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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:19
Okay, for our final talk for today, I am very happy to announce Eden Kuppermanns.
00:25
He's working at the Utopia Festival and is based in Tel Aviv, and which is very nice to hear, he's also passionate about science fiction. Welcome Eden.
00:43
Okay, is this on? Yes, it is. Wow, okay. So, hi. As our moderator said, my name is Eden. I'm soon to be 29. I study in Tel Aviv University. I'm doing my MA in general history, which actually means European history. We'll talk about that in a second. My BA is in philosophy and history.
01:03
One of my professors from the BA, whom I hate, always told me to never apologize when you're giving a talk. So just to piss him off, I'm going to start with three apologies. The first one is that later on in the talk, I will be giving some examples of science fiction. Now, I would like to admit my ignorance of non-Western science fiction,
01:24
and just say that those fields are massive. French science fiction, Chinese science fiction, Japanese, Eastern Europe, and all over the globe. These examples are just those that are closer to my heart. The second apology is to the thinkers that I will quote, because I will completely butcher their theory for the sake of brevity.
01:41
And I encourage you to go online. All of these texts are by unfortunately deceased people, and some of them have been released to the public domain, so you can read them all for yourself. And the last apology is to you, because I will be covering some basic terminology. And if any of you are familiar with them, then I apologize for repeating things that you already know.
02:01
That being said, let's get started. What am I here today to tell you, or convince you, or even sell you? I'm really grateful to be giving this talk on the second day, because I heard many speakers, Julia and Eva, who gave an excellent talk before us, Richard Sennett, who spoke yesterday, and others,
02:20
say that there needs to be new thinking about what a city is. And I couldn't agree more. But what are the blueprints which we can use to rethink this very basic idea that governs the way that we live? I'm here to tell you that science fiction represents a source for those blueprints.
02:42
It's not the only source, but it's definitely one which is accessible to all. So the way we will be doing this is by following this trail. Our first stop will be postmodernism. I will talk very briefly about what postmodernism is, and even try and create something which one of my professors, whom I like,
03:04
called the bumper sticker version of postmodernism. Then we will talk about urbanism. And I will ask the question, what is urbanism? And how can we use it to be radical? And lastly, we will answer that question by looking at science fiction.
03:21
Okay? So that's the plan for today. Let's get started. So the first stop that we have is the bumper sticker version of postmodernism. Now, there's a reason I chose this image, because it's not actually a pun. It looks like a pun, but it relies on the fact that you don't know how to pronounce Immanuel Kant's name. It's not Kant, which is what the pun is supposedly meant to be.
03:43
But it's Kant. However, and I apologize in advance if I'm offending anyone, if you're American and you read it, the pun works. This drives the point home which postmodernism would like to make. There is no such thing as objective knowledge devoid of context.
04:00
Everything depends on the eyes of the observer who reads the sentence. Now, is that to say that I am a college student having a mind-blown moment that nothing exists? No, the sentence clearly exists. But the meaning which you derive from it depends on your perception of reality. Now, is that perception of reality naive?
04:23
Is it free of outside influences that would like to shape the way which you see the world? Of course not. You are constantly being shaped by the forms around you. You are all sitting very nicely now and being quiet while I'm talking because I'm the authority figure.
04:40
If you would want to ask a question, you would raise your hand. When was the last time anyone enforced these rules to you? Way back when, when you were in kindergarten. Ever since then, you have been silently modeled to fit these structures. And who does the modeling? Power. More than that, power is the modeling.
05:02
The power structure in this room doesn't make the chairs in these neat rows. It is the neat rows. And what this power does is it activates other forces at little cost to itself that monitor and cultivate society. Now, you can just take society, cross it off, and fill it in with anything you want.
05:23
This room, your life, your relationship, school, work, whatever, society, the city. Power doesn't need to operate on you. There is no police officer here or someone from the convention telling you how to sit. And yet, here you are.
05:42
It activates other forces like shame, anger, hate, and positive forces as well, like happiness, love, compassion, to make sure that you follow the structures which make it live. This is the bumper sticker version of postmodernism.
06:02
And believe me, it's a bumper sticker. There's a lot of side questions that can be asked, like what is power? Who is power? How does power operate? The question that I would like to focus on is how can we resist power? How can we make sure that these hidden forces,
06:20
which we have no control over, shape our lives into ways which we find optimal? Now, this train of thought, called postmodernism as a very general term, is essentially an urban train of thought. All its speakers, thinkers, and writers grew up in the city.
