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Juvenis scientia 2019 № 1 | Искусствоведение и культурология
УДК: 177 ГРНТИ: 02.41.41 DOI: 10.32415/jscientia.2019.01.12
ON XENOPHOBIA IN SCIENCE FICTION
S. E. Kuzeev
Eotvos Lorand University
1-3 Egyetem ter, H-1053 Budapest, Hungary
El Kuzeev Sergei - sergei.kuzeev@gmail.com
The article deals with how the notion of xenophobia is re-iterated in contemporary science fiction. First, the author provides a brief analysis of xenophobia as a cognitive phenomenon that is, on the one hand, built into the mass culture as an archetypal attitude and, on the other hand, symbolically disguised following the two prototypic scenarios-those of alienation and of appropriation. One of the central arguments of the article is that the quintessential sci-fi "alien" is based on the reinvented image of a Jew in the Western culture, while the narrative of "androids" draws on the historical and emotional experience of black slavery.
Keywords: xenophobia, science fiction, post-structuralism, post-humanism, mass culture, cultural criticism, otherness, alienation, antisemitism, slavery.
О КСЕНОФОБИИ В НАУЧНОЙ ФАНТАСТИКЕ С. Е. Кузеев
Университет им. Этвеша Лоранда
Венгрия, H-1053 г. Будапешт, Университетская пл. 1-3
И Кузеев Сергей Евгеньевич - sergei.kuzeev@gmail.com
В настоящей статье рассматривается феномен ксенофобии и то, каким образом он переосмысливается в жанре научной фантастики. В статье дан краткий анализ ксенофобии с когнитивно-поведенческой точки зрения, а также рассмотрена встроенность этого архетипического явления в массовую культуру. При этом утверждается, что ксенофобия в современной научной фантастике «маскируется» в рамках двух базовых сценариев: «отчуждения» и «присвоения». Один из главных выводов статьи заключается в том, что прототипическая фигура «пришельца» основана на стереотипном отношении к евреям в европейской культуре, в то время как линия «андроидов» ассоциируется с историческим и эмоциональным опытом черного рабства.
Ключевые слова: ксенофобия, научная фантастика, постструктурализм, пост-гуманизм, массовая культура, критика культуры, другой, отчуждение, антисемитизм, рабство.
1. Since the emergence of psychoanalysis and the post-structuralist theory that utilized psychiatric notions to a sensible effect in its societal and cultural scrutiny, the dividing line between sanity and insanity has melted away: already in Freud's works the neurotic condition was reinvented as the inherency of the psyche that struggles to adapt to the irremediably neurotic scenery of its own environment. Even further, by courtesy of the critiques of the "sane society" narrative (M. Foucault, E. Fromm, G. Deleuze, and others), paranoia, depression, obsessive demeanor, schizophrenia, fetishism, etc. were similarly adopted as non-clinical concepts, of which some were identified as tools of ideological control following the "political demand of psychiatry" [7, p. 151], while others had to follow the reverse route with xenophobia being eminently symptomatic. Once theorized and practiced as the cornerstone of civilization and the sine qua non of survival-both physical and that of identity-over the last decades it has, at least by way of proclamation, been repudiated by postindustrial democracies as a social malady, non-productive behavior, and, hence, an impediment to the perdurance and progress.
Though definitions of xenophobia may vary from "unreasonable dislike or fear of people from other countries" [3] to "pervasive, irrational fear or uneasiness in the presence of strangers, especially foreigners, or in new surroundings" [15, p. 1897], what they all share in common is focus on fear of what is perceived as foreign, uncharacteristic of the immediate topography, and offbeat-be it ethnicity, race, religious affiliation, sexuality, or even gender. With this in mind, I will proceed with
xenophobia as an umbrella term for a broad spectrum of satellite discomforts, including homophobia, antisemitism, gynecophobia, etc., or, to put it simply, for the fear of the Other.
When approached from the behavioristic standpoint, the locus of xenophobia-similarly to that of other bias-is found in specific cognitive patterns, of which stereotypization and arbitrary induction are commonly mentioned [17]. Indeed, in its elemental sense, xenophobia arises primarily in "black box situations" of uncertainty [2], which impel their participants to resort to the apriori knowledge in the form of established beliefs and opinions, including popular sayings, parables, and anecdotes [13]. Though stereotypes as such are not embedded in valid personal experiences-but are instead transmitted and instilled as apriori knowledge by what L. Althusser termed as "ideological state apparatuses", including family, mass media, educational institutions, church, etc. [1]-they might as well be practical, since they are usually grounded on statistically correct data [5].
