Article

Thesis Eleven
2015, Vol. 131(1) 8198
The people beyond Mars: The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513615613459

trilogy to understand the.sagepub.com

post-scarcity
Amedeo DAdamo
Universita Cattolica, Italy, and Universita Della Svizzera-Italiana, Switzerland

Abstract
For at least 50 years science fictions dangerousness has sprung largely from its leaps into
the transgressive. But something has now changed; the biggest problem today for anyone
trying to create dangerous science fiction is that in the developed countries we now live
largely in a libertarian, post-transgressive culture. There is, however, at least one target
for science fiction that grows increasingly dangerous; the border between scarcity and
post-scarcity. This danger is perhaps best realized in the great Mars trilogy by Kim
Stanley Robinson, which not only imagines a bridge from our current scarcity-based
culture to a post-scarcity culture, but also shows people building this very bridge up
from the foundations of our life today. Perhaps more dangerously, he then follows
Marcuse and Mumford in envisioning not only an end to the economic problem of
poverty but also to the social, anthropological and psychical forces of scarcity, showing
step-by-step the dramatic changes in psychology, values and lives that post-scarcity
would bring. And so, like certain tales by Plato and Tolstoy, it is a threshing tale, a
tale that forces us into an imaginative confrontation with our current values, intending to
winnow the false from the true. This epic sets out to alter the way we see ourselves and
our social sphere, hoping like William Blake that altering the eye alters all; perhaps
nothing but such a plausible, non-utopian and social vision of life in post-scarcity can be
truly dangerous to the way we now think, love, work and war.

Keywords
Post-scarcity, post-transgressive, Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, solidal
aesthetics, threshing tale

Corresponding author:
Amedeo DAdamo, Universita Cattolica, Milan, Italy.
Email: amedeo.dadamo@gmail.com
82 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

Introduction: What is most dangerous transgression, Ayn

Rand in rocket-ships, or a complete reinvention of the social self,
reimagined up from its substructural roots?
Fifty years ago one thing was clear about science fiction: its best work made dangerous
leaps into the transgressive. Picking four books that have held radical power to astonish
and challenge, we remember how Stranger in a Strange Land, Naked Lunch, A Clock-
work Orange and The Dispossessed embodied radicality at a time when the New Left and
identity politics were newly-defining the very edge of our freedoms and social imagi-
nation. In their time, when the boundaries of sexual transgressions and the borders of
identities seemed to be the cage of surplus repression, imaginative transgression seemed
the path to the liberation of the psyche, even somehow to a life beyond capitalism.
This was not a complete fantasy. Certainly transgression will always be an axe with
which we break up the ice of the soul, as Kafka argued was the task of all literature, and
will always be a useful tool in the important ongoing fight to open up spaces for
oppressed and forbidden identities. But while a younger generation is certainly still
attracted to classic transgressive SF, in this cultural moment it is no longer so liberating
to fantasize about being a stranger in a strange new body; after a half-century of identity
politics and the liquidification of our world culture, the global cultural imagination has
become far less committed to certain fixed borders those of gender, race and species,
for example and so our increasingly neo-libertarian culture can incorporate and dismiss
most of the transgressive visions that science fiction throws at it. Today the biggest
problem for anyone trying to create dangerous science fiction is that we now live in the
developed countries at least largely in a post-transgressive culture. And from this shore
we can see that those old imaginative battles have won us only small freedoms, granted
easily within a libertarian framework and safely placed within the apparently unlimited
horizon promised by capitalism to the individual. In fact, capitalism now rules our planet
and our imaginary in part by arguing that it itself is the only economic model in which
both imaginative transgression and the liberation of micro-identities can and will end-
lessly take place. And so today these once-radical visions now only refine our sense of
liquidity.
There is, however, at least one target for science fiction that grows increasingly
dangerous as our history continues to unfold through crisis after crisis: the issue of
scarcity and all of the cultural values that follow in its train. Though we have spent
decades and vast amounts of cultural capital endlessly re-imagining all manner of
individual freedoms, sketching out all kinds of fantasies of individual power, protean
bodies and gender fantasies in comic books, movie-screens, X-boxes and novels, we
have barely even begun to imagine ourselves conquering scarcity. In short, while we
arguably live in a post-transgressive culture and world, ours is obviously not one of post-
scarcity; that world remains off-planet.
But now this red planet hangs ever-larger on our horizon. Brought closer by todays
energy, fabrication and robotics technologies, it now stirs the tides of our blood, beck-
oning us like a fertile unexplored terrain whose exotic fruit remain largely unharvested,
provoking us to ask: Could we get there? And would its contagions be dangerous if
brought back to ours?
DAdamo 83

Yes, Ill argue, and moreover this danger is perhaps best realized in the great Mars
trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. On this Mars, post-scarcity becomes a pivotal tech-
nique for showing how contingent so many of our values are upon the current categories
of work, leisure and social relations. Here post-scarcity is not a demand for the block-
granting of small freedoms but is instead a redrawing of the imaginative horizon of
freedom itself. To see how, we first consider a short summary of the Martian trilogy.

Robinsons Mars trilogy summarized

The Mars trilogy, published between 1993 and 1997, is a story of the struggle on Mars of
a nascent socialistically-oriented society to invent itself and then liberate the Martian
planet from the control and ravages of a corporate-run Earth. The tale is told through the
close third-person perspectives of eight of the planets first scientist-settlers and of two
other characters who first appear in the second volume.
Formally, the story eschews the neo-Aristotelian structure of 19th-century novels;
rather than a linear narrative driven by a traditional single active character, these three
novels instead deploy a group of initially somewhat passive characters and a timeline full
of flashbacks that cut across multiple perspectives to portray the growth of a new form of
civilization.
This civilization is made possible by a standing-wave of technological developments
(all outgrowths of todays technology, thus positioning the tale as hard science fiction)
that are then deployed by our main characters to invent a new social model on Mars.
Their modeling efforts incorporate actual social struggles, pairing an unusual hard-
sociology approach with the tales hard-science commitment. Then, as this new society
frees itself of the problems and social psychology of scarcity, it falls inevitably into a war
with a dystopian corporate Earth. And so this is a tale about an anti-colonial war of
liberation and also a tale of two planets, with Earth beset by our familiar capitalist
globalized culture and Mars birthing a rich, complex reaction against it by inventing a
new post-scarcity form of life.

