# 6 = Volume 2, Part 2 = July 1975
Boris Eizykman
On Science Fiction
Translated by Peter Fitting
Editorial Note. The book by Eizykman mentioned below is both an interesting and, to my mind, intellectually very undisciplined work, When Professor Fitting proposed a discussion of it to SFS, it provoked sharply opposed reactions from reviewer, editor, and editorial consultant. For these reasons it was found most useful to print a recent article by Eizykman in which he sums up his approach in a relatively clarified way. -DS.
Translator's Note. Boris Eizykman's Science fiction et capitalisme: critique de la position de désir de la science (Paris 1974) is a difficult and forbidding work, in its language, in its polemical stance, and in its theoretical horizons and density. As a theory of SF it is part of the larger position of "libidinal economy" and the work of J. F. Lyotard Discourse, Figure (1971), Economie libidinale (1974); see Robert Hurley, "Introduction to Lyotard" in Telos 19 (Spring 1974). This theoretical position is grounded in a conceptual apparatus based on Freud (which can perhaps be best understood by referring to the recent translation of the Laplanche-Pontalis vocabulary of Freudian concepts, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London 1973), in particular to the sections dealing with the Economic aspects of mental processes) and on the seminal Capitalisme et schizophrénie: 1. I'Anti-oedipe of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (1972, English translation due early in 1975). The following article appeared in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, April l, 1974.
SF is a revolutionary, mutant literature. But it is hard to see how it can escape the scandalous classification which presently exiles it to the dungeons of sub-or para-literature (a vile concept, deserving only of history's garbage can), as long as the swampy amalgam which has been trying to engulf it endures. Most SF specialists are responsible for sustaining this smug amalgam when they study SF according to its themes or its history. The histories of the genre are animated by a concern for a so-called objective exhaustiveness, that is, by a completely arbitrary desire for totality which manifests itself in either the constant pushing back of SF's historical limits (colonialism), or in the perpetually frustrated obsession with not omitting a single name, a single title beginning with a specific origin or within the never questioned framework of the specialty magazines, as if the criterion which determined a work's appurtenance to the genre could be summed up as follows: everything published in an SF magazine qualifies for the label of authentic SF!
In similar fashion, the thematic perspective is but a pretext for a painstakingly assembled and impressive list of authors who have in common only the use of a theme so general as to include no matter who, no matter what, and no matter when! But what is hidden in this desperate extension of lists is how these themes are used, their specific treatment, in other words, and the very contradictory and different desires they contain. Thus an Assyrian myth which raises the question of eternal life has in fact nothing in common with The World of Null A and the hypothetical immortality of Gilbert Gosseyn, nor with lack Barron and his sorrowful eternity.1 The same type of mistake leads to asserting that H. Beam Piper and P.K. Dick are both SF writers, an assertion about as relevant as the statement that both Franco and Puig Antich are Spaniards,2 or that Bernard Buffet is comparable to Barnett Newman under the pretext that both inscribe colored pigments on a plastic surface. The criterion which is lacking in such an amalgam concerns the relationship of desire to reality, the reality of desire, which can possibly be understood by reference to the concept of "reduplication" introduced around 1950 by Michel Butor when he wrote that SF ("reduplication") was a new form which was taking on the role of exotic or escape literatures-- in reality, the literature of false escapes since it consisted of disguising our contemporary reality as well as the most traditional adventure stories by means of futuristic gadgets, planets, and more or less exotic extraterrestrials. By projecting "our reality" into the future which will, as a result, remain virtually unchanged, these stories attempt to maintain the reader in "his" reality: so that he will find himself back in his own reality rather than having escaped from it, and so that there will be no possibility of envisaging any other reality.
It is not very difficult to show, in particular through a study of temporality in these stories (their temporal structures as well as their treatment of time), how, apart from their camouflaged roots in the all too familiar context of 'our reality,' these stories participate in the existing systems of order and power (which goes much further than a simple paranoiac identification with the hero), and how they reinforce the coordinates of "our" reality (space and time), which they claim are universal, eternal, and objective by means of this "vampirization" of the future. This is how our society works, by accusing madmen and drug users of fleeing reality; a good example of coercive insanity which demands the recognition of its unique and exclusive validity. There are, in fact, an infinity of spaces, of times, and of possible realities; and madmen and drug users violently reject any exclusive reality which tries to substitute itself for this potential infinity. Thus the proximity of SF to madness and drugs, in that SF reinstitutes this infinity of realities while separating itself from the literature of reduplication.
In two novels recently published in France the respective treatments of time are sufficient to show the fundamental differences between SF and reduplication. H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan is but the desire to extend to all possible universes the marketable "secondary" characteristics of capitalist time (secondary in the sense that Freud speaks of "secondary processes," the articulated processes for binding libidinal energies). P.K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, on the other hand (like the admirable Temps incertain by Michel Jeury, which has just been named the best French SF novel of 1973), disrupts time as we know it, provoking repetitions and impossibilities which thus create new realities where these times are no longer impossible. This SF is directly related to a larger mutation which is beginning to take shape in contemporary society, a mutation of desire by which the values of capitalism, that is to say exchange value and the kinds of works subject to this law, are disinvested and abandoned. There are instead desires for other modes of relationship between individuals, with things, with the universe; relationships which could be termed more intense, but which, in any case, are no longer subject to existing social codes; relationships which could be termed more intense, but which, in any case, are no longer subject to existing social codes; relationships which point toward the psychic and somatic mutations that define SF. This SF bears witness to the fact that space and time are arbitrary bonds which make possible the cohesion of the (psychological) Subject, as well as the institution of power and of work. Firstly, the dissolution of time and of the Subject is tested and tried out through intense emotional states. But in SF too, the various psychic powers of entities from parallel or future worlds, as well as the abolition of time and space, appear as the realization of the free circulation of the energies of the unconscious, without space or time, where the impulses flow in chaotic simultaneity, with maximum intensity, where the "connections of desire" (Deleuze and Guattari) are unlimited, without blocks, outside the usual, exclusive channelings of those energies. And this dissolution in turn, through the institution of a circulation of absolute giving, with no possibility of return, suppresses: 1) the menace of power, which, to the contrary, depends on the fixing of those energies to specific moments and authorities (the self, institutions, etc.); 2) the menace of work, insofar as it is understood as a generalized repetition (of the same gestures, decisions, productions, the same elements, the same connections; and 3) the menace of exchange value which today conditions all our productions.
It is important to realize that the disinvestment which now strikes capitalism from within, through the unbounded desires which are bursting all the regular circuits which delimit and restrict our powers of experimentation, are, as a result, freeing unlimited power and are opening the way towards the tremendous and wonderful mutations foretold in SF, towards unverifiable psychic powers (as in D. Galouye's recently translated Lords of the Psychon). Instead of copying or masking "social reality," SF invents radically new societies, ephemeral models defined by the absolute opening up of libidinal production. Consequently it is inappropriate to apply to this literature the theoretical grids which have been developed on the basis of "our" blocked reality. Let us use rather this revolutionary power of invention (of connection) to imagine other realities. And in this way SF is utopian, for it is the social no-place through which intensive desires and currents pass: SF is directly related to those contemporary mutations of desire which, in recent interviews, P.K. Dick and Norman Spinrad have described as being on the rise in and against capitalist society. SF is destined to perish as it becomes the reality of the unforeseeable unbinding of desire.
NOTES BY TRANSLATOR
1. In his Encyclopédie de l'utopia et de la science fiction, Pierre Versins discusses, under the heading "Immortality," the Epic of Gilgamesh as well as the novels of van Vogt and Spinrad.
2 Puig Antich was a young anarchist garrotted by the Franco government in 1974.
ABSTRACT
SF is a revolutionary, mutant literature. But it is hard to see how it can escape the scandalous classification that presently consigns it to the dungeons of para-literature (a vile concept, deserving only history’s garbage-can) as long as the swampy amalgam which has been trying to engulf it endures. Most SF specialists are responsible for sustaining this smug amalgam when they study SF only according to its themes or history, concepts too broad to assist in determining the differences between, say, H. Beam Piper and P. K. Dick. Instead of copying or masking "social reality," SF invents radically new societies, ephemeral models defined by the absolute opening up of libidinal production. Consequently, it is inappropriate to apply to this literature the irrelevant theoretical grids—the searches for themes or lists of writers—that have developed. SF is utopian, for it is the social no-place through which intensive desires and currents pass: SF is directly related to those contemporary mutations of desire which, in recent interviews, P. K. Dick and Norman Spinrad have described as being on the rise in and against capitalist society. SF is destined to perish as it becomes the reality of an unforeseeable unbinding of desire.
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