False Mathematics and Comic-book Fiction

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Roy T. Cook

Every so often Marvel attempts to explain some of the weirder aspects of the fictional universe described in their comics by invoking some more-or-less obscure bit of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. I am concerned with the mathematics today, and in particular the way that the mathematics of the transfinite has been used (abused?) to explain the relative power status of various ‘cosmic’ beings (e.g. how can one omnipotent being be more powerful than another?)

One such incident occurs in Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #21, where it is implied that the Marvel multiverse is made up of the transfinite numbers. Transfinite cardinal numbers – presumably the authors don’t have ordinals in mind – are the numbers that measure the size of infinite sets (the finite cardinals are just the numbers that measure the size of finite sets – that is, 0, 1, 2, and so on). Since there is an infinite series of larger and larger infinite sets, there is an infinite sequence of transfinite cardinal numbers. Georg Cantor, who was the first mathematician to study transfinite numbers, himself makes an appearance on this page, although for some reason he is transformed from a German mathematics professor to a Russian monk (I doubt Cantor ever wore a cool hood like the one in the art – Cantor did in fact go mad, however). But the page makes a deeper mistake: a tranfinite number is not a (cardinal) number greater than infinity, but rather a (cardinal) number greater than any finite cardinal number (thinking about the etymology of the word should have made this clear: “transfinite” is “beyond the finite”, not “beyond the infinite” – presumably they meant something like Cantor’s notion of the absolute infinite, which is beyond all the transfinite numbers, but whose existence is highly controversial amongst mathematicians and philosophers who work in this area).

Things get a good bit more confusing in other, later comics, however. In the page reproduced on the right, Kubik is explaining the nature of infinitely powerful cosmic beings to the newly formed Kosmos (I think it’s from Fantastic Four somewhere – please school me on the exact reference in the comments!) First off, Marvel seems to equate omnipotence with being infinitely powerful (already problematic). But then, since on this reading of “omniscient” there are lots of omniscient beings in the Marvel multiverse, and some of these are clearly more powerful than others, an explanation of this discrepancy is required. Cleverly, Cantor’s hierarchy of transfinite numbers is wheeled in to do the job.

So far, so good. But the problem is this: they get the math wrong – badly. Here is the relevant bit of the conversation between Kubik and Kosmos:

Kubik: Consider then, the set called whole numbers ~ 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. Is it not infinite?

Kosmos: Obviously.

Kubik: Then consider the set called the even numbers ~ 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on – how long is it?

Kosmos: Why, infinite, of course.

Kubik: Half of infinity is still infinity. And the same would be true of the set of odd numbers?

Kosmos: Of course.

Kubuk: Both sets are infinite, and yet the set of whole numbers contains both subsets, and is therefore twice as large as either subset alone.

Kosmos: …? … !

Kubik: Thus are demonstrated two levels of infinity. There are, of course, an infinite number more.

[Admission: I like to interpret the fourth panel – the close-up of a shocked Kosmos where she utters “…? ….!” – as depicting Kosmos’ dismay at what a crappy mathematician Kubik is, especially for an infinitely powerful cosmic being. But I suspect that is not the reading the creators intended – see below!]

Basically, the infinitely powerful Kubik has achieved a cutting edge level of mathematical expertise – or would have, were it about 1600 AD. The confusion here is pretty much what has come to be called Galileo’s paradox: How can the collection of even numbers be both half the size of the collection of whole numbers, since we obtain the evens by taking every other whole number, and also the same size, since we can match up each even number to exactly one whole number (and vice versa) as follows:

1 <–> 2

2 <–> 4

3 <–> 6

4 <–> 8

5 <–> 10

and so on.

Roughly three hundred years later, Cantor cleared all this up. Basically, his idea was that two sets are the same size if and only if the elements in the sets can be matched up one-one like the wholes and evens are above, and are different sizes if they can’t. He also proved that for any set (including any infinite set), there is another set that is strictly speaking bigger than the first set. As a result of Cantor’s insights (along with those of other mathematicians including Dedekind, Zermelo, and others) set theory is one of the richest and most productive areas of modern mathematics. But here’s the kicker: the set of all whole numbers, and the set of even numbers, aren’t an example of this phenomenon: they are the same size, or, in more technical jargon, have the same (transfinite) cardinal number, since they can be mapped one-one to one another as shown above (self-serving plug: for a good, rigorous yet readable introduction to all this, see Chapter 4 of this excellent book!)

Now, the obvious explanation of all of this is that the writers at Marvel recalled hearing something about different sizes of infinity in a philosophy course at some point during their alcohol-soaked college years, but couldn’t remember the details (or misremembered them, etc.), and so they just made some shit up. Fine and dandy. But the really interesting question is this: How should we interpret passages such as the one above, where cosmic beings seem to be sincerely explaining the nature of the multiverse in terms of transfinite cardinal numbers, but where they get the mathematics horribly wrong?

