Connecting Red Mars to Art

When I think on Robinson's work as a whole it reads on a very different level than what I typically think of as sci fi because it explores lines of thought very much in tune with philosophy and art.

Within Robinson's work we confront a notion that has been explored extensively by the artist duo Arakawa + Gins. This in the notion of "reversible destiny"
Essentially, it is a type of philisophy that the duo worked out that speaks to enabling humans to live eternally ... by refusing to die. In working toward non-death humans are required to establish architecture...places of dwelling..living that accomodates them and in fact encourage life by constantly reminding one that they are alive.

I cant help but see the parallel in arkady's "socio-architectural theories"(pg 339) and again in the types of architecture that abound on Mars in general. It echos in the actualized architecture of Arakawa + Gins' park "reversible destiny" based in Japan http://www.yoro-park.com/e/rev/

One step past this is an additional connection articulated in Arakawa + Gins' manifesto - in the form of an introduction to their book "Architectural Body"
In which they go about stating the following:

Without doubt, the human race has hideously acquiesced in regard to its own abysmal fate. Underlying all cultures, in East and West alike, is this assumption or attitudinal stance: we--each and every one of us--must die, no doubt about it, for all those who lived before us died. So unquestionably mortal are we that we have even come to call ourselves mortals, for God's sake. Everyone everywhere wants to insist on this. A bunch of defeatists all. Nobody wants to be caught not getting the "real" straight, for not accurately registering what comes to pass puts one at odds with society. How could what so evidently stares one in the face not be, after all, what it rings true as? (A/G Architectural body Intro)

Architecture must be made to fit the body as a second, third, fourth, and, when necessary, ninth (and counting) skin. We believe that people closely and complexly allied with their architectural surrounds can succeed in outliving their (seemingly inevitable) death sentences! (A/G Architectural body Intro)

It must never be forgotten that we don't know what we are in the first place. (A/G Architectural body Intro)

Although the human condition is a crisis condition if ever there was one, few individuals and societies act with the dispatch a state of emergency requires. The fact that the human condition is a crisis condition gets routinely covered up, with culture invariably functioning to obscure how dire the condition is and to float it as bearable(A/G Architectural body Intro)

All intellectual pursuits thus far, in East and West alike, have been largely stopgap measures, so much fiddling while Rome burns, that is, while people line up one after another to die. (A/G Architectural body Intro)

Consider this: An organism-person allied with, in close correspondence with, surroundings that guide skillful coordination of bodily actions ought to be able to escape so-called human destiny, the as-if-ordained downhill course of things. Not only will houses and towns that architecturally guide and sustain an organism-person help her to compose, execute, and coordinate actions more skillfully than was ever before thought to be possible, they will also automatically enlist her in a thoroughgoing architectural questioning of the purpose of the species. An architecturally guided and sustained organism-person should then be able to reverse that destiny known to have been the lot of billions of other members of her species; when it becomes possible for an organism-person simply to go on indefinitely, a reversible destiny shall have been achieved. (A/G Architectural body Intro)

Architecture is the greatest tool available to our species, both for figuring itself out and for constructing itself differently. (A/G Architectural body Intro)

And the body, a complex organism that is always in the process of reading surroundings, needs to be defined together with that within which it moves; peering at it from the other way around, the surroundings need to be defined together with the bodies moving within them (A/G Architectural body Intro)

Theoretical constructs as to the nature of person can be assessed in a thoroughgoing manner through -- and, in the end, only through -- architectural construction.(A/G Architectural body Intro)

The way in which these key phrases parallel the ideas that are quilted into Robinson's novel is rather compelling. For does he not explore in extensive detail the very acts that A/G call for? Indeed!
Terrafoam, Sax's arctic asteroid, the DNA manipulation, moholes, Olympus Mons, The offspring of Hiroko's clan, the paul bunyon tale,Frank's Neitzche quote about the individual (pg 456)and so on.
In closing, I think it important to look to works aside from lit theory in understanding a text for texts are ineed dynamic things that are heavily influenced and influentual in different areas. Though this is known at our level of study I still think we must remember...that there is music, dance, art, photography, and subcultures waiting for inclusion in our analysis beyond the obvious: such as punk - for cyberpunk lit.

Cultural Seed plot

Roy Wagner in his text "The Invention of Culture " states that culture is invented "whenever and wherever some 'alien' or 'foreign' set of conventions is brought into relation with one's own"(10). This notion applied to Red Mars makes for quite a compelling read in that there are multiple cultures being invented simultaneously. There is the culure that forms between the members of the first hundred who are in themselves representative of there respective governments and with it their national traditions. There is the culture that slowly emerges between earth and mars via the overseeing committee (UNOMA)in contact with the first hundred based on observation and regulation of activites. There is the culture that emerges between the members of the first hundred and the planet. And the culture that comes about as the occupation spreads.
So what to do make of it??
Well, one way to look at the cultural invention of Red Mars is to look at it through the eco-economics lens that Robert Markely refers to in his article. And though this may seem inappropriate it really isn't at all...Because while Markley seems taken with the notion of eco-economics in terms of the bio-system interactions that have taken place in the novel, it can be argued that this same notion can appropriately be applied to the culture invention/clash/collision taking place along side the biosystem evolution. For indeed the culture invention/clash/collision is made up of complex relationships that result in making apparent the "interlocking systems that create and sustain tenuous seemingly miraculaous conditions that allow life to flourish"(775). It is these relationships - the more intimate ones to be exact, that keep the momentum of the novel moving. It is so because within each relationship one finds a small scale cultural invention in that those who are bound up in intimate relationships function initially in different cultural paradigms thus in coming together sexually, religiously, politically, amicably they serve to create/invent a new way of being. And this can be readily seen in the Maya/Frank/John love/hate triangle; the nadia/arcady romance; the Michel Duval/Hiroko/areophany affair; and ann and "her" mars to name a few. Each of those mentioned relationships create a "social" and gives to Mars a foreign culture. And while this giving is taking place Mars continues to provide them with the backdrop of opportunity placing the relationships and the culture that amounts from them in a dynamic coupling with the planet.

All this talk of cultural invention (which is by its nature divisive) though is rather ironic given the "trans" lable under which the colonization of Mars occuring. That is not to say that there aren't subversive characters such as Arcady, Ann, Sax who in their own ways are working against the division that one can't help but be confronted with within the framework of culture; however, Robinson makes explicit that transcendance of cultural boundaries cannot be escaped. And this is pointed to implicitly by Willima White in his article that discusses Greimas' semantic rectangle. For cant we argue that robinson utilizes this tool to emphasize just how bound humans are to binary systems?

This last question brings me to my final point.

Wagner in his novel makes it explicit that culture is a convention that we ourselves have created. Following this line of thought then..culture is "made up" or created by us. As such (I'm tying this notion to Robinson now)no matter how far we travel we cannot escape the boundaries of our own making.

What's this war in the heart of nature?

Singing :
"War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing"

Slonczewski's novel speaks to me in a political sense; conjuring up sympathetic echoes of movies: mainly that of "Thin Red Line" a movie about the occupation of Guadacanal during WWII.

Almost poetic in their thinking: Shora's collective speaks in and among notions of altruism, moral codes, love, and unity. And this is done in the face of death: that is represented by Joan S in a way that plays up its multiplicity. For Death is: The act or fact of dying; the end of life; the final cessation of the vital functions of an animal or plant or individual. It is a personified agent - a state or condition of being without life, animation, or activity.
And then there is death-in-life, life that lacks any satisfaction or purpose; living death.

Moreover death is: the loss or cessation of life in a particular part or tissue of a living being; Loss of sensation or vitality, state of unconsciousness, the being or becoming spiritually dead. The loss or deprivation of civil life; the fact or state of being cut off from certain rights and privileges, as by banishment, imprisonment for life, etc. The end, extinction, destruction, Bloodshed, slaughter, murder
A general mortality.

All of the above are played out in the invasion and occupation of Shora in episodes such as : Merwen's detainment, Spinel's staged assimilation, Shora's ebb and flow in light of the Valan's attempt to moderate it via violent pesticides/poisons, the death of individual Shorans, in Bernice, and Realgar rein and resignation.

Joan S indeed related death to the political and embeds only its onesided meaning (death in the negative as an act inflicted on another without apparent influence on the arbiter) within the language of valans while defining it in dynamic terms within the language of the Shoran's(sharers) which imbues all that are involved with a sense of responsibility. Perhaps it is this train of thought that leads me to thinking on "The Thin Red Line" a movie (much different from the book for sure) which reflects the thoughts of soldiers very much informed by the dynamic notion of death.

Soldiers think, while in the jungle in looking upon death or after being affected by violent death the following thoughts:

"Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness, light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining."


We. We together. One being. Flow together like water. Till I can't tell you from me. I drink you. Now. Now

This great evil. Where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known. Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed to this night?

Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man

If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack; a glance from your eyes, and my life will be yours

These quotes taken together reflect the core of the sharer's belief: the unselfish devotion to the welfare of others b/c of the interconnectedness of all things. What is more is that Joan S. confronts the multiplicity of death with loveforce - something that was not alloted to the soldiers of guatacanal as an option.
She enables the sharer's with a resistance against the proliferation of war - indeed b/c they refuse to participate with outwardly violent means toward man, and in doing so open themselves to the will of those who wished to inhabit them. Their lifestyle heavily dependent on natural science combat, so to speak, the tyranny of the valan's by engaging them in terms of survival on Shora and BY shora- a feat that could only be accomplished by them and those educated in their ways.

Stepping away from the text, Joan S admits that her novel was informed by the political maneuvers that were occuring during the time she was composing. Indeed, her political stance is made clear: power moves made between nations are based on what a soldier from "thin red line" states quite concisely : "Property. The whole fucking thing's about property" Is this not the kernel around which Door Into the Ocean is composed?