Ideology and Utopia in the work of Fredric Jameson: or the counter-revolution in the revolution.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Buchanan, Ian
• Published date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Buchanan, Ian

Ideology and Utopia

Ideology and Utopia are intricately linked in Fredric Jameson's work. On the one hand, he calls upon marxists to 'reinvent Marxism as an Ideology, that is, as a vibrant, prophetic, Utopian call to a radical and systemic transformation of our world', (1) and on the other he argues that even the most degraded (his word) art forms such as schlock airport thrillers must offer a certain utopian impulse (he calls it a 'fantasy bribe') as their means of soliciting our interest, which is to say that 'the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well'. (2) This ambiguity is not a fault in Jameson's thinking on the subject of ideology, however, but rather the structural condition of ideology itself. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that the very usefulness of the term is 'intimately related' to its ambiguousness, rather than 'vitiating' it. (3) At its best, ideology is synonymous with the utopian, it is the rousing cry of the revolutionary at the barricade; at its worst, however, it is the counter-revolution in the revolution. It contains revolutionary ardour and reduces the utopian to a screen for commodity fetishism, becoming simply a reason for buying something that is not as banal as merely wanting to own it. (4) This still begs the question: What is Utopia? What is it that ideology cannot function without? What is it, in other words, that is so powerful an attractor it can compel us to submit willingly to a social system, namely capitalism, that is by definition so utterly iniquitous?

Over the years, Jameson has furnished any number of intimations of what he means by Utopia. Usually, it is treated as a codeword for some form of socialism, the critical element of which is always a welfare safety net. The clearest, as well as the most obviously political, statement of this position can be found in his comments on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the associated rhetoric of German reunification, which consistently emphasize the enormity of the loss entailed in the surrender of the social guarantee experimented with by the German Democratic Republic. Socialism, he says, 'means guaranteed life'. (5) In this sense, Utopia functions as both a vision of the future and an indictment of the present. It both conjures what could be and inquires why it cannot be. Now, though, Jameson has taken his analysis a step further and worked through the implications of this depiction of Utopia. Utopia, he has lately come to think, suspends the political. (6) Very far from the idle thought it is not infrequently taken to be, it is a breakpoint, leap, or schism that cannot be accommodated by the existing social system without that whole system itself undergoing paradigmatic change. If, for instance, one defines Utopia as Jameson does, as, minimally, jobs for all, it soon becomes apparent that even to entertain this thought is already to imagine a world-historical situation that is completely different from the one we find ourselves imprisoned in today. At this point, Jameson says, the impossible demand, the putative pipedream, becomes trenchant critique because it enables us to read all present-day social evils, from juvenile delinquency to drug culture, which allegedly arise out of unemployment, as 'so many results of a society unable to accommodate the productiveness of all its citizens'. (7)

The relationship between Ideology and Utopia in Jameson's work can now be formulated as two propositions which, brought together, clarify the critic's task: ideology uses the utopian to solicit support and the utopian suspends the political. Read together, we come up with a formulation that would go something like this: the political prolongs itself via ideology but does so by courting its own limit, namely Utopia. The question we will have to return to is, what kind of a limit Utopia is--to put it in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, we need to decide whether it is a relative or absolute limit, an interior or exterior limit. (8) Relative limits are those limits a system paints for itself like so many murals on the wall, hence their designation as interior, and can be crossed and recrossed with relative impunity. The supposed limits which capitalism is always transgressing are of this order. By contrast, the absolute or exterior limit can only be crossed once--the obvious exemplar of this limit is death, but it is not the only instance of an absolute limit. There are countless instances in everyday life when saying the wrong word, or just as often failing to say the right word, results in the irremediable destruction of a relationship. 'I love you', uttered prematurely, can make future conversation very awkward indeed. Our tendency is to create interior limits so as to forestall any encounter with the absolute. This was, in a sense, what Lacan was referring to when he famously said we have language in order to not say what we mean. If saying 'I love you' is too risky, we skirt around it with intimations of an abiding affection, until finally we feel confident enough to annunciate what we by then presume the other already knows. We use words, then, to express what we feel without actually having to say what we mean.

We can use this twofold proposition to propose that the critic's task is to distinguish between the utopian and the ideological, along the lines that the utopian is that which would bring the system to an end, while the ideological is that which would keep it going. (9) This is a more complex picture than it may seem at first glance, because the question of what counts as the extinction or survival of the system is by no means straightforward. As Jameson points out, More's Utopia stamps out money not because it thinks money itself is bad, but because human nature cannot be trusted as incorruptible. 'The question of hierarchy and egalitarianism is, on this interpretation, primed in More by the more fundamental question of money.' (10) In this sense, the market system survives in the form of a lingering 'mistrust' of its alleged origin, human nature itself. Human nature thus comes to stand for the market. We can square this particular circle by reading, in turn, the seemingly endless stream of Hollywood's mass-produced 'triumph of human nature' dramas as so many reassurances that the market system is really not as bad as some people make out. These narratives invariably personalize the system so that its structural iniquities appear to be the pernicious effects of an individual's actions, the proverbial villain, fall guy for the predations of capitalism, not the mindless effects of an exploitative system. To my mind, the most telling examples come from blockbuster science fiction--Predator, Independence Day, The Matrix, and so on. In every instance, human nature, in its representative form of the maverick hero--because it is at once perverse, unpredictable, capricious and creative (which is of course also how the market is described by its pundits)--wins against the alien automatons who, on this reading, obviously stand for alternative (read de-individualizing, planned or socialist) social systems. As Jameson puts it, a key reason for the success of the market idea is that it 'promises social order without institutions, claiming not to be one itself'. (11) The take-home message is that the situation--in the full Sartrean sense--merely maps out the parameters of the game of life and that true champions will adapt to the conditions and rise above them.

We get the full-blown and, as it were, over-exposed version of this in Survivor. The premise is comparable to More's Utopia inasmuch as it works by stamping out money, property, and so on, but does so in a way that exacerbates the extent to which human nature is then seen to be responsible for the failure of new forms of social collectivity to come into being more widely, in spite of generally propitious circumstances (here I am referring to the fact that 'social capital' research generally indicates that community cooperation peaks in times of extreme duress, such as wars, famines, and so on). The survival of...