Riding the Whirlwind: Fate, Virtual Systems and the Individual

RIDING THE WHIRLWIND: FATE, VIRTUAL SYSTEMS, AND THE INDIVIDUAL A Paper Presented to Dr. Roland Faber For the Class LPS4033: Proces and Postmodern Thought Rafael Reyes III May 08, 2013 INTRODUCTION Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series, a 6-part science fiction novel that explores the roles religion, politics, ecology, technology, corporations and economics meld together around a certain planet and a distinct commodity, the spice melange, has written an astounding work. There have been various attempts at turning it into a film, the first being a cult classic, yet never able to achieve the essence of the book. The second, a mini-series that further accomplished the goal of the book, still missed the essential portions of the series, that of fate, and of the loss of the most precious book which is one of the most celebrated of science fiction novels that discusses and critiques the venture of a society that is inundated by religion, in particular a universe run by a religious society of a God with their priests and priestesses. A recurring theme throughout Frank Herbert’s six titles is quite prevalent: In a place where manipulation is the key to control, and fate is the ultimate outcome, can a god-like being produce a more positive outcome? Can the will of god and god’s fate prove better for society? How does one break away from the inevitable future, the path laid out for us? Can one escape fate, or are they doomed to accept it? Can it be controlled? What are some of the ways in which one can break free from the fate of destiny? Is there only one destiny? In a similar vein, the postmodern work within the last 50 years has dealt with the same issue, albeit in diverse ways. In a move away from the modern enlightenment perspective, what does the world look like when the notion of the metanarrative is held suspect? How can we account for the various perspectives in society? How can one be individual, yet maintain oneself within society? How can one survive as a distinct individual, subversing the labels brought on by the virtual realities that seek to override who we are and what we should be thinking of? Postmodern thought provides a framework for discussing the issues in Frank Herbert Dune series, discussions on how systems of theory can in many ways end up controlling our perspectives, thus becoming like god. It is god-like because it controls how we see and how we proceed from that event. In controlling everything it can lead us 1 to a dark future. This is what postmodernity pushes against, the reign of a singular view of the world, creating a system that encompasses all things, labeling them, domesticating them, and thus controlling them. Postmodernity, at least in its positive reception, pushes and pulls for a future that is open, that introduces uncertainty, difference/differance, and novelty, creating a world that is sustaining, a hope for the future. In order for this to happen, fate needs to be changed; an apoc/alypse, an un/covering of the virtual to the real, a world of webs of connection with multiple meanings and futures moving forward. However, the deeper realization is not to remove the virtual, but also see its connections in that web, opening itself to the process. So in this paper I will explore Dune and its interplay with postmodern thinkers on the subject of fate. In particular, I will look at the lives of the protagonists Paul Atreides, his father Leto Atreides (albeit briefly), his son Leto Atreides II. This lineage of generations provides a key to what I am trying to get to in this paper. That only through the process of connections, through difference, novelty, in the hope of the next generation in all its differences, is the removal of fate as a single trajectory. To Know the Future: Paul Atreides, Prescience and Liberation as the End of Freedom Postmodernity is a reaction to the Enlightenment project developed in America, France, and other spaces where they were undergoing change from a feudal society to an industrial and colonized world, in turn bringing forth the process of individualization, secularization, industrialization, cultural differentiation, commodification, urbanization, bureaucratization, and rationalization.1 With all its advances, it still masked forms of oppression and domination, for industrialization and colonization requires oppression and domination to work. In the field of modern theory, the problem at issue was that it searches for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, for its hubris to supply apodictic 1. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 2-3. 