The Utopian Impulse & Its Trouble With Postmodernity
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:15
Thank you very much for coming. I will need paper to talk.
00:26
The biggest challenge we face today seems to be our own imagination. It looks like we gave up on our own future, and if we dare to think about it at all,
00:43
climate catastrophe seems to be unavoidable. Even science fiction offers no relief, dystopian visions are all around, and even those seem to have trouble to keep up with the speed of a deteriorating reality. So, what to do?
01:01
How can we get out of this? Let's see. I stole this from a recent panel called apocalypse buffering, and I changed it a little bit, because I'm here to talk to you about utopia.
01:20
Not so much as science fiction, but as a thinking tool that can be used by anybody, and that I hope will help us get our future back. Autopia, by definition, is a good place, there is no place. And if one thinks about it like this,
01:41
it doesn't sound very alarming, rather like a harmless exercise of the imagination, a thought experiment, yet today, a lot of people believe that, even if maybe naive and useless, that such imaginary exploration of difference,
02:01
if taken seriously, will always and inevitably lead to disaster. If we think about utopia, we think about it only in negative terms. It's either ridiculous, or will lead to the horrors of Stalinism or Nazi Germany. It's this, our rightful fear of its totalizing powers,
02:22
that made us banish utopia, and with time it kind of almost became unthinkable. But what if being unable to think it, has also made us blind to see it, to recognize utopia? What if, nameless and hidden from our view,
02:40
it still controls the world? A world which seems to be quickly changing into a bad place for people everywhere, what if we have been trapped by what we fear? I want to argue that utopia is inescapable, and that indeed we have been trapped, but that it's not utopia that we should fear,
03:02
but our denial of its powers. Because, as I will try to show you, utopia is not only the cause, it's also the key to get out of what Fukuyama called the end of history. But to make my point, I first will have to clarify some terminology,
03:20
because words and their meanings are important to understand the story I want to tell you afterward. It's a story of neoliberalism, the most successful utopian ideology to date, yet we never call it that. I will explain why, by taking you back to its beginnings, rooted in anti-utopianism,
03:41
and how this curious but seldom acknowledged connection resulted in our current state. Locked into the present, seemingly unable to imagine any change, despite knowing that without it we seem destined to perish. Frederic Jameson calls this predicament late capitalism or postmodernity,
04:02
a time that is best described by its rampant cynicism. How to get over it, using what he calls anti-anti-utopianism, will be the second part of my talk. But first let's start with clearing up some common misconceptions about utopia.
04:21
Anti-utopianism's most powerful weapon against utopia has always been the claim that a perfect society can only be achieved by coercion. Therefore, utopianism will always usher totalitarianism and the use of force and violence against people. But it is important to remember that utopia,
04:41
by definition, is a good place that is no place. It's not supposed to be perfect. It's also very rarely just escapism that tries to deny and dream away all negativity. Far from it, by imagining alternatives, it highlights and brings into focus what it seeks to overcome.
05:01
Or as Jameson puts it, utopia is not a positive vision of the future so much as it is a negative judgment of the present. Utopias are not blueprints to build societies on. They're tools for criticism, opening doors to debates about problems that often didn't even have a name before.
05:23
And seen in this light, it becomes clear that utopia has always been the driving force of human development and history. The fact that it is haunted by reversals into its dark side or dystopia only helps to underscore that the utopian impulse is a process,
05:43
a self-correcting, critical mechanism that aims for better rather than a perfect world. There's one more thing. The difference between anti-utopia and dystopia. Those two terms often get conflated, but there is a distinction between them and it's really important.
06:02
According to Leementauer Sargent, dystopias are imagined by their authors to be societies substantially worse than the ones they are living in. The term anti-utopia in contrast, and I will quote him here, should be reserved for that large class of works,
06:20
both fictional and expository, which are directed against utopia and utopian thought. Maybe one could also say that anti-utopias are about the dangers of seeing utopias as blueprints and acting on it, whereas dystopias, as well as utopias, are tools for analysis and criticism of the contemporary,
06:43
which, especially in our times, because dystopias are so popular, seems to express a collective yearning for rupture, a collective desire to somehow break free from an all-oppressing, inescapable totality.
