Media
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932.
Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1982. (make sure to watch Director’s Cut or Final Cut) (on Amazon Video, iTunes, and Pay to Watch YouTube)
Geek of the Week
Psycho Pass: Suggestions and warnings: since I choose the episodes toward the end of the first season, where the story gets to the climax and more intense, I would recommend people to look up on Wikipedia and get a sense of the background. As for episode 16, it could get quite violent and shocking, so if people feel uncomfortable toward watching mentally disturbing scene, I would suggest skipping this one. (Jun)
Vonnegut, Kurt. “Harrison Bergeron.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. 1961. (Dawn)
Theory and Commentary
Baccolini, Raffaella. 2004. The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction. PMLA 119(3): 518-21.
Milner, Andrew, et al. 2015. Ice, Fire, and Flood: Science Fiction and the Anthropocene. Thesis Eleven 13(1): 12-27.4
The society in Brave New World seems a really crazy one, but not entirely impossible. The development of high technology and advancement and knowledge are more likely to be held in the hands of the elite class and higher educated people, thus the difference between classes is getting bigger and more solidified. Would the majority of people willing to give up their freedom, individuality, rights to choose an decide, in exchange for a “happy” and “worryfree” life that is rich of all materials and needs?
Should it even be a choice?
If most people say yes and vote for the exchange, would the After Ford era come one day?
What do the references to Shakespeare’s works and religion serve in this story? How do these classic/historical texts shape John’s ideas and values, and what pushes him to choose suicide? The society, the dictator, or himself?
The biggest question I’m always left with while reading utopia/dystopia stories is whether or not they were trying to red-scare me. So frequently the authoritarian societies portrayed in false-utopias are, like Brave New World, governed on this principle of the state knowing what is best to make people happy, and there’s also this reoccurring aspect of the loss of personal choice that has lead to the state of things (Psycho Pass has this as well) that feels like a tool of neoliberalism used to demonize the concepts of communism while not actually engaging with the reality of communist beliefs. I’m not trying to argue that the USSR was good or anything, but red-scaring by showing the authoritarian Stalinist-esque state (like 1984 does) is just not a genuine discussion being had about communal ownership of the means of production and the goals of a communist society.
Baccolini in “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopia Science Fiction” states: “we are, in a sense, what we write” (519). Indeed, vast amounts of dystopian and utopian literature tend to mirror the world that the author or creator inhabited. Such seems to be the case for the media of this week. Is it possible to conceive a dystopia without the influence of our current world bearings?
Huxley’s “Brave New World” transcends its time. I was shocked by the publication year. What does this text say about youth culture during that period? During modernity? To predestine and precondition human beings raises ethical concerns. Does this diminish the capacity for humanity?
Why won’t our version of 2019 become Blade Runner’s fictional 2019? Does 2019 hold any particular relevance? Can replicants, like people, experience pain? What sort of moral issues does this raise?
I’m a massive fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s work. “Harrison Bergeron” raises some powerful, thought-invoking questions. One remained with me: can we have a utopia or are all utopias doomed to have dystopic elements?
One of the most interesting moments in “Brave New World” for me is when John proclaims: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” and Mustapha Mond responds with: “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.” In this false utopia, everyone is “happy.” And yet this means humanity has sacrificed everything that makes life worth living and most of the population in BNW are barely human at all. Given this example, can a true utopia exist where everyone is happy AND human?
Since one of the inspirations for Psycho Pass was Blade Runner, it doesn’t surprise me that the job of “blade runner” and “Enforcer” are remarkably similar. I was interested in the reasonings behind the selection process for these jobs. In Blade Runner, it’s meant to be ambiguous whether Deckard is human or replicant. If he is a replicant hunting other replicants, is that because he would be able to understand him better? Human or replicant, is he expendable? Similarly, with the Enforcers, they are “latent criminals” and go after criminals. Are they considered expendable for this reason? What does it say about the society as a whole, and what it values, in terms of who are given these jobs?
In “Harrison Bergeron,” Hazel is the one who watches Harrison on screen while George is out of the room, and when he returns she is crying, but has already forgotten why. In “2081,” it is George who watches Harrison while Hazel is gone, and when she returns the sound device in his ear makes him forget what he just saw. I’m wondering what these two different versions do to change our perception of the story? How do we view the characters, and the state of humanity, if one character forgets on her own and the other is forced into forgetting?
In the “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction” Raffaella Baccolini argues for the importance of utopia, and nonetheless, seems unable to find it as a genre in contemporary science fiction. The only two ways in which utopia is found in today’s productions are: (1) outside of them: that is, dystopia is a warning that by imagining the worst scenario imagines silently the ideal one, and (2) by resisting closure, which “allows readers and protagonists to hope”. The utopia is there, argues Baccolini, but by omission.
This brought to my mind Jameson’s remarks on utopia. According to him, “utopia” is a literary form that has always been political and that today, in this capitalist world, it is probably the only political option left to us. Faced with the failure of all economic and political systems, and the absence of (viable) alternatives to capitalism, utopia has become the only way to conceive an alternative system. “The utopian form is in itself a representative meditation on the radical difference, the radical otherness, and the systemic nature of the social totality”, says Jameson. However, he reminds us, it is impossible to imagine something we have never experienced: “even our most unleashed imaginations are nothing more than collages of experience, constructs composed of fragments and fragments of the here and now”. This means that we can never escape to our present: our history, our mode of production. Thus, utopia becomes the vehicle that makes explicit our inability to escape from the present and ideological imprisonment. Does Baccolini’s description of the utopian mode only uncovers the impossibility of utopia becoming a rounded and complete genre today?
While reading Huxley’s “Brave New World” I’ve been also reading Louis Althusser, the perfect companion to Huxley’s dystopia. Althusser, revising Marx proposes that what reproduces the conditions of production, and particularly the reproduction of labor power, are the ideological State apparatuses: a number of specialized institutions (i.e. religion, school, family, communications, culture, etc.) that reproduce the ideology of the dominant class and produce subjects perfect to fit in the current political and cultural order. Through these institutions and their discipline, the subject not only learns how to behave but also what is his place in the world: “(the educational systme) takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them (…) a certain amount of ‘know how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology (…) Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of children are ejected ‘into production’: these are the workers or small peasants. Another portion (…) fills the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar workers (…) A last portion reaches the summit (…) Each mass ejected en route is practically provided with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfil in class society” (155). Following the same line, the conditioning in Huxley is the corner stone of the happy (or at least orderly) society. Unconscious learning patterns prepare individuals for production and existence in society. Following Marxism closely (not in vain the characters are called Lenin-a, Marx, Engels or Bakunin) but superseding it, ‘Brave New World” envisages a future Capitalism not governed by repression and violence, but by pleasure and happiness. A power maintained “peacefully” by ideology, as Althusser explores, is precisely what is at game in Huxley’s novel. In Althusser text, however, the subject has no idea that he is operating under a certain ideology, in contrast, what is curious about Huxley’s novel, is the openness and honesty of the system of indoctrination. Does this only happen with the higher castes? Why don’t we ever see closely the lower ones?
Brave New World, Psycho-Pass, and Blade Runner are all dystopias of the type that Raymond Williams would classify as owing to technological transformation, but it is really fascinating how these works have interacted with the social dynamic of technological advancement in such different ways.
Psycho-Pass is open about its Western SF influences, but there are still some very distinctively Japanese elements. For a Western audience, though, what is the main theme of the narrative? How do we engage a Western critical tradition with this work without the lived cultural experience?
Brave New World has an obvious – and discussed in the Williams essay – Communist critique. But who is John as “the other?” As a liminal character between the World State and the “savages,” what does his death represent?
