Navsa2015

ANTHROPOGENIC STEAMPUNK:A GEOLOGY OF THE VICTORIAN IN CHINA MIEVILLE’S IRON COUNCIL

@RogerWhitsonWash State U

07/09/2015

I examine the nineteenth century as a digital system.

–Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real

(2015)

“The concept of cultural techniques clearly and unequivocally repudiates the ontology of philosophical concepts. […] [T]ime as such

does not exist independently of cultural techniques of time measurement” (56-7).

• media are cultural but also produce material acting as measurements of time.

• media materiality is geological, multi-scalar temporal phenomenon from human use to interstellar asteroids.

• geological forms of time-criticality confront period-based, human temporality.

• Steampunk fantasy

• Bas-Lag Trilogy: Perdido Street Station and The Scar, Dickensian world (revolution, unionization) mixed w/ weird fiction like Lovecraft (other-dimensional creatures, different temporalities).

“The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and slow dissolution of rock in exact places, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall off in layers, coming off with the rain, and at the very last taking their long planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths” (558).

-China Mieville, Iron Council

“They combined into a careful and exact music of breaking, snaps and tolling iron that added to the flawless beat of the train; and for seconds, for that snatch of time, there was a pulse-magic; a palimpsest tempo, and in that moment complexity, each accented block of noise intervening in time, cutting time into shape so that as the huge hunter’s head of the Iron Council emerged from the rock folds and synclines into open lands the moments themselves were hacked by the noise, axed into shape, an intervention through the mechanism that sucked energy from Judah Low, the great self-taught thaumaturge of New Crobuzon, the crude, vigorous, ineluctable, the precision of that parceled-up reshaped time, was an argument in time,

reshaped the time itself, and made it

a golem

time golem

which stood in its ab-life, a golem of sound and time, stood and did what it was instructed to do, its instruction became it, its instruction its existence, its command to just be and so it was.”

Thanks!@RogerWhitson

http://www.rogerwhitson.net