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  Methods Devour Themselves

  Taking their cue––and title––from Frantz Fanon, Benjanun Sriduangkaew and J. Moufawad-Paul have refused all methodological straitjackets in this genre-defying book. The result is a chaotically dialectical spiral of fiction-critique-fiction whose form is as speculative as its content, imagining new worlds from amid the crumbling wreckage of the old.

  George Ciccariello-Maher, author of Decolonizing Dialectics and Building the Commune

  Compelling science fiction and evocative instant postcolonial criticism entwined in a mutually reproductive double helix. Every page contains an intellectual thrill.

  Nick Mamatas, author of Sensation and I Am Providence

  First published by Zero Books, 2018

  Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,

  Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK

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  Text copyright: Benjanun Sriduangkaew & J. Moufawad-Paul 2017

  ISBN: 978 1 78535 826 5

  978 1 78535 827 2 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949638

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Benjanun Sriduangkaew & J. Moufawad-Paul as authors have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK

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  Contents

  Foreword – Analogical Assemblages – J. Moufawad-Paul

  Chapter One. We Are All Wasteland On the Inside – Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Chapter Two. Debris and Dead Skin: the capitalist imaginary and the atrophy of thought – J. Moufawad-Paul

  Chapter Three. Krungthep is an Onomatopoeia – Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Chapter Four. Living in Amber: on history as a weapon – J. Moufawad-Paul

  Chapter Five. That Rough-Hewn Sun – Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Chapter Six. An Envelope of Futures: necessity and freedom – J. Moufawad-Paul

  Afterword – Authorial Intentionality – Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Endnotes

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgments

  To dreamers in the margins and those who came before.

  There is a point at which methods devour themselves.

  Frantz Fanon

  Foreword – Analogical Assemblages

  J. Moufawad-Paul

  Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

  Arundhati Roy

  In Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction Quentin Meillassoux makes a distinction between two related subgenres of speculative fiction. According to Meillassoux science fiction (SF) is based on an appeal to a coherent science, whether real or imagined, whereas what he categorizes as extro-science fiction (XSF) violates the rule of theoretical laws. “The guiding question of extro-science fiction is: what should a world be, what should a world resemble, so that it is in principle inaccessible to scientific knowledge, so that it cannot be established as the object of natural science.”1 This genre distinction is less interesting for literary theory than it is for philosophy. Indeed, if Meillassoux was writing an essay that intended to map the genre his claims about the meaning of science fiction––as well as his coining of the imaginary subgenre extro-science fiction––would immediately be undermined. Science fiction is not so easily defined and, once we take into account its long history of sharing genre space with fantasy and horror, the category of extro-science fiction is not as rare in speculative fiction as he seems to believe. The examples of SF and XSF that Meillassoux provides in his extended essay are few and underwhelming. The fact that his analysis is paired with a short story by Isaac Asimov might demonstrate that his awareness of SF is decades out of date and limited to a particular mainstream sample.

  But Meillassoux’s claims about speculative fiction are not intended to contribute to literary theory or genre history. His seemingly naive claims about literature are meant to function as an analogical argument: Meillassoux’s interest is in elaborating a philosophical problem (namely his perspective on Hume’s problem of causality/induction) and using what amounts to a fiction about fiction to illustrate his position. Hence, while on the surface it appeared as if Meillassoux was making claims about the meaning of literature in this essay, what he was really doing was what philosophers have been doing for a long time with the literature and literary genres they enjoy: mining them for analogical meaning so as to elaborate upon their particular philosophical concerns. The point is not really to explain the meaning of a novel, story, poem, film, or a genre; that is the concern of the literary theorist or the scholar of the history of the arts. Rather, the point is to use this material to elaborate on other concerns that might have nothing to do with the material itself but might be illuminated by analogy.

  When we go all the way back to the canonical classics of philosophy we witness this same plundering and slipshod use of the arts. Plato, for example, appropriated Homer and Hesiod to analogically shed light on his arguments despite (and maybe because of) the fact he also despised the ancient poets. Or when we look at the philosophical context from which Meillassoux emerged we cannot help but be impressed by the appropriation of poets such as Mallarmé to illustrate a wild variety of competing philosophical perspectives that Mallarmé himself would not have known or cared to know. (And Meillassoux, following Badiou and others, has also plundered the poems of Mallarmé for his philosophical project.2)

  This book thus takes its cue from Meillassoux’s extended essay about science fiction and for two reasons. The first reason is formal: in its pairing with the Asimov short story, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction was an interesting publication where a philosophical treatment determined by an analogical appeal to a piece of fiction could share space with the latter so that there was some (but limited) dialogue between the realm of fiction and philosophy. The second reason is provocative: the problematical genre categories Meillassoux established and used to justify his philosophical claims should have indicated to anyone familiar with genre literature that there were a lot of writers and fictions that would challenge his categorization, or at least some who would better demonstrate his claims about XSF. The conjunction of these two reasons is the motivation of this project which is inspired by the following concerns: i) to create an extended dialogue between literature and philosophy with the same analogical motivation; ii) to highlight an author who better demonstrated Meillassoux’s category of XSF than the examples he chose; iii) to force the philosopher to engage with fiction that is not an artefact (like the work of Asimov who is dead and cannot respond to Meillassoux’s engagement) but in fact the product of a living artist who can also respond to philosophical engagement.

