Reddit mentions of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

Someone posted this thread on psychedelic leftism today, with a link to a longer piece on the subject here, might be relevant to your interests. And although I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, Bloch's Principles of Hope sounds like it would relate to the intersection of spirituality and leftist utopianism too (it's referenced in the book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions by Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson)

Have an upvote. Your answer's not shitty at all.

I'm not an expert, but I'll add some stuff.

First, if you want a complicated answer that will open up a lot of sources to you, a place to start would be Frederic Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

In that collection of essays, Jameson argues that, like /u/Plecboy states above, in order to think about technology leading civilization into some kind of future, people first had to notice that technology was really changing the present.

Because technology changed the present from the past so much, people started to think that the future could be different than the present. To paraphrase and make a huge generalization, before the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, people didn't think the past was very different than the present. They certainly didn't think the earthly future was going to be different than the present except for divine revelation, and that's why popular stories about the direction of humanity were tied up in religion, like judgment, the second coming, etc. People thought that's where humanity was headed, or else they thought humanity was doomed (for some, or everyone, etc).

There's another big current of thought that I don't want to leave out, though. It wasn't just technology that was changing the world; capitalism and the sociopolitical construction of the self underwent a huge change. This is not easy to sum up, but to make another big general statement, people began to realize (very slowly) that the forces that change the world are not divine, or god-given, but very much subject to power that certain persons hold at a certain time and place.

So besides immersing yourself in the post-modern standards like Foucault's Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish, as well as Marxist history, I would also invite you to read Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse because White argues that the way of thinking about history has always been quite dynamic and subject to political and literary forces of the moment too. Reading White's work fits in really well with thinking about science fiction, not only because the lines between fiction and non-fiction are often blurred in both genres, but also because writing about the (real) past and the (speculative) future both involve a lot of ... artistic decision-making.

Jamesons writing is really difficult. White's is easier and awesome to read.

You might also check out Peter Lang's Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia. I haven't read this collection, but Jameson often refers to Williams's work on utopian literature.