Starve.Org White Noise Usenet Archive: "Fwd: [tt] [x-risk] Dystopian Lit and the End of Politics"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Hughes, James J. <James.Hughes@trincoll.edu>
Date: Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:43 PM
Subject: [tt] [x-risk] Dystopian Lit and the End of Politics
To: For discussion of existential risks <existential@transhumanism.org>,
ieet-images@ieet.org

http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1308

Fall 2008 dissent

Dystopia and the End of Politics

By Benjamin Kunkel

IN retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since
the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear
particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the
end of the cold war as the dawning of a millennium of capitalist democracy,
but even dismayed leftists tended to forecast the coming century by
extrapolating from current trends. These included increased liberalization
of trade, increased commodification of natural resources (such as water) and
human roles (such as fertilization, courtship, and the care of the elderly),
the internationalization of culture, continual advances in digital
technology and genetic science, the rolling back of governmental authority
to its police powers, and regular elections to ratify it all. This vision,
whether taken for a nightmare or a dream, was of a world integrated under a
total market and consecrated to private as opposed to public life: the
"private sector" of corporations, and the "private life" of households. You
called this tendency globalization if you liked it, neoliberalism if you
didn't. Either way, the sense was that capitalism would, for the foreseeable
future, consolidate its achievements rather than undermine them.

This notion of the future neglected certain facts. For one thing, it's not
as if no one knew about global warming during the nineties. Indeed, the end
of the cold war and the first public awareness of climate change arrived
almost simultaneously. In 1988, the Soviet Union declared it would no longer
intervene in the affairs of allied countries, and in the same year the
scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress that he possessed
a "99 per cent" certainty that "global warming is affecting our planet now."
In December of 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved; the following summer,
the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced the UN's first climate
change treaty, with its aim of "preventing dangerous anthropogenic
interference with Earth's climate system." And, though the connection was
rarely noted, these developments were not quite unrelated: petroleum exports
made up some 60 percent of the USSR's foreign currency earnings, and the
same high oil prices that buoyed the Soviet rivalry with the United States
encouraged conservation in the West. When, in the mid-eighties, oil prices
collapsed, it not only helped finish off the USSR but increased fuel
consumption outside of the Soviet bloc, which in turn accelerated global
warming, along with-something else to worry about-the depletion of the
earth's oil reserves. Many of our newer anxieties turn, in fact, on the idea
that the oil-intensive planetary transportation system so vital to the
functioning of contemporary capitalism ultimately abets climate change, the
arrival of peak oil, and the circulation of viruses, while globalized
financial markets are capable of spreading contagions (as in the "Asian flu"
of 1998) of a different kind.

None of this was impossible to imagine during the nineties. But it may have
been simply too much to take that the cold war should immediately be
succeeded by awareness of a dangerously overheating planet. Part of this is
simply that it's not the same thing to know something yourself (you and your
favorite periodicals), and to know something you know your neighbor also
knows. As Susan Sontag noticed in an essay called "The Imagination of
Disaster," about the typical science fiction movie of the early cold war,
the arrival of the new menace (monsters, aliens) was "usually witnessed or
suspected by just one person, a scientist on a field trip." That was phase
one of the plot. Phase two involved the "confirmation of the hero's report
by a host of witnesses to a great act of destruction."

As viewers of the old and many of the new disaster movies know, it's in
phase two, with its crowd of witnesses, that the feeling This is really
happening dawns, and true panic begins. In the real world of history, things
happen more slowly, and even a televised real-life version of that
fundamental disaster movie set piece, the destruction of a great city-New
Orleans, by Hurricane Katrina-hardly signifies the imminent end of life as
we know it. Still, it changes one's private mood to know the public mood has
changed.

A VISIT to a bookstore or multiplex confirms the new strain of morbidity in
the air. Every other month seems to bring the publication of at least one
new so-called literary novel on dystopian or apocalyptic themes and the
release of at least one similarly themed movie displaying some artistic
trappings. (Artsy, but not quite aspiring to be art, films like 28 Days
Later and Children of Men might be called, without scorn, "B+ movies," to
distinguish them from ordinary apocalyptic crowd-pleasers.) What is striking
is not so much the proliferation of these futuristic works-something that
has been going on for generations-but the wholesale rehabilitation of such
"genre" material for serious or serious-seeming novels and movies. If
ordinary citizens are taking their direst imaginings more to heart than
before, so, it would appear, are novelists and filmmakers. The new cultural
prestige of disaster will be worth returning to later on.

