Levitas - The Concept of Utopia
Levitas - The Concept of Utopia - Introduction
Both the colloquial definitions and the anti-utopian position illustrate the fact that the concept itself is an ideological battleground. The elision between perfection and impossibility can serve to invalidate all attempts at change, reinforcing the claim that there is no alternative, and sustaining the status quo. Perhaps, as Khayyám suggests, we would do better to forget the future and drown our sorrows. But even among different groups committed to change, the derogatory meaning attaching to utopia is what dominates. People rarely claim that their own aspirations are utopian but even dream- ers may hurl the epithet at others. The rejection of other people’s projects as utopian and unrealistic is part of the process of promoting the merits of one’s own plans, and is thus an intrinsic part of the political process. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.4
Utopia is the expression of the desire for a better way of being. This includes both the objective, institutional approach to utopia, and the subjective, experiential concern of disalienation. It allows for this desire to be realistic or unrealistic. It allows for the form, function and content to change over time. And it reminds us that, whatever we think of particular utopias, we learn a lot about the experience of living under any set of conditions by reflecting upon the desires which those conditions generate and yet leave unfulfilled. For that is the space which utopia occupies. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.9
Colloquial usage thus tends to dismiss speculation about the good society as intrinsically impractical. This dismissal may be tolerantly good-humoured, seeing utopia as an interesting if esoteric byway of culture and the utopian as a well-meaning dreamer. It may, on the other hand, be extremely hostile, seeing attempts at instituting utopia as highly dangerous and leading to totalitarianism. This anti-utopian position is typified by Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.3
Sometimes utopia embodies more than an image of what the good life would be and becomes a claim about what it could and should be: the wish that things might be otherwise becomes a conviction that it does not have to be like this. Utopia is then not just a dream to be enjoyed, but a vision to be pursued. Yet the very term utopia suggests to most people that this dream of the good life is an impossible dream – an escapist fantasy, at best a pleasant but pointless entertainment. Those utopians who seek to make their dreams come true are deemed to be hopelessly unrealistic, or worse, actively dangerous. The view that utopia is not escapist nonsense but a significant part of human culture is a fundamental assumption of the expanding field of utopian studies. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.1
This book sets out to clarify the meaning of the term utopia and provide a new definition. Such a project could be undertaken from many points of view: definitions are tools, not ends in themselves. The aim here is to address some of the problems that arise in the field of utopian studies from the absence of a clear and agreed definition. The purpose is firstly one of clarification, to show the basis of the current variation in usage of the concept of utopia. Since this variety arises only in part from a lack of conceptual rigour on the part of commentators and more fundamentally from the range of questions and approaches that are involved, it is important that any common definition which is proposed takes account of this variety. The object is not to impose an orthodoxy, but to encourage communication about issues which are already being addressed and to suggest new ones. Above all, it is to encourage a greater degree of conceptual clarity in discussions of utopia. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.2
In exploring existing definitions of utopia we can consider three different aspects: content, form and function. Firstly, there is content. There is a common assumption that utopia should be a portrayal of the good society. It is however obvious that this will vary, being a matter not just of personal taste, but of the issues which appear to be important to different social groups, either in the same society or in different historical circumstances. […] The variation in content, however, makes it particularly difficult to use this as part of the definition of utopia. Definitions in terms of content tend to be evaluative and normative, specifying what the good society would be, rather than reflecting on how it may be differently perceived. The issue of possibility also relates directly to the content of a utopia, and again judgements differ. Secondly, one can attempt to define utopia descriptively, in terms of form. The common sense equation of utopia with a description of a good society (leaving aside the question of possibility) is one version of such a definition. Another is the equation of utopia with an ideal commonwealth. Some commentators take the form of More’s Utopia as a model and argue that utopia is a literary genre, involving the fictional depiction of an alternative society in some detail. However, as we have already suggested, depictions of the good society do not necessarily take the form of literary fictions – and indeed this form is only available under certain very specific historical conditions; is it then to be assumed that when these conditions do not exist, there are no utopias? Broader historical comparisons require more inclusive definitions, to accommodate changes in the way in which aspirations for a better life may be expressed. Thirdly, one may define utopia in terms of its function. This is less obvious; to focus on the function of utopia is already to move away from colloquial usage, which says nothing about what utopia is for, but implies that it is useless. […] utopia is seen as presenting some kind of goal, even if commentators as opposed to the authors of utopias do not see them as necessarily realisable in all their details. At the very least, utopias raise questions about what the goal should be. Many commentators, however, go further and use the function of utopia as a defining characteristic – although that function is differently represented by different authors. […] Broadly, one may divide approaches to utopian studies into two streams. The liberal-humanist tradition tends to focus on definitions in terms of form. In contrast a largely, but not exclusively, Marxist tradition has defined utopia in terms of its function – either a negative function of preventing social change or a positive function of facilitating it, either directly or through the process of the ‘education of desire’. Contemporary utopian studies draws on both these traditions, and definitions of both kinds may be found, although those in terms of form tend to predominate. […] It is argued that all definitions in terms of form, function or content are problematic. Not only do they place limits upon what may properly be regarded as utopian and thus upon the field of enquiry itself, they also obscure variations in the utopian genre. In order to make such a claim, one must of course be able to locate something which remains constant while content, form and function vary. This element, I would argue, is that of desire – desire for a better way of being and living. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.5-8
Levitas - The Concept of Utopia - Chapter 1, Ideal Commonwealths: An Emerging Tradition
There is an ambivalence here: utopia fascinates as an expression of the felt problems and solutions of particular historical situations; it inspires as a response to the recurrent problems across history; yet it provokes fear that the revolutionary may make the mistake of taking it literally. There is an implied model of the process of social change, as well as its direction: ideas are the motive force in social progress, so that utopia must be taken seriously as a contribution to this – but not too seriously, or evolution and progress may turn to revolution and disaster. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.9
Levitas - The Concept of Utopia - Chapter 2, Castles in the Air: Marx, Engels and Utopian Socialism
The Marxist tradition has for the most part been strongly antipathetic to utopianism, which it has understood as the construction of blueprints of a future society that are incapable of realisation; the charge of utopianism has also been levelled at Marxism by its opponents, using a similar definition. Throughout the twentieth century there have been notable exceptions to the dominant unpopularity of utopianism (including the views of Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse and Edward Thompson, discussed in subsequent chapters) but the idea that utopia can be valuable for Marxists has always been a minority view. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.41
The roots of Marxist objections to utopia can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels; however, their criticisms of utopian socialism have been used illegitimately as justification of a general rejection of descriptions of the future socialist society. The concept of utopia deployed in this rejection, besides being a political weapon in a process of ‘annihilation by labels’, conflates two issues: speculation about the future, and the possibility and means of transition to socialism. The real dispute between Marx and Engels and the utopian socialists is not about the merit of goals or of images of the future but about the process of transformation, and particularly about the belief that propaganda alone would result in the realisation of socialism. The general orientation to utopia that has developed not only misrepresents the views of both Marx and Engels, but has had thoroughly deleterious effects on the socialist project in the past hundred years. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.41
Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equal naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 3, p. 296. (Cited in Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47)
Marx’s suggestions as to the nature of communist society range from very abstract principles put forward in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the more specific statements in the Grundrisse. In Marx’s early writings the goal of communism is the transcendence of alienation, the overcoming of the estrangement of human beings from themselves which results from the institution of private property. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47
although it [communism] is in one sense a goal, it is not very specific about the precise institutional arrangements which will prevail. There are two reasons for this. The more fundamental objection to describing communist society is that the needs, wants and capacities that will develop within it are neither static nor predictable from within the constraints of capitalism. In addition there is a strategic reason for silence: the criticism of utopian socialism in terms of its supposition that its schemes would be self-realising would be undermined by appearing to offer a competing plan of the good society. Hence Marx’s reluctance to identify communism as a state rather than a process: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 5, p. 49) Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.50
The abolition of private property through social ownership transforms the nature of work. It is alienated labour which is the root of alienation; hence it is only through the transformation of the work process and its place in communist society that human estrangement can be overcome. A key issue here is the division of labour, which turns people into extensions of the productive process and prevents the full development of each individual’s broad potential. Hence the familiar statement in The German Ideology that “in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47-48
Finally this new society entails the production of a different kind of person, not just in the sense of increasing their powers as atomised individuals but (and in fact this is how the increase of individual powers is possible) as the production of fully social human beings. Alienation affects not just the relationship of people to themselves and to their work, but to one another. The recognition of interdependence and of the social nature of production and of human existence in general leads not only to a transformation of work, but also means that the relationships between individuals both within and outside the work process cease to have the instrumental and competitive nature they assume in capitalist society. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.50
Similarly, ‘in a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities’. The division between mental and manual labour is abolished, and the division between town and country. On this point, the utopian socialists were commended by Engels in Anti-Dühring: "The utopians were already perfectly clear as to the effects of the division of labour, the stunting on the one hand of the labourer, and on the other of the labour function, which is restricted to the life-long uniform mechanical repetition of one and the same operation. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country was demanded by Fourier, as by Owen, as the first prerequisite for the abolition of the old division of labour altogether ... abolition of the antithesis between town and country ... has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself ... . The abolition of the separation between town and country is therefore not utopian.” Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.48
In the Grundrisse it is made clear that the new human being who develops with communist society does so through the expansion of ‘free time which is both leisure and time for higher activity’, which transforms ‘its possessor into another subject’. Work remains a realm of necessity in contrast with the realm of freedom outside work, where human development is an end in itself. This does not mean, however, as one commentator has suggested, that the problem of freedom is in the Grundrisse reduced to the problem of free time, nor does it mean that the realm of work consists of alienated labour. Work does not become ‘pure fun, pure amusement, as in Fourier’s ... childishly naive conception’, since ‘really free work ... is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort’. But if ‘labour cannot become a game, as desired by Fourier’, it remains to his great credit that he ‘stated that the ULTIMATE OBJECT is the raising of the mode of production itself, not [that] of distribution, to a higher form’. And the nature and conditions of work are to be transformed so that work, while necessary, is nevertheless free: "Work involved in material production can achieve this character only if (1) its social character is posited; (2) if it is of a scientific character and simultaneously general [in its application], and not the exertion of the worker as a natural force drilled in a particular way, as a subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity controlling all natural forces.” (Marx, Grundrisse, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 28, p. 530; Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 29, p. 97) Work in communist society is both greatly reduced and transformed in character. These features depend upon the expansion of productive powers, made possible in the first instance by capitalism but then exponentially so by its demise. Abundance is a necessary condition for communism. These four key features – the abolition of the division of labour, the development of individual potential, the transformation of work and the increase in material prosperity (made possible by the social ownership of the means of production) – are summed up in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: "In a higher phase of a communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!“ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 87.) Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.49-50
Whether the sexual division of labour is also to be entirely abolished is less clear. There is certainly support for communal living arrangements as a new productive force, involving the development of new machinery and the abolition of the family, in The German Ideology, which is entirely congruent with Engels’s praise for the saving in labour power implied in Owen’s planned communities. Ollman argues that the communal raising of children is implied by the need that parents be prevented from exercising a destructive influence over their children without forcibly separating them from each other. He does concede, however, that this is never made explicit in Marx’s writing, and that Marx never deals with the limitations child-rearing imposes upon the self-development of adults, in practice usually their mothers, although Ollman asserts that ‘he was surely aware of it’. Although it is clearly intended that the all-round development of the individual in communist society should apply to women as well as to men, the means by which this is to be made possible have to be inferred or invented. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.48
