Fredric Jameson offers a similar analysis in his critique of the ‘postmodern’. For Jameson, the modern sensibility arose in the late nineteenth century, through a reflexive engagement with the temporality of industrial capitalism. As exemplified in the genre of science fiction writing, modernism is a way of representing or seeing the present in relation to a past and a future that are both radically different. Science fiction and other utopian writing enables us to imagine ourselves looking back upon the present, with a critical eye. It is thereby a political resource, as it empowers the critic and the radical to see the present as amenable to conscious transformation. Science fiction’s ‘multiple mock futures serve the…function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come’.22
Emerging in the early 1970s, postmodernism represents the end of the modernist utopian project, Jameson argues. In place of a collective historical consciousness, in which the synchronous present is differentiated from both our past and our future, postmodernity offers only a spatial heterogeneity. There is no collective progress or radical emancipatory project understood in a historical sense, but simply a panoply of locations, scattered in space but never differentiated in time. ‘Today,’ Jameson writes, ‘all politics is about real estate.’23Physical differentiation replaces temporal change, making the body a central space of political action. As exhibited in postmodern architecture, historical artefacts are pastiched, remixed, mashed up, ideally for maximum profit, on the basis that the ingredients of a different society are already scattered across space. This amounts to a permanent now.
Utopian thought privileges the role of enclaves and islands, cut off from the mainstream, thereby gaining or offering a glimpse of an alternative future for the whole. As China Miéville stresses, Thomas Moore’s original ‘Utopia’ was an island, but not a natural one: it was deliberately separated from the mainland by force of human labour.24 Jameson points to examples such as Bauhaus and the garden city movement as examples of institutions and spaces that were declared separate, as a basis on which to dream of or experiment with a different future. We might even see the modern university as once being such an enclave from dominant forms of power and capitalism. But the fate of the university since the 1970s speaks of a broader fate for enclaves under postmodernity. Their distinction and separation is no longer tolerated, and they become treated as resources to be connected up, networked, calculated. As Jean-François Lyotard observed in 1979:
The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume – that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.25
Postmodernity is the eradication of enclaves, working in alliance with the logic of neoliberalism to ensure that monetary valuation permeates ever corner of society. Differentiated and finite spaces of ‘discipline’ dissolve into a constant and endless feedback circuit of ‘control’.26
In place of ‘the future’ as a collective unknown, postmodern or neoliberal society offers endless new ‘risks’, to be calculated primarily by the financial sector. It is often remarked that a utopia is not a plan or a constitution or a blueprint, but something that emerges among all of us as a need in the face of some lack. It expresses itself as much in science fiction as in design or architecture. The grim achievement of neoliberalism is to produce an overarching calculative infrastructure – namely finance – to harness and channel these hopes and dreams for the future, and to render them mathematical and computable in the process. Modernity, as a collective, reflexive historical movement, becomes reconstituted in terms of individual aspirations and speculations regarding the future, which are then fed into a giant machinery of calculation. Once the market is granted its status as the harbinger of rationality, as initially envisaged by Mises in 1920, then there is no limit to the hopes, fears, beliefs, guesses and dreams that can be rationalised by being plugged into the banking system.
In this way, ‘progress’ becomes replaced by ‘change’. Rather than a collective movement from an empirical past into an uncertain future, there is individual bet-taking within an infrastructure that is presented as permanent, as beyond speculation. In rescuing the financial system in 2008–9, the most powerful governments in the world sent out a simple message: you might short a given stock, but you can’t short the system as a whole. In this, the notion of ‘risk’, and the complex cognitive and technical capacities that constantly work to extend it into new areas via derivatives, play a crucial role. Risk, like money or property, becomes a transcendent and permanent instrument, through which everything ephemeral is compelled to churn. Thanks to risk modelling, the unknowability of the future, which might otherwise be a basis for hope, becomes instead a source of further financial profit.27
What 2008 demonstrated above all else was that this system of underwriting is not rooted in anything real, but it is underwritten by state sovereignty when necessary. The neoliberal state insists that this and only this is how the problem of the future is to be dealt with, and will spend whatever is necessary to deliver on this pledge.
When considering the fate of utopia in the neoliberal age, one of the most striking features is the terrible disappointment (or worse) wrought by advances in cybernetics and software. Far from the socialist hopes for non-market computation, computers have turned out to be the perfect weapon for financial investors, to the point that machines now trade happily among themselves. Rather than offer the basis of a democratic economy or a different society with a different future, ‘smart’ infrastructures are now in the hands of ‘surveillance capital’, capturing data about every aspect of our daily lives so as to render political change even less likely.28 As capitalist computation becomes more intimate to the person, via wearable technology and social media, it becomes ever harder to represent it as a source of oppression that might be collectively rejected, in the way that institutions of discipline and bureaucracy were in 1968. We become more and more complicit in our own surveillance and disempowerment, as cyborg ideals of personal and physiological enhancement come to displace those of economic emancipation or progress.
Equally, the postmodern collapse of history into the present (as diagnosed by Jameson) seems to be exacerbated by the ubiquity of digital connectivity and data capture. The past is converted into a searchable, mineable data archive that serves principally as a cognitive enhancement in the here and now. Risk models at least represent the future as something that has not yet happened, constructed out of empirical data that were collected in the past. Yet lying beyond this ‘probabilistic’ approach to the future lies what the geographer Louise Amoore terms a ‘possibilistic’ one, in which infrastructures of data capture a sense that something may be emerging as it emerges.29 A low-tech version of this would be the phenomenon of ‘cool-hunting’, in which market researchers find niche tastes that are likely to spread, before they’ve gone mainstream. A high-tech version would be the way security services seek to detect suspicious behavioural patterns amid the vast data generated by mobile phone and internet usage. No enclave outside the grid. No future beyond already emerging trends. And no past other than that which has been captured as data.
Ultimately, Mises lost the socialist calculation debate, though not for reasons that he could ever have possibly imagined in 1920. The dominant variety of capitalism that has emerged since 2008 looks as much like socialism as it does like market liberalism, yet it works more effectively than Mises declared possible. Large Silicon Valley firms make vast profits by watching our day-to-day lives, though without necessarily actually selling us anything, and view the exploitation of labour as an unnecessary and inefficient use of resources. Social and cultural change is computed in real time, but this computation is not necessari
ly enacted by market prices any longer. Entrepreneurial innovation, which neoliberals viewed as a safer alternative to political modernisation, has brought us figures such as Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, whose restlessness will never be limited to the transformation of the private or productive sector. In the age of President Trump, their charismatic leadership meshes all too easily with overbearing state power. The ‘sharing economy’ points towards a post-ownership society, though unlike the original socialist model it is consumer goods that are being collectivised, rather than enterprises themselves. Capitalism and socialism have converged. Perhaps we now do have a collectively planned future ahead of us, after all; we just have little way of knowing what it is, because our twenty-first-century planners have no obligation to tell us.
Why ‘Economic Science Fictions’?
Is it still possible to go back in search of the future? Jameson has argued that the first step towards resuscitating hope is simply to reassert utopianism as a necessary and viable project at all. ‘Utopianism,’ he argues, ‘must first and foremost be a diagnosis of the fear of utopia, or of anti-utopianism.’30 Seeing as it stems from a deep human need, and not from expertise, utopianism necessarily has an amateur and artistic dimension that evades professionalism or expertise. To write science fictions about the economy is to insist on the possibility that imagination can intrude into economic life in an uninvited way that is not computable or accountable. To imagine wholly different systems and premises of calculation, for example, is in itself to resist the dystopian ideal promised by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, that there is nothing that can evade the logic of software algorithms, risk and finance. In a time when capitalism and socialism have collapsed into each other, obliterating spaces of alterity or uncalculated discourse in the process, simply to describe unrealised (maybe unrealistic) economic possibilities is to rediscover a glimpse of autonomy in the process.
The assemblage of humans and machines that makes up modern capitalism is fearsomely complex. Yet unlike the market price system, so admired by Mises and Hayek, there is no apparent reason to see anything magical or ingenious about a cybernetic system combining Goldman Sachs, iPhones, Visa, call centres, Facebook, credit-rating agencies, Google, the Federal Reserve, Jawbone wristbands, HSBC, high-frequency traders, and so on and so on and so on. Rather, this uncontrollable technical complexity is ripe for reimagining. Each bit could be different, resulting in a whole that could be unrecognisably better or worse. This edifice has some vulnerable support structures, which allow virtually all human life to be capitalised and economised. None of those support structures is permanent. As Ursula Le Guin recently urged science fiction writers to consider, ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.’
The science fictional imagination is not merely fictitious in its economic implications. This is because ‘the economy’ is already partly fictional in its constitution. Imagination and fantasy are internal to the space of calculation; indeed, it is the human capacity to think or believe that which does not materially exist that makes economic expansion possible, and provokes the explosion of risk management and calculative edifices as the more paranoid neoliberal response. The economic sociologist Jens Beckert has explored the importance of ‘fictional expectations’ in the institutions of capitalism – that is, those things that we treat as real and dependable, but are not yet empirical. They therefore rely on collectively endorsed fictions. This includes the value of money, which exists only by virtue of our expectation that others will accept it; or a business plan, which an entrepreneur produces as a narrative into which an investor might place his or her confidence; or an advertisement, which is a quasi-utopian promise of how a product or service will enhance the purchaser’s existence. Risk models, as generated by economists, actuaries and physicists, are all science fictions, inasmuch as they represent a reality that has not yet come about.
In a system such as capitalism, which undergoes change over time, the division between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ value is not absolute or fixed. This, after all, is how financial bubbles occur: when collective imagination starts to become mistaken for an empirical reality. It was a similar ambiguity that led to the global financial crisis, whereby mathematical models of a non-empirical future started to be treated with the same level of confidence as the empirical past. Capitalism rests on traffic between the imaginary and the real; it’s not just that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, but that air is constantly materialising into solidity. The marrying of fictional futures and empirical facts is what makes capitalism possible, but it is also what makes it unreliable and potentially dangerous. As Beckert argues:
Under conditions of uncertainty, assessments of how the future will look share important characteristics with literary fiction; most importantly, they create a reality of their own by making assertions that go beyond the reporting of empirical facts. Fiction pretends a reality where the author and the readers act as if the described reality were true.31
The key difference between the ‘fictional expectations’ that make up capitalism and ‘literary fiction’, Beckert argues, is that the former are ‘design fantasies’ that are scrutinised for their plausibility, not only for their seductiveness. Moreover, these ‘design fantasies’ seek to motivate people in a certain direction: to attract investment, to provoke a purchase, to accept payment. This is unlike a literary fiction, which exists to produce pleasure or engagement or provoke reflection, but less commonly seeks to change or reinforce behaviour.
And yet, by seeing how ‘real’ economic institutions bleed into ‘imaginary’ fictions (including literary fictions), the question arises of how this ambiguity might be harnessed and expanded. One way of doing this, perhaps, is to cultivate ambiguity between the role of ‘experts’ and that of ‘artists’ or ‘amateurs’, and to challenge assumptions about who really influences our political economy and how. The literary fiction of Ayn Rand, for example, has very clear ‘real-world’ consequences, in the form of the libertarian conservative clique that is inspired by it and now has access to the White House. The discipline of economics deals in all manner of things that do not exist outside the economics profession and its journals, conferences and models. And yet it is safely insulated from the realm of literary fiction, not least by the specialist language game it employs to insulate itself from the world (perhaps some enclaves survive postmodernity better than others). Lawyers, equally, traditionally see their role in terms of interpreting existing rules, but far less commonly in terms of inventing new ones or imaginatively recombining them. Meshing these professional identities with those of artists, activists, amateurs and dreamers would also mean weakening (or at least challenging) the rigidity of capitalist institutions, which are always partly imaginary.
Cultivating such ambiguity does return us to past utopias in one particular sense. As the sociologist Ruth Levitas has explored, before sociology was established as a discipline, circa 1890, its progenitors shared many characteristics with utopian dreamers, literary science fiction writers and reformers. One of these was H. G. Wells, who wrote:
Sociology must be neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively and with an element of personality, that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature.32
Social theory, especially anthropology, retains some connection to the task of writing good fiction.33 But the idea of an economic science fiction sounds somehow oxymoronic. The liberal market economy, Foucault reminds us, is governed so as to be a site of truth, and nothing else. Science, yes; fiction, no. Why so dogmatic? What is there to be afraid of? It’s not as if the fictions of ‘incentive’, ‘preference’, ‘supply curves’, ‘utility’ and ‘efficiency’ have done an especially good job in keeping the economy under control over the past decade. Maybe it’s time to inject some new ones.
There is already an abundance of conservative visions of the future, even if they are not a
lways recognised as such. An industry of ‘futurists’ seeks to narrate futures in such a way that they can be brought under managerial control, pre-empted, offset and planned for via investment strategies and marketing. The vocation of the futurist is narrow and ahistorical, seeking the mitigation of risks and blame on behalf of existing powers rather than sources of hope. As Peter Frase puts it, ‘[S]cience fiction is to futurism what social theory is to conspiracy theory: an altogether richer, more honest, and more humble enterprise.’34 Similarly, Jameson distinguishes science fiction from ‘fantasy’, as the latter involves imagination floating completely free from history.35 Science fiction matters politically because it treats the fictional as a means of accessing the non-fictional.
If the fictions that make up capitalism are, as Beckert says, ‘design fantasies’, then this should pose the question of why there are no economic design schools. Where is the Bauhaus for economic reform? Where is the futurist manifesto for a different form of money or property? Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have provided one bold answer in Inventing the Future.36 Yet even that leaves hanging the design question of who is willing to design, implement, run, fix, improve systems of a different economy, in the way that Harvard Business School, PwC and the World Trade Organization do for this one. In our present anti-technocrat political moment, there is a risk that we give up on the radical possibilities of economic techne altogether. ‘Innovation’ and ‘creativity’ are now tedious obligations of every middle manager and worker, having lost whatever modernist zeal they ever had. Unless possibilities for broader economic transformation are rediscovered, then the future will belong entirely to those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the utopias they bring with them.
Elements of the modern utopian imaginary are returning in any case, though not necessarily with the emancipatory or progressive implications they originally carried. The common historical fate of humanity has become a live political concern once again, though now in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’, which places the problem of nature (and not reason) at the heart of all politics. As Andreas Malm has argued, this may well signal the end of the ‘postmodernity’ that emerged in the early 1970s.37 We now have to see capitalist expansion as a gift granted millions of years in the past in the form of fossil fuels, and every continued year of that expansion as carrying consequences that will last thousands of years into the future. If we remain stuck in the cybernetic and financial imaginary of the perpetual present, constantly churning information to ensure that nothing truly changes, we will be doomed. A revived historical consciousness is therefore a matter of existential urgency, though that doesn’t guarantee that it will occur.
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