Hollywood Utopia

discourse. I would assert, however, that a potentially new ecological super-heroic
structure is reconstituted and evoked, which uses the recuperative female version
of agency, though all the while promoting a playful postmodern aesthetic.
Haraway more recently speaks of new forms of ‘witnessing’ and the need for a ‘new
experimental way of life to fulfil the millenarian hope that life will survive on this
planet’ (Haraway 1997: 270). While she looks to the Internet and gene technology
for such ‘hope’, I would contend that a witnessing of this kind could also be found
in varying degrees within mainstream science fiction films. While Samuel Beckett
and others drew on the lowest form of comic representation in Waiting for Godot,
for example, to affirm the complexity, if not the break-up of the modernist
sensibility, many science fiction texts are putting the weight of a playful but
provocative postmodernist sensibility on the inadequate and often equally
insubstantial synthetic shoulders of (post-humanoid) cyborgs. Surprisingly,
however, such liminal types afford the greater potency for an expression of
changing conditions within the prototypical eco-human species.
Haraway correctly concludes that both ‘conventional’ feminists and Marxists have
‘run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary
subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppression and/or latent position of
moral superiority, innocence and greater closeness to nature’ (Haraway 1991: 176).
This can be appreciated most especially through her vicious critique of
conventional feminism and ‘victimhood’. The question remains, however, whether
such a female cyborg embodies as much feminist and ecological potential as
Haraway and others claim for cyborgs as evidenced within popular culture. This
question cannot, of course, be fully answered in the affirmative but at least such
issues are addressed. The Pandora’s box has been opened and such ‘metaphoric
simulacra’ are now becoming available and used within a wider cultural context
which can adapt and diffuse progressive ecological sensibilities within a
postmodernist mythic framework.
Postmodernist art at its best contests the ‘simulacralisation’ process of mass
culture: not by denying it or lamenting it but by problematising the entire notion of
the representation of reality and thereby pointing to the reductionism of
Baudrillard’s view.
It is not that truth and referentiality have ceased to exist, as Baudrillard claims; it is
that they have ceased to be unproblematic issues. We are not witnessing the degeneration
into the hyperreal without origin or reality, but a questioning of what ‘real’
can mean and how we can know it
(Hutcheon 1988: 223).
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 223