UTOPIA

Utopia



Utopia

Q1- Do you agree with Jameson's statement? Do you disagree?

Ans. No I would not fully agree to the statement by Jameson, as it generates a distinctly odd classification of the utopian text alongside the intentional community, revolutionary practice, space and the city as 'program', but the texts of political and social theory alongside political reformism, the individual building, the body, time and the collectivity as 'impulse'. Jameson writes that utopia as a form provides 'the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible'. It does so, he elaborates, 'by forcing us to think the break itself ... not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.' Hence, the memorable conclusion that utopia is 'a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right'. There are two issues here: first, Jameson's overwhelming concentration on American SF, which seems strangely parochial in such a distinguished comparatist; and second, his aversion to dystopia, Jameson argues that there are two main kinds of loosely 'dystopian' text: the 'critical dystopia', which functions by way of a warning, through an 'if this goes on' principle; and the anti-Utopia proper, which springs from a quite different conviction that human nature is so inherently corrupt it could never be salvaged by any 'heightened consciousness of the impending dangers'.39 Jameson borrows the term 'critical dystopia' from Tom Moylan and, like Moylan, he argues that this form is essentially utopian in intent and import and thus a kind of 'negative cousin' of utopia. Only the second variant, the anti-Utopia, is a true antonym of Utopia, a systemic and textual equivalent to the anti-utopian impulse in politics, 'informed by a central passion to denounce and to warn against Utopian society. Jameson'sexpertise is particularly strong in the analysis of urban labor markets—the sources of underemployment, the so-called spatial mis-match between where workers live and where the jobs are located within metropolitan regions, how job seekers and employers find one another, and which public and private institutions work best to facilitate that matching. (Jameson, Fredric 2004, 'Pp., 35-54.)

Q2- Which further readings will help you to demonstrate that utopia is/is not 'somehow negative'.

Ans. Jameson's central analysis, which proceeds by distinguishing three levels at work in Orwell: an 'articulation of the history of Stalinism', which the novelist had 'observed and experienced empirically'; a supposed 'historical universalization' of this experience into a vision of human nature as 'an insatiable and lucid hunger for power'; and the conversion of this 'conjuncture' into 'a life-passion'. This passion, Jameson insists, has 'become the face of anti-Utopianism in our own time'. (Eagleton, Terry 2006, Pp. 55)

Comparing Orwell's 'Cold War public' to that for 18th century 'gothic nightmares of imprisonment and ... evil monks or nuns', Jameson concludes that these two 'dystopian awakenings' can each be considered 'collective responses of the bourgeoisie':

the first in its struggle against feudal absolutism and arbitrary tyranny, the second in its reaction to the possibility of a workers' ...