James Burton

"After I finished my undergraduate degree and started working, I found I wasn't very happy sitting in an office, and was increasingly feeling dissatisfied with the politics and culture of the world around me. I didn't think I had the personality to go into politics, but I thought I might have the characteristics of someone who could research and write about it and maybe hope to help change it that way. So, I thought, how can I pursue that further? And I joined Goldsmiths.

I had previously studied English literature, and the people who taught me were brilliant and very open-minded, quite politically minded and so on, but by the end of that degree I had begun to see traditional disciplinary boundaries as quite rigid and somewhat arbitrary. If I was going to pursue postgraduate study, I wanted something that would let me combine my different interests in philosophy, literature, politics and other fields, and let me experiment with different media and cultural forms. Goldsmiths turned out to be just what I was looking for: in the anti-disciplinary cultural studies tradition of figures like Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, but with an openness and sensitivity to a wide range of contemporary cultural and political trends, as well as modern continental philosophy and cultural theory (which was particularly important for me).

Studying at Goldsmiths can be a bit of a chaotic experience at times, but to an extent that just reflects how much there is going on in terms of seminars, invited speakers and other events. There's a sort of intermingling of theoretical, academic, but also social and activist, activities. We used to organize a lot of things among ourselves, just the students, like reading groups, and the journal (or noctournal) Nyx, which is still being produced by students and ex-students. I think overall it's a lot less of a lonely experience than most people describe as characteristic of doing a PhD. I never felt alone or isolated, and if anything I had to carve out space to be alone to finish writing my thesis.

On the surface, my PhD was about philosophy and science fiction – specifically, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the science fiction writer Philip K Dick. More thematically speaking, it developed a theory about the relationship between mechanization and salvation in modernity, how modern culture is beset by contradictory imperatives, caught between immanence and transcendence, materialism and spiritualism, and the way fictionalising or fabulation, might function to mediate those difficulties, to enable what I termed a form of 'immanent salvation'. On another level though, it was just a reading of two thinkers/writers who I love and think have a lot to say to each other.

Now I'm doing a postdoctoral research fellowship in Germany at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. My research here is geared towards producing a book on the concept of metafiction as a central category in contemporary cultural theory and experience. I'm also rewriting aspects of my PhD for publication as a book called The Philosophy of Science Fiction."