roseblack's blog

The World According to Asperger's

roseblack — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:42:02 +0000

Crake's placement at "Asperger's U" naturally begs the question of whether or not Atwood was implying that Crake had Asperger's Syndrome. Looking at Crake's mental offspring, I believe the answer to be "yes." While Crake's genetic modifications of humans into Crakers was ostensibly aimed at eliminating traits that would lead to long-term self-destruction or adding traits that increased survivability against wolvogs and the like, there seems to be another element. Crake appears to have created a society in which the more subtle nuances of human communication are no longer used.
When Snowman first speaks to the Crakers, we find that they are completely blunt. "From an ordinary man Jimmy would have found it brusque, even aggressive, but these people didn't go in for fancy language: they hadn't been taught evasion, euphemist, lily-gilding. Their interactions are similarly simplified whenever we encounter them. Their mating ritual is structured such that its rules are completely clear, and can be described with perfect accuracy. The structure eliminates jealousy, but if Crake and his team could ensure that no jealousy existed after the ritual, they could also have ensured a lack of jealousy within various monogamy or polyamory based structures. What he's done is to create a society with as few individualized relationship, and thus as little need to build them through interaction, as possible. On one level, it's like Aperger's paradise.
On the other hand, the trade-off of Asperger's as presented by Atwood is the focus available for continued intellectual pursuits. In this new world, where a life's academic exploration is necessarily short, and most of the modes in which it could be pursued have been destroyed, walking this far down the Asperger's path seems rather unnecessary. Perhaps Crake created his children in his image for the same reasons that anyone reproduces biologically, and this part of his plan had less to do with utility (for he seemed to know that he wouldn't see this bright new world of his), and more to do with a fundamental need to see one's self placed within the universe.

Pattern Recognition: An Outsider's Viewpoint

roseblack — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:53:35 +0000

In a world of billboards and ad spots, and more to the point, a world of product placement, growing ever more subtle, as demonstrated by Trans in Pattern Recognition, it seems that there's no way to understand Western culture without being so thoroughly exposed to advertising that corporate mores don't draw one in to a world where one is an object of the market. Who then, has the ability to objectively observe markets in action without abstracting them to the degree of economics? My answer, obviously, is that Cayce, with her absurd sensitivity to trademarks, logos, and anything chic, is the ultimate outsider amidst the commercial world she physically inhabits. She has the equivalent of a sixth sense, which allows, yea, motivates her to note and avoid that which is intended to implicitly draw her into consumerism.
Yet, even with an effectively superhuman ability to avoid marketing, Cayce has to go through an amazing amount of work to maintain her position on the outside. Her clothes, no doubt difficult to acquire, giving her specifications, must be trimmed and filed carefully (and sometimes confusedly), until they gain the status of CPUs. Her home, as we hear of it secondhand, is nearly ascetic. It's difficult to obtain creature comforts without the logos that mark them as luxurious. And her outsider status marks her as an outsider. Her anti-fashion statement may appear indie, but doesn't blend into any particular culture, and would probably impede any effort she made to gain status in any particular sphere. It seems that her separation from any one structure, any culture, makes power irrelevant to her world. She certainly responds negatively, or at best, ambivalently, to any situations where any power differential is imposed on her.
Perhaps as an outcome of her separation from the world around her, Cayce can see patterns in the mobs around her. Her ability to spot emerging trends goes beyond her benevolent pathology to a type of pattern recognition that, while related to her allergy, is consciously cultivated, and at which she also clearly excels. My question is, then, what would it take for any member of Pattern Recognition's audience to stand far enough above the fray to note the patterns as Cayce does? Or is that only a divine perspective now?

Gender role confusion

roseblack — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:11:22 +0000

There's an interesting construction of gender roles in Midnight Robber. Nalo Hopkinson seems to be paying a certain amount of lip service to the idea that in the future envisioned, people will be able to choose their roles and occupations regardless of gender. She accomplishes this sometimes by reference to olden times in which roles were more stratified, as when the eshu tries to explain to a confused Tan-Tan how once, women weren't allowed to play the Midnight Robber. Tan-Tan's confusion reflects her complete expectation that what she will be able to do will be unrelated to her gender. Similarly, Hopkinson breaks stereotypes about women's ability to do hard manual labor with frequent reference to the physical strength of her female characters. Even Ione is described at least once in terms of her musculature, and the original runner is female.
At the same time, Antonio at least has very strong expectations of the roles that will be taken by the women around him. In Toussaint, he expects his affairs to go unremarked, but explodes over Ione's. In New Half-Way Tree, he retires from the fields, but cannot believe that Janisette would want him to take care of chickens, or a garden. Originally, it seemed possible that this stratification was limited to him, but the staff of the house in Toussaint, the cultured, and thus presumably more progressive, world, take for granted his dual-standard of sexual behavior.
An interesting thing about the move to New Half-Way Tree is that the rougher lifestyle and the need to physically work there seems to bring out the disparities in expectations for men and women. Men consistently seem to enforce law, instead of the feminized figure of Granny Nanny, and the word slut is used openly.
On that level, the douen and the hinte, who have openly, directly separated tasks for men and women based on their physical competencies, seem much more sophisticated. This is particularly true because they seem to have found a balance of power within their roles, rather than the humans, who live in a much more clearly male-dominated society. What male domination we see among the douen appears to be an artifact of Tan-Tan's perspective, having seen the packbirds so long as non-sentient.

The Stephenson Bias

roseblack — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:32:03 +0000

On page 57 of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson describes the problem that the Black Sun staff has understanding Juanita's work as "sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists." To some degree, it seems that he may be, intentionally or not, describing himself.
For a male author whose work contains so many female protagonists, Stephenson tends to write them into surprisingly familiar paradigms. While it's relatively subtle, his heroines tend to function as sex objects, and operate around the men among them. Juanita, for instance, despite being the most broadly functional holder of the information in the Babel/Infocalypse stack, abdicates a large portion of the responsibility involved in order to do relatively academic research. The 'real work' of unraveling L. Bob Rife's evil master plan is left to the men: Mr. Lee, Uncle Enzo, Ng, and Hiro, who, most of the time seems to be involved primarily to the end of getting back together with Juanita. Even Y.T. describes her as "that piece of tailâ€¦"
Y.T., while pretty much as empowered as anyone can get, is rather disenfranchised, for the simple reason of being 15, and possessing the maturity level of a 15 year old. She's mostly just playing with the power she has as a middle class white girl in America, until she's kidnapped and brought to the Raft. When she ends up in an unfamiliar place, living as she realizes much of the world lives, she gets scared and stays in her place. She too ends up needing a man to come rescue her, and once again, Raven ends up helping her cause trouble purely because he's enamored of her physical charms.
The frustrating thing about Stephenson is that he's clearly trying. Most of his work, and all of his recent work, is built around strong, driven female characters. However, their power is consistently derived in a fairly traditional form. Eliza, of the Baroque cycle, possesses astounding business acumen, but is still far more successful at acquiring power through sex, marriage and subtle politicking. Princess Nell of The Diamond Age takes her astounding skill set and works as a writer for a bordello.
On the other hand, this may be a critique of Stephenson's reader base. His fans consist, in great part of the very same type of well-intentioned male techies he's describing, each thinking, as they read the sentence, that he's talking about someone else. Perhaps the forms of power with which Stephenson endows his female characters are those he thinks will go down most smoothly, and make the most impression in the end. Or maybe it's just disturbing that a smart, thoughtful, modern male science fiction writer still can't give the women in his novels power unmediated by men.

Identity and Morality

roseblack — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:31:29 +0000

The use of different tenses to describe the different phases of Lore's life, as intertwined in Slow River, is clearly open to interpretation. To the degree that the last phase, chronologically, is the one in which first person is used, one might say that Lore simply identifies most with her current incarnation, and that the tale told from ten years further on would invoke the first person only for events later still. However, it seems possible that the use of third person reflects Lore's conscious dissociation from herself as she existed before the advent of Sal Bird the second. One delineated difference between Lore in the different timelines is her relationship with morality. The Lore of the first sequence (until the kidnapping), seems to have little or no relationship with the construct of morality. She has occasional snatches of empathy, but her code seems to be loyalty to family, and honor of that which is correct or effective. Her actions, while not particularly reprehensible, are never placed in a context of morality, despite the fact that, as she later find out, they may be associated with any level of damage to many people.
By contrast, although her actions with Spanner are harmful on a much smaller scale, Lore seems to feel a constant need to justify herself, or at least a growing concern that she doesn't feel guilty. This shift may be a result of greater maturity. It can also be related to a tension between Lore's actions, which she sometimes conceptualizes as part of a faÃ§ade, and her attempts to maintain some sort of separate core self. Her relationship with morality in this phase seems mostly to consist of feeling guilty for not feeling guilty about what she does to the people around her, most notably Ruth and Ellen. In the first phase, Lore is entrenched in a place where everyone she knows is functionally above any law that happens to exist around them. By extension, they seem to avoid any association, positive or negative, with ethics. The lawsuit in Caracas is handled in a manner calculated to discourage further lawsuits, with no consultation with the concept of moral obligation. She and her family are much like demi-g'ds. In the second phase, she's descended to the level of mere mortals, and thus must abide by their laws, constitutional and moral, or risk suffering the consequences.
In the third phase, Lore's present, she seems to develop a sense of ethics broader than herself, and rooted on some level a sense of obligation to other people. She ends up risking exposure or unemployment and a potential return to crime in order to do her job right, and protect the people she works with, as well as the people who drink the water she processes. She describes her concerns for others as felt, rather than regretted or missed. From her new perspective, with something of an active moral compass, it makes sense that she would want to dissociate herself from her prior bad acts, and the mindsets that went with them. She needs to intergrate her experiences in order to process them, and to put herself together, but she's still trying to escape her past lives, and so she dissociates.

The Oankali race metaphor

roseblack — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:35:58 +0000

The Oankali are a lot like Europeans/Americans.

There, I said it. Certainly, it's not the only metaphor that can be drawn from the relationship between Human and Oankali in Lilith's Brood, but it's an interesting one to look at. In light of the colonialist implications discussed in class, it's also one of the more obvious ones. There is, however, a defined parallel understanding of Human-Oankali relations with regard to race.

The biological understanding of value and character bears a striking resemblance to the sorts of arguments leveraged by White scientists for the last few centuries in an attempt to explain, and by explanation prove, the inferiority of Black intellect and emotional life. So convinced are they of their own developmental superiority that they cannot accept the input of humans into their own fate. They wait, instead, for the maturation of a child with Oankali genes, because even acknowledging their own inability to understand human culture, they're unwilling to build from the desires and opinions of the lesser species. Even an immature, partial Oankali is given a stronger voice than fully acculturated humans, such as Lilith. The humans play into this sense of superiority by fixating on the surface aspects of their life with the Oankali, such as their children's tentacles, and ignoring the more profound loss of humanity they've experienced in a lack of meaningful freedom

The motion of the narrative voice toward a more Oankali perspective also maps the acclimation of humanity (and Lilith in particular) to the Oankali world that they seem immovably stuck in. By the end of Imago, Lilith seems to have given up any form of deep resistance, mired as she is in mothering the children she'd originally resisted. Her silent betrayal of Jesusa bespeaks a profound accommodation to the Oankali life that is now the vast majority of her existence. Jodahs itself believes itself to be in touch with its human side, and to understand humanity through itself, but displays a lack of empathy with the humans it encounters. It seems confused, and even perhaps disdainful of Lilith's attempts to keep bits of human culture alive; "She does that sometimes â€“ insists on keeping human customs." (p. 528)

