This review appeared in BULL SPEC #1, March 2010, as well as the New York Review of Science Fiction:

TECHNOLOGIZED DESIRE: SELFHOOD AND THE
BODY IN POSTCAPITALIST SCIENCE FICTION
by D. Harlan Wilson
Guide Dog Books

Review by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

In its just short of 5,000 words, Eric S. Raymond’s essay “A
Political History of SF” brings politics in juxtaposition with
science fiction and attempts to develop and defend a straightforward
thesis that science fiction is by its nature most compatible
with political libertarianism. Amidst a backdrop of
the rise and fall of several pushes and movements against this
underlying compatibility, Raymond goes on to argue that
mainstream—that is to say, libertarian-leaning—science fiction
will continue to absorb and de-politicize the stories which
comprise such counter-movements, from Cyberpunk to Hard
Science Fiction and onto future inroads against “the bedrock
individualism of Campbellian SF.”
Since the essay’s publication in 2002, the ongoing foreign
engagements and crumbling economy around the ultra-capitalist
policies of much of the world’s leaders has led to a renewed
round of questions about the humaneness of capitalism
and the consumer culture which accompanies it. With these
societal questions have come several postcapitalist works of
note, among them: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream,
which examines the intersection of science, history, and politics
in an imagined far future of solar system-spanning human
colonies; a new edition of Terry Bisson’s alternative history
Fire on the Mountain, which examines the course of history if
John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded and led
to a socialist movement among the freed slaves of the Confederate
south; and Accelerando by Charles Stross, which envisions
an “Economy 2.0” of artificial intelligences and
augmented and simulated human consciousness.
A common accompanying theme, however, of postcapitalist
science fiction is dystopian posthumanism: a merging of
the biological self with technology with disastrous global consequences.
Such stories swarm with clones, cyborgs, and virtual
realities. These latter stories have a tendency to
dehumanize the human, many seeming to strive to answer the
question, “What is humanity?” while characters plug or jack
or dial into virtual, highly-technologized existences.
With this backdrop of science fiction, along with that of
decades of culture, philosophy, politics, and history as its
base, and expanding his science fiction data field to include
cinema as the prevailing mass medium for such fiction, prolific
fiction and non-fiction author D. Harlan Wilson’s Technologized
Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science
Fiction is an ambitious undertaking, analyzing the currents of
all these information flows and examining them for patterns
and meaning with a keen, postmodern eye.
His success is a resounding and accessible one, though his
analysis seems to have been directed toward and apply most
specifically to hypercapitalist or dystopian posthuman fiction
rather than definitively postcapitalist. Presented in five sections
and framed by an introduction and coda, with each section
analyzing a particular work or collection, Wilson
illuminates a growing consistency in theme, mood and message,
aptly captured in the book’s description from publisher
Guide Dog Books: that “the universe of consumer-capitalism
is an illusory prison from which there is no escape—despite
the fact that it is illusory.” He ably defends his central thesis,
that the merging of self and technology in a “techocapitalist”
future, where the subjectivity of the self has expanded outward
through technology, leads inevitably to a loss of self,
adrift in a sea of media, information, and consumption, fueled
ever more violently by the very production that a highly tech-
nologized society demands. That, despite an innate human resistance
to the technocapitalist machinery, “free will is a fiction.”
He begins with an examination of Cameron Crowe’s 2001
film Vanilla Sky, in which a disfigured man learns through a
glitch that his reality is virtual, and is given a choice “between
returning to the real world or to another, glitch-free dream.”
Wilson argues that this is a typical construct, defining good,
wholesome “humanity” as a return to the “real” world, despite
the still-functioning capitalist technological and political
machinery which reigns there and from which there is no escape.
The second chapter analyzes William S. Burroughs’ “cutup”
trilogy from the early 1960s (The Soft Machine, The Ticket
That Exploded, and Nova Express) as illustrating that even the
technologies of the 1950s and 60s were used as mediators of social
interaction; just another, yet maddeningly large and fast,
step on the path that humanity has taken since the wheel, papyrus,
and the printing press first started the expansion and dilution
of the self into our technological extensions. Wilson
particularly uses Burroughs’ work as a representative depiction
of the inevitability and inescapability of the self from
technology; that there is “no choice but to live as a technopathological
extension of the machine.”
The most captivating ofWilson’s analyses follows as
chapter 3, where he turns his attention to Sam Raimi’s Army
ofDarkness. In it, the protagonist Ash, portrayed in the 1992
film by Bruce Campbell, attempts to escape a life of drudgery
in service to the modern capitalist world but is thrown back
in time into a world of witches and the undead. Reading Ash’s
journey to the medieval world as a “schizophrenic delusion of
grandeur,” Wilson pits Ash’s experience against postmodern
capitalist philosophy and each comes out a bit worse for the
wear. Ash “only succeeds in reifying his status as a common
postmodern subject” due to his underlying acceptance of the
technologized, capitalist reality to which he longs to return.
It would have been hard for Wilson to ignore The Matrix,
despite the overabundance of overanalysis of its content. After
examining the ultraviolent, hyperconsumerist, “global free
market” future world of Max Barry’s 2003 novel Jennifer Government,
Wilson decodes the Matrix with both a scathing eye
for its collection of tropes and clichés and as a map into the
collective subjective experiences of its creators and fans. His
analysis here is memorable and casts a wide net, beginning by
pulling the Spider-Man films into the discussion (the “badness”
of both the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus being embodied
in their technological extensions), contrasting the
issues of choice and enslavement alongside a brief dismissal of
Spider-Man’s “good” technological powers as “natural”—“the
spider that bit him being a radioactive, genetically tailored
mutation.” Wilson uses this illustration to further solidify his
concept of the terminal choice, that being whether to give up
the self entirely or to, effectively, embrace a schizophrenic existence
in the face of dehumanizing technology and choices.
Bringing in analyses from writers as diverse as the revolutionary
socialist Slavoj Žižek and the cyberpunk and now
solidly futurist Bruce Sterling, Wilson exhumes the source
material of the Matrix trilogy and brings each, in turn, under
the harsh light of his analytical framework. To illustrate the
dangers of allowing our fictional realities to become the backdrop
to our daily existence, he contrasts the Matrix trilogy
with another trilogy, that ofWilliam Gibson’s cyberpunk
Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer and on): “Gibson speaks in the
technologized, fractal, jargon-infested language of deterritorialization.
But the Wachowski’s speak plainly, as it were, in the
common, everyday language of today’s masses, underscoring
that our primal desire is to be controlled by our technocapitalist
extensions,” implying that the over-jargoned, frenetic
vocabulary of Gibson has become, in essence, both our inner
and outer monologues.
Wilson transitions toward his conclusion by arguing that,
particularly as evidenced by the use of advanced technology
in the filming of the Matrix trilogy, we are inhabiting a reality
which is becoming harder and harder to distinguish from science
fiction, leading the elements of often-marginalized science
fiction to become the archetypes of daily life and
mainstream experience. Capitalist technologies, he argues, incorporate
and shape the ideas of science fiction for “unrelenting
socioeconomic ends” in an increasingly violent,
self-perpetuating cycle of production and consumption. Finally,
Wilson argues, within this inescapable cycle the very
foundation of science fiction will follow the continuing commoditization
of our inner lives in a final shift from “a genre
of fancy” to “a genre of capital.” Raymond, as it turns out,
might end up having being right, though not necessarily due
to a fundamental compatibility or aesthetic of author or
audience. Instead, it is the very structure of our current
technocapitalist reality which might constrain the stories
which can be authentically told.
Addressing the accessibility of this critique, it reads quite
well to a layperson, here meaning someone with at least a basic
interest in philosophy, technology, and science fiction.
There is an economy of technical terms from postmodern
analysis, and Wilson presents the denser portions with
enough background to keep the reader from being left adrift,
with the introduction’s setting ofWilson’s starting points for
analysis among the more challenging for its references to the
prevailing modes of postmodern literary and cultural analysis.
At about 200 pages, split into five sitting-sized chapters, it
serves well both in its intended purpose as an in-depth survey
of the landscape of ideas and culture emerging from science fiction’s
intersection with our increasingly technologized future
and as an introduction to such topics.
In future efforts to expand or build upon Wilson’s Technologized
Desire, writers might do well to explore more than the
dehumanizing side of fictional worlds which Wilson has engaged
here. By including well-imagined and yet fully human
postcapitalist worlds, particularly those of postscarcity—even
those with a high level of technology—other insights into the
paths our future selves may take might be gleaned, as well as
beginning to form a more balanced and hopeful picture for
technology’s place as an extension of our consciousness and
subjectivity. Alternatively or additionally, such analysis could
expand to include explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-technology, or
primitivist works, explaining how they fit into this picture of
inevitable over-technologization and technocapitalist total control
of choice. While these may, like Raimi’s Ash in Army of
Darkness, end up being properly characterized as reifying the
very framework they set out to reject, such missing sister
pieces to Wilson’s analysis are intentional, as he has set his
sights explicitly on stories of over-technologization of the currently
dominant capitalist identity, revealing glimpses of postcapitalist
identities “in silhouette.” It remains to be seen,
however, whether stories of hope against the inevitability of
technocapitalist dominance will be accepted by readers and
critics as anything more than as Wilson now characterizes
Robinson’s Mars trilogy of the first half of the 1990s: “authentic
fantasy instead of an extrapolated potential reality.” From
our subjective positions of already over-technologized desire,
Wilson concludes, such characters as Robinson’s “colorful,
wide-eyed personalities” are simply not believable any longer.
Within his framework presented here, further and wider
analysis should be encouraged to explore and define these
identities; otherwise, as Wilson’s deconstruction here warns,
we may find ourselves firmly caught in the cogs of the machines
that we ourselves rush, madly, to build. ( )