“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” said Benjamin Franklin, who ought to have known as a highly successful businessman and politician. But the world no longer rewards us directly for our knowledge and intellect, or to put it another way, merit is no longer the metric, or even among the metrics now valued.
The academic system, which rightly in the past faced accusations of being a redoubt of privilege for certain demographics, is broken and all the attempts to fix it appear only to be breaking it further in some regards. The marketisation of higher education in places like Britain and America has led to reliance on precarious underpaid staff, the primacy of student as customer or client, and the incessant rise of a class of highly remunerated apparatchiks who dictate market values to academia.
Today I saw yet another inspiring and astonishing colleague out of work. Someone with multiple well-regarded books to their name, the recipient of international scholarships, with experience teaching in multiple countries. There’s no merit in this. If people like that are dispensable, one becomes baffled to see those who remain in position, despite losing fortunes in speculative ventures like foreign campuses, rash restructuring of institutions, and declining standards and institutional reputations.
Academia has really sickened me in the past few years. I’ve seen some truly horrendous things. Professors without doctoral theses. People who have literally never published a paper criticising the work of colleagues with multiple monographs. Demands that extend into the weekend, the evening, days off and even when staff are literally hospitalised from overwork.
I’ve seen some astonishing people laid off and let go from academic posts. Truly inspiring teachers, highly qualified, whose research is globally renowned. I’ve also seen cabals of admins backslap each other with ridiculous pay increases for shuffling reports back and forth at each other.
I don’t know how it can be fixed, or if it can, and I don’t know if everywhere is as bad as things appear to be in Britain. Maybe they’re actually worse elsewhere. The system is broken though, and if we don’t fix it we will literally enter a dark age – a time of ignoring experts, not checking facts, considering preening on social media to be preferable to learning about the world. At times I feel we are already deep into that process.
Today, I offer solidarity to my many colleagues worldwide, the ones who got hounded out, the ones who wouldn’t put up with it anymore, the ones who are still being ground down and bullied by the apparatchiks, the ones who literally died too young as a result of overwork. It’s all I have to offer, alas. But I can’t change the system. Only all of us can.
SF often envisages a post-religious future. In other words, it often fails to foresee a role for religion in the futures it imagines. Far from always, which is what you might think from most SF criticism, but certainly a lot of the time.
Usually, this is just by simple omission. There is a kind of unexplored assumption of societal evolution that runs from multi-religious (including non-religious as a range of strands among the range of religious strands) present to monothematic post-religious future (often fully automated luxury communism enabled by post-scarcity) without ever explaining the intervening steps.
I wondered if it helps to understand how a post-religious future might come about by considering how a religious past came about out of a pre-religious past. In other words, was there a time before religion, and how was it?
This question arose in my mind when I was reading about Çatalhöyük, widely considered to be possibly the world’s oldest town.
The site in rural Turkey at its peak during the Neolithic era contained a population in the thousands, and there is clear evidence that even at that early moment in human civilisation, ritualistic behaviour was a significant part of people’s lives.
Exactly what that was, is hard to tell. Some people think the town’s residents were goddess worshippers, others feel it was a cult of masculinity, focused on fighting bulls and bears. Mostly, the evidence is open to wide interpretation, but the nature of burials, the room adornments, the special ‘history houses’ and especially the wall art all seem to suggest ritualistic practices, if not actually spiritual ones.
But at what point does ritual activity become religious devotion? There are various schools of thought on that, which I won’t delve into here, but one rule of thumb is the development of dogma and doctrine, ie precepts which are passed down from generation to generation in terms of behavioural proscription, narratives, or a cosmological understanding.
In Çatalhöyük, this may have occurred about half way through the site’s settlement, at around 6500BC, when building use changed, modes of burial and adornment changed, and the site slowly began to depopulate.
Debate has gone back and forth as to what the cosmology or beliefs of the people of Çatalhöyük might have been. Were they goddess worshippers as James Mellaart and Maria Gimbutas believed? Animists? Ancestor worshippers? Shamanistic? A cult of masculine leopard, bear and bull fetishists? One particular opinion stood out to me. M. Bloch wrote a book chapter entitled “Is there religion at Catalhoyuk . . .or are there just houses?” Intriguingly, he concludes there were just houses.
So can we speak of human civilisation BEFORE religion? If so, what do we mean by that? And if we can speak of human civilisation before religion, does that give us any clues, however dim and distant the archeology may be, as to what civilisation AFTER religion might look like?
Furthermore, Bloch’s position is heavily contested, and many scholars insist in various ways, basing their arguments on evidence such as the burial practices, figurines, wall paintings and animal skulls, that religious practice WAS central to the residents of Çatalhöyük some 8,000 years ago.
Fundamentally, in terms of religious futurism, the question I’m asking is whether religious faith is somehow inherent to the human psyche, or at least to sufficient human psyches in any particular polity to make it a significant presence?
We can see from the histories of the great atheistic communist regimes of the twentieth century, all of which sought to suppress religion and clergy of various ilks, that religion in recent times has proved strangely resilient under state disapproval, despite Weber’s disenchantment of society and the slow ebbing away of faith practitioners in Western countries with freedom of worship.
Most SF, as I noted above, tends to envisage a future without room for faith, often predicated on the Enlightenment idea that eventually science will provide answers to our deepest questions. These ubiquitous attempts to depict a future without religion in some senses may well be the most speculative and imaginative SF concepts of all.
More intriguing to me are the narratives in which SF alterities, whether artificial life or alien, emerge with either an attachment to terrestrial religion or else a faith format of their own. These seem to me to be more plausible than the idea that society will at some point casually jettison as retrograde the accumulated cultural capital and transcendence attached to the faith experience.
They are also more plausible than Bloch’s suggestion that houses which contained the bodies of ancestors, imagistic figurines, animal heads and other non-practical items were as he says “just houses”.
Maybe human civilisation and the religious impetus (setting aside its truth content as being a matter for the individual to invest in or not, as the case may be) are intrinsically entwined. We can presume that religiosity predated Çatalhöyük.
Even if we accept that Çatalhöyük was, as Bloch argues, “just houses”, it eventually fell into disuse as a residential site and that region of Turkey is today rather devoutly Islamic (having experienced no doubt many differing religious beliefs in the interim). Let’s agree with him and accept that they were, as far as we can tell, non-religious. Who knows what faiths or beliefs lurked in the hearts of those who, like devout Orthodoxy during the Soviet era, kept their dangerous thoughts to themselves?
If religion is somehow inherently human, would becoming truly post-religious require us as a species to become truly posthuman? Could we, in fact, define posthumanism in terms of non-religiosity? Must we become posthuman in order to become post-religious? And how might we do that?
There was for a time (it is always only for a time) a funny meme which skewered the ubiquity of Harry Potter references among a certain cohort of society, sometimes identified generationally as millennials, other times identified by political affiliation, as liberals. (Neither of these identifications in truth map very well, incidentally.)
The meme responded to such referencing by demanding that the referencer “READ ANOTHER BOOK.” It’s funny, or at least it was way back when, not because it suggested that referencers had only read Harry Potter and nothing else. In terms of quotation and convoluted metaphors and linkages, both the Collected Shakespeare and the Bible have generated many single-book citers in their time.
No, it’s funny because, unlike Shakespeare or the Bible, the limited remit of a children’s book series about a schoolboy wizard has to undergo often significant semantic stretching to accommodate some of the parallels that were suggested. It’s never ideal to explain jokes, so let me illustrate:
Generally these parallels are political. And in fairness, the Potterverse is not without its own politicking, from the formal politics of the Ministry of Magic, the geopolitics of ‘Fantastic Beasts…’, and the fascist implications of Voldemort rule, to personal politics like Dumbledore’s closeted queerness or the construction of non-nuclear families. The books at times were very long. They’re not entirely without content, even political content.
But the parallels became so common, so ubiquitous on social media, and also to be honest, at times so risible, that even the esteemed Washington Post felt obliged to add its weight to the ‘read another book’ school of thought.
It was perhaps inevitable, given that the graduate student essay has now become almost as common a mode of expression for some of the Harry Potter generation as a half-thought out tweet, that eventually this mode of analysing world events through the prism of Harry Potter fandom would emerge.
It has not disappointed, I would argue. The one that led me down this particular line of pondering was entitled “Wizards First: The Muggle and Mudblood Crisis Reflecting the Rohingya Crisis”. I may not be alone in questioning the taste, if not the sincerity, of such an extended parallel. It comes from a sub-genre of Potter-political academic analysis of which the exemplary is surely “Voldemort Politics“.
In short, this is such a prevalent mode of cultural analysis, that I am somewhat surprised that Potter as Critical Lens does not yet have a name. In which spirit of helpfulness, I propose – Potternism.
We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a forthcoming collection of essays on the broad topic of Religious Futurisms, to be edited by Sumeyra Buran Utku and Jim Clarke.
Religious Futurisms derives its intellectual inspiration from the emergence of Afrofuturism and other Alternative Futurisms as ideological and analytical frameworks in recent years. Religious Futurisms can manifest as ideology, criticality, prophecy, futurology, philosophy or artistic practice. They may be discerned in a wide range of forms, ranging from speculative theology to performative videogame interaction to abstract or polysemous imagery in visual art.
Fundamentally global and interdisciplinary in nature, Religious Futurisms encompass not only attempts within theology to reframe and examine faith-based futures, but also the lengthy tradition of revelatory knowledge forms as theme and mode within speculative fiction and other texts and formats of speculative artistic expression, such as film, television, music, gaming, comics, graphic novels, visual and conceptual art, theatre and poetry.
Faith-related themes and narratives have proliferated in speculative fiction since its earliest manifestations, and feature heavily in some of SF’s most popular and influential texts, such as Dune, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. However, Marxist and materialist modes of academic critical analysis have tended to shy away from addressing Religious Futurisms. This volume of essays seeks to address that gap in scholarship.
In this first attempt to codify and taxonomise the various strands and manifestations of Religious Futurism, the editors invite abstracts for essays which address any of the following topics:
Futurological approaches to existing terrestrial religions in artistic expression.
Futuristic approaches to theology.
The depiction of religion or faith in speculative artforms.
The intersection of Religious Futurism with other Futurisms, such as Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Chicanofuturism and so on.
The intersection of Religious Futurism with other emancipatory ideological modes of analysis, such as gender studies, queer studies, critical race theory, disability studies, etc.
Religious futurism and utopia or dystopia.
Posthumanism or Transhumanism and Religious Futurism.
Cyberpunk and Religious Futurism.
Islamofuturisms, Sufi Futurism, and their relationships with Gulf Futurisms.
Judeofuturisms.
Futurisms of Christianity.
Futurisms of religions of sub-continental origin – Hindufuturism, Buddhist futurism, Sikh futurism, etc.
Religious Sinofuturism and other East Asian religious futurisms, such as Taoist Futurism and Confucian Futurism.
Religious Futurism in Techno-Orientalism.
Indigenous belief futurisms and Shamanic futurisms.
Mystical, Esoteric and Mythic Futurisms which relate to religious belief.
The depiction, reception, repurposing or Alienating (attributing to aliens) of antiquated or ancient faith systems (Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Nordic, Greco-Roman, Animist, etc) in futuristic cultural works.
Invented religions and theology in speculative fiction and speculative artforms.
The development of real-world faith practices out of speculative fiction and other speculative artistic genres, for example Jediism.
Conceptualisations of Alien or Artificial Intelligence revelatory practices, faiths and religions.
Messianics, Apocalypse, Rapture, Chiliasm, Millenarism, or other faith future endpoints in speculative artforms and fiction.
Speculative religious cosmology and cosmogony.
Speculative exegetical forms, such as Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, or Erich Von Däniken’s paleo-contact Biblical hypotheses.
Conversion, proselytising and dogma in religious futurisms.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a 100 word bio and affiliation by December 1st 2021. We aim to inform successful contributors by January 31st 2022, and completed drafts of 5,000 – 7,500 words will be required by May 31st 2022.
In that they offer uncomfortable seating and there’s usually some guy ranting incoherently while everyone else avoids eye contact.
Also, you wait ages for one and then a whole bunch arrive at once.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, relating primarily to parenthood, emigration and writing commitments, I’d not actually been to a conference in over a year, until I was invited to take part in this excellent one-day event on Literature, Cultural Studies, and Translation. It was my first conference held in Cyberspace, so I finally got to experience the Zoom fatigue everyone else has been complaining about for 18 months.
Speaking on Nadsat in translation alongside Benet Vincent.
Anyhow, it was an excellent, eclectic and engaging experience, for which I must thank the organisers at Cappadocia University. And it has spurred me into action to do a few more. Often, one thing which precluded attending conferences was the same reason which rendered them appealing – that you had to visit a different location. The upside to Zoom-fatigue conferencing is the same as the downside – it can and will be done from one’s back bedroom. So, newly emboldened, I’ve re-engaged on the conference circuit and have a few abstracts accepted already for the forthcoming year, primarily on religious futurism topics.
Next up is an especially busy conference, as I’ll be presenting not one but two papers in two days. I’d link to SFRA 2021, except you have to be a member and pay to attend. If that is you, then please pop in to listen to my papers. I hope you find them interesting.
I’ve already mentioned the first paper here, which will examine Israel in Alt-History. The other relates to my long-running SF and Buddhism project and takes us up to the Sixties:
There is, of course, four days worth of exceptional SF research, not to mention roundtables, keynotes and discussion. If you’re not an SFRA member, you should definitely consider joining and (virtually) coming along to the conference. There are too many papers I’m looking forward to hearing (childminding permitting) but most of all I’m excited about my fellow panel members. I’m on two amazing panels, one on Israel and Palestine in SF and one on religious futurisms.
We might even have a little announcement to make too. More of that after the event.
There is to be an odd little celebration this month, in Folkestone of all places, to commemorate its visitation by, and subsequent nuptials therein of, Samuel Beckett.
Beckett married his long-term partner, as we now know due to a series of excellent biographies, in curious circumstances. He was embroiled in a serious relationship with a BBC producer at the time.
Beckett with Mme Beckett
Ostensibly, marrying Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in March 1961 was intended to achieve the aim of ensuring her inheritance of his copyrights. As it happened, she ended up dying about six months before him, in 1989.
The curiosity pertains to Beckett’s decision to marry after nearly three decades of relationship, at the very moment when he was most involved in a separate relationship with an entirely different woman.
The organisers of the festival in Folkestone aim to give voice to those surrounding the events of the marriage, including the perspective of a journalist thrown off the scent, and a witness to the wedding itself.
It’s fun, original and embedded theatre, doing what theatre can do best, which is dramatise our stories back to ourselves. Samuel Beckett’s mysterious marriage took place in Folkestone, and it is great that they can now include this odd intrusion from the world of absurdist theatre and continenal intellectuals as one of their own stories, for it is that too.
It’s especially gratifying to see oneself mentioned, not only in Chiara Crosignani’s conference report about “Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them”, from Genzano a couple of years ago, but also in Derek Thiess’s imaginative and very current article about preppers and the apocalypse.
As always, there’s a bumper smorgasbord of non-realist writing to be enjoyed, from the Gothic to SF, from Britain’s haunted forests to Stanislaw Lem. Over 280 pages in fact!
I’m personally saving up, like a child hoarding his easter egg, their review of the Korean SF anthology Readymade Bodhisattva for after I finish reading the collection.
Fantastika is always an excellent read, and in these days of outrageous access charges for academic research, it’s delightfully free to read.
Okay, it perhaps might not carry the same cultural weight as rediscovering Aristotle’s volume on comedy, or Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ early poetry, or James Joyce’s lost stageplay.
But in terms of sheer unexpectedness, it’s on a par with hearing of the existence of Ernest Hemingway’s secret gay erotica, Franz Kafka’s rediscovered techno thriller, or Sylvia Plath’s long forgotten shopping and fucking chicklit.
Actually, it’s even less likely than all of those. But, we are assured, nevertheless, it exists.
Such is the proliferation of social media platforms nowadays that I kind of gave up some time ago trying to keep up. I don’t do Twitter, or Insta or Tiktok. I’m on Facebook largely out of habit and because it’s where I can find a lot of the people I often need to find relatively quickly.
I’d love to say I got burnt by Bebo or something, but really it’s just a combination of laziness, and a desire for order. It’s also one of the reasons why I’ve finally (after a decade of owning the domain) launched this site.
I can tell by the stats that having one’s own webpage, especially as an academic, is probably not the most effective outreach methodology. But it suits me, as it gives me a degree of control, and allows me to archive things.
Am I a luddite? Perhaps (definitely in many ways, only perhaps in this though.)
Therefore I have great respect for those, like Grammar Girl, who have embraced the changes and the platforms and found successful ways to communicate with new audiences.
And I have great gratitude when such people share the love with those of us who don’t have their magical powers.
