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AUTHOR:	PHILLIP E. WEGNER
TITLE:	Horizons, Figures, and Machines: The Dialectic of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson
SOURCE:	Utopian Studies 9 no2 58-73 '98

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    FOR TOO MANY CONTEMPORARY INTELLECTUALS, there is something deeply scandalous about the very idea of utopia. Not the least significant reason for such resistance arises from the fact that, as Fredric Jameson himself has tirelessly reiterated, any sustained engagement with utopia will inevitably bring us back to that other apparently thoroughly discredited concept, in our postmodern imaginations at least, of the totality itself.(FN1) And yet, it is precisely his uncompromising faith with the promise of utopia, of the possibility of a radically different social organization, that accounts for both the consistency and depth of Jameson's own political intellectual commitments. In this paper, I trace out some of the adventures of the utopian concept as they develop in Jameson's work, or what we might more usefully refer to as the utopian "problematic": "not a set of propositions about reality, but a set of categories in terms of which reality is analyzed and interrogated, and a set of 'essentially contested' categories at that" ("Science Versus Ideology," 283). Although I recognize, and indeed will highlight in the following pages, that the very centrality and multiple expressions in his work of this crucial problematic render impossible any isolation of it from the entirety of his critical project, I nevertheless want to focus particularly on three different forms of utopia--what I call horizon, figure, and machine--that emerge through his engagements with the work, respectively, of Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, and, most recently, Rem Koolhaas. I ultimately argue that, consistent with his other work, Jameson's treatment of the problematic of utopia is a deeply dialectical one: on the one hand, taking the form of an early well-nigh "negative dialectic," that maintains utopia is as impossible as it is indispensable; and, on the other hand, re-emerging as a pedagogical and transformative dialectic, which reaches full fruition in his later articulations of the aesthetic of cognitive mapping. Moreover, I suggest that the latter has its roots firmly planted in his earlier reflections on utopia. Ultimately, by exploring his engagements with the utopian problematic, I hope to illuminate both something of the originality of Jameson's critical project as a whole, and the ways it might help us think about utopia, and more particularly literary or narrative utopias, in new ways.
    The centrality of Ernst Bloch for Jameson's intellectual project becomes evident in his early influential book Marxism and Form (1971). In this text, Jameson develops by way of an engagement with Bloch a powerful hermeneutic model that sensitizes us as cultural critics to even the most feeble traces of utopian hope, or anticipatory illumination (Vor-Schein) of an utterly transformed human existence--one which, as Bloch crucially bears out, has "not-yet" ever existed in the world. Hence, Jameson argues that Bloch's understanding of utopia needs to be distinguished from what would have been in the late-1960s the more celebrated Marcusean notion of utopia as anamnesis, "of memory as a return to lost sources of plenitude" (Marxism and Form, 128). Moreover, Jameson suggests that Bloch's project redresses a fundamental imbalance in contemporary philosophical thought as well: "For what strikes the random observer of the history of philosophy is the lack of attention given the future as such, as though there were something essentially frivolous in a consideration of that which does not yet exist, when so much exists already" (Marxism and Form, 125).
    The inability to take into account the horizon of the "not yet" has consequences which resonate across the political spectrum. For it is precisely the denial of this horizon of utopian Otherness that we find haunting so much of classical ideological criticism with its conception of the present as a closed totality or an iron cage from within which any change becomes not only impossible but well-nigh unimaginable. Jameson, on the other hand, maintains, as does Bloch before him, that any notion of ideological full self-presence is itself ideological through and through, masking the constitutive "unevenness" present in any historical moment, Bloch's "nonsynchronicity of the synchronous" (Ungleichzeitigkeit) or Raymond William's "residual" and "emergent" formations (Bloch, "Nonsynchronism;" Williams, "Base and Superstructure," 40-42). Even more distressing, the model of the present found in these other forms of ideological critique risks losing contact with the basic revolutionary political energies, the particular orientation toward the future, that must be at the heart of any Marxist cultural criticism.
