Fredric Jameson and anti-anti-Utopianism.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Fitting, Peter
• Date: 22 September 2005

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...