REVIEW-ARTICLES
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr
Postmodern Technoculture, or The Gordian Knot Revisited
Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. xxii+438. $34.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Andrew Ross. Strange
Weather. Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits. London
& NY: Verso, 1991. 275p. $59.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.
Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991. xvii+327. $39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.
Ever since we have had "Western" history, we have been taught to admire Alexander's
bold stroke, when he sliced through the decadently overcomplicated Gordian knot with the
consummate logic of his sword blade. Somehow that use of force became associated with
reason, and theory became the razor, the keen edge, the brilliant stroke that could cut
through the tangle of the world. With postmodernism and what Fredric Jameson calls
postmodernism theory, the knot is making a comeback.
The Gordian knot is a good emblem for the problem of postmodernism. For the postmodern
sensibility, the threads of the world are inextricably intertwined. What earlier eras took
to be different categorical levels, hierarchical heights and depths, postmodernism sees as
twists and loops. With the debunking of the ideas of origins and ends, signs and
referents, essences and occasions, the world has come to appear as a great knot, its
threads seeming to begin nowhere, ending nowhere, and maybe even imperceptibly fused. This
knot does not tie anything up; if we could solve the tangle of languages and the web of
communication/control we would not find the Truth revealed inside, like a Christmas
present. The knot is all there is; it not only holds postmodern culture together, it is
the postmodern world.
This topological fantasy is not as bizarre as it sounds. Fredric Jameson has based his
contribution to postmodernism theory on the premise that a "great transformation" took
place after World War II, a transition to an international capitalism, whose ideology
effected the spatialization of what has previously been conceived temporally (156). The
concept of cognitive mapping that informs Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism is essentially a socio-topological one. Like the concepts it
purports to co-ordinate, cognitive mapping is also a spatializing, explanatory operation
that can only go so far in pointing out the vectors of future change and evolution.
Even so, a few things need to be added to the Gordian knot to make it truly postmodern.
For us it isn't the cool formal proto-topological symbol of the universe it probably was
for the ancients of Asia Minor. For us it must move, even if not toward inevitable
self-solution. And since we will be most concerned here with the SF-dimension of recent
Left theories of postmodernism, let's change the knot's strands into...serpents.
Harryhausen serpents. That's the ticket: the Gordian knot of postmodernism is a writhing
tangle of stop-animation serpents. And no cardboard heroes in sight.
Jameson's perspective on postmodernism is that of an observer of the knot. He stands at
a distance, walks around it, examines several threads, moves to a new vantage, all the
while commenting on the "flow" of the knot. Most of the essays in Postmodernism have
appeared before, and the title essay has had such a powerful influence on the concept of
the postmodern that I will assume most readers of SFS will not need them
explained. It is striking, however, to readers familiar with Jameson's pioneering work on
SF that he does not explicitly discuss the genre very much in the book. Jameson treats
architecture, video, installations, film, the syntax of Claude Simon, and other privileged
concrete compartments of pomo culture. But not SF.
The book's introduction, it is true, opens with an allusion to William Gibson, to which
Jameson adds a footnote regretting the absence of a chapter on cyberpunk, "henceforth,
for many of us, the supreme literary expression of, if not postmodernism, then of
late capitalism itself" (419, n.1). Evidently, SF in general and cyberpunk in particular
would have a privileged position in the constellation of postmodern expressive modes, were
Jameson to discuss them. It's easy to imagine why: what more potent image of spatialization is there than Gibson's cyberspace and its real-world cousins, Virtual
Reality and Artificial Life? Postmodernism does include short meditations on
LeGuin and the utopian revival of the 60s, Delany's use of undigested chunks of theory as
an aesthetic device, Road Warrior and Blade Runner, Ballard's
"Voices
of Time," as well as a longer analysis of Dick's Time Out of Joint as a model
for the ideological double bind of American culture in the 50s. These quick hits are
important to the arguments in which they occur, and there is much to be said for folding
discussions of SF unobtrusively into the whole fabric of postmodernism without
distinguishing it as a distinct genre--if contemporary SF truly does produce the supreme
literary expression of pomo, then why should it be artificially separated and put on
display?
