In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

183 chapter 6 Other Modernisms On the Desire Called Utopia True believers can, in other words, be exceedingly intelligent, historicist and reflexive, without ceasing to be fanatics. The commitment to the Absolute is an act of will, and not always hospitable to pluralist fairness. —Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future1 In the conclusion to Postmodernism, Jameson offers the following observation concerning the “Sartrean coinage” totalization: “‘From time to time,’ Sartre says somewhere, ‘you make a partial summing up.’ The summing up, from a perspective or point of view, as partial as it must be, marks the project of totalization as the response to nominalism.”2 It is just such an act of totalization that takes place in Jameson’s Ar­ chae­ ologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005).3 Archaeologies is, of course, neither his final book, nor is it meant as the last word on the problems invoked throughout. It is, rather, the culminating point, a “partial summing up,” of a number of different historical and intellectual sequences unfolding within Jameson’s project. I will elaborate upon some of the most important of these sequences in the pages that follow. Most significantly, in this final chapter, I will draw upon the resources of Jameson’s “modernist” classic , The Political Unconscious, to show how Archaeologies represents a climactic moment in his extended engagement with the question of literary and cultural modernisms, one that clears the space for his (re)turn in his most recent book, The Antinomies of Realism (2013), to the realism that had also been among his earliest concerns.4 Archaeologies of the Future is in reality two long books combined into one; and in this regard it is much like the single“volume”composed of the two books A Singular Modernity and The Modernist Papers. Like Thomas More’s Utopia—a book that is central to the concerns of Archaeologies—the second part was composed before the first. It brings together for the first time many of Jameson’s most significant essays on science fiction and Utopian literature, including studies of the work of Charles Fourier, Brian Aldiss, Ursula K. Le Guin, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky , Vonda MacIntyre, A. E. Van Vogt, George Bernard Shaw, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Kim Stanley Robinson.5 In making these essays available in this form—indeed, in making them widely available in any form, as a number were published in more obscure venues, and a 2000 essay, “History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick,” had not appeared in print previously—this second “earlier” book demonstrates the centrality of science fiction and Utopia for Jameson’s intellectual project . Among other things, these readings function as laboratory spaces wherein Jameson first develops many of the concepts—“generic discontinuity ,” “world reduction,” and most significantly, if more indirectly, “cognitive mapping”—that will become central in his other writings.6 However, the very focus on science fiction and Utopian literature risks making Archaeologies one of the more under-appreciated of Jameson’s texts. In the fourth chapter of Archaeologies’ first book, entitled “The Desire Called Utopia,” Jameson offers a Brechtian refunctioning (Umfunktionierung ) of a series of conceptual oppositions: Coleridge’s Fancy and Imagination (which he in fact first evokes at the beginning of his career in Sartre: Origins of a Style),7 the distinction between the private fantasy and the work of art in Freud’s “Creative Writers and DayDreaming ,” and Althusser’s infamous couple of ideology and science. He does so in order to begin to think about the distinction in utopian fictions between “two very different types of wishes (or desires, to use the postcontemporary word)”:8 their individual narcissistic elements, and, what is of real interest, the more collective dimensions that enable the most successful of them to have such a magnetic hold on their audiences at certain times and places. In this sense, Jameson’s interests in science fiction—and in these particular writers (after all, who reads Fourier, Van Vogt, or John Brunner any more?)—thus might be misperceived by some as a personal, even idiosyncratic, expression of taste, his “fancy” rather than the “imagination” at work in books like The Political Unconscious or Postmodernism.9 (Of course, as Jameson notes too, this opposition is never that simple, because “as with all dualisms, the terms keep swapping places ceaselessly.”)10 If this were the case, the fate of Archaeologies could ultimately be the same as that of Jameson’s other 184 ❘ On the...

Share