You Will Never Own a Jetpack: Warren Ellis’ Doktor Sleepless by Steven Shaviro

From doktorsleepless

From Warren Ellis' Site[1]:

The New Narrative? Comics in Literature, Film and Art — a conference over May 10 and 11 at the University of Toronto.

Features Steven Shaviro’s presentation “’You Will Never Own a Jetpack’: Warren Ellis’ Science Fiction Comics” (on the Saturday, 3A, 1:30pm):

This paper looks at the science fiction comics of Warren Ellis: Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, and the currently ongoing series Doktor Sleepless. These comics are about the social effects of new technologies. They bring us a wavering and uncertain vision of a highly technologized future, and ponder the possibilities of change in a world pervaded by a sense that the future itself has largely been played out.

Steven Shaviro[2][3] is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism (1997), and Connected, Or, What It Means To Live in the Network Society (2003).

Transcription from Steven Shaviro's lecture:

You Will Never Own a Jetpack: Warren Ellis’ Doktor Sleepless

<slide 1: Titlepage>

“Someone stole your future. Don’t you ever wonder who?” This is one of the taglines for Warren Ellis’ current science fiction series, Doktor Sleepless (illustrated by Ivan Rodriguez). I’d like to use this comic in order to think about a certain difficulty we have in imagining the future – or perhaps I should say envisioning the future, of what the future looks like.

<slide 2: Doktor Sleepless>

Warren Ellis writes science fiction comics (among other genres) because, he says, science fiction is :a toll with which to understand the contemporary world.” Science fiction does not predict the future, so much as it extrapolates from the “futurity” that is already implicit in our present. Ellis also downplays the importance of plot in genre writing, saying that plot is merely “the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.” Ellis’ science fiction comics endeavor to invent personalities or characters, and explore ideas, that are “as radical as reality itself,” and that are suited for a time when (as Donna Haraway wrote more than twenty years ago) “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” Ellis’ science fiction comics explore the junction between the mundane and the surreal, between cultural and technological invention and corporate cooptation, between expectation and disappointment, and between the plausible and the impossible.

We live in a world of astonishing, radical change. New technologies have already changed the world in ways so vast as to beyond the powers of science fiction writers to conceive. Information and communication technologies, from phone and internet connections to surveillance cams to GPS have reshaped the world in the past twenty years. Biotechnology and nanotechnology are next. These changes have taken place both on a personal level (how I use a mobile phone and the Internet, for instance) and on a larger social scale (the global economy, with its industrial production dispersed around the globe, and with trading in currencies and derivatives happening instantaneously, 24/7). The result is that the world I live in today is inconceivably distant from the one that I was into in 1954, let alone the one that the early modernists faced (and that they already found to be convulsive) at the start of the 20th century.

Nonetheless, now, in the early 21st century, this relentless change feels a lot like stasis. Even though new technologies so in fact give us new capacities, it is hard not to feel them as just being changes in fashion. Our society is increasingly on, as Ernst Bloch put it long ago, of “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything out to be constantly, new, everything remains just as it was…merely endless, contentless zigzag.” It is if we had become numb to change, by virtue of overexposure; as if we were suffering from something like “novelty fatigue.” One way to put this is in terms of the discordance between the changes that have actually occurred, and out continuing image of what the future should be like, of what actually constitutes its “futurity.” Our imagination of change is entirely out of sync with our actual technological accomplishments. This is reflected in the ways that they “futures” of years past seems quaint, démodé, and hopelessly obsolete, at the same time that they promise revolution in our lives that still remain far beyond out capabilities.

<slide 3: Metropolis> In 1927, the future looked like this.

<slide 4: Seattle Worlds Fair> In 1962, the future looked like this.

<slide 5: Blade Runner> In 1982, the future looked like this.

<slide 6:Dubai> Today, in 2008, the future looks like this….

<slide 7: Heavenside> … or perhaps this.

Of course, I am only giving a selection here; I am alternating back and forth between “utopian” and “dystopian” takes on urban futures. But I think all these images, even the contemporary ones, gives is a double sense: promises not yet kept, on the one hand, and of visions whose times have already passed, on the other. There are several reasons for this, I think. Part of it has to do with the relation between individual well-being and social change. New technologies have affected out individual well-being – at least for those of “us” in the more affluent portions of the world – in all sorts of ways. And in fact they hae also affected global social, political, and economic relations in all sorts of ways. But they haven’t led to the kind of reorganization and regeneration that these futuristic visions, with their fantastic architecture, seem to promise us.

The time between when a new technology appears as a novelty, and when it has retreadtred into being just a humdrum, taken-for-granted feature of everyday life, gets shorter and shorter. The radical transformation wrought by technology insinuate themselves into our lives almost unnoticed – because of how quickly we go from no even knowing about these new possibilities to taking them entirely for granted. Take the example of mobile phones. Twenty-five years ago, when William Gibson was inventing cyberpunk with his first novel, Neuromancer, he imagined brain implants that could directly convey to us the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace; but he failed to imagine anything like mobile phones or GPS or other “locative” technologies (which have played a large role in his more recent fiction). Fifteen years ago, almost nobody had a mobile phone. Now, almost nobody is without them, and they are so familiar as to have fallen into the category of cliché.

Mobile phones have penetrated both North American suburbs and Brazilian favelas – but they are vastly different ways in these different settings. Recent economic and socio-political developments have, if anything widened the gap between them. It is estimated that, with the next decade or two, over half of the human population will live in cities – for the first time in human history. But the growth will be mostly in what Mike Davis calls “global slums”: favelas and shantytowns and temporary dwellings in areas with no government services, and other precarious physical conditions. These are far from the visionary architectures (even the dystopian ones, dating back to the regimented underground city of the workers in Metropolis) that have long defined out visions of the futures. Even as we look past the limitations of the present, we seem unable to imagine the futurity that is already upon us.

This may be why, even as everything changes, it increasingly feels to us as if nothing does. We have a sense that the future itself (as a category) has largely been played out, or all used up. In the eternal “now” of globalized commodity capitalism, there is innovation galore, but no longer any room for radical differences or for wonder. Futurism – whether in the form of new technological devices, or of deviant subcultural invention – increasingly becomes just a matter of style and product design. On the largest scale, the only future – the only radical difference – we seem able to imagine is an apocalyptic one, i.e. a future fashionable in the 1980s, the Age of Reagan? Aside from some catastrophe putting an end to it all, marketing and advertising and new product introductions will just go on and on. As Slavoj Zizek has put it “today it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest change in capitalism. ”

<slide 8: Doktor Sleepless>

This is one of the issues that Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez address in Doktor Sleepless. It’s an ongoing long-form series; only the first six issues have been published so far, so I don’t really know where the book is going – I can only give you some preliminary observations. The book takes place in the near future, in an American city known (ironically enough) as Heavenside. It’s lodged between a giant lake and the mountains. Ellis has set up several websites in conjunction with the book. There’s a wiki on which fans can add facts and speculation about the book; a blog dealing with new “grinder” technologies (body modification primarily, one of the comic’s main themes) and (apparently) a hidden bulletin board/community (which I have not found as of yet).

The opening premise of Doktor Sleepless is precisely the technological double bind that I have been describing. Ellis has published a brief “manifesto” in which he describes what the comic is about: You are never going into space. You will never own a jetpack. Your car will never fly. HIV will not be cured in your lifetime. Cancer will not be cured in your lifetime. The common cold will not be cured in your lifetime. Don’t these things bother you?

Suicide is the third biggest killer of teenagers in the United States. In 1999 more people in America died from suicide that from homicide. Do you think about this?

As anyone who has ever read MyDeathSpace.com for any period of time knows, the leading cause of death in American is automobile accident. This is generally interpolated into a number placed under the heading “accidental death.” When the operation of cars in the leading cause of loss of life I’m not entirely sure how it comes under the term “accidental death.” It wasn’t a fucking accident, it was done by someone with a car. It’s 2007 and we don’t how to operate cars without killing people. It’s not a fucking accident if it was caused by someone getting into a one-ton metal bullet that cannot be operated with complete control at all times.

In Europe in 2004, 13000 kids – persons under the age of fourteen – died due to poor water. It’s 2007 and the society does not yet understand how to operate water.

Are you thinking about this now?

People keep asking me what DOKTOR SLEEPLESS is about. This is what it’s a bout.

Someone stole your future. Don’t you even wonder who?

<slide 9: Where’s my jetpack?>

In the world of Doktor Sleepless, people complain, “where’s my jetpack? where’s my flying car?”; but they fail to even notice how much they have been altered by stuff they take for granted: technologies like ubiquitous, mobile instant messaging (which, in the world of the comic, is in a state that is just barely beyond what we actually have today). Thus Ellis looks at the contrast between shiny, high-concept SF of the past, and the way that technological innovation is already, much more quietly and unassumingly, worming its ways into our lives in ways that are far more profound, precisely because they are less spectacularly noticeable. “You live in the future and you don’t know it… You can tell people where you are today and what it looks like in seconds, no matter where they are… You can rebuild your own fucking bodies at home with stuff you bought at the hardware store… The future sneaks up on us, it leaks in through the small, ordinary things.”

<slide 10: John Reinhardt becomes Doktor Sleepless>

The eponymous protagonist of Doktor Sleepless is a self-described “cartoon mad scientist” figure. He explains, on the first page of the first issue, that he has “become a [fictional] character”; for “people like listening to characters. Characters are safe, because they are not real. ” Originally this man was John Reinhardt, eccentric techie and occult enthusiast (or perhaps not; there are several possible John Reinhardts in the pages of Doktor Sleepless, and we don’t know thus far which, if any, is the “real” one) By putting on the masquerade o0f a cartoon character, Doktor Sleepless hopes to slip under people’s radar, and to change Heavenside in ways that are themselves quite real, and quite serious indeed. In the the midst of pulling high-tech pranks and broadcasting delirious rants over the radio, he hints at having a “terrible prescription” for curing our “non-future” malaise, and even announces (in the most recent Issue) his intention to take Heavenside and “burn it all down... Because this is not the future we were promised … And if we can’t have that, then we shouldn’t have anything at all.” In this way, Doktor Sleepless expresses the nihilistic, apocalyptic “cyberpunk” attitude that (as I have already suggested) seems to be the only way in which we can still imagine futurity.

<slide 11: Shrieky Girls>

But at the same time, Doktor Sleepless is all about DIY low tech, of the sort that has already changed our world, more profoundly perhaps than we have even noticed. Thus issue two of Doktor Sleepless introduces us to the “Shrieky Girls” – young women who have tiny haptic devices on their hands or arms, connected to a ubiquitous instant messaging system that they can access through their contact lenses. The result is that they can share not just words, but perceptions and senses. When one of the Shrieky Girls takes a boy (or girl) home with them, then the next morning “it’s all of them who share the modemed sensation of warm arm closed softly around them.” So “Shrieky Girls are never alone; they live in a invisible web of constant secret conversation, transmitting raw feelings like they were texting notes.” What’s brilliant about all this is that it’s barely even science fiction. It’s only a step beyond what is already technologically feasible today. In the world of the story, this technology isn’t even spectacular. It is merely something cobbled together out of already obsolete components and second-hand networking links. “The Shrieky Girl system is literally just half a dozen abandoned objects and cheap electronic rigging.” it is light-weight, cheap and almost impalpable. Unlike jet packs and flying cars, it is nearly invisible. Yet it messes with our ideas about selfhood and privacy, and the boundaries between self and other, more profoundly than the more flashy technologies of science fiction past had ever done.

<slide 12: Grinders>

Doktor Sleepless spends a lot of time what it calls “grinder” culture, the culture of DIY body modification. This extends from the tattoos, piercings, and genital modifications that are already widely practiced today (and which Warren Ellis is often documents on this blog, with links to excruciating penile piercings and the like, and the warning, “Don’t look”) to cyborg technologies like that of the Shrieky Girls, to other sorts of things like neural implants, RFID chips embedded under the skin, and even more extreme body modifications.

<slide 13: Be Someone New Every Day>

There’s a philosophy behind grinder culture, and it’s expounded by Doktor Sleepless in one of his rants over the radio. It has to do with the difference between authenticity and self-fashioning. “Bob Dylan’s authenticity was entirely constructed,” Doktor Sleepless says. “Bob Dylan and Superman are the greatest American myths of the last century… Who the hell wants to be real? … Authenticity is bullshit… We can be anyone we imagine being. We can be someone new everyday… Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be mad scientists. Here at the end of the world, it’s the only thing worth doing.”

<slide 14: Not Possible>

This is a stirring manifesto. But it necessarily runs into a kind of paradox that always shadows self experimentation. If I am experimenting on myself, is it the same person who runs the experiments and who is experimented on? Because the process involves self-modifying feedback, it cannot really be controlled. For my freedom to alter myself necessarily involves the risk that, once I have made these alterations, I will be a different person, a different “I” than the one who started out doing them. This seems to be what is happening to Doktor Sleepless himself; on the evidence of the few episodes published so far, it appears that he is not as much in control of his project, and his persona, as he would like to be. He is obsessing paranoiacally over the murder of Max Cale, a former associate, unaware that his bodyguard, “Nurse Igor” is in fact (with good reason) the killer. And in the last issue to date, (#6), Doktor Sleepless himself starts seeing apparitions of angels, some that he had earlier described as a symptom he was instigating in the populace. The prankster/shaman/provocateur is starting to discover that he is by no means exempt from his own provocations…

<slide 15: Fetus Pendant>

Sometimes we revel in the sorts of the self-modifications and self-disturbances; at other times we are terrified by them. You never know in advance just where the breaking point will be. In the opening pages of the first issue of Doktor Sleepless, a woman confronts her ex by showing him the tiny fetus of theirs that she aborted, encased, and transformed into jewelry. He freaks out and immediately kills himself – though it is also suggested that [it] may have something to do with imbalances in his meds, or even with Doktor Sleepless’ malign influence. Again, in issues 4 and 5, people start coming down with “St. Theresa’s Eyes,” a malady in which they have seizures after they start to see strange and terrifying visions that materialize out of thin air, or out of storms, or out of the darkness. Apparently this is a “designer disease: tailored infections, experimental virri, exotic prescriptions”: some that Doktor Sleepless didn’t exactly create, but which he admits to having “opened the door for.”

<slide 16: Tomorrow>

Doktor Sleepless, like all the best science fiction, exhumes and exhibits the futurity, the potentiality, the not-yet-but-almost, that is already a part of our present. For the “present moment” is never complete and pure; it is haunted by the future with which it is, as it were, pregnant (whether or not it ever will give birth to it), as much as it is by the past whose traces it is unable to erase. And this is something that the comics medium, by virtue of its difference both from prose fiction, on the one hand, and from film and television, on the other, is especially suited to explore. Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez concerned with the “look and feel” (both literal/visual, and more metaphorical) of the extrapolated future; they present it with iconic, resonant images, in such a way that (as Ellis describes Rodriguez’s visual style) “everything seems hyper-real, is you like – too strange and graceful to be completely real.” There’s an apocalyptic menace oozing from the pages of Doktor Sleepless. Yet, at the same time, what is presented is a stealth future, very different from the one of jet packs and flying cars, but in a way much more radical – precisely because it happends before we are fully able to take notice. [I]n Doktor Sleepless, the mirco-affects and micro-politics of technologists that have insinuated themselves within our lives pretty much without a splash (albeit with lots of marketing hoopla) are exposed, dramatized, and made subject to the harsh security of genre fiction.