07:00
But yet, in this yearning, or this yearning in its wish for an end and a new beginning, is in itself inherently utopian. It doesn't matter how humble it is in its aspirations, it still is a wish for difference. So let's look at how we got here.
07:20
How did we lose our ability to imagine anything beyond the status quo or global capitalism? It started, as a lot of history does, with an utopian desire to change the world. 1938, five years after the first concentration camp was built in Dachau, and at the height of Stalin's Great Purge,
07:43
two refugees from Austria met at a conference in Paris. It was a gathering of intellectuals who aimed to construct a new liberalism, one strong enough to fight what they saw as threatening the world, socialism. And it was there that neoliberalism was born.
08:03
The two men, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, went on to define this new ideology through what can only be called a fierce anti-utopianism. They believed that social democracy and its programs like Roosevelt's New Deal were just another form of collectivism
08:21
that would ultimately lead to the same terrifying results as communism and Nazism For them, any form of state planning could only lead to tragedy and terror. And both went on to write books in which they ridiculed the socialist idea by calling it utopian.
08:41
In Bureaucracy, published six years later in 1944, von Mises writes, Nobody doubts that bureaucracy is thoroughly bad and that it should not exist in a perfect world. And therefore, socialist utopias are entirely impracticable and must result not only in impoverishment for all,
09:00
but in the disintegration of social cooperation in chaos. That same year, Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, was published too. It dedicated a whole chapter to attacking utopian thought and argued that socialism, by destroying individual freedom, must always lead to dictatorship. He concludes this chapter with,
09:23
To those who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at the close quarters, the connection between the two systems is obvious. The realization of the socialist program means the destruction of freedom. Democratic socialism, the great utopia
09:41
of the last few generations, is simply not achievable. But during those times, their anti-utopianism was still at the margins of political thought. Or as George Monbiot writes, It was still a time when governments tried to achieve social outcomes without embarrassment.
10:02
Not only in the US, but most of Western Europe, full employment and poverty relief were common goals and pursued by developing new public services paid for by high taxes on the rich. It was another economist, John Maynard Keynes, whose policies and ideas were on the rise
10:21
and became wildly adopted. Keynes rejected neoclassical economics, which claimed that the free market would naturally establish full employment if unfettered by the government. It was an old utopian idea and Keynes replaced it with his own. Having witnessed the hardships of the Great Depression,
10:42
his general theory stated that the economy could stay trapped in a high state of unemployment if the government didn't help boost consumption or investment. He argued that state intervention was necessary and he went as far as to recommend that governments should spend money on these interventions
11:02
even if they didn't have it. That was a radical idea which Robert Reich later proposed may have saved capitalism. But nowhere is his utopian dreaming more evident than in his conviction that his new system of state-managed capitalism could promote peace rather than war in the world.
11:24
And even though the ideas of Hayek and von Mises stayed at the margins for decades to come, the very rich immediately identified the new theory as a promise of freedom from government regulation and those hated taxes. Think tanks were born and lavishly funded
11:40
to refine and promote the new ideology throughout the world, and it grew and evolved away from Hayek's belief that the state still had a role to play in preventing monopolies to Milton Friedman who saw them as a reward for efficiency. Those were decades at the margins but they were not spent idly.
12:00
And then it happened, something that according to Keynes shouldn't be possible, high inflation and high unemployment at the very same time. It was the 70s and his dreams of a crisis-free transformed capitalism hit a brick wall. And those who had been waiting seized the opportunity. Friedman records,
12:20
when the time came that you had to change, there was an alternative ready. Astonishingly though, this alternative had already started to lose its name. And maybe what's odd about that slogan with which it a couple years later under Reagan and Thatcher finally came to power is not only that it promoted freedom and choice
12:41
by claiming that there is no alternative, but that the slogan itself celebrated something nameless. And this namelessness turned out to be a brilliant marketing idea. It played on gut feelings instead of trying to explain a new theory. And what in rough times when people are disoriented and scared could feel better than a bit of common sense.
