A year and two days ago I started the Ficticities website, intending for it to serve as a laboratory where readers and writers collaborate in designing, building, and testing prototypes for an alternative postcapitalist fictional reality.” After three weeks of online theorizing and speculating I thought I was ready to go. The pilot project was to be called Strands. As I described it in a post from early December 2017:

Strands will be issued as a series of compiled volumes, each published as an e-book, in which contributing writers edit, select, and format one another’s manuscripts. Each edition will be organized around a unifying premise or thematic element – a “strand” – that spans diverse genres and styles. Incorporating a wide variety of texts into a thematically focused compilation can limn the intertextual vectors by which insular fictional zones are drawn together into cities, worlds and universes, linking writers and fellow explorers on collaborative trajectories that might not otherwise have been apparent. Writers are invited to contribute manuscripts in which one or more of the unifying strands is implicated in some way. All forms of text are appropriate: short stories, fragments of longer works, essays, reviews, memoirs, poems, plays, recipes, sermons, prophecies, ecstatic utterances, manifestos, jokes, fake ads, fake news, experiments, simulations, formulae, lists, outlines… The big-tent inclusiveness of Strands is compatible with the way fictions are already written, since arguably every novel incorporates non-fictional content. It’s also an attempt to recapture some of the broad original meaning of fiction as “that which is invented or imagined in the mind.”

The very next day I abandoned ship. I was concerned that the call for submissions would be nearly indistinguishable from so many others, and with no track record to draw on Strands would likely not receive high-quality manuscripts. That was before I began reading short fictions published in online open-access literary magazines. New litmags pop up continually, with no stronger credentials or vision than Strands would have offered, yet those magazines don’t seem to suffer from a shortage of submissions. But I harbored other, deeper concerns:

The main point of Strands isn’t to provide yet another venue for writers to publish their short fictions; it’s to chart an alternative course that leads toward the formation of writer-controlled syndicates for publishing long fictions. The Strands publication format is too cautious, too incremental, too concerned with veering so slightly from the main channel that writers barely have to adjust their trajectories. The alternate route needs to veer more decidedly off the main shipping lanes, and its intermediate destinations need to look more like anarcho-syndicalist publishing houses than do the nicely edited and formatted compilations of short fictions envisioned in Strands. Back to the charts and astrolabes…

At the time I deemed it important that would-be writers board the ship already understanding and endorsing Strands‘ explicitly postcapitalist and anarho-syndicalist charter. Subsequently I discovered how hard it is to find fiction writers who explicitly  entertain such notions. Just because NASA hasn’t found evidence of life forms on other planets doesn’t mean they’re not out there somewhere. As the old saying goes, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” There might be writers out there who would want to collaborate on designing and testing postcapitalist fictions, but I just haven’t been very successful at detecting them. I knew going in that I might have a hard time finding fellow travelers, mostly because I’m not well-connected with other writers and because I have no alluring authorial reputation of my own that would pull other writers into my force field. It’s entirely possible that many if not most fiction writers are as interested in postcapitalist alternatives as I am but are just as isolated, making them hard to find by me or anyone else. It’s also possible that I’m all but alone in the universe, one of the few writers who has much interest in conducting collaborative explorations of an imagined postcapitalist fictional universe.

Or maybe it’s just not that important to endorse a particular socioeconomic ideology when you’re trying to write a short fiction. I’d been busy designing a distinctly postcapitalistic project top-down from first principles but, as I observed in my last post, most open-access litmags and fictional texts are compatible with postcapitalism. Maybe it’s better to pursue a more inductive, bottom-up approach: set sail with a minimum of baggage, charting a general direction rather than a specific course and destination, then see how the winds blow and the currents flow.

Or maybe both top-down and bottom-up. Or middle-out. Establish a short-term destination and set a provisional course. If and when we arrive, figure out where to go next and how to get there. Or lower the life rafts and abandon ship.