Another cognitive mechanism, to which I refer as arbitrary (or unsustained) induction and which is crucial in understanding the foreground dynamics of xenophobia [17], is more intricate, as it results from reasoning premised on verifiable experiences. Induction, which is generalizing on particulars, is a mode of cognition used extensively in both day-to-day interactions and in experimental science. To become a law of nature, however, all assumptions have to be legitimized deductively; hence, there exist apparent limits to the expediency of the inductive method, which is only able of delivering approximations ("working hypotheses"), whose credibility is to remain at the whim of individual judgment.
As seen from what I have sketched above, both stereotypization and induction may uncontrollably generate bias and prejudice, i.e. emotional predispositions of a negative register towards what is unknown or insufficiently experienced. That said, however, it should be borne in mind that the cognitive model alone is deficient in explicating the inward nature of the xenophobic feeling, as well as the logic of its institutionalization (e.g. in Nazi ideology), for which an array of other tools and methodologies should be involved, including, psychoanalysis and social anthropology [12].
2. As a narrative genre (or a family of genres), science fiction is built upon the work of imagination, technological reveries, and prophetic visions, which brings its imagery in close association with scientific advances in the areas of robotics, artificial intelligence, space exploration, genetic medicine, and quantum theory, to name only a few. With these as basis for contrivance, sci-fi has been especially prolific in creating and propagating the image of the Other performed primarily by aliens (extraterrestrial life forms) and androids (anthropomorphic robots), which, I suggest, are prototypical and foundational for the rest of the existing sci-fi bestiary (posthumans, mutated animals, etc.).
An elemental alien narrative is highly illustrative, as, despite the seeming variability in their appearances and principles for the support of animated existence, there is at least one quality that all aliens share in common: being perilous. It comes as apriori knowledge, or sensibility, unfolded within a storyline as an invasion, war, suppression, continuous strife, or abduction of humans (which is a sub-genre on its own right).
Aliens always represent the ultimate degree of "otherness" and, hence, of peril: they physically outfit humans and act as violent killing machines ("Alien", 1978; "Predator", 1987; "Extraterrestrial", 2014; "Pitch Black", 2000; "The Thing", 1982; etc.), or they excel humans in intelligence and technology ("They Live", 1988; "Aliens", 1986; "K-PAX", 2001, etc.); they are intent on conquering and subjugating the humankind in order to take possession of the Earth's resources ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers", 1978; "Altered", 2006; "War of the Worlds", 2005; "The Village of the Damned", 1995, etc.), or they may pose other similar threats. In sum, aliens are a source of immanent menace and have to be destroyed (if not exterminated) or sent back into the outer space, since the possibility of cohabitation-within a planet, a stellar system, and even a galaxy-seems very unlikely. In a slightly different type of scenario the focus diverges from warfare and open hostility towards the failure to communicate-either due to linguistic complications ("Arrival", 2016), or, more frequently, due to the irreducible bodily and mental incompatibilities ("Edge of Tomorrow", 2014; "The Abyss", 1989; "2001: A Space Odyssey", 1968). In other words, an alien narrative in its most basic sense is predicated on the de-humanization of the Other as a response to the overwhelming incongruities that result in conflict and misunderstanding.
The politics of alienation outlined above-however fictional they might seem in the given context-are all real: thus, for instance, the television image of the 9/11 assault on Twin Towers could well be borrowed from an alien movie with only spaceships instead of jet planes. Today's islamophobia is the aftermath and the further deployment of the alien invasion scenario: religious and cultural prejudice continues to proliferate in creating aliens, while acts of terror may be thus viewed as manifests of alienation between the postindustrial and the "underdeveloped" worlds. Human history abounds with episodes of outstanding violence and antipathy based on religious and ethnic xenophobia with the St. Bartholomew Day's Massacre of 1572, Armenian genocide
by the Ottomans between 1915 and 1923, and the near-extermination of the American natives by Europeans as just some typical stories, but the model alien of the past two millennia in Europe has been, of course, the Jew.
What makes the antisemitic prejudice so strikingly akin to the sci-fi alien narrative is its inherent reliance on the paranoia of supremacy and peril: the anti-Jewish sentiment was historically predicated on the conspiracy of the Jews' financial power, which they seized, allegedly, through a covenant with evil forces with the aim of destroying Christianity and establishing a Zionist empire ("Protocols of the Elders of Zion", A. Hitler's "Mein Kampf"). The persistent adherence of the Jews to their religious practices and conventions enhanced distrust and led to alienation, when Jews had to be either driven into back-alley ghettos with regulated access or repeatedly exiled (Rome in 50, Spain in 613 and 1492, Kiev Russia in 1113, France in 1182 and 1306, England in 1290, etc.). Atop of that, massacres were common (Spain and France in 1320, France and Germany between 1348 and 1351, Poland in 1648, etc.) with the Holocaust-Nazis' "final solution"- being the biggest ethnic cleansing in modern history [16].
This day, as I mentioned earlier, sci-fi alien narratives are readily paralleled with the "war on terror" unleashed by the US and their allies in response to the 9/11 attacks, which, among other consequences, caused widespread (and largely reciprocal) antagonism towards the followers of Islam, and-especially during the recent years-the anti-immigrant hysteria in Europe. All this, coupled with the still visible stigmatization of ethnic (e.g. gypsies) and sexual minorities elsewhere, leads us to conclude that the alienation has never ceased to be a viable policy of xenophobia and controlled neurosis.
3. Passing over to the second prototypic sci-fi narrative of "otherness"-that of androids-I will first bring forward its major dissimilarities from the alien narrative. The "otherness" of androids is of a different nature: as they are meant to appear and act like human beings, the focus here is on their inferiority conceptualized as a set of lacks that underpin their inability to fully equalize and fulfill "humanness". Though androids generally surpass humans in terms of computational skill and may be almost impregnable physically, they lack the richness of emotion and of imagination, creativity, and intuition-all replaced by cold math.
Similar to humans in terms of appearance, fluency of speech, and reaction (sometimes to the point of complete indiscernibility), androids still fall short of something uniquely humane, which-allegedly-a variation of the Turing test is bound to uncover. This gives rise to a phenomenological confusion: since the subtlety of human experience and the immanency of human psyche constitute philosophical (that is, intangible) rather than practical notions, all attempts to behold the semantic difference between a high-quality android and a human being would inevitably fail ("Ex Machina", 2015). This has dramatic consequences: following the post-humanist paradigm of the "natural vs. artificial" dichotomy collapse, the humans themselves are thus degraded to the category of bio-robots; if they do not grant other robots freedom and recognize their free will, the overall (bio-)ethical integrity of the world is ruined, which means the instigation of a new, unparalleled social dystopia ("Blade Runner", 1982).
The challenge of freedom is of paramount importance in android narratives, since robots are often meant to be slaves, intelligent home appliances, caretakers, sexual toys, or pets. They may remain resilient and leave their destinies to the discretion of their owners ("Robot and Frank", 2012; "THX 1138", 1971, etc.), or they may rise in rebellion to fight for their freedom ("Blade
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Runner", 1982; "Runaway", 1984; "Westworld", 1973, etc.). Though typical alien and android narratives unfold differently, they may as well dovetail in their ambition to overturn the politics of subordination and alienation: in some scenarios, the underlying xenophobia is exposed and contested ("District 9", 2009; "Bicentennial Man", 1999, etc.), while in others androids employ the alien practices of extermination and savagery towards humans ("Terminator", 1984, etc.).
The logic of subjugation and control of androids in sci-fi narratives resonates, most obviously, with the history of slavery, especially the black slavery in the Americas. For nearly four hundred years the slaves of African descent had been identified and treated as "near humans" on account of their feigned inferiority to the white race primarily in the context of intellectual abilities and emotional finesse. Similarly with sci-fi androids, black slaves were forced to observe stringent behavior codes and hierarchy, which-even after the slavery had been abolished-led to the emergence of institutionalized and de-facto apartheids in South Africa (until 1994) and USA (until the 1970s).
