Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder

usage, “science fiction” is for Suvin an incoherent bundle of conflicting generic tendencies trundled together for commercial purposes. “The literature of cognitive estrangement” is, in contrast, a precise formal definition. Chapter 1 of this book will address the question of generic definition at much greater length, but let me preface that discussion by saying that “the literature of cognitive estrangement” is what Tzvetan Todorov would call a theoretical genre rather than a historical one (Fantastic, 13–15). Unfortunately for the Suvinian paradigm, what we might call really existing SF is not a theoretical entity but rather a historically situated, and therefore ever-changing, set of practices, so that the historical ground of the really existing genre continues to shift under the theory’s feet. This is what yields the situation described by Williams:

      Sf strictly defined is no longer capable of estranging us from the hegemonic discourse for which it operates as ideological cheerleader [because] … the authority of specifically capitalist science and rationality and its promises of progress are falling into doubt…. It is for precisely this reason that the creative and utopian energy in genres of the fantastic is currently manifesting itself in erosion and destruction of the false, self-crowned purity of that discourse…. “reality” and “fantasy” … have changed value over the years, and with them have necessarily changed the meaning and character of “scientific progress,” “rationality,” and even “utopia.” The problem with the Suvinian paradigm lay in his creation of a universal abstraction of exactly the type he sought to dismantle. (626)

      Williams’s historical analysis is on the mark, but the theoretical issue here has to do with basic assumptions. One cannot have it both ways: either the genre is indeed a “universal abstraction,” an enduring possibility in some eternal grammar of narrative forms, or it is the work of historical agents, subject to the contingencies of history, and therefore always liable to shift its ideological and formal moorings in response to those contingencies.³

      Attending to the contingencies of history brings us to the second problem, the question of what exactly is at stake in genre theory. However robust Suvin’s analysis of the formal strategies that impart critical power to the best examples of SF, his analysis nonetheless manages to simultaneously trivialize and exaggerate what is at stake. The trivializing consists in the tendency to nitpicking distinctions between what is and is not SF, best (or rather worst) exemplified in the “Annotated Checklist of Books Not to Be Regarded as SF, with an Introductory Essay on the Reasonable Reasons Thereof,” in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (86). The exaggeration comes when Suvin presents the ability to make these distinctions as immediately and drastically consequential in ways that certainly do not correspond to any sort of common sense—for example, the mere confusion of the genres of SF and supernatural fantasy is called a “pathological” phenomenon “stimulated by irrational capitalist conditions of life” (91). The key to this overvaluation of generic difference is the loaded term “cognitive logic,” which SF has and other proximate genres such as supernatural fantasy do not, making a failure to tell the difference between the genres (or to care about it) tantamount to a general failure to exercise one’s critical capacities.

      There are two ways to respond. The first, which has been forcefully argued by China Miéville in his essay “Cognition as Ideology,” and which Williams builds upon, takes the strategy of accepting Suvin’s description of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement and then working through the consequences to demonstrate that Suvin’s privileging of cognition over ideology is itself ideological. The crux of the argument is that where Suvin asserts the operation of form and reason, Miéville sees rhetorical acts of persuasion that aim for power and authority. Thus, according to Miéville, Suvin’s insistence on correct taxonomy depends on his identifying himself with the charismatic authority of the authors who deploy the “cognition effect”: “This is a translation into meta-literary and aggrandizing terms of the very layer of technocrats often envisaged in SF and its cultures as society’s best hope” (239).⁴

      A second approach to Suvin’s deployment of “cognitive logic” is to see it from outside Suvin’s paradigm. This is a matter of asserting first of all that every theoretical genre is also historical in the sense that it is a construction put in place at a specific time and place under specific circumstances, and therefore always constitutes taking a position within a field of possibilities or, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, the field of cultural production. The distinction between Todorov’s historical and theoretical genres is not between genres that are formed in a historical process and others that are not, but rather between genres constructed in the academy by an identifiable theorist (and, for Todorov, along certain rigorously formalist lines) and genres constructed more or less anonymously in a collective process. What is at stake in the definition of SF as a species of “literature” with an ancient lineage is the difference between the cultural prestige associated with the academic-classical genre system, with its deployment in higher education, and the mass cultural genre system and its commercial milieu. The fairly obvious point is that Suvin’s definition is a way of assimilating SF into the classical-academic genre system and gaining for it a share of the cultural capital invested in that system—this in spite of Suvin’s aggressive assertion of SF’s political resistance to the status quo. I think that this understanding of Suvin’s pugnacious defense of SF’s genre boundary against its noncognitive neighbors might put him in a more forgiving light than that afforded by Miéville’s ideology critique. He was in a fight of sorts, though it was not really with those who pathologically intermingle SF and fantasy, but rather with those—and they were the majority of literary scholars when Suvin did this work—who simply would dismiss SF as unworthy of academic study. Suvin’s animosity toward the fantasists could actually be read as a kind of peace offering to the powers that controlled the gates of academic legitimacy.

      To insist on holding the academic-classical genre system and the mass cultural genre system separate from one another rather than trying to conflate them or to turn one into a subset of the other draws upon a rich vein of genre theory devoted to connecting specific media, venues, and purposes with sets of genres tailored to them. John Frow is the theorist of literary and narrative genres who draws most ably upon this rhetorical tradition that stretches back to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on speech genres. Citing Carolyn Miller’s argument that genres are “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller 31), Frow stresses that “genres have to do with the strategic work accomplished by texts in particular circumstances” (Genre, 115). In chapter 2 I will draw on Clay Spinuzzi’s ideas about the way entire ensembles of genres are integrated with one another into what he calls sets, repertoires, systems, and ecologies. The notion of a narrative genre system, however, derives more directly from the work of Rick Altman and Jason Mittel on film and television genres, respectively. As Frow puts it, “We should perhaps not speak of a single system. Rather, we could posit that there are sets of genres organized by domain, those of film or television or literature or architecture…. Indeed, it may be the case that there is not, or no longer, a single system of film genres or literary genres; there may be only relatively disconnected sub-systems representing relatively disconnected organizations of value” (Genre, 124–25). Indeed, I think it is clearly the case, if one thinks for a moment of the world and not of a single nation or a single language, that there has never been a single system of narrative genres, a thesis that could be abundantly supported by examples from the history of translation of indigenous narratives in colonial settings (see for example Bacchilega, Naithani, and Owen). The issue that needs to be explored as regards academic and mass cultural genre systems, however, and which this book makes some attempt to open up, is how disconnected those “relatively disconnected sub-systems” of value are from one another, and what kinds of pressures they continue to exert on one another.

      John Cawelti’s work on what he calls formula fiction represents an important approximation toward the distinction between the academic and mass cultural genre systems. According to Cawelti, “popular story types such as the western, the detective story, or the spy adventure … are embodiments of archetypal story forms in terms of specific cultural materials…. Formulas are ways in which specific cultural themes and stereotypes become embodied in more universal story archetypes”