A Place in the Stars, a Place in the Dirt
an Investigation into the Utopian Desires
in Science Advocacy and Science Fiction
written by Ivo Stoop toward the completion of the Media Studies: Film Studies Master’s Program at the University of Amsterdam, 2015 Supervisor: Dr. A. M. Geil Second Reader: Dr. M. C. Wilkinson istoop96@gmail.com Student ID#: 10850929 Completed on: 27 October 2015 23,561 wordsCONTENTS Introduction The Mess We’re In ...………3 Chapter 1 Utopia: the ShapeShifting Ideology ….………..………...11 1.1 Thomas More’s Utopia ………..……….13 1.2 After More: The Program and the Impulse.……….………....16 1.3 Body, Time, Collectivity ………..………...19 1.4 WishFulfillment and The Reality Principle of Science Fiction …….…………....23 1.5 Upon Reaching the (Apparent) Horizon of the SciFi Imaginary …….…………..28 Chapter 2 Cosmos and the Utopia in Scientific Discovery ………..31
2.1 Humanist and Scientific Utopias ………...32 2.2 A Personal Voyage ………...36 2.3 A Spacetime Odyssey ………...40 2.4 Spaceships of the Imagination ………...42 2.5 Technological Adolescence ……….47 Chapter 3 Interstellar and Scientific Exploration as Utopian Antidote ………….………….54
3.1 The Indomitable “Spirit” of Science ………...56 3.2 Scientific Realism ………...58 3.3 The Other Future ………...60 Conclusion ………...65 Bibliography ………....67
Introduction The Mess We’re In Science fiction in its most general definition concerns itself with fictionalized futures, but under the preconception that that future will be determined by current and yettocome advancements in scientific knowledge and their uses. This predilection toward predictive futurefantasy, which is based primarily in an assessment of current real scientific and/or technological capability, seems to be among the more widely taken premises within the genre — as Peter Fitting puts it, “there is a science fiction which continues to claim for itself some predictive or extrapolative function” (Fitting 136). Works of science fiction thus often work as cultural critique, in that the portrayal of a future antagonistic abuse of the power of science is relevant to its contemporary uses and abuses. The science fiction films of the 1970’s and 80’s often told stories of the bizarre and horrible effect on culture a hypothetical nuclear apocalypse might have; scifi films of the 21st century, in contrast, often portray a future after economic and environmental collapse has decimated human civilization. There seems to be a thread which runs between the constituent qualities of science fiction, apocalypse narratives, and something which can be described as a kind of broad fascination or fear of the ‘moment’ at which humanity teeters between annihilation and triumphant return. Depictions of apocalypse and postapocalyptic settings in film are virtually always placed within the genre of science fiction. It seems that merely the precondition that the world has gone through violent, ‘worldending’ catastrophe is enough to associate a narrative with the imagination of scifi, even if the cause of the apocalypse is vague or unknown — a curious example being the Mad Max series, which despite depicting a markedly antifuturistic and technologically backwards postapocalyptic world is widely considered to be a work of science fiction. Arguments can undoubtedly be made that Mad Max sits well within the genre parameters of sciencefiction for a variety of other reasons, but the association between apocalypse and other scifi constituents is strong enough that it may be considered a scifi element in and of itself. This is obviously not a new notion, as apocalyptic themes have appeared frequently in scifi narratives since the literary genre took off at the turn of the 20th century. However, where apocalyptic events had initially been included to show an extremely long passage of time — as in,
for example, the strange postapocalyptic farfuture visited in H.G. Wells’s 1892 novel The Time Machine — the apocalypses of scifi films in the 1980’s onward have drawn nearer and nearer to the present day. Pulp science fiction once stood generally as a chronological opposite to medieval fantasy, and contained arguably the same fantasy escapism in a different guise. It was changed fundamentally, however, when apocalypse began to take a more critical role in the narrative: it became social/political critique, as the world ending was almost always the result of an authoritative force getting out of hand. Scifi developed a critical edge over the course of a century, elevating its fantasy element to a more bluntly put reaction to real frustrations and fears in modern life. Apocalypse serves as the ultimate price to pay for the failure to address these anxieties, but also as a morbid catharsis which allows for fantasies of a heroic return. At this point the same could almost be said for Utopia/Dystopia narratives. Once a selfcontained genre of its own right, the concept of Utopia in mainstream narratives is just as readily associated with scifi now as apocalypse is. Apocalypse can provide a useful catalyst for the birth of a narrative Utopia or Dystopia, as is very often the case in contemporary scifi films. In a typical film narrative within the quasigenre of ‘apocalypse films’, political, economic, or environmental catastrophe erupts and results in a new world order. Newly discovered technology or science is usually the cause of the cataclysm — even if that ‘new science’ is an asteroid
crashing into Earth (see Deep Impact, 1998). The resulting organization or disorganization of humanity on what’s left of Earth proceed with the same narrative constraints as the older genre of Utopia did: the inhabitants of a time and/or place, spatially or temporally separate from the present known world, are tasked with the chance at a clean slate for humanity. They then either succeed in creating an image of a society which is a correction (according to the ethical leanings of the filmmakers) of our own reallife society, or utterly fail and thus show the folly inherent in Utopian projects. Occasionally, the apocalypticUtopic scifi narrative takes an imaginative leap and presents a scenario in which humans have taken the next “giant step” out into the cosmos as a solution to worldending woes. While not necessarily outright Utopian in the sense that the narrative revolves around a Utopian program, a world imagined in which humanity can organize itself well enough to even attempt such fantastic feats of engineering (especially in contrast to
