Land of a Thousand Dreams, Research Time, 02/09/2015

I finished reading Frederic Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future last night, which had some fascinating ideas, as you can tell from the last few weeks of me writing about it now and then. I found one confrontation in the book that I was hoping I’d see from the time I started it: Jameson the dedicated left-winger confronts the concept of utopia developed by Robert Nozick, a foundational philosopher of libertarian politics.

Jameson would be reluctant, I
think, to call a right-wing thinker
a utopian, but I think we have to
take that possibility of thought
seriously.

I wrote about Nozick quite a bit when I was reading his most famous and influential book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia last October. The last part has a very curious argument. Essentially, he describes a world where every community is organized according to its own ideal concept. 

Some are pure state communisms, some towns full of mercenary capitalist shysters, some Christian fundamentalists, some feudal states of lords and vassals, some anarchist communes where no money as such even functions. Everyone is free to live in whatever community suits their inclinations. 

Some communities will grow, some will shrink and whither away. The communities that thrive will be the styles of living best suited to human life and desires. That's utopia for Nozick.

It’s not only about the styles of ideal community that would emerge from this long-term self-selection experiment, but the ability to choose what ideal you want your life to embody in the first place. It’s also the seduction of free-market propaganda: only in a totally free market can you be totally free yourself.

Jameson puts his finger on precisely why free-market propaganda is as seductive as it is. There's a small kernel of truth to it. Being able to live as you want, exchanging in trades and contracts with other individuals on equal footing who themselves wouldn’t mess with your life, would actually be a paradise. 

The problem with this ideal is that everyone needs to be on equal footing, and stay there, for this utopia not to implode almost immediately. As it is, the global inequalities of wealth – comparing on individual, community, and national scales – are too massive for exploitation, intimidation, and domination not to be the name of the game. 

But the core of the idea remains a good one. For each person, each personality, each style of life, there will be an ideal society. And we should be able to explore those ideals to know which one we'd want most to live in. 

And in the modern nature of politics, this ability to pick and choose your utopia pragmatically matters more than ever. All people today have multiple identities, or at least are more conscious of their own multifaceted nature than they've ever been.

I think the multiple nature of human identity is another
reason why Rawls' thought experiment of the original
condition can't quite work. Emphasize some aspects of
my identity, and I'll get the fairest shake in one kind of
society. Emphasize some others, and I'll have the best
deal in different kinds of society. Those kinds of
society may not have enough in common to become
real at the same time.

I’m a white cis male working-class well-educated slightly-indebted Anglophone Canadian. This helps determine how I can act in political and social contexts. Socially conservatives today might decry this as a move toward identity politics, but who and what we are is actually the most important political question we can ask.

I can’t network in particular circles of rich folk at country clubs, for example, because I can't afford the cover. I can only take direct part in societies and discussions where the majority language is English, which is an advantage today, but can't get me everywhere. 

I can go safely to places where sexual harassment is frequent because I’m a man, so I'm not sexually harassed to any problematic frequency. I can interact fairly safely with police, and in fact, I know I won't interact with police very often at all, because I'm white and won't be singled out as a minority would. 

Who we are determines the limits of what we can do, and there are many different identities for each of us that condition all those limits. Each of those identities will have a different social and economic context where they’ll work best. 

That’s why the ability to choose your utopia based on what needs action now is so important. No utopia will ever be permanent, even for an individual.

History Creates Progress; It’s Called Time, Research Time, 28/08/2015

Wednesday was a crazy day. So I took the night off from writing a blog post. Today, we’re back, picking up what I posted on Wednesday about the problem of utopian politics in real life.

I want to get into some of the conceptual machinery behind the idea that turns so many people today against utopia. The entire revolutionary socialist movement, pretty much from Karl Marx onward, was about creating a radical change in human society that would transform its entire character. 

A young Josef Stalin even looks kind of
like he could be a film director.

But the only way to transform a whole society according to a specific program is with totalitarian dictatorship. Stalin as the artist and society as the materiel. This is basically why modern right-wing libertarian activists call all leftists Stalinists: they think the left is about revolutionary state socialism, and they think state socialism is the totalitarian transformation of society along a single program. 

Countering this vision is the core problem of the left in the 21st century. And the solution has to do with the way we think of time. When I eventually write the full Utopias manuscript, thinking about time is the thread running through the whole thing.

Here are some ideas I picked up and ran with in Frederic Jameson’s book on utopian thinking and literature, Archaeologies of the Future. 

A utopian society is perfect. Because such a society is perfect, we must resist all change. Any change from a perfect society is a degradation, a fall from grace, or at least a chip away from perfection. Therefore, the political imperative in a utopian society is to resist change, to suppress all innovations and discourage any radical change. 

The problem with this kind of politics is that it destroys and suppresses all human creativity. I’ll probably play around with Henri Bergson’s and Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of creativity in the text when I deal with this problem. It’ll explore how essential creativity and innovation is to human thinking. 

Our creative powers as a species are at the core of how successful we’ve become. Humanity has a history of adaptation to ecological changes that would (and did) wipe most other species out. That’s why I’m still a little hopeful that humanity can survive the Holocene Extinction, even though it’s also our fault.

The key here is, human creativity is necessary if we’re to respond to the world’s changes. This is where my influence from the American pragmatist tradition would show up in the manuscript. I’ll play with some of John Dewey’s ideas specifically. So we’re stuck with an explicit problem with utopia: by definition, it’s a human society that’s perfect and so must never change, but humanity is defined by our powers to change.

The end of season 9 of Trailer Park Boys saw Julian
literally transform Sunnyvale Trailer Park into an
anarchist utopia, a perfect community in an enclave
far from the oppressive shadow of Halifax.

Jameson discusses a paradox of utopia, but a different one. He talks about how all the real utopian programs that were developed were responses to concrete political problems that were singular to their authors’ times and cultures. Thomas More confronted English Christian extremism and the early Protestant movements. Karl Marx confronted the development of industrial capitalism and extreme exploitation of working people.

Yet utopias always present themselves as the universal solution to humanity’s ills, the perfect society not as a response to a historical issue, but as a literal heaven on Earth. This makes for an internal contradiction, a collision of the universal and the particular as the collision of Heaven and Earth. Jameson understands this paradox as a Derrida-style contradiction: thought is arrested, we hit the schizz point and can’t go further.

The current way I’m thinking about this is simply to double down on the historical aspect of utopian thinking. The will to universality is a feature of human egotism: we always think our own problems and our own society’s problems are the essential problems of human existence. But we’re wrong, and we don’t understand how different human societies genuinely can become if we give them enough time.

So the achievement of a utopian society inevitably collapses. Even if everyone is on board and there’s no repressive violence to force people to accord with the plan, the world will eventually make the plan obsolete. When the problems the utopia was meant to address are solved, the utopian society itself becomes a problem.

Progress is change.

When You’re Part of an Artwork Without Consent, Research Time, 26/08/2015

When humanity has dreamt of its perfect society, we tend to use art to do it. It might be through fictional stories of a visitor from our culture who tours Utopia, like Thomas More’s original Utopia text (which Frederic Jameson gives an extended treatment early in Archaeologies of the Future) or Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.*

* It was so early in long-form written literature as an art form that a trick as transparent as spelling “Nowhere” backwards counted as clever wordplay. 

Clooney plays a man who discovers utopia on a
planet-wide intelligent ocean.

Over the last hundred or so years, utopian fiction has become more sophisticated. A utopia is a place where a story happens, as in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, about a man who’s grown up on an egalitarian communist bureaucracy planet visits a capitalist world filled with wealth disparities and violent uprisings. 

Or else, utopia appears before a traveller from our world, in an unstable, strange form, like a living hallucination. Jameson’s key example of this more fleeting utopia, with its shakier foundations, is the oceanic life form in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. The cool part about this discussion was that he compared Lem’s original story to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet film to Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation starring George Clooney. They were all weird.

