Cultural Imperialism and the Ends of Empire: Iain M.

Banks's "Look to Windward"

Author(s): Sherryl Vint
Source: Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , 2007, Vol. 18, No. 1 (69) (2007), pp. 83-98
Published by: International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24351028

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 Cultural Imperialism
and the Ends of Empire:
lain M. Banks's Look to Windward

Sherryl Vint

M UCH OF THE CRITICISM ON IAIN M. BANKS'S CULTURE NOVELS HAS

focused on the question of whether the Culture can be considered a Utopia.
The Culture—an intergalactic civilization managed by sentient Minds and
characterized by a post-scarcity economy, immortality for those who choose it,
and a near-absolute ethic of freedom of choice—on its surface seems to be the
ideal place to live. Despite the society's many appeals, however, all six of
Banks's Culture novels to date—Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games
(1988), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998) and Look to
Windward (2000)—have in some way focused on protagonists who are not
content with the Culture's values. Carolyn Brown reads the Culture as a com
plex heterotopia rather than as a blueprint for Utopia, while Simon Guerrier
suggests the novels are examples of Tom Moylan's critical Utopias in which
"the interactions between Utopian and non-utopian models...are problema
tised" (36). William Hardesty sees in the series an ongoing tension between a
master narrative of benevolent imperialism and counter narratives that prob
lematize this position, a reading similar to Tim Middleton's contention that
Banks's Scottish heritage is important for understanding the Culture, given
that nation's grasp of the damaged and distorted identities that come with
being colonized. I have argued elsewhere that the Culture novels are limited
as a model of Utopia because their version of posthuman identity too easily falls
into a disembodied fantasy of transcendence, a liberal humanist ideal of self,
which disavows ethical responsibility.1
In this paper, I want to look at the Culture's connections with liberal
humanism from a slightly different point of view, emphasizing the importance
of capitalism as the economic form of liberal humanist democracies. The very
model of the body and subjectivity that grounds liberal humanism is economic
in structure, an ideal of "possessive individualism" as C. B. Macpherson has

Vol. 18, No. 1, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

Copyright © 2007, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

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84 • Sherryl Vint

argued. Macpherson points out that the philosophical roots of liberal human
ism are based on a vision of the human as defined by ownership of one's body
and a definition of freedom as freedom from connections to others, the free
dom to appropriate the world by one's own labor, without obligations of reci
procity. As N. Katherine Hayles points out, Macpherson also notes that this
model of self in which "ownership of oneself is thought to predate market rela
tions and owe nothing to them" provides a "foundation upon which those rela
tions can be built, as when one sells one's labor for wages" and thus is a false
ideal, retrospectively created by market society; in actuality "the liberal self is
produced by market relations and does not in fact predate them" (Hayles 3).
The importance of market society is a crucial, yet under-acknowledged aspect
of the liberal humanist model of self. Banks's Utopia is posited as a society of
post-scarcity and so the strong connections between liberal humanism and
capitalism are muted in his novels, made irrelevant by the fantasy of material
abundance produced by the labor of machines who cannot be alienated from
their products because they are not sentient. Nonetheless, the imperialist
implications of the Culture's tendency to intervene in the affairs of other
races—one source of ambivalent assessments of its status as a Utopia—are best
understood through this economic lens. I will argue that the last Culture
novel, Look to Windward, reveals most clearly the economic basis of the anxi
eties around imperialism that inform Banks's work.
Look to Windward is dedicated to veterans of the first Gulf War2 and begins
with the same quotation from The Waste Land which served as a source for the
title of the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas: "Gentile or Jew / O you who
turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once hand
some and tall as you." The novel gives no indication of which veterans are
included in its dedication, and its plot of "justified" intervention gone wrong
should make the attentive reader aware of this ambiguity, as the dedication
might as easily refer to Iraqi veterans as American or British ones (and might
be taken by readers unaware of the date of publication to refer to the subse
quent Iraq invasion). Consider Phlebas is set at the time of the Idiran War, the
most devastating Culture military offensive operation in the series' history.
The main character in Consider Phlebas, Horza, is opposed to the Culture and
supports the Idirans not because he agrees with their ideology—they consider
themselves the "chosen" people of their god and are pledged to wiping out all
inferior races—but because he opposes even more strongly what he sees as the
Culture's capitulation to its own machines, reducing human activity to leisure
while almost all the proper business is conducted by the sentient Minds. At the
end of this first novel, we learn that Horza was not successful in his resistance
to the Culture; the Culture won the Idiran war and the race to which Horza
belongs, the Changers, was entirely destroyed as collateral damage. Notwith
standing these severe consequences, the war was relatively insignificant,
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 Cultural Imperialism and the Ends of Empire • 85

