Archive for conferences

ICFA 36 paper: Here at the end of all things: An Archaeology of Return

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on 24 March 2015 by Ben

Here is my paper from this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, on the problem of ending in fantasy and John Clute’s conception of return.

“Here at the end of all things”: An Archaeology of Return

Benjamin J. Robertson

This paper considers the final stage of John Clute’s grammar of “full fantasy,” first known as healing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and renamed as of 2011 when Clute questions “healing” as a useful term in Pardon this Intrusion and substitutes “return” as a “placeholder.” (116). It argues, first, that return is an irreducibly problematic and contradictory concept—not necessarily through any fault of Clute’s, but because of the historical problem of the end to which return is bound—and, second, that the extent to which fantasy involves return derives from its own historical condition.

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What we talk about when we talk about werewolves: Genre and Genus, Wer- and Wolf

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, papers, The Generic, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 18 April 2014 by Ben

Following is the transcript of my talk for Morrisville State College’s Science, Technology, and Society Symposium on monsters. I was given the topic “Abominations” and, as you will see, chose to speak about werewolves, among other things. I am definitely humming some of the hard parts here, but will leave it at that. You can download a PDF of the talk here.

What we talk about when we talk about werewolves: Genre and Genus, Wer- and Wolf

Benjamin J Robertson

My epigraph is from Angela Carter’s short story, “The company of wolves:

Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops–of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, orgres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is the worst, for he cannot listen to reason.

Introduction: why talk about werewolves?

It’s weird to me to be talking about werewolves, because they terrify me. Or perhaps it’s not so weird. Perhaps I am talking about them because they terrify me. In a short encyclopedia entry on the relationship between horror and science fiction, Leslie Fiedler writes:

[I]f many of us tend to speak apologetically, defensively, self-mockingly about our fondness for horror fantasy, this is primarily because of a cognitive dissonance that lies at the heart of our response, a conflict deep in our psyches between what we, as heirs to the Age of Reason, think we know to be so and what we ambivalently wish or fear to be true. We are convinced that the universe we inhabit is fully explicable in terms of ‘natural’ cause and effect and that once we understand their ‘laws’ we will be the masters of our fate. But we also suspect that we are the playthings of occult forces that we can never understand and that, therefore, will always control our destinies.

Perhaps I am talking about werewolves despite the fact that my father let me watch An American Werewolf in London when I was far too young. Perhaps I am talking about them despite the fact that I still get a tiny bit creeped out by the full moon when I am walking my dog late at night. Perhaps I am talking to you about werewolves today despite the fact that doing so forces me, a grown man in theory, to acknowledge my own fear of something I know for certain not to be real.

Or perhaps I am talking to you about werewolves because of all of these things, because such discussion is productive, because it reveals something important about who we are in 2014, about what we think, about what we are capable of. Perhaps, along with Fiedler, I am talking about werewolves because I believe that if I understand them, if I understand horror, I will become master of my fate. If knowledge of equates with control over, then perhaps I believe, along with humanity, that I can avoid horror altogether by knowing it. I take as one of my core assumptions that humans do precisely this: order the world for themselves so that they might escape or ignore horror, so that they might forever forget that existence is not their understanding of it.

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some thoughts on fantasy after ICFA 35

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, The Generic, The Profession, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on 23 March 2014 by Ben

So ICFA 35 was the first conference I have ever attended at which there was a strong and ongoing discussion of fantasy literature. I have only recently returned to reading fantasy at great length and only even more recently started teaching it and writing about it. I had taught sf for years, and had written a bit about it, but SFRA last year was my first conference on that subject. Point being: I am rather new to being amongst people talking about the issue of genre and these specific genres. Since I am writing about sf, fantasy, and horror in Here at the end of all things, perhaps this moment is long overdue. Better late than never.

In any case, several rather unfinished thoughts from the conference.

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Empires of Disbelief: ICFA 35 proposal

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, papers, The Generic, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 30 October 2013 by Ben

I’m working in this general area right now for Here at the end of all things. I actually used the voice recorder on my phone to take notes on this subject as I walked to school yesterday. First time I have ever done that. I would do it again.

