REVIEW-ESSAY
Rhys Williams
New Practices for the Genre Community
John Rieder. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2017. 224 pp. 2 illus. $22.95 pbk.
The fundamental move that John Rieder’s radically important book makes is to “clarify and strengthen the impact of a historical genre theory on SF studies” (13). In the field of sf scholarship we are still more or less muddling along with formal definitions of the genre—what it does, how it does it, and which texts are therefore circumscribed by it—that have a distinctly ahistorical bent. Hence the continual arguments over precisely the right definition (with Suvin as heavyweight champion of the field), and over origins (Frankenstein? the pulps? Plato’s Republic?). But in genre studies there was a paradigm shift in the 1990s from formal to historical and situational definitions that has so far failed to reshape sf studies. Rieder draws on the insights since developed in genre studies and film and tv studies to make his argument here.
In his first chapter—lightly modified from his earlier, Pioneer-Award-winning article (“On Defining SF”)—Rieder gives us five propositions that act as a logical bridge from our workaday attitude to sf to his proposal:
● SF is historical and mutable;
● SF has no essence, no single unifying characteristic, and no point of origin;
● SF is not a set of texts, but rather a way of using texts and of drawing relationships among them
● SF’s identity is a differentially articulated position in a historical and mutable field of genres
● Attribution of the identity of SF to a text constitutes an active intervention in its distribution and reception. (16)
These propositions work to undermine formal efforts at genre definition by stripping away their premises (1-3), before moving to a positive identification of sf as something continually produced and context-dependent (3-4), and finally turning back to encompass previous definitions of sf within the new paradigm (5). The “clearest” and most formal definitions of sf are revealed as inextricably tied to value judgments and ideological positions, and the genre as a whole is comprised of the overlapping uses to which it is put by different “communities of practice,” to use Rieder’s phrase (11). If we skip to the end of the book, Rieder gives the most concise account of his argument. He claims that the history of sf is
the history of a shifting set of conventions and expectations successively laying their various claims to definition of the genre and exercising their influence over an intersecting but heterogeneous array of practices—comprising not just different ways of telling SF stories, but also of taking roles within its production, distribution, and reception—that draw on vastly different resources and enact correspondingly divergent motives. (161)
Basically, Rieder is saying that what sf is depends on who is interacting with it: what kinds of readers, writers, scholars, publishers, and so on, what they do with it, and what they want from it. Over time, what sf is will change as the communities of practice involved with it change. Further, these communities operate in relationship with each other and with the social, political, and cultural landscapes of their time, and each has varying access to a diversity of economic and cultural resources. As such, “the shape of the history of the genre is given to it first and foremost by systemic transformations of the options that make up this field” (161). So genres change through history, and genres in a sense are this flexible terrain of claims and counterclaims as to their identities.
An example to clarify: science-fiction blockbusters since the 1970s have made sf into a legitimizing language for normative dominant ideologies. The genre contains these examples of itself, and is thus partly constituted by the studios, the enormous production and distribution companies, the authors, the mass audience, and so on, that make up the machine that produces and consumes this thread of sf. But that very same shift in the landscape prompts sf also to become a viable and influential language for marginalized groups, subordinated identities, and non-normative subjectivities to appropriate, to recode, and to speak directly against the values of blockbuster sf and so against the normative values of the dominant culture. The recent growth of Afrofuturism, for example, from marginal radical status to mainstream element of the genre, demonstrates the shifting ground that makes of sf both a hegemonic expression ripe for radical recoding, and a popular mode of expression that sits comfortably in the commercial arena. At other times and in other places, sf has meant something different, because different communities have deployed it from different positions with respect to the terrain of politics, economics, and culture.
