THE TECHNOLOGY OF CONSENT: AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND CULTURAL CRISIS IN THE 1980s A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (c) Copyright by Chad Andrews 2016 Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program May 2016 ABSTRACT The Technology of Consent: American Science Fiction and Cultural Crisis in the 1980s Chad Andrews The 1980s in the United States have come into focus as years of extensive ideological and socioeconomic fracture. A conservative movement arose to counter the progressive gains of previous decades, neoliberalism became the nation’s economic mantra, and détente was jettisoned in favour of military build-up. Such developments materialized out of a multitude of conflicts, a cultural crisis of ideas, perspectives, and words competing to maintain or rework the nation’s core structures. In this dissertation I argue that alongside these conflicts, a crisis over technology and its ramifications played a crucial role as well, with the American public grasping for ways to comprehend a nascent technoculture. Borrowing from Andrew Feenberg, I define three broad categories of popular conceptualization used to comprehend a decade of mass technical and social transformations: the instrumental view, construing technology as a range of efficient tools; the substantive view, insisting technology is an environment that determines its subjects; and a critical approach, which recognized the capacity for technology to shape subjects, but also its potential to aid new social agendas. Using Feenberg’s categories as interpretive lenses, I foreground these epistemologies in three of the decade’s most popular formations of literary science fiction (sf), and describe the broader discourses they participated in: military sf is connected to military strategy and weapons development (instrumental), cyberpunk to postmodernism and posthumanism (substantive), and feminist sf to feminist theory and politics (critical). These were not just discursive trajectories, I claim, but vital contributors to the material ii construction of what Antonio Gramsci would call hegemonic and counterhegemonic formations. While the instrumental paradigm was part of the decade’s prevailing hegemonic make-up, substantive and critical discourses offered an alternative to the reality of cowboy militarism and unchecked technological expansion. By engaging with the decade’s texts—from There Will Be War to RoboCop to “A Cyborg Manifesto”—I hope to illuminate what I call the technology of consent, the significance of technological worldviews for modern technocultures, where such views are consented to by subaltern groups, and at the same time the existence of consent itself as a kind of complex social technology in the first place. Keywords: Science Fiction, American History, American Culture, Technology, Instrumentalism, Substantivism, Critical Theory, Gramsci, Hegemony, Discourse, Military SF, Cyberpunk, Feminist SF iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I extend my deepest gratitude to Veronica Hollinger, Alan O’Connor, and Finis Dunaway for their invaluable support in shaping this dissertation in particular, but also my thinking in general. Their guidance and critical insights are as much a part of this as anything else, though any shortcomings are entirely my own. Extraordinary people stood beside me through the years of work that went into developing this study: my parents from the very start, and my wife Sasha most courageously through the entirety of the process. The final periods of feverish writing took place only steps away from our sleeping son, Seth, who was, and is, the greatest impetus of all. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page i Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents v INTRODUCTION: THE DRONE PARADOX 1 Technology as Cultural Crisis 8 CHAPTER ONE: MILITARY SF 28 1. The Strange Nexus of Military Sf 30 2. Genre, Discourse, Consent: The Many Lives of Military Sf 38 3. Hammer’s Slammers and the Theory of Instrumental Technology 52 4. Gramsci and the Technology of Consent 62 CHAPTER TWO: CYBERPUNK 71 1. RoboCop’s Horrific Visage 76 2. Literary Histories and Postmodern Entanglements 85 3. Language and Experience in William Gibson’s Early Stories 102 4. Feedback Loops 111 CHAPTER THREE: FEMINIST SF 119 1. An Uncomfortable Decade: Feminism, Fiction, and Fracture 124 2. By Ones and Twos: A History of Feminist Sf 135 3. WMDs, Uterine Replicators, and Critical Theory in Lois McMaster Bujold 148 4. Haraway’s Manifesto, the Indeterminate Future, and Split Consciousness 160 CONCLUSION: THE CYBORG PARADOX 171 Towards a Sublime Politics of Sf 178 NOTES 184 WORKS CITED 198 v 1 INTRODUCTION: THE DRONE PARADOX You might think of it as