Can We Imagine The Future? by Fredric Jameson

The common sense position on the anticipatory nature of Science Fiction as a genre is what we would call a representational one. These narratives are evidently for the most part not modernizing, not reflexive and self-undermining and deconstructing affairs. They go about their business with the full baggage and paraphernalia of a conventional realism, with this one difference: that the full ‘presence’ –the settings and actions to be ‘rendered’ are the merely possible and conceivable ones of the near or far future. Whence the canonical defense of the genre: in a moment in which technological change has reached a dizzying tempo, in which so-called ‘future shock’ is a daily experience, such narratives have the social function of accustoming their readers to rapid innovation, of preparing our consciousness and our habits  for the otherwise demoralizing impact of change itself. They train our organisms to expect the unexpected and thereby insulate us, in much the same way that, for Walter Benjamin, the big-city modernism of Baudelaire provided an elaborate shock-absorbing mechanism for the otherwise bewildered visitor to the new world of the great nineteenth-century industrial city.

If I cannot accept this account of SF, it is at least in part because it seems to me that, for all kinds of reasons, we  no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly ‘science-fictional’ futures of technological automation.. These visions are now historical and dated –streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals –while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past. Yet, even if this is the case, it might  at best signal a transformation in the historical function of present day SF.

In reality, the relationship of this form of representation, this specific apparatus, to its ostensible content- the future- has always been more complex than this. For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us ‘images’ of the future – whatever such images might mean for the reader who will necessarily predecease their ‘materialization’ –but rather to de-familiarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from other forms of de-familiarization. From the great intergalactic empires of Asimov, or the devastated and sterile Earth of  the post-catastrophic novels of John Wyndham, all the way back in time to the neater future of the organ banks and space miners of a Larry Niven, or the concepts, autofabs, or psycho-suitcases of the universe of Philip K. Dick, all such apparently full representations function in a process of distraction and displacement, repression and lateral perceptual renewal, which has its analogy in other forms of contemporary culture. Proust was only the most monumental ‘high’ literary expression of this discovery: that the present – in this society- and in the physical and psychic disassociation of the human subjects  who inhabit it – is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect.. Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to ‘experience’, for some first and real time, this ‘present’, which is after all what we have. In Proust, the retrospective fiction of memory and rewriting after the fact is mobilized in order for the intensity of a now merely remembered present to be experienced in some time-release and utterly unexpected posthumous actuality.

Elsewhere, with reference to another sub-genre or mass cultural form, the detective story, I have tried to show that at its most original ,in writers like Raymond Chandler, the ostensible plots of this peculiar form  have an analogous function. What interested Chandler was the here and now of the daily life of the now historical Los Angeles: the stucco dwellings, cracked sidewalks, tarnished sunlight, and roadsters in which the curiously isolated yet typical specimens of the unimaginable Southern California social flora and fauna ride in the monadic half-light of their dashboards. Chandler’s problem was that his readers – ourselves- desperately needed not to see the reality: humankind, as T. S. Eliot’s magical bird sang, is able to bear very little of the unmediated, unfiltered experience of the daily life of capitalism. So, by a dialectical slight-of-hand, Chandler formally mobilized an ‘entertainment’ genre to distract us in a very special sense: not from the real life of private and public worries in general, but very precisely from our own defense mechanisms against reality. The excitement of the mystery-story plot is, then, a blind, fixing our attention on its own ostensible but in reality trivial puzzles and suspense in such away that the intolerable space of Southern California can enter the eye laterally, with its intensity undiminished.

It is an analogous strategy of indirection that SF now brings to bear on the ultimate object and ground of all human life, History itself. How to fix this intolerable present of history with the naked eye? We have seen that in a moment of the emergence of capitalism the present could be intensified, and prepared for individual perception, by the construction of a historical past from which as a process it could be felt to issue slowly forth, like the growth of an organism. But today the past is dead, transformed into a packet of well-worn and thumbed glossy images. As for the future, which may still be alive in some small heroic collectivities on the Earth’s surface, it is for us either irrelevant or unthinkable. Let the Wagnerian and Spenglerian world-dissolutions of J. G.  Ballard stand as  exemplary illustrations of the ways in which the imagination of a dying class –in this case the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny –seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death that range from the destruction of the world by fire, water and ice to lengthening sleep or the berserk orgies of high-rise buildings or superhighways reverting to barbarism.

Ballard’s work- so rich and corrupt – testifies powerfully to the contradictions of a properly representational attempt to grasp the future directly. I would argue, however, that the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of or social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serves the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come. It is this present moment –unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises is un-totalized and hence unimaginable, and also because it is occluded by the density of or private fantasies as well as of the proliferating stereotypes of a media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence –that upon our return from the imaginary constructs of SF has offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered. Nor is this only an exercise in historical melancholy: there is, indeed, something also at least vaguely comforting and  reassuring in the renewed sense that the great supermarkets and shopping centers, the garish fast-food stores and ever more swiftly remodeled shops and store-front businesses of the near future of Chandler’s now historic Los Angeles, the burnt-out-center cities of small Midwestern towns, nay even the Pentagon itself and the vast underground networks of rocket-launching pads in the picture postcard isolation of once characteristic North American natural’ splendor, along with the already cracked and crumbling futuristic architecture of the newly built atomic power plants – that all these things are not seized, immobile forever, in some ‘end of history’ but move steadily in time towards some unimaginable yet inevitable ‘real’ future. SF thus enacts and enables a structurally unique ‘method’ for apprehending the present's history, and this is so irrespective of the pessimism or optimism of the imaginary future world which is the pretext for that de-familiarization. The present is in fact not less a past if its destination prove to be the technological marvels of Verne or, on the contrary, the shabby and maimed automata of P. K. Dick’s near future.

We must therefore now return to the relationship of SF and future history and reverse the stereotypical description of this genre: what is indeed authentic about it, as a mode of narrative and a form of knowledge is not at all it its capacity to keep the future alive, even in imagination. On the contrary, its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to body forth, through apparently full representations which prove on closer inspection to be structurally and constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference; to succeed by failure, and to serve as unwitting and even unwilling vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown, finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-to-familiar, and thereby becomes unexpectedly transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits. .  .

What has been said about SF in general, the related proposition on the nature and the political function of the utopian genre will come as no particular surprise: namely, that its deepest vocation is to bring home, in local and determinate ways and with the fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself; and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systematic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or the other prisoners. This proposition, however, now needs to be demonstrated in a more concrete analytical way, with reference to the texts themselves.