Anti-Utopianism and Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future

It is most tempting to think of Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005) in utopian terms, as a contribution to the history of utopian philosophy represented by Theodor Adorno, Louis Marin and Herbert Marcuse, if not Hegel, Marx and Jameson himself. To trace the line of utopian ideas in their works is to be seduced by Jameson's own project, which has, since Marxism and Form (1971), mapped the utopian continuities that exist between an assortment of Marxist writers. Marxism and Form stands as a seminal beginning to Jameson's utopian project, introducing the work of untranslated German writers, including Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, to a generation of Anglophonic scholars. One reviewer went so far as to recommend the book to English-speaking Germans to clear up the muddy phrases of Gyorgy Lukács and Ernst Bloch, claiming that Jameson presented a much more articulate version of their ideas! There is no better demonstration of the recognition effected upon the Marxist corpus by Jameson's intellectual clarity than the conclusion to Aesthetics and Politics (1980), in which the hostility between Lukács and Bloch is transformed into two sides of the same politics. Indeed, the very meaning of Jameson's Marxism comes about from just such theoretical sublimations as these, as disparate European projects are unified both intellectually and politically. The sheer synthetic power of Jameson's writing makes it difficult to think about his writing in terms that aren't Jamesonian, the range of his project transforming Marxist literary criticism into a totality.