The path of totality: Pedagogy and the utopian impulse in Fredric Jameson and Kim Stanley Robinson

This article explores the implications of Fredric Jameson’s utopian theory for critical education. Although Jameson wrote about education sparingly, the article argues that his scholarly project was pedagogical. To elucidate this interpretation, I examine Jameson’s theoretical formulation of utopian impulse in his writing about science fiction. However, the pedagogical implications of Jameson’s utopian thought can be grasped more fully by analyzing the utopian imagination of his most famous student, Kim Stanley Robinson. In Robinson’s science fiction, readers encounter post-capitalist futures that illustrate Jameson’s maxim, “Always historicize!” Thus, considering Jameson’s claim that utopia is a mode of thinking that ruptures the ideology that alternatives are impossible, Robinson’s future histories enact such ideological transgression in utopian form. Considering capitalism’s catastrophic trajectory, the task of critical education is for pedagogy to be utopian, and for utopia to be pedagogical. Reading the utopian theory and science fiction of Jameson and Robinson as an archive of critique, speculation, and pedagogy, the article maps the dialectical relationship between education and utopia in the chaotic flux of late capitalism.