Anti-Utopian anxiety fears socialism as simplification rather than greater complexity

Evidence

Yet a rather different “conclusion” often coexists with this one, and it is the libidinal fear or fantasy that Utopian society, the Utopian “reconciliation of subject and object,” will somehow be a place of renunciation, of the simplification of life, of the obliteration of exciting urban difference and of the muting of sensory stimulus (fears of sexual repression and taboo are here explicitly deployed), a place, finally, of the return to simple “organic” village forms of “rural idiocy,” from which everything interestingly complex about “Western civilization” has been amputated. This fear or anxiety about “Utopia” is a concrete ideological and psychological phenomenon that demands sociological investigation in its own right. As for its intellectual expression, however, the late Raymond Williams has succinctly disposed of it with the retort that socialism will not be simpler than capitalism, but much more complicated; and that to imagine the daily life and the organization of a society in which, for the first time in human history, human beings are fully in control of their own destinies makes demands on the mind which are forbiddingly difficult for subjects of the present “administered world” and often understandably frightening to them. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 725

Categorization

• QUESTION: Jameson calls the fear of Utopia-simplification ‘demanding sociological investigation in its own right’ — worth chasing what empirical work addresses this.
• XREF: Raymond Williams’ retort that socialism will be more complicated connects to the reader’s interest in cognitive maps and the ‘administered world’ critique that also runs through Horkheimer/Adorno. — connects to: Fear of PCF power launched the Nouveaux Philosophes to prominence — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 70