The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson

Author(s): PETER FITTING

Source: Utopian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1998), pp. 8-17
Published by: Penn State University Press
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The Concept ofUtopia
in theWork of Fredric Jameson
PETER FITTING

"The world has long since dreamed of something

of which itneeds only to become conscious for it
to possess it in reality."
?
Marx, Letter toRuge,
September, 1843, cited in Jameson 1994a: 75

One manifestation of the collapse of the consensus inAmerican politics in

the nineteen-sixties was the revival of Utopian writing, which took place pri
marily within the generic boundaries of science fiction;1while, on another
level, therewas a parallel development in theoreticalwriting, prompted by
the growing discovery of thewriting of the Frankfurt School (and in partic
ular in this context of thework of Herbert Marcuse, then living in theUS
and whose 1955 Eros and Civilization can be seen as one as the firstmajor
theoretical text of the Utopian revival). In the following I review Fredric
Jameson's engagement with these literarydevelopments and the concept of
Utopia as ithas evolved over the past twenty-six years, from the perspective
of someone who writes about literaryUtopias and science fiction.2
Jameson's first contribution to the development of Utopian studies fol
lows from his presentation of "dialectical thinking" inMarxism and Form
(1971) with its influential discussion of Bloch and Marcuse, and his defence
of the timeliness of the Utopian impulse:
For where in the older society (as inMarx's classic analysis) Utopian thought
represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfilments and

imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very nature of the Utopian concept
has undergone a dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which every
where represents a capitulation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to
the power of that system to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror

image. The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world
qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of
all that is. (1971: 110-111)

In the 1960s, Utopian writing inNorth America found a home in science

fiction, a genre better suited to the task of imagining "a world qualitatively
distinct from this one" than was the realism of mainstream fiction. The
enlargement of science fiction, from hardware and adventure to social con
cerns began with the critique of the status quo and soon turned to more

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 The Concept ofUtopia 9

explicit "thought experiments." While therewas science fiction which pre

sented a critique of capitalism or of the US intervention in Vietnam, the
most importantnew thematic area followed the fault line of gender. Ursula
K. Le Guin's celebrated science fiction novel dealing with sex and gender,
The LeftHand ofDarkness (1969)?was followed by a series of science fic
tion Utopias in the 1970s: beginning with her own The Dispossessed (1974),
Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), Samuel Delany's Triton (1976) and
Marge Piercy's Woman on theEdge of Time (1976)?to name only a few of
the best known of theseworks.3
Jameson was well aware of these popular Utopian novels, and in 1975
he wrote about Le Guin's The Left Hand ofDarkness ("World Reduction in
Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative"). A few years later he used
the occasion of an essay on Louis Marin's book on Utopia (Utopiques: Jewc
despace) to introduce Le Guin's The Dispossessed to a more theoretically
inclined audience which was not so well acquainted with science fiction
("Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian
Discourse" 1977). Then, in a continuing extension of Bloch's recovery of
the Utopian impulses at work inmass cultural phenomena, he furtherelabo
rated the idea of a dialectic between ideology and Utopia. His article "Reifi
cation and Utopia inMass Culture" (1979) explored this dialectic in terms
of popular culture; and then, in The Political Unconscious (1981), he
extended this concept, explaining that "all class consciousness?or in other
words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including themost exclusive forms
of ruling-class consciousness just as much as thatof oppositional or oppressed
classes?is in itsvery nature Utopian"(1981: 289).
Jameson's presentation and reworking of the concept of the Utopian
impulse has had a tremendous influence on literary studies inNorth Amer
ica, particularly as a way of dealing with popular culture from a Marxist
as
perspective, for it avoided the extremes of straightforward enthusiasm
well as that of disdain for popular culture as mere commodification and
manipulation. Yet the impact of his ideas on Utopian studies has been mixed
since the recognition that there is a Utopian dimension in all cultural mani
festations has sometimes led critics to confuse the Utopian impulse with the
as literaryUtopias,
literaryUtopia and to claim a variety of unrelated works
leading to an unhelpful inflation of our field of study.
From the perspective of those of us who work on and write about
Utopian fiction, Jameson's most fruitfuland troubling intervention lies else
where, in his proposal that the literaryUtopia should not be seen as the rep
resentation of an ideal society, but as a reflection on "our own incapacity to
conceive [utopia] in the first place" (1975: 230). This argument, first
advanced in the conclusion of his article on Le Guin's The Left Hand of
Darkness (1975), was fully elaborated in his 1977 analysis of Marin's Uto
piques, and again in the 1982 article "Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We
Imagine the Future," inwhich he discussed the Strugatsky brothers' Road
side Picnic. There he wrote that our "constitutional inability to imagine
Utopia itself, [is not due] to any individual failure of imagination but is the

