Tag: Fredric Jameson

Finding Utopia in the Failures and Lost Languages of Dialect

By Ben Platt

It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”

What happens when we combine TTRPGs, an artistic medium that often depends on the productive forces of failure, with utopianism, a ‘philosophy of hope’[1]that expresses the ‘desire for a better way of being’[2] but which has been undermined by its ties to the social and political failures of the 20th century?

TTRPGs often build their mechanical foundations on the bedrock tension between success and failure through action-resolution systems that some game studies scholars identify as one of ‘three key design areas […] relevant for all types of RPGs.’[3] Failure, for many players, makes the eventual successes that emerge through these improvisational stories all the sweeter. As Sarah Lynne Bowman remarks, ‘even players who enjoy various types of games for entertainment… locate their pleasure as rooted in the mental challenges necessary for success and the competitive gratification inherent to outwitting an opponent.’[4]

Utopianism, on the other hand, seems to have been undermined in the popular imagination due to its association with failure. In our current socio-political climate, ‘to call a political ideology or project “utopian” in this context was not only to signal that it was unrealistic or unrealizable,’ but also that utopianism as a whole is ‘irresponsibly and actively dangerous, an effort to exert political control over whole societies, freeze history, deny social complexity, and treat human beings as so much raw material for the fulfillment of grand philosophical visions.’[5] These visions were more often than not ‘the emanation of a single, individual will, a fantasy of total control.’[6] Remnants of a utopian desire persist, but have to contend with the bleak socio-political landscapes where they are often drowned out by the ‘empty din of globalized neoliberal capitalism’ and the general consensus within ‘mature capitalist liberal democracies’ that the ‘prospect of gradual progress under consensual, relatively depoliticized, liberal or social-democratic governance’ is the best path forward.[7] Because of its perceived failures, utopianism as a method of representing and bringing about concrete ‘replacement ideologies’[8] and ‘full-fledged alternative communities ready to supplant existing institutions’[9] has lost much of its foothold in the contemporary imagination, despite the urgent feeling that we need a better world now more than ever.

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Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren: Mapping economic landscapes in science fiction

By Josephine Wideman.

In this academic article, Josephine Wideman explores themes of temporality and capital accumulation in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975). As Fredric Jameson suggests, we must find new methods of spatial and social mapping in order to navigate the geographical and cultural landscapes of late capitalism. Delany’s Dhalgren is deeply concerned with the fate of US hegemony, and with the uncertainty that capitalism has produced: the duality of its unsustainability and seeming inevitability. Bellona is a cityscape which has been devastated by the cycle of accumulation and taken off the map. Delany’s creation ultimately should not be read as a prophecy of what will come of late US capitalism, but it gives insight into the complex historical and apocalyptic consciousness that has been cultivated.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany’s 1975 novel Dhalgren is lengthy, hallucinatory, and at times unnavigable science fiction. Its form is as dense and as wavering as the urban landscape it depicts, where Delany’s protagonist, Kid, can wonder whether ‘there isn’t a chasm in front of me I’ve hallucinated into plain concrete.’1 Bellona – the fictional city where events take place – is a space ‘fixed in the layered landscape, red, brass, and blue, but […] distorted as distance itself,’ a place where ‘the real’ is ‘all masked by pale diffraction.’2 Although the scenery and scenarios of Bellona may be fictional, and perhaps even fantastic, they are also true representations of real experience. The unfixed landscape we live in becomes ‘fixed’ before us in Delany’s book. The distortions and diffractions by which it is fictionalised only increase its representational precision. The gaps in our experience, usually masked, are made visible. For although it takes an unusual form, we can recognise

this timeless city […] this spaceless preserve where any slippage can occur, these closing walls, laced with fire-escapes, gates, and crenellations are too unfixed to hold it in so that, from me as a moving node, it seems to spread, by flood and seepage, over the whole uneasy scape.3

In looking at Dhalgren, I have borrowed from the political theorist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi in order to trace the presence and effects of capitalist accumulation in Delany’s fiction. Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century, describes the ‘interpretative scheme’ of capitalism as a ‘recurrent phenomena.’4 Drawing on work by the historian Fernand Braudel, Arrighi follows the Genoese, the Dutch, and the British cycles of accumulation to the current North American cycle. By examining past economic patterns and anomalies, he suggests that we may be able to gesture at the fate of our current cycle. Arrighi sets out to demonstrate that the rise and fall of these hegemonies, while never identical, tend to follow a set of stages that begin ‘to look familiar.’5 To make his argument, he proposes a new use for Marx’s ‘general formula of capital’:

Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM’) can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM’ phases).6

In Das Kapital, Marx initially proposes the formula CMC to theorise how capital functions. This theory begins with the assumption that people have needs and desires they can’t satisfy by themselves. Thus we create the commodities we know how to make (C), which are sold for money (M), which allows us to buy the commodities we want (C). As this cycle repeats, those who are skilled presumably accrue more value than others, being able to sell their commodities for a greater profit. This theory centres around the individual and his role in a capitalist system. But Marx then sets CMC aside in favour of another formula – the formula borrowed by Arrighi in The Long Twentieth Century – MCM’. In MCM’, circulation does not begin with the dissatisfied individual, but with capital itself. Money is invested (M) into the materials and labour necessary to produce a commodity (C), which is then sold for money (M). The difference between CMC and MCM’ is subtle but crucial. The first formula implies that capitalism recurs, and things are made and exchanged, in order to satisfy human desire and need. The second formula implies that money is in charge, that production and exchange are ultimately subservient to profit, and that money begets more money. For Marx, what drives capitalism is not only MCM, but MCM’ – the apostrophe signifying ‘prime’ – or the concept that money increases in value through circulation. The source of this additional, or ‘surplus’ value, is where capital really loses its lustre. This value is gained within labour – in the time spent on the creation and production of a commodity from raw material – and for Marx, its appropriation by capitalists is inherently exploitative.

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