Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

1, “Definitions,” focuses on the two terms of my title. I define critical theory as something broader than Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School usage but not unrelated to it. I use the term to designate the traditions of dialectical and self-reflective thought initiated during the historical moment of Kant and Hegel. Insofar as twentieth-century work is concerned, I maintain a certain privilege for specific forms of critical thinking: Marxism above all, but also psychoanalysis and the best work of such postdialectical theorists as Foucault and Derrida. As to science fiction, here I lean heavily on Darko Suvin’s pathbreaking definition that science fiction is the literature of cognitive estrangement. Although this insight seems to me the starting point for any genuine understanding of science fiction, I do suggest some modifications and elaborations of Suvin’s account. I establish a distinction between cognition proper and what I call the literary cognition effect. I also insist that the category of science fiction, like any other generic category, is best used to analyze tendencies within a literary work rather than to classify entire works in one or another pigeonhole. Like Suvin, I make clear that the estrangements of science fiction need not be limited to the technological estrangements popularly associated with the genre.

      Chapter 1, then, is concerned simply with establishing the two categories that dominate the volume. Chapter 2, “Articulations,” is concerned with setting these categories in motion, so to speak, with regard to each other. In the chapter’s first section, I offer some general theorizing on the nature of reading and canon-formation, arguing that every kind of reading implicitly or explicitly privileges its own canon. In the next three sections—which constitute the conceptual center of the volume as a whole—I move to my fundamental argument that critical theory, as a mode of reading, tends to privilege science fiction (though usually, so far, implicitly and even unconsciously). To prefigure here the core sentences of the entire book: I maintain that science fiction, like critical theory, insists upon historical mutability, material reducibility, and utopian possibility. Of all genres, science fiction is thus the one most devoted to the historical concreteness and rigorous self-reflectiveness of critical theory. The science-fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes. It is also a world whose difference is concretized within a cognitive continuum with the actual—thus sharply distinguishing science fiction from the irrationalist estrangements of fantasy or Gothic literature (which may secretly work to ratify the mundane status quo by presenting no alternative to the latter other than inexplicable discontinuities).

      The second, third, and fourth sections of chapter 2 make and substantiate this general argument in different ways. The second section operates on the micrological level of style, and attempts to demonstrate the affinity between critical theory and science fiction by analyzing the prose of Philip K. Dick. I necessarily engage the question of style in the novel generally, and bring to bear on it the work of Bakhtin, who provides what I take to be the most critically informed discussion of novelistic style to date. In the third and fourth sections of the chapter I turn from the micrological to the macrological level, and focus on the narrative structure of science fiction with regard to the latter’s affinity with critical theory. More specifically, in the third section I discuss this question by examining the relations between science fiction and historical fiction. To do so it is necessary to provide a historicizing account of science fiction itself and, of course, to offer a full-scale engagement with Lukács’s theory of the historical novel. In the following section I concentrate on science fiction and utopia, producing a narrative of the relations between science fiction and utopia as forms in the context of Bloch’s hermeneutic philosophy of utopia. Chapter 2 concludes with a brief fifth section in which I give a perspective on how the deep affinity between critical theory and science fiction has been largely occluded by what might be called the internal political economy of critical thought.

      Chapters 1 and 2 operate on a quite comprehensive level. Though a great many individual works are briefly discussed, and though a few passages are analyzed closely, the overall aim of these two chapters is not to provide any detailed readings but to make a general argument about the relations of critical theory and science fiction. In chapter 3, “Excursuses,” I continue the argument through fairly extensive analyses of five major science-fiction novels. I deliberately employ the somewhat unusual term, “excursus” (which I take from a similar usage in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Max Horkheimer), in order to emphasize that the readings are not intended to provide “proof” (in any empiricist sense) of the argument in chapter 2 but rather to extend the argument in a somewhat different way.

      Each of the novels considered in chapter 3 resonates strongly with concerns proper to critical theory. In my reading of Solaris I explore how the text uses science fiction to foreground the problems of cognition and estrangement themselves, and to deconstruct positivistic science in order to stress the dialectical provisionality of all knowledge; I also argue that the crucial category of Otherness can be illuminated by comparing its treatment in Lem’s novel with that in Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the analysis of The Dispossessed that follows, I turn from a cognitive-epistemological emphasis to an ethical-political one. I consider how Le Guin’s achievement is nothing less than the reinvention of the positive utopia after many years of eclipse by negative versions of the Orwell-Huxley sort. I maintain that the novel’s insistence upon the unavoidable complexities and ambivalences of social organization coexists with a definite radical commitment, and that in many ways the text’s most consequential intellectual kinship is less with the anarchist thought of the author’s own political lineage than with the more critical, dialectical Marxist thought of Trotsky. Joanna Russ’s The Two of Them then provides the occasion for a consideration of feminism as a unique area of critical theory, one in which, as I suggest, theory and narrative bear an unusually close and complex relationship to each other. More specifically, I show how the novel radically recasts many of the masculinist conventions of pulp science fiction in order to demonstrate the special compatibility of feminist critical thought with science fiction. I then approach Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, showing how the text’s awesomely ambitious representations of cultural and biological difference can be understood in connection with the critical philosophies of difference constructed by Jacques Derrida and, even more, by Adorno. Delany is perhaps the living American novelist most personally familiar with the texts of critical theory, and his greatest work (which I believe Stars in My Pocket to be) may be the most intellectually impressive single achievement in current American fiction. Chapter 3 ends by returning to Philip K. Dick (for me the greatest of all science-fiction writers). Reading The Man in the High Castle, I revisit the problem of the relations between science fiction and historical fiction; I show how certain of the novel’s concerns are related to the Adornian concept of the dialectic of enlightenment; and I argue that the text critically interrogates (both implicitly and explicitly) the generic form of science fiction itself.

      Finally, the book as a whole concludes with a coda in which I coordinate both critical theory and science fiction with the historical category of the postmodern in order to produce some speculations about the future of both modes of discourse.

      Such, in outline, is what this essay sets itself to do. How original a project do I take it to be? Though the theoretically engaged criticism of science fiction in the American academy often feels like a lonely activity indeed—beset both by those who dismiss science fiction altogether and, more insidiously, by those who maintain a purely empiricist interest in it as an instance of “popular culture”—I am far from the first to insist that science fiction ought to be read with much closer and more alert attention than it usually has been. Indeed, for more than half a century there have been distinguished critics—not