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not the betterment of humanity and the earth but rather the triumph of transnatlonal capital and
right-wing ideology, Engaged in restructuring since the end of
the postwar boom in the 1970s and furthered By the rise to power of ftonatd Reag m in the United
States, Margaret Thather in Britain, and Helmut Kolzl in Germany in the 1980s,tlze new hegemanic
constellation generally succeeded in slzifting from a less profitable centralized mode of production
to a more flexible
regime of accumtzfation that took h l l advantage of technological developments
in cybernetics and electronics.Wultinationa1 corporations based in and supported by
pc>werfufnation-states transformed themselves into transnational entities able to shift the rote of
their ""partner" sates away horn econctmic and social
regulation and into the narrowr job of providing national security (which in the
United States took the form of a "military Keynesianism" "at renewed the war
machine and led to Reagan's covert operations in Central America ancl Buslz's
open pursuit of the Gulf War) 184 scraps of the untainted
what Paul Smith calls "millennia1 capitalism" "claims a planetary system presided
success yet ignoring the social and ecological cost. Supported by the largely
name of a false competitiveness that only ends up serving those within the state
As she puts it, the new dystopias "with their permeable bctrders, their
questioning of:generic conventions, anci their resistance to closure, represent one
of tlze preferred sites of resistance" "(""Gencler and Genre" "50). 1 would only add
tlzat this preferred site is not only, even tlzougla importantly, feminist but also
anti-capitalist, democratically socialist, and radically ecological in its overall
stance.
--
Conside~din terms of:the disthctions set out in the Clzqter 5,these historically
specific texts cluste~; as it happens, on the '3efi'\ide of the dystopian continuum, as
they negotiate the necessary pessimism of-the generic dystcrpia with an open, mtlitant, tztopian
stanGe that not only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure of the
text" alternative world btzt also self-reflexively refuses the anti-tztopian temptation
that fingers like a dormant virus in every dystopian acclount (see Figure 6.1).
In contrast, contemporary dystopian examples that are anti-criticat can be
identified as texts that more readily remain in the camp of nihilistic or resigned
196 The Critical Dystopia
ctxpressions that may appear to challenge the current social situation but in fact
end up reproducing it by ideologically inoculating viewers and readers against
any form of anger or acticzn, enclosing them within the very social realities they
disparagingly expose, Thus, anti-critical texts of this period can be located in an
anti-utopian canstellation of dystopian (better, psetldo-dystopian) cammodities
against which tlze critical dystopian fictions and films struggle for reception and
effect. 196
interested in otherness and change. All utopias involve people who radically
suffer of the existing system and desire to radically change it.
B1 Post-Fordism
14
If history is a creatively constitutive factor of utopian writings and horizons,
then we also have to recognize the epistemic shift beginning in the 1930s
and crystallizing in the 1970s: capitalism co-opts all it can from utopia (not
the name it abhors) and invents its own, new, dynamic locus. It pretends
this is a finally realized eutopia (end of qualitative history) but since it is in
fact for about 90 percent of humanity clearly, and for 8–9 percent in subterranean ways, a
lived dystopia, it demands to be called anti-utopia.(…) . The economists and sociologists I
trust call it PostFordism and global commodity market – unregulated for higher profit of
capital, very regulated for higher exploitation of workers. 389
unprecedented Post-Fordist mobilization and colonization of all noncapitalized spaces, from
the genome to people’s desires (…) After “belief became polluted, like the air or the water”
(de Certeau),
culture began supplying authoritative horizons for agency and meaning.
It does so either as information or as esthetics: information-intensive production in working
time (for example biotechnology, whose output is
information inscribed in and read off living matter) and “esthetic” consumption in leisure
time, the last refuge of desire. The new orthodoxy of
belief proceeds thus “camouflaged as facts, data and events” (de Certeau)
or as “culture industry” images. MUY IMP 390
all talk of
wholeness and totality be henceforth terrorized into extinction.
