Survival and other science fictions
Peter Frase’s Four Futures (2016) is a work of fairly simple intent that opens out onto a wide scope that the book itself screens out. (Such popularising works involve, contrary to appearances, much more in the way of material and writing experience than the average academic monograph that aggregates a heap of unlike chapters into an approximation of an argument.) He selects two economic and social variables - scarcity and hierarchy - and shows what complex results are produced from altering them and extrapolating from the present. He casts the four resulting scenarios in terms of speculative fictions, citing specific pop-cult examples. Communism, without scarcity and with an equality this condition enables, is Star Trek; exterminism, in which scarce resources and extreme hierarchy drive the class system to wipe out the populations it makes into surplus, is Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. Marx and Engels, famously, disclaimed the idea that such fictions were means of imagining the communist future: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” But then Frase’s claims are relatively modest: the communism he describes in the first chapter isn’t a blueprint, but a fable of sorts, a narrative, to be spun from the “present state of things”, potentialities as socialism, rentism and exterminism themselves are too. Therein lie its strengths and weaknesses.
No-one takes fictions seriously, or if they do it’s in a very particular way. They are, as the OED puts it, “something that is imaginatively invented; feigned existence, event, or state of things; invention as opposed to fact.” They aren’t defined by states of non-being, but they aren’t to be treated in the same manner as the facts and explanatory structures of the scientific discourses. They’re to be entertained, attended to with a light touch, with the (already unrigorous) epistemological test of “disbelief” suspended but ready to be reapplied in another eventuality. (Scheherezade doesn’t expect her audience to believe her stories, just to listen until the morning.) In this sense, Frase’s method contrasts with the discourses of the social and political sciences, which map out existing trends and potential outcomes based on interpretation of a specific gathered set of data from their field. Their material and the stories they extrapolate from it are as real as the rent needing to be paid. The repeated failures of such discourses to accurately predict things doesn’t necessarily dent their truth-claims: Milton Friedman, famously, disclaimed the idea that economics was ever a system for describing real objects or the results of real policy changes, but that didn’t prevent it from exercising hegemony over global politics and economics departments for decades. Marxism, as a ‘critique of political economy’ as a social science, has notoriously been a special case: even when whatever predictive capacity it has has been right, its analysis of the increasing immiseration of the working classes and the internal contradictions leading to repeated and escalating crisis is dismissed as ‘unrealistic’ or abstract.
In that sense, Frase’s speculative fictions are a handy evasive strategy. They showcase a series of more or less plausible outcomes - assuming the basic conditions of mass automation and incipient climate change, which are after all part of the measurable empirical world his fictions develop out of - without requiring them to be put to the (selective) test of verisimilitude. But they also continue a long-running, if sometimes troublesome, alliance between SF and Marxism. Darko Suvin, writing in the late 1970s, defined SF’s “formal framework” in terms of the concept of “estrangement” that Marxist literary theory inherited from Russian formalism. SF alters the physical conditions of the empirical world and traces out the consequences of these in the narrative terms of the naturalistic fictions from which it diverges, maintaining a narrative causality distributed through time, characters who remain psychologically continuous and the kinds of description attentive to a lifeworld’s appearance, weight and texture established by the 19th century novel. (Where they don’t, as in the mentally collapsing protagonists and ontological decay of Philip K Dick’s novels, it’s as a result of those changes in physics.) Thus, for Suvin, SF is the “factual reporting of fictions” which, in a move that conjoins the “science” of SF to the scientific tracing of the laws of motion of the economy in Marxism, estranges the “norms” of the empirical world and “sees [them] as unique, changeable, and therefore subject to a cognitive view”. As with Brecht’s conception of the epic theatre, which foreswore letting the audience identify with the fiction onstage, SF’s estrangement of physical laws allows the reader to reason, judge and follow lines of causality to their expression in social and economic consequences, rendering the frozen lifeworld of the present into the outcome of a chain of contingencies rather than necessities. Thus - and here Suvin follows the species of difficult analogy rife in Marxist literary theory - the place of the present in an historical chain stands revealed, and the “latent tendencies” that might lead into different futures, everywhere screened out by neoliberal political economy, identified and developed. As Frase suggests, none of the futures he presents, outcomes of the different variables of who wins out in the current contest over social goods - who owns the automating software or 3D printers and whether the fossil fuel interests that are already putting control over renewable energy in the hands of the owners of capital maintain the upper hand - is inevitable. This contingency clarifies exactly where and what the determining struggles (over free time, social goods, democratic control over our lives) and physical conditions (environmental degradation, depleting natural resources, expansions and erosions of the category of “the human”) are that will make or unmake those futures.
And yet, there’s a contradiction here: science fictions, as Suvin emphasises, are eminently to be taken seriously. Cognition, making the environment the object of reflective thought, “differentiates it not only from myth, but also from the folk (fairy) tale and the fantasy.” If there’s an archaic flavour to Suvin’s insistence on the “science” in SF, which correlates the “mature approach” of realist fiction with the epistemology of the scientific method and the critical theory of Marxism, it’s not just that Marxism has seen an entire tradition of critique against the “scientific” economism into which it degenerated, but that the history of actually existing science since he wrote has been almost entirely a history of capital’s catastrophic domination of nature. The epistemological force once associated with Marxism has dissipated as the social movements that once threatened to “realise philosophy”, in Marx’s phrase, have dwindled. “Knowledge”, as a supposedly neutral object, has become divorced from politics as the focus on critical theory has shifted, after Foucault and Jameson, to the conditions that constitute knowledge. As science has dwindled in its real freedom of thought, it has risen inexorably as an ideal in the liberal imagination.
If Frase’s fictional methodology - which, incidentally, leaves out most of the tapestry of details of everyday life that constitutes SF “worldbuilding” - renounces scientific seriousness, it’s perhaps because “storytelling” or “narrative” have come to constitute the liberal lens par excellence for understanding the political present. While liberal demands for “evidence-based policy” represent knowledge as a pure object that somehow precedes its life in society, historical thinking about how society arrived at its current form and where it will go is boiled down to a mess of fictions: the island story of multicultural Britain, or the national narrative of US politics (a story of exceptional liberty and manifest destiny), which can come to be replaced by a different story that, while existing as an actor in an undeniable struggle over a national past, in the end changes nothing about the distribution of resources and freedoms in the present. This isn’t to suggest that Frase has somehow renounced Marxism, but may perhaps explain the parable-like nature of his fictions, which hint at the splendour or horror of a future they can’t really portray and don’t expect the audience to mind not knowing about. Believability becomes a weight around narrative’s neck, a formal problem that we’ve seen emerge before in modernist fiction’s refusals of verisimilitude in dealing with the empirical world. Frase may ultimately be chafing against the grave limits of “storytelling”. There may be something else in our present, quite apart from the limited and realistic but necessary narrative variables he focuses on, that is unamenable to storytelling - something that is the abstraction of capital itself. When what a previous generation of revolutionaries called mere survival - Frase’s version of socialism is more or less New Deal social democracy with green credentials - appears only as a more and less plausible fiction, this suggests ‘narrative’ itself may be more part of the problem than the solution.