Tag Archives: Frank Hampson

science fiction, situationist, the sinister science

Glorious failures in science: a sinister year in review

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fig. 1. “There must be a sinister explanation…” Illustration by the great Frank Hampson. From Dan Dare, ‘The Man from Nowhere’, May 1955.

I started this blog back in 2020 at the height of the first lockdowns and waves of COVID washing over our lives. The intention then, as it still is, appeared relatively simple: “writing on critical theory and science fiction”. My twist on critical theory is that which I’ve largely inherited from the Situationist International (SI)—both my long relationship with their works as well as my attempts to understand their version of revolutionary theory and practice. Whereas my twist on science fiction (SF) comes from an even longer relationship that dates back into the mists of my childhood.

In part, SF and the SI meet in their somewhat shared and entailed historical context. However, the shared context of SF and the SI is perhaps the least interesting aspect of their confluence—or at least, is less interesting than what can be gained from bringing the critical insights of the SI to bear upon SF. The peculiar trajectory of written Anglo-American SF takes it from Hugo Gernsback ‘scientifiction’ in 1926, through the Second World War and beyond, to become one of the key landmarks of pop culture in the 1960s and after. In the process of this rapid, half century of development, SF moved from its relatively niche existence to global cultural phenomenon. It is my belief that SF came to play an important role in the explosion of the global culture industry in the wake of the Second World War, paradoxically as both sometime critic of this ‘explosion’, and as an awkward exemplar of the burgeoning spectacle of commodity culture. Indeed, SF’s initial existence as almost solely a phenomenon made in and exported from the United States goes some of the way to explaining its later success as one aspect of the global hegemony of the US in the wake of the 1940s. However, I am less interested in the national or even international peculiarities of Anglo-American SF than I am in its singular existence as both overture and swan song to the dream of a technological utopia fostered in the Second World War and largely in ruin a short thirty years later.

Over the course of 2022, views of and visitors to my blog have more than doubled. Unfortunately, much like 2021, health problems once again intervened to undermine my ability to post more regularly. This year I am keen to work toward the gold standard of one post per week. Let’s see how that pans out.

You may ask—ask! ask!—what is the sinister science? Back in September 2020 I wrote of the sinister science as something akin to what the situationists proposed in their imaginary city beyond the capitalist one, or the surrealists in their dreamt of marvellous chateaus of no clear utilitarian purpose. Perhaps slightly more clearly—or more confusedly, depending on your taste—I wrote that,

the sinister science is closer to Hegel’s negative dialectic and Marx’s redeployment of this under the aegis of his ‘materialist conception of history’.

It occurs to me today that Karl Marx provided the best definition of the sinister science early in his anti-career, when he spoke of a ‘science to come’—a science that would, by turns, reconcile the unfortunate split between the so-called natural and human sciences.[1] The sinister science aspires to be this, or at the very least a tributary or pointer to this science to come. Which is not to say that the blog called the sinister science is this science, only that it dares to name itself after such. And just to be clear, the latter is not to be confused with Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, no matter how much I would welcome such confusion (at least some of the time).

My top five posts are a good indicator of what’s on offer here. They run the gamut from posts more concerned with the SI through to posts more concerned with SF. Except for the first one below, they are more likely to be somewhat impure, i.e., a mix of SF and the SI.

Here are my top 5 posts for 2022:

1. Surrealism: an irrational revolution (2 July 2021)

The top post two years in a row, though the only one of the top five that was not published in 2022. Last year I wrote that the popularity of Surrealism: an irrational revolution was ‘due to the fact that a “new” old work of Guy Debord’s has a potential audience much bigger than my own peculiar take on SF’. No doubt this remains true. It constitutes an excellent introduction to the surrealist revolution that emerged in Europe in the 1920s—an irrational revolution moreover that was highly influential upon Debord and the situationists, amongst others.

