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Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Poetics of Social Forms)

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What is Utopia? And what relevance does it have today? These are the questions Jameson wants to ask and answer in this, his latest and most substantial offering since "A Singular Modernity." "Archaelologies of the Future" picks up Jameson's larger project entitled "The Poetics of the Social Forms" (first hearlded in "The Political Unconscious") where he suggests that today's historical situation requires archaeologies of the future and not forecasts of the past--meaning, we must take as our political signposts a potentially different future, even if that means radically rethinking the present and seeing it as an archaic relic, instead of nostaligically clinging to the modernity project (a la Ulrich Bech or Jurgen Habermas). As such, Jameson pronounces Modernity, as a project, dead but simultaneously refuses to accept post-Modernity as the only choice, which for him would be accepting the cultural logic of late capitalism.

It is within this context that, through a rigorous examination of the form of a Utopian text (most notably: More's "Utopia"), Jameson envigorates Utopia and claims it has relevance for us today. Jameson's defense of Utopia can be seen as far back as his "Marxism and Form," while discussing Marcuse's Utopianism, Jameson affirms that Utopia--as a wild projection of a possible world--has more relevance than practical strategies. This is because Utopia relentlessly believes that an entirely new world is possible, not just piecemeal reformism.

The major thesis of this book is that Utopia's primary contribution is that it allows us to break, in thought, with the current order of things. By projecting a hypothetical future, Utopian texts allow us to think of our present as a contingent and changing time that can be broken and revamped.

The second half of the book amasses all of Jameson's writing on Utopia--minus the most recent essay "The Politics of Utopia," published in "New Left Review." I think they excluded this essay because the first half of the book basically is an extended version of the essay.

If you are someone invested in Utopian studies, then, you must read this book. If you are someone who things Utopia is simply a wishful fancy of a too ideal world to actually be lived, then, this book will give you another perspective to consider.

The leading, influential contemporary philosopher Frederic Jameson looks to the literary genre of science fiction for gleanings of the notion of utopia and utopian yearnings in late Modernism. With the failures of Marxist/Communist ideologies and the apolitical mood throughout Western culture, what remains of the idea of utopia which once played such a strong role in modern culture is to be found mostly in the science-fiction literature. Jameson takes on this latest topic with his characteristic thoroughness, exceptional acuity, and masterful synthetic capacity. The voluminous work with elements of literary critique, political/cultural analysis, and philosophical thinking is a survey of science fiction over the century of the 1900s and its shifting relationship to society. Jameson's approach is to focus on one major science-fiction writer (with science-fiction somewhat loosely defined) such as Philip K. Dick or Ursula Le Guin as representative of the topic is wants to take up; and then range through the topic by many references to other science-fiction writers and inclusion of respective aspects of the concept of utopia and relevant political, social, and scientific conditions to result in illuminations and renderings about the persisting, yet protean, idea of utopia. "Archaeologies of the Future" is one of Jameson's most wide-ranging and illuminating works on modern culture and its distinctive factors and idiosyncratic ways.

As a huge science fiction fan I was excited to see that one of my favorite literary critics, Fredric Jameson, is publishing a new book of criticism that explores Utopian thinking in the works of some of the best writers in the genre: Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, etc. Now that I've read the book I feel I can recommend it for Sci-Fi fans and non-fans alike. Archaelogies of the Future is far more accesible than some of Jameson's earlier books, but it's just as essential. The writing style is straight-forward and balanced by a prodigious amount of scholarly expertise. He is constantly saying something unexpected and interesting, introducing ideas that I've never thought could be connected to Sci-Fi. He starts at the very beginning, with Thomas More's Utopia, and continues up to a review William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which prompted me toward a whole new (favorable) opinion of that book. He makes me want to re-read every single one of the novels he writes about. Marxist criticism rules.

No one is better than Jameson at defining modernity and postmodernity and addressing the many paradoxes surrounding any attempt at periodization. To me his ability to think and re-think modernity and postmodernity seems to be his most valuable and lasting contribution to literary theory. And since he can go on about anything from architecture to literature to painting to film Jameson can be very entertaining. If you have to spend your time with just one social thinker or cultural critic Jameson would be the one to spend time with. However, after awhile, all the fancy re-formulations of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukacs...and all the sexy talk of paradigm shifts, seductive as it is, just starts to sound, well, so very dated. Ultimately, there is very little that is original in his thought when all is said and done as Jameson is not introducing anything new in the realm of social and political theory. What Jameson does and does well in these arenas is synthesize other peoples thoughts. Unfortunately for his more eclectic readers (that sounds odd, who could be more eclectic than Jameson?) Jameson doesn't really come across as all that eclectic as he's only attracted to one school of thought: the Frankfurt school. Its there he began and its to those thinkers that he returns time and again. Like his favorite marxists, Jameson has been detecting utopian impulses in mass culture since grad school. So even though Jameson looks at a variety of cultural objects in his work he always reads those cultural objects through the same marxist paradigm. Because he is always "engaged" in the Sartrean sense there is always something exciting about his work; at the same time because he never ventures outside his beloved marxist paradigm there is always something reductive about it as well. Despite being exceptionally gifted at refitting Marx in fashionable new prose every few years its really the same old same old. I think the most productive way to view marxism is to view it as a critique of humanism. This is also a productive way to view feminism and postcolonialism. As critiques they are each of inestimable value, but thinking through only one critique of humanist thought is limiting. To be fair Jameson does touch on feminist and postcolonial concerns but there is never any doubt when reading Jameson that there is a hierarchy of concerns in his work and its those (all white, all male, all western) Frankfurt marxists who have Jameson's ear and are setting his agenda.

Jameson's real nemesis, as he defines it, is postmodernism. But the postmodern means so many different things to so many different thinkers. For some it defines an epoch; for others its merely a style of reflection or state of mind (which maybe amounts to the same thing). Some might even say that it describes a utopian state of mind because it describes a state of mind that is no longer worried about history or the government. But its a confusing word because its used to describe both a style of thinking or critique and the art object or epoch being critiqued. For hardline marxists the postmodern spells trouble because as a style of critique it means a whole new level of disengagment from real politics. Though Jameson's long engagement with the postmodern is presented as an ever-evolving critique of the modern/postmodern, to some like Terry Eagleton, Jameson's style of critique is itself really just another form of political disengagment. And I am sympathetic with Eagleton's view because in Jameson's books there is always a certain ambivalence as to whether calling something "postmodern" is a compliment or a criticism. Reading Jameson is a bit like reading the New York Times or Jorge Luis Borges: you get a bit of everything but what you don't get are any practicable solutions; just a sense that rigorous thinking, even thinking that leads nowhere in particular, is good for you.

Don't get me wrong, Jameson is exciting for first-timers and I don't want to rob anyone of the pleasure of encountering Jameson at his best, but for that best I would go to _The Political Unconscious_ (a tome you will find on the shelf of every well-intentioned intellectual) or the hefty and heady _Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_ (the favorite of art lovers who dabble in social & political theory). As for _Archaeologies of the Future_, this will feel like a one-note exercise (and a familiar note at that) to anyone who has read the previous two tomes mentioned.

Maybe I'm just too firmly entrenched in a postmodern logic that is skeptical about everything, even itself, but to me it seems we postmodern subjects are brave precisely because we do not think in utopian terms. Utopians like to present themselves as liberatory thinkers but theres always something about thinking in utopian terms that reeks of an absolutist exercise and we postmoderns (who are not by any means a unifed group) are tired of the totalizing dogmas of the grand systemizers (& synthesizers). When you get down to it nothing is more boring than utopia because in utopia we are either a) victims of excessive social engineering, or, b) beings who no longer live in recognizably human forms and are thus no longer recognizably human. We love our half-finished world (with all of its half-finished liberal projects) and we love not knowing the future because knowing the future means that we know ourselves and we humans need a bit of mystery. Most of us know what we will be doing tomorrow at high noon but only because we are creatures of habit, but we also know that if we really want to we can change our routine. The same can be said of societies. The point of this entire book (and of much philosophy, social and cultural theory) is that by tomorrow at high noon we could all very well be doing something entirely different. But why a whole tome for this entirely relevant but entirely transparent point? We needed the Frankfurt marxists to tell us about utopian urges when they were deeply embedded in mass culture but why do we need marxists to tell us about utopian urges in science fiction when those urges are readily apparent?

Modernists and postmodernists alike love to theorize change. (The difference between these two groups may just be that the latter group simply suffers from a more pronounced sense of cognitive insecurity). But the future (the one beyond tomorrow) and the past for that matter are simply elsewheres that never materialize. To a certain extent we are shapers of our life-worlds and yet we are also inheritors of a life-world that pre-dates us. We, as individuals and collectives, are humbled by the fact that we are not the sole creators of the world and that our dreams alone do not alter the fabric of existence. What we can do is make slight alterations (hopefully improvements) in the present. Piecemeal change is what a humanity that knows its limits (as well as its potentialities) can do and do effectively (or at least can do effectively at times). Its those who work well with others ( those who are a little bit of everything: marxist, feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, globalist...) who get things done. For this reason humanism, at its best, is and has always been eclectic. Like everything else humanism changes shape as it adjusts itself to and integrates new knowledges with old. Jameson is one of the few thinkers whose synthetic abilites allow him to move with the times. That said the very eclectic and very refined lens through which he views postmodernity, and, in this book, science fiction, is crafted to perform a very particular project and Jameson's project can be defined as an attempt to detect general tendencies in a time period or genre. What Jameson is not particularly effective at doing is determining what makes individual authors and works so powerful. Thus as a social thinker who thinks in broad strokes he is always interesting (if also always somewhat derivative) but as a literary thinker his method is not the most subtle when you get into the nuances of literary and human value.

Call it a tome or call it a pan-gloss of science fiction, myth, philosophy and political theory. In "Archaeologies of the Future," the fictional status of the former two blurs into the real, immediacy of the latter. From "The Alien Body" to "The Barrier of Time" from More to LeGuin, Fourier to Philip K. Dick, Jameson digs up works that are now relics of the past and reevaluates their relevance to our contemporary struggles. Dated by our own passage through "the future" that was once predicted, annihilated, feared and hoped for, Jameson's perspective is appealing to me, a philosophy nerd who has read little Orwell or Asimov, but it will be just as appealing to those who have yet to read Marx, Freud and Gramsci...just as soon as their done with "Brave New World."