Last Tuesday, I passed my PhD viva examination. It was a good day, the opponents were friendly and the atmosphere was good. The text of my presentation is provided here.
Recently, on August 11th 2006, the US government publicly stated that reading science fiction enriches society as it ignites public interest in science and help science programs get government funding. By asking ‘what if?’ questions, science fiction makes scientific research seem relevant and dramatic for researchers but also for the general public, states Margaret A. Weitekamp, curator with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum’s division of space history (Walton, “Society, Science Enriched by Science Fiction”).
But already in 1929, science fiction writer and editor Hugo Gernsback said much the same thing, when he wrote an editorial stating that science fiction is “an important factor in making the world a better place to live in, through educating the public to the possibilities of science and the influence of science on life” (quoted in Roberts, 2000: 68).
Who says that sf isn’t prophetic?
I therefore feel more confident because I have in my possession How to Survive a Robot Uprising, by robotics researcher Daniel H. Wilson. Because of this book, I already know that robots with impassive Austrian accents are the most dangerous (82) and that karate is useless against robots, unless one can punch through sheet metal (99).
Wilson’s book is a mix of actual science and robotics research, science fiction and healthy doses of humor, and is a good example of how all-encompassing references to sf have become. Dr. Daniel H. Wilson knows full well that while robots are part and parcel of our everyday lives, to most people, the iconic robot comes straight from science fiction, more than anything which has emerged from actual robotics research.
Robotics. The word ‘robot’ comes from Czech writer Karel Capeck’s proto-sf play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1921), where it describes artificial people happy to serve. The word means ‘forced labor’ in Czech and has since entered everyday vocabulary, replacing previous words such as automaton to describe technologically created humanoids. ‘Robotics’ was coined by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who believed that the word already existed as a parallel to words such as mechanics. It seems that there is a distinct affinity between sf and new technological vocabulary.
I, for one, feel comfortable that I will never experience a generation gap between myself and those younger than me, for I have already beaten them to the punch by reading the Dictionary of the Future, so I already know what ‘netlag’ is and what ‘ear cones’ are for before the kids have even had a chance to see those things.
Unlike Robot Uprising, Faith Popcorn’s book is less an attempt at humour and more an attempt to stay ahead of the wave of technological and social development occurring all around us. While some of it is tongue-in-cheek, much of the dictionary is a serious investigation of how our language will develop because of changes in our society. Innocent as the book may be – and I would certainly caution anyone to put too much stock in what someone called Faith Popcorn predicts – it does point to a certain anxiety, if not outright fear, of being left behind when society and technology change.
Alvin Toffler calls this encounter with the new and undiscovered “future shock”. It seems that every day brings new future shocks and perhaps this feeling that things are changing just a bit faster than you can absorb them, is why we need a vocabulary from somewhere else than our own present, and that vocabulary has in fact been waiting for us, right there, in the pages of sf, where the encounter with new technology and new worlds is commonplace. A place where words such as borg, corpsicle, dalek, doublethink, ESP, ET, FTL, grok, hive-mind, kipple, and waldos are everyday words.
To an increasing extent, the science fictional invades our everyday life as well as the books we read and the films we see. Science fiction crops up where it may seem oddly out of place, but often it seems as though technological and social developments are more easily understood when read as science fiction. Just a few weeks ago, the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking argued that humans must colonize other planets in order to survive.
In this way, science fiction seems to be a useful interpretative strategy for our current historical moment. It is this interconnection between science fiction and contemporary culture that my work has focussed on, taking as its point of departure the transformations which can be traced within literary and cinematic culture. This starting point is chosen because science fiction originated within literary culture and has since been endlessly adapted into every medium.
In order to describe how science fiction has penetrated much of our cultural discourse, I need a basic terminology which allows me to express not only this penetration, but also the consequences of such penetration. In my dissertation, I have argued for the concept of cultural dissemination, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida. It is the process where a text “explodes beyond stable meaning and truth toward the radical and ceaseless play of infinite meanings spread across textual surfaces” to quote Vincent Leitch.
It is this movement from one discourse into another which defines dissemination, and makes it obviously a part of intertextuality. Derrida’s point is that meaning occurs in this particular movement from one discourse – novel, film, song, etc – into another, and that such movement always happens: “What interests me is that this re-mark – ever possible for every text, for every corpus of traces – is absolutely necessary for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry, or literature” (Derrida, 1980: 64). This re-mark is what Derrida also refers to as the graft, which is the point of juncture and stress where different discourses blend. Often, this blending goes unnoticed but at other times it is evident and may be subjected to critical analysis. It is this dependency on the earlier discourse – in my case science fiction – that I am interested in.
As for the consequences of this dissemination, I argue for two results at either end of the cultural spectrum: either the graft is completely subsumed by the new discourse, or the new discourse is radically altered by the introduction of the graft. To articulate this, I draw upon the work of the Situationists and of Dick Hebdige’s work on subculture.
Hebdige shows how especially dominant culture is capable of absorbing emergent cultural forms into its own mode, and so naturalize these new forms as if they were always part of the dominant mode. He refers to this process as recuperation, and it is by and large a negative process, where difference from the norm is either effaced as meaningless or transformed into a commodified spectacle.
The flip-side to the process of recuperation, is what the Situationists termed detournement – originating in French and best translated as a mix between ‘diversion’ and ‘subversion’, and its practice best described as an embezzlement of convention. The Situationists – members of the Situationist International – were Marxists, anarchists and general troublemakers in Paris during the late 1950s, some coming from the avant-garde art movement COBRA. The most well-known member was Guy Debord, who also wrote “Methods of Detournement”, where he argued for the use of pre-existing aesthetic elements to create new works and disfigure earlier ones. A kinship can thus be seen between the Situationists, Tristan Tzara’s automatic writing and William Burroughs’ cut-up technique.
We must therefore distinguish between those texts that recuperate new materials and subordinate them into a larger, culturally dominant framework, and those texts that use new materials to detourn representation and so challenge dominant culture through oppositional texts.
Cultural dissemination, for me, is the movement between recuperation and detournement which occurs at various points of the cultural production and process of distinction. In other words, it is part of what Pierre Bourdieu has dubbed the cultural field, and cultural dissemination is part of the struggle for authority, power, and distinction which takes place within this cultural field.
It is also this concept of a field which informs my understanding of genre. In my investigation of science fiction, I emphasize the cultural dimension by focusing specifically on genre as a site of struggle. It is thus struggle which to a large extent determines how science fiction has developed, and what is considered sf. I do this in order to point out the fact that while science fiction consists of a set of recognizable traits which identifies it as science fiction – what Alastair Fowler terms the genre repertoire - this set comes from a continuity established on the basis of precisely a struggle for distinction and authority. Genres do not produce their own categorization, it is rather the producers and readers of science fiction who do so, based on a complex network of power relations.
What allows me to make this move, is the fact that many genre theorists have already argued that genre is a historical process, and that genre classifications serve social as well as aesthetic purposes (Ralph Cohen). Furthermore, genres are integrations of linguistic, social and aesthetic conventions that are located in the archive of culture (Vincent Leitch). In other words, genres are a combination of what Gerard Genette has termed transtextuality and Pierre Bourdieu has termed a space of possibles.
I propose the term genre field as the combination of transtextuality and a space of possibles, where genre is regarded as a cultural field rather than primarily a textual category. In the context of science fiction, this makes particular sense, as the genre has given birth to a very distinct and recognizable subculture, which leads me on to my second point about the genre field. While Pierre Bourdieu sees the field of cultural production as running along an axis of power ranging from the dominant to the dominated, I argue that the cultural field is more complex when we take subcultures into consideration. The cultural field is not one of monopoly, but rather one of a multitude which allows us to view culture as a network rather than a two-dimensional axis.
Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, distinction and struggle remain valid, but no longer is distinction simply a measure of cultural power that the dominant can hold over the dominated, but also a distinction which a subculture may use to distinguish itself as separate and closed off from the mainstream, where people lack this particular subcultural capital.
Subcultural capital may be possessed due to knowledge of genre histories and traditions, the recognition of specific pieces of dialogue considered canonic such as “Klaatu barada nikto”, to realizing the implications of a t-shirt with the inscription “Han shot first”, or knowing the use of specific hand gestures indicating subcultural belongings whether from the distinct, yet generally familiar [horns], to the more geeky [live long and prosper]. Such subcultural genre capital is exclusive in the way it draws a line between members and non-members.
Viewed from a primarily literary point of view, science fiction has traditionally been defined by the presence of cognitive estrangement – the introduction of unfamiliar elements that are presented as plausible. Science fiction thus denies its status as fantastic literature with the introduction of a material rationalization which is often scientific but not always. It is also typical to view science fiction as a literature which speaks critically about contemporary issues, as well as emphasizing social change, thus containing a particular subversive potential.
I emphasize science fiction’s tendency to create representational zones wavering between possibility and impossibility – our mundane reality and the imagined world. This zone creates a rhetorically heightened space which allows a critical, cognitive unmapping. I emphasize this because in the process of grafting science fiction elements onto a new text, a similar rhetorically heightened space is introduced and it is here that the process of recuperation or detournement takes place.
Throughout my dissertation, I discuss the process of dissemination in relation to three specific areas: time, space and identity. Taken as a whole, these areas provide a broad view of significant issues in our contemporary culture and so allow me to suggest specific consequences for the dissemination of science fiction.
Taking my findings one by one, history and temporality has entered a representational crisis in postmodern culture. History no longer asserts our present as following from the past, since the past has been recognized as a problematic construction ever since Jean-Francois Lyotard proclaimed the death of the grand narratives. It is not that the past does not exist, but rather the fact that we only have access to the past via texts that are subject to distortions.
In much critical theory, it has been argued that our current postmodern period is marked by the disappearance of the past, and denies any essential differences between past and present. Such an argument is made by those critics who follow Fredric Jameson’s view of postmodernism as a flattening of history and historicity. On the other hand are critics such as Linda Hutcheon, who argue that history is not obsolete but rather rethought and reimagined.
Science fiction has approached this field for a long time, with the creation of alternate histories, where the ideas of our present are challenged by transforming narratives of our past. Much like Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction, a number of alternate histories have approached the past in a similar way, by contrasting our present historical moment to that of an alternate past. The difference between our own present and our own past is highlighted in these alternate histories, and this is a strategy which has found its way into the work of contemporary authors.
In my dissertation, I contrast novels by Kingsley Amis – The Alteration – and Philip Roth – The Plot Against America – to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. All can be considered alternate history novels, and there are several similarities in the way history reimagined is used as a strategy for social critique. However, neither Amis’ nor Roth’s novels have been categorized as science fiction novels, despite depending on the same literary devices as Dick’s. Clearly a case where the cultural capital previously accumulated by Amis and Roth prevents them from entering the sf gutter, and where a science fictional device has been recuperated into mainstream literary culture, due to a similar preoccupation with history.
History, however, is not the only concern with time that postmodern culture has, temporality itself has become an issue and we find an increasing number of fictions who suspend linear time, or mix various temporally distinct narrative levels. Time travel has become a surprisingly popular device in a variety of texts ranging from experimental films to popular romance novels.
An example of experimental film can be found in Shane Carruth’s Primer, where the time travel device is used to cast the cinematic narration into doubt, and to reject time as a realistic frame for understanding the narrative sequence. By leaving out significant scenes and events, while repeating seemingly inconsequential scenes with slight differences, the temporal frame of the film is broken and we get no clear access to the narrative discourse, making it impossible for us to construct the actual story.
On the other hand, romance fictions such as Audry Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife and the Warner Brothers TV series Felicity employ time travel as a way of creating a rhetorically heightened space where love and desire take on even deeper emotional resonances than would otherwise be possible. By narrating the love story non-linearly due to male character’s incessant time travel, The Time Traveler’s Wife not only adds an exotic element – sf and time travel – to a formulaic genre – the romance novel - but also emphasizes that the two characters are meant to be together, when even time cannot keep them apart. In the case of Felicity, time travel is used to turn the otherwise rather passive protagonist Felicity into an active subject who alters her own destiny to be with the one she truly loves. In both cases, the science fictional device of time travel is used to augment, but also to some extent problematize, the conventions of romance fiction.
What we can see from these different examples, is that time is no longer considered to be linear or to even have a teleological drive. Rather, temporality is viewed instead as simultaneity: all time periods, whether past, present or future are seen as existing at the same time and time travel is simply the logical extension of this view. History becomes a place instead of a time, and we can clearly see the typical view of postmodernism as the spatialization of time emerging here.
But this does not mean that space – my second area of interest – is more stable than time. It seems, in fact, to be just as problematic as the conception of time. Spatial constructions and representations of place can be seen as becoming increasingly problematic and unstable. We can connect this to the general development of representational language as being viewed as insufficient, and a desire for a metalevel developing. For a number of fictions, science fiction has become part of this metalevel as a way of creating a new representational repertoire, able to deal with these alternate conceptions of space.
In Hal Hartley’s The Girl From Monday, the science fictional mode of the dystopic future becomes the only way to motivate the completely unstable cinematic space which provides the resolution of the film’s story. By drawing a parallel between the paradoxical trap of the future world – no matter what you do, it will be good for business, even revolution is good for business – and the paradoxical trap of the narrative space, the film attempts to articulate that consumerism is an inescapable social structure.
In two other cases – Kathryn Kramer’s Handbook for Visitors From Outer Space and Ted Mooney’s Traffic and Laughter – there is no future world, but instead a constant confrontation between our empirical world and the imagined world of the novels. While both novels seem perfectly realistic, there are small discrepancies that slowly grow so large as to completely destabilize our belief in their existence. In Kramer’s Handbook, we constantly hear about a war, but nobody knows where it is, not even the soldiers have any idea where to find the battlefield. While in Mooney’s novel, The Beatles made a song called “Twitch and Shout”, and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is a documentary.
These small discrepancies lead up to a major discontinuity – the end of the world, perhaps in Kramer, and the realization that in Mooney’s novel the atom bomb has not yet been invented in 1990. this tie them together with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, in which clones exist in 1990s England. What appear to be realistic, contemporary novels suddenly turn out to be discontinuous with our own world. The effect these novels have is one of cognitive dissonance – the simultaneous perception of the fictional world as ours, and yet not ours.
These texts and others like them – referred to as slipstream fictions, by a number of authors and critics – work by projecting a representational zone similar to that of science fiction unto our present time, thus arguing that our present time is a liminal zone wavering between the possible and impossible. As Scott Bukatman argues in his book Terminal Identity, we often experience the world as having lost visibility, corporeality and comprehensibility and that new modes of expression must arise to articulate these experiences (164). I have already mentioned how the world can often seem exceedingly difficult to comprehend. To return to Stephen Hawking, what do you pack when moving to another planet?
Of course, the world has always changed, and the feeling that things are changing rapidly has also existed previously. As David Harvey points out, the transition from the 19th to the 20th century was marked by much the same sense of urgency and feeling of acceleration as our transitional period. David Harvey refers to these sensations as feelings of time-space compression, a “speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us” (240). During the last twenty to thirty years, our society has been undergoing such a transformation, which is distinct from yet parallel to that experienced in the early 20th century.
And that period also saw the rise of new modes of expression; the one being an avant-garde response which created what we now know as modernism, and the other being a more popular response and this was the rise and consolidation of the science fiction genre. While it had its predecessors like all genres, it was in the 1920s that science fiction became a recognized genre with magazines devoted only to sf. As we can see, already at this point there was a connection between contemporary issues and science fiction. Modernity – just like postmodernity later – required novel engagements with time and space and science fiction became one place where this happened.
However, although there was some degree of exchange between sf and literary modernism – such as in the case of Franz Kafka – science fiction was primarily isolated in the cultural field. This may seem peculiar to the extent that one could imagine the same interest in and potential significance for science fiction, given the transformations occurring. We may begin to explain this in a number of ways.
From the point of view of modernism, the changes in society should create changes in the arts and particularly by finding new and radical forms. Traditional art was insufficient and traditional forms, structures and themes were rejected. Science fiction, drawing largely on formulas from adventure stories and similar low cultural forms, would definitely seem too traditional for modernist authors to be interested in it.
From the point of view of science fiction, the consolidation of the genre occurred primarily in technical journals before the publication of distinct sf magazines. Readers of sf were therefore mostly technically educated people rather than the literati. Scientific realism was valued higher than literary technique, and avant-garde sf was decades away.
Modernism’s preoccupation with literary form stood in opposition to sf’s preoccupation with the technological object. This resulted in the relegation of sf to the lower parts of the field of cultural production for most people, despite it being continuously popular with technically and scientifically educated people, such as Stephen Hawking who has stated that his early interest in sf was what made him study astronomy. However, the cultural capital of sf has remained very small and accounts for much of the isolation of the genre.
Despite its isolation, science fiction often functioned as an outlet for many of the concerns of modernity. Fear of outsiders, science destroying the world, mass disasters and world wars are themes that have echoed through most sf and thus creating fictional imaginings of these events. It is not unusual to find that low cultural forms have a higher degree of freedom of expression than those considered more significant and thus more subjected to scrutiny.
Science fiction has generally been ambivalent about industrialization, portraying many of the potential problems and pitfalls, but also revelling in technological fetishism. Because science fiction has both criticized and celebrated technological and social development, there is no unified ideological message, and so it allows for both the recuperative and detourning modes of dissemination. When interest in hybridity grew and the division between mass culture and high culture waned, the cultural status of sf was less of an obstacle for those who wanted to experiment with cross-genre forms.
Such experiments have occurred in various forms as I have already pointed out, but one of the more unusual areas sf has cropped up in, has been that of identity. Science fiction has been used as a means to articulate a sense of difference from dominant culture, either by presenting the Other as alien or as stitched together from different narratives in the same way that Frankenstein’s monster is stitched together from different people.
Identity as alien can be seen in the case of David Bowie’s album and character Ziggy Stardust, where he invites teenagers to express their sense of dissatisfaction and rebellion in the form of the androgynous aliens Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. By assuming an identity as alien, teenagers are able to create a place for themselves in a culture which otherwise might ignore them.
The same move can be seen in Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place, the 1974 science fiction blaxploitation free jazz epic, in which Sun Ra wants to liberate black people by moving them to a new planet on his spaceship fuelled by music. Blackness is shown to be inherently alien to Earth, and instead partakes in a complex, private mythology for Ra consisting of sf, Egyptian gods, jazz and more. Ra’s argument is thus one of separatism, but in the manner of science fictional discourse, where blacks must move to colonize a new planet in order to find their own space.
These spaces have a degree of Utopianism to them, in the way that they attempt to create new communities which can better accommodate the presence of alterity, be it that of youth or race. Utopia is something that I have not dealt with extensively in my dissertation, but Utopian fiction – the concept of imagining a better place than the society one lives in – has existed forever. While the name comes from Thomas Moore’s Utopia, we can trace utopian ideas to Plato’s story of Atlantis and earlier myths. Today utopian fiction has become a subgenre of science fiction to the extent that they are difficult to separate.
The focus of the utopian impulse is the difference between our world and the world projected by the text, especially regarding questions of identity. From a methodological point of view, we can note a convergence here and thus the introduction of a new critical vocabulary.
Fredric Jameson states in his recent book Archaeologies of the Future that utopia’s fundamental dynamic lies in the dialectic of identity and difference (xii). This difference comes from the historical situatedness in which we live and utopian fiction acts as a disruption. Disruption is specific to the utopian impulse for Jameson, and he defines it as break with the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible (232). Instead, radical difference is shown to be not only possible but also necessary, and does so focussing on the break rather than simply the state of affairs after the break.
This is what is also referred to as a critical utopia, and we can see that there is a degree of overlap in this thinking with my use of detournement. Both act as a radical break with dominant culture’s ideological assertion that their forms are without alternatives, but there are some differences of which two are particularly important. First, the concept of situatedness emphasizes the historical context in which texts are produced and so links a given text specifically to that time – something which the concept detournement does not do, as it functions as a structural and ahistorical concept. Second, critical utopias often speak for those who are dominated. As Tom Moylan states “critical utopia offers a literary strategy attuned to the process of social negation and transformation of the existing society in the name of those who are oppressed by it” (Moylan, Science Fiction Studies #87).
In other words, the critical utopia is more sensitive to the nature of difference than my concept of cultural dissemination. Many critical utopian fictions attempt specifically to articulate a space for difference within the fictional worlds, and to argue for the creation of such a space in contemporary society. Such a critical approach would have provided a more nuanced tool in the cases of identity construction, but also in the way that we can discuss the reverberation between fiction and culture, as a kind of folding back the fictional into the cultural – which is the desire and hope of Utopian fiction.
While science fiction has served as a form of expression of different cultural movements – where I have focussed on time-space compression – there are also cases where sf has helped produce time-space compression. First of all, by articulating emergent phenomena there have been instances where sf and science have converged. By creating imaginative models of future developments, sf can sometimes provide a concrete case for people to investigate. Such was the case when the computer illiterate sf author William Gibson coined the word ‘cyberspace’ and so provided the fictional model for what developed into the Internet.
Second, sf can help make these emergent phenomena seem cool, interesting or significant. If a text strikes a chord in contemporary culture, it will enter into the cultural fabric and will increase interest in the text, but might also be performed, so to speak. Consider again the concept of cyberspace which not only ignited the imaginations of scientists, but also helped begin cyberculture by becoming the new bible for techno-geeks around the world, who then began populating the newly-developing internet. The same is the case for the virtual world Second Life, where the stated goals of developers Linden Labs is to create a world like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s sf novel Snow Crash. As a virtual world, real world geography breaks down and becomes irrelevant as opposed to Second Life geography.
As can be seen, I have primarily dealt with literary forms more than non-literary ones. Part of this is because science fiction began as a literary phenomenon, but there is something more to this. The narrative aspect is the first point. With the disappearance of the grand narratives, we need to find other narratives and texts become new repositories of narratives for us to make sense of the world. As a result, the stories that we tell take on a larger and more significant role, and the knot between culture and text is tied even closer. Navigating the world becomes a matter of narrating the world.
This brings us to the methodological part of the answer, which is that textual analysis is well suited to deal with narratives and provides a specificity which is often difficult to otherwise establish in cultural analysis. Certainly when dealing with a primarily narrative form and its move into culture, it seems obvious to use textual reading. But that is not all, for such an approach also allows for a way to investigate the particularities of these cultural narratives; what themes, tropes and motifs are plotted into these narratives? Furthermore, where do they come from and how are they used? Only specific textual readings will allow us to do this.
As we have seen, sf has allowed us to articulate how we might feel in our current historical moment. It functions as a form of abstraction that provide ways of making sense of the world around us. It can comfort us by lessening the impact of unexpected developments, or it can cause new movements to spring up that challenge our old conceptions of time, space and self.
That’s all I have to say for now. Thank you for listening.
