[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Terrific little essay!
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/11/20/back_to_utopia/ > > Back to utopia > > Can the antidote to today's neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages > of far-out science fiction? > > By Joshua Glenn | November 20, 2005 > > > IN 1888, when Massachusetts newspaperman Edward Bellamy published his > science fiction novel ''Looking Backward," set in a Boston of the year > 2000, it sold half a million copies. Never mind the futuristic inventions > (electric lighting, credit cards) and visionary city planning; what > readers responded to was the transformation of a Gilded Age city of labor > strikes and social unrest into a socialist utopia (Bellamy called it > ''nationalist") of full employment and material abundance. > > By 1890 there were 162 reformist Bellamy Clubs around the country, with a > membership that included public figures like the influential novelist, > editor, and critic William Dean Howells; and from 1891-96, the > Bellamy-inspired Nationalist Party helped propel the Populist Movement. > The Bellamyites fervently believed, to paraphrase the slogan of today's > anti-globalization movement, that another world was possible. > > But during the Cold War - thanks to Stalinism and the success of such > dystopian fables as Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World" and George Orwell's > ''Nineteen Eighty-Four" - all radical programs promising social > transformation became suspect. Speaking for his fellow chastened liberals > at a Partisan Review symposium in 1952, for example, the theologian and > public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed what he called the > utopianism of the 1930s as ''an adolescent embarrassment." > > Niebuhr and other influential anti-utopians of mid-century - Isaiah > Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper - had a point. From Plato's ''Republic" > to Thomas More's 1517 traveler's tale ''Utopia" (the title of which became > a generic term), to the idealistic communism of Rousseau and other pre- > and post-French Revolution thinkers, to Bellamy's ''Looking Backward" > itself, utopian narratives have often shared a naive and unseemly > eagerness to force square pegs into round holes via thought control and > coercion. By the end of the 20th century, most utopian projects did look > proto-totalitarian. > > In recent years, however, certain eminent contrarians - most notably > Fredric Jameson, author of the seminal ''Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural > Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991) and Russell Jacoby, author most recently > of ''The End of Utopia" (1999) and ''Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought > for an Anti-Utopian Age" (2005)-have lamented the wholesale abandonment of > such utopian ideas of the left as the abolition of property, the triumph > of solidarity, and the end of racism and sexism. > > The question, for thinkers like these, is how to revive the spirit of > utopia - the current enfeeblement of which, Jameson claims, ''saps our > political options and tends to leave us all in the helpless position of > passive accomplices and impotent handwringers" - without repeating the > errors of what Jacoby has dubbed ''blueprint utopianism," that is, a > tendency to map out utopian society in minute detail. How to avoid, as > Jameson puts it, effectively ''colonizing the future"? > > Is the thought of a noncapitalist utopia even possible after Stalinism, > after decades of anticommunist polemic on the part of brilliant and > morally engaged intellectuals? Or are we all convinced, in a politically > paralyzing way, that Margaret Thatcher had it right when she crowed that > ''there is no alternative" to free-market capitalism? > > Borrowing Sartre's slogan, coined after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, > about being neither communist nor anticommunist but ''anti-anticommunist," > Jameson suggests we give ''anti-anti-utopianism" a try. In his latest > book, ''Archaeologies of the Future," just published by Verso, he invites > us to explore an overlooked canon of anti-anti-utopian narratives that > some, to echo Niebuhr, might find embarrassingly adolescent: offbeat > science fiction novels of the 1960s and '70s. > > Jameson, a professor of comparative literature at Duke, isn't talking > about ''Star Trek" novelizations. Because of the Cold War emphasis on > dystopias, Cold War writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and > Samuel R. Delany had to find radical new ways to express their > inexpressible hopes about the future, claims Jameson. At this moment of > neoliberal triumphalism, he suggests, we should take these writers > seriously - even if their ideas are packaged inside lurid paperbacks. > > In Dick's uncanny novels, the author demands of us that we decide for > ourselves what's real and what isn't. ''Martian Time-Slip" (1964), for > example, is partly told from the perspective of a 10-year-old > schizophrenic colonist on Mars, where civilization is devolving into > ''gubbish." And ''The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965) is a > psychedelic odyssey of hallucinations-within-hallucinations from which no > reader emerges unscathed. > > Delany, meanwhile, is best known for ''Trouble on Triton" (1976), a > self-consciously post-structuralist novel that depicts a future where > neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality is the norm. Le Guin, author of > a fantasy series for children, ''The Earthsea Trilogy," explores Taoist, > anarchist, and feminist themes in novels like ''The Left Hand of Darkness" > (1969) and ''The Dispossessed" (1974). Fans of Dick, Delany, and their ilk > warn neophytes not to read too many of their books too quickly: Doing so, > as this reader can attest, tends to result in pronounced feelings of > irreality, paranoia, and angst. > > In ''Archaeologies," Jameson characterizes utopian narratives (which he > classifies as a subgenre of science fiction) as being, at the level of > content, less a vision of a truly different world than a > situation-specific response to a concrete historical dilemma: the > immiseration of the working class during the later 19th century, in > Bellamy's case. Such content is ''vacuous," he sniffs, and of interest > primarily to antiquarians. > > The ability of utopian narratives in particular, and science fiction in > general, to break the paralyzing spell of the quotidian has less to do > with its content than with its form, he argues persuasively. (Buck > Rogers-type science fiction in the mode of ''extrapolation and mere > anticipation of all kinds of technological marvels," as Jameson puts it, > is far less effective at doing so.) It requires a tremendous effort to > imagine a daily life that is politically, economically, socially, and > psychologically truly different from our own. And this effort, Jameson > writes, warps the structure of science fiction. As a result, he claims, > even Dick's amphetamine-fuelled potboilers are as productively alienating > as the plays of Brecht and Beckett. > > But isn't it perverse to describe novels quite so alienating as utopian? > The title character of Dick's ''Palmer Eldritch," for example, is an > industrialist-turned-evil demiurge who brings to mankind a ''negative > trinity" of ''alienation, blurred reality, and despair" in the form of > Chew-Z, a drug that inducts users into a hallucinatory semireality from > which they can never finally escape. Le Guin's ''The Dispossessed," > meanwhile, was written as a pointed critique of typical utopian > narratives: It's set on Annares, a planet whose hippie-like inhabitants > value voluntary cooperation, local control, and mutual tolerance - but who > have preserved their grooviness through dogmatic conformism and an > entrenched bureaucracy that stifles innovation. Le Guin's protagonist > abandons Annares for a nearby world, one that is superior in important > respects because its inhabitants value the free market; later editions of > the book are subtitled ''An Ambiguous Utopia." > > Delany, finally, gave ''Triton" (set on a Neptunian colony where no one > goes hungry and everyone is sexually confused) the subtitle ''An Ambiguous > Heterotopia," to signal his own critique not only of utopian narratives > but of Le Guin's vestigial nostalgia for pastoral communes. > > Asked in a recent interview why the science fiction novels that he calls > utopian portray future societies not even remotely like the > cloud-cuckoo-land the term suggests, Jameson explained that the problem > confronting Cold War science fiction writers was how to describe utopia > ''negatively," in terms of what it won't be like. ''There is, in effect, a > ban on graven images, meaning you can't represent the future in a > realistic way," he said. Anti-anti-utopian writing ''has to be about > freeing the imagination from the present," Jameson continued, ''rather > than trying to offer impoverished pictures of what life in the future's > going to be." > > Dystopias aren't the only example of ''negative" utopianism, Jameson > points out in ''Archaeologies." The rise to popularity in the mid-1960s > and early '70s of disaster novels - about atomic warfare, meteors hitting > the Earth, environmental collapse, and so forth - ought to be interpreted > as evidence of a collective desire to start over from scratch, he writes. > He points to books like Dick's ''Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After > the Bomb" (1965), a pastoral set in a post-apocalyptic Berkeley; Le Guin's > ''The Lathe of Heaven" (1971), about an overpopulated Portland, Ore., made > livable by a plague; and John Brunner's ''The Sheep Look Up" (1972), about > an Earth whose air is unbreathable. > > These books are more utopian, in a way, than Bellamy-style idylls, Jameson > claims, because the latter offer false hope that ameliorative reforms > might transform society. ''What utopian thought wants to make us aware of > is the need for complete systemic change, change in the totality of social > relations, and not just an improvement in bourgeois culture," he said. > ''If we want a [bourgeois idyll], we can go to Celebration, Fla." > > If discussing a future society that can't be represented realistically is > complicated and off-putting, that's because ''it's a new form of > thinking," Jameson insisted. ''It's a new dimension of the exercise of the > imagination." > > Jameson, who's been writing about Dick, Le Guin, Delany, Brunner, and > others in the pages of scholarly journals like Science Fiction Studies for > 30 years, is reticent when it comes to the question of what makes a great > anti-anti-utopian narrative. ''The talent or the greatness of science > fiction writers," he said, ''lies in what individual solutions they have > for a formal problem - the ban on graven images - that cannot be resolved. > There's no universal recipe." But when it comes to the power of science > fiction to spring us from what he claims is our current state of political > paralysis, Jameson is enthusiastic. ''It's only when people come to > realize that there is no alternative," he said, ''that they react against > it, at least in their imaginations, and try to think of alternatives." > > Can reading science fiction, I asked, help us decide between various > utopian alternatives - urban vs. pastoral, statist vs. anarchistic? No, > replied Jameson, insisting there are ''utopian elements" in each of these. > What science fiction does afford us, he said, ''is not a synthesis of > these elements but a process where the imagination begins to question > itself, to move back and forth among the possibilities." > > What contemporary science fiction author most inspires this ideal process? > In ''Archaeologies," Jameson suggests it might be a former doctoral > student of his, Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote his dissertation on Philip > K. Dick and whose popular trilogy, ''Red Mars" (1992), ''Green Mars" > (1993), and ''Blue Mars" (1995), explores the political, economic, and > ecological crises that ensue when 21st-century colonists from Earth begin > terraforming Mars. Instead of asking the reader to decide on any one of > the colonists' competing utopian ideologies, Jameson said, Robinson ''goes > back and forth between these various visions, [allowing us to see] it's > not a matter of choosing between them but of using them to destabilize our > own existence, our own social life at present." > > In the final analysis, Jameson writes in ''Archaeologies," the demanding > exercise of holding incompatible visions in mind is what ''gives utopia > its savor and its bitter freshness, when the thought of utopias is still > possible." > > > Joshua Glenn writes the Examined Life column for Ideas. E-mail > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Life without art & music? 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