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Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future? (Progrès contre Utopie, ou: Pouvons-
nous imaginer l'avenir)
Author(s): Fredric Jameson
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Utopia and Anti-Utopia (Jul., 1982), pp. 147-158
Published by: SF-TH Inc
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 PROGRESSVERSUS UTOPIA 147

Fredric Jameson
Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?
It will then turn out that the world has long dreamtof that of which it had
only to have a clear idea to possess it really.
Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (1843)
A storm is blowingfrom Paradise;it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned,while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward.This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1939)

What if the "idea"of progress were not an idea at all but rather the symptom
of something else? This is the perspective suggested, not merely by the
interrogationof cultural texts, such as SF, but by the contemporarydiscovery
of the Symbolic in general. Indeed, following the emergence of psychoanalysis,
of structuralismin linguistics and anthropology, of semiotics together with its
new field of "narratology,"of communications theory, and even of such
events as the emergence of a politics of "surplus consciousness" (Rudolf
Bahro) in the 1960s, we have come to feel that abstract ideas and concepts
are not necessarily intelligible entities in their own .right.This was of course
already the thrust of Marx'sdiscovery of the dynamics of ideology; but while
the older terms in which that discovery was traditionally formulated-"false
consciousness"versus "science"-remain generally true, the Marxianapproach
to ideology, itself fed by all the discoveries enumerated above, has also
become a far more sophisticated and non-reductive form of analysis than the
classical opposition tends to suggest.
From the older standpoint of a traditional "historyof ideas," however,
ideology was essentially grasped as so many opinions vehiculated by a narra-
tive text such as an SF novel, from which, as Lionel Trilling once put it, like
so many raisins and currants they are picked out and exhibited in isolation.
Thus Verne is thought to have "believed"in progress,' while the originalityof
Wells was to have entertained an ambivalent and agonizing love-hate
relationship with this "value," now affirmed and now denounced in the
course of his complex artistic trajectory.2
The discovery of the Symbolic, however, suggests that for the individual
subject as well as for groups, collectivities, and social classes, abstract opi-
nion is, but a symptom or an index of some vaster pensee sauvage about
history itself, whether personal or collective. This thinking, in which a
particular conceptual enunciation such as the "idea" of progress finds its
structuralintelligibility, may be said to be of a more properly narrative kind,
analogous in that respect to the constitutive role played by master-fantasiesin
the Freudian model to the Unconscious. Nevertheless, the analogy is
misleading to the degree to which it may awaken older attitudes about
objective truth and subjective or psychological "projection," which are
explicitly overcome and transcended by the notion of the Symbolic itself. In
other words, we must resist the reflex which concludes that the narrative

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148 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 9 (1982)

fantasies which a collectivity entertains about its past and its future are
"merely"mythical, archetypal, and projective, as opposed to "concepts" like
progress or cyclical return, which can somehow be tested for their objective
or even scientific validity. This reflex is itself the last symptom of that
dissociation of the private and the public, the subject and the object, the
personal and the political, which has characterized the social life of capi-
talism. A theory of some narrativepensee sauvage-what I have elsewhere
termed the political unconscious3-will, on the contrary, want to affirm the
epistemological priority of such "fantasy"in theory and praxis alike.
The task of such analysis would then be to detect and to reveal-
behind such written traces of the political unconscious as the narrative texts
of high or mass culture, but also behind those other symptoms or traces
which are opinion, ideology, and even philosophical systems-the outlines of
some deeper and vaster narrative movement in which the groups of a given
collectivity at a certain historical conjuncture anxiously interrogate their fate,
and explore it with hope or dread. Yet the nature of this vaster collective
sub-tqxt,with its specific structurallimits and permutations,will be registered
above all in terms of properly narrative categories: closure, recontainment,
the production of episodes, and the like. Once again, a crude analogy with
the dynamics of the individual unconscious may be useful. Proust'srestriction
to the windless cork-lined room, for instance, the emblematic eclipse of his
own possible relationships to any concrete personal or historical future,
determines the formal innovations and wondrous structuralsubterfuges of his
now exclusively retrospective narrative production. Yet such narrative cate-
gories are themselves fraught with contradiction: in order for narrative to
project some sense of a totality of experience in space and time, it must
surely know some closure (a narrative must have an ending, even if it is
ingeniously organized around the structuralrepression of endings as such). At
the same time, however, closure or the narrative ending is the mark of that
boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. The merit of SF is to
dramatize this contradiction on the level of plot itself, since the vision of
future history cannot know any punctual ending of this kind, at the same time
that its novelistic expression demands some such ending. Thus Asimov has
consistently refused to complete or terminate his Foundation series; while the
most obvious ways in which an SF novel can wrap its story up-as in an
atomic explosion that destroys the universe, or the static image of some
future totalitarian world-state-are also clearly the places in which our own
ideological limits are the most surely inscribed.
It will, I trust, already have become clear that this ultimate "text" or
object of study-the master-narrativesof the political unconscious-is a
construct: it exists nowhere in "empirical" form, and therefore must be
re-constructedon the basis of empirical "texts"of all sorts, in much the same
way that the master-fantasiesof the individual unconscious are reconstructed
through the fragmentaryand symptomatic "texts"of dreams, values, behavior,
verbal free-association, and the like. This is to say that we must necessarily
make a place for the formal and textual mediations through which such
deeper narratives find a partial articulation. No serious literary critic today
would suggest that content-whether social or psychoanalytic-inscribes
itself immediately and transparently on the works of "high" literature:
instead, the latter find themselves inserted in a complex and semi-autonomous
dynamic of their own-the history of forms-which has its own logic and
whose relationship to content per se is necessarily mediated, complex, and
indirect (and takes very different structural paths at different moments of

