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

"I’m cheating a bit with this selection because it’s going to give me all of science fiction and fantasy for these five books, so I’m not going to have to choose my five favorite science fiction novels or fantasy novels. They’re all covered by this book. In the book, Fredric Jameson looks at the idea of utopia as being a form of political wish fulfillment. He quotes Freud writing on the unconscious that when we dream, our dreams are very interesting to us and boring to everyone else. The role of a writer is to try to make one’s dreams interesting to others and to try to make them universal. For example, if someone had a dream about being wildly popular and partying every day, or a nightmare about having to do their school exams all over again but this time in their underwear, this might say something about that person’s values or vulnerabilities but there’s no reason why anyone else should care. What the writer does is take those underlying, unconscious hopes and fears—in this case hopes and fears about being judged in different ways—and turn them into a story that speaks to others. Jameson sees utopia and dystopia as a political form of dreaming and nightmare. How do you make your unconscious political wishes or fears interesting to others? You try to tell a story about a whole world that others can care about – so the dream you share, the story you tell, is not just about yourself. The story you tell is about a shared world. These political problems that inspire the search for utopia really have only a certain number of dimensions. It might be the problem of labour, or the problem of time, or the problem of mortality, and so on. With that understanding of what utopia really is, Jameson argues that science fiction and fantasy —the genre of speculative fiction—are the art forms that let us explore and express our unconscious political dreams. The difference between the two is that science fiction tends to see science as a form of technology whereas fantasy (as a genre) tends to see nature in that way. In science fiction, a technology like androids might be how we explore and test our values around how labour is organised in our society. And in fantasy, a technology like sorcery might be how we explore our feelings about how power is distributed and used in our society. Ezra Pound said that the artists are the antennae of the species. Our writers, our creators, our filmmakers, are able to tune into aspects of the unconscious and tell us about it. So we can consider speculative fiction to be a wonderful mirror for revealing a community and their values, in ways that they might not be aware of themselves. As a policy-maker, you can only work within the range of a society’s cultural imagination. If you want to do more, then you have to find a way to make new stories. Frederic Jameson says even though texts about utopia are often presented as a blueprint—‘here’s a manifesto for what an ideal society should look like’, or, if it’s dystopia, ‘here’s a warning about what a terrible society would look like’—very often they’re not actually blueprints; they’re just a reaction to something in our world that’s gone wrong. They’re presented as a blueprint, but they are really just a kind of daydream with no serious indication of how they could become real. So we still don’t have a map to get to ‘the good place’. The danger is if a tech mogul mistakes the fantasy for a working blueprint, and expects their technology to deliver utopia: it won’t."