It would be a truism to contend that we are experiencing an unprecedented prevalence of technology. With our pandemic-induced collective fallback into the home, screen times have skyrocketed to such a degree that optometrists are now fearing an entire generation of myopic children.
Under these circumstances, the very idea of in any way moving “beyond tech” may seem enticing, but must invariably appear foolish; and yet, there has never been a time when pondering humanity, society, the human condition, the social world – or however you may want to call the real practice of life we share – beyond the singular lens of technological progress has been more necessary. Especially as scepticism towards technology’s ever-increasing hold on our lives and our politics grows, and technology seems positively inescapable, alternatives are sorely needed. Perhaps we can rely on a somewhat unlikely candidate: imagination.
In fact, much of human life is inherently and most likely eternally “beyond tech”. This is simply because it takes place in what has been called the social world. Traditionally, technology has primarily concerned modes of productivity, or the relationship between humans and the material world surrounding them. It has allowed some of us to summarily conquer the material aspects of Ananke, Lebensnot as Freud called it, which can be roughly translated as “the exigencies of life”, and which in neoliberal discourse is often identified with the concept of scarcity.
Of course, technology increasingly encroaches on social life as well, and not just since the inception of social media: paper, the telegraph, transatlantic phone cables and intercontinental flights all changed the makeup of the social world. One could, however, argue that the qualitative difference between such technologies and social media is that the former merely facilitated already existing forms of social life by providing an improved, more conducive medium for them to develop further and more quickly, while the latter attempt to replace that life rather than strengthen it – see the unsolicited by inevitable monstrosity of the ‘Metaverse’ as a case in point. In any case, the fundamental reason why the social world lies beyond technology is precisely that it is not material – not because technology cannot touch on the immaterial, but because this means that the social world is a mental phenomenon; as such, it is constituted by a force that technology can influence but never replace: human imagination.
In the early 20th century, scholars affiliated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory first noticed the connection between social reality and imagination. Because the social world lacks the ‘given’ character of the natural world, Max Horkheimer contended, it can be understood only if we accept that it is a human construction. This contention is really the fundamental justification of any radical social science. Of course, the most immediate and politically explosive implication of this realization is the fact that we do not have to accept a given social world, because it could easily be different.
According to such critical theories, this fact has merely been obscured by ideologies sustaining the status quo. Simply put, the easiest way to prevent resistance to an existing social world is to convince its detractors that, in the appropriated words of Margaret Thatcher, ‘there is no alternative.’ Much has been made of this tendency to present social constructs as a given, natural realities. The late great Mark Fisher, for example, coined the term ‘Capitalist Realism’ to describe modern neoliberal thinking’s tendency to reduce its own existence to an incontrovertible necessity, a historical fact that could not be otherwise.
He also emphasised the role of imagination, specifically creative, literary imagination, in uncovering this supposed reality’s true nature and in formulating alternative social worlds. His outlook, of course, was bleak: the ideological-aesthetic aspect of financial capitalism to him was ‘a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.’ In short, modern capitalism has colonized culture to such a degree that art, creativity and imagination itself have lost their ability to formulate valid alternatives to it.
It is, however, hard to fathom narrative imagination losing its influence on the world entirely, however much the exigencies of financial capitalism in a pandemic might curtail, neuter or cripple it. Narratives are simply too fundamental in our construction and perception of the world, social or otherwise. This is because they not only structure but constitute knowledge. In fact, there is very little human knowledge that narratives leave untouched.
Scholars like Mieke Bal have applied narrative theories not just to art and religion, but even to mathematics and astrophysics, often with surprising and enlightening results. As part of the same ‘narrative turn’ in the humanities, the interpretative historian Hayden White showed that historiography relies on narratives for meaning in much the same way as literary writing does. Every use of language, most poststructuralists hold, is necessarily wrought by narratives. All knowledge, on this view, is human knowledge and therefore necessarily part of the constructed social world, rather than the natural one. To paraphrase the cryptic but immortal words of Foucault in The Order of Discourse, the Universe does not turn us a legible face; it is not complicit to our understanding. Importantly, this also means that reality does not possess intrinsic structures that organise or guide knowledge – they have to be imagined as well.
This thought was most famously formulated by Jean-François Lyotard, one of the central figures of postmodernism. Lyotard postulated that Western knowledge had traditionally been organized into grandes recits, or “meta-narratives”, amongst which he counted the classical political ideals of Progress, Enlightenment and Emancipation, but also Marxism.
In their reliance on transcendent universal truths, these metanarratives claimed exclusivity, which they manifested in strong totalizing tendencies. Perhaps most crucially, Lyotard defined postmodernity as the abandonment and scepticism of these singular grand narratives in favour of many parallel “local” ones which were more limited in scope, throwing off the universal aspirations of their grand relatives. Thus, he showed that the influence of postmodernity on the human condition was profound and had universal implications – simply because the narrative structure humans applied to the world had changed.
This is, of course, a profoundly political point: if the human condition itself could change merely by a change in the narratives people adhered to, then narratives not only order the world, but fundamentally influence its course by determining the way in which people engage with it. To Lyotard, narratives were the axis on which both the perception and manipulation of reality hinged.
