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Simona Bartolotta
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Between
Postcritique
Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement
Text.Serial.Journal
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Essays
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2021-09-21
2022-05-31
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Simona Bartolotta
2022/05/31
10.13125/2039-6597/4925
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University of Oxford
2039-6597
23
Postcritique
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28289
Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/4925/5115
12
                Beyond Suvin: Rethinking
                 Cognitive Estrangement

                               Simona Bartolotta

Abstract
      This article proposes a reconceptualization of Darko Suvin’s notion of
cognitive estrangement through affordance theory. Specifically, science-fic-
tional estrangement is redescribed as the creation of fictional world-affor-
dances imbued with cognitive potential. This perspective, drawing from
traditional SF criticism, cognitive literary studies, and post-critical literary
theory, allows taking the study of SF beyond the coordinates of critique and
critical theory. On account of the profound influence of theorists such as Dar-
ko Suvin and Carl Freedman, such a critical theory has so far been the prima-
ry rhetorical and critical mode of this branch of genre criticism.

Keywords
     Cognitive estrangement; Science fiction; Cognitive studies; Affordance
theory; Postcritique




Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/4925
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement




               Beyond Suvin:
     Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement

                                 Simona Bartolotta

      What are we talking about when we talk about science fiction (SF)? To
this day, genre theorists and SF critics are still trying to find a satisfactory
answer to this question. One of the most famous and influential attempts
at an all-encompassing definition of SF dates back to the 1970s, with Darko
Suvin and his theory of cognitive estrangement. In this article, I will first
discuss Suvin’s cognitive estrangement, Carl Freedman’s cognition effect,
and some insights from Heideggerian aesthetics in order to indicate some
directions in which the study of SF, and in particular of the genre’s distinc-
tive use of estrangement, can be expanded through contributions from the
field of cognitive literary studies (which so far has failed to develop a sus-
tained interest in SF or genre fiction in general), and I will show how this
expansion participates in a larger ongoing debate in the humanities about
the limits of critique and critical theory. I will then propose a new defini-
tion of science-fictional cognitive estrangement as a non-mutually-exclu-
sive alternative to Suvin’s own formulation, and I will illustrate it through
a reading of Ted Chiang’s SF novella “Story of Your Life”, concluding with
a final remark on the role of language and indeterminacy in science-fiction-
al estrangement.
      Although the notion of cognitive estrangement features in Suvin’s
critical writings on SF as early as 1972, its best-known formulation is to
be found in his 1979 study Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, now consid-
ered a landmark in the history of SF criticism. Suvin presents cognitive
estrangement as the key to grasping the true nature of the notoriously slip-
pery literary category of SF, which he defines as follows: «a literary genre
whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interac-
tion of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an
imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment»
(Suvin 1979: 7-8). Deeply preoccupied with the problem of establishing
the literary worth of SF, Suvin maintains that, if we are to pass any sort of
«value-judgement» on works in this genre, it is first necessary to confront
what he calls the «empirical realities of SF» with its «historical potentialities»


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(ibid.: viii). Accordingly, we should eschew considerations based on the
genre’s distinctive thematic concerns, such as its engagement with science
and technology or its future-oriented scope, and focus instead on what lat-
er in Metamorphoses will be called “novum”, that is, the element(s) of radi-
cal novelty that determines the difference between the imaginative world
of the text and our own. As indexes of the “empirical reality” posited in
the text, and in spite of their constitutional alterity, novums (and, by exten-
sion, the textual worlds they generate) are granted an ontological status of
“non-impossibility” within the frame of the «cognitive (cosmological and
anthropological) norms of the author’s epoch» (ibid.), and it is in this sense
that the particular form of estrangement that SF narratives engender is best
described, precisely, as “cognitive estrangement.”
      Suvin openly acknowledges the debt that his theory of cognitive es-
trangement owes to the Russian Formalists, in particular Viktor Shklovsky
and his concept of ostranenie, and to Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt.
The latter, in particular, fascinates Suvin on the account of its connections
to the scientific outlook, through which Brecht aimed to foreground how
the attitude of artistic estrangement is «both cognitive and creative» (ibid.;
6). If this specifically Suvinian conception of estrangement ‒ i.e., the set-
ting up of a cognitively-validated alternative to empirical reality ‒ is what
differentiates SF from realistic mainstream fiction, the presence of the cog-
nitive element, on the other hand, sets the genre apart from sister forms
of fantastic writing such as myth, the folktale, fantasy, and the pastoral.
In Suvin’s vision, in fact, all these genres fail in some way to open up
the heuristic, genuinely revealing possibilities that the cognitive attitude
grants SF, privileging instead, in their uncritical embracing of utter impos-
sibility, reactionary stances, wish-fulfilment, and escapism (ibid.: 8). In a
specular manner, however, there is as well a risk that undue insistence on
the rational and scientific character of ‘valuable’ SF might translate into
excessive indulgence in scientific and technological extrapolation, which
Suvin sees as a juvenile and ultimately sterile pleasure that plagues lesser
SF works. Thus, in a narrative where the two elements are correctly bal-
anced, it so happens that «a cognitive ‒ in most cases strictly scientific ‒ ele-
ment becomes a measure of aesthetic quality, of the specific pleasure to be sought
in SF. In other words, the cognitive nucleus of the plot codetermines the
fictional estrangement» (ibid.: 15). The clearly hierarchizing and prescrip-
tive tendencies both implicitly and explicitly central to Suvin’s argumen-
tations have been the focus of many of the objections levelled at them




