Speculative Matter: Generic Affinities, Posthumanisms and Science-Fictional Imaginings

284 Pages·2012·1.63 MB·English

by  Laura Wiebe

GENERIC AFFINITIES, POSTHUMANISMS, SCIENCE-FICTIONAL IMAGININGS
SPECULATIVE MATTER: GENERIC AFFINITIES, POSTHUMANISMS AND
SCIENCE-FICTIONAL IMAGININGS

By LAURA M. WIEBE, B.A., M.A.

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

McMaster University © Copyright by Laura Wiebe, October 2012
McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2012) Hamilton, Ontario (English and Cultural
Studies)

TITLE: Speculative Matter: Generic Affinities, Posthumanisms and Science-Fictional Imaginings
AUTHOR: Laura Wiebe, B.A. (University of Waterloo), M.A. (Brock University) SUPERVISOR:
Professor Anne Savage NUMBER OF PAGES: vi, 277

ii
ABSTRACT

Amidst the technoscientific ubiquity of the contemporary West (or global North), science fiction
has come to seem the most current of genres, the narrative form best equipped to comment on
and work through the social, political and ethical quandaries of rapid technoscientific
development and the ways in which this development challenges conventional understandings
of human identity and rationality. By this framing, the continuing popularity of stories about
paranormal phenomena and supernatural entities – on mainstream television, or in print
genres such as urban fantasy and paranormal romance – may seem to be a regressive reaction
against the authority of and experience of living in technoscientific modernity. Nevertheless, the
boundaries of science fiction, as with any genre, are relational rather than fixed, and critical
engagements with Western/Northern technoscientific knowledge and practice and modern
human identity and being may be found not just in science fiction “proper,” or in the scholarly
field of science and technology studies, but also in the related genres of fantasy and paranormal
romance. This thesis offers an interdisciplinary examination – a science-fictional and
posthumanist reframing – of the lines of affinity and relationality between these discursive and
imaginative domains. Bringing together genre theory and critical posthumanism – itself
informed by postmodern and poststructuralist feminism, postcolonialism, science and
technology studies, and critical animal studies – with readings of several series in print
(Christine Feehan’s Ghostwalkers, Kim Harrison’s The Hollows, and Justina Robson’s Quantum
Gravity) and on television (Fringe, True Blood, and Sanctuary), I argue that such narratives’
powerful abiding interest in the domains of knowledge, experience and imagination that lie
within, along and outside the margins of scientific orthodoxy, registers a broader cultural
apprehension of the conditions and critical perspectives by which Western/Northern
humanism, anthropocentrism, modernity, and technoscientific authority have been and can be
seen to be destabilized.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It would not have been possible to imagine, pursue, or complete this project without the
support and assistance of a great number of mentors, colleagues, friends, family and other
human as well as nonhuman companions.

In particular, I would like to thank Drs. Anne Savage, Susan Fast, Catherine Grisé and Petra
Rethmann for serving on my committee. I deeply appreciate the time you put into this work, the
criticisms, the suggestions, and the encouragement at various stages of my doctoral studies.

I would like to dedicate this thesis to my parents, Valerie and Lorne Wiebe, and to the cats
Xavier and Max, who were not able see it through to the end.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
INTRODUCTION: ORIGINS AND SPECULATIONS 1
Origin Stories
Speculation: An Etymology/Archaeology
Science/Fiction: A Prelude
Transitionary Thoughts
CHAPTER 1: SCIENCE, THE PARANORMAL AND LOVE 21
Paranormal Science and Fiction
Paranormal Science and Love
Science Fiction, Feminism, Scientific Margins and Love
CHAPTER 2: FRAMING UNDERSTANDING: GENRE IMPURITIES AND
SCIENCE-FICTIONAL WORLDS 72
Our World Is Science-Fictional
Genres, Frames and Imagined Worlds
Science/Fictions
The Provisionality of ‘Science’ and ‘Science Fiction’
CHAPTER 3: MAGIC, TECHNOSCIENCE AND SCIENCE-FICTIONAL FANTASY 111
Supernatural Fiction and Irrational Technoscience
Patchwork Genres, Rational Magics and Supernatural Realities
Speculative Narratives, Speculative Epistemologies
CHAPTER 4: GENERIC AFFINITIES AND POSTHUMANIST CRITIQUE 159
From Modernity to a Posthumanist Condition
Post/humanities and the Framing of Modernity and Science
Science and Technology Studies: Epistemologies, Ontologies, and
(Anti-) Anthropocentrism
Posthumanism and/in Science Fiction
CHAPTER 5: ABNORMAL ENTANGLEMENTS, POSTHUMAN REALITIES 199
The Posthuman Supernatural
Abnormal Reality
Knowing Subjects, Acting Objects, Posthumanist Entanglements
Post-Quantum Futures
Moving Toward a Conclusion
v
CONCLUSION: SCIENCE-FICTIONAL SPECULATION, WORLD-MAKING
FRAMING 243
Posthumanism, (Ir)rationality and Science Fiction
World Framings and Multiple Worlds (in which I live)
Imagination and Social Change
Concluding Thoughts
WORKS CITED 264