The first option is to interpret the incident as one where Kubik just makes a mistake. On this reading, everyone, including infinitely powerful cosmic beings, are fallible, and Kubik just didn’t pay enough attention in his “advanced mathematics of the infinite” course at Cosmic Beings College. But this seems a stretch. After all, setting the mathematics aside, it seems clear that we are meant to take this page to be a sincere and correct explanation of the nature of infinite powers within the Marvel universe (i.e. the creators intended us to interpret it that way and, barring ret-conning or other overt manipulation of the content, it seems that is enough to justify the claim that we ought to understand the page that way).

The second option is to interpret the incident as one where Kubik gets it exactly right. On this reading, the mathematics of the Marvel multiverse is just different than the mathematics that holds in our actual world. Of course, most philosophers and mathematicians think that mathematics is necessary – that is, that the truths of mathematics are the same in any way that the world could have possibly been (further, many think that even in ‘possible worlds’ where the laws of physics might be different, the laws of mathematics would remain the same!) In short, there is a way the world could have been where I was a mathematician and not a philosopher, but there is no way that the world could have been where there are more whole numbers than natural numbers. As a result, Marvel comics are describing a ‘reality’ that is not even possible in a basic, logical sense.

As a result, if we opt for the second reading, then we find ourselves in a conundrum: If Marvel’s comics, and the description of the multiverse contained in them, is a correct description of that multiverse, but is also (from the perspective of the real world) completely impossible – that is, the world couldn’t possibly have been that way – then it is not clear that, in some deep sense, we can understand these comics in the first place. The characters depicted in these comics live in a reality that is so different from our own that it is not clear what it might mean to say that we understand what living in such a world might be like. But of course we do seem to understand what living in such a world might be like, and presumably we think that we get more information about what it would be like every time we read a new Marvel comic. Hence, the conundrum.

Of course, DC might have even bigger problems along these lines – see the Superman panel above.

Alright – discuss!

Old Enough to Be Confused

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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It’s taken me somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years to appreciate fIREHOSE. A friend taped it for me back in the early 90s, maybe a year or three after its release in 1991. I didn’t hate it or anything, and I listened to it a fair amount because my friend said I should like it and I felt like I should keep trying. But it was only when I started to listen to it again last month after that two decade hiatus that I ended up falling in love — and buying all of fIREHOSE’s other albums.

It’s appropriate that I had to wait, and wait, and wait, to really appreciate the band. Most rock at least makes some pretense at aiming for the kids, but fIREHOSE really is music for aging decadents. Bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley were already punk legends when the band coalesced — they’d been two thirds of the Minutemen, before guitarist D. Boon died. The new guitarist and vocalist, Ed Crawford, substituted for Boon’s youthful political charge a jaded, wigged out irony — everything the band does sounds like it’s in quotes. One of their songs, from 1993’s Mr. Machinery Operator is even called “More Famous Quotes.” Another, from 1987’s If’n, is called “For the Singer of REM” and is a gleefully goofy skewering of Michael Stipe, with Crawford burbling about how “the door’s a symbol for/these objects in your drawer,” while Watt and Crawford somehow imitate REM’s folk-rock shimmer exactly while still sounding like their own spiky, funky selves. It’s as if they’ve contemptuously swallowed their target whole.

As that parody suggests, there’s a little Weird Al in fIREHOSE’s makeup — but it’s Weird Al as he would have been if he was more musically talented and more ambitious than any of the bands he parodied. fIREHOSE is undoubtedly joking throughout Flyin’ the Flannel, but the jokes are so fractured and bizarre and cool-as-shit that they end up slipping over into the sublime. It’s the greatest chortling grandpa music ever.

Most of the songs on Flyin’ the Flannel are only one to two minutes long, and they all seem put together out of spare pieces, shards, and novelty items. “Can’t Believe” is a joyful power-pop ode to love into which someone has inadvertently dropped a barrel-full of amphetamines and the lunatic what swallowed them. Crawford wails his Michael Nesmith lines like Rob Halford with head trauma, while Watt and Hurley burp and stutter, turning the wannabe triumphant hook into a series of strutting pratfalls. On the band’s version of Daniel Johnston’s “Walking the Cow,” Mike Watt emotes like a slowed down Elvis, while the band turns the fey original into a faux-soulful stroll, with the meaty bass insisting that there really is a cow lowing over there. “Flyin’ the Flannel” is a cock rock roar about the need for tailors, interspersed with fruity folksy interludes, as Watt’s base meditatively scuffles about in the underbrush And then there’s “Towin’ the Line,” which is maybe the album’s closest song to actual funk. Though it’s still all slowed down and spaced apart, like George Clinton leisurely bouncing around the studio on a pogo stick.

