Abstract
As Robert Tally notes, globalization itself is a term often loaded with utopian significance, promising growing freedom, unleashed wealth creation, and rising intercultural traffic and understanding – its major mechanisms in creating a better place being the world market and the supersession of the state (p. 72). At the same time, there’s often a sense that globalization somehow banishes utopia – that our globalizing moment is ‘paradoxically dynamic yet fixed’, turbulent and unpredictable but also ‘a stable, mostly immutable system’ (p. vii). This is to emphasize the frequent suggestion that globalization is unstoppable, inevitable, that no one is to blame, that no one is in control. Adding further complications to this, Tally contends – quite rightly, I think – that utopia has made a bit of a comeback in the age of globalization, signalled by the steeply rising attention it has received across the human sciences over the past decade or so. In a series of closely interwoven, elegantly written, and thoughtful essays, Tally seeks to reflect on such questions and paradoxes, urging us to pay more explicit attention to utopia, best illuminated by the work of Fredric Jameson and Herbert Marcuse, and understood, above all, as method.
It’s the figure of Fredric Jameson who really emerges as the hero of these essays, reflected in Tally’s three-stage periodization of utopia: an early-modern utopianism that is mostly about other spaces; a late 19th century–First World War shift to a utopianism centred on the future; and, following this, a break marked increasingly by dystopian literary products. This falling out of favour of utopia, particularly from the mid-20th century – under the weighty blows of total war, genocide, totalitarianism – is captured, in its ultra-contemporary form, by Jameson’s much cited comment that it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the much more modest end of capitalism. Despite the dystopian predominance of this third stage, we do find sequences of utopian rejuvenation – the ’60s and our own post-1999 moment. 1960s utopianism draws us back, Tally argues, to the work of Herbert Marcuse and to the importance of some of those memorable ’60s slogans – ‘demand the impossible’, ‘power to the imagination’. Joining Marcuse’s attention to the aesthetic dimension, refusal, and imagination with Jameson’s contemporary work, especially the notion of ‘cognitive mapping’, gives us a glimpse, in Tally’s view, of the urgent utopian tasks at hand for critical theory and for transformatory movements – the education of the imagination, the task of critically mapping the world system.
A crucial issue, as always, is that of definitions, because what we will have to say about both of Tally’s central objects – ‘globalization’ and ‘utopia’ – is deeply conditioned by our sense of what these things mean. And pausing to reflect upon this might be the point at which even those who enjoy Tally’s very rich and readable work will start to ask critical questions. Very importantly, Tally’s understanding of utopia leans towards utopia as literary production and decidedly away from Bloch’s expansive conceptualization that gathers into its sphere of interest the entirety of the ‘not-yet’. The methodological focus for a more Blochian thinker such as Ruth Levitas – for whom utopia is, simply and widely, the desire for a better way of being – is analysis and critique of the enormous array of utopian figures before us and utopian production. In contrast, Tally’s utopian focus is predominantly about the way we represent the present, ‘the critical projection of the world system’ (p. 12). It is a critique of the now, underpinned by imagination; it is a graspable, totalizing representation of the world system, rather than an ideal society, state, or condition that we might want to head towards (pp. viii, 12, 52); it is, then, above all, critical/negative – in Russell Jacoby’s phrasing, iconoclastic rather than blueprint utopia, or, in Krishan Kumar’s terms, utopia as opposition rather than proposition. This predominantly critical quality means that utopia still posits for us an otherness, an outside of the now, but what matters most, Tally believes, is the implicit break or distance from a well-represented present. To reformulate, this task is about addressing what Jameson diagnoses as a possible contemporary ‘weakness in our imaginations’ (p. 51), about negating the actual in the name of the possible, by way of constructing a legible map of our global present: this method’s vocation ‘is not to discover utopia on the world map, but to map the world system itself’ (p. 6).
This proposed method will strike some as working with a rather idiosyncratic understanding of utopia, and critical questions might mount as we turn to the second of Tally’s crucial terms, ‘globalization’. Tally’s orientation to globalization is a world away from, say, Wallerstein – referenced in the bibliography, whose term ‘world-system’ (though without the hyphen) is deployed throughout, but who is entirely absent from the body of the text – who would energetically contest the reality of globalization, the newness of financialization, the demise of the nation-state, and so on. For Tally, on the other hand, the global shift is the immediate terrain on which we need to rethink utopia – in particular, the present post-national condition, a capitalist mode of production now pivoting around trade in financial derivatives, a new world that presents us with a ‘seemingly unrepresentable array of forces’ (p. 63).
The other major object in play here is, of course, critical theory – represented by Marcuse and, especially, Jameson. But, again, Tally moves in a perhaps surprising direction, championing a post-realist, non-epistemological orientation to critical theory, a response to the postmodern crisis of representation that leans towards figuration, narrative, and myth (pp. ix, 6, 62), towards ‘literary cartography’ (p. xi). In Blochian terms, it is warm rather than cool stream utopianism, about incubation and illumination rather than explication. And, for more traditionalist theory folk, Tally might seem to be effectively ignoring or sidelining well-recognized descriptive, explanatory, and evaluative theoretical tasks and tried and tested conceptual tools.
Returning to earlier objections, perhaps we already have to hand some pretty good critical theoretical maps of the present – world-systems analysis, for instance, or, in a quite different vein, Hardt and Negri’s trilogy. Perhaps, in the end, Tally’s utopian method will feel too negative, cautious, defensive – in its prohibition on ideal future conditions, social orders, in its emphasis on the ‘dangers’ (‘Here, there be Dragons’) (p. 95) implicit in contemporary utopianism, and in its post-modern italicization of lack and limits. Might we not need something more affirmative and less post-modern right now? And isn’t this affirmation quite clearly there in Jameson, for whom cognitive mapping is, after all, another way of saying class consciousness, and who is arguably working much more closely from Bloch than is indicated by Tally? And, last – being tough not just on Tally but on all of us who have seen utopia as the big issue for Left-leaning theory people – perhaps the main problem for theory and practice today is entirely elsewhere – the return, somehow, to what those horribly out of fashion, age of imperialism socialists managed quite well: the creation of socialist sub-cultures, built as well as excavated, right here-and-now. The fact that I was stimulated and troubled into such questions is, in any case, an indication of the great provocation and interest that Tally has provided here.