Empires of Disbelief

This paper begins with the remarkable coincidence of several historical events (“historical”, here, in a Foucauldian sense). First, John Clute argues in Pardon this Intrusion that fantastika can be traced to the early nineteenth century; the genres of fantastika “are intimately connected with the becoming visible of the engine of history, round about 1800, when the future began.” Second, we have Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807 and a singular influence on Western notions of history as progressive and significant. Third, Foucault traces the advent of disciplinary power to roughly the same period. As the human being entered History (Hegel) as an individual who is the same as all other individuals (Foucault), it began to narrativize its position within that history through forms that could face the end whether that end was understood to be apocalyptic or Paradisaical. These accounts dovetail, I argue, with the project of Western Empires to at once offer a sort of carrot to individuals in the form of a promise of meaning for their lives (the completion of humanity, the Rapture—what Clute would call Healing or Return) as well as the the constant denial of such an end in order to maintain their existence (humanity is never complete, history never actually ends in its perfection, the Rapture never occurs). Over the course of the past two centuries, individuals in the West (a term I use advisedly not to refer to a given unity but to a construction) have been denied what they have been promised so often that rather than believing in the future, they find themselves in a state of what Bernard Stiegler calls “disbelief.”

With reference to key fantasy texts from the last several decades—such as Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains, China Miéville’s The Scar and Iron Council, Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World, Patricia McKillip’s In the Forests of Serre—as well as secondary/theoretical texts from Clute, Foucault, Deleuze, and Stiegler, this paper investigates how the Story that fantasy “wishes to tell” (of Healing, in Clute’s sense of the term) has, despite constant retellings, become impossible. Of course, Healing has always been impossible, but I argue that Empire now no longer even requires it as a carrot. Whereas the West formerly relied on coherent individuals (in Foucault’s sense) who desire insertion into the History (or Story) or Empire as individuals , it now maintains itself despite the fact that people (as what Deleuze calls “dividuals”) no longer believe in such metanrratives of progress and freedom. With seemingly no possible way out of this situation, we can turn to the impossibilities of fantasies such as those listed here (among others) as models for ways of thinking that resist and overcome our disbelief.

Primary sources

Gilman, Felix. The Half-made World. New York: Tor, 2011. Print.

McKillip, Patricia A. In the Forests of Serre. New York: Ace Books, 2003. Print.

Miéville, China. Iron Council: a Novel. New York: Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2005. Print.

—. The Scar. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Print.

Morgan, Richard K. The Steel Remains. Del Ray trade pbk. ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. Print.

Secondary sources

Clute, John. Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. N. p. Print.

Clute, John, and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge ; and the Discourse on Language. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Print.

Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1980. Print. Agora Paperback Editions.

Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. Meridian : Crossing Aesthetics.

—. Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals. Trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Print. Disbelief and Discredit 2.

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My Eaton/SFRA 2013 Paper: Media Theory and Genre

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, papers, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 13 April 2013 by Ben

Here is my paper for the 2013 Eaton/SFRA conference, as part of the panel on “Mediation and Transmedia” with Scott Selisker (“Transmedia Automatism: Cinematic Motion in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl“) and Veronica Hollinger (“The Dis/enchantments of the Mediated Real”).

Media Theory and Genre

This paper is sort of chasing a certain claim, a double inversion of Arthur C. Clarke, although I cannot address it in any depth here: “Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

So, this boringly-titled talk opens a discussion of genre as media and genre’s relation to other media. By “genre,” I mean at the start something fairly non-controversial, I hope: a set of texts, however blurry the boundaries around that set, the conventions of which take on meaning within the set and without historicity. By “media,” I follow McLuhan who more or less understands a medium as a thing, in the broadest possible sense. At times the term “technics,” which here is closely aligned with media but takes on Stiegler’s definition as “organized inorganic matter,” will supplement or replace “media.”

There are a number of strands of thought here that I hope to weave together. First, I am interested in theorizing fantasy as a genre, especially in relation with science fiction and horror, although the latter will not be present here. I am not interested in defining fantasy with regard to dragons or magic or elves and, likewise I am not interested in SF insofar as it involves technology or aliens, nor horror insofar as it involves vampires or transformation. We all “know” fantasy, SF, and horror when we see them, even if we continue to argue about many specific cases and definitive boundaries. Rather than ask “what is fantasy?” I wish to ask “what does, or perhaps better can, it do?” I shall draw shortly on a talk China Mieville gave in 2009 to help articulate this theorization.