You should expect that art would be a primary focus in probing utopia. Even though philosophy writers have sometimes touched on the subject, that style always has an eye on the real world that art doesn’t always. 

A philosopher will probe what the perfect society could be as a series of arguments, often about things of real material import: moral principles, political and economic institutions, the human relationship with nature. 

You won’t always end up with a list of things that must be done to change this shitty world into that better one. But a philosophical argument is always rooted in the real world. An artwork can fly free of constraint.

The most radical utopian visions have to be imaginary, because when we put them into action in the real world, they rapidly become nightmarish. This is why so much real-world opposition to politics inspired by utopian thinking exists.

Designing a perfect society, says Jameson, is a form of art. Normally, it happens in a literary artwork, so nobody gets hurt when the statue of the body politic needs some rough sanding. But utopian politics has been real. And lots of people get hurt. 

Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris makes you feel how weird
such a utopia would be. He was quite likely killed by
the KGB, I think by surreptitious isotope dose, when
he was planning to defect to Italy in the 1980s.

Josef Stalin often painted himself in Soviet propaganda as the artist whose masterwork was Soviet society itself. Discussing this, Jameson calls back to the philosophical tradition’s best known utopian work, Plato’s Republic, and its ban on artists. Socrates, as the architect of the perfect society, is the only artist allowed.

Artists are people who produce creative works, obviously. But when the society itself is a single, massive creative work, other artworks are little competing visions of what the world could be – whether those other imagined worlds are utopian, dystopian, or just different. The utopia is one, and only one, such vision. 

That’s why autocratic and totalitarian politics follow from the real-world victory of utopian political movements. If utopia is achieved, then society is perfect. If society is genuinely perfect, then no one can legitimately think something would need to change. Anyone who wants to change the perfect society is a danger to everyone around him. He must be taken care of.

Alienating Labour III: The Better Way to Free Yourself, Research Time, 24/08/2015

So getting back to this question of labour, and what it means to be alienated from it. There have been a couple of tangents, one circumstantial, which was that I had to answer Steve’s question about my thoughts on protest politics. The other tangent, about shitty instruction in humanities, was organic to my writing, if aided by circumstance. 

And once again, Zeppo is erased. Still, it was basically
Zeppo's joke to be eraseable. I'm convinced that Zeppo
Marx was the most revolutionary comic genius
of his era. That's a blog post for another day, I think.

I realized that while I was discussing the mediocre accounts of Karl Marx’s philosophy that I learned as an undergraduate, two friends in the international Doctor Who community were having a ridiculous conversation with a Gamergater troll who, in a fit of misplaced spite, wrote them an incoherent account of Hegel’s philosophy, and why that made all left-wing politics idiotic and stupid.

You see, another thing I don’t like about the dumbed-down content of too many undergraduate courses and textbooks in the humanities is that a student doesn’t have room to experiment with the ideas. They have no opportunities to pull something strange from the text, only learn a standard, simplified reading that they can easily recall in a few sentences.

Humanities education is meant to confuse you, and its core skills should be techniques of thought and analysis to understand your way through confusion. 

So a good humanities education will expose you, not just to a single standardized reading of a historically remarkable work, but an idea that emerges from your thinking on it that will, in turn, make you think in a different way.

Frederic Jameson finds one such idea in the work of another Fred, Friedrich Schiller. In particular, Schiller developed a concept of play, from his reading of the major Critique works of Immanuel Kant. Kant developed a very regimented conception of how human faculties of reasoning were divided: there was the cognitive, the moral, and the aesthetic, which was its own category as well as a function which blurred the division of the other two.

Schiller took this a step farther, and conceived of the power of judgment as a kind of creative play. In Kant’s thinking, the cognitive is our power of recognizing the world around us, the moral is our power of knowing what’s right and acting according to it. The aesthetic is our creative faculty, how we’re able to understand the assembly of the world and change how things fit together. 

I haven't really read much of him myself,
but I do get the distinct feeling that
Friedrich Schiller was an extremely
intense person.