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10 UTOPIAN STUDIES

result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all
in one way or another prisoners." (1982: 153) Instead of a mode of repre
sentation, then, the literaryUtopia is "a determinate type of praxis" (1977:
6), whose firstoperation is the "neutralization" of the real: "In the case of
the Utopian narrative, the place of the Real?of thatwhich must first be
constituted within thework before itcan be dissolved or 'neutralized' by the
work as process?may be identified by the obsessive references to actuality
which seem part of the conventions of such texts ..." (1977: 10).
Thus, in his discussion of Le Guin's The Dispossessed, for instance
(and I am takingmy examples from other critics writing about the novel),
instead of writing about Le Guin's use of Bakunin or the feasibility of the
Anneresti system for assigning work, instead of critiquing the sexual poli
tics demonstrated in Shevek's monogamous, heterosexual relationship with
Takver, Jameson argues that
it is only in terms of a more conventionally novelistic and more properly repre
sentational standard of literature that [The Dispossessed] can be reproached for
the poverty of its political concepts and the naivete of its view of present-day
world history; ifon the contrary we adopt Marin's view of the Utopian as proc
ess and production, we will see that it is precisely such stereotypicality, and the
raw material
conventionality of Le Guin's own liberalism, which constitute the
upon which her Utopian praxis must do itswork of transformation. (1977: 8)
In thisway, ifwe refer to the familiar definitions of the literaryUtopia
as containing both the critique of the author's existing society as well as a
model for a better one (e.g. Suvin: 54), "neutralization," in Jameson's
dynamic terms,may be seen as an analogue to the idea of critique or nega
tion.This dynamic critique
has less to do with the construction and perfection of someone's "idea" of a

"perfect society" than it does with a concrete set of mental operations to be per
formed on a determinate type of raw material given in advance, which is con

temporary society itself?or what amounts to the same thing, on those collective
representations of contemporary society that inform our ideologies just as they
order our experience of daily life. (1977: 6)

For the critic, then, it is not (only) a question of identifying these "men
tal operations," but the "collective representations," and more specifically?
and in familiar Jamesonian terms?of uncovering the buried and repressed
contradictions which it is the text's function to "resolve" or "neutralize." In
reference toXenakis's project for a "cosmic vertical city," for instance, Jame
son asks what purpose thisvision serves, and then turns to our contradictory
feelings about the city itself:
Our point of departure for such a reconstruction is the nature of Xenakis'

U-topia itself, the fundamental features of that ultimate not-place or non-place

which he invented to neutralize the contradictions of contemporary thinking
about the city.We must therefore try to reorganize the latter in such a way as to
articulate our own ideology of the city, our own fuzzy stereotypes and fan
tasies,into a system of determinate antinomies and aporias into which the
seen to be locked.
thought of theWestern city-dweller about his city can be
(1977: 12)

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 The Concept ofUtopia 11

As I said above, for those of us interested in literaryUtopias, Jameson's

arguments are provocative. Despite Jameson's contention that literary Uto
pias are a "type of praxis" rather than a "mode of representation," theynone
theless continue to be read and understood as if theywere meant to be taken
literally, as designs for, or at least images of, a better society. Inmaking his
argument Jameson examines several of themost significant works of the
Utopian revival of the 1970s, which do include textual reservations about
their own representability (for this see Tom Moylan's discussion of the
"critical Utopia" in his book, Demand the Impossible), but these works are
only a few of themany Utopian novels published in thatperiod, whose writ
ers, readers and critics have continued to use representational categories to
understand and discuss them.4
Reading fictional Utopias literally has a long history, as can be seen in
the most famous American Utopia?Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
(1888)?which had a immediate practical effect: the launching of a national
political movement. Within months of the book's publication the first
Nationalist Club was founded to propagate Bellamy's ideas (as expounded
inLooking Backward). "By February 1891 therewere 165 Nationalist Clubs
spread across 27 states of theUnion, togetherwith a host of more informal
Bellamy clubs ..." (Kumar 136). These clubs played an important role in
the founding of thePeople's Party and in the 1892 presidential elections.
Already inMarxism and Form Jameson had written that:
when the literary work attempts to use this Utopian material directly, as con
tent, in secular fashion, as in the various literary Utopias themselves, there
results an impoverishment which is due to the reduction of the multiple levels
of the Utopian idea to the single, relatively abstract field of social planning.
(1971:145-146)
Impoverishment and misreadings perhaps, but readings nonetheless, which
many authors feel was thewhole purpose of the exercise in the firstplace.
There have been suggestions for distinguishing Utopian novels from prop
erly literal schemes for social transformation as a way of resolving this
problem, but to do so we would have to ignore not only the impact of Bel
lamy's novel, but themixing of genres within many literaryUtopias as well,
like?for instance?the Constitution appended toH.L Hunt's Alpaca Revis
ited (1967?a book which also includes an appendix composed of the
mostly pro forma replies of various "Heads of Foreign Nations" towhom
Hunt had sent copies of his model constitution). Going in the opposite
direction in this blurring of the line between fiction and non-fiction, there is
the example of the Utopian dream which Andre Gorz appended to his 1988
essay Farewell to theWorking Class.
Other critics have argued that the Utopian novels of the 1970s moved
beyond such literalism, yet as the dates of these last examples suggest,
recent Utopian writing has not abandoned representation. For every 1970s
Utopian novel which includes an acknowledgment of the dilemma of repre
sentation, as in Le Guin's subtitling The Dispossessed an "ambiguous
Utopia," there are as many blueprints, of which themost famous would be

