Producing criticism as Utopia: Fredric Jameson and science fiction.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 2006
• Author: Cevasco, Maria Elisa

This essay is an attempt at a meditation on the role of oppositional cultural criticism in a globalized world where all forms of opposition seem to be foreclosed by the non-existence of any strong form of otherness; a world in which, as Thatcher so memorably put it, there is no alternative to what is.

We are all familiar with the prevailing diagnosis on actually existing globalization: capitalism reigns supreme through its main agent, the market, and its ever-increasing 'immense collection of commodities'. In social life, consumerism constitutes the true universal religion: every country on the globe is different, but I am yet to see the most fantastic sight of all: a country with no shopping mall.

The Left is in disarray all over the world. The beacons of the past all seem to be flickering: China is flirting with capitalism under the guise of a third way to globalization. Cuba seems to be in a permanent crisis of shortage: shortage of goods as well as of civil liberties. Latin America seems to be able to offer only the difficulties of a left populism, as in Venezuela, or the paradox of having a Workers' Party in government which follows all the practices--certainly including corruption--of the neo-liberals it was voted to replace, as in my own country, Brazil. The former socialist countries show a record which is no more encouraging, while in the only remaining superpower, we witness what Michael Hardt recently termed the 18th Brumaire of George Bush the son, as a second New World Order is born out of a 'coup d'etat within the global system'--a new 18th Brumaire, this time a repetition of father and son, not uncle and nephew, and this time on a global rather than a national scale. By coup d'etat Michael Hardt means 'a usurpation of power within the ruling order by the unilateral, monarchical element and the corresponding subordination of the multilateral, aristocratic forces, leaving us, the ones who do not want to support either side, in the untenable position of waiting for the emergence of a force we can be with'--and which will lead us out of this purgatory in which politicians, as they did in the 1840s, 'breed anarchy itself in the name of order'. (1)

As cultural critics we are all very much aware of the difficulties this situation poses. How can we construct an alternative critique of the meanings and values of a social formation that seems ceaselessly to reconfigure all forms of opposition as yet another ideological option, equivalent to all the others: not a challenge or a threat, but simply one more item in the immense supermarket of ideas that constitutes intellectual exchange in a thoroughly commodified world? Only the most hubristic of theorists would fail to acknowledge the increasing commodification of our own practice. The list of traps would certainly include the star system among intellectuals; the ways in which each insurgent knowledge soon becomes another market option to be replaced by another product signed by a rising star; the fact that our location is the university campus, where no apologia for the revolutionary potential of education succeeds in patching up our sundered relations with other social movements; the ever-increasing difficulty of making a professional discourse in the humanities reach those for whom the profession was invented in the first place; the sophistication of our abstract schemes which, on the one hand, allow us to construct models that enable the apprehension of social reality and, on the other, keep us safely sheltered in our professional niches from the challenges of real choices. All of us, committed cultural critics as we are, have gone through the agonies and temptations of inhabiting a world that has tended to turn theoretical criticism from an indispensable organizer of practice into yet another symbolic denial of social reality, as it constructs itself as a discourse permanently running after its own tail, engaged in a conversation that has become more and more abstract and self-referential, mesmerizing us with its wondrous and seductive inventions. Committed cultural criticism, whose mission includes cleaning up the ideological garbage and opening up a space for revolution, is in permanent danger of colluding with the world it wants to criticize, caught up in the quintessential move in capitalist society: ideology and fetishism joining forces to produce the illusion of novelty and thus prevent real change.

And yet, as a marxist, I am bound to agree with Raymond Williams when he draws the cultural consequences of living in a world that, being based on a fundamental contradiction, inevitably produces--to speak with Marx--its own grave-diggers. While discussing his useful distinction between hege-monic, residual and emergent cultural practices, Williams lays the material conditions of possibility for the thought of what is to come:

no mode of production, and therefore no dominant society or order of society, and therefore no dominant culture in reality exhausts the full range of human practice, human energy, human intention (this range is not the inventory of some original 'human nature' but, on the contrary, it is that extraordinary range of variations, both practised and imagined, of which human beings are, and have shown themselves to be capable). (2) And we need only look at our own field to...