This must be why Jameson refers nowhere in Postmodernism to his influential
essays on SF, not even in footnotes or his bibliography. There are rumors that these will
soon be collected in a separate volume. That would do them justice, for SF figures at the
heart of Jameson's theory of postmodernism. Jameson makes much of the historical affinity
he detects between the historical novel and SF. Like the historical novel, which emerged
in Europe at a time when national cultures were forced to imagine the concept of
historicity, i.e., that social life is subject to fundamental changes at the hands of
human agents, SF is, for Jameson, a new form adequate to the new historical (or rather
post-historical) consciousness of the age. If the historical novel "corresponded" to the
emergence of historicity in the late 18th, early 19th century, "science fiction equally
corresponds to the waning or blockage of that historicity, and particularly in our time
(in the postmodern era), to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression"
(284). This is the basis for an extraordinarily rich analysis which Jameson does not, in
fact, provide.
There are obvious differences between the Lukácsian view of the historical novel and
quasi-Lukácsian views of SF (apart from the fact that it's difficult to imagine Lukács
ever considering SF an adequate vehicle of social representation). There is in the Marxist
view of historical fiction a sort of adequation-test, which has to do with the degree of
dialectical class-conscious analysis of concrete social phenomena that the bourgeois
European readership might see around them. By contrast SF is, as Ballard is so often
quoted saying, a literature not won from experience. The many varieties of SF have to
stand up to completely different tests. If they are analogies, they are abstract
model-producing analogies, and their test is more statistical than dialectical. Even when
we agree with Jameson and most Left critics of SF that SF is about the present, we cannot
ignore that is also profoundly future-oriented. Not like historical novels, which were
explicitly intended to be interventions in national partisan conflicts that, it was hoped,
would be resolved in the future. SF's future is full of the promise of breaks as radical
and novums as unpredictable as the "great transformation" of the postmodern present
through its cyber-evolution. There is always an element of the wager about SF: a system of
bets on what will last and what will wither away, wagers that are not entirely
logical--cultural, historical or otherwise. A fundamental wager of SF concerns how much of
the evolution of the future is a matter of logic at all.
The notion that SF is adequate to the blockage of history sounds very similar to
Lukács's own assessment of the sincere realistic historical novelists at the end of the
heroic period of critical realism. They may have done their best, but they simply did not
have a reality sufficiently great to be displaced into a great art. Is Jameson implying
the same about SF? If we are to go on the evidence in Postmodernism, Jameson's
view of SF is, on the whole, negative. Once the naive utopian experiments of LeGuin
and 60s "heterotopian" SF are factored out, SF is evidently a machine for producing images
for the blockage of historical consciousness. Many of Jameson's pieces in SFS, from the
essay on Aldiss's Starship through the often-cited "Progress versus Utopia,"
have treated SF as a rich and powerful symptom of the absolute bad faith of postmodernism.
To what extent Jameson is now basing his theory of the postmodern on cyberpunk I would
love to know.
Eventually, I believe, Jameson's theory of the postmodern will have to ride a serpent
or two, if it is to go beyond a distant description of a cultural-historical period as if
it were already finished and contained. Like Haraway's cyborg and Baudrillard's fatal
strategies, it takes a kind of delirious entry into the knot to imagine its
transformations. What is lost in such a letting go is the sort of rational
comprehensiveness that has always been Jameson's great gift as a cultural critic. For the
moment, Jameson has offered a compromise. Postmodernism tries to balance the
postmodern demand for de-totalizing accounts with Jameson's own modernist commitment to
totalizing description. The compromise is in the form of a constellation of
cultural manifestations that are linked by the underlying economic determination of late
capitalism (determination in the last instance in crypto?), but whose relations
to the social-economic formation are incredibly complex. "In periodizing phenomena of
this kind," he writes, "we have to complicate the model with all kinds of supplementary
epicycles" (xix). Epicycles, indeed; is postmodernism theory a Ptolemaic cosmology
awaiting its Copernicus? Rather than a full totalizing theory or a display of difference, Postmodernism
is best read as an excursion, an extended meditation reaching a serene climax in the
"associative flow" of the concluding section. It is distant, but it is masterful.
Andrew Ross has no use for totalizing theories. Strange Weather has an
activist agenda; instead of standing away from the knot to try to see it whole (impossible
in any case, because of its serpentine shape-changing), Ross comes up close in order to
identify certain strands that he believes may be trying to untie themselves.
SW is a synchronic series of cross-sections of contemporary American
subcultures for whom technology is a central concern, and who are not explicitly aligned
with the historical Left. In his accounts of these subcultures --New Age, hackers,
technocrats, cyberpunks, futurologists, and Ross's sweet new category, "weather
culture"--Ross studies the ways they reflect the dominant cultures they wish to resist
and at the same time the ways they appropriate the tools and forms of the dominant culture
for their own uses, displacing, deflecting and subverting hegemonic goals. In design, SW
is rather tenuously stretched between the ethnography of techno-subcultures like Sharon
Traweek's study of high-energy collider culture, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, and a
sort of highbrow Mondo Cane, a travelogue about bizarre practices and belief
systems--bizarre at least to the rationalist materialist choir to whom Ross preaches. Ross
often shows unexpected sympathy for unlikely objects. His chapters on New Age groups,
computer hackers, and weather-watchers gain depth because he becomes a willing subject of
their putatively skewed resistance to the dominant culture of multinational capitalism.
The obvious criticism is that Ross oversimplifies highly complex and diverse subcultures
(especially New Age and SF) for polemical purposes; his point is precisely to understand
the liberatory seeds in these scorned communities in order to make them useful
for revolutionary social transformation, to discover avenues for synthesis with a green
cultural politics.
The groups Ross studies have all been scorned by the Left for the same reason: their
ostensibly uncritical commitment to technology. Technocentrism has been traditionally
viewed as anti-human or dehumanizing by the New Left, a vulgar submission to the allure of
technocratic capitalist manipulation. Without giving up the critique of technoscience as
the dominant ideology of multinational capitalism, Ross accepts that technological
domination and the reduction of nature are inexorable givens of the postmodern era. The
problem then is to understand the agents of technological practice well enough to
influence the development of new, emancipatory, democratic technological designs.
This, in opposition to Jameson's magisterial Hegelian historicism, is cyborg populism.
Although Ross does not invoke them very often explicitly, the thought of Donna Haraway and
the cyborg provides the theoretical vehicle for Ross's touring. Haraway is the most
prominent current articulator of this need for the Left to take a fresh look at technology
and technocultures in order to begin to use them for counter-hegemonic purposes. Ross goes
so far as to imply that one of the subcultures, computer hacking, is the exemplary one.
For hackers, who are fiercely proud of their technical identity and jealous of their
freedom, are the ones who are actually best placed to practice serious resistance. This
leads Ross to propose a generalized hacker identity, a real-world cousin of the
theoretical cyborg. Ross wishes to extend the notion of hacker down the caste hierarchy of
systems analysts, designers, programmers, and operators, to include all high-tech workers,
"who can interrupt, upset, and redirect the smooth flow of structured
communications that dictates their position in the social network of exchange
and determines the pace of their work schedules" (92). I'm not sure whether this
isn't terminological inflation of a group-name that is pretty clearly defined at
the moment. And Ross's own enthusiasm for hacker resistance leads to an
exaggerated "ich bin ein Hacker" attitude that
fudges the distinction between technocultist and literary intellectual that gives Ross'
book its intelligence and critical distance in the first place.
SW includes two essays that deal explicitly with SF. "Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum," which treats the technocratic tradition of the Futurians and
Gernsback-era SF, and "Cyberpunk in Boystown," which treats cyberpunk as a literature of
defeatist technological determinism. It is refreshing to read a discussion about the Gernsback era in terms of its activist social milieu, the
"engineers' revolution"
dreamed by the Technocracy movement and the Futurians. And Ross restores some dignity and
sophistication to the reputation of the Golden Age, which was treated for many years as a
world of purely juvenile masculine fantasy. Here too there is some oversimplification--as
when Ross takes Gernsback at his word regarding his intentions to provide populist
enlightenment through the popularization of science. (My colleague R.D. Mullen has pointed
out to me that Gernsback's devotion to the rhetoric of hard science, of which Ross makes
much, had little to do with the stories he accepted. And further, the fact that the most
popular and imitated SF writer of the period was A. Merritt calls into question Ross'
notion that early SF was characterized by straightforward populo-rationalist language.)
Perhaps because of Ross' investment in the notion that hackers are a potentially
progressive force, "Cyberpunks in Boystown" is one of the weakest essays in SW.
Ross' complete lack of sympathy with the putative subcult is in sharp contrast with his
treatment of the New Agers and hackers, leading him to overstate his objections to
cyberpunk style. One reason for this is surely that cyberpunk, and Bruce Sterling's
megalomaniacal claims for it in the 80s, are sitting ducks. Ross' piece fits into what is
by now a fairly thick pile of similar essays by Left SF critics; Darko Suvin, Peter
Fitting, Veronica Hollinger, Tom Moylan, myself, and most recently Terence Whalen and
Nicola Nixon have all had a bash at that particular serpent, and it has proven to be a
surprisingly mild-mannered old python. Indeed, at this point in the game, we may all end
up envying Jameson's canny delay in discussing cyberpunk. After having called c-p the
apotheosis of the postmodern (I don't retract it), I now wonder whether it is not
Sterling's effective game of overstatement that should be studied, rather than his
ostensible claims.
More to the point, by clinging to a fairly literalist notion of cyberpunk, Ross misses
out on the actual subculture most affected by the SF--namely the engineers of virtual
reality. Two of Ross' concrete models of cyberpunk are Gibson's fiction and the
role-playing game Cyberpunk. The first is a natural choice, even though I believe
by now it is apparent there is more postmodern c-p to be found in Sterling and SF film
than in Gibson, who more and more seems to me to be, as an artist, a "late modernist."
The latter is an odd choice, since role-playing games are hardly the place to discover the
implicit codes of a subculture. An attitude that is conveyed by explicit rules is
blatantly derived and in bad faith.
The most significant elements of the cyberpunk world view are cultivated by the
visionaries of virtual reality, for whom the transformation of the human being into a
cyborg, replete with artificial experiences, is a matter of imminent material possibility.
These material changes could affect political and cultural life to an as yet unimaginable
degree. A project like Ross' requires the study of VR and its relation to dominant
technoscience since VR is in a position to transform the material future, while cyberpunk
probably is not.
Furthermore, the fashionable pitting of the cyborg against the cyberpunk, the
emancipatory radical feminist theory-being versus the juvenile male romantic outlaw, is,
as the saying goes, already tired. Neither term actually names an existing thread in the
writhing knot of postmodernism. The cyborg is underdefined...she may yet exist, but
perhaps she is by definition in an always not-yet state, an object of terrific desire and
hope. The cyberpunk, on the other hand, is overdefined, a fantasy, first of the young SF
Turks, then of the information establishment, a Hollywood gentrification of the
hacker-nerd. It would be much more useful for the Left to begin to study the vectors of
virtualization and the politics of experience it will inevitably create, and soon.
If SW is an attempt to find the potential threads of progress in subcultures
that are by and large apolitical, Technoculture,a collection of essays edited by
Ross in collaboration with Constance Penley, delivers examples of technophilic social
movements that are actively engaged in a politics of liberation. The title of the
collection is misleading, since Penley and Ross are interested in technological
countercultures, not the broader spectrum of technoculture that characterizes
postmodernism as a cultural dominant. As in SW, the essays emphasize the
appropriationist praxis of these groups-- which include abortion rights discourse,
pornography in Japan, AIDS activism, hacking (Ross' contribution is his chapter of hacking
included in SW), rap, popular video, K/S, workers' cultural underground, avant
garde and mega-events, and, by way of inoculation, cyberpunk fiction. More than SW,
Technoculture speaks the discourse of difference, and is directed to a much more
activist, and difference-oriented audience than SW. Indeed, putting the two books
together one gets the sense that the distinction between (utopian) social movements and
(ideological) subcultures that Ross has attempted to take the edge off in SW (by
appropriating from the appropriators) remains very much in force in current Left
discourse.
Technoculture also can be read as being under the sign of SF. Haraway, in an
interview later republished in her Simians, Cyborgs and Women, discusses her
notion of SF as the provider of critical alterity. There are also two explicit discussions
of SF. Fitting's "The Lessons of Cyberpunk" is a general overview of cyberpunk's place
in the contemporary SF scene. Written primarily to provide a lay audience an account of
cyberpunk as a cultural phenomenon, Fitting's piece is a useful critique. But it adds
little to the pile of Left essays on c-p I mentioned above, bringing in the usual
suspects, Gibson and Sterling. Fitting's is one of only two essays in Technoculture
(the other is Jim Pomeroy's "Black Box S-Thetix: Labor, Research, and Survival in the
He[Art] of the Beast") that can find almost no redemptive twists in the subculture under
discussion. Of course, cyberpunk is no social movement to begin with, and my critique of
Ross' treatment of the genre in SW holds for this book, too. Cyberpunk may very
well be part of technoculture at large, but it is a straw man in a discussion of
emancipatory futurism.
Much more intriguing for me is Constance Penley's account of the K/S, or slash
subculture, the community of fans devoted to rewriting the original Star Trek
with Kirk and Spock as lovers. This piece, "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and
Technology," attempts to describe techno-appropriation by true amateurs. The subject is
ripe with interesting questions about gender identification and displacement, of
genre/gender bending, and the desire for free self-expression by women wary of feminism's
perceived requirements of political correctness and puritanism. Star Trek offers
its transformers a thesaurus of SF conventions that welcome subversions: alien contact,
esoteric communications, relations between humans and machines, and many other topoi that
invite symbolization of gender relations.
Penley has truly landed on one of the most puzzling appropriative phenomena I have ever
encountered. It is no wonder that she found it a fascinating practice; but it seems to me
that she emphasizes her particular example far more than general theoretical questions
about appropriation and liberation. Absent other equally popular underground rewritings of
mass cultural texts, K/S seems to stand alone as a model for this activity. It may be the
result of Penley's particular interest in psychoanalysis that the most significant element
of appropriation/subversion appears to be erotic politics. Since Penley does not theorize
this in the essay, but offers no alternative models, the wider significance of K/S remains
unclear. The slash phenomenon does not cease to seem eccentric, and it would be nice to
know how all this fits into Penley's theory of women's viewing of SF before we actually
begin to see mainstream slash movies, and then it'll be too late.
All three of these books are significant contributions to the question of technology's
position in postmodern culture. If technology is the determining material system of
mediations in postmodernism, then Haraway, Ross, Penley and other students of
technoculture are right to study the possible avenues in which technology can be coaxed to
serve democratic and humane needs. But the root question that must continue to be asked of
the Marxist or radical populist-materialist theory of technology is whether the acceptance
of the cyborg theory has not been premature. I read both SW and Technoculture
as attempts to give flesh and bones to the cyborg, a concept that remains so indefinite
that it equals utopia in its abstraction. The fear of being considered latter-day Luddites
or unhip in a technoculture may be leading many intelligent commentators to give up the
ethical subject as historical agent a bit precipitously. The very non-materialist and
unhip Jacques Ellul makes the claim at the end of The Technological Bluff that
ultimately it is the quality of individuals' choices that determine the quality of social
life. If individual subjectivities are de-legitimized in favor of the cyborg, whose
choices can never be pre-figured, who will choose how to change technological design to
make it more democratic? What will democracy be for?
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