Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  “Baby Don’t Sleep” is lyrically as well as sonically the most abrasive track on the album. Diggs alternates between more declamatory and more metrical styles of rapping. His words caustically demolish all of the hopes, fears, and laments that have been expressed on previous tracks. Cargo number 2331’s ideals – the things he yearns after, and believes in – are nothing more than self-inflicted, and indeed cripplingly self-congratulatory, delusions:

  You call it god, or man, or woman

  Love or hope, it’s all the same

  A nickel-bag philosophy, a beta boost inside a brain.

  These are all consolations. They might make Cargo number 2331 feel better, in the same way a nickel bag of weed would. But they don’t really change anything. They have no purchase upon the actuality of his situation. They explain away his oppression and his exile, without giving him any tools to deal with them.

  Diggs issues a steady stream of bitter words, throughout the track. But he pauses, briefly, just before the pre-chorus, and then again before and during the chorus proper. (The pre-chorus and chorus come around twice in the course of the song.) The pre-chorus and chorus are also the only portions of the track that have any sort of toned sounds to them at all, rather than just unpitched noise. The pre-chorus reminds Cargo number 2331 yet again of the losses he has suffered, and of the emptiness of his hopes:

  No home, you’ve been there

  Clearly off safety

  No destination

  No time for waiting …

  And most importantly of all, perhaps: “saviors are fiction.” Cargo number 2331 shouldn’t expect any sort of redemption or restitution. Nobody is going to rescue him. But then, Diggs ends the pre-chorus poignantly rather than harshly, by evoking “memories fading like ghosts, ghosts.” There is no cure for yearning and nostalgia, except to know that they too will fall apart, and vanish into oblivion.

  After another pause, we get the chorus proper, which gives us the track’s only hint of a respite. The chorus solely consists of repetitions of the title phrase “baby don’t sleep.” (Sometimes it is extended to “baby don’t sleep too much.”) At first, the phrase is repeated in Diggs’ almost-singing voice; then it is repeated in a high-pitched, cartoony synthesized voice. But finally, after yet another brief pause, Diggs says “baby don’t sleep” just once more – only this time in a whisper, and with no accompanying background noise. I want to say that this concluding whisper, with its note of tenderness and intimacy, entirely changes the overall feel of the song. It doesn’t negate all the bitter scorn that came before; we are still in the heart of loneliness and loss. We also remain aware that much of Cargo number 2331’s misery has been self-inflicted; as we recall from an earlier track, he “seems upset by that to which he is subjected/But convinced he brought it on himself.” But even at this desperate moment, oblivion and exile also have much to recommend them – especially when the alternative, the society that Cargo number 2331 is fleeing from, is grounded in slavery, murder, and exploitation. “Baby don’t sleep,” and you may be able, knowingly, to embrace the “all black everything.”

  Indeed, clipping. suggests as much on its Bandcamp page for Splendor and Misery:

  In a reversal of H. P. Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic insignificance, the character finds relief in learning that humanity is of no consequence to the vast, uncaring universe. It turns out, pulling the rug out from under anthropocentrism is only horrifying to those who thought they were the center of everything to begin with. Ultimately, the character decides to pilot his ship into the unknown – and possibly into oblivion – instead of continuing on to worlds whose systems of governance and economy have violently oppressed him.

  (clipping. 2016)

  Isn’t there something dishonest – or perhaps it would be better to say, symptomatic – about the way that Lovecraft conflates cosmic indifference with cosmic malice? On the one hand, Lovecraft’s Old Ones appear to be no more concerned with (or even aware of) human beings than we are with the tiny organisms that we obliterate under our feet, unknowingly, with every step we take. But on the other hand, and at the same time, these figures are portrayed as willfully destructive, and actively hostile to (ostensibly civilized) humankind; this is what makes them grotesque objects of pagan worship, screens upon which Lovecraft projects all his racist fantasies. There is a nasty sleight of hand at work here, in the way that cosmic horror provides an alibi for Lovecraft’s panicky clinging to white supremacy. Against this, Cargo number 2331 does well to take comfort in the evidence of a “vast, uncaring universe.” After all – and in contrast to Lovecraft’s neurasthenic upper-class white characters – he never thought that he was important, or at the center of things, in the first place. At the very least, the outer reaches of the cosmos are not pervaded with the parochial prejudices and injustices that actually prop up our own (white, patriarchal American) supposed cosmopolitanism and universalism.

  These considerations help us to make sense of Splendor and Misery’s final track, “A Better Place.” This song, unlike everything else on the album, features a corny, cheesy, upbeat melody – actually not much more than an extended cadence – that sounds like it is being played on a calliope, or some such carnivalesque instrument. Clashing with this, we hear Paul Outlaw’s elegiac and heavily processed voice, singing “A Long Way Away,” just like at the very start of the album; only this time, recalling the bitter experience of exile and isolation, Outlaw tells us to find nourishment in our very state of exile: “remember the darkness will show you the way.”

  After Outlaw’s introduction, Diggs’ voice enters the mix. His rapid rapping recapitulates many of the album’s overall themes, from messages gone awry, to the oppressions of time (both when it passes away and when it lingers), to all the deprivations that Cargo number 2331 has suffered:

  He’s missing something pretty

  He’s missing where the air tastes gritty

  He’s missing the splendor and misery

  Of bodies, of cities, of being missed …

  Here we have the loss of community, the loss of all sorts of experiences, both positive and negative (with a shout-out to Delany’s lost novel), and finally the loss even of a certain feeling of loss (“being missed”). It’s a problem, Diggs tells us, of “making the best of a universe/Far too expansive to cope with” – a universe that “he never chose” – while “the senses are numbed by emotional stresses.” Cargo number 2331 (and anybody who follows in his footsteps) is a victim of “centuries/Of mistakes” that he cannot help internalizing; he “calls it history.” We cannot erase the past, but must we remain bound by its constrictions? Diggs suggests that “species with memories longer” than ours “don’t bother with sweating the old shit.”

  All the while, the relentlessly upbeat carnival music continues, and even gets thickened with occasional drum beats and synthesized arpeggiated chords. The track goes round and round, coming back repeatedly to a chorus that Diggs sings instead of speaks:

  There must be a

  Better place to

  Be somebody

  Be somebody else

  In the course of this chorus, the aim of Cargo number 2331’s quest slips from the fully positive “be somebody” (as in the old protest chant “I am somebody!”) to the far more ambiguous “be somebody else” (implying a process of metamorphosis). We would do well to be suspicious of fixed identities here, given how the album’s protagonist finds it so difficult to shake off his former identity as a slave, fixed by a number. He doesn’t know what “something else” will be, and neither do we. But this at least means that something is open, and not already predetermined.

  Similarly, to say that “there must be a better place” is to make a wishful assertion, and not to state a settled fact. No “better place” is actually known; the album has argued at great length that the likelihood of finding one is minuscule. Nevertheless, “there must be” such a place; for Cargo number 2331’s very life is staked upon “the hope brought on by this belief.” The
force behind this “must be,” therefore, is hypothetical and multiply mediated: an insistence founded upon a hope that is itself founded upon an unsubstantiated belief. As Diggs says earlier in the track, it is a “bet” made in the full knowledge that its “odds are ungodly.”

  We might say, following the typology that Kim Stanley Robinson adopts from Fredric Jameson, that this attitude – “there must be a better place” – is not directly (or “naively”) utopian, so much as it is “anti-anti-utopian” (Robinson 2019). To continue this quest for a better place in spite of all the odds is to reject the ostensibly “realistic” assumption that “there is no alternative” (Margaret Thatcher’s notorious slogan, cited by Fisher 2009), or that the world we know, with its oppression and exploitation, is the only world there is or ever can be. It is better – and indeed even safer – to “set up a random course” into the unknown than to stay with what is reliably oppressive and deadly.

  The qualifications here do not negate the force of the assertion; just as the self-consciously acknowledged chintziness of the music does not erase how jubilant and celebratory it feels – all the more so in the face of the harrowing experiences that the album has put us through up to this point. If this is irony, it’s not of the usual cynical sort. Rather, clipping.’s mode of irony allows them to actually say something positive and affirmative, without falling into the Disneyesque cheerfulness of so much mainstream culture. As members of the band put it in an interview,

  Making the void and the infinite unknown a triumphant choice at the end of this record was the heated discussion of many a night while making this record … the discussion was how to make it sound like piloting into a black hole feel like a powerful choice.

  (Burns 2016)

  At the end of “A Better Place,” as the music thickens, with more insistent arpeggios and more active percussion, Diggs repeats the exhortation

  Are you ready to go?

  Are you ready to go yet?

  Let’s go!

  until finally all we hear of his voice is “Go! Go! Go!” in the background, gradually fading out, while the music gets ever louder, thicker and dronier. This sound is dissonant because of all the overtones, but it still contains pitched notes rather than unpitched noise. This final minute of the album even has some of the emotional effect of an extended cadence at the end of Wagner’s operas or other pieces of classical music. But as befits the science fiction storyline, not to mention clipping.’s overall aesthetic, Splendor and Misery ends, not with any sense of final resolution and (post-orgasmic) repose in the tonic key, but rather with the sound abruptly cut off while it is still going full blast.

  Chapter 8

  Proof of Concept

  Gwyneth Jones’ 2017 novella Proof of Concept (Jones 2017) takes place some 200 years from now, in the early twenty-third century. The book is about a world that is depressingly similar to our own, except that things have gotten progressively worse. It is also about the prospects of escaping from such a world, given that nothing can be done to salvage or reform it. The book’s storytelling is extremely compressed; even favorable reviewers tend to complain that this “dense and clotted story” (of about 30,000 words) would be better if it were expanded to full-novel length (Kincaid 2017). But I think that Jones draws considerable power from the brutal concision and abruptness of her text. Indeed, she suggests in a blog entry that expanding the story to novel length would risk making it feel “padded-out” (Jones 2017a). Proof of Concept, in novella form, is brilliantly telegraphic in its brevity. It never tells us anything more than once, and it gives us only laconic hints of matters that we need to flesh out for ourselves. Things that might be major plot points in other texts are here passed over in a sentence.

  Take how Proof of Concept evokes its twenty-third century media landscape. On the very first page of the novella, we are introduced to the media personality Da Jue, who is “not human, not even the holopresence of a human,” but rather an avatar: a “data entity” based on “the input from a fantastically huge global audience: the statistical sum of its real-time response.” Despite being entirely generated by the artificial intelligence system known as Global Audience Mediation (GAM for short), Da Jue is given a gendered pronoun (“he”) and a physical appearance: “an absurdly eager face and a bouncy body in a smart suit,” and wearing a “gaudy necktie.” Da Jue is a hyperactive, caricatural TV talk show host, with “crazily intense attention,” but a short attention span. He speaks at one moment “with slightly mad enthusiasm,” giggles the next at a supposed “naughty word,” and relaxes at the prospect of “fun” the moment after that, winking and smirking to the audience all the while.

  After this brief appearance, we do not encounter Da Jue again. But in his (simulated) person, Jones has effectively given us all we need to know about how the media work in the world of Proof of Concept. Televisual programming, watched both on flat screens and in holographic 3D displays, is global in reach, ubiquitous, and highly interactive and immersive. GAM varies in tone: “the global audience had many faces,” so that even Da Jue can be “nonpatronizing” and factual at times, instead of cheerfully inane. But whatever its momentary mood, GAM’s interface is implacable in its grasp. It is instantly responsive to the desires and reactions of “the masses” – but only because it molds those desires and reactions in the first place.

  GAM works as an outlet for discontent, offering the spectacle of people “saying outrageous things and meaning nothing.” In this way, it provides “crude, fake, freedom of speech for people who have none.” But behind the scenes, GAM sets the limits of what is thinkable. It watches you far more carefully than you ever watch it; “your every little eye kick, choice, and contact” is collated as data, so that it can be either “monetized, or racked up against you.” You have to watch out; if you say something that goes too far beyond the guidelines, you may be subjected to “cognitive remodeling, or even Vanishment.” Cartoonish displays like that of Da Jue allow the “fantastically huge global audience” to not take GAM seriously, or even to dismisss it as “a bad joke.” But beneath this easy disavowal, everyone is forced to recognize the media system’s authority and power. Its judgments are final; it can make you or break you. When GAM comes calling, you had better maintain “a warm, happy expression”; and above all, “you must never say no.”

  Behind this media facade, living conditions are grim. “At least there are no more wars”; but nothing in this early twenty-third century world is free from “the vicious stranglehold of the One Percent.” The superrich continue to profit (much as they already do today) at everyone else’s expense. Not only do the One Percent control all the wealth; they are also able to live for hundreds of years, thanks to longevity treatments that nobody else can afford. This gives them an even greater sense of entitlement; such “super-post-lifespans … do whatever comes into their heads and they just don’t care. They have no consideration, no boundaries.” There is an ever-increasing gulf between the One Percent and the rest of humanity.

  Meanwhile, the political system continues to deteriorate, together with the climate:

  Many great cities had been abandoned. All the oceans were rated dead or dying, and a frightening global percentage of agricultural land was useless. Almost the entire human population lived packed into the surviving cities, remodeled and densely stacked: the crumbling “megahives.” Inside the Hives civilization survived, in a permanent state of moderate crisis. Outside them scavengers eked out short lives in the polluted “Dead Zones,” or in raft clusters on the acidified oceans, while every remaining scrap of agricultural land was machine-tended, and trespassers punished with summary execution.

  However horrific this situation may seem, it is scarcely more than a straightforward science fictional extrapolation from conditions that we already face today. In the globalized, neoliberal world of the early twenty-first century, democratic structures are eroding. All human activities are rapidly being financialized, so that profits can be extracted from them. Wealth is
redistributed ever upwards. Property rights – especially those to so-called “intellectual property” – are rigidly enforced, no matter the human costs. Everything that we think, say, or do is recorded by governments and large corporations. Global warming and environmental pollution also continue unchecked, and these governments and corporations go out of their way to block any actions that might reduce them. We muddle through “in a permanent state of moderate crisis.” The authorities continually improvise makeshift and provisional measures, while making it impossible to address deeper problems. Logically speaking, these sorts of conditions cannot be sustained forever; eventually we will reach some point of total system failure, and the economy and the environment will both come crashing down. But this moment of reckoning is continually being deferred.

  Proof of Concept asks us to consider the consequences of an additional two centuries of such deferral. Some things have changed, obviously, in the world of the novella. For instance, nation-states as we know them today no longer exist; they have been superseded by private corporations that exert their power directly. An individual person may still be designated as a “Yank,” “Brit,” or “Nigerian”; but these terms no longer refer to political entities. “There are only three actual countries left in the world. MegaCorps East, which you call China, MegaCorps West, and the Dead Zones.” The last of these really isn’t a country at all, as it consists of people reduced to bare life (Agamben 1998): they have “no legal status,” no homes, no property to speak of, and no recourse against rape and murder. They scavenge for the necessities of life in otherwise abandoned areas, full of chemical contamination and radioactivity; they are continually falling ill, and they die young.