First, however, a distinction needs to be made between the dystopian and the
apocalyptic, because these categories refer to different and even opposed
futuristic scenarios. The end of the world or apocalypse typically brings
about the collapse of order; dystopia, on the other hand, envisions a
sinister perfection of order. In the most basic political terms, dystopia is
a nightmare of authoritarian or totalitarian rule, while the end of the
world is a nightmare of anarchy. (There is also the currently less
fashionable kind of political dream known as utopia.) What the dystopian and
the apocalyptic modes have in common is simply that they imagine our world
changed, for the worse, almost beyond recognition.

Both versions of the future are plentifully on offer in recent literary
fiction and B+ movies. In 28 Days Later (released 2002), an accidentally
released supervirus transforms virtually all of Britain into a population of
cannibalistic zombies. Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake (published
2003) is a post-apocalyptic bestiary of genetically engineered species;
among them, in a world half-drowned by rising seas, lives apparently the
last surviving human. Michel Houellebecq's Possibility of an Island
(published 2004) is narrated by a misanthropic contemporary of ours named
Daniel, as well as numbers 24 and 25 of the successive clones made from this
not-quite individual. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (published 2005) is
another clone novel; it concerns genetic supernumeraries raised for purposes
of organ harvesting. And cloning likewise furnishes subject matter for David
Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (also published 2005), where one of five braided
narrative strands takes the form of a Q & A between a normally human
historian and an imprisoned rebel "fabricant," who-unlike Ishiguro's clones,
with their lamblike passivity-has escaped an underground world of slavery
into horrified awareness of the genocidal nature of a "corpocracy" raised on
the blood of clones. Mitchell has imagined the smoothest-running and most
cynically organized of possible dystopias, in which business and government
have melded with one another-perhaps for this reason the narrative is set in
South Korea, notorious in the late nineties for its state-supported
chaebols, or conglomerates, and "crony capitalism"-and the sole
revolutionary movement abroad in the land is in fact sponsored by the
corporate state to supply it with the fictitious enemy it requires.

Such feats of organization are inconceivable in the recent run of
apocalyptic fictions, which-as an era of confident globalization gives way
to one shot through with ecological anxiety-lately outnumber their dystopian
counterparts. In Cormac McCarthy's fantastically grim The Road (published
2006), all non-human nature has perished beneath the shuttered skies of a
nuclear winter, and social organization as such appears to persist only in
the form of roving cannibal gangs; the story follows the efforts of a father
and his pre-adolescent son to elude these "bad guys" (as the father-hero
matter-of-factly calls them) while scavenging cans of food for themselves.
Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (released 2006, and based on the 1992 P.D.
James novel) mixes dystopian elements with the apocalyptic premise that no
human child has been born for seventeen years, leaving civilization to
crumble under the accumulated weight of age and despair; once the world's
unique pregnant woman arrives on the scene, the handsome desperado played by
Clive Owen takes up the burden of shepherding mother and child to safety.
The Biblical template for such stories is of course Joseph's rescue of the
infant Jesus from Herod's soldiers during the massacre of the innocents, and
it is persistently suggested about both the movie's epochal newborn and
McCarthy's kindhearted boy that he may be our Redeemer.

Often it seems that the contemporary apocalyptic mode offers only a few
possible combinations of a restricted set of elements: for example, just as
McCarthy's setting is the southeastern portion of a charred and depopulated
former United States, so in The Pesthouse (published 2007), Jim Crace has
imagined a desolated America where environmental collapse and something
called the "Grand Contagion" have reduced the onetime U.S. colossus, as well
as all knowledge of the modern world, to the status of rumor and legend. The
American downfall is more recent and less complete in Matthew Sharpe's
Jamestown (also published 2007), where a busload of prospectors sets out
from New York City, with the Chrysler Building tumbling behind them, in
search of scarce petroleum, and connects with a group of "Indians" whose
tribal status is a matter not of ethnic composition but of the simulated
native folkways they have adopted in order to ride out what one character
calls "the end of civ."

