Science Fiction and Cultural History

SF-TH Inc
Science Fiction and Cultural History

Author(s): Roger Luckhurst
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 3-15
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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SCIENCE FICTION AND CULTURAL HISTORY 3
Roger Luckhurst
Science Fiction and Cultural History
In 199 1 , the eminent historian Keith Thomas began his keynote speec
congress on cultural history with an embarrassing confession: "I h
thought of myself as a cultural historian, and I am not quite sure w
history' is. In the United Kingdom there is no such subject. There are s
chairs or lectureships in cultural history, no departments of cultura
journals of cultural history, no conferences on the subject" (65). F
scholars like Thomas, the term tended to evoke an avowedly elitist in
the high-cultural artefacts of the Western tradition, the Kultur gesc
identified with Jakob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century, reaffirm
Huizinga in his 1926 lecture "The Task of Cultural History," and still
by Ernst Gombrich as late as In Search of Cultural History (1
Britain, Thomas thought, would now rally unambiguously to this
conceptions of what constituted culture had changed so profoundly
Yet there has been a very striking transformation since T
observations. Every seven years or so, British academics are forced
Research Assessment Exercise. This is a largely punitive auditing a
assessment of published academic research, judged by disciplinary
peers, that determines highly selective government funding for resear
the English language and literature panel (the 57th of 67 panels) wa
Rick Rylance. Rylance has since offered his informal observations on
in research the panel observed since the last exercise in 2000. Rylan
that the research of just over two thousand literary scholars who subm
for assessment could be reduced to one main headline: the age of the
and the dominant mode of doing literature was now what might be
called cultural history. Historicism had become the default, although
new trends emerging in a minor revival in aesthetic formalism and e
partial turn to the cognitive sciences to replace the void once filled
theory.1 Within two decades, then, in Britain at least, cultural history
being a weakly articulated and under-theorized mode and beca
something like a critical orthodoxy. But surely this cultural history w
different from that expounded by Buckhardt or Gombrich?
This explosion has also been evident in the history discipline. Hi
nearly all point to the collection of essays edited by Lynn Hunt call
Cultural History in 1 989 as a moment when something important was
in the field. Peter Burke, one of the first professors to hold a chai
history, at Cambridge, has since counted at least ten introductory t
cultural history that have appeared since 2000, including his own he
What is Cultural History? (2004, 2008). In 2004, the journals Cultu
and the Literary Imagination and the Journal of Social and Cultural H
launched. Symptomatically, the UCLA Historical Journal re-
4 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 37 (2010)
Directions in Cultural History in 2005. The International Society for

History was founded in 2007, holds an annual conference, and is shortly
ajournai.
All of this seems very new and was a largely invisible wave of change when
I was approached by Polity Press to write the book on sf for their new Cultural
History of Literature series. This appeared in 2005. What I hoped would be an
attempt to write a history of sf literature in a new or different way looks
retrospectively part of the pattern of change in critical orthodoxies. Like writing
about Ballard in High Theory deconstructive mode in the 1990s, I had once again
merely conformed to the internal logic of my own discipline. It is always mildly
disconcerting to discover that your own work exemplifies Foucault' s insight that
it is discourse that speaks us and not the other way around.
Yet cultural history has become such a convenient catch-all term, a vague
appellation, that I am not entirely convinced there is still much of a grasp of what
it actually is or, perhaps more importantly, what kind of work it might yet
promise. Cultural history often comes across as a practice or set of practices that
is somewhat reluctant to theorize itself (another symptom of a post-theory
moment, perhaps). So what follows are some thoughts on what this method might
add to the critical armory, what it might bring to sf history specifically, how and
where it changes the focus of that study, and what it might open up in the future.
1. What is cultural history? When I was trying to marshal resources, the answers
were bewilderingly diverse. It really did depend on where you thought its main
centers and its intellectual origins were located. It was mainly British, some said,
and derived from the Marxian and leftist impulse of Cultural Studies, as
formulated by E.P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, Raymond Williams, and Stuart
Hall in work from the late 1950s to its apotheosis in the 1980s. Williams in
Culture and Society (1958) and Thompson in The Making of the English Working
Class (1963) did the crucial job of expanding the definition of "culture" to
encompass an inclusive, anthropological sense of the grain of lived experience.
Williams saw the culture of modernity in "the practical separation of certain
moral and intellectual activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society"
that also meant "new kinds of personal and social relationship": "Where culture
meant a state or habit of mind, or the body of intellectual and moral activities, it
means now, also, a whole way of life" {Culture and Society 17-18; emphasis in
original). The ramifications of redefining culture in this way were manifold. In
Keywords (1976), Williams examined how the term culture had been compacted
with meanings of cultivation, civility, and a civilizing role in the course of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a network of ideas that literature studies in
the university had imbibed wholesale. A more anthropological sense of culture
democratically expanded study to any mode of meaning-making rituals, practices,
representations, and texts. Thompson and Samuel, in particular, saw this as a
means of recovering a semi-autonomous and often resistant working-class culture
that had been disregarded even by leftist historians. Cultural history refused to
make culture epiphenomenal, a simple reflection of social or economic
determinants (a problem Williams and others saw in reflectionist Marxism and its
reductive accounts of culture). In their turn, Williams and Hall ope