2. J. G. Ballard—Manhole 69 & The Concentration City (16 January 2022)

Ballard is a particularly rich vein to be explored regarding the possibility of a situationist influence, though it is more likely he was influenced by the surrealists than the situs. Nonetheless, there is a remarkable congruence, particularly regarding the shared interest in the profound effects of urban alienation. Ballard is certainly less concerned with the amelioration of such, and tends to naturalise the effects of alienation, insofar as he sees the city as the expression of deeper, more subterranean forces than those of the relatively recent arrival of capitalism. Still, more than many of his contemporary SF confreres Ballard captures the enervating effect of modern city life, and its technological avatars. This is on show in these two early pieces, ‘Manhole 69’ and ‘The Concentration City’, both from 1957—which is also the year the SI was founded.

3. What comes after SF (25 February 2022)

My personal fave of the year. Here I attack what is, to me at least, the strange problem of the absence of something like science fiction in most SF stories. More pointedly, I investigate the genre’s avant-garde chops, considering that in its initial conceptualisation by Hugo Gernsback, SF was presented as a proselytising vision of the coming technological future, whose purpose—chiefly educational, though cunningly disguised as entertainment—would be fulfilled once this future arrived. If SF is realised—as it were—then what comes after?

4. Internationale Situationniste number 7, April 1962 (8 April 2022)

A pivotal issue of the situationist journal. When they turned toward realising a project whose clearest result would come some 6 years later, among the biggest wildcat general strike in recorded history. I wrote my PhD thesis in order to better understand the nature of the pivot, of which this issue was one of the more obvious results. Another result, the Hamburg Theses, also haunts the pages of number 7…

5. Robert Silverberg Downward to the Earth (8 February 2022)

I have discovered over the last year or so that I truly love much of Silverberg’s oeuvre. Which is not to say there are no problems—the fate of women in his many representations being one of the obvious ones. Renowned in SF circles as initially more machine than man when it came to composing works, Silverberg entered his own golden age in the 1960s. More intriguingly he was burnt out by the mid-1970s, and even gave up writing SF for some years. Indeed, scattered amongst his many introductions to short stories from this period are some illuminating thoughts upon the nature of the genre and the impasse it reached in the early 1970s, on the back of such conflicting forces as New Wave experimentation and commercial success. ‘Downward to Earth’ is a product of Silverberg’s golden age, a striking novel that deals with the inhuman dimensions of the human. Highly recommended.

So that’s the top 5.

Who knows what heights this year will bring?

FOOTNOTES

[1] Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,’ in Karl Marx & Frederich Engels Collected Works Vol. 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 304.

critical theory, situationist, the sinister science

To experiment with the creation of everyday life

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fig. 1. Who are the enemies of poetry? All those who use poetry as an end in-itself, not as a means for life and liberation. Which is to say all those who fetishize the poem over poetry itself. Graphic detourned from Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, Rogue Planet, April 1956.

I wrote the following essay for the collection Suddenly Curving Space Time: Australian Experimental Poetry 1995-2015 (Brisbane: non-Euclidean Press, 2016). In the essay I perhaps too briefly and bluntly attempted to outline the radical trajectory of avant-garde and experimental art in the 20th century against what now passes for “avant-garde” and “experimental” in the cynical art markets and cafeterias. If I were to write it today, I would be more forgiving of the original surrealists. Whereas I agree with Guy Debord’s critique of the surrealists, notably that André Breton in effect fetishized the irrationality of unconscious desire as the true font of all human creativity, I would argue that nonetheless the surrealists struggled—and Breton in particular—to distinguish the ongoing surrealist experimental inquiry into new forms of consciousness and everyday practices against its domestication as so many art objects readily commodifiable (particularly of the painterly styles that are now synonymous with ‘surrealism’). I hope to return to the question of this tension among the surrealists—between a properly surrealist practice and its reduction to art-objects—in a future essay.

The thrust of this essay is its call for a new revolutionary practice beyond merely the umpteenth iteration of so-called radical art—or the nth generation of boring political radicalism and reactionary Marxism for that matter. A pox on the artists and the wannabe politicians.

