To
begin the explication of this discourse, I want to introduce a quote from
science fiction writer Philip K. Dick:
[Robert] Heinlein has written what he
calls “future history,” and much of SF is.
And much of the motivation that drives the SF writer is the motivation
to “make” history – contribute what he sees, his perception of “…and then what
happened?” to what all the rest of us have already done. It is a great colloquy among all of us,
writers and fans and editors alike.
Somewhere back in the past (I would say about 1900) this colloquy began,
and voice after voice has joined in, little frogs and big in little puddles and
big, but all croaking their sublime song… because they sense a continuity and the possibility, the
opportunity, the ethical need, if you will, for them to add onto this growing
“future history.” (Dick 71)
This
quote is taken from The Shifting
Realities of Philip K. Dick, a collection of essays, speeches, interviews,
and even some proposals, and hypothetical introductions, for unwritten novels
or screenplays. The book concludes with
excerpts from Dick’s Exegesis, an
intimate portrayal of the writer’s hallucinations and visions near the end of his
life. A participant not only in science
fiction, but also the countercultural movements of the 1960s, Dick’s catalogue
offers an exceptionally unique perspective on modernity. His writings are more than mere machinations
of a sci-fi-inspired imagination; they are reactions to the elements that we as
human beings must suffer: political hegemony, cultural ideology, technology,
religious fundamentalism, economic exploitation, and even more
personal/psychological elements such as paranoia, hallucinations, memory, and
the uncanny. Taken altogether, Dick’s
work explores the relationship between reality and appearance: do we understand
other people, or only ourselves? Are we free beings, or are we slaves under the
illusion of freedom? Is technology making our lives better, or worse? Is hard
work the means to success, or is it the instrument of exploitation? Is what I remember doing yesterday what I really did yesterday? The list goes on and on, but the central
theme remains the same: who am I, and what have I done with the real me?
Historically,
Dick’s work heralds the advent of a new movement in science fiction: the shift
from what has traditionally been known as “the Golden Age of Science Fiction”
(characterized by the work of early giants such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.
Clarke, Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Poul Anderson, and Robert Heinlein among
several others) to what has been more recently referred to as “New Wave
Sci-fi”. Each is characterized by a very
specific style and set of standards. In
Golden Age, plots are often rather straightforward, linear, and feature more
traditional, archetypal models (despite its late appearance, George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy fits rather nicely
into this category, albeit without the advanced scientific knowledge that characterized
many earlier examples). Golden Age
science fiction also traditionally falls into the category of “Hard Sci-fi”, or
science fiction that attempts to deal realistically with legitimate scientific
problems or situations, thus remaining more scientifically accurate. Finally, Golden Age sci-fi is also often
profoundly concerned with the ideas it proposes, ideas that often trump plot
and character in importance. For this
reason, many critics find Golden Age sci-fi simple and hackneyed in style, and
some of them rightly so.
In
contrast to the Golden Age, New Wave sci-fi introduces something new. Although opinions vary in this matter,
general consensus holds that the Golden Age comes to a close just prior to the
1950s (although many of its greatest writers, such as Bradbury, continued
working throughout the 20th century), and the New Wave picks up
sometime in the 60s and 70s. If we
accept this relative chronology, we find that Philip K. Dick occupies a unique
and perhaps uncategorized moment in sci-fi history – not quite Golden Age, but
slightly prior to New Wave – and yet he is considered by many to be one of the
most important writers of science fiction, and fiction in general, to ever
grace the printed page (he was the first writer of what can be definitively
called “science fiction” to have his work anthologized in the Library of America collections). Thus, we find Dick’s fiction to be some of
the most original and interesting to ever emerge in the science fiction genre,
namely because he can be said to embody the very shift between Golden Age and
New Wave. His early writing is often in
debt to his predecessors; strong emphasis on ideas, concepts, but lacking in
developed characterization and plot, particularly his short stories. However, even in these earliest writings, we
find that his ideas and proposals take on a form that is distinct from those of
his predecessors in that they explore, to a greater extent than the sci-fi
leagues before him, their cognitive and psychological implications. In Dick’s work, even his earliest stories,
the speculative environments introduced are rarely posited as objective or
noumeal realities, in-itself
realities. They are, readers will often
find, skeptical to a sometimes debilitating extent. The speculative environment becomes reflexive
of a possible internal disjunct with reality, a perception that might not
square with what actually exists.
As
readers move chronologically forward through Dick’s body of work, they will
find that his characters begin to adopt more personalized attributes, more
round representations. As he matures, so
does his writing, and later novels such as A
Scanner Darkly or VALIS begin to
look less like imaginative explorations of strange worlds and more like
poignant psychedelic critiques of a world that is oddly similar, yet not quite
right – an uncanny world, one that we know to be real, but that seems strange. This is the immense contribution that Dick
offers to the New Wave tradition, wherein we begin finding more and more
writers who are obsessed with their characters’ reactions to the environments
represented in their narratives, with the philosophical implications of
hypothetical worlds, with the relationship between the human subject and the
inhuman object (for a fantastic example of Dick’s own fascination with the
latter, observe his late novel Ubik). It is in this tradition that we see writers
such as William Gibson, M. John Harrison, and Ursula Le Guin, writers whose
novels take an exciting new energy, an obsession with the fractured and
delicate human subject that had been exposed to literary audiences by Modernist
writers like Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. This shift from Golden Age to New Wave can
perhaps be characterized most explicitly as a shift from idea/concept to character. The heroic characters of Golden Age sci-fi
are characters who know the world they exist in, who take charge and
effectively enact change, and possess an almost preternatural (maybe even meta-textual)
certainty of their diegetic position.
The tragic and flawed characters of New Wave sci-fi, in contrast, are
often helpless, submissive victims of an unrepresentable reality, an
object-realm that exacts its unrelenting dominance over human subjects
specifically because it is alien, other, nonhuman.
The
divide between Golden Age and New Wave can actually be rather explicitly
identified. After the advent of the
space race and the cultural obsession with the “final frontier,” radical
scientific ideas that had been the central theme of much Golden Age Hard sci-fi
suddenly begin to look less like science fiction, and more like science itself. Writers (and readers) become less concerned
with the “wow factor” of new ideas, and more concerned with the implications
that new technologies and global markets have on a largely superstitious and
tradition-steeped public. They become
less concerned with imaginative intrigue and futuristic fantasy, and more
concerned with literary ambition, stylistic innovation – the power of
literature to expose the consequences of the imposition of new worlds on a
(potentially obsolete) human subject.
Science fiction literature, in a sense, reclaims its right to be thought
of as “High Culture” (an unfortunate form of segregationist elitism to begin
with), as opposed to the low, popular, “pulp” culture environment that provided
its original breeding ground in the 1920s and 30s.
Despite
his sometimes unorthodox prose and style, Dick is a major informant of this New
Wave movement in sci-fi; but I would suggest that it is in this
non-aestheticism that part of his unique appeal can be found. Even the excerpt cited above offers an
example; I highly doubt that many science fiction authors would exhibit
appreciation at being referred to as frogs “croaking their sublime song.” Yet this is the procedure and strategy of the
New Wave: to turn the Golden Age on its head, to introduce a radically new form
of science fiction that will make its readers scowl, raise an eyebrow, and perhaps
even question the text they are reading.
In
light of this historiographical exploration of science fiction, I feel inclined
to propose another question: what are the connections between science fiction
and history (a more literary variant of this question might be: what are the
connections between the sci-fi novel and the historical novel?)? The debate can be traced to a stunted
dialogue between Fredric Jameson and Darren Jorgensen (which is less of a
dialogue per se and more of a newcomer taking on a giant of literary theory),
which in turn illuminates a much broader and influential dialogue between two
monolithic Marxist thinkers. In his
essay “Towards a Revolutionary Science Fiction: Althusser’s Critique of
Historicity”, Jorgensen criticizes Jameson’s ruthless emphasis on science
fiction’s historical “self-consciousness,” claiming that this emphasis contains
a contradiction: “if history determines genre, no one genre should be more
historical than any other” (Jorgensen 197).
Jorgensen is referring to comments made by Jameson in an early essay on
science fiction, but also in large part to a wider argument made popular by
Jameson’s 1981 book The Political
Unconscious, which specifically targets Althusserian scientific
Marxism. Althusser’s theory posits a
framework of radical existence and experimentation beyond capitalist ideology,
which he claims individuals can access as a means of revolutionary praxis. This mode of being exterior to capitalism is
not conditioned by the latter, thus making it a pure, radically other form of existence that is always
available, always potentially present and ripe for revolutionary action. In contrast, Jameson’s historicist model suggests
that revolution and radical action can only develop historically, and he
observes literary models to support this.
In literature, The Political
Unconscious claims, we can observe certain antinomies of capitalist
ideology emerging as the systems interior components begin to come into contact
with one another. The Political Unconscious looks at binary oppositions in different
works of literature, and rewrites them as historically charged manifestations
of cultural conditions. Thus, for
Jameson, revolution is an emergent phenomenon, comprised of action that must
gradually develop over time, alongside capitalism but not a property of capitalism per se, until the antinomies
of the system can no longer sustain themselves.
Althusser opposes the historicist brand of Marxism because, as he sees
it, revolution should not be something that individuals must wait for, so to
speak; this always provides a kind of theoretical excuse to avoid action, an
argument that became useful for the academic elite during the May 1968
protests. For Jameson, revolution
becomes historically possible; for Althusser, revolution is always possible.
If
we wanted to understand this in more philosophical terms, we might suggest that
Jameson’s theory is an epistemological one, whereas Althusser’s is an
ontological one. That is, Jameson’s
theory of historicist Marxism suggests that revolution only becomes an option
over time, as knowledge structures (informed historically by cultural
developments) gradually shift and change, allowing for the option of revolution
to appear. Althusser’s theory, on the
other hand, posits an unchanging revolutionary framework that exists externally
to capitalist ideology, that is not conditioned by historical circumstances – a
kind of Absolute condition for revolution.
Let
me reiterate: I subscribe to the Jamesonian version. I find it difficult to square a kind of
universal, Absolute theory of emancipation with a society and a culture that is
constantly in a state of flux. If
ideology and cognitive/physical bondage take different historical forms, how
can any “universal” revolutionary praxis work for all of them? Is it not more likely that history conditions
not only the components of cultural ideology, but also the components necessary
for emancipation? Althusser’s theory
thus becomes one of idealism, despite his claim that “ideology has a material
existence” (Althusser 112). Ideology
might very well have a material existence in Althusser’s theory, but its
resolution has an ideal form, one that somehow exists exterior to ideology,
exterior to human thought itself, and thus exterior to its anthropomorphisms. Furthermore, Althusser claims that ideology
has no history, in stark contrast to Jameson, where ideology must be
historically determined.
If
one has difficulty seeing where all this leads, that person is not alone. Althusser claims that “ideologies have a history of their own” while
“ideology in general has no history,
not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely
positive sense” (108). These are strong
words, especially for a theorist who also wrote that “ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the
same time […] it is nothing but outside
(for science and reality)” (119). What
Althusser means by this is that in order for ideology to work, it must convince
its subjects that they are “outside” of it (i.e. not under its influence); and
yet, only by coming to an absolute scientific knowledge of ideology can one
declare that she is “inside” ideology (since she thus would understand that it
has no outside). The argument is so
cyclical that it begins to make its readers feel as though they have raced
around so quickly that they have caught up with and bumped into themselves.
Interestingly
enough, this is how I sometimes imagine the character’s in Dick’s novels feel.
I
will not try and convince readers of either the Jamesonian or Althusserian
model, but instead suggest that both models provide relevant methodological
apparatuses for exploring science fiction.
I personally find Althusser’s model problematic primarily for the reason
that by attempting to secure a scientific Marxism, and thus provide a
revolutionary model that is immediately present and at hand, Althusser also
precludes any possibility of human engagement with it. By positing a radical existence beyond
ideology (and hence beyond human apperception), Althusser closes off the
revolutionary possibility from the realm of the human subject; the very ability
of the human subject to conceive of revolution has been conditioned by that
individual’s subjectivity, which is a direct result of ideology. He thus proposes a method of philosophical
praxis that is impossible to practice.
If
Althusser’s theory succumbs to paradox, it is fitting; one must conceive of
ideology as an object in order to come to terms with her subjectivity within
it. The impasse collapses inward from culture and
society down to cognition itself – a theme that registers with a great deal of
contemporary sci-fi. Furthermore,
Althusser’s emphasis on a kind of scientific Marxism suggests that what human
subjects need to do in order to achieve emancipation is engage in action so
radical that it ruptures the very limits of ideology itself. A violence of this kind is unimaginable, and
it is this utter disconnect between ideological subjects and a revolutionary
exterior that is the truly “science fictional” component of his theory. On the other hand, Jameson’s approach
provides an interesting methodology for exploring the genre of science fiction
as a whole; and this shall bring us back to Dick’s prophetic statement that
what sci-fi writers desire to create is a kind of “future history.”
It
is with this point that Dick hits on the crux of the argument between
historicism and scientism. Dick suggests
a hypothetical situation in which a three million-year-old skull is discovered
in Africa, and the implications of such a discovery for a sci-fi writer:
[…] I would imagine a whole culture, and
speculate as in a voluntary dream, what that person’s world might have been
like. I do not mean his diet or how fast
he could run or if he walked upright; this is legitimate for the hard sciences
to deal with. What I see is what I
suppose I would have to call a “fictional” environment that that skull tells me
of. A story that that skull might wish
to say. “Might” is the crucial word,
because we don’t know, we don’t have the artifacts, and yet I see more than I
hold in my hand. Each object is a clue,
a key, to an entire world unlike our own – past, present, or future, it is not this immediate world, and this skull
tells me of this other world, and this I must dream up myself. I have passed out of the domain of true
science. (Dick 72).
This
excerpt, as the one above, is from a 1974 essay titled “Who is an SF
Writer?” In this essay, Dick zeroes in
on one of the most important and identifying themes of New Wave sci-fi: the
obsession with an inaccessible reality.
This reality cannot be explained, Dick claims, through recourse to
traditional science, that being a pursuit of knowledge conditioned by known, or
contemporary, reality. The sci-fi
writer, according to Dick, must resort to something else; and if it is the
sci-fi writer’s aim to imagine fictional world-extensions of a decontextualized
object, then it must attempt to place that object in some kind of logical
context. This context is only available
to the sci-fi writer through the lens of historiography.
This
might seem contradictory, since history itself is always a human history. It is written
by humans, requested by humans, and read by humans. But by writing history, by requesting it, and
by studying it, we can come to see the element of contingency at play in
historical progress. That is, we can
begin to identify where history took a certain direction, and some of the
circumstances that conditioned that direction, but also how things might have
been different. The study of history
also allows for the study of non-history; not the study of what actually was
(yet still through the lens of structured narrative), but the potentiality of
radically different outcomes. It is in
this way that we begin to see the inherent chaos of historical development, and
the illusion behind the notion of progress.
It is no coincidence that one of Dick’s early and most successful
novels, Man in the High Castle, was
an alternative history novel. And merely
three years later he published Dr.
Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, a novel that dealt with the
aftermath of nuclear war on earth. More
than anything, these examples should suggest to us the poignancy of Dick’s
statements from “Who is an SF Writer?”: namely, that a science fiction writer’s
method is, first and foremost, historical.
Jameson’s
theory posits the historical development of both ideology and the revolutionary
tools with which human subjects can try to dismantle it. The conclusion implicit in this is that
humanity must wait, in a certain sense of the word, for its revolutionary
capacity to catch up with its ideological containment. In a sense this is true; but in another
sense, it is misleading. Jameson would
not condone apathy or indifference; the attitude of “Well, it isn’t time for
revolution yet, so we might as well wait a little longer.” Not at all.
Jameson’s theory is one of intellectual dedication and commitment, and
the continual attempt of revolution against a continually adapting ideological
complex. One should notice here a
certain similarity with the Hegelianism of Slavoj Žižek (despite the
differences between the two thinkers), especially as it emerges in his
explication of the slogan “We are the ones we have been waiting for” (Žižek
148-157). For Žižek, as for Jameson,
historical development is against us, in a large sense, and it is up to the
collective masses to inaugurate a revolutionary historical event, a rupture in
the apocalyptic tide of history (154). What
Jameson’s The Political Unconscious
exposes, then, is not an absolutely positive notion of ideology or revolution,
but a method of identifying ideological antinomies in the textual production of
different historical periods (one might even say in the textual production of
history itself). In the conclusion of
his book, Jameson asks his audience the following:
[H]ow is it possible for a cultural text
which fulfills a demonstrably ideological function, as a hegemonic work whose
formal categories as well as its content secure the legitimation of this or
that form of class domination – how is it possible for such a text to embody a
properly Utopian impulse, or to resonate a universal value inconsistent with
the narrower limits of class privilege which inform its more immediate
ideological vocation? (Jameson 288).
Jameson
is here outlining the problem of discerning from literary/historical texts,
which he takes as superficially infused with the class ideology of their
contemporary cultural circumstances, a certain revolutionary impulse; a Utopian
twist that exposes, in the underlying hypocrisies of the work, the inherent
emptiness of the ideological values that it espouses. Jameson offers a potential solution to this
problem by suggesting a dialectic, in the Hegelian sense of the term, between ideology
and Utopia: Jameson says that all class
ideologies contain a Utopian element within themselves, and this is the
justification for his historical conception of Marxism. If ideology and Utopia are forever engaged in
a dialectic struggle, then history is the battlefield for that struggle, and
human subjects are its soldiers.
Although
I have been referencing Dick to explicate this concern with history in science
fiction, I want to turn now to what I perceive as the most explicit and
wondrous representation of a historicist Marxism in a work of speculative
fiction; specifically, China Miéville’s heartbreaking novel, Iron Council.
Iron Council is the story of
a railroad being built across Miéville’s fictional realm known as Bas-Lag,
about the laborers who rebel and take control of it, and lead the train-cars
back toward the metropolitan capital, the of authoritarian politics and
technocratic hegemony – New Crobuzon. I
will not spoil the narrative (which is a thrilling one), but will merely say
that major theme is the charged potential of revolutionary praxis in history,
the progression of history (the description of the railroad being built in Miéville’s
novel often utilizes vocabulary reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘Angel
of History’ section from the monumental Theses
on the Philosophy of History), and role of human subjects in realizing
historical opportunity. Toward the end
of the novel, two characters whose opinions disagree on the fate of the
revolutionary force (known as the Iron Council), face off in a verbal debate
that epitomizes the crux of the historical dilemma:
“You don’t decide when is the right
time, when it fits your story. This was the time we were here. We knew.
We decided […] We were something real, and we came in our time, and we
made our decision, and it was not yours. Whether we were right or wrong, it was our history. You were never our augur […] Never our
savior.” (Miéville 552).
The
point of the passage is that the historical moment of revolutionary praxis is
not decided by individuals, nor does it persist or stay the same. The speaker of the passage above is
emphasizing the role of human agency in revolution, but not the conscious
ability of human subjects to create or destroy the opportunity for revolution.
Jameson’s theory, as described above, is not one designed to create the
opportunity for revolution, but one designed to realize when the opportunity is present. The science fiction element, the speculative
essence of this theory, is in the acknowledgement that humanity has very little
role in the creation of revolutionary opportunity. Historical development, whether it be in
strides of economics, religious (in)tolerance, political alterations, or
technological or artistic development (or, more likely, a combination of all of
the above) is never reducible to one human subject, or even to human masses
that share some cognitive awareness of the conditions they are engendering. Human beings enact quantifiable change in the
material fabric of the world, that is certain; but it is erroneous to believe
that we can ever be totally aware of this change, or aware of our role in its
passing. Our role, rather, is to engage
history intellectually – to observe the conditions of the past, present, and
future in hopes of discerning when and where the potential for emancipatory
action appears. History is a
double-edged sword in this sense: on one hand, it provides the lens through
which we can attempt to understand our own position and possibly engage in
successful revolutionary action. On the
other hand, the very presence of history itself implies that we are still
constrained by the bonds of ideology, by the socio-political laws that govern
the way in which we represent the past, present, and future to ourselves. History is, in its very composition, an
ideological maneuver; a product, like the literary texts considered by Jameson
in The Political Unconscious, of
cultural ideology itself. This is no
doubt why Althusser finds the need to theorize a form of radical existence
outside of historical conditioning.
In
this regard, one might question whether or not successful emancipatory action
is ever truly possible, in an absolute sense.
Both Jameson’s and Althusser’s theoretical models seem to place the
prospect of revolution in a distant utopian realm, whether that realm be a
non-ideological ether totally separate from our socio/politico-economic system,
or a hypothetical future that history dreams of achieving but can only
asymptotically approach. I have no
definitive answer to this question, but I take comfort in Žižek’s recitation of
the Beckettian motto: “Try again. Fail
again. Fail better” (qtd. in Žižek 86).
Works Cited
Althusser,
Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and
Other
Essays.
Trans. Ben Brewster. New York, Monthly
Review Press: 2001. 85-126.
Dick,
Philip K. “Who is an SF Writer?” The
Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected
Literary
and Philosophical Writings. Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York, Vintage Books: 1995.
69-78.
Jameson,
Fredric. The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca,
Cornell UP: 1982.
Jorgensen,
Darren. “Towards a Revolutionary Science Fiction.” Red Planets: Marxism and
Science
Fiction.
Eds. Mark Bould and China Miéville. Middletown, Wesleyan UP: 2009. 196-212.
Miéville,
China. Iron Council. New York, Del
Ray Books: 2004.
Žižek,
Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.
London, Verso: 2009.
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