Notes on Estrangement 1: Quick skeptical comment on WorldCon academic track in Helsinki

This may just be the blazing Finnish sun and that weird walnut drink talking, but.

During his paper, Andrew Butler discussed Darko Suvin -- the theorist whose ideas are totally indispensable to our distinctively coherent, and focused, and totally packed-to-the-gunnels enclave conference here in Helsinki -- and in a throwaway comment, mentioned that Suvin thinks only a small fraction of SFF is any good.

Another way of putting that: Suvin might say that only a small fraction of SFF is actually cognitively estranging. (And btw, the more recent Suvin would certainly see cognitive and non-cognitive estrangement as braided together within any text, rather than functioning as a big distinction between SF and fantasy, or differentiating good books from bad ones).

I suspect that he'd see non-cognitive estrangements (which are mystifying, politically useless, conservative or reactionary in their effect) as fairly common. I think I would see them that way too, too, at least for the sake of argument!

I've been to two sessions and seen some fantastic papers and enjoyed them whole(withered)heartedly. But could that very enjoyment point to a problem? Is there maybe a pattern developing here? Do we perhaps systematically overestimate the political usefulness, or revelatory power, of the SFF we happen to love and/or happen to be researching? And/or if these texts do contain radical potentials (via cognitive estrangement or some other mechanism), do we systematically overestimate the ease with which we may access and elaborate those potentials as critics?

To take a crude example (and without doing justice to the nuance of the papers we've seen!): what if the figure of the cyborg does not rupture, but rather reinforces, the binary between nature and technology? What if chimeric human-animal hybrids likewise do not rupture, but rather reinforce, the binary between human and non-human?

(Or perhaps, what if these binaries have become like playthings that texts can rupture as often as they like to little or no effect, while unwittingly reinforcing other equivalent binaries, whose namelessness and elusiveness are part of their resilience and power? Equivalent binaries or other structures which nevertheless are quietly carrying out ubiquitous and obscure work on behalf of anthropocentric domination?)

I find the idea that We3 or Oryx & Crake or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? disquiet my deep normative structures halfway convincing. I also find the idea that they reinforce those structures halfway convincing.

There is a rich tradition of Marxist literary criticism, to which Suvin surely belongs, which takes as its starting point the powerful recuperative capacities of capitalism and its intermeshed systems of oppression ... a tradition which begins by viewing any object of culture as probably complicit, in at least most of its aspects, with that dominant order. Are we in danger of forgetting that tradition here?

In the WorldCon booklet, there's a splendid and indispensable field guide to academics. One important factoid is: academics do not squee, they critique. Behind it there hovers a gentle tongue-in-cheek recognition of the passion and pleasure of many SFF academics: shhh, don't spoil it for them, critique is just a scholarly squee -- nobody spoil it for them!

It feels a little close to the bone.

Notes on cognitive estrangement

1. Estrangement is a term that Suvin adapts from Brecht. This is pretty well-known. What gets mentioned less often is that cognition also comes from Brecht: or at least, if you look at the way Brecht uses that word, it makes Suvin's ideas a lot clearer.

2. More generally, I think it's really important to keep the context of radical theatre and dramaturgy connected with the concept of cognitive estrangement. Suvin in 'Estrangement and Cognition': "I want to begin by postulating a spectrum or spread of literary subject matter that extends from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author's empirical environment [...] to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum."

Of course the chief thing that Suvin is getting at here is a distinction, always a vague and complicated one, between mimetic and non-mimetic literature. But we could read the sentence in another way. It's very interesting that the proposed continuum extends from an act of material worldbuilding -- an "exact recreation" of an environment, presumably, would not be ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but furniture and walls and timbers and pipes and trees -- to a merely mental attitude, a way of looking, an "exclusive interest."

You could say it extends from the entirely real to the entirely simulated, presumably traversing all kinds of complex future-bearing material performativities. Somewhere in that complex territory, tangled together with visions, pranks, prototypes, drills, manifestos, folk tales, thought experiments and intuition pumps, war games, terms of incorporation, reparations invoices, spec sheets, white papers, victim impact statements, projected P&L statements, and design fictions, perhaps we may find science fiction.

Then we should stick a flag in it, right? Except, of course, that the territory must exhibit movement, because Suvin's spectrum is also reversible: what I just said was the material end is also only a phantasm, an "ideal," and all the way across the continuum lies a core Marxist keyword for capturing the objective materiality of a situation, whatever its participants happen to think about it: that is, an "interest."