Fredric Jameson. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

Gross, David S.

Fredric Jameson. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York / London. Verso (Norton, distr.). 2005. xvi + 431 pages. $35/20 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1-84467-033-3

IN THE FINAL SENTENCE of A Singular Modernity in 2002, Fredric Jameson announced that "ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past." In his massive new book, we see what he had in mind. Jameson has always insisted on the importance of science fiction, and in this latest work he seeks to demonstrate that in a present (ours) blinded by ideology and fear to both past and future, the insistence of science fiction on imagining a future different from the present constitutes a cultural intervention of crucial significance.

Archaeologies of the Future is divided into two large sections. Part 1 is a 233-page essay, "The Desire Called Utopia," which appears here for the first time. The second part of the book, entitled "As Far as Thought Can Reach," is composed of essays previously published elsewhere on individual science-fiction writers, from Fourier to Kim Stanley Robinson, by way of Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and others.

Obviously, the title deliberately involves us in a paradox, as Jameson requires us to get our minds around a metaphorical excavation of the human future with tools normally used to investigate the past. The title thus begins the central project of the book, engaging contemporary political debate perhaps more than is usual in this author's many books. "High theory" certainly has a presence here, but the book more frequently confronts central popular ideological notions: "What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief ... that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available." In "The Future as Disruption," the final chapter of "The Desire Called Utopia," Jameson refers to the "warning" from Clash of Civilizations author and prominent neocon spokesman Samuel Huntington that "genuine democracy is ungovernable and that therefore Utopian demands for absolute political freedom and 'radical democracy' are to be eschewed." "So successful have such positions been in contemporary ideological 'discursive struggle' that most of us are probably unconsciously convinced of these principles, and of the eternity of the system, and incapacitated to imagine anything else in any way that carries conviction."

Jameson's language here correctly indicates that this book is a continuation of the project initiated in The Political Unconscious (1981) to recover the vocation of "the desire called Utopia" (so important in science fiction) in the service of "a politics [that] aims at imagining, and sometimes even realizing, a system radically different from this one." This book may be both the most important and the most accessible volume in the large body of Jameson's work. For more than three decades he has tried to use "the weapons of criticism" to awaken us to the state of emergency we inhabit, and rouse us toward intellectual and political engagements that might contribute to struggles for change. Nowhere is Fredric Jameson's own vocation as an author been as clear as it is in Archaeologies of the Future. And the task he has assigned himself could not be more urgent than it is today.

David S. Gross

University of Maine