Portrait through Science Fictions


  It was really Hume who said it first. Reality as we think it, is an amalgam of perception, passion and imagination, in which we appear to lay claim to our world through fiction. So that in making up elements of that world or exaggerating what we are doing, or creating conjunctions within it between apparently unlinked thoughts, we make it feel our own. To inhabit a world or to lay a claim to a world is, as often as not, to lie about it, or perhaps rather it is to re-write reality such that one’s own importance or position is assured. This last point is all the more true for groups or individuals who are obsessed by the history books. To make a claim in the present to be historical cannot be other than fiction. What after all is ‘the new biological industrial revolution’ but a clear fiction? And what else is the Second Great Reform Bill for our time? Fiction has over hung the week like a smog, demanding individuals book their place in history. The most important of these moves has revolved around science and its fictions, in a week where ‘life was made’ and climate sceptics met, and it is these kinds of futures that this essay will examine.

  My starting points were two rather startling claims made this week. Firstly there was a claim that a scientist had made new life in the Petri dish, and secondly that the first humans who ‘will live to one thousand years old’ were already around sixty years of age. The main problem with both of these claims is that they are clearly appeals to Science Fiction. Science and its fictions are a curious pairing. On the face of it science as it is practised is a fiction-free zone, and yet of course from early on (at least the start of the nineteenth century) the very promise which science offered has created fiction. Moreover this fiction has a clear role as an outrider for science; it is in fiction as often as not, that the vision of a scientific future is codified and explored. More than that, the implication of what will be in the far future is examined, and to some degree worked through. It is then in fiction or through fiction that we all explore in advance some of the aspects of what it means to live in an age of science.

  Thence one might claim that science is a twin-headed process. It offers us at once a way to explore the world, and yet also a way to explore within ourselves what that exploration might means for ourselves, but also for the wider world. In fiction we explore the impossible - that is the unpredictable world which science creates, and then attempt to relate to that world. This process is then clearly rather a complex one. On the one level the fiction of science serves as a clear inspiration. It defines an agenda for what an aspiring scientist might do, what they might look to discover or hope for; space travel or eternal life are born in fiction, but science accepts them as possible realities for it to explore. This sentiment however works also the other way around, for it offers a way out for the scientist from all the sheer humdrum daily routine of science. For the meticulous careful and dull world of the laboratory is swapped in the mind’s eye for the glorious fiction that this world might conjure up. What one is doing then on the day to day level is boring, and yet as one locked in a dull technical task, one can no doubt keep oneself going with the dream of the brave new world which the experiments are opening on. This last point is of course all the more important as Fiction allows high profile sciences to make their funding pitches. For who will not fund a science that is only twenty years away form offering us eternal life? And who could not be impressed by the claim to make life and play God in the Lab (even if one does not like it)? Fiction (that is forecast claims about the use of a science) and funding clearly run together.

  However there is a clear danger in this fictive aspect to science (and its funding). The battle lines of fact and fiction in science are very odd ones. At any one time there are three such battle lines between science reality and science fiction. The first of these fronts concerns those very big claims, such as making life or discovering alien life. These claims often enough are exaggerations, which jolt the unwary reader far beyond the science that is being done, and into a fiction. To read then that a scientist has created life, that we are God, is one thing. To read that a scientist has merely taken the most inert of molecules in our cells (DNA) out of one single bacterium cell, and replicated it using molecular chemistry, and then replaced it with a manmade copy, and that that copy (when placed in the still-living cell) then worked, is quite another. The big claim with all the screaming headlines it produces and all the cod stories (of a virus to come) does not really match the reality. The entire debate then is fiction. - A fiction that is rewarding to the journalists who wish to sell newspapers, and to the scientist who gets extra laurels for his claim. The only trouble is that the truth is firmly being squeezed out here. What has happened is interesting but not worrying. A fact which, if it is lost, will lose sight of the value of this research, by burying it in anxiety, and regulating it with cod pieces of inappropriate legislation. More than that, when I hear these stories I always feel rather sorry for all the other researchers who are doing very good pieces of science as well, and yet who, because they do not make such flashy claims, miss out on funding but have to face the music of whatever cod regulation process public paranoia spins off as a result of this little piece of exaggeration.

  Beyond this last point, is a second front of Science and its fictions.  At the base of the front is a very deep problem. - Science empowers humanity as a whole, but deeply dis-empowers individuals who are not scientists. We live then in a world of machines and chemicals which we cannot control, and for which we are made to pay one way or other. This feeling of double powerlessness, where we cannot understand and so must pay, easily translates into something akin to paranoia. We assume that in putting us in this role, someone somewhere must be hiding something or doing something that we do not like. We look at science with eyes askance and suspect of all kinds of nonsense. We then endeavour to distrust it (and so return us our dignity). A distrust which given the fact that it robs us of the ability to understand our day to day gadgets, and so forces us into using a world way beyond our intuitive understanding, is reasonable, if misplaced. Science then when coupled with capitalism creates its own fictive resistances. We end up straining against the rather infantile position that it creates for us (the non-scientific population), and plot silly revenges. These revenges take the form of legislation to limit what a scientist can do what they can think about, and what we the general (ill-informed) public feel unhappy about them doing or thinking or feeling.

  This fiction is actually rather innocent, or it would be if big business did not move in and take it over. There is money to be made from cod science. Money that is all the easier to make because one can market back to disenfranchised individuals their own powerlessness, one can sell them endless little remedies each of which might be therapeutically valueless, and yet contain their own snippet of power and self-treatment. Alternative therapies then occupy the space that science blasts open. They offer a way to colonalize that feeling of powerlessness that descends upon the non-scientific citizen in the age of science. This fact then makes these disciplines effectively sacrosanct. For science cannot effectively attack them for being unscientific and useless. Or perhaps rather, the scientific community can attack them, and can prove that not one of their claims is justified, but this will not affect their position; indeed in a very real sense it will confirm it. For the very attack reminds individuals who use these services why they use them in the first place. The therapies will then say ‘look, science does not like us, that means we must be on to something as they are worried that we, and our hidden truth are right and they are worried’, a claim that finds accord in the souls of individuals who feel marooned in the world of science and look for solace and power of their own. Alternative therapies offer then individuals their own little piece of power, and theory, there own piece of hidden knowledge in a world that appears choc-a-bloc with specialisms and their hidden codes.

  All of which is fine of course as long as the very wealthy cod drug and faux remedy makers do not mistake what they’re doing for actual science. The trouble is they do more than that, as it is rather easy for them to do so, and so to use their constituency of those who feel disenfranchised by real science to make mischief, in a democratic age. I.e. their mass appeal allows them to punch way beyond their weight, and force science to move around their fictions, and worry at them.

  The third front is in many ways the deepest and most problematic. This front opens up at the conjunction of science, capitalisms, the state and the future. Science places us in a position were aspects of the future are forever manifesting themselves, for us to worry about in the here and now. And the real problem here is that in this here and now we only have science fiction as our guide for navigation to that future. Take as an example energy security. The problem is that we need to plan here and now for the next twenty years or so of energy production, but to do so at a time when no scheme is pain free in the short term. More than that in a world of shifting politics and shifting science it is not possible to know whether the scheme which one goes for now will still look good in five years’ time let alone twenty years’ time. There can be no guarantee therefore that one makes the right decision, and yet a decision needs to be made all the same (as no decision is even worse). What every politician can be sure of, is that whatever decisions they make now, will be pilloried in the short term and there will be moments at which it looks like it will all go horribly wrong whatever the eventual outcome. They are then faced with a leap into the dark. Or perhaps better a leap into fiction. What they choose will be eventually down to what prediction of the future, what fictions, they accept and which they do not. More than that, our attitude to that decision, in the short term at least, will by and large be defined by fiction. The general population’s role in this will be to read about their (the politician’s) choice and plug it into a number of possible plotlines (world saved, this world damned, future threat, etc.). Science fiction inhabits the breach into the future that science makes. We need to worry about that future now, now when we only have fiction to guide us (and form our manual for what will be).

  Science develops then a frontline between knowledge and the future, that forces us to confront fiction. Moreover politics is necessarily on the fiction side of this front. For political decisions that concerns events in the far future (more than one electoral term away), are always fiction, and not just to the politicians. They must then sell a future fear or hope in the here and now, a future that is worrying enough for us to take pain in the present in the name of what is to come. This move is possible, and yet needs a powerful myth or fear or politics to produce it; i.e. it needs a powerful fiction. At which point of course the Left routinely pricks up their ears, for they see the reflection of themselves in this politics of the future, and assume then that it must go hand in hand with their agenda for global development (and not capitalism’s, which they claim quite reasonably caused the problem in the first place). The trouble then is that the Right naturally allies itself with the ‘climate sceptics’, a move that then is rather worrying if the right then sweeps to power; a move that is of course all the more likely given the difficulty of the environmental message to preach.

  There is a further problem here. The long-term future is notoriously hard to predict with specificity: All that one can predict with any certainty is a trend line, but what particular events follow on from that trend line, or how it is or will be manifested is impossible to say. To say the world is warming as a whole is not to say that this little part of the world is warming. The world could get warmer but summers in Britain could get colder. Future by trend line forces citizens into a really odd world, a world where in a sense their very experiences are the fiction, and reality is elsewhere. They might then experience hot or cold or indifferent temperatures, but the hidden truth says warmer always warmer. How one then reconciles this fact, and what one makes of the fact that one’s own experiences seem not to matter, in a sense comes down then to how one locates oneself in a future fiction. Is one happy with the plotline or not? A question in the end for both taste and politics.

  Science then creates its own fiction, this we all know full well. But perhaps we do not fully appreciate what it means. This fiction is not an optional extra to science, a perk of the knowledge. It is rather a vital aspect to living in a world where what one can do and even what one is, changes all the time. Science Fiction is both a record of the change but also a manual for thinking about how we live in the world so changed. And yet it is a unique manual, for it does not merely describe what is, but also conjures in our minds worries about what will be, and creates politics for that future. To read about science here and now is then to enter also this tomorrow’s world of politics, a politics that is so difficult to fathom, and so hard to realize in this world. Our trouble of course is that it is our fate to realize it. For to put it another way, in a world where energy is problematic, and the climate shifting, we will be judged in future times by the quality of our future fictions, as only the ‘Axial Age’ has been. But where that Age defined all the world’s great religions and moral codes for two thousand years or more, we have to work out how we are going to define the way in which science muddles us up with the future, in fictions that are all too real. The trouble of course is that this politics is very hard to define; but the real trouble is, that if we want a future at all we are going to have to define them!