Psychological Perspective: The Creation of New Worlds
by Gregory Stewart
Editors note the following paper below is this author attempt to illustrate how science fiction impact the Western-American concepts through narrative, ideology, and cultural constructs...
The World of Sorrows
So it began. Johnny struggled to rid the image that had haunted him since early breakfast. But no matter how hard he tried to shake the image from his mind. To set it aside. To displace the inexplicable unknown that could not be reasoned, he did not know how to deny what Two Crows knew or with any certainty did not know.
He had failed to realize his vision. All too late the image of denial haunted his consciousness; his subconscious; his primordial id; staring back at him wanting explanation and rationality. It did not want to be set aside; or, to be displaced. It wanted validation. It wanted narration. It wanted to be deployed; redeployed over and over again.
The image that spirited Johnny’s mind and it wanted to be born into culture. To spread like a virus—and infect the world. It wanted to take hold and reveal itself to the world, but it needed Johnny to speak it into reality…
* * *
Any student of psychology, anthropology, or science fiction or otherwise understands that reality cannot be viewed until it has been objectified—or at least observed. In the sense that, until it is shared with another, the other’s view of their world is internalized, private and unspoken. If the perception of another, if vivid enough, will find a place, a name, and at the least, acknowledgement. How it spreads beyond textual and contextual impression is dependent upon the receiver perception of the other and their acceptance of what has been transmitted to create culture.
Culture has a purpose, whether viewed with a capital “C,” or small “c”; its purpose is to transmit the values, the ideals, and ideologies of the hegemony. And, for our children, according to Naomi Quinn (2005), “Culture has everywhere evolved to enhance the child’s brain’s capacity to learn (480).” In essence, culture was and is the arbiter of humanity’s text, in which the narration of community was and is told writ-large to individuals small and large over and over again in order to insure its world was and is created and its place was and is maintained: temporally, spatially, and geographically.
Thus, for this author, the science fiction genre was and is one of the vehicles that allows for culture to be maintained with a critical eye; and, through the examination of science fiction, the taboos, the extremes, the narrows, and the mainstream can be parsed, separated, and atomized for individual absorption. A unity, some claim to be, hegemonic and dichotomous in its presentations of the medias: writing, television, and oration.
Although there are the other genres, other fictive writings, television shows, and orations that allow creation of alternative worlds, such as murder mysteries, romance novels, and non-fiction historical writings, science fiction can examine these worlds as well, and in turn, propagate the social narratives of the hegemony and the oppressed. In the sense of Bourdieu’s “creative structure”, science fiction sets aside the norm, and enables the formation of alternative possibilities that can be deconstructed away from the “habitus” of socialization and idealized predispositions. Moreover, science fiction is a “configuration” (Ruth Benedict, 1932) of constructs of culture and cultures that can impart the ideals of identity, but also refute the fallacy of such folly. It is psychological. It is imbues the human condition; the evolution of the human spirit. It is science fiction, the Rorschach test of the Western-American culture set; symbolically, imaginatively, and to some degree, interpretively gives insight to the cultural milieu that makes up the Western thinking. From the psychological anthropology perspective, science fiction mental make up encounters the multi-various montage of cultural “somatic” meanings of diversity. In essence, science fiction whether locked in a utopia or in its counter-opposite, dystopia setting, becomes the materialist’s structuralized perspective; and is constructed in the form of vilification of the “modes of production” whether it is technological or post-apocalyptical viewpoint.
For instance, in the Mad Max series of movies, the over arching hegemony had been destroyed in a post-apocalyptic event, and the corruptive feudal states had replaced the once over burdened populace of consumption with fear and scarcity. In this world, it was the over consumption of goods and the means of production that brought down civilization and entombed humanity into a “new dark ages”; where knowledge and technology are in the “network” (Blanton et. al., 1996) of a few individuals restricting access and control of resource materials.
By network, I mean to say that power is perceived as coming from the top down. In essence, a centralized authority in which the resources are limited to an individual or within a constructed “network” accessible only to a few (Blanton et. al., 1996). The Mad Max movies replay these themes repeatedly in order to create a world of despair and hopelessness in order to create the mythic hero who will save the downtrodden. He is the anti-hero, fights against the establishment, the feudal states that is, in order to bring a better day and a better world to those that have lost their way.
