On Defining SF, or Not Genre Theory, SF, and History.pdf

ON DEFINING SF, OR NOT

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John Rieder

On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History

In his groundbreaking 1984 essay, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film

Genre,” Rick Altman could accurately state that “genre theory has up to now

aimed almost exclusively at the elaboration of a synchronic model approximating

the syntactic operation of a specific genre” (12). Only a few years later, in 1991,

Ralph Cohen announced that there had been a paradigm shift in genre theory, in

the course of which its dominant project had changed from identifying and

classifying fixed, ahistorical entities to studying genres as historical processes

(85-87). Yet the impact of that paradigm shift on sf studies, while no doubt

contributing to the predominantly historical rather than formalist orientation of

most scholarly projects these days, has been neither so immediate nor so

overpowering as to render entirely clear its implications for conceptualizing the

genre and understanding its history. In this essay I aim to help clarify and

strengthen the impact of an historical genre theory on sf studies.

I start from the problem of definition because, although constructing generic

definitions is a scholarly necessity, an historical approach to genre seems to

undermine any fixed definition. The fact that so many books on sf begin with a

more or less extended discussion of the problem of definition testifies to its

importance in establishing a framework for constructing the history of the genre,

specifying its range and extent, locating its principal sites of production and

reception, selecting its canon of masterpieces, and so on. 1 Perhaps the scholarly

task that best highlights the importance of genre definition is bibliography, where

the choice of what titles to include necessarily has to be guided by clearly

articulated criteria that often include such definitions.

Yet it seems that the act of definition cannot ever be adequate to the notion of

genre as historical process. Altman’s 1999 Film/Genre , one of the best and fullest

elaborations of this approach to genre, argues that “genres are not inert categories

shared by all ... but discursive claims made by real speakers for particular

purposes in specific situations” (101, qtd. Bould and Vint 50). Thus Mark Bould

and Sherryl Vint argue in a recent piece, drawing on Altman’s work, that “There

Is No Such Thing as Science Fiction,” by which they mean that “genres are never,

as frequently perceived, objects which already exist in the world and which are

subsequently studied by genre critics, but fluid and tenuous constructions made

by the interaction of various claims and practices by writers, producers,

distributors, marketers, readers, fans, critics and other discursive agents” (48).

The critical and scholarly act of definition seems reduced, in this conception of

the “claims and practices” that constitute the history of the genre, to no more than

one among many other “fluid and tenuous constructions.” In fact, the only generic

definition—if one can call it that—adequate to the historical paradigm would be

a kind of tautology, an assertion that the genre is whatever the various discursive

agents involved in its production, distribution, and reception say it is. And indeed

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statements of that kind consistently come up in discussions of the problem of

defining sf, the best-known example being Damon Knight’s gesture of dismissal

toward the very attempt at definition—“Science fiction is what we point to when

we say it” (122, qtd. Clute and Nicholls 314).

In his 2003 essay “On the Origin of Genre,” Paul Kincaid manages to turn the

tautological affirmation of genre identity into a thoughtful position. Basing his

argument on the notion of “family resemblance” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s

Philosophical Investigations , Kincaid proposes that we can neither “extract a

unique, common thread” that binds together all science fiction texts, nor identify

a “unique, common origin” for the genre (415). He concludes that

science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things—a future

setting, a marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an

interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of

story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, here more

overt, here more subtle—which are braided together in an endless variety of

combinations. (416-17)

The usefulness of Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance for genre theory

bears further discussion, and I will return to it a bit later. For now, the important

theoretical point with regard to Kincaid’s argument is not only to agree that,

according to an historical theory of genre, sf is “any number of things,” but also

to note and emphasize that this account of genre definition, like Altman’s and

Bould and Vint’s, involves subjects as well as objects. It is not just a question of

the properties of the textual objects referred to as “science fiction,” then, but also

of the subjects positing the category, and therefore of the motives, the contexts,

and the effects of those subjects’ more or less consciously and successfully

executed projects. To put it another way, the assertion that sf is “whatever we are

looking for when we are looking for science fiction” does not mean anything

much unless “we” know who “we” are and why “we” are looking for science

fiction.

In what follows I propose to offer an account of the current state of genre

theory as it applies to the attempt to say what sf is. The first section of the essay

will concentrate on conceptualizing what sort of thing a genre is, or is not. The

final section will then return to the question of how to understand the collective

subjects of genre construction. I am asking, throughout, what does the

tautological assertion that sf is what “we” say it is mean if taken as a serious

proposition about the nature, not just of sf, but of genre itself? And if the

notorious diversity of definitions of the genre is not a sign of confusion, nor the

result of a multiplicity of genres being mistaken for a single one, but rather, on the

contrary, the identity of sf is constituted by this very web of sometimes

inconsistent and competing assertions, what impact should this understanding of

genre formation have on the project of writing the history of sf?

Genre as a Historical Process. I am going to make five propositions about sf,

each of which could also be reformulated as a thesis about genre per se,

constituting what I take to be a fairly non-controversial but, I hope, useful

summary of the current paradigm of genre theory. The sequence leads from the

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basic position that genres are historical processes to the point where one can

effectively address the questions about the uses and users of sf that occupy the

final section of this essay. The five propositions are:

1) sf is historical and mutable;

2) sf has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of

origin;

3) sf is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing

relationships among them;

4) sf’s identity is a differentially articulated position in an historical and

mutable field of genres;

5) attribution of the identity of sf to a text constitutes an active inter-

vention in its distribution and reception.

Let me explain and defend these propositions one at a time.

Sf is historical and mutable. Nearly all twentieth-century genre theorists

before 1980 would have agreed that “Theory of genres is a principle of order: it

classifies literature and literary history not by time or place (period or national

language) but by specifically literary types of organization or structure” (Wellek

and Warren 226). The newer paradigm, in contrast, considers generic

organizations and structures to be just as messily bound to time and place as other

literary-historical phenomena, albeit with patterns of distribution and

temporalities of continuity and discontinuity that may differ quite strongly from

those of national traditions or “periods” in Wellek and Warren’s sense. A newer

paradigm is not necessarily a better one, however, and the choice between these

two alternatives remains a matter of first principles, where the evidence seems

susceptible of logically consistent explanation from either point of view. That is,

if one considers sf to designate a formal organization—Darko Suvin’s “literature

of cognitive estrangement” has of course been by far the most influential formal

definition—then it makes just as much sense to find it in classical Greek

narratives as in contemporary American ones; and, in addition, it makes sense to

say, as Suvin did, that much of what is conventionally called sf is actually

something else. But the newer paradigm holds that the labeling itself is crucial to

constructing the genre, and would therefore consider “the literature of cognitive

estrangement” a specific, late-twentieth-century, academic genre category that has

to be understood partly in the context of its opposition to the commercial genre

practices Suvin deplored. Suvin’s definition becomes part of the history of sf, not

the key to unraveling sf’s confusion with other forms.

Strong arguments for the logical superiority of the historical over the formal

approach to genre theory have been advanced from the perspective of linguistics

and on the grounds provided by the vicissitudes of translation. 2 Beyond that, I

would argue, the historical paradigm is to be preferred because it challenges its

students to understand genre in a richer and more complex way, within

parameters that are social rather than just literary. 3 Confronted, for example, with

the controversy over whether such acclaimed pieces as Pamela Zoline’s “The

Heat Death of the Universe” (1967) or Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See”

(2002) are sf or not, a formal approach can only ask whether the story is or is not

a legitimate member of the genre. Does it accomplish “the presence and

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interaction of estrangement and cognition ... [in] an imaginative framework

alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin, “On the Poetics” 375)?

Is it a “realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on

adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough

understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method” (Heinlein

9)? Is it “modified by an awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a

structure of structures” (Scholes 41)? 4 Does it explore the impact of technology

or scientific discovery on lived experience? And so on. An historical approach to

genre would ask instead how and why the field is being stretched to include these

texts or defended against their inclusion; how the identification of them as sf

challenges and perhaps modifies the accepted meaning of the term (so that

questions about form also continue to be part of the conversation, but not on the

same terms); what tensions and strategies in the writing and publication and

reading of sf prepare for this sort of radical intervention; and what interests are

put at stake by it.

Sf has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of origin.

That sf has no point of origin or single unifying characteristic is the Wittgen-

steinian position Kincaid proposes in “On the Origin of Genre.” The application

of Wittgenstein’s thought to the notion of genre that is crucial to Kincaid was first

proposed in 1982 in Alistair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature (41-44), an impressively

erudite book whose central thesis is that genres are historical and mutable. As

Fowler saw, Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance” is enormously

suggestive for genre theory because it conceptualizes a grouping not based upon

a single shared defining element. In the language game that constructs the

category of games, for example, Wittgenstein says, “these phenomena have no

one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all—but ... they are

related to one another in many different ways.... We see a complicated network

of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities,

sometimes similarities of detail.” We extend the concept “as in spinning a thread

we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact

that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many

fibres” (31-32, sections 65-66; emphasis in original).

Another conceptual model for the shape of a genre that has no single unifying

characteristic is provided by the notion of the fuzzy set (see Attebery, Strategies

12-13). A fuzzy set, in mathematics, is one that, rather than being determined by

a single binary principle of inclusion or exclusion, is constituted by a plurality of

such operations. The fuzzy set therefore includes elements with any of a range of

characteristics, and membership in the set can bear very different levels of

intensity, since some elements will have most or all of the required characteristics

while others may have only one. In addition, one member of the set may be

included by virtue of properties a, b, and c, another by properties d, e, and f, so

that any two sufficiently peripheral members of the set need not have any

properties in common. It thus results in a very similar conception of the shape of

sf as one based on Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance. Either model

allows sf the kind of scope and variety found in John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction .

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It seems worth remembering, however, that something like such a fuzzy set

was precisely the target of Suvin’s influential intervention into the history of

definitions of sf. What Suvin opposed to the wide range of texts included in the

category of sf was a precise concept of the genre ruled by what Roman Jakobson

called a “dominant”: “the focusing component of a work of art ... [that] rules,

determines, and transforms the remaining components” (Jakobson 82). The

categorical entity constituted by a fuzzy set or family resemblance, from this point

of view, simply allows any number of incompatible versions of the textual

dominant to operate silently, side by side, producing in the guise of a narrative

genre a motley array of texts with no actual formal integrity. That, according to

Suvin, was the state of sf studies when he entered into it his own rigorous formal

definition, which directed itself powerfully against the illusion of integrity in a

generic field that had allowed itself to be delineated in such a loose manner.

I think that the conceptualization of sf as a fuzzy set generated by a range of

definitions remains susceptible to this formalist critique—that it indiscriminately

lumps together disparate subgenres under a nominal umbrella—because it is still

ruled by the logic of textual determination, albeit in a far more diffuse way than

that demanded by Jakobson’s notion of the textual dominant. A thoroughgoing

theorist of the fuzzy set, rather than being pressed to identify the dominant that

commands the operation of inclusion or exclusion from the generic set, would

face the daunting task of enumerating the range of characteristics that merit

inclusion, including not only textual properties but also intertextual relationships

and paratextual functions such as “labeling.” Such a task would indeed be

encyclopedic in scope, but I want to suggest that it would also be futile, because

the quasi-mathematical model of the fuzzy set can never be adequate itself to the

open-ended processes of history where genre formation and re-formation is

constantly taking place. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s thinking is more attuned

to the historical approach to genre than is the notion of the fuzzy set, because “the

term ‘language- game ’ is meant to call into prominence the fact that the speaking

of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein 11, section

23; emphases in original). Categorization, in this view, is not a passive registering

of qualities intrinsic to what is being categorized, but an active intervention in

their disposition, and this insistence on agency is what most decisively

distinguishes an historical approach to sf from a formalist one.

The term “family resemblance” has its shortcomings, however, when it comes

to thinking about the problem of generic origins. Historians of sf are all too fond

of proclaiming its moment of birth, whether it be in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

(1818), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing

Stories (1926), or elsewhere according to one’s geographical and historical

emphasis; and the term “family resemblance” encourages the construction of the

history of sf as some version of a family tree of descendants from one or more

such progenitors. 5 It is not quite enough to argue, as Kincaid does, that there is no

“unique, common origin” for the genre (415); the collective and accretive social

process by which sf has been constructed does not have the kind of coherent form

or causality that allows one to talk about origins at all. Even without reference to

Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism, the historical approach to genre proposed in

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