Christian Roy (Concordia University, Montreal)

« James Cameron’s The Abyss : Digital Communication as Apocalypse »

Paper for the workshop on Science Fiction and Symbolic Communication, chaired by Elena Abrudan, of the11^th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas at the University of Helsinki, 28/7-2/8 2008.

Abstract

James Cameron’s science-fiction blockbusters often suggestively problematize mankind’s relation to technology. The Terminator films were thus based on the idea of the nascent Internet as a nervous system that could become self-aware as the subject of technology and promptly dispose of its human parasites. These dystopian visions have also had their utopian counterpart in The Abyss, the first film to use digital special effects for “morphing”, significantly used as a metaphor of the new mode of being made possible by global electronic communications. For the advent of this technical revolution is part of the Christian imagery of eschatology and conversion, translated to different states of matter, that functions to suggest the shift in human consciousness accompanying the transition from the rigidity of analog technology to the fluidity of digital technology. It thus symbolically locates salvation for an embattled mankind in the self-revelation of a liquid realm of instant communication overcoming all outward divisions in a unified global consciousness field. It thereby manages to transfigure its historical moment as a kairos bringing the Heavenly Kingdom within reach of earthly realization: 1989 as the meltdown of  Cold War blocks, on the eve of the emergence of the borderless global cyberspace of the Internet. Marshall McLuhan saw the creative artist as an “early warning system”, grasping and portraying such shifts in the economy of the sensorium even ahead of their full unfolding in technology, history and culture. Cameron’s The Abyss can illustrate this view, being a mythic epiphany of mutations then still around the corner that became discernible in it retrospectively. It thus uses Christian motifs to give narrative expression to world-historical shifts best conceived in McLuhanian terms. For instance, this is a film about beings dying to themselves and painfully learning to live in a new element to save others, and particularly about humans breathing a liquid instead of air to reach a new “heaven” in reverse in the depths of the ocean, inhabited by angelic creatures whose technology gives any form to water, like CGI does to screen contents. The dark sea stands for the fluid, all-encompassing acoustic space of electronic technology, as opposed to the visual space at the surface, where solid states and their steel vessels are poised on the brink of nuclear war; it is the overcoming of their sharp opposition of homogenizing units that is signalled at the end by the literal emergence from underneath them of the marine “Heavenly Jerusalem,» like the “global village” brushing aside the Gutenberg logic of territorial nation-states and industrial ideologies.

Symbols of Change in a Shattered World

 Jules Verne, Begum’s Millions (Les 500 millions de la Bégum)

Paper for the workshop on Science Fiction and Symbolic Communication, chaired by Elena Abrudan, of the11^th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas at the University of Helsinki, 28/7-2/8 2008.

Abstract

Peter Schulman, Old Dominion University, USA

         “Nous sommes malades, cela est bien certain, malades de progrès,” Zola announced in Mes haines. “Cette victoire des nerfs sur le sang a décidé de nos moeurs, de notre littérature, de notre époque toute entière.” Can Zola’s famous statement be applied to Jules Verne’s vision of the 19^th-century as well? Although Verne’s most famous works such as Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours and Vingt-mille lieues sous les mers are considered by many to be encomia to technology and progress, the recently rediscovered manuscript of Verne’s dystopic vision of Paris in the 1960’s, Paris au Xxème siècle, so scathingly denounces the dehumanizing aspect of modernity that it also points to the latent uneasiness with his era that would resurface in full in the later 500 millions de la Bégum which has been traditionally seen as a “turning point” in Verne’s career in terms of his own ideological evolution from sunny optimist to guarded pessimist. Written shortly after the Franco-Prussian war, Les 500 millions de la Bégum paints a grim nationalistic picture of two scientists, a  benevolent Frenchman, and an evil, despotic German who each inherit millions from a long-lost relative. Whereas the Frenchman, le Dr Sarrasin, creates a utopia on the West Coast of the United-States called France-Ville, the German, Herr Schultze, builds Stahlstadt or “City of Steel,” a dystopic mining village bearing an uncanny resemblance to Verne’s hegemonic 1960 Paris: “la liberté, l’air manquaient dans cet étroit milieu” (100). Indeed, Stahlstadt is essentially a slave camp similar to  Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. While France-Ville is a socialist society appropriately situated along the Pacific Ocean, Stahlstadt is a war mongering proto-fascist state, an environmental disaster which produces cannons to bellicose nations in general and to Germany in particular: “L’opinion générale était d’ailleurs que Herr Schultze travaillait à l’achèvement d’un engin de guerre terrible, d’un effet sans précédent et destiné à assurer bientôt à l’Allemagne la domination universelle” (102).

               While Paris au Xxème Siècle was dismissed by Verne’s publisher, the venerable P-J. Hetzel, as an unpublishable  “erreur de jeunesse” in favor of his more cheerful tales of adventure and travels, Les 500 millions de la Bégum is the first of Verne’s novels to present both utopic and dystopic views of society. Moreover, it is also the first to feature a truly evil scientist, Herr Schultze,  who is obsessed with initiating a proto-nuclear war on France in an attempt at German world dominance. A product of a general post-war, anti-German sentiment in France,  Les 500 million is also a fulfillment of  Verne’s general fear of global annihilation that he had to stifle after Paris au Xxème Siècle’s failure. As Arthur B. Evans has explained, the nationalistic, thanatos-driven microcosm Verne depicts in Les 500 millions in fact mirrored  a more general trend in post-Industrial Revolution France in which the “utopian focus of the French bourgeoisie of the Second Empire and the Troisième République began to shift with the times. The traditional utopian ‘nowhere” was soon replaced by a potential ‘anywhere;’ the pastoral setting by the industrial; personal ethics by competitive expansionism.” As such, Les 500 millions can be seen as more than  a simple cautionary tale of what happens when science and technology fall into the hands of an evil leader: in many ways, Verne’s shift in concerns towards the fin de siècle went hand in hand with France’s as well.

God and the Machine: Gnosticism and science fiction

Paper for the workshop on Science Fiction and Symbolic Communication, chaired by Elena Abrudan, of the11^th Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas at the University of Helsinki, 28/7-2/8 2008.

Abstract

Theo Malekin

Glasgow University’s Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts

My work explores the paradoxical pursuit of religious/mystical vision in science fiction.  My particular focus would be on Philip K Dick, especially ‘The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’ although other examples spring to mind: Gibson’s Neuromancer, the Matrix films, for instance.  What interests me is that they share a gnostic sense of the cosmos as fallen, and comprised of deceitful appearances – indeed Platonic as well as gnostic.  Science fiction is not alone in resorting to gnosticism as a response to the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, but it is ironic that the most purportedly materialistic of literary genres has in the last few decades produced some of the most intensely religious literature.

This paper addresses the persistence of the religious impulse in the scientific age by focusing on two novels by the seminal American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.  These books respond to what Max Weber described as the “disenchantment of the world” with a Gnostic vision of a fallen cosmos.  In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dick’s protagonists escape appalling drudgery by communing with quasi-divine presences in which individual identity dissolves, mediated in a parody of the Eucharist by the drug Can-D.  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? similarly depicts the Earth after an ecological catastrophe.  Here empathy has become the spring of religious life as individuals subsume their identity in that of Mercer, a technologically mediated saviour-figure repeatedly attempting to escape the world of death.

Dick’s novels envision the world in bleak terms: a death-world where religious promises of salvation offer little hope of escape.  At the same time, it suggests that technology and science do not engage the basic issues of being human, and his dystopianism indeed suggests that technological mastery is bound to fail. Dick’s work is nevertheless profoundly, if paradoxically, religious.

Mirrors Voices: The Return from Solaris, Mars and Japetus

Fernando Kuhn

Universidade Metodista de São Paulo (Brazil)

swocean@hotmail.com

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a reflection involving science-fiction works such as Stanislaw Lem´s “Solaris”, Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: a Space Odyssey”, among others, in context to issues as cyber society and biotechnology. Symbolical aspects of this convergence are also approached in this attempt of interpreting and figuring out such echoes of these different worlds, spaces – how many, and which ? – supposedly reserved for humans – how many, and which ? … and what kind of? 

We can hear Zarathustra shouting “behold, I teach you the Superman!”, but we can also hear Snow whispering that “we can observe, through a microscope, as it were, our own monstrous ugliness, our folly, our shame”. Yet it is still possible to find the discardable human leaving the gates of the millennium behind, and coming to bring us the isolation of the excluded. The “archetypal Fool”, insisting on existing despite representing nothing as a citizen – and soon, as a being – he is also there.

As Bradbury’s Martian speeches, “what does it matter who of us is Past or Future if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don’t ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds”.

 And so Superman appears, and gets lost while spying among so many windows. But there is also a Kafkian K. on the mirrors, several of them, confused, paralyzed; and so many bored souls demanding for the invasion of the body snatchers; and there is still a man in the crowd, a Poe’s man, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking in search of the world, following and dictating the flow towards the dawn of a new man.

Will they be so many, or simply one? And how many will this world be for?

The mythologist’s voice echoes: “When you see the earth from the moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with”. And from above, like a “fool on the hill”, a Russian cosmonaut in Andrei Ujica documentary “Out of present”reflects about the changes on Earth during the months he passed in the space: “Today is day, tomorrow is night”.

Maybe he is right.