An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army

by Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek (Editor)

Controversial manifesto by acclaimed cultural theorist debated by leading writers

Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal conscription, the full acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a fundamental challenge to any communist society, and the acceptance that the division between work and leisure cannot be overcome. To create a new world, we must first change the way we envision the world. Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on the alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to Jameson’s essay, the volume includes responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, as well as an epilogue from Jameson himself.

Many will be appalled at what they will encounter in these pages—there will be blood! But perhaps one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the Left a chance.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Theory, Nonfiction, Utopia, The United States Of America, Economics

336 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2016

About the author

Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But the army? As part of a utopian vision? 'Military democracy' sounds more like a contribution to a popular game played to pass the time on long road trips - alongside 'jumbo shrimp' and 'vacation Bible school' - than a description of a better future." - Kathi Weeks

For the manifesto (?) itself: 4 stars, for the book as a whole: 3 stars.

I couldn't help thinking of David Foster Wallace's criticism against Jameson while reading this. He was not a fan of academic prose and the artificial difficulty of its jargon. Whether that was ever a fair criticism of Jameson is a question I'll leave aside for the moment because in this tract, his writing is clear, concise, lively, and entertaining.

The exercise performed by this manifesto is essentially an ironic pointing up of how difficult it is to even conceive of a utopia now. Jameson even points to the prevalence of dystopic fiction as an inherently conservative trend that needs to be resisted on all fronts (just think of all of the disillusion against collective solutions to global problems presented by The Walking Dead).

So this ironic utopia serves to highlight all of the figures of our present society that prevent any sort of progress at all by circumventing them through what is essentially a cheat: he imagines them away by proceeding as if universal conscription is simply an accomplished fact.

This becomes, as with Plato's myths, a sort of tool used to focus thinking around the problems of the organization of the polis and the people. Indeed, the irony nested within this exercise is completely like Socrates' in his use of myths to stoke his incredulous discussion partners.

But I would stop at the end of the manifesto itself. The "roundtable" of sorts doesn't much add anything. One exception to this rule would be Jodi Dean's piece (one of the only actual criticisms of what Jameson has done here and, humorously enough, her arguments really serve to highlight how ironic all of Jameson's propositions are - he is creating a utopia we deserve) which, however, doesn't seem to really grasp how well Jameson deals with the average person's a.) total aversion to collective politics and b.) the fact that we are not and will never be the angels of some communist theorist. What she misses is that, as Alberto Toscano points out in his piece giving more of a historical context to the concept of dual power itself, Jameson is pointing up how the identity politics of today's left reflects a deep-seated, very liberal fear of the collective. But Dean at least is serious and makes a worthwhile contribution. Kathi Weeks, on the other hand, being the only other critic puts up the predicted reflex response that anyone's Inner Reptilian Liberal would put up - the type of response Zizek would call "too quick" or "too easy." Whereas with Dean, the only bad thing you can really say is that she didn't quite get the joke.

Toscano rightly points out that this text and its Trotskyite ideas of militaristic discipline is meant to be triggering because this trigger reaction is the police officer inside us:

"Whether because of a (partially justified) horror of the specter of the state or a kind of ontological optimism about the human condition (which Jameson nicely punctures), today's 'communisms' (of the commons, communization, or the commune) largely reject this very problem, that of what we could call an anthropological transition. In the end Jameson has refunctioned the strategic singularity of dual power into a sepeculative tool to pose this very question, repressed along with the Stalinist nightmare of the New Man (but also the Fanonian discourse of a new humanity). This is a vital contribution for which no amount of pseudo-iconoclastic invocations of communism as the imageless movement of the destruction of the status quo can substitute..."

But Toscano also uses the nebulous phrase "biopower" (a word that now has about as much meaning as "existentialist" does with regard to fiction) on EVERY SINGLE PAGE.

The other interesting piece would be Karatani's which kind of situates Jameson's tract within a genre that Jameson has been trying to avoid (political philosophy) while also playing it against the constitutional pacifism of postwar Japan.

Zizek is Zizek. He begins his piece with a discussion of how a military exercise in the American southwest allowed 100 conspiracy theories to bloom. Obama has allowed a Chinese takeover of Texas before he left office! "How are we to read this weird paranoiac construct?" As always, he's good fun. A decent palate cleanser at the end.

Aside from that, the rest of the writings are boring, uninspired recapitulations of what you have already read, not really a critical engagement. (Really just read Dean, Toscano, and Zizek, with Karatani if you're bored). The other pieces are so rife with academic jargon divorced from any sort of concrete thought that it served to highlight how crisp Jameson's own writing is. Everyone else's submission reminded me of DFWs injunction against empty academese. So don't feel like you need to stick around for the whole production (though Jameson does return at the end to respond to the interceding pieces).