described in a "historical appendix" to the novel as "a small, short war that
rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01%
by stellar population" (Consider Phlebas 490). Yet the Idiran war emerges as
important in the most recent novel, Look to Windward, as the setting concerns
an anniversary of a key battle in the war, the Battle of the Twin Novae, in
which two stars were destroyed, wiping out life in their solar systems. The
Mind running the Masaq' Orbital, on which most of the action of the novel
takes place, was involved in this battle and plans a ceremony to commemorate
those deaths which corresponds with the light of this explosion becoming vis
ible on the orbital, some 800 years after the battle.
The plot of Look to Windward mainly involves a scheme on behalf of the
Chelgrian race to seek revenge for a devastating civil war caused by the Cul
ture's intervention in the Chelgrians' domestic politics. The Chelgrians are a
class-based society, extremely exploitative of the Invisibles, the lowest caste
among them who do all the labor and who are intentionally blinded; unlike the
Culture's machines, the sentient Invisibles can be alienated. Chelgrian society
includes citizens working for reform of this system, including one of the char
acters in the novel, Ziller, an upper caste member who renounced his privilege
and has been living in exile since before the civil war. In events prior to the
novel's opening, the Culture, through the usual machinations of Special Cir
cumstances, pushed for reform in Chelgrian society, eventually ensuring that a
member of a lower caste was made president, believing this would lead to pos
itive reform and the ascendancy of the progressive forces on the planet.
Instead, this president "went crazy" (116), introducing a series of excessive
purges that resulted in the civil war. As the novel opens, the Culture is very
apologetic about the devastating consequences of its mistake, not having real
ized, as Ziller points out with some bitterness, that "a bit of equality—exactly
what these people have been shouting for all this time—might not be enough
for them, that some of them might be stupid and vicious enough to want
revenge. Never dawned on them that their shit-caste friends might want to do
some score-settling, no. That wouldn't make sense, that wouldn't be logical"
(117). There is some suggestion that the Culture's lack of familiarity with "a
predator-evolved species" (118) also contributed to their miscalculation. The
Culture's liberal humanist model of subjectivity—perfected in the Minds that
are the AI ideal of consciousness able to move into any material substrate
without change—is implicated in this problem. The Minds consider only logic,
not the desires of the body, which in this case are the desires of a species with
predator-embodied instincts, and thus they fail to anticipate the consequences
of their policy.
This back story about the Chelgrians is similar to the plot of most of the
Culture novels and their continued concern with the ethics of cultural rela
tivism and the cultural imperialism of the Culture itself. As in the earlier nov

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86 • Sherryl Vint

els, we are given a model of a civilization which offends Western sensibilities,

and thus a Western audience will presumably have a tendency to side with the
Culture's well-meaning interventions, even if feeling a slight twinge about the
problems of imposing one's own values on another race. Look to Windward dif
fers from the earlier novels in significant ways, however. Most importantly, we
are not shown the abuses of Chelgrian society as directly as we are shown the
abuses of other civilizations in whose affairs the Culture intervenes, such as
the Idirans in Consider Phlebas or the Empire of Azzad in The Player of Games.3
Although the earlier novels demonstrate an ambiguous attitude toward the
ethics of the Culture's interventions, as critical assessments of Banks's work
reveal, none of them as directly raise the issue of suffering caused by the Cul
ture as does this novel. Thus, Look to Windward most directly confronts the
issues of cultural relativism versus cultural imperialism, concerns which also
have their roots in liberal humanism. If the negative heritage of liberal human
ism is its unacknowledged embeddedness within a capitalist economy, its more
positive heritage is the discourse of rights, a discourse which asserts that all
humans are entitled to the freedom to pursue their desires and opportunities,
irrespective of race, gender, orientation, class, and other particularities, to the
extent that such freedoms do not infringe on the freedoms of others. The dis
course of rights has been crucial to improving the status of women under patri
archy, to asserting the rights of non-white people in racist cultures, and to
improving the standard of life by establishing a context in which there is gen
eral (if unfortunately eroding) international acceptance of certain basic uni
versal political freedoms.
At the same time, however, the discourse of rights—or rather the ration
ale of defending or asserting such rights—has also been used to justify imperi
alist intervention in the affairs of sovereign nations, interventions which are
not always motivated solely by such abstract and altruistic concerns.4 In their
work Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri discuss the return of the con
cept of the just war as part of a new kind of sovereignty replacing the sover
eignty of nation states in the new world order, an order they call Empire. In
their analysis, they distinguish between imperialism, as a nineteenth century
mode of expansion linked to the interests of nation states, and the postmod
ern regime of Empire, which seeks to regulate human nature through the con
trol of what Foucault has called bodies and pleasures. Following Foucault's
model of power that is widely dispersed rather than invested in any particular
individual or institution, Hardt and Negri's notion of Empire takes in the
actions and intentions of the US as a nation state, but is not reducible to the
US. Empire exists in conjunction with the remainder of old-style imperialism,
and thus they seek to understand how old and new cultural, economic, and
political forces work together to constitute the new world order. Flardt and
Negri's concept of Empire is a useful model for understanding Banks's Culture,

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 Cultural Imperialism arid the Ends of Empire • 87

an imperial power whose expansion is effected far more often through its way
of life than through its military force.5 At the same time, however, they argue
that this new type of sovereignty derives from the US conflation of liberty with
sovereignty "defined as radically democratic within an open and continuous
process of expansion" (169). Hardt and Negri argue that this transition from
old imperialism to new Empire is related to the shift from a disciplinary soci
ety (in Foucault's sense) and onward to what they now call a society of con
trol. In the latter, more and more aspects of society and private life are brought
under the management of the state and capital until all such social relations
come to be ruled by the criteria of capitalism. Such a description is uncannily
similar to the doctrine of neo-liberalism, which can also have extremely
adverse—if often unintended—side effects for a society that is the object of
Western neo-liberalist aid from institutions such as the IMF and the World
Bank (see Klein). Like Banks's Culture, the regime of neo-liberalism and the
linked package of economic and political reforms that are part of its new world
order are spread through both cultural and military means.
Hardt and Negri's framework is useful for understanding both American
invasions of Iraq. Banks's dedication to the veterans of the 1991 Gulf War is
illuminating in this light, as is Ziller's response to the plea that the Culture
"means well" despite the outcomes of some of its choices with the pithy, "They
mean ambiguously, sometimes" (17). Hardt and Negri argue that the concept
of the "just war" is central to the operation of new Empire which is "formed
not on the basis of force itself, but on the basis of the capacity to present force
as being in the service of right and peace" (15). In this new regime, Empire is
not formed by the colonial act of acquiring new territories and replacing their
domestic governance, but rather "the imperial process of constitution tends
either directly or indirectly to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of
the nation-states" (17), a process which is expressed in the "so-called right of
intervention" (18) of "the dominant subjects of the world to intervene in the
territories of other subjects in the interest of preventing or resolving humani
tarian problems, guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace" (18). This sort of
Empire building describes US activity in Iraq and elsewhere, but is also an
excellent description of the order the Culture itself represents. Seen in this
light, the utopianism of the Culture seems all the more ambiguous and its
implications all the more ominous.
Their shared commitment to liberal humanist subjectivity is another trait
the Culture shares with the United States. As Mel van Elteren points out, US
imperialism is frequently regarded as benevolent rather than exploitative by
conservative journalists and policy makers who call for "a national moral ren
aissance and a self-conscious, interventionist role for the United States abroad
based on a belief in the country's unique mission to spread freedom and
democracy around the world" (170). However, as with the Culture, and as

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88 • Sherryl Vint

described by Hardt and Negri's analysis of Empire, the US often finds it has to
rely on military might rather than simple moral suasion to compel others to
adopt its standards as their own. The appendix to Consider Phlebas points out
that the Culture's "sole justification for the rather relatively unworried, hedo
nistic life its population enjoyed was its good works" (484) and that when
faced with the Idirans, the Culture had to either admit that it was more inter
ested in its own comfort than in moral certitudes or wage war against the Idi
rans at any cost. This, presumably, is the reason that the war was so brutal and
so aggressive, and the Culture's policy of refusing to compromise with the Idi
rans is in part why the immense loss of life during the Battle of the Twin Novae
is so significant to the Masaq' Orbital's Mind.
Although it was the Idirans who destroyed the stars, "arguably, the Cul
ture might have prevented what had happened. The Idirans had attempted to
sue for peace several times before the battle started, but the Culture had con
tinued to insist on unconditional surrender, and so the war had ground
onwards and the stars had died" (25). The ease with which a "well meaning"
attempt to compel other cultures to adhere to liberal humanist standards—in
this case, the attempt to stop the Idirans from wiping out all life in the Galaxy
other than their own—turns into an exercise in balancing one's own atrocities
against this "greater good" is illustrated by the Masaq' Orbital's moral strug
gles. For the Orbital's Mind, the Battle of the Twin Novae also seems to serve
as a reason to reflect on the two Culture Orbitals it had to destroy during the
Idiran War in order to prevent them from falling into Idiran hands. Although
the Orbitals were evacuated, a number of people, for a variety of reasons rang
ing from religious conviction to personal grief, chose to remain on the Orbitals
and die there. In total, the Mind (then embodied in a battleship) killed 3492
out of the 310,000,000 people originally living on the Orbitals. This number
may seem small in the context of a war, and the Mind's culpability is mitigated
by the fact that all those who died would have been saved had they chosen
evacuation. Nonetheless, the Mind insists upon recording and individually
watching each death because it feels "war can alter your perceptions, change
your sense of values. I didn't want to feel that what I was doing was anything
other than momentous and horrific" (278). The Mind's sense of the signifi
cance of taking human life, whatever the reasons and however much scale
might seem to minimize certain deaths, gives the novel its title. In Consider
Phlebas, Banks used the quotation from Eliot to emphasize the forgotten per
spective of Phlebas who, like Horza, failed to see that his strength would not
last forever. In Look to Windward, Banks instead emphasizes the vigilance of
watching for such change. The Masaq' Orbital has dedicated its time since the
war to preserving life instead of taking it, "forever keeping an eye to windward
for approaching storms and just generally protecting this quaint circle of frag
ile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm

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 Cultural Imperialism and the Ends of Empire • 89

a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might

happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly
easy they are to destroy" (281).
In the remainder of this paper, I want to consider more fully the parallels
between the Culture's imperialism and US imperialism in both cultural and
military terms. Both the Culture and the US are civilizations which seem to
mean well and which officially stand for values with which it is difficult to
argue: democracy, freedom, and respect for human rights. Both also reveal a
slippage between cultural imperialism as a method of converting others to
one's values and more direct military imperialism when such cultural pressures
are not efficacious.6 Finally, both are rooted in liberal humanist models of self,
although a crucial difference between the two is that the Culture's premise of
non-scarcity means that the economic foundations of liberalism are obscured,
while American imperialism is clearly connected to the spread of global capi
tal. Examining the parallels between the two provides a reason to question the
apparent benevolence of the Culture, revealing clearly in this last Culture
novel the dark core that has always existed within the Culture's hedonistic
pleasures. These connections are particularly urgent in the context of US poli
cies that seem to be foregoing the velvet glove of cultural imperialism for the
undisguised iron fist of military imperialism.
John Carlos Rowe argues that we are living in a moment of "revival of tra
ditional imperialism as the US towers over all other human communities and
exerts its unchallenged power in the most flagrantly militaristic manner. Not
since the British Empire ruled the world by force and fear in the late eigh
teenth and nineteenth centuries has there been such undisguised rule by mil
itary power" (580). Rowe points to the "important relationship" between the
spread of US military imperialism and the "capitalization of 'cultural exports'
ranging from Hollywood entertainment and television programming to digital
technologies and the protocols for communication and work" (580). Like the
Culture, the US sells its ideals through the pleasures of its lifestyle; in the Cul
ture, this is accomplished by allowing those from other Cultures to participate
fully in the pleasures offered by Culture membership. For the US, however, in
a context of competitive capitalism, this marketing is accomplished through
the "selling" of lifestyles seemingly available through commodities, a market
ing ploy accomplished by direct advertisement but also by a popular culture
imbued with the logic of commodification. Both Rowe and van Elteren point
to the inevitable conflation between spreading the cultural values of liberal
humanist democracy, which the Culture and the US both strive to do, and the
inevitable expansion of "social visions of US-style development, with its heavy
emphasis on 'progress' in the form of unlimited, quantitative growth and eco
nomic-technological expansion" (van Elteren 180).
The important connection between the liberal humanist ideal of posses

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90 • Sherryl Vint

sive individualism and the economic logic of capital means that attempts to
extend the scope of the one result inevitably in the emergence of the other. In
the case of the Culture, the fantasy of a post-scarcity economy eliminates the
economic consequences one would otherwise see with the spread of capitalist
social relations, but the damage the Culture does to social stability (such as its
invasion of Chelgrian society) might be understood as analogous to the polit
ical instability caused by economic suffering. For example, Hardt and Negri
argue that the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East must be understood
as one of the consequences of a rejection of modernization (which becomes
conflated with a rejection of Western intervention). The benefits associated
with the spread of liberal democracy cannot be separated from an understand
ing of the particular way that such political models have spread—linked to
European and now US imperialism through economic relationships which
benefit the "mother" country. The result is that for many people a rejection of
the economic exploitation of liberal humanism has become bound up in a
rejection of all "foreign" interventions and thus social reform becomes tainted
with an overall resistance of Euro-American hegemony. In the case of US
imperialism, however, the dominance of this economic logic is such that the
move toward military intervention is not, as with the Culture and the Idirans,
a threat merely to "clarity of conscience; the destruction of its spirit; the sur
render of its soul" (Consider Phlebas 485), but more directly and openly a ques
tion of economic advantage, as more than one commentary has pointed out
regarding the importance of oil to US activity in Iraq. As Rowe argues,

Military force is thus held in reserve, not out of humane considerations but
primarily for reasons of practicality and economy, while the imperial power
promotes trade agreements—either for raw materials or finished products—
with the appearance of favorable and equitable terms to colonizer and colo
nized. It is only when this illusion of "free trade" is shattered that military
force is required to reimpose imperial "order." (581)

Even though the Culture in Banks's novels does not depict the direct eco
nomic exploitation that results from the spread of capitalism through the
medium of liberal humanist values, it nonetheless does reveal many of the
social consequences that can be understood as rooted in the same source.
Referring to Benjamin Barber's critique of globalization in jihad vs. MeWorld,
van Elteren argues that