The Mad Max movies are a simulated world, a possibility, in that it can be born into reality, if we let our guard fall. As a movie, it can be physically seen, observed in the physical world of senses, with the exception of smell, unless of course one considers the smells of the movie theatre (popcorn, soda, and candy). But I stray, the purpose of movies, television, books, radio, or any media for that matter, including in one’s head, is to realize the potentiality[1] of one’s vision imparted onto the physical world.
In terms of the psychological, the media[2] in which this potentiality is formed has left us pondering of whether they are prescriptive or descriptive for the narration of transmission (or deployment). In other words, how does culture permeates itself into the individual in order to shape the reality that is perceived? A possible source to answering this question can be found, in part, and in this author’s view, in the science fiction genre.
A genre, which at times, that can be very insightful as well as outright over the top fantastical. The many worlds that can be created in science fiction are first created in the simulation of a person’s mind, at one point displaced (set aside), validated, narrated, and then deployed into and onto reality. It is at this point, the question comes into play, of whether the projection from within the person is anew, or an instance of recapitulation of the culture is writ-large; in most cases, it is the latter, instead of the former.
This recapitulation of culture is revitalized in which the reforms the values, the ideals, and overarching beliefs that entwine the individual and culture are inexorably linked. Looking from the many perspectives of psychological anthropology, from Sapir’s “Two Crows” to Kroeber’s “super organic” to Levi-Strauss’s linguistic structural model, one has to wonder, if anthropology fully understands the extrasomatic nature of humans. Oh, to be sure anthropology may have coined the term “extrasomatic” to indicate humanity’s adaptability, but the arguments of understanding human nature’s variability in projecting itself onto reality, at best, is quixotic. I believe that mental creation of reality that humans project are simulated worlds, which are combined in the form of associations, or put properly, in the form of the social consciousness becoming the collective; or, as some see it, the super organic (Kroeber, 1917).
* * *
Johnny speaks the horror’s name. A world of uncertainty forms. Its foundation is set in fear and emotionalism in doubt to the skies of Sorrows. A place that had become known for its melancholy citizens and despairing souls, where Johnny’s heart sank deeper into his chest and his mind raced as he regretted for speaking its name. Now it was born into the world, waiting for a carrier to breed its discontent. It was Johnny’s culture, his moment of subversion, and his chance to renew the world in the image and name of the horror he had spoken.
He asked himself, what would he do if it took hold? His friend Lane, a soul, who had lost his way since birth, had heard him say the horror’s name—and recoiled in disgust. What had made him say such a thing? Had Johnny lost his mind? Who was he to counter the world before him? Lane ran away. Johnny looked desperate as his friend’s rejection broke his mettle, but he knew he had to tell others and why he had spoken it. He had to tell the horror’s name and the story of why it came to him. He was compelled, if not obsessively, he certainly was a bit overly determined. But his friends shook their heads in disgust, sympathy, or derided him for even talking about the story over and over again.
Nonetheless, it came to pass, that Johnny’s horror’s name was repeated. Like a wildfire, which has its own beauty, consumed and burned those who heard its name and enveloped them into something anew and ineffable. Even more, like a virus, the horror’s name attached itself throughout the small community of Sorrows. It reshaped the landscape—and its form shined light onto darkness that been Johnny’s world.
The Sorrows had always been a place of darkness—dank and foreboding. Like Sodom and Gomorrah Death’s odor filled the nostrils, and the people faces mirrored each of their personal hell, their madness, and their bitterness. Their very foundations were grounded in light and shadows, which danced off the walls of the city—and they gave it a name—Chiaroscuro. The darkness of shadows inter-played the desperation of the Sorrows’ Geist, never quite fomenting into physicality and translatable into perceptual reality. Johnny’s specter left the local folk psychology fall into disarray, the foundation of the community was disassembling, crumbling, disintegrating and transforming into the very culture that embodied the darkness…
* * *
Science Fiction Thinking
I have repeatedly, in various ways, implied, inferred, indirectly, and directly to state that science fiction not only mirrors one’s culture, but also the individual’s view of the world. It is these mental capacities that shape the reality of potentiality. But, in addition of all this, science fiction potentiality has also created a cultural narrative and ideology of its own.
In a paper by Darko Suvin (1972), he says that, “SF is, then a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment (p. 375).” In other words, science fiction allows for the potential, a possibility, a placement, if you will, for alternate viewpoints to best into a simulated “cognitive” world. Thus, science fiction allows for the estrangement (Suvin, 1972:374-375), and “sees the norms of any age, including emphatically its own, as unique changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive glance.”
