Category: Class Discussion

We’re all being watched. Whether it’s Google Analytics watching where we choose to spend our time on the Internet, or more malicious forms of spyware scanning for the input of valuable data, it’s always taking place in some way. Even written records can prove to be dangerous and always subject to the gaze of outsiders. Adam One is highly aware of this monitoring, which is reflected in the way in which he chooses to run the God’s Gardeners. For instance, written records are forbidden, and there is only one laptop available, concealed by the Adams and Eves. This is an extension of the fear that every middle schooler has, that someone will read their sincerest innermost thoughts (usually in the form of a diary, or in my day, a blog on Xanga), but with actual real-world ramifications. Besides exposing us to harm, there’s a sense of discomfort associated with exposing our inner lives to the world. Both within the world of Oryx and Crake and our real world, artists utilize that discomfort to evoke feelings in viewers.

This is demonstrated in Oryx and Crake with the lifecaster Anna K., who broadcasts every aspect of her life on the Internet. For Crake and Jimmy this is just part of their illicit titillating Web crawls, but the tasks she performs while streaming are more elaborate than expected: “tweezing her eyebrows, waxing her bikini line, washing her underwear.” These are somewhat mundane tasks, which are almost embarrassing in a way – revealing the things that women must do to make themselves presentable (plucking of body hairs), things that humanize women and reveal how odd these rituals are. This is probably why Jimmy was so entranced with Anna K. – for a teenager, especially, it is novel to get these glimpses into a woman’s life.

Jennifer Ringley was one of the first lifecasters, and likely who Margaret Atwood modeled Anna K. after. Between 1996 and 2003, Ringley streamed her entire life on JenniCam.com, starting from her dorm room at Dickinson College to her apartment in Sacramento. Like with Anna K., this included glimpses of nudity and she would keep the webcam on even as she participated in sexual acts. Although Jennifer did not view JenniCam as an art project, it was, like Anna K., an uncensored contrast to the ways in which women are typically presented (sanitized, unblemished, etc.).

Countless other artists have played with the concept of surveillance. For instance, Jill Magid’s “Evidence Locker,” a work of performance art, consisted of her walking around Liverpool in a bright red trench coat. Various police cameras would watch her, and Magid collected around eleven hours of CCTV footage. Magid had to file police requests to retrieve the footage, and which she filled out as if she were writing letters to a lover. Magid’s choices are a little different from Ringley’s and Anna K.’s – the latter two created their own avenues to share their private lives, while Magid chose to highlight how the government peers in at us, without us noticing.

I think it’s a little interesting that many of these artists toying with these concepts are female, because malicious groups on the Internet so frequently target women. In JenniCam’s early days, Ringley received death threats from teenage hackers. However, when I think about it more, I see where these artists are coming from – they’re writing their own narratives, taking over the male gaze and its way of glossing over the unpleasant parts.

That said, it must be exhausting to keep this up. Ringley ended JenniCam after having to deal with the fallout from carrying out an affair, visible to public scrutiny. I’m sure, with time, Anna K.’s operation would be over as well.

The more I study psychology, and the more I study the MaddAddam trilogy, the more connections I make.  In many senses, Crake is very much like Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst.

Sigmund Freud was most known for three things: unconsciousness, stages of sexuality, and psychoanalysis.  A big critique against him is that his theories were only based on his traumatic childhood, especially in terms of the stages of sexuality.  He was very rigid about his theories – only he could change, edit, or improve on his own work.  This led to many disputes with other psychologists that tried to work with him like Carl Jung and Alfred Alder.  He even invented a whole new process of analysis, dream analysis, to prevent being psychoanalyzed by someone else.  On even creepier levels, he also psychoanalyzed his own daughter, who went on to going against most of her father’s theories anyway.  Not only is he rigid in practice, but he’s also rigid in methodology and belief.  He believes in science and rationality.

Similarly, Crake’s character is much like Freud is these aspects.  Crake too is rigid in belief.  Crake only believes in the rational and in science.  He went as far as the try to rid the Crakers of religion because he thought it was pointless. (And Ironic because he himself basically became their God).  Crake also had a traumatic childhood that influenced his practice and theories.

While I don’t how much love Freud was capable of giving, I am certain that despite Crake’s rigidity, he had a special connection and feeling toward Oryx and in that sense he is separate from Freud.  As smart as he was, Freud was disliked by many and opposed by many.   As rigid and critical as he was, Crake was actually admired by many, if not all, for his intellect and uniqueness.

Food is culturally significant and ultimately reflective of the relationships (social and economic) we have with other people. For example, I have to prevent a destructive relationship when finding out someone is a picky eater (not eating when something looks weird to them), or when they say that they dislike food from a particular region (“Oh, I don’t like Asian food- like from the East”). When making broad statements like the latter, I find it to be somewhat problematic to be placing thousands of years of spice and cooking under one kind of taste. In this way, we can relate how people treat immigrants. Often natives force the latter group to reinvent themselves to be acknowledged and accepted by the community. We can see a result of this process maybe through the naming of the Tex-Mexs and the Asian Fusions in the MaddAddam Trilogy. At the end of this process, natives force these groups to become tasteless and completely different versions of themselves to be appealing.

Food appropriators tend to take a certain culture’s food and change it to make it appealing to certain groups.  Basically, they bastardize the original cuisine. Look at Taco Bell, Curry-in-a-Hurry, even Chipotle (oh please, it’s Tex-Mex-Cajun). They have an image of being ethnic but send out food that the respective, typical cooks from the culture would not send out (the women, the mothers, the wives). [My mom has a lewd phrase for people who make terrible chai, she told me that that stuff is what you clean your butt with. If there was an equivalent for crap imitation food I would use it here.]

I think this is strongly related to how PoC are put together in the series. Tex-Mex exists for natives. Asian Fusion is probably a group made of people from different ethnicities, but it was probably easier to combine everyone into group, and have one name. If these groups chose their names for themselves, they are internalizing how they are being seen by society and are thus making themselves digestable and acceptable for others. People in the series are there to be consumed- sometimes literally, since it is rumored human carbon is used in burgers. Even for characters who are “needed”, they are treated as objects. Companies literally bid on high school graduates, and buy them to work. Even if Crake is bought by the most prestigious corporation, he was still objectified. MaddAddamites were weaponized.

In the books, we don’t even have distinct characteristic for any PoC group mentioned, which sheds light on how useless it is to categorize them are. The only thing we know about the Asian Fusions is that they are vicious, which we would assume that all the gangs are like. The Tex-Mex migrate. These names are meaningless when they are used by others in society.

I recently read an article going over how people don’t really love ethnic food. They love what is specifically prepared for them. The over-spiciness of “Indian” food, which for them, is the distinct (and only) characteristic of that kind of cuisine. This is usually prepared by Indian men here who don’t understand the nuances of cooking those dishes, and then package it for natives specifically (fattier and spicier than normal). The sweetened pad thai dish. People think they love these ethnic foods, but they’ll only eat it when it’s not an authentic dish, and most of the time, they’ve only had a few of these dishes. I can literally list the Indian and Thai dishes most people typically have, on one hand: chicken tikki masala, paneer, naan (Indian); pad thai, drunken noodles (thai). I typically feel incredulous when people say they love a certain culture’s food with little experience, and feel more strongly this way when people say they dislike it.

A particular culture’s cuisine has an array of dishes. This is not to say there may not be an underlying connection, but it is a little messed up to dislike a whole region’s food based on a dish or two. If anything, a lot of frequented “ethnic” places serve trash food, as do fusions. I had biriyani from an Indian place on W4th for my friend to try, and it was bland (somehow it was popular, though??). I went to Japan this past winter, and they seriously bastardize French culture and food. Most of their appropriated food, called yoshoku, is terrible. If any of you go there, don’t try “american dogs”.

Often, immigrants package their food here in a way to be accepted my natives, much like they do with their behavior and character. It’s assimilation, instead of integration.

Many post-apocalyptic visions of the future do not recognize the existence of women’s reproductive autonomy. When the continued propagation of the human race is at stake, pregnancy seems to become both unavoidable and newly desirable to female characters. Carrying children becomes the fictional woman’s obligatory biological occupation, and it does not matter whether her pre-apocalypse-self was characterized as wanting, or even thinking about children. The pregnant woman, or the mother with a young child, is a symbol of hope for the survival of humanity – whether she has a say in the matter or not. In many cases, this serves as a cover of sorts for hetero-masculine power fantasy: before the apocalypse, the beautiful woman might have denied the male access to her body, but now she is super pumped to have his babies.

Post-apocalyptic narratives are typically characterized as a vehicle for dismantling contemporary societal structures and norms, but so often they seem used instead to reinforce traditional gender roles, heteronormativity, and patriarchal family constructs. Perhaps as if to say that if an apocalyptic event occurred, it would restore what was ‘supposed’ to be the ‘natural’ order of things. In Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand, pregnant heroine Frannie makes depressing commentary on this phenomenon when she says, “Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could—every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath” (King 648). Men in such narratives are glorified for being violent, emotionally-callous survivalists; women become vulnerable vessels who require protection, and must bear and raise the next generation as their duty to the human race.

Into this longstanding tradition comes Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam. It makes little commentary on it, and in some ways, I felt, really reinforced this played-out reinforcement of gender roles in post-apocalyptic fiction. She plays the trope straight: all female characters who can get pregnant, do get pregnant. The characters are paired off into heterosexual, monogamous family units – unless, of course, they are killed off. Worse, Amanda expresses repeatedly that she does not want to carry her pregnancy to term, and Toby pretty much ignores her, and then the situation is simply dropped, and never addressed again within the narrative. The next time it’s brought up is to say that Amanda gave birth and apparently this is a happy ending. No matter that we never see any indication of her changing her mind, that she doesn’t want the child. No matter that it is an especially dangerous pregnancy (with a Craker baby!) that could easily have killed her in childbirth – an early-term, plant-induced (the “herbs” Toby mentions knowing about) abortion might have been LESS dangerous, without modern medicine so many women die in childbirth in the best of circumstances! Amanda is never allowed a decision other than giving birth, and the question of abortion is placed entirely in Toby’s hands, excluding Amanda entirely. And when Toby decides to do nothing (not even to discuss it with Amanda, to run down her options!), there is never any discourse about it in the text. This makes it all too clear that in Atwood’s post-apocalyptic world, like so many others, reproductive choice no longer exists.

I’m going to return to our many discussions about choices in narrator/narrative to open up a general discussion about what Atwood’s ending means. The narrator in “MaddAddam,” particularly towards the end of the novel, is constantly shifting and being handed off and picked up. We go from Zeb telling his story to Toby to Toby telling it to the Crakers to Blackbeard telling it to the Crakers. In a story which ultimately ends in mating between Crakers and humans and the recreation of “civilization” post apocalypse, this narrative style mimics the way in which one generation leads to the next and one society gives way to the next as mapped out in the novel. In fact, many aspects of the story itself are come full circle in this way, such as how the Crakers and humans return to “Egg” they were created in for a final battle which decides how they will continue existing in this world.

By the end of the novel, we see the Crakers and humans rebuilding many of the fundamental aspects of our society. They are using religion, commemorative rites, and other cultural symbols. They are using language and writing to record. They even practice law in the form of the trial. What does Atwood mean by all of this? Why is the choice to reinhabit the earth, and with so many of the same cultural practices and institutions? Is this cycle of destruction and restoration hopeless? I am hesitant to say it is human nature to turn to these ways of living and meaning making and to center our lives around institutions like gender and religion. But, I am confused as to why Atwood would present all of the problems and violence that comes from a society which has taken it too far just to create a society that looks like it might head down the same path. Even as Blackbeard is recording written history, he is choosing the narratives that are the happiest and the most hopeful, which is not particularly useful for learning from the past which is so often painful, as Toby makes clear (“Will this be a painful story? It’s likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably,” 451.) I’m curious as to how others made sense of the end of the trilogy!

Last year, my eleven-year-old cousin showed me the wonders of Minecraft. I was bamboozled. I even have the Facebook Status (a rarity) to prove it:

My eleven year old cousin introduced me to Minecraft tonight and took me through the world she literally created. She taught me how to shear wool, build a home, and mine for materials. She even had some analysis of the app economics (“It’s worth the seven dollars”). Can’t tell if it’s impressive or terrifying. Are we connected to things by the money we spend on them? Or by the virtual pickaxe we used to make it?

Minecraft, a world-building game with such a large fandom that I have seen this videogame in MoMA, obviously made it to the New York Times earlier last week. The piece shaped the game as not only a product of our culture, but as a producer of it. Minecraft is given credit for molding a child’s sense of logic, discovery, 3D imagination, and even the basics of coding. All things that the next generation needs to survive the impending takeover of Google compounds. Different from easy to manipulate computers and programs, Minecraft is refreshingly full of bugs and problems. In fact, these intentional blips reportedly end up encouraging players to fix the problem themselves.

With the advent of websites that literally allow you to gamify your life (see link below), we have to face an added dimension to the virtualization of everything. Online gaming and computer games are usually best in moderation, as practice or for leisure. It’s all fun and games until it’s not. When we tie gaming and games with social development, in place of or prioritized over social interaction, or rely so heavily on gaming that our relationship becomes one of addiction, something scary happens. And increasingly, as children (at least most of my cousins) are growing up weaned off of the iPad, the first point of contact to the technology is often in the form of a distracting video game.

While there is undoubtedly much research into the psychology and neurology of such a dependency, I will leave it to speculation in this blog post. Just something to think about the next time your sibling/child/parent fails to respond to your attempts at conversation in favor of a riveting RPG or perhaps SimsCity, needing “just five more minutes.”

In Maddaddam, we see Crake as young Glenn, who is shaped by the traumatic events of his family and species, but is given one of his first tastes of autonomy through gaming. Specifically, through Zeb’s life lessons and idle Blood and Roses gaming. There is no other way that Glenn can technically take control of his life, especially as Zeb leaves him. Although this fixation on extreme environmentalism to the point of brushing off individual human lives could have come first from the “real world” and was reflective onto the games, it was definitely magnified and honed by playing games like Blood and Roses. On the other hand, the Maddaddam group manipulated Extinctathon to create their own web of communications. It is worth thinking about their specific differences in using these games.

While I am writing about excessive gaming from a negatively biased point of view, we can also think about the relationship between humankind and online gaming in the context of our readings this week. Tsing names fungi as the ultimate metaphor for resistance, evading domestication for years, and Harroway talks about the blurring of lines between human and nature, and debunking human exceptionalism so we cannot point to a single enemy for our social woes. Glenn almost merges with the videogame, letting his worldview intertwine tightly with that of the game (trade you 1,000 babies on fire for an Eiffel Tower). Maddaddam resists “domestication” under the videogame, twisting it instead to work for them. There is no negative or positive connotation here, and in some ways, Tsing and Harroway describe similar phenomena. Humankind still interacts with and eats fungi even if we have not domesticated it, and perhaps blurring this line and resisting exceptionalism is it’s own form of resistance.

I would like to start the conversation here: About a reflection of not only how we use literal online gaming but “make up rules” of games in daily life, or even how dependent we are on our devices to tell us how to see the world. And what filter are we forced to screen our perceptions through? For example, someone may store their entire calendar in their phone, or be unable to look away from the screen, even during a conversation with someone in the “real world.”

And finally, with regards to Maddaddam and Crake: There is a difference between living by the rules of the game, and making up the rules of the game to suit your lifestyle. And that difference is the one between powerlessness and direct autonomy over your own time.

Links:

The Minecraft Generation: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html?_r=0

Gamify Your Life: https://habitica.com/

 

 

The waterless flood, the plague created by Crake to decimate the human population, left in its place not a vacuum, but a world filled with life. This can be related back to the moral implications of the waterless flood, which I discussed in my previous post. While the end of human life is inevitably a source of fear for even the most righteous of human beings, what follows may be an improvement upon human society.

The survival of Toby was dependent entirely on human lust and vanity, qualities absent from the Crakers. By using the products associated with the commercialization of these aspects of human life, she is symbolically creating life and beauty from human baseness. Toby, a former God’s Gardener, is holed up in AnooYoo, a spa frequented by aging upper class women such as Lucerne. AnooYoo can be seen as symptomatic of the vanity and greed present in pre-flood society. Concerns about aging and beauty, no doubt fed by the availability of child pornography and the total commercialization of sex, was fed back into the system of corporations, contributing to more greed and wealth imbalance. In AnooYoo, Toby is living off of the food she stored according to the Gardener beliefs as well as the fruit-and-vegetable scented skin products the spa had sold. There is an undeniable irony to Toby gaining sustenance from avocado body butter and lemon meringue facials, the kind of beauty products that have become defunct in the post-flood world. Toby is turning these symbols of vanity, so indicative of the greed of the pre-flood world, into something useful.

The pigoons, genetically altered pigs containing human organs and brain tissue, have developed a basic culture and even some form of religion, providing an example of the beauty that has arisen from human cruelty. In Oryx and Crake, the pigoons serve as Jimmy’s awakening to the brutality of the world. Jimmy hears his father’s coworkers at OrganInc Farms, the creators of the pigoons, make jokes about eating their hybrid creations: “This would upset Jimmy; he was confused about who should be allowed to eat what. He didn’t want to eat a pigoon, because he thought of the pigoons as creatures much like himself” (Oryx and Crake, 24). Jimmy’s identification with the pigoons and concern about eating them is mirrored in MaddAddam, where it is revealed that the animals are much more intelligent than originally assumed. A group of pigoons converge on the cobb-house, where the human and Craker survivors are living. The pigoons carry with them the body of a dead piglet, covered in flowers and foliage. This indicates that the pigoons have advanced enough to have funeral rites, a sign of religion or at least a kind of culture. The pigoons, while the result of human experimentation on the bodies of other animals, have developed their own society, one which may inherit the earth.

Ultimately, the earth seems to be in the hands of the Crakers, who have adopted human inventions and traditions into their own culture. Unlike their human predecessors, the Crakers have the potential to live on the earth in harmony with its other creatures. In MaddAddam, we learn that the Crakers are capable of writing. Toby frets that this will spell the end of the Craker’s idyll: “What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?” (MaddAddam 204). Toby’s fears seem to be unfounded. For one thing, the Crakers have exceeded the expectations of their creator. They have formed a religion, centered around the mythical Oryx and Crake, and have assimilated human concepts into it, such as Toby’s explanation of Fuck. It seems likely that the Crakers will do the same with writing, make use of it in the context of what they know about the world.

The Crakers also have abilities that are not found in humanity, namely the ability to communicate with the pigoons. When the pigoons come to the human survivors and request help with protecting themselves from the painballers, they have to communicate through the Crakers. The humans seem to be out of the loop of communication, which could pose a problem considering the level of culture the pigoons have formed. This poses the question of whether humanity is compatible with this new, post-waterless-flood, earth. The flood, in both Jimmy’s mystical explanation and reality, was a result of human greed, vanity, and chaos. While the human survivors have done their part to rid the world of the remnants of their vanity, it remains to be seen whether they are willing to learn from the mistakes of pre-flood human society. If they are not, the fantastic beauty of the post-flood world, with its pig-societies and vegan, free-loving humanoid occupants, would be better off without them.

Throughout YOTF, I could not help but notice Ren’s fascination with, and maybe even love for, Amanda, and from thinking about this, I realized that neither of Atwood’s novels (so far) have included queer relationships. In O&C, Jimmy is woman-hungry, going from woman to woman without any real regard to their feelings, aside from Oryx. The Crakers participate in a 4-men/1-woman “orgy,” but with that ritual being ingrained into them by Crake/Glenn, one can debate that their relationships are not relationships at all. In YOTF, the Gardeners have both single and married members, but those in relationships are in heterosexual ones. (Yes, “straight” relationships could contain queer members in them, but there does not seem to be any evidence to support this claim.) The only relationship, queer one that is, that stands out to me is Ren and Amanda.

Though one hopes Ren’s love to be reciprocated, her adoration for Amanda, for the most part, seems to be one-sided, as even Ren knows that Amanda does not tend to show emotion. In the final scene of YOTF, when Ren and Toby rescue Amanda from the two painballers, Amanda starts crying hysterically, which really threw me off. As Ren says, “it takes more than a lot to make Amanda cry” (420). When they both reunite after the Flood, Amanda tells her, “I knew you weren’t dead…You get a feeling when someone’s dead. Someone you know really well,” (323) and that felt like Amanda letting herself show emotion for someone she cares deeply for.

When Ren finds out that Amanda is dating Jimmy, though in the novel she emphasizes her heart being broken by Jimmy, my ~queer heart~ believes that she is also distressed over Amanda dating someone else. I think the combined turmoil of having your best friend, whom you have a crush on, dating the first boy you ever fell in love with, who also broke your heart, must be tough. When Ren explains her sadness, she says that “It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.” (301)

I could not help but think of Jimmy’s perspective from O&C, where a major part of the novel was him whining about Oryx, and so reading Ren’s relationship issues, being from a female’s perspective, was a sort of breath of fresh air. Whereas Jimmy’s problems were rooted in a white savior complex where he needed to rescue the damsel in distress, while also exploiting and mistreating the other damsels he encounters along the way, Ren’s dilemma is very relatable, as a young, queer woman living in a patriarchal society, one that exploits a young woman’s sexuality and uses violence as a means of entertainment and personal gain, just as the Pleeblands do.

It is also interesting how different Ren and Amanda are, and even Ren recognizes it. Throughout the novel, Ren is seen as fragile, by Jimmy, Toby, and even herself. She lays her heart out, not holding back with her emotions, making herself vulnerable to her peers and to the reader. Seeing as Ren is one of the two main narrators, we get a much clearer insight into her life than we do with Amanda, who we have only seen through Jimmy and Ren’s lenses so far. Ren’s inner turmoil with her relationships with others leads her to Scales and Tails, where she feels comfortable in her body and her sexuality, while Amanda, who knows how to use her body in previous trades for drugs, uses art to express herself after departing from the God’s Gardeners. When Ren is trapped in Scales and Tails after the Flood, she creates her own reality, one with Amanda “smart and strong…smiling…[and] singing” (284).