13:04
Because if something is not even worth mentioning, surely somehow that must be common sense. So this namelessness enabled neoliberalism to present itself as the answer to what they successfully sold as something like a natural law.
13:21
A law that reduced humanity to self-interest and competition. And its theory then was just like the cherry on top, the way one had to deal with the facts. In a spectacular reversal, the blueprint on which to build societies on, which anti-utopians had spent years denouncing the root of all evil,
13:41
became nature itself, and therefore it was already given. Just like that, anti-utopianism achieved the impossible. In one ingenious move, utopia, this time as the best of all possible worlds, was not only declared and established, but also hidden from view. Because, not surprisingly,
14:01
those anti-utopians didn't claim that their utopia was a perfect world. Instead it was merely the best and all that we could hope for. All encompassing but not a place, this utopian enclosure was grander than any ever before, and it placed its new borders firmly
14:20
in the nowhere of our minds. But as any utopia recognized or not, it started to become haunted by strange reversals. If the world was one big competition, it was essential to figure out who was winning. Everything needed to be compared and quantified, and suddenly the bureaucracy
14:41
that von Mises had so despised and wanted to eliminate became the foundation, not only of economics, but of everything. And even worse, once privatized, banks and public services turned out to be too vital or too big to fail, making it obvious that competition
15:02
didn't ensure efficiency. But by 2008, when neoliberalism should have lost all credibility, bailing out banks while still maintaining that the same can't be done for actual people, it seemed that we simply couldn't imagine anything else anymore.
15:22
What had been a slogan had become reality. There really was no alternative. Neoliberalism's utopian enclosure, the big wall in our head, didn't allow for one. And almost ten years later, there still isn't.
15:43
So, this is where we are, and it seems a political crisis even bigger than the economic one. We all know it can't go on like this. But neoliberalism's anti-utopianism, exactly because it is utopianism in disguise,
16:02
has colonized our future. The only way to get it back is overcoming our cynicism that things cannot be otherwise. So, let's turn to Jameson's anti-anti-utopianism and see how it might be helping to free our imagination.
16:22
And instead of explaining, I want to show you how it works by comparing it to one of the few examples of political ideas today that still express some utopian longing, and that I'm sure you're familiar with, Ubi or universal basic income. According to Jameson, the radical difference of utopia
16:41
is achieved by two processes. One he calls utopian imagination, and the other utopian fancy. The former builds on the reason why we set out to imagine it, and the latter on how such an utopia could be achieved. Utopian imagination has a kind of wish-fulfillment
17:01
which identifies the root of evil and imagines the world without it. While utopian fancy is the construction of this world, the details are what in a traditional literary utopia would have been demonstrated by the guided tour. The utopian imagination of Ubi as a reaction to technology's achievements
17:23
identifies automatization as the root of evil and proposes a solution. The argument goes that automatization will obliterate the need for most of human labor, and that to deal with this, governments should pay each citizen
17:41
unconditionally a monthly fee to cover their basic needs. But to find out if this solution could in fact produce systemic change, we have to ask if it would result in a truly different world. And the moment we look at the utopian fancy of Ubi, or the details of how this world is supposed to work,
18:01
we look at a problem. Ubi lacks a global vision in a globalized world. Its utopian enclosure is, at least for now, envisioned and proposed depending on national or regional borders. The same borders' right-wing politics ignoring the complexities and interdependencies of an already globalized world
18:22
is so fond of emphasizing today. And in times when refugees die at those very same borders, when they are seen as a threat, not as people we need to protect, could Ubi, without a global vision, really accomplish systemic change?
18:40
Or is it just a patch for the same old system, a prolongation of what we already have? Despite that Ubi as a political program feels quite utopian, it still seems to keep our imagination trapped. In contrast, Frederick Jameson, admitting that all political programs today are destined to fail because they have to work inside the system,
19:03
doesn't even aspire to imagine one. Instead, he simply sets out on a thought experiment and asks himself what the most radical demand on our system would be that could not be fulfilled without transforming the system beyond recognition.
