A first version of this homage was presented at the commemorative event “Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of Our Future,” held in the School of the Arts at Columbia University on March 1, 2025. A Spanish version was published as “La utopía en tiempos de barbarie: Homenaje a Fred Jameson,” Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica 64.169 (2025): 53-58. Translated by the author for Communis with the permission of the Spanish dossier’s special editor, Ileana Rodríguez.

“For me, aside from the Jamesonian art of the voluptuously convoluted dialectical sentence, of which I remain infinitely envious as a nonnative speaker of American English, his influence always has been and will continue to be above all the effect of his principled method as a cultural critic and critical theorist. “Always historicize,” the opening motto from The Political Unconscious, remains the best-known of such methodological principles.”

— Bruno Bosteels

Utopia in Times of Barbarism: Jameson and Method

When Fred Jameson passed away in September of 2024, I lost not exactly an ex-colleague or a former teacher, something which technically speaking he never was to me as he was to many of the people who paid homage to him over the past months, but an ideal and constantly implied reader. In this sense, for sure, he was a mentor to me, but one who was always acting from a distance and, regrettably for me but perhaps fortunately for him, mostly unbeknownst to Fred himself. Like an instance of the superego, one that was more ironic than punitive, or like an absent cause that unselfishly vanishes into the sum-total of its effects, he would influence me almost every day, especially over the last decade, as I was writing in self-imposed isolation, first, a fiercely polemical book that is not yet finished against the defeatist post-Heideggerian consensus of our time and, then, its utopian counterpart, on the Mexican commune, which out of sheer desperation with the labor of the negative during the pandemic I decided to publish before the polemic for which it was supposed to offer an alternative and an escape route.

I predict that Jameson’s work will only gain in relevance in the coming years, not only because of the wealth of new materials that we might still expect to see in print, like his mythical seminars, but also because his writings, unlike some of the more famed books from “the years of theory” to which he dedicated his last volume, tend to age exceptionally well, like good wine in oak barrels. There certainly may be future shifts in dominance, as he might have said, from one book to the next, say, in my own appreciation, from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act or Marxism and Form to An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army all the way back to the earliest beginnings with his Sartre: Origins of Style. Yet, no matter which book ends up on top of the pile, I am convinced that his ability to speak to our present will remain as powerful and pertinent as ever.

For me, aside from the Jamesonian art of the voluptuously convoluted dialectical sentence, of which I remain infinitely envious as a nonnative speaker of American English, his influence always has been and will continue to be above all the effect of his principled method as a cultural critic and critical theorist. “Always historicize,” the opening motto from The Political Unconscious, remains the best-known of such methodological principles, but as we have come to learn ever since, in books such as The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System or the slender and delightful Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, this first principle in turn should always have been supplemented with the imperatives “Always spatialize” and “Always totalize.”[1] These are the same methodological imperatives from which I originally took inspiration several years ago when I developed a new seminar, first called “Cartographic Fictions” and then “Critical Cartographies,” which I am currently offering again and in which Jameson’s original “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” essay from 1984 in New Left Review as well as its programmatic supplement for a socialist aesthetic of “Cognitive Mapping” figure as prominently as the Situationists’ psycho-geographies, On Kawara’s I went and I met series, Doreen Massey’s “Spatialising the History of Modernity,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Geophilosophy,” Alfredo Jaar’s Geography = War, or Sylvia Wynter’s “1492: A New World View.”[2]

However, if there is one method to the rigorous Jamesonian madness that in the present moment will pose the gravest challenges for cultural critics and critical theorists alike, I would say it is Fred’s call always to look for the utopian element (which he tended to raise to the dignity of the concept by using the capitalized Utopia) even in the sheerest and most depressing forms of ideology. Thus, in one of his earliest essays, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” published in the first issue of Social Text (1979) alongside Edward W. Said’s “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” and Sylvia Wynter’s “Sambos and Minstrels,” Jameson counters both the “elitists” of the Frankfurt School or, later, the French Tel Quel group, with their contempt for mass culture as an object of consumption and manipulation, and the “radicals,” convinced that truth always resides in the masses and their popular forms of expression. Drawing a diagonal across these antagonistic positions, Marxist criticism according to Jameson must respect the dialectical relationship between ideology and utopia in all cultural expressions of late capitalism, from the modernist or postmodernist experimental novel to blockbuster films like Jaws. Speaking about this last film as well as other massively popular movies like The Godfather, Jameson states his method:

I will now indeed argue that we cannot fully do justice to the ideological function of works like these unless we are willing to concede the presence within them of a more positive function as well: of what I will call, following the Frankfurt School, their Utopian or transcendent potential—that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs. At this point in the argument, then, the hypothesis is that the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated.[3]

And then, in an ominous note that would prove to be premonitory of our present, he adds that even Nazism must have its phantasmatic core: “Even the ‘false consciousness’ of so monstrous a phenomenon of Nazism was nourished by collective fantasies of a Utopian type, in ‘socialist’ as well as in nationalist guises.”[4] This would be the hardest lesson to pick up from Jameson’s legacy: how, where, with what forms of presentation or representation, could we capture the element of the Utopian that lies at the base of the most extreme conservative, reactionary, or fascist ideologies today?

We undoubtedly are all familiar with Walter Benjamin’s tragic insight, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (also known as “On the Concept of History”), which he scribbled down in 1940 on the way to his death by suicide in Port Bou in the Spanish Pyrenees, trying to flee the Gestapo: “There has never been a document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”[5] Today, however, we are receiving nonstop breaking news of documents of barbarism the likes of which have never been seen before, as our demagogues might put it with a Nietzschean-fascistoid inflection typical of the grammar of greatness. How do we make this present the site of an archaeology of the future? How can we detect the Utopian promise in this neofascist totality that is taking the world by storm? How can we cognitively map, with what new sensorial apparatuses for perception and what new symbolic forms of representation, the totality of this anarchist-libertarian nihilism that is spreading like wildfire across the planet and that may well represent the cultural logic not of late but of terminal capitalism? The stage not of venture capitalism but of what perhaps we should call vulture capitalism?

These well-nigh impossible questions sum up the daunting tasks that Fred Jameson’s work bequeaths to us as his most vital legacy. For me, in any case, these are the questions of method and the challenges of a principled Utopian thinking in times of barbarism with which he will continue to read over my shoulder, with a smile on his lips and a twinkle of skepticism in his eyes, as I try to live up to his superegoic injunctions: Always historicize! Always spatialize! Always totalize! And, underneath them all: Always hypothesize! As Fred writes in the “Introduction” to The Geopolitical Aesthetic: “Nothing is gained by having been persuaded of the definitive verisimilitude of this or that conspiratorial hypothesis: but in the intent to hypothesize, in the desire called cognitive mapping—therein lies the beginning of wisdom.”[6] This is a form of wisdom that for sure is uniquely Jamesonian but that all the same we are also invited daily to make our own by giving it a new beginning.

The short book that is Raymond Chandler: Detections of Totality might give us a first clue in this direction. In it, Jameson begins by describing a kind of “duality of power” characteristic of American society, torn between faith in the dignity of the federal government based on the US Constitution and the dirty tricks of local politicking, reminiscent of the worst Mafia:

The federal system and the archaic federal Constitution developed in Americans a double image of their country’s political reality, a dual system of political thoughts which never intersect with each other. On the one hand, a glamorous national politics whose distant leading figures are invested with charisma, an unreal, distinguished quality adhering to their foreign policy activities, their economic programs given the appearance of substance by the appropriate ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. On the other hand, local politics, with its odium, its ever-present corruption, its deals and perpetual preoccupation with undramatic, materialistic questions such as sewage disposal, zoning regulations, property taxes, and so forth.[7]

If in 2016, when Jameson’s Raymond Chandler was first published, it was still possible to make such assertions about the double life of American politics, today such optimism is simply unsustainable. No one can ignore anymore that hatred, corruption, cruelty, and criminal gangsterism have emerged from the sewers of local politicking to flood the entire national political scene all the way to the top of the federal government, passing through all the intermediate levels of the so-called deep state, or the administrative state, which the people at the helm of the current government claim to want to destroy when in reality they are merely reducing it to the executive arm of a cabal of oligarchs. The Mafia has invaded and taken over the state. There is no longer any outside, then, from which it would be possible to denounce the criminal ideologization of the whole social space.

As Guy Debord announced almost sixty years ago in The Society of the Spectacle, with an apparent allusion to Jorge Luis Borges’s “On Rigor in Science”: “The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself”; “The spectacle is a map of this new world—a map drawn to the scale of the territory itself.”[8] However, for Borges as well as for Jameson, though from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, even the most absolute and totalitarian version of ideology contains—and in fact is based on—small fissures or lines of flight from which the energy of Utopia emerges. Thus, the Argentine writer concludes in his essay or inquisition “Avatars of the Tortoise,” first published in 1939 in Sur before becoming part of the 1957 edition of Discusión:

 “The greatest sorcerer (Novalis has memorably written) would be he who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions. Would that not be our case?” I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity that operates in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it to be resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason to know that it is false.[9]

The greatest height of sorcery—or ideology, in Jameson’s method—would be the fiction or lie that takes its own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions. If this situation effectively describes our present, where could we locate the interstices of unreason—or the negative reason of the Utopian—to know that it is false?

Take, for instance, the widespread ethnic and racial hatred toward the other, the foreigner, or the illegal immigrant, as part of the current turn toward late or neo-fascism. According to Jameson in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” based on the first two films of The Godfather series, it is possible to glimpse behind this hatred a kind of envy for the enjoyment of others, an envy that also conceals a positive desire to recover a sense of community that would have been lost or stolen in the alienation of modern life:

A narrative synthesis like The Godfather is possible only at the conjuncture in which ethnic content—the reference to an alien collectivity—comes to fill the older gangster schemas and to inflect them powerfully in the direction of the social; the superposition on conspiracy of fantasy material related to ethnic groups then triggers the Utopian function of this transformed narrative paradigm. In the United States, indeed, ethnic groups are not only the object of prejudice, they are also the object of envy; and these two impulses are deeply intermingled and reinforce each other mutually. The dominant white middle-class groups—already given over to anomie and social fragmentation and atomization—find in the ethnic and racial groups which are the object of their social repression and status contempt at one and the same time the image of some older collective ghetto or ethnic neighborhood solidarity; they feel the envy and ressentiment of the Gesellschaft for the older Gemeinschaft which it is simultaneously exploiting and liquidating.[10]

Similarly, in the current effort to liquidate the deep or administrative state, we can see a perverse recognition of the collective power whose achievements through social struggles have been condensed and deposited in the welfare state. In both its ideological aspect (racialized hatred of the foreigner) and its political aspect (deconstruction of the administrative state), the current politics of cruelty would be directly proportional to the degree of positive energy that is both feared and sought to be liquidated.

If Raymond Chandler: Detections of Totality allows us to understand the dual image of politics in the United States that is collapsing on us today, then An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, published in the same year, allows us to complicate the Jamesonian method with a second basic principle. It is not only a matter of negatively reclaiming the function of the Utopian element in each and every fragment of the dominant ideology, but, inversely, it is also necessary to situate the Utopian within what already exists in the immanence of the here and now. As Jameson writes: “If the critique of ideology deals with what Brecht called the good old things, cultural revolution itself has to do with the bad new things. But this is a complicated process in which the new cannot simply replace the old but must develop within it somehow, ultimately discarding the old ways like a husk or shell (as Marx put it).”[11] It is precisely for this reason that the US army, within the American constitutional order, can serve as an immanent point of reference for imagining an alternative socialist power; and we know that Jameson prefers to speak of socialism rather than communism, because of this desire to grapple with the practical limits of the given: “I have already said that I prefer the word socialism to communism in discussions today, because it is more than the latter and actually raises questions of party formation as well as transitions, privatizations, nationalizations, finances, and the like, which the loftier regions of communism allow us to avoid.”[12] To the extent that the Constitution constitutes an obstacle to any attempt to reduce federal politics to the mere politicking of the new Mafia of techno-plutocrats, the military with its guaranteed education, medical care, car and home insurance, and pension services, paradoxically demonstrates the possibility of a socialization program that is supposedly alien to the capitalist genius of the United States:

No genuine systemic change can take place here without an abrogation of the Constitution—a foundational fetish, as I have claimed, and a document the left itself would be as loath to forfeit as the right, owing to the protections of the Bill of Rights. The signal advantage of the army as a system is that it transcends that document without doing away with it; it coexists with it at a different spatial level and becomes thereby a potentially extraordinary instrument in the erection of dual power.[13]

No matter how problematic the hierarchical, masculinist, warlike, and violent model of the military may well be, Jameson’s wager is to situate his American Utopia in the breach opened by this seemingly irreplaceable instance of the American imaginary. As Kathi Weeks states in her response to Jameson’s original text: “His signature contribution to utopian studies involves a shift in focus from the positive content of a utopian vision to its negative function of producing an estrangement from and neutralization of the present order of things. From this angle, even the failures of speculative thinking can be effective as critical tools for the present.”[14] These are the same critical tools with which we henceforth will have to recover, preserve, and extend Fred Jameson’s legacy. In short, always find the elements of the Utopian even within the most abject ideology, but at the same time always situate Utopia within the immanence of the most irrevocable elements of the given: starting out from these two basic principles should allow us to follow Jameson’s method so as not to lose our sanity amid the new barbarism.

Notes

[1] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), ix; Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (London: Verso, 2016).

[2] Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 142 (1984): 53-92; Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson y Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347-60; Guy Debord, Guide psychogéographique de Paris (Copenhague: Permild & Rosengreen, 1957); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Geophilosophy,” in What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burcell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 85-116; Alfredo Jaar, Geography=War (Virginia: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1991); On Kawara: Whole and Parts, ed. Xavier Douroux and Franck Gautherot (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1996); Doreen Massey, “Spatialising the History of Modernity,” in For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 62-75; Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas. A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5-20.

[3] Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 130-148, quoted 144.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256-257 (Thesis VII).

[6] Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 3.

[7] Jameson, Raymond Chandler: Detections of Totality, 9.

[8] Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12 and 23 (Theses 2 and 31).

[9] Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise,” in Borges: A Reader, ed. Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 109 (translation modified). For an analysis of Borges’s changing theory of ideology, see Bruno Bosteels, “La ideología borgeana,” Acontecimiento: Revista para pensar la política 14 (1997): 51-92.

[10] Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 146.

[11] Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (London: Verso, 2016), 53.

[12] Ibid., 317.

[13] Jameson, An American Utopia, 27.

[14] Ibid., 244.

Bruno Bosteels