Imagining Utopia: Discussion Questions

Our next session takes place tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26, at 12:30 p.m. Susannah Hollister will lead our discussion of excerpts from Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, Fredric Jameson's "Cognitive Mapping," and David Harvey's Spaces of Hope. Follow the link to the full blog entry for discussion questions by CG and AG.


CG: I think we should give further consideration to the exchange between Nancy Fraser and Jameson in the discussion after Jameson's talk. Fraser first points out, for the record, that Jameson has oversimplified a long and complicated debate about the question of totality, then she asks, "...because I am so sympathetic to a certain kind of totalizing thought, namely, a critical social science that would be as total and explanatorily powerful as possible. Thus, I wonder why you assume that cognitive mapping is the task of the aesthetic? Why wouldn't that task be a task for critical social science? Or are two different tasks conflated in your paper?" Jameson's response, that the aesthetic addresses individual experience in a way that social science cannot, isn't very satisfying. However attracted I am to thinking about things aesthetically, I'm not convinced that envisioning Utopia has to be an aesthetic project. It seems to me that something is necessarily lost when we imagine Utopia as an organically unified art object--or even a totality that can fit inside one person's imagination. And imagining Utopia--or, better, appreciating Utopia--seems less important than achieving it. I suppose my question, then, is this: Is literary or art criticism the best means for envisioning the ideal social order?

A second, more practical question is this: What exactly is the difference between aesthetic representation and cognitive mapping?

AG: My questions are along similar lines. (1) So much of the theory that literary critics have liked to use in the last two or three decades is explicitly political in orientation. Jameson is of course a premier example; he makes the tendency helpfully explicit in the opening of his essay by admitting that his discussion of the aesthetic may only be a cover for a debate about Marxist political theory and strategy. Harvey, likewise a Marxist, is directly concerned with politics. What happens when we as literary critics use texts with this kind of explicit strategic aim--and use them only for analytic or heuristic purposes? Few of us, I think, conceive our research (perhaps unlike our teaching) as directly involved in any kind of political project, least of all a classical socialist revolutionary one. But what is the relation between political framework and cultural analysis in Jameson or Harvey? Do we try to get one without the other, or is there a critical use to be made of their politics? (For that matter Lynch has a politics too, as Jameson says. But I am less interested in the covert politics one could find in any theory than in the critical use of overt political tendentiousness.)

(2) As I'm sure Susannah will be discussing, all of these texts raise the question of how to relate different spatial scales to one another. Here is my variation on that theme: as literary critics, how do we cognitively map our object of study? In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova argues that no European work of the last 400 years and no literary work of the last 100 can be understood without locating it with respect to an emergent "international literary space," in which authors and nations compete with one another for recognition in an increasingly shared literary field. This would imply that our range of reference when we look at a poem or a novel should include not only local, contemporary historical context and a national or monolingual tradition but potentially a field of global rivals and touchstones. When I read this, I experienced a major failure of cognitive mapping: how do I look at a modernist novel at the word-to-word level while still conceiving it as shaped by processes operating at the inter-national level? This is, I suppose, simply the question of contextualization, but with the current rise of comparative interests (the trans-Atlantic, cosmopolitanism, the hemisphere, Weltliteratur, the global) in English literary study, our own problem of scale seems to me suddenly more acute.