Rincones

“A deja vu in which you repeat things you wish you had said, relieve things you wish had experienced before, secrets parts of you”

Diálogo extraido de “Content” de Chris Petit.

Stapledon is not strictly speaking a Utopian, as we will see later on; but no Utopian writer has been quite so forthright in confronting the great empiricist maxim, nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. If true, this principle spells the end, not only of Utopia as a form, but of Science Fiction in general, affirming as it does that even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experience, constructs made up of bits and pieces of the here and now: "When Homer formed the idea of Chimera, he only joined into one animal, parts which belonged to different animals; the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent." On the social level, this means that our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production (and perhaps to whatever remnants of past ones it has preserved). It suggests that at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment (something I have myself occasionally asserted); and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively.

It is a proposition which has the merit of shifting the discussion of Utopia from content to representation as such. These texts are so often taken to be the expressions of political opinion or ideology that there is something to be said for redressing the balance in a resolutely formalist way (readers of Hegel or Hjelmslev will know that form is in any case always the form of a specific content). It is not only the social and historical raw materials of the Utopian construct which are of interest from this perspective; but also the representational relations established between them - such as closure, narrative and exclusion or inversion. Here as elsewhere in narrative analysis what is most revealing is not what is said, but what cannot be said, what does not register on the narrative apparatus.

Fredric Jameson “Archaeologies of the Future”

With regard to the temporality of crisis, the cyclical character of crises of accumulation tends to instill less a sense of possibility than of repetition. This serves to reinforce the main form of temporal abstraction associated with the experience of commodities in capitalist societies: ‘the new’. The periodic character of crisis and the commodity-form each produce modes of experience of temporal abstraction that undermine or erode the historical experience of crises and, thereby, function to repress the political possibilities they contain. It is these structures and experiences that underlie the ontological generalization of crisis in Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. Eternal return, we can say, following Benjamin, is an allegory of the experience of capitalism. Capitalism appears here in Benjamin’s work in the figure of ‘the torments of hell… “pains eternal and always new’”.

Peter Osborne “A Sudden Topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the Politics of Crisis”