On learning to read Adam Roberts

I should write at the outset that I don't pretend to have a handy guide to how to read Adam Roberts. This is mostly a response to Paul Kincaid's blog post here.

Paul Kincaid describes an interpretive tool that may work for his own reading: Roberts writes Menippean satire. There's something to be said for that. Certain elements of the satire are there: fragmented narrative, the rapid movement between styles, the use of the picaresque, satirical commentary. Kincaid seems to me to be certainly right that many of Roberts' books work as satires of SF. (See, e.g., my piece here on Splinter.) But. The concept of the Menippean satire comes with a lot of baggage that doesn't seem to apply, and doesn't include a good deal of what I see as being there. The concept may work perfectly well for Paul Kincaid, who states upfront that he has trouble reading Roberts, but as a fan writer who's written a good deal about Roberts' work, it's not how I think he is best read.

Roberts' works seem to me to be best described as experimental novels. They would be avant-garde if there was now any literary garde to be in the avant of. Kincaid writes at the start of his post that "I don’t believe the set up, I don’t believe the characters, the plots seem an exercise in artificiality." Well, yes, sometimes they do. Adam Roberts, if I can resort to biographical criticism, is a professor and historian of SF who has read a tremendous number of SF works. The Ideal Author of his books, to revert to how they appear to me to be written, is not someone who wants to write a seamless set-up, believable characters, and realistic plots. Those elements of writerly technique have long since been turned into routine. Although I admire the craftsperson who can successfully carry out this routine, I'm really more interested in attempts to do something else.

What is the "something else" that Roberts attempts? His novels seem to me to be characterized by a high degree of formal structure coupled with underdetermination of what that structure means.

In Swiftly, in another passage that Kincaid had trouble with, we see Eleanor before and after a big gap in her described life, and she appears to be almost two different people in the two sections of the book. One could write a middle section of the book that explains the transition from one Eleanor to the other. But that would remove what Roberts is calling attention to: the gap itself, which the reader can and must fill in with their own narrative. "Blood in the gutter" is a comic-book critical phrase referring to the space between one comic book panel and the next, which the reader must fill in out of their imagination. By making the gaps in action small enough so that readers ideally never notice them, authors create "realistic characters". But what they are doing is pretending that they are doing the work that they are actually trying to get the reader to do. Swiftly is a formal balance with a beginning and an afterwards around a gap, and wouldn't work without it.

Does this kind of thing always work? No. Sometimes Roberts may attempt a bit too much at once. Yellow Blue Tibia might have had a bit less of the (yes, distracting) pseudo-Aspergers sidekick character if it hadn't been "how about a metafiction about Soviet SF coming true" mixed with "what would an action movie hero look like if he was old and plunked into a pseudorealistic setting". But experiments are experiments: some work and some don't. Literary experiments are better than scientific ones because literary experiments work for some people and don't work for others. Jonathan McCalmont wrote some excellent criticism of New Model Army that takes the same changes in viewpoint that Paul Kincaid notes and turns them into a sort of satire of SF yet again, "a cultural blueprint for the entire genre."

Do I think that Roberts intended to write the book that McCalmont read? No, not exactly. They are, to repeat myself, books with strong formal elements coupled with underdetermination of what those elements mean. In other words, they're wonderful toys, full of moving parts that don't do obvious things, made to order for a critic to play with and come up with a reading. I can understand why a bit of puzzlement is common when reading Roberts. If New Model Army is supposed to sit on the bookshelf shelves next to, oh, Lois Bujold, or Vernor Vinge, then why doesn't it keep the same viewpoint throughout? Why the scene "which feels like an intrusion from a different work altogether," to quote Kincaid? Write the thing in an accepted military-SF style throughout and then it'll be normal. But it's really supposed to sit on the shelves that hold, say, Aldiss' Report on Probability A.

Kincaid comes close to picking up on what I find interesting about Roberts' work. But a satire of the kind that Kincaid envisions is organized around a purpose. That purpose doesn't seem to me to be at the heart of these works. These are writerly artifacts, and while some of them work as satires -- Roberts writes what he knows, and what he knows is SF -- they do not seem to me to pick out a direction and then set out to guide the reader along it.

Progress

With the repeal of DADT, gay and lesbian people can now proudly and openly murder civilians along with the rest of our armed forces. Equality and civil rights!

However, since the DREAM act was defeated, illegal brown people can not become citizens through their military service. They have to be tracked down and deported as soon as they're done shooting other brown people. But the long arc of the sniper's bullet bends towards justice, and we can all hope that soon everyone who serves in our imperial legions will gain full citizenship.

