Love, Death, AND Robots? In THIS Economy?!
CW: “Love, Death, and Robots” is a show that depicts brutal violence and some instances of sexual violence, and this essay discusses them as well. I also extensively discuss the ongoing pandemic.
I recently got around to watching “Love, Death, and Robots”, a little over a year after its release, and I was struck by its ironic regularity. In my estimation, every episode follows, as a (very loose) rule, one of two basic formats: an ostensibly conventional plot with a twist ending, or a plot that ends predictably but is premised on some conceit that lies somewhere in the Uncanny Valley, both familiar and off-putting. In both cases, LDR is all about disorientation, about thwarting or upending the viewer’s narrative expectations. It’s about how these stories give us closure, or don’t.
The basic conceit of each short in the anthology is almost always deeply familiar. Werewolves, vampires, androids, demons, aliens, and so on all make their appearances as one might expect. LDR says nothing new really, and I think that’s the whole point. I can’t read the minds of the various writers and directors, obviously, but if I gave my guess (as I’m about to do) I’d bet that these stories were all written as musings on the realities of neoliberal austerity that we’ve all been grappling with for decades now. This extended moment we’ve been excessively told is the “End of History” was obviously no such thing, and now we are in a position to learn, with catastrophic brutality, exactly how deluded that assertion was. History has come back to bite us in our collective ass, seizing the opportunity we gave it when we turned our backs on it and insisted we need not pay attention to it anymore. LDR is an extended musing on the spiritual and political consequences of all this, play-acted with images of the things that go BUMP in the night.
As an aside; I generally ignore spoiler alerts myself and dislike them on principle. Stories are holistic experiences; you can’t say you’ve watched a movie and understand its significance or nuances if you just read a plot synopsis. You have to encounter the story, in whatever medium, in its whole form to reach any kind of comprehension of it, and so knowing the plot points diminishes nothing. “Spoilers” do no such thing.
But for LDR I will make an exception and, perhaps, a hypocrite of myself. By all means I hope you read this whole essay if you haven’t already seen the anthology, and then go watch the show. Or you can go watch the show, but I hope you come back for my thoughts because, well…I’d like to share them with you. But, as I said, LDR is all about (dis)orientation and narrative expectation: building it, destabilizing it, exploding it, withdrawing it. It’s all about the process of going through a story expecting one thing and getting something else entirely. Perhaps, in this one case, it’s best to get knocked off your feet with the original first before you go “spoiling” it for yourself. In any case, this essay will be here when you get back.
Now, if you’ll permit the form of my essay to mirror the form of its subject matter, I’ll ramble for a bit before reaching an end.
The Known and Exact Center of the Universe
Literally the first major assumption that LDR challenges is the notion that humanity’s place in the history of the universe is 1) at the center, 2) permanent, and 3) was always inevitable. Fukuyama’s “End of History” is an essential element of the “anthropocene”, and so, in an attempt to imagine a future–any future at all–that’s the first thing to go. Where does history take us when we acknowledge it was always going somewhere? LDR has no answers, only jokes.
The biggest joke, of course, is that human beings are irrelevant on a long enough a timescale, and this is only funny because of our bloated sense of our own importance. “Three Robots” tour our cities’ dead husks for mild amusement, and find them lacking in anything particularly noteworthy or even entertaining. When one robot finds bouncing a basketball anticlimactic, another sardonically replies “welcome to humans.” As if to underscore the point, the sardonic robot later abandons the idea of humanity’s origins at the hands of a divine deity placing them on this plane for an unknown purpose, in favor of describing our collective point of origin as “a very warm soup”.
The anthropocene comes un-moored in the face of such detached amusement. In “Ice Age”, a couple of millennial renters find a whole civilization in their freezer, at microscopic scale and on a vastly accelerated timeline. The civilization they find mirrors the history of our world so closely that there are recognizable historical markers. In the course of a day the micro-civilization goes from the origins of humanity to the achievement of a transhumanist singularity, exactly the sort of satisfying, closed arc we expect of our society. Either history has ended, or it will end.
But the very fact that a couple of bored tenants stare at this civilization for amusement like it’s a TV show raises the issue; why can’t there be somebody else, on another scale, doing the same to us? If this society in the freezer is just playing our history in front of us, what makes our world so important and all encompassing?
