Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE: THE DESIRE CALLED UTOPIA AND OTHER SCIENCE FICTIONS

by Fredric Jameson. Verso/480 pp./$35.00 (hb).

Rather than an archaeologist unearthing dry material, Fredric Jameson approaches utopia with the relentless passion of a naturalist trying to breathe life into an extinct creature. Having died out as a social program it appears somewhat artificially only as a genre of science fiction. But Jameson not only wants to revive it from its generic crypt but also restore its sense of immediacy and hold on the future. On the way to this goal in this magisterial volume, Jameson helps us understand the fate and predicament of utopia in the first place; its early identification in Marxist thought with ideology and its subsequent relegation to all that can go wrong with social engineering (Stalinism being Karl Mannheim's prime example). But these outward denigrations are not nearly as central to Jameson as the internal dissipations of subjective experience and the growing incapacity to imagine a more perfect human society. Returning to this internal terrain--expressed by the literature and cinema of science fiction--Jameson extends his project to understand the mutual complicity of social forms and representation; especially the burnout of the imagination under late capitalism. The extinction of utopia points to a failure of imagination somewhat similar to his portrayal of our growing inability to form coherent images (or "cognitive maps") of postmodern space. Jameson has been working at revealing these failures of social poetics for decades, and this archaeology represents a cross-section of many years and stages of this project.

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The book is made up of two sections with the last half assembling thirteen articles on science fiction and the utopian imagination published since 1973. Part One, however, offers fresh material and stands as the ultimate stage of Jameson's cycle of volumes on the postmodern imagination following Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002). In this latest publication, Jameson is at his best in evoking the labyrinthine play of the social imaginary in terms that are both clear and suggestively enigmatic. Utopia never stands still for Jameson--it is, after all, "no place"--and, tellingly, he rarely uses the term as a noun but rather as an adjective modifying a range of elusive subjects; a list of which gives a good indication of the sweep of utopian effects: utopian wish, utopian science, utopian scheme, utopian ideology, utopian text, and so on. Whatever utopia touches seems to expand its experiential range to the limits. While mindful of the ironic reversals along the edges of the imagination, Jameson convincingly resurrects and imagines utopia as an adaptable tool of progressive politics and culture.

CHRIS BURNETT is director of Visual Studies Workshop.

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