The recent studies of the uncanny valley effect also display the similarities between the fear of androids and racial xenophobia: it has been discovered during a series of tests that the human response to androids is more likely to be eeriness and revulsion instead of sympathy or neutrality when robots become almost indistinguishable from humans with slight differences, however, remaining in sight [14]. In the same spirit, a xenophobic eye will focus on the dissemblance-however negligible (tone of skin, shape of eye, etc.)-to call the otherness into being. But unlike in the mainstream alien narrative, this discomfort seems, indeed, surmountable, as we know of cohabitation, collaboration, and even romance between humans and androids ("Blade Runner", "A.I.", 2001; "Her", 2013; "Ex Machina", 2015, etc.).
4. My showcasing the confluence between sci-fi narratives and the historic praxis is not in any way meant to assert that science fiction as such promotes or enforces xenophobia-per contra, as I have suggested above, there is a plethora of storylines in which xenophobic policies are ridiculed, reproached, or altogether renounced. Instead, the underlying logic of these narratives should be equated with that of dreams, i.e. visions of the subconscious and the manifestations of unfulfilled desires, projected guilt, and repressed impulses.
"The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life"-says S. Freud in his "Interpretation of Dreams" in paraphrase of Plato [8, p. 614]. Indeed, as per the psychoanalytic canon, in dreams our desires are first displaced (disguised) and projected (referred to someone else), then symbolized (acted out metaphorically), and, finally, condensed and rationalized to produce a coherent story [8]. When analyzed from this perspective, sci-fi narratives may emerge as ornate rationales for the fear of the Other-disguised as alien or as android-which has to be neutralized by means of alienation (escape or destruction) or appropriation (keeping in bondage).
This mechanism is of vital importance, as it helps channel through the social distress and symbolically redeem the collective memories of colonial oppression, slavery, witch-hunting, and REFERENCES
genocides. The seeming advances of neo-liberal democracies that place the politics of tolerance and multiculturalism at the core of their socio-cultural agenda and that have made a significant headway in precluding prejudice have not, however, caused the primordial fears and anxieties to vanish; instead, by analogy to the tabooed desire of incest, these have found a safe harbor in the symbolic order, the realm of the pre-conscious, hence, in the narrative.
5. Now that I have outlined how xenophobia is produced as behavior by the dynamics of cognition and is then fictionalized via projection and symbolization within the sci-fi narrative, I need to bring my line of argument to a logical close by saying a few words about the Other, i.e. the object of fear and mistrust. For this end, following the post-Freudian tradition and, specifically, the works of J. Lacan, I will have to now speak of two "others" instead of one: the big Other and the little other [10]. In Lacan's theory, the "big Other designates radical alterity, an otherness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification", while the "little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego... He is simultaneously the Counterpart and the Specular image" [6, p. 135].
Lacan suggests that the big Other (or the Other per se) is nothing more than a structural phantom and a bearer of symbolic function that, nevertheless, exists as a vestige of parental control: the prototypic Other is, in fact, the figure of the mother, and the primordial threat that she poses is that of castration [6], [11]. Thus, the Lacanian big Other will correspond in my review to the image of the alien: likewise inassimilable, an intruder, and an extrinsic menace, from which there is virtually no escape (this modeling of aliens on the basis of the Lacanian theory has proved insightful in B. Creed's narrative analysis, where, for instance, the extra-terrestrial life form of the "Alien" movie (1979) is approached as the "archaic mother" and the spaceship as her womb, whereas the act of killing and devourment stands as a metaphor of castration [4]).
The little other will then be the protagonist of the android narrative: even more insubstantial and notional than its "big" counterpart (to which, at least, some hierarchical functions may be attributed), it is solely the projection of the self which is assimilated on the mirror stage, i.e. when a child recognizes itself in a mirror and appropriates this reflection to consolidate its own ego [9]. This appropriation occurs despite the incongruence between the coherency of the mirror image and the lack of coordination (disjointedness) in the child's own body, which becomes a locus of conflict and, in our approximations, the reason for xenophobic distrust and fear.
This is now conceivable how the circuitry of the two types of the sci-fi narrative that I have introduced above is contoured within the subconscious to produce the "self" through alienation from the parental figure and the appropriation of the mirror image: this paradigm predetermines all further transfigurations that might result either in recognition of or a failure to recognize otherness. It then follows that, rather than being aleatoric actors of a fictional narrative external to our experience, sci-fi aliens and androids genuinely represent the substantiality of the humane.
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Received 04.01.2019
