Jacoby, Picture Imperfect (i) (2005)

Preface and Chapter 1

Jacoby, like many utopian scholars, attempts to distinguish two versions of utopia. He calls the two currents of utopian thought, the 'blue print tradition' and the 'iconoclastic tradition' (xiv). They are distinguishable in that the blue print tradition is content-driven, outlining what utopia might/should look like, down to small details such as eating etiquette, dress, etc. He wants to distance his project from this rigid understanding of utopia and instead embrace those iconoclastic utopians, 'those who dreamt of a superior society but who declined to give its precise measurements' (xv). In this sense he alligns himself with Bloch, in that he is more interested in a utopian impulse or spirit.

Jacoby sets out to attempt to explain why he thinks 'the utopian vision has flagged' through a three part hyphothesis: the collapse of communism, the assumed connection between utopians and totalitarians, and an impoverished Western imagination (5). While pointing to his inability to add much to the fall of communism other than to suggest a wholesale rejection of all thinking connected to communism need not be thrown out tout court, Jacoby's main concerns is to splinter utopia from its connotation as necessarily totalitarian or, in other words, as a path to dystopia. He argues that utopia/dystopia is a false dichotomy, pointing to how dystopia has been seen as the necessary outcome of utopia, thereby emptying utopia itself. He provides a rich review of the most famous dystopian novels (1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World) to argue for their critiques of totalitarianism, rather than utopia. He further traces through the many publications, mostly focused on Nazism and genocide, that take utopia and totalitarianism to be necessarily yoked together. Jacoby argues that it is not utopian designs that lead to war, violence, and genocide but rather ethnic, religious, or nationalist agendas. Second, Jacoby argues that the position of imagination in both utopia and totalitarianism further cleaves them from one another. While imagination is integral to utopia, it threatens totalitarianism. However, Jacoby diagnoses a contemporary impoverishment of imagination. His concept of imagination links it to childhood, a space which he argues sustains imagination. He points to contemporary childhood as being 'colonized' by television, boredom, and the toy market which has created 'less inclination - and perhaps fewer resources - for utopian dreaming' (30).

Jacoby wants to insist on moving away from blue print utopias: 'The blueprints not only appear repressive, they also rapidly become outdated' (32). I think this part is interesting because it belies his belief in a universal tradition, like Bloch. He also emphasizes that the iconoclastic utopians held on to what could potentially be categorized as utopian affects: 'harmony, leisure, peace, and pleasure' (33). He is also keen to suggest that the Jewishness of these iconoclastic utopians may have something to do with their refusal of images, their resistance to drawing out their utopias. Further, he remarks that the refusal to sketch out utopia 'refuses to reduce the unknown future to the well-known present, the hope to its cause' (36). He wants to insist on utopia as no-place and I am wary of this tendency to agree with a universal utopian tendency that manages to free itself from particular presents.

Suvin, On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre (1972)

Suvin famously argues for the definition of SF as 'the literature of cognitive estrangement' (372). Suvin connects the subject-matter of the genre to a human curiosity of the unknown, whether it be a new space or, as has been more frequently the case since the industrial revolution, a new time. Further, a defining desire of the genre has been the 'hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good' (374). Suvin explains that at all costs, the SF genre holds up the possibility of other systems (374). These other systems are postulated through a fictional hypothesis and developed in SF with scientific rigor (374). It is this combination of 'factual reporting of fictions' aimed at 'implying a new set of norms' that can be said to define the attitude of estrangement (374). In other words, that which estranges is must be familiar enough to be recognized but it also is strange enough to hint towards the creative. It is this particular quality, or formal framework, that Suvin argues distinguishes SF from other genres. Suvin clarifies that his use of the words 'cognitiveness' or 'cognition' emphasizes a reflection on reality and 'implies a creative approach tending toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author's environment' (377). In other words, for Suvin, the category of the cognitive in SF is infused with a creative pull towards movement and change.

In comparison with other literary genres, Suvin argues that it is this mix of cognitive and creative that distinguishes SF. First, myth is opposed to the scientific, cognitive approach of SF because of the way it fixes human relations and offers explanations of essences. Suvin argues that SF, in contrast to myth, 'does not ask about The Man or The World, but which man?: in which kind of world?: and why such a man in such a kind of world?' (375). Second, SF is differentiated from the fairy tale precisely because the latter occurs in a world that is 'indifferent toward cognitive possibilities' (375). In other words, it does not use imagination to refer back to and understand reality. Third, the fantasy genre is aggressively opposed to the cognitive, 'committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment' (375). Fourth, Suvin argues that of all the comparisons, the pastoral is closer to SF in the way it imagines worlds without money, urbanization, etc., and thus can distill to important human motivations: 'erotics and power-hunger' (376). However, Suvin prefers to think of the pastoral as an early but unsophisticated approach to SF.

Suvin also clarifies that each of these genres has a unique relationship to time that is not compatible with SF. 'The myth is located above time, the fairy-tale in a conventional grammatical past which is really outside time, and the fantasy in the hero's abnormally disturbed present' (378). SF, on the other hand, 'concentrates on possible futures and their spatial equivalents, but it can deal with the present and the past as special cases of a possible historical sequence seen from an estranged point of view' (378). So while Suvin asserts that SF is indeed oriented 'futurologically' (379), he does seem to be suggesting that this temporal orientation might be bound up with pasts and presents.

Suvin again and again asserts that the challenge of SF is precisely the mix of the cognitive and creative. It is this mix that distinguishes it from other literary genres as well as gives it its unique relationship to time, imagination, and science.

Jameson, Progress Versus Utopia (1982)

Jameson's argues against SF as a representational drama which accustoms its readers to the rapidity of our present moment. Instead, he argues that these visions of a dizzying, rapid technological future are themselves 'historical and dated' (151). He starts by characterizing this notion of the 'future' as 'merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past' (151). This, he suggests, requires a shift in understanding of the function of present-day SF. Rather than give us images of the future, Jameson argues that SF's structure is 'to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present' (151). Indeed, but for Jameson, our own present in SF is experienced not as present, but instead it re-installs our present in History itself. In Jameson's conception, the past is 'dead' and the future is 'unthinkable' (152). Further, Jameson argues that the present is 'unavailable to us in its own right because of the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises' (152). It is SF's future imaginings then that function to transform 'our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come' (152). In SF, we experience our present as 'some future world's remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered' (152). Jameson argues that this is not only historical melancholy, but that it is comforting to be able to recognize our present day as not the 'end of history.' Through enabling an apprehension of a historical present, SF is not about keeping the future alive but instead to 'demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future' (153). It is this that Jameson characterizes as the nature of utopia as a genre in our contemporary time.

On the utopian genre specifically, Jameson argues that its purpose is to 'bring home in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutionally inability to imagine Utopia itself' (153). Jameson pushes for the importance of attending to the negative in utopian texts, as it is the place of that repression that will lead us to an understanding of the contradiction of utopian texts. This leads Jameson to his last claim, namely that if we accept that utopian narrative is about our inability to imagine Utopia, such texts then 'find their deepest "subjects" in the impossibility of their own production, in the interrogation of the dilemmas involved in their own emergence as utopian texts' (156).

To conclude, what I take from Jameson's article is that SF is about re-instating a sense of history in the present through enabling us to understand our present as a future past. Further, that the utopian genre specifically performs this inability to imagine a future utopia, but that it is this performance of failure that produces utopian texts.