but nonetheless this encyclopedic sense of the genre has the virtue of pointing toward the broad horizon of social practices where the history of genre systems can come into view. Third, science fiction could be taken as the set of objects that all the relevant communities of practice point to in common—that is, the boundary objects “we” communities share.
This third reading refers to a shared territory that is not a matter of giving up on arriving at a definition of the genre, but rather is precisely the product of the interaction among different communities of practice using different definitions of SF. The multiplicity of definitions of SF does not reflect widespread confusion about what SF is, but rather it results from the variety of motives the definitions express and the many ways of intervening in the genre’s production, distribution, and reception that they pursue. A wealth of biographical and paratextual material can be brought to bear here, as in Justine Larbalestier’s decision that “letters, reviews, fanzines, and marketing blurbs are as important as the stories themselves” in piecing together her detailed history of a riven and complex SF community in The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (1). Brian Attebery’s description of the shape of SF in Decoding Gender in Science Fiction also attributes that shape to the interaction of disparate communities: “Some outgrowths of the genre have so little in common that they hardly seem to constitute a single category. Yet if they share few features, all the myriad manifestations of SF may still be analyzed as products of a single process. All result from negotiated exchanges between different segments of culture” (170). Understanding the relations between its various communities of practice, whether of negotiation or conflict or deliberate noninteraction, is among the most important problems that genre theory poses SF critics and scholars.
Thinking of genres as categories wielded by communities of practice has one final advantage that can serve as the conclusion to this chapter and point our way forward to the rest. Bowker and Starr’s analysis makes all definitions of SF appear in the light of working definitions, provisional conceptualizations suited to the purposes of a particular community of practice and, within that community, to the needs and goals of a specific project. Thus definitions may be necessary, even indispensable, and yet constructing and adhering to a single definition of the genre, far from being the goal of a history of SF, is more likely to be a way to short-circuit it. Definition and classification may be useful points of departure for critical and rhetorical analysis, but if the version of genre theory offered here is valid, the project of comprehending what SF has meant and currently means is one to be accomplished through historical and comparative narrative rather than formal description. I hope to contribute a few episodes to that narrative in what follows. But first we need to examine the concept of the genre system, and the mass cultural genre system in particular, more closely.
2
The Mass Cultural Genre System
Most genre theory has focused on the choices writers make when composing texts or that readers make, or ought to make, in interpreting them. But the practice of attributing genre to narrative fiction also clusters heavily in two institutional locations, commercial publishing and the academy. On these two sites, practices of reading dovetail with acts of selection, publication, and dissemination coordinated with complex and multiform motives. The relation between these two institutional locations is a feature of contemporary genre systems that most twentieth-century theory turned its back upon, failing to even notice it, much less ask about its significance or implications. Recent contributions to media studies like Altman’s Film/Genre and Mittel’s Genre and Television have begun to repair this neglect by elaborating theories of genre attentive to the practices of the Hollywood studios and corporate broadcast television. What I am attempting here is a more general description of the mass cultural genre system that proceeds on the premise that the commercial and academic genre systems will be better understood in relation to one another than either one in isolation. My account takes its point of departure from the emergence of mass culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and will pay attention throughout to the relations between the mass cultural and the academic genre systems. I begin by asking not what kind of definitional or conceptual work these systems accomplish, but what sort of organizational tasks they perform. How do they intervene in organizing the distribution and reception of narrative fiction?
While literary genre theory has for the most part related genres to one another by means of formal and thematic, or as Altman puts it, syntactic and semantic, criteria, an opening to the institutional functions of genre differentiation can be afforded by recent rhetorical approaches to genre theory, which have been exploring the ways that complex organizational tasks often involve an array of interlocking and codependent genres. For instance, the organization of an academic conference might involve calls for papers, proposals, abstracts, the exchanging of drafts and feedback, and many other formal and informal genres in the course of its affairs. Summarizing and elaborating on this work, Clay Spinuzzi sorts out several different sorts of assemblages that such rhetorically interlocking genres can form. By a “system” of genres Spinuzzi designates a group of genres that are related to one another through a community’s use of them in a sequential and stable fashion to accomplish organizational or communicative tasks, like the organization of a professional meeting or the writing of a grant. More interesting to Spinuzzi, and more relevant to the sense of system I mean to explore here, are genre “repertoires,” a concept which recognizes that genres overlap, change over time, and demand improvisation, and that they are not simply means of communication but also ways of mediating social interaction and managing “distributed cognition” (Spinuzzi 4). Most robust of all Spinuzzi’s assemblages is the genre “ecology” (cf. the “information ecologies” of Bowker and Starr), which includes the properties of the genre repertoire but adds that within the framework of the genre ecology, “genres are not simply performed or communicated, they represent the ‘thinking out’ of a community as it cyclically performs an activity” (Spinuzzi 5). According to Spinuzzi, “genre ecologies are constantly importing, hybridizing, and evolving genres,” and in the framework of the genre ecology he sees “genres as collective achievements that act just as much as they are acted upon” (6).
Although I choose to keep the term “system” rather than “ecology,” the notion of a literary genre system proposed in this study resembles Spinuzzi’s notion of a genre ecology in a number of striking ways. Both the mass cultural and the academic-classical systems are means of mediating distributed cognition. Not only do the genres in these systems overlap, change over time, and demand improvisation of their users, but both systems also import and hybridize genres, albeit with quite different temporal rhythms. One can certainly argue that the genres involved are collective actions that act as much as they are acted upon. Most intriguing of all is Spinuzzi’s suggestion that the performance and communication of the genres within a genre ecology represent the thinking out of a collective activity. The mass cultural genre system plays a key role in organizing the production, distribution, and reception of storytelling within the milieu of mass culture, and although the activity of constructing narratives certainly does not exhaust the forms of verbal artistry, eloquence, and persuasion that are mediated by the mass cultural or the academic-classical genre systems, it would be difficult indeed to overestimate or overstate the importance of the collective activities and desires that are mediated and put at stake by storytelling alone.
But mass culture does not organize storytelling for storytelling’s sake. It turns some stories into entertainment, others into news. The collective activities of buying and selling coalesce in mass culture with the rhetorical projects of publicizing and promoting, and this rhetorical-commercial matrix inevitably tangles itself in political relations as well. In what follows, I will argue that the commercial advertisement is the keystone of the mass cultural genre system, and that its calculated instrumentalization of the aesthetic pervades not only narrative production, both high and low, but also political discourse in the form of advertising’s first cousin, propaganda. I will also be arguing, however, that this instrumentalization of the aesthetic is far from determining the quality or the critical power of all the products of the culture industry. I will borrow from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks the distinction