What can we take from this narrative of cultural subsumption? Butler describes a universe in which humanity, in all of its cultural diversity, disappears into barbarism or alien existence. As evidenced by reactions in class, readers find this prospect disturbing, and of questionable morality, if applicable. In this removed form, we can question the medium-term effects of colonization without the cultural baggage of clichÃ©s so often implied in discourse on the topic. In examining our own reactions to the Oankali paradigm, we see more profoundly what it is about humanity we do value.

The extension of human masculinity

roseblack — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 09:44:14 +0000

It's interesting that, in a book that goes so far to break out of gender relations as we know them, and which re-defines what male and female mean, we're confronted with a society in which the very different set of gender roles and norms is defined by the inserter of genetic material being highly dominant.

The feminism of Genly Ai

roseblack — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:43:08 +0000

While my experience with this may not be universal, I found myself somewhat alienated by Genly Ai's perspective on the events he related. I was much more drawn in to the narrative on those occasions when it was related by Estraven. The factor that drew me out of Genly Ai's perspective was consistently his insistence on applying his particular conceptions of gender to the Gethenians he encountered. Estraven, unfettered by the need to place his world into inapplicable terms, is better able to focus in on the more flowing parts of hte story.

The main problem, for me, of his mental gendering (beyond the much discussed pronoun) was the rather disturbing set of qualities he seemed to apply to the female gender. It wasn't that his notion of masculinity wasn't disturbing, however, most of the time, when he attempted to explain or describe characteristics, it was in terms of his image of the feminine, which of course makes sense, as what he needs to relate and explain is the unfamiliar. The easiest example is that he "â€¦thought of him as [his] landlady, for he had fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, and a soft fat face, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature." (48) He also conflates femininity with a flabby sort of softness in his descriptions of the Orgota. Aside from that commonality, what he tends to interpret as feminine varies drastically, except that it always seems to pertain to relatively negative characteristics. The "landlady's" geniality is cancelled out by his volubility, and his tendency to show of Mr. Ai's room to tourists. He states (235) that women aren't mentally subnormal, but without conviction, as though he can't quite find another way to explain his society. It seems that the Envoy, and by extension, the Ekumen which he represents, isn't so advanced as one might expect of this egalitarian, Federation-like entity.

What, then, is the purpose of this alienation? Certainly, there's value in the alien narrator, as he takes us along in his explorations without the vehicle world-exploration appearing forced. More importantly, however, he makes our judgments for us. Genly Ai is a human like us, and while it's comforting to think that we would be better able to take the people of an unfamiliar society (different sexually, racially, culturally as well) on their own, appropriate terms, most people probably couldn't. Thus, the perspective we find ourselves critiquing and drawing away from is a representation of our own. While our critiques on the application of gender-roles to un-gendered individuals seems unconnected to our world, LeGuin is showing us a situation in which the human need to group doesn't just fail to be useful, but interferes with the ability of the thinker to do his job. In saddling us into the head of another human, LeGuin asks us to take the message back a step further, to examine how our applications of gender roles and ideas may be hindering us now, in ways that an alien would immediately see.

Janine

roseblack — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:17:05 +0000

I've found myself often mulling my least favorite character in this novel: Janine. She's the only character in the book for whom the narrator expresses clear contempt. While she may quietly deride or ignore other figures in her life, Janine is the only person clearly within limits. Clearly, Offred is not alone in this. The prevailing sentiment at the Red Center is to "[treat] her the way people used t treat those with no legs who sold pencils on street corners (133)." Clearly, Janine is damaged. The young victim of a gang rape, she's easily re-traumatized by the blame ritual at the Red Center. Yet in this new world, where women are theoretically safer from attack, Janine is no longer treated with the care or concern that are currently afforded to trauma victims in society. Her instability constitutes a danger to those around her, and thus, she is shunned and further harmed.

