As If: The Alternative Histories of Literature and Science

It may be difficult for some readers to imagine, but the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts antedates the appearance of the World Wide Web by almost a decade. From its beginnings in the 1980s, SLSA's conferences and later Configurations registered the widespread changes that computer technologies were making to the history and philosophy of science, medicine, biology, art, ecology, and the study of literature. At the Society's early meetings, there were more than a few papers about Gibsonian heroes jacking into cyberspace, new romantic assertions that the Internet represented an evolutionary leap in the transformative potential of "electronic" technologies, and some thoughtful analyses of work by transformative media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler.¹ This intellectual terrain was shaped in part by the challenges of transforming the interdisciplinary criticism of science (scientific metaphors in literary texts, literary metaphors in scientific texts) into cross-disciplinary analyses of dialogic modes of disciplinary knowledge.² In this respect, the first ten or so SLSA conferences (1987–1996) helped to define a canon of theory that complemented but remained pedagogically distinct from the postmodernisms associated with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, among others. This alternative canon focused on the works of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Michel Serres, Brian Rotman, and others who treated C. P. Snow's division of the "two cultures" as an institutional rather than an essentialist division.³ Although the debates in the so-called Science Wars now seem like ancient history, the defenses of science studies by a number of critics in SLSA helped to shape the next generation of postdisciplinary analysis. By the late 1990s, feminist criticism of technoscience, critical reassessments of the history and philosophy of science, and, significantly, self-reflexive analyses by scientists of the practices and institutions of scientific inquiry had begun to remap a wide range of disciplinary intersections.⁴

Thirty-plus years into the history of SLSA, the debates about the "two cultures" have given way to a host of complex networks and alliances that resist being neatly summed up by convenient oppositions. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Literature and Science as a dynamic cross-disciplinary field built on work in Britain on the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) by David Bloor, Harry Collins, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer; in the ensuing decades, the field might be more accurately described by the metabolic rifts that characterize the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.⁵ In Marx's writings on the natural environment, metabolic rifts describe the pillaging of resources that characterized nineteenth-century capitalism, but the term itself has been taken up and given a more expansive formulation in other venues, notably in Kim Stanley Robinson's science-fiction novel Aurora (2015).⁶ Rather than simply decrying the degradations of "nature" under late capitalism, Robinson appropriates the term to explore the breakdowns of all closed ecosystems. In Aurora, a multigenerational starship returning from a failed mission to colonize a planet eleven light years from Earth eventually succumbs to the cascading problems posed by biochemical imbalances and genetic drift: island biogeography leading to "codevolution," the loss of genetic diversity among remaining plant and animal populations, and the differential evolutionary rates of bacteria, viruses, megafauna, and humans that throw a closed system into eco-collapse.⁷ The implications of these metabolic rifts beyond the novel extend to the reader's experience of life in the twenty-first century: "Earth is a starship too" notes one of the survivors in Aurora who arrives on a planet that his ancestors had left centuries earlier.⁸ This novel of a failed effort to colonize an earth-like planet might serve as an apt metaphor for the metabolic rift between the energy industries running near or beyond peak capacity to fuel billions of tablets, cell phones, and computers, and the realities of climatic crises brought about what Mackenzie Wark has called the "carbon liberation front" of the fossil fuel industries.⁹

We could, then, say that Literature and Science explores these metabolic rifts, the contingent...