The difference between Marxism and utopian socialism does not, then, rest on the existence or otherwise of an image of the socialist society to be attained, nor even on the content of that image. It rests upon disagreements about the process of transition. Even here the question of who is most utopian in the sense of unrealistic is a matter of dispute. Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, defends the orientation of utopian socialism (including not just Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer) to this problem. Buber’s argument is that a ‘society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals but of associative units’, and that the health of a society depends on the density of voluntary associations that constitute it; capitalist society is thus ‘a society inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day’. The strength of utopian socialism is that it addressed itself to the issue of ‘a renewal of society through a renewal of its cell-tissue’, and aimed to ‘substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible’.23 Buber argues that neither Marx nor Engels gave sufficient attention to the process of social restructuring, in spite of the assertion that the new society matures in the womb of the old. Organic restructuring necessitates the development of a network of cooperative settlements which go beyond simple consumer or producer cooperatives – as in the Israeli kibbutzim. […] His arguments in favour of cooperative settlements rest upon a recognition that the social relations of production lie at the root of the character of society. His claim, however, is that the post-revolutionary leap and the dictatorship of the proletariat involve a contradiction between means and ends which is not present in utopian socialism. The so-called utopian does not believe in this post-revolutionary leap, but in ‘continuity within which revolution is only the accomplishment, the setting free and extension of a reality that has already grown to its true possibilities’. In Buber’s view the ‘utopian’ approach to the problem is more realistic, since it is difficult to see how the centralisation of the first phase of socialism will give way to full communism. In other words, the expectation that the state will somehow wither away is itself utopian, i.e. unrealistic. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.53-54
Early in 1852 Marx observed that one response to political defeat was for the working class to retreat into essentially utopian schemes: "In part [the proletariat] throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionising of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck.” [Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp. 110–11.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.61
It is clear that the basis of Marx’s and Engels’s criticisms of utopian socialism is not an objection to speculation about the future, but a difference of view about the process of transformation. As Vincent Geoghegan puts it, ‘what is under attack here is not anticipation as such, but rather the failure to root this anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essential dynamics of capitalism’. […] Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one: "The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.” [Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 93] In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 64, 66
“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism ... bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social utopias, of founding isolated ‘phalanstères’, of establishing ‘Home Colonies’, of setting up a ‘Little Icaria’ ... and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.” [Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 6, pp. 515–16.] The fundamental error of the utopian socialists which gives rise to this unacceptable political position is the expectation that society can be changed by the appeal to all classes on the basis of reason and justice, and the belief that their blueprints of the good society will be the cause of social transformation. It is this idealist, as opposed to materialist, concept of social change which is the real problem. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.60
It is abundantly clear that in their hands the term is indeed used in a way which emphasises the unrealistic nature of utopia, More’s ‘no place’. However, the imputed lack of realism applies less to the content of the Utopian systems in question than to the models of social change associated with them. Since the primary concern of both Marx and Engels was with fostering such changes, the rejection of utopia is a rejection on the basis of its imputed social function – that of distracting the working classes from more suitable political activity, from ‘conscious participation in the historical process revolutionising society before our very eyes’. Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one: The chief offense does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement. In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 66
Levitas - The Concept of Utopia - Chapter 3, Mobilising Myths: Utopia and Social Change in Georges Sorel and Karl Mannheim
Sorel also argued that ideas, in the form of myths, could potentially perform a mobilising and transformative function. The distinction drawn by Sorel between myth and utopia is interesting in its own right, but doubly so when compared with the analysis offered by Karl Mannheim, probably the most well-known theorist of utopia; for Mannheim’s argument similarly insists on this transformative potential, while attributing it to utopia. Part of the difference between the two is terminological, with Sorel’s use of the term myth having strong similarities with Mannheim’s definition of utopia. There are, however, also differences of substance, particularly concerning the emphasis on human will and the political evaluation of myth or utopia: Sorel celebrates the non-rationality of myth for its effectiveness; Mannheim fears the irrationality of utopia as well as the possibility of its extinction. The focus for both writers is […] on the role of ideas in social change; but whereas in Marxist hands utopia is defined in terms of the negative function of preventing social change, here myth and utopia, respectively, are defined in terms of the positive function of promoting it. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 69
Myth and Utopia in Sorel
Myths are necessary because without them, revolts will not provoke revolution. Whether they bear any relation to future history is irrelevant to their power and their value. At the centre of the myth lies the experience of grasping the inner self, of becoming and possessing oneself more intensely than is possible in normal life. Utopias, on the other hand, are cognitive constructs, products of the intellect, of reason. As such they are divorced from the soul of the proletariat, have no real connection with anything, are at best impotent and at worst diversionary and reactionary. Myths emphasise process, utopias portray ends. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 78
Utopia, as defined by Sorel, embodies several distinct characteristics which are presumed to be inseparable. It includes plans for a future society and failure to grasp the real possibilities and processes of social change, thus eliding in a familiar way two elements which have no intrinsic connection. Utopias are also condemned for being abstract, and for being essentially products of the intellect rather than the will. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 75
“Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may … be very effective and have very few inconveniences; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions and mental activity.” [Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Allen and Unwin, p. 133.] The particular myth which is central to revolutionary syndicalism is the myth of the proletarian general strike, construed both as a possible actual event in the future and more importantly as a myth which mobilises people to action. Sorel observes that ‘men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph’; it is to these images that he applies the term myth. The function of any such myth is to facilitate action and it must therefore be judged in these terms, not in terms of its empirical accuracy, so that it should not be taken seriously as a prediction. It operates intuitively rather than intellectually, and thus is fundamentally different from a utopia. The myth of the general strike is ‘a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society’. Revolutionary myths are thus expressions of will rather than descriptions of the future and as such ‘lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things’. A myth cannot be separated into its constituent parts and judged against reality, for it only operates as a whole, and it is not susceptible to refutation by empirical evidence: "A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.” [Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Allen and Unwin, p. 33.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 75-76
His [Sorel’s] identification of socialism as a movement rather than a state of society to be treated as a historical goal recalls Marx’s assertion that communism is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things: "Socialism is the workers’ movement, the revolt of the proletariat against ruling institutions. It is the organization which is both economic and ethical at the same time, which we see forming before our eyes, and whose purpose is to struggle against bourgeois traditions.” [Stanley, From Georges Sorel, Oxford University Press, p. 147.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 76
Ideology and Utopia in Mannheim
His [Mannheim’s] discussion of utopia forms part of his best-known book *Ideology and Utopia*, which was published in German in 1929 and in English in 1936. As the title of the book implies, Mannheim makes a distinction between ideologies and utopias, and it is a distinction based upon their social function. Both ideologies and utopias are ideas, and are ideas which are ‘incongruous with’ and transcend the reality within which they occur, being oriented towards objects which do not exist in the actual situation. The difference is that ideologies operate to sustain the existing state of affairs, while utopias operate to change it: "Only those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.” "Utopias … are not ideologies in the measure and in so far as they succeed through counteractivity in transforming the existing historical reality into one more in accord with their own conceptions.” Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 79
Mannheim is quite clear that form and content are not the defining characteristics of utopia. He argues that ‘the utopian element in our consciousness is subject to changes in content and form’ and ‘it is not always the same forces, substances, or images which can take on a utopian function, i.e. the function of bursting the bonds of the existing order’.33 Because of this focus on function rather than form or content in the definition of utopia, Mannheim’s object of analysis differs from that conventionally assumed in the liberal-humanist tradition. He is not concerned with a literary genre, or even with the somewhat wider category of visions of ideal societies. Indeed such visions may be ideological rather than utopian, that is they may act as forces to maintain rather than to transform the status quo. He points out that the medieval idea of paradise, while located outside of society in an other-wordly sphere, was an integral part of the maintenance of that society. It is only when such images take on a revolutionary function, as in such millennial sects as the Anabaptists, that they become utopian rather than ideological. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 80
The use of the term utopia to refer to a category of social fictions is rejected by Mannheim as historically naïve and descriptive rather than analytical. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 80
The use of the term utopia to refer to a category of social fictions is rejected by Mannheim as historically naïve and descriptive rather than analytical. Literary works commonly designated utopias are, at least initially, only individual expressions; they can become truly utopian only if and when they become the expression of the will of a social group, and the inspiration of successful social action in pursuit of change. Much of what is conventionally (and sometimes pejoratively) regarded as utopian is therefore excluded on this definition and consigned to the realm of ideology. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.80
Mannheim’s typology of utopias
Critique of Mannheim’s distinction between ideology and utopia
Levitas - The Concept of Utopia - Chapter 4, Utopian Hope: Ernst Bloch and Reclaiming the Future
Bloch’s relationship to Marxism is more problematic. Like William Morris […] Bloch stands at the juncture of Marxism and Romanticism. His project can therefore be seen as an attempt to import into Marxism a concept of utopia deriving from a mixture of mysticism and the Romantic tradition and thus as a contamination or dilution of Marxism itself, or it can be seen in Bloch’s own terms as an attempt to reinstate Marx’s own intentions within Marxism through the fundamental but neglected Marxist concept of utopia. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 97
Bloch refuses the identification of utopia with a literary genre: "to limit the utopian to the Thomas More variety, or simply to orientate it in that direction, would be like trying to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed. Indeed, the utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole total of philosophy becomes necessary … to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia.” [Bloch The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1986, p. 15.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 99
Bloch would agree with Mannheim that ‘wishful thinking has always figured in human affairs’ and that ‘myths, fairy-tales, other-worldly promises of religion, humanistic fantasies, romances, have been continually changing expressions of what was lacking in actual life’. He would agree too that they have a compensatory aspect and even that they are susceptible to manipulation: the mirror in which wishful images are reflected is ‘a beautifying mirror which often only reflects how the ruling class wishes the wishes of the weak to be’. However, the compensatory aspect of wishful thinking does not in itself mean that it operates, as Mannheim supposes, to sustain the status quo. It is not merely fictitious compensation for the discomforts of experienced reality, but a venturing beyond that reality which is essential to the inauguration of a transformed future. Utopia contains compensation, but also anticipation. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 100-101
The designation of utopia as ‘anticipatory consciousness’, which is the subtitle of part two of The Principle of Hope, depends upon Bloch’s central concept, the Not Yet. It has two aspects, the Not-Yet-Conscious and the Not-Yet-Become – its ideological and material, or subjective and objective aspects. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101
The idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious is developed through a critique of Sigmund Freud. In Bloch’s view, Freud regarded the unconscious as a kind of rubbish bin of repressed material that was no longer conscious; this overly negative approach on Freud’s part disregarded the additional and countervailing characteristic of the unconscious, that of being a creative source of material on the verge of coming to consciousness. The unconscious is also the pre-conscious, is intrinsically creative and the source of the utopian impulse, which Bloch appears to regard as a fundamental human propensity. The expression of the Not-Yet-Conscious is of course subject to social determination and thus varies with individual and historical circumstance; hence the variation in utopian expression demonstrated in the rest of The Principle of Hope. The Not-Yet-Conscious is at its strongest in youth, is expressed par excellence in the creative arts and is intensely present in times of change, particularly revolutionary change. Thus ‘all times of change are filled with Not-Yet-Conscious, even overfilled; a Not-Yet-Conscious which is carried by a rising class’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101
What prevents the Not-Yet-Conscious from being a purely psychoanalytic or ontological category is that it is the subjective correlate of the Not-Yet-Become, a category which applies to material reality. It is fundamental to Bloch’s argument and to the concept of the Not-Yet-Become that the material world is essentially unfinished, the future is indeterminate and therefore that the future constitutes a realm of possibility. Once the world is seen as in a constant state of process, but a process whose direction and outcome is not predetermined, there are always many possible futures – futures which are real possibilities, rather than merely formal possibilities. Not all projected futures are real possibilities; there are of course constraints, and Bloch’s model is not one of pure voluntarism. Nor are all real possibilities desirable: they include ‘devastatingly, possible fascist Nothing’ as well as ‘finally feasible and overdue, socialism’. These possible futures must be seen as part of, rather than outside, reality despite the fact that the indeterminacy of the future means that there is no necessary development from potentiality to actuality, and despite the fact that not all real possibilities will in fact be realised. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101-102
Anticipatory elements are identified with concrete utopia (and, as we shall see, Marxism), compensatory elements with abstract utopia; thus Bloch refers to ‘the power of anticipation, which we [call] concrete utopia … (as distinct from the utopistic and from merely abstract utopianizing)’. It is not a question of dividing the mass of material outlined above into concrete and abstract examples, as a division of sheep from goats. Just as Mannheim pointed out that ideology and utopia are ideal types and appear in reality interwoven with one another, so too Bloch sees abstract and concrete utopia, compensation and anticipation, as interwoven in the objects of his study. Unlike Mannheim, Bloch carries this to its logical conclusion: the task is to reveal and recover the anticipatory essence from the dross of contingent and compensatory elements in which utopia is dressed up in particular historical circumstances. Abstract utopia means that the derogatory sense of the term remains, and rightly so, but should not outweigh the positive sense that pertains to the function of concrete utopia: ‘the category of the Utopian, beside the usual, justifiably pejorative sense, possesses the other, in no way necessarily abstract or unworldly sense, much more centrally turned towards the world: of overtaking the natural course of events’. Bloch’s celebration of the anticipatory element present even in vestigial or contaminated forms across the range of human culture, and his simultaneously ruthless attitude to utopia’s abstract trappings, recall Engels’s response to utopian socialism; it is a celebration of the thoughts that break out through fantastic coverings, coupled with a rejection of the coverings themselves – and implying that it is a greater blindness to reject the former than to be deluded by the latter. Nevertheless, the distinction between abstract and concrete utopia is fundamental to Bloch’s project. The rehabilitation of utopia depends upon the removal of the abstract elements which clutter up the concrete core. Concrete utopia must be winnowed out, stripping wishful thinking of that which is purely fantastic, compensatory and escapist. The process entails: "knowledge and removal of the finished *utopistic element*, with knowledge and removal of abstract utopia. But what then remains: the unfinished forward dream, the docta spes which can only be discredited by the bourgeoisie – this seriously deserves the name utopia in carefully considered and carefully applied contrast to utopianism; in its brevity and new clarity, this expression then means the same as: *a methodical organ for the New, an objective aggregate state of what is coming up.*” [Bloch The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1986, p. 157.] What can then happen is that the utopian function ‘tears the concerns of human culture away from … an idle bed of contemplation’ and ‘opens up, on truly attained summits, the ideologically unobstructed view of the content of human hope’ [Bloch The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1986, p. 158.]. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 104-105
A large part of the substance of The Principle of Hope consists of Bloch’s attempt to demonstrate the core of concrete utopia in a range of cultural forms, including both religion and bourgeois culture. The reclamation of these as more than repressive ideology is justified by the idea of cultural surplus. Bloch does not dispute the view that the ruling ideas in any age are the ideas of the ruling class, or that ruling class ideologies justify social conditions by disguising their own economic roots and the system of economic exploitation. However, many cultural productions outlast the conditions that give rise to them: they ‘reproduce themselves in cultural consciousness even after the disappearance of their social bases’. This formulation is unsatisfactory in that it ignores the fact that cultural productions do not reproduce themselves, but are reproduced within historical contexts, even if these differ in some respects from those in which they originate. However, Bloch argues that ideology would be unable to carry out its most important function, ‘namely premature harmonization of social contradictions’, if it consisted only of deception and false consciousness; and those elements which are detachable from the immediate conditions of creation are designated cultural surplus. This surplus is differentially distributed between different cultural forms, being more prevalent in architecture than philosophy, and particularly so in music; it is this that creates continuing culture, and this which must be reclaimed. Cultural surplus is equated with concrete utopia: ‘it becomes clear that this very surplus is produced by nothing other than the effect of the utopian function in the ideological creations of the cultural side’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 105-106
[Bloch] treats religion, and particularly the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with considerably more respect than is general among Marxists. It is the mystical rather than didactic elements of religion which appeal to him and he argues that the biblical tradition is the major source of utopian striving in the Western world. […] In Bloch’s view, this is not simply because the ideological supremacy of institutionalised Christianity made the Bible an available cultural resource which could be extensively drawn on by architects of the utopian tradition: in the third volume of The Principle of Hope Bloch makes far more radical claims about the importance of the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God. Bloch’s overall project has been described as an intention to fill the gap into which the Gods were imagined. He refuses to belittle the importance of the gap or to underestimate the richness of the way in which it has been filled by religion. Again, he denies that this involves any departure from Marx, who observed not only that religion was the opiate of the people but that it was the heart of a heartless world and the spirit of spiritless conditions. For Bloch it is also therefore an anticipation of a world no longer heartless, conditions no longer spiritless. Religion carried utopia as goal and as aspiration and would continue to do so as long as reality fell short of the conditions for a truly human existence. […] Bloch’s view of Marxism does not involve simply the assertion that the conditions for communism as a better mode of social organization exist, although this was part of his thesis. What is prefigured in all utopian traces is the overcoming of antagonism between humanity and the world – a state which begins to be really conceivable and approachable through Marxism, in communism. The resolution of antagonisms that is represented in the image of the Kingdom is more profound than could be imagined in any currently conceivable social state for it, like Brahms’s Requiem, involves the overcoming of death, the most profound problem of human existence and the most profound anti-utopia. What Bloch argues is that for religion to become unnecessary (for his is an atheistic position, if one that can only be misunderstood by merely describing it as atheistic), Marxism must absorb the field of hope represented by the Kingdom. Or, to put it another way, the idea of God must be separated from that of the Kingdom, and repossessed as at least a potential embodiment of true humanness, the *humanum*. The Marxist inheritance of religion involves the abolition of religion, but it also involves the affirmation of faith in a redeemed future which Bloch sees as religion’s positive aspect. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 114-116
In the end, there is no doubt that Bloch’s view of utopia rests on anthropological claims about the nature of human beings and human consciousness, embodied in the concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious, as well as on cosmological claims about the unfinishedness of the world and real possibility embodied in the Not-Yet-Become. These, as well as the political claim that Marxism makes concrete utopia a real possibility, are contestable, but there are other reasons why Bloch’s work has not had more impact outside the realms of theology. For most readers the problem of whether or not Bloch is orthodoxly Marxist is not a burning issue, and rightly so; the question of whether his position is right, or at least useful, is of much greater importance. Yet problems remain for Marxists and non-Marxists alike and Bloch remains difficult to assimilate to either a Marxist or a liberal-humanist tradition. For Marxists, there is a suspicion that Bloch’s Romanticism and mysticism render him fundamentally anti-materialist (although this judgement is far too simple). […] Further, within both Marxist and liberal-humanist traditions in the Anglo-American academic world the predominantly positivist orientation is at odds with the non-verifiable nature of the argument. If Bloch is not hopelessly mystical, he is at least irredeemably evaluative. From the point of view of both these traditions there are major weaknesses in Bloch’s argument: the positing of transcended alienation as a goal disconnected from the process of material production; the emphasis on subjective experience; the failure or refusal to provide clear or verifiable criteria for his distinctions; and a teleology which suggests that history has a goal rather than simply that human beings have purposes. These weaknesses make it difficult to assimilate Bloch’s strengths, which in the end may be more important. Besides the fact that Bloch brings into focus both the question of the function of utopia and the boundaries, if any, of the field of its subject matter, his work transcends the limits of purely intellectual enquiry. He reminds us that utopia involves fundamental questions about the human condition and its future, and he refuses to abandon faith in the possibilities of that future. His legacy is therefore too important to be left solely to theologians. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 121-122
Tillich opens with three assertions about the status of utopia. First, utopia ‘is rooted in the nature of man himself ’. Secondly, it is not possible to understand history without reference to utopia, since human consciousness and action are meaningless without reference to utopia as beginning and end. Thirdly, with clear dependence on Bloch, he argues that ‘all utopias strive to negate the negative … in human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary’. Utopia has both positive and negative characteristics: it contains truth, in so far as it contains the telos, the goal and the purpose of existence; but it also contains untruth, in that it forgets that estrangement is a condition of human existence. Utopia is fruitful in that it opens up possibilities which would have been lost without utopian anticipation; but it is unfruitful in that it is in the nature of the wish to describe impossibilities as real possibilities. Utopia contains power, the power of transformation, and the ‘root of its power is the essential – the ontological – discontent of man in every direction of his being’; but utopia is also impotent in that its negative inevitably leads to failure and disillusion. This contradictory nature of utopia – again defined in terms of function and implicit content – calls for its transcendence. Tillich sees this as accomplished by reference to two orders, the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal is that of the political and social, of immanent utopia. The vertical is that of radical transcendence, the divine, which continually breaks through. In this breaking through, the Kingdom of God actualizes itself in history; but it is always resisted and suppressed, so that fulfilment in the horizontal is only ever partial. Although Tillich’s debt to Bloch is obvious there is also a radical departure here. Bloch did not see estrangement as a necessary feature of the human condition, but as a contingent one. As we have seen, despite the suggestion that utopianising is a fundamental human propensity, Bloch denied the existence of a fixed human nature which would make it possible to posit estrangement as a necessary and universal condition. ‘There is’, he says, ‘no fixed generic essence of man … ; rather the entire course of human history is evidence of a progressive transformation of human nature’. Bloch saw in communism a way out of estrangement, so that utopia was a real possibility. Although there are similarities between Tillich’s notion of radical transcendence and Bloch’s discussion of the fulfilled moment, there is no doubt that Bloch believed more strongly in the possibility of the full actualisation of utopia – at least if the abstract content (which corresponds to Tillich’s negative aspects) were to be eliminated. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 120-121
Levitas - Utopia as Method
Levitas - Utopia as Method - Introduction
A utopian method relevant to the twenty-first century […] is both appropriate and necessary. It provides a critical tool for exposing the limitations of current policy discourses about economic growth and ecological sustainability. It facilitates genuinely holistic thinking about possible futures, combined with reflexivity, provisionality and democratic engagement with the principles and practices of those futures. And it requires us to think about our conceptions of human needs and human flourishing in those possible futures. The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively. Its expressions explore and bring to debate the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. It is thus better understood as a method than a goal – a method elaborated here as the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, or IROS. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xi
The economic and ecological crises mean that change is both essential and inevitable. It is the nature of that change that is in question. We need to think about what kind of social and economic system can deliver secure and sustainable livelihoods and ways of life for all. For those who still think that utopia is about the impossible, what really is impossible is to carry on as we are, with social and economic systems that enrich a few but destroy the environment and impoverish most of the world’s population. Our very survival depends on finding another way of living. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xii
The encounter between sociology and utopia implies reconfiguring sociology itself. Sociology must affirm holism and must extend this to include ‘the environment’, locating our human and social existence within the ‘natural’ or material world. It must embrace the normativity that it has systematically sought to exclude, address the future which it has systematically sought to evade and engage with what it means and might mean to be human. Insistence on the historical determination of human nature distances such existential questions, but all images of the good society unavoidably posit what is necessary for human happiness and human flourishing. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xv
This encounter also implies thinking differently about what constitutes knowledge. It challenges the assumption that sociology constitutes a form of knowledge while utopianism is simply a form of speculation, and seeks to legitimize utopian thought not as a new, but as a repressed, already existing, form of knowledge about possible futures. […] The distinctive feature of knowledge in the contemporary global economy is its commodification. Increasingly, knowledge is not something possessed as part of ‘the commons’, but is privately owned and exploited for profit. All societies restrict access to knowledge, especially knowledge that generates power or profit, but the contemporary extent of this is unprecedented. Knowledge is also very fragmented. This is partly the result of complexity and necessary specialization but is also connected to the institutional organization of knowledge and especially the emergence of separate ‘disciplines’ within universities. The current emphasis on interdisciplinarity is, of course, an attempt to overcome some of these problems and return to more integrated thinking, while discursively reinforcing the primacy of disciplines. This fragmentation accompanies a short-term orientation to problem solving in which the future appears only as an extrapolation of the present: ‘if present trends continue’. Favoured forms of knowledge are those which are non-evaluative and highly specialized and which can be sold as ‘real’ knowledge under the badge of ‘science’. Other, exploratory, evaluative, holistic forms of knowledge do not receive this endorsement. The consequence is a situation better described as the stupid society than the knowledge society. The explication and defense of utopia as method challenges these assumptions. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xv-xvi
The French sociologist André Gorz argued that ‘it is the function of utopias, in the sense the term has assumed in the work of Ernst Bloch or Paul Ricoeur, to provide us with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do’. This reading is supported by Bloch’s claim that ‘utopian conscience-and-knowledge … confutes and judges the existent if it is failing, and failing inhumanly; indeed, first and foremost it provides the standard to measure such facticity precisely as departure from the Right’. This suggests that utopia is at least a regulative ideal, a standpoint or measure for evaluating our circumstances and actions. As such, its literal plausibility and desirability are crucial. But neither Gorz nor Bloch would be content to leave it there, for if utopia is no more than that, it is stripped of the transformative capacity that both of them intend – a transformation both of existential experience and of the objective structures of the social world that generates that experience. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xvii
Part III maps out the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society as a method, and one which has three aspects. The first of these is an analytical, archaeological mode; the second an ontological mode; and the third a constructive, architectural mode. The architectural mode is precisely what characterizes the literary form of utopia, and gives it its sociological character. It involves the institutional design and delineation of the good society – and, in the case of intentional communities or prefigurative practices, its partial concrete instantiation. The archaeological mode complements this, for it involves the interpellation of absent or implicit elements in political, literary or artistic utopian ‘accounts’. Its similarity with archaeology lies in the excavation of fragments and shards and their recombination into a coherent whole. The point of such archaeology is to lay the underpinning model of the good society open to scrutiny and to public critique. And the ontological mode is concerned precisely with the subjects and agents of utopia, the selves interpellated within it, that utopia encourages or allows. These modes or facets of the utopian method are analytically separable from one another but are also intertwined; for the distinctive characteristics of IROS are its holism and its institutional specificity. Wherever we start in the process of imagining ourselves and our world otherwise, all three modes must eventually come into play. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xvii
There are several advantages of utopian thinking as a method. It is holistic. Unlike political philosophy and political theory, which have been more open than sociology to normative approaches, this holism is expressed at the level of concrete social institutions and processes. It allows, as both Gorz and Bloch suggest, an element of ethical and institutional separation from the present. Although the critical edge of utopianism depends upon imagined alternatives possessing a reasonable degree of internal coherence and at least theoretical possibility, it is less constrained by what now seems immediately possible. Importantly, its explicitly hypothetical character enables us to insist on utopia’s provisionality, reflexivity and dialogic mode. Explicit alternative scenarios for the future are fundamental to any kind of democratic debate. This means envisioning alternatives, but also setting out the images of the good society buried in the constant barrage of political rhetoric and policies. The utopian method involves both making explicit the kinds of society implied in existing political programmes and constructing alternatives. It entails also considering the kinds of people we want to become and that different forms of society will promote or inhibit. Our institutional arrangements affect both the imagination and the reality of human flourishing through the values, skills, capabilities, experiences and relationships they encourage or suppress. To put it another way, utopia as method is concerned with the potential institutions of a just, equitable and sustainable society which begins to provide the conditions for grace. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xviii
Aris Goudouras
Some background on schools of sociology would be beneficial to understand how utopia changes things here.
Levitas - Utopia as Method - Chapter 1, From Terror to Grace
The very term utopia is fraught with difficulty. Its meanings are various and contested in both academic and lay discourse. Thomas More coined the word as the title and locus of his 1516 Utopia in a pun which conflates outopos or no place and eutopos or good place. Consequently utopia is widely understood as an imagined perfect society or wishfully constructed place which does not and cannot exist. Such imaginings are held to be unrealistic so that utopia has connotations of impossibility and fantastical dreaming, divorced from the hard and the joyful realities of the world and life we actually inhabit and where, as Wordsworth put it, ‘we find our happiness, or not at all’. New generations are inducted into the view that utopia is dangerously escapist through popular children’s literature. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry spends two nights gazing at his lost family in the Mirror of Erised, around which runs the inscription ‘Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi’ (I show not your face but your heart’s desire). On the third night, Professor Dumbledore intercepts Harry and tells him that the Mirror of Erised ‘shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. … However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible’. The mirror will be removed and hidden, and Dumbledore counsels Harry that ‘it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live’. Defending utopia entails insisting that the identification and expression of the deepest desires of our hearts and minds, and those of others, is a necessary form of knowledge and of truth. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 3
[In ‘The Concept of Utopia’] I concluded that most definitions rested on one of the form, or the function, or the content of utopian expressions, and that this placed unsatisfactory limits on understanding the historical shifts in the utopian imagination. I argued for greater clarity about usage and in favour of the more open definition of utopia as the expression of desire for a better way of living and of being. This analytic rather than descriptive definition reveals the utopian aspects of forms of cultural expression rather than creating a binary separation between utopia/non-utopia. It allows that utopia may be fragmentary, fleeting, elusive. It mirrors an existential quest which is figured in literature, music, drama and art, and which, as we shall see, Dennis Potter described as looking for the blue. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 4
[…] one element in the transformative process is what Abensour calls the education of desire. Where utopian literature is concerned – and this may be equally true of other artistic forms – Abensour sees the main function as estrangement or making the familiar unfamiliar. The utopian experiment disrupts the taken-for-granted nature of the present. It creates a space in which the reader may, temporarily, experience an alternative configuration of needs, wants and satisfactions. As I argued in *Concept*, the claim here is that utopia works towards an understanding of what is necessary for human fulfillment and towards a broadening, deepening and raising of aspirations in terms different from those dominating the mundane present. Or, as Thompson glosses Abensour: 'And in such an adventure, two things happen: our habitual values (the “commonsense” of bourgeois society) are thrown into disarray. And we enter into Utopia’s proper and new-found space: the education of desire. This is not the same as “a moral education” towards a given end: it is, rather, to open a way to aspiration, to “teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way”.’ [Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Merlin Press 1977, pp. 790–1] This has similarities with Bloch’s idea of *docta spes*, informed or educated hope. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 4-5
In Bloch’s account, music, art and literature not only carry utopian desire but offer a glimpse of what it is that is missing. Although all cultural artefacts are shaped by the social and historical circumstances of their production and reception, Bloch argues that some have an element that cannot be reduced to these conditions. He calls this transcendent element cultural surplus, which produces, at the moment of encounter, the fulfilled moment – a prefiguration of wholeness or a better way of being. Read in this way, utopia does not require the imaginative construction of whole other worlds. It occurs as an embedded element in a wide range of human practice and culture – in the individual and collective creative practices of art as well as in its reproduction and consumption. Utopian method here is primarily hermeneutic. We can explore culture (in its broadest sense) for its utopian aspects, its expression of longing and fulfilment. The strength of this analytical definition is that it encourages the identification of an element that different cultural forms have in common, although in so doing, it may also at times gloss over important differences between them. If we start from here, it is evident that contemporary culture is saturated with utopianism, even (or especially) where there is no figurative representation of an alternative world. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 5
Bloch is frequently represented in utopian studies as giving a kind of blanket endorsement to all forms of ‘utopian thought’. In a way this is true. Yet Bloch can also be quite sardonic, referring to ‘a beautifying mirror which often only reflects how the ruling class wishes the wishes of the weak to be’. He is also adamant that wishful thinking or abstract utopia (which is a start) needs to become will-full thinking in reaching concrete utopia. For Bloch, the development from abstract to concrete utopia is a process rather than a classification, the process of *docta spes*. It is in part a move from the purely fantastic to the genuinely possible. It is also a move from the potentially fragmentary expression of desire to social holism, a move from speculation to praxis and to the social and political pursuit of a better world. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6
The central idea of not yet carries the double sense of not yet (but expected, a future presence) and still not (a current absence and lack). The not yet operates at two levels: the subjective, individual not-yet-conscious, the essentially creative preconscious utopian impulse, that which is on the verge of coming to consciousness; and the objective, external condition of the world, the not-yet-become. The not yet is real; for Bloch, reality includes the horizon of future possibilities and the novum as it comes into being. He refers to the perception of the future in the present as Vor-Schein, pre-appearance or anticipatory illumination. Utopia as forward dreaming is not an esoteric byway of culture nor a distraction from class struggle, but an unavoidable and indispensable element in the production of the future, for ‘the hinge in human history is its producer’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6
The subject position of human flourishing is figured by Bloch in terms of human dignity as the upright gait, ‘the individual who is no longer to be humiliated, enslaved, forsaken, scorned, estranged, annihilated, and deprived of identity’. Bloch concludes The Principle of Hope with the aspiration for the world anticipated as outcome of this process: "But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no-one has yet been: *Heimat*. [Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell 1986, p. 1376.] [The English translation renders Heimat as ‘homeland’. This never captured the resonance of Heimat] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6-7
The most common objections to utopia reflect hostility to the fundamental utopian wish to make the world otherwise. Public discourse and political culture are profoundly anti-utopian, portraying utopia as an impossible quest for perfection whose political consequences are almost necessarily totalitarian. This position is predicated on the climate of the Cold War and the later capitalist triumphalism that accompanied the fall of communist regimes after 1989. It contains two implicit equations: ‘utopia equals totalitarianism equals communism equals Marxism equals socialism’, and ‘communism equals totalitarianism equals fascism’. The founding texts of contemporary anti-utopianism date from the 1940s. Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom argues that all state intervention leads inexorably down the slippery slope to dictatorship. Karl Popper’s 1945 The Open Society and its Enemies and his later lecture on ‘Utopia and Violence’ reinforced the anti-utopian position, as did works by Hannah Arendt, Jacob Talmon and Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s. Norman Cohn’s 1957 The Pursuit of the Millennium made a specific link between medieval millenarianism and both Nazism and communism. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 7
The problems of coercion, terror and violence are of course real. What is at issue is how far such problems are attributable to utopianism. Moreover, laying totalitarianism at the door of utopia is a political move that is intended to make any aspiration to social change impossible. As Jacoby puts it, anti-utopianism is always ‘a political reply to the political project of realizing utopia’. He also points out that utopianism does not consist solely or even primarily of detailed plans intended for implementation. Sargent, the foremost authority on utopian literature, endorses this, saying that ‘very few actual utopias make any pretense to perfection’, and that ‘many utopias welcome the possibility of change’. And yet it remains the case that ‘conventional and scholarly wisdom associates utopian ideas with violence and dictatorship’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 8
If utopia is understood as the expression of the desire for a better way of being, then it is perhaps a (sometimes) secularized version of the spiritual quest to understand who we are, why we are here and how we connect with each other. Both the fulfilled moment and Heimat can be understood in relation to the existential components of alienation. For Marx, alienation had four components. The first two concern the labour process and commodification of products under capitalism. Wage labour is a system in which people sell their labour power, and both the process of work and what is produced are externally controlled and literally alienated or separated from the intention, ownership or control of the worker. This has profound existential consequences which go beyond the material facts of expropriation, exploitation and dispossession. It divides us from each other and from our essential humanity. Marx describes this as alienation from others and alienation from ‘species-being’: in the commodification of our relationships with others they become means to our ends rather than ends in themselves; and the treatment of ourselves as commodities distorts our humanity. Heimat is the expression of a desire for a settled resolution of this alienated condition, while the fulfilled moment is the fleeting glimpse of what such a condition might be. It is a quest for wholeness, for being at home in the world. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 11-12
Tillich’s theology employs what he calls a ‘method of correlation’. It begins with the ontological questions raised by existential philosophy, and seeks answers in terms of what Tillich claims as Christian revelation, but in unconventional terms which can be read by both critics and sympathizers as compatible with atheism. His portrayal of grace bears a secular interpretation, yet one which points to the inadequacy of secular language to encapsulate the human experience and aspiration at issue here. There are, argues Tillich, no adequate substitutes for the terms sin and grace that carry appropriate gravity and intensity. The recovery of their proper meaning ‘leads us down into the depth of our human existence’. Sin, says Tillich, is not an act of wrong conduct and should never be used in the plural. It is a state of separation, something we all experience: ‘separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being’. Separation is part of the human condition, necessarily born from the existential anxiety provoked by the unavoidable knowledge of our inevitable death. Grace is the polar opposite of sin. It entails connection, acceptance, reconciliation, wholeness. ‘Grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 13
Bloch’s project has been described as an attempt to fill the gap into which the Gods were imagined. The longing for Heimat and for the fulfilled moment can also be understood as the quest for a (sometimes) secular form of grace. ‘Grace’ has both secular and religious meanings. Its secular forms are predominantly active: it is the root of gracefulness and graciousness; we may act with good or bad grace. In both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, grace is freely given by God to fallen humanity, independent of human action, will or desert. […] However, grace here is not exactly an existential state. Because it belongs to the supernatural order, it is outside our experience and can be known only by faith. […] Grace is also the defence against death. Thus ‘God does provide grace to heal death’. Such a view of grace is incompatible with a secular understanding, as it depends on belief in a divine giver and thus a divine being.