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 PROGRESSVERSUS UTOPIA 149

formal as well as social development). It is perhaps less widely accepted that

the forms and texts of mass culture are fully as mediated as this: and that
here too, collective and political fantasies do not find some simple transpa-
rent expression in this or that film or TV show. It would in my opinion be a
mistake to make the "apologia"for SF in terms of specifically "high"literary
values-to try, in other words, to recuperate this or that major text as
exceptional, in much the same way as some literary critics have tried to
recuperate Hammett or Chandler for the lineage of Dostoyevsky, say, or
Faulkner. SF is a sub-genre with a complex and interesting formal history of
its own, and with its own dynamic, which is not that of high culture, but
which stands in a complementary and dialectical relationship to high culture
or modernism as such. We must therefore first make a detour through the
dynamics of this specific form, with a view to grasping its emergence as a
formal and historical event.

1. Whatever its illustrious precursors, it is a commonplace of the history of

SF that it emerged, virtually full-blown, with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells,
during the second half of the 19th century, a period also characterized by the
production of a host of utopias of a more classical type. It would seem
appropriateto register this generic emergence as the symptom of a mutation
in our relationship to historical time itself: but this is a more complex
proposition than it may seem, and demands to be argued in a more
theoretical way.
I will suggest that the model for this kind of analysis, which grasps an
entire genre as a symptom and reflex of historical change, may be found in
Georg Lukacs' classical study, The Historical Novel (1936). Luk'acsbegan
with an observation that should not have been particularlysurprising:it was
no accident, he said, that the period which knew the emergence of historical
thinking, of historicism in its peculiarly modern sense-the late 18th and
early 19th century-should also have witnessed, in the work of Sir Walter
Scott, the emergence of a narrative form peculiarly restructured to express
that new consciousness. Just as modern historical consciousness was preceded
by other, for us now archaic, forms of historiography-the chronicle or the
annals-so the historical novel in its modern sense was certainly preceded by
literary works which evoked the past and recreated historical settings of one
kind or another: the history plays of Shakespeare or Corneille, La Princesse
de Cleves, even Arthurianromance: yet all these works in their various ways
affirm the past as being essentially the same as the present, and do not yet
confront the great discovery of the modern historical sensibility, that the
past, the various pasts, are culturally original, and radically distinct from our
own experience of the object-world of the present. That discovery may now
be seen as part of what may in the largest sense be called the bourgeois
cultural revolution, the process whereby the definitive establishment of a
properly capitalist mode of production as it were reprograms and utterly
restructuresthe values, life rhythms,cultural habits, and temporal sense of its
subjects. Capitalism demands in this sense a different experience of tempo-
rality from that which was appropriate to a feudal or tribal system, to the
polis or to the forbidden city of the sacred despot: it demands a memory of
qualitative social change, a concrete vision of the past which we may expect
to find completed by that far more abstract and empty conception of some
future terminus which we sometimes call "progress."Sir Walter Scott can in
retrospect be seen to have been uniquely positioned for the creative opening
of literary and narrative form to this new experience: on the very meeting

