What sorts of games or instruments of power exist in out societies? To what extent do systems of various kinds control us or determine the actions we perform? Does such a system carry with it an inherent potential for abuse, and where might that lead us? Through reading fiction, we are sometimes led to imagine horrible futures, in an effort to avoid them – even if they happen to be imagined as something we can’t avoid. From Foucault to Deleuze, passing by way of Burroughs, Orwell and Garfinkel, and in considering Bye Bye Belgium, Frédéric Claisse analyses the philosophy of control, and has something to say about the influence of catastrophic or dystopian (fictional) narratives on our way of apprehending the world. Such narratives create a particular mode of knowledge, they deploy capabilities for an analysis of the real, and thus they are to be taken seriously. The author characterises dystopian visions as “future anterior”.
 
Frédéric Claisse, a sociologist and political scientist in the Department of Political Science at the University of Liège, has just defended a doctoral dissertation concerning accounts of contemporary events and fictional narratives. Their connection is that both accounts exaggerate the events of the present in order to constitute a plausible dystopian future; these narratives induce the readers to call into question the very basis of their social and political environment. Their task is to present a horrible and menacing world in order to provoke action to change the conditions that might bring it about in reality. Dystopias can be seen as “detours into the future for the purpose of talking about the present.” In this research, a narrative becomes an object as much as an “analyser” of politics. It centres upon the question of power. The power of narrative, and power as a narrative. 

Two aspects of the relationship between power and narrative

Following Yves Citton, Frédéric Claisse adopts a narrative approach to power, using the metaphor of narrative codes. These terms are used by Claisse in two ways. First the ‘power of the narrative’, which justifies the importance of fiction as a field of investigation. As a mode of knowledge, the narrative is an analyzing tool for political situations; the reader may be mobilised, his behaviour may be influenced. Claisse shows how this process functions for some kinds of narratives in the ‘future anterior’ mode (a verb tense in French, equivalent to the future perfect tense in English) – the events of tomorrow recounted as if they had already happened.  Secondly, ‘power as a narrative’: “if ‘acting upon the possible actions of others’ [to quote Foucault’s definition of power], or influencing that person in favour of doing something he would not have done without that influence is sufficient to characterise a relation of power, it should also suffice, according to Citton, to characterise a narrative in the minimal sense,” the researcher writes. “Controlling, setting up an intrigue, putting someone’s actions into a scenario, these are almost the same thing: it is all about getting that person to adopt a different narrative line, to construct a world for him or her and to get him or her to live in it.” (1) It thus involves imagining for an individual the whole set of all possible trajectories for a life, and to subject him or her to it. This is power as a narrative, as putting someone into a scenario. But in order to get away from such total and immanent control it is possible to develop counter-narratives. The rest of this article presents what the future anterior and simulacra are for Claisse, two kinds of counter-narratives that use fiction in order to offer us a new point of view on the world around us.

Future anterior – tomorrow’s events in a narrative past

“Future anterior” is a characterisation of anticipative fiction which through metalepsis makes readers experience another narrative level, in ‘another’ narration than that of the world in which the reader lives. It can be defined as a dystopia, an “enlightened catastrophe” (the expression comes from French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy) which visualises the worst in order to prevent it from happening, in order to forestall it. “These fictions act on two levels,” the author explains. “They work as fiction, but also as simulation, as representations of the real world, even if we are talking about a world in the future.” If these worlds are not presented together with a sort of minimum of realistic effects, the reader will not be able to relate them rationally to his own experiences. In order for the fiction to resonate with the reader, the reader must be able to immerse himself in them. “Immersion is what is frightening. The reader is afraid to dive so deeply into a story that he never returns to the surface. That is the force of fiction.”

(1) Frédéric Claisse, Simulacres et Futurs Antérieurs, Contribution à une approche narrative du
 politique, doctoral dissertation, p. 62, June 2012.