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Between Technophobia and Utopia: Science, Technology and Contemporary Literature
From: Columbia University
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Ursula K. Heise |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Ursula K. Heise, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, discusses the ostensible divide between the disciplines of art and science, demonstrating how they come together in specific works of contemporary literature. |
 n the Western cultural imagination, science and literature are often understood as two completely separate or even mutually exclusive spheres of endeavor. Science is perceived as the domain of rational inquiry and of the search for the abstract operating principles of nature, whereas literature represents the realm of imagination and intuition where individual and specific human circumstances are explored. Over the past two centuries, literature has often articulated its self-understanding in terms of this opposition, contrasting the moral and emotional exploration of the world in literary works with the "inhuman;" mechanistic explanations allegedly offered by science. Literary texts and artworks, in this view, function as defenses of the human spirit against the encroachments of industrialization, urbanization and technology. |
As a consequence, literature has quite frequently represented science and technology in ambivalent or negative terms. The classic text in this tradition is no doubt Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, along with the various film versions the novel has spawned. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" and H.G. Wells's novel The Island of Dr. Moreau similarly feature scientists who create monstrously deformed human bodies or minds. In other cases, science and particularly its technological applications give rise to oppressive environments that degrade humans to mere parts of machinery (Fritz Lang's film Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times), or even lead to the emergence of totalitarian societies (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World). |
This is, of course, not to say that technology has always been viewed with suspicion in literature. In the 1910s, the Italian Futurists, under the leadership of F.T. Marinetti, celebrated new transportation technologies, such as the car and the airplane and the experience of speed they made possible. Even the destructive techologies of military warfare became the object of Futurist praise as a means of liquidating obsolete social, cultural and aesthetic structures. But such an active embrace of technology remained the exception rather than the rule in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature. |
Under the double threat of nuclear annihilation and environmental disaster, skepticism vis-à-vis science and technology intensified in the literature of the late twentieth century. From the "day after" scenarios of atomic-age novels and films to the polluted, overpopulated or decaying cities and desertified environments of much recent science fiction, pessimism about the impact of science seems to prevail. |
In spite of the Cold War and global warming, however, the relation between literature and science has changed. Science generally makes less sweeping claims about its understanding of reality now than it did in the nineteenth century (whether this because of a "legitimation crisis," increasing specialization, or the nature of recent scientific discoveries), thereby diminishing the incentive for other cultural forces to articulate counterclaims. Literature, too, has become more ambivalent about its role, and the consequent blurring of the boundaries between "high" and "popular" literature has allowed themes previously confined to certain popular genres, such as science fiction, to spread to a broader spectrum of literary works. With computers transforming the work of visual artists, filmmakers and poets as well as physicists and statisticians, a sense of separation between science and art becomes harder to sustain. |
As a consequence, contemporary literature, far from associating technology only with apocalypse, also celebrates science's potential to transform human bodies, minds and cultures. From John Cage's techno-utopian poetry of the 1960s and '70s to the cyberpunk novelists' fascination with global computer networks and alterations of the human body, science has inspired contemporary writers with scenarios of fantastic possibility: deserts and moons transformed into livable habitats, hunger crises solved through the cultivation of artificial protein, humans with implanted sensory devices or neuroelectronic interfaces, biological and psychological gender transformations accomplished in less than a week--all these form part of exhilarating new worlds, crucially enabled by science and technology. |
Technology and the postmodern body
One dimension that has particularly attracted the imagination of contemporary writers is the expanded range of possible technological alterations of the human body through genetic engineering, advanced surgery or various types of "cyborgism," fusions of bodies and mechanical artifacts. Bruce Sterling's "Shapers," for example, genetically engineered and psychologically reconditioned family clans, would surely have filled Aldous Huxley with horror. In Sterling's work, the "Shapers" are first and foremost people who seek to extend their life span as far as possible--at the same time that they have come to form a power block that is in constant conflict with the "Mechanists," who alter their bodies through implants and prostheses, with the same goal. |
William Gibson's novels feature few characters whose bodies and minds have not been altered by implants and drugs, from the "ordinary people" who interface with computers through their nervous systems, carry microchips implanted in their brains or weapons surgically attached to their limbs, all the way to "vat-grown" ninja bodyguards and immensely wealthy patients whose financial resources allow them to live a virtual life in simulated space while their bodies no longer have any recognizable human shape at all. Some of these characters cause the reader more discomfort than others, but they do not call up the visions of monstrosity or totalitarian control of human reproduction that they would have been associated with in earlier texts. |
In a much more contemporary setting, computers in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs become a means of helping the disabled communicate with a world they would otherwise be exluded from: while the title seems at first to refer to computer programmers whose entire lives take place at Microsoft headquarters, at the end it designates advanced machines that help humans live the lives they need and desire. Far from appearing as mechanistic, deterministic and inhuman, technology in these works frees humans from biological and physical as well as social and cultural constraints. |
This is not to say that contemporary novels celebrate technological progress wholesale: Samuel Delany's Triton describes a world where people change gender with little effort, but where interplanetary wars also wipe out millions within minutes. Marge Piercy, while she endorses certain forms of cyborgism in He, She and It, in the end has her protagonists reject the creation of artificial humans as unethical. And the less futuristic protagonists of Christa Wolf's Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages [Accident: A Day's News] and Don DeLillo's White Noise experience intense anxieties over the possible consequences of radiation impact on their bodies. |
When one compares the way in which Western literary texts of the last quarter-century tend to represent technology with the way in which it was approached in the bulk of nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century literature, then what emerges is by no means a transition from technological pessimism to optimism. While technology tends to be celebrated more often than before, ambivalence and suspicion toward it remain. But what disappears is the belief in the possibility or even the desirability of a "natural" human body unadulterated by technology: even those authors (like Piercy or DeLillo) who are intensely ambivalent regarding the impact of new technologies do not envision the return to an "authentic," unmediated experience of the body as a viable alternative. This absence of nostalgia for the authentic and the natural is one of the hallmarks of what one might want to refer to as "postmodern" literature in contrast to "modernist" works that still expressed an awareness of alienation and a desire to overcome it, though often no conviction that this goal could be attained. |
Science and postmodern history
A similar ambiguity often attaches to attempts to deploy not only technological procedures and artifacts but also scientific theories in fiction. American authors Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, for example, some of whose works are structured around concepts of thermodynamics and information theory, portray societies saturated with technologies that can by turns become liberatory or threatening. Outside Anglo-Saxon literature, writers such as Stanislaw Lem, Arno Schmidt, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino and the French Ouvroir de Littirature Potentielle (OULIPO) group have also experimented with elements of science and mathematics to give shape to fictional texts. |
In the late '80s and early '90s, nonlinear dynamics, or chaos theory, became a major source of inspiration for writers such as Tom Stoppard, whose play Arcadia is explicitly based on chaos theory, and Bruce Sterling, whose cyberpunk novel Schismatrix narrates the future history of mankind following the model of Ilya Prigogine's philosophical extrapolations from his work in chemistry. |
Strikingly, many of these texts employ scientific theory as a model for explaining historical processes. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow are arguably less concerned with order and entropy in themselves than they are with tools that might reveal secret patterns of twentieth-century history, even though this search remains inconclusive. The same is true of Stoppard and Sterling's deployments of chaos theory. Inevitably, these texts envision history less as the outcome of human agency than of the operation of forces above or below the individual's threshold of perception and comprehension, a predicament that British novelist Christine Brooke-Rose has brilliantly fictionalized in her novel Out. |
The weakening or even demise of individual intention as a central motor force of history and society is described with fear and despair in some novels, with hope and even euphoria in others. This ambivalence about whether the human being as conventionally understood should be at the center of literary endeavor links the works that use scientific theories with the more technology-oriented texts that prominently feature robots, cyborgs and surgically or genetically altered characters. |
This postmodernist move away from the anthropocentric focus of realist and high-modernist narrative has opened up new avenues for the integration of science into literary texts--not necessarily making literature less human, but allowing it to envision the human in a broader range of contexts and histories. |
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