“Is the dialectic wicked, or just incomprehensible?”1 Fredric Jameson’s punchy interrogation of the dialectic could also be turned onto Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the classic space opera, Dune: is it wicked, or just incomprehensible? The answer is “both” and in the best possible way. It is “wicked” in the full double entendre, presenting a cruel universe lavished with gladiatorial death matches, atomic weapons, titanic sandworms—and it looks really fucking cool under Villeneuve’s masterful direction. Its incomprehensibility derives from a power structure that portends a stark future for humanity, even with flags planted across thousands of planets. But anything is possible in a sci-fi future and book author Frank Herbert took pains with his imaginary universe to have it all make narrative sense. What we should pay attention to is how he does this. The best science fiction is great because of what it says about our world in the present and Dune is no exception.
Throughout the novels and film adaptations, much of Dune’s plot revolves around the desert planet of Arrakis. Arrakis was long ago a water world covered by oceans and its transformation into a vast desert of sand dunes expresses the tendency of things to change into their opposites. This tendency is a staple of Heraclitus’ ancient Greek philosophy, it is an ancient Chinese principle of the I Ching, of yin and yang and was popularized by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung who had a tremendous influence on Herbert. The transformation of things into their opposites is also articulated by concepts like “only the living may be dead” or “the Sun at its zenith must turn toward its setting.”2 These simple articulations are true but omit the key ingredient of dialectical conception which is the countervailing force, the contradiction.
Dialectics
The unity of opposites is foundational to modern dialectical thinking but it is the strength of contradictory energies that determine the transformation. The living being will struggle against its environment and degenerating cellular metabolism before death comes, just as the force of a rotating Earth is what brings the Sun into view each day. On Arrakis, it was the introduction of sandworm larvae to the planet which made it a desert, as the spawning larvae enclosed the existing water in their bodies until it was all gone. With the larvae, this simple contradiction turned a water world into sand but, without it, the oceans would have remained forever. It is the contradiction which provides friction—the energy necessary to break up stasis, create change and propel matter.
Dialectical reversals leave their fingerprints all over the story of Dune. For example, when the Baron of the powerful House Harkonnen orders the annihilation of House Atreides and the genocide of Arrakis’ Fremen people, he sets in motion the forces which would destroy his own house and the imperial order writ large: the Fremen give shelter to the surviving Atreides’ son who then guides them on a violent quest to destroy the oppressive imperial order, beginning with the assassination of the Baron and his heir. In sequels, the Fremen army overruns the galactic Imperium and realize their long-standing ambition of terraforming Arrakis into a greener, more habitable planet. But their success is what renders them extinct; when they disperse and lose their customs attached to the desert planet, they cease to exist as a distinct people. The dialectical reversal occurs here at the moment of victory, when their success amounts to their demise.
In Dune, as on Earth, “history puts its worst foot forward.”3 From an attempted genocide of the Fremen by House Harkonnen, both are ultimately destroyed—the Fremen being victims of success, the Harkonnens victims of failure. But Jameson reminds us that “these conditions of possibility are what you work back to, after the fact.” We cannot know in advance the consequences of an action taken, whether the existing conditions will lead to success or what contradictions remain to run us over in reverse.4 This is true whether we are talking about a fictional jihad in Dune, the legacy of the Treaty of Versailles or the genocide in Gaza. Temporality is an important aspect of dialectical thinking as the present represents yet another unity of opposites: that moment when knowledge of the past meets everything unknown about the future.
The Bene Gesserit are a matriarchal order whose ultimate goal is to obliterate this opposition of known past and unknown future by producing a superhuman who can presently know both at once. At the point where Villeneuve’s films pick up, their plan was to have the Harkonnen heir reproduce with Paul Atreides’ unborn sister after reaching an appropriate age, giving birth to an all-seeing messiah. This plan did not materialize because, despite their superior access to ancient memories, the future is shrouded to them as it is for anyone.
There is a caution to dialecticians here, that even the best-laid plans will always find complications and contradiction beyond the simple cause-and-effect equation. When evaluating the future state of things, such as the consequences of the Trump presidency or the social implications of environmental ruination, it is important to guard against the myopic scope that searches for the path to a preferred outcome. Rather, we must consider the prior contradictions brought us to the present momentum before considering the future oppositions which are inevitably aroused within a spiralling capitalist juggernaut. Every future is preceded by a past and the task of the dialectician is to try and locate these “future anteriors” before submitting a range of possible outcomes.
