Fakeshop: Science Fiction, Future Memory & the Technoscientific
Imaginary
by 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)
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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."
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+references+
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.
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Eugene Thacker teaches at Rutgers University, where he directs New Media
& Digital Arts.
This article is from CTheory, www.ctheory.com.
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