Reading the Maps: Realism, Science Fiction and Utopian Strategies (Part I: Archaeologies of the Future) (Critical Essay)
Arena Journal 2006, Annual, 25-26
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For what is the task of the true philosophy if not to draw the archetypal map? Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel 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)