On Understanding Our Needy World through Science Fiction and Utopia/nism

Abstract

How do dominant epistemological frames create political understanding and violence in the public sphere and through cultural texts? This article explores a theoretical answer to this question by identifying narrative categories, or frames, that create shared realities and collective political understanding and action in contemporary antiutopian US culture. Much current public information is marred by the juxtaposition of fact and fiction, logic and emotion, creating forms of knowledge and thus political action not necessarily based, then, on actuality or a communal ethic of care. Through analysis of worlds made possible in science fiction, the author builds on his previous theoretical work to develop what he calls “a method for radical utopian cognition”—one that sees cultural cognition based in logic, emotions, and a utopian frame in which destiny or resolution is not dictated by class or preordained authorial expectation but is instead open for constructive possibilities and new realities through the presentation of alternative possible worlds.