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150 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 9 (1982)

place between two modes of production, the commercial activity of the

Lowlands and the archaic, virtually tribal system of the surviving Highlan-
ders, he is able to take a distanced and marginal view of the emergent
dynamics of capitalism in the neighboring nation-state from the vantage point
of a national experience-that of Scotland-which was the last arrival to
capitalism and the first semi-peripheral zone of a foreign capitalism all at
once.4
What is original about Luk'acs'book is not merely this sense of the
historical meaning of the emergence of this new genre, but also and above all
a more difficult perception: namely, of the profound historicity of the genre
itself, its increasing incapacity to register its content, the way in which, with
Flaubert's Salammbo in the mid-19th century, it becomes emptied of its
vitality and survives as a dead form, a museum piece, as "archeological"as its
own raw materials, yet resplendent with technical virtuosity. A contemporary
example may dramatize this curious destiny: Stanley Kubrick'sBarryLyndon,
with its remarkable reconstruction of a whole vanished 18th-century past.
The paradox, the historical mystery of the devitalization of form, will be felt
by those for whom this film, with its brilliantimages and extraordinaryacting,
is somehow profoundly gratuitous, an object floating in the void which could
just as easily not have existed, its technical intensities far too great for any
merely formal exercise, yet somehow profoundly and disturbingly unmo-
tivated. This is to say something rather different from impugning the content
of the Kubrick film: it would be easy to imagine any number of discussions of
the vivid picture of 18th-century war, for example, or of the grisly instru-
mentality of human relationships, which might establish the relevance and
the claims of this narrative on us today. It is rather the relationship to the
past which is at issue, and the feeling that any other moment of the past
would have done just as well. The sense that this determinate moment of
history is, of organic necessity, precursor to the present has vanished into the
pluralism of the Imaginary Museum, the wealth and endless variety of
culturally or temporally distinct forms, all of which are now rigorously
equivalent. Flaubert's Carthage and Kubrick's 18th century, but also the
industrial turn of the century or the nostalgic 1930s or '50s of the American
experience, find themselves emptied of their necessity, and reduced to
pretexts for so many glossy images. In its (post-) contemporary form, this
replacement of the historical by the nostalgic, this volatilization of what was
once a national past, in the moment of emergence of the nation-statesand of
nationalism itself, is of course at one with the disappearance of historicity
from consumer society today, with its rapid media exhaustion of yesterday's
events and of the day-before-yesterday'sstar players (who was Hitler anyway?
who was Kennedy? who, finally, was Nixon?).
The moment of Flaubert, which Lukacs saw as the beginning of this
process, and the moment in which the historical novel as a genre ceases to be
functional, is also the moment of the emergence of SF, with the first novels of
Jules Verne. We are therefore entitled to complete Lukacs' account of the
historical novel with the counter-panel of its opposite number, the emergence
of the new genre of SF as a form which now registers some nascent sense of
the future, and does so in the space on which a sense of the past had once
been inscribed. It is time to examine more closely the seemingly transparent
ways in which SF registers fantasies about the future.
2. The common-sense position on the anticipatory nature of SF as a genre is
what we would today call a representational one. These narratives are

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 PROGRESSVERSUS UTOPIA 151

evidently for the most part not modernizing, not reflexive and self-
undermining and deconstructing affairs. They go about their business with
the full baggage and paraphernaliaof a conventional realism, with this one
difference: that the full "presence"-the settings and actions to be "rendered"
-are the merely possible and conceivable ones of a near or far future.
Whence the canonical defense of the genre: in a moment in which tech-
nological change has reached a dizzying tempo, in which so-called "future
shock" is a daily experience, such narratives have the social function of
accustoming their readers to rapid innovation, of preparing our conscious-
ness and our habits for the otherwise demoralizing impact of change itself.
They train our organisms to expect the unexpected and thereby insulate us,
in much the same way that, for Walter Benjamin, the big city modernism of
Baudelaire provided an elaborate shock-absorbingmechanism for the other-
wise bewildered visitor to the new world of the great 19th-centuryindustrial
city.
If I cannot accept this account of SF, it is at least in part because it.
seems to me that, for all kinds of reasons, we no longer entertain such visions
of wonder-working, properly "S-F" futures of technological automation.
These visions are themselves now historical and dated-streamlined cities of
the future on peeling murals-while our lived experience of our greatest
metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particularUtopian future
has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment
of what is now our own past. Yet, even if this is the case, it might at best
signal a transformationin the historical function of present-day SF.
In reality, the relationship of this form of representation, this specific
narrative apparatus, to its ostensible content-the future-has always been
more complex than this. For the apparent realism, or representationality,of
SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give
us "images"of the future-whatever such images might mean for a reader
who will necessarily predecease their "materialization"-but rather to
defamiliarizeand restructureour experience of our own present, and to do so
in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.From the
great intergalactic empires of an Asimov, or the devastated and sterile Earth
of the post-catastrophe novels of a John Wyndham, all the way back in time
to the nearer future of the organ banks and space miners of a LarryNiven, or
the conapts, autofabs, or psycho-suitcases of the universe of Philip K. Dick,
all such apparently full representations function in a process of distraction
and displacement, repression and lateral perceptual renewal, which has its
analogies in other forms of contemporary culture. Proust was only the most
monumental "high"literary expression of this discovery: that the present-in
this society, and in the physical and psychic dissociation of the human
subjects who inhabit it-is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty
of affect. Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are
somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to "experience," for
some first and real time, this "present," which is after all all we have. In
Proust, the retrospective fiction of memory and rewriting after the fact is
mobilized in order for the intensity of a now merely remembered present to
be experienced in some time-released and utterly unexpected posthumous
actuality.
Elsewhere, with reference to another sub-genre or mass-culturalform.
the detective story, I have tried to show that at its most original, in writers
like Raymond Chandler, the ostensible plots of this peculiar form have an
analogous function.5 What interested Chandler was the here-and-nowof the

