Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction. Annika Gonnermann

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СКАЧАТЬ dystopian genre are currently subject to, it is vital to look further afield. Having established external criticism as the modus operandi of classical dystopian fiction, the following chapter will demonstrate that some contemporary novels seem to stand in the tradition of critical utopia and to work only through the lens of immanent criticism. Since this shift is a complex phenomenon and requires a broad theoretical foundation, it is thus necessary to shed light on the socio-political reality of the 21^st century and its defining actors on a global stage (neoliberalism and globalisation), before attempting to show how these changes have started to affect dystopian fiction. Therefore, this chapter will first define the concept of neoliberalism and trace its influence on all levels of human life, before showing how this economic system has successfully colonised the realm of the possible, i.e. how we have come to think of neoliberal capitalism as the natural state of life. Drawing on the notions of Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Mark Fisher, this chapter will continue by explaining in detail why external criticism is not a suitable platform from which to criticise a social formation such as neoliberalism. Finally, this chapter will present the theoretical framework necessary to formulate immanent criticism in the first place, introducing David Grewal’s notion of ‘network power’ as one possible theoretical lens before continuing with the analysis of five informative and illustrative examples of contemporary dystopian fiction, which offer a critical reading of neoliberal capitalism.2

      Theorising Neoliberal Capitalism and Globalisation

      Neoliberalism – just like Fordism or Taylorism – is a historically bound formation, that is to say, a specific manifestation of the current macro-economic, political, and social system commonly referred to as capitalism (cf. Dörre 47).1 Demarcating capitalism from earlier forms of socio-political and economic systems such as feudalism, Ellen M. Wood defines capitalism in The Origin of Capitalism (1999) as a movement starting approximately in the 16^th and 17^th century, “in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where all economic factors are dependent on the market” (2). If capitalism is thus defined as a historical process, favouring market exchange (most notably in the form of wage labour) as the principal mode of societal regulation (cf. Best 500), neoliberalism can be thought of as capitalism’s logical, global extension, its current “stage” ever since the 1970s:2 it is the “political, economic, and special arrangements within society that emphasize market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual responsibility. [It is] broadly defined as the extension of competitive markets into all areas of life” (Springer, Birch, and MacLeavy 2).3

      Moreover, neoliberalism connects the two phenomena globalisation and capitalism (cf. Grewal 247). Commonly associated with the rise of neoliberalism, globalisation is defined as a specific set of socio-economic changes dating from the 1970s (cf. Eagleton-Pierce 17), which include, among others, the “international dispersal of production and consumption” and “rapid technological development, especially in communicative technology and a concomitant expansion of speculative capital and the dematerialization of value” (Connell 225). While globalisation had of course started centuries before (one might think of the British East India Trading Company, which promoted intercontinental trade as early as 1600), it is the specific nexus between neoliberalism and globalisation that is of particular interest to this analysis. Alain Touraine, too, connects the two phenomena on a fundamental level, stating that “[g]lobalization means the triumph of economic forces that are increasingly organized at the world level, while political, legal, and social agents retain very limited if any capacity to intervene at this level at all” (270),4 thus commenting on the increasing divide between international and national power.5 Neoliberalism denotes “a historical situation in which structure, politics and society have embraced the market as an ethics, as the universal determinant of life and human activity” (Nilges 162),6 thereby substituting any other guideline for human behaviour.7 Valuing market exchange as a universal standard, the aim of neoliberalism is to “maximiz[e] the reach and frequency of market transactions” (Harvey, Neoliberalism 3), seeking to “bring all human action into the domain of the market” (ibid.), – even those areas previously untapped. In short, neoliberalism has “become hegemonic as a mode of discourse” (ibid.), dominating in theory and practice the way we structure our lives.

      The free market focuses not so much on macro-structures but zooms in on the individual: to say it in the words of Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, “the individual tends to acquire ontological priority over the collective” (19). Neoliberalism turns individuals into the homo oeconomicus, identifying them as the centre of all responsibility of action.8 As Ralph Fevre writes in Individualism and Inequality (2016), in a neoliberalist setting, “people are expected to know their own minds, and be able to make plans, and take decisions, which help them to achieve personal objectives” (5). Moreover, as David Harvey adds, “[a] ‘personal responsibility system’ […] is substituted for social protections (pensions, health care, protections against injury) that were formerly an obligation of employers and the state” (Neoliberalism 168). In a life free of state intervention (only as a last resort to stabilise markets), the market becomes the yardstick for social action, the individual within the market the architect of his or her own fortune – the basis for a American understanding of individualism (cf. Eagleton-Pierce 20). The promise: life will be better and free of coercive control.9

      Neoliberalism and the Colonisation of the Imagination: Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’

      Francis Fukuyama’s notorious ‘End of History’ thesis has popularised the assumption that democracy and neoliberalism are the telos of human destiny.1 In his dialectical, neo-Hegelian approach to history, understood as the process of societies overcoming conflict (cf. Sagar), Fukuyama states that humanity has reached its telos by installing liberal democracies and the free market; it has produced an equilibrium of forces and the “best we were going to get” (ibid.). In Francis Fukuyama’s own words, “liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles and economics – the ‘free market’ – have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity” (xiii).2 For better or worse, Fukuyama’s text has often been “read as the apologia for rampant capitalism” (Jacobson), for it advocates the claim that democracy in combination with neoliberalism lacks an equivalent alternative but constitutes the epitome of history.

      Neoliberalism has been stylised as the most natural approach to human relations, being accepted even “at the level of the cultural unconscious” (Fisher 6). Mark Fisher has cultivated this assumption under ‘capitalist realism,’ a term created to refer “to the contemporary condition in which all social and political possibility is seemingly bound up in the economic status quo” (Shonkwiler and La Berge 2). He argues that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2, emphasis in the original). Taking the view that neoliberalism is the embodiment of the capitalist realist spirit par excellence, Fisher offers a rather bleak diagnosis: the economic sphere has successfully colonised the cognitive capacities of humanity, obscuring the very possibility of conceiving of alternative systems. Capitalism “is more like realism in itself” (ibid. 4), impeding our capacity to conceive alternatives. As Ellen M. Wood comments somewhat sarcastically, “if capitalism is the natural culmination of history, then surmounting it is unimaginable” (Origin 8). Benjamin Kunkel, too, criticises this understanding, “neoliberal principles were ardently proclaimed by some people I knew and shruggingly accepted by most of the rest” (Utopia 6). Entire intellectual schools refuse to even consider alternatives to the status quo, dismissing them as “madness” (Žižek in an interview with O. Jones et al.) and condemning those who articulate them “as lunatic or terrorist” (Levitas and Sargisson 26). Thus, these schools successfully impede the search for alternative social systems, defending free market capitalism as the natural order of things, and decrying alternatives СКАЧАТЬ