For Tillich, grace is emphatically not a matter of belief or of moral progress. We are struck by grace: ‘a wave of light breaks into our darkness’. epiphanic quality of the incursion of redeemed experience into the mundane, which transforms both our relation with ourselves and our relations with others: "In the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. We experience the grace of understanding each other’s words. We understand not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry. For even then there is a longing to break through the walls of separation. We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted. … For life belongs to life. And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we.” [Tillich, Theology of Culture, Oxford University Press 1964, p.7-8] The power of the term grace lies both in its intrinsic reference to emotional depth and in its otherness. […] utopia in this sense shares the quest for what Tillich describes as ‘the aspect of depth in the totality of the human spirit’. […] The supposition of utopia as a hermeneutic method is the parallel secular claim, that in many (if not all) aspects of culture, we can recognize the (sometimes) unconscious utopian aspect. Tillich says that ‘in poetry, in visual art, and in music, levels of reality are opened up which can be opened up in no other way. … But in order to do this, something else must be opened up – namely, levels of the soul, levels of our interior reality’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 13-14
Tillich is adamant that the (religious) orientation to ultimate concern must not dissolve itself into art. Utopia too must resist such dissolution. The suggestion that grace might have a transformative effect on social relations points in the direction of Heimat, that projected state in which grace is more accessible and more stable. […] Utopia also entails refusal, the refusal to accept that what is given is enough. It embodies the refusal to accept that living beyond the present is delusional, the refusal to take at face value current judgements of the good or claims that there is no alternative. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 17
[Tillich] concludes by arguing for the transcendence of utopia. Utopia strives to negate the negative in human experience. Truth lies in utopia’s expression of what is, individually and socially, necessary to human fulfilment. Untruth lies in the goal of overcoming that estrangement which – deriving as it does from human finitude – is an inescapable element of experience. Fruitfulness lies in the capacity of utopia to anticipate human fulfilment and thereby to open up real possibilities for the future. Its unfruitfulness is that it can do this only by pushing beyond what is actually possible, by failing to distinguish emergent possibility from impossibility. One might say that Tillich here posits the intrinsic impossibility of a decisive move from abstract to concrete utopia, not just in imagination but in reality. […] […] untruth and unfruitfulness lead also, through the inevitability of disillusion, to impotence. Disillusion is the result of failing to recognize the necessary provisionality of utopian projections Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 17
For Tillich, the transcendence of utopia’s suspension between positive and negative characteristics requires us not to abandon commitment, but to commit ourselves without idolatry, that is to ‘recognize that we are not committed to something absolute but to something preliminary and ambiguous’. […] the shift both in utopian writing and in its criticism in the decades following the publication of Tillich’s essay suggest that provisionality and contingency became deeply embedded in the later utopian imagination and in our retrospective reading of earlier works. Modernity, let alone postmodernity, enforced the understanding of the contingency of imagination and thereby enforced an element of reflexivity and provisionality. The difficulties which Tillich identifies can be overcome by understanding utopia as a method rather than a goal – and this time as a constructive rather than hermeneutic method. Utopian thinking in this sense is not about devising and imposing a blueprint. Rather, it entails holistic thinking about the connections between economic, social, existential and ecological processes in an integrated way. We can then develop alternative possible scenarios for the future and open these up to public debate and democratic decision – insisting always on the provisionality, reflexivity and contingency of what we are able to imagine, and in full awareness that utopian speculation is formed always in the double squeeze of what we are able to imagine and what we are able to imagine as possible. The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society means envisioning the social institutions and social relations of a better society, and thus making a shift from the aesthetic and existential to the social and political – or rather, acknowledging (as critical theory has always done) the interdependence of the existential and the political. For if, to paraphrase John Ruskin, we are concerned with what kind of life is good for human beings and makes them happy, we are necessarily concerned with society as structure, not (just) with the realm of aesthetics. And yet we are still concerned with aesthetics, both because the reading of the aesthetic realm in terms of the utopian impulse involves a philosophical anthropology, a claim about what it is to be fully human, and because the ultimate criterion of judgment of our social arrangements is how far they can deliver the satisfaction of human longing. This raises core questions about the social construction and satisfaction of human needs and the potential for human flourishing, as well as the construction of the subjects and agents of utopia. It is the holism and institutional specificity of the social utopia that provide the critical link between utopia and sociology Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 18-19
Aris Goudouras
Levitas also believes there is an ideological position of sustaining the status quo in neoliberal anti-utopian arguments.
Levitas - Utopia as Method - Chapter 4, Between Sociology and Utopia
The problematic polarity between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ later becomes definitive of sociology. This generates a vantage point in which sociology is the dominant narrative, explaining the various forms and expressions of utopianism in their social contexts as part of cultural anthropology or the history and sociology of culture. If utopia is the expression of what is missing, of the experience of lack in any given society or culture, then a proper understanding of any society must include the consideration of unfulfilled aspirations which it produces. The sociology of utopia defines the legitimate relation between the two. Wells suggests something else. He argues that ‘sociologists cannot help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia’. We must consider the utopian assumptions, the assumptions about what should be, in sociology. That is, rather than confining ourselves to the sociology of utopia, we must consider sociology as utopia, as well as utopia as sociology. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 66-67
[…] literary utopias are always intended – and predominantly read – as a criticism of the present, and thus also embed a sociology of the originating society. They represent and explain the institutions and practices of the society from which they arise, offering accounts of how its substantive irrationalities produce negative outcomes. They contain narratives of the place in history of both originating and alternative societies, of how we got here and how we might get there. They delineate the future as a criticism of the present, and also, as Beaumont emphasizes, reconstruct the present as the prehistory of the future. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 75
Sociology and utopia are similarly engaged in making explicit the processes and relations embedded in the social imaginary, while themselves forming part of it. But they do this in slightly different ways. Sociology foregrounds what utopia backgrounds, while utopia foregrounds what sociology represses. Sociological models are explicitly holistic, descriptive, explanatory and present (or past) oriented. They are, necessarily, imaginary: any model of how society works entails an imaginary reconstitution of society. Sociological models are sometimes explicitly critical, normative and prescriptive, but more usually implicitly so: our very silences shape utopias. Utopian models are explicitly holistic, imaginary, critical, normative, prescriptive and (often) future-oriented. Nevertheless, most of them contain descriptions of present conditions, not just as a foil for the better utopia but as an explanation of how social processes work and therefore what needs to change. In this sense, they are present-oriented. But utopia involves the imaginary reconstitution of society in a slightly different sense: it is the imagining of a reconstituted society, society imagined otherwise, rather than merely society imagined. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 83-84
Levitas - Utopia as Method - Chapter 5, Utopia Denied
The denial of utopia resulted in a triple repression within sociology: repression of the future, of normativity, and of the existential and what it means to be human. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 85
Wells challenges the one point of consensus, namely that sociology should be regarded as, and should aspire to be, a science. Looking back, he said ‘I insisted that in sociology there were no units for treatment, but only one single unit which was human society, and that in consequence the normal scientific method of classification and generalization breaks down’.10 It is an argument against reductionism, and for respecting the level of the social as something indivisible: ‘We cannot put Humanity into a museum, or dry it for examination; our one, single, still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing in the real world with which to compare it’. […] In consequence, ‘Sociology must be neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively and with an element of personality, that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature’. He distinguishes two appropriate literary forms. One involves ‘the fitting of “schemes of interpretation” to history’, anticipating later arguments following Clifford Geertz that sociology, like anthropology, is best understood as ‘thick description’. The second, both ‘smaller in bulk’ but altogether ‘under-rated and neglected’, is the creation and criticism of utopias. Wells suggests a project of utopography to map all the different versions of the ideal society, ‘a sort of dream book of huge dimensions’ and claims this ‘would be the backbone of sociology’. The role of utopia is two-fold, and in both cases the relation with sociology is interpenetrating rather than hierarchical. Given the indivisibility of human society and hence the impossibility of comparative method, utopia provides a virtual point of comparison. Max Weber would not have wholly disagreed with this, since he explicitly describes ideal types or conceptual models as utopias. For Wells, the comparison is also prophetic and normative, measuring what exists against the direction of social development and (simultaneously) against the ideal society. This underpins his view of social action and what sociology is: in A Modern Utopia, he defines sociology as ‘the study of the aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men’s sympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a large proportion of their conduct and personal policy’. He argues that the interpellation of utopias is inevitable, and should be explicit than implicit. […] "There is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what is, without considering what is intended to be. In sociology, without any possibility of evasion, ideas are facts. … I submit it is not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle and express one’s personal version of [the Social Idea], and to measure realities from the standpoint of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the creation of utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology … Sociologists cannot help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia.” [Wells, ‘So-called Science’, pp. 367–8.] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 87
What is distinctive about Wells is that rather than devaluing literature relative to science he recognizes both sociology as utopia and utopia as sociology as legitimate and necessary forms of knowledge. He is right that building alternative scenarios and exploring the interrelationships between elements, structures, systems and processes does result in better understanding of both present realities and future options. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 91
The question of normativity is related to, but not identical with, that of scientificity. Utopia may be rejected as sociology either because of its literary form or because of its evaluative content. In the 1960s, undergraduates were taught that sociology was concerned with what is, not what ought to be, and that these could and should be rigorously separated. The distinction reprised Hobhouse’s inaugural editorial in The Sociological Review: ‘sociological thinking must start with a clear cut distinction between the “is” and the “ought”, between the facts of social life and the conditions on which society actually rests and the ideal to which society should conform’. Less attention was drawn to his following comments on the difficulty of the distinction, to his belief that sociology and social philosophy are intrinsically connected, or to his suggestion that it may sometimes be possible to deduce ought from is. Hobhouse is critical of the danger of collapsing what ought to be into representation of what is actually the case. Again, this suggests that if sociologists are not open about their aspirations for the future, their very silences make utopias. Neither Hobhouse nor Wells thought that the distinction between is and ought implied that sociology should be solely focused on the former. Endorsing the role of utopia as a proper mode of sociological orientation is not to collapse this distinction, but to admit normativity as a proper aspect of sociology itself. […] Wells is surely right that sociologists carry silent utopias in their work, both as substance and as inspiration. Utopia’s exclusion was never absolute, but its presence was persistently denied. It was not recognized as sociology, and the utopian content of sociology was seen as a serious flaw. But sociology contains repressed utopias. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 92
If we understand utopia to be a totalizing (though not therefore totalitarian) representation which is holistic, social, futurelocated, unequivocally better and linked to the present by some identifiable narrative, and one which embeds a view of human flourishing, then postmodernism is profoundly anti-utopian. These positions implied not just a loss of hope in the social, but a loss of belief in it. The quest for utopia in this reading is an irretrievably modernist, and therefore irredeemably flawed, project. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 98
Horkheimer argued in 1937 that traditional social theory was concerned only with explanation and understanding, whereas a properly critical social theory was oriented to critique and to social transformation. […] Horkheimer’s formulation implies a distinction from (and superiority to) ‘ordinary’ social theory and sociology, and that difference lies in the explicit normativity of critical theory, as well as its claims to greater explanatory power. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 98-99
Sociology is comfortable with utopia only as an element in the social imaginary that is the object of explanation. It repeatedly approaches utopia and retreats from it. And yet the impulse towards social transformation, there at the origin of the discipline, does not go away. The warm stream runs underground. Both the general diffusion of utopia across culture (in Bloch’s sense) and the parallels between sociology and utopia (in Wells’s sense) would lead us to expect this. For the excitement and promise of sociology lies in this presence; the disappointment lies in its recurrent repression and denial. Substituting sociology for politics in Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili’s defence of utopia, we might say that: "To be utopian … is the stuff of [sociology], and it first involves subjecting the [society] of the present to critique. Secondly, it involves imagining human communities that do not yet exist and, thirdly, it involves thinking and acting so as to prevent the foreclosure of social possibilities in the present and future.” Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 101-102

