The dimensions of negativity in Adorno and Jameson's conceptions of Utopia

Student Number: 11104775

Philosophy MA Thesis: “The dimensions of negativity in Adorno and

Jameson’s conceptions of Utopia”

Supervisor: Dr. Johan Hartle

Word Count: 18144

Abstract

This study explores the ways in which Theodor W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson frame the category of Utopia. Both thinkers try to provide a critical social theory that will reawaken one to the possibility of conceiving a world different to the one we presently inhabit. Thus, the level at which Adorno and Jameson are interested in Utopia can be said to be a negative one, which suspends concrete images of what a good life would look like and instead seeks to recover the Utopian sense in the first place. While each thinker employs different methods to do this, I will show that they are united by a certain interest. Both are concerned with how conceptions of Utopia are presently limited by tendencies within late capitalism: the forces of commodification and reification which distort our ability to think against that system. They are united by the conviction that we must refuse affirmations of Utopia and the good life, as well as acknowledge its present impossibility, if we want to move towards the emancipation of society. However, after drawing out the dimensions of negativity in Adorno’s articulation of Utopia, I will explore the extent to which Jameson’s conception is sufficiently negative. I will show that his interest in the ideology of narrative and the Utopian impulse is underpinned by an over-emphasised, face-value reading of Adorno’s writings on the commodification of culture. His conception of Utopia as an allegorical, defamiliarizing and disruptive category is heavily dependent on a historical diagnosis of postmodernism, which for Jameson poses challenges to emancipatory thought far greater than those faced by Adorno. However, as I will ultimately conclude, Jameson does not provide good reason to accept such a narrative. This betrays not only the inadequacy of his critical practice in light of Adorno’s, but also the broader unconscious of Jameson’s own work, which appears to be a desire to recover, rather than put into practice, negativity in the first place.

Key words: Adorno; Jameson; Utopia; negativity; good life; ideology; narrative; commodification of culture; postmodernism.

The dimensions of negativity in Adorno and Jameson’s

conceptions of Utopia

Table of contents

1.1. Utopia as aesthetic negativity and the broken promise of happiness………..13

1.2. Social epistemology of the good life……….20

Chapter 2: Jameson……….30

A shared social-epistemological interest?...30

2.1 Utopia as ideology and narrative……….32

2.2 Jameson’s negative Utopia………43

2.3 The problem of the postmodern………..51

2.4 Utopia as critique or recovery of critique? The entwinement of Utopian disruption and postmodern mourning……….57

Conclusion……….65

Bibliography……….66

Introduction

The ambivalences associated with the concept of Utopia take a variety of shapes and forms. Our contemporary moment is seemingly marked by the sheer absence of Utopia, of

conceived alternatives to global capitalism, the latter of which, as Fredric Jameson remarks, persisting in part because of an ideological blockage on the emergence of different futures:

What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but 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. (2005: xii)

In an age where, as the much-quoted phrase goes, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, many contemporary theorists like Maeve Cooke, Mark Fisher, Slavoj Zizek, Kathi Weeks, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, as well as Jameson himself, have reengaged with the concept of Utopia, resituating the significance, for social and political theory, of the imaginary construction of alternative worlds and societies, along with all its attendant difficulties. In particular, Jameson has drawn attention to the ideological functioning of mass culture within what he identifies as its postmodern stage in maintaining this sense of no alternative. This can be seen in the proliferation of dystopian

disaster/catastrophe narratives (take films such as The Day After Tomorrow, for example), or, more crucially, within that peculiar effacement (of which postmodern texts are but a

symptom of a broader historical condition) of criticality, historicity, the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous” (1991: 309) that retained within modernist texts a sense of an outside to capitalism, something like a Utopian enclave. As we shall see, the recovery of Utopia

depends a great deal for Jameson on the recovery of a Marxist hermeneutic, the

identification of a “political unconscious” lying within varying forms of culture, high or low. Jameson’s proposed hermeneutic will emphasize the way in which cultural forms always

historical moment. He maintains that such careful attention to Utopian traces or moments must persist despite our prevailing historical condition that seemingly forecloses the possibility of such identification.

Therefore, might we not ask, in a more general and provocative way, whether this era of finance capital, in which speculation replaces production, also contain Utopias of its own, from the celebratory excesses of “cyberpunk” to today’s valorization of emerging new technologies, manifested more openly in discussions surrounding the link between such new developments and the emergence of “post-capitalism”?1 _{This amounts to something like the}

identification of a Utopian impulse, the persistence of a certain desire or longing within even the most debased forms. Paralleling the aforementioned project undertaken in The Political

Unconscious (1981), Jameson’s recent work, especially Archaeologies of the Future (2005),

wrestles more openly with the category of Utopia itself, not only in discussions surrounding Utopian form and genre, but also in the explicit formulation of this Utopian impulse.

Drawing on Ernst Bloch, Jameson clarifies the hermeneutic project in a later essay from his

Valences of the Dialectic (2010):

The interpretation of the Utopian impulse, however, necessarily deals with

fragments: it is not symbolic but allegorical: it does not correspond to a plan or to Utopian praxis, it expresses Utopian desire and invests it in a variety of unexpected and disguised, concealed, distorted ways. The Utopian impulse therefore calls for a hermeneutic: for the detective work of a decipherment and a reading of Utopian

1 See for example Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future (2015), which deals largely with the possibilities of a post-work society through the acceleration of automation. See also speculations on the effacement of traditional market forces by way of declining marginal costs, rendering goods and services effectively free, limitless and available to all, in Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014) and Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015).

clues and traces in the landscape of the real; a theorization and interpretation of unconscious Utopian investments in realities large or small, which may in themselves be far from Utopian in their actuality. (2010: 415)

This seems like an imperative to approach mass culture in the same way that Jameson outlines in his 1979 essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”, in which he argues that even while films such as Jaws function to legitimate the existing order, they nonetheless “cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and most

fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity” (1979: 144). Yet to insist solely on this “detective work” is misleading, for it would arguably be a mistake to say that Jameson is interested in Utopia only insofar as its traces lay waiting to be uncovered as concrete alternatives by us as critical theorists. This is what led Herbert Marcuse to reject the category, expressing contempt for the fact that emancipatory alternatives are considered Utopian when it is precisely their real existence within everyday life and practice that should be recognized and unleashed. Utopia, by contrast, is for him an appeal to some abstract future promise. This raises questions concerning the relationship between negation and Utopia. For Marcuse, positing alternatives to capitalism arises out of a “negation of the prevailing modes”, in which, for example, “economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy-from being controlled by economic forces and relationships (…) Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control” (1964: 74). In the same way that Max Horkheimer argued that “in regard to the essential kind of change at which the critical theory aims, there can be no

corresponding concrete perception of it until it actually comes about” (2002: 220), Marcuse maintained that “the so-called Utopian possibilities are not at all Utopian but rather the

determinate socio-historical negation of what exists” (1970: 69). While the advent of a better future is the desired outcome of that uncovering of potentials and alternatives through critical negation, Marcuse insists that they cannot determinately assert what such a future would consist in. This reflects Marx’s assertion in his “Letter to Ruge” (1843/1977) that the task is not “dogmatically to prefigure the future, but (…) to find the new world only through criticism of the old.” (1977: 13)

