by Rob Latham;
There is much more we could say about this rich political myth. But even this is enough to see how much this imaginary technoscientific Empire offers sf. The genre’s favorite counterfactual operations and mechanisms are all made rational by imperial ontology. Time-machines, faster-than-light travel, galactic history, parallel universes, the restless reconstruction of relationships between the center and the periphery endlessly replayed in the relationship between Old Earth and the offworlds, aliens and cyborgs, space opera, utopia and dystopia—these motifs, like many others in sf, rely on a cosmos governed by the laws and right of technoscience, and yet are open to almost infinite variation. Sf is an endlessly productive engine of local crises in a highly tolerant universe from which it is impossible to depart.
Hardt and Negri’s model of Empire has a distinctly science-fictional feel to it. Polybius, Machiavelli, and Spinoza may hover in the background, but the Empire of the contemporary resembles the familiar world of cyberpunk and tech noir.
Empire appears in the form of a very high-tech machine: it is virtual, built to control the marginal event, and organized to dominate and when necessary intervene in the breakdowns of the system (in line with the most advanced technologies of robotic production). (39)
The imperial order is formed not only on the basis of its powers of accumulation and global extension, but also on the basis of its capacity to develop itself more deeply, to be reborn, and to extend itself throughout the biopolitical latticework of world society. (41)
The empire’s institutional structure is like a software program that carries a virus along with it, so that it is continually modulating and corrupting the institutional forms around it. (197-98)
This is the imperial Sprawl, ruled not through decrees and armies (well, mostly not through armies) but through communication/control networks that distribute virtual power. This power is internalized by imperial citizens as surely as if they had chips embedded in their brains. In Empire, subjectivity is multicentered, produced through institutions that are terminally unstable, always breaking down. As the integrity of social institutions (such as schools, families, courts, and prisons) fragments, and the once-clear subject-positions associated with them weaken, the call for imperial comprehensiveness is strengthened, inaugurating a comprehensive ideology, a finely distributed pragmatic myth of networked, globally interlocking power. This is the twenty-minutes-into-the-future of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, and Mamoru Oshii, where computerized communications operate 24/7, generating a mindscape of consuming subjects into which capitalist ideology feeds directly. It perpetually breaks down and reconstructs human consciousness, as in a Cadigan novel, into provisional target-identities to which the nostalgic, utopian dream of wholeness can be sold and resold perpetually in variant, sometimes mutually contradictory forms, and which can be hired to convey its fictions of sovereignty ever deeper into the self that once imagined it was itself sovereign. In this empire, there are infinite possibilities of projection, but only one reality.
The most natural thing in the world is that the world appears to be politically united, that the market is global, and that power is organized throughout its universality. Imperial politics articulates being in its global extension—a great sea that only the winds and the current move. The neutralization of the transcendental imagination is thus the first sense in which the political in the imperial domain is ontological. (354)
Since contemporary imperial power does not emanate from one center, but rather from the cyberspatial ganglia of postmodern metropoli, resistance manifests itself in the daily refusal on the part of “the multitude” to follow commands. For Hardt and Negri, revolution is neither possible nor desirable, since no class can act as the self-conscious agent of history. Freedom rests, as in Gibson’s world, in finding one’s own uses for things. In contrast with sabotage, the resistance strategy of national modernism, resistance under Empire consists of withdrawing consent, of desertion (212). Even the greatest rebels are refuseniks, choosing to withdraw, leaving behind them, like the fused AIs in Neuromancer (1984), a world in which “things are things” (270). Although this strategy hardly promises much as a way of landing blows against the empire, it is a dominant motif in the countercultural “Lost in Space” (or alternatively, “Lost in the Urban Labyrinth”) subgenre. (Ironically, Lost in Space [tv series, 1965-68; film 1998] itself is as hysterically conservative as Robinson Crusoe.) Where the overtly imperial mode accepts the hierarchical network of administration—Starfleet commanders still representing the Federation—even mainstream popular works such as Farscape (1999-2003) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) try to establish a decentralized web of relationships in the uncharted territories, now just a wormhole away from the past (and the politics of empire).
This homology between Empire and sf extends to formal levels. The cinematic serial form, for example, is particularly well-suited for imperial sf. It permits an enormous variety of elements to be juxtaposed with only minimal motivation. In each episode, yet another cultural metaphor of spatial or temporal disruption is managed. This has been true from the earliest versions, such as Flash Gordon, to more recent ones—e.g., Star Trek and Farscape. The serial permits alien and local elements to be acknowledged, without threatening the order of things. The physically infinite expanse of space in such forms is generally controlled by forms of recursion and recapitulation—plot devices revealing that far-flung differences are related to the terrestrial metropole’s perennial problems. At its most intellectual extremes, sf can even imagine that basic laws of nature are artificial, tools for the manifestation and communication of power—as, for instance, Stanislaw Lem’s notion in “A New Cosmogony” of Great Cosmic Civilizations that change underlying cosmic laws in order to communicate with each other (and prevent human beings from ever threatening their hegemony).
Hardt and Negri’s Empire is a creature of its time. Its model is the image of global capitalism that crystallized immediately after the first Gulf War. Their vision is essentially the liberal world-picture, slightly Marxified, of a post-Fordist international service economy attending the transformation of production by computers and robots. The authors have surprisingly little to say about technologies other than communication/control nets. For them, technology signifies control, the “imperial machine” (34). Their conception of historical imperialism, too, ignores the technological momentum that demolished the dams and breakwaters of the nation-states, and created the constantly mutating channels of global flows. From the perspective of sf, Empire belongs to a special subgenre—let’s call it the sf of global management—with affinities not only to cyberpunk, but to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels (1951-53), James Blish’s Cities in Flight series (1955-1962), and Star Trek.
Sf’s imperial imagination is more comprehensive than this. Since the basic conditions of sf are made possible by the hypothesis of the immanent ontology of technoscience, the genre sets out to imagine the effects of any technology that might affect the way we live now. This includes not only the near-future applications of already operative communication/control technologies, but technoscience that might radically transform the most basic aspects of physical reality, such as nanotech, faster-than-light space travel, genetic engineering, etc. The only restriction sf writers have historically set for themselves is that the powers in conflict must test technology as a basis for sovereignty. Sometimes the drama is explicit, as in overt imperial science fictions. In works as various as H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974), Star Wars (1977), Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985), Dan Simmons’s Hyperion (1990), Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels and Iain Banks’s Culture novels, antagonistic technological regimes compete for dominance. Whatever their differences may be, however great the gulfs between them, they operate in the same social-ontological continuum, the
most salient quality of which is the ability of sentient beings to construct technological cultures to manipulate and extend their power over the worlds in play.
In the human-against-nature varieties of sf descended from Verne, heroic protagonists use their know-how to cope with problems posed by hostile natural phenomena. They may be ultimately successful, as in most catastrophe films, or they may fall to the superior power of the physical universe, as in works like Arkaday and Boris Strugatsky’s Far Rainbow (1963) and Sakyô Komatsu’s Japan Sinks (1973). Whatever the outcomes, each contest is a local test case for the resilience and maturity of human technoscience as a species enterprise. Even in stories that take resolutely anti-technological stances, and where the technoscientific empire takes an Ozymandian fall, such as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), the terms of struggle are determined by technoscience. Technological culture’s incapacity against the universe is the point of such parables.
To say that sf is a genre of empire does not mean that sf artists seek to serve the empire. Most serious writers of sf are skeptical of entrenched power, sometimes because of its tyranny, sometimes because it hobbles technological innovation. This is one reason why some Marxist critics consider the genre to be inherently critical, despite the fact that careful social analysis rarely plays a central role in sf narratives. Fredric Jameson, by contrast, has argued that sf thematizes (and indeed imitates) the way global capitalism prevents dialectical historical awareness from coming to revolutionary consciousness. Jameson traces the origin of sf in the West from Verne, whose works began to appear precisely at the point of transition from metropolitan modernism to imperialism (149). Jameson’s terms are different from the ones under discussion here, but it may be a short step from his view to the one I am proposing. Pace Hardt and Negri, the technoscientific Empire that makes sf possible has much in common with Jameson’s negative totality.
In the past fifty years, sf has come to occupy an important place in highly technologized cultures. In more and more areas, modernization wipes away pre-modern, and indeed pre-postmodern, hierarchical and transcendental world-views that obstruct market rationality and technological rationalization. Hypercapitalism labors to replace them with the “multicultural” coexistence of irresolvable, irreduceable, and intractable differences that must never develop into serious challenges to imperial sovereignty. The utopian ideal of universal right and law is replaced by the imperial practice of corruption—i.e., the constant violation of universality in the interest of power.
Empire requires that all relations be accidental. Imperial power is founded on the rupture of every determinate ontology. Corruption is simply the sign of the absence of any ontology. In the ontological vacuum, corruption becomes necessary, objective. Imperial sovereignty thrives on the proliferating contradictions corruption gives rise to; it is stabilized by instabilities, by its impurities and admixtures; it is calmed by the panic and anxieties it continually engenders. Corruption names the perpetual process of alteration and metamorphosis, the anti-foundational foundation, the deontological mode of being. (Hardt and Negri 202)
Empire manages its populations by bombarding them with a multitude of subject positions, a multitude of hailings. Each one pretends to offer the prospect of unity, consummation, the fulfillment of wishes, yet each is comfortably corrupt. They reproduce the imperial process of establishing sovereignty (for the market, for law and order) by creating and managing crises in individual subjects. Mark Bould theorizes that modern fantastic fiction is inspired by the need to manage this relentless forced division and mutation of subjectivity through a strategy of paranoid self-construction.
But this psychic and aesthetic equivalent of deserting the Empire has limited force in sf. In its purist forms, sf ultimately places its trust in the problem-generating and problem-solving capacities of technology and the ontology of science. The more technoscientific hegemony is consolidated, the more contradictions it seeks out and strives to mediate in fiction. The most characteristic imperial fantastic forms may then be world-blends, in which the technoscientific ontology of sf is mixed with other kinds. This is a well-established element of the Japanese sf-anime idiom. In many of the major works of the genre—Neon Genesis: Evangelion (1996-97), Serial Experiments: Lain (1998), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Galaxy Express (1996)—non-realistic domains of power or styles of representation infiltrate realism, creating hybrid worlds. It is also characteristic of much French sf (whose influence on Japanese sf is considerable), for which scientistic plausibility is secondary compared with carnivalesque blending and philosophical metaphor. Many—perhaps most—important works of sf violate the strict rules of scientific plausibility and introduce heteronomic realities into their stories. Arguably, this signifies that the power to manage cultural differences is at least as important to sf as the cultivation of technoscience’s mythology.
If my hypothesis is correct that the cognitive attraction of sf is closely linked to the imaginary world-model of Empire, many interesting projects may follow. It may help us to locate sf’s place in the formation of a larger ideological mythology of modernization and capitalist globalization. It may help us to see how sf mediates between the cultures of nation-states and the imaginary coexistence of infinite variety in unbounded order. It may help us to see how specific national cultures undergo globalization; and how technology impinges on artistic culture not only as a set of tools, but as a mode of awareness. And perhaps most important, it may, by showing us the extent to which we imagine the world in imperial terms, begin to challenge us also to see the world differently.
Notes
1. The one significant exception to this pattern is the Mitteleuropa of Karel Cˇapek and Stanislaw Lem. A case might be made for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the most northern city of which was Lem’s Krakow.
2. For overviews of British sf, see Stableford, Griffiths, and Greenland. For French sf, see Lofficier, the more eccentric Gouanvic, Bozzetto, and the special issue of SFS on sf in France (16.3 [November 1989]). A serious book-length study of French sf as a whole has yet to appear in English.
3. For German sf, see Fischer, Fisher, and Nagl.
4. Regarding Japanese sf, Matthew is uninformative; see Napier on anime, and the SFS special issue on Japanese sf (29.3 [November 2002]).
5. On Soviet sf, see Heller, Griffiths, and Nudelman.
6. For a discussion of “prototype-effects” applied to sf, see Stockwell 6-7.
7. Critiques of Empire include: Kevin Michael, “The Non-Dialectical Marxism of Hardt and Negri,” Theory/Practice Newsletter (April 2002)
8. On Baudrillard and Haraway as sf writers, see Csicsery-Ronay, “The SF of Theory.”
9. Adas and Headrick are exceptions.
10. See Headrick.
11. Brian McHale argues in Postmodernist Fiction that postmodernism replaces modernism’s epistemological dominant (typified by detective fiction) with an ontological dominant (typified by sf). He elaborates on sf’s privileges in Constructing Postmodernism, where he identifies cyberpunk as the quintessential postmodern genre. I have argued (in “An Elaborate Suggestion,” my review of Constructing Postmodernism) that sf is not truly concerned with ontology, since the many worlds it admits are part of the single, albeit diverse and highly malleable, immanent world of scientific materialism. To the extent that there are significant world differences, sf posits that they were either created or discovered (a
nd hence understood and appropriated) by technology. McHale’s notion of postmodernism’s ontological dominant is strengthened, however, if we take not sf, but the fantastic as the privileged genre of the age. Fantastic fiction and its various slipstream hybrids do not require any ontological decisions about the status of the imaginary worlds. (See my review of the Marxism and Fantasy issue of Historical Materialism in this issue.)
Works cited
Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: U of Cornell P, 1989.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books, 1951.
Bould, Mark. “The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy Theory.” Historical Materialism 10:4 (2002): 51-88.
Bozzetto, Roger. “Intercultural Interplay: Science Fiction in France and the United States (As Viewed from the French Shore).” SFS 17.1 (March 1990): 1-24.
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. “An Elaborate Suggestion.” [Review of Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism.] SFS 20.3 (November 1993): 457-64.
—. “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway.” SFS 18.3 (November 1991): 387-404.
Fischer, William B. The Empire Strikes Out: Kurd Lasswitz, Hans Dominik, and the Development of German Science Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1984.