Finally, there is a tertiary phase of canon-formation as well: the tendency, already discussed above, of every distinct school of reading to privilege a distinct kind of reading matter. This phase of the process, which distinguishes not merely literature or even “good” literature but the best, the most important literature, is, as we have seen, also largely governed by generic factors (though no doubt more crudely ideological forces are here stronger than in either the primary or secondary phases). Science fiction is certainly literature in the primary sense, but often not in the secondary and—in any explicit fashion—very rarely in the tertiary sense.
Two conclusions may, then, be drawn. First, it is evident that the affinity a mode of reading has for a particular literary object is by no means a matter of taste or judgment within an unproblematically predetermined field of literature. Rather, it is the most subtle moment or what I have called the tertiary phase within the project of constructing literature itself, of determining, out of all the verbal material available for inspection, which works possess the peculiar power that all respecters of literature from Plato to Paul de Man have attributed to the object of their devotion or fear—which is to say that it is, like the primary phase of the same process, a functional act involving, in the long run, determinate social ends. Genre plays a large role in all phases of the canon-forming process, and genre is of course (as shall be discussed in some detail below) not in the least an ideologically neutral factor. Accordingly, if science fiction has rarely been a privileged genre, this means that the literary powers-that-be have not wished science fiction to function with the social prestige that literature in the stronger senses enjoys. It cannot be too emphatically stated that the marginally or dubiously canonical status of science fiction has nothing to do with a series of unfavorable judgments on a series of individual texts—as a conservative empiricist ideology of canon-formation might imagine—but results from a wholesale generic dismissal of a kind organic to canonization as a practice. Plausible reasons for the general disinclination to eulogize science fiction will become clear in the course of this study.
The second conclusion involves recognizing that, at least in the most rarefied—the tertiary—phase of the canon-forming process, the operative generic judgments may be implicit rather than explicit. Usually, this distinction is relevant when considering both the positive and negative choices of precritical schools of reading. The Leavisites, for instance, would have hotly denied that they had any special (or certainly any ideological) attachment to the sort of fiction produced by George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence, except insofar as such a preference expressed an innocent recognition of what was worth reading at all (and favorable, of course, to “life”). But what I maintain here—and this is, indeed, the central claim of the entire current essay—is that critical theory itself, especially in its most central, Marxian version, does implicitly privilege a certain genre; and the genre is science fiction. This is a large claim. But it should be clear that I am not trying to “revalue” any particular canon in order to beg admission for science fiction. Instead, I have described canon-formation itself, and I now maintain that the most conceptually advanced forms of criticism unconsciously privilege a genre that has been widely despised and ghettoized.
Such an assertion raises two difficult questions. How and why does critical theory privilege science fiction? And, if it does, why do most critical theorists seem to have been unaware of the fact? I tackle the first question in the following three sections of this chapter, in which I explore various dimensions of the affinity between critical theory and science fiction. I then take up the second question in the final section, where the question of the canon once again becomes paramount.
The Critical Dynamic: Science Fiction and Style
In examining the affinity between critical theory and science fiction, there is tactical as well as methodological economy in beginning with the specifically stylistic dimension of science fiction. Style is widely taken to be a privileged category in the analysis of any literary kind, a kind of touchstone of the literary itself. The critical or precritical status of this privileging, and its special relevance to the study of science fiction, will be discussed below. But the precise language characteristic of a genre can hardly fail to be a salient aspect of the latter, and we may begin by analyzing the language of the following passage, which opens a major science-fiction novel, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968):6
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised—it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice—he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.
In some of its particulars, the passage could be the straightforward opening of a mundane novel (that is, a novel in which the generic tendency of science fiction is reduced to the barest minimum): a married man, lying in bed beside his wife, awakes and is, presumably, about to start the day. The stylistic register of the paragraph, however, marks it as unmistakably science fiction. The key factor here is the reference to the mood organ—evidently a technical device somehow connected to emotional states and one that, though unknown in our own empirical environment, is an ordinary accoutrement of everyday life in the world of the text.
In fact, the mood organ does figure as an important motif in Dick’s novel as a whole. But in the context of the opening paragraph, its chief function is to signal the science-fictional character of the language, and thus to impel us to read the latter differently than we would read the language of mundane fiction.7 Because technology and emotions are apparently connected in ways unfamiliar to us (though not wholly unfamiliar or unpredictable, because we do know of mood-altering drugs, not to mention television itself), the adjective merry, as applied to a surge of electricity, may have a sense other than the expected metaphorical one. What does it mean to be “awake without prior notice”? We understand the difference between being jerked from deep sleep to full consciousness and gradually passing through intermediate stages; but the context suggests that a more specific meaning may be operative. Nor is the grammatically simple phrase “his wife Iran” free of ambiguities. Are we here in a world where a man can be married to an entire country? And what of the fact that Rick and Iran seem to sleep in different beds? As in mundane fiction, it may be a detail without profound significance, or it may signify certain sexual problems between the couple. It might, however, also signify some completely novel arrangement of sexual relations that is normal in the society portrayed. In any case, the whole topic of human feelings, sexual and otherwise, is estranged, and the question of a technology of emotion is posed. A few lines following the above paragraph is this bit of conversation:
“Get your crude cop’s hand away,” Iran said.
“I’m not a cop.” He felt irritable, now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.
This exchange might be completely mundane, until the final clause. But that clause, though formally subordinate, makes the crucial science-fictional point.
It would be possible, in a full-scale reading of the novel, to show how the first paragraph does function as an appropriate overture. Of course, not all of the possibilities raised there are actually developed. But the relations between technology and emotion do constitute the principal focus of the text, not only with regard to such household appliances as the mood organ, but also in connection with the state of virtual war between human authorities and androids, the latter presumed (though one cannot be completely certain) to have no emotions at all. But the opening of the novel may also stand alone as paradigmatic, on the molecular level, of the science-fictional generic tendency. The point to be stressed about the language is its profoundly critical, dialectical character. For undialectical theory, the most familiar emotions—love, affection, hatred, anger, and so forth—tend to be unproblematic categories, assumed to be much the same in all times and places, and to exist on an irreducibly subjective level. They may of course manifest themselves in a practically infinite number of permutations, and the precritical reader may relish such psychological fiction as that of Dostoevsky or Flaubert for the subtlety and acuteness with which those authors portray the