This is the Abstract of a lecture that I will give sometime in 2011, at a location to be disclosed later.
In my view, science fiction studies is the most advanced field of the humanities. Its role and scope should be greatly expanded, and its relation to the other fields of academic knowledge should be redefined. Our techno-culture is still too dominated by scientists and engineers, who operate with a naïve epistemology that believes in the separation of “science fact” and “science fiction.” But science fiction is the movement of the real. Science fiction becomes science fact. We need to pump up the power of an activist science fiction that exits the compartmentalized domain of SF novels and films and makes things happen. We need to gain a deep understanding of where the real arena of change is now, and then act science fictionally and futuristically in the present. Science fiction will become an active force hundreds of times greater than it has been so far. Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard were the forerunners of this. They had a much more insightful epistemology about the present, and its link to the past and the future. Previous attempts to relate McLuhan and Baudrillard have focused on media theory (Douglas Kellner) and semiotics (Gary Genosko). I see futurism as being the grounds where this great Canadian thinker and this great European thinker meet. McLuhan made a pioneering attempt in the 1960s to make money in a revolutionary way in the business world as a futurist-oriented consultant on the present, based on his profound knowledge of the history and future of design, physical environments, architecture, urban planning, transportation, fashion, media, advertising, communication, technology, and culture. McLuhan made an amazing and legitimate stretch from literature to business. His “present-futurism” emerged from the specific way in which he was a Professor of the Humanities. As science fiction scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. has pointed out, Baudrillard was, more than anything else, a science fiction theorist. His famous writings on simulation are a diagnosis of the disappearance of the “factual” real (the “murder of reality”) and the appearance of a new “fictional” real: the “pataphysical” reversal of the capitalist system against itself, the breakout of objects. Baudrillard was deeply connected in spirit to Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. He wanted to try to think far in anticipation of events. He wanted to shift the weight of what we understand to be truth from the past to the future, but without a teleological goal. Baudrillard wanted to alter the assumption that what happened in the past (history) is knowable, and what may happen in the future is not knowable. Two agnostic thinkers nearly alone in their intense engagement with examining the present because they saw it future-oriented while everyone else was driving while looking at the rearview mirror.
