Recently I've been immersed in the writings from Evan Colder Williams' blog
Socialism and/or Barbarism, which explores the apocalypses of fiction and those that have occurred in real life already, teasing out their political subtexts and even their progressive potentials. I confess I am instinctively skeptical of some of this musing, as the American left seems overstuffed with apocalypse cultists from Peak Oilers to Deep Ecologists all waiting for a massive crash in industry or technology so things can go back to their 'natural state' in other words--a billion or so people must go to the wall so things can get right back to normal. But Sa/oB is quite different, the apocalypse it seems is often just outside our doorstep and is in fact the kind of 'man behind the curtain' moment for reigning social order (think New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), and by burning down, washing away, eating away of the old society by monsters, the
possibility of a new society is converted into
necessity and this radicalism with a hard-edged feel for the terrifying is exactly what makes the blog so damned cool.
That said, I find I'm in real disagreement with the blog over the author's concept of Salvagepunk as a new progressive aesthetic that in his view moves beyond both what he sees as the no-holds barred Thatcherite neoliberal futurism of cyberpunk and the trite soft-edged neoliberal society of Barack Obama's kinder, more adaptive politics (and we might add here Blair and Brown's New Labour) which he sees in Steampunk. Instead, Salvagepunk moves toward a kind of radically different aesthetic which he associates with the kind of patchwork, jerry-rigged, functionalism of
Howl's Moving Castle or
Mad Max films. Salvagepunk, then is a way of envisioning how people might take the remains of a society devastated by disaster and reconfigure it for servicing their direct human needs
ad-hoc. It needs to be said that, as other bloggers like Owen Hatherley has that despite its connotations of (mere) survivalism where society and nature give individuals a direct order "things are scarce, become a cannibal or die" Salvage punk as described seems to have the world as having a sense of childlike-optimistic vision of a free sandbox of rusty and grimy abundance, and no more security guards or state officials to tell you that it can't be simply taken and used for...whatever! So what's the problem, then?
Well for one, what
are all those idle and ruined means of production going to be used for, will they simply be disassembled and reasssembled? Why can't the brute material of the old society by melted down and something greater rebuilt without the weight of the ruins on it's shoulders? To state things more plainly, Salavgepunk does indeed provide an optimistic vision of how to react and cope with the world a disaster (like that of the recession) would leave humanity with but it gives us no guide as to what to build anew. For a really satisfying answer to that I think we would need to turn again to the aesthetic of Cyberpunk which, I will argue later in this post, was not the accomplice of smash the unions and raise the stocks neoliberalism as he and others make it out to be. But for now I'd like to turn back to salvagepunk.
Anticipations of Salavgepunk: Real and Imagined
The popular Manga Barefoot Gen is well known for its true-to-life biographical descriptions of apocalyptic devastation wrought by the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it's vision of the protagonist Gen's struggle for survival, but for our purposes the important thing is the real background setting, that of a Japan where society has been essentially dissolved and the people whose actions were during the war organized rigidly (report for rations, report to the bomb shelter) now wander aimlessly through a chaotic landscape. Children become hardened criminals, victims of radiation wander with with wounds like the mutants of some pulp dystopia--the post-apocalyptic vision of the game Fallout had nothing on the reality of millions of Japanese. Nevertheless the depictions of Gen and the actions of ordinary Japanese people at the time seem to me anticipations of salvagepunk. For Gen, the old relations of deference to the Imperial state and the old social hierarchy no longer apply he lives in a shanty of salvaged tin and wood with his mother and a (salvaged?) orphan boy who is made a part of the family and scavenges the wastes for everything they need...when not looking for work (a scarcity that allows the old relations to reassert themselves). Parallel to this story is that of the production control movement among Japanese workers, wherein with their owners either caught up in the anti-fascist purge or worried that they might be, more radical workers seize control of the shop floor and turned it to other uses. Some uses presented themselves readily: the printers and journalists of one of Japan's conservative newspapers used production control to print agitprop and political criticism of the ultranationalists who led Japan into war. In another case on the Keio electric railway (I don't have my source in front of me on this, the name could be wrong) the seized the line and allowed passengers to ride free, which built up support for their struggle against the company.
All of this would lend support to a progressive side of salvagepunk, not just one depicted in fiction but perhaps in reality as well. Yet we can't lay to rest the fact that the story doesn't end at that point in history, the Japanese workers involved didn't only want to rearrange the pieces of the remains of their old society but to bring into being a new one. More to the point, the idea of salvage couldn't really assert itself in a conversation about what to build upon the firebombed ruins of cities and overgrown wastes of abandoned fields. In one sense this might be simply a problem of what Evan Calder Williams might have termed the disastrous Salvagepunk scenario of too many mouths to feed after the old world is turned into a junk heap, as opposed to the more ideal situation of a huge abundance of junk. But in another sense, it's about rasing new functional structures (unions, states, hospitals, cafeterias) to serve people's needs and wants, particularly those repressed by (especially in Japan's case) the prewar capitalist social order wherein masses of workers did tedious dangerous work for extremely low wages, like much of the textile industry and on the other social pole wealth was extremely concentrated in the ownership of megacorporate Zaibatsu by a few families. Japan remained a capitalist country, to be sure, but one of a very different type wherein private wealth owners had very little say and wages and consumption were made to rise every year through the unions "spring offensive" putting intense pressure on managers pressure to move up the technological ladder. The proto-salvagepunk of this period didn't endure, the postwar Japanese order that evolved out of the union-corporate agreements and political party battles of this period, in particular those related to the MITI resulted in the built environment in society that would be the key inspiration for
cyberpunk writers, particularly William Gibson.
