The Fenland Gent

The End of Utopia by Russell Jacoby.

You can buy this book from Amazon.co.uk (UK) here.
You can buy this book from Amazon.com (USA) here.

In writing about this book I’m going to get all personal and anecdotal.

I went to Portsmouth Poly in 1987 to study Cultural Studies and at the freshers fair I made an approach to join the SWP (Socialist’s Workers Party). The SWP man on the stall took my details and told me to watch the TUC conference which was on telly at the time (seems strange now that it was televised) in preparation for an SWP meeting the following week.

So I did, for a bit, but I found it tedious, and there was no way I was going to waste an evening discussing it.

And that was that – my first flirtation with revolutionary left wing politics. I’d like to say that I didn’t go to the meeting because I made an instant judgment based on the brilliant insight that the SWP were a political party in decline, a party rooted in something that had been routed. But I would be lying. I just could not be bothered.

So finding myself immune to the charms of the SWP I was left to lose myself in the heady world of Cultural Studies, which brings me to the book. According to Jacoby Cultural Theory grew in the gap left by the collapse of the revolutionary and radical left. In place of universal values, of absolutes and of reason we get instead the theories of competing narratives, we get the deconstruction of systems of power, we get the reading of society as a text. In short we get what Jacoby calls the “Post Coherent”.

I’d like to say that much like Jacoby I saw through the thoroughly pointless academic games played by the post structuralist and post modern theorists that shaped the Cultural Studies syllabus, but I didn’t. Instead I spent most of my student days sleeping, stirring only to watch indie bands and to read the NME. But perhaps there was a faint glimmer of a critical instinct – we read a bit of Marx and Freud and I did feel that there was something in their theories that had a substance, a totality and an aspiration to reason that was entirely missing from Cultural Theory.

A few years later, whilst living in Brighton I fell in with a different group of Marxists. This lot had a much greater sense of how terrible the predicament of the left was and it was they who recommended this book. I think I read parts of the book at the time and I’m sure, being an ex Cultural Studies student, that Jacoby’s critique of Cultural Theory would have struck home – but really it’s reading it 10 years later that I see how much the book had to offer.

It’s concern is with how political arguments for any notion of Utopia have come to an end and as such you no longer hear of people arguing for an imagined perfect future. For Jacoby this is a huge loss in and of itself but it’s also a loss because this loss shapes the political and intellectual debates and concerns of today. Shorn of the radical/revolutionary left the liberal parties have been left to manage society the best they can in what they fundamentally think is really the best of all possible worlds. This leaves the political arena to be little more than a place where competing parties are little more than managers all armed, not with some great vision, but with only their mealy mouthed piecemeal strategies.

So this was the first book I read in my attic clearing project and it did get right to the point about something I think about the world that I’ve found myself in. The ideals and ideas that I would argue for – that would motivate me to engage politically with the world barely exist today. Politics as it currently exists leaves me cold. I don’t care if the Tories or the Labour party win the next election – and not just because there are no fundamental difference between them (which there isn’t), but because neither represent anything beyond a rather mundane set of programmes to manage things. Good for them I suppose – but I’m not going to get enthused about it.

My only period of sustained political activity, in my twenties was motivated by my irritation at the lack of imagination in politics, at the idiot old Left trying to reheat old arguments which were well past their sell by date, at the obscurificating Cultural Theorists wasting time and energy with their inane theories. What was missing then and is still missing now is a lack of agency, a lack of real progress. There is no possibility to argue for a future that would be as extraordinary and brilliant to us as modern Paris would be to a medieval monk.

Of course during the politically charged periods of the C19th and C20th people got hurt so maybe finding myself in a world where the debates are not about human emancipation or universal suffrage but are about the number of computers in a class room or about interest rates is ok. A bit of a dull world perhaps but a safe world, a world where I can happily pootle along, making my days up as I go, buying random stuff, filling my attic with junk. It’s been ok – but I still think something very important is missing.

As part of my attic clearing project I will be getting rid of this book – but I’ve not yet worked out exactly how I’m going to do that.