Anti-anti-utopianism

On the analogy to "anti-anti-communism" (Sartre):

... even if we can no longer adhere with an unmixed conscience [!] to this unreliable form [of Utopia], we can now have recourse to that ingenious [!] political slogan Sartre invented to find his way between a flawed communism and an even more unaccaeptable anti-communism. ... for those only too wary of the motives of its critics [!?], yet no less conscious of Utopia's structural ambiguities, those mindful of the very real political function of the idea and the program of Utopia in our time, the slogan of anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy.

Jameson,  Archaeologies of the Future, p. xvi

 Noteworthy for its moral, political, and cultural defensiveness -- the siege mentality of the contemporary Left. Akin, in this, to the replacement of "socialism" with "anti-capitalism" among the lumpen "masses".

Underlying it is also a rather bizarre notion of a separation between "art and culture" and "the social" -- "a separation that inaugurates culture as a realm in its own right and defines it as such". But then 

... that very distance of culture from its social context which allows it to function as a critique and indictment of the latter also dooms its interventions to ineffectuality and relegates art and culture to a frivolous, trivialized space in which such intersections are neutralized in advance.

p. xv

But, amid the confusions, bad faith, and special pleading involved in such contortions, you can feel a real pathos in such passages. And perhaps a certain courage, in facing the loss of belief, unaccompanied by any foundational alternative.

On the ambiguity of the anti-utopians

Berdiaff (or Berdyaev -- see p. 122) again:

The opponents of socialism say that socialism is a utopia and that it flies in the face of human nature. There is some ambiguity in this. It is not clear whether they do not want socialism on the ground that it is unrealizable, utopian, and a mere dream, or whether it is unrealizable because they do not want it and do everything in their power to hinder it and prevent it coming into being.

A good point, no? You might try to resolve the ambiguity by saying that what the anti-utopians struggle to prevent isn't the idealized but impossible utopia, but rather the all too possible attempt at utopia, which always turns dream into nightmare. But I don't think that's really Berdiaff's point -- nor Huxley's, at least in his Brave New World phase. No, their point is that the dream and the nightmare are really one and the same thing, the same social entity, simply seen from different perspectives....


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