Next post I’ll sketch out Son of Strands.

 

Aspects of a literary magazine that could generate affordances compatible with a postcapitalist ecosystem:

Open Access

Selling commodities one at a time to consumers is the essence of a capitalist economy. I’m not saying that writers and publishers shouldn’t be compensated for their work. Grants, contributions, co-ops that purchase on behalf of collectives — any number of alternative compensation schemes could be envisioned short of full-blown communism. Maybe one or more of those alternatives will take shape, at least on a limited experimental basis. Meanwhile, the decommodified open-access format for literary magazines is already up and running, with plenty of writers and publishers willing to work for no pay while offering readers free and unlimited access to content. Let’s go with that format, which would be compatible with most postcapitalist compensation mechanisms.

Vetting and Selection

Evidently it’s important to writers that the short fictions they submit to literary magazines be deemed worthy of publication by a qualified arbiter of good taste. It could be argued that upholding the protocol of “submitting” one’s work for judgment to authorities is antidemocratic and elitist — that readers individually and collectively are best qualified to decide what’s worth reading. But capitalism is already responsive to people’s choice — it’s called consumer demand. And the readers of short fictions published in open-access literary magazines are few and far between, with no feedback loops to tell the writers how many readers saw their work or what they thought of it. Of course the publishers, just like any other sort of boss, can be co-opted and corrupted: by tradition, cronyism, groupthink, power, ambition, laziness, incompetence… Besides, the tastes of tastemakers aren’t necessarily reliable — no doubt there’s a lot of variation between publishers as to whether a particular text is worthy of publication. The writers themselves should know whether their stuff is up to snuff, but in most endeavors people tend to overestimate their own excellence while simultaneously craving external validation.

Printed magazines face page constraints: each additional text selected for publication increases incrementally the costs of duplication, storage, and transportation — costs that either the publisher or the purchaser has to absorb. But online magazines aren’t hampered by these material limitations: the online platform or downloadable file can expand enormously with minimal impacts on storage space or access time. Yes, each additional published text requires more effort devoted to copyediting and formatting, but the vetting process that weeds out texts is time-consuming as well. Why not eliminate the artificial restriction on the length of each issue, which in an e-publishing context seems mostly a holdover from capitalistic practices of artificially limiting supply in order to increase prices? On the other hand, readers’ time is limited, so publishing every manuscript that’s submitted would likely prove overwhelming to the readers. For readers the vetting process serves not so much to limit supply as to focus demand, bringing to their attention those texts most worthy of their time.

So let’s tentatively accept that the submission/acceptance vetting tradition is something that most fiction writers and readers want, and that the process of evaluating merit needn’t be inimical to postcapitalism.

Periodical Compilations

The traditional publishing practice of bundling multiple short fictions into a single periodical issue emerged as a practical exigency: printing, copying, and distributing bundles of texts is more cost-effective than dispatching fictions to readers one story at a time. Online publishing obviates the logistical pragmatism of compilation, since individual texts can be posted as soon as they’re ready. And with open-access distribution there’s no need to impose a cumbersome per-story payment scheme on would-be readers.

Are there other reasons for a postcapitalist publisher to uphold the compilation rather than the individual text as the unit of distribution? I can think of two. First, if a compilation is assembled for thematic rather than pragmatic considerations, the publisher can explore ways in which a fragmented and libertarian fictional universe might converge on meanings and aesthetics that link otherwise isolated writers, readers, and texts. Second, by pulling multiple authors into a single compilation, some sort of solidarity, however short-lived, might be cultivated among writers, a solidarity that might give shape to an economy and an ecology that’s not dependent on investors and bosses to coordinate workers into production lines.

Ficticities

Short fictions published in online open-access magazines tend to take the form of stories — narratives about characters passing through situations. But of course fiction encompasses a much vaster territory than that. According to Wikipedia:

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe. The resulting world may be called a constructed world.