Jameson takes this idea as his template for what non-alienated labour would be. The standard textbook version of non-alienated labour remains reactive: workers instead of an investor class in control of production, working conditions that let people relax and breathe instead of working them to death. These are improvements, but they’re essentially the same economic structures as before, just with the beneficiaries flipped.

Instead, Jameson runs with Schiller’s idea: labour that doesn’t alienate us is creative labour, fun labour. Labour that we can own as a singular product unique to ourselves. It’s the labour of art and artisans. 

It’s a brilliant idea. It’s survived in innovative philosophical systems for the next two hundred years. Friedrich Nietzsche’s figure of the creator as a society’s genuinely revolutionary character. Frantz Fanon’s concept of the creative, multifaceted culture as the one that truly overcomes colonialism. Henri Bergson and and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of creativity and the new as progress. 

The idea that progress isn’t about perfecting some program and living in that social template forever, but about constant reinvention, and flexibility of thought and action to become wholly new kinds of being if the world demands it. 

This is the political centrepiece of my own work too, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. If we have to answer a problem whose causes and conditions lie in our fundamental nature, then the occasion demands that we change our natures, literally change human nature, a directed, creative act of adaptation that practically amounts to revolution.

Jameson, from his Marxist orientation and intellectual history, considers different images of industry transformed into artisanal work, images that depict such a world as perfect, utopian. 

It’s not just some intellectual distraction, the idea does move people in politics. It lies under the environmentalist movement, as I mentioned, as well as Italy’s Autonomia movement, and Occupy. The idea that we could solve many of the world’s problems by reorienting our industrial processes along a model of artisanship.

Well, I’ve heard worse.

Alienating Labour I: The Version I’ve Always Learned, Jamming, 20/08/2015

I have a weird relationship with Marx. I identify with the political left, and right-wingers would (and have) insulted me by calling me a Marxist. But there’s a lot in Marxist thought (and the wider Marxist tradition) that I disagree with, and my political priorities have, for a long time, been driven primarily by environmentalist concerns. Not those of Marxism.

Marxism: A long and proud tradition of t-shirts sold on
the internet.

But one thing I do know about the history of Marxism is that the actual meaning of the term is very slippery. Karl Marx was the first one to say, “I’m no Marxist.” And that’s not apocryphal either. He said it during one of the International conferences late in his life.

It depends on what you want to emphasize in his enormous amount of writings. There was an early, more abstract and directly philosophical thinker. His political and economic research began in the cultural and historical studies that culminated in 1845’s The German Ideology. 

Within two years, he and Friedrich Engels had written The Communist Manifesto and Marx dove head-first into a life of revolutionary activism trying to overthrow the monarchies of Europe. His masterwork Capital was a product of the 1860s until his death in 1883, the period when he pretty much invented political economy.

And let’s face it. Practically speaking, Marx was the single most influential political philosopher in a very direct sense. You don’t hear too many governments and political parties openly call themselves Humboldtian or Feuerbachian. But at the height of Marxist political parties, billions lived under Marxist regimes.

I don’t think we really appreciate today (at least not among a lot of my generation) just how weird it was that this major trend in global governance just disappeared so fast. It’s difficult today to even think of alternatives to capitalism, and I say this as someone who generally thinks capitalist business principles are decent ideas. But every dominant culture and idea needs its critics.

I learned myself a little Marxist philosophy in school, and one of the most popular (and easily digestible in spoon-fed undergraduate programs that frequently underestimated students’ intelligence) was the concept of alienated labour. It refers to setups where the labour of workers is divorced from the end product of the work, where workers labour in such a way that they can take no ethical ownership of what they do.

The model was the privately-owned factory. So in the obvious sense, the workers were employees of factory owners. The owners didn’t work on the products the factory made, just hired the employees. But the owners got to control the product and profit from it. The workers got paid for their time and labour alone.

