Inventions of Nemesis

I was reading Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) simultaneous to reading Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation and Justice by Douglas Mao, which does not mention Young. Unsurprisingly, given Mao’s interesting inclusion of theorists of justice in his analysis of utopian literature, there are clear connections between Young’s understanding of what it means to think about justice and the reasons why Mao looks to the idea of justice in his book. Young notes, “Since Plato ‘justice’ has evoked the well-ordered society, and it continues to carry those resonances in contemporary political discussion. Appeals to justice still have the power to awaken a moral imagination and motivate people to look at their society critically, and ask how it can be made more liberating and enabling.”1 Young’s contention here—starting with Plato, who constructs a utopia in order to find justice—that we need a theory that both considers the order of things and prods a reader to think anew is precisely what Mao is investigating: What does it mean to pursue an investigation of utopia through the lens of justice? He sees value in asking “basic questions about justice—what we’re really thinking about when we talk about justice, for example, and how justice relates to utopia” (12). By considering traditional theorists of justice alongside familiar and unfamiliar utopian fictions, Mao brings a set of theorists not usually mentioned into the conversation about utopian literature.Divided into three sections and a final note, Inventions of Nemesis turns the gaze of utopian scholarship to the question of what persons are “due.” Justice is the system for both determining and delivering that. Critiquing what he sees as a rejection of the “obsessive engineer” of utopian thought, Mao follows the engineer and thinks through how and why structure, systems, and attempts to make order (whether that be in twentieth-century political thought or in utopian writings) matter. The first chapter focuses on the idea of indignation and counter-indignation, the second on the tension between the transformative utopia and the managerial utopia, and the third on the tension between freedom to work and freedom of movement. The short coda adds a new twist on the investigations introduced in the third chapter. Each chapter investigates a theoretical principle through a close reading of a set of texts. Mao is interested in the discourse around justice. While he draws from a wide array of theorists, he focuses on two twentieth-century justice theorists in particular: John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Inventions of Nemesis goes far beyond tracing connections between Nozick, Rawls, and utopian imagining and considers the role of “indignation,” not just concern but righteous anger about how things are.Mao notes at the beginning that he sees his book as “descriptive” (10). He embarked on this project in search of “some through lines in the literature of utopia” (10); he did not begin with a framework to apply to that fiction. In his exploration he discovered the three themes “indignation, justice, mobility of work” (10) that now structure the book. Inventions of Nemesis is like Rawls’s idea of pure procedural justice, where justice is what emerges from a procedure properly established. This book opens a variety of potential responses and applications. There are many novels that Mao does not address but that fit within this set of principles, as there are many justice theorists who are also asking questions about the connection between thinking about justice and imagining better worlds.The impulse to “set things right” (67) requires both the willingness and capacity to identify a problem and the impulse to imagine a better working order. “What would we do with—how would we make sense of—thorough indignation at a world badly formed” (3), Mao asks. He opens with a moment of such indignation from Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), where Tess notes that our world is “blighted,” and in posing this question, Mao sets up his study. Little attention has been paid to the idea of indignation and yet indignation is “a driving force of utopianism” (3). This indignation, a disappointed reaction to the way that things are, can result in imagining that somehow things were otherwise. To capture this potential outrage at the way things are and the way in which we might begin to imagine things made right, Mao uses the notion of nemesis, the particular form of indignation at a world poorly made: “the feeling of indignation not at one’s own mistreatment but at something wrong in the order of things” (56), “umbrage taken at a state of affairs or an action that in some basic or absolute sense is not right” (4). Mao notes that justice is reflected in “a desire that people have what they ought to have, that they be treated as they should be treated, that they be able to live as they ought to be able to live” (13; emphasis added). This formulation is a motivating impulse of political philosophy. One can map the three “oughts” above to different approaches to how we should live together. The Rawlsian, or distributive justice approach, asks what resources people need to be able to pursue the life that they desire. Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities or welfarist approach asks what people want to do and be. This book, more than any other book of utopian scholarship that I know, orients its inquiry in the language of political philosophy. Mao affirms that “justice resembles utopia” (137) where justice demands that people be able to live under the right arrangement and that the task of justice is reparative, identifying problems and seeking to overcome them. Mao notes, “It’s very hard to imagine justice mattering apart from indignation against injustice” (139).The utopian fictions explored in Inventions of Nemesis run the gamut from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852) to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) to Chang Rae-Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and others. In a section of chapter 2 that focuses on the “prospects of abundance and anxiety about the transformative designs’ shaping power” (125), for example, Mao starts with the short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) by E. M. Forster, then considers Robert Graves’ Seven Days in New Crete (1949), then Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998), and finally Walter Mosley’s collection of short fiction, Futureland (2001). This sweep of fictions, older and more recent, short and long, familiar and obscure, adult and middle grade, represents one of the most valuable aspects of Mao’s study; his enthusiasm for utopian fictions does not limit his investigation. Mao does not confine himself to a set of texts dictated by particular academic specializations; instead, he moves deftly between differing kinds of texts that are usually looked at in their particular homes: young adult fiction, science fiction, African American fiction. While Mao’s intended audience may primarily be scholars of utopia, this wide range in investigation of fictions, together with his foray into twentieth-century debates about distributive justice, opens the audience of his book to political philosophers who should consider more carefully the value of utopian fiction and literary scholars who might consider theorists of justice. Additionally, the close readings themselves are a pleasure to read. Mao balances right on that fine line between description, analysis, and textual evidence. He offers enough so that a reader unfamiliar with the text is given a window in, and his analysis is at the same time rich enough so that those familiar with the text can see it anew.This same impulse to look beyond what a typical book of utopian scholarship might investigate extends to Mao’s discussion of Rawls and Nozick. The consideration of John Rawls begins with Rawls’s contention at the beginning of A Theory of Justice (1971) that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions” (qtd. on 41). This claim—which Rawls himself gives up in his later reworkings of his theory as it is grounded in a comprehensive and not a political liberalism—provides Mao with a hook for thinking about justice as both responding to problems and offering an ordered remedy. What Mao does not quote from Rawls, interestingly, is the contention that one of the roles of political philosophy is to be “realistically utopian.” Rawls notes in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), echoing the same claim from Theory of Justice, that “we view political philosophy as realistically utopian: that is, as probing the limits of practicable political possibility. Our hope for the future of our society rests on the belief that the social world allows at least a decent political order, so that a reasonably just, though not perfect, democratic regime is possible.”2 Rawls’ reference to the idea of utopia as “reasonably just, though not perfect,” is a step toward Mao’s interest in what we might imagine for a just future and how that imagination is motivated by injustices in the present.Mao also considers the Rawlsian critic Robert Nozick and his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) to highlight a position that he notes Fredric Jameson echoes, namely, that the only possible utopia is a world where individuals can choose their own possible world (an idea that Mao returns to in a different guise in the epilogue, with Octavia Butler’s short story “The Book of Martha” [2003]). Jameson’s utopian archipelago then works as a frame for interpreting a wide variety of utopian novels that consider these multiple societal options. Mao chooses Chang Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea for a close reading as “a grim parody of Nozick’s and Jameson’s archipelago . . . one in which emigration . . . is not a way of finding like-minded souls and a congenial style of life but rather a staggeringly dangerous undertaking holding scant promise of social or material, let alone spiritual, gain” (200). Here is an argument that illustrates that migration, the how and why of freedom of movement (one of Rawls’s own primary social goods and a feature of one of Nussbaum’s ten human capabilities), means one thing in theory and another in contemporary literature. So why is there this discrepancy? Do we no longer think of freedom of movement to be an essential feature of a just society? Or is it that we need to think more closely about who utilizes that freedom? The principle of exit, the right to leave one’s polity, grounds freedom of movement. And tacit consent to the law, the idea that by remaining in a polity we agree to the system of law, paints a picture of those who leave as merely expressing displeasure with the law as it is. But, those who are most likely to take up the promise of such a right out of desperation, and who are willing to suffer to do so, challenge the very notions of tacit consent and exit. We want to be able to move, to leave, but the reality of leaving and arriving elsewhere is itself fraught.As I began with Iris Marion Young, let me end with Martha Nussbaum, who will also connect the search for justice with the imagination necessary to motivate us:Inventions of Nemesis follows through on Nussbaum’s charge here, illustrating how theories of justice are doing utopian work. Mao provides a bridge between theories of justice and utopian fiction, both informing the reader and inviting consideration of other justice theorists whose work should be more seriously considered by utopian scholars, just as justice theorists should, on Mao’s argument, more seriously consider utopian accounts

Conversation · Economic Justice · Indignation · Politics · Scholarship · Utopia · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Marxism and Critical Theory · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction