"Science Fiction Is the Entertainment Wing of Futurism"

Bloggerheads has an interesting exchange up between the always fabulous but far-too-kind-to-transhumanists Annalee Newitz and one of the transhumanists she is far too kind to, James Hughes.

They cover a lot of interesting ground in their conversation, and I found that Annalee especially said lots of stuff that had me nodding my head sympathetically. I so rarely agree with anybody as much as I tend to agree with Annalee that that experience itself is nicely edifying. Nevertheless, one of the things that excited me most in their exchange was something Annalee said that I think I disagree with.

At one point she said in a rather offhand sort of way that "science fiction is the entertainment wing of futurism."

As somebody who has been devoted to science fiction ferociously all my life but who frankly abhors futurology, Annalee's subsumption of science fiction under a futurological wing was a window on a really alien mapping of terrain that preoccupies me as intensely as anything I can think of.

And after all, what queergeek doesn't love an alien contact narrative?

I certainly would never want to put words in Annalee's mouth, but I can say a little about how I would personally relate science fiction and the futurological to suggest how her phrasing here might be at odds with my own.

My own glib variation on Annalee's phrase would be to say that boner-bill commercials and ads for the armed forces involving CGI laser platforms zapping debris out of the path of orbiting satellites with the caption "It's Not Science Fiction" better represent the "entertainment wing of futurism."

In my view futurology is always selling a kind of reassurance to incumbent interests that "the future" (which I forcefully distinguish from futurity) will be an extrapolation or amplification of the terms of their own parochial present. That futurism and futurology function primarily as a genre of reassurance -- even if sometimes in a disasterbatory mode in which incumbents get to stew in what usually looks to be a high state of arousal in their worst pet apocalyptic fears, their own private Room 101 -- is suggested to me already in the very notion that one could append to the radical contingency of futurity ("future is a process, not a destination" as Bruce Sterling rightly scolds) an -ism or an -ology, of all things, in the first place.

Futurology, it seems to me, is just another variation of the familiar swindle in which we are bamboozled into mistaking the profession of a wish or promise or unwarranted prediction for an asset. In futurism as in an enormous amount of corporate sales, promotion, and public relations discourse one is parted from one's money or deranged in one's wants by the projection or prediction of some hyperbolic hope or anxiety idientified with "the future," typically a straightforward extrapolation or amplification of key terms of the parochial present.

As I have remarked elsewhere, I regard futurology as the quintessential genre and gesture of neoliberal ideology. The characterization of the waste, stratification, destabilization, precarization, and distress exacerbated and exploited by neoliberal financialization as "accelerating change" "acceleration of acceleration" or even "progress toward transcension" by the current crop of futurologists (especially in the Robot Cult Caucus of futurology) is the reductio ad absurdum of futurism as neoliberal (corporate-militarist) apologia.

Not to put too fine a point on it, financialization is the temporal (futurological) elaboration of the alienation already enabled, first, through the abstraction from the unjust social conditions and unsustainable ecological impacts of production through the fetishized commodity-form and also, second, through the spatialization of uneven development/(post)colonial organizations of exploitation.

From a political perspective the present has always been riven by the diverse vantages and aspirations of the plural stakeholders who share and contest the world, peer to peer, and hence the present is always as Hannah Arendt put it, "between past and future," a collaboration and antagonism interminably reconciling the diversity of human hopes and histories, always restlessly edging us waywardly elsewhere and otherwise. In our own anthropocene epoch of thoroughly technoscientific agencies the intensity, inter-dependency, scope, and stakes of this open futurity in our present (in our plural presenting, peer-to-peer) is exacerbated to a point of crisis for which the word "revolution" or the phrase "quarrel of the ancients and moderns" are hopelessly inadequate.

Science fiction, it seems to me, provides the generic conventions through which our technoscientific present can be rendered unfamiliar enough for us to gain some critical and imaginative purchase here and now. Science fiction at its best redirects us to the open futurity inhering in our plural present, and is far from reassuring. If anything, science fiction mobilizes stakeholders in the present to educate, agitate, and organize where we are on our way elsewhere.

For me the futurological (as well as the futuristic, which I think was well characterized by Daniel Harris as a style vocabulary involving the perverse denial of the present at the level of details -- which is not at all the same thing as a critical interrogation of the terms of the present -- treated thereupon without cause as markers of "progress") is a profoundly de-politicizing discourse. This feels paradoxical, I know, since we associate technoscience with disruption and denaturalization. But to politicize or de-naturalize the status quo is to insist that the terms on which the present is given are open to collective contestation, are contingent formations caught up in interminable historical struggle. When historical change is figured as reductively techno-determined (deduced, extrapolated, amplified, or even hyperbolized from a parochial vantage in the present) then it is radically de-politicized however disruptive or "transcendental" its apparent preoccupations. It is not surprising, then, however paradoxical it may be, that we find every futurism functionally to be a retro-futurism, a reactionary endorsement of incumbency stealthed behind the mask of a false festival of change.

I won't deny that there is plenty of science fiction that takes on the coloration of the futurological, that sells itself as a spinning of predictive what-ifs in a way that disavows it is always much more about who we are and where we find ourselves now than it is indulging in some at once neutralized and hyperbolized blue-skying about what the world will be like in the next decade or the next century. But it seems to me that such pieces are almost inevitably camp (or just crap), and that they are still most interesting when they are treated as symptomatic engagements with their historical situations anyway.

I have sometimes derided futurologists as folks who cannot distinguish science from science fiction, or futurologists as would-be sf writers so inept that they not only endlessly regurgitate sf tropes and conceits with whiskers on them but also they don't even try to do the work of elementary character and narrative and setting building that even crappy fiction writers grasp as part of their task. But I do think it is crucial that we avoid making too close an identification of sf genres with the promotional pseudo-scientific genres of futurology, and certainly that we resist subsuming science fiction and speculative fiction underneath the futurist or futurological heading altogether.

While I will grant that some sf functions as a retro-futurological celebration of incumbency as the eternal protagonist of history the rest of us can best hope to consume or screen, I think it is crucial to insist as well that much sf is a critical intervention in the present that is politicizing and hence democratizing, at once testifying to and invigorating the open futurity inhering in presence, peer to peer, and as such the insistent opposite of futurism and the futurological.

"The Future" of futurism and futurology is constituted through the denial of open futurity. Futurisms and ologies characteristically substitute for the promise of political freedom arising out of open futurity the sterile promise of incapacious capacitating amplifications of instrumental force. They pretends their essentially promotional discourse is a science when it isn't, that their sales-pitch is foresight when it isn't, and that their celebration of triumphalist incumbency is a doctrine of change when it isn't. Quite in tune with the neoliberal spirit of its time, futurology originates in facile error and consummates in fraud, and to the likely ruin of the world.