RELIGION IN POSTMODERN SCIENCE FICTION: A CASE STUDY IN SECULARITY by CHRISTOPHER J. PIZZINO A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English written under the direction of Professor Barry Qualls and approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January, 2008 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Religion in Postmodern Science Fiction: A Case Study in Secularity by CHRISTOPHER JOSEPH PIZZINO Dissertation Director: Barry Qualls Using recent debates in the humanities and social sciences, this dissertation argues that the category of the secular is currently being critiqued, contested, and modified from within. This dissertation considers postmodern science fiction, particularly the subgenre of cyberpunk, as a literary instance of this contestation. This study focuses on the ways cyberpunk fiction constructs religious others against which to define its protagonists, and on the way that the distinction between the secular and the religious is understood using concepts of subjectivity and history. Further, this work argues that the secular concepts common to postmodern science fiction can be considered a key expression of secular subjectivity as it undergoes new challenges to its legitimacy. Further, using examples from postmodern science fiction film, this work considers the ways that secular subjectivity may be undergoing further modifications that challenge the opposition of the religious to the secular. ii Acknowledgments My greatest thanks, first and last, go to my committee members, Barry Qualls, Marianne DeKoven, and Richard Dienst, all of whom have given generously of their time and energy in the course of the process of my doctoral work. I wish to thank Barry in particular for helming this project, which took so many partial forms before assuming a workable one under his direction. Thanks also to Mike Pinsky, for agreeing to be my outside reader at a busy time, in the midst of a busy life. Channette Romero and Anthony Lioi have been vocal, daily supporters and readers of this work, and this is not the least of the debts I owe them. Union College has been a substantial supporter of my work in the past year and a half, providing both financial help and a collegial atmosphere that helped to focus my own sense of scholarly purpose. I particularly wish to thank Harry Marten for the timely encouragements he has given me in the past several months. A number of professors at Rutgers have influenced the content, shape, and methodology of this work, not least my committee members. I wish also to thank Michael McKeon, whose intellectual guidance in earlier years of graduate school has only manifested itself more strongly since then. If I have managed, over the course of this document, to write a dialectical sentence here and there, this accomplishment owes far more to Michael than to any other influence. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii Chapter 1 Cyberpunk Fiction and the Secular 1 Chapter 2 Fighting the Freaks: Religion as Virus in Snow Crash 64 Chapter 3 Encountering Zion: The Secular Sublime in Neuromancer 111 Chapter 4 Exits, Entrances and Alternate Paths: Cyberpunk Cinema 157 Bibliography 199 Curriculum Vita 219 iv 1 Chapter 1 Cyberpunk Fiction and the Secular This work considers the kinds of subjectivity represented in cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the end of its first decade, cyberpunk had attracted strong interest from critics and theorists, who identified one particular cyberpunk novel as especially worthy of investigation: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). In the 1990s, a second novel became important to the cyberpunk canon, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). These two novels continue to serve as exemplars for cyberpunk as a whole, and are the most widely discussed works of cyberpunk fiction. In what follows, I will explore the prominent place both novels, and also a number of cyberpunk films, give to narratives of encounter between religious and secular characters and forces. The terms “religion” and “religious,” as I use them here, refer to institutions, beliefs, practices, and subjects concerned with sacred categories1. The term “secular,” as I use it here, refers to a set of beliefs, practices, and institutions associated with the rise of modernity, particularly with the rise of science, capitalism, and 1 To consider religion in terms of beliefs, practices and institutions is typical of the social- science approach that I will be discussing this chapter. One standard definition of this kind is Peter Berger’s formulation of religion as belief in the sacred, a term he defines as “a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience” (The Sacred Canopy 25). In his article “Religion, Religions, Religious” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Jonathan Smith argues that this sociological way of using these three terms became the dominant usage in the 18th century, through a “process of transposing ‘religion’ from a supernatural to a natural history, from a theological to an anthropological category” (273). Hence, the terms became taxonomic tools for the discussion of the objects they named, a function that became increasingly important for social science in the 19th century when it became desirable to organize the “explosion of data” (275) concerning religions around the world, a development brought about by European colonial endeavor. 2 political institutions and subjects associated with the nation-state2. In the futures imagined by cyberpunk texts, secular forces and their individual representatives come into contact with religious forces and subjects in ways that prompt sustained consideration of the categories of religion and the secular. The religious figures and forces portrayed in cyberpunk have thus far received very little critical attention. As I will show, the theories of the secular that have shaped critical discussions of cyberpunk assume that religion holds little or no significance for an understanding of the present (or, presumably, of the future). However, the texts themselves allow religious institutions and believers to play a variety of important roles, some of which are threatening to their secular protagonists, some of which are helpful. I will argue that the presence of religious forces in these texts allows them to develop a complex and troubled representation of their secular protagonists, a representation that sheds light on how secular institutions are defined and on their powers and limitations. In this way, texts like Neuromancer and Snow Crash can serve to enrich and complicate a critical understanding of secular institutions and selves. These novels do not, I will argue, abandon secular categories for religious ones, nor do they transform secular categories in ways that would ultimately collapse the distinction between the religious and the secular. Instead, these novels trace the boundaries of secular selfhood and practice, subjecting them to critique but ultimately affirming them over and against the religious categories with which they are contrasted. 2 For a succinct summary of this definition of the secular, particularly as it bears on the discussion of secularization theory that follows, see Casanova, Public Religions 20-25. It should be noted that in his discussion of the growth of the secular as a historical phenomenon, Casanova insists on a fourth factor that he claims was important to the expansion of secularization, namely the Protestant Reformation; see in particular pp. 21- 23, and also Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 3 This engagement with religion coincides with challenges to the central categories of modernity used to define secularity. When cyberpunk emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist, leftist, and postcolonial texts and movements had already begun to question and render unstable scientific rationalism, nationalism, and traditional notions of subjectivity. Cyberpunk texts reflect and magnify these instabilities, but they also work to refashion and reassert secular selfhood. The protagonists of cyberpunk must confront conditions in which the meaning, function, and power of secular institutions and categories must be refashioned in order to sustain the existence of the secular self. Cyberpunk often questions secular categories in the process of refashioning them, sometimes subjecting secular practices to sharp critique, but finally demonstrating their continuing viability. This process of critique and refashioning heightens the importance of religious alternatives to secular categories. In cyberpunk, these religious alternatives sometimes threaten secular selves directly, and sometimes serve to revitalize secular practice. In both cases, religious forces and subjects portrayed in these novels provide opportunities for secular selves to define, or redefine, their own powers and purposes. Later in this chapter, and in the chapters that follow, I will seek to put cyberpunk’s redefinition of the secular into conversation with recent scholarly discussions of the secular and its relationship to the religious. As I will show, theorists are beginning to challenge