The definition and scope of utopia and dystopia have long been a subject of debate, and still invite many scholars to critically engage in expanding the framework of these concepts and to make their own statements so as to bring new insights and revisions into existing delineations. Ever since these concepts appeared, they have undergone a series of novel definitions and meanings, regarding their nature, form and content. These transformations in the definitions and boundaries of utopia and dystopia have necessarily followed parallel lines with major changes in social concerns, politics, economic circumstances, cultural issues, international relations, and scientific and technological developments over the centuries. Each century has introduced new insights into these concepts and into the understanding of the relation between utopia and dystopia.
Utopia, which primarily appeared as a product of modernity, was more or less abandoned as a literary genre—if not as an impulse—in the wake of the twentieth century, which is characterised by a loss of faith in modernity. Instead, dystopia was staggeringly taken up by authors and critics who intended to criticise the rapidly growing terrors of the new age and problematise the idea of progress inherent to utopia. Dystopia’s problematic position in relation to utopia and the idea of modernity accordingly culminated in a diversity of definitions. Some defined dystopia as “anti-utopia” or “negative utopia” (Claeys 2010, p. 107) while others perceived it as “literary utopia’s shadow” (Moylan and Baccolini 2000, p. 111) or “[utopia’s] essence” (Claeys 2013, p. 15). Throughout its shifting and varied history, dystopia has faced the most tremendous transformations in the contemporary era, which may be said to signal that new definitions and conceptualisations of it are yet to come. This book, likewise, emerges out of the need to create an alternative definition for dystopia which accounts for the transformations it has recently undergone.
With the rapid rise of globalisation and late capitalism, or what we might call corporatism, particularly from the 1970s onwards, the boundaries between the nation-states gradually have begun to blur, the distinctions between people of different races, cultures and so on have become less pronounced, and identity-defining roots have begun to disappear. All these changes signal a gradual shift from sovereign nation-states towards new global societies. These new global societies emerge from a new form of power that is decentred, fluid and yet overarching and all encompassing, and a new social formation that is seemingly more flexible and liberating, yet more controlling. Following the passage from the totalitarian nation-states to seemingly libertarian global societies, contemporary dystopia has begun to display some significant divergences from earlier examples in terms of the motivations in its representation, temporality and plot mechanisms. Unlike the earlier examples of dystopia which depict imaginary representations of a possible future that is remarkably worse than the present society, contemporary dystopia often tends to portray an imaginary and almost allegorical re-presentation of the present society which could not get worse than its current state. Abandoning the tendency in earlier examples to condemn the resistant dissenter to an inevitable failure in his or her resistance to society, contemporary dystopia now appears relatively more hopeful and inclined to offer multiple affirmative ways of resistance and alternative modes of life in and for the present society. Thus, dystopia in the new millennium has passed from a progress-driven form to a process-oriented form that places the emphasis on the actual societies rather than on possible ones. This book suggests that this passage could simultaneously envision a new phase in the history of dystopia as a literary form, and attempts to explore this new phase alongside Deleuzian philosophy. As we shall see, this attempt will involve offering as full and clear a Deleuzian interpretation of the history of dystopia and the contemporary world as possible, identifying and outlining a significant shift in the politics of dystopia and conceptualising a new definition of it that would correspond to this shift.
In recent years, a growing number of studies have begun to define and describe the shift that has been going on in contemporary dystopia. In his latest book Dystopia: A Natural History, for instance, Gregory Claeys has recognised that dystopia was reshaped particularly after World War II and evolved into a “post-totalitarian” form with the emergence of “liberal non-totalitarian societies” (2017, p. 447). In her article “Living in Dystopia” published in Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage, similarly, Raffaella Baccolini has implied a passage in social formation towards a relatively “soft regime” and underlined that this new regime does not necessarily suggest a disappearance of dystopia. On the contrary, as she puts it, “today, more than ever, dystopia matters” (Baccolini 2013, p. 45). Yet she has emphasised the necessity of resisting and keeping our hopes alive rather than elaborating on the reasons as to how and why dystopia matters today and in what ways it offers new forms of resistance. Likewise, another book titled The Age of Dystopia: One Genre, Our Fears and Our Future has scrutinised recently produced dystopian works, highlighting the fact that the contemporary age is gradually becoming an “age of dystopia” (Demerjian 2016, p. 1). But this book hasn’t really investigated in what ways contemporary society has become a dystopian one and how the recent dystopian works testify to its becoming a dystopia in itself. Several other studies in both utopian scholarship and Deleuzian scholarship have been carried out which have in one way or another acknowledged the dystopian potential of the new coming age and the newly arising aspects in contemporary dystopia. But none of them has truly and critically addressed these aspects in detail, explored the real dynamics behind them and questioned whether they require a new insight into the contemporary world and into the concept of dystopia.
At this point, I consider that Deleuzian philosophy can be a guiding spirit in understanding the politics and poetics of the contemporary world and contemporary dystopia, and in creating a new conceptual framework that would account for its newly emerging tendencies. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) does not himself present a formal conception of contemporary dystopia and its motivations. He does not even delve into the concept of dystopia throughout his philosophical trajectory. He only briefly touches upon the perception of utopia in his book What Is Philosophy? (1991) published jointly with the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Felix Guattari. Therefore, it is not Deleuze’s own theoretical insights into dystopia but his valuable insights into the contemporary world that have induced me to consider Deleuze as a good fit for acknowledging the symbiotic relationship between dystopia and contemporary issues. First of all, Deleuze links the above-mentioned change in social formation—from a totalitarian system to a liberal one—to the emergence of late capitalism, and defines it as a passage from “disciplinary societies” to “societies of control ” (Deleuze 1992, p. 3). He not only recognises the changing dynamics of the contemporary world but also elaborates on its revolutionary potential in his inquiry into late capitalism. The way that this revolutionary potential has been theorised by Deleuze and Guattari and represented in fiction by contemporary dystopian writers necessarily leads to the idea that if the passage to late capitalism has brought about a passage to a new form of society, it could also signal a shift in the history of dystopia.
The arguments I put forward to reinterpret and theorise the concept of dystopia are particularly concerned with Deleuzian notions of “immanence”, “transcendence” and “minoritarian”. Over the course of this book, we will see how these three interlinked concepts converge in unveiling the links between contemporary dystopia and the contemporary world because these concepts appear and work at various levels, both as the internal condition of contemporary dystopia and the contemporary world and as the measure against which we evaluate their links. To begin with the notion of immanence, it is one of the most recurrent concepts in Deleuze’s philosophical project, manifesting itself through all his work ranging from Difference and Repetition (1968), The Logic of Sense (1969) and Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (1995) to those co-authored with Felix Guattari like Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and What is Philosophy? (1991). Immanence or the plane of immanence, for Deleuze and Guattari, is a major attribute of life or desire, representing its mobility, dynamism, fluidity, creativity, openness and infinity. Life is immanent in the sense that it is in constant variation and mutation, and full of creative and transformative forces that are capable of establishing new connections and creating new productions. It is immanent since it designates a pure multiplicity that cannot be reduced to negative differences in its entirety. The notion of immanence is thus often linked to “infinite movement or the movement of the infinite ” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 37), or more specifically, to the act of deterritorialisation that is a process of removing any stable reference point to reside on, any destination to arrive at and any roots to refer to. Immanence is strongly suggestive of an affirmation in Deleuzian philosophy because it is the plane where production takes place due to the movement of the infinite inherent to it. Yet there are some moments when this movement is disturbed and interrupted, which can be called the moment of “transcendence”. Transcendence hereby corresponds to the organisation and stabilisation of movements, intensities, forces and flows inherent to life’s immanence in accordance with a particular ground, foundation or a priori ideal. Thus, this notion is often used interchangeably with the plane of organisation. Transcendence predominantly coincides with paths of reterritorialisation, that is, an act of restructuring, taking back to certain roots, advancing towards a destination or blocking the flows of life. Thus, it could be considered as a form of organising and anchoring gravity lurking within immanence. It is at this point that immanence should be perceived not simply as a plane that enters into a problematic relation with transcendence, but as a mode of thinking that values multiplicity over dichotomous difference, connections over disjunctions and consistency over organisation. It is a mode of thinking that paves the way for the creations which would give consistency to chaos or chaosmos in Deleuzian terms. This mode of thinking is integral to the development of minoritarian politics that calls into question and resists the politics of molarisation, or to be more precise, the politics creating moments of transcendence in the plane of immanence.
These concepts are also the major criterion of what constitutes the contemporary world as a background to contemporary dystopia. The contemporary world is run by what Deleuze and Guattari call a “modern immanent machine”, that is, late capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 261). Late capitalism, in a sense, renders and feeds on life’s immanence by creating temporary moments of transcendence. It is an immanent system since it works through an axiomatic principle for the perpetuation of its power and interests. Yet late capitalism’s immanence is not affirmative, as is suggested in the immanence of life. It is indeed a relative immanence, which is best understood when the act of deterritorialisation inherent to the plane of immanence is periodically followed by an act of capitalist reterritorialisation. That is to say that late capitalism deterritorialises the existing codes or blockages on the flows or forces of life; in other words, it opens these flows to new connections, to infinity. But then it quickly creates its own relative limits in the infinite, and recodes or reterritorialises the decoded flows in line with its own purposes. These new recodings or reterritorialisations express “the apparent objective movement ” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 247), that is, a form of movement restricted to capitalism’s relative limits. This process of constant deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation is what exactly defines the axiomatic principle. In this sense, the immanence of late capitalism suggests that it is still...