From the essay:

In 1957 when the situationists kicked off their experiments in living and ‘unitary urbanism’ they saw themselves as starting from the bases the surrealists had already staked out in 1924. Today we need to start again from the bases that the situationists established in 1968; and the surrealists in 1924; and the Dadas in 1916; and etc. However such bases are merely points of departure not closed projects to be emulated repetitively or ironically. In today’s world in which the look of surrealism has triumphed throughout popular culture, the original surrealists desire for a new way of living beyond the mundanity and horrors of capitalism seems more pertinent. As the situationists argued against their surrealist forebears, what is implicit is in need of being made explicit. It is not enough to limit our experiments to art alone. To the extent that our appropriations remain purely artistic—as poems, paintings, and even more process based conceptual works—is the extent to which we will be defeated and recuperated. The surrealists never tired of explaining: there is no poetry for the enemies of poetry. And poetry for the surrealists, beyond their paintings and poems, was synonymous with the playful creation and recreation of life itself. 

Anthony Hayes
Canberra, April 2021

To experiment with the creation of everyday life

Today in the worlds of artistic production and consumption the adjectives “experimental” and even “avant-garde” are used most often to describe works that are perceived to be formally different to more “mainstream” or conventional artistic modes of production (see Gerald Keaney’s introduction for more details with regard to written poetry). However such a formal definition of “experimental” often masks the historical roots of the terms use among the artistic avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. For instance, both the terms “experimental” and “avant-garde” were deliberately used in order to evoke an association with the communist and anarchist political avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and their experiments in new forms of social life. The present use of “experimental” often bears little resemblance to its avant-garde origins, having become a “floating signifier” of sorts (to use a phrase derived from semiotic theory). This is not necessarily a bad thing; however, it is worth considering why such a de-contextualisation took place and whether or not we should attempt to infuse once more contemporary artistic practices with the “experimental” utopianism from which it so obviously descends.

In the early 20th century, some artists in Europe and then elsewhere in the world styled themselves “experimental” and “avant-garde”. At the time such declarations were not merely in relation to the formal experiments in the arts—such as the various experiments with poetic and novelistic form (e.g. Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce) and in painting and other plastic arts (e.g. Cezanne, Picasso, de Chirico, Giacometti). In addition to their startling formal playfulness, these artistic experimenters pictured themselves in the avant-garde of a social upheaval they saw all around—the rapid transformation and creation of a global society via the spread of capitalism and in particular the forces which opposed it. In 1917 the poet Apollinaire would call this the ‘New Spirit’.

The first self-professed avant-gardists, the Futurists, declared their art in keeping with the terrific technical development evinced by Industrial society, and to be in advance of the lagging culture of their day. However, their avant-garde ended in the decidedly archaic celebration of fascist brutality (though the Russian Futurists fared better, caught up in the brief cultural efflorescence in the wake of the Russian Revolutions of 1917). It was left to other contemporaries, notably German Expressionists, Russian Futurists, and various Dadas and surrealists, to draw out the potentially explosive and progressive nature of such artistic experimentation. The surrealists in particular declared themselves “determined to make a revolution” in order to break apart all the fetters of the mind, “even if it must be by material hammers!” (in their Declaration of 27 January 1925). However, the surrealists fell prey to the confusion of their times, in particular the enervating results of the Russian Revolution and the effective burial of the international working class movement by Stalinism. Capped off by the fascist counter-revolution of the 1920s and 30s, the brutal destruction of the Spanish Revolution by Franco, Hitler and Stalin, and the hitherto undreamt-of destruction of the Second World War, the new world fashioned on the backs of the industrial proletariat proved itself more resilient to the often solely artistic criticism of art made by these avant-gardists.

The post-1945 world saw the previously controversial styles of the surrealists and Dadas welcomed into the corrosive worlds of the art market and academic dissection, two processes that further stripped the formal achievements of the avant-gardes from their association and attachment to the revolutionary criticism of capitalism. In the 1950s and 60s artists and revolutionists associated with the Situationist International (1957-72) called such processes “recuperation”, pointing to the way then contemporary experiments in artistic form divorced from broader social and political criticism tended to dissipate precisely the social applications of such experimental creation and criticism. Against this “recuperation” the situationists proposed to realise the “revolution of everyday life” that the surrealists had originally proclaimed in the 1920s, but had dissipated in largely artistic ventures and misbegotten fidelities to Stalinism, Trotskyism and the irrationalist mysticism that many surrealists were never able to completely shake off.

The situationists argued that avant-garde artists should focus on the possibilities at hand in contemporary society. Capitalist industrialism and the increasing mechanisation and automation of production had ushered in a material abundance that immediately raised the possibility of a more leisurely and creative existence for all. However, the capitalist and bureaucratic classes East and West enforced a universe of work and militarism as the corollary of this new mass market of commodities (even while many of their ideologues pondered the coming future of automation and leisure). The situationists argued that under such conditions radical artists should focus on two tasks. Firstly, the elaboration of an experimental practice directed toward demonstrating the creative possibilities of contemporary technical and cultural potentialities beyond their capitalist use; and thus, secondly, the development and dissemination of a revolutionary critique of contemporary society which drew upon both the modern artistic and political-philosophical avant-garde movements. Accordingly, it was not enough to ponder the possibilities of automation and leisure, because without a decisive break with capitalist society such processes would be used to enforce new forms of work, unemployment and more marketing opportunities (as we future dwellers know only to well).

In keeping with the idea of the potentialities already present within the capitalist social order the situationists proposed “détournement” as their central method. Derived from the French verb signifying “diversion” and “hijacking”, the situationists argued that the most advanced artists had already used “détournement”—notably the collage and “automatic” techniques pioneered by Cubists, Dadas and surrealists. What they proposed, particularly in the face of the repetitive nature of formal artistic experimentation in the post-war period, was that détournement should be made the key method of the artistic and political avant-gardes. Thus, they later argued that Marx’s early conception of “revolutionary practical, critical activity” could be détourned from the mutilated version that traded under the name of “Marxism”. However, détournement is not simply “appropriation” or “reappropriation”, as some later day postmodernists would like to imagine. For instance, the situationists return to Marx was made alongside of their attempt to understand the nature of the contemporary capitalist spectacle. The situationists used the term “commodity-spectacle” to describe the then new mass consumer markets in commodities that were both the logical development of, and divergent elaboration of the capitalism Marx criticised. 

As the 19th century pioneer of détournement, Isidore Ducasse (aka the Comte de Lautréamont), had argued, the creative plagiarism that lies at the heart of all human endeavours cannot be reduced to the mere copying or facile rearrangement of previously fashioned components. Rather, détournement proposed to improve on the original, adapting ideas and repurposing them for current needs.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a role in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author’s sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.—Isidore Ducasse, Poesies, 1870

The situationist conceived of “détournement” as both the most significant discovery of the artistic avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th centuries, and a sort of “ultima thule” beyond which solely artistic practices could not proceed. What they meant was that most attempts to revolutionise artistic expression (even those that ended in a Dada like anti-art) had effectively exhausted the formal innovation of the arts. Certainly, one could continue with different contents, chiselling away at the already discovered new forms (collage, automatic poetry, the use of found objects, abstraction, etcetera, etcetera). But all that would be achieved would be the elaboration of so many works of art, liable to be sold in the markets for art, or not as the case may be. Instead—and here the situationists clearly drew upon the original sense of “experimental” and “avant-garde” amongst the Dadas, surrealists etc.—experimentation must move away from the impasse of formal experiments and aim at the transformation of everyday life itself. The situationists initially attempted to experiment with the design and use of cities (under the name of ‘unitary urbanism’—see here, and here). Ultimately, they moved beyond this and took aim at the organisation of capitalism itself, helping to usher in the last great revolutionary experiments of the 1970s amidst the festive occupations movement in France in May 1968.

