# Metacommentary on Utopia, or Jameson's dialectic of hope



## somnambulist (May 4, 2010)

by Ian Buchanan 

Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy. So how can we deal with it without being crushed? We have to look everywhere for answers to this, including the systems the current order defeated.

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars.

What is most striking about Jameson's writings on Utopia is his marked interest in its failings and failures rather than its strengths and successes. Yet he is not a pessimist. His paradoxical catchcry--Utopian thought succeeds by failure--is, I want to argue, optimistic, but peculiarly so (Jameson 1982 153; 1975 239; 1973 59). Instead of prophesying a bright future on the basis of a rosy present, Jameson uses the various futures art has so far been able to imagine to diagnose what it is tempting to call the existential health of the present. Postmodernism, for instance, can conjure fantastic digital paradises in which everything a person could want would be available instantly in virtual form (as well as a host of apocalyptic scenarios, to be sure, from total environmental collapse to thermonuclear Armageddon), but appears unable to conceive of a world-system other than capitalism (Jameson 1994 xii). Criticism, then, is a matter of exposing the widespread numbness felt in the face of this poverty of imagination (Jameson 1994 61; 1971 374). Utopia, in this sense, is an essential dialectical tool. And it is precisely as a tool that I intend treating it. So instead of attempting to determine what Utopia means to Jameson, I will (as Jameson has himself already famously done) appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's anti-interpretative cri de coeur and ask how does Utopia work in Jameson (Jameson 1981 22)? In so doing, I will be following Jameson's own method of engagement, the metacommentary: it is not so much the nature of Utopia that we need to know, as the need for it.(1)

The implication I want to develop here is that for Jameson, Utopia is not a place, but a process whose mechanism I will try to flesh out here, and that however welcome and fantastic (or even unappealing, as is sometimes the case too) specific Utopias may appear to him, it is still the act of fantasizing itself that he prioritizes not the actual fantasy (Jameson 1988b 80). As in the case of the basically artless Hollywood films like The Godfather and Jaws, what impresses Jameson is the way they conceal a Utopian impulse--"that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs" (Jameson 1992 29). His method consists in discovering the best in the worst, Utopia in other words, and then asking why it is that it must be so deeply buried, and moreover, why it is that no-one else seems prepared to look for it? Resistance to Utopia, the ailment he finally diagnoses our culture as suffering from, is shown to occur on two levels: first in the text itself, and second in the analysis, the latter being the more worrying of the two because it is calculated whereas the former in all likelihood is unconscious (Jameson 1994 61; 1982 154). In this way, cultural analysis has been, through recourse to such a historical notions as pleasure, desire and gratification, thoroughly depoliticized.(2) Utopia is the critical means of reversing this trend: not only does it provide an explanation of the appeal of certain texts (why they give us pleasure), it also provides a critical yardstick by which they can be measured.

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## nickel (May 4, 2010)

Χριστέ μου! Ορίστε, σε πιντιέφι για εύκολη εκτύπωση, αν διαβάζετε στο κρεβάτι σας. (Μα κανένας δεν με λυπάται;)


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