Sanctimonious purists

Ha! If anyone gives me trouble for leaving the Democratic Party for some poorly defined variety of anarchism, I'll just call them a sanctimonious purist. After all, their own party leader does.

How bad off are progressives in the U.S. right now? I'll go through the main paths for the immediate political future, assuming no catastrophe:

1. Obama loses in 2012.

In this case, it will all be progressives' fault, because they didn't support him enough. The left wing of the party will be blamed for everything the Republicans do for the next four years.

2. Obama wins in 2012.

In this case, he'll have demonstrated that he can insult his base and it doesn't matter because he doesn't need their help. No one will ever bother listening to progressives again.

3. Obama is primaried from the left in 2012 and wins the primary.

In this case, he'll actively bear a grudge against progressives. He's already shown that he's a lot more angry at them than at the GOP. Is he the type to let his personal vanity affect politics? Sure -- he just did.

The left is then stigmatized as a group of losers who weakened the party by splitting it, after which go to 1. or 2. above.

4. Obama is primaried from the left in 2012 and loses the primary.

This is the best outcome for progressives, certainly, but it's almost certainly not going to happen. If it does, then the new candidate wins or loses the general election. If the new candidate to the left loses, 1. above gets especially bad. If he or she wins, well, again that's the best possible outcome, but seems very unlikely. And in that case, assuming that there is still significant centrist support for Obama -- he's still a popular President -- there really will be a split in the party.

Wow am I glad that I bailed before this happened.

You can't leak out a social relationship

Of the recent flood of Wikileaks articles, this one at 3 quarks daily by Robert P. Baird is like catnip to me for its references to langpo (did my three readers know that I think of myself as a poet? probably). But at any rate, it sets out quite well three possible theories of what Wikileaks could be doing:

1. "the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes 'information wants to be free' as its gospel"

2. "The traditional argument for transparency is that more information will allow a populace to better influence its government."

3. "What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims."

I think I've criticized the first of these two sufficiently already. For the first, I'll just note that Wikileaks has a copy of the hacked CRU Emails. They weren't the ones to release them, as far as I know, so it hardly matters -- but still, when people go on about the benefits of techno-libertopia, I didn't think that they had in mind as one of those benefits that right-wing politicians would generate a storm of lying propaganda whenever a climate scientist used the word "trick" in an Email to another one. Naturally, people who actually have to fight against corporate propaganda in that area take a dim view of this kind of triumphialism. For more, see The Limits of Techno-Politics post here. The release of information is, by itself, apolitical, and doesn't make political content until someone uses it for something.

For the second, it should be obvious to everyone now that information is not power. Everyone knew that e.g. the justification for the Iraq War was a sack of lies. No one could do anything about it. Those levers of democratic power have long since been broken, if they ever existed. This article, for instance, takes Wikileaks to task for interfering with within-the-system public advocacy (before it, amusingly, becomes a press release about FAS's accomplishments), but what has that advocacy really accomplished? It talks about stockpile secrecy, for instance. All right, the size of the American stockpile of nuclear weapons has moved from open secret to acknowledged fact. Does that bring us any closer to getting rid of any of those weapons? No.

But I don't know if I've addressed the third. This is really the theory under which what Wikileaks is doing makes the most sense. As Baird writes: "If this sounds like sabotage, well, that’s sort of the point." Josh Marshall, in a post that reminds me what an establishment reporter he's becoming, writes "this seems more like an attack on the US government itself than an effort to inform American citizens about what their government is doing on their behalf."

At first glance, this seems like a common form of radical activism: "things must first get worse before they can get better." Everyone knows the problems with that: things get worse and stay worse. Or they get much worse than anyone anticipated. Making the American government even more paranoid than it is may not be a good idea. That would be the first line of criticism if you thought that this was likely to be effective in the form proposed.

But will it be effective as sabotage? I don't think so. I don't think that the important secrets of the government really were in the system that the leaked cables came from, which 3 million people reportedly had access to. But more importantly, I don't think that contemporary systems of power really rely on secrecy in any decisive way. Leaks are part of the ecosystem, and often appear as a tactic in attempts to embarrass people within the hierarchy. But no leak has the power to change policy. Power is held through arrangements of financial and military power, not through conspiracy. Sure, people find it comfortable to buy a media apparatus to put some glitter over the bare workings of the machine. But the hallmark of politics in our time is the non-denied truth. Did the last President of the U.S. openly have people tortured? Yeah, sure. He says so in his book. What are you going to do about it?

The title of this post is taken from "You can't blow up a social relationship", a somewhat well-known anarchist tract. In that sense, it's about my belief that it's futile to try this kind of informational sabotage. The government of the U.S. depends on people continuing their habitual social relationships, not on beliefs that can be changed by the revelation of the contents of diplomatic cables. And the government does not depend on protected channels of conspiratorial information in order to achieve competence at reacting to circumstances. It's quite clearly incompetent and is bungling every challenge of the contemporary era already. We will be out of Afghanistan not because our government will conspiratorially decide when that would be best, but because we will be driven out as the rest of our empire implodes.

Does it matter that I think that Wikileaks will be unsuccessful at this form of sabotage? No, not really. There are many recent articles criticizing Wikileaks for being newcomers, amateurs, for not knowing what they are doing. For instance, Greenwald here has a dialogue with a critic of Wikileaks, and Greenwald's defense basically agrees with the charge of amateurism but involves saying that Wikileaks is getting better at redacting the names of informers from its released documents and so on.

Well, of course the people who do Wikileaks don't know what they are doing. No one knows what they're doing! Some people know how to act within the expectations of the system, that is all. And they confuse this with knowing what they are doing. I don't think it's important that Wikileaks may be acting under what I think is an incorrect premise. They are still taking nonviolent action in something that might well turn out to be a right direction. It's better than doing nothing.

Wikileaks is, at least, helping to demolish the more important myth, the myth of American government in general. Look at all of the media and political gasbags calling for Assange to be arrested, killed, jailed for treason, or whatever other violent and stupid fantasy occupies their heads. No one can possibly justify that within the framework that American politics runs on in theory. It's tribal politics. Once people get over their Two Minute Hate, one more little bit of the facade of American exceptionalism will have fallen and shattered. And that's all to the good.

Edited to add: this event around Wikileaks is also revealing the hollowness of the capitalist Internet as enabler of change. Every familiar large company for Internet transactions -- Amazon, Paypal/Ebay, Visa, Mastercard -- has frozen or banned Wikileaks.

Also, oh please:

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism.

If Assange wasn't currently imprisoned without bail on some trumped-up charge, this would be a "get over yourself" moment. But he is, so he can bloviate about scientific journalism if he likes. No one else can though.

Wikileaks

Is Wikileaks an embarrassment for the U.S. government and nothing more? Well...

Look at this article, for example. It uncritically lists two of the things we've learned from the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables as "North Korea supplied Iran with long-range missiles" and "Iran used the auspices of the Red Crescent to smuggle spies and weapons into war zones." True, the text of the article uses more accurate "the U.S. government believes that" language. But that subtlety appears to have slipped the minds of many of the commenters, who are now musing that here is new information that they didn't know.

If only Wikileaks had been around before the Iraq War. Then it could have been leaked that the U.S. government believed that Iraq was stockpiling biological weapons, and funding the 9/11 terrorists. And it would have been a leak, something that they didn't want people to know -- so of course it's correct, right?

Lest people think that I'm positing some conspiracy theory, I'm not. But diplomats and other spies routinely write back things that they confidently believe that are in fact not true. Diplomats and other spies who want to rise through the ranks also develop a talent for writing back things that they know that the politicians in charge want to hear. These leaks are pretty much worthless from the point of view of determining whether the events in question actually took place.

Doctorow's Little Brother

Shorter Little Brother: Whatever you do, don't torture the white kid.

This is a deeply irksome YA book by Cory Doctorow -- irksome in the sense that it's one of those books where the author sees perfectly well what he's writing and then writes it anyway. Markus is a 17 year old white kid. The friends who we see him interacting with are all properly multicultural in various ways, but he's their leader. Marcus engages in some adolescent rebelliousness around a Department of Homeland Security squad that's been amped up by a nearby major terrorist attack and Marcus gets put through all of the by now familiar to us minor tortures: stress positions, isolation, threats that he will be disappeared, etc. Marcus then is released and swears that he'll get the DHS, especially since they disappeared one of his friends. Marcus ends up in "Gitmo-by-the-Bay" -- this happens in San Francisco -- but just as he's being waterboarded, local cops informed by a muckraking reporter burst in, arrest the DHS agents, and save him. Then the DHS is effectively kicked out of California due to the public scandal of local teens disappearing into the gulag.

They had me chained to five other prisoners, all of whom had been in for a lot longer than me. One only spoke Arabic -- he was an old man, and he trembled. The others were all young. I was the only white one. Once we had been gathered on the deck of the ferry, I saw that nearly everyone on Treasure Island had been one shade of brown or another. (pg. 352)

Let's consider that for a moment. Everyone immediately calls the prison on Treasure Island Gitmo by the Bay. Why? Because they are all familiar with the real Gitmo, of course. The book is set is a post-9/11 imaginary America that is supposed to be ours. Was Gitmo a scandal for these people in the book? No, no more than Gitmo has been a scandal in real life. I mean, it's been a scandal, but it's still holding prisoners. No one bothered to do anything about it, really. So why was Marcus' story so scandalous?

