Message, Politics, and Form: Debates in Science Fiction

            This essay was published on my most recent failed blog project, and I thought I would reprint it here with some minor revisions.  I thought it was one of the better things I wrote for the project, but it didn't get a lot of attention, so I thought I would see if it got more attention over here.  The essay opens with the now close to defunct debate over the Hugo Awards, but it uses the controversy to explore the nature of science fiction through a discussion of the concept of message fiction.  Rather than simply taking a side on the debate, the essay both rejects the concept of messages a good way to understand science fiction and argues that politics are inherent to the genre at a formal level.  It does so by drawing from the critical work of Samuel Delany and Darko Suvin, and their understanding of the genre.  In any case, here is the essay....

            In the past few months, I have been fairly faithfully following the controversies surrounding the Hugo Awards, which was created by the expansion of what is called the Sad Puppies slate, along with the creation of a mirroring, Rabid Puppies slate.  Rather than getting into the details of that fairly baroque debate, I thought I would focus on one small rhetorical feature of the conversation.  Throughout the debate, the puppies have focused on condemning something called ‘message fiction’, which they define as the imposition of the political on the form of science fiction.  In response, the critics of the puppies tend to make two arguments, either noting the ‘messages’ or political aspects of the puppies texts, or arguing that all texts have a message, or political dimensions to them.  Not surprisingly, my views are far closer to the critics of the puppies, but they make a common mistake, collapsing the broader implications of the political into the narrower framework of message, which doesn’t necessarily operate within political terms.  I plan on showing the distinction between message and politics, and then use the literary criticism of Samuel Delany to examine how the political dimension of science fiction is better understood as a formal dimension of the genre.

            The concept of message fiction is probably most easily understandable by referring to its earlier antecedents, notably morality tales, fables, and folk tales.  These stories are explicitly constructed to pass on a lesson, which can often be expressed in sentence or two.  These lessons might express an abstract concept such as the golden rule, or may express the far more concrete danger of wandering alone, away from home, in the dead of winter.  There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this form of literary construction, and, indeed, it is a far older form of literary creation, and deeply contributes to all forms of literature.  However, the authors were far less concerned with literary form and quality, which was in service of the lesson. Not surprisingly, the structure of this traditional approach is most easily found in pedagogical literature produced for either children or adolescents.  We might reference Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, or the Canadian television series, Degrassi Junior High, as examples of this sort of ‘message fiction,’ along with a great deal of religious fiction.  It’s significant to note that we are far away from the narrative structures of science fiction, when we discuss is sort of literature, and that while this form of pedagogical fiction has political implications, it rarely is intended to act as a political intervention.  However, another subsection of ‘message fiction’, which might be called polemical fiction, interventions into the events of the day, can be constructed with explicitly political purposes in mind, and utilize science fictional narrative structures.

           However, the politics of science fiction and other dominant literary forms takes a distinctively different approach than the messages discussed above.  That politics can be found in the explicit and implicit background assumptions of the writer that are embedded in the narrative form of the story.  They are produced in the effort to create a sense of ‘reality’ that constitutes the background of the story, and the norms and expectations of the characters interact within social institutions.  Indeed, even within the polemical fiction discussed above, the story is judged far more on its ability to engage an audience on these formal questions.  Perhaps, this argument is better explained through a concrete example.  A recent debate has opened up around conservative John C. Wright’s nostalgic invocation of the literary trope of the ‘princess in distress,’ which he marks as part of the origins of the genre, before the accursed introduction of political messages.  A critic argued that this trope itself constituted a message, a political dimension to the text.  At a larger and more substantial level, I’m largely in agreement with this critic.  The ability to imagine women as only in need of rescue has a disturbing and deeply hierarchical implication to it.  But, it isn’t a message.  Instead, it’s a narrative convention, created to engage with a set of audience expectations to produce a sense of enjoyment.  Its political implications are embedded in a set of common assumptions about the role of women in a society and about what it means to be feminine. 

