Critical Theory and Dystopia

Scholars of utopian studies commonly note the recent surge in dystopian representations in written and visual narratives, reflecting the crisis-ridden dynamics of the contemporary moment. They investigate the meanings and significance of this phenomenon within literary, historical, and cultural frameworks. Patricia McManus’s Critical Theory and Dystopia is one such notable contribution to the field, with its insightful comparisons among a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century dystopias. Her main concern is the form of dystopia, which, she explains, contains utopia as its “sedimented content” (1), as well as figurations of “things which are not even named by the dystopian texts themselves but the absence of which motivates the misery of what is there: freedom, equality, difference, hope” (7). McManus reads her case studies mainly through an Adornian perspective, while drawing also on a vast array of critical sources including the work of Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Tom Moylan, and Raffaella Baccolini.Critical Theory and Dystopia’s five chapters are framed in a meticulously argued introduction that establishes the author’s critical parameters and the texts’ historical backgrounds. Subsequent chapters survey the shapes of dystopia and explore a rich selection of texts from authors as diverse as E. M. Forster, Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Leni Zumas, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, Michel Houellebecq, Gary Shteyngart, and Lionel Shriver. In historicizing the dystopian genre, McManus engages with the claim that dystopias today fail to generate any constructive critique of or cognitive estrangement from the existing world: “[If] our present is already dystopian,” she asks, “then why so much writing about futures which are worse?” (6). McManus responds by reading through those texts by Adorno that focus on the workings of power and instrumentalized reason in literature and history, and she adds her own nuanced emphasis on dystopia as a form. She reworks Darko Suvin’s well-known account of the novum as a mediating category and as the sine qua non of science fiction. By examining the interrelationship between cognition and estrangement encapsulated by the Suvinian novum, she identifies a political logic governing dystopian narratives as a “pattern of familiarization and defamiliarization” based on “forms and relations of power” (18). This allows McManus to understand the generic positioning of dystopia “as formally defined by a commitment which cannot be figured, a negative commitment” (12). Negative commitment, in turn, provides a useful critical tool for her insofar as it helps her highlight the political logic of dystopian narratives and its historical conditions.McManus’s concept of “negative commitment” is an adaptation of Adorno’s delineation of “commitment.” As McManus translates this framework to the positioning of literary dystopias, she concludes that the model of classic dystopia exemplified by the likes of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four is essentially conservative in its reliance on the reader’s reception. Yet, she adds, this model also registers its own formal limitations: The in medias res positioning of the narrator and of other characters compromises the aesthetic distance between those characters and ourselves as readers. This observation grounds McManus’s forceful analysis of contemporary dystopias and their differences from the earlier model. The identification of these differences is, of course, the most important contribution of the book.In chapter 1, McManus discusses Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, and Zumas’s Red Clocks, fleshing out how the concept of negative commitment operates and differentiates recent dystopias from older ones. Like so many protagonists in classic dystopian texts, the narrator of “The Machine Stops” is distanced from his society and its excesses (in this case, leisure), and tends to assume the reader’s core values to be humanist. McManus identifies a contradiction between the presence of these values and the narrative impossibility of representing them, a contradiction that creates the condition for negative commitment. Herein lies the ideological conundrum within classic dystopias: Much as they rely on the liberal humanist tradition, “the object of humanism collapses into and becomes as problematic as ‘progress’ or ‘civilization’ itself, concepts which are at the heart of the problem but are also the place from which the problem has to be named” (39). McManus therefore reads The Space Merchants in terms of a dilemma concerning submission and deceit, exemplified particularly through modern advertising. Her reading combines Adorno and Horkheimer’s formulation of the culture industry with the motif of space-colonization marketing to highlight the entanglement, in the novel, of “legitimized” colonial violence ingrained in European and American histories with monopolizing corporate powers. McManus identifies here an intriguing narrative maneuver: “The satire works through estranging the notion of cognition itself” (46). Once the narrator belongs to the dystopian order as a senior advertising executive, he fails to see the need to oppose the system even after he is kidnapped and downgraded by that very system to the lower-class rank of “consumer” (worker, in this context).Zumas’s Red Clocks becomes McManus’s “sharp example of the distinctiveness of contemporary dystopias,” which “have sloughed off the structural need for distance or are denied it by the dailiness of the situations they trace” (59). While in The Space Merchants McManus explores the ironical estrangement of the narrator’s supposed “enlightenment,” here she traces the collapse of the novum through the removal of a future-oriented temporal distance. There is thus no “unspoken commitment to the present,” indeed “no commitment at all” (59), but only the intricacies of the present, the here and now, in this dystopian world. She marks the implications of this shift by noting that the quotidian is too familiar to be instantly shocking; yet the shocking effect gradually sinks in. Whereas oppression in classic dystopias operates externally and uniformly, these contemporary dystopias, McManus argues, reveal that the present is built on the past. The historicity of the systemic issues embedded in the “dailiness” of the domestic life matters as much as the broader context of imperialist exploitations that destroy the possibility for the present to generate a different, better future. This argument functions as a synecdoche of the whole project, interrogating the force of history within the classic dystopia, along with the tension between the personal/private and the political/public.The second chapter offers a compelling analysis of Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, demonstrating this text’s “peculiar attachment to history simultaneously with its erasure of history” (89). Taking her cue from Adorno’s reading of Brave New World, McManus scrutinizes the multilayered structure of Orwell’s novel, which interweaves Winston’s diary and the fictional book titled “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.” She contends that this paradigmatic dystopia, like Brave New World, juxtaposes the subjective and the objective. Winston’s diary is “dysfunctional” because he fails to compose a personal history; he cannot remember his past, whereas the collective political history explained by the book within the book appears to provide an empirical account of the Party’s consolidation of power. McManus observes that power for its own sake is a pathology, referring to the link established between Communism and oligarchical collectivism that maintains the historical legibility of the novel. This legibility is also where she locates its negative commitment and disentangles Orwell’s personal intellectual views from the power of the novel itself. Negative commitment, she claims, cannot be nostalgic about things lost under a dystopian regime, since it signifies the impossibility of imagining those things in the first place: “The world put forward is wrong because it has defeated the possibility of something which has never had any historical existence” (94).Borrowing from Adorno again, in chapter 3 McManus employs the phrase “hollow space” to explicate how the dystopias written in English in the first half of the twentieth century have to forget, if not ignore, their own pasts, damaged as these are by British imperialism and slavery in the United States, while continuously stressing the value of memory, language, and history. Each case study here counters the supposed primacy of a “better” history with its faltering stability. Although Nineteen Eighty-Four is an inspiration for Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale, the latter is different in the protagonist’s first-person narrative, which also represents the handmaids collectively. Offred is nostalgic not for the past but for the futures dreamed in that past. These (past) futures, however, are ambivalent due to the differences between feminist movements across generations.McManus goes on to argue that Ballard’s Hello America (1981), Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), and other dystopias written in the 1980s not only diverge from the conventions of the older dystopian narratives but also dispense with the faith in an autonomous subjectivity. Hello America and Neuromancer, despite their future settings, both depict worlds that are trapped in “this miserable present” of oil crises and nuclear threats (114). Hello America is the story of a derelict America, its scarcity of resources leading to a reverse migration of its populace. The country can exist only as a vivid, “hollow” fantasy in the minds of its dictator-president as well as of the characters who visit it. These fantasies, McManus notes, feed on America’s prior image as a superpower: the land of freedom, opportunities, and consumption, “the America that never was” (121). She aligns Neuromancer with Ballard’s portrayal of a “grey future” that no longer promises improvement and difference (122), but now is bogged down in a stagnant present. This stagnancy is coded into cyberspace, which replaces the totalitarian states of the earlier dystopias by turning people’s identities and subjective belongings into abstract data. As McManus explains à la Jameson, this novel’s novum exposes the end of history in an endless present of corporatized late capitalism. Imagining the future is made impossible: “In a world without time, there can be no politics” (127).The remainder of Critical Theory and Dystopia examines three twenty-first-century dystopias in terms of political indifference and ineffectiveness articulated as pain and crisis. Chapter 4 investigates Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015), which controversially deals in Islamophobic tropes and the “clash of civilizations” thesis, and narrates the rise of a new, patriarchal “Islamo-European Empire” in response to the deterioration of Western culture and heteronormative family life. McManus persuasively observes that the clash of two civilizations is nullified as “one ‘civilisation’ is a corpse and one is a fear” (154). Western civilization no longer exists in the present “but [is] rather visible only as faint ruins or rubble in this present” (154). The novum of this dystopian novel is thus incapable of generating a counter-narrative unlike that of a single individual in classic dystopias and the collective resistance depicted in critical dystopias.1 There is only embracing of and submission to dystopia in Houellebecq’s world—at least on the narrator’s part—as well as scorn for a present deemed culpable for the dystopian future that arrives. McManus remarks that this narrative shift prevents the reader from defending the present against an undesired fictional future: “There is no estrangement possible as no subjectivity exists which is capable of it” (161).She revisits this important difference and the overall exhaustion of the genre in the final chapter of the book, within the framework of what she calls two contemporary “American dystopias.” As Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) and Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016) demonstrate, the estranging effect of the dystopian novum has waned concomitantly with the lack of faith in a different and better future. The future is now “proximate rather than estranged” (175). For McManus, both novels portray recognizable worlds in their accounts of systemic inequality and financial precariousness that are reflected on to the private sphere. Shteyngart’s bibliophile narrator Lenny Abramov records in his diary the pain that he fails to understand or eliminate, rendering the novel “no longer a warning” but rather “an act of mourning” (180). In The Mandibles, households are invaded and families become homeless after the collapse of the US dollar, and working-age citizens are microchipped by the state for taxation purposes. McManus carefully argues that the domestic space of the family, and the familial ties explored through the four generations of the Mandibles, operate not as a genuinely safe haven but as “a machine for circulating wealth, for privatizing utopia and for cleaning up a present fit only for a future from the past” (192).Critical Theory and Dystopia is a remarkable endeavor, bringing together Adorno’s literary writings and critical theory, which are often cited but not interpreted in depth with respect to the formal and thematic dynamics of dystopian fiction. McManus bolsters her Adornian perspective with her innovative employment of Suvin’s novum, which sits at the uneasy tension between the cognition of and estrangement from the past, the present, and the future. She undertakes the challenging task of orchestrating a wide range of novels and critical sources, establishing the transformation of the dystopian genre from its early classic examples to twenty-first-century novels. McManus’s argumentation is complex, an interweaving of thematic observations across chapters, and therefore each chapter’s concluding summaries are extremely helpful for the reader. Considering the increasing number of dystopian novels produced in the twenty-first century, she asks: “Would a weary or defeated genre be simultaneously so productive?” (169). McManus’s work is valuable in reminding us that this productivity testifies to the inescapable impingement of the past on the present and on our imagined futures, with an ongoing historicity that contains both colonial and environmental injustices.