Multimodal Exposition
Looking From Inside The Crystal Ball
PREDICTING THE PAST AND PRESENT, NOT THE FUTURE
Writers, for many ages and across many different mediums, have struggled with the adversities of prediction. Accurate prediction requires extensive knowledge of the present and where it seems to be heading. Historians would argue it requires knowledge of the past and its eternally repetitive trends. Indeed, many science fiction novels, films, works of art, and television aim to postulate fictional worlds as extensions of humanity’s present and past states. However, with every proposed fictional world is the inevitable connection to the present world of now. With every crafted future of humans, there is a need to base its foundations on humanity as we know it: where it was, where it is now, and how it always has been.
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Prediction is a statement of what will happen in the future. But there are also “predictions” that are statements of what may happen, or simply portrayals of possible futures. Any science fiction novel falls under this category; the works that aim to “predict” the future end up creating perspective lenses on our past and present.
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For example, in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the dystopian setting along with an ostentatious allegory to communist regime point to the real life issues with Russia under Stalin. Also crafted in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a future America under heavy censorship, which can be seen as more of a prediction of the near present than the far future. Both of these works being fiction certainly contributes to the sense that allegory can ironically convey truth more effectively than explicit predictions. However, what exactly does this mimetic “prediction” — a purposeful statement or allegory about what may happen in the future of the real world — say about the past/present; how does it create new perspectives on the real world and distort existing ones?
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Consider the creative writer John Crowley contemplating on the nature of prediction. Crowley juxtaposes a concern for the future with implications of the past. When he mentions the “rapidity and noise as a function of interconnectedness” at one point, he exudes a technical and technology-minded tone. While his language evokes concerns of a technologically advanced future, the two images used are both historic and primitive. The pre-modern visuals clash brazenly with the idea of the “future”, the topic of the essay.
His main argument: predictions are easily reversible, and they tell more about the present and past than the future. Similarly to Crowley’s essay, works of fiction place much of their rhetoric in juxtaposition. They conjure a fictional world for the purpose of comparing it to the real world. However, the juxtaposition that Crowley employs is not between fiction and reality, but rather the past and the future. The concluding remarks become less rigidly technical, as he expresses romantically “[the future] is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute”. Crowley purposefully leverages the disparity between our familiarity with the past and our uncertainty towards the future. Most strikingly, he simultaneously compares and separates the strangeness of future from that of fiction or art, albeit in an artistic tone of voice. The future to Crowley is not unknown because of time, but because of its lack of familiarity, which we can instead find in the art of fiction.
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What aspects of fiction’s art, then, appeal to our familiarity? Let’s utilize juxtaposition and examine a lens that has aspects of both fictionality and reality. For example, a utopia is a fictional existence that has actually been attempted multiple times in the past (e.g. Canudos). The concept of Utopia and its failure heavily relates the hope for a further-progressed, content future to the problems of today. Therefore, utopia appeals to the pathological confidence in tomorrow, but is hindered by practical logic and the world of the present.
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Examining the history of utopia’s meanings, Yves Zarka studies Thomas More’s book Utopia and observes:
Etymologically, “utopia” is a combination of the Greek “ou-” (not) and “topos” (place). The name evokes a sense of reality or “place”, and subtly reverses it to give the word a mimetic appearance that is “not” true; the word itself is juxtaposing fiction and reality. To illustrate its fictionality, Zarka describes Utopia as a “heavenly” object that is “perfect” and has “no concern”. This description matches the carefree world of heaven prevalent in works of fiction (i.e. the bible). Additionally, “maintaining itself, as close as possible” is the ultimate and sole purpose of a utopia. While many utopias are fancied in science fiction and the realm of the future, More and Zarka demonstrate that utopia is primarily affiliated with stagnation and the present. However, because true utopia is fictional, this “present” is a fictional one. By its perfection and constant state, utopia is a lens to compare reality to (whether the reality of the present or the reality of the future) in the hope that it will come close to this fictional ideal. Utopia is therefore timeless.