Well, because he's a local teenager. Teenagers were, of course, routinely tortured by our forces in Iraq, but he's a local kid. Local kids in California are routinely sent to prison on minor drug charges, or shipped off to somewhere if they are illegal and brown, but hey -- this is a middle-class, white teenager. We aren't supposed to do bad things to them. The reaction of the people in the book makes sense if you tacitly assume that people in California couldn't care less about torture as something happening to Others, but do care if it's a kid who looks like one of the kids of the important people.

That seems fairly realistic, actually. Good for Doctorow, for writing a grittily truthful, unpleasant book -- but wait. It's not gritty, or truthful, or unpleasant other than a few well-done torture scenes. No one really confronts this at all, not authorially and not within the world of the book. Marcus is just the natural leader of his group of non-white friends, most of whom spent significant parts of their screen time embarrassing him by telling him how awesome he is, and when his captivity and that of his white friend who got taken at the start of the book is discovered and publicized, it's just instant scandal and DHS stopped and that's a wrap.

Why do I find this irksome? Doctorow is a competent writer. His heart is clearly in the right place. I find it irksome for the same basic cluelessness that's in too much of techno-libertarian agitprop. Because that's a large part of this book: bits about crypto, and Linux, and trust networks, and all the rest. And faith that if the truth comes out, it will mean something. Will it?

What really happens in this book is that the security forces made the mistake of victimizing a child of privilege. All the rest of the book could have pretty much been short-cut if Marcus had told his parents about what happened to him when he got home, they'd told the reporter they contacted, and on from there. But instead we get lots of bits about hacking game machines, as if that would have made a difference if Marcus had instead been his Latino friend.

What's the current real-life equivalent to this book? Let's take Wikileaks as an example. Of course I support Wikileaks. They're doing good things. Historians will have a much better picture of what happened in our era because of the material they archived. But have their revelations changed anything? No. People in America really already knew that our armed forces murdered civilians in Iraq with impunity. They didn't care, and they still don't care. No anonymizer or encoding scheme or clever hack is going to get them to care. No revelation of the truth is going to matter to people who already know the truth. Evasion of our security systems will not let you evade what's in people's hearts.

Let's leave Marcus' whiteness aside for the moment. Would people really care about Gitmo by the Bay? The families of the people imprisoned would, of course. Would anyone else? Our society already has little Gitmos all over. It's quite normal for people to suddenly be sent to prison. The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, and the highest documented prison population in the world. Yes, this is a method of controlling the underclass, but sometimes a middle-class white kid has to be put away as an example. I think that Gitmo-by-the-Bay might have ended up as just as much of a nonscandal as Gitmo has been, really. Could it happen that it's a politics-changing scandal as presented in the book? Sure. But it wouldn't happen so overwhelmingly, so easily. The lesson of the Bush years, and now the Obama years, is that the truth will not set you free.

So this a book with its heart in the right place, and it's also thoroughly, although unintentionally, dishonest, or at least misleading. Irksome.

Legality theater

"Security theater" has become a more and more popular phrase, especially in connection with airport security -- measures visibly taken to make people feel secure, not because doing them actually makes people more secure.

I should resist too much blogging that is simply re-citing Greenwald, but we just had an example of legality theater. An accused terrorist was put on trial in a civilian court amid much administrative self-congratulation. To quote Greenwald:

Most news accounts are emphasizing that trying Ghailani in a civilian court was intended by the Obama DOJ to be a "showcase" for how effective trials can be in punishing Terrorists. That's a commendable goal, and Holder's decision to try Ghailani in a real court should be defended by anyone who believes in the rule of law and the Constitution. But given these realities, this was more "show trial" than "showcase" since the Government would simply have imprisoned him, likely forever, even if he had been acquitted on all counts.

Yes, the Obama administration claims "post-acquittal detention power", which means that this person was going to be sent to jail indefinitely no matter what. The trial was meaningless.

Or was it? Here's where I disagree with Greenwald: the goal of showcasing how effective show trials can be is not commendable. The trial did have a purpose: to convince the public that we still live under rule of law when we do not. It was legality theater, the replacement of actual rule of law with a formal show intended to represent it.

That is the sorry pass that advocates of Constitutional protections have been brought to. "Please have the show trial, because showing the brutal reality would let the dream of justice die." Some dreams are better off disposed of. Or rather, when the reality behind them is dead, they begin to stink.