A model that helps to better conceptualize the absence of origins in a historical approach to genre is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of the rhizomatic assemblage.8 What Deleuze and Guattari call a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (22) is constituted by “lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” (3). It has no center, no “hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, [but rather] the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system … without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (21). The most important feature of the rhizomatic assemblage in relation to genre theory is that it is an “antigenealogy” that “operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots…. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” (21). The movement of texts and motifs into and through SF does not confer a pedigree on them, then, but instead merely connects one itinerary to another. The paths that connect those itineraries are not given in the “acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying” structure of the genre, but rather have been and must be constructed by writers, publishers, and readers out of the conjunctures they occupy and the materials at hand.
The notion that SF’s history is one of “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” rather than a lineage of ancestors and descendants is nowhere more important than in the study of what, following the hint in the title of Everett Bleiler’s indispensable bibliography, Science-Fiction: The Early Years, I would call early science fiction. Studying the beginnings of the genre is not at all a matter of finding its points of origin but rather of observing an accretion of repetitions, echoes, imitations, allusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to an emerging sense of a conventional web of resemblances. It is this gradual articulation of generic recognition, not the appearance of a formal type, that constitutes the history of early SF. Thus, rather than sorting out true SF from the genres in its proximity or trying to find its primal ancestors, it is far more useful to take stock of the way SF gradually comes into visibility in the milieu of late nineteenth-century fantasy, imperial adventure fiction, the romance revival of the 1880s and 1890s in England, the boy scientists of the American dime novel, utopian writing, the future war motif, and so on.9 One is not looking for the appearance of a positive entity but rather for a practice of drawing similarities and differences among texts, which is the point further elaborated by the third proposition.
SF is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing relationships among them. All those involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of SF—writers, editors, marketing specialists, casual readers, fans, scholars, students—construct the genre not only by acts of definition, categorization, inclusion and exclusion (all of which are important), but also by their uses of the protocols and the rhetorical strategies that distinguish the genre from other forms of writing and reading. John Frow, at the beginning of his excellent and concise 2006 book on genre theory, writes: “I understand genre as a form of symbolic action: the generic organization of language, images, gestures, and sound makes things happen by actively shaping the way we understand the world…. Texts—even the simplest and most formulaic—do not ‘belong’ to genres but are, rather, uses of them” (2). The fact that genre requires “symbolic action” rather than being inherent in the form or content of a text can be illustrated by the way generic difference can reside within verbal identity. Consider the example offered by Samuel R. Delany of applying realist versus SF protocols to the sentence “He turned on his left side,” where the realist reading understands that someone has changed the position of his body, but the SF reading might mean that he has activated the left side of his body by turning on a switch (“Science Fiction and ‘Literature,’” 103). My point is not so much that the SF reading exploits the grammatical and semantic possibilities of the language in a different and richer way, as Delany argued, as that the second reading depends upon the reader’s familiarity with and use of SF conventions—in particular, here, the expectation that the distinction between organism and machine is going to be blurred or violated. Both the writer and the reader of the sentence in its SF sense are using the genre to actively shape their understanding of the world—that is, the world depicted in the text in question, and its relation to both an empirical environment and to other generically constructed worlds (the world of fantasy, the world of comedy, and so on).10
The distinction between a text’s using a genre and its belonging to it also changes the relationship between the individual text and the genre, so that it is no longer one of simple exemplification, where the text stands as a metonym or synecdoche of the genre. The character of genre as “symbolic action” implies that genre is one of the many kinds of codes that, as Roland Barthes pointed out so relentlessly in S/Z, a text activates. Generic hybridity is not a special case, then; any narrative longer than a headline or a joke almost inevitably uses multiple generic conventions and strategies. Distinctions between SF and fantasy typically, if tacitly, acknowledge this fact, since they so often turn upon the status afforded to realist conventions in relation to the rest of the narrative. Because of the way that multiple genres play upon and against one another in individual texts, pigeonholing a text as a member of this or that genre is much less useful than understanding the way it positions itself within a field of generic possibilities.11
SF’s identity is a differentially articulated position in a historical and mutable field of genres. Frow, after postulating the thesis that texts use genres rather than belong to them, goes on to say that the uses of genre in a text “refer not to ‘a’ genre but to a field or economy of genres, and their complexity derives from the complexity of that relation” (Genre, 2). To speak of an “economy of genres,” as Frow does here, means to think of the generic codes activated in a text or by a reader as a matter of making choices with values attached to them by virtue of their difference from other possible choices. Such an economy depends crucially on the system of genres in play at a given time and place. Genres—like phonemes and words in Saussure’s lectures on linguistics—are here considered values that signify by virtue of their difference from the other values in their field, and may change or lose their meaning if transposed into a different system. Thus, as Tony Bennett puts it, generic analysis must always take into account “the system of generic differences—conceived as a differentiated field of social uses—prevailing at [a given] time in terms of its influence on both textual strategies and contexts of reception” (108), because every generic choice constitutes what Pierre Bourdieu calls a position-taking with respect to the positions and values that structure the contemporary field of choices. Understanding the dynamics of genre in a given text depends upon being able to understand the field that offers the writer or reader its range of generic possibilities and determines the values attached to them.
Problems of generic economy are absolutely crucial to SF studies in two ways, the first having to do with questions of prestige and the second with writing the genre’s history. Roger Luckhurst has written very entertainingly about SF’s “death wish,” which is to say its desire to stop being SF and become “literature.” The source of that desire is the way positions and values line up in the contemporary economy of genres to produce the negative connotations often attached to “genre fiction”: “The paradigmatic topography of ghetto/mainstream marks a border on which is transposed the evaluations popular/serious, low/high, entertainment/Literature…. The only way, it is proposed, to legitimate SF is to smuggle it across the border into the ‘high.’ And for the genre as a whole to become legitimate paradoxically involves the very destruction of the genre” (Luckhurst, “Many Deaths,” 37–38). The conceit of the death wish actually refers to something rather different from an instinctual drive, of course—the fact that, although one can make choices (in this case, about genre), one can choose only from the options that history makes available. Many scholars (and editors, writers, and readers) of SF would like to have their SF and their literature