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 12 UTOPIANSTUDIES

Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) and its 1981 "prequel" Ecotopia

Emerging which, by attempting to explain how the Utopian society came
about, does then dissolve back into the real as political strategy replaces
Utopian vision.5
By some accounts, this discussion is no longer moot since?like other
developments in the 1960s?the high point of the flowering of literary
Utopias seems to have waned. Yet Utopian fiction does continue to appear,
while in Jameson's case there has been a shift or widening of focus in his
attention to themanifestations of the Utopian. In his 1988 "Utopianism after
the end of Utopia" (written as part of a catalogue for an exhibition of
"recent sculpture and photography"), Jameson acknowledges this shiftwhen
he writes that the utopianism of the literaryvisions of the 1970s now mani
fests itself in a very differentway, as part of what he sees as the "spatial
turn" of postmodernism: "the development of a whole range of properly
spatial Utopias inwhich the transformation of social relations and political
institutions is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the
humanbody" (1991: 160)
In Jameson's own writing, then, references to the Utopian have not
diminished, although the cultural artifacts he studies have changed. In the
preface to thePostmodernism book, for instance, he identifiesUtopia as one
of the "four themes" of the book: "Utopian representations knew an extraor
dinary revival in the 1960s. If postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties
and the compensation for theirpolitical failure, the question of Utopia would
seem to be a crucial test of what is leftof our capacity to imagine change at
all" (1991 :xvi).
Even as his interests have widened, Jameson has continued to seek out
literary Utopias, as in his lengthy analysis of Platonov's "peasant Utopia"
Chevengur in Seeds of Time ("Utopia, Modernism and Death," 1994a:
73-128). As he points out, this belated attention is linked to the novel's
publishing history, for although itwas written in the 1920s, was
it only pub
lished recently, emerging "in the last fifteen years ... as though only just
written down" (1994a: 78). In the same year, he turned his attention to one
of the classical writers of the Utopian canon, Charles Fourier ("Ontology
and Utopia") which did not deal directly with the nature of the literary
Utopia, but offered an evaluation of Fourier's "ontological vision," and of
his unique observations on group dynamics, an area of investigation which
is, as Jameson argues, central to any transformativeproject and yet has been
mostly ignored by political theorists (he discusses two important recent
exceptions in thework of Sartre and of Laclau and Mouffe). While this
leads to a fascinating discussion of Fourier's three "distributive" or "mecha
nizing" passions, it is not really relevant to the issues I have raised concerning
the literaryUtopia.
In a forthcoming article on theMars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson,6
Jameson turns again to the contemporary literary Utopia. While this is not
the place for a full discussion of this sprawling (and prize-winning) SF tril
ogy, it is important to note thatRobinson's work is already a step beyond

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 The Concept ofUtopia 13

the critical Utopias of the 1970s. Just as thoseworks were described as mov
ing beyond the presentation of the Utopian society as a no-place of static
perfection (as inBellamy, or even inCallenbach's Ecotopia), so Robinson's
novels move beyond that Utopian model. Those "critical Utopias" of the
1970s used narrative strategies which called into question thework's own
Utopian status, ending (as did Morris's News From Nowhere), with the
warning that the Utopian society will only come about if the reader becomes
involved (as in Piercy's Woman on The Edge of Time or in Russ's The
Female Man), or through the depiction of a Utopia in crisis because it has
stagnated and needs to be renewed (as in The Dispossessed). Yet however
much they included a critique of Utopia, they nonetheless shared a common
vision of the values theywere tryingto achieve and maintain. The Mars tril
ogy, on the other hand, is built on restaging those very debates and discus
sions about what the new society should be; Robinson brings to the familiar
plot of the colonization of Mars a whole range of Utopian questions, an
ongoing discussion elaborated in great and wonderful detail about what this
new world could and should be. It is not so much thatUtopia has receded?
although thatmight be a way of visualizing what is new about Robinson's
work?but that the author sets his Utopia at an earlier stage in the familiar
transition to the Utopian society, themoment when change is coming, when
all the discussions not only about how, but what the new society will be, are
still open. It is as if?even as our Utopian hopes have receded, or passed
behind a cloud?SF remains today, at "the end of history" (like JudithMer
ril's statement about SF being the only place one could write political fic
tion during the 50s),7 the only place where the discussions about the
possibility of an alternative society could be argued. As Jameson puts it in
his discussion of theMars trilogy:
[W]e do want to be able to think about "real" politics here and not merely about
its convincing or unconvincing "representation" in these episodes, which dra
matize our ideological objections and resistances to Utopia fully as much as

they satisfy our impulses towards it. Unlike the "monological" Utopias of the
tradition, which needed to dramatize a single Utopian possibility strongly
because of its repression from Terran history and political possibility, thismore

"dialogical" one includes the struggle between a whole range of Utopian alter
natives, about which itdeliberately fails to conclude. (27)

This receding of the Utopian moment?as manifest in the temper of the

times, and in the sense of the passing of a particular Utopian moment (which
we thought of as the 1960s)?is marked by a scaling back of the Utopian
visions of most of thewriters of the 70s Utopias (with the exception of
Piercy's 1991 He, She and It; U.K. as The Body of Glass). Although Robin
son had written a more traditional Utopia,8 here, inmoving beyond the criti
cal Utopias of the 1970s, it is as if his novels were written as an illustration
of Jameson's own statements about the impossibility of imagining Utopia,
(and it is perhaps relevant tomention thatRobinson is a former student of
Jameson's), a point which he reiterates in the conclusion of his article on
Robinson: "And it is also a structural presupposition of thisUtopia, since

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14 UTOPIAN STUDIES

we do not even witness its evolution as a narrative event: perhaps indeedwe

could not do so. Yet Utopia as a form is not the representation of radical
alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them" (36).
So where does this leave us? In a situation akin to that Jameson refers
to as that of the Utopia's effect on us, "in which themind is [brought] up
short before its own ideological limits, in a stunned and puzzled arrest of
thought before the double bind inwhich it suddenly finds itself paralysed"
(1977: 12) My double bind stems from the recognition, on the one hand,
that by accepting his arguments about the "true vocation" of the Utopia,
thereby abandoning the consideration of the Utopia in terms of its ability to
portray an alternative, we are apparently leftwith only its critical and neg
ative dimension. This certainly helps us to understand the "conditions of
possibility" of a specific Utopian work, and the buried contradictions it is
attempting to resolve, but itdoes not satisfactorily acknowledge the positive
aspects which brought us to Utopias in the first place. For many of us
became interested in literaryUtopias precisely insofar as theywere visions
of alternatives.
In a 1983 talk Jameson introduced the notion of "cognitive mapping"
which I would use to argue for the relevance of the literaryUtopia to this
continuing attempt to findways of imagining an alternative:
[There is] not a crisis in Marxist science [today, but] inMarxist ideology. If
ideology... is a vision of the future that grips the masses, we have to admit
... no Marxist or Socialist
that, save in a few ongoing collective experiments
party or movement anywhere has the slightest conception of what socialism or
communism as a social system ought to be and can be expected to look like.
That vision will not be purely economic. ... It is, as well, supremely social
and cultural, involving the task of trying to imagine how a society without hier
archy, a society of free people, a society that has at once repudiated the eco
nomic mechanisms of themarket, can possibly cohere. (1988: 355)

