Стиймпънк Лондон

Punked Pasts and

Cyborg Cities

Helena Esser

 

(Steampunk London

Neo-Victorian Urban Space and Popular

Transmedia Memory)

 

Science fiction critic John Clute viscerally describes how William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s seminal steampunk novel The Difference Engine (1990) radically transforms the Victorian city of memory as follows:

Very soon the face of London begins to convulse into a Freemason’s wetdream of the City as a monologue of temples: parks and homes are demolished to make way for entrepreneurial edifices decorated with pharaonic runes and dedicated to Progress: new thoroughfares slice through the heart of town, steam gurneys choke the roadways and poison the air; and everywhere one can hear the sound of the new order being born.¹

In so doing, he illustrates the central subject of this interdisciplinary study: By deconstructing and then re­mapping a vaguely familiar but commonly held urban imaginary, steampunk London emerges as a retro-speculative, alternative ‘Victorian London’ that both affirms and re­imagines its status as emblematic socio-economic nexus and collective symbol for the Victorian past.

This study explores why steampunk fiction, as a creative- critical, neo-Victorian, and popular memory practice, gravitates so often to Victorian London as its potent setting, and how its anachronistic impulses work both within and against a collective memory of the Victorian city. It contextualizes steampunk cities against Victorian cross-media strategies to represent the complexity, simultaneity, and social challenges of the modern metropolis, and so illustrates how and to what end steampunk creatively re-imagines London’s urban environments across both spatial and temporal axes. In so doing, it illustrates how popular fiction at large, and neo-

Victorianism in particular, invites participatory consumption and a playful, yet politically informed re-evaluation of the Victorian past’s legacies, and considers its potential - and its failures - to interrogate and challenge our relationship with that Victorian past.

A Short History of Steampunk

Steampunk is notoriously difficult to define, although easily identifiable as retro-speculative, Victorian-looking universes populated by airships, automata, ray guns, or revenants: Steampunk, ‘as a genre and a paradigm resists definition’.² It typically infuses neo-Victorian settings, be they fantastic secondary worlds or identifiably real-world Victorian past, with retrofuturism and technofantasy³ as either aesthetic marker or temporal concept, and may incarnate across genres in literature, film, fashion, music, video games, or sculpture. Termed - although not invented⁴ - by K.W. Jeter in 1987 for Locus Magazine,⁵ steampunk initially synthesized 1980s anti- neo-liberal politics against the collapsing industrial paradigm and has re-emerged in the internet age as a cross-cultural, collaborative transmedia subculture that spans fiction, maker culture, music, art, and cosplay.

This maker culture most exemplifies steampunk’s creative interrogation of our relationship with technology, and has most often garnered scholarship’s attention.⁶ It potently illustrates how steampunk synthesizes Victorian fictions, aesthetics, and materials - ‘the dandified gear of aristocrats, peculiar brass gear, rather stilted personal relationships, and elaborate and slightly kinky underwear’, as Sterling postulates - into a culturally charged visual shorthand,⁷ and therefore merits a brief overview. Steampunk’s quest to re-capture a knowability of the technology that saturates and defines our lives is illustrated by a much-quoted manifesto out of SteamPunk Magazine by the Catastrophone Orchestra:

First and foremost, steampunk is a non-luddite critique of technology. [...] It revels in the concrete reality of technology instead of the over-analytical abstractness of cybernetics. [S]teampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural; it moves, lives, ages and even dies.⁸

Attempting to ‘rediscover the inherent dignity of created objects’,⁹ steampunk’s online and collaborative maker culture seeks to re-humanize technology by externalizing its hidden functions in the Arts and Crafts spirit. Steampunk creations promise accessibility and offer a sensory experience: Their levers, gears, and boilers can be seen, heard, and touched, in opposition to the streamlined digital black boxes that refuse us users access or agency over their inner workings. The Victorian design aesthetic here signifies a complex network of meta-historical interrelations between production, workmanship, materiality, capitalism, and identity that are firmly identified with, and located in, the Victorian past. It so re-thinks and re-applies Victorian critiques of industrial production and the mass market by Karl Marx, John Ruskin, or William Morris, and employs similar strategies of reclaiming agency and dignity through manufacture. However, the industrial design which Victorian critics rejected now becomes itself the object of reverence, because, now outdated, it is perceived as picturesque and intriguing. As a postmodern and post-industrial aesthetic, steampunk also illustrates our collective re-evaluation of a technological aesthetic once perceived as daunting and infernal as now quaint and clanky: ‘Steampunk’s key lessons are not about the past,’ reflects Sterling in the Steampunk Bible:

