We Hear Only Ourselves: Utopia, Memory, and Resistance

Readers of Utopian Studies might be surprised to learn that the idea of utopia is “almost universally denied” (xv) that is has heretofore played little to no role in “liberatory political philosophy” (xv), and that, despite these things, “the idea of utopia ought to have a place in radical political theory” (xvii). And yet such proposition appears to be the starting point, as well as the raison d’être, for Bill Cashmore in We Hear Only Ourselves: Utopia, Memory, and Resistance (2023). In many respects, the chief weakness of this book is this sense that its arguments are wholly new, without much regard for the long history of utopian theory in radical political philosophy and in liberatory politics more generally. The laughable assertion in the book’s introduction, which comes off as self-inflated braggadocio, that “the concept of narrative has not yet been brought to bear on utopia, at least not to the degree that I do so here” (xvi) is almost enough to make one wish to put the book down already. What insights this book does have, which are actually many and valuable, are marred by an overall lack of knowledge—and perhaps more so, a lack of respect—for the work done in the interdisciplinary fields of utopian studies over many years.To be sure, We Hear Only Ourselves does discuss Thomas More, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Fredric Jameson, and other key utopian thinkers, although it lacks any reference to the many important scholars and theorists associated with utopian studies in recent decades. (For example, no mention is made of work by Lyman Tower Sargent, Ruth Levitas, Peter Fitting, Darko Suvin, Phillip Wegner, Raffaella Baccolini, Tom Moylan, Ken Roemer, Gregory Claeys, and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, to name a few likely candidates.) At such times when it skims over the history of utopia, from More to Fourier and so on, Cashmore’s study seems like it was written for an audience that had never heard of utopian discourse at all; at other times, the text seems to present Cashmore as being the first to connect utopia to critical theory or to narrative, as if the author were somehow unaware of the long history of such research. Cashmore insists that this work be viewed as a work of “philosophy” (“I tend to think and write in a philosophical register,” Cashmore asserts) (xii). So perhaps the fact that many of these utopian theorists are political scientists, sociologists, historians, or literary critics may attaint them in the author’s view.Among the literary critics Cashmore does engage with, Jameson stands out for special treatment, as Cashmore’s mischaracterizations of Jameson are matched perhaps only by the apparently lack of attention to Jameson’s overall body of work. Jameson’s project for now some sixty-five years (and counting) has been devoted to making connections between Marxism, narrative, and utopia, topics explicitly addressed in his essays from the 1960s and in Marxism and Form (1971), a text Cashmore never mentions, as well as voluminous writings thereafter, nearly all of which deal explicitly with the relationship between narrative and utopia in some form or another (as in The Political Unconscious [1981], The Seeds of Time [1994], Valences of the Dialectic [2009], An American Utopia [2016], The Benjamin Files [2020], and so on). Cashmore briefly cites Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005), specifically noting Jameson’s distinction between a utopian impulse and a utopian program, which Cashmore takes to be a key “aporia” to be investigated. But, of course, that distinction is not original to Jameson (and, even in his work, it was certainly mentioned long before 2005). What little of Jameson’s oeuvre Cashmore does read is badly misread, and the author accuses Jameson of contradicting himself even as Jameson is explicit in addressing such contradictions (or antinomies) head on; this may have something to do with Cashmore’s lack of feeling, or lack of caring, for dialectical thought. But Cashmore also wishes to do battle with this imaginary straw man whom he names “Jameson,” so much so that when acknowledging a point, Cashmore adds, “Be that as it may, it does not respond to my argument” (13), as if Jameson in 2005 were somehow attempting to respond to something Cashmore will say only in 2023. With what seems to be characteristic arrogance and ignorance, Cashmore doubles down on this fantasy of a duel with Jameson, ending that section with the words: “Therefore, Jameson has no response to the force of my arguments here” (14). No doubt, Jameson himself will be crushed to learn of his defeat.I use the word ignorance advisedly, but it is hard to think otherwise when in the very next section Cashmore deals with Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative without even mentioning, much less working through, Jameson’s own nearly book-length essay (included in Valences of the Dialectic [2009]) on Ricoeur, narrative, and yes, utopia! Cashmore seems to think they are the only one to have stumbled across the idea of examining narrative and utopia, which is shocking enough, but then to ignore the very work of the person they are criticizing for not adequately doing so is quite wild. We Hear Only Ourselves offers less of an argument than a series of authorial self-congratulations, with frequent allusions to being the wisest person to have ever thought about this subject. That the book is often poorly written makes this a rather laborious read, even at a mere 128 total pages. A typical sentence almost audibly thuds along: “This is the question of the possibility of the formation of an agent of liberation in an actuality that appears to be increasingly determined by that which liberation should overcome” (xv).That said, the argument in We Hear Only Ourselves does have merit and can be summarized succinctly. Cashmore identifies three “aporias” attendant to the idea of utopia, and these form the basis for an argument over three chapters. The first aporia has to do with the notion that utopia simultaneously entails both an impulse (i.e., a yearning for a non-existent order, as signified by the ou- prefix in the Greek) and a program (i.e., a blueprint of a potentially existing and better place, the eu- prefix, essentially). These aspects cannot be satisfactorily resolved by logic—hence, perhaps, Jameson’s fondness for the figure of the antinomy—but may be worked through in narrative. Cashmore, drawing from Ricoeur while ignoring Jameson’s many writings on this very subject, argues that “utopian narrative” responds to, if not resolves, the aporia by internalizing its opposition via the “threefold mimesis” of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration. Why this explanation should be preferable to others is not discussed, although one could argue that Louis Marin’s Utopiques (1973) or Jameson’s lengthy review essay on it, “Of Islands and Trenches” (1977), already established a relevant narratological rendering of this purported aporia decades ago, but Cashmore’s use of Ricoeur makes for an interesting discussion of utopian narrative as a practice and a concept.The second aporia Cashmore identifies involves “utopian memory,” which is established as a “response” to the problem of utopia’s simultaneously narrative and normative statuses. Cashmore discusses the idea of utopia and memory in Marcuse and Bloch, rejecting each in turn, before finding in Benjamin’s nostalgia and Adorno’s idea of “the shudder”—discussed also by Jameson in Late Marxism (1990), incidentally—the elements that will make possible “the refigurative force of utopian memory that provides the possibility of a politics informed by utopian narrative” (51). As Cashmore elaborates, “Utopian narratives work by identifying the promises and recognising that they have been broken, reigniting a utopian futurity in general in the present. . . . The utopian narrative, at least for a moment, allows us to experience what it would mean to be utopian, that is, to break with everything we are and everything that is actual” (52).In moving to the third aporia, Cashmore develops what is likely the most original part of the argument of We Hear Only Ourselves, by exploring a utopian tradition within contemporary politics of race with particular regard to Black studies. Identifying the key aporia of utopia’s “separation from actuality” and concomitant actuality (i.e., utopia’s being is bound up with its definitive non-being), Cashmore borrows from Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman to ask how the unrepresentable can be represented. Appropriating the manifest radicality of Black resistance for utopian theory, Cashmore finds common cause enough to show how “what is called ‘blackness’ in black studies occupies a subject position that I argued gives rise to the parallel aporia for utopia” (69), later citing the Black Panthers, including Huey P. Newton and Angela Davis, as exemplary figures for a radical politics based on utopian narrative (75). Combining these elements with his earlier discussions of aesthetics, mimesis, and memory, Cashmore concludes:In this moment, we find the shock (or “shudder”) of recognition of the sheer badness of the present that can allow us to “turn energy in the present against forces of actuality,” which seems like another way of referring to revolutionary action. The “narration of utopia” is itself “the universal energy of resistance to all our actuality” (86). So we’ve got that going for us.The title of the book deserves a word, even if it necessarily involves speculation. It comes from a line in Bloch’s essay on “The Philosophy of Music,” specifically the “Dream” prologue, the first line of which reads “We hear only ourselves.” With respect to music, this is the primordial moment before any encounter with external sounds. So it makes sense, but it is not entirely clear how this relates to utopia, memory, and resistance, and Cashmore does not address it at all. (Indeed, the title phrase is never mentioned; it appears only in the book’s epigraph, quoting Bloch.) Given Cashmore’s discussions of narrative, aesthetics, and politics, it would be interesting to see how this phrase about the philosophy of music relates to the book’s argument. One hopes that it does not signify unintended irony on the author’s part, at least.For all its flaws, We Hear Only Ourselves is clearly a work of deep philosophical and political commitment. Cashmore wants to rescue the idea of utopia from its detractors, who dismiss utopian thinking as hopelessly idealistic and fantastic, but they also want to wrest an idea of utopia as radical alterity from those seeking to imagine it as an imagined “outside,” thus in turn domesticating it for the “real world” after all. Rather, Cashmore would have us think the utopian narrative as a resolutely immanent project, one whose critical function establishes the actual as a bad place while not really positing a non-existent place as the alternative either. As Cashmore writes in the final lines of the volume, in a “Political Afterword” no less, we who are in this hell that is the world must find our politics not in a heaven, but rather, “Utopia is found only in hell. So we must live there. Nothing can save us now” (94). It is unclear how this conclusion informs the basis for a “liberatory political philosophy” or for the radical politics based upon it that would presumably lead to some desirable alternatives. Nevertheless, Cashmore’s passionate intensity cannot be gainsaid.