From Utopia to Apocalypse. Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

213 Pages·2010·2.16 MB·English

by  Peter Y. Paik

FROM UTOPIA TO APOCALYPSE
F R O M U T O P I A
TO APOCALYPSE
Science Fiction
PETER
and the Politics
Y.
PAIK
of Catastrophe
University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London
Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paik, Peter Yoonsuk.
From utopia to apocalypse : science fiction and the politics of catastrophe /
Peter Y. Paik.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-5078-1 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-5079-8
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Science fiction—History and criticism. 2. Utopias in literature.
3. Apocalypse in literature. 4. Politics in literature. 5. Politics and
literature—History—20th century. I. Title.
PN3433.6.P35 2010
809.3'8762—dc22 2009016789
Printed in the United States of America on acid - free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal - opportunity educator and employer.
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR MY PARENTS
KYUNG-SOO PAIK AND JU EUN PAIK
MYSTERIES,
AFTER THEY HAVE BEEN REVEALED,
DO NOT CEASE TO HAUNT US.
CONTENTS
Introduction THE GOD THAT SUCCEEDED 1
1 UTOPIA ACHIEVED 23
The Case of Watchmen
2 THE DEFENSE OF NECESSITY 71
On Jang Joon - Hwan’s Save the Green Planet
3 THE SAINTLY POLITICS OF CATASTROPHE 93
Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind
4 BETWEEN TRAUMA AND TRAGEDY 123
From The Matrixto V for Vendetta
Acknowledgments 183
Notes 185
Index 201
INTRODUCTION
THE GOD THAT SUCCEEDED
The disbelief of the stars comes down to establish an unbalanced
heretical light
—ROBERTO JUARROZ, “SECOND VERTICAL POETRY,” NO. 17
(TRANSLATED BY W. S. MERWIN)
The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being
progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The
conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable
if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the
idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you
do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
—G. K. CHESTERTON, ORTHODOXY
This book is a study of revolutionary change. Inasmuch as it focuses on a
set of narratives belonging predominantly to the genres of science fiction
and fantasy, this study undertakes to examine the hypothetical transfor-
mations and imaginary upheavals overtaking fictitious individuals and
societies. Yet the underlying contention of this work is that science fiction
and fantasy, in particular narratives drawn from media often dismissed as
unserious and trivial, such as the comic book and the science fiction film,
are capable of achieving profound and probing insights into the principal
dilemmas of political life. Indeed, this book explores such themes as the
foundation of new political orders, the endeavor to realize utopia, the exi-
gencies underpinning tyranny, the relationship of a saintly politics to the
practice of realpolitik,and the potential and limitations of radical politics
1
2 INTRODUCTION
in the present age. Science fiction proves to be eminently constructive for
reflecting on these far - reaching questions, thanks in considerable measure
to its roots in the practice of philosophic speculation. Many works of the
genre are after all distinguished by the effort to imagine a fundamentally
different world, one that, though it might be drastically divergent from
the really existing world in its laws, mores, and technologies, nevertheless
exhibits the consistency and coherence of actuality. Science fiction can
accordingly serve as a vital instrument for the investigation of the contin-
gencies governing political life, the forces that structure and dissolve col-
lective existence, by providing the reader with visions in which familiar
realities are destabilized and transformed. By compelling us to imagine a
different order, science fiction cultivates in us the capacity to conceive of
our contemporary situation in a dynamic manner,whether in terms of its
disintegration or rejuvenation, making it the literary genre that perhaps
most actively fosters a sense of historical as well as—in the Nietzschean
sense—unhistorical consciousness in the present.
The work of literary speculation, to be sure, can be mobilized toward
the depiction of an ideal social order as much as it can result in the cre-
ation of a society with flaws and limitations distinct from our own, a col-
lective in which the ideals and repressions of our society have become, as
it were, dislodged and reshuffled before cohering into another, possibly
utopian, hierarchy of values. Leading academic critics of science fiction,
such as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, and Carl Freedman, have focused
on the utopian orientation of the genre, invoking Thomas More’s Utopia
as its prototype and Ernst Bloch as its presiding theorist.1The approach I
take in this book emphasizes by contrast what might be called the expository
aspects of literary speculation. Whereas More’s text generates the image of
a society already established and governed according to more rational and
enlightened principles, the texts on which this study concentrates deploy
the speculative mode in order to explore the dynamics whereby a social
and political order is transformed. Thus, the book takes as its imaginative
paradigm not More’s dialogue but rather Plato’s Republic,which portrays
the play of forces and desires—on a sweepingly collective as well as on an
intimately personal scale—whereby one type of social and political organi-
zation transforms into another. In a discussion of the evolution of the five
regimes, Socrates shows the just city, once it is completed in speech, under-
INTRODUCTION 3
going a process of cumulative decline and disintegration until it becomes
the worst of all regimes. Plato’s dialogue thus proves to be disarmingly
candid in these late passages about the fate of the ideal city after it has
been founded upon that perennial stumbling block of liberal thinkers,
the Phoenician tale or noble lie.
The idea of utopia has, nevertheless, provided the conceptual horizon
for science fiction scholarship; the genre’s emphasis on the technologi-
cally advanced future makes it, in the words of Istvan Csicsery - Ronay, a
significant repository of “critical utopian imagining.”2Science fiction, ac-
cording to Darko Suvin, manifests its utopian character through the opera-
tion of cognitive estrangement. A text portraying a society in which the
political institutions, social norms, economic system, and ways of life are
superior—i.e., more harmonious, reasonable, virtuous, enlightened, and
pleasurable—than those of the author’s own society serves to estrange the
reader by underscoring for her or him the bitter gulf that exists between the
injustices and oppressions plaguing the society she or he inhabits and
the more humane and enlightened political order on display in the fiction.3
Science fiction, in its most progressive incarnations, advances a form of
enlightened social critique, as inaugurated by More in his “great discov-
ery” of the capacity of human powers to abolish “misery, sickness, and in-
justice” by means of the transformation of “sociopolitical institutions and
norms.”4The utopian element of science fiction thus enunciates the im-
perative to bring the status quo closer to the fictional ideal, albeit with the
disclaimers that “the actual place” in question is “not to be taken literally”
and that “it is less significant than the orientation toward a better place
somewhere in front of the orienter.”5Carl Freedman continues this line of
thought when, following Ernst Bloch, he asserts that “the transformation
of actuality into utopia constitutes the practical end of utopian critique
and the ultimate object of utopian hope.”6
This is not to say that Freedman and Suvin underrate the diagnostic
powers of science fiction. As Freedman observes, the possibilities of social
critique in the genre rely on the effort to “account rationally for its imag-
ined world and for the connections as well as the disconnections of the
latter to our own empirical world.”7Yet, not surprisingly, the Marxist critics
of science fiction have not themselves managed to transcend the funda-
mental aporias and bedeviling contradictions of Marxist ideology. As much