Note, too, that both The Pesthouse and Jamestown are primarily love stories.
In Crace's novel, the wreck of the world throws together a decent young man
and a virtuous young woman who escape from bloodthirsty highwaymen in
possession of a surrogate child and determine to establish an old-fashioned
frontier life of modesty and virtue: "Some land, a cabin, and a family. A
mother waiting on the stoop." Jamestown's story of a spirited and
resourceful postmodern Pocahontas (as the girl calls herself) meeting her
good Johnny Rolfe (John Rolfe in the history books) naturally conjures up a
similar vision of the resettlement of North America by the honorable and
just. But Sharpe's version is tragedy-as-farce: Pocahontas is murdered; a
ludicrously unkillable warlord with an arrow lodged, Steve Martin-style, in
his brain rules a ruined New York City; and the author appears to endorse
the idea, floated by several characters, that the ostensible phases of human
history are just so many disguises for a single continuous era of violence,
conquest, and oppression.

In general, fantasies of a social situation radically simplified and
ennobled by the imperative of survival-a life in which good-versus-evil is
all that could be said to remain of either politics or morality-dominate
contemporary visions of the end of the world. It would be nice to feel that
a warmed-over entertainment like I Am Legend (released 2007), a third film
adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, is too empty and unimaginative
in terms of its catastrophic premise (a supervirus), its villains
(cannibalistic zombies), and its idea of virtue (solitary heroism of the
stoical family man) to suggest comparison with recent work by so formidable
a writer as Cormac McCarthy. But in fact The Road and I Am Legend have a lot
in common. Impressively stylish productions, they are also alike in
presupposing a collapse of civilization that happens utterly and all at once
rather than by degrees-in the movie the trigger is the supervirus, in the
book "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" signaling
all-out nuclear war-and both stories set the decency and steadfastness of
the solitary hero-father against the sheer evil of a human population
otherwise consisting of marauding cannibals.

THIS QUICK inventory of recent apocalyptic and dystopian fictions-with an
almost equal number left out-does some violence to each work in its
particulars. But as certain features of the imagined future landscape are
visible only from a great height, it should now be possible to venture some
general topographical observations.

Each of the more dystopian novels sketched above involves human cloning. It
should also be clear that in the current political context the clone novel
can hardly fail to suggest a nightmare of perfected neoliberalism. In the
clone novel, class society-in what may be a lurid reflection of our
distinction between citizens with full legal rights and "illegal" foreign
workers without them-hardens into a strict demarcation of castes. Thus in
Mitchell and Ishiguro, clones are bred to slavery and slaughter in order to
spare "normals" (Never Let Me Go) or "consumers" (Cloud Atlas) the necessity
of death and labor. Or, alternatively, in the much funnier vision of
Houellebecq, it's the rich who clone themselves (and their pets) in the
quest for quasi-immortality and narcissistic tranquility: from generation to
identical generation, Houellebecq's placid and solitary "neohumans" e-mail
one another and masturbate before Webcams, while outside their fenced-in
preserves old-fashioned human beings, "less numerous and more dirty" than
before, must mate and struggle with one another in person: "Occasionally
they throw themselves on each other, fight and wound each other with their
blows or their words."

IN ITS main features, then, the world of the clone novel-whether the clones
are the rich, or merely exist for the rich-is the present-day world made
grotesque by its own longevity. (Ishiguro's counterfactual novel in fact
gives its setting as "England, late 1990s.") Not only has income
stratification joined with genetic engineering to promote social class into
something approaching species difference, but, at least in Cloud Atlas and
The Possibility of an Island, digital communications and entertainment
technology have become more refined and immersive for those who can afford
their "sonys," as Mitchell calls his all-purpose information appliances. In
other words, technological advance continues apace, all things and many
persons are for sale-a condition no one any longer recognizes as
political-and the state exists only to keep the peace in wealthier districts
and ensure the continued functioning of markets in labor and other
commodities (such as organs).

And yet the most interesting anxiety stirred up by these books doesn't
necessarily concern bioengineering in combination with unregulated
capitalism. All three clone novels also confront more or less directly the
problem human cloning raises not only for society but for would-be lovers.
Romantic love, after all, by its nature implies the irreplaceability of one
person by another, while the familiar sci-fi theme of cloning virtually by
definition evokes fears that a person is nothing if not replaceable,
fungible.

Much of the plot of Never Let Me Go concerns the rumor, cherished by several
young clones, that if a pair of them can demonstrate to the relevant
authorities that they are, as one puts it, "really, properly in love," the
couple can win a reprieve of several years from the sequence of organ
donations that will bring their lives to an early end. Ishiguro wants to
endow his clone characters with enough individuality that the untruth of
this rumor can prove an especially cruel deception; but at the same time he
has deliberately given his narrator, the clone Kathy H., such a banal and
generic voice as to cast doubt on her personal uniqueness.

In a sense The Possibility of an Island pursues a similar idea: the threat
posed to love and individuality by the use of human beings according to
purely biological criteria. But Houellebecq handles the problem differently.
After all, the clone Daniel24 is perfectly content with pixilated images of
vaginas on his computer screen; he lives a "calm and joyless life." The
failure to love is experienced as an affliction only by contemporary humans
like Daniel1 (as the original is called) and the flesh-and-blood women that
he meets. In Houellebecq's present-day consumer dystopia, where advertising
and entertainment establish the tyranny of a pornographic ideal, sexual love
cannot withstand the slightest initial sagging of a woman's breasts: "The
disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism. There
is no refined relationship, no higher union of souls, nor anything that
might resemble it . . ." Houellebecq rages hysterically against the soft
fascism of the pornographic ideal-"Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for
physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism"-and in each of his
novels he arranges, in the end, for his alter ego to briefly enjoy romantic
love of the old-fashioned sentimental kind. But these dénouements carry none
of the conviction of his rants against a deregulated sexual marketplace,
where some are attractive or wealthy enough to glut themselves with serial
couplings while others are reduced to chronic masturbation, and love is in
any case out of the question.

David Mitchell's more conventionally dystopian clone narrative also turns
out to be one of failed love. The escaped rebel clone Somni-451 has a
passionate affair with her apparent rescuer, Hae-Joo, who makes love to her
and pretends to share her outrage over "the tidy xtermination of a fabricant
underclass," only to deliver a copy of her revolutionary Declarations into
the hands of the police. Hae-Joo, it emerges, was just another provocateur
doing the bidding of the "corpocracy," the irony-not an entirely fresh one
in the world of science fiction-being that the dissident clone possesses
more in the way of a soul than the compliant mass of biologically "original"
human beings dyed through and through with the unanimous ideology.

The possibility of love requires the existence of at least two irreplaceable
individuals, a condition that can't quite be met in any of the clone novels.
The anxiety dominating each of these books is that a human being might prove
perfectly fungible in an emotional and sexual as well as an economic sense,
a fear most coherently and angrily expressed by Houllebecq, who may be the
living writer best at suggesting the dystopian element in contemporary
society. For him the problem lies not only in the liberalized private
sector, with its ready disposal of people according to their economic value,
but also in sexually liberalized "private life." Labor has become
casualized, we say, when workers can be let go at the sole convenience of
employers; and Houellebecq's work implies that terms like casualization and
redundancy might be applied with equal justice to today's personal
relationships.

AS FOR the contemporary apocalyptic scenario, its ideological content-not to
be confused with the conscious political opinions of the various authors and
filmmakers-is both harder and easier to specify than with the clone novel.
Superficially, the task is harder because a considerable variety of
precipitating causes of the apocalypse are given: the most common culprit is
that hoary villain, the Promethean ambitions of science, as in Oryx and
Crake and I Am Legend, where respective efforts to engineer a superior
mankind or to design a cancer-curing virus lead to the near-elimination of
the species. Alternatively, the fear of a specific contemporary problem,
such as global warming or "the war on terrorism" can ally itself with a
general skepticism about the wisdom of the European conquest of North
America and, by extension, the world, as in The Pesthouse and Jamestown.
Both Crace and Sharpe even sometimes give voice to a pessimism about
tool-using humanity per se: "Metal is the cause of greed and war," one
character proclaims in The Pesthouse, while in Jamestown another blames
airplanes for the end of the world, as if the destruction of contemporary
civilization were embryonically present in the first smelting of iron ore or
the Wright brothers were of Mohammad Atta's party without knowing it. In
McCarthy's The Road, we can only consider planetary nuclear war in light of
the succeeding era of cannibals and assume that innate human depravity
ultimately caused the button to be pushed. The most satisfying cause given
for the coming collapse is probably the universal suspension of childbirth
in Children of Men, precisely because this is the least literal and most
allegorical of conditions: when the global population has reached six and a
half billion, infertility is not a pressing problem, but who can't think of
figurative senses in which our society might be considered sterile or
barren?

