The aff is more than just imagining stuff; utopian speculation works to break down a logic of capitalist realism on a material, archaeological, and ontological level

More important than these economic issues, more pernicious, is the narrowing of our horizon of utopian possibilities to this type of thinking about the future: the future is only more of the present, more of the same capitalist values and sites of invisibility, the future—as the present in which some of us already live—while the actual present pales in comparison to the techno-product-saturated future to which we aspire. Mark Fisher calls this kind of thinking “capitalist realism.” Capitalist realism, he argues in his book of that title, is the dominant ethos of the present, a present in which we can imagine no alternatives to capitalism, in which the world as seen by capital is simply the world, not one social alternative among many. Under conditions of capitalist realism, Fisher contends, dystopias no longer function to prompt us to imagine something other than the present but simply exist as the spectre of its intensification. Under the condition of capitalist realism, we seek simply to survive, to endure, and are no longer capable of imagining that there is an outside or alternative to it. Echoing work done by Michael Schudson, a Marxist theorist who studied advertising, Fisher points to the speculative images of the future that are produced by corporations as the chief mechanism by which we are encouraged affectively to invest in the future of capital. Fisher calls such images “science fiction capital” and suggests that our emotional investment in them encourages us to place our material investment in only a narrow range of futures. He calls on us to invest our sf capital instead in estranged new worlds rather than the continuation of this one. This is a crucial challenge for those of us who work on speculative culture. How can we resist the limited kinds of utopianism promised by the future that is imaged by corporate capital? How can we say “no” to such visions and their surface promises of inclusivity, how can we show our concern for the deleterious effects of globalization, solutions to real problems such as food distribution or climate change, and what Povinelli calls “the unequal distribution of life and death, of hope and harm, and of endurance and exhaustion in late liberalism” (3)? How is it that the right has so effectively captured the social imaginary of the future that those of us on the left find ourselves arguing against the future? Capitalism has colonized not only our present and imagined futures, but also, literally, has consumed the future in the form of futures markets. We now sell future value or assess the worth of corporations based on the products they will make in the future. As Robert Tally notes, derivatives such as commodity futures are “are at once products of the new capitalist world order and the engines driving it” (78). So, how might we invest our imaginative, affective and material energies in other kinds of futures? Part of the answer, I think, lies in thinking about the utopian as ways of living, as embodied in the social arrangements of the future rather than in its commodities. Ruth Levitas’s recent work on the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society in her book Utopia as Method offers a path forward in her insistence that utopia is an urgently needed, material practice, not merely some kind of imaginative fantasy; she refutes those who reject utopia as an impossible fantasy by noting that “what really is impossible is to carry on as we are, with social and economic systems that enrich a few but destroy the environment and impoverish most of the world’s population. Our very survival depends on finding another way of living” (122-124). She argues that the utopian method has three aspects: the architectural practice of producing concrete visions of a better society; the archaeological method of finding elements of utopian possibility “buried in the constant barrage of political rhetoric and policies” (242); and the ontological method of “considering the kind of people we want to become” (244) and thus the kind of society capable of fostering such people. Levitas sees her method as a kind of speculative sociology, emphasizing that utopia is a practice, not a goal or a static visio. More importantly, she contends, we need to be aware that utopia as process is … necessarily provisional, reflexive and dialogic. It is always suspended between the present and the future, always under revision, at the meeting point of the darkness of the lived moment and the flickering light of a better world, for the moment accessible only through an act of imagination. (3366-3369) She ends her book by proclaiming, “we must live in this world as citizens of another” (4787-4788). In a variety of ways, both the creative works discussed in this issue and the essayists themselves take up this project, this “act of imagination” through which we can foster the light of a better world. We can live in this world as citizens of another by inhabiting a perspective from which the default logic of capitalist realism no longer holds, through which we can see, as some of the essays suggest, the cracks in its operations; as other essays and reviews demonstrate, we can live in this world as citizens of another by already understanding ourselves through this ontology, as those better people. We reclaim the capacity to imagine the future and, via that cultural work, remake— imaginatively and affectively, hence politically—our mode of living in the present.