vi
Ph.D. Thesis – L. Wiebe; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies
INTRODUCTION: Origins and Speculations
Origin Stories
We humans are narratively-minded creatures. That is one of the basic premises
of this thesis – the idea that storytelling is a primary means by which we engage with
the world, a key mode of framing information and experience that allows us to
comprehend and miscomprehend our sense(s) of self (individual and collective), of
what lies beyond the boundaries of self, and how that boundary between self and other
can change. Framing, as Judith Butler argues in Frames of War, isn’t simply about
cognition and meaning-making – the processes by which we consciously recognize what
or who is framed; framing also has affective dimensions that allow us to apprehend
what lies outside our frames, to feel the instabilities introduced by the slight breakage
inevitable in reframings, the misalignments introduced through the reiteration of
frames as images, ideas and information circulate. This tension inherent in the
processes of framing entails an insight that underlies a range of traditions and
methodologies in literary and cultural criticism: that the stories we tell are not always
what they seem. The stories that I’m interested in are the stories of popular culture, and
this thesis is an argument about how a particular generic web of pop cultural narratives
functions to frame the complex and contradictory experience of living in the mystifying
and high-tech societies of the contemporary West/North.
As narrative creatures we like our origin stories and this thesis has its own
originary tale. In this particular framing my investigation begins with a cartoon, an
animated television series produced by the Buena Vista division of Walt Disney
entertainment. The series, a 1990s production, is called Gargoyles, and what continued

1
Ph.D. Thesis – L. Wiebe; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies
to resonate with me more than a decade after its original airing was the program’s
persistent fusion of science and sorcery, myth and magic, futuristic technologies and
medieval monsters. In Gargoyles, I noticed, neither the superstition of medieval
Scotland (where the creatures themselves originated) nor the rationalism of
contemporary America offers an adequate explanation of the world, and in the science-
fictionalized and fantastical Gargoyles reality, neither magical powers nor
technoscientific wizardry alone are sufficient tools for coping with the complexities of
“postmodern” existence.1 For the characters in this television show, sorcery and science
are more potent when used in combination, and most effective when combined with
good intentions.
One of the most fully elaborated expressions of this Gargoyles philosophy plays
out over four episodes dealing with a hybrid character named Coldstone. In these
episodes, the collision of magic and technoscience in the hands of ‘villainous’ characters
leads to and exacerbates instability – specifically, the hybridization and fragmentation
of body and identity. Coldstone – ‘created’ by the series’ primary villains – is the
gargoyle version of a cyborg, a monstrous splicing of legend and technology and the
‘freakish’ collision of sorcery and science. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Coldstone is a
patchwork masculine creature, made up of, in this case, the stone remains of three long
dead gargoyles and several pieces of machine. But the pieces of Coldstone’s body are

1 Donna Haraway credits popularization of the term technoscience to Bruno Latour, who
uses it to mobilize an “attack [on] the distinction between what counts as ‘science’ and
as ‘society’.” Building on this, and on Heidegger’s notion of “technicity” to signify the
process of changing “all the world into resource,” Haraway’s feminist and leftist
interpretation of “technoscience” asks questions about “for whom and how” the
products and practices of technoscience work, and seeks not just the predictable but
also the unexpected results of technoscience – the potential for good surprises
(Modest_Witness 279-280, note 1). For Haraway, technoscience is “more, less and other”
than ideology, exceeding most critical definitions, even that of Latour, whose ideas she
repeatedly invokes (49-51).

2
Ph.D. Thesis – L. Wiebe; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies
stitched together with robotics instead of surgical thread, initiated and reawakened
with technoscience and magic, and the fragments that make up the creature’s identity
and psyche are a mix of computer programming with the memories and personalities of
the one female and two male gargoyles ‘he’ used to be. Coldstone’s resurrection is
confusing, traumatic; however, as his story develops and magic and technoscience are
(re)combined by other characters with good intentions, we see a more harmonious and
restorative possibility for magical-technoscientific collaboration – a balm for
psychological ruptures and a cure for gender and body confusion, with all the
problematics that any such notions of healing entail.
Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, Coldstone is a “postmodern” chimera suffering
not from loneliness or the rejection of his maker, but from mental instability and gender
trouble – internal conflicts that mirror his own hybridity but also reflect contemporary
boundary instabilities and cultural schisms, including crises of subjectivity and gender
identity, and more broadly, the divides between nature and culture, reason and feeling.
The difficulty of Coldstone’s hybrid identity comes through in the dis-unity of his body,
in confused and contradictory speech and actions, and in the battles that take place
within the virtual reality of his mind, where fragments of memory reside alongside
actualized versions of gargoyle souls and software. It is, finally, the collaboration of
magic and machine combined with good intentions that cures Coldstone of his
confusion – but not his hybridity (an ethical as well as a moral lesson not that surprising
in a children’s cartoon). The beneficent motivations here involve repaying a debt owed
and compensating Coldstone for the trauma of resurrection by providing each of the
reawakened gargoyle souls with a body of his or her own. The additional bodies, one
male and one female, are robotic, and the transfer is all magic; in the end Coldstone’s

3