Methods Devour Themselves

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  One man, one woman. The man is nondescript, lanky and thin-faced, a mop of unruly hair; the base of his skull is sheathed silver, data storage and direct neural links. The woman is tall and thick-waisted, coiffed and neat. While there’s only one of the man, the woman’s images are replicated everywhere––seated, standing, hands flung out. Suranut does not need to ask who these two are.

  The AI lets them go, opening doors for them, coaxing passages between decks that let them stay out of public sight. Gullaya’s life supports follow them, rippling through the ceiling like strange lotuses treading stranger waters.

  And then they are at the crash site, as close as Suranut has ever gotten to the shipworld’s skin.

  Blasted and blackened, scabbed over with globules of machine-blood and sealant. The area is smaller than Suranut expected, epicentre oddly precise as though the AI finessed the trajectory until the moment of impact. The ship itself is gone, its wreck recycled into repair pods or perhaps salvaged for the next effort. Everything has its use, everything must be used until no further function can be wrung out of it.

  The filtered pane gives them a view of umbral space, lit by the blue-white fire that the shipworld orbits. The star is visually arresting, but uninhabitable: no planet has ever been found in the shipworld’s long journey that suits humanity. Suranut likes to look at this star until the afterimage is burnt into her vision. Half of a binary system, ever-burning, on the cusp of a cannibal event where it and its twin will meld into one.

  “By then we’ll either be dead or away,” Gullaya says, as though divining Suranut’s thought from the smooth glass. “At the very last moment I was still trying to fly into that and burn. My ship––the ship that I was––couldn’t have survived. Nothing would’ve been left, not a fleck of ash, a fistful of hair.”

  “I get the appeal.” A finale, total and absolute. Annihilation untainted by memento or regret, undiluted by past or future.

  “Do you?” Gullaya runs her knuckles along the pane. “You got the wrong person, you know. She was the one you would have wanted––the scout, I mean. Someone who can usher in change. The fulcrum on which history turns. The catalyst.” A deep breath. “Of us three, she should’ve been the one to survive. I was never the marrying type, but she made wife and wife sound wonderful.”

  Suranut thinks back to the image, projected over and over. Vivacious, even in memory. “I would have liked to meet her, but getting you isn’t half bad.”

  A low short laugh. “I thought I couldn’t live without her, but I can, and that’s the worst part. This person, this impossible person––a nova-flower, a galaxy in herself––she’s gone and I’m still here and I can still breathe. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t that a betrayal.” She covers her eyes. “Cortex, are you there? Are you listening?”

  The answer emanates from the ceiling, a fine haze flowering carmine and lotus-blush. “You are always heard, Pilot.”

  Gullaya’s hand lifts and Suranut takes it, instinctive as she would take a drowning person’s. “I did it. I killed them both or might as well have. There was a, a malfunction when they tried to access an archive vault, looking for the last moments in Krungthep––the city––and then they got so sick, their cybernetics were rotting from the inside. It corrupted… Halfway back to the ship, he––the archivist––was already… he didn’t make it. Died mad with pain. She asked me to end it before she lost her mind like him, she wanted to remember who I was, she wanted me to be the last thing she saw while… while lucid. So I did. A bullet in her head. Just one shot. That close, I couldn’t miss.”

  Silence, then. Suranut’s hand is limp on the pilot’s. But a part of her is not precisely surprised. The thorns Gullaya wears skin-close, the map of her secrets: it can only take this path, assume this shape.

  “Yes, Pilot,” is all the AI says in pulses of bleeding light.

  “Yes, Pilot? That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

  Suranut stares at the ceiling, unable to shake the habit of addressing the cortex as though it is overhead, a presiding divinity. “No,” she says softly, “it already knew.”

  “Not the specifics, esteemed citizen. Archivist and Scout wore trackers, which continued to transmit up to a certain point. Pilot’s turmoil suggests she feels guilt, either as survivor or––as she perceives it––participant in their deaths. That is obviously not the case. As the shipworld balances the account, Pilot did nothing wrong. But the administrative council would disagree and judge her unstable, fit only for termination.”

