Mr Jameson, Sir, You're Canceled

This is a review of Fredric Jameson’s book Archaeologies of the Future. Archaeologies of the Future argues for utopia as a way to oppose the singular vision late capitalism now gives us; it is also a historical account of the form that traces its ebbs & flows through history. I would supply quotes of Jameson here to clarify his positions, but a quote from Jameson is unlikely to clarify anything except his pedantry.

Why this book, though, if I didn’t like it? Well, it’s a large part of the theoretical basis for the current revival of utopias: Kim Stanley Robinson cites Jameson, José Muñoz cites Jameson in Cruising Utopia, Jacobin cites him from time to time blah blah balh

To explain why we’re canceling Fredric Jameson’s future(s), I think we’ll start with his readings of Ursula Le Guin.

Here’s some background on the first book of Le Guin’s Jameson does a reading of, The Lathe of Heaven. If you’ve read the Lathe of Heaven, you can skip this paragraph:

In tLoH, the main character, George, has dreams that affect reality. If he dreams about a picture on a wall that doesn’t have a picture, there will be a picture on the wall when he wakes up. In an attempt to dream world peace, George achieves peace through an alien invasion: the people of earth unite to fight the aliens. George, though, does not want his dreams to affect reality, so he steals sleeping pills to prevent himself from dreaming. However, he is caught & forced to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, Dr Haber, realizes the power of George’s dreams & attempts to control them, resulting in, among other things, the alien invasion mentioned above. End background.

Le Guin, it should be noted, was an anarcha-feminist writer strongly influenced by Taoism. In an introduction a book of Murray Bookchin’s essays, she wrote

Every benefit industrialism and capitalism have brought us, every wonderful advance in knowledge and health and communication and comfort, casts the same fatal shadow. All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned. Yet we can’t stop the process. A capitalist economy, by definition, lives by growth; as he observes: “For capitalism to desist from its mindless expansion would be for it to commit social suicide.” We have, essentially, chosen cancer as the model of our social system.

But that depends on how we read the Utopianism of George's dream director, the sleep specialist William Haber. He certainly has big plans, but one feels that this fable comes down rather hard on him, all things considered, and that his undoubted "will to power" - Nietzsche after all showed that it was active in the smallest as well as in the greatest things -is sometimes denounced mainly as a foil to Le Guin's Taoist agenda:

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more. As there was no visible limit to the power Haber wielded through Orr's dreams, so there was no end to his determination to improve the world. (128)

When Jameson does discuss Le Guin’s anarchism, he reduces it to an avoidance of the Cold War: “To be sure, the writer has attempted to transcend local Cold War stereotypes by making her communists over into anarchists, with overtones of Taoism,” rather than treating Le Guin’s anarchism as an ideology like his ‘marxist’ one. He further goes on to dismiss anarchism through economic determinism, “conventional state socialism… can easily be accommodated by convergence theory, which saw capitalism and Stalinist industrialization as two faces of the more general process of modernization. No such resolution can be imagined for the decentralization of Anarres.” Jameson’s inability to seriously consider Le Guin’s anarchist beliefs prevent him from realizing Le Guin’s ambiguous anarchist utopia as a possible alternative.

[Sidenote: The second half the paragraph is about another of Le Guin’s books, The Dispossessed.Not the Lathe of Heaven]

To Jameson’s failure of imagination, I respond with Jameson:

The officially "non-serious" or pulp character of SF is an indispensable feature in its capacity to relax that tyrannical "reality principle" which functions as a crippling censorship over high art, and to allow the "paraliterary" form thereby to inherit the vocation of giving us alternate versions of a world that has elsewhere seemed to resist even imagined change.

That the author of The Dispossessed is also capable of indulging in a classical Dostoyevskian and counterrevolutionary anti-utopianism may be documented by her nasty little fable "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

A few pages before his ‘nasty’ comment, Jameson praises a review of Le Guin’s work by the sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem as ‘relentlessly logical.’ It’s pretty clear that Jameson views Le Guin as an illogical Taoist who is need of ‘relentless logic.’ This sexist misreading of Le Guin is made possible by his class reductionist politics:

All of this suggests an unhappy outcome for the Utopian and SF genre itself, whose lines of exploration and invention have now been rerouted and deviated along the lines of gender and sexuality, rather than those of class dynamics and the mode of production. Where the latter categories have been maintained they are expressed as a reversion to older modes of production in which filiation and inheritance were fundamental determinant mechanisms. Perhaps the dynamics of class and class struggle -as exemplified in Stapledon for example - do not admit of as much interesting and exotic variation and differentiation as do gender phenomena (as for race, its thematic is relatively neutralized by the presupposition of alien life in the first place - which can, to be sure, stand as the allegory of race, as in Octavia Butler - although it can also return, within an alien world, as the representation of interspecies coexistence and rivalry, as in Aldiss' Helliconz"a Sp ring [1982]). Are we then to follow Louis Marin's rather pessimistic prognosis, that the invention of Utopia takes place within the still empty space that later a "science of society" (Marxism) will fill, thus rendering this genre henceforth unnecessary? At the very least, the gender turn of the Utopian imagination is the sign of a waning of the Utopian imagination in the post-Cold-War period, in which the socialist model seems to have been discredited by Stalinism and the excesses and dysfunctionality of the newer global capitalist system have not yet begun fully to appear.

1. The first piece of context, is that the run-up to this paragraph is Jameson favorably citing a right-wing utopia called The Mote in God’s Eye by the conservative (to say the least) sci-fi writers Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle:

Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, which can be taken as a kind of military utopia (the delight in castes, corporations and aristocracies, male bonding, the non-profit ideologies of warfare and technology, which hard-science SF tends to reproduce at a lower level of political intensity): such right-wing Utopias are quite unlike the free-enterprise, neo-conservative celebrations of present-day cyberpunk; nor do they reproduce the fascist themes of inferior races, resentiment, physical prowess and the like, more often to be found in fantasy.

Motie history is a constant pressure of overpopulation, leading to periodic crises and the cyclical breakdown of civilization and its constraints: horrendous wars, times of troubles, the reversion to Neolithic conditions and the long climb back into Enlightenment science and technology again and their destructive capacity. This historical destiny both reflects a human one (the fact of overpopulation itself) and differentiates itself by the absence of any possible medical or political controls.

There's a small group of science fiction authors who call themselves SIGMA and offer the U.S. government advice on futuristic scenarios. Many of them are invited to conferences and events where they dispense wisdom to security types, and just recently one of them — Larry "Ringworld" Niven — offered the Department of Homeland Security some of the creepiest advice we've ever heard about how to handle problems with overcrowding in hospitals.

National Defense Magazine reports that Niven offered his advice while in a public discussion with his longtime collaborator Jerry Pournelle:

“Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

"The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren't going to pay for anything anyway," Niven said.

"Do you know how politically incorrect you are?" Pournelle asked.

"I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work," Niven replied.”

So why is Jameson reviving this right-wing sci-fi novel? What James finds interesting in Niven & Pournelle’s ‘utopia’ is its mode of production (because he is a class reductionist); for this, he ignores the long-running right-wing record of the authors:

A similarly unique combination of features - about which it is not clear whether it is regressive or Utopian - can be observed on a social level, where the definition of this particular mode of production -industrial feudalism - synthesizes two antithetical modes and socio-economic arrangements, in which a decentralized clan system, with competing overlords, is combined with factories (themselves constantly in the process of transformation and restructuration) and has reached an extraordinarily high degree of scientific and technological knowledge (probably greater than that on Earth). It then becomes clear that the gap or contradiction which cannot be filled in by the earthly mind - the absence of any centralized or coordinated government for a population of this size and a social life of this complexity -is very precisely overcome by the existence of the caste of mediators we have already described: better still, the latter have been invented to solve the problem of the former.

2. It is after his discussion of this right-wing text, that Jameson comes to say “All of this suggests an unhappy outcome for the Utopian and SF genre itself, whose lines of exploration and invention have now been rerouted and deviated along the lines of gender and sexuality, rather than those of class dynamics and the mode of production.” It is here that Jameson mentions Octavia Butler for the first time. It is also the last time he discusses Octavia Butler. The entirety of her appearance in Archaeologies of the Future is parenthetical to a discussion about how race & gender have destroyed utopian thinking.

This is something of a pattern for Jameson in this book. I discussed Ursula Le Guin at such length because most of the other writers are white men & Jameson's sexism is less apparent there.The few women or writers of color he does analyze are Le Guin, Samuel Delany, & Marge Piercy. Jameson, in fact, credits the first ‘feminist utopia’ to BF Skinner’s Walden Two, 1948 (a white man). At first, I thought Jameson was simply unaware of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1916 feminist utopia Herland. However, he later cites Gilman as a utopian writer… parenthetically.

The concerns of women, people of color, & lgbtqa people are occasionally noted, usually parenthetically or in a footnote, but rarely more than that. The most egregious example is Jameson’s acknowledgment of the role of utopia in colonialism:

Then too, we do well to remember (as Balasopolous reminds us) that Utopia is very much the prototype of the settler colony, and the forerunner of modern imperialism (at least in its North American, apartheid, or Zionist forms - "the people without land" supposedly meeting "the land without people"). That Utopias should turn out to be one of the privileged literary expressions of the Spanish empire (whose subject Campanella also was) is thus equally significant: the predestined harmony between a form without content and a content without form. My own feeling is that the colonial violence thus inherent in the very form or genre itself is a more serious reproach than anything having to do with the authoritarian discipline and conformity that may hold for the society within Utopia's borders. All of which goes a long way towards justifying Barthes' structuralist comment that closure alone allows system to come into being, or in other words enables the deployment of genuine systemic difference. Closure thereby operates on a conceptual or categorical level fully as much as in international relations, and it may also determine the emergence of those abstract ideals of purity and unanimity, of identity on all levels, that have inspired the enemies of Utopia to associate it with racism and other forms of political compulsiveness.

“I would characterize its solution as the fitful and necessarily ephemeral emergence of a different kind of collective being. But perhaps this is only to endow the still missing new concept in advance with a nimbus of quasi-sacred legitimacy.”

“Yet it should be noted that both of these paradigmatic texts are essentially anticolonialist (in the spirit of the American revolution).”

But all of this is leading to Jameson’s biggest failure: why is science fiction popular? Richard Slotkin & Susan Sontag, among others, have argued that space became ‘the Final Frontier’ of colonization after Earth had been fully colonized. Slotkin does so through a reading of Star Wars & Kennedy’s New Frontier.

Sontag, then, goes on to discuss the utopias imagined by various sci-fi films:

Science—technology—is conceived of as the great unifier. Thus the science fiction films also project a Utopian fantasy. In the classic models of Utopian thinking—Plato’s Republic, Campanella’sCity of the Sun, More’s Utopia, Swift’s land of the Houyhnhnms, Voltaire’s Eldorado—society had worked out a perfect consensus. In these societies reasonableness had achieved an unbreakable supremacy over the emotions. Since no disagreement or social conflict was intellectually plausible,none was possible. As in Melville’s Typee, “they all think the same.” The universal rule of reason meant universal agreement.

Mannheim’s distinction between ideology as the legitimation of the ruling group and utopia as the manifesto of a social group aspiring to hegemony is reinforced by Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the role played by utopias in the legitimation and de- legitimation of desire. They argue that utopias function not “as ideal models but as group fantasies, as agents of the real productivity of desire, making it possible to disinvest the current social field, to de-institutionalize it.”

Stay tuned next for either:

1. Why Utopia is NOT Marxist
2. Jameson cannot read Octavia Butler