News from Nowhere is often criticized for its lack of institutional specificity: Darko Suvin says that ‘unfortunately the absence of socio-political organization in Nowhere is a gap that cannot be argued away and denies it the status of a utopia’. For Abensour, this absence is the central point of the text and the saving grace of the genre: ‘The power of Morris’s utopia stems from there being no ideal or plan for the moral education of humanity and, furthermore, from the impossibility of there being one’. For Abensour, the antitheses of openness are closure, didacticism and repression. This is consistent with his later writing on ‘persistent utopia’ and on democracy and the state. ‘Eternal utopia’ is a figment contructed by anti-utopians who claim, in order to invalidate the possibility of alterity, that utopia is always a myth of unrealizable harmony. ‘Persistent utopia’, in contrast, which Abensour derives from Bloch and Emmanuel Levinas, is a genuinely utopian recurrent gesture towards exit, towards an open not yet. His discussions of insurgent democracy, or democracy against the state, are similarly suspicious of institutions themselves: if anti-statist democratic action may give rise to institutional forms, their only legitimate character is ‘greater plasticity, more openness to events, and a stronger disposition to welcome the new’. Such an institution, he suggests, occupies a temporal caesura where it must constantly oscillate between the poles of ‘relapse into inherited condition’ and ‘the hold of a form to come, that is in the making’. It is this emphasis on openness that leads Abensour to contrast Morrissian utopia with ‘those utopias that are an imaginary projection of a new mode of social repression of impulses’, or written utopia that is ‘a closed totality’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 114-115

It is, however, an unnecessary hypothesis that the textual structure and serial publication were conscious strategies on Morris’s part. Moreover Abensour lays claim to the definitive and only correct reading of Morris, and does not consider processes of cultural reproduction which are as crucial to literary texts as to musical theatre. All of these run counter to the deconstructive turn in literary criticism, which proposes that there is more in the text than its author consciously intends, and which endorses multiple readings. Abensour is especially critical of readings which treat Morris’s hypotheses about the future as posited solutions: the importance of News from Nowhere cannot lie in the portrayal of a libertarian socialist utopia, for this reduces it to ‘a gem of literary anarchism’. ‘One cannot’, he says, ‘consider Morris’s utopia a socialist parable … without totally misreading the text’. Such objections assume, as Patrick O’Sullivan says, that Morris did not mean what he said. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 116

Morris’s letters, lectures and political writing demonstrate his own appreciation that the utopian mode is necessarily provisional. Images of the future are necessary because it is ‘essential that the ideal of the future be kept before the eyes of the working classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people be broken, or lest they should be misdirected’. However, we cannot predict the needs and wants of later generations: ‘it is impossible to build a scheme for the society of the future, for no man can really think himself out of his own days’. Morris warns against literal readings: ‘The only safe way of reading a utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author’. The danger is that ‘incomplete systems impossible to be carried out but plausible on the surface are always attractive to people ripe for change, but not knowing clearly what their aim is’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 113

Literary form is central: ‘the structure of the narration involves putting utopia to the test’. The contrast between the old systematic, didactic utopia and the new, experiential utopian spirit is embedded in this structure, which counterposes the dialogues of the central section with the drama of the journeys in the outer sections, especially the final journey up the river. It is there in Morris’s subtitle, ‘An Epoch of Rest’, implying the suspension of time, and in the fluidity of the river itself. […] The original serial form of News from Nowhere is argued to counter this repressive tendency of the written utopia. It revises ‘the distinction between author and reader’, producing a dialogical and potentially participatory process, and constituting a ‘definitive rupture with utopian socialism’s monological character’. Serial publication was not innovatory or unique to Morris. But Abensour points here to the potential for a more collective engagement where utopian imagination is embedded in a political or dialogic community. And indeed the circulation of Commonweal, where News from Nowhere first appeared, was between two and three thousand; most copies were sold at street meetings, including those at pitches where Morris regularly spoke, and Morris read excerpts at meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Society. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 114-115

He [Abensour] approaches News from Nowhere, and by extension the proper function of utopia itself, in terms of desire. Desire, as throughout postmodernism, involves a libidinal energy rather than simply a cognitive preference for a better society. What matters is less the portrayal of objects of desire in the text, but how the text itself acts on the act of desiring. We should not approach it as a naturalistic representation of the good society. Rather, we should understand it as the catalyst of a process, in which the reader is an active agent, of disrupting the normative and conceptual frameworks of mundane experience. As noted in Chapter 1 above, utopia does not simply illustrate the meeting of familiar wants unmet by existing society, the meeting of already experienced lack. It creAbensourpace that enables us to imagine wanting something else, something qualitatively different. It offers not simply cognitive distance, but existential and affective estrangement through the experience of transformed desire. For Abensour, the ‘education of desire’ is the ‘organizing function’ of News from Nowhere. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 113

The best example of this [utopian texts are simply read differently in the context of late modernity] is Miguel Abensour’s re-reading of News from Nowhere which emphasizes its reflexivity, provisionality and openness. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 113

Abensour posits a significant disjuncture in utopian thought around 1850 between a ‘systematic’ mode which involves constructing blueprints and a ‘heuristic’ mode, in which utopias become exploratory projections of alternative values sketched as alternative ways of life. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 113

It [the education of desire, which is the organizing function of “News from Nowhere”] depends on the presence of a particular quality in the text, the utopian marvelous. He [Abensour] quotes Pierre Mabille in terms which recall the utopian charge of colour and music and the moment of grace: "The marvelous expresses the need to bypass empirical limits, imposed by our structure, to attain a greater beauty, a greater power, a greater pleasure, a greater duration. The marvelous wants to bypass the limits of space and time, it wants to destroy all barriers, it is the struggle of freedom against everything which reduces, destroys and mutilates; it is a tension, that is to say something different from routine mechanical work, an impassioned and poetic tension … It is the strange lucidity of the delirium, the light of the dream and the green light of passion; it burns above the masses at the time of revolt. But the marvelous is less the extreme tension of being than the juncture of desire with external reality. The marvelous is, at a specific moment, the troubling instant in which the world gives us its assent.” The presence of the utopian marvelous ‘intensifies the ambition of Morrissian utopia to awaken and energize desires so that they might rush toward their liberation’. This is ‘action on the movement of passion’, or ‘affective formation’. It withdraws libidinal energy from productive, rational and useful concerns, orienting it in a radically different direction of ‘a new principle of reality whose desire and foretaste can be communicated only by means of a simulacrum’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 113-114