Can utopia and sociology be considered knowledge?

Aris Goudouras
I like the transparency regarding the inevitability of normativity.
Aris Goudouras
Postmodernism is anti-utopian when we think about utopia in the traditional (grand-narrative) way. There can actually be a (more open) postmodern utopia.
Levitas - Utopia as Method - Chapter 6, Utopia Revised
By the 1970s, however, change was overtaking both utopian literature and utopian commentary. These were affected by same intellectual and political challenges as social theory, with similar results. An upsurge of political activism in the 1970s stimulated utopian thought, and the very nature of those politics altered both its content and its form. This brought contingency, provisionality and reflexivity centre-stage. But this political impetus overlapped with and gave way to the postmodern turn, in which sociological and systemic analyses were downplayed in favour of questions of representation and literary form. This signalled a retreat from reading utopias as programmatic proposals for social transformation; issues of process rather than structure and form rather than content, or form as content, took priority, while ‘openness’ was preferred to ‘closure’. The risk here is that utopia becomes a vehicle only of critique rather than of transformation. The best work implied a dialectic of openness and closure, transcending that binary through an implicit though not yet conscious treatment of utopia as method. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 103
[…] the impact of postmodernism on the relationship between social theory and utopia was ambiguous: it undermined utopia in the sense of a specification of an alternative social structure, but simultaneously intensified concern with the very desire that is the motive force of utopia in its analytic sense. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 104
For Siebers, aesthetics becomes central to postmodern theory because objects of art are ‘allegories of desire’ and postmodernism, like utopia, turns on questions of desire. This is endorsed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, one of postmodernism’s founding texts. Deleuze and Guattari contest both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The Oedipal triangle, they argue, is a formulaic representation which does not describe the ‘natural’ development of desire, frustration, and healthy transcendence or otherwise. Rather, Freudian psychoanalysis demands that we understand our blocked desires in terms of the Oedipus myth, which both constrains and denies our experience, and proves our desires to have been illegitimate in the first place. Desire should be understood as a much more variable complex of libidinal flows. It is not oriented solely sexually, nor to parental figures, but to fragmentary, partial objects. They argue against Lacan that the centrality of the phallus, like the oedipal triangle, is a totalizing myth, which denies the fragmented character of flows of desire; and it intrinsically links desire to lack, which Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly oppose. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 104
[…] postmodern aesthetics involves the willed transformation of the body by ornament, diet, exercise and surgical intervention. As David Morris argues, ‘utopia in the postmodern era has largely fixed its new location in the solitary, private, individual body’, reflecting ‘a belief that the only valid remaining space of perfection lies … in our own individual flesh: a paradise of curves and muscle’. If utopian thought of all kinds is expressive of a desire for a better way of being, its projection onto the body rather than the body politic is a retreat from hope, at least social hope, to desire. It is a retreat from understanding desire, as Deleuze and Guattari, Reich, and Marcuse did, in terms of a libidinal energy suffusing the realm of the social, and thus fuelling capitalism and fascism as well as their potential utopian alternatives. For these writers, desire may emanate from the body in an essentialist, vitalist way; but it does not stay there. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 105
I think this is a manifestation of the ideological hegemony of individualism and neoliberalism. Desire and change acquire an individualistic character, retreating from any ambitions of transforming the social. Although indeed a big part, I don’t think body and flesh are the sole or even main location of the individualistic “utopia”. I am thinking of “personal growth” and “self-help”, along with the quantitative character of measuring progress. Also, the dream of passive income, making money, being more productive etc.
Bloch is more sympathetic, regarding even the most trivial imaginings as proleptic social critique. He recognizes that utopian longing is not necessarily profound: ‘Most people in the street look as if they are thinking about something else entirely. The something else is predominantly money, but also what it could be changed into’. A shop window proclaims ‘Utopia: Everything Five Pounds’. People may take refuge in daydreams about winning the lottery and having the resources for more substantive escape. Most lottery winners buy a new house. This creation of a personal utopian enclave is underscored in twenty-firstcentury Britain by the prevalence of television programmes dedicated to property transformation on all scales, including the renovation of the Country House and (as Mumford noted a hundred years earlier) its miniature suburban imitation. Such programmes also emphasize the reciprocal process of the conversion of utopian capital back into its economic form. The travel industry constitutes another repository of compensatory utopianism, advertised in explicitly utopian and paradisical terms. Both dreams imaginatively transform only the dreamer’s place in the world, not the world itself, although property markets, the DIY industry and the travel industry of course have profound physical, social and economic effects both locally and globally. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 107-108
Utopia may do more than articulate through compensatory fantasies the unsatisfactory nature of present reality. As critique it foregrounds and makes explicit this inadequacy, identifying the source of dissatisfaction as something more systemic, more general than one’s own place in the world. A sociological imagination is brought into play and personal troubles become public issues. This is a necessary though not sufficient condition for utopia’s strongest function, that of change. For many, utopia’s importance lies its capacity to embody hope rather than simply desire and to inspire the pursuit of a world transformed. Williams argued that this willed transformation of the social world was an essential characteristic of the utopian mode, and that without it, there was the danger of utopia settling into ‘isolated and in the end sentimental ‘desire’, a mode of living with alienation’. Such willed transformation is the target of political and ideological anti-utopianism. But it demands a holistic, sociological approach, normative judgement and political commitment, all called in question by the social and cultural conditions of late modernity. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 108
Abensour and his reading of “News from Nowhere”
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

Acknowledged provisional character of utopias.

Heuristic instead of systematic mode.

The primary function is the education of desire, estrangement from the current state of affairs and defamiliarizing the familiar.

The “utopian marvelous” as an expression of desire to break with the current mundanity and limits and dream and live differently.

“Permanent utopia” always renewing itself, putting concrete institutions to test and criticism through an authentic democracy.

“News from Nowhere” literary form and serial publication working to open up a dialogue on the text itself when it was published (according to Abensour).

Re-reading Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” and Wells’ “A Modern Utopia”
This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it on one retina. The picture of a solid thing, although it is flattened and simplified, is not necessarily a lie. Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding as this Utopia must come. First here, first there, single men and then groups of men will fall into line – not indeed with my poor faulty hesitating suggestions – but with a great and comprehensive plan wrought out by many minds and in many tongues. It is just because my plan is faulty, because it mis-states so much, and omits so much, that they do not now fall in. It will not be like my dream, the world that is coming. My dream is just my own poor dream, the thing sufficient for me. We fail in comprehension, we fail so variously and abundantly. We see as much as it is serviceable for us to see and no further. But the fresh undaunted generations come to take our work beyond our utmost effort, beyond the range of our ideas. Wells, Modern Utopia (Chapman and Hall, 1905), p. 369-370

Re-reading Bellamy’s “Looking Backward”

Acknowledgment that selfishenss will continue to exist and that measurements need to be taken (e.g. material equality) so that it’s reduced to a minimum (Blavatsky and the Theosophical writers).

Re-reading Wells’ “A Modern Utopia”

Human beings are not intended to be perfect of perfectible. There is the potential for conflicts and the need for institutions to resolve them.

There is an interesting reluctance of the scarred subject of the present world to enter and live in the utopian world. Acknowledgement of a tension between the larger systemic concern and the individual, human preoccupation with self and relationship.

There is acknowledgement of provisionality and contingency on behalf of Wells.

Such stories include ‘downsizing’, trading fast-paced urban living and visible material consumption for an imagined higher quality of social relationships. They may be delusionary, entailing forms of rural life that require high levels of capital available only to the rich, and not necessarily implying smaller ecological footprints; but they do envision an alternative set of desires and satisfactions. These narratives are not always liberatory. There is overwhelming cultural pressure to monitor and control our bodies through diet and exercise: imagining the perfect honed and healthy – and especially not obese – self points to downsizing of persons rather than lifestyles. Health and longevity become an individual responsibility, and physical imperfection, illness and death itself marks of failure. Managerial texts offer technologies of self prescribing conformity to models of personal behaviour and promising financial and social success: they are perhaps the only dreams the powerful wish us to have, offering as they do a more comfortable fit between our disciplined selves and the demands and satisfactions generated by the world we currently inhabit. Imagining ourselves otherwise is thus imposed on us and extracted from us. Structural as well as ideological processes are at work here. Richard Sennett argues that character, in the sense of a coherent and consistent developmental narrative of self depends crucially on the possibility of stable employment. If this is true at an individual level, the possibility and nature of collective narratives also depends on structural and institutional processes, a point Marx made very clear in relation to class consciousness. Envisaging ones desires and capacities somewhat changed is an everyday occurrence. The question of how this is or may be oriented to social transformation is a social and political question, not primarily one of human imaginative capacities. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 122-123
Jameson: Utopia as the imperative to desire alternatives but confined within ideological limits
For Jameson, as for Abensour, the purpose of utopian fiction is no longer to provide an outline of a social system to be interrogated in terms of its structural properties, still less treated as a goal. Utopia is important less for what is imagined than for the act of imagination itself, a process which disrupts the closure of the present: ‘Utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them’. For Jameson, as for Abensour, this process circles around desire. His 2005 Archaeologies of the Future is subtitled The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Thus ‘we might think of the new onset of the Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called utopia in the first place’ – a passage bearing a remarkable similarity to Abensour’s. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 119-120
For Jameson, as for Abensour, form is more important than content here, and the function of utopian writing is negation and critique, not building an alternative. Utopia’s proper role is not to resolve tensions, but to hold them in mutual opposition. Any apparent resolution in an institutional proposal is necessarily ideological: “[...] we have been plagued by the perpetual reversion of difference and otherness into the same, and the discovery that our most energetic leaps into radical alternatives were little more than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation.” Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 120
Failure is an inevitable part of the process of trying to think utopia itself rather than a characteristic of particular representations. He [Jameson] argues (like Marx and Morris) that utopia is literally unimaginable. The imaginable always falls short of utopia, so that actual utopian texts ‘bring home in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself; and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners’. Utopias enable us to explore the structural limits of what is thinkable, ‘in order to get a better sense of what it is about the future that we are unable or unwilling to imagine’. Thus ‘the true vocation of the utopian narrative begins to rise to the surface – to confront us with our own incapacity to imagine Utopia’. The function of the utopian text can only be ‘to provoke … to jar the mind into some heightened but unconceptualizable consciousness of its own powers, functions, aims and structural limits’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 120-121
Jameson proposes that libidinal investment in utopia is difficult because it is impossible to imagine ourselves radically otherwise: the prospect of annihilation of one’s actually existing self evokes existential terror. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 121
Recognizing provisionality, reflexivity, dialogue and an element of inevitable failure may be useful. Overemphasis on openness, process and impossibility is not, and sidestepping the substance of imagined alternatives can go too far. Abensour and Jameson are Marxists, but perhaps over-influenced by understanding that any future we envision will of course not come to pass. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 124

The limits of utopia

Utopian constructions are always ideologically mediated.

Ideology constrains what is thinkable, utopia exposes those boundaries.

There is existential terror accompanying utopia because it often involves the annihilation of one’s current self.