But this isn’t the only way a worker can become alienated from her work. Workers laboured in the factory, and in Marx’s time, they worked hours that we’d consider homicidal today, sometimes for 14-16 hour shifts in filthy, pollutant-filled buildings with no thought given to employee safety. They’d earn pittance wages and often have to live on site and become financially dependent on their employers through debts incurred in company stores. 

At the end of the day, they saw no profit from what they made. In the Ford-influenced era of factory production, working conditions and wages improved (not without lobbying and protest action by the trade unions of the day), but a worker’s distance from the end-product was even greater. In a Fordist factory, the assembly line cut up the labour into so many small and repetitive tasks that a worker would spend a full day screwing the same nut into the same bolt on hundreds of different models. 

Frederic Jameson spends a long chapter in Archaeologies of the Future examining Marxist philosophy, since the ideal of communism was a utopian ideal that inspired, and provided even blueprints for, real political revolutions.

The typical solution to alienated labour is non-alienated labour. A worker or a committee of workers controls the factory and profits from its products. The workers labour in good conditions in ways that integrate them with the entire process of production. 

But Jameson understands that this is a reactive concept without a truly original departure from the exploitive way of doing things. He says such a departure is in Marx, which means what I’ve always experienced as the standard way of teaching Marx to undergrads fundamentally gets the philosophy wrong. . . . To be continued

You Can Only Achieve Universal Revolution, Research Time, 19/08/2015

Last week, I talked a little about a favourite book of mine, Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They were two brothers who wrote beautiful science-fiction novels in the late 20th century, and Roadside Picnic came out in 1971. It’s their most famous novel, and it was adapted into a very weird film and a video game series, both called Stalker.

The video games take place in a
wasteland after Chernobyl, which is a
very different setting and set of
implications than the Strugatskys'
novel. But the image is pretty cool.

There’s a curious device that appears in the novel, an alien machine that grants wishes. The problem is that it will only grant your wish if you survive its gauntlet of deadly razor wire that flies absurdly fast at you from all directions, and slices your body into tiny pieces. The alien technology, strewn haphazardly around the site of their three-day landing several years before the action of the story, is all about that hazardous.

Frederic Jameson discusses this novel’s climactic moment to explore an aspect of our concept of the utopia. He starts from an interpretation of the scene in which the protagonist’s wish is actually what saves him.* That wish is a genuine desire for universal human happiness, that no one need ever go without and that everyone is happy.

* Talking about this interpretation isn’t really a spoiler for the book, because the actual ending is incredibly ambiguous. Its ambiguity is part of the point, of course.

He’s wishing for utopia, the perfect society. The best wish you could possibly make if you had the opportunity for a wish to come true. But why is utopia such a perfect desire?

At first impression, this idea sounded like an appeal to a moral truth. The Stalker’s wish for universal happiness was a wish made without selfishness. It wasn’t a self-sacrificing wish, but simply with the happiness of all being just as important in his mind as his own happiness.

But as I read on, I realized that Jameson wasn’t being quite so simplistic. It’s much too easy simply to presume that there’s a moral universal that exists somewhere in reality transcendent to ourselves, determining what’s right and wrong. It’s no different than believing there’s a magic man in the sky who, if we do something he doesn’t like during our lives, will set us on fire for eternity after we die. 

And I’m not making fun of religion here either. Religious ideas and ethics can help a person’s life gain a profound meaning, and make someone a more ethical person. But those fruitful ideas go far beyond the simple moralisms of pedantic religious belief.

Instead, Jameson has a more material cause for why a selfish wish is met with death in this story. Only a wish for universal happiness can work at all. Imagine your greatest selfish desires were granted. For a wish to come true, it has to stay true. 

The Canadian sci-fi film Cube featured a more sedate
version of how I imagined the Strugatskys' death
machine.

But we live in society, so everyone else has to be okay with your wish being granted. Otherwise, they’ll de-grant it very quickly. So, says Jameson, you should at least be able to fit with the wishes of everyone else.