Implausibilities
Although the Bene Gesserit were unable to foresee the dramatic reversal of fortunes experienced by the Fremen people and great houses of Dune, their general goal of maintaining stability in the galaxy can be judged positively. In the universe of Dune, imperial dynasties last millennia, the Spacing Guild, Bene Gesserit and Mentats mirror medieval-style guilds and monastic orders, aristocratic bloodlines trace to prehistory and antique weaponry like swords experience revivals. While the political dramas and fight scenes make for a rapturous story, the “feudalism in space” that Dune showcases feels impossible for a few reasons.
Every social organization carries with it processes that both uphold and undermine the system simultaneously. These supporting and undermining processes are things like class division, use of resources, technology, environmental conditions, religious movements, political organization and so on. In Dance of the Dialectic, Bertell Ollman points out that “over time, it is the undermining aspects that prevail.”5
For most of human existence, human beings organized along tribal lines, in hunter-gatherer societies that were primitive communist. The reason why this system endured for well over 100,000 years is because it embedded almost no undermining processes for much of its existence; low population density, strong communal cooperation, plenty of land to roam and natural resources to harvest. What undermined the communal system was a warming climate and the mass extinction of megafauna at the end of the ice age. The nomadic tribe then found itself at a material disadvantage to the permanent settlement and it was here when class society emerged, as both land and people became property.
The feudal system in the West appeared much later, a synthesis between monotheistic Christian religion, successive Germanic assaults on the Western Roman Empire and a collapse of the urban economy. It was a system sustained by the suppression of usury, the ideological monopoly of the Catholic Church, control of land by warlords and aristocrats and the extraction of rents from the peasantry. Since feudalism crumbled upon the discovery of the Americas and the exploitation of its vast landmass, it is difficult to imagine how such a system could assert itself in the context of a spacefaring, multi-planetary civilization. Socialists generally believe that unlocking the technological capability for cheap and efficient space travel would duplicate the conditions of primitive communism, in a higher form: low population density relative to the stars, abundant natural resources, strong communal cooperation amongst starship crews and the ability to relocate in the galaxy should undesirable circumstances arise.
Reconciliation
Herbert understood the relationship between class-power and scarcity, with his character Liet-Kynes of the Fremen remarking, “beyond a critical point within finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.” This is a matter of history on Earth, as the advent of nutrient-dense agriculture increased humanity’s numbers, shrank the quantity of available land and ripened the conditions needed for slavery, feudalism and then capitalism. The Fremen are oriented toward a more nomadic, communal society because the harsh conditions of Arrakis requires mutual cooperation and low population density in order for them to survive.
With the historical experience of Earth in mind, we must assume Arrakis is an outlier in the Imperium. Herbert gave his fictional universe a feudal structure which implies a few characteristics: that the planets of the Imperium became crowded over the centuries; there is little upward social mobility; the economic strength of the ruling houses derives from rents; technology is restricted; religion is uniform. This is explicitly evidenced in a few areas of the story. First, there is the Spacing Guild that holds a monopoly on interstellar space travel, effectively making it impossible for the average person in the Imperium to escape the tyrant ruling their planet. Second, there is the Bene Gesserit and a standardized “Orange Catholic Bible” which confers a degree of religious conformity to the galactic feudal empire. Third, there is a prohibition on certain technologies, including “thinking machines,” which may otherwise provide the basis for revolution.
Because Dune focuses so closely on those at the top of the social pyramid, the processes that either support or undermine the centralized authority of the galactic empire are obscured. It isn’t the political intrigue or battles on the ramparts that make any human society tick; it is the people at the economic base with boring and ordinary lives. The ones who feel anxious during a commute and go to work for a living and play with their kids at home—they are the ones that make their rulers possible.
Frank Herbert once described himself as a “techno-peasant” and since it is a peasantry that supports monastic orders and aristocratic titles, this label must apply to the average resident of the Imperium as well. It is incredibly pessimistic to think that humanity could achieve technological mastery over the stars only to replicate the oppression of the Dark Ages. But class systems are inherently unstable—as the existential problems which press us today attest. But if the Dark Ages lasted one thousand years on Earth there is no reason to think it could last tens of thousands of years across space. A fictional universe can send us to the stars and wave away class struggle with a pen stroke. But in the real universe we would have to abolish this primary contradiction long before taking such a grand evolutionary leap.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010), 102. ↩︎
The first quotation is from Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003), 49 and the second quotation from The I Ching or Book of Changes (Princeton University Press, 1967), 63. ↩︎
Henri Lefebvre cited in Jameson, Valences, 287. ↩︎
Ibid, 280. ↩︎
Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003), 163-4. ↩︎