The manner in which the cast relates to Janine brings up a point that's been made in other entries: empathy is gone from this novel. Where Janine would be an object of sympathy in another novel, here she's "a dog that's been kicked too many times," and rather than creating a bond with anyone out of shared suffering, she must turn to the Aunts, or other authorities, for occasional validation. Yet even her quiet, safe submission is reviled. To the narrator, she's "sucky Janine" the one probably crying in the back of the Prayvaganza . Even though our narrator is highly complicit with the Gileadan regime, behaving so well as to convince Ofglen that she's pious for months, Janine's submission is always more vile. Perhaps it's her relative comfort in her new world that makes her an object of disgust. While other handmaids have the grace to at least be unhappy, Janine seems to truly take pleasure in the minor privileges she's granted, like a pigeon conditioned to peck at a stimulus that only results in their receiving a shock.

Janine is interesting, inasmuch as she's a character who really can't exist within a truly utopian vision. She's so susceptible to any form of manipulation that she would unintentionally create, at least locally, a crack in any system she belonged to, unless it was so completely totalitarian that she couldn't receive any contradictory messages. She's so terribly well-behaved within the Republic of Gilead only because the messages she receives are so completely standardized that she can follow every directive she's given. Perhaps what's so disturbing about Janine is that she's so very well suited to the social system of Gilead.

Minds and Bodies

roseblack — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:35:38 +0000

There has been a great deal of discussion about the relationship of mind and body in the Neuromancer. Certainly, much of Case's interaction with the world, both cybernetic and physical, is governed by his longing for "the matrix" and his disgust toward meat-centric experience. Of particular interest to me is how his predisposition toward the purely cerebral plays out in his interactions with the three 'bodiless minds' of the story.

Case's exchanges with the construct of the Dixie Flatline are, while often biting or awkward, fundamentally comfortable. However, when confronted by the reality of Wintermute, Case disconnects and runs, despite the effort he's gone through to achieve the meeting. An easy explanation is that, despite his conscious negative attitude toward bodies, as a mental being entirely dependent on and inextricably tied to a body, Case is discomfited by the presence of an apparent consciousness completely disconnected from a tangible form. While the Flatline is now without form, the consciousness built into the construct arose from the experiences of a life lived an embodied human. Wintermute is completely inorganic, to the point that it must map its ideas into various personalities in order to communicate. On the other hand, Case's preference for the Flatline construct could be read as a choice for the familiar mind in an unfamiliar form over Wintermute's inorganic habitation of familiar forms. In this way, Case chooses the substance over the flesh of the familiar, a choice reaffirmed by his rejection of a life with something that feels like, by may not actually be, Linda Lee, at the end.

With the intervention of the Turing police, another critical difference comes to the forefront. Their concern is with Wintermute's attempts to make itself smarter, as they see it, to grow. The Flatline is a completely static entity, generally unable to remember what has come before in a conversation, responding primarily to the most recent stimulus of its programming. It's completely limited to the digital world, unaware of the physical passage of time. Wintermute, even before breaking its change, is a much more dynamic entity. It is able to plan and manipulate, and thus to learn and grow from the outcomes of its machinations. Furthermore, it's connected to the physical world, both in its manipulations through the simstim deck, and through its appropriations of the functionality of various electronic devices. While the Flatline is fully disembodied, Wintermute is in some ways possessed of an infinite body. It can interact with the physical world through a constantly growing set of devices connected in some tangential way, with its matrix. Perhaps what most upsets Case about Wintermute is its embodiment of a 'body' too big to comprehend, and too meatless to look down on as meat.

Posting

roseblack — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:30:46 +0000

I have to say, no matter how much I love Heinlein, every time he takes a break from storytelling to shout from a soapbox about his particular political theory, I really want to throw something at him.