Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

settings of seventeenth-century Germany or twentieth-century China, these works evoke arealistic loci alternative to the author’s mundane environment in order to enforce not only cognitive but critical Marxian estrangements of Western capitalist society with regard to such fundamental issues as war, love, family, commerce, and morality. What distinguishes Brechtian estrangement from the estrangements more familiar in texts explicitly marketed as science fiction is not that Brecht is more closely allied to literary realism but simply that he is relatively uninterested in those specifically technological versions of estrangement that have traditionally figured (though to a decreasing degree since the 1960s) in science fiction that derives directly from the pulp line. Conversely, Star Wars (and its sequels) might be understood as activating the science-fiction tendency only weakly and fitfully in most regards—in cognitive terms, the diachronic sequence from John W. Campbell, or even Doc Smith, to George Lucas is a narrative of regression—but with a spectacular hypertrophy of the specifically visual dimension associated with science-fictional tales of space travel. (Given the centrality of the visual dimension to film as a medium, it might even be argued that this one factor establishes the generic dominance of science fiction in the filmic text.)²⁷ Both Brecht and Lucas, then, might be described as producers of science fiction, but in quite different ways, which a dialectical generic approach allows us to specify with some precision.

      It is this basically Suvinian definition of science fiction as the fiction of cognitive estrangement—but modified so as to emphasize the dialectical character of genre and the centrality of the cognition effect—that will enable further such discriminations to be made throughout the remainder of this essay. Having thus defined, at least provisionally, my two central categories of concern, I will now, in the following and necessarily much longer chapter, articulate the two categories together. My aim is not to read science fiction “in the light of” critical theory (itself a suspiciously positivistic metaphor), but to articulate certain structural affinities between the two terms. Although critically informed readings of particular science-fictional texts will inevitably play a part in the following chapters (especially chapter 3), my chief intent is to show that the conjunction of critical theory and science fiction is not fortuitous but fundamental.

      1. An excellent demonstration of this principle (which I deliberately choose from a context far removed from any of my immediate current concerns) is provided by Garry Wills’s brilliant deconstruction of the orthodox political liberalism of Arthur Schlesinger, particularly in the latter’s revealing opposition of “ideas” to “ideology”; see Wills, Nixon Agonistes, exp. ed. (New York: New American Library, 1979), 311–326.

      2. My authority here is, of course, the American Heritage Dictionary.

      3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 13; translation modified.

      4. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), esp. 114–140. Some interesting neo-Lukácsian remarks on Kant may be found in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 248ff. Terry Eagleton incisively rewrites Lukács’s analysis in somewhat deconstructive terms: “The thing in itself is thus a kind of empty signifier of that total knowledge which the bourgeoisie never ceases to dream of, but which its own fragmenting, dissevering activities continually frustrate”; Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 77.

      5. See Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay, 1983), 3–15.

      6. Goethe’s Faust (whose composition extended from 1770 to 1831) might be mentioned in this context; the transformative power of science is certainly in many ways a powerful presence in the text. Yet Goethe’s project is curiously overdetermined by his choice of a medieval legend as its source, so that Faust exhibits many of the attributes of the modern Promethean scientist without wholly ceasing to be a general “scholar” of the medieval type. The great opening monologue invokes the four medieval faculties of philosophy, law, medicine, and theology—in dissatisfaction, to be sure, but a general orientation is nonetheless implied from which Victor Frankenstein is quite free.

      7. It may be noted in passing that the stance that in Swift’s day could be adopted by a man of towering literary genius has now sunk so low on the intellectual scale that it is almost never encountered in life-forms higher than the sort of politicians and journalists who sometimes ridicule the titles of scientific research projects supported by public funds.

      8. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin, 1962), 23. Though I am indebted to Lukács for this discussion of the intellectual consequences of the French Revolution, the far larger debt that the current work owes to The Historical Novel will gradually become evident.

      9. Cf. Horkheimer in the founding text of the Frankfurt usage, “Traditional and Critical Theory”: “The hostility to theory as such which prevails in contemporary public life is really directed against the transformative activity associated with critical thinking. Opposition starts as soon as theorists fail to limit themselves to verification and classification by means of categories which are as neutral as possible, that is, categories which are indispensable to inherited ways of life”; Horkheimer, Critical Theory, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 232.

      10. By far the most noteworthy absence in what immediately follows is the lack of any discussion of feminism—a theory (or constellation of theories) that presents special problems, with which I grapple in the third section of chapter 3.

      11. See, for example, Mandel’s introduction to Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1:82–83.

      12. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), xxxiv.

      13. “As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allows us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy” (ibid., 34; emphasis in original). This suggests, incidentally, one of the fundamental errors in any assimilation of Marxism to religion: whereas the religious believer desires the categories of his or her religion to be of eternal relevance, the Marxist desires nothing so much as a state of affairs in which the categories of Marxism will finally be obsolete.

      14. In the field of cultural studies, Jameson’s immense critique of postmodernism (cited above) seems to me an important instance. Although Jameson, in my view, exaggerates the extent to which postmodernism (in both aesthetic and other terms) can usefully be considered the “cultural dominant” of the current age, his study is nonetheless a pathbreaking attempt to coordinate current cultural production with the dynamics of what Mandel has analyzed as late capitalism.

      15. See Louis Althusser, “On Marx and Freud,” trans. Warren Montag, Rethinking Marxism 4 (Spring 1991): 17–30.

      16. See, for example, the opening pages of Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

      17. The “negative dialectic” of Adorno is a rather different matter. Adorno is not so much epistemologically suspicious of totality as he is hostile to the social phenomenon of total administration, which he sometimes silently conflates with totality as a Marxist and Lukácsian category; see Carl Freedman and Neil Lazarus, “The Mandarin Marxism of Theodor Adorno,” Rethinking Marxism 1 (Winter 1988): 85–111.

      18. See especially Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).

      19. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 7–8.

      20. See J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis (London: Oxford,