antagonist

The growing list of movies dealing with utopian/dystopian issues can not be simply dismissed as a Hollywood capitalization of our consumer need for or addiction to widescreen rehearsals of a humanity in crisis, facing apocalypse or enduring to the point of near extinction: catastrophe. Or rather the need is there but for not obvious reasons. This is what I consider an important point Frederic Jameson makes: ‘Utopia emerges at the moment of the suspension of the political’. Jameson means that while the political, the fabric of which is time i.e history itself, is a continuously changing presence, at the same time its material manifestation congealed and concealed into political institutions creates that strange ‘realist’ sense of their unchangeability and inescapability. Hence the late capitalist or postmodern condition comes across as something inevitable, as a political and economical status quo, locking us into a Weberian cage of calculative rationality. When this point, this status quo is reached, on a cognitive level, it is utopian thinking that generates what Jameson calls ‘mental play’ which consist of thinking through the possibilities under which the political institutions can be genetically recombined into new, possibly even revolutionary, institutional constellations. Jameson therefore agrees with other thinkers in that Thomas More’s Utopia or Roussau’s work appeared as they did at particular conjunctures in time – i.e. the rise of capitalism and the dawn of the preconditions for French Revolution resp. – for a reason, namely that the social configuration of space and time at those conjunctures created exactly the cognitive and affective preconditions of the mental play meant: the sense of a total lock-in in the then current system (political, economical etc).

The question we might be tempted to ask in the current conjuncture of capitalist realism is: which utopia has emerged that will allows us to play freely this mental game yet again only to realize immediately no such utopian mindset did arise. Here, I’d like to suggest an intuition or suspicion: the suspension of the political might be permanent and that our capacity to envision utopia anew has been foreclosed. After 1968, the exceptioned or suspended state of the political has become one of endurance and persistence into the belief that ‘there is no alternative’. Hence new ‘classical’ utopias, will not do, they will not be able to ‘free our minds’ (slight pun intended). Our constant infatuation with doomsday entertainment can be looked upon as sympthomatic for this suspicion.

We can understand this failure for a new utopian mental play to arise by realizing that what sets apart capitalist realism from postmodernism or late capitalism is the idea that CR comes with utopianism built-in. CR works on the basis of structural disavowal as first and most succintly voiced by Octave Mannoni: je sais mais quand meme: I know capitalism is not really the only alternative but still I act as if it is. As German philosopher Robert Pfaller theorized, this kind of disavowal, which Zizek calls fetishistic disavowal is based on the objective existence of the ‘illusions of others’. Why do we act as if capitalism is the only alternative, even though we don’t really believe it? Because, we believe anonymous others believe so. Our illusions are never our own, that for them to be constructive and constituating fantasies they must necessarily belong to others, who we are not able to identify as such. Hence Pfaller concludes that these are illusions without owners, they are orphaned illusions, meaning there is no subject to be found anywhere that these illusions spring from or belong to. The illusions of others, while ownerless, are shared illusions and in this sense I believe they can be properly called utopian. The collective disavowal through these ‘illusions of others’ is what I mean when I say utopianism is built-in.

As a sidenote: contrary to the standard notion of dystopia, negative utopianism is not identical to dystopia. The negativity I’m referring to stems from the either explicit or implicit prevention of the possibility of utopia to arise at all. Or, to put this in apocalyptic terms: the end, the eschaton will never be reached. Fukuyama’s notorious ‘end of history’ thus understood, does not just claim that liberal democracy is an end stage of an evolutionary historical process. With it, what has come to an end is utopian thinking, in that we realize that the end of capitalism will never come and that in an evolutionary sense therefore history is as complete as it will ever be. Or so we are led to believe.

Thus, the question is not which utopia will allow us to think recombination but rather which reconfiguration of utopia, and possibly the built-in utopianism itself, must we realize in order to escape the state of political suspension. I think that in this way, a particular utopia, understood in the terms set out above, has been able to foreground itself in an increasingly plausible manner, namely: communism or rather the hypothesis of communism. However right Badiou is to state the communist hypothesis as a generic or Kantian regulative Idea, thereby dismissing the utopian as a negative qualification of communism – obstructing our cognitive and affective capabilities to even think communism as plausible yet again – a utopian mindset, albeit in a new configuration, remains an important precondition of envisioning a radically different future. I feel, that when he asks us to endure through time, to connect to a different durée with courage i.e ‘the virtue which manifests itself through endurance in the impossible’; this can only be done if we maintain a sense of utopianism. For what else could a durée, a perpetually changing, unquantifiable stream of reiterative and repetitive historical reconfiguration of the same, in which we reconstitute ourselves anew each time, mean but a utopia? Is not this what enables us to think a new future at all?