The Futurological Fetish

The futurological is an essentially fetishistic discourse.

Although one hears discussions every day devoted to the contrary proposition, there actually is no such thing as "technology in general" about which one can say anything useful or in respect to which one can properly declare oneself to be devoted or opposed.

There are in fact always only indefinitely many techniques and artifacts at hand and in play, of concern to a diversity of stakeholders according to the diversity of their stakes, imagined, invented, regulated, talked about, taken up, paid for, put to uses according to a welter of what finally amount to political assumptions, conditions, ends. And so, to advocate or invest one's hopes in "technology" in the conventional futurological construal requires first a disavowal of the plural political substance that defines its given instances.

As often as not, this derangement of our sense of the political substance of the "technological" then prepares the way for a crucial second futurological disavowal of the political, whereby one goes on to fancy otherwise "intractable" political problems -- for instance, the persistence of poverty, the irresistible corruption of authoritative institutions, the inadequate responsiveness of government to the consent of the governed -- will be susceptible of "technofixes."

To be talking about "technology," then, is always to be not-talking about the politics through which certain technoscientific vicissitudes, certain technodevelopmental assumptions or aspirations are selectively de-politicized, and always in the service of parochial political ends, and often as a preliminary to indulging in empty talk about overcoming political problems by means of this politically de-politicized "technology."

The "technological" as such is always produced through the de-politicizing stabilization of the field of actually always contested practices of imagination, education, discovery, invention, testing, publication, regulation, deliberation, application, appropriation. Also, the "technological" is always selected from a greater profusion of artifice and technique actually at hand through the work of familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing discourses. Further, the "technological" would always divert agency from collectivity into capacity, from the political to the physical, from organization to force-amplification. And so, the "technofix" is less a marginal instance than the condensed essence of the "technological" as such, the fixation that would fix things. And whatever else it may be in the manner of dangerous oversimplification, wishful-thinking, or outright fraud, the techno-fix is always a placeholder for relinquished political agency, it is a site of hope very specifically for the one who is bereft of the hope of political agency.

The structure of this placeholder is classically fetishistic: "I am without x, but through the fetish, it turns out after all that I am not." While the terminology may be unfamiliar to you, the notion is of course very familiar: "I have lost my wife, but through my infatuation with my young girlfriend, it turns out I have not lost my wife at all" -- "I have lost my youth, but through my purchase of this red sports car, it turns out I have not lost my youth at all" -- (and in the facile Freudian fetishism classic) "The woman traumatically lacks a penis, but through the spiked heel, the lipstick, the riding crop, it turns out she has one after all" and the trauma of "lack" thereby presumably eased.

The futurological fetish in the form of the technofix clearly rehearses this structure: "I know but cannot bear knowing that I do not have a real voice in the political decisions that affect me, but because I blog it turns out that I do," even if almost nobody reads my blog -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that our civilization is no longer progressing to the benefit of all, but because this liquid laundry detergent now has the E-Z Pour Spout it turns out we are progressing after all," even if the marketing campaign for the E-Z Pour Spout is just repackaging as a feature something that isn't really either useful or even new at all -- "I know but cannot bear knowing that anthropogenic climate change has passed the tipping point beyond which catastrophe for all but the richest scoundrels on earth is likelier by the day, but because I advocate 'geo-engineering' it turns out that there is hope for us after all," even if I cannot coherently specify in what ways 'geo-engineering' proposals differ essentially from the presumably failed or failing proposals that provoked my despair, I cannot explain why they are to be assessed differently from these presumably failed or failing proposals, I cannot explain how they will presumably elude the organizational and political bottlenecks of these presumably failed or failing proposals, and so on.

Now, in the more classically Marxian understanding of the fetish-form, one fetishizes the commodity when one confuses the price at which it is offered for sale as an encounter with what matters essentially about it.

