Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Wed 22 Oct 2008 05:20 AM PDT
Fredric Jameson and anti-anti-Utopianism
Arena Journal, Fall, 2005 by Peter Fitting
In the following I want to give an account of Fredric Jameson's theory of Utopia as presented in Archaeologies of the Future. (1) Like Thomas More's Utopia, this is actually two books, the second written before the first, since the latter is made up of eleven previously published essays on science fiction and Utopia, while the first part, aptly entitled 'The Desire Called Utopia', was written as an introduction to those essays. (2) In such an account, of course, I can only begin to address Jameson's theories and will thus limit myself to the 250 pages of the Introduction, 'The Desire Called Utopia', calling attention to a few of the highlights of this dense but rewarding text, while leaving the specific readings of the second part and the question of science fiction aside.
As many of his readers know, Jameson has had a long involvement with science fiction and Utopia--stretching back at least to 1971 and Marxism and Form, where he proclaimed the importance and timeliness of the utopian impulse:
For where in the older society ... Utopian thought
represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle
wish-fulfilments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own
time the very nature of the utopian concept has undergone a
dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which
everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself,
and stands as a testimony to the power of that system to
transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image.
The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility
of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the
form of a stubborn negation of all that is. (3)
While Jameson's writing on science fiction and Utopia began in the early 1970s (as can be seen from some of the essays reprinted in Archaeologies of the Future), the full extent and impact of his rigorously dialectical approach to the genre has taken a while to sink in. The outline of that position can be seen in provocative statements like his warning that the literary Utopia should not be perceived as the representation of an ideal society, but as a reflection on 'our own incapacity to conceive [of Utopia] in the first place'; (4) or that our 'constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself [is not due] to any individual failure of imagination but is the result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners'. (5)
But Jameson's position was only sketched out in these earlier articles, particularly in the essays on Louis Marin's Utopiques (1977, 'Of Islands and Trenches') and on Platonov's Chevegur (1994, 'The Seeds of Time'). It is also interesting to note that the concept of Utopia is rarely mentioned in the many articles and books about his theories and method. (6) Now 'The Desire Called Utopia' brings a long-awaited systematic and sustained presentation and elaboration of those earlier thoughts on the literary Utopia.
As the two lapidary statements I just cited make clear, the utopian form presents a dilemma or contradiction for Jameson, which he restates in his Preface as follows:
All these formal and representational questions lead back to
the political one with which we began: but now the latter
has been sharpened into the formal dilemma of how works
that posit the end of history can offer any usable historical
impulses? how works which aim to resolve all political
differences can continue to be in any sense political? how
texts designed to overcome the needs of the body can remain
materialistic? how visions of the 'epoch of rest' (Morris) can
energize and compel us to action? (7)
There are good reasons for thinking that all these questions
are undecideable: which is not necessarily a bad thing
provided we continue to try to decide them.
Following this outline of some of the contradictions to be addressed and clarified, Jameson lays out the grand lines of the next 250 pages of his argument, beginning with a description of what Utopia is:
Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on
radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic
nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot
imagine any fundamental change in our social existence
which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many
sparks from a comet. (8)
The fundamental dynamic of any Utopian politics (or of any political Utopianism) will therefore always lie in the dialectic of Identity and Difference, in the degree to which such a politics aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing, a system radically different from this one.
This reference to the dialectic is the key to Jameson's interrogation of the Utopian, as indeed are the traditional definitions of the Utopian to which he refers (Elliot, Suvin (9)) that emphasize the genre's dual nature, insofar as they constitute a critique of the author's society as much as they propose an alternative to it. A first step in untangling the dialectic of identity and difference lies in acknowledging the impossibility of imagining radical otherness, an acknowledgement which he grounds here in the 'empiricist maxim, nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses'. (10) Despite this apparent impasse, Jameson refuses to abandon the Utopian, and 'The Desire Called Utopia' will explore and clarify this dilemma. At the same time, as in his earlier statements, he reminds the reader that 'at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment ... and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively'. (11)
Consequently, the first and most crucial aspect of the dilemma (at least from the perspective of those critics who, like myself, think and write about the utopian features of this or that imagined society) is Jameson's repeated caution about representation and the 'literal', about the dangers of reading utopias as depictions of some new society:
[I]t is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive
expectations, as though they offered visions of happy
worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation,
representations which correspond generically to the idyll or
the pastoral rather than the Utopia. Indeed, the attempt to
establish positive criteria of the desirable society
characterizes liberal political theory from Locke to Rawls,
rather than the diagnostic interventions of the Utopians,
which, like those of the great revolutionaries, always aim at
the alleviation and elimination of the sources of exploitation
and suffering, rather than at the composition of blueprints
for bourgeois comfort. (12)
Unlike some more traditional and systematic approaches to the genre (as in Darko Suvin's definitional and taxonomic efforts in the Metamorphoses of Science Fiction), 'The Desire Called Utopia' is more of a philosophical reflection on the issues and problems posed by the Utopian genre. And unlike traditional definitions, there will be few final answers here, since Jameson is not so much interested in tracking the various manifestations of the genre as he is in understanding and arguing its relevance at a time when it seems that there is no longer any room for alternatives. Jameson continues (in the passage quoted above), that 'The confusion [about the positive, literal dimension of the Utopia] arises from the formal properties of these texts, which also seem to offer blueprints: these are however maps and plans to be read negatively, as what is to be accomplished after the demolitions and the removals'. (13) 'Reading negatively' is the crucial term, the key to his dialectical approach, which he sums up (at the end of the Preface) in his call for an 'anti-anti-Utopianism' (14)--a negation of the negation which points to Hegel and the dialectic, and to A. J. Greimas' semiotic rectangle (of which Jameson will make frequent use) as Jameson refuses to describe Utopianism in terms of a simple opposition between Utopia and anti-Utopia. (15)
'The Desire Called Utopia', then, will be a series of differentiations and dialectical reversals that range over a number of topics, alternating theoretical discussions with readings of science fiction and Utopian texts. In the Introduction Jameson points out that the problem of representation will shift the examination of Utopia from the familiar terrain of content (what a utopia would consist of) to formal questions; and from there to what he calls a 'psychology of Utopian production: a study of Utopian fantasy mechanisms, rather, and one which eschews individual biography in favor of historical and collective wish-fulfillment ... [which] will necessarily illuminate its historical conditions of possibility'. (16)
The first differentiation is the familiar opposition between Utopia's programmatic status and (following Bloch) the utopian impulse. After elaborating this distinction between program and impulse, Jameson wonders who writes utopias anyway? In a typical dialectical and complicating fashion, Jameson passes from the utopian process to consider the larger social totality in which the utopia was written--the 'conditions of possibility' of this or that fantasy:
But such creation must be motivated: it must respond to
specific dilemmas and offer to solve fundamental social
problems to which the Utopian believes himself to hold the
key. The Utopian vocation can be identified by this certainty,
and by the persistent and obsessive search for a simple, a
single-shot solution to all our ills. (17)
Not surprisingly, since this is a book about science fiction and Utopia, Jameson will use science fiction examples to demonstrate some of his explanations of the dilemma posed by the Utopia. Our 'constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself' can of course be explained in more political terms, as in Marx's letter to Ruge, that 'The world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality'. (18) But here, Jameson offers the reader a fascinating study of the representation of the alien in science fiction as a meditation on why and how the truly different of a 'qualitatively distinct' society cannot be imagined or thought. Or to put it in opposite terms, science fiction's aliens are little more than amalgams of the already known--the head of an insect, the body of an animal, or the social system of the bees, and so on--although more recent science fiction aliens have sometimes tried to confront directly this limitation.
