matters is that as they explode the consensual view of democracy by opposing democratic government to a democratic society they urge us to consider a disjunction at the heart of democracy and that such a disjunction is possibly the characteristic not of a bad political regime but of politics itself.

In other words, the current criticism of democracy points to a dissensus at the heart of politics. Dissensus is more than the conflict between a part and another part—between the rich and the poor or the rulers and those who are ruled. Rather, it is a supplement to the simple consensual game of domination and rebellion. How should we understand this supplement? Once more, it can be understood either from an aesthetic or from an ethical point of view.

To understand dissensus from an aesthetic point of view is to understand it from a point of view that neutralizes the ethical rule of the distribution of power. [...] the demos is a supplement to the collection of social differentiations. It is the supplementary part made of those who have no qualification, who are not counted as units in its count.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

On the one hand, there is the sociological criticism that saw an ignorance of the social law of the ethos. Pierre Bourdieu’s work epitomizes this type of criticism, namely, arguing that the view of aesthetic judgment as a judgment independent of all interest amounts to an illusion or a mystification. The disinterested aesthetic judgment is the privilege of only those who can abstract themselves—or who believe that they can abstract themselves—from the sociological law that accords to each class of society the judgments of taste corresponding to their ethos, that is, to the manner of being and of feeling that their condition imposes upon them. [...] Such judgments are also part of the mystification that hides the reality of social determinism and helps prevent victims of the system from gaining access to the knowledge that could liberate them.

[...]

Lyotard dismisses the heterotopy of the beautiful in favor of the heteronomy of the sublime. The result of this operation is the same as that of the sociological critique, though it is made from a very different angle; in both cases the political potential of the heterotopy is boiled down to a sheer illusion that conceals the reality of a subjection.

[...]

Ignoring to whom the palace actually belongs, the vanity of the nobles, and the sweat of the people incorporated in the palace are the conditions of aesthetic judgment. This ignorance is by no means the illusion that conceals the reality of possession. Rather, it is the means for building a new sensible world, which is a world of equality within the world of possession and inequality.

[...]

Aesthetic ignorance thus neutralizes the ethical distribution insofar as it splits up the simple alternative laid down by the sociologist that claims you are either ignorant and subjugated or have knowledge and are free. This alternative remains trapped in the Platonic circle, the ethical circle according to which those who have the sensible equipment suitable for the work that does not wait are unable to gain the knowledge of the social machine.

The break away from this circle can only be aesthetic. It consists in the disjunction between sensible equipment and the ends that it must serve. The joiner agrees with Kant on a decisive point: the singularity of the aesthetic experience is the singularity of an as if. The aesthetic judgment acts as if the palace were not an object of possession and domination. The joiner acts as if he possessed the perspective. This as if is no illusion. It is a redistribution of the sensible, a redistribution of the parts supposedly played by the higher and the lower faculties, the higher and the lower classes. 

As such it is the answer to another as if: the ethical order of the city, according to Plato, must be viewed as if God had put gold in the souls of the men who were destined to rule and iron in the souls of those who were destined to work and be ruled. It was a matter of belief. Obviously Plato did not demand that the workers acquire the inner conviction that a deity truly mixed iron in their souls and gold in the souls of the rulers. It was enough that they sensed it, that is, that they used their arms, their eyes, and their minds as if this were true. And they did so even more as this lie about fitting actually fit the reality of their condition. The ethical ordering of social occupations ultimately occurs in the mode of an as if. The aesthetic rupture breaks this order by constructing another as if.

From "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," by Jacques Rancière

To the extent that a power is political, the rulers rule on the ultimate ground that there is no reason why they should rule.

[...] the power of the demos is nothing but the inner difference that both legitimizes and delegitimizes any state institution or practice of power. As such it is a vanishing difference that is ceaselessly annulled by the oligarchic functioning of institutions. This is why, on the other hand, this power must be continuously reenacted by political subjects.

[...]

This also means that the political subject acts in the mode of the as if; it acts as if it were the demos, that is, as the whole made by those who are not countable as qualified parts of the community. This is the aesthetic dimension of politics: the staging of a dissensus— of a conflict of sensory worlds—by subjects who act as if they were the people, which is made of the uncountable count of the anyone.

When a small group of protesters takes to the streets under the banner We Are the People, as they did in Leipzig in 1989, they know that they are not the people. They create the open collective of those who are not the people that is incorporated in the state and located in its offices. They play the role of the uncountable collection of those who have no specific capacity to rule or to be ruled.

This is what I call the aesthetic understanding of the democratic supplement, which amounts to a political understanding. I think that we can oppose it to the ethical view of the supplement, which is epitomized in Derrida’s concept of democracy to come.

My observations should not be misinterpreted. I amaware that Derrida was also concerned with the elaboration of a concept of democracy that would break the consensual-ethical view of democracy as the way of governing and the way of being of wealthier countries. I am also aware that his search for a new concept of democracy was part of a commitment to a number of struggles against various forms of oppression throughout the world. I acknowledge this theoretical and practical commitment to the main issues of democracy.

Nevertheless I think that it can be said that the concept of democracy to come is not a political but an ethical concept. Democracy to come is not, for Derrida, the aesthetic supplement that makes politics possible. It is a supplement to politics. 

And it is because Derrida’s democracy actually is a democracy without demos. What is absent in his view of politics is the idea of the political subject, of the political capacity. The reason for this is simple. There is something that Derrida cannot endorse, namely, the idea of neutralization (or substitutability)—the indifference to difference or the equivalence of the same and the other.

Consistently, what he cannot accept is the democratic play of the as if. From his point of view there can be only one alternative: either the law of the same, the law of autonomy, or the law of the other, the law of heteronomy.