I can here identify three exemplary Post-Fordist constructions, all “esthetic.” One is
dystopian and anti-utopian: Disneyland (points
18–20), and two are reworkings of old stances and genres, Fallible Utopia
and Fallible Dystopia (points 21–24). This already points to the fact that
hegemonic bourgeois ideology (say in TV and newspapers) has kept resolutely systematic,
albeit in updated guises such as Disneyfication. 391
MUY IMP the overarching dystopian construct is the “informational” one of Post-Fordism and
global capitalism itself, the killer whale
inside which we have to live 391
Muy imp An exemplary (bad) case of a dystopian misuse of eutopian images are the
edulcorated fables and fairy-tales of Disneyland. I shall use it as a privileged pars pro toto of
the capitalist and especially US admass brainwash. Its
spatial rupture with everyday life masks its intensification of commodity
dominance. Its central spring is what I shall (adapting Louis Marin) call
reproductive empathy. As Benjamin remarked, “the commercial glance into
the heart of things demolishes the space for the free play of viewing” by
abolishing any critical distance. This empathy functions, perverting Freud’s
dream-work, by transfer ideologizing and substitution commodifying.
Gloss 18a: Transfer ideologizing is the continually reinforced empathizing immersion, the
“thick,” topologically and figurally concrete, and
seamless false consciousness, that injects the hegemonic bourgeois version
of US normality into people’s neurons by “naturalizing” and neutralizing
three imaginative fields: historical time as the space of alternative choices;
the foreign/ers; and the natural world. Historical time is turned into the
myth of technological progress, while the foreign and nature become the
primitive, the savage, and the monstrous.
In substitution commodifying, the Golden Calf is capillarized in the psychic bloodstream as
commodity. The upshot of Disneyland,
life as “a permanent exchange and perpetual consuming,” commodifies
desire, and in particular the desire for happiness as signification or meaningfulness. The
dynamic and sanitized empathizing into the pursuit of commodity is allegorized as
anthropomorphic animals who stand for various
affects that make up this pursuit. The affects and stances are strictly confined
to the petty-bourgeois “positive” range where, roughly, Mickey Mouse
introduces good cheer, the Lion King courage and persistence, etc (oh <3) (392-93)
In sum: Disneyland’s trap for desire, this fake Other, is a violence exercised
upon the imaginary by its banalized images. Disneyfication is a shaping of
affective investment into commodifying which reduces the mind to infantilism
as an illusory escape from death: a mythology. It can serve as a metonymy of
what Jameson has discussed as the Post-Modern “consumption of the very
process of consumption,” say in TV. It pre-empts any alternative imagination, any fertile
possibility of a radical otherness or indeed simply of shuttling in and out of a story. 394
Commodity aesthetics
This our intermediate class-congeries in the world has since 1945 in the
capitalist core-countries been materially better off than our earlier counterparts: but the price
has been very high 400
But capitalism without a human
face is obviously engaged in large scale “structural declassing” of intellectual work, of our
“cultural capital” (Bourdieu, and see Guillory). There is nothing more humiliating, short of
physical injury and hunger, than the
experience of being pushed to the periphery of social values (and thus of
financing) which all of us have undergone in the last quarter century 402
Last not least, why call our theme and focus “dystopia”, a neologism
invented by J.S. Mill in 1868? Again, one of the reasons is that it was widely
picked up by criticism from the 1950s on. As I discuss at length above,
there is by now wide scholarly consensus that the term of “anti-utopia”
should be reserved for a specific subsection of dystopias written to warn
against an existing utopia, not (as in most dystopias) against the existing
status quo. 408
a piece of
utopian literature, a Fourierist blueprint or Disney World does not fully
enclose any person: one may visit it, but not live in it, one may dwell on but
not in it, one is finally outside not inside.409
postmodernism’s analysis of the surface, hysteria, the sublime, the pastiche, the end of history, the waning of
affect and the simulacrum
over the original has opened up avenues of exploration which have yet to be
entirely excavated, particularly with regard to non-cyberpunk sf. 147 cambridge companion to sci-fi
sf writers do not have the space for deep
and studied character development, because they are bound to foreground
the imagined world, the action-adventure and the gadgets (…)sf relies, like the other
popular fiction genres, on a set of stock figures, recognizable and emblematic as the characters of pantomime or
the Commedia dell’Arte. 171 cambridge
The manipulation of mutation and evolution by humans is genetic engineering, once a fearful, undefined
prospect, now a multibillion-dollar industry.
The accumulating advances of the last half-century have found expression
in sf 180 cambrirdge
Establishing the historical breakpoint . . . is only half the game of writing alternate history. The other half, and to me the
more interesting one, is imagining
what would spring from the proposed change. It is in that second half of the
game that science fiction and alternate history come together. Both seek to extrapolate logically a change in the world as we
know it. Most forms of science
fiction posit a change in the present or nearer future and imagine its effect
on the more distant future. Alternate history, on the other hand, imagines a
change in the more distant past and examines its consequences for the nearer
past and the present. The technique is the same in both cases; the difference
lies in where in time it is applied. 211
it is partially, if belatedly, a timetravel story. Many alternate histories make explicit the comparisons between
real and fictional timelines by intersecting one with another through some sf
mechanism, most commonly time travel. 213
Related to the timeslip story is the ‘time loop’ story, a very personal sort of
alternate history in which a part of the protagonist’s life repeats itself, with
variations.215 MUY IMPOPOOO
Inspiración? Other alternate histories dramatize more than one timeline while denying
the protagonists any awareness of their parallel selves. (…) The cumulative effect of
the four parallel stories, each quite low-key in its own right, is quite moving,
and the umbrella title invites the reader to seek a broader meaning.
like popular history in general, alternate history also suffers from militarism – a fixation on war as the
instrument of historical change – and from
the flawed assertion of historian Thomas Carlyle in 1841: ‘The history of the
world is but the biography of great men.’
Reacciona De Man (en Rhetoric of Romanticism) contra los intentos de establecer una
distinción entre autobiografía y ficción. Frente a la idea de una referencialidad resultado de
una vida, la del autor, que se narra en la obra, plantea si no sería más acertado decir que es la
obra la que produce la vida: lo que el escritor hace está determinado por el proyecto y los
recursos del medio. No es pues el referente quien determina la figura, sino justo al contrario,
es la figuración la que construye su referente. Por ello el resultado es el mismo que el de la
ficción.(…) la relación entre ficción y autobiografía no es una polaridad o/o, es
indecidible.(..) la aspiración de la autobiografía a moverse más allá de su propio texto, a
trascenderlo e imaginar un “yo” al que se conoce y se narra, es una pura iluusión ya que el
modelo especulativo de la cognición, en el cual el autor se declara el sujeto de su propio
entendimiento es (la manifestación, al nivel del referente, de una estructura lingüística.197
El mundo, esa referencia, no es tal sino un libro, una serie de tropos sin voz. Es el lenguaje el
que figura esa voz y ese mundo, figura y des-figura. 198
El núcleo central del pensamiento de Lacan es la idea de que el sujeto no puede ejercer nunca
la soberanía sobre sí mismo, sino que unicamente puede surgir en el discurso intersubjetivo
con el Otro. El inconsciente está estructurado como lenguaje y es por tanto intersubjetivo.