  The pilot opens her mouth. Clenches it shut and through her teeth: “You knew––you felt them die––and you didn’t do anything.”

  “The three of you were very far away, Pilot. There was nothing to be done. You were a ship, after a fashion, and you ought to understand. Their loss is felt as a wound in the shipworld’s fabric; there is a bereaving, and their names have been memorialized so that subroutines will sing of Archivist and Scout always.”

  Gullaya looks at Suranut, then at the wall where shipworld presence coagulates in a nest of pearls. “Those therapists and psychiatrists they sent me, Suranut, were all handpicked by the council. But the expedition was picked by the AI. And when I returned without my scout and archivist, they thought the cortex’s logic was no longer trustworthy.” A smile pricks the corners of Gullaya’s mouth. “Guess who picked you?”

  “Algorithms prevail over human sentiment. Tools must prove constantly useful and fit for purpose.” The pearls resolve into spiders, legs rapidly spinning out the cortex’s messages in tactile language. The script is Sanskrit rather than Thai. “Choices lay before you, Pilot. Nothing and no one can force you, but you must select. Decision cannot be forever postponed.”

  The pilot stands. In fluid strides she is next to impact-point and imperfect repair. She pushes. It gives, though not far. “I can penetrate this.” She looks down at her hand, fingers clenched as though still caught in that moment. Gripping the gun with which she’d given her lover mercy, the woman who would have been her wife. “And you’re letting me.”

  “Correct, Pilot. In all the decks and corridors, the nerve-ends and nerve-paths of the shipworld, this is the one place where you can choose to exit.”

  Suranut moves to do––something. Stop Gullaya. But she knows that her strength is no match. “If you step out you’re going to kill me too.” There is no airlock between the breach and where they stand.

  Gullaya looks over her shoulder. Blinks. “Yeah. The AI put you there and gave me the choice. Symbolic, isn’t it. What’s one more life after I took my scout’s.” She pushes again, fingers tracing the seam in shipworld skin, that fault-line. “Suranut, what do you want the most in life?”

  “I––” She licks her mouth, tasting salt and copper. “The sky. I want to see the sky. Like everyone else really, but it is something I want.”

  When the pilot inhales it is so loud, in the quiet. She turns from the scar in shipworld skin. “Then it’d be terrible to take that away. You want. You should have a chance, like I did.”

  Pressure leaves Suranut’s chest in stages. She pushes herself forward and grips Gullaya’s elbow. “Thank you. And let me try again.”

  “To do what? You did what you’re supposed to. You won. The cortex won.”

  The spiders are weaving fast, a blur. Immaculate Sanskrit streams from the web, onomatopoeiac.

  “No,” Suranut says, steering the pilot from the away that is irrevocable, “I think you did. Now it’s my turn to earn my purpose. Shall we introduce ourselves? You’re Gullaya, the pilot. I’m Suranut, the historian who wants to see the sky, and I’m here to help you want to see it again.”

  Chapter Four

  Living in Amber: on history as a weapon

  J. Moufawad-Paul

  I will try here to make an inventory of what history teaches us. This will be provisional, modest, but dangerous in that it invites all manner of criticism. It is based on the presupposition that only the present gives meaning to the past.r />
  Samir Amin

  Perhaps the most widely cited passage by Walter Benjamin is that part in Theses on the Philosophy of History where he invokes the Klee painting Angelus Novus. In a description that might be more iconic than the painting itself Benjamin writes:

  This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a single chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.1

  The point of this passage was to describe a historical perspective that Benjamin found lacking in the socialist movement of his day. Whereas the Social Democratic Party [SPD] of Germany was demanding that the wretched of the earth look towards an imagined socialist future for its direction, Benjamin felt that this perspective “made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”2 That is, in the midst of an emergent fascism the SPD was demanding that its social base look to a future where even fascism could be justified––where the inevitable development of productive forces would transcend the horrors of the present. Thus, “in the name of progress [fascism’s] opponents treat it as a historical norm.”3

