Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk

CLOCKWORK RHETORIC

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Designed by Peter D. Halverson

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Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2014

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clockwork rhetoric : the language and style of steampunk / edited by Barry Brummett.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-091-9 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-62846-092-6 (ebook) 1. Steampunk fiction—History and criticism. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) 3. Style, Literary. 4. Steampunk culture. I. Brummett, Barry, 1951–editor of compilation.

PN3448.S73C58 2014

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Editor’s Introduction

The Rhetoric of Steampunk

BARRY BRUMMETT

Introduction

A Rhetoric of Steam

DAVID BEARD

A RHETORIC OF STEAMPUNK IDEOLOGY

There Is Hope for the Future

The (Dis)Enchantment of the Technician-Hero in Steampunk

MIRKO M. HALL AND JOSHUA GUNN

Victorians, Machines, and Exotic Others

Steampunk and the Aesthetic of Empire

KRISTIN STIMPSON

Liberation and a Corset

Examining False Feminism in Steampunk

MARY ANNE TAYLOR

A RHETORIC OF STEAMPUNK SEMIOTICS

Antimodernism as the Rhetoric of Steampunk Anime

Fullmetal Alchemist, Technological Anxieties, and Controlling the Machine

ELIZABETH BIRMINGHAM

Jumping Scale in Steampunk

One Gear Makes You Larger, One Duct Makes You Small

BARRY BRUMMETT

Steampunk and Sherlock Holmes

Performing Post-Marxism

JAIME WRIGHT

A RHETORIC OF STEAMPUNK NARRATIVE

Kenneth Burke Meets a Time Lord

Steampunk’s Grammatical Disruption

JOHN R. THOMPSON

Clockwork Counterfactuals

Allohistory and the Steampunk Rhetoric of Inquiry

JOHN M. McKENZIE

Steampunk’s Identity Horizon and Contested Memory

ANDREW MARA

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes

Steampunk Superhero?

LISA HORTON

Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Any press takes a chance in bringing out a new book, especially when the book is the first of its kind. The editor and contributors wish to thank the University Press of Mississippi for their wise guidance and efficient development of this manuscript.

Editor’s Introduction

The Rhetoric of Steampunk

BARRY BRUMMETT

THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES CONTAIN A VAST REPERTOIRE of images and themes taken from industrialization in the Age of Steam. Factories contribute images of boilers, pipes, gears, cogs, pistons, the helmets and goggles of workers in the factories, the belts and chains driving gears and wheels. Firearms of the period show their mechanisms with cylinders, blued metal, pawls, hammers, tubes. The locomotives of the American West provide their own boilers, heavy metal moving at dangerous speeds, pistons, and gears. This time period also contains the imaginary mechanical images of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, fantastic machines made to explore time, the depths of the sea, or outer space. The clothing of the period does not share the same machine aesthetic but has its own aesthetic of exploration and empire, inextricably linked to the mechanical sensibilities of the industries of the time.

This fertile trove of images and themes has since roughly the early 1990s been mined for the emergence of a new movement, largely aesthetic, called Steampunk. Steampunk is growing in popularity in popular culture and may be found in film, television, clubs, music, and comics conventions among other venues.

Steampunk resituates aesthetic elements from the Age of Steam into our world. It imagines an aesthetic that would occur had steam and electricity remained the primary industrial sources of power. Suppose watches ran on tiny steam engines, suppose dirigibles instead of airplanes ruled the skies, suppose people wore the clothing of the era still—what would our society be like with those suppositions? Sometimes Steampunk imagines what would happen if later technological innovations had emerged during the Age of Steam, a premise often found in The Wild Wild West or Briscoe County television and film iterations. Sometimes Steampunk imagines the course of social and scientific development of Age of Steam technologies and aesthetics in parallel universes, as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Sometimes in conjunction with comics or science fiction conventions, Steampunk is found in the costume play of participants. Steampunk, then, is an aesthetic and performative movement that in our time has moved in on many other genres and aesthetics. It is an aesthetic on the make, becoming more popular every year.

In this volume, we want to address this question: When these images and themes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are used today aesthetically, what social and political messages are urged upon audiences, readers, and participants of that aesthetic? Or, in other words, what is the rhetoric of Steampunk in use today? If someone shows up at a comics convention wearing a long linen duster, a watch that looks like a little steam engine, a top hat, industrial goggles, and a fabulous weapon of some sort constructed around a small boiler and smokestack, what does this apparition do to those who see it? To those who perform it? If Steampunk images are borrowed by film or television today, what social or political influence does that usage have the power to create in its audience?

We do not propose the study of the historical or literary sources of Steampunk themes and images per se. It is important to be aware of that vast closet of Steampunk references, for today’s usages retain some of their meanings. But this volume is not a historical study of Victorian and Edwardian literature and icons. Instead, we want to know what happens to those images and themes when used today, and that usage is what is called Steampunk.

The essays in this volume use a wide variety of theories and methods, but central to them is a shared understanding that texts in popular culture have a rhetorical impact on audiences, the potential for which may be discovered through textual analysis. This theoretical grounding, developed in several works,¹ sees the text as primary in the rhetorical transaction and as able to generate meanings, based on the discursive, semantic possibilities within their constituent signs, that affect how people think about and perceive the world. Our texts run from embodied performances to films to jewelry to novels, but we approach texts as primary in creating the possibilities for rhetorical effects, possibilities that are then inflected by audience and context.

Behind the questions we ask is the idea that the images and themes of Steampunk cohere in some way, that they form a symbolic economy that will influence the social-political economy of those who create and consume Steampunk texts. In this volume we are after the logic of that economy; we want to know how Steampunk reliably coheres around an aesthetic logic that generates rhetorical effects. Given the unavoidable politics of our era, this means asking questions having to do with the distribution of power in society, often along lines of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and so forth. How is Steampunk gendered, and what does its presence in a text or performance do to affect gendered attitudes? Because Steampunk arose from a context of European imperial domination of Asian, African, and other nonwhite peoples, do Steampunk images and themes have racial implications? Age of Steam images are of mechanical power and industrial might; how do those images bear meanings of power and force into today’s texts? Because rhetoric always emerges into specific historical and cultural contexts, a subsidiary question we will be considering is how Steampunk works today in our peculiar historical moment: why over the past few decades has Steampunk emerged, and how does it engage this particular historical moment?

Although the essays in this volume span a wide range of specific topics, they cohere around the question of how a contemporary text creates rhetorical effects using the Steampunk repertoire. This anthology opens with a general theoretical introduction from David Beard of the University of Minnesota Duluth. Beard presents a comprehensive conceptual map of Steampunk. In doing so, he explains the possibilities and dimensions for the rhetorical impact of Steampunk texts.

The remaining chapters are divided into three groupings suggested by Beard’s introduction: A Rhetoric of Steampunk Ideology, A Rhetoric of Steampunk Semiotics, and A Rhetoric of Steampunk Narrative. In the first group, Mirko Hall of Converse College and Joshua Gunn of the University of Texas at Austin hold that Steampunk tries to reclaim a nineteenth-century utopian ideology from the dystopian industrial realities that often resulted. Steampunk appropriates and alters memory, in their view. The vision was first articulated in Victorian literature, especially, they argue, that of Verne. This utopian vision is based on the trope of the technician hero, which they argue is a site of fluid male subjectivities, with rhetorical effects on the audience’s understanding of masculinities. Kristin Stimpson of the University of Texas at Austin notes the lack of obvious aesthetic connection between the costumes often associated with Steampunk and the machine aesthetic of gears, pistons, shafts, and so forth. Nostalgia, a politics of memory, makes use of materials of visual culture across these usages to reinscribe empire. Also, the American West is a theme that seems not aesthetically unified. Stimpson argues that an ideology of empire unifies the style, specifically to support a racial politics in a context of colonialism. Mary Anne Taylor of the University of Texas at Austin explores several texts to argue that there are feminist possibilities in the fan culture surrounding Steampunk. These possibilities are created by Steampunk’s breakdown of the binary between bodies and machines. She explores the implications for gendered politics today and the ideology of feminism.

In discussing Steampunk semiotics, we focus on the ways in which particular signs used in Steampunk are appropriated from their original Industrial Age context and applied in different ways. Elizabeth Birmingham of North Dakota State University argues that the Victorian Age is a resource of signs that are applicable in many times and places, and that Steampunk is one strategy of application. Although its subject would appear to be medieval, the Japanese television series Fullmetal Alchemist uses Steampunk signs for rhetorical purposes. The series portrays the state through the figure of alchemy, a failed way of thinking. Birmingham examines ways in which a neo-Victorian aesthetic centered on Victorian signs can have rhetorical effect today. In my contribution, I study texts in which Steampunk jumps scale up or down, becoming very small or very large. The scale of signs, large or small, is of importance in Steampunk. The aesthetic simulations of empowerment or of being controlled by the state are two rhetorical effects of these shifts in scale. Jaime Wright of Saint John’s University argues that Steampunk reflects cultural anxiety over the escape of objects from the usual conventions of shared memory. Steampunk shows objects as strangely caught up in systems of meaning instead, and she studies Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film Sherlock Holmes to show this. A specific effect studied is the classism of Holmes as presented in the film.

Our third group of essays is composed of studies of narrative texts that make heavy use of Steampunk, with rhetorical consequences. John Thompson of Saint Edward’s University argues that the radical visual anachronisms of the television polyseries Dr. Who render scenic motivations impossible. In doing so, it problematizes collective memory. Into this motivational vacuum steps the Doctor, who foregrounds the agent as the only unifying center of the texts. The class position of the Doctor influences the ways in which audiences read the texts and form their own judgments of class. John McKenzie of Lakeland College sees the Steampunk text as an example of allohistory, which imagines alternative paths of historical development and thus problematizes collective memory. Our current received ideas of the historical are challenged, as history is seen as malleable and changeable. This changeability may then be used to challenge ideas of class, gender, race, and so forth. He examines several literary texts to show this. Andrew Mara of North Dakota State University claims that the tension between backward-looking memory (steam) and forward-looking chaos (punk) is creatively productive. He uses the idea of electracy to examine memory juxtaposed to visions of chaos. This juxtaposition is studied in texts of embodied performances of Steampunk at a conference. Mara identifies ways in which nostalgia defines race and gender with rhetorical effect. Lisa Horton of the University of Minnesota Duluth examines different narrative iterations of the Sherlock Holmes story, showing how different uses of Steampunk in each can have rhetorical effects. She especially focuses on fan culture’s appropriations of these narratives.

Note

1. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and Barry Brummett, Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991).

Introduction

A Rhetoric of Steam

DAVID BEARD

Steampunk has become popular now because it is no longer just fiction. It is an international design and technology effort. Steampunk is a counterculture arts and crafts movement in a 21st century guise.

—BRUCE STERLING, User’s Guide to Steampunk

BRUCE STERLING, COAUTHOR OF ONE OF THE MORE INFLUENTIAL NOVELS INVOKING steampunk ideas,¹ spoke those words at an early steampunk convention—a meeting of individuals who are committed to expressing themselves through steampunk. Steampunk conventions are distinct from other kinds of popular culture conventions (comic book conventions, science fiction conventions, historical reenactment get-togethers) in significant ways, although it is a steampunk presence in those other pop culture gatherings that introduces a wider array of people to what steampunk is.

I first encountered steampunk in comic books, when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen reintroduced nineteenth-century adventure heroes into high-tech adventure comics. In the second Hellboy movie, the character Johann Krauss (a man of ectoplasm sealed into a suit built from a madman’s array of gears, levers, and valves) struck me as cool precisely because his suit wasn’t virtual reality. Krauss’s suit was old-school science fiction, of the kind I watched with my grandfather on Saturday afternoon TV in the syndicated television of the 1970s. I had no idea it was steampunk.

I became more conscious of steampunk as a coherent intellectual and creative project as I learned about re-creations of popular icons in a steampunk style. For example, movie and theater prop designer Gordon Smuder designed a steampunk light saber, the tool that Luke Skywalker used to duel Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy.²

Instantly, I could recognize why the young boy still in my heart would love any light saber. Nearly every boy raised during the 1970s dreamed of being the boy from Tatooine who has a secret destiny as a Jedi. I wanted that light saber and I wanted to be a Jedi. At the same time, I recognized the spin that derived from the steampunk style. No boy from Tatooine could carry the light saber, which seemed suited more to an Edwardian adventurer. It was ornate and deeply textured, with components of wood and brass. And I also recognized the do-it-yourself, thrift-store aesthetic—I recognized that the switches and buttons were parts from antique lamps, reworked into something new. To be a steampunk light saber was to be all of these things at once—playing with my childhood imagination, allowing me to reimagine my favorites in a new context, all within a DIY, thrift-store, craft aesthetic.

At that moment, I recognized that to understand the central questions of steampunk culture is to understand the central questions of rhetorical studies in the twenty-first century.

On the one hand, the fact that we can steampunk a light saber means that steampunk can be imagined, as rhetoric often is, as just a style, a system of ornament to be applied to ideas. We can apply wooden handles and wind-up keys to a light saber the way we can apply metaphors and elegant language to ideas.

On the other hand, to its practitioners, steampunk is a different kind of rhetoric. It is not reducible to the application of gears and clockwork to preexisting objects. Participants in steampunk culture believe that they are steampunk from the ground up—the core of their ideas, the core of their creations, the core of at least some of their values, can be understood in terms of steampunk.

This deeper self-understanding of steampunk is analogous to the preferred understanding of rhetorical studies as an area of inquiry in the twenty-first century: rhetoric is part of thought and part of communication from the ground up, as well. We do not dress our ideas in rhetoric to share them with the world. Rather, rhetoric is the means by which we formulate and communicate our ideas, values, and beliefs.

This collection holds that deeper understanding both of steampunk and of rhetoric at the core of our vision. When we speak of a rhetoric of steampunk, as we will, over and over again in this book, we don’t mean that we dress our ideas in dirigibles and locomotives. Rather, we mean that there is a core set of ideas, values, and beliefs that are formulated and communicated through steampunk literature, film, art, costume, and design. Our exploration of steampunk rhetoric, then, is an explanation of those ideas, values, and beliefs as we can see them in steampunk discourse.

To introduce steampunk, this essay outlines both the historical antecedents of steampunk media and the historical moment in which the contemporary steampunk movement arises. Then, it differentiates steampunk as a field of media consumption from steampunk as a field of human subcultural creativity and expression. Fans of steampunk media read novels and comics, they watch movies and TV, they purchase doodads and whatchamacallits. But, on another level, they also write, they draw, paint, and design; they cut, craft, and sew. To understand steampunk, we will need to understand both halves of this activity system: the acts of consumption and production.

Then, this chapter outlines the ways that steampunk operates as a rhetoric and an ideological system. At the same time that steampunk promises the possibility to reimagine relationships between gender, race, and technology, it inculcates values that bind steampunks together. As a rhetoric, it generates a utopian nostalgia or memory, rather than a utopian vision, and so cannot guide new sociopolitical relationships. Steampunk defines how we wish things might have been, instead of how we can work for change in the future.

The chapter will conclude with a set of conjectures about the uses and gratifications that come from engaging in steampunk culture. Participating in this utopian memory has meaning to the participants, even as it has clear and identifiable limitations.

Historical Roots of Steampunk

Steampunk derives from at least three root systems: the nineteenth century’s own fantastic representations of the changes that transformed its social and cultural fabric, some key science fiction works of the mid- and late twentieth century, and the DIY aesthetic of the punk and postpunk eras. We will discuss each in turn, attempting to draw these root systems into the tangle of practices that constitute contemporary steampunk culture.

Nineteenth-Century Antecedents

Steampunk claims antecedents in the nineteenth century’s own popular self-representations of the encounter between technology and the human. Technology, understood as an optimistic engine that responds to the will and creativity of the tinkerer and the adventurer, was a powerful theme in the serialized and fantastic fiction of the period.

Serialized fiction like Edward S. Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies³ appeared in the 1860s and provided an abundant set of images that would be picked up as part of a larger steampunk aesthetic. The Steam Man of Ellis’s novel represents the explosion of the locomotive onto the American landscape—the plume of smoke ripping across the horizon. At the same time, envisioned on a very human scale, the Steam Man is domesticable—the Steam Man, unlike the locomotive, operates on a level that the tinkerer-adventurer can understand and engage. (Questions of the scale of technology are at the core of steampunk aesthetics, as Barry Brummett will outline in a subsequent chapter. Steampunk is in part a response to the sense that science and technology have become too massive for human intervention.)

More popular sources for steampunk include the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Wells’s time traveler, for example, is the consummate steampunk tinkerer; his invention is not the gleaming chrome of the starship Enterprise of later science fiction but a patchwork of gears and levers that, in the aggregate, somehow take the traveler far into the future. As for Verne, the image of the Nautilus defines the ornate science fiction technology of the nineteenth century.⁴ Even Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story in this vein (The Balloon Hoax).⁵ The visual style of steampunk develops organically from the fantasy and science fiction works of the Victorian period in both the United States and United Kingdom.

Mid- and Late Twentieth-Century Neo-Victorian Innovations

Steampunk is the grandchild of these genuinely Victorian-era texts. The movement is also a result of innovation in literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: neo-Victorian science fiction and novels outlining alternative history (allohistory, as described by John McKenzie later in this volume).

Among fans of steampunk, Michael Moorcock’s Warlord of the Air is identified as proto-steampunk or neo-Victorian science fiction. The steampunk fascination with dirigibles as air transit can be traced to Moorcock’s work. Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (also published as A Tunnel through the Deeps) is similarly neo-Victorian. This neo-Victorian fiction is an umbrella genre under which steampunk fiction resides.⁶ Academic reflection on steampunk and related genres can be found in Neo-Victorian Studies, a peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to the exploration of the contemporary fascination with re-imagining the nineteenth century and its varied literary, artistic, socio-political and historical contexts in both British and international frameworks.⁷

Late Twentieth-Century Punk Culture

Finally, tracing a third line of influence, steampunk derives the punk portion of its name from two prior usages: the punk music culture and the cyberpunk literary and media culture.

The steampunk literary tradition was jump-started by the cyberpunk tradition. A key early steampunk work (The Difference Engine) was written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, science fiction authors and cyberpunk pioneers. In The Difference Engine, Gibson and Sterling retell history as it might have been if Charles Babbage, inventor, had built his difference and analytical engines—early computers. What attracted readers in the cyberpunk community is the depiction of clackers, the punch-card computer programmers who are analogous to hackers. But, among the steampunk community, the recovery of the nineteenth century as a site for fantastic fiction has made this work a touchpoint.⁸

In both cyberpunk and steampunk, there is a countercultural, counterinstitutional, countercorporate impulse. There is a rejection of the black boxes that mask technology and turn us into passive consumers. As Jacqueline Christi put it, we are surrounded by technology. Our world is filled with machines that are comprised of wire, chipboards and circuits. Electricity flows through our lives and people desire to comprehend why it works, not only that it does. All of the answers have been hidden by smooth panels⁹ The punk in steampunk (and in cyberpunk) wants to rip off the panels and play with the guts of the technology.

In that sense, steampunk is rooted in a do-it-yourself aesthetic, like all punk cultures. In punk music, the emphasis on DIY meant the sense that anyone could pick up a guitar and make some noise. In cyberpunk, anyone could become a hacker. In steampunk, the celebration of the tinkerer and the inventor continues that spirit. As Mirko Hall and Joshua Gunn will discuss later in this anthology, the steampunk tinkerer is modeled on the genius-adventurer of popular Victorian romantic fiction. He is a person of particular Victorian sensibilities: culturally refined, eternally optimistic, and imaginatively engaged. But he also is a product of the postindustrial age, versed in the DIY ethos. In this anthology, John R. Thompson will explain the ways that one particular media icon, the twenty-first-century reintroduction of Doctor Who, exemplifies the steampunk hero as well. Whether Wells’s time traveler or the BBC’s Time Lord, the steampunk hero patches together his time machine and slips into the unknown for adventure.

The DIY culture of steampunk is central to separating it from a purely fan culture (like Star Trek fandom or baseball fandom). Bruce Sterling described this difference at an address to a steampunk convention:

the heaviest guys in the steampunk scene are not really all that into steam. Instead, they are into punk. Specifically, punk’s do-it-yourself aspects and its determination to take the means of production away from big, mind-deadening companies who want to package and sell shrink-wrapped cultural product.¹⁰

As the Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective put it: Ours is not the culture of Neo-Victorianism and stupefying etiquette, not remotely an escape to gentleman’s clubs and classist rhetoric.¹¹ Anyone with grits, determination, and an innovative spirit can imagine themselves as such a steampunk hero or heroine.

There are two general forms or practices that participation in steampunk culture can take: imagination fueled by the consumption of steampunk literary culture (novels, graphic novels, film, and more), and imagination fueled by the steampunk maker culture (costuming and crafting of many types). We’ll discuss each of these in turn in the next two sections.

Steampunk and Media Consumption

Steampunk has become an arena of media consumption. We can map that media landscape and so offer the reader a sense of what is available to consume.

As a subgenre of science fiction, steampunk has been subdivided into dozens of subgenres and connected into a web. In the third issue of SteamPunk Magazine, fans argue that when an outsider inquires, What is steampunk?, it is the insider’s duty to the nature of steampunk to speak in terms that are descriptive rather than definitive. Steampunk can blur into clockpunk can blur into sandalpunk can blur into biopunk can blur into goth can blur into punk can blur into metal, and nobody needs to get hurt in the process!¹² Some of the genres are described below.

Boilerpunk: While a great deal of steampunk is focused on the neo-Victorian gentleman, the boilerpunk variety of steampunk focuses on the lives of the lower classes who literally work the boilers that generate the steam.

Clockpunk: Clockpunk is steampunk that deemphasizes steam technology in favor of clockwork technologies—a gear-based aesthetic and a wind-up key are typical visual motifs.

Dieselpunk: Dieselpunk is steampunk in which diesel or nuclear technologies replace steam technologies; this subgenre is typically set later than the Victorian era (say, in the interwar period, the Great Depression in the United States). Dieselpunk swaps the iconography of Jules Verne for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and Rosie the Riveter.

Mannerspunk: Steampunk that emphasizes elaborate social hierarchies as plot points in the narrative tends to be labeled mannerspunk.

Weird West: A substantial amount of reimagining of the nineteenth century in the United States passes under the name Weird West.

The more deeply one reads, the more subgenres become clear: raygun gothic, gaslight romance, stitchpunk, and many more.¹³ Additionally, steampunks can follow their passions into other genres: young adult fiction (Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan and Behemoth),¹⁴ romance (Kady Cross’s The Girl in the Steel Corset), and graphic novels (Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius¹⁵ and Mike Mignola’s Amazing Screw-On Head). Steampunk has arrived as a literary form, even recognized by the Library of Congress as