Fredric Jameson wants the reader of his 2004 essay The Utopian Enclave to think of utopianism not as a striving towards an ideal state inherent in a teleological human path to perfection, but as a socially constructed and facilitated mode of disruption that is very much a product of its circumstances. Jameson defines utopia as “the radical closure of a system of difference”.
In contrast to liberal political theory which Jameson claims generally just creates situations for optimal bourgeois comfort, utopian thinkers always aim at the alleviation and elimination of the sources of exploration and suffering. Therefore, while the aim of liberal political theory is additive/positive, the aim of utopianism is always subtractive/negative. Jameson therefore believes it is folly to anticipate instances of utopian realization as positive, happy spaces, full of cooperation and fulfillment, since all energy is focused on the navigation and eventual negation of a specific ill.
One such utopianism and demonstration of subtractive energy mentioned is a utopia in which money is abolished. However, Jameson notes that a search for an ideological justification for the abolishment of money is fruitless, because the old, often religious, value systems which could replace that of money are dead and no longer viable.
Jameson recognizes that utopian thinkers are always individuals or small groups with a fractured or incomplete conception of their contemporary social totality, and as such, there is no guarantee that their ideas will be relevant or beneficial to the society it is diagnosing.
Jameson defines two types of utopian raw material: the utopian thinker’s relationship to their social situation, and the utopian thinker’s actual historical moment. Jameson is particularly interested in the instances in which theses two types of utopian raw material become inextricable. He goes on to name some of these raw materials: cultural and social values, laws, industrial and institutional organization, etc. However, Jameson posits, these raw materials can only be utilized by the utopian in so far as they are representable, and for them to be representable, they must allow themselves to be read in terms of “problems and solutions, questions and answers”. In other words, they must have congealed in some way or another that allows a fundamental problem to be identified. This fundamental problem will be the focus of the negative (subtractive) utopian energy. However, Jameson recognizes that utopian thinkers are always individuals or small groups with a fractured or incomplete conception of their contemporary social totality, and as such, there is no guarantee that their ideas will be beneficial or even relevant to the society it is diagnosing. The fundamental ill that the utopia is focused on negating has been made legible and has been able to be defined as fundamental only by means of this fractured social totality, which is an argument for the instability of utopianism.
Jameson wants the reader to question whether utopian thought is possible within economic globalization. In other words, he wants to know whether or not a fundamental problem and subtractive utopian energy can be generated within globalization. He states that both subjectivity within utopian conception and decentralized globalization are compatible with and even facilitated by postmodern thought.
For Jameson, discourse on utopia should focus on two things: pedagogy and transition. In other words, it should focus on the means by which the utopian ideas are disseminated, and the means by which the utopian ideas are carried out (in addition to the means of sustaining the utopian’s ideas after they have died).
1 comment:
Excellent work here. This is another of the more densely theoretical assigned texts I feared nobody would try to tackle in a precis. This piece is excerpted from Jameson's book *Archaeologies of the Future*, and the project of that whole book is one of the not-so-secret conversational partners for our whole course!
I am more or less in agreement with you as to the main points and conclusions here, but rather than merely commend you (which I do) let me step back to contextualize the case Jameson is making a bit in the hopes of deepening your appreciation of the argument but also to genuflect to some other course themes. You write: "Jameson recognizes that utopian thinkers are always individuals or small groups with a fractured or incomplete conception of their contemporary social totality, and as such, there is no guarantee that their ideas will be relevant or beneficial." And you also write: "Jameson defines two types of utopian raw material: the utopian thinker’s relationship to their social situation, and the utopian thinker’s actual historical moment."
All this is true as far as it goes, but Jameson is coming out of a tradition of Marxist cultural criticism here indebted to German aesthetic philosophy (Kant, Schiller, Adorno) for which *every* literary/cultural/aesthetic work that manages to exhibit style or autonomy is a compromise/intervention between/within idiosyncratic situation and objective ("objective") history. And similarly it is not just utopian-minded individuals or groups but everyone who has a "fractured or incomplete conception of their contemporary social totality." Social totality is unrepresentable in principle, precisely because it consists of diverse and dynamic works by living beings with different hopes and histories, and is consequently stratified by interlocking oppressions.
This is what Donna Haraway is getting at when she says that there is always more going on in the present than anyone knows." This unrepresentability of the social totality (the social present) is the *futurity* in the present to which I refer in the class so repeatedly, right? I say all this -- which you may already be familiar with -- just to make the point that Jameson's account is all the more powerful because it is legible within a more general aesthetic account that also addresses non-utopian art-making.
Utopianism for Jameson is a particular aesthetic strategy in which the usual unrepresentability of the social is experienced as a crisis or produces a unique impasse for which the solution is to reduce that frustrating endlessly elusive social totality into problem/s susceptible of instrumental address. That is to say, a prior reductionism ("radical closure of a system of difference") enables techno-utopian solutionism.
This comes as no surprise to our class, of course, after our many discussions of instrumental reason in relation to political reason, of tech-freedom/power as capacitation-amplification rather than political freedom/power as *potentia* arising out of equity-in-diversity. From More's Utopia to the present, utopianism has offered up its techno-fixes (whether gadgets or policies) to solve problems upon a reductively techno-fixated historical terrain; sometimes, let it be said, to extraordinary and even emancipatory effect.
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