Here is a bio from 2006:

 Xabier Barandiaran is a PhD student and researcher on Cybernetics, Neurophilosophy and Artificial Life at the University of the Basque Country (Europe), member of the autonomous server SinDominio.Net, the hacktivist laboratory Metabolik BioHacklab (located at the social squat center Undondo Gaztetxea), the spanish and european HackLabs.Org network and the recent copyleft activist campaing “CompartirEsBueno.Net” (SharingIsGood: a spanish network of hacktivists and media-activists against intelectual property regimes and the media-culture industry). He has also been involved on other grassroots movement such as alternative education, social desobedience, anti-war movements and squatting. Xabier has also co-organized and activelly participated on a number of HackMeetings (self-managed technopolitical meetings that take place in squatted social centers in europe), Copyleft Conferences and other parallel events, workshops and seminars. His work has been devoted to development and promotion of free-software tools for social movements, direct action and coordination of autonomous technopolitical networks as research on free technologies & culture, community based digital self-management and hacktivism.

What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem?

“Some books are important not because they solve a

problem or even address it in a way that points to solution,

but because they are symptomatic of the confusions of the time.”

SEARLE1Searle, 1997, p.162. Searle’s review on David Chalmers The Conscious Mind; In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Structure of the essay:

1. Introduction.

2. The Hard Problem (HP)

3. What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem.

3.1. The dissolution of the HP and the HP of functionalism

3.2. What is (it like) to be a cognitive system

4. Recognising a conscious being.

5. Conclusion: conscious experience and scientific study

6. Discussion: pointing to a hard problem and a crucial gap

7. Acknowledgements

8. Bibliography and References.

Abstract: In this essay I argue that a systemic perspective of cognition may be sufficient to explain whatever it must be necessary to explain about consciousness. By analysing Chalmers’ diagnosis of the Hard Problem of consciousness we conclude that the only Hard Problem arises from the functionalist view of cognition. I argue that a functional explanation is not enough to explain consciousness (and that is why Chalmers’ Hard Problem arises) and that an operational explanation is required. It follows that once we have specified the structure that makes us conscious then ‘what phenomenal consciousness is’ becomes a matter of being that structure and not something to be explained. Finally I argue that considering a system conscious depends on the operational conditions under which it is legitimate to describe an entity as conscious i.e. the necessary and sufficient operational conditions for a system to be conscious.

Key words: Consciousness, Cognitive Sciences, Cartesian Dualism, Explanatory gap, Dynamical approach, Phenomenal experience, Operational explanation.

1. INTRODUCTION

Since Descartes the relation between the phenomenological world (res cogitans) and the physical world (res extensa) occupies a privileged position between the unresolved philosophical questions of the Western history. If not so much Descartes’ dualist ontology, its vocabulary and conceptual foundation remain alive in the contemporary debate (Searle, 1992) and, while consciousness is becoming an object of scientific study it’s ontological and epistemological status is still in question. And it’s not a trivial question since consciousness seems to us the highest human capacity, the more inaccessible domain, the most secret privacy, and the last hiding place of the individual against the objectivity. Can science grasp this mystery? Is there any mystery at all?

The current study of consciousness is characterised by a transdisciplinary, multidimensional and weakly co-ordinated approach. All sorts of theories and approaches inhabit the scene while they remain unconnected (at best) or incompatible. Moreover the claim of the impossibility of a scientific study of consciousness remains alive among some scientist and philosophers (Nagel and McGinn). In this context, as Searle’s Chinese Room Experiment (1980) for the problem of intentionality, Chalmers’ article Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995) became a reference point and focused the debate. Even if Chalmers’ article has been considered a steep back in the debate (Dennett, 1996) I consider it symptomatic of a profound disagreement between different views in the field. I believe the really Hard Problem stands in the deep tension between confronted underlying assumptions in the current field (specially among Functionalists) and that we shall assume a biologically grounded operational perspective in order for the Hard Problem to vanish.

But what is the, so called, Hard Problem?

2. THE HARD PROBLEM

From Chalmers’ article we will rescue the analysis of the so called Hard Problem (HP); a) because part of the current debate is focused in Chalmers diagnosis of the Hard Problem, b) because I consider (and I will try to argue) that Chalmers’ mistake is already present in that diagnosis and that the latter development of his paper is a consequence of that mistake, and, c) because the claim of the HP, seems to me, is the point where consciousness, as a philosophical debate/problem, should arrive to an end, just because there is not such a problem (or at least the problem shows to be a philosophical problem in the more Wittgensteinian linguistic viewpoint).

At the beginning of the paper Chalmers divides the problems of the study of consciousness into the ‘easy’ problems and the ‘hard’ problem.

“The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods” (§ 3).

The easy problems: the easy problems are those concerning functional mechanisms:

·Ability to discriminate stimuli

·Integration of information

·Reportability of mental states

·Focus of attention

·Control of behaviour

·Difference between wakefulness and sleep

All those phenomena are associated to consciousness but they have a functional role in the cognitive processes of the cognitive agent; thus they can be explained in functional terms. However difficult they may turn to be in the future, Chalmers takes for grounded the conceptual frame on which they will be explained so that a good explanation is a matter of techno-scientific achievement but not one of conceptual re-formulation.

The Hard Problem: But… (Chalmers follows) if those phenomena (easy problems) are exhausted in their functional role… how is it possible that they give rise to phenomenal experience? And this is what Chalmers considers The HP. The HP, thus, is the problem of experience that carries on in the Mind-Body debate under different forms:

•Consciousness* (Harvey)

•First person ontology (Searle)

·Qualia

·Phenomenal consciousness (Ned Block)

·“What is it like” (Nagel)

·Explanatory gap (Joseph Levine)

·Knowledge argument (Frank Jackson)

•Phenomenal experience (Chalmers)

·Etc…

What makes the HP hard, for Chalmers, is that it goes beyond any performance of functions because “to explain a cognitive function we need only specify a mechanism that can perform that function” (§12) and after explaining all those mechanisms we still have something else to explain: consciousness is more than a mechanism. That’s why, again on Chalmers’ view, any attempt to explain consciousness in the current literature, doesn’t work. We need an extra ingredient, a something else to fill the explanatory gap of why this functional or neural processes are accompanied by experience (the italic is mine to highlight Chalmers’ most common expressions when describing the problem).

After analysing some case studies that fail to explain consciousness, Chalmers concludes

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. (§ 43)

At this point, considering that any given cognitive process could exist without experience, Chalmers proposes to introduce experience as a fundamental feature of the world. Then he outlines a theory of consciousness whose central claim is ‘The double-aspect theory of information’ by which information is understood as being the basis of consciousness and the link with physics through the embeddedness of information in physical processes.