In one sense, the dilemma I am describing is analogous to the dilemma

facing any politicized approach to literatureor art, inwhich the activist asks
the theoretician if, beyond investigation and analysis, there is not some
place for the prescriptive, and in that sense, I can't help wondering if it is
not still useful to acknowledge the role thatUtopian representation plays in
the imagining of an alternative.
If the Utopia is to be considered as a form of praxis, itmust be one
which like the often cited bust of Apollo inRilke's sonnet, will force us to
acknowledge that "you must change your life."9Yet this is the crux of the
dilemma, for the specificity of the literaryUtopia lies not in some ideal of
beauty which reminds us of the insufficiency of our own lives, not in its
ability to express the Utopian impulse, to "figure" in some metaphorical way
"the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopia or classless soci
ety" (1981: 291), nor even to negate or neutralize ideological contradictions,
although the literaryUtopia may also do all of these things.Many of us still
think that the special task of the Utopia?and I am thinking precisely of the
revival of the 1970s?was to reach a differentaudience with images of,with

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 The Concept of Utopia 15

the look and feel and shape and experiences of what an alternative might
and could actually be, a thought experiment or form of "social dreaming"
(Sargent: 3) which gave us a sense of how our lives could be different and
better, not only in our immediate material conditions, but in the sense of an
entireworld or social system.
Yet those Utopias are no longer being written, and few would dispute
the link between Utopian writing?or its absence?and the larger social and
political context inwhich we now live. I have perhaps mistakenly given the
impression that in Jameson's analysis of works like Robinson's Mars trilogy
there is no place for the actual discussion of thework's Utopian features.
Rather, in his typical dialectical manner, Jameson moves between generic
considerations (e.g. the consideration of the relationship of science fiction
and Utopia, or of the possibility of Utopias today), and a description of the
properly Utopian (and dystopian) elements inRobinson's work:
[The Utopian text] is not supposed to produce this synthesis all by itself, or to
represent it: that is a matter for human history and for collective praxis. It is
supposed only to produce the requirement of the synthesis, to open the space
intowhich it is to be imagined. And this is the spirit inwhich the various politi
cal "solutions" of theMars trilogy are also to be evaluated: that they are numer
ous, and contradictory or even irreconcilable, is I believe an advantage and an
achievement in a contemporary Utopia, which must also, as Darko Suvin has
pointed out, stage an implicit debate with the objections and ideological and
political prejudices of its readers. (26)

I cannot resolve this dilemma, even formyself. Yet, at a timewhen the

Utopian seems to have receded it remains essential thatwe follow Jameson's
call to understand "the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which
we are all in one way or another prisoners" (1982: 153), a closure which
prevents us from imagining much less attaining thatbetter society of which
we dream. In the Platonov essay he describes what I might call a possible
"pre-utopian" project as follows:
This firstmoment of destruction and seeping away, then?what I have else
where called the moment of "world reduction" inUtopian discourse?will then
be followed by a process that itwould be too simple and misleading to call
reconstruction or Utopian construction, since in effect it involves the very
effort to find a way to begin imagining Utopia to being with. Perhaps in a more
Western kind of psychoanalytic language?with specific reference to the ori
gins of Freudianism in hysteria?we might think of the new onset of the
Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the inven
tion of the desire called Utopia in the first place, along with new rules for the

fantasizing or daydreaming of such a thing?a set of narrative protocols with

no precedent in our previous literary institutions . . . (1994a: 90)

NOTES
1. See for instance Darko Suvin's explanation that "Strictly and precisely speaking, Utopia is
not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction. Paradoxically, it can be seen as

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 16 UTOPIAN STUDIES

such only now that SF has expanded into its modern phase, 'looking backward' from its

englobing of Utopia" (Suvin 61). See also Moylan, passim.

For the larger politcal context, see Jameson's own historical account of these develop
ments in "Periodizing the 60s."
2. Although there have been references to the significance of this concept in Jameson's work,
there has not been a systematic discussion of it until this special issue of Utopian Studies. In
the Jameson issue of Critical Exchange, for instance, some of the essays briefly discuss the

concept, particularly in the context of the final chapter of The Political Unconscious. The
most extended such discussion is not an appraisal per se, but John Beverly's very productive

attempt to apply those insights to the development of poetry during the Spanish Golden Age
("The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia in Spanish Golden Age Poetry.") Similarly, the
articles in Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique sometimes refer in passing to the concept of

Utopia in his work, but without any sustained discussion.

In The Jamesonian Unconscious Clint Burnham writes that "Jameson's theory of Utopia
has three sources/implications: the positive and negative resonances inMarxist discourse; its
secular label of artistic 'content'; and its theologico-formal metaphysics" (57). As the quota
tion suggests, Burnham's approach is rather different from my own, and these insightful few
pages (55-69) are part of a much more complex attempt to write what he describes as "an

objectivation of theory via thework of Fredric Jameson" (xiv), rather than an examination of
the concept of Utopia.
3. For discussion of the development of science fiction in these terms, see my own "The
Modern Anglo-American SF novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation." For a dis
cussion of the major works of this Utopian revival, see my '"So We All Became Mothers':
New Roles forMen inRecent Utopian Fiction"; and Tom Moylan Demand The Impossible.
4. For a series of articles which use representational categories to discuss literary Utopias, see
the essays inRuby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds. Women in Search of Utopia.
InDemand theFuture Moylan writes that the critical Utopias of the 1970s should not be
seen as "blueprints or plans to be imposed by one author or by a central authority; rather they
are a diverse series of preconceptual images which express the realms behind that political
activity and anticipate the social alternatives thatmany are still working for" (198, my italics).

Moylan takes the expression "preconceptual images" from Sheila Rowbothan (in Beyond the
Fragments) where she wrote of the need "to make the creation of prefigurative forms an

explicit part of our movement against capitalism" (cited inMoylan, 196).

5. Another well-known example is the Susan Haden Elgin's novel Native Tongue (1984)
in which she describes fictionally her ongoing project for designing a Utopian language
which would then enable and produce a Utopian society. See the Laadan web-site at

www.interlog.com/~kms/laadan/ for a fuller explanation of this Utopian project.

6. The Mars trilogy consists of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1995).
7. "The most important secondary effect of the Bomb was not felt until the height of the
McCarthy era, when science fiction became, for a time, virtually the only vehicle of political
dissent..." (74), in "What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?"
8. Again a part of a trilogy, all set in Orange County, California, and portraying a series of

alternative, post collapse futures, of which only the last, Pacific Shore (1990) is a Utopia. The
worksare:TheWild Shore (1984) andTheGold Coast (1988).
othertwomore dystopian
9. When confronted with the headless statue of Apollo, the poet is driven to conclude (in the
final stanzas) that even so "his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp,
inwhich his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power," that if the statue were complete
itwould not have the same impact: "for here there is no place that does not see you. You must

change your life" ("Archaic Torso of Apollo").

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 The Concept ofUtopia 17

FREDRIC JAMESON:PRINCIPAL TEXTS ON UTOPIA

1971 Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton:
Princeton UP.
1975 World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative. Science-Fiction
Studies7 (November1975): 221-230.
1976 Introduction/Prospectus: To Reconsider theRelationship ofMarxism toUtopian Thought.
Minnesota Review (Spring 1976): 53-58.
1977 Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse.
Diacritics 7:2 (Summer 1977): 2-21.
1979 Reification and Utopia inMass Culture. Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130-148.
1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
1982 Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future. Science-Fiction Studies 27

(9:2 July1982): 147-158.

1984 "Periodizingthe60s" (rptd.inThe Ideologiesof Theory,vol 2 "The SyntaxofHis
tory/'Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988: 75-102.)
1988a Cognitive Mapping. In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg eds., Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 347-357.

1988b Utopianism after the end of Utopia, (in 1991, chap 6:154-180; 424-425).
1991 Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP.
1994a The Seeds of Time. NY: Columbia UP.
1994b Ontology and Utopia. P esprit createur XXXIV, 4 (Winter 1994): 46-64.
1998 "If I find one good city I will spare the man": Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley
Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Forthcoming in Estrangement and Cognition in Science
Fiction and Utopian Literature, ed. Patrick Parrinder, Liverpool UP.

REFERENCES
Beverly, John. "The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia in Spanish Golden Age Poetry." Criti
cal Exchange "Jameson Issue" #14: Fall 1983:102-123.
Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Fitting, Peter. "The Modern Anglo-American SF novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist
Cooptation," Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1979: 59-76).
_. "'So We All Became Mothers': New Roles forMen in Recent Utopian Fiction,"
Science-Fiction Studies 12 (1985: 156-183).
Kellner, Douglas, ed. Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique. Washington DC: Maisonneuve
Press, 1989.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopian and Anti-Utopia inModern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Merril, Judith. "What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?" inThomas Clareson ed. SF: The Other
Side of Realism. Bowling Green: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1971: 53-95.

Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science fiction and the Utopian imagination. NY:
Methuen, 1986.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by
Stephen Mitchell. NY: Random House, 1982.
Rohrlich, Ruby and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds. Women in Search of Utopia. NY:
Schocken, 1984.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited. Utopian Studies 5, 1
(1994): 1-37.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary
Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

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