David Foster Wallace claims that the way out of postmodernism is going to be through a generation of authors who intentionally reject irony and completely believe in what they are doing. As a postmodernist himself, though, he can’t get out of making this sound “sweet” or even “bad.” Nonetheless, I assert that this new sincerity is happening in the pages of science fiction being written following 9/11. While not as cloying and sentimental as Wallace attempts to suggest, The New Sincerity (as I’m calling it) is affirmative of the world, rather than maintaining an air of ironic distance that marked so much of the objective stance of postmodern narrative. Authors such as Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and William Gibson retain much of the character of postmodern fiction but jettison the irony and the joy felt for the end of the world, the destruction of the subject, and the dissolution of the body that was often crafted as an ironic gesture to enforce the horror we should feel for these things. Instead, these writers of The New Sincerity affirm the loss of these very things: subjectivity, the body, and (ultimately) a stable sense of the world. Rather than attempting to articulate this as some sort of mourning for the worldview of the postmodern (shattered on a New York morning in 2001), I wish to articulate this as an affirmative gesture that attempts to come to terms with the violence of globalized Terror and economics in way that finds new spaces of agency, individualism, and production. The New Sincerity, to me, suggests a reformation of the subject, following the excesses of the posthuman, that, far from being a nostalgia for the rightly outmoded Liberal Subject of Enlightenment discourse, mark a radical, distributed, alien vision of subjectivity in which the agency of biology and machine are not questioned or problematized but, instead, exploited for the potential to act on the world. In other words, The New Sincerity marks the emergence, within literature and praxis, of the cyborg as Donna Haraway fully understood it.
The New Sincerity is opposed to the Transhuman Salvation Narrative
Title: Beyond Postmodernism: The New Sincerity, Science Fiction, and 9/11