Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  My son Gabriel tells me stories. Not surprisingly, given his environment, he tends to tell me science fiction stories. I’m delighted when he comes up with some motif or scenario that I recognise as a new variation on a familiar theme: and he’s furious (like some adult storytellers I could mention) when I point out to him he’s doing something that’s been done countless times before. Always, already, what we say has been said before. A while ago he came up with an adventure where the characters kept being swept away into the Fourth Dimension, an experience that transformed them, partially and then permanently if they stayed too long, into horrible gargoyles. That was where I found the title of my paper. Sadly, I can’t fault his argument. There’s no getting away from it, the Fourth Dimension makes monsters of us all. My Aleutians, though, have managed to change the process around. Sometimes science fiction aliens represent not merely other people, but some future other people: some unexplored possibility for the human race. Maybe my Aleutians fit that description. But it has been a surprise even to me to see how human they have become, how much I’ve found myself writing about the human predicament, about the mysteries of self and consciousness. But that’s the way it has to be, unless or until the great silence out there is broken. Until we meet.

  Notes

  1. Saucer shaped flying machines: Hypersonic flying saucers driven by microwaves are at present the goal of serious researchers in the US (reported in New Scientist, 2017, 17 February 1996). MRI imaging of brain activity, involving something oddly similar to those old sciffy hairdryers, is already reality.

  2. Valmiki, writing in the third century BC, Christian chronology.

  3. Mungo Park, travelling in Africa in the eighteenth century was staggered by the size of the cities he found, comparing urban conditions very favourably with those in Britain (Mungo Park, Travels In The Interior of Africa, 1799).

  4. Although Octavia Butler’s trilogy ‘Xenogenesis’ develops a ‘slavery’ narrative of alien invasion of great complexity.

  5. Pleasingly, for me, a quotation from a Porgy and Bess lyric (George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward, 1935) intended to be sung by a black American who finds refuge from cultural domination in this defiant thought.

  6. Annie Coombes, Re-inventing Africa (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

  7. Joanna Russ in The Female Man (New York: Bantam, 1975) makes a similar observation about idyllic separatism.

  28

  Technofetishism and the uncanny desires of A.S.F.R. (alt.sex.fetish.robots)

  Allison de Fren

  The interfusion of technology and sexuality—particularly when it takes the form of an artificial woman—has been an explosive combination, dating back to Pandora, the first artificial woman in literature. Hesiod tells us that Pandora was molded from clay by Hephaestus and endowed with desirable attributes by all the gods, at the behest of Zeus, who wished to punish men for the gift of fire that Prometheus had given them after stealing its secret from the heavens. The stolen fire has inspired various interpretations, many of which suggest a form of human knowledge or technics; thus, the artificial woman was meant to void the progress made from Prometheus’s gift. Although Pandora was a “wonder” to behold, she was “sheer guile” (described with the oxymoronic kalòn kakòn or “beautiful evil”), an irresistible and deceptive exterior masking a secret horror in the form of a box (or jar) containing sickness, toil, and sorrow. On the orders of Zeus, Hermes offered Pandora as a gift to Prometheus’s more gullible brother Epimetheus, who was so entranced by her beauty that he forgot to heed Prometheus’s warning to beware all gifts from the king of the gods. And so Pandora entered the human realm and, soon thereafter, incited by curiosity, she opened the box, releasing pain and suffering into the world.

  While the Pandora myth is an early reflection of and on the intersection of technics, knowledge, and desire, its indictment of women has been its enduring legacy. As Laura Mulvey notes, Pandora is the first in a long history of femme-fatale androids—creatures in which “a beautiful surface that is appealing and charming to man masks either an ‘interior’ that is mechanical or an outside that is deceitful”; this “inside/outside topography” connotes “mystery” and is “only readable in death” (55). While she mentions the fabricated women in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s novel Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Eve future, 1886), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816), and Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), one might extrapolate from such early examples to those female WMDs that were a common trope of twentieth-century sf media, typified by the female-android-cum-nuclear-warhead in the 1991 film Eve of Destruction and the villainous fembots who took on Jaime Sommers in the original Bionic Woman television series (1976-78). They were brought to a parodic extreme by their “bikini machine” and “girl bomb” counterparts in the Dr. Goldfoot (1965, 1966) and Austin Powers (1997, 2002) films. Such creatures both literalize the notion of the sexual bombshell while seeming to corroborate Andreas Huyssen’s proposition that within European modernism female sexuality and technology become analogues:

