Tarde’s 'Fragment d’histoire future' and the modal coordination of history and fiction – Reflections on 'Imagining the History of the Future'

Last week, I had the great fortune of attending the Imagining the History of the Future conference, part of the Unsettling Scientific Stories project (based at the universities of York, Newcastle and Aberystwyth). It was a really fantastic three days that introduced me to some fascinating people and has left me with a lot to think about.

For my part, I presented a paper – an exerpt from my thesis – on 'Gabriel Tarde’s Fragment d’histoire future and the milieu-fantôme.' This title is slightly modified from what I originally proposed (and from what appears in the programme). However, the original abstract still gets the gist of it:

Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) was a magistrate, criminologist, sociologist and philosopher. Around the turn of the century, he engaged in a series of polemical exchanges with Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) concerning the remit and purpose of sociology. He also wrote a science fiction novel: Fragment d’histoire future (1896), published in English as Underground Man (1905) with a preface by H.G. Wells. The setting is apocalyptic: The sun has gone out and humanity – or rather a lone inventive pocket of it – has burrowed into the earth’s crust, chasing its enduring inner heat. All other life is extinguished. Written from the perspective of a future historian, Tarde uses this subterranean scenario to conduct a thought experiment that tests out his sociological theories concerning imitation, creativity and 'great men.' Although war and strife are suffered early on, this new civilisation comes to enjoy a golden age, free from the hardships of its surface-dwelling ancestors. Diseases are few; air is “the purest that man has ever breathed”; food is plentifully acquired from the frozen oceans above; the new troglodytes wear “coats of asbestos spangled with mica.” The Malthusian tendencies of population are the only serious problem, held in check by strict controls on marriage. Read in relation to Tarde’s other works, particularly Monadologie et sociologie (1893), Fragment d’histoire future provides an alternative means of approaching the development of the social sciences, their relation to race, class and gender, as well as the not so much ecological as sociological futurology of an eccentric but important fin de siècle thinker.

More precisely, I am interested this book for several reasons: First, in explaining the premises of the story, the narrator describes a "social milieu" entirely separated from the "natural milieu" that was destroyed with the cataclysm. It is this "purification," as he calls it, that constitutes Tarde's thought experiment; that is, he asks what would happen to social relations when all other conditions of life are removed.

Second, this sociological system – or, rather, ontology – involved an open criticism of Durkheim's rather more superorganismic conception. Whereas Tarde understood sociology along the lines of networks of creative imitations, Durkheim thought of society as a totality of collective representations impinging upon and transcending individual agents. Third, just two years later, this led Tarde to ridicule Durkheim et al.'s use of the concept of "milieu" as a kind of explanatory panacea for all phenomena. Durkheim's "milieu-fantôme," as Tarde called it, was therefore to be repudiated, although Tarde continued to use a somewhat different conception of milieu. 

Fourth, Tarde's book can be taken as a kind of witness to its situation – that is, to the time and place to which it accommodated itself. As well as the apocalyptic science-fiction premise, Tarde's technological anticipations give us a strong sense of the common sense of his time, as does his apparent endorsement (however eccentric) of a kind of artistic eugenics (where only the most creative are permitted to reproduce). Moreover, Tarde's development of a social ontology based on ideas of epidemic contagion (he was by no means the only to propound such an ontology but was unusual as regards the extent of his defence of it) creates interesting parallels not only with other sociologists and criminologists but also with post-Pasteurian transformations in bacteriology.

Tarde, then, links together a great many things. Indeed, a rather wide-ranging world can be reconstructed in terms of the networks and milieus that relate to his choices and dispositions – an elite, metropolitan world but nevertheless a significant one for my purposes.

The presentation was, I think, well-received and there were a number of great questions that tested my thinking and gave me ideas as to how to take this further. However, one question in particular, from Hanna-Riikka Roine, has stayed with me (I paraphrase): What was Tarde trying to do with this shift from legal and academic to fictional-speculative writing? What was the purpose or motivation of this segue of genres?

This is not something that I've looked into in detail yet; however, my immediate response was that Tarde was, at this time, involved in a polemical relationship with his intellectual competitors and wished to propagate his ideas to a wider audience. I am quite sure that this is the case; however, it is also a rather unsatisfactory answer and I hope to develop a better one.

The conference closed with a roundtable where participants were invited to submit questions ahead of time. I asked:

Should academics be writing (science) fiction (rather than just writing about it)?

