“We Need the Stars”: Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

All that you touch You Change.

All that you Change Changes you.

The only lasting truth Is Change.

God Is Change.

—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.

—Karl Marx

It is in her treatment of the concept of change that many critics locate the most accessible basis for an examination of the politics of Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents—and rightly so. The Parable novels, spanning a time frame of over sixty-five years (from 2024 to 2090), revolve around the attempts of Lauren Oya Olamina, a young African American woman, to overcome the loss of her family in the destruction of her former home Robledo, a small Californian walled-community. Central in Lauren’s effort is the attempt to form a new community, based upon a new understanding of individual and collective existence, which is designed to accept the fact that the post-apocalyptic world surrounding them lacks any form of permanence or stability. The expression “God is Change” becomes the central credo of this new community and forms the philosophical cornerstone of a quasi-religious system Lauren creates. “All that you touch/You Change./ All that you Change/Changes you./The only lasting truth/Is Change./God/Is Change” (Sower 3). This excerpt from the “Book of the Living,” the collection of “truths” Lauren writes down and advertises as the basis for her vision of a progressive community, is commonly considered evidence that supports readings of Butler’s novels as arguments for the necessity to leave behind outdated conceptions of community and society, trading them in for the progressive ideal of change. Such readings of the Parable novels frequently refer to classic postmodern arguments regarding the liberatory potential contained in concepts such as diversity, pluralism, the incredulity toward repressive “meta-narratives,” or the embrace of difference.¹ From this perspective, the Parable novels can seemingly be construed as postmodern visions of a progressive politics of community and identity. Yet, such a reading of Butler’s novels, especially of Butler’s treatment of the concept of change in the context of a destabilized and deregulated world, quickly reveals itself as one-dimensional, undervaluing the true scope of Butler’s critical intervention. Furthermore, labeling Butler’s novels postmodern misses a crucial shift in literary history. As we shall see, Butler’s Parable novels are not postmodern but post-Fordist novels.²

Despite the fact that the terms “Fordism” and “post-Fordism” are becoming more prevalent in critical discourse, it appears prudent to begin this analysis by establishing the ways in which these terms will methodologically and analytically operate in what follows. By post-Fordism I do not merely designate a shift in the dominant mechanisms of production of Western capitalism over the course of the last few decades. Instead, I assign the term a more expansive descriptive force, rooted in its conceptual antecedent: Fordism. Fordism is not just defined by the assembly line. More importantly, the term Fordism describes a mode of production that for the first time in history invades, standardizes, and regulates virtually every aspect of the lives of its subjects—their social, political, cultural, geographical, and even medical lives. By extension, the term post-Fordism, as I use it in this essay, does not just describe the shift in production from national, regulated, industrial economies to globalized, deregulated service and immaterial economies, but also a vast shift in the entirety of social and political life, including politics of the state, nations, and, notably for the purposes of this essay, cultural and intellectual production. Methodologically, I base the following inquiry on the writings of the French Regulation School, whose insistence on the importance of analyzing the ways in which capitalism progresses and changes depending on its “social regulation” provide an invaluable tool for contemporary cultural critics. Regulation...