The Political Form of Postmodernism: Bakhtin, Jameson, and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The Ministry for the Future (2020) is Kim Stanley Robinson's latest and most complex in a series of science-fiction novels that engage with the issue of climate change. It adds to Robinson's long engagement with the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, though its polyphonic nature also rewards reading it through the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. The utopian dimension that is so important in Robinson's work has often led Jameson to see Robinson precisely as an exception to the cultural hegemony of postmodernism. That utopian dimension is also strong in The Ministry for the Future. Many characteristics, however, of this long, complex, highly polyphonic novel make it more appropriate to characterize it as an example of the "political form of postmodernism" that Jameson has suggested might someday come to be, challenging the death grip of the "cultural logic of late capitalism" on contemporary cultural production. While The Ministry for the Future has many of the formal characteristics typically associated with postmodernism, it uses these characteristics not just to outline the problems posed by climate change and economic injustice but also to suggest ways in which ordinary people—working together on a global scale—can confront these problems and make a better world.