What if fictioning was part of our daily practice - in teaching and researching? (Or is it already?)

— Philip Conway (@PhilipRConway) March 29, 2018

In the discussion itself, in response to a comment by Sarah Dillon on the subject of evidence in relation to historiography, I expanded on these questions a little. In my thesis work I've found a comment from Michael Oakeshott's 1933 book Experience and its Modes to be particularly useful – specifically, that a historian is someone who is obliged to interpret the past in terms of the evidence of that past. In other words, an historian qua historian bears an obligation to evidence.

This leads to a criterion of distinction (or a differentia as Oakeshott calls it in more formal philosophical terms) that differentiates historical from other modes of experience. A fictionist qua fictionist may or may not incorporate historical fact into her text; however, a fiction qua fiction cannot be faulted for its choices in this regard. Rather, the obligations incumbent upon a fiction are to the immersive or transformative effects it may have on its audience – a quite different condition of relevance.

(My thinking on this point is related to both Étienne Souriau and, more recently, Bruno Latour who have described fiction as a 'mode of existence,' as well as to Isabelle Stengers' philosophy of science; however, I will leave their particular propositions for another day.)

To cut a long histoire short, it is in relation to this distinction between history and fiction that my thinking as regards historiography (and, indeed, my practice thereof) is being developed. However, while history and fiction are therefore understood as fundamentally distinct in modal or categorical terms, they are also practically and technically highly interrelated. In the abstract, they share a great many textual and rhetorical techniques and, in the concrete, it may be difficult in certain liminal cases to tell them apart.

So, the basic point that I was (and am) trying to make is that historians, even if they do not write fiction, already venture onto at least some of the same terrain. Likewise, fictionists often have more interesting things to say about the writing of history (or just writing in general) than do professional historiographers (I think this is no coincidence). And so what is needed, I believe, is a more precise understanding of the modal differentiae that both distinguish these practices and, at the same time, allow them to be intellectually and, perhaps, politically coordinated.

I am making this argument here in perhaps more cohesive terms than I managed 'off the cuff.' Indeed, articulating these ideas was quite a challenge, given the diversity of the audience. During the three days, I talked to at least one non-academic sci-fi author, a curator, and academics from half a dozen recognised disciplines and many more subfields and disciplinary interstices.

In response to my mini-monologue, Maxine Gee (a screenwriter and PhD candidate at York) made the completely fair point that many academics are already authors of fiction (sci-fi and otherwise). Amanda Rees added that writing fiction is not at all easy. Mat Paskins commented that while the exploration of the intricate overlaps between history and fiction is all well and good, historians must recognise a fundamental moral obligation to relating the past as it happened, both for the sake of the victims of historical events (such as, to take only the most obvious and oft-cited example, victims of the Holocaust) and also for present-day survivors (such as those gay men for whom the very possibility of a collective future was, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, very much in doubt). Then, towards the end of the session, Kanta Dihal commented that there are many more voices producing (science-)fiction than are usually taken notice of in academic discourse – a lack of diversity being something for which this conference itself could, indeed, be faulted. And, so, rather than writing more fiction, perhaps academics should instead undertake to read more widely.

I would not substantively disagree with any of the above remarks (as I have remembered and reconstructed them). Indeed, they really expand on, in different ways, what I was trying to articulate.

However, I would just add that I think there remain unexplored possibilities at the modal and practical meeting point of fiction and history that I want to explore further. I do not mean to suggest that academics (as a homogenous group) can or should all start writing fiction. Some already do; many would not want to; most would not be much good at it. Nevertheless, I think it is notable that the likes of Tarde's Fragment can still, today, be understood as being a rather eccentric and exceptional expressive and discursive choice.

Writing fiction well is indeed a formidable task, as is any other kind of artistic creation. However, while counterfactuals are a common enough pedagogical (and, to a lesser extent, historiographical) tool, the active coordination of historical and fictional modes of experience (or of existence) remains at the margins. This is not, moreover, to deny the vibrancy of the margins; however, it is to call attention to what may be lost by accepting marginalisation as a given.

As to why the practices of historical and fictional writing are thus, for the most part, estranged, the reasons are fairly obvious: In more or less all of the social sciences (where I am located) and perhaps most of the humanities, scholarship is institutionally rewarded in a manner not only strictly demarcated from the artistic but is, to some extent, defined in opposition to it. This arrangement is tied to political expectations as to what constitutes useful knowledge and how funding regimes, accordingly, are to be distributed. For most academics, writing fiction could only be a pastime; it could not be a serious part of that for which they are employed.

