transition, violence, and dystopia; or, utopia's struggle with realism

At least since More, the imagination of an ideal society in Western literature has traditionally invoked an ideal state to regulate it. As this imagination underwent a decisive shift from the spatial to the temporal (utopia as a possible future rather than a far-off land) from the late 18th century onward and became more practically oriented, it became more and more tightly bound to socialism, a marriage that with few exceptions (for the most part either millenarian or Rousseauian primitive communalism) went without competition from the middle 19th century until after WWI. Outside of this period, and especially since the dismantling of the New Deal, Americans have tended to be the least keen on the idea; within it they were among the keenest. Still, suspicion of statist fantasies has existed from the beginning, and today it remains at an all-time high. For between the present and any ideal future is a space of uncertainty on which the possibility and the very identity of the coming state depends, and not even the most glimmering, comprehensive vision of perfection can assimilate it without bearing its marks.

The most prominent American socialist utopian novel of the 19th century is Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). From our present perspective, it might as well have been written in an alternate universe. It depicts a world of allied super-states, each network of production and distribution centralized under the control of a technocratic Industrial Army of labor. This allows for a radically simplified, moneyless/classless economy able to provide absolute security and even comfort to everyone, all without systemic violence or exploitation. In our post-communist, post-1984 environment such a fiction would probably be dismissed as naive by most people, and appear unintelligible to most Americans. At the time, however, it quickly became massively influential in a number of areas, spawning hundreds of imitators (some critical, others merely derivative) as well as leading to the formation of 'Bellamy Clubs' and even political parties all over the world. It inspired such prominent socialists as Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founder and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and Socialist Labor Party founder Daniel DeLeon. And in a slightly different vein, it was the key touchstone for British urban planner Ebenezer Howard's Garden city movement, which in turn influenced the faux-towns of New Urbanism -- though bits and pieces of it also found their way (in distorted form) into the antithetical design 'philosophy' of American suburbia.

Letchworth Garden City, England

Bellamy's vision is indeed packaged as a bourgeois lifestyle for the masses, and it's probably no coincidence that his utopia sometimes reads like a giant Wal-Mart -- with the end of private ownership, all wares are sold at huge district department stores, all fed by even larger centralized warehouses (as in Wal-Mart, the aggressive salesmanship of what we might call 'customer service' is absent, along with all pretense of expertise: "Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders are all that are required of him"). Art and other types of intellectual work are the only economic sectors based on open meritocracy, but one that contrary to free market advocates is enabled rather than restricted by the social 'safety net.'

But Bellamy's utopia is structurally incapable of absolute closure. Something is opened up by the utopia's position in time -- the future, not an island of the imagination but a specific date: the year 2000. We have moved from simple proposition to extrapolation from existing trends. The question 'how do we get here' thus demands an answer. For the 19th-century gentleman narrator Julian West, it's the riddle of the devouring Sphinx, the question of labor. The answer, like all this society's answers, is simple and direct: "The solution came as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was to recognize and cooperate with that evolution, when its tendency had become unmistakable." Utopia is not merely an end, but a projected stage in an evolutionary process. Contrary to that other evolutionary socialist, Karl Marx, no revolutionary struggle is required to move things along, just widespread knowledge of the facts. The eminently reasonable next stage, remarks one of West's guides, is for all the world's nations to merge into a single global nation.

Among the many criticisms of Bellamy's utopia embodied in William Morris's socialist-pastoral News from Nowhere (1890) -- its statism, its antiseptic environment, its cultural uniformity -- what may be the most fundamental is that his state utopia dishonestly glosses over the struggle and pain of social change, which always risks being much worse than the adverse conditions that initiate it. There's an incongruous moment toward the end of LB where the good Reverend Mr. Barton confesses a wish to exchange his present happiness for a taste of "that stormy epoch of transition," which is elsewhere explained again and again as entirely pedestrian and nigh-instantaneous. In Morris's 'epoch of rest' the wish to forget the 19th century (common to the people of both scenarios) is extended also to the horrific period of revolution and revolt that birthed the new society. This brilliant chapter from the middle of NfN describes in detail the terrible, and contingent series of revolts, repressions, and mishaps that led to the present peace. "It was war from beginning to end: bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it."

William Morris and Philip Webb's "Red House"

In terms of the ideal society itself, Morris's dream functions in a more traditional vein than Bellamy's -- where the latter describes in detail the economic and political structure of his world, Morris only describes their pleasant lifestyle. His people are naturally communal in a state of anarchy, requiring only the pleasure of cooperation and unalienated manual and handicraft labor to 'regulate' them. It is a world not quite outside of time, but outside the time of development and property, the most basic logics of capitalism. It's difficult to call it naive considering the grasp of human motive Morris displays throughout the novel, and the fact that unlike Bellamy he was a practicing socialist, but one can wonder if it really deserves the title 'utopia.' It serves more as a vision of human happiness than a plan for the future, what humans could collectively desire if they really had the opportunity to choose. All the same, Morris's ideas along with those of the Arts and Crafts movement had at least an equivalent effect on modern architecture as Bellamy's via their influence on the Bauhaus school, even if in terms of politics his fiction left little to work with.

In the now-competitive world of utopian literature, Morris's attention to the gory details of utopia's actual realization made the subject impossible for serious writers to ignore. Equality (1897), Bellamy's sequel to LB, addressed Morris's critique by providing a more detailed analysis of the transition (here), though still refusing the idea that violence is necessary to make it happen. H.G. Wells, in Anticipations (1901), argues that evolution rather than simple teleology is the necessary form for 20th century utopian imaginings, and that large-scale violence (especially against other races, which are mostly absent from both Bellamy and Morris) may well be necessary for the establishment of a World State. Perhaps the apotheosis of attempts to realistically consider the transition to utopia can be found in Jack London's Iron Heel (1908), in which socialist utopia is relegated entirely to the footnotes, as a framing device -- the narrative itself, in the form of a revolutionary's incomplete journal, is an episode within the (extremely) violent, centuries-long transition into this merely hinted-at future. Though its premise of protracted class war is predated by U.S. Congressman and Atlanticist Ignatius Donnelly's little-known Caesar's Column (1890), that novel at least takes a few stabs at utopian speculation. London's (much better written) entry is an aggressive blend of narrative action and didactic criticism; its 'scholarly' footnotes, like of the fictional footnotes more common to 18th-century literature, serve as a mere justification and ironic distancing device. In IH we are being trained to read a 'new'* genre. Welcome to the dystopian imagination.


What can we say about dystopian fiction at this point? Certainly that it is not simply the obverse of utopia. It comes from a strain of utopian fiction that has become extrapolative, its speculations devoted as much to what will be as what should be. While it's easy to regard something like More's Utopia as 'really' a dystopia (what should not be), it's hard to imagine More himself writing it that way. Even a paradise of torment like Dante's Inferno shows something that, however complex our reaction might be to it, is ultimately subordinated to the good -- the punishment of the wicked by a (the) moral being. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is basically a satirical fantasy, designed to achieve piecemeal, non-systemic critique through fanciful caricature and exaggeration. Second, though dystopian fiction is more interested in describing a corrupt society (as the hidden potential or underlying truth of the writer's own) than individual psychology, its protagonist is not just an observer but a dramatic actor, bringing the genre formally much closer to realism. The most obvious difference between IH and traditional utopian fiction is that London's novel actually has a plot. A drama with active characters. This may seem like a strange comparison for those used to contemporary 'domestic' realism, but a good dystopia is not so different from a Balzac or Dickens, where exciting plots and documentary-style social detail combine in more or less equal measure. And of course, many of the great realist classics take place during periods of social upheaval, where the individual is pitted against the forces of social oppression.

