Utopia & Infinite Regress

On Olaf Stapledon's masterpiece, the novel Starmaker--
Fredric Jameson has a comment in Archaeologies of the Future to the effect that Starmaker is less a utopian work than the sort of work that would be written inside a utopia. He states it simply as an impression, but an impression of that sort, if it is sufficiently precise, must have a conceptual skeleton. What follows, then, is a brief attempt at dissection, by way of a thesis about utopianism:

I've come to think that the nature of early modern utopias and particularly More's is importantly different from that of their generic descendents. One might say that they are in the lineage of Plato's Laws, while the utopias of Morris, say, or Skinner, follow The Republic--the former utopias are cynical states, predicated on an opposition both to the real governments their interlocutors live in and to an implicit ideal state, which cannot be attained due to very nature of human affairs. There is a high hope of human possibility and a despairing knowledge of human necessity; the latter must not be attributed merely to utopia's nonexistence--the main source of despair, if there is one, in later utopias--but to its indequacy even as an imaginative construct. Christianity had to give the dream of a perfect politics the lie--even as a dream--but Plato had already done the same thing, for reasons not far removed, in his last & longest dialogue. This is the tradition of utopia that makes distopias unnecessary, even childish & simplistic. Utopia's situation between these two realities, the earthly and the divine is, so far as I can tell, generally ignored by theorists of utopianism, and for good reason; I'm not convinced that this is a characteristic of nineteenth or twentieth century utopias at all, with the exception of Stapledon's Starmaker.

What this characteristic means, in effect, is that every utopia could have its own utopia; that there is a potential infinite regress asymptotically approaching divinity or idealism or the void or whatever. Starmaker is structured in terms of this regress: the successive utopias of which the novel consists are each in turn consumed in superior models--each might be the utopia of the one before. In another work, this could continue forever (one could imagine a Borgesian story on such a theme) but in in Stapledon's novel it doesn't, because the novel is a mapping of a theoretical infinite regress onto a finite universe. Ideas might embed themselves one in another forever, but the imiginative space in which Starmaker progresses is eventually consumed. All that is left, then, is the encounter with the divinity the book has been steadily moving towards. I'd better not give away the ending--though as you've probably gathered, giving away the ending to this strange, marvelous book is like giving away the ending to a book by Hobbes or Hume, more of a transgression against sense than plot--but it is hard to read it except as a gesture to utopia's qualititive failure to attain the ideal.

This bears out, or with a little adjustment could be made to bear out, Jameson's observation. And though all this is apropos of nothing, yet because this blog claims to be a place for infinite regress, it's only fitting that, like Stapledon, I should make my method my matter.