It is then, the conflation of cognition (which other vehicles and methodologies are capable of as well) with science fiction that sets it apart from other vehicles, this genre gives the permission of the authors, the viewers, and those outside of the genre to extrapolate their own interpretation, filter, if you will, in projecting their mental potentiality unto the sensory or physical world. This physical sense can be embodied within the mental construct as well as the projective construct in how the world view can be seen in the cultural and individual perspective.
This is what I mean, in a paper by William R. Bascom, in 1953, that folklore and anthropology should be concomitant, in that they are both entwined and cannot be parsed or separated (pp. 283-290). He says in discussing the positioning of folklore within anthropology, “Folklore, however, falls squarely within the fourth field, cultural anthropology, which is concerned with the study of the customs, traditions, and institutions of living peoples.” Essentially, folklore and anthropology are the individual narratives of a culture that illustrate the potentiality of not only redeploying those cognitive traditions that are seen from within and without, and whether emically or etically, but also can be demonstrated empirically in such vehicles as science fiction, as imparted by Suvin:
In the 20th century, SF has moved into the sphere of anthropological and cosmological thought, becoming a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and—most important—a mapping of possible alternatives. This historical movement of SF can be envisaged as an enrichment of and shift from a basic direct or extr (a) polative model to an indirect or analogic model.
Therefore, science fiction can be used as an analogy, in which cultural norms, deviancy, taboos, or any other sub-categories that can be thought of, and in turn, examined. Suvin says that myth, fantasy, and fairy tales, however, should not be confused, he sees these as a disservice to science fiction—and is “creative suicide” (p. 375).
Suvin then believes that science fiction, and I tend to agree, is a cognitive exercise that is multi-vocal, multidimensional, multi-local, multi-reality, and multi-lingual in its expression of empirical knowledge and critical thought. In closing remarks of his poetics essay on science fiction Suvin says,
Significant modern SF, with deeper and more lasting sources of enjoyment, also presupposes more complex and wider cognitions: it discusses primarily the political, psychological, anthropological, use and effect of sciences, and philosophy of science, and the becoming or failure of new realities as a result of it (p 381) [Suvin’s emphasis].
Therefore, science fiction was and is a result from the Age of Enlightenment and a way for Western thought to express and extrapolate itself. Suvin continues, “Once the elastic criteria of literary structuring have been met, a cognitive—most cases strictly scientific—element becomes a measure of aesthetic quality, of the specific pleasure to be sought in SF [Suvin’s emphasis].” I see this structuring in the context of Bourdieu’s structuralizing structuring, in which, the contextual and textual perspectives are “capitalized” in socialized forms of culture or sub-cultures in providing an “educational tool” for critical thinking. Suvin eventually concludes,
Even more importantly, [science fiction] demands from the author and reader, teacher and critic, not merely specialized, quantified positivistic knowledge (scientia) but a social imagination whose quality, whose wisdom (sapientia), testifies to the maturity of his critical and creative thought (p 381).
It is this “critical and creative thought” that makes science fiction a functional feature for analogy and metaphor gives the individual and the “group social collective” dynamic to exploit the potentialities of one’s projective simulation onto the world.
* * *
A new day had been borne unto the world of Sorrows. The horror’s name had brought a new way of thinking, a perspective, based on rationality, based on empirical data, based on observation, but also entangled with emotion. The shadows that once dance on the walls of the city, now illuminated the dark towers in their full decrepit display. The state of tattered pillar were rundown and in need of repair. The walkways, thoroughfares, expressways had deteriorated beyond repair and showed the city at its core being. The illumination from the horror’s name revealed the state of fear and foreboding that had reigned within Sorrows had imbued the citizenry with the smallness of spirit and of physical stature.
The citizens of Sorrows saw themselves as they were: small minded, closed-off, fearful people who looked for the darkness as comfort food in order to maintain a life of scarcity. Never did they seek for abundance or happiness. They never knew such things were possible, but now, a light in which the horror’s name had born, had perfunctorily disrupted life. It shown their foibles, their failings, their discontent—their bitterness for existing—Johnny’s friends were changing. He saw things that he did not know were possible. He saw changes he had only seen in nightmares of possibilities. He had spoken it—and the world had changed before him. The horror’s epidemiology was a contagion that infused enthusiasms, possibilities, and potentialities. It was a disease that spread with a single word—and it was a contagion that made the opposite sex swoon. Words are like viruses Johnny soon realized, they either catch on, hold tight as they can, or they fail to take hold and are thwarted by the defenses of the other person. However, despite his fear, he told his world of the horror’s name. His validation, his story, his telling inspired him, and compelled him to do it again and again; it became comfortable and rewarding.
***
Science Fiction and Gender
Invariably, when one thinks of science fiction genre, an image of a geeky ten year old boy with acne and glasses, reading a novel with giant robot on the cover with a blonde young woman scantily clad in the arms of the robot, screaming her head off for somebody to rescue her. This is the stereotype that has been generated, and like a place name in Western Apache (Basso, 1995), the term science fiction generates an image, a history, and expectation from the receiver of the message—and certain beliefs that in general—science fiction has primarily been written by men. This is not the case, however; one of the first novels, in the fantastic genre was written by woman, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.
Her novel has been often the standard bearer of what a “critical cognitive” extrapolation of the fantastic should be, an enough of an estrangement to take one in the potentialities of natural science into the area of the unusual, but not so fantastic that it is rejected—and considered out of place. This is how science fiction entangles the reader, and why Darko Suvin rejects fantasy as being part of the genre. He says of fantasy,
A genre committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment… [in] that fantasy is significant insofar as it is impure and fails to establish a super-ordinated maleficent world of its own, causing a grotesque tension between arbitrary supernatural phenomena and the empirical norms they infiltrate (p 375)…
In other words, if the simulated world is too fantastic, it can be rejected out of hand as a farce. A world that is too improbable to be created in reality has no basis to be simulated, although it can be displayed in the form of fiction, television, and movies. But to return to point, Mary Shelley setting the standard for the science fictive propelled the simulated worlds into a “structuralizing structure” (Bourdieu) which enabled the vehicle for cultural examination.
It is unfortunate, however, that so few women, until recently, have written in the genre of science fiction. This is due, in part, of the perception of the structuralized stereotypes of who reads the fantastic novels, and in part, of who were in the position of power in deploying the simulated worlds. Granted, in the beginning, there were more than capable women writing for the start-ups of science fiction magazines, such as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Quarterly. These women not only wrote what has often been associated with female writers, the utopian future models, but also compelling space operas (Donawerth, 1990).
Authors such as Minna Irving, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Clare Winger Harris were all early contributors to the genre, but sexism often held these women back in making deeper contributions. Harris once quoted her editor, Hugo Gernsback, as saying that “as a rule, women do not make good scientification [sic] writers, because their education and general tendencies in scientific matters are usually limited” (Donawerth, 1990:39). The belief back then was that, when women names appeared on the bylines of stories that it “lowered sales to adolescent males” (ibid, 40). It was not really until the 1960s when women came back into the fold of the genre in full force with authors such as Ursula K. Le Guins, whose father was anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, and wrote such classics as Lathe of Heaven and Left Hand of Darkness.
What is fascinating is that science fiction and anthropology took similar parallel courses, in the matter of how women influenced their particular fields; Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were early contributors to the study of the human cultural conditions. Both of these women contributed heavily in establishing the foundations of anthropology, Ruth Benedict in setting up the early school of culture and personality and Margaret Mead in providing the structure for cross cultural comparative analysis. And, not unlike science fiction, these alternative views of the world provided by anthropology and public access to those worlds, allowed for the human imagination to recreate those worlds within their minds.
In her paper, Jane Donawerth makes the case for the continual encouragement for women to be involved in not only the genre of science fiction (heretofore referred to as the genre), but also in the field of science as well. By involving and encouraging women to write science fiction, and seeing the genre being written by women, she says “Using women writers in a science fiction unit also allows female students (not just males) to see themselves as potential writers.” Thus, giving a place at the table for the other to be represented in their world view, instead of being invisible[3] they can be part of the simulated world as an “active agent.” Donawerth continues,
Women’s experiences in our culture naturally produce different emphases in their writing. Teaching science fiction by women writers will add to discussions not only the possibilities of women becoming scientists but also the awareness of important contemporary issues, such as changes in gender roles, alternative methods of childcare, and the importance of empathy and communication, rather than aggression, for resolving problems (p 41).
Therefore, from Donawerth’s perspective then, the mental construct of the genre enables the potentialities of feminine point of view to be brought into simulation; and, this is in turn, allows for, as Dan Sperber (1984) may put forth, a kind of “epidemiological representation” that could and has become viral within the attitude of the hegemonic culture. Essentially, a feminine perspective becomes part of the psychological makeup that may have been simply ignored or discounted as unimportant to the contribution of the culture writ-large, except for limited and assigned “representations” or conceived “roles.”
Tying all this altogether, the genre, anthropology, Sperber and Donawerth, and the representation of feminism being more active, is another illustrative point of how science fiction can examine culture—and be adaptive to a simulation or projection of observed reality.
***
The sun came up. Its light illuminated a new world. The people of the Sorrows had been transmogrified into something that they thought that could never happen. They now knew different. Heads were held high, eyes shined with life, and Death’s odor had dissipated. The world had changed—and Johnny’s words—his horror’s name had become the representation of choice. The world changed once it had been taken, transmitted into the minds of those who had feared it, its power had been subversive, its truth had been enlightened, and its vision undeterred. The name that had found a place—a moniker that enveloped change—and brought the potentiality of acceptance—the word that feared if spoken aloud—and referred to as the horror—was the word to be known as Hope. The world of Sorrows changed its name—to the Land of Reveries.
***
Science fiction, Folk Tales, Emotions
Early in anthropology, one of the examining questions,was the quality of human intelligence the same among “different races,” or “ethnic groups.” Franz Boas, considered the father of anthropology, provided his answer in a paper, “The Mind of Primitive Man”; he says
… If we compare civilized people of any race with uncivilized people of the same race, we do not find any anatomical differences which justify us in assuming any fundamental differences in mental constitution… [And] when we consider the same question from a purely psychological point of view, we recognize that one of the most fundamental traits which distinguish the human mind from the animal mind is common to all races. It is doubtful if any animal us able to form an abstract conception such as that of number, or any conception of the abstract relations of phenomena. We sfind that this is done by all races of man (p 3-4)…
I reference Boas, by way of introduction, to set the stage, if you will, to illustrate a point in regards to how attitudes change over time. In this paper he wants to make the case that the assumptions about race are incorrect; and, that more information is needed to either refute or support certain cultural assumptions that were prevalent in his era, circa 1901, in regards to human development as a species. But this paper also has an interpretation of folklore which I find useful, Boas says
When we define as folk-lore the total mass of traditional matter present in the mind of a given time, we recognize that this matter must influence the opinions and activities of the people more or less according to its quantitative and qualitative value, and also that the actions of each individual must be influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the mass of traditional material present to his [or her] mind (p 3).
In other words, folklore is a vehicle, similar to the genre, in which cultural (traditional) matters are transmitted to the individual as well as the group. In the Western cultural mind set, folklore is used to establish values, ideals, beliefs, and emotions in order to facilitate boundaries for group and individual behavior, but one of the main differences between folklore and science fiction is that while both do and can retransmit the cultural messages, folklore is the celebration of the past—look backwards in time and can stagnate the “evolution” of culture. In the case of science fiction, it looks forward and sets itself aside into the future, giving the potentiality of resolution or correction within the extrapolation of the simulated world.
Folklore then is a vehicle that imbues cultural transmissions from without to be “embodied” within the individual and reformed, later to be deployed back into the culture writ-large. The embodied deployment passes on the emotional association of what has been imbued from without, therefore creating a didactic relationship with the sensory environment[4] from outside the personal “self.” This embodiment of one’s environment with the later redeployment creates what Bourdieu refers to as “habitus” entangling the folkloric tradition in the conditioning of the person, but also the aspect of the “self.” This is the other aspect of folklore, the psychological conditioning of the individual nuances of the person’s engagement in relation to one’s cultural transmissions socialization are realized.
This socialization in aspect of habitus, embodiment, and physical conditioning are part of the mental potentialities of the person and the identity of the “self.” And in turn, the creations of the cultural and individual narrative of the folklore are diffused throughout the body and mind of the society. From a cross-cultural perspective it could be argued that folklore, the human narrative, is the one universal that can be consistently illustrated as a necessity for the human agent. As Michelle Scalise Sugiyama puts it,
World folklore is also strikingly consistent in its subject matter. Studies of worldwide variants of particular folktales (e. g. ‘Cinderella’) and the classification of folktales by plot units (i.e. ‘motif’) show that certain topics recur across widely divergent cultures: cosmology, topography, animal characteristics and behavior, birth and death, and a wide array of topics that may be loosely categorized as ‘human social behavior’—for example, sex, marriage, religion, prohibitions, punishments, deceptions, and violence. In sum, all peoples tell stories, and the stories of all people exhibit similar concerns (p 235).