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Dystopias, on the other hand, predict the problems of our impending future, delve further into the realm of reality, and identify the problems of our present world. From “dys-” (bad) and “topos” (place), the word attaches itself to the negative and corrupt aspects of the “place” of today. Without the “ou-” prefix to negate “place”, the word suggests that the place in question is reality and not fiction. The “growth and corruption” of the cities we know (Zarka) are precisely what are studied through the lens of dystopia:
Thrown straight into a dystopian setting, a viewer of this episode of Black Mirror may need time to get adjusted to the overload of visual and aural stimulation. Bing, the main character of “Fifteen Million Merits”, is routinely subject to cycling to fund the society’s insatiable virtual consumerism. Bing is forced to watch his friend Abi performing a sexual act on screen and he is unable to skip the content. Rather than bearing it out, he is driven to madness as he bashes on the walls of his cell, unable to close his eyes or ears. A desire for silence, or lack of sensory stimulation, is not only indicative of a world with too much instantly gratified content and entertainment at fingertips, but also shows the irony in the present world and its extension into the future. With the overuse of multimodal (visual and aural) elements in this TV medium and the desire to return to silence of sound and sight, the show seems to beckon the simplicity and unobtrusiveness of books.
The overload in sensory input drives Bing to desperation for some sort of output. When the judge beckons him to speak, Bing states he did not have any speech prepared but knew he had to speak anyways. He further elaborates that he wants everyone watching to truly listen, yelling exasperatingly “the faker the fodder the more you love it, because fake fodder is the only thing…we can stomach”. Comparing the essence that humans live on – food – with the virtual, fictitious stimulation that the citizens constantly take in, the character seems to point directly to the present world’s addiction to screens. Like a tobacco addiction, this one seems just as vital to the user’s state of present content, despite future consequences. The focus on instant gratification makes this dystopian work a lens very critical of real world issues. In particular, it paints the present as a repulsive, addiction-filled world. The ending scene shows a vast, untouched expanse of greenery, evoking desires to return to the past, and making Crowley’s fantasy of a “neoprimitive” future a tantalizing reality.
“Like Aristotle’s heavenly bodies, fixed to the celestial vault, the island of Utopia is of a quite different nature from the cities we know, subject as they are to growth and corruption. It is perfect, and has no concern other than maintaining itself, as closely as possible, as it is” (Zarka).
How do direct predictions of the future compare to these fictional lenses? Using three metaphors to animals, James Cascio illustrates the difficulties in true prediction. It is striking that the author uses what seems to be archaic animals as symbols that were more prevalent in the past (dragons, swans, mule) to create these metaphors. He explains “most of the times a futurist uses ‘here be dragons,’ it’s to indicate a topic area in a forecast that is uncertain and dangerous”. Observing the archaic form of English in the phrase “here be”, the predictions of futurists are being compared to old traditional sayings. Cascio continues with this pre-modern ideal by noting “the term [black swan] comes from the 16th century European belief that swans were only white, so a ‘black swan’ indicated an impossibility”. The binary nature of this black-and-white term creates a division: futurist predictions either say something is possible or otherwise say it is impossible. Most predictions will not dare to rule out a possibility of the future because considering possibilities is the entire job of a futurist. Appropriately, Cascio notes the problem “isn’t the difficulty in predicting the future, it’s the difficulty in deciding who to listen to”. Just like how Bing in Black Mirror is overloaded with the choices in virtual stimuli every day and wants people to dismiss the fodder, there is an over-saturation of possibility in futurist prediction that makes it difficult to use as a lens on the future, let alone the present. Additionally, the fact these predictions must all be “listened to” create the risk of being dismissed; Bing’s fellow citizens only pretend to listen because of their numbness to stimuli.
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Thus, unlike fictional allegories, futurist predictions are both limitless and limited by their adherence to expanding possibility. Perhaps prediction holds the most potential in the works of fiction that extend our current society and its problems (i.e. utopian and dystopian literature) because of its artistic, prospective, or escapist appeals. However, Crowley’s discourse and Zarka’s examination of utopia revealed that the art of prediction may transcend time. Is it possible that predictions are not lenses on the past, present, or future, but rather on human nature as a whole? If humans have the same flaws and concerns as the people of hundreds or thousands of years ago, then could prediction be time-less in its ability to predict the shortcomings of man? The fact that future prediction and dystopian novels alike are almost always concerned with humans and their place in the world suggests that what we are truly anxious about is not time-dependent, but rather human-dependent.
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References
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Hitchens, Christopher. “The Importance of Being Orwell”. Vanity Fair. Web.
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Birzer, Bradley. “Ray Bradbury and the Dystopia of Fahrenheit 451“. The Imaginative Conservative. Web.
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Allen, Paul. “The Singularity Isn’t Near”. MIT Tech Review. Web.
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Crowley, John. “The Next Future”. Lapham’s Quarterly. Web.
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Zarka, Yves. “The Meaning of Utopia”. The New York Times. Web.
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“Fifteen Million Merits”. Black Mirror. Television.
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Cascio, James. “3 Reasons Why Your Predictions Of The Future Will Go Wrong”. CoExist. Web.
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October 25, 2016