  Two decades prior to Theses on the Philosophy of History the SPD collaborated with fascism by handing Luxemburg and Liebknecht over to the Freikorps for execution after the failed Spartacist Uprising. Benjamin in fact names the Spartacus group as one that acted “in the name of generations of the downtrodden”4 and thus possessed the historical perspective of the angel of history. Whereas Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and the Spartacus group refused to abandon their focus on the historical immiseration of the exploited and oppressed, the SPD instead turned its face towards progress––on the assumption that a future socialism was secured by an argument of history where fascism was merely a hiccup. Aside from betraying revolutionaries who sought to explode the historical continuum through an awareness of past and present misery, the danger of this utopian future-looking perspective was that, according to Benjamin, it mimicked the very ideology that was propelling fascism on to the historical stage: “[i]t recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism.”5

  For Benjamin, over-valorizing progressive historical transformation could easily degenerate into the triumphalist assertion of a predestined march of progress. The dogmatic belief paradigmatic of the Marxism of the Second International was that socialism was historically inevitable due to the logic of the development of productive forces. That is, once technology progresses to a level that challenges capitalist social relations the latter will be forced to bow off the historical stage because they will not be able to contain the changes that point to a post-capitalist utopia. We find a similar logic, today, with “accelerationism” (i.e. accelerate the contradictions of capitalism through developments of technology so as to end capitalism), but this was the same productive forces analysis that bothered Benjamin in 1940: an endorsement of the march of progress that not only dismissed the fascist version of progress but collaborated with fascism in erasing those who disputed this line of march.

  At the same time, however, a perspective of history that encourages a return to the past can be quite fascist. Although fascism is indeed about technocratic progress (i.e. the cliché of “making the trains run on time”), on another register it is about retrogression. That is, while fascism may hope to develop the progress of technology it does so by an appeal to retrograde relations of production: a gesture to and a grounding in a past that never existed; the preservation of historical stasis. Fascist and conservative perspectives on history have always sought to conserve an image of the past that progressives, by definition, struggle against: progress might be privileged on the level of technology but it is definitely not privileged on the level of significant historical change. The average fascist is a culturalist who seeks to preserve past ways of relating and seeing the world in the face of historical dynamism: they demand a return to norms of family, nation, race, and gender in response to a perceived social instability.

  In Class and Nation Samir Amin demarcates the progressive perspective of history from the reactionary:

  History is a weapon in the ideological battle between those who want to change society… and those who want to maintain its basic features. I do not believe the pronouncements of those who claim to be above the fray, because people make history, albeit within objectively determined conditions. In fact, social laws do not operate like natural laws. And I do not believe in a single cosmogony embracing nature and society––even when it goes under the name of the materialist dialectic […] On the contrary, those who want to change society necessarily have ideas of a higher quality than those who wish to keep it from changing. This is because society changes. Those who want to stop its motion must therefore ignore the evidence.6

  For Amin, whose social-historical context was quite different from Benjamin’s, demanding a historical perspective that privileges the past might be a problem. Appeals to an idealized past were used by comprador elements (serving imperialism) to undermine progressive movements in the global peripheries. Such appeals were often contingent upon assumptions that there were natural laws determining a given culture’s past and that this idealized past mattered more than the possibility of future transformation. Therefore, according to this culturalist understanding, an idealized past of an oppressed nation mattered more than its future-oriented struggle against colonialism––this backwards-looking perspective would indeed galvanize colonialism!

  In this context, according to Amin, transforming history into a weapon is to admit that the struggles of the progressive masses possess a “higher quality” by being future-orientated. It is the capitalist and imperialist who seek to contain change and thus dismiss “the evidence” of the historical march of the oppressed. “To do this,” writes Amin, “they encumber thought with so much detail as to justify their refusal to abstract and generalize” and thus seek bastion in a “moral reflection” on the past.7 In Eurocentrism Amin refers to this backwards-looking gesture as a hallmark of the “culturalism” mentioned above, where “[c]ultural specificity… becomes the main driving force of inevitably quite different historical trajectories.”8 The most insidious culturalism, however, is not the kind expressed by oppressed nations and peoples but the hegemonic historical narrative of Eurocentrism that constructs the historical specificity of an imaginary trans-historical Europe, appealing to an idealized past to justify its domination of the present. Subaltern culturalisms are a by-product of this hegemonic culturalism, in fact coded by its overdeterministic logic of “irreducible ‘cultural specificities’“––a logic that resists the more universalist, and far more radical, claim that cultures can be open to the future, are transformed through struggle, and that domination can be transcended.9

  Amin’s understanding of historical perspective makes sense in light of recent culturalist appeals to the past and tradition made by contemporary reactionaries. There are the Men’s Rights Activists with their appeal to a masculinist utopia that preceded the evils of feminism. There are the neo-fascist organizations, such as PEGIDA, who seek to preserve the “civilization” of a white Europe that they see ruined by progressive waves of immigration. Conservatives possess the name “conservative” because they seek to conserve the perceived values of an imaginary past. Reactionaries are, by definition, reacting to the progress of history by upholding historical stasis.

  Moreover, in my previous essay in this book I discussed the ways i
n which capitalism determines a limit in thought, preventing us from thinking beyond the boundaries of its imaginary. In theorizing itself as “the end of history” capitalism thus conceives all thought that transcends this limit as threatening. Hence Amin is correct in valorizing a historical approach that is future orientated because it is indeed a “weapon” that can be mobilized against the limits imposed by the state of affairs.

  So, does the perspective of history described by Amin undermine the backwards-looking perspective demanded by Benjamin? Whereas Benjamin claims that the perspective of an ideal future admits fascism, Amin claims that the perspective of an ideal past is the problem. According to Amin it seems as if the proper historical perspective is to embrace change and transformation rather than seek to preserve the past through the present; ideas of a higher quality are those produced by an attention to social transformation, i.e. the future. Benjamin’s angel of history does not appear to face this direction.

  On the one hand a utopian perspective of the future ameliorates the event of fascism by dismissing it as an element that is part of a historical chain that leads inexorably towards a communist destiny. On the other hand, a traditionalist perspective of the past justifies reaction and thus courts fascism by a refusal to recognize historical transformation: the reactionary despises change whereas the progressive is open to the future. Perhaps these two perspectives on history––one that seeks recourse in past struggles and one that seeks justification in future transformation––are only moments of dialectical contradiction. Perhaps they point to a higher level of unity.

  The struggle for historical meaning

  The tension between the perspectives of history discussed in the previous section is beautifully illustrated in Sriduangkaew’s Krungthep is an Onomatopoeia. To restate the possible contradiction: on the one hand there is the perspective that focuses on past wreckage so as to avoid a concept of progress that justifies oppressive events; on the other hand there is the perspective that demands a revolutionary investment in change against reactionary invectives to preserve the past. But this contradiction is doubled, reflected as a distorted image, in the reactionary concept of history: on the one hand there is the doctrine of a return to “natural” and primordial ways of being (i.e. family values, traditional conceptions of race, “make America great again”); on the other hand there is a doctrine of progress that places the development of technology and unbounded accumulation over human existence (i.e. triumphalist neoliberal discourses of civilizational growth). The two sets of tensions tend to cut into each other and often undermine clarity. How can we know whether an appeal to the past is more reactionary than progressive? Conversely, what ensures that appeals to progressive change do not mimic neoliberal dogma? Such confusion is explored in this story of Sriduangkaew’s but not entirely resolved. At best it is troubled but, in this troubling, we are at least exhorted to think our relation to history with the gravity deserves.