Conclusion
At the end of his book, Scott admits that an anarchist history seems odd from our perspective country: nation-states have increasing power over everyday lives. Certainly, there remain threats—terrorism, most obviously. But the systems once proposed to undermine state power—international communism, anarchism—these have failed, or only served to strengthen the state power. The modern position of science seems more tenuous. It is a durable institution, one that is deeply entangled with the state, which further gives it strength, as well as another powerful institution, industry. Nonetheless, judging by the popular press, it seems embattled on many sides: by religious fundamentalists, by some of those same corporations, and by scientific anarchists such as the Forteans. So how should we evaluate the Forteans? Were they threats to science? Were they insignificant?
To answer that question requires making explicit something that had been implicit: that is, the power relations. Corporations have the power to set agendas, to affect public policy. When they seek to undermine science—by refuting the dangers of tobacco or dismissing the possibility of global warming—their actions have serious consequences. To the extent that religious fundamentalists inject themselves into secular institutions—schools, for example, on matters of teaching evolution and sex education—they also have the power to check science, although to this point that power has been more theoretical than actual. The Forteans, for the most part, were not interested in setting out contrary institutions, or even altering public ones on the matter of science. Theirs was a more subtle project. To paraphrase Colin Bennett, the Forteans were battling for humanity’s imagination: they did not want it limited by what scientists said it could be. From one perspective, this seems to make them insignificant—like Scott’s anarchists, their operations were eventually swamped by the expansion of the nation-state. Similarly, as Sam Moskowitz pointed out, the Fortean fantasy was equally overwhelmed by science. Fort suggested that the planets were only a few miles away, that a Super-Sargasso Sea hovered above all creation. But, by 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, this theory was a shambles. There was no way to maintain it.
Scott’s conclusion suggests—although he does not draw this point out—that the most interesting thing about anarchists, then, are not their ideas, but that they were able to patch together local practices and an international network to resist Leviathan. The same could be said about the Forteans. The San Francisco Bay Area Forteans drew on local practices—especially in the arts—and tied this together with the more international Fortean movement. They did so in many distinct, sometimes mutually exclusive ways. But the point—beyond the various ideologies—was the same in all cases. They wanted to find ways of viewing humans as beyond the parameters that science erected. And in this, they were successful, sometimes ironically so. Their imaginative creations did create a space in which humans could be free—what Philip Lamantia said was an imaginal world, distinct from the mundane one and the religious one. Forteans, he said, were explorers of this world, explorers who reported back on the extreme, new worlds that they had found, unimaginable before their explorations. The ironic fulfillment of some of these ideas, though, was to further the power of science. Science fiction is a literature of resistance, opposing humane values against scientific ones, but it is also a press agent for science, increasing science’s cultural authority. The Forteans, then, at least the Bay Area Forteans in the immediate post-War years, allowed Americans to imagine themselves free from the constraints of science, even as they strengthened science’s power to determine what counted as real.
At the end of his book, Scott admits that an anarchist history seems odd from our perspective country: nation-states have increasing power over everyday lives. Certainly, there remain threats—terrorism, most obviously. But the systems once proposed to undermine state power—international communism, anarchism—these have failed, or only served to strengthen the state power. The modern position of science seems more tenuous. It is a durable institution, one that is deeply entangled with the state, which further gives it strength, as well as another powerful institution, industry. Nonetheless, judging by the popular press, it seems embattled on many sides: by religious fundamentalists, by some of those same corporations, and by scientific anarchists such as the Forteans. So how should we evaluate the Forteans? Were they threats to science? Were they insignificant?
To answer that question requires making explicit something that had been implicit: that is, the power relations. Corporations have the power to set agendas, to affect public policy. When they seek to undermine science—by refuting the dangers of tobacco or dismissing the possibility of global warming—their actions have serious consequences. To the extent that religious fundamentalists inject themselves into secular institutions—schools, for example, on matters of teaching evolution and sex education—they also have the power to check science, although to this point that power has been more theoretical than actual. The Forteans, for the most part, were not interested in setting out contrary institutions, or even altering public ones on the matter of science. Theirs was a more subtle project. To paraphrase Colin Bennett, the Forteans were battling for humanity’s imagination: they did not want it limited by what scientists said it could be. From one perspective, this seems to make them insignificant—like Scott’s anarchists, their operations were eventually swamped by the expansion of the nation-state. Similarly, as Sam Moskowitz pointed out, the Fortean fantasy was equally overwhelmed by science. Fort suggested that the planets were only a few miles away, that a Super-Sargasso Sea hovered above all creation. But, by 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, this theory was a shambles. There was no way to maintain it.
Scott’s conclusion suggests—although he does not draw this point out—that the most interesting thing about anarchists, then, are not their ideas, but that they were able to patch together local practices and an international network to resist Leviathan. The same could be said about the Forteans. The San Francisco Bay Area Forteans drew on local practices—especially in the arts—and tied this together with the more international Fortean movement. They did so in many distinct, sometimes mutually exclusive ways. But the point—beyond the various ideologies—was the same in all cases. They wanted to find ways of viewing humans as beyond the parameters that science erected. And in this, they were successful, sometimes ironically so. Their imaginative creations did create a space in which humans could be free—what Philip Lamantia said was an imaginal world, distinct from the mundane one and the religious one. Forteans, he said, were explorers of this world, explorers who reported back on the extreme, new worlds that they had found, unimaginable before their explorations. The ironic fulfillment of some of these ideas, though, was to further the power of science. Science fiction is a literature of resistance, opposing humane values against scientific ones, but it is also a press agent for science, increasing science’s cultural authority. The Forteans, then, at least the Bay Area Forteans in the immediate post-War years, allowed Americans to imagine themselves free from the constraints of science, even as they strengthened science’s power to determine what counted as real.