    This hermeneutic approach to the utopian horizon enables Jameson to maintain a productive distance from these classical forms of ideological criticism, and in turn results in the production of a series of startlingly innovative readings of various literary and cultural texts. We can see an early example of this in a brief reading of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu that is found in the Bloch chapter of Marxism and Form. Here, Jameson shows how what appears in Proust's work as the thoroughly ideological vision of the fin-de-siècle French upper classes turns over into a more properly utopian projection:

For it is precisely the leisure of this class, given over completely to interpersonal relationships, to conversation, art, and social planning (if one may so characterize the energy that goes into the building of a salon), fashion, love, which reflects in the most distorted way the possibilities of a world in which alienated labor will have ceased to exist, in which man's struggle with the external world and with his own mystified and external pictures of society will have given way to man's confrontation with himself. (153-154)

    Such a hermeneutic of the utopian horizon is further deployed in much of Jameson's later work, notable, for example, in the analysis in The Political Unconscious of Honoré de Balzac's realism and Joseph Conrad's modernist style; in Fables of Aggression in the still scandalous discussion of Wyndham Lewis's fascism; and, more recently, in the beautiful lyrical invocation, in The Seeds of Time, of Franz Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People."
    Moreover, the insistence on the recoverable traces of this utopian horizon also lies at the heart of some of Jameson's most significant broader theoretical interventions. Thus, for example, in his influential reconsideration of the workings of mass culture, Jameson advances the hypothesis that the ideological manipulations and recontainment operations performed by mass culture texts are accompanied by expressions of deep utopian longings for a radically other form of existence. Indeed, Jameson goes so far as to suggest that ideology in mass culture is impossible without utopia, such that these works "cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated" ("Reification and Utopia," 29). Similarly, in the concluding chapter of The Political Unconscious, Jameson argues that "all class consciousness of whatever type is Utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity," it being understood once again, however, that these collectivities are themselves--to introduce a term whose significance we shall explore momentarily--"figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society" (291). Finally, and also pointing toward the influence of Theodor Adorno on his work, Jameson shows how the very category of the aesthetic itself is deeply charged with these utopian energies. Indeed, already in Marxism and Form, Jameson writes that for Bloch, "the task of art and language is to recover this wholeness of experience, or rather to make it possible for the first time" (155), a notion further developed, and to different ends, in the discussion of the promesse de bonheur in Late Marxism. Conversely, the rigorous maintenance of this hermeneutic perspective also enables a series of critical interventions that highlight the consequence of the attempt to deny this utopian horizon in everything from the ideologies of naturalism to the immanent and nominalist strands of postmodern theoretical discourse (The Political Unconscious, 193, and Postmodernism, Ch. 7).
    However, it has been the similarly deeply Blochian dialectical inversion of this conceptualization of utopia as horizon that has led to what have been for many students of utopia some of Jameson's more troubling pronouncements. From this understanding of the utopian horizon as an allegorical or indirect pre-figuration of an as-of-yet unrealized future necessarily follows the corollary that any full or non-allegorical re-presentation of that same future Otherness is in fact impossible. The concrete contents of utopia will become available only within the lived horizon of what remains for us a fundamentally unimaginable other existence. Hence, the attempt to portray directly in the here and the now such a culture and society, as for example within the tradition of the literary or narrative utopia proper, will always be premature, if not ideological in and of itself. Perhaps Jameson's most infamous articulation of this conclusion is found in his essay "Progress Versus Utopia: or, Can We Imagine the Future?" Answering the question in his title in the negative, Jameson contends that the "deepest vocation" of the utopian text "is to bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine utopia itself, and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners" (247). The force of the utopian text then is not to bring into focus the future that is coming to be, but rather to make us conscious precisely of the horizons or outer limits of what can be thought and imagined in our present. Nevertheless, even in this essay the thoroughly dialectical nature of Jameson's thought processes manifests itself: following upon the heels of a demonstration of this proposition by way of a brief reading of the ideological horizons illuminated in the presentation of utopia in Ivan Efremov's Andromeda, Jameson proceeds to recover the irrepressible utopian horizon present in the apparently dystopian or even anti-utopian conclusion to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic.
