Jerzy Kociatkiewicz
Graduate School for Social Research
Warsaw
Poland
e-mail: kociak@kociak.org
Fiction seems to be entering, re-entering, or just acknowledging its existence in the discourse of organization studies (Phillips, 1995; Czarniawska-Joerges and Guillet de Monthoux, 1994), and its admittance seems the more justified the less technical the issue at hand. While production and consumption have been repeatedly quantified into numerous indices, when they are regarded as human attitudes, they nevertheless easily evade being circumscribed by the numbers. Therefore, I try to tackle the issue from the opposite side, looking for descriptions of consumption, production, and the interplay between them in sf stories.
The abbreviation sf comes originally from the words "science fiction," but has since been interpreted by various authors as "speculative fiction" and "social fiction," which serves as a perfect excuse to look there for speculation on the issues of social science. Furthermore, Philip K. Dick (1995a) claims that "the true protagonist of an sf story is an idea and not a person."
I start my explorations by examining "The man who ate the world" by Frederick Pohl, who describes a nightmare of a world where production has already been robotized, but consumption remains the burden of humans--an issue paralleling Jean Baudrillard's (1989) idea of VCRs freeing people from the duty of watching television, then move on towards stories featuring alternate notions of consuming and producing and the societies presented therein.
Nelson Phillips (1995: 643) argues that "an over-reliance on non-narrative fictions and non-narrative non-fictions has resulted in an unnecessary reduction in its ability to deal with the personal experience of organization," and proposes placing more emphasis on both narrativity and fiction in social science. Where the non-fictive accounts strive to provide information about the subject of study, fiction hopes to bring insights and inspiration. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux and Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges (1994) comment further that works of fiction
transmit tacit knowledge; they describe knowledge without analysing it, thus tapping on more than an explicit message characteristic for paradigmatic teaching. In broader terms one can say that novels are rich in narrative knowledge, as the one which depicts the world in terms of human actions and motives, in contrast to the logo-scientific one, which depicts the world in terms of casual laws and abstract models. (p. 9)
This knowledge serves not only to provide understanding, but also to change the socially constructed world that surrounds us (Berger and Luckmann, 1983), and the narrative knowledge of literature definitely has the ability to change people's mindsets. One example of such strong influence of the works of science fiction on the social world is the striking popularity of the Internet, which owes much of its beginnings to the ideas spread by the cyberpunk movement in general, and William Gibson's prose in particular, regardless of the fact that the latter supposedly never actually uses the Internet.
The authors' role in enacting the environment described in their works is thus twofold--on the one hand they can redefine the situation by providing insights and points of view different from the currently dominant (or, of course, strengthen the currently dominant viewpoint by using it in their writing), and on the other they can invite change by creating visions of the world different from the current setup. These visions need not necessarily be Utopian--returning once again to the cyberpunk example, we can see that the authors of these movement tend to present a grim and bleak world, but by portraying humans that inhabit it as as cold and unfeeling as machines, it also elevated these very machines to a near-human status, making them seem humane and empathetic in comparison.
A question may arise as to what is to be gained by analysing various literary works, if, as stated above, part of their power and expression derives from the fact that they refrain from analysis of the subjects presented therein. First of all, I do not attempt to dissect these ideas and offer conclusions, but rather to present them as sources for inspiration. Second, I do try to bring forth a single theme from a group of very varied stories, creating a net of interpretations and allowing for some communication between the works normally standing apart.
Which brings us to the actual theme of this paper, which is the diversity of ways of dealing with the notions of consumption and production provided by the authors of science fiction stories. I have chosen science fiction deliberately, partly because of my interest in this particular genre and mostly because it offers opportunities for presenting social relations and behaviours quite different, at least on the surface, from those found in the everyday interactions. Actually, the name science fiction itself is often abbreviated to sf, which in turn has been interpreted by various writers practising this genre as social fiction or speculative fiction (Gunn,1987), emphasizing the dimensions important for observing social phenomena.
Here I would like to state that I view both consumption and production as such social phenomena, or rather as attitudes and actions of the people (usually not of the homo oeconomicus variety), and what I look for in the stories, following Gibson Burrell's (1997) call for avoiding the lethal effects of linear thinking, are ways of escaping the dichotomous view of one opposing the other, with highly enjoyable consumption balancing the unpleasant but necessary production.
Throughout the text, I have highlighted the various escape routes from such a concept by formulating them as short catch phrases displayed in frames labelled as consecutive exits from this linear reality. As all slogans, these are obviously simplistic and do not do justice to the ideas I try to present in greater detail in this text.
Frederick Pohl (1989) tackles the inherent inequality between the concepts of consumption and production, the former being regarded as pure pleasure, the latter as pure suffering. Consequently, incessant efforts are made to free the human beings from the pains of production and to allow them to wallow in the immense joys of intense consumption. Drawing the idea to its perfectly logical (if somewhat absurd) conclusion, Pohl sketches a world where production has already been robotized, but consumption is still left to the people. Thus the "richer" the person is, the less products s/he has to use. The resulting nightmare tale of unwanted excess is broken only by the discovery that consumption can be robotized just as easily, thus freeing the humans form the vicious circle of economy.
Jean Baudrillard (1989) describes a very similar problem in a present day setting--a feeling of obligation to watch the films being shown on TV, coupled with the lack of time for doing it. He further claims a VCR to be an answer to this problem, as it virtually watches the movies for the people while recording them, and the fact that they never find the time to view the recorded tapes no longer matters--their VCR had already fulfilled their consumer's duty for them. The parallel to Frederick Pohl's vision is thus complete, right down to the solution:
Exit 1:Leave consumption as well as production to others, preferably machines |
The other side of the coin is presented in Robert Sheckley's (1987) short story, "The cost of living," set in a world that does not stray far from the production for living, consumption for enjoyment. The time is some indefinite future, and people relish in an immense level of affluence, and the human workload has been reduced to simple and unabsorbing tasks--the hero, for example, works at a laundry machine factory, checking every product for defects by pressing buttons initiating a self-check sequence in each of the machines. The only problem marring the picture is an extensive and all-encompassing credit system, which allows the people to live their lives high above the levels set by the salaries--but at a cost; we are shown a scene in which the protagonists pays for new home appliances with the first 30 years (out of the statistical 150) of his teenage son's future salaries. This precludes the realization of any of the child's wild and adventurous plans for his future, but on the whole does not seem so bad, as the work is easy and undemanding. Only in the last scene the main hero bitterly realizes the problem: he does not enjoy pressing buttons,
The abundance of consumption does not cause any distress in this story, it is the lack of production, or rather of productive activity, that the hero finds oppressive. This is not reducible to a simple problem of work boredom, but rather creates a scene of futility and a lack of meaning, which consumption alone is not able to fill. And so we arrive at another way out of the good consumption/bad production dichotomy:
Exit 2:Look for meaning that only production can provide |
The issue of excess is taken up again by Robert Sheckley (1984) in another one if his short stories "The laxian key," in which the protagonists acquire a strange machine, apparently capable of producing a mysterious powder, tangress, out of nothing. They are sure of their imminent success, convinced that whatever the machine can manufacture for free constitutes pure profit. Soon, however, they start running into problems, as the costs of storing or transporting the product rise well beyond the ridiculously low prices for tangress, usable as either tasteless food or poor building material. The heroes' troubles do not end here, as switching off the machine requires the laxian key of the title, unavailable and unheard of anywhere in the known universe. The product gets redefined as waste, and the initial problem of sales and marketing turns into a much more painful problem of waste disposal.
Here we see a separation of production from an equal but opposite consumption; but it is also interesting to note that this production is freed from its usually inseparable qualities of drudgery, effort, and cost; in terms of our search for escape routes, this is
Exit 3:Consider the issues on their own, and not only in obligatory pairs |
The opposite occurs in David Brin's (1990) "The Practice Effect." Here Dennis Nuel, the hero of the novel, gets transported into an alternate reality, a world very similar to our own but for one significant difference--all objects improve rather than deteriorate on use. As long as something is at the beginning usable for a particular purpose, its continued utilization transforms the tools into a sophisticated and efficient instrument. Conversely, when left unused, tools deteriorate quickly into ever cruder implements. It is a world where advanced construction contrasts with very basic design principles; the invention of a wheel was never necessary, as simple sleds dragged on the ground often enough quickly became self-lubricating vehicles operating with almost no friction.