Talking about individual tracks is a little deceptive though. The songs tend to blur into each other, not because they all sound the same, but, again, because they’re each so fragmented. The whole feels less like a whole than like an assemblage, stiched together out of Hurley’s weird shifting beats, Watt’s weird shifting bass runs, and Crawford’s weird shifting riffs and wails. You end up with this tattered, limping thing, which keeps trying to rock and then gets tired and goes off to snark or fart or sit down for a rest, or bellow at the kids on the lawn. Maybe I felt like it was bellowing at me once upon a time, I don’t know. But whatever my problem was, I’m glad I finally got old enough to like my music this distracted and crotchety and glorious.

Romance>Lit Fic

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Ian McEwan secretly writes romance. He’s supposed to be a lit fic author, but most of the books of his I’ve read — The Innocent, Atonement, and Sweet Tooth — all function like category romances, with a bit of meta-fictional trickery (which isn’t exactly foreign to category romance either. The last of these I read, Sweet Tooth, even works as a kind of love letter to the fan fic wing of romance. The book is narrated by Serena Frome, a low-level operative in MI-5 tasked with secretly funding propaganda funds to likely anti-communist literary sorts. She falls in love with Tom Haley, a novelist she’s gotten into the program…and then (spoiler!) it turns out at the end that she isn’t actually the narrator; instead, Tom is the narrator writing as her. The romance trope of switching between male and female protagonist consciousnesses is both tweaked and perfectly fulfilled, as is the fan fic genre trope of telling the same story from different characters perspectives. It’s a tour de force, not because it upends romance conventions, but because it fulfills them so gleefully and perfectly. Quite possibly McEwan doesn’t read category romance or fan fic—but he has enough common roots with the genre that he understands them, and loves them and makes them his own— or, if you prefer, lets them make him theirs.

So it was with some disappointment that I read McEwan’s “Solar”and realized that it was not a romance. It’s just literary fiction. And you can tell it’s literary fiction not because it dispenses with genre tropes, but because the genre tropes of literary fiction are all in place. The aging priaptic professor and his string of wives; the jabs at academic politics, the ironies, the metafictional asides (the main character, Beard embellishes a story “not because, or not only because, he was a liar, but because he instinctively knew it was wrong to dishonor a good story.”) And of course the inevitable, drearily happy unhappy ending, where everyone figures out that the main character is a horrible person and all his lies catch up to him, and so we’re left dangling in media res with disaster delightfully coming. Yawn. It’s almost as drearily cliché as the end of Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World” where the last scene is of the characters literally gazing at a rich tapestry. No, really.

Genre fiction, and especially romance, is generally thought of as predictable and structurally uncreative. Lit fic requires idiosyncratic genius. But for McEwan, at least in the four books I’ve read, the opposite is the case. Romance seems to inspire him to play with the genre; to stretch it out and move the bits around, to see just how far he can push his characters and his readers while still retaining their love. In lit fic, though, the pretense of no formulas seems to mean he can’t even see the formulas, and so he just goes trudging through them, without even bothering with variation or wit or invention. The box you know is there becomes an inspiration; the box you refuse to see is the one that holds you.

This isn’t to say that Solar is utterly without merit; there’s an incredibly funny bit involving sub zero urination and the consequences thereof. But the amusing set pieces never add up to anything interesting, because lit fic’s non formula-formula robs McEwan of invention as surely as his main character is (inevitably) bereft of inspiration and genius. Without genre, lit fic is at the mercy of its formulaic conventions.

Spider-Man vs. Ted Cruz vs. Spock vs. Barack Obama

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I had considered Senator Cruz my least-likely-to-vote-for Presidential candidate ever, until Donald Trump robbed him of the title. Worse, I recently learned from his New York Times Magazine interview that the Tea Party favorite and I share at least one interest/obsession: superheroes. Not only did the former “unpopular nerd” describe himself as “a Spider-Man guy,” but he named his company Cruz Enterprises after Iron Man’s Stark Enterprises—a quirkiness that hovers in the sweet spot between adorable and psychotic.

Cruz might be horrified to learn that his arch-nemesis Barack Obama (Cruz likened him to Darth Vader in one of his filibustering rants) is a Spider-Man guy too. When Entertainment Weekly asked the then Presidential candidate to name his favorite superhero in 2008, the Illinois Senator chose both Spider-Man and Batman. Why? Because, Obama said, “they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.”

President Obama has spent his two terms getting knocked around by Republican-controlled congresses, but, like his comic book role models, he’s won many a battle “against insurmountable odds.” That’s how John McCain described Batman, the superhero the former Republican candidate championed when asked the same question.

The standard answer is Superman. When Darren Garnick and his nine-year-old son, Ari, asked the 2012 Republican primary candidates, “If you could be any superhero in the world, who would you be and why?” Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain all went with the Man of Steel (check-out the six-minute documentary Republicans in Tights for the delightful details). Rick Santorum shook things up with Mr. Incredible, the super-dad from The Incredibles (which, unlike Mr. Santorum, is finally getting a sequel). Only Ron Paul, the only candidate older than comic books, snubbed the nine-year-old interviewer.

McCain was born in 1936, same year as Detective Comics, but most candidates (including Hillary Clinton, who has yet to be asked her superheroic preference) were born in the Golden Age of the 40s. Obama was the lone wolf, born in 1961, the year the Fantastic Four launched themselves to the moon and Marvel Comics into pop supremacy. But now Ted Cruz has him beat. Not that his birth year, 1970, is an auspicious one for superheroes. The comic book industry was in decline, and Vietnam-influenced antiheroes were flooding the market along with a new breed of horror titles.

Cruz’s birth also marks the first year without Star Trek. A fact that doesn’t stop him from preferring Captain Kirk over The Next Generation’s Captain Picard. Why? Because, he told The New York Times, Kirk is “working class,” and Picard an “aristocrat.” That actually makes Cruz a fan of President Obama’s superhero team. Obama’s other reason for endorsing the “Spider Man/Batman model” (his term) was his dislike for Superman’s lazy privilege: “The guys who have too many powers — like Superman — that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy.”

It also turns out that Obama wouldn’t vote for either Kirk or Picard. He’s a Spock guy. When he met Leonard Nimoy during a 2007 campaign event, he greeted him with the Vulcan salute. When the actor died earlier this year, the President eulogized him:

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy. Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time. And of course, Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.

“I loved Spock.”

Cruz isn’t quite so generous about the arts and humanities, but he does like NASA. When he became chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Competitiveness, he announced his desire to expand the U.S. space program—even though he had to laud Democratic President Kennedy in the process. Ensign Chekhov, however, will not be invited aboard the new Enterprise. According to Cruz, NASA’s partnership with the former Evil Empire, Russia, on the International Space Station could “stunt our capacity to reach new heights and share innovations with free people everywhere.”

That’s not as bold as Newt Gingrich’s pandering promise to place astronauts on Mars by 2020 (he was speaking to laid-off NASA employees at the time), but it’s still unclear how the budget-slashing Cruz would finance his space exploration. Perhaps a joint public-private venture with Stark Enterprises? Or is this a job for Superman? Or super-businessman Lex Luthor? Even most comic book readers forget that Lex won the 2000 Presidential race (a fact since rebooted out of existence several times by DC Comics).

A Cruz-Trump White House isn’t more far-fetched, right?

Utilitarian Review 8/1/15

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: I try to turn poetry into comics criticism. (Perhaps the post on the site least likely to ever find an audience.)

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics in late 1944. Pretty covers!

Leonard Pierce on Marvel’s hip hop variant covers and their crappy history with black characters and creators.

Kim O’Connor on the problems with Scocca’s On Smarm.

I wrote an open letter to Axel Alonso about Marvel’s hip hop variants and his comments about me.

Chris Gavaler on the convergence of lit fic and pulp.

Jimmy Johnson on SVU and sex work stigma.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about how inequality is behind the deaths of both black people and Cecil the Lion.

At Urban Faith I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and tradition as a gift.

At the Guardian I profiled science-fiction author N.K. Jemisin. We talked about race, change, and the status quo.

At Playboy I interviewed Monica Byrne about diversity in literature and criticism.

At TNR I wrote about Jack and Jack and the disturbingly bland future of independent music.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—Salon and Gawker hitting each other.

—how Harper Lee’s reputation should be tarnished.

A short blurb about SZA in the Chicago Reader’s Lollapalooza coverage.

Other Links

Claire Napier on why Emma Frost’s wardrobe is idiotic.

Kenny Keil parodies Marvel with way better hip hop covers than theirs.

Emily Shire on Lena Dunham and others pushing to criminalize sex work.

Robert Stanley Martin on Birth of a Nation.

The author N.K. Jemisin

Law & Order: SVU – Pornstar’s Requiem (Season 16, Episode 5)

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Jimmy Johnson

This was first published on CiCo3.
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The following post examines gendered violence and sex work in the context of a recent Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode. I make use of narratives by two adult film performers, Belle Knox and Kayden Kross, who recently published articles that overlap with the SVU episode, one directly engaging the episode. For broader context I cite Incite!: Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence and the Sex Workers Project and, while not quoted directly, analysis developed by Emi Koyama. Knox and Kross’s lived experiences provide fuller context and analysis than I cite below and Incite! and Emi Koyama’s work are central to the struggle against gendered violence against marginalized and criminalized populations and systemic violence more broadly. I strongly recommend reading their narratives and supporting their work and prioritizing it over what follows should you have to choose between them. Thanks to Megan Spencer for insightful feedback and to you for reading.

Like many Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes, the theme of the 22 October episode “Pornstar’s Requiem” is rape culture and the entitlement men assume over women’s bodies. This assumption is especially acute against women of color, colonized women, trans women and other communities marginalized by racism, patriarchy, capitalism and other oppressive organizations of power. Though SVU often centers middle class and wealthy white women, “Pornstar’s Reqiuem” centers one such marginalized community, sex workers. While all sex workers are marginalized or dehumanized in one way or another, an individual or group’s status as indigenous, working class, black, transgender or any other Other (including intersections of any or all of the above and more) means not all sex workers have the same experience. That should be read throughout what follows. (For this review I ignore the production value and storytelling quality, saving that for a later engagement. In brief, this episode suffers from the caricatured posturing and hero-villain hyper-polarization prevalent in the last few seasons of SVU though it is not as bad as some.)

“Pornstar’s Requiem” is one of the series’ ‘ripped from the headlines’ productions. It takes an element from popular media discourse and fictionalizes it to fit the half-police procedural/half-courtroom drama that is Law & Order ’s trademark. The episode takes inspiration from the case of Belle Knox, a porn star and Duke University student whose real name was exposed without her consent by a male fellow student leading to extensive harassment on and off campus.

In the SVU version, Hannah Marks plays Evie Barnes, a white, working class student at Hudson University (a frequent Law & Order stand in for NYU) and adult film performer under the name Roxxxane Demay. Two fellow Hudson University students watching porn on-line recognize Barnes and arrange to get her alone in a bathroom at a college party where they, invoking the rough sex of the porn clip they previously saw, proceed to rape her.

As is usually the case, SVU gets some stuff right while embedding the broader story in problematic politics. At its best numerous characters, especially Barnes herself along with Sgt. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hartigay) and Det. Amanda Collins (Kelli Giddish), over and again strongly reject repeated interjections from men trying to justify or rationalize the rape of Barnes due to her work in adult film. In one instance Barnes, her parents just having turned their backs on her because of her work, says, “I did nothing wrong and people need to hear that.” Barnes repeatedly invokes the principle of consent with no qualifications as to the job or social position of the person granting or withholding consent and how any violations of that are sexual assault.

Evie Barnes defends her right to withhold consent and perform in porn saying, “I did nothing wrong and people need to hear that.

In her write-up of the episode, Belle Knox identifies closely with Barnes.

I know well the chilling rape culture entitlement that comes along with men discovering that I’m a porn star. This is the scenario that plays out on the episode. One of the frat boys accused in “Pornstar’s Requiem” even goes so far as to say to the police the following jaw-dropping line: “I didn’t think you could rape a girl like that.”

Have I heard this before?

Not in those exact words, but in actions and in snide remarks, in the assumptions people make with my body and my livelihood because they have watched me in porn or heard that this is my profession. One time a hotel provided a key card to a friend of another man I knew, and at 2 in the morning, this large and loud, older and incredibly drunk stranger wandered into my hotel room — with his own key. I was terrified. Did he think that because I was a porn star he could just come in? Did he think he could do something with me?

She continues, “There is this sense of ownership of porn stars from strangers, which is, quite frankly, chilling.” In a recent article for Salon, fellow porn star Kayden Kross describes her own nonconsensual outing as a college student and how, due to sex workers’ societal position, people outside the industry can’t even imagine how it is that she hasn’t been raped.

I have not been molested by an uncle. Not by a single one of them, if you can believe it. Yet strangers every day tag me with this scarlet letter because they can imagine no other circumstance under which I might choose the life I have chosen. Not only is this an insult to me, but it is an insult to all women who have made unconventional personal choices, because the go-to assumption is that a woman who doesn’t fit the mold has very likely been sexually damaged by a man. It is a comfortable way to explain away a disobedient woman.

There are few keener descriptions of rape culture then how Kross describes the public as demanding her past rape in order to comprehend her. Rape is necessary for their engagement of Kross’s narrative, part of the “sense of ownership of porn stars” that Knox writes about. Kross describes the expected consequences in case of actual assault.

I sometimes wonder how deeply the assumption that the adult performer is somehow a lesser person really runs. Will our aggressor be given a lighter sentence in the event of a murder trial? Will the case be taken less seriously in the event that one of us disappears?

This is the result portrayed in “Pornstar’s Requiem”. After achieving the uncommon in real life result of a guilty verdict – according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, only nine out of every one-hundred sexual assaults are ever prosecuted in the first place – the judge sets aside the verdict and admonishes Barnes in the most condescending manner saying, “I hope going forward you find a way to respect your body and yourself.” Knox writes that the judge’s phrasing is “something I have heard so many times from my friends, family and peers it practically feels like my first name.”

The Patriarchal State and Accountability

SVU, like all cop shows, even more critical ones like The Wire, defines accountability as state intervention followed by incarceration. In the case of sex workers, people of color, colonized (including intersections thereof) and other Othered populations, interventions by institutions of state violence (the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the military, F.B.I., etc.) frequently exacerbate rather than mitigate violence, including sexual violence.

The Sex Workers Project (SWP) at the New York City-based Urban Justice Center conducted a small survey of folks in the trade. Among their findings:

Thirty percent of sex workers interviewed told researchers that they had been threatened with violence by police officers, while 27% actually experienced violence at the hands of police. Reported incidents included officers physically grabbing and kicking prostitutes, as well as beating them; one incident of rape; one woman was stalked by a police officer; and throwing food at one subject. Sexual harassment included fondling of body parts; giving women cigarettes in exchange for sex; and police offering not to arrest a prostitute in exchange for sexual services.

Perhaps most obviously, that most sex work is criminalized means that agents of state violence generally seek to incarcerate sex workers, not offer any kind of protection or support. As Incite! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence notes, “Existing laws that criminalize sex work often prevent workers from reporting violence, enable law enforcement agents to not take violence against sex workers seriously when it is reported, and facilitate police violence against sex workers.”

The vigorous defense offered by the (initially reluctant) District Attorney and police in “Pornstar’s Requiem” is anomalous in the real world though the lack of rapist accountability of any kind in the end, the paternalistic dismissal of Barnes by the judge, the exploitation of class differences between the rapists to turn the working class rapist snitch and the perpetual saving mission of the police all ring true.

Condemned to Porn

The end of “Pornstar’s Requiem” is filmed as tragedy. Kross writes about experiences outside of the porn industry bubble where porn stars are dehumanized and made punchlines. In a comedy class she is taking the instructor says, “Don’t worry, if you fail at this, there’s always porn.” It’s a common punchline. In their opening monologue for the 2013 Golden Globes, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler make a similar joke.

Tina Fey: I don’t think she has plans to do porn Amy.

Amy Poehler: None of us have plans do to porn.

Examples abound. Porn is not a career one chooses in such comments but a life one is condemned or resorts to.

The porn industry has no doubt been tragic for some of its workers. But so has the restaurant industry. So has accounting. So has professional American football. The “porn as last resort” narrative is another way of dehumanizing sex workers. Since, in patriarchy’s narrative, no one would choose it, those engaged in it must not be anybody nor any body. This is how “Pornstar’s Requiem” ends.

Evie Barnes broadcasts her social death.

After the judge sets aside the verdict and frees Barnes’s rapist, Barnes commits what the show portrays as a kind of suicide, complete with suicide note, where she leaves university for porn. “Pornstar’s Requiem” narrates this as the failure of the agents of state violence to complete a saving mission. Barnes no longer exists, they lost her. Only Roxxxane Demay remains. Demay partially affirms her position telling Collins, “At least here when I say stop, they stop.” But she does so on the verge of tears over a funereal soundtrack making that affirmation instead part of the “resort to porn” narrative. No matter that earlier in the episode Barnes expresses a certain fulfillment with her work in porn, “I signed contracts. I got paid. It felt good. I mean these guys [Barnes looks to each side at the men on campus] look right through me. They have no idea what I’m doing on set with hot porn actors.”

Evie Barnes self-medicates before her funeral.

Evie Barnes’s social death is finalized on a porn set. Collins tells her, “You don’t have to be here,” and tries to offer her other options. Demay tell Collins, “Once you’re Roxxxane Demay, you can’t be Evie Barnes again,” takes some kind of pill, disrobes and walks to her burial, a gangbang scene with fifteen men as stand-ins for pallbearers.¹ This, as with all saving missions, ends with the ‘saved’ being dehumanized by the saviors. The dehumanization that Barnes fights against earlier in the episode is finalized with the heavy, tragic soundtrack, Barnes/Demay’s tears and Collin’s desperate, sorrowful pleading. She is literally dehumanized in this narrative. The human Evie Barnes is dead and Roxxxane Demay, a fictional character invented by Barnes for stage purposes, now exists in a non-life as the title “Pornstar’s Requiem” suggests. Here Collins and Barnes’s rapists are no longer opposing parties, they find shared ground with Barnes’s dehumanization.

Roxxxane Demay approaches her funeral.

The episode’s end message affirms both agents of patriarchal state violence as sole recourse of accountability (though failed in this instance) to victims of gendered violence and the dehumanization of sex workers. NBC broadcast this message to over two million initial viewers. As with all popular culture, the episode did not invent this message. Instead it (re)produces it in conversation with broader media and popular discourse. “Pornstar’s Requiem” is another exchange in the conversation and in spite of its attempt at critical engagement, it ends up projecting and producing the real-life alienation described by Kross and Knox.
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^{1.The episode strongly suggests a social death and portrays Roxxxane Demay’s evolution as solely horror. There is another interpretation though the show does not point to it in any way at all, what Emi Koyama calls “Negative Survivorship“. Interpreting the scene this way is far better and appropriately positions the agents of state violence with the rapists while supporting Demay/Barnes. Based upon all previous episodes of SVU, this is not the intention of the writers.}

The Physics of Fiction

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I grew up in a universe in which electrons were like planets orbiting double nuclei “suns” in tiny solar systems. It was a metaphor, a useful one at the time. Then new data required a figurative upheaval. Now the electrons of my children’s universe mingle in clouds. Electrons always have—chemistry teachers of my youth just didn’t know better. Any change in metaphor is also a change in reality. That’s why the in-between state, when the old system is collapsing but no new figurative principle has risen to organize the chaos, is so scary. Metaphors are how we think.