But my selfish desires are incompatible with the selfish desires of everyone else. Our most selfish desires usually involve other people suffering. Either we desire it directly, or it’s a side-effect of one of the things we want. So everyone’s selfish desires resist each other. My desire to be happy at your (possible) expense slams into your desire to be happy at my (possible) expense. They can’t both come true at once.

A wish for universal happiness builds this mutual compatibility into one person’s desire. So utopia is the only wish that can even work for a society.

Folks who know the history of philosophy might pipe up and say that this sounds quite a lot like Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. You know what’s good if the desire still makes sense when it’s the desire of everybody all at once.

This is how it tends to be learned in a lot of undergraduate classes where you explore this idea (to which Kant dedicated one of his most complex and dense books, The Critique of Practical Reason). But it isn’t quite the same as Jameson’s. 

Kant’s universalization is literally about testing whether it makes sense. His own most famous example was adultery: if everyone cheated on their marriages, then the promises of fidelity wouldn’t have any actual meaning. So an imperative telling you to cheat on your spouse wouldn’t even make sense: if everyone cheats, there would be no spouses. Cheating as a moral proposition contradicts itself. It’s a matter of logic.

Jameson’s idea is purely practical. There’s nothing about a person’s selfish wish making itself logically incoherent if everyone lives it out. The selfish wish of one person quite often simply meets the fist of another. 

Good enough reason for me not to pursue a desire.

Pure Conceptual Imagination III: Is Philosophy Sci-Fi?, Composing, 18/08/2015

The question is totally rhetorical, of course. Philosophy has historically been written as arguments, and in many cases can become very dry language. Science-fiction is primarily a literary genre of entertainment. 

Really, because it began in publications perceived as being purely and crassly entertainment (the pulp magazines), it’s only relatively recently that science-fiction has even been perceived as a very prestigious form of art at all. As for philosophy, it’s rare that people even understand its artistic and creative dimensions. 

This is one element of my own writing career that I suspect will both be fruitfully fulfilling, and also very difficult: demonstrating that philosophy is a genre of art.

It’s an unusual way to think about philosophy, because most of our experiences with the tradition come in university courses and departments. That can be a great place to learn about and read philosophy, but it can be alienating if you hit a bad teacher or the department teaches the subject in a very dry way. The tradition has been so much more than classroom discussions and academic papers, secondary and tertiary material. 

What I presume is an accurate depiction of
Philip K. Dick's state of mind when
writing VALIS.

The best philosophy can read like the radical inventiveness of the most talented science-fiction author. That was the feeling I had, for example, when I first read Philip K. Dick’s VALIS. The book was amazing, a blur of schizophrenic delusions, political conspiracy, mythmaking on an epic scale, the total breakdown and rebuilding of a subjectivity, and a description of a complex philosophical system of how the social, personal, and neural combine to construct our reality. 

Dick created the most fruitful and strange* metaphysical idealism I think I’ve ever come across. VALIS was as perfect a union of philosophical concept-making and science-fictional drama as I’ve ever seen.

* So fruitful precisely because it was so strange.

Reading Frederic Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future, as I’ve said before, I see many examples drawn from literature, particularly science-fiction, because of its frequent utopian bent. But with him, it isn’t just a matter of examples and illustrations. 

I find that Jameson has a remarkable skill of drawing a philosophical concept through the explication of some literary work. Yesterday evening, I read a chapter that dwelled for a long time on the implications to update traditional Marxism for the era of modern capitalism, what he accurately called the Walmartization or Waltonist economy.**

** I once called it the Dollarama economy. I do like to follow Canadian content rules. I’m at least that much of a patriot.

His entire framework for this philosophical exploration was the storyline and world-building of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, where each person’s dream is often exploited to hide the most violent rot of a society. It’s a blurring of analytic styles and academic disciplines that I’d like to learn from and apply to writing, eventually, the Utopias manuscript itself.

He doesn’t have the same skill as Dick, of course, because Jameson is still writing philosophy, not the alchemical blend of philosophical argument, post-schizophrenic perversion, religious revelation, autobiography, and sci-fi. But few people can achieve the same level that Dick could when he was at his best.

Pure Conceptual Imagination I: Is Sci-Fi Philosophy? Research Time, 11/08/2015

While I was on vacation, I switched gears again in what I picked up to read for my Utopias project research. Filippo Marinetti’s work is a perfect storm of the beauty, transformative potential, visionary drive, uplift, and terrifying danger of utopian dreaming. 

I’ve written here before of how uncomfortable Marinetti’s writing can make me. One minute, I’m cheering alongside his angry calls to turf cronyist career parliamentarians and bloodless technocrats out of government. By the end of the same paragraph, he’s calling for a government of radically militarized trade unions run by stormtrooper regiment veterans and dreaming of paving every forest in Italy to build countless smoke-belching factories.

Literature is the imagination of a new world, built so we
can learn from that imaginary world. Maybe it's wonderful,
maybe it's horrifying. From Amazon Prime's The Man in
the High Castle, based on Philip K. Dick's masterpiece.

That’s Gervaisian levels of awkwardness.

After turning the old Italian over and over in my thoughts, I started reading a book with a much more benign imagination, Archaeologies of the Future by Frederic Jameson. The book is an exploration of how science-fiction as a genre has tended to understand the human impulse to build utopias in life and thought, the concepts underlying utopian politics, and the content of utopian visions. 

Jameson is primarily a literary theorist, though his knowledge of philosophy’s tradition is expert as well. He weaves descriptions and storylines from fiction works into a philosophical examination of what utopia is, and how its meaning shifts from era to era. 

His training in literary theory weds him a little too closely to the fine details of the idea’s history than I’d like to take in my own work. One long chapter of Archaeologies examines Thomas More’s Utopia, as if the book that brought the word into being had some special insight over and above everyone else who’s thought this way, whether or not they’ve ever used the word.

Writing the history of literature, or the history of philosophy, you need to focus on the origins this way. But we shouldn’t mistake how to do the history for how to do philosophy itself. Philosophy – and literature too – is fundamentally creative. What matters is where you take an idea in the present, to help build the future.

I've always considered the best philosophy to draw as
many of its ideas from literature as from the ostensible
philosophical canon. Frederic Jameson.

Utopia is an interesting concept because it’s more often been developed in literature than in philosophy, even though philosophy is the tradition of creating concepts. And the concept of utopia has primarily been developed in science-fiction literature. It’s the gleaming space palace, the narrative of progress, the voyage to seek out new life and go where no one has gone before. 

As of last October, I became a published science-fiction writer. As of later this month, I’ll become a published philosophical writer. When you look at them as genres of creative writing, they depend on similar imaginative abilities. Think about how I developed the utopian (and more often dystopian) ideas in my novel, Under the Trees, Eaten.

The Digger aliens of the novel offer a new way of life to humanity, taking on their nature and their morality, the morality of intelligent ants. They’re an advanced species of physical individuals with no self-conception of their own individuality. It’s a way of life that offers humanity a way out of the everyday violence of individuals jockeying for power. That’s the utopian element. 

But I developed the end of the book by following through on one of the real-world implications of their natural communism. As for what that is, I don’t spoil the kickers of my own stories. So the Diggers’ supposedly higher morality comes with its own cold brutality, which you could say is the dystopian.

Jameson describes utopian thinking as a product of the imagination. A utopian draws an elaborate diagram, his vision of the world if he could correct with absolute power the essential social and political conflict of his era. 

From Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of
Roadside Picnic.

The real-world content of what a utopia could be in all its gritty, material detail is only plausible as a wish. Jameson talks about the end of one of my favourite novels, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, where the protagonist encounters a literal alien wish granting machine. In the throes of ecstasy and fear, he can wish only for total happiness and abundance for everyone. No more specific than that. Only a wish.

The utopian impulse is the wish that the world could be better. Utopian imagination is to describe that better world. Dystopian imagination sees all the new problems that better world would create. It’s the diagnosis required for the next utopia.