There’s no satisfying answer to this question, and so LDR runs wild with the possibilities. In “When the Yogurt Took Over,” a sentient yogurt takes over human society, ultimately using humanity for its own ambitions. An insecure and uncertain narrator whines at the end of the short, “What if the yogurt takes to the stars and leaves us behind…forever?” As if such a being would have any reason to take us with it at all.
This context lends the musings in “Alternate Histories” on the various ways Hitler could have died a new resonance. Surely, the episode is entertaining primarily as a spiteful, gleeful way to fend off existential fear in a world threatened by resurgent and emboldened fascism. “Man, fuck these Nazis, let’s dream up some fucked up deaths for their fave” is a cathartic exercise all on its own.
The episode goes a bit further, though. Each new death scenario also comes with an explanation of how historical events unfolded from there, starting with the obvious questions: how did the World Wars unfold? What was the geopolitical state of Europe? Who was first to the moon? But each episode is increasingly unhinged, positing more bizarre answers. In one scenario, human beings are wiped out by an asteroid to be supplanted by sentient rats, who undergo more or less the same historical trajectory humans expected of themselves only to annihilate themselves with nukes. The rats are followed by a race of squid, who end up being the first beings from Earth to make it to the moon millions of years in the future.
These historical events we use as mile markers of human development, of this grand story we tell about ourselves, are so arbitrary and meaningless that they can be bunched together, dispersed, replaced, or forgotten quite easily. Not only is history not deterministic (how the hell would one know squids would develop sentience and reach the moon by the year 3 million anyhow?) but it’s not even any more about us than it is about rats, or squid, or yogurt. The assertion of the End of History is a paradox, both an insistence that the story is all about us, and a surrender of any meaningful role in history to the next mammal, cephalopod, or fermented dairy product intrepid enough to assume the spotlight.
When those three robots discover a missile lying unguarded in a silo, they start talking about the end of humanity. They remark that nukes could easily have ended the human race, but ultimately weren’t necessary for the task; ecological collapse did the trick. In a particularly poetic turn of phrase, the sardonic robot describes the apocalypse of climate change as “the long, heedless winter of their own self-regard.” But in the interest of straightforwardness, it restates, “they just screwed themselves by being a bunch of morons.”
The robots almost instantly learn that humans were actually displaced by cats once the former granted the latter opposable thumbs through genetic engineering. Once the cats could open cans of tuna without human caretakers, they were disposable. Humans are shitty stewards of history anyway, nobody needs them–err, us.
Losing the Plot
My original exposure to arguments along the lines of the “the novel form is constitutive of imperialist epistemology” comes from Said, in Culture and Imperialism. His argument, that “the novel is…a concrete historical narrative shaped by the real history of real nations” rests on a reading of Lukacs. I have not read Lukacs, so this will be an amateurish attempt to discern the potential connections between the novel form and imperialism.
From grade school English, I remember some basic lessons about narrative, or rather, narrative as it’s imagined in the novel. A proper novel has a beginning, middle, and end, a series of scenes which roughly encompass exposition, destabilization, rising action, climax, and denouement. It has main characters. The novel has protagonists, and it may have antagonists. These main characters do, or should, motivate most of the action. The story revolves around them. This last part sounds trivial, but bear with me.
In seventh grade, my English teacher tried to inspire some critical thought about the novel format by having us read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and then asked us “so where was the climax?” Without spoiling that as well, long story short…Hitchhiker’s is all rising action. No real climax to speak of. They kinda spliced something like a climax and denouement in for the movie, but the book? Nah.
Why was this? Because Douglass Adams was notoriously insouciant towards deadlines, and only had about two thirds of his intended manuscript ready when his publisher insisted he hand over whatever he had for publishing. So he gave them the unfinished book, and that was that on that.
But, I digress. The point of all this is that one, this is a very specific structure that we’ve all become accustomed to in Western storytelling and two, it’s not actually necessary to tell a story. In fact, the novel form is a really strange and strained way to relate a series of events. Series’ of events don’t usually have discrete, separable scenes that are easily grouped into undulating tensions like we expect them to be in a novel. And yet, this extremely specific storytelling structure, ill-suited as it is for describing anything in the real world, has become our primary cultural model for making sense of the world in the West.
You can easily see how an application of the novel form can lead to, for example, the Great Man Theory of history. After all, if human history can be told as any sort of novel, then it needs main characters. The novel form as a historiographical practice also helps to explain the popularity of the bizarre notion that history has an arc that moves, or has moved, in some deliberate traceable way.
