The Revolutionary Impulse

Why can't we muster up a resistance?

At the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, the residents of the world’s first fully automated utopia—in which machines perform humanity’s every service, making work redundant and liberating their time—organise a national riot and trash the machines. But the book does not end there. As the organisers of the riot wander the streets in the aftermath, having decided to turn themselves in, they notice that on every corner people have gathered to repair those very machines. What begins as a triumphant scene resisting the material conditions of what turns out to be a dystopia ends in a quiet defeatism with humanity scrambling around in the dust to piece themselves back together.

Discussing this book over lunch last week, I was reminded of Frantz Fanon’s theory of the politics of recognition. An Algerian revolutionary and psychiatrist, who ended up advocating for violence as a mode of cleansing the colonised subject of the self-worthlessness mandated by the settler state, Fanon argued that this psychological dimension of oppression was as important as the material conditions of oppression, and that both had to be attacked and dismantled in order for a colonised people to fully emancipate themselves and achieve self-determination. He insisted the psychological element of this battle could only be done through turning away from relations with the settler-state, and back towards their cultural roots and practices, rather than integrating with it, for integration, he argued, inherently legitimised the very thing which dispossessed entire cultures and peoples of their right to exist as they are. Looking to that very vehicle of violence for emancipation only reproduced the conditions of oppression, if through a more subtle and insidious manner. Ultimately, Fanon did not believe that any colonised people could achieve their self-determination through recognition, through becoming subjects of the state.

Vonnegut’s characters are not a colonised people. But they are the descendants of colonised people, even if that violation is mostly lost to history. Their lives of luxury are built upon the loss of a culture that can never be recovered. This becomes more evident with every passing day, as the horizon of freedom greets them with each dawn, a horizon they can neither reach nor escape. The citizens of this utopia have no idea how to fill their time now that it is unlimited and they are freed from the pressures and constraints of modernity. Rather than create a society of pure luxury and creativity, they begin to disintegrate under their unbearable lightness of being; there are no anchors in this new life for the very relationship which dominated their existence, their ancestors’ existence, and erased their culture from the face of the earth—their social contract with the state—has ceased to exist.

So why does Vonnegut have them repair the machines? Why not destroy the automated society and return to what was?