    Such a position also has its roots in Jameson's original engagement with the work of Bloch, and especially in Bloch's distinction between what he calls "concrete" and "abstract" utopia. The former refers to those elements of "anticipatory illumination" which, while standing "on the horizon of every reality," nevertheless evade efforts to apprehend them directly (The Principle of Hope, 223); the latter, on the other hand, operates in any historical conjuncture primarily in a compensatory fashion, projecting a simple fulfillment of those specific needs that are felt to be lacking there. Many of the fully elaborated aspects of the "good place" (eu-topia) in the literary utopia fall into this category: the representation becomes less that of something radically new, than one of a "repaired" present. Although Bloch maintains that even abstract utopias are more "real" than many expressions of literary realism precisely because they mark the place that these latter forms deny of history in the present, the abstract utopia nevertheless plunges us back into the immediate and local desires that define any present, and thereby risk diffusing the hope for some fully other existence, this latter condition being one in which our sense of our selves and our world would be so thoroughly and utterly transformed that the very desires to which the abstract utopia responds would themselves have become obsolete. Moreover, by projecting "solutions" in the future to the problems of the present, these abstract utopias risk reducing the dialectical complexity of the historical process--wherein change in any one element will have dramatic and unpredictable consequences for the whole (in this, Bloch's work would resemble the modeling found in chaos theory of the behavior in complex systems)--to what Jameson describes as "the single, relatively abstract field of social planning" (Marxism and Form, 145-146).(FN2)
    As with Bloch, this refusal to accept the attempts to represent utopia directly is an expression of the radical, revolutionary, and indeed totalizing nature of Jameson's critical project, part of his consistent refusal to be satisfied with any partial or reformist solutions to the crises of the present. Such an understanding of the representational failure of the utopia also makes its influence felt in the later argument that the Marxist vision of past history, which we can of course assume to include all the literary utopias heretofore written (and indeed at this point Jameson refers to the great nineteenth-century feminist utopian author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman) as one of "tragic failure": "all the radical positions of the past are flawed, precisely because they failed....it would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht (to pick a few illustrious names at random) as failures--that is, as actors and agents constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment in history--than as triumphant examples and models in some hagiographic or celebratory sense" (Postmodernism, 209).
    There is a danger I think, one manifest in too many discussions of Jameson's critical project, of taking such statements in isolation from their argumentative contexts. However, the very notion of "context" itself takes on special resonance when we also consider the experimental nature of Jameson's own dialectical critical and writing practices, and their challenge to the most deeply ingrained common-sensical or everyday habits of thought. In Marxism and Form, Jameson argues that, "The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, 'totalizing' character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system" (306). It is this difficulty, a difficulty arising no doubt from the utopian prefigurative dimension of dialectical thought itself--the manner in which it requires us to think in ways alien to our own particular historical enclosure--that thwarts the incessant effort on the part of some readers to pin down definitive position statements in Jameson's work. Is, he, for example, arguing for or against structuralism, for or against postmodernism? Depending upon where one is currently located in his argument--within any single text or indeed within the various works making up his corpus--the answer may be definitively yes, or equally definitively no, or something else altogether. Dialectical thought, as Jameson has suggested, takes place on the level of the writing of the individual sentence itself, every claim and every apparent conclusion being understood as only one contingent place within a longer discursive chain. Indeed, to my reading, the productiveness of Jameson's thought is not to be located in the originality of his inventions, as if the purpose of engaged critical thought were to produce the latest designs or to open up new fashion boutiques in the great marketplace of ideas (an ideology of innovation which has been very profitably challenged recently by Evan Watkins in his Throwaways). Rather, the force of his project lies in the way that it takes already existent concepts and theoretical discourses, those of others and himself, and works and re-works them until they begin to emit messages that might appear radically different than those produced in their original contexts. Thus, if we understand the purpose of dialectical thought to be the production of these kinds of transformations, or what Jameson later calls "transcodings," and recognize that in this process the holding of one idea in mind does not preclude the simultaneous maintenance of its converse, then we can begin to see how what appear as irresolvable dilemmas and apparent dead-ends at one point in the discussion, actually appears as solutions when we arrive somewhere else. This holds as much for Jameson's life-long engagement with the problematic of utopia as it does for the rest of his work. Any "definitive" announcement of the failure of utopia rather than being taken as an end instead should be understood as a starting point from where we can begin to re-imagine, in perhaps wholly unexpected ways, how these forms might in fact be said to succeed.
    In the concluding paragraphs of his review essay of Louis Marin's own essential work on utopian representations, Utopiques: jeux d'espaces (1973), Jameson once more reiterates the failure of the utopian text: "Utopia's deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as with fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history" (101). However, this conclusion only comes in the latter pages of what has been an extended engagement with Marin's work. And indeed, before this apparent conclusion, Jameson offers a different description of the vital work performed by the narrative utopia, drawing upon Marin's intricate mapping of the textual operations of "neutralization" and "figuration." Both concepts are not without resonances with earlier theoretical formulations by Jameson himself, the former resembling the concept of "world reduction" that he develops in his discussion of the utopian fiction of Ursula Le Guin (and which has re-appeared recently in his reading of Andrei Platonov's Chevengur); while the latter appears already in the concept of "class allegory" emerging in his reading of Dog Day Afternoon ("World Reduction;" The Seeds of Time, 90; "Class and Allegory"). However, in this essay on Marin's Utopiques, both elements are joined in an analysis of the narrative processes of utopian texts proper.
    The first term, neutralization, refers to what other students of utopia like Darko Suvin have called the critical "estranging" work performed by these texts; or what Jameson describes here as a "point-by-point negation or canceling" of the historical and ideological context from within which the particular utopia--in this case, the founding work in the modern genre, Thomas More's Utopia--it being understood that this context itself is also "constructed" by the utopian text (Suvin, Metamorphoses, 53-58; Jameson, "Of Islands and Trenches," 85). Such an indispensable critical operation is however only a first step, clearing the stage for the productive operation of utopian figuration. It is with this concept too that we begin to give some concrete content to what Jameson means when he says that the utopian text illuminates the outermost horizons of its present. Marin subsequently argues that the neutralization, deconstruction, or deterritorialization of the ideological parameters of one social situation clears the space for the construction of something new, the contours of this latter situation receiving one of its first elaborations in the neutral space represented by the utopia itself. The narrative utopia thereby maps the place of an imminent and concrete future forming within the horizons of its present, this emerging history serving as what Marin calls the "absent referent" of the form (Utopics, 196).(FN3) The historical originality of the narrative utopia as a genre thus lies in its capacity to mediate between two different cultural and social realities, between the world that is and that which is coming into being.
    This mapping occurs through the process that Marin refers to as utopic figuration, a schematizing or "pre-conceptual" way of thinking, taking the form in the utopian text of the "speaking picture" or narrative elaboration of the utopian society. Marin describes such an operation as pre-conceptual--but better understood as pre-theoretical--because although crucial aspects of a newly emergent social reality are present in the utopian figure, the relationship between these elements, which are dispersed in the textual mapping, cannot yet be articulated. That is, the utopia presents a narrative picture of history-in-formation rather than the theoretical description of a fully formed historical situation. Thus, if utopia is an "anticipatory" discourse, a way of marking the place of a particular future already emerging in the present, it anticipates, Marin contends, "blindly":

This is so because for Raphael and More their present, their society hic et nunc ...cannot articulate its own concepts. That will be the epistemological privilege of the emerging society, of which symptoms can be glimpsed in sixteenth-century England. That is the function of utopic practice: it is revealed by the play of "epistemological spaces" of the various discourses it activates. It renders these theoretical constructions present. It does not present them in all its theoretical power, however (it cannot: the utopian thinker is not a historical prophet); utopic discourse offers them as poetic figures. In other words, utopic practice does not construct a theoretical concept through the play of its discursive topics. Rather, it offers the setting, the space of representation. It provides the place of figurability, which is the imaginary schema and sensuous framework for it. In Kantian terminology utopic practice is the schematizing activity of political and social imagination not yet having found its concept. A blind activity, but one that would trace out the place, or the topic, of its concept for knowledge or action. It is a schema in search of a concept, a model without a structure. (Utopics, 163)

    Beginning in the early part of the sixteenth century, utopian discourse represents one way for a modernizing society to critically represent itself to itself, a self-narration that, crucially, appears long before "the constitution of the scientific theory of society," by which Marin means Marx's historical materialism (Utopics, 200).
    The implications of Marin's observations are profound for an understanding of the relationship between figuration and theory. As Marin sees it, these operations of figuration always historically precede the more coherent and systematic "perceptions" of the world found in theoretical discourses, and indeed, these theoretical models are only ever constituted retroactively. This latter work is performed through a critical re-reading, reconstruction, or re-authoring of the original figurative presentations. In a later summation of the critical project undertaken in Utopiques, Marin observes,

the theoretical discourse about utopia operates (like in dreams, the screen memory) by filling up the gaps and the blanks of the utopian text, of the utopian space, by producing the systematic elements which are necessary to make the text intelligible. This production was possible only après coup, in a site supposed to be the true knowledge of the end of history that is the end of utopia as well. ("Disneyland," 52)

    The sense of totalization and scientificity that one finds in these kinds of theoretical discourses are in fact a product of this retrospective view. The difference between what we might call the open-ended nature of the kinds of figurations produced in the literary utopia and the closure of theoretical discourses--the end of history and the end of figurative practices--are suggested by Marin when he writes, "Utopian practice introduces into the historical narrative and geographical report the sudden distance by which the contiguities of time and place are broken and through which is discerned, in a flash of lightning, the other, unlimited contradiction, before it is immobilized in the utopic figure and fixed in the 'ideal' representation" (Utopics, 7; translation modified). Here the fixing "ideal representation" may be thought of as the theoretical re-presentation, and the "other," the open-ended possibilities of meaning, of supplementarity, and of historical difference that the spatial play of the utopia figure makes available in its own present.(FN4) The danger thus arises when the perspective is reversed and the theoretical discourse usurps the place of the figuration, thereby transforming social and cultural processes, the very life-blood of historical movement, into dead reified entities. For Marin then, the point of final totalization, of absolute theoretical knowledge, of science, and of the end of history, must always remain in front of us.
    Jameson's convergence with Marin's thinking is signaled in the concluding line of his essay, where immediately following upon the statement that I cited above about the "failure" of utopian representations, Jameson writes, "This is surely the ultimate sense in which 'Utopian discourse accompanies ideological discourse as its converse and designates the still empty place of a scientific theory of society'" ("Of Islands and Trenches," 101). Both Marin and Jameson maintain here that in the very "failure" of the utopian text, its inability to offer a systematic description of an emerging reality--the work surely of any theoretical discourse--it nevertheless "succeeds," in that it enables us to conceptualize for the first time the place that such a description must one day fill. It is significant to note here that this emphasis on the "pre-theoretical" nature of the utopian representation necessarily shifts the location of the critical perspective: for if the production of a theoretical discourse, much like the salvaging of the utopian horizon undertaken in the hermeneutic approach, always takes place after the fact, a re-reading as it were, the recovery of utopian figuration can only occur by imaginatively re-occupying the original situation from within which the text had emerged in the first place.
    Where this reconceptualization of the utopian text becomes most productive in Jameson's work is when his own interests begin to shift from the cultural texts of the past to those of our own present, culminating in his seminal and ongoing discussions of the cultural logic of late capitalism, or postmodernism. For it is this understanding of the operation of figuration in the utopian text that I believe contributes in an important way to the subsequent articulation of what is perhaps the most significant of Jameson's recent critical contributions: the elaboration of the aesthetic practice he labels "cognitive mapping." In his 1984 essay, which crystallizes his thoughts on postmodernism, Jameson shows how the radically original experience of the postmodern itself--the most significant aspect here being the suppression of critical distance resulting from the completion of the global circuit of capitalism, such that the subject becomes unable to perceive either the totality or her position within it--have created the need for new conceptual "organs," or a new aesthetic (Postmodernism, 39). The transformations of the postmodern have dramatically altered the "terrain of ideological struggle today, which," Jameson later provocatively claims, "has migrated from concepts to representations" (Postmodernism, 321). Jameson suggests that older theoretical schemas have become inadequate for the task of grasping the originality of the postmodern, and hence new forms will need to be organized. However, before we can begin to create such schemas, we first need to begin to represent this reality to ourselves, and it is to this end that the operation of cognitive mapping is directed.
    Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, as may be already evident in his earlier discussion of the related operation of utopian figuration, uses the concept of the aesthetic to designate a specific kind of representational practice. Jameson argues for a correspondence between the operation of cognitive mapping and that of Jacques Lacan's Symbolic, both playing an indispensable mediating role between the Real and the Imaginary, or in Louis Althusser's terms, between what is articulated by the theoretical structure of a Science and by Ideology, "the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Jameson, Postmodernism, 53-54; Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus," 162).(FN5) I think there is another interesting correspondence to be found here, between Lacan and Jameson's tripartite schematizations and the model of social space first developed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974). (It is no coincidence too that Jameson's work on postmodernism in part sprung from an early 1980s conference in Los Angeles honoring Lefebvre). Lefebvre argues that any socially produced historical space is constituted by a dialectically interwoven matrix of what he calls "spatial practices," "representations of space," and "representational space," each allied with a specific cognitive mode through which we "re-present" it to ourselves (a process orientation captured far more effectively in the German word, Darstellung): these are, respectively, the domains of the "perceived," the "conceived," and the "lived" (The Production of Space, 33-46). The first of his three terms pertains to the most abstract processes of social production, reproduction, cohesion, and structuration, and hence bears a striking resemblance to the concerns of the various structuralisms whose "perceptual" apparatus take on the abstract systematicity of a science (although in making such a comparison we need to keep in mind Lefebvre's own critique of what he views as the consequences of the structuralist privileging of the static notions of "mode of production" and "coherence" at the expense of the more dialectical concepts, "relations of production" and "contradiction" [The Survival of Capitalism, 59-68]). The third terminological set, on the other hand, refers to the space of the embodied individual's cultural experience, and the signs, images, forms, and symbols that constitute it. It is this level of space that has been mapped so thoroughly by phenomenology, whose emphasis on the individual's "lived" existential experience of space resonates with that found in this dimension of Lefebvre's work. This too, as Lefebvre's description suggests, is where we locate the representational practices we commonly associate with art or the aesthetic. The middle term then, that of the "representations of space" or the realm of the conceived, is that of what we more conventionally think of as space proper, mediating between and drawing all three of the levels together into a coherent ensemble. Of the social and cultural representational practices that constitute this dimension of space, Lefebvre writes: "conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent--all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived" (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38; emphasis added).
    In Lefebvre's schema, as with that of Lacan, each of the three levels are understood to be dialectically inseparable from the others, although in both cases, we can analytically isolate them by way of a genetic narrative reconstruction of the moment of their respective origins: beginning in Lacan's case with the infant's entrance into the Imaginary during what he calls the "mirror stage;" and, for Lefebvre, with the primal emergence of "spatial architectonics"--demarcation and orientation, border (inside/outside) and energy flows or "rhythms"--emanating from the phenomenological body itself (Lacan, "The Mirror Stage;" Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 169-228).(FN6) This first level of spatiality, again in both cases, encompasses the particular "pre-" or "non-verbal" insertion of the individual being in the world (but crucially not yet, or not even necessarily ever, a centered subject), and it is here to which Althusser's famous formulation of ideology also alludes. At the other extreme, we find that Lefebvre's level of the practice of space corresponds nicely to the Lacanian Real, which Lacan famously argues "resists symbolization absolutely," and which Jameson has suggested is another term for "simply History itself" ("Imaginary and Symbolic," 104): this level is that of the spatial social totality, a kind of Kantian noumena or Althusser's "lonely hour of the last instance," whose "perception" must always be mediated through the lived-Imaginary and the conceived-Symbolic.(FN7)
    The analytical force of each of these schematizations lies in the distance that is maintained between each of these three terms, and the unwillingness of their respective creators to allow one to be folded into the others: indeed, Lefebvre's, Lacan's, and Jameson's work all stand as powerful rejoinders to the tangential textualization of the world, or what Lefebvre calls the "generalization of the concept of mental space," at play in certain strands of structuralist, semiotic, and post-structuralist theory (The Production of Space, 3). Moreover, in all three cases, it is the level of the Symbolic, of the conceived, of representations of space, or of cognitive mapping which provides the mediating link between the spaces of the individual and those of the larger social and historical realities she inhabits. If this level too is thought of as that of space proper--the domain, according to Lefebvre, of architecture, urban planning, nation building, and social engineering--then it should come as no surprise that one of the first examples of cognitive mapping that Jameson points toward is the home of architect Frank Gehry, an attempt, Jameson writes, "to think a material thought" (Postmodernism, 129). In this essay, Jameson argues, "At any rate, the very concept of space here demonstrates its supremely mediatory function, in the way in which its aesthetic formulation begins at once to entail cognitive consequences on the one hand and sociopolitical consequences on the other"; and later, "The problem, then, which the Gehry house tries to think is the relationship between that abstract knowledge and conviction or belief about the superstate and the existential daily life of people in their traditional rooms and tract houses" (Postmodernism, 104 and 128).
    Deeply resonant with his earlier reflections on the representational practices of the utopian text, Jameson's own conception of cognitive mapping, as I hope is now evident, also offers us an extremely productive way to reimagine how past utopias work.(FN8) Utopian texts, whose real force we now understand to have always already been representational rather than conceptual, now appear as among the earliest expressions in Western modernity of the operations of cognitive mapping. The utopia too is fundamentally concerned with space, and it is thus precisely in its "failures" that the form succeeds so dramatically, offering a "pre-theoretical" or, in Lefebvre's terms, a "pre-perceptual" way of thinking about the transformations in and by way of social space that occur during the long history of modernity. Moreover, this connection between cognitive mapping and the utopian text enables us to challenge the commonplace assumption that utopias offer maps or completed pictures of some alternative world: rather, both the operations of utopian figuration and cognitive mapping are deeply narrative ones--narrative, as Jameson writes in his essay on Marin, understood to be "a process whereby something is done to the Real" ("Of Islands and Trenches," 81). From such a perspective, it is far more productive to think of the unfolding of what I want to call the "narrative utopia" as a performance, a travel itinerary, a semiosis, a mapping, or an ongoing totalization rather than as a picture, a map, an imaginary mimesis, or a completed totality.(FN9) Finally, this shift moves us away from a concern with the theoretical discourse imagined to be taking place in any utopia--its reputed "ideas," for example, about society, work, leisure, or even human "nature"--and toward the pedagogical force of the representational practice in which it is engaged: the ways it re-educates the desires of its audience, enabling them to grow the "new organs" necessary also to "live" and later "perceive" a newly emerging social and cultural reality.
    Jameson's own interest in the pedagogical dimensions of various representational practices is apparent in a discussion, also first published in the years when he is in the midst of formulating the aesthetic of cognitive mapping, of Manfredo Tafuri's Architecture and Utopia. Tafuri's analysis of the necessary failure of modernist architecture to produce a program for a radical social reorganization, and indeed of the ways that the realization of its own utopian visions contributed to the emergence of the total rationalized world system of late capitalism, in many ways resonates with Jameson's own reflections on the failure of narrative utopias to achieve their related ends. Thus, the lesson, once more, is that "there can be no qualitative change in any element of the older capitalist system--as for instance in architecture or urbanism--without beforehand a total revolutionary and systemic transformation" ("Architecture," 48). However, while Jameson emphasizes the "therapeutic" value of Tafuri's stringent refusal to accept any partial or reformist solutions--the "repair" operations that Bloch finds in abstract utopias--he also notes that the orientation of the narrative form deployed by Tafuri, which Jameson describes as "dialectical history" (whose other rare examples include Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music and Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero), is always already toward the past: "dialectical history, must somehow always involve a vision of Necessity or, if you prefer, must always tell the story of failure. 'The owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk': dialectical interpretation is always retrospective, always tells the necessity of an event, why it had to happen the way it did; and to do that, the event must already have happened, the story must already have come to an end" ("Architecture," 41). If there is to be comic resolution to this singularly tragic narrative--all past history viewed as what Walter Benjamin famously described as a pile of wreckage growing skyward ("Theses," 257-258)--it is then to be located in the as-of-yet unforeseen future.
    And yet, what happens, Jameson asks, if our own critical perspective shifts from a reconsideration of the past to that future which in fact remains in front of every one of these works and programs, regardless of when they first historically appear? At this point a very different Marxist critical cultural praxis begins to emerge, whose most distinctive formulation is to be found in Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony:

Gramsci's notion of "hegemony" (along with the later and related idea of "cultural revolution") attempts rather to displace the whole distinction of materialism versus idealism (and, along with it, of the traditional concepts of base and superstructure). It would therefore no longer be "idealist" in the bad old sense to suggest that "counterhegemony" means producing and keeping alive a certain alternate "idea" of space, the urban, daily life, and the like. It would then no longer be so immediately significant (or so practically and historically crippling) that architects in the West (with the possible exception of France)--owing to the private property system--do not have the opportunity of projecting and constructing collective ensembles that express and articulate original new social relations (and needs and demands) of a collective type. The essential would rather be that they are able to form conceptions and Utopian images of such projects, against which to develop a self-consciousness of their concrete activities in this society (it being understood, in Tafuri's spirit, that such collective projects would only practically and materially be possible after a systemic transformation of society). ("Architecture," 51)

    Given the political paralysis that potentially arises from the sheer negativity of Tafuri's critical vision, a paralysis that is very much part of the general condition of our postmodern present, Jameson concludes that we must give a careful reconsideration to this pedagogical understanding of utopian projections.
    Something of this pedagogical imperative is similarly borne out in Jameson's most recent explorations of the utopian problematic. This too, interestingly enough, takes place by way of an engagement with another central work of architectural and urban theory, Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York (1978). Jameson now suggests that the "object of representation" in a utopian text may never have been the "realm of freedom" that would exist in a radically other society--the concrete phenomenological contents or "lived" experience of such a future--something, as Jameson has stressed all along, that at best can only be glimpsed on the very edges of our conceptual retina. Rather, Jameson now asks us to consider the possibility that what the utopia successfully brings into view is precisely the "machinery" concentrating and localizing necessity--those structures that enable a social order to (re)produce itself--so that new forms and spaces of freedom can come into being in the first place. For example, in Koolhaas's narrative, the urban street grid and the elevator are seen as the embodiments of a structural necessity around which then accrete "delirious" free and multiple possibilities of urban space.
    With this latest formulation, we have in a sense come full circle: for how better to conceive the "realm of freedom" realized in Proust's leisure classes than that made possible by the "machinery" of class society? (Jameson also suggests a similar structure is at work in the contemporary utopian images of the "free" market [The Seeds of Time, 60.) Of course, the goal of the classic utopias is to replace this class machinery with something else, so that the free realization of the potentiality of all is for the first time made possible. And yet with this realization, a new dilemma for the classical narrative utopia emerges as well. This is not to deny the power that these texts have in cognitive mapping or in generating an original "conception" or Symbolization of a new kind of social machinery--indeed, these works perform an indispensable pedagogical labor by holding up such figurations to us. Rather, where these works fall short is in their lack of attention to the central political question: how might we begin the process of implementing this new reality? In our own moment, when politics itself has apparently been relocated to the utopian horizon--part not of the here-and-now, but rather of some as-of-yet unimaginable future--these political processes themselves must become the object of utopian figuration (and here we might point toward exactly this achievement in the most important of contemporary "utopian" fictions, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead).
    Thus, we finally arrive at another set of concerns which have in fact always already been central for Jameson's work. These are given direct expression in the series of questions which he proposes, and then answers, in his recent essay, "Actually Existing Marxism": "1) what is Marxism then exactly, if the media and the various right-wing blowhards have it all wrong? 2) what is socialism in that case, and what might it be (or be thought of being) in the future? and above all, 3) what can the relationship of both be to that supremely stigmatized traditional concept called revolution?" (19). How do we imagine, and in imagining, begin to live, revolution, the process of transforming society in the most fundamental ways? Jameson's engagement with the problematic of utopia has, we might say, all along been trying to teach us the urgency of exactly this question.
ADDED MATERIAL

FOOTNOTES
1. For a discussion of the relationship between utopia and totality, see Postmodernism, especially 331-340.
2. For two related discussions, see Kenneth Burke's analysis of what he calls the "bureaucratization of the imaginative," 225-229; and, in a more specific vein, Arthur Lipow.
3. For a useful related discussion, see Marc Angenot.
4. Similarly, Marin later writes, "Utopia is the infinite potentia of historical figures: it is this infinite, this 'work,' this potentia that the Greek negation ou allows to be understood as a prefix to the name topos. Utopia is the plural figure of the infinite work of the limit or frontier or difference in history" ("Frontiers of Utopia," 413).
5. For some important recent reconsiderations of the status of science in Marxism, see Suvin, "'Utopian' and 'Scientific'"; Jameson, "Science Versus Ideology"; and Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, especially Ch. 1.
6. However, in order to avoid too hastily assimilating the work of one to the other, see Lefebvre's own deployment of the figure of the mirror in the constitution of space (The Production of Space, 181-188). Jameson too suggests the link between the Lacanian Imaginary and the concerns of phenomenology in his "Imaginary and Symbolic," 101.
7. For a powerful recent exploration of the implications of the Lacanian concept of the Real for cultural criticism, see the work of Slavoj Zizek, beginning with Looking Awry.
8. Another more properly science fictional source for Jameson's formulation of the aesthetics of cognitive mapping--which unfortunately I do not have the space to elaborate upon more fully here--can be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, of whose 1959 novel Time Out of Joint Jameson offers a brilliant reading in Postmodernism, 279-287. In this novel, one character offers the following description of a representational practice which resonates with that of Dick himself: "You work from an esthetic, not a rational standpoint. Those scanners you constructed.... You try to fill. Complete the pattern. Anticipate where it goes if extended one more point. That's not rational; not an intellectual process. That's how--well, vase-makers work" (41-42).
9. I take the notion of the difference between the map and the travel itinerary from Michel de Certeau, 118-122; also see the brilliant work of phenomenological historicism by Paul Carter. The opposition between mimesis and semiosis is drawn from Roland Barthes, 37.

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