Great fodder for a politics discussion group.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Universal Army is a revolutionary idea: seizing the American military's wide and encompassing apparatuses to mobilize the entire population, as a means to bypass the superstructure of the state - turning it, slowly but surely, obsolete. Beginning with a mass conscription of the population, which can begin with every man from 18-60 being conscripted into the army. Turning the army from a corps of professional soldiers that the Military Industrial Complex funds and arms into an army that is filled with the country's able-bodied men. From here on, the entire population of the country is now at the behest of the military's command, not at the behest of the formal-legal state nor civil society. It is an evolution of the traditional Marxist-Leninist "destruction of the state machinery." The state machinery is still, of course, smashed - but it is via a drawn out method that has the goal of withering away the current state machine.

Historically, the 20th century Communist states also did the same, such as the Red Army, the Red Guards,etc. Here, however, Jameson offers a new perspective. The United States is a federal state, which has its federalist boundaries of federal, state and local laws; of which, has strict regulations granted by the constitution of the United States. To bypass the federalism's boundaries, the Universal Army will become an institution that wields 'dual power' within the sphere of politics and law. At first, it is not a subsumption of the formal state apparatus - rather, it is paralleled institution that both runs along the formal state, but also, eventually, will overcome the *vlast* (the power that transcends institutions) of the formal state. Think the Bolsheviks and the Soviets in 1917. As it stands right now, the military is already used as emergency reserves for natural disasters, and is not restricted to state or local laws; its movement, therefore, are not restricted. The seeds of *outmoding* the state have already been planted by the formal-legal state.

Jameson's contribution to Leninist party politics begins with: from 1917 to the 21st century there has been a revolution at the level of space as such. Thanks to the transformations in information technology and globalization, we are now more than ever cogniscent of space -- or, to put it ontologically, aware of the space where our respective living-Being resides. Corresponding to this, there must also be a revolution in our evaluation of politics and statecraft. And this is where I find the real value of Jameson's "utopian proposal" : he draws upon the lessons of dual power in 1917, draws from Lacan's breakthroughs in Psychoanalysis (especially in his conceptions of the Other and the envy of jouissance), and, most importantly, looks at the stagnated nature of modern political strategies to, then, formulate a 'totalitarian' proposal that seeks to respond to the 'totalitarian' nature of 21st century reality.

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

An American Utopia consists of the Fredric Jameson essay by that name and a number of responses to his ideas, followed by an epilogue by Jameson. This is a dense but accessible book which should stir everyone to some level of discomfort whether one agrees or disagrees with Jameson's proposal.

I won't try to elaborate on what various terms mean in the book, the attempts I saw in other reviews should have been labeled as their opinions about what the concepts are rather than a hit and miss pseudo-lecture. I found every "explanation" or bit of historical background lacking, as mine would likely be, for the simple reason that there is no brief overview except from a selective viewpoint and I refuse to limit a new reader in this area to a not-wrong-but-not-right overview. One can read this without the background and still understand the arguments as they apply to the current political/economic situation. This does not have to be an academic exercise but rather one open to any interested party.

Jameson generally points out the many problems with so-called democracy, namely that it is all in service to capitalism and the illusion of a free market. He argues for a dual-state approach and uses conscription into the military as a way to create a viable second state. There is not a great deal of logistic detail on how this might be accomplished but the end product, from Jameson's description, sounds significantly better than the miserable state of affairs we are currently in.

Whether you find yourself drawn to western Marxism or not this would be a valuable book to read. The responses to Jameson are not all supportive and point out many of the proposal's weaknesses or unanswered questions. In other words, this book is not just for those of us who for decades have been interested in Marxist thought but for those who are not interested in Marx specifically but are interested in looking at all the options to try to turn this neoliberal mess around, or at least slow the destruction of life on Earth.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inspiring call and effort to generate “new fantasy images, capable of overcoming those of present-day late capitalism.” Jameson’s essay and most of the contributed responses are challenging in both senses, difficult to understand and provocative. The responses greatly help decode the main piece, though only a few rise to the imaginative level set by Jameson.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wildly erudite, Jameson employs a wide range of disciplinary tools (and historical lessons) to expand upon Bellamy’s utopian idea of a creating a national army to bring about a socialist future.

[Rodrigo Domínguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I celebrate this book in two important ways.

On the one hand, I think we need more original thought that dares to challenge the sacred dogmas of (left/right/etc) thought. Jameson is able to demonstrate how concepts so maligned by the left as militarism, civism, discipline and irreducible social antagonism can be reintegrated into an emancipatory project.

On the other hand, I think it's a shame that utopianism has gone from a great intellectual tradition to a smear used by both conservatives and progressives to shut down ambitious political projects as impractical, unachievable, and thus unworthwhile of consideration. Jameson's brave rehabilitation of utopian thinking shows that the point of utopia has never been to craft a concrete politics (which is not the job of philosophers anyway) but to stimulate our political creativity and expand our collective existential horizons.

[Tom L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it for the Jameson piece, which is an exciting provocation and thought experiment. The other essays/responses are a mixed bag.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jameson repeatedly reminds the reader that Engels considered Fourier to have been a great satirist. I think that offers a clue as to how he hopes American Utopia will be read.

[Gracchus Babeuf · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would be better without all of the Lacan

[Don Yurmanovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jameson's essay - 5
The rest - 3

[Bloom Rash · Rating 5 out of 5]

I definitely recommend to all radicals, socialists, communists, anarchists, and progressives, alike. It challenges all sorts of preconceived leftist notions of resistance, drawing out our hesitations to forming a genuine collective like “blinded snakes writhe and twist in the open air.” The text is great at forcing us to confront our deepest insecurities that prevent our own imagining of a better world.

[Sarah Reffstrup · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skræmmende men tankevækkende. Som alternativ til kapitalisme ved jeg dog ikke om jeg syntes det er vejen at gå. Men det kan vel næsten ikke blive værre end nu, kan man jo sige.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is Jameson's most overtly political work (or antipolitical, as the case may be), in the form of a sharp polemic—and the only work of his I can think of which put literary criticism in the back seat.

In the forward Zizek says reader beware! And also, within contemporary sentiments on the left, there will be blood! Zizek may be a little over the top here; Jameson's text isn't really breaking into new territory regarding divisions on the left (at least as they have existed over the last several decades). But I do think Jameson has written a very provocative and thoughtful work about one of his central focuses: the loss of Utopian thinking, why it matters, and what to do about it.

On top of Jameson's nearly 100-page text are nine responses. While some, such as Jodi Dean's, are fairly straightforward critiques of his program, others, such as Alberto Toscano's, are more of a jumping off point for further inquiry; but all of them have something useful to say about Jameson's quixotic project.

So what the heck is Dual Power and the Universal Army? Well, I can't do better that Dean's concise summary:

Fredric Jameson's "American utopia" returns to the notion of dual power as a model for revolutionary change. Unlike either Lenin's classic formulation of soviets and provisional government or contemporary anarchist suggestions for institutional counterpower coexisting alongside the state, Jameson's version of dual power uses the state to dismantle the state. In a two-part move, he offers, first, a political program that expands one part of the state, the military, against another part, representative government. Jameson proposes, second, a utopian vision that extends this military arrangement to eliminate the political altogether. From the transitional dual power of active military and ineffective government evolves a new classless society organized in terms of the dual power of base and superstructure, economy and culture, military work and creative leisure (all variations on the same split between realm of necessity and a realm of freedom). Not only is politics unnecessary in this utopian arrangement, the political has no place.

For each twist and turn in his utopian fantasy, Jameson has a particular reason (read the book if you want to know what each is). But where does it all lead? In short, this energetic and engaging work of utopian theory states what is basically the unstateable by risking the invocation of Betteridge's law, as if it were some news headline: if it is the case that "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (as quoted many times over, and probably originating with Jameson himself), is it impossible to even imagine a better future where radical social transformation has taken hold?

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rapidly dated book, in that it was published in the summer of 2016 as a contemporary political intervention but with apparently zero cognizance of the fascist menace within the country, instead looking back to 2008 as a prompt for a radical utopian leftism.

Jameson describes his utopian vision in admirably specific terms, but as usual with specified utopias, one is left howling at various points at the utter daftness of it all. In a nutshell, his proposal is to draft everyone into the army, thus at a stroke giving everyone both a job and the right to cradle to grave social services, while at the same swamping the military’s capacity to fight wars. Imagine Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal state circa 1944, but dedicated not to fighting a war against fascism but instead to producing fully automated luxury communism.

The howlers, for me, come in where Jameson concedes that this model has to be predicated on a refusal of what he refers to as the cult of efficiency, and later concedes is the very concept of differentiated excellence. This is where I got off the bus.

As with every Jameson book, however, it is written in muscular prose and sparkles with delightful aperçus about and interventions into the history of Marxist thought. Whether than will be appreciated by anyone under the age of 50 is hard to know, however.

[Luis Gomez · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's time to dream big and develop new ways to organize ourselves. We need to stop fighting to create someone else's dream. That is the main message of this book.
Political camps are often fighting about old ideas that are known not to work. Capitalism is in constant crisis (Greek debt, us dot com and housing crisis...). communism it has not worked in the past. Jameson argues that instead of arguing about the merits of existing utopias there is a need to develop new ones and transform human relations. An extremely reductive summary of his vision: universal conscription into an army of workers enables the base that generates goods to be consumed by society and the rest of the time is spent in leisure. Everyone is forced to work 10 to 15 hours per week ( or whatever is socially necessary ) to enable the enjoyment of society during free time.

Of course, any system like this will have problems stemming from surface antagonisms related to cohabitation. There he does note that this is inevitable and gives a somewhat tepid solution of embracing envy towards the other.

This books is no panacea, however, it is an essential read for anyone interested improving society!

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

More finished as in "done with it for now" rather than read cover to cover. There's a core of something interesting in here, the dual power strategy of using/building up existing institutions to create a structure that replaces the State/capital/etc.. Lucid, erudite and everything else you'd expect from Jameson, but it has this whiff of sensationalism about it, kind of like you were having an oh so clever tricked pulled on you, that left me kind of cold (a bit like anything with Zizek's name attached tbh...). Anyway, worth a read, if only for Week's essay in response which actually made me laugh as it seems to open with one long sigh as if to say, "do I have to take these dudes seriously, ok...". The Karatani essay was a disappointment. Though the deeper I get into his stuff the more uncertain I am that it holds that many possibilities. I'm on to Archaeologies of the Future now, which seems to lay the ground nicely for the whole dual power thing, minus the actual somewhat shitty details, which suits my purposes better really (those being the increasingly entwined thesis writing/story writing processes).

[Frederic Bush · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this mostly for the short story by Kim Stanley Robinson -- which became the first chapter in his book NY 2140 -- to get some context for the cursorily-developed ideas in the book, which are slightly better expounded by Fredric Jameson. It's been a while since I've read any high theory and I struggled quite a bit with Jameson, but in the end I was not particularly satisfied. I don't think KSR was either -- he ended up going in a different direction in the novel and took out any mention of being conscripted into an army of socialism, which is basically Jameson's premise. Zizek's essay, the only other part I read, was not particularly exciting either, although Z did point me to a lengthy youtube video featuring Jameson debating Stanley Aronowitz that I probably will not be desperate enough to watch.

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's funny how improvisational and fun the Jameson essay is, and then everyone else in response is so literal and concern controlling and it's like "guys, be cool, he's just spinning a yarn, relax and enjoy the flood of weird ideas". Jameson should do this same tone and style but do planet colonization next.

[Jesse McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This dude chose the military to illustrate how socialism can be employed to create an equitable society. Nice move. Hopefully future generations of readers choose to see this not as hard "socialism" but a thinker's attempt to imagine an alternative future where raw "value" in the capitalist sense does not dictate your value as a member of the moral community.

[Brittany]

Jameson really wants us to rethink what a "utopia" is, how we can get there, and I appreciate the nuance he provides. However, this was really hard to get through. I felt super lost 80% of the time, and had to re-read passages over and over again. Probably a big old "me problem," but I struggled with this one (maybe I'm not smart enough and that's absolutely a possibility!)

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read it for Jameson's essay on using the US Military for the capacity to intervene where politics can't/won't. Like much academic Philosophy, this collection is too longwinded and digressive to have held my addled attention.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a similar idea when I joined the U.S. Army at age 28. Unfortunately, they weren't then interested in my new-fangled psychological theories of cultural assimilation.

[ellen grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kim, there’s people that are dying

[Wyatt Browdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

😲

[Gonçalo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got sidetracked at Žižek being Žižek

[Caroline Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

must read. Insane political thinking, but more a self-help book almost.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate authors who overuse thus in their writing. Thus, I will not be reading anymore Frank Ruda anytime soon. The Jodi Dean, Kathi Weeks, and Zizek essays were bangers though.

[Chuchu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the first essay, the rest is not in the same level.
From the dual power framework, we could better understand Bernie Sander's Nordic-like socialism. The socialised medicine we've been longing for could be right in front of us. The Veterans Administration hospitals have already been described recently as a system of socialised medicine with no connections whatsoever to the immense private medical and hospital organisations surrounding it: their woeful conditions and deplorable underfunding is then one more illustration, if any more were needed, of the fate of socialist or even public enclaves within an all-embracing late-capitalist system. The military hospitals would become a free national health service open to everyone (insofar as everyone is now a service person or a veteran) and the entire centre of gravity of universal health care, and also pharmaceutical production, disease control, and experimentation with and production of new medicines, would now be reorganised and situated within the army itself. It is not a utopian scheme but inherently practical.

[Louis Cabri]

Relaxing.