  

          All fiction, whether escapist or engaged, fantastic or realistic, focused on a past or a future, engages in this unmistakably political process through their construction of a world that is both recognized and enjoyed by an audience.  In his effort to define the genre of science fiction in his essay, “About 5,750 Words”, author and critic, Samuel R. Delany understands this process through the concept of ‘subjunctivity,’ which he draws from an engagement with the linguistic theorist, Ferdinand Saussure.  Delany notes, “Subjunctivity is the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between (to borrow Saussure’s term for ‘word’:) sound-image and sound-image.”  (Delany 10)  To break that fairly opaque statement open, Delany is noting that narrative is constructed by a string of words being joined together to produce a narrative.  The subjunctivity of a piece is defined by the relationship of that narrative to its relationship to the world of the author.  Reportage is defined the “blanket indicative tension… this happened,” while  naturalistic fiction is defined by “could have happened,” fantasy is defined by “could not have happened”, and  science fiction is defined by “have not happened.” (Delany 10-11)  Within this series of generic descriptions, Delany shifts from the narrative conventions of ‘reportage’, which must correspond with the facts of the empirical world, to a variety of fictional narrative structures, which produce worlds that critically engage with that world through a variety of rules sets, which define what can and not occur within that world.

            In every case, the author has to make a series of critical interventions about what the world is, and how will their fictional world engage with those expectations.  Science fiction attempts to largely imagine what might be called ‘potential worlds’, worlds that could exist, but do not, whether in the form of a future to come, an alternative present, or a past that never occurred.  In each case, we break away from the ideological horizons of the present to imagine a different, and even alien society that could exist.  At the same time, the author has to produce that alternative with a meaningful engagement with the available natural and social sciences, history, and critical theory.  The ‘have not happened’ has to be plausible within the knowledge of its time, and it has to show that plausibility through its narrative structures.  It therefore has to engage with the question of politics, amongst other questions.  Delany stresses these demands on the genre in his lengthy critical investigation of Ursula Leguin’s Utopian novel, The Dispossessed,

Mundane fiction can get by with a clear and accurate portrayal of behavior that occurs merely because it occurs.  Science fiction can not.  In an alien culture—both Anarres and Urras are alien cultures—we are obliged to speculate on the reason behind any given behavior; and this speculation, whether implicit or explicit, must leave its signs in the text.  The scenes and paragraphs are signs of limitations on the social egalitarianism of Anarres; they are not sighs for the causes of those limitations.

            Nothing prevents an SF writer from writing a story about an intelligent species in which adolescent male bonding behavior is imprinted on the genes.  (The species might biologically and genetically bear a resemblance to birds, who exhibit much complex behavior that may well be genetically controlled.)  Similarly, nothing prevents the SF writer from writing about an intelligent species in which such behavior is completely the product of intrasocial forces.  Indeed, the writer if she chooses can write about a species in which the reason switches back and forth according to the changes in the moon.

            What we must remember, however, is that once mundane fiction has accomplished its portrait of behavior at some historical moment, from the here and now to the distant past, if we ask of it: “But what do you think the surrounding cause are?” mundane fiction can answer, without fear that it is shirking its job, “Frankly, I don’t know.  It’s not my concern.” But because science fiction is not constrained to answer such a question “correctly,” within its generic precincts, the “I don’t know. It’s not my concern” of mundane fiction not only becomes self-righteous and pompous, it signifies a violation of the form itself.   Science fiction may ultimately end with an “I don’t know” about any given point, but only after a good deal of speculation, either implicit or explicit, has left its signs in the text. (Delany 128-129) 

