Cultural Xenology and Ethnographic Allegory: Science Fiction, Cultural Theory and Fantastic Modeling

[This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Einstein meets Magritte International Interdisciplinary Conference. Free University of Brussels, Belgium (May 1995)]

The genre of literary fictions known as science fiction has always been closely associated with the branch of scientific writing we might call culturography. As I hope to show in this paper, the dominant subject of both kinds of writing is the relationships between the material forces of a culture (especially its technology) and its symbolic structures. The obvious differences between the two kinds of writing should be viewed as dialectically related to their similarities. For both are concerned with what the sf writer Michael Bishop calls “cultural xenology” (9) and the anthropologist James Clifford calls “ethnographic allegory” (98), the construction of narratives about the encounter of Western, modern observers with cultural models alien to their own.

Ethnographic and sociological literature has provided science fiction with a vast thesaurus of models and facts for writers to displace and recombine. But we should also recognize that much of the most artistically ambitious sf repays its debt with fantastic models of imaginary cultural formations and dynamics. This fantastic modeling activity may occasionally provide new perspectives from which scientists might view the world; more often it invites readers to shift their gaze away from the truth-claims of ethnological/cultural science toward viewing it as an axiological and a value-generating practice — in Victor Turner’s terms, as a form of social rite de passage of modern societies, in which playful pleasure, cognitive terror, and reflective imagination all play parts.

Science fiction is related to culturology both in history and in praxis. Sf grew out of the literature of exploration and early ethnography, and its proto-models were the writings of adventurers. When the adventurers ceded the colonized territories to the anthropologists, adventure novelists and ultimately sf writers worked to fill the niche they left empty. These writers have always been drawn to questions that preoccupy anthropologists: problems of colonization, biosocial origins and evolutions, the primitive and the advanced, the question of technology. After treating human groups in terms of species and abstract societies, many in the human sciences have come to prefer to study groups as cultures in which beliefs, practices, symbol- and sign-systems, are all treated as things that cannot be reduced to some overarching general theory. This emphasis on cultural identities and differences is clearly part of the so-called multicultural project of the developed West, which attempts simultaneously to de-centralize cultural thought and to fabricate simulations of cultural difference as actual cultural differences are eroded.

Sf is also closely akin to, and somewhat dependent on, scientific futurologies, i.e., projective speculations based on models (analogies and extrapolations) taken from natural and human history. To mention a few such models, there is natural evolution, the dynamics of epidemics, the chaos of traffic, the various speculative curves, cycles, effects, constants and other theoretical patterns proposed in the history of science. These scientific and quasi-scientific models naturally seek scientific elegance by limiting the chosen base of the model. Nonrational elements are excluded of course in science — since these are the a priori unpredictable elements that cannot be adapted to a consistent model. They remain the wild zone, where the wild things are. Sf writers on the other hand relish the unruly, mixed up combinations of incomplete projective models. Sf, like any form of art or entertainment, is expected to engage its audience, not mainly in a search for truth, but in pleasure at the representation of the audience’s thought and life. Clearly, as the social reality of the audience undergoes rapid change on ever more fronts, especially with regard to science and technology, the number of fundamental changes a sf work can allow itself will grow as well.

Let us return for a moment to historical similarities between the ethnographer-culturologist and the sf writer. Ethnography has never been secure as a positive science for the simple reason that it has always depended on the representations of observers who are bringing strange information back to their own cultures. These privileged informants have always had stories to tell over and above the “hard data” that they have inscribed in their studies. These stories have been part of ethnography since the earliest accounts of adventurer-travelers (Pratt). They are the media by which the strange cultures and practices are linked to the home culture; the ethnographer’s told journey is the vehicle by which the reader at home traverses the putative real space of the world to arrive at the different space, thus accomodating and even assimilating the alien domain into the imperial domain of the home culture. Culturology has become increasingly conscious of the subject-position of the ethnographic observer. It has become self-consciously about the way in which inherent structures of culture — symbol-systems, ritual performances, structures of feeling, etc. — are conveyed to, and experienced by, the describer. This culture study has become inter-cultural study, or the study of “interculture” — and its body of reflections then feeds back onto the cultural assumptions of the ethnographic observer.

