2061: A Frederic Jameson Odyssey
Syomin's audience, while clearly literate in science fiction, overlaps with fandom only partly. In rejecting a radiant future, however, he drew the ire of a set of ideological comrades for whom the literary and artistic representation of a twenty-first century Soviet utopia is of crucial importance: the editorial team behind the "USSR-2061" project. I'll be going into much more detail about their work in subsequent posts; for now, though, it is their polemic with Syomin that is important.
In a LiveJournal post entitled "An image of the future is unnecessary?" by kpt_flint on June 12 (three days after Syomin's video, one of the founders of "USSR-2061" takes apart Syomin's argument step by step. Why, he asks, should the steady immiseration of everyday life be the only argument? The standard of living in the USSR rose steadily before perestroika, but people still turned away from socialism towards capitalism. And if we don't paint a picture of the future, our enemies still will.
Ultimately, kpt_flint argues for the power of the imagination: "In order to build [a better] world, we must first understand what exactly we want to build....For that, we need red science fiction and red futurology. Honest, thoughtful, and scientific."
kpt_flint casts the political argument as a struggle between genres. Dystopian fiction has tended to be more entertaining, but he is unwilling to write off utopianism as both political program and fictional genre. Yes, the radiant future easily descends into a set of familiar cliches (which is why kpr_flint and his partner in the USSR-2061 project are at such pains to steer participants clear of a whole host of aesthetic and political sins), but that only means that imagining a convincing utopia takes much more work than churning out the latest variation on 1984 or Brave New World. Pessimism is easy; optimism is not for the lazy or the faint of heart.
At the beginning of this chapter, I claimed that, after the Cold War, the West inherited the discursive tools for imagining the future. The polemics occasioned by "2045. Episode 1" remind us that this custody battle is as much about Left and Right as it is about East and West. After 1989/1991, what avenues remained for imagining an alternative to an increasingly hegemonic neoliberal capitalism? In a much more reader-friendly fashion, the Marxist kpt_flint is making largely the same argument as the critic Frederic Jameson, particularly in his 2005 Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
Best known as one of America's foremost Marxist literary theorists, Jameson is also an accomplished scholar of science fiction. Archeologies of the Future, in addition to being a comprehensive typology of American postwar science fiction, takes as its project the aesthetic and political rehabilitation of utopia and utopianism. As both genre and political theory, utopia has long been the whipping boy of sophisticated critics. Marxism, with its explicit refutation of utopianism (despite its obvious utopian elements), rendered utopian socialism passe, while the excess of communist regimes in the twentieth century have fueled the longstanding conservative critique of leftism as naively utopian in its understanding of 'human nature." If anything, the fate of utopia in literature has been even more dismal. As Gary Saul Morson (no friend to utopians or leftists) puts it, utopia and the novel are opposites. Utopias are tendentious, plotless, and boring almost by definition. Utopias are analogous to the "all happy families" Tolstoi invokes in the first line of Anna Karenina; we may want our family to be happy, but it is the unhappy family that will keep us reading over the course of several hundreds of pages.
Jameson does not try to pretend that the utopian classics are more interesting than they seem, though he does champion modern novels whose utopian aspirations are not an obstacle to reading pleasure. Utopianism is particularly redeemed in his reading of Kim Stanley Robinsons Red Mars trilogy, about the settling and transformation of our neighboring planet. Robinson populates Mars with complex, flawed, and believable characters who often violently disagree about the proper course of action, but still manage to create a society that is, if not perfect, far closer to perfection than anything the Earth has ever seen. Utopia for Robinson is a process, not a place, as Jameson explains:
What is Utopian becomes, then, not the commitment to a specific machinery or blueprint, but rather the commitment to imagining possible Utopias as such, in their greatest variety of forms. 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. It is 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).
With its focus on utopia-in-the-making Robinsons' trilogy is an unusually successful example of a compelling engagement with utopian thought. Even in works that do not share Robinson's focus on process, however, Jameson sees utopia as a crucial exercise in political imagination: "“The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break" (232). Or, in the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."
Though Jameson is writing specifically about science fiction, his defense of utopia, particularly in light of the online arguments about Russia's radiant future, should push the reader in the direction of SF's most famous allied genre (despite Jameson's own apparent lack of interest in it): fantasy. Or rather, the multiple meanings carried by the genre's name. Perhaps the argument over utopia is a proxy for a larger debate about fantasy itself? "Fantasy" also connoted "imagination" (in Russian, the two meanings are divided between two very similar words, "fantastika" and "fantasia," along with the more recently-imported term for epic fantasy, "fentezi"), while for Freud, fantasy can refer either to something desired or something dreaded. Jameson subtitles his book "The Desire Called Utopia, and Other Science Fictions;" might utopia and dystopia map onto Freud's positive and negative fantasies?
What is at stake in the post-Soviet Russian fantasies of a Soviet future (and perhaps in their shadow, the coming apocalyptic hellscape), is the function and value of this kind of imaginative play. What does the Soviet future fantasy actually do? Is it a form of banal entertainment, an opiate for the nostalgic post-Soviet masses? A call to action? A productive exercise of the political imagination? A return of repressed anxiety and desire?
For that, we must look at both the USSR-2061 project and the broader aesthetic phenomenon sometimes called Sovpunk.