In his discussion of Utopia, Jameson is similarly not so much concerned with

projecting determinant images of the future as he is the critical dismantling of the present. Though, as will be discussed later, Jameson is not always faithful to critical negativity, the idea that the Utopian form is a vital tool in negating a world in which “Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism […] is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious” (Fisher, 2009: 6) remains a touchstone to his thought. Against the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism, Utopian forms such as those of Science Fiction, which project images of alien life, alterity and otherness, are useful precisely

because they shed light on our own limited imaginations. These radical alternatives are therefore not images of the future for us to latch onto, but rather narrative devices,

estrangement techniques that enable us to focus our energies onto the breaks and ruptures with the present in themselves. (2010: 232). Marcuse’s suggestion that the “aesthetic-erotic dimension” can aid considerations of a qualitatively better world could be said to pre-empt Jameson’s emphasis on the ways in which narratives of all kinds are employed for critical negation. Yet whereas Marcuse was writing at a time where alternative systems were very much on the agenda (nineteen-sixties counter-culture movements, “really-existing”

mystifying concrete possibilities through its connotations of otherworldliness – today, conversely, the “increasing inability to imagine a different future enhances rather than diminishes the appeal and also the function of Utopia” (Jameson, 2005: 232). Hence Jameson’s insistence that the category of Utopia, the presentation of collective futures unimaginable, is for him a pertinent mode of negativity for our present stupor.

In the work of Theodor Adorno we find a similar concern with the way present society poses blockages to our ability to conceive Utopia. In his 1964 correspondence with Bloch, Adorno remarks:

It seems to me that what people have lost subjectively in regard to consciousness is very simply the capability to imagine the totality as something that could be

completely different. (1988: 3)

Unlike Marcuse’s advocating of the construction of a better society through the coupling of technical reorganization and the promotion of “true”, vital needs (1970: 67), Adorno suspends determinant images of what a future society would look like. Like Jameson, he, too, is concerned that the collective capability to imagine something different is waning. Yet this is not to ignore crucial differences. Adorno’s hostility toward “the collective as a blind fury of activity” (1974: 156) certainly distinguishes him from Jameson’s hermeneutic work into repressed forms of collectivity, however much this latter is meant as a strategic, defamiliarizing deployment of allegory. However, there is a dimension of negativity, a negative framing of the subject’s relationship with the social totality, which sets both thinkers out from the more positive, anthropological approach of those like Marcuse and Bloch. This dissertation will hone in on the shared elements between Adorno and Jameson,

who are being compared because both want to think Utopia in a negative way. Both want to relate Utopia to a social-epistemological thesis that suspends concrete formulations of what a good life should look like. Their respective aesthetic considerations (Jameson the ideology of narrative, Adorno the broken promise of high art) are different ways of prompting us to grasp an epistemological thesis that amounts to awareness of the fact that conceptions of Utopia are limited by commodification, and therefore presently impossible. Moving towards an emancipated society requires refusing the affirmation of happiness and Utopia in the present.

Adorno’s theoretical interest in awakening us to alternatives to the present order parallels Jameson in two key senses, which I will presently outline quite generally before drawing attention to the nuances and difficulties. Firstly, Adorno and Jameson both write about the intrusion of commodification into our everyday needs, desires and ultimate framing of social possibility. In fact, Jameson builds on Adorno and the Horkheimer’s analyses of mass reification in the Culture Industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/2002), arguing that the ability to conceive of alternatives outside the world generated for us by commodity society is even greater now than it was for Adorno. Secondly, Adorno, like Jameson, wants the category of Utopia to shed light on the present, arguing it denotes the necessity of critiquing existing conditions before Utopia can be imagined:

at any rate, utopia is essentially in the determined negation, in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what should be. (1988: 12)

This concretization of the false is an indication of a crucial difference, in methodological terms, in Adorno’s negative deployment of Utopia. Unlike, Jameson, in the work of Adorno we do not see an attempt to bring forth Utopian traces of collective longing or

transformation from within the “degraded works of mass culture” (1979: 148). Adorno instead articulates Utopia through art’s presentation of happiness as a “broken promise”. High modernist works refer to happiness only negatively, by refusing to affirm it in any form of aesthetic harmony within the present. It therefore stands in opposition to mass cultural works, which Adorno and Horkheimer identify as symptoms of a Culture Industry that ideologically obscures individuals from realizing the present possibility of obtaining happiness within capitalist society. This marks a form of austere negativism or imageless materialism which is distinct from Jameson’s political hermeneutics. While Jameson’s consideration of the ideological functioning of all kinds of narratives prompts claims about their simultaneous Utopian impulse, Adorno refuses to affirm anything out of such

ideological functioning. For instance, he is very cautious of the way that doctrines of happiness ideologically operate to block ethical insight into the barbarism of capitalist society:

It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That it is model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. He who calls it by its name will be told gloatingly by psychoanalysis that it is just his Oedipus complex. (2005: 63)

Yet, as I will show in chapter one, Adorno’s negative formulation of aesthetic experience is not a mere form of resistance; it can be seen to motion a theoretical outlook that enables us to think through more meaningfully the potentials for Utopian rupture and transformation within the present. This is one in which positivistic affirmations of the immediate are rejected in favour of a social theory which keeps the individual and the social totality in continuing (negative) dialectical tension, and reveals the Utopian possibilities contained therein.

