Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia [1st ed.] 9783030431440, 9783030431457

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Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia Rahime Çokay Nebioğlu

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia

Rahime Çokay Nebioğlu

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia

Rahime Çokay Nebioğlu Ankara, Turkey

ISBN 978-3-030-43144-0    ISBN 978-3-030-43145-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The foundations of this monograph were laid during my doctoral studies at the Middle East Technical University, and I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Nil Korkut Nayki for her guidance and generous support from the very first moments of this research. I am also hugely thankful to the members of my dissertation committee, Selen Sevgi Aktari and Elif Öztabak Avcı for their constructive feedback and unfailing encouragement. I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to my academic sponsors at Duke University, Ken Surin and Markos Hadjioannou, for generously giving their time to offer invaluable comments for this research. I would also like to thank Liz Grosz, Fredrick Jameson and Michael Hardt for all their support throughout my time at Duke. It was the most productive and festive time of my doctoral studies. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ronald Bogue for his support, recommendations and comments on my research from the very beginning of this adventure I undertook in Deleuze scholarship. His boundless energy and passion for Deleuze studies have been a source of inspiration. My gratitude is also due to the Deleuze Studies and Utopian Studies Societies and to their members for welcoming me so warmly into their communities and providing me with every opportunity to share and discuss my ideas in conferences, seminars and talks. I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Nursel İçöz, Zeynep Zeren Atayurt Fenge and Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu for giving me the inspiration to always go further v

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in my academic endeavours. My thanks also go to those at Palgrave for seeing this study through to publication, and to my blind readers for their highly constructive reports. This research has been assisted by grants from the Turkish Fulbright Commission and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBİTAK), and I gratefully acknowledge their support. Above all, I wish to thank my family for their infinite love and support. Finally, my heartfelt thanks are due to my husband, Fevzi Nebioğlu, for his love, encouragement and patience as I spent many long days and nights completing this study.

Contents

1 Introduction: Postscript on Dystopia Today  1 References  15 2 Dystopia from Transcendence to Immanence 17 A Cartography of Dystopia: Then and Now   17 Transcendent Dystopia  24 Transgressive Dystopia  30 Immanent Dystopia  34 References  40 3 Dystopia After Late Capitalism 43 The Move Towards the Plane of Immanence   43 Dystopian and/or Distopian?   49 Dystopia from Discipline to Control   55 References  63 4 Minoritarian Politics of Contemporary Dystopia 65 Towards a Minor Dystopia   65 Dystopian Writers as Cultural Symptomatologists   71 References  73

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5 Schizoanalysis of Contemporary Dystopia 75 From Breakdown to Breakthrough: The Invention of a People to Come  75 From the Clinical and Critical Approach Towards Schizoanalysis  82 References  90 6 The Immanence of the New Weird: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station 93 From the New Weird to Immanent Dystopia   93 Smoothing Over the “Hybrid Zone”  102 Hybrid as the New Intermezzo  112 Queering Desire and Nomadising Science  115 Orphaning Art and Unconsciousness Against the Oedipal Yoke  118 “To Think Aesthetically” as a Way of Affirming the Hybrid  122 Schizophrenising Language  125 References 132 7 The Roads to Immanent Dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy135 From Ustopia to Immanent Dystopia  135 Beyond the OrganInc Walls  140 “Anti-Rev” Movement Against the Oedipal Yoke  152 “Sheer Vertigo”: Between Forgetting and Remembering  154 “Animals R us!”: Becoming-Animal in the Anthropocentric Stratum 163 The “Rag Ends” of Meaning  171 References 176 8 Conclusion: Contemporary Dystopia as an Art of the Possible179 References 195 Index197

1 Introduction: Postscript on Dystopia Today

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 © The Author(s) 2020 R. Çokay Nebioğlu, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_1

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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 a vicious circle, each movement of which is in variation. Most probably as an outcome of this relative immanent system taking the helm of the entire world, there occurs a gradual transformation into a new form of society that complies with this seemingly liberative yet in fact more encapsulating working mechanism of late capitalism. Deleuze calls these newly emerging social formations “societies of control” in his “Postscript”, and defines the current situation as a passage from “spaces of enclosure” to “spaces of free-floating control”, from the process of moulding to the process of modulation, and from a closed system to a dynamic system (1992, p. 3–4). This is accompanied by some changes in subjectivity, forms of control and organisation, the school system and so on. With this in mind, Deleuze concludes his “Postscript” with a critical question, the question of whether these changes may “give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control” (1992, p. 7). In a sense, in this book I formulate my main argument in relation to the definition of societies of control and to the critical question Deleuze poses at the end of his “Postscript”. I argue that these newly emerging societies have more dystopian potential than the societies of the previous centuries since they are governed with a more insidious form of power and a more expansive mechanism of control. This dystopian potential

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makes itself clear in contemporary examples of dystopia in the sense that they predominantly portray the present societies rather than a future model of dystopian societies. In so doing, they tend either to avoid making specific time references to a future setting or to locate the dystopian societies in the present. Contemporary dystopia, thus, becomes today’s dystopia. I contend that if dystopia becomes a literal re-presentation of the present dystopia, then it simultaneously becomes an exploration of ways of resistance to the present, as well. To comprehend how contemporary dystopia becomes a resistance to the present, it is necessary to go back to Deleuze’s question and explore “new ways of resistance against the societies of control” (1992, p. 7). In line with a Deleuzian perspective, I claim that societies of control are more inclined to produce new and affirmative ways of resistance that would comply with the new dynamic peculiar to their formation. The new dynamic of these societies could be seen as the mobility inherent to late capitalism. As previously discussed, capitalism owes its mobility to its axiomatic, that is, the constant act of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. The axiomatic principle operating for capitalist interests could become a weapon to fight against the dystopian reality of present societies. Put succinctly, societies of control that reside on the plane of immanence manifest affirmative forces and flows of desire, although these forces and flows are constantly frozen into fixed forms and structures for capitalist interests. However, whenever the capitalist “immanent machine” deterritorialises and liberates these flows for further capitalist production, they become open to revolutionary lines of flight and could resist further capitalist reterritorialisations.  This means that the capitalist axiomatic could very well be turned against itself, and what makes the societies of control dystopian in the first place could simultaneously become a tool for their resistance and liberation. Contemporary dystopia tends to illustrate this complicated yet still promising process by becoming more and more hopeful and affirmative in its portrayal of dystopian reality and ways of resistance. In so doing, it embraces a minoritarian position by pushing not only the limits of late capitalism but also the limits of the concept of dystopia to their extreme. In this book I consider the newly arising tendencies in dystopia as an outcome of the newly arising tendencies in social formation, which makes

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it necessary to revisit the history of dystopia in line with the changes in social formation. More specifically, as a society moves from the plane of transcendence towards the plane of immanence, dystopia also moves from transcendence towards immanence. This movement can be traced in two significant phases in the history of dystopia according to their degree of intensity. We can acknowledge the first phase as the moment of transcendence which predominantly coincides with twentieth-century dystopia, and the second as the moment of immanence which largely coincides with contemporary dystopia. Yet this shift from the moment of transcendence to the moment of immanence is not definitive in the sense that these two phases suggest two different fully determined stages of dystopia; or dystopia has fully evolved from one particular form to another. I attempt to reinterpret the historical trajectory of dystopia by observing the new tendencies arising in dystopia, to show their relation to the contemporary world and to finally create an alternative terminology that would address these relations. In so doing, however, I do not circumscribe all the dystopian works of a particular period into the strict borders of such labels as “transcendent” or “immanent”. I simply aim to highlight the predominance of some particular aspects in some particular historical periods, and leave space for exceptions and subversions. Working through these stated purposes, I suggest a new term, “dysaxiomatic”, that would help us to delineate the distinctive characteristics of the new moment of dystopia and its immanent relation to the contemporary world. Dysaxiomatic is a concept created out of the combination of the term “dystopia/n” and the Deleuzian notion of “axiomatic”, disclosing the double-edged nature of any territory under the axiomatic of late capitalism. A territory under late capitalism does not refer to a tangible and sedentary place, or simply the earth, but it stands for a mutable site. It does often have an organising principle that makes it hold on to a specific time, space, objects and objectives. To preserve its organising centre, it tends to draw strict boundaries and construct fixed subjectivities, representations and significations. That is, it basically forms a rigid system or an organisation which could be a linguistic, social, political, conceptual and even corporeal one. Nevertheless, this is not to say that it  cannot abandon or switch its organising centre and gravitate towards other formations. To the contrary, it is often forced to do so. This  indeed

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explains the logic behind the axiomatic of late capitalism. The axiomatic of late capitalism constantly hovers between the forces of deterritorialisation and the forces of reterritorialisation. It perpetually purges territories of their previously existing organising principles, codes, norms and forms, and opens them to new creations. It allows flexibility “always ready to widen its own limits so as to add a new axiom to a previously saturated system” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 238). Yet even if this flexibility targets the sustainability of capitalist accumulation and production, it can simultaneously tolerate “sectors and modes of production that are noncapitalist” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 455). Dysaxiomatic, then, characterises both a dystopian territory, that is, closed space of impossibilities and a distopian territory, that is, an open site of possibilities. It stands for “dystopian territory”, for it is perpetually subject to striating, Oedipalising and molar forces, and is perpetually frozen into closed and rigid structures. It, at the same time, suggests a “distopian territory” for it is incessantly disposed of its established codes, systems of thought, forms and practices, and opened to new creations that may not always essentially be capitalist. In this book I hope that this new concept will allow us to distinguish not only immanent dystopia from transcendent dystopia but also the contemporary world from the previous eras with regard to their capacities “to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here-and-now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 100). As suggested by the aims stated above, this book is primarily a theoretical study, introducing new ideas and fresh insights not only into utopian scholarship but also into Deleuzian scholarship while simultaneously offering a new conceptual groundwork for the study of dystopia. In seeking to introduce alternative definitions and conceptions of dystopia, the aim of this book is not to be critical for criticism’s sake but to be creative and productive. Rather than blindly refuting the long-established conceptions, I aim to rethink them from a Deleuzian perspective and go beyond them so as to be able to address the arising tendencies in contemporary dystopia. The process of rethinking and/or going beyond, in this sense, marks not only an attempt to look into the forces behind the

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concept of dystopia but also an attempt to explore the ways of affirming these forces. These forces could be identified as the potential to resist and to draw subversive lines from the dystopian reality and as the capacity to create affirmative changes within and for the society. This idea culminates in the creation of both new conceptions to define these forces and new tools to work with, through these forces in contemporary dystopia. Pursuing the aims and concerns stated in this introductory chapter, the second chapter stages a confrontation between the traditional conceptions of dystopia and a possible Deleuzian understanding of dystopia. Within the framework of this confrontation, this chapter first focuses mainly on the traditional understanding of the concept, providing a brief survey of the existing definitions and meanings of utopia and dystopia. It then presents a discussion of the critical problems regarding these definitions and complications, and traces the shifts which have occurred in contemporary dystopia and the shifts which could be said to be distinguishing it from twentieth-century dystopia from a Deleuzian perspective. I do not claim that these shifts stand for two different, clear-cut categories of dystopia. I argue that these shifts are nonetheless significant enough to suggest that there are two different phases in the history of dystopia. This chapter identifies these two phases along with the transition period in the history of dystopia and characterises the differences between these phases from a Deleuzian perspective in terms of their tendency towards transcendence or immanence. The third chapter argues that traditional conceptions of dystopia fall short in defining contemporary dystopia and addressing its distinct features, and that a new working definition may be made in the light of Deleuzian philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari’s works appear to be a good fit for a novel definition, considering their emphasis on the notions of immanence and the virtual present. Deleuze and Guattari do not probe into the concept of dystopia in their philosophical framework but briefly note their opinions on the concept of utopia in their book What is Philosophy? This book utilises these ideas in its delineation of the concept of dystopia, seeing that utopia and dystopia are already close siblings and can even be used interchangeably due to their common tendencies. This chapter further sheds light upon the theoretical background of the distinction between transcendent and immanent dystopia within the context of Deleuzian philosophy.

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The fourth chapter continues the second and third chapter’s discussion on the deterritorialising role of contemporary dystopia. It explores contemporary dystopia’s complex links with minoritarian politics, posing the question of whether it could be considered as what Deleuze and Guattari call “a minor literature” (2003, p. 16). If contemporary dystopia functions as a minor literature which is basically defined by its political immediacy, collective value and deterritorialising mission, its political, collective and revolutionary dimension marks a new understanding of the contemporary dystopian writer, as well: the dystopian writer not as a passive foreseer of a future dystopia but an active healer of the already-­existing dystopia. In this regard, this chapter delves further into the idea of contemporary dystopian writers as what Deleuze calls “cultural physicians” (1991, p. 16) that not only unveil the shortcomings of society but also offers positive cures for these shortcomings. The role of the contemporary dystopian writer as a physician necessarily draws life and dystopian fiction into a relation of sickness and “health” (Deleuze 1997, p. 4), which is also elaborated in this chapter. The idea of dystopia as an enterprise of health reinforces contemporary dystopia’s affinities with its own era, and helps us to contextualise its mission of resisting the present. Resistance to the present, for Deleuze, requires the creation of a new people. Drawing from Deleuze’s contention, this chapter interrogates the invention of a new people to come in contemporary dystopia as a possible manifestation of its resistance to the present, and explores it as a literary element in contemporary dystopia. In this chapter I contend that the invention of a people to enter into contemporary dystopia derives from the schizoid dimension of desire, a kind of desire freed from the capitalist capture, and bears close links with the kinds of subjectivity emerging in and through the late capitalist system. This strongly suggests that contemporary dystopia becomes a revolutionary agent, a form of remedy that triggers the real productivity of desire by deinstitutionalising its capitalist regulations. Seeing this, I propose a schizoanalytic approach as an alternative way of reading contemporary dystopia that would enable us to disclose its novel treatment of the present, its potentialities to create a new earth, a new people and a new health, and its move towards the plane of immanence.

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Although this book is primarily theory-driven, I still need to experiment with these new definitions and tools, as explored in these chapters, by putting them into practice in some contemporary works. To this end, the sixth and seventh chapters respectively present close schizoanalytic readings of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. In so doing, these two chapters test out the possibilities of a schizoanalytic reading of literature, which is highly likely to bring about some difficulties, considering the fact that although Deleuze and Guattari do offer an alternative way of reading literature they do not provide clear tools or routes to follow in the analysis of literary works. To reduce these possible difficulties to a minimum, these chapters draw a particular path of reading by limiting the application of the concepts at hand to three main fields: space, subjectivity and textuality. Miéville’s and Atwood’s critical engagement with the concept of dystopia is one of the major reasons for bringing these two writers together as the main focus of these chapters. As a Canadian canonical dystopian writer, Margaret Atwood has her own conception of dystopia and a long history of dystopian writing. This gives us an opportunity to theoretically and practically explore the conceptual links between her understanding and my theorisation of dystopia. Likewise, Miéville, who is a young yet promising British candidate for being a part of the canon, has powerful insights into the concept of dystopia and into the potential of the contemporary world as a dystopia. Unlike Atwood, who is an acclaimed dystopian writer, Miéville is primarily a science-fiction, fantasy and weird-fiction writer. However, as he himself argues, his works often intersect with the political agenda of dystopia. In this sense, bringing these two names together firstly widens the perception of dystopia, making us see it both within its generic boundaries as in Atwood and outside the immediate boundaries of the genre as in Miéville. More specifically, it sheds light upon the ways in which dystopia overlaps with other genres like fantasy, weird fiction and science-fiction. Secondly, these two writers not only offer different treatments of dystopia as a genre and as a concept but also represent the inclinations of two different generations due to their difference in age. Considering that the movement from the plane of transcendence towards the plane of immanence is traceable in the

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historical trajectory of societies and of the dystopian genre, it could be asked whether being a member of an older or a younger generation makes it possible to trace some differences in these writers’ tendency towards transcendence or immanence in their literary oeuvre. I have selected Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from among the many novels these writers have produced so far and of the novels written in the contemporary era primarily because these texts meet on a common ground in terms of their experimental and subversive tendencies. In addition, they depict the representation of contemporary society in a similar way since they were produced in the same decade, that is, the early 2000s. Perdido Street Station (2000) depicts the dystopian world of Bas-Lag where capitalist interests have become the primary concern of the government and the means of subjugation, corruption and victimisation. In the same way, the MaddAddam trilogy, which is composed of Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), explores a dystopian world run by multinational corporations and devastated by scientific, technological and ecological crises. The trilogy presents a realistic portrayal and a critique of the latest configuration of capitalism, its collaboration with science and technology, and the dystopian aspects of societies of control. These texts crystallise the workings of late capitalism as an “immanent machine” through the constant act of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation and show how this act breeds dystopian disasters in present society. Not only do they reflect today’s dystopian reality, but they also explore the possibilities of resistance in a more hopeful way. These texts become a testimony to the fact that the capitalist axiomatic can become a powerful means of resistance to the present. These texts also prove to be very rich in material demonstrating strong connections between both writers’ styles and Deleuzian concepts. They, in this sense, help to punctuate the diverse potentials of the Deleuzian concepts at hand. To this end, the sixth chapter scrutinises how the dysaxiomatic of late capitalism takes on an almost allegorical dimension in Miéville’s Perdido Street Station to depict a literal portrait of  how the late capitalist system actually operates. In so doing, I tackle Miéville’s position primarily as a fantasy and weird-fiction writer who injects dystopia as a political

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project in his creative oeuvre. I show how the confrontation of dystopia with different genres such as fantasy and weird fiction can broaden the scope of dystopia and increase fictional possibilities through a variety of techniques, one of which is the embodiment of allegory. I interpret the allegorical presence in the novel as a political tool, to emphasise Miéville’s stance as an ardent socialist, and a literary tool, to intensify the political meanings inherent in the text. This chapter further expands on how dysaxiomatic allegorised in the novel permeates into other Deleuzian concepts such as becoming-minoritarian, nomadism, deterritorialisation of language and orphanage, which could help us to tackle the dystopian and distopian aspects of the Bas-Lag world. The full sense of the capitalist axiomatic emerges through the analyses of these Deleuzian concepts in subsections of the chapter like “Hybrid as the New Intermezzo”, “Queering Desire and Nomadising Science” and “Orphaning Art and Unconsciousness against the Oedipal Yoke”. The seventh chapter, likewise, interrogates the possible conceptual correspondences between Atwood’s notion of “ustopia”, which sees utopia and dystopia as a ying yang pattern, and immanent dystopia, by adopting a similar approach to the MaddAddam trilogy in the light of some new Deleuzian concepts such as becoming-animal, becoming-minoritarian and non-­ Oedipalisation. In characterising the dysaxiomatic nature of late capitalism in relation to these concepts, this chapter simultaneously highlights the political efficacy of Atwood’s ustopian project. Throughout these chapters, I seek to explore how contemporary dystopia feeds on the revolutionary power of deterritorialisation inherent in the capitalist axiomatic and is capable of carving out relatively more effective and affirmative ways of resistance than those in the twentieth-century dystopia. Finally, and to conclude this book, the last chapter discusses how contemporary dystopia becomes an art of the possible. Contemporary dystopia does not give up on life no matter how it turns out to be a dystopia itself. It believes in life itself and follows its footsteps towards the plane of immanence, the plane of the possibilities, movements and intensities. Evaluating life through and within itself gives contemporary dystopia an unbounded power to take up the possible and use it to create multiple alternative modes of existence and alternative lives against the present dystopian one. This last chapter extends this discussion to a wider corpus of contemporary works from different literary traditions in order

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to show how works from all regions of the world could render a potential collectivity and a micropolitics of dystopia. It is the micropolitics of dystopia that not only helps us to find the possible at the heart of the present dystopian reality that could go beyond the limits of late capitalism, but also helps to find the possible at the heart of the concept of dystopia that could go beyond the limits of the genre.

References Baccolini, Raffaella. “Living in Dystopia.” In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage. Edited by Fatima Vieira, 44–49. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholarship Publishing, 2013. 14–19. Claeys, Gregory. “The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell.” In The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Edited by Gregory Claeys, 107–135. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. ——. “Three Variants on the Concept of Dystopia.” In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage. Edited by Fatima Vieira, 14–19. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholarship Publishing, 2013. ——. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (1971). New York: Zone Books, 1991. ——. “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October 59 (1992): 3–7. ——. Essays: Critical and Clinical (1993). Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ——. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. ——. What Is Philosophy? (1991). Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia UP, 1994. ——. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 2003. Demerjian, Louisa M. “Introduction.” In The Age of Dystopia: One Genre, Our Fears and Our Future. Edited by Louisa MacKay Demerjian, 1–5. New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Moylan, Tom and Raffaella Baccolini. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Colorado: Westview. 2000.

2 Dystopia from Transcendence to Immanence

A Cartography of Dystopia: Then and Now The term “utopia” was first coined by Thomas More in 1516 from the Greek and incorporates two homonyms, ou-topos and eu-topos, meaning both “no place” and “good place” respectively. It was More who used the word “utopia” first to define the imaginary island in his book Utopia, though this is not to say that he was the first to mention utopianism. Actually, the concept goes back to as early as 380 BC, when Plato created his imaginary ideal city in The Republic. Despite the differences in their ways of presentation and the long gap between these two periods, both Plato and More display a similar utopian impulse to pose questions about and offer solutions to their present society. Both present alternative worlds set in a remote future wherein idealised societies are depicted with their alternative ways of organising human relations, daily life and politics. In The Republic, the promises of a communal system are proliferated to the extent that the justice and equality among the members of the society are achieved by means of a thoroughly structured control mechanism headed by philosopher-kings. More’s Utopia, on the other hand, draws the picture of an idyllic community that has perfected itself and © The Author(s) 2020 R. Çokay Nebioğlu, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_2

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been purged of the ills and evils of More’s society, and has been structured around the principles of morality, equity and tolerance. That is, these two preliminary works seem to be practically on the same plane. They both portray a fictional society that is far removed from the miseries and troubles of the present society, idealised in its commitment to the pursuit of social justice, peace and security in all its dimensions. They are both intended for awakening people to realise the huge gap between the society they are living in and the idyllic society they might have instead been enjoying, and hence to aim for the betterment of their community. No matter how closely these two initial examples are affiliated in establishing the very characteristics of the genre of utopia, scholars of utopia do not seem to have reached an agreement regarding the scope of the term. Starting its life as a coinage, as the problematic combination of eu-­ topos/ou-topos, the meaning and understanding of the concept of utopia have changed many times over the years. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is a wide range of definitions or conceptualisations of utopia today and even more are about to come. Moritz Kaufmann’s definition is apparently amongst the earliest and most adopted one, calling utopia “a ‘nowhere Land’, some happy island far away, where perfect social relations prevail” (Kaufmann 1879, p.  1). Kaufmann as a socialist relates utopia to socialist doctrines. For him, socialist utopianism is a move towards a faultless social structure, of moral and material improvement; to be more precise, utopianism moves towards social perfection. This tendency to associate utopia with perfection observed in Kaufmann’s definition is shared by a later scholar, Joyce Hertzler. Hertzler regards perfection and progress as a distinctive feature of utopia through his references to More’s Utopia, which, for him, depicts “a perfect, and perhaps unrealisable, society located in nowhere, purged of the shortcomings, the wastes and the confusion of our own time” (Hertzler 2012, p. 1). Thus, it is the idea of perfection and belief in social reform that underpins utopia. Krishan Kumar is another milestone contributor to utopian studies who seems to defend the equation between utopia and perfection. Kumar (1987) describes utopia as “a description of the best […] society […] as a society in full operation in which we are invited vicariously to participate” (p. 25). Refuting the idea of utopia simply as an abstraction and as a mere critique of existing society, Kumar defends its understanding as a

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perfection-seeking enterprise. In these three prominent scholars’ visions, utopia is patently a future-perfect society far removed from the deficiencies, fallacies and disorders of the present. This discrepancy between a utopian society and existing society inevitably becomes the focus of interest for contemporary scholars as well, paving the way for new definitions. These definitions seek to explore the relationship between the ideal society depicted in utopia and present society, and the utopian writer’s stance towards and projects for existing society. Lyman Tower Sargent (1994) acknowledges this divergence between the utopian alternative and present society by defining utopia in its broadest sense as “social dreaming – […] which usually envision[s] a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live” (p. 3). What is envisioned in utopia is then a dream of a better—if not a perfect—life than the existing one. Utopia not only expresses dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs but also a desire for social fulfilment and improvement. Ruth Levitas (2010) similarly comes up with a novel definition of utopianism and utopia, defining the former as “a precondition, a disparity between socially constructed experienced need and socially prescribed and actually available means of satisfaction”, and the latter as “the desire for a different, better way of being” (p. 209–11). For her, utopia is a political practice of yearning for the improved ways of living and a condition of happiness; and it is obviously the ills of the existing society that generate the utopian impulse to dream of a transformation and a betterment. I take up Levitas’s understanding as my starting point to create my own conception of utopia and dystopia. The existing society with which the utopian writer is increasingly discontented becomes a background against which the utopian alternative is created. While creating the ideal society, however, the utopian writer cannot be claimed to be severing all ties with the society he or she lives in. On the contrary, the utopian alternative takes its material from the existing society, and serves both as a criticism addressed to the unbearable realities of the present and as a solution proposed to resolve them. This alternative comes up with an idyllic model in the writer’s mind against which the present conditions are measured and future objectives are determined. To be more precise, utopia

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emerging as a reaction to the present comes to function as a standard designed for the future. This utopian quest to design a better future which began with Plato and culminated with More in the sixteenth century continued to draw considerable attention in the seventeenth century. During this period, the works of writers like Tomasso Campanella, Francis Bacon, James Harrington and Margaret Cavendish contributed a lot to the formation and proliferation of the utopian genre and tended to rely on the potential of the human mind and effort to attain the desired progress in the betterment of society. The reliance on human progress, reason and scientism in utopia rose dramatically in the eighteenth century, also known as the Age of Reason, which was best reflected in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1727), François Fenelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), Voltaire’s Candide (1759) and Louis-Sebestian Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1771). Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), likewise, illustrated the continuing utopian impulse in the nineteenth century. These utopian pieces were depicting more and more conspicuously the increasing disappointment with existing society, a society bearing the grim consequences of the newly emerging industrialisation. Not surprisingly, this utopianism which was in its prime until the beginning of the twentieth century came to a halt upon encountering the grim face of modernity. To be more precise, utopia appeared primarily as a product of modernity, positing the pursuit of progress. This progressivism was found to be problematic, first, in the sense that it evolved into a totalising ideology itself. Second, the newly flourishing age was characterised by wars, rising fascism, nuclear weaponry, geopolitical conflicts, depression, traumas and disillusionments. Relating these negative changes in the sociopolitical atmosphere to the idea of modernity, writers began to see its possible threats and destabilising effects, and hence lost their faith in the myth of progress. This disillusionment with modernity necessarily killed the utopian imagination and the hopes for the betterment of society. It was a kind of discontent with modernity that led to the emergence of dystopia. Against this background, the term dystopia, which was first employed as the antonym of utopia by John Stuart Mill in 1868 in a parliamentary debate, made its first appearance in the literature of the

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twentieth century as a reaction to “what others have called the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity: reason and revolution, science and socialism, the idea of progress and faith” (Kumar 2013, p. 19). That is, dystopia appeared in order to problematise modernity. Yet it is hard to say that it really achieved this; on the contrary, it fell into the same trap of progressivism and modernity. Early works such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) presented a critique of a society driven by the logic of progress by portraying its possible nightmarish future. These early instances depicted a fictional society worse than present society, where an atmosphere of pessimism and terror was reigning as a consequence of the irredeemable social, economic and political changes the alternate society would have undergone. The better horizons intended in utopian works were replaced by the radically worse horizons intended to frighten people and warn them to tidy up their present society so as not to end up in such a future, since the impulse for utopianism was no longer regarded as influential enough to effectively raise awareness in the wake of the terrors of the new century. The move from better horizons to worse was signalling a change in attitude towards the increasing problems of existing society. Whereas utopia reacts to the shortcomings of society by proposing an idyllic alternative for the future, dystopia counters these shortcomings with its nightmarish alternative that is envisioned to be on the way unless some positive transformation occurs. What positions dystopia in direct opposition to utopia is the depiction of a considerably worse society than the present one. This is also why it is perceived to be pessimistic. Dystopia, lacking the utopian optimism, is frequently defined in comparison and contrast to its utopian counterpart. Dystopia evidently sparks many critics to come up with their own definitions and neologisms regarding its function and conception. Yet, what remains almost constant in these definitions and neologisms is the major characteristics that most dystopian narratives tend to employ. These narratives created from the 1910s onwards till the end of the twentieth century picture utterly undesirable future societies dominated by totalitarian regimes where power and technology become the major means of the control of the people. Since control mechanisms in these totalitarian states view individualism as a threat

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to the perpetuation of their power, they dictate a kind of collectivism that cancels out all the individual differences and reduces heterogeneity in all aspects of life to a forced homogeneity. People are kept under constant surveillance; freedom and human rights become a luxury; and justice remains only as an expectation. No matter how frequently dystopia is delineated as the opposite of utopia, these characteristics of dystopian narratives bring the term closer to its counterpart, not as its negation but as its continuation. Even the earliest examples of utopia prove to be drawing a picture of an equally totalitarian regime, as in dystopian examples. Plato’s Republic, to begin with, illustrates a totalitarian regime hidden under the guise of the ideal society. To build up the perfect egalitarian system, Plato establishes a hierarchy, placing the philosopher-kings as rulers at the top. This hierarchical system underpins a strict class system in which people are separated into three categories: the guardians having gold-souls function as leaders and controllers, the silver-souled auxiliaries serve as soldiers, and the producers having bronze-souls work as farmers, merchants and labourers (Book III). All citizens are under the constant surveillance of the guardians and exposed to strict education and training. This training, however, is maintained to eliminate their individuality, make them accept their social status and finally turn them into obedient citizens. The communal rule, though designed in favour of justice and equality, bears strong resemblances to those in dystopian narratives. Another communal rule can be observed in More’s Utopia in which an equally hierarchical and patriarchal social structure is established. In More’s utopian society, people are restricted to a brutal sameness; they wear the same clothes, eat the same meal in the same diner, earn the same amount of money, do the same labour and live in the same houses (Books IV and V). Although this sameness targets the obliteration of social and economic inequality, it ends up with the obliteration of private lives and individualism. The kinship recognised between utopia and dystopia necessarily puts the date regarding the emergence of dystopia into question: whereas dystopia appeared in its actual form in the 1900s, its lineage apparently goes back to the times when the first utopian narratives were created. Dystopia is not the opposite of utopia but rather owes its appearance to that of utopia itself. It derives from the very desire to create the betterment

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inherent in utopia. This complicated situation arises from utopia’s and dystopia’s relation to modernity. Utopia, which is a product of modernity, and dystopia, which supposedly emerges as a reaction to modernity, fall into the same trap, that is the trap of a totalising ideology. Both somehow intend to reach an anticipated transcendent ideal. Hence, it is not unusual to find a degree of dystopia in utopia and a degree of utopia in dystopia. Seemingly, both utopia and dystopia use the same narrative devices, creating an imaginary society, either idyllic or dystopic, locating it in a distant place in the remote future, crowding it with people characterised by their sameness rather than their distinctiveness and governing it by strong control mechanisms organising all terrains  of social, economic, political and private life. Both narratives have the same motive for a change and a transformation in existing society. Presenting either an alternative society that is worse than the existing one to show how things could go wrong or an idyllic society that is idealistic in all ways to depict how things could be improved, these sibling genres foreground their intentions to ameliorate the present so as to reach a better system designed with the future in mind. While the impulse of hope dominates utopia, the impulse of fear governs dystopia in order to cope with the prompt yet voluminous changes of the age; but what remains the same in both is a dream for a better future. In other words, what remains the same is a progressive movement towards a future telos. Considering these sibling concepts’ simultaneous embodiment of both utopian and dystopian horizons and their common progressivism, it is obvious that the boundaries between utopia and dystopia have long been blurred and that these terms can even be used interchangeably. In this regard, Levitas’s definition of utopia as “the expression of desire for a better way of living and being” (Levitas 2010, p. 17) could also be said to stand for the definition of dystopia. Building upon Levitas’s emphasis on desire, I argue that there is always an agenda for the future, that is a desire for future improvement in the traditional understanding of dystopia, and that the present serves only as a ladder (to be built up) to reach it. This progress-oriented tendency suggests a linear logic which positions itself around a telos. In linear logic there is a constant urge for the end. In a sense, it desires closure. It accordingly dictates the truthfulness and superiority of the centre it revolves around. It is structured by roots and

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pinnacles; to be more precise, a beginning to stem from, and an end to arrive at. It operates through binaries and hierarchies, setting time as a straight line in which the past, the present and the future are firmly segregated. This segregation is strongly felt in the manifestations of early dystopia: although dystopia just like utopia finds its sources in the ills of the present, hopes are preserved only for a future possibility, and a transformation in the present is necessitated only for the fulfilment of this future possibility. This necessarily increases the gap between the present society and the future alternative and intensifies the presence of a linear logic behind the emergence of dystopia. The political implications of linear logic in dystopia mark a teleological and progress-driven desire in its agenda. This is tantamount to saying that the traditional conception of dystopia is grounded upon the idea of a telos, prioritising the future over the present and imposing a grand alternative. I designate this traditional conception as the first moment in the history of dystopia. This is the moment when dystopia leans towards transcendence.

Transcendent Dystopia Although one can trace the genealogy of dystopia back to the times during which the first utopias were written, the actual emergence of dystopia as a genre is still accepted to have occurred in the twentieth century. The new century of world wars, epidemics, depression, violence, repression, increasing totalitarianism, and scientific and technological developments unsurprisingly led to total disillusionment for man and laid the groundwork for the appearance of dystopia in its full sense. The early examples produced in this era by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and others constituted the agreed canon of dystopia. These canonical works have been debated often in terms of totalitarianism, gender relations, body politics, Foucauldian disciplinary aspects and the like. Yet none of them has probed into these works from a critical point of view, putting them to the test and questioning their problematic tendencies. In drawing the distinct features of contemporary dystopia, I put the twentieth-century dystopia into question and interpret them through a

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Deleuzian lens. To this end, I find the affinity between the concept of dystopia and the above-mentioned telos-orientation quite controversial in the sense that it suggests a commitment to a grand alternative, a foundation or ground for and from which dystopia emerges. Telos-orientation, as Lisa Garforth (2009) points out, “at its heart, is about the relationship between ends and means, and the purposive action that seeks to bring them together” (p. 10). This is necessarily accompanied by a progressive movement, an orientation towards a transcendent ideal and a dialectical thinking, which subjects the interior mechanisms of dystopia to a negation, as in the case of twentieth-century dystopia. No matter what good intentions dystopia might have in its emergence, the idea of telos has a paralysing effect on the way it operates. This culminates in a kind of contradiction with the very motives in the emergence of dystopia since it creates the same gravity that a transcendent centre of power can create, and this sense of gravity is what dystopia has emerged from in the first place to warn people against. Apart from this dialectical aspect, the idea of telos in dystopia’s closure-orientation suggests a linear logic. In other words, the idea of betterment is envisioned only for the future, which necessitates a continuous progression towards the future. In this respect, this orientation keeps dystopia not only from recognising the very forces and potentialities of the present for transformation but also from initiating any transformative activity for the present. The present serves merely as a means while the future becomes an end only. The linear logic that prioritises the future recognisably contradicts the very logic of dystopia. Although dystopia emerges to negate the idea of progress and the growing tendency towards totalitarianism, it ends up by submitting to the same progressive ideology and displaying similar problematic tendencies towards totalitarianism in its essence. In one sense, dystopia betrays itself. Not surprisingly, the canonical works of the early twentieth century, such as British writers Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), predominantly tend to host these problematic tendencies. To begin with the earliest example, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in the wake of rising capitalism and bourgeois British society. The novel draws a picture of a dystopian society in which a highly stratified caste system is built up, classifying people as Alphas,

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the members at the top of the society, who are assigned for leadership positions; Betas for positions requiring intelligence; Gammas and Deltas for occupations demanding no intelligence; and Epsilons, those at the bottom of the class system, for physically demanding positions. This sharp classification that allows no change of status is not an outcome of natural selection among those with more intelligence or those with less intelligence; on the contrary, it is literally created by the pioneers of Fordism. The citizens of this Brave New World are not naturally born but are designed and produced by means of reproductive technology. They cannot move up or down on the class ladder since it is their genes that determine their social status. Much as people are genetically designed for their classes, they are still subjected to conditioning via hypnopaedic, which is a technique used to instil doctrines during sleep, in order to prevent the build-up of any potential resistance. To reinforce the illusion of happiness, they are continually delivered soma, a kind of drug serviced by the government to control the citizens’ attachment to reality. In this dystopian society, the concept of family loses its meaning since any kind of emotional attachment is assumed to be dangerous and hence restricted; sex is reduced only to a physical need and satisfaction; literature, art and history are seen as the cruelest enemies of the state and strictly banned from being accessed. Instead of all these, the citizens are encouraged to recklessly consume. This dystopian regime ruled by Fordism meets its resistant dissenters, Bernard Marx and John the Savage. Bernard Marx is an Alpha who is genetically programmed to serve the state as an intellectual, yet a systematic error occurring during his reproduction enables him to realise the grim reality he is surrounded by. As for John the Savage, unlike Marx, he is neither produced by breeding machines nor raised by the Ford state since he is a natural born living in the primitive part of the state called “Savage Reservations”. These characters, still preserving their humanity despite the dehumanising practices, resist by questioning the principles of the state; however, their resistance is doomed to fail: while Marx is banished from the state in order to prevent his destructive potential, John the Savage chooses to commit suicide after a period of self-exile at the end of the novel. Written as a critique of the period during which technology was rapidly replacing the labour force and falling into the hands of government,

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with society gradually being channelled to embrace consumerist capitalism, Brave New World shares the above-mentioned dangers of telos-orientation and linearity. Realising the threatening potential of the present, Huxley set out a worst-possible future alternative for that present. Linearity is highly observable in Huxley’s text, in which he not only presents a dystopian future but also offers a relatively more preferable alternative, which testifies to the dialectical logic behind his dystopia. The Brave New World under the control of the Fordist state, the dystopian pole of the novel, stands in direct contrast with the Savage Reservations, the utopian pole, that are purged of all technological, social, political and even psychological contamination seen in its dystopian counterpart. As Huxley himself remarks in the 1947 foreword to his novel, “[t]he Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia,1 or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects” (p. 7). Dissatisfied with the primitive alternative against the dystopian society, however, Huxley further explains his regret for not giving a third alternative, in which he desires a future community where the economy would be prorated, politics cooperative and where technology would be at the service of man and for the benefit of man. This alternative, though not given in the novel itself, obviously proves the tendency towards a transcendent ideal in Huxley’s dystopian vision. The desire for betterment is obviously preserved not for the present which he observes is getting worse but for the future utopian alternative. This makes his dystopian text inhold all the threats of utopia. Following Huxley’s work, George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 is among the pioneers of the dystopian genre. Written in 1949, the novel portrays the totalitarian dictatorship of Oceania where, unlike the previous dystopian societies pretending to be caring about the happiness of their citizens, power becomes the only objective of the state. To hold the absolute hegemony, Oceania utilises technology by implementing telescreens everywhere in the country, including the private houses of its citizens, and manipulates language by making up Newspeak, a language which is designed to limit people’s thought. People are under constant surveillance not only by means of telescreens keeping track of their each and every movement, but also through the family spies trained to betray those transgressing the state’s principles. The sexual activity of the citizens is

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controlled on the grounds that sex wastes the human energy necessary for the maintenance of the state’s power and hence is only allowed for the purpose of reproduction. The thoughts and reality of the citizens are regulated by subjecting them to doublethink, a kind of practice forcing people to simultaneously keep two conflicting beliefs in their minds. Their past and present are reconstructed by manipulating all the previous and current newspapers, textbooks, films and documents. “Two minutes of hate” rituals are performed every day to keep people’s hatred alive towards the common enemy, which distracts them from thinking about their present situation and resisting authority. The nonconformist of this totalitarian regime exerting oppression on every single aspect of life is Winston Smith, a clerk hired to rewrite historical documents in the Ministry of Truth. In Oceania where the sexual act is regarded as an act of rebellion, Smith’s act of resistance happens to be sexual intercourse with Julia, yet another nonconformist who sees herself as a rebel from the very beginning. As in previous dystopian novels, their resistance ends with failure: both are arrested by the government and brainwashed with the cruelest techniques until they blindly succumb to the authority of Big Brother. Orwell, like his predecessors, wrote his novel at a time of political turmoil following the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Revolution, the rising of Stalinism and Nazism, World War II and the Cold War years. Orwell was a man who spent some time as a policeman in Burma, where he witnessed and even had to implement the laws of an authoritarian political regime. Although there was not such a strict totalitarian regime reigning in the countries at the time, he was sensing the increasing political authority of the Soviet Union, Spain and Germany and became alarmed at these countries’ inclination towards the monopoly of power in a single party and hence towards totalitarianism. Thus, he aimed at warning people against such a future possibility by portraying Oceania as a state under the despotic control of Big Brother and people whose lives are under constant surveillance by means of technological devices. 1984 was not merely a critique of the society Orwell was living in; rather, it was also a prophecy of a possible future. It not only alerted people to a dystopian future but also offered a better alternative which he preserved for the future: socialism. The whole novel was, in this respect, grounded on the conflict between socialism and totalitarianism. Orwell’s text exemplifies

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telos-orientation because he seemingly advocated for an ideal socialist political regime and wrote his novel to lead people to make provisions against the threats to liberal democracy and to start a transformation in the present society so as to reach the ideal state, according to his agenda. These progress-driven tendencies  observed in these early dystopian texts bring the genre to a transcendent and authoritarian pole whereby the concept of dystopia opens up to a controversial trajectory that does not comply with its initial motives, which I perceive as the first moment in the history of dystopia. This transcendence not only implies the existence of a binary thinking system sneaking into the concept, but also results in the emergence of some recurring patterns and conventions. The transcendent pole of early dystopia eliminates the likelihood of any individual victory in or escape from dystopian societies. Each protagonist shows an individual effort to resist the totalitarian nation-state he is immersed in and looks for a way out by carving a revolutionary space, though each attempt to overthrow the dystopian system results in failure. The inevitability of the protagonists’ tragic ends adds another aspect to the traditional definition of dystopia. The protagonists of the dystopian novel come closest to modern tragic heroes, though they do not attain it. “Tragic hero”, in the broadest sense of the word, designates a character who, despite his heroic or revolutionary deeds to achieve his ideal, brings his own demise due to his tragic flaw. The dystopian protagonists appear to be heroic in their rebellious acts against the corruption and oppression of the totalitarian states and in their tragic ends; nonetheless, they cannot be regarded as truly tragic heroes since it is neither their tragic flaws nor “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that drag them to their disastrous ends, but rather the tricky hands of the dystopian writers. This is because most of the twentieth-century dystopian writers tend to furnish their vision with a cruel pessimism and condemn their protagonists to ultimate failure so that they can increase their texts’ influence on the reader. These dystopian writers apparently believe that this shocking effect on the reader will trigger the transformation in present society to avoid the dystopian future depicted in their texts and to achieve a better alternative instead. Stripping the dystopian alternative of any possibility of hope and liberation, the early dystopian writers locate these attributes only in the

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better alternative. They offer the existing society an either/or option and threaten with the cruelest pessimism the inevitable failure of any attempt at resistance. Since their intentions, preserved for the future, could only be achieved through a transformative action initiated in the present, they seek to educate people’s desire for a change of agenda and locate it at the back of their minds by foregrounding a dystopian context where individuals and individual attempts at resistance no longer make sense. Yet this transcendent tendency breeds a contradictory situation. Although the change advocated for the future can only be achieved through the individual efforts of the whole community, such efforts of the protagonists in these dystopian examples are, at every turn, doomed to get nowhere. Nonetheless, the more contradictory these dystopias sound, the more revealing they become in disclosing their underlying agenda. These texts apparently serve as open letters to present society to prevent them from making the wrong choice since the wrong choice made in the present will culminate in the emergence of a dystopian future as depicted in these texts. By condemning the resistant dissenters in the novels to inevitable defeat at the end, they assure that, once the dystopian world is created out of today’s wrong choices, there will be no way to overcome it. This kind of dystopia that reserves utopianism for a better alternative while dooming other revolutionary alternatives to failure essentially has strong totalising aspects, albeit seemingly criticising totalitarianism itself. All totalising systems have a closed nature that is structured upon binary sets and hence reduce differences and contradictions of any kind to negation. The early dystopian texts seem to have become the totalising negation of totalitarianism, which is why in this book I henceforth call them “transcendent dystopias”.

Transgressive Dystopia The incident of 9/11, the war waged on terrorism, environmental disasters, the 2008 financial meltdown, late capitalism and globalisation have led to the new century hosting an outpouring of dystopian works ranging from literature and movies to games. MaddAddam (2003, 2009, 2013), The Hunger Games (2008, 2009, 2010), Divergent (2011, 2012,

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2013) and Maze Runner (2009, 2010, 2011) came out one after another as massively popular examples of dystopian fiction and were later filmed and screened, which made them gain even more in popularity. The new millennium also witnessed other fiction-to-movie and comic-to-TV series adaptations like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Eric Garcia’s The Repossession Mambo (2009) and the black-­and-­white comic book series The Walking Dead (2003–). There has also been a remarkable rise in the number of dystopian video games like Battlefield 2142, Year Zero, BioShock and Robotron 2084. Much as the contemporary era seemed to be a continuation of the twentieth century in its abundance of terrors and predicaments, it has indeed witnessed a remarkable change in its social formation with the rise of late capitalism, and hence the dystopian works of this new century have created a new phase in the history of dystopia by differing from those written in the previous century. In the 1970s, with the onset of postmodern thought, dystopia began to take a different turn, following the new trend towards multiplicity, fragmentation and subversion. The principles of transcendence began to shatter with a change in emphasis from progress to process. This change that has moulded into its mature form in contemporary dystopia, nevertheless, did not occur all at once; on the contrary, it was an outcome of a gradual but steady transition. This transition was made possible through the emergence of a new articulation of dystopia, which appeared in the 1970s as something in between the transcendence of the twentieth century and the immanence of the twenty-first century. Moylan and Baccolini were among the first critics to recognise this new articulation of dystopias and distinguished their features from the twentieth-­century dystopias with regard to their degree of pessimism. To Moylan and Baccolini, the early dystopian pieces seem to have retained an “anti-­utopian” disposition, while those written in the 1970s showed a “eutopian tendency”2 and did offer a small glimpse of hope. The grim pessimism of transcendent dystopia was then replaced with a tiny utopian possibility. With the introduction of a horizon of hope in dystopian thought, anti-utopian dystopia was replaced with eutopian dystopia, which was later categorised as “critical dystopia” by Moylan and Baccolini (2003, p. 7).

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This useful definition of “critical dystopia”3 was later defined by Sargent as “a non-existent society […] that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia” (2001, p. 222). Under the influence of the newly emerging postmodern thought, these new constellations of dystopia of the 1970s strived to go beyond the monolithic discourses of the age. They left out the utterly pessimistic mode, and carved a little space for hope and transformation. The intentional break from the anti-utopian pessimism marked a change in the content, particularly in the endings of dystopian narratives. They tended to have ambiguous and open endings, which give a small hint of hope; however, this ambiguity can become problematic. Most of the time, these narratives ended in the middle of the protagonists’ attempt to explore alternative ways of escape from the dystopian world they were stuck in. Although they did not condemn their attempts to unavoidable defeat and, instead, did give voice to their resistance, these dystopias left it vague as to whether the protagonists really did manage to escape and find happiness in their alternative lives. Even if there seems to be a promise of victory and emancipation in these dystopias, this victory is not one gained within the totalitarian system: these dystopias do not allow for the possibility of change and transformation within their societies, but always explore it from outside the existing system. The change in content is strengthened with a change in the form, as well. These narratives began to transgress the boundaries of the dystopian genre by deliberately merging it with other genres, which could also be seen as a microcosm of the striving to go beyond anything that claims absoluteness or carries the risk of turning into a grand narrative. This attempt in the 1970s to go beyond the singularity and hegemony of authoritative discourses and to blur genre boundaries has made dystopia recognisably transgressive and moved it from the transcendent pole that the twentieth-century dystopia fell into. In a sense, it paved the way for the emergence of contemporary dystopia that portrays the real break from the plane of transcendence. Therefore, I call this form of dystopia “transgressive dystopia”. The transgressive stance emerging in the late twentieth-century dystopia can be observed in the early works of Ernest Callenbach, Joanna Russ,

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Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and many others. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is one of the best known examples of its kind. Atwood’s feminist text portrays the dystopian future of the United States as the Republic of Gilead. Presenting a critique of the patriarchal discourse emergent in her present society, Atwood comes up with an extremely religious totalitarianism which reduces marriage to a legal union contracted to increase the number of obedient citizens, and reduces women to empty vessels utilised only for breeding purposes. As in the early examples of the genre, the society is highly striated, separating particularly women into several categories with regard to their roles in society: Wives, Marthas as servants, Handmaids as breeding vessels, Aunts as guardians and overseers of the Handmaids, Jezebels as prostitutes and Unwomen as workers in the colonies. In this dystopian future, not only women but also men are subject to strict rules of the totalitarian state, banned from reading, writing, talking and even loving. The resistant dissenter of Atwood’s critical dystopia is a Handmaid, Offred, named after the Commander Fred with whom she is assigned to have regular sexual intercourse so as to breed a child. Offred violates the rules of the Gilead by having secret liaisons with the Commander, setting an emotional bond with Nick and, more importantly, secretly reading and keeping a diary. Although the novel predominantly appears to be proceeding like a transcendent dystopia, it foregrounds its transgressive stance most prominently through its ending. Whereas the earlier dystopias all culminate in the destruction of the protagonists, Atwood’s dystopia ends in ambiguity: Offred, scheming an escape plan with her lover Nick, steps into the van of the Eyes, wondering whether she has been betrayed and reported to the Gilead regime by Nick or whether she has just taken the first step to her new life of freedom. Atwood introduces a positive impulse into her dystopian vision by not condemning her hero to a tragic defeat and instead opting for a vague ending. The vagueness of the novel is even more intensified with the addition of historical notes after the ending. The historical documents confirm that the Gilead regime is now over and Offred’s recordings are a subject of study; yet, what is problematic is that these historians are all male and they are all inclined to interpret and reconstruct the manuscript presumably from a patriarchal point of view.

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However transgressive the novel is in its striving to disturb the authority of patriarchal discourse and the binarism of previous dystopias, it still cannot escape falling into the trap of transcendence with its problematic ending.

Immanent Dystopia Obviously, no matter how the dystopian writers in the 1970s intentionally and self-reflexively sought to break free from the chains of transcendence, the actual release could only be achieved in the new century, characterised by late capitalism and globalisation. This break paved the way for the emergence of contemporary dystopia as a new constellation. Contemporary dystopia employs the same strategies as the transcendent dystopia of the twentieth century, but, nevertheless, it does not always share the same motives with the earlier instances of the genre. This difference, first of all, derives from the fact that the alternative societies depicted in these newly emerging dystopias of the age are not imaginary representations of a possible future that is worse than the present, but imaginary re-presentations of the present that apparently could not get worse. Contemporary dystopian writers portray the present under a different light to break the automatic perception of people who have become unable to see the grim reality of present society. This is because one cannot escape the prison unless one realises one is in one. To clarify the point, it might be useful to draw an analogy with Baudrillard’s well-­ known illustration of Disneyland. Baudrillard, in his Simulation and Simulacra (1981), refers to Disneyland as both a fantasy world, wherein people enjoy themselves like children, and as the real world and the real life experience of the Americans who have become obedient slaves of consumerist capitalism. Baudrillard exemplifies Disneyland as the third order of simulation, that is, as a sign concealing the absence of the reality: “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland” (p. 12). Since people cannot differentiate the dystopian reality of Disneyland (of the present society) from its utopian and fantastic pretences, contemporary dystopia exists in order to highlight that it is the “real” country, all of the “real” world that is a dystopia. Just as

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Disneyland is a microcosm of real America, contemporary dystopia is a microcosm of the real present. Faced with the dystopian vision already existing in present society, contemporary dystopian writers do not have the motivation to save the future by creating changes in their societies. Nor do they dream of a better society as an alternative to the present one. On the contrary, what they dream of is merely to create a transformation both individually and collectively in order to save the present. The dystopian texts written in this new millennium stand out with their process-orientation and effectivity in making people aware of their potential and the forces of life to challenge, change and create new ways of living and being in the present itself. These new ways are, however, distant from the binaristic alternatives inherent in transcendent dystopia and from ambiguous attempts observed in transgressive dystopia. These alternatives are multiple, undefined and yet affirmative, rather than dictating either/or choices. These alternatives are not predetermined in the sense that they do not gesture towards a transcendent ideal. This not only prevents them from once again falling into the trap of totalitarianism but also makes them relatively more convenient in terms of dystopia’s attempt to create a change in the present. These changes in closure-orientation undoubtedly underpin changes in the plot devices and the endings of contemporary dystopia. First of all, dystopian writers no longer feel the urge to locate dystopian societies in a remote future. Even if some writers tend to follow the convention to locate them in the future, they do not strongly underline the time reference. Second, they become more inclined to enable the protagonists to succeed in their resistance. The resistance in contemporary dystopia, however, is not confined to secret rebellious acts or clandestine escape plans; instead, the protagonists resist by finding means of fight and flight within and against the present system and by exploring the ways to destroy it. These changes in contemporary dystopia make it easier for its readers to recognise the fact that they are living in dystopia itself and should take action to change their current society. Contemporary dystopia does not propose predetermined schemas for the betterment of the

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current society but instead it simply raises people’s awareness of their own capacity and of the potentiality of life to transform and create. This can be achieved only by showing people the glimpses of transformation, successful resistance and new creations in dystopian worlds. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) nicely pictures contemporary dystopia’s break from transcendent dystopia. In Collins’s first novel, the gap between the present society and the dystopian future is not as huge as it is in Orwell’s 1984. Whereas Orwell depicts a prophetic vision that is likely to happen in the near future, Collins bluntly portrays simply a familiar version of the present. In The Hunger Games, a future society is presented without a specific time reference under the control of the Capitol, in which citizens become the puppets of a reality show nurturing violent competition. The Capitol organising the hunger games selects a male and a female teenager from all of its 12 regions to attend a reality contest. These teenagers are sent to a remote forest where they have to fight with one another so as to be the only survivor of the death game. The lives of these children, now turned into a game, are broadcast to the whole world. Physical beauty, prettiness and charm become crucial to attract the attention of the rich, to get sponsorships and to extend their time of survival in the hunger games. Much as Collins has situated this imaginary world on a different space in a remote future, what is depicted in this dystopian world is indeed an imaginary re-presentation of the present. It is undeniably true that today’s reality shows choose ordinary people for the entertainment of the masses, exploit their lives and ruin their privacy, and people even volunteer to appear on screens at the cost of being the puppets of media. Apparently there is no agenda designed for the future in The Hunger Games; instead, there is an agenda for transformation in the present, which is illustrated by the protagonist Kathness Everdeen. Kathness introduces into the dystopia vision of the Capitol new lines of flight and new ways of seeing. She uses the weapon of the reality show against itself without internalising its doctrines. She survives in the hunger games but her survival does not promise an alternative ideal situated in the future but promises a way of flight and of resistance in the present only, in order to cure the present. The Hunger Games does not intend to achieve some predetermined ideals but works to create an awareness in the minds of people, to break their automatic perception to

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see the dystopia they are literally experiencing and to make them realise that they can find their own ways of resistance and their own lines of flight within the dystopian world itself. Thus, the novel is simply concerned with the potentiality of the present. It is not closed or idealistic in the sense that it does not present a single alternative; on the contrary, it is processual since it glimpses hope for transformation in the here-and-now in myriad ways. Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011) is set in a similar context, in future Chicago where society is separated into rigid factions, each of which corresponds to a particular virtue: the Erudite for the smart and serious, the Amity for the amicable and cheerful, the Abnegation for the devoted and helpful, the Dauntless for the courageous and bold, and the Candor for the decent and truthful. The novel, like The Hunger Games, disguises the existing predicament of the present society in its portrayal of a highly striated social structure. It sheds light upon the implicit categorisation and control mechanisms prevailing in contemporary societies. The five factions strictly tested and determined by the government are quite down-to-earth, holding a mirror at today’s society where you can see prototypes of each category: the Amites in the guise of Greenpeacers representing peace and energy in life or those figures on big screens pretending to behave as if everything were safe and sound in the world; the Erudites in the guise of those assuming that they can save the world with their MacBook Pros; the Abnegation in the guise of those slyly trying to channel people into their own groups, charities or communities by pretending to be selfless and wholly committed to other people’s well-being and happiness; the Dauntless in the guise of soldiers and police officers who, despite their pretension of fidelity to their society, serve only the government’s interests; and the factionless in the guise of invisible lower-class masses living in poverty. In Roth’s dystopian world, the role of the citizens in society is far more privileged than their role in their families, which inevitably eliminates the idea of individuality for the sake of government. The government of this dystopian world prevents its citizens from realising the dreary reality of their situation by breeding a fierce competition and a sick enmity between the factions. Maintaining the perpetuity of its power by first classifying people and then creating a competition between these classes, the government utilises cruel ways of

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marginalisation and punishment for those who pose a threat to its authority. The major source of threat in this dystopian society is apparently the ones who resist being categorised and dare to question the underlying system. Those people are labelled as “Divergent” and condemned to death immediately after they are discovered. Roth’s novel, in its depiction of social segmentation and control mechanisms, seems to bear many resemblances to transcendent and transgressive dystopian examples. Yet the novel departs remarkably from these earlier instances in terms of the disappearance of the wide gap between the present society and the future dystopian society, the means of resistance, and its allowance for the victory of alternative ways of resistance. Bridging the gap between the existing society and the dystopian alternative, the novel necessarily avoids the danger of linearity which most of the time results in the trap  of  transcendence. Moreover, Divergent neither dooms its protagonist to an ultimate failure as in transcendent dystopia nor leaves its ending in ambiguity as in transgressive dystopia. On the contrary, it ends with a promise of hope and liberation, letting its protagonist Beatrica Prior succeed in her resistance against the government. Beatrica Prior is a Divergent who refuses to act and think in a certain way determined by her faction, since her mind flows and moves in multiple ways, which constitutes a huge threat for the government, whose power is based on the absolute control of people’s thoughts and acts. Being Divergent is a resistance in itself on the grounds that the Divergent do not stand for either/or choices but for the plurality as opposed to the monolithic discourse of the government. This plurality accommodates a potentiality to break free from the dictated modes of thinking and to revolt against the oppressive authority. Without proposing a transcendent alternative against the existing one, the novel culminates in Beatrica’s successful attempt at demolishing the authority figures. The novel proves to be an immanent dystopia since it both gives voice to the previously unvoiced subjects and allows them to succeed in their attempts from within the dystopian society itself. The most distinguishing asset of this immanent dystopia is, however, the implication that there is still a space for hope and liberation in the dystopian world. This implication of hope and liberation is established only with such an ending in which the resistant dissenter not only explores ways of resistance and lines of flight in

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the existing system but also manages to subvert the structures of power and make positive alterations without seeking any outside power structure to hold on to. Contemporary dystopia, as illustrated in these works, indicates a new phase in the history of dystopia in which the long-established relation between the means and ends of dystopia is shattered. It divorces itself from the trap of transcendence that locks the possibility of a change into the future realm. It promises a glimpse of hope for a change in the present itself. This glimpse of hope does not point to a predetermined ideal but powerful affects on the contemporary reader to break their automatisation and take action to transform themselves and the world outside. “Contemporary” no longer has anything to do with ends, means, designs or programmes; it simply wages a war against all systems of representation, closed power structures and taken-for-granted monolithic discourses. It paves the way for the opening of multifarious alternative spaces of revolution and resistance without privileging any over the others. Put succinctly, it moves towards the plane of immanence and becomes an integral part of the moment of change in the present societies of control under late capitalism. This is why I hereinafter call it immanent dystopia.

Notes 1. Huxley writes his dystopian novel as a critique of utopia, so he describes the dystopian society in his novel as “Utopia”. In this study I argue that although Huxley’s dystopia emerges as a reaction to utopia, it comes up with its own utopia, which is the primitive alternative in the novel. 2. Lyman Tower Sargent, in his article “Three Faces of Utopianism”, makes a useful discrimination between utopia and eutopia, calling the latter “positive utopia” (p. 9). While utopia is defined as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space”, eutopia is considered to be “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended the contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which the reader lived” (p. 9). 3. One of the motives behind Sargent’s coinage of “critical dystopia” is his idea that the dystopian works of the 1980s critically address the problems

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of the present society with their subversive modulations on content and form. I, however, argue that the critical dimension cannot be peculiar to a particular form of dystopia but rather is something inherent in the very concept of dystopia and utopia. As Fredrick Jameson also puts it, utopia/dystopia is already “a critical and diagnostic instrument” (2005, p. 148). Thus, although I do not agree with this particular idea of Sargent, I find this definition quite useful in the sense that it testifies to the fact that the recent constellations of dystopia depict distinct features as against the earlier examples and that these features are significant enough to be recognised and to trigger a need for alternative definitions as Sargent does.

References Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). London: Vintage Books, 1996. Collins, Suzanne. Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic Press, 2008. Garforth, Lisa. “No Intentions: Utopian Theory After the Future.” Journal for Cultural Research 13.1 (2009): 5–27. Hertzler, Joyce O. The History of Utopian Thought (1922). London: Allen and Unwin, 2012. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Falmingo, 1994. Jameson, Fredrick. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Kaufmann, Moritz. Utopias. London: Kegan Paul, 1879. Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. ——. “Utopia’s Shadow.” In Dystopia(n) Matters: On the Page, On Screen, On Stage, Edited by Fatima Vieira, 19–23. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholarship Publishing, 2013. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. More, Thomas. Utopia, Edited by Ronald Herder. London: Dover Thrift, 1997. Moylan, Tom and Raffaella Baccolini. “Introduction: Dystopia and Histories.” In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Edited by Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, 1–13. New  York: Routledge, 2003. 1–13. Orwell, George. 1984 (1949). New  York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1983.

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Plato. Republic (380 BC), Translated by G. M. A. Grube, Edited by C. D. C. Reeve. Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1992. Roth, Veronica. Divergent. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37. ——. “US Eutopias in the 1980s and 1990s: Self-Fashioning in a World o f Multiple Identities.” In Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: A Comparative Perspective, Edited by Paola Spinozzi, 221–231. Bologna: COTEPRA/University of Bologna, 2001. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We, Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Avon, 1987.

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The Move Towards the Plane of Immanence In What is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the constant “risk of a restoration, and sometimes a proud affirmation, of transcendence” in the concept of utopia and dystopia, and distinguish “between authoritarian utopias, or utopias of transcendence, and immanent, revolutionary, libertarian utopias” (p. 100). As they suggest, an orientation towards a predetermined telos runs the risk of transcendence whilst the shift towards the process  in and for the present  promises a glimpse of immanence. The concepts of immanence and transcendence loom large in Deleuzian philosophy. Transcendence could be considered in relation to its common usage in Western metaphysics, suggesting the existence of a centre, logocentrism and binarism. The plane of transcendence is, for Deleuze and Guattari, where one creates a foundation or a fixed reference point for the image of one’s thought. Any ground that comes along with binarism hints at transcendence since it is transcendence that always produces the illusion of a distinction between body and mind, interior and exterior, inside and outside. Transcendence reduces the multiplicity and virtuality of life into closed forms, and imposes © The Author(s) 2020 R. Çokay Nebioğlu, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_3

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limits on its infinity: “[t]ranscendence enters as soon as movement of the infinite is stopped” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 47). Life, for them, is in essence imbued with infinite flows, movements, diversities and chaos. Transcendence congeals life by congesting its flows, negating its affirmative differences, and freezing its fluidity and mobility into rigid categories. Due to this tendency towards categorising, organising and homogenising, the plane of transcendence is also called the plane of organisation. If transcendence is perceived to be a congealing of life’s energy, dystopia’s appeal to transcendence in the early stages of its appearance is, then, not a coincidence. The problem with transcendent dystopia is precisely the problem with the nature of the societies in which it emerged. Dystopia as a genre appeared at the turn of the twentieth century. It was a period that saw the rise of fascism and then communism alongside the horrors of the two upcoming world wars. Twentieth-century societies were largely characterised as disciplinary societies where a transcendent source of power fostered a teleological mode of thinking in order to perpetuate its authority. The movement of life and man was restrained into the spaces of enclosure, and all the alternative modes of living and thinking were strictly banned. Transcendent dystopia emerged primarily as a bold expression of resistance to this authoritarian vision, foreseeing its destructive potential in the future. It envisioned and desired a better future. In instituting its own vision and desire for betterment, however, it ironically re-enacted the teleological mode of thinking inherent in the societies it critiqued in the first place because it became an enactment of a desire for a particular telos, a magnificent design, drawing a linear route through the present to the future. The logic underlying transcendent dystopia tended to freeze the free flow of desire by repressing and channelling it towards an idyllic model. Rather than creating diverse forms of life, it relied upon an arborescent system that squeezes life’s creative energy into binaristic compositions. The arborescent system is modelled on a tree, suggesting the existence of a root, a centre or a foundation from which all the existing modes of thoughts are derived. The notion of a centre immediately brings the notion of margins or the notion of the other to the fore since the existence of the centre is predicated upon the existence of margins. This

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existential reliance culminates not only in the formulation of binary oppositions such as white/non-white, male/female, good/evil but in the establishment of a hierarchy between these binary pairs. In the tree-like, binaristic and hierarchical model of the arborescent systems, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) put it, “one can never get beyond the One–Two, and fake multiplicities. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any further” (p. 16). Dystopia in the twentieth century proceeded through such One–Two dichotomies just as twentieth-­ century societies did. The major dichotomy was the one between the future dystopian world and its grand alternative. Although the early dystopian writers seemed to be drawing a portrait of a future dystopian world—which they feared their present world would soon turn into— with the traces of the present, they simultaneously yearned for an opposite portrait: a non-totalitarian, non-oppressive, non-patriarchal, non-dystopian (namely a utopian) world. Hope, bliss and peace became beholden to an either/or choice: you would either dream and strive for the grand alternative and find happiness, or you would be doomed to fail in the future dystopian world. At the close of the twentieth century, however, dystopia gradually moved from the plane of transcendence towards the plane of immanence. This was primarily because transcendent discourses such as fascism and communism lost the battle and left the scene to neoliberal capitalism. The new century realised the impossibility of moving forward in politics and the economy within the limitations of existing transcendent discourses. It rather needed a new discourse of freedom: freedom in politics, freedom in economy, freedom in ideology, freedom in social life (Jameson 2003a; Zizek 1999; Negri 2013). The new discourse of freedom under the shield of neoliberalism and late capitalism paved the way for the emergence of liberal democracies, free market economies, and an enhanced notion of human rights and individual liberties. This new discourse, in short, turned the congestion inherent in the disciplinary societies of the twentieth century into a free flow since a new form of mobility was needed to perpetuate the free market and economic growth. Twenty-­ first-­century societies, unlike disciplinary societies, lacked a transcendent centre because the idea of a centre was creating a paralysing effect on movement. They rather needed smooth spaces which would allow for an

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infinite mobility and flexibility, which is why these societies gravitated towards the plane of immanence. The gradual orientation towards immanence was at first promising, precisely because immanence corresponds to life, representing a kind of force that is capable of addressing the nature of life, and, as powerful, infinite, creative, transformative and affirmative, as life itself. Immanence is what breaks free from the tyranny of transcendence, and what lets the flow of difference run in all directions and establish endless rhizomatic connections at all speeds. In the plane of immanence, as these connections do not hold on to any fixed point, there is a constant jump from one connection to another, from one assemblage to another, which ceaselessly creates new relations. The plane of immanence is, therefore, always in movement, diversity and variation, shuttling back and forth in ceaseless weaving and unweaving. Immanence, in short, designates the rejection of singularity for the sake of multiplicity, the rejection of forms for the sake of connections, the rejection of the idea of telos for the sake of process, and the rejection of binaristic either/ or choices for the sake of endless and … and … ands: it is “[t]hinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, p. 57). Despite the promising nature of the plane of immanence, however, the neoliberal scene in the contemporary age has turned out not to be as liberative as it seems. The new discourse of freedom has created its own impasse: the movement of politics, the goods, ideas and individuals are no longer disciplined and regulated, but they are kept under a spider’s-­web-­like control. As Deleuze saw it, disciplinary societies have now been replaced by global societies of control, which are no longer based on metaphysics, which envisions a linear projection of life, moving from the past, through the present, towards the future. They are encapsulated in an infinite present: they constantly assign new temporary anchor points to hold on to, keep circulating, moving and changing through each movement. The utopian project of neoliberalism and late capitalism has gone bad; and the twenty-first century has produced its own dystopia. It no longer becomes possible to think of an outside system other than the existing one. As I contend, the present world is still not entirely devoid of hope, either. The discourse of freedom intended primarily for late capitalist interests allows for new possibilities of resistance in the social and political terrains.

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Immanent dystopia appears as the expression of this new dystopian constellation and new possibility of hope. Contrary to the dangerous metaphysics implied in transcendent dystopia, dystopia today finds itself on the plane of immanence primarily through its adoption of a rhizomatic system inherent in the new discourse of late capitalism. A rhizomatic system is not grounded upon a tree-root structure but is modelled on a network of connections. It does not point at a binaristic system of thought, a beginning, an end, a cause or an effect. A rhizome constantly establishes new connections: it does not assume a point or a position since the only position or point it can embody is a line of connection and of multiplicity. Immanent dystopia’s potential to produce infinite new possibilities of life lies in this rhizomatic logic. Unlike the either/or mandate dictated in transcendent dystopia, immanent dystopia offers endless and … and options. Abandoning the hold on binary oppositions, it does not restrict its protagonists to two poles; it rather allows for a multiplicity of choices. Yet these choices are not predetermined. The new dystopia produced in the contemporary era no longer rests upon an underlying agenda against the dystopian world. Immanent dystopia is not concerned with the restoration of a metaphysics. It does not portray and impose the necessity of a grand plan. To the contrary, it re-presents the present community to which it resists and offers multiple ways of resistance and alternative modes of life. That is why the protagonists in immanent dystopias are given the chance to draw their own lines of flight from the norms and prescriptions of the dystopian system. As a side-effect of the discourse of freedom in the contemporary world, immanent dystopia frees desire from its transcendent chains and releases its affirmative energy to change, transform and create new lines of becoming. In immanent dystopia, there is no linear progression towards the future but a strong reliance upon the inherent potentialities of the present as the source of resistance. As Constantin V. Boundas (2006) avers, “[a] process without telos, intensity without intention, desire […] has its ‘specific perfection’ in itself ” (p. 16). Immanent dystopia is, similarly, a dystopia without a future, but a dystopia with hope, having its own specific perfection. The introduction of hope into dystopian vision becomes possible through its embodiment of a new temporality, that is, a temporality that repositions the future in the present. This shifting

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emphasis is indeed a reflection of the capitalist axiomatic. The axiomatic of late capitalism  conditions a new temporality which is devoid of a future. In the late capitalist axiomatic system, it is not the future but the present that constitutes a space of potentialities, which makes the latter the only temporal horizon available (see Jameson 2003b). The present appears as a dynamic interpenetration of the past and the future and is full of multiplicities and intensities while the future always remains unpredictable. Whilst the axiomatic of late capitalism feeds on the present for its infinite circulation of capital, immanent dystopia rests upon the present as its source of resistance. It preserves the hope of transformation not for the future but for the present because it is the present that requires a creative transformation and simultaneously bears within itself all the creative power for such a transformation. The present in this context is not a slice of linear temporality but an intensity of multiple durations. The perception of time as linear temporality is one of the reasons why in this book I problematise transcendent dystopias. Deleuze and Guattari find the traditional conception of utopia/dystopia “a bad concept” precisely because it submits to a linear logic and “posits a pre-formed blueprint of the future, whereas a genuinely creative future has no predetermined shape” (Bogue 2003, p. 77). What is meant by “creative future”, however, is “not a historical future, not even a utopian history, [but] the infinite Now, the nun that Plato already distinguished from every present: the Intensive or Untimely, not an instant but a becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 112). Immanent dystopia embraces such a perception of temporality in which different time zones can simultaneously exist. The past, the present and the future are not sequential but co-existent in the present itself, and the present inholds all the power to produce new relations. The present, thus, serves both as a source of the dystopian predicament of the contemporary world, namely late capitalism, and as a source of solution to this predicament. The increasing emphasis on the present in immanent dystopia indicates a shift from an emphasis on progress to an emphasis on process. This means that immanent dystopia is no longer interested in advocating a particular telos, an end product, but interested in the creation of powerful affects. The idea of affect in literature should not be confused with personal emotions that arise out of literary texts, whereby “[t]he readers

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of novels, spectators of dramas, find themselves led by these works to fear, to grief, to pity, to anger, to joy and delight, even to passionate love” (Nussbaum 1997, p. 53). Affect corresponds to impersonal structures of feelings and impersonal singularities (see Spinoza 1992; Deleuze and Guattari 1994). It is an intensity, a mode of becoming or an affirmative energy that transgresses boundaries of all kinds and triggers new creations, new modes of existence and new possibilities. It is not a singular configuration but a rhizomatic multiplicity of inner experiences that can be innately felt. It is the change itself, a change that is not towards a predetermined schema but towards undetermined and unshaped possibilities. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) note, affect is more than feelings and sensations; they are “beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived” (p. 164). Exceeding itself and any other sensual experience, affect disrupts taken-for-granted notions, beliefs and habits. In Deleuzian words, it “operates as a dynamic of desire within any assemblage to manipulate meaning and relations, inform and fabricate desire, and generate intensity – yielding different affects in any given situation or event. Perception is a non-passive continual moulding, driven and given by affect” (Colman 2005, p.  13). Immanent dystopia invents such affects which increase the potentiality of our bodies to react and resist the present dystopian reality. This is achieved in immanent dystopia through our encounters with the resistant dissenters who, unlike those in transcendent dystopias who decrease our power to act as they are always inevitably doomed to fail, succeed in their revolutionary endeavours against the dystopian system. These encounters strongly act upon us and increase our power to act against the dystopian system itself by using and abusing its own working mechanisms just like the resistant dissenters do in immanent dystopia. Affects in immanent dystopia are, in this sense, not only an expression of but also a trigger of transformative change.

Dystopian and/or Distopian? In the contemporary era dystopia no longer appears as transcendent models but as what Deleuze and Guattari (1983) call “agents of the real productivity of desire, making it possible to disinvest the current social

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field, to ‘deinstitutionalise’ it, to further the revolutionary institution of desire itself ” (p. 30–1). For Deleuze and Guattari (1994), utopia etymologically is “always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu” (p. 100). That is, utopia/dystopia is innately revolutionary and its revolutionary power comes out of the forces of present life, yet this power is often exposed to some moments of congealment as in the case of transcendent dystopia. Immanent dystopia correspondingly draws its strengths from the forces of the present milieu and uses them for revolutionary purposes. Yet the existing definitions and conceptions of dystopia cannot escape the dangers of -topia. They often fall short of standing for these strengths and potentialities in the contemporary world and contemporary dystopia. In defining and conceptualising the present constellation of dystopia, “dystopia” may not be the right word. Frankly, we need an alternative concept. In this book I do not offer a new concept that would replace the concept of dystopia in its entirety in fear that any absolute replacement would run the risk of submitting to the problematic implications of -topia such as idealism, perfection, linearity and closure. But I do offer an alternative concept that would help us to understand the very dynamics underlying the contemporary world and immanent dystopia; a concept that would hopefully display the capacity of the contemporary world and immanent dystopia “to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here-and-now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p.  100): dysaxiomatic.  “Dysaxiomatic”  is a concept created out of the combination of dystopia and axiomatic. It discloses the very nature  of  any territory under late capitalism innate to the contemporary world and immanent dystopia, and corresponds to two opposite yet somehow interrelated poles of the two. The first pole stands for “dystopian territory”, a territory where the axiomatic of late capitalism creates a tendency towards transcendence within the immanence of life—even if temporarily—, a territory where the affirmative forces of life are subject to dystopian practices of striation, Oedipalisation and molarisation—even if temporarily. The second pole suggests a “distopian territory”, that is, a disinfected territory,

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where the capitalist axiomatic, that is, the continuous act of deterritorialisation1 and reterritorialisation,  is always at work to free the dystopian territory of its established codes, systems of thought, forms and practices. It is “distopian” in the sense that its dystopian dimension is exposed to negation. This suggests that the dysaxiomatic principle innate to the contemporary world and immanent dystopia is like a poison that is capable of producing its own antidote. What turns it into a dystopia is at the same time what allows it to draw a line of flight from it. And if one were to ask what makes this bizarre relation possible, the answer would definitely be late capitalism, the distinctive feature of the present world order. Thus, understanding how the axiomatic of the capitalist social machine works would simultaneously help us to understand how the contemporary world and immanent dystopia work. Late capitalism is the most recent configuration of capitalism that underpins a paradigm shift coming along with certain changes in social, political, economic, cultural and even literary structures. It operates through an immanent criterion, where capital is capable of taking different forms and shapes on different scales in all parts of the world, from the first world to the third. Capital perpetually surpasses not only its own limits but also national and social boundaries, which enables its rapid and all-encompassing expansion. What enables late capitalism to obtain this liquidity and flexibility is, first of all, its reliance upon the axiomatic principle. The axiomatic2 is the process of constant deterritorialisation, which is a movement, a rupture or an escape from fixed forms and norms, though it is always followed by a reterritorialisation, that is, a process of the restructuring of a deterritorialised territory. What is meant by capitalist deterritorialisation is not decoding in the traditional sense of the word. It is rather an act of removing the code in its entirety. “Capitalist decoding”, as Ian Buchanan (2008) defines it, “evacuates the meaning out of all codes, that is to say all the rules, regulations, laws, codes of conduct, and so forth, rendering them completely arbitrary, or rather purely functional. Decoding in this context doesn’t mean interpretation or deciphering, it literally means taking the code away” (p. 112). Then, capitalist deterritorialising activity clears the blocked pores on the plane of organisation by decoding and prepares an unstructured territory, which is now vulnerable to new capitalist reterritorialisations. Whenever an act of

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deterritorialisation is followed by a reterritorialisation, it is called relative deterritorialisation. For its own perpetuity, late capitalism relies on relative deterritorialisation only. This means that every single liberating activity initiated by the capitalist social machine is in danger of an upcoming capture. This axiomatic system evolves capitalism into its current form, through which nation-states were replaced by global power holders, factories were replaced by multinational corporations and money was replaced by flows of finance and stock markets. With this new form, capitalism is now able to go beyond the particularities of spaces, politics and societies: it hails the margins as well as the centre. More importantly, this new form has made the language of capitalism less annoying, and has begun to sound more liberative, inclusive and more friendly than ever. The liberative, inclusive and friendly outlook of late capitalism is indeed highly synthetic. Its actual practices are nothing but “terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.  163). Late capitalism caricatures the plane of immanence because the idea of liberation advocated in/by late capitalism is not infinite. Under certain circumstances, late capitalism imposes its own limits. It is indeed a utilitarian rationality, where freedom is attributed to the flow of capital only whilst everything else keeps being caught up within the limits of the capitalist social machine. It creates temporary congealments and limitations on the flows of life; in other words, it creates capitalist social productions. But these productions would eventually be exposed to a process of decoding again since late capitalism always tends to extend its limits by producing new axioms. It establishes new relations between the deterritorialised flows, which enable the continuity of constant production. As Hardt and Negri (2000) put it, “the social development of capital, the mechanisms of modern sovereignty […] are progressively replaced by an axiomatic” (p. 326). The late capitalist system proves to us that hailing the margins and advocating a micropolitics of liberation may not be as innocent as advertised. This is primarily because its axiomatic constantly creates deterritorialised territories and yet turns them into cancerous ones. A body without organs would perhaps be the right term to help us to understand the dystopian pole of dysaxiomatic. A body without organs does not suggest a body stripped of its organs, but it rather refers to a process that resists organisation. It is, in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s words, “the ultimate

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residuum of a deterritorialised socius” (1983, p. 33). To put it more simply, it is a deterritorialised territory that comes into being when the capitalist axiomatic decodes the socius and opens the floodgates for the flows of desire. A body without organs as a deterritorialised territory functions like a tabula rasa, a surface that is open to new productions of desire. It is full of creative energy, affirmative potentiality and revolutionary power. Yet its potentiality as an open surface simultaneously makes it viable for capitalist reproductions, which is indeed the reason why late capitalism strives to deterritorialise the socius in the first place. Once it comes out, however, it is caught up in an endless series of capitalist reproduction and transforms into a cancerous body without organs, which is that which proliferates, fascising organisations, stratifications and significations. And this corresponds to the moment when the deterritorialised territory becomes a dystopian territory, and when contemporary life becomes most unbearable, most suicidal and hence most cancerous. What is promising about the contemporary world under late capitalism is that the deterritorialised territory does not always fall into capitalist reproduction despite the capitalist axiomatic’s efforts to capture. By its very nature, it can resist capitalist capture, escape any form of organisation and function as what Deleuze and Guattari call a “full body without organs” (1983, p. 19; 1987, p. 30). A full body without organs is “a body populated by multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 3), “a locus of connection for all the machines of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p.  369) and is “the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable” since it belongs to “the realm of antiproduction” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 8). In other words, it is the deterritorialised territory where the revolutionary power of deterritorialisation can be enacted with the sole purpose of resisting any stratification, reproduction and Oedipalisation imposed by the capitalist social machine. It is the site of resistance and real freedom in which absolute deterritorialisation takes place. It tolerates spontaneous jumps from one singularity to another, escapes from striated spaces and drifts in the flows of life and desire. It abandons strata in favour of destratification, codes in favour of decoding, sedentary life in favour of pure nomadism and being in favour of incessant becoming. And this corresponds to the distopian pole of dysaxiomatic, where possible lines of flight could be drawn from the dystopian

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reality, and where possible alternative forms of life could be offered. This is the moment when the axiomatic of late capitalism is used against itself and paves the way for the emergence of a revolutionary act of deterritorialisation. A revolutionary act of deterritorialisation suggests a movement from within the system because its forces are omnipresent in the dystopian territory as a potential to go beyond or renew itself. In this sense, as Deleuze and Guattari stress, the revolutionary act of deterritorialisation is “identical to the earth itself ” (1987, p. 143). Just like the earth, which has the full potential of recovering itself, it is capable of resuming the flow of energy and creativity that is congealed in dystopian territory. It is capable of turning the dystopian territory, which has become a site of fixity and immobility, into a site of possibilities. It is thus what Deleuze and Guattari call an “operation of the line of flight” (1987, p. 593), a process of “coming undone” (1983, p. 367) and “a line of escape by which it escapes itself and makes its enunciations or its expressions take flight and disarticulate” (2003, p. 86). The shift from industrial capitalism to late neoliberal capitalism crystallises a conjuncture where contemporary societies, despite their increasing means of control, meet the means of resistance born out of their very nature. These societies, in this sense, become the metonymic embodiment of the capitalist axiomatic, that is the actual dystopian reality that installs within itself a virtual possibility of resistance. An immanent dystopia perfectly enacts these opposite sides within itself. It not only depicts the present dystopian reality of the contemporary world, but also shows possible ways of resistance from within. To be more precise, it discloses both a dystopian territory that is subject to striating, Oedipalising and reterritorialising forces under late capitalism and a “distopian  territory” where the dystopian territory is freed of its established codes, systems of thought, forms and practices for the emergence of new creations. As late capitalism caricatures the plane of immanence to proliferate its interests, immanent dystopia caricatures late capitalism to proliferate its ways of resistance. And this complex trajectory of immanent dystopia makes today’s dystopian vision much more hopeful than ever, promising that the present, despite its dystopian aspects, holds an endless potential to go beyond itself and to create the new.

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Dystopia from Discipline to Control My remarks on the notion of dysaxiomatic were to trace and define the shift in the concept of dystopia in the twenty-first century. I have a distinct sense that contemporary dystopia enacts the working mechanism of late capitalism and reflects the shift from transcendence to immanence in its internal mechanisms. I have proposed the notion of dysaxiomatic to articulate this shift and show the link between dystopia and the late capitalist system. With the shift from transcendence to immanence, there appeared new spatial organisations and new forms of subjectivity in contemporary dystopia. It would never be possible to properly comprehend these new spatialities and subjectivities without turning our lenses into the social conjuncture in which this shift occurs. It is necessary to think and evaluate the meaning of dysaxiomatic in the social structure of twenty-first-century societies beyond its limited economic function in late capitalism. Late capitalism has introduced a discourse of freedom not only into the economic sphere, but also into the social and political spheres. The free market has needed a democracy or a discourse of freedom to operate. It has thus tainted every single aspect of contemporary life, injecting its pseudo-liberative discourse for its own interests. In the economic sphere, it has brought about a new globalised market system beyond all national borders and boundaries. For the late capitalist system, economic freedom is beyond all existing reality. But it has not been an easy and smooth path to achieve this freedom. It has necessitated the propagation, imposition and application of the same discourse of freedom into the social structure of societies. It is only when the idea of freedom has been introduced into societies and removed all the previously existing cultural and social anchoring points that a sense of freedom has been achieved in the economic sphere in its entirety. There have appeared changing reactions to the discourse of freedom invented by late capitalism. Some have failed in recognising that late capitalist discourse of freedom is illusory, or to be more accurate, they have failed in recognising its dystopian reality. Others who have seen its dystopian potential have failed in recognising that this illusory freedom could still provide us with a glimpse of hope; that is,

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they have failed in recognising the distopian potential of this new discourse. Deleuze was the earliest to imagine contemporary societies as societies modelling on the axiomatic principle of late capitalism. In his brief essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992), Deleuze recognises the fact that the contemporary era has witnessed a significant paradigm shift, observing that the social regime changes from the disciplinary mode to the control mode with the advent of late capitalism. This makes it hard to call contemporary societies a disciplinary society in a Foucauldian sense. In disciplinary societies, as Foucault elaborates in his Discipline and Punish (1975), there is a static relationship between power and the individual, a relationship that is based on the disciplinary regulation of power on the individual, the subject’s fixation within and by institutions as a functioning and non-resistant member of the society. Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary societies resonates with the existence of sovereign dictatorship or a kind of totalitarianism. Deleuze associates disciplinary societies with enclosure, asserting that in these societies the individual constantly passes through “spaces of enclosure”: “from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (‘you are no longer in your family’); then the barracks (‘you are no longer at school’); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment” (Deleuze 1992, p. 3). What is meant by the principle of enclosure is that the subjects are restricted and shaped in disciplining spaces like schools, hospitals, family, military, factories and so on. The space of disciplinary societies is thus a striated space. It is a space “both limited and limiting” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 383). It is limited in the sense that it is structured upon binary divisions, boundaries and borders. It is limiting in the sense that it seeks to enclose, restrict and contain. Due to its limited and limiting nature, Deleuze and Guattari recognise the striated space of disciplinary societies as “optic” just as Foucault does. It operates through the laws of optics (Foucault 1995, p. 176), where each unit, be it a school, a factory or a hospital, is organised, enclosed and regulated by its own dialectical strategy. For Deleuze, the Foucauldian notion of disciplinary societies can no longer express the nuances of present societies under the late capitalist system primarily because there are new spatial organisations in the

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societies of control that wait to be identified and defined. Unlike disciplinary societies, the societies of control in the twenty-first century emit smooth spaces that are characterised not by enclosure but by the discourse of freedom. While striated space stands for the closed, structured and limited space, the smooth space of the control societies corresponds to a space free from all the previous taken-for-granted bounds. Smooth spaces are characterised by the principle of modulation, variation and flexibility, unlike striated spaces that are characterised by the principle of moulding, stability and rigid boundaries. Therefore, they are seemingly more liberative than striated spaces. They, however, are the spaces aptest for capitalist production, namely, the spaces which always necessarily host striations. Deleuze observes the shift from the spaces of enclosure into more liberative yet still controlling spaces in all units of control societies: in the prison system, penalties are replaced by substitution; in the school system, the evaluative system is replaced by a perpetual training; in the hospital system, a new form of medicine “without doctor or patient” is introduced; in the social system, individuals are replaced by “dividuals”; and in the economic system, factories are replaced by corporations (1992, p. 7). For Deleuze, the move from spaces of enclosure to smooth spaces suggests that the strict walls of disciplinary institutions have begun to break down and that these institutions have abandoned their reliance upon a transcendent centre of power. He avers that “these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door” (1992, p.  4). Yet there is an important point missing in the Deleuzian understanding of control societies. Despite the implications of a disappearance of sovereignty, disciplinary institutions are not entirely eliminated but have undergone a new configuration, becoming seemingly much less enclosing, restrictive and limiting, yet remaining still there and still very powerful. Moreover, societies of control are not entirely purged of striating forces. To the contrary, these societies are equally exposed to striations but nonetheless it is not the striating forces but the smoothing forces that take the lead in those societies because societies of control under the reign of late capitalism are structured upon the continuous circulation of

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capital in different disguises, and the constant creation of smooth spaces only to be striated again is what enables the perpetuation of this circulation. This means that the above changes Deleuze observes in the prison, school and corporate system indicate the fact that the old disciplining tools reappear with major alterations in keeping up with the needs and circumstances of the societies of control. A close inquiry into how these new tools of control work would perhaps allow us to better trace the dystopian and distopian potential of the axiomatic system in the societies of control. Disciplinary societies preceding these new societies purported to make the subjects internalise the very dynamics of power. The disciplinary tools of these societies were what Althusser called ideological and repressive state apparatuses which both strived to turn heterogeneous masses into homogeneous groups that would abide by societal rules and norms. The movement of the disciplinary subject was very limited because in these societies, as Deleuze points out, “one was always starting again, [passing from one disciplinary institution to another] (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory)” (1992, p. 5). As such, Deleuze resembles the forces of disciplinary tools to “mold[ing]” forces and the movement of the subjects in disciplinary societies to “the burrows of a mole” (1992, p. 4–7). Through the ideological and repressive tools, practices and institutions, the subjects are “[p]artitioned and distributed, selected and segregated, ordered and determined”, and are exposed to a “more subtle kind of violence (‘discipline, the gentle way …’)” (Flaxman 2018, p. 125). It was quite understandable to perceive the very idea of discipline defining these societies as a form of violence, and all the disciplinary spaces as a form of prison. With the rise of late neoliberal capitalism, however, the idea of discipline has undergone a metamorphosis and been replaced by a new diagram of control. These tools do not purport to confine and restrict the movement of the subjects but rather promote mobility: the subjects are free to choose, free to be in “metastable states”, free to simultaneously reside on or pass through different systems, be it a corporation system or an educational system or a family system, and free to assume multifarious identities. The movement of the subjects is not restricted, regulated and disciplined as it is in disciplinary societies, but it is rather monitored

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through invisible tools of control. The institutions of control in these new societies are no longer restricted to state institutions. The agents of control have been expanded to any institution from any industry to media as long as they are equipped with the most recent technology. These institutions in societies of control no longer exercise disciplinary practices over the subject but they use their power to monitor the subjects through their smart phones, GPSs in their cars, computers, social media accounts, emails, credit cards, bank accounts and many other technological devices these subjects willingly purchase and use. With each and every click, tweet, post, purchase and message of the subjects, they collect data which can be used and abused for any purpose and in any industry. The power of these new agents of control in the contemporary era has recently been proved in the Trump and Brexit campaigns which both culminated in success through their collaboration with such institutions as Cambridge Analytica. Ideas, ideologies and cultural and societal norms are no longer imposed on the subjects by force but are insidiously injected into their minds through their smart devices. This insidious and limitless form of control which operates with the same logic of late capitalism constitutes the dystopian pole of what I call the dysaxiomatic. As Deleuze describes the dystopian aspect of societies of control in another work, Negotiations (1995), “[c]ompared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past” (p. 175). One of the most important questions that should be posed at this point is, as Deleuze himself poses in his Postscript, whether there is any way out from the grid of control. As Deleuze anticipates, there is no absolute outside to the “ceaseless control in open sites” (1995, p. 175). But this does not necessarily mean that there is no way of resistance, either. The very nature of control societies paves the way for the emergence of new ways of resistance to the grid of control from within. Control offers open sites/smooth spaces, which testifies to the distopian pole of the capitalist axiomatic. These are the spaces that possess a revolutionary potential. This is firstly because smooth spaces allow the subjects to attain multiple identities and float in a constant flux of networks. In the open sites, the subjects are more mobile, more fluid and more flexible. Their movements are not limited to the structured “burrows of a molehill” but

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are as complex and unpredictable as the “coils of a serpent” (Deleuze 1992, p. 7). Once the subjects are not imprisoned in structured and limited spaces, they can more easily carve alternative forms of living and being for themselves. Secondly, these spaces allow for non-linear movement, rhizomatic connectivity and unlimited communication. Considering the nature of smooth spaces and subjectivities in societies of control, however, it would be wrong to think that the forms of resistance remain the same. To the contrary, as Deleuze foresees in his interview with Toni Negri, “[c]omputer piracy and viruses, for example, [replaces] strikes and what the nineteenth century called ‘sabotage’ (‘clogging’ the machinery)” (1995, p. 175). This means that to elude the ceaseless control in the late capitalist system, new forms of resistance appear. The ability of these new forms to resist control relies on the extent to which they understand and model the inner mechanisms of the capitalist axiomatic. The Internet could serve as a proper example to illustrate both the dystopian and the distopian aspects of the societies of control under late capitalism. The Internet offers a smooth space where infinite flows of networks and flows of information become possible. The space of the Internet is rhizomatic as it possesses all the principles of what Deleuze calls a rhizome: heterogeneity, connection, multiplicity, rootlessness and asignifying rupture. The rhizomatic space of the Internet makes it a site apt not only for capitalist, corporatist and political interests but also for revolutionary activisms. It offers sophisticated tools of control for states and multinational corporations to monitor behaviour patterns and movements of citizens by accessing their social media, browsing histories, account activities, Internet correspondences and memberships. The collected data on the Internet help states and corporations to create algorithms to control the behaviours of citizens for elections, national security, sales and marketing. Moreover, they often have the power to determine, limit or prohibit the kind and the amount of data people can access. This means that the smooth space of the Internet is frequently exposed to striating forces of states and their closest alliances, the corporations. The Internet simultaneously offers sophisticated tools of resistance such as hashtag activism, cyber piracy and online protest. Modelling on the axiomatic of late capitalism, activist hackers, online nomads or anyone who has access to the Internet could deterritorialise it to resist the dominant

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power and the striating forces of the state–corporation couple as in the case of WikiLeaks incidents all over the world, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US and the #MeToo movement in India. That is, the Internet which is used and abused to create a dystopian territory can easily become a vector of deterritorialisation to create a distopian territory in societies of control. The move from disciplinary societies to the societies of control, in this sense, becomes a testimony to the shift from transcendent dystopia to immanent dystopia. The nature of disciplinary societies reflects the nature of transcendent dystopia. Transcendent dystopia, despite its critique of disciplinary societies, still demands a transcendent power in the sense that it brings forth an either/or choice, that is a binaristic agenda: one is the future dystopian (disciplinary) society; the other is its opposite, an idealistic (a would-be disciplinary) society. Once the transcendent centre of power is a dystopian one rather than its idealistic opposite, then one is inevitably destined to fail. This is because the disciplinary man is now imprisoned in the enclosure of disciplining institutions of a sovereign nation-state; the only movement he can make in this disciplinary society is the burrowing of a mole, a passage from one enclosure to another. Nonetheless, this is not to say that the disciplinary man does not strive to carve out a resistant space for himself: he actually does. However, since the enclosure of a particular institution begins even before one enters it, disciplinary man cannot find himself a space for resistance during his passage through the spaces of enclosure. When disciplinary man attempts to break down the individual/mass pair in society and transgresses the fixed social striations, this culminates in a discontinuity in the production of energy and maintenance of the dominant power. Such a cessation is not tolerated in disciplinary societies. Thereby, the moment he sets out his path for resistance, he is captured, regulated and moulded into his previous passive/submissive state by disciplinary forces. Similarly, the nature of societies of control reflects the nature of immanent dystopia, and helps us to understand why and how immanent dystopia has become much more hopeful in advocating the idea that there is a way out. The protagonists in immanent dystopia are no longer exposed to a severe confinement in the spaces of enclosure. They are what Deleuze perceives as the man of control that can pass “from one animal to the

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other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others” (1992, p. 5). The man of control is capable of the infinite swinging of a serpent for societies of control need the man of control as a subject that is “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” (Deleuze 1992, p.  6). Rigid subject positions fall short in meeting the needs of the late capitalist system. The flexibility and mobility observed in the smooth space of global society is required in the man of control, as well. The man of control can transgress any existing confinements and limitations and embrace a hybrid subjectivity. He is “factory worker outside the factory, student outside school, inmate outside prison, insane outside the asylum—all at the same time. It belongs to no identity and all of them—outside the institutions” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p.  331–332). This amorphous nature of the man of control, however, cannot be claimed to be contributing to the running of global society and the world market only; it simultaneously enables him to resist and find alternative modes of existence in the dystopia here-and-now. Whenever the capitalist system deterritorialises the striations or blockages on the flow of energy so as to reterritorialise them for its own purposes, the man of control can draw a line of flight from subsequent reterritorialisations. This explains why the protagonists of immanent dystopia are given the chance to spread out in their resistance as it is much easier to move in the smooth spaces of societies of control rather than in the disciplinary spaces.

Notes 1. Deterritorialisation is a term Deleuze and Guattari first introduce in their mutual work, Anti-Oedipus (1972). Since the term is used in several different ways in terms of its functions, it would be more reasonable to clarify how it functions rather than explicating what it means, which could also be a path to follow in the explanation of other terms employed by these philosophers in this study. In its broadest sense, the process of deterritorialisation is a process of dethroning fixed points of views or perceptions, and freeing subjects, objects, bodies or relations from the trap of organisation, going beyond binary oppositions, undoing constructed

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forms and organisms, liberating desire to move with all the flows and paving the way for creative assemblages and revolutionary lines of flight. In the conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari (1987) clear up the basic concepts crucial to the understanding of their philosophy, deterritorialisation is treated as a process or movement by which one departs from a particular territory (p. 508). Deterritorialisation is, in its most general sense, a movement that brings about change. 2. “The capitalist system of inscription”, as Eugene Holland (1999) remarks, “derives from the dynamics of axiomatisation: from deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, decoding and recoding” (p. 81). The axiomatic is a determining factor that separates the capitalist machine from other social machines and makes it an immanent system. Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the capitalist social machine’s axiomatic ability for constant growth and expansion by calling it “the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialised” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 245–246). What gives late capitalism its potential to push its limits and to become the limit of all societies is its axiomatic. It is the axiomatic that makes it move to different territories without being confiscated in any and to accommodate itself to the different economic, social and political circumstances of these new territories. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) themselves underline, “[t]he strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones. Capitalism defines a field of immanence and never ceases to fully occupy this field” (p. 250).

References Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. London: Routledge, 2003. Boundas, Constantin V. Deleuze and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus’: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2008. Colman, Felicity J. “Affect.” The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition. Edited by Adrian Parr. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005.

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Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October 59 (1992): 3–7. ———. Negotiations, Translated by Martin Joughin, New  York: Columbia UP., 1995. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II: Revised Edition. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. ———. What Is Philosophy? (1991). Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia UP, 1994. ———. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 2003. Jameson, Fredrick. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP., 2003a. ———. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29. 4 (2003b): 695–718. Flaxman, Gregory. “Cinema in the Age of Control”. In Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline. Edited by Frida Beckman. 121–141. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP., 2018. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2000. Holland, Eugene W. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1999. Negri, Antonio. Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity. New  York: Columbia UP., 2013. Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon P, 1997. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London/New York: Verso, 1999.

4 Minoritarian Politics of Contemporary Dystopia

Towards a Minor Dystopia Deleuze and Guattari’s discrimination between “minoritarian” and “majoritarian” first appears in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) and then in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). In both, Deleuze and Guattari underline that minoritarian or majoritarian does not stem from a quantitative measure as minority or majority; rather, they are defined by their capacity to become, as an alternative to being, and to create lines of flight. Majoritarian stands for a tendency to put a closure, to dominate, to organise, to authorise and to striate for the purpose of a singularity, whereas minoritarian refers to an opposite potential to open this singularity to a multiplicity by pushing all of its closed organisations to their limits. Accordingly, minor literature is literature that displays minoritarian tendencies in its political agenda. For minor writers, the present society constitutes a condition of the intolerable against which they feel themselves required to react. Their reaction to the intolerable is creation. Deleuze and Guattari call what they artistically create “minor literature”. Minor literature is not concerned with representing an oppressed minority, but with inventing new © The Author(s) 2020 R. Çokay Nebioğlu, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_4

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conditions and new possibilities that would minorise any dominant system of power whatsoever. As a blueprint of its revolutionary mission, it targets not only majoritarian politics and majoritarian social practices but also majoritarian literatures. Therefore, minor literature always moves towards its own limits. This is exactly what brings it closer to immanent dystopia, which engages itself with minor literature in the sense that it is equipped with the same revolutionary mission to resist not only the conditions of the intolerable in present societies of control but also the conditions of the intolerable in the dystopian genre having evolved into a majoritarian form. Immanent dystopia subjects these conditions to the process of deterritorialisation and opens them to new relations that are presumably not majoritarian at all. But how does immanent dystopia as a minor literature escape from the trap of majoritarian systems? For Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature owes its capability in drawing a revolutionary line of flight to its practices: “the deterritorialisation of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (2003, p. 18). For Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature is essentially a political action. Since the minor writer is attracted to the unmaking of the present system, writing becomes a political act that questions the existing order and its power dynamics, wrecks all the long-established hierarchies and instead offers greater possibilities for life. Minor literature is not merely a political act of resisting the present, but also a political act of creating new possibilities. The political presence is so governing in minor literature that it blurs the boundaries between the private and the public, the individual and the political. Whereas the political and social forces serve only as a background to characters’ individual concerns in majoritarian literature, the characters become only secondary to the political context in minor literature. This is, for Deleuze and Guattari, best observed in Franz Kafka, who, as a German-speaking Jewish writer in Czech society, sheds light upon the political dynamics of the small communities within majoritarian politics, regarding literature as a kind of political action. Individual dilemmas are necessarily connected to politics as in the case of Josef K.’s passing through all the political, judicial and bureaucratic segments of society in The Trial. K. wanders through winding streets and buildings in order to reach the Court that has charged him with an

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unknown crime, yet his striving to receive information about his supposed crime only leads him further into an endless and labyrinthine path. In K.’s path, every single room continuously opens to another and every single individual detail leads to another political triangle. Minor literature, in a similar fashion, offers rooms that open up profoundly political horizons. This immediate political nature of minor literature is obviously the major common denominator within immanent dystopia, in which there is often no space reserved for individual concerns and personal feelings. Every individual issue unquestionably serves as a tool either to depict the bigger picture of degenerating politics, to present a critique of unapproved political practices or to find ways to subvert them. In Deleuzian terms, immanent dystopia’s function is “to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, p.  49). For Booker, the political tendency in dystopia derives from dystopian writers’ discontent with present political and social affairs. Throughout his book The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature (1994a), he relates “the literary history of dystopian fiction more closely to the social and political history of the modern world” (p. 20). In the conclusion of his book, he blatantly states that “if this study serves as a defense of dystopian fiction, it is a defense more of the political engagement of that fiction than of its literary merit” (Booker 1994a, p.  174). Immanent dystopia’s critical and resistant stance towards the existing system is sufficient to be testament to its political immediacy. As Bertolt Brecht, a writer who is most conscious about the political aspect of art, notes, “for art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group” (1964, p. 196). Thus, if immanent dystopia shares a common ground with what Deleuze and Guattari call minor literature, it is primarily due to its political aspect emerging from the way it addresses the predicament of the present system, which is mostly neglected in majoritarian literatures. Since the political dimension infects each and every statement, minor literature essentially takes on a collective value. In minor literature, as Deleuze and Guattari remark, “what each author says individually already constitutes a common action” (2003, p. 17). That is, each of his or her statements contains a collective assemblage of enunciation, for it is no longer the subject of enunciation but the enunciation itself that matters.

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The enunciation we hear in minor literature is, then, neither that of the writer nor that of the character only, but it is the voice of a people who do not yet exist. This suggests that the collective value of minor literature signals the invention of a people to come that would take up the mission of making, unmaking and transforming society by enacting alternative modes of existence. Immanent dystopia, similarly, displays such a collective value in the sense that it poses a critique of the present social assemblages and proposes new alternatives through its invention of a people to come. In quite a similar fashion to minor literature, the alternative collectivity in immanent dystopia does not suggest a transcendental counterpart against the existing one since such a collectivity would hinge upon majoritarian power structures that the dystopian writer finds intolerable in the first place. A people to come in immanent dystopia is, therefore, not “a collective of individuals bound together in the imagined community of a nation” (Dowd 2009, p. 201). It is neither an imagined utopian community that the dystopian writer dreams of, nor an imagined dystopian community that he or she condemns. A people to come in immanent dystopia is a virtual community, a potentiality to resist and transform the present dystopian reality instead of the real people who are missing either because they exist as invisible minorities at the margins of societies or because they simply do not have the courage to speak out and so choose to become invisible. Immanent dystopia is principally these “people’s concern” (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, p. 18; emphasis in original). Considering that minor literature is a political programme to minorise the dominant power structures, the deterritorialisation of language is notably significant in the definition of a minor literature. The reason why language is targeted in minor literature lies in its maintenance of power. In the traditional understanding of language, it is assumed that there is a discrimination between the word and the world, and that language is only there to represent the outside reality. Nonetheless, language is not so innocent a tool, utilised only to depict what is already out there. It contains within itself all the dominant power structures and functions to create dualism (particularly between the signifier and the signified), to categorise, to code and to impose fixed formulations upon these linguistically constructed categorisations and codifications. In order to dig a hole in this complex system of power, one first needs to dig a hole in language

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itself, which explains why minor literature takes up the deterritorialisation of language. In Kafka: A Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari delineate the deterritorialisation of language as a minor use of majoritarian language. But how can one minorise a majoritarian language? This can be achieved primarily by detaching language from its representative function because once language quits its assumed role to represent outside reality, it becomes available to utilise without imposing its binaristic and hierarchical categorisations and codifications. Stripping language of its representative power and shattering the relation between the signifier and the signified would then be a minorisation of a majoritarian language. The minorisation of language designates being a foreigner in one’s own mother tongue as a political action. Deleuze clarifies the notion of being a foreigner in one’s own language by providing examples from Kafka’s position in German language. In Kafka’s language, one can find the deterritorialised Prague German, the language of a Prague Jew which is taken to a new dimension. Kafka makes German language take a line of flight by impoverishing its vocabulary, corrupting the unproblematic relation between the signifier and the signified and expanding the limits of the signs so far as to denote different meanings and functions. Kafka’s minor usage of majoritarian German then adds to German a deep intensity and inventiveness and stretches its linguistic boundaries. A minor use of a majoritarian language, however, does not suggest that minor writers simply mix other languages with their own languages. They rather invent a new non-existing language by pushing language to its extremes to the point where “the language itself scream[s], stutter[s], stammer[s], or murmur[s]” (1997, p. 110). The language is so stretched that it exceeds its own frame and generates a new language. This new language “is not external to the initial language”; “it is the outside of language, but is not outside it” (Deleuze 1997, p. 112; emphasis added). It is not outside the language, but at the asyntactic, agrammatical and asemantic edge of it. It is the inverted language functioning to invert the power structures inherent within the majoritarian language. This mission of inverting dominant power structures by deterritorialising language is shared by immanent dystopia which has its own political agenda to fight the representatives of power. Language in immanent dystopia is the language of late capitalism which serves both as an insidious

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means of marketing, commodification, Oedipalisation and legitimisation and as an effective means of resistance. Dystopian writers channel their focus to the function of language in dystopia “not only because it is a potentially powerful tool with which to control and manipulate their subjects but also because language may harbour powerfully subversive energies that [dystopian] governments would like to suppress” (Booker 1994b, p. 19). Informed by the power of language both to suppress and to resist, they carve out a resistant space within dystopian worlds by deterritorialising language. Compared to modernist texts like those of Kafka, Beckett and Woolf through which Deleuze illustrates his point, immanent dystopia makes relatively less use of linguistic deterritorialisation. However, the language of late capitalism in immanent dystopia is still effectively minorised to disclose its transformative, emancipatory and revolutionary power. Its vocabulary is still effectively overturned. It gradually evolves into a language of resistance. The language of resistance problematises the political and cultural assemblages that the language of late capitalism represents. Much as immanent dystopia does not seem to lend itself to a tense syntactic subversion of majoritarian language, it is still prone to reflecting a minor use particularly in their nomadic subjects’ refusal to stay within the boundaries of the language. The minor use of majoritarian language is often strengthened by some textual choices like the use of free indirect discourse in immanent dystopia. “Free indirect discourse”, a term coined by the Swiss linguist Charles Bally, is the embedding of the character’s speech or thought into a third-­ person narration without using any quotation marks or making clear to whom the speech or thought belongs, which is why some scholars prefer calling it “narrated monologue” (Cohn 1996, p.  103) or “represented perception” (Banfield 1982, p. 199). Free indirect discourse is a widely used technique in the novel and it allows this genre to simultaneously represent a variety of voices without prioritising any over the others. Representing the existence of a dual voice, both the voice of the narrator and the voice of the character, it is seen as “an intertwining of objective and subjective statement, of narratorial account” (Pascal 1977, p. 107). Free indirect discourse, often found in many of the canonical Victorian novels and modernist texts, according to Rimmon-Kenan, has several significant functions such as drawing attention to “‘deviant’ linguistic

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practices”, enhancing “the bivocality or polyvocality” and “the semantic density of the text”, and having an intense use of “stream of consciousness” (2002, p. 117). These functions inevitably make it a very important stylistic element in immanent dystopia to deterritorialise majoritarian language. This is primarily because it is always more than the dual voice it represents. Free indirect discourse is an opaque mixture of two different consciousnesses which calls forth a new collectivity and an affirmative heterogeneity in language. Its use opens up a zone where the “I” of the narrator or the character is no longer available, which creates a zone of indiscernibility between different consciousnesses. It creates a pure speech act that is “neither an impersonal myth nor a personal fiction but a collective utterance, an utterance that actually expresses the impossibility of living under domination” (Smith 1997, p. xliv). Yet this collectivity, no matter how it sounds, does not suggest a homogeneity. On the contrary, it promises a kind of heterogeneity that is missing in majoritarian language. While majoritarian language tends to create homogenised systems on everything it touches, particularly on subjectivity, the use of free indirect discourse takes language back to its natural form which is diverse, heterogeneous and impersonal. It gives a voice to the missing people, the people marginalised, outcast and made invisible in the late capitalist system.

 ystopian Writers as Cultural D Symptomatologists Life is immanent in the sense that it stands for boundless creative energy, affirmative forces, affects and percepts. Yet the immanence of life is pinned down to molar categorisations, organisms, forms and structures; in other words, life is plagued with an illness that blocks its passages and flows of energy. Literature appears as a creative force that revitalises such a stamina to heal life and free it from its chains. Deleuze highlights this healing power of literature in his Essays: Clinical and Critical by calling literature “an enterprise of health”, a health that “would be sufficient to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within

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organisms and genera” (1997, p.  3). The health that literature brings about does not take its source primarily from the health of the writer since literature is not an individual affair but a collective assemblage of enunciation. In a parallel fashion, the writer is not always necessarily in good health, but rather he has a feeble nature that makes him too sensitive to life’s illnesses: “[he] possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him” (Deleuze 1997, p. 3). The fragility of the writer does not make him a patient, but a physician of the world. He writes to liberate life from its molar zones, releases its creative energy and moves it towards the plane of immanence. The ultimate end in his writing is to create a health, namely, a possibility of life as immanence. The Deleuzian understanding of the writer as clinician and symptomatologist is elaborated first in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and then in Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty (1967) and The Logic of Sense (1969). This view, which draws a link between literature and medicine, has its roots in the Nietzschean notion of critique. Much as Nietzsche is often construed to be defending a negative philosophy, Deleuze praises his critique as positive and affirmative, interpreting the philosophy of the “will to power” as a “joyous message: to will = to create, will = joy” (2006, p. 84). For Deleuze, it is a misconception to perceive Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power as the desire to attain power for domination. On the contrary, the Nietzschean will to power is a generative force that promises a play of difference, multiplicity and creation abounding in life. He interprets the problematic understanding of the will to power as a destructive force as the illness of negativity. Since negativity is a disease that pervades all human history and philosophy, Deleuze argues, the philosopher must be a physician that both interprets the symptoms of the disease and offers a cure, as Nietzsche himself suggests in his selected letters and books like Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873) and The Gay Science (1882). In Deleuze’s understanding, Nietzsche’s notion of the cultural physician designates “not simply an interpreter of signs, but also an artist who joyfully eradicates cultural pathogens and invents new values that promote and enhance life” (Bogue 2003, p. 2). That is to say, writers, like clinicians, can be great symptomatologists who not merely interpret the

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symptoms of sicknesses in society but find solutions and alternatives to eliminate these sicknesses. They are concerned less with the causes of the sicknesses of civilisation and more with the ways of affirming life by curing the symptoms and creating affects, and it is the work of art itself that provides them with the means. The Deleuzian understanding of the writer as the symptomatologist may very well apply to contemporary dystopian writers since they present a cultural and political critique of the present society they are living in, look for ways to overcome the sicknesses they suffer from and often open new possibilities for life. Life has never abounded more in symptoms of sickness than it does now. The new century severely suffers from globalisation, terrorism, human trafficking, war, overpopulation, corporatism, environmental issues and all the other problems arising with the advent of late capitalism. At this point, contemporary dystopian writers take on the task of clinicians not merely to display a symptomatology of contemporary life and its sickness but also to heal society by purging life of its boundaries and releasing its virtual energy. These diagnoses, however, do not stem from these writers’ personal involvements. In contrast, they are impersonal accounts of the blockages, pauses and breakdowns in the flow of life’s virtual energy. Their solutions to remove these blockages are not predetermined and fixed formulas but harbingers of infinite possibilities of a collective life. These writers as clinicians display an affirmative will to power to metamorphose and transform society by first deterritorialising it and then inventing a new earth and a new people to come. As Deleuze himself notes, “it is the measure of health when it invokes this oppressed bastard race [a people to come] that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting everything that crushes and imprisons, a race that is outlined in relief in literature as process” (1997, p. 4). Only in this way can they introduce new ways of resisting, thinking and living.

References Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Print. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature. London: Routledge, 2003.

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Booker, Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport: Greenwood, 1994a. ——. Dystopian Literature: a Theory and Research Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994b. Brecht, Bertolt. “A Short Organum for the Theatre.” In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and Trans. John Willett. 179–205. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Cohn, Dorrit. “Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style.” Comparative Literature 18.2 (1996): 97–112. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays: Critical and Clinical (1993). Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. ——. Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II: Revisited Edition. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 2003. Dowd, Garin. “Paris and its Doubles: Deleuze/Rivette.” Deleuze Studies 3.2 (2009): 185–206. Pascal, Roy. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functions in the Nineteenth-­ Century European Novel. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. London and New  York: Routledge, 2002. Smith, Daniel W. “Introduction: ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project.” In Essays: Clinical and Critical. ix–lv. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 1997.

5 Schizoanalysis of Contemporary Dystopia

F rom Breakdown to Breakthrough: The Invention of a People to Come If late capitalism has the potential both to create a dystopian reality and to offer ways of resistance to this reality, the question to be posed next is: How does it manage to keep possible ways of resistance under control? The answer would be the regulation of desire. Desire can be seen as the actual force of all production: it is what gives life its energy and productivity and enables life to endlessly flow. Since desire manifests in itself all the positive, creative, productive and liberative potentials, it is the ultimate stimulus for all actions. It always wishes to connect more and more networks and assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari, thus, define desire as the producer of reality. Desire that has neither a subject nor an object is only about production. It is plugged into all aspects of the social field, which means that each and every investment of desire is necessarily social. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions” (1983, p. 28–29; emphasis in original). This means that it is the creative force of desire that

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ultimately triggers any productive activity in the social milieu. Desire and the social are, in this sense, two sides of the same coin. The close affinity between desire and the social is strictly rejected in the late capitalist system. Rather than acknowledging this affinity, late capitalism proposes a deliberate enterprise to separate socio-political economy from libidinal economy. This is precisely because late capitalism regards desire as a revolutionary potential which can pose a threat to the maintenance of its power. Desire is a groundbreaking force and could overthrow all the boundaries late capitalism relies upon. This potential is so intimidating to the capitalist system that its whole mechanism relies on the organisation of desire. By regulating desire, it simultaneously regulates the social sphere. This immediate relation between desire and the social is kept secret by alienating desire as a lack1 and confining it to the private sphere of the family. The regulation of desire is fundamentally rooted in the mummy– daddy–child model, which automatically means that the nuclear family is a means of repression. The Oedipus complex2 or Oedipalisation is not a result of the infant’s unacceptable desires for the mother within a single family. It is actually a carefully designed product of late capitalism: “The family is the agent of Oedipalisation, but not the cause” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 88). By introducing the nuclear family into the production of desire, late capitalism achieves the exercising of social repression at the very beginning of the subject’s life. It needs the “holy family” to guarantee the strangulation of the flows of desire and their entrapment into molar forms as well as the formation of capitalist subjectivity, which, in this context, quintessentially corresponds to Oedipal subjectivity. Each individual member of the family is a social subject for the nuclear family which is the microcosm of the social field. Each individual is then nothing but the subject constructed by the capitalist social machine. That is, it is not the sovereignty of the phallic father but the sovereignty of the capital that castrates the subject and dominates his whole life by dominating his desire. The capitalist social machine under the guise of the nuclear family reduces the revolutionary potential of social desire to familial desire which is prohibited by the idea of castration. It works to create obedient subjects, blind consumers and passive labourers. Those who reject going through Oedipalisation/capitalist subject formation are

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cast aside and labelled as the abnormal who need to be exposed to psychoanalytic cure, a cure which is nothing but the taming of one’s ego until he or she becomes a non-resistant member of capitalist society. In today’s societies of control under late capitalism, the subjects oscillate between two poles: “the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 260). These two poles mark two different investments of desire in late capitalism: paranoiac and schizoid. The paranoiac type designates the fascising pole that imprisons all the creative potential of desire into molar segregations. It first emerges in the despotic social machine where everything is overcoded and fixated upon the despot’s body. Late capitalism, which is built upon its axiomatic, that is, the continuous acts of decoding and recoding, borrows the paranoid despotic sign to establish its own sovereignty. It is the paranoiac despotic sign that enables capitalism to invest temporary arborescent structures and reterritorialisations that operate through binaristic systems. The Oedipus complex, for instance, is such a paranoiac investment that reduces all libidinal drives to molar aggregates in the form of familial romance. The paranoiac type is by its nature sedentary; it reterritorialises the deterritorialised territories on the body without organs and totalises all the molecular forces by attaching them to an organising principle and turning them into organisms. Unlike the paranoiac type that has totalising effects on the flows of desire, the schizophrenic type stands for the revolutionary tendency that dissolves the molar aggregates, deterritorialises the territorialised assemblages, overthrows any organisms and frees desire from its constraints. For Deleuze and Guattari this type is unique to the capitalist social machine. This is because, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist social machine does not rely upon fixity and stability only. It needs to decode already existing codes so that it can continually forge new connections and enable the circulation of capital. The schizophrenic type, arising out of the act of deterritorialisation, makes molecular investments on the socius. It revitalises all the creative potentials of desire by clearing the blockages in its flows. The flows of desire are reactivated through the dismantling of normed forms and structures in which they are imprisoned. In opposition to the sedentary and fascising enterprises of the

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paranoiac pole, the schizophrenic pole stands for the nomadic, polyvocal and revolutionary enterprises. Thereby there are no fixed meanings and no limitations on desire but polyvocal meanings and insurmountable flows of desire on the schizophrenic pole. Wherever late capitalism generates its paranoiac pole to build its Oedipal walls, there also hides a schizophrenic potential to go beyond these walls, dismantle their forms and deterritorialise the whole socius. This is what makes late capitalism a relative limit that could be passed through and schizophrenia an absolute limit that surpasses all the taken-for-granted limitations, codes and territorialisations. The dynamic between the relative and absolute limits of late capitalism culminates in the formation of two types of subject positions in societies of control under late capitalism: paranoiac and schizo subjects. The paranoiac subject is trapped in the Oedipal genealogy and lost in the fictitious familial romance. He is what Freud would call normal/heterosexual subjectivity. The paranoiac subject is assumed to have a properly functioning ego because he is castrated and has identified his ego with the ego of his phallic father, which makes him an obedient member of the social structure. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the paranoiac subject is in effect the neurotic that is “trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society, and reduces all of them (les rabat toutes) to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality—as reconstructed in the analyst’s office and projected upon the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, my boss is my father, and so is the Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor)” (1983, p.  245; emphasis in original). The neurotic is a product of capitalism and psychoanalysis. He submits his desiring-production to the transcendental signifier, namely, to the norms and necessities of the social terrain. The transcendental signifier, which is first introduced in the form of the phallic father in the nuclear family, transforms into different roles in the public sphere; it becomes the employer, the government, the officer and the psychoanalyst. In each case, the neurotic, condemning his desire on the grounds that it is a lack, desires the desire of the transcendental signifier. Therefore, the neurotic is situated at the relative limit of capitalism. The schizo, however, pushes the limits of desiring-production, the limits of territorialities and the limits of social organisations, which positions him at the absolute limit of the capitalist social machine. The schizo

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rejects all the fictitious limitations imposed upon the flows of desire. Rather than acceding to either/or choices, he follows the endless ANDs and draws schizophrenic lines of flight from the Oedipal theatre, its arborescent structures and its binaristic systems. Unlike the paranoiac that is moulded into the “normal/heterosexual” norm, the schizo explodes all these codes by passing through them. He is the deterritorialised par excellence that constantly revitalises the acts of deterritorialisation within himself. There is a mutual relationship between the act of deterritorialisation and the schizo subject. He is, on the one hand, the subject of deterritorialisation since he comes into being when the schizophrenic pole of capitalism is activated to remove the inhibitions on the flows of desire. He, on the other hand, carries out the act of deterritorialisation itself, for the basic motivation of the schizo is to move all the social codes to the absolute limit of late capitalism where he stands. The schizo, or what Freud would call the pervert to this end, is unOedipalised and daringly resists it. His desires are not absorbed into a lack or mummy–daddy– child triangle since he demolishes the Oedipal genealogy by refusing to assume his fixed subjectivity in the social machine. He is also unOedipalisable because he releases the flows of desire from the Oedipal trap into the desert and stands beyond all the striated spaces. Defying the restrictions and enforcements of Oedipus, he creates smooth spaces where his unconscious is an orphan and his desire is defined by infinite affirmative potentials. The schizo does not fit into the norms of normality in the capitalist social machine. On the contrary, he is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “a strange subject […] with no fixed identity” (1983, p. 18). The schizo remains at a critical threshold in the capitalist social machine. The threshold where he stands leads him to a constant process of movement and departure. The act of departure that characterises the schizo’s position, however, is not a literal movement from one place to another. It is a conceptual departure from the striated spaces within any “structure” towards an affirmative intensity. The schizo’s departure neither stems from a transcendent origin, nor culminates in a transcendent telos. It is a pure process, a process that rejects being channelled into sedentariness which here implies an orientation towards transcendence. Such a movement that orients not towards an ultimate destination but towards unknown possibilities defines the schizo as a nomadic subject.3

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The nomadic subject always moves between different paths, without having a destination, only to trespass the defined territorialities. The type of subjectivity represented by the schizo problematises traditional identity politics, which have been dominant since Plato, and is still dictated by the paranoiac pole of late capitalism. Firstly, schizo subjectivity embraced in Deleuzian philosophy abandons the reliance upon the Cartesian cogito, which prioritises the mind over the body and assumes the subject as a fixed, rational, coherent and knowing being. The subject in totality can be the source of production because of the flows of desire he carries within himself. Desire is capable of overthrowing the linear temporal proceeding that brings about not merely the dichotomy between the mind and the body but also myriad other dichotomies in the social milieu. It is, thus, unreasonable to reduce the subject, who himself is a multiplicity, to one leg of such dichotomies. Rather than representing the knowing mind/self, the schizo is the simultaneous existence and performance of all kinds of bodily and mental configurations. Secondly, schizo subjectivity rejects the psychoanalytic assumptions of subjectivity as the healthy ego. The schizo rejects undergoing Oedipal resolution or linguistic castration. His desire surpasses the false claims of lack and prohibition, and his unconscious discards the familial fantasies and repressions. The threat that he will be ostracised by society as the inappropriate other cannot deter the schizo from his revolutionary path. The schizo willingly chooses to be abnormal. He chooses to enact pure intensities, assemblages, multiplicities, flows, fluxes and fluids all at once. Schizophrenic breakdown in the late capitalist world, then, suggests a revolutionary breakthrough in that world, which brings to the fore the idea of a people to come. Immanent dystopia appears as a blunt manifestation of a resistance to the present world under late capitalism. All forms of dystopia have found their sources primarily in the shortcomings of the times in which they are produced, but none has been more capable of resisting the present than immanent dystopia. The present constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari call “the intolerable”, that is, “a lived actuality that at the same time testifies to the impossibility of living in such conditions” (Smith 1997, p. xliii). Immanent dystopia addresses the intolerable, not by presuming an imaginative future dystopian society but by re-presenting the

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here-and-­now dystopia of the age. The future setting, if any, becomes only a defamiliarising means of its resistance to the present. It assumes the mission of “absolute deterritorialisation even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people” (Deleuze 1997, p. 101). This newness implies a need to push the present to its limits so far as to disclose its virtual potentials and missing people. People are missing not in the sense that they are not present in the present, but in the sense they are forced to reside in the margins, to be unseen and to be unheard due to their destructive potentials. As Deleuze reiterates in his Essays: Critical and Clinical, “[i]t is a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becomingrevolutionary. Perhaps it exists only in the atoms of the writer, a bastard people, inferior, dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete” (1997, p. 4). The invention of a people to come suggests a close engagement with the absolute limit of late capitalism, that is, the schizophrenic pole, where one can articulate revolutionary forces. A people to come stands for the virtual potentialities of the schizo subject to liberate him or herself from the molar in favour of the molecular, from binarism in favour of multiplicity, from finality in favour of process, and from stability in favour of change. A people to come is an attempt to go beyond the present system not by simply presenting rigid models of what life should be like but by creating endless possibilities of what life could be like without such rigid models. Immanent dystopia invents a people to come by entailing such an engagement with new possibilities of life. It illustrates how the ongoing tension between the paranoiac and schizophrenic pole manifests within itself a revolutionary potential and how the schizo/the pervert/the bastard is not a breakdown but a breakthrough promising a new people and a new earth. A people to come emerges in immanent dystopia predominantly in the form of schizo characters that constitute sites of resistance against the present molar practices and paradigms of identity. These characters are invoked in immanent dystopia to show that there are always ways of drawing lines of flight from the dystopian system. A line of flight does not suggest that these characters seek to escape the existing reality and create a new earth outside of it. A line of flight is indeed an act of unearthing: unearthing the present only to find new tools of resistance to it.

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Therefore, these characters are portrayed to succeed in their resistance only when they learn how to use and abuse the Oedipalising and commodifying logic of late capitalism. With this in mind, the invention of a people to come in immanent dystopia neither promises the creation of an idealised future alternative to the existing one nor advocates any transcendent ideal or a telos to ultimately reach. A people to come heralds the coming of the new. But “newness”, as Ronald Bogue underlines, “need not […] be ideal” (2011, p. 87). If a people to come emerges as an ideal standard or a measure, it will immediately engage with the problem of transcendence. The new people of immanent dystopia appear simply as a process of change whose destination cannot be foreseen. This process of change would be not to substitute one predetermined system to another, but to “[s]ubstitute the AND for IS” and to advocate “[t]hinking with AND, instead of thinking IS” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, p. 57). The new people think, act and resist with AND, rather than serving for IS. Thinking, acting and resisting with AND corresponds to thinking with/in multiplicity, which helps to maintain the perpetual fight with the present, only to unearth its revolutionary potentials and carve out new modes of existence and new possibilities of life from its within. In other words, it ultimately helps to reintroduce immanence into life.

F rom the Clinical and Critical Approach Towards Schizoanalysis Immanent dystopia questions our conception of and relation to the present by giving us hints about the working mechanism of late capitalism and about the possibilities of using this mechanism against itself for revolutionary purposes. On the one hand, it tends to display the paranoiac tendency of desire in late capitalism, criticising how the capitalist social machine seizes the helm of the entire world and produces the neurotic subjects with its Oedipal myth. Thereby its axiomatic is depicted in all its negativity: life is no longer a process filled with pure intensities and creative energies but a restricted mode of existence. It becomes sick with the fascising workings of

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late capitalism. On the other hand, when life gets sick, immanent dystopia appears as an activity of health. “[W]hat constitutes the health” in literature is, as Daniel Smith underlines, “precisely its capacity to construct such lines of flight, to affirm the power of life, to transform itself depending on the forces it encounters (the ‘ethical’ vision of the world)” (1997, p. lii). It accordingly releases the schizophrenic pole of desire from its capture by capitalism and invents a new people to come and a new earth, both of which signal the positivity of its axiomatic system, becoming the harbingers of possible lines of flight from the present dystopia. Immanent dystopia, as an enterprise of health, seems to be in need of a theoretical approach that can pay regard to this close link between literature, health and the workings of the capitalist social machine. In this way, a critical and clinical approach could be a good fit for the analyses of contemporary dystopian works at hand. The critical and clinical project, proposed in Deleuze’s last book Essays: Clinical and Critical (1993), relies upon the argument that the writer is a profound symptomatologist of civilisation. The writer reads the symptoms of the sicknesses of society and offers positive cures for it and hence literature becomes a health which is supposed to be scrutinised not only critically but also clinically. The clinical aspect of Deleuzian literary analysis traces how paths of life are blocked and repressed and make life sick, how lines of flight are drawn from the arborescent structures, striated spaces and Oedipal myths that clog the fluxes and flows of unbound desire inherent in life, and how these schizo lines create positive cures against life’s sicknesses. Departing from the traditional notions of literary interpretation, the critical aspect engages with how these clinical symptoms and positive cures are integral to literary techniques and authorial style embraced in literary works. The clinical and critical approach fashions an affirmative enterprise in the sense that the critique is no longer limited to mere interpretation but becomes a clinical case which creates and transforms. It owes its affirmative nature primarily to its departure from the discourse of psychoanalysis. Its departure from psychoanalysis brings it closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “schizoanalysis” which first appeared in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Schizoanalysis, which Deleuze and Guattari call “universal clinical theory” (1983, p. 281), is a powerful critique of psychoanalysis which takes into account the previously neglected social

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and political aspects of repression. It condemns psychoanalysis for being a negative and transcendent representation that hides the fact that social repression is essentially a psychic repression. Schizoanalysis sets out as an alternative to psychoanalysis to create a health in which the Oedipal myth is entirely dysfunctionalised and the unconscious is orphaned. As Deleuze and Guattari stress, “[i]t is not the purpose of schizoanalysis to resolve Oedipus, it does not intend to resolve it better than Oedipal psychoanalysis does. Its aim is to de-oedipalise the unconscious in order to reach the real problems” (1983, p. 81–82). The real problem suggested by Deleuze and Guattari is indeed the collaboration between psychoanalysis and late capitalism under the guise of a “clinical cure”. Late capitalism, as a reiteration of the fictitious representation of the unconscious, purports to produce paranoiac subjects, linguistically and psychically castrating their revolutionary desire through the norms of lack and the Oedipus complex. Those who, despite their willingness, fail in identifying themselves with the ego of the phallic father are diagnosed with neurosis and assumed to be in need of a cure. The cure advocated by psychoanalysis is a reintegration of the neurotic into society as a conforming and yielding subject. The neurotic becomes a healthy subject only when his unconscious is recaptured by the Oedipus complex and he is psychically and socially castrated. Schizoanalysis, in contrast, argues that once the unconscious is rescued from its Oedipal capture, the subject is cured. Therefore, schizoanalysis attacks psychoanalysis’s claim to cure the neurotic, disclosing the fact that psychoanalytic cure is nothing but the castration of the subject, the regulation of the ego and the repression of the unconscious. It is what produces sickness in the first place. In so doing, psychoanalysis founds the internal relative limits of late capitalism, and the task of schizoanalysis is to constantly push these limits forwards until reaching the absolute limit of late capitalism where the creation of a new earth and a new people becomes possible. Immanent dystopia employs such a schizoanalytic task. It emerges as a healing and productive process capable of converting the pathological breakdowns into revolutionary breakthroughs and of creating alternative modes of life. The new understanding of dystopia as a curative and creative enterprise requires a new method of reading. Schizoanalysis is probably the most convenient methodology to read and understand immanent

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dystopia. There are still debates about the applicability of Deleuzian schizoanalysis to literary texts, for he does not provide a certain set of principles or points of reference. This, however should not suggest an imprecision or disorganisation in his philosophy; rather, it stands for the exact way he intends to encourage his readers to adopt. That is to say, Deleuze himself does not transmit his schizoanalytic method through definitions, rules and principles, but with its practices. This book circumvents the possible difficulties a schizoanalysis of immanent dystopia could lead to by focusing on three major points:  space, subjectivity and textuality. In this respect, in this book we will delve into the formation of subjectivity in the dystopian world of late capitalism and trace how the subjects do not submit to the compulsions of the Oedipalised unconscious; instead, we will focus on how they shatter the traditional conception of Being and take lines of flight from their formalisation and capture in the late capitalist system. Late capitalism corresponds to a social machine which is, distinctly from the previous two social formations, structured upon the axiomatic. The axiomatic that capitalism relies upon is what gives it its flexibility and constant modulation through the acts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. As in the case of every single entity in the capitalist world, the position of the subject is subject to a perpetual oscillation between the act of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. That is, desire shuttles between the fascising pole and the schizophrenising pole, and the subject is alike forced to be Oedipalised, molarised and fixated upon a stable and non-threatening position while at the same time encouraged to go beyond this Oedipalisation and fixed position. In this book we will trace the subject’s oscillation between these two opposite poles and the possibilities of a people to come that would draw rhizomatic shifts from the world of dystopian order into the world of affirmative chaos, that is chaosmos.4 This shift from negative order to affirmative chaos with a degree of consistency is another point of reference that I aim to draw attention to. Late capitalism simultaneously inholds both smooth spaces and striated spaces. While striated space stands for the closed, structured and limited space, smooth space corresponds to a space free from all the previous

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taken-for-granted bonds. The embodiment of these two types of space is closely related to the constant act of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation on the socius. Deleuze and Guattari note this coexistence of smooth and striated spaces by saying that “the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (1987, p. 474). While striated space denotes a dystopian territory of the present, smooth space designates a distopian territory. In line with the perpetual movement of the subject from the fascising pole to the schizophrenic pole of desire, there is also a constant movement from a striated space to a smooth space. In this regard, I will examine how the dystopian spaces can be constantly turned into deterritorialised spaces, despite late capitalism’s endless striving to retrieve them back to striated spaces. Along with the moments of deterritorialisation of subjectivity and space, as Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan argue in their introduction to Schizoanalysis of Literature, a Deleuzian reading of text “should be oriented around those ‘pragmatic’ moments – embodied in linguistic blocs, refrains, formulae and so on – when meaning swings over to use, where something ‘occurs’ in the text rather than being signified or narrated” (2015, p. 5). This necessitates an examination into language and textuality in immanent dystopia in order to show how the cures suggested by the text are reflected in its literary style. Language cannot escape deadlocks on the flows of desire. It becomes one of the main fascising means of societies of control. In the capitalist social machine, language itself is adorned with the forms and structures dictated for fascising and reterritorialising effects. Considering the role of language in the creation of paranoiac subjects and striated spaces, Deleuze is concerned with how literary texts could submit language to a deterritorialising function. This function is, for Deleuze, to reach and overpass the limit of language which is not “outside language, but the outside of language” (1997, p. 5). This is to say that language could be pierced and turned upside down till a new language is created out of its scraps. This new language no longer harbours the arborescent structures within itself; on the contrary, it falls into a schizophrenic delirium and is driven into a flight. Regarding

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Deleuze’s frequent reference to language in his works, I will trace how contemporary dystopian writers target the language of late capitalism as a dystopian tool and convert it into a tool of resistance in their works.

Notes 1. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire is linked as a lack to the Real. The Real is one of the three registers that Lacan proposes to delineate the phases in the formation of human subjectivity in his Seminars. Among them, the Imaginary corresponds to the phase in which the infant considers itself as a fragmented entity and associates its ego with the imago of its mother that it sees in the mirror. Thus, this register is indeed a state of illusions and images since the formation of the infant’s ego is based upon a false identification. As for the Symbolic, it is the phase in which the infant begins to speak. The moment the infant enters into the realm of language, which is for Lacan equal to the Symbolic register, it is castrated by language and becomes a submissive subject of the dominant ideology. While these two registers stand for concrete and observable phases of human subjectivity, the Real is impossible to reach and revitalise in concrete terms. This is primarily because it corresponds to anything beyond language. The dismissal of the Real from the Symbolic stems from the idea of castration. Once the infant is castrated by the name-of-the-father, namely the phallus/language, it represses the feelings, experiences and drives that belong to the pre-Oedipal phase into its unconscious. The Real is, in this regard, the sum of all the repressed desires beyond the reach of the subject and language (Lacan 2007, p.  191–207). Relating the notion of desire with the Real can thus be understood as an attempt to relate the notion of desire with fantasy. Deleuze and Guattari find this perception problematic in the sense that desire, despite its overflow of productive and creative energy, is reduced to an impossible fantasy. They oppose the assumption of desire as mere fantasy but nonetheless they do not entirely abandon the Lacanian notion of the Real. Instead, they bring new insights into the Real by releasing it from the repression of language and disclosing the flows of desire it embodies. They attempt to “renew, on the level of the Real, the tie between the analytic machine, desire, and production” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 53). To be more precise, unlike Lacan,

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they associate desire with the Real in positive terms, foregrounding its affirmative potential. As opposed to the Lacanian assumption that the Real is impossible to reach and bear, it is the realm in which production takes place: “desire is to produce, to produce within the realm of the real. The Real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible. Desire does not express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organisation deprives desire of its objective being” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 27). Thus, it is not because of the very nature of the Real that desire is negated and forced to be unproductive, but because of the trammels of the Symbolic. 2. The Oedipus complex lies at the heart of Freud’s theory on the development of human psychology and sexuality. Human sexual development undergoes several specific phases before the human subject acquires his heterosexual identity. Drawing attention to the polymorphous nature of the infant, Freud argues that the infant abandons his instinctual and perverse drives and his biological sex conforms with his social gender only after he experiences the Oedipal complex, which occurs in the phallic stage in which the infant who enters into a mother–father–child triangle begins to see the parent of the same sex as his rival since he bears sexual tendencies towards the parent of the opposite sex. What makes the infant abandon his feelings towards his parent is the Oedipal fear: the fear of being castrated by the father who represents the phallus. Freud interprets the Oedipal resolution with regard to the male infant’s sexual development (2001, p.  142–145). While the male infant severs his sexual ties with his mother upon the fear of castration, the female infant undergoes a reverse process: she assumes the absence of a penis in her mother as a failure and turns away from her. Since she conceives her father as a figure of authority, she wishes to identify herself with the father’s law and sees her mother as a rival. In either case, the Oedipus complex makes the infant assume phallic authority and succumb to its laws. Through the Oedipal law, according to Deleuze and Guattari, desire is identified with prohibition because what is assumed to be lacking is what is supposed to be prohibited. In Freudian psychoanalysis, what is prohibited and desired is the unity with the mother: “The law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to our-selves: so that’s what I wanted” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 114). However, both this notion of desire for something prohibited and the notion of the law that imposes the prohibition are equally fictitious and

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aiming at injecting repression into the unconscious of people. Both aim at repressing desire and keeping its liberative potential under control: the infant should go through the Oedipus resolution to be a functioning member of society; otherwise, he or she will be a pervert or a psychotic. The Oedipus complex can thus be considered as a disciplinary means of the state rather than a discovery of psychoanalysis. It helps to turn individuals into obedient, healthy and normal subjects in the social terrain. Thus, no matter how ferociously late capitalism defends the opposite, social repression indeed goes hand in hand with psychic repression. Oedipalisation is indeed the modern version of social repression: it kills the productivity of desire by reducing it merely to familial sexual desires. Once the human subject is Oedipalised, he begins to perceive his desires merely in negative terms as unhealthy drives that should be driven into his unconscious. Despite the flow of powerful productive desires he inherits, he now becomes the subject in lack. 3. Unlike the sedentary/paranoiac subject that restrains his or her movement from A to B by assuming a transcendent point of arrival, the nomadic subject is always in-between, and the in-between is, for Deleuze and Guattari, the one that “[takes on] all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo” (1987, p. 380). The nomadic subject is, then, a joyous and free subject since the abandonment of a telos provides one with a liberatory space. This space could also be called a nomadic space which is, by its very nature, a space of affirmative difference and polyvocality. This space born out of the nomadic subject’s line of flight from the taken-for-granted sedentary lines is indeed a configuration of nomos. Nomos essentially corresponds to “the law”, “distribution” or “a mode of distribution” where there is no closure, no measure and no boundaries (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 380). The nomos then stands for a non-structured space that does not hold on to a centre. This makes it a direct opposite of logos which implies the existence of an organising principle which not merely creates a structure but also reinforces its maintenance through its construction of false binaries. While the logos ends up drawing sedentary spaces surrounded by boundaries, walls and territorialities, the nomos is the revolutionary distribution of smooth spaces that resist any enclosure and instead allow for new configurations of subjectivity, new modes of existence and new ways of thinking. This is why the schizo subject is not logocentric but nomadic: he has “no points, paths, or land, even though [he does] by all appear-

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ances” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 381). Having no determined point to arrive at, no determined paths to follow and no determined land to stay in, the nomadic subject is always on the move and in the act of deterritorialisation. 4. Chaos, in Deleuzian philosophy, stands for a kind of formless multiplicity, heterogeneity, potentiality and infinite flows of difference prior to any organisation. Yet this multiplicity or difference may not always necessarily be affirmative. Chaos becomes affirmative only when art, literature or science gives a consistency to its disorder through the creation of concepts and people. In other words, chaos becomes chaosmos through new creations. As Deleuze and Guattari underline in the last chapter of What Is Philosophy?, art, literature and science “transfor[m] chaotic variability into chaoid variety” (1994, p.  204), which makes chaos affirmative. In this regard, when we make references to affirmative chaos, we do not imply simply a chaotic existence of flows of difference but take this degree of consistency in chaos into account without endangering its productivity.

References Bogue, Ronald. “Deleuze and Guattari and the Future of Politics: Science Fiction, Protocols and the People to Come.” Deleuze Studies 5 (2011): 77–97. Buchanan, Ian, Tim Matts & Aidan Tynan. “Introduction: Towards a Schizoanalytic Criticism.” In Deleuze and The Schizoanalysis of Literature. Edited by Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan. 1–25. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays: Critical and Clinical (1993). Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II: Revisited Edition. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. ———. What Is Philosophy? (1991). Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

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Freud, Sigmund. The Infantile Genital Organisation: An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality (1923). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19. Edited and Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan of Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Routledge, 2007. Smith, Daniel W. “Introduction: ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project.” In Essays: Clinical and Critical. ix–lv. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 1997.

6 The Immanence of the New Weird: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

From the New Weird to Immanent Dystopia Young British writer China Miéville (1972–) is one of the most notable science-fiction and dystopian writers of the contemporary age. Despite his young age, Miéville is quite a prolific writer with nine novels, several novellas, short story collections, comics and non-fiction writings. As a writer who has strong affiliations with Marxism and socialism, he views writing as a vehicle for social and political action that could bring an affirmative transformation and revolutionary impulse to society. His commitment to Marxism goes beyond a simple interest. In fact, he is a well-known left-wing activist, a member of the British Socialist Workers Party and an earlier academic in international law, having studied and still investigating socialist revolutionaries and other political activisms and struggles. This involvement was first articulated in his publication of his doctoral thesis titled “Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law”, where he deals with how international law has been shaped by commodity relations in the capitalist social machine, and where he makes clear his critical stance towards capitalism. His involvement with political affairs was expanded to several other political © The Author(s) 2020 R. Çokay Nebioğlu, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_6

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non-fiction writings, as well. His critical stance accompanied by a revolutionary desire for positive change also complies with his fictional works that necessarily bear a political dimension even if they cannot be reduced to politics alone. It is the strong connection between his desire for change and his political involvement that helps him become a successful world-maker. He creates imaginary worlds which abound in monsters, horror and strange situations. For Miéville, his passion for world-making and monster-­ creating dates back to his childhood years. He has always been attracted by the unseen monstrosity of life that man is locked in and is hence driven by a strong desire not only to show it but also to look for ways of getting away from it. This interest, beginning in the very early years of his life, has led him to produce fictional works that overlap with several different genres. Miéville obviously has an ability to switch from one genre to another even within the same book without particular effort. This is why much ink has been spil t on the question of which generic category Miéville should be included. One critic has labelled him a “Fantasy writer” (Rayment 2014, p. 9), another has designated his work as “Marxist steampunk” in close relation to “cyberpunk” (Kendrick 2009, p. 259). Yet another has described him as “the most entertaining, interesting, and intellectually gifted writer of Anglophone speculative fiction to have yet emerged in his generation” (Freedman 2010, p. 25). Mark Bould, rather than attempting to squeeze his work into a single category, acknowledges the fact that his work actually draws “elements from the formal strategies of sf, fantasy and horror” along with being “profoundly realist, driven to explore ‘aspects of the conflict-ridden and con trajectory nature of social relationships’” (2009, p. 310). Many, however, agree on finding his work too ambivalent to categorise. Yet the word “ambivalent” would be an inappropriate and even hasty word to define his work precisely because it would reduce its richness and depth. This explains why there are only a few critics who truly scrutinise his work while the rest prefer labelling it simply as “ambivalent” without disclosing its richness. As opposed to these insufficient descriptions, in one of his interviews titled “Messing with Fantasy”, Miéville acknowledges his association with what he “generally call[s] ‘Weird Fiction’”, or what we might say the “New Weird”, which has its roots originally in the works of H. P. Lovecraft

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and is a term coined by the British writer M. John Harrison in 2003 (2002, p. 4). The term defines a group of writers and their works that defy being categorised into a single generic form due to their drawing from several genres such as science fiction, gothic, horror and fantasy. As Noys and Morphy point out, it is indeed an “unsettling transnational hybrid” (2016, p. 117). Since it is a hybrid form that can simultaneously draw upon several different genres and yet cannot fall into any single one of them, it is often regarded as a mode of writing rather than a neat genre. The major motivation behind the emergence of weird fiction is then the idea of transgression: it transgresses the strict boundaries not only of genres but of social, political and moral organisations. It has revolutionary potential for subversion, resistance and transformation, which unavoidably gains weird fiction a political dimension and a revolutionary energy. In this regard, it is not surprising that it is primarily thanks to Miéville and his works that the New Weird has gained its real articulation and commercial success in literary history. Miéville, as a renowned Marxist socialist and a creative writer, instills his power of writing and political commitment into his fiction. He marks a turning point in the weird tradition. He has a critical eye on the realities of the world and the weird is just implicit in this reality itself as he expresses in an interview: “I think the whole ‘sense of cosmic awe’ thing that we hear a lot about in the Weird tradition is to do with the sense of the numinous, whether in a horrific iteration (or, more occasionally, a kind of joyous one), as being completely embedded in the everyday, rather than an intrusion. To that extent the Weird to me is about the sense that reality is always Weird” (Miéville 2012). Apparently, what Miéville basically does in his fiction is to draw his material from the present reality and make it estranged from the here-and-now by inhabiting it with monsters, unimaginable creatures and situations. In doing so, he wants his readers to see the weird, that is, the reality, with an estranged eye, and hence purports to raise their awareness. Miéville’s motivation to raise awareness and create a difference can be inextricably tied to his being a “political writer of fiction”, as he puts it (Miéville 2000). As a strong defender of revolutionary socialism, Miéville engages with political affairs in his fiction intending to transform life for the better even if this is not the sole purpose of his works. Most of his works are centred around the idea of creating new political possibilities

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and the idea of taking a revolutionary action. His political commitment allows him to make simultaneous use of the potential of different genres, discharge his extraordinary imagination and combine the two to conceptualise alternative worlds in which anything is possible. This unavoidably brings him closer to the position of a dystopian writer. Although he does not call himself a dystopian writer, he does not deny the connection between the political aspiration of his fiction and that of dystopian narratives. In one of his interviews, he says that “[d]ystopia and utopia are themes, optics, viruses that can infect any field or genre” (Miéville 2018). As such, his work cannot avoid being infected by dystopian “optics” not only in terms of its strong tendency to portray the grim reality of the contemporary world and speculate about its possible future but also with regard to its frequent use of dystopian tropes. His imaginary worlds are productions of a creative intervention into the political, economic and social affairs in contemporary societies, where the real figures are often replaced by monsters, weird creatures and situations and located in a different time zone. His weird worlds constitute a social critique imbued with a subversive and transformative twist. Although Miéville’s weird fiction shows affinities with dystopia as a genre and as a concept, he is quite wary of the possible pitfalls of “-topias”, seeing “the ruptures and monsters that lurk in [them]” (Miéville 2018). What he finds toxic in the concept of utopia is its transcendent tendency to totalise and fascise. In a quite similar tone with the major argument of this book, he argues that utopia has a potential to become a “part of the ideology of the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree” (Miéville 2014). Yet his critical attitude towards utopia does not necessarily suggest that he entirely abandons his faith in it or opts for dystopia instead. Rather, he recognises the fine line between utopia and dystopia as sibling concepts and embraces a cautious stance to both. He sees utopia and dystopia as equally dangerous especially when their “degree of intent” (Miéville 2014) begins to desire a fixed and transcendent goal. What he favours is a form of -topia, be it utopia, dystopia or heterotopia, “without rage, without fury […] without hate”, over its transcendent form (Miéville 2014). His political agenda does not envision one single ideal state of the world but a world that would become better only with the creation of

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multiple alternatives. He believes that we do not need “merely to change the world, but to change the agenda about changing the world […] to keep alternatives alive in [creating a better world]” (Miéville 2018). Miéville’s understanding of dystopia strongly corresponds to the conception of immanent dystopia. Seeing the grim orientations of late capitalism and globalisation, Miéville is of the opinion that the contemporary world is in a state of crisis. The new form of capitalism, for him, becomes even more oppressive and fascising than ever. Hence, he perceives today’s “epoch of potential catastrophe” not as “Anthropocene” but as “Capitalocene”, that is, a world order whose primary drive is capitalist interest (Miéville 2014). In his interview “A Strategy for Ruination”, he reveals how dystopia is getting closer to “realism”, adding that “[i]t is hard to avoid the sense that these are particularly terrible days, that dystopia is bleeding vividly into the quotidian, and hence, presumably, into ‘realism,’ if that was ever a category in which one was interested” (Miéville 2018). He sees today’s societies as the utopia of capitalism and the dystopia of the rest. For him, dystopia no longer suggests an imaginary foresight but rather it is the current reality itself. Accordingly, his works mostly draw upon familiar dystopian scenes from real life, locating them in unfamiliar urban spaces and inhabiting them with a vast variety of fantastic entities. The dystopian worlds that he portrays in his works resonate with the concept of dysaxiomatic, features a very recognisable dystopian reality retrieved from the present world, and also promises the possibility of a way out from within. That is why the ideas of resistance and revolution appear in his works as necessities. Miéville as an active revolutionary socialist strongly believes it is high time that we created an upheaval that would eliminate the long-established hierarchies and social inequalities. Yet at the same time he is very doubtful about whether a real overthrow of a capitalist empire could be achieved since he considers the end of the world even more possible than the end of capitalism. Even if such an overthrow is possible, moreover, he is not quite sure whether this will not lead to the emergence of another empire. Therefore, he opts for an affirmative discourse of hope rather than a radical claim of revolution. The idea of hope, for Miéville, hinges upon the potentialities of the present. The capitalist axiomatic, despite its dystopian aspect, preserves in itself a transformative capacity to be disclosed by hope and action. There

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are multiple ways of disclosing this transformative energy. Yet the strategy Miéville embraces in his life and literary endeavour is to use the elements of a vast variety of different genres, particularly those of fantasy and New Weird, as a tool to dream the unreal, namely revolution as a plane of immanence, and then make it real, seeing that “the not-real isn’t separated from the real” (Miéville 2000; emphasis added). His “weird-dystopian” fiction, then, signifies a literary impulse towards a transformation, a becoming in the Deleuzian sense. Perdido Street Station (2000) is one of Miéville’s earliest novels that can be read as an embodiment of the dual nature of the capitalist axiomatic. The winner of the 2001 Arthur C.  Clarke Award and British Fantasy Award, the novel appears as the first of Miéville’s “Bas-Lag series”, which is composed of two other novels entitled The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004). Bas-Lag is the fictional world Miéville creates as the setting of his novels. It is a very complex and diverse geographical location inhabited by equally complex and diverse subjects. It comprises several continents, two of which are Rohagi and Bered Kai Nev, having a long and complicated history full of wars, empires and political conflicts. As a reflection of this rich background, the series hosts human, non-human and hybrid races, monsters and creatures. It is also a bizarre literary form influenced by various generic forms varying from fantasy and science fiction to cyberpunk and horror. Such a complexity makes Bas-Lag an utterly hybrid world where different voices, values, genres and styles meet and even the opposites overlap in an organic harmony. In this sense, if a single word were required to define the Bas-Lag series, it would be “multiplicity”. The whole series is a configuration of heterogeneous lines, of a multiplicity at all speeds and intensities that would lend itself to other multiplicities. The multiplicity that occupies Bas-Lag as a whole unfolds into each novel’s form and content as well. Each novel posits an open and transformative multiplicity within itself, stretching and transgressing the boundaries of several genres, of social and cultural norms, of subjectivity and of space in its own unique way. Thus, each novel inherently reflects one another both in its portrayal of heterogeneity characterising the Bas-­ Lag world and in its rhizomatic characteristics. This provides the Bas-Lag series with an internal consistency even if none of these novels follow the same plot line with the same characters. In this book, therefore, I focus

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only on the first novel of the trilogy, Perdido Street Station, considering the limitations of time and space and the necessity of thematic coherence. Perdido Street Station takes place in New Crobuzon, a city of multifarious races, values and lifestyles. In New Crobuzon, there are a great variety of inhabitants from completely different races and species ranging from humans to bird-like creatures, to insect-headed people and to plant-­ people. It is hard to say that all these creatures live peacefully in this city because there is a strong sense of social hierarchy even among those of the same species. But they all manage to coexist in tandem for this hierarchical system promises stability and reclaim its inhabitants only when they remain within its societal and racial boundaries. The plot revolves around the story of a human scientist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, who has a relatively more privileged position in this multifaceted city compared to other species. He, nevertheless, pursues a subversive lifestyle, digressing from the mainstream ways of being and living, not only in his profession but also in his social life. In his profession he chooses an experimental and subversive research topic—crisis theory—which leads his colleagues to ostracise him and banish him from the field and to work independently, despite his affiliation with the university. In his love life, similarly, he chooses a cross-species romantic relationship with a Khepri named Lin, which leads his friends and relatives to ostracise him and banish him from their human community. This subversive life becomes even more complicated after a crippled bird-man named Yagharek asks Isaac to invent a mechanism to restore his ability of flight. Yagharek has had his wings taken in exchange for a hideous crime he committed back in his homeland. Isaac is not interested in Yagharek’s crime at all. What fascinates him about his request is the idea of creating something new. He agrees to help him only because he sees it as an opportunity to experiment. Setting out for a new scientific adventure, Isaac soon realises that he needs to work on different flying creatures to outline their wing patterns. Lemuel Pigeon, a friend of Isaac, helps him to find these creatures. One of the creatures he finds is an unusual caterpillar called slake-moth. While experimenting with this caterpillar, Isaac discovers that it has interesting nutrition habits: it feeds merely on a type of liquid which abounds in the human brain. As the novel proceeds, Isaac’s caterpillar gradually metamorphoses into a monstrous creature, a slake-moth, and breaks itself

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free from his laboratory. The novel’s central story begins to unfold after this moment. We soon learn that this monstrous creature escapes Isaac’s laboratory in order to rescue his siblings who are held captive by Motley, a crime boss collaborating with the government, who imprisons these creatures to sell their milk as drugs. But his illegal business, with the government’s knowledge, is interrupted when Isaac’s slake-moth rescues them. Now they all begin to terrorise the city. Motley and the city-­ government of New Crobuzon immediately go after these slake-moths because they want to keep using these slake-moths to feed on the brains of the city’s inhabitants. Their profit-driven motivations to recapture these creatures leads to the emergence of a collective fight against them. This arduous fight pioneered by Isaac is shortly joined by a diverse group of individuals from different racial and socio-economic backgrounds because they all want to bring an end to the exploitative practices of Motley and the city-government. This fight not only unites different sects of the society as a harmonious whole but also allows Isaac to try out his crisis theory as a revolutionary tool against the enemy. The novel ends with a victory: the brain-draining slake-moths are caught and annihilated, and the running of Motley’s and the city-government’s business comes to a full stop. But this victory comes along with its costs: Lin is fatally injured and her brain is drained by the slake-moths; Yagharek loses his hope of regaining his ability of flight as Isaac discovers his hideous crime and refuses to help him; and Isaac goes into exile as his life is now under constant threat. In Perdido Street Station, the collective fight against the slake-moths says more in terms of its latent political inclination. Beneath the surface plot arrangement, the novel is in effect an allegorical re-presentation of rising globalisation and late capitalism. The novel is predominantly featured with Neo-Victorian sentiments in its embodiment of steampunk technology under the inspiration of nineteenth-century machinery. Nevertheless, as Miéville himself acknowledges in his interview “The Road to Perdido” (2003), what he actually depicts in the novel bears significant similarities to present societies that are getting more and more dystopian in nature. New Crobuzon stands for today’s rising capitalist metropolis with its political structure, economic practices, hybrid population and means of control. In this sense, as Jonathan Newell describes

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it, the novel presents “a defamiliarised vision of our own social reality, broadly construed: a reality structured around strictly and largely subconsciously enforced binaries of self/other, us/them, whole/broken” (2013, p. 498, emphasis added). The re-presentation of the late capitalist world order posits Perdido Street Station as a dysaxiomatic  system in the Deleuzian sense. It both presents a “dystopian territory” as a reflection of the present dystopian reality, and simultaneously presents a “distopian territory” as a reflection of its motivation to go beyond the existing reality. Miéville locates his dystopian world in a fantastic context and populates it with fantastic and weird characters. However, what is interesting about his dystopia is not that it is presented in the fantasy form but that it takes on an almost allegorical representation despite the employment of the fantastic. The way Miéville portrays his dystopia becomes almost an allegory of the workings of capitalism. He materialises the abstract concepts related to the inner mechanisms of the capitalist social machine. While illustrating the capitalist exploitation of the minds of people, for example, he literally shows how the slake-moths drain the minds of people rather than depicting it metaphorically. Similarly, he displays the literal hybridisation of the subjects through the process of Remaking to illustrate the notion of hybridity and body without organs inherent in the capitalist social machine. This technique could be expressed with what Regina Barecca coined as “metaphor-into-narrative” (1988, p. 243). As Barecca clarifies, the metaphor-into-narrative, or what some call the literalisation of metaphor, is an act of “attaching a buried, literal meaning to what is intended to be inert and meaningless” for the purposes of subversion (Barreca 1988, p. 244). Although it is hard to guess whether Miéville employs the literalisation of metaphor deliberately or incidentally, it is certain that this technique significantly contributes to the building-up and amplification of his criticism of the dystopian reality of present societies under late capitalism. In addition to its concretisation of the late capitalist dystopia, the novel also explores the possibilities of resistance within the capitalist system in the same way. Taken in its full trajectory, it becomes obvious that the fight against slake-moths materialises not merely the fight against the corrupt city-government and its criminal associates but also the fight

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against capitalism. Yet, the nature of this fight is beyond a literalisation of metaphor due to its hybrid aspects. This fight is immanent in the very nature of the dystopian society depicted and in the novel’s overall structure. Seemingly, New Crobuzon is a capitalist and globalised city-state that is characterised by a strong sense of diversity and hybridity. This hybridity is felt not only in the diversity of its population but also in the diversity of its cultural and social values as well as of its economic interests. In a sense, the racial, social and economic hybridity represents the new spirit of late capitalism ruling this cosmopolitan city. Unlike the general assumption that it stands for the margins of society, it actually defines both the centre and the margins as an intricate part of the capitalist system. No matter how such a diversity contributes to the workings of the capitalist system in New Crobuzon, there is still a very powerful state apparatus that would keep it under control. This apparatus functions as a vehicle of capture, organising flows of any nature into lines of segmentarity. Yet, such a hybrid mechanism that characterises the very structure of the capitalist social machine necessarily bears strong potentialities for transgression and resistance. Even if the presentation of hybridity in New Crobuzon in effect reproduces the negative system of differences based upon binary oppositions, it is the idea of resistance that actually uncovers the affirmative aspect of hybridity, that is, multiplicity. As such, the novel probes into how this hybridity can be turned into a collective action that would open up lines of flight from domination and manipulation within the capitalist system. Even if it cannot be claimed that the novel promises a victorious revolution that would entirely eliminate the capitalist world system, it is certain that it heralds revolutionary possibilities of drawing a way out from the system and of making hybridity a “vector of deterritorialisation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 294) to change its form from a site of negative difference into a site of affirmative multiplicity.

Smoothing Over the “Hybrid Zone” Miéville’s New Crobuzon serves as a political arena that witnesses this transformation of the hybrid yet striated space of the city into a hybrid and smooth space of resistance. New Crobuzon appears as a metropolis

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that functions as the global centre of late capitalism. It is a city-state with a multicultural and hybrid background, inhabiting a vast variety of species alongside humans such as frog-like Vodyanoi, human-bodied and insect-headed Khepri, plant-people Cactacae, humanoid-bird Garuda and brain-draining Slake-Moth. Each of these species is a hybrid entity sharing a common zone with other species in terms of their physicality and racial features, yet at the same time having their own unique histories, cultures and languages. Accordingly, each embodies a different way of living and seeing, occupying different urban spaces. Humans live in the central area around Perdido Street Station, the Khepri community is in Creekside and Kinken, the Garudas in Spatters, the Vodyanoi in Kelltree and the Cactacae in Glasshouse. Each urban space hosting a different racial entity has its own laws, rules, values and standards. As underlined in the novel by Motley—a Remaking, that is, a hybrid entity whose body parts are either removed or replaced and whose body is transformed into an entirely different form—New Crobuzon is characterised by “[t]he hybrid zone” (Miéville 2001, p. 41) with multiple races, values, beliefs, lifestyles and forms just like his remade body. Hybrid zone stands for a positive plurality, “[t]he zone where the disparate become part of the whole” in Motley’s words (Miéville 2001, p. 41). It suggests an active micropolitics and molecular forces. The micropolitics of hybridity is by its very nature an opposite of the politics of molarisation that defines capitalism. Against capitalism’s inclination towards homogenising and standardisation for social production, the micropolitics of hybridity always has a potential to create revolutionary minorities, becomings and a people-to-come. This makes it a threat for the sustainability and expansion of the capitalist social machine. Thus, New Crobuzon, under the impetus of late capitalism, does not cherish its hybrid zone; on the contrary, its state apparatus actively works to turn it into a zone of segregation and negative differences. In other words, it overcodes the urban space of New Crobuzon only to become a striated space par excellence. The molecular flows of the hybrid plurality of the city are captured and organised into rigid segregations, and despite its hybrid nature the city is structured upon the principle of polarisation. Hierarchical stratifications are established, and racial lines are highlighted to launch a rigid binaristic system that would replace affirmative diversity. Although the primary

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form of binarism in the city appears as the one between the human and the non-human races, it is rapidly expanded to each and every racial entity. The molar boundaries drawn between the races are reflected, reproduced and re-enacted upon the literal urban space of New Crobuzon. The state apparatus operates with the motto “Divide, rule” (Miéville 2001, p. 93). This is why it is not surprising to see how highly striated and compartmentalised the city is in its organisation of neighbourhoods varying from dangerous suburbs (such as Griss Twist and Smog Bend), industrial slums (such as Kelltree and Sobek Croix) to middle-class quarters (such as Galmarch and Flyside) and rich and safe districts (such as Flaghill and Rim, to name only a few). Even the city’s architectural design is rigid and exclusionary. It is nonetheless remarkably diverse, which complies with the logic of late capitalism: it moves “from the industrial to the residential to the opulent to the slum to the underground to the airborne to the modern to the ancient to the colourful to the drab to the fecund to the barren” (Miéville 2001, p. 41). The urban space of New Crobuzon is organised to integrate and strengthen the striations in the social and economic structure of society and hence to enable the smooth circulation of capital. Each species is therefore highly segregated from one another in terms of living spaces, life styles, socio-economic background, values and beliefs, despite their hybrid features that put them in a common zone. Invisible sets of rules and laws are applied to keep these striations sustained and prevent any transition among them. Transition of any kind, either from one race to another or from the outside of the urban space of New Crobuzon to the inside, is not met with approval. Thus, transition of any kind is overly intimidating, especially considering the contribution of the urbanised planning of the city. Even the topography of the city with its twisted architecture, dirt, decaying neighbourhood and inhabitants makes Yagharek feel as an outsider on his first day of coming to New Crobuzon. These rules and laws, however, are set up not only for creating boundaries between races and between the inside and outside of New Crobuzon and promoting isolation instead of interaction, but they are also created to striate each individual race from within. The Khepri community, for example, is based upon a binary logic fostering gender discrimination,

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where male Khepris constitute the majoritarian standard as sentient entities while female ones stand for the non-sentient minority. Apart from the exclusionary mechanism of striation and spatio-­ temporal boundaries, there are other mechanisms of control and striation that the capitalist social machine deploys to pursue its capitalist expansion in New Crobuzon. The city seems to be in the initial phases of the shift from a disciplinary society into a society of control, which necessarily creates a difference in the ways the state apparatus handles controlling and striating society, politics and the economy. New Crobuzon is reigned by the city government, a parliament under the leadership of the mayor, Bentham Rudgutter. The government is equally corrupt in its collaboration with corporate companies, scientists and even criminal bosses. Capitalist interests and economic collaborations are so dominant that the government is no longer the sole sovereign power. Likewise, even if disciplinary institutions have not entirely collapsed in this city-state, they are not as effective as they were in the past, either. New Crobuzon society, then, is not a society entirely under surveillance but a society that uses disciplinary means for making its subjects “undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network” (Deleuze 1992, p. 6) in order to ensure the circulation of the capitalist market. With this in mind, one of the regulatory means of the capitalist social machine is the militia, that is, the military defence organs of New Crobuzon. The primary duty of militia agents is to sustain the striated space of the city and the political and socio-economic stratifications, which in turn ensures the safety and durability of the capitalist market. This unit functions in two ways: militia agents either secretly sneak into society and foster the existing segregation between the races by fuelling the hatred, or violently quash any anti-capitalist activity as in the case of the Vodyanoi strike. Since the conquest of the late capitalist market becomes the only goal of the states that are in transition to control societies, as Deleuze puts it, “older methods of [discipline and punishment], borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications” (1992, p. 7). This applies to New Crobuzon where older disciplinary methods are modified with the help of advanced technology to serve utilitarian capitalist ends. One of these is the Remaking, that is, a process of mutilating and reconstructing the bodies of the criminal convicts as a form of punishment. The

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reconstruction of the criminals’ bodies in line with their crimes is an utterly disciplinary regulation but the underlying motivation behind it is to promote capitalist utilitarian logic by turning them into productive hybrid-machines that could attain different functions and hence could work in different areas. This is tantamount to saying that the bodies of the criminals become a space to be deterritorialised only to be reterritorialised as functional organisms that would ideally contribute to the workings of the capitalist social machine. The latent motive behind creating molar striations in the urban space of New Crobuzon and the space of its subjects’ bodies is to control the free flows of desire. Desire, the moving force and creative energy of life, invests every single social space of the city-state. There the productions of desire necessarily become social productions. But the reason why the capitalist social machine sees desire as something to be repressed lies in the fact that it is “revolutionary in its essence”: “every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors”, as Deleuze and Guattari underline (1983, p. 118). Desire constitutes a major threat to the stability of the dominant power structure, which makes the capitalist social machine take immediate action to keep it under control. This is perfectly illustrated with the figure of slake-moths in New Crobuzon. Slake-moths are the creatures designed and created by scientists working for the government. They are violent predators that suck the essential fluid of their victims, draining their dreams, desires, creative energies and revolutionary tendencies, and turn them into empty bodies. They turn this essential fluid into dreamshit, a very powerful illegal drug whose exchange market is in the hands of the government. This ironically reminds one of the actual operation of late capitalism. As desire seeks multiplicity, desiring-­ production and an infinite network of relations, the capitalist social machine seeks to rob its subjects of desire. Thanks to slake-moths, it transfers the investments of desire into capitalist production. In this sense, it can be argued that slake-moths stand for the metonymic embodiment of capital in New Crobuzon, draining the free flow of desire for control and profit.

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New Crobuzon becomes the locus of late capitalist production, namely a striated space where everything including bodies and subjectivities is exposed to the capture of the state apparatus and evaluated according to its exchange value. Moreover, the rigid striations and hierarchies created in the urban space of the city reinforce the inequality in labour division, racial discrimination, gendered discourse and repression. As stated in the novel, the city is “gripped in an epidemic, an outbreak, a plague of nightmares” (Miéville 2001, p. 349). With the operation of striating forces, late capitalism increasingly consolidates itself in the urban space of the city till it reaches the point of perfection. Yet, for Deleuze and Guattari, late capitalism’s point of perfection ironically suggests a smooth space rather than an absolute striated space. The edge of every striated space interferes with the emergence of a smooth space, a form of space that is necessary either for the accelerated circulation of capital or for a resistance to the capitalist social machine. The latter applies to New Crobuzon where smooth spaces emerge as a site of resistance against power. The city, despite its strict striations, still stands for a “[c]ondensed force, the potential for counterattack” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 481). This is primarily an outcome of the very nature of metropolises. The metropolis, as Negri and Hardt point out, can be seen as “the skeleton and spinal cord of the multitude, that is, the built environment that supports its activity, and the social environment that constitutes a repository and skill set of affects, social relations, habits, desires, knowledges, and cultural circuits” (2009, p. 249). As they continue, the metropolis functions as a platform that both witnesses the multitude’s subordination and allows the conditions for resistance and transformation. This makes it “the inorganic body, that is, the body without organs of the multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 249). In a similar vein, New Crobuzon is a metropolis that resists striation by its nature. It is a rhizome-city without roots. It is not only a network of canals, stations and alleys but also a living dynamic of different cultures, races, traditions and values that connect every part of the city to one another. Because of the hybrid nature of the city, the state apparatus strives to create rigid boundaries. It expects that these boundaries would physically separate each neighbourhood, socially and economically segregate each racial community and enclose each into its own unique living

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space. Even if the neighbourhoods are segregated in line with their prosperity and inhabitants as wealthy quarters, middle-class districts and poor ghettos, it is still too hard to draw strict boundaries, considering how close and evenly interwoven all the neighbourhoods are to one another. Canker Wedge, for example, is very close to the centre but it is an entirely different world. It is one of the most prosperous places in New Crobuzon whereas the city centre next to it is extremely chaotic and gloomy. This is to say that all those hierarchically organised spaces are just one step away from one another as an irony of the divisions they are exposed to. At this point, Perdido Street Station becomes a powerful metaphor of this interwoven and rhizomatic aspect of the space of the city: it is “the centre of New Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiated out from the Spike like a web and the five great train lines of the city met, converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that yawned hugely at the city’s vulgar heart” (Miéville 2001, p. 22). It is a microcosm of the city structured by the principles of “connection and heterogeneity” which allow it to ceaselessly and simultaneously establish networks among its various lines, and by the principle of “multiplicity” that has no points superior or inferior to one another. This rhizomatic nature of the station helps to eliminate any supposed distinction between the centre and the peripheries, defying any categorisation and hierarchy. Hence it makes transition and transgression inevitable between zones, worlds, races and traditions. Thanks to such a hybrid and rhizomatic nature represented by Perdido Street Station, the striated space of New Crobuzon inevitably surrenders to smoothing forces. The seeds of smooth spaces exist not only at the peripheries but also at the very centre of New Crobuzon. The spatio-­ political contour of the city inhabits that space both as a necessity of the rapid circulation of capital and as an inevitable outcome of its multiplicity. Despite several striations that are created to control and limit the movement of the subjects from one fixed point to another within an assigned space, movement is never halted in New Crobuzon, either because the state apparatus cannot manage to capture each and every territory in its rhizomatic geography (as it is with the suburbs that are beyond its reach), or because there are zones of indeterminacy in each

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territory that transgress and defy those striations even if the state apparatus somehow reaches and attempts to striate them. In such a rhizome-city having an infinite number of entrances each of which is simultaneously both detachable and connectable, there are also infinite lines of escape from the confines of the dominant power. The city, therefore, is invested with a revolutionary desire and envelops an intense force that waits for a stimulus to generate it. A nomadic consciousness becomes such a stimulus to activate deterritorialising forces to smooth out the stratified territories by digging out holes from within. In New Crobuzon, the nomadic consciousness appears as a form of political resistance against the state and functions as a war machine, the goal of which is not to destroy but to subvert and transform. It is immanent in the contours of the city that is open, diverse and multiple in its essence and that challenges representation and singular identification. It has a collective aspect not in the sense that it would suggest a homogenised unity of bodies similar to the ones promoted by the state but in the sense that it would welcome all acknowledging and respecting of their heterogeneity, diversity and multiplicity. Accordingly, this nomadic consciousness deriving from the city’s hybridity triggers an affirmative difference and collectivity which opens up smooth spaces of resistance. Apart from individual attempts that will be given in the upcoming pages, like Lin’s, Isaac’s and those of many others to smooth out the molar striations, there are several major sites of resistance that form smooth spaces in the novel. The first one is Runagate Rampant, which is the illegal news-sheet driven by minoritarian politics to unravel the operations of the capitalist social machine and to create an awareness in the community against its repressive and discriminative practices. This underground magazine boldly criticises how profit-driven the government is in its decisions, regulations and collaborations. It displays the government’s links with mob crime, and with the drug and prostitution industry. The main concern of the capitalist social machine in New Crobuzon, in Runagate Rampant’s words, is to “[c]hurn out the commodity, grab the profit, get the militia to tidy up your customers afterwards, get a new crop of Remade or slave-miners for the Arrowhead pits, keep the jails full […] nice as you like” (Miéville 2001, p. 138). In this sense, Runagate Rampant offers an alternative and more truthful presentation of the

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reality against the dominant representation held by the state. The slogans published in its newspaper and booklets run along the walls of the streets, of governmental institutions and even of churches. Those graffiti constitute liminal smooth spaces of resistance challenging the cleanliness, order and segmentation fostered in the striated spaces. The site of resistance created by Runagate Rampant is a smooth space since it is driven by a revolutionary desire to overturn the hierarchical organisations and inequalities. It solely aims to deterritorialise the stratified territories without taking into consideration which racial community they are formed on. It does not enclose its deterritorialising activities within a self-­ contained space of resistance; on the contrary, it is open to any collaboration with other sites of resistance in New Crobuzon. One of these sites supported by Runagate Rampant is the Kelltree strike led by Vodyanoi dockers. The strike begins among Vodyanoi stevedores as a reaction to unfair labour wages, and rapidly extends across other labourers including humans. By paralysing the river, they collectively create smooth spaces of resistance that simultaneously paralyse the capitalist operations of the state. This “all-race union against the bosses!” movement, starting and expanding on the shore, is actively backed by Runagate Rampant without being asked. In this regard, the smoothing force over the striations of the state is not the strikes, slogans or graffitis themselves but the collective action lurking behind them. The collective action taken against the capitalist social machine in New Crobuzon strongly evokes the motif of the patchwork quilt Deleuze and Guattari mention in Thousand Plateaus. A patchwork is a perfect example of smooth space where different materials in different shapes, sizes and colours are randomly stitched to one another so as to form a unity. In this unity, there is no particular centre that organises patterns around it, but a juxtaposition of pieces that could be arranged in an infinite number of ways without privileging one over another. In this sense, as Deleuze and Guattari underline, “[t]he smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that ‘smooth’ does not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, conformal space prefiguring on art” (1987, p. 477). In the same vein as the formation of patchwork quilt, the collectivity behind the smooth spaces of resistance in New Crobuzon is governed by the principles of heterogeneity, difference and creative

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connectivity. With such sites of resistance, all those stratifications and molar segregations that the state apparatus creates among different racial communities are dissolved; and instead all differences are embraced and turned into a powerful yet heterogeneous collectivity where there are no longer us/them oppositions. The hybrid space of the city, which is turned into a site of negative differences, retrieves its affirmative multiplicity and diversity with the release of revolutionary desire. This affirmative collectivity is best illustrated with the unified fight against the slake-moths in the novel. The slake-moths, gigantic creatures sucking the sentience out of all inhabitants, are accidentally set free and pose a significant threat to the city. With their release, New Crobuzon is driven into a nightmare. Yet the city government’s and Isaac’s reactions to their release display differences in their motives. While Isaac and his friends want to eliminate these creatures to save the city from this “plague of nightmares”, the city-government wants to catch them only to keep using them against its people for its own interest. Thus, the combat against the slake-moths simultaneously becomes a combat against the government itself and the capitalist social machine it represents. In this triple-edged fight, a truly collective site of resistance emerges out of “all-­ races against the bosses” approach. The resistance group led by Isaac consists of people from several different communities: humans that are assumed to be the privileged race in the city, the Weaver that is a giant spider-like creature and the Construct Council that is an artificial intelligence created for multifunctional purposes. This heterogeneous group becomes victorious only after a collaborative act of creating crisis energy. Crisis energy, as Yagharek defines it, designates “the channels of power, transformative energy, thaumaturgic flow, the binding and exploding force that inheres” (Miéville 2001, p. 505; emphasis in original). This energy which is “all about potentiality” stands for the virtual in a Deleuzian sense. The virtual is a pure potentiality and constituting power of multiplicity from which the actual unfolds. Its actualisation, as Deleuze puts it, “always takes place by difference, divergence or differentiation (1994a, p. 212). Likewise, the potentiality of crisis energy in the novel unfolds only through a collective action that affirms differences, diversity and hybridity. The crisis energy is produced out of the combination of the Weaver’s unfiltered with a collective intelligence represented by the

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Construct Council, who is a machinic entity having unbound databases and calculating capabilities, with the help of a group of individuals from different species and races. This collective action becomes even more telling when one takes into consideration that it is Perdido Street Station, the centre of interaction and multiplicity, where the crisis engine is created out of a network connecting all sources of energy coming from different racial entities, and where the final fight against the slake moths, government and the capitalist social machine triumphs. This testifies to the fact that smooth spaces are not in themselves emancipatory, but rather it is only through a combination of a degree of affirmative difference, collectivity and revolutionary desire that they come into being as spaces of resistance.

Hybrid as the New Intermezzo Smooth spaces are wedded to diverse orientations, multiple entrances, and unforeseen and undefined oscillations between points, which are frequently highlighted as “hybrid zones” in the novel. Hybrid zones, by their nature, are open to smoothing forces, rhizomatic networks of relations and emancipatory practices that could halt the functioning of the capitalist social machine. Once the hybrid zones meet an affirmative multiplicity, the molar boundaries and stratified structures dissolve and leave their place to an open site where infinite movement is possible. As Robert Wood points out, hybrid zones can be “intimately linked with a transformation of society through pushing its contradictions to the point of crisis”, a crisis that could be seen as pure multiplicity (2018, p. 85). This pure multiplicity not only reinforces the dissolution of the dominant power structures by offering multiple exits from their capture, but also promotes the unfolding of dominant forms of subjectivity and the emergence of alternative modes of being and living. To put it another way, the hybridity where “the disparate becomes the part of the whole” (Miéville 2001, p. 41) is reflected not only in the body of the city, its smooth spaces of resistance and its architecture, but also in the subjectivities of its inhabitants. Almost all characters in the novel, regardless of their races and species, are in “the intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.  380),

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illustrating a borderline trajectory either in their bodies or in their ways of being and living. However, the status of being in the intermezzo does not always suggest a non-dialectical and affirmative position of being in the novel. On the contrary, it is predominantly turned into a means of subjugation and hierarchical imposition. Even if hybridity as a form of subjectivity is exposed to the processes of Oedipalisation and the normative standardisation of the capitalist social machine, it keeps preserving its capacity to offer schizophrenic lines of flight from and leaks within the molar structures. Despite its capture, it still allows for the creation of affirmative alternative subjectivities as a mode of resistance just as is observed in the urban space of the city. The normative standards designed for the subjects are, in this sense, always at stake in New Crobuzon as an outcome of this hybrid nature that is integral to the body of the city and of its inhabitants. The capitalist social machine seeks to produce a scheme of negative differences, cruel discriminations and monstrosities on and through the bodies of its hybrid subjects in New Crobuzon. This is primarily because hybridity constitutes a potential alternative to standardisation. It is a constantly changing assemblage of diverse forces. It is utterly dynamic and creative, which can pave the way for the subjects to experience a crossing-­ of-­the-boundaries, a revolutionary trajectory. As opposed to the mobile, ever-changing and improving nature of hybrid subjectivity, the capitalist social machine favours immobile and rigid forms of subjectivity. As such, there are two types of hybrid entities in New Crobuzon, both of which are exposed to the Oedipalisation of the state apparatus. The first type is the Remades, the hybrid bodies produced at state factories: the bodies of crime suspects are literally castrated as a form of punishment, which takes place even if the accusation is false or uncorroborated. This testifies that there are motives other than punishment behind this act. Firstly, these bodies are deterritorialised from their original states of being and reconstituted as working tools of the capitalist social machine. Secondly, these bodies function as the signifier of the power of the state apparatus. In this sense, the bodies are hybridised only to be socially stigmatised and to make hybridity a status to be ashamed of. The second type is a pure-bred species such as Khepri, Weaver and Garuda, which are naturally hybrid. In either form, be it naturally cross-bred or reconstructed, the subjects

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hold a bodily heterogeneity by comprising a mutual relationship with different species. The capitalist social machine, however, reduces hybridity to a transcendent normativity, aiming to immobilise its dynamic and transformative force that would open up to creative becomings. In other words, it models hybridity on the molar subject since it feeds on the rigid edges, segmentations and hierarchies created as an outcome of its Oedipalising identity politics. As such, even if each hybrid entity shares liminal zones of connectivity with those of other species by its very nature, each is segregated from one another by rigid identity markers defined and forced by the state apparatus in New Crobuzon. These identity markers are gradually internalised by each community and hence culminate in the creation of boundaries and us/them binaries. Accordingly, those trespassing beyond the boundaries and going beyond the binary structures are doomed to a cruel ostracisation within their own community. Likewise, no other community would be willing to welcome those ostracised entities. It is not only the affirmative difference and multiplicity inherent in hybrid subjects that the state apparatus in New Crobuzon strives to mould into essentialist binary structures. There are several other realms of subjectivity such as gender and sexuality that are exposed to Oedipalising forces as well. The identity politics run by the capitalist social machine defines heteronormative standards for gender and sexuality. It equates the male with power and the female with lack of it and channels the flux of desire to heterosexual normative arrangements. However, New Crobuzon, as a site of diversity and revolutionary desire, never fully yields to such molar and Oedipal arrangements. No matter how hybridity is negated, it always entails a potential to destabilise all these categories and molecularise the self. Traversing the heteronormative and discriminatory discourses into which their subjectivities are moulded, the inhabitants of New Crobuzon are capable of deconstructing the dominant identity politics. They easily activate deterritorialising forces to take revolutionary lines of flight from the standardising forms of subjectivity. Once escaping from the restrictions of these forms, their bodies move into a zone of indeterminacy where they redefine the ontological categories of the human, non-human and hybrid. In other words, they move from the defined, Oedipalised and normative subjectivity towards the new,

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creative and undefined realm of becomings. In the novel, accordingly, several moments of productive intensity are observed, where the characters experience a series of lines of flights and becomings. The following section will illustrate this.

Queering Desire and Nomadising Science In Perdido Street Station, Isaac’s position indicates several lines of flight from the molar standards of identity. From the early pages of the novel, Isaac appears as the main resistant dissenter in this dystopian city. His revolutionary activity can be observed under two positions: Isaac as a scientist and Isaac as a lover. He, as frequently stated in the novel, is “the scientist-outcast” (Miéville 2001, p. 12). Science in New Crobuzon cannot escape the capture of the state apparatus, and becomes one of the capitalist tools. Most scientists, including Vermishank, the head of the department at the university where Isaac once held a post, work not for the good of society but for the interests of the capitalist social machine. Unlike his colleagues, Isaac rejects conforming to majoritarian science. He willingly walks away from the university to pursue his independent studies, which remarkably diverge from mainstream scientific trends and make it harder for him to obtain funding for his experiments and to legitimise his findings. Taking revolutionary lines of flight from the conventional values of science, Isaac defines his own work as rhizomatic and hybrid, likening it to Perdido Street Station. As an alternative to majoritarian science, which is static, not open to interdisciplinary collaboration, and is inclined towards linear and teleological thinking, Isaac comes up with a new form of science, which is innovative, transgressive and interdisciplinary. In Deleuzian terms, Isaac’s research illustrates a “nomad science” that “develops eccentrically, one that is very different from the royal or imperial sciences” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.  362). As Deleuze and Guattari elaborate, “this nomad science is continually ‘barred,’ inhibited, or banned by the demands and conditions of State science” (1987, p. 362). In New Crobuzon, similarly, science is subject to stratification and molar organisation in accordance with the interests of the capitalist

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social machine just as scientists are exposed to the Oedipalisation of the state apparatus. Isaac, however, boldly resists being a scientist defined, projected and managed in majoritarian terms. He reaches the outer limit of the capitalist social machine. He carries out his research by feeding upon majoritarian science, deterritorialising it from within. He secretly uses and abuses the sources of the university, remains in contact with those in the field and keeps sending his findings to the journals for publication so as to have his subversive studies recognised and legitimised. He is both inside and outside the system. Although he is educated according to the standards of majoritarian science and owes much of his knowledge to such a heritage, he manages to keep himself away from its appropriation and remains within the system as an outsider who constantly seeks to destroy it from within. In this sense, his nomad science moves beyond being a transgressive mode and is indeed a war machine against the capitalist social machine. This is best portrayed by the collective combat against the slake-moths. The strategy of this combat is modelled on his crisis theory. As Robert Wood puts it, Isaac’s theory is “intimately linked with a transformation of society through pushing its contradictions to the point of crisis” (2018, p. 85), a transformation from a state of submission to resistance, and from negative discriminations to affirmative multiplicity. Isaac achieves this transformation by transforming himself in the first place. It is not only Isaac’s nomad science but his sexual preferences that position him as a threshold figure. Transversal activity seen in his scientific endeavour reappears as a political attitude in his intimate relationship with Lin. In New Crobuzon, the capitalist social machine represses collective and individual desire by means of its state apparatus. It congeals its fluidity and mobility into heteronormative form. This reductionist organisation could be seen as the Oedipalisation of desire, which is so internalised in each community that they strictly forbid their people from expressing and actualising any diverse form of desire beyond normativising limits. Those transversing these limits are condemned as outcasts and pushed either to the margins or to the outside of society. The position of Isaac, both as a human and a scientist, similarly restricts him to the societal limits of desire. Yet he transgresses these limits by having a cross-affair with a Khepri female, Lin. In doing so, he rescues desire from

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its Oedipal yoke and reintroduces it into a multiplicity which is its real essence. Isaac experiences this transgressive sexual act as a means of resistance to the dominant power structure. Just as  he cannot stick to the conventions of majoritarian science as a scientist-outcast who, he cannot stick to the conventions of normative majority in his sexual preference, either, having a cross-affair with a Kephri. This is depicted in the novel as follows: “She undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster. I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she. […] What did he care for convention? He would sleep with whomever and whatever he liked, surely!” (Miéville 2001, p.  10–12). Queering desire with a cross-affair is obviously a schizophrenic line of flight that brings about an alternative way of feeling and perceiving. Isaac’s describing himself as pervert, in this regard, is quite revealing because the pervert, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, is the one that “resisted oedipalisation […] since he has invented for himself other territorialities” (1983, p. 67). The pervert or queering promises a state of becoming as it designates a move from the molar and majoritarian subject position towards the molecular and minoritarian one. Isaac’s becoming-queer indeed triggers a movement that brings him into a transformational multiplicity. He recognises himself as multiple by overcoming himself and the supposed difference between himself and the other. He enters into becoming-other-than-himself and feels one with other entities. This enables him to reach a third space where he temporarily experiences “a psychic sluice” (Miéville 2001, p. 184). Several mindsets or personalities begin to invade his consciousness simultaneously. He feels like rolling into the minds and dreams of other people ranging from “a six-year-old girl” or “a pubescent boy” to a “cactacae mind” (Miéville 2001, p. 185). He becomes a meeting point, a shared consciousness of almost all the races in New Crobuzon—even if temporarily. Isaac’s becoming occurs through his inhering into a non-linear dynamics of temporality. As thoroughly discussed in the previous chapter, an asubjectivity in the form of becoming hardly engages with a linear sense of time since it would be contradictory to its very nature. As such, Isaac’s experience of the state of becoming coincides with the destruction of his perception of linear temporality. He is bombarded with a million scintillas of time, and begins to perceive time not as a linear succession but as a simultaneous embodiment of multiple moments, of zones of temporality.

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Just like his subjectivity that is no longer one but multiple through his psychic unification with other entities, his perception of time is no longer in a chronological sequence but in coexistence with several other time zones and moments of life. Undoubtedly, such a perception of time and asubjectivity moves Isaac into a zone of indeterminacy. He pursues a micropolitics of desire. Nonetheless, it would be too strong an argument to say that he fully performs his becoming in the long term. This is because he is too concerned about his status quo within the majoritarian discourse and hence he cannot entirely enjoy the deterritorialised intensities and affects unleashed by his transgressive acts. Everything reminds Isaac of the fact that he is living a secret. Becoming-queer is perceived as shameful and guilty in such a society. As stated in the novel, it is a “guilty desire” (Miéville 2001, p. 10). But it is significant to recognise that being a social-outcast scares Isaac more than being a scientist-outcast. This is tantamount to saying that his delirium oscillates between two poles, the schizophrenic pole that pushes him into the flows of diverse desire and the paranoiac pole that pulls him back to a neurotic impasse where he gets worried about his public grace. Nevertheless, much as his transversal sexual activity cannot reach the point of pure becoming due to this constant oscillation, it is certain that it is still an attempt to overcome the capitalist barriers and still calls for schizophrenic investments.

 rphaning Art and Unconsciousness Against O the Oedipal Yoke As Deleuze and Guattari underline in Anti-Oedipus, “[v]ery few accomplish […] the breakthrough of this schizophrenic wall or limit: ‘quite ordinary people,’ nevertheless. But the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified” (1983, p. 138). Unlike Isaac, who comes that close to the schizophrenic limit yet feels horrified by the idea of transgression itself, Lin actualises such a breakthrough with her transgressive act and fully embraces its affects and percepts. The act of transgression followed by a schizophrenic breakthrough has been immanent in Lin’s life from

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the early days of her childhood. She is a female Khepri with a beetle head and a human body, already incorporating a multiplicity within herself. Yet this multiplicity is constantly exposed to Oedipalising forces in her community. Lin has been confronted with Oedipal repression since the age of six when her hybrid body first began to form. Her position as a female Khepri makes her subjected to double repression: the first is the imposition that the Khepri is the inferior race while the second is that female Khepris have a much more inferior position in the social hierarchy since they are believed to have no consciousness and sentience at all due to their femininity: “khepri women were cursed. Some vile flaw on the part of the first woman had consigned her daughters to lives encumbered with ridiculous, slow, floundering bipedal bodies and minds that teemed with the useless byways and intricacies of consciousness. Woman had lost the insectile purity of God and male” (Miéville 2001, p. 215). Oedipal repression in the Khepri community is organised around racial and gender binaries, and is strongly legitimised on religious law. It is in “a double bind” between familial authority and social authority. This explains why Lin finds herself circumscribed by her family that forces her to accept her inferiority and monstrosity as a female Khepri in the face of the he God, the male members of her community and the other supposedly superior races. Lin and her sisters are “taught to worship Him with a terrified fervour, and to despise their self-awareness and their soft, chitinless bodies” (Miéville 2001, p.  215–216). They are forced to live in a world of self-contempt, guilt and shame with submission to the Oedipal law, which is so internalised even by female Khepris that there is no longer a need for “male” figures to represent and implement it. In Lin’s family, it is her mother that becomes an Oedipal figure. It often takes great courage and time for Khepri people to escape the Oedipal hold since each community in New Crobuzon is run by similar, if not the same, forms of Oedipalisation. As such, it takes Lin until she is 15 to challenge all the Oedipal familial and social impositions. She denounces her Oedipal mother as a heretic, and flees the self-loathing Khepri life. She willingly orphans herself from her familial and racial roots. She is now an orphan in the sense that she not only rejects the name of her Oedipal mother but also rejects the supposition that Khepri woman are devoid of sentience. On the contrary, she unleashes her

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unconscious from any capture to retrieve its intensities back. This orphan status is similarly made into a metaphor in her baptising herself with a new name. With her baptising, she moves from her previous rigidified subject position into an asubjective schizo identity, which paves the way for her to destroy all the other transcendent beliefs and representations and to pursue a life beyond all law. Once Lin crosses the Oedipal frontiers of identity and rescues desire from its capture, the schizophrenic process of deterritorialisation she activates continues to disrupt other spheres like sexuality and art. The representation of sexuality in the Khepri community slightly differs from its representation in the human society of New Crobuzon. It is not that sexual desire does not undergo a process of Oedipalisation in the Khepri community. It actually does, which results in the creation of heteronormative standards for sexuality. But different from human society, desire is, in its most strict sense, kept from female Khepris. Female members of the Khepri society are taught to see their bodies as a source of contempt and abjection, and barred from pleasure. In this sense, queering desire with a cross-affair is, for Lin, a double-transgression. Firstly, she goes beyond the Oedipal representation of female sexuality as something to be avoided and ashamed of. She achieves this by discovering the nature and operation of her desiring-machines. She begins to see her body as the focal point of pleasure where she unleashes the free flows of desire. The repressed and abject female body is turned into an affective body after her decontextualising and reappropriation of it. In this sense, she transgresses the defined limits of sexuality that forbid women from pleasure, which she describes as the most difficult transition: “Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her” (Miéville 2001, p. 217). Secondly, she traverses the heteronormative standards that restrict subjects from having affairs with a same-sex or a different-racial entity. This transgressive act, however, does not terrify Lin as much as it does Isaac. This is primarily because Lin, as the schizo subject, does not see public grace or social exclusion as a threat to her ontological security. On the contrary, she excludes herself not only from the Khepri community but also from human society since she does not seek to have an ontologically secure position in any society

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organised around the Oedipal laws. Instead, she wants to carve out a conceptual space for herself where she can overcome ontological barriers and enjoy the idea of transgression. Apart from being a subversive female Khepri, Lin is an eccentric artist who continues her transgressive activity in terms of her artistic endeavours. Her artistry subverts traditional Khepri art and invents a completely new and creative alternative as a part of her “rebellion” (Miéville 2001, p.  39). Abandoning the traditional techniques and materials, she performs her art with Khepri spit. Her innovative artistry is way more than a simple subversion of the conventions. It in effect functions as a minor art, that is, as an artistic form of resistance. Her minor art becomes her only means of expression which helps her to carve out a presence for herself. The conceptual space where Lin creates to perform her art often converges with the conceptual space where she performs her transgressive acts in her social and sexual life. Just as her queering becomes “an avant-­ garde transgression, an art-happening” (Miéville 2001, p. 12), her artistic performance becomes a queering of traditions. In this regard, creative affects born out of queering and subversive artistry often slip into each other and make Lin pass into a becoming. Lin experiences a becoming not in the sense that she transforms from one position to another, but in the sense that she enters a zone of indeterminacy where she no longer complies with Oedipalised norms of identity imposed on her but reaches the affects and sensations that come out of being one with life. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “[t]he artist is a seer, a becomer” (1994b, p. 171). Lin is such an artist who is fascinated with the affirmative power of life, and she strives to free it from its capture with her artistic, sexual and social endeavours. As Motley describes her, she is “the bastard-zone” (Miéville 2001, p. 115), the orphan unconscious, the schizo. Her hybrid body is orphaned from its Oedipal roots and passes from a site of negative differences into an affirmative multiplicity. Her body is, on the one hand, a sign of traversal sexual activity since she actualises the virtual potential of her hybrid body by discovering her erogenous parts. It is, on the other hand, a sign of her artistry since her artistic creation entirely depends upon her Khepri spit that is another product of her hybrid nature. Then it is her body of affects that she uses as a source to draw schizophrenic lines of flight from the dystopian realities of New Crobuzon and

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re-­establish her lost connection with life’s creative energy. In this sense, there is an inevitable relationship between her art, her body and her lines of flight, which definitely calls for a revolutionary becoming, an affirmative hybridity and a passing into one another not only within herself but also within society.

“ To Think Aesthetically” as a Way of Affirming the Hybrid Miéville illustrates best the close affinity between art, the social body and new possibilities of life with the character of Motley. Motley is originally a Remade whose body has been exposed to the remaking process several times and stripped of its organs as a punishment. After several remakings, his body literally becomes unrecognisable as a heterogeneous collection of many different body parts with scraps of skin, feathers and fur, eyes rolled from their niches, and mouths glistened, and wings broken and fluttered. Apparently, his body is reconstructed to have an abject and monstrous appearance. The fragmentariness and diversity of his remade body is represented as something to be ashamed of and feel contempt for. Quite contrary to the agenda of the state apparatus, however, Motley, whose name suggests an affirmation of diversity, uses his fragmented and diverse body as a source of power. His body, in a sense, becomes a possible answer to the question “how do you make yourself a body without organs?” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 149). In other words, Motley’s body becomes a concretisation of body without organs, in the novel. To clarify this, one can begin by drawing an analogy between the remaking process and the working of late capitalism. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus, “[c]apitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialised field” (1983, p.  33). In a similar vein, the capitalist social machine in New Crobuzon puts the body into a constant process of deterritorialisation followed by reterritorialisation: the body is first deterritorialised from its previous organisms by being torn apart from its

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organs and made into a “body without organs” of capitalism. The body without organs is a state of full intensities, potentialities and decoded flows. It is the deterritorialised socius, which makes it simultaneously open to both smoothing and striating forces. The capitalist social machine pursues its circulation by consummating this open potentiality and the decoded flows by recoding, regulating and rechannelling them. As such, the Remade as the body without organs of capitalism is turned into the abject and monstrous body that is both used to threaten all the other resistant subjects and used to have it work in line with the needs of the state apparatus. It becomes a “cancerous” body without organs whose creative energy is nullified, whose flows of desire are repressed, and whose diversity is condemned to exclusion and discrimination. No matter how the capitalist social machine locates the body without organs into a stratum, it is always necessarily the locus of pure intensity. Motley is perfectly aware of the potential of his body without organs as an epitome of potentiality and fabricates it for himself without it being cancerous. He recognises his body not as an “error or absence or mutancy” but as an “image and essence” and as a “totality” (Miéville 2001, p. 115). Just as Lin, who sees her love life as an art-happening, Motley sees his body as an artistic creation, a hybrid zone to be cherished and a miracle of transition. Rather than submitting to the marginalised stratum to which his remade body is destined, he denounces it and draws an alternative line of flight for himself by affirming the hybridity he represents. In this regard, he calls himself “the bastard-zone”, which could be considered as the bastard in a Deleuzian sense that defies the majoritarian imposition of subjectivity. Motley as the bastard-zone no longer works for the interest of the capitalist social machine; on the contrary, he becomes a rival to it. Instead of succumbing to the social and economic position that the state apparatus determines for all the Remades, Motley begins to pursue an illegal business that the government cannot control but has to tolerate because of their mutual interests. Even if his motives as a criminal boss often do not comply with the motives of other transgressive subjects like Isaac and Lin, he still single-handedly constitutes one of the most powerful images of transgression and resistance, compelling us to see possible alternatives to the capitalist social machine. This means that his hybridity, which first appears as a product of the capitalist act of deterritorialisation and

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reterritorialisation, now becomes a reversal of this process, working for itself rather than for the interests of the city-government. Among all the alternative subjectivities in New Crobuzon, the most radical one is the figure of the Weaver. Weavers are gigantic spider-like entities that are described as monstrous and grotesque creatures due to their hybrid bodies with enormous bulks, heads as huge as a man’s chest, multiple eyes, wet gullets and so on. Their grotesque hybrid appearance makes them intimidating figures both for those in power and for the rest of society. Yet it is not only their bulky bodies but also their critical stance that make them a real threat for the state apparatus. They are the opposite of Oedipal subjectivity moulded in the capitalist social machine primarily because they have no particular division of conscious and unconscious. They have access to unmediated thinking; that is, they are able to think without any filter and any repressed material. This state of having nothing to suppress resonates with an orphan unconscious where the process of Oedipalisation can no longer be an issue. As such, they have direct access to the creative energy of life which they call “worldweave”. The Weaver describes his worldweaving as follows: WITHOUT YOU ASK THE WEAVE IS TIGHT RUCKED COLOURS BLEED TEXTURES WEARING THREADS FRAY WHILE I KEEN FUNERAL SONGS FOR SOFT POINTS WHERE WEBSHAPES FLOW I WISH I WILL I CAN COILS OF MONSTERS SHADE SLATESCAPES WINGS MOIL SUCK WORLDWEAVE COLOURLESS DRAB IT IS NOT TO BE I READ RESONANCE PRANCE FROM POINT TO POINT ON THE WEB TO EAT SPLENDOUR REAR AND LICK CLEAN RED KNIFENAILS I WILL SNIP FABRICS AND RETIE THEM I AM I AM A SUBTLE USER OF COLOUR I WILL BLEACH YOUR SKIES WITH YOU I WILL SWEEP THEM CLEAN AND KNOT THEM TIGHT. (Miéville 2001, p. 335–336)

The Weaver’s description of the worldweaving with the acts of cleaning and knotting strengthens the idea that worldweave suggests an immanence of life. As Deleuze argues, life is immanent in its very nature, full of pure multiplicities and affirmative energies. Since this affirmative

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power of life poses a threat to the maintenance of the capitalist social machine, life is perpetually captured and imprisoned into molar organisations. The Weaver’s worldweaving could then be considered as an attempt to clean all these molar organisations blocking the flows of life and to open it to a new web of relations. The Weaver is, in this sense, a “seer” and a “becoming” of the affirmative power of life. For the Weaver, the creative force, that is the woven patterns of life, could be unleashed only through art: “For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically” (Miéville 2001, p. 335). And to act is to create the new. The Weaver, thus, sees life aesthetically and subsists on the appreciation of life’s creative power. Seeing the slake-moths, the representatives of capitalism, as the biggest threat to this affirmative energy of life, he decides to help Isaac in his fight against the capitalist system. In this collective fight, ironically, the Weaver’s art becomes the most powerful element in defeating the slake-moths, which in a sense testifies to the power of the artist in becoming revolutionary, not only in an individual aspect but also in its socio-­ political aspects.

Schizophrenising Language These subjects, in the form of various becomings like the Weaver, in the novel reach the limit of late capitalism. This limit is the exterior edge of New Crobuzon society where schizophrenia paralyses the working mechanism of the capitalist social machine via its divergences. This is to say that the vicious circle of capitalist deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation falls back into a state of reversal. It no longer spins the wheel of the capital but opens out onto alternatives that grow from its very middle, namely, from the very conditions of its own operation. In Miéville’s fiction, however, it is not only the alternative subjectivities and smooth spaces that grow from the middle of the capitalist social machine. Language, just like space and subjectivity, cannot be considered separate from the points of capture and the points of escape in the late capitalist world. In its majoritarian form, it can easily function as a means of Oedipal encapsulation and molar segregation. It becomes a language through which problematic structures, formed on the realms of space,

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and subjectivity are firmed. In its minoritarian form, however, it can be turned into an efficient weapon to demolish these firm structures. Yet these differences should not suggest that the majoritarian and minoritarian are two different languages. They are actually two different uses of language. Understanding them as two different languages would be misleading in tracing the lines of flight occurring within language in New Crobuzon. It is true that there are different languages in New Crobuzon that could be regarded as the language of the majority, which would in this case be the human language, and the language of the minorities, which would then be the language of other communities like the Khepri, Garuda and Vadyonoi. Yet this does not mean that the languages of the minorities would definitely be minoritarian because being a part of a majority or minority has never been a distinctive feature of being majoritarian or minoritarian. What makes something majoritarian or minoritarian is more of a potentiality to extricate the molecular from its molar organisations, the schizo from its paranoiac investments. In this regard, even if these languages belong to the communities that could be seen as the minority in New Crobuzon, they prove to be majoritarian in their tendencies. For instance, the Khepri language, despite its being a language of the minority, is an utterly majoritarian language in the sense that it functions as a capturing machine of patriarchy in Khepri society. Thus, once one is immersed into Khepri language, one is simultaneously captured by the molar structures underneath. This is best recognised by Lin who finds the stigmatising power of the Khepri language rather intimidating and hence fears using it. In New Crobuzon, language, regardless of the community it belongs to, often appears in its majoritarian form with its perfected grammaticality, punctuation, semantics and signification. But some minoritarian uses also appear as an unconscious political act of resistance in this dystopian city. In Perdido Street Station, Miéville pushes language to its extreme limits where it begins to stutter, murmur and even stammer in a Deleuzian sense. The stuttering of language could be considered to be its turning inside out. Once language is reverted and reaches its outside, it simultaneously reaches its underlying operations and puts them into play. This is achieved in the novel with a strong sense of musicality, poetics, ungrammaticality and lack of punctuation embraced in the language of Yagharek

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and the Weaver. To begin with the former, Yagharek is a crippled Garuda and an irreversible outsider in both his community and in the human community. He adopts a poetic language that is eminently musical, emotional and abstract. His speech is often incomprehensible because he carries language to heart-touching musical tones. He often sounds like the voice of a cry. In the words of those listening to him, he speaks like a poet, modelling the language of the epics and histories. His speech at times tends to be an outpouring of sentences that are so overly poignant as to put a halt to the operation of the majoritarian language domineering the lives of New Crobuzon people. It is like poetic leaks from the flow of desire congealed in prose. These leaks are most felt when one takes into account particularly how and when Miéville implants Yagharek’s speeches in the complexity of his novel and to what they contribute. All of his speeches are italicised and woven in-between prosaic parts, which serves two ends in the novel. Firstly, this systematic oscillation between the prose of majoritarian language and Yagharek’s prose poetry offers a gap, a divergence, a move from the hegemony of majoritarian language, undermining its power and undoing its dominance over the whole narrative. In a sense, it testifies to language’s turning inside out. Each poetic piece that interrupts the prosaic parts becomes the outside of language. Each works up to a rhythm and/or musicality where one can go beyond the pre-­ existing logic of molar thinking immersed in language. Each directly addresses the sentiments. Secondly, Yagharek’s prose poetry predominantly introduces the non-orderly consciousness into the Oedipalised consciousness inscribed in majoritarian language. In other words, it becomes the outside of an orderly consciousness in the sense that it moves the narrative lens from how the capitalist social machine works to create a submissive consciousness and a non-threatening insider to how the consciousness of an outsider, of a schizo, operates. With this two-fold effect in mind, it could be argued that Yagharek’s prose poetry engages in a minoritarian inclination, constituting a new rhythm of thinking and a linguistic stuttering that makes language move, stretch, take a flight and even dance. In Perdido Street Station, Yagharek’s speeches are not the only example of the stuttering of language through poetry. With the character of the

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Weaver, linguistic deterritorialisation reaches its extreme point in the novel. Among all the subversive uses of the majoritarian language, the Weaver’s is perhaps the most purely minoritarian one. His language embodies several linguistic anomalies that exceed the constraints of majoritarian language. First of all, his speech is given in capital letters without any punctuation and intonation, where no phrase or sentence is properly finalised, each is instantly followed by another word, phrase or sentence, and no particular conjunction or punctuation is used to distinguish them, as in: “FIVE DIGITS OF A HAND TO INTERFERE TO STRIP WORLDFABRIC FROM THE BOBBINS OF THE CITY-­ KIND FIVE AIR-TEARING INSECTS FOUR FINELY FORMED NOBLE BERINGED WITH SHIMMERING DECORATION ONE SQUAT THUMB THE RUNT THE RUINED EMPOWERING ITS IMPERIOUS SIBLING FINGERS FIVE A HAND” (Miéville 2001, p. 333). The capitalisation of his speech could be regarded as an outpouring of the Weaver’s thoughts and feelings without any filtering, and as an indication of his sonorous rebellion. He is a character that represents a schizo mind where the taken-for-granted boundaries of the conscious and the unconscious are blurred. This means that the way the Weaver thinks is the same as the way he speaks: there is no mechanism of filtering between the two. All of his speeches abandon the proper use of punctuation and intonation, and in this sense mark an unmediated stream of his consciousness. His language, therefore, reaches an asyntactic and even agrammatical dimension. His words spill out of his mouth in the form of babbling without filtering of any sort, which makes them almost incomprehensible for those adopting a proper language in its proper linguistic order. They are utterly spontaneous, repetitious, improvised and anomalous. There are even times when they come close to the voice of body or bodily sensations and sound like a cry or an echo. Such an effect is achieved mostly through grouping words or phrases that sound alike. That is why his speech is often perceived as an unbearable, inarticulate and squeaky murmur by humans, even by the most revolutionary ones like Isaac and his crew, as in: “AND I AND I WILL BE BY BY-AND-BY” (Miéville 2001, p. 336). The effect of the Weaver’s language is even more intensified through the movements and vibrations of his body that is found to be equally bulky, grotesque and squeaky by

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other characters. His language trembles and totters just as his body does. Much as the Weaver’s stuttering is perceived to be cacophonous and grotesque by many in the novel, it is actually a minoritarian language that is carved out from within the majoritarian language. This new language not only undermines the power of the dominant language that stands for the dominant power and slows down its pace throughout the novel, but also over-reaches the boundaries of Oedipalised consciousness encoded in it. It is, therefore, the language of a schizophrenic subject living at the very limits of the capitalist social machine. This is precisely because the Weaver has a schizo mind that is already “in a continuous, incomprehensible, rolling stream of awareness”. In his schizo mind, there are no Oedipal filters, repressed layers or “no ego to control the lower functions, no animal cortex to keep [it] grounded”, “no hidden messages from [its] secret corners […], no mental clearout of accrued garbage bespeaking an orderly consciousness” (Miéville 2001, p.  30). It is a purely orphaned, nonorderly consciousness. Hence what comes out of such a consciousness is accordingly an unrepressed flow of revolutionary desire. It is this overflow of desire that intoxicates the Weaver on his own juice, stammers his language and makes him not speak but babble. Both Yagharek’s and the Weaver’s languages remind one of the way in which modernist writers such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and e e cummings use and abuse majoritarian language. Particularly in their books Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and Essays: Critical and Clinical, Deleuze and Guattari make frequent references to these modernist writers to illustrate how they stutter and minorise language. These writers intentionally deviate from the conventional standards and units of language, employing several techniques and new writing styles like the constant use of lower-case letters, unmeaning, agrammaticality, run-on lines, fragmentation and wordplays. All these divergences and inversions, for Deleuze and Guattari, presuppose pure intensities at the very limit of language. In other words, although the stuttering of language by these writers might seem to be a kind of defect created in language at first glance, it is, on the contrary, a significant way of expressing their resistance to majoritarian language. The same goes for Yagharek and the Weaver in the novel. Yagharek’s and the Weaver’s languages are systematic deviations from the standards of the majoritarian language in New

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Crobuzon. Through these characters, the majoritarian language that is structured upon an arborescent and singularistic thinking system via its grammar, syntax and other internal organisation is introduced into a new multiplicity. It becomes hybrid, a playful mixture, an experiment, just like the space of New Crobuzon and the subjectivity of its inhabitants. Yet it is not these linguistic deterritorialisations that single-handedly reinstate language to its multiple and polyphonous nature. The use of free indirect discourse also contributes to the creation of a linguistic polyphony in the novel. In one instance, Isaac’s insight into his subversive relationship with Lin is presented in free indirect discourse: “What did he care for convention? He would sleep with whomever and whatever he liked, surely!” (Miéville 2001, p. 12). Using an impersonal voice instead of Isaac’s own voice here echoes a collective voice of the entire community that is equally displeased with the restrictive and prohibitory conventions. It is indeed the voice of a people-to-come in the dystopian city of New Crobuzon. In another instance, likewise, the questions concerning Yagharek’s crime and punishment are posed in free indirect discourse, where the voice of Yagharek mingles with the voice of his victim, the voice of Isaac and the voice of some unknown narrator: “The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then […] what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child? The choice to look at Yagharek with respect?” (Miéville 2001, p. 693–694). The transitions between Yagharek’s voice and other voices are so smooth that it is hard to distinguish who exactly poses these questions. This co-mingling of voices becomes even more important when Yagharek’s crime and punishment are taken into consideration. Yagharek commits the crime of stealing the choice of a female of his own species, and, as a punishment for his choice-theft, he is dispossessed of his wings and of his name and expelled from his own community. Driven into exile, he has never been given the chance to be reconcile with himself, with his victim or with his community. The use of free indirect discourse, at this point, helps to pose these critical questions that should have been asked long before, shedding light upon Yagharek’s inner feelings about his crime, Isaac’s insights into Yagharek’s position as an offender, his victim’s feelings and experiences, and finally the collective common sense. In doing so,

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free indirect discourse displaces the dominant discourse that seems to be exclusivist and unvoicing, and becomes inclusive of even the most marginalised, victimised and ostracised. It allows for voicing different subjective experiences simultaneously without excluding or privileging one over the other since it is composed of enunciations that are interested not in the subjects of utterance but in the utterances themselves. A considerable part of the novel consists of such enunciations that are basically dependent upon other enunciations that are a mixture of narration and interior monologue. The use of free indirect discourse in the novel is quite telling. The more language grows from its very middle with linguistic undoings, newly created dialects or minoritarian languages, the more open it becomes to free indirect discourse, as in Perdido Street Station. This is primarily because free indirect discourse, as Deleuze puts it, “testifies to a system which is always heterogeneous, far from equilibrium. [It] is not amenable to linguistic categories, because these are only concerned with homogeneous or homogenised systems” (1997, p. 73). If language is something that is never entirely complete, fixed and homogeneous, the nature of language is then free indirect discourse since it never straightforwardly gives insight into the mind and perception of the subject but at the same time it is never entirely detached from the character, either. This means that it is always being more than one, namely, being an assemblage. As such, Miéville’s novel is all about being an assemblage, being more of a multiplicity in terms of space, subjectivity and language. That is why the use of free indirect discourse becomes a very powerful stylistic tool, and helps to convey the major arguments going on throughout the novel. Miéville’s novel, to conclude, suggests a political agenda through the notion of transgression in favour of multiplicity. The notion of transgression functions as a multifaceted feature that is reflected on the level of the novel’s style, structure and organisation of space, subjectivity and language. The novel transgresses all the generic, stylistic, spatial, subjective and even linguistic boundaries, and reaches a point of multiplicity. This point is often metaphorised in the novel as a “hybrid zone”, which is depicted in two different ways. In its first treatment, it appears as a bundle of negative differences, molar organisations and fascistic polarisations. In its second treatment, however, it appears as an affirmative multiplicity

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that comes along with a transformative power. What is most remarkable about the portrayal of these two treatments is that they actually shed light upon how the axiomatic of late capitalism operates and how its axiomatic operations can be interrupted. In this sense, Miéville might be suggesting that capitalism itself is a hybrid zone, which it is in the sense that it works upon its diversity by continually reducing it to a system of differences. It is also simultaneously due to this diversity that it is highly prone to transgression and destruction from within and can easily be turned into a site of resistance and positive transformation. From this standpoint, Miéville’s novel takes a revolutionary path not only in disclosing the here-and-now dystopia of the contemporary world but also in discovering the ways to draw lines of flight from this dystopia.

References Barreca, Regina. “Metaphor-into-narrative: Being Very Careful with Words,” Women’s Studies 15 (1988): 243–256. Bould, Mark. “Mind the Gap: The Impertinent Predicates (and Subjects) of King Rat and Looking for Jake and Other Stories.” In Extrapolation. Edited by Javier A. Martínez, Andrew M. Butler, Michael Levy, Sherryl Vint, Lisa Yaszek and Patricia Melzer. 307–326. Texas: Morgan Printing, 2009. Gilles, Deleuze. “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October 59 (1992): 3–7. _____. Difference and Repetition (1968). Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994a. _____. Cinema 1: Movement-Image (1986). Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. _____. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. _____. What Is Philosophy? (1991). Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia UP, 1994b. Freedman, Carl. “Speculative fiction and international law: The Marxism of China Miéville.” Socialism and Democracy 20.3 (2010): 25–39.

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Kendrick, Christopher. “Monster Realism and Uneven Development in China Miéville’s The Scar.” In Extrapolation. Edited by Javier A. Martínez, Andrew M.  Butler, Michael Levy, Sherryl Vint, Lisa Yaszek and Patricia Melzer. 258–276. Texas: Morgan Printing, 2009. Miéville, China. “Fantasy and revolution: an interview with China Miéville.” Interview by John Newsinger. International Socialism Journal 2.88(2000). Web: http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj88/newsinger.htm _____. Perdido Street Station (2000). New  York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 2001. _____. “China Miéville: Messing With Fantasy.” Interview by Charles N. Brown. Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. 48.3 (2002): 4–76. _____. “The Road to Perdido: An Interview with China Miéville.” Interview by Richard Marshall. 3:AM Magazine, 2003. Web: http://www.3ammagazine. com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html _____. “China Miéville and Monsters: ‘Unsatisfy me, frustrate me, I beg you.’.” Interview by Jeff VanderMeer. Weird Fiction Review, 20 March 2012. Web: http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/china-mieville-and-monsters-unsatisfyme-frustrate-me-i-beg-you/ _____. “The Limits of Utopia.” Eighth Annual Nelson Institute Earth Day Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 20 April 2014, Keynote Address. Web. _____. “A Strategy for Ruination: An Interview with China Miéville.” Interview by Boston Review. Global Dystopia, 8 January 2018. Web: http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture-china-mieville-strategy-ruination Newell, Jonathan. “Abject Cyborgs: Discursive Boundaries and the Remade in China Miéville’s Iron Council.” Science Fiction Studies 40.3 (2013): 496–509. Noys, Benjamin and Timothy S. Morphy. “Introduction: Old and New Weird.” Genre, 49.2 (2016): 117–134. Rayment, Andrew. Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity: Pratchett, Pullman, Miéville and Stories of the Eye. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2014. Wood, Robert. “‘Extravagant Secular Swarming’: Space and Subjectivity in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.1 (2018): 75–89.

7 The Roads to Immanent Dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

From Ustopia to Immanent Dystopia Margaret Atwood’s career as a writer began as early as the 1960s with the publication of her poetry collection, Double Perspective (1961), which was followed by her first novel The Edible Woman (1969). Her writing skill has its origins in her childhood interest in creating imaginary worlds. Her motive for the invention of alternative worlds from an early age onward may be said to reside in her conception of power and power relations. For Atwood, “[p]ower is our environment. We live surrounded by it: it pervades everything we are and do, invisible and soundless, like air” (1973, p. 7). She has an understanding of power which penetrates not merely the political sphere but also the personal sphere. Her focal point hinges primarily upon a collective desire for a state of living that is stripped of taken-for-granted political binaries and their practices; that is, it hinges upon a desire for betterment. Her disappointment with the present society and her increasing desire for a better way of living necessarily position her as a political writer who creates narratives of resistance and subversion. Her works very often investigate existing power structures and social organisations, and offer alternatives that go beyond the © The Author(s) 2020 R. Çokay Nebioğlu, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_7

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dualities and hierarchies of for example mind/body, inner/outer and man/woman. This not only makes her an inventor of imaginary worlds and an innovator of traditional forms, plots and characters, but also constitutes a long and astonishing case for theorising the concept of dystopia. As a subversive creator of new genres, forms and plot, Atwood’s conception of dystopia remarkably departs from those critics who approach dystopia and utopia as opposite poles. In her essay titled “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Utopia”, she outlines the relationship between dystopia and utopia as a “yin and yang pattern” and argues that “within each utopia, [there is] a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia” (Atwood 2014c, p. 85). Drawing upon such an understanding that is discontented with the traditional definition of dystopia as anti-utopia or negative utopia, Atwood comes up with an alternative coinage of her own: “ustopia” (2014c, p. 75). “Ustopia” collapses the supposed boundaries between dystopia and utopia, which aligns with one of the major arguments of this book, which is that dystopia and utopia are close genres that simultaneously embody each other’s horizons and meet on a shared ground. To elaborate upon her neologism and point out its distinguishing features from science fiction as a genre and as a concept, Atwood draws a cartography of dystopia. She supposes that ustopia is a state of mind that can be depicted by a landscape. Her ustopias are not entirely imaginary places in the distant future but real and locatable places in the present. The mapping of ustopia as an unlocated yet somehow locatable landscape offers a new approach to space and temporality in the concept of dystopia. This new understanding of space and temporality is in effect what distinguishes dystopia from science fiction. According to Atwood, writing about what is to come is often assumed to be a concern of dystopia; it is nevertheless the interest of science fiction. Science fiction novels, as she puts it, “can set themselves in parallel imagined realities, or long ago, and/or on planets far away. But all these locations have something in common: they don’t exist” (Atwood 2014b, p. 61). That is to say, science fiction as a genre creates non-existing worlds mostly located in the future. They are non-existent because they are the portraits of what could possibly happen rather than what is already happening. Atwood consciously distances herself and her work from science fiction as a category. She thinks that the future is unattainable but the

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present can provide us with traces of the future. What awaits exploration for the creation of cautionary tales is, for her, not the future but the present itself. She, thus, proposes a new perception of temporality which relies upon the idea that the future is unpredictable and unattainable, and it is only the present that is inclusive of the past and the future simultaneously. Drawing upon such a perception that deviates from linear perception, Atwood sees her cautionary tales as ustopia, or speculative dystopian fiction, which does not portray things that could possibly happen but things that might have already happened or keep happening. Atwood’s concept of ustopia coincides with the concept of immanent dystopia in many aspects. Ustopia no longer posits a predetermined or foreseen model of the future but re-presents the present as the blueprint of an unpredictable future. This necessarily eliminates the problematic tendency towards closure that often implies the imposition of a single future ideal. Such an imposition would only be the reversal of pre-­existing binaries, that is a matter of either/or choice. Atwood, however, is never contented with either/or choices. She instead opts for eliminating all hierarchical binaries. Thus, the goal of writing fiction is, for her, “[t]o express the unexpressed life of the masses. […] To show the bastards. […] To say a new world. To make a new thing. […] To subvert the establishment. […] To experiment with new forms of perception” (Atwood 2002, p. xx–xxi). What is mutual in Atwood’s writing and in immanent dystopia is to create the new, one that promises a revolution, not in the sense that it is only “a revolving, a turn of the wheel of fortune, by which those who were at the bottom mount to the top and assume the choice positions, crushing the former-holders beneath them” (Atwood 2014d, p. 143), but in the sense that it is the opening of innumerable ways of struggling against the present until reaching out to pure multiplicity. In this regard, the analogy Atwood draws between ustopia and landscape matches with the dysaxiomatic nature of any territory under late capitalism: an ustopian landscape that stands both for a real space or state of living that is located in the present and for a state of mind that acknowledges the possibility of such a revolution that seeks pure multiplicity. Atwood develops the concept of ustopia in her 2011 article “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia”. The ustopian aspects that Atwood conceptualises in this article are most felt in her MaddAddam trilogy

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(2003–2013), which testifies to the connections made between immanent dystopia and ustopia. In an obviously optimistic yet humorous manner, she also addresses the very question of whether there is a way out from the dystopia of the present. Oryx and Crake, the first novel of the trilogy published in 2003, tells the story of an epidemic that annihilated the entire human race somewhere on the east coast of the United States. The story is given in the form of flashbacks predominantly from the perspective of Jimmy, also known as Snowman, living in a tree after the apocalypse. He tells what happened to the world and to the entire human race. It all begins in the corporate compounds where Jimmy lives with his scientist parents. These compounds are separated and highly protected from the rest of society. Jimmy’s position as an insider gives us an insight into what happens inside these compounds. Told in Jimmy’s naive child-­ like recollections, these are the places where the multinational corporations conduct their radical genetic and pharmaceutical practices at a devastating cost to nature, human beings and all other species. The central conflict of the novel revolves around how these malpractices are interrupted by a group of revolutionaries led by Glenn, also known as Crake, who is a childhood friend of Jimmy. They meet at an early age and become best friends despite their stark differences in character, intellect and worldview. Whereas Jimmy is an idle loner who chooses a mediocre profession unlike his scientist parents, Glenn is an intelligent boy who later becomes a scientist and starts to work for a pharmaceutical corporation. As the story unfolds, it is revealed that Crake is highly aware of corporate terrorism and works for these corporations only to destroy them from within. He proposes a revolutionary project, the Paradice Project, that would unite all those against the corporations, that is, the MaddAddamites, to take collective action. This project not only aims at interrupting corporate malpractices but also aims at creating a new bioengineered race that is purged of all human defects such as racism, gender bias, religious discrimination and greed for power. The project is implemented as planned at the end of the novel. But it is left vague whether it has been a success or yet another disaster because it culminates in the annihilation of the entire human race. The second novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), which came six years later, delves into the story of Oryx and Crake from a different perspective.

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These two novels are “parallel narratives” (Jameson 2009, p.  7) in the sense that the former portrays the post/pre-catastrophe from the perspective of a male protagonist, Jimmy, while the latter explores the same world through the lenses of two female protagonists, Toby and Ren. Whilst Oryx and Crake gives an insight into the corrupt practices of multinational corporations from the perspective of an insider, Jimmy, who lives in the privileged compounds, The Year of the Flood gives an insight into the effects of these practices on the lives of ordinary people living outside the compounds from the perspective of those people. This makes it easier for us to understand why and how people from completely different walks of life unite and join the Paradice Project to resist and revolt. Nevertheless, these two story lines constitute an organic and comprehensible unity only after the publication of the third novel of the trilogy, MaddAddam (2013), which not only crystallises the entire series of events by bridging the gaps but also elaborates the question of what really happens in the post-apocalyptic world and how the world would be like with the Crakers, the new bioengineered race. These three narratives in the MaddAddam trilogy appear not as prequels or sequels, which are often linked to the model of a tree, in their fullest sense. Rather they appear as three different sections of the same novel that have been rhizomatically scattered. Accordingly, they do not follow a chronological and linear narrative but begin in medias res and proceed in flashbacks. Therefore, the true nature and motives of the events unfold only after reading all of the narratives at once. Apart from their rhizomatic nature, these three narratives offer rich materials in style, story and structure to keep critics busy pondering where to locate and how to categorise this trilogy. Despite various disagreements on its genre, critics too often agree that the trilogy does not follow a traditional dystopian novel structure. Rather than depicting a foreseen future society, the trilogy describes the dystopian reality of the present, that which is an utterly capitalist world where multinational corporations have taken over control of the economy, politics, science, technology, and social and individual lives. Even though the story takes place in a not-perfectly-clear future setting, the future, as Fredrick Jameson remarks, begins “to dissolve into ever more porous actuality” (2009, p. 7). The increasing focus on the present reality puts its fictionality into question. Not surprisingly,

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Atwood herself calls it “fact within fiction” (cited in Case and McDonald 2003, p. 40–41). The trilogy does not include any technologies that do not exist. It rather examines present societies that are the control of late capitalism and that align with corporatism, bio-engineering and advanced technology. It is not simply the portrayal of the present dystopian reality that makes the trilogy ustopian, to use Atwood’s term, and dystopian in a Deleuzian sense, but the glimpses of resistance observed at both individual and collective levels. The MaddAddam trilogy not only depicts the working mechanism of late capitalism but also reveals its possible breakdown when its means are used against itself. It attempts to redistribute power and reorganise power relations by creating leaks within the social structure. It explores how spatial, temporal, subjective and biological boundaries are created in the first place and how they can be transgressed. Such a notion of resistance, therefore, brings us back to the main goal of this book, which is to examine the ways in which Atwood’s comment on the already existing complicates of late capitalism and subverts the operation of its axiomatic system.

Beyond the OrganInc Walls One of the ways in which the MaddAddam trilogy manages to become a revolutionary political enterprise is through its exploration of how the forces of smoothing and striating work within the ustopian space. Each of the novels begins in the present, giving an insight into the pre-­ apocalyptic world where a form of late capitalism has taken the helm of each and every domain of life. In this world, portrayed from different perspectives in each novel, there is no longer a single centre of power, like that of the state, that functions as an organising principle. Rather, it is multinational corporations such as HelthWyzer, OrganInc, NooSkins and RejoovenEsence that have taken over and now control the economy, politics, science, technology, education and even culture.

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The society under the control of corporations is structured as a “striated space”, which is strictly organised around fixed points, hierarchies and binaries. The pre-apocalyptic world of the MaddAddam trilogy is moulded through commodified social and economical norms and practices which compartmentalise space. This world is built upon a number of oppositions, most of which derive from the major binary division between the Compounds and the Pleeblands. The Compounds serve as the autonomous and privatised space of corporations where only the Compound people, namely those who work for corporations and their families, can reside. The Pleeblands, on the other hand, are the cities outside the Compounds where the majority of the diverse population, ranging from the homeless, the sex workers to the immigrants, live. The corporate Compounds and the Pleeblands constitute an inside/outside opposition created and fed by the corporations themselves. The Compounds host the privileged, namely the supposedly superior leg of the social binary, and separate and protect them from the rest of society through both literal and illusory boundaries. These boundaries literally exist in the sense that the Compounds are closed and gated spaces where no one except their residents is allowed to enter and no one inside is allowed to exit without official permission. These boundaries are at the same time illusory since the idea that the Compounds are safe and idealistic depends upon the supposition that the Pleeblands, the outside of the OrganInc Walls, are insecure and dangerous, inhabited by addicts, muggers and crazies. The Compound people believe in such assumptions even though most of them have not ever been in the Pleeblands. In this society structured upon hierarchical modes of categorisation, the Pleeblands appear to be the Other of the Compounds. Throughout the whole trilogy, the place is defined by the Compound people with stock epithets implying an almost colonial discourse: “nothing of interest went on in the Pleeblands, apart from buying and selling: there was no life of the mind. […] but to Jimmy it looked mysterious and exciting, over there on the other side of the safety barriers. Also dangerous” (Atwood 2013a, p. 231). The idea that the Pleeblands are exotic, intimidating and unknown discloses the logic behind late capitalism, which, as

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a constant process of decoding and recoding for merely economic interests, correlates with colonial discourse. In line with this logic, the Pleeblands function as the colonised Other which is located at the peripheries of the Compounds. In these overpopulated and polluted areas, people struggle with increasing poverty, violence and crime. They are marginalised and subjugated to the operations of the striation of identity by being labelled as the Other in terms of racial, social and economic background. They are strictly forbidden to access the Compounds. It is the Compounds that channel their subjugation and discrimination because they see these places as their waste yard which they do not have any interest in ameliorating other than pursuing their commercialisation and exploitation. Even though the Compounds are represented as completely oppositional places to the Pleeblands and even interpreted by some critics as “semi-utopia” or “micro-utopia” (Joseph 2016, p.  39; Wagner-Lawlor 2013, p. 74), they are actually as dystopian as the Pleeblands. Atwood’s portrayal of these two seemingly oppositional spaces both from the centre and from the margins allows us to perceive how the social structure is built upon striations and turned into molar assemblages from inside and outside. Thus, all the oppositions through which the pre-apocalyptic world is striated are there to be unveiled and deconstructed via these different perspectives. Oryx and Crake gives us a picture of the Compounds from within and the Pleeblands from outside, from the perspective of the centralised, predominantly that of Jimmy. Jimmy, the protagonist of the first novel, is one of the residents of the Compounds whose parents are working for the OrganInc Compound. These corporations are run through a market system, having their own housing estates, schools, security firm and shopping malls. They are not oriented towards a single and transcendental centre of power, but they still depend upon the state apparatus to striate and regulate smooth spaces for their expansion since the essence of late capitalism is to capture and appropriate the free flows on smooth surfaces. Thus, even though the Compound people are made to believe that “[o]utside the OrganInc walls and gates and searchlights, things are unpredictable” (Atwood 2013a, p. 31) and inside they are safe and free, they live in a society of control where they are indeed under the incessant monitoring of these corporations. Everything, including the

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houses, the pools, the schools, the hospitals and even the people themselves, belong to the Compounds. The residents are constantly tracked through their smartphones, their DNA and their fingerprints. They are indeed imprisoned in the closed space of the Compounds under the guise of “protection”. In contrast to the illusion of freedom and security which make the people feel like “kings and dukes” (Atwood 2013a, p. 32), the Compounds actually mark the essence of sedentary space, which Jimmy’s mother defines as “all artificial”, nothing but a “theme park” (Atwood 2013a, p. 31). The interest in striating spaces lies in the goal of gaining more and more profit. The Compounds in the MaddAddam trilogy, accordingly, tend to striate and reposition all the possibly diverse flows for capitalist interests. They hold the control of every single domain of society through their collective security firm, the CorpSeCorps, the “faceless power centre” (Jameson 2009, p. 7), which is responsible not only for the security and order of the Compounds but also for the regulation of the market flow outside the Compounds. The capitalist practices of the corporations outside the Compounds become much clearer in The Year of the Flood. In this second constellation of the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood presents the same pre-apocalyptic world from the perspective of the pleeblanders Toby and Ren, both of whom have been victimised by the corporate-­ dominated world. The constitution of the Compounds is mainly based upon their usurpation of the market in the Pleeblands. The Compounds exert a rhizomatic expansion of the global market at the cost of the elimination of small retailers. Happicupa cafe chains are one of those exploitative companies of the Compounds: HelthWyzer Compound develops a new genetically modified coffee bean called Happicupa and instantly throws small growers like Ren’s father out of business since huge machines now replace the labour force needed to plant, hand pick, process and ship coffee beans. At this point, the CorpSeCorps appear to help the Compounds run their business and suppress resistance movements against exploitation. Another food chain supported by the Compounds is SecretBurgers which is indeed a simultaneous embodiment of patriarchy and late capitalism. SecretBurgers hires pleeblanders, who are mostly banned from working officially like immigrants or escapees from the Compounds, and pays them low wages despite long

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and exhausting work hours and dire circumstances. What is worse, the female workers of SecretBurgers are sexually assaulted, raped and even murdered by their manager. It is even rumoured that this food chain functions as the dumpsite of the Compounds to grind their corpse disposals, either killed by the CorpSeCorps or devastated by organ transplants or scientific experiments. In return, the CorpSeCorps turn a blind eye to SecretBurgers’ abuses, maltreatments and even assassinations, which indeed proves that the real tendency of these capitalist entrepreneurs is only to exchange, extract and exploit at all costs. These multinational corporations extend their span to all the previously non-commodified territories including the military, social life and politics. Science and technology cannot escape their capture and encapsulation, either. They structure and articulate the domain of science and technology, and turn scientific and technological progress into a flow of commodities. At this point, while science becomes a tool for the reproduction of commodities rather than improvements designed for the good of society, scientists become their new labourers to increase the economic profitability of the system at the cost of the degradation of human beings and nature. As Adam, the leader of the revolutionary group named the Gardeners, states, “[t]hey’re using their vitamin supplement pills and over-the-counter painkillers as vectors for diseases – ones for which they control the drug treatments. […] A very good plan for siphoning the victims’ money into Corps pockets” (Atwood 2014a, p.  308–309). Obviously, science and technology become striated spaces like everything else measured by its commodity value and quantity in late capitalism. The new task of the scientists is quite telling: they produce diseases and their treatments, that is, they are now assigned with the task of creating a demand first and providing the supply second. Science, which has now become a new market, brings about a new relation between disease and its treatment. This actually marks the relation between the flow of finance and the flow of personal income—which makes the circulation of capital possible and that is enabled through an activity of exploitation run by a collaboration of the corporations with scientists. That is, this circulation is designed to be from the less fortunate to the more, which is clarified in the trilogy as:

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‘Axiom: that illness isn’t productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it’s an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does money wise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it.’ […] ‘So, you’d need more sick people. Or else – and it might be the same thing – more diseases. New and different ones.’ (Atwood 2013a, p. 246)

This suggests that the major motive of science is financial interest. Science operates just like capitalism itself: it deterritorialises the idea of sickness only to reterritorialise it, namely, to create new and different sicknesses that require further treatment. Similarly, the scientists design and develop transgenic pigoons with human-tissue organs that would enable organ transplants without any possibility of rejection. Each pigoon could grow five or six kidneys and brain tissues at a time. This sounds as if it were a huge scientific progress that would contribute to the good of society, yet it is nothing but a part of these corporations’ profit-seeking practices on the way to become a global market. These hybrid pigoons are designed only to allow the transaction of capital “from clients to cure-­ peddlers” (Atwood 2013a, p. 246). The constitution of the Compounds as a global market brings about several paths of striation. This, however, does not mean that all the paths are eternally blocked to allow for anything but profit motives or that there is no longer a possibility of an escape from these striated spaces. No space is perfectly striated or smooth. Despite the distinction between striated space as closed, hierarchical and arboreal, and smooth space as open, dynamic and rhizomatic, there is an inevitable overlap between these two. Smoothing and striation can occur simultaneously without dissolving into each other entirely (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 486). This mutual relationship between striated and smooth spaces is quite revealing in disclosing how the idea of resistance becomes possible in this dystopian world depicted throughout the trilogy. Both the Compounds and the Pleeblands equally fall under the striation of the state apparatus as they both are defined by fixed and identifiable points between which only movement is allowed. Yet they both simultaneously remain open to smoothing forces. Especially at the margins of the Compounds where the

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pleeblanders reside, smoothing forces are seen actively at work. While the forces of the Compounds striate space in the Pleeblands, there simultaneously appear revolutionary enterprises that emanate smooth spaces. The Pleeblands’ position as the Other of the Compounds makes this space a site of potential. Despite their being under the control of the Compounds, they are not structured as strictly as the Compounds due to the multiplicity and diversity of their population and their unplanned sprawl. No matter how much the Pleeblands are subject to severe stratification in order to be manipulated for the Compounds’ economic interests, they are still relatively less organised than the Compounds themselves, which allows smoothing forces to get activated. The openness of the Pleeblands is even observed and admired by the Compound people: “He [Jimmy] glimpsed a couple of trailer parks, thinking about it made him slightly dizzy, as he imagined a desert might, or the sea. Everything in the Pleeblands seemed so boundless, so penetrable, so wide-open. So subject to chance” (Atwood 2013a, p. 231; emphasis added). This description of the Pleeblands is very reminiscent of the description of smooth spaces in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari often use the analogy of sea and desert to delineate the nature of smooth spaces: “smooth space itself, desert, steppe, sea, or ice, is a multiplicity of this type, non-metric, acentred, directional, etc.” (1987, p. 484; emphasis added). Just like a sea, a desert, smooth space is characterised by its boundlessness, multiplicity and movability. It is occupied by intensities, lines without pre-determined points, speeds and haecceities. It can grow boundless and move in all directions. The Pleeblands, accordingly, allow for the unvoiced to be heard, the differences to be affirmed and the striated spaces to be smoothed. This makes them potentially smooth spaces of resistance. The Gardeners, a part of the diversity of the Pleeblands, have in this sense great potential as nomadic war machines that smooth over the striations. They are a revolutionary group which is, to quote Fredric Jameson, “ecological, communitarian, cunningly organised in decentralised units” (2009, p. 8). They are highly aware of the horrors of the Compounds and hence propose an alternative organisation that favours nature over culture, equality over hierarchy and primitive life over technology. They reject the idea of buying and selling, namely the very foundations of capitalism, for they find it responsible not merely for the consumption of

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nature’s resources but also for the increasing gap between the poor and the rich. Rather than having a commercialised lifestyle that would contribute to the flow of capital from the poor to the rich, they opt for a simplistic one where everyone lives only on nature’s own resources without endangering it. They are at the same time vegetarians who have abandoned eating, hunting or trapping animals as a reaction to the long established hierarchy between man and all the other creatures: “why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything? […] How many other Species have we already annihilated?” (Atwood 2013b, p. 62). For them, man is neither exceptional nor superior to any other creature, and hence should not disturb any other creature at his own pleasure. Considering their position as a group that is against any kind of hierarchy and prioritisation, it is not surprising that the Gardeners consist mostly of those people who are socially or racially marginalised and victimised. Their principles and the profiles of their members make them an obvious opponent of corporate capitalism. They offer an alternative lifestyle that rejects everything profit-­ seeking corporations rely on. As opposed to the closed, hierarchical and confining nature of the Compounds, their organisation occupies a smooth space that is liberating, open and egalitarian. Their impact is boundless in the sense that they not only carve out a revolutionary space so as to go beyond the impositions of the state apparatus in the Pleeblands but they also expand rapidly within the Compounds, creating leaks in their territory from within. They bring together a diverse group of people coming from different origins, having different ideologies and different life goals without pledging any hierarchy among them. There are even several Compound people who are secretly affiliated with this group. Despite the differences among their members, what unites them is simply their desire to resist and go beyond the restrictions of the Compounds and prevent them from exploiting nature and all its inhabitants including human beings, animals and plants. The Gardens form a smooth space of resistance not only because they rhizomatically work to transform and deterritorialise the corporate capitalist practices, but also because they have no grand goals to achieve or ultimate destinations to arrive at. In the Gardens, it is not the point of arrival or the speed of travel but the movement itself that matters. That

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is, the Gardeners do not orient themselves towards a shared transcendent telos but rely upon the act of deterritorialisation as part of their survival. That is why this alternative group is tolerated by the CorpSeCorps themselves. Even though they remarkably deviate from the standards of the system, they do not actively and directly participate in destructive actions that would prevent the flow of capital through the Compound gates: “They view us as twisted fanatics […] we own nothing they want, so we don’t qualify as terrorists” (Atwood 2013b, p.  58). In this sense, the degree of smoothness which the Gardeners represent is relatively mild when compared to other revolutionary movements within the Pleeblands and the Compounds. This partly stems from the fact that the Gardeners hold a problematic position to the idea of logos due to their spiritual grounding. To quote Fredrick Jameson, “our noble savages here do have another defect, a most significant one indeed: they believe in God” (2009, p. 8). They ground their revolutionary practices on a belief system, having their assigned Adams and Eves, religious sermons and even taboos and restrictions. They even have a hymn book that they read during their rituals held at regular intervals. No matter how they distance themselves from the essentialist notions and dogmas and embrace an egalitarian, ecological and subversive stance in their sermons and practices, this religious motivation behind their whole activity brings them to a dubious position. While trying to uproot the Compounds’ roots and principles, they incidentally end up creating their own roots that rely on religious faith. However, what still preserves their revolutionary stance is that they do not see and perform religion as an arborescent culture that is strictly centred, hierarchical and limiting; on the contrary, they use religion only as a motivation to unify their members and justify their resistant activities and subversive lifestyle without realising its possible traps and drawbacks. As opposed to their supposition that this eco-conscious religion could bring the masses together to resist the capitalist horrors of the Compounds, it is indeed the idea of resistance that gathers people under their roof. Among those people, Zeb, Pilar, Toby and Crake are the most remarkable ones who, despite their affiliation with the Gardeners and their position among the group members, do not share their spiritual grounding. Zeb, Pilar, Toby and Crake depart from the Gardeners not only in their religion but also in their resistance, finding the former unnecessary and the

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latter not revolutionary enough. This departure leads them to launch another revolutionary movement called “Extinctathon” under the leadership of Crake. Extinctathon is an “interactive biofreak master-lore game” (Atwood 2013a, p. 92) that Crake and Jimmy used to play as children. It is a game basically about the names and taxonomy of extinct animals. The players in the game are asked to identify extinct species and name them by specifying their characteristics. It is based on competition among the players who try to get points by giving correct answers. As the time of a challenge extends, the players can obtain more points and win bonuses for their speed. It is a virtual space which breeds an idea of competition and a desire for gaining more profit. In this respect, Margrit Talpalaru remarks that Extinctathon is a game which strongly resonates with “capitalist conditions, which tout competition as the only type of regulation that a free market needs” and almost becomes a microcosm of the rationale behind the corporate Compounds (2013, p. 250). Online video games are created on and through a rhizomatic space, the Internet, which has no point of transcendent centre, or a pre-determined telos. It is almost always open to the processes of smoothing as it is merely about establishing infinite networks. This points to its liberating potential. Accordingly, Extinctathon displays this liberating potential that is immediately taken up by Crake. Extinctathon has a surface organisation that is strongly reminiscent of multinational corporations’ practices, but at the same time it has an underground organisation where anti-­ Compound people called the MaddAddamites unite to fight against late capitalism. This becomes possible only after its capitalist space has been decoded by Crake: “Top scientists—gene-splicers who’d bailed out of the Corps and gone underground because they hated what the Corps were doing. […] We were doing bioform resistance” (Atwood 2013b, p. 398–399). The profiles of the MaddAddamites are quite reflective of the process of smoothing, which is always about movement, a movement through which striations, molar organisations and stabilised identities are destroyed. Among the MaddAddamites, the movement is two-fold. It is either from the striated space of the Compounds toward the smooth space of resistance as in the case of top scientists like Crake, Pilar and Jimmy’s mother who, despite their privileged positions, choose to resist the system, or it is from the relatively less smooth space of the Gardeners

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to the absolute smooth space of Extinctathon as in the case of Toby and Zeb who, despite being already engaged in a revolutionary group, want to take real action against the system and join the MaddAddamites. In either case, the movement is not from one point to another, which would otherwise suggest that smooth space is always there to be discovered and is not very different from the striated space. On the contrary, the movement itself is a smoothing force. That is why the resistant dissenters involved in Extinctathon also keep changing and self-transforming during their voyage towards the smooth space of affirmative alternatives. The MaddAddamites not only attempt to shatter the existing dichotomies and organisations of the Corporations from within, but also aim to offer new alternatives that could replace them. They struggle against the concrete practices of the Corporations that manipulate science, exploit people, eliminate any subversive voice for the continuous flow of capital. This struggle is indeed a struggle against the logic behind all these capitalist practices, that is, the fascising tendency. Crake, the leader of the MaddAddamites, interprets this tendency of capitalism as “symbolic thinking”: “Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view. Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war” (Atwood 2013a, p. 419–420). In Crake’s view, it is this kind of symbolic thinking or fascising tendency that invests intensities and multiplicities into blockages, and instead forms striations, inscribes in desire a kind of lack and kills its revolutionary potential. It is the source of all existing hierarchies, segmentations, closed forms and structures in this corporate world. Yet Crake thinks that this tendency cannot be overcome by the MaddAddamites’ fight against the corporations. This is not because he undermines what the MaddAddamites do but because there will always be “micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power, microfascisms” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.  205) as long as humans exist. Microfascism is even more effective and stronger than the fascising pole of capitalism. Microfascism is a deep sense of heaviness which keeps one from enacting life’s energy, desire and trying out virtual possibilities. It is a kind of trap that binds one to the idea of impossibility since it is the major obstacle before one’s self. Since killing one’s inner fascist that inhabits one into submission is too hard a deed, Crake sees the absolute

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deterritorialisation only in his Paradice Project, which emerges as part of the MaddAddamites’ revolutionary action. But no one except Crake knows the true motive behind this project, that is, the annihilation of the entire human race and the creation of a new bio-engineered people that are stripped of all micro-Oedipuses, micro-formations of power and microfascisms. With the help of the MaddAddamites, Crake implements his project and creates a new race, the Crakers. He calls these Paradice people “the art of possible” against the microfascist sense of impossibility. The genetically modified new people of the Paradice Project are a people to come who lack the neural complexes that create distinctions among people with regard to their skin colour, race and gender. They stand for “the Deterritorialised par excellence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 381), bearing no micro-fascistic tendencies. Yet this absolute deterritorialisation is accompanied by a global pandemic that is released through the BlyssPlus pills designed by Crake himself. Wiping out the human race to replace it with a new race opens the text and the idea of resistance to various biting criticisms. Many critics condemn Crake as a “mad-­ scientist” (DeFalco 2016, p. 150; Bosco 2010, p. 162) and a “scientist-­ imperialist” (Bouson 2004, p. 141), drawing an analogy between Crake and Dr Faustus in terms of their manipulation of science and mischief to human beings. In the last book of the trilogy, the last survivors on earth are faced with a critical question, the question of whether they should opt for a future generation with a human ancestor with all of its flaws or with a Craker–human hybrid generation which would be hopefully stripped of transcendent and micro-fascistic tendencies. They eventually make their decision in favour of the latter. Despite the harsh criticisms, the ending is quite promising in the sense that Crake’s deterritorialisation might not necessarily suggest a problematic finish but a promising beginning which opens up to virtual possibilities of space and subjectivity.

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“ Anti-Rev” Movement Against the Oedipal Yoke Late capitalism is the cruelest system whose most-produced commodity is human subjectivity, which begins in the nuclear family through Oedipalisation. The nuclear family is a capitalist institution where the father implements paranoid investments under the Oedipal yoke and where desire is captured and organised around a sense of unsatisfiable lack. Through the institution of the nuclear family, the father becomes an agent of capitalism responsible for the reproduction of Oedipal subjects. This is meticulously caricatured in Atwood’s trilogy in the characterisation of the Rev, the father of Adam and Zeb. Unlike his sons, Adam and Zeb, who are the pioneers of the revolutionary movements under the name of the Gardeners, the Rev is a metonymic embodiment of late capitalism and its corrupt practices. He is the preacher of the Church of PetrOleum, following a theology only in order to get him cash and performing his prayers only to sanctify the holiness of capital: the “true meaning of ‘Peter’ refers to petroleum, or oil that comes from rock. […] ‘oleum’ is the Latin word for oil. And indeed, oil is holy throughout the Bible! What else is used for the anointing of priests and prophets and kings? Oil!” (Atwood 2014a, p. 138). The Rev administers a transcendent use of the unconscious and continually transforms everything into its commodity value. He forces his sons to pray not for forgiveness but for oil, and makes them yield to his way of living and seeing. His oppressive behaviour makes itself clear in his punitive and inhibitive acts: “How not to smell, how not to taste, how not to think: [living under the roof the Rev] was like the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil blind, deaf, and mute monkeys” (Atwood 2014a, p.  95). In both the private and public institutions of late capitalism, his role as a father and a preacher remains the same: to squeeze desire into lack through repression and fatally negate it to produce Oedipalised subjects, namely “blind, deaf and mute monkeys” or a “true Petroleum believer”. This is in fact strongly reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s famous observation noted in A Thousand Plateaus: “Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest casts the triple curse

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on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal” (1987, p. 154; emphasis added). As a critique of late capitalism, the trilogy presents several other configurations of the Oedipal father, such as Blanco and Jimmy’s father as well as several revolutionary movements that resist these Oedipal fathers. Ironically, some of these movements are called the “anti-Rev” movement, which testifies to the fact that a resistance to the Oedipal father is always already a resistance to late capitalism. The dual nature of resistance is exemplified in Adam and Zeb’s nomadic trajectory. Since their early childhood, Adam and Zeb have been encoded into docile puppets of the corporations by the Rev, whom they call “Child torturer? Religious fraudster? Online girl decapitator?” (Atwood 2014a, p. 148). But they have always had a nomadic consciousness that resists homogenising and sedentarising forces. Their identities have always been characterised by patterns of sheer movement. The first series of their nomadic movement begins with their escape from home, or what we might call the enforced path of righteousness or the path of Holy Petroleum. This, however, has not been a cowardly escape from the established forms of domination that bind Adam and Zeb to fixity. But it has been an escape only to “look for new weapons” (Deleuze 1992, p. 4) to destroy the Rev and everything he represents. The first moment of Adam and Zeb’s nomadic movement accordingly comes along with a moment of deterritorialisation, which is very much reflective of the new weapons of resistance in the age of late capitalism. In such societies as depicted in Atwood’s pre-apocalyptic world, control becomes invisible yet rhizomatically dispersed thanks to advanced technology. The whole system works through a constant process of decoding and recoding since capital requires the production of fluid codes that would be adaptable to the incessantly changing environment. This necessarily brings about a search for new ways of resistance that would comply with the nature of late capitalism. Hacking is one of these new ways of resistance that could manipulate the fluid codes and use them against the system itself as exemplified in Adam’s and Zeb’s case. Adam and Zeb slip into the online social media and donation sites of the Church of PetrOleum through the Rev’s account. Hacking his account, they not only divert the flow of money coming from donations to their account

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and disrupt its flow from the poor to the rich, but they also keep a record of the Rev’s secret life, that is, his frequent visits to sexually explicit websites. This initial moment is followed by the murder of the Rev via a fatal poison. Once they are literally and metaphorically orphaned and de-­ Oedipalised, Adam’s and Zeb’s lives become nomadic, that is in constant movement and transition. They change their identities several times and constantly move from one place to another. However, it is not their literal displacement but their resistance to the idea of stability that makes them nomads. Their movement does not orient towards any pre-determined destination. The only motivation behind their movement is to create alternative ways of living that are devoid of hierarchy, forced unity and organisation.

“ Sheer Vertigo”: Between Forgetting and Remembering In the MaddAddam trilogy, most of the characters, like Adam and Zeb, push the formations of identity to their limits. Although they all attempt to disidentify themselves from the molar organisations of the Oedipalised self to some degree, none of them is able to take this disidentification to the point of becoming as much as Toby and Jimmy do. Deleuze and Guattari see becoming as the point where a new notion of subjectivity is created out of the blurring boundaries between the self and the world to the point of imperceptibility. Becoming is an actualisation of an immanent “encounter between two reigns, a short-circuit, the picking-up of a code where each is deterritorialised” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, p. 44). In other words, it suggests an affirmative interaction of two different forms where they evolve into a zone of intensities deterritorialising not merely their existing assemblages and their long-established structures but also their relation to one another and to the world. These new deterritorialised reigns and relations are no longer attributed to any organising principle or roots whatsoever. This means that becoming is indeed a process of transformation from the molar to the molecular, from the arborescent to the rhizomatic consciousness, from fixity to a line of flight. It is a sheer

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interconnectedness, a creative merging that pushes the process of deterritorialisation always further. The notion of sheer interconnectedness that characterises “becoming” marks not only the dissolution of the unified subject but also the dissolution of linear dynamics of temporality as it is observed particularly in the characterisation of Jimmy in the trilogy. Deleuzian distinction between Chronos and Aeon could be a guiding light to trace Jimmy’s move from the plane of being towards the plane of becoming. Chronos is the notion of time as a linear movement from the past, through the present, towards the future. It stands for “the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 262). In its simplest interpretation, it is how we conventionally perceive time. It is the time of the unified, stable and rational subject, moving only forward. It is the time of the actual. Unlike Chronos, Aeon is the “time out of joint”, “the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 262). It is the time of becoming, having the flexibility of moving both forward and backward simultaneously. It is the time of the virtual. Yet this distinction is much deeper and much more complex than it seems. These two trajectories of time, first of all, do not stand in stark opposition. On the contrary, Chronos is indeed a condition of Aeon. To be more precise, Aeon is “precisely the border of the two, the straight line which separates them; but it is also the plain surface which connects them” (Deleuze 1990, p. 64). These complexities could perhaps be cleared out—if not entirely captured—through an insight into Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze outlines these two trajectories of time in three syntheses. The first synthesis suggests a perception of time that “goes from the past to the future in the present, thus from the particular to the general, thereby imparting direction to the arrow of time” (Deleuze 1994, p. 71). It is, on the one hand, suggestive of a sequential movement from the past to the present: the present as a living present

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that belongs to the realm of the actual, and distinguishable from the past and the future. It is, on the other hand, suggestive of an intratemporality: the present as a lived present that immediately falls into its past and joins the virtual. The first synthesis, then, marks a present that both exists here and now and simultaneously passes. The second synthesis of time is “that of memory, constituted time as a pure past, from the point of view of a ground which causes the passing of one present and the arrival of another” (Deleuze 1994, p. 94). The pure past is, for Deleuze, full of deeper implications. Firstly, it implies a contemporaneity with the present, for the past is necessarily a passing present as clarified in the first synthesis. Secondly, it implies a coexistence with the new present, for every past event calls for a new future present. Thirdly, it implies a pre-existence, for the past inevitably pre-exists the passing present. All these implications indicate that the past never stands for the actual but for the virtual that both co-exists and pre-exists the present (Deleuze 1994, p. 82). The third synthesis of time elaborates more on the virtuality of time, concerning itself primarily with its creative and transformative potentiality. Uniting all three syntheses within itself, the third synthesis stands for a pure form of time that is unrepresentable, unmeasurable, unconditioned and indivisible. It is, as Deleuze calls it, the “time out of joint”, that is, time “liberated from its overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made up its content, its relation to movement overturned; in short, time presenting itself as an empty and pure form” (Deleuze 1994, p.  88). Unlike time in the first synthesis that moves linearly from the past to the future, the empty and pure form of time does not move between points. It cannot be measured by the periodic movements, either. It is not the agent of a progressive movement but the agent of change. To put it more simply, the third synthesis calls for change, situating the present as a domain that involves not only the living present and the passing present but also the past of everything and the traces of the potential future creations. The present in the third synthesis keeps changing while simultaneously accumulating and absorbing all the past and all the future changes that would potentially take place. In its loosest sense, Chronos can be matched with the present implied in the first synthesis, and Aeon with the third synthesis of time that is inclusive of the other two syntheses.1 Even if this simplified matching

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were highly reductive of the depth and complexities of Deleuze’s understanding of time, it could still serve to establish the links between subjectivity and temporality. Chronos, occurring in chronological sequence despite its loose connections with the virtual, punctuates the representation of the subject as a unified, stable, self-contained and complete entity. Its regulated and linear nature promises an ontological security. Aeon, however, points to a rupture in the representation of the subject as well as a rupture in time. It is “the time of the pure event or of becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 263) as it defies the idea of stable identity by defying the idea of being situated in a predetermined time and space. On the axis of Aeon, the subject is always in change, always in becoming. In his Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes Aeon as a sign of becoming in its essential relation to the eternal return of difference (1990, p. 179–180; 1994, p. 276). He borrows the idea of the eternal return from Nietzsche, who uses the term to answer the questions of how one can make oneself strong enough to bear the repetition of horrifying things, how one can make oneself strong enough to overcome oneself and how one can be prepared to affirm everything. Building upon Nietzsche’s ideas, Deleuze interprets the eternal return as a productive cycling where each movement of life comes along with difference and transforms life itself. The transformation of life immediately applies to the transformation of the subjects, as well. Each movement of life pushes the subjects into a continual becoming, and only those who could embrace the change, overcome negation and overcome themselves could affirm their lives. This suggests that each becoming has its own duration that apparently resides not on the axis of Chronos but on the axis of Aeon. On the axis of Aeon, what returns is what differentiates us. Therefore, it is this form of time, the eternal return, which “distributes throughout itself an I fractured by the abstract line, a passive self produced by a groundlessness that it contemplates” (Deleuze 1994, p. 276). And a becoming is that which becomes creative out of this return and endures this sense of fracture and groundlessness. In Atwood’s trilogy what makes Jimmy enter into a process of becoming, where he moves from his unified subjectivity to an asubjectivity, is similarly a move towards the axis of Aeon. Unlike other major characters

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in the trilogy such as Adam, Zeb, Pilar, Toby and Crake who function as resistant dissenters having nomadic consciousness, Jimmy has never appeared as a person with a critical awareness. In the pre-apocalyptic world where the Compounds are in control of the entire socio-political milieu, he yields to the already established modes of subjectivity and has no individual desire or no driving force to go beyond it. He is a “words” person that is secondary to “numbers” people in the hierarchy of the social and intellectual status determined by the Compounds. He does not even seek to free himself from these rigid images of identity and rigid models of life: “I’m not a numbers person” (Atwood 2013a, p. 85). He submissively agrees to operate within the space and temporality he is situated in. He is willing to remain on the axis of Chronos as he is content with the ontological security he has. Having a recognised position and ground in life is satisfying for him. He, thus, finds everything that would shatter his ontological stability annoying and threatening. Even his joining Extinctathon is not an intentional act of resistance but a practical joke that intimidates him. It is not his own dream but a passive involvement in Crake’s dream. To put it briefly, Jimmy willingly chooses to be contained within a predetermined space and temporality where he waits to evolve from “the raw material, Jimmy in his gloomy form” into “the end product, a happy Jimmy” (Atwood 2013a, p. 223). In the trilogy, it is not until the destruction of the capitalist investments with Crake’s Paradice Project that Jimmy begins to develop a new consciousness to overcome himself, namely, the Cartesian self: “A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is” (Atwood 2013a, p. 3). Crake’s revolutionary project creates a rupture in the institutionalised perception of time. In other words, time goes “out of joint” as implied in “zero hour”. “Zero hour” here corresponds to the axis of Aeon. It is where the production of the real takes place.  The zero hour,  however, appears too intimidating for Jimmy’s ontological security which is established upon a spatio-temporal unity. He feels his unified subjectivity is at stake. As Eleonora Rao points out, he is now in “a state of suspended time […] He is at a crossroads, suspended in the present, ‘up to his neck in the here and now’” (2006,

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p. 110). In the post-apocalyptic world created out of the annihilation of not merely the capitalist system but also the whole of humanity, time no longer moves on the axis of Chronos. In smooth spaces where the capitalist axiomatic is overturned, as Elizabeth Grosz underlines, “[t]ime is no longer defined by the relations of the movements it measures” (2012, p. 148). On the contrary, the past and the future subsist in the virtual present. This temporal coexistence necessarily suggests the abandonment of the perception of the future as an end point where a transcendent ideal resides. It replaces the orientation towards a transcendent telos with a purposelessness. There is now only a present which appears as the opening of a vast virtuality and hence abounds in infinite possibilities. The sense of purposelessness and infinite possibilities actually designates a point of indeterminacy which Deleuze relates to his conception of “body without organs”, which is, for Deleuze and Guattari, “the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialised socius” (1983, p. 33). It is the zero state where the previously established assemblages of time, space and subjectivity are dismantled. The clearance of the socius from all the predetermined molar aggregates of late capitalism hence culminates in Jimmy’s withdrawal into a body without organs. Although this does not necessarily imply any negativity but a vast openness, Jimmy’s encounter still becomes very traumatic, considering his secured subject position is shaped through molar spatial and temporal organisations. The dismantling of the striated space of the Compounds into the smooth space of indeterminacy and of the linear and segmented temporality into an all-­ encompassing present is not met with joy at all: “[Jimmy] doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo” (Atwood 2013a, p. 173). Some disjunctures already begin to occur in Jimmy’s unified subjectivity. The Cartesian cogito which assumes the human subject as stable, fixed and fully rational no longer applies to a body without organs. Once the world gets free from its striations and linear compositions, the long broken link between man and the world begins to be bridged. Accordingly, Jimmy tries to assure his superiority by naming himself the Abominable Snowman in the early days of the disaster. He refers to himself by this name particularly when he talks to himself and

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to the Crakers. This new name of his not only suggests a kind of supremacy but also evokes a feeling of intimidation and terror. But as he starts to go beyond this hierarchical positioning of the human over other beings in the world, he begins to avoid his new identification. Rather than assuming himself superior to nature and its inhabitants, he now gradually becomes one with the world, which could be regarded as his first step on the way to his “becoming-other”: “The Abominable Snowmanexisting and non-existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints. […] For present purposes, he’s shortened the name. He’s only Snowman. He’s kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt” (Atwood 2013a, p. 8). His abandonment of the capitalised Abominable indicates that he begins to lose his reliance upon the supposition of the human as the transcendental subject. The ontological barrier that privileges the subject over the object dissolves into a kind of asubjective and acentred world view that cannot position any being as superior. Therefore, Jimmy is no longer the absolute subject that marginalises animals and nature as his object and the other, going beyond the anthropocentric attitude instilled by and within the capitalist system. However, the elimination of the subject/object barrier of the body without organs is not well perceived by Jimmy at his first encounter. He cannot easily embrace the idea of being in the world and affirming life. On the contrary, he has great difficulty in conceptualising the erasure of this ontological hierarchy and its existing binaries. He interprets it simply as a reversal which, for him, positions him as inferior to other beings in the world. Thus, he falls into a grim depression and a deep feeling of inferiority. Jimmy undergoes a sense of depression and inferiority for two reasons. Firstly, a body without organs, which is a zone of thresholds, intensities and gradients on the axis of Aeon, could be a “harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living centre of matter” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p.  19). All the stimulus coming from life without any filtering is apparently too much to bear for Jimmy who still demands to be a unified whole. His subjectivity being constantly liquified comes into

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collision with the side of his being that desires to be stratified. He is, thus, in a vain search for a centre to direct and organise his disposition. Secondly, his past self continues to haunt him, which results in an over-­ indulgence in his memories. As Jimmy himself says, the past is full of “[b]ooby traps” (Atwood 2013a, p. 7) that bind him to his memories and prevents him from living the present and actualising its potentialities. As Dunja M. Mohr puts it, he is stuck in “[t]he zero hour, located in the ‘terror’ of the timeless present”. In order to overcome himself and acknowledge his becoming-other-than-himself, a degree of forgetting is required, as Nietzsche suggests in his revision of history. For Nietzsche, the right amount of forgetfulness is fundamental to affirming life as he underlines in his Unfashionable Observations: All action requires forgetting […]. A human being who wanted to experience things in a thoroughly historical manner would be like someone forced to go without sleep, […] without forgetting, it is utterly impossible to live at all. […] There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of historical sensibility, that injures and ultimately destroys all living things, whether a human being, a people, or a culture. (1998, p. 89)

Forgetfulness is then one of the key features of man that brings him closer to animality. Being stuck in the past, namely having too much history, is what holds man back from overcoming himself and affirming life itself. To affirm life and activate creativity, it is crucial to have a degree of animal forgetfulness and overcome oneself. Deleuze also acknowledges the positive force of forgetting, arguing that to forget is an experimentation with what-is-yet-to-come. Yet this idea of forgetting as affirmation should not be understood as leaving everything past behind. The past, as the virtual, already exists in the present and suggests a potentiality for the future. To forget is to select from the past what is useful for what-is-yet-to-come. It is obvious that Jimmy suffers from too-much-past that imprisons him in reminiscences and keeps him back from overcoming himself. However, as he spends time with the Crakers, the embodiments of pure body without organs, who are absolutely purged of all the molar

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aggregates and impositions of the past, of all essentialist attributes and of man’s microfascistic tendencies, he begins to understand the necessity to recognise the infinite vitality of life: “The present’s bad enough without the past getting mixed into it. Live in the moment. […] Why chain your body to the clock, you can break the shackles of time, and so on and so forth. […] So here it is then, the moment, this one, the one he’s supposed to be living in” (Atwood 2013a, p. 311–312). Once he decides to break free from the chains of Chronos, he at the same time realises the boundaries of his previously unified subjectivity. The realisation of how his subjectivity has been structured and stratified so as to be moulded into a kind of submissiveness so far as to reach the level of ignorance becomes another step on his way to becoming-other. This actually reveals that the affirmative force of forgetting and of the present culminates in an embracement of duration and a self-realisation: “Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, incite. There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out” (Atwood 2013a, p.  216). He not only comes to know how his subjectivity is organised and repressed within the striated space of the Compounds, but also realises how he is made to desire his own repression and become “willing” to ignore being stratified, bounded and repressed. This selfrealisation bespeaks his transformation from the state of grim pessimism into a kind of vitality that pushes him to willingly dissolve his subjectivity, overcome his microfascistic tendency to desire his own repression and become other-than-­himself. This is strongly felt when he gradually loses the sense of inferiority and instead feels interconnected not merely with nature and its inhabitants but also with the Crakers. His becoming becomes clear in his animalistic descriptions of himself and his admiration of non-human entities. He admires birds “with resentment: everything is fine with them, not a care in the world. Eat, fuck, poop, screech, that’s all they do” (Atwood 2013a, p. 148). His interconnection with life as a continuous becoming and with the Crakers as pure becomings finally makes him totally abandon his reliance upon his past and past self: “‘My name is Snowman,’ said Jimmy, who had thought these over. He no longer wanted to be Jimmy, or even Jim […] He needed to exist only in the

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present, without guilt, without expectation. As the Crakers did” (Atwood 2013a, p. 406–407). The fact that he is no longer Jimmy but Snowman marks the shift that occurs in his perception of life, time and self which are all interrelated. He affirms himself as other-than-himself and other-than-human. He is so distanced from his past identity and the idea of the human as transcendent subject that he now feels insecure in the presence of other humans when he learns that he is not the only survivor of the pandemic, although he has longed for other human companions. His metamorphosis from human Jimmy into becoming-other-than-himself makes him find human beings intimidating. Since he embraces an acentred and asubjective perception of life with its own duration, the zero intensity that terrorises him at the very beginning of his narrative now empowers his process of becoming-other. Although his initial reaction to the body without organs was a deep nostalgia for going back to the idea of the human with all its transcendent tendencies, this zero intensity finally becomes the plane of consistency, namely, the plane of possibility where he can actualise his potentialities and affirm life as becoming, just like his “self ”. Thus, it is not surprising that he also affirms “zero hour” at the end of his narrative: “Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go” (Atwood 2013a, p. 433). It is time for Jimmy to go away from the spatio-temporal boundaries of being human into unknown possibilities of becoming.

“ Animals R us!”: Becoming-Animal in the Anthropocentric Stratum Toby is another character who moves into a zone of indeterminacy where she embodies the deterritorialising effect of the processes of becoming, which will be the concern of this section. Unlike Jimmy who begins his life in a relatively more privileged position and is moulded into an Oedipal submission in the earlier phases of his childhood, Toby is a pleeblander who is born into a socially and economically underprivileged family, which is one of the many victims of multinational corporations. Her father who lives off selling air conditioning loses his job due to the

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air conditioning corps while her mother falls sick because of the HelthWyzer supplements. Her father is just a “small potato” (Atwood 2013b, p. 30) in the cruel system of the corporate-dominated world. Her mother, in a similar vein, gets sicker and eventually dies because of the pills that have actually been designed as vectors for other diseases. As an invisible part of the chain used to enable the flow of capital from patients to doctors, from labourers to corporations, her father ends up committing suicide and her mother dies of disease. This literal orphanage of Toby becomes one of the defining factors in her attaining an orphan consciousness. From the very beginning of her life, although she has been subjected to the Oedipal representatives of late capitalism, she gradually acquires a revolutionary desire to free herself from the Oedipal yoke and all the predetermined ontological categories of human/non-human, man/ woman. Smoothing over the static subjectivity based on binaristic discrimination, she experiences the life of a nomad, constantly voyaging from one place to another. She first leaves her family house upon the loss of her parents, begins to work first as a furzooter and finds herself a place to stay temporarily in the Pleeblands. Then she moves to an apartment above a couture shop and begins to work at SecretBurgers, from which she soon has to escape, whereon she starts to live with the Gardeners, but later has to move to the Compounds from the Gardens in the guise of a new person. There is never a final destination for Toby. In each of these voyages, she constantly deterritorialises and molecularises herself and her environment. Toby’s nomadic voyaging not merely resonates with smoothing forces over the capitalist machine and its by-products but also implies a “becoming” in a Deleuzian sense. She passes through several layers of becoming in her struggle to escape and resist Oedipal repression. Becoming revitalises the non-human in human beings. In Toby’s case, she reaches a zone of multiplicity and indiscernibility through her becoming-animal, which is initially triggered by both animals’ and women’s marginalised positions in the pre- and post-pandemic world order. In the pre-pandemic corporate-­driven system, the Compounds change and manipulate animals’ genes and turn them into commodities. Genetically modified animals are used as multiorganifiers, and once their organs are taken, they are nothing but meat that is served in the Compound cafeterias. The

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Pleeblands cannot be regarded as an ideal place for animals either, since here too pets, just like the pigoons in the Compounds, end up in someone else’s deep fryers. This meat-animal analogy is also applicable to the position of women in the Pleeblands. In the same vein as animals, women are reduced to a position where they are defined only in terms of flesh and meat, and their female agencies and their bodies’ virtuality are repressed and ignored. SecretBurgers in this sense becomes a metonymic embodiment of a kind of cannibalism exerted upon women in the Pleeblands. Blanco, the manager of SecretBurgers, implements exploitative male violence on female workers at his company. Seeing women as nothing but “a sex toy you can eat” (Atwood 2013b, p. 500), he sexually abuses his workers and perpetrates violence. His treatment of women is described with the verb “to take apart” (Atwood 2013b, p. 42), which is reminiscent of the tropes of meat and flesh. Despite his maltreatment, however, the only thing he expects from women is submission. Toby shares the same fate as other girls working at SecretBurgers, becoming Blanco’s latest sex toy. He kills Toby’s female agency and reappropriates her body as the object of sadistic male joy. However, unlike other girls who mostly end up either murdered or committing suicide, Toby manages to escape from Blanco’s oppression with the help of the Gardeners. Toby’s escape is not merely an escape from male oppression embodied in the figure of Blanco, but also an escape from the molar assemblages, striated spaces and Oedipalisations. As such, her escape triggers a strong drive in Blanco to bring her to submission, uttering several threats: “Bitch!”, “I’ll slice off your tits!” (Atwood 2013b, p. 51), “I see you, stringy-assed bitch!”, “You’re meat!” (Atwood 2013b, p.  303). These threats of mutilation necessarily suggest that Blanco represents the Oedipal fathers of late capitalism which assumes the role of castration. Along with women’s and animals’ shared position of being reduced to meat, Toby’s work in the early years of her orphanage as a furzooter, wearing fake-fur animal suits, also suggests the initial steps of her experience of non-human liminality. She is frequently harassed by animal fetishists who rub their pelvises against her fur and make strange noises. These molestations which in effect target animals allow her to see and experience life from a non-human point of view. What makes this experience even more unbearable is that she has to live above a luxury

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couture shop which sells Halloween costumes made up of endangered species’ skins. However, it cannot be claimed that it is her furzooter experience solely that connects Toby to becoming-animal even though it suggests a degree of non-human experience and empathy towards non-human entities. Becoming, as Deleuze and Guattari continually underline, “is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something” (1987, p. 239). Becoming-­ animal accordingly bears no relation to mimicking or resemblance to animals. Thus, Toby’s becoming-animal would definitely differ from her simply wearing animal costumes. Actually, her sufferings and marginalised position constitute a common zone with animals. Within the striated space of this pre-apocalyptic world as she experiences it, both women and animals serve as a kind of commodity used for capitalist interests and fantasies. This exposed vulnerability to patriarchal capitalist practices is what creates a shared proximity between Toby and animals. In her shift into becoming-animal, Toby does not imitate animals, but moves into a molecular contiguity with animals in which her movement designates a line of flight from existing norms, anthropocentric attitudes and Oedipalisations of both humans and animals. She becomes an animal only through overcoming the anthropocentric thinking system that assumes the superiority of humans over all other creatures. Deterritorialising forces are thus actively at work in Toby’s becoming-­ animal. She deterritorialises her human self from all the metaphysical and anthropocentric tendencies, raising ontological and ethical questions regarding not merely traditional conceptualisations of her own subjectivity but also conceptualisations of animals and animal agency in the anthropocentric world. The smoothing of the striated space of the pre-apocalyptic world strongly contributes to the formation of Toby’s true becoming. In striated spaces, subjects are exposed to order and control to the point of losing their revolutionary desire, and their bodies turn into organisms. This exposure to organisation might even become desirable for the subjects since it offers a sense of ontological security, as is seen in the case of Jimmy. But order and control have never been appealing for Toby who as a female pleeblander has always been doubly marginalised. Even though she has already begun to attain a non-human consciousness and

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awareness, the striated space she is imprisoned in does not allow her to actualise her potentialities and her becoming. That is why her becominganimal begins to occur in the smooth space of the Gardeners. The Gardeners’ communal, egalitarian and ecological way of living paves the way for Toby to gradually disperse her subjectivity and create a new way of living and being which is defined by fluidity and multiplicity. Much as the Gardeners represent a degree of transcendent tendency in terms of their spiritual grounding, Toby never feels herself fully a part of them, except sharing their revolutionary stance towards anthropocentrism. Rather than channelling herself towards the Gardeners’ spirituality, she learns how to develop a new molecular relationship with animals and consequently with herself. She drifts into a transition process from the molar organism of being into the molecular possibilities of becoming. As she herself recognises, “[s]he wasn’t quite a Gardener, yet she wasn’t a pleeblander any more. She was neither the one nor the other” (Atwood 2013b, p. 116). Toby’s breakthrough with the boundaries between the self and the non-human other is actually a nomadic voyage which is triggered particularly with her becoming-bee within the smooth space of the Gardeners in the pre-apocalyptic world, and continues with her becoming-­ minoritarian in the smooth space of the post-apocalyptic world. Bees, by their essence, can be considered as what Deleuze and Guattari call “pack or affect animals” which designate a multiplicity, a population and an assemblage of affects (1987, p. 241). This, however, does not mean that they are pack animals only because they live in communes as a pack. On the contrary, each and every animal has already a pack mode, calling out a larger group of its own species. In other words, every animal necessarily stands for a multiplicity. Thus, one cannot become animal “without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us?” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 239–240). Toby’s fascination with bees is, in this sense, interlinked to her desire to transgress the singularity of the self and to engage in a multiplicity. She enters into a symbiotic relationship with bees as she converses, touches and lives with them. Her relationship is not of an anthropocentric kind which brags about raising the non-human to the level of the human but of a

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pure becoming which both encounters the multiplicity and the non-­ human within herself and gives animals back their own agencies. In Toby’s becoming, therefore, it is not only Toby that forms a new self which is no longer singular, molar and Oedipalised, but also bees themselves that are mutually involved in a transformation. For becoming-­ animal is a bilateral process that both traverses human beings and simultaneously affects animals. Toby’s becoming-bee is likewise a co-­ evolution, a mutual relationship during which she goes beyond what Deleuze calls “the white wall” of molar determinations and the black hole of her subjectivity and of her ego. Bees simultaneously become participants in this relationship rather than being merely its objects, which is best clarified when Toby is extremely concerned about the necessity of telling Pilar’s death to the bees in an appropriate way before anyone else. They should be spoken to and consoled as Pilar’s friends. This mutual exchange is achieved when Toby begins to see bees not as objects existing for human needs but more precisely as non-human entities having their own autonomy in life. Thus, becoming-bee brings about the deterritorialisation of both Toby and the bees, placing both in a zone of pure multiplicities. Getting free of the straitjacket of the anthropocentric stratum built upon the human/non-human binary opposition through her dynamic symbiosis with animals, Toby develops strong ethical concerns about using animal by-products. One of these most problematic ethical issues regarding a human relationship with animals in both the pre- and the post-apocalyptic world is meat-eating. As Toby grows into a non-human liminality, meat-eating as a practice reminds her of her past self which she now faces with guilt. It might be considered that it is merely because she lived among the Gardeners that she might have embraced such an attitude towards meat-eating. It is true to some extent that the Gardeners consider the practice of meat-eating as a kind of slaughter and violation of the equality of all creatures on earth with their slogans: “God’s Gardeners for God’s Garden! Don’t Eat Death! Animals R Us! They looked like raggedy angels, or else like midget bag people. They’d been the ones doing the singing. No meat! No meat! No meat!” (Atwood 2013b, p. 48). Yet it is not the Gardeners’ principles but Toby’s becoming-­ animal that culminates in a kind of innate guiltiness and shame for her

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previous practices of meat-eating. This sense of guilt and shame gets even more intensified following her bodily transformation into another identity as Tobia to escape Blanco’s threats. She undergoes several surgeries to peel off her previous identity and attains a new self with a brand new look. For her bodily transformation, ironically, her hair is replaced with a human–sheep hybrid hair-transplant, which actually become a powerful metaphor for her becoming-other-than-herself. She is now not a pure human but a human–animal hybrid, not one but a multiplicity: “I could have a whole new me, thinks Toby. Yet another whole new me, fresh as a snake. How many would that add up to, by now?” (Atwood 2013b, p. 282). This is tantamount to saying that through her physical and spiritual transformation, her molar human traits dissolve and she moves into a plane of consistency where true becomings occur. Toby’s becoming-animal which allows her to reinvent herself is most closely aligned with a transformative power she now attains for all the marginalised and exploited minorities including not merely animals, but women, hybrid pigoons and Crakers. In this sense, her becoming-animal is followed by becoming-minoritarian, namely an affirmative desire to undo all the binaries between majority and minority since “all becoming is [always already] a becoming-minoritarian” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 291). In Toby’s case, she is thrown into becoming-minoritarian through her bodily and psychic intimacy with animals. Where white male adults constitute the majority and occupy the centralised position, women, children, old people, plants, animals, hybrid-pigeons and Crakers are all pushed to the margins. In such a world, Toby’s becoming emerges as an active micro-politics not merely to create a line of flight from her position as a minority but also to form a new life that does not yield to the anthropocentric and phallogocentric view. She therefore begins to feel deeply interconnected with her surroundings, specifically with the most marginalised. Her interconnection stresses an impulse to form creative destratifying lines of flight for the minorities, which at the same time functions as an active medium of overcoming her obsession with the past, embraces the present despite its horrors and discloses the forces of the virtual. For both Toby and Jimmy, becoming occurs as a political affair to deterritorialise the anthropocentric view of the human and to reach a

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non-human intensity. This is particularly because anthropocentrism is a mechanism that colonises and fascises the human and the non-human into molar and arborescent standardisations. Anthropocentrism organises the category of the human according to the standard of being Western, masculine and white, while assigning the rest as the less-than-human or the non-human. Becoming, in this sense, comes to the fore to wreck this representation and go beyond the human. Jimmy and Toby, in the same vein, drift into the realm of becoming by overcoming themselves and transgressing the received notions of the human subject and to reach their multiplicities and immanent potentials. Their becoming pushes the limits of the human as a category, dismantles the anthropocentric stratum and discloses life’s transformative energy. The Crakers appear as another figure of resistance in the form of becoming in the trilogy. The Crakers are the transhuman entities bioengineered by Crake as an alternative to the human. The reason in the creation of the Crakers, for Crake, lies in the fact that deterritorialisations in the category of the human are always inevitably prone to reterritorialisations. Crake sees the microfascistic tendency inherent in the human essence as a major obstacle to defeat the capitalist social machine. For him, human essence is a dead end. Rather than attempting to fix the microfascistic traits in the human and instead reaching the non-human, he creates a new hybrid race which is entirely sterilised of all transcendent and destructive tendencies, such as racism, hierarchy and desire for power. They are no longer affiliated with arborescent institutions such as family or marriage which would bind them to their roots and restrict their movements. More importantly, they would no longer be categorised according to their race, skin colour or gender, and hence would not in any case be oriented towards any pre-determined telos affiliated with these roots. They are designed to live in harmony with one another and with their environment because they have no sense of superiority or inferiority and of domination or submission, seeing each and every living/ non-living, human/non-human, masculine/female, organic/inorganic entity as equal. In this sense, this alternative subjectivity extends into both the human and the non-human, blurring all the boundaries regarding these ontological categories and bringing them into an affirmative and transformative form.

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The “Rag Ends” of Meaning In Atwood’s trilogy, the move towards the plane of consistency is what unites Jimmy, Toby and the Crakers on a shared ground. They evolve into a mutual conceptual space within which they constitute blocs of becomings, transgress ontological categories and enter into a zone of indeterminacy. They dismantle the apparatus of the Oedipal capture and draw schizophrenic lines of flight from the dystopian social structures. To put it succinctly, they move towards life as an immanence, a mode of life which is unmediated, impersonal, pure and beyond any judgement and representation. Yet it cannot be claimed that the constitution of an alternative subjectivity is the one and only motive and medium in their movement towards life as an immanence. The minoritarian subjectivity in the form of becomings is inseparable from the minoritarian use of language and storytelling in the novels. Just like subjectivity and space, language in this pre-apocalyptic world cannot escape the capture of late capitalism. Language which is essentially heterogeneous is subjected to the formation of a molar identity, standardisation and regulation. It becomes a medium of power and manifests within itself all the binaristic structures that the capitalist social machine relies upon. It performs as a language of oppression and domination, governed by grammaticality, symbolism and binarism. Therefore, resistance to power inevitably demands a resistance to language, as well. In the trilogy, the minor use of majoritarian language becomes one of the powerful mechanisms of resistance that simultaneously contributes to the formation of new and alternative subjectivities. Throughout the trilogy, it is Jimmy’s and Toby’s relationship with the Crakers that allow them to develop a bloc of becoming and a network of self-overcoming in which they become other than themselves as human beings since the borders between the self and the other have dissolved. These moments of transgression actually revolve around their storytelling. This is the initial medium of communication with the Crakers. In the Paradice Project, Crake’s primary plan is to break the link “between one generation and the next” by creating the Crakers as hybrid entities, sterilised not only of the destructive features of human beings, such as race, hierarchy, territoriality, but also of human language. However, this

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problematic plan does not work in the way that Crake imagines. The Crakers break through his design and get inquisitive about their origins, the world and their environment. In bridging the link between the Crakers, human beings and the world, Jimmy’s and Toby’s storytelling plays a crucial role. In all three novels, Jimmy and Toby invent stories that both reveal truths about the world and open out new possibilities. Their storytelling is often interpreted as a myth-making that implies a transcendent goal or a utopian project, which yet in effect functions as an act to resist the dominant myths. Even though it appears to be a story of the Crakers’ origin, it turns out to be a story of how each character has been somehow victimised by the capitalist social machine and has eventually found his or her own line of flight from capture as seen in the story of Toby’s nomadic voyaging and Jimmy’s coming to terms with himself and the world. Thus, storytelling becomes not a medium of myth-making but a way of tackling the present problems of late capitalism, a way of disclosing its invisible truths and voicing the unvoiced, and a means of inventing new alternatives, namely, a new earth, a new people and a new language. The task of storytelling, which is first taken over by Jimmy, then Toby and lastly by Blackbeard, comes along with the creation of a foreign language, that is, “neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of language, a minorisation of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system” (Deleuze 1997, p.  5). This primarily derives from a necessity to communicate with the Crakers. The Crakers as the deterritorialised par excellence cannot conceptualise any arborescent system built upon binary structures and hence cannot understand the majoritarian language which is organised around such systems. Language which abounds in dualisms, symbolisms, metaphors and transcendent signifiers is completely incomprehensible to them. At this point, Jimmy and Toby are left in a position to decide either to teach the Crakers the majoritarian language they are also imprisoned in or to create an alternative language to communicate. Jimmy and Toby opt for the latter on the grounds that teaching the majoritarian language would be teaching all the categories, binary oppositions, codes, concepts and associations inscribed in language. This is central to Toby’s concern, as she often associates majoritarian language

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with “[r]ules, dogmas, laws”: “What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?” (Atwood 2014a, p. 250). Rather than instilling all the previously established molar assemblages, they therefore create an alternative language which is not seized by any master signifier, subject position and linguistic binaries. This language cannot be claimed to be entirely distinct from human language; on the contrary, it is derived from human language by deterritorialising its transcendent tendencies. Human language is turned inside out, which paves the way for first depleting its problematic inner mechanisms and then creating a minor language out of its remains. In this language shared by Jimmy, Toby and the Crakers, the reliance upon symbols, neologisms and metaphors is abandoned, seeing that the language of symbolism and metaphors suggests the transcendence of the signifier, that is, the continuous deferral of meaning. The linguistic signifier is a fascising element working through transcendence; it not only reduces the multiplicity and heterogeneity of language into binaristic series but also establishes a problematic relationship between the word and the world. As Claire Colebrook clarifies, “[i]f signification is, in general, a sign that stands in for what is not present, then this signifier of all signifiers, or ‘transcendental signifier’, is the signifier of what is absent, not present. This signifier signifies that towards which all meaning and speaking is directed; it signifies a promised or deferred presence” (2002, p. 20). The alternative language created in the trilogy is not built upon this assumed symbolic relation between the signifier and the signified. On the contrary, there is no sign assigned to concepts which the Crakers do not have in their understanding of life such as racism, hierarchy, territoriality, swears, insults, marriage, kingdoms, gods, money and war. These words sound utterly incomprehensible and have no meaning for the Crakers. This is because language names only what is there, what is perceivable by the Crakers. As Crake puts it, “no name could be chosen for which a physical equivalent […] could not be demonstrated” (Atwood 2013a, p. 8). This means that the boundary between the word and the world gradually becomes blurred. Likewise, the signifiers in this alternative language are not defined in terms of negative difference, namely, of what they are not, because the Crakers do not

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have the conception of difference as opposition or binarism. This wipes out all the discourses created out of such binaristic thinking systems lurking behind language as well. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle remarks, “[t]he signifier, a carrier of force, an instrument of power, is the main actor in the process of subjectification” (2002, p.  81). The modulations on the inner mechanisms of language including the signification process necessarily bring about changes in the formulation of subjectivity. This is evident in Jimmy’s attitude towards this minor language. Although the Crakers do not have difficulty in acquiring this minor language, Jimmy has great difficulty in formulating and embracing it since language is never solely a means of communication for humans but an ontological site of being. His subjectivity simultaneously moves from the realm of human “being” into the realm of becoming as the majoritarian language begins to dissolve. He sees and hears the words but cannot attach them to anything. Meaning dissolves into the air. This is because deterritorialising forces functioning in space, time and subjectivity are equally at work in language itself. Language becomes a site of resistance which makes him a foreigner in his mother tongue. In Deleuze’s words, language stutters in its syntax, grammar and semantics, it becomes other than itself. As Jimmy describes in his own experience, “language [loses] its solidity, it [becomes] thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he [slides] around like an eyeball on a plate” (Atwood 2013a, p. 305–306). Thus, he can no longer use a language that is ruled by its grammaticality, syntax and semantics. The signifying, rule-based language is now replaced by wordlists, a bundle of irrelevant words taking flight from their linguistic connotations: “Rag ends of language are floating in his mind: mephitic, metronome, mastitis, metatarsal, maudlin” (Atwood 2013a, p. 175); “The old wordlists were whipping through his head: fungible, pullulate, pistic, cerements, trull. […] Prattlement, opsimath. […] Concatenation. Subfusc. Crutch” (Atwood 2013a, p. 382). These words are randomly brought together and grouped to the extent that they disrupt the logical possibilities of meaning and mean absolutely nothing at the end. Language is therefore turned into a list of names where naming ironically does not stand for power any longer.

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Language enters into a phase of depersonalisation and becomes asubjective, just like its speaking subjects, Jimmy, Toby and the Crakers, who have undergone the processes of asubjective becoming. For Deleuze, language essentially has an impersonal and asubjective nature which is yet organised and restructured around subjectivity through mechanisms of power. Thus, the movements of deterritorialisation and minorisation bring language to its own nature and purge it of subjective positions. One way this new asubjective and impersonal position of language is achieved in these novels is through the use of free indirect discourse. In the MaddAddam trilogy, defined subject positions are abandoned. Even though each of the novels is structured upon the narrations of the characters, they do not speak in the first-person pronoun; instead, they are spoken through indirect speech. Once the “I” of the speaker is eliminated, the speaking subject is removed from its central position and the positions of the speakers or narrators and of the characters intermingle. On several occasions, Jimmy and Toby provide an insight not only into their own thoughts and feelings in the third person but also into the psyches of other characters like Zeb, Ren and Oryx. The narrators and the characters do not often function simply as narrators or characters that stand for distinct subjectivities in the trilogy, but instead become a collective assemblage. The extensive use of free indirect discourse, in this regard, introduces a collective value into Atwood’s trilogy which replaces individual utterances. Utterances surpass individuated statements and become a product of assemblages, of multiplicities. They all constitute a form of action to subvert the existing configurations of power and invent a new earth, new usages of language and a people to come in the figure of the Crakers and other resistant dissenters. This necessarily provides this trilogy with a social and political character. The trilogy intricately performs the revolutionary act of deterritorialisation, takes a flight towards the plane of immanence and constitutes the potential for becoming-minor of all states, forms and literature. It is never certain that the moment of deterritorialisation will necessarily come up with affirmative outcomes, considering that it is always in danger of capture. But still this does not prevent Atwood’s post-apocalyptic world from being “a thing of hope” as the Craker, Blackbeard, puts it at the very end of the MaddAddam trilogy.

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Note 1. It is important and necessary to recognise the difficulty of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of time. Every attempt to translate and articulate it would be reductive of its depth, which extends to a great variety of works including A Thousand Plateaus, Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, Bergsonism and Nietzsche and Philosophy. The third synthesis of time, just like the other two, for instance, inholds several different ideas and processes such as caesura, eternal return, event and seriation, which Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise with references primarily to Bergson and Nietzsche. Therefore, a complete view of their understanding of time would be too big a subject to fit into the limits of this chapter. That is why, I choose to interpret it in simpler terms.

References Atwood, Margaret. “Notes on Power Politics.” Acta Victoriana 97. 2 (1973). ———. “Introduction: Into the Labyrinth.” In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. xiii–xxv. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. ———. Oryx and Crake (2003). London: Virago, 2013a. ———. The Year of the Flood (2009). London: Virago, 2013b. ———. MaddAddam (2013). London: Virago, 2014a. ———. “Burning Bushes: Why Heaven and Hell Went to Planet X.” In In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). 15–38. London: Virago, 2014b. ———. “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia.” In In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). 38–66. London: Virago, 2014c. ———. “George Orwell: Some Personal Connections.” In In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). 141–150. London: Virago, 2014d. Bouson, J.  Brooks. “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3 (2004) 12–156. Bosco, Mark. “The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake.” In Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. 156–172. New York: Continuum, 2010.

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Case, Eleanor and Maggie McDonald. “Life After Man”: Interview with Margaret Atwood. New Scientist (2003): 40–43. Colebrook, Claire. Understanding Deleuze. Edited by Rachel Fensham and Terry Threadgold. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. DeFalco, Amelia. Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense (1969). Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia UP., 1990. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October 59 (1992): 3–7. ———. Difference and Repetition (1968). Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP., 1994. ———. Essays: Critical and Clinical (1993). Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P., 1983. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II: Revisited Edition. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Time out of Joint.” Time and History in Deleuze and Serres. New York: Continuum, 2012. Jameson, Fredrick. “Then You Are Them”. London Reviews of Books 31.17 (2009): 7–8. Joseph, Terra Walston. “Victims of Global Capitalism in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Imaginary.” In The Age of Dystopia: Our Genre, Our Fears and Our Future. Edited by Louisa MacKay Demerjian. 35–47. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Unfashionable Observations. Translated by Richard T. Gray. Stanford: Stanford UP., 1998. Rao, Eleonora. “Home and Nation in Margaret Atwood’s Later Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Edited by Coral Ann Howells. 100–113. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Talpalaru, Margrit. “Extinctathon: Margaret Atwood’s Urge for an Immanent Episteme in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” Canada and Beyond 3.1.2 (2013):243–265. Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer. “With No Guarantees, Of Course.” In Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions. 58–89. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.

8 Conclusion: Contemporary Dystopia as an Art of the Possible

The primary and highest aim of literature is, as Deleuze puts in his Dialogues with Parnet, “[t]o leave, to escape […] to trace a line […] to cross the horizon, enter into another life. […] The line of flight is deterritorialisation” (2007, p. 36). The act of deterritorialisation is not merely a defining feature of literature but also a principal characteristic that typifies the movement of the contemporary world. Contemporary dystopia as the leading literary genre of the age makes use of deterritorialisation in creating ruptures and divergences from the dominant power structures while the contemporary world under the reign of late capitalism makes use of it to ensure the circulation of capital. This interesting intersection has paved the way for the creation of an alternative terminology to define the world and dystopian fiction today. This new terminology has defined any territory under late capitalism both as a dystopian territory, where late capitalism rhizomatically and immanently expands itself through its axiomatic, and as a distopian territory, where this axiomatic system falls back on itself, is turned into an act of resistance and hence helps to create lines of flight from this immanent machine.

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This book has pointed to a new moment in the history of dystopia in which dystopia has moved towards the place of immanence and begun to display new tendencies distinguishing it from the earlier examples. Among these new tendencies, the most remarkable one is that it has begun to re-present the present of today’s societies of control rather than depicting an image of the future. In the societies of control under the late capitalist system, the present has become utterly dystopian and the future has become unpredictable. Contemporary dystopian writers have realised the fact that the present has become a dystopia, and the only hope lies not in escaping this dystopian reality but in finding effective ways of resistance within it. They have abandoned envisioning fictitious future scenarios and begun to demonstrate our real experience of survival within the dystopia of the present. As the emphasis on dystopia has shifted from the future to the present, dystopian writers have no longer felt the necessity to locate their worlds in future settings. The emphasis on the present suggests a space of possibility rather than a grim pessimism of not imagining a future. In Fredrick Jameson’s words, the absolute present promises “a new kind of freedom” in the contemporary world (Jameson 2003, p. 710). It inholds all the potentialities to rescue itself. Feeding on the power of the present, contemporary dystopia embraces the art of the possible, which, for Deleuze, is the capability of seeing the “possible at the heart of a problem which stands opposed to the possibilities or propositions of consciousness, to the currently accepted opinions which make up hypotheses” (1994, p. 201). Contemporary dystopia recognises the possible at the heart of the problem and takes affirmative action to disrupt the established norms and forms that create the problem in the first place and create the new from within the problem itself. As shown in the analyses, Miéville and Atwood acknowledge the presence of the possible in today’s dystopia and take up the mission to actualise it in their works. Both New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station and the pre-­ apocalyptic world of the MaddAddam trilogy become the portrayal of the problem. Both provide a close insight into how the capitalist social machine operates as illustrated through the workings of the multinational pharmaceutical corporations in Atwood’s work and the function of the slake-moths and the city government in Miéville’s novel. Both

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simultaneously recognise the possible at the heart of the dystopian reality and look for ways of resistance from its within. In other words, they test out the distopian potential of the contemporary world. In creating a distopian territory, both mark the loopholes of the axiomatic system, which offers an opportunity to experiment with the formation of smooth spaces in lieu of striated spaces, and asubjectivities in lieu of Oedipalised organisms. Both contend that the possible is always there in the midst of the impossibilities; the real trick is to be able to see and actualise it. Although the close textual analyses in this book have been conducted on a small corpus of Miéville’s and Atwood’s works in order to present a subtle treatment of the new concepts it proposes, these ideas can be extended to a larger corpus of contemporary works from different literary environments and geographical coordinates, such as Matthew Tobin Anderson’s Feed (2002), William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), Max Barry’s Jennifer Government (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Richard Morgan’s Market Forces (2004), J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (2006), Tahsin Yücel’s Gökdelen (2006), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), Jon Armstrong’s Yarn (2010), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), Veronica Roth’s Divergent Trilogy (2011–2013), John Twelve Hawks’s Spark (2014) and Cindy Pon’s Want (2017). Having said that, I do not present Deleuzian insight into dystopia as the only theoretical model to understand the contemporary world and contemporary dystopia. Rather I see it as an alternative way of looking that can function complementarily with other approaches rather than expelling them. It remains for others to decide to what extent a Deleuzian insight is useful and applicable as a literary theoretical tool. This book has demonstrated its value in conducting a schizoanalytic reading of Miéville’s and Atwood’s works in great detail, and a closer look at some of the aforementioned works would possibly make one realise, if not its usefulness, its coherence on the intricate relation between the world and dystopian fiction today. To begin with the British writer William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), this is doubtlessly among the most telling examples of immanent dystopia that illuminates the dysaxiomatic of the new world order  in essential ways. In Pattern Recognition, Gibson presents how

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contemporary societies have begun to evolve into control societies more swiftly than ever, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. The novel set in the present time successfully exhibits the dual nature  of contemporary societies, re-presenting the dystopian reality of the control era—run by what Deleuze calls “a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers” (1992, p. 6)—and simultaneously its distopian territory to create alternative spaces and subjectivities. The dystopian world portrayed in the novel is a literal description of today’s societies of control, where the global market takes the helm of all life with the assistance of computers and advanced technology; blind consumption of goods, information, ideas and ideologies becomes the new cultural habit; and advertisements become the new language. The striating and Oedipalising forces operating in this globalised and computerised world is portrayed through the lenses of the main protagonist, Cayce Pollard. Cayce is a freelance marketing consultant working for multinational corporations, having a unique sense of branding, marketing and advertising due to her sensitivity to corporate logos. Through the main focaliser Cayce, on the one hand, we observe how the capitalist social machine in the form of multinational corporations striates city spaces such as London and Tokyo with its perpetual bombardment of signs, logos, brands, trademarks and adverts, and moulds people into ardent consumers of the hottest trends, that is, into subjects in debt. On the other hand, we witness how these societies are not entirely devoid of revolutionary forces to resist their dystopian aspects. The revolutionary forces inherent in these societies of control unveil themselves primarily in the creation of smooth spaces. As opposed to the striations of the city spaces, the rhizomatic nature of cyberspace in these societies allows for the emergence of alternative spaces of resistance such as the Footage. The Footage is a smooth space free from the capture of the capitalist social machine, offering an open and liberated site for art and artists. Whereas everything including ideas, ideologies, fashion, individuals, literature and even life itself is commodified and corporatised within the striated space of this late capitalist world, art could escape commodification and corporatisation in the Footage. The Footage is purged not only of the restrictions of the corporate world but also of national, cultural and economic boundaries. It rests upon the principle of heterogeneity as

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its rhizomatic and vast space is open to users from all walks of life regardless of race, gender, age, colour and social status. The emergence of such smooth spaces in the dystopian societies of control depicted in the novel promises the possibilities of alternative subjectivities such as Nora, who is the mentally disabled twin sister of Stella Volkova and the anonymous creator of the Footage. Her description as a mentally abnormal person with shrapnel in her brain is quite ironic. Her non-Oedipalised orphan consciousness, the source of her revolutionary power, is what makes her the abnormal in the gaze of others. She is the abnormal in the late capitalist system as it cannot tame and control her. In describing the dystopian and distopian aspects of these control societies projected in Pattern Recognition, Cayce is perhaps the most appropriate case to start with. She has internalised “the semiotics of the marketplace” (Gibson 2003, p. 2) and has a perfect eye on what can be branded, marketed and sold: she can “point a commodifier at it. It gets productised. Turned into units. Marketed” (Gibson 2003, p. 86). She, however, is simultaneously allergic to trademarks, with her body developing a physical reaction, panic attacks and nausea towards them. She is both the most desired subject of late capitalism, whose changeability and sensitivity fosters the workings of the capitalist machine, and the greatest adversary of late capitalism who inholds the potentialities to resist it. In other words, she is both inside and outside this dystopian system. She is inside the system because she has an acute sense of recognising the patterns that would sell most; and the system desperately needs her. She is outside the system because her body literally desires to repel these patterns, developing what Jameson calls “a commodity bulimia” (2005, p.  390). Her bulimic body becomes an expression of a body without organs that oscillates between emptiness and fullness and of a dysaxiomatic that alternates between yielding and resisting. Similar patterns marking the control societies’ position between yielding and resisting are portrayed in the Australian writer Max Barry’s 2003 novel Jennifer Government. In Jennifer Government, Barry literalises the globalisation of capitalist production with an insidious collaboration between multinational corporations and governments, visualising their decentred and deterritorialised means of control. The story takes place in a remarkably familiar setting to ours in which the United States has taken control of almost the entire world including North America, the UK,

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Ireland, Central Asia, most of Africa, India, the Middle East and many others except the countries in the European Union. The governments and governmental institutions are all privatised and closely collaborate with corporations. It is no longer political decisions but economic decisions that determine the course of events in this world. The portrayal of the world under the economic hegemony of the States is remarkably reminiscent of the new world order Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri envision in their co-written work Empire. For Hardt and Negri, the contemporary world has been evolved into a kind of empire which is predominantly ruled by the United States. They call it an empire not in the sense that this world order shares similarities with the empires of the past but in the sense that it is vast, unbounded and rhizomatically expanded (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. xiv). It is purged of national and political boundaries. No matter how much the abandonment of such boundaries suggests a strong sense of freedom, Barry meticulously demonstrates that freedom is allocated not to the people of this new world but to the privatised governments and multinational corporations, only to create a globalised world market where the infinite circulation of capital is possible. In contrast, people of this new world are exposed to incessant means of control: they are defined, classified and identified by their companies, and marked, monitored and controlled by barcodes and corporate logos on their bodies. In short, they literally become the commodities of the corporate capitalist system: “We make cars we know some people will die in. We make medicine that carries a chance of fatal reaction. We make guns […] you want to expel someone here for murder, let’s start with the Philip Morris Liaison. We have all, at some time, put a price tag on a human life and decided we can afford it” (Barry 2003, p.  221–222). Each and every sphere of public and private life is strictly striated, corporatised and invaded by the semiotics of the marketplace, and all communication going on within and through these spaces is controlled through cybernetic machines and computers. The ceaseless control over space and subjectivities in this corporate capitalist world strongly resonates with the dystopian pole of the capitalist axiomatic. As suggested in the novel, however, our abilities to resist and elude this ceaseless control are implicit in the present itself. As Hardt and Negri put it, Empire, the present order, manifests within itself all the

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creative forces that are “capable of autonomously constructing a counter-­ Empire” (2000, p. xv). This means that one can be or even must be within Empire in order to resist it precisely because being within it would provide one with the necessary tools to fight with it. This is exactly how resistance takes place in Barry’s Jennifer Government. The anti-corporate activist groups including such members as Hack Nike recognise the very fact that this corporate dystopia offers its own weapons and calls for its own destruction. One of the strategies they discover is to use the semiotics of the marketplace against itself, believing that if the corporatist capitalist system expands its global market with advertising, then their resistance to it should be to manipulate these advertisements for revolutionary purposes. They, thus, expose the dystopian reality of the system by reversing the adverts of the corporations: Then there was a Nike poster on the freeway that used to say: I CAN SHOOT THE MOON; now it said: I CAN SHOOT 14 KIDS. Beneath it was the line: NIKE KILLS ITS CUSTOMERS. […] a medical insurer that now boasted: WE CARE ABOUT YOUR WALLET. On the corner of Springvale Road, Coke told people to ENJOY STOMACH CANCER. A tire retailer advertised: 25% MORE CARBON MONOXIDE, and CARS = DEATH! (Barry 2003, p. 216)

Such actions taken by these revolutionary groups in Barry’s Jennifer Government justify Deleuze and Guattari’s views on the ways of resisting the capitalist social machine. For them, to resist is not to “withdraw from the world market” but to “go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialisation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 239). In going still further, these groups smooth over the striated spaces of the world market, accelerating its flows to the opposite direction, to the distopian pole of the capitalist axiomatic. The American writer Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013) similarly sheds light upon the bilateral position of the territories under late capitalism. The story takes place in California and tackles the subtle and all-­ encompassing practices of a tech company, The Circle, over society and its people. Eggers describes The Circle in such a way that it strongly resonates with Google: The Circle is a tech company that produces the most

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innovative digital technology. As people keep using its technology, it accumulates more and more information. One of its recent inventions is TruYou, a digital platform where people create an online identity for themselves and can integrate all the other online identities and passwords on other social media accounts into this online identity. This platform becomes a metonymic embodiment of the workings of The Circle: it is simply designed to accumulate information and produce statistics of the users’ buying, voting and other civic behaviours rather than facilitating their work: “the actual buying habits of actual people were now eminently mappable and measurable, and the marketing to those actual people could be done with surgical precision” (Eggers 2013, p. 22). As such, it is intended to become the only tool to pay taxes, shop, vote and do other social activities while simultaneously recording the statistics of these activities. In the digital age of what Deleuze calls a third generation of machines and computers, information becomes the most valuable asset in the world. In collecting data, thus, The Circle turns out to be a power mechanism which becomes much more omnipotent than governments. The omnipotence of The Circle is achieved through the new digital means of control it invents such as SeeChange cameras. These means of control are no longer enforced as they were in disciplinary societies. But they are willingly consented to by the users of technology because people are made to believe that using them would improve the quality of their lives and provide them with the kind of transparency required in a democracy. The links forged between the idea of going transparent and the idea of democracy is quite mocking in the sense that the more The Circle uses the rhetoric of democracy, the further it goes away from the real essence of democracy. By means of its digital tools and social media influencers, it skilfully manipulates and influences the behaviours of the people from buying to banking, from voting even to thinking, under the illusion of democracy and freedom. This encapsulating system is highly reminiscent of the dystopian aspect of today’s control societies where the neoliberal discourse of freedom is employed to cover the fact that every single space, be it public or private, is strictly sedentarised, organised and handled, and every single person is insidiously repressed, monitored and controlled. As the title of the novel suggests, life, space and subjectivity is encircled in such a way as to enable

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the circulation of capital only. In the midst of these encircled impossibilities, Eggers portrays some distopian moments. Some resistant dissenters, Ty and Mercer, strive to push the limits of this circle and create an outside within it. Despite the optimistic suggestions of the ending where Mao is seen dreaming of a world without The Circle, Eggers leaves his point bleak in promising there could be a way out. The 2017 film adaptation of The Circle, however, takes up the mission of finding the possible at the heart of The Circle. It not only makes a critique of the idea of ceaseless control that is confused with “transparency” and “democracy” but also interrogates the possible ways of resistance in such a dystopian world of cameras, drones, smart devices and AI technologies. It offers a much more optimistic outlook with its ending, where Mao realises the grim reality of so-called democracy and makes a bold attempt to use it against those in power, that is, the politicians and the CEOs. The revolutionary action begins when the politicians and corporate fathers are exposed as transparent, as much as the people are. The success of such an action is promising for the new digital tools that are used to control us are sufficiently powerful to be used to rescue us. In order words, the tools that create a dystopia are simultaneously capable of creating a distopia. The Taiwanese writer Cindy Pon’s 2017 novel Want could serve as a good example for describing the dual nature of the capitalist axiomatic in another geographical setting, the Republic of China. Departing from the dystopian pieces which predominantly depict the rise of late capitalism in North America and Europe, Want presents a portrayal of the late capitalist workings in Asia which have gradually begun to share a leading position with the US in the distribution of capital and high-tech sectors today. The world illustrated in the novel is indeed a literalisation of the current socio-economic dynamics emerging in the Republic of China. The novel sheds light upon the dystopian aspects of the growth of late capitalism in Taipei. It pictures Taipei as a city which is turning into a global market with growing alliances between the government and big businesses like the Jin Corporation. As the city embraces corporatism, it begins to be defined by its heterogeneity and diversity, inhabiting people from different racial, political and social backgrounds just like other global capitals such as New  York, London and Toronto. However, the heterogeneous and diverse nature of the city is immediately stigmatised

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and captured into strict striations. In spatial terms, even though the city space is rhizomatically scattered, bringing the slums next to the skyscrapers, the capitalist social machine builds up enormous boundaries between each neighbourhood, creating hierarchical spatial organisations. The city space is invaded by a bombardment of digital billboards, high-tech architecture and corporate advertising, exposing its people to the consumerist discourse on every single platform. In social and cultural terms, even though the sociocultural nature of the city goes beyond the national and racial boundaries, hosting a diverse variety of people from different backgrounds, such as the Philippines, China, Taiwan and India, the same cruel machine of capitalism constructs social and cultural boundaries among people as the yous, the haves, the meis and the have-nots, and plants animosity between these two poles. In presenting a critique of the late capitalist system in Asia, Want, unlike the Western examples of immanent dystopia, focuses more on the social and economic inequalities and environmental damages it brings about. The new digital means of control in this corporate world help to maintain these inequalities and damages, increasing the privileges and wealth of the few yous at the cost of victimising nature and the lives of the vast meis. Yet the novel simultaneously features the attempts to escape being appropriated within the system through the characterisation of Jason Zhou, who not only seeks for himself an identity that goes beyond the rigid cultural boundaries but also seeks to smooth over the striated spaces. In so doing, the strategy he employs slightly differs from those employed in the North American examples of immanent dystopia: resistance emerges not in the form of a collective action as the previous dystopian works, but in the form of individual heroism taken up by Zhou, who, like the other resistant dissenters in the previous works, recognises the fact that the late capitalist system should be and could be overturned only from within by using its inner mechanisms against itself. Unlike the others, however, he performs his act of resistance as a personal take-on, which in a sense testifies to the divergences appearing in the modes of resistance in different political and cultural climates. Turkish writer Tahsin Yücel’s 2006 novel Gökdelen (The Skyscraper) could be another example of immanent dystopia to explore such

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divergences. Whereas immanent dystopias in the Western, North American and East Asian tradition predominantly portray worlds which almost completely assume a corporate capitalist system and evolve into a mature form of control societies, Yücel’s The Skyscraper renders the shift towards such a system in Turkey and explores not only the limits of late capitalism but also the limits of resistance in its new political and cultural environment. This shift to late capitalism materialises itself in the novel as the project of making Istanbul the New York of Turkey. This project is caricatured around the image of skyscrapers as the corporate fathers believe that the first step of creating a new world market like New York itself starts with building enormous skyscrapers. The image of skyscrapers is an interesting and yet highly convenient choice in defining the rise of late capitalism. They can be interpreted as the translation of late capitalism into architecture, representing the vertical accumulation of capital. As Yücel depicts it in the novel, the building up of gigantic skyscrapers in Istanbul and the rise of capital accumulation and the corporate capitalist system are closely juxtaposed, both necessitating an intricate affinity between the corporations and the government. In portraying the growing affinities between the two, Yücel not only discloses the underlying logic of late capitalism today but also explores the idea of privatisation and control. He presents a literal picture of how the law is privatised under the guise of “neoliberal democracy” and “globalisation” and how the means of information and communication, such as digital and printed media, are controlled and manipulated in a way that justifies the exploitative practices of the new corporation–government alliance. While presenting a critique of the dystopian reality in contemporary Turkey where the attempts to embrace the corporate capitalist system and the privatisation of the law are seen as a “revolutionary proposal” (Yücel 2018, p.  82), the novel simultaneously interrogates the possibilities of resistance. In a similar vein to the aforementioned dystopian writers, Yücel recognises the fact that resisting the late capitalist system requires us to be knowledgeable about its inner working mechanisms and its insidious means of control. As such, the resistant dissenters in the novel are portrayed as having chosen to remain within the system in order to find out its loopholes and learn how to use and abuse its own tools against itself. One of the dissenters is Can Tezcan who is a former revolutionary

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and a renowned lawyer currently working for one of the most corrupt corporations in the country. When he is offered the job, which is to prepare the legal and political background for the corporatisation of the law system, the only reason for him to accept the offer is the possibility that the corporatisation of the law could be used for revolutionary purposes. The underlying motivation behind the corporations’ insistence upon the corporatisation of the law is to eliminate the barriers that limit the infinite flows of capital. The late capitalist system deterritorialises the law system only for the smooth circulation of capital. The deterritorialised space of this system accelerates the duration and the procedures necessary for handling business cooperations between the government and the corporations because it technically removes the government and the law system from the scene. Nevertheless, this new system simultaneously offers a legal loophole to release the political prisoners, the revolutionaries from jail. Can Tezcan as a schizo subject both within and outside the system recognises the fact that the most effective means of resistance lies in the deterritorialising act of late capitalism and successfully uses it against the system itself. His revolutionary act of deterritorialisation eventually triggers a collective resistance towards the end of the novel. There appear to be some divergences among these immanent dystopias from different literary, political, cultural and geographical environments. These divergences are significant to capture the nuances of the passage from disciplinary societies to control societies and from industrial capitalism to late capitalism in different walks of life. It is first of all important to understand that each and every society’s passage may not necessarily be of the same degree, of the same pace and of the same style. As such, the differences among all these texts in terms of the treatment of the new societies and their ways of resistance can become a testimony to the idea that this passage has occurred at different paces in North America, Western Europe, Asia and the Middle East—a topic which could be explored for further comparative studies. Whilst the countries in North America and Western Europe seem to have completed the transition almost entirely, those in Asia, the Middle East or countries with a history of fundamentalist regimes seem to have either fallen behind in such a transition or been perceiving it differently. This is why each of these works offers a different set of problems arising out of the very same source, the

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late capitalist system, ranging from the increasing sense of incessant control to environmental disasters, from the consumerist pop culture to the degeneration of the juridical system. Each provides us with a remarkably different perspective on immanent dystopia and hence forces us to rethink its implications in different contexts and realise its potentials for application to different narratives. Notwithstanding these divergences among these immanent dystopias, their shared focus still remains on the nexus of the dystopian and the distopian poles of the contemporary world. They are all an autobiography of the present societies of control, re-presenting what is happening now rather than what will happen in the future. The re-presentation of the present appears almost as an allegorical presence in most of these works. They all demonstrate that societies of control defined by their rhizomatic, complex and hybrid nature are more open to the flourishing of smoothing forces of resistance. These forces can be generated more easily in societies of control from within because such societies as the pre-­ apocalyptic world of MaddAddam, the hybrid society of New Crobuzon and the cyber societies in Pattern Recognition and Jennifer Government reside on the plane of immanence; they are relatively more flexible and less confining in appearance, and their means of control are more likely to be used against themselves. As shown in the novels, this applies to the field of subjectification as well. As is strongly suggested by Deleuze’s notion of “the coils of a serpent” (1992, p. 7), the field of subjectification in societies of control is elastic and hence can be stretched for the emergence of new configurations. Thus, it is not surprising to see how effectively these dystopian writers expose rigid forms of subjectivity to the act of deterritorialisation. They place their characters in a kind of delirium where subjectivity begins to take flight from all the pre-existing norms and models, and moves towards a becoming or a nomadic trajectory. The alternative subjectivities put forward as a consequence of deterritorialising activity are often beyond the Oedipal form, getting rid of all the reductive codes that bind them to the prison of the organism. Once the subjects break free from the Oedipal yoke, they move towards a becoming in which they overcome themselves by overturning the rigid stratifications structured upon their subjectivity. This process has often been observed in the novels as becoming-other-than-the-self or

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becoming-­minoritarian, both of which suggest a transformation into an entity that is capable of establishing a more affirmative relationship with itself, with the world and with other entities. However, it is important to recognise the fact that the transition to a form of becoming may not always necessarily be permanent or absolute. On the contrary, as Deleuze and Guattari continually underline, the act of deterritorialisation which carries the subjects from the molar and Oedipal modes to a nomadic movement or becoming always runs the risk of further reterritorialisations in different forms. It is only a few who could actually achieve absolute deterritorialisation. Be it relative or absolute deterritorialisation that takes place in these texts, it is obvious that the principal drive behind these acts is to affirm life by rescuing it from its congestions. This drive positions contemporary dystopian writers as part of a larger political agenda, which can be called the micropolitics of dystopia. They constitute a struggle against the majoritarian power and its practices. This struggle lies in their revolutionary potential to create not only lines of flight from and within the dominant power but also new alternatives and novel conceptions. As Deleuze and Guattari often highlight in What Is Philosophy?, there are three major disciplines through which the active micropolitics of resistance and affirmative creation could come into being. These are art, science and philosophy. In the MaddAddam trilogy and Perdido Street Station as depicted in the detailed analyses, as well as in other contemporary works like Pattern Recognition, The Circle and Jennifer Government, art and science become the major means through which an active micropolitics of resistance is formed against the capitalist social machine. These writers depict how science and art could deviate from the majoritarian forms by becoming a nomad science, as in the case of Crake and Isaac, and becoming a minor art, as in the case of Lin and Motley. What is more interesting is that the transgressive politics drawn in science and art merge with philosophy in their constitution of new conceptions. This explains why Crake’s Paradice Project has an underlying philosophical aspect, that is, a struggle not only against the capitalist practices of multinational corporations but also against the microfascistic tendency inherent in human beings. Such a philosophical depth culminates in the creation of a new conception of man as an entity deprived of all his transcendental ties,

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which is put into practice through the Crakers. In the same way, Isaac’s nomadic science is generated from a revolt against science relying upon a binaristic thinking system and represents the conception of transgression in its endeavour to create a crisis energy. In artistic activities, accordingly, a similar philosophical attitude is embraced both by Lin and by Motley. Contemporary dystopian writers employ art as an act of resistance, “a resistance to the present”, an enterprise of “acting counter to the past, and therefore on the present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future – but the future […] [as] the infinite Now, the nun” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 112) and a creative art of the possible. The creative enterprise illustrated particularly in Atwood’s and Miéville’s works along with others suggests that immanent dystopia could be seen as an example of minoritarian writing or minor literature, which Deleuze and Guattari define through its political aspect, collective dimension and deterritorialisation of language. The micropolitics explicitly drawn in these works becomes a manifestation of their underlying political agenda. These texts are obviously bound up with wider concerns rather than with individual problems. This necessarily gives these texts a collective dimension because there are only collective assemblages of enunciation that replace the subjects of enunciation. This is not to say that these texts do not have any narrators or characters. It rather suggests that the voice of the narrators and characters are there not to be in the forefront but there only to open these texts to a larger context where each and every individual utterance designates a collective utterance. The voice heard in immanent dystopia is, then, the voice of what Deleuze calls a people-to-come. As shown in the analyses, contemporary dystopian writers engage in an effort to fashion the people that are missing in the majoritarian discourse. Therefore, the people-to-come depicted in immanent dystopia represent not the majority but the people that enter into becoming-revolutionary against what is majoritarian. The people-to-­ come of these dystopian narratives are a minor people that discover and revitalise the very forces inherent in the present to create new possibilities for life. They are, in this sense, internal war machines of the dystopian present. This political and collective enterprise introduced in these texts is also intricately reflected in their textuality,  narrative styles and linguistic

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inquiries as a sign of their minoritarian writing. These writers experiment with the impact of deterritorialisation in language without following a particular path other than letting language take flight and stutter. The stuttering of language is achieved in the MaddAddam trilogy by removing it from its representative, transcendent pole and introducing it into the world of signifiers that are purged of binarism. In Perdido Street Station, however, the same impact is created through linguistic anomalies such as ungrammaticalities, silences and asyntactic divergences. Similar linguistic divergences can be found in Pattern Recognition, Jennifer Government and The Circle as well. Even though these texts differ in terms of their strategies to deterritorialise the majoritarian language, they all unite in their success in forming a minor language within it. Unlike the majoritarian language that allows only for the voice of the powerful, the minor language they formulate could articulate the impersonal forces and potentialities of life unleashed through revolutionary means. This is best illustrated in the intense use of free indirect discourse in these texts, which Deleuze sees as the real form of language that could enunciate the impersonalities, intensities and haecceities of life. In this way, language turns back to its natural state just as life itself turns back to its unorganised, chaotic yet productive form. The political activity of deterritorialisation marked in these texts indicates that contemporary dystopian writers become the cultural symptomatologists of the world and the practitioners of minoritarian writing. In diagnosing the dystopian symptoms of societies and finding remedies for these symptoms, these writers employ a double process of deterritorialisation: the deterritorialisation of space, subjectivity and language as a way of curing life from its sicknesses, and the deterritorialisation of the concept of dystopia as a way of curing it from its transcendent tendencies. This double process of deterritorialisation taking place in contemporary dystopia moves life and the concept of dystopia to the plane of immanence. In the plane of immanence, life’s sicknesses are remedied by passing from its dystopian territory to a distopian one whilst simultaneously the traditional concept of dystopia is dismantled by changing its content and form from the worst future scenarios to the already-existing contemporary reality and from a grim pessimism to an affirmative hope. This makes contemporary dystopia an enterprise of health which is sufficient

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not only “to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera” (Deleuze 1997, p. 7) but also to liberate the concept of dystopia wherever it is imprisoned by and within the plane of transcendence.

References Barry, Max. Jennifer Government. New York: Vintage, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7. ———. Difference and Repetition (1968). Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP., 1994. ———. Essays: Critical and Clinical (1993). Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ———. What Is Philosophy? (1991). Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II: Revisited Edition. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Eggers, Dave. The Circle. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. Jameson, Fredrick. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (2003): 695–718. ———. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkeley Books, 2003. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2000. Pon, Cindy. Want. New York and London: Simon Pulse, 2017. Yücel, Tahsin. Gökdelen (2006). İstanbul: Can Yayınları, 2018.

Index1

A

Affect, 39, 48, 49, 71, 73, 107, 118, 121, 167, 168 Affirmation, 5, 43, 122, 161 Axiomatic, 52, 53, 60, 63n2, 85

Body without organs, 52, 53, 77, 101, 107, 122, 123, 159–161, 163, 183 C

B

Becoming, 3, 7, 47–49, 53, 57, 81, 83, 98, 103, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 125, 154, 155, 157, 162–171, 174, 175, 191, 192 Becoming-animal, 14, 163–170 Becoming-minoritarian, 14, 167, 169, 192 Becoming-other, 160, 162, 163, 172 Binary oppositions, 45, 47, 102, 168, 172

Capitalist social machine, 51–53, 63n2, 76–79, 82, 83, 86, 93, 101–103, 105–107, 109–116, 122–125, 127, 129, 170–172, 180, 182, 185, 188, 192 Collectivity, 15, 68, 71, 109–112 Control, 4, 6, 7, 13, 17, 21, 23, 26–28, 36–38, 46, 54–62, 66, 70, 77, 78, 86, 89n2, 100, 102, 105, 106, 108, 123, 129, 139–141, 143, 144, 146, 153, 158, 166, 180, 182–184, 186–191

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 R. Çokay Nebioğlu, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7

197

198 Index

Corporate capitalism, 147 Corporations, 13, 52, 57, 58, 60, 138–145, 147, 149, 150, 153, 163, 164, 180, 182–185, 189, 190, 192 Corporatism, 2, 73, 140, 187 Critical dystopia, 31–33, 39n3 Cultural physician, 11, 72 Cyberspace, 182

Dystopia, 1–15, 17–39, 39n1, 40n3, 43–62, 65–73, 75–87, 93–102, 132, 135–175, 179–195 E

Empire, 97, 98, 184, 185 Event, 49, 139, 155–157, 176n1, 184

D

F

Deleuze, Gilles, 4–7, 9–12, 43–46, 48–50, 52–54, 56–62, 63n2, 65–73, 75–87, 87–88n1, 88n2, 89n3, 90n4, 102, 105–107, 110–112, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 124, 129, 131, 145, 146, 150–157, 159–161, 166–169, 172, 174, 175, 176n1, 179, 180, 182, 185, 186, 191–195 Desire, 4, 7, 11, 19, 22–24, 27, 30, 44, 47, 49, 50, 53, 72, 75–80, 82–86, 87–88n1, 88–89n2, 94, 96, 106, 107, 109–112, 114–118, 120, 122, 123, 127, 129, 135, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 158, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 183 Deterritorialisation, 5–7, 14, 51, 53, 54, 61, 63n2, 66, 68–70, 77, 79, 81, 85, 86, 90n3, 102, 120, 122, 123, 125, 128, 130, 148, 151, 153, 155, 168, 170, 175, 179, 190–194 Disciplinary society, 4, 44–46, 56–58, 61, 105, 186, 190 Discipline, 55–62, 105, 192

Foucault, Michel, 56 Freud, Sigmund, 78, 79, 88n2 G

Globalisation, 2, 30, 34, 73, 97, 100, 183, 189 Government, 13, 26, 28, 37, 38, 70, 78, 100, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 123, 180, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190 Guattari, Felix, 4–6, 9–12, 43–45, 48–50, 52–54, 56, 63n2, 65–69, 75–80, 83, 84, 86, 87–88n1, 88n2, 89n3, 90n4, 106, 107, 110, 112, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 129, 145, 146, 150–152, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 166, 167, 169, 176n1, 185, 192, 193 H

Hardt, Michael, 52, 62, 107, 184 Hope, 3, 9, 20, 23, 24, 29, 31, 32, 37–39, 45–48, 55, 97, 100, 175, 180, 193, 194

 Index 

Hybridity, 101–103, 109, 111–114, 122, 123 I

Immanence, 4–14, 17–39, 43–50, 52, 54, 55, 63n2, 71, 72, 82, 93–132, 152, 171, 175, 180, 191, 194 Immanent dystopia, 9, 10, 14, 34–39, 47–51, 54, 61, 62, 66–71, 80–86, 93–102, 135–175 Internet, 60, 61, 149 J

Jameson, Fredrick, 40n3, 45, 48, 139, 143, 146, 148, 180, 183

Market/marketing, 45, 52, 55, 60, 70, 105, 106, 142–145, 149, 182, 185–187 Media, 36, 59, 139, 189 Micropolitics, 15, 52, 103, 118, 169, 192, 193 Minoritarian, 4, 5, 7, 11, 65–73, 109, 117, 126–129, 131, 171, 193, 194 Minor literature, 11, 65–69, 193 Multiplicity, 5, 31, 43, 45–49, 53, 60, 65, 72, 80–82, 90n4, 98, 102, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 130, 131, 137, 146, 150, 164, 167–170, 173, 175 N

L

Late capitalism, 2, 4–7, 13, 15, 30, 31, 34, 43, 63n2, 69, 70, 73, 76–87, 89n2, 97, 100–104, 106, 107, 122, 125, 132, 140–144, 149, 152, 153, 159, 164, 165, 171, 172, 179, 183, 187, 189, 190 Lines of flight, 7, 36–38, 47, 53, 65, 79, 81, 83, 85, 102, 113–115, 121, 122, 126, 132, 169, 171, 179, 192

Nation-state, 2, 29, 52, 61 Neoliberalism, 45, 46 Nomadism, 14, 53 O

Oedipalisation, 50, 53, 70, 76, 85, 89n2, 113, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 152, 165, 166 P

M

Majoritarian, 65–71, 105, 115–118, 123, 125–130, 171, 172, 174, 192–194

199

Paranoiac, 77–82, 84, 86, 89, 118, 126 People to come, 11, 68, 73, 75–83, 85, 103, 130, 151, 175, 193

200 Index

Power, 2, 6, 14, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 37–39, 44, 48, 50, 52, 53, 56–61, 66, 68–73, 76, 83, 95, 105–107, 109, 111–114, 117, 121, 122, 124–127, 129, 132, 135, 138, 140, 142, 143, 150, 151, 169–171, 174, 175, 179, 180, 183, 186, 187, 192 Process, 5–7, 43, 46–48, 52, 54, 66, 79, 81, 82, 84, 88n2, 101, 105, 113, 120, 122, 124, 142, 143, 149, 153–155, 157, 163, 167, 168, 174, 175, 176n1, 191, 194 Production, 5, 52, 53, 57, 61, 75, 76, 80, 87–88n1, 96, 103, 106, 107, 153, 183 Progress, 1, 18, 20, 21, 25, 48, 144, 145 Psychoanalysis, 78, 83, 84, 87n1, 88–89n2 R

Resistance, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 26, 28, 30, 32, 35–39, 44, 46–48, 53, 54, 59–62, 70, 75, 80–82, 87, 95, 97, 101, 102, 107, 109–113, 116, 117, 121, 123, 126, 129, 132, 135, 140, 143, 145–149, 151, 153, 154, 158, 170, 171, 174, 179–182, 185, 187–193 Reterritorialisation, 5–7, 62, 63n2, 77, 85, 86, 122, 124, 125, 170, 192

Revolution, 9, 21, 39, 50, 97, 98, 102, 137 Rhizome, 47, 60 S

Schizoanalysis, 75–87 Schizophrenic, 77–81, 83, 86, 113, 117, 118, 120, 121, 129, 171 Smooth spaces, 45, 57–60, 62, 79, 85, 86, 89n3, 102, 107–110, 112, 125, 142, 145–147, 149, 150, 159, 167, 181–183 Society of control, 105, 142 Sovereignty, 52, 57, 76, 77, 105 State, 2, 19, 21, 26–29, 33, 58–61, 63n2, 67, 87n1, 89n2, 96, 97, 102–105, 107–111, 113–117, 122–125, 135–137, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 158, 159, 162, 175, 194 Striated spaces, 53, 56, 57, 79, 83, 85, 86, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 110, 141, 144–146, 149, 150, 159, 162, 165–167, 181, 182, 185, 188 Symptomatology, 73 T

Telos, 23–25, 43, 44, 46–48, 79, 82, 89n3, 148, 149, 159, 170 Temporality, 2, 47, 48, 117, 136, 137, 155, 157–159

 Index 

Totalitarianism, 24, 25, 28, 30, 33, 35, 56 Transcendence, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 17–39, 43–46, 55, 79, 82, 173, 195 Transcendent dystopia, 9, 24–31, 33–36, 38, 44, 47, 48, 50, 61 Transgressive dystopia, 30–35, 38

201

Utopia, 1, 2, 4, 10, 17–24, 27, 39n1, 39n2, 40n3, 43, 48, 50, 96, 97, 136 V

Virtual, 10, 54, 68, 73, 81, 111, 121, 149–151, 155–157, 159, 161, 169

U

W

Ustopia, 14, 135–140

World market, 62, 184, 185, 189