Only science fiction can save us now

1.

“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future”

T. S. Eliot

Just as many people today look nostalgically to a past that never happened, others do so — look nostalgically — to a future that may never arrive. Should we look forward in anger, not in nostalgia? 

But in dystopia there is no room for rebelliousness or anger, and nowadays we can only imagine the future as a dystopia. The future that is now, that is already happening. A future that will never be future again. Is the future definitely over for us?

 

2.

“You hide behind a 

borrowed chase for the 

sake of future days”

Can, “Future Days”

Since the Romantic era, a role has gradually been developing for art as a kind of substitute for religion. Actually, many thinkers have been coming to suspect that other disciplines in our social life have played such a role over the course of modernity and postmodernity. John Gray, for example, has examined this idea in the political sphere — Marxism, capitalism and democracy as new messianic creeds, reloaded, updated versions of Christianity — in his book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.

The thing is that, as Lacan and Freud said, whatever is obliterated or repressed returns, sometimes in secret, hidden ways, much more strongly than before. Should we de-repress, de-obliterate religious feelings in relation to our faith in the future? Should we found a sort of religion around it?

I mean, so as to recover some kind of faith in the future. 

Some kind of faith in some kind of future.

 

3.

“We are much more adept at making dystopias than looking for utopias. Because we are more adept at creating hell than inventing heaven”

Margaret Atwood

As I say, nowadays we can only imagine the future as a dystopia. But it was not always so. Half a century ago, the Frankfurt School allocated what they called utopia to art. Do we have time now to write a history of utopia? Would it serve any purpose? Would it enable us, for example, to understand how this future without a future, this loop of the perpetual present in which we are now trapped, was concocted? 

The whole history of humanity is really nothing more than a long, secret history of science fiction. Human beings are simply the science fiction in which ancient apes dreamed themselves.

God is a secret being from science fiction who becomes real in us, constructing his slow possibility of existence in us. Because as the philosopher Quentin Meillasoux says, from a future doctoral thesis that he has not yet published — in other words, one that also comes into being in a future that has not yet arrived, has not yet been born — God is not a past, dead reality, as Nietzsche claimed, but a future reality, still unborn.

Everything, everything comes to us from the future. Everything will be given to us then. Everything is still being granted to us from there. From the future.

As it has always been given to us. As language, for example, was given to us.

Language or music.

Sound and image.

All of them great forms, definitive forms — and gifts — of science fiction.

“Waiting for the gift of sound and vision”, sang David Bowie. “I passionately love things in which sound is mingled with light”, wrote Charles Baudelaire more than a hundred years earlier. “Making both the eye and ear rejoice”, Garcilaso de la Vega will write again, sometime, in a glittering sixteenth century of the future.

From the future of the species. 

The tomorrow of the ape.

 

4.

“—What are we going to 

see?—I don’t know, light 

and sound.”

Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard

The history of painting is nothing more than a long, secret history of science fiction.

Architecture too, because it designs spaceships — literally space ships — for our long, extraordinarily long, intergalactic journeys through the chasms of our tiny daily lives, tiny and therefore quantum-level, cosmic, universal — multiversal, if we consider their multitude of rooms.

Where do we live our unique and miraculous life from?

Let us return to painting. Velázquez did science fiction from the moment he placed the future viewer of his paintings, according to Foucault’s analysis, in the place of the king of Spain, the most powerful man in the human universe of his time. Of course, he also did science fiction, in relation to the representational codes of his time, in each of his portraits: from Pope Innocent X and the Count-Duke of Olivares to his woman frying eggs and his beggars.

Painters really did invent the world. 

An inexhaustible world of future science fiction. 

Early-twentieth-century pulp fiction — that cheap science fiction for all readers, that avant-garde of the newsstand — shaped popular culture and acquired an iconic status that many painters since then have visited — have resonated with, have become — in their work. The return to figurative art was an act of pure science fiction, as it never stopped occurring. The gravity of the Duchamp star — the Duchamp black hole? — remains highly fascinating, that is to say irresistible; but even Damien Hirst has now abandoned conceptual art without painting and has returned to painting.

What do painters paint when science fiction has become the present, a perpetual present, as elusive as the future that invades everything and permeates and penetrates everything and then escapes us and never arrives?

Future delayed.

Cervantes and Velázquez — pictura et poiesis — already revealed to the world of their time that it no longer had a past. The trouble is that it no longer had a future either.

I think of Cervantes or of Velázquez and I realise that actually Spain already knew, four centuries ago, what it was to be a world without a future.

Perhaps that was why Cervantes and Velázquez were able to develop works with so much future. Works, in fact, that were to be the foundation of our whole future at a planetary level.

Our future that is now being left, at a planetary level, without 

a future.

 

“To be the same thing in every way possible at the same time”

Álvaro de Campos / Fernando Pessoa

For some time there has been a kind of Charris algorithm, but only because every artist, every creator generates an algorithm: what used to be called a poetics in a poet or a style in a painter. 

And nowadays everything becomes an algorithm, at least for the moment. While we still wait for science fiction to save us, that is, while we have not yet actually been saved; while we do not yet know that perhaps it is not science fiction that can save us, because perhaps science fiction can no longer save us.

There is something machinic about Charris when he, like every great artist, is inscribed in a specific time and speaks to us of it, of it and from it. The art generated by Charris, the art we call Charris, observes the world while being inscribed in it; it observes the world while it too, like all of us, constructs it. And Charris makes art, constructs art, from what is intrinsic to art and creation: from intelligent sensibility and, very importantly, from humour; the humour that allows distance from/within the very interior of systems, as advocated, at the dawn of modernity, by the Cervantes algorithm, the Don Quixote algorithm.

Irony and intelligence. Humanity to observe dehumanisation — as Ortega y Gasset called the procedure of the historical avant-gardes — and what we now call posthumanity. Automatisms of technology, of systems, as opposed to the humanity of Don Quixote. The network that technology offers us with the Internet has become a swarm, as the philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi warns us, and Charris constructs his own endless parodic swarm, with its constant thematic shifts, its intelligent fantasy, its irony and inventiveness, restoring the inexhaustible narrativity that figurative painting always enjoyed during modernity. Modernity was destroyed, blown to pieces, some time ago; and Charris, with a hyper-referentiality rivalling that of Cervantes’s Quixote, salvages the best of it, annotating and elucidating every one of those thousands of pieces and connecting them to the thousands of fragments with which we are bombarded today, in our world of hyper-images, from every conceivable side.

Irony disregards codes. That is what Cervantes and Velázquez did, with respect to the very strong pre-established codes of their time, and so it is with Charris’s work, so strongly narrative, so closely linked to literature, and at the same time so irreducibly painterly.

Charris’s work illustrates exceptionally well the distinction between conjunction and connection of which “Bifo” Berardi speaks in his book Phenomenology of the End: the fantasy and freedom of knowledge as opposed to predetermined, programmed signs. True art has always expressed the unspoken, and today more than ever the unspoken escapes us, because the diabolical swarm-system we have constructed so determines, “untraining” us, as Berardi says, in sensitivity. In this way, the real human machine that should be saving our future, as against the pre-established machine, from the worst of our past, dooms our future.

 

6.

“If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable”

T. S. Eliot

History of a history of science fiction. While history explains what happened, as Aristotle said, poetry, creation — poiesis — shows us what could have happened.

Is there a poetry of the future? 

The spirit of science fiction of which Roberto Bolaño spoke. 

Shouldn’t a history of future creation —future pictura et poiesis — begin with the future, instead of the past, as all chronologies begin?

We have such a craving for the future that we have even invented a nostalgic form of futurism: retrofuturism.

Cyberpunk, in particular, has been especially favoured in the last forty years. Perhaps because it has been the science-fiction movement that has best described our current world. Or perhaps because it has turned out to be the least fictional science fiction of all.

Cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk. No wonder the names of the most important recent trends in contemporary science fiction culminate in the lexical component “punk”. Everyone knows the quintessential punk slogan: “No future.” 

What better slogan than “There’s no future” for a futurist literature that no longer believes in the future? 

That believes, at any rate, in a closed future. 

Because there can be no future in a timeline where a bloated present occupies everything, invades everything. A present like a quicksand from which it seems we can no longer escape. 

It is curious, by the way, that the twentieth century began with the euphoria of futurism and ended with the rage and depression of the punks’ “no future”.

 

7.

“The search for the form would only be the technical search for time”

Paul Virilio

History of a history of science fiction: space opera, hard science fiction, retrofuturism, cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk. We have reached the point of constructing a whole encyclopaedia of futures and we all know that when you start compiling encyclopaedias, it is because what you collect in them has been dead for some time.

The last stage of Ancient Greece, for example, the era in which Hellenic splendour all began to decline and fall into decay. The era of compilation and imitation. The era of classification and unbelief. It was precisely in this era that Lucian of Samosata lived and wrote. 

Tracing the origin of science fiction leads us to him — in the second century AD — although the interest of his writing lay more in satire and humour than in what is properly called science fiction today. But it is, in any case, a very contemporary interest. In his story Trip to the Moon, for example, parodying travel writers and their excessive inventions, which in his period were lapsing into implausibility and absurdity, the narrator describes the daily life of the supposed inhabitants of the moon, combining the fantastic with the outlandish, and then adds: “And anyone who does not believe it has only to go there and see it.”

 

8.

“I write to look at what I cannot see”

Luis Rodríguez

In fact, as we know, it all began with Homer. A Homer who probably never existed as such, but rather as a group of poets. In short, Homer may have constituted a collective identity of poets, or, as we would now say, thinking of science fiction — a type of science fiction that is no longer science fiction — a swarm-identity.

When I say that it all began with Homer, in the eighth century BC, I am not recalling that famous passage from the Iliad with the description of Achilles’ shield, a classic, foundational example of the pictura et poiesis that could be of interest to us now. 

I mean that it all began with his Odyssey. Not only because Odysseus has to win back his identity as Odysseus — another theme very typical of contemporary science fiction, in other words (again) a type of science fiction that is no longer science fiction: Odysseus returns from the Trojan war, but must face numerous hardships before regaining his past — and therefore his future — as the father of Telemachus, the husband of Penelope and king of the island of Ithaca, from which he had been absent for twenty years.

To hold his bow, manage to shoot it and thereby reconquer 

his identity.

But all this is not the essential point here. The essential point here in relation to the Odyssey, I think, is the human space race, which has only just begun, in the last few decades, spurred by the cold Trojan wars of the present day. It is in this sense, I think, that a story like that of Odysseus has a great future. If indeed that possibility of a future in which the human race will leap from planet to planet and from star to star is fulfilled.

Isaac Asimov and many other authors of the past envisioned it. So did Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, as well as Elon Musk, India, China and the rest of the planet. For some time now the future has been a registered trademark.

In fact, the Odyssey is the grandmother of all adventure novels and stories. And one day, when times conducive to dystopia, social tension and mental illness are long gone, the future will be fully restored. The future will be a great adventure again. Another Odyssey.

We will experience it on board our spaceships.

And so it will be: an adventure, an odyssey, if only in the form of an adventure read by our future aoidoi, the epic singers of our spaceships, that is to say, by the artificial intelligences that will accompany us wherever we go. And what better reading could they give us than Homer’s Odyssey, perpetually updated? So that we do not get too bored on the long, extraordinarily long space flights we will have to undergo; so that our inevitable boredom does not turn into attacks of psychosis or schizophrenia.

That transformation, however, is also inevitable. And we will have no alternative but to avoid, again and again, the psychotic Scyllas and schizophrenic Charybdises into which we ourselves will have been transformed.

And we will arrive at faraway extraterrestrial courts. And with great hospitality, after we have been washed, perfumed and clothed, they will sit us down at their extraterrestrial tables. And extraterrestrial aoidoi or AIs will make us sob with emotion when from their mouths and their musical verses, in their fascinating extraterrestrial music, we hear our own history, our own Odyssey with our own names, our proper names.

Will that contact with alien civilisations happen or not? For the moment, all we know is that we are going to remain in contact with our own civilisation. For the moment, all we know is that we are going to carry on avoiding our own — psychotic — Scyllas, our own — schizophrenic — Charybdises, those that will inevitably accompany our species wherever we go; because we are them and they are us.

For the moment, all we know about that space flight, if not interstellar journey, is that it will be a long, a very long horror novel.

 

9.

“I worship the countries we never saw because they forced us to invent them”

Henrik Nordbrandt

The first science fiction novel recognised as such is also a horror novel: Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Not for nothing was its author, Mary Shelley, the daughter of one of the pioneers of feminism in the English-speaking world. Because the current feminist reading locates the heart of the novel in the power to give life. It is a man, Victor, that creates the monster, another man. And if Victor then creates a woman it is because he wants to emulate God and give his Adam an Eve. Prometheus, Jehovah: male narrative codes. 

But beyond this seismic fault line in relation to gender, aside from this jiggery-pokery that feminism justly satirises, men and women have always been on an equal footing as science fiction characters. Since life began, all reproduction and all power to give life was already science fiction.

After Frankenstein came positivism and Edgar Allan Poe, quantum physics and H. P. Lovecraft: even pulp fiction and its still cheaper and more popular stepchildren, comic books. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, the civilised world collapsed and Franz Kafka, the dystopia that preceded them all, began to practise a very sui generis kind of autofiction avant la lettre. A sort of auto-science fiction.

Both Franz Kafka in the first half of the twentieth century and Philip K. Dick in the second saw that the most powerful science fiction begins and ends with oneself. And the fact is that both of them mixed science fiction with what we now call autofiction.

It is auto-science fiction. The kind that every one of us nowadays turns into reality every day by immersing ourselves in our mobile phones and computers, in a continuous, endless screen; that of the great Taylorist-Fordist assembly line of social media; that of work deterritorialised and reterritorialised in the remote work through which our self-exploitation is perpetuated wherever we go.

A perpetual connection, a perpetual present as well as a life sentence.

A present extended to all the futures that were once possible and that are now closed to us right in front of us in their perfect, inaccessible sphericity.

We think we are playing an active part in constructing reality, when we are only a passive part of that construction.

All of us, today, are part of the swarm.

Only we ourselves will be able to save ourselves from ourselves, some day.

Some day, in the future.