On the Possibility of Legal Form in Miéville's Speculative Fictions

Abstract

This article explores the nexus of the legal and the literary in the works of China Miéville. Miéville's acclaim and popularity among the genre fiction communities often overlooks his political commitment to a Marxist view of law. At the same time, literary criticism of Miéville's fiction tends to flatten this Marxist politik by ignoring its historical indebtedness to Pashukanian and Trotskyist lines of thought in Miéville's critical and creative works. This article responds to both these vectors by asserting that there is a significant and hitherto unexplored difference in the frame of possibilities to imagine law in the Weird speculative fictions that Miéville composes.

Keywords:

• literary criticism
• Weird fiction
• China Miéville
• Marxist legal theory
• Yevgeny Pashukanis
• trauma

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Science Fiction Studies was begun in part by the eminent Marxist literary critic of sf Darko Suvin. Miéville has taken Suvinites, including Carl Freedman, to task for their elitist use of “cognitive estrangement” to distinguish sf from fantasy; China Miéville, “Afterword – Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory,” in Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 231–48.

2. Joan Gordon, “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville,” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 3 (2003), http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm/.

3. A significant portion of Between Equal Rights relies on Francisco Vitoria and Hugo Grotius to focus attention on the emergence of international law from arising maritime protocols (i.e., the fifth and sixth chapters). The lack of consistent systematic approaches to international law has lead, according to Miéville, to the peculiar scenario that should a state decide that it no longer wants to observe a particular law, “then it ceases to be law”; China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 11. For more on the reactions to international law and its functionalism, see Nigel Purvis, “Critical Legal Studies in Public International Law,” Harvard International Law Journal 32, no. 1 (1991): 81–127. The doing away with law in international law is largely a pragmatic point for Miéville, Between Equal Rights, 297.

4. For examples of this kind of scholarship, see Greta Olson's comparison of American law and literature scholarship to British and German scholarship in the field in Greta Olson, “De-Americanizing Law and Literature Narratives: Opening Up the Story,” Law & Literature 22 (2010): 341–45, 359–60.

5. Miéville was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015. The varied membership of the society has a broad literary focus and has included authors such J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, J. K. Rowling, Nikolai Tolstoy, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Mary Midgley, and Louis Bernières. There are over 500 fellows from almost all genres of literature: philosophy to speculative fiction, biography to the historical novel. For a full list of fellows and some “royal” honorary members, see Royal Society of Literature, http://rsliterature.org/.

6. Miéville's creative novels have been variously recognized by three Arthur C. Clarke Awards (2001, 2005, 2010), a British Science Fiction Association award for best novel (2009), a Hugo (2010), a Kurd Lasswitz Prize (2002), two Locus Awards for best fantasy novel (2003, 2005), and two August Derleth Awards (2001, 2003). In lieu of these awards, a satirical website was set up (Could They Beat Up China Miéville; https://couldtheybeatupchinamieville.wordpress.com/) that imagined different fantastical encounters between as varied a range of adversaries as Prince Charles, Fox News, Bill Gates, The Joker, bad teenage poets, Lady Gaga, Cthulhu, and Iain M. Banks.

7. This imagery is particularly visible through the trope of the New Crobuzon justice system and the punishment of being ReMade in Miéville's triptych: Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. It also appears in the representation of refugees in The City & the City and the diplomatic structures of Embassytown, to name two further examples.

8. In Miéville's literary criticism since 2009, he targets the dominance of Suvin's Marxist interpretation of sf as an escapist literature that derives its cognitive logic from an external authority; Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979). In his critical gaze, Miéville sees sf's self-description – a community of writers, publishers, and readers – as something different to the folk-logic endorsed by a certain line of argument that follows Suvin, such as the contribution by Freedman to the Red Planets collection co-edited by Miéville and longtime friend and sf theorist in his own right Mark Bould. The Miévillian criticism is that because there is subservience to an external authority from which the folk-logic answers its own reader-question of “what is sf?” any cognitive rationality derived from such subservience is both a-rational and ideological; Miéville, “Afterword – Cognition as Ideology,” 239.

9. Michael Moorcock, “Foreword,” in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus, 2011), xiii.

10. For Suvin, sf uses these tropes as part of a rigorous scientific extrapolation of a fictional hypothesis beyond mere rationalism; Darko Suvin, “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion,” Extrapolation 41, no. 3 (2000): 209–47, at 239. They are, nonetheless, tropic rationalizations that manage and are managed by the audience's expectations imagined by commissioning editors of publishing houses and sf magazines.

11. Moorcock, “Foreword,” xii.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. China Miéville and Mark Bould, eds., Historical Materialism, 10, no. 4 (2002).

15. Gordon, “Reveling in Genre.”

16. Andrew Milner has recently mapped out the relationship between sf and the literary field following the discourse analysis of Pierre Bourdieu. A significant limitation of Milner's approach is that it commits its analysis to a “transcendental reduction” of sf genres, which dilutes or overlooks the force of Miéville's literary project; Andrew Milner, “SF and the Literary Field,” Science Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (2011): 393–411.

17. China Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, and Sherryl Vint (Florence: Routledge, 2009), web. 494; S. T. Joshi, The Modern Weird Tale (Jefferson: McFarland, 2001).

18. Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992); Peter Fitzpatrick, Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

19. Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart, 2000); Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire (Oxford: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).

20. Histories of sf tend to begin with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) or Hugo Gernsback's editorship of Amazing Stories in the 1920s, but can go as far back as the epic poets of ancient Greece who poeticized the realm of the gods.

21. Duncan Wu, “Introduction,” in Romanticism: An Anthology, 4th edition, ed. Duncan Wu (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), xxxiii; George Levine, “Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism,” in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Second Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (London: W. W. Norton, 2011), 316.

22. For more on this, see F. R. Leavis’ extended discussion of realism in F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).

23. China Miéville, “Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy – Editorial Introduction,” Historical Materialism 10, no. 4 (2002): 39–49, at 40.

24. Ibid., 41, 41 n. 5.

25. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I [1867] (London: Penguin, 1976), 173; Miéville, “Editorial Introduction,” 41.

26. Miéville “Editorial Introduction,” 41.

27. Leavis, Great Tradition.

28. S. T. Joshi, Modern Weird Tale, 250.

29. Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, & Adam Roberts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 510–15.

30. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale (Holicone: Wildside, 1990).

31. Miéville “Weird Fiction,” 510.

32. Isaac Asimov, “1967: Foreword 1 – The Second Revolution” [1967], in Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (London: Gollancz, 2013), xxii–xxviii.

33. Miéville is particularly interested in contesting Suvin's Marxist–cognitivist theorizing of sf as an exercise in escapism and cognitive estrangement. For Miéville, “There is little doubt that the Freedman/Suvin theory is accurate in asserting that, for that folk-understanding of SF-not-fantasy, SF-ness is a function of the cognition effect – an embedded relation in the text between cognition and the reality function. […] Inasmuch as the experienced effect is in fact a function of authority, the ‘cognition effect’, in deriving supposed cognitive logic from external authority, is not only fundamentally a-rational but also intensely ideological”; Miéville, “Afterword: Cognition as Ideology,” 239.

34. Asimov, “1967: Foreword 1,” xvii.

35. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” in The Weird, xix.

36. Ibid.

37. Paul Kincaid, “Fiction Since 1992,” in Bould et al., Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 174–82.

38. Ibid., 180.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” in Mythologies [1957] (London: Vintage, 2000), 15–25, at 15.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 15–16. There is an interesting tangential discussion to be had here about the way these ideological coordinates contributed to the Sad and Rabid Puppies incident in the voting for the 2015 Hugo Awards for speculative fiction, which Miéville has won multiple times. The Puppies’ complaint was that the awards were dominated by minority identities and speculative fiction that tended to be derived from the New Wave tradition rather than from the Campbell redux that is Hard SF. Through block-voting strategies, the Puppies were able to game the online voting form so as to nominate a works of Hard SF in an unprecedented way. The irregular voting was vetoed by the Hugo awards committee and the books receiving unusual prominence removed from the ticket, but the dilemma remains as to how the counter-current of New Wave sf from the 1960s is now just as dominant and ideological as Campbellesque sf from the 1920s–40s. It must be said, of course, that such awards are built on Jansenism and celebrate celebrity more than celerity.

44. Carl Freedman, “Speculative Fiction and International Law: The Marxism of China Miéville,” Socialism and Democracy 20, no. 3 (2006): 25–39, at 25.

