Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (1990)

Or the one about the Chair. If you’ve read it, you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t, I am loth to spell it out, for fear of spoilers. It’s very good: some consider it his masterpiece. Certainly it has all the merits of his best writing—the characters draw you in, the narrative (divided between one set of chapters advancing chronologically 1, 2, 3 … and one reversing, like a balding middle-aged reviewer, through the salient, XIII, XII, XI …) is cleverly structured without being clever-clever. Throughout it is inventive, spacious, violent, varied and arresting without ever being saggy or loose. And it has the chair.

Still, can we talk about the science-fiction-ness of a chair? Is not this diremption between vastly intelligent spaceships and galactic scales and sense of wonder on the one hand, and chairs on the other—is not this exactly the point? We must, in other words, refer to our copies of Heinleindegger's Seince und Zfiction (1927) and read what he has to say about the chairness of chairs—the existential and ontological constitution of the chair’s Banksein, grounded as it must be in temporality and textuality. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordially somatic chair to the meaning of reading? Some might say the chair is a silly device in a novel of this sort; that it mismatches the Vast-y Galactic-operatic of his idiom; that as a result Banks's ingenious grand guignol veers daft rather than unsettling. (a chair? Seriously?) But is not this the essence of equipment? No single equipment element or piece, for all ‘equipment’ is relational to the totality of equipment. Heinleindegger argues that enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist; and that 'things' go from whole to parts: and what else does this Chair embody, but the disembodying of the somatic whole into the parts of, first, a material fragmentation (and lesser recombination) and then, as the narrative surprise is invoked, we realise of a psychological process that exactly mirrors this. Dasein understands being in a pre-predicative way. In this manner we are asked to Dasein on the dotted line; for all whole lines are revealed as a furniture of linear dots.

Is not this novel playful, and Banks at his best himself a playful writer? And it is one of his strengths he evades the po-faced earnestness of so much SF, and especially of ideologically- or politically-impelled science fiction. His is the Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play. The possible ranks higher than the actual: and in Banks, as in the best SF, it is precisely the possible to which we are treated

Still we must return to the chairness of the chair. Chairs have a limited or non-present role in most science fiction and fantasy—the Captain’s chair; the throne made of a thousand (or many fewer) swords, and so on. In these cases the chair discloses status, and has no innate interest qua chair. How often does a mundane chair appear? An actual chair, a chair defined not by status and symbolic performance but by function—a chair which disappears from under us (in a manner of speaking) as we sit upon it, in the same way spectacles vanish from the bridges of our noses in use, or any tool ‘in use’ ceases to be anything other than the use to which it is put?

Particular acts such as sitting upon a chair, going to war, etc. can be viewed as occurring on an as-it-were 'ontic level'; whereas it is the nature of Human Freedom (and is not the great theme of sf not this?—its freedom not only from quotidian concerns, but shaking off the surly bonds of Earth and kissing the face of … I forget how the rest of this goes) to underpin such actions, real or textual, on the 'ontological level'. Thus the ontological structure of ‘imaginative projection’ becomes the ground for the possibility of all particular (ontic) manifestations of imagination. The Dasein Analytic wishes to uncover the existential structures of this chair. Dasein is in every compossible case my Dasein (which is to say nothing more than that: each one of us is a human being)—but my chair may become somebody else’s chair—it may be borrowed, or sold at a boot sale, or stolen, or in the simplest mode somebody else may come by my house and sit upon it. The iteration ‘my chair’ is in this sense very different to, and yet oddly the same as the iteration ‘my girlfriend’—or, let us not be sexist (although it is hard to shake the sense that Use of Weapons would have been a very different novel if Darckense had been male, and Zakalwe-Elethiomel female) ‘my boyfriend’. They too may be stolen away, ‘sat’ upon (in jest, or erotic play), broken and so on. From this adolescent point of view the crucial thing about a chair, or a girl/boyfriend, has to do precisely with this instrumentality. Were we talking about a pencil we might invoke the kind of Being which such equipment possesses and the way in which it manifests itself: 'Readiness-to-Hand.' But since we are talking about a chair we must instead invoke ‘Readiness-to-Arse.’ For the paradoxical nature of equipment is such that, no matter how long and attentively we regard its outward appearance, we will never be able to discover anything ready-to-arse about a chair unless we actually take it up and place an arse upon it.

Use of Weapons, in other words, reveals the chairness of its chair not through use—for as far as I can see, re-reading this novel after many years, nobody actually sits in the chair. On the contrary, the chair is revealed to be not-chair, both functionally and ethically. Conventionally speaking the ‘ethics’ of the ordinary chair are instrumental, either in a ready-to-arse sense or perhaps (let’s say one were to lift it and bringing crashing down on the back of another fellow in a bar-room brawl, whilst the piano-player jangles Scott Joplin rapidly on the keys and everybody roars) ready-to-smash. But the ethics of the chair in this novel have to do with torture (physical), torture (psychological), murder and cruel ingenuity. This is the same as the Theme that is slowly disclosed (aletheia) as I work backwards (aiehtela) through the Culture novels (erut-luc): namely the conflict of will-to-torture the bad ones and will-to-prevent-torture of the good ones, that in turn comes sloshing up to a great height in the bathtub of the novel (Erschlossenheit)

There is also a joke about a hat in the novel, which is quite funny in context. I would explain it at greater length, but, again—spoilers deter me): but we must acknowledge that talking of ‘the hatness of hats’ is a different thing to talking of ‘the chairness of chairs’. One wears a hat; where, in a manner of speaking, a chair wears you. And this particular Use of Weapons chair wears more than its usual panoply of sitters. It ‘wears’, as it were, its plot-significance; it ‘wears’ its provenance and the significance thereof and so wears the reader’s ‘patience’ and ‘willing-suspension-of-disbelief’ (Abigail Nussbaum explains why this might be, although this discloses spoilers-in-the-blog). This Ready-to-Arse chair comes to overwhelm the otherwise lively, varied and engaging peripatetic military adventures of the characters. And the various small wars do make for entertaining reading! ‘Destruction’ sounds so much cooler when spelled with a ‘k’ (Destruktion).

The twist is that, like everyday Dasein, the main character has no 'self' of his own. His sense of self, of what he is to do, of how he is to live—this, for the most part, is given from the outside—from the they-world, or simply as the they (Das Man). The 'who' of everyday Dasein is Das Man; the ‘M’ in Iain-M-Banks is Man (Das). Only (Das)-sayin’.