Methods Devour Themselves

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  In Krungthep is an Onomatopoeia the generation ship, or “shipworld”, named Krungthep “after the city in which it was built”, has been away from Earth for centuries following an unexplained Armageddon. Krungthep is an ark, a massive citystate, containing an entire exiled civilization whose members dream of a planetary sky they have never directly experienced. Generations have passed and the shipworld Krungthep remains in exile, yearning to return to the place where it originated and its inhabitants’ ancestors fled.

  (A brief aside: I feel it is necessary to make a passing comment about my co-author’s choice of centring Krungthep in this story. In the earlier story that began this dialogue Krungthep was the site of a collision between two orders of reality, an “XSF” fictional context where the supposedly fantastic was brought in line with mundane positivism. In Krungthep is an Onomatopoeia, however, the city is delinked from its planetary location and transformed into a deterritorialized vagabond civilization yearning for its namesake. The distance between the two Krungtheps is perhaps a distance provoked by my earlier intervention between the cities. Against the worry of the atrophy of thought the same setting is reasserted as a space that might exist beyond the norms imposed by the capitalist imaginary. Anxiety is thus shifted into the realm of historical meaning.)

  The visceral opening passages of the narrative concern the search for historical meaning: the return of an expeditionary trio that was sent back to Earth to investigate whether humanity could end its exile. The lone survivor of the expedition is the pilot, reduced to ruin herself, who is excavated from the ship along with her recorded memories. These memories reveal that she executed one of her companions. In order to make sense of the wreckage, the character Suranut is recruited by the shipworld’s AI to engage with the revived pilot so as to convince her to reveal the meaning of the sequence of events.

  Suranut is a historian who specializes “in certain social movements from late twenty-first to early twenty-second century.” She is thus someone whose attention to the past is invested in the concept of social transformation. Despite being invested in the past of a ruined Earth––she is one of those citizens who dreams of its lost sky––this investment is guided by a concern about her present’s possible inability to embrace progress. At one point she tells the recovered pilot, Gullaya, that life on the shipworld is “like living in amber. It’s stasis. Something has to change or break.” Her investigation of the wreckage of the returned expedition, along with her investment in a past she has never known, is thus conjoined with a future-oriented impulse to break from the stasis because her training makes her aware that change is a fundamental fact of existence. Hence her viewpoint demonstrates the unity of the two aforementioned perspectives on history: her understanding of the past, as well as her investigation of the past’s wreckage in Gullaya the pilot, intersects with her proclamation that the shipworld civilization must transgress the limits of its present stasis––that progress is necessary.

  Gullaya is an avatar of the past. Although she and her dead companions were not literally sent backwards in time they were dispatched to that spatial point where the moment of historical rupture occurred. Earth is the diseased past, the terrain that forced the event of at least one shipworld. To travel back to a destination that determined the current state of affairs is to make contact with the past; Gullaya has become part of the historical wreckage. The dialogue between Suranut and Gullaya thus represents a confluence of the multiple perspectives of history.

  First of all, Suranut represents the unity of both historical perspectives: her understanding of the past is such that it is interested in a future moment of transformation. She dreams of the pre-apocalyptic Krungthep and an open sky she has never known so as to guide her belief in the necessity of social change. Her dialogue with Gullaya, the sole survivor of an expedition dispatched to this very past, is driven by this concern. Indeed, at one point Gullaya senses that Suranut seeks to interpret the expedition as a possible momentum for change and asks: “And you want me to be the change, so we don’t break?” But Suranut’s understanding of a perspective that is both open to the future and driven by the messiness of the past refuses to accede to this simplistic demand: “No, I want you to try again… There’s no reason any of this has to be final.” Suranut’s perspective is both grounded in the past and open to a future of multiple possibilities that must, in order to avoid the easy answers of a univocal doctrine of progress, avoid predictions of finality.

  Secondly, the event of Gullaya’s return to the shipworld signifies the inverse of the historical perspectives in tension. Those in charge of the exiled situation treat both the expedition and the riddle of its survivor as justification for their future projections: the expedition serves a role in the perpetuation of the shipworld; it becomes clear that the authoritative structure in charge of Krungthep is sceptical of the AI cortex’s investigation and thus seeks only to link the event into the doctrine of its projected civilization. Moreover, the expedition’s encounter with the actual city of Krungthep upon Armageddon Earth symbolizes the way in which the past is as much a contamination as it is a guide for future action: upon attempting to access the “archive vault” of Earth’s Krungthep, the members of the expedition “got so sick, their cybernetics were rotting from the inside.” Fixation on the past can indeed become a rot: conservatives, cultural nationalists, and fascists annex and preserve a diseased traditionalism.

  But thirdly, the entire narrative represents the ways in which the tension between the two ostensibly radical perspectives on history intersect in the figure of the historian-investigator, are inverted in the problematic represented by the surviving pilot, and are troubled by the social context of the shipworld. So how can we unify the progressive tension? What rearticulation of historical meaning will unify the figures of Suranut and Gullaya? The answer to these questions begins with Fanon.

  Through Fanon: the dialectic of past and present

  Frantz Fanon was also concerned with the tension between past and future orientated historical perspectives. Although Fanon’s engagement with this tension was conditioned by the problematic of colonialism it still provides an insight into the apparent contradiction. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon examines the ways in which the native intellectual understands their cultural history in a context where everything about this history has been declared inferior by the settler. The circuit looping between these two perspectives of history is part of a dialectic that, when understood as a totality, unifies the contradiction.

  In a colonial present where the history of the colonized has been dismissed as uncivilized and barbaric, the first radical option of the oppressed intellectual (whether they are an author, artist, philosopher, or historian) is to seek bastion in this inferiorized past. “In order to ensure his salvation and to escape from the supremacy of the white man’s culture,” Fanon writes, “the native feels the need to turn backward towards his unknown roots and to lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous people.”10 The impulse is revolutionary because it is an attempt to carve out a historical space, to locate oneself in a time that the event of colonialism has either ruined or denied.

  The future promised by the colonized present, even if it is one that uses the progressive language of a “common humanity”, is merely an apology for the colonial present: every act of oppression, every experience of immiseration, can be justified by this bland humanism. For example, a key component of US ideology is the sanctification of genocide and slavery through the event of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. The rapist slavers that founded the United States are treated as part of a historical chain that produced the end of slavery and the civil rights of the slaves: the liberation of the latter is discursively positioned as a future logically motivated by the violence of the former; the violence ought to be forgiven and forgotten, the “image of enslaved ancestors” less important than the discourse of liberty and the rights of man established by the Founding Fathers. Thus, even those moments of libera
tion won by the oppressed are, according to the historical perspective of the oppressors, treated as by-products of colonial civilization. The musical Hamilton, popular amongst wealthy US liberals, is the perfect metaphor of this discourse: the white oppressors are played by black actors as if they are part of the same cultural continuum––as if resistance to settler-colonial hegemony is in fact the by-product of imperialist civilization, the only language that can be spoken.

  Such a historical perspective is what is resisted by Fanon’s intellectual who seeks inoculation from this narrative through an appeal to a past culture which includes a long tradition of resistance. It is an act of remembering through a “tearing away” that is “painful and difficult.”11 My partner, Vicky Moufawad-Paul, in her experimental documentary about her family’s ruined village in Palestine, has referred to this perspective as “re-membering the dismembered record.”12 As Fanon writes: “the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is.”13

  And yet this perspective is not enough for Fanon; by itself it produces only a limited understanding of the subject’s relation to history. For one thing, this perspective is too close to the understanding of history upheld by the most reactionary elements of the colonial edifice. While there are indeed those settler-colonial liberals who attempt to sanitize their past with a “document of civilization which is… at the same time a document of barbarism”14––who promote an anti-racist future by appealing to sanitized doctrines of colonial history, who celebrate cultural productions such as Hamilton––there are also those atavistic conservatives who uphold the most violent aspects of their culture by appealing to an idealist version of the colonial past. The fascist is as much an identitarian as the resistant culturalist and the struggle between the two is based on a choice between competing and atomic cultures.

  The fact that this radical re-membering mimics reactionary appeals to the past is more than formal; it possesses substantial dangers. A past that has been actively suppressed, destroyed, and distorted by the event of colonialism must necessarily meet its limits. Indeed, attempts to re-member an irrevocably dismembered historical sequence can be like the past encountered by the expedition in Sriduangkaew’s story: a contamination. Amin’s comments about a progressive historical perspective were in fact partially motivated by this worry; he was well aware of the ways in which the comprador elements lurking within a resistance movement could be galvanized and valorized by imperialism so as to sell out the revolution, becoming its managers, through discourses of cultural nationalism.15 The colonizer will not “blush for shame” because the colonized are “spreading out little-known cultural treasures under its eyes.”16 Imperialism can adjust to cultural celebrations so long as these celebrations do not threaten its dominance; its museums are proof of this fact.

  In some ways colonialism is a museum, a vast museum that produces settler experts who speak with authority upon the meaning of the cultures they occupy, containing the elements of this culture within discursive boundaries. The colonial bureaucrat is a museum official par excellence: they curate the culture they have appropriated, and distort it through their curation.17 In this sense, even the past grandeur of a civilization thoroughly distorted by colonialism can be appreciated by colonial experts and, in this appreciation, further distorted. Take, for example, the Mayan Empire that has been a source of excited curiosity for innumerable archaeologists and anthropologists. In Ottawa and Empire Tyler A. Shipley discusses a 2012 exhibit in Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum “which presented Mayan civilization as ancient and mysterious, a relic of an era of mysticism and superstition so backward and irrational that it may hold the key to primeval secrets about the nature of humanity or the meaning of life, long forgotten by the fast-moving modern society constructed by European civilization.”18 Shipley points out that such a celebration is in fact a Eurocentric mystification that, by celebrating the Mayan civilization as “mysterious” (and obscuring the reality that part of this “mystery” is the result of a destruction wrought “by the catastrophic European conquest”19), suffocates the dynamic reality of a people open to the future in the stranglehold of claims about mystery, primordiality, unknowability. Shipley writes:

  In fact, these religious, artistic, and scientific advances were not the product of some vaguely alien mystical force but, rather, of a complex social and political system that was able to sustain a large population and create the conditions under which some people could pursue a variety of activities that were not directly related to survival. The Mayan civilization constructed complicated agricultural systems, which many Eurocentric historians had previously deemed impossible given the supposed backwardness of their society.20

  When the oppressed seek their liberation in appeals to the past they encounter numerous gatekeepers of the present squatting upon the remains of a history reduced to rubble by the colonizer, the occupier, the dominator, the exploiter.

  Hence, Fanon argues that all radical appeals to the past on the part of the oppressed only remain radical if the historical subjectivity gained from this perspective reverses its gaze and focuses instead on a future that, like the imagined sky in Sriduangkaew’s story, transgresses the stasis imposed by a present that despises substantial change. In the closing passages of Wretched Fanon proclaims that the revolutionary option is to break the colonial impasse and its false division of humanity by founding a new humanity: “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.”21 Such a rupture gleaned from a gaze aimed at future transgression is not merely a denial of the past orientated perspective; it is derived from its apparent negation.

  According to Fanon, the native intellectual who begins by re-membering the past must necessarily, if they are honestly seeking to pursue a revolutionary historical perspective, realize that this past is compromised. Whereas a comprador consciousness emerges in the intellectual who fails to move beyond culturalism, a revolutionary consciousness is developed amongst those who treat this past as an invitation to a reopened future. “The culture that the intellectual leans towards is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people, but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion.”22 As Amin pointed out “society changes” and a living culture is not the customs discovered in cultural nationalism but a history open to the future in the process of development.

  Thus, according to Fanon, while the grounding in the past is necessary to reacquaint oneself with a historical position outside of the narrative of oppression and its pseudo-progress, this grounding must be part of the re-initiation of a futureaimed historical sequence if it is to escape the tomb of the past. Although the rediscovery of custom and tradition produces the necessary inoculation and grounding to resist various doctrines of oppressive civilization, one cannot remain in a state of quarantine without risking the breach of contamination; combat through new sequences of vaccination is required. Fanon is unequivocal: “The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people.”23

  For Fanon, the past and future orientated perspectives are unified in the struggle against the present’s oppressive state of affairs. As Amin stated in Class and Nation, “the present gives meaning to the past.”24 But the present also provides meaning to the future based on how it has translated its past: this is the science of historical materialism.

  The weapon of history

  Although Fanon’s analysis of historical perspective concerns the particularity of colonialism it nevertheless exhibits a universal lesson about the revolutionary understanding of historical time. The past must be treated as a guide to future transformation and, if our perspective is not fixed on the way in which this past has been ruined by predatory historical sequences, then we will lose our perspective. Simultaneously, hope in a future free
from oppression that is produced by the understanding that history is by definition transformation––that we are open to the future––must guide our engagement with the past. Retrograde historical narratives are derived by ignoring this relationship: the liberal narrative that justifies all present oppressions under the doctrine of progressive-reformist development; the reactionary narrative that embraces the oppressive stasis of the past.

  The problem is thus not found in the antinomy between past and future orientated historical narratives but on another register. A different axis of historical perspective is required, one that registers history as a struggle from those above and those below:

  When seen from below or seen from above, the same reality is often viewed very differently. Two different points of view, which generate two different understandings, and consequently, two different kinds of feelings and reactions, such as hope and fear. […] The first revolutionary act in class struggle is to recognize, understand and to seize the world from below! We must not fall into the trap that is believing that the bourgeoisie’s hallucinations from above are truthful reality.25