For the diversity of apocalyptic triggers hardly conceals the basic
sameness, from work to work, of the apocalypse itself. In almost every case
(exception being made for Children of Men, where civilization is still
intact, albeit along more or less fascist lines), large-scale social
organization, including the state, has disappeared; the cumulative
technological capability of century upon century has collapsed to the point
that only agricultural know-how, if that, is retained; and the global
society we know has shattered into small tribal groups, separate families or
couples, and helpless solitary individuals. In such anarchic conditions,
without governments to enforce contracts, stable currencies in circulation,
or any industrial or transportation infrastructure, capitalism likewise
becomes a thing of the past-and yet the contemporary apocalypse, as painted
in our collection of movies and novels, illustrates in the most literal
fashion possible Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum that there is no such
thing as society, only individuals and their families.

The corollary view holds that "society" is merely the excuse used by
tyrannical regimes like the Soviet one to justify the trampling of
individual rights-and contemporary apocalyptic works are all but united in
stigmatizing any group larger than the family as oppressive and evil.
Frequently, collectives are simply occasions for organized cannibalism, as
in 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, and The Road. Or bands of survivors are
fascists at heart: again, 28 Days Later. Or brigands with the delicacy to
refrain from eating human flesh nevertheless press-gang wayfarers into
slavery: The Pesthouse. Already we've noted the triumph over New York, in
Sharpe's Jamestown, of the immortal warlord who is the quintessence of
history. Granted, in Sharpe's "Indian" tribe and Crace's curious Finger
Baptist community (whose holy men refuse to use their hands for any task
lest they commit evil, leaving their arms to hang slack at their sides), we
find examples of more tolerable social groups, but nothing so attractive
that a young couple in love doesn't flee at the first opportunity. The
underground revolutionary league known as The Fishes in Children of Men at
first looks slightly more promising, but it soon emerges that its leaders
would use the sole pregnant woman on earth for despicable "political" or
propaganda purposes.

It is true that it's customary for the apocalyptic work to gesture, just
before the end, to the possible existence of an enclave of just persons
committed to the rescue of innocents: this happens at the end of 28 Days
Later, The Road, I Am Legend, and-more ambiguously-Oryx and Crake. But this
final hopeful glimpse of a vague pale radiance such as dying people are said
to see seems intended to signify something like "the immortal resilience of
the human spirit" rather than any possibility of a decent earthly politics.
This makes the neoliberal apocalypse an especially confused and
contradictory expression of our times. Its air of plausibility and urgency
derives from certain real and serious political problems, easily perceived
but difficult to address-yet these apocalyptic narratives are by no means
stories of joining or founding political communities dedicated to averting
or surviving civilization's collapse. On the contrary, they are stories of
love, the strongest of all antipolitical forces, as Hannah Arendt once said.

Sometimes the love is of a doomed sexual kind (Oryx and Crake and
Jamestown), but more often the end of the world supplies the occasion for
the coming together of a loving family. So a lone, just father protects the
life of his child while otherwise avoiding human beings (The Road), or a
lone, just stepfather does the same with another man's child (Children of
Men), or it is instead a man and woman together who are the surrogate
parents protecting the innocent child (28 Days Later, I Am Legend, The
Pesthouse). The fact that these units are not always biologically linked
does not prevent them from being families, any more than Joseph himself is
traditionally excluded from the Holy Family.

In short, the contemporary apocalypse pits family values against the
cannibal universe-the good guys versus the bad guys, in McCarthy's unironic
terms. And so, with the end of civilization, the age-old conflict between
sexual love (eros) and love of one's neighbor (caritas) also disappears; and
the grown-up Jesus' exhortation to his followers that they leave their
families if they wish to pursue righteousness is as little remembered as
among Christian fundamentalists today. No one pauses to reflect that in our
civilization, pre-collapse, it was invariably the defense of the individual
household that justified a nation's warlike international posture or its
profligate use of energy. Nuclear war might be averted, went the insipid
Sting hit of the late cold war, if the Russians love their children too. But
if global warming is not arrested, it will be because we (and the Russians)
want for our children everything we have and more.

TO BE as schematic as possible: in the neoliberal dystopia a totally
commodified world transforms would-be lovers into commodities themselves and
in this way destroys the possibility of love. In the neoliberal apocalypse,
on the other hand, the wreck of civilization reveals the inherent depravity
of mankind (excepting one's loved ones) and ratifies the truth that the
family is a haven in a heartless world. Both the neoliberal dystopia and the
neoliberal apocalypse defend love and individuality against the forces
threatening to crush them; the difference is that the clone novel sticks up
for humanity from the standpoint of an implied or explicit critique of
neoliberalism, while the apocalypse narrative (whether in prose or on film)
tends to reflect the default creed of neoliberalism, according to which
kindness may flourish in private life but the outside world remains now and
forever a scene of vicious but inevitable competition.

