WORKS

COLLECTIVE

NEWS

CONTACT

MULTIMEDIA
REALIZATION

UNIT 404

NOT FOUND.


Alright.
Yes, my name is Timothy, and I'm here as a member of Unit 404. We're an art collective from Germany, and our member, Johanna Spieker, also provided one of the artworks shown in the exhibition.
Within the collective, I'm mainly responsible for research, especially as it regards the theoretical aspects of our collective practice. And, just as a short rundown, I got my BA in Media Studies from the University of Art in Braunsweig.
a school at which I'm also currently teaching a course on film theory and psychoanalysis, and I'm currently in the process of completing my MA degree in European literature at Humboldt University in Berlin.
What particularly interests me, are the intersections of theory and art during the 20th century, with a focus on literature and film.
And this is why my contribution to this event will take a literary approach to this lecture, which I think fits well with the concept of the exhibition.
I will now give a lecture of about 35 minutes or so, and afterwards, I invite anyone to feel free to share their thoughts or opinions of any kind, and if I remember correctly, the ones listening from London will have a discussion afterwards.
After the talk, I will stay in the chat for a few minutes to see if there are any questions from the people watching from home.
And so, without further ado…
Let's get into it. So, I wanted to take the chance to talk about something that I've been very interested for a while now, and that is the work of Frederick Jameson.
As many of you will know, Jameson is a renowned literary scholar. He's also a Marxist, and is a central figure in the tradition of Marxist literary studies, from Georg Lukac on.
And one of the central themes that always comes up in Jameson's work is the idea of utopia. And this is not accidental, as the utopia is a deeply political form, and Jameson always thinks his politics by way of culture and art, especially literature.
For this lecture, I want to analyze the utopia and how it compares to dystopia, because I feel like Jameson's work shows that the difference is not as easily defined as it might seem.
I want to do this by utilizing different concepts of Jameson's, but primarily focus on his concept of the anti-utopia.
But first, I want to begin by focusing on Utopia itself.
And here's a little picture of the…
book I'm basing a lot of my argument on.
And the first thing one has to know is that in his work, Jameson separates between the utopian impulse and the utopian program. And this really begins with Thomas More's text, Utopia, which is usually considered to be the founding text of the form.
And he traces these two distinctions between impulse and program.
In a rather complex but insightful manner.
And he provides… this chart…
To make this distinction more clearer in his chapter, Varieties of the Utopian, in the aforementioned book, Archaeologies of the Future.
So, on the left here, we have the utopian program and its different forms, the utopian space, the intentional community, revolutionary praxis, and last but not least, the utopian text itself.
And what all of these have in common is that they are closed-off systems, and this will be one of the central aspects of my lecture. All of these systems are total systems, completely self-sufficient and autonomous.
If we think about the utopian text, we notice that one common theme with them is that they are often geographically, ideologically, and politically isolated.
I think, one of my favorite examples of this is Ernest Kalenbach's Echotopia, which is a utopia in which Northern California, Oregon, and Washington become independent from the U.S. and become a completely sustainable and ecologically conscious state.
And this totality of the utopian program is crucial with Jameson. So, this is my first quote.
Of Jameson's?
And here says, Totality is then precisely this combination of closure and system in the name of autonomy and self-sufficiency, and which is ultimately the source of that otherness or radical, even alien difference already mentioned above, and to which will be returned at some length.
Yet it is precisely this category of totality that presides over the forms of utopian realization. The utopian city, the utopian revolution, the utopian commune or village, and of course, the utopian text itself.
In all its radical and unacceptable difference from the more lawful and aesthetically satisfying literary genres.
So…
To sum this up, what Jameson is saying here is that the utopian program concerns the realization of utopia.
A utopia is here defined as a system that is radically different than the system we are living in now. This is why the utopian text is so important, because it enables a complete realization of a utopia.
The totality of the utopia is already implied by its status as something that lies beyond revolution, beyond rupture. It is the end of progress, and an absolute state in which the desire for utopia itself is erased, where history gets a different meaning.
And Jameson writes, about this relationship of history and utopia.
At least two kinds of historical events seem to have been excluded in advance from the utopian framework. The convulsions of the various dystopias in store for our own world, and the systemic transformation or revolution that ushers in utopia itself.
It is as though the utopian end of history has canceled the very category of events to which these collective experiences belong, leaving only that daily life to which Bott claimed the utopian form was reduced to in the first place.
And this last reference to Roland Barth of the utopian in the everyday brings me to Jameson's second category, which is the utopian impulse.
And for this, I will go back to the graph from before.
The utopian impulse consists of all the times, bits, and pieces, where utopia seeps into our everyday life.
This consists of political theory and reform, as well as the individual building, and here he literally means a building, space of warmth and privacy.
and the hermeneutics of utopia. And with this latter part, the hermeneutics, Jameson refers explicitly to the work of Ernst Bloch.
Who analyzes the utopian impulse in Das Principte Hofnung, or das Principhofnung, or in English, The Principle of Hope.
Important here is that the utopian impulse is something that can be found in everyday life.
And, jameson writes about this in this…
quote, where he says, Just as clearly, then, it will be this very impress of the form and category of totality, which is virtually by definition lacking in the multiple forms invested by Bloch's utopian impulse.
Here we have rather to do with an allegorical process in which various utopian figures seep into the daily life of things and people and afford an incremental and often unconscious bonus of pleasure unrelated to their functional value of official satisfactions.
The hermeneutic procedure is therefore a two-step method in which, in a first moment, fragments of experience betray the presence of symbolic figures, beauty, wholeness, energy, perfection, which are only themselves subsequently to be identified as the forms whereby an essentially utopian desire can be transmitted.
So the impulse in Jameson is something that is not total, and therefore more easily attainable, in the way that a reform is easier to attain than a revolutionized society.
But Jameson doesn't really state a preference, but he merely categorizes.
And this brings me to my next point, which is that of the dystopia.
And I find this to be, or at least for me, this was one of the first things I was confronted with as a young reader.
A journey that began with me for…
with reading dystopias like 1984, Brave New World, or, Yevgeny Zamyadin's We.
And this lecture is based on the central question, how does one separate exactly between utopia and dystopia?
Our first impulse would be to say they are complete opposites.
Utopia is a concept of a perfect world in which negative aspects of society are eliminated, while dystopia exacerbates the negative tendencies of our current systems, and constructs a totalizing system based on these negative aspects. So, dystopia represents a nightmarish version of a radically different system, while utopia creates the ideal radically different system.
But this also leads us to the first two points of commonality. What they both have in common, at least on the surface, is that they are complete, closed-off systems.
Within these systems, time and history take on a different meaning. In the classic dystopia, as we will see, change is impossible, while in utopia, change is unnecessary. So, they're both closed off.
Furthermore, they are both based on the society they stem from.
If we start, for example, with Thomas More's Utopia from 1516,
We have a text written right before the transition to the first capitalist-like systems.
And one thing people usually remember about this foundational text is that one central part of Moore's utopia is the abolition of money.
In the same vein, dystopia is also a product of the society that comes up with it. Dystopia is primarily a literary genre of the 20th century, and a reaction to the horrors of totalitarianism and its fascist and Stalinist models.
Interesting is also the genre of cyberpunk, whose dystopian aspects are mostly rooted in the injustices created by a hyper-financialized, neoliberal, and technological advanced future. So with both systems, at least on a generic surface level.
We have closed off societies that have its roots in our current societies.
One could conjecture that one main difference is that a utopia is a way to eliminate currently existing problems, while the dystopia exacerbates these problems. But this is kind of where I would like to complicate the matter a little bit.
By moving into the realm of a current day and age, and for a moment away from Frederick Jameson.
Something that has haunted me, and probably most of you as well, is the question of what are often called the tech utopians of the current moment.
Let me switch to this slide.
The most obvious example of this is billionaire Peter Thiel. He's the founder of PayPal, but now also one of the founders of Palantir, which is a surveillance company who has a data back on pretty much all U.S. citizens. And just to give you…
a little idea of their good deeds. By good deeds, I'm obviously being sarcastic.
They've provided data to ICE, and to Donald Trump's… which is Donald Trump's government immigration enforcement agency to help them find what they call illegal aliens. They provided technology to the IDF during their genocide in Gaza and the continued surveillance and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
And Thiel is also one of the major donors of U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.
Which is all pretty dystopian stuff.
But nonetheless, Thiel and other tech billionaires constantly describe their projects in utopian terms. And many of these billionaires imagine corporately owned city-states or general AI, fusion of the human with AI,
colonies on Mars, and also entirely new systems of governance. An example of which is the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin.
who has been associated with Thiel and J.D. Vance, and has advocated for the US president governing like a king that is a CEO.
So, if we define a utopia as a total system constructed by the desire for a world that is radically different, one can frame this vision as somewhat utopian, because they act like it is a utopia.
But it is just not a utopia for the majority, or even humanity as such. And this becomes abundantly clear in a recent interview with Thiel, conducted by New York Times journalist Ross Dalfad.
who directly asked Theo if he wanted humanity to survive, to which Theo couldn't really muster a convincing answer and just started, stuttering.
And their utopia, meaning the billionaires and Peter Thiel, is one that is a dystopia to most of us, and one that does not necessarily include the human race at all.
So, one important aspect to focus on here is not only the desire for a system of difference, but also a collective desire, a collective yearning for a different system.
And it is this collectivity of desire that I want to here designate as a defining difference between dystopia and utopia, which clearly places utopia within the realm of leftist politics.
But what then is dystopia? And now I want to take a few minutes, to argue through Jameson that not all dystopias are alike, and that there are radical differences in their political utility and their possibility for a utopia.
And of course, the first book that comes to mind when dystopia is brought up is George Orwell's 1984, and I want to take this chance to talk about Orwell for a little bit.
What is interesting about 1984 is that you will hear it mentioned by either side of any kind of political discourse during any given time since it was,
Publicized in 19… or published in 1949.
If you type in 1984 on Fox News website, you will find a slew of articles comparing wokeness or leftism to Big Brother.
What they seldom mention is that Orwell considered himself to be a democratic socialist, and that he fought for the Workers' Party of Marxist unification in the Spanish Civil War, an experience he extensively wrote about in his memoir, Homage to Catalonia.
But despite his left-leanings, Orwell's work has a complicated legacy from an anti-capitalist perspective, which I'm going to argue now by looking at one of his books that is less known.
but interesting in this context, and that is his 1936 novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
And this novel follows a poor poet named Gordon in his late 20s that refuses to further participate in a system that is organized around money and profit.
He purposefully takes worse jobs for less money, and the money he does earn, he immediately spends on liquor or restaurants.
One of his rather wealthy middle-class friends tries to convert him to Marxism, but he refuses to resort to any kind of activism. Rather, he takes a position of nihilism and self-sabotage.
He is in love with a woman that has the utmost patience with him and tries to get him to fulfill his potential, but even though he loves her, he can't bring himself to do what's best for their relationship.
Towards the end, she falls pregnant, and Gordon realizes that he has to fit into society and accept capitalism for what it is. So he takes a well-paid job that had been on the table from the start, and submits to a life of wage labor and middle-class comfort, which is poetically represented by the Aspidistra plant.
It is my opinion that these elements combine to make up one of the most ineffective critiques of capitalism in 20th century literature.
Anti-capitalism is portrayed as a kind of immature aberration during adolescence. It seemed to me to be the equivalent of a 16-year-old running away from home, only to return a few days later after realizing that McDonald's doesn't take the paper money he took out of his Monopoly set.
On one of the final pages of the novel, Orwell's narrator says the following word.
Words? Yes, that was the truth of it. Now that the thing was done, he felt nothing but relief.
Relief that now, at last, he had finished with dirt, cold, hunger, and loneliness, and could get back to decent, fully human life.
His resolutions, now that he had broken them, seemed nothing but a frightful weight that he had cast off.
So, Orwell basically validates capitalism because he frames the anti-capitalism of his protagonist as a passive and childish aversion to capitalist society, rather than in any kind of constructive activism.
While Keep the Espedistra Flying is not a dystopia, it is illustrated of a certain tendency in Orwell's work, which is that of the anti-utopia. And this brings me back to Frederick Jameson.
For Jameson, the anti-utopia is a concept way more important than that of the dystopia, and as we will see, it is a term he applies to novels that we usually associate with the dystopian form.
He uses the term anti-utopia in at least two different ways.
The first is that of a kind of anti-utopian sentiment.
The idea that there is no alternative to our current system, which is capitalism, but more specifically neoliberalism or late capitalism, that has been made the mode of production since the 1980s, and which, and I quote Jameson here, has no natural enemies.
In the introduction to archaeology of the future, Jameson writes, What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy, but rather the universal belief not only that this tendency is irreversible, and with that he means neoliberalism, privatization, undoing of social programs.
But that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socioeconomic system is conceivable, let alone practically available.
And this he places opposite of utopia, When he says.
The utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems, utopia forms itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off utopian visions like so many sparks from
a comment.
What makes the anti-utopia so effective has mainly to do with Stalinism, which is always invoked as an argument against utopia.
The fear of a totalizing system gone wrong has been inextricably linked with this particular form of communism, and in the same breath to any other forms of communism or socialism.
And this is particularly true of the United States, where a significant part of the population associates even corporate Democrats like Barack Obama or Joe Biden with Marxism or communism, and relatively interchangeable, as it seems.
And I have an example of this. Just a few months ago, Donald Trump said about the New York City Mayor-elect Sora Mamdani, that he is, and I quote, communist, not socialist. He is way worse than a socialist.
And I just find it very unfortunate that none of these reporters ever ask him to define the term, which would definitely make for an amusing answer.
But this is, of course, a long-standing sentiment that has been developing over almost a century through World War II, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the Cold War.
So, the anti-utopian sentiment can be described as the fear of communism as such, and the belief that there is no alternative, which is a phrase often associated with Margaret Thatcher.
This is also what led to the late Mark Fisher asking, is there no alternative? In his modern classic.
capitalist critique, capitalist realism, which goes hand-in-hand with the idea of the anti-utopia. He himself bases his argument on Jameson's famous dictum that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
So we could say the anti-utopia represses the collective desire of utopia through a narrative of rational choice and individualism.
The second way Jameson uses the term anti-utopia is as a form of text.
He uses it precisely for narratives that perpetuate this fear of the totalizing system, and therefore the fear of utopia. Again, like a utopia gone wrong. And this is where I want to turn back to Orwell's 1984.
Because Frederick Jameson very notably argues that George Orwell's 1984 can hardly be categorized as a dystopia, since its primary aim is to warn of any kind of totalizing system to which the utopia definitely belongs.
For Orwell, the destructive tendencies of the human animal are impossible to eradicate, and has to constantly be restrained.
I assume most of you are aware of the ending of 1984 and its final paragraphs that conclude Winston's total submission to Big Brother. And I also have a slide with the ending of 1984, where it says, he gazed up at the enormous face.
Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. Oh, cruel, needless misunderstanding.
Oh, stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast. Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose, but it was alright. Everything was alright. The struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
And as you can see, the novel really ends on a bad note, so…
what I want to emphasize here is that there is a certain closing off that happens that fully negates utopia.
It is a utopia gone wrong, so to speak, and it ends in a…
in a point of complete totality, and where it's impossible to escape. And if you remember, the whole deal in 1984 is that Winston
Has all of this… goes to all of this effort to break out of, the terrible world he's trapped in, and in the end, he finds out that he's always been watched, and that he's
that it's always been planned out for him to go that way. So, this ends in a totalizing system staying total, and the ending guarantees a complete annihilation of the utopian impulse.
But what then is dystopia?
And this brings me to another concept, which is the term of the critical dystopia. And for this, I'm relying on Tom Moylan's Scraps of the Untainted Sky, which is a fantastic book on
Utopia and Dystopia, where he has a chapter on critical dystopia.
And as I have just done myself, he traces the pseudo-utopian promises, or rather, the pseudo-utopian promises made during the rise of neoliberalism and free market economics that marked the 80s. Most notably, as I've mentioned.
Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the UK, but also Helmut Kohl in Germany.
And as I'm sure everyone here is aware of, in the 1980s, the dominant economic and social model became that of privatization, deregulation, the weakening of unions, and the reduction of the welfare state.
And this makes neoliberalism one of the purest forms of the anti-utopian.
This is, again, best illustrated by the slogan, there is no alternative.
On the other hand.
Neoliberalism did utilize utopian or pseudo-utopian elements to justify its assault on the working class and deregulation and so on.
And this is most poignantly condensed in the term trickle-down economics, which is, of course, the idea that the end of privatization and deregulation, that there is some kind of point where all the current social problems are fixed.
And this leads to Jameson's assumption later in his book that any kind of utopia is usually associated with socialism, and that neoliberalism's core contradiction is that it presents itself as an autonomy to socialism, but at the same time claims to fix the problems of society.
And this trend, of course, continued into the 90s and 2000s, with the administrations of the likes of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schroeder completing a complete neoliberal takeover of what used to be center-left parties.
And, this kind of draws a parallel between neoliberalism and what I'm now going to talk about with the critical dystopia.
Which is that…
neoliberalism, or at least that we are convinced that neoliberalism is not a closed-off system and not dystopian, and that at the end there is the possibility of utopia, which is, of course.
Just a trick.
And, Tom Moylan traces the term critical dystopia back to feminist literary scholar Raffaelli Bacolini. I'm sorry for botching that name.
And Bacolini uses the term of a kind of dystopia, or uses the term critical dystopia, for a kind of dystopia that refuses the closed structure of the anti-utopias that I just described with Orwell.
More specifically, she ties this form to feminism and to the works of female authors like Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler, who created dystopias with more open endings.
These open endings leave room for the utopian impulse and for the possibility of change, usually narrated through the lens of all those people who have been so far refused their status as subjects. And here I have a quote from the book of Tomoylan saying this in his words.
And he says, From her analysis of the works by Burdekin, Atwood, and Butler, Baccalini argues that critical dystopias reject the conservative dystoptopian tendency to settle for the anti-utopian closure invited by the historical situation by setting up open endings that resist that closure and maintain the utopian impulse within the
work.
And this is very interesting. To sum up, the critical dystopia decidedly differs from the anti-utopia, as the anti-utopia represses the utopian impulse and frames it as dystopian, while the critical dystopia preserves the possibility for utopia within the dystopian.
So what we have here are two different models that complicate the concept of dystopia.
Dystopia can take the form of a warning against utopia, but it can also serve as a container that keeps alive the hope for utopia.
And this is why Moylan and Baccalini both associate the critical dystopia with feminist dystopias.
And this is, of course, most famously represented by The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Which is written with emancipatory intent.
And since women have never been fully granted a status as subjects in our society.
A dystopia that exacerbates these conditions does not have the effect of warning against utopia, but rather exemplifies the problems existing in a current society, and thereby makes possible real societal critiques and awareness that might be able to bring us closer to utopia.
So…
This brings me already, towards the end of my talk, and I want to summarize my argument of the central differences between utopia and dystopia.
First of all, utopia and dystopia both describe literary genres, and they both describe total systems that lie beyond the end of history, and that cannot be changed.
The second problem lies in the fact that there are competing utopian visions for the future. What might seem utopian to Peter Thiel might seem dystopian to us.
So, the question I posed was, is there a way we can distinguish between Peter Thiel's or Elon Musk's utopia, and a utopia that fits more to an idea of the utopias that are exemplified by this exhibition?
My answer to that would be.
There is indeed a difference which lies in the fact that the left-wing idea of utopia is usually based on a collective and humanist desire for a utopian future, while a seemingly utopian future by the likes of tech billionaires is based on a utopian vision that only includes a few select billionaires, and, as we've seen with Peter Thiel, doesn't even include humanity as such.
This brought me to the idea of the anti-utopia, which is exemplified by the works of George Orwell. Jameson's version of the anti-utopia is based on the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism, and that any kind of utopia necessarily leads to a totalitarian, absolute system of terror.
In the realm of text, the anti-utopia takes the form of a narrative that depicts these fears of the totality of utopia.
Then, we turn to neoliberalism and its false promises of its own utopia, which implies that late capitalism makes use of left-wing promises of utopia, but only does so as a way of getting working-class votes.
To conclude, I looked at the concept of the critical dystopia, which offered us another vision of dystopia as a way of criticizing the current system and opening it up for the possibility of utopia.
We ended up with a complex web of relations. Two seemingly complex… two seemingly closed-off systems, utopia and dystopia, are really not equals, as the utopian narrative is an absolute system of different
Difference, and is indeed closed off and beyond the end of progress.
But the dystopia is not quite its equal. It rather takes the form of an inversion of utopia.
The anti-utopia, or it becomes a form that mirrors our own condition, that of a world that is terrifying and dystopian, but that still contains the possibility of utopia.
And I find this to be a quite hopeful idea, and that is why I decided to close
this talk by quoting the ending of Jameson's influential essay in the New Left Review, The Politics of Utopia.
And… For the end of his essay, he quotes Marge Piercy's novel, A Woman on the Edge of Time.
And it has this wonderful quotation.
That I want to read to you.
I, this is first Jameson speaking, until the quotation marks. I have hoped to convey something that I have not yet said, namely that our…
that utopias are non-fictional, even though they are also non-existent. Utopias, in fact, come to us as barely audible messages from a future that might never come into being.
I leave the articulation of that message to Marge Piercy's metapocid utopians, time travelers from a future which, they warn us, without ourselves and our own present, may never come into existence. And here he quotes from the novel.
You may fail us. You individually may fail to understand us or to struggle in your own life and time. You, of your time may fail to struggle altogether.
But we must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That's why we reached you.
Yeah.
I thought this would be a great quote to end on.
And I want to thank you all for listening, and I hope this was insightful, and I also want to thank you again for making art and continuing to struggle, and to try and to envision new futures that at times kind of seem unlikely.
And I think, and I maybe have a bias as somebody that studies literature, but I truly think that fiction is one of the most powerful tools we have.
And with that, I want to give anyone the opportunity to share some thoughts of your own.
And otherwise, I'm sending my greetings to London.
And I wish everyone at home and in London a wonderful evening and a good… time, Christmas time.
Kumi Sakai Timothy, can you hear me?
Yes.
Kumi Sakai I just want to say thank you so much. We're the London group here, we've got, we could hear it really clearly, our tech is working really well, and we wanted just to thank you very much for giving this lecture tonight.
Kumi Sakai It's great to make contact with you, and hopefully we'll follow this up with some conversations.
Yeah, so…
Kumi Sakai Yeah.
Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure, and I think it's a very great concept, and I think we have to keep alive the…
Thinking and, fictions and, trying to…
Make everything a little better, especially with the tools we have, which is art, really, and fiction.
Kumi Sakai Yeah, thank you so much. It's great, great. We'll hopefully have some communication about how we watch the recordings well afterwards, so we're going to,
Kumi Sakai come out of the meeting now and see if anyone has any questions or wants to discuss anything, but thank you so much.
Kumi Sakai Thank you.
Thank you, have a great night.
Kumi Sakai Hi, sweetheart.
Kumi Sakai Bye-bye!
Awesome, bye!
Kumi Sakai How do we… how do we come out of that? Is that okay to close? Yeah, we can place it, yeah.
Ich glob ich Ken jeden hierin.
Wich aus machinen.
Johanna mal.
I don't care.
Johanna Gnosson.
Okay, that's fuck me.
Gordon Endt That's good.
Johanna Excellent.
Gordon Endt a walk.
Huh?
Johanna Huh?
Gordon Endt But I thought.
Thank you, man.
Johanna Yeah, this guy, good job.
globscht.
Help me to feel the first pressure, then.
Johanna Yo, if you didn't.
Johanna Ich musset auchternscheweg, aberformigamerise, wirt furtsion die Tagen Tagmall.
Hello, Claude!
Johanna Juice!
Despite Lloydin.
Gordon Endt No, I'm here.
Cheers!



UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA – A DIALECTIC OF TOTALIZING SYSTEMS?

lecture by Timothy Whitlock at The Handbag Factory︎︎︎ - London
2025

Many thanks to SEED_2065︎︎︎ for having us!


The great Marxist and literary critic Fredric Jameson has repeatedly written about the role of utopia within the context of literary studies and political theory, most notably in his 2005 book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. He implies that the distinction between utopia and dystopia is not as clear and stable as it might seem. Both describe totalizing systems of social organization that are constructed as an „other“ to the world we currently live in. Utilizing Jameson’s concepts like the „anti-utopia“ or the „utopian impulse“ this lecture will take a closer look at the difference between the two systems. How are they structured and how can one draw a distinction between the two? What is their function and ultimate purpose? How can these concepts be used and made productive within art, activism and political discourse? To illustrate this tension, we will examine different examples from science-fiction as well as other utopian and dystopian concepts.

Folder Icon SOURCES Jameson, Fredric (2005): Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions. London: Verso Books.

Jameson, Fredric (2004): „The Politics of Utopia." In: New Left Review, 25,1, p.35-54.

Moylan, Thomas (2000): Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Oxfordshire: Routledge.

Orwell, George (2018): Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin.

Orwell, George (1987): Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Penguin.

  
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