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IntroductionAuthor(s): Roger LuckhurstSource: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006),pp. 1-3Published by: SF-TH IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241404 .
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INTRODUCTION
1
Roger
Luckhurst
Introduction
It is now
twenty-two years
since the
publication
of the three texts that
have
dominateda
generation
of sf criticism: FredricJameson's
Postmodernism,
or
the Cultural
Logic
of Late
Capitalism,
Donna
Haraway's
A
Manifesto
for
Cyborgs,
and the
English
translation
of
Jean-Francois
Lyotard's
The
Postmodern Condition. These works have been
immensely
productive,
acting
genuinelyin Foucault's terms as foundersof discursivity. Inthe postmodem
paradigm,
sf found itself
in
a
surprisingly
powerful
cultural
location,
the
exemplary symptomatic
writing
of a new
epoch.
Sf was
diverse or
ambiguous
enough
to
support
anxiousaccountsof the
hypercapitalized
echnological
capture
of the last elements of human freedom or more
optimistic
accounts of
the
posthuman,
anti-essential
hybridization
of human and
animal,
animal and
machine. There are now canonical sf texts
associated with these strands: vast
critical
literatures
now
attendWilliam
Gibson, Philip
K.
Dick,
James
Tiptree
Jr., Octavia
Butler,
Blade
Runner,
the Alien
quartet,
and a small
handful of
otheralleged exemplifications.
As historical
materialists,although
of
different
kinds,
Jamesonand
Haraway
addressed a
specific
conjuncture
in
the
1980s,
with
specific
theoretical
and
writerlystrategies
(indeed,
one of the most
striking hings
re-reading
heir
work
now
is the exorbitant
rhetoricaldevices
in
which
their critical
theory
inheres,
a
rhetoric
that has often
been badly
imitated).
But can these
frameworks,
formulated n
Ronald
Reagan's
first
term,
survive
across
twenty-twoyears
of
profound
global transformation?
Does the
postmodernparadigm
still work for
2006?
The idea for this special issue was generatednot from a sense of wantingto
discreditor
displace the
conjuncture
of sf
and
postmodemism-indeed, several
essayists
here
engage
with the still
uncircumventablework of
Jameson and
Haraway.Rather,it was
to
attempt
o find
new
connectionsbetween
contempo-
rary
sf
and a
body
of
critical
theory
that
focuses on
technoculture
but that has
largely
been
eclipsed by
the
exhaustive
finessing of
the concept of
postmodernism.There have been
some
strikingblindspots
n
this
regard.
The
first four
essays
will
lead
readers from
the familiar to
(we hope)
the
rather more
strange.
Manuel
Castells, as
Robert
Harding explains,
borrows
much of his culturalcommentary romJameson, andthis thesis of a distinctive
new
epoch of
informationalism
marked
by
timeless
time and the
space of
flows
is
entirely compatiblewith
cultural deas of the
postmodern.Yet his huge
three-volume
sociological
work, The
Information
Society, reads
like a
compendiumof
science-fictional
tropes
in
its
central emphasis
on the
role of
technologicaltransformation
n
the 1990s. It
provides
the mass of
sociological
raw
data that
updates
Jameson's 1984
sketch. The
pleasingly
eccentricGerman
theorist,
Friedrich
Kittler,
is
also
prepared
o use
epochal
markers, proposing
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2
SCIENCE ICTION
TUDIES,
VOLUME 3
(2006)
distinct techno-cultural
discourse networks at
1800,
1900,
and
2000.
The
critical resources,
however,
are
wildly
different from the familiar
array
of
cultural
critique:
Kittler
mixes
up
Goethe and circuit
diagrams,
Lacan
and
Victorianpedagogic
manuals,
Rilke
and
gramophones.
Kittler's
contention,
hat
technology
and modem
subjectivity
are
inextricably
related, speaks
to the
core
of the cultural
work undertaken
by sf,
yet
his
work
has
had
greater impact (so
far)
on
media
studies scholars and historiansof media
technologies.
BrunoLatour s perhaps he most well-known
figure
here, yet
his
wholesale
rejection
of the
modern/postmodem
paradigm
has contributed o his
miniimal
influence on sf criticism. The
strangest
silence
in
sf
scholarship
has
surely
been
the
marginal
nterface
between
sf critics and those
in
Science and
Technology
Studies and
History
of Science
programs.
With a
very
few
exceptions (most
notably,
N. Katherine
Hayles),
the revolutions nside the
history
of science
in
the last
twenty years
have
passedlargely
unnoticed
n
sf criticism. Latourhas
been
at
the center
of
many
of the
disputes
n the field:
his actor-network
heory,
and
his
provocative
championing
of a
nonmodernism that
might
network
togetherhumans
and
nonhumans
n new
formations,provide
an
exciting
matrix
of
ideas within which
to
rethink
contemporary
f.
Sherryl
Vint
and
Mark
Bould
also engage
with
Latour's scientifiction
book, Aramis,
or the
Love
of
Technology 1993),
in
their
trenchant xamination
of
his critical
potential
for sf
scholars. Latour s a theoreticalmagpie,but apersistentpointof reference is the
work of
Michel Serres. Serres is of the
generation
hat
provided
the main
body
of
French
structuralists and
poststructuralists, yet
his
rejection
of the
phenomenological
raditionhas placed
him
outsidethis
grouping.Instead,Serres
has
pursued
what
Laura Salisburyrightly calls an
authenticallyperverse
trajectory, placing literature,
philosophy, quantum
physics, mathematics,
and
mythology
in
bizarrenew topological
and temporal
relations. Serres provides a
whole
set
of
metaphoricalpassageways between the
literary
and scientific that
again
allow
for new
ways
of
negotiating
he
hyphen between the
technological
andthe cultural,that transitional pace explored by sf.
The
four
introductoryessays on Castells, Kittler,
Latour, and Serres
are
designed
to
provideorientations o more or
less unfamiliar
heoreticalwork, and
have
space to make
only suggestivecommentson how sf
texts might be
read in
relationto
these very different
theoreticalwritings. Our other contributors
ave
had freer rein to
explorecontemporary f
and its relations
o thetechno-cultural.
Enns, along
with
Vint and Bould, directly pick up
from our
theoretical
orientations:
hey
read
Philip K. Dick or
Hugo Gemsback
with and against the
matrix
offered by Kittler and Latour.
Sf readings are
already opening up along
these new pathways. Stacey Abbott offers a genealogy of the computer-
generated
mage special effect,
while
Kaye Mitchell's
reading of the fiction of
Justina
Robson and
Pat
Cadiganpushes the
feminist
debates aboutcyberculture
and
embodiment n
new
directions.
The
central idea
that might be taken to link
Castells, Kittler, Latour,
and
Serres
together is the
network. Latour
insists that the success of a
scientific
statement, technological project, or
indeed journal
special issue comes from
making
as
many
connections as possible to as many
heterogeneous
social,
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INTRODUCTION
3
political, scientific,
cultural,
and critical elements. One
of
the ambitionsof
this
guest
editor
was
to
introduce o Science Fiction Studies
young
scholars
who
have
beenproducingworkacross a diverserangeof literaryfields and who would not
necessarily
identify
themselves as sf scholars.
It
is
my sense that there is an
emerging generationthat
reads science fiction
alongside and intertwinedwith
other literatures
without
having
tortured
debates about
culturalvalue
or
generic
boundary. Laura
Salisbury eaches and writes
about Samuel
Beckett,
neurosci-
ence,
the
flickering
technologies
of
Modernism, and
children's fantasy; Gill
Partington
tudies
eighteenth-century rint
technologies at
the birthof the novel
but also
internet
conspiracy
theories
and the fiction of
Neal
Stephenson. This
kind
of fluid
movements
between fields are
what
attracts them to network
theories. To thrive, sf criticismneeds to welcome them into its network, too.
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