Virtual icon Socialism as Fictional Experimentalism

Abstract

For Axel Honneth, the unthinkability of socialism lies in two of its ideas: its attitudes towards “the reconstruction of the economic system” and its conceptualization of “the freedoms of a future fraternal society” solely within the economic sphere (2015, 53). For Honneth, these two ideas make socialism seem unfeasible and undesirable. It is these ideas that explain a “puzzling divide” in the contemporary: the widespread “discontent with the current socio-economic state of affairs” but the fact that “this widespread outrage seems to lack any sense of direction” or “ultimate aim” (4, 1). This novel disconnect between “outrage and any notion about the future, between protest and a vision of a better world” is not to be simply explained away by the collapse of communism in 1989 (Fraser 1997), nor the way that postmodernism leads to the experience of time as eternal recurrence (Jameson 1989), nor the reification of the world as a result of its increasing globalized complexity (Fisher 2009). Rather, Honneth claims, the trouble starts with the idea of socialism itself. One innovative solution Honneth offers to the problem is “Socialism as Historical Experimentalism”: a method of exploring models of how socialism might work in the contemporary. This involves assembling traces of previous attempts at socialist economics: documents about early production and consumption collectives, accounts of post-WW2 debates about welfare, archives of social housing construction, and testimony of union efforts to humanize labor. From this “encylcopedia,” socialists would be able to experiment, test, model and falsify different economic models, to suit the contemporary, and thus increase socialism’s perceived feasibility. This paper argues that Honneth, with his sense of socialism as a science, misses a crucial arena which could assist him with this task: that of fiction. By working from Stanley Cavell and Remo Bodei’s approaches to fiction––that movies “convince us of the world’s reality in the only way we have to be convinced” (Cavell 1979, 102); that works of art show us “the infinite possibilities” of existence (Bodei 2013, 7)––the paper turns to a case study of a short story by Lydia Davis about the operation of a film on a viewer. It uses this to sketch how fictional experimentalism might help Honneth’s project, by habituating us to new norms. In highlighting the predictive potential of culture, the paper sketches a hope for a socialist political aesthetics, designed to suit the challenges of our moment.