Robinson and trans-humanism

Hopefully even this brief summary shows why Robinsons trilogy is arguably the pre-
mier progressive exploration of post-scarcity in literature, offering political strategies
and solidal aesthetic techniques that can help us engineer and execute resistance to the
current globalized corporate logic.
Today this is obviously an odd claim to make for a work in which there is very little
gender play, very little ethnic identity (despite some excellent characterizations,
Robinsons is largely one of well-educated whiteness) and scant efforts to present
marginalized voices. In fact his Mars is a privileged white world; it feels at times as if a
top North American research university was given a very large land grant to indulge its
youthful ideals of intentional communities.
Yet despite these limitations, Robinsons master-work remains dangerous because it
not only imagines a bridge from our current scarcity-based culture spanning across to a
post-scarcity culture but because it shows us a complex familiar-feeling group of people
84 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

in a very realized, material and specific world, struggling to build this bridge up from the
foundations of our actual social-political struggles, and depicting on its planet-sized
canvas the unfolding of this social construction in authentic, encyclopaedic, Bruegel-
like detail. His epic then envisions not only an end to the economic problem of
poverty but rather to the far-more-complex social, anthropological and psychical forces
of scarcity, showing step-by-step the dramatic changes in psychology, values and lives
that this change would bring. Most importantly, Robinson stays always committed to a
literary and scientific realism, his thick description married to the actual history of
progressive struggles, and therefore his work does not collapse into the dreaminess of
so much utopian fantasy; we cannot discount it as escapist entertainment.
In this way the Mars trilogy contrasts with most science fiction. This genre usually
dismisses scarcity either by imagining that the poor will always be with us or by simply
imagining the erasure of the poor as a class, positing a materialist paradise as a given in
the future. Of course paradise is not only a fiction but is also an enclosure, a walled park,
a gated pleasure-ground metaphysically walled-off from our ordinary lived lives; such
stories actually feed our alienation because they either assume there is no paradise and
treat scarcity as a fixed immutable, or they just dream someones magically thrown us all
over the wall. Either way, those stories argue that the end of scarcity can only be a
fantasy. In fact even that great futurist Karl Marx was unable or unwilling to imagine the
future man and woman in any detail, refusing to depict the life to come in his socialist
paradise; even in most Marxist accounts post-scarcity appears only as a gauzy fantasy
with religious dimensions.
Consumer culture has certainly had no trouble filling that gap in our cultural ima-
ginary; in the science fiction field, for example, Robinsons remaining competing vision
of post-scarcity comes in that branch of the trans-humanism movement which imagines a
future of infinite supply and infinite demands, one where everyone is super-rich and can
realize any fantasy, any whim. In these libertarian visions of unlimited individual power,
all of our social problems even the social itself are often pictured as a boundary to be
surpassed like the limits of Earths atmosphere. Thus this vision feels akin to Ayn Rand
in rocket-ships; by staying within the imagination of libertarianism, at best it yearns for
an end to singular poverties while the social remains scarce. It too plays safely within the
imaginary walls of subjective paradise.
By contrast, Robinson is linked to the social concerns of the human potential
movement, the Ur-ideology of trans-humanism. He is of course not entirely alone in this;
other authors (with a more narrow focus) have also explored ways post-scarcity might
change the constitution of friendship and romance, the boundary between work and play,
the division between public and private property, the divisions between education and
life, fundamental kinship rules and sexual norms, and even the nature of motivation
itself. But clearly Robinsons six-year-labour has brought the most sustained intellectual
and imaginative breadth to this attempt.
To understand Robinsons deeply-social project, we now position the Mars trilogy not
in the science fiction tradition nor in the utopian tradition but rather in another very
different line, one which we argue runs through Plato and Tolstoy and that forces us into
a subjective-yet-social re-imagination. In our account, Robinson is combining a century
of criticism around the sociology of work with this specific piece of aesthetic machinery
DAdamo 85

that subjects ones own social realm to ones imagination. To see this move, we step back
for the moment from Robinsons epic and instead focus specifically on this imaginative
machinery, which we argue will reveal aspects of the concepts of both the social and of
post-scarcity. This machinery also reveals one central reason why it is so hard, in life and
literature, to imagine a world beyond scarcity.

The threshing tale: The story-machinery designed to change the

social self
At the core of Robinsons richly-imagined world is a scarcity/post-scarcity thought-
experiment proposed by critics of capitalisms concept of work. In this thought-
experiment, proposed by both Lewis Mumford and the Freudian-Marxist Herbert
Marcuse, we are asked to imagine a specific scenario where governments use tax dollars
to build factories and the robotic machines to run them. The government then uses the
robotically-generated resources of these largely-automated factories to fund the basic
necessities of its citizens, freeing us all from the constraints of scarcity and liberating us
to pursue rich, new lives.
Note that this thought-experiment is not simply a familiar utopian projection. Cer-
tainly it is asking us to daydream of a better tomorrow, and certainly it is proposing a
political initiative, but it is also doing something else that we need to pay attention to: the
thought-experiment asks us to engage in a radical and self-reflective act of our aesthetic
imagination. Most of us gain a substantial sense of our self-worth from our jobs, no
matter how repetitive or unchallenging they may be the many small and often-
unconscious investments of intention and pride in, say, a well-mopped floor, a manu-
facture lot finished on time or a cash-register tray coming in even at the end of the day.
But with this simple thought-experiment, all that is suddenly swept away as I am
confronted by a vision that makes much of my existing life suddenly looking useless,
pointless and oppressive. The conceptual action of imagining how I might live in this
post-scarcity world then puts me into an imaginative crisis about my own life.
Lets attempt a phenomenology of this process. We suggest that this thought-
experiment which importantly removes a wide bank of current motivating fears and
incentives from my life has three important steps. The first two steps cross from a
negative into a positive imaginative activity, or what we will call a thrashing and then a
threshing activity.

Step one: The thrashing of our current unexamined values

First I take a negative step in imagining that my own labour is easily replaced by an
automated process. This alienating, thrashing vision creates a kind of acid-bath that
melts certain values, life-projects, prides and preoccupations. Suddenly, once you realize
that a robot can do the work you now do (and more quickly, tirelessly, and probably
better than you ever could), you ask yourself some withering questions such as, so then
what were all those years of struggle marbled with office politics and petty rivalries and
scraping and saving what were they all worth? I was proud of my work, but now Im
wondering whats the point? What is my hard work at the factory really worth? Nothing,
86 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

it seems, and so all of your sense of self-worth that is tied to your easily-replaceable job
suddenly melts into air.
Remember that in the thought-experiment it is not as if your own speciality has simply
been surpassed and so some retraining is needed. It is also not like imagining that you
have won the lottery, nor is it like imagining that your factory has been closed but you
will continue to be paid. Nor is it simply that you glimpse your own embeddedness in a
substructure and then you see that substructure itself become archaic; it is not simply that
you are obsolete but will receive a paid stipend from now on.
Instead, the vision grants an imagined freedom that is much more profound. We are
asked to imagine the entire work ethic being surpassed, to picture ourselves living
through a massive anthropological shift in which the ocean of work itself that great
sense-making realm has suddenly and massively dried up and left us all gasping for
breath in the new air, gazing at the strange new landscape of ourselves where the sea used
to be.
This rather shocking acidic disenchantment and alienation is the negative thrashing
recognition (as distinct from the next, positive threshing step) in which your work-based,
scarcity-based values are now suddenly revealed to be only contingent, seemingly-fixed
necessities that like your working identity have suddenly evaporated in this
withering vision. This thrashing of our self-image and self-worth can certainly lead to
despair, especially for a person deeply invested in the Protestant work ethic; it certainly
makes it harder to go back to work tomorrow.
But. This thrashing does not necessarily lead to hopelessness and nihilism.

Step two: The threshing of our remaining values

Hope arrives again with the second, positive step, which is the threshing of those values
that remain. This moment begins once I see what would be left of my existing values in
this imagined future. I now realize that in fact not all of my values are oriented around
work and, with those erased, with the false and contingent melted away, I begin to
suspect that what remains is what truly matters.
And what would still matter in this robot-based economy? Many activities come to
mind: those times spent with family and friends, time spent in creative activities or in
improving others lives, experiences, learning, researching and exploring. Social values
such as love, affection, care, and teaching would all remain, as would many aesthetic
activities (even if the art market itself would almost certainly evaporate). In fact, it can be
surprising to many who first consider this scenario how many value-laced actions and
activities remain worthwhile after the elimination of labour. It seems this distinction
between labour-based and post-labour values manages to re-introduce something like
John Stuart Mills old distinction between lower and higher pleasures, or like Maslows
hierarchy of needs; this way of ordering values seems to privilege social and aesthetic
values and exploratory activities over others. This revaluation is central to Robinsons
characters as the Mumford-Marcuse thought-experiment slowly unfolds around them.
But before we return to the Mars trilogy, we should consider two very different and
far more famous tales that are, like our robot-based thought-experiment, also designed to
throw our current morality into relief. I am suggesting we compare this post-scarcity
DAdamo 87

scenario with Platos Ring of Gyges tale from Book II of The Republic which may be
the worlds first thought-experiment (Shields, 2010: 73) and with Tolstoys novella
The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
On the surface, there is little to unite these three tales Robinsons is a 2000-page
SF epic, Platos is a short flash-fiction-length fantasy and Tolstoys is a realistic
drama in novelette form. But in fact all three share a common pedagogical ambition;
at their core all three have an easily-grasped situational scenario that is crafted to
trigger a specific phenomenology of moral improvement. All three authors believe
that if I consider their story against my life I will suffer a shock, the recovery from
which can improve my life. This shock and recovery process distinguishes all three
stories from utopian tales on the one hand, which model a better world that we should
yearn to achieve, and moral parables on the other, which model an individuals life
that we should imitate. These three threshing tales blaze a different path; they all
confront us with ourselves.

From the magical to the ordinary: Platos ring of invisibility and

Tolstoys fertile sickbed as exemplary threshing tales
To see how, we begin with Platos Ring of Gyges tale. In this simple fantasy, a
shepherd finds a ring in a crypt that lets him become invisible at will. He goes to the
Kings court and successfully projects the image of a just and dignified man, mistakenly
admired and respected while in truth his ring lets him secretly sleep with anyone he
wishes, steal whatever and kill whomever he wants. The sobered tale-teller Glaucon then
asks Socrates: If there were no possibility whatsoever that my injustices would be
detected and punished, would I still desire to do what is just and be a just man? Why
would I? Why would I want to be just in such circumstances? (Plato, 2000).
Plato opens the main argument of The Republic with this story and, though the tale
initially shocks Socrates, he gradually recovers, using the bulk of The Republic to argue
that this powerful ring would in fact make Gyges unhappy by cutting him off from his
society, that being just is itself a social relation and an integral part of ones happiness.
Socrates answer to this question has structured many later science fiction and fantasy
tales, from The Invisible Man to Lord of the Rings, both of which follow Plato beyond the
momentary fantasy of sudden subjective power to examine how such personal power
would slowly falsify and destroy ones social bonds, leading one to fall into the decaying,
despairing orbit of a Gollum.
Notice the clear parallel now between Platos and the Mumford-Marcuse scenario.
Both challenge us by asking us for a projective act of our own imagination what kind of
person would I become if this X-and-Y were suddenly true of my own life and the logic
of all social relations were suddenly changed?
Now let us look at what seems to be a very different kind of story Leo Tolstoys
novelette The Death of Ivan Ilyich. This is a realistic psychological tale about Ivan Ilyich,
a provincial official who dies a long, painful death and then examines how he and others
around him are affected by this death, contrasting their prosaic false reactions with his
own newly-profound insight about his social realm.
88 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

