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Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.
The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson's project on the Poetics of Social Forms.
Henry_Berry
Posted January 22, 2009
The leading, influential contemporary philosopher Frederic Jameson looks to the literary genre of science fiction for gleanings of the notion of utopia and utopian yearnings in late Modernism. With the failures of Marxist/Communist ideologies and the apolitical mood throughout Western culture, what remains of the idea of utopia which once played such a strong role in modern culture is to be found mostly in the science-fiction literature. Jameson takes on this latest topic with his characteristic thoroughness, exceptional acuity, and masterful synthetic capacity. The voluminous work with elements of literary critique, political/cultural analysis, and philosophical thinking is a survey of science fiction over the century of the 1900s and its shifting relationship to society. Jameson's approach is to focus on one major science-fiction writer (with science-fiction somewhat loosely defined) such as Philip K. Dick or Ursula Le Guin as representative of the topic is wants to take up and then range through the topic by many references to other science-fiction writers and inclusion of respective aspects of the concept of utopia and relevant political, social, and scientific conditions to result in illuminations and renderings about the persisting, yet protean, idea of utopia. 'Archaeologies of the Future' is one of Jameson's most wide-ranging and illuminating works on modern culture and its distinctive factors and idiosyncratic ways.
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Overview
Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.
The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss,...