But the acknowledgement that we cannot really imagine a truly transformed society does not end Jameson's reflections on the Utopian text. Rather, in typical fashion, this seeming dead end produces new insights, as he assures the reader that
the debate over Utopia's representability ... indeed over its
imaginability and conceptualization, does not threaten to
put an end to Utopian speculation altogether and to return
us sagely to the here-and-now and our own empirical and
historical limits. Rather such debates find themselves drawn
inside the Utopian text, thereby becoming occasions for
further Utopian productivity. (19)
This thread leads to a discussion of Utopian intertextuality and to an analysis of some of the familiar antinomies to be found in utopias, like city and country utopias, or utopias of work versus those of leisure, and so on. More generally, Jameson has moved (as I pointed out earlier) from a focus on the contents of Utopia to its form. Thus, the significance of these oppositions lies not only in their substance, but in the ways in which the Utopian 'form itself seems to interiorize differences ... [becoming] in the Utopian tradition a Bakhtinian dialogue or argument between positions which claim the status of the absolute but are willing to descend into the field of struggle of representability and desire in order to win their case and convert their readership'. (20)
Another example of how Jameson's dialectical method allows him to turn apparent dead ends into rich new directions of investigation lies in the inevitable acknowledgment that insisting that all utopias are historically situated leads to admitting that they are all constrained by that situation, and in that sense are always ideological. But again this does not signal the end of Utopia's force or importance:
Whatever the persistence of the Utopian form, then, its
content comes to seem irredeemably tainted, and we come to
wonder whether any Utopianism is possible which is not
some mere projection of our own situation. Does this mean
that there cannot even be a minimum formulation of
Utopian demands which might somehow retain effective
universality? Can we not envision some zero-degree Utopia,
a Utopia in which content was reduced to its most
undeniable validity for all societies?
It was always Adorno's merit usefully to complicate the
simple problems, while brutally simplifying the complicated
ones: slashing through antinomies and productively using
idealism and materialism against each other in the
movement of a thought thereby released from its paralysis.
It is thus not surprising that we owe just such a minimalist
Utopian proposal to this thinker, a proposal calculated to
clarify our own options in the present situation [and he now
quotes Adorno]:
He who asks what is the goal of an emancipated
society is given answers such as the fulfillment of
human possibilities or the richness of life. Just as the
inevitable question is illegitimate, so inevitable is the
repellent assurance of the answer, calling to mind the
social-democratic ideal of the personality expounded
by the heavily bearded Naturalists of the 1890s, who
wanted to live a good life. Genuine feeling is only to
be found in the crudest response: that no one shall go
hungry any more. Every other answer substitutes, for
a condition that should only have been defined by
human needs, the habits of a system organized
around production as an end in itself. (21)
Adorno's compelling reply or description of the 'positive' dimension is not meant, however, to provide a final answer or organizing political strategy. Indeed, Jameson goes on to further complicate this response by introducing again the concept of critical negativity--so that Adorno's 'moment of truth' is thus not a substantive one, not some conceptual nugget we can extract and store away with a view towards using it as a building block of some future system. Rather its function lies not in itself, but in its 'capability radically to negate its alternative'. (22)
Another of Jameson's attempts to explain and illustrate the problems and limitations of trying to imagine an alternative is that any change would change everything. This is a crucial reminder that a better society cannot be imagined piecemeal, that it is not a question of 'fixing' this or that flaw in the present, but of total social transformation. Again there is a celebrated science fiction example, namely one of Ray Bradbury's most famous stories, 'Sound of Thunder' (1952), where a time-traveller crushes a butterfly during a visit to the Paleolithic past, an event that has changed the present beyond recognition when the traveller returns. Jameson then goes on to give his own example of a demand which would transform everything, a utopian change to the present which is both necessary and impossible to fully conceive or realize under capitalism:
Few Utopian fantasies are quite so practical and potentially
revolutionary in their effects as the demand for full
employment, for if there is any program that could not be
realized without transforming the system beyond
recognition and which would at once usher in a society
structurally distinct from this one in every conceivable way,
from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural
to the political, it would be the demand for universal full
employment in all the countries of the globe, full
employment at a living wage. (23)
Another aspect of his reflections on the 'unknowability thesis' (which provides the substance of his penultimate chapter, 'The Fear of Utopia') is perhaps even more shocking, as the reader is taken from the prospect of a transformed and therefore unrecognizable society, which is the familiar face of Jameson's utopian conundrum, to a transformed human nature, so that we would not even recognize ourselves in this new society:
This brings us to what is perhaps the fundamental Utopian
dispute about subjectivity, namely whether the Utopia in
question proposes the kind of radical transformation of
subjectivity presupposed by most revolutions, a mutation in
human nature and the emergence of whole new beings; or
whether the impulse to Utopia is not already grounded in
human nature, its persistence readily explained by deeper
needs and desires which the present has merely repressed
and distorted. As we have implied in some of the preceding
chapters, this is a tension which is not merely inescapable; its
resolution in either direction would be fatal for the existence
of Utopia itself. If absolute difference is achieved, in other
words, we find ourselves in a science-fictional world such as
those of Stapledon, in which human beings can scarcely even
recognize themselves any longer ... On the other hand, if
Utopia is drawn too close to current everyday realities, and
its subject begins too closely to approximate our neighbours
and our politically misguided fellow-citizens, then we
slowly find ourselves back in a garden-variety reformist or
social-democratic politics which may well be Utopian in
another sense but which has forfeited its claim to any radical
transformation of the system itself. (24)
The final chapter of 'The Desire Called Utopia' begins with a 'recapitulation' of Jameson's arguments and the persistence of the dilemmas with which he began:
We have come laboriously to the conclusion that all
ostensible Utopian content was ideological, and that the
proper function of its themes lay in critical negativity, that is
in their function to demystify their opposite numbers ... In
addition we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion of
difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery
that our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical
alternatives were little more than the projections of our own
social moment and historical or subjective situation: the
post-human thereby seeming more distant and impossible
than ever! (25)
Again this seeming impasse (the 'ideological impasse of utopian content') (26) leads to a new series of questions, beginning with that of the future of Utopia, which he considers both in terms of the literary genre itself and of the political program ('radical social alternatives'). He first refers to some recent developments in Utopian writing since its high point in the 1970s--namely the concept of the critical dystopia, on the one hand, and what might be called the 'liminal' features of recent Utopian writing, as well as their internalization of these various dilemmas:
Yet Kim Stanley Robinson's monumental Mars trilogy
(1993-1996) is only one example of a new formal tendency, in
which it is not the representation of Utopia, but rather the
conflict of all possible Utopias, and the arguments about the
nature and desirability of Utopia as such, which move to the
center of attention. Here the new form seems to reach back
and to incorporate within itself all the oppositions and
antinomies we have identified in an earlier chapter; to
reorganize itself around the increasingly palpable fact and
situation of ideological multiplicity and radical difference in
the field of desire. Utopia now begins to include all those
bitter disputes around alternative diagnoses of social
miseries and the solutions proposed to overcome them; and
the formal center of gravity then begins to shift precisely to
the question of those differences ... (27)
As for the impasses contained in more practical utopian projects, particularly in the context of globalization, he proposes a different utopian formula--a 'pluralism of utopias', that is to say a world made up of numerous and distinct utopias, with only two universal directives, 'the right of migration; and the abolition of taxes'. (28) This means of course that one could leave a utopia that one did not like, while the abolition of taxes means that
the moneys normally available from taxation are to be
replaced by the public work of the citizens themselves ...
everyone will do some civic and even manual labor ...
Finally, it should be noted that both these principles are
anti-capitalist (without for all that being necessarily or overtly
socialist): the first makes the enlargement and expansion
necessary to capital impossible; the second removes the
medium whereby capital is accumulated. (29)
In returning to More's starting point--the abolition of money--Jameson has found an example of what he calls a 'dramatic rupture' with the present; and 'The Desire Called Utopia' ends with a call for more such 'utopian disruptions':
This is indeed how Utopia recovers its vocation at the very
moment where the undesirability of change is everywhere
dogmatically affirmed ...
Disruption is then the name for a new discursive strategy,
and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes.
And this is now the temporal situation in which the Utopian
form proper ... has its political role to play, and in fact
becomes a new kind of content in its own right. For it is the
very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility,
which is reinforced by the paradoxicality of the Utopian
form, which insists that its radical difference is possible and
that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the
answer to the universal ideological conviction that no
alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the
system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break
itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what
things would be like after the break (30) ...
Utopia thus now better expresses our relationship to a
genuinely political future than any current program of
action, where we are for the moment only at the stage of
massive protests and demonstrations, without any
conception of how a globalized transformation might then
proceed. But at this same time, Utopia also serves a vital
political function today which goes well beyond mere
ideological expression or replication. The formal flaw--how
to articulate the Utopian break in such a way that it is
transformed into a practical-political transition--now
becomes a rhetorical and political strength--in that it forces
us precisely to concentrate on the break itself: a meditation
on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right. This
is very far from a liberal capitulation to the necessity of
capitalism, however; it is quite the opposite, a rattling of the
bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation
for another stage which has not yet arrived. (31)
As can be seen by the number of quotations I have included, I am still in the process of understanding and assimilating 'The Desire Called Utopia'. Like Borges' map ('a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it'), my attempt to adequately explain Jameson's arguments risks becoming a restating of the argument in its entirety. From a literary perspective, 'The Desire Called Utopia' is a rich, complex account of the genre, particularly in conjunction with the readings of specific 20th-century texts. But it is clear from the very outset that this is also a political text, as he asks in the Preface 'how [such] visions ... can energize and compel us to action?' (32) This is not simply an intervention in some ongoing literary discussions about the nature of science fiction or the role Utopia plays today--although the book will certainly make important contributions to those discussions. Jameson also intends this book as a continuing interrogation of marxism and its validity today. In those terms, the political role of the utopian disruption may seem paradoxical, frustrating those readers looking for a solution or a particular strategy, who wonder how utopian disruption is meant to replace or supplement other more traditional forms of political activity.
Yet the suggestion that 'The Desire Called Utopia' ends with the dilemmas with which it began is only part of the argument. For while it does finish in an 'open' fashion, by citing the call from the future asking Connie to help in the struggle to bring the utopians' world into existence (from the final page of Woman on the Edge of Time), Marge Piercy's novel also gives us a detailed portrait of a Utopian future. And so it is with Jameson's 'The Desire Called Utopia', for in addition to the many dialectical reversals and negations, there are moments (particularly in Jameson's concluding chapter) where he does resolve or point to some possible resolutions of the dilemmas contained in the question he posed about the future of Utopia. The 'end' of the Utopian moment of the 1960s and 1970s is not the end of Utopian writing, but its transformation, as he describes (through the example of Kim Stanley Robinson) the heightened self-awareness of the genre's tradition and limitations. Similarly, in terms of practical utopian projects, even as he admits that 'we are for the moment only at the stage of massive protests and demonstrations, without any conception of how a globalized transformation might then proceed', Jameson has also offered the reader a vision of a new global system, a 'pluralism of utopias', one that is foreshadowed by current events in the present:
The possibility of a new union of like-minded Latin
American states, or the possibility of a Brazilian leadership
of a community of states around the world intent on forging
a resistance to US globalization, would be other possible
figures of the invention of collective entities beyond either
empire or secession. (33)
Finally, within the context of a radical break with the present, Jameson has reiterated several fundamental principles of any new society, from the right of migration and the abolition of money to Adorno's end to hunger and his own call for full employment. This is my own undialectical interpretation of the meaning of anti-anti-Utopianism, as I begin the 'intense spiritual concentration' he calls for as part of the 'preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived'.
(1.) F. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York, Verso, 2005.
(2.) One of the essays, 'History and Salvation in P. K. Dick', has not been published before.
(3.) F. Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 110-11.
(4.) F. Jameson, 'World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative', Science-Fiction Studies, no. 7, 1975, p. 230.
(5.) F. Jameson, 'Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?', Science-Fiction Studies, no. 27, 1982, p. 153.
(6.) An earlier attempt to assess Jameson's theory of Utopia was undertaken at a meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies in Memphis in 1997, and some of the results were published in a special issue of Utopian Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1998. It is also apparent that these earlier remarks (1971) did not include a fully worked out theory of Utopia, for in this early formulation he does not distinguish between impulse and project, combining them in the 'concept' of Utopia.
(7.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. xiv-xv.
(8.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xii.
(9.) See R. Elliot, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970; D. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979.
(10.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xiii.
(11.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xiii.
(12.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 12.
(13.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 12.
(14.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xvi.
To get a sense of Jameson's use of the dialectic, here is his description of the dialectical method (Archaeologies of the Future, p. 142): '[T]he dialectic is in reality the study of all these types of negation together (along with their contradictions with each other): thus, it includes both contrariety and contradiction (the two negative axes of the Greimas square), but also the logical difference between them (a difference which is at once both contrariety and contradiction, a sublation of both which is at one and the same time their synthesis and their differentiation)'. Early in the course of his arguments, Jameson describes Niklas Luhmann's concept of differentiation, which is also useful, not so much because it is significant in terms of understanding Utopia, but insofar as differentiation provides another way of understanding how Jameson's argument advances from chapter to chapter (Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 14-15): 'Thus, a Luhmann-inspired metaphysic would posit something like an undifferentiated substance which begins internally to differentiate itself into so many related but distinct, semi-autonomous "systems". We may think of these systems in any form we like: Kant's witty identification of the faculties of the university with the older tradition of the mental faculties offers a good random starting point, for it projects a comparison between the increasing differentiation of the various bodies of the specialized academic disciplines with the separation from each other of "parts" of the psyche, such as cognition or the will. That these are ongoing and increasingly complex differentiations is a matter of empirical history: the traditional disciplines begin to hive off new ones, such as sociology or psychology, or in our time molecular biology, while modern literature testifies to the emergence of all kinds of new psychic functions which were not registered in the traditional literary genres. But now the juxtaposition of these two evolving fields (the academic disciplines, the psyche) reminds us of the multiplicity of other such fields contained within the social totality (or "system"): social classes, for example, which then differentiate into a host of strata, professional specializations and the like; or productive activities, which multiply as industry itself becomes refined into ever more varied technological and scientific processes, while the products thus produced (and the demand for them) are multiplied virtually without limit. Meanwhile the political system itself hives off the jurists, who become a separate profession governed by a distinct field of knowledge in its own right, from its administrators and bureaucrats, elective officials, state, municipal and federal employees, along with the multiplications of the welfare state, the appearance of social workers, and the various branches of public medicine as well as scientific research; and so on and so forth'.
(16.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. xiii-xiv.
(17.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 11.
(18.) Marx, letter to Ruge, September 1843, cited in F. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, New York, Columbia University Press, p. 75.
(19.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 142.
(20.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 143.
(21.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 172.
(22.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 175.
(23.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 147.
(24.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 168-9.
(25.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 211.
(26.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 212.
(27.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 217.
(28.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 219-20.
(29.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 220.
(30.) Is it necessary to add that 'disruption' here is not a code word for so-called terrorism? Of course, and it is therefore also necessary to add three points on violence, in order to distinguish it from disruption as Novum, as restructuration and the unexpected blasting open of habits, as that lateral side-door which suddenly opens onto a new world of transformed human beings. The points are these: 1) violence is an ideology, constructed around the structural omission of state power and physical oppression authorized by the 'law'; 2) violence is always initiated by the Right and by conservative or counter revolutionary repression, to which left violence is then a response; 3) political violence is self-defeating, and dialectically strengthens its opposite number: thus, US expansionism generates al Qaeda, whose growth then encourages the development of an American police state.
(31.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 231-3.
(32.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xiv.
(33.) Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 225.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Arena Printing and Publications Pty. Ltd.
COPYRIGHT
2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
For where in the older society ... Utopian thought
represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle
wish-fulfilments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own
time the very nature of the utopian concept has undergone a
dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which
everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself,
and stands as a testimony to the power of that system to
transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image.
The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility
of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the
form of a stubborn negation of all that is. (3)
Jameson's utopian conundrum, to a transformed human nature, so that we would not even recognize ourselves in this new society:
This brings us to what is perhaps the fundamental Utopian
dispute about subjectivity, namely whether the Utopia in
question proposes the kind of radical transformation of
subjectivity presupposed by most revolutions, a mutation in
human nature and the emergence of whole new beings; or
whether the impulse to Utopia is not already grounded in
human nature, its persistence readily explained by deeper
needs and desires which the present has merely repressed
and distorted. As we have implied in some of the preceding
chapters, this is a tension which is not merely inescapable; its
resolution in either direction would be fatal for the existence
of Utopia itself. If absolute difference is achieved, in other
words, we find ourselves in a science-fictional world such as
those of Stapledon, in which human beings can scarcely even
recognize themselves any longer ... On the other hand, if
Utopia is drawn too close to current everyday realities, and
its subject begins too closely to approximate our neighbours
and our politically misguided fellow-citizens, then we
slowly find ourselves back in a garden-variety reformist or
social-democratic politics which may well be Utopian in
another sense but which has forfeited its claim to any radical
transformation of the system itself. (24)
The final chapter of 'The Desire Called Utopia' begins with a 'recapitulation' of Jameson's arguments and the persistence of the dilemmas with which he began:
We have come laboriously to the conclusion that all
ostensible Utopian content was ideological, and that the
proper function of its themes lay in critical negativity, that is
in their function to demystify their opposite numbers ... In
addition we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion of
difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery
that our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical
alternatives were little more than the projections of our own
social moment and historical or subjective situation: the
post-human thereby seeming more distant and impossible
than ever! (25)
Attachment: