i Economic Science Fictions ii Part of the Goldsmiths Press PERC series Goldsmiths’ Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) seeks to refresh political economy, in the original sense of the term, as a pluralist and critical approach to the study of capitalism. In doing so it challenges the sense of economics as a discipline, separate from the other social sciences, aiming instead to combine economic knowledge with various other disciplinary approaches. This is a response to recent critiques of orthodox economics, as immune to interdisciplinarity and cut off from historical and political events. At the same time, the authority of economic experts and the relationship between academic research and the public (including, but not only, public policy-makers) are constant concerns running through PERC’s work. For more information please visit http://www.gold.ac.uk/perc/. iii Economic Science Fictions Edited by William Davies iv © 2018 Goldsmiths Press Published in 2018 by Goldsmiths Press Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross London SE14 6NW Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Distribution by the MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Copyright © 2018 William Davies for selection and editorial material. Chapter copyright belongs to individual contributors. The right of William Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and review and certain non- commercial uses permitted by copyright law. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Davies, William, 1976- editor. Title: Economic science fictions / edited by William Davies. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Goldsmiths Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017039951 | ISBN 9781906897680 (hardcover: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Economic forecasting. | Time and economic reactions. Classification: LCC HB3730 .E248 2018 | DDC 330.9001/12–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039951 ISBN 978- 1- 906897- 68- 0 (hbk) ISBN 978- 1- 906897- 72- 7 (ebk) www.gold.ac.uk/ goldsmiths- press v To Mark Fisher vi vii Contents Foreword xi Mark Fisher Acknowledgements xv Introduction to Economic Science Fictions 1 William Davies Section I The Science and Fictions of the Economy 29 1 Economics, Science Fiction, History and Comparative Studies 31 Ha- Joon Chang 2 Future Incorporated? 41 Laura Horn 3 Currencies of Social Organisation: The Future of Money 59 Sherryl Vint 4 Automating Economic Revolution: Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress 73 Brian Willems Section II Capitalist Dystopias 93 5 ‘Feeding Like a Parasite’: Extraction and Science Fiction in Capitalist Dystopia 95 Carina Brand viii viii Contents 6 Pain Camp Economics 125 AUDINT 7 AT392- Red 139 Khairani Barokka 8 The New Black 147 Nora O Murchú 9 Fatberg and the Sinkholes: A Report on the Findings of a Journey into the United Regions of England by PostRational 163 Dan Gavshon Brady and James Pockson Section III Design for a Different Future 205 10 Prefabricating Communism: Mass Production and the Soviet City 207 Owen Hatherley 11 Megastructures, Superweapons and Global Architectures in Science Fiction Computer Games 237 Mark R. Johnson 12 Economic Design Fictions: Finding the Human Scale 257 Bastien Kerspern 13 Valuing Utopia in Speculative and Critical Design 281 Tobias Revell, Justin Pickard and Georgina Voss Section IV Fumbling for Utopia 295 14 Shooting the Bridge: Liminality and the End of Capitalism 297 Tim Jackson ix Contents ix 15 Speculative Hyperstition at a Northern Further Education College 311 Judy Thorne 16 The Future Encylopedia of Luddism 327 Miriam A. Cherry 17 Public Money and Democracy 341 Jo Lindsay Walton List of Figures 369 Contributors 371 Index 375 x xi Foreword Mark Fisher Capitalist realism posits capitalism as a system that is free from the sentimental delusions and the comforting mythologies that governed past societies. Capitalism works with how people actually are; it does not seek to remake humanity in some (ide- alised) image, but encourages and releases those ‘instincts’ of competition, self- preservation and enterprise that always re- emerge no matter what attempts are made to repress or con- tain them. The well- known paradox of neoliberalism, however, was that it required a deliberative political project, prosecuted through the machinery of the state, to reassert this image of the human. Philip Mirowski has argued that neoliberalism can be defined by a double (and somewhat duplicitous) attitude towards the state: on the exoteric level of populist polemic, the state is to be disdained; on the esoteric level of actual strategy, the state is to be occupied and instrumentalised. The scope and ambition of the neoliberal programme to restore what could never be expunged was summarised by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous remark that the method was economics, the goal was to change the soul – the slogan of market Stalinism. The libidinal metaphysics that underlies neoliberalism might be called cosmic libertarianism; beyond and beneath the social, political and economic structures that constrain enterprise is xii xii Mark Fisher a seething potential waiting to be released. On the face of it, then, the goal of politics, according to neoliberalism’s exo- teric doctrine, is essentially negative: it consists in a dismant- ling of those structures that keep enterprising energies locked down. In actuality, of course, and as Thatcher’s remark indi- cated, neoliberalism was a constructive project: the competi- tive economic subject was the product of a vast ideological and libidinal engineering project. And, as Jeremy Gilbert, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work, has observed, neoliberalism has in fact been characterised by a supervisory panic; its rhetoric of releasing individual potential obfuscates its suppression and fear of collective agency. Collectivity is always stupid and dangerous; the market is able to work effectively only if it is a decorticated mass of individuals; only then can it give rise to emergent properties. Far from being a system liberated from fictions, capitalism should be seen as the system that liberates fictions to rule over the social. The capitalist social field is cross- hatched by what J. G. Ballard called ‘fictions of every kind’. Ballard was think- ing of the banal yet potent products of advertising, PR and branding, without which late capitalism could not function, but it is clear that what structures social reality – the so- called ‘economy’ – is itself a tissue of fictions. It must be stressed here that fictions are not necessarily falsehoods or deceptions – far from it. Economic and social fictions always elude empiri- cism, since they are never given in experience; they are what structures experience. But empiricism’s failure to grasp these fictions only indicates its own limitations. Experience is only ever possible on the basis of a web of immaterial virtualities – symbolic regimes, ideological propositions, economic entities. We must resist any temptation to idealism here: these fictions are not cooked up in the minds of already existing individuals. On the contrary, the individual subject is something like a special xiii Foreword xiii effect generated by these transpersonal fictional systems. We might call these fictionseffective virtualities. Under capital- ism, these virtualities escape any pretence of human control. Crashes caused by arcane financial instruments, automated high- speed trading … but what is capital ‘itself’, if not an enor- mous effective virtuality, an inexorably expanding black hole that grows by sucking social, physical and libidinal energies into itself? Capitalism has not, apparently, been weakened by the crash of 2008. While right-wing populism has been terrify- ingly successful, anti- capitalism has not proved to be a suffi- cient mobiliser. Provocatively, we might hypothesise that the emergence of anti-capitalism can be correlated with the rise of capitalist realism. When actually existing socialism disap- peared – with social democracy soon to follow – the radical left quickly ceased to be associated with a positive political project and became instead solely defined by its opposition to capital. As capital’s cheerleaders endlessly crow, anti-capitalists have not yet been able to articulate a coherent alternative. The pro- duction of new economic science fictions therefore becomes an urgent political imperative. Capital’s economic science fic- tions cannot simply be opposed; they need to be countered by economic science fictions that can exert pressure on capital’s current monopolisation of possible realities. The development of economic science fictions would constitute a form of indir- ect action without which hegemonic struggle cannot hope to be successful. It is easy to be daunted by the seeming scale of this challenge – come up with a fully functioning blueprint for a post- capitalist society, or capitalism will rule forever! But we shouldn’t be forced into silence by this false opposition. It is not a single-total vision that is required but a multiplicity of alternative perspectives, each potentially opening up