Transnational corporations raise people's expectations through advertising,

making consumers believe that their purchases will open avenues to a better
life of freedom and opportunity, which generally prove false. McWorld threat
ens a local democracy and, more generally, civil society: transnational corpo

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 Cultural Imperialism ana the Ends of Empire • 91

rations have no interest at all in improving people's quality of life or strength

ening civil society. Neither do they promote the kind of transnational solidar
ity that might empower global citizens to cooperate in dealing with common
problems. Capitalist culture cannot really satisfy people's needs for commu
nity involvement, personal development, and meaningful relationships.
(181-182)

Similarly, Rowe suggests that "What lures consumers to new digital technolo
gies is the general promise of social communication, ironically just the ideal
offered by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, but it is a false promise
that substitutes complex programming and upgrades for socially meaningful
communication" (579). Unlike real-world capitalism, the Culture can live up
to the promises of its cultural "advertising" in the sense that anyone who
enters the Culture can have access to all the commodities enjoyed by a Cul
ture citizen. Thus, the non-Culture characters in Look to Windwind—Ziller, a
Homomdan named Ar Kabe Ischloear, and Quilan, the Chelgrian initially
intent on revenge against the Culture—can enjoy all the benefits accorded to
a Culture citizen. They never lack for material comfort, they can amuse them
selves in any number of pursuits and be assured that they can recover from any
injury, including death, due to stored memories, and if they desired they can
even have their bodies modified so that their glands will secrete a number of
recreational substances.
Like capitalism, however, the Culture cannot deliver on the social prom
ise embedded in commodities and their advertising. As is emphasized again
and again in the novel, largely through the perspective of these outsiders, cit
izens of the Culture lack "community involvement, personal development,
and meaningful relationships." The extreme recreational activities enjoyed by
many of the Masaq' Orbital's citizens—lava rafting, choosing to live as Dispos
ables (without mind backup so that they might die), traveling in an unmain
tained cable car—are evidence of the ennui which suffuses their lives. It is
clear from the novel's descriptions, focalized through the perspective of the
amused if somewhat contemptuous foreigners, that simple enjoyment is not
sufficient explanation for these lifestyle choices. Kabe, for example, partici
pates in a lava rafting trip which ends with many people burned and emotion
ally distraught, but is later informed that "most of the people you saw there
had lava-rafted before and had just as awful a time. I have checked up since
and all but three of the twenty-three humans you saw there have taken part in
the sport again" (95). Kabe is described by the Culture as an Ambassador, but
he describes himself as more of a journalist, whose job is "to explain the Cul
ture and its people more fully to my own. Of course both our societies know
everything about the other in terms of raw data, but sometimes a degree of
interpretation is required for sense to be extracted from such information"

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92 • Sherryl Vint

(126). One of Kabe's first observations about the Culture is that they have
"No laws or written regulations at all, but so many little...observances, sets of
manners, ways of behaving politely. And fashions. They had fashions in so
many things, from the most trivial to the most momentous" (10, ellipses in
original). To more traditional societies such as his own—his people were allied
with the Idirans during the Idiran War—and the Chelgrians, the Culture's
emphasis on personal freedom makes the Culture appear to have no culture at
all, just a changing series of fads. Nonetheless, Kabe's knowledge of Special
Circumstances means that he well understands that the Culture does insist
upon certain standards of behavior, even if it refuses to characterize these
requirements as laws. He is also aware, however, that Special Circumstances
makes up only a small portion of the Culture's citizenry. The rest "spend time.
That's just it. They spend time traveling. The time weights heavily on them
because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They per
sist in hoping that something they think they'll find in the place they're head
ing for will somehow provide them with a fulfillment they feel certain they
deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing" (98).
This sense of fulfillment that forever eludes Culture citizens is the sense of
socially meaningful communication that capitalism also promises through its
commodities but fails to deliver. Culture citizens in a post-scarcity economy are
freed from the requirement to alienate oneself by selling one's labor on the free
market. However, because they are still caught up in a liberal humanist model
of subjectivity, they cannot achieve true species being, theorized by Karl Marx
in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, that is, meaningful and
unalienated labor, and thus a full life as subjects for themselves rather than an
alienated life as subjects for capital. They do not have to work, but they lack
meaningful things to do with their lives at all, as the Minds have taken over all
socially necessary labor. In contrast to the ennui that infuses the experience of
most Culture citizens, the Minds seem to lead full and enriched existences. In
an exchange about happiness, the Masaq' Orbital Mind tells Ziller that it is
quite happy as it has "an entire—and if I may say so—quite fabulous Orbital to
look after, not to mention having fifty billion people to tend to," plus it is also
"observing a fading supernova," "tracking millions of comets and asteroids," "in
simultaneous communication with hundreds of other Minds," and has "eleven
Roving Personality Constructs, each one flitting over time from place to place
in the greater galaxy" (216). It is about to continue this list of its amusements
with the activities of its various avatars currently interacting with Orbital res
idents, when Ziller sardonically interjects, "Think of all that bullshit, the non
sense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandisement and self-deception, the
boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the
slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland
addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness" (217). The Mind
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 Cultural Imperialism and the Ends of Empire • 93