            Delany opens his engagement with the genre by contrasting its narrative horizons with that of ‘mundane’ or what he may have earlier called ‘naturalistic fiction.’  The latter can simply represent the world ‘as it is.’  It need not explain why a social phenomenon exists; it merely has to exist to be represented.  However, science fiction has to live up to a much higher standard, due to its speculative nature.  Delany goes on to show how open ended this process can be, allowing for the imagination of radically different worlds, with structures of gender and sexuality that have radically different biological and social explanation.  However, the author produces the rules for the universe of the novel, and therefore must be able to show either the natural or social rules for such a world, in either an ‘implicit or explicit’ manner.  Anarres fails, Delany argues, not because it represent inequality, but because it fails to offer an explanation for that inequality.  It naturalizes the social expectations of the present, and therefore fails in its obligations as a science fiction novel.  In effect, the science fiction novel demands a sort of political engagement with why its social structures work the way they do, even if that explanation imagines an alternative biological structure.  To draw on the work of Darko Suvin, science fiction "does not ask about The Man or The World, but which man?: in what kind of world?: and why such a man in such a kind of world?" (Suvin, "Estrangement and Cognition", 2.1)

            It should be noted that the political engagement that Samuel Delany demands has no partisan markers.  It doesn’t demand that the author be a radical or a conservative, commit to the views of a particular party, or even understand the social structures of the present in the same way.  It simply demands that the world that is represented has some sort of explanation of how its culture came to operate in the way it does in the book, either in an implicit or explicit fashion.   It’s why radical critics are more than happy to recognize that novels such as Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Keith Roberts’s Pavane, and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series are great science fiction novels.  They produce richly imagined worlds, with complex social and political structures that are formal political engagement with the present through those author’s conservative political framework.  They ask substantial political questions that are worth following in the narrative form, even if you profoundly disagree with the answers.  To use the language of Darko Suvin, science fiction is a literature of cognitive estrangement, which means it’s a literature of critique, in its richest and most open ended sense.

an initial and short posting on Ursula Leguin's The Dispossessed

       I'm going to let myself have a little time before I return to the conversation around the Khatru debates, but I certainly will be returning to those conversations.  However, I want to put down some of my initial thoughts in regards to Ursula Le Guin's novel, The Dispossessed.  I've been rereading the novel to prepare for my final chapter of my dissertation, which is going to deal with that novel, along with Samuel Delany's novel, Trouble on Triton, as responses to the radical feminist provocations produced by critic and theorist Joanna Russ through her essays of the time, and her novel, The Female Man.   Both writers had read early drafts of that novel, and the influence of the novel on both later texts is fairly clear.  Additionally, Delany acknowledges the influence that reading Le Guin's manuscript had on his novel, an influence that can be seen in his extensive critical engagement with the novel, contained at the end of his first book of science fiction criticism, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, initially released in 1977.  The influence is understandable, given the incredibly richness and complexity of the novel, which is still one of the greatest formal achievements within the subgenre of science fiction.

      I want to take a little time to put down some of my initial thoughts on the novels take on the topics of social reproduction, and the forms of domesticity represented in the novel.  A number of feminist critics have taken Le Guin to task for a lack of engagement with these questions in the novel.  At an initial glance these claims are extremely problematic.  The novel through its observation of Shevak's childhood and education on his own planet, Arras, on one hand, and his observations of the alien world of Urras, on the other hand, produce a deep engagement with the institutions of the home, of the radically different educational approaches of the two societies, and the informal forms of common sense found within each society.  Le Guin uses the radically egalitarian structures of the moon society to question and estrange us from a long series of common sense assumptions about the sex/gender system found on the analog to our society, the wealthy and authoritarian Urras.  (Le Guin's critique of the university is particularly relevant, and is something I probably will return to.)  But when we turn to the particular ways that Le Guin conceives of sexuality, we find something a bit more troubling, and aspect of Le Guin's work that reveals that the feminist critics that I previously mentioned are perhaps more perceptive than is revealed in a cursory glance at the novel.

        I'm inclined to direct folks to Delany's lengthy review of the novel in dealing with it's representation of homosexuality in the figure of Bedap.  Instead, I want to turn to the novel's representation of the relationship between Shevak and Takher, and how the particular mixture of romantic convention and mysticism allows for a reinscription of the heterosexual couple as the central institution of the society, undoing, in many ways, the forms of collective living found in the rest of the novel.  We can see this in operation through an early description of their romance, which occurs early in their relationship, and is linked with Shevak's involvement with a small group of dissidents within the anarchist society of Arras.

      "They would talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then to dinner at the Institute commons.  after dinner there were meetings, or a concert, or they saw their friends, Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from the Institute, Desar and others from the Institute, Taker's colleagues and friends.  But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them.  Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact.  It did not seem to offend the others.  Rather the reverse.  Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain.  The others were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others.  They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing them presents--the small offerings that circulated among these people who possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters' Federation workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the Sorruba sea.  They gave the present to Takher, saying "Here, Shev might like this for a paperweight," or to Shevek, saying, "Here, Tak might like this color."  In giving they sought to share in what Shevek and Takher shared, and to celebrate and to praise."  (Le Guin 152-153

      If the text attempts to reimagine forms of childcare, of education, and of the family structure, it remains deeply committed to the centrality of heteronormative romance. Breaking away from the concepts of mutual aid that ostensibly define the society of Arras, the text informs us that the love of Takher and Shevak "was enough, and they could not hide the fact."  The social structures of the society become 'peripheral' to the story, and the political questions that drive the various small dissident groups take the same position.  Indeed those social formations begin to draw sustenance from that bond, rather than the reverse, treating the relationship as a combination of a religious shrine and a perpetual wedding, continuingly granted the couple gifts, and attempting to strengthen the relationship through a peculiar reversal of the description of the exchange of women that Levi-Strauss posits as the central tenet of human civilization.  Rather than reading this as an aberrant moment in Le Guin's text, I want to argue that it directly connects to the Jungian theory of anima and animus that she acknowledges as a central influence on her work at the time.  The relationship of Shevak and Takher takes this position because it reveals the secret essence of the potential of the society as a whole, a kind of social symbiosis that is produced through this heteronormative bond.  Additionally, this notion is reinforced through the repetitive insistence on the notion of sexual privacy contained in the text, a notion that allows for a reinscription of the public and the private, a conservation of the space of the personal without politics, while ostensibly challenging these structures. 

     The question is how to resolve this dimension of the text with extraordinary exploration of the explosive political antagonisms that also define the text.  In a certain sense, we see a tension that might be at the heart of the 'ambiguous' utopia, between the forms of antagonism and multiplicity that form the collective formations of the proletariat and the attempts at recuperation appropriation that define the engines of the changing formations of capitalist appropriation. 
     

Notes near the end of the year

      I haven't been posting much this month for a number of reasons, notably because of travel, research, and other distractions.  Happily, this brief exodus has translated into a full if fairly rough draft of another chapter, books read, and two trips undertaken, one to Minneapolis and one to San Francisco.  Not much of this has translated into the sort of material that I could easily translate into blog postings.  (No doubt, other writers would have produced a number of excellent posts, but not me.)  However, I've been driven back into writing by my brief reading of Samuel R. Delany's 7 Essays, 4 Letters, and 5 Interviews About Writing,  which might be titled 7 Essays, 4 Letters, and 5 Interviews About Why You're Probably Not a Writer. While neither Delany's primary message nor the main point that I gained from the text, it was a good reminder that I had set up this blog in order to do more day to day writing, and the fact that this day to day writing has translated into much stronger writing on my part in other situations.

      The result is what you are seeing now, a slightly stream of consciousness effort taken up in order to start the creative process.  I suspect that I will be writing another piece about the current problems with the Progressive Labor Party, but I suspect that I will need to check in with folks to get a better sense of the current situation.  (The organization has written a defensive and not terribly coherent response to the demands that they deal with the rapist in their organization, but I'm not sure what they have been doing on the ground.)  Similarly, I want to return to some of the questions about science fiction that have been a thread through the publication, but the last book I read, John Scalzi's Old Man's War, while enjoyable, didn't really translate into a desire to write about it.  Perhaps, I should visit Uncle Hugo's while I'm in town.  Finally, I'm tempted to write about Kathi Weeks' new text, The Problem With Work, but I haven't completed reading it.  It does deal with the ways that work has been increasingly marked as private, a current political interest of my own.

      Moving on, the question of generic convention has been on my mind a considerable amount recently, most likely because of the sheer amount of time that I have spent reading, thinking, and writing about women's magazine.  The work of Lauren Berlant has played a significant role in shaping the way that I read those publications, and the ways that they attempt to construct particular types of subjects through their pedagogical efforts.  However, Delany's work also brings up the issue of convention and genre in his work, emphasizing the ways that writing must rigorously engage with a set of generic conventions and reader expectations in order to operate as successful writing, even if that work is designed to unsettle or transgress those infrastructure.  The thread that runs through this is the way that each conceptualizes generic convention not as restriction or censorship, but a constitutive of a set of social relations, whether producing the housewife installed in the matrix of unpaid reproductive labor or the novel that is recognizable as successful by both reader and writer.

      Perhaps at some point I'll take another point that has interested me, the pleasure in generic familiarity, whether in the form of the enjoyment of a piece of literature that fulfills these familiar expectations or the ways that we attempt to shape our social relations based on a series of conventions.  This question has been an implicit one through a number of my short essays, whether in the exploration of how anarchist activists attempted to take Boots Riley's critique of particular forms of property destruction and transform it into a very familiar set of debates about the divisions between anarchists and communists, or the ways that both critics and advocates of the Occupy phenomena refuse to recognize the multiplicity and immense contradictions in the emergent form.  Perhaps my position is increasingly close to the positions taken by Delany because of our common influences through marxism, formalism, and a sort of structuralism.  For Delany, the question of ethics and aesthetics are distinctly related, and the construction of richer and thicker literary conventions gestures towards the ability to produce a more ethical society.  (It would take a long time to work through how this remains faithful to a sort of materialist analysis, but I think you can.)

      It's significant that this position doesn't argue for the end of conventions as either a desired outcome or even as a possibility.  Instead, the goal is to produce an aesthetic that deals with the complexity, contradictions, and conflict that defines what might be called the real, the immense complexity of the world.  To turn briefly to my examples, each response refuses to engage with the emergent properties of the social phenomena, or to use Ernst Bloch's term, it's function as novum or novelty.  Conversation becomes repetitive and ultimately futile, but in such a way as to reinforce the positions of both parties through a series of mechanisms of pleasure.  I don't deny the functionality of this approach at times.  Offering substantial and thoughtful criticism to racist and sexist internet trolls is exhausting in a not terribly productive manner.  But there's a danger in attempting to take every utterance and place it into a familiar and repetitive category, and perhaps more significantly in the desire to only engage with the modes of communication that fall into this terrain, which is stasis,stasis not understood as a sort of immobility but as a sort of unending and repetitive civil war.  If those sorts of engagement are unavoidable, and I do believe that they are, we need to find other forms of engagement in order to escape being fully defined by their terms....  somehow that ties into the aesthetic novum.

Interlude (5): Conversations involving Samuel R. Delany

      I recently realized that I had abandoned an earlier structure of the blog, the interlude.  I'm returning to that structure by offering a number of conversations with Samuel Delany.  The first piece is a conversation in a classroom setting, and the second piece is set in a typical science fiction convention panel setting.  I would love to see some material of Delany in a more academic setting, engaged in conversations as a critic, rather than as an author and fan community participant, but I haven't come across that material yet.  Still, this is fairly interesting stuff.  I might follow up on this in the somewhat distant future.

On Delany's The Jewel Hinged Jaw, Initial Thoughts

I came across this recently, and thought I would put it up. My initial reaction to Delany's first collection of science fiction literary criticism.

Samuel Delany’s collection of essays The Jewel Hinged Jaw shows a lot of similar pressures as other science fiction criticism at the time. There is still a clear sense that the genre was not respected either in the academy nor in many mainstream literary arenas. At the same time, it is also clear that science fiction is becoming an important commodity. One can see the shifts that occur within the book itself. The initial essay discusses the commercial uptake of the genre. At that point, it was impossible to sell books labeled science fiction on the market because the distributors would just ignore them, but by the time “Shadows” comes out as an essay, that description had become outdated. This only represents one facet of what Delaney is trying to respond to. He is also involved in a complex conversation with the science fiction writing community about literary style and experimentation, a conversation about the problems with literary critics about the problems with structuralism, and with both authors and publishes about audience expectation in genre theory. In effect, he tries to juggle a lot of tasks, and it can be questioned whether he keeps all the balls up throughout.

Probably the most significant of the essays is the one entitled “Shadows”. It opens with a statement from Joanna Russ, which appears to be its purpose, an experiment in what science fiction criticism would look like. Russ argues that in order to produce science fiction criticism, the critic would have to engage a radically different set of tools in its production. This set of tools would emphasize the unusual and would bring in a whole set of interests traditionally read as extra-literary into the process. She states this in these provocative terms. “For example, allusions to the death of God will be trivial jokes, while metaphors involving the differences between telephone switchboards and radio stations will be poignantly tragic. Stories ostensibly about persons will really be about topology.” (Delany 38) Russ is, of course, referencing the modes of estrangement that operate in science fiction. She puts this estrangement in terms that would have be extremely familiar to the formalists that initially produced the concept of estrangement, which is in a manifesto form that takes on the forms of extremity and grotesqueness found in futurism.

Let’s return to Delany. He takes up these provocations and runs with them. Along with a discussion of science fiction, he introduces long conversations about structuralism and its relationship to literary criticism and anthropology, formal logic, and a series of anecdotes about Delany’s everyday life and his literary production. There are moments that it is difficult to grasp why these various fragments are put together, especially the moments of formal logic, but there seem to be a couple projects that can be drawn from the work. The first concerns the role of criticism. Delany argues against the structuralist imagination that posits their work reveals some sort of essential skeleton from the literary work. He instead argues that critical work can only allow for a partial, distanced look at the work. This response is always personal, although the best work will be methodologically rigorous. This isn’t a dismissal of criticism, and Delany makes the point of recognizing that criticism can allow for a more productive reading of the text, but it is an attack on the notion of the discipline as an objective science.[1] A second point swirls around issues of political domination. He argues that domination operates within a form of unconscious, rather than as conscious decision. He marks this in the remarks of a SF author, structuralist criticism, and later on in Ursula Leguin’s novel, The Dispossessed. The implicit argument seems to be that we can only begin to recognize these unconscious structures because the modes of resistance have put them into crisis. This has been because of the conscious decisions to reject those modes by the NSM’s. The final point might be that science fiction operates in a manner analogous to the future, by “casting a shadow over coherent areas of imaginative space that would otherwise be largely inaccessible.” (Delany 117-118)

What is to be made of this? The common point that might be drawn from these goals is that approaches to producing knowledge must remain contingent, multiple, and open to recognizing their own partiality and incompleteness. The brief even tossed of reference to the various new social movements might be an important clue to this in that they have challenged forms of knowledge production, even in older counter-systemic movements. Delany attempts to not only prove this, but perform it in his work. This leads to the modes of reflexivity that appear throughout the book as well as the various references to the tidbits of his personal life. To a certain extent, one could read Delany as a mediator between the late work of Michel Foucault and the various social movements that he is trying to understand.[2] The science fiction he examines is both a marker of these times and something that critically engages in these times.

[1] While I agree with Delany that criticism is always partial, subjective, etc, I think its important to remember that genre still acts as a disciplining an normalizing structure on what is recognized as literature (and criticism). A critic might be able to point to those forces within the work of art, which are not a ‘skeleton’ so to speak, but do mark its structural conjuncture.

[2] Foucault is, of course, not attempting to produce a history of these movements. Instead, they act as studies of the conditions that brought rise to these movements.