A COLLOQUIUM WITH DARKO SUVIN: QUESTIONS BY RUSSELL BLACKFORD, SYLVIA KELSO, AND VAN IKIN

[2001]

Dr. Darko Suvin F.R.S.C. was a full Professor of English at McGill University, Montreal until his retirement in 1999. His distinguished career—as academic, sf critic, writer, and poet—includes co-editing the journal Science-Fiction Studies from its inception until 1980 (after which time he was a contributing editor) and producing three books which the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes as “one of the most formidable and sustained theoretical attempts to define sf as a genre”: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power (1983), Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988). Suvin played a major role in fostering academic interest in science fiction in the USA, and is credited with introducing the concept of “cognition” to modern sf criticism. He was awarded the coveted Pilgrim Award (for services to sf scholarship) in 1979.

The following “colloquium” arose when Darko Suvin kindly agreed to be interviewed for Science Fiction. Russell Blackford and Sylvia Kelso joined the editor in submitting a series of questions by email, and Professor Suvin responded as set out below, sometimes answering related questions together.

Ikin: Let us begin by getting to know something about Darko Suvin as person. In your first email, which sparked this interview, you happened to say “my 1st violin is theatre.” Is all your expertise in sf and literary theory a destiny chosen for you, rather than by you? What started Darko Suvin on the path toward the pinnacle of international twentieth-century sf criticism?

Well, I think the civic persona of Darko Suvin is only interesting because certain historical shapings happen to have crossed and possibly fused in his flesh (including the brain). As best I can make sense of those shapings, they were first of all my family ambience. My father was an MD specializing in dental prosthetics, who had the good fortune to have lived thru a socialist (well, semi-socialist maybe, but that was an awful lot then and there) revolution during and after the Yugoslav (and world) anti-fascist Second World War 1941-45. He had studied in Vienna (for Zagreb, our native city, to the childhood in which I still think back fondly, was in his youth a part of the rotting Austro-Hungarian empire), trying for the very newfangled Freudian psychiatry, only to be told by an assistant of Freud that he had no talent for discovering the proper symptoms and complexes—so I have a family inheritance (I guess) of suspicion toward individualist psychology and its facile circles and wedges. Though very small and gracile, he managed to survive 2 years as a Partizan doctor and eventually was a main founder of the Stomatological Faculty at the University of Zagreb, dying revered by his pupils, then deans and professors—happier than we are in foul PoMo times where having master-teachers is considered irksome (so much the worse for all of us and our craft). I might have from him my scholarly side, for he published oodles of articles and books on prosthetic dentistry. But as usual for sons (and Hitler’s rise to power saw to it that I remained an only child), the most important shaping came from my mother, a strong and worldwise personality, who from a young bourgeois lady before WW2 evolved into somebody saving her nuclear family during the war under three Fascist states (Croatia, Germany and Italy) and a chief secretary of a research institute—one of those really running the place—in socialist Yugoslavia. Those interested in my feelings at her death can find it in my book of verse The Long March: Notes on the Way 1981-1984 (Willowdale ON: Hounslow, 1987), in the poem “Be Still in Peace” and the shorter “The Watch Given to the Verse-Smith by Trude”: for I’ve been writing poetry on and off from 1951 (and short prose even longer), first in Croato-Serbian and then (after I began dreaming in English in the ’70s, so Freud had some good insights) in English.

I was a translator and interpreter (English-Italian) already as a very young boy who had fled with his mother in a fishing boat from a Dalmatian island across the mine-infested and German bomber-infested Adriatic Sea to the newly liberated southern Italy in October 1943. 1 remember spurning the offer to learn the piano at the age of 7 or so (my father played Vienna waltzes on it, very rarely) and choosing to learn languages instead, which resulted in an intense and lifelong but totally consumerist love of music, Bach to Bartok and the Beatles and not much further I’m afraid (one’s sensibility does close down at 40 or so, which is how I explain Lukács’s misunderstanding of Brecht).

I was enrolled in the daringly progressive Zagreb Montessori kindergarten (English and French) at the age of four, I think—and yes, I come from the bourgeois intelligentsia (my two grandfathers were respectively a small “colonial goods” merchant and a bank chief bookkeeper) whose nose was in the Fascist times rubbed into the betrayals our class shamefully wreaked on its own whilom ideals, Milton to Mill to Mazzini, so that they found abode with Marx. So I believe the (temporally) second main influence on me is the profound plebeian antifascist liberation movement I saw and felt viscerally indeed both in Dalmatia and indirectly in liberated Italy.

Marxism as a theory came upon its heels; it has its own huge intellectual delights but it was never (I hope) for me a bloodless dance of concepts, Parisian style; which is why I don’t feel a need to jettison its still crucial insights when the historical movement—for a time—collapsed (though I’ve been working a lot on just what needs to be modified in it, such as 19th-Century scientism). I read the Communist Manifesto back in Zagreb in my early teens at the end of 1945, a wartime printing by a Partizan brigade agitprop section I got from my father; and I still remember the passage about the proletariat not being able to liberate itself without upending the whole structure of bourgeois life as vividly as I do my first love (at age 10) and my first sex experience (much later): “yes,” I said to myself excitedly, “that’s it”! I didn’t quite know—not having yet studied the Roman kings—what the proletariat was, but I knew they were the poor, oppressed, and persecuted, so surely I belonged with them (for the Fascists had dispossessed us of everything but life and the pursuit of happiness) just as much as the peasants in Yugoslav Army uniforms. I joined the still mysterious and hush-hush Young Communist League at the end of the same year, in high school, and in 1948, during Tito’s break with Stalin, I was as it were drafted—protesting my unworthiness—into a Communist Party preparing a mass basis for that tough struggle (which also meant that if the Russians occupied Yugoslavia, as was quite possible, I would have been a good candidate for one of the grapes on the city lamp-posts). I did get, as I discovered later, both into the KGB and the CIA files at the time. Well, you sheltered and cosseted people from the upper “Western” 10% of the globe can maybe see this is a quite normal—or indeed an extraordinarily lucky—East (or better Southeast) European biography: a German bomb fell 50 meters from me, and if their technoscience had been up to the Vietnam War standards (never mind today), I wouldn’t have gone on to “the pinnacle of international 20th-Century criticism” as Van Ikin flatteringly puts it, or anyplace else but a small rocky grave for my pre-teen fragments. Living on borrowed time your whole life—and seeing that other children like me in Korea or Vietnam or Angola or indeed the black ghettoes of the US of A may not be so lucky—wonderfully clears the mind.

And how did I get to sf? Not by way of Sumatran jungles like Brian Aldiss or the skyscraper bureaucracies of New York like Fred Pohl or the campus oases into which a dying Native wanders like Ursula Le Guin (to mention only three people I know well enough to speculate biographically about), but by way of having lived in say six years (1940-46) in five regimes: a monarchist despotism, several Fascist militarized states, the “Western” allies in Italy 1943-45 with some insight in the corrupt business of profiting from feeding hungry Italy, the peasant communist revolution in postwar Zagreb.... And I have no words, even after a lifetime, to describe the outrageous sense of annihilating psychophysical anxiety and heart-constricting persecution a small boy in fear for his existence can feel when subjected to the monstrous threats from which the Revolution was the only salvation. Thence I guess my assiduous reading of utopias from More on (eventually sf from Lucian on) to Wells, of course preceded at age eleven or so by every European child’s hefty dose of Jules Verne. I wrote an extrapolative mini-utopia of a united classless world for a high-school homework in I think 1948 (just an anatomy, I fear, though I think it did have a point-of-view narrator zooming around daringly in an airplane) which may still exist among the school papers my wife Nena retrieved last year from a friend in Zagreb. But of course I studied “high lit,” there was nothing else (except sciences, in which I first did a six-year degree): English and French literature—German was still too painful, though reading Hegel, Karl Marx and Karl May, as well as a pretty young redhead from Munich on the Adriatic, eventually cured me of that. I specialized (if that’s the word—I’ve always been easily bored and going on to new fields) in Drama, having studied that also at Bristol UK, the Sorbonne in Paris, and eventually Yale for one semester or year in each place, as an indigent foreigner imitating the vie de bohème.

I suppose Van Ikin’s formulation, that sf (and, I’d add, cultural theory) was “a destiny chosen for me, rather than by me” has a good share of truth: we are given only a few choices by History (my name for destiny), and if wise we choose the one we were having elective affinities toward anyway, before conscious choice. Theatre was for me utopian oases of storytelling in the fleshly present: but I’ve always had a commonsense, I guess bourgeois intellectual, distrust of crassly intrusive collectivities, having gone through my share of them (I remember with some horror visiting Chip Delany around 1970 in a commune where he was living and which he has recently so beautifully described), and I’ve never ventured into the whipwielding-cum-cajoling role of a theatre or maybe movie director, so that the nearest I came was dramaturge (art director?) of a student theatre: and of course critic, historian, theoretician first of drama and then even of performance. But this faded after moving from Europe, my great and untranscended shows of the 1950s-60s Golden Age in Stratford, London, Paris, Milano, Berlin....

sf (always considered as between the utopian and anti-utopian horizon, as—I decided later—a sort of parable for us) was then what we weren’t but could perhaps be, or at least could explore analogues of us as being. You’ll understand that there’s a certain importance and urgency about such a business, not simply competing (as Poul Anderson put it), for the idiot multitude’s beer money.