The story is purposefully structured backwards to avoid any conventional sense of

drama; it opens with the announcement of Ivans death in the paper being read by his
colleagues at work, who all say they are grieving while each really thinks about how this
will affect his own personal advancement. The bulk of the story is about how his friends
and familys false social projections and enacted bourgeois hypocrisies reveal that they
never really cared about him.
After this long, discouraging portrait of egocentricity, social falseness and atomized
individuals, the story flashes back and we finally meet Ivan. Now we learn of his
ordinary yet hopeful youth, then about the slow corruption of his morals, morale and
spirit as he learned to play the professionals game and rose to become a judge. Then we
vividly enter Ivans own first-person perspective as he injures himself and takes to his
bed. Now we stay with him for pages as he slowly dies and meditates on his life.

What do I want? To live and not to suffer, he answered. And again he listened with such
concentrated attention that even his pain did not distract him.
To live? How? asked his inner voice. . . . As you lived before, well and pleasantly? . . .
And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to
say none of those best moments . . . now seemed at all what they had then seemed none
except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something
really pleasant . . . [but] the nearer he came to the present, the more worthless and
doubtful were the joys. This began with the School of Law. A little that was really good
was still found there there was light-heartedness, friendship, and hope. But in the upper
classes there had already been fewer such good moments. Then . . . his marriage, a mere
accident . . . and the sensuality and hypocrisy: then that deadly official life and those
preoccupations about money, a year of it, and two, and ten, and twenty . . . It is as if I had
been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. . . . I was going up in public
opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. . . . What if my whole life
has been wrong? (Stobaugh, 2012: 3634)

In the storys last moments Ivan escapes his egoistic cocoon by comforting his son and
trying to comfort his wife, acting on a self-insight that grants him a certain final
redemption.
Note how far we are from Platos fantasy. Platos tale imagines the ego first in sudden
radical indulgence and then, as this radical freedom wears off, falling into isolated
despair. Instead Tolstoys tale is about our normal lifelong everyday ego indulgences
suddenly confronted by radical ego self-honesty. As Philip Rahv observed,

Tolstoy is above all an artist of the normal the normal, however, so intensified that it
acquires a poetical truth and an emotional fullness which we are astounded to discover in the
ordinary situations of life. Analysis is always at the center of the Tolstoyan creation. (Rahv,
1986: 412)

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is aesthetically provocative in large part because it is, first, an
undeniably plausible story of the everydayness of the last moments in a mans life and,
second, because it ends with an implicit, pointed imaginative challenge: what if just like
DAdamo 89

this dying everyman, you yourself finally had the panic and the paralysis to gain an
epoche of insight and honesty to truly evaluate how youve loved and been loved in your
life?
Note that neither Platos nor Tolstoys story is simply about personal virtues (for
example, a commitment to self-expression, discovery or excellence); instead, both are
about how we relate to, connect with and treat others. They both generate an imaginative
perspective for evaluating ones honest and dishonest social relationships. Each then
generates a choice between, on the one hand, an authentically-social life where I am
connected with a community and, on the other, a successful and egocentric life where, as
I rise above the pressures of scarcity, I am psychically isolated from others. In a sense,
and seen if we tilt the tales slightly leftwards, both tales also mirror a common antagonist
in life the quiet ways that scarcity and scarcity-based values shape, master and corrupt
our joys, ambitions, aspirations and relationships. These are all characteristics they also
share with Robinsons epic.
So let us now draw parallels between all three tales so we can define, and grasp the
power of, the threshing tale. Platos shepherd, Tolstoys judge and Robinsons world-
building characters each make us ask two questions about ourselves. First, if the pro-
vocative supposition of this story were true of my own life (respectively: if I had a ring of
invisibility, if I were dying painfully and honestly reflecting on what was joyful in my
life, if my labour was no longer a necessity for living), then what aspects of my current
life would be revealed as contingent and would fall away? Second, with those values
gone, then what values, occupations, and relationships would remain worth pursuing?
All three tales trigger acts of personal and social re-imagination, asking me to confront
the basic values and assumptions of both my personal and my social life, to examine not
just how I am treated but how I treat others.
Note that a threshing tale, because it engages us to re-examine our own memories and
sense of self, certainly affects different individuals in different ways. They do not
impress a model of a sinner or a saints life or of a utopia upon us; rather, each tale
intentionally provokes a fundamental and life-changing debate that we must have with
ourselves about our own social values. In forcing this individual reflection, these tales
claim the power to thresh our personal values, to winnow out the false from the true.
With this in mind, we now turn to just how the Mars trilogy goes a step beyond these
other two threshing tales. We call this extra step the leavening step to capture the sense
that it provokes a new growth of new values.

