Periodical Utopianism: Charles Fourier, Playboy, and Erotic Serialization

Abstract

This article argues that the nineteenth-century utopian writings of Charles Fourier and twentieth-century United States pornography franchises including Playboy participate in the same generic form of serialized eroticism. Although Fredric Jameson argued for a formalist study of utopianism, his writings on Fourier engage only with his “content.” It argues instead that Fourier's project is best understood in the serialized form of his writing, which, as in Playboy, coordinates two different temporal scales: a larger scale on which the drama of world transformation plays out, and a smaller one on which the hope for this transformation is nourished in daily, increasingly erotic labor. What their doubled temporality of promised but deferred pleasure makes possible—when formalized in periodical writing as a comforting, albeit ambivalent, state of suspension—is a kind of utopianism that locates itself in the activity of planning to build the world today, rather than living in the built world tomorrow.