Yet this presents us with a curious paradox Cyberpunk are Steampunk were depicted as the hadnmaidens of the neoliberal restoration of the old social hierarchies disturbed by all of that 'excess' and 'utopianism' in the 1960's and 1970's. Salvagepunk is given as a successor which reappropriates the pieces of these old failures--rather than to mask their failures. Leaving us with a sequence that looks roughly like this:
1-Cyberpunk (Thatcherite neoliberalism's trimumphant phase)
2-Steampunk (neoliberalism's pragmatic 'preserve the social order' phase)
3-Salvagepunk (the phase that allows for radically different arrangements)
But with Japan it seems to go:
1-Steampunk (the old emperor centered, Zaibatsu-controlled system, with family ownership and steam-centered production)
2-Salvagepunk (the postwar phase of chaos and rearrangement)
3-Cyberpunk (a weird hybrid system state-centered and capitalist, loathed by most neoliberals)
What is this supposed to prove, not much other than the association of Salvagepunk as a new ground to stand on may not be the case. In addition maybe the relationship between Cyberpunk and neoliberal economics and social relations is strained as well. It might be that all three of these are simply ways we conceive the productive and technological forces of our time as shaping our total social relations, at once revealing their present trends and obscuring actual social relations and alternative possibilities.
In might be possible then to conceive of a cyberpunk premise on egalitarianism or a Salvagepunk premised on brutal (but still playful) exploitation and hierarchy (see
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome). But even with these pitfalls there still might be grounds for preferring Salavgepunk if it offers a kind of immunity towards being sucked into futile efforts to shore up a perpetually failing system- something
Socialism and/or Barbarism sees most of all in an Obama capitalism, a little more homely, a little greener, a little less alienating but otherwise the same old crap.
But if it could be shown that even Salvagepunk could fall into this trap, than perhaps the reasons for prefering it aren't so appealing. In my comparison of the Salvagepunk aspects I see in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, I believe such a trap can be shown. The problem I would argue is that for all the promise of recombination and change in Salvagepunk it doesn't serve as a negation of our existing order, but a pragmatic ad hoc transformation. This may in the end turn out to be a wholly different social order, but if it is, Salvagepunk will simply be discarded as a vestigial remnant as it was in Japan. We might find ourselves saying the same things about salvage punk that we have said about Obama, sure change is good--but what sort of change?
A final tangent on Cyberpunk:
The cyberpunk world need not be a Neoliberal one. Leafing through the works of William Gibson we find a hyper-exploitative Chiba City which seems to be like a sprawling warren of 'informal' sector activities and a stateless zone of fierce and unregulated capitalism--like the Victorian East End suped up with 21st century technology. Many authors of Cyberpunk fiction seemed to What is this but the blending of Victorian social relations with the most futuristic visions found in Japanese society? This is neoliberalism par excellence, but in other authors like Bruce Sterling we find totally different, and far more progressive possibilities for society fleshed out from the same technology and even much the same aesthetic.
Cyberpunk put forward the promise of humankind breaking loose from the shackles of biological nature through radical life extension, human-machine interfaces, global information networks and near-total automation of menial tasks. All of this, without the added dictates of the social-engineers and technocrats presented in Golden Age and New Wave science fiction: with their positive and negative valuations respectively. Instead, the individual can modify themselves to their own needs. Unfortunately these needs are themselves controlled through institutions like megacorporations and shady thugs. People are given (collectively) the means to autonomy, but don't have it (individually).
Yet all of the potential of these possibilities is constrained and redirected towards an exploitative order. Rather than mass immortality and the radical diminishing of fear it promises, we have corporate clans perpetuating their ownership is suspended animation. Rather the 'abolition of labour' we are presented with unemployment and innumerable tertiary industries like 'black clinics' and cybernetic chop shops. We can envision, however, far more optimistic uses of this technology, and indeed many have, notably Ken Macleod and Bruce Sterling. In Bruce Sterling's
Islands in the Net and
Distraction, Capitalism is faced with the pressures its own technology engendered towards a ludic society without labour, and the democratization of technolgical goods. Here we have Anti-Labour parties Leisure Unions and Consumerist Communists with virtual networks, providing the means to organize and expropriate the cornucopian future. Our vision of the future has been dulled by the realities of today but a Cyberpunk Utopia is not an oxymoron, though it hasn't been created yet.
