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