Again, History intervened. I discovered that the revolutionary afflatus was fading back home, I dimly felt the Party bureaucracy had let the self-management project—in which I’d been involved—slide when it got too close to (their) power, I had a falling out with the dominant forces at my Faculty of Arts in Zagreb (the Nationalists hated me and the Party people didn’t defend me), so that I decided I could be an alienated intellectual anywhere where I could fruitfully work.

The only proper job I could get was first in Amherst Mass. 1967, and then at McGill University in Canada from 1968 on (I retired in 1999). Students had been rioting there too, demanding power, French-language teaching, and more interesting courses—including sf. They didn’t get the first two, but they got a “Marxist” teaching drama and—on and off—an sf course. Some who later became my friends confessed to an immense disappointment when the Marxist appeared in suit and tie, but I’m a European and dislike drugs of any sort, from tobacco and marijuana to Scotch and Disneyland (I do have a small chink for white wine and Italian brandy). What I taught in the first ten years can be partly seen in the Metamorphoses, which however doesn’t include the oodles of contemporary sf I was teaching, Heinlein to Le Guin and Dick, better seen in S-F Studies at the time. So I never felt I had academic problems, sf was riding the wave of the epoch and became a recognized niche in academia—I even got Fredric Jameson to write for S-FS and sit on its Board with Northrop Frye and sundry academic worthies. Just luck. And I continued in tandem to write about Brecht and Beckett and John Arden.

Blackford: As a cultural theorist you have been notable for your overt political engagement, and I’d like to ask you some large questions about how you see the relationships among science, politics and the work of theorists in areas such as language, literature and general culture. Two contrasting images that come to mind of politically engaged intellectuals in these fields are those of Chomsky and Foucault, who notoriously showed little connection with each other when they met in the 1970s. Does either image attract you in any sense?

Blackford: More generally, could you explain how you now see the relationships between the natural sciences, the study of language and culture, and the politically committed life?

Blackford: In “Novum Is As Novum Does,” you state that you do not wish to lose the “central cognitive impetus” of science, but you also subject the program of reductionist science to a severe critique. Could you explain this and how (or whether) the evils you describe can be avoided without losing that cognitive impetus of “systematic and testable understanding of material realities”?

Salus rei publicae suprema lex

(The health/salvation of the commonwealth is the supreme law)

—Old Roman maxim

Russell, my problem is that I’ve come to deeply disbelieve our dominant institutional carving of the domain of knowledge and commitment (belief). Its historically first step, the laicization of Descartes (I’ve written on this extensively in “Polity”) was defensible as a politically liberating turf war between theologians and philosophers, though Descartes himself—probably with sincerity—conceded the final say to the Church and—what is even more pernicious—took over its split between body and soul (renamed mind by the new philosophers) to the ongoing detriment of the body. The next step, that of Galileo and Newton, was then to anathematize “natural philosophy,” call it science, and allot to it the same dual role of Queen of Cognition and Supreme Good as was formerly held by theology. This shut out (better: pretended to shut out) the Subject in favor of the Object, emotion in favor of reason, female knowers in favor of male (see Donna Haraway on the early Royal Society in England or the encroachment of MDs on the delivery of babies).

So if we today ask, as a young man called Volodya Ulyanov did at the beginning of the unfortunate 20th century, “What Is to Be Done?”, the hegemony of the last quarter of the millennium has brainwashed us to answer: Whatever it may be, it must be by means of, under the flag of, science. (And of course the only true sciences are the mathematizable ones, while the “social sciences,” involved in messy human affairs which refuse to be totally quantified, are womanly soft as opposed to hard male reason; the contempt felt by the “hard” for the cringing “softies” can be wonderfully heard if you’ve been even at the margins of funding debates in a university Senate or a Government granting body!)

This is a powerful answer, seductive precisely for the intellectuals we need, yet on the whole a misleading one. Transmuted into technoscience, it intervenes with exponential force and speed into everybody’s daily life.

Let us then further ask, on pain of extinction: What does science do? How does it do what it does? Is the power of intervention gained by this method worth the price we’re paying for it (genocide, ecocide, hunger, wars)?

When “science” separated itself out of wisdom—whose backbone is care for health and salvation, theology’s strongest trump card—on the basis of quantifying, it displaced the wrong qualities of theological knowledge, for example, Aristotelian “qualitative physics.” But it also displaced the supreme law of the commonwealth’s salus. It dispensed with any quality, except the quality of being quantified. It thus divorced scientific fact from value. This price seemed right for 300 years, but it became too high with the triumph of the Industrial Revolution (circa 1848, say), and has grown exorbitantly ever since. The project of human survival is consubstantial with a return of “specialized” sciences—most urgently the most powerful ones—into their matrix of cognitive wisdom. Truly democratic science—by and for (the) people—has to espouse being publicly taken to account as to each and every of its uses and consequences. This would be no more dictatorial than the strict control relentlessly exercised over it today by and for profit, debasing all that’s not instantly marketable as quantified bytes of “information.”

Modem natural science itself has given us hints how to do this spirally, by not abolishing Newton but subsuming him under Einstein as a specialized case. As just noted, human affairs are certainly messier than the Lorenz algebraic transformations which can quantify that particular subsumption. We shall have to declare that big chunks or aspects equivalent to Newton (or Bacon, or Descartes) are counterproductive and not usable after a given point of people’s relationships with each other and with the environment, such as 1848 in the rich North. Use-value qualities are by now an intrinsic and inalienable part of facts. For example, as a fact for us air is only air if breathable and water only water if drinkable. Chunks or aspects of science compatible with this may be—must be—subsumed. Genetic engineering is in the present profit-mad state of society much too risky: soon the filthy rich shall have chimaeras and sphinxes as pets, and the military sentient weapons. Any prudent society would ban it, just like research into Atomic-Bacteriological-Chemical and any other weapons, until we grow wiser (after the Revolution).

But I’m not ready to concede science to the Pournelles and Bovas, nor to the Tellers and Von Brauns. My answer is: not against science but for a science saturated with consciously chosen survival values (beginning with anti-military values). Not back to Aristotle but forward from Marx and Nietzsche.

Thus, I refuse the carve up of wisdom into science, religion, politics, economics, and similar. What today (meaning in the last 30 years) passes for politics I have the deepest contempt for, be it Blair-Clinton or Reagan-Thatcher or the various bloody sects rightly (but in wrong ways) reacting against capitalism without a human face triumphantly astride a wrongly united planet. The liberatory force of the only bearable politics, radical socialism or communism or anarchism, was defeated from without and within in the half century after 1917. I participated in it, as a Titoist (from 1945 to the mid-’60s), still believe in its original aims and achievements, and would participate again if I found it anywhere. In the meantime, we are all privatized and have to do the best we can. Chomsky does very well (better in politics than in linguistics, I think), Foucault did much less well, for his tergiversations and outright obfuscations hindered as much as helped, but he tried and should be honored for that. I could give other names: Trotsky, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall....

The less crassly Philistine traditions of France and Germany kept an assistant Supreme Good, whose cognitive role was however unclear: Art or Poesy (from painting to verse: prose fiction joined this only in C18-19).

But I should end with a warning: alienated politics are clearly at odds with disalienating (that is, viable) art. Artists (poets) can best help by being idiosyncratically within but at the margins of fighting, liberatory movements (Brecht, Picasso...). For example, they can help by writing about the implications of genetic research by means of narrative cognition (stories). Perhaps you can find some further positions in my “Appendix on Science,” planned as an entry into an encyclopedia of the twentieth century:

§

Who used in the twentieth century the scientific method, how, in whose interest, and with what results? It was used by intellectuals, as a rule, in the service of capitalist collectivities (States or corporations). In the guise of “technology,” it has become a directly intervening and decisive force of production. The fruits thereof are contradictory: potentially liberating, today at best mixed, and at worst catastrophic—a good chance at destroying vertebrate life on this planet through profiteering and militarism.

The dynamics of developing sciences seem opposed to the sudden durable revelation of religion. But they are poles of the same globe. True, there is a real difference between them, of a piece with the difference between precapitalist social formations based on agricultural space and capitalism based on industrial time and then financial spacetime. Yet, the dogmatic pretension of science to get—in however deferred and lengthy ways—to a final capital-T Truth about the universe participates of the same long-durational, class-society delusion that history and human interests and evaluations in it can be brought to a stop: or that, in a Platonic-Christian vein, history is only a manifestation of the unchanging Truth.

