Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ finally be understood as raw material out of which, in that dialectical process of knowing which Freud designates the transference, psychic meaning is (in quintessentially post-Kantian fashion) constructed. It is the de-centering of the subject—this critical interrogation of the human psyche that forever renders unacceptable the notion of the latter as the unproblematically knowable conscious unity of the older precritical psychology—that remains the enduring “scandal” of psychoanalysis, far more than the much advertised emphasis on sexuality (just as, according to D. H. Lawrence, bourgeois taste in painting can welcome any number of conventionally sentimentalized nudes but finds the postimpressionist apples of Cézanne to be profoundly immoral). Though Freudian vocabulary can certainly be appropriated for precritical purposes (for example, a kind of vulgar-Freudian one-dimensional sexual determinism that is the rough equivalent of the economic determinism of vulgar Marxism), psychoanalysis in full dialectical rigor is a critique of almost unsurpassed richness and subtlety.

      Though less important in my view than either Marxism or psychoanalysis, one other area of critical theory deserves attention: that body of work—heavily indebted to Nietzsche, mainly of French provenance, and extremely influential during the past three decades—most strongly instanced by Jacques Derrida’s analyses of cultural, especially linguistic, sedimentation and by Michel Foucault’s investigations of the microtechnologies of power. The common term for such work is, of course, poststructuralism, a designation that is accurate from the viewpoint of intellectual history as narrowly constructed and is in that way superior to such increasingly meaningless rubrics as “postmodern discourse.” A more adequate term for such theory, however, might well be postdialectical. In many ways, poststructuralism, at least in its stronger forms, continues the classic dialectical project. Its approach is generally interpretative and antirealist in the post-Kantian way, and is frequently radically historical as well. The latter point is quite obviously true of Foucault (who in disciplinary terms can be considered, as he sometimes considered himself, a historian) but is really no less true of Derrida as well. For Derrida, deconstruction is not an ahistorical property intrinsic to writing itself (though Paul de Man’s domesticated American version of deconstruction does come close to this position). Rather, it is a critical operation enabled by a certain moment in the history of writing, a moment defined by such diverse developments as the rise of cybernetic technology and the growing awareness by Western of non-Western cultures.¹⁶ Indeed, in some cases the basic strategy of poststructuralism can be understood as the restoration of a dialectical (and temporal) dimension to the increasingly claustrophobic static structures of classical or “high” structuralism: witness, paradigmatically, Derrida’s critique of the Saussurian sign, a critique that in many ways parallels Bakhtin’s (or Volosinov’s) explicitly dialectical and dialogic “deconstruction” of structuralist linguistics.

      If, however, this body of thought must be considered postdialectical rather than dialectical proper, it is not only because of the strategic distance that figures like Foucault and Derrida have usually maintained from Marx and Freud (and even leaving aside that, in the particular French intellectual formation relevant here, the names of Marx and Freud have often served as code words for Althusser and Lacan). More important, though not unrelated, is the suspicion that virtually all versions of poststructuralism have cast on the indispensable dialectical category of totality. This is the point of contact between poststructuralism and neoliberalism (or, sometimes, neoconservatism), a contact grotesquely illustrated in, for example, the editorial history of Tel Quel.¹⁷ Still, it must be stressed that much poststructuralism has remained faithful to the principle of relationality, which is a crucial component of totality as dialectically understood, and which is partly detachable from the issue of an overdeterminationist dynamic that would guarantee the integrity of totality as such. It should also be stressed that, in general, the attitude toward totality of thinkers like Foucault and Derrida is a great deal more complex than the vulgar slogans about “wars on totality” fashionable in much weaker varieties of poststructuralism. It is possible to maintain irreducible reservations about even the most rigorous versions of contemporary postdialectical thought while nonetheless appreciating the intellectual creativity and usefulness of the latter.

      Such, then, is my understanding of critical theory—not exhaustive, of course (such an attempt would be preposterous), but sufficient to provide some conceptual mapping for the study that lies ahead. In what follows I shall be concerned with critical theory mainly in its cultural and, still more, its literary contexts. But any Procrustean disciplinary division is of course profoundly contrary to the spirit of critical theory itself.

Science Fiction

      It is symptomatic of the complexity of science fiction as a generic category that critical discussion of it tends to devote considerable attention to the problem of definition—much more so than is the case with such superficially analogous genres as mystery fiction or romance, and perhaps even more than with such larger categories as epic or the novel itself. No definitional consensus exists. There are narrow and broad definitions, eulogistic and dyslogistic definitions, definitions that position science fiction in a variety of ways with regard to its customary generic Others (notably fantasy, on the one hand, and “mainstream” or realistic fiction on the other) and, finally, antidefinitions that proclaim the problem of definition to be insoluble. Indeed, not only the question of definition proper but even the looser matter of description—of deciding, even in the most rough-and-ready way, approximately which texts are to be designated by the rubric of science fiction—is a matter of widespread disagreement. We may begin the definitional task by considering the two poles of opinion in the matter of simple description.

      Science fiction can be construed very strictly to refer only to that body of work in, or that grows directly out of, the American pulp tradition established in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories. This is, of course, an extremely narrow construction of science fiction, one that excludes even such close precursors as Mary Shelley, Poe, Verne, and H. G. Wells (works by the latter three were reprinted by Gernsback in his inaugural issue), not to mention contemporary British work by writers like Stapledon, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley, as well as the rich Russian and East European traditions. Though obviously deflationary from the viewpoint of anyone, like myself, who wishes to make large literary and theoretical claims for the genre, the strict construction of science fiction does have two merits. One is popular currency. For the general public (as well as for the commercial marketing system employed by publishers, bookshops, and the vendors of the newer electronic media), the name of science fiction has always suggested the pulp tradition, today largely as the latter has been transmogrified into such filmic and televisional equivalents of pulp as Stars Wars (1977–onward) and Star Trek (1966–onward). The other merit, not unrelated to the first, is philological correctness. It is certainly true that the term, originally in the more cumbersome form of “scientifiction” and then as “science fiction,” was invented in the pulps (by Gernsback himself, according to some accounts), and that any wider use involves deliberate semantic change. Mary Shelley never heard the expression; Wells very likely never heard it; and even Lewis, who had some interest in and sympathy for the American magazines, hardly belonged to the world of pulp, instead taking his inspiration mainly from Stapledon and Wells directly (as well as from the entire tradition of Christian heroic and fantastic literature from Beowulf [c. 750] onward). Accordingly, whatever critics like myself may propose, it seems unlikely that the narrow usage will ever completely vanish.

      Yet it suffers not only from general critical inutility but from immense self-contradiction: the list of authors who have directly and self-consciously succeeded Gernsbackian pulp includes (to pick only a small fraction of the names that could be adduced) Americans like Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Walter M. Miller, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Alice Sheldon, Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, Joe Haldeman, Thomas Disch, Norman Spinrad, Kate Wilhelm, Vonda McIntyre, and William Gibson, and probably also such British figures as Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Michael Moorcock. Accordingly—and unless science fiction is construed not only narrowly but defamatorily, so that by definition only bad fiction can bear the label—the body of work suggested by such names must be science fiction even by the strictest philological standards. But it is ludicrous СКАЧАТЬ