3. WHAT IS (IT LIKE) TO BE A HARD PROBLEM

3.1. The dissolution of the HP and the HP of traditional functionalism.

Explanatory gap, extra ingredient, accompanied by experience, something else, and so on seems to me dangerous expressions that cover a non-existing problem. If we add to a functional explanation a structural bottom-up, operational2Here operational vs. functional will be understood following (Di Paolo, 1999). By operational we mean an explanation which is “formulated in terms of a set of elements all pitched at a same descriptional level and also in terms of law-like realtionships between these elements so that an account can be given of how the phenomena are generated” (p.16) while by functional explanation we understand an explanation where “the terms of the reformulation are deemed to belong to a more encompassing context, in which te observer provides links and nexuses not supposed to operat in the domain in which the systems that generate the phenomena operate” (p.16). We intuitivelly understand operational explanations as specifying the structure of the system by establishing the elements and the law-like relations between the elements that constitute the system as such. While by funcional explanation we will understand particularly the kind of explanations of cognition held by Traditional AI where a cognitive agent can be defined solely in terms of the causal-computational relations between inputs and outputs requiring an external observer to specify them.

I don’t deny conscious experience, the vivid sensation of perceiving a red apple or having an orgasm. The Knowledge Argument (Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia 1982, from Torrance, 1998) illustrates this point: it is still different to have an orgasm than knowing all the processes and biological structures involving the phenomenon. But the Knowledge Argument is not an argument against the explanation (as it has been used), it is not an argument that shows that any explanation of consciousness is not enough; it just shows that it is different to explain how a cognitive systems works than being a cognitive system (how are they going to be equal? They are not even in the same level to be compared!). Probably the narrow vision of the classical functionalist viewpoint of what a cognitive agent is makes impossible to imagine that experience is to be a cognitive system. If we take cognition (as traditional functionalists do) to be the computation of an algorithm (independently of the system that performs it) then experience (the inner vivid sensation of experience) seems to be something else and the HP arrives when we realise that phenomenal consciousness cannot be added to the list of algorithms that constitute cognition. That’s why Chalmers considers that ‘the something else’ must be explained. But, from a systemic perspective, there is nothing to be explained about being a cognitive system because there is nothing on the being that can/should/must be explained. As well as there is nothing to be explained about “what it is like to be solid“; there is nothing to explain about being conscious. The only way of explaining solidity is specifying how the microstructure makes a solid macrostructure (what we have called structural3The term structural or structure won’t be used in this essay as oposed to operational (Varela) but rather as oposed to functional.

Lets go back to the beginning of this section; now we can see how terms like explanatory gap, extra ingredient, accompanied by experience, something else, and so on, are absolutely mistaken. There is no explanatory gap because there are not two objects to be linked. From our perspective accompanied by experience is completely nonsensical, the perceptive process of perceiving red IS the experience, thus, there is no extra ingredient to be added. But Chalmers mistake is still worst since the assumption of any extra ingredient falls under the Hard Problem again (the extended HP, Torrance, 1998), and no matter how many ingredients we add we will always need another one. At this point Zhalmers could argue against Chalmers with his own arguments: “why does any aspect of information give rise to experience? We need a third extra ingredient since it is, still, conceptually coherent to imagine any physical process + informational process without experience.” and so on, and so on ad infinitum.

Chalmers’ Hard Problem itself is a problem of functionalism (whose view of the mental and cognition is disembodied and functional and never operational), not a problem of Cognitive Sciences. As Jackendorff pointed out: if consciousness has no causal effect (functional role) then ‘it is useless’ (Jackendorff, 1987 p.26, from Varela et al. 1991. P. 82). But all there is in the domain of the mental is not functional. Chalmers functionalist view of the mind (only considering the causal connections between representations) is the real Hard Problem. As Searle points out (Searle, 1997) Chalmers mistake stands on trying to hold both functionalism and property dualism or irreducibility of consciousness; and it just doesn’t work. As Chalmers itself sees, functionalism is not enough to account for consciousness. And that is because functionalism has an horizontal concept of causation. Functionalism studies relations between representations (propositional attitudes) and this is not enough to account for cognition; on the lower boundary of cognition to account for the symbol grounding problem (Harnard, 1990), embodied situated cognition (Brooks, 1991) etc.; on the upper boundary for such non-functional ‘phenomena’4I quoted ‘phenomena’ because the self and consciousness cannot be properly called phenomena because they are prior to any phenomenon as such. In fact, this is the whole point of the essay.

3.2. What is (it like) to be a cognitive system

If we now consider a dynamical-embodied perspective of cognition, the functionalist HP comes to an end: our experience is embodied (Varela et al. 1991, Varela 1996) thus if we don’t want to fall into explanatory gap problems we have to consider cognition as embodied, as realised (and only realisable?) in a biological-dynamical structure. And then take (conscious) experience as being this embodied dynamical structure. Them, ones we assume this viewpoint, what makes us being as we are, which are the concrete dynamics that constitute a conscious being, will become a scientific task to be resolved, an operational description to be made.

At this point I would like to point to a dynamic-systemic Artificial Life (A-Life) approach to cognition from which I believe the problem could be addressed in a fruitful way (as this new approach to cognitive phenomena has showed with many other problems of Cognitive Science). Within this view cognition as a process can be understood as the structural coupling between an agent and its environment and a cognitive agent can be studied as a dynamical system. The dynamical approach (van Gelder, 1993, Van Gelder and Port 1995) does not entail, necessarily, the exclusion of symbolic/computational explanations of some cognitive processes because any computational process can (in principle) be explained by dynamical system theory (even if the concrete mechanisms require a research effort not yet resolved –Crutchfield, 1998). Thus any informational and functional account of consciousness (the easy problems) is not rejected but subsumed in an embodied dynamical bottom-up explanation of cognition (at the same time an embodied perspective can solve the symbol-grounding problem, the intentionality (Searle) of some cognitive processes5It is not a coincidence that what Chalmers calls the Hard Problem is strongly related to the problem of semantic content and intentionality, which is, at the same time, one of the major problems of functionalism (are consciousness and intentionality very far from being the same problem?).

Up to now we have been addressing the explanation of consciousness to a structural-operational study. But how does consciousness emerge from the dynamics of the brain? There is an increasing work on the foundations of biology, A-life and complex dynamical systems (Varela et al., 1991), where the concept of emergence plays a central role. Collier (Collier, 1998) argues that emergent properties entail cohesion, where “cohesion represents those factors that causally bind the components of something through space and time, so it acts coherently and resists which internal and external fluctuations”. But cohesion, as causal condition for the emergence of a property can be understood in terms of transfer of information (according to Collier). Thus, Chalmers was probably not completely wrong with his double aspect theory of information after all? Well it depends on what we understand by completely wrong, which is clear is that Collier’s argument does not support any interpretation of a phenomenal side of information. On the contrary I suggest that consciousness could be understood as an emergent property of informational processes happening in the brain6In this sense my position could be compared with Searle’s biological naturalism.