Blade Runner is always an act of cinematic misdirection for me. The film is full of holes, but lovely to just gaze at. Deckard moves through space with minimal waste. It is easy to see why I have built up such a cult of fascination around this film, and why watching it with a downer “um… actually” skeptic is such an indefensible position: because the film is nonsensical. I haven’t read Dick’s work that inspired it, but I have nothing but questions about it.
In Brave New World, history before the 19th century has been erased or forgotten. Without being able to draw on history for alternative modes of living, could the individuals in Brave New World, even an Alpha plus, produce a work of SF that both critiques, and reimagines, the world as it is? In other words, is historical knowledge necessary for SF?
In “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction,” Baccolini asserts that a feminist take on SF challenges binary thinking, and questions the notion of genre altogether. An example she gives is Dystopian fiction mixed with elements of Utopian fiction (specifically, maintaining belief in hope). In your opinion, is this example of genre bending radical enough? Why or why not?
In “Ice, fire and flood: Science fiction and the Anthropocene” I thought it was interesting that the authors decided to borrow elements of Wallerstein’s notion of a Capitalist world system to create a Literary world system. Do you think the adoption of Wallerstein’s model works in this essay? Why or why not?
Is the world described in Brave New World really a dystopia? The vast majority of people, thanks to Soma, genetic engineering, and operant behavioral conditioning from birth, are blissfully unaware of their slavery and enjoying their lives. One might say they exist in a pre-fabricated utopia.
In response to “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction”, can the writing of critical dystopia and oppositional texts be seen as a subtle (or overt) form of activism?
The anime series “Psycho Pass” is considered cyber punk. This sub genre of science fiction is particularly interesting to me. How is it distinguished between other types of science fiction that use advanced technology as a novum?
1. What are some of the ways in which these dystopia/utopias play on the societal fears of the time in which they were written? For example, in Blade Runner, could it be argued that the East Asian influence on the Los Angeles “future” is evoking the fears of the time that immigrants and multi-national corporations were coming to take over? How does Harrison Bergeron’s “satire” of “equality” evoke the McCarthy and Dr. Spock (the child shrink) eras, if at all? And, of course, there are the eugenic-esque elements of Brave New World that would only become more prevalent throughout the 1930s.
2. In thinking about the smog-choked, rain-filled skies of BLADE RUNNER, I’m remembering the sand blasted landscapes of the sequel, and wondering about the effectiveness of this elliptical technique when it comes to vaguely referencing climate change. The desiccated outback of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD and the vague allusions to climate change as the first stage of national collapse which led, years later, to the formation of Panem in the HUNGER GAMES also spring to mind, and leads me to ask whether science fiction, as a response to the current moment, *should* be more overtly referential to the circumstances in which characters find themselves at the mercy of climate? To paraphrase MM:FR, should we actually answer the question “who broke the world?”
3. Speaking of effectiveness, as someone that has worked a lot with – and has written in (albeit only in draft form) – this genre of dystopia/post-apocalypse, I wonder if the idea of hope isn’t just effective, but necessary. And that to suggest otherwise – to suggest total hopelessness (a la McCarthy’s THE ROAD) – is ahistorical. I was talking with a friend about the climate report, and I mentioned that people in the middle of the black plague thought *they* were living through the end of the world, but that humanity has always progressed forward in one way or another. So when it comes to hope in dystopias, should we incorporate hope more into our dystopias? Should they be the rule and not the exception?
In Blade Runner, when Deckard is testing Rachael (the unknowing android) in Tyrell’s office and a conversation sans Rachael ensues. Deckard asks “How can it not know?” to which Tyrell responds “Commerce; is our goal here”. As an instance of a larger statement contained within the film , commerce, or capitalism, does in fact produce these “more than human” androids that eventually escape the system. How does this narrative become muddied when thinking with the “perfect system” that is described in Pyscho Pass? That is, if a perfect system is one that is constantly capturing contingencies, is not commerce a perfect system? And did this “perfect system” then not create beings beyond human ability?
Psycho pass produced a lot of interesting philosophical dialogue, particularly with the hive mind controlling the society. Could we argue that the world they inhabit is a logical extension of our current digital world turned inside out and made to encompass everything? Consider the statement made by the hive mind: “[we are] creating an environment where every citizen enjoys and accepts our governance”.
I thought the two examples of Harrison Bergeron were highly useful in light of the theory piece on utopia in dystopia. The original text by Vonnegut leaves nothing more to be said in the end, wrapping up the short story in the absurdist logic of its context. There is no open-ended hope lingering here. Yet, the film version opens up the story allowing for a greater investment (especially due to the media used) in the characters and the narrative. Although both end similarly, does the film version leave the utopic impulse open even within a semi-closed-ending? And more broadly, how might a medium play into the ability of SF to accommodate “incomplete subjugation”?
Central to both Brave New World and Psycho-Pass is a desire to address uncertainty through over-rational systems dictating and leading society into even darker nooks. Harrison Bergeron addresses inequality not through lifting others but by limiting certain talents, abilities, and advantages. Both solutions prove problematic as freedom and human creativity are limited (even banned in numerous dystopias). Dehumanization is a common enough theme in u/eu/dystopian literature, but is it realistically possible to achieve a perfect (or if not perfect then near-perfect, or if not, then at least better) society without losing our very sense of humanity?
Despite both dealing with certain extremes, where does the divide between u/eutopia and dystopia really lie (or if there is a distinct line at all) as the usually opposing traditions have shown utopian tendencies in dystopian literature and dystopian tendencies in utopian literature?
I’m intrigued about the idea of free will vs determinism debate present in the Sybil system of Psycho pass and the way it develops in society.
I would love to discuss the idea of Pascal’s quote “Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognised nd is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice.” And the implications in the utopia dystopia debate.
Finally I would like for us to delve into the idea of progress, perhaps from a Nietzchean perspective.
The movie Brave New World really shock me even I watched more than three times. The first time I watched this movie was in high school and think it is impossible to create a society like that. However, now I think a similar society is beginning to create, at least in some countries. A government with strong power and technology can make its citizens become slaves. Is the soma in Barce New World just like video games, sports, and all other entertainments?
In Baccolini’s article, he points out most the Utopia/Dystopia fictions are the reflection of current society. It is reasonable as people read the novel Animal Farms and 1984. This novel is the reflection of the fear of Communism. However, some stories just happened in the past 30 years. So can we see Utopia/Dystopia fictions as the prophecy of future?
What is the significance of the novel being named after a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest? In the play, Prospero manipulates his daughter, Miranda, with magic and illusion, while in Brave New World’s London the citizens are pacified by the drug soma. Are the subjects in both stories being manipulated in the same way? Would you say the novel shares some common themes with the play? In what ways are the London of Brave New World and the island in The Tempest both utopic and dystopic?
While I find the whole idea of an authoritarian government taking control over citizens’ bodies and minds through the use of drugs terrifying, part of me wonders what it would be like to live in a constant state of ignorant bliss. If you could achieve a true level of happiness—or at least a more convincing level of happiness than modern drugs and alcohol can achieve—wouldn’t that (at least in some way) be appealing?
Someone in class mentioned how all of the narratives this week dealt with the death of God and how the characters created technologies to put similar controlling structures in place. Do people place more faith in technology because it is tangible? Is there more comfort in the visible?
With all of the utopia/dystopia examples we discussed, I keep returning to two questions for everything: what is essential and what is expendable in these future societies? And who gets to decide the value and expandability in people, places, and things? I think it’s interesting that I associate essentials and value with utopian futures and uselessness with dystopian futures, as if these two fictions can’t house both in an equal manner. I really enjoyed “Psycho-Pass” because this division of utopian and dystopian ideals wasn’t as simple as the ones presented in “Blade Runner” or “Brave New World.” Knowledge is of value to the society, but only a certain kind of knowledge which means something else that’s extremely intangible is lost, erased, and criminalized.