LITMIR.BIZ

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By demonstrating that classical dystopias are trapped within the same conceptual problems and shortcomings they seek to criticise, these novels sabotage their own self-imposed agenda. As Jean Baudrillard and Arthur B. Evans write in Simulacra and Science Fiction (1991), science fiction is often “an extravagant projection of, but qualitatively not different from, the real world of production” (309, emphasis in the original). Inevitably, these constructs “wind up reproducing the conditions of society [they] seek to reform or replace” (Tally Jr. 20). Classical dystopia, then, is not necessarily the departure to better shores, but to places “in which our own ideological limits are the most surely inscribed” (Jameson, “Progress” 148). It fails to truly provide an alternative since it is constrained by its own cognitive limits.

      Furthermore, the inefficiency of external criticism arises from capitalism’s systemic nature. Free market capitalism, other than totalitarianism with its monuments, headquarters and symbols of power, decidedly lacks centre and author. As Mark Fisher elaborates, it is difficult, if not nearly “impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable interests exercising corporate irresponsibility” (63). Experiencing the capitalist system as almost Kafkaesque, as “unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary” (ibid. 64), victims are left alone with their anger and frustration, unable to identify an addressee for their critique. As Fisher writes, “anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system […]. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect” (ibid.). Zygmunt Bauman, too, diagnoses the centreless nature of modern capitalist systems. In Liquid Modernity (2000), he argues that our time is characterised by an absence of centres of power:

      If the time of systemic revolutions has passed, it is because there are no buildings where the control desks of the system are lodged and which could be stormed and captured by the revolutionaries; and also because it is excruciatingly difficult, nay impossible, to imagine what the victors, once inside the buildings (if they found them first), could do to turn the tables and put paid to the misery that prompted them to rebel. (5)

      No matter who sits at the world’s control desks, to speak metaphorically, systemic difficulties will always limit the possibility of reform. External criticism, which is essentially dependant on a recipient, i.e. on being direct at someone, will ultimately deflagrate without effect. Capitalism, it seems, is the ultimate, diffuse form of power decoupled from the individual and it thus remains almost impossible to criticise directly.5

      As David Harvey correctly notes, “[c]apital is a process and not a thing. It is a process of reproduction of social life through commodity production, in which all of us in the advanced capitalist world are heavily implicated” (Postmodernity 343). The absence of an external point of view – a moral high ground so to speak – makes the attempt to formulate external criticism equally futile. This dilemma is grounded in the fact that free market capitalism involves nearly everyone on this planet, rendering external criticism useless. Indeed, for external criticism to work, there must be an alternative at hand that can claim the moral high ground and substitute the first system. Yet, in the words of Fredric Jameson, “it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations” (Turn 50).6 The entire left and the anti-capitalist movement lack – to use Jameson’s terminology – “cognitive mapping,” or, the ability to chart alternatives to the current situation (cf. “Mapping” 356).7 Despite the fact that “capitalism has always pulled out of its recurrent crises, but never without laying a foundation for new and even worse ones” (Wood, Origin 1), the system seems without alternative at the present moment for its dynamics and interwoven complexities seem particularly difficult to untangle: “[c]ontemporary globalized capital presents particular difficulties when it comes to mapping its dynamics and limits, such that imagining what might lie beyond it becomes even more challenging than in earlier stages of capitalist development” (Best 498).

      Moreover, Jürgen Habermas has diagnosed of a weakening in eutopian dreaming and potential in the face of the apparent inevitability of neoliberalism: “[t]oday it seems as if the [e]utopian energies have been used up, as if they had withdrawn from historical reflection. The horizon of the future has now narrowed itself and in doing so has fundamentally changed both the Zeitgeist and politics, at least in Western Europe. The future is occupied with the merely negative“ (2). Equally, Fredric Jameson speaks of “the Utopian problem,” the necessity of introducing a “vision of the future that grips the masses” (“Mapping” 355). The triumphant march of the post-apocalyptic narrative, and the mingling of dystopian and apocalyptic imagery and themes in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in The Capital” novels (2004–2007), or Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) represent a case in point. Our imagination is able to conceive of the end of the world, the total destruction of the human race, yet not of an alternative to free market capitalism. With ideas and developments like universal basic income in their infancy, and alternative communities co-opted by ‘hipsters’ living the ‘Insta-life style,’ this dilemma is likely to continue for some time.8

      Under these circumstances, novels in general, and dystopias, struggle to maintain their integrity as channels of criticism. They are always products of a neoliberal market policy and are produced as commodities by publishing houses and marketing departments to satisfy consumer demand for the highly popular dystopian genre. Consequently, the novels cannot occupy the moral high ground per definitionem, usually attributed to external criticism, since they are the product of the very system they seek to criticise. As Mathias Nilges claims in the context of the American novel, for instance, bestsellers are “formally complicit with the logical structures of neoliberal capitalism and free market ideology, [and] appear[…] altogether unable to work through the hegemony of the market” (158). Quoting Walter B. Michaels, he writes that “the American novel today […] is entirely in the grasp of the market” (Nilges 158) and therefore unable to address the real problem, namely “the full subsumption of culture under capital” (ibid.). Echoing Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument on the culture industry from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Nigels ultimately declares the contemporary novel unfit to address the real issues of our time – the inequalities caused by contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Walter B. Michaels agrees, stating for instance that

      the more unjust and unequal American society has become, the more we have heard about how bad, say, the Holocaust was. […] So maybe it’s time to forget about the Holocaust for a while and focus on the free market instead, to stop congratulating ourselves on being against genocide and to start questioning what it means to be for free trade. (“Going Boom”)

      Inevitably, these novels are products of the system they want to criticise in the first place and have thus weakened their own position to do so. Subversive fiction must be aware of these limitations and consider them in their own production of literature.

      Contemporary Dystopian Writing, ‘Immanent Criticism,’ and David Grewal’s Network Power (2008)

      Contemporary dystopias and changes in their style and structure make sense when read within the tradition of immanent criticism, employing this method as the narrative modus operandi. Externally, they seem to agree with Tom Boland, who laments the ineffectiveness of external criticism: “perhaps the remedy to the crisis of critique is not more or better or purified critique, but other ways of thinking” (“Cacophony”). As previously stated, immanent criticism is neither a straightforward matter of imposing one world view onto another (external criticism), nor is its aim to recover the underlying values and morals (internal criticism). In the tradition of the Critical Theory as brought forth by the Frankfurt School, immanent criticism is essentially diagnostic in nature: it requires neither an Archimedean point of reference outside a system, nor a direct recipient. Its transformational potential aims to solve the immanent paradoxes by making them comprehensible in the first place, rather than supplanting one system with another. It does not claim to know a

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