The Past and Future of Utopian Studies

This critical forum on “The Past and Future of Utopian Studies” originated as a roundtable discussion at the conference, “Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies,” held at the University of Brighton in July 2022. The title of the conference reflected a determination on the part of the program coordination team—Patricia McManus (University of Brighton), Laurence Davis (University College Cork), Siân Adiseshiah (Loughborough University), Antonis Balasopoulos (University of Cyprus), Tom Moylan (University of Limerick), Michael G. Kelly (University of Limerick), Emrah Atasoy (Cappadocia University), and Ross Sparkes (University of Brighton)— to make the conference an inclusive and potentially radically transformative event, one that would challenge entrenched orthodoxies in the field of utopian studies and help scholars and activists chart new directions in utopian scholarship and practice.This transformative ethos was reflected in the collaboratively produced conference call for papers, which stipulated that the event was dedicated to an exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary praxis. The conference, we emphasized, was intended to create a welcoming and broadly inclusive space where participants could explore the role of utopian thinking, imagination, and practice in addressing some of the fundamental challenges of our times. Towards this end we appended to the call a section, entitled “USS and Utopia Beyond the University,” in which we noted that our aim was to design a program that would center work intended to blur or break the well-policed and expensive borders between the university and the communities within which universities sit. We proposed, and indeed later fulfilled the promise, to work with local activists in Brighton to establish some in-person and remote-access events that would highlight and explore radical hope as it is present in the politics of migrant solidarity, co-housing initiatives, and anarchist and queer groups and spaces. We also explicitly invited contributions from those working outside the formal limits of academia or who were inside academic spaces pushing out. The enthusiastic response to the call for papers exceeded all expectations, and the resulting conference program was exceptionally varied and promising and indeed suggestive of many possible new directions in utopian studies. What follows in this special section of Utopian Studies is a product of one very lively five-person conference panel that I co-organized with Antonis Balasopoulos (University of Cyprus).The chief impetus for the transformation from conference panel to special journal section was an email invitation from the then-editor of Utopian Studies, who had attended the session and who subsequently invited us to revise and elaborate the talks for publication in the journal. Interestingly, the journal editor suggested that the contributions might provide answers to two questions: first, “where do you see the value of utopian studies in our dark times?” and second, “how can utopia and utopianism inspire activism and political changes?”In response, and speaking in my capacity as the panel chair and prospective editor of the special section, I noted that while it would be fascinating to see the contributors address questions of the value of utopian studies in our dark times, and specifically how utopia and utopianism might inspire activism and political change, such a remit would not get to the heart of what was distinctive about either our panel or the Brighton conference as a whole. The Brighton conference was dedicated specifically to an exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary practice. And its title, “Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies” suggested that utopia can be a catalyst for transformative change only if the study of utopia(s) is itself open, or “opened,” to radical influences. In our panel we explored both the past and some possible futures of utopian studies and considered “new directions” that might facilitate more radical utopian thinking and revolutionary practice. While all of the contributors celebrated utopia’s transformative potential, they also criticized aspects of the field of utopian studies that arguably have limited that transformative potential, including its “blind spots” in relation to the “organizational imaginary” (Balasopoulos), its own privileged “whiteness” and colonial prerogatives (Edwards), its Anglo-American focus and tendency to overlook significant social movements outside this ambit (Ramírez Blanco), complicity with neoliberal funding imperatives (Stock), and future-oriented abstraction away from the grounded realities of terra in a time of ecological collapse (Alberro).I therefore proposed as an alternative that the publication take the form of a critical dialogue, not exclusively or even primarily about what utopian studies in its current form can contribute to radical social change, but rather about what might need to change in the field for utopian studies potentially to be such a catalyst. Caroline Edwards also helpfully recommended that the individual pieces be followed by a “Response” section in which all the contributors would have an opportunity to respond briefly to the provocations of their colleagues.The result of these creative conversations, followed by several rounds of careful editing, is the special section that you the reader now see before you. In the space remaining in my editor’s remarks, I will introduce the individual pieces, highlight significant areas of agreement and debate, and conclude by exploring some of the implications of one such debate for the future of utopian studies.In his “Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive Utopianism,” Antonis Balasopoulos examines anti-utopian denunciations of blueprint or programmatic utopias during the Cold War period and argues that these critiques were motivated not simply by liberal capitalist opposition to state planning and regulation in so-called actually existing socialism, but also by the ideological need to normalize and legitimate the transition within Western capitalist societies to “disorganized capitalism.” Against such ideological mystification Balasopoulos reminds us of some of the positive features of the utopian organizational imaginary. He also maintains provocatively that “without the laborious cognitive mapping of both existing and alternative social orders involved in at least the more powerful ‘blueprint utopias,’ we become increasingly impotent to imagine historical change itself.”In “Hope Draped in Black: Decolonizing Utopian Studies,” Caroline Edwards opens her contribution with the observation that while utopian scholars have begun to unravel the colonial entanglements of utopianism’s origins, very few have incorporated the perspectives, aesthetics, and theoretical work of Black scholars themselves. This leads her to pose a thought-provoking question, namely, what does utopian studies have to learn from critical race theory, Black studies, and ideas of Black futurity? Edwards’s wide-ranging “sketch” of a preliminary response encompasses Black literary and cultural critiques of hegemonic Western conceptions of historical progress, counterpoetics, alternative temporalities, and queer Black imaginings of the utopian possibilities of the inhuman at a time of escalating ecocatastrophe. All of these, Edwards maintains, are compelling examples of a Black utopianism “that is opening up rich areas of scholarly inquiry that do not see themselves as utopian, do not name themselves as such, and yet from which utopian studies has much to learn.”Like Caroline Edwards, Julia Ramírez-Blanco urges utopian studies scholars to devote more and better attention to the rich contributions of nonwhite scholars and activists, including in the Spanish-speaking world. The primary foci of her contribution, entitled “Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a Prompt,” are the “Histopia” group based in Madrid and the direct democracy of the 15M movement in Spain. Bringing these two subjects together, Ramírez-Blanco observes that social movements prepare the ground for utopian thinking. It is therefore vitally important for utopian studies scholars to reflect on what we can learn from these movements in terms of actual practices. In short, she concludes, “utopian studies are not alien to the currents of social change and activism, and as researchers we must remain open to an active listening.”Adam Stock, too, is interested in the ways in which utopian studies scholars engage with social movements. However, the starting point of his essay, entitled “Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic Excellence,” is the dispiriting observation that academic utopian studies is integrally connected to what Darren Webb has termed the “corporate-imperial” university. Specifically, Stock focuses on funding of utopian research in a UK academic context that prioritizes a discourse of “academic excellence,” or more accurately, institutionally funded research that conforms to the dictates of an elite-oriented and inherently conservative and exclusionary prestige market economy. In this context prestigious income streams fund academic projects that are ripe for recuperation by institutional powers; these institutions can and do commodify and profit from awarded funding, while hollowing out the impetus for change in social movements. Stock concludes his reflections on a cautiously optimistic note, maintaining that utopian studies scholarship can be self-reflexively critical of its engagements with market-oriented institutional structures, and at the same time can be oriented toward better social relations, including (and here again Stock agrees with Webb) by drawing on institutional resources to create “bolt holes and breathing spaces” from which to engage in utopian politics.Finally, in “Blind Spots and Avenues for Transformation Within the Utopian Canon: Towards a Terrestrial Ecotopianism,” Heather Alberro criticizes not only the Eurocentrism of the Western utopian canon (a subject also discussed by Edwards and Ramírez-Blanco), but also its deeply rooted anthropocentrism (a topic broached by Edwards in a different context). Building on previous scholarly work in the field of utopian studies focusing on “critical,” “transgressive,” and “grounded” utopias, as well as on contemporary green utopian scholarship and insights gleaned from Indigenous movements and futurisms, and radical environmental movements, Alberro emphasizes two important shifts needed within utopian theory and praxis: first, its thorough decolonization; and second, its reorientation as an undertaking grounded in terra for the liberation of all terrestrials. She also sketches the contours of and argues persuasively for a terrestrial form of ecotopianism that foregrounds multispecies agency and flourishing both as a vital value and as a means of resisting and building beyond the multiple depredations of the Capitalocene.There are numerous areas of overlap and intersection in the thought-provoking arguments developed in these essays. Perhaps most fundamentally, all of them elucidate and critically analyze dystopian features of our current historical juncture, with its multiple and interlocking systems of domination. In particular, and from various but largely complementary perspectives, they converge in their denunciations of colonial capitalism and the racialized and ecocidal trail of destruction it has left in its historical wake (though, interestingly, there is very little discussion of its gendered dimensions). They also acknowledge the complicity of dominant academic paradigms and institutional structures in perpetuating and reproducing these same systems of domination, including, importantly, in the ostensibly liberatory field of utopian studies. In short, all of them agree that utopian studies can only keep pace with our current troubles and continue to serve an emancipatory, as opposed to power-legitimating, function if its practitioners rethink and reimagine some of the defining features of the field. Among these features are white colonial biases; an ivory-tower mentality; future-oriented abstraction against and away from the here and now of place and time; relative unconcern with political economy and the politics of structural violence; inattention to and unwillingness to learn from social movements; and continuing calamitous failure to break from dominant anthropocentric paradigms and presuppositions, at a time of climate emergency and the sixth mass extinction.Less pronounced, but no less importantly, there are also areas of disagreement or debate evident in the contributions. Foremost among them is the debate about the history and future of “blueprint” utopias sparked by Balasopoulos’s opening essay. Citing the example of Fourier’s utopian writings, Balasopoulos maintains that there is no necessary correlation between programmatic organizational imagination and regimented uniformity. He also references Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction to make the point that large-scale exploration of the work of alternative organizational imaginaries may be a precondition for survival in the face of unfolding and lethal global ecological catastrophe. The other contributors are more skeptical about the utility of utopian “blueprints,” even as they all acknowledge the positive value and indeed necessity of utopian organizational imagination. Stock and Ramírez-Blanco discuss this point explicitly in their response piece dialogue. As Stock points out, the contributors share an understanding that we are living in an epoch of great human and environmental destruction, one moreover that necessitates fundamental changes at a structural level. Ramírez-Blanco agrees and observes that the question of organization appears in different ways in all the essays. However, they also note what they term a “productive tension,” most apparent in the contrast between the arguments advanced by Balasopoulos and Alberro. Whereas Alberro focuses on grassroots social movements and draws on alternative views of historical temporality informed by non-Western perspectives to argue the case for a utopianism of the temporally extended and spatially rooted here and now, Balasopoulos focuses on large-scale institutional structures and philosophies of history that in Stock’s words “trouble” a linear view of time, but that are perhaps easier to resolve in Western Marxist terms.More critically, Ramírez-Blanco and Alberro express serious reservations about the advisability of using the catch-all term “blueprint utopias” to refer to the utopian organizational imaginary. According to Ramírez-Blanco the term is very much linked to prescriptive abstract solutions, a point developed by Alberro in her response piece when she notes that inklings toward domination can be seen within many blueprint utopias linked to totalizing visions of Western modernity and progress, which have been ending other-than-Western worlds for centuries. As a result, she urges caution in relation to the possible closure of the heterogeneous “to come” associated with prescriptive blueprints. In response to such criticisms, Balasopoulos maintains that only “old-fashioned” central planning is adequate to the task of confronting global environmental crisis and the tenacious recuperative mechanisms of capitalist co-optation, even as he also takes pains to emphasize that his position is antiteleological and freedom-enabling rather than constraining.This debate is by no means a new one, as students of utopian studies will be aware. It has arisen in numerous different contexts, including notably in scholarship on the utopianism of William Morris. Famously, French scholar Miguel Abensour argued that Morris broke decisively with the closed juridico-political model-building characteristic of classical utopians from More to Cabet and reworked in ever more doctrinally systematized and rationalizing forms in “neoutopian” responses to the defeat of the Revolution of 1848 (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward being a paradigmatic case in point). According to Abensour, the power of Morris’s utopianism stems in part from the fact that one cannot—except in the most sterile terms—extract from a work like News from Nowhere any doctrine or specific socialist system. Rather, Abensour maintains, one finds in Morris an original tendency associated with the post-1848 “new utopian spirit” exemplified by Ernest Coeurderoy and Joseph Déjacque and distinguished precisely by its dialogical and nonexclusive rejection of “solutions” and/or plans for the moral education of humanity. The “education of desire,” Absensour averred in a formulation that would significantly influence E. P. Thompson’s interpretation of Morris’s socialist utopianism, is the organizing function of Morrisian utopia: the point is not for utopia to assign “true” or “just” goals to desire, but rather to educate desire, to stimulate and awaken or open a path for it.1Arguably, however, Abensour went too far in his critique of systems and organizational plans, prompting a critical response from scholars like Ruth Levitas. According to Levitas, the historical shift in the theorization of utopia from telic to heuristic entails not only the promise of provisionality, reflexivity and pluralism, but also the danger of what she terms a kind of “pathological pluralism,” in which the acknowledgment of the positions and standpoints of others effectively undermines the capacity to occupy, even critically and provisionally, a ground of one’s own. Utopia thus understood, she suggests, may not be able to move beyond the function of critique, or disruption of the ideological closure of the present, because the transformative function of utopia requires the disruption of the structural closure of the present. In a tantalizing formulation, she concludes that “the effective synthesis of provisionality and responsibility may be the condition of keeping utopia open as a space in which to reach out to the real possibility of a transformed future.”2Levitas’s reference to “effective synthesis,” like Stock’s metaphor of “productive tension,” suggests the need for intellectual nuance and balance, as opposed to ideologically driven polemic, in dealing with such complex and difficult questions. Helpfully, Alberro strikes such a balance in her response piece when she acknowledges the urgency of a collective movement toward a better world, and poses the following important question:Balasopoulos, too, points to a promising and productive ideological balance or synthesis in a footnote of his essay when he observes that anarchist thinkers form an interesting counterpoint to the anti-utopian liberal denunciation of the programmatic character allegedly inherent in all utopias. Specifically, Balasopoulos cites the work of Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia (1950) and of Paul and Percival Goodman’s Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947) to support the proposition that anarchist thinkers have rightly criticized aspects of blueprint utopianism while also defending the wider utopian tradition and critiquing unsparingly the authoritarian and bureaucratic tendencies within liberal societies themselves.3 One might add to Balasopoulos’s helpful preliminary reading list an abundance of relevant anarchist or anarchistic works, from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) to Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974).4 In the former, Scott develops a devastating analysis and critique of a range of high-modernist, authoritarian utopian social engineering schemes in the twentieth century, from collectivization in Russia and The Great Leap Forward in China to compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. However, Scott’s critique is probably best read in conjunction with works such as Goodman and Goodman’s Communitas and Colin Ward’s Anarchy in Action (1973), which advocate persuasively for planning done democratically (and ecologically) from below.5 In a similar vein, Le Guin drew on Goodman and Goodman’s ideas during the composition of The Dispossessed, an exceptionally subtle utopian fiction that portrays in imaginative detail the norms, institutions, and individual relationships of an anarcho-communist world (“Anarres”) even as it explores through the varied experiences and contrasting and evolving perspectives of its main characters the dangerous centralizing tendencies and capacity for revolutionary self-correction inherent in such a society.It is the sincere hope of the contributors to this forum that it will catalyze lively, thoughtful, and critical debate about the past and future of utopian studies. I share this hopeful desire, but it would be remiss of me to conclude my introductory remarks without making at least some mention of more disturbing developments in contemporary higher education that threaten the very possibility of critical scholarly dialogue. As previously discussed, this special journal section originated as a roundtable discussion at a conference held at the University of Brighton in July 2022. Our hosts were the wonderful Brighton University Humanities staff. One year on from the conference, these very same staff face the prospect of unemployment due to a “cost-saving exercise” being implemented by the university’s senior management team. As I write these words, and notwithstanding fierce and very public opposition from staff and students across the university, supported by members of both the local community and the international academic community (including in the form of an open letter signed by more than 1,400 scholars), senior management at the University of Brighton continue to push for mass staff redundancies that potentially affect all academic staff but that in practice disproportionately target those working in the Humanities subject area. Sadly, and as Caroline Edwards’s concluding response piece makes abundantly clear, what is happening at the University of Brighton is by no means an isolated case. Rather, it is indicative of a much wider, ideologically driven assault on public education and free inquiry.The ongoing assault is a global phenomenon, neoliberal and neoconservative and increasingly neofascist in ideological orientation and propelled by developments in contemporary capitalism that have shaped its anti-intellectual practice as a form of class warfare.6 To put the point more simply and bluntly, whereas a great utopian writer such as William Morris could dare to dream of a radically democratic, egalitarian, and free socialist world in which all would have the opportunity to make their innate senses of beauty and value an integral part of their lives, the reactionary fantasy of those leading the current fight against critical thinking in academia and beyond is an end to democracy and active citizenship and the effectuation of unchallenged rule by plutocratic elites. In such a perilous political context the critical utopian reflections of the contributors to this special forum resonate with even greater urgency, like warning bells sounding the alarm at a time when utopia is being smothered under the mounting wreckage of historical progress that Walter Benjamin termed “catastrophe.” Abensour’s remarks in relation to Benjamin’s (self-)critical utopianism are apposite: