Ninth lecture for my students in English 192, "Science Fiction," summer 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m13/

1. Lecture 9: “Utopia and Other
Science Fictions”
English 192
Summer 2013
19 August 2013
“History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this
alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere
object of representation or as one master code among many
others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather
the inexorable form of events […] History is what hurts, it is what
refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as
collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic
reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be
apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some
reified force.”
— Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

2. Administrative matters
● Reminder: tomorrow is the last day to drop classes.
● I know that no one is thinking of dropping this class. This is
just a friendly reminder that the deadline is rapidly
approaching, in case any of your other classes are less fun.
● Papers are due at the beginning of lecture on
Thursday.
● Today is the last day to propose a paper topic not on the list
of paper topics handed out last week.
● As with all other course-related issues, I am happy to
discuss paper-related matters in my office hours or via
email.
● Questions? Other matters?

3. Utopian thought
● … generally attempts to envision a society in which
the various social, political, and economic ills of the
real world have been solved.
● … is first recorded in systematic form in Plato’s
Republic (ca. 380 BCE), a dialogue between
Socrates and various others which discusses
existing political forms and describes a city
(Kallipolis) ruled by philosopher-kings.
● … gets a generic name in Thomas More’s Utopia
(1516); it depicts a fictional island society and its
religious, social and political customs.
● “Utopia” may be read as both “Outopía,” no-place-land,
and “Eutopiā,” good-place-land.

4. Intentional communities
● Flourished especially in the early 19th century.
● Saw themselves as radically altering social
structure for those within the communities.
● Frequent areas of critique and intervention
included commercialism and capitalism.
● Religious communities also formed after the
Second Great Awakening (ca. 1790-1840) to
provide believers with spaces in which all
aspects of their lives could be lived according to
their religious principles.

5. Later literary examples
● Left-leaning (socialist):
● Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1887)
● William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)
● H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)
● Right-leaning (libertarian):
● Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
● Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
(1966)
● Psychologically oriented:
● B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948)

6. ● Gender-oriented:
● Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
● Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
● Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
● Twentieth-century fiction treating the topic
increasingly sees the attempt to rationally solve
all problems as leading in the direction of
horrifically dystopian fiction:
● H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
● Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1924)
● Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
● George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
● Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

7. Fredric Jameson (1934-)
● Possibly the best-known
and most productive
Marxist literary critic and
theorist working today.
● Most commonly read
works are probably The
Political Unconscious
(1981) and
Postmodernism: The
Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991).
● Has taught at UCSD and
UCI; currently at Duke
University.
Jameson at the Holberg Prize Symposium
(Norway), 2008.

8. Some formal notes on SF
“we need not examine the scientific premise any
too closely, since it is rather the mimesis of a
scientific premise which is the crucial feature (and
which, according to Aristotle, must be plausible
rather than necessarily true).” (Jameson 90)
“literary analysis is best served by a conception of
such scientific content as constituting a formal
device: here [in Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’], in other
words, a specific scientific effect or mathematical
paradox (or, if you prefer, the plausible mimesis of
those things) serves as a frame, or better still, a
pseudo-causal hypothesis to be matched up with a
story type of a different order.” (91)

9. “Dominants” in SF periodization
“I think it might be better to take an immediate
lesson from our own immediate theme of the
synchronic system versus the diachronic
narrative, and to rewrite Asimov’s periodizing
narrative of SF history in terms of so many
possible dominants which form different
functional constellations in any given period.”
(92)
● We will return to Jameson’s periodization of SF
(90-94) later this term.

10. The Utopian impulse
“Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a
political slogan and a politically emerging perspective.
“Indeed, a whole new generation of the post-
globalization Left […] has more and more frequently
been willing to adopt this slogan, in a situation in
which the discrediting of communist and socialist
parties alike, and the skepticism about traditional
conceptions of revolution, have cleared the discursive
field. The consolidation of the emergent world market
– for this is really what is at stake in so-called
globalization – can eventually be expected to allow
new forms of political agency to develop.” (Jameson
xii)

11. But what about our argument that SF cannot
radically transcend our own perspectives?
“On the social level, this means that our
imaginations are hostages to our own mode of
production (and perhaps to whatever remnants
of past ones it has preserved). It suggests that
at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose
of making us more aware of our mental and
ideological imprisonment […] and that therefore
the best Utopias are those that fail the most
comprehensively.” (xiii)

12. “These [Utopian] texts are so often taken to be
the expressions of political opinion or ideology
that there is something to be said for redressing
the balance in a resolutely formalist way […] It is
not only the social and historical raw materials of
the Utopian construct which are of interest from
this perspective, but also the presentational
relations established between them – such as
closure, narrative and exclusion or inversion.
Here as elsewhere in narrative analysis what is
most revealing is not what is said, but what
cannot be said, what does not register on the
narrative apparatus.” (xiii)

