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By Root 883 0

was a committed Marxist, an East German citizen, and a vocal supporter of the Soviet Union at a time when Soviet communism still held out hope for some as a site of potential social perfection. For us in the western world post-1989 (and post-1984), the promise of the effective and well-planned utopia has justifiably faded. Now, the term “utopian,” when it does not suggest impractical, crackpot ideas, evokes something sinister, even horrifying. Most often, the notion of utopia can be seen as shorthand for totalitarianism or for unintended consequences (in literature Nineteen Eighty-Four, V for Vendetta, The Handmaid’s Tale; from history think of Stalinism, China’s Cultural Revolution, ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and Rwanda, “a land without a people for a people without a land” in Palestine). In other words, the gigantic blind spots of the utopias of the second half of the twentieth century seem to have ruined concrete utopianism, leaving those of us stuck in the twenty-first century with much less optimism for the future.

Nevertheless, the American literary critic Fredric Jameson has recently taken on the problem of utopia. In Archaeologies of the Future (Verso, 2005) he argues that the role of utopian thought in our post-concrete utopia world lies in the simple act of contem-plating the future. Recent history and literature teaches us that “all our images of Utopia, all possible images of Utopia, will always be ideological and distorted by a point of view which cannot be corrected or even accounted for” (p. 171). Concrete utopias, in other words, will necessarily be utopias for only some, and likely repressive for others.

Yet, the future still is of desperate importance, especially when we live in a world in which “there is no alternative to capitalism,” to borrow a slogan from Margaret Thatcher. The complete dominance of global capitalism and exclusion of other possible socio-political systems produces, in Jameson’s words, a “future prepared by the elimination of historicity, its neutralization by way of progress and technological evolution” (p. 228). This regime, even in its social-democratic (or Democratic) forms—and in fact contemporary global capitalism seems quite impervious to political changes in individual nations—removes hope for a different future. It guarantees that the future will be pretty much like the present, even if changeable through small, incremental reforms. As many partisans of the political Left (at least some of the members of Radiohead included) recognize, global capitalism has produced a world that is far from ideal. The prospects of an eternal present and a “colonized” future show that utopia still has a part to play. It enables us to imagine a disruption from the present, to think that, yes, the world is one way now, but it always hasn’t been this way; in fact, it has been radically different and therefore it could (and will) be in the future, even if we cannot now quite conceive how it could be so.

The inchoate utopian impulse (Bloch’s “abstract” utopia), accordingly, takes on the lead role of utopian thought in Jameson’s framework. It becomes the demand to “concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right” (p. 232). In this way, dystopias are as essential as utopias for visualizing the possibility of a reality utterly different from our own. Even, in other words, when dystopias are meant to teach us some particular negative lesson about our own times, formally (or, simply by existing as a story about another world) they also tell us that historical disruption is at least imaginable. It’s not that utopia’s possible, but that it’s necessary.

Back to the Future

The significance of this for Hail to the Thief is that dystopia and utopia are two sides of the same coin. The act of imagining a different world, even one as totalizing and repressive as Hail to the Thief’s, itself derives from the impulse toward “abstract utopia.” Even more, while the dominant mood on the album is dark and pessimistic, Hail to the Thief also reveals