45. Barthes, “World of Wrestling,” 16.

46. “Resigning from the Socialist Workers Party,” International Socialism, March 11, 2013, http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/fao-central-committee-of-socialist.html/.

47. BBC News, “Vote 2001: Results & Constituencies” (2001), http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/vote2001/results_constituencies/constituencies/474.stm/.

48. Gilbert Achcar, Jean Alain Roussel, Alan Gibbons, Zita Holbourne, Kate Hudson, Roger Lloyd Pack, Ken Loach, China Miéville, and Michael Rosen (2013) “Left Unity Read to Offer an Alternative,” The Guardian, August 13, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/aug/12/left-unity-alternative and http://leftunity.org/letter-in-the-guardian-left-unity-ready-to-offer-an-alternative/.

49. Notably, since 2015, Miéville has published a cultural history of the October revolution and founded a new Left journal entitled Salvage, both with Verso.

50. In his afterword to Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, Miéville has an especially critical tone to his confrontation with sf Suvinite Freedman that echoes the voice and cadence of Between Equal Rights; Miéville, “Afterword – Cognition as Ideology.”

51. Gordon, “Reveling in Genre.”

52. Miéville, in VanderMeer and VanderMeer, The Weird, 916.

53. T. E. Holland, in Myres S. McDougal and W. Michael Reisman, International Law Essays (Mineola: Foundation Press, 1981), 188.

54. Miéville, Between Equal Rights, 17.

55. Ibid., 19.

56. Ibid.

57. Peter Malanczuk, Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law, 7th revd ed. (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.

58. Miéville, Between Equal Rights, 17.

59. Manfred Lachs, The Teacher in International Law (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 10.

60. Miéville, Between Equal Rights, 19, 24, 31.

61. Engels, cited in ibid., 5.

62. Engels, cited in ibid.

63. For an allied reading of the real-world effects of international law, see Matthew Nicholson, “Walter Benjamin and the Re-Imageination of International Law,” Law and Critique (2015): 1–27. Published online October 26, 2015. Nicholson cites his sympathies with Susan Marks’ call for “scholarship […] addressed openly, and indeed insistently, to life”; Susan Marks, The Riddle of All Constitutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145. It would not be a flight of fancy to imagine that Miéville's jurisprudence fits the aims of Marks’ call. Miéville may likely lump Marks in with his third group of denialists whose optimism about international law's social effects is aspirational, particularly Susan Marks, “State-Centrism, International Law, and the Anxieties of Influence,” Leiden Journal of International Law 19 (2006): 339; and Susan Marks, “International Judicial Activism and the Commodity-Form Theory of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 18 (2007): 199. Nicholson, “Walter Benjamin,” 7, lumps Miéville and Marks together with Robert Knox, Paavo Kotiaho, and Bill Bowring, but this is a bridge too far over the critique offered in Miéville's Between Equal Rights.

64. It is important to note that although there is legal theory taking its cues and inspiration from the work of Marx, Marx himself never coherently theorized a general theory of law across his few scattered legal examples.

65. For example, Freedman, “Speculative Fiction and International Law.”

66. Freedman, “Speculative Fiction and International Law,” 26.

67. In particular, see Carl Freedman, “From Genre to Political Economy: Miéville's The City & the City and Uneven Development,” New Centennial Review 13, no. 2 (2013): 13–30; and its impact on the argument in Christopher Kendrick, “Monster Realism and Uneven Development in China Miéville's The Scar,” Extrapolation 50, no. 2 (2009): 258–75.

68. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution [1930], trans. Max Eastman (London: Pluto, 1977), 27.

69. Ibid., 25–37.

70. Leon Trotsky, “The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism” [1924], in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (London: W. W. Norton, 2011), 880–92.

71. See the editorial introduction to extracts from Trotsky in Leitch, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 878–80.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Hourigan

Daniel Hourigan is a committee member of the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia, an Associate Editor of the “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities” series with Edinburgh University Press, and an Adjunct Research Fellow with the Law Futures Centre at Griffith University, Brisbane. He teaches English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland, where he is also a founding member of the Trauma Cultures research group. He facilitates projects on cultural approaches to law, law and speculative fictions, law and contemporary philosophy, and psychoanalysis and sexuality.