Archaeologies of the future - the desire called utopia and other science fictions: A review essay
Christian De Cock, Swansea University
As Fredric Jameson (2005) engages exhaustively with the key conference theme, it seems rather appropriate to make connections with what I consider to be his best book in years. What seizes Jameson’s attention in utopian (science) fiction is the sheer possibility of trying to figure a radical break with the present. Any figuration of the future is bound to fail (there can be no ‘original’ future if the imaginable future must be fashioned out of the tainted materials of the present); but in doing so it draws our gaze to the limitations of the present, and thus acts as a negative critique of it. As he puts it:
“The utopian text is not supposed to produce synthesis all by itself or to represent it: that is matter for human history and for collective praxis. It is supposed only to produce the requirement of the synthesis, to open the space into which it is to be imagined (p. 410)”.
In discussing the possibility of a radical break – “a sudden collective movement of the people that can never be predicted in advance, that strikes the least likely place and the least likely collective agents or actors (p.335)” he strays into terrain obsessively explored by Žižek: that of the ‘(authentic) act’, the difference that really makes a difference. Thus, once again (cf. De Cock & Volkmann, 2002), I aim to employ Žižek as ghost reader of the book I’m reviewing. The fact that Jameson recently wrote a review on Žižek’s (2006) self-declared ‘magnum opus’ (LRB, 17 September 2006), not to mention the location of the SCOS conference itself, makes the exercise delightfully incestuous… a very productive kind of incest I will argue (of course). All this takes us far away from the conceptualisation of Utopia as a “blueprint for a desired world” (Grey and Garsten, 2002, p.10) which seems to pervade both the mainstream and critical literature in Organization and Management Studies. The implication, from a critical perspective, seems to be that it is futile to imagine or envisage any ‘alternative’ to the present because it will be just as oppressive as what we have now (e.g. WOBS, 2001, p.xxxiv). Jameson (2005) suggests an alternative devoid of any such resignation:
“Disruption is, then, the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes… 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 (p.233)”.
References:
De Cock, C. & Volkmann, C. R. (2002). ‘Of Language, Limits and Secrets’, ephemera, 2 (4), p.357-371.
Grey, C. and C. Garsten (2002). ‘Organized and disorganized utopias: an essay on presumption’, In M. Parker (Ed.),Utopia and Organization, pp.9-23. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London: Verso.
WOBS (2001). Organizational Studies: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management (4 volumes). London: Routledge.
Žižek, S. (2006). The Parallax View. Cambridge (MA): MIT.