Future conceptions of language in contemporary science fiction novel

Abstract

This thesis focuses on three contemporary science fiction novels, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and China Miéville’s Embassytown, in which those who are deprived of self-determination and abandoned to precarity try to cope with the negative effects of biopolitics. Although biopolitics as the intersection of biology and politics claims to be concerned with the health of human population, it ends up marginalizing certain lives as disposable and threatening to the order. This contradiction is sustained by the historical distinction between political life (bios) and biological life (zoe). Language, being viewed as the apex of a uniquely human political existence, is the site on which bare life is objectified and dominated. Consequently, the science fiction of the twentieth century often viewed language as a prison-house for thought and a tool of social control. However, with the nascent posthuman understanding of human nature as a cultural construct, these novels show the confluence of language and embodiment as an effective means of creating political resistance. In Native Tongue (1984), women construct a language to name their experience and to transform an oppressive biopolitics. Similarly, Snow Crash (1992) treats multiplicity of languages as a means of resisting power and viral discourses. Embassytown (2011) imagines a future when human and non-human beings discover the potential of metaphoric language in realizing the arbitrariness of political constructs and utilize it to resist authority. Representing bare life as a discursive category, these novels ultimately complicate the logic of biopolitics, which rests on the foundational distinction of bios from zoe.