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• Title: Possible Fictions: Blochian Hope in the Scar (Report)
• Author : Extrapolation
• Release Date : January 22, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 196 KB

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To some, it has become axiomatic to consider utopia a bankrupt subject, the futile dreams of naive social reformers or a quaint literary genre suitable only for teaching us about former visions of the future. Yet, as Fredric Jameson points out in Archaeologies of the Future, we have never been more in need of utopian thought than in the present moment of spreading global capitalism and the erosion of many social gains made in the past century. "What is crippling," Jameson proposes, "is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available" (xii). In a context in which the right seems to have won important victories, not only in dominating the market and civil society but also in winning the consent of the majority of those subordinated to capital, there is still a trace of hope, as Carl Freedman reminds us in The Incomplete Projects. Despite their triumphs in economics and policy, Freedman argues, the right remain "haunted by a suspicion" that they are immersed in "a largely left-wing culture" (34), creating a context in which "it is in the domain of cultural production that radical ideas are most likely to gain a hearing in the society at large" (35). It is in this spirit of finding the trace of hope in the grim situation, a Blochian approach to culture which has influenced both Jameson and Freedman, that I turn to Mieville's The Scar, a novel not conventionally classified as a utopia. This novel is, as Jameson has argued about Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, an example of utopian form rather than content, utopia "not [as] the representation of radical alternatives ... [but] the imperative to imagine them" (416). Reading The Scar as utopian in form enables us to see how the novel engages with two of the troubling issues in utopian thought. First is what Jameson calls the "unknowability thesis" (142), that is, the problem that we cannot imagine utopia specifically because it is too different from the alienated social world we inhabit. Instead, all we can imagine are possible futures which are inevitably constrained to the horizon of "projections of our own society and its parochial obsessions" (Jameson 128). Second, all attempts explicitly to realize a utopian vision tend toward totalitarianism, an imposition by force of one's vision of the good society. Jameson provides an answer to the first difficulty in Archaeologies of the Future: "Utopian is no longer the invention and defense of a specific floorplan, but rather the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place,... no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its production and of the very process of construction as such" (217).

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