Absent Paradigm

Their real opponent was not the hierarchy of residents in the heights far above them, but the image of the building in their own minds, the multiplying layers of concrete that anchored them to the floor.  High Rise, J.G. Ballard 

Within the iconography of sf, the vertical urban environment has become so ubiquitous that for urban theorists such as Stephen Graham, it is “almost a cliché.” But this generic conflation of multiple texts, images and graphics risks flattening the variety and complexity of the urban imaginary in sf. 

 This workshop drew upon SF theorist Kathleen Spencer’s concept of the ‘absent paradigm’ of SF worldbuilding as a methodology, to look closely at the construction of imagined worlds. It asked participants to undertake a close reading of selected sf texts, to examine the lacuna within passages of spatial description which we fill with fragments of our own experience.  

 It asked participants to use collage, mapping and film techniques to explore the materials, forms and aesthetic tropes which comprise the visual language of the futuristic city in science fiction. We undertook collective acts of construction to unpick the web of references and associations which influence and inform our readings of imagined urban space, to inhabit the embodied implications of these spatial constructions. 

“The image of the building presented in science fiction, be that novels, short stories, film games, poetry, plays or any other media holds an even more significant place in our social construction of the world. It is here that the limits to this image of the building are tested, that the breathtaking scope of possibility and impossibility is explored. It is also here that the ground of what can be considered ‘futuristic’ is laid down. For Gary K. Wolfe the city is an icon in science fiction, alongside the robot and the spaceship. Not something that has a specific conventional weight or meaning, but which coheres around a set of ‘variations on a theme’. This generic conflation of multiple texts, images and graphics risks flattening the variety and complexity of the urban imaginary in sf. So, this workshop is an attempt to delight in the individuality of our readings of any one given sf city, and to open up a space for conversation about the image of the city in sf as a trope or icon.   

In her work ‘The Red Sun Is High, the Blue Low’ Kathleen Spencer builds on Marc Angenots’ discussion of the absent paradigm to discuss SF worldbuilding. For her, the absent paradigm is the word behind the text, assumed by the reader to by fully rounded and realised, and yet visible only in fragments. We construct our own image of this fictive world from these slight glimpses; drawing on description or inferring from the implied impact the environment has on its inhabitants. As the imagined world spreads behind the text in a network of allusions and associations, we are emotionally and imaginatively involved in its production, inevitably weaving our own experiences of place into the imagined world.  

This workshop then is an exploration of the construction of these absent worlds. An opportunity to critically consider how we form the image of the building in our own minds, and how we have written ourselves into these texts.”