a big, super-fancy, remote-controlled model airplane,” the lieutenant colonel said. “You couldn’t be more wrong. Gentlemen, what you are looking at is the future of modern warfare.” (Martin 18) A paradox inheres at the heart of modern technological warfare. Although on display in most instances of contemporary conflict, it is perhaps nowhere more apparent than with the United States’ deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—state-of-the- art “drones” involved in reconnaissance and active engagement while the “pilot” operates the controls at a distance, often thousands of miles away—in Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other contested territories.1 In an era of unimpeded technological expansion, the phenomenon of drone warfare is compelling for any number of reasons, demanding assessment from not only the higher echelons of military policy (where the baseline reasoning seems to be that UAVs are “the future of modern warfare,” consequences be damned), but from a range of competing perspectives. The most obvious question: what, precisely, does warfare become (and what purpose does it serve) when the flesh-and-blood soldier is subtracted from it? Less obvious, perhaps: to what extent, if at all, is it inevitable that the technology of drone warfare expands beyond the purview of its mostly American exclusivity? These and other questions are to varying degrees intertwined with the notion of a modern technological paradox, one captured by the phenomenon of the drone. As with any paradox, one involving the drone results from the combination of two mutually exclusive statements. First, the drone represents a fully controllable form of technology, one capable of being deployed without inaugurating widespread consequences in other spheres of human life. The almost complete lack of official 2 discourse surrounding the implications of drone technologies is testament to this unquestioning belief in controllability. As the crowning achievement in the long succession of weapons designed to calculate and optimize conflict, the drone represents the pinnacle of precision warfare.2 Designed with a specific, rational purpose in mind and guided by trained, proficient operators, it achieves a level of meticulous exactitude that places it above more rudimentary tools of warfare. This almost one-to-one control is certainly one factor that leads many UAV “pilots” to cultivate a belief in their own omnipotence, as Lt. Col. Matt J. Martin, responsible for the opening epigraph, suggests in his firsthand account of drone piloting: “Sometimes I felt like God hurling thunderbolts from afar” (3). But beyond this operational precision the drone is accompanied by an unquestioning belief in its ability to not produce radical social and cultural upheavals (a different kind of precision altogether). From this perspective the drone is an advanced instrument that functions within its original parameters without contributing to unforeseen technological, cultural, economic, etc., transformations. It therefore encapsulates what Andrew Feenberg calls “the neutrality of technology” in Transforming Technology (2002), a concept emerging from “the commonsense idea that technologies are ‘tools’ standing ready to serve the purposes of their users. Technology is deemed ‘neutral,’ without valuative content of its own” (5). The drone is “neutral” and “without valuative content” because its designers and operators are solely responsible for deciding its purpose; as a neutral tool, the drone is not intrinsically predisposed to this or that end, but is rather “indifferent to the variety of ends 3 it can be employed to achieve” (Feenberg, Transforming 5). For Feenberg, the insistence on indifference and neutrality belongs to the “instrumental view” of technology. But secondly, the phenomenon of remote-controlled drone conflict is fully uncontrollable. As with the drone’s instrumental function as a tool of precision warfare, this uncontrollability is apparent on the day-to-day operational level as well. The technology itself, the specific configuration of technical elements and their potential functions (in the most general sense, the blueprint or design) gets reconfigured, transmuted, and redirected towards any number of divergent and unpredicted applications. The company behind one of the American military’s most trusted robotic systems, the PackBot, a system primarily used for bomb disposal, later developed the Roomba using an earlier blueprint for a military robot, the Roomba being the robotic vacuum cleaner that dutifully, autonomously, and unquestioningly inhales the dirt from the floors of millions of homes across the globe (Singer 22). While the military drone may be controlled with a level of precision unheard