                                                                                    51
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



through the years1. In what follows, however, I wish to address a different
aspect of Suvin’s formulation of cognitive estrangement, not primarily in
the attempt to offer a critique of or to supersede this model, but rather to
suggest a parallel and complementary line of reasoning to Suvin’s own.
      To recapitulate, Suvin defines cognitive estrangement as the effect gen-
erated when the imaginative world postulated in the SF text triggers and
stimulates a critical juxtaposition with the world of the author ‒ or, in Suvin’s
vocabulary, the “zero world”. Although we should not forget his Formalist
and Structuralist inspirations, possibly the strongest influence on Suvin’s
critical work, including his writings on SF, is Marxist thought. In Metamor-
phoses, he explicitly associates the cognitive interest of SF with «the rise of
subversive social classes and their development of more sophisticated pro-
ductive forces and cognitions», as opposed to the numbing escapism found
in «second-rate SF» (ibid.: ix). He also affirms that, as used in his study, «the
concept of “cognitiveness” or “cognition”… implies not only a reflecting of
but also on reality», and that this «typical SF methodology… is a critical one,
often satirical, combining a belief in the potentialities of reason with me-
thodical doubt in the most significant cases» (ibid.: 10). Furthermore, in the
context of his insistence on the close alliance between his idea of cognition
and scientific thought, Suvin also points out that while «cognition is wider
than science», the two concepts can be made to align more closely if one
takes “science” «in a sense closer to the German Wissenschaft, French science,
or Russian nauka, which include not only natural but also all the cultural or
historical sciences and even scholarship» (ibid.: 13). Elsewhere, he openly
contrasts “cognition” with “ideology”, writing that «the horizon of a mod-
ern, epistemologically self-conscious and self-critical science or cognition» is
the only frame within which a truly critical attitude is possible, because this
perspective alone can incorporate «the viewer (experimenter, critic) into the
structure of what is being beheld (experiment, text)» (Suvin 1988: 49). In
Suvin’s conception, then, “cognition” constitutes an approach to historical
understanding, critical in the Kantian sense, always open-ended but also al-
ways «codetermined by the social subject and societal interests» (Suvin 2010:
293), rebuffing final closure as it does unruly formlessness and responding
to the «meta-principle» of «not only but also (or both/and)» (ibid.: 295). It is
well worth noting here that at the heart of Fredric Jameson’s seminal The


     1
      Suvin himself later revised his appraisal of fantasy and related genres, too
quickly dismissed in Metamorphoses as simplistic forms of “irrational” estrange-
ment and thus intrinsically less “significant” than pure SF. See Suvin 2000.


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Archaeologies of the Future lies a cognate conception of the estrangements per-
formed by SF as fundamentally social, often expressed by direct reference
to Suvin’s pioneering work (see, for example, Jameson 2005: 63), and even,
across the career-spanning selection of essays that forms the second part of
the book, by anticipating some of Suvin’s key intuitions (ibid.: 256).
      No wonder, then, that this sociologically oriented approach, also due
to Jameson’s titanic influence, has informed the quasi-totality of SF criti-
cism from its beginnings to the present day, greatly improving the latter’s
fertility and even its currency for mainstream literary criticism. Neverthe-
less, the possibility arises that Suvin’s characterization of the source of the
historical potentialities of the genre as “cognitive” (by which he rough-
ly means, as we have determined, “socio-political” or “socio-politically
aware,” and allied with modern scientific thought) might have stalled the
study of SF and non-mimetic fiction at large from the perspective of the
extremely ample and variegated critical frameworks that fall under the ru-
bric of cognitive studies. Suvin’s cognition, in fact, arguably shares little
with what is normally meant by the same term in the field of the cognitive
sciences2. Without necessarily displacing Suvin’s meaning, which retains
its own invaluable relevance for a vision of SF as a form chiefly concerned
with social criticism, we can also wonder if and in what ways a theory
of cognitive estrangement revised in the light of contemporary cognitive
literary studies ‒ and thus envisioning “cognition” as the subject matter of
the cognitive sciences, that is, as the ensemble of mental processes and phe-
nomena associated with perception, knowledge, memory, language use,
emotion, and so forth ‒ could contribute to the study of SF. Carl Freedman’s
notion of the cognition effect, which significantly re-examines some of the
key points of Suvin’s theory, and the Heideggerian conception of aesthetic
defamiliarization (which, as I shall argue, offers unexpected contributions
with a view to understanding the specificity of the type of estrangement
produced by SF), both indicate some possibilities for integrating the cogni-
tive outlook into a theory of science-fictional estrangement.
      Freedman expounds his theory of the cognition effect in his 2000 study
Critical Theory and Science Fiction, whose title already signals the influence


    2
        In the account of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, research in
at least six general fields of enquiry on «questions about the mind» participates
in the construction of a broad taxonomy of the cognitive disciplines. These are:
philosophy; psychology; the neurosciences; computational intelligence; linguis-
tics and language; culture, cognition and evolution (Wilson and Keil 1999: xii).


