Behaviourism and social constructionism

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-166
Author(s):  
Gavin Miller
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Operant Conditioning ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Different Sources

This chapter explores science fiction’s deployment of behaviourism and social constructionism, which insist on the malleability of human psychology. B.F. Skinner’s near-future utopia. Walden Two (1948), authorizes the behaviourist model of the self by inscribing operant conditioning into long-standing progressivist discourses. But this is subverted by the novel itself, which persistently endorses historical, philosophical, and ethical discourses that have supposedly been rendered obsolete. Behaviourism is further undermined by Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and William Sleator’s House of Stairs (1974). These narratives juxtapose against behaviourism counter-discourses from different sources, including wisdom traditions such as world religions, and also antagonistic discourses such as psychoanalysis and existentialism. Social constructionism encourages science fiction to dissolve psychological and cultural givens of our time (such as heterosexuality or patriarchy) in a future or alternative social order. With enormously varying complexity and ethical sensitivity, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Edmund Cooper’s 1972 Who Needs Men? and Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three (1974), explore the utopian and dystopian reconstruction of gender relations, but are troubled by issues of natural and cultural diversity.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

scholarly journals Ectogenesis and Representations of Future Motherings in Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-71
Author(s):  
Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Growing Season ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
The Family ◽  
Biological Explanation ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Near Future

After the boom of feminist science fiction in the 1970s, many such novels have tackled the different sociocultural understandings of gender and sexual reproduction. Conventionally, patriarchal thinking tends to posit a biological explanation for gender inequality: women are supposed to be child bearers and the primary caregivers, whereas men should provide for the family through their work. However, if men could share procreation, would these views change? A recent work of fiction exploring this question from multiple perspectives is Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017), a novel that presents a near future in which babies can be grown in artificial wombs that can be carried around. As an analysis of the novel will show, The Growing Season creatively explores the existing tensions among contemporary understandings of motherhood and feminism(s), as well as developments in reproductive biotechnology, through the different perspectives offered by the heterodiegetic third-person narration and multiple focalisation. Ultimately, the voices of the different characters in the novel convey a polyhedral vision of possible future feminist motherhood(s) where ideas of personal freedom and codependency are radically reconceptualised—a rethinking that becomes especially important nowadays, for the biotechnological elements of this fictional dystopia are already a reality.

scholarly journals Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard

Ícone ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Benjamin Noys
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jean Baudrillard ◽  
British Science ◽  
Car Crash ◽  
Media Imagery ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Fiction Writer ◽  
The Erotic

In his key work Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Jean Baudrillard lauded the British science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1973) as 'the first great novel of the universe of simulation' (1994: 119). The novel explored a world of perverse obsession with the erotic potential of the car-crash saturated by media imagery.

scholarly journals From Contamination to Community: Octavia Butler's Clay's Ark

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-24
Author(s):  
Neeraja Sundaram
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Viral Agent ◽  
Definition Of

This paper examines the trope of the virus in Octavia Butler’s 1984 science fiction novel Clay’s Ark, where an alien virus manifests as a border organism that produces new forms of the human. I argue that the trope of the viral agent in Butler’s Clay’s Ark reconfigures the ‘self’ (the human) and the ‘other’ (the virus) at the level of the material and the discursive, leading to a reconceptualisation of the epistemological and ontological basis for the definition of and distinction between, the two. Secondly, the diseased, contagious self in Clay’s Ark, is subject to neither ‘containment’ nor quarantine, but instead is the basis for the formation of a new social contract in a world that is soon to be ravaged by an extraterrestrial epidemic. The paper demonstrates the pervasive influence of the epistemic and discursive formulations of the “human” in a social order transformed by viral invasion.

scholarly journals The sheep look forward: Counterfactuals, dystopias, and ecological science fiction as a social science enterprise

Elem Sci Anth ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Resilience ◽  
Global Environmental Politics ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The World ◽  
Ecological Science ◽  
Near Future

John Brunner’s 1972 novel, The Sheep Look Up, is the story of the year leading up to a global ecological and political catastrophe. Set primarily in the United States in an unspecified near future, The Sheep Look Up tells the story of “death by a thousand cuts”: problem upon problem, malfeasance upon malfeasance, which accumulate, reinforce each other and are met only by a failing political and economic system that ultimately collapses under its own weight. This article reflects on themes and topics of the novel that resonate for social science theorists and teachers in the environmental social sciences, including global environmental politics. First, it provides a type of counterfactual analysis. It opens a window into how the world might have been had certain actions not been taken. Second, it provides a warning: how the world might be if we do not act. Third, it provides a model of how a disastrous transition might unfold as social resilience has been worn down. Looking back on the almost fifty years since the novel was written demonstrates how its scenario was averted through concerted government and societal actions, but the article also points out how Brunner’s work has strong resonance with our present – and at different times in the recent past.

scholarly journals (CYBER) PUNK'S NOT DEAD – RICHARD MORGAN'S ALTERED CARBON

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1603-1607
Author(s):  
Ana Kečan
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Current Trend ◽  
Data Networks ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Visual Potential