Más radicalmente afecta aún a la autobiografía la idea lacaniana de que la identidadd del “yo”
sea una construcción significante y no una referencia, lo que genera su especularidad, su
relación con el espejo. 201
a pesar de lo anterior (la autobiografía) puede ser leída como un discurso con atributos de
verdad. (..) un discurso en la frontera de la ficción, pero marcando su territorio con esta. 202
(conviven) la ficcionalidad que de facto se da en todo discurso autobiográfico con la hipótesis
de autenticidad que de iure (y ese es el pacto) contrae ese discurso con sus lectores en el
funcionamiento social. 203
El pacto de lectura propone (la autobiografía) como discurso de verdad para ser leído con tal
valor 208
211
215
216
216
217
El juego de fforde:
219
220
223
Neologies call attention to themselves; they are artful. They also call attention to the linguistic power of their
users. 14 seven beauties
sciencefictional neologisms will represent the social-evolutionary powers that dominate that fictive world’s
history 18
MUY IMPORTANTE Science-fictional neology operates between two termini. At the first are
neosemes, semantic shifts of words and sentences that remain familiar in
structure and appearance, but have been appropriated by imaginary new social conditions to mean something
new.13 The pleasure of reading them lies in
inferring surprising, and often humorous, pseudo-evolutionary connections
between the familiar and the imaginary new meanings. Science-fictional
neosemes correspond to sf-extrapolation; they are imaginative extensions of
historical and current linguistic practice. At the other terminus is neologism
in the strong sense, the invention of new words that have no histories. The intelligibility of such words does not
depend on social changes in usage, but in
their ability to evoke imaginary differences of culture and consciousness. 19
(CHAPTER 13 BOOJUMED
SF relies on the historical past tense, both because narrative requires it, and
because sf’s particular construction of the future does. It is the illusion of a completed future that allows science
fictions to be told, and for a parable-space to be
formed, through which readers can shuttle back and forth between the fictive
world and consensus reality. 77
MUY IMPORTANTE No story of its own? It is often said that sf has no distinctive myth or storytelling
formula, that it thrives by adopting the plots of other genres, punching them
up with its distinctively exotic futuristic settings. SF Westerns, detective, and
crime stories abound, as do quests, farces, romps, picaresques, Kafkaesques,
political parables, philosophical fables, fractured fairy tales, surrealist assemblages, rationalized fantasies, and
even terror-and-pity–inducing tragedies.
Given this abundance of host plots, however, it would be puzzling if there were
no shared story-forms latent in them to be shaped by the genre (…)If its stories are
always concerned with global/species/collective transformations mediated by
technology, we may reasonably expect that these concerns will exert morphogenetic pressure on storytelling
itself..216
Most commentators agree with Northrop Frye that sf stories derive from,
and adhere closely to, the mythos of romance: stories in which human heroes
prove their powerful virtue through a series of trials, many of which take place
in anomalous spaces where normal laws do not apply. 216
The style — both of the prose and the design — is governed by the same chaste rigor as scientific writing, or
better yet, the displaced
calculation and mathematical precision of detective fiction. (Hence the attraction of the detective form for many
sf writers — and the shared provenance of
detective fiction and SF in Poe and Conan Doyle.) 65
57 cambridge co
Pynchon names his heroine Oedipa, suggesting that this novel, too, belongs
to the genre of detective story—which it does, in a sense. Oedipa, like the
classic private-eye, needs to know; she must struggle to bridge the gap between
appearances and reality; she must question the reliability of every piece of
information, every source.22 po mo fic
of the future, who have naturally already solved the mysteries of Mohenjo-Daro
and of the Etruscans, are only too eager to confront the puzzle of alienlanguage
and life, thereby placing their creators in the even more uncomfortable situation of having to invent the latter out of whole cloth in the first
place.