for cultural studies to investigate popular texts in the most expa
Whilst other cultural commentary in the 1950s often used sf
spreading ooze of degrading (and American) mass culture, the work
and Hall provided one of the legitimating frameworks for historie
culture such as sf to emerge.
Yet after a highpoint in the 1980s, when cultural studies made th
argument that Anglo-American social and political conservatism wa
effectively challenged in the cultural realm, the movement has had
institutional influence. In Britain, this was symbolized in 2002 by t
Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural S
established in 1964. This had been led by Richard Hoggart and then
and nurtured important figures in cultural studies including Angela M
Dick Hebdige. The temporary assemblage of disciplines brought t
cultural theory was dismantled. Cultural studies, then, appeared to b
as cultural history was emerging. Perhaps from a Darwinian impul
close competitors, Peter Burke is unusually hostile to what he con
narrow, ahistorical, and presentist approach of most British cultural s
championing of cultural history.
Maybe, then, as others said, cultural history was mainly French
be understood in two very distinct ways. One of these pointed to t
poststructuralism on what Mark Poster terms the "realist or
assumptions" of conventional historiography, by theorists such a
Lyotard in the 1970s (6). The historiography established and institu
the nineteenth century was associated with nationalism, imperial
triumph of the bourgeoisie and had to be overturned. There were t
grand narratives, no more ideological trajectories of nation, or Geis
other words: no more Herder, or Hegel, or Marx. Instead, there h
challenge to the historicity of History as the automatic metaphysi
all knowledge. Derrida, for instance, warned that one needed to be
metaphysical conceptions that attended history, "the history
developing itself, producing itself, fulfilling itself. And doing so li
straight or circular line" (56). Despite often being accused of
historical explanation, Derrida wanted to interrogate but also re-emplo
this double move being typical of deconstruction. As he explained
very often use the word 'history' in order to reinscribe its force an
produce another concept or conceptual chain of 'history': in
'monumental, stratified, contradictory' history, a history that also
logic of repetition and the trace" (57; emphases in original).
In an allied way, Jean-François Lyotard argued that the crisis i
Western thought by the atrocities attendant to modernity (impe
tyrannies of right and left, genocidal logics) had put the co
Enlightenment historical narrative into crisis. In The Différend (
Lyotard called "signs of history" were events that destroyed the
narrative capacities of conventional historiography. "Auschwitz"
sign of history, an event rendered ungraspable by a historiography

(however distantly) in the logic of nationalism:
With Auschwitz, something new has happened in history (which can onl
sign and not a fact), which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the t
of here's and now's, the documents which indicated the sense or senses o
facts, and the names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases w
conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as possib
emphases in original)
A true historian, Lyotard pronounced, must "break with the monop

history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he or she mu
forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under th
knowledge" (57). Elsewhere, Lyotard defined the postmodern as an in
towards the "grand narratives" of progress and liberation developed
nineteenth century, and instead advocated a preservation of the local, t
and the multiple: what he called the petits récits. So The Postmodern
(1979) ended with this peroration: "Let us wage war on totality;
witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save
of the name" (82). At times, Lyotard' s stance seemed to regard any mo
synthesis as unacceptably violent, preferring instead a disarticu
knowledge into a set of autonomous language games.
Suspicion of history as an epistemological tool was at its most rad
anti-historical in France in the early 1970s, something often ascribed (in
conventional historiographical manner!) to the fall-out of the failed revo
began in French universities in May 1968. Suspicion or outright anti-h
fed belatedly into the adoption of poststructuralism in America and Brit
1980s, producing bad-tempered debates in books with titles like Derek
anthology Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (1989). The
to debate noisily the place of historical explanation or grounding in any
that wanted to declare itself "radical" or "political." Yet after
oppositions generated by the Theory Wars, it has become possible to
oneself as a cultural historian precisely because one has absorbed just so
insights of poststructuralist cultural theory. In this sense, cultural histor
seen as combining elements of critical theories of historiography with th
politics that were consolidated in the 1980s. A definitional list might the
an interest in what social or intellectual history had excluded becaus
unexamined frameworks; an awareness of the constructedness of an
categories such as gender, sexuality, or race; a de-emphasis on social c
such as class and on the empirical and quantitative methods of social h
pre-eminent attention to the historical formations of subjectivity; an aw
the textuality of sources, no longer treated transparently or instrum
evidence; a foregrounding of the place of narrative artifice and
figuration in the very act of writing history, as Hayden White had a
Metahistory (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978). This new synthesis
organize a work like Mark Poster's Cultural History and Postmodernit
In his definition, "Cultural history might then be understood as the st
construction of the subject, the extent to which, and the mechanisms
which, individuals are attached to identities, [and] the shape and

of those identities" (10).
Yet there was another French grouping that developed a cultur
somewhat different tack. The presiding influence here was Mi
institutional and discursive histories of modernity that focuse
normative was defined by the remorseless pursuit of "pathologic
as the lunatic, the prisoner, the ill, the deviant, the homosexual
hysterical woman. Official histories were complicated by atten
Foucault called "subjugated knowledges," discourses considered
unscientific. His specific histories of the prison or the clinic link
a vision of modernity as an interlocking grid of political, juridica
cultural discourses that actively constituted the modern su
contemporaries, Foucault was suspicious of conventional h
(particularly its linear, evolutionary, or progressive belief
development), but his method of critique was not to abandon o
possibility of writing history. In meta-studies, he formulated
approaching the archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge
undertaking an auto-critique and developing "genealogical cr
regarded Foucault' s work up to Discipline and Punish (19
determinisi, the social world modeled on the prison panopticon
and determined every move; but geneaology emphasized how t
constituted between discursive systems and real practices, allow
agency through "technologies of the self."2
If Foucault did not call himself a cultural historian, his influence
French historians such as Roger Chattier or Robert Darnton, w
adopted this self-description. Chartier's Cultural History, only
English in 1998, began with an important attempt to argue how
advanced beyond social history or the study of mentalités (the at
particular psychological "world-view" that was a method associ
French Annales School of the 1920s). Cultural history aimed at
"a specific social reality was constructed" (4) by remaining awar
classifications or schemata were always themselves contextually
the product of vested interests, rather than abstract (and ahis
categories. A particular focus was on representation, first as a
exercise of power that produced social classifications, then as a s
like rituals or customs that signified status or rank symbolically, a
textual forms that inscribed the existence of groups or commun
representations foregrounding the need for a textual hermene
history, Chattier therefore proposed, was "the analysis of
representation - that is, of the production of classifications and
constitute the social and conceptual configurations proper to o
place" (13). This sort of method was concretized in the case his
by Robert Darnton in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episod
Cultural History ( 1 984), which embraced the anthropological defin
but headed out for "unmapped territory" (1 1) on the principle "tha
of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those w
be most opaque" (82). Thus, Darnton's titular essay tries to unravel the
of the mock-trial and mass slaughter of cats by a group of printmaker
Paris. In Darnton's interpretation, this odd incident becomes a c
overdetermined rite, piling specific class resentments in the printing tra
cusp of industrialization on top of the multiple resonances of the cat a
religious, and class symbol. "The men of the Old Regime," he observ
hear a great deal in the wail of a cat" (95). Darnton provides a
métonymie model for cultural history: the local, enigmatic, or eccent
typically overlooked by grand synthetic narratives or social historica
becomes the portal for slowly revealing a whole cultural ethos.
sometimes also been called microhistory, given its suspicion of the m
ambitions of social history. These new ways of proceeding were at t
how Lynn Hunt defined the "New Cultural History" in 1989 in a colle
showed the strong influence of the new French history.
The New Cultural History was coined in the title of an American co
proceedings, a signal that cultural history was a synthetic approach u
brought together on American campuses. This context brought two
elements into play. The first was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, w
The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) exerted a major influenc
development of cultural history. For the American academy it was Gee
than literary critic Raymond Williams who re-centered analysis on an
meaning of culture. Geertz revived a hermeneutic model of anth
regarding it as "not an experimental science in search of a law but an int
one in search of a meaning" (5), thus making it closer to the model of th
critic. The cultures at the core of his study were webs of meaning, "an h
transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of
conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men com
perpetuate and develop their knowledge and attitudes toward life
ethnography sensitive to the mysterious difference of the other, his app
not have the strong Marxian impetus of cultural studies, reading cultu
or practices as symptoms of larger political or economic processes. Cu
to remain cultural, rather than being translated as social or economic
Geertz was suspicious of any a priori theorizing, instead offering acto
pragmatism. His aim was to work from the specific instance, heading
limited conceptual abstractions "from the direction of exceedingly e
acquaintances with extremely small matters" (21). These "ethn
miniatures" (21) resurface in Darnton's work, but then he worked clo
Geertz in Princeton in the early 1970s. Geertz' s influence was also stro
second specifically American input into cultural history, the critical
that became known as New Historicism. This term was coined as an incidental
description by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982, although he soon tried to abandon it
for the vaguer "cultural poetics." His own Renaissance Self -Fashioning (1980)
suggested that the focus would be on the diverse interchanges of culture and
power that helped constitute the modern subject. It bore the imprint of Foucault,
but also used the recognizably Geertzian tactic of deploying odd anecdotal
starting points or strange juxtapositions. But New Historicism saw itself as a
resolutely political yet post-Marxist criticism because it viewed th

