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Chapter 5: The Children Who Need No Parents
- Rutgers University Press
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T H E C H I L D R E N W H O N E E D N O PA R E N T S 111 Powerful science fiction, like good theory, defamiliarizes our present moment and makes us look at it as an unstable contingent condition from which a break with the past is possible. Challenging us to think of what the future might be if certain tendencies in the present are taken to their extreme although logical conclusion, science fiction makes us confront the present as a contested space for action. In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, the parents faced a terror and threat of separation from their children unprecedented in human history because their children were poised to evolve into a species other than that of the parents, one so radically different that the parents could not even call it human. Consequently, there was no possibility of either a reunion or a reconciliatory understanding between these parents and children. Here Arthur C. Clarke contemplated the end of humanity and the birth of a new species that transcended the human—a transformation that is a tragic loss for the parents and a bold new adventure for the young, retelling once again modernity’s persistent narrative of the new replacing the old, a narrative that is only further radicalized in postmodernity. What was so new, almost “posthuman,” about children that Clarke foresaw in 1953? First, Clarke’s children ceased to exist as individual The Children Who Need No Parents “I’ve only one more question,” he said. “What shall we do about our children?” “Enjoy them while you may,” answered Rashaverak gently. “They will not be yours for long.” It was advice that might have been given to any parent in any age: but now it contained a threat and terror it had never held before. —Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End 5 112 C O I N I N G F O R C A P I TA L beings, becoming instead cells in a larger single entity he called the Overmind, a power that enveloped the entire universe. While Clarke’s Overmind evoked religious belief, contemporary science fiction is equally apt to see in its place an all-pervasive, homogenizing consumer culture or a cybernetic technological factory that has killed the individual , transforming her or him into a zombified consumer or a cybernetic worker. Jean Baudrillard, who has been at the forefront in announcing the victory of consumer culture and technology over human agency, claimed in “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign” that affluent societies in the West were now primarily concerned with turning people into consumers. This was done systematically by subjecting people to an overarching code or system of signs that reference each other through advertising, fashion, marketing, and so on, producing a totalitarian system that runs by itself. Rather than see technology as the product of human society and as reflecting the economic, social, and political relations of that society, Baudrillard ascribes a logic and perfection to technology that is independent of human intervention , so much so that, as shown in The Matrix (1999), a film inspired by his writing, “society as a whole takes on the appearance of a factory ” to which we are all subjected as consumers.1 Rob Latham, analyzing recent science-fiction texts, takes on an approach that, in contrast to Baudrillard’s, is dialectical and locates cultural changes in the historical material transformation from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy. Commenting on the preponderance of teenagers and even children as vampires and cyborgs in recent sci-fi, Latham incisively argues in Consuming Youth that these figures are metaphorical representations of the expansion of consumer culture, at the heart of which is a contest over the meaning of youth. Aptly named, his study focuses on the three ways in which consumer culture has shifted the social position of young people in the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist socioeconomic system. These are the widespread transformation of young people into consumers, the commodification of youth, and the fetishization of youth. The teenage vampires and cyborgs that inhabit this genre represent, according to Latham, the dialectical impulses of consumer culture: While it grants the young a certain autonomy by recognizing them as consumers, it in turn consumes youth by turning it into a commodity. It can be added as a corrective to Latham’s emphasis on consumer culture that capitalism...