That commodities are first of all products, that is to say they appear before us as end-products of an organized process of labor involving people who share this historical moment in the world with us and who labor under conditions of ease or distress, freedom or constraint, health or disease, and a process of manufacture, transportation, distribution taking place on and impacting wholesomely or destructively the planet in which we all live and on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing, all of that vanishes behind the price at which the fetishized commodity declares itself available for purchase, and so declares itself essentially related to every other commodity likewise available for sale at a higher or lower price and also as related to whatever money you have in your pocket or might save or borrow in the future to purchase that commodity if you set yourself to that task.

To live in a world in which the fetishized commodity form prevails is to live as it were in a world every event and entity of which is arrayed before you as if in a department store display window. Interposed between you and everything before you is a price-tag, and it is through that price tag that you grasp your essential relation to the things of that world.

For Marx, our habituation to buying and selling as mediated by these prices, by the fetishized commodity-form, amounted to the learning of a kind of self-limiting over-literal language, and through our becoming accustomed to relating to the world and to one another solely through these fetishized forms we gain a knowledge of the world that demands ignorance most of all, that is to say the ignoring of much that actually matters most in the world. Through our mastery of the literalizing language of fetishized commodities we fancy that we are empowered, that we have acquired the know-how to navigate our world successfully as reasonable responsible agents, but we actually come to relate to one another mistakenly as though we were things and not people. We mistake an encounter of persons (peers who labor to produce, co-ordinate, and distribute goods and services and people who need or want goods and services) that happens to be mediated by commodities as an encounter between things-available-at-a-price (the commodity and the wage-earner who would purchase the commodity). We thus become hopelessly subservient to things, and through this subservience become subservient in turn to the elites on whose terms things are available for exchange first of all.

To return to the allegory of the shop window, it is not just all the world that is arrayed before us behind the glass offering itself up for sale at a price, but we mistake our own reflections in the surface of the glass as our own selves, selves indispensably part of that world for sale, and so we lose the sense of actually living our lives and substitute for that the sense of having lives the moments and energies of which we will auction off to the highest bidder in exchange for the satisfaction of our wants as displayed on offer with the money we make among them, all on terms otherwise than the ones we might make together. We disown our own selves in imagining a self that owns itself, we sell ourselves into a kind of willed slavery, a dispossession of selfhood figured as a possession we have but always only to sell it to someone else.

I hope I can be forgiven this long detour, but what it enables me to point out is that although the futurological fetish may derive its legibility from what seems a citation of the psychoanalytic fetish (I know but cannot bear knowing x, but through the fetish I know otherwise and hence can bear what I really know), it derives its force from what seems more a citation of the Marxian fetish. Futurological fetishism is above all habituation to a language of "The Future," a disabling of agency enabled by the mirage of capacity, a disabling of freedom enabled by the mirage of force-amplification, a disabling of our promising-threatening inhabitation of the plural-present enabled by the mirage of the crystallization in the present of "The Future" to come.

Strictly speaking, given the triumphalist determinism of Marxist accounts of history (a triumphalism that might in justice be depicted as the technofix writ large beyond belief), whatever the family resemblances the futurological fetish finally differs definitively from both from the classic psychoanalytic and Marxist varieties, however useful the grasp of these is to understanding it. What seems to me key to the futurological fetish is the habitual displacement onto a depoliticized "technology" of an essentially political dilemma, second the habitual displacement of political agency (collective education, agitation, organization to solve shared problems) onto technoscientific capacity already thus depoliticized, and third the habitual displacement from the plural-present of the political and the non-deductive vicissitudes of historical struggle onto the "The Future" toward which these technoscientific capacities are presumably logically, as it were mechanistically, unfolding.

In futurology, the ones blinded by greed would lead those blinded by fear... into The Future! The futurological fetish is the phony promise of mastery fueled by the fear of helplessness and purchased through the relinquishment of the only real power available to us to make a difference in the world and to make sense of the world, our political power, peer to peer.