Back to IH: the utopian perspective given by the footnotes make it more of a transition to dystopia than dystopia proper, but we can already begin to see shades of 1984 in the uneasy dissonance between the detached, self-satisfied scholar and the passion, moral drama, and intrigue of his material. Like all extrapolative fiction it treats the present as the past, but unlike most later dystopias (and like the realist novel) it shows historical changes happening in a world that is immediately familiar to us. The consequences of a realism that tries to show historical change taking place, in either the past or present, tend to be a) that the story must be full of conflict and excitement and b) though it can excoriate, it must not make positive recommendations, and in spite of public pressure (no longer much of an issue), should ideally avoid absolute moral judgment. It is thus capable of indirect criticism, but never proposals, no matter how ironic they may be. One cannot apparently write a realist utopia. So the principal differences between dystopia and 19th-century realism may well be the relative frequency of direct criticism and speculative content, meaning that we now come up against a very late-20th-century question about realism: why is it that made-up stories directly about political events tend to be excluded from the genre, restricted to 'all the rest': fantasy, popular fiction (i.e. mystery, thriller), journalism, travelogue, and speculation?


*new insofar as it is among the first in a slew of socialist and anti-socialist dystopias -- American dystopian fiction in general goes back further, prior to the Civil War.

Singularity Summit

Check up on the current status of the Singularity -- Summit 2006 and Summit 2007. All via Metafilter.

As in the early days of futurology, a 'discipline' usually attributed to H.G. Wells, the degree of influence from science fiction on all proceedings is immediately apparent.

Here's AI scientist Rodney Brooks introducing the subject:

Now, predicting the future is sometimes hard, so I want to take you back to Paris in 1783.The first hot air balloon floats out of Paris. Marie turns to Francois, and what does she predict about the future based on that hot air balloon? Does she say, “This is great, we’ll be able to travel internationally anywhere within 24 hours”? Does she get upset about noise abatement at airports, which is a big issue from flying? No, that’s not the sort of things that she can think about. They are the consequences that happened from tha, but they weren’t the things she could think about. She was more likely to have said, “No one will be able to breathe in those things.” Or, “It’s going to crash and the city is going to burn down!” Or, maybe, and this looks a little quaint, we’ll be able to get up really close to God and touch his face.

I think at the time when things are happening, you understand the world as it is, but it is very hard to understand the world as it will be. And the sorts of questions we ask ourselves here may well be the wrong questions in the long term. So, I’m a little skeptical about some of the worries of an artificial general intelligence and I’m a little skeptical about some of the promises. I sort of see a little too much techno salvation and techno holocaust. I don’t think things are ever quite as good as we expect, in my experience anyway, and never quite as bad as we fear. I’m being up front about that. There are the questions that Hollywood asks. Will they be great, will we accept them, or should we fear them? This is a theme in movies.

When we think about the future, lots of people have thought about it. Niels Bohr said it’s really difficult to predict. Albert Einstein, this shows he was really a scientist, he was not a technologist, because technologists will not bear with that. And Yogi, he had something intelligent to say. As I was looking through quotes about the future I realized, we didn’t know how good we had it when Dan Quayle was our vice president. “The future is here, maybe, just not everyone’s got it.” And now every research lab in the world now uses this one as their slogan: the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and we’re the ones who are going to invent it. I actually think Arthur C. Clarke had it right. Arthur C. Clarke said that when it comes to technology, most people overestimate it in the short term, but underestimate it in the long-term. And that’s, I think, what we would have seen in Paris in 1783 - overestimating how good it would be in the short term but completely missing the understanding that we have 200 years later.

So, in the future, the way we think about the future often is through Hollywood. But Hollywood has a very specific way of talking about the future. This is from one of, I think, the best movies about the future, Bicentennial Man. And there’s Robin Williams being a robot, but look what else is in this picture. Here, he’s sitting there, he’s got a fully functional android and he’s reading a paper newspaper. She’s pouring orange juice, though she’s got a fully functional android. So, what happens in Hollywood, we tale the world exactly as it is, and then we add one thing. So, in AI, which is one of the worst movies about the future, it was the world as it is and then they had robots, and then they added emotion to the robot and then everything changed. In Minority Report, they still used regular guns, even though they were able to predict the future in great detail.

My point there is that when an artificial general intelligence appears, the world is going to be a very different place than it is today. So it’s not today’s world and add in this really super-intelligent being. It’s the world that’s going to change over time. By the way, I think by then “we” will be long gone, but in a positive way. I’ll come back to that.

The rest is here.

For the sake of historical comparison, let's look at Wells' seminal work, Anticipations, his attempt to collate all the ideas from his earlier science fiction novels into a single theoretical position (which, characteristically, required several more attempts). Note the financial metaphors on top of the references to fiction. Note especially the widening gap, as in the above speech, between the drag of a gradualist evolutionary narrative, now increasingly weighed down by excess data and escalating standards for 'completeness,' and the accelerated speed of speculation. And watch how deemphasizing the individual's role in historical (now technological/'natural') change draws the meaning of 'invention' and 'creation' closer and closer to speculation and investment -- placing (or preferably fixing) a bet -- even as the underlying overdetermined techno-historical narrative paradoxically becomes deterministic.

It is proposed in this book to present in as orderly an arrangement as the necessarily diffused nature of the subject admits, certain speculations about the trend of present forces, speculations which, taken all together, will build up an imperfect and very hypothetical, but sincerely intended forecast of the way things will probably go in this new century. Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces of the performance. Hitherto such forecasts have been presented almost invariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation of the satirical opportunity has been too much for the writer; the narrative form becomes more and more of a nuisance as the speculative inductions become sincerer, and here it will be abandoned altogether in favour of a texture of frank inquiries and arranged considerations. Our utmost aim is a rough sketch of the coming time, a prospectus, as it were, of the joint undertaking of mankind in facing these impending years. The reader is a prospective shareholder—he and his heirs—though whether he will find this anticipatory balance-sheet to his belief or liking is another matter.

For reasons that will develop themselves more clearly as these papers unfold, it is extremely convenient to begin with a speculation upon the probable developments and changes of the means of land locomotion during the coming decades. No one who has studied the civil history of the nineteenth century will deny how far-reaching the consequences of changes in transit may be, and no one who has studied the military performances of General Buller and General De Wet but will see that upon transport, upon locomotion, may also hang the most momentous issues of politics and war. The growth of our great cities, the rapid populating of America, the entry of China into the field of European politics are, for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of new methods of locomotion. And while so much hangs upon the development of these methods, that development is, on the other hand, a process comparatively independent, now at any rate, of most of the other great movements affected by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising, and of experiments made, and upon laws of political economy, almost as inevitable as natural laws. Such great issues, supposing them to be possible, as the return of Western Europe to the Roman communion, the overthrow of the British Empire by Germany, or the inundation of Europe by the "Yellow Peril," might conceivably affect such details, let us say, as door-handles and ventilators or mileage of line, but would probably leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotion untouched. The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relation to the Western European peoples. It is no longer dependent upon them, or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadays sets out upon his pilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron, and the immemorial Hindoo goes a-shopping in a train, and in Japan and Australasia and America, there are plentiful hands and minds to take up the process now, even should the European let it fall.

...

A curious and profitable question arises at once. How is it that the steam locomotive appeared at the time it did, and not earlier in the history of the world?

Because it was not invented. But why was it not invented? Not for want of a crowning intellect, for none of the many minds concerned in the development strikes one—as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare, or Darwin strikes one—as being that of an unprecedented man. It is not that the need for the railway and steam engine had only just arisen, and—to use one of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever dropped from the lips of man—the demand created the supply; it was quite the other way about.

And to drive the point home with a hammer, here's a hedge fund manager on the perils of investing in the world in a time of extreme crisis:

I thought I would dispense with the powerpoint presentations and the detailed slides to share a few thoughts I’ve had on investing in a world where the possibility of a Singularity exists. It’s sort of a different perspective from some of the discussions people have had. There are two levels one can think about investing. One is as a venture capitalist, investing in early stage companies. The basic rule there, and for investing in general, is that you want to do something that is fundamentally true and that nobody else sees. That’s how your do really well.

Artificial intelligence, or near-artificial intelligence, or quasi artificial intelligence, this is so out of fashion today that it is perhaps the only thing thematically that I think makes sense on a venture capital side to do - to try to identify things that are promising in this sort of direction. I think the venture capital end of it is fairly straightforward. There are all sorts of details you can discuss, but I want to focus instead on a very different element of it, which is the big picture. How do you invest in the world as a whole? What is going to happen to the world’s stock market or the world’s larger financial markets in a world where this possibility of a Singularity, or something like this, exists? How will the world’s markets be different from a Singularity-type world from a world where such a thing would never happen or not even be possible?

I suppose the basic intuition that I have about it is very simply, this is a world in which there is a possibility of things going extraordinarily well or extraordinarily badly, where both the good things and the bad things are bigger than people think. If you have a bell curve distribution of possible futures for the world, the tails on that bell curve are much fatter than people think. There is far more that can happen at the far edges. This would lead to a very different behavior in markets from a normal bell curve of distributions where nothing that interesting or extraordinary is going to happen. In particular, the Singularity will either be very successful, in which case we are going to have the biggest boom ever, or it is going to blow up the whole world and there will be nothing left to invest in whatsoever. This leads to an interesting investment dynamic.

I will start parenthetically by saying that the second category is one that’s rather difficult to invest in. If you are somebody who is predicting the end of the world, even if you are right, I think you will still not make a lot of money. Even if you put all of your money into gold coins in a silver chest and hide it in some forgotten corner of the planet, when the world does come to an end there will be nothing left to buy or to sell, and probably well before then some humans or robots will have come along and taken your gold away from you. The bad versions of the Singularity are things that one cannot invest in, at all. They are not investable. So there are all these possibilities that one cannot even think about. In some sense, if you believe in something like this, you have no choice but to bet on it, as an investor. The best investments will be the ones that represent the most aggressive bets on it: you have no choice at all, ultimately.

the past as anti-future

Our in-person discussion last week ended up on some interesting ground that bears heavily on the question of the end of the world as a cultural form. We found ourselves wrestling with the question of the origins of apocalyptic fantasy, why these sorts of productions are so very popular. We basically hit upon five overlapping and sometimes contradictory motivations:

1) The roller-coaster hypothesis: We are able to enjoy scenarios about radical destruction or the collapse of civilized society because we do not fear they will ever come to pass.

2) The survivalist hypothesis: We consume these scenarios precisely because we believe they will come to pass, because we know they must come to pass.

3) The recursive hypothesis: Apocalpytic fantasies succeed in the box office and the best-seller lists because these sorts of fantasies had succeeded in the past. In other words, consumer culture just keeps feeding us the forms that have already worked, over and over again.

I think this is probably at once the best and worst answer, as it explains Cloverfield better than anything else, but can't explain the genesis of our initial attraction to the form at all. Take this as a given—I won't be talking much about it.

4) The bare-life hypothesis: We enjoy apocalyptic fantasy because we have been primed by ideology to recognize the absence of civilization as a ultra-Hobbesian state of permaviolence and degradation, which is to say that the purpose of apocalpytic fantasy is to serve as reinforcement and justification for the biopolitical power structures that already exist.

5) The wish-fulfillment hypothesis: We persist in imagining the end of the world because we secretly (or not so secretly) long for the destruction of society in general and/or capitalism in particular.



I'm tempted to note here that #1 generally goes with #4, and #2 generally with #5—but I don't believe it's that simple. They're all inextricably bound up with one another. I'm happy to accept "overdetermination" as the answer to this argument, but not without qualification—I think we must acknowledge that Jameson is essentially right when he insists (following Bloch) on the Utopian kernel at the core of both cultural production and daily life. Without #5—without the carrot, whatever form it takes—apocalypse could never sell. There are plenty of places where Jameson says this, but I thought it might be useful (given that our discussion last week came to focus on what exactly is the Utopian hook in a movie like Saw IV) to look at Christopher Sharrett's well-known essay on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not all of it is available online, but a good portion of it is through Google Books, in particular the part I was hoping to quote:

The point to be made here is that the failure of America's sense of divinely ordained "mission," the development of pessimism and the fixation by many American artists on a nonregenerative apocalypse, suggests a kind of wish-fulfillment calling for an end to history, a divine intervention meant to destroy what cannot be revitalized or what has worked against the earlier collective (that is to say white, male, capitalist) beliefs of society.

What is the nature of this wish-fulfillment? Against Sharrett I would suggest that it is almost no different than the catastrophe of science fiction, or rather that it is of a piece with the tripartite possibility that is opened up by the end of the world. When we pass through societal collapse and find ourselves on the other side, three dialectically interrelated possibilities present themselves:

1) We are now free to rebuild capitalist society, but "right" this time. This sort of story inevitably involves a kind of jack-of-all-trades, Swiss-Family-Robinson, white, male, capitalist Übermensch with exactly the skillset necessary to rise to the equation and restart civilization.

We can see already that this narrative hits nearly all the points above—the latest in a long tradition of Robinson Crusoe stories (#3) that we simultaneously don't fear and yet always expect (#1 and #2), this type of post-apocalyptic fantasy both wipes clean the slate of capitalism's practical injustices (#5) while simultaneously justifying an idealized form of capitalism as the natural state of humankind and our only protection against a life of utter deprivation (#4).

You can usually tell you're in this kind of story when the story ends just as it looks like they're about to get the lights back on.

2) In a second variation on apocalpyse, we find ourselves in the state of nature, again as an Übermensch but this time as one finally empowered to fight and struggle and conquer completely freed from societal constraint. The collapse of society is equated with the collapse of all taboo, allowing us to "do whatever it takes to survive," which often just means murdering other people without compulsion, but sometimes also includes such psychoanalytic breaches as abandoning our wives to sleep with our daughters. The post-apocalyptic here is therefore bound up hopelessly with both nightmare (#4) and with wish-fulfillment (#5)—the one feeds into the other—but it is a nightmare that our identification with the hero allows us not only to survive, but on some level enjoy. (This, as I argued in our meeting last week, is the brilliance of High Rise—Ballard makes all his characters so unlikable that we are denied identification and left with just the nightmare.) Clearly, too, this is a thrill ride (#1) that positions us through the power of identification as the unbound survivor hero we all imagine we would be (#2)—we are able to experience at last (albeit vicariously) the total freedom we long for (#5 again).

3) But there is a third track, which might be called the "quiet end" for capitalism, and which in a kind of reverse synthesis leaves #1 and especially #4 out of the equation. While there is always deprivation and destruction, it is always downplayed in favor of a survivalist mentality that denies the capacities of the individual survival in favor of the collectivity of survivors. It is here, not surprising, that we find the Utopian kernel in its purest form, and likewise that we find renewed in these stories a new sense of history that extends far beyond the "Great Disaster" and its immediate aftermath. This is the longed-for apocalypticism of primitivism or of Earth Abides, a life free from capitalism's pressures and contradictions, a literal turning back of the clock. The past, then, not merely as anti-future, but as super-future.

In the most extreme of these fantasies, as in 2007's The World Without Us, there are no longer any people at all—a strange Utopia, yes, but an undeniable one.

The sheer incomprehensible violence required to ever get there from here—the massive, world-historical hardship that would have to be endured—makes these vision of an ahistorical future no less Edenic when they are presented to us, especially—and this may well be the key point—given the fact that the power of narrative identification always ensures our personal passage, no matter how improbable, through the crucible of Tribulation into a better world.