AN AMERICAN UTOPIA Dual Power and the Universal Army FREDRIC JAMESON - Edited by Slavoj Zižek AN AMERICAN UTOPIA AN AMERICAN UTOPIA Dual Power and the Universal Army FREDRIC JAMESON, JODI DEAN, SAROJ GIRl, AGON HAMZA, KOJIN KARATANI, KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, FRANK RUDA, ALBERTO TOSCANO, KATHI WEEKS EDITED BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK Y VERSO London • New York First published by Verso 2016 The collection© Verso 2016 The contributions© the contributors 2016 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1357 9108 64 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-453-9 (PBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-452-2 (HBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-454-6 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-451-5 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Press Contents Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams Slavoj Zi{ek- vii I. An American Utopia Fredric jameson- I 2. Mutt and JeffPush the Button Kim Stanley Robinson- 97 3. Dual Power Redux Jodi Dean- IO) 4· The Happy Accident of a Utopia Saroj Giri- I33 5· From the Other Scene to the Other State: Jameson's Dialectic of Dual Power Agon Hamza - I4 7 6. A Japanese Utopia Kojin Karatani- I69 vi CONTENTS 7· Jameson and Method: On Comic Utopianism Frank Ruda- 183 8. After October, Before February: Figures of Dual Power Alberto To scano - 21 1 9· Utopian Therapy: Work, N onwork, and the Political Imagination Kathi We eks - 24 3 10. The Seeds of Imagination Slavoj Zi[ek- 267 An America Utopia: Epilogue Fredric Jameson- 309 Index- 329 Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams Slavoj Zitek Fredric Jameson's An American Utopia radically questions standard leftist notions of an emancipated society, advocating­ among other things-universal conscription as the model fo r the communist reorganization of society, fully acknowledging envy and resentment as the central problem of a communist society, and rejecting dreams of overcoming the division between work and pleasure. Endorsing the axiom that to change society one should begin by changing one 's dreams about an emancipated society, Jameson's text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on possible and imaginable alternatives to global capitalism. This volume brings together Jameson's pathbreaking text, especially revised fo r this edition, with an original short story by Kim Stanley Robinson that plays upon some of Jameson's motifs, philosophers' and political and cultural analysts' reactions to Jameson, and Jameson's short epilogue. Although the reactions are often critical toward Jameson, they all agree on the need to radically rethink the leftist project. viii SLAVOJ :ZI:ZEK Many leftists (and especially "leftists") will definitely be appalled at what they encounter in this volume-there will be blood, to quote the title of a well-known film. But what if one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the left another chance? 1 An American Utopia Fredric Jameson 1. We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monot­ onously alike). Can these developments be dated or periodized in some way? I have always been tempted to mark the end of utopian production with Ernest Callenbach's great Ecotopia of 1975, a work whose most serious flaw, from today's standpoint, is the absence of electronic or informational technology. Maybe the utopian fo rm, then, cannot integrate such technology, or maybe on the other hand the Internet itself has soaked up many of the available utopian fantasy impulses. Or was it the triumph of Reagan-Thatcher financialder egulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s that spelled the end of utopian thinking, at the same time that it seemed to seal the victory of late capitalism over all imaginable, let alone practicable, alternatives? In fact, the possibilities for utopian thinking were always bound up with the fo rtunes of a more general concern, not to say 2 FREDRIC JAM ESON obsession, with power. The meditation on power was itself an ambiguous project. In the 1960s this project was a utopian one: it was a question of thinking and reimagining societies without power, particularly in the form of societies before power: here Levi-Strauss's revival of Rousseau gave rise to the utopian visions of early Baudrillard, of Marshall Sahlins in his Stone Age Economics, of Pierre Clastres, and of that supreme utopian vision, The Forest People by Colin Turnbull. Yet at a certain point the inquiry into societies without power begins to turn into an inquiry into the emergence of power in early human societies; this theoretical problem slowly links up with practical politics, in the form of an anti-institutional and anarchist preponderance on the left whose causes are clearly multiple. They range from the failure of May '68 and the disillusionment with the old Communist Parties to the disillusionment with African decol­ onization, not to speak of the sorry fate of Third Wo rldism and of the triumphant wars of national liberation, from Algeria to Vietnam. At some such general point the reflection on power acquires its ideological foundations in the work of Michel Foucault and others, reinforced by "revelations" about the gulag, and becomes a dystopian obsession, a quasi-paranoid fear of any form of political or social organization-whether in the formation of political parties of one kind or another or in speculation about the construction of future societies radically differentfr om this one­ as well as a desperate brandishing of the terminologies of freedom and democracy by leftists, who ought to know better and to appre­ ciate the quasi-ownership of this language by Western "democra­ cies" or, in other words, by late capitalism. At any rate, these developments in the field of utopias seemed to go hand in hand with the virtual dissolution of practical politics of all kinds on the left. This is the situation in which I want to propose a project about which I can't be sure whether I am proposing a political program or a utopian vision, neither of which, according to me, ought to be possible any longer. AN AM ERICAN UTO PIA 3 Why not? Well, the left once had a political program called revolution. No one seems to believe in it any longer, partly because the agency supposed to bring it about has disappeared, partly because the system it was supposed to replace has become too omnipresent to begin to imagine replacing it, and partly because the very language associated with revolution has become as old­ fashioned and archaic as that of the Founding Fathers. It is easier, someone once said, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: and with that the idea of a revolution overthrowing capitalism seems to have vanished. Well, let's be fair: the left did have another political strategy, whatever you think about it, and that was reformism-sometimes, in contradistinction to revolu­ tionary communism, called "socialism." But I'm afraid no one believes in that any longer either. The reformist or social-democratic parties are in a complete shambles: they have no programs of any distinction, save perhaps to regulate capitalism so it does no really catastrophic or irrepara­ ble damage. There is omnipresent corruption both in these parties and in the system at large, which is, in any case, too enormous and too complex to be susceptible to any decisive tinkerings which might improve it, let alone lead to something you could truly call systemic change. Social democracy is in our time irretrievably bankrupt, and communism seems dead. Thus, it would seem, neither of Gramsci's celebrated alternatives-the war of maneu­ ver and the war of position-seem any longer theoretically or practically adequate to the present situation. Fortunately, there exists a third kind of transition out of capital­ ism which is less often acknowledged, let alone discussed, and that is what was historically called "dual power." Indeed, dual power will be my political program and will lead to my utopian proposal.1 I am grateful to Alberto Toscano and Sebastian Budgen fo r indispensi­ ble guidance in researching this theme. 4 FREDRIC JAM ESON The phrase is, of course, associated with Lenin and his descrip­ tion of the coexistence of the provisional government and the network of soviets, or workers' and soldiers' councils, in 1917-a genuine transitional period if there ever was one-but it has also existed in numerous other fo rms of interest to us today. I would most notably single out the way organizations like the Black Panthers yesterday or Hamas today fu nction to provide daily services-food kitchens, garbage collection, health care, water inspection, and the like-in areas neglected by some official central government. (If you like current Foucauldian jargon, you might describe this as a tension or even an opposition between "sover­ eignty" and "governmentality.") In such situations, power moves to the networks to which people turn fo r practical help and leader­ ship on a daily basis: in effect, they become an alternate govern­ ment, without officially challenging the ostensibly legal structure. The point at which a confrontation and a transfer take place, at which the official government begins to "wither away," a point at which revolutionary violence appears, will of course vary with the overall political and cultural context itself.