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