Those concerns being the basic travails and trails of life, and the interaction of the other, in telling our narrative of what we perceive to be true of our human experience within our surrounding environment and of others. This is how the genre interconnects Western culture set attitudes in modernity, in that science fiction is the modern expression of the storytelling narrative and provides a vehicle in which social mores can be vetted in totality.
In the totality of the storytelling narratives, there can be certainty that these are interactive in creating emotions within active participants (that being the reader, the listener, or the viewer). However, in the science fiction narrative, emotion is often portrayed as lacking, or better put, cold. Catherine Lutz says,
Science-fiction films and novels often present threatening aliens as characterized by lack of emotion. The Body Snatchers, extraterrestrials take over human bodies, leaving their victims altered in only one fundamental way—they cannot feel. The ‘cold fish’ and the ‘cold hearted’ are cultural types whose most important failing is a lack of warmth. A metaphor for emotionality, warmth is generated by action and feeling. The warm, live person has the heat of emotions; the cold, dead one feel nothing on either side of the grave (p 57).
In essence, the science fiction narrative is often portrayed as being technical, mechanical, cold, sterile, and emotionless. This is due, in part, to the fact science fiction is seen as a rational, logical, empiric system, and perceived to be extension of the natural sciences. But, this is counter to what narratives are suppose to be, they are, if anything, to elicit a particular emotion and create a response for one to take action. Science fiction then, takes on the other roll of the storytelling narrative, that is, to be instructive, a teaching tool for the perceived future, in which, the participant (the observer) is learning something of value that can be later applied into action; or, to be used as a cognitive moment of recognition for later formulation of potential reasoning, an adaptive strategy for modifying behavior or philosophy.
Philosophy and Cultural Myths
One of the more fascinating aspects of science fiction is how it is situated as a “touchstone” in many areas of Western thought. How science fiction is used to convey not only the moral lessons for the future, but also of the past. Moreover, science fiction is rooted in the foundation concepts of the Enlightenment, meaning that it is used often to explore the human relationship, in regards to potentiality and the enlightened spirit, if you will excuse the metaphor. In fact, science fiction, in the Western tradition, is another form of an explanatory and exploratory metaphor, in which the cultural milieu can be observed, explained, and examined with rational, logistical, and logical perspectives.
For instance, a book edited by Jason T. Eberl, Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, takes a critical analysis of the 21st century version of the television show that is currently running on a cable channel, known of as, of all things, the Sci-fi Channel, which runs on a weekly basis. Battlestar Galactica, the actual name of the show, is actually a remake of an older television show of the same name, in the late 1970s. The 21st century version of Battlestar Galactica, of course, has been updated, and reset to the latest cultural and geopolitics of today. What is most interesting is how the television series seems to go out of its way to challenge the status quo and the cultural hegemony.
In the original series of the 1970s, there were two primary metaphors being put on display, the geopolitics of the cold war between Russia, China, and the West, such as the United States and Europe, and the technological, the machine—cyborg—relationship between humanity and the human condition. These themes have somewhat changed geopolitically, of course, but the machine—cyborg—human relationship and human condition remains in the 21st century version. This aspect of the show, to keep it rooted in the human condition, was not only a necessity but also has to be grounded in the function of the narrative. In so being that, the storytelling narrative, whether it is with the oral tradition or told in the fashion of a scientific fantasy, must be embodied within the human form of expression in order to be diffused or deployed to the larger cultural mores of the group or individual agents. Or, put simply, it is the necessary psychological component, the human “self,” that must always be expressed and essential for the creation of new simulated worlds.
In an essay by Robert Sharp, “When Machines Get Souls: Nietzsche on the Cylon Uprising,” in the show, Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons are machine robots who have been installed with an artificial intelligence program, and eventually rise up against their human masters. Sharp begins the essay with the statement, “Picture yourself as a slave” (2008, 15). This is to draw you into his hypothetical world and provide a basis, a launching point, in garnering a perspective that a machine can be human too. Throughout the essay he uses a variety of situations, where he discourses on the morality of slavery, argues for sentient beings and their rights, and implies whether sentient being’s behavior can create a spiritual soul, and ask by inference does self-awareness come from only human beings? This question has all kinds of implications in the realm of science fiction, from cloning to artificially intelligent machinery, then finally the essay explores the Cylons from the perspective of Nietzsche’s grand discussion in regards to how slavery’s morality interplays with the Cylons, the machines, having a “soul” and believing in a god—a single god, “the one true God,” and does a comparison of the Jews exodus, and wandering through the desert for 40 years, and only to return for vengeance against your enslavers—humanity. Sharp draws reference of several episodes that have been aired to build his case.
Another essay by the editor Jason T. Eberl, and his wife Jennifer A. Vines, “I Am an Instrument of God”: Religious Belief, Atheism, and Meaning, examines the nature of belief, and how humans, and also in this case, Cylons, the machines, create a world of meaning through belief, and through the rationality of the empirical—what can I prove? Again, the authors use several episodes to lay the foundation in regards to how the show philosophically scrutinizes the ideology of faith, beliefs, and meaning. This science fiction episodic series tries to extrapolate why humans feel the need to create something greater than themselves—a structure or an agency—that has to be not themselves, but something that has a narrative meaning and morality that imparts the values or ideals to be imbued, instilled to the individual and extended into the culture for a code of conduct. They end the essay with the following,
The recognition that human beings are essentially rational animals motivates many religious believers to engage in secular, and not merely faith-based, discourse. At the same time, however, religious believers hold that there are limits to pure rational inquiry, and so faith must take over at those junctures to further our knowledge.
Hence, the litmus test for the validity of religious beliefs may be, as Roslin asserts, whether they ‘hold real-world relevance’ (‘Lay Down Your Burden, Part 2’). To the degree that religious believers acknowledge rational, scientific inquiry can deliver to answer some of the ultimate questions of human concern, the ground is fertile for mutually respectable and fruitful dialogue as humanity continues its ‘lonely question’ on this ‘shining planet, known as Earth’ (p 167).
On the contrary, the importance of meaning and any belief is that, what is important for the human condition is that we find it necessary to justify our existence. To look for the unattainable, and search for meaning in the ineffable questions of, why are we here? What matters most is the journey and the story we create for ourselves along the way; the creation of the stories we bring to the observable world.
Orientation
A paper by David Samuels, “These Are the Stories That Dogs Tell”: Discourses of Identity and Difference in Ethnography and Science Fiction, discourses on the similarity of ethnography and science fiction. He lays out the narrative nature of both anthropology and science fiction illustrating their psychological tools in establishing rapport with the reader in a description of the Other from another culture or another world. He says of anthropology and science fiction,
In both genres, the alien is often constructed along fairly conventional lines of Western psychologism. It is the revelation of ‘underlying psychology’ that helps the reader identity with the alien subject in both ethnography and science fiction, by constituting a space of common universal humanity within, and simultaneous with, the constitution of alienation. By this orchestration of the reader’s desire, the manipulation of the form and placement of such psychological revelations, the author can make the reader feel greater or lesser identification with the other (p 97).
Samuels quotes Daniel Cottom in referring to these constructions as enchantments; some refer to them as estrangements (Suvin, 1972), while still others may refer to it as form of displacement (Stewart, 2006, unpublished). No matter how they are referred to, these constructions allow for the reader to be absorbed into the world of ethnography or science fiction wielding their “literary power” (Samuels, 1996).
David Samuels negotiates through several ethnographies to demonstrate how ethnography and science fiction use “underlying psychology” to create the simulated textual worlds to engage the reader. Through identification and alienation, and the examination of the “self”, he refers to this as Western cultural poetics, extrapolating both of the genres in trying to discern their commonalities. He then speaks to how each deals with Otherness and how science fiction conveys “cultural poetics” in revealing “underlying psychology motivations.” He uses one of the gold standards of science fiction, Star Trek, a television series of the late 1960s, as way to promulgate his theory. One of the main characters, Mr. Spock, who is half-Vulcan, and half-human, is used as the example of identification and alienation (Samuels, 1996:98).
The character of Mr. Spock is used as a metaphor of the Other along with him being a juxtaposition of emotion and rationality. In addition, the series itself interplays the theme of “us versus “them” to communicate how the alien cultures behave differently. He then puts forward the argument for naturalization he says, “Science fiction and ethnography, as modern discourses, share common narrative techniques and practices in the naturalization [process] … in order to produce empathy for the other (p 101).”
David Samuels further elaborates the textual construction of both genres in how they orientate the viewer/reader in relation to the other. He says of this,
To put it reductively for a moment, it could be said that science is more interested in disorientation, and ethnography reorientation, of the reader. That is, science fiction is more comfortable with presenting to the reader a disorienting lived enactment of a different social formation. Ethnography, other the hand, tend to be uncomfortable, and to pull back quickly disorienting move, inserting the distance of an explicitly reorienting explanation. Ethnographic writing sometimes falls back on a sort of covert prestige adhering to the ability to present an authoritative and coherent of the other (p 102-103).
Thus, science fiction and ethnography gives us a sense of orientation, one from examining the spatial anomalies of disorientation, and other through the structure of agency of “authority and coherency.” In anthropology then, psychological motivation is to recapitulate the familiar and co-opt the message of the hegemony of their own cultural biases. Understand I am not inferring that the modern anthropologists are ethnocentric, but I am implicating them, at times, as being restricted to their own cultural lens of academic authority of prestige.
With that stated, the ethnography and science fiction, from the Western construct can demonstrate, cross culturally, that humans need to tell stories, and that this need is innate, if not entwined with our human evolution development. Going back to the paper of Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, in which she lays out the potentialities of the evolutionary narrative, she states “Indeed, a growing number of evolution-minded anthropologists and psychologists have reached the conclusion that many patterned cultural means of exchanging information relevant to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats (p 238).”[5] In other words, the construction of the narrative has been born into our genes, if you will, and science fiction and ethnography provides and fills the psychological need in understanding those things that are different from us.
Final Thought
Woven into my paper was a short story, a narrative of a community, that let fear and hopelessness rule their psychological nature and the creation of their world. I attempted to illustrate in my short story, how the textual construction of narration can be simulated within the minds of you, the reader, and thus, are observable—and therefore objectified. It is this objectification, in which the narrative storytelling begins, because it is set aside, at first, within the individual’s mind, validated, narrated with the person’s filters and interpretations from personal experiences and enculturation, and then redeployed to the next observer for objectification. My short story was to illustrate this to you, the reader, how narration can be the creator of worlds, and new personal experiences within the individual—and redeployed those experiences into the culture writ-large. Science fiction and anthropology, through ethnography, can create, do, and promote the vision of new worlds—and hopefully bring a better understanding of the world we all live in.
Bibliography
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1953 Folklore and Anthropology, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 66, No. 262 (Oct-Dec., 1953), pp. 283-290.
Basso, Keith H.
1995 Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque (1995).
Blanton, Richard E.; Feinman, Gary M.; Kowelewski, Stephen A.; Peregrine, Peter N.
1996 A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization, Current Anthropology, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 1-14.
Boas, Franz
1901 The Mind of Primitive Man, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 14, No. 52 (Jan.- Mar., 1901), pp. 1-11.
Donawerth, Jane
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Eberl, Jason T.
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Samuels, David
1996 “These Are the Stories the Dogs Tell”; Discourse of Identity and Difference in Ethnography and Science Fiction, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 88-118.
Sperber, Dan
1984 Anthropological and Psychology Towards an Epidemiology Representation, Man (N. S.), Vol. 20, pp. 73-89.
Stewart, Gregory K.
2006 Just Another Day in Paradise in Day: Science Fiction America—The Signs and Symbols of the American Life Mythology, editor J. David Eller, Ph. D., (unpublished).
Sugiyama, Michelle Scalise
2001 Narrative theory and Function: Why Evolution Matters, Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 25 (2001), pp 233-250.
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[1] This a term I am borrowing from a fellow classmate Jonathan Cornwall, this term is to mean, humans variability in adaptation, but also on an epistemological level. The “potentiality” of the human condition on whether it is mental, physical, other such variables allow humans to adapt and shape their environment unlike any other species.
[2] In another private discussion with a fellow classmate Jonathan Cornwall and Professor David Eller led to a perspective that all human interaction is mediated, whether it is internal or external.
[3] This was a term used in a discussion between me and my professor—Dr. Jean Scandlyn—in relation to how women are perceived within the hegemony of culture.
[4] When I speak of the sensory environment I am not only speaking of the naturalized environment, but all that makes up a person, including the senses that are used on daily basis, I am also referring to the engagement of the self and person has interact with others outside of themselves. The didactic or greater potentialities of encompassing the whole sensory experiences creates unique individual in any situational moment at hand.
[5] Sugiyama details how this evolutionary narrative within Homo sapiens sapiens works, she says “Firstly, because narrative processing requires no physical exertion, it involves minimal energy expenditures. Secondly, because narrative compresses time (ellipses), the audience gets more information for its investment relative to time and energy spent than it would through direct experience. Thirdly, because narrative is a representation of experience, its participants need not undertake the physical and social risks of firsthand experience. And, finally, narrative may be easily tailored to meet the specific information needs of local habitats.” In other words, those capable of speech were naturally more “fit”, because of it was more efficient in adapting to the “local habitat.”
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