Shaviro describes Connected as “a speculative exercise in cultural theory,” and begins with a brief meditation on the parallels between science fiction and theory. He writes,
Both of these sorts of writing seek to grasp the social world not by representing it mimetically but by performing a kind of ‘cognitive estrangement upon it (a term Freedman borrows from Dark Suvin), so that the structures and assumptions that we take for granted, and that undergird our own social reality, may be seen in their full contingency and historicity. (x)Many theorists I’ve encountered comment on the relationship between SF and theory, but these comments are usually tantalizingly brief and underdeveloped. Shaviro claims to be writing a form of science fiction, but his theoretical justification is limited to a short preface. (I haven’t read Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction, which might be the text for which I’m searching.) Nevertheless, Shaviro does offer some valuable insights, some of which I will articulate here.
First, an idea inspired by Shaviro (he doesn’t argue this directly): there may be a formal and/or stylistic mode that critical theory shares with science fiction. According to Csicsery-Ronay, one of SF’s seven beauties is “fictive neology.” He argues that SF functions as a source of language innovation and that the new words it deploys are a key element of the genre. SF readers “decode” and begin to understand a new cognitively-estranged world in part through encountering and deciphering the fictive neology within an SF text. Each SF author coins new words to describe their speculative inventions, for example, words such as “cyberspace,” “matrix,” “net,” and “virtual reality,” some of which bleed over into popular usage (like Gibson’s “cyberspace”).
Like SF, critical theory is also a source of language invention, new words, and concepts. Many of the terms developed by theorists are explicitly science fictional: Haraway’s “cyborg,” Baudrillard’s “hyperreal,” Hayles "virtuality." Many theorists create their own coinages to represent concepts that are closely related to those of other theorists. This seems not unlike SF authors who develop their own fictive neology to describe things like artificial intelligence, faster than light travel, genetic engineering, digital information and communication systems, and so on. Each SF author not only develops his or her own fictive neology for the features a cognitively-estranged world, but also offers his or her own perspective on how a particular novum will change the world. When you read an SF novel, you can’t help but situate it in relation to other SF works in the SF “metaverse.” What does Neal Stephenson do with cyberpunk in Snow Crash that Gibson doesn’t? How is this author’s “cyberspace” indebted to and/or different from Gibson’s depiction of it in Neuromancer?
I think these questions are a more elemental part of the SF reading experience than literary criticism. In other words, I think the chain of intertextual associations that the fictive neology triggers in a reader's mind is something that occurs for those without formal training in literary criticism, for those not interested in situating authors in relation to one another for the purpose of academic discussions. In any event, I would conjecture that a similar chain of associations occurs when we read theory, which, unlike most SF, is a highly-rarefied academic discourse. How many other theoretical notions does D&G's concept of the "rhizome" evoke for experienced readers of theory, for instance? From how many theoretical notions does the rhizome itself derive from and complicate? The skillful SF writer, like the theorist, must survey how a science-fictional (or theoretical) trope has been addressed previously in order to write something original and provocative, in order to evoke the cognition effect of SF.
To the extent that SF is attempting to explore the social and cultural consequences of technoscientific development, these are important questions; both theorists and SF authors are trying to get a handle on the current globalized technoscientific condition. Like the SF metaverse, these theoretical perspectives also exist in a continual conversation. Indeed, as Shaviro points out, quoting Freedman,
critical theory and science fiction share ‘certain structural affinities’ (23) in the ways that they engage with late capitalist society. Science fiction and critical theory alike are engaged in the task of what Frederic Jameson calls the ‘cognitive mapping’ of postmodern space: an effort that ‘seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system,” given that this system is unrepresentable by traditional mimetic means (54)I’m interested in critical theory as science fiction at least in part as a way of understanding and situating myself within the sheer volume of theoretical discourse available to a scholar in the humanities. I often think about questions such as, “Which theorist offers the most insightful and useful model of the phenomenon under consideration?” “Which theorist do I find most accessible and interesting?” “What theoretical work offers me the thrill of gaining a new vantage point on the world?” Similarly, we tend to evaluate SF authors to the extent that they offer estranged perspectives on reality, fictional insights into the direction of technoscientific development, to the degree that they evoke cognitive wonder. Critics have commented extensively on Neuromancer, for example, precisely because it is so useful for thinking (pleasurably) about contemporary human-techno relations.
When I consider Connected as a whole, I don’t get the sense that Shaviro offers any unifying thesis concerning “what it means to live in the network society.” There doesn’t seem to be any particular theory being developed in the text, nor does Shaviro seem to think any particular theorist offers a privileged vantage point on the condition of being “connected.” All the usual suspects are here: Benjamin, Foucault, D&G, Derrida, Haraway, and others. However, his ability to employ them in his analysis of various science-fiction texts and contemporary techno-cultural concerns is remarkable.
Shaviro’s rapid forays into various cultural texts begin and end abruptly. Stylistically, the effect evokes the sensation of surfing television or web browsing. I read Connected as an e-book, in fact, so I found it easy to read alongside my other online activities, like listening to music and checking my Facebook. If I lost my place, I could just jump to the next italicized topic heading. I was unfamiliar with many of the works he examines, particularly the music, so my reading sent me to Google several times, where I either looked at books on Amazon or videos on YouTube. I wish I could say that I did something like “spiral out into the web,” propelled by Shaviro’s abundant use of cultural texts, that his text in fact connected me to other texts. However, I’m reminded of how a few websites owned by a few companies control so much of my access to information. Shaviro, in his reading of Jeter’s SF novel Noir, notes that that every connection leads back to a corporation (1).
Connected doesn’t provide any easily-summarized set of ideas about the networked society. This is in part because so much of his discussion is situated in relation to specific cultural artifacts: experimental hip-hop albums, music videos, science fiction literature, digital copyright law. He examines an array of cultural texts emerging from and reacting to capitalist technoscientific development, and the insights are as diverse as the texts themselves. This is both innovative, but also frustrating, as I’m used to being able to quickly gain a sense of a text’s primary conceptual/argumentative movements. Connected demands a different style and set of expectations for reading.
Like the network society, Connected employs a sort of fractal structure. There isn’t a table of contents or a traditional chapter organization, and ideas seldom build from one another in a linear fashion across sections. The reader is more or less thrown into the “middle” of a series of mini-meditations on cultural artifacts that embody the features of the networked society. However, like a fractal, Connected contains recurrent patterns. It explores new theoretical tropes appropriate to the network society: the virus, the system, the hive mind. Connected also reexamines how pre-digital ideas and entities are transformed and reconfigured within network society: the body, the soul, and money. It would have been useful for Shaviro to explain in more detail his rationale for his book’s unconventional structure – is this how cultural criticism reads in the network society?
It also seems difficult to extract Shaviro’s observations from the cultural artifacts on which they are based; although the author employs a “networked” argumentative structure, his ideas seem to resist easy replication and portability. In other words, aside from the idea of cultural criticism as SF, it would be hard for me to imagine how to use Shaviro, except for the odd quotation, or in relation to a specific text he analyzes, or perhaps as an inspiration for a new way of performing criticism. As I write this, however, I realize that these are all interesting ways to connect a text to other texts. Perhaps Connected suggests that doing cultural criticism or theoretical work in the network society is letting go of monolithic theoretical constructs. Or, more precisely, the desire for a unified interpretive framework from which to understand our place within the network.
Useful quotations about SF and critical theory/cultural criticism from Shaviro’s preface:
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“This means that science fiction is the privileged genre (literary, cinematic, televisual, and digital) for contemporary critical theory, in much the same way that the nineteenth-century realist novel was the privileged genre for the early-twentieth century Marxist criticism of Georg Lukacks and others.”
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“Throughout this book I look at cultural practices, especially those involving digital media, both as they are described in science fiction novels and films and as they are being enacted today on the Internet. I do not distinguish between these two sorts of sources. My aim, like that of any other science fiction writer, is to discern the changes that are transforming our world into a very different place from the one into which I was born. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will happen then, a hundred, or a thousand years from now; what distinguishes the genre is its linguistic and temporal orientation. Science fiction is always written in the future tense – conceptually, if not grammatically. Not only is it about what has not yet happened, but its very structure is that of the not-yet happened. It addresses events in their potentiality, which is something vaster and more mysterious – more perturbingly other – than any actual outcome could ever be. Science fiction is about strange metamorphoses and venturesome, unpredictable results. It is a practice of continual experimentation, just as science and technology themselves are.”
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“Science fiction conjures the invisible forces – technological, social, economic, affective, and political – that surround us” (xi)
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“It is only by writing cultural theory as science fiction that I can hope for my work to be (in Lenin’s famous phrase) ‘as radical as reality itself’ (xi)
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