So we can read the very many definitions of sf, from Felix Bodin’s introduction to his Novel of the Future (1832) to Mary Shelley’s remarks in the preface to Frankenstein, to Wells and Campbell and Suvin and beyond, as the tips of so many icebergs of social practice, desire, value, and agency. Each definition accompanies a way of making sf, of thinking about it, of using it, of wanting things from it and for it, and of wanting things for ourselves in our production, consumption, and evaluation of it. Science fiction is the patchwork of all the mini-sfs that stand in for and register these communities of practice. It is a battleground, a tug-of-war, an orgy, a conversation, a joint celebration—it is a communal activity above all, among multiple communities of readers, authors, publishers, academics, and so on. Basically, every person or group that deals with sf in some way contributes to the chimera of its shifting contemporary form.
But, Rieder is quick to assure us, this complex makeup does not reduce sf scholarship just to “pluralistic attentiveness to its divergent practices” (161), and it does not mean that scholarship in this mold cannot be a political intervention. On the contrary, we might say that Rieder gives us a means to tackle the significance of sf in the real world. The framework he posits leads the emphasis away from the product—the individual text—and points it toward the means and mode of production, circulation, and consumption, and also, excitingly, to questions of real world value, desire, and agency, all of which are registered by these narratives we study and by their interactions with each other.
In other words, science fiction is not just political because it might have radical content, or because it is cognitively estranging, or is good to think with, or is a useful map of hell—or any other rationalization provided over the years by someone invested in the genre. It is political precisely because people are invested in it, and their investment, what they want from the genre, and how they contribute to it and shape it, is ultimately shaped by who they are and their relationship to the world. Race, gender, socio-economic status, nation, all the factors that mediate between the individual and the world and that comprise the formal structure through which the world makes sense of these differences, all this is registered by the genre of sf. Shifts in the former become shifts in the latter, while the latter provides a space in which changes in the former can be advocated for, leveraged, imagined, and criticized. This is true, however, only insofar as a particular individual or community of practice engages with sf. This in turn means that the more sf becomes a shared grammar uniting more and more communities of practice, the more privileged it should be as an index for culture and society. The more politically useful it becomes to speak with and through, and the more powerful a venue it becomes for counter-claim and disagreement about the world. Further, the very specificity of sf’s affordances as a genre, which is broadly to say that it deals with alternative real worlds, typically in the future, means that a growth in its use in and of itself registers an important tendency in the wider world.
So, on the one hand, genre is shaped by relationships between and among diverse and situated communities of practice—the level of social reality, we might say. But on the other hand, there is also, in this conceptualization, a symbolic level—that of the genre among all the other genres and their relationships to each other, and the ways in which their identities are partly given to them, Saussure-style, by their differences from each other. Science fiction in part is simply not-fantasy, not-horror, and so on. And then, finally, we must take into consideration the relationship of this symbolic layer with the material layer. The genres are arranged into separate ecosystems in tension with each other and which cluster around (because they are produced, reproduced, sustained by, and sustaining of) particular configurations of the material communities of practice.
Rieder focuses on two of the systems that he considers key to the development of sf in the Anglosphere: the “Academic-Classical” and what he names the “Mass Cultural Genre System” (MCGS). The Academic genre system is comprised of the classical genres—Tragedy, Comedy, Epic, and so on—and clusters around academic and educational institutions. It has been around longer, has more prestige (or perhaps we should say that it is a function of prestige-granting institutions), is more stable through time (and so takes on the impression of universality), and is produced and reproduced via the academy. The MCGS on the other hand (sf, fantasy, horror, noir, action, etc.) is younger, unstable, lowbrow, and the product of commercial production and distribution and various communities of practice from authors to readers to ’zine makers and beyond.
The MCGS is a product of the market, always shot through with the motives of capital, but it is also a shared language in which the communities of an unequal world speak, from different places and with different motives. The resulting system of genres is the negotiation of this morass of competing and conflicting communities. I should say here that Rieder is not claiming these are the only two systems. They are the two that are most important to understanding Anglophone sf—his object of study—but he acknowledges that there are numerous genre ecosystems outside this purview, just as there are many communities of practice absent. It strikes me that Rieder’s approach here provides something of a more narrowly focussed and finer-grained companion to World-Systems theory, and would in turn benefit from the global-systemic perspective of the latter.
So sf’s “array of shifting identities” is “one cluster of options in an evolving and interconnected system of generic choices” (162) and its “cultural and ideological power,” as well as the values and meanings attached to it at any given moment, are best understood when “set in this systemic context” (162). For a more structured heuristic, he proposes three coordinates through which to map the shifting values of genre: stratification, seriality, and subcultures (54). Stratification takes into account the relative value and prestige of genres and of the communities of practice engaged with them—good advice for scholars. But the other two are more interesting to my mind. Seriality “dictates the priority of repetition as an object of study” over “individual distinction” (55). This is, in effect, an insistence that study of the MCGS demands a different set of values from that of traditional literary study. Not only do individual texts speak to and about the megatext, and not only are traditions a way of reading history through formal change, but also seriality
constructs a set of continuities in the generic world that simultaneously accentuate its discontinuities from other domains of experience. It establishes a periodicity that punctuates the other routines and duties of the mass audience by separating itself from them and asserting a life, or at least a temporality, of its own. Thus the topic of seriality leads from repetition to collective fantasy, on the one hand, and to the temporal rhythms of mass culture, on the other. (57)
While this disjunction allows some autonomy, for Rieder the package as a whole serves to “disconnect the audience from the workaday world, … to envelop information in an atmosphere of distraction” (57; emphasis in original). Against the too-easy insistence on the radical potential of genre fiction, this statement comes as a refreshing piece of realism. Too many works of criticism extol the radical virtues of sf but only really present the genre’s ability to think radical thoughts as evidence. Given the broader argument of Rieder’s book, I think it becomes clear that the radicalness of sf is, at least partly, something generated within the corridors of academia, to satisfy the values and desires of that community of practice. It is important, now, to face the problem here posed as to the actual functioning of a radicalness hived off from the real world and swaddled in entertainment and distraction. That these visions register an unsatisfied utopian impulse (cf. Richard Dyer) is clear enough, but is it possible to claim anything more? Rieder’s knitting together of genre and communities of practice suggests there is a way, but that the connecting fabric needs to be worked up in earnest.
In discussing the third coordinate, subcultures, Rieder inadvertently demonstrates the need for this work. He points to “the energy and creativity with which such subcultures can assert their resistance to assimilation into a homogenous … social order” (62). Genre has radical potential, his argument goes, freed from the influence of capital, since exchange value must be embodied in a commodity at some point, which then “falls under the control of laborers and consumers and so eludes the calculations of the corporate accounting sheet” (62). While it is true enough that fan culture generates a lot of excitement for its creative reappropriation of mass-market commodities, recent work—by Dan Hassler-Forest, for example—has shown persuasively that the tendrils of capital are integrating this creative and affective labor firmly into the circuits of profit.
Not that Rieder would be surprised. The final key move he makes—in an inspired reduction—is to take the form of the advertisement as the primary structuring influence in the MCGS. This is not to say that everything is an advertisement, but that everything that survives in the MCGS does so in relationship to the advertisement and the formal demands it places on everything around it. To simplify: the more a commodity relies upon advertising revenue, the more it resembles the variety-act model of trying to attract as many people as possible. Examples are Hollywood movies, glossy magazines, and broadcast networks. When the point is to get the biggest audience, the form and content of the storytelling itself is changed because, crucially, the product of these companies is not the stories they produce, but rather it is the audience for those stories that they sell to advertisers. Niche products, such as much genre fiction, rely more on sales and so instead cultivate a narrowness and a repeatability that approximates dependability, like a recognizable brand. These outlets remain closer to the model of selling a product, which necessitates the construction of a very clear identity. So blockbuster sf is what it is—and sf in part is what it is—because of these external demands upon it, and the same goes for niche market sf. This is an important insight, one that provides a foundation for more complex elaborations of the relationship of mass-market capitalist production to specific genre products. To turn to Hassler-Forest’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics again, clearly the spread of world-building over contained narratives, and the transmedia platforming of franchises, cause problems for this simple binary, being an attempt to gather and maintain as large an audience as possible, but under an umbrella of coherence and consistent branding. Science-fiction “worlds” might then be understood as mini-genres, given the number of individual stories produced within them, and as capital-driven innovations to gain broad but dependable audiences.
There is a lot going on here. Science fiction exists and has meaning in relation to its own traditions and innovations, and also within a broader ecosystem of genres, which in turn is codefined alongside other ecosystems. These in turn are products of overlapping communities of practice, all of which operate inside the constraints of the capitalist market system. The profit demands of the latter raise the advertisement to the level of structuring principle, which influences the possible forms of the other products around it, including generic productions, which in turn effects the shape of the genre ecologies within which these exist. At the same time, the overlapping communities of practice struggle and cooperate and speak through the genre, shaping it with their motives, desires, and values, each from different positions of access to cultural, political, and economic power and resources. Finally, the whole field is striated by questions of prestige, social status, and social value, structured by the place everything holds within the wider social field.
In chapters three through six, Rieder takes his approach for a ride. He looks at the question of the “origins” of sf in Frankenstein and the pulps. The former’s importance is not as a formal paradigm, he argues, but as providing “an extraordinarily rich matrix of opportunities for response” (73). It is the way in which it acts as a border object, uniting many different communities of practice, that suggests its importance. Gernsback is crucial not for inventing the genre, but for influencing its split into three separate practices—emerging niche market, emergent mass market, and pre-existing literary market, all in dialogue with each other (82). Rieder then looks at Philip K. Dick and the focus shifts to seriality: Dick’s canonical status (in Literature as well as Genre) is dependent upon how his fiction holds the values and conventions of sf subculture and mainstream literary fiction in tension and dialogue. The final two chapters focus on different communities of interpretation, from Hollywood to the Tiptree award anthologies, and on how sf is now “being blended more interestingly and provocatively with the dialects and purposes of non-white communities” (139). All these readings are insightful, especially on the origins of sf, an area where the book really shines.
To conclude then: Rieder’s argument has a number of consequences. First, it reveals that when sf scholars talk about innovations in the genre, they are really talking about a new claim being made in the world, a new perspective opening up, a new political position becoming heard. Think about the rise of Afrofuturism, for example, which often complicates traditional formal definitions of sf, which in turn only really seemed plausible and comfortable when the dominant communities of practice for sf were less diverse. Or consider the Sad/Rabid Puppies saga, in which the question is less “what is sf?” and more “what kind of sf should be valued?” And the conflicting value systems are precisely the conflicting interests of divergent communities of practice. Second, Rieder asks scholars to take much more seriously everything outside and around the text, as well as what is inside it, if they are to perform worthwhile scholarly work that is not blinkered in its interpretation and evaluation. Third, it brings all the competing definitions of sf into focus as claims that reveal the values and desires of the various individuals and factions that make them. Science fiction, in a sense, is all of these definitions—they are a part of the genre, its para-literature. In this way the genre can be didactic and Marxist, spectacular and ideological, liberating and agential, traditional and reactionary all at the same time. It can estrange in a way that opens us up to history, it can entertain, it can recode futures along previously suppressed lines.
Finally, revealing the definitions of sf as motivated rather than objective knowledge does not diminish them. It negates the possibility of universality, but rewards us by enriching the definitions as they stand. It is not incompatible to approach sf following Rieder’s lead and also to privilege sf’s ability to cognitively estrange. A key point here is that sf does cognitively estrange—some of it at least—and to privilege that aspect of the genre is simply a marker of who one is and what one wants, not only from sf, but also from the world. The same can be said for other definitions, other claims upon the genre. The important thing is to take this in hand, to reflect upon the truth of it, and—for scholars of the genre at least—to incorporate this self-reflection into producing an enriched and situated knowledge. One would hope that, if nothing else, Rieder’s outstanding book makes it more difficult to produce scholarship that does not understand its own place, politics, and purpose in the world.—Rhys Williams, Glasgow University
WORKS CITED
Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Genre, the Musical: A Reader. Ed. Rick Altman. London: Routledge, 1981. 175-89.
Hassler-Forest, Dan. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-Building beyond Capitalism. New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016.
Rieder, John. “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History.” SFS 37.2. (2010): 191-209.
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