None of this is either surprising or insightful but it remains, I think, relevant.

My thesis asks: What is the history of the concept of environment? I am interested in how this expression, along with its precursors such as milieu and climate, came to be a part of the everyday conceptual landscape. However, I am also interested in answering a second question: What does this history mean for the problems of the present?

Fictions, such as that of Tarde, are a crucial resource for reconstructing this history – that is, for answering the first question. However, could they not also be a starting point for approaching the second?

To be sure, I would not like to align myself with Tarde in any substantive sense. And yet at least some of his problems remain problems that concern us today. Thus, I take his work as presenting a problem of inheritance: What worlds will we make from the always conflicted and often deeply corrupted traces and evidences that we have, with great degrees of preservational prejudice, inherited?

My paper and this post only tease out the outer fringes of this question. However, this conference has given me many more routes to now explore.

The value of science fiction for history

There is no more vivid encapsulation of an historical moment than that which is captured in a futural vision that no longer passes for futuristic. They are troves, these archaic futurities.

This is part of my ongoing semi-obsession with the film Silent Running (1972). It quite beautifully articulates a very particular understanding of what an environment is – an understanding that now stands out as being something from another era altogether. And the fact that it does so through such a rich medium serves more important purposes than the simply illustrative (although there's that too).

Of course, when reading or watching science fictions past, it is often striking just how much they get right and there is far more to such texts and reels than their out-datedness. But there is something particularly striking in moments that jar with the present rather than resonate with it. Something irreducibly valuable.

And all of this is why I would much prefer to pursue a 'history of ideas' than an 'intellectual history.' How staid and textureless is the latter as a flag for thought? That is not to condemn the close, focused concern with the texts that such a term designates, far from it. It is just to prise open the possibility of there being no useful or interesting distinction to be made between 'cultural' history and that of the 'intellectual.' To regard the separation of 'high' and 'low' not so much with scorn as with humour. (What is funnier than the vain, indignant defence of a hierarchy that has already crumbled?)

Launched into the stars by their own bootstraps: The American post-imperial anxiety of Interstellar; or, The anti-Gravity

***Some minor spoilers in the following***

"Humanity was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here."

A little behind the curve, perhaps, but I finally got around to seeing Interstellar this week. First thing to say is that it’s a terrific piece of entertainment. The 169 minutes fly by in no time. Beyond that, it’s a really interesting film for a number of reasons; however, my impression of it differs from most of the reviews that I’ve read.

It’s a film that’s premised on ecology, set in space, sold on the basis of science and tells everyone that it’s all above love. However, my first reaction (second, if you count watching the trailer) is this: it is, quite unambiguously, a film about American post-imperial anxiety.

The quasi-ecological element is really just a narrative crutch; an external cause qua fig leaf; a reason for the empire’s decline that is entirely unattributable to the empire itself; a blameless (and, crucially, carbon-neutral) act of God that sets the wheels of the narrative in motion. The fact that the larger part of the film is set in space is really just a matter of genre. Its only importance in terms of the film’s subtext is that outer space is the only medium into which the (Final) Frontier can now be comprehensibly extended; the only direction in which there are still lands weak enough to conquer. (The lands beyond are fearsome and cold, but infinitely less so than the future of the irremediably dying Earth – it is in this precise sense that Interstellar is the anti-Gravity.) The early parts of the film doff their cap sufficiently to their physicist attachés to lend it all Nolan’s signature air of vérité and to partially placate imagination-phobic militants of ‘hard sci-fi,’ while locating it tonally (if not ontologically) within the zeitgeisty aesthetic footprint of Gravity. The film glorifies techno-science but this is hardly what it’s about. Likewise, although the somewhat overbearing quasi-spiritual message that it’s really all above Love that transcends time and space has been repeated time and again, this is really just a through-line that holds everything together. It’s only ‘all above love’ if you stay strictly on the surface and believe everything that you’re told to believe.

The film opens in a near-future, Midwestern USA where everything is pretty much exactly the same as the present, only worse. Every value, convention, pastime and social structure (besides capitalism) seems to be intact only now everyone’s poor, covered in dust, thinks that the moon landings were faked and are rubbish at baseball. The world has gone to hell but in a manner where everyone is more or less ‘in it together.’ We are told briefly and offhandedly of bombs being dropped on food rioters at some point in the past but no one in the film is morally compromised or, indeed, visibly malnourished. Just dusty. It’s a relatively soft-lensed dystopia; yet it is a dystopia nonetheless. Above all, though, it is self-absorbed.

At no point does the film show any interest whatsoever in the rest of the world. The closest we come to an international perspective is in the opening moments where the family McConaughey take down an Indian surveillance drone through Dad’s ‘last of his kind’ techno-wizardry. Although, for no apparent reason, all non-agricultural forms of advanced technology have been rendered obsolete due to crop-blighted mass hunger (surely, given all we know about the world from the past century, this would make military technologies more valued rather than less?) this drone has been circling under its own solar power for years. Despite the daughter’s plea to let it go – ‘it wasn’t hurting anyone’ – the drone is salvaged for parts. (Tellingly, this is framed in quasi-evolutionary terms as 'adaptation' to the external, unnegotiable natural circumstances.) But, besides all that character development, what could be more humblingly post-imperial than an Indian drone circling American skies for decades unchallenged? It may have landed softly but its impact on an already wounded hegemonic psyche is obvious.

Fear of imperial decline has been a mainstay of US political discourse since the 1950s. Its most heavy-handed iteration in this film comes in the continual references (through the medium of inset talking heads) to the ‘Dust Bowl’ era of the 1930s. This humiliating, regressive ‘return of the repressed’ emblemises the fallenness of the Great Power. When McConaughey repeats the film’s tagline ‘we used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars … now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt’ he nearly spits his porch-supped beer on the grubby, only semi-fertile ground in disgust. Here this existential ‘geocentrism’ is to be understood as a tragic humiliation, a loss of all vitiating force, of all that would make life worthwhile; this is why I call it the anti-Gravity.

What way out of this? Nothing says ‘Space Age’ like the acronym NASA. Reduced to a rag-tag bunch of misfits and a few talking fridges though they may be, it is the ever benign (and now scandalously maligned) National Aeronautics and Space Administration that is the ultimate saviour of humanity. (Having said that ‘everything is the same, only worse,’ there is, as mentioned parenthetically above, no capitalism in this film. There seem to be three social categories: the ‘hard working families’ of goddarn, salt o’the earth farmer folk; the soft-handed but hardly well-heeled scientists in their middle-of-nowhere bunker; and, finally, the unseen remnants of state power providing the last scraps of techno-scientific resources to the would-be guardians of the human race. At least in the shreds of the world we are privy to, there is a certain ‘equality of poverty.’)

It is techno-science that is at the root of everything. If only ‘we’ could ‘dream big’ once again and not be so darned defeatist, the film seems to say, things will work themselves out. Optimism. Let’s launch ourselves into the stars by our own bootstraps! We need only one really, really smart girl/woman to solve just one equation and the universe is our oyster. Because science.

Finally, numerous commentators have pointed to the 1997 film Contact as a parallel to Interstellar, and for good reason. The important contrast that sticks out in my mind is that there is at least a semblance of internationalism in Contact in terms of how the single representative (and hence embodiment) of humanity is selected. Of course, that film operates in a benign state of civilisational non-devastation (and in a post-Cold War period when American power was perhaps at an all-time high and therefore needn’t be so jealously self-obsessed). Nevertheless, the contrast is striking. The candidate eventually chosen in Contact is, inevitably, American (despite being hilariously inappropriate for the role); nevertheless, at least there was some hesitation before installing the closed loop that would have American speak for Man as though this were the most obvious and natural thing in the world.

In short: there’s life in the Final Frontier yet. The subtext of this film could be readily summarised with the aid of Stephen Colbert’s brilliant book title America Again: Re-becoming The Greatness We Never Weren't. Of course, this Hollywood film is far too politically correct (and mindful of its global audience) to ever explicitly frame ‘America’ as its collective subjectivity. Its ‘we’ is always an abstract ‘humanity’ that the cast of Americans (besides the somewhat out of place Michael Caine) just happen to embody.

We are all familiar enough, I hope, with popular humanism to see straight through this ploy. The future space colonies that the film ultimately envisages fly stars and stripes. Yes, yes – ‘it’s just a film’ and one can read too much into these things but I can’t help but experience this film as being something like the death throes of the self-image of American world supremacy in its popular cultural form, faced with its half-denied anthropocenic non-future.

It's a magnificent spectacle, and that's really the point. It takes some extremely bright lights to make a film that is as backwards looking as this appear as though it is facing forwards. (But, for all that, I like it.)

