Reading the Maps: Realism, Science Fiction and Utopian Strategies (Part I: Archaeologies of the Future) (Essay‪)‬

It is fair to assume that readers of this journal share at least a sympathy with Oscar Wilde's assertion that 'a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at'. (1) But this quote gestures at more than is usually assumed and points us in the direction of a crucial utopian function: mapping. Utopias are not concerned with imagining the future so much as with sketching out the present and our ways out of it, allowing us, as The Seeds of Time describes it, 'to feel around our minds' invisible limits'. (2) They function here, as Fredric Jameson suggests elsewhere, as 'a determinate type of praxis, rather than as a specific mode of representation ... as a concrete set of mental operations to be performed on a determinate type of raw material given in advance, which is contemporary society itself'. (3) News from Nowhere, so often read as a dream of that world we call the future, takes on a quite different significance when we recall that William Morris' serial publication in Commonweal was a form of polemic by stealth, locking horns with the anarchists he saw wrecking what was left of the Socialist League. (4) These preliminary remarks ought, hopefully, to reinforce the common observation that the debates which open up between the proponents of the various utopias, realism, science fiction and cyberpunk are not so much about our visions of the future--indeed, as Jameson has reminded us on many occasions, utopias underline our very inability to imagine this future--as they are quarrels about strategy for the present. How do we get reliable information about contemporary capitalism and the various collective fantasies of it or, in more properly utopian terminology, what forms are adequate for mapping the current world system? This latter question is as much one of identification (just what stage in global capitalism are we in, or, how late is late capitalism going to be?) as it is one of immediate tactical oppositions.