There are by now few respectable thinkers who would not concede that of the two main kinds of scientific knowledge, “facts” and “theories,” the theories—say of chemical valency—are self-evidently useful fictions and the facts an unholy amalgam of sensual evidence and semantics plus theory (that is, fiction). Let me take Harré’s example for a factual sentence, “A blue precipitate appeared at 28º C.” (80), and note its referent would be rendered quite differently in cultures which see blue as not different from green (there are many such cultures), which would instead of degrees Celsius use a qualitative scale (say, “it blushed”), and which would instead of “precipitate appears” say “Mercury has been revealed” (the alchemists would). Is the sentence “Mercury is revealed when water blushes green” really translatable into Harré’s lab language without remnants? If a sentence (as any linguist would know) includes presuppositions as well as positions, it is not. Is the untranslatable part simply magical mumbo-jumbo that can be suppressed? This would depend on what additional cognition it might contain: for example, “Mercury” may well be more specific (as to its look or curative powers) than “precipitate” and thus contain more bytes of information. And what about great cultures which instead of the subject-object syntax use mainly contiguity and richer if less univocal relationships, and say something like “East Dragon—green—sudden event—blush—liquid,” as I fantasize the Chinese would? How come they invented gunpowder, printing, and the South-pointing compass needle?

In sum, “Many, indeed infinitely many, different sets of hypotheses can be found from which statements describing the known facts can be deduced...” (Harré 87). As a whole current of philosophers has maintained since Gassendi, theories are not true or false but good or bad instruments for research. Formally speaking, “atom” is the name of an agent in a story about “chemistry,” just as “Mr. Pickwick” is the name of an agent in a story about “the Pickwick Club” (Harré 89), notwithstanding some different rules of storytelling in the two cases. “[Theoretical f]ictions must have some degree of plausibility, which they gain by being constructed in the likeness of real things,” concludes the middle-of-the-road Harré (98). In other words, literary and scientific “realism” are consubstantial products of the same attitude, the quantifying immanentism of bourgeois society. Yet institutionally sanctified technoscience persists in claiming it can provide the truth, a socially enforced certainty, while the apparently “weaker” and certainly more modest Dickens did not. The philosophic and other systems of belief arising out of (and constituting) science remain stuck on this two-dimensional surface. As a planet’s map is regulated and shaped by the grid of cartographic projection, so is any such system based on a principle (for example the Aristotelian excluded middle or the Hegelian necessarily resolved dialectical contradiction). And this principle is also a kind of (obviously circular) meta-reflection about, or methodic key of, the system that is in turn founded on and more or less necessarily deduced from it, and that exfoliates in the form of a finite series of propositions culminating in a rounded-off certainty. This form is finally not too different from the 19th-Century “well-made” illusionistic stage play; no wonder, they both flow out of the Positivist orientation. The Lady with the Camelias and the Laws of Thermodynamics are sisters under the skin: both show a beautifully necessary death.

Therefore, cognition is not only open-ended but also codetermined by the social subject and societal interests looking for it: the horizons are multiple. Not only is this legitimate, it is unavoidable and all-pervasive. The object of any praxis can only be “seen as” that particular kind of object (Wittgenstein) from a subject-driven—but also subject-modifying—standpoint and bearing. The way science has been practiced since Galileo is not only a cultural revolution but also a latent or patent political upheaval. The bourgeois civilization’s main way of coping with the unknown is aberrant, said Nietzsche, because it transmutes nature into concepts with the aim of mastering it: that is, it turns nature only into concepts and furthermore makes a more or less closed system out of concepts. It is not that the means get out of hand but that the mastery—the wrong end—requires consubstantially wrong means. If you want to be Master of your Company, you got to treat profit-making concepts as raw material on the same footing as profit-making laborers and iron ore. The problem lies not in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice but in the Master Wizard. The scientific is the political.

The ready subservience of science to capitalist destruction of life—in theory, the crude but still very powerful scientific Positivism and philosophical Objectivism—must be decisively abandoned if we are to preserve the human species and most life as we know it.

Kelso: “Novum is as Novum Does” (Foundation 69 (1997), 26-43) suggests a shift in the view of sf originally constructed in Metamorphoses, as a rationally based, cognitively organized, “intellectual” genre, implicitly superior to the less intellectually rigorous form that is now sold as fantasy. Having in mind the proviso that contemporary fantasy is almost as heterogeneous as sf, has your view of the former genre changed with your re-assessment of sf?

Blackford: You also state that “With Gautama the Buddha and Diderot, I’m in favor of enlightenment.” The reference to Diderot suggests a wish to associate yourself with the capital-E Enlightenment, which seems a very unfashionable gesture, coming from a contemporary theorist of culture. Then again, you seem critical of current fashions in cultural theory. Can you explain what kind of enlightenment you are “in favor of” and how you see the current schools of cultural theory?

Sylvia, there seem to be two questions you have posed here. The latter one, having to do with Fantasy or “fantastic fiction,” I have dealt with in a forthcoming 20,000-word piece, so I had better respectfully refer your readers to it (“Considering”). I’ll now focus on your first question, whether my 1997 Foundation article, “Novum Is as Novum Does,” represents (in your words) “a shift in the view if sf originally constructed in Metamorphoses [of sf], as a rationally based, cognitively organized, ‘intellectual’ genre....”

In brief, no and yes. Centrally, my view was a blend of description of sf possibilities and a prescription of which of those I deem the best (most sane and politically useful) horizon for it. This has not changed: the only sane way of survival for our (and other vertebrate) species—for the cockroaches and worms will with any luck survive the worst Homo sapiens will inflict on the planet—is a society without classes rooted in political economy, which is some form of communism (socialism, anarchism, or whatever better name we’ll find for it in the future); this is best known to sf readers from the desert Kropotkinian variant in The Dispossessed, or differently variant approximations in Marge Piercy, Kim Stanley Robinson and others. (A languidly beautiful variant refusing machine rhythms is of course William Morris’s News from Nowhere, in an echo of which the alternative title to my above article was “News from the Novum”).

What has changed is the historical reality, devolving from the Welfare State to a new beast slouching toward Bethlehem: Global Capitalism without a Human Face; and therefore the short-range prospects into which this long-range view of mine was immersed have also changed, and entail much rethinking. Trying this for the last 15 years or so, I’ve concluded that—since we have to have terms by means of which to handle the new experiences of huge human groups, interpenetrating within and comprising in different ways all of us—the foci of this change can be stenographically analyzed as two questions: in the present to which all of us belong, “What is this present?” and “Who are we?” My working hypotheses for a first delimitation, without the ifs and buts no doubt necessary for further understanding, are: The what is Post-Fordism; the we is Intellectuals. Again, I’ve had to write about this extensively, both in the article you mention and in another one in Utopian Studies, but I cannot answer your question without these two somewhat lengthy detours; and for your Australian readers I may be allowed to recapitulate some main points.

§

Post-Fordism: more than forty million people die from hunger each year, which is equal to 300 jumbo jet crashes per day every day with total loss of lives; or (I don’t know which is worse) the UN report that in 1996 “[n]early 800 million people do not get enough food, and about 500 million are chronically malnourished” (Drèze-Sen, Hunger 35 and Human 20). The starving hundreds of millions are joined by the couple of billion people eking out a living at the periphery of the world system or dossing down in the center of the affluent cities of the North, trying as best they can to survive the fallout from the civil and overt wars waged by the big corporations, and which with poetic justice migrate from their “hot” foci also into the “Third World inside the metropolis,” the creeping war in all our slums so far best described in hip-hop and in the post-Dischian and post-Dickian dystopian sf of Piercy, Butler (Octavia, not Judith), Gibson, Spinrad or Cadigan. The argument to which I subscribe is that we are in a series of boom-and-bust cycles. An ascending part, that began in the 1930s, found in Fordism and Keynesianism the remedies to the dangerous 1920s bust. These strategies effected a limited but real redistribution of wealth: Fordism through higher wages rendered possible by mass production of goods but neutralized by total production alienation and consumerist PR, Keynesianism through higher taxation neutralized by bourgeois control of the State. They functioned in feedback with the rise of production and consumption 1938-73, itself inextricably enmeshed with imperial extraction of surplus-value, armament production, and the warfare State. In class terms, Soviet pseudo-Leninism and Rooseveltian Liberalism—as well as some important aspects of fascism—were compromises with and co-optations of the pressures and revolts by plebeian or laboring classes. In economic terms they meant the institution of a modest but real “security floor” to the lowen-nost classes of selected “Northern” countries as well as a great expansion of middle classes, including all those hearing or reading this, with a fairly comfortable financial status and an appreciable margin of maneuver for ideologico-political independence. Wallerstein somewhat optimistically numbers these “[sharers] in the surplus value” (us) as 10-15% of the world population, of course disproportionately concentrated in the richer North (Historical 123).

However, the shock of 1973, when we entered upon the “bust” part of the cycle that began with the 1930s-40s boom (the oil crisis, debt crisis, global domination of the corporate credit system, the computerized stockmarket speculations, the World Bank, etc.), revealed that our planet Earth, a finite system, cannot expand indefinitely to bear 6 or 10 or 20 billion people up to the immensely wasteful “Northern” standards (see for example Lummis 60-74). This real emergency was seized upon and twisted by the ruling capitalists into revoking both the Keynesian compromise with the metropolitan lower classes and the Wilsonian promise to the peripheric “South.” In a fierce class war from above, through a series of hidden or overt putsches by the Right wing (hidden in the “North,” from Britain to the USSR, overt in the “South”—China being the pivot between the two), all protective barriers and mitigating bumpers are dismantled, so that what Marx called “the extraction of absolute surplus value” may be sharply increased: the security floor is abolished, the permanent Fordist class of chronically poor is now enlarged beyond one third even in the rich North, while the “middle” group of classes is squeezed back into full dependency by abolishing financial security (there is a wealth of uncoordinated data on this; see for example Lash and Urry 160-68). This leads to increased world concentration of capital now dominated by cartels of “multinationals.” For example, the IMF 1998 “bailout” of South Korea meant in practice a cut in half of wages expressed in US$, huge unemployment of employees and bankruptcies of small businesses, opening the door to takeover of Korean banks by foreign finance, strong reduction in government spending on social programs, infrastructure, and credits to business, fracturing of the large domestic conglomerates—in brief, a whole thriving “high tech and manufacturing economy up for grabs” (Chossudovsky, “IMF”).

Rocketing indigence and aimlessness provide the ideal breeding ground not only for petty and organized criminality—business by other means—but also for its legitimization in discrimination and ethnic hatred (for example in India or Yugoslavia). The warfare state had a little hiccup after the end of the Cold War but it has recovered nicely (the best estimate seems to show that two-thirds of US citizens’ taxes go to pay for military technology and wars; see Ross, 4). The welfare-state transfer of wealth from one class to another goes on in spades but for the rich. The latest report to have percolated into public domain tells of the US Congress and FCC handing $70,000,000,000.000 (yes, seventybilliondollars) to the TV conglomerates in free space on public airwaves (“Bandwidth”). No wonder the number of US-dollar millionaires has from 1980 to 1988 risen from 574,000 to around 1,300,000 (Phillips, 9-10) and of billionaires, 1982-96, from 13 to 149, so that by now the “global billionaires’ club” of 450 members has a total wealth much larger than that of a group of low income countries comprising 56% of the world population (Forbes Magazine ,1997, cited in Chossudovsky, “Global”). Whole generations, as well as the planetary environment for centuries into the future, are being mortgaged to an arrogant fraction of 1% on the top and a faceless world money market. The gap between the rich “North” and the poor “South” of the world system has doubled from 1960 to 1992, with the poor “transferring more than $21 billion a year into the coffers of the rich” (The Economist, see Chomsky, 62). Lowering “the cost of labor,” the ultimate wisdom of capitalism, means impoverishing everybody who lives from her work and enriching top-level managers and the upper mercenaries (ranking politicians, cops, engineers, lawyers, administrators...). The dire poverty gap is turning all societies into “two nations,” with good services for the small minority of the rich and shoddy ones or none for the dispensable poor. Compared to Dickens, we’ll have more computers, more (or at least more talk about) sex, and more cynicism for the upper classes. Human groups divide into resentful islands who do not hear the bell tolling; Marx’s “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation: accumulation of wealth is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality” (Selected, 483), has been confirmed in spades.

What then is the balance sheet of the capitalist social formation (cf. Wallerstein, Historical, 99-105 and 117-37)? Let me take the two most undoubted material achievements: production and length of life. As to the first, it is clear that human domination over nature has mightily increased: per unit of labor-time, the output of products is considerably greater. In other words, technological productivity under capitalism has finally created the presuppositions for rendering our globe habitable for all. But the habitability has been hijacked: is the required labor-time for production and reproduction per one person, per one lifetime or in the aggregate smaller? Certainly, in comparison to precapitalist formations, the working classes “work much harder in order to merely scrape by; they may eat less, but they surely buy more” (ibid 124): Paul Lafargue’s right to creative laziness (by the way, this son-in-law of Marx wrote an early political sf story) is nowhere on the horizon. In the last thirty years, at the same time that a fake decolonization redrew political borders outside the metropolitan countries, from Ghana to the Ukraine, “the world proletariat has almost doubled... [much of it] working under conditions of gross exploitation and political oppression” (Harvey, 423). There is a serious possibility that the classical Marxist thesis of the absolute immiseration of the proletariat as compared to 500 or 200 years ago may after all be correct, if we look at the 85% or more of the working people in the world economy rather than only at the industrial workers of the metropolitan countries; and there is no doubt of the huge relative immiseration in comparison to the dominant classes and nations. Obviously, even the latter is politically quite explosive and morally unacceptable: it demoralizes and alienates all classes, if in different ways.

As to the second, infant mortality has been strongly reduced in peacetime: but have the pollutions of air, water, and food as well as the psychic stresses and unceasing compulsion and insecurity lengthened life for those who survived beyond cared-for infancy? The jury is out on this: but the quality and ease of life has surely fallen sharply within my lifetime, and it is bound to fall exponentially with structural long-term unemployment. The amount of social waste and cruelty was larger than ever before in the century beginning with the great capitalist world wars (1914). “[C]apitalism cannot deliver world peace” (Wood, 265): it must be considered quite probable we’ll have further ABC wars after the Gulf Oil one. Capitalism is positively dependent on ecological devastation, condensing geological change into historical time. True, “really existing socialism” also badly failed at this (not at keeping peace); but ecological vandalism is a measure of capitalism’s success, not failure: the more vandalism the more short-term profit (look at Amazonia). So I asked in “News”: is our overheated society better than the “colder” one of (say) Tang China or the Iroquois Confederation? There are more of us but do we have more space or more trees, per person? Many of us have less back-breaking toil, but all have more mind-destroying aimlessness resulting in person-killing by drug and gun; we have WCs but also cancer and AIDS.... Most probably, even quantitatively—and with greater certainty qualitatively—the achievements of the bourgeoisie celebrated in The Communist Manifesto have been overbalanced by what it has suppressed.

From this point of view, one would have to defend the principle of enlightenment. True, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had its limits, historically quite understandable. But they grew pernicious only when the two-faced bourgeoisie had forgotten its citoyen soul (see Marx’s discussion of that in “On the Jewish Question”) in 19th-Century Positivism. So, the principle of mass examination of all prejudgments and ruling pieties, what Marx called “the pitiless critique of all that exists,” is my Supreme Good (I think any artist or writer does that all the time anyway). Diderot is better than Herder (the Nationalist Romantics), Gautama Shakyamuni—a true atheist—than Jehoshua of Nazareth. (Lao Tse may be still better.) As for the present hysterical anti-Enlightenment consensus among “soft” sciences, as (“objectively”) a bourgeois intellectual I find it a shameful abdication of our class’s historical role. But I console myself with Kant’s great dictum that even a thousand years of something being so does not make it right: and the Lyotardian consensus is already falling apart, the fish smells from the head after less than thirty years.

§

Intellectuals: If we are to take the “identity politics” seriously, surely the first identity of a true intellectual is his “professional” social class rather than nation or anything else. What then of our liberatory corporate or class interests as intellectuals?

In the twentieth century, as capital has been completing its molting from individual into corporate, Fordism was characterized by “hard” technology (crucially that associated with mass car transport), semi-automation, the rise of mass media and advertising, and State planning; and Post-Fordism—the watershed is c.1973—by “soft” technology (crucially computer technology and biotechnology), automation, mega-corporations and world market regulation, and the integration of the media with the computer, all under total domination of corporate marketing. In both cases more “software” or “human engineering” people were needed than before. One of the century’s earmarks was therefore the enormous multiplication and enormous institutionalization or collectivization of the earlier independent artisan and small entrepreneur. This ensured not only higher production but also its supervision and general ideological updating: that is, it was “not all justified by the social necessities of production [but] by the political necessities of the dominant [class]” (Gramsci, 13).

These “new middle classes,” who do not employ other people, include teachers, office workers, salespeople, the so-called “free” professions, etc. Their core is constituted by “intellectuals,” largely university graduates (but see Mills, Noble, and the Ehrenreichs), people who “produce, distribute and preserve distinct forms of consciousness” (Mills, 142)—images and/or concepts. Hobsbawm calculates that two-thirds of the GNP in the societies of the capitalist North are now derived from their labor, though their proportion within the population is much inferior. Politically, they (we) may be roughly divided into servants of the capitalist and/or bureaucratic state, of large corporations, self-proclaimedly “apolitical” or “aesthetic” free-floaters, and radicals taking the plebeian side; the alliance of the first and fourth group with some non-”intellectual” classes determined both the original Leninism and New Deal.

Our new collectivism, while mouthing liberal slogans stripped of the State worship, needs other-directed intellectuals. Post-Fordism has had quite some success in making intellectual “services” more marketable, a simulacrum of profit-making. This has long been the case in sciences and engineering: industrial production since around the 1880s is the story of how “the capitalist, having expropriated the worker’s property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well” (Lasch, xi, see also Noble). In the age of World Wars and revolutions this sucks in medicine, law, and “soft-science” consulting experts. Now those who buck the market better get themselves to a nunnery. The class aggression by big corporations against the immediate producers, corporeal and intellectual, means that Jack London’s dystopian division of workers under the “Iron Heel” into a minority of indispensable Mercenaries and a mass of downtrodden proletarians (updated by Marge Piercy in He, She and It) has a good chance of being realized. The increasingly marginalized and pauperized humanists and teachers are disproportionately constituted by women and non-”Whites,” a sure index of subalternity. To the contrary, what Debray calls the reproductive or distributive intellectuals—the engineers of material and human resources, the admen and “design” professionals, the new bishops and cardinals of the media clerisy, most lawyers, as well as the teeming swarms of supervisors—are the Post-Fordist “organic” mercenaries, whom PoMo cynicism has dispensed from alibis. The funds for this whole congeries of “cadre” classes—“administrators, technicians, scientists, educators... have been drawn from the global surplus” (Wallerstein, 83-84): none of us has clean hands. The welfare-and-warfare State epoch saw the culmination of the “cut” from the global surplus we “middle” 10-15% were getting; and “the shouts of triumph of this ‘middle’ sector over the reduction of their gap with the upper one per cent have masked the realities of the growing gap between them and the other [85-90%]” (ibid 104-05).

Our position is thus one of a living contradiction: we are essential to the policing of workers, but we are ourselves workers—a position memorably encapsulated by Brecht’s “Song of the [Tame] Eighth Elephant” helping to subdue his recalcitrant natural brethren in The Good Person of Setzuan. On the one hand, as Marx famously chided in The Communist Manifesto, “the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has turned the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the scientist, into its paid wage-laborers.” On the other hand, the constitution of intellectuals into professions is impossible without a measure of autonomy: of corporative self-government which allows control over one’s work. This constitution was enabled by the fact that salaried men and women are “the assistants of authority” (Mills, 74), but no authority can abide without their assistance. “[The middle class] individuals live or attempt to live an elite life, evading through ‘culture,’ while their knowledge serves capitalism.... They live a double life...in a jouissance half real and half illusionary.” (Lefebvre, 32-33) Our professionalization secured for some of us sufficient income to turn high wage into minuscule capital: but even the poorest intellectual participates in privilege through her “educational capital.” Excogitating ever new ways to sell our expertise in producing and enforcing marketing images of happiness, we decisively contribute to the decline of people’s self-determination and non-professionalized expertise. We are essential to the production of new knowledge and ideology, but we are totally kept out of establishing the framework into which, and mostly kept from directing the uses to which, the production and the producers are put. We cannot function without a good deal of self-government in our classes or artifacts, but we do not control the strategic decisions about universities or dissemination of artifacts. The list of such variants to Dr. Dolittle’s two-headed Pushme-Pullyou beast, between self-management and wage servitude, could be extended indefinitely.

For me, the main realization dawning from the above little inventory on Post-Fordism is that the hope for an eventual bridging of the poverty gap is now over, and it is very improbable the Keynesian class compromise can be dismantled without burying under its fallout capitalism as a whole. Will this happen explosively—for example in a quite possible Third World War—or by a slow “crumbling away” which would generate massive breakdowns of civil and civilized relations, on the model of the present “cold civil war” smoldering in the US, which are (as Disch’s forgotten masterpiece 334 rightly saw) only comparable to daily life in the late Roman Empire? And what kind of successor formation will then be coming about? The age of individualism and free market is over, the present is already highly collectivized: as a small example, control of the major US media had passed from fifty corporations in 1983 to twenty in 1992, so that four movie studios, five giant book publishers, and seven cable TV companies—all interlocked with major banks—produce more than half of the revenue in their field (Bagdikian, ix-xii and 20-26). The dazzling surface array of diversity hides bland uniformity: there are 11,000 magazines but two (!) magazine publishers dominate the field. The people running these 20 media monopolies and their bankers “constitute a new Private Ministry of Information and Culture” (Bagdikian, xxviii). Demographics as well as insecurity will make the future even more collectivized: the alternative lies between the models of the oligarchic (that is centrally Fascist) war camp and an open plebeian-democratic commune.

In this realistically grim perspective, a strong argument could be made that our class interests as intellectuals are twofold and interlocking. First, they consist in securing a high degree of self-management, to begin with in the workplace. But second, they also consist in working for such strategic alliances with other fractions and classes as would consent us to fight the current toward militarized browbeating. This may be most visible in “Confucian capitalism” from Japan to Malaya, for example in the concentration-camp fate of the locked-in young women in industries of Mainland China, but it is well represented in all our sweatshops and fortress neighborhoods (see the US example in Harvey). It can only be counteracted by ceaseless insisting on meaningful democratic participation in the control not only of production but also of distribution of our own work, as well as of our neighborhoods. Here the boundary between our, as it were, dissident interests within the intellectual field of production and the overall liberation of labor as their only guarantee becomes permeable. True, history has shown that alliance-building is only more painful than base organizing: any Mannheimian dream about the intelligentsia as utopian arbiter was unrealistic to begin with. But at least we know it can only be done by bringing into the marriage our honest interests and uncertainties, by eschewing like the plague the PoMo certainty and apodictic terrorizing, adapted in a bizarre mimicry of their two rivals, Admass and Stalinism, as the newest variant of the intellectuals’ illusion that they do not suffer from illusions (as Bourdieu notes in Other).

Our immediate interests are oppositional because capitalism without a human face is obviously engaged in large scale “structural declassing” of intellectual work, of our “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, “Field”; see also Guillory, 134ff.). There is nothing more humiliating, short of physical injury, than the experience of being pushed to the periphery of social values—measured by the only yardstick capitalism knows, our financing—which all of us have undergone in the last quarter century. Our graduate students are by now predominantly denied Keynesian employment, condemned to part-time piecework without security: capitalism has now adjoined to the permanent reserve army of industrial labor that of intellectual labor. The new contract enforced on the “downsized” generation is: “Workers undertake to find new occupations where they can be exploited in the cleverest and most efficient way possible” (Lipietz, 77). Intellectuals never had power over productive relations, but now we are, bit by bit, losing our relatively large autonomy. The best we can expect from capitalism is the shrinking and proletarianized autonomy of a begging order—certainly not Rabelais’s Abbey of Thélème, beset as it is by an unholy alliance of barbaric businessmen and what Gayatri C. Spivak (in Robbins, ed., 167) calls “corporate feminists” (or corporate ethnics). This is not good enough.

In this bind, we can at any rate say to the supposed realists: Look where you’ve landed us! There’s no more realism without utopia! (Your reality itself works toward a negative utopia.) But what does this practically mean? A number of things.

First, I must be the bearer of painful news: the professionalism of which we were up to a point justly proud has been overwhelmingly corrupted—by outright bribery where it matters, by self-willed marginality in the humanities. The ivory of our towers has been largely ground into powder as aphrodisiac for the corporate bosses. Looking at our class position soberly, we shall have to redefine professionalism as including—rather than complementing—self-managing political citizenship; or we shall be political by selling our brains to the highest bidder. On the one hand, in our classes we shall have to redefine, with Nietzsche, philology not simply as the art of reading rightly (what is there) but the art of reading well (what we may get from it). And outside the class it may mean anything from picketing the University Board or the Faculty of Business Management to lying down on the railway tracks (to use an improbable ’60s parallel). It certainly means striving for activist unionization, at a time when corporations are corrupting academic administrators by making them into well-paid CEOs in exchange for downsizing teachers (see Soley, 24-32 and Guillory). Like publishers vs artistic cognition, universities vs teaching cognition are now “the swine... in charge of the pearls” (Anthony). As Benjamin put it, in the permanent part of an essay which was alas written in a more hopeful situation:

...only by transcending the specialization in the process of production that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its order can one make this production politically useful; and the barriers imposed by specialization must be breached jointly by the productive forces that they were set up to divide. The author as producer discovers—in discovering his solidarity with the proletariat—simultaneously his solidarity with certain other producers who earlier seemed scarcely to concern him. (230)

Only this can, in his wonderful polysemy, unfetter die Produktion der Intelligenz: the production of us intellectuals, but also the productivity of intelligence or reason. And if we at the moment don’t find many proletarian organizations to meet us in the middle of the tunnel, we can start by doing utopian cross-pollinations of at least the cultural with the philosophic, economic, political, and other history studies. This is, for example, why I consider Attali’s book on the political economy of music (the age of repetitive evacuation of meaning and big centralized apparati determining production and listening as commodified time, best foregrounded in muzak) as one of the most enlightening diagnoses of Post-Fordism; or why my latest book interlards seven essays and seven sequences of poetry. But I’m afraid we’ll have to relearn the tradition of persecution ranging, say, from Cyrano and Spinoza, through Marx’s and Benjamin’s exile from universities and many countries, to the Pope’s treatment of Liberation Theology: such ecumenic professionalism will entail less reading of papers and much more civic conflictuality.

For, on the citizenship end of the same continuous spectrum, it means beginning to fight two even more difficult long revolutions. One is to master what we might call, adapting Said, critical worldliness: Brecht called it the art of thinking also in other people’s heads. Though we partly become intellectuals in order to get far from the madding crowd, our class and often even personal survival requires us now—without surrendering either our bearings or the clarity of our arguments’ articulation!—to get out of the elite ghetto of writing, theatre, etc., into the mass media. The most important politico-cultural position today is obviously the TV station (rapidly fusing with virtual space), secondly the radio station, and thirdly the cinema and the video production. This is why they are also, in descending order, the most firmly controlled by billions and laws. Nonetheless, there may be limited chinks in the system, as proved by the stories of the computer groups, the three-kilometer-radius Japanese radio stations, or of the movie producing units at the end of “real socialism” in East Central Europe—all successfully used by small self-governing groups. Video production, and in particular computerization and the Internet offer many possibilities, so far used by the Rightwing subversives much more efficiently than by the Left. The second long struggle might be called global solidarity: it consists in fighting what would be a Fascist geopolitical involution, turning our privileged Northern continents into an insular Festung Amerika and Festung West-Europa. The Japanese dissident Muto Ichiyo called it perhaps more precisely “transborder participatory democracy,” and Douglas Lummis argues on his tracks that it is a necessity of our time when “imperial power is incarnated in three bodies: pseudo-democracy at home, vast military organizations, and the transnational corporations....” (Lummis, 138). Its furthest utopian horizon, absolutely necessary if we wish to avoid oblivion or caste society, is the long revolution of achieving “democratic forms of ‘social control’ of financial markets” (Chossudovsky, “IMF”).

The Modernist oases for exiles (the Left Bank, Bloomsbury, lower Manhattan, major US campuses) have gone the way of a Tahiti polluted by nuclear fallout and venereal pandemic: some affluent or starving writers à la Pynchon or Joyce may still be possible, but not as a statistically significant option for us. Adapting Tsvetaeva’s great line “All poets are Jews” (Vse poèty zhidy), we can say that fortunately all intellectuals are partly exiles from the post-Fordist Disneyland and/or starvation-cum-war dystopia, but we are an “inner emigration” for whom resistance was always possible and is now growing mandatory. The only resistance to Disneyland brainwashing is “the invention of the desire called Utopia in the first place, along with new rules for the fantasizing or daydreaming of such a thing—a set of narrative protocols with no precedent in our previous literary institutions...” (Jameson, Seeds, 90). This would be a collective production of meanings, whose efficacy is measured by “[how many] consumers it is able to turn into producers” Benjamin, “Author,” 233, and see also Attali): that is, to begin with, critical thinkers. And the only chance to do this is “[to keep] in touch with all kinds of streams of protest and dissent so as to know what’s important to say” (Ehrenreich, 177-78, and passim). And a final piece of painful news: this means “doing things we’re not used to, like saying things that ‘everybody’ (meaning everybody in one wing of the profession) ‘already knows’” (Bérubé, 171, and see also the whole section 164-78, especially 176). The gentle reader will notice I haven’t quite managed to follow this prescription....

True, utopia as static goal has been dead since the nineteenth century, even if its putrefying cadaver poisoned the twentieth. Marx’s critique of Cabet’s project of emigrating to found a colony as desertion from class struggles (and I find it rather significant that Marx did not focus on criticizing Cabet’s earlier—rather poor—utopian novel) could have taught us that “the place of utopia is not elsewhere, but here and now, as other” (Marin, 346). As Calvino’s “city which cannot be founded by us but can found itself within us, can build itself bit by bit in our capacity to imagine it, to think it through” (252), utopia cannot die. But its latent rebirth—Kim Stanley Robinson’s great Mars trilogy has understood this—depends on us.

This also means—to finally face Sylvia Kelso’s initial question—that I think my project in Metamorphoses is being misread if it is taken simply as a plea for “cold” reason as against emotion, interests, and similar. Perhaps I ought to have spent even more space on defining my terms: and for other reasons I’ve in the meantime done so (in “Cognitive”). For it was quite clear in my mind that I switched from the use of “science” to “cognition” precisely in order to prevent the subservience to and disciplining of sf by institutionalized science of the militarized technology kind or of the cheerleading futurology kind—both US and Soviet. Sylvia is right in seeing within my rethinking of the 1990s an even stronger delimitation against these, for they have in the meantime grown both stronger and more obviously complicitous with our ruling wreckers. Therefore I insist today more on the distinction between the fake and the true Novum (radically diminishing, versus radically enhancing, the potentialities of life). But I hold that valid emotion is both articulated and in a feedback with categories of reason: as is proper for a cognitive faculty.

Blackford: More recently, there appears to be a division in the sf community about the relentless philosophical materialism of Greg Egan’s work, in particular, but also in stories such as Brian Stableford’s “The Pipes of Pan,” which seems to suggest that human nature itself will be changed quite fundamentally by a future science—and that this fact (as Stableford evidently sees it) must be accepted. Some would question whether this sort of Homo proteus vision of the future (to use Edward O. Wilson’s term) is not deeply offensive to morality in some way. Politically and morally, what do you make of such transhuman and post-human scenarios?

Blackford: In the context of sf, some appear to question whether the expression of reductive materialist viewpoints about human nature and experience is simply antithetical to the purposes of art. That seems to come out in Rob Latham’s review of the 15th Dozois Year’s Best anthology (in the October 1998 issue of New York Review of Science Fiction). The fiction I’m referring to is very different from the magical fantasy which you have appeared to reject in the past, yet I wonder whether you might not be troubled by it. Do you have a view about this?

Russell, many thanks for sending me the text of the Symposium on “Posthuman sf” chaired by you at Aussiecon 1999. 1 confess that before you sent it I was stumped by your question. Posthuman? It seemed déjà vu: Foucault at end of the 1960s? and then the interminable tomes of everybody else in Paris recycling their Nietzsche, best in the Guattari-Deleuze hundreds of pages jumping from plateau to plateau amid the playful rhizomes? Well, there’s a limited number of fashions, so after recycling those of (say) the 1920s and 1930s why not advance to the haute couture of the 1960s—especially when you can disguise this in the shiny new material of teflonized cyberspace when walking down the catwalk and hoping to rake in millions from the New Yorker yuppies? So where are now the discussions about the death of sf after the Hiroshima bomb, or after landing on the Moon, or after the end of US protests from Selma to the Kent State University shootings (say 1961-73, the true Golden Age of US sf in that quarter-revolution)? But where are the snows of yesteryear? What will you discuss, Russell, when you get (as I hope you do) an equally brilliant panel in 2002? I’d lay you a little bet: not “Posthuman Nature in Sf”…

This is not to say that hidden somewhere within this ultra-violet herring there are no real, even central problems facing us; and I think your panelists ably dug many of them up. These are, of course—as everybody knows unless irremediably taken in by the fake extrapolation ballyhoo legitimating sf as bellwether for US capitalist technoscience and promoted by the Bova-Pournelle wing in sf—matters that have practically nothing to do with any far future but take the muddled white-gray-smoggy light of our everyday life through the sf cognitive system of parabolic mirrors or prisms so as to analyze it into clear, pro analysis component colors. I’ll focus here only on the downfall of the nuclear Self and the correlative or consubstantial global political economy.

I do believe the bourgeois nuclear Self is fast receding on our horizons, and the adventures of nuclear physics from Rutherford on can be read as an exact and spitting image of that “long, melancholy withdrawing roar.” (Let us pause for a moment and think why—to begin with, the same brains stamped with the same historical horizons were delving into either.) Seven years ago I wrote a long essay, whose full title might hint at my position: “Polity or Disaster: From Individualist Self toward Personal Valences and Collective Subjects.” It evinced rich sympathy for arguments from the most diverse quarters (one of them is Marvin Minsky’s work on AI cited in your Symposium, but some of my main arguments were drawn from the Chinese cultural sphere where there never was a Self in the individualist sense—just as there wasn’t one in Antiquity and not fully in the Middle Ages) that if there ever was an unsplittable Self between Descartes and Mach, or Robinson Crusoe and Stephen Dedalus, it is now an assemblage of quarks and charms and whatever. That does not at all mean there are no Subjects or personalities: Chinese or Japanese or Hellenic history is full of them. It just means that the Individuum (non-divisible-essence-of personality) is a historical invention—the English historical semantics for that invention are admirably disentangled in Raymond Williams’s Keywords—for which praise and blame ought to be given to two major forces: first, the Christian idea of a soul with interiority in direct communication to God, eschewing all Earthly City loyalties such as clan, city, State or other non-Godly collectivities. The problem is that this is tenable only in times of dire threat to life by war and starvation, when such collectivities are seen to work badly if at all (we’re getting there again, thank you). But it does not cope with the need of halfway equal citizenship in a reasonably livable affluence. This need gets met, second, by the bourgeoisie of Machiavelli’s, Luther’s, Bacon’s, and Descartes’s time, which transferred such inner loyalties to the new godhead of market competition, flatteringly usurping the ancient nickname of “freedom.” True, the invisible hand of market competition often got into inexplicable trouble and needed to be rescued by State protection (the Left Hand of Darkness indeed), so a collateral invention came to be the Nation.

We’re now, in my diagnosis, already more than halfway to new collectivities, the top-down ones; the “senator from Boeing” from Bester’s Tiger, Tiger has been with us almost forever (Clinton seems to have been the president from the abominable broiler-chicken industry). The Cartesian delusion, culminating in Kant or Mill, is over. The only question is: will this be a bottom-up, democratic collectivism—such as envisaged by Jefferson, Marx or Kropotkin—or a top-down, oligarchic one? Commune and coop, or dictatorial war camp? Alas, I wouldn’t bet any big part of my pension funds on the former: as More said at the end of his Utopia, I rather hope than believe it. In other words, will our “psychic” charms and quarks be able to recombine according to our bodily interests, as in Piercy’s Mattapolsett or Robinson’s Mars, or will they be straitjacketed into the terrorism of Bill Gates, Wall Street, and the World Bank, mortifying our flesh in the new corporate and feudal capitalisms? You can find this too in Gibson, Piercy, Gwyneth Jones, and many others in sf, probably the best X-ray instrument we have within fiction. So the dislike of the body, rampant from cyberpunk to Ken Macleod, seems to me a very bad sign. To split mind from body, sensorium from senses, is Cartesianism gone crazy. And Maureen Kincaid Speller rightly made the crucial parallel between the traditionally (in Christianity) “lower” body and the lower classes:

...all these portrayals of a transhuman or posthuman existence... show privileged societies, peopled by an elite who can afford to cut loose from their flesh containers and play throughout the Universe.... Who maintains this existence for them?...who tends the machine or grows the new body? One is left to posit a mysterious invisible underclass,...rather like the servants running a Victorian country house, or the Hispanic gardeners and maids in Los Angeles. The emphasis is on choice, but choice is governed by material wealth, and that is surely no choice at all.

The lower classes traditionally (magically) include women, the lowest creatures on any religious scale. Since we don’t have sf critics from global periphery or from working classes (bar one or two maybe), the female and feminist critics are as a rule most attuned to this. Not only Speller but also Helen Merrick rightly notes how “women, people of color, and gay people” are accustomed to thinking of their bodies as constructed, usually by others. Speller’s Hispanic maids serve here an admirable triple purpose: they identify ethnicity, class, and gender of the oppressed and exploited, the immigrants from the colonized periphery of the global capitalist system into its core, who bring with them (in a fine show of poetic Justice) the overt violence exported by the empires into their countries and classes one or two centuries ago. But of course, the economy and daily life of the rich would collapse without the working and consuming poor: so their immigration, legal or not, is tacitly or openly encouraged, while taking good care they do not get the economico-political rights of the unionized workers they’re helping to displace and vanquish.

Finally, what does this do to the techniques of writing and reading sf? Not much, I’d think. Whatever Greg Egan’s or anybody else’s scientific and futuristic ideas, they still inevitably write for today’s readers. The problem of “rounded characters” à la E.M. Forster, taken from 19th-Century Realism and propagated (but not practiced) in sf by Le Guin, seems to me no problem: sf does not have them, nor should it, nor can it: for it is a parabolic or emblematic and not a mimetic or naturalistic genre. Kingsley Amis had it right long ago, in his New Maps of Hell: Gulliver cannot be a mariner out of Joseph Conrad—that is, an individual seen simultaneously from without and within, which gives the stereometric effect. All the interesting, indeed most ingenious variations involving non-human entities—for example, the “demons” of Walter Jon Williams—are simply metaphors or emblems for existing facets (charms and quarks) of the Subjects or personalities today. Personality has, as pointed out by your panelists, always been fabricated: there is no original Rousseauist Noble Savage whom we have lost through capitalist technology. True, the pace of change enforced by computerized stockmarkets seems unprecedented in duration and in global scope—the direst stresses of Auschwitz or Vorkuta or the Ithaca jail were more limited. The fragmentation thrown up by the Subjects in answer to such stress will surely present some new recombinations, not necessarily pleasant. While it is only fair to try to get the best out of any situation one finds oneself in, its particular potential delights, the yuppie delight in them, well noticed (say) in Gwyneth Jones’s review of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, seems to me much too exaggerated, one-sided, and more than somewhat irresponsible. And the reader of 2001 or 2010 will be able to accept and understand more fragmentation than before, not so much because Prigogine or Foucault have by now percolated into the intelligentsia but because the reader’s life will be increasingly such: run where the corporation wants you, when it wants, and how it wants; and the wants change with the profit winds. But a story will still have a beginning, middle, and end, simulacra of people and of landscapes in time, and so on. In the evolution of Homo sapiens, the 4,000 years from Homer and Gilgamesh are not such a big deal.

But we do kill and maim more efficiently.

Ikin: Finally, looking at the field of sf criticism as it stands at present, what do you see as its most significant weakness or oversight? What are the aspects which we are most pressingly still struggling to grasp? What specifics would you like to see addressed in the next few years?

Let us, in the interests of propaganda, compile a list of problems we do not pretend to have solved (Brecht).

Of course I won’t compile a Brechtian list here either for sf criticism in general (Marc Angenot and I gave it a shot in the essay “Not Only but Also,” now in my Positions, but this was in another country and the wench is dead) or for mine own. For one thing, it might be longer than the interview so far. For another, a single person cannot do it, only a group; and I should stress here that I deeply disbelieve in copyrights and geniuses, so that whatever strengths my criticism may have truly derives from my having—in a doubtless truncated way, dictated by our social (dis)organization—functioned as a focuser and formulator of group debate, incorporating selected hints, insights, scoldings, proposals... by, say, the co-editors (Dale Mullen, and then Marc Angenot) and almost the whole board of consultants of Science-Fiction Studies during my 1973-81 tenure—just as half of the contributions in that S-FS bear traces of my hands-on editing. I simply wish to indicate the most glaring gaps, which prey most on my mind. From what is to be done in sf criticism, I pick out one matter which seems to me a key: the Parable as the strategic (creative and critical) tool (which then logically entails a reconsideration of Fantasy).

When Patrick Parrinder (as editor) and I were discussing a possible title for a volume of essays by various hands somehow connected with my retirement (it is due out this Summer from Liverpool and Duke UP), I suggested that instead of “Cognition and Estrangement” it really ought to be “Cognition, Estrangement, the Novum, and the Parable.” This was an only semi-joking proposal, for my (teleologically) final essay in the Positions book advances a view of sf that takes a new tack in comparison to the first three terms from Metamorphoses, though I trust it is not incompatible with them, as a further analogy or variant of allegory. In art rather than science, the nearest analogy may be the “moment of Cubism” (thus Picasso rather than Einstein), which John Berger dates around 1910-14 but in his sense of a horizon where all was possible I’d extend it to the 20 years after 1917, to the Left Modernism of Joyce, Chaplin, Eisenstein, and Brecht. It would not be too difficult to correlate this with the debates between the open and closed (Bloch’s “warm stream vs cold stream,” say Luxemburg or Gramsci vs Kautsky or Stalin) interpretations of Marx, in which the “cold” pole eschewed the scandal of dialectics in favor of the comforting Newtonian predictive element (“iron laws”) inherited but also transcended by Marx.

I cannot here retraverse the theory of parable, but may only in the most abbreviated way (to be filled in by the kind reader reaching for the old essay in Positions) repeat that the parable has perennially been the privileged genre—and even more: the privileged method, which can therefore extend to stories of any length—of fruitfully marrying textual seduction (in the “vehicle”) and cognitive consummation (in the “tenor”). You’ll note it is a highly affective, nay erotic, way of bringing about what Brecht called “the gentle might/authority/violence of reason” (die sanfte gewalt der vernunft), the feedback between the universal and the singular that constitutes any cognition. This Way may be sneered at by people who cannot imagine that reason may be seductive—poor they! For they are weighed in the balance against Aristophanes, countless mashal-writing rabbis, Jehoshua of Nazareth, Gautama the Enlightened, Swift, Lessing, and so many others; “I had not thought death has undone so many” (T.S. Eliot).

All very well, I hear the dogmatic Post-Modernists reply, we know Bellamy wrote impressive parables and Wells stories which are narrativized parables (as “The Country of the Blind”), but what has this to do with us in the new dispensation? Well, maybe little with you—though I read much Derrida and Guattari-Deleuze as parables, and in fact the whole PoMo vulgate-text is one mega-allegory of the lovehate at the loss of Master Narrative and of the clever hysteria of Hegel’s Serf without a Master—but a lot with the state of affairs we’re trying to understand today. The parable is the most complex, refined, and populist form of allegory, opposed to the elitist theological combats of Virtues and Vices or Psychomachia, those black-and-white exorcisms. The overall horizons of allegory to my mind deal with the relationships of art to truth, or of narrative and metaphoric imagination to conceptualized, normative doctrine; in other words, allegory has to do with the interplay between what is in social hegemony held to be true (and thus in a way privileged and indeed sacred) and what is held to be feigned (and what has therefore, historically, oscillated uncomfortably between being unholy, just entertaining, or a second mode of privileged cognition). This has become more complex and exacerbated after the capitalist Industrial Revolution, which both installed inescapable social dynamics and yet held fast to the ruling-class traditional belief that history is at a qualitative end, and—in the new bourgeois variant—only quantitative growth remains (as in sports records or computer software: faster, higher, more).

What then is the role of new creativity, which is, as it were, generically discontinuous from the privileged body of normatively “true” texts, which is fiction or heresy rather than fact or orthodoxy? I have argued in a brief old text that all allegory, verbal or otherwise, is a (more or less admitted) relationship between a new proposition and an existing privileged set of normative and ruling propositions which the allegory re-produces (egoria) in a variant and other (allos, dare I say estranged?) way; and it might be apparent how discussions of the Novum necessarily intertwine with allegorical horizons. I noted there an inherent tension in a dynamic bourgeois society between piety and creativity, the static tradition of doctrine and the deviating pressure of experience, so that a modern parable can only be faithful after its own fashion: even the most believing creators are uncomfortable allies for priests, I concluded on the basis of my own heretical Titoist experience. Within such horizons, the small forms of proverb, riddle, animal (or Alien) fable, and parable will be more open to a conflict of authority than the “large forms” of mythical and religious systems, which are inexorably drawn into a confirmation of (sometimes new) authority.

The parable is, then, traditionally a way of intimately relating doctrine to fiction—and vice-versa. The traditional politico-religious point of the parable is to open the listener’s ears to the irruption of (often new) understanding, Bloch’s “aha-effect”: “O now I see that the tiny grain of mustard seed growing into the biggest bush of them all is Christ’s Word about the Kingdom of Heaven growing into my heaven-reaching faith in it!” Theoretically, one might expect the parable not to survive the death of God in the 20th-Century, the rise of competing macro-godheads and tribal godlets which entailed the slaughters of tens of millions as well as the starving of and psychic terror over—and thus evacuation of imaginative reason from—hundreds of millions, that have between them irretrievably sullied the alternatives of ideology and the Id. But practice is always slyer than theory, and while Old Nobodaddy might be dead, the parable has managed to survive in two ways, identified with Kafka and Brecht (not counting nostalgic reactions back to reach-me-down Romanticism). Kafka managed to write parables—as Beckett managed to write Mystery-plays—against a backdrop of “zero doctrine,” that is, the painful absence of community values and interhuman sense that was traditionally codified into a more or less religious doctrine, so that his isolated protagonist became a grotesque lone creature (my favorites are the animal fables of “The Burrow” or “Josephine the Songstress” rather than the clearer almost-sf of “The Penal Colony,” but the overt thumbnail sketch is in “The Door of the Law”). Brecht on the whole successfully navigated the whirlpools between the Scylla of nihilism (Kafka) and Charybdis of pseudo-religious Marxism as belief-into-scientific-destiny (not confined to Stalin) to approach a paradoxically experimental doctrine in which it is the method of fitting the sight to the situation seen that matters, and not any system. The allegorical Little Man Schweik meets finally the allegorical Ruler Hitler at the end of one of Brecht’s most engaging parables of how to survive despotism, and Hitler fails: he is not prepared for Winter.... Neither is Joan Dark in the slaughterhouses of locked-out Chicago, an awful warning—the first “new map of hell,” in fact—how the unemployed and dispossessed have to stick to each other or miserably die (St. Joan of the Slaughterhouses). It’s a cold world, my masters, and you better be prepared—by slyness, wit, and method.

I shall try now to apply this to K. S. Robinson’s [Color] Mars trilogy to make my point by using a brilliant unpublished essay of Fredric Jameson’s, in the book edited by Parrinder. As I was arguing, after Marx and Nietzsche it’s no go for parables (or any other allegories) which trust in the Transcendental Signifier, the doctrinal tenor as soul or static essence, to which is then adjusted the imaged story, the vehicle as sensual body: they cannot satisfy. If there is to be any soul or essence (I argue in “Two Cheers” that a dynamic, changeable essence is necessarily to be posited in order to speak about anything, so that I was emboldened by reading in Robinson that “Terra sees [in Mars] its own essence”), it can only be decisively co-constituted by the body—here the story with its figures and metaphors. Surely all flesh is grass and in a way perhaps the vanity of vanities, but it’s the last line of defense and offense, delight and memory, left to us. In fact, if the Platonic-Idealist doctrine of two realities is thereby refused—the soul being either a changeable disposition of flesh or nothing at all—it is no longer quite true that the vehicle is concrete (plant) and the tenor abstract (belief in the Kingdom), and we might even pose the question whether this understanding of allegory is not characteristic of German Idealism and Romanticism, a late and degenerate form. Was King Pluto concrete but riches an abstract concept for Aristophanes, was Christ’s Kingdom To Come really abstract for medieval believers? In this intimate interaction, the fact that the tenor is being elicited by such-and-such a Possible World (in Robinson, by all the features consubstantial to the three changing colors of Mars) cannot be simply subsumed by the tenor’s concept or even image and then forgotten, otherwise we’d have to equate any such fictional text to a leading article written against the same horizon. (This is my problem with the useful “discourse theory,” debated for years now with Marc Angenot.) An irreducible surplus is engendered by the humanizing features of World, Figuration, and Narration of their interactions; Jameson names it after Althusser’s “overdetermination,” but I suspect pluricausality is only an important synecdoche for what is happening and at stake here.

To exemplify it by contraries: the contingent grain of mustard-seed gives rise to a stout suspicion that whatever tenor is built by means of it may get into trouble once the world of the listener is sufficiently removed from Mediterranean agriculture. A post-industrial Kingdom of Heavens may have to cease being a Kingdom and in Heavens, acquire a dynamic vector, etc. In fact, it may have to become a utopian something to which the Mars trilogy relates as Dante’s equally outrageous Mount of Purgatory does to his planetary Paradises. Post-industrial cognition can only proceed by experimental construction out of “nature”‘s (the production mode’s) constriction, the main constriction or resistance as well as source of strength in capitalism being the money economy (on which Balzac’s realism is founded). Thus, science—as Jameson argues—is no doubt an allegory for human relationships, from which it anyway stems and which it then strongly inflects, but also the philosophical—or better, methodological—model for steering their dynamics.

While Robinson might demur from any such residual triumphalism (utopia is for him indeed the unnamable color on which Jameson zeroes in, approachable only by symbolic detail), what we can clearly see in his exemplum is how our bourgeois categories of institutionalizing, fragmenting, and alienating cognition into politics, religion, economics, psychology—the entire organigram of our social science Faculties, against which Marxists and Nietzscheans of all stripes have always struggled—begin to break down here. The ideal equivalent of the rainbow coalition is cognitively debated in the story’s interplay of what we poorly classify as ecological, political, economical (Martian and Corporate Terran), ethnic, and even psychological matters (only religion seems to have been displaced into ecological politics on Mars). This is of a piece with a cognitive recovery of History. Let me call it “the filling in of King Utopus’s trench”; in Robinson, the most astounding image and pars pro toto standing for it is the space-elevator cable which “wraps itself twice around the planet like a broken necklace” (Jameson): an anti-trench which has always to be reckoned with as an unclean (but for this age’s horizons unbreakable) birth-cord from mega-capitalism, which may yet strangle any attempt at new birth.

Thus, it becomes clear that Stan Robinson has managed a Herculean feat which we might at first, within sf, call the reconciling of an almost Stapledonian grand sweep with a micropolitics out-Delanying Delany’s individualist and sometimes whimsical details (see Broderick). But then, I’d go further, to the highest level: Robinson is giving a new twist to the Kafka-Brecht dilemma. His mega-parable is certainly not nihilist, though it shares with Kafka (or Nietzsche) the refusal of the Law as transcendental signifier. Updating the Brechtian (or Marxian) tension between the need for orderly learning and for productive anarchy, it plumps for nearness to the latter but on the same globe: we could call it the Tropic of Anarchy on the globe of cognition. Brecht’s equidistant Equator, halfway to the Tropic of Order, seems out of reach today. In storytelling terms, this means no explicit “moral” of the fable or tenor of the parable is imaginable and thus tellable today, unless it be the moral of open-endedness: History does not end, and this is no small matter when all the gleichgeschaltet—or forcibly coordinated mass media—tell us it’s ended definitely (and as we can see, badly). And conversely, the “show” of vehicle is to be much “thicker,” much more validated by material(ist) details or “realistic,” much more livable-in and seductively ostended, than the usually laconic and somehow reticent, wry European brevity of Brecht or indeed Kafka. Both of them knew roughly or precisely what to expect; we today—and Robinson as our story’s teller—do not know: we must not believe Kafka, we cannot believe Brecht (who is politically equivalent to a warm halfway house between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg). Indeed, from where I stand, the fact that Lenin is, as Jameson notes, conspicuously absent in Robinson even as a false alternative (which was still there in Piercy’s Dance the Eagle to Sleep) seems a serious—dare I say American—gap not well compensated by the utopian optimism of eppur si muove. One hopes he will return to this gap, for no serious utopianism can fail to work through the problem of vanguard organization versus bloody defeat. Yet the most important matter remains that in any such ongoing history Kafka’s and Brecht’s Judgments are inescapable, and the Trial may be upon us sooner than we think.

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