Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  SF and imperialism

  The role of technology in propelling imperialist projects is often neglected.9 And yet technological development was not only a precondition for the physical expansion of the imperialist countries but an immanent driving force. It led to changes of consciousness that facilitated the subjugation of less developed cultures, wove converging networks of technical administration, and established standards of “objective measurement” that led inevitably to myths of racial and national supremacy (Adas 145). It stands to reason that sf, a genre that extols and problematizes technology’s effects, would emerge in those highly modernized societies where technology had become established as a system for dominating the environment and social life. Imperialist states were at the wavefront of technological development. Their projects had what Thomas P. Hughes calls “technological momentum” (111). The tools of exploration and coercion formed systems, as did the tools of administration and production in the colonies, and these systems gradually meshed. Colonial territories were treated as free zones, where new techniques and instruments could be tried out by companies and bureaucracies far from the constraints of conservative national populations. These innovations then fed back into the metropole, inviting more and more investment, technical elaboration, and new applications. The exponential growth of mechanical production and the production of mechanism continually widened the gaps between imperial agents and their subject peoples. Supremacy became a function of the technological regime (Adas 134).

  There can be no doubt that without constantly accelerating technological innovation imperialism could not have had the force it did, or progressed so rapidly. Without steamships and gunboats, repeating rifles and machine guns, submarine cables, telegraph lines, and anti-malarial medicines, the power of imperial adventurers would have been greatly limited, and perhaps not even possible.10 But imperial technology was not only a set of tools used for exploitation of the colonies. Imperial future shock blew back into the home country, consolidating a new idea of political power linked to technological momentum, essentially colonizing the homeland too, and at a speed that made all resistance futile. Each global technological success brought power and money to technological projects, creating a logrolling effect that drove irrational political and economic exploitation beyond its tolerances, in grandscale uncontrolled social experiments. It also fueled ever more focused and complex technological momentum—until social conflicts, both within and beyond the national borders, could only be seen as politically manageable through technological means. With imperialism, politics became technological.

  Let us look at this proposition from the perspective of literary history. It is generally accepted that the novel was an instrument for establishing bourgeois national consciousness. In Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation, the novel was one of the tools for constructing the imaginary sense of national community in modernizing societies. The Marxist Georg Lukács, for his part, argued that the novel developed in every national culture in more or less the same way because modernization followed a single historical trajectory. A society was either on the bus—indeed, like England and France, sitting behind the wheel—or off the bus and in the dust. The fact that novels were written in national vernaculars, relying on certain collective memories and myths, was irrelevant to Lukács. However, students of the Western novel can’t ignore that novels were also projects of national consolidation and normalization. Novels were attempts to reconcile at least two great competing cultural desires: to preserve the specific knowledge of a society’s present in its language and collective memory (what Balzac called “the archeology of the present”), and to ascend into the world community of modern players, to join the Club of Nations at the forefront of historical progress.

  If the popularity of a literary genre is a sign of its power to mediate real social dilemmas through imaginary resolutions, what is sf’s role? What and how does it mediate? Sf is generally set in marked contrast with the bourgeois realism of the novel. It has been linked to a variety of anti-realist, and so antibourgeois, literary forms (most frequently, pastoral, romance, and utopia). In the US, sf’s most enthusiastic audiences were originally on the margins of the bourgeoisie: recent immigrants, working-class readers, and students of technical schools; for them the fantasies of physical mastery and engineering know-how offered an imaginary alternative source of social power to the norms of middle-class existence (Stockwell 99). In Weimar Germany, by contrast, sf was directed primarily to the middle class, but a class preoccupied with national resentment and revenge fantasies (Nagl 30-31). In both cases, the fantasies were quite similar to the ideologies of mastery that inspired the imperialist adventurers and colonists. Historians treat Cecil Rhodes’s sublime statement of regret as the consummate expression of imperialist desire:

  The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it, is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far. (qtd in Hardt and Negri 221)

  To paraphrase Philip K. Dick’s Palmer Eldritch: imperialism promises the stars; sf delivers.

  I am not arguing that sf replaces bourgeois realism as the main mediating agent of late modernist national culture in the West. That would too great a claim. (Even so, some versions of that argument will make sense, if instead of sf we put forward a larger class of fantastic writing that incorporates sf’s traditional devices and world-pictures, a version of slipstream writing in which bourgeois realism, the non-Western fantastic, visionary satire, and sf are blended.11) Aspiring technocratic audiences did not replace the bourgeois national publics wholesale. If sf took on some of the role of mediating between the national pasts and the late modern “future present,” what role did national traditions have in the cultural work of sf?

  Students of imperialism know from the work of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said that imperial expansion had a profound effect on culture in the home countries, even when the effect was hardly noticed at the time. Since most bourgeois nation-states had completed their political consolidation only recently, and their social consolidation not at all in many cases, their underlying conflicts were often still active and menacing. Imperialism attempted to resolve living domestic problems by exporting them beyond the borders of the Homeland. As these “offworld” colonial constituencies established themselves, they put great pressure on the metropoles to give up certain constraints that went with the nation-state, and to adjust to the “facts” of occupied territories: technological violence was justified by ideologies of supremacy (Arendt 136-38). The corrosive effect that this justification, and the reliance on technological violence, had on the most positive institutions and values of the nation-state is seen climactically in the attempt by the home powers to reproduce their offworld successes on the Old Earth of Europe in the First World War (Adas 365-66). At that point, the colliding would-be empires revealed that their technosystems had determined their identities more than their histories had. Their national traditions could not extend to the outer planets, mainly because the colonists themselves refused to accept the constraints placed on their liberty. For adventurers such as Rhodes, the national flag had been merely an asset in the work of imperial accumulation; for the home populations, it had represented the very reason for that accumulation. For imperialists, the twentieth-century’s world wars proved merely that national identity is a volatile investment instrument; for national populations it catastrophically undermined the politics of reality itself.

  Sf raises some very specific questions in this historical context. One is: are the differences in national traditions of sf due primarily to the desire to retain traditional cultural values historically established against the engine of technological expansion? Is this why we notice the significant differences of tone, of generic affiliation, of conventions of representation, that mark French sf from British, US fro
m German, Japanese from Russian? If so, then sf may have much the same function that novelistic realism had in bourgeois national modernization: managing the abstract techno-political leap forward out of “domestic” culture, from a nation among nations to a global culture.

  Another question is: has sf been a privileged thematic genre (perhaps in the way that film has been a privileged material medium) for expressing and representing the dialectics of this imperial process, because of its central fascination with technology? Has sf labored to manage the technological momentum inherent in imperialism, by infusing it with national cultural “dialects”—symbol systems, literary forms and formulas, artistic techniques, and discourse practices?

  To study this genealogy, we will have to correlate at least three domains:

  1.the character of the imperial moment—what difference did it make whether the expansion was a gradual and articulated process, as with the British and French; or intense, short, highly artificial, and self-reflective like the German and the Japanese; or a smooth accession and aggrandizement of economic and military power, as in the case of the US?

  2.the character of the techno-culture—was it widely diffused in social life, as in the US, Britain, and France, was it a foreign import as in Japan, was it associated with revolutionary mysticism as in Russia and the Soviet Union, was it an expression of romantic longing and resentment as in Germany? From the rear-view mirror of achieved Empire, what role did a given technoculture play: dominant agency, marginal late-coming, adversary counter-imperialism, or historical sublation?

  3.finally, the character of the literary-cultural traditions that infused the fiction of sf. This is the zone of science fiction’s literary unconscious. National literary or artistic forms may lead us to the traditions that distinguish the styles of different nations’ sf. Clearly, sf is identifiable by the icons it uses: the spaceship, the alien, the robot, super-weapons, bio-monsters, and the more recent additions, wormholes, the net, the cyborg, and so on. It is not difficult to link these to colonialist and imperialist practices. They represent the power tools of imperial subjects, the transformations of the objects of domination, and the ambiguities of subjects who find themselves with split affinities. In these terms, sf’s icons are abstract modern universals, free of any specific cultural associations. Yet when we view or read sf of different national styles, we feel marked differences. The same icons are cast in the mode of political and/or visionary fantasy in Soviet sf; scientific romance in British sf and its slapstick, dance-hall Red Dwarf inversions; as fanciful ironic surrealism in post-Verne French sf and its vertiginous inversion, the camp of Métal Hurlant; as supersaturated nationalist romanticism in German sf and its militant ecophile sf descendants; as catastrophism in Japanese sf and its hidden puppet-theatre traditions; and as galactic Edisonian problem-solving in US sf and its wired-beatnik bourgeois-bashing twin of tech noir. These are, of course, crude characterizations. National styles develop along with social life, and change constantly in response to influences, both domestic and foreign. There are also clear signs that these currents are converging, precisely because of the delight in diversity that Negri and Hardt consider characteristic of capitalist globalism.

  SF and empire

  If we look at sf’s connection with technoscientific empire only from the perspective of historical imperialism, we will see an exoskeleton, the genre as the interface between the pressures of global capitalist evolution and national technoculture. To take a truly dialectical view, we also have to look at the internal space of the genre, its world-model, its assumptions of conceptual design through which it makes politics, society, ontology, and technology science-fictional. I believe that this imaginary world-model is technoscientific Empire—Empire that is managed, sustained, justified, but also riven by simultaneously interlocking and competing technologies of social control and material expansion. Sf artists construct stories about why this Empire is desired, how it is achieved, how it is managed, how it corrupts (for corrupt it must), how it declines and falls, how it deals with competing claims to imperial sovereignty, or how it is resisted. The history of sf reflects the changing positions of different national audiences as they imagine themselves in a developing world-system constructed out of technology’s second nature.

  To see this connection concretely, let us take a quick look at the qualities that Hardt and Negri attribute to Empire. Where imperialism is about unlimited growth, embodied in unlimited expansion (of capital, markets, and production), empire is also about the consolidation of the expansions of the past, and the irresistible attraction to imperial order. Its expansion is driven not by greed or national pride, but by the putatively superior ability of the imperial order to deliver peace and security.

  Empire seeks to establish a single overdetermining power that is located not in a recognizable territory, but in an ideology of abstract right enforced by technologies of control. Its characteristic space is horizontal, expansive, and limitless; it exhausts and suspends historical time, pragmatically (i.e., cynically) taking up typological justifications from the past and the future as the occasion demands. Its goal is the management of global conflict, “world peace.” Empire continually reproduces and revitalizes itself through the management of local crises, and indeed by the transformation of potentially global challenges into administrative conflicts. It eschews dialectics and transcendence (which are inherently destabilizing) in favor of constant intervention. It intervenes both in the social world and in the minds of private individuals, two spheres it fuses through pervasive communications technologies. Its physical space is limitless, open to perpetual expansion, and its social space is open to variety, hybridity, and relentless denaturing. Empire is the consummate replacement of nature by artifice. In its ontology, all existence is derived from a single, infinitely varied immanence—with rules that allow for infinite exceptions, but not repudiation.

  Empire is the fusion of force and legitimacy. Since order is its driving value, its driving motive is enforcement. Its laws are not the laws of God, but of science. These are theorized globally, but they are enforced locally, as exceptions. Technology pervades Empire; it constructs a power grid through which it distributes its force and, by doing so, converts the line of communication into a power-cord. It rules, write Hardt and Negri, through the bomb, money, and ether (345). Its centers of power are the ganglia we know as global cities. To these, we can add Haraway’s privileged sites of biopolitical virtuality: the gene, the fetus, and the lab—distributed interfaces where the essential conflicts of capitalism between social control and unbridled material expansion are ceaselessly engaged.

  As an imaginary political domain, Empire is related to utopia. Utopia is an idealized image of the city-state—indeed, the nation-state—where internecine conflicts do not arise, since the ideal congruence of right and law is an ontological given. Utopias resolve inherent differences through the irresistible logic of their order. They are spatially circumscribed, and so they easily contain their people, reinforcing their self-identity. Their hegemony may extend past their city walls, but they are essentially insular. They do not expand, and so their stability depends on their strict adherence to natural laws of balance. They are scientific and rational because their laws reflect a logic of stability inherent in natural reason.

  The model of Empire is grounded in the history of real empires. Utopia is crafted from an abstract conjunction of community and natural harmony; Empire is energized by a more concrete relationship: the conjunction of might and right. Even in its most idealized form, Empire is a complex machine that distributes—and thereby produces—force. In utopias, force is occasionally rationalized as a way of protecting the balance between people and state, and insuring the inviolability of the enclave. In Empire, it is the vitalizing condition of possibility. All the social and creative endeavors of imperial peoples are shot through with the institutional violence that makes them materially possible. Imperial violence is so powerful that it must expand; contained, its soc
iety would implode like a black hole.

  Sf’s debt to utopia is great; but it owes more to Empire. For sf’s techno-science—which is the basis of its icons, energies, and imaginary historical conflicts—has little to do with utopia’s institutionalized balancing acts and containment strategies. Technoscientific projects expand, mesh with others, and gain power from grand-scale conflicts that inspire new resolutions, which then evolve into new mechanisms. The expansion of technoscience is both internal (the logic of its technical applicability and improvement) and external (the logic of its universal application). An engine aspires to maximum relevance. Violently overcoming obstacles placed in its way by “nature” (which is nothing less that the world-as-given before imperial technologies go to work on it), technoscience charges all its claims to right and law with the irresistible expansion of its violence. The force is justified, however, in the name of peace and order.

  Before armies and proconsuls, technoscientific Empire favors the adventurer, the Odyssean handyman far from home, whose desire for movement and conflict inspires his skill with tools. With each fight and each sociotechnical problem solved, the imperial handyman gains increased personal sovereignty and power. As Empire produces perpetual conflict on local levels that invite its intervention (a process Hardt and Negri call “omnicrisis” [189]), imperial fiction produces adventures in an immanent, lateral cosmos. Sf is most comfortable with such imperial adventure-worlds.

  Even the classical genres to which sf is often traced (the pastoral, the romance, the utopian cityscape) originate in the imperial imagination (specifically from Alexandria, Byzantium, and Rome), as do their shadow-genres, the slave’s narrative, the journey through hell, and the dark city. Utopias demand placement, position, definition; they are, as Louis Marin names them, games with spaces, real maps of imaginary territories. Empires are, by contrast, unbounded in space, and restless in time. Empire is a model of constant, managed transition: its worlds are perpetually at some point on the timeline of imperial evolution, from initial expansion, through incorporation, and then corruption, to decline and fall.