By Fredric Jameson
Debatable manifesto by means of acclaimed cultural theorist debated by way of major writers
Fredric Jameson's pathbreaking essay An American Utopia notably questions average leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. encouraged the following are—among different things—universal conscription, the entire acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a basic problem to any communist society, and the attractiveness that the department among paintings and rest can't be overcome.
To create a brand new global, we needs to first switch the way in which we envision the realm. Jameson's textual content is preferably put to set off a debate at the possible choices to worldwide capitalism. as well as Jameson's essay, the amount comprises responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, in addition to an epilogue from Jameson himself.
Many should be appalled at what they'll come upon in those pages—there could be blood! yet possibly one has to spill such (ideological) blood to provide the Left a chance.
Contributing are Kim Stanley Robinson, Jodi Dean, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Kojin Karatani, Frank Ruda, Alberto Toscano, Kathi Weeks, and Slavoj Žižek.
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Extra resources for American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army
Sample text
But the emergence of the modern armies, with firepower and the transformation of discipline into a new and as it were Cartesian or mathematical kind of exercise (with Maurice of Nassau), introduce a new issue that modifies this traditional semiotic: it is the relationship to the civilian population, or, stated another way, the possibility of a substitution, for the standing army, of citizen militias (Machiavelli), or later on, as its virtual climax, the nation-in-arms of the French Revolution. It is as though the practice of the ancient Greek city-states had reemerged, transformed into a political and social issue by modernity as such (something that could only have been thinkable with the reemergence of the city-state as a form in medieval Italy, along with the charged word “commune,” which will have a glorious future ahead of it).
I give a quick example of its insufficiencies before moving on. Recently, the old untenable notion of underdevelopment—unsatisfactory because, as Robert Kurz showed, it implies that development and so-called modernity are still possible—has been succeeded with a new slogan, namely that of the “failed state”: a pseudo-concept which really cannot be blamed on the neocons inasmuch as it is today the basis of everyone’s foreign policy. This expression is all the more ridiculous in light of the fact that today all states are failed states, very much including this one (the United States).
I will therefore at this point wish to claim that the unique feature of American space (which I also characterize as a non-national reality) is a historical construction of the American Constitution, and therefore that whoever interrogates political possibility in the United States must necessarily confront the unique problems posed by that counterrevolutionary document, which also claims to be a form of federalism. Indeed, we must anticipate that federalism will remain a fundamental theoretical issue for any utopian projection today.