Step three of the threshing sublime: The leavening of the new values of post-
scarcity
The leavening step in the Mumford-Marcuse scenario begins when we inevitably ask
ourselves the following question: In this world of post-scarcity where robots have freed
us of our scarcity-based values and where so many new possibilities for life are suddenly
opening up to us all, what new values that we dont currently hold and what undreamt
forms of life might beckon to us there?
Closer examination reveals that this change is far harder to imagine, by orders of
magnitude, than the dangers of a ring of invisibility or of deathbed self-honesty. In a
90 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

sense the first two tales thresh us in a subjective way; they propose that I myself should
have an epoche that will provoke me into changing my values and improving my life. I
can for the most part imagine such a new life for myself, even if perhaps I cannot in the
end live up to its new demands, but neither tale imagines any fundamental change in the
community.
But to imagine the dimensions of post-scarcity, one aspect is overwhelmingly diffi-
cult. Of course I know this post-scarcity reality would change everything about my work,
my day, my family, and far more profoundly than if I were suddenly elevated to the top 1
per cent, since wealth itself would no longer structure any social hierarchy.
What is much harder to imagine is how this transformation ripples out through every
relationship, every subjectivity, and thus the entire social fabric, an end to scarcity for
every single other person I now know and will ever meet. This possibility combines both
the power of the ring story to change all economic situations for me with the power of the
Tolstoy tale to release me from all my falsely-based social relationships, but it simul-
taneously changes all of these economic and social relationships for everyone else in the
entire community. I am being asked to fundamentally re-imagine our entire anthro-
pological framework, to work out the exponential math of the transformed Other.
Picturing this future is, for most of us at least, impossible. At this point I can rationally
understand that all social relations and structures would change profoundly, but I am too
imaginatively challenged to clearly envision their new shape. And so even though we
rationally know that post-scarcity is achievable within the framework of our current
science and technological trends, our attempts to imagine it remain only dreamily
paradisiacal.

Why is a life in post-scarcity so difficult to imagine?

Perhaps now it is clearer why post-scarcity has not played a larger role in either Marxist
thought or imaginative literature; it is simply a different challenge on our faculties than
either utopian and dystopian models or our other threshing tales, which extrapolate from
more limited analyses of conflicts. We seem built to imagine new situations, archi-
tectures and even new bodies, but not new anthropologies. And so post-scarcity takes us
to the very horizon of our present cultural imagination, but there at that lip of our utopian
vision, it then challenges the imagination to make a leap it fundamentally cannot make.
In doing so, the post-scarcity imaginative moment pushes us to the very horizon of
what Kant called the mathematical sublime. Any experience, imagining or artwork is
mathematically sublime to the extent that ones reason knows it is real and that it has
profound dimensions, but yet one also knows ones imagination cannot fully grasp it in
its tremendous entirety. Consider the analogy of trying to imagine the galaxy; you can
know how many light-years wide it is, how many stars it holds. The reason has some way
to understand it, but still you know that you cannot mentally grasp its actual magnifi-
cence and wonder and size, and you are aware of your own failing to do it justice to
grasp its tremendousness is to grasp the paucity of your own apprehension, a very dif-
ficult conceptual place to occupy for long.
Consider now that when the mathematical sublime has as its object a far-more-
unobservable realm like post-scarcity, it becomes easy and perhaps unavoidable to
DAdamo 91

project the sense of sublime vagueness here onto the object itself, and thus to dismiss its
possibility. But, we argue, real phenomenological analysis reveals that our sense of its
sublime unreality is actually a sense of the limits of our own imagination.
But understanding the limits of our current imagination may let us peer beyond those
limits. And so we again ask, why is it so famously hard to imagine the end of scarcity in
our tales and life? Why do we have difficulty picturing life in post-scarcity as being any
richer than winning the lottery or being on a permanent vacation, images that are clearly
simple parasitic visions of our capitalist experience? Why have socialist and communist
revolutionary writers never been able to portray life beyond the revolution in any
plausible detail, even though we know such a portrait would be a profound revolutionary
tool?
Here we suggest two explanations. Comparing the tale of post-scarcity to our other
examples of threshing tales helps highlight the extraordinary demands that post-scarcity
makes on our imagination, a far more profound challenge than any ordinary utopian
vision one which takes us to the very horizon of our current aesthetic. To go beyond
that horizon, in realistic imaginative detail, would be to go dangerously beyond the
hegemonic anthropology of capitalism itself, and that might be an imaginative act that
we are subconsciously afraid of, perhaps because once that threshing act is done, it
cannot be undone; our sense of our existing life would be changed, our eyes altered. At
the same time, perhaps the concept of post-scarcity is also mathematically sublime: we
may rationally know it is possible but we cannot imagine a life over there across its
borders. In these ways post-scarcity marks the uneasy horizon of the aesthetic imagi-
nation today.

Robinson heads towards the horizon

And yet Robinsons massive literary work rumbles bravely towards this very horizon.
Unique among the imagineers of post-scarcity, he has spent more than six years con-
structing this tool for taking our imagination across the boundary to post-scarcity.
In this massive conceptualization what stands out is Robinsons refreshing social
focus, dramatized in the changing boundary of the self and the social on Mars. Just as he
begins his epic in a world that is technically close to ours before unfolding it techno-
logically into a post-scarcity world, the initial social realm where he begins his char-
acters also feels very familiar. When we first meet these scientists they seem like
ordinary everyday professionals who, though highly self-actualized, are all caught up in
familiar competitions, jealousies, and office politics; they swim in the same sea of work
that we do. But then they come ashore on Mars, and as they slowly grow committed to
building a new culture, their entanglement with the social becomes more complex.
So let us look at his characters development on three fronts, those of character-arc,
of social horizon, and also of what Hviid and Tester (2012) call is-ness. Consider
that, though this is a story of revolutionaries, none of the main characters is actually
born into the life of revolutionary hero none has the strong ego, the certainties and
steadfast persona of a Lenin or a Mao. In fact, for the epics first 1000 pages, none of
the main characters even fits the model of the ordinary active protagonist of most
genre fiction, someone whose internal and external objectives drive a narrative
92 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

forwards. Instead most of these characters are initially passive protagonists whose
lives even into much of the second book are often pushed forward by the events
around them. In this stretch most of them pursue self-chosen projects, maintaining a
kind of libertarian distance from one another. At one early moment Sax expresses
their common irritation about the growing discussions of their ethical obligations by
quoting Sartres line that Hell is other people.
But after the failure of the first revolution the survivors must hide from Earths
corporate armies in a refuge they build under Mars southern ice cap. Here the trilogys
second book opens as they raise their children, and now we see them naturally begin to
shift from their professional concerns to ethical concerns that focus on the Other. This
slow change is from their old research-based ethics (that let each person focus on specific
technical projects while maintaining a commitment to open communication) to an ethics
of care of the sort first described by Carol Gilligan.1
Simultaneously, another shift takes place among them. We see how post-scarcity
begins to deeply affect their existing social balances among Aristotles forms of
friendship those based on pleasure, utility, and virtue.2 In the first book, their lives
resembled ours in that the demands of scarcitys work-based culture pressure us all
towards friendships of utility where, in the need for social advancement, even our
pleasure over the company of others is often harnessed to our job pursuits. Certainly at
this point friendships of virtue are a luxury item.
But once they hide together under the ice cap, their friendships increasingly become
bonds of virtue and pleasure. While the scientists never form a mutual admiration
society, and never stop bickering, their relationships are increasingly solidal.3 Though
utility remains important in their relationships, it is no longer the capitalist or Ilychian
work-based utilities of self-advancement but the virtuous utilities of pursuing their
mutual social-political commitment.
In this long phase-change (as Robinson describes it), the land of Mars serves as a kind
of transitional object. As Mars slowly changes under their terraforming hands, its
wonderfully-described geo-physicality grants their experiences a malleable phenomen-
ological ground as they struggle to shift it from its alien present-at-handedness. The
planets slow grand plastic change then provokes a new openness to existence in them
all, paradoxically both grounding them in the role of stewardship and enveloping them in
a sublime reaction of wonder and re-enchantment (Bennett, 2001) that grants their own
imaginations an open, Blochean sense of the possible.
This is the unfolding of a social ethics of care, twinned with a corresponding shift in
the forms of friendship that their post-scarcity situation makes possible. I suggest that
Mars is a transitional object in this process because this unfolding social ethic in our
scientists moves from geological Mars to human Martians, transferred from the changing
land to the social realm through the introduction at the start of the second book of their
kibbutz-like clutch of children. In this new circle of Martian children who have never
really known scarcity or capitalism life is highly social and primarily motivated by the
joys of discovery, the fear of the corporations that control the cities, and a growing
mutual loyalty to the cause of a new Martian identity liberated from Earths psychoses.
The scientists first construct and maintain a secret home for the children in their
commonly-run ice cave, and this serves as practice to build a real future for the entire
DAdamo 93

group, and then that becomes the seed of a planet-wide alternative economic, social and
political realm.
It is only after this long dialogic process of social bonding and re-imagination is
complete that a real commitment to the second revolution is even possible, and this long
introduction helps insure that their leadership, when it finally arises, is remarkably non-
hierarchical and instead seems to organically express the will of their communities. But
struggle is not over; the very plasticity of Mars landscape which, like a growing child, is
now so deeply imbued with themselves threatens to trigger a civil war over two versions
of an ethics of ecological care. This conflict runs well beyond the end of the revolution.
Throughout their struggles, and because our characters are empirically-trained
scientists and engineers, they spend great amounts of time examining the actual
struggles of progressive history, finally constructing their new constitution and
society on our actual lived conflicts. By this tactic Robinsons work is a grounded
response to critics like Hviid and Tester who caution against the use of utopian fiction
as a form of political understanding, arguing that in the arts there are no necessary
restraints on creativity whereas in social theory the concern to understand the is-ness
of the world in which human praxis is carried out, and to reveal its latent tendencies,
does indeed act as a brake on a too-free imagination (2012: 3). Hviid and Testers
basic critique of utopia here is that no literature, however imaginative, can match the
is-ness of life in the ways it is captured by the economically-informed practice of
sociology and anthropology.
Ironically, Robinsons fictitious scientists agree this is why they draw on the actual
is-ness of actual progressive struggles. But of course we might also argue against Hviid
and Tester that perhaps literature can be a mirror of social understanding which, while
explaining aspects of our lives, has no direct analogue in it. To back up this rejoinder, we
offer both the concept of threshing tales and also our next aesthetic category, that of
inter-emotionality, as we consider the connections between Robinsons architecture of
character development, his extensive grappling with is-ness, and his striking specific
choice of aesthetic form.

Caring inter-emotionality: Taking William Jamess limited third

person into the social realm
All of the Mars novels are largely written in the limited third-person subjective, a
technique first perfected by Henry James. The epics long limited third-person sequences
sometimes overlap one another in time and events, with each sequence offering the
moment-by-moment subjective experiences of one of our repeating core characters. And
so rather than identifying with the challenges in achieving a singular objective as we
might with fewer and more heroic characters in a more traditionally-designed plot-
driven narrative, we instead are serially immersed moment-by-moment within their
many different singular POVs.
Consider just two examples from the Mars trilogy. Perhaps the central turning-point,
which comes midway in the epic, is the moment when the revolutionaries free Sax from
the prison where he is being tortured. This desperate rescue triggers a rare act of brutal
violence in which Maya, one of the revolutions leaders, kills Phyllis, a former colleague
94 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

and current corporate executive who was participating in Saxs torture. As they escape in
their camouflaged Mars-rover, Maya is being harshly judged by the other revolutionaries
while Nirgal, the young Mars-born protagonist who we follow in this sequence, is trying to
make sense of the experience, looking at Maya as she drives them away from the prison.

