By Jessica Hurley
We live in wretched, beautiful times. Surrounded by ecological disasters, brutally visible state- sanctioned and state-inflicted violence and murder against black, indigenous, and trans communities, and the blatant profiteering of the ruling classes, the catastrophes of the present don’t require us to use our imaginations in the way that the threat of disaster sometimes has. We no longer have to imagine what it will be like when the glaciers melt, when the oceans acidify, when the possibility of having a single job that can support you with adequate healthcare and a plan for retirement is vanishingly slim. The oceans are retaking New Jersey. My last Uber driver was the dean of students at a Philadelphia public high school. He couldn’t afford not to work nights and weekends.
At the same time, in these same times, we live surrounded by newly visible forms of protest and resistance. Out in the streets, at political meetings, or across the internet, the grassroots political organizing of #BlackLivesMatter refuses to let the lives lost to state violence slide back into invisibility. Visible catastrophes are able to galvanize mass action more readily than those that we have to imagine. And seeing resistance movements spurs more action, makes it easier to see what resistance is, and to perform it.
I went to Geneva this summer with all of this on my mind. My trip was to give a paper at a conference addressing the concept of posthumanism, a term developed as a tool for thinking about what becomes of our concept of the human – defined as, for example, being not-an-animal, not-a-machine – when the outsourcing of our memories to our phones makes us cyborgs, or when we know that our bodies are composed more of the bacteria who live in us and keep us alive than they are of own cells. Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto in 1986, long before the internet and personal computers made the idea of prosthetic computers that would take over functions previously performed by the body an everyday one. She had to imagine it. She invented the language to talk about our hypertechnological society before it became visible, when it existed only in the imagination. I got on the plane thinking that posthumanism could, at its best, still be this: a poetics of the invisible, a way of describing the impossible. But cities burn, and forests burn, and does it matter so much, any more, this imagination? What need is there for imagination when our problems and their solutions are fighting it out on the streets around us?
At this conference, unexpectedly, I met my first bona fide Capitalist. Not just someone who owns the means of production, who makes money from money or from other people’s labor. This guy has a PhD in philosophy and an MBA and now works at the World Economic Forum. You know the cabal of shadowy masters-of-the-universe types who meet in Davos every year to determine the fate of global capital for the next twelve months? This guy organizes that. He spoke for double his allotted time about the business models that make certain technologies more or less likely to be developed by private companies (hint: PROFIT). He said, in short, that we didn’t need to imagine what posthuman might look like. We can see it now in balance sheets and budgets, tax breaks and subsidies.
I have a private rule at events like this: don’t fight with capitalists. They will not hear you, you will not convince them, and you will only get upset. But oh, did I fight with this one. I wanted to protest a simple point, and I got sucked in, and I found myself for a full hour after the end of the session arguing with this guy and two other (male, white) literature scholars about whether capitalism was good or bad.
The outcome was predictable in one way, at least: they did not hear me, I did not convince them, I got upset. But what struck me hardest was the absolute incapacity of all three of my colleagues to exercise their imaginations. My Capitalist interlocutor, sure. Why imagine differently when you really believe that the free market will always produce the best of all possible worlds? But I also stood next to two men who were obviously trying to engage more seriously but who were crippled by their own lack of imagination. Here, at a conference addressing the poetics of the invisible, two professors of imaginative literature could not discuss alternatives to capitalism because they could not imagine beyond it. I stood in the room where, six hundred years earlier, Jean Calvin turned the world upside down by imagining a book differently and watched two men whose lives are devoted to interpreting books that describe the impossible fail to imagine the world even slightly differently to how it is now, to how our ambassador from Davos saw it.
This experience wasn’t an epiphany for me, a sudden realization that art matters, that making art matters, that making other worlds for others to experience is political, and important. I’m incredibly lucky that Applied Mechanics talks hard about these ideas, thinks hard about them, and makes art with the assumption that art matters, that making art matters. But saying that art is always political isn’t quite the same thing as what I sensed in Geneva: that there can be no politics, and certainly no politics of liberation, without art. Without art, the concerted effort to imagine, represent, experience and share the impossible, we’re stuck with what we have. We can look out of the window and see forests burn, cities burn, acts of heroic resistance and the daily labor of fighting for a better world. But how can we fight if we can’t imagine a world where the forests don’t burn, where the people flourish? The reality that we see, visibly, around us existed as pure imagination once, as cracks in the real through which Calvin, for one, saw an impossible future shine. Fighting with capitalists is still a dumb idea; they will not hear you, you will not convince them, and you will only get upset. We make art instead: prosthetic imaginations for those who can’t yet imagine for themselves, realities that rise like an ocean around our friend from Davos, cracks in the ice, trees in the desert.