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Paper Proposal for 2013 &Now Conference

Posted in Conferences, Writing with tags , , , , , , on 2 April 2013 by Ben

Second proposal of the night. If it weren’t for the last second and all that. This one is for the 2013 &Now Conference, this September in Boulder. I wish this proposal was a bit more fleshed out, but that’s the way it is.

Horror after History: Glenn Duncan’s The Last Werewolf

Proposal for &Now 7

Benjamin J. Robertson

Jake Marlowe is, as the title of Glenn Duncan’s 2011 novel suggests, The Last Werewolf—and he dreams of suicide. Jake’s life, perhaps never meaningful, has become unbearable in its absurdity. Despite the pleas of his single friend, he prepares to end his centuries-long existence in the knowledge that his death will be as meaningless as his life.

According to Kojève, following Hegel, at culmination of modernity, the end of history, the human, having achieved its perfection and without the possibility of art and therefore meaning, will revert to animality. Similar to Marlowe’s understanding of his imminent death, the disappearance of the human has little consequence for the universe: “The disappearance of Man at the end of history is not a catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And it is not a biological catastrophe either: Man remains live as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called.”

This paper investigates, through a consideration of The Last Werewolf, the horror genre in relation to questions of history, knowledge, and human being. Far from returning the human to a state of nature, in The Last Werewolf, the animal ‘inside’ the human takes the human out of sync with itself and undermines the notion of history’s end by undermining the notion of history itself in the manner that Kojève pace Hegel understood it, Specifically, I consider Marlowe’s statements, made with regard to his soon-to-be werewolf lover Talulla: “Thus she’s discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it. […] You do what you do because it’s that or death.” This short passage moves the horror genre beyond the knowledge practices of modernity, in which horror derives from a challenge to positive knowledge and rationality, a challenge to our deepest epistemological assumptions. Here, horror becomes the groundless ground of being, an ontological “truth” that renders all meaning impossible, including the meaning of one’s life and the meaning of one’s death.

 

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My Paper Proposal for Frontiers of New Media 2013

Posted in Conferences, Writing with tags , , , , , , on 2 April 2013 by Ben

Here is my proposal for the 2013 Frontiers of New Media Conference, on the theme: The Beginning and End(s) of the Internet: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Future of Cyber-Utopia.

Publicity, Privacy, Anonymity: Futures of New Media

Proposal for The Beginning and End(s) of the Internet: Surveillance, Censorship, and the Future of Cyber-Utopia

Benjamin J. Robertson, English, University of Colorado, Boulder

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, addressing in part concerns over photography, considered the question of a right to privacy in the United States. They begin, “That the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the new demands of society.”

A century later, in the 1990s, the increasingly public availability and use of the the Internet and the World Wide Web should perhaps have engendered a new consideration about the exact nature of and right to privacy. Of course, discussions of privacy in the digital age happen nearly everyday. Civil libertarians continue debate authoritarians, law enforcement, and commercial interests about the necessity and value of privacy in the wake of warrantless wiretapping, the expectation of privacy in the cloud, and now Google Glass. When, in 2010, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg claimed that privacy is no longer that big a deal, claiming “That social norm is just something that has evolved over time,” it seemed that the largest, newest, and most powerful capitalist interests in the world would, in the future, determine the extent to which private citizens would retain their privacy. When, in late 2012, a Gawker writer (though an analysis of public information), revealed private citizen Michael Brutsch as notorious Reddit editor Violentacrenz, whatever our feelings about Brutsch and his online persona, we were forced to wonder whether, on the Internet, we ever enjoyed any privacy and whether we could ever hope to in the future.

However, our concerns and the contemporary debate about privacy in the age of networks remain, strikingly, mired in the same assumptions behind Warren and Brandeis’ arguments in the late nineteenth century. More precisely, these concerns and this debate have failed to engage with the “political, social, and economic changes”—not to mention the technological changes—of the past several decades. We must wonder if drawing upon a discourse of privacy that began in the early years of traditional photography can have anything to say about a world of Instagram and the WiFi and 4G networks that facilitate it.

This paper investigates the question of privacy, and by extension the nature of publicity (in the sense of one’s being-public) in the context of new media and network technology. It considers whether privacy—as imagined by Warren and Brandeis, dependent on Enlightenment notions of the human and traditional notions of the commons—can survive, should survive, in the contemporary world. If we are to be posthuman or create the posthumanities as a field of study, and if this posthumanism is to be something other than the mere extrapolation of the present (what Bernard Stiegler would call the calculation of the future), perhaps we must rid ourselves of those concepts that depend on and underpin the human itself. However, the end of privacy and, along with it, publicity, need not involve simply turning our data over to capitalists. If the private/public binary involves the movement of an individual from one space to another, from the home to the commons for example, anonymity involves a permanent sort of publicity, one no longer attached, however, to the private identity of the liberal human subject.

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Everything looks worse in black and white: Graphic Violence in From Hell: My Proposal for ROMOCOCO:

Posted in papers, Writing with tags , , , , , , on 1 March 2013 by Ben

It’s not quite BI-MON-SCI-FI-CON (“Be there and be square!”), but ROMOCOCO (The Rocky Mountain Comic Convention) has a great name. and now it has this proposal to consider.

Everything looks worse in black and white: Graphic Violence in From Hell

Benjamin J. Robertson

In the early 1970s, I recall looking through HBO’s monthly guide and discovering that among the reasons a film might be rated R was something called “graphic violence.” My parents explained that graphic violence involved a lot of blood. For years I understood the word graphic to mean something like “gratuitous and visual.”

From Hell is an unquestionably violent text and a certain amount of this violence seems to be graphic in the manner of those movies on HBO after the kids are sent to bed. Absent, of course, in From Hell’s black-and-white artwork, are the red of the blood and the sheen of the guts of Sir William Gull’s victims. And while HBO’s definition of “graphic” applies to this text, its another form of “graphic violence” that is all the more notable in it.

This paper investigates the manner in which From Hell’s black-and-white artwork interacts with, underscores, and augments the text’s themes of violence and history. The most violent aspect of the text is not its portrayal of the relentlessness of William Gull but the relentlessness of its representational strategy. Moore and Campbell offer no respite from the onslaught of rough black-and-white images, images which assault the reader with their sameness and with their inability to render any clarity. Far from offering the simplicity or morality that “black and white” implies (following from, for example, the nostalgia we feel for the image of the 1950s given us in the television reruns from that era), From Hell instead offers the past as an elaborate sketch. Indeed, From Hell appears to the reader as more of a study for some as yet incompletely imagined work than it does a finished product.

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“There is no dark side of the digital really”: My proposal for The Dark Side of the Digital

Posted in Page a Day, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on 6 January 2013 by Ben

Here is my (late as it were) proposal for the upcoming Dark Side of the Digital Conference. (edit: I’m calling this my page of writing for the day, even if it’ snot quite a page.)

“There is no dark side of the digital really”

Benjamin J Robertson

In a recent blog post, Jussi Parrika suggests that we should read the “dark” in “dark side of the digital” in terms of “the dark side of the moon” rather than “dark side of the force.” Instead of the evil or malevolent “side” of digitality we should, with Pink Floyd, address the fact that “There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it’s all dark.”

These two approaches to this conference theme are not at all at odds with one another. This paper argues that among the darkest (as in the force) aspects of the digital is its darkness (as in the moon) by design if not by nature. That is, the digital is closed to us, an inhuman space much in the manner that Galloway and Thacker suggest that networks stand opposed to humanity. Drawing from Galloway and Thacker—as well as upon Stiegler’s notions of default, disbelief, and discredit—this paper describes the dark side of the digital through nine short discussions:

  • Speak to Me: when we communicate through digital tools, what else do we communicate with?
  • Breathe: the digital gives us so much room, but none in which to pause.
  • On the Run: as in “on the digital”: the pharmacology of speed.
  • Time: history and futurity in the age of hypersynchronization.
  • The Great Gig in the Sky: where is the cloud?
  • Money: not too much credit but too much discredit—no investment where no belief.
  • Us and Them: there is no us and no them—the digital has neither “side” nor “sides”.
  • Any Colour You Like: the perils of choice; hyper-demography—all content directed to the individual.
  • Brain Damage: how damaged? is the digital now the default?
  • Eclipse: the end of the Enlightenment, even the parts we “like”, such as privacy.

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