Theses on Dystopia

Nine Theses on Dystopia

  1. Dystopia is a noun, not an adjective. The latter opens up to ethical judgment (“the root form of all ideology,” Jameson); the former, to analysis (critique in the dialectical sense).
  2. Dystopia is a literary genre. Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition, while open to some modification (see #3 below), offers a productive starting point: Dystopia is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived.”
  3. Because it is a literary practice, reading dystopias requires rigorous formalist protocols. Meaning is to be determined by reference to the texts and not by appeals to the “oracle” or one’s “gut.” That is, neither Intentional nor Affective approaches should be the foundation on which to base creative readings. (See Invoking Hope, Chapter 1).Intentional Fallacy: It doesn’t matter what Thomas More thought he was doing: such information is part of the sub-species of Intentionalist theory that the New Criticism refers to as the genetic fallacy: “It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism” (Wimsatt and Beardsley). To take such an approach to its extremes would be to abolish utopia altogether: for example, prominent post-WWII conservative-liberal critics maintained that Utopia is consciously intended by More as simply satire (Hythlodaeus as a speaker of “cunning or skilled nonsense”). Rather, we need to work to grasp the significance, limitations, and possibilities of the original narrative technology to which More’s efforts gave birth (Hythlodaeus as a speaker “hostile to, destructive of nonsense”). The same holds for dystopia.Affective Fallacy: An even more dangerous strategy, and still far too commonplace, is to read dystopias “affectively” or in terms of what “I” feel about them (and this is what Sargent rightly tries to guard against in his appeal to intention). It may be the case that I do not desire to live in More’s Utopia (or to deploy More’s trope of the litote, perhaps it is not the case that I do not desire to live in More’s Utopia). However, such information only tells you something about me—and while such information is useful to my biographer, or therapist, it is not relevant to a discussion of a text’s meaning.
  1. Like utopia, dystopia is a form of science fiction (SF): a practice of cognitive estrangement (Suvin).Science fiction here is understood not as a genre, but as one of four interrelated modes of narrative engagement (cognitive estrangement, non- cognitive estrangement [fantasy], cognitive non-estrangement [realism], non-cognitive non-estrangement [mythology-ideology]). SF as a genre, as I argue in Imaginary Communities (page 32) and elsewhere, emerges after utopia and dystopia and later rewrites utopia/dystopia as “socio-political subgenres of SF” (Suvin). (See Thesis 6 below)There are no “realist” dystopias. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) is allegorical realism, and as Koestler’s countryman Georg Lukács stresses, all realist novels are historical novels. (The contemporary cannot be represented except through science fiction.)
  2. Dystopia emerges in the late-nineteenth century as the third term in a concretely situated dialectic of naturalism (thesis), utopia (negation), and dystopia (negation of negation) (Life Between Two Deaths, Ch. 5).The most influential writer of dystopia, George Orwell, understood this when he wrote: “I will tell you now that this is a novel about the future— that is, it is in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel.”Orwell continues: “That is what makes it a difficult job—of course as a book of anticipations it would be comparatively simple to write.” Dystopia— again like utopia and science fiction—is not prediction or futurology.
  3. There are no dystopias before the late-nineteenth century. However, as in the case of utopia and science fiction (see Thesis 4 above), we can identify earlier texts as dystopian (“resembling” dystopia) through what Henri Lefebvre terms a dialectical “regressive-progressive” reading practice: “It takes as its starting-point the realities of the present…. [the new genre], having attained the conceptual and linguistic level, acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing aspects and moments of it hitherto uncomprehended. The past appears in a different light, and hence the process whereby that past becomes the present also takes on another aspect” (Production of Space 65).
  1. Like other forms of SF, dystopias are materialist (see Shockwaves 11). However, as with utopia, they are also more specifically concerned with human agency and freedom.There are no utopias or dystopias without humans (although the “nature” of these humans may be modified beyond recognition).Thus, dystopias differ from the SF practice of the post-apocalypse narrative. As evident in 1950s nuclear post-apocalypse narrative, post- apocalypse can produce utopia or dystopia, depending on what the surviving humans do in response to the “apocalyptic” event. (Although as I argue in Shockwaves of Possibility [Ch. 3], most post-apocalypses envision no more than a modified continuation of the status quo and hence the event presented in them is a “pseudo-one.”)
  2. The imaginative limits of any utopia or dystopia are located in history: history is “what hurts. . . . But this History can only be apprehended through its effects” (Political Unconscious 102), in this case the textual traces of an author’s singular biographical experience and concrete historical situation (culture [groups], society [class], economy [mode of production]).
  3. As in the case of utopia, dystopia is not representational, but first and foremost a pedagogical genre: it’s aim is to “educate” the reader’s desire (Abensour/Levitas).All dystopias estrange the present from which they emerge and educate desire for a journey to a specific locus:The past: nostalgic or conservative utopia: non-utopianism. The present: ideological anti-utopianism.
    Ontological or cosmological nihilism: resigned anti-utopianism. The future: critical dystopia (Moylan): post-post-utopianism.

    For progressive political readers, the first three practices are topics for rigorous ideological analysis and critique. In every “moment of danger” (Benjamin), only critical utopias invoke hope.