The science-fictionality of the myth of progress:understanding the displacement of techno-scientific imagination

Abstract

This thesis draws on the analysis of science fiction world imaginaries to discuss the generating process of the narrative of technoscientific progress. It uses, in specific, the theoretical accounts of the modalities of “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin 1979, Mather 2002) as a framework to analyze two case studies: the figure of the robot and space exploration. The concept of “cognitive estrangement” is adopted to understand how the figure of the robot and outer space are staged as other forms of intelligence and as indicators of new frontiers of knowledge. The fictional representation of such figures is thought to provide a dialectical space of interrelation between human/robotic intelligence and earth/space that informs techno scientific consciousness on a global scale. This point is further elaborated through the concept of “science-fictionality” (Csicsey-Ronay 2008) that is used to analyze the discursivity of progress. The creation of the narrative is framed as a synchronization process that derives from four sources: the imagery, the fictionality, the discursivity and the rhetoric. This analysis implies that the narrative synchronization of progress and the cognitive-aesthetic effects of “science-fictionality” co-shape each other and generate the imaginative quality of progress. More precisely, they generate the discursivity that makes of progress a network of imaginative patterns that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world and the future (Midgley, 2005).