responds that such things are in the minority of its experiences, "chaff" which
it can ignore, "like ignoring all the boring bits in space between the neat stuff
like planets and stars and ships" (217), but this aspect of life in the Culture, the
endless series of amusement that promise fulfillment but deliver only distrac
tion, is what is left for human experience. Horkheimer and Adorno pro
nounced long ago in their diagnosis of the "culture industry" that commodity
society destroys the possibility of human happiness, even as it seems to deliver
material fulfillment. These same limitations apply to Banks's ambiguous Utopia.
Van Elteren and Rowe suggest that this same pseudo fulfillment and
pseudo freedom is exported by American cultural imperialism, although with
the key difference that the US model is also informed by the profit motive. In
Consider Phlebas, Horza outlines his reasons for rejecting the Culture in terms
of his perception that it is "ruled by [its] machines" (26). He argues that this
makes the Culture artificial rather than natural and that it "could easily grow
forever, because it was not governed by natural limitations. Like a rogue cell,
a cancer with no 'off' switch in its genetic composition, the Culture would go
on expanding for as long as it was allowed to. It would not stop of its own
accord, so it had to be stopped" (Consider Phlebas 169-170). US imperialism is
not guided by sentient Minds as is this fictional imperialism, but it can be
understood to be directed toward the "desires" and ends of another sort of
non-human entity: corporations. Corporations legally have the status of "per
sons" under a number of laws that allow them to do things such as enter into
contracts or own property as a single entity. The operation of capital makes
clear that it is designed to serve the "needs" of corporations over the needs of
other beings, seeking to accumulate surplus value no matter the cost to the
environment, the lives of workers, or the social relations within which produc
tion takes place. I am not suggesting that Banks's Minds are equivalent to
transnational corporations or that we should begin to think of corporations as
sentient, independent entities. The fact remains that behind the legal fiction
of the corporation-as-person lie individual human stockholders and decision
makers who control the activities of the corporation and benefit from the
wealth that accrues to it, although, like the commodity form itself, this legal
fiction of corporations as persons obscures this reality of human social rela
tions. I do suggest, however, that the parallels between the Culture's imperial
ism as guided by its Minds and US capitalist imperialism as guided by the
"needs" of corporations provide a useful structure for generating insights into
the implications of cultural imperialism.7 Banks's portrayal of the Culture is
ambiguous at best, acknowledging the problems of presuming to hold others to
one's own moral standards, although all the novels seem ultimately to uphold
the Culture's choices as creating the best of all possible worlds.
The difference between the Minds and transnational corporations is
instructive here, and demonstrates why we should be much less sanguine

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94 • Sherryl Vint

about material examples of cultural imperialism than we are about the discur
sive Culture. The lack of interest in the quality of human life van Elteren sees
in corporate culture (182) contrasts starkly with the Masaq' Orbital Mind and
its commitment to "forever keeping an eye to windward" (281) in order to pro
tect human life and happiness, even the seemingly quite trivial lives enjoyed by
most Culture citizens. At the end of Look to Windward, although we have been
given reason to doubt the Culture's choices in some of their interventions and
although we have seen that not all Culture citizens live up to the potential for
intellectual and artistic achievement implied by a society freed from the strug
gle for existence, we are still led to conclude that, despite its flaws, the Cul
ture's imperialism really is benevolent rather than selfish and chauvinistic.
Two characters in Banks's novel have a more negative view of the Culture's
interventions in the affairs of others and plot against it: Quilan, a former soldier
on the traditional side in the Chelgrian civil war who lost his wife to permanent
death (her soul keeper was not able to be recovered from her damaged ship) and
who now wishes to die himself, and Huyler, the stored mind of a Chelgrian gen
eral who entered such disembodied storage before the civil war began. Their
plan is to destroy the Mind, causing massive systems failures on the Orbital, and
a sufficient number of deaths of Culture citizens to balance Chelgrian deaths
during the civil war, thereby allowing the stored minds of those Chelgrians to
enter their virtual reality "heaven" in a way consistent with Chelgrian religious
doctrine. Because he lives among Culture citizens, Quilan begins to have sec
ond thoughts about his mission and does not want to proceed, but he is under
the impression that he cannot change his mind lest Huyler, stored in Quilan's
soul keeper, take over Quilan's body and complete the mission himself.
As the crucial moment approaches, Quilan is taken into a virtual reality
space by the Masaq' Mind and told that his plan could never have succeeded
in any case, as the Culture has known about it and monitored his activities
since he arrived. Quilan was allowed to believe the mission was possible, it
seems, so that he could decide on his own not to proceed rather than merely
being prevented from killing. This change in Quilan's subjectivity is also con
sistent with the operation of new Empire as theorized by Hardt and Negri who
argue for the crucial role of the shift to bio power, meaning that "the great
industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also
subjectivities" (32). At the end of the novel, Quilan and the Masaq' Mind,
both tired of the losses they experienced in war, decide to end their lives
together, the Mind having already made other arrangements for the Orbital's
safety. Huyler, the Chelgrian who seemed most opposed to the Culture and
who frequently challenged Quilan's moments of doubt throughout, is revealed
to have been an agent of Special Circumstances all along. Speaking to Kabe at
the end of the novel, after Quilan's death, Huyler confides that "the best way
to turn an individual—person or machine—is not to invade them and implant

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 Cultural Imperialism and the Ends of Empire • 95

some sort of mimetic virus or any such nonsense, but to make them change
their minds themselves, and that is what they did to me, or rather what they
persuaded me to do to myself. They showed me all there was to be shown
about my society and theirs and, in the end, I preferred theirs" (356). This is
also, it seems, what they have "done" to Quilan, who is in effect a Culture cit
izen as well when he goes to his death.
The hubris of this conclusion, the sense that any reasonable individual
when looking at the Culture compared to his or her own society will prefer the
Culture, reinforces the reading of Banks's work as ultimately on the side of the
Culture and its anti-Prime Directive ethos. Kabe responds to Huyler's obser
vation by pointing out that "he had lived in the Culture for nearly a decade
before he realized that when the Culture calls somebody from an alien society
who lives amongst them 'Ambassador,' what they mean is that that person rep
resents the Culture to their original civilization, the assumption being that the
alien concerned will naturally consider the Culture better than their home,
and so worthy of promotion within it" (357). Such ambassadors and the con
cern the Minds show for human life is the benevolent side of Culture imperi
alism. The picture that emerges from the series as a whole is sufficiently
complex to include more troubling implications of the Culture's imperialism,
such as the mistake that resulted in the Chelgrian civil war, but on the whole
we are left with this very positive image that most reasonable sentient beings
will prefer the values the Culture represents if given the opportunity. All the
Culture need do is export its culture and the rest will follow.
A similar model of Cultural imperialism also seems to guide US foreign
policy, not only in its rhetoric of "bringing democracy" to the world, but also
in the belief of many involved that their way of life represents a genuinely
superior set of values that will be freely chosen by other nations if they are
given a chance. One must remember Hardt and Negri's understanding of
Empire as a diffuse and non-localizable power in order to understand how the
best intentions of many involved in aid or cultural programs can nonetheless
become part of a force of cultural imperialism. Hardt and Negri suggest that
NGOs, for example, are "in effect (even if this runs counter to the intentions
of the participants) some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new
world order" (36). Van Elteren notes that US foreign policy and US firms oper
ating in a global market also "profit from cultural exchange programs that
bring large numbers of foreign students, academics, and other professionals to
the United States who continue to consume US cultural products when they
return home" (173). Most importantly, however much we might prefer the val
ues represented by the Culture to those of the societies it displaces or incorpo
rates, the future in Banks's novels is a future of successful imperialism, and the
building of Empire is always a morally ambivalent activity, at best. The Cul
ture's "good works" ultimately serve to legitimate its use of force, as Hardt and

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96 • Sherryl Vint

Negri argue about the current Empire, whose "arsenal of legitimate force for
imperial intervention is indeed already vast, and should include not only mil
itary intervention but also other forms such as moral intervention and juridi
cal intervention. In fact, the Empire's powers of intervention might be best
understood as beginning not directly with its weapons of lethal force but rather
with its moral instruments" (35).
Whatever the benefits of liberal humanist values and the rights discourse
that they uphold, we must not lose sight of the fact that US cultural imperial
ism and liberal humanist axioms also bring with them the spread of global cap
ital, a commodity-driven lifestyle that promises fulfillment but cannot deliver
it, and a model of "progress" driven by technological expansion and competi
tive accumulation. For all we might be attracted to the vision of abundance,
leisure, and the tender care of omniscient entities dedicated to our well-being
that Banks's Culture seems to promise, we should also pay careful attention to
the intimations of darkness that continually creep into his fictions. Within a
science fictional framework, cultural imperialism can be unambiguously
benevolent and can inevitably lead to the spontaneous conversion of those
exposed to the exported values; such an outcome works in this fantasy uni
verse where the beings running the Culture really are omniscient (or nearly)
and really do act in altruistic ways. The fact that the novel is dedicated to vet
erans of the 1990-91 Gulf War suggests that Banks is well aware that such a
vision of benevolent imperialism can be rendered ironic by history. As those
currently involved in the more recent US invasion of Iraq can well attest, it is
at our own peril that we cling to a vision of US imperialism as wholly benevo
lent and of the liberal humanist and capitalist values informing it as naturally
superior. Corporations, unlike Minds, serve only their own ends, and cultural
imperialism is no more innocuous than any other kind.