This has brought with it a special concern for narrative. For narrative represents not only the rational linking of the home culture with the alien (rational in that a logical sequence of events occurs in a time that the reader as recognizes as congruent with his/her own sense of time); it is also the wild zone of where we observe the observer’s own prefiguring cultural assumptions, that is: the ethnographer’s cultural unconscious. The notion of prefiguration is important here. The narrative wild zone is wild because the writer can assume the naturalness of the narrative mode, of the professional Bildung, and the writer can allow the subject to experience itself more revealingly: the story of a Self, after all, is a favored medium of reflection and characterization in the West. It is important therefore to see the role of prefigurative narrative structures. These are structures — or “plots” (Hzyden White) — that predetermine to a great degree which data will be emphasized, and even which will be selected. In this, culturography resembles historiography, which is also obligated to adhere to available data, but free — and even duty-bound — to provide plausible connective explanations in order to support the interpretation of data with a rational narrative of cause and effect. As historians reflect more and more on their work and that of their predecessors, they become aware of the effects of their own cultural prefigurations on the construction of the past’s events, what theorist of history Hayden White has called the limited number of “enplotments,” Contemporary historians are acutely aware of Nietzsche’s dictum in the The Use and Abuse of History: “One can explain the past only by what is most powerful in the present.”         

Cultural study of the present, like the historical study of the past, relies on hybrid modeling. To underscore the association of sf’s fantastic modeling with the scientific modeling of ethnography, I would like to take an short excursion through the poetics of modeling. Models, to the extent that they are syntactical systems of co-ordinated sentences and paragraphs, can be approached not only in terms of their cognitive adequacy, but in terms of their rhetoric: i.e., how their language invites assent and pleasure. Beyond this, in many cases models can be studied as imaginative texts (and this certainly includes mathematical models as well as what philosopher of science H. Rom Harré calls “statement-picture complexes” [Harré 35]). They can be approached in terms of the connotations of their underlying analogies, the cultural associations of their examples and syntagms, and the manner in which their analogical relationships are motivated.

The terms of analogies are not determined by any internal necessity. If they were, they would not be ana-logical. Models are attractive, and suspect, because of the quasi-fictive status of the analogical link. Harré speaks of the necessity for some kind of “plausibility control” (48). But such controls become increasingly difficult, the more undefined the elements of the model, the more global the model’s application, and the less predictive the consequences of the model are. The further a theoretical model moves from the strictest notion of the model as nomic isomorphism toward archetype or the hybrid forms described by Harré, the more as if it becomes. The Bohr-Rutherford atom, or Schrödinger’s wave-mechanics model of a single electrically charged electron surrounding the nucleus, could hardly have been considered plausible explanations of atomic behavior, since they were predicated on drastic violations of “normal” plausibility. Yet they were generally far more acceptable to contemporary scientists than Heisenberg’s even less plausible claim that the physical entities being studied could only be perceived via a mathematical transformation of perception. The question of plausibility is a question of context, and it becomes increasingly vexed as the context becomes increasingly uncontrollable — especially in the completely irreproduceable context of history.

The greater the sense of as if associated with the model, the more it can call into question whether the phenomenon the model was called upon to illuminate was indeed prestructured, and hence not necessarily distinct from the structure used to interpret it. Harré could perhaps argue that the purpose of the model is precisely to indicate such prestructurings, since they are clues to underlying — or overarching — regularities we do not yet understand. Yet clearly this presents problems for scientists, who must avoid the needless proliferation of such concepts if they are to arrive at anything approaching positive knowledge. From the culturological point of view, it is more interesting to observe that, from a sufficiently abstract remove, the distance between the cultural interests of scientists and the phenomena of nature they study does not appear so very great. 

Completely fictive, or fantastic modeling begins by posing counterfactual examples of the link between, on the one hand, cultural interests and values (even biological ones, culturally conceived), and on the other, scientific consciousness. As the theorist of science fiction Darko Suvin puts it, science fiction is concerned with “cognitive estrangement,” presenting fantastic models of human cognition that, through implicit contrast with society’s received wisdom, reveal the unconscious ideological and cultural assumptions that delimit its rationality (4).

The essence of such fantastic modeling is given in a phrase by the Polish science-fiction writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem. Writing on Jorge Luis Borges, Lem says: “As soon as nobody assents to it, a philosophy becomes automatically fantastic literature” (“Unitas Oppositorum”  237 n.3). Obviously, a writer of scientific fantasy can secure assent for models that could never pass the plausibility controls of serious science.

Plausibility is gained in fantastic modeling by imitating the language of scientific modeling, and, absent an extratextual reality to appeal to, bringing the persuasive and imaginative qualities of modeling into the foreground. By a sleight of hand, the model becomes a grand cultural trope that reveals the consciousness of its makers more than the physical qualities of its object. Fantastic modeling treats models as if they were all we could know of nature.

Fantastic modeling belongs to the genre of sf. Works of rational fantasy directed toward the hyper-elaboration of scientific-logical models, or their arbitrary (from the point of view of normal science) mixing and matching is generally classed as sf. It is perhaps more by default than by any compelling definition that writers like Borges, Italo Calvino, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Lem and many “experimental” or “slipstream” writers are classed among the writers of formula-fiction, but the classification has much to recommend it.

Lem in particular makes the question of modeling the central problem in his fictions, and his mature work can be read as a project to invent as many ironic potential combinations as possible. Let me mention just two. In the story “Professor A. Donda,” Lem narrates the history of the discovery of the “Donda Barrier,” the threshold of information density beyond which information reaches critical mass, and is transformed into energy; the verification of which is the day when all recorded information on Earth disappears to form a “cosmicle,” a tiny new universe whose energy is our information that was. In Lem’s magnum opus, the novel Solaris, scientists have been frustrated for a hundred years studying the ocean of the planet Solaris, which appears to be a sentient being, but cannot be comprehended in the available categories of human science. In what amounts to a Swiftian cavalcade of flummoxed models (which can be read as an ironic version of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions), we are told of a long-repudiated, eccentric work by a dilettante Solarist, who claimed to have discovered anthropomorphisms in the theory of relativity and the equations of field theory. In both these cases, the fantastic models give form (in ironic style) to the uncertainties inherent in the culture/nature difference upon which positive science in the West has been traditionally based.

In his major critical work, Science Fiction and Futurology, Lem provides four examples of writers working at the level of “fantasy of the abstract”: Olaf Stapledon, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, and Kafka. Stapledon, the English author of visionary works of science fiction in the 30s and 40s, offers Lem the least problematic example. In Lem’s view, Stapledon was the first writer to understand that science fiction is a visionary branch of philosophy; that its proper subject is the transformations of human culture and the problems encountered in the dialogue with Nature; and that its proper method is to model the process of modeling itself, to place in an imaginative and contrafactual metaphysical frame the process of constructing models of reality for the whole human species. Stapledon’s work acquires tragic grandeur in the way he depicts these models being tested constantly by Nature on the existence of every sentient species, who nonetheless continue to create cosmic-scale models (cultures) in an effort to understand the universe and to communicate with all other forms of consciousness (“On Stapledon’s Last and First Men” 272-73).

Stapledon referred to his futuristic-historical epic, Last and First Men, as “an essay in myth-creation.” Lem translates this into terms consonant with the scientific imagination:

I would use another word, and speak of a modeling intention,          which starts from the extremely modest state of existing knowledge and strives to grasp the gigantic, unfamiliar mass   of the future’s facts through approximation. Stapledon did not really set out to predict the future. […] (272)

Lem considers Stapledonian fantastic modeling the closest to the actual historical experience of science. For example, midway through Stapledon’s epic, an early evolutionary incarnation of humankind discovers that the Moon is exhibiting certain inexplicable new perturbations which will, in the far future, threaten the survival of human beings on Earth. With this knowledge they can begin work on migrating to another planet. In a later, far more advanced evolutionary stage, on another planet, humanity discovers that there is a connection between the level of civilizational complexity of a planet and the orbital regularity of its satellites.

Now, whether or not there may be some real correlation between psychozoic and gravitational phenomena is not important. Most likely there isn’t any. But the statement is  completely unprovable from the standpoint of our present knowledge. It goes beyond the boldest hypotheses of science and philosophy, and so it leads us to wonder. It is precisely its extraordinariness that gives it value as a   model. In our own time we have seen bridges rise up between fields that were previously isolated from one another: like the bridge between thermodynamics and logic built by information theory. We should certainly expect other,  similar  discoveries, especially in the far distant future– probably not like the connection of gravitation and information, but on the same scale. […] (273)

Other forms of fantastic modeling have also been tried, not all of them realistic. Lem mentions Borges’s rigorous, quasi-algebraic collapse of fundamental cultural oppositions, demonstrating the arbitrariness of the “natural selection” of historical value categories. There is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s method of inviting randomness into the intentional text, through cutups and related techniques of “damaging” the text with noise. But perhaps the epitome of fantastic modeling for Lem is that of Kafka. Kafka’s work is not mimetic, either of nature or of science. It deals rather with the arché of science, Law, and its relation to Meaning, on the one hand, and to consciousness, on the other. Kafka devised a technique for modeling  what Lem calls “the Secret” of the meaning of the cosmos, and the condition in which it is impossible to determine whether the object of the scientific quest is meaning or emptiness, metaphor or mirror, just as it is impossible to decide whether the search for knowledge of the origin of the Law is the transcendental drive for freedom or an inescapable wild goose chase. Only the Secret and its narrative model remain.²

Although the domain of fantastic modeling has been primarily literary, separated from more sober cognitive approaches to modeling by the genre boundaries of science fiction, the situation appears to be changing in the postmodern era. The collapse of boundaries of authority and hierarchy between cultural texts has extended to the heretofore fundamental difference between fiction and scientific and philosophical reflections of nature. In the works of certain radical cultural philosophers, like Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Donna Haraway, fantastic models occupy a central position, incorporating scientific methods and models into critical meta-models. Baudrillard’s various fantastic models and Haraway’s concept of the cyborg differ from earlier periods’ pseudo-scientific mythologies in that they are both overtly ironic and meticulously critical of actual scientific work. Arguably, the late 20th century has witnessed so many different scientific paradigms, both in Western history and in non-Western cultures, that critical theorists are being drawn naturally to models that reflect the inherent plurality of paradigms, and the undecideability of their future evolution.

The social sciences have long owed much to this genre of rationalist fantasy. Sf has provided highly evocative fantastic models of many of the ultimate “others” of sociological study: utopias and anti-utopias, alternate histories, models of hyper-civilizational encounters, of wrestling with cognitive assumptions that prove inadequate to deal with new knowledge, the historical transformation of cultures by unpredictable novums, models of evolution and auto-evolution, and models of scientific self-criticism. Indeed, with the development of complex technological societies many of the stock scenarios of sf have become the subjects of sober scientific speculation. Recently serious collections have been published devoted to the question of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence and to the problems of interstellar migration (Regis: Extraterrestrials. Science and Alien Intelligence and Finney/Jones, ed.: Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience). The fantastic character of these speculative projects permits scientists to combine their knowledge of many disciplines and intuitions with relatively few constraints.

Cultural Definition: Alien Contact

Cultural xenology, however, is not quite so speculative. Perhaps the best way to approach the relationship between SF and culturology is through one of the dominant motifs of sf: the alien contact story. These stories are traditionally parables about the self-definition of humanity; but of course this tradition has taken a particular culture as its norm — the androcentric technological culture of Europe and North America. In sf the alien almost never appears to human protagonists as an opaque, entirely inaccessible being. Either through language or behavior, the alien somehow demonstrates attitudes and tendencies that overlap with what human protagonists know; at least sufficiently for them to try to interpret them. The alien is almost by definition something sentient; it is almost always inferred to be a being that has goals. For most of SF’s history these goals were directed toward us: either to wipe us out and take away our Green Earth like Wells’s Martians, or to help us in our evolutionary struggles, like Arthur C. Clarke’s Overlords.

As SF writers arrived with more sophistication, the intentionality of aliens became much more varied, and the ambiguities of alien contact became one of the favorite themes of SF. This process of changing relations to aliens matches fairly closely the historical progress of the concept of culture and culture studies. It is the most hoary of social science clichés that a culture defines itself through its relation to what it considers alien, strange, abnormal. After Edward Said’s groundbreaking work on Orientalism, it is also clear that European culture, if not all cultures, create images of the Other in certain ways to support a dialectically different vision of themselves. There is a close and intricate link here between the notion that the collective self of a culture helps to construct the idea of the individual self and the way it defines itself against others.

In the current historical moment, the self-analysis of western cultural study is complemented by cultural studies itself — a model less interested in unearthing a cultural anthropological unconscious than in treating cultural groups as dynamic and contested.

At this point there is a particularly marked convergence between SF and cultural theory — to the point that they exchange ideals and models explicitly.

Aliens in SF have been traditionally modeled on five types of “others”: animals, machines, women, children and nonwestern peoples. The zero-degree forms would be: bug-eyed monsters, evil computers, “Amazon women on the Moon,” demon-seed child-Nazis-psychopaths, and Flash Gordon’s villain, Ming the Merciless. 9In recent years, the influence of feminism can be seen in the emergence of aliens modeled on the worst traits of male humans.) Even the most sophisticated alien is a combination of some or all of these elements. In each case the SF involves a whole unconscious notion of culture, with internal contests between different orders of being projected out as external struggles either for survival (when the fiction is written from the perspective of the dominant elements) or for freedom. Each alien-model evokes a profound disorientation because each of the originals: animals, machines, women, children and nonwesterners, formerly represented the relatively primitive, compared with the developed state of the human European male norm. As soon as they are capable of being evolutionary threats or saviors, they have clearly transgressed their primitive cultural compartment, and become more complex than their crude determinations.

Cultural Construction: World reduction

Cultural theory has a number of problems or stress points. The main one, to my mind, is that it is strung very tight between two very antagonistic tendencies: on the one hand, there is the desire to assert that all cultures have fundamental legitimacy, that all have equal claims to respect (relativism); on the other, the methods and language in which these claims of legitimacy are couched assumes the primacy of Liberal analysis and explanation. Rationalist language is a lingua franca, the language of cross-cultural communication, at the same time that it is one of the primary phenomena to be resisted. If it is only through the language of imperial rationalism, which levels all cultural differences and substitutes the value of universality, that the value of non-imperial cultures can be formulated to others, a sort of value schizophrenia sets in. This schizophrenic condition means that more and more people view themselves as simultaneously members of several cultures that are distinct but coexistent — yet which may be quite antagonistic to one another when brought into close proximity.

SF is particularly inspired by the problem of culture stress (with future shock in a prominent place, of course) — so the rational core of SF is related to cultural dialectic: how the internal stresses of a culture evolve, and how a culture responds to contact and collision with external stresses. A look at a list of some of the main topics headings in the recent Encyclopedia of Science Fiction shows how many of the main themes are about an external stress, and the dynamic evolution of a culture. Under external stress we could include aliens, disaster, ecology, end of the world, eschatology, holocaust and after, invasion, life on other worlds, machines, monsters, mutants, paranoia, UFOs. Under dynamic evolution we might list colonization, communications, conceptual breakthrough, cultural engineering, discovery and invention, dystopias, ecology, economics, ESP, evolution, feminism, futurology, genetic engineering, immortality, intelligence, life on other worlds, machines, medicine, metaphysics, monsters, mutants, origin of man, paranoia, perception, politics, psychology, religion, sex. Many of these entries can be under both rubrics: the external stress becomes a motivating factor in the dynamic evolution of human society (evolution in a neutral sense, so degeneration is possible too); while the dynamic internal transformation can become an external threat: think of intelligence, monsters, mutants, machines, gender conflicts that are detached from the main evolutionary line and thus appear as external to it.

Merely introducing an alien being or setting will not necessarily go beyond the crudest cultural definition: us against them. To get to the main SF technique of cultural speculation we have to mention the technique of “world reduction.”

SF shares “world reduction” with most sociography. Most writers and loyal fans may prefer to call this “world building,” or “world construction,” but the building-blocks of new worlds are the ones given by the culture of the writer and his or her public. Sometimes writers pay homage to this by constructing SF cultures that are the home planet’s distorted and selective reflections; sometimes the cultural mechanisms of world reduction are invisible, merely implied. 

SF is devoted world-reduction. Every planet, every alien society or future culture, every generation starship or beleaguered future earth involves an imaginary reduction to certain quasi-fundamental cultural principles.

Jorge-Luis Borges writes somewhere that a fantasy consists of taking a single part from a complex whole and then making that part appear to be the determining, dominant principle. SF does this when it depicts an imaginary social group reduced to certain principles — gender-political, technological, biological — that reflect the author’s cultural conceptions of these things. Culturology works in similar ways — it first identifies certain definitive practices, power-contests, or communications systems, and then offers narratives to show how these cultural drives develop.

A science-fictional world is generally a reduced model of cultural conflict. It can take the form of explicit cultural collision, as it does in anthropological SF, but I believe it is too limiting to think of it only in terms of overt theme. It is present throughout the whole work, in the interplay of three main implicit domains of a SF narrative: the details, the plot and the dominant icon or attractor.

Details in works of SF have a particularly marked position vis a vis other aspects of narrative — we might call details the dominant trait. The Romanian literary scholar Cornel Robu has defined SF as the modern incarnation of the sublime. In SF, one might say, the sublime is in the details. The SF writer and theorist Samuel R. Delany has claimed that SF requires a different reading protocol because its language signifies differently than the language of realism. Two linguistic turns in particular mark SF in this view: the literalized metaphor and the appeal to assumed imaginary knowledge about the world, what we might call filling in the futuristic ellipsis. SF’s language is typified by neologisms and unusual usages which are distributed throughout the writing in the form of details of speech and the object world, not primarily in the form of new dominant concepts, which are rare. In Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, for example, each character’s name is introduced, and the character is made to participate in the action, before we are given enough information to determine its gender. This is an appropriate method for depicting a world in which there is full gender equality (in other words, not our own); and also for tricking us into making decisions about characters’ gender before we know enough about their culture, implicating us in gender-prejudices. William Gibson’s prose is a dazzling display of SF language, filled with techno-neologisms, Japanese loan words, futuristic slang, and lyrical transformations of technological practice and the futuristic culture it embodies, seducing us into treating its imaginary terms as if we were familiar with them. In films like Alien, Terminator 2, and Blade Runner, the eye is constantly kept interested by details that signify conditions changed on the most everyday level. To the degree that a work of SF does not draw attention to this gap between the reader’s present and the imaginary future, the work embodies a theory of cultural slide, the easy and unconscious dissolution of one’s culture and the drift into another.

On the level of plot the traditional cultural myths of home are played out. It is often said that the plots of SF are generally very traditional; hence the almost ritual refrain that SF is a form of romance. The significance of this for me is that these traditional narrative structures which tell some of the oldest stories of European culture are in a complex relationship with the level of neologistic detail.

The third relevant domain is that of the governing icon, or attractor. Most works of SF involve an object or an image that has metaphorical dimensions and governs the fiction thematically. This level of the fiction takes it out of the individual work’s framework, and connects it with the culture of SF at large. (Some examples of contemporary real-world sf icons are the VR-rig, signifying the cyberspace network, the dolphin, signifying alternative evolutions, the cyborg, signifying liberation from historical determination, and the perennial UFO, which is much less favored by sf literature than by popular consciousness.)

SF is a complex thing: it is an artistic genre with certain thematic traits; it is also, in technically-oriented cultures such as ours, a form of consciousness in and toward reality, an attitude that interprets certain kinds of information in a certain way and then produces more in the same vein. We take a science-fictional attitude when we respond to certain new ideas and/or images by wondering what would happen to our framework of values if they were materially embodied and applied. It is a classic “what if” game, but it is not just an abstract thought-experiment. SF is a genre closely associated to the consciousness of cultures that are radically transforming their own histories through the application of new technologies and/or new techniques of thought. It is born out of an orientation toward a future that is influenced by human intentions, although usually with effects that differ greatly from those intentions. If SF is the contemporary incarnation of the sublime, as Cornel Robu claims, it is because human history has become, once we view it in terms of the infinite possible outcomes of our techno-historical experiments, a kind of sublime as well. This orientation toward the future can include notions of a changed/ different past, as well, since whenever important new ideas or facts are discovered in the past, the way we conceive our future changes also.

At the moment many, if not most, scholars of cultural studies in the US and UK are involved in sophisticated critical world-reductions of the area of contact and difference. It is a postmodern truth universally acknowledged that all categories of knowledge are culturally-determined, including so-called biologicals, like gender, race and age. We are witnessing the next step, in which the categories of nature are also being approached as cultural. 

The achievements of the information revolution–such as telematics, genetic engineering, digital sampling, statistical social sciences, nonlinear dynamics and chaos science, high-energy physics, the promise of some form artificial intelligence, etc. — have created a situation that I call artificial immanence, in which values that the purveyors of Western culture once considered sacred and transcendental, like consciousness, life and birth, global extermination, exact replication, and chaos, have been transformed into technical-material processes that can at least in theory be manufactured and artificially fed back into social life. Increasingly, our high-technologized cultures are substituting operational instructions for values. To be melodramatic, humanity is appropriating previously divine powers wholesale. This cultural situation was not foreseen by even the most Whiggish historian. The ones who came closest to it were writers of SF — and it is appropriate that we look to SF more than to the lessons of history (which is already turning into an interactive hypertextual database). As the so-deemed cultural boundaries collapse, it is natural for SF to become more important, with its treasury of metaphors and icons expressing the transgression of established historical and philosophical categories: Joanna Russ’s Female Man, Octavia Butler’s xenogenesis, the cyborg, the simulacrum, William S. Burroughs’ viral language, cyberspace, Bruce Sterling’s Mechs and Shapers, etc. Contemporary SF is a machine for inventing such new conceptual monsters.

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