But worldbuilding isn’t limited to imaginary worlds; it happens in the actually existing world as well. There’s a material substrate to be sure, but humanity has built so many layers of artifice on top of it that most of us spend much of our time living in a reality that’s the product of countless imaginations. Sometimes I think the job of a postcapitalistic fiction is to write worldbuilding texts that can serve as simulations for replacing, in whole or in part, the actually existing world that we presently occupy and that seems on the verge of collapsing around us. In an early Ficticities post I wrote a couple of posts about fiction’s place in the world:

What happens to an idea once it’s been acknowledged as a fiction? First it will be dismissed as unreal, irrelevant to practical concerns. Then, maybe, the fiction will acquire entertainment value as a made-up story, to be read or watched as a temporary diversion from the day-to-day ordeal of grappling with the real world. Even serious fiction, so-called literary fiction, serves real-world functions: as a non-threatening way to practice empathy, for example, or as a means of gaining insight into the world, into the people who populate it and, perhaps especially, into oneself.

This partitioning off of fiction from reality is a death trap, not only for fiction but for reality as well. Fictions are transformed into coping mechanisms, like weekends and happy hours and self-help groups. Sometimes fictions operate as pressure valves to keep people from exploding, at other times as stimulants to help them avoid sagging into inertia. Fiction becomes incorporated into reality, assigned its proper subservient role in keeping things moving along smoothly. And with fictions partitioned off as entertainments, the what-is of actually existing reality becomes reified, immunized from the what-is-nots – the vast and depthless expanse of possibilities and improbabilities and impossibilities on which the actual floats like a rowboat on the ocean…

It’s not fiction’s job to be the scapegoat, reconciling society to its own unintended consequences, to the collateral damage it inflicts on the innocent and the guilty alike while trying to engineer a better world through goal-setting and action plans. Neither is it fiction’s job to entertain the reality engineers when they’re taking a break. It’s not fiction’s job to instruct its readers in how to be more successful reality engineers by illustrating what can go right or wrong in various hypothetical scenarios. It’s not fiction’s job to redeem the facts of the world.

At other times I think that postcapitalist fiction should acknowledge that resistance to the already built world is futile. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about absurdist fiction:

Kids don’t always play to win; sometimes they just play. No goal to be pursued, no tactics to accompish the desired goal, no instrumental agency for deploying tactics, no well-defined outcome, no exultation in victory or desolation in defeat, no lessons to be learned on how to play better and win next time. Aimless play — it seems to escape the boundaries of the training ground, where children acquire the skills and attitudes necessary to achieve success, not just individually but also for those who benefit from their achievements: parents, societies, investors. Jokes without punchlines, stories that diverge from well-defined linear plots and character development, activity without production. Maybe aimless play is a training ground for insurgents, exposing them to a different sort of game, a game where the rules aren’t constraints on play but are part of the game, to be altered at will or even discarded; where process is the outcome; where the play’s the thing, play for play’s sake, art for art’s sake; play staying play without getting co-opted into work; where the aggregate of all games isn’t a zero-sum killing field of winners and losers but a playground where everybody wins or, even better, where nobody wins or loses.

It turns out though that the insurgency playground, just like the competitive playground, is owned and controlled by the players of a larger game. They don’t have to win because they’ve already won, don’t have to resist because nothing stands in their way. You can play whatever games you want — in fact you’re encouraged to do so — but you always have to buy the equipment and rent the playing field, to defer to the refs and in the last resort to the Commissioner. Whatever game you play and however well you play it, you’re bound to lose. Even hammerspace is controlled by The Man, letting him rig the game to suit his own purposes.

The situation is ripe for random irruptions of surreal absurdities.

And finally, here are the last paragraphs of a book I wrote a long time ago about Genesis 1, which in a nutshell I interpreted as a narrative describing the creation of narrative worldbuilding:

Our world is suspended across time by a multiplicity of intertwined realities. A powerful engine is at work, weaving alternative futures right under our feet. Sometimes the push from behind is so strong it seems to be hurling us headlong into chaos. At other times it’s as though we’re riding through a flat and featureless landscape with nothing new under the sun. There are, of course, those who resist the collective lean into the future. They may cast their gaze backward upon a prior golden age, but they aren’t abandoning the future – they’re just looking for the right road to take them there. Leaning backward in order to gain forward momentum: sometimes a revival is just what we need to get the juices flowing again.

Some among us pull the slingshot back even farther, before the foundations of our modern civilization, to the era in which humanity first arose. What are the origins of the upright stance and the cerebral cortex, of consciousness and language, of individuation and society, of love and aggression, of motivation and habit, of innovation and its dissemination, of morality and belief? These are the questions that lure explorers back to the origin of our species. On their pilgrimage they peel away layer upon layer of culture that have accrued over the millennia, layers that becloud our vision of what natural man is “really” like. At last these time travelers return to the beginning, when as yet there was no formal government, no economy, no science or art, no architecture, no written language, no religion – in short, no systems of meaning, no realities. Stripped of culture man looks raw – a complex and unique sort of animal, but an animal all the same, sharing the same genes, the same drives, the same communal instincts as the other creatures.

Natural man, newly evolved, full of potential and devoid of artifice – it’s hard not to see him as more real than the civilized poseurs who surround us, who we ourselves are. It’s this very same ancestor of ours, this natural man, this protoman, who in the beginning witnesses the creation recorded in our scriptures. He has no advanced language, no complex thoughts, no distinctly human culture – yet. The ancient narrative documents the first movement of mankind out of the raw natural state. In associating thing with word and word with idea, natural man begins to make sense of the world in a way no other animal can do. He also comes to a realization about himself: I am someone who can make sense of things. The natural world becomes real for the natural man even as he separates himself from that reality. In this initial act of creation natural man becomes fully real, making of himself an artifact.

We have become a complex and pliable species, able to live in an extremely wide range of habitats and to overwhelm virtually all predators. But these aren’t permanent advantages. Complacent nihilism might undermine us until at last through our own artifice we blow ourselves up, at which point some other species will fill the void and take our place as the crown of creation. It’s all a matter of variation and selection and time. All the other species seem to get along fine without any higher or deeper understanding of themselves and the world. Have we reached the point where this insistence on “higher and deeper” is starting to get in the way, because we’re really just a flat and shallow species living in a flat and shallow universe? Maybe it’s time to slip out from under all this baggage so we can get back to who we really are.

But is it possible ever to make return passage across that first frontier without setting aside what makes us human, and perhaps also what makes us godlike? To position ourselves before the beginning, to take the place of the Witness, to watch as the beginning takes shape around us – do we dismiss the work of the Creator, the sheer nerve and imagination of his project, as just so much charlatanry and legerdemain, designed to distract our attention from the empty truth? Or, as in rapt awe we watch the rapidly-unfolding heavens and earth, are we startled to find ourselves walking in the footsteps of the gods?

In brief, the horizons of postcapitalistic short fiction are limitless, though in all likelihood most of them will never see the light of day.

Okay, so suppose this…

I keep reading online open-access short fictions and interacting with them here. Maybe I shorten up my textual responses: instead of the 500 word average of my recent output I aim for something more like 150. At the same time I amp up my posting frequency, from 5 per week to 15 or so. I focus my attention on texts to which I experience a personal resonance and whose authors I can readily contact via social media. I continue to notify authors directly about my online interactions with their texts; this time I also follow them on Twitter etc., anticipating that at least some will reciprocate.

When the authors arrive here to read my posts, I won’t attempt to lure them into participating in online discussions or surveys. Instead I’ll invite them to consider joining forces in building an alternative fiction publishing house that’s owned and operated by fiction writers themselves.

