Bifurcated Life

China Mieville’s work is speculative fiction. Not just because it depicts imaginary monsters, worlds unheard of, and impossible adventures, but because it genuinely speculates. I say this to people and they respond: show me. Today I will.

It so happens that in Mieville’s latest, Embassytown, he speculates, among other things, on what Hegel called “recognition,” the advent of self-consciousness through consciousness’s encounter with itself in the medium of another.

The action of Embassytown takes place in Embassytown, a human outpost on the planet Arieka originally home to the sentient Ariekei. It is an outpost in that the humans only possess the one, small city in the midst of a planet teeming with Ariekei, and in the sense that Arieka itself is at the edge of the unexplored expanse of the “immer,” the absolute space beneath the spaces of the succession of expansions and contractions of the universe. “Immer,” and the techniques of immer-travel, are probably the foremost science-fiction-y element of the story. The protagonist, and narrator, is Avice Benner Cho, a navigator of the immer, who grew up in Embassytown, but returns to it for the benefit of her linguist husband, Scile. Scile wants to go to Embassytown because it contains a lingual phenomenon unique in the known universe: Language.

The Ariekei speak Language; it is the only language they understand. It consists of double vocalizations — two voices speaking at once — which the Ariekei accomplish in their own bodies. If humans attempt to communicate with them via mechanically reproduced versions of their vocalizations, the Ariekei can’t understand what they’re saying. Only when two humans vocalize Language together can the Ariekei understand them. But even that isn’t enough: the two humans must appear to the Ariekei to be one mind, so the humans must have a special empathic bond to each other. Embassytown has its name from the human solution to this stricture: ambassadors. Ambassadors are cloned humans who have been raised together and who, every morning, undergo an equalizing operation to keep them as identical as possible. They speak, when conversing with other humans, as one, completing each other’s sentences; and, when conversing with the Ariekei, they genuinely appear to the aliens as one mind when they vocalize together.

The central conflict of the plot occurs when the imperial planet of Bremen, of which Embassytown is supposed to be a colony, send an unusual pair of ambassadors to Embassytown. Bremen’s hope is to undermine the local power of the Embassytown born-and-bread ambassadors, to forestall the defection of Embassytown from their empire. This pair of ambassadors are not clones: far from it. One of them is an enhance empath, who can speak Language, in a way recognizable to the Ariekei, with any trained co-vocalizer. Bremen hopes to subvert Embassytown’s nascent independence by gradually replacing the homegrown Ambassadors with ones exported from Bremen. But the mismatched ambassadors have an unexpected an devastating effect on the Ariekei when they speak. They cause instant addiction. The entire species of Ariekei become addicted to the voice of the Bremen ambassador, and they essentially take the human population of Embassytown hostage in their need for regular doses of the language-drug. Because human survival in the inhospitable atmosphere of Arieka is at this stage of the city’s development dependent upon the bio-tech given to the humans by the Ariekei, it seems likely that the humans will all die before they can receive relief or refuge off-planet. In the uproar of their addiction, the Ariekei neglect to maintain the bio-tech. Worse, some among the Ariekei rebel against the addiction, mutilating their “gift-wings,” the physiological key to their ability to speak Language. These deaf and dumb Ariekei band silently together, marching toward the Embassytown with murder in their hearts, hoping to eradicate the interlopers who have destroyed their civilization by mass addiction.

The story could easily become a simple political and military epic — the embattled humans could survive by grit and stratagem. Then the story would be essentially an adventure story, not speculative fiction. But Mieville chooses an infinitely more sophisticated and complicated resolution. He chooses to have his main character lead the Ariekei through the process of Hegelian recognition.

What really stands as a barrier between humans and Ariekei, you see, is that the Ariekei don’t possess the human kind of self-consciousness. In Language, the Ariekei can only speak the truth, e.g., all their similes must refer to actually existing things. Avice Benner Cho, it so happens, is a simile. When she was a girl, the Ariekei requested that she perform a simile. She went with them to a dark place, alone, and ate something painful and unpleasant. Thus she is, in Language, the-girl-who-ate-what-was-given-to-her. The Ariekei can use similes — they can say that they are like the-girl-who-ate-what-was-given-to-her in that they accept their fates, for example, but then they cannot also say that the are not like the-girl-who-ate-what-was-given-to-her in some other way. In other words, they cannot make the dialectical leap that is metaphor, in which the distinctions between different things are discarded in grasping their unity: they cannot comprehend, in conjunction, we are the-girl-who-ate-what-was-given-to-her in accepting our fates, and we are not the-girl-who-ate-what-was-given-to-her.

In the climax of the story, Avice teaches one particularly complicated Ariekei to say — and in saying, to comprehend — this kind of dialectical thing. She has to teach him through the mouths of an ambassador pair, because he cannot understand her and does not recognize her as sentient by herself. But when the avenue of dialectic opens to him, when he learns to signify, suddenly he becomes aware of her as sentient, suddenly he recognizes her.

The event of this transformation is an incredibly compelling representation of the famous master-slave dialectic from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Avice is the slave, a consciousness for-itself who becomes a consciousness for-another, the means of the Ariekei’s accession to self-consciousness. The Ariekei is the master, seized with desire and dread, who perceives the negativity of her consciousness, and comes to perceive his identity with himself through her.

Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. The recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. (Phenomenology, 112)

In Mieveille’s version of this recognition, the mutuality takes place at the level of language, when the Ariekei begin signifying rather than referring:

What they spoke now weren’t things or moments anymore but the thoughts of them, pointings-at; meaning no longer a flat facet of essence; signs ripped from what they signed. [...] With that spiral of assertion-abnegation came quiddities, and the Ariekei became themselves. (Embassytown, 311-312, italics mine)

One could write a whole paper elaborating the parable in terms of recognition. The addiction is Desire. The stoic, the skeptic, and the unhappy consciousness are all present. The first dialectic of sense-certainty, which I’ve celebrated on this blog, is implicit in the pointing-language of the self-mutilated Ariekei who give Avice the idea that saves the day. And all of this is brilliantly couched in a narrative dealing with imperialism and colonial rebellion, that gives a profoundly urgent point to the embodied speculations.

Few works of “literary fiction” have the depth or intellectual force of Mieville’s speculative fiction. That he is not rated among the few best writers, genre completely aside, in our generation is utterly the fault of blind, snobbish, class-based discrimination. When literary culture descends to a matter of discriminating between the socially couth and uncouth — as in this depressing text, to which I am partially reacting, where we are told “literary fiction is not genre fiction” — then it screams to be renewed. Mieville-style spec-fic is one such renewal.