The Black Widow, they called her. Nirgal had discounted these stories as malicious gossip,
spread by people who obviously hated Maya . . . But certainly Maya now looked poiso-
nously dangerous, sitting in her car glaring at the radio, as if considering breaking their
silence to send word to the south: white-haired, hawk-nosed, mouth like a wound . . . it
made Nirgal nervous just to get in the same car with her, though he fought against the
sensation. She was one of his most important teachers after all, he had spent hours and hours
absorbing her impatient instruction in math and history and Russian, learning her more than
any of the subject material; and he knew very well that she did not want to be a murderer,
that under her moods both bold and bleak (both manic and depressive) there writhed a
lonely soul, proud and hungry. So that in yet another way this affair had become a disaster,
despite their ostensible success. (Green Mars, p. 316)

In this moment Nirgal is not on the same page as Maya; he is not sharing an emotion as in
a represented moment of harmonic empathy that is the standard machinery of sympathy.
Nirgal is also not simply bringing the wisdom of the psychologist to coldly explain
someones motivations, joy or pain, nor is he experiencing any Roshomon-like factual
difference about events, nor is he simply experiencing different emotions about the same
event. Instead he is inter-subjectively participating in Mayas social and existential exis-
tence; he has been hit hard by what has happened and is one of the recipients and carriers of
this experience and action of Mayas, but in a way different from Maya, in a way that
exhibits true but different dimensions from her own subjective sense of her actions. He is
in short an accurate mirror of her better self, one she herself does not have full access to; he
both loves her and yet also knows things about her that she herself does not know.
His evaluations also illustrate Aristotles virtuous form of friendship; Nirgal refuses
to believe the gossip, showing his own virtue as a friend. Appreciating Mayas virtues of
pride, knowledge and bravery, he knows he has learned more from her own courageous,
passionate stance on life than from her teachings; he takes both pleasure and inspiration
from her personae in ways she herself does not appreciate. In a non-sexual way, he helps
complete her.
Compare this to another moment that comes decades later, after their revolution
succeeds. Here Maya experiences something and is again observed by her friends. This
scene is told twice the first time from Mayas own point of view, and then some pages
later again from Saxs. It begins as Maya comes into her house with the other revolu-
tionaries after the funeral of a friend. She notices an old picture of a man on her counter
and stares at it, then casually comments: What an interesting face. When she sees the
shocked looks of her friends she quickly flees the apartment and wanders the city, unsure
why she is so depressed.
In fact, like them we know why; it is because the photo is of her long-dead lover Frank,
one of the two most important people in her long life; her Alzheimers-like memory loss
has progressed. A few pages later the scene is told again from Saxs point of view.
DAdamo 95

. . . he took a cup of tea from Maya, and watched her go back into the kitchen, past the table
on which Michels scrapbooks were spread. Face up was a photo of Frank that Maya had
treasured long ago . . . Sax remembered that most clearly, it was a kind of heraldic feature
of those tense years: all of them struggling while the young Frank laughed at them.
Maya stopped and looked down at the photo, stared at it closely. Remembering their earlier
dead, no doubt. Those who had gone before, so very long ago.
But she said, What an interesting face.

Sax felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. So distinct, the physiological manifestations of
distress. To lose the substance of a speculative train of thought, a venture into the meta-
physical that was one thing. But this her own past, their past it was insupportable. Not
to be abided. He would not abide it.
Maya saw they were shocked, though she did not know why. Nadia had tears in her eyes, not
a common sight. Michel looked stricken. Maya, sensing something seriously wrong, fled the
apartment. No one stopped her.

The others picked up the place. Nadia went to Michel.

More and more like that, Michel muttered, looking haunted. (Green Mars, pp. 3778)

Note that these two scenes do not propel our dramatic narrative forwards. Instead their
power comes purely from the inter-subjectivity of the emotional experience; they reveal
a self Mayas existing in and being carried forwards in others in ways that she alone
cannot. And note how Sax has changed. At the very beginning of the tale he opined that
hell was other people, but for this post-revolutionary Sax other people have become life
itself. In fact they have all gained true solidal sociality; Robinsons multiplied per-
spectives show us that in this new, richly-social world, no one person by herself contains
her own truth or character.
These scenes also illustrate what Aristotle meant when he describes a true friend as
another self (Nichomachian Ethics, Book 9, Section 4). In his trenchant analysis
Bennett Helm (2009) interprets this to mean that real friends are not a mirror of your
good and bad qualities but really are a thoughtful, caring repository of what is best about
you. That is a friendship of virtue, and these two examples from Robinson highlight this,
showing it in subjectively-distributed moments where a character is not existentially in
connection with her own best attributes and yet others see her in a stronger, truer light.
We might call this phenomenon caring inter-emotionality, defining inter-
emotionality as a cluster of empathetic emotional reactions in which one persons
pain and experiences are realized through the eyes of other characters who can actually
understand them in another dimension sometimes even more profoundly than the
initial person. In specifically caring inter-emotionality, this recognition of the other
reveals a caring historical and social relationship with the person that recognizes his life-
projects. Here the emotions, memories and meaning of a person are shared in a tight
groups history in ways that extend and entangle that persons identity with the groups.
Caring inter-emotionality allows Robinson a profound aesthetic technique for
revealing the distribution of the social subject. In each example above, Mayas truth is
96 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

not only hers alone, and not even very well understood or glimpsed by her. Its full
emotional form unfolds only in the myriad reactions among Nirgal, Sax and her other
friends; they witness her with a resonance that shivers throughout their social tree of
intertwined memories, histories and projects.
Robinsons formal writing style allows him a dramatic intersubjectivity that respects
his characters subjectivities while granting their experiences an objective vivacity. But
it also allows the reader to see how in solidal enterprises those subjective experiences
begin to extend outwards, entangling into a social web where they are meaningfully
preserved, cared for and treasured in common. His post-scarcity social realm is pow-
erfully illustrated by being lit up with these dendritic pulses of inter-emotions, thus
expanding and re-architecting the readers own social imaginary. It is a remarkable
solidal aesthetic accomplishment; by constructing his tale within this intersubjective gap,
Robinson deduces at least one beautiful theorum of what we are calling the exponential
math of the transformed Other in post-scarcity.
And with this point we return to how post-scarcity represents the horizon of our
current imagination. This socio-historical caring inter-emotionality is fundamental to
any progressive projection of post-scarcity, and perhaps to any literature that wants to
capture the social as a positive network of bonds. Because of its intersubjective nature,
caring inter-emotionality remains a gossamer presence somewhat hidden in ordinary
life, growing ever-withered as it is denied importance by capitalism. It therefore seems
less of a priority to our scarcity-born imaginations than any specific relief from our
subjectively-lived anxieties and desperations. And yet, though its easily denied,
atomized and made invisible within our limited libertarian imaginary, it nevertheless
remains more importantly transformative and joyful than any promised paradisiacal
pleasures, intense adventures or subjective utopias. In fact, the Mars trilogy suggests that
caring inter-emotionality is the great prize of any real post-scarcity worth fighting for.

Summary
Following Marcuse and other social thinkers, the Mars trilogy shows how to unwind our
subjectivity and our ethics from scarcitys tangle, revealing how much of our current
moral and psychological make-up is simply made up, a mixture of scarcity-generated
social tensions and psychic scars, and then gives a well-drawn glimpse of the kinds of
subjectivity and anthropology that might grow once these apparent necessities were
made completely contingent. In Robinsons world, which treats the self as an outgrowth
of an anthropology that is itself malleable, scarcity can be treated much more danger-
ously than in the libertarian movement where the self is a fixed concept.
In our imaginative literature there is a double-star of this concept of a static self the
imaginary of a static paradise. Ever since Dante our imaginary of paradise has often been a
utopia where the living social domain has congealed; in such visions the self is released from
the problems of others, entering a placeless place lacking negotiation over social frictions.
But Robinsons work makes clear that post-scarcity is not paradise, showing how in a
post-scarcity world we would still need, for example, to create, legislate and enforce
private contracts, public-private distinctions and both civil and criminal law. Though
their destructive force would be lessened, social conflict would not disappear, nor would
DAdamo 97

ethnicity nor gender nor cruelties nor oppressions nor history itself. Nor would experi-
ments to go beyond such histories, and such experiments would certainly raise hotly-
debated and contentious questions of the permissible and impermissible. In ordinary
life there would still be betrayals, loss, death, and thus great risks to friendship and love.
Mars never falls into the black hole of paradise; Robinson takes pains to show that even
decades after Mars liberation the planets post-scarce culture is no end-state but only a
larger platform for richer social and political foment. There are not just persons but a
living, growing people beyond Mars.
This is a far more plausible vision of post-scarcity than weve had elsewhere in our
literature, and to know this plausibly-imagined world is to face Blakes sentiment that
altering the eye alters all. Arguably our greatest aesthetic challenge today is to create a
fresh, realistic and solidal imaginary for battling scarcity and the deadly, perhaps planet-
destroying forces that it now generates and underpins. But one barrier to creating such a
new solidal aesthetic is that post-scarcity is presently beyond our imaginative horizon,
and that is no easy border to cross.
And yet Robinsons heroic 2000-page effort sets out to take us to and slightly
across this very horizon. Facing Hviids and Testers criticism about is-ness,
Robinson combines life and literature to explore our Blochean could/should/would-
be-ness. By melding progressive historical struggles, the power of a threshing tale and a
rich understanding of solidal sociality, he helps us intuit something crucial about life
lived beyond the opaque event-horizon of post-scarcity. Robinsons epic is both an
investigation into the empiric possibility of post-scarcity and an investigation into the
phenomenology of the hope itself, offering us tools, maps and inspiration for our own
ventures there. He boldly charts this social path out of our bordered libertarian imagi-
nation by first beginning close to us, with a group of disparate scientists who, like us,
strive only for self-actualization the only form of rich personhood available to sub-
jectivities living within our capitalist, libertarian imaginary and then showing them
evolve beyond the ethics of our capitalist life into an ethics of care. In doing so, they find
themselves transforming a planet and leading epically-meaningful, inspiring lives, in the
process becoming not just persons but a people.
Now its our turn.

Acknowledgements
This essay is dedicated to three brilliant teachers; Joseph Volpe, John E. Hare and Bernard Wil-
liams. Thanks to Salvatore Satta, Nevina Satta, Sean Redmond, Andrew Milner and Mauro
Magatti for their help.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
98 Thesis Eleven 131(1)

Notes
1. Joan Trono (2005) lays out categories of an ethic of care that very closely aligns with
Robinsons tale.
2. Defined in Book 8 of Aristotles Nichomachian Ethics.
3. By solidal aesthetics I mean any aesthetic that engenders, facilitates or deepens relationships
and solidarity among people. In this way solidal aesthetics are distinct from many (perhaps
most) progressive aesthetics (Brechtian, deconstructive, hermeneutical, etc.), which are often
about critique and clarifying problems and flaws in existing social relations in order to prompt
action for change. They are, I argue, two quite different approaches, directing two different
kinds of cultural aesthetic projects.

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Author biography
Amedeo DAdamo currently teaches film at the Universita Cattolica and at the Univer-
sita Della Svizzera Italiana. He was the Founding Dean and then President of the Los
Angeles Film School, a floating graduate film-crafts conservatory. He co-founded The
Traveling Film School, which has built small tuition-free film schools in Cameroon and
Sardinia. He has written and, with his wife Nevina Satta, co-directed and co-produced
the UNICEF-endorsed feature The Tree of Ghibet, a drama about the exploitation of
street children. Together they argue for Fairtrade cinema, the adoption of international
production rules for making films in underdeveloped regions.