2 truth, and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism.2 The goal of modern theory was to provide a unified system of knowledge, where all things are explained. Therefore meta-narratives are used as overarching systems of what things really are. And it is in this space, that of universalizing systems, that we find Frank Herbert world, Dune, being developed. In this world, the protagonist Paul Atreides, begins his inevitable journey to the planet Arrakis (Dune). Dune is a desert land, with little water, and a society called the Fremen. The Fremen are the free tribes of Arrakis who dwell in the desert, and are the remnants of an ancient religious group called the Zensunni Wanderers.3 He is moving from his home world Caladan, a lush water planet, so that his father Leto Atreides can take over production of a scarce and powerful commodity called spice melange for consumption on the planet Arrakis. Commanded by the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM), a universal development corporation that controls all economic affairs, Leto Atreides goes without question, but understands the horrible fate that awaits. This same dilemma, that of destiny, of being labeled by a system other than ones own, is what Paul Atreides battles with throughout the novel. Leto, Paul’s father, states, “Knowing where the trap is—that’s the first step in evading it. This is like single combat, Son, only on a larger scale—a feint within a feint within a feint...seemingly without end.”4 The trap is the system, the CHOAM, who have placed him in that location for termination. Paul’s father is held within the CHOAM system, unable to break free from it. That virtual world is all that there is, although he hints at the possibility of another way. Deleuze’ BwO, Leto and CHOAM The CHOAM can be labeled as an organization, a political and economic organization that classifies persons for their use. Deleuze writes on the subjectification of the individual 2. Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p. 4. 3. Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Ace Books, 1965), p. 502. 4. Ibid., p. 43. 3 in a system.5 This subjectification, the articulation of the body, of being the signifier and signified, of being interpreter and interpreted, forces one to take part in the act of articulation, of segregation, of organization. It forces one to be caught in the flow of the organization, to be within a system. If not, you are labeled as “depraved...deviant...tramp.”6 These are the signs of the person that are the bottom of the very same system that one is forced to be in. It is the lowest sign, the lowest in organization, a shame tactic to place the person back into a more normal part of the system which conforms the self into desiring things outside of itself.7 Why does Deleuze seek to oppose organization? To organize is in once sense to limit. But not quite. It is a single perspective in which it forces the BwO to confine itself to. As Deleuze writes, “it is a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor...imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchichized organization, organized transcendencies.”8 Deleuze does not want the disarticulation, the separation of the BwO at the joints, for then it would bring desire outside of itself, trying to articulate itself into a system that one will never be able to become, precisely because it is not found within the BwO. The BwO finds fulfillment within itself, fully immanent, fully univocal. It does not separate thought and practice, but is combined to an animal state in which to hear automatically creates the action. Thought is at one with action. Deleuze does recognize that one cannot be fully immanent, and not engage in the system. We are always within a system, an assemblage of connections joined together. The question is how one can give just enough to the system while still generating the BwO. Deleuze writes, 5. This section on Deleuze is taken from another paper I wrote, Rafael Reyes, “Society, Individuality, and the Possibility of Harmony” (Paper, Claremont Lincoln University, 2013) 6. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans., with a foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 159. 7. The terms depraved, deviant, and tramp could be considered those that are outside of the system. However the realization that they are labeled and noticed by society makes them a part of the system itself. They are part of the signifier-signified, they are the opposite of being in knowledge, the opposite of the model citizen. You can say that I am reading this from the perspective of Whitehead, the removal of bifurcation and realization of relationality. 8. Deleuze and Guattari, “How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?” 4 “You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata.”9 It is this space that Leto was in. In order to reform the system, to break through it, he had to remain within it, keep small supplies of the systems signifiance and subjectification, all the while preparing the next steps for his son to break away from it. Leto was mimicking the strata. This, unfortunately led him to his fate within that system, that of death. Knowing there is a trap is the first step in evading it. Leto, being within the system, understood that there was a trap and planned accordingly. And it was Paul, his son, who spent his life breaking through the system, escaping one fate, but taking on another. Paul’s story is a sad turn of events; Paul’s life is threatened, his father is assassinated, while he and his mother narrowly escape through help. Fate seems to have cut his life short. To continue in that life would be the end of him and his lineage. He required another reality than this world, one in which gave him the opportunity to survive and thrive, to be free. This opportunity of freedom came in becoming part of the Fremen society. In this way he could be free: free to take on a new form. Part of this came through involvement in Fremen religious activity. It is there that he learns of the prophecy, one in which fits him and his mother well. He takes on that prophecy, becoming a strong leader in their society. However, there was one act that needed to be done. In his desire to to acquire more knowledge, to better know the possibilities of the future, Paul needed prescience. Although he had limited prescience, the only way to gain a mastery of it was to do what was only possible by the Reverend Mother of the tribe.10 By performing the same act as the Reverend Mothers, taking in the “illuminating poision,” and transforming it for consumption, he would take in the ultimate awareness, not only of his lineage, but the webs of connection of the Reverend 9. Deleuze and Guattari, “How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?,” p. 160. 