Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation

4. Utopia and Technopolitics in Woman on the Edge of Time

4 Utopia and Technopolitics in Woman on the Edgeof Time Traditional Utopian literature relates to the novel's contemporary historical circumstances through a process of negation—contemporary society is present only as a repressed subtext, and visible only in the conceptual "antinomies" that the Utopian text attempts to neutralize or resolve. In the previous chapter, I explored the effects that occur when, instead of repressing the connection between contemporary society and imaginary society (a repression that is designed to preserve the absolute "elsewhere" of Utopia), a text actively foregrounds and thematizes the interaction between Utopia and contemporary society. This increased interaction funds an "ideologeme of activism" within the text, while the increased emphasis on agency leads the imaginary society to fall back as the setting for the actions of the protagonist.1 The protagonist's movement between social spaces heightens our sense of how an imaginary society can function within a novel as a strategic space deployed against existing conditions in order to foster action and resistance on the part of the protagonist . As a result of these related shifts in form and emphasis, the imaginary societies I discussed become more tied to and embedded in existing conditions and less capable of sustaining their "ideal" removal from these conditions. In Marge Piercy's critical Utopia Woman on the Edge of Time, description of Utopian space once again coexists with the narration of a female protagonist's experience within her contemporary society. By foregrounding how Utopian space interacts with the protagonist 131 Utopia and Technopolitics to denaturalize her experience of contemporary society and to inspire her resistance against oppressive conditions, the structure of Womanon theEdge of Timeonce again reflects a goal that is less the consolidation of an imaginary space free from all ideological conflict than it is the female protagonist's discovery of her own potential for agency. If in The FemaleMan the deferred discovery that Jael's agency lies behind the creation of Whileaway remains an unsettling one—a purposeful compromise of Utopia's innocence—in Woman on the Edgeof Time the very existence of the Utopian future is revealed to depend upon the active resistance of the female protagonist in her own time. The protagonist's passage between contemporary dystopia and future Utopia is thus fundamental, not only to her own developing agency but also to the existence of Utopia as such. Within Woman on the Edge of Time, the Utopian society Mattapoisett exists simultaneously as a strategic projection that "arms" Connie with the conceptual tools to resist oppression and as an external reality that depends on her resistance for its survival. Mattapoisett is thus both a conventional Utopian space in which the oppressive conditions that define Connie s contemporary existence are already resolved and a social space whose parameters shift in relation to Connie's experiences and actions in her own time. With this development , Piercy addresses directly what Russ only alludes to—the unresolved question of the relationship between contemporary resistance and the image of a positively transformed future society. Piercy narrates the relationship between contemporary dystopia and future Utopia through the use of a Foucauldian-style genealogy that explores the way power acts on and through the individual body/ subject along three complexly related axes: the protagonist's experience of oppression, the image of a transformed society, and the protagonist 's evolution to a consciousness of active resistance. While Piercy's novel does not resolve the question of how one moves from an identity of resistance formed by oppression to an identity beyond oppression, her narrative articulates a relation between the experience of oppression and the image of a transformed society that constructs them not as mutually incompatible, but as productively interactive. 132 Utopia and Technopolitics Power and Visibility I have already discussed how an economy of visibility, in which group members are subject to a disciplinary gaze, operates in traditional Utopias to stabilize or "fix" the harmonious social space. In the traditional Utopian space, discipline remains somewhat external to the subject; although an ever-present surveillance is designed ultimately to create a self-disciplining subject, the surveilling "gaze" generally originates from a position outside or above the individual and social body.2 According to Foucault, the goal of modern power is progressively to internalize this gaze, to create a power relation that is independent of the person(s) who exercises it and a social order wherein individuals "become caught up in a...