Progress Vs Utopia Fredric Jameson
Progress Vs Utopia Fredric Jameson
Progress Vs Utopia Fredric Jameson
Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future? (Progrès contre Utopie, ou: Pouvons-
nous imaginer l'avenir)
Author(s): Fredric Jameson
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Utopia and Anti-Utopia (Jul., 1982), pp. 147-158
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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Fredric Jameson
Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?
It will then turn out that the world has long dreamtof that of which it had
only to have a clear idea to possess it really.
Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (1843)
A storm is blowingfrom Paradise;it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned,while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward.This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1939)
What if the "idea"of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom
of something else? This is the perspective suggested, not merely by the
interrogationof cultural texts, such as SF, but by the contemporarydiscovery
of the Symbolic in general. Indeed, following the emergence of psychoanalysis,
of structuralismin linguistics and anthropology, of semiotics together with its
new field of "narratology,"of communications theory, and even of such
events as the emergence of a politics of "surplus consciousness" (Rudolf
Bahro) in the 1960s, we have come to feel that abstract ideas and concepts
are not necessarily intelligible entities in their own .right.This was of course
already the thrust of Marx'sdiscovery of the dynamics of ideology; but while
the older terms in which that discovery was traditionally formulated-"false
consciousness"versus "science"-remain generally true, the Marxianapproach
to ideology, itself fed by all the discoveries enumerated above, has also
become a far more sophisticated and non-reductive form of analysis than the
classical opposition tends to suggest.
From the older standpoint of a traditional "historyof ideas," however,
ideology was essentially grasped as so many opinions vehiculated by a narra-
tive text such as an SF novel, from which, as Lionel Trilling once put it, like
so many raisins and currants they are picked out and exhibited in isolation.
Thus Verne is thought to have "believed"in progress,' while the originalityof
Wells was to have entertained an ambivalent and agonizing love-hate
relationship with this "value," now affirmed and now denounced in the
course of his complex artistic trajectory.2
The discovery of the Symbolic, however, suggests that for the individual
subject as well as for groups, collectivities, and social classes, abstract opi-
nion is, but a symptom or an index of some vaster pensee sauvage about
history itself, whether personal or collective. This thinking, in which a
particular conceptual enunciation such as the "idea" of progress finds its
structuralintelligibility, may be said to be of a more properly narrative kind,
analogous in that respect to the constitutive role played by master-fantasiesin
the Freudian model to the Unconscious. Nevertheless, the analogy is
misleading to the degree to which it may awaken older attitudes about
objective truth and subjective or psychological "projection," which are
explicitly overcome and transcended by the notion of the Symbolic itself. In
other words, we must resist the reflex which concludes that the narrative
fantasies which a collectivity entertains about its past and its future are
"merely"mythical, archetypal, and projective, as opposed to "concepts" like
progress or cyclical return, which can somehow be tested for their objective
or even scientific validity. This reflex is itself the last symptom of that
dissociation of the private and the public, the subject and the object, the
personal and the political, which has characterized the social life of capi-
talism. A theory of some narrativepensee sauvage-what I have elsewhere
termed the political unconscious3-will, on the contrary, want to affirm the
epistemological priority of such "fantasy"in theory and praxis alike.
The task of such analysis would then be to detect and to reveal-
behind such written traces of the political unconscious as the narrative texts
of high or mass culture, but also behind those other symptoms or traces
which are opinion, ideology, and even philosophical systems-the outlines of
some deeper and vaster narrative movement in which the groups of a given
collectivity at a certain historical conjuncture anxiously interrogate their fate,
and explore it with hope or dread. Yet the nature of this vaster collective
sub-tqxt,with its specific structurallimits and permutations,will be registered
above all in terms of properly narrative categories: closure, recontainment,
the production of episodes, and the like. Once again, a crude analogy with
the dynamics of the individual unconscious may be useful. Proust'srestriction
to the windless cork-lined room, for instance, the emblematic eclipse of his
own possible relationships to any concrete personal or historical future,
determines the formal innovations and wondrous structuralsubterfuges of his
now exclusively retrospective narrative production. Yet such narrative cate-
gories are themselves fraught with contradiction: in order for narrative to
project some sense of a totality of experience in space and time, it must
surely know some closure (a narrative must have an ending, even if it is
ingeniously organized around the structuralrepression of endings as such). At
the same time, however, closure or the narrative ending is the mark of that
boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. The merit of SF is to
dramatize this contradiction on the level of plot itself, since the vision of
future history cannot know any punctual ending of this kind, at the same time
that its novelistic expression demands some such ending. Thus Asimov has
consistently refused to complete or terminate his Foundation series; while the
most obvious ways in which an SF novel can wrap its story up-as in an
atomic explosion that destroys the universe, or the static image of some
future totalitarian world-state-are also clearly the places in which our own
ideological limits are the most surely inscribed.