4. DISTINGUISHING A CONSCIOUS BEING

Up to now we have dealt with what it could be defined as an explanatory problem. But immersed in the literature around the topic of consciousness we find another sort of problem which is strongly linked to the above one not necessarily determining it (as it happens for some authors) , i.e. the problem of distinguishing a conscious being from a non-conscious one. I find the problem quite similar to the Turing test and all the ongoing functionalist problems of Strong and Weak AI (Searle, 1997). If we reduce consciousness (the cognitive and the phenomenal side) to a functional explanation, thus to an observable behaviour, then the Hard Problem arises and Zombies enter the scene (as well as if we reduce cognition to functional computation the ‘symbol grounding problem’ arises and ‘Chinese room’ kind of arguments enter the scene).

But nor functionalism is enough to explain cognition nor we do discriminate solely by behavioural observations. Until the sciences of the artificial, and robotics arose, for a certain behaviour there was usually the same kind of physical structures performing it (i.e. a human body for linguistic behaviour). That is why we, humans, take for grounded that for a certain behaviour there is a corresponding structure performing it, with its evolutionary history, structural causality and so on. But if, by chance, a plastic ball gets out of the window, nobody will attribute to that behaviour any intentionality of willing to suicide, nor any other intentional instance, because we know that the causal relations that make that ball going out of the window are structurally different from ours.

At this point the problem can be understood as an attitude problem:

So if one accepts that the creation of robots with consciousness1-3 offers merely ‘easy’ problems (…), the additional magic ingredient for consciousness* is merely a change of attitude in us, the observers. Such a change of attitude cannot be achieved arbitrarily; the right conditions of complexity of behaviour, of similarity to humans, are required first

(Harvey:10)

But an attitude problem is not merely an ‘attitude’ problem because my attitude with my teddy bear does not make the teddy bear conscious. The problem must be addressed as under what condition it is legitimate the attitude of considering or not a certain entity to be conscious. If phenomenal consciousness is referred to that being a cognitive system independently of the performing functional behaviour of the moment, the attribution of consciousness to a certain entity cannot be a matter of behaviour but a matter of the operational organisation of the entity that performs such behaviour. This way the matter of ‘attitude’ becomes an epistemological matter of establishing the operational conditions under which it is legitimate to describe an entity as conscious i.e. the necessary and sufficient operational conditions for a system to be conscious.

5. CONCLUSION: CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC STUDY:

By the claim that being conscious is no more (nor less) than being a certain kind of cognitive system (with the appropriate structure and processes from where consciousness emerges) and thus that the HP does not entail any problem at all (but addresses a HP inside the functionalist assumptions), I don’t mean that we have no inner experience. What I suggest is that the existence of experience, of phenomenal consciousness, does not require any intrinsic explanation at all: because it is impossible a priori (by definition of the term explanation), and because the concept of intrinsic explanation entails the same problem ones again ad infinitum. Neither do I mean that there is no place in science for conscious experience. I suggest that the place of experience should be methodological rather than ontological. In this sense Varela’s proposal for a neurophenomenological framework (Varela, 1996) seems to me completely coherent with my argument. If there is anything to be explained this must be in functional and structural-operational terms, as proposed above.

But this claim does not narrow the methodological scope, it just opens it ones we realise that there is no extra ingredient nor explanatory gap. In this context, doubtless, phenomenology stands for one of the most powerful tools to take into account. Just because been cognitive systems put us in a privileged position to know how 3 trillion neurones work (and how the embodied study of those 3 trillion neurones work, as well). After all, the problem, seems to me, is more methodological than ontological. We know that something special (cognition, intentionality, consciousness) is going on in our brains, because we experience it7I want to point to the contradiction involved in this expresion, namely that we cannot experience consciousness because consciousness is not an object to be experienced or hadled by a subject but the very fact of been a subject. Language makes the whole subject/object dicotomy hard to solve since the very structure of language involves such dualism.

Probably explanable by the 40 Hz hypothesys (Crick and Koch).

6. DISCUSSION: POINTING TO A HARD PROBLEM AND A CRUCIAL GAP

I wish to finish this essay by pointing to a further discussion about some related issues that I find specially important but far from most of the efforts in the field. I will briefly note them.

In what accounts for consciousness we are dealing as well with the notion of the self (and still worst, with the experience of the self) considered as the unifying substrate of experience. I consider that the underlying problem of the self has great possibilities of becoming a real hard problem since it is one of the constitutive notions of western civilisation on which science is immersed.

On the other hand (but somehow linked with the former problem) I find the problem of the gap between dynamic experiences (understood as personal/individual experiences) and intellectual experiences (purely symbolic/abstract experiences). Following the work by Varela et al. (1991) I believe that working in this two issues is fundamental if we want knowledge to serve human purposes and not vice versa.

7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my father for his help on rigour, for his patience, for being always there. To Steve Torrance and Alvaro Moreno for guiding me first steeps into Cognitive Sciences. To Alfredo for technical support on What Macintosh still can’t do (on decompressing on-line articles).

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY and REFERENCES

BROOKS, R. (1991) Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991), 139-159.

CHALMERS, D. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2:200-220.

[I used the HTML version on http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/archives/phil/papers/199806/199806022/…/cosnciousness.html]

COLLIER, J. D. (1998). The dynamical basis of emergence in natural hierarchies. From George Farre and Tarko Oksala (eds) Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy and Organization, Selected and Edited Papers from the ECHO III Conference, Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, MA19 (Finish Academy of Technology, Espoo, 1998.)

CRUTCHFIELD, J P. (1998) Dynamical Embodiment of Computation in Cognitive Processes. Submited as Open Peer Commentary on T. van Gelder (1998) The Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science, BBS to appear.

[Taken from the internet http://www.santafe.edu/jpc]

DENNETT, D. (1996). Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness. Published in Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol.3, no.1, 1996, 4-6.

[I used the HTML version on http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmers.htm]

DI PAOLO, E. (1999). On the Evolutionary and Behavioral Dynamics of Social Coordination: Models and Theoretical. DPhil Thesis, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex.

[I used the internet version from www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ezequiel/thesis.html]

DI PAOLO, E. (2000). Behavioral coordination, structural congruence and entrainment in a simulation of acoustically coupled agents. Adaptive Behavior 8:1. 25-46. Special issue on Simulation Models of Social Agents. K. Dautenhahn (guest ed.)

GUTTENPLAN, S. (editor). A companion to the philosophy of mind. Blackwell, 1998.

