Science Fiction: The Janus-Faced Angel of History

It took me far too long, but I’ve finally finished Sherryl Vint’s Science Fiction (2021), thanks in no small part to my partner’s interest in the book, as well as a series of coincidences that gave me the time I needed. From this text rich in historical and theoretical insights, one particular image has really stuck with me, and that is Vint’s description of science fiction as “a Janus-faced discourse, equally available as a tool to critique injustices of the present and inspire better futures or deployed to reconcile us to the inevitability of the future as a continuation of our present consisting of technologized capitalism and social injustice” (ebook, 109). While contemporary vernacular often mobilizes “Janus-faced” to denote a characteristic of being two-faced—often with intended connotations of unreliability, ambivalence, or deception—I think that here, if we really unpack the term, it does so much more.

Like Janus, “the [Roman] god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings,” science fiction rules our imagination of origins and fates and every intermediating stage of transformation (Wikipedia, “Janus”). Like Janus, who “presided over the beginning and end of conflict, and hence war and peace,” science fiction symbolically presides over humanity’s most brutal violences and most beatifying visions. Like Janus, “in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, […] concerned with traveling, trading, and shipping,” science fiction obsessively concerns itself with ceaseless searching, connecting, and transporting, of possibilities, concepts, and subjects. Finally, like Janus, “invoked at the beginning of each [religious] ceremony, regardless of the main deity honored on any particular occasion,” science fiction can fold within its capacious discourse the conventions, forms, and topoi of every other narrative mode, invoking them to serve its own ends and further theirs. Science fiction is not only “a Janus-faced discourse”; it is, in a sense, the modern discursive face of Janus.

This Janus conception of science fiction helps me develop a thought I have been playing with for a while (ever since 2020, when the students in my first technological singularity narratives course helped me arrive at the conclusion that the singularity happened in 1971, when unilateral termination of the gold standard by the US unleashed the worst excesses of late capitalist financialization): a notion of science fiction as a mode concerned not with the future and our relationship to technology—its literal, empirical appearance—but with the past and our relationships to each other. This is not a claim that science fiction is not concerned with the future and technology. In fact, I subscribe to Steve Shaviro’s argument that “[s]cience fiction envisions a futurity that never becomes present, never actually comes to pass,” with technology a decisive component of these visions (Shaviro, Fluid Futures, ebook, 13). Rather, my claim is that, for subjects subjected to “capital’s perceptual physics," in which society’s general representational mode presents relations in, through, and as their own inversions, contemplation of the future and technology is always already mediated contemplation of their dialectical opposites (Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish, ebook, 45). It is a claim that the Real substance of “technology” is the social relation, that the Real substance of “the future” is the past, the traumatic origin from which we proceed through the endlessly unfolding and disappearing present—present only experientially, with every symbolic act an emissary of what-has-been—as we head always towards a purely subjunctive timespace where our wishes are fulfilled or our fears are realized, a destination at which we never arrive but which manifests in our lives as the constant generation of new pasts. As a figure to represent science fiction and its speculations, I had been toying with Angelus Novus, Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” blown “irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap [of past catastrophe] before him grows sky-high,” but I felt there was something missing, a dimension of the signified inadequately mediated by the signifier (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”). I see now what that something was.

I see now that there is perhaps no better metaphor for science fiction than Angelus Novus wearing Janus’ two faces, oriented not forward and backward but perpendicular to the angel’s uncontrolled trajectory, each of the twinned and opposed aspects glimpsing the future and the past peripherally as their gazes strain to penetrate the storm of “progress” that swirls all around, as Paradise’s gale blows them before the mountainous rubble-heap that can never be directly apprehended in all its terrifying might but that endlessly haunts as that which can be neither escaped nor inhabited, neither justified nor forsaken, but only endlessly fought for.