During the second half of the 20th century, the literary universe was a simple binary: good/bad, highbrow/lowbrow, serious/escapist, literature/pulp. Like Bohr’s atomic solar system, that model has lost its descriptive accuracy. We’ve hit a critical mass of literary data that don’t fit the old dichotomies. Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem are among the most obvious paradigm disruptors, but the list of literary/genre writers keeps expanding. A New Yorker editor, Joshua Rothman, recently added Emily St. John Mandel to the list: Her postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven is a National Book Award finalist—further evidence, Rothman writes, of the “genre apocalypse.”

Rothman resurrects Northrop Frye to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing genre system, but the Frye model’s four-part structure (novel, romance, anatomy, confession) is more likely to spread chaos (“novel” is a kind of novel?). Another suggestion comes from a holdout of the 20th-century model: The critic Arthur Krystal believes an indisputable boundary separates “guilty pleasures” from serious writing. Perhaps more disorienting, Chabon would strip bookstores of all signage and shelve all fiction together. Ursula Le Guin, probably the most celebrated speculative-fiction author alive, agrees: “Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.”

I applaud the egalitarian spirit, but the Chabon-Le Guin nonmodel, while accurate, offers no conceptual comforts. The Bohr model survived even after physicists knew it was wrong because it was so eloquent. Even this former high-school-chemistry student could steer his B-average brain through it. A vast expanse of free-floating books is unnavigable. A good metaphor needs gravity.

To explain the lowly lowbrow world of comic books, Peter Coogan, director of the Institute for Comics Studies, spins superheroes around a “genre sun”—the closer a text orbits the sun, the more rigid the text’s generic conventions. It’s a good metaphor, which is why most models use some version of it, including all those old binaries: The further a text travels from the bad-lowbrow-genre-escapist sun, the more good-highbrow-literary-serious it is. But because metaphors control how we think, solar models are preventing us from understanding changes in our literary/genre universe. It looks like an apocalypse only because we don’t know how to measure it yet.

Chabon is often credited for starting the genre debate with “Thrilling Tales,” the first genre-themed issue of McSweeney’s, published in 2003—though the Peter Straub-edited “New Wave Fabulists” issue of Conjunctions beat it to press by months, and surely Francis Ford Coppola deserves credit for rebooting the classic pulp magazine All-Story in 1997. Coppola has since published luminaries like Rushdie and Murakami, even if, according to the old model, those literary gas giants should exude far too much gravitas to be attracted to a lowly pulp star. And what becomes of second-class planets when their own creators declare them subliterary? According to S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 writing rules, detective fiction shouldn’t include any “long descriptive passages” or “literary dallying with side-issues,” not even “subtly worked-out character analyses.” For Krystal, if a “bad” novel becomes “good,” it exits its neighborhood and ascends into Literature. The Krystal universe of fiction resolves around the collapsed sun of a black genre hole, and his literary event horizon separates which novels are sucked in and which escape into the expansive beauty of literary fiction.

Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, calls that argument “bollocks, of the most bollocky kind.”

“As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great,” he retorted in Time, “critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.” The problem is nomenclature. Grossman defines genre by tropes: A story about a detective is a detective story—it may or may not also be a formulaic detective story. Krystal defines genre exclusively by formula. Substitute out the ambiguous term, and his logic is self-evident: When a formula novel ceases to be primarily about its formula it is no longer a formula novel. Well, duh.

Grossman’s trope approach makes more sense, but Krystal is nostalgic for more than generic categorization. The old dichotomy was seductive because it was (as Grossman points out) hierarchical, performing the double organizing duty of describing and evaluating. By opposing “literary” to “genre” and then conflating “literary” with “quality,” Krystal is forced to make some ineloquent claims: “All the Pretty Horses is no more a western than 1984 is science fiction.” While technically true (Cormac McCarthy’s and Orwell’s novels are genre to the same degree), such assertions are forgivable as long as they are exceptions. But when those free-floating planets represent the expanding norm (in what possible sense are Atwood’s, McCarthy’s, and Colson Whitehead’s most recent novels not apocalyptic?), Krystal’s model collapses.

At least the good/bad dichotomy has collapsed. It never made categorical sense, since a “bad good book”—a poorly written work of literary fiction—had no category. Literary fiction is another problematic term. It traditionally denotes narrative realism, fiction that appears to take place here on Earth, but it’s also been used as shorthand for works of artistic worth. With the second half of the definition provisionally struck, we’re left with realism. Its solar center is mimesis, the mirror that works of literature are held against to test their ability to reflect our world. Northrop Frye declared mimesis one of the two defining poles of literature, though he had trouble naming its opposite. Frye located romance—a category that includes romance as well as all other popular genres (and so another conceptual strike against the Frye model)—in the idealized world, so Harlequin romances are part fantasy too (real guys just aren’t that gorgeous and wonderful).

But any overt authorial agenda can rile mimesis fans. Agni editor Sven Birkerts panned Margaret Atwood’s first MaddAddam novel because “its characters all lack the chromosome that confers deeper human credibility,” and so, he concluded of the larger premise-driven genre, “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L.’” Atwood was writing in a subliterary mode because she had an overt social and political intention. So her greatest literary sins, for Birkerts, aren’t her genetically engineered humans, but her Godlike and so nonmimetic use of them.

Others have tried to balance the seesaw with poetic style or formula or sincerity, suggesting that literature is a wheel of spectra with mimesis at its revolving center. In the old model, mimesis was also the definition of “literary quality”: The closer a work of fiction orbited its mimetic sun, the brighter and better it was. Like the Bohr model, that’s comprehensively simple, and so little wonder Krystal is still grasping it: Literature is the lone throbbing speck of Universal Goodness surrounded by an abyss of quality-sucking black genre space. Remove “quality” from the equation and posit a spectrum of mimetic to nonmimetic categorizations bearing no innate relationship to artistic worth, and the system still collapses.

Quality could rest in that fuzzy middle zone, a literary sweet spot combining the event horizons of two stars: mimesis and genre. That middle way is tempting—and perhaps even accurate when studying “21st Century North American Literary Genre Fiction,” the clumsily titled course I taught last semester. I am requiring my current advanced fiction workshop students to write in that two-star mode, applying psychological realism to a genre of their choice. But it’s a lie. If quality is mobile, and it is, then no position on the spectrum—any spectrum—is inherently “good.”

Perhaps novels, like the electrons of my youth, orbit double-star nuclei, zigzagging around convention neutrons and invention protons in states of qualitative flux. It’s not just the text—it’s the reader. That’s a central paradox of physics too. “We are faced with a new kind of difficulty,” wrote Albert Einstein. “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.” Light, depending on how you measure it, is made either of particles or of waves—and so somehow is both. That seemingly impossible wave-particle duality applies to all quantic elements, including works of fiction.

The cognitive psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, in their 2013 study, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,”dragged the genre debate onto the pages of Science. Literary fiction, they reason, makes readers infer the thoughts and feelings of characters with complex inner lives. Psychologists call that Theory of Mind. I call it psychological realism, another form of mimesis. The researchers place popular fiction at the other, nonmimetic pole, because popular fiction, they argue, is populated by simple and predictable characters, and so reading about them doesn’t involve “ToM.”

Kidd and Castano are recycling Krystal’s “genre” definition, only using “popular” for “formulaic.” Their results support their hypothesis—volunteers who read literary fiction scored better on ToM tests afterward—because their literary reading included “Corrie,” a recent O. Henry Prize-winning story by Alice Munro, and the genre reading included Robert Heinlein’s “Space Jockey,” a detailed speculation on the nuts and bolts of space travel populated by appallingly two-dimensional characters. The science is as circular as Krystal’s: Stories that don’t use readers’ ToM skills don’t improve readers’ ToM skills.

If psychological realism is taxonomically useful for defining “literary” (and I believe it is), then here’s a better question: What results would a ToM-focused genre story yield? My colleague in Washington and Lee University’s psychology department, Dan Johnson, and I are exploring that right now. For a pilot study, we created two versions of the same ToM-focused scene. One takes place in a diner, the other on a spaceship. Aside from word substitutions (“door” and “airlock,” “waitress” and “android”), it’s the same story, the same inference-rich exploration of characters’ inner experiences. When asked how much effort was needed to understand the characters, the readers of the narrative-realist scene reported expending 45 percent more effort than the sci-fi readers. The narrative realists also scored 22 percent higher on a comprehension quiz. When asked to rate the scene’s quality on a five-point scale, the diner landed 45 percent higher than the spaceship. The inclusion of sci-fi tropes flipped a switch in our readers’ heads, reducing the amount of effort they exerted and so also their understanding and appreciation. Genre made them stupid. “Literariness” is at least partially a product of a reader’s expectations, whether you lean in or kick back. Fiction, like light, can be two things at once.

This wave-particle model may or may not emerge as the organizing metaphor of contemporary literature, but follow-up experiments are under way. We will survive the genre apocalypse. In fact, I predict we’ll find ourselves still orbiting the mimetic sun of psychological realism. The good/bad, literary/genre binary has collapsed, but the center still holds.

[This article originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January 2015.]

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon