nav-icons nav-icons
Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Progress in Political Economy (PPE)
LOGIN REGISTER
LOGIN
REGISTER
linklink
  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Making Global Society
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • PPExchanges
  • Pedagogy
    • IPEEL Of The Environmental Crisis
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
Environmental Justice 2017 – Looking Back, Looking Forward
Previous
Bill Dunn, Marx, Keynes, and the Classics: Towards a Theory of Unemployment that is Both General and Specific
Next

Rethinking Utopia

by David Bell on March 16, 2017

Rethinking Utopia

David Bell | March 16, 2017

Tags: utopia
utopia
| 0 668

We all know the story of utopia. It’s a tragic narrative in which hopes, dreams and projects oriented to a better world give way to ‘totalitarianism’. ‘Nice ideas on paper’ prove ‘disastrous in practice’. Utopia itself is disgraced, revealed as nothing more than dystopia disguised by false promises and enforced through violence. We are so over that. We know better now. Our present is post-utopian.

Such glib truisms don’t extend to an analysis of the utopianism inherent to our dystopian present, of course; nor to the violence through which this present reproduces itself. As many have noted, we are not living after utopia but through its disavowal. The post utopian is the most utopian (with apologies to Deterritorial Support Group).

Given this, the task I set myself in my recently published book Rethinking Utopia was, well, to rethink utopia (though I must confess, the publisher chose the title, and this ‘rethinking’ is not mine alone but is the product of a general intellect that citation can never capture). I mobilise ‘utopia’ as a vibrant, slippery concept helping us to navigate the present; and to struggle within, against and beyond it. I explore dystopia, anti-utopianism and the post-utopian too: reading our world through operations of power and subjectivity in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We and Michael Winterbottom’s 2003 film Code 46. These texts refuse liberalism’s anti-utopian-post-utopianism even as the form to which they belong – dystopia – is marshalled in its support, and offer tantalising (if problematic) suggestions for a recalibration of utopianism.

Rethinking Utopia is grounded in the tradition of utopian studies, and I explore how the interdisciplinary field has revitalised utopia such that it becomes a tool for conflict and struggle rather than finality and certainty. However, I argue that in doing so it often conflates utopia with utopianism, or rejects the former in favour of the latter. And whilst I reject the liberal critique of utopian violence as apologism for a violent status quo, I note that attention must be paid to utopianism’s role in that status quo by noting its historic imbrication with state and colonial power.

This provides me with a platform to rearticulate utopia in a more normative manner: a ‘utopian utopianism’, perhaps. Doing so means rejecting the ‘harmony’ with which utopia has so often been associated in favour of a politics of dissonance. It means denying the possibility not just of our end of history, but of any end of history. It means working against the ontologies and epistemologies of patriarchal, racist, statist, colonial utopianism.

I seek to do so by paying utopia a ‘subversive fidelity’ through its three constituent terms – ‘good’ (eu), ‘no’ (ou) and ‘place’ (topos) – and their ‘ambiguous’, dissonant relations. The works of Gilles Deleuze, Sara Ahmed and Doreen Massey are particularly important to this end, and are explored alongside, through and within musical free improvisation, radical experiments in education and Anarres – the anarcho-communist world in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed; as well as the (anti-anti)utopian glimpses in We and Code 46 and a magpie’s array of Indigenous, queer, communist, and anti-racist praxis. Joyful and joy-killing place-making practices are connected across time and space, allowing the book to undo the finality of any world. And perhaps, even, to undo utopia itself…

Share this post

  • Tweet
  • Share Post:

Author: David Bell

David M. Bell is the Research Associate on and Co-ordinator of the 'Imaginaries of the Future: Historicizing the Present' Leverhulme International Research Network, based in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, UK.

Related Posts

 

Utopia

Can the notion of ‘utopia’ be explained in 500 words? This was the challenge that Mark Steven set for me in relation to his exciting new book entitled,&n...

 

Anarchism and Utopianism

Utopia is a complex and contested concept that has been explored elsewhere here on the PPE blog by David Bell. My own work has also covered the concept of utopia in detail, nota...

 

Utopia and Economic Development

From the very beginning, the area of mainstream economics devoted to Third World development has been imbued with a utopian impulse. The basic idea has been that traditional soc...

 

Utopia and Value Theory

Mainstream economists refer to it as price theory, everyone else value theory. But whatever it’s called, it’s at the center of economists’ differing explanatio...

Comments

Leave a Response Cancel reply


Join our mailing list

© Progress in Political Economy (PPE)

Privacy | Designed by Nucleo | Terms and Conditions

  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Making Global Society
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • PPExchanges
  • Pedagogy
    • IPEEL Of The Environmental Crisis
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
 

Loading Comments...