13. “It is important to complete this Utopian formalism with
what I hesitate to call a psychology of Utopian
production: a study of Utopian fantasy mechanisms,
rather, and one which eschews individual biography in
favor of historical and collective wish-fulfillment. […] This
is clearly a question that needs to be enlarged to include
Science Fiction as well, if one follows Darko Suvin [in
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction], as I do, in believing
Utopia to be a socio-economic sub-genre of that broader
literary form. Suvin’s principle of ‘cognitive
estrangement’ – an aesthetic which, building on the
Russian Formalist notion of ‘making strange’ as well as
the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, characterizes SF in
terms of an essentially epistemological function […] –
thus posits one specific subset of this generic category
specifically devoted to the imagination of alternative
social and economic forms.” (xiii-xiv)

14. The Utopian wish
“It has often been observed that we need to
distinguish between the Utopian form and the
Utopian wish: between the written text or genre
and something like a Utopian impulse detectable
in daily life and its practices by a specialized
hermeneutic or interpretive method. Why not add
political practice to this list, inasmuch as whole
social movements have tried to realize a Utopian
vision, communities have been founded and
revolutions waged in its name, and since, as we
have just seen, the term itself is once again
current in present-day discursive struggles?” (1)

15. “Yet the lifework of Ernst Bloch [1885-1977] is
there to remind us that Utopia is a good deal
more than the sum of its individual texts. Bloch
posits a Utopian impulse governing everything
future-oriented in life and culture; and
encompassing everything from games to patent
medicines, from myths to mass entertainment,
from iconography to technology, from
architecture to eros, from tourism to jokes and
the unconscious.” (2)

16. Ernst Bloch’s Utopian schema
(source: Jameson, p.5)

17. Wish-fulfillment in SF
● For Jameson, SF is a site in which the question of
what we want and how this constitutes our
epistemological and ontological categories comes
to the forefront in particularly revelatory ways.
“it does not seem irrelevant to inquire how the Utopias
themselves, or their SF analogues, stage wishing as
such, and what counts in them in particular as the
fulfillment of just such wishes.” (72)
“What is then so often identified as Utopian boredom
corresponds to this withdrawal of cathexis from what
are no longer seen as ‘my own’ projects or ‘my own’
daily life. This is meanwhile the sense in which
depersonalization as such becomes a fundamental or
constituent feature of Utopia as such.” (97)

18. ● Keeping in mind our provisional assessment (from
lecture 6) that SF “explores the consequences of
some transformation to the basic parameters of
existence,” the genre can frequently be seen as the
exscriptive (in Lippit’s sense) projection outward of
human desires.
● It is worth remembering that Jameson has advocated
(on page 1) the hermeneutic detection of wishes in
everyday life as well as in literary writing.
“as Science Fiction approaches the condition of Utopia […], a
peculiar fairy-tale topology begins to rise towards the surface
like a network of veins.” (74)
● Note that Jameson, in today’s selections, is explicitly
linking the SF genre to several predecessors and
related discursive fields, including earlier Utopian writing
(throughout his book), fantasy (e.g., 74, 83), the fairy
tale (e.g., 77), and historical fiction (e.g., 76).

19. ● Ultimately, wishing itself, and the object of the
wish, is a fundamental characteristic of Jameson’s
Utopian hermeneutic.
“Freud’s insights […] identified the particularity of the
wish as the insatiably egoistic fantasy which repels us
not because it is egoistic but because it is not mine: a
formulation which discloses an unpleasant swarm of
competing and irreconcilable desires behind the social
order and its cultural appearance.” (76)
“[We can] reduce the stakes somewhat, and make of
Haber [in Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven] not a
Utopian revolutionary, who wishes to change everything
and to transform the very totality of being, and read him
rather as a New Dealer and a liberal or social
democrat, eager for reform rather than revolution, and
intent on changing now this, now that, as he encounters
the various ills of society one by one on his path.” (80)

20. Synchronic and diachronic systematics
Synchronic. Linguistics. [translating French
synchronique (F. de Saussure a1913, in Cours de
linguistique générale (1916) iii. 117).] Pertaining to or
designating a method of linguistic study concerned with
the state of a language at one time, past or present;
descriptive, as opposed to historical or diachronic. Also
transf. in Anthropology, etc.
Diachronic. Linguistics. [translating French
diachronique (F. de Saussure a1913, in Cours de
linguistique générale (1916) iii. 120).] Pertaining to or
designating a method of linguistic study concerned with
the historical development of a language; historical, as
opposed to descriptive or synchronic. Also transf., in
Anthropology, etc.
(from the Oxford English Dictionary)

21. “Bradley’s elegant formulation warns us of the
self-defeating price to be paid for any truly
thoroughgoing exercise of systemic thinking in
history; and this, whether we have to do with a
relatively contemporary (structural) conception
of the synchronic (or of totality, or of the mode
of production, or the Foucauldian episteme), or
simply (as in Bradley) of some state a/state b
progression, or indeed with some more general
sense of the present as an immense and
interrelated web from which not even a dead
butterfly can fall at the peril of the whole.”
(Jameson 87)

22. Media Credits
● The photo of Fredric Jameson at the Holberg
Prisen Symposium was taken by Tor Erik H.
Mathiesen. It is shared under a Creative
Commons-Attribution license. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fredric_James
on.jpg