ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’ posits the existence of ‘counter-sites’, which he defines as ‘kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites … that can be found within culture … are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. 1 These ‘heterotopias’ occur ‘by way of contrast’ to utopias, 2 alternate systems of being that are, as Fredric Jameson argues, radically other, by which he means that the form itself – what he also refers to as the utopian ‘program’ – reflects on difference in a late consumer capitalist state where every other possibility always already seems exhausted: the future will have failed. 3 Jameson’s utopian argument is, according to Phillip E. Wegner, a utopian ‘problematic’, interrogating reality through a contested idea, that is, utopia, considered as a dialectic, impossible and yet indispensable, because trying to imagine a ‘not yet’ (as) opposed to the present order: 4 it stands against the ‘invincible universality of capitalism’ 5 at the same time that it attests to capitalism’s catastrophic power. The ‘best Utopias’, according to Jameson, ‘are those that fail the most comprehensively’ because as records of ‘ideological imprisonment’, 6 they might nonetheless yield the means to neutralize the present and future-as-insolvent. He understands utopia, then, as potentially transformative; the dynamics of utopian politics is its dialectic of ‘Identity and Difference, to the degree to which such a politics aims at imagining, and sometimes even … realizing, a system radically different from this one’. 7 It can be a space of revolutionary practice, invariably closed or seeking closure, read autonomy, because removed: a zone apart, a new spatiality committed to (a precarious) totality, with us here and them over there, beyond the moat, the wall. He also distinguishes, however, a utopian ‘impulse’ that he defines as a ‘specialized hermeneutic of interpretive method’, encompassing political practice, even ‘liberal reforms and commercial pipedreams, the deceptive yet tempting swindles of the here and now’. 8 He recognizes a spatial distinction between this program, that is, dreams of enclosure, and an impulse as a hermeneutic, but what the utopian vocation really means is the ability or compulsion to think a break. In this way, and considering that ‘in the absence of reliable content only form can fit the bill’ – because the utopian content can only ever work in terms of a ‘critical negativity’ without being able to offer up any viable alternatives – the form itself is rupture, the ‘radical closure of a system of difference in time’, in which the aftermath is secondary: the vital political function of the utopian form is to ‘force’ a breakage. 9
