the last paragraph of Valences of the Dialectic (2009)

December 28th, 2009
By: Paris Ionescu
Topics: Theory and Criticism

The following is the final paragraph of Frederic Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic (2009), re-blogged from K-Punk.

… We may argue that Utopia is no longer in time just as with the end of voyages of discovery and the exploration of the globe it disappeared from geographical space as such. Utopia as the absolute negation of the fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained cannot now be imagined as lying ahead of us in historical time as an evolutionary or even revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it cannot be imagined at all; and one needs the languages and figurations of physics – the conception of closed worlds and a multiplicity of unconnected yet simultaneous universes – in order to convey what might be the ontology of this now so seemingly empty and abstract idea. Yet it is not to be grasped in this logic of religious transcendence either, as some other world after or before this one, or beyond it. It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world – better to say the alternate world, our alternate world – as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

I have been reading this book to try and get a grasp on how Utopia, philosophically out-of-commission in favor of versions of realism and the microtopian¹, is envisioned today, from the specialized realm of philosophical discourse, to popular culture, to the role it plays in the extra-institutional beliefs of regular people. Jameson argues that Utopia is not only no longer a potential somewhere on Earth, like James Hilton’s Shangri-La, but actually has no possibility as a place in time either. Utopia is, after all avenues of theorization have been explored, a mystical concept, belonging to one’s dreams, outside the universe (though not in the religious sense of transcending our universe); a kind of parallel thread that ghosts our own. My 22-year-old’s analogy is that it is, for Jameson, like when you play a time-trial in a racing videogame (Project Gotham, whatever) and get to see the “best time” car doing a ghost run around the circuit. As brilliant as Jameson’s description is, I fear that when he mentions “the language and figurations of physics” as the required mode of conception for understanding Utopia, he does what seems to have become rather common in contemporary philosophy, which is to vaguely invoke theoretical physics, astronomy, and cosmology, as more lofty fields (which maybe they are). But, as Stephen Hawking among others have told us, science became wildly complicated in the twentieth century, and the result is that most if not all philosophers (not to mention artists!) have had a very difficult time keeping up, making their invocations flimsy and cargo-cultish. Surmounting the challenges that extreme complexity in each and every field present to generalist writing and thought will be of importance to the development of human knowledge this century. Still, Jameson is pointing to a cross-pollination between the philosophic, the mystic, and the rigorously scientific, to great effect.

Here are a few art associations: