Borders and Frames
Doctoral course
Tromsø and Sommarøy, 8-13 November 2004
Humanities Faculty, University of Tromsø
This essay is a methodological and theoretical positioning of my research project. I will elaborate on the theories of genre as they pertain to my use of them, specifically dealing with border-crossing generic texts; in this case of the science fiction genre (sf). In order to present a useful context I shall first briefly outline my project, after which I will dive into my views of genre and their function. Having done so, I will turn to the dissemination of sf, which will deal with generic boundaries and how texts may participate in a genre without belonging. This participation without belonging is clearly a Derridian notion, so I will focus on boundaries, dissemination, frames, grafts and traces. What I will not do, however, is deal with the specific generic traits of sf as this would push beyond the limits of my space, and so out of respect for the law of genre and of the audience, I shall abstain from recounting except as becomes necessary.
I
First, however, an outline of my project, which deals with cultural dissemination of sf as a rhetorical/metaphorical strategy. A number of cultural texts (literary, cinematic, theoretical, philosophical, etc) have since the late 50s increasingly turned to sf to borrow styles, metaphors, words, semantic groups and more. This has most clearly been reflected in literary movements within and without the sf genre; New Wave, cyberpunk, slipstream and transrealism have all had a tenuous and problematic relation to sf and any number of these authors have crossed generic borders in a number of cases. From within the sf field and out of it we may think of Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Jeff Noon, Kurt Vonnegut and others. Writers who have never been considered inside yet have a peculiar affiliation with it; ie people often refer to sf when dealing with their works; Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Steve Erickson, Carol Hill, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, and others. Within film, we can think of people such as Terry Gilliam, Spike Jonze, Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. Theorists who employ sf strategies include Jean Baudrillard, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles, while philosophy has Giles Deleuze who argue that philosophy ought to be seen in part as a kind of sf (Deleuze 1994:xx).
As one can see, this field is much too large to be the focus of a single dissertation, so I have had to disregard a number of these various instances, most notably the move out of sf since that has been dealt with before, and while I will touch on the cases of New Wave, cyberpunk and transrealism it will not be my focus. Slipstream is an interesting case, a term which Bruce Sterling chose to signify a number of writers who used elements of sf yet did not belong to the genre (not in the Derridian sense). This was in 1986 and was generally a lament of the state of sf which had been outpaced by the literary establishment. In 1999, however, the Fiction Collective 2 published a ‘best of’ anthology of their radical, experimental literary fiction (hardly the literary establishment) which was called In the Slipstream. Along with a number of the authors mentioned in Sterling’s list were authors such as Samuel Delany (New Wave) and John Shirley (cyberpunk). While slipstream is still mostly used within the sf community to designate those works which they regard as ‘not quite’ sf, there is at least a growing complication of the word and whom one means when using it. It does seem that a number of theoretical fictions/critifictions/avant-pop, in essence postmodern literature, has turned increasingly to genre and particularly to sf.
It is this transtextual relationship which I am interesting in investigating, focussing on which strategies and generic elements are pla(y)giarised and why this transtextual relationship has grown, to extend even outside the literary field. Critical attention to this field has been lacking, Brian McHale’s analyses always revolve around the sf writers who turn postmodern, as do Damien Broderick’s. Neil Cornwell, Gerhard Hoffmann and Martin Horstkotte draw parallels between the postmodern and the fantastic, arguing for the suspension of reality in postmodern culture. Yet none of these have argued for this as a broader cultural movement despite evidence precisely to this effect, and most of the work done has also been reductionist to some extent; McHale lumps it in with his ontological flickering, Broderick calls it transrealism to bolster sf’s relevance, Cornwell,Hoffmann and Horstkotte and regard it as a general shift in postmodernist literature towards the fantastic and leaves it at that. I wish to create a more varied view of this new and broad cultural emergence.
II
That genre is a cultural field is my basic proposition and basic premise for arguing that the dispersal of sf elements can exist in a broader cultural field and not just within a textual field of literature and film. I will argue for the conception of genre as a cultural field a little later on, but first we need to examine the more textual approaches to genre. Here it should also be made clear that when I am dealing with genre here, I am specifically talking about popular genres (sf, fantasy, romances, detective, etc) and not the ’supergenres’ of novel, poetry, drama. That a popular genre may exist in any number of artistic media, such as literature, film, computer games, television, comics, paintings, music and so on seem reasonably straightforward and can regarded as the ‘common cultural consensus’ approach to genre which Andrew Tudor argues must be the starting point for any discussion of genre, in order to escape at least to some extent the empiricist’s paradox (Tudor 1974:138). Tudor’s best insight, which he shares with Bazin, is that “… the crucial factors which distinguish a genre are not only characteristics inherent to the films themselves; they also depend on the particular culture within which we are operating.” (Tudor 1974:139, emphasis in original).
This logic applies not only to popular genres but clearly also to the supergenres, as we can see from the discussions on the death of the novel; if one had extended the notion of what a novel can be, there would never have been any threat to the form of the novel. It is, however, usually far easier to deal with cultural impact and production of popular genres since these genres often have a more segmented and stable audience. Here I should note that this is especially so for the sf fan community which has a closer relationship between writer and reader than most any other popular genre; because of this there are some of the points I make later on which are emphatically convincing for the sf genre yet may not be so for others. Still, I believe that cultural production and reproduction is closely connected to any genre, even the most experimental ones, such as theatre of the absurd, critifictions and so on.
Sf’s reader community, however, is particular in the way it has continually and consistently defined itself against the literary mainstream/experimental field, evident in the expression that sf literature (along with fantasy and horror) represents imaginative writing, clearly condescending the realist novel, its practitioners and readers. Also, the number of conventions, fanzines, newsgroups, bulletin boards, forums, etc create a literary subculture which is surprisingly aware of other fans and their shared identity. Note that this just as often results in power disputes between, for instance, male vs female readers, or readers of sf literature and viewers of sf films (often labelled ’skiffy’ due to the journalistic term sci-fi which is seen as a derogatory view of sf). Because of this, sf readers will almost always also be members of the sf subculture and at least to some extent aware of the ‘institutional’ side of text production. The problematic definition of sf also began within the community itself, via the pulp magazines of the 30s-50s instead of growing from a literary critic as is more usually the case. Of course, Todorov’s division between historical and theoretical genres (Todorov 1970/197513-14) seems to indicate that all readers help create historical genres, and I agree with this claim, but it is rare to see the parameters for a genre being discussed so energetically within the genre community, which will far more often lean on an unspoken, consensual agreement. Yet in the early sf magazines the definition was vigorously discussed, both in the descriptive and prescriptive sense and this clearly helped create a unified identity of the reading community.
Moving on to a more general approach to popular genre theory, we must recognise the most basic division of genre texts lie between the text as a product for entertainment or a work of art. When articulated this way, we can see that what is essentially discussed is the status of the genre piece as either work or text in Barthes’ sense of the words (Barthes 1977). Those discounting popular genres as paraliterature regard the genre as work, suitable only for consumption and so closed off from any activity from the reader. In other words, genre works remain uninteresting and static objects suitable only for consumption and are hence not to be allowed inside the study of literature.
However, for those who believe that popular genre fictions remain a valid object of study, it remains of vital importance to be able to regard these fictions as representatives of texts to the same, or at least almost same, degree as the established texts of the canon, even if such a canon remains disputed. It is interesting to note how many genre critics, trying to establish a genre as worthy of study, often tries to separate specific novels as being texts, while relegating the crasser novels to the status of works, inferior products that are usually seen as somehow not truly belonging to the genre. Consider for instance Scholes’ defence of some science fiction novels as being specifically structural fabulations and hence superior to those where the writers “have no sense of the difference between purposeful discontinuity and a magical relaxation of the cosmic structure. And many others seek to present traditional romance as if it had some structural or speculative significance.” (Scholes 1975:43).
So are the proper sf novels defended as texts from the inferior, and far more commercially oriented works of science fiction, which are not really sf at all anyway. This division of genre fictions into work and text is not a discussion which is openly acknowledged by most critics, yet it remains probably the most basic point of contention between genre critics and theorists and those who would rather do away with genre altogether. The general criticism of genre by these critics is the classificatory and, in their perspective, the reductionist aspect of genre terminology. It is evident that some genre critics have approached genres as systems and structures and so have dealt more with the macro-level of genre instead of the micro-level of text. For those who consider a work of art to be autonomous and free, reworking tradition and earlier texts, genre clearly is anathema because it reduces the originality of the text to variations over a tired scheme. It is here that the concept of intertextuality may be seen as a way of re-focussing on genre, although it was originally intended to remove the concept of genre and instead focus on the limitless nature of the intertext.
However, we may return to genre via one concept of intertextuality, and that is Genette’s concept of the architext. The architext is Genette’s way of accounting for the evolution of the term genre, in addition to explain how particular structures and elements are repeated through literary history and how this may give rise to a genre, within a framework of repetition, dependence, and difference. One could also use Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence to gain some further understanding of the historical relations between works, but we will not venture there now. Genette’s architext is useful because it allows us to focus on the connections between genre texts; how they develop, how they change, in essence how the genre evolves, but this is usefully done within the larger domain of intertextuality, which indicates that connections may be drawn from other areas than within the genre itself. I shall return to that briefly, but here one may object that although Genette deals with intertextuality (a poststructuralist concept) he is in many ways himself a structuralist. This is most clearly evident in the way he posits five types of intertextuality, or architextuality, hypertextuality, intertextuality, metatextuality, paratextuality, the whole of which he renames transtextuality. In this move, Genette is clearly trying to contain what is essentially and originally an unlimited, border-less concept.
Still, Genette’s terminology remains useful, especially so for genre in that it goes beyond the mere classificatory element of much genre theory, though he does not deny the classificatory element, and allows a more historical understanding which depends on a specific structure, what Genette calls the ‘architexture’ of the text. Genette’s view, then, is that genre are constructed by writers who respond to, rework and recycle a specific ‘architexture’ from earlier texts. Genette’s view, then, is clearly textual which is the typical way of identifying genre texts.
By defining a number of specific textual traits, genres are usually classified according to these traits. It is this tautological argument which Tudor tries to evade, but it is generally inescapable and Genette’s view of genre-construction is presumably the only textual way of defining genres. Classification, then, becomes as Anders Pettersson hyperbolically states “as whatever you decide to regard, for purposes of critical understanding, as a separate type of literary work.” (Pettersson 2003:37). The statement is hyperbolic because it reveals the nature of genre definitions as completely arbitrary (not that Pettersson agrees with this claim, only that this is the logical extension of genre as a classificatory system) and this is clearly not what genre critics want to hear. The most basic of all genre theoretical claims is the ontological claim that genres exist. There is, independent of literature, something which we can call genres and in Robert Scholes’ words “a text is to its genre as the speech act is to its language.” (Scholes 1985: 2). It is this natural state of genre which a number of genre theorists have followed, be it Northrop Frye, Tzvetan Todorov, Alastair Fowler, Thomas Schatz, Adena Rosmarin, Ralph Cohen, Rick Altman or Jean-Marie Schaeffer (obviously, this list needs to be investigated further with specific analyses of each critic, but for now it will do), and as Pettersson goes on to show, there is nothing natural about genre.
Genres, usually, is regarded as either essential or normative objects which can be described from or located in the text. Scholes specifies it as “The genre is a network of codes that can be inferred from a related set of texts” (Scholes 1985: 2). As can be gathered here, how we argue that the texts are related actively determine the network we end up with and so we are back to the empiricist’s dilemma. Whether we argue for a definition based on a number of exemplary texts or if we try to deal with a full canon, this problem is not resolved. Inevitably, we proceed from the text as the ground on which genre is based.
Within sf, the ground on which all sf genre theory bases itself on is Darko Suvin’s definition of sf as the literature of “cognitive estrangement” based on the existence of the novum. Cognitive estrangement is borrowed from the Formalist vocabulary of ostranenie, which is estrangement, defamiliarisation, deautomatisation. Suvin argues that we are estranged from the sf text because we cannot recognise the world which the text constructs. This estrangement is caused by the presence of at least one object, thing, or concept which is discontinuous with our reality and this object is the novum. This is the brief version of Suvin’s essay “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” (1972), later extended in his book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). Since that, very little has changed about the view of sf; although its history and field has been extended both within literature and into film, every critic has assumed that this definition is basically correct. I am not going to challenge it here, only mention that it is peculiar that a definition of sf which is more than thirty years old has only been mildly modified by current critics. However, that is a different story not suitable here.
As we can see from a number of critics, this ground is not always so stable. The most well-known example of rocking the ground on which stable units stand is clearly Jacques Derrida and in this instance his “The Law of Genre” (1980) in which Derrida also identifies genres with classification. However, Derrida also shows that genre is not just a descriptive term (although it is certainly also that), but it is also a prescriptive term, hence the invocation of the law; genre implies that some things are not allowed. It is in this announcement of the law, of the prescription, which also invokes that of the border; a genre establishes a line which must no be crossed and if it is crossed by the text, the text no longer belongs to the genre. A genre imposes restrictions, borders to keep things in as well as out.
In some of the more typical moves we have come to expect from Derrida, the law of genre is shown to be dependent upon the counter-law which may confound the first law. It seems logical to say, then, that a law can only exist if it can be broken otherwise there is no law. It is this transgression, this contamination, which enables the law of genre to exist and therefore the law of genre is actually the law of overflowing, the law of participation without belonging. Derrida goes on to argue that generic texts are definable through a specific trait and a specific code in which one may decide questions of classification. In the case of sf, the trait would be the novum and the code would be cognitive estrangement.
However, if we agree that these traits are what marks the sf genre, what enables us to point to a novel and say that it is sf, then we must also realise that these marks can be re-marked, they can be used in other texts which are not sf. Also, no text has traits which will identify all other texts within the ’same’ genre, just as every genre will be altered upon the inclusion of a new text; “participation inevitably means difference”, in Marjorie Perloff’s words (Perloff 1988:4). Therefore, what we use to describe and identify a genre is never just part of the genre but always outside as well as inside. The term ’sf’ which designates the genre we are dealing with, is never present in a sf text and so the term itself is not part of the genre either, but stands outside of it. But if it stands outside the text, how can the genre have in impact on the text; this is the paradoxical law of the law of genre.
It is because of this that Derrida argues that no text ever belongs to a genre but instead participates in a number of genres. This may sound peculiar and counter-intuitive, yet it certainly seems that the postmodern period has brought on a number of texts which do participate in a number of genres, hence the interest in hybrid genres. This notion of hybridity is something I shall return to a bit later on, but let us first turn to other critics who have insisted on texts having interactions with more than one genre.
For those who have worked with him, it probably comes as no surprise that Mikhail Bakhtin should have argued for a somewhat similar position to Derrida, as many people have observed that Bakhtin in many ways was a proto-poststructuralist (in this case proto is not meant to identify Bakhtin as a structuralist). This point is relevant since it means that Bakhtin and Derrida shares, to some extent, the same view of text and textuality. His view of language and literature certainly paved the way for poststructuralism’s theory of textuality and Julie Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality is derived from Bakhtin’s dialogism. So that his ‘theory’ of genre also includes the dialogic principle is clear enough. I do not wish here to fully examine Bakhtin’s system of genres, grounded on primary and secondary genres, but instead focus on genre interaction and genre memory.
As Jostein Børtnes says, Bakhtin’s view of genre is that:
in concrete utterances there is a constant and complex interaction of genres. [...] Such interpenetration may result in a dialogisation of the genres involved, since each genre ‘remembers’ the contexts of which they have emerged and evolved together with other utterances from which they have been adapted. (Børtnes 2003:75)
Bakhtin’s concept of genre memory, the notion that a genre may ‘remember’ is close to Genette’s architext; certain structures and elements are common to a genre and they remain even when lifted out of context, just as the genre remembers its history. In Derridian terms, this memory would be a trace, but I will return to that in the third part of my essay. As we can see, Bakhtin’s concept of genre dialogism in texts is very close to what Derrida says about participation, with the notable exception that Bakhtin does seem to indicate that a text may ‘fully’ belong to a specific genre, although there are always other genre contacts.
It is useful to keep Bakhtin’s thoughts in mind because they indicate a more discursive nature of genre participation/interaction. While Derrida, as we have seen, insists that there is always genre and always more than one, he never touches on any particular use or meaning of this genre participation; he restricts himself to note how the law of genre is the law of overflow. With Bakhtin, we can see that the genre participation may indeed provide specific meanings; the co-existence of more than one genre may be regarded as a textual strategy and not just a function of the existence of genre. This point may seem commonsensical, but it is vital for the understanding of any number of texts, whether postmodern or not.
Johan Schimanski makes a similar point when he argues for the reader to draw a parallel between genre borders and cultural borders in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (Schimanski 2003). The different ethnic, cultural, national, etc borders all represent shifts in genre, from the realist to the utopian. This, Schimanski argues, is a clear textual strategy meant to provide a specific cultural production of place and serve as contrast between white, black etc communities.
Because of this interest in border crossings, both generic and other, Schimanski argues for two different approaches to the division of genres, the establishing of borders which may or may not be crossed. One is the classical, classificatory notion of genre, where the borders exist between different genres; here is utopian literature and here is realist literature and never the twain shall meet. The second is his argument that genre borders may exist within the text and represent different moments in the text; “conceptual genre borders are mapped out on the surface of the text itself” (Schimanski 2003:506).
Schimanski’s metaphor for genre is spatial; he talks of maps and landscapes which is clearly meant to indicate the similarity between genre borders and geographical borders. My metaphor is temporal, I spoke of ‘moments in the text’ and this is probably because I do not explicitly share Schimanski’s interest in geographical borders but instead on how the reader responds/reacts to the crossing of genre borders, the interpenetration of genre, the participation of different genres; hence different moments in the reading of the text.
One thing which we are both concerned with, however, is the notion of a multiplicity of genres within one text. Since most people believe in the existence of genres and that a given text may belong unproblematically to a genre, there is a need for critics to account for this. Certainly it would be peculiar to disagree with the notion that Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is not sf, or that The Odyssey is not an epic. Schimanski argues for a resolution between the text either belonging to the genre which is dominant or as creating a new hybrid genre, even if that may result in a very limited size of genre, perhaps even just one text. Schimanski puts this responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the reader; the reader searches for a genre until one ‘fits’ (Schimanski 2003:505). This is a similar move to Todorov’s fantastic, which must also in the end be resolved by the reader.
As might be expected, with my interest in reader-response, I am all for this argument, with one caveat. The danger of allowing the reader ‘full control’ over the generic classification and determination is the same danger which always exists when we approach a fully subjectivist view of text. So far, we have been dealing with a quite objectivist understanding of genre; ie that generic features are ‘there’ in the text and we as readers merely decode them. The subjectivist approach allows a greater freedom for the reader, yet at the same time also problematises the stable concept of genre. The argument that The Castle is a criminal novel may be put forth by a reader, and the same reader will then believe that the text is a poor instance of a criminal novel, just to use Umberto Eco’s example (Eco 1970/1984: 9-10). While we as critics can never stop the reader in practising misreadings, nor can these misreadings always be said to bring any particular insights. Because of this, I argue for a culturally constructivist approach to genre, in the sense that the culture at large, ie the reading community helps draw up the borders of the genre in question, constantly containing and prescribing the features of genres.
It is here that the dominant comes into play, which, although it does not necessarily work well with a constructivist approach, since it originates in Roman Jakobson’s Formalist vocabulary (Jakobson 1935), does point to a resolution to the problem of genre-belonging as it is generally used and still allows us to identify a number of hybrid texts. Here I agree completely with Schimanski. Just as no single genre text can ever describe the entire genre, so can no genre theory describe all genre texts, which Vincent B. Leitch expresses so: “The text is always more than a genre allows, and this surplus is incorrigible for no genre can totally saturate all the phrases and gaps in a text.” (Leitch 1992:78). This is Leitch’s ’solution’ to a textualist approach to genre, and it does work well with the poststructuralist understanding of the intertext, which is also Leitch’s intention of course.
However, despite the fact that we now have identified a number of problems with classifying texts in genres and have noted on a number of solutions to these problems, we have not escaped the basic problem of classifications being anything other than textual and only identifiable as textual structures. It is here that we must both return to Tudor’s notion of the ‘common cultural consensus’ and yet extend beyond him. That genres are cultural also comes from Pettersson’s point that genres are ontological objects only in the culture in which they exist; genres are not found objects but socially constructed objects which thereby inscribe themselves into a cultural power relationship. Leitch again:
Because genres are sociohistorical discursive constructs partaking in regimes of reason, they are open to productive genealogical inquiry attentive to literary conventions and cultural practices as well as to institutional and ideological matters. (Leitch 1992:67).
This realisation is relevant when we consider that genre reproduction occurs only due to industrial and audience forces, not through the texts themselves. Cycles only occur because there is a demand for these texts and the industry recognises the possibility of making money by producing these texts. It is because of this that we need to locate genres in the complex interrelations between texts, industries, audiences, historical contexts, cultural incursions and similar practices. Genre must be located in the archive of culture. This approach moves away from genre histories chronicling generic texts using definitional and interpretive approaches; instead we should realise that genres are not “deep repositories of hidden meanings, formal structures, or subtextual insights” (Mittell 2001:17) but rather clusters of texts which exist in many different forms, best viewed within the frame of audience, industrial and cultural practices. Shifts in genres only come through broader shifts located in these three instances instead of spontaneous eruption. “It is, therefore, not enough to frame genre studies as a move from genre to literary system; the literary system itself must tie in with cultural systems.” (Leitch 1992:73). It is with this Foucauldian approach that I call for genre theory to move towards what I will call the genre function after Foucault’s author function.
When we regard genre as a discursive formation, the centrality of the text is deconstructed and the hierarchy of texts are no longer definable through the text itself (not that they ever were, of course) but must instead be analysed through the optic of power and authority. No longer is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series the definitive work of sf through any trait inherent in the text, but rather because the sf reading community has made it so through a deliberate and desired continuity in order to reproduce certain traditions and ideological values (see Williams 1981 for more on cultural reproduction). We know from John Fiske that popular culture is constructed by readers, not by the texts themselves (Fiske 1989); texts do not produce their own categorisation. Rather, the canonical texts are not necessarily chosen for their strict adherence to any particular traits within the text; many of the major works of a given genre are often those who alter and rejuvenate the genre instead of reproducing the conventions. Instead, broadly speaking, one may regard the major works as those which strike a chord with the time, represent, reflect and deal with the concerns of the present times. Neuromancer is certainly such a case, as is The Matrix. Based on this, we can propose a number of areas which genre studies must deal with in order to fully account for genre as a discursive formation.
Genres should account for textual attributes. This must be done with denying the form/content division in the identification of genres; we cannot privilege content or form as what truly defines or constitutes a genre.
Genre histories should be approached as discursive genealogies. Genre works are produced with a particular relation to the generic field as a whole, not just to the earlier texts; because of this liminal cases are interesting because of how the genre field reacts to the new text; whether it is accepted as a new work or disregarded because it does not live up to the current understanding of the genre. Here the focus of historicity becomes significant as there are several texts which would not be considered part of the sf genre if they emerged today, but now stand as classics in the field. Most of what Jules Verne and H.G. Wells has done would fall within this category.
A further point connects to the argument above of realising sf’s place not just within its own field, but also in relation to the larger literary/textual community. Many writers and readers of sf pride themselves on sf’s lack of recognition within mainstream literary culture, and even on the poor construction of some of the texts, simply because these instances are marks of distinction and the recognition brings a solid subcultural capital. Sf is not read for its prose but for its ideas, often coming close to philosophy. This understanding helps explain why sf films are disliked by literary sf fans, and why movements such as New Wave and cyberpunk had difficulties making it within the sf community, due to their more literary pretensions.
Genres should be understood in cultural practice and within larger systems of cultural hierarchies and power relations. A genre is often measured against the mainstream, even in mainstream genres such as sf, and the difference from the mainstream is regarded as what the reading community argues is authentic about it. The closer a specific text moves to the mainstream, the less authentic, conversely, it is regarded and often given lesser status within the genre. This process is most clearly evident in sf from the reception of most Hollywood sf films. Because of the mainstream appeal of Hollywood, most sf fans, especially literary fans, regard sf films are lesser version of the true genre which can only be found in literature. There have even been arguments that sf is a strictly literary genre which depend on elements that are incompatible with visual media. Such arguments are clearly counter-intuitive and not convincing. Popular genres are part of mainstream culture, but any genre has a specific place within cultural hierarchies and all the elements here needs to be considered in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on distinction.
Understanding the sf genre field in this way can also help us explain the escape that some texts have made from the sf field, specifically texts such as Flowers for Algernon (originally a short story published in a sf magazine), and even authors such as Kurt Vonnegut with Slaughterhouse Five (coming from an author who had originally published several sf novels, but who is now regarded as a postmodernist and one of the first new metafictionists) or why the recent Matrix-trilogy was seen as a failure after the first film (it moves heavily into the sf genre with the two sequels, rather than drawing on cultural concerns and fears).
However, although this does require a revisitation of the sf genre, I will not go into that now. Instead, I will deal briefly with what use genre has, which might seems to come a little belatedly. My basic understanding of the use of genre is the creation of a reading protocol; the term is Derrida’s which he defines as
In place of this discursive anticipation, the notion of ‘protocol’ substitutes a textual monument: the first page glued over the opening – the first page – of a register or set of records. In all contexts in which it intervenes, the protocol comprises the meanings of priority, formula (form, pharmacopoeia), and writing: pre-scription.” (Derrida 1972/1981: 8n, emphasis in original)
He furthermore stresses that a reading protocol has the structure of a ‘magic slate’, so that both memory and new perception is possible (Derrida 1972/1981: 8). Although Derrida specifically talks about a preface, I see no reason not to apply the same logic to other instances such as genre. In this way, genre serves a double function both as memory (similar to Bakhtin’s notion) and as an intervention on meaning, based on priority, formula and pre-scription. Such a view of genre is quite typical, of course, as it emphasises the communicative aspect of genre.
Genre as a communicative code positions genre as a frame for understanding, which operate during the reading of texts. Here, genre becomes the way one should understand texts, so that “her world exploded” would usually be meant figuratively but in sf it can be meant literally as in the case of Star Wars. It is this effect which genre has; a particular way of guiding the reader to the ‘correct’ reading of the text, the one desired by the text. We should immediately realise that this operation is of course not that simple and there are countless examples of misreadings.
We can easily find examples which disrupt the typical genre protocol, such as this one by Tom Maddox: “One room appeared to front upon a night filled with swirling nebulae and a million stars, the enxt on sunshine and dazzling snows.” (Maddox, 1991:31). In a typical sf protocol, we would try to figure out what the ‘enxt’ is; creature, object, etc, but here the truth is that it is a typo, the word is ‘next’. This is an example of how a metafictional strategy may confound the genre protocol, but this does not disprove the existence of the protocol, instead it shows that the protocol exists since it can be subverted.
The belief that genres create, or assist in the creation of, meaning is clearly an epistemological claim; things (genres) make meaning/sense. In a way, this is of course the very reason for why genres are studied and are considered important; they are one aspect which constructs the diegesis of the text in a specific way. Genre theory then hopes to specifically explain how this construction takes place and which elements are required to activate the reading protocol. As such, genres are understood within a communicative paradigm where we may again turn to Roman Jakobson. Where most genre critics have been interested in genre as a code, I wish to turn my attention to the context as well, as produced by reading community, institutional practices, etc.
If this is my belief about genre, that it is basically a communicative tool, why insist on the problem of belonging? It may seem counterproductive to understand genre as a deeply problematic term if one is interested in how readers understand texts through genre. I will argue that although genre belonging is clearly problematic and often difficult to ascertain, we cannot stand outside genre as one dimension of reading texts. This argument is deliberately parallel to Derrida’s argument that although logocentrism must be questioned we cannot stand outside it since it is the only way we have of making meaning possible.
III
The dissemination of sf cannot truly begin to take place after sf has been created as a separate and whole category or field. It is significant that the dissemination of sf begins in the late 50s, just at the time when sf becomes a stable and widely accepted generic marker. The connection to the rise of the postmodern period is clearly also significant, since postmodernism’s relation to genre is quite different. This is why I will briefly comment on postmodern genres, which one might have expected to be in the previous part but I have chosen to place it here in order to clarify the different ontological claims to genre which postmodernism can be seen to problematise.
As we know, postmodernism is suspicious of ontological claims and grand narratives and certainly the existence of genres can be seen as a form of grand narrative and as previously mentioned it is definitely an ontological claim. What we must keep in mind is that although postmodernism may destabilize ontological claims, it rarely does away with the completely. The ground is questioned but not always shattered. In Ralph Cohen’s words on the existence of postmodern genres:
Still, the very concept of transgression presupposes an acknowledgement of boundaries or limits. Such transgressions, as some theorists of postmodernism recognize, presuppose genres, presuppose that postmodern practices have not homogenized writing; rather that they continue to introduce distinctions even though these differ from modernist practices. (Cohen 1988:16)
It is in this way that we may reorient our understanding of genre within the postmodern paradigm as an unstable boundary which must still insist in order to be transgressed. The existence of genres remain significant and important, if continuously contested in an often playful manner. We may thus paraphrase Ihab Hassan and say that although genres may persist as “a fiercely contested category, at once signifier and signified, altering itself in the very process of signification, the effort to speak it can not be wholly vain.” (Hassan 1987: xii)
To turn to the topic of dissemination, how may we argue that genres disseminate? First, we should briefly look at what dissemination means, in Derrida’s terms. Dissemination is the division of meaning; the tendency of textual meaning to move out in all directions and so resist closure. These textual meanings are in constant process, always writing and rewriting themselves. Derrida is insists that dissemination is different from polysemy; being multiple and indefinite. Derrida here plays on the double meanings of seed/term/germ and semantics, all of which constitute the effect of dissemination (Derrida 1972a: 304). Dissemination, then, becomes the endless play of meaning both as divided and doubled; because words have too many meanings there will be an indefinite number of meanings, meanings proliferate.
This may sound as the ultimate in textual nihilism where any hope of unity or stability is forever lost and the text is utterly shattered and in the worst case completely redundant and useless, since we can never decide irrevocably which meaning is the most appropriate. The text has lost all meaning since it has an infinite number of meanings; the text is hollow. It is evident that there is a degree of semantic indeterminacy in Derrida’s proposition of dissemination and it is here that we may tie back into postmodernism which has lurked slightly passively in the background throughout this essay. Indeterminacy is one of the most vital aspects of postmodern culture (though it existed prior to postmodernism, of course) and Hassan describes indeterminacy as the tendency to “delay closures, frustrate expectations, promote abstractions, sustain a playful plurality of perspectives, and generally shift the grounds of meaning on their audiences.” (Hassan 1987:73). Meaning is not something definite in postmodern culture, there is no single truth which may stabilise meaning, instead meaning becomes a object which may be playfully examined and reexamined constantly.
Clearly Derrida’s project is not to eradicate all meaning but instead to investigate how meaning is produced, and he insists that dissemination is thus always also insemination (Derrida 1972a: 304) and that this insemination creates what he terms the graft. As Culler states “Meaning is produced by a process of grafting…” (Culler 1982:134) and as Derrida asserts:
To write means to graft. It’s the same word. The saying of the thing is restored to its being-grafted. The graft is not something that happens to the properness of the thing. There is no more any thing than there is any original text. (Derrida 1972a:355)
This is intertextuality in the way that Kristeva and Barthes both use it, the author becomes the scriptor (Barthes 1977:145) and any sense of a text which does not to some extent quote, cite, reproduce another is questioned and instead understood as the always ‘already-written’. It is because of this that Derrida argues that ‘textual samples’ can only be read within the operation of their reinscription which is the same as the graft (Derrida 1972a:355). Leitch argues: “The Derridian operation of grafting is a postmodern tactic designed to cross traditional boundaries in order to promote fruitful intersections among isolated disciplines and textual traditions.” (Leitch 1996:41). It is this useful intersection which I argue for exists in the grafting of sf in a variety of different textual traditions and fields. As such, my project can be seen as the process of a ‘double reading’ of the science fiction genre ‘against’ literature, theory, culture; in essence textuality.
Such a project remains valid because of Derrida’s point that: “Each grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory.” (Derrida 1972a:355) and so we realise that the number of different texts which contain within them textual samples from the sf genre are affected by this generic participation or contamination, which is both dissemination (from the genre) and insemination (into the text in question). Because every sign, or genre for that matter, can be cited, it can also break from its ‘original’ context and so “engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.” (Derrida 1972b:320).
It may appear as a quite diffuse argument that I am putting forward here and so I hope to illuminate the relevance with the briefest of examples. N. Katherine Hayles’ book How We Became Posthuman deals with the process of how we as humans have changed within contemporary society and the guiding metaphor she uses is that of the posthuman. For Hayles, the posthuman is based on four premises; information over matter, consciousness as epiphenomenon, the body as the original prosthesis, human being can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines (Hayles 1999:2-3). This identification is clearly connected to that of the cyborg which Hayles also admits and sees as a necessary step on the ladder to the posthuman (Hayles 1999: 291); moving through the cyborg as a cultural icon. In this move, Hayles particularly emphasises Donna Haraway and her influence on contemporary thought on body and identity.
While the cyborg does represent another significant area, I will here focus on the posthuman whose lineage Hayles places with Ihab Hassan who in a 1977 essay used the term ‘posthumanism’ (Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?”, in Michael Benamou & Charles Caramella (eds), Performance in Postmodern Culture). Hassan regards this posthumanism as following humanism, ie. last five hundred years of Western thought, although he also mentions the change of human form (Hayles 1999: 1, 320n). However, the word posthuman was used first in Robert Silverberg’s sf novel Son of Man from 1971:
Clay senses, as he has never before sensed, the full span of time through which he has passed; for now he is caught in a sea of shapes, prehuman and human and posthuman, coming and going, smothering him, demanding comfort from him, seeking redemption, chattering, laughing, weeping – (Silverberg 1971:189-190, italics mine)
Interestingly, there is more which connects Silverberg’s and Hayles’ text than just the word itself. Clay, a human from our time, travels billions of years into the future and encounters humans whose forms he has never seen before; they may alter their shape as it please them, even to the point of dissipating into a non-physical form. The four premises of the posthuman which Hayles put forth are all part of Silverberg’s text and investigated as Clay tries to understand human nature outside the physical parameters. Here, Silverberg text anticipates and reads Hayles’ text critically, such as when the loss of human culture is at stake, since none of the new humans remember any part of Clay’s/our culture their humanity is lost as well: “By the continuity of our culture we signify that we are human” (Silverberg 1971:24). Clearly Silverberg’s text is a conservative reaction fearing change and the loss of tradition, and yet many would surely feel more liberated than lost if Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, and Jesus were forgotten. The point here, however, is the graft of the sf which Hayles employs and even admits to. Sf, it seems, becomes the primary repository of metaphors and concepts when dealing critically with human culture.
There is another area in sf which has dealt with the posthuman and this is the cyberpunk subgenre of the 80s and 90s (some argue that cyberpunk still exists, other that it is dead, others for a post-cyberpunk. In any case, none of the original authors consider themselves cyberpunk authors any more; Gibson, Shiner, Shirley, Sterling). While the term ‘posthuman’ does not appear in cyberpunk until Sterling’s 1996 Holy Fire, it is evident that the entire genre is concerned with the existence of the human and the connection between body and mind. The crossing of the border between the animate and inanimate is a constant. The humanist concept of ‘man’ as the centre of creation is severely undermined.
Here the connection to Silverberg is evident enough in an architextual relationship, the borrowing of the problematics but with a different angle. Silverberg’s point is that man is defined through culture but a biological change will also affect the stability of our identity. Cyberpunk goes further and radically critiques the notion of a stable subject stabilised within a body. This is what posthuman means in Sterling’s novel, where the protagonist Mia experiences the rapture of being posthuman, where the body is extended like any other prosthesis, altered at the whim of the person. Unlike Silverberg’s dystopic vision, Sterling’s is far more positive in the view of what the posthuman can do and be, just as much cyberpunk denies the old humanist values. It is because of this that people like Haraway find the icon of the cyborg to be so liberating, it exists as a critique of stable, unitary, male identity and provides a metaphorical freedom for reinscribing a new identity. Hayles does the same when she argues for the posthuman as being a way to get out of “old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means.” (Hayles 1999:285).
Obviously, this whole field of the posthuman cannot be based on one textual instance. Clearly, the term posthuman must also be seen in relation to the whole ‘post-craze’ movement in theory of the 70s and onwards, instigated by those who saw postmodernism as a radical, liberating break with previous times and created a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity. However, it is evident that the anxiety about a deep shift in human nature was first given voice in sf and since ‘travelled outward’ in a dissemination into other fields. Not that sf is in any sense prophetic but we can see an increased desire and perhaps even necessity in using sf tropes, concepts, metaphors in order to understand our present, presumably brought on because, as Bruce Sterling notes in his preface to Mirrorshades, we have grown up in a science fictional world (Sterling 1994).
It is this relationship which Hayles employs and she is certainly not alone in this endeavour, Steven Shaviro also notes in Connected that he will “try to write cultural theory as science fiction to come to grips with a world that itself seems on the verge of being absorbed into the play of science fiction novels and films.” (Shaviro 2003:ix). Hayles agrees when she says: “As we accelerate into the new millenium, questions about the posthuman become increasingly urgent. Nowhere are these questions explored more passionately than in contemporary science fiction.” (Hayles 1999:247).
This may seem a peculiar approach, but Carl Freedman argues for the “certain structural affinities between the two terms [critical theory and sf].” (Freedman 2000:23). These structural affinities come because it is in both genres’ nature “to speculate about the future” (Freedman 2000:181) although of course in different ways. However, this affinity can be seen as the way that the graft of the sf genre inseminates a particular meaning into critical theory, and other fields, in order to provide conceptual frames for thinking about our world’s present condition.
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