Poetics of Social Forms Jameson Fichamento

Poetics of Social Forms] Fredric Jameson - Archaeologies of the Future_ The Desire
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005, Verso)
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the hoarfrost grip try tent
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[Poetics of Social Forms] Fredric Jameson - Archaeologies of the Future_ The Desire
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the hoarfrost grip try tent
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The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself
a r�presentational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the
systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any
fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions
like so many sparks from a comet
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no Utopian writer has been quite so forthright in confronting the great empiri cist maxim,
nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses
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It suggests that at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware
of our mental and ideo logical imprisonment (something I have myself occasionally
asserted7); and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively
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have flourished in one period and dried
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But what uniquely characterizes this genre is its explicit inter textuality: few other literary
forms have so brazenly affirmed themselves as argument and counterargument. Few
others have so openly required cross reference and debate within each new variant: who
can read Morris without Bellamy? or indeed Bellamy without Morris? So it is that the
individual text carries with it a whole tradition, reconstructed and modified with each new
addition, and threatening to become a mere cipher within an immense hyper organism,
like Stapledon's minded swarm of sentient beings.
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Bloch's hermeneutic is not designed to excuse these deformed Utopian impulses, but
rather entertains a political wager that their energies can be appropriated by the process
of unmasking, and released by consciousness in a manner analogous to the Freudian cure
(or the Lacanian
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restructuring of desire).
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It is however not a psychological account we now seek, but rather a more historical one,
which theorizes the conditions of possibility of these peculiar fantasies. Utopias seem to
be by-products of Western modernity, not even emerging in ever y stage of the latter. We
need to get some idea of the specific situations and circumstances under which their
composition is possible, situ ations which encourage this peculiar vocation or talent at the
same time that they offer suitable materials for its exercise
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What does this interesting picture of social differentiation have to offer a theory of
Utopian production? I believe that we can begin from the propo sition that Utopian space
is an imaginary enclave within real social space, in other words, that the very possibility
of Utopian space is itself a result of spatial and social differentiation. But it is an aberrant
by-product, and its pos sibility is dependent on the momentary formation of a kind of
eddy or self-contained backwater within the general differentiation process and its
seemingly irreversible forward momentum
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This pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change may be
thought of as a kind of enclave within which Utopian fantasy can operate.s This is a figure
which then usefully allows us to combine two hitherto
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This pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change may be
thought of as a kind of enclave within which Utopian fantasy can operate.s This is a figure
which then usefully allows us to combine two hitherto contradictory features of the
relation of Utopia to social reality: on the one hand, its very existence or emergence
certainly registers the agitation of the various "transitional periods" within which most
Utopias were composed (the term "transitional" itself conveying this sense of momentum)
; while, on the other, it suggests the distance of the Utopias from practical politics, on the
basis of a zone of the social totality which seems eternal and unchangeable, even within
this social ferment we have attributed to the age itself
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least reorganize it and plunge it into secular society and social space as such) . The
Utopians, however, reflect this still non-revolutionary blindness as to possible
modifications in the power system; and this blindness is their strength insofar as it allows
their imagination to overleap the moment of revolution itself and posit a radically
different "post-revolutionary" society
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It is an absence which will become unthinkable when the use of money is generalized to
all sections of the "modern" economies, at which point Utopian speculation will take the
form of various substitutions - stamp script, labor certificates, a return to silver, and so
forth, none of which offer very convincing Utopian possibilities. Yet the paradox which
More's fantasy allows us to glimpse is the way in which this monetary enclave, and this
strange foreign body as which money and gold momentarily present themselves, can at
one and the same time be fantasized as the very root of all evil and the source of all social
ills and as something that can be utterly eliminated from the new Utopian social
formation. The enclave radiates baleful power, but at the same time it is a power that can
be eclipsed without a trace precisely because it is confined to a limited space
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In More's near-contemporary Campanella the enclave status plays a somewhat different

role: it is because the monastery is an enclave within a more generally differentiated and
complicated society that it can be general ized outwards and serve as a Utopian model for
a social simplification and discipline. The irony of the success of this
counterrevolutionary Utopia among Protestants is to be explained by Weber's
observation: the Protestant elimination of the monasteries turned the whole world into
one immense monastery in which, as Sebastian Franck put it, "every Christian had to be
a monk all his life
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Industrialization greatly increases the wealth of nations (Marx's so-called General

Intellect spreading through the whole social order),19 but is not felt in the modern period
to have so completely colonized social space as to close all the loopholes and make an
enclave-type withdrawal impossible. Indeed, it is precisely the closing of those loopholes
(and the advent of the perspective
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Industrialization greatly increases the wealth of nations (Marx's so-called General
Intellect spreading through the whole social order),19 but is not felt in the modern period
to have so completely colonized social space as to close all the loopholes and make an
enclave-type withdrawal impossible. Indeed, it is precisely the closing of those loopholes
(and the advent of the perspective of a concrete World Market) which is now called
postrnodernity (or global ization) and spells an end to this type of Utopian fantasy
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It is worth pausing at this point to underscore the production process o f the Utopian text:
that process h a s a conceptual level (as Uvi-Strauss taught us long ago for the case of
tribal stories or myths), in which it not only thinks through figures but also solves
contradictions. Utopia thus has a specifically aes thetic level, about which most of the
literary critics have been singularly unhelpful, and eager to agree with the stereotypical
boredom of the form; but what if there were also a level in which the text proves not only
to be what Plekhanov called the "social equivalent", the correlative namely of ideology
and of a class standpoint, but also a kind of gestural equivalent? Here the Utopian text
and its mechanisms would correspond to something like an activity in daily life, and
would constitute a rehearsal of the latter on the purely symbolic level, offering a kind of
supplementary pleasure derived from the latter's imi tation. I would want at least
provisionally to distinguish this pleasure from what obtains on the representational level,
where I want to suggest that it is to be theorized in terms of miniaturization. The activity
satisfactions of Utopia are to be sure closely related to that aesthetic or representational
process; but we gain something in the way of insight by trying to classify the operations
involved, which it is far too general to subsume under the old aesthetic catch all of play
(Marin's work targets a very specific kind of spatial play, geometrical and cartographic,
which is theoretically and diagnostically distinct from the old anthropological category) .
I have already observed above that we need to grasp the Utopian opera tion in terms of
home mechanics, inventions and hobbies, returning it to that dimension of puttering and
active bricolage from which Levi-Strauss' source in 24 Kendrick, "More's Utopia and
Uneven Development", pp. 243-244
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I have already observed above that we need to grasp the Utopian opera tion in terms of
home mechanics, inventions and hobbies, returning it to that dimension of puttering and
active bricolage from which Levi-Strauss' source in 24 Kendrick, "More's Utopia and
Uneven Development", pp. 243-244
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f one follows Carl Schmitt's formula, that the political i s first and foremos t the decision
about friend and foe,30 it is clear enough that this is a central and constitutive issue both
in Machiavelli and in Marx and Engels, but less certain how it could be raised on the
occasion of More's vision of Utopia or even of his positions in Book One
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thus, i f one follows Carl Schmitt's formula, that the political i s first and foremos t the
decision about friend and foe,30 it is clear enough that this is a central and constitutive
issue both in Machiavelli and in Marx and Engels, but less certain how it could be raised
on the occasion of More's vision of Utopia or even of his positions in Book One
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Thus in some sense the Utopian form (genre or not) comes into being to complement
these various imperfect genres and to fulfill or to forestall each of them in unexpected
ways. It i s a paradox that a form so absolutely depend ent on historical circumstance (it
flourishes only in specific conditions and on certain rare historical occasions) should give
the appearance of being supremely ahistorical; that a form which inevitably arouses
political passions should seem to avoid or to abolish the political altogether; and that a
text so uniquely dependent on the caprice and opinion of individual social dreamers
should find itself disarmed in the face of individual agency and inaugural action. Yet
perhaps the generic question has some further lessons MANIFESTO SATIRE MIRROR
FOR PRINCES SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION THE COURT AS AGENCY HOLISM
WRITING CONSTITUTIONS CLOSURE MORAL FABLES -- END OF HISTORY
ENCLAVE REFORM .... ....... PROPHECY 30 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
(Rutgers, 1 976 [1933])
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perhaps the generic question has some further lessons MANIFESTO SATIRE MIRROR
FOR PRINCES SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION THE COURT AS AGENCY HOLISM
WRITING CONSTITUTIONS CLOSURE MORAL FABLES -- END OF HISTORY
ENCLAVE REFORM .... ....... PROPHECY 30 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
(Rutgers, 1 976 [1933])
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perhaps the generic question has some further lessons MANIFESTO SATIRE
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For the first o f these lines of inquiry, it will be formally crucial to interro gate the
interpolated narratives, those involving yet a different genre, namely the moral fables
about non-existent states, the Polylerites, the Achorii, and the Macarenses: for these
interpolated episodes should tell us two antithetical things, namely why More needed to
have recourse to non-existent or imagined places, and then why none of them could have
fulfilled the function that the fourth and final, but very different non-existent state of Bo
ok Two, namely Utopia itself, was called upon to fill. Why, in other words, does the image
or full figure of Utopia necessarily emerge from previous but local and analo gous
figures? The latter are, to be sure, imagined as enclaves within our existent world;
whereas, despite the pos itioning and the supplementary explanations, Utopia is somehow
felt to replace our world altogether
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Our three enclave states (or examples), whose nonsense names seem to take the measure
of the reforms,31 demonstrate (in reverse order): how to limi! the king's finances (the
Macaranses, translated by Turner as Happiland) ; how to discourage foreign conquests
(the Achorii, or No landia) ; and most exten sively, how to turn the severe English penal
system to the advantage of the citizenry (the Polylerites, or Tallstoria) . The two initially
mentioned imply common-sense rules and limits for monarchs: they are thus both
situation specific in their reference, and not unrealizable. Nor, when we come to the
longest example, the Polylerites, are the more moderate punishments and the forced labor
of the convicts unrealizable either, although they obviously collide with widespread
prejudice and popular doxa, as the heated discussion shows
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None o f which means that nothing o f significance can now be said about the wish-
fulfillment that drives Utopia and that lends it its trans historical fresh ness.
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The ambiguity of the tripartite framework is such that we can overlook the ethical origins
of this principle and take it for a whole political program and a way of realizing Utopia
as such. The rotation of these three ideologemes is itself the source of Utopia's seeming
autonomy on the representational level, and rescues the text from the status of a mere
tract on any one of the themes (a pamphlet against money, for example, or a theolog ical
treatise on pride, a revolutionary broadbill denouncing social hierarchy)
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This rotational operation forestalls the thematization or reification of any single factor
into an ideological system or vision of human nature (a problem to be discussed in
Chapters 1 0 and 1 1) . This is, I believe, what Louis Marin termed "neutralization" in his
fundamental work on Utopias, and it will require and receive an explanation, at the
appropriate time, of how neutralization can be grasped as production, rather than as
simple cancellation or effacement. Most immediately, however, it demands subsumption
into the structure of wish-fulfillment itself
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Uto p i an S c i e n ce v er s u s Uto p i a n I de o lo gy Yet few texts would seem to reveal

the structure of the Utopian wish-fulfill ment quite so transparently as More, in which
Book One o ffers a frightening picture of English society and its contradictions, to which
Book Two responds
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Yet few texts would seem to reveal the structure of the Utopian wish-fulfill ment quite so
transparently as More, in which Book One o ffers a frightening picture of English society
and its contradictions, to which Book Two responds with a series o f ingenious yet
plausible solutions. The opposition is, however,
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And yet the work o f art, for Freud, remains a wish-fulfillment, however much the writer
"softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it
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And yet the work o f art, for Freud, remains a wish-fulfillment, however much the writer
"softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it". We must
therefore distinguish between two forms presented by the wish-fulfillment: a repellent
purely personal or individual "egoistic" type, and a disguised version which has somehow
been universalized and made interesting, indeed often gripping and insistent, for other
people
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and the communal kitchen and dining area is allegorical of that Utopian equality as well
as instrumental in bringing it about - a matter o f Utopian science rather than Utopian
ideology, o n e would think
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But when the commercial and industrial process is itself recognized to b e a system i n i t
s own right - a dawning recognition whose maturation runs from Adam Smith to Marx -
at that point the overarching structure of capitalism has taken the place of any of the grand
constructions to which Imagination might lay claim; while its one great alternative -
socialism - has also emigrated from the world of Utopian fantasy to that of practical
politics. Thus in either case the capitalist or the socialist frameworks become posited in
advance and presupposed by the Utopian Imagination; and the center of gravity of
Utopian
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But when the commercial and industrial process is itself recognized to b e a system i n i t
s own right - a dawning recognition whose maturation runs from Adam Smith to Marx -
at that point the overarching structure of capitalism has taken the place of any of the grand
constructions to which Imagination might lay claim; while its one great alternative -
socialism - has also emigrated from the world of Utopian fantasy to that of practical
politics. Thus in either case the capitalist or the socialist frameworks become posited in
advance and presupposed by the Utopian Imagination; and the center of gravity of
Utopian construction passes to Fancy, which begins tireless to elaborate schemes by
which capitalism i s ameliorated or neutralized, or socialism is constructed in the mind.
At this point, the dominant theme of money proliferates into a mul tiplicity of funny-
money schemes and crackpot currency proposals, which become the central determining
mechanisms for this or that new Utopian fantasy (political forms of collective
organization taking on much the same function in socialist Utopias) . But clearly enough,
at this point the very spirit of Utopian invention has been modified, its difficulties
increased from the point of view of Fancy, while the function of Imagination slowly
atrophies for want of use; it is this process which we have called the waning of the Utopian
impulse, the enfeeblement of Utopian desire, and which saps our political options and
tends to leave us all in the helples s position of passive accomplices and impotent
handwringers
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Fantasy has indeed, as a genre, stronger afflnities with medieval content than with such
Renaissance forms; and this will indeed b e one of the topics to be explored in what
follows, particularly in the light of the medieval currents that continue to inform More's
Utopia. But I will also want to address two other structural characteristics of fantasy
which contrast sharply with SF and can also serve as differentiae speciftcae for this genre,
namely the organization of fantasy around the ethical binary of good and evil, and the
fundamental role it assigns to magic
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inasmuch as it would seem to be the absence of any sense of history that most sharply
differentiates fantasy from Science Fiction and must also be factored into any systematic
compari son with Utopian form
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In our present context, indeed, it has immediate consequences for our reception of that
fundamental motif of fantasy which is magic as such. If SF is the exploration of all the
constraints thrown up by history itself - the web of counterfinalities and anti-dialectics
which human production has itself produced - then fantasy is the other side of the coin
and a celebration o f human creative power a n d freedom which becomes idealistic only
b y virtue of the omission of precisely those material and historical constraints. Magic,
then, may be read, not as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great
bulk of mediocre fantasy production) , but rather as a figure for the enlargement of human
powers and their passage to the limit, their actu alization of everything latent and virtual
in the stunted human organism o f the present
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In any case, the charm of the world o f magic makes a more permanent claim of its own,
as it persists in medieval romance, of which the Arthurian cycle is the fundamental
expression. And like all the genres of modes of pro duction different from our own - myth,
tragedy, epic, Chines e lyric - it also offers that unique "Luft aus anderen Planeten", that
air from other planets (which Stefan George evoked and which Schoenberg set to music)
, that signals some momentary release from the force of gravity of this one. So also our
own genres - modernism in one way, SF in another - struggle desperately to escape our
force field and the force of gravity of our historical moment. But romance - all the way
from Chretien to its most modern echoes in Wagner's Parsifal (1 882) or the Lance/ot (1
9 74) of Robert Bresson - retains the fascina
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In any case, the charm of the world o f magic makes a more permanent claim of its own,
as it persists in medieval romance, of which the Arthurian cycle is the fundamental
expression. And like all the genres of modes of pro duction different from our own - myth,
tragedy, epic, Chines e lyric - it also offers that unique "Luft aus anderen Planeten", that
air from other planets (which Stefan George evoked and which Schoenberg set to music)
, that signals some momentary release from the force of gravity of this one. So also our
own genres - modernism in one way, SF in another - struggle desperately to escape our
force field and the force of gravity of our historical moment. But romance - all the way
from Chretien to its most modern echoes in Wagner's Parsifal (1 882) or the Lance/ot (1
9 74) of Robert Bresson - retains the fascina tion of a magical transformation of human
relations - conflict, violence, desire, sovereignty, bonding, love and vocation - all
uniquely reconfigured under the central narrative category of the adventure. Yet the
invocation o f magic b y modern fantasy cannot recapture this fascination, but is
condemned by its form to retrace the history of magic's decay and fall, its disappearance
from the "entzauberte Welt", the disenchanted world of prose, of capitalism and modern
times. It is only at this point, when the world o f magic becomes litde more than nostalgia,
that the Utopian wish can reappear in all its vulner ability and fragility. In Morris and Le
Guin both there visibly reappears that mysterious bridge that leads from the historical
disintegration of fantasy to the reinvention of the N ovum, from a fallen world in which
the magical powers of fantasy have become unrepresentable to a new space in which
Utopia can itself be fantasized
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The content of Utopian form will emerge from that other form or genre which is the fairy
tale
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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, then at least a more plebeian one, emerging
from the life world of the peas antry, o f growth and nature, cultivation and the seasons,
the earth and the generations; a figuration that lives on in the industrial or post-industrial
era only in the mocking remnant of "birth, copulation and death"
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1 . Adventure, or "space opera", which comes most immediately out of the work of Jules
Verne, but could perhaps be marked in the American tradi tion by Edgar Rice Burroughs'
A Princess of Mars (1 9 1 7) . 2. Science (or at least the mimesis of science), which might
classically be dated from the first SF pulps in Gernsbach's Amazing Stories, beginning in
1 926 . 3 . Sociology, or, better still, social satire or "cultural critique", which i t i s
conventional to attribute to the innovation of Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants (1 9
5 3 ) . 4. Subjectivity, or the 1 960s : Philip K. Dick's ten great novels are, for example,
all written in the concentrated period from 1 96 1 to 1 968. 5 . Aesthetics, or "speculative
fiction", conventionally a s sociated with Michael Moorcock's journal New Worlds,
which ran from 1 964 to 1 977
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1 . Adventure, or "space opera", which comes most immediately out of the work of Jules
Verne, but could perhaps be marked in the American tradi tion by Edgar Rice Burroughs'
A Princess of Mars (1 9 1 7) . 2. Science (or at least the mimesis of science), which might
classically be dated from the first SF pulps in Gernsbach's Amazing Stories, beginning in
1 926 . 3 . Sociology, or, better still, social satire or "cultural critique", which i t i s
conventional to attribute to the innovation of Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants (1 9
5 3 ) . 4. Subjectivity, or the 1 960s : Philip K. Dick's ten great novels are, for example,
all written in the concentrated period from 1 96 1 to 1 968. 5 . Aesthetics, or "speculative
fiction", conventionally a s sociated with Michael Moorcock's journal New Worlds,
which ran from 1 964 to 1 977; but which in the US is associated with the work of Samuel
Delany (1942-) . 6. Cyberpunk, which opens with a bang with William Gibson's
Neuromancer (1 984) : a general period break which is also consistent, not only with the
neo-conservative revolution and globalization, but also with the rise of commercial
fantasy as a generic competitor and ultimate victor in the field of mass culture.
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This figuration then, far more powerfully than Asimov's cyclical chronol ogy, allows us
to glimpse again that fundamental anxiety of Utopia, to which we will return in greater
detail later on, namely the fear of losing that familiar world in which all our vices and
virtues are rooted (very much including the very longing for Utopia itself) in exchange
for a world in which all these things and experiences - positive as well as negative - will
have been obliterated. "My project", as Sartre puts it, "is a rendezvous I give myself on
the other side of
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This figuration then, far more powerfully than Asimov's cyclical chronol ogy, allows us
to glimpse again that fundamental anxiety of Utopia, to which we will return in greater
detail later on, namely the fear of losing that familiar world in which all our vices and
virtues are rooted (very much including the very longing for Utopia itself) in exchange
for a world in which all these things and experiences - positive as well as negative - will
have been obliterated. "My project", as Sartre puts it, "is a rendezvous I give myself on
the other side of time, and my freedom is the fear of not finding myself there, and of not
even wanting to find myself there any 10nger."18 What is then so often identified as
Utopian boredom corresponds to this withdrawal of cathexis from what are no longer seen
as "my own" projects or "my own" daily life. This is mean while the sense in which
depersonalization as such becomes a fundamental or constituent feature of Utopia as such.
19
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Seen in this way, it becomes clear that the SF author is placed in a position of divine
creation well beyond anything Agatha Christie or even Aristotle might have imagined;
rather than inventing a crime of some sort, the SF writer is obliged to invent an entire
universe, an entire ontology, another world alto gether - very precisely that system of
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Seen in this way, it becomes clear that the SF author is placed in a position of divine
creation well beyond anything Agatha Christie or even Aristotle might have imagined;
rather than inventing a crime of some sort, the SF writer is obliged to invent an entire
universe, an entire ontology, another world alto gether - very precisely that system of
radical difference with which we associate the imagination of Utopia
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tracks by adding to this first puzzle a second one, namely that of the mass graves
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omnipresence of class struggle.
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perhaps significant, that the best of all alien repre sentations - Heinlein called it the finest
SF novel ever written - should have been composed in a resolutely Cold War spirit, and
designed to preach an unremitting vigilance and hostility to the newly discovered alien
species as a scarcely disguised foreign policy lesson, not particularly liberalized by its
prediction of a convergent American-Soviet military Empire of the galactic future
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been transformed into the commodity of "leisure" and is rapidly colonized by the
entertainment industry. The resultant right-wing critiques o f a "degraded mass culture"
(in Heidegger, T.S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset) are char acterized by the omission o f any
discussions of capitalism and the eventual transfer of this particular form of entropy to
this or that dystopian system, of which, to be sure, Huxley's Brave New World (1 932) is
the epic poem.23 On the Left, similar anxieties are expressed in Stapledon's picture in
Star Maker (1 937) of his "other world", whose inhabitants become so addicted to the
technological bliss of their telephonic taste system that they end up passing their whole
lives in bed. The "culture industry" (1 947) of Adorno and Horkheimer then theorizes the
structure of the commodification of culture and provides a powerful dystopian vision of
the alienation of leisure under capitalism which is not particularly relieved by any
alternative accounts of a socialist (and mostly Stalinist) culture, and which hands its
dystopian torch down to more contemporary critical theories, such as that found in
Debord's Society of the Spectacle ( 1968) and in Baudrillard, where the final stage of com
modity reification is famously discovered to be the image, and ultimately the simulacrum
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Indeed, it is first on the Right that the political and social anxieties associ ated with "the
masses" takes on a properly cultural dimension. For now the free time More provided his
Utopians for spiritual and intellectual pursuits has been transformed into the commodity
of "leisure" and is rapidly colonized by the entertainment industry. The resultant right-
wing critiques o f a "degraded mass culture" (in Heidegger, T.S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset)
are char acterized by the omission o f any discussions of capitalism and the eventual
transfer of this particular form of entropy to this or that dystopian system, of which, to be
sure, Huxley's Brave New World (1 932) is the epic poem.23 On the Left, similar
anxieties are expressed in Stapledon's picture in Star Maker (1 937) of his "other world",
whose inhabitants become so addicted to the technological bliss of their telephonic taste
system that they end up passing their whole lives in bed. The "culture industry" (1 947)
of Adorno and Horkheimer then theorizes the structure of the commodification of culture
and provides a powerful dystopian vision of the alienation of leisure under capitalism
which is not particularly relieved by any alternative accounts of a socialist (and mostly
Stalinist) culture, and which hands its dystopian torch down to more contemporary critical
theories, such as that found in Debord's Society of the Spectacle ( 1968) and in
Baudrillard, where the final stage of com modity reification is famously discovered to be
the image, and ultimately the simulacrum
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Alan Sandison, Robert Dingley (eds.) - Histories of the Future_ Studies in Fact, Fantasy
and Science Fiction (2000, Palgrave Macmillan UK)
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In this essay I will argue tha t the t empor a l 'gap' or bl ank space signifies the place of
an undescribed and undescribable apocalyptie moment , usually in the form of a
cataclysmic nuc l e a r war. In the form of the utopi a or dystopia, thi s textual 'bl ank
space' reveals the ideological aporias of discourse. Louis Marin suggests tha t the utopi
an form specifieally constructs these bl ank zones: Utopia constructs a spa c e (the space-
in-the-text) made up of artieulated spaces. They are places about whi ch the discourse
speaks. This cons t ruc t ed space-in-the-text allows for the analysis of 'whi t e zones',
terrae incognitae tha t do not show up semantically in the utopi e discourse, in the space-
of-the-text, unless displaced and condens ed in a figurative form. These whi t e spaces on
the utopi e map, signified
==========
the utopi e map, signified bl indly by utopi e discourse, are the places for unthinkabl e
theoretieal concepts in forms to be thought about.9 Utopia, as an 'ideologieal critique of
the dominant ideology', both reveals and manifests the unexamined (or occ1uded)
structures of ideology.lO
==========
the utopi e map, signified bl indly by utopi e discourse, are the places for unthinkabl e
theoretieal concepts in forms to be thought about.9 Utopia, as an 'ideologieal critique of
the dominant ideology', both reveals and manifests the unexamined (or occ1uded)
structures of ideology.lO The totalised dystopias of 1950s Ameriea paradoxieally reveal
the bl ind spots of the Cold War (the imminenc e and immanenc e of nuc1ear destruction,
the over-organisation of the warfare state) by not revealing them, by not depi e t ing the
nuc1ear de s t ruc t ion whi eh precedes the cons t i tut ion of the tot a l state.
==========

The 'bl ank space' of utopi a is itself scorched by the apocalyptie moment
==========
- Seu destaque na página 134-134 | Adicionado: quarta-feira, 6 de junho de 2018 13:01:51
The failure to represent nude a r war is itself significant. Fredric Jameson, writing on
utopi a r a the r than the apocalyptic, suggested tha t 'Utopia's deepest subject, and the
source of all tha t is mos t vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive
it, our inc apa c i ty to pro du ce i t as avi s ion, our failure to project the Othe r of wha t
is, a failure tha t [ . . . ] mus t onc e again leave us wi th this history.,36 This incapacity
ext ends itself to imagining the apocalyptic moment whi ch creates the condi t ions for
the ins t i tut ion of utopia, a moment figured as a gap or
==========
the ins t i tut ion of utopia, a moment figured as a gap or bl ank textual space. In the
American 1950s, the ideological frameworks of Cold War conflict, the legacy of
Hiroshima, the immanenc e of global destruction form the bl ank spaces of discourse tha
t dys topi an fiction spatialises. The dystopian worlds tha t the SF writers of the 1950s
imagined - totalitarian, mechanised, ent ropi c - also testify to a failure of the hope inhe r
ent in the utopi an project. W
==========
the ins t i tut ion of utopia, a moment figured as a gap or bl ank textual space. In the
American 1950s, the ideological frameworks of Cold War conflict, the legacy of
Hiroshima, the immanenc e of global destruction form the bl ank spaces of discourse tha
t dys topi an fiction spatialises. The dystopian worlds tha t the SF writers of the 1950s
imagined - totalitarian, mechanised, ent ropi c - also testify to a failure of the hope inhe r
ent in the utopi an project
==========
the apocalyptic moment precedes the ins t i tut ion of dystopia, and the t ext s end in a
moment of suspended possibility, an openne s s whi ch complicates the seeming
pessimism of the dys topi an form.
==========
Ralph Pordzik - Futurescapes_ Space in Utopian and Science Fiction Discourses. (Spatial
Practices) (2009, Rodopi)
Is this then the end of the utopian, the answer to limited resources, global decentralization
and new modes of communication with its concomitant modes of perception? Whereto
has the utopian (as opposed to utopia as ideal society) wandered off in an age that has
become so suspicious of homogenous space, so aware of the affinity between utopia and
apocalypse, and so pressed by increasingly practical rather than theoretical necessities?
==========
Ralph Pordzik - Futurescapes_ Space in Utopian and Science Fiction Discourses. (Spatial
Practices) (2009, Rodopi)
ries abound once more and access as the magic word has replaced property as the key to
Utopia (Rifkin 2000
==========
- Seu destaque na página 160-160 | Adicionado: segunda-feira, 11 de junho de 2018

10:13:17
Dans son oeil, ciel livide OU germe l'ouragon
==========
10:29:37
I am tempted to assert that the political is always a category mistake which arises at
moments of crisis or deeper contra diction, and takes its form of appearance from the
nature of the crisis itself
==========

10:40:19
It would be tempting, but facile, simply to observe that the very space of the political
itself (and of power) varies so completely with the mode of produc tion of which it i s a
function that it cannot be generalized and resists all definitional conceptualization. To put
it another way, the source of the polit ical - Schmitt's state of exception,35 Negri's
constituent power36 - is always outside conceptualization and codification, so that it
brings with it a kind of
==========

10:40:36
inverted G6del's law where the foundation is always open and indeterminable.
==========
10:47:23
might be thought that in the economic area the agenda o f decentraliza tion would offer
an advantageous space for the critique of monopoly and multinational "giants";
unfortunately the alternative - presumably small business, entrepreneurship and invention
- no longer strikes anyone as a viable one, but rather as a species on its way to extinction.
In this situation, flexible capitalism can arrogate the virtues of multiplicity and difference
to itself, in the way in which computerization enables niche production and the systematic
variation of products, while so-called p ostmodern marketing supplies globalized
corporations with the rhetoric and imagery of multicul tural adaptability and the
contextualization of their products around the world
==========

10:47:27
It might be thought that in the economic area the agenda o f decentraliza tion would offer
an advantageous space for the critique of monopoly and multinational "giants";
unfortunately the alternative - presumably small business, entrepreneurship and invention
- no longer strikes anyone as a viable one, but rather as a species on its way to extinction.
In this situation, flexible capitalism can arrogate the virtues of multiplicity and difference
to itself, in the way in which computerization enables niche production and the systematic
variation of products, while so-called p ostmodern marketing supplies globalized
corporations with the rhetoric and imagery of multicul tural adaptability and the
contextualization of their products around the world
==========
10:55:08
But the appeal to human nature is no longer plausible in the postmodern and constructivist
spirit o f late capitalism and its ideologies. This is indeed the ambiguity of pos tmodernism
as a philosophy, that its progressive endorse ment o f anti-essentialist multiplicity and
perspectivism also replicates the very rhetoric of the late-capitalist marketplace as such
==========

11:04:41
But today the presence to hand of the computer has blurred the economic issues, allowing
one to assume that decen tralization can now magically be achieved by the new
technology, and thus flattening out and defusing the contradiction which Utopian
solutions were one called into being to resolve, at least in the imagination.
==========

11:36:16
Meanwhile, even i f w e divest
==========
11:38:36
T H E FUT U R E
==========

14:24:28
tation as such: if there is nothing in the mind which was not already transmitted by the
senses, according to the old empiricist motto, we are also generally inclined to think today
that there is nothing in our possible representations which was not somehow already in
our historical experience. The latter necessarily clothes all our imaginings, it furnishes
the content for the expression and figuration of the mos t abstract thoughts, the mos t
disembodied longings or premonitions. Indeed, that content is itself already ideological
in the sense outlined above, it is always situated and drawn from the contextually
concrete, even where (espe cially where) we attempt to project a vision absolutely
independent of ourselves and a form of othernes s as alien to our own background as
possible
==========

14:24:38
But the argument can also be pitched at a lower level, in terms of represen tation as such:
if there is nothing in the mind which was not already transmitted by the senses, according
to the old empiricist motto, we are also generally inclined to think today that there is
nothing in our possible representations which was not somehow already in our historical
experience. The latter necessarily clothes all our imaginings, it furnishes the content for
the expression and figuration of the mos t abstract thoughts, the mos t disembodied
longings or premonitions. Indeed, that content is itself already ideological in the sense
outlined above, it is always situated and drawn from the contextually concrete, even
where (espe cially where) we attempt to project a vision absolutely independent of
ourselves and a form of othernes s as alien to our own background as possible
==========

15:59:59
Bien laire comme une bete, lying
==========

16:00:03
Bien laire comme une bete
==========
[Publication in partnership with the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University]
Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, Gyan Prakash (editors) - Utopia Dystopia_ Conditions
of Historical Possibility (2010, Prin

histories of the present. Even before we begin to explain that sentence, some readers may
feel a nagging concern, for the very term “utopia” often sounds a little shopworn
==========
Dystopia, typically invoked, is neither of these things; rather, it is a utopia that has gone
wrong, or a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of society
==========
Despite the name, dystopia is not simply the opposite of utopia. A true opposite of utopia
would be a society that is either completely unplanned or is planned to be deliberately
terrifying and awful. Dystopia, typically invoked, is neither of these things; rather, it is a
utopia that has gone wrong, or a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of
society
==========

Every utopia always comes with its implied dystopia—whether the dystopia of the status
quo, which the utopia is engineered to address, or a dystopia found in the way this specifi
c utopia corrupts itself in practice. Yet a dystopia does not have to be exactly a utopia
inverted. In a universe subjected to increasing entropy, one fi nds that there are many
more ways for planning to go wrong than to go right, more ways to generate dystopia
than utopia. And, crucially, dystopia—precisely because it is so much more common—
bears the aspect of lived experience. People perceive their environments as dystopic, and
alas they do so with depressing frequency. Whereas utopia takes us into a future and
serves to indict the present, dystopia places us directly in a dark and depressing reality,
conjuring up a terrifying future if we do not recognize and treat its symptoms in the here
and now
==========
Every utopia always comes with its implied dystopia—whether the dystopia of the status
quo, which the utopia is engineered to address, or a dystopia found in the way this specifi
c utopia corrupts itself in practice. Yet a dystopia does not have to be exactly a utopia
inverted. In a universe subjected to increasing entropy, one fi nds that there are many
more ways for planning to go wrong than to go right, more ways to generate dystopia
than utopia. And, crucially, dystopia—precisely because it is so much more common—
bears the aspect of lived experience. People perceive their environments as dystopic, and
alas they do so with depressing frequency. Whereas utopia takes us into a future and
serves to indict the present, dystopia places us directly in a dark and depressing reality,
conjuring up a terrifying future if we do not recognize and treat its symptoms in the here
and now. 4 Thus the dialectic between the two imaginaries, the dream and the nightmare,
also beg for inclusion together, something that traditional Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual
history) would not permit almost by defi nition. The chief way to differentiate the two
phenomena is with an eye to results, since the impulse or desire for a better future is
usually present in each.
==========
We confront, therefore, something of a puzzle, almost mathematical in nature: the

opposite of dystopia seems to be utopia, but the converse does not hold. There is rather a
triangle here—a nexus between the perfectly planned and benefi cial, the perfectly
planned and unjust, and the perfectly unplanned. This volume explores the zone between
these three points. It is a call to examine the historical location and conditions of utopia
and dystopia not as terms or genres but as scholarly categories that promise great potential
in reformulating the ways we conceptualize relationships between the past, present, and
future. But what unites these three poles with each other? To our mind, the central concept
that links them requires excavating the “conditions of possibility”—even the “conditions
of imaginability”—behind localized historical moments, an excavation that demands
direct engagement with radical change. After all, utopias and dystopias by defi nition seek
to alter the social order on a fundamental, systemic level. They address root causes and
offer revolutionary solutions
==========
As such, utopias are not to be seen as referring to an imagined place at some future time;
instead, we are interested in how the historian can use variants of utopian thinking and
action to explore the specifi city of a time and a place. Utopian visions are never arbitrary.
They always draw on the resources present in the ambient culture and develop them with
specifi c ends in mind that are heavily structured by the present. Heavily, but not totally,
for in each instance the specifi c utopias produce consequences that force a questioning
of the original vision and that shape both its development and how individuals experience
it. Marxism, for example, emerged as a utopian form of thinking, but it did so initially in
England in the context of industrialization
==========
that exists. Their thought is never a diagnosis of the situation; it can be used only as a
direction for action. In the utopian mentality, the collective unconscious, guided by
wishful representation and the will to action, hides certain aspects of reality. It turns its
back on everything which would shake its belief or paralyse its desire to change things.
13 Or, as he put it more pithily: “The innermost structure of the mentality of a group can
never be as clearly grasped as when we attempt to understand its conception of time in
the light of its hopes, yearnings, and purposes.” 14 By exhuming the aspirations of
historically located actors, this volume seeks to meet Mannheim’s challenge to present a
series of partial histories of utopia/ dystopia that will illuminate the subjective
positionings of historical agents. Tell me what you yearn for, and I will tell you who you
are
==========
The concept of utopian thinking refl ects the opposite discovery of the political struggle,
namely that certain oppressed groups are intellectually so strongly interested in the
destruction and transformation of a given condition of society that they unwittingly see
only those elements in the situation which tend to negate it. Their thinking is incapable
of correctly diagnosing an existing condition of society. They are not at all concerned
with what really exists; rather in their thinking they already seek to change the situation
that exists. Their thought is never a diagnosis of the situation; it can be used only as a
direction for action. In the utopian mentality, the collective unconscious, guided by
wishful representation and the will to action, hides certain aspects of reality. It turns its
back on everything which would shake its belief or paralyse its desire to change things.
13 Or, as he put it more pithily: “The innermost structure of the mentality of a group can
never be as clearly grasped as when we attempt to understand its conception of time in
the light of its hopes, yearnings, and purposes.” 14 By exhuming the aspirations of
historically located actors, this volume seeks to meet Mannheim’s challenge to present a
series of partial histories of utopia/ dystopia that will illuminate the subjective
positionings of historical agents. Tell me what you yearn for, and I will tell you who you
are
==========
Utopia and dystopia in practice tend to test the boundaries of reality: the former
approaches an ideal but rarely reaches it—stopped by the real world— and the latter
makes visible various breaking points and vulnerabilities
==========

Here we are interested in the ways in which old themes—memories of lost worlds, if you
will—are repackaged in the transition to modernity. In the process, many of these
reorientations went right to the heart of human subjectivity. The hope of a general
reorganization of the world proved to be deeply and intimately connected to a highly
specifi c conjuncture
==========
stock- in- trade
==========
But modernism is over, and it is my impression that the postmodern city, west or east,
north or south, does not encourage thoughts of progress or even improvement, let alone
utopian visions of the older kind; and this for the very good reason that the postmodern
==========

city seems to be in permanent crisis and is to be thought of, if at all, as a catastrophe rather
than an opportunity. As
==========
city seems to be in permanent crisis and is to be thought of, if at all, as a catastrophe rather
than an opportunity
==========
but that was a modernist nightmare, and what we confront today is perhaps not a dystopia
either, but rather a certainty lived in a different way and with a properly postmodern
ambivalence, which distinctly forecloses the possibility of progress or of solutions
==========
What has tended to perplex readers of this book, Archaeologies of the Future, 6 if not to
annoy them, is not only the repeated insistence on the form rather than the content of
utopias—something that would, on the face of it, scarcely be unusual in literary criticism,
no matter how deplorable—but also another thesis more likely to catch the unwary reader
up short, namely the repeated insistence that what is important in a utopia is not what can
be positively imagined and proposed, but rather what is not imaginable and not
conceivable. The utopia, I argue, is not a representation but an operation calculated to
disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do
not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world (except in the
direction of dystopia and catastrophe)
==========
The waning of utopias is thus a conjuncture between all these developments: a weakening
of historicity or of the sense of the future; a conviction that fundamental change is no
longer possible, however desirable; and cynical reason as such. To this we might add that
sheer power of excess money accumulated since the last great world war, which keeps
the system in place everywhere, reinforcing its institutions and its armed forces. Or maybe
we should adduce yet a different kind of factor, one of psychological conditioning—
namely that omnipresent consumerism, having become an end in itself, is transforming
the daily life of the advanced countries in such a way as to suggest that the utopianism of
multiple desires and consumption is here already and needs no further supplement
==========
what it tells us about a present in which we can no longer envision
==========
To that degree, what I’ve been calling representational utopias seem to take the form of
the idyll or the pastoral, and assuredly we do need to recover the signifi cance of these
ancient genres and their value and usefulness in an age in which the very psyche and the
unconscious have been thoroughly colonized by addictive frenzy and commotion,
compulsiveness and frustration
==========
Indeed, we might well want to argue that the Marxian view of historical change combines
both of these forms of utopian thinking, for it can be seen as a practical project as well as
a space of the investment of unconscious forces
==========
a space of the investment of unconscious forces. The old tension in Marxism between
voluntarism and fatalism fi nds its origins here, in this twin or superimposed utopian
perspective. A Marxist politics is a utopian project or program for transforming the world
and replacing a capitalist mode of production with a radically different one.But it is also
a conception of historical dynamics that posits that the whole new world is objectively in
emergence all around us, without our necessarily perceiving it at once, so that
==========
a space of the investment of unconscious forces. The old tension in Marxism between
voluntarism and fatalism fi nds its origins here, in this twin or superimposed utopian
perspective. A Marxist politics is a utopian project or program for transforming the world
and replacing a capitalist mode of production with a radically different one.But it is also
a conception of historical dynamics that posits that the whole new world is objectively in
emergence all around us, without our necessarily perceiving it at once, so that alongside
our conscious praxis and our strategies for producing change, we may take a more
receptive and interpretive stance. In this stance, with the proper instruments and
registering apparatus, we may detect the allegorical stirrings of a different state of things,
the imperceptible and even immemorial ripenings of the seeds of time, the subliminal and
subcutaneous eruptions of whole new forms of life and social relations.
==========
Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates,
postal services, consumers’ societies, and offi ce employees’ unions. Without big banks
socialism would be impossible. . . . The big banks are “state apparatus” which we need to
bring about socialism, and which we take ready- made from capitalism; our task here is
merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even
bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. Quantity will be transformed
into quality. . . . We can “lay hold of” and “set in motion” this “state apparatus” (which
is not fully a state apparatus under capitalism, but which will be so with us, under
socialism) at one stroke, by a single decree. 14
==========
I have quoted these very representative passages at some length because their very
defense of size and monopoly is shocking today, for those both on the Right and on the
Left, for admirers of free markets as well as for those who believe that small is beautiful
and that self- organization is the key to economic democracy. I often share these
sympathies and do not particularly mean to take a position here, but I observe that in both
cases—regulation and the breaking up of monopolies in the name of business competition
on the one hand, and the return to smaller communities and collectivities on the other—
we have to do with historical regression and the attempt to return to a past that no longer
exists. But we apparently cannot think of an impending future of size, quantity,
overpopulation, and the like, except in dystopian terms. Indeed, the diffi culties in
thinking quantity positively must be added to the list of obstacles facing utopian thought
in our time.
==========
The dialectic is an injunction to think the negative and the positive together at one and
the same time, in the unity of a single thought, where moralizing wants to have the luxury
of condemning this evil without particularly imagining anything else in its place
==========
I am tempted to add something about the ambivalence of the dialectic itself, particularly
with respect to technological innovation. It is enough to recall the admiration of Lenin
and Gramsci for Taylorism and Fordism to be perplexed by this weakness of
revolutionaries for what is most exploitative and dehumanizing in the working life of
capitalism. But this is precisely what is meant by the utopian here, namely that what is
currently negative can also be imagined as positive in that immense changing of the
valences that is the utopian future
==========
valences that is the utopian future. And this is the way I want us to consider Wal- Mart,
however briefl y, as a thought experiment: not—after Lenin’s crude but practical
fashion—as an institution from which (after the revolution) we can “lop off what
capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus,” but rather as what Raymond Williams
called the emergent, as opposed to the residual—the shape of a utopian future looming
through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity
==========
valences that is the utopian future. And this is the way I want us to consider Wal- Mart,
however briefl y, as a thought experiment: not—after Lenin’s crude but practical
fashion—as an institution from which (after the revolution) we can “lop off what
capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus,” but rather as what Raymond Williams
called the emergent, as opposed to the residual—the shape of a utopian future looming
through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian
imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive
nostalgia
==========
utopian “method” outlined here as neither a hermeneutic nor a political program, but
rather something like the structural inversion of what Foucault, following Nietzsche,
called the genealogy. By that he meant to distinguish his own (or perhaps even some more
generalized post- structural or postmodern) method from either empirical history or the
evolutionary narratives reconstructed by idealist historians. The genealogy was, in effect,
to be understood as neither chronological nor narrative but rather a logical operation
(taking “logic” in a Hegelian sense without being Hegelian about it). Genealogy, in other
words, was meant to lay in place the various logical preconditions
==========
utopian “method” outlined here as neither a hermeneutic nor a political program, but
rather something like the structural inversion of what Foucault, following Nietzsche,
called the genealogy. By that he meant to distinguish his own (or perhaps even some more
generalized post- structural or postmodern) method from either empirical history or the
evolutionary narratives reconstructed by idealist historians. The genealogy was, in effect,
to be understood as neither chronological nor narrative but rather a logical operation
(taking “logic” in a Hegelian sense without being Hegelian about it). Genealogy, in other
words, was meant to lay in place the various logical preconditions for the appearance of
a given phenomenon, without in any way implying that they constituted the latter’s
causes, let alone the latter’s antecedents or early stages
==========
So far, there is no term as useful for the construction of the future as genealogy for such
a construction of the past; it is certainly not to be called futurology, and utopology will
never mean much, I fear. The operation itself, however, consists in a prodigious effort to
change the valences on phenomena that so far exist only in our own present and
experimentally to declare positive things that are clearly negative in our own world, to
affi rm that dystopia is in reality utopia if examined more closely, to isolate specifi c
features in our empirical present so as to read them as components of a different system
==========
This kind of prospective hermeneutic is a political act only in one specifi c sense: as a
contribution to the reawakening of the imagination of possible and alternate futures, a
reawakening of that historicity which our system—offering itself as the very end of
history—necessarily represses and paralyzes. This is the sense in which utopology revives
long- dormant parts of the mind, unused organs of political, historical, and social
imagination that have virtually atro-
==========
phied for lack of use, muscles of praxis we have long since ceased exercising,
revolutionary gestures we have lost the habit of performing, even subliminally. Such a
revival of futurity and of the positing of alternate futures is not a political program or even
a political practice, but it is hard to see how any durable or effective political action could
come into being without it.
==========
Readers have a right to wonder what they will find to read in Utopia, the unspoken thought
being that a society without conflict is unlikely to produce exciting stories
==========
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Utopian relationship to History itself; and if
for many of us Utopia is grasped as a political fulfillment of History, we tend to overlook
an "end of history" internal to the Utopian texts themselves and not unrelated to the crisis
in their aesthetic production within Utopia
==========
There would thus seem to be a fundamental contradiction between the timeless placidity
of the achieved Utopias and the enormity of the social ills and evils that lends the Utopian
solution its urgency and its passion. At least two kinds of historical events seem to have
been excluded in advance from the Utopian framework: the convulsions of the various
dystopias in store for our own world, and the systemic transformation or revolution that
ushers in Utopia itself. It is as though the Utopian end of history has canceled the very
category of events to which these collective experiences belong, leaving only that daily
life to which Barthes claimed the Utopian form was reduced in the first place
==========
and existential misery ("je mein eigenes
==========
That may well be; but when the existential lesson is transferred to the political level, it
simply becomes one more political ideology as such among others, this par ticular version
of Nietzsche turning out to be the equally aberrant vision of an eternal present where
nothing ever changes and unhappiness is always with US.22 No wonder the desire called
==========
That may well be; but when the existential lesson is transferred to the political level, it
simply becomes one more political ideology as such among others, this par ticular version
of Nietzsche turning out to be the equally aberrant vision of an eternal present where
nothing ever changes and unhappiness is always with US.22
==========

05:49:53
I conclude, at any rate, that it is still difficult to see how future Utopias could ever be
imagined in any absolute dissociation from socialism in its larger
==========

05:50:46
sense of anti-capitalism; dissociated, that is to say, from the values of social and economic
equality and the universal right to food, lodging, medicine, edu cation and work (in other
words, to put the proposition in representational rather than ideological terms, no modern
Utopia is plausible which does not address, along with its other inventions, the economic
problems caused by industrial capitalism) . The proof is that even the neo-conservative
fundamen talisms of the day continue to promise eventual satisfaction in all these areas,
in that rising tide of universal prosperity and development to which they claim to add the
elusive thing called freedom, as well as the imaginary thing called modernity
==========

05:58:11
dangers. Tom Moylan's proposal for a generic conception of the "critical dystopia"
clarifies this difference.31 The critical dystopia is a negative cousin of the Utopia proper,
for it is in the light of some positive conception of human social pos sibilities that its
effects are generated and from Utopian ideals its politically enabling stance derives. Yet
if one reserves the term dystopia for
==========

05:58:20
Tom Moylan's proposal for a generic conception of the "critical dystopia" clarifies this
difference.31 The critical dystopia is a negative cousin of the Utopia proper, for it is in
the light of some positive conception of human social pos sibilities that its effects are
generated and from Utopian ideals its politically enabling stance derives. Yet if one
reserves the term dystopia for works of this kind, then Orwell's works must be
characterized in a markedly different way and by a distinctive generic terminology: I
propose to characterize them as anti
==========

05:58:26
Utopian, given the way in which they are informed by a central passion to denounce and
to warn against Utopian programs in the political realm. This passion, which is of course
at one with Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution as well as with more
contemporary anti-communisms and anti socialisms, is clearly quite distinct from the
monitory fears and passions that drive the critical dystopia, whose affiliations are feminist
and ecological as much as they are Left-political
==========

06:00:52
In that case, a fourth term or generic category would seem desirable. If it is so, as someone
has observed, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,
we probably need another term to characterize the increasingly popular visions of total
destruction and of the extinction of life on Earth which seem more plausible than the
Utopian vision of the new Jerusalem but also rather different from the various catastophes
(including the old ban-the-bomb anxieties of the 1 950s) prefigured in the critical
dystopias. The term apocalyptic may serve to differentiate this narrative genre from the
anti-Utopia as well, since we do not sense in it any commitment to disabuse its
==========
06:00:58
In that case, a fourth term or generic category would seem desirable. If it is so, as someone
has observed, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,
we probably need another term to characterize the increasingly popular visions of total
destruction and of the extinction of life on Earth which seem more plausible than the
Utopian vision of the new Jerusalem but also rather different from the various catastophes
(including the old ban-the-bomb anxieties of the 1 950s) prefigured in the critical
dystopias. The term apocalyptic may serve to differentiate this narrative genre from the
anti-Utopia as well, since we do not sense in it any commitment to disabuse its readership
of the political illusions an Orwell sought to combat, but whose very existence the
apocalyptic narrative no longer acknowledges. Yet this new term oddly enough brings us
around to our starting point again, inasmuch as the original Apocalypse includes both
catastophe and fulfillment, the end of the world and the inauguration of the reign of Christ
on earth, Utopia and the extinction of the human race all at once. Yet if the Apocalypse
is neither dialec tical (in the sense of including its Utopian "opposite") nor some mere
psychological projection,32 to be deciphered in historical or ideological terms, then it is
probably to be grasped as metaphysical or religious, in which case its secret Utopian
vocation consists in assembling a new community o f readers and believers around itself
==========

06:01:39
assurance reinforced by the shabbiness of Oceania itsel f) . Orwell's linguistic anxieties

are ecumenical, combining a critique of the dialectic (the original double-speak, in which
any utterance can have two diametrically opposed meanings) with a sense of the
impoverishment likely to result from the
==========
a solution to his own existence, its conversion into a life passion. The haggard
==========
The haggard and implacable elaboration of this passion has certainly become the face of
anti-Utopianism in our own time, and as a representation it can scarcely be argued away.
But is it historical or universal? Did anti-Utopianism always take forms like this, indeed,
did it even
==========
The haggard and implacable elaboration of this passion has certainly become the face of
anti-Utopianism in our own time, and as a representation it can scarcely be argued away.
But is it historical or universal? Did anti-Utopianism always take forms like this, indeed,
did it even exist as such in earlier moments of history?

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Poetics of Social Forms] Fredric Jameson - Archaeologies of the Future_ The Desire

Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005, Verso)

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the hoarfrost grip try tent

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the hoarfrost grip try tent

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have flourished in one period and dried

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In More's near-contemporary Campanella the enclave status plays a somewhat different

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Industrialization greatly increases the wealth of nations (Marx's so-called General

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Uto p i an S c i e n ce v er s u s Uto p i a n I de o lo gy Yet few texts would seem to reveal

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omnipresence of class struggle.

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