06:45
And that's no accident. It's postmodern. And the modern experience is entirely influenced by the city. Ever since the 12th century, and we won't go into the history side of things now, ever since the 12th century, cities in Europe, but also in China, in Turkey, and other places,
07:04
became exceedingly, if not the main ways in which we live our lives, the main influencer on how we live. Even the villager living outside of the city would sell his produce inside the city. So it's no wonder that postmodernism is urbanism.
07:24
And when we say it is urbanism, what do we mean? It is the way in which we think about being, living, producing in the city. What you see here is a picture. This guy is Michel Foucault. This guy is Jean-Paul Sartre, two great French thinkers.
07:43
And what they're doing here is taking part in a protest. This protest was in 1972, and it protested a Maoist activist who was shot by a guard working for Renault, one of the biggest automotive companies in the world. The claims were is that it was no accident.
08:02
Renault hired the guard to assassinate this activist who was working for workers' right within the city of Paris. This protest did not end here. They marched through the streets of Paris. And when the protest was done, and this is documented, Foucault and Sartre took a seat at a Parisian cafe to discuss the next steps.
08:26
All of their ideas, all of their thoughts, all of their theories were formulated within the city. Now, you think these chairs are power structures? Think about the street. Think about where you walk, who you talk to.
08:43
I don't know how many of you here have experienced the shocking day-to-day reality of being a stranger in a city, or being in a place where you're not supposed to be, where the skin color of the people around you is different than yours,
09:00
where your gender is not the right gender, and how segregated our cities have become. Personally, I come from Tel Aviv. One of the most segregated cities in the world. Five minutes from the high street, there is one of the poorest neighborhoods. And if one of those poor people came to the main streets of Tel Aviv,
09:22
there wouldn't be a police officer to take them down. There wouldn't be someone to shoot them. But they would feel the full force of shame, and being perceived, and being looked at as something weird. So here, urbanism tells us, is where resistance begins.
09:42
We must say to power that there are other ways to live, that there are techniques and technologies which enable us to be different than power wants us to be. New ways in which to live. And by live, I mean everything.
10:02
Eating, having sex, giving birth, going to sleep, collaborating, every time you think about a new way in which to be, you are resisting. Okay, great. What does science fiction have to do with it? Science fiction is the art of thinking about new ways to be.
10:25
It is the art of asking what in our lives could be different. The way we travel, the way we talk, the way we do everything.
10:42
Diversity and richness and multiplicity is the name of the game. You are seeing an illustration by Moebius, one of the greatest comic book artists of all time, with Jeff Darrow, another amazing comic book artist. And when you look at it for the first time, it looks amazing. It looks exactly what I'm talking about. Look at all these people.
11:01
Look at the colors. Look at their faces. Look at their skin color. Everything is so diverse. But if you look a bit deeper, you will see that one thing has been maintained here. Gender. All the gender roles are as you know them. The woman has a baby.
11:23
This woman is promiscuously clothed, and she's engaging not in trade, but in the background of the trade. So is the clothing. The men's clothing is practical. It's still flamboyant. But it's practical. So this shows us how science fiction can either
11:43
resist the power structures and preserve them at the same time. The way in which it preserves them is if it takes for granted the facts of our lives and projects them with its vision into the future. So it says this one thing is different,
12:03
but these 10 things are the same. So it reinforces, reenacts, reinvigorates the current power structure. To drive my point home, we'll take a look at some examples. They are somewhat chronologically in order,
12:22
but that's just an accident. I'm not saying anything chronological here. The science fiction in the 50s was better added than the science fiction of today. It is, but that's not the point I want to make today. Our journey starts with one of the fathers of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote many books, some of them you know,
12:40
Childhoods and Rendezvous with Rama. His name is a mainstay. But he also wrote this book, which is a bit underrated and underread, called The City and the Stars. In it, can we dim the lights a bit? A bit. Oh, perfect. Okay, so in it, you have a city
13:00
that is controlled by a computerized entity which codes the DNA of every one of its citizens. Should that citizen fall to disease or violence, it simply recreates that citizen from the database. It also maintains the city itself, leading to a very interesting fact
13:22
that you can see clearly here at the cover. The city is eternal. It is self-sufficient. It is its own object, and man is small, transient, momentary. But then, one of the citizens of this city
13:40
breaks the mold, goes outside, and I won't spoil the ending because it's a great book, but he does something which changes everything. The cover itself and the story tell us all sorts of things about the city that Arthur C. Clarke would like to imagine
14:01
us living in in the future. First of all, there are two polar opposites, the city and man. This is a thinking which would be familiar to anyone here who studied architecture and urbanism of the 40s and the 50s. The structure and man are opposite. We create the interface,
14:21
but in essence, they stand apart. The city is grandiose. Like Schopenhauer said, architecture is music which froze in time. Think about that saying. The grandeur of the city is maintained in C. Clarke's work, and even though it tells the story of a radical,
14:41
someone who breaks away from the system, he's the genius. He's the prodigy. He's one in a million. You aren't rebels. You aren't fit to be rebels. You are code in the database. Amongst you somewhere, starting to see the matrix comparisons, amongst you somewhere, there hides the one,
15:00
the aberration. That's what matrix tells you as well. It's not one of my examples, by the way, but what matrix tells you is be docile, except for that one of you who is the genius. That's a mainstay of the non-radical science fiction group. Sure, rebellion is possible, but it's only the exceptional human who can perform it.
15:21
The second example is by Ursula K. Le Guin, my personal favorite author, one of the best science fiction writers to have ever existed. She wrote a lot of books, but she also wrote a dispossessed. The dispossessed tells of two planetary bodies. One is the mother planet,
15:41
the other is the moon. The moon is very stark. It is a desert, and because of its starkness and lack of resources, the community which it creates is a communist one. And when I say communism, I don't mean Lenin Marxism, and I don't mean Stalinism. I mean the old concept of the Soviet,
16:01
the working agricultural body whose members work in unison for a goal. It existed for like two years, but it was idolized for 100. So these homeskin syndicates operate on the moon, and regulate their own resources, while the planet remains a distant partner
16:23
to which they export all their goods, until a philosopher, who is somewhat of an aberration within a Soviet society, decides to leave the moon and go back to the planet. Now, he was born on the moon. His grandparents moved there, but he was born there.
16:41
It's all he knows, and when he arrives at the planet, he sees a horrible reality. The planet is paradise. Resources are everywhere. They're so everywhere that society is free. Read, free equals capitalist. Everybody can consume as much as they want,
17:00
but of course, that a few hold the faucet. So he begins to interrogate the society, and disassemble it, and destroy it from within, although he doesn't want to do that, and everything comes crashing down in a very beautiful and Ursula Le Guin-esque way. But Ursula took a good step from Alpha.
17:25
She moved forward. She saw that the city is not this eternal object to be worshiped, but a very real object grounded in the politics of every society which builds it. But what she missed was that everything is inexorably part of the city.
17:46
There is no escape from Ursula's city. Even if you are against it, even if you are everything which the city hates, you are within it, and there is no way to operate outside of it.
18:01
That philosopher which leaves his moon to the capitalist planet, he never once thinks of the possibility to run away into the rugged wilderness. He never once thinks of the possibility that there is something outside of this mega-capitalist city in which he has arrived.
18:20
Ursula's tale begins to chip away at the boundaries of the objectified city. Wow, that was a big sentence. But it doesn't go the full distance. The experience is still completely understood through the lens of the city. And along comes this madman. He has no problem that I'm calling him a madman.
18:43
He quite likes that he's still alive. Ursula is still alive as well. Arthur C. Clarke isn't. M. John Harrison. M. John Harrison writes weird books. What he does is he takes a genre and he deconstructs it completely. He wrote space opera, he wrote sci-fi adventure,
19:01
and he also wrote vericonium. He wrote vericonium from the 70s and up until the 2000s where the final compendium was released. And I'm actually cheating a bit because this is not actually the cover to the book. This guy I found on Tumblr, he made a post, possible covers for vericonium that I would like to see. This is actually a cover for Edgar Allan Poe's book story,
19:24
The Man of the Crowd. And this is an illustration by a guy called Harry Clarke in 1928. But it's perfect for our needs because think of the Eternal City before and then Ursula's Desert, and look at this. This looks more like a city the way that I know it.
19:41
It is degraded. It is chaotic. It is brutal and violent and beautiful and ugly. What John Harrison does in vericonium is say, look, you think that if you get a board large enough and you draw the lines of the streets,
20:03
you will know the city. But the city is unknowable because what knowledge does it give you to know the name of the street? This and that. 22nd Street and 34th Street. Frederick Strasse and the countless streets which cross it.
20:20
What does that tell you about the actual place? Nothing. The city is always moving. It makes vericonium a very hard book to read because literally the hero lives on a different street corner every chapter. It's the same house but it's on a different intersection of streets. And what John Harrison is trying to tell you is stop thinking about the city as an immovable object.
20:43
It is not an immovable object. Every time that one of us perceives it, they see something else. Instead of letting the central power tell you what this and that corner mean, define it yourself.
21:01
And even if you don't want to define it yourself, it will happen anyway. So you might as well take control of the process. Instead of letting it operate beneath the surface, own it. And let's make cities that are fluid. The last author is very much alive. He's also very active on Twitter.
21:22
He's a great guy, Jeff Andromir. He wrote a series of a trilogy of three books called, he sort of started a genre around climate change horror or science fiction in which the environment becomes the enemy or something to be understood.
21:41
But before he did all that, he wrote Venice Underground. It's not a typo. It's not actually the name of the city. It's just what its denizens call it. And in this very cyberpunk city, as you can see from this, there exist two layers to Venice. Venice proper, well, I'm taking a chance here.
22:03
People like you live. Students, upper middle class, middle class, maybe some lower middle class, but that's about it. And of course the rich. They live and they operate and they breathe and they work above. And underground are the unwanted,
22:23
are those which the city has no use for. But if that was the point of the book, it wouldn't be that interesting because we said it so many times before. We get it. The city has wanted and unwanted and is segregated and they distance themselves from them. But what Andromir says is even more interesting.
22:44
The city exploits both the wanted and the unwanted to the same degree. The lines which you think separate you from those who are unwanted are superficial.
23:00
Even if you have the right skin color, even if you have the right name, even if you have the right body type, you are still being exploited. But more than that, stop worshiping the oppressed as the free. And that's what the free stories that we showed do to varying degrees.
23:21
The oppressed have always been romanticized in what is essentially, and here I'm self-deprecating like I like to do, bourgeoisie thought, oh, the worker has a hard time, but at least he has his freedom. He goes back home and he can drink his Guinness and he can go to sleep how he wants and he can curse and he can swear
23:41
and he can be physical and the bourgeoisie are so limited in our social shells. At least they have their freedom. And Jeff Vandermeer says, what the hell are you talking about? There's a reason they're called the oppressed. There's a reason that they are called the exploited. Now to summarize,
24:01
just in case this all seems to you as science fiction in its derogatory sense, that it doesn't matter in its own ideas, I'd like to tell you a story about a city that you all know. It's called Jerusalem. And it's one of the most hotly contested cities in the last 4,000 years.
24:21
But now it appears that even this ancient struggle has ways to create new dimensions to it. Because apparently, remember Venice underground? Now there's Jerusalem underground. One of Israel's leading newspapers, its liberal newspaper Haaretz, ran a story about the structures
24:42
that are being built beneath Jerusalem as architects drill down to discover the secrets of the past. But in those hallways, they haven't just found repositories or storage houses. They've found spaces to make their point.
25:01
That point happens to be, Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish people, of course. They use those spaces which were created underground to tell a story. To say, this city is ours. It's just one example of how space is not just a place in which we sit
25:23
or put our things or sleep. It is the backdrop to the stories which we tell about ourselves and society tells in our name for us. Only by reclaiming those spaces
25:40
and understanding them as these radical or conservative vectors can we ever hope to actually implement our ideas about open societies and smart cities and communes. The first step is to reimagine the city. Thank you very much.
26:19
Thank you very much, Eden. We have time for a very short question
26:21
and quite short answer, maybe. Are there questions? I'll also be around. Yeah, sure. Could you wait for the mic? Sorry, pardon. Well, short simple question. If the city is everything now, and everything is the city, to start reimagining it is quite a big task
26:43
because it involves reimagining everything. So would you like to give us a hint about how you'd start off doing that? Perfect answer. Every time I give a talk about this subject, this is the question that's asked of me. So you got us pumped. What now? What should we do? I don't have a good answer. The answer that I do have is that you have to break down the unit
27:03
as little, as small as you can from the city, to the neighborhood, to the street. I'll give you a personal story. In Tel Aviv, there was an old police station left there by the British. And when they left, the military built a base there.
27:20
And when they left, that territory was promised to the citizens of Tel Aviv as a park. But instead, the city wanted to make some money. So they said, let's not build a park, let's build five towers. The citizens heard of this, and one of them, biased, my mother, decided to found, for the first time, a neighborhood committee.
27:41
And that neighborhood committee, consisting of 10, 15 people, worked tirelessly, day in and day out, to block the construction of those towers and get the park built. And they succeeded. They succeeded not by tackling these grandiose issues. They succeeded by working in the field and politicizing their neighbors.
28:02
Why did they need science fiction for that? Why did they need to reimagine the city for that? For that first move, for that first standup to say, these streets belong to us and not to you, and this is a negotiation, you need that switch in your thought. I'm not gonna take credit for what my mom did,
28:21
but from discussions with her, she told me that she's also a reader of science fiction. It enabled her to look at the reality and say, why should this be the case? Why should we live as those that before us have lived? We can live in new ways, not big ways, a neighborhood committee, and from that committee can be sparked great things.
28:42
That's not a good answer, because it's much more complicated than that, but it is an answer, and I think that's where we need to start.