Coming late to this: but Jo Walton (that's Jo Lindsay Walton, of course; not the other one) posted a fascinating piece on Banks, in part riffing of my Reversing Through The Culture blopposts.* Smart stuff, smartly put (I especially liked the idea of Excession as an epistolary novel); rather more smart and smartly put than my posts, actually, which some might consider rude. But there you go. One of my arguments was that Banksian ethics was a touch shallow, a sort of juvenile empathy-based 'you wouldn't like it if it happened to you' morality, as opposed to (say) the more complex and demanding kind of ethics theorised by Levinas (say). Walton replies:
Perhaps an awful lot of their ethics is reducible to empathy, but perhaps that empathy itself is actually quite a tricksy and multifarious and broad concept -- at least inasmuch as it accommodates berk empathy (or bathetic empathy). That is: empathy which doesn't involve much replication of affect, much harmony of hearts but an empathy which operates through a bureaucratic crankishness sometimes mistaken for evil's prerogative exclusively. The banality of righteousness.I'm still thinking about that (say).
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*I'm thinking of petitioning to change the word 'blogposts',with that awkward pebble-in-mouth 'gp' middle phoneme, to the easier-to-say 'blopposts'. Could catch on? No? Oh well; suit yourself.
So this:
ReplyDelete'Banks goes further, registering how consciousness itself is a lot like reading your own supremely untrustworthy secret diary, and how self-knowledge is always falling short of the sort of status and capabilities we are somehow forced to pretend it possesses.'
Along with the section you quoted is what I was really trying to say. But considerably more succinctly.
It's well put, isn't it!
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