  When I initially read Meillassoux’s essay, and was forced to consider his categorization of XSF, I immediately thought of an author of whom he was unaware
. An author who both exemplified and defied his genre categories but whose work I had begun to excavate for similar analogical reasons. This author was Benjanun Sriduangkaew, the contemporary enfant terrible of science fiction and fantasy, and this book is the result of my attempt to further engage with her work in a way that Meillassoux was incapable of doing with the corpse of Asimov. It’s interesting when a philosopher uses the work of a dead fiction writer to illuminate a philosophical point; it’s possibly more compelling if this writer is still alive, can respond in kind, and extend the analogical dialogue.

  Sriduangkaew’s organic speculative fiction at the conjuncture

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s work emerged at a particular speculative fiction conjuncture: when the genre was gaining more literary credibility, when some of its non-white and non-Western authors were being nominated for awards (and she received such nominations), but when various fan communities were invested in protecting the supposed boundaries of the genre. The pushing of the boundaries and the subject positions of some authors involved in this pushing resulted in a predictable backlash from fans, rhizomatically unified across various social media sites, who wanted their favourite books to be taken seriously but to also remain unchallenged. The attacks on women of colour genre authors who received critical acclaim in the form of nominations and awards, the “gaming” of the Hugo awards by right wing trolls, the snide dismissal of “sensitivity readers” in the name of free speech, and the disdain for literary quality in the name of genre purity are all characteristics of this conjuncture.

  I do not wish to explore this conjuncture in too much detail because it would take us beyond the bounds of this project. But if Sriduangkaew’s work emerges from this context then we should understand the general meaning of this emergence. Therefore, it is necessary to point out this conjuncture’s main contradiction since this book was conceived in a space produced by this contradiction’s problematic. On the one hand we are presented with authors, a significant portion of whom come from marginalized communities, producing new concepts––sometimes with literary acumen––and thus mobilizing for change and development. On the other hand, there are authors and fans who, despite their complaints that science fiction and fantasy fiction is not being taken seriously by critics, resist all critical engagement. Whereas the former category might succeed in demarginalizing speculative fiction by bringing it into contact with literary theory and academic analysis, the latter category seeks to keep the genre pure and free from the contamination of change, what might result from literary engagement and debate, despite (ironically) its long-standing complaints about stigmatization.

  What I find particularly interesting about the above antinomy is that some of the significant authors devoted to challenging and thus demarginalizing speculative fiction from the genre cantonment are also authors who occupy sites of marginalization: people of colour, queer, trans, differently-abled, and voices from the global south. Subjects at the peripheries of global power are publishing perspectives that are crystallizing into new permutations of genre fiction. Conversely, those who seek to keep speculative fiction marginalized generally benefit from, or are at least complicit in, the dominant structures of social power; because of an interest in preserving the state of affairs they believe that their beloved genre should be accepted by everyone without critical intervention.

  In such a context Sriduangkaew’s fictional output was significant, even becoming notorious, for the following reasons: i) it cut across the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in a manner similar to “new weird” authors such as China Mieville, thus reinforcing the idea that speculative fiction could be transgressive and wildly imaginative; ii) it evinced a concern for the abstract philosophical ideas that has always made speculative fiction a literature of concepts; iii) it was driven by a progressive political ethos that liberals working within the genre and broader SFF community would find too radical; iv) its form and style was intended to be literary rather than “popular”.

  When one reads a story or novella by Sriduangkaew one cannot help but be struck by a richness and depth that is held together by an impressive command of syntactic and semantic formal structure. Sofia Samatar and Catherynne Valente are other contemporary speculative fiction authors who match Sriduangkaew’s literary skill. Although Valente is also a master of philosophical concepts, genre violations, and transgressive gestures, only Samatar is Sriduangkaew’s peer on the level of political radicalism. And yet Sriduangkaew, unlike Samatar, is the kind of political writer that has been notoriously invested in “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

  Therefore, as a political philosopher interested in speculative fiction for its imaginative potential, I find authors such as Sriduangkaew extremely interesting. Because of its richness, I have already used her work as an analogical device for my own philosophy on more than one occasion. Elsewhere I have referred to the deep “organic” nature of her literary production in the sense described by Gramsci: “millions and millions of social infusoria building up the red coral reefs which one day in the not too distant future will burst forth above the waves and still them, and lull the oceanic tempest, and establish a new balance between the currents and climes. But this influx is organic, it grows from the circulation of ideas, from the maintenance of an intact apparatus.”3 This quote describes Sriduangkaew’s work and the reason it demands philosophical engagement: the “circulation of ideas” that has resulted in a literary “oceanic tempest”, the latter of which has grown from a coherent literary apparatus. Such an organic literary irruption is precisely what a philosopher finds interesting. Sriduangkaew’s work, in its organic depth, is primed for analogical appropriation.

  As noted above Sriduangkaew is one of the authors who came to mind when I read Meillassoux’s concept of XSF. Of course, Sriduangkaew is more than capable of writing fiction that remains within the boundaries of SF. For example, her story The Universe as Vast as Our Longing––one of her most heart-shatteringly poignant tales––unfolds within a traditional space opera setting but, eschewing the dominant imperial narratives of this trope, demonstrates a commitment to an anti-colonial ethos. Parable of the Cocoon is another example of Sriduangkaew’s ability to remain within SF boundaries, though demonstrating how far these boundaries can be pushed without becoming insensible to scientific knowledge, as she writes about alien visitation and theories of parallax time. Much of her work, when it is not what is classified as Fantasy or Magic Realism, is precisely what we could call XSF and I have often wondered how Meillassoux would have written about this category if he was familiar with Sriduangkaew. Indeed, those stories that take place in her fictional universe of the Costeya Hegemony are space operas concerned with a reality that defies modern scientific sense: characters who have become living beehives, exhale prophetic petals, live incarcerated with thousands of versions of their self. Or the grim story of Comet’s Call where a living comet mercenary is hired to solve the riddle of a machine that is murdering an entire civilization through ancestral lines, a machine that defies all scientific reasoning and can only be thwarted when it is not treated as an “object of natural science.”4 The list could go on.

  More interestingly, though, some of Sriduangkaew’s work demonstrates how Meillassoux’s category of XSF loses its coherence when faced with literature that breaks traditional SF boundaries. For example, in the story we chose to begin this collaboration, We Are All Wasteland On the Inside, we are met with a “Zone” type event5 where our reality has collided with the reality principles of a mythic order so that all the rules of physics are at first “rendered inaccessible to modern science.” As readers will notice this inaccessibility is formalized in the prose and descriptions of a world colonized by phantasmagoria; the opening description of a plague/curse victim is mind-boggling, forcing the reader to think around causality. And yet, as a defence mechanism, scientific knowledge is re-established since the poetic and artistic imagination have been rendered null by a reality structured around u
nbounded fantasy: the only way to remain sane and to survive is to resort to empirical wagers and positivist tools.

  Thus, to return to Meillassoux’s formula of XSF, while it is the case that “the question of science is present in the tale, albeit in a negative mode,” it is not the case that it is “always excluded because of the frequency of aberrant events.”6 In fact it is more accurate to say that the science in this story “subsists without subsisting as a whole,” and though this might in fact imply “that [science] has completely collapsed in its general coherence,” the only reason it “continues to haunt the universe” is precisely because its form has been weirdly retained.7

  This project is not guided by the desire to elaborate Meillassoux’s thoughts on the genre. Highlighting the ways in which Sriduangkaew’s work intersects with Meillassoux’s conceptualization demonstrates the level of depth that the former possesses and how this depth might be elaborated by the latter’s analysis of the genre. While I’m sympathetic with stories that might be called “XSF” because they are ripe for philosophical engagement, my interest in Sriduangkaew is also, as aforementioned, motivated by my interest in a commitment to a liberatory politics particularly at this genre conjuncture. The fictional openings she indicates, the ways in which her stories can be used to illuminate revolutionary arguments, the cultural counter-hegemony of which she is a part demands engagement. I am thus interested in the dialogue that results from a prolonged engagement with her work: what subjectivities it will encourage, and the possible meaning of this dialogue when the author also replies through fiction to a political philosopher who has drawn from her work.

  Engagements

  The essay engagements with Sriduangkaew’s fictions should not be treated as reviews or even critical analyses. They are not intended to be works of literary theory let alone claim to unlock some “inner truth” of the fictions with which they engage. Rather, they are motivated by the desire to mine deep fictional troves for analogical ore. Sometimes when we read a story we are reminded of concerns and problematics that were not part of the author’s intentions when she crafted her fiction. Stories also reflect the interests of the reader who might be able to force and develop a unique sense of meaning retroactively through a critical reading. A reader can take elements from a story and use them to think through ideas that may have not crossed the author’s mind: multiple analogical moments are encountered in a single reading; passages and characters signal an isometric engagement.