Global Utopias
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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?






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  • About
  • Readings
    • Reading Group Discussion 1 Notes
    • Reading Group Discussion 2 Notes
    • Reading Group Discussion 3 Notes
    • Reading Group Discussion 4 Notes
    • Reading Group Discussion 5 Notes
    • Reading Group Discussions, 2015-2016 >
      • Reading Group Discussion 1 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 2 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 3 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 4 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 5 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 6 Notes
    • Reading Group Discussions, 2014-2015 >
      • Reading Group Discussion 1 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 2 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion Notes 3
      • Reading Group Discussion 4 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 5 Notes
      • Reading Group Discussion 6 Notes
    • Reading Group Archive
    • Suggested Readings
  • Events
    • List of Past Events
    • Past Events Archive
  • Contact
  • Workshops
    • Teachers Workshop 2017 >
      • Sign Up
      • Workshop Materials
    • Teachers Workshop 2016 >
      • 2016 Workshop Program
      • Materials from 2016 Workshop
      • Sign Up
    • Teachers Workshop 2015 >
      • 2015 Workshop Program
      • Sign up
      • Photos From May 2015 Workshop
    • Graduate Student Teaching Workshop >
      • Sign Up
      • 2017 Workshop Program
      • 2016 Workshop Program