Archaeologies of Anti-Capitalist Utopianism

Abstract

In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson anticipates the emergence of “cognitive mapping” of a new and global type’ and explains this as a code-word for class consciousness ‘of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind’. This paper explores Jameson’s concept of ‘cognitive mapping’ to suggest that, at the end of the 1990s, the world witnessed the first glimmerings in radical political practice of precisely such mapping in the efforts of the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate globalisation movement. The utopian dimension to this movement is explored through examination of the declared aims in its rhetoric and the euphoric responses to its potential by its participants. The practical significance of utopian extremism in political agitation is then investigated through consideration of the impact of the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate globalisation movement on the institutions and systems it confronted.