Trans-historical Apocalypse?

 
Peter Paik’s new book, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, makes an interesting contribution to the growing study of science fiction. Paik continues the move away from the study of texts, which dominated work on the genre in the 1970s, to study comics and films. Paik is a thoughtful and attentive reader. In particular, his close and careful analysis of Alan Moore’s series, The Watchmen, brings out aspects of the narrative it is easy to miss even in repeated readings of the series. He captures the depressing fatalism of Moore’s V for Vendetta, and offers a nuanced reading of the contradictory relations between the comic series and the problematically appropriated narrative in its film form. Paik maps out the historical dimension of each narrative, whether the alternative history offered by The Watchmen or the critical reaction to Thatcherism in V for Vendetta. Perhaps more significantly, he recognizes a common thread running through a group of seemingly disparate texts and films. His book begins with the analysis of Moore’s The Watchmen, discusses Jang Joon-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet in the second chapter and Hayao Miyazaki’s manga and anime work in the third, and concludes with an analysis of the Matrix films and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta in the final chapter. If Paik focuses on the figure of the superhero, he also shows these texts’ larger social conversation, connecting Moore’s critical reading of superhero comics with the paranoid science fiction of Joon-Hwan and the epic narratives of Miyazaki through a set of common ethical concerns.
 
Paik opens his text with the statement, “This book is a study of revolutionary change” (1). The connection between this claim and the focus of the book, a series of film and comic narratives that critically engage with the figure of the superhero, is negotiated by understanding revolutionary change not as a collective act but as an act of the “demiurgic creator.” Paik negotiates this shift through a reading of Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism, which argues that socialist realism “strove after and achieved the objective of the avant-garde to organize ‘the life of society’ according to ‘monolithic artistic forms'” (qtd. in Paik). That logic, according to Groys, depends on the role of the artist as creator of a new world. Stalinism shifted this desire onto the state, creating new artistic forms in order to effectively achieve “a consummate unity of aesthetic theory and political practice in his [Stalin’s] leadership over the revolutionary state” (Paik 16-17). Paik notes that Groys’s “terms…strikingly resemble the narrative conventions of American superhero comics” where he argues that “the struggle between the ‘positive hero’ of Bolshevism and the counterrevolutionary ‘wrecker’ is a conflict that unfolds on a transcendent plane, in which material reality is reduced to a mere staging ground for their superhuman battles” (Paik 17). Through this gesture, Paik argues that the Soviet project and U.S. dominated liberal capitalism constitute mythic forms, containing “an ideological symmetry that betrays in turn their shared faith in technology, whether in the form of sociopolitical engineering or of an infinitely expanding global market, to eliminate forever the historically intractable afflictions of poverty, scarcity, and war” (18). Both Soviet and U.S. projects fall back on a sort of messianism, legitimating extraordinary acts of violence and exploitation to create a new and more perfected world. Drawing on the work of conservative jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, he argues that these formations continue to be constituted through secularized versions of older political theological debates concerning the relation of the sovereign to an omnipotent god. The demiurgic creator becomes the hidden double of the secularized figure of the sovereign, one who creates new orders, rather than preserving the old by invoking a state of exception (18-9).
 
Paik argues that the material he examines critiques these mythic formations, revealing the hidden acts of violence that were necessary to their foundation. He argues that this critique comes out of a commitment to “realism.” Paik defines these texts as realist, but he distinguishes his notion of realism from generic realism:
 

The reader will note that I am not speaking of realism in the sense of the nineteenth-century novel and its representative conventions, but rather in terms closer to how it is understood in the realm of political philosophy. Realism in this latter sense constitutes a discourse which analyzes in an impartial and dispassionate manner the workings of power. It arises out of the awareness that the wellsprings of political conflict generally lie in the tragic struggle between two irreconcilable forms of the good.
 

(19)

Realism as a political discourse operates in ways that contrast with the mythical forms found both in liberal democracy and in the Soviet project. Effectively, realism entails a rejection of what Paik sees at the heart of both projects, a belief in the perfectibility of society and, implicitly, the perfectibility of human nature. Developing that latter point in his analysis of Miyazaki, he argues that tragedy can be read outside of the Aristotelian framework that has been largely accepted even by its radical critics. Instead, tragedy shows important truths, notably the fact that pain is an intrinsic part of human existence. It also refuses to narrate conflict exclusively from the perspective of one group. By demanding an analysis that operates from the perspective that a conflict is derived from equally legitimate but irreconcilable perspectives, this construction of realism allows for a significant form of cognitive mapping to occur. It allows one to think structurally, rather than as a partisan. On the other hand, it reduces the rich history of utopian thought to a simple call for perfection, rather than recognizing its role as protest, satire, critique, which are as significant to its formation as a genre as is the fantasy of perfectibility. Perhaps more significantly, Paik’s construction of realism as tragic political struggle ignores the genre’s long reception history as an outlet of protest for the poor and exploited.

Paik’s statement not only separates his work from the long history of the study of generic form taken on by literary criticism, it also elides the question of the relationship between historicity and literary form. Rather than proposing an analysis that would ask, “Why is it that narratives of catastrophe became a dominate narrative in the era of neoliberalism?” he moves into a set of transhistorical questions posed by the conventions of political philosophy. That approach amounts to an uncritical acceptance of the ideological premises of his objects of study. Neither the claim that he will focus on “revolutionary change” nor the title’s implicit claim that the book will focus on “apocalypse” or “catastrophe” accurately describes the focus of his text. Instead, the book focuses on a set of dystopian narratives, beginning in the late 1980s and ending with the turn of the century. Aside from a brief engagement with the definition of utopia in the introduction of the book, Paik avoids analyzing either the history of the genre, or its criticism. Additionally, the text makes very few references to the study of comics or to film theory. Paik’s lack of engagement with this critical tradition can’t be reduced to breach of protocol, but leads to a number of analytical problems in what could have been a more critical intervention in the field.
 
This problem is most evident in his reading of Moore’s The Watchmen, although it also affects his reading of the other films and comics. Paik recognizes the intertextual dimension of Moore’s work, but makes no effort to work through the theoretical implications of that intertextuality. Paik reads Moore’s work through the lens of the superhero as a “demiurgic creator,” focusing on Ozymandias’s attempt to create a new order through mass death. While this assessment is true, the narrative is also continually reflecting back on the history of comics as a genre. The series invokes the history of a multiplicity of comic forms, both licit and illicit, and explores the confessional from of the memoir and a number of other forms. Moore’s narrative not only comments on the fantasy of the superhero as secularized sovereign, but on the history of comic art itself. Moore’s narrative takes the relationship seriously–the relationship between form and history, which is dropped from theoretical concern in Paik’s analysis. Paik never deals with the narrative’s allusions to the comic’s code, nor with the complex and contradictory attempts on the part of the genre to deal with the counter-culture and New Left. More significantly, Paik avoids thinking through how Moore’s narrative itself might be influenced by the policies of Reagan and Thatcher, the crushing of counter-systemic movements, the dismantling of the social safety net, etc. The refusal to deal with the history of generic form simultaneously erases the way the various texts Paik engages with operate as products of their times.
 
Effectively, Paik’s analysis ignores the need to read these films and texts symptomatically, that is as products of the common sense assumptions of their time. The need to read texts symptomatically doesn’t leave out the possibility that these texts diagnose and critique the political formations of their time, but it does demand a critical engagement with the objects at hand. To give an example of an alternative approach to dystopian literature, we can look at Tom Moylan’s Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Moylan introduces a note of ambiguity in his analysis of the genre: “The dystopian text does not guarantee a creative position that is implicitly militant or resigned. As an open form, it always negotiates the continuum between the Party of Utopia and the Party of Anti-Utopia” (xiii). Within Moylan’s explicitly political framing, the genre has both the possibility of contributing to the implicitly positive potential of political militancy and of contributing to its negative potential for resignation. There are legitimate critiques of this partisan approach to literary criticism. After all, the approach tends to create a binary between the “good” and the “bad” text, losing out on the possibility of complexity and ambiguity in narrative.
 
Still, Moylan’s approach holds out the possibility of reading the genre critically, exposing its assumptions, its mystifications. More significantly, Moylan continually insists on reading dystopia as a product of a particular historical time and particular events. He notes, “Although its roots lie in Menippean satire, realism, and the anti-utopian novels of the nineteenth century, the dystopia emerged as a literary form in its own right in the early 1900s, as capital entered a new phase with the onset of monopolized production and as the modern imperialist state extended its internal and external reach” (xi). Moylan foregrounds the historical aspect of the conditions that the dystopian novel was simultaneously defined by and that it critically engaged, rather than gesturing towards or alluding to it, as Paik does. If Paik had taken this historical aspect more seriously, he could have avoided some of the more problematic interpretations of the historical materialist tradition, particularly in his attempt to ascribe a notion of human nature to the tradition. This difficulty persists in his reading of Darko Suvin’s work, where he focuses on the notion of utopia as a “good place,” rather than on Suvin’s historical argument about the rise of utopian literature. Suvin’s concept of the novum, or “novelty, innovation . . . validated by cognitive logic” (Suvin 63), can be understood only within temporal innovations of the commodity form, or within what Benedict Anderson, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, calls the “homogenous, empty time” of print capitalism (24). To put it simply, the history of the genre of science fiction is intertwined with the history of crisis and transformation in the formation of the capitalist world system. At an even more basic level, science fiction operates on the premise that the future will be radically different from the present.
 
But that engagement with history is not part of Paik’s theoretical engagement with his texts. Instead, Paik frames his argument through the trans-historical framework offered by Carl Schmitt. Despite his critical interpretation of Schmitt, Paik accepts the transhistorical framework implicit in his methodology. Rather than thinking about the fear, cynicism, and opportunism that define our particular “leaden times” as a result of the class offensive contained in neoliberalism, Paik’s narrative accepts the political resignation of those texts, not as an effect of the counterrevolutionary violence of our times, but as a transhistorical truth. This translates into an unconscious conservatism that runs throughout Paik’s text. Unlike Moylan, I am unsure whether resignation is an accurate reflection of our current political possibilities or a conservative mystification of those possibilities, but, along with Moylan, I would argue that critical political theory should interrogate the assumptions of contemporary common sense, rather than repeat them.