15.7.12

'a post-revolutionary society is unthinkable'

‎'...if we take seriously the scale of social and psychic upheaval represented by a revolution, a post-revolutionary society is unthinkable: for someone not born in a post-revolutionary situation, it takes the process of going through a revolution to fully imagine it. To depict it is to diminish it.'
One of the ways to get around the 'so go on then, what is the alternative?' question. But shouldn't we then ask exactly what value to attach to something we cannot describe. How logical is it to believe something unrepresentable is both possible and desirable? Is it worth striving for a society you cannot even IMAGINE clearly?

I did like The City & The City, and Perdido Street Station to an extent. But if this is the sort of thinking that underpins Miéville's fiction, I don't know if it is ever going to affect me that deeply. Unless (to risk repetition) there is a change of heart / crisis of confidence / personal breakdown that takes an axe to his hopes for the restoration of humanity to some prelapsarian social and psychological state.

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