Sunday, May 15, 2011
hautepop: Very good interview with China Mieville in The Guardian today, mentioning his BA in Anthropology from Cambridge. To complement, a review of The City and The City by an anthropologist, Samuel Gerald Collins: That this is absolutely believable is testament to the 21st century explosion of “spaces of exception”—all of variously enfeoffed “zones” that proliferate along the edges of capital and empire, marking off places for foreign capital investment, for the suspension of one governing system for another (think Kaesong industrial complex at the border of North and South Korea), for the suspension of citizen rights or even (after Agamben) human rights: refugee camps, the chicanery of international “internship” visas, etc. When we hear, as we have now daily for years, about Bagdhad’s “Green Zone,” Guantanomo on the edge of Cuba, occupied territories, what we’re really doing is witnessing the ability of law and politics to create hybrid spaces within nations—what Mieville calls in the context of his novel “interstitial” spaces. Take a conventional topographic narrative—say Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities—and then fold it on itself like a Mobius strip. That’s the theory behind Mieville’s novel (although his narrative takes a more familiar, linear form). But, in a real sense, it’s also exactly the situation for much of the world’s population today, all of whom, and with varying degrees of choice, shift between legal, political, social and cultural orders in a world where borders are mobile, but still very real. So: in the grand tradition of SF dating back to at least More’s Utopia, Mieville describes the present through his oeuvre. And really, only through sf is this kind of description of hyper-reality possible.

hautepop:

Very good interview with China Mieville in The Guardian today, mentioning his BA in Anthropology from Cambridge.

To complement, a review of The City and The City by an anthropologist, Samuel Gerald Collins:

That this is absolutely believable is testament to the 21st century explosion of “spaces of exception”—all of variously enfeoffed “zones” that proliferate along the edges of capital and empire, marking off places for foreign capital investment, for the suspension of one governing system for another (think Kaesong industrial complex at the border of North and South Korea), for the suspension of citizen rights or even (after Agamben) human rights: refugee camps, the chicanery of international “internship” visas, etc. When we hear, as we have now daily for years, about Bagdhad’s “Green Zone,” Guantanomo on the edge of Cuba, occupied territories, what we’re really doing is witnessing the ability of law and politics to create hybrid spaces within nations—what Mieville calls in the context of his novel “interstitial” spaces.

Take a conventional topographic narrative—say Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities—and then fold it on itself like a Mobius strip. That’s the theory behind Mieville’s novel (although his narrative takes a more familiar, linear form). But, in a real sense, it’s also exactly the situation for much of the world’s population today, all of whom, and with varying degrees of choice, shift between legal, political, social and cultural orders in a world where borders are mobile, but still very real. So: in the grand tradition of SF dating back to at least More’s Utopia, Mieville describes the present through his oeuvre. And really, only through sf is this kind of description of hyper-reality possible.

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Notes

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