19:21
And he comes up with an old answer, full employment. As economists will frankly admit, capitalism runs on profits and eternal growth and eats its masses of the unemployed to keep inflation low. If workers weren't threatened by cheaper unemployed competition, they would start to demand fair share of those profits
19:42
and therefore full employment would no doubt transform the system radically. But one rather quickly comes to realize that the system would have to be changed in advance for such a change to ever take place. And it looks like a vicious circle with no escape.
20:01
But still, imagining such a future allows us to read the dark spots of our current situation as symptoms of the root of evil we identified. Jameson writes, Crime, war, degraded mass culture, drugs, violence, boredom, the lust for power, the lust for distraction,
20:21
sexism, racism, all can be diagnosed as results of a society unable to accommodate the productiveness of all its citizens. But what's the difference then to UBI you might ask? Doesn't UBI want to solve the same problem? It does, but the difference becomes clear
20:41
when we look at the main arguments brought forward by its proponents from the left and the right. And which can be summed up to something that sounds rather familiar, there is no alternative. The focus lies not on the value of all human beings for society, but on an inevitable progress that simply cannot be stopped.
21:03
The left might highlight the promise of new social productiveness unleashed by the freedom of not having to worry about food or a roof over your head, but the discussions always seem to end up at the same question. Could we afford the freeloaders, the people that can't or won't compete
21:21
to prove their value? Oops. I really want UBI to rid us from our belief in this fake human nature of self-interest and competition that neoliberalism so successfully implanted in our brains and hearts. But how could this be achieved
21:42
if UBI won't change the system itself? I believe what most of us hope is that UBI could create alternative spaces for collaboration inside the system, but the problem becomes painfully visible when even its defenders admit that its success depends on the amount of money that will be handed out.
22:02
Could that ever work in times of global inflation? And even if the money will help us build those collectives and co-ops, wouldn't we still end up being forced to compete with each other, measuring human value by economic gains? So, although Jameson's proposal of full employment also misses
22:22
global aspirations and seems less likely than UBI to ever come true, it still offers something that UBI does not. It makes us realize much more clearly those walls in our heads. And once we've seen them, we can start to examine what they are made of and wonder if there might be any cracks.
22:43
If the problem seems to be that we can't imagine a society where all humans have value, then good crack to start with might be the realization that our cynicism is just the frank acknowledgement of exactly that. Because the truth is
23:02
that even if we still try to believe in them, we lost all our values, replacing them with money. And if that's so, it might be a great idea to return to and ponder one of the oldest utopian dreams, abolishing money and imagining a life without of it.
23:20
Because, even if seemingly impossible, the mere thought experiment of it not only brings immediate static relief, but unmasks all kinds of individual and social relationships that have been disguised by the abstraction of value through money. Imagining a world without it makes visible the immense,
23:42
often already unpaid human collaboration on which even our system rests. And instead of the deadlock that a supposed human nature based on competition used to create, the utopian impulse finally is released to imagine other forms of being. What Jameson anti-anti-utopianism proposes
24:02
is that the answer to our conviction that there is no alternative is the utopian form itself, not by offering a blueprint or a plan, but by insisting that difference is possible and that the break is necessary. In our times, where we are at the stage of massive protests
24:20
and demonstrations, but without any conception of how a globalized transformation might proceed, where we want to act, but we don't know how, and where any political program currently offered only fuels our cynicism, our state of mind might be best reflected by utopia's radical break from reality.
24:43
Its formal weakness, lack of agency and plans for a working political transition paradoxically now turn into a power, forcing us to concentrate on and to think the break itself. Anti-anti-utopianism does not offer immediate solutions for the problems of our globalized world,
25:03
but it also isn't cynicism or capitulation and hopelessness. Instead, much stronger than any rhetoric about the future of our children ever could, it helps us see what keeps us locked in the present and locates the fear
25:20
of losing the future directly within ourselves. It's grasping and rattling the bars of our cage in an intense spiritual preparation for an impossible future that yet has to arrive. We may feel helpless and we don't have a plan, but we do have power.
25:42
The system of money making and profits may not need us to believe in it, but it still needs us to believe in its eternal permanence. Thank you. Oh, and I will put
26:02
all the references and material on the website in a couple of days if you want to read more about. Thank you. Thank you.