In 1957 when the situationists kicked off their experiments in living and ‘unitary urbanism’ they saw themselves as starting from the bases the surrealists had already staked out in 1924. Today we need to start again from the bases that the situationists established in 1968; and the surrealists in 1924; and the Dadas in 1916; and etc. However, such bases are merely points of departure not closed projects to be emulated repetitively or ironically. In today’s world in which the look of surrealism has triumphed throughout popular culture, the original surrealists desire for a new way of living beyond the mundanity and horrors of capitalism seems more pertinent. As the situationists argued against their surrealist forebears, what is implicit is in need of being made explicit. It is not enough to limit our experiments to art alone. To the extent that our appropriations remain purely artistic—as poems, paintings, and even more process based conceptual works—is the extent to which we will be defeated and recuperated. The surrealists never tired of explaining: there is no poetry for the enemies of poetry. And poetry for the surrealists, beyond their paintings and poems, was synonymous with the playful creation and recreation of life itself. 

In order to make poetry dangerous again we must turn our experiments once more to the vast canvas of everyday life.

Anthony Hayes
Canberra, January 2016

critical theory, science fiction

The prehistory of the human imagination

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fig. 1. ‘Wreck! Smash! Destroy!’ Detail of ‘The prehistory of the human imagination accordingly closes’ (see below).

The images and imaginary of Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare still exert a profound influence upon me. “Still,” in the sense that they first crashed upon my sensibilities as a frivolous and anxious 12 year old, and now forty years later remain radioactive, albeit somewhat decayed.

When I discovered Dan Dare he was already old. The reprinted story, The Man from Nowhere (Dragon Dream, 1979), was what seemed then a very long twenty-five years past in 1980. So much had seemed to have happened in the intervening years.

Today, it is this vision of Dan Dare more than the explicit story that remains potent. Though I’m not arguing that one can be painlessly extracted or divorced from the other, like some metaphysical surgery that finally cuts the cord of form and content. Nonetheless, I have a huge soft spot for the first two stories of Hampson’s—the Venusian bound ‘Pilot of the Future’, and the somewhat Martian ‘Red Moon Mystery’.

From a critical perspective the vision and story of the future presented in Dan Dare is problematic. Taking off in 1950, Hampson’s imaginary future of 1996 is mostly devoid of women, excepting the wonderful if somewhat underutilized Professor Jocelyn Peabody. And despite the utopian planetary unity and species universalism of the series, and the fact that Colonel Dare’s Space Fleet is a global organisation, none of the main characters are non-Europeans. Hank Hogan, the consonantly named Yank, and the French Pierre Lafayette are as exotic as it gets. Created in the wake of the Second World War, this is a boy’s own tale of British daring-do in space (+ some wartime allies…), one-part stiff upper lip, another part the spirit of the Blitz. Needless to say, none of the roll call are Russians.

Analyzing Dan Dare is not without interest. Certainly, these stories have much to tell us about the time and place in which they were composed, not to mention what was imagined there about the end of the 20th century. At its best Dan Dare expresses the optimism associated with the United Nations after the victory over fascism in the 1940s. At its worst, the stereotypes and oppressive reality of the 1950s sit uncomfortably with its vision of the future. But I find that the representational content of culture—at least in terms of a purported realism or near future realism in this case—is often the least interesting aspect. The tensions of the present in which it created are patently on display; but it is the possible hidden in this thicket of the imaginary that is by far its most interesting content.

I believe that Dan’s adventures are best used for other purposes, beyond mere consumption or citation. This cultural artefact needs to be revived and put back into play. The situationists called such revivification détournement; the 19th century Uruguayan writer Isidore Ducasse called it simply plagiarism. Drawing upon both of the foregoing, I’ve been known to call it open plagiarism.

The détournement below, ‘The prehistory of the human imagination accordingly closes’, is drawn from two sources. From the Dan Dare story ‘Rogue Planet’ (Eagle, Vol. 7 No. 8, 24 February 1956 and Vol. 7 No. 10, 9 March 1956), and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (1978). The title is a riff on the closing sentence of that famous paragraph from Marx’s Preface to his A Contribution to A Critique of Political Economy (1859).

Keep your spaced eyes peeled for more Dan Dare détournements…

The prehistory of the human imagination accordingly closes

fig. 2. ‘The prehistory of the human imagination accordingly closes’. Right click and select ‘view image’ for a larger version.