HARNAD, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D42: 335-346

[I used the HTML version on http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/archives/psyc/papers/199803/199803014/doc.html/The_Symbol_Grounding_Problem.html]

HARVEY, I. Evolving Robot Consciousness: The Easy Problems and the Rest. To appear in Evolving Consciousness, G. Mulhauser (ed.), Advances in Consciousness Research Series, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. In preparation.

[I used the internte version at ftp://ftp.cogs.susx.ac.uk/pub/users/inmanh/consc.ps.gz]

MORENO, A., UMEREZ, J. & IBAÑEZ, J. (1997) Cognition and Life. The Autonomy of Cognition. Brain & Cognition 34 (1) Special Issue Academic Press pp. 107-129.

RORTY, R. (1994).Consciousness, Intentionality, and the Philosophy of Mind. From The Mind-Body Problem (A guide to the current debate). Edited by Richard Wagner and Tadesz Szubka. Blackwell, 1994. P. 121-127.

SEARLE, J. (1992) What’s Wrong With the Philosophy of Mind?. 1st chapter of ‘The rediscovery of the mind’ (MIT press, 1992). Taken from The Mind-Body Problem (A guide to the current debate). Edited by Richard Wagner and Tadesz Szubka. Blackwell, 1994. p. 277-298.

SEARLE, J. (1997). The Mystery of Consciousness. Granta Books 1998.

TORRANCE, S. (1996). Real world: embedding and traditional AI.

TORRANCE, S. (1998). The Taste of Lemons: A New Twist to the Cosnciousness Debate. (Talk delivered in Psychology Group, Middlesex University, November 1998)

Van GELDER, T. (1993) What can cognition be if not computation? From III International Workshop on Artificial Life and Arificial Intelligence, Workshop Notes, second edition, UPV. San Sebastian, 1995.

Van GELDER, T. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of cognition. MIT press.

VARELA, THOMPSON AND ROSCH, (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge MA:MIT Press. (I used the Spanish edition: Editorial Gedisa, 1997)

VARELA, F. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem. In Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Special Issues on the Hard Problems”, J.Shear (Ed.) June 1996.

[I used the HTML version on http://www.ccr.jussieu.fr/varela/ human_consciousness/article01.html]

Raymond Williams

There are many close and evident connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither, in deeper examination, is a simple mode, and the relationships between them are exceptionally complex.** Thus if we analyse the fictions that have been grouped as utopian we can distinguish four types: (a) the paradise, in which a happier life is described as simply existing elsewhere; (b) the externally altered world, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by an unlooked-for natural event; (c) the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort; (d) the technological transformation, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by a technical discovery.

It will of course be clear that these types often overlap. Indeed the overlap and often the confusion between (c) and (d) are exceptionally significant. One kind of clarification is possible by considering the negative of each type: the negative which is now commonly expressed as “dystopia.” We then get:

(a) the hell, in which a more wretched kind of life is described as existing elsewhere; (b) the externally altered world, in which a new but less happy kind of life has been brought about by an unlooked-for or uncontrollable natural event; (c) the willed transformation, in which a new but less happy kind of life has been brought about by social degeneration, by the emergence or re-emergence of harmful kinds of social order, or by the unforeseen yet disastrous consequences of an effort at social improvement; (d) the technological transformation, in which the conditions of life have been worsened by technical development.

Since there can be no a priori definition of the utopian mode, we cannot at first exclude any of these dystopian functions, though it is clear that they are strongest in (c) and (d), perceptible in (b), and barely evident in (a), where the negative response to utopia would normally have given way to a relatively autonomous fatalism or pessimism. These indications bear with some accuracy on the positive definitions, suggesting that the element of transformation, rather than the more general element of otherness, may be crucial. We find:

(a) The paradise or the hell can be discovered, reached, by new forms of travel dependent on scientific and technological (space-travel) or quasi-scientific (time-travel) development. But this is an instrumental function; the mode of travel does not commonly affect the place discovered. The type of fiction is little affected whether the discovery is made by a space voyage or a sea voyage. The place, rather than the journey, is dominant.

(b) The externally altered world can be related, construed, foretold in a context of increased scientific understanding of natural events. This also may be an instrumental function only; a new name for an old deluge. But the element of increased scientific understanding may become significant or even dominant in the fiction, for example in the emphasis of natural laws in human history, which can decisively (often catastrophically) alter normal human perspectives.

(c) The willed transformation can be conceived as inspired by the scientific spirit, either in its most general terms as secularity and rationality, or in a combination of these with applied science which makes possible and sustains the transformation. Alternatively the same impulses can be negatively valued: the “modern scientific” ant-heap or tyranny. Either mode leaves open the question of the social agency of the scientific spirit and the applied science, though it is the inclusion of some social agency, explicit or implicit (such as the overthrow of one class by another), that distinguishes this type from type (d). We must note also that there are important examples of type (c) in which the scientific spirit and applied science are subordinate to or simply associated with a dominant emphasis on social and political (including revolutionary) transformation; or in which they are neutral with respect to the social and political transformation, which proceeds in its own terms, or, which is of crucial diagnostic significance, where the applied science, though less often the scientific spirit, is positively controlled, modified, or in effect suppressed, in a willing return to a “simpler,” “more natural” way of life. In this last mode there are some pretty combinations of very advanced “non-material” science and a “primitive” economy.

(d) The technological transformation has a direct relation to applied science. It is the new technology which, for good or ill, has made the new life. As more generally in technological determinism, this has little or no social agency, though it is commonly described as having certain “inevitable” social consequences.

We can now clearly describe some significant relations between utopian fiction and SF, as a preliminary to a discussion of some modern utopian and dystopian writing. It is tempting to extend both categories until they are loosely identical, and it is true that the presentation of otherness appears to link them, as modes of desire or of warning in which a crucial emphasis is obtained by the element of discontinuity from ordinary “realism.” But this element of discontinuity is itself fundamentally variable. Indeed, what most has to be looked at, in properly utopian or dystopian fiction, is the continuity, the implied connection, which the form is intended to embody. Thus, looking again at the four types, we can make some crucial distinctions which appear to define utopian and dystopian writing (some of these bear also on the separate question of the distinction of SF from older and now residual modes which are simply organizationally grouped with it):

(a) The paradise and the hell are only rarely utopian or dystopian. They are ordinarily the projections of a magical or a religious consciousness, inherently universal and timeless, thus commonly beyond the conditions of any imaginable ordinary human or worldly life. Thus the Earthly Paradise and the Blessed Islands are neither utopian nor science-fictional. The pre-lapsarian Garden of Eden is latently utopian, in some Christian tendencies; it can be attained by redemption. The medieval Land of Cokaygne is latently utopian; it can be, and was, imagined as a possible human and worldly condition. The paradisal and hellish planets and cultures of science fiction are at times simple magic and fantasy: deliberate, often sensational presentations of alien forms. In other cases they are latently utopian or dystopian, in the measure of degrees of connection with, extrapolation from, known or imaginable human and social elements.

(b) The externally altered world is typically a form which either falls short of or goes beyond the utopian or dystopian mode. Whether the event is magically or scientifically interpreted does not normally affect this. The common emphasis is on human limitation or indeed human powerlessness: the event saves or destroys us, and we are its objects. In Wells’s In the Days of the Comet the result resembles a utopian transformation, but the displacement of agency is significant. Most other examples, of an SF kind, are explicitly or latently dystopian: the natural world deploys forces beyond human control, thus setting limits to or annulling all human achievement.

(c) The willed transformation is the characteristic utopian or dystopian mode, in the strict sense.

(d) The technological transformation is the utopian or dystopian mode narrowed from agency to instrumentality; indeed it only becomes utopian or dystopian, in strict senses, when it is used as an image of consequence to function, socially, as conscious desire or conscious warning.

1. No contrast has been more influential, in modern political thought, than Engels’ distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism. If it is now more critically regarded, this is not only because the scientific character of the “laws of historical development” is cautiously questioned or sceptically rejected; to the point, indeed, where the notion of such a science can be regarded as utopian. It is also because the importance of utopian thought is itself being revalued, so that some now see it as the crucial vector of desire, without which even the laws are, in one version, imperfect, and, in another version, mechanical, needing desire to give them direction and substance. This reaction is understandable but it makes the utopian impulse more simple, more singular, than in the history of utopias, it is. Indeed the variability of the utopian situation, the utopian impulse, and the utopian result is crucial to the understanding of utopian fiction.

This can be seen from one of the classical contrasts, between More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis. It is usual to say that these show, respectively, a humanist and a scientific utopia:

that excellent perfection of all good fashions, humanitye and civile gentilnesse [More — first English translation, 1551];

the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible [Bacon, 1627].

It can be agreed that the two fictions exemplify the difference between a willed general transformation and a technological transformation; that More projects a commonwealth, in which men live and feel differently, while Bacon projects a highly specialised, unequal but affluent and efficient social order. But a full contrast has other levels. Thus they stand near the opposite poles of the utopia of free consumption and the utopia of free production. More’s island is a cooperative subsistence economy; Bacon’s a specialised industrial economy. These can be seen as permanent alternative images, and the swing towards one or another, in socialist ideology as in progressive utopianism, is historically very significant. One might indeed write a history of modern socialist thought in terms of the swing between a Morean cooperative simplicity and a Baconian mastery of nature, except that the most revealing trend has been their unconscious fusion. Yet what we can now perceive as permanent alternative images was rooted, in each case, in a precise social and class situation. More’s humanism is deeply qualified: his indignation is directed as much against importunate and prodigal craftsmen and labourers as against the exploiting and engrossing landlords — his social identification is with the small owners, his laws regulate and protect but also compel labour. It is qualified also because it is static: a wise and entrenched regulation by the elders. It is then socially the projection of a declining class, generalized to a relatively humane but permanent balance. Bacon’s scientism is similarly qualified: the scientific revolution of experiment and discovery becomes research and development in an instrumental social perspective. Enlarging the bounds of human empire is not only the mastery of nature; it is also, as a social projection, an aggressive, autocratic, imperialist enterprise; the projection of a rising class.

We cannot abstract desire. It is always desire for something specific, in specifically impelling circumstances. Consider three utopian fictions of the late nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871); Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888); William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).

The Coming Race is at one level an obvious example of the mode of technological transformation. What makes the Vril-ya, who live under our Earth, civilized is their possession of Vril, that all-purpose energy source which lies beyond electricity and magnetism. Outlying underground peoples who do not possess Vril are barbarians; indeed the technology is the civilisation, and the improvement of manners and of social relations is firmly based on it alone. The changes thus brought about are the transformation of work into play, the dissolution of the State and in effect the outlawing of competitive and aggressive social relations. Yet it is not, for all the obvious traces of influence, either a socialist or an anarchist utopia. It is a projection of the idealised social attitudes of an aristocracy, now generalised and distanced from the realities of rent and production by the technological determinism of Vril. In its complementary liberation of sexual and family relations (in fact qualified, though apparently emphasized, by the simple reversal of the relative size and roles of women and men) it can be sharply contrasted with the rigidities of these relations within More’s humanism. But this is of a piece with the aristocratic projection. It is (as in some later fantasies, with similarly privileged assumptions) a separation of personal and sexual relations from those problems of care, protection, maintenance, and security which Vril has superseded. Affluence delivers liberation. By contrast the greed, the aggression, the dominativeness, the coarseness, the vulgarity of the surface world — the world, significantly, both of capitalism and of democracy — are easily placed. They are what are to be expected in a world without Vril and therefore Vril-ya. Indeed there are moments when Vril can almost be compared with Culture, in Matthew Arnold’s virtually contemporary Culture and Anarchy. Arnold’s spiritual aristocracy, his spiritual force beyond all actual classes, has, though, been magically achieved, without the prolonged effort that Arnold described, by the properties of Vril. It is in each case desire, but desire for what? A civilising transformation, beyond the terms of a restless, struggling society of classes.

What has also to be said, though, about The Coming Race is that desire is tinged with awe and indeed with fear. The title introduces that evolutionary dimension which form this period on is newly available in utopian fiction. When the Vril-ya come to the surface they will simply replace men, as in effect a higher and more powerful species. And it is not only in his unVril humanity that the hero fears this. Towards the end he sounds the note that we shall hear so clearly later in Huxley’s Brave New World: that something valuable and even decisive — initiative and creativity are the hovering words — has been lost in the displacement of human industry to Vril. This was a question that was to haunt the technological utopia. (Meanwhile, back in 19th century society, an entrepreneur took his own short-cut. Inspired by Lytton he made a fortune from a beef extract called Bovril.)

Bellamy’s Looking Backward is unquestionably a utopia, in the central sense of a transformed social life of the future, but it is in a significant way a work without desire; its impulse is different, an overriding rationalism, a determining total organisation, which finds its proper institutional counterparts in the State-monopoly capitalism which is seen as the inevitable “next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity” (the order of adjectives there is decisive.) That this forecast, rather than vision, was widely taken as socialism is indicative of a major tendency in Bellamy’s period, which can be related to Fabianism but has also now to be related to a major current in orthodox Marxism: socialism as the next higher stage of economic organisation, a proposition which is taken as overriding, except in the most general terms, questions of substantially different social relations and human motives. Morris’s critique of Bellamy repeated almost exactly what is called the Romantic but is more properly the radical critique of utilitarian social models — that “the underlying vice … is that the author cannot conceive … anything else than themachinery of society”: the central point made in this tradition, from Carlyle’s Signs of the Times onward. Morris’s fuller response was his News from Nowhere, but before we look at this we should include a crucial point about the history of utopian writing, recently put forward by M. H. Abensour in his Paris dissertation “Formes de l’utopie Socialiste-Communiste.”

Abensour establishes a crucial periodisation in the utopian mode, according to which there is, after 1850, a change from the systematic building of alternative organisational models to a more open and heuristicdiscourse of alternative values. E.P. Thompson, discussing Abensour in New Left Review No. 99 (1976), has interpreted this latter mode as the “education of desire.” It is an important emphasis, since it allows us to see more clearly by contrast, how examples of the mode of “willed social transformation” can be shifted, in their essence, to the mode of “technological transformation,” where the technology need not be only a marvellous new energy source, or some industrial resource of that kind, but can be also a new set of laws, new abstract property relations, indeed precisely new social machinery. But then, when we have said this, and recognized the contrasting value of the more heuristic mode in which the substance of new values and relations is projected, with comparatively little attention to institutions, we have to relate the change to the historical situation within which it occurred. For the shift from one mode to another can be negative as well as positive. To imagine a whole alternative society is not mere model-building, any more than the projection of new feelings and relationships is necessarily a transforming response. The whole alternative society rests, paradoxically, on two quite different social situations: either that of social confidence, the mood of a rising class, which knows, down to detail, that it can replace the existing order; or that of social despair, the mood of a declining class or fraction of a class, which has to create a new heaven because its Earth is a hell. The basis of the more open but also the vaguer mode is different from either. It is a society in which change is happening, but primarily under the direction and in the terms of the dominant social order itself. This is always a fertile moment for what is, in effect, an anarchism: positive in its fierce rejection, of domination, repression, and manipulation; negative in its willed neglect of structures, of continuity and of material constraints. The systematic mode is a response to tyranny or disintegration; the heuristic mode, by contrast, seems to be primarily a response to a constrained reformism.

It is then not a question of asking which is better or stronger. The heuristic utopia offers a strength of vision against the grain; the systematic utopia a strength of conviction that the world really can be different. The heuristic utopia, at the same time, has the weakness that it can settle into isolated and in the end sentimental “desire,” a mode of living with alienation, while the systematic utopia has the weakness that, in its insistent organisation, it seems to offer little room for any recognisable life. These strengths and weaknesses vary, of course, in individual examples of each mode, but they vary most decisively, not only in the periods in which they are written but in the periods in which they are read. The mixed character of each mode then has much to do with the character of the 20th-century dystopias which have succeeded them. For the central contemporary question about the utopian modes is why there is a progression, within their structures, to the specific reversals of a Zamyatin, a Huxley, an Orwell — of a generation of SF writers.

It is in this perspective that we have now to read News from Nowhere. It is commonly diagnosed and criticised as a generous but sentimental heuristic transformation. And this is substantially right, of the parts that are made ordinarily to stick in the mind: the medievalism of visual detail and the beautiful people in the summer along the river are inextricable from the convincing openness and friendliness and relaxed cooperation. But these are residual elements in the form: the Utopians, the Houyhnhnms, the Vril-ya would have found Morris’s people cousins at least, though the dimensions of universal mutuality have made an identifying difference. But what is emergent in Morris’s work, and what seems to me increasingly the strongest part of News from Nowhere, is the crucial insertion of the transition to utopia, which is not discovered, come across, or projected — not even, except at the simplest conventional level, dreamed — but fought for. Between writer or reader and this new condition is chaos, civil war, painful and slow reconstruction. The sweet little world at the end of all this is at once a result and a promise; an offered assurance of “days of peace and rest,” after the battle has been won.

Morris was strong enough, even his world is at times strong enough, to face this process, this necessary order of events. But when utopia is not merely the alternative world, throwing its light on the darkness of the intolerable present, but lies at the far end of generations of struggle and of fierce and destructive conflict , its perspective, necessarily, is altered. The post-religious imagining of a harmonious community, the enlightened rational projection of an order of peace and plenty, have been replaced, or at least qualified, by the light at the end of the tunnel, the sweet promise which sustains effort and principle and hope through the long years of revolutionary preparation and organisation. This is a genuine turning-point. Where the path to utopia was moral redemption or rational declaration — that light on a higher order which illuminates an always present possibility — the mode itself was radically different from the modern mode of conflict and resolution.

Morris’s chapters “How the Change Came” and “The Beginning of the New Life” are strong and convincing. “Thus at last and by slow degrees we get pleasure into our work”: this is not the perspective of reformism, which in spirit, in its evasion of fundamental conflicts and sticking points, is much nearer to the older utopian mode; it is the perspective of revolution — not only the armed struggle but the long and uneven development of new social relations and human feelings. That they have been developed, that the long and difficult enterprise has succeeded, is crucial; it is the transition from dream to vision. But it is then reasonable to ask whether the achieved new condition is not at least as much rest after struggle — the relaxed and quiet evening after a long, hard day — as any kind of released new energy and life. The air of late Victorian holiday is made to override the complexities, the divergences, the everyday materialities of any working society. When the time-dreamer finds himself fading, as he looks in on the feast at the old church, the emotions are very complex: the comforting recall of a medieval precedent — “the churchales of the Middle Ages”; the wrench of regret that he cannot belong to this new life; and then also, perhaps, for all the convinced assent to the sight of the burdens having been lifted, the impulse — and is it only unregenerate? — of an active, engaged, deeply vigorous mind to register the impression, though it is put into a voice from the future, “that our happiness even would weary you.” It is the fused and confused moment of the longing for communism, the longing for rest and the commitment to urgent, complex, vigorous activity.

2. When utopia is no longer an island or a newly discovered place, but our familiar country transformed by specific historical change, the mode of imagined transformation has fundamentally changed. But the historical agency was not only, as in Morris, revolution. It was also, as in Wells, some kind of modernising, rationalising force: the vanguard of Samurai, of scientists, of engineers, of technical innovators. Early rationalist utopias had only, in the manner of Owen, to be declared to be adopted; reason had that inevitability. Wells, refusing popular revolution, belonged to his time in seeing agency as necessary, and there is a convincing match between the kind of agency he selected — a type of social engineering plus a rapidly developing technology — and the point of arrival: a clean, orderly, efficient and planned (controlled) society. It is easy to see this now as an affluent state capitalism or monopoly socialism; indeed many of the images have been literally built. But we can also, holding Morris and Wells together in our minds, see a fundamental tension within the socialist movement itself — indeed in practice within revolutionary socialism. For there are other vanguards than those of Wells, and the Stalinist version of the bureaucratic Party, engineering a future which is primarily defined as technology and production, not only has its connections to Wells but has to be radically distinguished from the revolutionary socialism of Morris and of Marx, in which new social and human relations, transcending the deep divisions of industrial capitalist specialisation, of town and country, of rulers and ruled, administrators and administered, are from the beginning the central and primary objective. It is within this complex of tendencies — of efficient and affluent capitalism set against an earlier capitalist poverty and disorder; of socialism against capitalism in either phase; and of the deep divisions, within socialism itself, between the reformist free-riders with capitalism, the centralising social engineers, and the revolutionary democrats — that we have to consider the mode of dystopia, which is both written and read within this extreme theoretical and practical complexity.

