Notes from Global Utopias Reading Group -- Discussion
#1 (September 17, 2014)
Readings (for copies see the Compass Research Space link under "Readings"):
-Bloch/Adorno discussion (1964) from The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 1-17
-Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1967)
-Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review (Jan-Feb 2004): 35-54
-Michael Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, eds., Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (2010), intro
DIscussion themes:
Utopia as
Practice, not a place or time to be imagined
mode of thinking/imagining (more than the content of a utopia)
category of analysis; a diagnostic (including for understanding conditions that can produce thinking about utopia)
claim-making and inspiration
politics
knowledge of possibilities and limits (including limits in the power to imagine possibility)
a counterfactual
fantasy, escapism
generated by a fear of death
conjured in the anti-utopian/crisis moment
negation of the present, a critical “discursive strategy,” a “disruption” (Jameson)
unsettling, disruptive, uncanny
fleeting moment (of possibility, even of realization)
“leap into the open air of history” (Benjamin)
hope (not limited by secular bias)
Other questions/problems:
Conditions of possibility that stimulate and shape utopian thinking (including utopian thinking about conditions of possibility)
Blocked agency; losing; states of emergency
Does utopia need to have a political goal?
Relation of utopia to violence and terror.
Relation of utopian futurity to the past.
The danger of easy conflation of utopia with pleasure, happiness; utopia assumed as pleasure and/or as boring.
Relation of heterotopia to utopia? The heterogeneity of spaces. Counter-sites that that both mirror and contest/unsettle/subvert all other spaces
“Realizable”? What happens when utopia is practiced? Is utopia authentic and powerful only when always “not yet” (Bloch); always a promise unrealized?
Readings (for copies see the Compass Research Space link under "Readings"):
-Bloch/Adorno discussion (1964) from The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, 1-17
-Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1967)
-Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review (Jan-Feb 2004): 35-54
-Michael Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, eds., Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (2010), intro
DIscussion themes:
Utopia as
Practice, not a place or time to be imagined
mode of thinking/imagining (more than the content of a utopia)
category of analysis; a diagnostic (including for understanding conditions that can produce thinking about utopia)
claim-making and inspiration
politics
knowledge of possibilities and limits (including limits in the power to imagine possibility)
a counterfactual
fantasy, escapism
generated by a fear of death
conjured in the anti-utopian/crisis moment
negation of the present, a critical “discursive strategy,” a “disruption” (Jameson)
unsettling, disruptive, uncanny
fleeting moment (of possibility, even of realization)
“leap into the open air of history” (Benjamin)
hope (not limited by secular bias)
Other questions/problems:
Conditions of possibility that stimulate and shape utopian thinking (including utopian thinking about conditions of possibility)
Blocked agency; losing; states of emergency
Does utopia need to have a political goal?
Relation of utopia to violence and terror.
Relation of utopian futurity to the past.
The danger of easy conflation of utopia with pleasure, happiness; utopia assumed as pleasure and/or as boring.
Relation of heterotopia to utopia? The heterogeneity of spaces. Counter-sites that that both mirror and contest/unsettle/subvert all other spaces
“Realizable”? What happens when utopia is practiced? Is utopia authentic and powerful only when always “not yet” (Bloch); always a promise unrealized?