The authors of fictions published in literary magazines can certainly generate the product. They’ve responded to publishers’ requests for submission, written and edited their own texts, formatted them in conformance with the litmags’ specs, had their work deemed worthy of publication by acquisition editors. It’s at the back end of the publication cycle that the authors’ co-op might falter.

As a cooperative can writers exercise quality control over their own collective output, ensuring that the texts have been thoroughly vetted, honed to excellence, and formatted professionally in the house style before being published? A traditionally published book gets blurbed on the back cover by other published authors, heightening the book’s attractiveness to the potential reader. Mutual blurbing probably also enhances the sense of camaraderie among blurbers and blurbees. But can fellow writers exercise editorial judgment with respect to one another’s manuscripts — a responsibility from which they’ve traditionally been buffered by agents and publishers?

I believe they can. Academic journals have historically relied on peer review in accepting and rejecting manuscripts for publication. Blind review is the usual procedure, avoiding cronyism on the one hand and vendetta on the other. With enough fiction writers in the peer network, blind review would be practicable and swift. Can fiction writers exercise reliable and valid judgment about the merits of other writers’ fictional texts? With practice they could. Many literary magazines already rely on blind peer reviewers to make a first pass through the pool of submissions. Through experience and conversation a set of house standards would surely take shape.

What about money? If the writers are doing most of the work, and if only e-books are published, then overhead costs are reduced nearly to zero. Advances and royalties? For now let’s assume that the novels published by the writers’ co-op are open access, generating no revenue from sales. Many litmags operate that way; many if not most don’t pay their authors. While many writers of short fictions hope to have a novel or compilation of their own published, often as not they expect the publisher to be a small independent operation that pays only a small advance with no additional royalties generated from sales. But a small-press publication conveys prestige on its author. The book might serve as a stepping stone to a bigger and more lucrative book deal with a commercial press; it also might enhance the writer’s credentials for securing paid work as an editor or a teacher. If the writers’ co-op publishing house can attract excellent submissions, and if the editorial selection process is rigorous, then it could convey the same sort of prestige on its authors as would the small independent publishers. In addition to the pragmatics, there are also the aesthetics and the egoistics that come into play. Being published by a well-respected outfit offers validation of the author’s art and craft; it also gives the author something to talk about at parties.

Could the authors publicize not just their own books but the co-op’s entire portfolio of literary offerings in order to attract broad readership? If the co-op publishes open-access e-books, then it wouldn’t make use of bookstores or Amazon, which generate their revenues as percentages of book sales. Online literary magazines cultivate readership through online promotion and social media; the co-op could pursue a similar strategy. Rather than relying exclusively on the publishing house’s online presence to build readership for the books, the writers themselves would take an active role in announcing book releases through their own social networks. The authors of short fictions on which I recently wrote posts generated quite a bit of traffic through their Facebook friends. If the writers were to make social media announcements not solely for their own individual works but for all of the books in the co-op’s portfolio, reader awareness could expand exponentially.

*  *  *

On the other hand…

Of the 14 randomly selected short fictions I wrote blog posts about, only one author engaged in an ongoing discussion, going beyond the specifics of her own story into the larger societal contexts of education, ecology, empirical evidence, and personal agency in which her story is embedded. Three other writers offered a single comment, focusing exclusively on their own texts, without pursuing further conversation. The other writers never engaged, never even acknowledged that I’d written a post about their stories. None of the 14 authors commented on any of my other posts in the series, or on any of the recently published short fictions written by other authors on which those posts were based. None asked me why I’d read and written about their stories, nor did they offer any reaction to my larger agenda as outlined in other fairly visible places on the website. In short, based on the limited evidence available, with one exception the authors were interested exclusively in the attention I gave to their own stories, or else they were entirely indifferent.

Participants in a writers’ collective publishing company would doubtless need to be motivated by self-interest — the collective can advance my career, or increase my readership, or make me money. A sense of outrage with the status quo would also help: the traditional publishing industry is a racket, a pyramid scheme, a false hope, a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. But wouldn’t there also have to be a sense of authorial collegiality, or at least an awareness of a shared fate, of swimming or sinking together? Even better, wouldn’t the prospects of success be enhanced if the writers’ collegiality extend to the readers, who collectively are exploited by the same industry that exploits the writers, whose own interests could be served by joining forces with each other and with the writers?

I’m not much of a rhetorician; my expectation is that, once the evidence is laid out on the table, the advantages of anarcho-syndicalism speak for themselves. In an earlier iteration of this website I marshalled evidence indicting the status quo and outlined the parameters of an alternative system predicated on collective pursuit of mutual interests. Those posts and pamphlets went nowhere, largely because so few people showed up to read them. Maybe I shouldn’t take the rejection personally: if you google “postcapitalist fiction,” Ficticities shows up on the first page of the results. The fact that so few people clicked through to my postcapitalist content tells me that very few people give much thought to the topic. It’s hard to know whether that’s because most writers and readers are satisfied with the status quo, or because they’ve not given serious consideration to alternatives.

I could perhaps launch a fiction publishing house that wasn’t collectively owned and managed. It would operate similarly to to the open-source literary magazines, specializing not in online periodicals but in e-books, mostly novels. The writers wouldn’t get paid, but then neither would I. Instead of trying to reach consensus on manuscript selection, house style, distribution, and so on, I’d decide unilaterally. My publishing house would still rely heavily on the writers for editing, formatting, and promotion, but so do other publishers. With minimal overhead costs, the house could expand its offerings more rapidly than do many of the small independent presses. I suspect that, like most publishing houses, my operation would draw a lot of interest from authors. But why would I do it? Running such an operation would be a full-time job, for no pay — a do-gooder project. Besides, I’m a novelist myself, dammit! I don’t just want to help other fiction writers to get their novels read; I want them to return the favor.

You could say that I’ve already got my own publishing company, just like every other self-published author. Mine is an open-source e-book operation: anyone can download any of my books for free. I could expand, inviting other novelists to submit their manuscripts. But doesn’t that look like precisely what it is — an expanded self-publishing endeavor? Besides, a prospective author might well ask, just how many readers have taken you up on your personal open-access postcapitalist publishing house’s free book offer?

I could set aside the publishing house idea for now, focusing instead on affiliating with a cohort of fiction writers, and maybe readers too, linked not so much on economic considerations — on explicitly pursuing alternatives to commodity capitalism in the world of fiction —  but on aesthetic ones. A decided advantage offered by open-source literary magazines is that they can feature good work that doesn’t necessarily generate commercial potential for either the writer or the publisher. There are compensatory dangers: on the one hand a suspicion that the no-pay outlet is a lower-status venue best suited for mediocrities and novices; on the other, a whiff of esoteric preciousness wafting from the self-appointed literary elite who through academic appointment are able to buffer themselves from crass commercialism and popular tastes. These are the risks intrinsic to decommodified publishing — the same risks that a writers’ syndicate would face in publishing one another’s longer fictions. Open source literary magazines provide an ongoing source of market research for postcapitalistic fiction.

Of the 14 short fictions I recently read, 3 or 4 struck me as unusually good — not far better than usual, but good in an unusual way. I could allow myself to be drawn selectively to the unusual short fictions  — the same pull I rely follow when looking at novels on the New Releases shelves at the public library. I could write about each of these unusual short fictions, notify the author, perhaps strike up a discussion, maybe even a correspondence. We might converge onto some form of collective collaboration founded on a shared appreciation for the unusual. Or, as seems equally likely, I would find that those who cultivate the unusual diverge not only from the norm but from one another. I could give this project some time — considerably longer than the 3 weeks of my latest experiment — to see what develops. Meanwhile I will have read some alluring short fictions, will have let those fictions inflect some idiosyncratic textual engagements of my own, will possibly have initiated some stimulating conversations.