What is most important, here, is the way in which historical struggles against oppression have conceived of themselves as moments where the problematic of necessity is, in some ways, viscerally grasped. Mao expands on the connection between freedom and necessity when he writes that freedom is much more than simply “the understanding of necessity.” Rather, human freedom should be conceived as “the understanding of necessity and the transformation of necessity. When you discover a law, you must be able to apply it, you must create the world anew… It won’t do just to understand necessity, we must also transform things.”17 Understanding that one is enslaved, and then publishing political tracts lamenting this enslavement rather than attempting to transform the situation of enslavement, is not complete freedom. Better yet, as the revolution in the colonies of Saint-Domingue would illustrate: take the axiom of the French Revolution, apply it to the context of oppression in Haiti, and create that world anew. On the historical stage every pursuit of necessity is a grand gesture towards freedom. Or, as Engels puts it elsewhere, an “ascent… from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”18
The necessitated subject
Reflection upon necessity is what leads the character of Lussadh towards a transgression of the “kingdom of necessity” that has been imposed by the social relations within which she operates. In her encounter with the third moment of necessity, in the sequence leading up to her poisoning of the envoy Crow who has also become her lover, she is already making gestures towards this transgression. She begins to see her grandaunt, the king, as “harried” and “diminished”, no longer “an avatar of power.” Even still she follows the necessity of princely duty and murders Crow.
The final murder reveals, however, that Crow was merely an “effigy”, a “second self”, of the Winter Queen. When the Winter Queen herself manifests Lussadh’s world is cracked open, the necessities imposed by her social order breached, and the possibility of breaking with destiny is presented. Earlier, Lussadh remembered that the lover she murdered before That Rough-Hewn Sun began told her that “[i]nside all of us is a second self, one that could have been. We’re an envelope for futures.” The murder of the Winter Queen’s “second self” unlocks the possibility of Lussadh’s “second self”, a historical trajectory and a new chain of necessities that can be. Necessity is an invitation for reinvention.
Of course, such a historical trajectory and Lussadh’s possibility of freedom are mediated by the fact that they are unlocked only in another imperial order. The Winter Queen is a literalization of Hegel’s “march of God in the world” and thus is not a space where domination is revealed as contingent, a state of affairs that itself necessitates transgression. We are merely presented with the necessities encountered by ruling class subjects; the masses that live and toil under both regimes largely remain voiceless. (What of the painter and child supported by Nuriya, the cousin murdered by Lussadh? They remain pushed to the margins of the imperial order; the child is literally rendered voiceless through sedation––and this is the point.) Since That Rough-Hewn Sun is a prequel story to Sriduangkaew’s novel Winterglass even Lussadh’s transgression of her kingdom of necessity will be bittersweet.
Narrative concerns aside, the three moments of necessity that form the structure of this story are significant in that they demonstrate the ways in which the encounter of necessity determine historical trajectory: doubled with the contingency of “second selves”, pointing towards freedom, establishing at every moment a subject who can only be a subject through its recognition of necessity. To imagine history shorn from necessity is to imagine mindless chaos where freedom is impossible: to be subordinated to pure contingency is to live within a lottery, where one can never know or understand what actions will result in a desired outcome. Rather, historical necessity represents “an envelope for futures.” In this sense, if we are ever to break free from the limits imposed by the capitalist imaginary, then we must follow a path akin to the one charted by Lussadh: through an understanding of the necessities imposed by our historical conjuncture we must struggle to render every moment the “strait gate” through which another reality will emerge.
Afterword – Authorial Intentionality
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
There is no such thing as apolitical art; nothing is made in a vacuum. This is something I believe in very strongly, and my collaboration in the book you’re reading has sprung out of this belief. As a writer of fiction it’s exceptionally rare to participate in responses to your work, least of all in responses this thoughtful and incandescent: I have called Moufawad-Paul’s Austerity Apparatus as precise as a bullet, and reading his considered essays that combine his area of specialty and my fiction has been an experience in epiphanies.
I want to talk about intentionality a little.
The stories included in this book are of some range. One is fabulist, the next speculative toward a distant and devastated future, and the last a fable of power and governance done in the mode of Asian epics. Each has been written intentionally: this might seem a tautology––of course fiction is written intentionally rather than manifesting out of the ether unattached to any idea or person. What I mean rather is that some writers ascribe more staunchly to the idea of apolitical art than others. They set out to tell a story as both the means and end, a school of thought that operates from the assumption that it is possible for art to be anything but a product of its creator and its context. What is inevitable is that something of the writer’s ideology comes through, whether it is one’s worldview on authority or capitalism, or which group of people is more human than others. Who you are and what you think saturate what you make. Nobody can escape this, and what is thought of as apolitical merely means it is part of the unmarked default (while the subaltern is the one marked as political, message fiction, “has an agenda”). And there’s something to be said for art that is made with a political or ideological intent from the ground up, and it can be so without crossing the line into polemic or propaganda. Intentionality is a measure of conviction. (Whether one needs to declare one’s intent behind each work of fiction is a different point––I prefer not to––but that’s its own tangent.)
Writers are frequently flawed; many of us simultaneously believe in the power of stories but also wish to peddle the concept that stories can just be stories––this is an adventure novel, this is a fantasy about wizards and dragons, here is a love story between a love-struck intern and the billionaire who finds her irresistible. There is an odd disregard to what your story might say about you or what you think: that it doesn’t mean anything when your doorstop epic uncritically touts the authority of absolute monarchs, or when every woman in the story is sexually brutalized, or when all the murderous monsters happen to be black while the wily counsellors all happen to have “slanted eyes”. Citing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, may be overdone, but while the lesson it delivers is frequently quoted few writers take anything away from it (that stories do have power, yes, but not just because they teach children to love reading––stories can nudge beliefs, affirm existing ones, can shape an entire continent like Africa in the eye of a reader who has never visited it). When you believe stories can just be stories, that there’s nothing revealing or politically fraught about creating narrative spaces where the only victors belong to an empowered hegemony, you inevitably reiterate the dominant discourse. In other words, writers who don’t think of intentionality will almost always uphold the status quo.
What I find unique and critically necessary about Moufawad-Paul’s engagement with my work is that it reveals aspects of my work that are surprising even to me; they are not counter-readings or conventional literary criticism, but they peer well beneath the surface that I present, and incorporate my fiction into a framework of radical philosophy. It engages with that intentionality: the first story We Are All Wasteland On the Inside becomes a framework for limits on the imagination and ideological movements, Krungthep is an Onom
atopoeia serves as an analogy on the weaponization of the past (and incorporates one of my favourite post-colonialist theorists, Frantz Fanon), while That Rough-Hewn Sun provides material for a discussion of liberation and social order. It’s very different from what I’m used to as a writer––which is a model of a finished product being analysed and reviewed––and is instead a collaboration; one story results from the earlier engagement, and the parts that form this text as a whole inform each other intricately.
It’s a startling, exciting experience to have as a writer, and it’s something I feel deeply about. I don’t declare my authorial intention, but what I would like is that the dialogue between my fiction and his exploration will exert the same force on the reader that it did on me.
Endnotes
Foreword
1. Meillassoux, 6.
2. See The Number and the Siren.
3. Cited in Morera, 71.
4. In fact I use this story as an analogical device in another project, The Denouement Machine. It was in fact my use of Comet’s Call while drafting that manuscript that prompted me to pursue this project with Sriduangkaew.
5. The Zone was the name for the strange region that resulted from alien intervention in the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (adapted by Tarkovsky as Stalker) and has spawned a small subgenre within SFF that includes M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing, the anime series Darker Than Black, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy among others.
6. Meillassoux, 44.
7. Ibid.
8. And Zizek is a case in point, as his recourse to the first Star Wars prequel in his The Fragile Absolute should demonstrate.
Chapter One
1. This story was originally published in The Future Fire in 2016.
Chapter Two
1. Fisher, 2.
2. Dean, 53.
3. This was my argument in The Communist Necessity.
4. This is precisely what happened at a Historical Materialist conference at York University in 2007 when Aijaz Ahmad, an ideologue of the CPI(Marxist), delivered a speech where he claimed the future of revolutionary movements was in peasant and Indigenous rebellions in the peripheries. When he was asked, in the Q&A, to explain how he could make such a claim when his party was actively suppressing a people’s war led by peasants, Indigenous Adivasis, and lower caste militants, Ahmad refused to answer and in fact walked off the stage.
5. I discussed this particular issue in my essay “Quartermasters of Stadiums and Cemeteries” in the Journal of Socialist Studies (Winter 2016).
6. Really, I think we could write the most contradictory and non-sensical history of the left if we collected all the claims about Stalinism and compiled them into a single document.
7. Fisher, 39–53.
8. In the past decade and a half, however, a number of books dedicated to explaining the New Communist Movement’s significance have been written: Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher’s Heavy Radicals, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Outlaw Woman.
9. One of Sriduangkaew’s skills as an author lies in her characterization of compromised subjects. In most of her fictions she presents characters whose struggles emerge from a combination of the rejection of the fictional state of affairs and the difficulty of transcending socialization. Sometimes these characters are cynical noir individuals, such as the detective of this specific story who struggles with the legacy of her tragic romance with a Himmapan denizen, sometimes they are the powerful agents of Comet’s Call who are pulled into regional conflicts because of their desires and secrets, and sometimes they are the colonized subjects of A Universe as Vast as Our Longing who intentionally accept compromise so as to keep living. The overall point, however, is that socialization produces the grounds for compromise; individuals, especially when they are isolated and separated from broader social movements, cannot be anything but.
Chapter Four
1. Benjamin, 257–258.
2. Ibid., 260.
3. Ibid., 257.
4. Ibid., 260.
5. Ibid., 259.
6. Amin, Class and Nation, 1.
7. Ibid.
8. Amin, Eurocentrism, 7.
9. Ibid., 8.
10. Fanon, 217–218.
11. Ibid., 218.
12. Re-Membering the Dismembered (2005).
13. Fanon, 222.
14. Benjamin, 256.
15. There are many examples of a backwards looking cultural nationalism undermining revolutionary movements, transforming the leaders into imperialist managers of new structures of oppression. One that an author such as Amin would have had in mind when he wrote Class and Nation and Eurocentrism would be the revolution in Zanzibar, led by Amin’s friend Abdulrahman Babu, that was undermined by the Tanzanian cultural nationalism of Julius Nyerere’s “African Socialism”. As Amrit Wilson’s The Threat of Liberation (London: Pluto Press, 2013) has thoroughly demonstrated, the CIA used Nyerere to undermine and destroy the mass anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movement mobilized by the Umma Party of Zanzibar.
16. Fanon, 223.
17. If there is an image that best represents the history of settler-colonialism it is the London museum that contains the skulls of Zimbabwe’s resistance (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zimbabwe/11802355/Britain-confirms-Robert-Mugabes-claim-a-London-museum-has-Zimbabwean-heroes-skulls.html).
18. Shipley, 6.
19. Ibid., 7.
20. Ibid., 6–7.
21. Ibid., 316.
22. Ibid., 223–224.
23. Ibid., 224.
24. Amin, Class and Nation, 1.
25. PCR-RCP, 5.
26. Marx, 15.
Chapter Five
1. This story is a prequel to the novel Winterglass (Apex, 2017).
Chapter Six
1. McClintock, 352.
2. The original source of this claim is never directly cited, and sometimes takes different forms: “wading through rivers of blood” is another common attribution.
3. Benjamin, 260.
4. Ibid.
5. Hegel, Science of Logic, 550.
6. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §2.
7. Ibid., §15.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., §127.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., §135.
13. Ibid., §44.
14. Ibid., §258.
15. Engels, Anti-Duhring, 106. Nature, for Engels, means in this specific context any external force to which humans may be subjected––even constructed forces such as governments.
16. Ibid., 146.
17. Mao, 183.
18. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 73.
Works Cited
Amin, Samir. Class and Nation. New York: Monthly Review, 1980.
Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism (Second Edition). New York: Monthly Review, 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso, 2012.
Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Duhring. New York: International Publishers, 1987.
Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. New York: International Publishers, 1998.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Hegel, GWF. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Hegel, GWF. Science of Logic. Amherst: Humanity Books, 1969.
Mao Zedong. On Practice and Contradiction. New York: Verso, 2007.
Marx, Karl. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1969.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Meillassoux, Quentin. Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015.
Morera, Esteve. Gramsci, Materialism, and Philoso
phy. London: Routledge, 2014.
PCR-RCP. How We Intend To Fight. (http://www.pcr-rcp.ca/old/pdf/pwd/3.pdf)
Shipley, Tyler. Ottawa and Empire. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2017.
Acknowledgments
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
My first and foremost thanks to J. Moufawad-Paul, my accomplice and co-author in this strange and, I think, unique book. When he asked if I was interested in doing a collaboration, I was as flattered as I was surprised; this is not the kind of work I usually do, since I am primarily a writer of fiction (and a media/literary critic, though not so much anymore). Working with his area of philosophy was new to me, but I believe all writers of fiction can easily fall into a comfortable rut, and engaging in something entirely new was welcome to me, as well as an opportunity for growth. It makes good on my intent to delve into radical theory. I’d also like to express my appreciation for his partner Vicky, who has contributed no small amount of labour. I’m deeply grateful to the editors of Zer0 for giving life to this strange, beautiful project.
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