Ontology and Utopia

Ontology and Utopia Fredric Jameson T HE TIME-HONORED FRENCH WAY of introducing a subject like Fourier (the English equivalent is not so pointed) is the for­ mula “actualité de" : which sets us in a more historicist and relativ­ ist frame of mind than some more Crocean “ what is living and what is dead in.” The actuality approach supposes a rotating conception of the work which sets off gleams and strikes different sparks from age to age; while “what is living” suggests a hodgepodge of residual and emergent, from which the outmoded has carefully been extracted piece by piece. Neither formula turns out to be particularly viable in a situation in which the work in question is incompletely known in the first place: half unpub­ lished, mostly unread except for anecdotal plot summaries in surveys, utterly unclassical and probably uncanonizable as well, owing to its textual peculiarities and generic irregularity. But this is Fourier’s case today and tomorrow: I am tempted to add, not despite, but rather also because of, Jonathan Beecher’s first-rate biography,1which is a model of discreet psychological and socio-historical analysis and an eloquent and persuasive introduction to the works themselves. We must be more than usually grateful for a study of this rare distinction at the same time that we understand how its very merits inevitably turn it into a substitute for the “ works” themselves, which are thus likely to become even less read at first hand at the very moment in which they have become more accessible. At any rate, in what follows I want to say something about Fourier’s “ contribution” to only a very few limited yet important fields: literary history, the politics of groups, and the apparently unavoidable question of desire that constitutes the unique aureole of this particular Utopia. Yet the matter of literary history may seem extraneous to the Fourier question, and a problem for French departments more than it can be for Utopians and the other sympathizers and fellow travellers. Perhaps it does not need to be argued exclusively in terms of the national glory, however, but rather in those of representativity if not of classicality (I’m not sure that the related issue of canonicity applies here in the same way): for it is a peculiar problem in the unfolding of the premier European literature which, unlike the uneven development and historical spurts 46 W in t e r 1994 J a m eso n and irregularities of the other national literatures, regularly if dialectically produces the crucial cultural documents in every generation. There is no particular mystery about this, since the French language had already been acknowledged as their literate lingua franca by the other traditions from the Renaissance onward, and since the ever more obvious sub­ ordination to England in a power struggle that had begun in the seven­ teenth century determined the strategic and symbolic restructuration of that same struggle in cultural terms in which the French tended to be win­ ners across the board, from gastronomy to literary movements and fashion and perfume. The mystery is rather the gap of Romanticism, or if you prefer, what the standard histories typically negotiate as the thirtyyears ’ lag, the incomprehensible lapse between the “great” romanticisms of the Germans and the English and the “ battle of Hernani” on the eve of the revolution of 1830. Nor is this a question of a mere statistical anomaly, like the skipped beat of a cardiograph: rather it concerns the most truly significant moment in the emergence and formation of modernity and engages unique and historical breakthroughs in form as well as conceptuality, in the poetic ontology of the English fully as much as the absolute systematicity of the Germans. Few other moments in modern times witness the exfoliation of a Novum of this magnitude, and the reader confined to purely literary and intellectual histories is certainly entitled to a more than ordinary perplexity at the contemplation of that blank—as peremp­ tory as anything on the period maps of Africa—that stretches between the execution of André Chénier and the first lyrics of Lamartine, and is not “properly” filled by the more doubtful productions of either...