10. In the Dune Novels Reverend Mothers are proctors for the Bene Gesserit, an ancient school of physical and mental training for female students. The Reverend Mothers were responsible for transforming an “illuminating poision,” thus raising her awareness. Please see Herbert, Dune, p. 510 5 Mothers of the past. He would be fully prescient. This is what was missing for him. In order to be free from one fate, he must have mastery of the past, in order to calculate and manipulate the future as possibility. In this desire to have control of the future, he would be able to control his life and the life of others. He would be able to protect those he cared for by removing them from the prior path into this new one. However, liberation from one path, from this evil, does not mean that one ends their fate. Fate and Control: Between Certainity and Uncertainty It is important here to tie in Jean Baudrillard’s Impossible Exchange. In it he writes on the impossibility of exchanging uncertainty. Uncertainty is at the heart of difference in the world. This in fact makes “reality” difficult. What is real? The real is becoming ever more complex, to the point of the development of a virtual reality, a screen above the real, one in which different spheres, whether economic, political, the world of aesthetics, law— they contain the same uncertainty: they have no meaning outside of itself, and cannot be exchanged for anything. Thus we have multiple spheres of meaning going on in the world. This is witnessed in the world of Dune: The CHOAM, controlling the economic system of worlds, and thus having a set of laws and ethics, is itself an uncertainty; it depends on those who make the claim and uphold it. It is real in a virtual sense. The religious Fremen, also a system, develops it own meaning and worldview from their perspective. These realities try to become metanarratives, seeking to cover all other realities into its own. For instance, the CHOAM has a neo-universal system of control in terms of the economic and political structure. However, because the overarching system is one of economics, it misses the control of the masses, who function on beliefs, not the economy. What it lacks is the religious structure which ultimately ties it all together. The layer of religion, in particular that of the Fremen society, makes it difficult for the CHOAM to have full control. In reality, there are multiple layers, layers upon layers of the virtual, all with their projected destinies and fate. Fate is what they are trying to control, by manipulating all systems and delivering 6 measured outcomes. Yet in order for one to control these outcomes, one must become like a God, and thus produce fate. This question of fate, of “acts beyond ones control that seems to be from a supernatural power,” is perplexing, and one many avoid. For Baudrillard, the really real is meaningless, and we derive meaning by these virtual worlds created. Thus fate, in some sense is a condition we would create. Paul is therefore replacing meaningless with meaninglessness, nothing for nothing, by moving from one fate to another. But the created fate placed on him by the CHOAM is one Paul Atreides is trying to avoid. This can be taken in a form of a question: What is better in the world that we live in, uncertainty, or being certain in knowing the future, in knowing one’s destiny? Paul’s journey has been the search for that question. His father was assassinated, his kingdom taken over, and Paul and his mother escaped to join the Fremen. It is there that they take on the customs and the religious culture of the Fremen. The Fremen teach him a different way, more tribal, as opposed to the more cultural defined life he once led. But this is the underlying layer, the virtual that he never knew existed. In it was a prophecy, a destiny that he believed would free him from one virtual world, the CHOAM, and into his own destiny, one which he knew and could control. In the writings of Princess Irulan, she writes, “You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.”11 Whitehead’s Web of Connections Here we see the inevitability of control when entering a system, we are both controllers and are controlled by the system. To survive it, one becomes a part of it. For Paul to rid himself 11. Herbert, Dune, p. 390. 7 of one fate, he must take on another. Here we see the flow of connections that are there; one cannot but be affected by the world in which they are in. Alfred North Whitehead in his Process and Reality discusses his notion of the philosophy of organism, in which the world does not emerge from the subject, but the subject emerges from the world.12 The subject emerges from the many of the universe around them, and become one actual occasion, the actual things of the universe. This is a nexus, an event, which makes one aware that we are not creators solely, but also created, at every moment. We are constantly prehending the universe around us, its outcomes of the immediate past. Similar to Irulan’s quote, the web of connections permeate in the real world, unknown to us. In every moment we are affected. We may in one instance, develop repetitions which produce a habit. In another instance, we may be affected by an event to the point that it changes our way of thinking. Regardless of either instance, they both affect us and forever change our immediate future. We succumb to the interaction. Even to deny it already means that it has affected us, changed us in some way, and the decision is an act forcing out that entrance, not as a violation, an entry of force, but rather because of the open web we are in the act of becoming, the open window we must leave open in order to take in the universe. To deny that reality, that we are utterly connected one to another, does not remove that reality. We make a virtual world above that reality as if it no longer applies to us. This is an incorrect assumption. In his Religion in the Making, Whitehead describes the event which takes place when an individual moves from the tribe and is introduced to the stranger, the one outside of the tribe. Upon that chance encounter, the individual is forever changed. Whitehead writes, “A tribe which is wandering as a unit....will strengthen its sense of tribal unity in the face of a hostile environment. But an individual who travels meets strangers on terms of kindliness. He returns home, and in his person and by his example promotes the habit of thinking dispassionately beyond the tribe.”13 Their world in one sense gets enmeshed. In Paul’s case, the Fremen world becomes 12. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 88. 13. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, with an introduction by Judith A. Jones (New York: Fordham Press, 1996), pp. 39-40. 8 enmeshed in the world of the CHOAM. Because he lies as the fulcrum, they join together. The question of fate here is, which one is held over and above? In Paul’s case, the one held on to is that of the prophecy of the Fremen. It is in that future, the one in which he achieved prescience, that he takes upon himself. To choose that of the CHOAM would have been his death. The Fremen prophecy and fate brought him life. Into the Same: Baudrillard, Paul and the Illusion of Freedom But this does not free Paul. He moves from one fate to another. This action does not lead to freedom, but to another layer, another virtual world that has a much more acceptable fate. Jean Baudrillard in his chapter titled “The End of Freedom” is concerned with the difficulty of full use of the Will, while exercising boundless freedom. The desire for freedom enters the subject into the process for liberation. It is an ideology, a surreal goal, to reach that liberty. However if liberty is only an ideology, what happens when that ideal is reached? Ideologies tend to move towards a God and Evil, and the good is that side in which one wants to be on the side of. The ideal, once reached, leads to the perversion of liberation; not only are we free of the evil we were once succumbed to, we have now freed evil. We begin again in uncertainty about that which lies around us, specifically since we no longer have a master, an evil to go against. What happens when we no longer have a master, especially since that evil which is there is a created evil within a system? What we therefore have is not the killing of the master but the absorption of the master. Baudrillard writes, “he has absorbed him while remaining a slave – indeed, more slavish than a slave, more servile than a serf: his own serf.”14 Freeing oneself from one ideal to achieve another does not make one free, but rather makes one responsible for the self, completely inward. One no longer serves the other. More importantly, what this does is make the self responsible for their action. Freedom is thus a falsity, for one always becomes subject to something or someone, even the self. 14. Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso Books, 2001), p. 75. 9 What does Paul Atreides do? The false sense of freedom can only be found in a path that controls all things, and in controlling all things, one must be aware of the immediate outcomes of the future, one needs prescience. It allows him to see the past, present and immediate future as one. Only then can he create fate. By having the power of prescience, he develops a system of religious, political and economic system in which he controlled. But that is only a reflection of his master, the one he has swallowed. The added layer is that of freedom. Fate is now in his hands. He has become God. He now controls all interactions of religion, politics and the economy. He is a prophet, and a king. He develops a future combining all systems into one system to rule it all. In it he believed he could control the system, having the ability to see the future, but fate has a way of showing what is unavoidable. Swallowing the Same: Repetition and Badiou, Foucault and Power Q:What led you to take your particular approach to a history of Muad’dib? A:....I was caught by the shallowness of the common view of this planet which arises from its popular name: Dune....History is obsessed by Dune, as desert, as birthplace of the Fremen. Q:....Are these not true, then? A:...They are surface truth. As well ignore what lies beneath that surface.... Q: But such things are crucial to the Arrakeen character! A:....But they produce a one-view planet in the same way that Dune is a one-crop planet because it is the sole and exclusive source of the spice, melange.15 The passage above is of an interview of the character Bronso of Ix. The brilliance of its statement is that of the fate of Paul’s reign, that of repetition of the same: one-view. The problem I am lifting is that in virtual systems, one is controlled by that systems fate. The only escape is to enter into another virtual world. Paul does something never before done, he assumes the prophetic vision of the Kwisatz Haderach, the “shortening of the way.” This 15. Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah (New York: Ace Books, 1969), pp. 1-2. 10 is the name given to the “unknown for which the Bene Gesserit sought a genetic solution, a male Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time.”16 By taking on this mantle, he joins all systems into one large virtual world to replace the real. In his taking the position of the throne of the CHOAM, he became like god, having control of the past, and as a mentat, able to calculate possibilities of the future, coupled with the religious backing of the Fremen, who became his religious army, traveling all over the universe converting planets in Paul Mua’dib’s name.17 However, Paul repeats the same as that of any system, it repeats itself for its own survival. Repetition and Badiou In his Being and Event, Alain Badiou deals with the question of agency, not in the how a subject can initiate an action in an autonomous manner, but how the subject emerges from an “autonomous chain of actions within a changing system.”18 In a system that Paul has created, the religious, political and corporate system creates a chain of events that at first may promote a form of change. But eventually it becomes repetitious, more of the self same. We begin to witness the cracks within that system where political and/or corporate gain is won by entering religious networks, for instance in Bronso Ix’ calling out the Fremen priest for their hypocritical actions, “Then listen carefully you Fremen degenerate, you Priest with no god except yourself!”19 Systems are not the representation of the generic, which for Badiou are where there is a real recollection of a truth, expressed in the procedures of art, science, (real) politics, and love.20 The subject can then only be a subject when they are supported by the generic procedure of the artistic, the political, the scientific, the amorous. Everything else is repetition. How does this translate in a system? It cannot, for the system 16. Herbert, Dune, p. 506. 17. Mua’dib is the Fremen name of Paul Atreides. But it has a similar pronounciation as the Mahdi, which is “The One Who Will Lead Us to Paradise.”ibid. 18. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought, ed. and trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 5. 19. Herbert, Dune Messiah, p. 4. 20. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 16-17. 11 is an ossified, closed system which generates the same, based an a one-view model. And thus the notion of fate falls in the same category. Fate remains closed to revision if one holds to a one-view system. Foucault and Power The system that Paul takes on uses coercion to get to its destination, thus looking very similar to CHOAM and its reign, now with religious justification. Continuing on Dune Messiah, the organization of this new system takes on a nature of its own. Unable to hold to the original laws of its initial reign, it takes on what is known as “water-fat,” signaling the the corruption by water to the desert planet Dune. The dream he has envisioned has failed, for the government Paul lifts, the intertwining of the religious, political and corporate, although seeming new, brings with it its evil thrice multiplied; it duplicates the repressive techniques of the Old Empire, allowing fate to once again come in. Paul may have tried to repress fate, but in doing so produces it all throughout the empire. Paul Atreides on reflection states, “To come under seige, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.”21 This echoes the cry of system, to have power is to be under constant critique and attack of it. Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge writes on systems that deligitimate other systems to legitimate theirs, or create a second-level discourse that functions to legitimate them.22 Paul, in legitimating power, must create a virtual form of reasoning, or second level reasoning, to justify that what is happening is not because of the failed and corrupt system, but because of power. Tim O’Reilly writes on Paul in Dune Messiah, “Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with a 21. Herbert, Dune Messiah, p. 32. 22. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 27-63. 12 plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him. As the planet flowers, Paul grows barren, watching the friends of his exile become sycophants and his teachings an absolute creed. His people demand from him the illusion of absolute certainty. They want a god, and although he continues to warn them against such a dream, he cannot deny them. The religious juggernaut that he rode to power has turned on him.”23 Closed systems, one which seeks to encompass the whole of other virtual realities, force whoever enters into it to be succumbed by it. For Paul, in trying to find freedom, is engulfed in the the system he has now created, the sum of the political, the corporate, and the religious, with all its evil. The problem comes not only from within each virtual system, but in the power for supremacy in each virtual system. Governments cannot be both religious and self-assertive simultaneously; religious experience needs spontaneity which laws suppress, yet one cannot govern without laws.24 Michel Foucault here lays some important groundwork on the the notion of how modern forms of power and knowledge have served to create new forms of domination. For Foucault, to seek truth and knowledge is to seek power, an edge. Systematizing knowledge develops new forms of hegemony by controlling what is knowledge and who can attain it. More so, by the systematization of knowledge, one domesticates it, making it accessible to administration and control. In modern theory knowledge and truth were neutral, objective and universal, but for Foucault, components of power and domination.25 Paul contained knowledge, a knowledge that would have proven helpful in the advance of the system as a changing system. However it is the evil within the system that hindered its progression. When left for a moment, it returns to its old patterns. These patterns are not based on the overall system Paul created, but on the individual systems returning to their normative patterns. A corrupt system only produces corruption, and ills the same fate. 23. Timothy O’Reilly, Frank Herbert (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing, 1981), Chapter 7. 24. Herbert, Dune Messiah, p. 252. 25. Foucault’s work centers on history, medicine, sex, and power. For an overview of Foucault’s work, please see Paul Rainbow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) 13 Returning to Foucault, his answer to overarching systems was to have a preference for the discontinuous, the particular and local criticisms, the plurality of forms of knowledge and microanalysis over global totalitarian theories, i.e. metanarratives, metaphysics. There are no ultimate narratives, and following Nietzche, there are no facts, just interpretations. No one theory or method is able to interpret and grasp the multiple discourses. For Paul, one-view moves against Foucault’s notion, and for good reason; it introduces uncertainty into the picture. However, Paul’s initial vision of a system that would escape his fate leads to a hidden secret, that within himself is constantly changing. Riding the Whirlwind: God, the Novel and Fate in Whitehead, Deleuze and Stengers Paul was unable to speak. He felt himself consumed by the raw power of that early vision. Terrible purpose! In that moment, his whole life was a limb shaken by the departure of a bird... and the bird was chance. Free will. I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought. And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn’t tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future? Had he exposed his life to some web of underlying threads, trapped himself there in that long-ago awakening, victim of a spider-future which even now advanced upon him with terrifying jaws?26 In Dune Messiah Paul Atreides asked himself the question that has led to this point. In choosing to be lured by the path of prophecy, the path of the oracle, the building of a closed system, he came to realize that the future is not told as if one walks through it, but made, which leads to a terrible purpose. He had the choice to make a change, to ride the whirlwind, as he once did, but could no longer take that chance. Fate, as it seems, made him repeat the same choices of his father. Being in the system, it is difficult to move out from it. Because of Paul’s prescience he came across an option called the Golden Path. It plagued him, as it was a terrible purpose. Paul repeats this throughout Dune Messiah, as a thought 26. Herbert, Dune Messiah, p. 49. 14 that was forever running through his mind. Terrible purpose, the inevitable fate that he would have to usher in. What was this terrible purpose? The answer is found in his son Leto II, the offspring of Paul an Atreides, and Chani, a Fremen woman. The story continues in Children of Dune. In Dune Messiah, Paul had failed, but he retained a measure of majesty. He was still the prophet whose motivation went beyond that of ordinary men into realms of paradox. In Children of Dune, Paul is brought back from his seeming death in the desert, an old, broken man who can only rage at the church built on his legacy.27 His son Leto II must undo the damage Paul had unwittingly done, topple the church, and reverse the transformation done in his reign, both to the planet Dune and to humanity, before it is destroyed. Leto II takes the Golden path, the terrible purpose, the vision that Paul feared and refused. He becomes an absolute tyrant. Inhuman and nearly immortal, he can give the people the absolute assurances they desire, but only at the price of absolute control. Leto II in conversation with his father Paul, states, Leto II: “You didn’t take your vision far enough, father. Your hands did good things and evil.” Paul: “But the evil was known after the event!” Leto II: “Which is the way of many great evils,” Leto said. “It is sad you were never really Fremen. . . . We Fremen know how to commission the arifa. Our judges can choose between evils.” Leto II is willing to commit great evils for an end he can see in the distant future. The choice he is making is as difficult for him as it was for Paul, but he must bear it. He does not look for justification or escape. ”I have no passionate belief in truth,” he says, ”no faith other than what I create.”28 He is willing to go on creating the future moment by moment, shifting ground when past decisions are no longer appropriate. This Golden Path Leto II takes required him to go through a conversion, a metamorphosis, one in which Baudrillard would say is the end goal of of the perversion of liberation: He 27. O’Reilly, Frank Herbert, Chapter 7. 28. Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (New York: Ace Books, 1976), p. 344. 15 becomes God. Similar to his father, he is emperor, but his reign is ironclad: he rules by controlling all things. His main project, a project which runs the course of three thousands years, is a genetic process of creating the ultimate human being. The Golden Path that Leto II took was not solely the path of tyranny, but its exact opposite: it was a path to save humanity. This human being, found in the young woman Siona, has one capability that no one else has. She could not be seen. Not visually, but mentally. To have prescience is to see into the future of all things, to have insight in the lives of all people, and see there place on the chess board. Leto’s achievement was to create a being that no longer has the ability to be placed on the board. They move themselves. Leto left this gift “I give you a new kind of time without parallels....It will always diverge. There will be no concurrent points on it curves. I give you the Gold Path. That is my gift. Never again will you have the kinds of concurrence that you once had.”29 The second and last task of Leto’s life in the Golden Path, was to fulfill the fate set before him upon accomplishing the Golden Path: his own death. In order to become God, he took on the skin of Shai-Halud, the worms of the Desert. The worms were considered Shai Halud, God, because of the water of life they give, their connection to the spice, and their free roaming throughout the planet. The worm gave life because they were an intrical part of the process of spice production. Leto, in joining himself with the worm became a man-god, god with a voice, god with a singular purpose and goal. Having prescience, he knows his inevitable end. His end was death, and to allow Siona to start a new humanity without futures, only futures they create themselves. However, in his death he ejaculates thousands of other mini worms. In each of them a part of Leto II was with them all, an awareness that the worms never had. They too went through an evolution. As quoted in Hunters of Dune, “Legend holds that a pearl of Leto IIs awareness remains within each of the sandworms that arose from his divided body. The God Emperor himself said he would henceforth live in an endless dream.”30 Leto II performs what ultimately could not be done 29. Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune (New York: Ace Books, 1981), p. 418. 30. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Hunters of Dune (New York: Tor Book, 2006), p. 34. 16 in past generations, evolve both humanity and the natural species of the planet Dune. Both were able to live in on in the new world set before them. This ultimate gift is the world of possibility, the world where fate of a singular system no longer applies. It is the life of the individual among a multiplicity of individuals, born not for utilitarian purposes, or a result of a political, religious or corporate system or strategy, but on a more personal level. Whitehead provides a framework for understanding this concept, of riding the whirlwind. This concept, riding the whirlwind, is from Paul Atreides, how, instead of riding on the path of history, and seeking an inevitable faith, rode on the whirlwind, on the ebbs and flows of the desert winds. That was the only way he was able to withstand and enter into a new path. Leto II takes it farther. The idea of God is no longer able to compare and choose, but rides the whirlwinds itself. Deleuze, in his take on Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the event, speaks on God, “Even God desists from being a Being who compares worlds and chooses the richest compossible. He becomes Process, a process that at once affirms compossibilities and passes through them.”31 God, which can here be used metaphorically, or in the case of the Dune novels, Leto II, no longer has control to choose the best outcome, but becomes part of the process of all things itself. This is precisely given in the spreading of the mini worms, of no longer being one, but going back into the multiplicity of the universe, spreading the idea of process, about the possibilities that can arise. And in leaving a remnant of himself, an idea, in the worms, he becomes part of a process like anything else, a spectator, a datum, a part of a actual occasion, always asking in silence, “so what?” In this way, humanity, and life itself, can truly create something novel. God, in Dune, is removed, yet not removed. God in the sense of deciding one’s fate, is removed. Whitehead in Process and Realitywrites on the function of God in the world,“In the foundations of his being, God is indifferent alike to preservation and to novelty. He cares not whether an immediate occasion be old or new, so far as concerns derivation from its ancestry. His aim for its depth of satisfaction as an intermediate step towards the fulfillment 31. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), p. 81. 17 of his own being. His tenderness is directed towards each actual occasion, as it arises.”32 Isabelle Stengers notes that Whitehead’s God exists not to choose sides or decide fate: the Whiteheadian God is indifferent to it. Rather god exists to usher in the Creative Advance, to ask the question, “so what?” In this God ushers in the next phase of creativity, the new order of novelty.33 In the Dune universe, the creation of Siona is the hope of a world where the future is no longer manipulated, but created by individuals with divergent paths, in divergent systems, although not held by anyone singular system. New connections are required, a new history is necessary. To be invisible does not mean that one does not exist, but rather its opposite; it is the realization that one is no longer under the control of a system, and is able to evolve, to connect, and choose ones own destiny and take chances, or in other words, choice. In the realization that one, like in Deleuze BwO, is a univocity of being, they can no longer be domesticated in a system. In Whitehead’s case, an actual occasion in its process of becoming creates a final satisfaction for its own cause, its own reason, “An entity is actual, when it has significance for itself. By this it is meant that an actual entity functions in respect to its own determination. Thus an actual entity combines self-identity with self-diversity.”34 This self-identity with self-diversity is significant in defining oneself, and thus, like Paul, Leto, and in its ideal Siona, they create divergences that build new possibilities, forcing open what were once closed totalities. In this Deleuze writes, “The play of the world has changed in a unique way, because now it has become the pay that diverges. Beings are pushed apart, kept open through divergent series and incompossible totaliteis that pull them outside, instead of being closed upon the compossible and convergent world that they express from within.”35 Fate has been moved from the hands of virtual systems to the hands of the individual. 32. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, p. 105. 33. Isabelle Stengers, “Thinking With Deleuze and Whitehead,” in Deleuze, Whitehead Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, ed. Keith Robinson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 28-44. 34. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, p. 25. 35. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, p. 81. 18 CONCLUSIONS The question of fate, whether it is handed down to us, a reality set in the future already waiting for us to walk through it, or if it is something we make, is what I have been attempting to answer. The ultimate fate I have not discussed is the sheer reality in that we are all going to die. The fate I was discussing in particular are narrower fates, ones which are decisions, and choices and their outcomes. If fate is chosen for us, it is because we fall within a closed system with determined ends. The only thing which comes close to this is the sheer reality of the world, of nature, which describes to us that all things perish. However, within the virtual worlds we create, virtual worlds that give us meaning in this world, fate can be take on various meanings and ways of becoming. In religious settings, the path of the oracle tells us that the future is determined, and can be revealed to us. This makes for a narrow and limited view of our lives, with limited space for change. In the era of enlightenment, science was God. If given enough time, one could describe the world and through the sciences show how nature works. The world is a machine run by natural laws. Fate is part of that law. With these singular views, one is doomed to accept that fate of that system. So imagine when a nation takes on this notion, and what outcomes emerge? The notion of a system, and only one system to rule as a meta-arch to all things limits development, and more importantly, limits life. But the story of Dune is not a story of the modern era, but of both modern and postmodern eras. It describes the Baudrillardian notion of the illusion of freedom, by noting the reality of outcomes of closed systems. It shows the deeper reality of the notion of process, that we exist in a web of connections related to one another. Further, that although we may exist within a system, we must always be at work breaking it open, holding open and together compossibilities for the novel, the something new. What this means for the question of fate is that it is ultimately in our hands. Just as Leto II gave the gift of time without parallels, so time is given to us to create a world within our context, a virtual layer in which we find new meaning, which is also further deepened by 19 the connections of others. Fate then becomes open-ended, making ones own life both limited and limitless, limited by our context, but limitless in the divergences it creates for novel possibilities in the future. We therefore ride the whirlwinds where it takes us, enjoying the adventure of novelty, adjusting, informing and conforming for life that is constantly evolving, and no longer in fear of a fate not built by ones own life. 20 BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2005. . Infinite Thought. Edited and translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. New York: Continuum, 2005. Baudrillard, Jean. Impossible Exchange. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso Books, 2001. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 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