It will, I trust, already have become clear that this ultimate "text" or
object of study-the master-narrativesof the political unconscious-is a
construct: it exists nowhere in "empirical" form, and therefore must be
re-constructedon the basis of empirical "texts"of all sorts, in much the same
way that the master-fantasiesof the individual unconscious are reconstructed
through the fragmentaryand symptomatic "texts"of dreams, values, behavior,
verbal free-association, and the like. This is to say that we must necessarily
make a place for the formal and textual mediations through which such
deeper narratives find a partial articulation. No serious literary critic today
would suggest that content-whether social or psychoanalytic-inscribes
itself immediately and transparently on the works of "high" literature:
instead, the latter find themselves inserted in a complex and semi-autonomous
dynamic of their own-the history of forms-which has its own logic and
whose relationship to content per se is necessarily mediated, complex, and
indirect (and takes very different structural paths at different moments of
evidently for the most part not modernizing, not reflexive and self-
undermining and deconstructing affairs. They go about their business with
the full baggage and paraphernaliaof a conventional realism, with this one
difference: that the full "presence"-the settings and actions to be "rendered"
-are the merely possible and conceivable ones of a near or far future.
Whence the canonical defense of the genre: in a moment in which tech-
nological change has reached a dizzying tempo, in which so-called "future
shock" is a daily experience, such narratives have the social function of
accustoming their readers to rapid innovation, of preparing our conscious-
ness and our habits for the otherwise demoralizing impact of change itself.
They train our organisms to expect the unexpected and thereby insulate us,
in much the same way that, for Walter Benjamin, the big city modernism of
Baudelaire provided an elaborate shock-absorbingmechanism for the other-
wise bewildered visitor to the new world of the great 19th-centuryindustrial
city.
If I cannot accept this account of SF, it is at least in part because it.
seems to me that, for all kinds of reasons, we no longer entertain such visions
of wonder-working, properly "S-F" futures of technological automation.
These visions are themselves now historical and dated-streamlined cities of
the future on peeling murals-while our lived experience of our greatest
metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particularUtopian future
has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment
of what is now our own past. Yet, even if this is the case, it might at best
signal a transformationin the historical function of present-day SF.
In reality, the relationship of this form of representation, this specific
narrative apparatus, to its ostensible content-the future-has always been
more complex than this. For the apparent realism, or representationality,of
SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give
us "images"of the future-whatever such images might mean for a reader
who will necessarily predecease their "materialization"-but rather to
defamiliarizeand restructureour experience of our own present, and to do so
in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.From the
great intergalactic empires of an Asimov, or the devastated and sterile Earth
of the post-catastrophe novels of a John Wyndham, all the way back in time
to the nearer future of the organ banks and space miners of a LarryNiven, or
the conapts, autofabs, or psycho-suitcases of the universe of Philip K. Dick,
all such apparently full representations function in a process of distraction
and displacement, repression and lateral perceptual renewal, which has its
analogies in other forms of contemporary culture. Proust was only the most
monumental "high"literary expression of this discovery: that the present-in
this society, and in the physical and psychic dissociation of the human
subjects who inhabit it-is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty
of affect. Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are
somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to "experience," for
some first and real time, this "present," which is after all all we have. In
Proust, the retrospective fiction of memory and rewriting after the fact is
mobilized in order for the intensity of a now merely remembered present to
be experienced in some time-released and utterly unexpected posthumous
actuality.
Elsewhere, with reference to another sub-genre or mass-culturalform.
the detective story, I have tried to show that at its most original, in writers
like Raymond Chandler, the ostensible plots of this peculiar form have an
analogous function.5 What interested Chandler was the here-and-nowof the
daily experience of the now historical Los Angeles: the stucco dwellings,
cracked sidewalks, tarnished sunlight, and roadsters in which the curiously
isolated yet typical specimens of an unimaginableSouthern Californiansocial
flora and fauna ride in the monadic half-light of their dashboards. Chandler's
problem was that his readers-ourselves-desperately needed not to see that
reality: humankind,as T.S. Eliot's magical bird sang, is able to bear very little
of the unmediated, unfiltered experience of the daily life of capitalism. So, by
a dialectical sleight-of-hand,Chandler formally mobilized an "entertainment"
genre to distract us in a very special sense: not from the real life of private
and public worries in general, but very precisely from our own defense
mechanisms against that reality. The excitement of the mystery story plot is,
then, a blind, fixing our attention on its own ostensible but in reality quite
trivial puzzles and suspense in such a way that the intolerable space of
SouthernCaliforniacan enter the eye laterally,with its intensity undiminished.
It is an analogous strategy of indirection that SF now brings to bear on
the ultimate object and ground of all human life, History itself. How to fix
this intolerable present of history with the naked eye? We have seen that in
the moment of the emergence of capitalism the present could be intensified,
and prepared for individual perception, by the construction of a historical
past from which as a process it could be felt to issue slowly forth, like the
growth of an organism. But today the past is dead, transformedinto a packet
of well-worn and thumbed glossy images. As for the future, which may stillbe
alive in some small heroic collectivities on the Earth's surface, it is for us
either irrelevant or unthinkable. Let the Wagnerian and Spenglerian world-
dissolutions of J.G. Ballard stand as exemplary illustrations of the ways in
which the imagination of a dying class-in this case the cancelled future of a
vanished colonial and imperial destiny-seeks to intoxicate itself with
images of death that range from the destruction of the world by fire, water,
and ice to lengthening sleep or the berserk orgies of high-rise buildings or
superhighwaysreverting to barbarism.
Ballard'swork-so rich and corrupt-testifies powerfully to the contra-
dictions of a properly representational attempt to grasp the future directly. I
would argue, however, that the most characteristic SF does not seriously
attempt to imagine the "real"future of our social system. Rather, its multiple
mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own
present into the determinate past of something yet to come. It is this present
moment-unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the
sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises is
untotalizable and hence unimaginable, and also because it is occluded by the
density of our private fantasies as well as of the proliferatingstereotypes of a
media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence-that upon
our return from the imaginaryconstructs of SF is offered to us in the form of
some future world's remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively
remembered. Nor is this only an exercise in historical melancholy: there is,
indeed, something also at least vaguely comforting and reassuring in the
renewed sense that the great supermarkets and shopping centers, the garish
fast-food stores and ever more swiftly remodelled shops and store-front
businesses of the near future of Chandler's now historic Los Angeles, the
burnt-out-centercities of small mid-Western towns, nay even the Pentagon
itself and the vast underground networks of rocket-launching pads in the
picture-post-cardisolation of once characteristic North American "natural"
splendor, along with the already cracked and crumbling futuristic architec-
ture of newly built atomic power plants-that all these things are not seized,
3. After what has been said about SF in general, the related proposition on
the nature and the political function of the utopian genre will come as no
particular surprise: namely, that its deepest vocation is to bring home, in
local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our
constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself, and this, not owing to any
individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural,
and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.
This proposition, however, now needs to be demonstratedin a more concrete
analytical way, with reference to the texts themselves.
It is fitting that such a demonstration should take as its occasion not
American SF, whose affinities with the dystopia rather than the utopia, with
fantasies of cyclical regression or totalitarianempires of the future, have until
recently been marked (for all the obvious political reasons); but rather Soviet
SF, whose dignity as a "high"literary genre and whose social functionality
within a socialist system have been, in contrast, equally predictable and no
less ideological. The renewal of the twin Soviet traditions of Utopia and SF
may very precisely be dated from the publication of Efremov's Andromeda
(1958), and from the ensuing public debate over a work which surely, for all
NOTES
RESUME