  As soon as the machine came to be perceived as a demonic, inexplicable threat and as harbinger of chaos and destruction—a view which typically characterizes many 19th-century reactions to the railroad to give but one major example —writers began to imagine the Maschinenmensch as woman. There are grounds to suspect that we are facing here a complex process of projection and displacement. The fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the male’s castration anxiety. (70)

  Mulvey attempts to recuperate the iconography of Pandora and her box from its misogynist legacy by framing it within the context of psychoanalytic feminist theory. In her essay “Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity,” she employs Pandora’s curious gaze as an intervening agent in the closed circuit that she describes, in her influential 1975 article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” between the gaze of the cinematic spectator, understood as both active and masculine, and the passive female image that serves as its object. There is, Mulvey suggests, a self-reflexivity at work in the curious gaze (a gaze often coded as female), a desire to know that is “associated with enclosed, secret, and forbidden spaces” representative of female interiority. So when Pandora looks inside the box, a hidden space that many have read as a synecdoche for female sexuality, she is interrogating the site/sight of sexual difference that she herself represents. Thus, the curious gaze as epistemophilia (the desire to know) serves as a challenge to fetishistic scopophilia (the desire to see, but not to know) through which the female image is constituted as a sight or “surface that conceals”:

  While curiosity is a compulsive desire to see and to know, to investigate something secret, fetishism is born out of a refusal to see, a refusal to accept the difference the female body represents for the male. These complex series of turns away, of covering over, not of the eyes but of understanding, of fixating on a substitute object to hold the gaze, leave the female body as an enigma and threat, condemned to return as a symbol of anxiety while simultaneously being transformed into its own screen in representation. (64)

  While Mulvey draws a binary distinction between knowledge and desire in an attempt to reclaim the “inside/outside topography” of the artificial female, other critics have questioned the relevance of both topographical and corporeal binarisms, as well as the epistemology of fetishism, in relation to both cyberbodies and the crisis of representation within the postmodern imaginary. Thomas Foster, for example, reflecting on the sexy robots and gynoids of the Japanese artist, Hajime Sorayama (see Figure 1), asks whether their explicit foregrounding of both technology and sexuality is reducible to traditional ideas around fetishistic disavowal: “If anything, these images represent technology as the truth of sexuality, and this inversion of the modernist tradition Huyssen defines produces anxieties that cannot be entirely or safely framed by the fetish
ism the images evoke” (101).1

  If such technofetishistic imagery undercuts the psychoanalytic model of fetishism, however, it is by pushing “the logic of fetishism to a point of crisis” (Foster 98), inspiring an ambivalence and confusion that has haunted technologically-mediated bodies ever since Donna Haraway first suggested their critical potential in her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). Although Haraway heralded the possibilities of both “cyborg writing” and “cyborg imagery” for offering “a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (181), many critics have noted the difficulty of realizing a simultaneously female and post-gendered body, particularly in the visual field.

  Claudia Springer, for example, draws attention to the cyberbodies in film and cyberpunk sf, which “appear masculine or feminine to an exaggerated degree. We find giant pumped-up pectoral muscles on the males and enormous breasts on the females” (66). Similarly, Anne Balsamo comments on the extent to which gender remains one of the more resilient markers of difference in the portrayal of technologically enhanced bodies:

  As is often the case when seemingly stable boundaries are displaced by technological innovation (human/artificial, life/death, nature/culture), other boundaries are more vigilantly guarded. Indeed, the gendered boundary between male and female is one border that remains heavily guarded despite new technologized ways to rewrite the physical body in the flesh. (9)