                                                                                     53
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



of Suvin’s sociological approach on Freedman’s work. Freedman’s main
proposition is that the category of “cognition” as employed by Suvin is at
fault insomuch as it ties the definition of what constitutes SF to extraliter-
ary criteria ‒ specifically, the attitudes and scientific principles which are
recognized as empirically valid at the time of the composition of the text.
Thus, Freedman’s crucial argumentative move consists in detaching the
meaning of “scientifically sound” from “cognitive” (a semantic identity
which Suvin took for granted), and reconfigure the definition of SF on the
basis of «the attitude of the text itself to the kind of estrangements being per-
formed» (Freedman 2000: 18). On this account, SF generates what Freed-
man names, after Roland Barthes’ effet de réel, “cognition effect”. What is
important to note here is that such reformulation, as Freedman argues,
allows for a deeper understanding of SF not merely as the instantiation of
a set of generic conventions, but rather as a tendency which, to a degree,
is inherent to all fiction: if we were in fact to envision the narrative inter-
play of cognition and estrangement assumed by Suvin to be the marker
of true SF as a continuum, we would find a combination of maximum es-
trangement and minimum cognition at one extreme of the spectrum, and,
complementarily, maximum cognition plus minimum estrangement at the
other. For Freedman as for Suvin, the former option is best embodied in
fantasy literature, whereas the latter corresponds to realist fiction. On these
grounds, it is possible to argue that even the most referential and realis-
tic of fictions rely on an irreducible degree of estrangement. Although far
from ground-breaking, Freedman’s argument that «the estranging tenden-
cy of science fiction» supplies «some of the power of great realistic fiction»
is crucial in this context, as it suggests that «the science-fiction tenden-
cy», that is, what we might call ‘textually-‘ or ‘discursively-cognitivized
estrangement’ (as opposed to Suvin’s reliance on extraliterary criteria to
determine the text’s compliance to the requirements of cognition) is in fact
«the precondition for the constitution of fictionality ‒ and even of repre-
sentation ‒ itself» (ibid.: 21).
      Heideggerian aesthetics presents several surprising affinities with
Freedman’s model, especially in that both provide a focus on the text as
an active participant in the determination of how the narrative strategies
that the text implements affect its reception. The relevance of Heidegger-
ian thought to SF theory has already been pointed out by Adam Roberts
(2016), who, through a compelling rereading of Heidegger’s “The Ques-
tion Concerning Technology”, has put forward the contention that SF is
the literature capable of operating what in Heideggerian jargon could be
called ‘technological enframing’. In his 1953 essay, Heidegger recovers the


54
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original meaning of the Greek word technē to famously define technology
as a “mode of revealing”; technē, in fact, was employed to indicate at least
three interrelated areas of human culture and experience: the activity of the
craftsman, philosophy and the fine arts, and also, similarly to epistēmē, the
ability and process of «knowing in the widest sense» (Heidegger 2008: 318).
It is true that modern technology, for Heidegger, is guilty of “enframing”
the world as “standing-reserve”, blocking off its revealing potential and re-
ducing its resources to assets to be stored and then used in the aimless sys-
tem of large-scale production; in its original meaning, however, technology
represents a particular intellectual stance ‒ indeed, a mode of knowing or
revealing ‒ that allows human beings to relate to the world in such a way
as to bring forth alētheia, truth (ibid.: 319). From this poietic function of tech-
nology stems, for Heidegger, its affinity with art, which in ancient Greece
shared, significantly, precisely the humble name of technē (ibid.: 339).
       It is by turning to Heidegger’s theory of the work of art, howev-
er, that it truly becomes evident in what respect Heideggerian aesthetics
can be thought of as an aesthetics of estrangement3. Heidegger’s concern
with the ‘truth’ that great art is capable of bringing forth does not evolve
as a quest for referential accuracy or for an extra-phenomenal reality,
but rather as a preoccupation with what he calls “unconcealment”, the
way in which in the world appears to us before being reformulated as
representation. We find an echo of this ‒ or rather, Heidegger’s theory of
art bears an echo of ‒ in Shklovsky’s own belief that art ought «to return
sensation to our limbs… to make the stone feel stony» (Shklovsky 1991:
6). As remarked, moreover, this idea is prominent also in “The Question
Concerning Technology”, exemplified in the essay’s final juxtaposition
of art and technology, the latter seen as a form of poietic craft. The char-
acteristic operation of all great art, then, consists in opening up a space
in which human beings can comprehend the world by operating «a hap-
pening of truth», «a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and
how it is» (ibid.: 162). Peculiarly, however, this revelation does not affect
merely the subject of the work of art, but the world in which the subject is
shown to exist and in which, by virtue of its relation to the world itself, it
is revealed in its significance. In Timothy Clark’s words, «Heideggerian
defamiliarization has a holistic ‘transcendental’ aspect, i.e. in seeing its
object anew it transforms our sense of the whole context of practices and


    3
        My main reference for the discussion that follows is, of course, “The Ori-
gin of the Work of Art” (in Heidegger 2008: 143-212).


                                                                                    55
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



perceptions in which that object inheres» (Clark 2002: 47): in short, it calls
into being a world to which we would not have attended otherwise. It is
in this sense that Heidegger’s rejection of mimesis as the rationale of art
is to be understood: for Heidegger, the work of art cannot be seen merely
as the result of a certain authorial design, nor merely as the product of
its times, and its goals (if indeed one insists in attributing to art any sort
of intentionality) are not referential. Rather, art «presents its own unique
and ultimately inexplicable mode of being, something for the reader, be-
holder or listener to dwell within and not merely something to de-code»
(Clark 2002: 43).
      The work as a mode of being irreducible in its alterity, and, by virtue
of this alterity, able to serve as a lens, a stepping stone, an affordance, a
cognitive artifact4, an aide to thought. In this light, my effort to point to a
mode of reading SF that would take into consideration this potential for
coadjuvancy ‒ the capacity of texts, and specifically narratives of specu-
lative fiction, to help create new visions, on top of their usual and widely
acknowledged practice of encoding «the tendencies latent in reality» in
their imaginary terms, to use Suvin’s own phrase (Suvin 1979: 8) ‒ sub-
scribes to a larger recent debate in the humanities about what the title of
Rita Felski’s fundamental book on the topic condenses as The Limits of
Critique. In this context, critique is identified as the privileged rhetorical
mode of critical practices such as critical theory and ideology critique, a
style of criticism that fashions itself as inherently suspicious, sceptical,
demystifying, and at times even morally condemning, and which too ha-
bitually is mistaken as the norm in humanist studies, rather than being
recognized as what it is ‒ one of many available rhetorical styles. Among
Felski’s several suggestions for the “postcritical” future of literary stud-
ies, particularly resonant for my own project is her proposition, reliant
on Bruno Latour’s contributions to actor-network theory, that texts and
everything that relates to their makeup and reception, from narrative
devices to fictional characters, from extratextual factors such as horizons
of expectation to genre classifications, can be productively thought of as
nonhuman actors (Felski 2015: 154). The appeal of this outlook for cog-
nitive literary studies ‒ and, vice versa, the appeal of cognitive literary
studies for such an approach ‒ is clear: on the one hand, the cognitive-lit-


     4
        Many of the essays collected in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences,
edited by David Herman (2003), elaborate on the definition of texts as cognitive
artifacts, including Herman’s own contribution, “Stories as a Tool for Thinking”.


56
                                              Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



erary research project, in its multiple and variegated instantiations, can
provide numerous specific directions to investigate the idea that the text
is powerful in its nonhuman agency, and that in their being enmeshed in
a complex network of phenomena, texts can produce an effect on the other
actors to whom or which they are connected. (To illustrate the workings
of a nonhuman agent, Latour uses the example of a speed bump: inert,
strictly speaking, but with an undeniable effect on the movement of hu-
man actors.) Conversely, the reorientation of critique carried out by Felski
and similar-minded critics opens up a new intellectual space where cogni-
tive-literary studies can find renewed legitimacy and momentum, contrib-
uting to the common enterprise of understanding how texts deploy their
power to point to new visions and frames for interpretation, rather than
only stand by as objects to be scoured in search of ‘symptoms’5. Cognitive
studies, moreover, also offer an invaluable frame of reference to explore
the affective dimensions of texts and of our interactions with texts, which
for Felski should be a crucial component of the postcritical mode of read-
ing which she envisions.
      It is in this view, then, that I advance the proposal of a new conception
of what we mean by “estrangement” (and more specifically, “cognitive es-
trangement”) when we apply the term to the study of SF ‒ not, as I have
explained, with the intention to supersede the Suvinian model but simply
to offer an alternative perspective on what the representational strategies

    5
        With regard to the larger problem of the compatibility between herme-
neutics and cognitive studies and the relation of both to SF studies, to which
I cannot do full justice here, let me refer back to my reference to Heidegger to
briefly acknowledge that if we can say, with Roberts, that Heidegger (as any
thinker linked to philosophical hermeneutics, which has generally been not too
sympathetic towards the methods of the empirical sciences) is indeed an «un-
likely figure to bring into a discussion» of SF (Roberts 2016: 13), he is an even
more unlikely figure to bring into a discussion of SF that relies 1. on the insight
of cognitive studies and 2. on Felski’s proposition to explore alternatives to the
“hermeneutics of suspicion” that shapes the rhetoric of critique. With regards to
the first point, see for example Shaun Gallagher’s article “Hermeneutics and the
cognitive sciences”, in which the author sketches some premises for a hermeneu-
tics that combines philosophical understanding with the explanatory power of
science (Gallagher 2004: 163). As for the second, Felski herself provides a more
than valid justification: “Hermeneutics simply is the theory of interpretation and
leaves room for many different ways of deciphering and decoding texts…. While
the retrieval of hidden truths is one kind of hermeneutics, not all hermeneutics
require a belief in depth or foundations” (Felski 2015: 33-4).


                                                                                    57
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



of SF6 are especially suited to do, and what their study can reveal about
the ways in which human beings use art and narrative to express, elabo-
rate on, and even create or otherwise affect aspects of their experience of
being-in-the-world. If, like Suvin and Freedman, we take estrangement to
mean what we might roughly call representational estrangement, that is,
the depiction of storyworld features that are imaginary in that they find
no empirical validation in the reality of our experience, then it is possible
to think of the text’s estranged (and thus estranging) elements as a partic-
ular kind of literary affordances able to extend the semantic, connotative,
and meaning-making reach of the text itself. I also contend that one of the
preferred uses (though by no means the only use) to which SF puts its
estranged affordances seems to be characteristically cognitive: SF loves to
think about how we think ‒ or rather, to stress the inherently self-reflective
character of this particular use of literary affordances, we love to think
about how we think through SF.
      Before I proceed to illustrate these points with a concrete example, a
few notes are due on the meaning of the term “cognitive affordance.” Liter-
ary studies are no strangers to the notion of affordance, first developed by
psychologist James J. Gibson to signify features of the environment which
lend themselves to specific uses by living creatures. Felski mentions this
concept briefly to note its compatibility with the notion of the text as non-
human actor (Felski 2015: 164-5), but my choice of this idea to illustrate
what I see as a key feature of science-fictional estrangement is especially
influenced by Terence Cave’s Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive
Criticism, in which an entire chapter is dedicated to exploring the advantag-
es of affordance theory for a cognitive model of literary phenomena. «The
notion of ‘affordances’» writes Cave, strikingly in tune with Felski’s own
vision, «might provide a different perspective on the things that literature
can make happen ‒ the ways in which it can change our cognitive environ-
ment» (Cave 2016: 47). Since affordances exist at multiple levels of the text,
they can also form «complex ecosystems» (ibid.: 49), either horizontally, in-
teracting with other same-level affordances (generating, for example, cross-
genre narratives) or vertically, serving as platforms for further affordances
or containing them in their own structure. Cave’s account matches Felski’s


     6
       Although the present discussion focuses specifically on SF, the possibility
that such ‘postcritically cognitive’ approach to estrangement might prove useful
and beneficial in the study of other forms of speculative fiction as well does not
seem farfetched.


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in the recognition that affordances possess a peculiar type of agency, but if
Felski focuses on the power of nonhuman actors to affect the behaviour of
human agents, Cave emphasises the potential of each affordance to serve
multiple purposes, its open-endedness: affordances are always typically
«underspecified», available for the most disparate ends, and «only a particular use
and a particular context can select the relevant purpose» (ibid.: 51). These two
views are, of course, complementary: if affordances structure our way of
perceiving and thus of interacting with our environment, the availability
of more numerous and more prolific affordances generates in its turn more
possibilities for influence and action.
      From these considerations, it should be evident why my redescrip-
tion of science-fictional cognitive estrangement as the creation of imagi-
nary world-affordances imbued with cognitive potential is not animated
by a definitional intent with regard to its generic frame and holds only
limited definitional value. In accordance with their nature as open-ended
and underspecified affordances, in fact, the estrangement acts performed
in SF lend themselves to potentially infinite readings, not all of them fo-
cusing necessarily on the cognitive or metacognitive payoff of the affor-
dance. Conversely, there is no reason why other genres similarly reliant
on the non-mimetic should not employ estrangement in the cognitive and
self-reflective sense described above. Nevertheless, there seems to be an
undeniable and inescapable attraction between the use of imaginary es-
trangement as cognitive affordance and the rhetorical game of SF, whose
escapades into the realm of the fantastic are methodically substantiated by
the rules of scientific, or at the very least pseudo-scientific, discourse7 (“the
attitude of the text itself” that generates the cognition effect). Consider how
even a book like Stranger in a Strange Land, whose political readings often
overshadow entirely its generic identity as SF (this is, after all, one of the
genre’s most celebrated classics), elects to process its social satire through
an accurate detailing of the cognitive difficulties that Valentine Michael
Smith, the human protagonist born and raised among Martians, faces in
adapting to life on Earth, not the least of which difficulties concerns the
problem of untranslatability and language.


    7
        Istvan Csicsery-Ronay is probably the critic who most compellingly has
reflected on how prominently SF flirts with and relies on the «presentation of su-
pernatural phenomena in materialist language» (Csicsery - Ronay 2008: 73). See
his The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008), especially the chapters on the second
and fourth beauties, “Fictive Novums” and “Imaginary Science” respectively.


                                                                                       59
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



      Language, and especially the possibility of alien languages, seems
indeed to hold an inexhaustible fascination for SF, but rarely in the history
of the genre has the character of language as affordance been brought to
the fore as relevantly as in the work of Ted Chiang. His novella “Story
of Your Life”, first published in 1998, is exemplary in this regard. In the
story, a fleet of alien spaceships suddenly descend on Earth, in a scenario
strongly reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Because these
aliens possess seven limbs, they are quickly dubbed “heptapods”, and
since any form of non-verbal communication with them appears to be
impossible, linguistics professor Louise Banks and other experts are re-
cruited by the government to study and hopefully to decipher the hep-
tapod language. Through more than a hundred communication devices
(called simply “looking glasses”) scattered across the planet’s surface by
the aliens themselves, Louise and her colleagues begin to painstakingly
‘speak’ with the heptapods. Eventually, Louise discovers that heptapod
writing is semasiographic, meaning that, contrary to all human written
languages, heptapod writing is comprised of symbols that have no rela-
tion to speech. Crucially, this implies that the heptapods regularly em-
ploy two entirely different languages, which Louise accordingly renames
“Heptapod B” (their written language) and “Heptapod A” (their spoken
language). This breakthrough, however, confronts the linguist with an
even greater mystery. Why would the heptapods, whose intellectual ad-
vancement appears so staggering, need to maintain speech and writing
as two completely separate languages when, at least in the human ex-
perience, the alternative is infinitely more economical? Why complicate
communication and language learning to this extent?
      The first tentative answer that Louise gives to these questions proves
soon to be uncannily correct: «For the heptapods, writing and speech
may play such different cultural or cognitive roles that using separate
languages makes more sense than using different forms of the same one»
(Chiang 2015: 132-3). Meanwhile, after an exchange with the heptapods
about Fermat’s principle (i.e., in travelling between two points, a ray of
light follows the path that takes the least time), the physicists working at
the looking-glass sites ascertain that even though heptapod mathematics
is roughly equivalent to the human one, the two systems are basically the
reverse of one another: what is elementary from the point of view of hu-
man mathematics and physics requires extremely complex calculus for the
heptapods, and vice versa. In front of this second revelation, Louise won-
ders about how different heptapod cognition must be from the human one
to warrant such a topsy-turvy conception of physical laws: «[W]hat kind


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of worldview did the heptapods have, that they would consider Fermat’s
principle the simplest explanation of light refraction? What kind of percep-
tion made a minimum or maximum readily apparent to them?» (ibid.: 144).
      As Louise’s proficiency in Heptapod B increases, so does her under-
standing of the heptapods’ cognitive mould. Her very perception of time
undergoes radical and eerie changes, as she notices that she has acquired
cognizance of events that lie as yet in her future. Accordingly, Chiang con-
structs the novella as a restless alternance between a time in the past, re-
cording Louise’s on-site study of the heptapods and their languages, and
a time in the future, when Louise gives birth to a daughter. Louise tells
both these stories ‒ her past and her future ‒ from the perspective of her
actual present, in which she and her partner (Gary, a physicist she met
at the looking-glass site to which she was assigned) decide to conceive a
child. On a stylistic level, this results in an unusual use of verbal tenses:
addressing herself to the daughter she has not met yet, but whom she al-
ready knows thanks to her fluency in Heptapod B, Louise begins her tale
by saying, «Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most
important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention» (ibid.: 111;
emphasis added). The segments from the past are told using the normal
narrative tenses, as one would expect, while Louise’s memories of her fu-
ture with her daughter often feature variations of the logically shocking
structure “I remember when X will happen”: «I remember a conversation
we’ll have when you’re in your junior year of high school» (ibid.: 129), or
«I remember once when we’ll be driving to the mall» (ibid.: 138). Chiang’s
ingenious use of verbal tenses makes to the reader immediately clear the
temporal positioning of each of the narrative’s sequences; this clarity is
lost in the 2016 cinematographic adaptation of the novella, Arrival, directed
by Denis Villeneuve, in which the viewer is led for a long time to believe
that Louise’s flashes of her life with her daughter are flashbacks rather than
flashforwards. While this confusion heightens the emotional impact of the
movie’s final revelations, it clouds somewhat the epistemological interest
that drives forward the original novella. In fact, the unusual chronological
structure that Chiang artfully implements in his text is meant to mirror the
alien mode of consciousness that Louise acquires through Heptapod B, a
writing system devised specifically to reflect a vision of the universe as
perceived through minds that experience reality not sequentially, as hu-
man minds do, but simultaneously, and which are thus capable of experi-
encing both past and future at once.
      It is useful to contrast Chiang’s strategy with how Kurt Vonnegut de-
picts the same kind of synchronous time perception in Slaughterhouse-Five,


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Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



which also features an alien species, the Tralfamadorians, who experience
time non-linearly. Vonnegut’s main character, Billy Pilgrim, acquires the
same ability for unspecified reasons, but, in contrast to Louise, he under-
goes what would seem to be actual leaps across time, jumping restlessly
from one moment of his life to another. In addition, also as in Slaughter-
house-Five, the way in which Heptapod B affects Louise’s memory and con-
sciousness raises several troubling questions, especially with regard to the
idea of free will. As the reader realizes quite early in the story, Louise’s
daughter will die at twenty-five in a rock-climbing accident. Louise has
been well aware of this fact since before the conception of her child; yet, as
far as the reader knows, she never so much as considers taking any kind
of measure to avoid the final tragedy8. Why? For Louise, the explanation
comes once again from the new worldview disclosed to her by Heptapod
B: within the context of simultaneous consciousness, in which the per-
ception of sequential cause-effect relations gives way to an awareness of
events as if animated by an underlying purpose, the concepts of freedom
and coercion simply become meaningless. The consequence of this view
(or perhaps its cause: in heptapod thought, the distinction is null) is that
for the heptapods ‒ and now, to a degree, for Louise as well ‒ all language
becomes performative, necessary not to inform but to actualize, so that if it
is true, on the one hand, that the heptapods always already know how any
conversation or event is going to unfold, on the other hand, «in order for
their knowledge to be true, the conversation [or event] would have to take
place» nonetheless (ibid.: 164).
      A second comparison with Slaughterhouse-Five serves to illustrate both
the specificity of the science-fictional estrangement performed by Chiang
and the applicability of my concept of estrangement as affordance to mul-
tiple texts. In Vonnegut’s novel, it is time travel that functions as the key
estranging strategy and cognitive affordance of the narrative, as Billy’s in-
cessant jumps through time, resulting in an accordingly jumbled and frag-
mented narrative, is a representational stratagem to express that for which


     8
        In Villeneuve’s adaptation, Louise’s daughter dies from an incurable ill-
ness at the age of twelve. This puts a different but equally stimulating spin on
the moral complications of Louise’s predicament, as she still ‘decides’ (a grossly
incorrect word choice from the perspective of the heptapods, but one which re-
flects the unshakable bias of the human viewer for the perception of agency) to
give birth to her child knowing all the while that even if she could somehow en-
tertain the possibility of trying to avoid her daughter’s death, nothing she might
do would help.


62
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there is no language, that is, the experience of irremediable trauma9. Time
travel and the non-linear perception of time experienced by Billy ultimate-
ly heighten the novel’s paradoxical sense that language is useless and inap-
plicable («there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre» [Vonnegut
2000: 16]). Chiang’s approach is diametrically different, because in “Story
of Your Life,” it is language (not the alien invasion, not time travel) that acts
as world-revealing technē ‒ language that performs the text’s main act of
science-fictional estrangement. Furthermore, there are at least two distinct
ways in which Chiang’s novella deploys language as cognitive affordance.
Firstly, language functions as an affordance for Louise, who, through the
immersion in the written language of the heptapods, becomes able to ac-
cess a cognitive state so foreign that it would have remained hopelessly
out of her cognitive reach, were it not for her knowledge of Heptapod B10.
Simultaneously, language also functions as a literary affordance deployed
by the text itself for the benefit of the reader, who in this way, similarly to
Louise herself, is provided with the conceptual instruments necessary to
conceive and speculate about what it would mean to describe the universe
in teleological rather than causal terms.
      On a final note, there is one more reason why “Story of Your Life”
works as such a quintessential illustration of my reassessment of science-fic-
tional estrangement through affordance theory: Louise explains that even
though within the semasiographic writing system developed by the hep-
tapods each “semagram”, roughly equivalent to a human written word,
possesses a meaning of its own, it is its combination and relative position
with respect to other semagrams that determine its role within the sen-
tence. As a result, the semagrams in a sentence are so «interconnected that
none could be removed without redesigning the entire sequence» (ibid.:
147). This is undoubtedly a serendipitous concurrence, but nonetheless, it
is fascinating how closely this description of heptapod writing matches the
semiotically-informed accounts of the specificity of SF writing that have
been developed by SF theorists and authors such as Samuel Delany and
Damien Broderick, accounts which bear significantly on the question of the



    9
        See Wicks 2014 for an analysis of trauma and traumatic memory in Slaugh-
terhouse-Five.
     10
        See Cave 2016: 52-4 for notes on language as «the key empowering affor-
dance…. mapped onto the way we perceive the world». See also Gary Lupyan
and Rick Dale’s article “Why Are There Different Languages? The Role of Adap-
tation in Linguistic Diversity” (2016).


                                                                                   63
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



workings of estrangement in SF.
      For Delany, the primary meaning-making mechanism of the literary
text is fundamentally relational: the words in a narrative do not sit in a
fixed chronological sequence but rather «in numerous inter- and over-
weaving relations. The process as we move our eyes from word to word is
corrective and revisionary rather than progressive. Each new word revises
the complex picture we had a moment before» (Delany 2009: 4). Clear-
ly, our absorption of the text, being curtailed by chronological necessity,
can never be as simultaneous as it is for the heptapods, for whom even
the very act of writing is non-linear and entails the inscription of multiple
semagrams at the same time. Nevertheless, the result of the self-correc-
tive mechanism that takes place during reading is a mental world-image
whose details accrue and change endlessly as new information is added.
According to Delany, recognizing the distinctiveness of this process is es-
pecially important for the study of SF, because the genre’s constitutional
tension between its speculative freedom on the one hand, and what he
calls its specific subjunctivity (i.e., the level of possibility proper to events
that have not happened, but which could happen in certain conditions) on
the other determines an even heavier dependence between signifiers: only
when considered in relation to the fictional world in which they are en-
meshed, do fictional objects and events fully (or at least, sufficiently) make
sense11. The source of this incessant recalibration, however, is always to be
found at the level of the word: «Once the new word has been absorbed into
a sentence… neither the word, nor the sentence considered apart from the
word, retains its old meaning» (ibid.: 140).
      Although Delany conceived this model to remedy the excessive
simplification of which he accused Suvin’s theory of science-fictional es-
trangement, Broderick argues convincingly that «Suvin’s sense of a textual
micro-universe founded in a continuously creative act of distantiation» is
rather implicit in Delany’s paradigm (Broderick 2005: 36). «What science
fiction does», Delany argues, «is to take recognizable syntagms and sub-
stitute in them, here and there, signifiers from a till then wholly unexpect-
ed paradigm» (Delany 2009: 139). These opaque combinations inevitably
generate estrangement, and with it an irreducible instability between the
metaphoric and the metonymic, the imagined and the empirical. Cognitive


     11
       For a detailed account of this mechanism, see especially the essays “About
5, 759 Words” and “To Read The Dispossessed” in Delany 2009. See also Broderick
2005: 33-6.


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studies are understandably fascinated by the responses elicited by unusu-
al ‒ ‘literary’ ‒ language uses: studies by David S. Miall and Don Kuiken,
for example, cite empirical evidence to tie this problem to the constructive
aspect involved in text-processing via the power of foregrounding stylis-
tic techniques to elicit affective engagement and interpretative reflection
(Miall - Kuiken 1994; Miall 1995). In a similar vein, Nancy Easterlin makes
a compelling case for the cognitive-evolutionary relevance of the human
predilection for novelty and its expression through literary practices, on
the grounds that the experience of uncertainty and unresolvability pro-
vided by literary texts encourages the reader to «construct narrative possi-
bilities» (Easterlin 2015: 625), to explore and create, to test out hypotheses
and transform our perception of the self and the world. In short, where
the text employs strategies of defamiliarization, it becomes possible to en-
vision ambiguity as an affordance: it is the tool that the text uses to keep
us interested, to keep us wondering, to keep us engaged in the effort to
imaginatively reconstruct its foreign world and worldview.
      This goes to the heart of why, as I have tried to illustrate in this article,
it is now necessary to develop a postcritical language for discussing liter-
ary phenomena, and why the cognitive perspective can prove useful in this
task: our comprehension of what the experience of estrangement, which
is only one among innumerable such phenomena, adds to the experience
and practice of reading will forever remain partial if we forgo consider-
ations about how estrangement directs our perception towards new vi-
sions, besides pointing slyly to what is already, to once again quote Suvin,
“latent in reality”. In this sense, science-fictional estrangement redefined
as a literary affordance is able to offer a privileged perspective into ‘how
the text thinks’, which in turn discloses new ways in which the text affords,
invents, makes possible; the ways, in short, in which texts do.




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Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



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                               Filmography
Arrival, Dir. Denis Villeneuve, United States, 2016.



                                The Author
     Simona Bartolotta

      Simona Bartolotta is a DPhil Candidate in English at Mansfield Col-
lege, University of Oxford. She holds a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Lit-
erature from the University of Bologna and a M.A. in English Studies from
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her research interests include speculative
and mystery fiction, cognitive literary studies, and narratology.

     Email: simona.bartolotta@mansfield.ox.ac.uk



                                The Article
     Date sent: 30/10/2021
     Date accepted: 31/03/2022
     Date published: 30/05/2022


                                                                                   67
Simona Bartolotta, Beyond Suvin: Rethinking Cognitive Estrangement



                             How to cite this article
    Bartolotta, Simona, “Beyound Suvin. Rethinking Cognitive Estrange-
ment”, Straniamenti, Eds. S. Adamo - N. Scaffai - M. Pusterla - D. Watkins,
Between, XII.23 (2022): 49-68, www.betweenjournal.it




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