Archaeologies of anti-capitalist Utopianism.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Burgmann, Verity
• Date: 01 January 2006

The relationship between Utopia and the political, as well as questions about the practical-political value of Utopian thinking and the identification between socialism and Utopia, very much continue to be unresolved topics today, when Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a political slogan and a politically energizing perspective.

Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions1

'"Cognitive Mapping" of a New and Global Type'

For Fredric Jameson the temporary absence of class consciousness from postmodern late capitalism is a crucial and problematic feature of the postmodern condition. His solution is '"cognitive mapping" of a new and global type', which, he explains, is the attempt to learn how to represent 'the truth of postmodernism--that is ... the world space of multinational capital'. (2) In 1984 he described cognitive mapping as 'a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system', requiring the invention of 'radically new forms' to achieve

a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [the world space of multinational capital] ... in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. (3) In 1991 in Postmodernism, he anticipated 'a process of proletarianization on a global scale' and explains that 'cognitive mapping' is a code word for class consciousness 'of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind'. (4)

By the end of the 1990s the world was witnessing the first glimmerings in radical practice of such a politics of 'cognitive mapping of a new and global type'--class consciousness 'of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind'. Though by no means the first of such events, the 'Battle of Seattle' against the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) late in 1999 has been described as the 'coming out party for a new global movement'. (5) It was followed by significant mobilizations across the world. By July 2001 the 200 000 demonstrators in Genoa represented a doubling of the numbers that amassed in Seattle. On 16 March 2002 the media reported 300 000 protesting in Barcelona, and organizers claimed 500 000. (6) Among the 'summit-hopping' after-parties that form part of this global anti-capitalist movement was S11 in Australia, when protesters effected a mass blockade of the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting between 11 and 13 September 2000 at Melbourne's Crown Casino. (7)

Eye-witness descriptions of the Seattle and S11 demonstrations bring to mind Jameson's notion of 'cognitive mapping'. Chris Carlsson wrote on the Internet of his experience in Seattle: 'the people in the streets of Seattle articulated a sophisticated understanding of the new global political situation, and saw their issues as transcending borders, workplaces, industries and populations'. They imagined a community of the oppressed as wide as the world itself: 'in the fight over trade policies, the people in the streets knew that their situation was fundamentally allied with people in other countries being victimized by the same policies'. (8) Pete Cooper and John Lister maintain that the Seattle events put 'fundamental questions of exploitation and the workings of capitalism and imperialism on the news agenda'. (9) Most of the Seattle demonstrators, according to William Tabb, 'had the sort of class analysis which working people intuitively, if inchoately, often have ... The proposals for confronting transnational capital are in class terms and, for the most part, inclusive'. (10) John Charlton argues that Seattle revealed 'an enormous depth of feeling--a raised consciousness across a significant swathe of society'. (11) Kurt Iveson and Sean Scalmer note how the S11 protesters 'transformed Crown Casino into a place from which they could contest corporate capital's domination of global space [and] created a new space for discussion and debate about globalization in the wider public sphere'. (12)

This cognitive mapping of a new and global type evident in anti-capitalism is characterized by utopian extremism. Cognitive mapping, according to Jameson, 'retains an impossible concept of totality whose representational failure [seems] as useful and productive as its (inconceivable) success' (13); for,

Successful spatial representation need not be some uplifting drama of revolutionary triumph but may be equally inscribed in a narrative of defeat, which ... causes the whole architectonic of postmodern global space to rise up in ghostly profile behind itself, as some ultimate dialectical barrier or invisible limit ... (14) In its 'impossible originality', cognitive mapping, according to Jameson, transcends the limits of mapping altogether. (15) The implausibility of anti-capitalist triumph was the easy object of humour in the satirical newspaper, The Chaser, a few years ago:

WORLD BANK CAVES IN TO PROTESTERS. GLOBAL UTOPIA TO BEGIN IMMEDIATELY. In a major victory for the opponents of the global capitalist oligarchy, the World Bank's intransigent resistance to the will of the people collapsed today, following a concerted campaign of marches and demonstrations, 'guerilla gardening', riots, counter-hegemonic T-shirts and carefully drafted letters to selected daily newspapers ... At simultaneous press conferences, the World Bank and [World Trade Organisation] announced a joint initiative to 'dismantle the world military-industrial complex' in favour of a 'more gentle world which respects values of biodiversity, cultural activity, the greening of public spaces and the riding of bicycles'. (16) The movement is defined by those who wish to 'nix' rather than fix the WTO. (17) This became evident on the streets of Seattle, as reformist non-government organization (NGO) spokespeople, union bureaucrats and environmentalists in suits were caught completely off guard. Jeff St Clair observed that

In the annals of popular protest in America, these have been shining hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly protest and white-paper activism and the timid bleats of the professional leadership of big labour and environmentalism. This truly was an insurgency from below, in which all those who strove to moderate and deflect the turbulent flood of popular outrage managed to humiliate themselves. (18) Referring to conventional political science distinctions between transformist and reformist political movements, Tom Bramble and John Minns' research into the S11 protest concludes:

The activist component of the Australian anti-capitalist movement was evidently transformist in nature. It did not seek particularly to engage with the WEF or World Trade Organization, so much as to 'name the enemy' ... they did these things not in order to bring about corporate globalization with a human face, or to engage with it, but to stop it in its tracks. (19) Anti-Capitalist Utopianism as Negation

It is a common criticism of anti-capitalism that it is precisely that: anti. Subcommandante Marcos has articulated the essential 'antiness' of contemporary anti-capitalist utopianism.

A world made of many worlds opens its space and conquers its right to be possible, it raises the banner of being necessary, it penetrates into the middle of the reality of the Earth to announce a better future. A world of all worlds that rebels and resists the Power, a world of all worlds that inhabit this world opposing cynicism, a world that fights for humanity and against neoliberalism. (20) 'Ya Basta!' is a way of saying 'No'. Aleader of the indigenous residents' resistance to construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China says: 'The highest expression of dignity can be summed up in the single word "No!"'. (21) Similarly, the slogan of the Narmada Bachao Andolan movement in India is 'Koi Nahin Hatega, Bandh Nahin Benaga'--'We will drown but we will not move'. (22) Another characteristic way that anti-capitalist utopianism says 'No' is in the rhetoric of reclamation, typified in this statement in Toronto by Reclaim the Streets:

Whether we were reclaiming the road from cars, reclaiming buildings for squatters, reclaiming surplus food for the homeless, reclaiming campuses as a place for protest and theatre, reclaiming our voice from the deep dark depths of corporate media, or reclaiming our visual environment from billboards, we were always reclaiming. Taking back what should have been ours all along ... not the corporations'. (23) Anti-capitalist utopianism is no less utopian for its anti-ness. Consider, for example, the quintessentially utopian movement of anarchism, which means, literally, 'against authority' or 'anti-domination', from the Greek an-arkia. James S. Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance argues that 'utopian beliefs can, in fact, be understood as a more or less systematic negation of an existing pattern of exploitation'. (24) Tom Moylan refers to the critical utopia that attempts to 'achieve a breach in the ideological and cultural structures that surround us'. (25) Zygmunt Bauman maintains that any utopianism worth the label 'must engage in a significant polemic with the dominant culture'. (26)

Neo-liberal corporate globalization is currently hegemonic; it is easier, as Jameson notes, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. (27) Utopia is therefore all the more attractive and urgent. For Jameson,

this increasing inability to imagine a different future enhances rather than diminishes the appeal and also the function of Utopia ... The radical break or secession of Utopia from political possibilities as well as from reality itself now more accurately reflects our current ideological state of mind [in] the current period in which capitalism has, as in the industrializing...