In discussing the varying degrees of negativity in Adorno and Jameson’s respective articulations of Utopia, some sense of historical context will prove important. Jameson’s account of commodification, of the complete aestheticization and becoming-cultural of the economic, against which the concept of Utopia is articulated, marks a world “in which social homogenization is far more complete, the past has been more definitively disposed of, and this kind of temporal or modernist dialectic seems inoperative” (1990: 72). His account of postmodernism as the cultural dominant of late-capitalism can be read as a fulfilled, contemporary version of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that, in the Culture Industry, “something is provided for all so that none may escape” (2002: 126). In the face of this impending social totalization, Adorno advocates the negativity of non-identity thinking, which is Utopian insofar it enables sites of resistance and non-hierarchical modes of life to come into view. Jameson, however, at many points mourns the loss of such negativity, arguing that postmodernism poses several challenges to our sense of conceiving totalizing visions of society and beyond. Critical negation, an awareness of history as a determinant site of transformation, which would prompt considerations of alternatives to global capitalism – Utopia – needs to be initially recovered. Jameson aims to achieve this by

emphasising the category of Utopia itself, which has two distinct yet closely related

dimensions: on the one hand, the flipside of mass culture’s ideologically reinforcing function is the “ineradicable drive towards collectivity” (1979: 148) latent within its narrative form; on the other is the way in which its form intervenes into a present in which the very concept of Utopia is no longer conceivable. Both have the critical function of disentangling us from that latter state. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the category of Utopia is deployed to keep alive the possibility of imagining Utopia in the first place. But here we are left with an even more striking paradox: for if negativity, occluded by the postmodern, is what needs to be recovered, then how can Jameson’s usages of Utopia themselves be considered negative? Indeed, while Jameson’s interest in the Utopian impulse, the way narratives point to

presently unimaginable forms of collective existence, do not denote positive representations of the good life, there is a sense in which we could argue that Jameson is insufficiently negative in his critical practice.

This study will begin by foregrounding the dimensions of negativity in Adorno’s conception of Utopia. It will aim to show how the ethical considerations of his negative aesthetics relate to a broader critical social theory of Utopia, which both sheds light on the question and possibility of happiness under late capitalism and awakens the critical subject to alternatives. Chapter two will begin by outlining Jameson’ respective interest in Utopia. After outlining some of his major claims, I will suggest that, though working at a different methodological level, there is a shared commitment, in Adorno and Jameson, to keeping alive the possibility of, to providing the socio-epistemological conditions for, Utopia.

Jameson’s negative conception proposes that Utopia says more about a failure to imagine a different world than it does for what that world might look like. Its thesis is illustrated with

reference to the ideology of narrative and literary Utopias such as the Science Fiction genre. I will thereafter investigate Jameson’s historical diagnosis of postmodern commodification, which arguably underpins his negative conception of Utopia. This will lead me to stress Jameson’s ultimate diverging motivations, and subsequently question his negative hold-out, in light of Adorno’s. To what extent do the former’s narrative analyses elide genuine,

concrete forms of critical intervention? To what extent does Jameson over-emphasise, and take at face-value, Adorno’s thesis concerning the all-encompassing nature of

commodification, meaning he can only oscillate between narratives of mourning and Utopian speculation? By addressing these questions, I will conclude in arguing that

Jameson’s articulations of Utopia are insufficiently negative. His insistence on recovering the Utopian sense, in a world where it is apparently lacking, is perhaps not as radical as it may seem. Ultimately, neither Adorno nor Jameson can provide a concrete proposal for how to begin constructing alternative life-worlds, and this is undoubtedly a flaw of both thinkers. However, I believe it is in fact Adorno who can best provide us with the critical tools through which we can begin constructing a different future.

Chapter 1: Adorno

1.1. Utopia as aesthetic negativity and the promise of happiness

In Adorno’s work the question of Utopia often takes the form of the question and possibility of happiness under present social conditions. Rather than probing the present’s capacities and potentials for constructing a new world, such a world can only be glimpsed negatively because real happiness, for Adorno, can no longer be obtained within immediate existence. Before exploring how his critical social theory aims to reawaken us to a sense of

Utopia, it is necessary to examine how Adorno frames happiness both through his aesthetic theory and within the context of the society against which he was writing, defined by commodification and barbarism, which we will continuously explore throughout this chapter.

Adorno states that, in today’s world, happiness can only take the form of a broken promise. Art itself, it is claimed, embodies this formula:

Stendhal's dictum of art as the promesse du bonheur implies that art does its part for existence by accentuating what in it prefigures utopia. But this utopic element is

constantly decreasing, while existence increasingly becomes merely self-equivalent. For this reason art is ever less able to make itself like existence. Because all happiness found in the status quo is an ersatz and false, art must break its promise in order to stay true to it. (1999: 311)

How can art at once promise and yet fail to live up to happiness, and how might this signify a form of resistance against the prevailing order? In strictly formal terms this can be seen in works which intentionally resist aesthetic reconciliation and harmony. Such works are the most faithful to the damaged, fragmented life of late-capitalism, on which we will elaborate below. Rather than striving toward aesthetic harmony, the historical period in question calls for “a self-conscious elaboration of the impossibility of aesthetic harmony” (2009: 12). The difficult, estranging formal effects of composers like Schoenberg, for example, resist and therefore self-consciously fail to achieve organic harmony. Yet this is not to say that all semblances of reconciliation are purged from the work. Rather they appear, through the juxtaposition with dissonant elements (e.g. the atonal components alongside the tonal

ones), in distorted, and suppressed form. James Finlayson points out that for Adorno this allusion to consonance through the very prominence of dissonant elements mirrors the idea that happiness can only be grasped negatively or indirectly:

Happiness here is a name only for the foil that throws the unhappiness and pain of the sounds into relief and makes them simultaneously dissonant yet more than merely dissonant. In this way an imageless image of happiness is conveyed through the transfiguration of tonal elements in atonality. This is one concrete example of how the ‘’force of negativity in the artwork” can give rise to the promise of happiness. (2009: 12-13)

It is not only within the form of the artwork that happiness is presented as a “broken promise”. It is also in its very relationship to, and in particular the way that it resists, the damaged social world. In other words, the failure to reconciliation inherent in any successful artwork is not just a failure to achieve harmony within the form of the work. It is also an intentional failure to project any illusion of harmony in a world where that is currently not possible. Therefore “successful artworks “shatter,” they “go under,” they ‘’self-destruct,” they “fail’’, and thus they resist absorption and assimilation into that culture that entirely failed: the administered society” (2009: 13).

Adorno’s valorization of the modernist artwork, specifically referring to European music and literature from around 1750 to 1950, sheds light on the impossibility of obtaining happiness within capitalist society. The intentional refusal of reconciliation, the way in which the great twelve-tone symphonies of Schoenberg resist the simple gratifications of melodic harmony and comforting refrains, exposes the impoverished ideas of happiness that persist

within capitalist society. But just as the atonal techniques of Schoenberg retain an element of reconciliation or harmony through juxtaposition, rather than complete destruction, art keeps faith with Utopia, with the sense that happiness might be achieved in some future state. The possibility that organic harmony between subject and object might be reobtained someday is not dispensed with. Yet the preservation of this possibility can only be achieved precisely through initial refusal of reconciliation:

through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled. (1999: 33) Happiness can only take the form of a “broken promise” in the work of art: while its

possibility persists, it is perpetually postponed from a social system that increasingly renders such an experience impossible.

