Midterm
Rebuttal
Part 1
Question
1
I
was given a mark of one out of two for defining the term novum. We agree upon
the definition, so there’s no point in discussing this further. Nonetheless, I
would like to assert that your claim that a “novum” separates science fiction
literature from non-science literature is baseless and invalid, negating your
justification for decrementing a mark.
I
am a mathematician, so I think and talk in math (I’ve been told that I don’t
buzz like a fridge, but if you listened to some of my music then you’ll likely
agree that I am like a detuned radio). One of the things that mathematicians do
is define and write theorems for algebraic structures. Usually, the first goal when it comes to
understanding a new algebraic structure is formulating a characteristic theorem
that determines whether or not some related algebraic structure is really the
algebraic structure that is desired. On page 1 of the midterm, you claim that:
Also, distinguishes SF from non-SF
dis - tin - guish [di-sting-gwish]
–verb (used with object)
2. to recognize
as distinct or different; recognize the salient or individual features or
characteristics of: It
is hard to distinguish her from her twin sister.
So,
your claim is clearly that a work of literature is science fiction if and only
if it has a novum. I will prove this false by contradiction in both directions,
completely collapsing any claimed causal relation between “novum” and “science
fiction”.
First,
the assumption that it is even possible to define literary genres at all is
required to even consider whether or not your claim has any meaning. Now,
consider the genre of political theory. Clearly, the genre describes works of
fiction as texts that describe ideal political structures are also describing
fictional political structures. Often, these texts are written with an attempt
to construct an ideal that is hoped to be almost workable, this is even the
goal within the genre; but, as the proposed implementation is an abstraction it
cannot, regardless of how realistic the implementation, ever be considered as
non-fiction. Who could argue that the attempt to write a new political system,
even if it is a synthesis of existing ideas, is not the presentation of a new
idea? So, then, is The Republic science
fiction? The Constitution of the United
States of America? The Magna Carta? The works of Marx and Engels? Il Principe?
This list could grow quite long but five counter-examples are more than
sufficient.
Further, what of the case of
historical revisionism? While the term itself has negative connotations, the
idea is actually quite scholarly. Anybody working in the fields of linguistics,
archaeology, geology, evolutionary biology, palaeontology or physical
cosmology, to name a few, is essentially a historical revisionist. These people
too are constructing works of fiction as eventually they will all be
overturned; science has no absolute end point and is itself fully aware of the
impossibility of constructing a perfect model of the universe because the
mathematicians have informed them, through the works of Gödel, that this
is impossible. They have even, as they desire to do, compiled experimental
evidence that “proves” this by experimenting with particles and formulating the
various quantum theories from their observations. The newest idea coming out of
cosmological physics is actually that the universe breathes in the way that
Empedokles envisioned, that it cycles through creation and destruction
indefinitely, which renders free will to precisely the place that Vonnegut
describes it on p. 241 in the small text. I tried to write my first honours
thesis about that by the way, this was another text that I read long ago, but
the School of Mathematics wouldn’t let me; I ended up
exploring a kind of abstract algebra that I (incorrectly) thought may be useful
in attempting to describe events in time in precisely the way that Vonnegut
did. A group is an associative loop. I’ve digressed too far. Scientists thrive
on knowing that nothing in science is absolute, it is what excites them at
their core, they are always hoping for some new discovery that’s going to let
them rewrite the books that have already been written. What future was there in
rewriting notes to Newton
for the next thousand years? Who would have been content? Do you think they
want to write notes on Einstein for the next hundred, let alone thousand? He’s
already being questioned loudly. Everything in science is fiction, even if it
does roughly describe the way that things almost are. Does a profound novel not
roughly describe the way that things almost are, albeit using different methods?
