Towards a "non-didactic didacticism" of the sociopolitical: assemblages and the event in surface tension and shame

To write sociopolitical fiction is to be caught in an odd double bind. The term itself, ‘sociopolitical’ (hyphenated or not), implies an ‘assemblage’, and the terms it combines—‘the social’ and ‘the political’—each suggest complex, worldly assemblages. However, the more the writer attempts to express the assembled complexity of the sociopolitical domain, the more he/she feels a tug in the other direction: towards the version of ideas that might best explain the sociopolitical world and motivate political action. This article engages with the aesthetic and political challenges that arise in writing within a genre in which, to some extent at least, a moral content is desired by readers as an explanation for sociopolitical issues, only to be resisted when, as it often does, it becomes didactic. Co-author Cathryn Perazzo’s sociopolitical novel-in-progress, Surface Tension, is, we suggest, a laboratory of an assemblage in action. In it, we test and elaborate our hypothesis of the ‘assembled idea’ or ‘assembled morality’ of the sociopolitical novel. We conclude with a look at a published short story, ‘Shameʼ, by co-author Patrick West, which similarly deals with the sociopolitical, with how ‘non-didactic didacticisms’ might be germinated, and, most explicitly, with the ‘event’, following Deleuze’s use of this term.