They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times. A host of objects and services that we see each day all around us are not sustainable. [...] Once they’re gone, they’ll seem every bit as weird and archaic as top hats, crinolines, magic lanterns, clockwork automatons, absinthe, walking-sticks and paper-scrolled player pianos.¹⁰

As such, steampunk is intrinsically bound up with the neo­Victorian project of re-assessing the nineteenth century’s legacies, here from a technological perspective. It condenses ideas about agency, artistry, and accessibility that defined object-user relationships amid the Industrial Revolution into a retro-speculative aesthetic shorthand¹¹ and adds irony and adventure. Its anachronistic, (re-)created objects become understandable, emotionally valuable, and full of (dangerous) possibility: ‘Through the recovery of the everyday danger of interacting with volatile objects, steampunk practitioners desire to re-engage with the physical world, subverting the sterile and safe relationships they perceive to exist between people and objects in contemporary society’.¹²

Despite its semi-ironic reverence for Victorian materiality and aesthetic, steampunk remains conscious of the social and ecological cost of Victorian industrial production, and steampunks are called to ‘punk responsibly’ and remember that ‘steampunking is a political act’.¹³ Ultimately, steampunk is animated by a semi-nostalgic, semi-ironic celebration of a perceived sense of escalation and hubris associated with the Victorian age as a riotous, dirty, adventurous age of invention, romance, and exploration. As Diana Pho explains: ‘Modern science fiction tells us: “Oh god, don’t go build giant robots. They’ll kill us all!” But Victorian science fiction says: “Yay! Let’s go build giant robots! Oh shoot, they killed us” ’.¹⁴

Steampunk is a self-aware, meta-historical, transmedia aesthetic that flaunts playful, retro-speculative anachronisms as its defining feature, and so collapses linear timelines into an imaginative and often semi-ironical triple exposure of past, present, and future. It usually includes techno-fantastical impulses and incorporates multiple, often paradoxical tensions. Marked by an inherent hybridity that blends genres and modes, such as the neo-Victorian with science fiction, it resists ontological coherence and unsettles dichotomies between fact and fiction, past and present, history and speculation, irony and nostalgia, the familiar and the strange. As such, it resembles Donna Haraway’s cyborg in that it may ‘contain contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes’, instead holding ‘incompatible things together, because both or all are necessary and true’.¹⁵

It is the thesis of this study that, for steampunk fiction to function and deliver a satisfactory audience experience, it mobilizes a variety of popular cross-genre, transmedia tropes and mechanisms, with which its contemporary, transmedia­literate and globally connected audience of what one might call post-modern natives is intrinsically, if subconsciously, familiar. Through its anachronistic remix, steampunk creates ludic, irreverent relationships with space and time, here centred on and embodied through the Victorian metropolis, opening the past to interventions that play on the tensions and ironies of our hindsight position towards history. As such, it creates an active reader position and invites audiences to re­imagine their subject position in relation to material culture, here the shared memory of ‘the Victorian’, and urban space, and to evaluate competing collective narratives of the Victorian past. Steampunk so creates a unique interplay between (perceived) past and present, which in turn reflects back on our contemporary identity politics. Thus, depending on which historical meta-narratives are mobilized and how, steampunk holds the potential to shape its audiences as active political agents in pop culture discourse. Indeed, ongoing debates about the re-signification of post-colonial legacies and reparative re-shaping have been an integral part of the steampunk culture since its beginnings,¹⁶ and so align it with the neo-Victorian project.

Neo-Victorianism and the Popular Imagination

As a meta-historical remix of popular memory, steampunk is always, if sometimes unconsciously so, engaged in what has been established as neo-Victorianism’s core-principle, namely that it must ‘in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians.’¹⁷ It is also a decidedly popular incarnation of post-modern ‘historiographic metafiction’, ‘those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’,¹⁸ and, in its re-evaluation of the conditions, enduring traumas, and legacies of the nineteenth century in light of the present moment and its (usually) post-colonial and post-neo-liberal identity politics,¹⁹ is likewise

resurrecting the ghost(s) of the past, searching out its dark secrets and shameful mysteries, insisting obsessively on the lurid details of Victorian life, reliving the period’s nightmares and traumas. At the same time, neo­Victorianism also tries to understand the nineteenth century as the contemporary self’s uncanny Doppelganger, exploring the uncertain limit between what is vanished (dead) and surviving (still living), celebrating the bygone even while lauding the demise of some of the period’s most oppressive aspects, like institutionalised slavery and legally sanctioned sexism and 20 racism.²⁰

Steampunk, while its origins lie somewhat far afield of those of neo-Victorianism, is then nonetheless an essentially neo-Victorian mode, as it, too, constitutes an active site of interpretive struggle over the (re-)signification of cultural memory and, by extension, the collective identity of imagined communities,²¹ only steampunk’s neo-Victorian re­interpretation is infused with playful retro-speculation.