But what is it about the system that makes happiness increasingly less possible, and only available in the form of such a negative aesthetic? What is it, exactly, that art is

revolting against? The answer lies, in part, in the significance of commodification, the process by which the commodity form increasingly invades our everyday existence.

Additionally, we are required to look at that sphere in which commodification is most visible in day-to-day life, and which constantly provides assurances that happiness and harmony are indeed possible; namely, the Culture Industry. The Culture Industry is therefore the other side of the negative Utopia proposed by the idea of happiness as broken promise. What does the Culture Industry consist in, and how is it symptomatic of a false idea of happiness against which Adorno responds? To explain this opposing “false” notion of happiness, it is necessary to move our attention from aesthetic form to that of aesthetic experience. We

shall focus more on Adorno’s conception social experience of needs and happiness under capitalism, which portends our discussion of the social-epistemological dimensions of Utopia in the succeeding section.

Though not under any pretence regarding its ultimately illusory, class-based origin, Adorno nevertheless laments the fading autonomy of cultural or aesthetic experience, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth century could be said to mark an enclave of critical

distance, a realm of “purposiveness without purpose” (Kant), in which we suspend the day-to-day practicalities and instrumental concerns of the empirical world. Adorno sees this sphere collapsing under the increasing penetration of capitalist forces, which now reach into those areas typically held in some sense to exist outside the logic of the market. Following Marx and Lukacs, the compromising of authentic aesthetic experience is developed from an analysis of the reification and commodification of society at large. Reification refers to the way in which human experience and activity becomes rationalized and fragmented

according to the logic of commodity production. Human relations have become abstracted and formalised: “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing” (1975: 83), since, under capitalism, “the fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject.” (1975: 89). As human activity becomes defined per the extent it can be purchased on the labour market and subsequently squeezed for profit, distinctions between various human activities and ways of relating to the world are eradicated. Following this initial stage of the universal commodification of labour power - the fundamental precondition of capitalism, according to Marx - aesthetic experience becomes equally reified through the increasing interpenetration of commodification. All such aesthetic experiences become infected with the commodity form, valuable for purely

instrumental purposes and to the extent to which they are at one with the logic of abstract exchange-value, rather than any concrete, intrinsic use-value. This process is trenchantly summarized by Adorno and Horkheimer thus:

Everything is perceived only from the point of view that it can serve as something else, however vaguely that other thing can be envisaged. Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish – the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art - becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy. (2002: 128)

As capitalism increasingly comes to define inner, personal experiences concerning beauty, leisure and play, it thus increasingly defines and structures one’s needs and desires: “even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according to the unity of production” (2002: 98). The mass manufacturing and distribution of entertainment and culture according to the logic of the market and production saturates the individual with “baby-food: permanent self-reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place” (1991: 67).

But how does this interpenetration of commodification provide an account of happiness qualitatively different from the negative one offered by Adorno? The experience denoted by the writings on the Culture Industry deceptively proposes that pleasure and happiness can be obtained here-and-now, within that very framework of false needs and desires. The Culture Industry is a totality of manufactured needs which demands

nature. For Adorno, the happiness that is offered is thus a false one, for “Everyone can be like the omnipotent society, everyone can be happy if only they hand themselves over to it body and soul and relinquish their claim to happiness.” (2002: 124) Indeed, what is

inauthentic about the offerings of the Culture Industry is “the ideology of happiness they simultaneously embody: the notion that pleasure or happiness (…) already exists, and is available for consumption” (1990: 147). In contrast, the aesthetic experience of difficult, austere modernist works remains truer to happiness in representing the latter “as a broken promise” (2002: 125). The negative Utopian moment, the freeing up of space for the possibility of an alternative order, can therefore be illustrated in the highlighting of the Culture Industry’s false account of fulfilment. In positing authentic aesthetic experience alongside the latter, happiness is instead wrestled away from the drudgery of that everyday experience and deferred to a space beyond the present. Thus, in Jameson’s gloss:

This is, then, one crucial thematic differentiation between ‘genuine art’ and that offered by the Culture Industry: both raise the issue of the possibility of happiness in their very being, as it were, and neither provides it; but where the one keeps faith with it by negation and suffering through the enactment of its impossibility, the other assures us it is taking place. (1990: 147)

Utopia cannot be affirmed in the present world because capitalist society increasingly manufactures a set of false needs and desires amongst individuals. While both authentic art and mass culture are infected with the instrumentalities and abstractions of

commodification, the latter “simply identifies with the curse of predetermination and joyfully fulfils it” (1991: 72). It is the standard against which we can measure the negative idea of happiness, which is embodied in a narrative of the experience of happiness as

deferred. The broken promise contained within genuine aesthetic experience refuses affirmation.

For Adorno the Culture Industry is significant in betraying the sheer illusoriness that happiness can be obtained in capitalist society. Adorno’s negative conception of Utopia, by way of the aesthetic, sheds light on the unrealizability and impossibility of Utopia within the current system, making “people aware of their own unhappiness, and of the gulf between the potential for happiness contained in the technological and economic wherewithal of modern societies and the catastrophic state of the actual world” (Finlayson 2009: 14). The above quote suggests that Adorno’s aesthetic formulation holds onto the idea that Utopia might become obtainable given the correct socio-economic conditions. However, we may question what positive critical function this account of art, in relation to Utopia, can actually have. Does it not suggest a mere melancholic formulation, a perpetual deferment, where happiness can only be glimpsed in austere negative aesthetic experience?

1.2. Social epistemology of the good life

For Adorno the artwork’s reference to happiness as a broken promise arguably does not amount to resigning oneself from the possibility of obtaining happiness in the present. As Paolo A. Bolanos highlights, for Adorno art has critical significance because it awakens us to a social system that denies happiness:

The dimension of utopia that art creates is not a positive one, in fact, it is a moment when a “lack” is realized. (…) The role of art, therefore, is a reminder of a lack, that the present society lacks something. This realization of a lack is the precondition of social

critique. An artwork can present itself as an opposition to the present and, thus, opens up the present to the future. (2009: 30)

However, if we want to avoid the conclusion that Utopia is only conceivable in the

aforementioned austere aesthetic sense, we need to supplement this critical account with Adorno’s underlying social-epistemological concerns. In other words, what kind of thesis regarding the individual’s relationship to the broader social totality is entailed by the negative, aesthetic conception of happiness just sketched?

To gain an understanding of this, we must first elaborate on Adorno’s negative conception of happiness by honing in on the ethical dimension of his formulation. Such considerations are ultimately inseparable from the context under which Adorno was writing, where the horrors of Nazism, World War II and Auschwitz have made a mockery of the idea that the culture, morality and art of everyday institutions can provide happiness. We have already spoken of the increased suffusion of commodification into the most intimate

spheres of life, which for Adorno requires a negative aesthetic that refuses affirmation of the needs and desires generated by market society. Yet it is equally important to recognize the more rudimentary conviction driving Adorno’s thought: that one cannot affirm happiness within a present that systematically produces misery and unhappiness.

For Adorno, administrative, capitalist society prevents us from genuinely conceiving the good life as immediately identifiable, whether in the instant gratifications of the Culture Industry or in conceptual thought. He refuses to attribute Utopia with positive content, for the latter will always bear the stamp of the domination that modern society produces. Upon being asked what would constitute an emancipated society, any account that appeals to the

flourishing of human needs and desires can only appeal to that which is produced by the system itself. Therefore, besides the minimal demand that “no one shall go hungry any more”, “Every other answer substitutes, for a condition that should only have been defined by human needs, the habits of a system organized around production as an end in itself” (2005: 156). In this respect, Marcuse’s attempts to disentangle happiness from its false framing within the labour process, would hardly be adequate for Adorno. Insofar as the former believes that “General happiness presupposes knowledge of the true interest: that the social life-process be administered in a manner which brings into harmony the freedom of individuals and the preservation of the whole on the basis of given objective historical and natural conditions (2009: 145), Marcuse accepts too much of the present as it stands. He arguably evades the ethical considerations of affirming a dominating system that would link knowledge and happiness, the present’s “very social development [which] has also brought forth the forces which can once again bring about that connection” (2009: 146).

This ethical consideration of the implausibility of affirming happiness in the present can be elaborated by looking at Adorno’s criticism of Friedrich Nietzsche in section 61 of

Minima Moralia (1951/2005). Although he is not by any means a Utopian thinker,

Nietzsche’s notion of amor fati, that we affirm life in the here- and-now, is a target for Adorno that resonates with the latter’s critique of affirmations of the good life in a world where “life does not live”. This in turn requires the elaboration of a social epistemology, one which Nietzsche does not provide, and which provides the conditions for thinking Utopia in a more meaningful way.

as that of Christian theology, that which grounds truth in a transcendental beyond, is that “hope is mistaken for truth” (2005: 97). The fact that individuals seemingly cannot live happily without the thought of an absolute does not justify it as truth, as Adorno quotes from Nietzsche’s Antichrist: “The proof of pleasure is proof of: pleasure –nothing more; why in the world should true judgments cause more enjoyment than false ones and, in

accordance with a preordained harmony, necessarily bring pleasant feelings in their train?” (2005: 97-98). Philosophy is thus in error when it infers truth from pleasure, or indeed from anything that is merely given and taken at face-value in experience. While Adorno is in agreement here, he argues that Nietzsche’s teaching of amor fati, that one should love things as they are (one’s fate), falsely escapes the philosophical tendency to ground truth in the given. Adorno asks whether in Nietzsche

Is it not the same false inference that leads from the existence of stubborn facts to their erection as the highest value, as he criticizes in the leap from hope to truth? (2005: 98).

If the Christian is delusional in positing faith as true simply because it brings about happiness, then surely Nietzsche is equally wrong in affirming fate simply because it has been recognized. For Adorno the doctrine of amor fati, “the glorification of the absurdist things” (2005: 98), is symptomatic of a flawed, problematic philosophical tendency, “the same ignominious adaptation which, in order to endure the world’s horror, attributes reality to wishes and meaning to senseless compulsion.” (2005: 98).

Why is this problematic? While admiring Nietzsche’s attempts to provide a genealogy of all pre-existing values, for Adorno any philosophy which suggests that genuine happiness

can only be found within the immediate is an ethically inadequate attempt to meaningfully think through the barbarism of culture and civilization. The events not only of Auschwitz but also the institutionalization of torture and weapons of mass destruction have made a

“mockery” of the idea that “what is has meaning” (2003: 428). Not only is the existential assertion of meaning, to that which simply “is”, gravely disrespectful and insensitive to victims (to ask them, say, to find meaning in their own suffering); it also renders one complicit with oppression. This is because it allows one to remain content with existing oppressive structures without thinking beyond them:

For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning moderates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things that have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will have had some kind of purpose. (2003: 428).

Nietzsche, who showed that most of which we take to be self-evident, including morality, reason and logic, has in actuality been formed by a whole range of dynamic processes (which he locates ultimately in the Will to Power), ends up reaffirming the present order-of-things in spite of his insights.

While Nietzsche essentially seeks to utilize his insights regarding the fictive nature of reality to promote healthier forms of life, a “joyful science”, Adorno takes issue with the way “myth debars Nietzsche’s critique of myth from truth” (2005: 98). This is because Nietzsche does not have a social theory, “no general concept of society nor thus of a specific kind of society, for example capitalist society” (Rose, 2014: 34). Therefore his

criticism of ‘values’, and his exposure of the ‘will to power’ by which concepts and ideas are imposed, do not logically depend on being located in a subject, social or non-social, nor thus in a social group or class. (2014: 34)

It should be noted that Nietzsche did not wish to ground his philosophy in any kind of theory of society, hostile as he was to philosophies which conceptualize existence in a static,

systematic way. Adorno also did not want to provide a social theory that shows the subject to be crudely determined by social factors. He was “confronted by the same paradox which beset Nietzsche, namely, how to present or ground a philosophy or point of view when the aim of that philosophy is to criticise reality or society altogether and thus the prevailing norms of philosophical or sociological discourse as well.” (2014: 18). However, for Adorno a theory of society is nevertheless quite essential to avoid lapsing back into the form of identity thinking which would grant affirmation, the false Utopia, of life and happiness in the face of a debilitating social order.

What does Adorno’s social theory look like, and why is a theory of society necessary? Adorno’s account of the social is one that stands in opposition to identity thinking - that which consists in the use of a concept as if the individual which it denotes instantiates it when it does not. (2014: 198). Philosophies which assert a simple correlation between concept and object, always designate some kind of dislocation

in the relation between the subject and the object: a denial of one pole of the relation, and/or a founding of the philosophy on the primacy of one pole, or, an attempt to avoid the subject/object dichotomy altogether. (2014: 55)

It was therefore Adorno’s task to search for a form of theorizing that would unmask this veiling over of individual objects by their concepts (identity thinking), in order to gain a sense of subject and object as dialectically related, rather than asserting the primacy of one over the other. In aiming to conceive non-identity, that which escapes conceptualization, it is necessary to think dialectically, to conceive the relation between subject and object without dispensing with either, and yet to hold off from any kind of synthesis or reconciliation between the two. Thus Adorno advocates what he terms negative dialectics, for he argues that the only way to think beyond the reified structures of consciousness is precisely through that which avoids affirmation or reconciliation. And, contra Nietzsche, this requires

awareness of that which contains and structures the subject-object relationship – the social process:

Adorno’s philosophical ambition was to redefine the subject and the object, and their relationship, without presupposing their identity, and to show that this can only be accomplished if the subject and the object are understood as social processes and not as the presuppositions of pure epistemology. (2014: 56)

For Adorno identity thinking has the same internal structure as the production of value in exchange, the way in which all forms of existence come to be defined by their exchange-value rather than their use-exchange-value. Both commodity society and identity thinking have a “reified structure”, maintaining the illusion that individual objects can be readily categorized according to concepts. Any attempt at “pure epistemology”, which does not account for its imbrication in the social, or any sense of its historical determination, will ultimately fail to escape this way of thinking.

A theory of society is therefore necessary for drawing attention to the dialectical mediation between the individual subject and the abstract social forces that constitute them. As Adorno demonstrates in his writings on “Sociology and Empirical Research” (1976), social research is inadequate if it merely registers its findings as isolated facts about

individuals, and fails to relate those findings to a broader theory of society and history:

Empirical social research wrongly takes the epiphenomenon – what the world has made for us – for the object itself. In its application, there exists a presupposition which should not be deduced from the demands of the method but rather the state of society, that is, historically. (1976: 71)

In contrast to the positivistic workings of much sociology and empirical research, whereby “already in the here and now it is man as such who is central, instead of determining

socialized human beings in advance as a moment of societal totality” (1976: 71), a genuinely critical theory about the individual and society would recognize the way in which the former is a product of the latter. It requires one to relate the individual to a Marxist theory of society, of the predominance of exchange-value in everyday social relations. Thus, as Rose asserts,

Adorno insists that empirical research as described and the techniques listed, must be distinguished from ‘theory’, reserving ‘theory’ to mean a commitment to a view of the production of value in exchange as the underlying process in society in relation to which all other phenomena are to be understood. (2014: 124)

Yet this may be misleading to the degree that it holds the epistemological subject as mere epiphenomena of the broader social process. To place undue emphasis on objective

socio-economic factors would be to lapse back into a form of identity thinking, in which the object (the individual) is fulfilled by its concept (society).

Instead, conceiving society requires non-identity thinking, recognizing that “the concept of ‘society’ is one which is not identical with its object” (2014: 101). This means that one cannot work with empirical research alone. Rather, one must adopt the critical

perspective of totality. Such a stance does not project the individual as a mere by-product of the social totality. Rather,

the critical perspective of totality ‘seeks to save or helps to bring forth what does not obey the totality, what contradicts it or what first forms itself as the potential of individuation which does not yet exist, that is, to perceive the mediation of the individual by the totality (or, of the appearance by the essence) is to perceive how the existence of individuals or the façade of society, does not fulfil its concept, how unequal things are made equal by the prevailing form of commodity exchange and by the corresponding conceptual apparatus of that society. (2014: 101-2)

It is, in other words, “simply another way of stating that basic characteristic of non-identity thinking” (2014: 101). The moment of non-identity between the subject and the social is ultimately necessary to grant a critical perspective whereby the subject may recognize her position in the social and the possibility of going beyond it. This is the Utopian dimension of Adorno’s social epistemology. Opening critical space between the subject and the broader social process is a necessary component of Adorno’s negative Utopian thought. Had Nietzsche possessed a theory of society, this may have fed into the ethical conviction that life cannot be affirmed in the here-and-now. The generation of alternative life-worlds

requires a critical perspective on, and from within, the social. It necessitates the deployment of non-identity thinking, the critical perspective of totality which identifies the locus of Utopia in a space beyond the affirmation of what is. Beyond either an individual conception of flourishing or endurance (e.g. Nietzsche), or the valorisation or acceleration of existing structures (e.g. Marcuse). Either of such instances would amount to an affirmation of one pole of the subject/object dialectic at the expense of a critical perspective on its mediation.

In other words, Utopia requires a negative social epistemology that postpones considerations of the good life. For Adorno the good life must exist in some form of a beyond. Yet it cannot be a beyond in any mystical, transcendent sense, because then this would lead back to the affirmation of a new myth, of happiness as something identifiable. Happiness must be viewed negatively, as that which cannot be conceptualized or reconciled to immediate thought and reality, yet which nonetheless promises reconciliation in its very postponement to a space beyond the immediate. Finlayson points out that this idea coheres with Adorno’s thought in Negative Dialectics (1966/1981) concerning the relationship between identical and non-identical thought. That book proposes that while the true object of philosophy is what escapes representation and conceptualization, we nevertheless cannot stop using concepts as the only form of thinking we have. We must “use concepts against themselves”(…) Only by such a means, by pushing thought against its limits, and as it were cracking open its surface, is the good, or the right life, to be glimpsed’’ (2009: 8). Finlayson quotes the following passage from ND, which sheds light on the paradoxical idea that only through the absence of images of Utopia might we be able to see it:

It is only in that absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism secularises it by

not permitting utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. (1981: 207)

As we have seen, this negative, “imageless” perspective on Utopia is inseparable from a thesis regarding the subject’s immanent, dialectical and non-identical relationship with the social totality. Rather than mere melancholic defeatism, Adorno’s negative conception of happiness can thus be said to be underpinned by an inherently critical theoretical outlook.

Chapter 2: Jameson

A shared social-epistemological interest?

On the surface, Jameson’s interest in Utopia is miles away from Adorno’s. In terms of concrete definitions, Adorno’s imageless negativity limits any kind of conception of an alternative society to moments of aesthetic refuge, determinate negation and deferment of happiness. In MM, for example, Adorno wistfully writes:

Lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, ‘being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfilment’, might take the place of process, act, satisfaction (…) None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled Utopia than that of eternal peace. (2005: 157)

On the other hand, Jameson’s interest in the Utopian impulse, the Marxist hermeneutic work of demonstrating how cultural artefacts of all kinds are both ideological and Utopian, has a positive inclination towards the potential for collective transformation. Whereas

Jameson looks to cultural forms for “the imperceptible and even immemorial ripening of the seeds of time, the subliminal subcutaneous eruptions of whole new forms of life and social relations” (2010: 416), Adorno’s imageless materialism bans the pre-determination of a future where all social antagonisms are reconciled (Bilderverbot). Overall, Jameson’s focus on the category of Utopia itself is markedly different from the negative articulation of happiness which informs Adorno’s social theory.

Yet, as stated in the introduction, Jameson does not seek to concretely outline such new forms of collectivity. Contra Marcuse, he is under no present illusion that the

transformation of needs would bring about “a total technical reorganization of the concrete world of human life” (2010: 403), though not for the ethical reasons that preoccupied Adorno. His interest is rather to suspend concrete proposals of the good life through a critical practice that reawakens us to new possibilities for Utopian thinking. Like Adorno, it could be said that his aim is to keep alive the possibility of Utopia. But how can one frame such a negative, critical practice through attentiveness to the way narratives unconsciously relate to Utopia? In what way does such a hermeneutical interest betray dimensions of negativity, which can, at face-value, be compared with Adorno? The following section will focus on the way in which Jameson’s framing of Utopia can be read as a form of critique, one which refuses positive images of what Utopia would look like. I must stress that I am not trying to ignore the crucial methodological differences adopted by Adorno and Jameson; I only wish to outline the initial thesis that Jameson, too, could be said to frame Utopia as a form of critique, the laying of conditions before Utopia can be imagined. I will outline the claim that we could read Jameson as providing a social-epistemological thesis of Utopia, one which points to the possibility of Utopia through its refusal to affirm it presently. Like

Adorno, Jameson relates Utopia to an epistemological thesis that allows us to both grasp and critically move beyond the social totality.

However, Jameson’s framing of critique and totality, as a way to reignite Utopian

possibility, will need to be interrogated in the section which follows this one. There, through outlining Jameson’s concern with the problems thrown up by the postmodern era, we will see the way in which the two thinkers depart. There too, we shall see that Jameson’s

apparent negativity is quite far from that which we find in Adorno. Furthermore, we will see the problems entailed by Jameson’s simultaneous reliance and betrayal of some of Adorno’s key themes. For now, however, we will suspend such historical and methodological

comparisons. We will focus purely on Jameson, reconstructing his negative framing of Utopia through his interest in ideology, narrative and allegory, and hone in on the way his negative framing of Utopia betrays qualities like that which we find in Adorno.

2.1. Utopia as ideology and narrative

In his 1979 essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”, Fredric Jameson argues that it is the task of the critic to uncover “some sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity that can be detected, no matter how faintly and feebly, in the most degraded works of mass culture” (1979: 148). Arguing that mass culture should not be regarded as mere false

consciousness, Jameson prompts consideration of this Utopian “detective work”” by presenting a popular narrative such as the Hollywood film “as a transformational work on

social and political anxieties and fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to be “managed” or repressed” (1979: 141). In other words, such works of mass culture do not exactly distort reality, and all its attendant injustices and repressions, per se; they instead set themselves to work on individual desires and concerns through certain narrative mechanisms. Such mechanisms include the

projection of social harmony, and usually involve the “construction of imaginary resolutions” (1979: 141) to social unease and political anxieties.

The ideological function of such narratives can be seen, for example, in the popular film

The Godfather. Jameson here argues that the myth of the Mafia serves as a narrative

solution to very real social contradictions. This is through the way that desire for genuine insight into the economic miseries of American business society, “whose prescription would be social revolution” (1979: 146), is displaced onto a narrative of individualised moral corruption and dishonesty; namely, the myth of the “evil” Mafia. However, this narrative is also shown to be inseparable from a conception of Utopia. This is in the sense that the narrative cannot, as the remark about “transformational work” attests, do its ideological work through distortion and repression alone; it must also work on and provide some sense of fulfilment to Utopian fantasy and longing.

What does such a Utopian conception entail? First, it is to be recognized as a kind of impulse, something future-oriented, pointing to an alternative world that lies in even the most degraded realms. Utopian longings are to be read as existing even within the most debased forms of life. Drawing heavily on the work of Bloch, Jameson summarizes this idea thus:

The premise here is then that the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfillments and Utopian gratifications; indeed, I have often used the example of the humble aspirin as the unwitting bearer of the most extravagant longings for immortality and for the transfiguration of the body. (2010: 415-16)

Such gratifications are also necessary components of both the mass cultural artefact and its ideological function. The second aspect of this Utopian conception is the collective, social dimension, of how works refer to and work on the desire for happiness within a community. For Jameson, the close-knit community of the Mafia family satisfies this urge, offering “a contemporary pretext for a Utopian fantasy which can no longer express itself through such outmoded paradigms and stereotypes as the image of the now extinct American small town” (1979: 147). Jameson recognizes the Mafia family as projecting such an “image of some older collective ghetto or ethnic neighbourhood solidarity” (1979: 146), the envy and hatred towards which it is directed representing a distorted urge for Utopian, collective transformation. Whether manifested in this particularly distorted form, or in a more simple affirmation of the reassurance of the nuclear family, the gratification of Utopian impulses is ultimately inseparable from the ideological, repressive functioning of the work, for “the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated” (1979: 144).

with an ideological-repressive function, one which cannot manipulate by merely repressing the energies of passive individual subjects, but which must also manage and divert Utopian gratifications. These Utopian energies must be “initially awakened within the very text that seeks to still them” (1981: 277), in order that the text can manage, defuse and re-channel these “otherwise dangerous and protopolitical impulses” (1981: 277). This requires a

preliminary step whereby the collective and future-oriented components of everyday life are unconsciously invoked, subsequently gratified in the ideological narrative. Underpinning this theoretical move of Jameson’s is a desire to modify traditional Marxist cultural analysis. This concerns the classic view in which cultural forms are mere epiphenomena to the economic, their function to delude us from what is going on in the “real”, underlying means of

production:

The most influential lesson of Marx (…) has, of course, rightly been taken to be the lesson of false consciousness, of class bias and ideological programming, the lesson of the structural limits of the values and attitudes of particular social classes, or in other words of the constitutive relationship between the praxis of such groups and what they conceptualize as value or desire and project in the form of culture (1981: 272)

However, as should be clear, it is not Jameson’s intention to dispose of this instrumental view of culture. He wants, rather, to modify it so that we see ideology not only as something which distorts and represses, but which also has a positive, Utopian dimension. This

provides us with an outline of the elementary proposition to be explored here. On the one hand, Utopia is necessarily ideological. On the other, ideology is necessarily Utopian.

For Jameson “the instrumentalization of culture is a temptation or tendency within all Marxisms” (1981: 272). While reading the cultural artefact as fulfilling a certain

ideological function, one that pertains to certain historical and social realities, is of great use to the critic, employing this method alone contains several difficulties. Firstly, it implies a conception of ideology that is crude, reductive and wholly negative. This is one in which the superstructure is secondary to the base. Culture is a mere functioning of the economic, its only role that of ideologically reinforcing the underlying mode of production (e.g. the capitalist mode of production). Drawing on the historical context of the French Communist Party’s polemic against Stalinism, which according to Jameson underpins Louis Althusser’s reformulation of ideology (of which we will not go into here), Jameson highlights scruples with the perceived disregard for the autonomy of the cultural sphere within Marxist

ideology critique. The Stalinist emphasis on the primacy of the forces of production, that the superstructure would be automatically transformed after the completion of necessary work within the base (industrialization, modernization, nationalization etc.), rendered cultural revolution, and any attention to “the collective attempt to invent new forms of the labor process” (1981: 22) within the Soviet Union, unnecessary. For many like Althusser, this historical fact becomes justification for casting doubt on any kind of Marxist cultural analysis that is purely instrumental, and that does not respect the autonomy of the cultural sphere. Though space does not permit an extended discussion of Jameson’s relationship with Althusser, it is helpful to note that the former shares the concerns of treating culture as purely instrumental.

As we have seen, for Jameson this concern calls for greater attention to the Utopian dimension of culture. Yet this requires caution. For if, as Jameson outlines, the Utopian is so

thoroughly wrapped-up with this project of manipulation, recapturing and neutralizing our existential yearnings in the sphere of consumption rather than collective praxis, what positive capacity can it offer us? We must not succumb to the view that the harnessing of Utopian and collective energies has a purely repressive function. Jameson wants to argue that the Utopian impulse shows that even the most privatizing, individualized repressive forces of commodification must unconsciously relate to some urge for a collective future. The concept of the Utopian impulse at play here, the Blochian investigation into the Utopian, collective urges that underlie even the most degraded areas of life, becomes “the model for an analysis of the dependence of the crudest forms of manipulation on the oldest Utopian longings of humankind” (1981: 278). For Jameson this manipulatory theory of culture has the initial benefit of illuminating us precisely to the hidden traces of Utopia that, even if repressed by the dominant culture, nonetheless persist within the latter’s everyday functioning. However, the shortcomings of such cultural analyses risk treating the Utopian impulse as a mere means to manipulation, which Jameson neatly summarizes in the following passage:

In particular, they depend on an initial separation between means and ends – between Utopian gratification and ideological manipulation – which might well serve as evidence for the opposite of what was to have been demonstrated, and might be invoked to deny the profound identity between these two dimensions of the cultural text. (1981: 278)

Moreover, we should equally not valorise this Utopian impulse, as a hidden shred of Utopian content that can be affirmed despite the repressive apparatus to which it belongs. As we shall see, for Jameson what is instead required is a collective, dialectical method of

try and view the text as ideological and Utopian at one and the same time; not at some points Utopian, at some points ideological. The pay-off for holding Utopia together

dialectically with ideology is for Jameson a richer sense of how it can open-up the space to reengage us with political praxis, and the reawakening of the Utopian imagination.

How can this “profound identity” between Utopia and ideology be demonstrated? In other words, how can a text both reinforce (both in terms of form and content) and point toward the transcendence of the existing order? To gain some sense of this we must

resituate the problem - of how ideology can simultaneously be Utopian - within the classical Marxist framework of class consciousness. Jameson states that class-consciousness

embodies ideology in the strongest sense; in particular, this is evident within the ruling-class. The problem is therefore encapsulated in the question of how the legitimation of class domination can also convey a universal, collective value embodied in the Utopian impulse. For Jameson, this becomes clear once we recognize that such narrow ideological interests are not merely the monadic, isolated prejudices of one or a few individuals. Rather, there is an inherently collective dimension to such ideologies. We find the generation of collective solidarity, of class-consciousness, not only within the oppressed class, who come to realize their exploitation and form collective bonds with others in the same position. This threat of resistance that the ruling-class subsequently will sense creates class-consciousness amongst themselves, through growing solidarity amongst those that need to maintain their ruling position. For Jameson, it is precisely this dialectical sense of collectivity that is the key to understanding the functioning of class-consciousness as ideology, for “the index of all class consciousness is to be found not in the latter’s contents or ideological motifs, but first and foremost in the dawning sense of solidarity with other members of a particular group or

class” (1981: 280). The Utopian impulse, the appeal to collective longing, is therefore inseparable from ideology: ideology is necessarily Utopian.

This conception requires two qualifications, both of which are deeply related, and will hopefully enrichen our understanding of what has just been formulated. Moreover, they will prove integral to our following discussion surrounding the critical negative significance of the category of Utopia. The first is the need to stress, as has already been mentioned, that ideology and Utopia must be thought together dialectically. In other words, we cannot argue that the ruling-classes express Utopian longing in spite of their ideological forms of

repression. Jameson argues that this has its in analogue in something like the liberal view that “the greatness of a given writer may be separated from his deplorable opinions, and is achieved in spite of them or even against them” (1981: 279). Such a separation elides the centrality of the political in its positing of the private or personal as the more authentic sphere. We must instead retain the contradiction, and this appears central to Jameson’s notion of the Utopian impulse overall. It is not to unearth the positive from the negative as such, but to hold the two together in the dialectic, “an injunction to think the negative and the positive together at one and the same time, in the unity of a single thought” (2010: 421). As such we must avoid thinking in terms of value-judgement, instead recognizing the unity of the ideological and the Utopian as we proceed to investigate whatever text or artefact.

The second idea that needs to be brought to the forefront of our discussion is that of narrative. It needs to be emphasised that, for Jameson, the Utopian impulse is not a positive representation of the good life, but rather a figure for such a unified collective existence. The collective sense of class solidarity is to be read as an allegory for a perfect world:

The achieved collectivity or organic group of whatever kind – oppressors fully as much as oppressed – is Utopian not in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities are

themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society. (281)

Allegory must be understood here as a figure or trope for the collective, historical material in question, as opposed to a form of direct, conceptualization which captures such material as complete representation. This negative sense can be brought out if we recognize that ideology does not denote false consciousness, but rather marks a limit to our thinking. Jameson points out, in the opening chapter of PU, that the best way to view Marx’s theory of ideology is as “structural limitations and ideological closure” (1981; 37). He his indebted to Althusser’s Lacanian formulation of ideology as “the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence" (1991: 51). The ideology of the text is marked by its attempt to make sense of and resolve the contradictions of the historical context in question. Ideologies are therefore narratives which always refer to collective history. History, for Jameson, is the untranscendable horizon of all narratives, and the latter tries to make sense of the former, but never achieves full resolution. This is because of the violent contingency of historical factors; history is described, famously, as “what hurts, (it is) what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (1981: 88). This emphasises, as Alexander Galloway summarizes, the determining nature of the (historical) material conditions of existence, shaping individual existence, social life and cultural production: