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HOME : EVENT-SCENES
Event-Scenes: e087
Date Published: 3/15/2000
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=220
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors
Fakeshop: Science Fiction, Future Memory & The Technoscientific
Imaginary
Eugene Thacker
The 21st century will be a time of biotech. Most people don't understand that we are entering a biological
revolution. They don't see biotechnology as connected to things far beyond biology. Biotech has the potential
to dramatically change electronics, computational devices via both hardware and software, and
multifunctional materials.
- Dan Goldin, Chief NASA Administrator (at the 1999 NASDAQ Biotech Summit in Seattle, WA)
Science Fiction has Disappeared
In a recent special report, Biospace.com - the major online hub for news in the biotech industry - featured
"Eight Visions of the Future" from a selected group of researchers in fields ranging from pharmacogenetics
to gene therapy. As may be guessed, most of the researchers deployed a rhetoric of combined technological
optimism and discovery science, echoing President Clinton's recent endorsement of biotech by naming
January "National Biotechnology Month." Such intimate fusions of narrativised scientific extrapolation and
speculation, and hard science research, are also to be found in the very techniques of biotech itself. This past
January, Celera Genomics, a private genomics corporation, announced that it had completed "90%" of the
sequencing of the human genome, years ahead of the federal Human Genome Project. As the networks of
technological advance, scientific research, institutional and corporate support, market values, and product
development become increasingly integrated, the modes of legitimation - that is, the discourses and practices
- through which biotech lays claim to the future of medicine, the body, and normativity, are more and more
reliant on the domain of science fiction.
Amidst the fin-de-millennium hype surrounding the intersections of postmodernism and science fiction,
Fredric Jameson had already outlined two functions for contemporary and future science fiction: a critique of
the concept of the future and a politicization of the utopian imagination. With the emergence of the biotech
century, near-completion of the Human Genome, and a dizzying array of biotech-research (cloning, tissue
engineering, stem cell research, labs-on-a-chip, proteomics, pharmacogenetics, etc.), it is clear that the
domain of extrapolation and speculation is becoming an essential component of current technoscience
research and practice. However, the points which Jameson makes for science fiction still apply to this
contemporary situation, perhaps with even greater resonance.
Function 1 - Forget the Future
As a critical function, science fiction performatively demonstrates what Jameson simply calls "future
history," that moment in which the project of imagining the future - whose narratological converse is the
historical novel's construction of narratives of progress - is seen to be conditioned by the social, scientific,
and technological dynamics of the present. Put simply, every imagined future has its past, just as every
historical moment has its own vision of the future. We need only to recall the changes in architecture, science
fiction film, illustration & design, consumerism, and most of all technology, to grasp this point. Science
fiction can not only reveal the baroque industrial clutter of the early twentieth century, the streamlined wind-
tunnel futures of the 1930s, the post-war outer space habitats of the 1950s, or the virtual futures of the 1990s,
but that it also provides a critique of the very ideological underpinnings of the task of imagining the future.
In this sense, imagining the future is not an issue of imagination vs. actualization, and neither is it an issue of
affirming the future, or "keeping the future alive." Rather, science fiction can configure the future as the
conditions of possibility and constraint for social change in the present. It can do this, as Jameson suggests,
through techniques of defamiliarization combined with good old-fashioned extrapolation, producing what is
essentially a political commentary on the possibilities of imagining radical otherness and difference.
Such a function is especially resonant as the wave of postmodern pastiche and citation begins to wane, and
the very ideological infrastructures of what means history may serve are being re-negotiated. We are now
entering what many are calling "the biotech century," in which the management of populations and
individual subjects is increasingly becoming an issue of databasing and data profiling, fetal design, off-the-
shelf organs, and telemedicine. What the concepts of collective (that is, species) social history and individual
(that is, bioinformatic) memory may come to mean in such a context has yet to be seen. But if the trends in
genomics, corporate biotechnology, "preventive medicine," pharmacology, and advanced simulation and
hyper-surveillance of the species-population and biological subjects is any indication, then the future
definitely appears to be something like the DNA chip or genetic algorithms.
Function 2 - Dysinfotopianism
This leads us to the second function Jameson outlines for contemporary science fiction, which he variously
characterizes as "imagining the future" or the "utopian imagination" (referencing Marcuse). Science fiction
demonstrates the contingency and impossibility of truly imagining the future (since every vision of the future
is conditioned by a historical moment in which it is imagined). Science fiction also demands that the very
terms in which the hegemony of "keeping the future alive" be mutated and transcience fictionormed in more
cathartic and "impossible" forms. Here the examination of boundaries between a lived, situated present and a
lived, imagined future, enter into a tension mediated by the "no-place" or dead zone of utopia. In such a
scenario, the utopian imagination becomes something other, or something more, than the critical dynamic
expressed by the Frankfurt school; it becomes what Baudrillard has identified as a "fatal strategy," a
technique of hyper-izing a given condition - that is, of applying a science fiction speed-extrapolation - until
that condition reaches its mutation point, point of "reversibility," or its own event horizon.
In one sense, then, this radical utopianism is no different from critique, since it measures the distance
between hyper-extrapolation and the present. In another sense, science fiction becomes more than just
theoretical critique, and demands of itself that it work from within the very sciences and technologies on
which it comments. This understanding and interest in technical matters is a very old aspect of science
fiction, extending back to Verne. But, more than science-by-other-means, such an understanding of science
and technology can also be mobilized towards unforseen points of crash-tech, pixellation-noise, and polygon
monstrosities.
Especially when dealing with biotechnologies, biomedicine, and the transcience fictionormations and
rationalizations in species-history and organism-memory, the ability of science fiction to symbolically and
technically demand radical otherness not outside of but through existing technologies is a crucial endeavor.
Without it, history becomes a linear narrative of exponential evolution (culminating in the "age of spiritual
machines"), memory becomes a FireWall-protected online database (the genetic RAM of the flesh), and the
task of envisioning the future is condensed into the act of literally putting in VR contact lenses. In this way,
radical utopianism or fatal strategy science fiction must not only work towards critique of bioscientific and
medical reason, but it must also work on a technical level towards extending and constructively mutating the
domain of possibility, such that the future does not become synonymous with a notion of progress.
Tel-E-mbodiments
How might these attributes of future-critique and radical utopianism operate in our present "network
society?" I'd like to offer a combination experiment and statement of purpose, by discussing the new media
collective Fakeshop, whose concerns over the body-technology relationship, "future memory," and science
fiction provide a test-bed for the functions described above.
First, Fakeshop make no secret of the fact that they operate in the symbolic domain, the domain of the
"vision machine," and the production and distribution of media in contexts of all kinds. In this they can be
considered an art-group, but the designation is only temporary. As many new media artists and groups show,
a technical know-how (especially a technical know-how of misuse) often forms one of the most generative
points of creativity for those working with new media. Thus Fakeshop can be considered more of a site of
research into the uses and mis-uses of computer and networking technologies, which often include the Web,
streaming media, programming, digital video and audio, IRC, 3-D modeling, and VRML. Combined with
such virtual technologies are often physical-space installations utilizing warehouses, abandoned industrial
spaces, basic construction materials, and live performers. All of these elements come together in a scheduled
networking session involving multiple participants, remote locations, and the real-time generation of
"artificial products."
The challenge which Fakeshop takes on is to utilize spectacular technologies (especially video and
projection modes), and to reconfigure them in such a way that they are as far from the standard multimedia-
theater format of audience-stage-screen as possible. Such a distancing or defamiliarizing strategy inevitably
means a rethinking of the relationships between body, image, and architectural space, as well as different
degrees of disorientation for physically-present and remote audience members.
Imploding Dead Media
One way of talking about the affective spaces which Fakeshop construct is to refer to the media revolution of
the late 19th century, when pre-cinema technologies such as shadow plays, dioramas, and the like begin to
become integrated into the developing urban environment of Industrialism. In particular, the tableau vivant -
most often an enclosed space in which a scene from a well-known literary work is displayed through a
viewing window - provides one takeoff point for the Fakeshop performances.
The fascination with the tableau vivant was not only that of a kind of living sculpture, but it was also that an
entire narrative became condensed into a single space, in which the difference between body and image
became blurred. Using this same effect of narrative condensation into space, Fakeshop has taken scenes from
several science fiction films - Coma, Solaris, THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451 - and used those scenes to construct
tableau vivant-like spaces (both physical and virtual) which audience members can inhabit. For example, a
scene from Coma of a large medical warehouse space of suspended bodies used for organ harvesting was
transcience fictionormed into a large scaffold structure, suspended performers, biomonitoring stations, and
digital cameras, which captured body-images which were then mapped onto wireframe bodies in a VRML
space.
Between genre science fiction (which still proceeds mostly through print) and contemporary technoscience
(which is increasingly becoming computerized), new media experiments such as those by Fakeshop offer a
point of negotiation between a critique of the future and the present mapping of the body. In such an instance,
science fiction becomes not a genre, but it actually begins to embody the very technologies it critiques.
Again, working on the symbolic level, such a strategy is also a re-membering and a dis-membering of how
history is constructed in the future visions of biotechnology and biomedicine. science fiction can thus
intervene in the construction of histories which, for example, involve the inevitable future ubiquity of
genomics and gene therapy.
Put briefly, science fiction can intervene in the production of the future by such hegemonic industries as
biotech. By integrating technoscience with science fiction narrative, a unique, ambiguous, and affective zone
is opened up in which real subjects (online or in the physical space) intersect with the celebratory future
visions of technoscience, mediated by the perturbations and questioning of science fiction. If the future is a
sign of the conditions of possibility for social change in the present, then the utopian function of science
fiction is to extend those possibilities, and to seek a future history which is about radical otherness and the
"promises of monsters."
Notes
Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Science Fiction." Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994.
Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990.
Biospace.com: http://www.biospace.com/.
Fakeshop: http://www.fakeshop.com/.
Jameson, Fredric. "Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?" Science Fiction Studies #27 9:2
(July 1982): 147-58.
Eugene Thacker teaches at Rutgers University, where he directs New Media & Digital Arts.