  Although for Haraway “cyborg sex” conjures “the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism)” (150), its visual interpretation seems to align more readily with the cyborgian nightmare depicted in Shinya Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk film Tetsuo (1989), in which a salaryman becomes perforated from the inside out by rapidly advancing metallic probes, whose mutating offshoots converge into a gigantic power drill with which he impales his lover. While Tetsuo offers a hyperbolic (and humorous) example of the technofetishistic imaginary, it also underscores an interpretive dilemma in relation to the technological displacement of bodies and sexualities in the visual field: are they to be understood as compensatory or strategic? Do we read the metallic “member” as an avowal or a return of the repressed, phallocentrism or a commentary on phallocentrism? Foster notes similar confusion around Sorayama’s robotic and cyborg bodies: “these images make it impossible to determine whether the sexy robot is a fetish object or a woman who has been fetishized” (102). Moreover, he points out that, even when the technological mediation of bodies destabilizes traditional categories of gender and sexuality, it is difficult to escape the feedback loop of castration anxiety since “fetishism paradoxically uses ambivalence and a blurring of gender or sexual categories to defend against the anxieties created by the breakdown of such categories” (82). The ability to maintain the kind of ironic stance encouraged by Haraway in relation to technofetishistic imagery, as Foster notes, thus “seems to depend on the assumption that this technology and its popular imaging will not or cannot be ‘psychoanalytically framed’ ” (98).

  Figure 1 Gynoid by Hajime Sorayama.

  Foster points to the work of E.L. McCallum as a potential starting point for approaching technofetishism outside of the Freudian model. McCallum proposes a reconsideration of the discourse around fetishism, which, she reminds us, came of age with modernism and, particularly, with the rise of sexology, as a means of marking sexual differences and making categorical distinctions between the normative and deviant. She notes that while fetishism, within its narrow definition as a fixation, seems to work in opposition to the crisis of representation within postmodernity, “[t]his view reflects the fact that fetishism itself has come to be fetishized” (xv)—that is, fixed in meaning in a way that offers little theoretical wiggle room. By thinking through the fetishistic relationship—in which pleasure is courted despite “ambivalence, indeterminacy, and contradiction”—rather than merely about the fetish object, McCallum suggests that, far from serving as a screen against epistemophilia, fetishism can provide an alternative epistemological model for exploring the connections between subjects and objects, desire and knowledge (xvi).

  In this essay, I follow the lead of both Foster and McCallum in an attempt to think through the technofetishistic relationship with the machine woman, as well as about the visual representations of machine bodies that are an outgrowth of that relationship, using as a springboard a little-known community of technosexuals with whom I have had contact, on and off, for nearly a decade.2 It was an act of Pandora-like curiosity that first led me to the community: spurred by the saying that “if you enter any object in a search engine followed by the word ‘sex,’ you will find people who fetishize that object,” I typed “robot” and “sex” into a search engine and, sure enough, found websites created by groups of people who collectively fantasize about, among other things, robots (many of whom found one another in the same way that I found them). While some do refer to themselves as “technosexuals,” many call the fetish itself A.S.F.R., an acronym for alt.sex.fetish.robots, the name of the now-defunct Usenet newsgroup where members originally congregated online. Although A.S.F.R. was made possible by the advent of virtual communities, its fetishistic interests have historical antecedents that were documented in the early literature of sexology. Against their classifications of similar fetishistic practices as variations of necrophilia, as well as subsequent Freudian interpretations, I will argue that A.S.F.R. is less about technology in general, or the artificial woman in particular, than it is a strategy of denaturalization that uses the trope of technological “programming” to underscore subjecthood. Like the trope of “hardwiring”—which Foster discusses as a signal within cyberpunk of the constitution of bodies and identities in relation to “preexisting systems of control and power, as figured” for example “by the invisible computer network of Neuromancer’s cyberspace” (74)—“programming” serves as a metaphor for the biological and cultural matrices within which desire is articulated and pursued. “ASFRians” experience pleasure and agency through, in a sense, hacking the system, the visual indicators of which often take the form of a female android who has run amok—an image that, in Freudian terms, emblematizes male castration anxiety. A.S.F.R. thus complicates the binary relationship between fetishism and curiosity proposed by Mulvey, while corroborating Foster’s claim that technofetishistic imagery has the potential to foreground “the problematic status of psychoanalytic categories and arguments within technocultural contexts” (95).

