Taking Science Fiction Seriously

“Today, it is science fiction that often carried the torch of the utopian aspiration.”

Introduction

Fredric Jameson is among the acclaimed theorists in the world today, influencing areas from literary analysis to political philosophy. Critical theorists like the late Mark Fisher (discussed here), literary interpreters like Chaohua Wang, and many others have been inspired by his challenging but ever rich account of what Jameson calls “late capitalism” and postmodernity. Now in his 80’s, Jameson continues to be active with a new book Allegory and Ideology, which was released with Verso Books this year.

While it would be impossible to summarize the richness of his work in this short article, I’d like to gesture to one of his more important ideas: the importance of science fiction and utopian literature as an artistic genre. He has written many essays on these subjects over the decades, but the most important source for understanding his perspective is probably the book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, which was published in 2005. Jameson argues that the fascination with science fiction and fantasy which has developed since the 1970’s stems in no small part from a growing sense of anomie. We increasingly find it very difficult to change the actual world we live in, given that it is so driven by the influence of money and power. And so we take various forms of solace in the fantastic worlds of our imagination where it is still possible to contemplate a radically different future.

Jameson on Postmodern Culture and Late Capitalism

To the reading public, Jameson is undoubtedly best known for his work on postmodern culture. His interest in postmodernity goes back a long way, and one can find references to it as early as 1971 essays like “Metacommentary.” However, Jameson hammered away, in particular, on this topic in the 1980’s and 1990’s. In 1984, his seminal paper “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” was released with the New Left Review and quickly sparked a storm of controversy. This was followed in 1991 by a book of the same name. In these pieces, Jameson argues that with the emergence of what Mandel called late capitalism, we also witnessed the development of a new kind of culture. In it, one saw the end of traditional ideologies and interpretations of everything from identities to value systems. This generated a very serious problem for post-modern subjects, who were unable to figure out who they were or what they should do by appealing to a living set of identities and values. What was instead available were the cultural products of mass media, presenting stereotyped and hyperreal images of the past. This offered a vampire-like power to live again on the sentimental nostalgia of the present. Many of us—eager and even desperate to find some bearing within an increasingly deconstructive post-modern culture—latched onto what Jameson called a “pastiche” of different tropes, identities, and values to help us make sense of the world.  As he put it in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:

“This approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way.  It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occulation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, though these inner contradictions, the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience.”