Popular Culture and Epistemological Doubt:
The Limits of Reality in Postmodern Science
Fiction
It is generally assumed that the great philosophical questions regarding
human understanding belong to the realm of “high culture,” by opposition to
popular culture, which on the contrary is considered as mass oriented, purely
escapist, and determined by strict, naturally anti-artistic commercial imperatives.
Although such a view might prove accurate regarding many current and
financially successful cultural artifacts,1 it is no longer functional when applied
to the totality of our ever changing cultural landscape, and it appears necessary
today to evaluate the significance of an entire cultural corpus without
preconceived notions nor cultural prejudices. Besides the well-known fact that
countless authors and works considered at one time as part of “popular culture”
have been since then canonically re-evaluated and have become part of “high
culture,”2 which should already make us suspicious of any clear-cut distinction
between high and low culture, one cannot deny the increasing scholarly interest
raised by popular cultural artifacts, as if our academically sound canon proved
more and more unable to satisfy our critical inquiries.3 More than ever, it seems
that the creations emanating from popular culture are worthy of scholarly
attention and rightfully so, for some of them do tackle serious epistemological
issues, such as the dialectic relationship between our perception of the world and
the construction of reality.
The nature of reality and the cognitive tools at our disposal to apprehend it
have long been a major epistemological issue, and the latest developments in
postmodern critical theory are precisely centered around this particular question:
from Derrida’s deconstructive move to Spitvak post-colonialist views, post
structuralist thought would have us believe that the notion of an objective reality
is a simple chimera and that any idea of the world we may have is but a cultural
construction, most likely informed by deplorable hegemonic tendencies, either
racial, sexual, or simply territorial. Whereas one can hardly espouse such a
radical relativism, denounced elsewhere as mere rhetoric pose and “fashionable
non-sense,”4 we must nonetheless acknowledge the persistence of our doubts
regarding the exact nature of our relationship with our environment in terms of
rational reduction and consider it as a fundamental epistemological question:
reality may be what it seems to be but then again, maybe not. We expect
naturally such concern to be expressed within the domain of “high culture” and
implicitly addressed to its logical recipient; however, we find that what the
proponents of cultural constructionism fail to prove, that is the essentially
constructed nature of our reality, is at the very core of a reputed popular genre
such as the Fantastic, which is rooted upon an incomplete knowledge of reality;