SF-genrens implosion
Inte bara William S. Burroughs var en inspiration för franska efterkrigsfilosofer. Baudrillard tog sitt The Simulacra från Philip K. Dicks bok med samma namn, och gjorde det till ett av sina filosofiska centralbegrepp.
I Jean Baudrillards essä Simulacra and Science Fiction beskrivs en implosion av SF-genrens imaginära landskap. Två parallella utvecklingar läggs fram – domesticeringen av jordklotet och raderandet av dess jungfrumark, och jämte detta förlusten av SF-kartans näringsrika, okända territorium – inga mer raketresor till okända planeter, inga mer framtida färdvägar att söka i stjärnhimlen. Rymdprogrammen är övergivna, och den upptäckarlusta och vetenskaplighet som investerades i erövringen av galaxen vänds nu inåt.
“When the map covers all the territory, something like the reality principle disappears.” I hyperverkligheten växer inga okända världar längre fram, inga heroiska rymdexpeditioner lämnar planeten. Eftersom (enligt Baudrillard) verkligheten med detta har förlorat sin jämförbara äkthet, är den spekulativa fiktionens uppgift nu att utrusta fragment hyperverklighet med en aura av äkthet.
“True SF, in this case, would not be fiction in expansion, with all the freedom and “naïveté” which gave it a certain charm of discovery. It would, rather, evolve implosively, in the same way as our image of the universe. It would seek to revitalize, to reactualize, to rebanalize fragments of simulation—fragments of this universal simulation which our presumed “real” world has now become for us.”
Naturligtvis fortsätter han med att nämna Dicks arbeten.
“But where can one find fictional works which already incorporate this condition of reversion? Clearly, the short stories of Philip K. Dick “gravitate,” one might say, in this new space (although it can no longer be expressed as such because, in fact, this new universe is “anti-gravitational,” or, if it still gravitates, it does so around the hole of the real, around the hole of the imaginary). Dick does not create an alternate cosmos nor a folklore or a cosmic exoticism, nor intergalactic heroic deeds; the reader is, from the outset, in a total simulation without origin, past, or future—in a kind of flux of all coordinates (mental, spatio-temporal, semiotic). It is not a question of parallel universes, or double universes, or even of possible universes: not possible nor impossible, nor real nor unreal. It is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is something altogether different. And this is so not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF has always done so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared. There is no more double;
one is always already in the other world, an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated, without exteriority. We can no longer move “through the mirror” to the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence.”
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