The SF novelist thus shares, but to a metaphysically far greater degree, that
problem of the construction of a "double inscription" which marks the
vocation of the mystery writer: namely that of inventing some fIrst narrative
which is to be hypothetically reconstructed as "fact" in the second or properly
narrative time of the detective himself It is a distinction that goes back to
Aristotle's differentiation of myth and plot - the original legend, rearranged
on stage into dramatic episodes by the playwright; and then reinvented by the
Russian Formalists (fable and "suzhet" ), and after them Genette. "Who cares
who killed Roger Ackroyd?" Edmund Wilson famously wondered; and
perhaps it is less the solution than the very deductive process itself which is
the true focus of our interest and fascination. Even the Great Detective, with
all his eccentricities, is only as charismatic as his Great Deductions. The consequence is unhappily not unlike the phenomenologists' account
of the act -
serving a tennis ball, for example - which must fail in order for us to become
conscious of it. So the Great Deduction must always be just slightly skewed
or flawed in order for us to grasp it as such; and in order to distract us from
a solution which would inevitably fall beneath the Wilsonian judgment. Thus
the grandeur of George C. Scott's supreme act of intellection in The List of
Adrian Messenger Oohn Huston, 1 963) consisted in the properly linguistic flair
with which this amateur detective construed the victim's delirious ravings, as
reported by a French witness: "the last brush: no more brushes! all gone!"
Scott conjectures that in reality the dying man had pronounced a synonym of
the English "brush", namely the word "broom", itself a homonym of the
name of the family - Brougham - whose heirs are in the process of being
successively eliminated. The flaw lies in the supposition that the Frenchman's
unconscious would have known English well enough to have been capable of
making this mistake: on the other hand, it seems possible that only a foreign
speaker would have been tempted to do so; and this slight hesitation between
plausibility and improbability endows the Great Deduction with its electrifying and paradigmatic value.
Seen in this way, it becomes clear that the SF author is placed in a position
of divine creation well beyond anything Agatha Christie or even Aristotle
might have imagined; rather than inventing a crime of some sort, the SF writer
is obliged to invent an entire universe, an entire ontology, another world altogether - very precisely that system of radical difference with
which we
associate the imagination of Utopia. 101 arqueologies of the future
As many writers, &ins, and scholars of s f have noted, the ctxperienced sf reader
moves through a text like a traveler in a foreign culture or a detective seeking clues
to unravel the mystery at hand,fWothproceed incrernenfafly,observing and gradually absorbing
information, making patterns, discovering wqs to see and understand the larger picture in its own right,
ancl finally to act decisively within tlzat
new context-ta enjoy the newfouncl culture or to solve the crime and reestablish
justice and well-being. Miorking from a comparison with the process of detection,
Edward Tames notes that ""the deccrding and assessment rrf these dues can be a major part of the
pleasure provided by the worte; indeed, without that dea3ding and
assessment, in a process of careful reading, it may be impossible to understand the
text at aff" "0th Gentziry 115)." SSf thus invokes and invites a particufar readerly
experience built around a distinctive ""snse of wctnder," qayuality that has long
been part of the sf community's self-~~nderstanding, as can be seen in flamon
Kniglzt's 1956 volume of sE criticism entitled Irz Sear& of6.21onder
(…)This invented world
challenges readers, or seductively invites them, to engage in the thoughtful activity of constructirlg
both tlze details and the social Xogic that comprise it," h doing
so, tl-tesf imaginary maclzine offers them the opportunity to reorganize ""their assumptions and
knowledge, reversing and distorting conventional structures ancl
relationships, and drawing upon the reservc3ir of other [sf) fiction, in order to
make sense of the text"
7 scraps of the untainted sky
8 scraps
t>etectivefiction is written and read by women and often features women protagonists, and its exploration of
""genuine intellectual puzzles" p i n t s to a way to interrogate the status quo (220 Mii.i;t.e91). Russ, of course,
anticipates writers such as
Sarah Peretsky and Sue Grafton, who soon began to transft3rm the hard-boiled
detective novel, or "crime fiction:hs Russ names it, into even more p<>werful social in&errrrgations.
Supernaturat. fiction, also written and read by wctmen, offers
another way into the reafrn of the strange, the dangerous, and that which is not
regarded as "naturaln$ (…)In sf, however, she finds the mrrst p<>werful way fc)rwifrd; for she sees it as an
intellectual mode in which the very struct~jreof the narrative is ccrncerned with the
positing and exploration of new wrlds:
42
287