our own reallife, comparably inept deep space travel abilities) must hold in its structure at least some elements of what can be considered an achieved Utopia. This type of plot trajectory is more typical of science fiction novels of the 20th century — specifically those of Robert Heinlein, whose vast mythos covers the rise and fall of several Utopias/Dystopias on Earth and in outer space over the course of thousands of years. Perhaps many of these ‘postEarth’ narratives from scifi novels were never adapted to film for historical reasons, namely that the United States was caught up in Cold War anxiety during much of the 20th century, resulting in an excess of nationalism injected into Hollywood filmmaking. It’s easy to imagine why fantasies of the collapse of (Western) civilization and leaving a broken Earth behind might not be popular amongst film producers tasked with bolstering the American morale. This has however not at all been the case for the past several decades. The aftereffects of the softending of the Cold War in the United States were that of a kind of anticlimactic, uncertain victory over (not only the Soviet Union, but) the allencompassing destruction which had seemed so imminent in the previous decades; a shift towards more loosely defined, omnipresent ideological threats has been cemented in American media culture since 9/11 — after which not only are the enemies of the state pursued universally, indiscriminate of national borders, but the general civilian population is aware of (and to a very large extent, complicit in) the farreaching surveillance performed by government agencies into their own individual lives. The resulting confusion has left a disillusioned public which can no longer seek legitimate consolation in the virtuous narratives of scifi Utopian success stories — for it would seem that such visions have already to a certain degree been grotesquely actualized, with the most antiUtopian consequences now glaringly clear. The tonal shift of big blockbuster action films from the early 90’s until the current mid2010’s plots a descent into unprecedented dark territory. It is, for example, hard to imagine 1995’s Independence Day enjoying the same box office success 20 years later in 2015 — its
classic Hollywood underdog hero story and gungho patriotism (in one scene the President’s plane emerges triumphantly from the flames of an exploding Washington, D.C.) would come across as comical and unintentionally ironic. By contrast, four of 2014’s biggest scifi box office earners — The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Divergent,
and Interstellar — all have narratives that negatively critique the status quo and offer bleak
representations of a post”event” world broken or corrupted by exaggerated features of realworld cultural, political, and technological trends.
Of those four mentioned, Interstellar is the only one that focuses specifically on space travel, which it portrays with deliberate realism. Its sequence of rocket liftoff staging for example has been praised for its trueness to life, and its precise representation of stranger physics (wormholes, black holes) has received equal appraisal from the science community, the merit of which has had no small effect on its critical and general reception. Its apparent endorsement from mainstream scientists (namely, Neil deGrasse Tyson) lends credence to its not so subtle contentious reflection on current global crises and their irresponsible handling by world leaders. Tyson, who I will discuss at length later in Chapter 2, works within a legacy of mainstream science advocacy which can be said to have begun with Carl Sagan in the 1970s and 80s —
particularly with his science education television program Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. There seems to be a clear genealogy traceable from Sagan’s hopeful scientific humanism and the kind of faith in and celebration of science in Interstellar and its critical reception.
Interstellar takes up the older scifi plot archetype of moving humanity outward into the cosmos, but does so through the most realistic portrayal of currently available and thoughtfully speculative space technology since 2001: A Space Odyssey1. The global crisis at hand in the narrative of the film is also notably topical — the world has simply run out of food, and a runaway greenhouse effect is killing off the remaining crop species on Earth while slowly suffocating humanity at the same time. The film exploits our current era’s broad anxieties of resource depletion and unalterable, deadly atmospheric changes which buzzes in the background of global news media and forces an ultimatum on its viewers: in the face of a slow, tortuous decline towards extinction, are we ready now to begin seriously imagining life beyond Earth? The film also more mildly addresses a somewhat related but less disastrously grim problem familiar amongst its audiences — an educational crisis which sees a decline in what’s become known as ‘scientific literacy’. It’s worth noting that this is primarily a problem discussed in the U.S., especially as advocates of stronger science education (and better education in
1 I am here ignoring Gravity (2013), which despite involving high technology and space flight is not at all
general) butt heads ideologically with both religious fundamentalists and the drafters of state education budgets. (But then, Interstellar is also a thoroughly Americacentric film, from the fact that NASA is the sole organization on Earth secretly spearheading a humanrace exodus all the way to an American flag, representing all of humanity, planted on an alien planet at the end of the film.) The same advocates for better scientific outreach programs also strongly argue for the government and the public to accept humandriven climate change as a legitimate and factually based concern that must be addressed soon to prevent disaster in the near future. The film stands clearly on one side of the current ideological rift in the USA over science — and attempts to make its point very loudly heard through a huge blockbuster action film. It’s clear that there is a certain ideological platform that this film is working from, and it takes for granted that its audiences are familiar with the ecological crises referenced in the plot and already have developed a position regarding their severity that matches that of the film’s. By showing a more or less ‘realistic’ depiction of what may be the most likely apocalypse humanity faces, it is an interesting development in representations of apocalypse in scifi film, which have thus far been presented primarily as fantastically weird aftermaths of singular global catastrophes. Whether or not it is entirely successful, the film adds drama to a doomsday narrative which has for the most part evaded effective dramatization, in news media or in Hollywood film (the closest is perhaps The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which portrays global warming and nature itself as a kind of monstermovie adversary to be defended against). Climate change and reduction of biodiversity are perhaps simply too slow to dramatize, as opposed to nuclear holocaust or global domination by foreign power — the sensational world crises which
were dramatized successfully in the nuclearfear film tropes of the 50s through the early 80s. Before unraveling into a broad film about love, family, and death, Interstellar begins with a quasipolitical critique of American antiintellectualism and complacency. It depicts a (at least somewhat) plausible apocalyptic scenario which is vaguely understood to be caused by
humanity’s carelessness with science, and then offers a heroic reappropriation of science which brings it back to its essential adventurous spirit. This is the kind of defining revolutionary moment common to scifi apocalypse films which betrays the genre’s appeal: it is a reassurance
that the heroism and ingenuity of humanity will triumph over death, that our intelligence combined with an innate adventurous spirit will always be what saves us from annihilation.
Earlier in the same year Interstellar was released, a reboot of Sagan’s by now classic science education program Cosmos was aired on FOX this time presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson, a prominent science advocate and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. The original series presented by Carl Sagan was unprecedented in its success at the time of its original broadcast date in 1980, and is often noted for remaining almost completely scientifically relevant today with no information presented needing any amendment or redaction. However, many new discoveries have been made since, warranting an ‘updated’ version of the series in 2014. The updates are not only in the information presented, but also in its style of presentation: Sagan’s calm sincerity, akin to the hosting style of Mr. Rogers, is expanded in the new series into a more robust, stimulating version which pairs Tyson’s charismatic lecturing with eyecatching visuals, which have become increasingly emphasized in television science programming of recent years.
Tyson’s series, subtitled A Spacetime Odyssey, essentially reasserts the same narrative historicization as the original series — it charts the heroic growth of science as humanity’s greatest and characteristically defining enterprise while describing its findings with an overflowing sense of wonder and adventure, all with the purpose of (re)igniting public interest in the support and pursuit of scientific advancement and education. Both the new and old series promotes a position that humanity is a species which has evolved towards an end of attaining knowledge about the universe, and urges its viewers to view this evolutionary achievement with immense pride and humility. A Spacetime Odyssey also secondarily tasks itself with criticizing religious fundamentalism and intellectual shortsightedness, and portrays these as the essential challenges to what the series presents as the indomitable, innocent curiosity of humans. Science is here historically slated to have in its most pure form an ultimately liberal, pacifist and
humanistic agenda; this is most clearly represented in its glorifying portrayal of Enlightenment era thinkers.
This is even more clear in Sagan’s Personal Voyage. His favorite historical anecdote to return to in the series, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, encapsulates the conflict
being addressed in his lecturing — the benign, proud efforts of humanity towards learning about the world and the cosmos, and the foolish, narrowminded antiintellectualism which rises periodically to destroy the fruits of those efforts forever. For Sagan, paramount to all apocalyptic ends is the diminution of human intelligence and its collection of knowledge. His compassionate attitude towards science and its role in the identity of the human race indeed contains a kind of Utopianism, though not in the traditional sense — his is a Utopianism based entirely on a spiritual belief in science, in the hope that it may be used to correct the corruptions in human nature which have cropped up throughout history. Both Tyson and Sagan enthusiastically dip into the scifi imaginary in order to demonstrate their views. Much of their success as educational series is likely due to this: by utilizing a visual language which is familiar to audiences who enjoy fantasies of science and outer space, the viewer is able to impart some of that fantasy enjoyment onto information which is based directly in reality. By doing so, Cosmos goes further than simply holding the attention of the viewer on information which may otherwise bore them — it attempts to make science accessible and unobfuscated by adding a dramatic severity, and imprinting an element of fantasy in the narrative of science history. **** The visual language of science fiction and its narrative tropes are utilized in both fictional narrative and nonfictional educational media, in both cinema and news media platforms, as a way to call upon an underlying source of emotional gravity which is carried with all things futureoriented. The postindustrial age has made humanity aware of its apparent power over nature and its own place within it, and there comes with this power the fear of failure to prevent speciessuicide through reckless abandon. Fantasies of a corrected system (or, in its negative image, the collapse of a corrupted system and its rebirth) at some point in the future constitute a dominant portion of contemporary science fiction. As a species we have come to understand the negative consequences of unchecked technological development: as new fantasies of the possibilities of science fuel its very progress, humanity is faced with the unsettling notion that the speed of technological development has ‘gotten out of hand’ and will continue in a cycle of selffulfilling prophecies even as we foresee its apocalyptic end.
As a vehicle for critical reflection on these matters, science fiction of the late 20th / early 21st century works within the same critical mode as Utopia has as a literary and political construct. In the following chapters I will (1) clarify this parallel using theories of Utopia by Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch, specifically in their understanding of the Utopian ‘impulse’ as a certain subconscious mechanism of desire underlying all things futureoriented, (2) perform a comparisonanalysis between Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s separate versions of the series Cosmos — including a closereading of their particular separate versions of the “ship of the
imagination” — in order to outline a shift from the Utopian/Dystopian fears of the 1980’s to those
of the present, and (3) perform an analysis of the film Interstellar by way of Bloch’s hermeneutic (with amendments by Jameson) in order to essentially diagnose the apocalyptic preoccupation in fantasies of science in contemporary science fiction cinema. Before I begin, it is important to make clear my reasons for choosing to perform such an analysis using two objects of quite different mediums and contexts of viewing. It is worth saying outright that the application of Bloch/Jameson’s hermeneutic will not have much to say about its mode of presentation, or even the difference in phenomenological affect elicited by each specifically. I rather am setting out to prove that this particular method is useful in describing a common agenda, or ‘program’, which operates in both cases on the level of ideology. As Bloch’s hermeneutic is tasked with finding threads of Utopianism amongst disparate objects, and Jameson’s adaptation reformats it for more thorough literary analyses of narrative and allegory, I will try to show that this method is equally powerful in describing a base Utopian ideology which seems to work systematically across media. It is in my view necessary to establish Utopianism as a major aspect of all science fiction produced today, which will include its intertextual formulations across all forms of media which make use of the ‘science fiction imaginary’; as science fiction’s effect on real depictions and attitudes towards science has been a focal point of much writing in the field of science fiction studies, I contend that a thorough analysis of contemporary trends in science advocacy and science fiction would be valuable to a larger critique of postindustrial ideologies of science, progress and technology — specifically in its effect on a society’s coordinates of desire.
Chapter 1 Utopia: The ShapeShifting Ideology Wie reich wurde allzeit davon geträumt, vom besseren Leben geträumt, das möglich wäre. Das Leben aller Menschen ist von Tagträumen durchzogen, darin ist ein Teil lediglich schale, auch entnervende Flucht, auch Beute für Betrüger, aber ein anderer Teil reizt auf, läßt mit dem schlecht Vorhandenen sich nicht abfinden, läßt eben nicht entsagen. Dieser andere Teil hat das Hoffen im Kern, und er ist lehrbar. 2
— Ernst Bloch, “The Principle of Hope” (Bloch 1) It is clear to me that a tracing of the genealogy of the Utopian origins of the sciencefiction genre is necessary in order for a reliable account of the status of Utopia (as a context for ideological content) in the current era to be considered. The intertextuality between Utopian literature and science fiction has in fact been the focus of consideration for writers within the field of science fiction studies for perhaps as long as that field has existed, and Utopia is understood by many to fill an important position in the varieties of scifi narrative; Darko Suvin has rather aptly recognized Utopia as a “socioeconomic subset of Science Fiction” (Jameson xiv, n. 8). Although the literary genre of Utopia has not been explicitly utilized nearly as frequently as it once was, to say the entire concept as an ideological source for literary imagination died with the genre would be to grossly misrepresent a century of literary and filmic narrative trends which are undeniably Utopian in subject matter — especially if such material purports to be expressly antiUtopian or Dystopian. Upon taking a thorough account of the usage of and attitude towards all things deemed ‘Utopian’, it becomes obvious that any categorically political alignment of the concept does not hold up when moving from one historical period to another. Although it is, without question, an innately political concept, it deftly avoids any 2 “How richly people have always dreamed of this, dreamed of the better life that might be possible. Everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has hoping at its core, and is teachable.” (translation obtained from the Marxist Internet Archive: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/introduction.htm>)
attempt to attach it to other wellunderstood ideologies. Eras of geopolitical ideologies have risen and fallen all under the pretext of a Utopian goal only for the next era to see the concept reincarnated, under different terms, in some new political struggle. In fact, as Ernst Bloch’s research into the matter seems to suggest, virtually all political strife in human history can be understood to be Utopian at its core, inasmuch as all political strife aims towards a corrected state (Jameson 1, 34). Utopia, as initially a fictional construct and a literary genre and secondarily as an intentional, real political program has been significantly altered in terms of its allegorical content since the beginning of the 20th century — around a time at which we may also, through certain perspectives of history, trace the origins of science fiction. It is important to consider that the concept of Utopia (which I will elaborate on and clarify below) carries along with it a kind of timeless motivating factor throughout the course of history. By this I mean that there is a critical core, a fundamental agency of the concept of ‘Utopia’ which up to and past the beginning of the 20th century has adapted itself allegorically to each new era’s concerns and cultural variations. As a political concept, Utopia is as pervasive as it has ever been (Jameson 1), although now so deeply enmeshed in the political sphere that it takes some degree of analysis in order to reveal. Where it is mentioned explicitly in politics, it is virtually always in an antiUtopian context — with connotations similar to the denouncing of someone as a communist or as anticapitalist in the United States. There is then, as it is often employed currently, the more loosely applied context of Utopia as a component in science fiction fantasy structures. The concept as a literary setting or trope no longer has any serious representation in literature and film as being ‘purely’ Utopian in a genre sense: it is safe to say all contemporary inclusions of Utopia in narrative are examples of science fiction, if not solely because of its use of Utopia. For the enormous historical compendium of Utopian texts to be currently most heavily represented in science fiction warrants a more serious look at how this historically fluid ideological context is portrayed for large audiences; I will thus provide in this chapter a brief overview of Utopia’s literary origins before delving into the interpretive methods provided by Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson which
will prove useful in performing an analysis of the Utopian threads in modern scientific activism and science fiction.
1.1 Thomas More’s Utopia
Let us begin by distinguishing Utopia in its various historical transformations, starting with its literary inception Utopia, a novel written and published in 1517 by Thomas More. The book’s exact meaning is something that is still uncertain, and the debate over More’s intention in writing it is ongoing. Fredric Jameson, in his book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, offers a chapter (Chapter 3 Morus: the Generic Window) dedicated to providing his own interpretation alongside historical context and other scholars’ differing analyses before continuing throughout the rest of his book with an extensive argument on Utopian ideology and its assimilation into science fiction literature. I will therefore almost exclusively refer in this chapter to his research on More and Utopia before introducing his particular spin on Ernst Bloch’s theory of the Utopian impulse, which I will also use extensively to support my own claims. Utopia is a novel in which a travelhardened and jaded Portuguese sailor named Raphael Hythloday recounts his travels to a forgotten island whose inhabitants live in a ‘perfected’ socioeconomic system. The people of Utopia use no money, rotate members of the government automatically regardless of social background, only go to war when absolutely necessary and avoid casualties at all cost — essentially, they live in a state constituted by all the various components of a ‘free society’ that were being discussed in nascent European liberal political circles contemporaneous with the book’s publication. As noted above, its ultimate purpose is still contested, but the book is unquestionably in some form or another a critique of the political and social climate of the Europe of More’s time . This is made clear through the structure of novel 3 itself: Book I consists of fabricated correspondences between More himself and other real contemporary scholars for the purpose of adding to the mystique of realism surrounding the island discussed, followed an extensive evaluation of the social, political, and economic strife of 3 Jameson suggests that Henry VIII’s closure of the Christian monasteries, Utopian prototypes in their own right, may have significantly contributed to More’s reasons for writing the text, as More is known to have spent much of his upbringing in and around a Christian monastery outside London (see Archaeologies of the Future, Chapter 3, pp. 2627).
England and continental Europe conducted through conversation between More and Hythloday. Book II — the “properly Utopian part of the text” as described by Jameson (22) — describes the
visit to the island of Utopia, the social organization of which seems in all its aspects to directly correspond as inversions or corrections of European systems . In the last lines of the book, More 4 expresses through narration that though he may not agree with everything Hythloday has told him of the Utopians, there are many things of their society that he would “rather wish, than hope, to see followed in our governments” (More 1901). This final note by More notwithstanding, interpretations of the text tend to be polarized between whether the text is purely satire, or meant to be taken as a genuine critique of contemporary life in Europe under the guise of a travel narrative. Considering the legacy the book has spawned ranging from real political revolution to truly satirical usage of the concept of Utopia in fiction, More’s exact intention in writing Utopia is obviously of substantial interest. This problem of interpretation is further complicated by the twopart format of the book. It is known that Book II was written first, which would lead one to believe that it is naturally the primary focus of the entire text and contains the key to its most accurate interpretation (which would be, as many have written, that More has sincerely outlined a hypothetically corrected version of European statehood) (Jameson 22). However, this begs the question of the relevance of Book I are we to regard it, as Jameson asks, as a “kind of afterthought or cautious and politically prudent (but also daring) recontextualization of the account of the island itself[?]” (22). Hythloday is, in Book I, set up as a surly character who enjoys using his extensive knowledge of foreign lands to criticize the states of Europe , who then tells his tale of the perfect 5 country to his incredulous listeners; More in the end is impressed to some extent by what he has heard, but is careful not to go so far as to endorse Utopia wholeheartedly. It would seem to me that, for narrative purposes, More has created a character of himself who at first scoffs at the notion of Utopia, then is told of it and has his mind changed slightly but not entirely — a rather traditional character arc in such a frame narrative. Nonetheless, the ‘satire’ side of the interpretive argument insists that Book I sets up the text to be read as a work of satire, after 4 See Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, Ch. 3. 5 “…Raphael had discoursed with great judgment on the many errors that were both among us and these nations, had treated of the wise institutions both here and there, and had spoken as distinctly of the customs and government of every nation through which he had past, as if he had spent his whole life in it…” More, Utopia [London 1901]
which Book II delves into a more fantasyoriented travel narrative before being grounded in reality once again in the final lines. The opposition between interpretations of this seminal text is revealing in that it lays bare a general paradoxical attitude taken towards Utopia which has persisted throughout history. The question of whether More should be taken seriously, or if the book is merely tongueincheek and actually intends to negatively portray an absurd vision of a ‘perfected’ world can be broadened to a question of the very dual nature of Utopian texts after More: the “fundamental political [question]” of, as Jameson puts it, “whether Utopias are positive or negative, good or evil” (23). Of those who are proponents of the latter assumption we can say that their wariness of any serious indulgence in Utopia is based on the position that the entire concept is in fact founded on a farce — that More never intended his text to be anything more than fantasy with some light political satire, and that any deliberate, real application of the concept of Utopia is a foolish (and in fact dangerous) attempt to render real what is essentially pure fantasy. In my view, this very struggle is ongoing in the ideology presented in scifi apocalypse films of the present. Villainous utopian visionaries of such stories are based on the common understanding that Utopia is, at least historically, a ludicrous enterprise which has failed time and time again, with often devastating results. It is then very simple to use this historically motivated anxiety to present an identifiable pathos for audiences to engage with: Utopian endeavours, however wellintentioned, will produce further unforeseen misery and will have to be corrected (heroically) back towards a state of ‘normalcy’ (in other words, validating the good parts of the system already in place). It is important to note that this is in fact also a form of Utopian ideology, but inverted — by portraying the negative consequences of unchained Utopian reform, the filmmakers themselves perform the task of the Utopian text by outlining the negative constituents of the present system worth correcting in order to avoid a hypothetical future Dystopian state. If the typical apocalyptic scifi film indeed abides by this pattern, to simply let a discussion of the genre rest on the assumption that it is merely performing an antiUtopian stance as a narrative tool for creating the basis of relatable conflict would be to stop short of uncovering a possibly deeper ideologicalpsychological mechanism at work. The fact that such a
timehonored debate over the good or evil nature inherent in the notion of pursuing Utopia belies a baser motivation worth characterizing — namely that both sides of the argument are based on an innate desire for, first of all, a collective engagement in the process of a social system’s selfimprovement and selfcorrection (meaning, a rewarding investment in the creation of a perfected system over time), and secondly a more general desire directed towards a fantasized version of a life within such a system which may be realistically pursued. The breadth of what such a desire encompasses is, admittedly, virtually allencompassing; for what human endeavour isn’t directed toward progress and advancement and the elimination of undesirable aspects? It is important, however, to ground ourselves in this discussion within the context of the current era and contemporary modes of expression for such desires. Currently, Utopia stands as the primary ideological pathway for addressing this anxiety towards progress. Science and technology currently act as the processes which dictate how such progress unfolds; it is therefore natural that science fiction, the fantasization of such processes, can serve as a window into the less obvious workings of this timeless desire. 1.2 After More: the Program and the Impulse The interpretive problem of Utopia as either good or evil, positive or negative, political blueprint or literary satire, is further complicated with a historical division between its practical application and its use as a purely literary narrative tool — and the innumerable ways in which these two sides cross over. It would seem that after More’s inaugural text, some deeper conflict in the human spirit had been aroused, which clings to the concept of Utopia as its venue for expression (Jameson 10). Jameson attempts to address this illusive emotional content with a methodical approach to its various Utopian formulations throughout history. He bases his arguments on that fundamental division in conceptions of Utopia: that of a practical attempt to realize a state of Utopia (the Program), and a much subtler Utopian quality (the Impulse) which motivates, directly or indirectly, nearly all areas of human desire (Jameson 2, 3) . 6 The important distinction to be made here is between deliberate attempts to plan a society with a level of organization which can be deemed Utopian, and its other apparently unconscious 6 Although Jameson does not capitalize the terms Program and Impulse, I have done so in order to avoid confusion when referencing his work.
workings which inform futureoriented ideological content in all forms. On the one hand, the Utopian Program includes revolutionary politics and “intentional communities” as well as “written exercises” in the mode of fictional Utopian literature, which act as supplements to the development of actually attempted Utopias; the Utopian Impulse, however, covers areas in which Utopian ideology is not immediately made explicit but is nonetheless present as a working procedure (Jameson 4). The latter branch includes political theory in general and liberal reforms specifically, as well as the Utopian qualities which, through a certain perspective of analysis, present themselves in an infinite variety of commodified forms. This methodology for investigating the Utopian impulse is built upon the work of Ernst Bloch as it is presented in what is regarded by many as his most important book, The Principle of Hope — a threevolume work containing his Utopian philosophy of human history. The premise
of Bloch’s theory of utopianism is the contention that the longing for Utopia has had a formative, fundamental agency throughout the history of humanity; or, as it is introduced by Jameson, insists that Utopia is “a good deal more than the sum of its individual texts” (Jameson 2). Rather than working solely from the Utopian literary genre and its reallife applications, The Principle of Hope seeks to excavate the Utopia embedded in all areas of everyday life. According to Bloch, anything futureoriented a term which is then stretched to its most abstract applications — can be found to be ideologically “Utopian” at its core. Jameson structures the generic split between the Program and the Impulse in order to bring attention to a categorical problem in Bloch’s work — namely, that “Bloch’s interpretive principle is most effective when it reveals the operations of the Utopian impulse in unsuspected places”, and avoids entirely the area of deliberate Utopian programs (Jameson 3). This structural clarification is a necessary step to approaching the Impulse, because the Utopianism of what will fall under the Impulse category will be by definition unintentionally Utopian. He suggests from the outset that a distinction between the “Utopian form” and the “Utopian wish” is necessary for a complete understanding of the concept (1). However, since we are investigating the latent Utopian anxieties within the scifi imaginary, the branch of this methodology that will be most useful for this discussion is his clarification on Bloch’s hermeneutic for revealing the “hidden”
impulse, as it will provide the theoretical machinery for uncovering the sometimes difficult to elucidate Utopian threads which run through contemporary science fiction media. Before moving on in that direction however, a final point must be drawn from Jameson’s definition of the Program which will further solidify its distinction from the Impulse. The key difference between the two, he writes, is in the properly Utopian program’s “commitment to closure” (Jameson 4). This follows his preference to understanding deliberately implemented Utopias in spatial terms. He cites More’s Utopia as the first pure example of this kind of spatial closure/totality in his setting of the perfected society on an island isolated from the rest of the world. It is this spatial separation “between the island and the mainland [...] which alone allows it to become Utopia in the first place”(5): only through the autonomy of a closed, selfsufficient system can a place be considered a generic Utopia. This necessary component is already inherent in all lay understandings of the concept, such as in the typical arc of the Utopian revolution leading to the formation of the commune/village/city/nation, sundered unto itself apart from the larger society which its founders deemed necessary to remove themselves from. That Utopian projects all work towards such a spatially closed system poses a problem for understanding the Utopian impulse, in which Jameson rightly notes such totalities are “virtually by definition lacking” (5). However, he has in his overview of the history of Utopian literature noted an important shift from Utopias of space (as in More’s island) toward Utopias which are positioned in the near to far future (1); this temporal shift in fact can be said to have arisen from the purposing of Utopian programs as blueprints for future revolutions to work towards. Here Bloch’s focus on the impulse within “futureoriented” ideas and materials can be understood in Jameson’s terms of the qualification of closure and totality. While Utopian programs either imagine or legitimately plan for a physical secession in order to fulfill themselves, areas which are saturated with Utopian impulsion socialist reform, for example, or commercial advertising which promises a life changed for the better are desirable in that they imply the possibility of a future state which is wholly different from the undesirable present.
1.3 Body, Time, Collectivity However, the Impulse cannot simply be left to constitute ‘unconscious’ Utopianism; to do so brings up a problem between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ Utopias and leads to a tedious digression. The Impulse can rather be understood as an allegorical mode of Utopian expression, which Jameson has refined into three additional categories: body, time, and collectivity. This extra level of specification is meant to add to Bloch’s existing hermeneutic for uncovering the Impulse so that it corresponds, in Jameson’s words, “more closely to the levels of contemporary allegory” (6). Bloch’s interpretive method is a twostep process, whereby first “fragments of experience betray the presence of symbolic figures” abstract experiences such as beauty and energy which are then identified as “forms whereby an essentially Utopian desire can be transmitted” (6). (fig. 1.1) Varieties of Utopia A diagram provided by Jameson in the text, which shows the initial bifurcation between the Program and the Impulse as well as his additional levels of the Impulse: body, time, and collectivity. (Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 4)
Bloch’s own investigations rely on classical ideals, such as beauty and energy, which make it difficult to directly transfer his methodology to a contemporary context in which such aesthetic categories are complicated at best, irrelevant and outdated at worst. Therefore, Jameson’s addendum resituates Bloch’s hermeneutic in the context of what he deems the more ‘postmodern’ modes of allegory used in contemporary culture; by doing so, Bloch’s work can be appropriated towards a sharper method of investigating the Impulse as it works in media and culture today. Understanding the Impulse in a contemporary context can be best understood by moving through Jameson’s allegories in a linear fashion, beginning with the level of the ‘body’, through ‘time’ and on to ‘collectivity’. This movement through the levels charts a kind of path of ascension that Utopian desires move upwards along, from materialist satisfaction towards a pseudospiritualist transcendence of materiality. It is important, however, to first establish this materialism through which the Impulse first expresses itself, especially in its initial role in removing spiritualism in favor of a materially grounded image of the self. The tripartite categories of body, time and collectivity can be seen then as also materialist allegories, in that the Impulse finds its modes of expression through the semiotics of material desire. “Materialism is already omnipresent”, he states, in an attention to the body which seeks to correct any idealism or spiritualism lingering in this system. Utopian corporeality is however also a haunting, which invests even the most subordinate and shamefaced products of everyday life, such as aspirins, laxatives and deodorants, organ transplants and plastic surgery, all harboring muted promises of a transfigured body. (Jameson 6) Bloch refers to such commodities of the body as “Utopian supplements”, because their consumption links the body to a symbolic chain in which a corrected system, in the Utopian sense, is offered through material means. But as the process of correcting the body system implies a safeguarding against degradation plus the added incentive of a progressed state in the near future, we find ourselves placed within a temporal thread along which we move towards a
(still vague) future Utopian state. It would make sense to suggest, as Jameson has, that such Utopian supplements also carry “overtones of immortality” (6), leading us to towards that second level of allegory, time. Just as Utopian supplements address the body’s perceived tendency to decay and degrade against the will of the futureoriented, progressive mind, it can be said that such supplements also imply a symbolic gesture against mortality itself. Indeed many, if not most, medical supplements such as vitamins and surgeries are explicitly used in order to lengthen human life — to both correct or stabilize the body and allow the individual to experience the steady (yet still largely allegorical) movement towards a Utopian state of the body. This implicit desire for longer life is represented constantly in science fiction fantasies in which medical supplementation of the body has the pointed effect of allowing the people of the future to experience longer periods of history. Jameson explains that the two opposing levels of temporal experience — historical and personal time — are “reunited” in Utopia, and that “existential time is
taken up into historical time which is paradoxically also the end of time, the end of history” (7). Jameson offers as an example the immortal “elders” of John Boorman’s film Zardoz (1974), who in their arrested state of youth also live in a ‘frozen’ state of (historical) time, inasmuch as historical time no longer has meaning in such a situation (the film makes this point more obvious by including the fact that in their Utopian village, the elders have an uncaredfor museum cluttered with artistic and scientific artifacts from the entire history of humanity). Zardoz portrays this state of affairs, in which humans’ minds are programmed into a magic crystal and people are continuously reborn into bodies grown in plastic sacks, as markedly perverse and thus is thoroughly antiUtopian in its intention; I would offer another, less polemic example with Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), in which a man is frozen in existential time within a genuinely ‘closed’ Utopian system (in that it is in a literal bubble floating in space) containing only some water, soil, and a tree whose bark is a kind of medical fountain of youth. Though spatially separated by astronomical distances from Earth, where one assumes historical time (whether experienced immortally or in mortal generations) continues as it was, he is in that separated and timeless system able to pour over the chronology of his own personal timeline (portrayed through a series of flashbacks) while simultaneously participating on a grander scale
with the historical time of the cosmos as he flies at lightspeed towards his destination (a nebula which, as the film explains, symbolizes the continuous death and rebirth of history). Through the main character’s flashbacks, we are shown that what started as his attempt to cure cancer (an ambition fueled by his sick wife) accidentally leads to the discovery of the deathcuring benefits of one particularly rare tree. His wife dies before he is able to give her his new medicine, after which the true meaning of his life’s work is revealed to him — to not simply cure the body of degradation, but to find a cure for the inevitable departure of his wife from his own existential history. As a cruel twist of this Faustian exchange, he achieves his goal of immortality, but then must seek further closure to the episode within the explosive death/rebirth spectacle of a supernova in the heart of a distant nebula.
We can see through this example (as well as in Zardoz) the place that ‘totality’
aforementioned by Jameson as a requisite for Utopia takes up in materialist Utopian allegory. Though lacking the concrete, physicallyapparent closure of the island or geopolitical secession, the Impulse is directed towards a state which is instead closed temporally. Utopian supplements hint at the promise of a transfigured body, but the symbolic chain moves us further towards broader fantasies of a kind of mastery over time, in which the assimilation of historical time into individual time is the ultimate goal. As in the examples of Zardoz and The Fountain, time then loses its meaning just as the body does once it is cured of entropy, at least in the sense that time and body traditionally delineate the boundaries of human experience. As time ‘freezes’ and the body made incorruptible, we approach a state of closure and totality, insofar as the system is essentially removed from the endless stream of historical time . 7 It is here, through the closure of time and the historical permanence of the self, that we come upon the last of the three allegories — collectivity. Indeed, in this hypothetical progression towards the ultimate Utopia the individual is faced with a strange paradox — namely that in this time and place where the difference between individual experiences and world history no longer has any real meaning (in such a world, the history of the Utopia is indistinguishable from the 7 In Jameson’s words, “it is worth pointing out that at some point discussions of temporality always bifurcate into the two paths of existential experience […] and of historical time, with its urgent interrogations of the future. I will argue that it is precisely in Utopia that these two dimensions are seamlessly reunited and that existential time is taken up into a historical time which is paradoxically also the end of time, the end of history.” (Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 7)
personal life experiences of every individual in the system), existential experience “fold[s] back into the space of the collective”(Jameson 7). It is at this stage, according to Jameson, that Utopian impulsion ceases to be an ‘unconscious’ project and reaches its apparent end/goal as a realized Utopian Program; he explains that Utopian investments prior to this stage “were still locked into the limits of the individual experience” and thus confined to sporadic instances of impulsion (8). Just as the conventional meanings of the body and time no longer apply, the achievement of apparent historical closure through such bodily mastery also renders the boundary between the individual and the collective irrelevant. Though perhaps the most obtuse of the three, this level is certainly explored imaginatively in science fiction, as in the collective hivemind networks which often seem to address the problem of mortality through the preservation of minds on computers or as the inevitable final form of hyperadvanced civilizations. We now have a clear idea of what the Jamesonian impulsive Utopia (for lack of a better description) consists of: it is an ingrained striving towards a time and place where the desiring individual attains a level of closure which unifies personal experience with large scale historical experience, so that the individual is left to experience all that there is to experience without risk of missing out on further improvements to the system. To put it bluntly and in the broadest sense, the Utopian time and place desired by the individual is simply the end of history in and of itself— for, if there were some history to be that would alter the system of the present moment fundamentally, the present system would cease to be Utopia and the process of impulsion would continue to strive towards yet another Utopic horizon. 1.4 WishFulfillment and the Reality Principle of Science Fiction It would seem that the chain of impulsion theorized by Jameson, beginning in the correction of the body through Utopian supplements, is historically conflated with scientific progress. By this I mean that, in a culture dictated by materialism, the material results of scientific enterprising (as that human enterprise which seeks to describe new things, new ideas) are the objects which are imbued with the symbolic weight of Utopia. If, as Bloch’s hermeneutic dictates, the symbolic contents of human experience (beauty, energy, perfection, etc.) are the
avenues for the transmission of Utopian desire, then modern day science is certainly saturated with it — especially as science advocacy pundits such as Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson make it their clear intention to port those classical notions of abstract experience into a scientific worldview . This is not to say that the ‘goal’ of science (if we must say that it indeed has one) is 8 to address Utopian desire — it is rather that the fantasies in which these desires are expressed are most satisfactorily played out under the umbrella of science and technology, as the realization of some aspects of these (materialist) fantasies are dependent upon the speed at which science and technology advance. Utopian impulsion fantasies are thus most naturally played out in the theater of science fiction, as the symbolic process (if we trust Jameson’s allegorical model) begins with a materialist project focused on the physical sustainability of the body system — an area which (barring traditional forms of medicine) falls entirely within the realm of scientific research. In our search for a modern contextualization of Utopian ideology, we must shift our attention primarily to a dissection of the science fiction genre, as we can safely assume that it is the primary venue for our Utopian expectations and fantasies of science and technology. In any standard appraisal of science fiction’s ultimate value, the adage ‘science fiction inspires real scientific progress’ is often rephrased in some form or another as a concrete proof. Those who invoke this notion will point to a variety of currently existing technologies which do indeed seem to be traceable back to conceptual origins in some scifi trope or invention; the prediction of GPS and satellite TV by scifi author Arthur C. Clarke, the continued development of ‘cloaking devices’ by the US military, and arguably the entire enterprise of robotics are just a few which come to mind easily. Science fiction is most often noted for its uniqueness in maintaining this prophetic quirk, and it is easy to see why the aesthetic formulation of guiding concepts such as robotics, cybernetics, lasers, etc. is especially interesting. We may even fantasize a plausible scifi scenario in which a bored scientist is surprised to find that some seemingly impossible technology in a favorite scifi fantasy is in fact possible in reality, thus rendering the fantasy content in its realworld approximation. The resulting technology, concept or material product is thus both an (apparently) actualized object of desire as well as a practical ‘benefit’ of what was otherwise mere fantasy. 8 See Chapter 2
This loop of prophesying between science fiction and real science can be thus described in terms of a wishfulfillment process. In creating entertaining, gripping fantasy visions of the future or of scientific achievement, scifi authors and filmmakers project personal wishes and desires into their work, which then plants seeds of that wish in the minds of their audiences. The genre of science fiction holds a rich, vast imagination constituted by conceptualizations of each contributor and consumer’s desires projected into the future. The exact functioning of science fiction’s modes of wishfulfillment, however, are markedly different from that of classical fantasy (as in magic, pastoral settings, etc.), a genre which it is otherwise fairly similar in terms of fantasy construction. All fantasies conducted in works of science fiction emerge from a fundamentally materialist backdrop — namely, they are all rooted in the possibilities of science, however fantastically distorted. The terms in which these fantasies are played out correspond, with some amount of rigor, to the narrative’s particular laws of science; they are in this way regulated, or kept in check, by the imagined scientific reality of the narrative, which in turn is at least partially based on scientific reality. Jameson describes there being a “hollow absence” at the heart of every wishfulfillment process; it is that psychoanalytic baitandswitch of the objet a which without fail frustrates every desire bound in wish. A kind of awareness of this factors into the process, a “reality principle,” which keeps the process in check. By keeping expectations low or ‘believable’, the wish is prevented from fully revealing itself for what it is — as unrealistic, “hollow”, and fabricated through fantasy (Jameson 83). He cites Proust’s fantasized love letter in In Search of Lost Time as exemplary of this principle: the Narrator, in fantasizing the words he would like to read in a love letter written by his romantic interest, realizes with dismay that he ought not imagine such words, as they would inevitably never be written in such a way should any love letter be received at all (Jameson 8384). To varying degrees, there is already a measure of disappointment worked into the process of wishfulfillment, and a reality principle helps to mitigate it by keeping the wish within a flexible boundary of what could realistically occur in its potential fulfillment. The reality principle that is built into science fiction is an integral aspect of the genre, as it is the overarching principle defining the boundaries of the genre itself. That the pretense of real
