Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse

Jameson, Fredric; Marín, Louis

doi:10.2307/465017

Cited by 83 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…73 Importantly, then, utopias have a distinctively negative thrust: they "dissolve" and "neutralize" the world from which they depart. 74 Hence, in his interpretation of The Dispossessed, Jameson identifies the novel's narrative device as "world reduction" 75 .…”

Section: The Dispossessed As An Ambiguous Utopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Hope Abjuring Hope: On the Place of Utopia in Realist Political Theory

Thaler

2017

Political Theory

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I don't think we're ever going to get to utopia again by going forward, but only roundabout or sideways. […] Increasingly often in these increasingly hard times I am asked by people I respect and admire, "Are you going to write books about the terrible injustice and misery of our world, or are you going to write escapist and consolatory fantasies?" […] I am offered the Grand Inquisitor's choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think is: No. Ursula K. Le Guin 1 [Utopias] don't speak to us trapped in this world as we are. […] Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. Kim Stanley Robinson 2 A start for any habitable utopia must be to overturn the ideological bullshit of empire and, unsentimentally but respectfully, to revisit the traduced and defamed cultures on the bones of which some conqueror's utopian dreams were piled up. China Miéville 3 I. An Old Problem in Need of a New Articulation Is a realist orientation in political theory compatible with an interest in, or even an endorsement of, utopianism? This paper tries to answer affirmatively, by complicating the conventional picture of the relationship between realism and utopia.

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Section: The Dispossessed As An Ambiguous Utopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Hope Abjuring Hope: On the Place of Utopia in Realist Political Theory

Thaler

2017

Political Theory

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“…For Louis Marin (1984), the value of utopian thought is the way in which the funda-mental pun that constitutes the term "utopia" (as both outopia ["non-place"] and eutopia ["good place"]) indicates that utopianism is less about erecting a new social order than it is about the neutralization of contemporary social relations by positing an alternative set of relations. As Jameson (1988) notes:…”

Section: Anarcho-utopianism the Utopian Impulsementioning

confidence: 99%

The Divergent Anarcho-utopian Discourses of the Open Source Software Movement

Bradley

2006

Canadian Journal of Communication

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Abstract:The discourse informing open source programming is important for many reasons, not the least of which is the way in which its ideological positions are translated into practical actions. It is argued that the initial anarcho-utopian move initiated by Richard Stallman's GNU Project and Free Software Foundation is currently being transformed into an organizational utopia in the form of the largely Linux-based open source movement. The utopian impulse evident in open source software development is therefore addressed from the perspective that the promises of liberation that inform its anarchy-inspired politics may be undermined by efforts to integrate its communal programming practices into existing market hegemonies.Résumé : Le discours sur la programmation libre est important à plusieurs égards, notamment dans la manière dont ses positions idéologiques se transforment en actions concrètes. Cet article soutient que le mouvement anarcho-utopique lancé par Richard Stallman avec son projet GNU et la Fondation pour le logiciel libre se transforme actuellement en une utopie organisationnelle prenant la forme d'un Mouvement du logiciel libre qui se fonde en grande partie sur le système Linux. Cet article adopte la perspective qu'on risque aujourd'hui de perdre de vue l'impulsion utopique qui était évidente dans le développement initial de logiciels libres. On risque en outre d'oublier les promesses de liberté qui sous-tendent les politiques du mouvement originel inspirées par l'anarchie.

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“…We are fighting for our right to live." The aliens thus serve as a "vanishing mediator" (Jameson 1988b;2izek 1993,226-37) between the fragmentary, alienated condition of our own present and the state of collective unity the film invites us to imagine will exist after they have been vanquished, a unity that will continue if in nothing else in the concerted global Marshall Plan that will be required to clean up the mess created by this intergalactic war. That is, once they have performed the task of dissolving the unbearable stasis of the past, the aliens, along with the threatening open-ended messianic possibilities they embody, must disappear.…”

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confidence: 96%

“…Moreover, it has long been a central part of the heritage of Marxist cultural criticism to illuminate the spectral traces of this power in all kinds of cultural documents and forms, as well as to make us aware of the constitutive unevenness (ungleichzeitigkeit) of history-what Derrida labels the hauntology disrupting the desire for ontology. In addition to the work of Benjamin and Derrida, I would point to the related texts of Louis Marin (1984Marin ( ,1993, Jameson (1981Jameson ( , 1984Jameson ( , 1988aJameson ( , 1988bJameson ( , 1994 and, most important of all, Ernst Bloch (1986Bloch ( , 1988. With these critics I mean to emphasize exactly how widely felt in the present are the desires that Derrida and Benjamin label the messianic.…”

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confidence: 98%