  I argue that in its attempt to unmask the artificial body (through physical breakdown), the ASFRian gaze is less aligned to fetishistic scopophilia—the desire to see but not to know, which is generally read in relation to the cohesive male subject—than with the self-reflexive curiosity of Pandora, the desire to see beneath the seen. Indeed, it embodies the etymological essence of curiosity as cura, the Latin word for care, which vacillates between its usage as a noun (meaning anxiety or sorrow) and a verb (meaning to provide relief or ministration). Curiosity often involves looking at that which causes anxiety rather than pleasure, and thus it stems from an impulse different from the visual delectation of the beautiful image. St. Augustine pejoratively referred to it as “the eyes’ urges” in his Confessions, explaining that while the beautiful inspires the body to delight in sensual pleasures, curiositas “experiments with their opposites, not submitting to the gross for its own sake, but from the drive to experience and know” (240). It is curiositas that compels human beings to look at those things that make them shudder, the ultimate example of which is, according to Augustine, the mutilated corpse:

  This is something [in terms of sensual pleasure] they do not want to see even in dreams, or if forced to look at it while awake, or if lured to the sight expecting something pretty. . . . It is for this perverse craving that unnatural things are put on in the theater. This also leads men to pry into the arcane elements of nature, which are beyond our scope—knowing them would serve no purpose, yet men make of that knowing i
ts own purpose. (245)

  Any act of looking that involves prying into things that are “beyond our scope” or “ken” raises the specter of the uncanny, a word that, according to Victoria Nelson, is etymologically rooted in “that which cannot be ‘kenned’ or known by the five senses” and that, by definition, is “beyond what is normal or expected” (17). In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud discusses the term’s relevance for psychoanalysis, using as a primary example Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman,” in which, significantly, a man falls in love with a mechanical woman. Freud, however, dismisses the relevance of the android female in order to prove that the origin of uncanniness lies beyond what he calls “the pleasure principle.” The fetishistic use of the uncanny android body by ASFRians raises questions about Freud’s analysis that have relevance for the critical understanding of artificial bodies in popular culture both past and present. In order to pursue these questions, I draw analogies between the uncanny artificial bodies at the heart of ASFRian fantasy and those fetishized by the Surrealists, in particular the disarticulated dolls of German artist Hans Bellmer, as well as those within the current technosphere as exemplified by Mamoru Oshii’s cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), which was deeply influenced by Bellmer’s work.

  Alt.sex.fetish.robots

  The originary myth of the group A.S.F.R. is that it was started as a joke. The Usenet site, however, began to attract a loyal following of participants, primarily men, who had a secret attraction to the mechanical and the robotic. Many of them had believed that they were alone in their sexual preferences, and the site provided a sense of relief and community, a place to share their interests and compare notes with others, as well as a definitive name for the ill-defined feelings that they had been harboring in isolation. Although the acronym privileges robots, A.S.F.R. is, in fact, a blanket designation for a range of different fetishes, which includes sexual attraction to mannequins, dolls, and sculpture, as well as to real people acting like mannequins, puppets, dolls, or robots, being hypnotized, turned into statues, or immobilized or frozen in a variety of ways. While all of these fetishes were explored on the original newsgroup, many of their fans later splintered off and founded websites geared to their specific interests. They do, however, still consider themselves to be “ASFRian” and acknowledge their point of common interest: the thematic of programmatic control—whether imagined as hypnotism, magic, a puppet-master, or artificial intelligence—of a human object. When taken in this sense alone, A.S.F.R. strikes the imagination as a technological elaboration of standard BDSM (bondage-domination-sado-masochism) fantasies, in which one person dominates another for sexual pleasure. ASFRians are, in fact, sensitive to (and some might even agree with) this interpretation of their fetish, as well as the perception that it represents the reification of normative gender ideals (for when many first hear about the fetish—myself included—they imagine that, for ASFRians, desire is contingent on replacing a human subject with a vacant Stepford Wife or Husband, who mindlessly fulfills the orders of its master, both sexual and domestic). Indeed, it is this common assumption about their fetish that, according to ASFRians, necessitates its obscurity and keeps its members highly closeted in comparison to fetishists like the Furries and the Plushies (those who eroticize anthropomorphic and stuffed animals and animal costumes, respectively), who hold dozens of public conventions each year throughout the world. ASFRians are so concerned about the accusation of sadism or misogyny that they have coined a mantra or tagline, oft repeated on their websites: “ASFR is not about the objectification of women, it’s about the feminization of objects.”3