'Silent Running' at the Eden Project—Some reflections on cinema and its world

Following on from a post I wrote recently, the 1972 sci-fi classic film Silent Running was shown last night at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

This is the poster i created for the @BFI @KermodeMovie screening of #SilentRunning at @edenproject this evening pic.twitter.com/SjLROmiRL6
— Matt Needle (@needledesign) October 26, 2014

Introduction to Silent Running at Eden by @KermodeMovie #BFISCIFI @wshed @bfi pic.twitter.com/8JdMgOkgr6
— Eden Project Media (@eden_media_team) October 26, 2014

Biomes lit up beautifully for tonight’s showing of Silent Running #BFISCIFI @bfi @wshed @KermodeMovie pic.twitter.com/V20dR48Z25
— Eden Project Media (@eden_media_team) October 26, 2014

Many thanks @KermodeMovie @edenproject @adrianutley Bruce Dern for magical evening #BFISciFi #SilentRunning pic.twitter.com/OF5b0uTFG6
— Mark Cosgrove (@msc45) October 27, 2014

.@KermodeMovie: Silent Running is "better than 2001, which gets you into trouble with the sci fi hardcore" #bfiscifi pic.twitter.com/RfYiBUNiYR
— Watershed (@wshed) October 26, 2014

The event was kicked off by the performance of a quite gorgeous sci-fi-inspired, ambient piece of music by Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), with Adrian Lee and Tim Allen, in the Mediterranean biome. (Among the celebrity Cornishmen in attendance—this needs to be mentioned as there really aren't many of them!—was the artist usually known as Aphex Twin.)

With dozens of speakers dotted around the place, the band's magnificently brooding, droning, chirping sound-waves reverberated all around the biome, mixing and melding with the rippling rhythms of talking, walking, dropping things... It was an immersive aural delight.

Afterwards, back in the main building and overlooking the domes, Utley and Gregory described how they were inspired particularly by the soundtrack for Forbidden Planet (1956) and its cobbled-together, hugely experimental techniques of sound-scaping.

Then came Mark Kermode's hilarious and heartfelt introduction to the film. I expect that a video of this will emerge on Eden's Youtube page soon, though it hasn't yet.

I'd watched the film five or six times before but never on a big screen, nor with a crowd of people. (Nor, indeed, on film as opposed to the DVD version.) It was quite remarkable how different the experience was under properly 'cinematic' conditions. I saw so many things in the film that I hadn't before (I am sure that it was differently edited to the DVD version, although it seemed to come in at the same running time); moreover, I felt many things watching the film that I had not previously. Scenes which previously slid by with little to mark them as remarkable became pivotal moments; the rhythm, pacing and structure of the film seemed to somehow reveal themselves; jokes that seemed only mildly humorous became hilarious ('laugh and the whole world...'), while the pathos of the film's closing act was stunningly magnified by the sheer silence of the audience as the events unfolded.

The film has its moments of kitsch and inadvertent humour (whatever the bird is that lands on Lowell's arm during the first Joan Baez song never fails to have them rolling in the aisles). In many ways, as even Kermode conceded, the film doesn't hold together; in many ways it is rather dated. However, there really is something very special about it as a work of art, especially when viewed in its proper environment—that is, when viewed cinematically.

The fact that some of the film's more naive moments provoked laughter only served to emphasise the degree to which its more sensitive moments were still able to move deeply, to make present sentiments that were utterly relatable, despite all the distancing effects of time and the ageing process of technical progression.

While the film was screened in a conference room rather than a proper cinema this hardly mattered. In fact the setting couldn't have been more perfect. The room was set up in such a way that Eden's domes, the architecture of which was inspired by the film, were visible just to the right of the screen. As the credits begin to roll we see one dome gradually drifting off into the distance. As Kermode noted rather excitedly, it appeared more or less the same size on the screen as the domes that were visible out of the window.

I can't think of a film that has been connected to its worldly consequences in the mere fact and technique of its projection as intimately as this one. What could sunder all pretences of textualism or filmic internalism more than this moment? Projection as a technical art is an intimate part of the broader art of cinema—this much is clear. And film is of the world. It is an ever transforming assemblage; it acts, it moves, it builds.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm planning on writing an article on all of this, taking this film as a case study for thinking about space and spatiality in film. It seems to me that for all the countless pages written on time in film there is precious little that concentrates on space—as though that were somehow either given or uninteresting. Neither of those things seem to me to be true. I am now quite excited about getting to work on this project!