That the question of ‘what it means to fashion the past for consumption in the present’²² is as contested today as it was in the wake of neo-liberalism is painfully evident in Britain’s Brexit era. Indeed, whereas the ‘Victorian’ marker, delineating Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, or what Eric Hobsbawm has termed the Long Nineteenth Century (1789­1914), is as potent as it is constricting and Anglo-centric, steampunk, like neo-Victorianism, is a global phenomenon with global potential.²³ What, then, comprises ‘Victorian-ness’ for international popular audiences? What is the symbolic significance of Victorian London especially as a potent essence of and emblem for that ‘Victorian-ness’ across national boundaries? How does steampunk London encapsulate, re-negotiate, or re-inscribe collective cultural memory which, as Jan Assmann suggests, is both externalized in symbolic spaces such as the urban sphere, and repeatedly communicated in and through everyday interaction?²⁴

This study’s aim is to pry apart and interrogate the multiple cultural mechanisms and meta-narratives about ‘the Victorian’ at play in the steampunk city in order to gain a deeper understanding of how a popular cultural memory of the Victorian past is shaped and transmitted. Steampunk emblematizes the production of communicative and cultural memory, not by relegated specialized authorities, but through the participatory space of popular culture, which Stuart Hall, after all, defines as a dynamic, ongoing process that both produces and reproduces a dominant cultural order: ‘Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured.’²⁵ Notably, he also identifies popular culture as deeply rooted in nineteenth-century mass media, which is why a comparative approach to collectively constructed notions of Victorian London - both Victorian and neo-Victorian - will be especially productive: Considering that widely consumed media lastingly shape popular perception and illustrate ‘what we want to imagine the period to have been like for diverse reasons, including affirmations of national identity, the struggle for symbolic restorative justice, and indulgence in escapist exoticism’,²⁶ which persisting meta-narratives about the city reflect back our projected fantasies about the nineteenth-century? Which narratives are prioritized in an imagined teleological genealogy towards our present collective identity? Which stereotypes persist in the popular reception, potentially hampering a productive re-negotiation of the past? For example, given that, as Diana M. Pho argues, steampunk’s ironically self-reflexive play dismantles homogeneous historical narratives, and rejects nostalgia in favour of transformative critique,²⁷ how does it reckon - or fail to reckon - with the nineteenth century’s colonial legacies, especially regarding London as the Empire’s capital?

Indeed, as Antonija Primorac notes, ‘audiences’ expectations are moulded less by a knowledge of the period based on the archival data (maps, blueprints, lithographs, paintings, photographs, life-writing, fictional and newspaper accounts), but more by the images generated by other, preceding, films and TV series set in the same period’.²⁸ ‘In a sense’, Kohlke and Gutleben diagnose, ‘the neo-Victorian is by definition hyperreal, since it has no direct access to the Victorian real, instead relying entirely on Victorian texts and documents, that is, on signs of the past’.²⁹ Popular neo- Victoriana, sourcing from a pre-established collective idea of ‘the Victorian’, therefore often re-construct and perpetuate ‘already accepted ideas about the Victorians for the sake of period authenticity. [...] [This means:] stereotypes about the Victorian past are (still) an important foundation on which popular adaptations rely’.³⁰ This may include persistent stereotypes about gender, or the almost reflexive, non-critical perpetuation of Gothic tropes, which are entangled in fraught Victorian ideas about race and Otherness. Popular neo- Victoriana and steampunk fiction may thus powerfully illustrate how our collective, politically conscious desire to reckon with the legacies of the Victorian past may be shaped by and entangled with shared fantasies and stereotypes about the period - and embodied, not least, through the ‘Victorian’ urban imaginary.

Cognitive Mapping and the Urban Imaginary

Collective memory is palimpsestically enshrined in the city. Its urban space is, as Henri Lefebvre conceptualizes, socially produced³¹ and, whether in answering the logistic and economic demands of everyday life or encoding collective identity through lieux de memoire,³² continually accumulates layers of meaning. Perhaps no modern metropolis embodies this like London, where Roman ruins can be found near the brutalist sprawl of the Barbican performing arts centre, or where Leadenhall Market, a colourful Victorian arcade built on a market site dating from the fourteenth century, stands next to the 1980s’ futuristic Lloyd’s Building. Indeed, London has been the subject of literary production for centuries, and this study considers prominent approaches such as urban

Gothic, flanerie, and psychogeography,³³ as well as literary urban studies.³⁴

Here, mobilizing Roland Barthes’ notion of the city as semiotic and symbolic,³⁵ the material city is conceived as a multilayered narrative, and the literary text may in turn become an urban model capturing or simulating the cityscape. Accordingly, my interest lies in how Victorian media (journalism, fiction, maps, paintings, and illustrations) aim to represent London’s ‘citiness’³⁶ - its socio-economic networks, palimpsestic infrastructures, simultaneous movements - and how their strategies lastingly shape the collectively imagined Victorian city against which steampunk London is juxtaposed. Literary cities, so Lieven Ameel states, can be considered ‘realms of the imagination, constellations of tropes in an intertextual network’.³⁷ Consequently, collective memory of Victorian London emerges as a transmedia phenomenon in the vein of Henry Jenkins’ notion of convergence culture, that is as a communally fostered imaginary constructed and consumed across multiple different media.³⁸ After all, neo­Victorian cities of memory are ‘spaces in which memory is not just continually fostered, produced, and preserved, but also contested, deconstructed, and sometimes deliberately distorted or fabricated’.³⁹

This study’s main interests are in understanding how a shared urban imaginary is constructed, maintained, or re­framed across media and across time, and how that imaginary informs collective identity politics. Following Edward Said’s concept of imagined geographies, it conceives of identity as spatial: Identity arises from how and where we locate, in our mental map of the world, the local and the strange, them and us, here and there, and is as such inherently political.⁴⁰ The city, too, functions as a microcosm of what Fredric Jameson terms cognitive mapping: Its paths and cornerstones externalize Lacanian notions of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’,⁴¹ and so ‘enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’.⁴² The urban environment serves as an embodied, spatial analogy for how we situate ourselves in relation to larger social systems, and so serves as ‘our mental and cognitive mapping of urban reality, and the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in these places, spaces, and communities in which we live’.⁴³ However, urban imaginaries, here of Victorian London, may function not only as mental maps of real spaces, but also as spatialized metaphors for our social and historical relationships.

This is why the steampunk city, albeit purely virtual because inherently fantastic and anachronistic, may illustrate how and to what end collective memory works in unique ways. As David Pike notes, ‘a key element to the allure of Victorian London for steampunk is its limitless capacity to contain not only the world, as the imperial narrative would maintain, but also the multiverse—this world, all alternative worlds, and all the holes, fissures, and folds in between’⁴⁴ - all encoded in and through the city. Steampunk London acts as a projected theatre of ‘Victorian-ness’ that is open to participatory play. It re-calibrates our ‘interpretive grids’ and so acts a heterotopic counter-site to historical memory, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.⁴⁵ Putting into play Kohlke and Gutleben’s claim that, ‘[p]alimpsestically, we read the past city through the overlaid present, but conversely, we also read the present city backwards through the underlying and resurfacing past’,⁴⁶ the steampunk city understands urban space as a cumulative texture, but also re-shuffles its palimpsestic layers. It draws attention to the process of memory-making and playfully invites audiences to re-think their subject position in relation to those processes and the identities they produce.

Book Overview

This book approaches the complex, multilayered nature of steampunk London from a variety of different angles and a multitude of texts. While the first two chapters focus on how steampunk comes into being through various cultural influences and collective memory-making, the latter two chapters ask why, that is for what purpose, and for whom, steampunk re-imagines the Victorian past. In all of them, Victorian London, whether imagined from a nineteenth­century perspective or through a steampunk lens, serves as a focalizing prism in which identity and memory are spatially encoded. While my focus lies largely on prose fiction, where steampunk Londons are typically most thoroughly imagined, I also discuss film, graphic novels, the visual arts, and video games at various points throughout, as my aim is to interrogate steampunk London as a transmedia phenomenon. As such, this study considers steampunk fiction from across the anglophone world, including the US, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. The fact that writers and creators of steampunk Londons, just like their audiences, are at once globally scattered and connected through social media and a popular culture shared through the internet, demonstrates that steampunk imaginaries of Victorian London function as de-localized shared memory figures - illustrated by the international success of games like Assassin’s Creed, or the globally sourced and read book reviews on sites such as Goodreads or YouTube, dedicated online forums, and blogs.

Chapter One examines the origins of seminal steampunk in 1980s California. I consider the impact of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) on the steampunk imaginary and argue that, while authors K. W. Jeter, James Blaylock, and Tim Powers semi-ironically coined the term steampunk in reference to cyberpunk, a coherent and recognizable steampunk aesthetic emerges later with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990). My analysis situates early steampunk in the context of cyberpunk’s counter-cultural agenda and the re-signification of the industrial paradigm at the dawn of the digital age. It examines how the novel utilizes the Victorian city in order to discuss the impact of cybertechnology and considers its re-use of urban space against the backdrop of Marxist urban theory, namely Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘right to the city’, and David Harvey’s reading thereof.

Chapter Two is concerned with how steampunk functions in the context of collective memory, adaptation, and remix. I use London’s East End as an example of how Victorian transmedia discourse constructed a palimpsestic urban mythology that encoded Victorian social anxieties through Gothic tropes. Focusing especially on Gustave Dore’s illustrations, Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896), and media generated around the Jack the Ripper murders (1888), I show how Gothic ‘knowledge’ is transmitted through popular culture. Against this backdrop, I examine how Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992) mines and remixes real and fictional events and people into a newly resonant, counter-fictional collage in order to satirize British 1980s neo-liberalism, positing that counter-fictionality is a staple of steampunk. I contrast Newman’s popular fiction archive against the psychogeography of Peter Ackroyd and finally present George Mann’s The Affinity Bridge (2008) and S. M. Peters’ novel Whitechapel Gods (2008) as examples of how stereotypically or radically steampunk may re-purpose the legacy of East End mythologies in new ways going beyond the Gothic legacy.

Chapter Three considers how popular video games Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and The Order 1886 (both 2015) actualize Victorian representations of London into a spatial simulation that aligns narrative progress with movement through space. Against the backdrop of Doreen Massey’s theory of space as an active process of interlinking trajectories, I examine how Charles Dickens’ London and the London of Sherlock Holmes have represented London’s complexity through immersive and panoptic perspectives and analyse how game spaces synthesize the two. With brief recourse to the retro-speculative game spaces of BioShock (2007-2013) and Dishonored (2012), I show how game spaces become legible textures and storytelling devices in themselves. I argue that Assassin’s Creed implements a fantasy of agency within urban spaces, whereas The Order uses cyberpunk impulses to build a dystopian hyper-city that undermines and challenges popular stereotypes about the Victorian era.

Chapter Four explores the ideological undercurrents informing steampunk imaginaries by discussing gender and feminist rebellion in fm-de-siecle London and steampunk fiction. I briefly consider the figure of the flaneur as a gendered phenomenon to offset how and why self-directed mobility in the modern metropolis was a central tenet of the New Woman’s transgressive potential. However, I also consider how different or successive feminist agendas have shaped our perception of the nineteenth century, and how a monolithic feminist genealogy informs modern stereotypes about femininity and emancipation. Against this backdrop, I consider the progressive and paradoxically conservative agendas that inform how sexually liberated neo-Victorian and steampunk action heroines are configured and where their shortcomings lie by considering them within a framework of post-feminist and fourth-wave-feminist theory. I then provide a close reading of Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse novels (2009 to present) as a positive example of how steampunk may imagine empowered and feminine heroines. By discussing how the same series reimagines LGBTQA+ characters through steampunk, I interrogate steampunk’s potential to provide radical alternative histories.

Steampunk’s retro-speculative play provides us with playfully anachronistic and unique meta-historical approaches towards a collectively remembered Victorian past. Here, we may highlight, redress, satirize, or re-experience its glories, quirks, and failures with utopian or dystopian impulses and nostalgic or radical outlooks. Free to re-imagine an era we understand as both socially, economically, and technologically formative, yet also fundamentally outdated and strange, steampunk’s adventurous re-calibration of the nineteenth century bears a uniquely radical potential to address, even re­dress, the era’s enduring traumas, such as its gender, class, and race hierarchies or colonial violence. However, as a popular phenomenon sourced from and aimed at a wide audience, steampunk’s retro-speculative interventions also reflect back on us. They reveal what and how much we think we know about the Victorian past, which perceived historical failures we believe we can amend, and whether or not we have the imaginative tools to actually re-think them. Indeed, as this study will reveal, steampunk may (often unintentionally) re­iterate fraught assumptions about both past and present, and so expose our own blind spots. Fundamentally, however, steampunk playfully highlights and challenges our relationship with history and deepens our understanding of human agency in the outcome of historical processes, seeking to inspire us to approach the future with the same creativity. After all, as Sterling notes, ‘the past is a kind of future that has already happened.’⁴⁷