The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction

At the beginning of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama caused quite a sensation. Framing the history of the world as teleological process with liberal democracy as its climax in his The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama claimed to have identified the universal denominator for civilisation: "liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe." (Fukuyama xiii) Diagnosing a growing global uniformity, Fukuyama declares democratic liberal capitalism to be the telos of human development (cf. Sagar).

Although Fukuyama's claims have by now been debunked prominently (many commentators have shown for instance, that capitalism and autocracies go equally well together), they still linger in the ideological memory of (most notably) leftist critics and movements, subconsciously accepted as unalterable truth about the current political status quo. Scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have lamented the lack of imagination exhibited by the left, claiming that the (intellectual) left has long abandoned the ideological arena: the envisaged revolution by those who Žižek calls "left Fukuyamaists" aims at erecting a more human scaffolding around the construction of neoliberal capitalism by insisting on universal health care, LGBTQ-rights, or anti-racist programmes. These cosmetic improvements, however, cannot disguise the late-Thatcherite understanding of politics and economy dominating the discourse around neoliberalism. To describe this cognitive paralysis, Mark Fisher introduces the concept of "capitalist realism," thereby capturing the perceived inevitability of the current socio-political system, i.e. "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it." (2) Expanding Fredric Jameson's insights on postmodernism, Fisher conceptualises capitalism as "realism in itself" (4), which has succeeded in colonialising the Blochian New, "seamlessly occup[ying] the horizons of the thinkable" (8). Having sustained itself through the financial crisis of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement, capitalism is here to stay—despite the cries of naysayers in the tradition of historical materialism, predicting an imminent end for capitalism. On the contrary, the mood of crisis does not challenge capitalism to its core, but rather strengthens its position by re-asserting the "insistence that there is no alternative" (78).

This mode of thinking leaves its sediments on a tradition of writing that is usually connected to the optimistic/pessimistic projection of the future: utopia. Following Darko Suvin, this essay defines utopia as "the construction of a particular community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships between people are organized according to a radically different principle than in the author's community" (Suvin, 188, emphasis in original), thus reserving "utopia" as a categorial denominator that includes both eutopian and dystopian writing. Suvin then goes on to differentiate between "eutopia," "organized according to a radically more perfect principle than in the author's community" and "dystopia," "organized according to a radically less perfect principle" (both Suvin, 189).¹ Functioning as a prophetic vehicle, as the "canary in the cage" (Baccolini and Moylan 1), utopia's means of prognosis oscillate between the cognitive limits of the present and the transformative potential of the future. In the words of Fredric Jameson, utopias are written "to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present" (Progress, 151, emphasis in original) cognitively exploring alternative futures.

Especially dystopias seem to express most aptly the zeitgeist of the 21^st century, a way of life conditioned by existential fears such as the global financial crisis of 2008 or the impending disaster of climate change, resulting in a pessmisitic outlook to the future. This article is therefore going to focus more narrowly on more recent dystopias and the kind of pessimism displayed within their narrative frameworks: written in an era of Fisher's "capitalist realism," contemporary dystopias like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and M. T. Anderson's Feed (2002) are informed by the late-Fukuyamaist notion of non-alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, most notable by the absence of a subplot or resistance. As Mark Fisher writes, "once, dystopian films and novels were...