Utopias

s – which are what utopia won’t be like? Um….sounds to me like Jameson has been reading too many Philip Dick novels. They can get to you that way.

Can reading science fiction, I asked, help us decide between various utopian alternatives – urban vs. pastoral, statist vs. anarchistic? No, replied Jameson, insisting there are ”utopian elements” in each of these. What science fiction does afford us, he said, ”is not a synthesis of these elements but a process where the imagination begins to question itself, to move back and forth among the possibilities.”

Well yes, science fiction can liberate the imagination, and I always thought there was something significant in the fact that, for me and I’m sure for many others, science fiction gave way at the end of the Seventies, along with the arrival of Thatcher and Reagan, with a switch to thrillers as the preferred form of popular literature. Some sort of dream had died, and we had to deal with a harsh reality. So I’m not unsympathetic to the idea of the imagination questioning things – but times have changed, and I’m not sure that a return to the science fiction of the Sixties and Seventies, frankly, has much to offer. Certainly much of the left recently appears to have run out of ideas: it’s the neo-cons who’ve proposed that parts of the world, like Iraq or Afghanistan, might conceivably become democracies, against the appalled opposition of a left that can only find consolation in the – all too frequent – setbacks. But it’s not utopian to hope that democracy can spread, and it’s certainly not more utopian visions that the left needs now.