The crucial political importance of narrative imagination easily follows from this – in fact, it means that the world and especially politics simply must engage with narratives, because they are not optional. Narratives always structure knowledge, whether we take control of them or not, so we might as well try. Lyotard imagined the advance of postmodernism to be precisely such a taking of control: his small or local narratives are subject to the consensus of the players involved, that is the people choosing to follow them are aware of their optional and malleable nature.
The postmodern mind consciously understands narratives as a necessary vehicle to achieve a specific social goal, and once that goal is achieved, its attendant narrative would naturally be cancelled. Progressive politics, he hoped, would arise from the coexistence of diverse and equally legitimate, localized narratives used to improve the human condition. Of course, this view turned out to be wildly over optimistic: the level of postmodern awareness that Lyotard posited clearly has not been universally achieved. Our disenchanted minds may fancy themselves above such petty illusions, but our world is nevertheless still wrought with grand narratives. They reach from the assertive nationalisms of the New Right, through deterministic visions of overpopulation and ecological collapse, to the widespread conviction that future technologies are all that is needed to solve humanity’s problems. But, again, whether we are aware of them or not, narratives invariably direct our world.
This is why imagination and its artistic expressions are so crucial especially today: our world seems at once unpredictably chaotic, and dead set on an unsustainable status quo that appears insurmountable. In such an environment, any sort of vision becomes political. Narrative imagination may not be the first kind of vision to come to mind as inherently political– but there are good reasons why it lends itself particularly well to becoming a tool for the reconceptualization of our political world. Even the famously unsentimental pragmatist Lenin saw crucial political utility in fantasy. In fact, the limits between fiction and the “real” world are not as definitive as they may seem.
Adapting the concept of liminality from groundbreaking anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, literary scientist Mihai Spariosu postulates literature as a liminal space – a place free from the coercive limitations of any existing status quo, beyond the social dichotomy of centre and periphery. From this liminal vantage point, the world can be seen clearly, and unrestricted kinds of knowledge are possible that can potentially change it. On this view, literary imagination has a crucial social political role because it articulates alternative worlds which can then become actualized through human agency.
As the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin postulated, literature thus becomes an agonistic force to existing politics, by challenging and subverting the coercive, canonical pull of hegemonic culture. In fact, Spar- iosu shows that in a consistent constructivist perspective there is no ontological or even logical distinction between actual and possible worlds, because imagination forms the base for all of them. ‘In principle,’ he writes, ‘all worlds become possible or can be actualized as soon as they arise in the imagination, or, to put it differently, actual worlds will always start out as imaginary ones. Why some imaginary worlds eventually become actualized and some do not is hardly an ontological issue; rather, it is a question of communal choice and sociocultural practice.’
All this considered, imagination is perhaps more important now than ever. For many people, existing narratives that used to structure their world have lost all meaning – the result is anger and confusion, which leads to abject depression or even violent outbursts.
The world, it seems, has come out of sync with the established models we have used to explain it so far. Put simply, the world makes absolutely no sense whatsoever – from politics to economics, the rules have seemingly ceased to apply, and the future is quickly becoming as unpredictable as the present is confusing. It should be the role of art and specifically fiction to reconstitute a fundamental understanding of the world; during the pandemic, most people have spent more time consuming fiction than ever before.
Does this fiction assume its role as the harbinger of alternative worlds and agonistic knowledge? Some of it might. But with more content being produced than ever before as well, much of it will necessarily be drowned out by big ticket blockbusters. To discuss the incessant onslaught of superhero content would be futile – it reveals its utterly regressive and even destructive politics at first glance. The treatment of other, more promising material unfortunately gives reason for actual pessimism.
Many of the most influential pieces of fiction in the Pandemic years have failed so spectacular in providing any alternative knowledge, any subversive power, any imaginary alternative that they have become destructive agents of the status quo, regressive factors in a system hellbent on self-preservation. Much needs to be said about these cultural products and the milieu that keeps producing them. And, in the future, some of it will be said here as well.
During the Pandemic people have used watching and reading primarily as an escape. Consequently, the political role of narrative imagination, it seems, has become atrophied – but the role of fiction literary or otherwise has always gone beyond mere escapism. It does not just exist to provide a distraction or to entertain away an irritating reality.
Fiction is not a panic room, nor is it a safe space; it is not meant to provide refuge from an inconvenient or insurmountable reality wrought with difficulties. One could almost think that the Pandemic has forced both people and culture into a dialectic of collective Bovarism – the use of fiction as an escape from the mundane when the mundane becomes unbearable. But this escape only makes the reality of the mundane more unbearable. As we have seen, narratives determine the social world whether we control them or not. A new, assertive and utopian politics is needed to reconstitute reality in the face of manifold disasters; but any utopia needs to harness our imagination, a force – perhaps the only one – that can remain beyond the ultimate reach of technology.
Mats Licht is a recent MPhil graduate in Islamic Studies and History. He currently works in documentary film productions in London.