Thus Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) projects a black amalgam of Wellsian rationality and the names and phrases of revolutionary socialism in a specific context of mobile and affluent corporate capitalism. This sounds and is confused, but the confusion is significant; it is the authentic confusion of two generations of SF itself, in its powerful dystopian mode. “Community, Identity, Stability”: this is the motto of the Brave New World State. It is interesting to track these ideals back into the utopian mode. Stability, undoubtedly, has a strong bearing; most of the types of utopia have strongly emphasised it, as an achieved perfection or a self-adjusting harmony. Huxley adds the specific agencies of repression, manipulation, pre-natal conditioning, and drugged distraction. Western SF has been prolific in its elaboration of all these agencies: the models, after all, have been close to hand. Stability blurs to Identity: the manufacture of human types to fit the stabilised model; but this, crucially, was never an explicit utopian mode, though in some examples it is assumed or implied. Variability and autonomy, within the generally harmonious condition, are indeed among its primary features. But now, under the pressures of consumer capitalism and of monopoly socialism, the mode has broken. As in the later stages of realist fiction, self-realisation and self-fulfillment are not to be found in relationship or in society, but in breakaway, in escape: the path the Savage takes, like a thousand heroes of late-realist fiction, getting out from under the old place, the old people, the old family, or like a thousand SF heroes, running to the wastes to escape the machine, the city, the system. But then the last and most questionable irony: the first word of the motto of this repressive, dominating, controlling system is Community: the keyword, centrally, of the entire utopian mode. It is at this point that the damage is done or, to put it another way, is admitted. It is in the name of Community, the utopian impulse, and in the names of communism (Bernard Marx and Lenina) that the system is seen as realised, though the actual tendencies — from the degradation of labor through an ultimate division and specialisation to the organised mobility and muzac of planned consumption — rely for their recognition on a contemporary capitalist world. In this 1946 foreword Huxley continued his running together of historically contrary impulses but then, interestingly, returned to utopia, offering a third way beyond the incubator society and the primitive reservation: a self-governing and balanced community, little different in spirit from Morris’ future society except that it is limited to “exiles and refugees,” people escaping from a dominant system which they have no chance or hope of changing collectively. Utopia then lies at the far end of dystopia, but only a few will enter it; the few who get out from under. It is the path travelled, in the same period, by bourgeois cultural theory: from the universal liberation, in bourgeois terms, through the phase in which the minority first educates and then regenerates the majority, to the last sour period in which what is now called “minority culture” has to find its reservation, its hiding-place, beyond both the system and the fight against the system. But then what is so strange is that this last phase, in some writing, returns to the utopian mode, throwing strange questions back to the whole prior tradition: questions which disturb the apparently simple grammar of desire — that desire for another place and another time which, instead of being idealised, can be seen as always and everywhere a displacement, but which can itself be transformed when a history is moving.

Not in Utopia — subterranean fields

Or in some secret island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world

Of all of us — the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all!

Wordsworth’s emphasis, it is true, can go either way: into revolutionary effort, when history is moving; into a resigned settlement when it goes wrong or gets stuck. The utopian mode has to be read, always, within that changing context, which itself determines whether its defining subjunctive tense is part of a grammar which includes a true indicative and a true future, or whether it has seized every paradigm and become exclusive, in assent and dissent alike.

For the same consideration puts hard questions to the now dominant mode of dystopia. Orwell’s 1984 is no more plausible than Morris’s 2003, but its naturalised subjunctive is more profoundly exclusive, more dogmatically repressive of struggle and possibility, than anything within the utopian tradition. It is also, more sourly and more fiercely than in Huxley, a collusion, in that the state warned against and satirised — the repression of autonomy, the cancellation of variations and alternatives — is built into the fictional form which is nominally its opponent, converting all opposition into agencies of the repression, imposing, within its excluding totality, the inevitability and the hopelessness which it assumes as a result. No more but perhaps no less plausible than Morris’s 2003; but then, in the more open form, there is also Morris’s 1952 (the date of the revolution), and the years following it: years in which the subjunctive is a true subjunctive, rather than a displaced indicative, because its energy flows both ways, forward and back, and because in its issue, in the struggle, it can go either way.

3. The projection of new heavens and new hells has been a commonplace in SF. Yet perhaps a majority of them, just because they are so often literally out of this world, are functions of fundamental alteration: not merely the intervention of altered circumstance, which in the type of the externally altered world is a minor mode of the utopian, but a basic recasting of the physical conditions of life and thence of its life forms. And then in most stories this is a simple exoticism, generically tied to the supernatural or magical romance. There is a range from casual to calculated fantasy, which is at the opposite pole from the hypothesised “science” of SF. Yet, perhaps inextricable from this genre, though bearing different emphases, there is a mode which is truly the result of a dimension of modern science: in natural history, with its radical linkages between life-forms and life-space; in scientific anthropology, with its methodological assumption of distinct and alternative cultures. The interrelation between these is often significant. The materialist tendency of the former is often annulled by an idealist projection at the last, mental phase of the speculation; the beast or the vegetable, at the top of its mind, is a human variation. The differential tendency of the latter, by contrast, is often an overriding of material form and condition: an overriding related to idealist anthropology, in which alternatives are in effect wholly voluntary. Yet it is part of the power of SF that it is always potentially a mode of authentic shift: a crisis of exposure which produces a crisis of possibility; a reworking, in imagination, of all forms and conditions.

In this at once liberating and promiscuous mode, SF as a whole has moved beyond the utopian; in a majority of cases, it is true, because it has also fallen short of it. Most direct extrapolation of our own conditions and forms — social and political but also immanently material — has been in effect or in intention dystopian: atomic war, famine, overpopulation, electronic surveillance have written 1984 into millennia of possible dates. To live otherwise, commonly, is to be other and elsewhere: a desire displaced by alienation and in this sense cousin to phases of the utopian, but without the specific of a connected or potentially connecting transformation and then again without the ties of a known condition and form. So that while the utopian transformation is social and moral, the SF transformation, in its dominant Western modes, is at once beyond and beneath: not social and moral but natural; in effect, as so widely in Western thought since the late 19th century, a mutation at the point of otherwise intolerable exposure and crisis: not so much, in the old sense, a new life as a new species, a new nature.

It is then interesting within this largely alternative mode to find a clear example of an evidently deliberate return to the utopian tradition, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). It is a return within some of the specific conditions of SF. The alternative society is on the moon of a far planet, and space-travel and electronic communication — to say nothing of the possibilities of the “ansible,” that device for instantaneous space-wide communication developed from the theory of simultaneity — permit interaction between the alternative and the original society, within a wider interaction of other galactic civilisations. At one level the spaceship and the ansible can do no more, technically, than the sea voyage, the cleft in the underground cavern and, crucially, the dream. But they permit, instrumentally, what is also necessary for another and more serious reason: the sustained comparison of the utopian and the non-utopian options. The form of the novel, with its alternating chapters on Anarres and Urras, is designed for this exploratory comparison. And the reason is the historical moment of this looking again at utopia: the moment of renewed direct social and political hope, a renewed alternative social and political morality, in a context with one variable from the ordinary origins of the utopian mode, i.e. that within the world in which the hope is being interestedly if warily examined, there is not, or apparently not, the overwhelming incentive of war, poverty, and disease. When Morris’s dreamer goes back from 21st to 19th century London the questions are not only moral; they are directly physical, in the evidently avoidable burdens of poverty and squalor. But when Le Guin’s Shevek goes from Anarres to Urras he finds, within the place provided for him, an abundance, an affluence, a vitality, which are sensually overwhelming in comparison with his own moral but arid world. It is true that when he steps out of his place and discovers the class underside of this dominant prosperity the comparison is qualified, but that need only mean that the exuberant affluence depends on that class relationship and that the alternative is still a shared and equal relative poverty. It is true also that the comparison is qualified, in the text as a whole, by what is in effect a note that our own civilisation — that of Earth, which in its North American sector Urras so closely and deliberately resembles — has been long destroyed: “appetite” and “violence” destroyed it; we did not “adapt” in time; some survivors live under the ultimate controls of “life in the ruins.” But this, strictly, is by the way. Urras, it appears, is not in such danger; Anarres remains the social and moral option, the human alternative to a society that is, in its extended dominant forms, successful. It is among its repressed and rejected that the impulse stirs, renewing itself, after a long interval, to follow the breakaway revolution, anarchist and socialist, which took the Odonians from Urras to a new life on Anarres. Shevek’s journey is the way back and the way forward: a dissatisfaction with what has happened in the alternative society but then a strengthened renewal of the original impulse to build it. In two evident ways, then, The Dispossessed has the marks of its period: the wary questioning of the utopian impulse itself, even within its basic acceptance; the uneasy consciousness that the superficies of utopia — affluence and abundance — can be achieved, at least for many, by non-utopian and even anti-utopian means.

The shift is significant, after so long a dystopian interval. It belongs to a general renewal of a form of utopian thinking — not the education but the learning of desire — which has been significant among Western radicals since the crises and also since the defeats of the 1960s. Its structures are highly specific. It is a mode within which a privileged affluence is at once assumed and rejected: assumed and in its own ways enjoyed, yet known, from inside, as lying and corrupt; rejected, from in close, because of its successful corruption; rejected, further out, by learning and imagining the condition of the excluded others. There is then the move to drop out and join the excluded; the move to get away, to get out from under, to take the poorer material option for a clear moral advantage. For nothing is more significant, in Le Guin’s contrasted worlds, than that Anarres, the utopia, is bleak and arid; the prosperous vitality of the classical utopia is in the existing society that is being rejected. This is a split of a major kind. It is not that Anarres is primitivist: “they knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology” (§4). In this sense, the modification of Morris is important; it is clearly a future and not a past, a socially higher rather than a socially simplified form. But it is significantly only available in what is in effect a waste land; the good land is in the grip of the Urrasti dominance. It is then the movement Huxley imagined, in his 1946 foreword. It is not the transformation, it is the getaway.

It is a generous and open getaway, within the limited conditions of its wasteland destination. The people of Anarres live as well, in all human terms, as Morris’s cooperators; mutuality is shown to be viable, in a way all the more so because there is no abundance to make it easy. The social and ethical norms are at the highest point of the utopian imagination. But then there is a wary questioning beyond them: not the corrosive cynicism of the dystopian mode, but a reaching beyond basic mutuality to new kinds of individual responsibility and, with them, choice, dissent, and conflict. For this, again of its period, is an open utopia: forced open, after the congealing of ideals, the degeneration of mutuality into conservatism; shifted, deliberately, from its achieved harmonious condition, the stasis in which the classical utopian mode culminates, to restless, open, risk-taking experiment. It is a significant and welcome adaptation, depriving utopia of its classical end of struggle, its image of perpetual harmony and rest. This deprivation, like the waste land, may be seen as daunting, as the cutting-in of elements of a dominant dystopia. But whereas the waste land is voluntary deprivation, by the author — product of a defeatist assessment of the possibilities of transformation in good and fertile country — the openness is in fact a strengthening; indeed it is probably only to such a utopia that those who have known affluence and known with it social injustice and moral corruption can be summoned. It is not the last journey. In particular it is not the journey which all those still subject to direct exploitation, to avoidable poverty and disease, will imagine themselves making: a transformed this-world, of course with all the imagined and undertaken and fought-for modes of transformation. But it is where, within a capitalist dominance, and within the crisis of power and affluence which is also the crisis of war and waste, the utopian impulse now warily, self-questioningly, and setting its own limits, renews itself.

*ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. This essay will appear in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder, forthcoming from Longmans (London, 1979).

**SELECT SECONDARY LITERATURE: M.H. Abensour, Utopies et dialectique du socialisme(forthcoming); John Fekete, The Critical Twilight (UK 1977); John Goode, “William Morris and the Dream of Revolution,” in John Lucas, ed., Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (UK 1971); A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (UK 1969); Patrick Parrinder, H.G. Wells (US 1977); Darko Suvin, “The Alternate Islands,” Science-Fiction Studies, 3 (Nov. 1976); E.P. Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary (new edn. US 1977); Raymond Williams, Orwell (UK 1971).

ABSTRACT

There are many connections between science fiction and utopian fiction, yet neither is a simple mode, and the relationships between them are complex. If we analyze the fictions that have been grouped as utopian we can distinguish four types: a) the paradise, in which a happier life is described as simply existing elsewhere; b) the externally altered world, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by an unlooked for natural event; c) the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort; and finally d) the technological transformation, in which a new kind of life has been made possible by a technical discovery. (Dystopian narratives may be discussed by inverting these terms, the utopian paradise becoming dystopian hell, for instance.) Among the texts discussed in the light of Engels’s distinction between “utopian” and “scientific” socialism are Bacon’s New Atlantis, More’s Utopia, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.