...Utopia as Political Tool...

 Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the future: the desire called Utopia and other science fictions. — London; New York: Verso, 2005. — 431 с.

Intro

• "At best Utopia can serve negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment (something I have myself occasionally asserted); and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively" (xiii).
• Will deal with expressions of the utopian.  So, formal, structural analysis rather than the revelation of the utopian material, content.

1.  Varieties of the Utopian

• Ref. Ernst Bloch in The Principles of Hope.  Paradox is that its analysis is effective in revealing utopian impulses hidden in everyday phenomena, it does not say anything about the utopian programs themselves.  This paradox is similar to Freud's — all dreams say of sexuality except for the overtly sexual ones.

2.  The Utopian Enclave

• Political in our society has a flavour of vice, ref. Machiavelli and Schmidt political thinkers par excellence as "be forever surrounded with an aroma of scandal".  "But what they dare to enunciate publicly, in a heroism indissociable from cynicism, our Utopians grasp more furtively, in forms more redolent of perversion than of paranoia, and with that passionate sense of mission or calling from which jouissance is never absent" (10).
• Utopians simplify the social problematic and there should be something in society which allows to track all structure to one cause.  "For the utopian remedy must at first be a fundamentally negative one, and stand as a clarion call to remove and to extirpate this specific root of all evil from which all the others spring" (12).  Positive programs of happy world are proposed by liberal theoreticians like Locke and Rawls.  Utopian intervention is diagnostic, aim to elimination of the source of exploitation and suffering.  Confusion is born by the formal properties of utopian text — "these are however maps and plans to be read negatively, as what to be accomplished after the demolitions and the removals, and in the absence of all those lesser evils the liberal believed to be inherent in human nature" (12).
• It is also required that the evil should be already grasped by the knowledge/science and also offered an aesthetic form.  In this case utopia calls to public senses.
• Thus, 2 contradictory links to society: 1) its very emergence registers agitation of "transitional period"; 2) it suggests distance from practical politics as something eternal and unchangeable.  E.g. court — "figure of closed space beyond social, a space from which power distantly emanates but which cannot itself be thought of as modifiable", which may be changed only by revolution (15).
• Money at the time of More was very limited to some trade, almost unknown in rural context.  And therefore evil may rationally be located and eliminated without a trace, it would not be possible later when money has become universal.
• Close link with social ideas (from More's project of money abolition).  And later, Utopia was given a secondary role of illustration of social idea, enclaved in the project of 'socialism in one country'.
• Socialism is though not terminated by the end of communist project — "and it is hard to see how the problems of modernising industrial society could be resolved without the Utopian solutions afforded by socialism" (21).  However, new cyber-capitalism renders the idea of factory obsolete, and other 'non-socialist' utopias come back (like Nozick's anarchism or romance of capital found in cyberpunk).

3.  Morus: The Generic Window

• First book is more of satire on the contemporary society, Second — travelog.  Also stresses the bricolage character of Utopia — important one as it is destined to be operable, manageable in domestic, everyday life (ref. Levy-Strauss in its research on origins of myths).  
• To talk of the genre of Utopia there are 4 figures of comparison: constitution; political manifesto (ref, Althusser's reading of Machiavelli's Prince); Mirror to Princes; prophecies.

4.  Utopian Science versus Utopian Ideology

• Contradiction between aesthetic and political (pragmatic) impetuses, the most evident in More.  This corresponds (following Adorno) to a tension very fundamental to aesthetic theory: b/w expression and construction.  "Even the driest artistic production — a collage of sounds by Cage, for example, or the dissonance of various geometric shapes in Malevich — retains an echo of expressiveness, or better still, necessarily acquires one, for those human views or listeners we still are; while the most minimal expressionist shriek is still necessarily a construction" (43).
• Ref. to Freud's analysis of day-dreaming and wish-fulfilment (in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming).  Claims that simple communication of day-dreaming will bore listeners, provoke embarrassment.  There are two forms of wish-fulfilment: "purely personal or individualistic" egoistic type, and a disguised version which has somehow been universalised and made interesting, indeed often gripping and insisting, for other people.  Secondary, decorative rendition of the wish-fulfilment makes it universal and collective, rather than primary exposing "which sinks to a rather shameful and private activity that needs to be disguised as all costs".  This distinction b/w two forms of wish-fulfilment is also a distinction b/w Imagination and Fancy, b/w godly creative power and decorative secondary embellishment.
• The insignificant details alienate readers.  They are however integral parts of Utopia texts.  These fancies are symptoms of fundamental repressions, "of the coming up short of the Utopian imagination against taboos that preventing wholesale redesigning of the social order as such" (53).
• In those fancies sees the utopian impulse itself, which distinguishes from "the primal architecture of Utopian Imagination as such, or of Utopian "science".  It these minute nooks and niches, indeed, we can observe the work of no less an energy — call it wit, invention, decoration or ornament — than that anguish power of plot-formation which Aristotle made central to what was after all limited to theatre as a form and a medium.  Here also we find Utopian satisfactions…" (53).
• As any dualist pair, this Imagination/Fancy may easily be gendered.  But any dual structure is endless reversible.  What is also to be noted — "it is always the subordinate term which seems more clearly defined than the dominant one" (54).

5.  How to Fulfil a Wish

• Particular features find so far in the content material (money abolition, women liberation, desire etc.).  Not only they are negative program and not positive constructions.  They also may be expressed in political treaties or pamphlets.  Therefore, utopia gratification should be found elsewhere.  And returns to magic that finds in fantasy.  On the ex. Le Guin and Strugatskys.  In Strugatskys the Zone — "a magical, incomprehensible area of radically other space —  a space beyond the law, an ontological Chernobyl" (73).  With alien objects and alien professions.  Such as stalker.  Which in turn seeks gratification for his job in curing element for his daughter.  And the text immediately transforms itself into fairy tale.  This salvation is exposed in the form of Golden Ball.  But what is also important that fulfilment seems to be dependent on the quality of the wish itself (may it be purely egoistic?)
• Frustration is a constitutive element of the Utopia.  A wish-fulfilling is corrupted by a sacrifice and cannot avoid of falling back into the world as another act of consumption.

6.  The Barrier of Time

• So, "the content of Utopian form will emerge from that other form or genre which is the fairy tale: if not a purer form of collective desire, than at least a more plebeian one, emerging from the life world of the peasantry, of growth and nature, cultivation and the seasons, the earth and generation; a figuration that lives on in industrial or post-industrial era only in the mocking remnant of "birth, copulation and death"" (85).
• Question then why the Utopia reemerges from time to time after having disappeared.  And this brings the figure of 'Utopus', legislator.  And the contradictory figure as it should at the same time be a God in establishing the rules and non-citizen (in executing them) at the same time (ref. Rousseau).
• This contradiction Rousseau solves in temporal twist: for the legislator the result of the constitution should preside over the constitution itself.  This antinomies of the cause/effect are nowadays banal pair in the analysis and notion of system.
• Ref. Bradley on danger of systemic approach to history (synchronic analysis).  This shift is not a result of greater accumulation of data, it "can be measured… by the increasing frequency of attacks on causality… and even by the hegemonic emergence of various non-causal doxa" (87).
• Diachronic analysis of one isolated cause-effect line has its disadvantage that it may be easily replaced by another.  A web of causes, synchronically acting is stable — what Hegel called "ground".  This search for stability caused proliferation of narratives.  And thus post-modern relativism.  It was reasonable to step out of this diachronic dilemmas all together.  But synchronic narrative does not have adequate representation (other than everyday ideology of doubts in changes).
• This put a contradiction: the more synchronic historian works the more he works against history, "the more airtight the synchronic system laid in place all around us, the more history itself evaporates in the process, and along with it any possibility of political agency or collective anti-systemic praxis" (89).

7.  The Unknowability Thesis

• Lem escapes this dilemma of representation by accepting non-representability of the Other.
• Switch this Other to a term of "absolutely alien".  The Other is a projection of anthropomorphic features.  For Lem takes two examples of non-comprehensibility of the absolute alien (in Solaris and The Invincible) — mostly in non-organic formations.

8.  The Alien Body

• Are there possibilities for representation of radically alien?  Negative descriptions are possible — but they are less representations, but rather references to taboos, the fear of violation.  This emerges in the situation of the alien that is in collapse, in destruction, and it should be reconstructed on the basis of traces and small hints.  Such operation is by default anthropological, and this is problem of anthropology sciences.  Because "the discipline of anthropology is… necessarily normative, and reestablishes the model of a norm even there where it is unthinkable: only Colin Turtnbull… and Levi-Strauss myself, in Tristes tropiques, have reflected on the frustration involved in the coming upon a society not merely in decline but in utter collapse" (123).
• Contradiction between sensory images and abstract philosophical constructions to be represented, and for which these images are supposed to be examples and "test cases" (124).
• "Non-profit ideologies of warfare and technology" (132), in regard to Niven&Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye.
• Golden age of alien representation is 60-70s.  Epitomised by Ridley Scott, and a switch happens b/w Alien and Blade Runner. Alien has been never fully represented and had no language, and thus fully other.  In Blade Runner the Other is the same — android, fully alienated from earlier robots but keeping humanoid form.  "This may be said to be the moment of a kind of Hegelian's self-consciousness or reflexivity in the genre, in which our attention and preoccupation as readers turn inward, and meditate on the "android cogito", which is to say on the gap or flow in the self as such" (141).
• It turned further into sexual relations with the alien, and subsequently association of the alien with non-normative and taboos.  And ultimately moved to the oldest of all taboos, to the insects.

9.  Utopia and Its Antinomies

• Debate over utopia representability, "indeed over its imaginability and conceptualisation", does not threaten to end Utopia and return to the here and now.  "Rather such debates find themselves drown inside the Utopian text, thereby becoming occasions for further Utopian productivity" (142).  "Un-knowability thesis" is critically different from anti-utopian (according to which any Utopia degenerates itself into totalitarianism and violence).
• Utopia interiorises the contradictions and antinomies and this is establishing feature of Utopia.  They should be taken one by one.  First is opposition of work and labor (strangely, usually absent in the studies of Utopia).
• Marx's is the account of nature of alienation (from tools, products, productive activity and co-workers) and this gives ground for re-establishing of what non-alienation may be.  But new account of alienation is to be ground in German idealism, in Schiller and his theorisation of play (Spiel) "as transcendence of Kant's devision of faculties" (152).  The response to alienation is thus aesthetic, where non-alienated labour is associated with the art.  This valorisation of the production returns in Marcuse's Utopias, inspired by practice of happenings and aesthetisation of everyday life.  In general, aesthetic serves to overcome utopian contradictions.  But now colonisation happens in the realm of leisure, Moor's free time for spiritual and intellectual pursuits are now captured by entertainment.
• The "culture industry' critique (not paired by any socialist alternative account) moved to Debord and Baudrillard, concepts of image and simulacrum.  Indeed, "image abolishes that older distinction between mind and body, between intellectual and manual labor, in which the philosophical humanism of the theory of non-alienated labor was predicated".  This distinction is also distinction between work and society (155).
• Next is b/w abundance and poverty.  Also translated into opposition b/w city and country — and not only the space but also in terms of production and distribution.
• Comes to the political.  But "I am tempted to assert that political is always a category mistake which arises at moments of crisis or deeper contradiction, and takes its form of appearance from the nature of crisis itself.  It would be tempting, but facile, simply to observe that the very space of political itself (and of power) varies so completely with the mode of production of which it is a function that it cannot be generalised and resists all definitional conceptualisation.  To put it another way, the source of political… is always outside conceptualisation and codification…" (161).

10.  Synthesis, Irony, Neutralisation and the Moment of Truth

• No moment of truth — or any domination — of any term of the oppositions analysed earlier.  No independent development of Utopia.  Utopia is an ideologically not neutral, it borrows from the surrounding context.  It "cannot escape the force field of ideology and class-situatedness" (175).  Utopian impulse is to be found in each of the opposition options.

12.  Journey into Fear

• Boredom of the readers of Utopias — "unspoken thought being that a society without conflict is unlikely to produce exciting stories"(182).  Art disappears from Utopias, but in a way that it is realised throughout the society as the very anesthetisation of daily life.  And immediately is detected the boredom, more precisely "fear of boredom" (184).
• Art is symptom if not of the quality of daily life, at least of what people fear it might be.  Artistic representation becomes a laboratory where the utopian ability to satisfy is tested, sort of optic glass to reveal defaults of the Utopia.  "In a world in which production has itself become purely aesthetic… in such world only the end of art itself can safe the beholder from a disabused revelation of everything we might miss" (185).
• Infantilism is also an utopian trait (186).
• Traces the boredom from Augustine and down to existentialists.  It this regard said: "the religious provenance can be identified by its privative definition, and the way in which the temporary misery of human beings is attributed to their status as secondary created nature, as opposed to the plenitude of the creator, and also to their sinfulness and corruption, as over against the angelic if not Devine itself" (191).  This link of Utopia (boredom) with religion is paradoxical as Utopia is normally sinless + its materialistic nature has much against creation concept.  Utopia is thus sacrilegious from religion point of view, it develops ideas of perfectibility of human, borrowed from Enlightenment.
• This social aspect of the Utopia is however very much depersonalised, almost complete abandoning of the self.  And this is the reason of the incurable fear of existentialism towards Utopia, in which "a loss of self so complete that the surviving consciousness cannot but seem an other to ourselves", even the boredom and existential misery is lost.  "Here, truly, Utopia would be the place of radical difference indeed, and ourselves the most unimaginable aliens" (191).
• Critique of post-Marxism — for promising no future, identified with "more metaphysical and Nietzschean resistance to promises about the future" (193).  Here Utopia is identified with religious transcendence.  And not because of all the problems that are solved, but because of "construction of an optical image from which existence itself — the miseries of the self… — all that has been removed by a sleight of hand, a masterful feat of ideological prestidigitation" (193).
• A test of new left development is needed.  In this regard a distinction between post-Marx and new anarchist movement.  Gradual assimilation of socialism by Utopia (and vice versa) was a historical development, which need not seem permanent in the face of a new stage of capitalism and a new kind of cybernetic production: in that case, the anarchist revival seems to offer the promise of dissociation between the two visionary concepts if not indeed a new liberation of the form itself" (196).
• Remarks that Cold War became a "essentially" mass culture phenomenon.  Ref. 1984 by Orwell.  Structural contradiction inside between advanced technological level of total surveillance and assertion that science cannot develop under totalitarian regimes.  But the most "haunting" in 1984, is its "elegiac sense" of loss of the past and uncertainty of the memory (200).
• Orwell's text is a response to the personal fears of Cold War.  But those fears are collective.  Its any-Utopian impulse coexists with utopian dreams (of another society).  There are personal fears.  But there is another reason for Utopian fear, derived from formal properties of the genre, from its closure (in space, in time, from history).  "For it is this seamless closure of the new system that renders it alien and existentially threatening" (202), in the paradigm of the sublime before which we necessarily pause and hesitate or draw back.
• Goes to the formal analysis of narrative.  It is driven by 'actants', undivided entities even if they are collectives.  In More there are utopians without creating any entity.  And this causes "distinctions of narrative structure" (203).

13.  The Future as Disruption

• Split the question of the future in two: about future of the genre (often proclaimed dead and several time resurrected in the time of need) and "of the thing itself" (political program whose very excess and commitment to the absolute and to absolutely unrealisable and impossible has paradoxically so often impacts daily life and praxis).
• For the first links the crisis of Utopia with the general crisis of representation in postmodern.  Relativism of the latter does not prohibit by itself a productive input of Utopia.  New Utopia may be though different than 'modernist' one.  E.g. problematic status if Irony in contemporary discourse (213). Same for "reflexivity".
• This also relates to the new temporality and related notion of Revolution.  Contrary to the modernist tradition of Marx's Capital with defeating capital and state at the Day of revolution (and linked modernist Utopia constituted by a gesture or an act), the modern life is centred on the individual in its resistance to the state without open conflict, by daily discovery of zone out of state reach ("perpetual revolt", 213).  The latter should have another utopian impact.  It is no longer the matter of resolving the dilemma or antinomy "but rather of producing new visions of those tensions, new ratios between two terms, which disrupt the older ones… and make of the antinomy itself the central structure and the beating heart of Utopia as such" (214).
• Political dimension of opposition of the centerer individual and its other is opposition between global and local.  Disclosure of ideological, false nature of this opposition as one cannot live without the other.  In this regard refer to the tourism, which is the industry of producing (rather than conserving) the 'traditional.   And "Disneyfication", which is creating and spreading of simulacra globally.
• "We thus suppose that the opposition between global and local is an ideological dualism which generates not only false problems, but false solutions as well" (216).
• How about utopian function to forecast political and empirical possibilities?  And comes to an account by Habermas of Benjamin's critique of progress in the "Thesis on History": "The notion of progress served not only to render eschatological hopes profane and to open up the horizon of expectation in a utopian fashion, but also to close off the future as a source of disruption with the aid of teleological construction of history.  Benjamin's polemic against the social-evolutionary levelling off of the historical materialist conception of history is aimed at just such a degeneration of modernity's consciousness of time open towards the future" (227).  Progress as the instance colonising the future.
• This colonisation is better addressed in classical More's Utopia with abolition of the money (rather than more recent form of Utopias, namely of federalism of localities).  This Utopia "now better expresses our relationship to genuinely political future than any current program of action" and "also serves a vital political function today which goes well beyond mere ideological expression or replication" (232).  And this is productive as it pushes to think about radically unimaginable future.  "Perhaps indeed we need to develop an anxiety about losing the future" (233).