In the context of timelessness, what
the historians write is even inevitably relegated to fiction. Consider the case
of Claude Debussy. We are close enough to his life to be able to state with
great certainty that Claude Debussy never learned to read or write. Recently, a
very popular dime store novel was written that has the fanciful notion within
it that Debussy was a learned statesman near the head of a powerful secret
society. As Debussy will long be remembered as the greatest composer of his
era, if remnants of this popular text survive, say, a nuclear war, then the
fantasy that Debussy had powerful links to the real structures of power in
western Europe could very well find it’s way into historical documents
discussing his life, at which point something that was intended to be purely
fictional will have become real history. If we go back a little further, we can
already see the blurring of myth with history when it comes to the lives of
Alexander Hamilton, H.G. Wells, Ludwig Beethoven and Evariste Galois. There was
some discussion in class about how one of the defining characteristics of the
steam-punk genre is that it is deceptively historically revisionist. Still even
further back, we have genealogical records housed in sagas that only abstractly
describe history in the form of short stories and symbolic links and still
further back we have texts such as The Iliad,
The Upanishads and The Bible that
are only capable of describing history in the form of elaborate and sometimes
epic poetry. All history eventually reaches this end state of poetry where it
can be regarded as nothing more than symbolic fiction. Today, the writings of
Herodotus are nearing that point. All that is required to take them over the
edge are a couple of really well written adaptations, some sloppy record
keeping, the collapse of western society and a subsequent new renaissance when
the texts are translated back in the version of epic poetry that was maintained
in, say, Chinese. The temporal relationship that describes how history becomes
poetry could be understood by observing the following graph, which sets pi
equal to the coefficient of poeticity because pi is a poetic number.
The new idea in the case of Debussy is
that he was a learned statesman. As it is the idea that is important here and
not the text, let w be a romance novel set in Nowheresville, Ohio
in the nineteen-fifties that’s about crew cuts. Yes, crew cuts; w is the most
elaborate and profound novel ever written about crew cuts, a novel where the
author concludes with an epic analogy between the crew cut and the
transmigration of souls through the process of rebirth, concluding that deep
within our subconscious nirvana is achieved and discarded as boring during the process of every trim. In the
alternate reality invoked by such a text, Debussy could be said to have lived
into the fifties and to have, due to his deep esoteric study within the priory,
have come to understand the process of rebirth attached to each trim and to
have attempted to undergo weekly crew cut trims in order to trap himself within
the discarded nirvana, to break this cycle; if successful, this would likely
render him a vegetable, but senility does strange things. Such a text could be
argued to be science fiction.
So, forget about crew cuts, what about
pogo sticks? Yes, a novel about the enjoyment that humans derive from pogoing,
one where it is claimed that even a powerful and connected man with a deep
understanding of the collection of compiled esoteric wisdom, one like Debussy,
who was the master of the Priory of Zion, can derive enjoyment from the simple
act of pogoing and listening to Rachmaninov.
We can’t have Debussy listening to Debussy as that could create an infinite
loop, which could be science fiction. If this text is written without discussing
the technology of the era, we are in Nowheresville, Ohio after all, and has no
interest in anything other than the personal relationships between Debussy, a
few locals and a pogo stick (which could not have it’s own personality as that
would be science fiction) then in what way is this text science fiction? It
could perhaps be called steam punk, but a story about personal relationships
that happens to have a few new ideas does not science fiction make.
So, if having a new idea doesn’t
imply that a text is science fiction, does a text being science fiction imply
that it contains new ideas? The large majority of science fiction is based on
mythological archetypes. Adapting Greek, Roman, Babylonian, German and Celtic
gods and heroes to roles is not just a common approach to writing science
fiction, it’s practically the template. Furthermore, the vast majority of
technological gadgetry utilized in science fiction comes from existing, older
science fiction. Consider the character of Marvin the Martian, which is based
on the aliens from The War of the Worlds.
Clearly, this silly cartoon strip was science fiction, but the technologies
were mostly adapted from Roadrunner
cartoons; they were not describable by the term novum because they already existed in Roadrunner. Less absurdly, consider all of the alien abduction
texts and films, almost none of which contain any ideas that weren’t developed
within the first few attempts at writing about alien abduction. There are
countless spin-offs of spin-offs of spin-offs of Star Wars that contain no new ideas or technologies but are
unquestionably science fiction.
So, if the concept of a novum is of
no value in constructing a characteristic theorem for the genre of science
fiction then what is? Nothing is. Literature cannot be defined in this manner;
only algebraic structures, i.e. numbers and things that contain numbers, can be
defined by characteristic theorems. In literature, every original work defines it’s own
genre, of which imitations may follow or even transcend but which cannot be
placed within the same category as any other original work. I would argue that Gravity’s Rainbow transcends Slaughterhouse-Five but I would place
them in the same genre as one is an imitation of the other; I would claim the
same thing for Star Trek and it’s
“American Colony In Space” derivatives and War
Of The Worlds and it’s alien invasion derivatives, if an earlier text about
alien invasion cannot be found. Using this approach, one may construct a set SF
that contains all of the original science fiction texts that have ever been
written (arguments will undoubtedly arise over the contents of such a set) and
then define science fiction in the following manner:
Science Fiction: All texts
that are or are derived from texts within the set SF.
And, if I was German, or at least Swiss, I could write a
Zscience-Fiction Characteristic Theorem:
ZFC
Theorem: A
text is zscience fiction if and only if it is either in the set ZF or it
derives from a text within ZF.
The arguments over which texts are
to be included in the set SF can never deny this process of legitimacy as the
contents of this set are trivial and of no relevance to the process, which is the novum of this
rebuttal. I think I deserve the full mark on this one, but I’ll stop whining
for a half a mark.
Question 3: I should type up
my precise response.
“Uncanny: Yes, from the German,
which is probably linguistically (ed - etymologically) sound as English is a
German language. Translated, it means “unhomely”, from outside of the home,
alien, “the other”.
You claim:
“àOk, but signifies both strangeness +
familiarity at same time. More than just strange or alien.”
The definition that you handed out
to the class is:
Uncanny: Loosely speaking,
the term is applied to that which is strange, unnatural or disturbing. In
German the equivalent term is “unheimlich”, which can translate as “unhomely”.
You then continue on with the
following.
Freud argues (ed - emphasis added) that the uncanny in literature and in
the psyche refers to phenomena that evoke
(ed - emphasis added) sensations simultaneously of familiarity and strangeness.
As a psychoanalytic term, the uncanny can also refer to that which has come to
light which should have remained hidden or suppressed.
What you presented to the class is
clearly broken down into two parts. The first is a definition of uncanny and
the second is a tangential comment that Freud has explored the concept,
probably right after he explained that Exotropia is the result of being
abandoned as a child (where’s mommy?). Let’s see what the dictionary says…
un-can-ny [uhn-kan-ee]
–adjective
1. having or seeming to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis;
beyond the ordinary or normal; extraordinary.
2. mysterious; arousing superstitious fear or dread; uncomfortably
strange.
Origin: 1590–1600
As a mathematician, I’m qualified to
state that 1590 < 1856 and I don’t see anything about the
strangeness/familiarity thing there. Freud actually appears to have written an
entire text analyzing the uncanny. I haven’t read the book (although I have
read two texts by Freud, including the opus; I find his writing to be creative
and thought provoking but irrigourous and ultimately pure philosophy with
little scientific grounding), so I’m not about to claim that I know what Freud
wrote in it, but that’s not really important as you didn’t present the Freudian/arbitrary
analysis as part of the definition, you presented it as tangential in the form
of a Freudian/arbitrary analysis. To be clear, what you said is “Freud argues that the strange and alien in
literature and in the psyche refers to…”, which is an analysis of the human reaction to the uncanny, that it evokes
contradictory sensations, and not a definition of the uncanny itself. How Freud
(arbitrarily) analyzes the human response to the strange/uncanny doesn’t alter
what the uncanny is defined as! So, I should again have 1.5 for this one, I
think, if you want to knock me a half point for not presenting the Freudian/arbitrary
analysis of how humans react to the uncanny, which is itself entirely baseless
as you asked for a definition of the term and not a Freudian/arbitrary analysis.
Question 4
First, my response was “Grotesque:
Imperfect; not conforming to idealizations or not having imaginary/ideal
characteristics.”
Your response: “No sense that this
is drawn from our class discussions or definitions.”
The mark was 0.5/2.
First, I deny the relevance of what
was discussed in class. Neither defining a concept within the class nor handing
out a sheet with a definition on it, regardless of where it was sourced from,
provide any evidence whatsoever for the validity of the views presented.
Quoting a pre-written text is not a valid way to provide evidence as the
existence of a view neither implies nor negates it’s correctness.
Furthermore, had I shown up to class
and presented this view then it would
have been drawn from the class, which means that your argument is equivalent to
allowing us to arbitrarily construct our own exams.
If the question was “What are the
arbitrary and largely irrelevant viewpoints of Mikhael Bakhtin when it comes to
the grotesque?” then I would accept the mark as I did not regurgitate the
arbitrary and irrelevant views of Mikhael Bakhtin. The question was to define
the term “grotesque”, which was actually done quite admirably; my definition is
an adaptation of the one that John Ruskin defines in The Stones Of Venice when discussing the grotesque nature of the
renaissance and it was actually presented that way as an attempt to present an alternate view of the grotesque body
that I found more convincing. I made repeated reference on the exam, directly
and indirectly, to various things that were of various interest during the
Victorian era because you made your interest in that time period clear during
class. Did you not recognize it?
The definition was drawn from class
because it was drawn from a view that was widely held during the Victorian era
and because it was drawn from what I would have presented to the class had I
decided to bother showing up.
Still, just because John Ruskin says
it is so does not necessarily mean that it is; there is likely an anti-Ruskin
lobby in existence that would actually claim that truth is defined precisely by
negating the words of John Ruskin and that periodically both burns effigies of
him and defaces his tombstone. While I would label such views and actions as
extreme, I cannot deny them of any sort of legitimacy. Ruskin’s views are no
less arbitrary than Bakhtin’s. Yet, deductions are impossible without
assumptions and if we’re going to discuss a definition at all we have to start
from somewhere. This is what the dictionary says about the word grotesque:
gro-tesque [groh-tesk]
- adjective
1. odd or unnatural in shape, appearance,
or character; fantastically ugly or absurd; bizarre.
If
we have a shape, how do we know that it is odd or unnatural in shape? Is it
truly arbitrary and of no consequence? Within a collection of slightly
different spheres, which ones are of an odd and unnatural shape?
It
could be naively argued that sometimes the difference between shapes is so
obvious that any discussion as to which is natural and which isn’t is a waste
of time. “Clearly”, these imaginary people say, “there is a profound difference
between a donut and a coffee cup.”. A mathematician that has spent time
studying topology would claim otherwise; such a person would claim that there
is absolutely no difference between a donut and coffee cup, that they are
exactly the same thing and that one can always be continuously transformed into
the other. A donut, then, is a grotesque coffee cup and a coffee cup is a
grotesque donut. If the donut is a coffee cup, is it not a coffee cup that does
not conform to an idealization of a coffee cup, both in shape and in function?
How
unnatural is unnatural enough to be grotesque? Consider a cube, one made of
granite. If you slowly chip away at this granite cube in a controlled manner
with the intent of constructing a sphere, taking photographs at intervals of
five seconds, when does the photograph cease to be of a cube and begin to be of
a sphere? With every chip, the block of granite is less cubical than it was,
meaning that even a single chip renders the block an imperfect cube, one that
is unnatural in it’s shape of being a cube, one that does not conform to cubic
idealizations, one that is indeed a grotesque cube. So, I’m completely
flabbergasted here and quite certain I deserve the full two marks. Unlike the
others, there was nothing missing
from my definition, you just didn’t follow the Ruskin reference as I assumed
you would.
summer, 2009
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/thoughts/trolls/2107rebuttal.html