But this is to speak strictly in terms of these works' content. What about
the form or generic envelope of these stories? From here on we ignore the B+
movies, which most people know how to enjoy without taking them seriously:
but what happens when prize-winning writers with impeccable literary
credentials adopt the material and conventions of genre fiction, in this
case sci-fi? The books discussed above already reveal the migration of
sci-fi material into the literary mainstream; at the same time several
notable science fiction writers (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling) have
decided that the present era is sufficiently outlandish to allow them to set
their futuristic novels in the here and now. One likely reason for this
crossover-literature to sci-fi, and sci-fi to literature-is that dwindling
readership for both categories of fiction encourages the consolidation of
the two markets. A second and better reason is that technology is advancing
at an ever more rapid pace even as our world appears to accelerate toward a
plunge into chaos more profound than any pre-technological civilization
would be able to take. This lends a certain grim plausibility to both the
apocalyptic and the dystopian scenarios, and it might not be too much to say
that (just as the two scenarios coexist in several of our novels) there are
already whole regions of the globe showcasing technological dystopia or
post-technological collapse.

Still, the seriousness of our political predicament doesn't guarantee the
seriousness of the novels evoking that predicament. We are confronted, in
other words, with the old-fashioned distinction between genre fiction and
what was sometimes called serious literature. Most obviously, the "genre" in
genre fiction refers to a certain material common to the works within a
given category: in the policier a murder is solved, in romance a love is
achieved, in sci-fi a future society (on earth or another planet) is
explored, and so on. Besides, it's enough to mention the names Austen,
Dostoyevsky, and Orwell-as the boosters of genre fiction always do-to show
that murderers can be found out, lovers united, or a new and terrible
society set up without literature having been abandoned. But this only
raises the question of what literature, in the case of the novel, might be.

Lionel Trilling thought that when he gave the following description of the
literary or art novel he was only repeating a commonplace: the novel, he
wrote, was "an especially useful agent of the moral imagination, as the
literary form which most directly reveals to us the complexity, the
difficulty, and the interest of life in society, and which best instructs us
in our human variety and contradiction." Notice that Trilling says nothing
about original language, sharp perceptions, or a significant order of
events. This is not because Trilling was indifferent to these things, but
presumably because he believed they acquired their value in fiction by
virtue of revealing the complex moral, social, and psychological realities
to which he refers. In this light, genre fiction doesn't exist in
contradistinction to literature merely because of stale language, secondhand
insights, or hackneyed plots. The larger difference is a failure or-less
judgmentally-a simple setting-aside of the moral imagination. The literary
novel illuminates moral problems (including sometimes those that are also
political problems) at the expense of sentimental consolation, while genre
fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination. It
doesn't alter this proposition that science fiction and especially crime
novels sometimes traffic in the idea that all people are at bottom equally
evil and all history in the end equally nightmarish, since this sort of
nihilism moots moral judgment altogether and is therefore its own kind of
consolation.

A WORLD of gleaming predatory corporations or a world of filthy
post-technological scavengers would-either one, or both at once-provoke new
and real moral dilemmas, as would the effort to avert such disasters by some
political means. And if we ask whether such dilemmas are represented or even
acknowledged in the books at hand, the clone novel and the contemporary
apocalyptic narrative emerge looking slightly different from one another.
This, in turn, owes something to the fact that, while both dystopia and
apocalypse fall under the heading of science fiction, they descend from
different prior novelistic genres. (The confusion between "genre" meaning
fiction generally outside of literature, and "genre" referring to various
fictional forms within literature is unfortunate-but seems unavoidable.)

Dystopia, generally speaking, is a subgenre of the gothic or horror novel,
in which the hero or heroine discovers a barbaric truth (the nature of
society) lurking beneath a civilized facade, and incurs the traditional
gothic-novel penalties of madness, isolation, ruin. Never mind that
dystopias often propose an antiseptic horror free from the gothic elements
of shadows and decay; their atmosphere of cleanliness and rationality only
serves, as in a hospital, to underline the ambient dread. The apocalyptic
narrative, on the other hand, derives genetically from the historical
romance or adventure story; the noble and free hero's rescue of an innocent
woman and/or child from danger has been a staple of such fiction since the
time of Walter Scott. The only difference is that the historical romance is
set in the past and the apocalyptic one in the future.

Of course the gothic novel may end in the triumph of evil as habitually as
historical romance ends in the triumph of virtue-but the gothic has
historically been much readier to acknowledge an admixture of good and evil
in the hero's or heroine's character. This is why the dystopian story so
often concludes with the hero yielding up his or her conscience to the evil
society after a failed or contemplated rebellion: famously in 1984 Winston
Smith ends by loving Big Brother. The pattern is the same in Never Let Me Go
(where the gothic inheritance of dystopia is writ large in the device of an
accursed and isolated great house: the Hailsham Academy for clones), and in
The Possibility of an Island. Ishiguro's Kathy H. finally returns the young
clone she loves to the medical facility at which he will resume his fatal
sequence of organ donations, never having raised a protest or attempted an
escape-while Houellebecq's Daniel1 decides in the end to have himself cloned
despite the ratification of his coldness and selfishness this choice
represents. In other words, both novels dramatize the final complicity of
their heroes with society-as David Mitchell doesn't do in his clone
narrative. Mitchell's heroine is so purely good, the development of her
righteousness so little accounted for, and the rest of society so thoroughly
bad that the story loses any moral interest and becomes little more than a
suspenseful tale of (failed) escape. But at least his sci-fi dystopia
advertises itself as one more pastiche in a novel made up entirely of genre
pastiches, and in this way seems prepared to admit its limitations.

Such self-awareness is in short supply in contemporary apocalyptic novels.
There self-awareness in general gives way to a savage imperative of
survival, and any struggles taking place within people are superseded by the
struggles taking place between them. One effect of this approach, noted
above, is that the neoliberal apocalypse abandons the field of competing
legitimate claims that is the terrain of politics for a stark flat choice
between good and evil or else a reign of uniform cruelty. Still, if we can't
take these books seriously from a political standpoint, and their only real
theme is love, do they at least succeed as romances? In a way it has always
been a virtue of historical romance that its facelessly beautiful or
handsome characters are also morally uncomplicated to the point of vacancy.
The same is true of the heroes and heroines of our apocalyptic romances;
they possess the sentimental virtue of moral perfection in a world otherwise
evil, and the biological virtue of attractiveness in a world otherwise ugly.
Their unreality as characters makes them ideal objects of fantasy-with only
the effect of disqualifying them as objects of love or items of literature.
This leaves the neoliberal apocalypse with its constitutive contradiction:
exalting the sphere of private life-in modern times the arena for the
fullest elaboration of individual personality-it promotes a basically
zoological idea of humanity, where mating and survival are all that matter,
and these efforts are pursued with an absence of reflection tantamount to
instinct. Self-preservation and moral life become identical, and differences
of character fade into insignificance: at this level we are all clones.

The main formal consequence, then, of a withered moral imagination has to do
not with subject matter (love, crime, the future) but with character.
Fictional character derives from moral choices made, contemplated,
postponed, or ignored-morality is the page on which the stamp of character
appears-and the signal formal trait of genre fiction is nothing so much as
its lack of complex characters. This deficit entangles even an acknowledged
generic triumph like Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968, and the basis of the 1982 movie Blade Runner) in a certain
incoherence. The ironic burden of Dick's novel is to stick up for the
warm-blooded humanity of androids (read: clones), and in this way imply the
cold-bloodedness of any society that denies fully human status to some
category of person. The rub, of course, is that such sci-fi humanism is
quickly overcome with another irony, this one unintentional, since it is the
hallmark of genre fiction to treat characters instrumentally, putting them
through the paces of the plot according to their function as the embodiment
of some general psychological or social category and failing or refusing to
endow them with the individuality to be found among the livelier inhabitants
of the traditional realist novel and, for that matter, the real world.

THIS IS the highly compromised "individualism" promoted by our collection of
futuristic novels: individuality here means escape from the bad collective
(cannibals, the corporate state) but does not entail real individuation. Our
literary sci-fi novels are bereft of strongly individual characters-the
apocalyptic ones even more depopulated than they know, the clone narratives
at least bespeaking the anxiety that their characters are redundant-and the
ongoing merger of genre fiction (where the reader is accustomed to finding
no complex characters) with literature (which no one would think to accuse
of being indifferent to individuality) has allowed the liquidation of
character to pass virtually unnoticed. And this, it seems, is likely to be
among the most accurately futuristic features of the "literary" genre
novels: they will have been the harbingers of a literary sea change in which
complex characters are rejected by critics and ordinary readers alike as
morally unattractive (compared to generic heros), hopelessly self-involved
(because capable of introspection), and annoyingly irresolute (because
subject to deliberation). These prejudices are already articulate and
operative whenever fiction is discussed, thanks in large part to the
incomplete literature-genre fiction merger, and the prestige such prejudices
acquire through that merger allows them to be expressed without the taint of
philistinism.

In sum, when the contemporary novelist contemplates the future-including, it
seems, the future of the novel-he or she often forfeits the ability to
imagine unique and irreplaceable characters, can no longer depict love
credibly, and responds to political problems by rejecting politics for
personal life, albeit one made meaningless by interchangeable characters and
a zoological conception of family and love. The result is political novels
without politics, social novels without society, and romances free of love,
amounting, in the end, to "literature" that isn't.

All of this deprives the resulting books of much political, artistic, or
psychological value-but they may at least capture something of our
present-day situation in an accidental and symptomatic way. For if lately we
find ourselves fearing that the complexity of our civilization is nothing so
much as an index of its fragility, the strange character of the neoliberal
apocalypse is to placate the very dread that it evokes. There are grounds
for fearing that this civilization devoted to private happiness and private
gain will end by intruding pain and loss horribly upon our own households
and personal relationships. In the meantime the likelihood of disaster is
only abetted by our sense of the hopeless corruption of public life and the
need to defend our wealth, our conveniences, and the small happiness of our
homes against the sacrifices our governments or our consciences might
otherwise exact. In the neoliberal apocalypse, we see the collapse brought
about by this approach to life-as well as the eternal triumph of the same
approach, at least for those who survive the wars and epidemics and
successfully evade the gangs of thugs stalking a devastated planet.

EVEN MORE striking is the way that romantic and familial love are allowed to
flourish only on condition of planetary agony and the substantial culling of
the human population. It would seem that personal relationships blossom in
the wasteland because they are freed from the problems burdening them today:
when a couple or a family is bound together by the project of survival, men
and women lose their inclination to treat one another as replaceable
objects, surmount any differences of outlook or habit, find all the time in
the world to spend together, and don't lack for quality time with their
children either. There is no choice in any of these matters, and so what are
to us the overwhelming problems of lifestyle, vocation, and politics-how
should one choose?-as well as what Freud called object-choice, are solved at
one stroke.

No real generational conflict survives the apocalypse either, because all
that is left of culture or mores is the need to persist in a biological
sense. This, too, resembles the lives of nonhuman animals. Animals
apparently evade any special anxiety about psychological redundancy or
clone-ishness, despite showing less character diversity within a given
species than humans do. The fantasy pervading the neoliberal apocalypse is
one in which we become as animals and shake off the human burdens of
history, society, and psychology. Perhaps the most genuinely frightening
thing about the neoliberal apocalypse is its patent character of
wish-fulfillment.

The nineties are well over-that blithe decade-and we are afraid again. Back
during what you might call the long nineties (1989- 2001), two artists with
otherwise very little in common found time to reflect on the emotional
fallout of the late cold war. Martin Amis rather melodramatically but with
some insight said this: "The children of the nuclear age, I think, were
weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing
yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might
at any instant become blood and flames, along with everyone else." And Kurt
Cobain more eloquently said this: "Everyone's parents got divorced. Their
kids smoked pot all through high school, they grew up during the era when
there was a massive Communist threat and everyone thought they were going to
die from a nuclear war. And everyone's personalities are practically the
same."

If this is right, then the end of the cold war promised not only safety and
security but flourishing personalities in place of stunted ones, and love
restored to its former power. It was impossible not to rejoice at the
apparent withdrawal of the nuclear threat, and even better-informed citizens
supposed that global warming would not cause serious problems for some
decades. Now we are forced to admit that our own children's capacity to love
and flourish may be undermined by the multiplication of new threats. Through
the forty long years of the cold war it seemed that civilization might not
be long for this world. Now it can seem to us again that we and the people
we love (or would wish to love) will have to live with an anxiety every bit
as pervasive as the old fear, though perhaps less acute. With luck some
novelists will be able to reveal-and not only by accident-what this
atmosphere of dread is doing to us.

Benjamin Kunkel is an editor-at-large at n+1 and author of the novel
Indecision.

_______________________________________________
existential mailing list
existential@transhumanism.org
http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/existential
_______________________________________________
tt mailing list
tt@postbiota.org
http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt