Reading the Maps: Realism, Science Fiction and Utopian Strategies

The debates which open up between the proponents of the various utopias, realism, science fiction and cyberpunk are not so much about our visions of the future - indeed, as Jameson has reminded us on many occasions, utopias underline our very inability to imagine this future - as they are quarrels about strategy for the present. How do we get reliable information about contemporary capitalism and the various collective fantasies of it or, in more properly utopian terminology, what forms are adequate for mapping the current world system? This latter question is as much one of identification (just what stage in global capitalism are we in, or, how late is late capitalism going to be?) as it is one of immediate tactical oppositions. Until reasonably recently these debates, within a marxist framework at least, could have a fairly stable frame of reference, with the infamous comments in 'Progress versus Utopia' standing as either antagonist or ally.5 But Jameson's most recent intervention in 'Archaeologies of the Future' suggests new lines of flight, and usefully complicates what once seemed like insurmountable oppositions. In what follows I hope to pursue some of these 'lines of flight' as they have appeared in Jameson's work to date. I will do so with the political goal of suggesting, from within Jameson's own interventions on behalf of science fiction, Utopia and the like, some futures for another form of literary mapping, one more often passed over in contemporary political and aesthetic debates: the tradition of literary realism.