American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army

263 Pages·2016·1.79 MB·English

by  Fredric Jameson

AN
AMERICAN
UTOPIA
AN
AMERICAN
UTOPIA
Dual Power and the Universal Army
FREDRIC JAMESON, JODI DEAN,
SAROJ GIRI, AGON HAMZA,
KOJIN KARATANI, KIM STANLEY
ROBINSON, FRANK RUDA, ALBERTO
TOSCANO, KATHI WEEKS
EDITED BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
First published by Verso 2016
The collection © Verso 2016
The contributions © the contributors 2016
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-453-9 (PBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-452-2
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Press
Contents
Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams
Slavoj Žižek
1. An American Utopia
Fredric Jameson
2. Mutt and Jeff Push the Button
Kim Stanley Robinson
3. Dual Power Redux
Jodi Dean
4. The Happy Accident of a
Utopia
Saroj Giri
5. From the Other Scene to the Other State:
Jameson’s Dialectic of Dual Power
Agon Hamza
6. A Japanese Utopia
Kojin Karatani
7. Jameson and Method: On Comic
Utopianism
Frank Ruda
8. After October, Before
February: Figures of Dual
Power
Alberto Toscano
9. Utopian Therapy: Work, Nonwork, and
the Political Imagination
Kathi Weeks
10.The Seeds of Imagination
Slavoj Žižek
An America Utopia: Epilogue
Fredric Jameson
Notes
Index
Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams
Slavoj Žižek
Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia radically questions standard leftist
notions of an emancipated society, advocating—among other things—universal
conscription as the model for the communist reorganization of society, fully
acknowledging envy and resentment as the central problem of a communist
society, and rejecting dreams of overcoming the division between work and
pleasure. Endorsing the axiom that to change society one should begin by
changing one’s dreams about an emancipated society, Jameson’s text is ideally
placed to trigger a debate on possible and imaginable alternatives to global
capitalism.
This volume brings together Jameson’s pathbreaking text, especially revised
for this edition, with an original short story by Kim Stanley Robinson that plays
upon some of Jameson’s motifs, philosophers’ and political and cultural
analysts’ reactions to Jameson, and Jameson’s short epilogue. Although the
reactions are often critical toward Jameson, they all agree on the need to
radically rethink the leftist project.
Many leftists (and especially “leftists”) will definitely be appalled at what
they encounter in this volume—there will be blood, to quote the title of a well-
known film. But what if one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the left
another chance?
1
An American Utopia
Fredric Jameson
1.
We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last
decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable
dystopias, most of which look monotonously alike). Can these developments be
dated or periodized in some way? I have always been tempted to mark the end of
utopian production with Ernest Callenbach’s great Ecotopia of 1975, a work
whose most serious flaw, from today’s standpoint, is the absence of electronic or
informational technology. Maybe the utopian form, then, cannot integrate such
technology, or maybe on the other hand the Internet itself has soaked up many of
the available utopian fantasy impulses. Or was it the triumph of Reagan-
Thatcher financial deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s that spelled the
end of utopian thinking, at the same time that it seemed to seal the victory of late
capitalism over all imaginable, let alone practicable, alternatives?
In fact, the possibilities for utopian thinking were always bound up with the
fortunes of a more general concern, not to say obsession, with power. The
meditation on power was itself an ambiguous project. In the 1960s this project
was a utopian one: it was a question of thinking and reimagining societies
without power, particularly in the form of societies before power: here Lévi-