Further reflections on being a utopian in these times

In this essay (a revision of my contribution at the closing session of the Imaginaries of the Future Leverhulme Network held in London in September 2017), I offer a situated commentary (by ‘me’) on ‘ourselves’ (and I know that category has to be deconstructed, complicated, exploded, erased, and yet retained) as utopians and on the work ‘we’ do, and can do (for this was a utopian conference). I begin with a reflection on the current mobilization of the term dystopia as a signifier for our times, and as I do so I offer a counterpoint to the ideological appropriation of dystopia by way of my own argument in Scraps of the Untainted Sky (Westview 2000) for the militant pessimism of the critical dystopia. I then comment on several interrelated matters: the role of the utopian as scholar and as intellectual; the context and import of our work, in the academy and in the world; the utopian problematic (in its inclusion of the utopian object of study and utopia as method); and the necessity, indeed urgency, of ‘our’ work in these critical times. My aim is tease out the utopian surplus within the utopian formatio

The necessity of hope in dystopian times: A critical reflection

n the face of the dire conditions of today’s global order, for those aiming to transform this reality in the spirit of a just, equal, and ecologically healthy existence for all of humanity and nature, it is time for the political exercise of the transformative utopian impulse. Yet, in the face of such utopian praxis, capitalism’s retrieval mechanism “subsumes and consumes” (Mark Fisher) the radical potential of utopianism. A key component of this apparatus can be seen in the contemporary upsurge of “dystopian” expression (especially in literature, film, and television). While this indulgent cooptation flourishes on the dark side of the neoliberal street, a concomitant enclosure of “eutopian” sensibility further restricts utopia’s anticipatory impulse by managed innovations that shrink this energy into a resigned “dystopian” structure of feeling as the radical utopian project itself is compromised through practices of disciplined improvement within the declared “realism” of the existing order. In this essay (writing as a utopian, and especially a teacher, and in the spirt of collegial utopian discourse), I discuss two symptomatic texts which I argue are imbricated within this dystopian ambience by way of a critique that enables me to examine such works as they play out within this current sociocultural order. On one hand, and with great respect for its internationally-recognized author, I read the text of Dystopia: A Natural History, by Gregory Claeys, as a (however unintended) component of this hegemonic structure of feeling rather than a challenge to it. On the other hand, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Dystopia Now” as a negation of that negation, as the sf author and public intellectual takes up an anti-anti-utopian stance that refuses the containment field of a “seemingly omnipresent reality principle” that informs today’s “fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism” and reasserts the radical utopian project (Robinson)