Fuck Slipstream

The other day I was procrastinating in a library and leafing through the Science Fiction Studies March 2011 issue on “slipstream” fiction. It prompted the following rant.

I have a theory: the creation of “slipstream” fiction as a genre is simply the effect of the middle-brow encountering modernism.

That’s right, I just insulted something by calling it “middle-brow” because apparently it’s still the 1960s.

Team Godzilla, forever. 

Let me begin by saying that I agree with critics who see the rise of cyberpunk as a fundamentally conservative movement within the history of science fiction: a way to recenter the genre around white men again after the emergence of feminist s.f. in the 1970s. And, of course, cyberpunk established late consumer capitalism as the singularly acceptable form of social/economic organization (because so realism!! much tough!! no nonsense! wow!!1!1!) after s.f. began turning to questions of culture, language and the organization of human societies in the 1960s/70s. In other words, cyberpunk is a turn away from when the social sciences became part of the “science” in science fiction. (And “slipstream” might be the domestication of these culturally critical forces through coding anti-realism as alterity.) The cyberpunk Bruce Sterling, who coined the term “slipstream” in 1989, also wrote in that year “We See Things Differently,” a future-war story as xenophobic as theoriginal future-war story by Georges Tomkyns Chesney. For those who haven’t read it, the logic of Sterling’s story is basically: the U.S. is populated by ignorant, oblivious subjects who uncritically stereotype Middle-Eastern Muslims, and these Muslims are far more complex and self-aware than these stereotypes, but under all these complex layers Muslims still embody every single characteristic of that stereotype, and are therefore all the more dangerous for their duplicity. Cleverly: “how dare you stereotype me as a religious fundamentalist terrorist” is the disguise of the religious fundamentalist terrorist; we cannot trust their superficial Westernization. The story is a complex interrogation of the logic of contemporary cultural representation, hahaha, but in the end it is also a clever defense of American myopia and a subtle defense of racism through its disavowal.

Many of the commenters in this issue of SFS on “slipstream” dwell on how this genre eluded easy forms of generic classification, the most nuanced critics noting (the by now banal commonplace) that generic purity is simply a myth. And while I am no advocate for absolutist distinctions—deconstruction was my first literary-critical (b)romance, after all—I am also quite weary of those who would throw out the baby of literary critique with the bathwater of metaphysical difference. The attempt to define the borders and contours of, say, science fiction (or even “slipstream”) as a genre might itself be an ultimately futile project, but I refuse to believe that such a project itself, futility and all, comprises a useless or unproductive exercise. To be uncommitted to the success of an undertaking does not imply that the undertaking is inherently useless. And obviously the insistence on slipstream’s unclassifiable nature hasn’t prevented critics from dwelling on it.

What I find to be symptomatic in this discourse is the emphasis on the anti-realist stance of “slipstream.” Judging from the “not-really-a-canon” canons of slipstream fiction available, this is an important dimension of it. But the rejection of realism is a literary tradition almost as old as realism itself. There is a misguided implicit assumption that the pre-post-modern (or pre-slipstream) is defined by its adherence to realism. So in using the term “slipstream” (even with all of the hemming and hawing caveats and “postmodern” tongue-in-cheek winks), these critics reduce the messy complexity of the literary history of modernism into an easy dichotomy, “mainstream” and “slipstream,” or even “modernism” and “postmodernism,” hinging on a singular realism and, by extension, a singular reality. Perhaps a lot of this can be traced back to undergraduate literary courses’ reliance on such a dichotomy to introduce these terms; certainly this is how I understood things at the wise age of 20, after just having read Fredric Jameson’s “The Cultural Logicof Late Capitalism” essay—an essay whose provocative power is directly inversely proportional to its attention to nuance. No. Modernism has had many complex phases and faces, and only few of them insist on realism. Let’s keep in mind that this “slipstream” canon includes Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, as if these writers could be appropriated from the “mainstream.” “Slipstream” seems to survive on historical amnesia.  

Now—to be similarly reductive, I’m afraid—I’d like to raise the image of the literary canon and its defense before the ‘culture wars,’ in which Western Civilization (capital ‘W’ & ‘C’) found its spiritual backbone through its insistence on the literary superiority of the Great Works (capital ‘G’ & ‘W’) of dead white men. At one point, our reductive history goes, literary criticism defended the canon, and the exclusion of minority literature works was founded on purportedly reasoned critical authority. And it is thanks to the arduous work of brilliant and committed scholars that this canon was opened on critical grounds to include literature concerned with alternative, minoritarian experiences. Cultural conservatives still exist, of course, but what is taught today looks radically different from before. Now, while the reality of what happened in the history of literary criticism is far more nuanced, it is important to consider that literary criticism has had an important legitimizing role. Details aside, my point is this: the critical reflection on the margins and limits of the canon used to be driven by (or, at the very least, was entangled in questions which could not but assume) a very real political exigency.

In contrast to this history of critical thought, “slipstream” as a genre evades rigorous categorization precisely to avoid such difficult questions. “Slipstream” is defined instead by a “sense,” “internal sensibilities,” “new meanings and new feelings and new structures of experience,” or “a new way to be alive” (phrases all from Bruce Sterling’s essay reprinted in SFS). The insoluble problematics of generic boundaries are replaced by an appeal to affect, and critical reflection replaced by a pseudo-mystical communion of peers. In my opinion, it’s a literary-critical gesture analogous to the neoliberal racism of the “culturally fit,” in which companies can justify not hiring women or minority workers on the basis of an ill-defined shared cultural sensibility. I can’t tell you exactly what disqualifies you from this position, better luck at the next company. So similarly:  I can’t really define this new and exciting genre of fiction that gets at the core of our (post)modern experience, but it’s defined by these (lo and behold, mostly white men) writers. A refusal to engage in serious critical work can be palliated by an exhortation to not shoot the messenger. And in place of rigorous criticism thinking through genre, we have popularity contests. “Slipstream” is another iteration of the endless hand-washing of the cultural (and political and economic) dominant.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the authors cited under the “Some Definitions” section of SFRA’s “Slipstream101.” Tell me what they have in common.

(As an aside: it’s telling that Sterling chose Lacan and Baudrillard for his examples of theory; these are two highly modernist critics whose jeremiads bemoan the decline of the institutions of traditional authority. Lacan and Baudrillard over a Fanon, a Viznor, or a Spivak? I suspect that these "slipstream" critics’ animosity towards the “mainstream” belies a secret attachment to it, a hope hidden in a disappointment: the “mainstream” is not inherently bad, but it has failed to deliver its promises. The rest of us learned to never trust the canon in the first place.)

To be sure, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are included in every list, and Takayuki Tatsumi is a major critic. But racism isn’t simply the institution of the exclusion of others; more and more it is not the denigration of racial others so much as the inclusion of ethnic others within a general frame defined by the culture or “sense” of heterosexual white men that is the alibi of the maintenance of social hierarchy (many people have written on this, but at the moment I am reading Rey Chow's The Protestant Ethnic). And as s.f. and s.f. criticism are becoming more self-aware of their historical roots in colonialism and racism, I cannot feel but “slipstream” or “the new weird” is an attempt to wrench the conversation elsewhere. A new canon is a new history, and we should keep in mind that a new history can be a new forgetting as well as a new remembering.

Much of my thinking on this has been prompted by reading Gerald Viznor’s “Custer on the Slipstream” story, which was first published in 1978—11 years before Sterling’s initial essay—and which was recently reprinted in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology ofIndigenous Science Fiction, which I can't recommend highly enough. And it is this story’s sense of alternative timelines, other histories, and the hidden persistence of colonial racism in a (term like) “slipstream” that prompts me to defend literary criticism against those who fetishize the new to escape the guilt of the past.