Harvey takes issue with writers who want to keep choices about the future endlessly open, or want to keep their own hands clean of prescription. Eternal openness leaves utopia as ‘a pure signifier of hope destined never to acquire a material referent’. It is politically evasive. It entails ‘a failure to recognize that the materialization of anything requires, at least for a time, closure around a particular set of institutional arrangements and a particular spatial form and that the act of closure is in itself a material statement that carries its own authority in human affairs’. The refusal of closure is a refusal to take responsibility around the question of that authority. Without such closure, we cannot define or discuss where we might want, collectively, to go. Of course we are unable to ‘leap outside of the dialectic and imagine that we are not embedded and limited by the institutional worlds and built environments we have already created’; by implication, then, our imagined alternatives must be provisional and accompanied by some reflexive awareness. But eternal openness offers no direction home. It leaves us, says Harvey, quoting Roberto Unger, ‘torn between dreams that seem unrealizable and prospects that hardly seem to matter’. Harvey’s […] ongoing commitment to social change, reminds us that desire is not enough and returns us to the question of hope. Only thus can we rescue transformative political thought or future-oriented sociology from the excesses of postmodern literary and social theory. Critique which disrupts the ideological closure of the present is essential, but it is even more important to disrupt the structural closure of the present. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 124-125
Even critique depends on some degree of plausibility of the utopian alternative. If this is absent, dreaming the world otherwise risks appearing to be compensatory fantasy, mere wishful thinking. Hope requires us to imagine a potential new society and to imagine it as possible. The transformative function of utopia depends on preserving utopian desire, but offering (as Morris does) an argument about the conditions of utopia’s (partial) realization and desire’s (partial) fulfilment. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 124-125
Bloch’s concrete utopia or the vision Morris sought to keep before the eyes of the working classes require that we read utopias literally and take them seriously in that mode, although they certainly do not require that we only read them in this mode. Without a certain element of closure, specificity, commitment and literalism about what would actually be entailed in practice, serious criticism is impossible. If utopia is constrained both by possible imagination and imagined possibility, the political task is to push outwards the limits of both. The imagination and critique of utopian alternatives as speculative sociologies of the future generates forms of knowledge, of social systems that are at least theoretically possible and of tendencies in the real that might make them potentially really possible. We are embedded in conditions which resist both contrary imagination and oppositional action. Both the anti-utopian present and our understanding of contingency mean our attempts at the imaginary reconstitution of society must be provisional, reflexive and dialogic and, as Wells said, subject to exhaustive criticism. But the conditions under which we live, which are not of our own choosing, require us to create radically altered means of livelihood, ways of life and structures of feeling. Only a form of utopian thought and of reading utopia that engages with the actual institutional structure of the present and the potential institutional structure of the future can help us here, and this demands an understanding of utopia as method rather than as goal. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 125-126
The feminist turn in utopian works in the 70s (Angelica Bammer)
Bammer’s Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s is primarily concerned not with historical recovery, but with the theoretical relationship between feminism and utopianism, and in particular the impact of feminism on the idea of utopia itself. She argues that ‘cumulatively, the feminisms of the 1970s recuperated the concept of the utopian as a vital dimension of a radical politics. “I want to counter the notion of the utopia as unreal with the proposition that the utopian is powerfully real in the sense that hope and desire (and even fantasies) are real, never ‘merely’ fantasy. It is a force that moves and shapes history.” Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 108-109
Bammer locates particular texts and textual strategies in the different politics of the United States, France and East and West Germany, noting that actual utopias are always historically situated and thus contain both utopian and ideological elements; the focus on gender inequality is sometimes accompanied by alarming blindness to questions of ethnicity and class. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 109
against [stasis and perfection] she [Bammer] posits a shift from timelessness into time that is also a move towards agency in which women become the subjects of history. For Bammer feminism itself is intrinsically utopian. It is driven by anticipation, by the recognition of patriarchy as an unnatural state, and by the belief in and pursuit of an alternative. But the nature of that alternative is hard to define because women have first to experience and articulate their authentic experience in the world. As we struggle to find this, questions of embodiment and of language become central, and utopia is redefined in a new and critical way, as a journey and not a goal. This demands an open and indeterminate future, which refuses the ‘illusory coherence’ of a fully worked-out alternative. Bammer argues that conventional utopias are inherently conservative by virtue of their form; their transformative potential is undermined by their closure, their ‘apparatus of self-containment’. Feminist utopianism, as Lucy Sargisson also argues, thus opens up both the concept and the content of utopia. The openness, the radical indeterminacy of consciousness and of the future, are seen as feminism’s contribution to a new utopianism. Bammer’s characterization of the place of utopia within the process of social change implies utopia as method: we should think of utopia not as antithesis, but as ‘a series of utopian moments within the shifting configurations of the possible’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 109
Critical utopias in Moylan’s “Demand the Impossible”
The ‘critical utopia’ does not offer an unequivocal alternative. It is, for Moylan, critical in three senses: it implies an Enlightenment sense of critique; a postmodern reflexivity and provisionality; and a political critical mass leading to change – the latter existing by implication outside the text. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 111
Dystopia portrays the darkness of the lived moment, the difficulty of finding a way out of a totalizing system. It is not necessarily anti-utopian: anti-utopianism actively opposes the imagination and pursuit of alternatives. Much hangs on whether the dystopia points to unremitting closure or to another possible future, and the ending and framing of the dystopia is crucial here. Baccolini and Moylan argue that these are dystopian ‘texts that maintain a utopian impulse’. Their emphasis on totality and transformation, argues Moylan, is one of the key distinctions between the critical and the classical dystopia. They both intend political change and inscribe it in the text by way of eutopian enclaves and appendices that indicate the dystopian world is history. But if the critical dystopia can be a vehicle of resistance, it is much less able to register transformation and redemption. It may point to the exit, but it does not suggest what we might find, or make, when we leave. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 110-111
My own more pessimistic view is that the political impetus and intent of the critical utopia is not necessarily matched by political effectiveness. This depends on the conditions of cultural reproduction. A politically quiescent context and reading enables them to function only as critique. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 111
On the other hand, the very reflexivity and provisionality means they can be seen as examples of utopia as method – the self-conscious promotion of interrogation of possible alternative futures from a position which registers both the necessary indeterminacy of the future and the plurality of the agents who will create it. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 111
Moylan also argues that the utopias published in the 1970s, many of them feminist, differ in both form and content from those of the fin de siècle. These works, for which Moylan coined the term ‘critical utopias’, have a more fragmented narrative structure than earlier utopias. The discrete register of plot and character is foregrounded; the iconic register, describing the social structure of both utopian society and its foil, recedes. Again, the emphasis is on subjects and on agency. As sociology, the combination of discrete and iconic registers is a double perspective on structure and agency; in Boltanski’s terms, it combines exteriority and interiority. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 110
The shift to a greater pluralism, provisionality and reflexivity in fictional utopias is paralleled in a theoretical commentary which treats utopia as heuristic rather than telic. Like the utopias themselves, this focuses on process rather than content, but the process is of dialogue with, rather than within, the text. Neo-Marxism, critical theory, postmodernism, and feminism converge in exploring utopia in terms of desire, in terms of form and process rather than content, in terms of how the text works rather than what it means. It is a move which has encouraged rich and deep readings of literary texts, surfacing utopian surplus and dystopian shadows that overspill the conscious intentions of authors. But this preoccupation with representation rather than figuration, or with the process of representation rather than what is represented, again tends to limit the possible function of both utopia and literary and social theory to one of critique. For Bammer, the two movements of feminism and deconstruction that converged in the 1970s are presented as unproblematically congruent. But the postmodern and deconstructive turn can also pull in the opposite direction, away from the political intention of the critical utopia. It also raises the question of whether there has, in fact, been a profound change in the nature of utopian writing, or whether utopian texts are simply read differently in the context of late modernity. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 111-112
[In News from Nowhere] Political difference is resolved through direct democracy. The system works for differences of opinion about the common interest; no fundamental differences of interest arise. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, an exemplar of the critical utopia, brings cultural difference and conflicts of interest into the utopian society, Mattapoisett, itself, with cultural pluralism deliberately and actively separated from any connection with ‘race’. She posits the need for institutional processes to address differences of interest. The process of conflict resolution is extended discussion: ‘We argue. … How else?’. This continues until agreement is reached; after a major dispute, the winners have to feed and give presents to the losers. Contra Gray, there is here no claim that utopia is a perfect world where all desires and all interests are harmonized. But the problem with ‘we argue, how else?’ – especially in a society which is not culturally homogeneous – is the presumption that agreement will be reached. This assumes that shared interests will override conflicting ones. It also assumes agreement over the terms of the debate, the procedures of discussion, the frame of the argument. A more radical challenge to the utopian imagination arises if the frame of argument is contested. How can utopia handle absence of agreement on the rules of the game as well as conflicts of interest? This difficulty contributes to the dystopian turn. If utopia is a space for the fictional resolution of problems that humankind has not (yet) solved, incommensurability can only enter as a dystopian shadow. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 111-112
Like Bammer, Moylan sees the new utopianism as a product of the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Authors like Marge Piercy were politically involved and trying to live differently; texts, like Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground, were part of the building of the political movements themselves. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 110
For Moylan, the societies portrayed are decentralized and differentiated. Their values and institutions are interrogated within the utopian society and less unequivocally endorsed. The gap between individual experience and public discourse in utopia itself, Boltanski’s unease, is opened up: this is a strong theme in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Many novels contain possible dystopian as well as utopian futures, breaking down the sense of an inevitable move towards utopia and refusing grand narrative. Such texts ‘reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 110

90s: Dystopian elements start to dominate

Examples: The Truman Show, The Matrix

“Critical” utopian texts of the 70s a product of the politics of the 60s and 70s.

In the literary works, the emphasis is on subjects and agency rather than the overall social structure.

The societies portrayed are differentiated and decentralized, also containing dystopian elements. Break with grand narrative & pacified schemes.

Reading Group Presentation

Στο κεφάλαιο αυτό η Levitas καταπιάνεται με την εξέλιξη της ουτοπικής σκέψης αλλά και του πεδίου των ουτοπικών σπουδών από τη δεκαετία του 1970 και έπειτα.

Κεντρικές θέσεις

Η Levitas ασκεί κριτική στην υπερβολική έμφαση στην αφηρημένη λειτουργία της ουτοπίας ως αγωγή της επιθυμίας. Τάσσεται υπέρ των πιο συγκεκριμένων προγραμματικών ουτοπιών και της ουτοπίας ως μεθόδου, αναγνωρίζοντας όλα τα “αλλά” και τους προβληματισμούς που προσέθεσε ο μεταμοντερνισμός.

Από τους θεωρητικούς που αναφέρει μου φαίνεται πιο κοντά στην Bammer και στον Harvey. Από εκείνους που έγραψαν ουτοπίες μου φαίνεται κοντά στον Wells και στον Morris.

Προς εμβάθυνση / Ενδιαφέρουσες θεματικές

Ουτοπία και υποκειμενικότητα. Η πρόσδεσή μας στις υπάρχουσες ταυτότητές μας ως εμπόδιο στην πραγμάτωση των ουτοπικών μας επιθυμιών. Πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα κριτική εδώ από τη σχολή της ανάλυσης λόγου και κριτικής της ιδεολογίας (Althusser, Laclau, Zizek, Butler, Stavrakakis etc).

Ατομικιστικές επιθυμίες που αναπαράγουν κυρίαρχα πρότυπα: Είναι ουτοπικές κατά Bloch αλλά κατά τη γνώμη μου όχι. Τις έχει ενισχύσει πράγματι ο μεταμοντερνισμός; Ίσως με τη μειωμένη έμφαση που δείχνει στις κοινωνικές δομές, αλλά δε νομίζω ότι μπορούμε να “χρεώσουμε” το φαινόμενο αυτό τόσο στον μεταμοντερνισμό όσο στην κυριαρχία του νεοφιλελευθερισμού και του ατομικισμού.

Μεταμοντερνισμός - Lyotard?

Emergence and history of utopian studies

Utopia and post-modernism

Postmodernism undermined utopia in the sense of a detailed blueprint.

But it also intensified concern with the concept of desire (which is central to the concept of utopia itself, according to Levitas).

Emphasis on process and representation rather than production, consumption and distribution (Habermas).

Loss of territoriality and finality.

Until the 2010s, class loses its centrality among certain theorists.

Desire in Deleuze & Guattari

Fragmented complex of libidinal flows

Opposed to “totalizing” myths like Oedipus and the Phallus

Opposed to linking desire to lack

Levitas - Utopia as Method - Chapter 7, The Return of the Repressed
The most frequent qualification is that utopia should be, or in particular cases is, ‘realistic’ or ‘feasible’. This recurs across disciplines and outside the academy in relation to both cognitive models and prefigurative practices. […] Qualifying utopia as realistic sets limits on its legitimacy, potentially confining it to a conservative reading of the present or binding imagination too closely to what can be imagined as possible rather than what can possibly be imagined. What remains may be only, in Mannheim’s terms, a form of ideology. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 129
The tension between realism and utopia occurs in relation to both abstract theory and practical politics, where it is expressed in the opposition between pragmatism and utopia. Karl Popper identified utopia with intellectual and social closure, insisting on the superiority of gradual and piecemeal change. The usual meaning of political pragmatism, more usually contrasted with ideology, is pursuit of ‘what works’. It prioritises short-term fixes for problems within the current system; questions of the viability or justice of that system itself, and certainly radical alternatives, are placed outside legitimate political debate. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 132

Thinking strategically, what is the value of pragmatism? Is it synonymous with reformism?