May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder and guard your left

This is a discussion about the nature of work from Samuel R. Delany's novel Nova. I'm so great and
wonderful now that not only do I have Kendall copy editing
for me, but he writes most of my self-promoting blurbage too!

But this time, as is the case with his own work, he tried to fill this blurb with all the flatulent and academic vocabulary that so mars his own prose. But I crushed him
and wrote it myself.

Bijan



May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder and guard your left
URL: http://www.tcom.ohiou.edu/books/scifi/delany.htm
By Kendall Clark


   February being Black History Month, I plan to spend a fair bit of
   time reading [1]Samuel R. Delany. It's likely that if you've spotted
   any of Delany's books on the shelf they've been the Wesleyan Press
   releases of the Nevèrÿon series, plus Dhalgren and Triton (although,
   I've been seeing The Einstien Intersection around), which are mostly
   from his mid-1970s to 1980s period (except The Einstein
   Intersection). And these are indeed wonderful books (and I hope to
   write about them later this month). But there is lots of very cool
   stuff going on in his 1960s novels. Nova, in particular, is shot
   through with stimulating ideas, complex interplay between plot,
   characterization, emotional confrontations, and intellectual themes,
   and just plain wacky stuff. The prose isn't as stylistically rich as
   the later works (which is no shame all things considered) but that's
   in many ways an advantage for the beginning Delany reader.
   
   Alas, Nova is out of print, but if you check out the [2]reader
   reviews at Amazon, you'll find a lot of focus on his "cyberpunk"
   ideas, in particular the use of neural plugs to connect with,
   control, and receive sensory input from machinery (e.g.,
   "Man-machine interfaces abound in Delany's books, a decade or more
   before William Gibson ever wrote or thought of Neuromancer"; "It
   also explores some territory that is now considered cyber-punk, ie
   man-machine interfaces and strange designer drugs"; "I've read it
   many times and am very fortunate to own a copy. It contains one of
   the first descriptions of complex man-computer-machine
   interfaces...").
   
   However, to make a great deal of Delany's anticipation of certain
   cyberbunk themes runs the risk of missing just how different they
   are. After all, cyperpunk per se is as much about literary style and
   social organization as it is about "cyberspace" and jacking in.
   Gibsonian cyberpunk focuses on our machine-mediated interactions
   with an information-based mega-corp structured economy with a
   standard MOO/MUDesque, though primarily visual, representation. This
   is not at all what Delany is getting at in Nova. The following
   quotation both makes this point clear and is one of my favorites.
   
     "May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder and
     guard your left."
     
     "Thanks." After another while he asked, "Katin, why do people
     always say Ashton Clark whenever you're going to change jobs?
     They told us back at Cooper that the guy who invented plugs was
     named Socket or something."
     
     "Souquet," Katin said. "Still, he must have considered it an
     unfortunate coincidence. Ashton Clark was a twenty-third-century
     philospher cum psychologist whose work enabled Vladimeer Souquet
     to develop his neural plugs. I guess the answer has to do with
     work. Work as mankind knew it up until Clark and Souquet was a
     very different thing from today, Mouse. A man might go to an
     office and run a computer that would correlate great masses of
     figures that came from sales reports on how well, let's say,
     buttons -- or something equally archaic -- were selling over
     certain areas of the country. This man's job was vital to the
     button industry: they had to have this information to decide how
     many buttons to make next year. But though this man held an
     essential job in the button industry, was hired, paid, or fired
     by the button industry, week in and week out he might not see a
     button. He was given a certain amount of money for running his
     computer; with that money his wife bought food and clothes for
     him and his family. But there was no direct connection between
     where he worked and how he ate and lived the rest of his time. He
     wasn't paid with buttons. As farming, hunting, and fishing became
     occupations of a smaller and smaller per cent of the population,
     this separation between man's work and the way he lived -- what
     he ate, what he wore, where he slept -- became greater and
     greater for more people. Ashton Clark pointed out how psychologi­
     cally damaging this was to humanity. The entire sense of
     self-control and self-responsibility that man acquired during the
     Neolithic Revolution when he first learned to plant grain and
     domesticate animals and live in one spot of his own choosing was
     seriously threatened. The threat had been coming since the
     Industrial Revolution and many people had pointed it out, before
     Ashton Clark. But Ashton Clark went one step further. If the
     situation of a technological society was such that there could be
     no direct relation between a man's work and his modus vivendi,
     other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly
     changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that
     weren't there before, moving things from one place to another. He
     must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with
     his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile (pages
     194 to 196 in my Bantam edition).
     
   We are embodied, physical beings whose cognitive structures -- and
   affective structures -- are profoundly affected by the exercise of
   sensory-motor system. One worry that developmental folks express
   more often these days is that computer use (of the standard monitor,
   keyboard, pointing device setup) may interfere with child
   development by impoverishing the child's sensory-motor explorations.
   Moving chess pieces on a physical board is kinesthetically very
   different from "moving" virtual chess pieces on a virtual chess
   board by clicking and dragging. Even more striking, the relation
   between our kinesthetic awareness of the chess piece in our hand and
   our visual tracking of it is enormously complex and getting it wrong
   or just different can have far reaching effects on our psychology.
   
   A personal example: I have inner ear problems and have had so since
   I was fairly young, as far as we can tell. One problem I have is
   that in large, brightly lit, echoing, visually busy environments
   (parties, dances, Wal-Mart's) I have trouble determining what's
   foreground movement, backgrond movement, and my movment.
   Essentially, I don't get enough feedback from my inner ear and the
   compensatory mechanisms in my visual and auditory systems get
   overwhelmed at a certain level of stimulus. What I experience is
   disjointedness, sometimes slight nausea, a lot of anxiety, and so
   on. If I remove myself from the environment, I feel better.
   
   I didn't discover the underlying condition until about five years
   ago. When I was younger, I quite naturally interpreted these
   feelings as feelings about the social situation. Thus, it seemed to
   me that I had a problem with, for example, parties, groups, people,
   and having fun. There are, in fact, many different things someone
   with my condition can do to compensate, including just saying, "Oh
   well, I need to cultivate different pursuits and make sure my
   friends and family understand why I tend to avoid the larger
   gatherings." It's a lot easier to convince folks that you're not a
   grump and frump if you can explain why you look and act ill-at-ease.
   
   Two points to derive from this example: 1) quite subtle
   disarrangments of our bodily systems can have significant and
   distressing effects and 2) lack of understanding of our own bodies
   and how they work in the world can greatly increase those effects.
   
   We are social beings, too, of a fairly specific kind. Much of our
   sociality is connected with our bodies. I think this is what
   Delany's Ashton Clark is getting at. It's interesting that the
   solution wasn't to go pre-industrial, though that may be a partial
   solution, but to reconfigure work so that it met our deeper needs.
   
     "Had he lived another hundred years either way, probably nobody
     would have heard of Ashton Clark today. But technology had
     reached the point where it could do something about what Ashton
     Clark was saying. Souquet invented his plugs and sockets, and
     neural-response circuits, and the whole basic technology by which
     a machine could be controlled by direct nervous impulse, the same
     impulses that cause your hand or foot to move. And there was a
     revolution in the concept of work. All major industrial work
     began to be broken down into jobs that could be machined
     'directly' by man. There had been factories run by a single man
     before, an uninvolved character who turned a switch on in the
     morning, slept half the day, checked a few dials at lunchtime,
     then turned things off before he left in the evening. Now a man
     went to a factory, plugged himself in, and he could push the raw
     materials into the factory with his left foot, shape thousands on
     thousands of precise parts with one hand, assemble them with the
     other, and shove out a line of finished products with his right
     foot, having inspected them all with his own eyes. And he was a
     much more satisfied worker. Because of its nature, most work
     could be converted into plug-in jobs and done much more
     efficiently than it had been before. In the rare cases where
     production was slightly less efficient, Clark pointed out the
     psychological benefits to the society. Ashton Clark, it has been
     said, was the philosopher who returned humanity to the working
     man. Under this system, much of the endemic mental illness caused
     by feelings of alienation left society. The transformation turned
     war from a rarity to an impossibility, and -- after the initial
     upset -- stabilized the economic web of worlds for the last eight
     hundred years. Ashton Clark became the workers' prophet. That's
     why even today, when a person is going to change jobs, you send
     Ashton Clark, or his spirit along with him."
     
   It's interesting that this explanation doesn't come until near the
   book's end, and that the main plot line involves a feud between two
   great houses and the potential economical turmoil of the galaxy.
   While I think the Ashton Clark doctrines are right on target about
   some of the problems with industrial and current
   semi-post-industrial societies, it's important to note that Delany
   is not just a didactic utopian ranter (however elegant). This
   passage is embedded in a conversation that immediately explores some
   of the problems with the Clark/Souquet system both theoretical,
   "historical", and from the characters own perspective, several of
   which we've observed in an incident long before we've get this
   discussion. And the events in the novel as a whole belie a too rosy
   interpretation of neural plug salvation.
   
   (Katin, the over-educated expounder above, is trying, throughout the
   book to write a novel in the largely post-literate society. There
   are many passages where he expounds his theories of novels -- since
   they are a lost form he must both reconstruct how they worked and
   try to transfigure them to fit his milieu. This commentary and
   meta-commentary on the form is woven deftly throughout the book at
   many, many different layers. It's characteristic of Delany's books
   I've read to take something so familiar and twist it into a
   completely alien artifact and then build it back into familiarity.
   The Nevèrÿon books are full of that.)
   
   In the end, I find Nova to be a far more sophisticated social novel
   than, say, Neruomancer. In Neruomancer the social analysis,
   projection, and reflection are in the service of the toys, both
   technological and literary. In that way, Neruomancer is more like
   Tofflerian/futurist style writings than an attempt to explore who we
   are and might want to be.
   
   It's sad that the catch phrase we all know is "May the force be with
   you" rather than (some variant of) "Ashton Clark go with you". I
   remember reading some Star Wars fan recounting "philosophical
   discussions" he had with his father over the nature of "the Force"
   and good and evil which I found sadly amusing, as the entire Star
   Wars story and universe is deeply impoverished in this regard.
   
   It would be nice if some tiny fraction of money, that will go to
   making a computer facsimile of a lame character with an odd accent
   for Star Wars Episode II, went instead toward getting Nova back in
   print. Unfortunately the voracious demands of spectacle-laden
   alienation from the physical and social worlds will, as usual, trump
   the modest needs of real people.

References

   1. http://www.pcc.com/~jay/delany/
   2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0553236210/customer-reviews/qid=981146476/sr=1-1/ref=sc_b_1/103-2024647-0559006


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Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/740