Freud in the Future: Work in German Science Fiction (Sigmund Freud‪)‬

Far into our future, in the planetary system of Gheera, some men knot hair rugs. (1) That is, fathers teach their sons to knot rugs of human hair, hair that comes from their several wives and daughters. Closer to our time and in another tale, men are trained as streetwalkers (2) and in a third narrative from yet another world, a hacker in the 2050s jacks into the matrix to steal and corrupt data. (3) These activities constitute work as we recognize it--or do they? In 1930, Freud published Culture and Its Discontents, and among his thoughts on culture in general is a lengthy footnote that provides us with useful comments about work that also productively complicate the issue. In this note we find his economic model of sexual psychology, namely the sublimation of desire and the redirection of the same through work toward the good of the community. It is particularly poignant, I believe, to keep in mind his speculations about work as a crucial constituent in our libidinal economy, anchoring us in reality and the human community. Freud's commentary will serve as a baseline for the development of the present project, which is drawn from selected writings of recent (West) German SF and their discourse about work. While we all know that different labors require different efforts, I have here performed the maneuver that Galbraith has called an "effective obfuscation" (Thomas 533), that is, essentially homogenizing all kinds of productive efforts. This, I believe, is unavoidable in order to gain an overview of the issue in some science fiction works. In the following I shall argue that imagined future work challenges Freud's concept of reality and human community as well as the role of the libidinal economy, all in dystopian fashion. My inquiry will examine how the chosen science fiction texts imagine future work and workers and what those texts say, if anything, about what lies in store for us with or without work and human workers in our own present futures. Finally, I speculate briefly on the possible consequences of those changes and what hopes and apprehensions about the present conditions we may construe from these representations. But first, a little background on German Science Fiction.