Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Carl Freedman

of science fiction—who have on occasion bravely spoken out to make serious claims for the genre; I am thinking—to take just a few instances—of such diverse figures as C. S. Lewis, Raymond Williams, Robert Scholes, Leslie Fiedler, Fredric Jameson, and Donna Haraway. Furthermore, for about a quarter-century there has been a developing tradition of professional science-fiction criticism frequently (if by no means invariably) informed by the perspectives of critical theory; the two most important (and not unrelated) enabling events in this regard are the founding of the journal Science-Fiction Studies in 1973 by the late Dale Mullen (perhaps the most underappreciated hero of the serious study of the genre) and the publication in 1979 of Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Because I depend heavily on Suvin’s work, and because I write frequently for Science-Fiction Studies and serve on the journal’s board of editorial consultants, it seems clear that it is in this evolving tradition (among other places) that the current volume places itself.

      But I do not know that anyone else has yet attempted to make and systematically support claims for science fiction in quite the encompassing and explicit way that I do. I do not know that critical theory and science fiction have ever before been examined together with the same level of detail that I bring to both kinds of discourse. Though the general relationship between critical theory and science fiction is certainly well established, it is in my view insufficiently recognized and very inadequately understood; that is the situation that I mean to remedy. Thus, although the current volume plainly owes much to work that has come before (most notably the work of Suvin and Jameson among my own contemporaries), it has some claims to originality too.

      I conclude these prefatory comments with a few pointers that I hope may be useful in orienting the reader about what can and cannot be expected in the pages to follow.

      First, I emphasize as strongly as possible a point briefly suggested above: that the main project of this volume is not what the title would imply to many readers, namely, the “application” of critical theory to science fiction. Sometimes, of course, I do bring critical theory to bear on science fiction, just as sometimes I bring science fiction to bear on critical theory. Both operations are necessary moments in my general argument, but that argument centers on the structural affinities between the two modes of discourse. Even the readings of science-fiction novels in chapter 3 are designed to illuminate the work of Lacan, Trotsky, and Adorno, as well as that of Lem, Le Guin, and Delany.

      Second, I therefore warn against the tendency to assume that, when a title contains two or more terms, the more or most specific term (which most readers, in this case, will take to be science fiction) conveys what the book is “really” about. This is a book about critical theory as much as about science fiction, and the order in which I have placed the two terms is not an accident. The following pages, after all, contain detailed discussions of critical theorists who never overtly concerned themselves with science fiction, and examinations of problems (such as the intellectual effects of socioeconomic modernity, and the nature and value of literary style) that are by no means limited, in their relevance, to science fiction. One practical issue here concerns my intended audience. I am sure that many readers who approach this text will have extensive familiarity with science fiction and the secondary literature on it. I hope also, however, to attract readers who are interested in critical theory but who have hitherto paid little or no attention to science fiction. My point, of course, is that they ought to be very interested in science fiction indeed.

      Third, I want to stress the essayistic—as opposed to encyclopedic—character of this project. The joint terrain of critical theory and science fiction is so vast that a really exhaustive demonstration of my basic argument would fill a shelf of thick volumes. So I have had to practice a strict economy. One consequence is that a number of theorists (like Lenin, Sartre, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Althusser) and a number of fiction writers (like J. G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, and “James Tiptree, Jr.” [Alice Sheldon]) whom I would like to have discussed at length are mentioned only in passing. Nonetheless, I hope that I have made my general argument with enough rigor and lucidity to establish what Althusser would call a problematic—that is, a conceptual framework within which further research and analysis can be conducted. In the future I will probably discuss, in the spirit of this essay, more texts of critical theory and of science fiction. Perhaps others will too.

      The vastness of critical theory and of science fiction means, of course, that the pertinent secondary literature is vast as well. And I have tried to be economical not only in the main text but also in the footnotes—partly for reasons of space, but also because of a long-standing dislike of the pseudoscholarly practice of citing works merely in order to suggest (truthfully or not) that one has read them. Obviously, genuine intellectual debts ought to be acknowledged as a matter of basic honesty, and this I have done to the best of my ability. But it should not be assumed (to paraphrase C. S. Lewis) that I must be ignorant or contemptuous of the articles and books that I do not mention.

      Finally, I should like to state one affirmation that, I hope, clearly animates nearly every page to come. Despite all the immense difficulties and complexities, I do believe that both critical theory and science fiction have the potential to play a role in the liberation of humanity from oppression. That (to adapt a similar remark by Terry Eagleton) is why I have thought the book worth writing.

       Critical Theory and Science Fiction

       1. Definitions

Critical Theory

      If theory is taken to mean an intellectual framework, a problematic that, by the form of its questions even more than by the content of its answers, defines a certain conceptual terrain, then all thought is theoretical. This proposition is, indeed, virtually tautological, since a theory or intellectual problematic is not that which merely shapes or contains thought (as though the latter somehow possessed an unshaped, uncontained earlier existence) but that which gives rise to the possibility of thought in the first place. It may be added that few theories are more narrow and dogmatic than those (like Anglo-American “common sense”) that remain oblivious or even hostile to their status as theories. Keynes’s aphorism about his colleagues—that those economists who think they dislike theory are simply attached to an older theory—is applicable in other fields as well.¹ Critical theory, however, has, or ought to have, a considerably more specific meaning. The term is by no means unfamiliar in current academic discourse; nonetheless, it is not always used with great precision. I shall begin by defining just what difference the adjective makes.

      The word critical can be etymologically traced to Greek and even Indo-European roots (a tracing that leads ultimately to the concepts of cutting and separation),² and the Oxford English Dictionary finds that critical in the sense of “involving or exercising careful judgment or observation” is used in English as early as 1650 (by Sir Thomas Browne). With the three Critiques of Kant, however, the meaning of the word undergoes a radical, irrevocable transformation. This is not the place for a full-scale rehearsal of Kantian philosophy, which few today would regard in any case as adequate to current theoretical exigencies. But it is important to remember Kant not only as the founder of German idealism and the paradigmatic exponent of a contemplative metaphysics (and aesthetics), but also as the thinker who first clearly establishes what might be called the priority of interpretation. The whole concept of the thing-in-itself and the separation of the latter from the phenomenal world of theoretical or scientific investigation (however inadequate and however widely challenged since Kant’s own day) is a pioneering attempt to provide an alternative both to theological dogmatism and to the vulgar empiricism that assumes an untroubled adequation of knowing subject to known object. Indeed, it is only with Kant that the affinity between dogmatism and empiricism, as varieties of an unreflexive philosophical realism, becomes fully visible. The Kantian alternative is to insist upon the active interpretive function of human cognition, whose various components—understanding, judgment, and reason, in Kant’s division—regulate the phenomenal world a priori but (in sharp contrast to the subjectivism and irrationality into which so much later idealism has fallen) with a validity guaranteed by the integrity of the phenomenal world,