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152 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 9 (1982)

daily experience of the now historical Los Angeles: the stucco dwellings,
cracked sidewalks, tarnished sunlight, and roadsters in which the curiously
isolated yet typical specimens of an unimaginableSouthern Californiansocial
flora and fauna ride in the monadic half-light of their dashboards. Chandler's
problem was that his readers-ourselves-desperately needed not to see that
reality: humankind,as T.S. Eliot's magical bird sang, is able to bear very little
of the unmediated, unfiltered experience of the daily life of capitalism. So, by
a dialectical sleight-of-hand,Chandler formally mobilized an "entertainment"
genre to distract us in a very special sense: not from the real life of private
and public worries in general, but very precisely from our own defense
mechanisms against that reality. The excitement of the mystery story plot is,
then, a blind, fixing our attention on its own ostensible but in reality quite
trivial puzzles and suspense in such a way that the intolerable space of
SouthernCaliforniacan enter the eye laterally,with its intensity undiminished.
It is an analogous strategy of indirection that SF now brings to bear on
the ultimate object and ground of all human life, History itself. How to fix
this intolerable present of history with the naked eye? We have seen that in
the moment of the emergence of capitalism the present could be intensified,
and prepared for individual perception, by the construction of a historical
past from which as a process it could be felt to issue slowly forth, like the
growth of an organism. But today the past is dead, transformedinto a packet
of well-worn and thumbed glossy images. As for the future, which may stillbe
alive in some small heroic collectivities on the Earth's surface, it is for us
either irrelevant or unthinkable. Let the Wagnerian and Spenglerian world-
dissolutions of J.G. Ballard stand as exemplary illustrations of the ways in
which the imagination of a dying class-in this case the cancelled future of a
vanished colonial and imperial destiny-seeks to intoxicate itself with
images of death that range from the destruction of the world by fire, water,
and ice to lengthening sleep or the berserk orgies of high-rise buildings or
superhighwaysreverting to barbarism.
Ballard'swork-so rich and corrupt-testifies powerfully to the contra-
dictions of a properly representational attempt to grasp the future directly. I
would argue, however, that the most characteristic SF does not seriously
attempt to imagine the "real"future of our social system. Rather, its multiple
mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own
present into the determinate past of something yet to come. It is this present
moment-unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the
sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises is
untotalizable and hence unimaginable, and also because it is occluded by the
density of our private fantasies as well as of the proliferatingstereotypes of a
media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence-that upon
our return from the imaginaryconstructs of SF is offered to us in the form of
some future world's remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively
remembered. Nor is this only an exercise in historical melancholy: there is,
indeed, something also at least vaguely comforting and reassuring in the
renewed sense that the great supermarkets and shopping centers, the garish
fast-food stores and ever more swiftly remodelled shops and store-front
businesses of the near future of Chandler's now historic Los Angeles, the
burnt-out-centercities of small mid-Western towns, nay even the Pentagon
itself and the vast underground networks of rocket-launching pads in the
picture-post-cardisolation of once characteristic North American "natural"
splendor, along with the already cracked and crumbling futuristic architec-
ture of newly built atomic power plants-that all these things are not seized,

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 PROGRESSVERSUS UTOPIA 153

immobile forever, in some "end of history,"but move steadily in time towards

some unimaginableyet inevitable "real"future. SF thus enacts and enables a
structurally unique "method" for apprehending the present as history, and
this is so irrespective of the "pessimism"or "optimism"of the imaginary
future world which is the pretext for that defamiliarization.The present is in
fact no less a past if its destination prove to be the technological marvels of
Verne or, on the contrary, the shabby and maimed automata of P.K. Dick's
near future.
We must therefore now return to the relationship of SF and future
history and reverse the stereotypical description of this genre: what is indeed
authentic about it, as a mode of narrativeand a form of knowledge, is not at
all its capacity to keep the future alive, even in imagination.On the contrary,
its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize
our incapacity to imagine the future, to body forth, through apparently full
representations which prove on closer inspection to be structurally and
constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has
called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical
difference; to succeed by failure, and to serve as unwitting and even
unwilling vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown,
finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-too-familiar, and thereby becomes
unexpectedly transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits.
This is indeed, since I have pronounced the word, the unexpected
rediscovery of the nature of utopia as a genre in our own time.6 The overt
utopian text or discourse has been seen as a sub-variety of SF in general.
What is paradoxical is that at the very moment in which utopias were
supposed to have come to an end, and in which that asphyxiation of the
utopian impulse alluded to above is everywhere more and more tangible, SF
has in recent years rediscovered its own utopian vocation, and given rise to a
whole series of powerful new works-utopian and S-F all at once-of which
Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Joanna Russ' The Female Man, Marge
Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Samuel Delany's Triton are only
the most remarkable monuments. A few final remarks are necessary,
therefore, on the proper use of these texts, and the ways in which their
relationship to social history is to be interrogated and decoded.

3. After what has been said about SF in general, the related proposition on
the nature and the political function of the utopian genre will come as no
particular surprise: namely, that its deepest vocation is to bring home, in
local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our
constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself, and this, not owing to any
individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural,
and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.
This proposition, however, now needs to be demonstratedin a more concrete
analytical way, with reference to the texts themselves.
It is fitting that such a demonstration should take as its occasion not
American SF, whose affinities with the dystopia rather than the utopia, with
fantasies of cyclical regression or totalitarianempires of the future, have until
recently been marked (for all the obvious political reasons); but rather Soviet
SF, whose dignity as a "high"literary genre and whose social functionality
within a socialist system have been, in contrast, equally predictable and no
less ideological. The renewal of the twin Soviet traditions of Utopia and SF
may very precisely be dated from the publication of Efremov's Andromeda
(1958), and from the ensuing public debate over a work which surely, for all

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154 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME 9 (1982)

its naivete, is one of the most single-mindedand extreme attempts to produce

a full representation of a future, classless, harmonious, world-wide utopian
society. We may measure our own resistance to the utopian impulse by
means of the boredom the sophisticated American reader instinctively feels
for Efremov's culturally alien "libidinalapparatus":
'We began,'continuedthe beautifulhistorian,'withthe complete redistribu-
tion of Earth'ssurface into dwelling and industrialzones.
'The brown stripes runningbetween thirty and forty degrees of North
and South latitude representan unbrokenchain of iurbansettlementsbuilt
on the shores of warmseas with a mild climate and no winters.Mankindno
longer spends huge quantities of energy warming houses in winter and
making himself clumsy clothing. The greatest concentrationof people is
aroundthe cradle of human civilization,the MediterraneanSea. The sub-
tropical belt was doubled in breadth after the ice on the polar caps had
melted. To the north of the zone of habitationlie prairiesand meadows
where countless herds of domestic animalsgraze....
'One of man'sgreatest pleasuresis travel, an urge to move from place
to place that we have inheritedfrom our distantforefathers,the wandering
huntersand gatherersof scanty food. Today the entire planet is encircled
by the SpiralWay whose giganticbridgeslink all the continents.... Electric
trainsmove along the SpiralWay all the time and hundredsof thousandsof
people can leave the inhabited zone very speedily for the prairies,open
fields, mountainsor forests.'7
The question one must address to such a work-the analytical way into
the utopian text in general from Thomas More all the way down to this
historically significant Soviet novel-turns on the status of the negative in
what is given as an effort to imagine a world without negativity. The repres-
sion of the negative, the place of that repression, will then allow us to
formulate the essential contradiction of such texts, which we have expressed
in a more abstract fashion above, as the dialectical reversal of intent, the
inversionof representation,the "ruseof history"whereby the effort to imagine
utopia ends up betraying the impossibility of doing so. The content of such
repressed "semes"of negativity will then serve as an indicator of the ways in
which a narrative's contradiction or antinomy is to be formulated and
reconstructed.
Efremov's novel is predictably enough organized around the most
obvious dilemma the negative poses for a utopian vision: namely, the
irreducible fact of death. But equally characteristically, the anxiety of
individual death is here "recontained"as a collective destiny, the loss of the
starshipParvus, easily assimilable to a whole rhetoric of collective sacrifice in
the service of mankind. I would suggest that this facile topos functions to
displace two other, more acute and disturbing,forms of negativity. One is the
emotional fatigue and deep psychic depression of the administrator Darr
Veter, "cured" by a period of physical labor in the isolation of an ocean
laboratory; the other is the hubris and crime of his successor, Mven Mass,
whose personal involvement with an ambitious new energy programresults in
a catastrophic accident and loss of life. Mven Mass is "rehabilitated"after a
stay on "the island of oblivion," a kind of idyllic Ceylonese Gulag on which
deviants and anti-socials are released to work out their salvation in any way
they choose. We will say that these two episodes are the nodal points or
symptoms at which the deeper contradictions of the psychiatric and the
penal, respectively, interrupt the narrative functioning of the Soviet Utopian
Imagination.Nor is it any accident that these narrativesymptoms take spatial

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 PROGRESSVERSUS UTOPIA 155

and geographical form. Already in Thomas More, the imagining of Utopia is

constitutively related to the possibility of establishing some spatial closure
(the digging of the great trench which turns "Utopia" into a self-contained
island).8The lonely oceanographic station and the penal island thus mark the
return of devices of spatial closure and separation which, formally required
for the establishment of some "pure"and positive utopian space, thus always
tend to betray the ultimate contradictions in the production of utopian
figures and narratives.
Other people's ideologies always being more "self-evident"than our
own, it is not hard to grasp the ideological function of this kind of non-
conflictual utopia in a Soviet Union in which, according to Stalin's canonical
formula, class struggle was at the moment of "socialism"supposed to have
come to an end. Is it necessary to add that no intelligent Marxist today can
believe such a thing, and that the process of class struggle is if anything
exacerbated precisely in the moment of socialist construction, with its
"primacyof the political"? I will nevertheless complicate this diagnosis with
the suggestion that what is ideological for the Soviet reader may well be
Utopian for us. We may indeed want to take into account the possibility that
alongside the obvious qualitative differences between our own First World
culture (with its dialectic of modernism and mass culture) and that of the
Third World, we may want to make a place for a specific and original culture
of the Second World, whose artifacts (generally in the form of Soviet and
East European novels and films) have generally produced the unformulated
and disquieting impression on the Western reader or spectator of a simplicity
indistinguishable from naive sentimentalism. Such a renewed confrontation
with Second World culture would have to take into account something it is
hard for us to remember within the ahistorical closure of our own "socie'tede
consommation": the radical strangeness and freshness of human existence
and of its object world in a non-commodity atmosphere, in a space from
which that prodigious saturation of messages, advertisements, and packaged
libidinal fantasies of all kinds, which characterizes our own daily experience,
is suddenly and unexpectedly stilled. We receive this culture with all the
perplexed exasperation of the city dweller condemned to insomnia by the
oppressive silence of the countryside at night; for us, then, it can serve the
defamiliarizing function of those wondrous words which William Morris
inscribed under the title of his own great Utopia, "an epoch of rest."
All of this can be said in another way by showing that, if Soviet images
of Utopia are ideological, our own characteristically Western images of
dystopia are no less so, and fraught with equally virulent contradictions.9
George Orwell'sclassical and virtuallyinauguralwork in this sub-genre, 1984,
can serve as a text-book exhibit for this proposition, even if we leave aside its
more obviously pathological features. Orwell'snovel, indeed, set out explicitly
to dramatize the tyrannical omnipotence of a bureaucratic elite, with its
perfected and omnipresent technological control. Yet the narrative, seeking
to reinforce this already oppressive closure, subsequently overstates its case
in a manner which specifically undermines its first ideological proposition.
For, drawing on another topos of counterrevolutionaryideology, Orwell then
sets out to show how, without freedom of thought, no science or scientific
progress is possible, a thesis vividly reinforced by images of squalor and
decaying buildings. The contradiction lies of course in the logical impossi-
bility of reconciling these two propositions: if science and technological
mastery are now hampered by the lack of freedom, the absolute technological
power of the dystopianbureaucracyvanishes along with it and "totalitarianism"

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156 SCIENCE-FICTIONSTUDIES, VOLUME9 (1982)

ceases to be a dystopia in Orwell's sense. Or the reverse: if these Stalinist

masters dispose of some perfected scientific and technological power, then
genuine freedom of inquiry must exist somewhere within this state, which was
precisely-what was not to have been demonstrated.

4. The thesis concerning the structural impossibility of utopian representa-

tion outlined above now suggests some unexpected consequences in the
aesthetic realm. It is by now, I hope, a commonplace that the very thrust of
literary modernism-with its public introuvable and the breakdown of
traditional cultural institutions, in particular the social "contract" between
writer and reader-has had as one significant structural consequence the
transformationof the cultural text into an auto-referential discourse, whose
content is a perpetual interrogation of its own conditions of possibility.10We
may now show that this is no less the case with the utopian text. Indeed, in
the light of everything that has been said, it will not be surprisingto discover
that as the true vocation of the utopian narrative begins to rise to the
surface-to confront us with our incapacity to imagine Utopia-the center of
gravity of such narratives shifts towards an auto-referentialityof a specific,
but far more concrete type: such texts then explicitly or implicitly, and as it
were against their own will, find their deepest "subjects"in the possibility of
their own production, in the interrogation of the dilemmas involved in their
own emergence as utopian texts.
Ursula Le Guin's only "contemporary"SF novel, the underratedLathe
of Heaven (1971), may serve as documentation for this more general proposi-
tion. In this novel, which establishes Le Guin's home city of Portland,Oregon,
alongside Berkeley and Los Angeles, as one of the legendary spaces of
contemporary SF, a hapless young man finds himself tormented by the
unwanted power to dream "effective dreams," those which in other words
change external reality itself, and reconstruct the latter's historical past in
such a way that the previous "reality"disappears without a trace. He places
himself in the hands of an ambitious psychiatrist,who then sets out to use his
enormous proxy power to change the world for the benefit of mankind. But
reality is a seamless web: change one detail and unexpected, sometimes
monstrous transformationsoccur in other apparently unrelated zones of life,
as in the classical time-travel stories where one contemporary artifact, left
behind by accident in a trip to the Jurassicage, transformshuman history like
a thunderclap. The other archetypal reference is the dialectic of "wishes"in
fairy tales, where one gratification is accompanied with a most unwanted
secondary effect, which must then be wished away in its turn (its removal
bringing yet another undesirable consequence, and so forth).
The ideological content of Le Guin's novel is clear, although its political
resonance is ambiguous: from the central position of her mystical Taoism,
the effort to "reform"and to ameliorate, to transform society in a liberal or
revolutionaryway is seen, after the fashion of Edmund Burke, as a dangerous
expression of individual hubris and a destructive tampering with the rhythms
of "nature."Politically, of course, this ideological message may be read either
as the liberal's anxiety in the face of a genuinely revolutionarytransformation
of society or as the expression of more conservative misgivings about the
New-Deal type reformism and do-goodism of the welfare state."
On the aesthetic level, however-which is what concerns us here-the
deeper subject of this fascinating work can only be the dangers of imagining
Utopia and more specifically of writing the utopian text itself. More
transparently than much other SF, this book is "about" its own process of

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 PROGRESSVERSUS UTOPIA 157

production, which is recognized as impossible: George Orr cannot dream

Utopia; yet in the very process of exploring the contradictions of that pro-
duction, the narrative gets written, and "Utopia" is "produced"in the very
movement by which we are shown that an "achieved" Utopia - a full
representation-is a contradiction in terms. We may thus apply to The Lathe
of Heaven those prophetic words of Roland Barthes about the dynamics of
modernism generally, that the latter's monuments "linger as long as possible,
in a sort of miraculous suspension, on the threshold of Literatureitself [read,
in this context: Utopial, in this anticipatory situation in which the density of
life is given and developed without yet being destroyed through its consecra-
tion as an [institutionalized]sign system.""2
It is, however, more fitting to close this discussion with another SF-
Utopian text from the Second World today, one of the most glorious of all
contemporary Utopias, the StrugatskyBrothers' astonishing Roadside Picnic
(1977; first serialized in 1972).'3This text moves in a space beyond the facile
and obligatory references to the two rival social systems; and it cannot be
coherently decoded as yet another samizdat message or expression of liberal
political protest by Soviet dissidents.'4Nor, although its figural material is
accessible and rewritable in a way familiar to readers who live within the
rather different constraints of either of the two industrial and bureaucratic
systems, is it an affirmation or demonstration of what is today called "con-
vergence" theory. Finally, while the narrativeturns on the mixed blessings of
wonder-workingtechnology, this novel does not seem to me to be programmed
by the category of "technological determinism"in either the Western or the
Eastern style: that is, it is locked neither into a Western notion of infinite
industrial progress of a non-political type, nor into the Stalinist notion of
socialism as the "development of the forces of production."
On the contrary, the "zone"- a geographical space in which, as the
result of some inexplicable alien contact, artifacts can be found whose
powers transcend the explanatorycapacities of human science - is at one and
the same time the object of the most vicious bootlegging and military-
industrial Greed, and of the purest religious-I would like to say Utopian-
Hope. The "quest for narrative,"to use Todorov's expression,15is here very
specifically the quest for the Grail; and the Strugatskys' deviant hero -
marginal, and as "antisocial"as one likes; the Soviet equivalent of the ghetto
or countercultural anti-heroes of our own tradition- is perhaps a more
sympathetic and human figure for us than Le Guin's passive-contemplative
and mystical innocent. No less than The Lathe of Heaven, then, Roadside
Picnic is self-referential,its narrativeproduction determined by the structural
impossibility of producing that Utopian text which it nonetheless miracu-
lously becomes. Yet what we must cherish in this text -a formally ingenious
collage of documents, an enigmatic cross-cuttingbetween unrelatedcharacters
in social and temporal space, a desolate reconfirmation of the inextricable
relationship of the utopian quest to crime and suffering, with its climax in the
simultaneous revenge-murder of an idealistic and guiltless youth and the
apparition of the Grail itself- is the unexpected emergence, as it were,
beyond "the nightmareof History"and from out of the most archaic longings
of the human race, of the impossible and inexpressible Utopian impulse here
none the less briefly glimpsed: "Happiness for everybody! ... Free! ... As
much as you want! ... Everybody come here! ... HAPPINESS FOR EVERY-
BODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!"

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158 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 9 (1982)

NOTES

1. See, on Verne, Pierre Macherey'sstimulatingchapter in Pour une theorie de

la production litteraire (Paris, 1966).
2. The literature on Wells is enormous: see, for an introduction and select
bibliography,Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, 1979).
This work is a pioneering theoretical and structural analysis of the genre to which I
owe a great deal.
3. See The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY:1981).
4. An important discussion of Scotland's unique place in the development of
capitalism can be found in Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: New Left
Books, 1977).
5. Fredric Jameson, "On Raymond Chandler," Southern Review, 6 (Summer
1970):624-50.
6. A fuller discussion of these propositions and some closer analyses of More's
Utopia in particular, will be found in my review-article of Louis Marin's Utopiques
(which also see!), "Of Islands and Trenches," Diacritics, 7 (June 1977):2-21.See also
the related discussion in "World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian
Narrative,"SFS, 2 (1975):221-30.
7. Ivan Efremov, Andromeda (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1959), pp. 54-55.
8. Compare "Of Islands and Trenches" (see note 6).
9. In other words, to adapt Claudel's favorite proverb, "le pire n'est pas toujours
sur, non plus!"
10. See my The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, 1972), pp. 203-05.
11. That the author of The Dispossessed is also capable of indulging-in a
classical Dostoyevskian and counterrevolutionaryanti-utopianismmay be documented
by her nasty little fable, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," in The Wind's
Twelve Quarters (NY: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 275-84.
12. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin
Smith (London, 1967), p. 39.
13. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, trans. A.W. Bouis (NY:
Macmillan, 1977).
14. This is not to say that the Strugatskyshave not had their share of personal
and publishing problems.
15. Tzvetan Todorov, Poetique de la prose (Paris, 1971).

RESUME

Fredric Jameson. Progres contre Utopie, ou: Pouvons-nous imaginer l'avenir.-Les

nouvelles theories de l'ideologie permettent de saisir plutot de pretendus concepts,
tels que "leprogres ", comme des symptomes (narratifs) de tout un rapport pratique
'a l'histoire et 'a l'avenir (aussi bien qu'au passe). La science-fiction, comme genre
emergeant, est a' voir comme le substitut de ce qu'e'taitle roman historique pour la
conscience de classe bourgeoise au debut du 19e siecle (selon Lukacs). De meme
que le roman historique, ses representations ne visent qu'en apparence cet autre du
present qui serait l'avenir ou le passe; en fait, ses detours narratifs sont autant de
strategies pour rendre l'historicite du pre'sent, de plus en plus inaccessible dans nos
societes actuelles. D'oui la fonction de l'utopie comme forme apparentee a' la
science-fiction: sa nature profonde n'e'tantpas de representer ou dimaginer un
avenir ve'ritable, mais bien plutot de denoncer nos incapacites a' le concevoir, la
cloture de nos imaginations, l'impossibilite oui nous sommes, dans la societet
actuelle, d'elaborer une vision concrete d'une retalite'radicalement autre.(FJ)

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