Notes
1 See Bodies of Tomorrow. My critique of Banks's work focused on the Culture's atti
tude toward the body and its similarity to the subject of liberal humanism, a subject "puri
fied" of all embodied specificity and presumed to be "neutral" or blank, which in practice
means a model of subjectivity which privileges white, male, bourgeois experience.
2 It should be noted that this refers to veterans of the first American invasion of
Iraq, not those involved in the current occupation of Iraq.
3 In fact, we are shown only one scene of a Chelgrian upper caste member abus
ing an Invisible who is trying his best to serve respectfully. The upper caste member is
annoyed and desires to take his frustration out on the lower caste member, which he
does with impunity. The upper caste member tricks the lower caste member, who is
blind, into walking off a cliff, and later claims it was the lower caste member's own

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 Cultural Imperialism and the Ends of Empire • 97

fault for being clumsy. He is not challenged by his countrymen, but later in the novel
he is tortured and killed by what seems to be a new sort of Special Circumstance drone
which can appear to be of any race. This flashback scene is told from the point of view
of Quilan, who also supports the traditional caste system, but who is disgusted by what
he sees as the abuse of this system. The only scenes from the civil war that are nar
rated is the scene of Quilan's wife leaving him, presumably to die, because he is
trapped beneath a machine and opposing forces are coming. The "revolutionary"
forces are not portrayed in a positive light when they take Quilan captive.
4 Hardt and Negri similarly argue that that Empire is often better than what preceded
it for the same reasons Marx said capitalism is better than what came before it: it does do
away with cruel regimes of modern power and increases the potential for liberation.
5 In the analysis that follows, I will sometimes use the phrase "US imperialism" to
designate the military actions of the US that are based on the ideal of the sovereignty
of nation states, what Hardt and Negri discuss as old imperialism. In both the US
under neo-liberalism and the Culture there is an interaction of these older forms of
imperialism with the new forces of Empire, an interaction that does not necessarily
imply an intentional coordination.
6 A crucial difference between the Culture and the US is that US national inter
ests are also promoted by the spread of global capitalism, while Banks's Culture lacks
any sort of economic system beyond the fantasy of post-scarcity. Nonetheless, I think
the novels offer important commentary on the way in which global capital spreads
itself through spreading its values and way of life, much like the Culture increases its
territory through spreading its values and way of life. Hardt and Negri emphasize this
in their analysis of the changes that capital inevitably brings to non-capitalist society
when it enters into trade relations with them: "Capital must therefore not only have
open exchange with noncapitalist societies or only appropriate their wealth; it must
also actually transform them into capitalist societies themselves. This is what is cen
tral in Rudolf Hilferding's definition of the export of capital: 'By "export of capital" I
mean the export of value which is intended to breed surplus value abroad.' What is
exported is a relation, a social form that will breed or replicate itself" (226).
7 Charles Stross's novel Accelerando, in which financial instruments themselves
become self aware and thus AI entities in their own right, is a more direct use of a sci
ence fiction trope to explore some of the tendencies of global capitalism.

Works Cited
Banks, Iain M. Consider Phlebas. New York: Bantam, 1987.
. Look to Windward. London: Orbit, 2000.
Brown, Carolyn. "Utopias and Heterotopias: The 'Culture' of Iain M. Banks."
Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation. Ed. Derek
Littlewood and Peter Stockwell. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 57-74.

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Guerrier, Simon. "Culture Theory: Iain M. Banks's 'Culture' as Utopia." Foundation

76 (Summer 1999): 28-38.
Hardesty, William H. "Mercenaries and Special Circumstances: Iain M. Banks's
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Palmer, Christopher. "Galactic Empires and the Contemporary Extravaganza: Dan
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Rowe, John Carlos. "Culture, U.S. Imperialism, and Globalization." American Literary
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of Toronto R 2006.

Abstract
This paper examines Iain M. Banks's Culture series as an example of the shift from
imperialism to Empire as analysed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Focusing on
Look to Windward, the paper argues that the series foregrounds the problems of cul
tural imperialism and draws attention to the damage that comes from exporting val
ues along with technology and culture. The Culture's shifts between integration of
other societies through technology and lifestyle exports and its forays into more direct
military intervention in the affairs of others are compared to the operations of US for
eign policy under conditions of late global capitalism and its unstable mix of benevo
lence and exploitation. The paper concludes that Banks's work helps us to see that
cultural imperialism is no more innocuous than any other.

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