These cognitive distortions, incidentally, are exactly what we see when it comes to imperialism. Imperialism, specifically the Western variety, depends on the notion that history has “moved” from East to West; the world has plot with some kind of resolution. When the world reaches this resolution, the purpose of its main characters–in this case, imagined to be the Great Men amongst White people–will be fulfilled.
Even more specifically, novels typically resolve in particular ways. The context at the beginning of the novel is prone to the destabilization that precipitates the novel. There is drama, often involving violence, that ultimately resolves the crisis of instability. The climax and denouement depict a world rid of the destabilizing force; in other words, the world the novel depicts always moves towards stability, towards a world more under control than before.
This, I think, is the fundamental reason the novel form lends itself to imperialist historiography; bringing the world under greater and stricter forms of control is much of the point of imperialism. In other words, the novel form flatters assumptions about the world that we (White Westerners) would prefer to hold true because they validate the project of empire. They make it make sense.
A couple of LDR’s shorts seem to humor the demands of the novel form. “Shape-Shifters” depicts a couple of werewolves as US military personnel in Afghanistan, and “Lucky 13” shows us the bond a pilot develops with the titular ship as they take it on missions on behalf of a colonizing conglomerate. In both cases, the story derives much of its meaning from the violence at the boundaries of the empire. The very act of conquest produces the meaning we are supposed to crave. You can see in the former short how the prejudice against the main characters for being “dog soldiers” could be analogized to homophobia in the military, and how the protagonist gains the respect and acceptance of his fellow men after brutally avenging a fallen comrade on some Afghan werewolves. In the latter short, we see the protagonist develop a relationship with her ship, interpreting her lucky survival streak as a sign that Lucky 13 has a soul and is motivated to protect her pilot.
But isn’t this all a little ridiculous? That in 2019, we would find analogizing homosexuality to lycanthropy to be compelling, rather than a cop-out? Or that we should bother assigning any more significance to Lucky 13’s persistent survival than pure chance? Why shouldn’t we take these stories exactly as they are–as long-winded prevarications that transform imperial violence into emotional resolution even when the violence doesn’t stop. We never get any explanation of what all the fighting in “Lucky 13” is even about. Will it end soon? What are the stakes? Does anybody even care about all the death as much as they care about whether or not a hunk of flying metal has a soul?
In “Shape-Shifters” the motivation of the plot is our protagonist’s vengeance against a couple of Afghan werewolves that killed his comrade. But these anonymous Afghans never speak a word; the real antagonists, if there even are any in this story, are the homophobic–err, sorry, lycanphobic(?) US Army that belittle our protagonists and treat them as expendable, ultimately precipitating the lethal events of the story. The “resolution” is that our protagonist goes AWOL, ripping off his dog tags and walking off base with his “friend’s” body. He rejects the imperialist structure that enlisted him into the novel form, and comes to live in the Afghan desert, closer to the Afghan werewolves he just murdered than to any of his so-called brothers-in-arms.
“Sucker of Souls” is more pronounced than either “Shape-Shifters” or “Lucky 13”, both more in-your-face and more subtle at once. The story shows us a couple of comfortable archetypes: a mousy archaeologist, a hard-bitten mercenary and his wise-cracking band, an ancient evil buried in exotic ruins. It’s all very familiar, and the animation style gives us the sensation of flipping through a pulpy comic updating an old Hammer horror film with a heaping helping of cheeky, “ironic” vulgarity.
What “Sucker of Souls” lacks is most of a plot. It’s heavy on cliches, archetypes, and jokes, but it lacks any exposition, destabilization, climax, or denouement; it’s all rising action in medias res. Of course, this whole plot is recognizable as one of the stock canards of Orientalism; Western agents of power (in this case historians and soldiers) travel to faraway lands and get too close to the Orient, awakening something dangerous and fatal. The moral of the story? Don’t touch the East, lest you wake it up and it bites you.
We only know this about “Sucker of Souls” because we’ve all seen The Mummy, or Tomb Raider, or something like it, and it’s an unoriginal story–so unoriginal that we can recognize it when most of it is missing. But that very absence does raise the question; why the hell did any of these assholes come to this ruin and do this in the first place? Haven’t they seen The Mummy? And, more importantly, what possible justification could they have had for doing so other than exactly the sort of naked imperialism we all know motivates this story we’ve already heard? The usual justifications for imperialism that the novel form would provide are stripped, rendering the whole scenario exactly as nonsensical and self-defeating as it has always been.
