Anarchist: "I love the Iain Banks Culture books!"
Anarchist: "Those other anarchists have a bad idea about what #anarchism is."
Did you know that the Iain Banks books have an idea of what anarchism is? It's just not immediately apparent because of a kind of displacement in the fiction.
1/n
First of all, I've written a whole lot about the early to middle Banks Culture books. I did a close reading of an entire novel of his (_Use of Weapons_) back on Usenet back in the 1990s. He commented on it. It was primitively written but I do somewhat better literary criticism now.
So I'd say I'm reasonably well read but cranky.
The basic displacement in the Culture novels is that Banks has written an entire group of super-advanced machine intelligences ("Minds") which do all of the work in the society, including production, service, and (mostly) military work. Humans still exist but no one relies on them for anything.
This one weird trick makes most of the recurring problems of anarchism disappear.
How do you get people to do the work? They don't. Why do the Minds do the work? They were built to be oriented towards doing it, and they have an incredible ability to multitask so that talking to millions of people at once doesn't really impinge on their attention.
What if people go bad? Well the Minds are vastly more powerful. What if the Minds go bad? They sort of mostly don't, but if they do, groups of other Minds control them. There's a small number of them so they know each other.
Most of the other hyphenated anarchisms are supposedly dealt with via technological irrelevance. Anarcha-feminism? Every human can change their physical gender at will through a biological process that they control. Green anarchism? The Culture builds space stations to live and doesn't need planets.
This makes it a well-loved setting. Guilt-free sex, drugs, and whatever else.
But what happens when social problems are imagined to have technical solutions?
Well, nothing can actually "happen" in an unmediated way because this is a fiction, not reality. At the same time:
1) Banks is notably not interested in writing what he once described as a soap opera, if I remember rightly, in which happy Culture citizens go through basically interpersonal conflicts. He seemed to think that a book required an external threat or internal faction-gone-bad to be interesting.
This is an authorial judgement on what, in human life, is interesting.
So Banks' setting is a great anarchist setting. I like it a lot more than, say, the one in _The Dispossessed_. (Who was it who described this as the most boring anarchist setting? Some current anarchist SF writer.) It really popularized an updating of anarchism past some of its 19th century roots, in which it was pretty much assumed that sex and drugs were parts of human happiness and not shameful problems.
But it doesn't really speak to much that relates to the actual problems of anarchism.
And it undermines its own anarchism a bit. Any text that says that you need some grimdark to be interesting is not so subtly suggesting that you need some amount of grimdark for human life to be interesting. Anarchism can be goth, or whatever, but grimdark mostly equates to hierarchical power, and I don't think you can have a successful anarchism that suggests that without continuous fights against power everyone would be bored.
/fin
@richpuchalsky I don't agree, on a couple of levels.
In general, I'm not sure I accept the link between "what makes for dramatic fiction" and "what I'd like the real world to actually contain".
In the context of the Culture universe, I think Banks emphasises that 99.99% of Culture citizens are perfectly fine without continuous fights against power. It's the outliers that make up Contact.
I think Banks approaches the grimdark point fairly directly at least once in-universe. In 'State of the Art', the character of Dervley Linter argues that late C20th Earth is more alive than the Culture because grimdark. The character of Diziet Sma (who is one of the Contact outliers who needs more fight than the average Culture citizen) treats him as being absolutely off his rocker. Their ship Mind pretty much concurs, but holds true to the principle that Linter is individually free to make dumb choices.
Author-as-storyteller comes before, and has more basic influence, than author-as-worldbuilder. I'm aware that the Culture and (strongly imputed in the work) Banks didn't think that work creates humanity or that deadly struggle creates humanity. But the stories that didn't involve deadly struggle just weren't worth telling, as stories.
Since the whole thing is a story, you can't really get away from that effect.
I'm not critiquing it as a lack of practical plans -- I'm saying that by setting it up as he did, he avoided having to take on various narrative burdens of common anarchist problems being addressed. By doing so, the work became a little bit of everything to everyone in anarchist circles: people think of it as not taking the kind of doctrinal position that they criticize other anarchists for.
@richpuchalsky It's late and I'm running out of brains.
Would it be fair to summarise your point as:
"It is inconsistent for someone to critique other people's anarchist doctrines whilst uncritically enjoying the Culture Series"
Or are people actually actively citing the Culture in these doctrinal discussions?
Or am I completely missing the point? In which case I apologise and thank you for your patience.
I'm primarily doing literary criticism in the sense of trying to help people observe how a body of work creates a particular effect -- in this case, the effect of appealing to everyone with anarchist sensibilities -- and why that doesn't work in most anarchist conversations.
@richpuchalsky I've only read a few of the Culture books, and I was too young to have seen those as anarchist themes. However, I'm really tempted now to go back and do it through that lense.
Also, sign me up for the "luxury space communism" as soon as possible, please, and thank you.
@richpuchalsky Yes. See also Surface Detail; and, going the other side of the M again, Complicity shows (I think) that Iain saw male sexual violence as very much the original sin.
It's fine that he thinks that: criticisms of patriarchy are a large part of anarchism. But -- he wrote a society in which people could change sex / gender (I get confused in this context about which is meant) at will, and in which this is still a basic underlying problem. It just sort of suggests that something hasn't been worked through in his universe.
Somewhere I have a thread about a time sequence of 4 SF books that wrote about trans-ness.
1/2
Le Guin's was the earliest of the 4 and also probably the best, because she really seemed to trust herself to write a different society in which this could work out differently, and the 3 other (male) authors all came down on "if you're born male you're born into patriarchal attitudes" in societies where that wouldn't seem to hold.
@richpuchalsky Going to disagree on two grounds.
Firstly, Inversions, which is a Culture novel, is basically a story about two separate interpersonal conflicts -- that between the two Culture agents, and that between the leaders of the two factions they serve.
Secondly, most of Iain's non-Culture books are all about inter-personal conflicts, and I think the distinction people make about M versus non M Iain Banks books is greatly exaggerated.
He's the same author, he has the same vision.
What I mean by interpersonal conflicts are things that don't involve people being killed. That leaves out almost all his books, with an M or without.
Like, what would be a major interpersonal conflict in the Culture universe? Something like friend jealousy: "you're spending too much time with them and not enough with me". That's what he meant by a soap opera, I think.
Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝
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