This has severe implication in the sphere of the division of labour in this world, as the process of production, barring the manufacturing of the first crude version of a particular object, is intimately tied to the act of consumption. While in a way it mirrors the situation from Frederick Pohl's story, in that people are employed to consume, here the production is no longer displaced outside the problem of human work, but rather united to form an amalgam of both processes. Also, this culture is not one of orgiastic excess, and the status differentiation occurs through the quality and not quantity of consumption. Because of that, the net result is astonishingly similar to that of our own world, as the poor people use crude (new) objects they can afford and the affluent can afford the efficient and streamlined (old) products. Nevertheless, this comprises a second solution:
Exit 4:Unite consumption and production |
which, upon reflection, does not seem as absurd as it does at first glance, even if the difference between the physical laws seems rather hard to traverse. If we consider the professional world of knowledge and data analysis, we start finding people employed as much to consume as to produce. This has to do with the
exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the "knower," at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process. The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become even more so (Lyotard, 1987: 4)
Let us look at an example of an academic teacher. True, s/he is formally paid to transmit knowledge, just as the characters in Brin's novel are paid to transmit the worn-out (or rather worn-in) clothes to their customers. But most of the work consists of acquiring that knowledge rather than of actually educating students. In other words, the teacher is supposed to consume the available knowledge in order to digest it and only then hand it over to the students. In a yet broader picture, any job requirement of skills and/or education is a demand of (past or present) consumption on part of the employee.
Moving towards yet stranger alternative, we find Philip K. Dick's (1995b) story, "Piper in the woods." In it we encounter doctor Henry Harris, who struggles to understand and to cure a bizarre epidemic affecting military personnel of a space base set on a remote asteroid--people become convinced that some mysterious piper in the woods teaches them to become plants--psychically, not physically. Because of this, they loose all inclination to work and execute any orders, preferring to sit in the sun all day instead. As the story progresses, the hero finds out the source of this affliction to be nothing more than a mass hypnosis, caused by a sudden confrontation of the military drill and discipline with a peaceful, rural landscape and climate of the asteroid, which also possessed some means of causing people to hallucinate. After returning happily to the hospital, however, dr Harris finds out that just sitting in a ring of soil is strangely comforting, and the burden of his duties far too tiring and quite unimportant.
The most interesting in this story, in the context of consumption and production, is the attitude of the "ill" soldiers, and the rationale their assessment of the situation. One of them says:
"You know, I struggled for years to get through Training. I had to work and pay my own way. Washed dishes, worked in kitchens. Studied at night, learned, crammed, worked on and on. And you know what I think, now?"
"What?"
"I wish I'd become a plant earlier." (Dick 1995b: 157)
Once again, though, a rather ridiculously sounding alternative turns out not to be that otherworldy, even if it remains quite radical. Not only do various communes operate on a similar basis, although in a somewhat toned down version, but, in a less controversial and more historically rooted example, numerous contemplative Christian monk orders, as well as Buddhist monasteries, offer seclusion from the hectic pace of the outside world, proving the most widespread lifestyle not to be the inevitable choice. Thus we have reached:
Exit 5:Chuck the action and possession oriented lifestyle |
This is the last point of view on consumption I wish to explore in this paper, and I so I would like now to reflect on the general image they form, or rather to once again consider whatever new they bring into the picture.
First of all, I hoped this text managed to demonstrate the variety inherent to the economically considered concepts of consumption and production--regardless of the social approach to these phenomena, I believe we have not strayed from the dictionary (Webster's New World dictionary, 1995) definition of consumption as:
the using up of goods or services, either by consumers or in the production of other goods
and of to produce as:
a) to make or manufacture
b) to bring into being; create
which I would call "economic" as opposed to the other meanings each of these words carries, and which I have attempted to avoid in this exploration, trying to be true to the concept expressed by this meaning of the word, rather than to the word itself, which, admittedly, has not been used in most of the described stories. This variety appears not only in the ideas the science fiction authors could think up, but also in the attitudes towards these concepts we can already encounter in the world around, and which, to some extent, mirror the images presented in fiction.
This ties up to what I consider the most, a more striking, and the most surprising, feature I came upon while thinking about and writing this paper; the ease with which associations between ideas I considered quite wild, imaginative, and unrealistic and the various situations and institutions of everyday life sprung to my mind. I do not believe that these associations are necessarily obvious (I actually hope some of them are not), or that somebody else would not have totally different ones, equally or more interesting and novel. The point is, however, that such associations are quite possible to come by, and therefore immediate inspiration taken from imaginative fiction is much closer at hand than I expected. What is more, the absurd ideas turn out to be no more absurd and paradoxical than the world that surrounds us, and their funniness--some of the stories described here where definitely comical in style--need not designate them as inane and unworthy of reflection. This seems like a nice place to finish (though hopefully not conclude) this text by what I believe to be its moral:
The Moral:Don't shy from considering the obviously absurd |