Hoping Against Hope
Wars are pretty much ideal for the novel form; at least, the traditional variety are anyway, whether those have ever existed or not.
Take WWII, for example. As we are taught it in US K-12 curricula, it fits the novel form almost perfectly. It has exposition (the “Factors Leading To” section of the textbook) which could be drawn from the Great Depression and WWI, the prequels to WWII. It has a destabilizing condition–the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Germany is a good candidate from the US perspective, or perhaps the invasion of Poland. It has rising action–pretty much everything before Normandy, typically. It has a climax–take your pick here: Normandy, Stalingrad, VE-Day (where the US pivoted to defeating Japan), perhaps others depending on how much of a historical pedant you are. And it has denouement–the occupation of Japan, the partition of Germany, the settling of the new world order that would become the Cold War. In sum, a stable context was disrupted by a malevolent outside force (the Nazis and Japanese Empire), which was ultimately defeated through events that were uncertain to contemporaries but that appear foretold in retrospect. In the US, at any rate, this is exactly how WWII is narratively structured for pedagogy and the public consciousness.
Virtually all of US history is narrativized this way for the sake of K-12 pedagogy. The story of the United States of America is digested into eras which adjoin each other at discrete boundaries–although any competent historian knows the boundaries are no such things and that history is more the analysis of potentialities than the study of epochs. No wonder Fukuyama declared an End of History; US culture since colonial days has prophesied exactly such an end. Manifest Destiny and all other utopian projects envisioned by settler-colonialism imagine some final climax. In the denouement, human society is stabilized in a perfected, immutable state–the shining city on a hill. It is a requirement of the USian civic religion that an end had to be declared eventually.
And The End really is (imagined to be) an utopian one. Settler-colonialism creates and depends on hope for this paradisiac resolution to history. Isn’t that fucked up? Of course the process of bringing more of the world “under control” has entailed slavery and genocide on theretofore inconceivable scales of misery. Whoever really believes in that shining city is, by default, part of a death cult; the hope for such a utopian resolution is grim and brutal.
Escaping the imaginary of a death cultist and imagining a way out of imperialism requires abandoning the hope of this final, stable, perfected form of society. It requires abandoning the possibility for denouement, and recognizing that history flows stochastically and unpredictably. The reason events always seem impossible to predict when you live through them is that they are impossible to predict. What we actually see when we look back on history is not a set of decisions deterministically leading to an outcome that contemporaries were simply not sophisticated to see. Instead, it is a constantly shifting array of potentialities, which seem traceable only because the super-position of these potentialities had to collapse eventually. People had to make choices, but the choices were always opaque and uncertain.
It is this historical reality, and the concomitant rejection of denouement, that LDR ultimately indulges. In “The Secret War”, a secret unit of the Red Army fights an army of monsters in an isolated Russian wilderness. The setting is WWII, the heroes are hard-bitten soldiers with a specific strategic goal. At first, it seems this is an ideal setup for exactly the sort of cathartic novelized narrative we would expect of a wartime setting. But an offhand remark about the fight for Stalingrad happening far away suggests that the telling of history we are accustomed to is far off.
Instead, we learn that this unit is chasing monsters summoned not by the Nazis, but by the Red Army itself. Senior officers in the Army summoned these creatures for a military edge. Unable to contain them, they were set loose on the world. All of the sacrifice, violence, and heroism of “The Secret War” is performed to reverse the mistakes of authority figures. While the contest of empires happens far off on the Eastern Front, these lonely soldiers pay the ultimate price to fix their superiors’ mistakes–mistakes which were made precisely in pursuit of the novel’s catharsis, of bringing the world more under (in this case, the Red Army’s) control.
“Huli Jing” is more circumspect, telling a story of two rural Chinese villagers (one man, one shape-shifting female spirit) as they live through the colonization of China by the British, particularly in Hong Kong. The story dips into the steampunk genre, as British occupation brings wondrous automata at the same time as it subjugates the Chinese and kills the magic that allows the Huli Jing to shape-shift. Our Chinese protagonist, the young man, plies his talent for the design of steampunk automata to restore the Huli Jing’s shape-shifting. Magic is lost and then restored by machinery, allowing the Huli Jing to hunt the colonizers who subjugate her and so many other Chinese.
The twist of “Huli Jing” is not just that the titular spirit gets to hunt misogynists again as she and her sisters would have before. The real twist is that everything and nothing has changed at the same time. The Huli Jing shape-shifts and she hunts both at the beginning and end of the story. Her primary enemy in both cases is murderous misogynists, be they parochial spirit hunters or British colonizers. The context has changed, but the characters do not grow–they simply become again who they always were by other means in strange environs.
In “Huli Jing” as in “The Secret War”, the stabilizing process that empire imagines for itself as the novelized narrative is totally absent. The plot doesn’t move anywhere, it loops through history away from and back to the same point. The Huli Jing asserts the ability to resist Empire’s (misogynist, racist) fantasies of possessive control in the same breath that she asserts an irreducible identity. The Russian soldiers lay down their lives as the price of reversing their superiors’ attempts at more effective domination. In both cases, the empire’s novel form is rejected for more cyclic narratives of resistance and accountability. In both cases, empire is the disruption, not the catharsis.
The Novel, Coronavirus
One of the many things the pandemic has done is dispense with our narrative assumptions about disaster. We thought there would be catharsis, violence, drama. We thought that this would be a grand, unifying test in which humanity rose to the occasion or definitively perished trying. In any case, there would be closure. Instead, it has largely shown that most people experience catastrophe as a quiet, gnawing anxiety that suffering will visit them and that those most empowered by this society will not help them.
But these narrative expectations–of growth, of stabilization, of catharsis–have always been foolish, it’s just harder to ignore now. LDR explores this as well, in a way that is perfectly fitting for this historic moment in spite of the fact that the first season was released over a year ago.
In “The Witness”, a sex worker witnesses a murder through a hotel window and is then chased through the city by the murderer; the killer is intrigued that the witness looks identical to his victim. The Chase takes them through the city, even through the sex worker’s club, where the killer sees her dance, only to scare her off when she notices him in the audience. The chase ultimately takes them to an apartment where the worker kills her pursuer in self-defense with a stolen handgun. At the end, the woman sees a man identical to the one she just killed staring at her, shocked, from a hotel window.
The whole episode is especially surreal. Animation is used to underscore sound effects and distort the faces of the characters as the chase winds through the city. The club is especially disorienting, with loud sound effects, deliberately off-center, close-up, blurry cinematography, and a complete change in tone. The characters never introduce themselves to us or each other. There is no identification or sociality, only the murder that (apparently) repeats ad nauseam in this bizarre cycle.
Sex work is perhaps the most intensely precarious of all service labor, at least in the US. Income ranges wildly, there are no labor protections, legal protection for those in the profession who suffer violence is largely nonexistent. This labor relation, of an extremely precarious service worker and her disoriented patron, is the only thing tying these individuals together besides the murder, and so one might assume this labor relation is the closest thing to a cause of that murder that we see. The only social ties between these people is the violence of precarious labor, periodically “resolving” in conflagrations of violence that merely restart the cycle.
“Helping Hand” is a bit more explicit about this relation, depicting a worker for some kind of satellite maintenance firm. There’s some expositional bitching about the corporation’s penny-pinching, leading to poorly maintained equipment and staffing cutbacks.
Inevitably, something goes wrong. Our hero is struck by space debris, damaging their equipment and setting them adrift. They survive through extraordinary ingenuity and grit, throwing a piece of their suit for a Newtonian push towards their shuttle; when that fails, they rip off their own frozen arm for another try. Their success is both a relief and a tragedy. Their bravery is no compensation for the horrifically dangerous situation they were put in by policies of corporate austerity that we are all aware of and accustomed to. “Helping Hand” is the ultimate “feel good, feel bad” story. The hero saves themselves but resolves no greater plot, making “a wee sacrifice for the great nothing”.
The grim fact is that the realities of capitalism render sacrifice painfully moot. In “Suits”, a paint-by-numbers mechs vs monsters story sets up some moving moments of charm, humor, and sacrifice, as a community of homesteaders defend their farm from aliens pouring in through a “breach” in their perimeter. But in the final moments, the meaning of those sacrifices is erased when the camera pans out and shows us that the homestead community is under a dome force-field crawling with more monsters. In other words, the terror and tragedy they just survived is bound to repeat itself. Nothing is resolved. The homesteader Jake, in self-destructing his mech to delay the aliens and save his friends, made his “wee sacrifice for the great nothing”.
In a way, “Suits” dramatizes an ontological reality of settler-colonialism, that apocalypse festers at its boundaries. I don’t just mean to say that settler-colonialism is unstable, constantly inviting catastrophe. At both the literal boundary of the historic Frontier, and the metaphorical boundaries of bio-political (read: identitarian) categories, settler-colonialism wreaks its own ongoing apocalypse on BIPOC; empire is the disruption. This wholly unnatural structure, propped up through constant violence and inviting implosion, erases any resolution that might come from surviving disaster.
This explains the impulse to speak of the pandemic in terms of war, and to draw analogies to WWII mobilization. In a way, this forcibly reasserts the narrative expectations of the novel form. It makes us feel like there is a resolution in sight. But of course, this is nonsense. There is no end to the War on Terror, nor to the War on Drugs, and there won’t be an end to the War on COVID because the pandemic recognizes no such narrative conventions. Much like the homesteaders in “Suits”, the meaning of sacrifice in defense of the community is undermined by the bullheaded self-destructiveness of persisting in settler-colonial capitalism at all. To hold up this house of cards simply gives entropy endless opportunities to bury us in it.
In “Fish Night”, the car of a pair of door-to-door salesmen, one young one old, breaks down on the side of a desert cutoff. A conversation about their poor prospects for success meets a tailor-made metaphor for the inability of old workers to persist under new realities of austerity in the form of the broken-down Plymouth. The two even get into a debate about whether the times have passed them by (the elder’s pessimistic nostalgia) or whether anything can be accomplished with the right attitude (the neoliberal responsibilization imbibed by the younger). It’s all very Death of a Salesman, instantly recognizable as a parable about the changing terms of the American Dream.
The second half of “Fish Night” takes a hard left turn though, as the two salesmen encounter the ghosts of sea creatures from a bygone geologic era. The two marvel at the tangibility of the ghosts, and the younger even jumps into the air, suddenly buoyant and swimming with ancient creatures. But this ultimately proves a fatal mistake, as the ghost of a megalodon ambushes and devours him. The short implements a reversal; it is at first about changing labor relations, but sidelines those concerns to assert the primacy of ecology. Permanent, always haunting and stalking us, ecology overrides all contemporary concerns with the monstrous inevitability of climate change.
Or does it? The elder doesn’t go swimming and doesn’t get eaten. Perhaps their differing attitudes are relevant after all. The younger salesman, after all, accepts the absolute individual responsibility preached by neoliberal meritocracy. Failure is the result, in Social Darwinian terms, of unfitness and never of social context. Your environment is irrelevant, only your “attitude” and competence matters.
No wonder such an ideologue would get themselves eaten by ecological ghosts; they witness ecology’s power and wonder, but reject the notion they have any relationship to it. The younger salesman can’t see that he’ll be eaten until it’s too late because he categorically refuses, as an ideological commitment, to be aware of context. The elder, for all his nostalgia, still fears and respects ecology. So “Fish Night” actually accomplishes a double reversal. At first about changing labor relations, it is really about the primacy of ecology, before revealing it is ultimately about changing labor relations as they relate to ecology. The elder sees the apocalypse that is constantly nipping at the homesteaders’ force field, that blindsides the astronaut, that structures the sex worker’s Groundhog Day existence.
Lines of Flight
What ways out of this mess become available to the imagination when we abandon the desire to see the novel structure in history, when we recognize that it doesn’t fit? One possibility is, obviously, that we can dispense with the Great Man Theory once and for all. Another is that we realize that discrete historical eras aren’t actually separable, that there exist continuities across all so-called eras that illuminate fundamental struggles. A third is that we recognize permanent stability, that hallmark of the imperialist imaginary, is actually an impossibility and that chasing it anyway is, perhaps ironically, self-destructive. Fantasies of a society that eradicates the possibility of mortality and harm, either through transhumanist means of transforming the body or managerial means of regulating the social fabric, evaporate. The stable society–and the immutable, invulnerable body it implies–disappears.
I am talking about the eradication of bio-politics, the abolition of hierarchies of power that inscribe moral characteristics on the body so as to justify violence done to them. Classically, such politics (i.e. racism, patriarchy, etc) depend on making a horror of some bodies in order to elevate and ostensibly defend others. Imperialism, and therefore the novel form, are intimately tied up in these moral assumptions about the body. So, when we abandon these narrative assumptions about history, what new ways open up not just to live, but to be?
“The Dump” illuminates one key possibility. A city health inspector visits the titular dump to evict its tenant on behalf of the city government and real estate developers hoping to take the land for luxury condos. The tenant, “Ugly Dave,” idly tells a story of a giant garbage monster in the dump that incorporates whatever it eats into its own body in a way that is visible at the surface, only for his story to end with the same monster showing up to eat the inspector.
Dave’s encounter with the monster is, at first, quite a tense scene. It eats his visiting friend and stalks him in the dump, until Dave chases it down and impales it on the tines of a forklift. But Dave’s realization that the thing consumes and becomes detritus sparks what is, perhaps, a moment of recognition. After all, that is quite a literal description of the operation of the human metabolism; you are what you eat. The maxim is just more literal for the garbage monster.
Dave keeps his dump, and exempts himself from capitalist circuits of value extraction/accumulation largely by remaining consumptive and responsive to changing inputs. He somehow befriends the garbage monster, naming it Otto, even after it ate his friend Pearly. Recognizing the mutability of the body in response to change opens us up to new relations that seem horrifying and disgusting to us at first, but that may ultimately render us resilient.
“Sonnie’s Edge” reifies the same issue more starkly. The titular Sonnie is ordered by a rich proprietor to take a dive in an underground fight where the contestants take mental control of monsters, but Sonnie refuses. All the characters speculate on why she fights so well, or why she refuses the payoff for the dive; the speculations usually revolve around the idea that her success in the fights is a cathartic reversal of a prior incident in which she was kidnapped, raped, and tortured. The short plays up this possibility, making Sonnie’s opponent a large, vulgar Black man who makes aggressive, suggestive gestures towards Sonnie throughout their matchup. The character deliberately conjures the image of the hyper sexual Black male, that absolute staple of Western bio-political moral panic. The sexual assault gives meaning to Sonnie’s fights in the eyes of the onlooker; it puts the bio-political categories of gender and race at the center of a cathartic narrative which travels from the degradation of the assault to the cathartic dominance in the arena. It imposes the novel form on Sonnie’s experience through the canards of patriarchal racism.
Sonnie herself explicitly rejects this framing and even expresses resentment and frustration with it. She dismisses the myth as reducing her to “a scared little girl out for revenge.” But when the proprietor’s enforcer tries to kill her in retaliation for rejecting the dive, she reveals her true edge. Her body was so broken after the assault that she transplanted her mind into the body of the monster that she “controls” in the ring; in other words, she is fighting for her life whenever she is in the ring, and her “human” body is actually the puppet. With her massive monster’s body, she makes short work of the enforcer and the proprietor; class struggle is best fought with sharp claws. But more importantly the metaphorical struggle to reestablish the boundaries of violated White womanhood is discarded. In its place is a straightforward fight-or-flight reflex, an immanent sensation that defies any and all narrative logic.
The supreme irony is reiterated in “Blindspot” which depicts a futuristic train heist by a bunch of cyborgs. Like any heist movie, the tension builds to either ultimate tragedy or ultimate success; in this case, all the crew members but the youngest is physically obliterated. But in the final moments, it’s revealed a supporting crew member created backs up of all their personalities in digital form, available to be restored to new bodies at any time. The rookie rides off with the payload, tragedy evaded. Like in “Sonnie’s Edge” and “The Dump”, abandoning the quest to make the body inviolable makes new, potentially more powerful, and less human configurations possible.
“Zima Blue” is the last short to expound on this theme. Ironically, it is the short that hues most closely to the novel form with something approaching a stable, cathartic resolution. The titular artist is world renowned for his exquisite and increasingly strange artwork. Multiple tales aren told about him, first by an admiring reporter, then by Zima himself. The short elucidates Zima’s quest for truth in the universe, first by depicting it in his art. Then Zima tries to impose a monochromatic vision on the world by painting a singular shade of blue on increasingly large canvasses. Finally, he takes on cybernetic modifications that make him nearly invulnerable to the elements and capable of processing vast spectra of information in order to “commune with the cosmos” in even the harshest environments. The whole venture is deliberately reminiscent of Doctor Manhattan.
Ultimately, Zima decides to shed his cybernetic modifications, stripping himself to the core of his body: a simple pool cleaning robot. When Zima relates the transformative process leading from the latter to the former body, he reveals that his name comes from the manufacturer’s name for the blue of the tiles he was created to clean. His final artwork involves this process of shedding all “higher” functionality and once again he becomes a simple mechanism with a primal, straightforward purpose.
The transhumanist quest to enclose the universe in a total understanding proves unappealing, or perhaps unnecessary, or maybe futile. Whatever the case, the possibilities of transformation are leveraged not to expand consciousness, but to diminish and enclose it in such a way that satisfaction becomes immediate, mechanical, deterministic. The quest for truth is reconfigured from an attempt to establish epistemic dominance over the universe to a journey from and back to a self-consciously limited role within it.
Zima Blue both reifies and explodes the novel form at once. His journey has an expository context, a disruption, a rising action, and a cathartic resolution. But the narrative moves through a greater enclosure of the universe, through a moment of greater control, only to find it unsatisfactory and pass by it. The true ending is not a perfection of the human form, but a rejection of it. A project of perfecting the human form by making it somehow all-knowing or inviolable is abandoned; in its stead is a search for new, explicitly non-human forms for instrumental or spiritual purposes.
Magical Thinking
“Beyond the Aquila Rift” is maybe the saddest short in LDR. Like “Helping Hand,” it’s about deep space working schmucks laboring in a precarious job. Idle chatter in the short suggests they are some kind of freight-hauling gig workers. They get sidetracked by a routing error in deep space, putting them light years off their course. To the captain, Tom, it appears they have landed in a station with at least one friendly face in it, albeit far away from home.
But Tom soon discovers that the friendly face, an old lover, is actually not who he thought she was. The station is an illusion being fed to him by…something. The only things the being asserts as true is that he did, in fact, fly far off course. But the industrial glitch in his ship did not lead to a safe harbor. The notion that the structure he was entrapped by and depended on had any safety net for him is dispelled.
When he finally sees through the illusion, he realizes he is in some kind of nest, or maybe a trap. The thing pretending to be his old lover is a truly Lovecraftian creature, insisting in a creepily paternalistic way that it does care for him and others. It presumes to make decisions for Tom and the others about whether they are “ready” to know the truth. But of course, when Tom insists that is up to him to decide and sees the truth, the next scene shows that he has once again been enraptured by the illusion.
Was he recaptured? Maybe. Perhaps the creature forcibly reasserted the vision when Tom’s terror became unmanageable. But I can’t help but think that Tom surrendered. The notion that the disruption was resolved, that the system had a safety net for him, was far more comforting than the immediate reality–outside of narrative logics–that he was spontaneously ensnared by a paternalistic monster that left him unconscious and emaciated. The truth was too much to bear, as the cliche goes–back into the Matrix he goes.
This is why this short, in particular, is so sad; it smacks of defeat. LDR is full of characters who, through sheer imagination, reject the narrativizing logics of settler-colonial capitalism. Tom embraces them–or rather, he lets them embrace him. It is easier to believe that the universe is fully enclosed in a capitalist empire that makes toiling at gig work for large conglomerates make sense. It is harder to accept that this is utter nonsense, that it could never have been true, and that the inevitable result is that we assent to being ensnared by entities that are predatory, paternalistic, or both.
Tom doesn’t surrender to the creature so much as he surrenders to the magical thinking necessary to believe that the rationalizing project of empire is sensible and achievable. He surrenders to the notion that capitalism has enclosed the universe such that all things within it make sense, and that even within his role as a precarious gig laborer he is ultimately safe from predation. He literally surrenders his imagination to the monster. And–if you’ll forgive me for being heavy-handed–the monster is empire.
The coronavirus pandemic constitutes the ultimate “glitch” in neoliberal austerity, a crisis that exposes to the most absolute extent how vulnerable to predation we have become. Not predation at the proverbial hands of the virus, but at the hands of capitalists and fascists. The bio-politics of neoliberal austerity–what Jasbir Puar calls “the bio-politics of debility”–is a delicately and brutally maintained state of injury in which we are all ensnared and suspended.
But the pandemic has, in its cruel and excruciating way, availed us of a silver lining; it has exploded the narrative logics that have worked for so long to make the end of capitalism less imaginable than the end of the world. In fact, it has shown so many more of us that the end of a world defined by capitalism is not only imaginable, but desirable. After all, who would want to perpetuate the system that has exposed us to this catastrophe in the first place?
The task ahead of us is to never relinquish our imaginations again. We must never shy away from the recognition that none of this makes any fucking sense, and none of it ever had to happen. We must not seek dominance over the universe, but our roles within it. We must sacrifice control for immediacy and accountability. We must seek ways to become less human so that we may, literally, become more alive.