The term cyberpunk refers to an offspring or subgenre of science fiction which rose to popularity in the 1980s. It was first coined by Bruce Bethke in his story of the same name, published in 1983. Even though there are critics today who claim that cyberpunk is long dead, numerous examples from the 21st century show that it is still very well and alive, and this revival is particularly aided by television, as cyberpunk has a massive visual potential. Hence, the 21st century saw the sequel to the cult Blade Runner (originally released in 1982), titled Blade Runner 2049 (released in 2017), another (fourth) sequel of The Matrix (set to be released in 2020), TV adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams (2017) and, the main interest of this essay, Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (season 1 in 2018 and season 2 set to be released in 2020). In this essay we are going to, first, outline the main narrative and stylistic conventions of cyberpunk, which include: a time and place in the future dominated by advanced achievements in information technology, science and computers (hence the term ‘cyber’) at the expense of a loss or breakdown of social order (hence the term ‘punk’) to the point of a dystopia (or post-utopia, as has been argued); virtual reality, data networks, illusion, bodily metamorphosis, media overload, intensity of visual components, bordering on what Norman Spinrad said was a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology. All of these encapsulate a core theme of the loss of distinction between real and artificial. In addition to this, the term cyberpunk requires clarification against several other terms which often appear alongside it and are related in one way or another, including science fiction, neo-noir, hard-boiled, post-cyberpunk, transhumanism, post-anthropocentrism, etc. Second, we are going to look at how those elements come together in the context of the first novel of Richard Morgan’s trilogy about Takeshi Kovacs, titled Altered Carbon, published in 2002 (the sequels, Broken Angels - 2003 and Woken Furies – 2005, have not yet been adapted for television and will, therefore, not be included in our analysis). We are going to, then, compare those elements with the Netflix version of the novel, a 10-episode TV series, released in 2018. The comparison of the visual versus the verbal narrative will show the differences in the presentation of cyberpunk elements and how (or whether) these differences are dictated by the medium or not. It will also show whether what started out as a dystopia in the original text has grown into a post-utopia in the television series, simply reflecting the current trend of nostalgia and nostalgic recycling.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Identifying Ethics: Dysfunction as Representation of Societal Relationship in Ian McEwans’s Sweet Tooth

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
A. Yacob ◽  
S. Veeramani
Keyword(s):  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Code ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Ian Mcewan

In the novel, Sweet Tooth, McEwan has employed an ethical code of conduct called, Dysfunction of Relationship. The analysis shows that he tries to convey something extraordinary to the readers. If it is not even the reader to understand such a typical thing, He himself represents a new ethical code of conduct. The character of the novel, Serena is almost a person who is tuned to such a distinct one. It is clear that the character of this type is purely representational. Understanding reality based on situation and ethics has been a new field of study in terms of Post- Theory. Intervening to such aspect of Interpretation, this research article establishes a new study in the writings of Ian McEwan. In the novel, Dysfunction is not on the ‘Self’ but it is on the ‘Other’. The author tries to integrate the function of the Character Serena, instead of fragmenting the self. Hence, Fragmentation makes sense only in the dysfunction of relationship.

Le premier moment de l’art dans À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust – une « leçon d’idéalisme » ?

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Larisa Botnari
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Aesthetic Thinking

Although very famous, some key moments of the novel In Search of Lost Time, such as those of the madeleine or the uneven pavement, often remain enigmatic for the reader. Our article attempts to formulate a possible philosophical interpretation of the narrator's experiences during these scenes, through a confrontation of the Proustian text with the ideas found in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. We thus try to highlight the essential role of the self in Marcel Proust's aesthetic thinking, by showing that the mysterious happiness felt by the narrator, and from which the project of creating a work of art is ultimately born, is similar to the experiences of pure self-consciousness evoked and analyzed by Schellingian philosophy of art.

Governing the Sacred

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuval Jobani ◽  
Nahshon Perez
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
High Profile ◽  
National Monument ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Scholarly Contribution ◽  
Difficult Challenge ◽  
Temple Mount

Contested sacred sites pose a difficult challenge in the field of toleration. Holy sites are often at the center of intense contestation between different groups regarding a wide variety of issues, including ownership, access, usage rights, permissible religious conduct, and many other aspects. As such, they are often the source of immense levels of violence, and intractable, long-standing conflicts. Governing the Sacred profiles five central contested sacred sites which exemplify the immense difficulties associated with such sites: Devils Tower National Monument (Wyoming, U.S.), Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi (Uttar-Pradesh, India), the Western Wall (Jerusalem), the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem), and the Temple Mount/Haram esh-Sharif (Jerusalem). The in-depth, contextual and casuistic study of these sites, which differ in spatial, cultural, and religious settings, enables the construction of a novel, critical typology of five corresponding models or ways of governing the sacred. By telling the fascinating stories of five high-profile contested sacred sites, Governing the Sacred develops and critically explores five different models of governing contested sacred sites: “non-interference,” “separation and division,” “preference,” “status quo,” and “closure.” Each model, in turn, relies on different sets of considerations, central among them trade-offs between religious liberty and social order. Beyond its scholarly contribution, the novel typology developed in Governing the Sacred aims to assist democratic governments in their attempt to secure public order and mutual toleration among opposed groups in contested sacred sites.

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