005: The Author as Misguided Activist: Why We Don't Publish Moralising Stories
I’m semi-frequently asked what I mean when I say we publish stories that don’t moralise. After all, making space for more emotionally messy fiction and imperfect, morally-nuanced characters was a key reason I founded STP in the first place and it remains a core part of our publishing ethos today.
Some of our early calls for submissions somewhat humorously (but also entirely sincerely) stated ‘no happy endings’. Looking back now I think that was something of an over-correction to what I saw as a genre fiction ecosystem drowning in a culture of numbingly cathartic, escapist reassurance that pretended towards some deeper resistance against the social malaise of the times. In that context I wanted STP to be a place where writers could explore negative emotions; for marginalised writers to break out of the expectation that their characters be moral paragons lest they harm their communities; for stories that didn’t necessarily inspire hope, because I believe the reduction of artistic purpose to the provision of hope is misguided. I think my publishing philosophy has matured since then, but I still think that analysis of the ecosystem was largely correct, so let’s start there.
I almost feel compelled to preface this with a recognition that our social landscape is saturated with critiques of ‘neoliberalism’ and the vast array of meanings given to it, but deep within that I think the term still has value, especially when applied to the hyper-individualism of the contemporary western world. We live in a consumer society, a world in which the critic Tom van der Linden says “the individual has become the expected driving force of all action, but also one in which self-actualisation, moral action, and self-expression has been reframed through the act of consumption”. What we’ve been experiencing, as this deranged form of neoliberal capitalism has taken hold and our collective forms of resistance to it have diminished, is the slow internalisation of the idea that “the burden of the world’s conscience rests on our shoulders". And so, when confronted with grand structural problems we as individuals have no hope of resolving, our moral and political identity finds expression in consumption. In a media context this means we find ourselves enmeshed in a culture that assigns too much significance to the educational function of storytelling, as well as viewing the production and consumption of ‘the right kinds’ of fictional media as a key battleground in the fight against our social and political foes.
In this environment, creating or supporting a piece of media that upholds and reflects our morals, and condemning one which is perceived to be harmful, becomes its own source of self-righteous satisfaction. And if we’re not careful, this can become a reinforcing feedback loop that turns artistic expression and media consumption into an end in itself, rather than as a means to engage with the world and our own relationship to it.
This is a culture that “no longer welcomes discussion and conflict as a fundamental part of the artform and an inevitable aspect of our engagement with it”, van der Linden says. A culture of purity in which “the presence of any form of conflict, contradiction, or complication is such an irredeemable sin that it automatically disqualifies a work from being engaged with”. One of the most demoralising consequences of this is seeing incredibly talented, insightful writers question the worth of their work and pre-emptively try to gauge the level of hostility they might receive from an incurious readership who might perceive their writing as harmful or problematic, while stories offering nothing but vapid didacticism that simply flatter the moral ego of the reader receive the highest accolades.
For me all of this misunderstands the role of art and misappropriates it. When the writer presents their work as a fundamental engine of social change, rather than as a piece of art that raises questions about our individual and collective selves and how we relate to the world around us, they simultaneously glorify and diminish that work, and delude both themselves and the reader into believing that the act of writing and reading is a form of moral accomplishment in its own right. This kind of writing, as Walter Benjamin put it, is “the metamorphosis of the political struggle from a drive to make a political commitment into an object of contemplative pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption” and it can’t lead us anywhere on its own. As the satirist Georg Lichtenberg said in the dated language of his time (quoted by Benjamin in The Author as Producer) “it doesn’t matter what opinions someone has, but what kind of a man these opinions make of him.”
Now clearly I believe in the power of art. I wouldn’t be doing this otherwise. If we’re willing to open ourselves up to it, I believe art has the power to reveal deep fundamental truths about the world, but just as importantly it allows us to grapple with the deeply contradictory, complex, beautiful, often unflattering, and ultimately unsolvable nature of what it means to be human. But this requires a mode of engagement that demands vulnerability, a willingness to invite conflict and discomfort into our inner being, and by doing so threatens that relentless forward march of self-actualisation that neoliberal conditioning demands of us. As the social theorist Byung-Chul Han writes, “Without negativity life degrades into something dead. Pain is constitutive for experience and life that consists wholly of positive emotions is not human at all. The human soul owes its defining tautness and depth to negativity.” A society that demands we reject this is an inhuman society. In this sense it was Brave New World, with its socially conditioned regime of willingly-administered pain-numbing drugs, and not the overt totalitarian control of 1984, that was the more prescient dystopia preceding our contemporary neoliberal world and its demands for continuous individual self-improvement.
What it boils down to is that, for all its transformative power, the production and consumption of art is not a substitute for material action, if what you’re concerned with is seeing your moral and political will expressed in the world. There’s no better place to finish than by returning to Walter Benjamin, and his assertion that “the intellectual who opposes fascism by trusting to his own miraculous power will disappear, for the revolutionary struggle does not take place between capitalism and the intellect, but between capitalism and the proletariat.”
This will form part of an ongoing series of reflections on our publishing ethos and what we look for in a story.
