ABSTRACT

This essay examines concepts of personhood and citizenship in Iain M. Banks’s science fiction novels Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata, both set in the fictional utopia of the Culture. Although personhood is often described as a quality inherent to human beings, this essay will show how the novels represent that concept of personhood and subsequent practices of citizenship as contingent on the Culture’s technology. The essay draws on theories of the dispositif to describe personhood and technology and proposes a distinction between technical and conceptual dispositifs. Drawing on Carl Freedman’s work on science fiction, I deploy the reading of the novels as a utopian theory that offers a critical perspective on Hannah Arendt’s work on human rights and citizenship and on the work of philosophers who have sought to develop more inclusive normative concepts of personhood. Although these philosophers have done significant philosophical work to develop more inclusive conceptual dispositifs, the utopian critique created by the novels suggests that our thinking would be better directed toward the technology used to put those concepts into practice. The last section of the essay shows how Surface Detail represents the Culture’s technology creating a form of ‘extraterritorial’ citizenship.

摘要

这篇文章探讨了伊恩·M·班克斯的科幻小说《表面细节》和《氢奏鸣曲》中的人格和公民概念，这两部小说都以虚构的文化乌托邦为背景。尽管人格通常被描述为人类固有的品质，但本文将展示小说如何将人格概念和随后的公民实践表达为视文化技术而定。这篇文章利用配置理论来描述人格和技术，并提出技术配置和概念配置之间的区别。借鉴卡尔·弗里德曼关于科幻小说的著作，我将小说阅读部署为一种乌托邦理论，它为汉娜·阿伦特关于人权和公民权的著作以及试图发展更具包容性的规范性概念的哲学家的著作提供了一个批判性的视角。人格。尽管这些哲学家为发展更具包容性的概念设置做出了重要的哲学工作，但小说创造的乌托邦式批判表明，我们的思维将更好地指向用于将这些概念付诸实践的技术。文章的最后一部分展示了表面细节如何代表文化技术创造了一种“域外”公民身份。