Beyond Utopia?: Response from Amanda Ciafone
“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”
Saturday, May 26, 2012
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Mohammed Bamyeh
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by Unit for Criticism
“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”
Written by Amanda Ciafone (Macalester College)
To begin to open up a conversation between the papers of the last two days, I’d like to use Jameson’s argument for a pedagogical operation to read the Utopian impulse rather than the praxis of Utopia, and identify some of the dialectic and agonistic approaches we’ve seen during the conference. And then I’d like to ask, quite sincerely (and not answer), why it is some of the most powerful theorists of the contemporary moment have seen neither Utopian impulse nor praxis in the “multitudes” and “horizontality” that has emerged in the recent social movements and Middle East "springs."
“Utopia,” Jameson writes in Valences of the Dialectic , “is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world,” except of course in the direction of dystopia and catastrophe. For Jameson, this operation, or “utopology,” is interpreting what he calls the Utopian impulse, which does not correspond to a plan or praxis, but instead “expresses Utopian desire and invests it in a variety of unexpected and disguised, concealed, distorted ways” (415). It therefore calls for “a decipherment and a reading of Utopian clues and traces in the landscape of the real …[where even] the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfillments and Utopian gratifications” (416). These “hidden traces and signs of Utopianism that lie in wait in the world about us” are much like what Raymond Williams would call “the emergent” of the future in the present and they become more visible in the disentangling of the negative from the positive in a process like Foucault’s “genealogy,” but instead uncovering the “genealogies of the future.”
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