social, and economic as discourses that circulated and interpenetra
hierarchy. Circulation was the dominant metaphor of the movemen
the injunction that "literary and non-literary texts circulate insepar
xi). 'Textual" interpretation therefore extended out from literary
juxtaposed juridical or political documents: the same courtly power,
would flow through diplomatic documents, legal proceedings, or s
plays. This led some to accuse it of relativizing the evidentia
historiography, and the movement was vilified in the counterreaction
seen as a motivated attack on canonical Western thought by neocon
Reagan's second term.
After the Theory Wars, the Culture Wars, and the Science War
history is undoubtedly a sort of irenic compromise-formation. The
History might best be seen as a pragmatic synthesis: the insights of cri
but re-grounded in empirical, archival, textual work. The anxi
destructive theory wars must also explain why so many rather in
modes of doing research are very keen to identify their practice as cult
But whether that compromise-formation pulls most of its political t
question for consideration.
After this brief survey of elements that combine to produce cultur
one central assumption is that a cultural history must be sensitive
detail and suspicious of any grand theory. It implies that particul
analysis require specific formulations. A cultural history of sf, ther
require its own specific conjuncture.
2. Sf history has not always had the luxury of being able to reflect
Establishing legitimacy of a long disregarded cultural form has its o
and that has often taken the form of traditional historiographie
identifying inventors and originators, great men (and occasionally w
lines of descent, national tempers, and the plucking of masterpiec
abjected mass of science-fictional discourse. These conservative mo
been steadfastly retained, somewhat surprisingly, by Marxist critic
Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson. Of late, however, sf critics have b
good at challenging genre history through specific identitarian cate
have the potential to re-configure the genre through race, gender, o
am sitting next to two key figures in this process. De Witt Kilgore' s A
(2003) and Veronica Hollinger's essays, collections, and her intervent
have been among the strongest signals that the generation afte
Jameson believe that Marxian criticism need not be hostile to the insig
politics brings to sf.3
Cultural history is too recent to have had much effect on schol
which has only patchily incorporated the questions it raises. When E
spoke of needing to produce a cultural history of sf in 1994, he only
the critic needed to expand the cultural categories for analysis, rightly
that sf was "no longer simply a collection of texts which can be a
literary critic. Its ideas and icons have permeated the imagery
television, rock music, and advertising ... and have helped to create religi
Scientology) and popular delusions (like flying saucers)" (viii-ix). Tradi
historical method, however, remained unchanged. To get a sense of how
history might begin to transform sf history, Lisa Yaszek's essay in the Ro
Companion to Science Fiction (2008) is a promising start. Yaszek sugge
cultural history is intrinsically interdisciplinary, fusing resources from ac
humanities and social sciences. Science fiction, she says, "lends itself t
critical methodologies of cultural history because it has always been a
form" (20 1 ). Yaszek' s main observation is that a cultural history approach
visible the modes of historiography that have implicitly underpinned s
fictional futures: the Hegelian spirit of expansive space opera; the Spe
pessimism of Olaf Stapledon's far future accounts of human decline and
reliance of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein on Arnold Toynbee' s ide
elite rational minority that can arrest and re-direct the otherwise inevitab
of civilization's history. This exposure of the historiographie assumption
moments in canonical sf is inspired by Hay den White and importantly rev
complicities of sf s intrinsically historiographie imagination. This only rep
a first step, however.
In my own attempt at cultural history, I wanted to explore how m
contextual saturation might explode and then reconstitute the ostensible ob
study: science fiction literature. This restriction to literary form was an im
of the series, rather than authorial choice, yet already a cultural history
that any internal literary history of genre could not work. Instead, it sugg
approach that considered literary texts as part of a matrix open to, and int
with, many other discourses in a flat, non-hierarchical net. I took the sp
of sf to be its odd yoking of incompatible fields of science and mechani
a literary culture being formulated in the nineteenth century as the last re
humanism in an increasingly industrialized modernity. It was therefore
and contradictory thing, always marginal to internal literary historie
repositioned as culturally significant by being put into communication w
histories of popular culture and changing print technologies, the expan
popular and mass-cultural entertainment from the late nineteenth cent
after, the history of science, and the debates since at least Carlyle and
about the place of mechanism or technology in conceptions of cultural expe
I was struck, too, by how little communication there had been betwe
new histories of science and emergent science studies with science
scholarship. Work by Stephen Shapin showed how the practice of scienc
be viewed as thoroughly and inevitably social and cultural, concerned to
"the historically contingent connections between knowledge and the con
various social groups in their intellectual and social settings" (164). Th
with other theoretical and historical attempts to re-think the relation o
and culture, outside the frame of mutually exclusive or hostile "Two Cu
Thinkers such as Bruno Latour reversed the anthropological gaze o
everyday practices of science, and used the history of science to illustr
intrinsically messy social and political nature of even (and perhaps especi
"purest" Science. Latour' s The Pasteurization of France (1984) explo
SCIENCE FICTION AND CULTURAL HISTORY 1 1
strategies that Louis Pasteur developed to demonstrate his theory o

transmission, his history forcing together test tubes, laboratories, g
pumps, cows, politicians, and bacilli, deliberately mixing up subjects a
nature and culture, and scientific, political, social, and cultural debates t
how they are all inextricably intertwined. A cultural history of sf m
work to network together heterogeneous elements by regarding th
focused on the fantastic enablements and disablements of the s
technological modernity.
Despite this commitment to the heterogeneity demanded by the very
of sf, any history will always produce an over-coherent account. My h
all the others that preceded it, worked by more or less explicit acts o
and exclusion, a process admitted with melancholy. This is where it
trouble. Where was X or Y? Why was there complete silence about te
the Anglo-American tradition? Where were the women? Was it really
isolate science fiction as a literature from all its other cultural forms, p
its visual cultural forms? Wasn't this a reinscription of the very literar
sought to overhaul?
Yet the project was conceived metonymically, with the hope that th
demonstrated in this local and particular act of cultural history would
the network remained open, ready to incorporate and be willingly trans
subsequent critical interventions. It was an open grid, less a rigid stru
imperial ambitions to incorporate any text or critical stance than somet
networked conception of sf would be fundamentally altered by
additions. So not, then, the structural or structuralist grid that wou
discipline texts into a few artificially constructed categories, a critical st
alive and well in the morphological essays in Istvan Csicsery-Ron
Beauties of Science Fiction (2008) or Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics o
(2008). To avoid the risk of the net or network turning into a fixed gr
the more anarchic figure of the rhizome works better. This is Gilles
Felix Guattari's metaphor that rejects the linear and hierarchical tap-r
the idea, recently revived by Franco Moretti in his pleasingly odd st
Maps Trees (2007), that literary history might be grasped ¡From an a
distance as an evolutionary tree of life, advancing by adaptations, div
and extinctions. Instead, using a different biological metaphor from t
roots, the rhizome is a headless, decentered, non-linear root which,
and Guattari say, "can be cracked or broken at any point." If cut, "it
again following one or another of its lines" (17). "A rhizome,"
elsewhere, "is not answerable to any structural or generative model
nature foreign to the very idea of a genetic axis" (24). Deleuze and Gu
resistant to lines of articulation, hierarchies, segmentations, or the cons
territories. A closed totality, they propose, will be undercut by lines of
produce constant deterritorializations. Perhaps the necessary but ri
coherence of history- writing could be combined or crosscut with such
subversions, moments of counter-narrative or indeed non-narrative inte
This would undoubtedly extend the possibilities of cultural history
have to break the genre of the academic primer or textbook as much as
the boundaries of sf history. The narrowing of academic publishing into

formats is not encouraging in this regard.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has recently posed the question "Shall we con
to write histories of literature?" Gumbrecht' s sweeping argument is that
history on the national model came into being with the bourgeois nation
the early nineteenth century, a historicism in which "every literary text ha
into a potential element for potential histories of national literature"
Literature was the national religion; critics were its theologians. This m
continues, went into crisis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth ce
with "a growing scepticism regarding the traditionally ontological sta
concepts such as nation and national spirit or culture, something finally
by the Great War (524). What emerged in its stead were diverse forms of l
theory, alongside Modernism, that interrogated the naturalness and r
foundations of accounts of national literature and emphasized in contrast t
fractious relationship of literature to forms of dominant national cul
Gumbrecht then suggests that there was an even greater crisis
epistemological legitimacy of any concept of literary history in the late tw
century, the period of High Theory. This was marked, he says, by "a tru
regarding history and any discursive form that could be called 'narrative
stands in the place of ambitious narrative arcs, he suggests, is local imm
provided by the concreteness of individual texts. Here's what Gum
concludes:
What a growing number of readers and scholars seem to be interested in today,

more than in conceptions of collective identity, is ... the punctual feeling of being
inscribed into the ... material world. As this is a punctual feeling, a feeling that
has to be found and established in each specific case, I strongly associate it with
a new type of literary history that is fragmented into hundreds of short "entries."
For this extremely dense historical contextualisation brings back to life and
presence what we call "literary events" while these short "entries" use literary
texts to conjure up worlds of the past - but they do not converge in any larger
concepts that try to capture the identity of a nation. (530)
This sounds like short encyclopedic entries are overtaking narrative history. These
poles are there in science fiction scholarship, too. Against, say, the sweeping
narrative account of the genre in Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree (1973),
another vision of the apex of genre knowledge are the hundreds of short non-
narrative entries that make up John Clute' s Encyclopedia projects. There is in fact
an overarching thesis about fantasy in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), but it
is broken up and distributed across entries one must read non-linearly,
interspersed between the empirical accumulation of specific entries, so that the
reader jumps around as if following hypertext links, never quite grasping the
totality. Gumbrecht is very worried about this kind of localization or deliberate
fragmentation, and sees it, more apocalyptically, as a further sign of the threat to
survival of the humanities themselves in the modern university. He sees no future
in literary histories and therefore no future for humanities at all.
Science fiction scholars, on the other hand, are in the business of futures. I still
think there is a place for writing large-scale histories, but that we are seeing new
devices to complicate its straight lines with networked and r

interventions.
Cultural history, exhausted from various academic wars, often wan
any flak by declaring itself a modest little thing. Geertz speaks abou
contexts" (21). It is the "tenor of the times," Victoria Bonnell and L
argue, to find "less ambitious" ways of doing history (25). It may no
be wise to avoid the messianic mode that tends to dog critical theorie
so cultural history does not need to be intellectually modest at all. It
to be the empty descriptor of a bland orthodoxy. In the most thoughtf
my attempt at a cultural history of literary sf, Mark Bould pro
suggested that rather than writing ever more literary histories, it migh
to think instead of "a critical history of sf which significantly downp
least polemically, marginalises sf literature" (540). This would better
the rush of science-fictional forms at least since the 1920s in comi
magazines, radio, advertising, cinema, interior design, Internet site
writing, transport interchanges, religions, fun-fairs, fandom, video gam
immersive spaces of World Expos - all of those multiplying extra-lit
that sf now inhabits but that textual histories have so routinely overloo
is right. This is what an unfettered cultural history would begin to
science fiction in the expanded field, traced not by pre-existent cate
following how the actors construct the pathways through the messy c
constantly sift and sort, hardly caring most of the time whether somet
fantasy, Gothic, dark fantasy, slipstream, weird, or whatever latest t
naming has appeared.5 Perhaps a different kind of writing, rejecti
narrowness and theoretical over-coherence, is also what is needed f
vibrant, ill-disciplined, and sprawling culture. I'm looking forward to
a glorious cultural history as this might look like.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
My thanks to Rob Latham for the invitation to UC, Riverside to participate in
Science Fiction Studies Symposium.
NOTES
1 . 1 am quoting Rylance from a presentation on the RAE2008 given to the School of
English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, 6 March 2009.
2. Foucault explored meanings of genealogical criticism in "Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History." One of the clearest expressions of Foucault' s late interest in "technologies of th
self is in the interview "On the Genealogv of Ethics."
3. Other recent influential feminist contributions to my mind include Larbalestier and
Yaszek, Galactic Suburbia.
4. A model for this kind of history writing, from a very different context, is suggested
by Elliott Colla' s Conflicted Antiquities. Colla' s history of the emergence of the science
of Egyptology and the process of generating scientific artefacts from ancient objects
explores the standard Western European sources, yet periodically cuts across them with
Islamic and Egyptian counter-narratives. These short, sharp intermezzos strongly convey
how the same objects can be motivated in totally different ways according to the politics
of the network within which they are examined.
5. 1 am echoing the title of Rosalind Krauss's essay "Sculpture in the Expande

(1979).
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Directions in Cultural History in 2005. The International Society for

reductive accounts of culture). In their turn, Williams and Hall ope

sign of history, an event rendered ungraspable by a historiography

A true historian, Lyotard pronounced, must "break with the monop

which, individuals are attached to identities, [and] the shape and

resolutely political yet post-Marxist criticism because it viewed th

strategies that Louis Pasteur developed to demonstrate his theory o

the boundaries of sf history. The narrowing of academic publishing into

What a growing number of readers and scholars seem to be interested in today,

devices to complicate its straight lines with networked and r

5. 1 am echoing the title of Rosalind Krauss's essay "Sculpture in the Expande

Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth, UK: Peng

Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Thomas, Keith. "Ways of Doing Cultural History." Balans & Perspect

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