Utopia and Science Fiction in Raymondwilliams

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chapter 19 Utopia and Science Fiction in Raymond Williams*

Raymond Williams was a significant figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life, a pioneer in the early history of what we now known as Cultural Studies and also a central inspiration for the early British New Left. He was variously – and inaccurately – likened to a British Lukács,1 a British Bloch2 and even, according to The Times, ‘the British Sartre’. Habermas’s initial the- orisation of the public sphere derived something from Williams’s Culture and Society;3 Stuart Hall, the Jamaican cultural theorist, cited Williams as ‘a major influence’ on his ‘intellectual and political formation’;4 Edward Said claimed to have ‘learned so much’ from Williams;5 Stephen Greenblatt, the guru of the New Historicism, recalled with enthusiasm the ‘critical subtlety and theoretical intelligence’ of Williams’s lectures at Cambridge;6 Cornel West, the most prom- inent contemporary exponent of Black Cultural Studies, described Williams as ‘the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals’.7 There areWilliamsites in Italy,8 in Brazil,9 in Australia.10 None seem to have made any- thing of Williams’s enduring interest in science fiction, however, an oversight this essay will attempt to rectify. I have argued elsewhere that there are three main ‘phases’ in Williams’s thought, each explicable in terms of its own differentially negotiated settle- ment between the kind of literary humanism associated with the English literary critic, F.R. Leavis, and some version or another of Marxism; and each characterisable in relation to a relatively distinct, consecutive moment in the history of the British New Left.11 The first and second sphases are associated

* This chapter has been published previously in Science Fiction Studies, No. 90 (Vol. 30, Part 2), pp. 199–216, 2003. 1 Eagleton 1976, p. 36. 2 Pinkney 1989, pp. 28–31. 3 Habermas 1989, p. 37. 4 Hall 1993, p. 349. 5 Williams and Said 1989, pp. 181, 192. 6 Greenblatt 1990, p. 2. 7 West 1995, p. ix. 8 Ferrara 1989. 9 Cevasco 2000. 10 Lawson 2002, pp. 33–65. 11 Milner 2002.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004314153_021 362 chapter 19 with the moments of ‘1956’ and ‘1968’, that is, to borrow Peter Sedgwick’s terms, the ‘Old New Left’ and the ‘New New Left’. Where the Old New Left had been formed from out of the double political crisis of 1956, that occasioned by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, on the one hand, and the Anglo- French invasion of Egypt, on the other, the New New Left was inspired by the May ’68 Events in Paris, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the Prague Spring and the revolt on the campuses.12 Where the Old New Left had attempted to preserve the particularities of the British national experience from Stalinist internationalism, the New New Left spurned nationalism in general, and the peculiarities of the English especially, in favour of an uncompromising internationalism and active political solidarity with the Vietnamese Revolution. Where the Old New Left had situated itself somewhere in the political space between the left-wing of the Labour Party and the liberalising wing of the Com- munist Party, the New New Left rejected both Labourism and Communism in favour of various ‘ultraleftisms’, Guevarism, Maoism, Trotskyism, and so on. Where the Old New Left had sought to counterpose ‘experience’ and ‘culture’ to Communist dogmatism, the New New Left discovered in various continental European ‘Western Marxisms’ a type of ‘Theory’ which could be counterposed to the empiricism of English bourgeois culture and the pragmatism of the Brit- ish Labour Party. To this typology we can now add a third phase, roughly that from the 1980s to the present, in which a ‘Postmodern New Left’ confronted the developing glob- alisation of corporate capitalism, the emergence of a postmodern radicalism centred on the new social movements and of a new theoretical relativism associated with ‘difference’ theory.Each of these three phases registers in a corollary phase in Williams’s own thought, respectively, his ‘left culturalism’, his ‘cultural materialism’ and what we might describe, a little improbably, as his ‘postmod- ernism’. Each also gave rise to a relatively distinct understanding on Williams’s part of the relationship between science fiction (henceforth SF), utopia and dystopia. It will be my task here to track Williams’s changing sense of this lat- ter complex in relation to his more general theoretical interests. More than twenty years ago, Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction established itself as the classic text of academic SF criticism. As one author- itative commentary has it: ‘More than any other study, Suvin’s Metamorph- oses is the significant forerunner of all the major examinations of the genre’.13 Suvin had argued that SF was best understood as an ‘estranged’ genre, distin-

12 Sedgwick 1976. 13 Hollinger 1999, p. 233.