Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays

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Globalization and Utopia Critical Essays

Edited by

Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Feng Chia University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-07

Globalization and Utopia

10.1057/9780230233607 - Globalization and Utopia, Edited by Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili

Also by Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili CONFRONTING GLOBALIZATION: Humanity, Justice and the Renewal of Politics (edited)

Also by Patrick Hayden POLITICAL EVIL IN A GLOBAL AGE: Hannah Arendt and International Theory JOHN RAWLS: Towards a Just World Order COSMOPOLITAN GLOBAL POLITICS

Also by Chamsy el-Ojeili FROM LEFT COMMUNISM TO POST-MODERNISM: Reconsidering Emancipatory Discourse



CRITICAL THEORIES OF GLOBALIZATION

Globalization and Utopia Edited by

Patrick Hayden University of St Andrews, UK

Chamsy el-Ojeili Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand



Critical Essays

Selection and editorial matter © Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili 2009 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–20359–4 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–20359–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Globalization and utopia : critical essays / edited by Patrick Hayden, Chamsy el-Ojeili. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–20359–4 1. Globalization. 2. Utopias. I. Hayden, Patrick, 1965– II. el-Ojeili, Chamsy. JZ1318.G5864 2009 335 .02—dc22 2008041048 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: Reflections on the Demise and Renewal of Utopia in a Global Age Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili

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Part I Globalization and Utopianism: Theoretical Connections 1 Placing Utopia: Some Classical Images Peter Beilharz and Christine Ellem

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2 ‘Globalization’ as Collective Representation: The New Dream of a Cosmopolitan Civil Sphere Jeffrey C. Alexander

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3 Two Post-Marxisms: Beyond Post-Socialism? Chamsy el-Ojeili

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4 Globalization, Reflexive Utopianism, and the Cosmopolitan Social Imaginary Patrick Hayden

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5 After Utopia: Notes on an Ethics of Newness Leela Gandhi

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6 Postsecularism: A New Global Debate Gregor McLennan

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Part II Critical Perspectives on Utopian Visions in a Global Age 7 After 1989: Globalization, Normalization, and Utopia Larry Ray

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Contents

Contents

8 Made in America: The Unsustainable All-Consuming Global Free-Market ‘Utopia’ Barry Smart 9 Islamutopia, (Post)Modernity and the Multitude Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

117 137

10 Utopias Without Transcendence? Post-Left Anarchy, Immediacy and Utopian Energy Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey

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11 Libertarian Cyber-Utopianism and Global Digital Networks Lincoln Dahlberg

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12 (Con)Temporary Utopian Spaces Giorel Curran

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13 Glocalization and the New Local Transnationalisms: Real Utopias in Liminal Spaces Ronaldo Munck

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14 The Grandchildren of Marx and Coca-Cola: Lefebvre, Utopia and the ‘Recuperation’ of Everyday Life Michael E. Gardiner

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Concluding Reflections Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili

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Bibliography

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Index

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The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for kind permission to reproduce copyright material: Springer Science and Business Media for Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Globalization as Collective Representation: The New Dream of a Cosmopolitan Civil Sphere’, from Ino Rossi (ed.), Frontiers of Globalization Research: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches, Springer (2007), pp. 371–382. We would also like to thank all of this project’s contributors for their insights, expertise, and enthusiasm. Our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Philippa Grand, encouraged the book from its inception. We are grateful as well to Aidan MacLeod for his invaluable assistance in preparing the index. Both of us acknowledge most of all our families, who have provided a great deal of support during the long process of preparing the book for publication.

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Acknowledgements

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy (Routledge, 2006), Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2007/2008), and A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations (Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2009). Educated at an evangelical private school in Germany and the University of Hamburg, American (DC) and Cambridge, he was elected the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. He teaches comparative politics and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology, Alexander has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. He is the author of Culture and Society in Transition: A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology with Kenneth Thompson (Paradigm Publishers, 2008), The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2003), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004, with Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, and Sztompka), and The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (2005), which he has edited with Philip Smith. With Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, he is the editor of Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge University Press, 2006). In the field of politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2006), which includes discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social movements and incorporation. Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe University, Australia. He is author or editor of 23 books, most recently Socialism and Modernity (2009). Giorel Curran is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Policy and researcher in the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, viii





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Lincoln Dahlberg teaches and researches in the areas of media politics, critical theory, and digital democracy. He has published extensively in these areas and is co-editor of Radical Democracy and the Internet (Palgrave, 2007). He is currently based in the School of Journalism and Communication at The University of Queensland, Australia. Christine Ellem is a PhD candidate in Sociology at La Trobe University. Her doctoral research considers the history of utopian thought in the Antipodes with a particular focus on late nineteenth-century flows of cultural traffic between Britain and America and their peripheries, Australia and New Zealand. Chamsy el-Ojeili is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of From Left Communism to Post-Modernism: Reconsidering Emancipatory Discourse (University Press of America, 2003), co-author (with Patrick Hayden) of Critical Theories of Globalization (Palgrave, 2006), and co-editor (with Patrick Hayden) of Confronting Globalization: Humanity, Justice and the Renewal of Politics (Palgrave, 2005). Leela Gandhi is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Postcolonial Theory (Columbia University Press, 1998), Measures of Home (Ravi Dayal, 2000), the co-authored, England Through Colonial Eyes (Palgrave, 2001), and Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin de Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press, 2006). She is a founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Michael E. Gardiner is Professor in Sociology at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. His books include the edited four-volume collection Mikhail Bakhtin: Masters of Modern Social Thought (Sage, 2003), Critiques of Everyday Life (Routledge, 2000), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words (Sage, 1998, co-edited with Michael M. Bell), and The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (Routledge, 1992), as well as numerous articles dedicated to dialogical social theory, ethics, everyday life, and utopianism. More recently he



Griffith University, Australia. Her research focuses on green political theory, theories of democracy, environmental politics and policy, and contemporary ideology. She has recently published 21st Century Dissent: Anarchism, Anti-Globalization and Environmentalism (Palgrave, 2006).

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Patrick Hayden is Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His interests include international political theory, critical social theory, human rights, globalization, and global ethics. He is the author of Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory (Routledge, 2009), Critical Theories of Globalization (Palgrave, 2006, with Chamsy el-Ojeili), Cosmopolitan Global Politics (Ashgate, 2005), and John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order (University of Wales Press, 2002). Gregor McLennan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol. Author or editor of books on Marxism, pluralism, ideology, and the state, he has published a range of articles in recent years on questions of explanation, Eurocentrism, complexity theory, critical realism, postpositivism, and new styles of cultural sociology. These themes were systematized in Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences (Palgrave, 2006). He is currently developing a book-length argument about postsecularism and social theory. Ronaldo Munck has written widely on Latin America, labour struggles and, more recently, on globalization and its discontents. He is currently part of Dublin City University’s ‘matrix model management’ in charge of internationalization and social development (www.dcu.ie/themes). He edits a new glocal journal called Translocations (www.translocations. ie). His main research is focused on globalization and human security. Larry Ray has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, UK since 1998. His research and publications include social theory, globalization, post-communism, and the sociology of violence. Recent publications include Theorizing Classical Sociology (Open University Press, 1999), Key Contemporary Social Theorists (Blackwell, 2002, co-edited with Anthony Elliott), Social Theory and Postcommunism (Blackwell, 2005, with William Outhwaite), and Globalization and Everyday Life, (Routledge, 2007). He is currently working on social memory and Jewish cultural revivals in Poland and is writing a book on Violence and Society. Andrew Robinson is an activist and post-doctoral research fellow attached to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice



has co-edited (with Gregory J. Seigworth) a special double issue of the journal Cultural Studies, with the title ‘Rethinking Everyday Life: And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out’ (Routledge, 2004).

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in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is the author of many articles for journals such as Utopian Studies, Theory & Event, and Thesis Eleven. His research interests are varied and encompass political agency and radical practices as well as political thought. He writes regularly for activist outlets and has been involved in a variety of campaigns combating exclusion and surveillance in the United Kingdom. Barry Smart is Professor of Sociology at the University of Portsmouth and is the author of several books on social theory and the transformation of late modern societies. Publications include Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies (Routledge, 1992), Facing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Morality (Sage, 1999), Economy, Culture & Society: A Sociological Critique of Neo-Liberalism (Open University Press, 2003), and The Sport Star: Modern Sport and the Cultural Economy of Sporting Celebrity (Sage, 2005). He also edited Resisting McDonaldization (Sage, 1999) and is the co-editor of the Handbook of Social Theory (Sage, 2001). He is currently working on a book on the consequences of the globalization of consumer culture. Simon Tormey was Professor of Politics and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham before joining the University of Sydney in 2009 as Professor and Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences. He has published numerous books and articles including, most recently, Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism (Sage, 2006); Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2004) and Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern (Manchester University Press, 2001). He is an Associate Editor of Contemporary Political Theory.






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Introduction: Reflections on the Demise and Renewal of Utopia in a Global Age

How should human communities – and ultimately, perhaps, the community of humanity – be created anew, in the sense of ‘anticipating’ and imagining ‘that which does not yet exist’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 147)? This question lies at the heart of utopianism. To be utopian, we suggest, is the stuff of politics, and it first involves subjecting the politics of the present to critique. Secondly, it involves imagining human communities that do not yet exist and, thirdly, it involves thinking and acting so as to prevent the foreclosure of political possibilities in the present and future. The perspective adopted in this book is that the question of how to anticipate and imagine communities that ‘do not yet exist’ animates many critical socio-political engagements with contemporary globalization. In 1999, the year of the anti-globalization movement’s ‘coming out party’ in Seattle, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope put forward the case for a renewal of utopian energies. For Rorty (1999, p. 277), ‘The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.’ His enthusiasm for utopian social hope – our ‘most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity’ (1999, p. xiii) – however, is tempered by Rorty’s sense that we are in the midst of a widespread loss of hope, a despair signalled by the retreat from ‘historical narrative and utopian speculation’ (1999, p. 234; cf. Rorty 1997). Interestingly, this positive valuation of historical narrative and utopian imagination echoes the arguments of H. G. Wells, who connects these vital tasks to the social sciences. In a 1909 essay, ‘The So-Called Science of Sociology’, Wells takes to task the scientific pretensions of Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim, arguing that ‘there is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what is, without considering 1




Introduction

what is intended to be’ (1916, p. 203). He contends that ‘Sociologists cannot help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia’ (p. 205). Facing up to this fact, for Wells, would issue in a sociology equivalent to ‘knowledge rendered imaginatively’ (p. 202), a sociology that would best take two chief literary forms: first, historical description and interpretation and, second, the creation of utopian ideas and subjection of these to ‘exhaustive criticism’ (p. 204). More recently, Ruth Levitas (2005), drawing, in part, upon Wells, has suggested a methodological reorientation of certain domains of social scientific inquiry around utopia. For Levitas, sociology and utopia are two modalities of ‘the imaginary reconstitution of society’, insofar as ‘sociology foregrounds what utopia backgrounds, and utopia foregrounds what sociology represses’ (2005, p. 14). That is to say, sociology is typically holistic, descriptive, explanatory, and present (or past) oriented; but it also frequently involves (at least implicitly) critical, normative, prescriptive, and future-oriented dimensions. Meanwhile, utopia is typically imaginative, normative, prescriptive, and future-oriented; but it is also very often present-oriented in its descriptive and explanatory depictions and criticisms of utopia’s other, the present. Levitas’s suggestions, we think, deserve serious consideration. The accent on the imaginative, as against the strictly rational and scientific, the questioning of the formerly strict separation of facts, science, and observation from norms, imagination, and politics, has been an increasingly important emphasis across the human sciences in the past few decades. Therborn (2007), for instance, has recently described social theory as strung between two poles: on the one hand, an explanatory framework for a set of social things; on the other, an attempt to make sense of these things. This second pole is acknowledgement that, as Jeffrey Alexander (1995, p. 70) says, ‘Intellectuals must interpret the world, not simply change or even explain it.’ Further, this meaning-making pole involves a utopian dimension: ‘Every historical period needs a narrative that defines its past in terms of the present, and suggests a future that is fundamentally different, and typically “even better”, than contemporary time. For this reason, there is always an eschatology, not merely an epistemology, in theorizing about social change’ (Alexander, 1995, pp. 66–67). The contention that utopianism might constitute serious ‘data’ towards addressing crucial social scientific questions – for instance, questions of change and stability, identity and agency, inclusion and exclusion, ideology and social movements, power



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and resistance – is worth taking seriously, as we hope the contributions within this book will demonstrate. Such an approach is bound, though, to strike some as unconvincing – perhaps as irrationalist, nebulous, unsystematic, trivial, epiphenomenal to the real tasks of social science. This is because in everyday usage the term ‘utopia’ carries predominantly pejorative connotations. As Zygmunt Bauman (2007a, p. 102) has recently noted, ‘utopia’ is typically connected to the following adjectives: ‘fanciful’, ‘fantastic’, ‘fictional’, ‘chimerical’, ‘air-built’, ‘impractical’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘irrational’, and ‘unreasonable’. To put it bluntly, utopia, as Terry Eagleton (1991) has said of ideology, is like bad breath – always something the other has. More darkly, of course, ‘utopia’ has come to connote not merely fanciful, unrealistic dreaming, but also a propensity to violence and intolerance, with many sceptics attaching utopianism to twentieth-century totalitarianism (Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1965; Furet, 1995; Kolakowski, 1978; Malia, 1995; Popper, 1966;). As Jameson (2005, p. xi) summarizes the position, During the Cold War . . . utopia had become a synonym for Stalinism and had come to designate a programme which neglected human frailty and original sin, and betrayed a will to uniformity and the ideal purity of a perfect system that always had to be imposed by force on its imperfect and reluctant subjects. Utopia, in this scenario, is viewed as a ‘pathological impairment of reason and imagination that must be vigorously treated with powerful and repeated doses of realism, inoculation of pragmatism and the shock treatment of cynicism and Machiavellianism’ (Goux, 2006, p. 96). This sceptical (and frequently liberal) critique has, we think, been persuasively criticized as unacceptably idealist (see Lefort, 2007), functioning paradoxically as an ideological ‘prohibition against thinking’ (Žižek, 2001, p. 3) insofar as many sceptics are themselves reliant upon utopian imaginaries when evaluating competitor ideologies, intellectuals, movements, and social orders. In spite of these counter-arguments, the sceptical critique of utopia has successfully punched well above its intellectual weight; especially as its Left competition was disorganized and disoriented by a cluster of intertwined social, economic, political, and cultural transformations since the late 1960s. From the 1970s, this critique and these changes have issued in a widespread ‘demise of utopia’ narrative across social and political theory and commentary. For example, Perry Anderson (2004) argues that ‘the utopian itself has been




Introduction

in general suspension since the mid-seventies’, bringing ‘a remorseless closure of space’; Kolakowski (1990, pp. 136, 143) maintains that ‘today’s life of the mind is anti-utopian’ and the ‘utopian mentality . . . is withering away’; and Russell Jacoby (1999, p. 15) contends that the Left has increasingly become ‘practical, pragmatic and liberal’ and that utopia is being eclipsed among intellectuals. This demise of utopia narrative has come in both tragic and triumphal registers: on the one hand, the demise of utopia is lamented as a retreat of the imagination, of democracy, of critical thought, of the still vital goal of emancipation; on the other hand, the demise of utopia is welcomed as a move away from abstract, totalizing, and speculative thinking that has affinities to totalitarian politics and is indifferent or hostile to individuality and difference. While some of the authors in the present collection assess the contemporary situation in terms of the demise of utopia narrative, we will suggest some reasons for scepticism about this story. A first point is that disagreements about the status of utopia are often expressive of conceptual incompatibilities, particularly between more stringent and more open conceptualizing efforts. On the stringent side, Krishnan Kumar, for instance, insists that ‘utopia’ is properly applied to rational, secular works of imaginative fiction, arguing that, in these terms, utopia is a Western genre. He maintains as well that this literary utopian form has gone into decline or tends now to be ‘written for particular, circumscribed constituencies’ (2003, p. 73). In a different vein, but also offering a more restrictive conceptualization, Russell Jacoby (2005) attempts to save ‘utopia’ from its current downward spiral by stridently rejecting the notion that fascist and religious ideologies or movements can be described as utopian, reserving the term only for progressive, emancipatory ideas and movements. A more productive approach, in our view, involves adopting a more open understanding of the term. Of course, the word ‘utopia’ appears in the English language with Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516, and involves a combination of two words from the Greek, bringing together meanings of ‘no place’/‘a place which does not exist’ and ‘good place’ (Gordon, 2005). Working from the conjunction of More’s pun, Levitas (1990) rejects the predominant definitions of utopia in terms either of form (say, Kumar’s focus on imaginative fiction), or of content (say, Jacoby’s attempt to restrict utopias to politically ‘progressive’ visions of the good life), or of function (utopia as critique, or transformation, or compensation). Instead, Levitas (1993, p. 257) suggests that we define utopia broadly as the ‘desire for a better way of living expressed in



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the description of a different kind of society that makes possible that alternative way of life’. Such an understanding clearly encourages the inclusion of a wide variety of things often referred to under the label ‘utopia’ – intentional communities, imaginative fictions, visions of the good life in social and political theory, and the goals of social movements. This broader conceptualization encourages two pertinent interpretative tendencies. First, it encourages us to see utopia as virtually ubiquitous. This is the approach of Ernst Bloch’s (1986, p. 4) magisterial The Principle of Hope, where utopia is equivalent to ‘venturing beyond’. Such venturing beyond, for Bloch, includes everything from day-dreaming to religious visions, to myths of golden ages, to fairytales, to high art and popular culture (glossy magazines, ‘syrupy stories’, fashion, travel literature), to medical and architectural utopias, to philosophy and social movements. Here, ‘everybody lives in the future’ (p. 4), and this capacity for hope, for the ‘not yet’, is to be generally valued as a source of immense creativity, dynamism, and progress in human affairs. Second, and relatedly, this embracing conceptualization encourages the idea of utopia as an ‘eternal human aspiration’ (Goodwin and Taylor, 1982, p. 57), an ‘itch somewhere deep within us [all]’ (Weiss, 2005, p. 191). This second tendency will often read the utopian as a dimension of the unique human capacity for imagination. Russell Jacoby (2005) posits the imagination as the source of utopian speculation, and he traces what he views as the retreat of utopia to a withering of that imagination in the West – for instance, through the contemporary commodification and growing structuring of childhood. On this second issue, while we admire Castoriadis’s (1987) attempt to redress theory’s historical neglect of the imagination and to underscore the human capacity to create truly new forms and figures via subjective symbolic articulation and imaginary representation, this ontological reading of utopianism can be problematic: first, because, as Levitas (1990) notes, the essentialism entailed is either wrong-headed or just cannot be proved; and, second, because a ‘modernist’ focus is more immediately relevant to the present collection. Nevertheless, despite accenting the transhistorical centrality of the imagination, Castoriadis does put forward something like a modernist view with his notion of ‘autonomy’. As conceived by Castoriadis, the notion of autonomy as unending, lucid questioning and attempted transformations of ourselves and our institutions is rather close to what we see as entailed by ‘utopia’. For Castoriadis (1997a, 1997b, 2003, 2005), autonomy signifies an immense historical ‘rupture’ that has occurred twice: first,




Introduction

in Greek Antiquity, as generated through the interplay of the polis, philosophy, politics; second, from the eleventh century in Western Europe, reaching a peak in the years 1750–1950. One of the more distinctive features of this account is that, with modernity, utopia becomes not merely a distant place but a possible future (Kumar, 2003). Modernists therefore will insist on something like an ‘epistemological break’ that occurs with the ‘age of revolution’ – appearing with ideas such as the normality of social change, progress, perfectibility, optimism, human control over social organization, the notion of popular sovereignty, and the arrival of ‘the social question’ (Bauman, 1976; Goodwin and Taylor, 1982; Kumar, 1991; Levitas, 1993; Wallerstein, 1991, 1997). It is these sorts of decidedly modern questions, coalescing around social and political theory, social movements, modern ideologies, democracy and equality, that form the matrix of investigation for this collection. Another reason for scepticism regarding the demise of utopia narrative – a reason central to the chapters in this book – turns on the transformations often condensed and referred to together under the signifier ‘globalization’, the first substantive term in the title of this collection. As Said Arjomand (2004, p. 341) has said, after the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’, globalization replaced post-modernism as ‘the social scientific master trend of a new era’. From this point, the literature around growing world interconnectedness has risen steeply, and ‘globalization’ has been paired with just about every imaginable topic – ‘utopia’ being a notable exception. On the one side, as Jeffrey Alexander (2006b, p. 521) points out, ‘globalization’ itself, as ‘dominant new imaginary’, frequently exists as a distinct mode of utopian representation; and, we would add, it is often posed as a threatening dystopian predicament. If we focus on those three conventional societal sub-divisions – the economic, the political, and the cultural – we find an array of utopian significations associated with globalization. We encounter, economically, the utopia of a ‘world without borders’, encompassing truly free trade, high-tech production, progressive equalization between nations, and unheard of individual freedom and choice; politically, the idea of the decline of sovereign states, and the simultaneous emergence of a cosmopolitan order of multilateral negotiation, human rights, peace, and global governance; culturally, the vision of an increasingly cosmopolitan orientation amongst world citizenry, where everyone is connected instantly with everyone else, a global village of mutual understanding and constructive interchange, where people can pick and choose



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from the wealth of humanity’s diverse, rich cultures. At the same time, globalization as imaginary representation sets loose a host of dystopian figures: economically, in the reading of globalization as a unilinear ‘race to the bottom’, with the growing polarization of wealth, the global rule of multinational corporations, and a profit-above-all drive that threatens life on the planet; politically, in the idea of a ‘new imperialism’ centred on US military might and plans for a ‘new American Century’; and culturally, in notions such as cultural imperialism, Westoxification, and Coca-colonization. On the other side of this, globalization frequently has been associated with the idea of a blockage of the utopian imaginary. For instance, Karagiannis and Wagner (2007, p. 3) argue that globalization tends to be seen ‘as an anonymous, actorless process, against which a defensive reaction is at best possible’. Similarly, responding to the discourse around globalization, Alain Touraine (2001, p. 1) asks, ‘Is our society still capable [in an age of globalization] of using its ideas, hopes and conflicts to act upon itself? Attempts are being made on all sides to convince us that this question has been answered in the negative.’ Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman (1998) has said that our experience of globalization is akin to that of passengers on a plane who discover that the pilot’s cabin is empty – globalization as unstoppable, uncontrollable, untouchable by human agency, and thus ultimately incomprehensible. In this vein, the arrival of globalization, often attached to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, appeared to provide support for the equation that the ‘end of socialism equals end of utopia equals end of history’ (Kumar, 1993). This is the period of ‘happy globalization’ (Holmes in Outhwaite and Ray, 2005, p. 19). However, we would suggest that by 1999 – the year of Seattle, the year of Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope – ‘happy globalization’ is decisively at an end, the neoliberal globalist utopia is punctured, and there are signs of a more wide-ranging ‘rejuvenation of utopia’ (Goux, 2006). These shifts might be accounted for by a host of ‘reality problems’ (Alexander, 1995) that appeared through the decade of ‘happy globalization’: the ‘institutionalization of the neoliberal order’ reached its limits (Wallerstein, 2003, 2006), with growing contestation of neoliberal restructuring and significant dissent from the ‘Washington Consensus’; the East Asian crisis and subsequent contagion brought widespread criticism of and ameliorative concern about the wisdom of unrestrained financial movements; opposition mounted against American military imperialism; dissatisfaction with the ‘postpolitical consensus’ rose (Mouffe, 2005; Žižek, 2000); a host of mobilizations and new anti-systemic movements appeared contesting neoliberal




Introduction

globalization, ranging from the growth of ‘global civil society’ to the rise of right-wing exclusionary populism, to the challenge of Islamism, and to the emergence of the alternative-globalization movement. By the start of the new century, then, ‘happy globalization’ was decidedly over, and it is in this context that we have seen an implicit and sometimes explicit rejuvenation of utopianism. That is, there has been not only what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. xvi) describe as a ‘very rapid revival of critique’, but also a more unambiguous revitalization of recognizably utopian themes and emphases within socio-political theory and commentary. As concerns the revival of critique, Gregor McLennan (2000, 2002, 2003) has argued that a ‘new positivity’ could be detected across the social sciences. This positivity, McLennan suggested, had seen a ‘more substantive and affirmative’ (2000, p. 18) direction in the social sciences, a return to concern with the ‘state of things’ (2002, p. 323), a desire – against post-modern ‘negativity and self-scrutiny’ – ‘to actually say something about the structure and direction of the world we inhabit, and about the values which will guide a better human future’ (1999, p. 566). With regard to the development of new utopian emphases, a number of prominent examples can be pointed to: Rorty’s plea for Left intellectuals to serve as the ‘party of hope’ by constructing ‘a plausible narrative of progress’ and pairing ‘historical narrative and utopian speculation’ (1999, pp. 232, 234); Pierre Bourdieu’s call for the creation of a ‘reasoned utopia’ by those ‘who really care about the good of humanity’, against a ‘banker’s fatalism’ in which ‘the social world is written in economic language’ (1998b, p. 128); Immanuel Wallerstein’s appeal for a project of ‘utopistics’, which would be the ‘sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity’ (1998, p. 2); Hardt and Negri’s sweeping characterization of the new capitalism, in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), and passionate vision of the construction of counter-Empire; and Russell Jacoby’s (2005) effort to revive the critical role of public intellectuals and call for a return to utopian reference in theory and daily life. In sum, we believe that a proper appreciation of globalization and of responses to it must take into account the rich theoretical work and practical activities emerging around the globalization–utopianism relationship. Unless we do so, our theorizing will be handicapped either by an inability to appreciate the inescapable significance of utopia and utopianism for contemporary globalized politics or by a failure to acknowledge the crucial role of globalized political experiences and



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dynamics in shaping the ways in which utopia is understood today. In the end, the chapters in this book challenge the view that globalization is merely the sum of existing practices and policies, by demonstrating that globalization and its trajectories first must always be imagined in some particular manner and from some particular standpoint.





Part I


Globalization and Utopianism: Theoretical Connections





1 Peter Beilharz and Christine Ellem

Except for a small band of enthusiasts, utopia has typically got bad press later into the twentieth century. This is a paradoxical situation, for utopia at the same time is a kind of ontological indicator of modernity. Moderns dream, like their predecessors, but they also know that such dreams can be materialized, and go awfully wrong, turning into twentieth-century nightmares. Utopia, in short, is ubiquitous, even when it is formally unpopular. We cannot stop dreaming, or anticipating. By definition, utopia is both the good place and no place, nowhere. In this chapter we respond to both themes with reference to some classics in the genre, from More’s Utopia to Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Huxley’s Brave New World and Island and Orwell’s 1984. Across this axis, of course, disillusion replaces illusion, and utopia morphs into dystopia, though any broader consideration of the field in any case begins from the sense that utopia and dystopia are analytically or historically inseparable. Our especial interest, however, is in the idea of locating or placing these utopias, reading them afresh with a curiosity about their geographical, insular and urban settings and global connections. For all these utopias, these non-places, are also placed; and their specific placement coincides with a global location, a place in the world-system, of which they are at first exceptional, or then, increasingly, exemplary. These classics of utopian thinking are also therefore both geographically located and connected to global developments which they deny or, later, confirm. As utopia becomes more modern it becomes not only more concrete, in both senses, but also more fully indicative of global rather than provincial trends. Utopia becomes globalized, well before globalization talk pervades the academy and polity. It becomes mainstreamed into popular 13



Placing Utopia: Some Classical Images

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culture, normalized into our everyday lives even as it stands out, starkly, as the representative of the impossible.

Has utopia always been no place as well as the good place? Even as far back as its particular genesis in 1516 at the hands of Thomas More, utopia had recognizable geographical characteristics. They were, famously, insular. More, or rather Raphael, his bearer, is explicit. Utopia is broadest in the middle, where it is about 200 miles across. The ends of the island taper, making it appear like a crescent, with a massive interior harbour (More, 1965, p. 69). There are watery dangers, but the Utopians know where the safe channels are. More’s Utopia has been engineered, like the world of Faust the developer or Soviet history, reshaped and formed from peninsula to island. It is not ‘natural’; this is not Robinson Crusoe’s island, given by nature for all time (More, 1965, p. 70). There are 54 ‘splendid big towns’ on the island, which all look alike, planned but decentralized among and across themselves. The centre – anticipating Canberra, Wellington, Washington DC – is Aircastle. Agriculture is widespread and worked alternatively by town dwellers. Each town consists of 6000 households; surplus population is transferred to new sites, though the general image is of a steady-state economy, not a growth machine (More, 1965, p. 79). One-seventh of total exports to any country go as a free gift to their poor. Foreign trade pays for essential imports, like iron, and returns a surplus (More, 1965, p. 83) – so there is a bad or other world out there, and war, and avarice, not least in the form of external love of gold, itself plainly no more than a socially ascribed value (More, 1965, p. 89). This much is well known and frequently visited; it becomes the model for a great deal of other utopian travelling. More’s Utopia remains a classic, not least for its sense of reversal or inversion, where all that is solid is made to look elusive, and anything becomes conceptually possible, at least within the frame of revolution-repetition. The images echo through, for example, to Fourier’s horticultural fantasies and Marx’s lampooning thereof in The German Ideology (Beilharz, 1992, Chapter 1).

Bellamy’s Boston By the time of the great early modern utopia, Looking Backward, almost four centuries later, the world has become more concrete, and its location is so much so as to make it real, not an imaginary map on the wall



More’s place

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or in the head, but the harbour city of Boston, itself also reclaimed, rebuilt, physically transformed through the pursuit of the politics of rational mastery. Presumably the choice of place is a feasibility trick, just as More’s is. For More, Utopia might just as well be anywhere, nowhere in particular. For Bellamy, it has to be someplace in order to achieve now a realist sense of credibility. Why Boston? Why not New York? We know from Arthur Morgan, Bellamy’s can-do imitator and first biographer, that Bellamy had himself first placed Looking Backward in Asheville, North Carolina, the extraordinary place where Cornelius Vanderbilt built his real utopia. The Biltmore House was just that – a house that looked like a chateau, with 250 rooms for Vanderbilt to stretch out in, a Gilded Age fantasyland utopia nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West North Carolina. Biltmore was even more fantastic than Bellamy’s personal utopia in Looking Backward (Morgan, 1940, p. 10; Beilharz, 2004). Morgan, for his own part, picked up on the Faustian component of Bellamy’s utopian vision in becoming a major developmental force in the Tennessee Valley Association (see Talbert, 1987). Having settled on Boston, imaginably for propagandist reasons, Bellamy name-checks particular place references like a nostalgic rockand-roll lyricist. The book opens in Shawmut College, Boston. It travels via the cemetery, in Mt. Auburn, and along the Sinuous Charles River, but it especially works the image of old and new to claim its contrast and to emphasize the novelty of the new city against the old Boston of the nineteenth century. At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broadstreets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees; along which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my days raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor are comparable to it before . . . . (Bellamy, 1986, p. 55) This is Olmsted’s Boston, Boston Common and the State House, stretching to the emerald necklace of its new constructed waterways. All made, all manufactured, as utopia might indeed be. Bellamy’s new world was indeed marketed by him as nationalist, more than socialist; socialist looked too dangerous, too distant and European, though this nevertheless was the content of the plea. Yet its markers



Peter Beilharz and Christine Ellem


continue local – Charles Street intervenes, as the claim is made that nationalism is indeed global, for all the societies of the old World have also thus remodelled, from Europe to Australia, Mexico and parts of South America (Bellamy, 1986, p. 115). The new order is also global, for it has dispensed with national, state, country and municipal debts, military and naval expenditure, no criminal class and few police (Bellamy, 1986, p. 167). Bellamy’s fictive device of a throwback to the original condition of sin, in nineteenth-century Boston, name-checks its way again. As West walks between his home and Washington Street in anti-reverie, he is back in squalor and stench, sales and advertising. As he reaches Washington Street, the location of the famous Filene’s, all he can see is the folly of the old consumerist decadence. Shops, within a stone’s throw of one another, devoted incredibly to selling the same sorts of goods. ‘Stores! Stores! Stores! Miles of stores! Ten thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse . . . ’ (Bellamy, 1986, p. 219). Julian West drifts over South Boston, where he finds 4000 small manufacturing units, the same illogic made manifest in production as in distribution. It is the same story, finally, told of his own location, not in Boston but in nearby Chicopee, where the falls become the source of industrial production in his own time and of postindustrial ruins in our own. From here to the tenements of Back Bay, all Bellamy’s narrator can detect is the pulse of an abscess taken for the beating of a heart (Bellamy, 1986, p. 223). From Tremont Street to South Cove, Bellamy’s story is placed at the very same time as it indicates global reach. The sense of reality and concreteness suggested by Bellamy’s so explicitly located utopia became a familiar and central theme of modern utopian writing. But the explosion of formal literary utopias that had occurred alongside and frequently in response to Bellamy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century began to subside after several decades. After the unparalleled disasters of the Great War, writers, social critics and political commentators became less inclined to imagine and argue for possible forms of the good society. The twin icons of modernity, America and Russia, drew increased attention and discussion, and previous enthusiasms for these as eutopias, realizations of the good society, turned to misgiving. Writing around the turn of the century and well into the next, H. G. Wells, ostensibly the ultimate embodiment of the spirit of his time, tossed fitfully between utopia and dystopia in his fictional writing. Ultimately he remained a passionate utopian in his politics and public commentary, if frequently one in despair. His work was profoundly influential on those to follow, and yet by the 1940s his



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utopian idealism looked ridiculous, untenable. Zamyatin’s We, with its mathematically flavoured ‘Onestate’, emerged from within Russia in the early 1920s, a response to both the new Soviet State and H. G. Wells. Its vision was one of social engineering as heaven turned hell, utopia as grotesque. On the tail of Zamyatin came the work of Aldous Huxley and later George Orwell and the paradigm shifted, but it was still clearly placed, indeed, increasingly so. Orwell’s Oedipal and very public denunciation of Wells in 1941 was emblematic of the change in mood. Orwell was firm, baldly stating that Wells’ optimistic attitude towards science and social progress even in the face of Nazism and the Second World War was out of step with the realities and sensibilities of the time: He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity . . . . Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age . . . [b]ut obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this . . . . The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves . . . . Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. (Orwell, 1968, pp. 143–145) With the publication of Brave New World and 1984, the chief concern about utopia was no longer how to foster its realization, but a fear that efforts to bring it about may succeed in bringing a nightmare instead. Central to these fears was the realization that the logics of such modern projects were expansive, potentially global. The visions differed on the precise shape and colour of the nightmare, but agreed on its reach. The narratives were still located in specific and deliberate ways, but their terror was amplified with the image of a global, total, social order. Globalized utopia was now looked on with horror.

Huxley’s World State Huxley’s vision of utopia gone sour mixes Fordism, modern consumerism and hedonism with equal parts of genetic engineering and behavioural conditioning, to produce the Brave New World of A.F. 632





(Huxley, 1973, p. 16). Overseen by ten regionally based World Controllers, the World State delivers ‘Community, Identity, Stability’. Science has been brought to bear on the problem of maintaining social order, and developed more efficient methods than brute force. Social order is now a matter of managing ‘ “the problem of happiness” – in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude’ (Huxley, 1973, pp. 12–13). Citizens are tailored to meet society’s exact requirements. The result is a stable and smoothly functioning world order. Operating on the basis of a genetic caste system that predestines social function, all the various needs of the social body are fulfilled, from the most basic and routine tasks of a semi-moronic Epsilon-minus through to the more complex intellectual work of the Alpha Plus caste. Created and grown in glass bottles on a Fordist production line, raised in communal nurseries, the World State’s citizens are genetically, environmentally, behaviourally and hypnopaedically conditioned to love their productive function and social position. Science, Fordism and orgiastic Solidarity Services have superseded politics and religion. Everyone works for everyone else, and everyone belongs to everyone else. Maintained in an infantile state of instant and continuous gratification with endless consumption, sensory stimulation, sex and soma, a maximum of happiness for all is assured. London is still a world centre, presided over by the Resident Controller for Western Europe. But the city’s notable landmarks have a new Fordist gloss: Charing-T Tower, The Fordson Community Singery and its clock, Big Henry. Fleet Street is home to a single towering building accommodating the assorted Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering. Westminster Abbey is a cabaret. The central preoccupation with consumption and leisure is also built into the landscape. Seen from the air in private aircraft, London’s surrounds are dominated by the complex apparatus of leisure sports:

They were flying over the six kilometre zone of parkland that separated Central London from its first ring of satellite suburbs. The green was maggoty with foreshortened life. Forests of Centrifugal Bumblepuppy towers gleamed between the trees. Near Shepard’s Bush two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles were playing Riemann-surface tennis. A double row of Escalator-Fives Courts lined the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden. In the Ealing stadium a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress . . . . Ten minutes



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The World is fully globally integrated, with vast distances rapidly traversed in rocket and helicopter technology. Travel offers access to a global array of leisure activities and is enthusiastically consumed. People may spend the afternoon watching sport in Amsterdam, the evening in London for dinner, the weekend in New York, or holiday at the North Pole. This anticipates brilliantly the yuppie tourist utopia of our own times; shit in the nest, and move on! Certain undesirable regions of the world serve as isolation zones for the rare troublesome individual. The prospect of removal to Iceland is often enough to produce more orthodox behaviour. Otherwise, those too intelligent or individualist to fit into the World State are relocated to distant islands where their intellectual pursuits are benevolently permitted to proceed once they pose no threat to the established social order. The only area in the world untouched by ‘civilization’ is the Savage Reservation in New Mexico. Here ‘primitivism’ remains preserved for visitors to witness as an exotic and freakish throwback to humanity’s distasteful past. The Savages live with domesticity, mothers, babies, family, love, marriage, dirt, dogs, gods, punishment, ostracism, loneliness, pain, sickness, hatred, violence and alcohol: all antithetical to the civilization of the World State. But this is not a romanticized primitivism. It is another extreme, not an alternative. There is no more space for a sane and fully realized humanity among the Savages than there is among the civilized society of the Brave New World. Huxley’s imagined future order offers no real way out. It is global, total. Huxley positions Fordism as the spiritual core of his dystopia, considering it the defining ideology of the twentieth century, and indicts America ‘as the parent and most systematic practitioner of Fordism . . . [and] furthest along the road to damnation’ (Kumar, 1987, p. 244). Certainly the consumerist, hedonistic ethic of Brave New World is Huxley’s critique of America writ large. So why set his utopia-as-hell in London? Why not America? Precisely because, for Huxley, it was not America itself but what it had set in motion that was significant: America is not unique; she merely leads the way along the road which the people of every nation and continent are taking. Studying the good and evil features in American life, we are studying, in a generally more definite and highly developed form, the good and evil features



later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of Obstacle Golf. (Huxley, 1973, pp. 58–59)

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He rejected the argument that the disturbing aspects of American society were simply a result of its youth, bound to settle as it matured into simply another version of Europe (Adorno in Kumar, 1987, p. 246). For Huxley, the principles of Fordism and mass consumerism were a new and fundamentally modern development, principles bound to become a generalized and global phenomenon. Huxley’s World State and his grotesque London of the year 632 AF is this future, fully realized. In the introduction to later editions of Brave New World, Huxley revised the cynical opposition between the ‘utopian and primitive horns’ of the Savage’s dilemma and emphasized the third option of exile. This community of intellectuals and artists could be the real utopia. Huxley later pursued this idea in one of his final books, Island. Both Brave New World and Island are ultimately part of the same impulse, although Huxley’s ideas matured and his outlook shifted in the later work. He wanted to offer the future a genuine alternative to ‘insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other’ (Huxley, 1973, p. 7). Imbued with a post-war sense of humanity as troubled and tainted, perfection was off the cards, but Huxley still felt a more utopian or ‘sane’ order remained possible, if elusive. Huxley locates this vision on Pala, an island isolated from the polluting influences of the modern world’s psychopathology and superficial consumerism. Its visionaries successfully combined the best of Eastern philosophy, Buddhism and mysticism with the best of Western rational science, medicine and psychology to produce a sane, balanced society of physically robust, psychologically healthy and spiritually satisfied people. Pala is relatively isolated, a ‘forbidden’ island amidst other islands. Its precise location is elusive, lying somewhere undisclosed amidst the Indonesian archipelago. This is a tropical setting, but Huxley is clear that this is no tale of primitive innocence and natural luxury against an evil, rationalizing modernity. The Palanese are not simple islanders whose lives are good because of the happy accident of tropical abundance and comfort. Nor is this a utopia that has developed only in isolation from the modern world. In fact, the history which Huxley crafts for his utopia has its beginnings with the fortuitous intrusion of



of the whole world’s present and immediately coming civilization. Speculating on the American future, we are speculating on the future of civilized man. (Huxley in Kumar, 1987, pp. 246–247)

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a Western doctor, whose last desperate bid to cure the ailing Raja of Pala with hypnotism was unorthodox but successful. A deep friendship was established between the two and what emerged was a commitment to developing a mutual understanding with an eye to social reform. Pala became a consciously crafted effort at a better society through the fusion of Western and Eastern ideas. Not Pala’s isolation, but its openness to the modern world produced its utopian character. The Palanese are modern to the extent that they are pragmatic, rational. Modern science and technology unquestionably improves their physical existence. But they lack an enthusiasm for modernity itself as a way of life, as a philosophy. For this, they look to various Eastern philosophies and practices which speak to a human spirit anchored in the material world, and produce a sense of everyday happiness and serenity against which the consumerist promises of the modern world look hollow and tacky. The features of its physical locale echo its philosophy: East meets West for a better society. The layout of the central village encourages a relaxed pace of life, designed for walking only. Cars and other vehicles are used all over the island but not within the village. Highways and main roads lead out to various research stations, which are kept separate from the island’s living spaces. As foreign import is limited to essentials, factories and some limited production is vital but also decentred, taking place well away from the village. Huxley enthuses about technology adapted to human purposes. Factory work and all forms of agricultural production are participated in by all, primarily for their health and well-being, rather than efficient production. Each person changes specialities frequently so that all Palanese receive a general education in, and appreciation of, the nature of others’ work. The role of money is not explained, but evidently modest consumption exists. A marketplace for artisan and producers occupies the central village ‘square’, as well as a temple and a theatre. This tropical paradise is not cultivated, not a ‘garden’ for humanity. Here nature and people coexist. Lizards wander in and out of houses; dogs and babies bond; a steady cacophony of bird and insect noises saturates the air; local mynahs are trained to call out to the human occupants to remind them of philosophical axioms of compassion and attention to the ‘here and now’; trees are integrated with functionality of social spaces, like the massive banyan tree in the middle of the marketplace used for displaying wares. The Palanese have achieved an ideal balance between the advantages of modern life and the influences of the wider world, and the locally cultivated pleasures of a more relaxed and spiritually attuned way of life.





But geographically and philosophically, Pala sits in unresolved tension with the rest of the world. It is shadowed by its closest neighbour’s ambitions to annex its land and oil to a developing project of militarized industrialism. The book closes with a military coup on the island. Huxley here is acutely aware that under modernity the idea of the good society must face the expansionist logic and globalizing imperatives generated by a capitalist world system. It cannot exist in isolation. As with Bellamy, the ideal and the concrete will meet, although here the result is no longer a happy one by any means. Huxley’s final word both in Island and in the 1946 Foreword to Brave New World is a warning that the outcome is perhaps predictable, but not determined: ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’ (Huxley, 1973, p. 14).

Orwell’s Oceania Oceania, Ingsoc, War is Peace. Orwell’s 1984 is a vision of restless global conflict. The world’s three equally matched but indefatigable superstates – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia – are perpetually at war. Each is essentially a geopolitical bloc with ambitions for total global control. Oceania incorporates the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia and Southern Africa. Eurasia includes all of the Northern European and the ‘Asiatic land-mass’, Portugal to Bering Strait. Eastasia consists of China and all lying south of it, the Japanese islands and large but varying parts of ‘Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet’ (Orwell, 2000b, p. 193). The war fronts are distant rather than domestic. Battles are fought over disputed territories including equatorial Africa, the Middle East, southern India and the Indonesian archipelago. The natural resources and ‘bottomless reserve’ of exploitable labour there are considered the key to crushing the otherwise equivalent forces of their enemies (Orwell, 2000b, p. 195). Each state’s social system and ideology are more or less identical in essence if not name: Ingsoc, Neo-Bolshevism, Death Worship. Each is totalitarian, and the crucial function of the war is in fact the maintenance of social order. Continuous conflict legitimates the ruling party’s tight control and ceaseless surveillance of its members. Bombs fall on the central cities just often enough to sustain a wartime mentality amongst its residents, underlined by meagre rations, supply shortages and frenzied ceremonies of hatred and patriotic fervour. Isolation reigns: except for the Party’s official reports from the battlefronts there is no news of other parts of the world. Foreigners are rarely seen in person, and



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are known only as prisoners and enemy combatants. The Party has an undisturbed capacity to dictate reality as it sees fit. Orwell’s specific setting is a ruined London. The history written into its urban landscape has been deliberately and systematically emptied out. Now the principal city of Airstrip One (formerly Britain) of Oceania, the only vestiges of the old London are crumbling. All its place names have been dropped or altered: the ruling party’s interests dictate an eternal present. Big Brother now stands on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, now Victory Square. The church at St-Martins-in-theFields is now a museum for military propaganda. History and the past are excised from memory. Former religious and judicial buildings barely register as existent. Only their ruins and the most ridiculous of traces remain: half remembered, barely decipherable hints about old churches in a children’s nursery rhyme. Instead, the landscape is dominated by the imposing, 300 metre tall, glittering, white, concrete pyramids of the Party’s four spuriously named ministries: Truth, Love, Peace and Plenty. Surrounding these is a wasteland of grimy desolation; colourless, mired in dust, dirt and paper scraps. Ageing buildings moulder in disrepair and roil with the stench of boiled cabbage, all under the watch of omnipresent telescreens. There is no real communication between parts of Oceania (Orwell, 2000b, p. 89). Citizen’s lives are lived out in their immediate locale, with the city divided up along social lines. The residences of inner party members occupy their own quarter of town. These are relatively plush and luxurious, spacious, carpeted, clean, attended by servants, rich with the smell of good food, and equipped with telescreens which can be briefly turned off when desired. The neighbourhoods of outer party member’s are comprised of grimy houses and apartment blocks in severe disrepair, presenting vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions . . . [and] sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses. (Orwell, 2000b, p. 5) Blocked sinks, broken lifts, bad food, meagre rations and oily gin are typical daily irritations borne with carefully composed faces under the constant watch of droning telescreens and spying neighbours. The prole districts are even more filthy, but largely unmonitored. Apparently





imbecilic, politically irrelevant animals, they have some measure of freedom from surveillance: police patrols roam the areas but telescreens are few. Venturing beyond one’s own neighbourhood is risky. The police patrols arrest anyone deemed out of place. Orwell’s portrait conjures up images of nineteenth-century industrial urban squalor, or the devastation of the Second World War London. It is a deadened cityscape with few touches of humanity. The Community Centres in which party members spend their spare time are utilitarian and unfriendly spaces, stages for the anxious performance of political orthodoxy, breeding grounds for contempt and suspicion. A forced and empty sociality prevails, sociality as mutual surveillance. The only hint of beauty is far beyond the city, out in the woods, which are somehow like Winston’s imagined sublime ‘Golden Country’. This is an image of beauty as nature, uncontrolled, uninstrumental, somehow linked to a sense of humanity now vanished. But it is vague and intangible. It is more a place in the past or in Winston’s mind than an actual location. The real woods are still shadowed by the Party, monitored with microphones hidden amongst the greenery. Nature cannot mount a challenge to this modern totalitarianism (see Wilding, 1980, pp. 225–227). Orwell’s setting is crucial, if frequently misread. Conservative political critics famously took up 1984 as an eloquent and terrible indictment of Soviet Socialism and hence socialism generally, both ultimately comparable to Nazism. Orwell himself always remained a socialist and attempted to redress the misappropriation of his work, refusing the reductive equation of socialism with Stalinism. Orwell’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War fighting with the revolutionary POUM militia saw him not only wounded but deeply disillusioned with Stalinist Socialism, having seen something of its totalitarianism and its ruthlessness towards its supposed ‘comrades’ in Spain (Williams, 1991, pp. 54–60). But he was frustrated and disappointed at the difficulty he had having this message heard amongst the progressive British intelligentsia, who preferred to continue as Stalinist fellow-travellers, or else felt ‘as did many people on the Left, that everything should be sacrificed in order to preserve a common front against the rise of Fascism’ (Davidson, 2000, p. xiv). After having the manuscript rejected by his regular publisher Victor Gollancz on this basis, Orwell finally published Homage to Catalonia in 1938. Reflecting on Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, he lamented that England lacked what one might call concentration-camp literature. The special world created by secret police forces, censorship of opinion, torture, and



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Orwell’s 1984 attempted that, and went further. Orwell was explicit: ‘This is the age of the totalitarian state . . . . I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be world-wide’ (Orwell in Kumar, 1987, p. 305). Also 1984 presents this image of totalitarianism as a global phenomenon, a general characteristic of modern life unconfined to any particular nationality or ideological outlook. The nightmare is of London, of English Socialism, of a repressive ‘Western’ political bloc, precisely because Orwell wanted to drive home the point that totalitarianism was a problem for all modern societies, not only the Soviets or Nazis. England was no exception. The wartime imagery in his portrait of London had a particularly acute sting of reality for those who had lived through the Second World War. The setting is once again a feasibility trick, now horrible rather than hopeful. The very locatedness of Orwell’s nightmare vision was not prophecy but a warning of modernity’s possibilities and universal implications for humanity. Like Looking Backward and Brave New World, this is a vision of a world system. As with these too, its focus is narrowed to a specific place, and yet this is a place within a system. The logics of its social order are reliant on a global system which is all-encompassing. While Bellamy mentions some elements of interaction between the countries of the world, and for Huxley global integration is a matter of leisure and consumption and the swallowing up of space for alternatives, for Orwell the global system is more total and diabolical. The antagonistic interaction between the world’s three superpowers is in fact the fundamental basis of social order. The superstates are mutually constitutive, with elements of the Other and the Outside an integral element in the legitimation of totalitarian control and the maintenance of social order. Global means not only total, but totalitarian.

Conclusions What stands out from these considerations is a sense that the wider world, the ‘global’, has always been a problem as well as a presence for utopia. There is significant tension between the themes of place and global connection in utopian writing. Even as the global context becomes more central, it becomes more problematic. For More, the



frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact. One result of this is that there exists in England almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union. (Orwell in Wilding, 1980, p. 237)


wider world had to be excluded for utopia to exist. Its non-placed-ness in the world and its insularity were its preconditions. For Bellamy, the world had to be included, even if not embraced. It was the particular sense of place, the locatedness of his utopia that fired his imagination most, and made it seem closer, more tangible, concrete. But his utopia had a rational, compelling logic, which would naturally expand and spread: no sane, thinking person or government could fail to grasp its goodness and seek to institute it themselves. Bellamy’s Boston was not only a specific utopia, but also stood as a beacon whose influence could not fail to be global. For Huxley, it was impossible to think of the future without modernity, modernity as hyper-rationalized, ambitious, global and totalizing. Only in pockets might something different or contradictory exist, and in this prospect he did see some hope for the notion of a good society. Huxley then takes us back to More: the wider world, the modernizing world, must be (selectively) kept out for utopia to function, although he also knew that this was no longer More’s world. At some critical point, confrontation between the two was inevitable, and potentially tragic for the good society. For his part, Orwell feared the implications of a totalitarian social order that could become global, even as it deliberately chained people to their locale. The global connections in 1984 lead back to internal social control, rather than out to a genuinely connected world. Orwell’s integrated world system sits quite easily alongside the most painfully located, limited existence, alongside mutual ignorance and strictly regional horizons. Global interdependence facilitates a totalitarian social order which does nothing but fix people more firmly where they are, tainting all places. It was this notion of global connection as potentially dystopic, of globalization as a problem, which resonated through the later part of the twentieth century. Published in 1962, the cautious post-war hopefulness of Huxley’s Island bombed. The earlier visions of Huxley and Orwell remained the touchstone. No one was listening to utopia anymore, despite its centrality to the modern imaginary. Nonetheless, the sense of globalization as a key dynamic of the modern world had been part of the modern utopian genre from its inception, just as its imaginings became more placed, realistic and solid. Visions of utopia and dystopia, the latter more insistently, were grappling with the implications and tensions of globalization long before discussion of it as an identifiable and significant phenomenon became common. Utopia was transformed by the twentieth century by what Zygmunt Bauman called the century of camps (Beilharz, 2001). Like the figure of



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utopia, those camps became both exceptional and exemplary, symbolic and concrete (Alexander, 2006a). They become universal stories about all of us, as well as particular stories about victims, bystanders and perpetrators. The classic texts of utopia were not, then, merely bedding their dreams or fears in by name-checking them to particular places, locales, institutions or buildings. Within the limits of their own cultural frames of reference, these writers were establishing their critical horizons through the capacity to evoke place, time, smell, taste and to call up similarity as well as difference, the known as well as the unknown. They gestured towards points and places of comfort to evoke discomfort. As the cultural horizons of the audience shift, and become more concrete themselves, so do the writing strategies adopted by our authors come more closely to ground. It may well be, for all this, that utopia thus is submerged into the present, into the dirt and dust of Boston and London, Auckland and Sydney. ‘Utopia’, like eternity, becomes a word chalked onto the pavement, washed away and yet recurrent, perennial, always there and yet elusive, as utopia ought properly be. Its place may be contingent, but it is nevertheless placed, even as we walk right over it, living it out.




‘Globalization’ as Collective Representation: The New Dream of a Cosmopolitan Civil Sphere Jeffrey C. Alexander

By friends and foes alike, globalization is hailed as a revolutionary, path-breaking, weltgesichte phenomenon. It solves the world’s economic problems or condemns more of the world’s people to poverty. It creates equality and cooperation or frightfully deepens inequality and hegemonic domination. It opens the way for world peace or it ushers in a new and nightmarish period of terrorism and war. Is it possible to pry ‘globalization’ out of the clutches of the rhetorical binaries that define the passionate simplifications of symbolic life? Globalization is, indeed, one of the central facts of our time. It is a reference that must become central to the social sciences, but has not yet. In this respect, Beck’s claim that modern social science is hobbled by methodological nationalism bears serious consideration (Beck, 2000a). But globalization is too important to be left to the ‘globalizers’, to the entrepreneurs of globalization, whether economic, political or intellectual, who have created what might be called ‘the discourse of globalization’. The members of this carrier group make use of the facts of globality to suggest that the traditional rules of the game no longer hold, whether these are the traditional social ‘laws’ that link capitalist markets with economic inequality and undemocratic political power with domination or the traditional ideas of the modern disciplines of social science.1 About such apocalyptic or utopian claims we must be very cautious. Globalization is not an alternative reality that makes previous knowledge and social reality irrelevant. It is a long emerging if only recently risible and represented reality, a social phenomenon that in itself is neither sacred nor profane. It must be put back inside history and social science. 28



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To begin this process, we might start with a compelling phrase of Anthony Giddens, one of globalization’s leading intellectual ideologists. Globalization marks, according to Giddens (1990), a compression of space and time. To this I would wish to add a relatively friendly amendment. Compression affects not only the pragmatics but the semantics of communication, the basic meaning units, the symbolic languages upon which interactions depend. There exist not only new technologies of movement and communication but more condensed and transcendent cultural logics, such as democracy and human rights, that spread common understandings and structures of feeling more widely than before. It is by the compression of space, time, and meaning that globalization creates a significantly more expansive field of action and organization. The question, however, is whether such an expansion marks a new order of magnitude, as Giddens and the other entrepreneurs of globalization suggest, such that radically new knowledges are necessary? If the answer to this question is no, and I believe it is, then why has incremental change in scale so frequently been represented as a change of exponential magnitude? Could it be that this shift in the representational order itself represents the fundamental and radical change? If so, it is an aspect of globalization to which globalizing intellectuals have not paid sufficient attention. We will return later to this shift in the field of representation. Let us speak first of the mundane process of globalization. My hypothesis is that globalization should not be understood as something radically new. It marks rather another step in the millennia-long compression of time/space/meaning, and the corresponding expansion in reach of the institutions that represent them, that is, the extension of political, economic, and cultural organization and power (Mann, 1986). In fact, far from being a radically new knowledge, this process of compression/expansion already formed the central subject of modernization theory in the middle of the last century. More than any other historical transformation, it was the movement from ‘particular’ and ‘local’ to the ‘universal’ and ‘national’ that fascinated modernization theorists, who framed it as the movement from traditional to modern society. In retrospect, from the perspective created by postmodern critique, we can see this binary as both tragic and absurd. The first side of the binary represents a vast simplification, ignoring the extraordinary variation between different forms of earlier societies, for example, the giant power reach of early empires. The other side of the binary is also highly exaggerated. National and universal are as contradictory as synonymous. As for the much heralded modernity of the twentieth



Jeffrey C. Alexander


century, it turned out to be as barbaric as any recorded in the annals of traditional history. Nonetheless, the modernization theorists were right in thinking broadly about an historical enlargement of scope. Insofar as we are moving toward a more global playing field, we are in the midst of this familiar process. Social organizations and cultural structures alike are expanding their scope and reach.2 By emphasizing the familiarity of this process, and how it was a central topic for modernization theory, I want to suggest that, whether italicized, capitalized, or followed with an exclamation point, globalization does not represent an abrupt change. To understand it, we need not invent new or alternative knowledges. Rather, we must better apply the theoretical and empirical ideas already available, which means to orient them in a more global way. Every process evoked in the globalization literature has already been conceptualized in studies of social and cultural transformations from local to national scale, which have traced sometimes incremental, sometimes abrupt enlargements in economic, political, military, religious, legal, penal, and cultural life. How these processes work has been conceptualized in a manner that has little to do with the scale of the nation as such. Let us consider, for example, the classical theoretical writings of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and their systemic understandings of such social phenomena as class formation, mode of production, division of labor, functional differentiation, bureaucracy, stratification, authority, and power. Were the concepts and propositions created by these writings, in contrast with their more restricted empirical referents, dependent on national scale? The empirical equation of their own societies – identified in terms of nation, civilization, or class – with progress, universalism, and rationality was often myopic. But the classical theorizing about the organizational and cultural processes involved in sustaining universalism and particularism can largely still stand. The same is true for much of the modern theorizing we have inherited from such sociological thinkers as Parsons, Elias, Goffman, and Geertz. They, too, dealt centrally with universalizing processes and compressions of temporal, spatial, and cultural scale, and their insights also provide foundations for thinking about the globalizing phase we are experiencing today. But in the impassioned and simplified rhetorics of globalization more is involved than merely empirical claims. There are moral assertions about justice being possible for the first time or no longer being possible again. There is a sense of imminence, of an historical shifting that, for better or for worse, has already transformed, or is about to, the basic



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meaning of social life. I wonder, however, whether globalization has, in fact, had any particular normative purchase? Does the compression of space, time, and meaning translate into justice and the good life? Let us do a thought experiment. You are a citizen of Florence in the year 1500 and you are visited by the angel of history and vouchsafed a vision of the different, nationally organized world that is to come. Deeply inspired by this new vision of universalism, you turn to your companion in the palazzo and exclaim: Hey, you’re not going to believe this, but there’s going to be, starting in a hundred years or so, the birth of an amazing thing called the nation state, and everything henceforth will be organized on a gigantically different scale. There will be an extraordinary compression of time and space, and everything, I mean everything, will be subject to the new law of nationalization. Someday, everything we take for granted – about economic life, war, science, customs, politics, religion, education – will be based, not on this little puny city or even this region, but on the great entity that will be called the nation. Would you have been right, in that long ago Florentine time, to be so excited? Did nationalization turn out to be anything so great? It did represent a new compression of space, time, and meaning, and it had immense historical significance. But was it liberating in the normative sense? Did it have any particular moral purchase? Should we have heralded it in the kind of utopian manner the economic, political, and intellectual entrepreneurs speak about globalization today? The enthusiasm of our Florentine ancestor may be excused. The movement toward the city-state had once promised enlightenment, freedom, and justice, and he was already beginning to feel its restrictive corruptions full face. The promise of expanding to the national field seemed to provide a way out of that urban cul-de-sac. The promise of the nation made universalism still seem possible, just as the promise of the city had before. But this new promise to make the universal concrete turned out no differently. The social and moral possibilities of nationalization were rather more limited than its ideologists had thought. Similar caution applies to the phase of time/space/meaning expansion in which we are participating today. Globalization is a mundane process that, in the course of the twentieth century, has created at least as much trouble as possibility. The reach of markets has dramatically expanded, producing and distributing on a wider scale than ever before. These economic processes, however, have contributed as





much to exploitation and poverty as to wealth creation and economic participation. Information from distant parts of the world has become increasingly available in real time, but it has not become free floating and universal. Even the most rapidly circulated and easily available information remains attached to particular world views, interests, and powers. Rather than having displaced enslaving religious dogmas for liberating reason, such globalizing ideologies as nationalism, communism, fascism, and economic liberalism have merely provided secular versions of equally heinous and dogmatic constraint. Like the earlier world-historical belief systems that emerged from the Axial age, these modern ideologies have created supplicants and priests. In the name of purification and world transformation, they have justified massive violence and created havoc and mayhem on a global scale.3 It is hardly surprising, in light of this modernist legacy, that so-called traditional religion has recently found on the global stage a new life. As the world’s territory has been scaled down from empires and up from cities, globalizing rhetorics charged nation-states with the mission of democracy and equality. It has been much more likely, however, for the new nations to become iron cages of suppression, with the universalism of the ‘people’ becoming a camouflage for primordiality of some primitive kind. If nations represented a new phase of time/ space/meaning compression, their expansionary powers have not necessarily been linked to individual freedom or civil rights. The origins of international law in the Treaty of Westphalia brought the destructive wars of religion to an end, but it did so by underscoring national sovereignty (Clark, 1999; Lipschutz, 1992). The treaty gave freedom and respect not to individuals but to states. We live still according to the tradition of international law that has nothing intrinsically to do with human rights (Cushman, 2005). With the significant exception of the European Union, which itself remains a regionally restricted power, no larger, more impartial, more universalistic, and more democratic entity has yet taken over from the nation-state.4 These sober reflections about twentieth-century globalization are underscored when we consider war, the national form of organized violence so conspicuously neglected by classical and modern social theory. Has it not been the very compression of time, space, and meaning that has allowed destructive violence and mass murder to become so world-wide? The utopian vision of a cosmopolitan and boundary-less civil society eloquently espoused by Kant (1970) emerged just as the ideal of a democratic civil sphere was becoming firmly instantiated in the revolutionary nation-state. Napoleon advanced even as Kant wrote.



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Since that time, the imperial idea of reshaping the world in the name of universal ideals has been related to war, whether waged for a French warrior’s vision of Europe, a Russian revolutionary’s ideal of communism, a German dictator’s scheme for a Volk Gemeinschaft, or a new and democratic world order envisioned by the United States. Yet, if we must resist the impulse to fold normative aspirations for a ‘global imaginary’ into some immanent empirical laws about globalization, we must try all the harder, as David Held (2004) quite rightly insists, to steer time/space/meaning compression in normatively more compelling ways. The present phase of globalization does open up new democratic possibilities. If the social and cultural processes involved in contemporary time/space/meaning compression are not radically new but mundane, it may well be that the sense of newness is in the name, in the signifier and not the signified. What I am suggesting is that we understand ‘globalization’ as a process of social representation. Why has ‘globalization’ emerged as a dominant new imaginary? What discourse does it crystallize, what fears does it carry, and what hopes does it represent? ‘Globalization’ appeared as response to the trauma of the twentieth century, in a moment of hope when it seemed, not for the first time, that the possibility for a world-wide civil society was finally at hand. Since before the Enlightenment, the idea of world peace has accompanied the expansion of organizational and cultural power. From the seventeenth century on, the political theory of high and organic intellectuals alike has articulated the idea of peaceful conflict resolution through the concept of civil power. The possibility for civil control, as opposed to military violence or political domination, can be traced back to the idea of the social contract, to the Lockean vision of consensual agreement and persuasion in contrast with the Hobbesian resort to force and fraud. Sociologically, the idea of civil society points to the idea of a liberal discourse that is at once critical and tolerant, and to institutions, from factual and fictional mass media to voting and law, that allow collectivities to be guided by symbolic communication among independent and rational citizens who feel bound by ties of solidarity and mutual obligation (Alexander, 2006a). In what has been called the long nineteenth century, during the ‘Age of Equipoise’ that followed upon the end of the Napoleonic wars, there was the sense, not only among Euro-American elites, that such cosmopolitan peace was finally at hand.5 It seemed possible to believe that, alongside the expansion of organizational and cultural power, ‘civilization’ was becoming worldwide. That this civil utopian vision of





a peaceful world was shadowed by the expansion of colonial conquest outside Europe is a fearful symmetry only visible from our own time.6 This dream of reason was shattered by the First World War. For intellectuals and artists, and thoughtful men and women on every side, the war exposed the barbarism that contradicted modernity’s promise to create a more civil society.7 If that first globalizing war exposed the ugly face of military nationalism that threatened cosmopolitan peace, so much more so did the totalitarianisms that emerged during its wake. The Second World War marked a globalizing battle over the very possibility for modern civil life. In the wake of these war traumas, the victors promised to renew the dream of cosmopolitan peace.8 The utopia discourse of world civil society was even embedded in formally democratic institutional regimes, the quasi-world governments of first the League of Nations and then the United Nations. The ideas for these repair efforts were provided by such high intellectuals as Bertrand Russell implemented by such organic intellectuals as Ralph Bunche. Yet, the carrier groups for these efforts at renewing the cosmopolitan dream were the victorious national hegemons themselves. Such an infrastructure of national power belied the aspirations for a global civil order. When strains at the level of nationstates became too intense, the League of Nations was destroyed. It had been hobbled from its beginnings, of course, by America’s refusal to join. The United Nations was undermined even more quickly by the division of the postwar universalizing spirit into the fighting camps of the Cold War. The rhetoric on both sides of this great divide rang the bells of international peace, but in the background one could always hear the sounds of war. When the Third World War of the short twentieth century was finished, there were once again utopian hopes for the repair of civil society and the creation of world peace. The utopian representation ‘globalization’ first emerged in the late 1980s, as the Cold War wound down. As this new collective representation gained power, in the decade following, it looked like a world civil society was finally at hand. This time around, the high and organic intellectuals were former activists and peaceniks, post-Marxist and liberal leftists who had campaigned for peace against the Vietnam war in the United States, for ‘Europe’ and against national boundaries on the continent, and for nuclear disarmament on both sides. International law would be based not on the rights of sovereign nations, but on individual and human rights. National force was pledged to multinational, not national interest, to a new world order in which peace and civil respect would reign. The Security Council



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of the United Nations was approached as if it were a global democratic forum in which rational discussion could affect the distribution of wealth and the application of power.9 Once again, however, this moment of equipoise was underpinned by a national infrastructure. It was the victors in the Cold War who were most excited about globalization; the losers were more interested in national reconstruction and restoring regional strength. It was the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, who gave commencement addresses on civil society as the key to world peace. It was NATO that intervened in Kosovo. It should not be surprising that this most recent dream for cosmopolitan peace reigned for scarcely more than a decade. The post-war collective effervescence in which globalization became such a powerful new representation came to an end with the election in America of George W. Bush, which was soon accompanied by a neoconservative discourse of empire. National interest was unabashedly reasserted, global agreements cancelled, and global conferences and institutions boycotted. As the President and neoconservative politicians and intellectuals handled and channeled the national trauma of 11 September 2001, it highlighted anticivil violence and global fragmentation and pointed to a Hobbesian struggle between civilizations. Collective violence once again came to be waged by nations and blocs, with divisive rather than unifying effects for the world scene.10 These events were experienced by the intellectuals promoting globality, and by its organized carrier groups, not merely as disappointment but betrayal. For explanation, many turned to anti-Americanism, the long-standing culture structure which divides good and evil by polluting the United States and purifying any collectivity, ideology, or region that comes to represent the other side.11 No matter how culturally satisfying, however, this interpretation elides the systemic processes at play. The structures and the ideologies of the world are still primarily organized nationally, and hardly at all in a globally civil way. As long as this organizational structure is maintained, if and when other states amass extraordinarily asymmetrical power, they will undoubtedly act in a similar way. To accept anti-Americanism as explanation rather than as interpretation, moreover, misses the ambiguous and often productive role that this cultural trope often has played. To pollute America as a hegemon is to make deviant anti-civil actions as such, not merely the United States. By creating a stark if simplifying contrast between ‘American’ action, on the one side, and a more civil sort of global power, this binary has the effect of allowing the purifying power of the globalization





representation to be sustained. In February 2003, in the days just before the American invasion of Iraq, the meaning of this cultural confrontation and the stakes involved were clearly displayed on the front page of the New York Times. Reporting the massive demonstrations that had unfolded throughout the world on the previous day, a Times correspondent wrote, ‘The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.’ Apparently factual, this statement must be seen rather as interpretive reconstruction. It framed these empirical events in a globally civil way. They are presented as transpiring on the public stage of the world, and America is portrayed, not as an elect but as a particularistic nation, confronting not the evil of an Iraqi dictator but the world as a civil, rationally organized society: ‘President Bush appears to be eyeball to eyeball with a tenacious new adversary: millions of people who flooded the streets of New York and dozens of world cities to say they are against war based on the evidence at hand.’ There is not a world government to curb a hegemonic state bent on defending its interests as nationally conceived. The nascent global civil sphere has none of the institutions that, in a fully functioning democracy, allow public opinion to produce civil power and thus regulate the state, such as independent courts, party competition, and elections. Yet this nascent global civil sphere does have access to institutions of a more communicative kind. Despite different languages and separated ownership and organization, national news stories construct extra-national events in a manner that often reveals a high level of intertextuality, creating the common understandings and interpretations that allow there to be putatively global events. These ‘factual’ understandings are sustained by the intense circulation around the globe of ‘fictional’ mass media, which are far from being merely entertaining in their cultural effects. These fictional media are movies, television dramas, novels, music, and the international brands whose consumption is creating a more common material culture worldwide. It is within this symbolic and institutionally constructed sea of global public opinion that there emerges the world stage, on which transpire polls, demonstrations, social movements, scandals, corruptions, terrorism, electoral triumphs, and tragedies, performances that palpably create the very sense that there is a supra-national life. It is within this febrile and often highly unstable membrane of global consciousness that international institutions and nongovernmental organizations



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create forms, not of governance in the state-political sense, but of governmentality, from agreements over labor conditions and world health to regulations about the environment and land mines. The rules and resources that sustain governmentality, as opposed to government, rest on consensus and agreement rather than on the violence-backed power of a state.12 The dream of cosmopolitan peace has not died. The forceful hope for creating a global civil sphere remains. It is embodied in the collective representation of globalization, which has organizational integuments and political and economic effects. There is a global stage in which local events are evaluated, not only nationally or ethnically, but according to the standards of the civil sphere. Before this stage sits an idealized audience of world citizens. Sometimes the performances projected to this audience are initiated by avowedly global actors. More often, they reflect local scripts of national actors, which are projected on the world stage and evaluated according to the principles of cosmopolitan peace and by the discourse and interactions of civil life. Since the first national institutionalizations of civil societies, there has been imagined the possibility for a civil sphere on a supra-national scale. In the seventeenth century, the trope of ‘oriental despotism’ emerged, reconfiguring colonialism into a fight for civil power on a global scale. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Lisbon earthquake became a trauma for Europe and offered a sentimental education for ‘all mankind’. In the early nineteenth century, the moral movement against anti-slavery achieved political success by generating moral empathy, extending solidarity and psychological identification to nonwhite others for the first time. In the mid-twentieth century, the narration and memorialization of the Holocaust formed a powerful basis for expanding moral universalism, establishing genocide as a principle for evaluating national, ethnic, and religious power. At the end of the twentieth century, globalization emerged as a new representation on the fragile public stage of world life. Globalization refers to a process of space/time/meaning compression that is ongoing. These expansions have not yet, by any means, created the basis for globality in the sense of a supra-national civil society, as the recent revival of nation-centered rhetorics and practices of national hegemony have demonstrated. Nonetheless, globalization is a new and powerful social representation. It has performative force, and it has emerged for good sociological reasons. Even if it is sharply contested, the dream of cosmopolitan peace can never be entirely suppressed.




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1. I have in mind such globalizing intellectuals as Giddens, Held, Beck, Keane, and Kaldor (see note 10). See later in this chapter for a discussion of the intellectual carrier group and their theoretical and empirical claims. 2. For a sympathetic reading of the progressive elements of modernization theory, and the contextualization of its critics, see Alexander (1995). 3. Eisenstadt’s (1982) Weberian perspective on the manner in which free floating intellectuals and transcendental, world-transforming ideologies emerged on a global level in the first millennium BC forms an important, relativising perspective for the current claims that are made for the newly emergent representation of globalization. 4. On how some of Europe’s leading democratic intellectuals have recently employed the particularistic and simplistic tropes of ‘orientalism’ to suggest European cultural and political superiority to America, see Heins (2005). 5. For the long nineteenth and short twentieth centuries, see Eric Hobsbawm (1990, 1994); for the Age of Equipoise that followed the Napoleonic wars and last nearly to the end of the nineteenth century, see Burn (1964). 6. For the self-deceptive conflation of the model of democratic citizen with patrimonial subject during the colonial era, see Mamdani (1996). 7. For how twentieth-century social theory responded to the ennui and traumas of the century’s first half, see Alexander (1990). 8. In the following, I draw upon Alexander et al. (2004), which suggests that the construction of cultural trauma – defining the pain, the perpetrators, the victims, and the antidote – is a central path by which collectivities sustain and develop collective identity. 9. It was Giddens’ Consequences of Modernity, in 1990, that most forcefully introduced the idea that ‘globalization’ characterized contemporary late modernity. Giddens brought Ulrich Beck, another intellectual central to this discourse, to SE, and it has primarily been a group of post-Marxist British intellectuals, including with Giddens and Beck, Mary Kaldor, John Keane and David Held, who brought the idea of civil globality into centrality in the 15 years since. Mary Kaldor emphasizes the importance of the 1980s European disarmament and peace movements in ‘The Ideas of 1989: The Origins of the Concept of Global Civil Society’ (Kaldor, 2003), and she points to such early collaborations as Kaldor and Falk, The New Détente (1989). The work of hers that discusses globalization in a manner that can most clearly be seen as casting it as an idealistic ‘collective representation’ is Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (2003). The representation process emerging from the end of the Cold War can be seen in Keane’s work (1988, 1991, 2003). Moving into this arena of representation slightly later, Held’s influential writings have clarified and highlighted the democratic dimensions of Giddens’ globalization concept (e.g. 1995, 2004; Held and McGrew 2002b). All these writings mix normative elaborations about the scope and desirability of a global civil society with empirical data about its structural processes and analytic dimensions. Held’s work is especially striking in this regard, for, while it makes broad incursions into the empirical domain, it is explicitly imbedded in normative political theory. At the other end of the empirical/normative continuum is the Global Civil Society project, the edited volumes that, since



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2001, have been produced annually at the London School of Economics by Mary Kaldor, Helmut Anheier, and Marlies Glasius. This tightly organized and highly collaborative project, funded inlarge part by the Ford Foundation, has projected the ‘representation’ of democratic globalization from London to activists, students, and intellectuals throughout the world. 10. For the neoconservative discourse of empire, see, for example, Boot (2001), D’Souza (2002), Kagan (2003). For an overview of this revival and an ironic yet forceful liberal-realist case for American imperial power as, in principle, the only viable force for progressive transformation in a Hobbesian world, see Ferguson (2004). The most sophisticated and influential conservative argument against the very possibility for a global civil society is undoubtedly Huntington’s (1996). which made its first appearance as a widely influential article in Foreign Affairs (1993). Huntington employs a primordial understanding of culture to develop a seemingly scientific case that the world’s distinctive civilizations are based on religions that can never be reconciled, which means that, rather than moving toward global civil order, the future of international politics will revolve around prolonged conflict for hegemony. 11. For a systematic empirical interpretation of French anti-Americanism during the post-war period, see Kuisel (1993) and, more generally, Buruma and Margalit (2004). 12. For this distinction, see, particularly, Held and McGrew (2002b).




3 Chamsy el-Ojeili

Introduction ‘Post-Marxism’ is a troublesome notion – an autobiographical declaration (Heller and Fehér, 1991, p. 4)? A distinct theoretical formation? An epoch? Each of these senses presents problems, and some of these difficulties are reflected in efforts to delineate the contours of this thing, ‘post-Marxism’.1 In this chapter, I seek to explore post-Marxism along the related axes of theorizing and utopia. I am following Therborn (2007, p. 79) in reading social theory as ‘strung between two ambitious poles’: first, as an ‘explanatory framework for a set of social phenomena’; and, second, as an attempt to make sense of such phenomena. The ‘narration of the social’, the ‘search for meaning’ (Alexander, 1995, pp. 78–79) implied by this second pole involves, importantly, a utopian dimension, utopia understood, after Levitas (1993, p. 257), as a ‘desire for a better way of living expressed in the description of a different kind of society’. My suggestion is that we can identify a first- and second-phase postMarxism, post-Marxism I and II. In the first part of the chapter, I explore post-Marxism I as an initial response to the so-called ‘crisis of the Marxist imaginary’, arguing that it coheres as an intellectual formation around largely negative ‘co-ordinates of unity’ and through a certain ‘residualization’ of utopianism. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to post-Marxism II, which I read as a certain theoretical and political line of response to globalization, or, perhaps more accurately, to the demise of ‘happy globalization’ (Holmes in Outhwaite and Ray, 2005, p. 19). In contrast to post-Marxism I, this later post-Marxist moment is more positive and reconstructive, both in theoretical and in utopian terms. 40



Two Post-Marxisms: Beyond Post-Socialism?

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In a concluding note, I reflect on the implications of the trajectory from post-Marxism I to II in terms of a theme, a debate, and a question in the literature: first, the recurrent theme of a pervasive ‘retreat of utopia’ since the 1970s; second, the debate around the challenges to, and transformations in, social theory over the past three or so decades; and, third, Bauman’s (1976; Beilharz, 1994, 1999, 2003) early question about the future of socialism as a central counter-culture within our modernity.

Post-Marxism I I want to begin with Fredric Jameson’s (1996, p. 1) contention that ‘ “Postmarxisms” regularly emerge at those moments in which capitalism itself undergoes a structural metamorphosis’. Historically, Jameson is thinking of Bernstein’s revisionism or the advent of Western Marxism. For Jameson, the latest iteration of post-Marxism – what I call post-Marxism I – is to be read as a product of that mutation he calls ‘multinational’ or ‘global’ capitalism, or what I see as best described as a post-1968 period of ‘transition’ (Wallerstein, 2000), ‘systemic chaos’ (Arrighi, 1994), or, as Wagner (1994, 2001a, 2001b) puts it, the ‘second crisis of modernity’. The new terrain issuing from these multidimensional transformations includes the so-called ‘crisis of the Marxist imaginary’. Therborn’s (2007, p. 67) elegant encapsulation of this crisis is to speak of Marxism’s ‘broken triangle’. This triangle – constituted by, first, ‘a historical social science . . . focussed on the operation of capitalism and, more generally, on . . . the dynamics of the forces and relations of production’, second, a ‘philosophy of contradictions or dialectics’, and, third, a ‘socialist, working class’ politics – has broken apart in the face of intellectual challenges, social changes, and Left defeats. Post-Marxism I wrestles with these ‘reality problems’ (Alexander, 1995) and with the consequences of this broken triangle, and its ‘coordinates of unity’ (Anderson, 1976) are best approached by Tormey and Townshend’s (2006) identification of six problems addressed by post-Marxism to Marx and Marxism. These six problems bring together those thinkers commonly and plausibly designated ‘post-Marxist’ – for instance, Laclau and Mouffe, Habermas, Castoriadis, Lefort, Heller, Bauman, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Derrida. I will run through these briefly. The first problem is the problem of history, which Tormey and Townshend (2006, p. 212) describe as the ‘common suspicion of the



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teleological narrative that is seen to underpin Marx’s work’. Across post-Marxism I, then, we see a common rejection of the notions of goals or laws in History and, related to this, a critique of all forms of essentialism. Instead, post-Marxism I underscores something like ‘contingency’ and the priority of something like ‘the political’. Castoriadis (1987), for instance, mounted early opposition against a Marxism that eliminated the centrality of struggle by reading history as rational and closed, emphasizing instead the groundlessness of being and the fundamental historicity, particularity, and creativity entailed in the production of meaning and society (Castoriadis, 1987; Howard and Pacom, 1998). The second problem is the problem of revolutionary subjectivity – essentially the critique of the idea of the working class as primary agent or ‘universal class’ (Fehér and Heller, 1987) in progressive social change, and the attempt to re-think issues of identity and collective agency. Thus, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) lean towards the new social movements, and in Laclau’s (1990, 1996, 2005a) subsequent work we see a decisive shift from class to demands, from Emancipation to emancipations, and from identity as recognition, potentially ‘full’ and aligned to material interests to identity as construction, articulation, difference, and lack. The third problem is the problem of ethics, a rejection of the ‘ethical deficit’ or ‘moral constipation’ (Lukes in Wilde, 2001) of Marxist orthodoxy. This post-Marxist ethical turn is, for instance, pronounced in the work of Agnes Heller 2 (Fehér and Heller, 1987; Heller and Fehér, 1988, 1991), who, emphasizing pluralism and contingency against Marxism’s ‘radical universalism’, develops an ‘ethical socialism’ where weight is placed on civic virtues, justice, freedom, and ‘the recognition of all human needs’ (Heller and Fehér, 1991, p. 186). The fourth problem is the problem of positivism, a postmodern type critique of the orthodox Marxist equation of Marxism with Science and, more generally, of Truth, Science, Rationality as attainable theoretical aspirations. Instead, we are urged to face up to a world without Truth or guarantees.3 The fifth problem is the problem of vanguardism, a questioning of the orthodox Marxist assignation of science and its carriers (socialist intellectuals, the Party) to lead role in socialist transformation and the post-capitalist ‘administration of things’. On this score, across postMarxism I, we find a critique of ‘really existing socialism’;4 we see echoes of the ultra-Leftist rejection of Leninist and social democratic ‘substitutionism’, and an insistence instead that emancipation can only



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equal self-emancipation; and we find criticism of the representative and legislative ambitions of intellectuals.5 The sixth problem is democracy, a re-evaluation of democracy in the light of Stalinism and what Boggs (1993) calls the ‘crisis of Modernity’. We find here something of a rethinking of the relationship between socialism, democracy, and liberalism, a greater caution regarding democratic institutions and rights, and a tendency towards the disappearance of the old socialist appeals to the necessary end of private property, the withering of the state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. For instance, Lefort (1988, pp. 17–19) accents the historical break of modern democracy, where ‘the locus of power becomes an empty place’, where we see ‘the dissolution of the markers of certainty’, a positive moment instituting a ‘fundamental indeterminacy’ as to the basis of power, law, and knowledge. Here, Lefort (pp. 31–32) refuses the hard Marxist critique of the welfare state, the maximalist reading of liberaldemocracy as the mere dictatorship of capital, the reading of rights as simply individualistic and property-founded veils of power. I want now to draw some broad conclusions about post-Marxism I, with respect to, first, the ‘situation and tasks’ of social theory and, second, the question of utopia. Theoretically the ‘post’ of the postMarxist equation is key to the point where we might be tempted to agree with Sim’s (1998, pp. 7–8) assessment that it ‘drives the theoretical enterprise’. For Sim, in fact, the ‘Marxism’ of ‘post-Marxism’ amounts largely to ‘a series of somewhat empty gestures whose content is emotional rather than theoretical’. The meaning of this emotion is nostalgia, marking an implicit or explicit recognition of defeat (the spectre of totalitarianism, the deadness of socialist language), alongside a reluctance to properly let go. In the end, for Sim, there can be no proper conversation between an inherently monistic (Marxism) and an inherently pluralizing (postmodern) paradigm. I think the last part of this assessment is highly contestable. Nevertheless, Sim is correct, I think, insofar as the overall theoretical thrust of post-Marxism I is postmodern and deconstructive or, more critically, as McLennan (1996, 2003) frames it, ‘negative’ and ‘selfscrutinizing’, detecting and rejecting the various ‘sins’ of Modernist theory – reductionism, universalism, enlightenment, objectivism, essentialism, and so on. I think that many of the objections raised against this theoretical trajectory are accurate and pressing. Richard Rorty (1997), for instance, contended that the postmodern Left had retreated to a theoreticist, spectatorial, and negative position, jettisoning social justice issues,



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common dreams, and the vital Left role as the ‘party of hope’.6 Nicos Mouzelis (1990, 1995), meanwhile, pointed to the problems entailed by the philosophical turn within – or more accurately, as replacement for – social theory. Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism, for Mouzelis (1988), was illustrative of some of these problems. Here, in the hope of avoiding reification and essentialism, Marxism’s theoretical tools are demolished without the construction of any conceptual replacements, leaving us with an ‘institutional vacuum’ (Mouzelis, 1988, p. 116),7 and thereby abandoning the central terrain of social theory – accounting for the constitution, reproduction, and transformation of social formations. While I think Laclau and Mouffe do far more than Mouzelis allows towards replacing the demolished Marxist theoretical apparatus with a discoursecentred analytical strategy, the overall register of substantive theorizing of the ‘Essex School’ tends to be negative and rather formal. Political identities and discourses are simply pulled apart into their constituent pieces, in order to demonstrate that there are no sure foundations, that identity is always precarious, relationally constructed, cohering around some contingent nodal point that is, in truth, empty of substantive content, while viewed (incorrectly) by participants as ‘points of supreme plenitude of meaning’ (for instance, Stavrakakis, 1997). Further to the explanatory and diagnostic moment of post-Marxism I, we see a tendency for a displacement from capitalism to modernity (Alexander, 1995; Jameson, 2002; Wagner, 2001c). For instance, Agnes Heller moves to reject Marxist reductionism that equates modernity with capitalism: first by positing modernity as marked by the dynamic intertwining of three logics – capitalism, industrialization, and democracy (Fehér and Heller, 1987); and later complexifying the picture by adding two ‘constituents’ to the rethought logics (technology, functional allocation of social positions, political power) of modernity (Heller, 1999).8 Part of what is involved here is post-Marxism’s entanglement with what Jameson (1989, p. 35) describes as a postmodern ‘war against totality’, and what Alexander (1995, p. 82) names as postmodernism’s essentially ‘deflationary narrative frame’. This war against totality, this deflationary modality, too can be seen in the realm of utopian significations within post-Marxism I. Overall, I think that we could say that we see a ‘residualization effect’ across post-Marxism I, away from substantial specification of the institutional content of societal alternatives. Here, emphases on citizenship, the extension of rights, completion of logics contained within modernity, the possibilities entailed by the productive tension between liberal and socialist axioms become



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the dominating kinds of future-oriented references – against what Boltanski (2002) views as the dominating trope of the historic Left, ‘total revolution’. To clarify, I am not saying that within post-Marxism I utopia disappears.9 Clearly, though, the major emphases here are tentative, negative, prohibitive, pessimistic, institutionally thin – withdrawal before the spectre of totalitarianism [against the ‘fantasy of harmony’ (Stavrakakis, 2005)], ‘internal democratization of liberal institutions’ (Laclau, 2005b, p. 259), pluralism, lack, limits, and so on. Castoriadis is, in a sense, the exception proving the rule. The entire thrust of Castoriadis’s work to the very end was underpinned by the project of ‘autonomy’, which is clearly connected to the historical ‘thin red line’ of workers’ councils and to the non-Leninist ultra-Left. However, clearly, too, Castoriadis’s earlier elaboration on the content of socialism is off the agenda, and, instead, the predominant future-oriented register is the gloomy dystopia of a looming ‘retreat into heteronomy’ – generalized conformism, a crisis of criticism, the ‘unprecedented wearing out of social imaginary significations’.10

Post-Marxism II My suggestion is that following the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ and an initial period of ‘happy globalization’, reality problems – deepening inequality, financial crisis, the emergence of new anti-systemic movements, discontent with ‘post-political’ politics, what Mann (2001) has called ‘ostracizing imperialism’ and ‘zones of turmoil’ – had provoked, by the close of the 1990s, important intellectual and political shifts. Alain Badiou (2007, pp. 41–42) has recently spoken of the proximity between the late nineteenth century and the present – ‘vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the “service of wealth”, the nihilism of large sections of the young; the servility of much of the intelligentsia’ – contending that we are witnessing a period of productive ferment and experimentalism comparable to that of the ‘age of imperialism’. On this score, those problems raised by post-Marxists against Marx and Marxism look today less decisive and pressing. I think that these transformations have led to shifts in the ways Left intellectuals deal with the encounters between the Marxian tradition, socialism, post-foundational thought, and the present; and one result is the consolidation of a broad variety of response I would call post-Marxism II. Here, among some of those thinkers of post-Marxism I,



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Utopian significations First, I want to focus on the question of utopian significations – the positing of societal alternatives, addressing questions of transformation (agency and ‘transition’). An initial observation, in line with Badiou’s (2007, 2008) comments on the experimentalism of the present, is the notable variety and creativity of focus in thinking future possibilities: ‘cosmopolitical utopianisms’ – for instance, Held’s (2003a, 2004) ‘global social democracy’; ‘utopias of supra-state polities’ – for instance, Habermas’s (1999, 2001a, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Habermas and Derrida, 2003, 2006) recent commentary on the possibility of a ‘postnational democracy’ (2001a, p. 100), or Vattimo’s (2004, p. 114) equation ‘Socialism, in other words Europe’; ‘utopias of national transformation’ – for instance, Roberto Unger’s (2005a, p. 167) ‘prophetic’ appeal to ‘a vision of unrealized human opportunity’ and creativity, by way of a nationalism ‘reinterpreted and redirected’ (2005, p. 49), or Wright’s (2006) proposals towards ‘social empowerment’; and ‘utopias of sub- and transstate communities’ – for instance, Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004) arguments about the construction of ‘counter-Empire’ through the singular and locally rooted struggles of the ‘multitude’. This variety contrasts with the previously dominant national utopian modality attached to the older anti-systemic movements (Wallerstein, 1995, 2002). A second observation involves the question of agency in social transformation. Overall, we see, here, broad continuity with the direction of post-Marxism I, away from the working class narrowly understood, towards wider and more variegated appeals, with emphasis placed on pluralism and complexity (Alexander, 2001b; Levitas, 1993; Therborn, 2000), acknowledgement perhaps of what Heller and Fehér (1988, p. 32) characterize as the ‘diffuseness of emancipatory action’ today. At the same time, the turn away from universalist and abstract agency appeals has not tended to issue in narrow localism, with ‘globality’ as a crucial guiding theme – global variability, connectivity, and intercommunication (Therborn, 2000). Broadly, in line with this, we see continued distance from approaches to agency that underscored party, state, programme (Tormey, 2004a; Wallerstein, 2002), towards what Tamdgidi



and in the work of other contemporary Left thinkers, we see not only continuity (though less explicit and ‘anxious’) in avoiding those six problems identified by Tormey and Townshend, but also movement in a more assertive and reconstructive direction, both in theoretical and in utopian terms. I will explore this now.

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(2007) calls ‘humanist utopianism’ – ordinary people as the key actors. At one end, we have the ultra-Leftist ‘spontaneism’ of Hardt and Negri; at the other, Unger’s (2005a, p. 168) appeal to the state as ‘central protagonist’, along with the ‘constructive genius’ of a citizenry who are increasingly ‘petty bourgeois’ in ‘imaginative orientation’, desiring not to be commanded (2005b), aspiring to a ‘modest prosperity and independence’ (2005a, p. 168). In between are the many proposals stressing a plurality of actors –world citizenry, global civil society, regional bodies, states, parties, and local movements.11 Finally, we have the broad question of the politics of transformation, involving both broad principles and institutional initiatives towards other futures. Here, we again witness the distance travelled from the two-step, statist, and nation-centred transformatory logic of the older anti-systemic movements (Wallerstein, 1995, 2002). Again, there is clear continuity across the two post-Marxisms in a scaling down of ambitions against the older utopianism. We have, in both cases, what Benhabib (1986) has called a ‘politics of fulfilment’ rather than a ‘politics of transfiguration’. That is, emphasis is placed on the accomplishment of logics contained in the present, rather than in the notion of a radical break (the ‘day of the great sweep’, in the old language of Marxist orthodoxy). Nevertheless, I would suggest that we can detect a shift from post-Marxism I to II, in terms of a move towards greater thickness of institutional proposals, more detail in strategic matters, and more confident principles which might guide such societal transformation: for instance, Held’s (2003a, 2003b, 2004) various short- and long-term proposals for extending social democracy’s central emphases – the rule of law, political equality, social justice and solidarity, and economic efficiency – to a global level; Habermas’s arguments about the need for a ‘global domestic politics’ (2006a, p. 6), the construction of a welfare state at a supranational level, and towards the ‘re-regulation of world society’ (2001a, p. 112);12 Unger’s (2005a) fairly detailed development of five institutional ideas – national rebellion against global political-economic orthodoxy, a social policy seeking ‘empowerment and capacity’ (‘social inheritance’ rather than redistribution), the democratization of the market economy (a multitude of small-scale enterprises), the institution of ‘universal responsibility to care for others’ (p. 29), and a high-energy democracy combining direct and representative mechanisms; and even in the more abstract work of Hardt and Negri (2000) we have three programmatic rights demands – global citizenship, a social wage for all, and the right to appropriation.13



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The second broad issue I have named, after Therborn (2000), ‘social cosmology’, a question about theorizing the ‘logic of the social’, mapping the way the world works, and, in particular, addressing the crucial issue of power. In general, I think that we see, here, something of a return to totalization [beyond the postmodern ‘challenge to representation’ (Jameson, 1989)] and concern with capitalism, often framed in terms of the contemporary autonomization and prioritization of the economic: in Held (2003a), we have the ‘democratic deficit’ in global governance; in Habermas (1999, 2001a, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Habermas and Derrida, 2003, 2006), the main issues include the diminishing autonomy, capacity for action, and democratic substance of states, US unilateralism, crass social inequalities globally, unbridled market forces, the reign of the Washington Consensus in economic institutions, waning ‘resources of civic solidarity’ (2001a, p. 76), political fragmentation, and a highly volatile international situation (the clash of cultures); in Unger, we have the entrenchment of individuals within social divisions and hierarchies, the predominance of finance over real economies, weakening social cohesion, and the imposition with globalization of a single version of economic order pivoting around free trade; and in Hardt and Negri, we are faced with a society of control, where war becomes a permanent social relation, and global apartheid reigns. An important point is to note the typically central presence of ‘globalization’ in post-Marxism II’s theoretical repertoire – a ‘global shift’ in Held (2004, p. 161), a ‘post-national constellation’ in Habermas, a ‘dictatorship of no alternatives’ in Unger (2005a, p. 1), ‘Empire’ in Hardt and Negri. First, ‘globalization’ is present in terms of positive observation of ‘the logic of the social’. Second, globalization is present in terms of Mannheim’s (1968, pp. 187–188) observation about the need to read utopianisms within the ‘total constellation’ as always ‘mutually antagonistic counter-utopias’. Here, in particular, post-Marxism II is in clear confrontation and competition with what Manfred Steger (2005) has described as the hegemonic ideology of our time, ‘globalism’.14 Third, globalization is often present in terms of providing a crucial axis of utopian hopes.

Concluding comments Having selectively surveyed this second-phase post-Marxism, I would now like to return explicitly to the theme, debate, and question



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raised in my introductory remarks, connecting these to the shift from post-Marxism I to II. First, I would suggest that post-Marxism II is a signal of the puncturing of both the globalist utopia and that widespread demise of utopia theme, as well as an indicator of a more general rejuvenation of utopian themes (Goux, 2006). If, as Therborn (2007, p. 76) puts it, it seemed that the ‘belief in the future had been fundamentally shattered by the 1990s’, post-Marxism II, as a more assertive, reconstructive utopian field, is one sign of a reversal of sorts by the close of that decade. Second, with respect to the debate around the challenges to and changes in social theory since the 1970s, I think post-Marxism II is a good case study of a shift Gregor McLennan has called a ‘new positivity’ across the human sciences. This positivity entails, says McLennan, a ‘more substantive and affirmative’ direction in theoretical work, a return to concern with the ‘logic of the social’ (2000, p. 18), to a concern with the ‘state of things’ (2002, p. 323), to the ambition ‘to actually say something about the structure and direction of the world we inhabit, and about the values which will guide a better human future’ (1999, p. 566). Finally, with respect to Bauman’s question about socialism’s future as a significant counter-culture within our modernity, I think we could suggest an affirmative answer. This affirmation is attested to by a range of signs – from the socialist significations contained in contemporary anti-systemic movements to the tremendous enthusiasm aroused by the recent work of explicitly socialist thinkers such as Hardt and Negri, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou. And it is attested to by post-Marxism II, which, against Left pessimism and Right triumphalism, demonstrates clearly that ‘left-wing intellectual creativity has not ceased’ (Therborn, 2007, p. 112). This variegated ‘post-modern socialism’ (Beilharz, 1994) is at some distance from the world-shaping movements of the twentieth century – social democracy, communism, national liberation; it is also at a distance from a first-phase post-Marxism that sought to acknowledge and address the demise of these movements, important social transformations, and intellectual challenges. It represents, I think, Left progress in responding to a situation characterized by Santos (2005) as a combination of modern problems (the unfulfilled promises of modernity) alongside the absence of modern solutions (the disarray into which the older divisions – socialism, liberalism, Marxism, reform and revolution, nationalism and internationalism – and their visions of the world and of social emancipation have fallen). It suggests that we have now passed beyond the post-socialist moment.



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1. See, for instance, Docherty (1996, pp. 243–244), Howarth (1998), Sim (1998, p. 2); and Marxist responses – Wood (1986), Geras (1987, 1988), Sivanandan (1990), Cloud (1994). 2. See also Bauman (1987, 1991) and Habermas (1990a, 1993). 3. See, for instance, Bauman (1987, 1991), Heller (1999), Castoriadis (1997a, 1997b); Laclau (1990). 4. See, for instance, Fehér et al. (1986), Bauman (1991), Castoriadis (1988a, 1988b, 1993, 1997a), Lefort (1986, 2007). 5. See, for instance, Bauman (1987) and Lyotard (1993). 6. In a similar vein, in his Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty (1999, p. 234) views the frequent recourse to the idea of ‘impossibility’ in Left thinkers such as Laclau as a signal of despair, as a retreat from ‘historical narrative and utopian speculation’. 7. Or, says Mouzelis, Laclau and Mouffe simply smuggle institutional complexes in through the backdoor. 8. See also Castoriadis (1997a, 1997b), Habermas (1987a, 1987b), Bauman (1991, p. 276), and Laclau (1990). 9. See, for instance, Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Chapter 4. 10. See, for instance, Castoriadis (2003, 2005). 11. See, for instance, Held (2003a, 2003b, 2004) and Habermas (2001a). 12. For example, a functioning Security Council, a binding International Criminal Court, a ‘second chamber’ of the General Assembly made up of representatives of world citizens (Habermas, 2006b). 13. See also Wallerstein (1998) on ‘decommodification’; Wright (2006, 2003a, 2003b; Fung and Wright, 2003) and others involved in the ‘real utopias project’ on ‘empowered participatory governance’ – basic income, stakeholder grants, and social priorities to capital accumulation; and Vattimo (2004). 14. Summarized by Steger as entailing the following propositions: globalization equals the liberalization and global integration of markets; globalization is inevitable and irreversible; nobody is in charge of globalization; globalization benefits everyone; and globalization furthers the spread of democracy.



Notes

Globalization, Reflexive Utopianism, and the Cosmopolitan Social Imaginary Patrick Hayden

Introduction Utopia and globalization are intrinsically linked. The classical definition of utopia considers it to be both no place (outopia) and good place (eutopia) (Kumar, 1991, p. 1). But utopia is more than an alternative society. More importantly, as Ernst Bloch recognized, utopia conveys a powerful impulse or drive that is simultaneously critical of present sociopolitical realities and anticipatory of positive alternative futures. It is a basic human aspiration, the longing and hope for a better world that, although emerging out of the historical past and present, is not yet (Bloch, 1986). While the term ‘utopia’ originated in the West – coined by Sir Thomas More with his combination of the two Greek words – it subsequently has been dispersed throughout the world by means of a manifold of social, political, economic, and cultural interactions on a global scale. It is notable that More’s vision of utopia is presented through a tale of world exploration in which the traveller-narrator, Raphael Hythloday, discovers unknown (from a European perspective) lands, seeks out new peoples, and brings the Old World into contact with the New World (More, 1965). Utopia thus connotes the desire to transgress borders and to encounter other lands and peoples, to connect together otherwise disparate places and identities across the globe. In this way utopia and globalization are born together. Utopianism mirrors the classical worldview of cosmopolitanism. When Diogenes the Cynic announced ‘I am a citizen of the world’, he meant that he belonged both everywhere and nowhere. In declaring independence from wealth, status, luxury, as well as from any particular polis or place, and in mocking the conventions and complacency of existing society, Diogenes radically expressed the utopian impulse. 51



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Diogenes portrays the ‘citizen of the world’ as someone who is at home anywhere in the world because each place is simply one place amongst many. The utopian impulse then becomes, in the hands of the Stoics, the grounds for the ‘most widespread fellowship existing among men . . . that of all with all others’ (Cicero, 1991, pp. 21–22). In other words, the utopian impulse traditionally functions for cosmopolitans as a unifying force helping to connect all persons together into a civic whole, an expanding moral and political community in which a better life is achieved for all. For cosmopolitan thinkers, the fate of a shared humanity should be at the centre of an imagined future from which sociopolitical critique and global transformation can proceed. The utopian impulse can be found, then, at the heart of cosmopolitanism and resonates with contemporary debates about local-global interpenetration and the moral, social, and political meanings of human boundaries (or the boundaries of humanity). However, the utopiaglobalization nexus can be marked as taking formal shape with the emergence of modernity, virtually coinciding with the publication of More’s Utopia in 1516. As Walter Mignolo (1998, p. 32) points out, when viewed sociohistorically globalization can be connected with Western expansion since 1500, such as in terms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s worldsystem account of modernity as a global economic system or Norbert Elias’s reading of modernity as the emergence of a European awareness of its ‘civilizing mission’. The utopian impulse took root in modernity through the European voyages of discovery, and especially with the colonization of America seen as representing a new world for the realization of a better life. But the utopian hope of modernity – to bring freedom, rights, and justice to all corners of the globe – has had its dark side; the dystopian effects of colonialism, oppression, war, violence, dispossession, exploitation, and poverty. Modernity’s utopian impulse has continually clashed with globalization’s dystopian ‘discontents’. Yet it is precisely because of this clash or dissonance that the utopian impulse of modernity recently has taken a new turn and assumed a new urgency: from the national (and thus inter-national) social imaginary of ‘first modernity’ to the postnational social imaginary of ‘second modernity’. As a consequence, the cosmopolitan outlook ‘has become the defining feature of a new era’ (Beck, 2006, p. 2). The goal of this chapter is to examine the renewal of the cosmopolitan vision, through the lenses of three major cosmopolitan critical theorists: Ulrich Beck, David Held, and Jürgen Habermas. This renewal of the cosmopolitan vision is, I suggest, simultaneously a rehabilitation of the utopian social imaginary in response to the transformative



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impacts of globalization. Since its earliest articulation in Stoic thought, cosmopolitanism has been an expression of utopian hope, yet, crucially, it is concerned not simply with making particular places in the world better, but with making the world as a whole a better place. Beck, Held, and Habermas continue to give voice to this hope for a better world, but they do so through a process of immanent critique rather than prescribing a transcendent model for the actualization of an ‘ideal’ world unmoored from modernity’s historical inheritance.1 I refer to the particular type of political cosmopolitanism adopted by these contemporary cosmopolitan critical theorists as ‘reflexive utopianism’, insofar as it is grounded upon the future-oriented possibility of self-reforming first modernity’s ideals, however imperfect, of justice, human rights, autonomy and democracy, suitably reinvigorated for the postnational age of second modernity.

From first to second modernity: the emergence of a reflexive cosmopolitan social imaginary The acceleration and consolidation of globalization since the end of the Second World War has generated the perception that a tangible ‘world society’ has been set in motion by the economic, technological, cultural, legal, political, and ecological interdependencies that attest to the ‘shrinking’ of our world. Public awareness of this world society both reflects and shapes the creation of a new social imaginary. This new social imaginary is an innovative understanding and image of the complex reality of contemporary forms of sociopolitical existence. Contemporary globalization, in short, both informs and is transformed by a rearrangement of the modern social imaginary and corresponding attempts to rearticulate modernity’s vision of a desired alternative reality. In order to make sense of this shift in the modern social imaginary, I will employ Ulrich Beck’s (1992) notion of the process of reflexive modernization and his distinction between first and second modernity. Globalization continues to radically alter our ways of thinking about and making sense of the world, culturally, economically, and politically. This transformation is taking place primarily across two modalities of the modern social imaginary: the first modality, exemplified by first modernity, is centred on relationships between sovereign nation-states, while the second modality, exemplified by second modernity, exceeds the boundaries of state sovereignty and territorial demarcations. The transition between first and second modernity requires the motivational energies of the social imaginary as a source of mutation. In his recent



Patrick Hayden


investigation into the construction of modern identity, Charles Taylor defines the social imaginary as referring to the ways that ‘ordinary people’ imagine their social existence and give sense to themselves, the means and ends of the societies they inhabit, the relations they have to each other and to power, and the expectations they have of one another and for what they can accomplish in the world. The social imaginary is both broader and deeper than formal theories or doctrines of social reality, as it is often conveyed in ‘images, stories, and legends’ which are ‘shared by large groups of people’. The social imaginary therefore can be seen as a factual and normative ‘background’ understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy, spanning an ideational continuum from the symbolic to the embodied habitus, to the explicitly doctrinal (Taylor, 2004, p. 23ff.).2 Ultimately, a social imaginary has both active and contemplative dimensions – the former ‘expands the repertoire of collective action’ while the latter ‘expands the repertoire of objective analysis’ – that reflect our efforts to intervene in and change our present reality. Such interventions illustrate the possibility of moving from one constellation of background understanding and imaginary to another, where the established contents of these constellations can be questioned and redefined in the continual enterprise of recreating society. For Taylor (2004, p. 2), the central institutional and symbolic forms of the modern social imaginary are ‘the market economy, the public sphere, and the self-governing people’. These forms are manifested in some of the main features of modern society: the decline of social hierarchies as a result of the notion of dignity replacing the idea of honour; the emergence of and importance attained by the public sphere, public opinion, and democratic consensus; the sense of national collective identity framed in a legal context; and the right of self-determination. Similarly, Benedict Anderson has shown how the emergence of modernity is bound up with the ‘imagined communities’ of nations and nation-states. These imagined communities were conceived, on the one hand, around the prescriptive homogeneity of popular sovereignty and, on the other, through the dense plurality of national communities either already existing or waiting to take shape. From the end of the eighteenth century, a host of new nations appeared on the world stage, in large part due to the diverse inhabitants of various lands imagining themselves as ‘nations’. The national imaginary of modernity thus functioned as a utopian model or ‘blueprint’ of community, whose destiny was to be ‘pirated’ and replicated across the globe (Anderson, 1991, pp. 67–82). Both Taylor and Anderson demonstrate that the



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imagined communities of the modern era represent a profound shift from ‘organic’ premodern communities to more abstract and impersonal societies. A central characteristic of modernity is the movement towards communities based upon formal and universalizable categories linked to the nation-state such as citizenship, legally guaranteed equal status, and collective self-determination. The profound transformation in social order and imaginary from feudalism to modernity also marks the decisive appearance of globalization, with capitalism and European colonial expansion signalling the gradual integration of all societies of the earth into a single domain of interrelation. In other words, globalization as such is to be understood as a consequence of modernity itself, arising from the radicalization of the conditions of modernity (Giddens, 1990). From feudalism through the Enlightenment to the industrial revolution, the modes of social organization, political power, and economic production became less fragmented and more integrated, stimulated by the new attitudes and social imaginaries of modernity (individualism, universalism, secularism, rationality, competition, innovation, and progress). Clearly these changes in the material, ideological, and symbolic orders did not preclude stratification and exploitation, yet these harmful consequences assumed a systemic rather than anomalous existence by means of the overarching movement towards transcultural inclusion within the increasingly globalized state and inter-state network (Said, 1994). Thus the incipient world society of first modernity was built upon the articulation of territorially bounded social space, that is, the sovereign state. But the image of society as territorially bounded space was also grounded on a logic of multiplication: such bounded spaces are meant to multiply and enter into relations with one another. The form and sensibility that constitute the modern world is as much outward looking as inward looking, and the internal consistency of national collective identity is predicated upon the real and imagined plurality of other peoples and worlds beyond any given territory. Hence, I would argue that first modernity is characterized not simply by the power of a national social imaginary but by a concomitant international social imaginary as well. Global exploration and migration, the internationalization of the market economy and social classes, and the development of international politics as the necessary corollary to domestic politics all indicate that globalization did not mysteriously appear after the passing of modernity but represents the realization of modern society. While modernity and globalization cannot be reduced to capitalism, for instance, it is also true that, as Wallerstein insists, they



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are inseparable from capitalism. According to his analysis (1984), modernity is both the producer and the product of a world system where all social action occurs within the general framework of an increasingly global capitalist economy. Indeed, as Marx himself was aware, the internal logic of capitalism is global, which Wallerstein (2004) identifies in terms of three constitutive elements: a single world market driven by Western expansionism; the development of strong states via the consolidation of market networks; and a system of exploitation integrated via core, peripheral, and semiperipheral zones. For these same reasons the process of globalization – whether as the generalized spread of nationstates or the institutionalization of the world market – is neither linear nor uniform as conflicts are introduced into and radicalized within the world system, and stratification in wealth, power and status arise between countries. What these interpretations suggest is that globalization has led to a paradigm shift in our modern social imaginaries. This shift in modern social imaginaries can be captured by the transition from first to second or ‘reflexive’ modernity as formulated by Ulrich Beck. ‘First modernity’ refers to the rationalization and industrialization of society enabled by secular Enlightenment ideals, scientific developments, and technological controls. This conventional description of progressive modernization became problematic, Beck contends, with increasing awareness that its very successes have put human life at risk. ‘Second modernity’ has arisen from the historical relocation of the category of risk: the primary threats to society no longer come from nature, but from the (frequently unintended) consequences of human action (Beck, 1992, 1999). The ‘world risk society’ of second modernity has become increasingly oriented around the tensions between rapidly globalizing threats to human beings and the frequently ineffectual state-based efforts to provide security from these. Because the new risks are ‘deterritorialized’, simultaneously local and global, they can no longer be viewed solely as national questions. The appearance of a world risk society thus offers the prospect of endowing ‘each country with a common global interest’ and provides the basis ‘of a global community of fate’ (Beck, 2002a, p. 42). For Beck (1999, p. 9), the reflective preoccupation with global dangers to humanity suggests the need for a reinvention of politics anchored in a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ that can place ‘globality at the heart of political imagination, action and organization’. According to Beck, inasmuch as social and political concepts remain fixated upon the nation-state they have become ‘zombie categories’, signifiers of a departed Westphalian order kept hopelessly animated



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through the epistemic transmission of methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism is the conventional social scientific account of modern politics, which takes the supposedly objective demarcation between the national and the international as the ‘fundamental organizing principle of politics’ (Beck, 2005, p. 21). In this respect, suggests Beck, methodological nationalism is a source of errors; it no longer accurately represents the global reality of political life, or at least how that political life is being imagined by increasingly large numbers of people. In contrast, cosmopolitanism recognizes that the classical limits between the national and the international have been transformed, and that our understanding of society must be reinscribed within a new ‘cosmopolitan vision’. The cosmopolitan vision is fundamental to understanding the new dynamic of global sociopolitical relations, especially in light of the plurality of resistances and emancipatory aims of social movements whose strategic purposes coincide with the emergence of globality, that is, the ‘common human awareness of the global’ (Beck, 2005, pp. 14–15, 82). Experience of the threats human beings have generated towards the very existence of humanity itself have led to the politically reflexive assertion of social struggles predicated on the mutual implication of the individual and the global. According to Beck (2005, pp. 13–14), this ‘cosmopolitanization of risks’ provides a ‘crucial starting point for the advocatory strategies’ pursued by the diverse social movements rooted in global civil society. The world constructed on the basis of first modernity’s social imaginary remains the historical background for social and political practices, yet the nature of this world has dramatically altered under globalization and has led to an associated transformation in the social imaginary. The social imaginary of second modernity entails a reflexive preoccupation with how to act in light of the mutually constitutive categories of the global and local, which in turn contributes to the cosmopolitanization of ‘everyday consciousness’, moral discourse, and political action (Beck, 2002b, p. 17). The result is that ‘the spaces of our emotional imagination have expanded in a transnational sense’ (Beck, 2006, p. 6). In speaking of a transition from first to second modernity, then, I would argue that this does not mean an epochal break from the modern to the ‘post’ modern, a revolutionary rupture which obliterates modernity and creates something entirely new. Rather it refers to the fact that a certain way of understanding the world, of imagining and making sense of it, is being reconstructed largely on the basis of the social imaginary of first modernity but which is also placing our newly



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emerging image of the world and what it can be within a new visionary frame. The transition is much less a break than a turning point, an opening up of modernization processes in the hope of achieving the full potentials inherent in modernity itself. The visionary frame of second modernity is essentially that of globality, the generalized reflexive consciousness of living in a globally connected world. The new social imaginary captures the self-representation of individuals and their changing social relationships as the assumptions of first modernity are questioned and revised; globality is the expression of modernization’s reflexivity reinforced by the expanding imagery of globalization. Once we recognize that ‘political identity is reproduced through the routines of everyday life, and remove the blinders that make us think that the only kind of politics are nation-state politics, we are led inexorably to the conclusion that new cosmopolitan political identities are being formed through the experience of everyday life’ (Beck and Willms, 2004, p. 37). Yet in order for the reflexive consciousness of globality to be taken up and associated with social practices intended to transform world society from a national to a cosmopolitan basis, ‘it needs concepts that suit it, and institutions to give it form’ (Beck and Willms, 2004, p. 38).

Cosmopolitan democracy and the frontiers of globalization In addition to charting the transition from first to second modernity, and the concomitant transformation in the social imaginary from the national to the cosmopolitan, we must also survey ways that the new image of a globalizing world are being theorized as alternative cosmopolitan visions of sociopolitical existence. If the reflexive commitment to modernity’s own liberal democratic ideals constitutes globalization’s potentially emancipatory movement, then the paradigm of cosmopolitan democracy can be regarded as one of the most acute theoretical formulations of that movement. While cosmopolitan democracy has been rendered in a number of different versions since the mid-1990s, the work of David Held is exemplary as an account of the visionary project of creating a just cosmopolitan world society. For cosmopolitan democrats, global civil society is a central feature of the emergent world society. Global civil society is thought to be an empirical reality on the basis of the tens of thousands of non-state actors engaged in transnational civic activism, including numerous high-profile human rights and environmental NGOs such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace, as well as individuals and activist groups involved in the alternative globalization movement



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(Kaldor, 2003; Keane, 2003). Global civil society plays several distinct roles and makes a variety of contributions to developing social and political expectations. Global civil society actors may participate in deliberative and consultative forums, such as international meetings designed to facilitate the formation of international legal regimes and conventions. These global civil society actors may be thought of as representing or defending the views and interests of world society, in contrast to the narrow interests of nation-states and corporations. It might also be argued that global civil society actors contribute a democratic or democratizing impulse to world politics, analogous to the role played by domestic civil society actors within specific countries. For cosmopolitan democrats, the political importance of the new forms of transnational activism and mobilization associated with global civil society is vital to understanding the emancipatory potentials of globalization (Munck, 2007). In Held’s (1995, p. 135) account globalization is ‘shifting the patterns of powers and constraints which are redefining the architecture of political power associated with the nation-state’. At the international level Held (1995, p. 99) discerns significant ‘disjunctures’ between the idea – vital to the current system of global governance – of supreme state sovereignty and the world economy, international organizations, regional and global institutions, international law, and military alliances which operate to shape and constrain the options of individual nation-states. For Held, both the autonomy and the sovereignty of the nation-state are being undermined under conditions of globalization by assorted transnational actors and forces. The prerogatives attached to state sovereignty are called into question as these are increasingly being taken up by other non-state actors. Furthermore, Held asserts that the existing system of global governance has failed to provide either sufficient or effective democratic mechanisms of political coordination and change. The Westphalian model with its ‘core commitment to the principle of effective power – that is the principle that might eventually makes right in the international world’ – and the assertion of the absolute sovereignty of the state is at odds with any possibility for ‘sustained democratic negotiation among members of the international community’ (Held, 1995, p. 268). In contrast, Held (1995, p. 88) views the UN as a potential forum for democratic deliberation about pressing international questions but regards it as having so far failed to achieve this capacity due to its lack of credibility as an agency influenced (and most especially funded) to a large extent by the most powerful states. Under these circumstances Held asserts the need for the creation of a global democratic



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polity and culture, the only framework in which the ideals of autonomy and democracy can be fully realized. The cosmopolitan model of democracy seeks to expand the levels of participatory politics and means of accountability through an adaptive ‘system of diverse and overlapping power centres, shaped and delimited by democratic law’ (Held, 1995, p. 234). Despite the deficiencies of the existing system of global governance, Held is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for cultivating cosmopolitan democracy. The cosmopolitan project is, then, an attempt to connect the cosmopolitan vision to cosmopolitan institution building (Held, 2002, p. 317). Hence the first step towards making the cosmopolitan model of democracy real would be to develop the UN system to live up to its Charter (in which Held finds many cosmopolitan ideals at odds with the current international order) entailing among other things, implementing ‘key elements of the UN Rights Conventions, enforcing the prohibition of the discretionary right to use force, and activating the collective security system envisaged in the Charter itself’ (Held, 1995, p. 269). More generally the priority is to establish components of what Held (1995, p. 227) calls ‘cosmopolitan democratic law’ which is ‘a democratic public law entrenched within and across borders’. The normative foundation of cosmopolitan democratic law is what Held refers to as the ‘principle of autonomy’. This principle requires that all individuals have the ability to participate in political decisions that directly impact upon them (Held, 1995, p. 147). According to Held the impact of globalization means that the state model no longer suffices to safeguard the autonomy of each individual and by implication, the functioning of democracy itself. If democracy is to function effectively there needs to be an entrenchment of democratic autonomy and institutions at all levels that impact on the civil, political and social rights of individuals. This entrenchment involves significant restructuring of the state system insofar as the state is not the only site of power affecting the citizen and therefore should not be the only democratically organized institution. Rather there are seven ‘sites of power’ – the body, welfare, culture, civic associations, economy, coercive relations and organized violence, and legal and regulatory institutions – within and across political communities that ‘mould and circumscribe’ people’s life chances and their ability to participate and ‘share in public decision-making’ (Held, 1995, p. 173). For Held it is imperative that these sites of power, in addition to the state itself, be democratically based which would require the implementation of democratic procedures and institutions at a number of interconnected levels,



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from that of the workplace to that of global governance. As a result cosmopolitan democratic law entails a transnational, common political structure founded on the principle of autonomy. This common political structure would incorporate not only existing international law (suitably revised) but also a system of cosmopolitan law which focuses on facilitating and consolidating individual autonomy and not simply interstate relations; both of which would parallel the growth of a global or transnational civil society capable of holding political authority to account and galvanizing social change. Although the concept of cosmopolitan democracy finds empirical support in institutional arrangements such as the United Nations and international regimes for global governance, the vision reaches beyond existing frameworks. Thinking of democratic autonomy beyond national territorial boundaries forces a reconsideration of the concepts of democracy, legitimacy, and representation central to the development of first modernity. Cosmopolitan democracy thus prefigures or anticipates a new institutional model that serves as a positive utopia for a better future. I suggest that cosmopolitan democracy is a reflexive utopia, however, because it builds upon the material and interpretive horizons of first modernity’s achievements and failures, and thus is difficult but not impossible to achieve. By reinvesting the idea of a democratic and just society with a new global significance, cosmopolitan democracy is able to direct the imagination and efforts of different actors towards the creation of a new transnational political order. While the actuality of globalization ‘anchors’ the development of cosmopolitanism, we can ‘reflexively reconstitute’ the latter from ‘clear legal, political and civil stepping stones laid down in the twentieth century’ (Held, 2003b, pp. 181–183).

The postnational constellation as cosmopolitan vision Taking the reflexive utopianism of cosmopolitan democracy as an example of the new social imaginary animating political theory and practice in a global era, I now want to turn to a related approach that harnesses the concerns of cosmopolitanism to develop a renewed vision of citizenship for a globalizing world. The work of Jürgen Habermas helps us to ‘clearly imagine post-national and cosmopolitan democracy’, which is the first step towards the ‘possibility of implementing’ the idea of cosmopolitanism (Beck and Willms, 2004, p. 201; emphasis added). A central theme in Habermas’s social theory is the emergence of and crucial role played by the public sphere in the development of modern



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society. As Taylor (2004, p. 85) notes, the public sphere is integral to the modern social imaginary in that ‘a public sphere can exist only if it is imagined as such’. The rise of the modern public sphere brought with it numerous practices and discourses about the normative desirability of and indeed entitlement to widespread participation in critical public debates about the composition of society, the common good, and the legitimacy of any given political order. One of Habermas’s longstanding concerns has been with permutations that the public sphere has undergone throughout modernity, including its most recent alterations in line with the dynamics of globalization. In his analysis of the differentiation of society into ‘system’ (state and market) and ‘lifeworld’ (experiential background and informal cognitive horizon), Habermas (1987a) argues that the public sphere has been increasingly mediated or ‘colonized’ by the system, threatening its creative and critical potentials. In response, he suggests that the progressive rationalization of the lifeworld involves developing a reflexive relationship with modernist conceptions of self and society, as well as expansion of the institutional aspects of the lifeworld by means of the legal and customary inclusion of civil society within democratic debates and procedures (Habermas, 1996, p. 81). Civil society, in other words, is interposed between lifeworld and system as the locus within which citizens can contest the existing order on the basis of new social imaginaries. The institutionalization of the lifeworld thereby contributes to the development of the public sphere in which the collective exercise of critique and publicity is possible (Habermas, 1992). This approach emphasizes the formation of new social and cultural practices, identities, and solidarities as the public sphere opens up from the national to the global – in short, a new social imaginary of the emancipatory potential of the actors, social spaces, and political forms appropriate to the global context in which modern life now takes place. An essential component of the Habermasian project is to revitalize the category of citizenship that has ‘shaped the self-understanding of modernity’ in line with the emergent ‘postnational’ vision of our globalizing world (Habermas, 2001a, p. 83). As with Beck and Held, Habermas’s reflection on the procedures for moving towards a more cosmopolitan world is based on the phenomenon of global interdependence and the inadequacy of the nation-state to address issues and problems that arise from global interconnectedness. In order to politically ‘govern’ globalization, political actors must equip themselves with new legitimized and functional institutional structures that exceed the limited horizons of the nation-state.



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The modern state, Habermas (2001a, pp. 62–68) notes, assumed its form through the combination of four elements: (a) the administrative and fiscal element which ensured legal formality and stability through positive law; (b) the territorial element, which demarcated geographical boundaries, constructed community on the basis of autonomy and self-government, and defined foreign policy; (c) the national element, which symbolically represented the people and the goal of civic solidarity; and (d) the social and democratic element, which realized the democratic will of the people as well as access to social welfare and political participation via citizenship. Globalization has, however, called into question the national constellation of modernity, giving rise to various dilemmas regarding the efficacy of the nation-state and the legitimacy of the democratic process itself (Habermas, 2001a, pp. 68–80, 2006b, pp. 176–8). What then is the way forward out of the dilemmas into which ‘the growing interdependencies of social arenas, communities of risk, and the networks of shared fate’ have thrown the modern state (Habermas, 2001a, p. 55)? According to Habermas, the solution lies in the design and implementation of ‘intermediate’ cosmopolitan institutions, such as federations of previously autonomous sovereign states, within a multilevel global system that includes supranational governance in the form of a modified and empowered UN. ‘Herein’, writes Habermas (2006b, p. 109), ‘lies the genuinely utopian moment of a “cosmopolitan condition” ’. The central problem facing such institutions – which Habermas (2006b, pp. 135–138) insists must be conceived in terms of a ‘global domestic politics’, or cosmopolitanization from within nation-states, and not a world state – is that of popular legitimacy: simply globalizing the welfare state in order to save it from oblivion is inadequate to generate and maintain the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Envisioning legitimate transnational democracy means, in part, reversing first modernity’s serial ordering that placed popular sovereignty first and human rights second as the sources of political legitimacy. This is because human rights make possible the exercise of popular sovereignty by establishing legitimate rules of law that guarantee life, liberty, and respect for communicative freedom regardless of the outcomes of democratic procedures (Habermas, 1998, pp. 258–260). Human rights thus occupy a special position at the international level, inasmuch as they serve as the enabling conditions upon which postnational democracies can be legitimated. Generally speaking, I contend that three potential utopian impulses may be adopted in light of the crisis of nation-state legitimacy today.



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A ‘nostalgic’ utopianism would seek either the protectionist closing of the state as advocated by neonationalists or the free-market opening of borders to economic self-regulation as advocated by neoliberals. An ‘idealist’ utopianism would advocate the complete elimination of states and borders, and the formation of a world community or government liberated from all sub-global forms of partialistic community and national culture. A third option, which can be found in Habermas’s work, is for a reflexive utopianism that combines the functional integration of states and markets (system) with transnational social practices through political intervention of national and regional public spheres (lifeworld). The system performs the task of opening markets, legal systems, and communication networks, thereby facilitating new ways of life that transcend national communities, while the lifeworld reconstructs identities, meanings, and practices that ground those new ways of life within democratic communities that regard themselves as members of enlarged, globally oriented communities of fate. This approach attempts to respond to the challenges of globalization by synthesizing multiculturalism and individualization in a democratic civil society attuned to both differences and universalism. In attempting to translate this reflexive utopian vision into practice, Habermas argues that the process of European integration might serve as an example of cosmopolitanization. While focusing on the European context, Habermas contends that the postnational character of this project makes it suitable for addressing global issues in a broader perspective. Thus European federalism per se should not be regarded as the telos or completion of the cosmopolitical vision, but as an experimental response to the anachronism of state sovereignty that defines the political imaginary of first modernity. As a political experiment, the European Union provides the prospect of formulating answers to various administrative, territorial, and social justice problems that cannot be resolved within the framework of methodological and political nationalism. European-wide common policy is potentially more effective than independent state-based policy in the management of international affairs, the establishment of criteria to address global problems, and the promotion of social inclusion (Habermas, 2006b, pp. 67–74). Nevertheless, a European federation cannot speak and act decisively on behalf of all actors in the global arena. To be democratic, inclusive, and legitimate, the political governance of globalization must eventually involve all peoples of the world through the integration of regionally differentiated political federations. European federalism obviously is a limited conception of the ‘cosmopolitan condition’, yet it provides a model for how this vision can



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be gradually implemented by redesigning sovereign states, citizenship, and modes of democratic decision-making within regional political integration (Habermas, 2006b, p. 177). In other words, the European Union indicates the real possibility of imagining the social and the political ‘beyond’ the nation-state.3 Habermas (1998, p. 28) also proposes a broader theory of social justice – of ‘equal respect and solidaristic responsibility for everyone’ – that seeks to embrace the entire globe and thus globalization in its maximum extension. Habermas’s theory of cosmopolitan globalization is grounded on the intrinsic relation between individuals, human rights, and just and legitimate institutions, irrespective of the ‘really existing’ political configurations that historically have determined the balance of power and relations of force between nation-states. In this way, Habermas’s theory eliminates the constraints of political realism and advances a vigorously utopian vision that radically rethinks the role of the individual and the state by making human rights the precondition for the legitimacy of political institutions and government. The key issue for Habermas (2006, p. 24) is that membership in the ‘inclusive moral community’ envisioned by cosmopolitanism is ‘open to all’ and ‘promises not only solidarity and non-discriminatory inclusion, but at the same time the equal right of everybody to the protection of their individuality and otherness’. Habermas’s theory of cosmopolitan justice is developed in light of Kant’s (1991) famous Perpetual Peace, which advocates the constitution of ius cosmopoliticum via the institutionalization of the rights of individuals, in order to ensure peace and inclusion within world society. While diverging from Kant on several points, Habermas endorses the essential ambition of Kant’s project: that cosmopolitan law, specified by the global recognition and protection of human rights, is an entitlement of every individual and is the foundation for a ‘decentred’ world democratic procedure by which a global and legitimate mode of governance can be constructed. Habermas’s cosmopolitanism assigns to each individual a comprehensive list of human rights, through which each person can assume the status of world citizen. This is because the point of cosmopolitan law is ‘that it goes over the heads of the collective subjects of international law to give legal status to the individual subjects and justifies their unmediated membership in the association of free and equal world citizens’ (Habermas, 1997, p. 128). While the longterm aim of cosmopolitanism, as Habermas sees it, is to convert all existing states to democratic constitutional polities within interlinked regional federations, a more immediate objective is to reinforce the progressive expansion of global governance through reformation of the



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United Nations. While states may remain semi-autonomous in terms of their territorial boundaries, the idea of global domestic politics suggests the transformation of divergent foreign policies into a common platform of shared policies internally mediated through a supranational body, such as the UN or EU (Habermas, 2006b, pp. 132–138). Yet important transitional measures are called for, such as establishing robust transnational democratic procedures; guaranteeing the political status of all citizens of the world through a world parliament (which would provide greater democratic legitimacy within and between each state as well as validate the principles of reciprocity, publicity, and opinionand will-formation necessary for a global civic consciousness); and promulgating equitable and transparent global market regulations in order to rectify economic stratification induced and reinforced by unfettered neoliberal globalization (Habermas, 2006b, pp. 173–193). By gradually eroding first modernity’s political distinction between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, global domestic politics can facilitate unification of the world’s citizens through civic solidarity borne of the universalism of human rights and second modernity’s awareness of the shared fate of globally interconnected communities.

Conclusion Robert Keohane (2003, p. 153) argues that cosmopolitan democracy ‘is a distant ideal, not a feasible option for our time’. Keohane is partly right; cosmopolitan democracy – or the cosmopolitan condition more broadly – as such does not yet exist as a fully realized global system. Given existing power structures and the continuing reliance upon state sovereignty within the international system, there is no doubt that cosmopolitan values and institutions are extremely difficult to implement. Nonetheless, the feasibility of cosmopolitanism is a much more open question than Keohane admits. Increasing global integration, substantial developments in global governance, the growth and empowerment of non-governmental civil society actors, and the continuing experimentation with European integration all point to mounting expectations that globalization ‘without cosmopolitanism could fail’ (Held, 2003b, p. 182). For many, it would appear that ‘cosmopolitanism is a less utopian project than that set out by the theory of the modern state at the time of Hobbes’s Leviathan’ (Held, 2003b, p. 183). In other words, the cosmopolitan vision is not mere ‘wishful thinking’ about a desired feasibility that is wholly absent, but a reasonable expectation of its viability based upon modernity’s own historical legacy – initiated by



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the then ‘utopian’ introduction of the modern state and inter-state system, as well as first modernity’s own promise of rights, justice, freedom, equality, and democracy for all. It is important also to note why Keohane is partly wrong. The question of cosmopolitanism is not exhausted by weighing up its present feasibility. All sociopolitical transformations, all fundamental reconfigurations of polity, identity and citizenship, are driven not merely by matters of feasibility but, perhaps even more significantly, by processes of the creative imaginary: politics is less the ‘art of the possible’ than it is the art of what we imagine to be possible. It is through the ‘political imagination’, William Connolly (1995, p. xxx) notes, that ‘contemporary possibilities and impossibilities are delineated’. Hence the ‘principle of hope’ – the counterfactual imagination of the not-yet and the desire or longing for a different and better way of living – is just as integral to acting politically here and now as it is to thinking about alternative political futures. Beck, Held, and Habermas recognize that while the unrealized ideals of first modernity continue to make a normative claim on us, the best of these potentials can only be realized by continuing to look forward, balancing the reality of a globalizing modernity with the utopian motivational energy of a future-oriented cosmopolitan vision. While Keohane equates ‘distant ideal’ with ‘unfeasible’, throughout this chapter I have sought to demonstrate that we cannot even begin to imagine what may be possible without the political impetus of a distant cosmopolitan ideal to nourish our hopes and dreams for a better world.

Notes 1. On the distinction between immanent and transcendent critique, see Adorno (1981). 2. See also Taylor (1999). While Taylor’s conception of the social imaginary is somewhat similar to that of Cornelius Castoriadis, an important difference between the two is that Taylor’s category is hermeneutical whereas Castoriadis’s is ontological; see Castoriadis (1987). 3. Despite these qualifications, many critics would contend that the particular version of cosmopolitan critical theory discussed here is tainted by Eurocentrism, which either undermines the cosmopolitan project as such or requires a radical opening up of the cosmopolitan vision beyond its Western-dominated imaginary and lexicon. One of the more exciting attempts to theorize an alternative critical cosmopolitan utopianism has been made by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, via the notion of a counter-hegemonic ‘subaltern’ or ‘insurgent’ cosmopolitanism; see, for instance, Santos (2006). For a useful overview of ‘postnational utopias’ within the postcolonial context, see Gandhi (1998).



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5 Leela Gandhi

In recent years the ideas of global ethical and social transformation commonly associated with utopianism have found fresh articulation under the sign of ‘the new’. Whilst tropes of ‘newness’ commonly occur within utopianist lexicons (witness the profusion of ‘new’ things at the scene of 1890s socialist utopianism, as in ‘new ethic’, ‘new species’, ‘new age’, ‘new sex’, ‘new woman’ and so on), they seem to have achieved a certain semantic and conceptual autonomy in the work of some recent theorists. For instance, Alain Badiou’s various accounts of the new as a de-suturing, inaugurating, all-inclusive effect evoke the field of utopian inventiveness without properly naming utopianism itself (Badiou, 1999, pp. 6, 67, 107, 2003, p. 42).1 A kin modality informs the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose invocations of a new philosophy and politics to come demand rigorous suspension of messianic thinking (see Agamben, 2004). Utopian taxonomies are, similarly, repressed in Homi Bhabha’s politics of neologism. This chapter makes an effort to pay closer attention to this subtle separation of the spheres of utopia and the new, out of the conviction that the breach between these former lexical allies might yield productive materials for a re-thinking of utopia as an art of the possible. Believing projects of newness to be the most resonant utopiasubstitute for our own troubled times, furthermore, I hope to clarify the structure of the new through closer attention to one historical moment in the early decades of the twentieth century where it underwent exquisite refinement as an ethical response to the crisis of those times.

On newness In an influential essay on ‘postcolonial time’, written over a decade ago, the theorist Homi Bhabha offers some apposite reflections on the 68



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subject on the new. The idea of newness when considered philosophically, he proposes, does not directly address the remediation of the present. Notwithstanding its semantic association with the news (as in current affairs), that which is radically new is not necessarily a thing pressingly relevant or pertinent or indeed useful to the moment in any straightforward way. Rather, newness achieves its temporal significance as an event, occurrence or modality that renders the future ‘once again an open question’, transforming it into a setting in which the present might find some tenancy (Bhabha, 1994, p. 219). Thus conceived, minimally, as a procedure that enforces hospitality upon the future (or as one which reopens the future), newness certainly prevents foreclosure of our best dreams but it provides no guarantee of respite from our worst nightmares in times to come. It merely makes available, in Bhabha’s words, ‘an agency of initiation that enables one to possess again and anew . . . the signs of survival’ (1994, p. 235). How then does newness instantiate such repossession of survival? Which is to say, how does it engage that which is present (whether materially or in the secret enclaves of our imaginations) with that which has yet to come? Not, we might answer, through the clarification of modular or axiomatic technologies, manifestos, programmes and sciences of change but rather through relinquishment of all that is given, fixed, held, inherited, known, capitalised, consolidated, calculable in the realms of subjectivity and sociality. In Bhabha’s terms, the first symptoms of newness (within an individual life or an age or epoch) are, accordingly, more apparently dissolutive than plainly creative, ‘inscribed in the “in-between” ’, the ‘temporal break-up’, ‘the disintegrative moment’, the ‘sudden disjunction of the present’ (1994, p. 217). The reopening of the future, in other words, is contingent upon the reopening of the present: a painful substitution of the habits of being for the muddle of becoming which proceeds through preliminary troubling of identity; as work that is foremost an unworking, as direction liberated through primary disorientation. In these ways, the Indian philosopher-yogi Sri Aurobindo suggests, the practice of newness (as inducement for spiritual and creative growth) consists in equal part of the harmonisation and rigorous disarrangement of identity. So, he goes on to propose, more than flawlessness of craft a poesis of the future might well demand complex disaggregation of the self, whereby we must teach ourselves, for instance, to hear through our eyes, to love from the regions above the head, to speak without language, to separate sound from sense and so on. In similar vein, the mystic Sri Ramana Maharishi conceives a truly generous and inclusive future affectivity



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as commencing with the foundational eccentricity of re-imagining the heart on the right side of the body, while the German phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, posits the future of philosophy upon the provisional suspension of sense-perception itself; the confounding refusal, that is, to register the reality of a world external to mind. Here we find ourselves in the face of a secret strain of thought, common to West and non-West alike, wherein the experiment of the new for the sake of permeable futures manifests itself, propositionally, as preparatory handicap, distortion, disaggregation, constraint, rather than as improvement, ordering, enhancement, profusion. Let us call this tradition the ‘non-renunciatory cultivation of self-limitation’ – non-renunciatory for the reason that its fundamental commitment to ‘signs of survival’ exempts it from any life-denying propensity at its origin. The ensuing discussion will interrogate newness, thus conceived, through the elaboration of two principal themes: the crisis of modernity and the reparative ethics of newness.

The crisis of modernity In the early years of the previous century, by some secret premonition of the war that would shortly transform much of the world into a killing field, the dogged nineteenth-century critique of capitalism yielded suddenly to a millenarian discourse upon the crisis of modern civilisation that would prevail until well after the conclusion of the Second World War.2 Emerging from a cluster of fields and sciences, Western and nonWestern, several early twentieth-century thinkers embarked upon this urgent updating and disciplinary substantiation of precursive fin de siecle critiques of modernity through rigorous meditation upon two interlocked themes: the crisis of materialism and the crisis of spirit. Writing in this timbre at the end of the Great War, Paul Valery offers the following grim reflections: We later civilisations . . . we too know that we are mortal. We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines . . . with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries . . . their critics and the critics of their critics . . . . And we now see the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labour, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends . . . .



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Conceding the devastating consequences of the prevailing culture of prosperity and production, shaped by the twinned demons of capitalism and empire, thinkers such as Valery nonetheless avoided the high moral pitch of renunciation by redefining modern materialism, compellingly, not only as a desire or greed for things but rather as a form of violence or a kind of brutish force that transforms life itself into things, that is, into stark or radical materiality. In these ways, modernity heralds an age of objectification, not merely because the subject of capitalism is avaricious but in consequence of its collusion, thereto, in the instrumentalisation of all that is external to itself.3 So it is that modern civilisation achieves the Midas effect that M. K. Gandhi would condemn in his 1909 polemic, Hind Swaraj, as the triumph of a matter-force or sharirbal, that converts unprofitable livingness into lifeless objects and technologies of inanimation, with, for instance, locomotion foreclosing the complex mobilities of longing, and with the various intercessory machineries of state, likewise, forestalling vital energies of unmediated or immediate interaction.4 The philosopher Simone Weil clarifies this critique of modern materialism in her essay, War and the Iliad, first published on the eve of the Second World War in 1939, wherein she too discloses modernity, in this instance retrospectively, as the apotheosis of a unique force ‘that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing’. In the most literal sense this consists in the development of those technologies of violence that facilitate the extinguishment of life. Far worse, however, is the psychic violence that achieves its effect without killing: ‘From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive’ (Weil and Bespaloff, 2005, p. 5). In the earlier decades that concern the present discussion, such devastating explanations of the crisis of modern materialism find themselves accompanied by an unusual set of reflections upon a contingent crisis of spirit (see Derrida, 1987). Where more cautious thinkers attribute the ascendency of materialism, mathematically, to an attrition of spirit, others find the flaw, perversely, in contradictions internal to the very structure of European spirit; a deviancy seen to occur, furthermore,



So the Persepolis of the Spirit is no less ravaged than the Susa of material fact. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish. (Valery, 1962, p. 24)


along the path of modern metaphysics. Thus, the philosopher Martin Heidegger ascribes the flawed thinking of spirit to that dualist Cartesian schema which enforces materiality and objectification upon all which is external to the ever contracting and elite sphere of subjectivity and mind. Modernity, thus conceived, achieves the force to turn life into things through a set of complex philosophical distortions whereby the more spirit is privileged the more exclusive and contracted it becomes, consigning greater and greater regions of existence to the desert of matter. There are two projects for survival opened up by this diagnosis of the crisis of modernity. The first, dominated by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, demands preliminary ascetic suspension of every existing articulation and experience of spirit and with that corresponding rejection also of the world of things, grievously disfigured by the wounds of materiality. We might call this ‘the logic of quarantine’, or after Heidegger of cura, that resolves itself into a remedial programme of salvation, recovery, refuge – a care of the self – for the subject of modernity, understood to be sickened by the toxins of metaphysical egotism.5 The second, and by my reasoning the more ecological project, recommends renewed cultivation (in the various senses of tending, fostering, nursing, husbandry) of matter, such as might enable its respiritualisation. To submit to this latter programme, however, demands preliminary surrender to our own occluded materiality and, thereof, ethical capacity to enter into contagious fellowship with the outcast and abandoned gathering of modernity’s wounded things. We could call this, with a little help from Jacques Derrida, ‘the logic of auto-immunity’, or apropos Heidegger, of anti-cura: ‘That strange behaviour where a living being in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its own immunity’ (Derrida, 2004, p. 94). The ethics of newness that I wish to pursue in the present discussion follows the logic of autoimmunity in fashioning its response to the crisis of modernity. In the main, it is a practice of altruistic care, liberated by apparent carelessness towards the prerogatives of self (in this case the concession that we are made of the matter that we make).

An ethics of newness While most early twentieth-century commentators on the crisis of modernity held Europe solely responsible for the malaise at hand, all agreed that the business of reparation was to be both cosmopolitan (inclusive of and available to non-European representation) and



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cosmological (deriving from consideration of the Universe as a totality). Furthermore, out of mindfulness for that ancient medical etymology whereby crisis or krinein marks the turning point in an illness and demands actualisation of the decision or judgement that could either improve or entirely destroy the subject of analysis, the thinkerhealers of interest here combined forces to reconceive ‘survival’, ‘health’, ‘recovery’ – therapeutics itself – as belonging to a future that could be actively created rather than passively forecast out of the available data. The crisis of modernity could well be countered, they proposed, via those organic and collectively conceived ‘futuribles’ that the French Republican syndicalist Bertrand de Jouvenel described as ‘futures which do not simply happen of themselves, but can be made to happen, if we meanwhile adopt wise attitudes and policies’ (cited in Toulmin, 1990, p. 2). Of the numerous disciplines that applied themselves to this inexact science of futuribles, the response I would like to foreground – for reason of its cogency and extremism – emerged from the inchoate scene of British ethical socialism and its various transnational interlocuters; some shaped by the philosophical anticapitalism inaugurated on the continent by Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, and others, such as M. K. Gandhi in South Africa, by the particular pressures of imagining autonomous futures from the brutal outposts of imperialist capitalism. In what follows I will especially draw upon the work and thought of the British Socialist, R. H. Tawney.6 Stimulated at home by the ever-widening rift between Parliamentary Labourism and the very Trade Unions responsible for the formative electoral successes in 1906 of the fledgling Labour Party, ethical socialism began its brief tenure in Britain as a form of anti-political politics, catalysed by the syndicalist industrial strikes of 1911–1912 that would shake Britain to the core in the prelude to the Great War.7 A loose blend of Guild and Christian Socialisms, largely but not exclusively congregated around A. R. Orage’s journal, The New Age, most Ethical Socialists and their allies united in the project of dissociating Union and Party politics, believing the latter to have lost sight of the true religion of socialism in the thickets of bureaucratic proceduralism. Placing their emphasis upon socialism as a project primarily of existential renovation, or as a whole way of life apposite both to economics and ethics, these thinkers immediately betray affinity with a long tradition of British radicalism, most recently on display in the anarcho-socialist cycles of the 1860s and 1880s that had devoted their energies to exploration of ‘inter-connections between the transformation of personal life



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and wider external social change’ (Rowbotham and Weeks, 1977, p. 9). Yet, for all their evident intellectual debts to this preceding tradition, early twentieth-century ethical socialists insisted that their proposals for change inaugurated an altogether new approach to modernity’s ailments. Indeed, what distinguishes this movement is its theoretical grasp of newness not only as a temporal marker but as the medical or pharmacological property that might bring crucial relief to the crisis-ridden world and show it the way forward into cosmopolitan and cosmological co-existence. What, then, does it mean to be new? In what ways do the signs of newness designate a discrete ethical style? And who, or, indeed, what, is the bearer of the programme of ethical innovation in this case? In the first instance, ethical socialism broke from its predecessors, for reason of its investment in Unionism, largely in a bid to reclaim the factory and industrial systems as the theatre for socialist transformation. Certain consequences follow. Earlier utopian socialisms had endeavoured to enlist as politically meaningful the impractical or even leisured spheres of human activity (love, poetry, sex, faith, food, dress) thence laying claim to an eclectic constituency – in Orwell’s words, ‘every fruitjuice drinker, nudist, sandal-weaver, sex-maniac, “Nature-cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England’ (1967, p. 152). By contrast, the new movement admitted only workers: not as a class category, that is, as ‘the proletariat’, but rather in the generic sense of man-as-worker, specifically, homo laborans; the agency, in Hannah Arendt’s formulation, ‘which labours and “mixes with” ’ matter.8 Furthermore, ethical socialism also refuted the conception of the future canvassed under the rubric of both the utopianism and the scienticism which had animated socialist quarrels of the late nineteenth century. This included the idealism of that generation from William Morris to Edward Carpenter, keenly committed to the doctrine of human perfectibility: the view, to be exact, that time itself would yield better, improved ‘types of human kind’ (Carpenter, 1993, pp. 114–115). Suspect too were the scientific antagonists of this position, the school as it were of Engels and Marx, equally confident, albeit upon the strength of altogether different premises, that an inevitable and inexorable logic of progress was secreted into the laws of historical necessity. By the early twentieth century, the optimism and futurism of these projects had already suffered serious ideological blows. Socialist utopianism would barely survive the charge of immaturity and wishful thinking instigated with the publication, in 1892, of Friedrich Engels’ Socialism, from Utopia to Science. Yet but a few years later, by 1898, a new revisionism within orthodox Marxism (more mindful of the global



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complexities of capitalism) also put paid to the optimistic catechisms of scientific socialism, declaring an end, to borrow the words of syndicalist Antonio Labriola, to ‘the ardent, lively and precocious hopes of a few years ago – those expectations of over precise details and contours’.9 Inheritors of a political psychology no longer favourable to either utopianism or scienticism, ethical socialism vigorously elaborated its own distaste for a politics of inevitability. Its subsequent refutations of hopefulness as an attitude appropriate to social change invite further reflection, for the dramatisation therein of the paradox that the very optimism that guarantees a better future also renders it remote to (or closed off from) the tedious present. However secular in conception, such a future is, strictly speaking, eschatological, an afterworld or afterlife predicated upon the abandonment rather than transformation of quotidian monotonies; or, to put it differently, one whose actualisation will in no way be determined by the complex practices of everyday life: the small ennobling rituals by which we defy the intractability of routine. In context, the rhetoric of newness, under review here, makes contrary appeal to a future that is accessible to the present, or to put this another way, it proceeds upon the perverse intuition that it is only upon removal of the safeguards of improvement which have hitherto secured the future (and made it secure) that newness will reenter the world. There are four procedures, consequent upon this early twentieth-century socialist reclamation of the future, by which an ethics of newness properly comes into view: antiromanticism, the critique of capacity, the separation of potentiality and sovereignty, the cultivation of self-limitation. Let us summarily consider these topics. Antiromanticism As participants in the pervasive anti-scientistic anti-utopianism of the early twentieth century, many of the minor philosophers associated with ethical socialism gave voice to a deep yet compassionate scepticism about human perfectibility. The Christian socialist R. H. Tawney, instrumental in sounding this chord, urged immediate substitution of the consummate subject of former socialisms with a new domestic hero for the times, fashioned mostly of clay and known to all as Henry Dubb: H. D.: the civilian equivalent of P. B. I. or poor bloody infantry, i.e., the common, courageous, good-hearted, patient, proletarian fool, whose epic is contained in the well-known lines, “We go to work to earn the cash to buy the bread to get the strength to go to work and earn the cash,” etc., and who is worth, except to his modest self,



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Where the protagonist of socialist humanism and romanticism boasted a reservoir of possibilities obscured merely by infelicitous external circumstances, Dubb’s problems were largely his own and any promise he might bear had to be laboriously crafted out of his own given materials, such as they were. He would scarcely emerge unscathed, already perfected, once society had been rearranged or, indeed, upon the fulfilment of utopian temporality. Rather, he would stumble through his age as a thing severely worked over and incrementally disarranged by the discipline or practices of socialism; not arriving into so much as giving shape to the future. The critique of capacity When fully elaborated, such refutations of human perfectibility revealed a fundamental dispute with the very claims of capacity, improvement, development, progress and so on as civilisational goods. The malaise of modernity, Tawney insisted, did not accrue from the failure of ambitions and opportunities but rather from their fulfilment: ‘the quality of . . . success’ whereby, much like the ‘spirits in Inferno’, we are ‘punished by the attainment of . . . desires’ (1953, pp. 33, 36). In similar vein, but a few decades hence, Aldous Huxley would draw upon the critique of increase and expansion, in his Brave New World (1932), to render dystopia as the unchecked realisation of modern advancement. At the heart of this imaginary, with its iteration of the psychoses of wish-fulfilment, lay a quieter apprehension of the terrifying legal compact between ability and dominion which had ensured the unrestrained preeminence of some over others, giving rise to a master-class, masternation, master-gender, master-species and so on. The subtle Benthamite adjustment whereby capacities alone qualified for rights – the power, as Tawney puts it, ‘of controlling with the assistance of the State, the action of others’ – had yielded ‘essentially a conquering race’ (1920, p. 50, 1972, p. 82). Here we have some sober English variations upon the theme of the incontrovertible bond between ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘exception’ also proposed by Carl Schmitt, the German thinker of this time who was to become the leading jurist of the Weimer Republic. There are procedures, Tawney and others seem to insinuate, in their version, whereby in certain historical circumstances and political cultures only those already



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perceived to be exceptional (in the sense of having capacities) attain to sovereignty (in the sense of having the power to curtail the action of others). By the laws of symbiosis which secure this particular compact, it then follows that only those who are sovereign can lay claim to, or command, the prerogatives of exceptionality. What precisely does the sovereign command in this circular dispensation such that it poses a problem to the project of newness being canvassed here? Reading between the lines of ethical socialism we find the following quasi-Schmittian diagnosis: the compact between exceptionality/capacity and sovereignty/dominion bequeaths to the sovereign a unique a law of exception (or exemption) from prevailing checks and balances which lays claim to change itself, for the reason that it alone transmits the authority to possess the future or declare it emergent. This happens because the rule of exception reserves the realm of potentiality (in the sense of potenza or power, but also in the sense of latency or availability to future development) exclusively for the exceptional sovereign, and this in two ways. First, where those under his jurisdiction are alike standardised and condemned to normativity, only the sovereign has the potential to become other, to escape from, to be taken outside (ex-capere), to alter what prevails. Second, as the figure of singularity in the general mass, the one whose claim to the exception demands that all others submit to regimen, regularity, routine and rule, only the sovereign has the potential also to become himself, to come into his own. So the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben notes in a recent gloss on sovereignty:‘ . . . a principle of potentiality is inherent in every definition of sovereignty. In this sense . . . the sovereign state is founded on an “ideology of potentiality” ’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 47n). The separation of sovereignty and potentiality On 13 June 1912, Tawney made the following entry in the Commonplace Book he maintained from 1912 to 1914: Major __ said, “I don’t approve of it at all. I don’t know what things are coming to. I saw a letter addressed to my butler the other day, and it had Esqre after his name! I said to him, “John, what do you mean by receiving letters addressed to Esqre? Kindly see that they are addressed properly in the future” (1972, p. 16) In the course of subsequent meditations upon the theme of socialist equality, Tawney’s writings iteratively condemn the modern cult of



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capacity principally for its sanction to the monopolisation of potential which has resulted in ‘the triumph of a single type of human-being’ (Tawney, 1931, p. 36). In context, his proposals for what we are calling an ethics of newness consist of encouragement to forms of equity that favour variety, such that all might have the potential to change and become other than they are; such that each can fully and uniquely become itself and repossess the time to come. This wresting of potential, as it were, from the jaws of sovereignty cannot proceed, however, and as Tawney understood too well, without an original or innovative suspension of exceptionality.

The cultivation of self-limitation In a series of rich reflections upon Aristotelian metaphysics, Giorgio Agamben points to the unique way in which the trope of potentiality occurs as a liminal or threshold concept in the earlier philosopher’s work, for the reason that it simultaneously designates both capacity and privation. Thus, the potential for vision is at the same time ‘the potential not to see’, just as ‘the potentiality for darkness . . . is also the potentiality for light’. In this way, ‘potentiality’ becomes the occult property that renders lack or privation to be as central to the fullness of being as capacity or ability might be. In Agamben’s words, ‘To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential’ (Agamben, 1999, pp. 181–182). Something of this wisdom is revealed at the very heart of the endeavour that we have been bearing witness to. For where does the separation of potentiality from sovereignty actually lead us? Where do we arrive when potenza is released from its task as place-holder for capacity and exceptionality alone? Into an ethos, I submit, where lack and privation and incapacity regain their status as meaningful types of human potential. So we have come full circle to our opening proposition: namely, that newness reopens the future by instantiating such disarrangement of known capacities that it often manifests as distortion or handicap. Writing out of the crisis borne of European aggrandisement, the Ethical Socialists of the early twentieth century understood, furthermore, that the future summoned by such a credo would obtain proper ethical content only when the conjunctural limitations and constraints that emerged along the paths of newness were consciously embraced and cultivated; that is, when being new signalled active commitment to a generous yet non-renunciatory capacity for self-limitation, or,



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If you can throw it away, it is not really yours. If it is really yours you cannot throw it away. And you may be certain that if you throw it [a]way, whatever in you is greater than it will produce something in its place. Never be afraid of pruning your branches. Trust the future and take risks. In moral, as in economic affairs, the rash man is “he who does not speculate” (1972, p. 20)

Coda: on love One reason why ethical socialism’s invitation towards self-limitation refuses resolution into a merely ascetic project is because its aetiology so resembles that of love. To plot this hunch we might refer to the transmission, from Oscar Wilde to R. H. Tawney, of a minor theme out of the philosophy of potentiality. Early in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891), Wilde dwells poetically upon the novel democratisation of potentiality under socialism such that everyone shall have the opportunity and will to become their best self, to fulfil their own integrity. ‘Know Thyself! was written over the portal of the antique world’, he observes. ‘Over the portal of the new world, “Be thyself” shall be written’ (Wilde, 1997, p. 903). Some two decades later, on 20 August 1913, to be precise, whilst contemplating the implications of this equalisation of opportunities for singularity, Tawney records the following entry in his diary: ‘To love another person means to desire that they shld [sic] be themselves’ (1972, p. 68). We already know love to be the property whereby a being-of-oneself is eo ipso the desire for another equally to be-themselves through Aristophanes’ account of the origin of love in Plato’s Symposium. In this version, we might recall, the originary human, cleft and wounded by the action of jealous sovereign deities, and always seeking its severed half, can only complete itself in and as the completion of another: ‘So love is the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.’ It is also that (de)formative generosity, we might add, for which a divine wound of self-limitation may well be the only condition of possibility. Here (with slight editorial license) is Plato’s rendition of the affect-inducing rage of Zeus and the gods: I think I can see my way, he said . . . by weakening these people without destroying them. What I propose to do is to cut them all in half . . . for each one will be only half as strong . . . . So saying, he cut 10.1057/9780230233607 - Globalization and Utopia, Edited by Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili


impotentiality. ‘Never be afraid of throwing away what you have’, Tawney records on 30 June 1912, in his diary.

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In another epoch, M. K. Gandhi would clarify the genetic sequence of a love consequent upon spiritual lesion as consisting, first, in aparigraha or non-possession, especially of the unique properties of self, which alone can augment the abhaya or fearlessness upon which depends the art of ahimsa or non-harmfulness. With modification and mutation this may yet still be the ethical sequence most likely to engender crucial signs of survival for our own times.

Notes 1. Badiou does, however, denounce anti-utopianism: ‘every revolutionary project stigmatised as “utopian” turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good turns Evil. This is sophistry at its most devastating’ (Badiou, 2002, p. 13). 2. The literature of crisis is vast and, perhaps, most cogently plotted through the phenomenological tradition. See, especially, Husserl (1965, 1970), Dodd (2004) and Lowith (1995). For a striking contemporary summation and iteration of this tradition, see Derrida (1992). 3. See Heidegger (1977, p. 128): ‘Certainly the modern age has . . . introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism’. 4. In an argument chiefly in favour of the reconciliation of means and ends Gandhi posits a clear continuum between modern civilisation’s ‘brutish’ energy and its production, thence, of ‘useless things’ (Gandhi, 1997, p. 80). 5. Heidegger (1987, p. 227): ‘Dasein’s Being reveals itself as care . . . no sooner has Dasein expressed anything about itself to itself, then it has already reinterpreted itself as care (cura) . . . .’ 6. For accounts of ethical socialism and R. H. Tawney’s place in this movement, see Denis and Halsey (1988), Terrill (1973), Wilkinson (1998), Thompson (1996, pp. 47–54), Williams (1983, pp. 227–243) and Carter (2003). 7. Of the many historical studies apposite to this particular moment, those most immediately relevant to the labour history that concerns the present discussion are Hobsbawm (1964, pp. 126–315), Dangerfield (1961) and Green (1997). 8. Arendt (1998, p. 136) actually makes a sharp distinction between homo faber ‘who makes and literally “works upon” ’, and animal laborans, ‘which labours and “mixes with” ’. Ethical socialism is, I believe, distinguished by its effort to designate a type of ethical work or labour that bridges precisely such a



them all in half just as you or I might chop up sorb apples for pickling, or slice an egg with a hair. And as each half was ready he told Apollo to turn its face, with the half-neck that was left, toward the side that was cut away . . . the gash . . . of . . . love (Plato, 2005, pp. 543–544)

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gap between man and animal, and furthermore, between the realms of consciousness and inert matter. The homo laborans can thus be conceived as the agent who submits to the self-contamination demanded by the ethical work apposite to the crisis of modernity. 9. A. Labriola, Saggi sul materialismo storico (Rome, 1968), p. 302, cited in Laclau and Mouffe (1985, p. 18). Laclau and Mouffe (1985, pp. 7–8) offer a detailed discussion of the revisionist crisis that, variously, took issue with ‘the category of “historical necessity” which had been the cornerstone of Second International Marxism’.



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6 Gregor McLennan

Secularism stalled The aim of this chapter is to give a theoretical characterization of emergent ‘postsecular’ discourses and connect them to the themes of this book. To fully understand the process of globalization, and as part of that process, many now think that the social sciences must be vigorously ‘provincialized’. Their public purpose and their typical categories must strenuously be re-examined in the light of ‘multiple modernities’ and ‘plural knowledges’. As an essential aspect of that reorientation, the status of secularism – or even ‘secularity’ – within critical thought has begun to be seriously questioned. Indeed, postsecularism may be the veritable ‘last post’ of all. Just when postmodernism, poststructuralism, postfeminism, and postcolonialism seemed to have yielded all their (mixed) fruits, a further thought struck: that all along, the deepest problem with critical social thought has been its presumption of the truth and inevitability of secularist humanism. In his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, Marx had legislated that the criticism of religion was not only the ‘premise’ of all social criticism, but was moreover ‘essentially complete’ in 1844. All these years later, secular criticism is increasingly viewed as part of the problem of, rather than the solution to, our contemporary global predicament. The postsecular challenge takes two forms, substantive and reflexive. In the substantive frame, the idea of a steady secularization process under conditions of modernity has been questioned from a number of angles. Even if in the ‘advanced’ countries the cultural authority, social functions, and strict observance of religion have all declined, religion has not after all disappeared. Indeed, as some of its incidental functions have receded, its primary function – its role in sustaining 82



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personal hope, love, moral perspective, and a sense of overall meaning – remains strong. It has also offered opportunities for (re)creating community and solidarity in the very urban, alienated settings that seemed set to destroy it. If the main churches and denominations have lost support, one argument runs, then at the individual level there is plenty of ‘believing without belonging’. Moreover, we should not forget, according to an American analysis, that neither secularism nor revivalism is a matter of a naturally patterned demand that variously dwindles or surges; rather these phenomena are strongly governed by the intensity of supply side activity. And under conditions of pluralistic competition, input entrepreneurs can regenerate the overall market for faith. Most generally, perhaps, the seemingly inexorable drive to materialist consumerism, social differentiation, and systemic impersonality brings many opportunities for religion-driven morality and spiritual outlet. Scientific rationality, finally, is not after all directly competitive with religious believing, because many people, including scientists, seem quite able to combine both stances, in their appropriate places. Globalization brings additional considerations. As the nation-state itself, supposedly, goes into decline, religions having a cross-national and cross-cultural appeal can grow (again). Within consolidated nationstates, the religious element can re-emerge strongly as a definer of cultural specificity, if only as a reaction to the threatening pluralism of diverse world views, and especially to alternative ‘fundamentalisms’. Within nation-states feeling the pinch of international economic/financial regimes, religious groups might be re-assigned welfare or dispute-resolution functions. As for nation-building movements, which have not ceased to press, prevailing nationalist sentiment is often steeped in religious particularity. Furthermore, there is the issue of ‘the God that failed’, namely, secular ideologies of progress and revolution (above all Marxism). These now-defeated perspectives have consistently underestimated the autonomous force, spread, and substance of movements such as contemporary Islam or Pentecostalism, and indeed social radicalism itself, especially in the global ‘South’, often seems more effective when powered by religious motivation. Globalization, then, reinforces religion in new ways, whilst religion actively ‘carries’ and expands globalization, not least through community- and identity-building via advanced communications technologies that operate freely across borders. Most basically, growing awareness of the sheer numbers and variety of seriously motivated religious people around the world, especially when perceived under a multiculturalist ethic of respect for identity and difference, have sharpened the sense that the



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secularization thesis is essentially Eurocentric in character. A case can still be made that the West – but excluding the USA, significantly – continues to secularize, but this forms only a small island in a vast ocean of global faith. Peter Berger (1999) summarizes the climate of opinion amongst those sociologists of religion whose thinking I have compacted together here by concluding that we are now witnessing nothing less than ‘the de-secularization of the world’. None of these points necessarily gives the coup de grace to the secularization thesis, broadly conceived, though the emphasis undoubtedly becomes more normative than explanatory. It remains unclear, for example, what secularism actually refers to. Discussions that roll up secularism into a rather crass amalgam of unbelief, atheism, agnosticism, naturalism, mundane materialism, humanism – all themselves needing differentiation – are neither helpful nor convincing. Second, some of the strands of opposition to the secularization thesis run directly against others. Then, a reasonable escape clause says that it is not religious belief per se that makes for credal survival or revival, but the existence of pliable handed-down materials serving social or personal needs that, contingently, have not (yet) been met in more secular ways. Secularism, for example, is strongly correlated with high levels of well-being, education, and feelings of security, and whilst these things may not currently characterize the lives of most of the world’s people, if and when they do, then religion could be expected (over time) to fall away. Contemporary revivalism, in any case, is not ‘authentic’ traditionalism at all, but one kind of ‘insider’ response to modernity itself, because the localized, ritualized communities that alone could sustain profound and ‘natural’ religious belief simply no longer exist. Such doctrines are therefore best seen as (complex) reactions to the community-killing, meaning-sapping drive of global capitalism itself. To be successful, they need to be organized instrumentally as interest group lobbies or assist disadvantaged communities and families to improve their material situation. So whilst there is no doubt that religions survive in these ways, there is still a strong case, in explanatory terms, for seeing them as the explanandum rather than, as anti-secularists gleefully declare, the explanans. Meanwhile, no religious mentality has a chance of surviving if it fails to positively embrace empirical scientific knowledge and the technology that only such knowledge produces. Through all these processes, the ontological depth of religions thin out and their sense of divinely dispensed morality weakens. That said, postsecularism is taking hold in the reflexive as well as the substantive frame. Amongst the classics, Simmel, in this regard as in



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others, has shot to the forefront of attention, with his emphasis on religiosity as an enduring social form, and his focus on the spiritual quest for subjective value in an objectivizing culture. Also, the canonical distinction between modernity and pre-modernity has become legitimately blurred over, not least in its crude counterposition of the wholly ‘enchanted’ world we have lost against the utterly rationalized world we are in. Then there is the problem of the residual naturalism of social science, accentuated by the steady erosion of positivist norms of enquiry. Thus, previous assumptions that religious values cannot logically be braided into our essentially this-worldly understanding of social action are being regarded as questionable ‘methodologically atheist’ protocol. The accusation is that the secular sociologist’s typical stance is actively religion-denying.

A postsecular spectrum This tendency to welcome explicit expressions of faith within social thought has led erstwhile critical realists to seek ‘alethic’ supertruths about the Ultimate (Bhaskar, 2000), while vitalist-inclined authors go out of their way to denounce secularism even though they show no serious religious allegiance as such (Connolly, 1999). Others emphasize the luminosity, liminality, and thisness of things; the holiness of the everyday; the uncanny impulses of performativity, affect, and sensing; and the primacy of utter otherness. Whether such re-figurings represent ‘religion beyond religion’, in Derrida’s phrase, or merely the ‘secularization of the secular’ itself, remains to be seen. But it all indicates a new spectrum of thinking in the postsecular mode. How are we to characterize this space of debate? Not long ago, Ernest Gellner (1992) engaged with two positions – postmodern relativism and religious fundamentalism – that stood in contrast to his own preferred secular enlightenment rationalism. Useful in its way, this tripartite division now needs to be stretched to include at least three further postures, which I will designate as ‘immanent transcendentalism’, with Charles Taylor as its spokesman; ‘epistemic dialogism’ as recently expounded by Jurgen Habermas; and ‘spiritual progressivism’. It is the work of Brazilian, Harvard-based socio-legal theorist Roberto M. Unger that is singled out by that last term, and the brunt of the chapter is that Unger offers the version of the postsecular problematic that most directly connects with the themes of globalization and utopia. First, a word about the other two perspectives: In his 2007 volume A Secular Age, Taylor relentlessly puts forward a case against what he



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assumes to be conventional social science understanding. According to Taylor, a damaging, undetected ‘unthought’ lies behind the secularization thesis and its supporting conceptual apparatus, in subservience to which social scientists routinely take it for granted in advance that belief in God and hope of transcendent redemption have nothing whatever to do with their knowledge-building practices or with social morality more generally. But this professional assumption, Taylor argues, is nothing but a secularist bias, born out of those (unsuccessful) doctrines that were designed to ‘keep at bay’ the ‘moral malaise’, the ‘terrible flatness’, and the ‘aching lack’ of over-rationalized being in the modern era. Taylor does not seek altogether to reject the ‘immanent frame’ of modernity and turn the clock back as such. But he does want to insist that the defining secularity of what he terms the ‘modern social imaginary’ is not a matter of secularism as such. Taylor rehearses many theorists and movements of ideas to show how ‘we’ have moved from an epoch in which everyone believed in God to one in which that orientation stands as only one option amongst others, and the way in which secularism, at least amongst academics, came to stand as the ‘default option’. Openness to the prospect of transformative spiritual ‘fullness’, however, has never been ruled out, and indeed can now be better appreciated as a truly ‘live option’ within modernity, especially in our contemporary situation of ‘galloping spiritual pluralism’ and thoroughgoing reflexivity. It follows that neither social analysts nor active citizens are justified in ‘closing out’ the possibility of transcendence, even if we are initially reluctant to appreciate its unique sensuous and intellectual comprehension. Once humbly entertained, the revealed power of ‘God’s pedagogy’ might steadily take hold. Unlike Taylor, Habermas confesses himself thoroughly ‘unmusical’ when it comes to religion. But he is troubled by the apparent hardening of positions between those of faith and those of none, not least since ‘9/11’. So Habermas has been constructively talking to the Pope, amongst others, in an effort to forge a way ‘beyond naturalism and religion’. In noting that ‘the thesis that a religious orientation to a transcendental reality alone can show a contrite modernity the way out of its impasse is once again gaining adherents’ (2008, p. 108), Habermas provides, unknowingly, a spot-on description of Taylor’s role. Habermas’ own commitment, of course, is to a rather different project, to a cosmopolitan, dialogic mode of democracy, conducted in a spirit of ‘constitutional patriotism’. On the one hand, this demands a certain withdrawal from particularistic cultures and specific moral traditions (thus his longstanding interest in Rawls). On the other hand,



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cosmopolitan democracy needs to be genuinely all-inclusive, and in this regard there is considerable risk that religiously devout citizens will withdraw from, perhaps even oppose, the secular public culture of democratic societies unless the latter become positive about the expression of religion in politics (McLennan, 2007). Habermas accepts that religious citizens have to be prepared to accommodate to what he sees as the inescapable conditions of modern secular life – religious pluralism, the universalism of law, the authority of science, and profane popular morality. But the onus falls not on them alone, but on secular citizens equally, to enter into a mutual learning process. Secularists, in other words, have to overcome their own kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ by appreciating not only that religion remains a source of moral energy in society, but, more radically, that religions may have truth-content too. Only by achieving such cognitive equivalence are we likely to cultivate the ‘enlightened common sense’ that Habermas thinks is key to political peace and democratic progress. At first glance, Taylor and Habermas provide variants of postsecularism appropriate for a provincialized social science and a global audience. On further inspection, however, intrinsic problems with their arguments weaken any further uses to which they could be put. Taylor in particular constructs his whole edifice on a quasi-Hegelian basis that most critical social scientists would find excessively idealist. Overwhelmingly a history of ideas, Taylor’s book pays only lip service to their social conditions, institutional articulation, and ideological rationale. Moreover, it inscribes a thoroughly ‘rigged’ trajectory for the secular morality of modernity, in that the significance of the latter is only granted if we understand it as the alienated expression/phase of self-consciousness in its progress towards transcendence. What Taylor bemoans as the terrible negativity and flatness of the modern moral order is in turn negated when we come to see it as a historically and logically necessary ‘moment’ – if a ‘mutilating’ one – in the higher ascent to wholeness. Indeed, Reflexive Spirit could only come to final self-realization through the recognition of the necessity of its negative moment, which takes on fresh significance, and as such is preserved, in and through being superseded. In the final chapter of A Secular Age, Taylor completes the dialectic in seeking to, literally, convert social analysis into spiritual apprehension. But the structural pathos of the theoretical design of Taylor’s immanent transcendentalism, together with the over-tilted rhetoric that sustains it throughout, is entirely tendentious (McLennan, 2008).



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The work is not only marked by explanatory inconclusiveness, but also massive repetition and a preacherly moralism, disappointments that are not compensated for by way of inspiring utopian possibility. This is because, whilst there may well be religious readings of utopian futures, the utopian tradition, arguably, requires a firmer secular element than that Taylor, other than superficially, is prepared to endorse. What emerges is a rather traditional Christian hope for an eternal redemptive beyond, in Taylor’s terms, a ‘communion of the good’ and of the saints, bathed in God’s love. The globalist attraction of Taylor’s postsecularism might be additionally reduced due to its Eurocentric cast, reflected in its governing Christian frame, the vast bulk of its featured thinkers and historical cases, and its lack of engagement with the growing ‘postcolonial’ literature on the historical interplay of science and faiths, empire, and knowledge. As for Habermas, that same charge of Eurocentrism has sometimes been leveled against the contextless ‘rationalism’ of his 1980s ideal speech situation, and even in relation to the later ‘constitutionalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’. Yet his thinking in this decade is notably more multiculturalist and pragmatic. Intemperate dismissals of religion in the name of secularism, he thinks, threaten the future of deep democracy. But Habermas’s construal of the background issues remains unpersuasive on three counts. One is that Habermas tends to assume that the majority of citizens in liberal states are secularist; that they are consciously secularist; and that secularism can be equated with non-believing. All these assumptions are questionable, and so, therefore, is the consequent implication that it is secularist naturalism rather than religious revivalism that stands as an obstacle to democratic advance. Secondly, just like Taylor, Habermas falls into the trap of presenting all the ‘richness’ of life as belonging to the religious side of the binary, with little imagination, energy, or intrinsic sense of morality accruing to a scientific or humanist ethos. This is highly contestable, not to say ridiculous. Finally, Habermas’s sense that the key to progress is to get deeply religious people and naturalistically inclined minds to take a more epistemically charitable attitude to one another seems misguided. People who hold considered or deep-seated views on truth, existence, causality, and cognition are unlikely to change their minds on these matters just because there are political difficulties to be resolved. Deep down, most people are not epistemic pragmatists. Better, then, surely, to work politically on existing overlaps in moral goals and social experience rather than fondly chase epistemic consensus.



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Roberto Unger has been depicted as offering a stirring blend of Northern conceptual sophistication and Southern political urgency (Anderson, 1992). Acutely conversant with social and political theory, analytical and ‘continental’ philosophy, Unger’s previous work, notably the three-volume Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory (1987), systematically sought to counter the ‘necessitarianism’ of major traditions of explanatory and programmatic thought. Emphasizing human ‘plasticity’ and irreducible social agency as against the kind of ‘false necessity’ in social life that Unger feels the concepts and theories of social science only underline, his drive was to play down our context-reinforcing thinking in the cause of developing our context-breaking collective and individual strategies. In Democracy Realized (1998), these ideas were taken further under the rubric of ‘democratic experimentalism’, including substantial proposals for a deepened social democracy. An important precondition (and outcome) of the latter was held to be the inculcation of a widespread ‘high-energy’ and even ‘prophetic’ social personality in each of us. With the publication in 2007 of The Self Awakened, Unger brings this aspect of his general thinking squarely into the postsecular arena that I am trying to shape here. One way of characterizing Unger’s enterprise is to see it as an alternative articulation of the ‘immanent transcendence’ that Taylor fails to secure. Like Habermas, Unger is more affirmative about Western modernity and its progressivist potential. Unhesitatingly, he approves the ambition of Western thought over 200 years to overthrow all attachment to ‘the perennial philosophy’ that once was dominant prior to the modern frame of reference, and that remains a standing temptation outside the West. Against all illusory quests to escape the reality of particular embodiment, temporality, and society through ascent into some changeless, eternal space-beyond-space, benignly governed by the mind of God, Unger endorses – ‘to the hilt’ (2007, p. 78) – the utter historicity of things: ourselves as ‘dying organisms’, our societies and ideas, indeed nature itself, and even nature’s laws. Unger has no patience with the various types of ‘possible worlds’ theory prominent today in academia, since these too simply detract from engagement with this world, with humanity’s shared current actuality. Despite his approval of intellectual frontier individualism, and his prohibitions on the perennial philosophy, any targeting of Unger’s possible ‘occidentalism’ is unlikely to stick, partly due to his personal background, and also because he is working in a manifestly ‘global’ idiom.



Unger: humanist politics in a spiritual voice


Unger’s humanism, unlike Taylor’s, comes unattached to particular religious strings. This secularist element is shown in his dedication to emancipation from all ‘enslaving superstitions of the mind’ (2007, p. 31). Moreover, his philosophizing urges that philosophy itself must become less contemplative and more interventionist. To seek to replace a political vocabulary by a theological one, he says, results merely in ‘idolatry’ (2007, p. 49). Given what he takes to be our utter saturation in time and change, there is no question of any ‘evanescent spiritual substance that escapes nature and its laws’. Material temporality goes ‘all the way down’, so that even a speculative contrast between secular and higher forms of time is ruled out. For Unger, we need to live for the future with no prospect of an afterlife, and without illusions about participation either in some eternal now or in God’s timeless mind. While religious doctrines of salvation provide undoubted existential ‘comfort’, they still have to be fearlessly judged at the bench of truth, where they do not fare well. As for ‘allegorizing salvation’, by blurring over its reliance on specifically religious truth claims and committed ontologies, this only ‘eviscerates’ holy traditions and ‘undoes’ their historical integrity (2007, pp. 67, 90, 140–141). Generally low-key on epistemic benchmarks for theory, Unger sharply departs from Habermasian dialogism at this point. So far, Unger would seem to be someone for whom secularism is beyond any compromise. But there are zones of convergence with more religious positions, such as Taylor’s, one of which is their common antinaturalism. Thankfully, there is no trace in Unger of the sort of vapid anti-science attitude that mars many an anti-positivist manifesto. Indeed, in line with his general progressivism, he upholds scientific boldness, technological innovation, and material progress as vital embodiments of creative historical practice. That said, forced naturalizations of social and cultural settings ‘place transformative will and imagination under a spell’ that must be decisively broken, otherwise ‘the naturalization of man will be his dehumanization’ (2007, pp. 1, 35). There are two overarching rationalizations for Unger’s humanism. One is that the natural universe is simply too vast and complex for us ever to grasp it in the same way that we can grasp our own lives and worlds. Echoing Vico, Unger states that humanity can only truly know that which it has made. So the metaphysical attributes that he formulates as central to our collective life – futurity, contingency, agency, and experimentalism – are not remotely applicable in the ever ‘strange’ setting of the natural world. If parts of science appear decisively concrete, neutral, and proven in ways that cannot be glossed in anthropomorphic terms, this solid near-sided independence steadily breaks up as we enter the many scientific areas



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that will always remain remote, their investigation advanced chiefly by contending metaphors taken from human projects. Unger therefore warns against the standing temptation to construct a ‘superscience’, a way of seeing, as he puts it, with the eyes of God. We must not think of nature as subsisting entirely outside of our moral frames, because then we would simply cower before it, in terror and awe, again as though it was God. The practice of science must of course push ahead, but nature’s impersonal governance has no equivalent in the social sphere. To put it there only ‘lengthens’ rather than ‘shortens’ the distance between our unimaginative, context-confirming routines and our all-important transformational thinking and action. When under the spell of the immensity of the natural world, unavoidably we get caught up in unresolvable ‘antinomies’ to do with time and objectivity, which can only be eased by a staunch pragmatist attitude. This will have to be a more radical pragmatism than the principal figures in that tradition avowed, because they too eventually fell for the temptations of naturalism, failing fully to cut the ties between modernist experiment and the ever-lurking perennial philosophy. Unger’s second, and consequent, move is to reinvigorate our sense of individual and human capacity. We are natural beings, of course: material, embodied creatures, the product of evolution, possessing limited intellectual access to the bigger world. But fatalism is the danger in overstating this natural formation. Anyway, our brains and drives are ‘indeterminate’ and ‘plastic’, and everything we know and feel is ‘contaminated’ by what we will. Social structures, for their part, are nothing but ‘fighting turned to stone’ (2007, p. 63). Human nature, therefore, concerns the achievement of social and personal novelty, remakings of the world in the image of futurity, conducted by collectivities of ‘radical originals’, people untamed by whatever constraints them. Where is the motivation to break with necessitarian and fatalistic understandings to come from? Here Unger gives full head to the quasireligious element of his ideas. For profound progressive social transformation to occur, equally deep personal renewal is required. Nature, it is clear, cannot be spiritualized, but human agency can. Transcendence is action under the sign of futurity, operationalizing our ‘unstoppable longing’ and enabling us to ‘demand the unconditional’. Consequently, ‘we poison our relations to one another by denying to one another the acknowledgment of the infinity within’. Accepting that these propositions borrow from the ‘theological vocabulary’, Unger is positive about the Christian tradition, though strictly speaking it is an ‘alternative’ to his own worldview. Taken as a ‘living faith’ rather than a ‘dead creed’,



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we can see Christianity as having ‘played a decisive part in the moral and religious history of humanity’, primarily through its elevation of ‘creation and love’ and its modality of ‘intense personal encounter’. As such, Christianity has contributed resources for our current goal to become, not God exactly nor even placed next to God, but decisively ‘more godlike’ (Unger, 2007, pp. 38, 45, 128, 162, 151–152). Contrary, then, to secularist denigrations of religion, Unger envisages it as having, along with politics and philosophy, a central role to play in the ‘ascent’ to progressive society and to human ‘greatness’. In Chapter 12, which is devoted to this, he sketches out a twofold spiritual upgrading. In a first ‘awakening of self’, we are supposed to go from a state of ‘narcoleptic daze’ to one of ‘presence, attention, involvement’, with the penalty for not moving thus being a descent into meaninglessness, dread, and disgust. Faced with the prospect of ‘entrapment in this life’, and not wanting to renege on ‘the nobility of struggle’, faith looks for a ‘rebirth’ in what amounts to salvation without ‘the theological backdrop’. Accordingly, the ethical virtues of the first awakening – forbearance, respect, fairness – are sorely worked in an attempt to manage, though they cannot at this stage overcome, the twin tensions that constitute the phenomenological and moral fabric of progressive personality: our need to ‘engage’ versus our refusal to ‘surrender’ to the world; and the way that our sense of connection pulls against our impulse towards transcendence. But the first-phase moral experience, in which personality is affirmed yet full identity remains uncertain, removes much ‘clutter’ and so ‘prepares our rise’ into a higher plane of perception and agency altogether. Respect then flowers into compassion, forbearance into self-sacrifice, fairness into mercy. In these higher perceptual and ethical states, virtue is touched by the divine, giving us a ‘taste of the eternal’. In this second awakening, we can only be ourselves by going beyond ourselves, by ‘looking for trouble’ instead of evading it, by ‘making good on the infinity within us’, and through a commitment to ‘smash the idols’ that reduce it. ‘Once discovered’, the sense of the absolute beckons to the higher self: ‘it is irresistible; it must be lived out’.

Discursive excess, compromised coherence That Unger deserves to be widely read and debated is not in question, and I have tried to convey something of the sweeping power of his discourse. But some basic objections quickly crowd in, around three sets of issues. The first relates to what Anderson (1991, p. 40) in a different context dubbed the ‘exorbitation of language’ that disruptive discourses



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sometimes exude. Initially appearing to be a less sentimental, more securely grounded thinker than Taylor, Unger ends up rivaling him in exhortatory outpourings, and not a little sanctimoniousness. It is not the excessiveness per se that jars, but the way in which the soaring, over-generalized reference-lessness of the prose – Unger rarely names particular thinkers or movements – summons up for the reader, in due course, a hint of narcissism, and even, eventually, embarrassment. The closing phrase – ‘life over everything’ (2007, p. 237) – epitomizes the gathering bathos. Moreover, given that the audience for his work, overwhelmingly, will be fellow academics rather than people in the favelas or rustbelts, Unger’s complete lack of reflexivity in the text with regard to the politics of communication that his fervour has to negotiate is startling. ‘Radical originality’, we might add, is a coinage that already carries too much egoistical freight amongst intellectuals and artists, quite apart from the rather dire prospect of swathes of cultural mediators feeling obliged to start sounding just like Unger. As for others who might, at a pinch, feel touched by his changed analytics, are sincere Christians, for example, seriously going to rush towards Unger’s tent when, in acting as their new prophet, he is probably depriving them of their Lord? Secondly, it is not evident that Unger really needs to invest in the religious register so intensely. If there is a problem about motivation for radical change in secular vein, there might be other fresh ways of disputing religion’s claimed monopoly on spirituality, creativity, and aspiration. Unger’s emphasis on our much-untapped powers of reinvention, for example, overlaps with the ‘capacitarian’ approach to human flourishing advocated by Martha Nussbaum and others. The latter offers its own kind of global uplift whilst keeping its feet pretty much on the ground. No doubt it could be given a further injection of heightened vocabulary, but Unger takes the infinity of our transcendent capacity straight to the heavens, where it still can find no peace. This is damaging for him, because a yawning gulf then opens up between the strategic and the visionary parts of his discourse, a relationship that was better managed in Democracy Realised. Unger assures us that achieving divinity is an ‘accomplishment’ rather than a gift, and that we become more godlike only to live more fully in the present. But many such reiterations only aggravate one’s sense that if the confident concern is secular social change and humanistic aspiration, this incantatory vein, in just those terms, is not quite right. The threshold from the first awakening to the second is key to Unger’s normative fusion with the once-distanced ‘divine’, and we should question both its formulation and necessity. The substitution of ‘awakening’ for ‘enlightenment’ is one thing, but the shining bliss-in-ordeal that



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radiates from the higher self arguably represents a foregoing of firmly humanist morality, not its intensification. Again let us acknowledge that Unger explicitly poses the transition between exemplary conduct in a contradictory mundane world and the saintly absolutism of the higher consciousness as only a possible ‘orientation’ to life, not a prerequisite for the radical social programme (2007, p. 222). But it is surely significant that the chapter in which this ‘optional’ matter is broached is the one that carries the title of the work as a whole. Also, any radical reforming pragmatism might have had cause enough to rest content with a collective move from narcoleptic daze to politically aware ways of reconciling the plural tugs of advanced culture – embodied fulfillment, activity for justice, and ‘absorption in a vision of the manifest world’ (2007, p. 225). To go beyond this already demanding subjectivity – at least if one is claiming to affirm ‘the capacity of ordinary men and women for transformation and self-transformation’ – carries the risk of disappointment for many ordinary people and the risk of disappointment in them. The achievement of true ‘immensity’ is a tall order on any count, especially if all of us are to achieve it by way of living for the future as very distinct from dwelling in the ‘trap’ of the present. The disturbing prospect emerges that if ordinary folks are not up to that huge task of attaining species greatness within the speedy time-frames and high-energy styles specified, then the seriously able ones amongst us may have to push on without the rest. If these points signal deficits in Unger’s political imaginary, their root source lies in his unbalanced treatment of the twosidedness of awakened virtue, being drawn more towards transcendence than to connection. Thirdly, anti-naturalism. One observation here would simply be that without a broadly naturalistic ethos of enquiry – which is not equivalent to ‘scientism’ in any reductive sense – sociology and related modes of enquiry are finished (McLennan, 2006). Characteristically, Unger gives a nice formula with which to re-track the well-worn lines of these debates: theorists should see themselves as lawyers rather than philosophers, and as advocates rather than judges (2007, p. 37). But we cannot do our job, or ultimately convince people of anything, if we equate social science with advocacy tout court. As Unger readily concedes, proper pragmatism does not come at the expense of truthseeking. But truthseeking is about the relationship between how things work and what they might become, a relation that cannot proceed without some firm naturalistic premises as well as some humanist ones. In out-of-shot moments, Unger seems fully to accept this. And if he is right enough to regard the ‘antinomies’ of objectivity and time, in a naturalistic frame, as



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unresolvable, this does not mean that they are resolvable religiously, except by deception. In any case, dilemmas and antinomies are good to work with: they trigger vital debate and enable cumulative – if never entirely consensual – collective learning. Unger’s rejection of necessity and naturalism, finally, generates its own kind of low-horizon fatalism, playing down the power of abstract human cognition and the indispensable insight that ‘distanced’ understanding brings to our grasp on the near-at-hand.

Utopia: programmatic, immanent, pragmatic Unger’s ‘global’ voice, distinctively humanist and political, is clearly also somewhat messianic, reminiscent in its way of an earlier vein of critical writing plied by the likes of Bloch, Benjamin, and Adorno. The question arises, then, as to whether the issues and critiques I have presented might be most appropriately considered by thinking of Unger as part of the redevelopment of progressive utopianism. Principally, this turns upon whether we want to italicize the first or the second term in one of his signature phrases, ‘radicalized pragmatism’. Unger explicitly rebuffs any suggestion of utopianism, partly because of his commitment to actual historicity and the need to avoid any kind of escapism about this. He is prepared to describe his project as ‘revolutionary’, but only if this designation is stripped of all ‘romantic otherworldly’ connotations and foolish devaluations of determined ‘reformism’ (2007, p. 57, Chapter 11 passim). Whilst opposed to false necessity, Unger firmly orders no ‘surrender to the fantasies of an unchastened utopianism’ (2007, p. 34). What about a chastened utopianism, though? After all, Unger assigns a central moral role to the notion of futurity and its potential for releasing our ‘unconditional’ commitment to social and personal accomplishment; the achievement of truly compassionate love in and through social transformation. So, if religious readings of these mighty ambitions cannot quite ‘show the way’ (2007, p. 152), then glimmerings of an earthly paradise seem to beckon. At the very least, Unger summons up an altogether higher level of civilizational solidarity than that presented in other formulations of ‘immanent’ or ‘pragmatic’ utopia. Jeffrey Alexander (2001a, 2001b), for example, argues that an aspect of utopia is already carried in the here and now, since every move towards greater levels of equality and respect within civil society implies consciousness of a better ordering of identities and relations. A kind of utopia, Alexander thinks, is thus implicit in every particularist group



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claim couched in the languages of inclusion, justice, or aspiration. However, for Alexander, these sphere-specific openings do not result in holistic institutional and cultural change. Indeed, aspirations for humanity in toto that go much beyond an improved version of what already exists are just what need to be deflated. Alexander’s conception is thus one of ‘self-limiting civil utopia’, a ‘robust’ and ‘mundane’ settling down of pluralistic group coexistence. This sort of civic-multiculturalist immanence pales beside Unger’s agenda for change. The latter’s entire effort is to renew our jaded confidence in ‘large projects’, in order to realize ‘the liberation of individuals from entrenched social division and heirarchy’ (2007, pp. 1, 57). And whilst he would not regard pluralistic democratic thinking as devoid of value, that kind of civil society ideal, without a more radical horizon, can only be ‘transient and occasional, not embedded’ (2007, p. 49). Unger’s thinking outreaches multiculturalism generally, even of the sort that Habermas seeks to endorse. If we are seriously to encourage progressive globalism, he thinks, and to deepen social personality, individuals and societies must be understood to have no essential identity, just as good societies have no single or ‘authentic’ cultural expression. There is no mileage, therefore, in seeking to preserve cultural ‘fossils’ (2007, p. 255); and, let us remember, ‘greatness is to be ranked above equality’ (2007, p. 181). The whole point, then, is persistently to break free of our current contexts and identities, however attached to them we may be. These are powerful anti-presentist, distinctly non-multiculturalist values. But this may not be sufficient for us to class his sense of futurity as utopian, exactly. Unger regards thinking about ‘a set of next steps’ as quite different from endorsing ‘blueprint’ utopianism (2007, p. 145). Against this, it could be pointed out that just such a contrast and just such a preference are put forward by several contemporary utopian scholars. Frederic Jameson (2004), for example, also disqualifies programmatic utopianism, partly because we cannot – contra ultra-utopian fantasies of a life that is wholly ‘other’ – contemplate the annulment of our existing personalities and situatedness. Even so, for Jameson, some apparently ‘mundane’ demands, such as the demand for global full employment, still count as utopian, because they are so bold and massive in their organizational and cultural implications, signaling a social re-ordering that the capitalist order cannot possibly deliver. Unger also stands in contrast to a pragmatist like Richard Rorty, even if they share an affirmative valuation of America’s contribution to progressivism. Throughout Achieving Our Country (1997), Rorty recommends



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the social democratic, popular Leftism of the pragmatist reforming tradition as counsel against contemporary despair not only about America’s current role in the world, but also in relation to the pessimism radiated by poststructuralist theorists. In Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), Rorty goes on to develop his platform as a form of ‘utopian realism’. Perhaps then, Unger has not attended closely enough to the later and more ‘activist’ Rorty when appearing to target the latter’s earlier ‘conversationalism’ as the kind of philosophically ‘deflationary’ pragmatism that abjectly declines to make ‘first order proposals’ for social reconstruction (2007, pp. 46–47). According to Ruth Levitas (2008, p. 52) any resemblances here are wholly superficial. Unger, she maintains, quite unnecessarily refuses the utopian label, whereas Rorty’s perspective is, in essence, ‘profoundly anti-utopian’. Since the ground of this assessment cannot lie in their common anti-necessitarianism, or even their shared opinion that institutionalized Marxism has been a disaster, any telling differences must lie in the seriousness of their first-order proposals and in their background conception of the person and society. Rorty’s Americanism, for instance, is basically backward-looking, trying to rekindle the outlook of the American Left ‘during the first two-thirds of the century’ (Rorty, 1997, p. 105). Unger, by contrast, disdains the kind of nostalgia that Rorty showers upon Dewey and Whitman, and critiques US-style ‘democratic perfectionism’ as a species of ‘institutional fetishism’. Whereas Rorty talks a lot about renewing utopian hope and achieving ‘social justice’, Unger, unbothered about the labels, is busy devising dramatically more challenging institutional possibilities (abolishing private inheritance, for example, establishing plebiscitary modes of local decision-making). Such a level of political transformation can only be underpinned by a ‘utopian ontology’ and a commitment to ‘radical alterity’ (Levitas, 2008, p. 45). This interpretation, while plausible up to a point, has to struggle with the fact that, apart from his stated anti-utopianism, Unger categorically rejects ontology as a valid level of understanding (2007, p. 85). Our fundamental psychological plasticity, moreover, requires that if the future is contingently open, it is open for ill as well as for good. So while it can readily be accepted that being less hostile than Rorty to both Marxism and poststructuralism, being stronger in anti-capitalist sentiment, and assigning priority to visionary political ‘imagination’ over necessary but vague ‘hope’, Unger’s burning sense of underdeveloped human being represents more than a mere ‘accommodation between pragmatism and utopia’ (Levitas, 2008, p. 57), it may still not amount to the full utopian



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article. The case remains open, partly because it is a persistently moot point as to whether a programmatic outlook can be regarded as utopian just in so far as it is seriously radical. What cannot be ignored, on all sides, is that strains have opened up between Democracy Realised and The Self Awakened, such that the relatively utopian element and the relatively pragmatic element in Unger’s thinking stand in some tension; and that his relatively secular re-imaginings are overwhelmed at times by standardly religious intuitions.

Conclusion Postsecularism represents an interesting and important new ‘turn’ in social theory, requiring us to revisit fundamental questions of both social enquiry and progressive politics. It also appears to have significant ‘global’ and ‘utopian’ resonance, not least in the hands of someone like Unger, who offers an animating release from some habitual discursive inhibitions, in conjunction with far-reaching social democratic proposals. Overall, however, this chapter suggests that whether taken as a space of general debate, or as specific lines of philosophical argument, postsecularism cannot bear the normative and analytical weight that is starting to be placed upon it. If it usefully prompts us to redefine and re-appraise many of the ‘worldview’ conceptions that we have come to take for granted – religion, secularism, believing, atheism, humanism, materialism, and the rest – there is plenty room for healthy skepticism too. One hundred and sixty years after Marx’s critique of Hegel, Edward Said, in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, stated that ‘it must be a major part of the humanistic vocation to keep a fully rounded secular perspective’ (Said, 2004, p. 51). If, due to the growing mood of postsecularism amongst intellectuals, as well as the ‘revival of religion’ on the global scene, Said expressed much less confidence in these matters than Marx, it does not follow that postsecularism, never mind any full ‘return’ to the sacred, is destined to prevail.



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Part II


Critical Perspectives on Utopian Visions in a Global Age





7 Larry Ray

This chapter examines the effects of thinking about utopia in the context of the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 and debates about globalization. Since Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), imaginative fiction has been a major source of utopian visions, and is also a critical commentary on society, and since the nineteenth-century, utopia has become an important strand of social theory (Kumar, 1991, p. 87). The latter differed significantly from fiction, though, in that for many political and social theories the projects of recreating social life according to principles of social justice and technological efficiency were understood as achievable objectives. On the other hand, such projects were alarming to some, and in response, images of the future in early twentieth-century fiction became increasingly dystopian – as in Huxley, Fritz Lang, Orwell, and Zamyatin. In social theory too, by contrast with optimistic socialist and liberal utopias, the future was often portrayed in dystopian ways – notably in Max Weber’s vision of a rationalized iron cage of modernity. But the utopia/dystopia dichotomy should not obscure the ways in which utopian visions have differing contents and, as Levitas (1990, p. 185) says, ‘are not the monopoly of the Left’ – on the contrary they may be uncongenial – neoliberal, nostalgic, past-oriented, and commodified. Levitas (1990, p. 187) further argues that utopia involves a temporal play of the past and the future in various combinations – a hypothetical-idealized past or future can be invoked as a critique of the present. Utopia refers not just to a past state, though, but to a past that is immanent within the present. She says that conservativism is ‘futureoriented only in the sense of preservation and restoration’ (Levitas, 1990, p. 188), but how does this play out with revolutions (such as 1989) of recuperation with the goal of restoring an anti-utopian ‘normality’? 101



After 1989: Globalization, Normalization, and Utopia


What images of past and future are deployed in condemnation of the past and the present? Harvey (2000, p. 183) suggests that an underlying problem of all utopias is to materialize a space and engage with closure rather than leave perpetually unfulfilled longing and desire. That is, there is the problem of the recalcitrance of the social that might refuse to mould to our will. For Todorov (2003, p. 19) utopianism attempts to bring utopia into the world and is necessarily despotic and totalitarian, whereas utopias have many functions such as tools for thinking and modes of criticizing society. Levitas (2000) identifies a broadening of the concept from content to process, from blueprint to desire, and from a totalizing vision to a critical heuristic. For others, though, limiting utopia to thought – a critical heuristic – is insufficient. Giddens (1990, p. 156) called for ‘utopian realism’ that was sociologically sensitive, geographically tactical, and proposed models of the good society that linked emancipatory politics to personal self-actualization. Even so, where utopian expectations lead to disappointment, which in view of the recalcitrance of the social they are destined to do, we may be left with a nostalgic note or sense of loss devoid of political immediacy. This will be discussed further here. One of the potential difficulties of what one might call post-utopian thinking, in an age that has lost confidence in grand utopian schemes of social reconstruction, is that ‘utopia’ can come to mean either any conceivable thinking that is opposed to current social and political arrangements or be simply a synonym for ‘unrealistic’. Yet as Habermas has often argued, in order to critique existing social conditions as ‘unjust’, we invoke both an ethical norm of justice and the potential for more just social arrangements that need to be conceivably realizable – otherwise the critique is empty of meaning. Utopias might not be ‘blueprints’ for the future but need to be grounded in conceivable possibilities – otherwise they are fantasies. Turner (2003) usefully identifies in Mannheim’s (1968) classical sociological discussion three distinct uses of utopia. First, there is his utopia-ideology dichotomy between ideologies (in service of the status quo) and utopias that present the alternative vision of rising social classes. Second, there are moderate reformist plans of political parties in democratic systems (of both the left and the right) that inform incremental social improvement. Third, there is an individual existential process of self-distanciation and transcendence that is not tied to social or political movements but, Turner suggests, has resonance with some contemporary theories such as Beck’s reflexive individualization. Here what appears to be apolitical – issues of food, the



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body, sexuality and identity – becomes politicized. Similar to the third meaning here, Gardiner (2006) argues that the everyday can be full of multiple utopian possibilities such as those that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall, which brought a rupture of normal expectations and a radical defamiliarization of the reified everyday. These are thoughts to which the chapter returns at the end. This discussion will be illustrated with reference to the anticommunist revolutions of 1989 and their aftermath. The events of 1989 had a paradoxical impact on European society and social theory. The Fall of the Wall became iconic of the promise of a borderless world, or at least continent, and did point to the subsequent enlargement of the EU to 27 member states, a prospect that in the mid-1980s would have appeared utopian. Yet despite ideas of a ‘rectifying revolution’, normalization, and rejoining Europe that were current at the time, the process of European enlargement has been fraught and increasingly contested. I will suggest that although often pegged as ‘anti-utopian’ there were utopian moments to 1989 that reflected wider globalization utopias. However, in the aftermath of subsequent developments both visions turned increasingly dystopian and looked to nostalgic-utopian notions of community and safety. The chapter concludes with a few reflections on the state of utopia today.

Utopia after the fall The end of the Cold War and especially the Fall of the Berlin Wall were events symbiotically linked to globalization. The term ‘globalization’ had been current prior to 1989 but it was only with these events that it came into its own, since the systemic alternative to Western capitalism collapsed and appeared as absurd.1 The significance of this was that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, socialism had become the utopia that challenged dominant capitalism in the modern world (Kumar, 1991, p. 91). For Bauman it was the ‘counter-culture of capitalism’ (1976) or latterly of modernity (1992, pp. 221–222). Of Raymond William’s (1979) four types of fictional utopian imagining – a paradise located elsewhere, an externally altered world, a willed rational transformation, and a technologically transformed world – at least three (the first, the third, and the fourth) applied to perceptions of the Soviet Union. For overseas admirers the Soviet Union represented an embodiment of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment vision of a rational, educated, and scientific society based on the maximization of resources and the steady improvement of human nature (Caute, 1988, p. 264).



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For example, the Webb and Webb (1936) regarded it as a ‘new civilization’, and this enthusiasm was enduringly captured by Lincoln Steffens’ comment, on returning from the Soviet Union in 1919, ‘I have been over into the future – and it works!’ (in Caute, 1988, p. 26). Examples of early Soviet utopian visions are Leonard Sabsovich’s anti-urbanist architecture, which envisaged agro-urban settlements powered by a nation-wide hydroelectric grid, and Okhitovich’s linear socialist cities, which provided the basis for Magnitogorsk (Starr, 1978). Soviet Marxism glorified the machine, technology, and science and waged an aggressive war against all forms of traditionalism, notably religion. Modernization – the transformation of the Soviet Union from a predominantly rural, illiterate, and technologically undeveloped society into a highly industrialized, urban, and literate culture – remained throughout its existence a core systemic goal. The end of communism ironically fulfilled Marx’s prediction in the Communist Manifesto (1848) that the whole world would be brought within the capitalist system of production – ironically because communism was supposed to follow not precede global capitalist domination. With the collapse of the Soviet system ended the belief in state-planned autarkic development and modernization. Most important here though is that there followed a crisis of alternatives – the end of the great experiment of twentieth century to create a wholly new kind of society and human being. The end of Communism was accompanied by a wider crisis in socialism and the possibility of viable alternatives to capitalism. ‘What happened in 1989’, says Giddens (1999a, p. 2), was not just a crisis for Marxism. It was also, and continues to be, a crisis for Western socialism too . . . . If you look back to the writings of the sixties, even early seventies, among Western socialists, they mostly thought the welfare state would continue to expand. They mostly thought that Western societies were on the right track. They mostly thought that socialism could be achieved in the West, although socialism for them was reformist socialism, rather than revolutionary Marxist style socialism. The contrast between Western social democracy and Soviet socialism was more complex than this implies, but Giddens is right that the crisis of 1989 affected not only the Eastern European region but was also global in its both causes and effects. The end of Communism was followed by a widespread view, as Furet (1995) said, of the ‘passing of an illusion’. This view was encouraged by



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the claim that the revolutions of 1989 had been ‘anti-utopian’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 94) and ‘self-limiting’ in that they eschewed central control of power or any pouvoir constituant and opposed radical revolution (Arato, 1991). Their organization was diffuse; they offered no utopian vision of the future, and at times claimed to develop an ‘anti-political politics’ (Konrad, 1984). Offe (1991) lamented the ‘a-theoretical character’ of the changes, which unlike the classical revolutions of modernity followed no historical model nor were informed by a revolutionary theory. Habermas depicted the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 as ‘revolutions of recuperation’ (die Nachholende Revolution), ‘overcoming distance’ with Western Europe, expressing a desire to connect up with the inheritance of bourgeois revolutions and taking their methods and standards entirely from the repertoire of the modern age. The democratic spirit of the West, he said, was ‘catching up with the East’ (Habermas, 1990b, 1994, p. 62). Again, in Bauman’s separation of ‘heavy’ and ‘liquid’ modernity, socialism’s goal of the rational reconstruction of society is decidedly ‘heavy’ – so what had previously been the ‘counter-culture’ of capitalist modernity had after 1989 lost its meaning. For some time the emerging reality in the 1990s suggested that post-communism was settling to a (perhaps rather dull) normality, an aspiration matched by many voices in the former Communist world that said ‘enough of experiments; we want to return to normality’. The apparent stability achieved by many post-communist countries especially in central Europe, combined with accession to the EU, supported the perception that the transformation was over, equilibrium and stability had been achieved. Not only this but the rapid and largely peaceful regime change in Eastern Europe was to be a model for democratization elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. It might be recalled that in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq the media were looking for images of statues being pulled down in imitation of the collapse of communism. At the same time, paradoxically, the image of the end of communism has entered the language of dictatorships such as Iran, which is exemplified by the detention of Haleh Esfandiari for 110 days in 2007 with other academics who are accused of planning a ‘Velvet Revolution’ (Khalaii, 2007).

Globalization and utopia It was not entirely right though to see in the end of Communism an end of utopian imagining. For one thing, globalization was itself associated



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with utopias of the borderless world, weightless economy, frictionless movement, and the vista of global peace and prosperity. With the end of the Cold War there was a widespread sense of global optimism epitomized by people such as Friedman and Fukuyama who, during what Holmes (2001, p. 79) calls the ‘long postcommunist “decade” (1989–2001)’, announced ‘the heyday of happy globalization’ during which time there was widespread optimism that as capitalism gained access to the whole planet it opened a decade of ‘frictionless competition’, bringing prosperity to the poor, peaceful dialogue and progress towards democracy and rule of law. At Fukuyama’s (1992) end of History and triumph of democracy and free-market capitalism, all competing ideologies would fade away and all human societies, regardless of their particular cultural inflection, would be drawn into a global consumer culture. Similarly Friedman (2000, p. 1) said, ‘The world is 10 years old. It was born when the Wall fell in 1989 . . . . And technology, properly harnessed and liberally distributed, has the power to erase not just geographical borders but also human ones.’ He envisaged a kind of Internetopia in which all restrictions on broadcasting have gone and no dictatorships could withstand the free flows of information in a parallel and self-governed society (Friedman, 2000, p. 61). Similarly the very collapse of the Soviet Union was explained with reference to its inability to enter the age of computer-mediated networks (e.g., Shane, 1995). Globalization was thus both (at least one) cause and consequence of the collapse of Communism. Again there is Beck’s utopia of cosmopolitan governance and global norms within a post-state ‘new space of globality’ (see Beck, 2000a). Levitas (1990, p. 165) suggests that utopia contradicts common sense and facilitates a ‘leap out of the kingdom of necessity into an imagined kingdom of freedom’, and this could too be said of the free-market utopias of the minimal state and self-equilibrating systems that followed the collapse of Communism. There were utopian dimensions to ideas and expectations circulating around the revolutionary period 1989–1990. The ‘heightened sense of social possibilities’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 97) common to utopian movements does describe the revolutionary period along with the expression of a desire for a better way of life (Levitas, 1990, p. 8). To begin with there were ideas about future self-managed, decentralized networks extrapolated from those that had arisen (especially in Poland and Hungary) parallel to the state socialist system and in this sense were what Levitas (1990, p. 168) calls ‘possible extrapolations of the present’. In late communism power shifted to some extent from a vertical axis between ministries and enterprises to



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reciprocal horizontal obligations between enterprises. This was mirrored by multiple networks of mutual reciprocity, as shortages resulting from the redistributive mechanisms were partially filled through informal networks, and by symbiotic exchanges between the informal sector and the state based on patrimonial protection through mutual security and political corruption (Fehér, 1982, p. 66). This society of informal networks was seen as the nucleus of a post-communist social order based on informality, reciprocity, and networks rather than big capitalism (e.g., Szalai, 1992). Further Vogt (2005, p. 260) says that it is ‘indeed a useful endeavour to think about the transformation from communism to democracy and a market economy through the lens of utopia’. People imagined utopian alternatives from the present – such as capitalism as a ‘nirvana’ bringing freedom of movement, open futures, choices about collective identity, and lifestyle choices. Much of Vogt’s study though charts the disillusionment with these widespread desires that in some ways parallel disillusionment with globalization. Indeed, there were always extensive critiques of globalization linked to anti-globalism activism. Scholte (2005) proposed a critical theory of globalization at the core of which was the view that the modern world produced widespread violence, arbitrary hierarchies, and avoidable deprivation. While not rejecting the promise of globalization for enhanced lives for many parts of the world, Scholte like many others pointed to major deterioration in working conditions and social protection, the growth in militarism, and the growth of antiglobal ultranationalist identities. Giddens (1999b) imagined globalization as a juggernaut, and many saw a new global regime of exploitation where ‘identity, citizenship and sovereignty are manipulated by industries of mass persuasion’ (Kraidy, 2005, p. 15). This more pessimistic mood intensified after 11 September 2001 with increased focus on new terrors that appeared to arise precisely from the globalization process itself. The appearance of powerfully ideological global movements, especially Islamist, further questioned the notion of an end of History. Indeed, the very permeability of borders and collapsed space and time that epitomized globalization now gave rise to new fears of violent incursion and dislocation of the naively assumed trust in everyday encounters. Spence (2005, pp. 293–294) argues that following 9/11 terror has become ‘insinuated within the structures of the social world, part of the background of prejudgements, assumptions and understandings that shape the reception, experience and reproduction of everyday life’. The state of emergency, he says, ‘becomes normal’ and also, surely, normalized. Since global mobility occurs across borders, and border controls regulate the



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passage of bodies, the border can serve as both a territorial threshold and a metaphor for the boundaries of the body threatened by violent incursion. The very permeability and openness of borders – the utopia of globalization – became a threat as mobility and fluidity also came to be perceived in terms of threats of violence. The ‘non’ vote in the French referendum on the EU constitution was fuelled in part by the ‘fear from the east’ of unregulated and alien migratory bodies that tapped into already potent ‘resistance’ to global forces (Ireland, 2005). By contrast to Fukuyama’s optimism about the end of History and eventual triumph of liberal democracy, Huntington’s (1996) dystopic vision of an imagined ‘clash of civilizations’ resonated with the Washington Consensus. In particular the utopia of borderless mobility floundered on one of the central contradictions in the global order – that between the economic logic towards frictionless movement (of capital and commodities) as opposed to territorially and socially embedded skills, resources, cultural systems, and political institutions. The state thus becomes the area of contestation between globalizing and de-globalizing imperatives, so that Government immigration policies that simultaneously deter and restrict entry yet promote cohesion and assimilation of migrant communities give contradictory and conflicting messages. (Zetter et al., 2006, p. 3) Migration and ethnic divisions are processes that epitomize the differential way in which global elements are localized, labour markets are constituted, and culture de- and re-territorialized (Sassen, 1998). They further attest to the continuing salience of state borders and powers and its ambivalence towards the global economy when the ability of the state to constitute itself as a distinct political community is threatened. Borderlands were already, prior to 9/11, taking on increased significance as resources and means of exploitation (Donnan and Wilson, 1999). Where inequalities are linked to ethnic divisions the potential for the re-emergence of conflicts at local and regional levels increases. So contrary to claims that the significance of borders has eroded, some states were already working to endow them with meaning in innovative ways (Goff, 2000), and since 9/11, immigration policy and border controls have become crucial to policing the global community.



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airports are . . . site[s] of science-fiction-like scenes. The controls that one undergoes on airports today, with their ‘deep questioning’ resemble checks for androids in Blade Runner. (Beck, 2003, p. 198) These rituals, though, themselves evoke an implicit security-utopia of the united and guarded community. Collins (2004) argues that the security rituals that have followed 9/11 represent a ‘solidarity plateau’ of magical defence in which the present community is experienced as more heroic, altruistic, and fearful than at other times. Thus in place of the utopia of borderless mobility, participation in public ‘security’ rituals invokes a reverse utopia of a closed social collective of defensively shared space, whether this is in an airport, sports stadium, or other public place. Combined with this reversal, and contrary to the consensus of the past two decades, there have been claims that there is now a ‘New Cold War’ (e.g., Lucas, 2008). Dockrill (2005) says that the hopes for a more peaceful world and better government that initially followed the end of the Cold War failed to materialize, especially post-9/11. Some commentators argue that the United States became distracted by the war on terror and ‘took its eye off the real competitor’ for global dominance, which was Russia. According to this view the institutional, financial, infrastructural, and social collapse of the former Soviet Union further lulled the United States into regarding themselves as the only superpower in town (Cohen, 2006). In 1999 Russia began to recover, even though it remains in serious depression, and under Putin began to challenge US hegemony and re-assert power over Eastern Europe. At the same time the 1998 crisis prompted a turn from economic and cultural openness to economic and political nationalism and a utopian-nostalgic valorization of a mythic past that retains utopian distance from the present (Morris, 2005). In the London newspaper, The Observer (3 June 2007), Jason Burke wrote of ‘Europe shivering in the new Cold War’ and said ‘tensions are rising . . . as the Russian giant flexes its muscles again in the old territories of the Soviet empire’. Some of these claims are exaggerated but illustrate how the global order is imagined. Despite Burke’s references to how ‘conflicts of the past are throwing a shadow over hopes for the future’, this is not a simple



The actuality of new borders and walls is that the mobility of people never matched that of ideas, finance, commodities, images, and organizations, thus


‘revival’ of the Cold War, but represents the formation of new postcommunist regional alliances and tensions. One could argue though that along with the war on terror, the United States and Russia were continuing to compete and consolidate post-communist alliances. The United States maintained competition with Russia, which is illustrated by its plans to deploy a missile shield in central Europe. At the same time, while Putin committed Russia to avoiding a foreign policy hostile to the West (Sakwa, 2005, p. 207 ff.), he asserted an autonomous role and influence in international relations through, for example, the G8, Russia’s regional energy policy, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which aims to become a regional bloc to counter US hegemony. Nonetheless, the lapse back into the frames of meaning of the ‘cold war’ illustrates the rhetorical force of such memories and yet again how, as Marx (1987, p. 300) suggested, the spirits of the past are anxiously conjured up to present the new scene of world history in time-honoured guise and borrowed language. A feature of the novelty of the present is the way the language of the past is invoked to make sense of it.

Conservative utopias? Rapid widespread disillusion with the dual promise of globalization and post-communism did not necessarily result in a rejection of utopias for ‘normality’, although the most intense expressions of solidarity in a rush of mobilization are generally ephemeral and are followed by normalization and demobilization (Collins, 2004). The process was more complex than this. Mannheim (1968, p. 206) thought that the ‘conservative mentality as such has no utopia’ because it is comfortable in its environment. But in the Revolutions of 1989 there was an element of utopian conservatism in the desire to return to a lost pre-communist past, which was a basis for populist mobilization. Not only is there now talk of a ‘new cold war’ but in the former communist world it seems that the spectre of settling of scores and working with the past that many feared would arise in the immediate aftermath of the collapse are returning. Vogt (2005, p. 179) sees in post-communist central Europe, in the aftermath of the utopian enthusiasm of 1989, ambivalence and disillusionment – a closed apolitical state of withdrawal. The tension between economic liberalism and locally embedded values and politics has been a crucial issue in post-communist countries – often fought out around relationships to the EU. This is perhaps why in many counties entry to the EU has been followed by the rise of populist anti-globalism, in particular, opposition



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to values of individuality and personal freedom – an example of this is the sometimes violent hostility to gay rights and Gay Pride in Poland and Latvia in 2005 and 2006. Economic integration into the EU and global markets combines with cultural revanchism. Further, if the new regimes are regarded as corrupt, or, indeed, more so than the communist system, then this too will further contribute to reduced commitment to the legitimacy of the system (e.g., Krastev, 2002). The legitimacy of the post-communist settlement is being challenged in some post-communist countries, which is illustrated in the example of Poland where a conservative-utopian invocation of the unsullied nation is mobilized by the populist religious Right. Although conservative utopias are grounded in the past, the particular circumstances of 1989 as revolutions of recuperation and restoration give these claims additional poignancy. The first Prime Minister of postcommunist Poland, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, argued that a ‘thick line’ (gruba kreska) should be drawn under the past and the actions in the past not be re-examined, in part because secret police files could not be trusted. But with the convergence of political parties over many economic issues the debate about the communist past and its legacies entered ever more on the public agenda. Moreover with economic hardships, lustration (exposing those who collaborated with the communist regime) became the main terrain of conflict (Misztal, 1999). This was mobilized during the 2005–2007 government of the ‘terrible twins’, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who were President and Prime Minister respectively. Although the Kaczynski government was defeated in the October 2007 Sjem and Senate elections,2 this period still serves as an example of the invocation of conservative nostalgic-utopianism. Under the slogan ‘Anyone born before 1972 is suspect’ the Law and Justice Party instigated a new wave of lustration backed by the Catholic Right and Radio Maryja which is a daily source of conspiracy theories and antisemitic propaganda.3 The Law and Justice Party challenges the legitimacy of the post-communist settlement, identifying as its enemies, first, ‘liberals’ whose commitment to the EU opens Poland to foreign companies and who poison Catholic with tolerant values, and, secondly, ‘post-communist networks’ that secretly control Poland in collusion with the liberals from former Solidarity (Davis, 2007). It won support from those who were marginalized by the transition and economic restructuring – the elderly, rural communities, the unskilled and poorly educated. Under the new Lustration Law (2007) all people in authority (including academics, journalists, and state company executives) born before 1972 must declare to the Institute of National Remembrance



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whether they cooperated with the Communists, and a false statement risks 10 years in prison. This applies to millions of people and the enormity of the exercise will make it impossible to complete, which will in turn create randomness and reinstate something similar to the communist practice of denunciation. These policies invoke nostalgic utopianism of the Rights’ image of the pure Catholic nation in which no true Poles collaborated with either the Nazis or the Communists – a myth which is often accompanied by ˙ that of the Zydokomuna (Jewish Bolshevik) and the claim that it was Jews (not Poles) who were the major collaborators with the Communists. This accusation has been made in the controversy over Jedwabne following publication of Jan Gross’ Neighbors, which documents the massacre of 1600 Jews in Jedwabne by some of the local Polish population in July 1941. The publication of Neighbors and in 2008 Gross’s Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz have provoked bitter controversy. There have been two lines of attack on Gross – one claiming that it was the Germans not Poles who were responsible for the killings and the other that hatred of Jews had been inspired by their alleged collaboration with the previous Soviet occupiers in Eastern Poland – a justification also invoked to explain post-War pogroms such as Kilece in 1946 (see Glowacka and Zylinska, 2007). The utopian-conservative narrative underlying these movements is the myth of Poland as the ‘Christ of nations’ – victimized by Nazis and Communists but never victimizer. Paradoxically there has been at the same time a large revival in Jewish Festivals4 and cultural events. With these, as Grimwood (2007) suggests, the past becomes a canvass for exotic nostalgia in which Yiddish culture becomes a symbol for a ‘melancholic nationalism’ (Ziarek, 2007), in which the Holocaust is internalized as a Polish tragedy. There has then been a complex play of utopian ‘return’ to the past in post-communist futures.

Rethinking utopia Where does this leave the idea of utopia? Rather than regard the 1989 revolutions as non- or anti-utopian they might prompt some rethinking about the nature of utopian thought. The idea of post-communism as the end of utopianism is true in the sense that with previous utopian thought revolutionary ruptures have generally led to chaos and authoritarianism and to the reduction not expansion of critical thinking and action. The idea of a state in which problems and conflicts have been resolved (like the utopia of the unsullied nation discussed above) is an



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infantile desire for return to child-like innocence. Utopian ideas might continue to inform politics but these can evoke uncongenial imagined ideal states. A mature approach to utopias is to acknowledge that while they may inspire critical thought and action the dull reality of the social will render our schemes always not yet fulfilled. For Alexander (2001a, p. 580) ‘Utopia refers to a normatively desirable model of a fundamentally different social order that is held to be regulative for both social thinking and social action.’ However, these can no longer be totalizing since in specialized and differentiated modern societies compartmentalized value spheres are informed by distinctive visions of utopia. This does not mean that ‘utopia retreats’ but it does mean that the totalizing versions of critical-left thinking need to change. Alexander suggests that in ideas such as ‘information society’, ‘leisure society’, and postmodernity there are ‘visions to utopian hopes’ – they are utopian because they are set apart from mundane life as it currently exists. Utopia is often seen as a heuristic that has a functional role in the lives of people rather than a fixed state of social perfection (Vogt, 2005, p. 76). In 1989 many new projects appeared – liberalism, EU membership, the information society, and environmentalism, along with individuality, plurality and ‘everydayness’ in freedoms of collective identity, new possibilities and choices, spatial freedom (travelling) and normality (Vogt, 2005, p. 9). It was noted above that Turner (2003) sees in Mannheim an individualized notion of utopia as ecstasy unbound to social movements. These are not grand schemes of social reconstruction but, as Vogt (2005) argues, everyday desires. Gardiner (2006, p. 2) similarly sees progressive potential in everyday experiences – utopia is ‘a series of forces, tendencies and possibilities that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of daily existence’. Following Benjamin, he suggests that everyday life becomes a kind of individual project, a ‘work of art’ constituting an end in itself, accomplished through the refinement of individual tastes and dispositions in a manner symptomatic of the general ‘aestheticization’ of daily existence under modernity. This does not prompt us to look backwards at a ‘Golden Age’ of presumptively genuine community, but rather to detect the pulse of utopian energies in the here and now, to tap into these forces, revivify them and link them to transformative political praxis. Similarly, Habermas’ theory of always already communicative norms embedded in everyday speech evokes the emancipatory potential of everyday life. However, to regard utopias simply in individualized terms avoids crucial questions of sociological possibilities. Utopia is an immanent



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potential within the present that may well be articulated through multiple cultural media that evoke latent desires for a better society. Amongst these are advertisements that key into utopian images that are already among the audience (Levitas, 1990, p. 189). Advertising as characteristic of a culture of consumption assumes a fundamental divide between work and leisure, and commoditized utopias are mostly leisure-centred – such as holidays, alcohol, food, and cars. Despite the carnivalesque iconography of global advertising, as Adorno noted, nobody really expects that the commodity itself will bring happiness – what is being ‘bought’ is the promise of utopian lifestyle associated with the commodity.5 Thus representations of consumption in global media are often occasions of collective joy rather than mere gratification: one would not expect an alcohol advert, for example, to feature a solitary drinker but rather people having fun, and similarly for food, furnishing, and transport – adverts provide images of social community and celebration. For example, a Lech Polish beer commercial featuring a beach party says, ‘With Lech, all your happiness will happen’. Their purpose (apart from the obvious one of selling the goods) is to associate utopian lifestyles (the carnival, abundance, and the erotic) with particular commodities. Simon (1999, pp. 77–90) writes of the ‘adtopias’ in which beautiful people are living for their own pleasure in a just and happy society, where poverty, suffering, and hate do not exist. Although few people work, there are more than enough goods and services to satisfy their needs, and people consume these products constantly and compulsively. Like the classical utopias, adtopias portray situations where suffering and injustice do not exist and escapes the evils of outside society. Like the Golden Age there is stress on consumption rather than production, and there are enough goods to satisfy needs, although there is an inversion of classical morality in that the seven deadly sins become cardinal virtues. However, in adtopia restlessness and boredom prevail, which could stimulate the desire for realization of the subliminal content of the utopian lifestyle parodied in adtopia. Even so this cannot connect with more than a vague experience of dissatisfaction and is not articulated through sociologically possible critical alternatives. David Harvey (2000, p. 257) asks, Is there no alternative? . . . It is alas all too fashionable in these times to proclaim the death of utopia, to insist that utopianism of any sort will necessarily and inevitable culminate in totalitarianism and disaster.



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He continues with a fictional-dream future-scape depicting a postrevolutionary utopia of new social organization based on hearths (the units of habitation), neighborhoods, regionas, and federations of nationas. These are ecological, playful, free, cooperative, self-sufficient, equal communities without organized religion or private property, where sexual freedom and open borders prevail (2000, p. 263 ff). Despite the emphasis on freedom there is an implicit trade-off here (as with other utopias) between personal freedom and the needs of maintaining social values, yet there is no hint of social conflict or dissidence. Harvey’s (2000, p. 183) criticism of Foucault and Lefebrve that they ‘leave the actual spaces of any alternative tantalizingly undefined’ might apply to this utopia too. But Harvey is not proposing a blueprint – more experimenting with the possibility of utopian thinking. Without at least the imagination to conceive of worlds in which solutions have been found to the most urgent social problems we are lost in the dull conformity and regimentation of capitalist rationalization. If we lose the capacity to transcend our social world we become, as Mannheim (1968, p. 236) said, ‘no more than a thing’ and ‘mere creature[s] of impulses’.

Notes 1. The absurdity of Communism became a motif of the revolutions, especially in Czechoslovakia. See, for example, Košuliˇcová (2001). 2. The right-populist government of Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s party Prawo I Sprawiedliwo´sc´ (Law and Justice) with coalition parties Liga Polskich Rpdzin (League of Polish Families) and Samoobrona (Self-Defense) were heavily defeated by the centre-right Platforma Obywatelska (Civic Platform), although Jaroslaw’s identical twin, Lech Kaczynski, remains President in 2008. 3. For example, on 27 March 2006 the commentator Stanislaw Michalkiewicz attacked Holocaust restitution efforts, claiming that the Judeans are sneaking up from the back, trying to force our government to pay protection money, concealing that fact by calling it compensation . . . . The US press, controlled by the holocaust industry . . . [has] to find someone guilty otherwise the world might think that those Jews died from natural causes . . . . Gazeta Wyborcza [the liberal daily newspaper] plays a crucial role in this process of taming, being a unique example of the Jewish fifth column in Poland. Available at http://www.eurojewcong.org/ejc/news.php?id_article=538#. 4. Notably the annual Kraków Festival of Jewish Culture. See http://www.jewish festival.pl/index.php?pl=program&lang=e.



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5. Indeed Adorno and Horkheimer (1979, p. 167) commented that ‘Personality scarcely signifies anything more than . . . shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions. The triumph of the advertising industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy . . . its products even though they see through them.’


Made in America: The Unsustainable All-Consuming Global Free-Market ‘Utopia’ Barry Smart

Introduction: neoliberalism, economic growth and the consumerist vision Economic policy narratives have tended to place emphasis on the necessity of pursuing economic growth, achieving year-on-year increases in production, increases in the value of the goods and services produced by commercial corporations and the economies of nationstates, a necessary corollary of which is that rates of consumption, in turn, have to rise to absorb growth in production. The strong implication conveyed in economic policy narratives is that ‘growth is good’, that ‘more’ is necessarily better. But the idea that economic growth is necessarily beneficial is questionable. Economic growth may have the potential to produce material and moral benefits insofar as the production of more goods and services, ceteris paribus, may lead to an increase in material standards of living, promote an increase in opportunities, enhance tolerance, improve social mobility, and perhaps even raise the prospect of greater commitment to democracy (Friedman, 2006). But much depends on what is produced, the terms and conditions under which things are produced, how commodities and services are socially distributed, and, increasingly, what impact production and consumption have on the environment (Starke, 2004). The neoliberal pursuit of economic growth through economic deregulation to promote entrepreneurship and free up market forces, along with an associated imposition of market philosophy on the public sector, coupled with the introduction of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, has not led to greater savings, investment, and enhanced economic activity of benefit to all – the great myth of supply-side 117



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or ‘trickle down’ economics. Rather neoliberal ‘free-market’ economic policy, the cultivation of a ‘consumer-driven culture’, and the transformation of citizen-subjects into desiring consumers has led to a form of unregulated capitalism – ‘turbo-capitalism’ (Luttwak, 1999), ‘savage’ or ‘wild’ capitalism (Bruner, 2002), ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2007) – which has promoted a rapid growth in inequality, rising poverty rates, and in addition is recognized to be increasingly threatening the very eco-system on which we all ultimately depend (Harvey, 2005; Shankar et al., 2006). At the heart of the neoliberal promotion of the ‘virtues’ of deregulation and free-market forces as the means to increase economic growth, prosperity, and freedom has been the institution of ‘a consumerist vision of the world’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 30), the most persuasive and globally pervasive version of which was born in the United States in the late nineteenth century from where it has for ‘well over a century . . . extended its global power through aggressive marketing of consumer products’ (Wilk, 2001, p. 255), which has led to ‘the global replication of the American pattern of intensively commercialized and commodified lifestyles’ (Dawson, 2005, p. 127), to other nations consuming ‘more and more like Americans’ (Ritzer, 2005, p. 38: see also pp. 41–43).

An all-consuming modern culture Global consumer culture was made in America. In the late nineteenth century a culture of acquisition and consumption that equated happiness with the pursuit and possession of things began to take root in America. It was a culture that relentlessly promoted ‘the cult of the new’, a culture made possible by what was considered to be ‘the benign genius of the “free” market’ which seemed to have the potential to provide an ‘infinitely growing supply of goods and services’ to all Americans, holding out the prospect of a ‘democratization of desire’ (Leach, 1993, pp. 3–6). A mass production economy, mass consumer institutions, and aggressive marketing of mass produced goods emerged first in America. A number of institutions contributed to the promotion of consumption, to the generation of consumer culture, in particular commercial corporations, banks, department stores, business and design schools, and government agencies each of which served in various ways to direct people’s aspirations ‘toward consumer longings, consumer goods, and consumer pleasures’ (Leach, 1993, p. 10). As an increasingly consumer-orientated society was taking shape in this period, a great deal of time and attention was devoted to



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‘democratizing’ consumer desire, to extending the market for the growing quantity of goods being produced, by presenting to would-be consumers enticing signs and displays of the range of things potentially available for purchase. With the increasing growth of commercial capitalism, the development of department stores, and a concomitant increase in advertising and marketing, the world of consumption began to acquire an other-worldly aura, came to be regarded as a ‘new heaven on earth’ and reference began to be made to a ‘consumer paradise’ in which the pursuit of goods could be equated with ‘the means to all “good” and to personal salvation’ (Leach, 1993, pp. 4–5). As manufacturing capacity increased in the opening decades of the twentieth century and the economic environment became increasingly more competitive, the fear was expressed that production might outstrip ‘available markets’ and in consequence consumption began to be accorded an ‘independent character’ and the economic significance it warranted (Leach, 1993, pp. 162, 147). Corporations began to recognize ‘that they would have to develop methods to entice the public to consume those products that were . . . [becoming] available in abundance’ (Renouard, 2007, p. 55). There was an appreciation that it was necessary not only to achieve an ‘expansion of existing consumption’ but also ‘the production of new consumption’ (Marx, 1973a, p. 408) and to do so corporations turned increasingly to marketing and salesmanship to deliver customers and promote consumption for their expanding range of consumer goods. The growth of corporate marketing and salesmanship led to product lines being redesigned and subtle methods being employed to influence the decisions of prospective purchasers. Early in the twentieth century, Veblen (2006, p. 306, emphasis added) noted that ‘the fabrication of customers’ was becoming ‘a routine operation . . . under the surveillance of technically trained persons who might fairly be called publicity engineers’. Wealthy Americans were identified as enjoying the delights of conspicuous consumption and their ostentatious consumer lifestyles were recognized to be increasingly shaping the aspirations of lower strata. The growth of corporate marketing and salesmanship directed towards the fabrication or production of customers and the promotion of consumption encouraged, indeed enticed, people to aspire to the consumer lifestyle ‘in vogue in the next higher stratum’ (Veblen, 1994, p. 84). And in due course the cultivation or incitement of desire for consumer goods became an increasingly prominent and vital feature of the production process and the prospect of ‘democratizing individual desire’ to consume, made possible by the potential to produce ‘an



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Consuming more and more things: ‘the first condition of our civilization’ Intermittently from the end of the nineteenth century the free-market industrial capitalist economy aroused concern and provoked opposition insofar as it was recognized to lead to ‘extremes of wealth and poverty’ (Frank, 2001, pp. 23–24). Early in the twentieth century in both America and England, concerns were being expressed about the direction in which the modern industrial capitalist system appeared to be heading. In England, Arthur Penty (1922, p. 53), a guild socialist, warned that ‘industrialism is a blind alley from which we must retrace our steps or perish’. Elaborating on his concerns, Penty (1922, p. 123) commented that the continual pursuit of innovations in production to increase capacity and the evidence of subsequent damage to the environment through pollution and the production of waste demonstrated that ‘it is simply impossible for civilization to continue on the road it is traveling’. But it was in America that the distinctive features of an expanding consumer culture, a necessary corollary of the rapidly developing ‘free-market’ industrial capitalist economy, were first most clearly articulated. As one early twentieth-century critical observer remarked, Through the centuries, the problem has been how to produce enough of the things men wanted; the problem now is how to make men want and use more than enough things . . . . Formerly the task was to supply the things men wanted; the new necessity is to make men want the things which machinery must turn out if this civilization is not to perish. (Strauss, 1924, pp. 578–579) After noting the centrality of economic growth for the free-market capitalist economy in the ‘machine age’, Strauss proceeded to draw critical attention to the significance of consumption, in particular the need Veblen had identified to fabricate customers: The first condition of our civilization . . . is that we must turn out ever larger quantities of things, more this year than last, more next year than this . . . . The problem before us today is not how to produce the



infinitely growing supply of goods and services’, came to be regarded as a significant political benefit of free-market capitalism (Leach, 1993, pp. 6–7; Renouard, 2007, p. 55).

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As the American domestic market expanded to become the largest in history, American businesses began to look beyond national boundaries and to actively pursue ‘global’ markets (Leach, 1993). In the course of the twentieth century the pursuit by American corporations of new markets ‘over the whole surface of the globe’ would, as Marx and Engels (1968, p. 83) had anticipated of the development of modern capitalism, give ‘a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’. The problem identified of ‘how to produce the customers’ has subsequently been addressed, and it might be argued successfully remedied by those identified as ‘publicity engineers’ (Veblen, 2006, p. 306), those engaged in ‘the symbolic work of producing needs . . . [through] design, packaging, sales promotion, public relations, marketing, advertising etc’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 345), those whose primary objective is to influence, cultivate, and excite consumer tastes, preferences, and lifestyle practices in order to nurture an endless demand for goods and services, not to mention those increasingly vital financial agencies that have emerged to provide necessary credit facilities which have extended the resources available for immediate consumption by taking ‘the waiting out of wanting’ (Bauman, 2007b; Ritzer, 1995). An awareness of the continual need to satisfy ‘the first condition of our civilization’, to generate consumer demand, ensure ‘consumer confidence’, and promote the virtues of ‘consumer choice’ remained a consistent feature in reflections by analysts and business figures throughout the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the significantly raised productive capacity of the economy, a legacy of the rapid development that was necessary to support the military campaign, was redirected as a matter of urgency towards increasing the production of consumer goods. Reflecting on the importance of consumer demand for the post-war American economy, one observer commented that our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions in consumption. The measure of social status, of social



goods, but how to produce the customers. Consumptionism is the science of compelling men to use more and more things. Consumptionism is bringing it about that the American citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer. (1924, pp. 578–579, emphasis added)

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In the course of the second half of the twentieth century there was a rapid growth in the consumption and material standards of living of a substantial proportion of the world’s population. The perennial gale of ‘creative destruction’ that Schumpeter (1975, p. 82) identified as a necessary feature of capitalist economic life continually brought into being new consumers, goods, methods of production, technologies, and forms of organization. By the end of this period worldwide consumer expenditure increased by a factor of six to US$24 trillion, but 86 per cent of this sum was accounted for by the wealthiest 20 per cent of the world’s population, the poorest 20 per cent accounted for a mere 1.3 per cent. And in Africa during the final quarter of the century average household consumption actually fell by 20 per cent (United Nation’s Development Programme, 1998). By 2004 it was estimated that 1.7 billion people worldwide had adopted the diets, modes of transportation, and ways of living that in the twentieth century were limited to the rich nations of North America, Europe, and Japan. This global ‘consumer class’ currently represents over 25 per cent of the world’s population and it is growing rapidly as a significant proportion of the population in China and India emulate American and European consumer lifestyles. The number of such consumers in China and India is now greater than in Western Europe, although currently the average Chinese or Indian consumes significantly less than the average Western European or North American (Gardner et al., 2004, p. 6). The growth in global consumption has also come at a cost, one borne by numerous ‘invisible’ others who have largely been excluded from the benefits of increased consumption, those whose terms of employment and working conditions, with the globalization of economic production, are frequently hidden from view, far removed from the marketplaces, malls, communities, and social contexts in which the commodities they produce are purchased and consumed (Bauman, 2004a; Klein, 2001; Labour Behind the Label). From the 1970s continuing rounds of creative destruction and the pursuit of a global free-market consumer ‘utopia’ have contributed to a range of negative outcomes, including increases in inequality, a further deterioration in the polarization of wealth, a growth in poverty, and an accumulation of evidence indicating that increasing economic growth and rising material standards of living have not led consumers



acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in consumption . . . . We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing pace. (Lebow, 1955, p. 7, emphasis added)

to feel more fulfilled or contented (Castells, 1998; Harvey, 2005; Starke, 2004). In respect of the latter, while income doubled and consumption increased significantly in America over the period 1957–2002, the proportion of people describing themselves as ‘very happy’ is reported to have remained unchanged (Gardner and Assadourian, 2004, p. 166). Evidence suggests that ‘once a society’s level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence’ additional increases in wealth, income, or consumer choice have little, if any, positive effect on people’s happiness or quality of life (Schwartz, 2005, p. 106; Shankar et al., 2006, p. 486). Insofar as an ever-expanding global consumer market has led to the production of a growing range of commodities, at least some of which can be considered unnecessary, wasteful, and potentially detrimental to the health, well-being, and welfare of users and communities, and for which longer hours of work and rising credit indebtedness have constituted part of the price that has had to be paid, it is no surprise to find that ‘the capacity of consumption to enhance happiness’ has proven to be ‘fairly limited’ (Bauman, 2007b, p. 45). But beyond the frustrations experienced by consumers there is a far more serious concern that warrants consideration, notably the ecological impact of modern consumer culture, the forms of ‘destructive creation’ that follow in the wake of creative destruction.

Destructive creation A concept of ‘destructive creation’ has been employed to describe the ways in which durable good manufacturers . . . appliance producers, software writers, or fashion designers have . . . [introduced] new generations of products that “destroy”, directly or indirectly, the value of old units previously sold . . . . Such destructive creation typically induces former customers to come back to the marketplace to replace or upgrade their old versions and therefore boosts profits as long as innovation costs are low enough. (Calvano, 2007, p. 1) The identification of destructive creation as a necessary part of the consumer cycle re-introduces a range of meanings that have largely been occluded by more favourable contemporary references to growing consumer expenditure and rising levels of consumption as necessary for the health and well-being of a ‘free-market’ economy. From the fourteenth



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to the eighteenth century, terms like ‘consumption’ and ‘consume’ had a series of unfavourable, ‘destructive’ or negative connotations which included ‘to take up completely, devour, waste, spend . . . destroy [and] exhaust’ (Williams, 1976, pp. 68–69). The concept of ‘destructive creation’ signifies that within a capitalist market economy things need to be, and are being, ‘burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing pace’ (Lebow, 1955, p. 7), something that is now routinely achieved by deliberately engineered increases in ‘product obsolescence’ in all its technical, functional, planned, and stylistic manifestations, courtesy of those intermediaries working in design, marketing, advertising, and branding (Smart, 2007). But there is a broader and more urgent sense in which a notion of destructive creation may be of relevance and that is in respect of the damaging, direct and indirect, environmental consequences of a consumerist way of life that began in America but subsequently has become global in reach and impact (Dawson, 2005; Schor, 2005; Spencer, 2007; Princen, 2002). There is now a substantial body of evidence indicating that ‘continued material based economic growth is unsustainable’ (Shankar et al., 2006, p. 491) and that ‘current aggregate consumption levels are either already unsustainable or fast approaching that state’ (Schaefer and Crane, 2005, p. 77). Further consideration is given to these matters below.

Consumer demand: sovereignty, choice, and marketing The conventional wisdom within the discourse of contemporary economics has been that rapid growth in and global diffusion of consumer culture, for the most part, has been a consequence of the exercise of consumer sovereignty and consumer choice within the context of relatively free markets, markets deemed to have been ‘liberated’ from the burdens of ‘excessive’ forms of state intervention associated with Keynesian economic policies that in the period following the ‘Great Crash’ of 1929 through to the mid-1970s economic crisis of ‘stagflation’ were considered to have subjected market forces to an unduly restrictive ‘mode of regulation’ (Galbraith, 1955; Harvey, 1989, 2005). The subsequent period has been one in which rolling back the state, deregulation, free-markets, privatization, and consumer sovereignty and consumer choice have become the watchwords for neoliberals and neoconservatives intent on promoting ‘the logic of the market as a functional equivalent of democracy’ (Frank, 2001, p. 57).



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Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm . . . . The consumers patronize those shops in which they can buy what they want at the cheapest price. Their buying and their abstention from buying decide who should own and run the plants and the farms . . . . They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities. (1949, pp. 269–270) The idea of the ‘sovereign consumer’ and the related notion of ‘consumer choice’ effectively place consumption at the epicentre of modern economic life. In the consumerist vision of the world, consumers are considered to exercise a significant degree of power and influence over economic life, and consumer culture simply represents what consumers have demanded, what ‘sovereign’ consumers want and have freely elected to choose. This view is effectively illustrated by economist Stanley Lebergott, who responded to criticisms of consumerism by asserting that ‘ “consumer driven culture” . . . [is created by] 270 million Americans’ (cited in Frank, 2001, p. 70). In a comparable vein James Twitchell, another celebrant of consumerism, complains that ‘elitist’ critics of consumer culture are inclined to portray ‘the consumer as dumb ox’ when by virtue of the medium of the free market ‘consumers are, in actuality, “the ones with the power” ’ (cited in Frank, 2001, pp. 296–297). This view of the consumer as ‘sovereign’ and as engaged in freely exercising ‘choice’ is not only ‘utopian’ but more to the point is undermined by the wealth of evidence that reveals the increasing significance of demand management, advertising, marketing, and branding in the cultivation of consumer desire (Baran and Sweezy, 1968; Conca, 2002; Dawson, 2005; Galbraith, 1963, 1969; Klein, 2001; Shankar et al., 2006). Neoliberal and neoconservative reflections on and endorsements of



In the neoliberal vision consumers are ‘sovereign’, and where and when permitted to exercise ‘choice’ it is argued that they ensure that the market maintains an appropriate responsiveness to their demands. While it may seem as though owners of industry, producers, and entrepreneurs exercise ultimate control over economic affairs, Ludwig von Mises argued that in reality the consumer is sovereign:

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hastened the achievement of full consumer democracy, that freemarket utopia where each empowered customer would make his or her voice heard in the great public agoras of shopping mall or Internet, participating in a system of choice vastly more complex, more lively, and more interactive than the sterile two-party plebiscites of our industrial past. (Frank, 2001, pp. 55, 254) However, the rhetoric of neoliberal and neoconservative advocates of the idea of global free-market consumer capitalism is increasingly at odds with the everyday reality experienced by a growing number of modern subjects who suffer discontent, disappointment, and debt as consumers and deterioration in the public domain as citizens. The ‘utopia’ promoted in neoliberal rhetoric has been exposed by measured critical assessments of the reality of free-market consumer capitalism (Dawson, 2005; Schor, 2005; Princen et al., 2002). Consumer demand is continually nurtured – promoted and managed – through advertising, marketing and branding. Business marketing in all its guises has as its principal objective influencing ‘people’s off-the-job perceptions and actions’, literally aiming to manage or govern consumer behaviour, in order to ‘get prospective customers to do as the corporation wants’ (Dawson, 2005, pp. 18, 54). At its most effective business marketing ‘profitably alter[s] product users’ behaviour . . . [whilst avoiding] recognition and resistance’ (Dawson, 2005, p. 54). Maintaining consumer demand means that there can literally be ‘no place’ for fully satisfied or satiated consumers within a competitive economic system that needs must continually create markets for the new generations of goods and services that are being perpetually produced. As one critic has commented, ‘capitalist consumer culture . . . however spectacular, glamorous and beguiling, perpetually plays with desires without ever conferring satisfactions’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 170). Insofar as significant increases in demand have been routinely achieved, business marketing makes it possible for corporations to continue to be reasonably confident that ‘if they make it we will buy it’ (Galbraith, 1969, p. 210). As a former chairman of J. Walter Thompson, one of the largest American advertising agencies, is reputed to have



markets in what is regarded as the ‘new’ information-based, de-regulated and privatized, hyper-competitive, entrepreneurially driven global economy frequently convey the impression that ‘corporate utopia is already a done deal’, that the new forms of economic life have

remarked, advertising has the capacity to create ‘in the minds of people needs of which “they haven’t got the faintest idea” . . . in order to make them consume’ (quoted in Gorz, 1989, p. 120). The ‘crafting and deploying [of] profit-boosting, behaviour-altering . . . enticements’ (Dawson, 2005, p. 54) has become global in scope. What began with US corporations subsequently has become a significant feature of ‘worldwide corporate capitalism’ (Dawson, 2005, p. 124).

Global free-market capitalism and consumer culture: promise and reality The neoliberal configuration – global free markets, privatization, consumer sovereignty, and consumer choice – has been represented as promising social, economic, and political benefits and its most exemplary manifestation has been the United States. The ‘free-market utopia’ became, as Beck (2000b, p. 112) observes, synonymous with the United States. The pursuit of global free markets and its necessary corollary, the promotion of a globally extensive culture of consumerism, has been closely associated with America, indeed has been described as ‘an American project’ (Gray, 1999, p. 100), one that is ‘aimed at universalizing the particular interests and the particular tradition of the economically and politically dominant powers (principally the United States)’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 75). But as critical analysts have noted, there have been other – ‘dystopian’ – consequences, other outcomes, in the course of the pursuit of the neoliberal global free-market ‘utopia’ (Giroux, 2003). Rising inequality and a growing disparity in wealth distribution, an erosion and undermining of social provision provided by the welfare state following the imposition of various economizing measures promoted as forms of ‘modernization’, including deregulation of significant aspects of economic life and associated demands for greater flexibility on the part of workers, and the off-shoring of jobs to places where labour costs are lower and health and safety legislation negligible have contributed substantially to the development of a global ‘political economy of insecurity’ (Beck, 2000b; Bourdieu, 1998a). Since the early 1970s, despite continuing economic growth, associated increases in the overall wealth of the country, and the global dominance of American corporate brands, in 2007 they constituted 53 of the top 100 brands (Kiley, 2007), a significant number of American citizens, if not the majority, have experienced income stagnation, or worse decline, and a steadily diminishing share of national wealth. In the period 1978–1995 ‘average weekly earnings of . . . 80 per cent



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of rank-and-file working Americans, adjusted for inflation, fell by 18 per cent between’, while CEOs in the period 1979–1989 enjoyed real annual pay increases of 19 per cent (Gray, 1999, p. 114). In this period ‘the richer families increased their average annual income the fastest, while the poorer ones saw their income decline the most’ (Castells, 1998, p. 132). The ratio between the pay of the average CEO and that of the average worker in America rose from 44.8 in 1973 to 172.5 in 1995 and to 262 in 2005 (Castells, 1998, p. 130; Mishel, 2006). In addition, on top of the sharp increase in income inequality, wealth inequality almost doubled. By 2003 the concentration of wealth, as measured by the Gini coefficient, had reached 0.82 and was ‘pretty close to the maximum level of inequality you can have’ which is 1.0 (Wolff, 2003). The United States, where in 1998 the top 1 per cent owned 38 per cent of all wealth, is ‘much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country’; the United Kingdom, where the top 1 per cent owned around 23 per cent of all wealth, is its closest competitor in terms of inequality (Paxton, 2002; Wolff, 2003). Promotion of the free-market ‘utopia’ has proven costly, especially for those suffering from the hardships of ‘inequality, polarization, poverty, and misery’ in an increasingly dual America (Castells, 1998, pp. 133–134). Yet despite growing inequality there have been very significant increases in private forms of consumption since the 1970s, leading analysts to make reference to rapidly growing ‘personal consumption expenditures’ (Toosi, 2002, p. 13), the increasing identification of personal fulfillment with ‘individualized hyperconsumption’ (Castells, 1998, p. 160), and the ‘triumph of rampant, individual and individualizing consumerism’ (Bauman, 2007b, p. 145; see also Beck, 2000b, p. 75). As a proportion of US GDP, consumer expenditure rose from 64.8 per cent in 1970 to 66.7 per cent in 1990 and to 67.8 per cent by 2000 and ‘durable goods, non-durable goods and services . . . all enjoyed growth’ (Toosi, 2002, p. 13). Increases in consumer spending above the rate of growth in GDP were made possible by a drop in savings rates, rising stock market and housing values, and significantly a growth in credit – ‘total (non-mortgage) consumer credit outstanding increased from $119 billion at year-end 1968 to $1,456 billion in June 2000 (in current dollars, not seasonally adjusted)’ (Durkin, 2000, p. 1). However, as the ‘credit crunch’ that began with the meltdown in 2007 of the US subprime mortgage market started to affect global stock markets, housing values, employment, interest rates, and consumer confidence, concerns began to be expressed about the economic sustainability of prevailing patterns of global (hyper) consumption. But, more troubling and certain is



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Consumerism puts consumption at the very heart of the modern economy and everything is done to persuade us to go and consume more . . . . Almost unnoticed, consumerism has become our principal pastime, our zeitgeist, our ideology, all rolled into one. It’s a very seductive idea, but it’s also a lethal idea . . . . Scale up all of these individual acts of consumption multiplied by several billion people and stand back and watch the disaster unfold. The argument advanced is that, given serious constraints associated with emission levels for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, it is not possible to simply continue to pursue consumer-led economic growth, ‘to go on growing the size of the consumer economy . . . because levels of consumption are already undermining life support systems on which we depend’ (Smith, 2007).

Landscapes of consumption and the consumption of landscapes In an analytic ‘tour’ of ‘new means of consumption’ – phenomena such as franchises, chain stores, shopping malls, catalogues, superstores, and electronic shopping centres – reference has been made to the contribution of American corporations to the rapid growth in consumption. Ritzer (2005, pp. 38, 39) notes how ‘American-based corporations are intent on, and aggressive about, exporting American consumer goods and the American way of consuming them’ and that ‘much of the world now seems enamored of the American way of consuming’. However, many of the means of consumption identified as ‘new’ are relatively longstanding and do not signify a ‘revolutionary change’ (Ritzer, 2005, p. ix). For example, franchising, which can be traced back to 1850s America and Singer’s establishment of a network to sell its sewing machines to the public, became increasingly popular from the late 1950s. Chain stores were being established from 1859 when the Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was set up. Shopping centres were developing from the 1880s, with the first open shopping mall being



the accumulation of a wealth of evidence indicating that prevailing patterns of global consumption are ecologically unsustainable (Princen et al., 2002; Starke, 2004). As Jonathan Porritt (2007), Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, has cautioned on the subject of the ecological consequences of consumerism,


established in the early 1920s near Kansas City, and the first enclosed mall in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota. By the late 1890s ‘1,200 mail-order concerns were [already] competing for the patronage of more than 6 million customers’ (Leach, 1993, pp. 57, 44, 26). But while there is a great deal more continuity than the notion of a ‘revolution in consumption’ suggests, it is true that there has been an increasing ‘proliferation of settings that allow, encourage, and even compel us to consume’ and to describe the growth of such settings, in particular the increase in locations where two or more franchises, superstores, chain stores, or malls are situated, the idea is introduced of ‘landscapes of consumption’ (Ritzer, 2005, pp. 2, xi). The term is intended to reflect the growth in scale of consumer activity and the increasing density of consumption settings in particular ‘geographic areas’. Consideration is given to a number of such examples, including ‘the Strip’ in Las Vegas, ‘the area around the main cathedral in Milan, Italy’, and a new ‘landscape’ in Columbus, Ohio (Ritzer, 2005, p. 155). Potential problems associated with consumption, for example, the extent to which Americans are ‘obsessed’ with it, spend too much on it, and may in consequence get into debt, are briefly noted and there is recognition of the need for structural initiatives to deal with the agencies ‘that play such a large role in hyper-consumption and overspending’ (Ritzer, 2005, pp. 31–32, 191–192). But there is no consideration of the wider economy within which the continual promotion and expansion of consumer activity is imperative and there is also a lack of any critical engagement with the responsibility of business marketing, advertising, and branding for promoting excessive consumption. Most remarkable of all, there is no recognition whatsoever of the ways in which ‘landscapes of consumption’ have consumed – quite literally have devoured, wasted, exhausted, and destroyed – irredeemable ecological landscapes, not just where they are physically situated, but also where the commodities they market and sell have been produced, increasingly with globalization in remote low labour cost, low tax, and lightly regulated locations, including economic production zones (Klein, 2001), and further where the waste from the consumer cycle is ultimately deposited, far removed from the artfully contrived consumer emporia that ‘enchant’ consumers. The continual provocation of consumer desire, leading to consumer goods being consumed at an ever-increasing rate and to consequent rising levels of consumer expenditure and debt, has made pursuit, purchase, and possession of commodities a prominent, if not dominant, aspect of everyday life for a growing number of people around the world. In consequence consumo, ergo sum (Saumarez Smith quoted in Hinsliff



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and Smith, 2007), or I shop therefore I am, which received aesthetic representation in Barbara Kruger’s (1990) photolithograph on paper shopping bag composition (Harvey, 2005, p. 170; Levine, 2007, p. 209), might appear to be an increasingly appropriate late-modern dictum, at least for the global consumer class. It is the globalization of a consumerist lifestyle, and evidence of its ecological consequences in particular, that is understandably promoting increasing analytic concern (Princen et al., 2002; Schor, 2005; UNDP, 1998). The problematic environmental consequences that have become increasingly apparent with the development of a materialistic consumer mentality have been the focus of a series of powerful artistic representations created by Chris Jordan (2007), a Seattle-based photographic artist. Jordan’s work (2003, 2006) provides a series of compelling images of the scale of the waste and destruction that is a corollary of the cycles of ‘creative destruction’ that generate new consumer goods, new designs, and technological refinements and upgrades that encourage replacement and renewal of commodities that frequently remain in good working order. In contrast to the ‘enchanted, sometimes even sacred, religious character’ attributed to the landscapes occupied by ‘new means of consumption’ (Ritzer, 2005, p. 7), Jordan directs a critical aesthetic gaze on to the urgent, problematic consequences flowing from the consumer process, notably the growing number of consumer goods that get prematurely ‘retired’, the waste that accumulates, the things that get excreted at the end of the consumer cycle. These aspects tend to be marginalized or neglected altogether, especially when the future that is anticipated is one that ‘will bring with it unimagined palaces of consumption filled to capacity with a cornucopia of goods and services’ (Ritzer, 2005, p. 207), a conception of the future that is oblivious to the impact consumerism has had, and is continuing to have, on natural resources and the environment (Cohen, 2007; Hertwich, 2005). The aim behind Jordan’s ‘Running the Numbers’ series is to expose viewer-consumers to the problems arising from consumerism through photographic images that powerfully represent ‘the tiny incremental harm that every single one of us is doing as an individual’ as we consume, images that are intended to get viewer-consumers to think about how ‘the cumulative effect of hundreds of millions of individual consumer decisions is causing the worldwide destruction of our environment’ (Jordan, 2007). The images presented of the rate of consumption of various commodities in America include the following: • 11,000 jet trails, the number of commercial flights taken every 8 h • 60,000 plastic bags, the number used every 5 s 10.1057/9780230233607 - Globalization and Utopia, Edited by Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili


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• 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used every 30 s • 426,000 cell phones, the number ‘retired’ each day • 1 million plastic cups, the number used on internal airline flights every 6 h • 1.14 million brown-paper supermarket bags, the number used every hour • 2 million plastic beverage bottles, the number used every 5 min • 8 million toothpicks, representing the number of trees harvested every month to make the paper for mail order consumer catalogues • 15 million sheets of paper, the quantity used every 5 min (Jordan, 2006–2008).

Free-market consumer capitalism: an unsustainable form of life The ecological implications of contemporary patterns of global consumption have not always been accorded the analytic consideration their significance warrants. For example, critics have commented that sociologists have tended to be preoccupied with ‘the status and meaning of consumption in modern society’ (Princen et al., 2002, p. 11) and ‘have made almost no reference to the environmental impact of rapidly expanding levels of consumption’ (Shove and Warde, 1998, p. 3). And where there has been a sociological acknowledgment of the environmental consequences of consumption reference has tended to be, at best, cursory (Gabriel and Lang, 2006, pp. 22–24). More critical consideration needs to be given to the environmental consequences of consumption and to what have been aptly designated as the ‘hedonistically repressive’ effects of consumerism, that is effects that blunt our ‘sensibility to sensual delight itself’, such matters as light pollution and noise, and the variety of other assaults on our senses that have become commonplace in the metropolitan and suburban consumer environments that increasingly dominate the habitats of the majority of the world’s population (Soper, 2007, p. 221). The range of consequences associated with the increasing growth in and global diffusion of forms of consumption formerly confined to the United States, Western Europe, and Japan is now a pressing matter. Ever rising levels of consumption of goods and services are argued to be vital to the maintenance of the fluid dynamism of a global capitalist economy, essential complements to seemingly ever-rising rates of productivity achieved through the deployment of rounds of technological innovation. But the rising environmental costs associated with current



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patterns of consumption, conventionally conveniently ‘externalised’, are now acknowledged to be of such magnitude and of such gravity as to be unsustainable and demanding address and action (Gabriel and Lang, 2006, pp. 22–24; Schaefer and Crane, 2005; Starke, 2004; Schor, 2005). As evidence has accumulated on the growing scale, scope, and range of detrimental consequences arising from consumer activity, unfavourable associations have begun to be (re)attributed to consumption (Gabriel and Lang, 2006, p. 24). Analysts have made critical references to the hollow experience of living on a hedonic consumer treadmill (Offer, 2006) and have termed the ethos of consumer capitalism ‘infantile’ (Barber, 2007). Elevation of ‘the value of novelty above that of lastingness’ and an associated acceleration of the cycle of desire, possession, gratification, rejection, and disposal have been identified as manifestations of a problematic ‘consumer syndrome’ (Bauman, 2004b, 2007b, pp. 85–86). In addition, modern consumption has been described as juggernaut like in character, as out of control (IISD, 1999; Maniates, 2002; Renouard, 2007), and growing consumerism has been identified as having an increasingly damaging impact on the environment and on those individuals and communities subjected to the global ‘gale of destruction’ that has been a corollary of economic production under the ethos of neoliberalism (Chomsky, 1999; Princen et al., 2002; Starke, 2004; Schor, 2005). It is in this context that calls to ‘consume differently’ have been articulated (Maniates, 2002; Smart, 2007; Soper, 2007). The notion of the ‘juggernaut’ provides a compelling image of modern consumerism as a powerful, fast moving and seemingly unstoppable form of life (Giddens, 1990). The apparent lack of control that exists in respect of our ‘runaway’ consumer society, the design faults and operator failures that contribute to the unintended and unwanted consequences of consumption that are a by-product of the complexity of the global ‘free-market’ economic system, and the impact that new generations of commodities, new forms of consumption, and associated new forms of knowledge and understanding, and related courses of action, have on both the social world, continually altering ‘its nature, spinning it off in novel directions’, and, no less significantly, the natural world (Giddens, 1990, p. 153) make the term particularly appropriate to describe the overwhelmingly expansive character of contemporary consumerism. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the growth of consumption has been truly relentless. The number of products and services produced and consumed has grown inexorably and continues to do so as



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more of the world’s population aspires to the lifestyles that predominate in ‘overdeveloped’ and ‘over-consuming’ countries (Renner, 2004). To date the growth in per capita consumption shows no sign of abating; to the contrary, it is reported to be ‘expanding eight to twelve times faster than population growth’ (Princen et al., 2002, p. 4) and in the United States alone between 1993 and 2004 ‘real personal consumption expenditures per capita’ rose by 33 per cent (Schor, 2005).

Concluding remarks: unsustainable consumption In America, towards the close of the nineteenth century, Veblen (1994, pp. 84, 99) noted how people were aspiring to the consumer lifestyle ‘in vogue in the next higher stratum’ and how what might start out as a conspicuous form of consumption, indeed might constitute an example of conspicuous waste, ‘frequently . . . [becomes] in the apprehension of the consumer a necessary of life’. Veblen (1994, pp. 102–103) recognized that the standard of consumption to which consumers might aspire, ‘the amount and grade of goods consumed . . . is flexible and . . . indefinitely extensible’, that yesterday’s novelty or luxury commodity very quickly becomes today’s necessity as it is ‘incorporated into the scale of decent consumption, and so . . . become[s] an integral part of one’s scheme of life . . . as hard to give up [as those commodities] that maybe necessary to life and health’. In the course of the twentieth century the range of goods and services produced grew rapidly as did the appetites of enticed and enchanted consumers who pursued a consumerist lifestyle that began in the United States but increasingly transcended international borders and cultural boundaries. The global production and consumption of products and services now extends far beyond those needed to sustain a secure and happy life (IISD, 1999). Insofar as growth is the virtually unquestioned goal of economic activity, then consumption becomes paramount, essential, sacrosanct, a necessary corollary of which is that products are, indeed have to be, regularly and routinely displaced – discarded, disposed of, and/or ‘retired’ (Princen et al., 2002, pp. 4–5).1 As one critical observer of contemporary consumer culture comments, Every cultural product is calculated for maximal impact (that is, for breaking up, pushing out and disposing of the cultural products of yesterday) and instant obsolescence (that is, shortening the distance between the novelty and the rubbish bin . . . quickly vacating the stage



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The growth of global consumption is now considered unsustainable, but an increasing volume of resources continue to be directed to advertising and marketing to promote increasing levels of consumption (French, 2004; Princen et al, 2002).2 The production-consumption-obsolescencedisposal-replacement cycle has accelerated as the mobility of global capital and associated downward pressure on labour costs has led to lower commodity prices and an increasing tendency to regard a growing range of commodities as ‘disposable’ (Schor, 2005). In turn, the globalization of mass production and mass consumption has given rise to a mounting problem of ‘mass waste’ which is having detrimental environmental and social consequences (Clapp, 2002). It is not enough to assume that future technologies capable of delivering more efficient and cleaner forms of production and the prospect of a ‘new type of service economy’ will resolve such matters, for the danger remains that ‘the consumer juggernaut will overwhelm even the most sophisticated methods and technologies that can be devised to make consumption lean and super-efficient’ (Renner, 2004, p. 111). In 2006 it was calculated that if everyone on the planet were to be consuming at the rate of the average American citizen then 5.3 planet Earths would be needed, at the UK rate 3.1 planet Earths would be required, and for China 0.8 Earths (Simms et al., 2006). In the same year the World Wildlife Fund reported that global human consumption has been in excess of the earth’s bio-capacity since the 1980s and that by 2003 global consumption ‘overshoot’ was running at 25 per cent. As the report states, The Earth’s regenerative capacity can no longer keep up with demand – people are turning resources into waste faster than nature can turn waste back into resources. Humanity is no longer living off nature’s interest, but drawing down its capital. This growing pressure on ecosystems is causing habitat destruction, or degradation, and permanent loss of productivity, threatening both biodiversity and human well-being. (2006, p. 4) The continuing pursuit of economic growth and expansion of market relations, involving a combination of deregulation, privatization, and



so that nothing should stand in the way of the cultural products of tomorrow). (Bauman, 2004a, p. 117)


the deployment of ‘technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyze, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 3), along with a necessary requirement that ‘all problems and needs – even collective ones – must be answered by individual consumption of marketable goods and services’ (Gorz, 1985, pp. 13, 16), has led to accumulating evidence of a growing ecological crisis that confirms the all-consuming ‘free-market’ economy is globally unsustainable.

Notes 1. Increasing attention is being directed to the extent and scale of ‘postconsumer waste’. Consider personal computers: in the United States in 1998, 20 million PCs were considered obsolete, a mere 10 per cent were recycled. In 2000, 130 million PCs were sold and it was estimated that by 2004 there would be 315 million obsolete computers (Clapp, 2002, p. 162). 2. The increase in the financial resources devoted to advertising and marketing is confirmed by data from the United States, where annual spending on advertising directed to the cultivation of consumers for products and services the industry promotes is reported to have increased steadily from US $6.5 billion in 1950 to US $56 billion in 1980, and to around US $170 billion in 2000 (Hemsley, 2007). It was reported that in the United Kingdom ‘advertising spend . . . topped £19bn for the first time in 2006’ (Advertising Association, 2007). Towards the close of the twentieth century it was estimated that each day in the United States people were being exposed to around 3,000 advertisements promoting brand names, logos, and consumer activity (Bordwell, 2002, p. 239). Stealth advertising, experiential marketing and mobile campaigns, as well as search engine marketing have added to the range of techniques available to producers to cultivate increasing consumption.



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9 Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Can I explain the Friend to one for whom He is no Friend? Jalaledin-Rumi Fire burns everywhere in the same way, whether in Greece or in Persia Aristotle Among the many powerful arguments proposed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire and Multitude is the idea that contemporary political movements in the Islamic worlds can be considered ‘postmodern’ in their ambition and constitution. ‘In the context of Islamic traditions’, the authors write, ‘fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 149). It must follow quite logically that contemporary Islamic movements are not ‘fundamentalist’, that they are not archaic and retroactive. Rather to the contrary, Hardt and Negri agree with Fazlur Rahman, Akbar Ahmed, Bobby Sayyid and others that contemporary Islamic movements are progressive, not at least because they emphasise ijtihad, or original thought. From this perspective, Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 149) conclude that the Islamic revolution in Iran may be considered the ‘first postmodernist revolution’. At first sight we can find a major theoretical progression in Hardt and Negri’s argument and it is this theoretical moment that I would like to discuss in the following paragraphs. Whereas Marx positioned the ‘East’ at the receiving end of history, Hardt and Negri lodge the Islamic worlds into the ‘Multitude’ transforming them into active constructers of the global project envisioned by the authors. I have argued elsewhere 137



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(2008) that Marx (and Hegel) do not necessarily express a conscious ‘Orientalist’ bias towards the East. Their historical verdict in favour of Europe emerges from their methodology which is a priori to the way they conceptualize the Orient in general and Islam in particular. It follows from this that history is projected from the East to the West, where the final destiny of mankind would be established. This temporality was worked out through the introjection of the other into Western time. The other is necessarily seen as ‘left behind’ only to be reanimated within the new age. In this context, the other becomes the site of Western temporality; the retroactive East is finally turned into the recipient of the civilizing mission of Western men. It appears to me that despite their efforts to the contrary, Islam faces a similar ‘fate’ within Hardt and Negri’s methodology and I am glad that the authors anticipated this type of criticism themselves.1 It is not only that contemporary movements in the Muslim worlds are ‘countersystemic’ ideationally rather than in materialist terms, that their protest against the world order in general and the policies of the US state in particular is codified in terms of norms, ideologies, social institutions and other cultural artefacts.2 The term ‘postmodern’ itself is haunted by the very idea of linear development from the West to the East that the idea of a global multitude purports to transcend. Understood as a term denoting an emerging ‘reality’ rather than an invented analytical device, postmodernity structures history along an imagined axis from the ‘premodern’ to the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’. If Hardt and Negri have attempted to challenge the subordination of the East into the Western narrative, the idea that contemporary Islamic movements are postmodern nonetheless denies them an existence of their own, a ‘being’ (or ontology) that is independent from Western modernity. The ‘East’ and its Islamic heritage remain positioned within an artificial temporality that is centred on the ‘West’. Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all concurring here with depictions of Islam in general and the revolution in Iran in particular, as inherently archaic and reactionary (or with the exact opposite idea that they are ‘hypermodern’). I am saying that organizing world history along the modernist axis itself is misleading because what we are really facing here are invented terms that denote attitudes towards a particular reality, ideas on a passage of time that does not have a real beginning or an end. Consequently, rather than attempting to define how Islam can be positioned within the emerging ‘postmodern’ condition of humankind, it would be more useful to discuss how Islamic movements strive for a ‘parallel reality’, a reality that attempts to escape the modernist mould



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exported by the ‘West’. Describing the whole range of Islamic ideologies in the last 200 years or so simply as ‘postmodern’ is not only to surrender complexity to parsimony, it is to reduce the élan of contemporary Islamic constructs to reaction, ‘a refusal of modernity’ as Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 149) put it. This is when descriptions of Islam as medieval, backward and inherently fundamentalist threaten to enter the picture. It appears to me that many contemporary, self-consciously Islamic movements are rooted in, and nurtured by, a fundamental dialectic that goes beyond passive resistance: True, on the one side of this dialectic we may locate the penetrative, ‘secular’ presence of Western modernity. But on the other side there is much more – many Muslims are also grappling with the determinations of reified Islamic norms, political, economic or social; they are immersed in a cultural reality that is ‘Islamic’ with many national variations and sub-identities that are not necessarily represented by this abstract label. Arguing otherwise shows wilful ignorance towards the intellectual archives of the Muslim worlds, a luxury only the rightwing can afford. How can we ignore exploring the genealogy of Islam with its explicit epistemological connections to Christianity and Judaism? How can we talk about a Muslim multitude without understanding the construction of Islamicate civilization on top of the ruins of the Persian, Egyptian and Babylonian empires and the reification of Islam by revivalist theoreticians from the nineteenth century onwards? Before we can make Islam functional for a particular paradigm we have to engage with its transcendental claim and ontological content. This presence of an ‘ontological Islam’ that is concerned with politics, economics, society, culture, revolution and so on, and a transcendental one that is oriented towards God represents a powerful (yet certainly not exclusive) part of the historical consciousness permeating contemporary Muslim societies. Muslim political philosophers, since the formative years of Islam, had to negotiate between these two institutions of their civilization, between heaven and earth, between the reality surrounding them and the utopia awaiting them. Islam’s contemporary ‘quarrel’ with Western modernity is an extension of this dialectic. Like the classical theoreticians of Islamic political thought such as Farabi, Ibn-Sina (Avicenna), Abu Yaghub al-Kindi, Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) and others, who subsumed ancient Greek philosophy under the intellectual archives of Islamicate civilization, intellectuals in the contemporary Muslim worlds have been busy negotiating between Western modernity and the metaphysical belief in ‘Islamutopia’ – in the immanence of change that can shatter the status quo and (re)establish what is perceived to be the



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Ontologies of Islam – ‘Islamic’ ontologies Ontology, or the study and science of ‘being’, has been central to the classical political philosophy, or falsafa, in the Islamic worlds. In close dialogue with the Aristotelian tradition, classical Islamic political philosophers (or falasifa) such as Avicenna, Ibn-Arabi, al-Kindi, Averroes, Farabi and others employed complex methodologies explaining how ‘truth conditions’ can be rationalized through the study of language, judgement, nature, syllogisms, deductions and inductions. Falsafa was considered to lead to the knowledge of all existing things qua existent (ashya’ al-maujudah bi ma hiya maujudah) and philosophy itself was deemed to be the art (sind’ah) of arts and the science (ilm) of sciences. Long before the modern University erected disciplinary boundaries producing a cadre of ‘specialists’, these thinkers were engaged in inter-disciplinary studies. All of them were polymaths, both poets and scientists, engaged in theology and mysticism, interested in God as much as in the empirical worlds. Yet despite their wide-ranging studies they never turned into positivists, they never revelled in their conclusions abandoning critical judgement. ‘What has been recognized as true’, Farabi (1999b, p. 94) writes pertinently, ‘can never be other than what we believe’. Indeed, I do not deem it too far fetched to argue that the presence of God in the Muslim mind has repeatedly turned Islam into a vehicle for critiquing the status quo. Ultimately, for Islam’s medieval political philosophers, reality is not exhausted by explaining what offers itself to immediate knowledge and perception. The understanding of the surrounding world must also include an aspect of future potentiality, a utopia wherein the discrepancy between the present and the future opens up, thus engendering dissent. This is why in the philosophy of Farabi and especially in Ibn-Sina’s seminal Danish-namah-yi alai (Treatise on Knowledge), philosophy (and politics) take on a forward-looking modality adequate to this idea of the capacity for change towards the transcendental object. In Ibn-Sina’s words: the contingent existent (mumkin al-wujud) is always relative to the necessary being (wajib al-wujud).3 Within such a dialectic we are constantly alerted to criticize the present in order to bridge the gap between the ontological world



ideal human community, madinat al-nubi, the perfect state of the umma. Hardt and Negri express an impatience with this dialectic when they lodge the Muslim multitude in their global project, without granting them the opportunity to express themselves first.

and the transcendental promise. Despite current experiments to reconfigure Islam into a hermetic system of thought guarded by a privileged caste of priestly saints, the discrepancy between Islam’s ontological reality and its utopian promise continues to lend itself to resistance to the status quo; in terms of both domestic dissent against authoritarian states and internationally against hierarchical and unjust world orders. According to the Indo-Pakistani poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938): The new culture finds the foundation of world unity in the principle of towhid [oneness]. Islam, as a polity, is only a practical means of making this principle a living factor in the intellectual and emotional life of mankind. It demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. (Iqbal, 1998, p. 256) The question for Samir Amin, Susan Buck-Morss, Hardt, Negri, Slavoj Žižek and other perceptive writers on the Left could be the following then: What is the presence of the ‘West’ within the ontology of Islam, within the being of Muslims, within the visible reality surrounding them because it is here that the ‘West’ has a presence and not within Islam’s utopian promise which remains rooted in the Qur’anic revelation, and to a lesser extent in the hadith and the life of Muhammad? Indeed, Western philosophers, at least since the ‘enlightenment’, have long seized to compete with Islam over God. What all the parties in the current standoff are fighting for are the ‘realities’ (political, economic, social, cultural) surrounding the umma, what they are fighting over is the contemporary ontology of Islam; capturing it is the first step towards seizing Islamutopia – one of the last great conquests of humanity. Other than recurring to reactionary descriptions of the Islamic worlds as backward, pre-modern, steeped in the medieval folly that there exists some kind of ‘godhead’, we continue to be ill-equipped to explain why in contemporary Muslim societies the radically transcendent Allah and the radically immanent human world have not left an ontological reality in which ‘God is dead’ as Nietzsche proclaimed rather prematurely. Islam, as opposed to Christianity, continues to function on the ‘boundaries between heaven and earth’ which is the exact phrase that Michel Foucault (1997, pp. 449–453) used in order to explain the Islamic revolution in Iran. Foucault was amongst the few intellectuals in Western Europe who understood what was happening in Iran and who was thus far ahead of his contemporaries and some of his critics today.4 He understood, to be more precise, that in Iran, Islam resurrected its dual




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For anyone who did not look for the ‘underlying reasons’ for the movement in Iran was but attentive to the way in which it was experienced, for anyone who tried to understand what was going on in the heads of these men and women when they were risking their lives, one thing was striking. They inscribed their humiliations, their hatred for the regime, and their resolve to overthrow it at the bounds of heaven and earth, in an envisioned history that was religious just as much as it was political. They confronted the Pahlavis, in a contest where everyone’s life was on the line, but where it was also a question of millennial sacrifices and promises. So that the famous demonstrations, which played such an important role, could at the same time respond in an effective way to the threat from the army (to the extent of paralysing it), follow the rhythm of religious ceremonies, and appeal to a timeless drama in which the secular power is always accused. (Foucault, 1997, p. 450) Heaven and earth, political and religious, ceremonial dramas and secular power, Foucault understood that in the Iranian case, these concepts did not stand in opposition to each other, they were not dichotomous. Rather, they functioned in a dialectical relationship, they were co-constitutive; ontological Islam and Islamutopia worked hand in hand. Here, I noticed with bewilderment that in Multitude, which was published in 2004, Hardt and Negri (2004, p. 317) indicate in passing that Iran is a dictatorship that is quite comparable to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, after describing the Islamic revolution in 1979 as ‘postmodern’ in Empire which was published 4 years earlier. Indeed, the case of Iran would have been a good starting point to test the ‘postmodernity’ of contemporary Islamic movements, because the Islamic revolution effectively ended Iran’s ideational dependency on the ‘West’ and here especially on the United States. Yet Hardt and Negri’s reliance on a materialist methodology does not account for this and tempts them into the misleading claim that the Islamic Revolution can be considered ‘postmodern’ because of its rejection of the world market (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 149). While it is true that Iran’s revolutionaries espoused a ‘moral economy’ that could function independently from the determinations of the capitalist world market, the country could not afford to be oblivious to this market because of the oil rent



orientation, one ontological, engaged with the here and now, the other utopian, a drama of the otherworldly:

Iran extracts from it. Indeed, Iran is currently undergoing a major privatization programme in order to strengthen the country’s bid for WTO membership; the Islamic socialists of yesterday are challenged by the nouveaux riche technocrats of today.5 I suspect that Hardt and Negri (and other Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals for that matter) come to their conclusions about Iran because they felt obliged to push their analysis into a materialist methodology. But Iran’s revolution, as much as other revolutions in world history, revealed itself within the context of invented norms, social institutions, ideologies and other cultural artefacts. It was the symbolism of Shia-Islam, the mobilizing force of Iranian nationalism, the rage against hegemony, the charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini, the solidarity with the Third World, the quest for a global humanistic consensus that constituted the revolutionary reality and not merely the political economy of the country. The latter appeared within an existing culture and was engineered in accordance with the political preferences within that culture. These processes can not be captured comprehensively within a methodology that remains committed to the historical materialism derived from Marx. ‘It is true that on occasion one learns something from this’, I agree with Raymond Williams’ (1958, p. 272) critique, ‘but, in general, the procedure seems to involve both forcing and superficiality’.

Where is ‘Islamutopia’? In order to capture some of the attitudes towards reality in the contemporary Islamic worlds, it is not enough to acknowledge that in ‘the context of biopolitical production the divisions between the economic, the social, and the cultural tend to blur’ and to argue that such a ‘biopolitical perspective is always necessarily beyond and broader than an economic perspective in any strict sense’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 224). It is the metaphysical claim of Islam which derives from both cultural attitudes towards the religious corpus and ‘real’ belief in the provenance of a godly ordained order on earth which is central, and thus has to be appreciated analytically. As the German critical theorist Max Horkheimer argues in Dämmerung, religion ought not to be understood merely as ‘false consciousness’, because it helped retain a hope for future justice which bourgeois atheism had long forgotten. Here, the social sciences, if approached with a critical attitude, are well equipped to enrich the explanation of ontological Islam and its cultural, socioeconomic, normative, materialist and/or ideational content. But they





are less adequate, even when they are operationalized sophisticatedly as in Muhammad Arkoun’s, writings, to capture Islamutopia, Islam’s extension into the other-worldly.6 To follow a meticulous methodology may be a perfect and necessary guide to engage with Islam’s many empirical manifestations, with ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamic’ economics, ‘Islamic’ art, ‘Islamist’ terror and so on. But Islam is not only reified within a set of norms, institutions or ideologies; it is not merely the ontology of Islam that Muslims are immersed in; it is Islam as a transcendental object that continues to be at the centre of Muslim consciousness. We may take this argument one step further now in order to appropriate the genealogy of this Islamutopia further. The position of the Muslim philosopher or contemporary Muslim intellectual at the boundaries of the empirical world surrounding us, the transcendental object termed ‘Allah’, encapsulated in the Medinese city-state under the rulership of Mohammad, continuously alerts him/her that science as such has not been a sufficient guarantee of ‘truth’ (especially in a situation where the ‘truth’ is as well managed by media conglomerates, ‘think tanks’, functionaries and lobbying organizations as today). That is the reason why in Islamic philosophy, from Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes onwards, science never really coincided with the futuristic potentiality onto which Islamutopia is projected. This does not mean that Islam resists scientific progress of course. It does mean, however, that from a ‘Muslim perspective’ scientific knowledge should be maximized to explain the here and now. Science constitutes a means to an end rather than the other way around, it is functional in a different place than God. This is why despite her access to the ‘hard sciences’, the Muslim doubts; she has retained an imaginative, utopian orientation which is strong enough to continuously transcend the present limits of reality. In this endeavour she joins ranks with Marx, the critical theorists of the ‘Frankfurt School’ and Hardt and Negri’s Multitude. She joins them in their refusal to eternalize the present and shut off the possibility of a transformed future. She agrees with them, in Herbert Marcuse’s (1968, p. 155) words, that ‘[w]ithout fantasy, all philosophical knowledge remains in the grip of the present and severed from the future, which is the only link between philosophy and the real history of mankind’. For its adherents, this utopian future opens up fables with fantastic figures and gnomic personalities that transcend both the empirical world and the artificial confinement within national histories. This Islamutopia imagines the post facto umma encapsulated in the idea of Mohammed’s rule over the city state of Medina (medinat an-nabi), and ultimately the birth of the ideal homo Islamicus, who seals the genealogy of human



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holds the most perfect rank of humanity and has reached the highest degree of felicity . . . . He is the man who knows every action by which felicity can be reached. This is the first condition for being a ruler. Moreover, he should be a good orator and able to rouse [other people’s] imagination by well chosen words. He should be able to lead people well along the right path to felicity and to the actions by which felicity is reached. This is the sovereign over whom no other human being has any sovereignty whatsoever; he is the Imam; he is the first sovereign of the excellent city, he is the sovereign of the excellent nation, and the sovereign of the universal state (the oikumene). This ‘ideal man’, Ali Shariati (1979, p. 122), contended within the Shia-Islamic context and amidst the revolutionary upheaval in 1970s Iran ten centuries later, holds the swords of Caesar in his hand and he has the heart of Jesus in his breast. He thinks with the brain of Socrates and loves God with the heart of Hallaj [a Persian Sufi executed on charges of heresy in 922 AD] . . . . Like the Buddha, he is delivered from the dungeon of pleasure-seeking and egoism; Like Lao Tse, he reflects on the profundity of his primordial nature; . . . [l]ike Spartacus, he is a rebel against slave owners . . . and like Moses, he is the messenger of jihad and deliverance. Western modernity to many Muslims is disturbing because it is diametrically opposed to this Islamutopia – because its secularist dictum makes it impossible to believe in madinat al-fadilah (the perfect state); because it shatters transcendence a priori; because it destroys the syntax of religious language and not only the syntax of the Qur’an, but also that of contemporary Islamic utopias which promise a return to the rightly guided period of the rashidun, the pious compatriots of Muhammad. This is why Islamutopia allows for romantic fables and mythical imagery: it travels with the very language of the Qur’an and the hadiths hence becoming part of that fantastic transcendental project of the umma. The Cartesian legacy that is at the heart of Western modernity threads Islamutopia, desiccates faith, contests the very plausibility of theodicy; it dissolves Islam’s utopian grain and demystifies



kind towards his transcendental fate. ‘This man’, wrote Abu Nasr Farabi (1999a, pp. 129–130), in the tenth century AD,


the romantics of the Islamic revelation. It is the counter-reality to Islamutopia that many Muslims are trying to escape from. A futile endeavour of course, but nonetheless an ongoing journey. But why futile? Immediately, the note of caution expressed by Marx (1973b, p. 146) that ‘Men make their own history . . . not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted’ comes to mind. Islamutopia can never really be detached from ontological Islam, because the reality surrounding us cannot be detached from the future awaiting us. If the Qur’an can be said to have a theory of truth that is immediately relevant to the current state of humankind, as the ‘neo-religious’ thinkers such as Muhammad Arkoun, Rachid Ghannouchi, Ali Mazrui, Tariq Ramadan or Abdol-Karim Soroush argue, it appears to us within the mystique of the prevailing reality which itself is always a product of social change. Ultimately, each age reinterprets Islam, not because the Qur’an changes, but because there has never been a fixed and nontrivial object as Islam independent of a historical context, or the hundreds of millions of Muslims and non-Muslims who have read the scriptures and who came up with their own interpretations. True, at least two of Islam’s central tenets, tawhid, or the oneness of God, and the shahada, la’ilaha illa-la va Muhammadan rasullah (there is no God but God and Mohammad is his prophet) do push the umma towards conformity. But this conformity is spiritual above anything else, manifesting itself in the yearly pilgrimage of millions of people from different races and social classes during the haj. On the political, social and economic level, however, there is no such uniformity, no ahistorical sacred canopy that has the powers to veil everything beneath it. Otherwise, the ontological status of Malcolm X would have been the same as bin-Laden’s today. Islam has never been a singular system, or a coherent cultural and political threat. Since Muhammad, it has engendered both a potent utopian alternative and an ontological, transnational space where different spiritual cultural, religious, socio-economic and political narratives extract themselves. As far as I know Michel Foucault is the only prominent intellectual in Western Europe who understood the interrelationship between ontological Islam and Islamutopia when he reflected upon the revolution in Iran for a series of reports published in Le Figaro and Corriere della Serra. He understood that the dialectics emerging out of the revolutionary process may not yield to a Hegelian, final reconciliation of opposites. The Islamic revolution was spiritual and empirical, religious and secular, modern and fundamentalist, revolutionary and reactionary, progressive



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to see this immense country, with a population distributed around two large desert plateaus, a country able to afford the latest technical innovations alongside forms of life unchanged for the last thousand years, a country that yet languishing under censorship and the absence of public freedoms, and yet demonstrating an extraordinary unity in spite of all this. It is the same protest, it is the same will, that is expressed by the doctor from Tehran and a provincial mullah, by an oil worker, by a postal employee, and by a female student wearing the chador. This will includes something rather disconcerting. It is always based on the same thing, a sole and very precise thing, the departure of the shah. But for the Iranian people, this unique thing means everything. This political will yearns for the end of dependency, the disappearance of the police, the redistribution of oil revenue, an attack on corruption, the reactivation of Islam, another way of life and new relations with the West, with the Arab countries, with Asia, and so forth. Somewhat like the European students in the 1960s, the Iranians want it all, but this ‘all’ is not a ‘liberation of desires.’ This political will is one of breaking away from all that marks their country and their daily lives with the presence of global hegemonies. Iranians also view the political parties – liberal or socialist, with either a pro-American tendency or a Marxist inspiration – or, it is better to say, the pontifical scene itself, as still and always the agents of these hegemonies. Foucault understood at an early stage that from the perspective of many Iranians, Islam continues to transcend; continues to constitute a transnational space, spiritual, cultural and political as well. As a critical intellectual who constantly positioned himself without the mainstream, whose quest for dissidence can be compared to Ibn-Sina’s endeavour to distance himself from the proponents of the Greek Peripatetics, Foucault appreciated the way Islamic utopias continue to extract themselves across the unmapped ideational spaces of the umma. He understood how ontological Islam and Muhammad’s transcendental prophecy created a parallel reality to the ‘West’, a new truth condition within the international system. He witnessed, in other words, the exhaustion of modernism, and, by implication, the rejection of capitalism and Western enlightenment as legitimizing agents of ‘national’ progress in Iran. Yet despite its political confinement, and its obvious Shia-Iranian



and retroactive. For Foucault (2005, p. 221), writing in the Corriere della Serra in November 1978, it was surprising


nationalist symbolism, the Iranian revolution was not merely a ‘national event’.7 Rather to the contrary, the theoreticians of Iran’s revolution, Ali Shariati, Ayatollahs Shariatmadari, Muttahari and Khomeini, tried to break down Iranian nationalism which was closely associated with the excesses of the Shah. The ideational fixations which were presented as inward and essential by the monarchy, the ‘Persian’ character of the nation, the Aryan race, the ‘Indo-European’ language, concepts that rely on racially coded elements of alterity for their definition were substituted with non-racial categories emphasizing Iran’s Islamic heritage and Third World consciousness. That is how the critique of the Pahlavi monarchs tried to find itself the ideological means to connect the popular power of the Iranian revolt with the consciousness of a new universality. Ultimately then, the revolution was driven by the traffic between cultures, identities and world-views that Iran’s ancient history has inevitably engendered. These are not at all limited to the confines of the modern Iranian nation-state. They are reflected, rather, in both the arcane poems of Jalaledin Rumi and Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi (Hafiz) and the Avesta of Zoroaster, in both the esoteric mysticism of Omar Khayyam and the revolutionary pan-Islamism of Jamal ad-Din al Afghani, in both the political treatise of Abu Nasr Farabi and Ibn Khaldun and the pamphlets of the Khomeinists, envisioned in both the martyrdom of Hussein in Kerbala and the shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Ferdowsi. Iran’s historical consciousness has always been transnational; any effort to seal it off hermetically, as the Pahlavis tried (and some rightwing contemporary Iranian politicians continue to try), was/is bound to fail.

Dialectics of the Muslim multitude Of course, there is no suggestion here that Iranian nationalism did not play a role in the Islamic revolution. The very fact that the revolution happened within the boundaries of the Iranian nation-state, that most latent manifestation of ‘Western’ modernity, indicates that the country slid into the ideational spaces that lie between the ‘national’, ‘transnational’ and the ‘international’. Moreover, the terminology of the Islamic Republic indicates that the dialectic between Islam and the nation-state, and by implication Western modernity, has remained unresolved, that their interrelationship has created a parallel temporality that is not moving towards synthesis by necessity of the supremacy of one system over the other. In this sense, the Islamic Republic conceals both a metaphysics of government and a politics of religion that



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is novel and constantly evolving. In other words, the Islamic revolution situated itself, as an effort of fantastic reconciliation, in the vast vacuum created by the absence of the prophets, separating the promised land of God and the ontological reality which men, banned from paradise, have erected for themselves. Hence the centrality of the Imam-e Zaman, the Vali-e Asr (the Lord of the Age) or Mahdi in Shia mythology that was so central to Ali Shariati’s characterization of revolution as a ‘revolt against history’ (that in turn fascinated even sceptical observers such as Salman Rushdie).8 The pious Twelver-Shia is convinced that the Imam Mahdi will return from occultation to establish the just rule of God on earth (and if he is not pious, but a shrewd political leader, he recognizes the potent political utility of this idea). Within such a conceptualization of time, the reality surrounding many Iranian revolutionaries, the ‘here and now,’ had been relative to the other-worldly reality awaiting them.9 This explains their willingness to sacrifice themselves in the street battles against the army of the Shah and the invading battle units of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the First Persian Gulf War (1980–1988). Iran’s martyrs sought to enter that unknown space between the Garden of Eden and the reality which men have invented for themselves. For them, the Islamic revolution created a feeling of vertigo, a sense of romantic exaltation, an arrogance towards the passing passage of time. Revolutions, like the music of Wagner or the poetry of Rumi, do that to the human mind, especially when they are couched in powerful religious symbols as in the Iranian case.10 Adherents to realist political theories would point out that revolutionaries soon turn into conservative reactionaries once the naïve self-esteem of the moment has waned. They are right to a certain degree (as the Presidency of Ahmadinejad shows), not at least because the demands of inventing and administering a post-revolutionary state requires hard-core political utilitarianism. The utopia of a better tomorrow and the overbearing ontology of today have always been in a dialectical relationship to each other. Revolutions simulate how the former could look like, but they cannot escape the determinations of the temporal sequence they are born into. In the Iranian case this means that the rebirth of Islamutopia has been concomitant with the penetrating presence of Western modernity. I found this exemplified in the terminology and constitutional structure of Iran which are constituted of both modern (Western) ideas/institutions and Islamic ordinances (such as the Islamic Republic, the Party of God or Hesbollah and the Supreme Leader Jurisprudent or Vali-e faqih).





To open a parenthesis here, I am not arguing that the Islamic Republic has displayed the intellectual resources to pull the ontology surrounding it and the utopia guiding it together synthetically; thus far it has failed to create a new rationality with global appeal. A quick look at the current repression in the country indicates that the Islamic Republic has not really managed to continuously reinvent itself in accordance with the utopian momentum engendered by the revolutionary process. Only the original formulation of the revolution expressed the romantic rejection of authority, the critical consciousness that is willing to operate in a perpetual state of suspended judgement. Iran’s state turned towards authoritarianism when it felt that this consciousness has to be subdued ideologically in order to reify the status quo. Yet utopian yearnings can never really be muted entirely, nothing can ever be solely ideological. This explains the resilience of Iranian civil society vis-à-vis both the authority of the state and boycotts by the ‘international community’; it explains, why Iran has one of the highest numbers of executions in the world, whilst the Iranian cinema woos film critics in Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Montreal. Even Ayatollah Khomeini, that most ardent advocate of Islamutopia, of a new temporality for humankind, knew that he could not escape the ontological reality surrounding him and, by implication, the forces of Western modernity: A mojtahed [Islamic legal scholar] should be fully aware of his time. It is not acceptable that he should say that he will not express an opinion regarding political issues. Familiarity with the methods of dealing with the tricks and deceits of the culture governing the world, the possession of an economic understanding and knowledge . . . familiarity with policies and even politicians . . . . An authoritative interpreter should possess the intelligence and shrewdness necessary for managing and safeguarding a great Islamic or even a non-Islamic society. He should in addition to possessing piety and sincerity, and asceticism befitting a mojtahed, be a skillful manager. (Khomeini, 2005, pp. 199–200) Thus, conscious and unconscious, Khomeini, as much as any other political leader, could not escape the universal temporality he was born into. He was a child of his time and a product of the political cultures enveloping Iran and the wider Muslim worlds during that particular historical juncture. How else can we explain why he linked the necessity for ‘righteous and proper organs of [Islamic] government to the struggle



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against the imperialists [who] have propagated foreign laws and alien culture among the Muslims . . . causing people to be infatuated with the West’ (Khomeini, 1985, p. 54)? How else could he function as the point of fixation for the Maoist on the radical Left and for the young cleric studying Islamic law at the religious seminaries in Qom? Ultimately, the political discourse of Khomeini is yet another indicator for the way post-revolutionary Iran is constituted by concepts associated with Western modernity, Islamic ideas and the demands of Iranian nationalism. Embedded within the Iranian nation-state yet not at all bound to its confines, the post-revolutionary Iranian polity tried to empower itself to continuously engineer Islam (and what it means to be ‘Iranian’), to create a new type of sovereignty that had both an ontological and a transcendental claim. Indeed, in a revealing decree in January 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini declared that an Islamic government (by implication Iran) had the right to overrule Islamic ordinances if it would be in the interest (maslahat) of the umma and the state. Khomeini announced that the legitimacy of the government was ‘derived from the absolute domination of the Prophet of God’. This was ‘the most important of God’s ordinances (ahkam-e elahi)’ and was hence superior to ‘all ordinances that were derived or directly commanded by Allah’.11 In other words, if it was in the interest of the Islamic state and the umma, major Islamic pillars (even prayer, fasting and the pilgrimage to Mecca) could be annulled – the Islamic state can ‘suspend Islam’, if the politics of the moment demands it. We may extend the empirical scope of our analysis now and establish a fundamental difference between the project of the Islamic Republic and al-Qaeda-type movements within the Muslim worlds. Whereas the Islamic Revolution (as much as HAMAS, the ‘Iraqi Mahdi army’, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Lebanese Hesbollah) has been produced within the nation-state, that is, within one of the most central manifestations of Western modernity, al-Qaeda-type groups claim the total reassertion of the objectivity of sharia law, the all-encompassing sovereignty of their particularistic interpretation of Islamutopia, without any concessions to the current passage of time. This consciousness explains why al-Qaeda considers Shia-Muslims heretics or kafirs who must be persecuted. It is this attitude, always also permeated by antiIranian sentiments, that explains the repeated bombings of Shia processions and/or shrines in Najaf, Kerbala and Kazimya by ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’; the mass killing of the Hazara (a Shia minority in Afghanistan) during the rule of the Taliban; and the repeated bombing of Shia places of worship in Pakistan.





Secondly, the ‘irrational’ aim to reassert the literal objectivity of the sharia in total detachment from the determinations of Western modernity also explains why for the Taliban al-Qaeda alliance, Afghanistan had been reduced to the status of an ‘Emirate’, rather than a state, without an official capital or a constitution and without a definition of Afghan nationhood. Mullah Omar did not take up a position as Head of State but declared himself amir al-momenin (commander of the faithful) staying in Kandahar rather than caring to travel to the Afghan capital Kabul. The concept of the nation-state, central to the politics in Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere, is resolutely rejected, as in Ayman al-Zawahiri’s July 2005 letter to Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, where he celebrated the latter’s battle against polytheism, secularists, detractors and inferiors in Iraq, anticipating the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate that would follow the ‘pure way of the Prophet, and the sublime goal that the Prophet left to his companions’. In the absence of that ultimate caliphate, believing in the neo-fundamentalist message demands huddling together with one’s fellow believers and accepting a sect like existence within a loose, transnationally stratified brotherhood. This sect-like existence of neo-fundamentalists groups such as al-Qaeda does not, however, divorce them from the determinations of political competition. To the contrary, without any control over state bureaucracies and national media outlets, organizing people to remain or to become sectarians demands maximizing both media exposure and, interdependently, terrorist political violence. This explains why many al-Qaeda attacks on coalition forces in Iraq are filmed, sometimes from a variety of different angles, annotated, set to music and posted on Internet sites or sent to Arabic satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera. Strategies like these are central to the ‘perception management’ propagated by al-Qaeda activists. Revealingly, in the correspondence between al-Zarqawi and al-Zawahiri mentioned above, the latter criticized filming the practice of beheading hostages. ‘We are in a battle’, Zawahiri (2005) argued, ‘and more than half of it is taking place in the battlefield of the media’.

Understanding the Muslim multitude While God must be a priori to the dialectics mentioned in the previous paragraphs (not at least because this is what makes him transcendental in the first place), he continues to be used as an empirical phenomenon, someone we can capture and drag down into the politics of the day. If Homo-Islamicus deems himself inseparable from him, it is not because



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he is waiting to be adopted into the (post)modernist narrative, but because in contemporary Muslim societies Allah continues to transcend; there, God has not died. The realities that Muslims find themselves in are thus somewhat different from the realities encompassing the ‘West’. The latter is concerned with the final decline of temporality, the former with its origin; the latter searches for finitude in the here and now, the former for the original riddle of humanity. While for the ‘West’, at least since the nineteenth century onwards, the great dream of an end of history constitutes the guiding utopia of mankind,12 Islam continuously transcends history, continues to question the validity of the ontological realities surrounding us. For Muslims the past is pregnant with the future, with Islamutopia as the midwife of history. For the ‘West’, the future is pregnant with the past, a burden of which it can only be delivered by the psychotherapist or televangelist. Now it becomes clearer from which direction Muslims join the ‘multitudes’. Despite the shift towards a more rigid and totalitarian register since the early twentieth century, Islam remains closely tied to its original utopia and, beyond that, in the line of critical thinking that we could spawn from Farabi, Avicenna, al-Kindi and Averroes to German idealist philosophy in the Kantian tradition and Anglo-American Romanticism. Islam continues to be, in this sense, a radical ‘criticism of hegemony’, whatever the impediments that politics is seen to place in the way of any functional, inclusive articulation of this disposition. Is not this the reason why, currently, Muslims are one of the major sources of global dissent, and why Islam has been turned into a police matter? I think it is. But the state is on the wrong track (once again). It should notice that the primary opposition to war and oppression does not emanate from the occasional terrorist violence perpetuated by nihilistic networks. It is the ‘non-Muslim Muslim’, an individual whose mindset is similar to Isaac Deutscher’s ‘non-Jewish Jew’, whose role as a dissident has been far more consequential throughout history. Indeed, the tradition of dissent within Judaism that Deutscher refers to in relation to thinkers such as Spinoza, Marx, Heine and Freud can be extended to include Mansur al-Hallaj, the ninth-century radical Sufi (Islamic mystique) who was executed for heresy because of his self-identification with God; Hafiz, whose odes on wine drinking guaranteed him the eternal wrath of the orthodox clergy; Jalaledin Rumi, whose ‘school of love’ enticed the human spirit towards transcending otherness; Ibn-Arabi, who was condemned as a heretic for having claimed to have seen the Prophet Muhammad; Suhrawardi, the theoretician of the ‘school of





illumination’ or ishraq, who was executed because of his radical ideas; Mullah Sadra, the founder of transcendental Theosophy (a tradition that was followed by Khomeini), who was ostracized from his home town Shiraz; Jamal ad-Din ‘al-Afghani’ (d. 1897), who rejected blind obedience to clerical authorities in a speech in Istanbul in 1870 and who was subsequently expelled from the Ottoman Empire; Ali Shariati, Iran’s archetypal revolutionary intellectual, who died in London under suspicious circumstances just before Khomeini’s return to Tehran in 1978; or Hashem Aghajari, a war veteran and lecturer of history at Tehran University, who was sentenced to death for blasphemy and apostasy in 2002 after criticizing the authority of the Shia clergy (the sentence was eventually suspended). I am aware that I am abstracting from disparate objects of analysis here, but I think it is fair to say that all of these ‘saints’, philosophers, poets and thinkers have searched for the ultimate communion of minds beyond confessional boundaries. They refused to submit; even though some of them were members of confessional empires; even though colonialism compelled others to engineer the nation-state; even though, all of them believe(d) in the Prophethood of Muhammad and in God. Ultimately, their type of thinking is irreconcilable with the fiqh oriented Islam upheld by the orthodox clergy on the one side and the totalitarian ideology espoused by al-Qaeda-type movements on the other. This has not been the place to advance a comprehensively critical understanding of Islam and its linkages to the multitudes, of course. But let me add in conclusion that we should place ourselves in a position to be able to appropriate such an understanding, not only in relation to Islam, but also in relation to other abstractions such as the state, the nation, us, them, immigrants, natives and so forth. I understand this project to imply that no single, causally pure explanation pointing towards a single origin is acceptable. And just as contemporary Islam cannot be explained by subsuming it under a postmodernist meta-narrative, Muslims cannot escape the determinations of global ontologies including the penetrative force of Western modernity. Thus, contemporary Islams are the effects of many dialectics, ontological, empirical, and transcendental. At this point of time, much that has been subjugated in the invention of postcolonial nation-states, much that has been erased or glossed over when Arab, Turkish and Persian nationalisms engineered their own myths and narrations is in the process of being deconstructed. The primary agent of this process is the continued search for Islam’s utopia – one of the oldest universalities of humankind. Understanding how this Islamutopia links up with



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the global multitudes requires some understanding of classical Islamic political thought and contemporary Muslim intellectuals. It renders useful their intellectual contribution to the epistemology of humanity, conscious of their suspicion towards ontological certainty (yaquin), normative assent (tasdiq), methodological conception (tasawwur) and definition (hadd). Such a critical approach captures Islam’s normative momentum in history. It appreciates that Islamutopia holds great enigmas for its agents; it acknowledges that its core motive is the flight or hegra to the ‘certitude’ of the perfect ‘Islamopolis’ or medinat-an nabi; it values that this ancient motive has taken on special powers within the context of (post)modernity; it understands, in short, that Islamutopia opens up the possibility of hope at the most profound level of human imagination: the transcendence of the mundane human order and the anticipation of the godly ordained order instead. We may disagree, but this is why the believer in this utopia laughs at us. As far as he is concerned, he is part of a grand, fantastic project that we are struggling to comprehend.

Notes 1. See especially, Hardt and Negri (2004, pp. 219–227). 2. On the dialectics of culture in world politics, see Adib-Moghaddam (2007/2008, part 2) and Adib-Moghaddam (2006). 3. See further, Nasr and Aminrazavi (1999, pp. 196 ff.). 4. See Afary and Anderson (2005). 5. See further, Adib-Moghaddam (2007/2008). 6. See especially, Arkoun (2006, pp. 29–63). 7. This has been argued most recently by Samir Amin (2007). 8. On Salman Rushdie and Islam, see further Almond (2007, pp. 94–109). 9. This orientation towards God and the relativity of the presence in the here and now is expressed in Article 2 of the Iranian Constitution. 10. See further, Adib-Moghaddam (2007/2008, parts 1 and 5). 11. See Khomeini’s letter to then President (and current ‘Leader of the Revolution’), Ali Khamenei published in Keyhan, 8 January 1988. See also Schirazi (1997, pp. 64–65). 12. See Foucault (2002, p. 286).




Utopias Without Transcendence? Post-Left Anarchy, Immediacy and Utopian Energy Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey

The slogan of the World Social Forum is, famously, ‘Another World is Possible!’ which reminds us what is at stake in delineating the relationship between globalization, alter-mondialisme and utopia. Other worlds, better worlds are needed; they are also possible. What is utopia today may become real, lived tomorrow. But why such a slogan now? On the one hand, so the story goes, utopia and utopianism ‘died’ with the fall of the Wall and the triumph of liberal capitalism. History came to an end and with it politics, hope for a better world, utopia. This story is not of course only told by those on the political right, the neoliberals and neoconservatives; it is also a story of the left, and of the left’s ‘exhausted’ utopian energies as Habermas (1986) put it in an article of the 1980s. For Habermas and indeed many others wearied by sectarian battles, the task of progressive thought was not to dream of other worlds, so much as to ensure that this world was as enlightened, progressive and egalitarian as possible. The time for thinking the ‘break’, the rupture, the cataclysmic event that would bring forward a new and better world has passed. Better to arrange this world as well as we can than to attend to the affairs of the imagined next world. One might wonder still whether such a gesture is one of resignation or understandable realism. However, it is clearly a gesture of another world, one that believed in the sustainability of capitalist development, in the capaciousness of liberaldemocracy as a basis for the continued expansion of egaliberte, in the civilizing propensities of occidental modernity. The present world is less sanguine about these promises, and searches for images and glimpses of something better. On the other hand, scepticism and doubt about utopia persist even in conditions which might be thought to be optimal for their proliferation. 156



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The miseries of communism serve as a stick with which to beat political idealism. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past, and these mistakes are so it appears rooted in the utopian or ‘aesthetic’ imagination that insists on the possibility of remaking the world anew, or according to some blueprint of human happiness or ‘fullness’ as neo-Lacanians put it (Stavrakakis, 1999). So we seem caught between a desire for utopia (‘Another world is possible!’) and a fear as to the ramifications of mobilizing utopia for political ends. We seem as John Holloway (2002) recently argued caught between varieties of political realism, whether social democratic or Leninist in origin or a puritanical idealism that is unwilling to confront directly the causes of human misery and thus which retreats to varieties of lifestyle radicalism. The WSF is perhaps an apt institutional expression of this immobilism – a utopian space, a space for dreaming, that itself resists becoming a radical form of agency (Tormey, 2004b). The WSF is a ‘non-political’ space, a space where we may dare dream, but not to act. Is there no way out of this impasse theoretically, politically? The aim of this chapter is to explore the potential for an otherwise neglected political current, post-left anarchy, to offer a way out of what can otherwise seem like incompatible position: a utopianism that is at once idealistic and radical but which also calls upon us to act in the hereand-now.1 After summarizing the origins and ideas of post-left anarchy, we examine how utopian energies are theorized in post-left anarchy and the extent to which it can be typified as a utopian movement. Focusing on Alfredo Bonanno’s ‘Propulsive Utopia’ and the anonymous article ‘Desire is Speaking: Utopian Rhizomes’, and also exploring briefly the relationship of post-left anarchy to intentional communities and utopian fiction, the chapter will attempt to locate similarities and differences between post-left utopia and the broader modalities of utopian thinking. In spite of post-left anarchists’ objections to future orientations and prefiguration, rejection of the separation of future and present, and resultant problematic relationship with utopia as ‘social dreaming’, it will be contended that their work contains a more-or-less explicit utopian element residing in the formation of lines of flight that escape the present without creating a new ‘present’ considered as a fixed or stable order. This leads to new theoretical possibilities for utopian studies and radical theory which will be explored in conclusion. The idea of lines of flight will be examined as a kind of present-oriented or atemporal utopianism which rejects the separation of present from future but retains the utopian energy of hope and of social imagining and creation which is



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a feature of ‘deferred utopias’ of the classically modernist kind, that is, fully mapped ‘other worlds’ that require leaps from the present to be realized or approached. The chapter will attempt to theorize the relationship between lines of flight and utopia by relating hope to the release into the social world of otherwise contained transversal connections and flows of desire, suggesting that social dreaming is a variety of the broader phenomenon of lines of flight and expresses these lines configured in a particular way or at a particular moment. In this way we can begin to move towards a form of utopian theorizing that avoids the trap of the ‘deferred utopia’ whilst recognizing the utopian energies present in many phenomena and initiatives that are otherwise prone to be written off by radical commentators as of little political significance.

Situating post-left anarchy It has sometimes been observed that the most interesting groups are small and internally fractious – hence the productivity of their ideas. Post-left anarchy is certainly a numerically small tendency, further split into tendencies such as immediatism, insurrectionism and anarchoprimitivism; but it is a minor tendency in a Deleuzian sense also, rejecting massified and majoritarian politics in favour of a fragmentary creativity. It has an unspecifiable relationship to what Richard Day (2004) terms the ‘newest’ social movements, such as Reclaim the Streets, Critical Mass, SchNews, the Wombles, the radical squatters movement, anarcho-punk, ecological movements such as Earth First!, animal rights, indigenous solidarity and so on. Its ideas often seem either to have echoed or inspired tendencies in these newer movements, its theorists are generally participants in the social field defined by these movements, and for this reason it has a wider field of influence than simply those people who openly define themselves as post-left anarchists (or even as anarchists), but this influence flows in subterranean and hybrid ways, not through clear channels of organizational affiliation or personal identity. In the absence of very much in the way of academic literature on the subject, we need to say something by way of introduction to this political current. Post-left anarchy is a recent tendency in anarchist theory drawing on post-Situationist and post-autonomist currents. It is defined as post-left against the dominant strand of anarchism which was termed ‘leftist’ – thinkers such as Bookchin, Chomsky, Meltzer and related political tendencies which associate with the Spanish revolutionary



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heritage, syndicalist or communist models and a formal organization into federations. In the polemical essay ‘From Politics to Life: Ridding Anarchy of the Leftist Millstone’, Wolfi Landstreicher (2005) defines post-left anarchy against what are taken to be the exemplary features of leftism: struggle, organization, representation, propaganda, massification, progressivism, identity-categories, quantitativism and ideology. Leftism is associated with class orientation, identity politics of class, organizationalism verging on bureaucracy, and uncritical relationship to industrial society. Post-left anarchists in contrast orient to the immediate expression of desire, constructing the kind of world one wants to live in immanently and horizontally, and radically and antagonistically rejecting or attacking the social forms and institutions of the dominant social system. While the ‘post’ tends to be emphasized in post-left writings, this is also clearly a current which draws on earlier ‘leftisms’ such as Situationism and autonomist Marxism, in regard, for instance, to the valorization of equality and freedom, the critique of capitalism and the state and the attack on alienation. Many but not all post-left anarchists are also what is termed ‘anti-civilization’, meaning that they reject technology (as distinct from tools used by a bricoleur) and propose radical ecological models of rewilding and wildness. Post-left anarchy has adherents throughout the social movements of core countries, but most of its theorizing seems to come from America, Italy and to a lesser extent France and Britain. Leading adherents have included John Zerzan, Hakim Bey, Bob Black, Feral Faun, Alfredo Bonanno, Fredy Perlman and John Moore. The theoretical tendency has originated a number of magazines and journals such as Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed, Wilful Disobedience, Fifth Estate, Green Anarchy and Killing King Abacus (all from America), plus similar publications in Britain, Italy, Holland and so on. As a speech-genre of theorizing, it most often takes the form of uncompromising critiques of aspects of the present social system, such as work, technology or the labelling of deviance. Hardly surprising therefore that academics have so far been largely oblivious to post-left anarchy. This is an unapologetically political form of radicalism, as opposed to a form of academic radicalism whose goal is to politely dismantle the baroquely expressed arguments of other academics. In general, post-left anarchy can be seen as a radical critique of the idea of the separation of future and present and a critique of the idea of orienting to the future. One source identifies post-left anarchy as primarily against separation of ourselves from the means of existence,





hence as a movement against separation and alienation. The hardening of power into permanent institutions is therefore to be resisted, both as something alienating and as destroying the effectiveness of struggles against capitalism and the state. Instead it substitutes an ethos of action, ‘just do it’ or ‘do it yourself’, in which creative action motivated by desire is to occur immediately in the present. Hence for Bonanno, being an anarchist is something continual and lived, expressed in every aspect of one’s life, not a position one takes or a truth one has access to. Most of all it means not separating thought from action. In this gesture post-left anarchy shows its affinity if not debt to earlier thinkers and traditions of thought that were similarly concerned to avoid the separation of theory and practice. One hears echoes, for example, of Stirner’s exasperation with all species of ideology as ‘spooks’ that prevent us thinking for ourselves, of Tolstoy’s anti-intellectualism and admonition to change oneself into an exemplar of the good life, of Agnes Heller’s humanist critique of the utilitarian ethics of Leninism, with its sacrificing of generations now for some far off Tomorrow (Tormey, 2007). In the case of post-left anarchy this embrace of the possibilities of the present is associated with an idea of abundance, a rejection of scarcity, which parallels the Situationist differentiation of life from survival and is partly inspired by Marshall Sahlins’ thesis of ‘primitive affluence’ (Sahlins, 1974; Vaneigem, 1994). Hakim Bey (1996a), for instance, argues that ‘the myth of scarcity is merely a means of control through immiseration, whereas the actual nature of the world is one of absolute fullness, indeed over-fullness, spilling over as constant excess’. Capital’s concern is not to satisfy desire but rather to exacerbate longing (Bey, 1996c). In ‘Feral Revolution’, Feral Faun (1988) urges experience of a ‘vital energy’ similar to that of children – an intensity of emotion which goes against domestication and repression. A ‘web of domination’ prevents us from experiencing this energy of untamed desire (Faun, 1988). In positing abundance, post-left anarchy radically rejects any transcendental dimension. Hence, the future is not radically other, nor is it ‘to come’; rather, alternative ways of being are realized directly in the present. This present action is about actually creating a new world and is not seen as prefigurative, propagandistic or counterhegemonic (though it has a strategic dimension in its collisions with the dominant system). It thus rejects the usual functions of intentional community in utopian theory which often places great emphasis on their allegedly exemplary properties and thus their importance to process of change and social transformation – usually to the surprise of



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members of such communities who as often as not are seeking to escape such strategic and consequentialist forms of reasoning.

Utopia in a negative sense could be identified with the illusions attributed to leftism, particularly the separation of present and future, and the organizational tendency to reshape the world according to a model. Obviously the latter approach of utopia as ‘blueprint’ would be rejected by most utopian theorists. But post-left anarchy is also sceptical of desires which are delayed or deferred, which would problematize its relationship to a wider current of utopian thought associated with authors such as Derrida, Levinas and Bloch. One is to realize one’s desires immediately, in concrete social actions and relations; in this sense, one is not to dream or hope, but to act. As Bey (2002) puts it, ‘act as if you were already free’. The situation is further complicated because post-left anarchy is explicitly anti-ideological (rejecting the idea of a single way of living or seeing), and overlaps with activist and lifestyle ‘scenes’ which do not identify themselves theoretically at all, particularly ‘do-it-yourself’ subcultures such as anarcho-punk. One also finds post-left anarchists are often very critical of what is taken to be ‘postmodernism’, which has been a polemical target for both Zerzan and Bey. The objection is made that ‘postmodernism’ either accepts and glorifies the present or is so caught up in negativity as to deny action based on affirmation. It is not our point here to assess the validity of this critique, which certainly rests on oversimplification of a large and diverse body of work. Nor is it to assess whether post-left anarchy is theoretically superior to the kind of politics of responsibility and limits which arises from deconstruction. Our point is, rather, to assess how post-left anarchy manages to theorize utopia in spite of rejecting the kind of transcendental otherness or deferred resolution which is implied in Derridean, Lacanian and Levinasian approaches.2 A Derridean approach taken strictly implies the impossibility of absolute immanence and of immediacy, because the horizon is necessarily separated from lived actuality. Post-left anarchy insists on the possibility and necessity of absolute immanence and immediacy. Our desire in this chapter is to show how post-left anarchy theorizes utopia in the absence of a transcendent dimension. We are sympathetic not only to the post-left position on immediacy and immanence but also to aspects of the Derridean position; we would not want to rule out the possibility either of new desires



Post-left utopia?


forming or of an existing actualization being inadequate to some further demand of the other to other others. At the same time, the possibility of immanence as a lived relational structure of life needs to be upheld as a possibility, and our purpose is thus to assess whether utopia can survive a rejection of transcendence. Following on from the above what is intriguing is that, even while rejecting utopia as transcendence, post-left anarchy both participates in and encourages what are traditionally seen as ‘utopian’ forms of social action, such as utopian writing, intentional communities and transformative action. Post-left anarchy has produced its own sub-genre of utopian and futuristic fiction such as PM’s Bolo’Bolo and Thom Metzger’s This Is Your Final Warning. It is associated with the creation of alternative spaces such as squats and social centres and is closely linked to the radical squatters’ movement in Europe. Even more crucially, its most central concern as a body of thought is what might, following Bloch and Marcuse, be called the utopian function of thought, escaping and thinking outside the categories of the existing system and finding other ways of thinking and living, by creating a gap between thought and the categories of the existing system. Hence in Landstreicher’s essay, anarchy is viewed as a ‘dream’ of the ‘total transformation of existence based on the reappropriation of life by each and every individual’, and in one of Bey’s essays, the ‘legend’, or daydream transmuted into active dreaming, is taken as central to insurgent activism. This aspect of lived social dreaming is the primary function, for instance, of the ‘primitive’ in anarcho-primitivism, not so much as a past to return to or a present to defend (though it has aspects of both of these), but as something which shows the contingency and undesirability of dominant industrial-capitalist ways of being in comparison. Hence the title of Zerzan’s best-known work, ‘Future Primitive’, is indicative. The ‘primitive’ (indigenous, natural, or non-technological) functions as an equivalent for intentional community even while posited as a past or present fact – ‘Ever-growing documentation of human prehistory as a very long period of largely non-alienated life stands in sharp contrast to the increasingly stark failures of untenable modernity’ (Zerzan, 2003–2004). Similarly, Bey (1996b) seeks not a return TO the primitive, but a return OF the primitive (as the repressed) – the return of psychological techniques we have lost or repressed. Bey calls for a re-sacralizing or re-enchantment of counter-imagery to combat the spectacle (Bey, 1996c). Where it may differ from many other utopianisms is in attempting to place action and life firmly on the side of the utopian, against



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the dominant system. This leads to issues of strategy in terms of making such a future thinkable and liveable. The realization of a primitive future in anarcho-primitivism is often conceived in terms of rewilding, which simultaneously refers to the recovery of wildness within the self (the overcoming of psychological repression theorized as recovery of wildness) and the defence and extension of wild and feral ecological spaces. A similar issue arises in Bonanno’s work, as regards the difficulty of inwardly rejecting psychological pressures exerted by ‘spooks’ (reactive formations). Discussing guilt associated with property damage, he argues in an echo of Stirner that, ‘[n]o matter how much we go into things theoretically spooks remain inside all of us’. Hence, it is not as simple as to say that the present completely replaces the future. There are often still tasks to be achieved in overcoming the impact of the dominant system. The point, however, is that this overcoming is to be realized in the present if at all possible. This is certainly not Marcuse’s (1969b) ‘repressive reduction of thought to the present’, but more an expansion of the present to the limits of thought. Post-left anarchy has faced criticism from authors such as Murray Bookchin on the basis that its rejection of transcendence amounts to a rejection of social transformation and that it is a theory of immediate personal satisfaction which disregards social change and hence accepts the status quo. For Bookchin (1995), ‘lifestyle anarchism’ is individualistic and childish. ‘Lifestyle anarchists’ demand ‘anarchy now’, imagining they can create a new society through individual lifestyle changes. In his view this is a kind of fake-dissident consumerism which ultimately has no impact on the functioning of capitalism because it fails to recognize the realities of the present. John Armitage (1999) mounts a similar critique of Hakim Bey, arguing that the kind of practices he envisages can be recuperated by capitalism and are already part of its logic – all of which provides fuel for the Zizekian-Badiouian insistence on the necessity for a rupture or break of a collective kind, and thus of the inevitable separation between the radical Act and the radical Future which necessitates evaluating all radical gestures in the present in terms of an overarching strategy to overthrow capitalism. This criticism misses the exact relationship between desire and social change in post-left anarchy. Although the point of social transformation is indeed desire-satisfaction, indeed the revolutionizing of the relationship between desire and social relations, post-left anarchy includes a definite orientation to social transformation. The point is, however, that this transformation occurs immediately and immanently, through the construction of new social relations and without a means-ends




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separation. Revolution or insurrection is to be pursued in the here and now, rather than displaced into a future which is then pursued by separate organizational means. We shall return to this issue below.

Alfredo Bonanno’s ‘Propulsive Utopia’ was written in the aftermath of the 1987 railway and student strikes in France and relates utopia to the active energies involved in movements for social change which reclaim spaces from the system. Bonanno argues vigorously against deferral and transcendence. ‘We cannot wait so are acting here and now, recognising no point of reference on which to pin our hopes and expectations’; ‘[a]nd we contradict historicism, or so it seems, with our craving desire for action’. This is, of course, in contrast to utopia theorized as precisely such a point of reference. Against deferral, Bonanno posits a type of utopianism which is infinite and actual. ‘The strength of the utopian concept multiplies to infinity at precisely the moment in which it is proposed, so long as it emerges within the real movement and is not an ideological plaything within the fictitious one.’ A distinction is hence introduced between two types of utopia – those which ‘emerge from the real movement’ and those which are ‘ideological’ and ‘fictitious’. We would suggest that this is not simply a repetition of the selectivity or sectarianism of Marxist ideology critique. Rather, it suggests a distinction of types between utopias and utopianisms, based on the energies and potentialities they express or actualize. The utopia in movement is something living and actual, which flows in and beneath the movement. This is ‘propulsive utopia, the life-blood of the real movement’, ‘[t]he incredible thunderbolt of a propelling idea suddenly surges up from the grey monotony of everyday life. A desire to be beyond the abyss, well beyond it’, which ‘feeds off a hidden but burning collective desire’. This utopian desire is similar to the ‘scream’ with which John Holloway (2002) begins his account, a rejection of the present which is simultaneously an active energy seeking otherness. In the earlier Armed Joy, it had been termed a ‘need for communism’ (Bonanno, 1977). Utopia here consists of something akin to the Situationist idea of ‘demanding the impossible’, something which defies and exceeds the system’s insistence that its own limits be taken as limits of the possible. Hence, ‘the real movement is rediscovering the explosive potential of utopia’, and ‘only with a radically utopian way of seeing the social problem will it be possible to break through the boundaries of a destiny



Propulsive utopia


The propulsive value of a concept cannot be understood in social terms if one limits oneself to examining existing conditions. In fact there is no causal relationship between social conditions and a utopian concept. The latter moves within the real movement and is in deep contrast to the structural limits that condition but do not cause it. (Bonanno, 1977) A sharp distinction is drawn here between movement and structure, the diachronic and the synchronic. Causality is placed on the side of structure, of the internal logic of an observable system, and hence distinguished from movement, which is excessive over it. It is not that this utopian element is somehow outside the network of causes and effects; rather, it is excessive almost in the sense of chaos theory, having effects which are not reducible or predictable. Hence, a claim is being made that the utopian concept is not part of the existing structure. In this way it becomes what Deleuze and Guattari term a line of flight, by which they mean something/anything that escapes the present structure and which therefore demonstrates the contingency and boundedness of that which is otherwise taken to be solid, stable, permanent. Something is ‘propulsive’ if it exists on the side of movement rather than structure. To understand it, one cannot remain within the analysis of existing conditions; one must rather enter the field of socially generative forces, a field that is populated not merely by things that are, but by things that are coming to be – that are becoming-something. Bonanno is here utilizing distinctions which are widespread in the history of radical thought. One could reconstruct this account around the categories of structure and agency, institution and group-in-fusion, substance and subject, to mention just a few. Propulsive utopia is not simply propulsive in the sense of generating action, but in that it exists in the field of movement, becoming and agency, not in the field of fixity, being and structure. Because it is on this side of the divide, it therefore exists in excess over the existing structure, and is not determined by the fixed relations of cause and effect internal to it. Because it is in excess



that those in power seem to hold in their hands’. Utopia is discussed in terms of finding a way ‘to see a clearer road for getting out of the swamp of possibilism’. Hence, utopia has the function of escaping the limits on the possible which are posited by the system. Bonanno locates the idea of propulsion in relation to the rejection of the limits of the present:


over the structure, it can go beyond the structure – even beyond its own causes within the present – into an opening to other possibilities. Another world becomes possible because the force of propulsion is in excess over the force of inertia. Not only are the two kinds of utopia counterposed to one another, but the ‘propulsive’ type is taken to be existentially primary, with the deferred or alienated kind taken to be a reified derivative of it. Hence, Bonanno argues that the utopian energy, the scream, is primary, but that many people put it out of their minds or introject it into themselves. It is when this happens that the other kind of utopia, deferred utopia, arises, and this is a domestication of the primary utopian energy. Conversion of utopia into theory is taken as an instance of such domestication. ‘Here in the rarefied atmosphere of the castle of spooks the utopian concept, having lost all its significance, becomes no more than a product of ideology like so many others.’ In this respect, utopia undergoes the same process that Situationists suggest afflicts most social phenomena, from activism to enjoyment. Bonanno also theorizes the distinction between the two types as a matter of reality versus unreality. Words become substance when they break into the consciousness of a real movement. This claim echoes an earlier discussion in The Anarchist Tension, where Bonanno (1996) argues that an idea, as a life-motivating point of reference, is distinct from an opinion, which is flattened and massified. Again this is open to a simplistic misreading that Bonanno is contrasting ‘real’ theoretically accurate to ‘false’ consciousness, positing a kind of essentialism. This is a misreading because it transmutes into categories of truth what are actually categories of types of subjective attachment. It is more accurate, and productive, to read Bonanno as counterposing different kinds of energies or commitments. A ‘real’ movement is associated with direct, active expressions of desire, whereas the insubstantial ‘false’ thought is emotionally disinvested and not actualized. His distinction is hence similar to Gramsci’s distinction between organic ideologies and arbitrary ideologies, but taken outside Gramsci’s class framework into a broader anti-capitalism focused on exclusion and alienation. Also echoing Gramsci, he draws a kind of distinction between types of imaginary which is similar to the common sense/good sense distinction. This similarity is not entirely surprising. In some respects Gramsci can be read as a proto-Deleuzian; both Gramsci and Deleuze emphasize the importance of the inscription of commitments and concepts at the level of desire and ‘vital energy’, and they both distinguish between an active type of inscription and a reactive (or passive) inscription, deeming the



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latter undesirable. Hence, the active energy underlying historical transformation is at risk of being rendered ‘fictitious’ by being disconnected from active energies. If this happens, it becomes a Stirnerian spook, an empty category which suppresses rather than enables, which renders itself impotent, and which cannot trigger positive changes. Bonanno has a specific sense of what the utopian concept is, which positions it in political theory. ‘[T]he real movement is finding itself by pointing to a great utopian objective: go beyond rights to the full reality of the deed’. This is partly a repetition of the point already made; rights here stands for the inscription of demands within the system, for their expression as ‘spooks’, whereas the ‘deed’ (or in other places, ‘conditions’) stands for the lived actuality of a situation. Hence, equal rights is counterposed to equality of conditions which is put on the side of difference, ‘a revolutionary struggle for the equality of all, the maximum exaltation of the difference of each one’, ‘[e]quality of conditions, possibilities, freedom, values, social space and so on, all in the more profound difference of desires, feelings, aims, interests, culture, physical aspects, etc.’ Bonanno here echoes Richard Day’s (2004) critique of the ‘politics of demand’ which inscribes desires in the system. He counterposes a language which is deemed utopian in the propulsive sense to a language which is deemed falsely utopian or non-utopian. In this, he understands clearly the structural forces involved, but presents an overly simplistic account of the language of rights. It is indeed the case that a right is necessarily a recognition of a demand, that it makes sense only in relation to an other, and that it usually expresses the way a social system recognizes the limits of its power or claims on others. Hence, an ultimate insurrection against the system as such cannot claim rights from it, because it does not recognize the other who recognizes rights. In a mobile strategic field, however, the winning of rights can serve to consolidate or defend autonomy by placing limits on the system’s intrusions in a context where it continues to exist. The language of rights can also express autonomy and freedom in an emancipated or autonomous space, ensuring for instance the construction of a space where dialogue is possible or where one project is not imposed as total; it could thus be enabling of difference. It may be more productive to follow Marcuse in suggesting that any ethical concept (such as freedom, rights, justice, equality) can function in either a utopian or non-utopian way, depending on its degree of distance from the existing system. The system can render almost any concept ‘operational’ and hence non-subversive, by defining it in





an identity with the present. If in contrast a concept is put on the side of frustrated desires and social dreaming, it can take on a utopian content. One could here say that Bonanno’s critique refers to the language of formal and legal rights, not to the language of rights per se, and similarly that equality, freedom, welfare and difference can be put on the side of the system by being reduced to fixed categories. This is what Bloch views as the utopian function of ideologies, a residue or surplus of transformative potentiality operating in ideological concepts (Kellner, 1997). Marcuse (1964, pp. 178–179) similarly argues for a distance between concepts and the existing world which is falsely elided in dominant appropriations of philosophical and ethical terms. The question may well be less about the specific concepts used than about different ways of using and relating to the concepts. This said, Bonanno is attaching a Blochian utopian residue to concepts such as equality and freedom, precisely by differentiating them from the dominant ‘operational’ meanings. In this sense he is assigning these concepts a utopian function.

Desire is speaking: utopian rhizomes Let us now proceed to ‘Desire is Speaking: Utopian Rhizomes’, an article about the radical squatters’ movement in Europe. As with Bonanno’s piece, this explicitly utopian article begins with an admission that the tendency under discussion is in a certain sense radically anti-utopian, contrasted with the big ideals of the 1960s and before. The 1980s and ‘90s, the period under discussion, are cast as a period of atopia. After the utopian period of Love and Peace, the ‘80s with all its ‘No Future’ attitude can be considered to be an atopia. With their dark clothes and nihilistic attitude, punks were not exactly flower children. They had no poetic vision of the future. Only the here and now existed, and the notion that you have to make the best out of that. If the system sucks, create something yourself, something different, something better or at least something more fun. (Kallenberg, 2001) We shall see in a moment how this immediatist attitude is nevertheless compatible with a certain kind of utopian theory. But the article also addresses another question: why did people nevertheless pursue alternative spaces, if not for a ‘poetic vision of the future’? The answer is



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that they wanted ‘[t]o live by own desires rather than what the system determines’, so that social struggle took the form of ‘fighting for a space to realise this’. In other words, there was a division between the (utopian?) alternative modality of action of the squatters and the system against which they defined themselves, even though this was not periodized into present and future, and both aspects were very much within the present. Most squatters didn’t want to change the world, but live their life here and now the way they chose to. If we can speak of any ideology, it was the ideology that there was none. As a female squatter said to a journalist of the newspaper de Volkskrant: ‘Not an abstract ideal, nor the adherence to an ideology, or even a better society, but the improvement of a lousy personal situation. That is why I am involved.’ (Kallenberg, 2001) But is this a utopian motivation? On one level it sounds very like a reformist or gradualist position, the kind of position which would affirm the label of ‘lifestyle anarchism’. But this would be accurate only if the improvement of a personal situation was taking place within limits determined by the system. The point of this kind of radical activism is often very different, to improve a situation (of poverty, or boredom, or suffering) which cannot be solved within the system, by actively pushing beyond its limits. It thus expresses much the same kind of orientation which, were it not actualized, would take the form of hope or social dreaming. It differs in that it is temporally present rather than deferred. In this sense, it has more in common with revolutionary utopianism than with reformism. One then sees a reintroduction of a distinction similar to that made by Bonanno between propulsive utopias and utopian spooks. A lot of people are disappointed that there isn’t a shared utopia anymore, no expectation of a better future. According to some of them, the shared utopian vision has always been ‘the core of left politics, and that has to stay that way.’ Well, if this is true, then perhaps the movement isn’t ‘left’ anymore. But the dischord with the existing order and the desire to create something different here and now still remains. The shared utopia disappeared, but the utopian practices didn’t.





One also finds again the idea that utopia is something dangerous which is rendered harmless by reconstruction in what the system takes as possible, by recuperation or domestication. ‘In the Netherlands, the actions of the Provos and Kabouters were overruled by Marxist student leaders and the politicians of the New Left. The desires became harmless, the utopian moment passed by.’ In this case, propulsive utopia versus utopian spooks is reconstructed as left utopia versus utopia of desire. This inscribes it clearly in the post-left anarchist framework. What about the content of utopia? Bonanno theorized the utopian concept in terms of changing conditions, equality and the scream. The anonymous author of this article theorizes it in terms of the replacement of exchange with gift, and scarcity with abundance. ‘The struggle against the economization of our daily lives is not merely a struggle against the market, but against economy itself, against the notion of scarcity. Most of the movement’s practices are based on this notion of abundance.’ Hence, abundance (in Sahlins’ sense of an existential relation, a way of constructing the world) becomes a part of the practices which are reconstructed in everyday life, against the economy of capitalism. This is taken to involve the release of desire. ‘Desire, however, doesn’t know exchange, but only theft and gift.’ It is also a ludic moment, pitted against the work system. ‘But most important is that the movement shows that you can have fun doing what you do. That you can play instead of work.’ This is something which comes into existence interstitially, in the gaps and holes in the system. ‘Squatters are idealistic, but also pragmatic, or perhaps “strategic” is a better word here. In order to survive you have to use the various possibilities the system unintentionally offers you.’ Hence, something is brought into being as radical outside, based on abundance, gift, theft, play and strategy. At its peak this creates an entire other world. ‘Back then [at the height of the movement] it was no problem at all to live in what might be called a squatted zone for almost 24 hours a day’. This explicitly Deleuzian theorizing of intentional communities goes further in theorizing these spaces as not so much communities as assemblages of desire, and as rhizomes instead of arborescent structures. What we see here is not a community, nor solidarity groups, but configurations of desire: networks of friendship and expression . . . . There is no utopian tree from which readymade ideas about another world can be picked, but endless rhizomes on which at unexpected moments flowers appear.



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This transition from tree to rhizome does not, however, mark an end of utopia: ‘utopianism didn’t disappear after the ‘70s, it’s everywhere’. One thus finds the propulsive versus spook distinction repeated in yet another form, this time as utopian tree versus utopian rhizomes. Again the difference is partly in the relationship to desire, active versus reactive, but it is here also theorized in forms of arrangements of space, hierarchic versus rhizomatic. Again, utopia means an ‘other space’ but not a temporal otherness, not future or deferral but a different kind of spatiality in the present.

Utopia as line of flight So, is post-left anarchy a body of utopian theorizing or not? It is clear that what is rejected in post-left anarchy is the association of utopia with deferral, with specific ideological projects, and with abstract products of the mind. Despite this rejection of much of what conventionally characterizes utopia, post-left anarchy nevertheless actively engages in utopian theorizing and practice, associating utopia with propulsive energies for change, different ways of being and the actualization of desire. This in turn can help us think more clearly about what is central and what is contingent in the concept of utopia. Utopias are often associated with temporal otherness, with the future or fictional spaces, with prefiguration or with deferral. However, this is not necessary to utopia as such. Rather, utopian energies can take present- or future-oriented forms. What is central to utopia is rather its functioning as a becoming, a movement – as ‘other space’, as rejection of the limits of the dominant system, and as articulation of desire in immediacy (as abundance or immanence) rather than the positing of a gap in the world as fundamental. The distinction to be made here is between utopia as energy and utopia as fixity. What Bonanno is calling ‘propulsive’ utopia implies a split between these two aspects and a critique of utopia-as-fixity as an alienation of utopia-as-energy, so that rather than social change emerging from utopian projects, it is the projects which either express or distort transformative energies. This is not necessarily a new element in utopian studies. Utopia has always been associated with critique, transformation and the social function (as opposed to simply the existence) of written utopias and intentional communities. What is different here, however, is the primacy attached to this utopian social function. The post-left rejection of some kinds of utopianism as ‘spooks’ or fixities reflects a particular view of the dangers of fixing and hence limiting





the movement of ‘propulsive’ or active forces. This is an instance of a concern expressed across a range of social theories – the Deleuzian distinction between active and reactive desire, Stirner’s distinction between desires and spooks, Marxist and Situationist critiques of alienation, the ideas of power-to and power-over in Holloway, constitutive and constituted power in Negri, instituting and instituted imaginaries in Castoriadis and so on. Implicit in such distinctions is a view that the usual represented or fixed expression of underlying forces is something to be treated with suspicion or even rejected. The basic state of existence is amorphous, diverse, abundant or excessive, and is characterized by flow and becoming; its expression in fixities of being is part of the social construction of repression. One could think of this, following structuralist analysis, as a distinction between diachronic and synchronic states of existence. Hence, a diachronic utopianism would not draw a distinction between the utopian moment and the process of its realization; it would bring the utopian moment into the present as a specific social force. In this sense it would be ‘propulsive’ – providing an energy within actual movements rather than standing outside them as an ideal or transcendent moment. It would hence be largely identical with the active desires underlying insurrection. Synchronic utopia, in contrast, would be alienated from the place of utopian energy in transformation. As a synchronic moment, utopia is fixed and hence limited (this is easiest to study – a community at a certain stage, or a text) – definable as non-transformative to the extent that it is viewed as fixed. It would be fixed, reified or turned into a ‘spook’, and would hence lose the active energies associated with diachronic utopia and tend to become transcendental and hence reactive. There is a danger in viewing utopia as fixity if it is identified exclusively with utopian literature and/or with intentional communities, even though studies of these often also emphasize the aspect of utopia as transformative energy. Hence, it is important to view such aspects of utopia as being moments of an energy which precedes and exceeds them. At the most basic level, utopia is not a particular space or place but movement or flow which in turn may create new spatial possibilities (‘smooth space’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms). Utopia is not necessarily a temporal category, but a category of desire (on the side of active desire, abundance, immanence and rhizomatics or horizontality); in this sense it can be presently active, not necessarily delayed or deferred. The concept of line of flight emerges in Deleuze and Guattari as a way of theorizing tendencies already existing in assemblages and structures



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of desire which point away from the inscription in arborescent and striated systems. A line of flight is a line which is distinct from the trunk-and-branches model, in that a line joins any two points and hence constructs a part of a rhizome. Hence the authors posit ‘a necessity for desiring-production . . . to be discovered through its lines of escape’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, pp. 314–315). Lines of flight lead out of dominant arborescent systems and into other types of assemblages. Instead of surrounding and girding in the earth, they can reconnect it into the cosmos. Absolute deterritorialization occurs when deterritorialization brings about a new earth by linking together lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 510). Hence, a line of flight has a triple aspect – as a line existing in the present and pointing out of it, similar to Gramsci’s ‘good sense’; as a different, radically other type of connection incommensurable with the dominant assemblage, but existing alongside it; and as a potentiality for radical otherness, for a wholly different type of social relations. Lines of flight are thus very close to what is meant by propulsive utopia, utopian rhizome or diachronic utopia. At a certain point, utopia fuses into line of flight, and thus utopian studies wash into studies of social movements, revolution and insurrection. To study utopia is to study the active energies which operate as underlying forces in the construction of social transformation. The distinction between active and reactive, between utopian tree and utopian rhizome or between propulsive utopia and utopian spook hence becomes crucial in distinguishing between utopias which express different kinds of desires and different kinds of underlying forces. How does this relate to the question of the principle of hope as the drive behind utopia? Hope is typically connected to unrealized desires, and hence, viewed diachronically, can be seen as an expression of the process of realization constructed over time, hence as a propulsive energy. On the other hand, hope viewed synchronically is connected to the alienation of desire, the displacement of realization into an ‘other’ time and space and the rejection or deferral of immanence and immediacy. Hope can be said to be a product of limited or in Deleuzian terms ‘cramped’ space and as expressing the internalization of the limits of the space within desire. Utopian energy in the full sense, however, is propulsive hope, which turns cramped spaces into smooth spaces. Hope remains an emancipatory energy even when trapped in a cramped space; it takes the form of an escapism which stops short of escape. Hence, hope is an expression of a diachronic energy of desire, bouncing off the wall of a confining space. Immanence, as in post-left anarchy, is desire




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seeking and creating smooth space in the present. Social dreaming thus becomes a synchronic, partial expression of an underlying diachronic energy which tends towards actualisation.

It remains to link this exploration of utopia back to the themes with which we started: what is the function of utopia today? As we analyse it, one of the causes of immobilism on the left is the resistance to utopia, because of the intellectual and political connotations of the ‘failed experiments’ of the twentieth century. We are scared to experiment, scared to dream, scared even to hope for something better for fear of invoking the dread totalitarian spook of the utopia that is One, singular and thus all-encompassing and intolerant of difference. Muscular realism prevails encouraging us to embrace ‘counter hegemonic’ strategies that build from the realities of political life and thus which inure us to the logics of consquentialism and ‘dirty hands’. Or we are encouraged to retreat to a pragmatic accommodation with the status quo in the name of a gradually unfolding ‘democratic revolution’. Better to secure the rights and freedoms promised in constitutional systems that to unleash the agonal forces lurking in the barrios, shanty towns and cardboard cities of our global metropolis. These two responses, ‘realistic realism’ and pragmatic accommodation, seem to us to ignore the necessary utopianism of any kind of meaningful transformative politics. We need not merely to keep hope for another world alive, but to enact and embody other worlds. We have argued that there is a considerable potential in post-left anarchy for thinking utopia as an interstitial concept, a way of dissolving the temporal, theoretical and political transition between the here-and-now and the future utopian world. We propose that the distinction between ‘deferred utopia’ and ‘propulsive utopia’ is particularly useful in the present conjuncture, because it shows us that utopia need not be theorized as a break or rupture in an otherwise crystalline or omnipotent structure. Utopian energies are present in this structure as lines of flight, leakages that remind us that the structure is, as Holloway puts it, always something that is being produced, always structuring. It is the result of a process, and that process is incomplete and imperfect. Energies escape or leak and this energy is itself utopian, propulsive, constituting, instaurating. Of course not everything that resists and challenges the status quo is utopian on this reading; it is not a case of valorizing those who are against, as if mere negativity is utopian. It is when those against, the



Another world is becoming-possible . . .


Notes 1. To be clear ‘post-left anarchy’ is not another term for ‘post-anarchism’ which is an intellectual current of thought associated with the work of academics such as Todd May, Saul Newman and Lewis Call. By contrast post-left anarchy has few advocates in academia. Indeed there is very little in the way of academic commentary on post-left anarchy in any of its guises. One notable exception would be Ruth Kinna (2005). 2. Those who endorse an approach of deferral but are less pessimistic than Derrida and Lacan often take an approach of prefiguration – utopia mediates between present and future. This is the position one could attribute to Benjamin, Bloch, Bakhtin and Agamben, for example. We find this approach useful, but for the purposes of this chapter, the relevant point is that it violates the post-left anarchist rejection of mediation and deferral.



scream, conjoin with energies that directly challenge the dismal instrumentality of the present that we sense utopia: not a prefiguration of something-to-come, but an instantiation of something-else, a not yet fully formed space/place, a becoming-different that shows that other worlds are not merely possible, they are in-formation.

11 Lincoln Dahlberg

Introduction Global digital networking has become the basis for renewed utopianism. Stories of and ‘from’ cyberspace tell of digital networking transporting users to a radically new and agreeable world, a realm beyond the physically embodied geographical coordinates and restrictions of offline life, where one’s needs and desires can be fully realized.1 Cyber-utopianism does not generally offer detailed societal blueprints, as in classical utopian writing. Rather, it provides loose visions of the good life online. These visions are of cyberspace as a place of global interaction free from dominating powers, enabling the realization of full human being. The specific content of these visions varies substantially, particularly due to the marked differences in political tradition being drawn upon, which range from conservative to anarchist. Here I focus upon libertarian cyber-utopianism, exemplified by 1990s ‘Silicon Valley’ Internet enthusiasm and more recently in some ‘Web 2.0’ rhetoric. This ‘discourse’ is important to investigate because it has gained significant influence in digital communications writing and policy. More generally, examining libertarian cyber-utopianism provides another means by which to explore utopian thought. To examine libertarian cyber-utopianism, I draw upon post-Marxist discourse theory (Laclau, 1990; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Discourse here refers to socially contingent and taken-for-granted signifying systems constituting the meaning of particular concepts, objects, identities, and practices. A discourse forms from the articulation of a range of elements around a particular signifier that comes to represent a shared positive identity, as against an antagonistic other or ‘enemy’. The representation of a closed system, together with an explicit enemy, obscures 176



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non-articulated and un-named elements (a heterogeneous excess), and thus also obscures the ultimate failure of discourse to suture. This understanding of discourse will enable me to outline the structure of libertarian cyber-utopianism. I will then contrast this libertarian discourse with a more sober (critical political economy) account of digital networking. The idea is not to determine the ‘reality’ of ‘the situation’, as some positivist political economists might wish. Rather, the aim is to show how ‘the situation’ could be understood otherwise and point to the limits of the libertarian cyber-utopian discourse, and subsequently to identify the problems and alternative imaginaries that the discourse obscures. Moreover, the comparative discourse analysis here will prompt reflection on the general conception of utopia, and the associated role of global digital communication networks in relation to such. I draw on a much broader and more inclusive definition of utopianism than can be found in more restrictive accounts. For instance, Kumar (2006, p. 176) argues that utopianism should be seen as ‘a tradition of thought that expresses itself in portraits of the best or perfect society’, differentiating it ‘from forms of social and political theory which are also concerned with portraying the ideal state’. Kumar agrees that the latter ‘all contain utopian propensity’, but asserts that ‘they are not utopias. They do not do what utopias do, which is to give a detailed account of life in the good society.’ In contrast, I understand utopian discourse to include not only ‘detailed accounts of the good life’ but also any system of thought and practice that has a ‘propensity’ or orientation towards, or simply an ‘impulse toward’, an ideal society (Bloch, 2000). Globalization, and its relationship to digital media, is often articulated differently in different discussions of cyberspace. This is the case with the libertarian cyber-utopian and critical political economy discourses considered here. Each focuses on different aspects of globalization. As will become evident, libertarian cyber-utopianism focuses on the possibility of global digital communications bypassing nationstate control and geographical limits, while critical political economy tends to highlight the link between cyberspace and some of the more negative aspects of globalization, such as the increased disparities in power and associated inequalities. As such, contrasting these discourses will illuminate not only their articulations, including which aspects of globalization are fore grounded and which left aside, but also, more generally, the evolving relationship between digital communications and globalization.



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Libertarian cyber-utopianism is most explicit in the rhetoric of the 1990s US ‘Silicon Valley digerati’. Through its mythological non-hierarchical network of free information flows, the Internet is hailed as offering a perfect ‘marketplace of ideas’, a space for private information exchange and individual decision-making free of bureaucracy, administrative power, and other restrictions (bodily, geographical, cultural) found offline (Barlow, 1996; Dyson et al., 1994; Fiorina, 2001; Gates, 1995; Grossman, 1995; Kelly, 1998; Keyworth, 1997; Negroponte, 1995; Toffler and Toffler, 1994). ‘Life in cyberspace’, Mitchell Kapor (1993) proclaimed, is ‘founded on the primacy of individual liberty’. For George Keyworth (1997) ‘cyberspace is the culture and society of people who are individually empowered by digital connection’. John Perry Barlow (1996), in his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, polemicizes against government attempts to ‘ward off the virus of liberty’, declaring cyberspace a place of undistorted expression where ‘we are forming our own Social Contract’ based on ‘enlightened selfinterest’. Cyberspace here is understood as a utopian place free of all power structures and constraints, constituted by autonomous individual interactions across the globe. By the late 1990s, libertarian cyber-utopian writing had largely disappeared from the mainstream public sphere. Increasing state regulation and corporate domination of online communication, together with the ‘.com bust’, dislocated the link between cyberspace and authority transcendent individual liberty. Subsequently the technological utopianism of the cyber-libertarian rhetoric appeared unconvincing. Rather than a utopian world apart, the general consensus among many digital communications writers (and users) was that online social and political interaction was ‘normalized’, fully integrated into existing socio-political systems (Davis, 1999; Resnick and Margolis, 2000). A subtler version of libertarian cyber-utopianism has more recently emerged in relation to the ‘next generation Web’, more popularly know as ‘Web 2.0’ (see, e.g., Anderson and Gillespie, 2006; Benkler, 2006a, 2006b; Hartley, 2006; Mangu-Ward, 2007; The Reality Club, 2006; Twist, 2006).2 The ‘Web 2.0’ celebrated here is an evolving signifier, but in general it can be understood to refer to user-managed and -driven digital networked interaction, collaboration, and production, including amateur publishing and broadcasting sites (e.g., Blogger, YouTube), collaborative cultural production (e.g., Wikipedia), integrated



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social networking services (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us), and interactive digital gaming (e.g., SecondLife).3 These new forms of online digital interactivity are praised for supporting the development of a ‘do-it-yourself’ digital citizenship and democracy free of old politics and old nation-state legal institutions (Hartley, 2006). Here, becoming a digital citizen means becoming an autonomous and ‘creative’ producer-consumer (or ‘prosumer’ in Alvin Toffler’s terminology). Time magazine, in celebration of this do-it-yourself libertarian cyber-democracy, in which we see ‘the many wresting power from the few’, announced its 2006 ‘Person of the Year’ as ‘You’, the liberated and creatively empowered individual of YouTube, MySpace, and other new digital networking technologies. These technologies, according to Time magazine’s Lev Grossman (2006), support no less than a social and political revolution: ‘Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.’ Through these technologies, ‘You’ are applauded ‘for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy’. While the rhetoric may be somewhat toned down, ‘Web 2.0’ cyberlibertarianism parallels the 1990s version. In both cases, cyberspace is celebrated as a transcendent communicative space liberating individuals from social, physical, and economic impediments. Libertarianism in general is often marked by such a focus on negative liberty, to use Isaiah Berlin’s (1969) terminology. In discourse theoretic terms, this from also names an explicit ‘enemy’ against which a discourse gains coherence. Here the enemy is that which is seen as getting in the way of ‘individual liberty’, and includes geographically based paternalistic nation-state regulation (passport controls, surveillance, behavioural regulation, taxation, etc.), other centralized political organizations (political parties and organized labour), and other forms of institutionalized authority (organized religion and hierarchical civil society groups). This wide range of elements is generally represented by ‘the state’, which condenses everything that the libertarian discourse is opposed to. Against this enemy, a range of elements of libertarian cyberutopianism are articulated around ‘individual liberty’. These elements’ meanings transform through association with each other and with ‘individual liberty’, which in turn is given meaning. Some of the most prominent elements are as follows. First, there is the liberal-individual subject. The subject here is a creative self-knowing, self-regulating, do-it-yourself prosumer (see, e.g., Grossman, 2006; Hartley, 2006). This subject is actualized through articulation with a second element, the



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liberating and enabling (including decentralizing and dislocating) qualities associated with digital technology, which also leads us to the third element: digital technology as revolutionary and evolutionary (see, e.g., Barlow, 1996; Kelly, 1998; Toffler and Toffler, 1994). This means that we are best to leave the sphere of digital communication to ‘natural’ technological developments (as opposed, particularly, to state regulation), which also means leaving it to a fourth element: ‘natural’ free-market mechanisms. In fact, cyberspace left in its ‘natural state’ is itself seen as an exemplary ‘pure’ free-market, a space of ‘friction free’ information flows and transactions (see, e.g., Dyson et al., 1994; Gates, 1995; Kelly, 1998). In the large, cyberspace is seen as (and should be left as) a ‘vast universe of interconnectedness’ regulated simply by the intermeshing of private interests (Mosco, 2004, p. 114; and see Johnson and Post, 1996). Individual freedom and deterministic technological evolution become compatible here through articulation with private market forces: when both are understood as constituted through, and constituting of, free markets. Associated with this universal friction-free space of digital networking is a fifth element, a global borderless technosphere beyond geo-political constraints (see Barlow, 1996; Grossman, 1995). Cyberspace is understood as the first truly global space of autonomous human being. The sixth and final element that I will identify in my reading is ‘democracy’. When articulated with all of the above elements, ‘democracy’ comes to be understood as the digitally enabled ‘spontaneous’ ordering of ‘free’ individual interactions, calculations, choices, and transactions across the globe. This is post-political democracy: democracy is equated with the technically produced liberty of individuals to satisfy private interests and power-free creative prosumerism (see, e.g., Dyson et al., 1994; Hartley, 2006). The resulting globally networked, market-based, post-political democratic utopia is nicely summarized by Louis Rossetto, past editor-in-chief of the unapologetically techno-libertarian Wired magazine: This new world [of the Net] is characterised by a new global economy that is inherently anti-hierarchical and decentralist, and that disrespects national boundaries or the control of politicians and bureaucrats . . . and by a global, networked consciousness . . . that is turning . . . bankrupt electoral politics . . . into a dead end. (Rossetto and Hudson, 1996, p. 30) As well as liberty from, we can see that cyber-libertarianism also contains a sense of positive liberty. Individuals are empowered to act as creative,



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self-actualizing, autonomous beings on a global scale. Through decentralized, collaborative networking we are able to freely choose how we wish to act and be, and who we wish to act with, where, and when. We can see both the negative and the positive aspects of cyber-libertarian liberty articulated in Time magazine’s person of the year referred to above. ‘You’ are the individual enabled by the Internet’s ‘me’ technologies to create the world as you wish, free from external constraint. We also see negative and positive liberty summarized in the idea of ‘do-it-yourself’ cyber-practice, which has been appropriated from anarchist traditions to emphasize cyberspace enabling individuals to ‘do-it’ without the help or control of centralized government. Most significantly for later discussion, individual liberty arises from a post-political universe. We have a picture of a post-nation-state, post-embodied, post-adversarial, post-antagonistic space constituted by digital communications, a global conflict-free arena harmonized efficiently and strategically through digitally networked private interactions, exchanges, and transactions. There is much appealing in this vision of human liberty. However, following discourse theory, the vision is only attained and maintained by the ideological4 operation of obscuring excessive elements that put the discourse into question. This obscuring, and subsequent discursive suturing, is supported by the explicit us/enemy, inside/outside opposition, which suggests that any discursive ‘outside’ is already accounted for. However, closure is only apparent. There is always an overflow of meaning: social heterogeneity can never be fully captured by any one discourse. If it was able to be, we would have the total fixation of meaning and social life, in which case there would not be socio-cultural change. Cyberspace becomes a libertarian utopia only through a particular reading of ‘the situation’ that obscures those elements which escape discursive articulation, including the naming of an enemy.

Critical political economy and limits to cyber-liberty What exactly is the excluded excess of libertarian cyber-utopianism? To answer this, and thus to identify (some of) the limits of the libertarian cyber-utopia discourse, I will undertake a comparative analysis. More specifically, I will contrast the libertarian reading of ‘the situation’ with a critical political economy reading, which involves an exploration of social contexts and systems (Golding and Murdock, 2000; Mosco, 1996). This reading is not taken as more objective or true than the libertarian one, as we would expect a positivist political economy to claim (and



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thereby reinforcing a realism/utopia binary). Rather, a critical political economy analysis is understood here as offering another particular reading of ‘the situation’, a different (rather than better) reading, which will help to illuminate some of the obscured excessive elements of the libertarian discourse. So what story does a critical political economy of digital communications tell? On the one hand, it points to progressive opportunities and developments in respect to digital media in general and the Internet in particular. International digital networks have enabled a significant increase in the amount and diversity of information sharing and interaction globally, supporting communication across geographical, political, and cultural divides. This increase points to the extension of global communicative freedoms. In particular, for those interested in strengthening democratic liberty, non-commercial civil society communications have been enhanced markedly (Critical Art Ensemble, 2004; McCaughey and Ayers, 2003). On the other hand, critical political economy analysis highlights a range of elements limiting ‘liberty’, elements excluded from and obscured by the libertarian cyber-utopian discourse. There is no space here to explore these limiting elements in depth. I have done this elsewhere (see Dahlberg, 2004, 2005). Here, I will simply summarize six of these elements. First, many digital media users are seen as caught in a consumer capitalist ‘cyberspectacle’ (Best and Kellner, 1999): when not passively consuming online media, ‘creative prosumers’ are observed to be extensively replicating (or simply ‘borrowing’) mass media content and genres. For instance, significant YouTube use simply involves the download and consumption of mass media content, or the re-creation of commercial television genres such as talk and reality shows. And despite the ‘semiotic democracy’ pointed to by academics of popular media, social networking often involves little more than ego-centric self-promotion, narcissistic indulgences, or the reproduction of celebrity identities (e.g., Bebo, Facebook, and MySpace), while virtual role playing ‘worlds’ are largely re-producing spectacular capitalism (e.g., Second Life). It is true that there are a myriad of online spaces where radical voices can be found articulating counter-discourses. However, these radical voices largely ‘speak’ to themselves, while online attention in general is dominated by sites propagating the cyberspectacle and other dominant discourses (Dahlberg, 2005; Downey, 2007; Hargittai, 2004). Second, corporate ‘interactive’ and ‘social networking’ digital communication systems constitute subjects not only as pliable consumers of the ‘spectacle’, but also as active participants in its construction and



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in their own exploitation, the exploitation of their contribution to the online ‘culture industry’ (Kleiner and Wyrick, 2007; Lowenthal, 2007; Wark and Patelis, 2007). Social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Bebo rely on user-created content to attract participants and thus advertisers, while online retailers such as Amazon rely on the work of reviewers, rankers, and recommenders. Third, cyberspace is a highly coded space. There is extensive political economy analysis that shows corporate control of digital networking operating through a combination of technological code and ‘terms of service’ agreement. As well as freedoms that can be attributed to decentralized digital networks, technological design and user agreements support the regulation of digital communications by network and content owners (Dahlberg, 2004; Lessig, 2004; Patelis, 2000; Rogers, 2004). Fourth, censorship and surveillance is rife. Despite the celebrated ‘natural liberties’ of the Internet, most governments deploy the network to carry out extensive digital surveillance of their citizens, while some governments (exemplified by China’s) also directly control their citizens’ online communications. Surveillance and control is being extended by the commercial harvesting of personal information for targeted marketing, which subsequently enables the extension of state surveillance (Andrejevic, 2007; Zimmer, 2008). Many digital media corporations have shown that they are prepared to contribute to state surveillance and censorship if profits are at stake. A number of Internet corporations (e.g., Google, Microsoft, and Skype) have already undertaken censorship so as to gain entry to the Chinese market, and some (e.g., Yahoo!) have even gone so far as to give information to Chinese authorities that has led to the arrest of ‘Internet dissidents’ (Human Rights Watch, 2006). Fifth, digital freedom is limited due to inequalities of participation. Unequal distribution of communication resources globally leads to a corresponding stratification of digital communicative freedom, where many of the world’s population are not free to communicate online because they simply cannot (Murdock and Golding, 2004). Moreover, the freedoms that digital communications gives to some can lead to inequalities and unfreedoms for others. Most significantly, the greater freedom that digital communication networks give trans-national capital to ‘manage’ investments and financial markets leads to increased insecurity for individuals throughout the world, with precarity always on the horizon if not a reality. As Žižek notes, ‘the dream of the virtual “frictionless capitalism” (Bill Gates) is turning into a nightmare in



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which the fate of millions is decided in hyper-reflexive speculation on futures’ (Butler et al., 2000, p. 322). These are just some of the limits to cyber-liberty that can be pointed to by a critical political economy analysis. Other limiting factors include the fragmentation of online communication into isolated ‘likeminded’ enclaves that may lead to intolerance and repressive socio-cultural norms (Sunstein, 2001), and cyberspace-based addictions and psychological disorders (Smith, 2008). The libertarian cyber-utopian discourse fails to account for such limits, which together paint a less than utopian picture. They are in fact obscured by the discourse’s techno-instrumental celebration of individual liberation through global digital prosumerism. The technology is believed to inevitably transcend power and social inequality. Louis Rossetto (1998) goes as far as to refer to the idea that there might be ‘such a thing as the info-haves and have-nots’ as an ‘utterly laughable Marxist/Fabian kneejerk’, while MIT digital guru Nicholas Negroponte (1998, p. 228) sees social inequality as ‘an artefact of the world of atoms’, not of cyberspace. With regards to user exploitation and the domination of online content by particular groups, it is argued that such limit is simply the end result of individual decision, given the freedom of choice provided by digital communications networks. With regard to control and surveillance, the argument is that creative digitally linked citizens can always ‘route’ around such, with the help of libertarian digital coding groups like the Cult of the Dead Cow.5 Alternatively, citizens may choose to accept certain levels of control, surveillance, and marketing, in exchange for certain services (see, e.g., corporate social networking sites like Facebook). Whatever the immediate sociological limits, digital technology is seen as leading to a libertarian future, as long as we do not get in the way of the (free-market-based) technological (r)evolution. However, this promise of individual liberation through digital technology is surely unconvincing to those imprisoned in various countries as ‘digital dissidents’, or to those whose closest encounter with cyberspace is picking over toxic electronic waste in a computer recycling yard. The libertarian discourse obscures such problems, naturalizing and legitimating its particular structuration of the world as universal, uncontestable, and inevitable. There are no real problems, no real alternatives, and no reason to contest the development of this utopian vision. In fact, any contestation or standing in the way – read state regulation – will only delay the cyber-libertarian (r)evolution. As a result, the libertarian discourse supports technocratic and neoliberal policies, including the deregulation of (digital) communication markets



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to produce a global frictionless online marketplace of goods and ideas, as enacted, for instance, in the 1996 US Telecommunications Reform Bill (Moore, 1996). This neoliberal support is explicit in the rhetoric of groups and publications like the Progress and Freedom Foundation (see Dyson et al., 1994) and Wired magazine. Take, for instance, the following Wired column by Nicholas Negroponte, structured as a letter to the then US Speaker of the House of Representatives and libertarian Republican Newt Gingrich: Dear Newt, Your support of the digital age is deeply appreciated. As we move from a world of atoms to one of bits, we need leaders like you explaining that this revolution is a big one, maybe a 10.5 on the Richter scale of social change. Alvin and Heidi Toffler [who are other influential cyber-libertarian rhetoricians] are dandy advisers; good on you for listening to them! The global information infrastructure needs a great deal of bipartisan cooperation, if only to help (read: force) other nations to deregulate and privatize their telecommunications. (Negroponte and Hawley, 1995, p. 224) However, this idea of bringing the digital (and neoliberal) ‘revolution’ to other nations by forcing them to deregulate and privatize their telecommunications systems is obscured by the naturalistic libertarian ideology of a technologically driven cyber-(e)volution with associated individual freedom. The forces and interests driving and structuring the so-called ‘digital (r)evolution’ disappear behind celebrations of liberation. As Žižek (1997, pp. 36–37) explains, on referring to Bill Gates’ (1995) anticipation of the Internet bringing about ‘friction free capitalism’, the ‘friction’ we dispose of in the fantasy of ‘friction-free-capitalism’, does not only refer to the reality of material obstacles which sustain any exchange process, but above all, to the Real of traumatic social antagonisms, power relations and so forth which brand the space of social exchange with a pathological twist . . . . [W]hat is obfuscated in these fantasies and their attendant naturalisation (freedom to escape unnatural state intervention and be ourselves) is the set of power relations – of political decisions, of institutional conditions – which enables Internet culture to survive. These power relations are highlighted by the political economy story and represent part of the excess obscured in the libertarian discourse.



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The critique here can be applied to any utopian discourse. All utopian visions assume ideological closure, masking non-articulated excess. However, utopian discourses should not be abandoned. Utopian thinking is more necessary than ever. We need to imagine (trans)formations of social life, to envision the transcendence of global capitalism, war, environmental devastation, poverty and, so on. But more fundamentally, utopian thinking cannot be abandoned for social life to be sustained. ‘The complete elimination of reality-transcending elements’, argues Mannheim (1968, p. 236), ‘would lead us to a matter of factness which ultimately would mean the decay of the human will . . . . The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man [sic] himself becomes no more than a thing.’ Bauman, following Bloch, agrees, seeing utopia as ‘an undetachable part of the human condition’ (Bauman and Tester, 2001, p. 49). Imagining the transcendence of present social conditions to something better enables us to be and to act in the face of societal failure. As such, ideological fantasises of achieving the total fixation of meaning, obscuring ultimate lack, and associated heterogeneity are at the very heart of social being. As Laclau (1990, p. 92) argues, ‘utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice’. Utopian social imaginaries help make the movement towards full society seem possible, providing ideological visions of the total overcoming of social failure. The utopian effect of this fantasy of closure is illustrated, as Jameson (2005, p. 5) notes, in Thomas More’s Utopia, where ‘closure is achieved by that great trench the founder causes to be dug between the island and the mainland and which alone allows it to become Utopia in the first place’. However, it also follows that societal (discursive) failure, and associated heterogeneity or excess, is the necessary presupposition for utopian visions and associated action: a social ontology of closure and homogeneity would be the end of human freedom. As such, attempts to fully institutionalize a particular utopia, to achieve closure by the elimination of heterogeneity, lead in the direction of totalitarianism. This can be seen in diverse twentieth-century utopian projects – from fascist to communist – that have undertaken to impose social closure through the (impossible) elimination of excess. The social horrors and cultural devastation resulting from these largely nationally focused totalizing projects has paved the way for the spread of today’s global utopias of consumer capitalism and various religious



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fundamentalisms, with their associated exclusionary and oppressive effects. Given this totalitarian threat, recent commentators argue for more open social imaginaries that accept failure. More specifically, they argue for progressive visions that incorporate ‘scepticism/realism toward dreams of final societal closure’ (el-Ojeili, 2003, p. 247) and recognize utopia as ‘method’, as a provisional process accompanied by ‘necessary failure’ rather than realizable goal (Levitas, 2007). This follows the insistence by political philosophers from a range of critical theory traditions that social imaginaries incorporate a disposition of openness to the future (e.g., Bloch, Derrida, Laclau, Mouffe, Habermas). It also parallels More’s understanding of utopia as not just ‘eutopia’, a ‘good-place’, or idealized human existence, but as ‘outopos’: a ‘nowhere’ or ‘non-place’, an impossible place. In Derridian speak, utopia must be understood as necessary and impossible at once. This all seems to be most logical. Yet at the practical (i.e., political) level, how captivating can visions of the future be that explicitly embrace failure? In order to avoid despair, and inspire action towards social change, it is necessary to forget the (necessary) failure of any utopian imaginary. In other words, fantasies of attainable closure are needed to motivate action. As Jameson (2005, pp. 4–5) argues, the properly Utopian program or realization will involve a commitment to closure (and thereby to totality): was it not Roland Barthes who observed, of Sade’s Utopianism, that ‘here as elsewhere it is closure which enables the existence of system, which is to say, of the imagination. This seems to leave us at a stalemate. A commitment to closure is necessary for positive social change, and yet any movement towards the realization of closure is accompanied by the threat of totalitarianism. The question then is, how to support utopian thinking while avoiding totalitarianism? Or to turn it around, how to accept contingency (openness and failure) while inspiring social change towards overcoming oppressive systems? Freedom is threatened by both movement towards and movement away from utopia. We need to conceptualize how to both encourage progressive social imaginaries and at the same time limit any one utopian vision from becoming hegemonic, that is, from becoming the singular universal and uncontestable horizon of human being. I suggest, paralleling Lefort’s (1986) logic, the institutionalization of political struggle between alternative competing utopian imaginaries



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and associated projects, so as to encourage utopian discourses while inhibiting any single utopia from fully hegemonizing the social imaginary. This means the institutionalization of a highly political space, in contrast to the post-political vision of the libertarian discourse. What is envisioned, drawing on Mouffe (2005), is an agonistic democratic politics involving the continuous challenge to sedimented/ing power. The effectiveness of such challenge is grounded in the ontological openness of every discourse, despite imaginings of closure. This ‘solution’ can be referred to as a radical-liberatory framework, as it not only acknowledges ontological dislocation of the social but exploits this openness for progressive ends by institutionalizing the contestation of power by multiple utopian discourses. It can be argued, following Žižek (2005), that what is being promoted here is just another particular utopian and ideological closure. Indeed, we must always admit to a certain ideological closure associated with any claim or practice – claiming non-closure is not only a performative contradiction but an ideological operation ‘par excellence’, deploying Habermasian and Žižekian terminology respectively.6 However, the radical liberatory framework advanced here works at a meta-level, a meta-utopia encouraging multiple contesting visions and practices of social being. Such a meta-utopian framework opens the future to many alternative possibilities, including those that wish to destroy such a framework. It is not prescriptive of a particular content (including subject) but rather attempts to institutionalize the opposite, a space of agonistic contestation between particular utopian discourses. How can such a space of contesting utopias be institutionalized? For this we can return to global digital communications. The agonistic framework promoted here fits with sociological and political economy accounts that point to cyberspace operating as a communicative space of political struggle, of a multiplicity of online activisms contesting power (see Dahlberg and Siapera, 2007; McCaughey and Ayers, 2003). New digital media systems are supporting openness to the future by enabling, at local and global levels, the formation and articulation of diverse imaginaries and the contestation of dominant ideologies and social formations. In particular, we see digitally supported groups and movements undertaking multiple contestations of both state power and global capitalism. This suggests a heightening of global politics and political conflict, in contrast to the politics-free space envisioned by the libertarian cyber-utopian discourse. Such contestations are under threat from a range of factors, including those outlined here in relation to the critical political economy reading. Rather than (naively) celebrating



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Notes 1. I will follow cyber-utopian discourse here and refer to the ‘Internet’, ‘digital networking’, and ‘cyberspace’ interchangeably. In most technical writing these terms are used to name different but inter-related and overlapping phenomena. The Internet names the global communications network of networks and associated tools and experiences that have evolved from the US Defence Force computer network ARPANET. Digital networking generally refers to the use of a much broader array of communications technologies, all those that utilize digital systems. Cyberspace names the ‘place’ formed by digital networked interaction. 2. Libertarian Web 2.0 rhetoric tends to derive from US futurist technology gurus (the Tofflers), certain pop-culture and media academics (Hartley, 2006), Web 2.0 entrepreneurs hoping to stimulate the .com market so as to secure venture capital (see O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conferences), and subsequent media reportage (Grossman, 2006; Twist, 2006). However, it is also important to note that ‘discourse’ here refers to a combination of statements and practices, not the specific positions of particular commentators or practitioners, which can draw on multiple discourses. For instance, Benkler (2006a) explicitly draws upon libertarian, liberal, and deliberative democracy discourses at once. 3. For more extensive definitions of Web 2.0, see Beer and Burrows (2007), O’Reilly (2005), and ‘Web 2.0’ in Wikipedia.org. 4. Drawing on post-Marxist discourse theory, ideology here involves the process of naturalizing a certain social order, closing down disputation through obscuring the discursive basis of meaning and the excessive elements that escape closure. Following Laclau (1990, p. 92), ideology involves the attempt to institutionalize ‘closure’, ‘the fixation of meaning’, ‘the non-recognition of the infinite play of differences’, ‘the will to totality’. 5. Cult of The Dead Cow can be found at http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cms/ main.php3. 6. Here the liberal ‘open’ project can be seen as an exemplary ideology: its claim to non-closure masks its prescription of a particular political formation and subject.



digital liberty, those concerned for institutionalizing radical-liberatory politics must fight to defend and extend democratic forms of digital communication. Without such, digital communications will intensify global inequalities and insecurities, not liberty.

12 (Con)Temporary Utopian Spaces

Introduction While many have worn the utopian badge proudly, utopian fantasies have usually been considered just that: fanciful. Certainly, for Lewis Mumford (1962), building ‘castles in the sky’ was an important task, and utopianism has long been seen as a driver of social and political change. But in an age of neoliberal ascendency that has seemingly vanquished ideological and utopian adversaries, utopianism is today more likely to be derided as naive and adolescent, except for when it is deemed unreservedly dangerous. To be fair, a long historical record supports suspicion of utopian projects. Many past and current utopias have hidden darker ambitions in lofty visions and promises; and others have achieved little. The price, however, can be a too restrictive interpretation, even wilful misreading, of utopianism. This makes it important to recover alternative meanings of utopia – of what it is as well as is not – and to re-articulate the kind of ‘transcendence’ attributed to it. Jacoby’s (2005) distinction between the blueprint and the iconoclastic utopian traditions alludes to a frequently considered, if differently conceived, division. The former are often prescriptive, detailed, highly planned arrangements, where the future is mapped out ‘in inches and minutes’; while the latter refuse such precision, preferring to be ‘protestors and breakers of images’ (2005, p. xiv). For some, outcome – the blueprint mapped and the vision realised – is key, and all manner of means are accommodated in the service of such ends. For others, in its seeming foreclosing of flexibility, the blueprint utopia contains an implicit authoritarianism. The conclusion that utopia’s main contribution could be seen to lie in its role ‘as a pure signifier of hope destined never to acquire a material referent’ is apt here, even as the social change 190



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problem remains: while visionary prescription is to be treated cautiously because of its authoritarian threat, ‘without a vision of Utopia [that is, a blueprint of sorts] there is no way to define that port to which we might want to sail’ (Harvey, 2000, p. 189). Hence the tension between those who want their ‘practical’ inches and minutes, and those who seek to both ‘break’ and remake images – however understood. In this chapter, I attempt to release utopia from such difficult expectations and attribute it a less grand but still important role. I maintain that utopias do not have to be burdened by grand visions of permanent futures – in effect, blueprints against which future developments are then judged; usually negatively, since perfection is highly elusive, or worse, because of the authoritarianism such grand visions can unleash. I look more closely to a certain kind of ‘image breaking’ – to a form of ‘utopianising’ not directly answerable to blueprinted futures. In doing so, I draw a link between the utopian experience and the political psychology of social change and contend that an important element of the social change dynamic – its political psychology – is often overlooked in the ‘practical politics’ of social transformation. ‘Utopianising’ – a combination of the envisional and experiential in present rather than future space – can tap into this political psychology in a way that activates and coheres the desire for social change, hence bridging the personal and the political. I illustrate this link through the notion of ‘temporary utopian spaces’: autonomous unmediated spaces temporarily detached from the enclosures of dominant socio-economic frames – today neoliberalism and globalisation. Utopian politics so conceived juxtaposes permitted, circumscribed activities with unconventional, autonomous ones. It admits not only that other worlds are possible but also seeks to inhabit them experientially, if temporarily – and where temporariness is also important in guarding against any authoritarian threats ‘blueprinted’ permanency may pose. To function this way, utopias need not be sweeping, grandiose projects; they can operate more modestly as small-scale and temporary experiences, where the ‘process’ of utopia-making, of a temporary and personal inhabiting of the vision, counts for much. This chapter reflects on this conceptualisation of utopia and identifies related utopian practices in some sections of contemporary radical politics today. It contends that the normative and strategic elements of utopia, as conceived here, make an important contribution to the armoury of social change and transformational politics. The chapter is divided into several sections. It first explores the notion of political psychology as applied to the dynamic of social change, tracing a range of views which inform its understanding of this notion. It next



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Political psychology and social change ’Political psychology’ is a very broad term that encompasses a wide spectrum of positions and approaches (see Kuklinski, 2001). This is to be expected in a term derived from two expansive disciplines – psychology and politics. But the link between the two disciplines is at the same time simple and straightforward: social change involves people, their motivations and political values. Hence to claim that the ‘personal is political’ is also straightforward. While a term commonly associated with the women’s movement, its insights are generalisable; that is, power relationships embedded in social and political structures are reflected in personal experiences. As Fromm (1942, pp. ix–x) pointed out long ago, ‘To understand the dynamics of the social process we must understand the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual, just as to understand the individual we must see him in the context of the culture which moulds him.’ The political psychology of social change – understood generally as the coupling of the personal and the political – has a long historical pedigree, and has been understood variously and defended in a range of analytical contexts. Post-structuralist theory has of course provided important insights into the notion, construction and complexity of political psychology (see, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Foucault, 1980; Irigaray, 1994; Lacan, 1993). Critical theorists too provided some insightful commentary on approaches to political psychology several decades ago. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and The Fear of Freedom (1942), for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the former and Erich Fromm in the latter make interesting cases for why modernity has honed rather than eliminated domination. Each book seeks to explain why, rather than ‘entering a truly human state’, humanity is instead ‘sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986, p. xiv). The fact that each of these books was written against a lived background of Nazism gives the question not only a specific reference but also a particular potency. They claim to uncover the modern face of oppression – and repression – in their expansive, including psychological, account of the patterns of domination



examines the ideas of autonomous space and ‘temporary autonomous zones’, ideas to which it then grafts a stronger utopian edge to generate the notion of ‘temporary utopian spaces’. Finally, the chapter explores how these temporary utopian spaces play out in some sections of contemporary radical politics.

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and repression. Fromm contends that the Enlightenment has proved a dual-edged sword: it frees people from their communal feudal bondage only to shackle them to the anxiety of individuation and belonging in a commodified industrial culture. Marrying elements of Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis, Fromm sees that many are ill-equipped, psychologically and politically, to embrace the ‘freedom’ unleashed in a modern capitalist society. Fearing freedom, and the challenges of identity and belonging that it poses, they seek an ‘escape from freedom’ through the comfort of authoritarianism, conformity and submission. Here a prescribed way of being – from the extremes of totalitarianisms to the seductions of commodification – is preferable to the boundlessness of autonomy. For Fromm, acute fear generates a genuflection to the promises of authoritarianism. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) then highlighted the extensive penetration of capitalist psychology in all areas of lived experience. For Marcuse, it was important to uncover and then resist the impact on an individual level of capitalist domination, particularly since industrial society drove a ‘culture industry’ that commodified individual identity and stripped it of its autonomy and integrity (see also Marcuse, 1941). While important differences remain, for both post-structuralism and critical theory modernity was highly suspect in both its epistemology and its practice, particularly in the instrumentalist and rationalist ethos that underpinned its universalism. Of particular concern was universalism’s trampling of autonomy; where, rather than liberating, modernity instead drove the technocratic and rationalistic mastery of humans and nature. Instrumental rationality thus became not a tool of freedom as it was posited, but one of domination and repression. Foucault too identified the complexity and interconnectedness of the political and the psychological, focusing on the ways in which individuals are ‘disciplined’ by power and inculcated in its practices. Here, power is not simply power over, but an internalised way of being in the world that burrows deeply into the individual’s psyche. For Foucault repression becomes both the means and ends of power and manifests in a multitude of political, social, sexual, cultural and emotional practices, as well as in the institutional state (Foucault, 1969, 1976). Furthermore, he claims that while ‘power in Western capitalism was denounced by Marxists as class domination . . . the mechanics of power in themselves were never analysed’; for Foucault this ‘task could only begin after 1968, that is to say on the basis of daily struggles at the grass roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 116).



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The individualist anarchist, Max Stirner, long articulated the dynamic of domination, insights subsequently embraced by some poststructuralist analyses (Newman, 2001). The justification of Stirner’s hyper-individualism was often obscured by its ‘egotistical’ underpinnings and its often derided ‘union of egoists’. Even so, we can trace in Stirner’s distinction between revolution and insurrection an appreciation of the political psychology of rebellion. For Stirner, individual insurrection is a truly transformational political act since it generates internal, individual change as well as changes to external conditions: Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition of status, the state or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter . . . is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’. It is . . . a working forth of me out of the established. (Stirner, 1995, pp. 279–280) Hence, while most fellow revolutionaries of the time championed an emerging modernism, Stirner instead warned of modernism’s threat to individual autonomy, particularly in its ultimate act of domination: the inscription of identity. In his critique of authoritarian communism and the capacity for community ‘tyranny’, Stirner sought to guard against the development of new mechanisms of repression whereby individuals themselves, rather than only an external state, exercise domination. Conjuring the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, Stirner contends that ‘a master is a thing made by the servant. If submissiveness ceased, it would be all over with [the state’s] lordship’ (1995, p. 175). Since individuals ‘cooperate’ in their own oppression, their ultimate insurrectionary act becomes to reclaim their desires, and hence their autonomy – insights the Situationists readily embraced. For Stirner, then, social change has to come from within as well as without. He contends that individuals will remain powerless unless they break free from externally imposed but internally reinforced subjectivities. These assertions have led some to claim Stirner as ‘one of the first to consider the question of self-repression’ and to expose the state’s reliance ‘on our willingness to let it dominate us’ (Newman, 2002, p. 229). For Stirner the political psychology of social



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change thus involves the ‘insurrection of the self’; ‘ordinary’ revolutions simply replace one form of authority with another: the individual still remains shackled. To be successful, social change thus requires the activation of internal as well as external transformation. In radical politics, hierarchy, or hierarchism, is often singled out as one of the most pervasive and persistent paradigms that drives social control and thwarts subjectivity. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin identifies hierarchy as the central organising principle of a repressive society. He traces the evolution of hierarchical sensibilities and structures in his major work, The Ecology of Freedom, concluding that hierarchy’s most sophisticated form culminates in the nation-state. But for Bookchin hierarchy is far more than an organisational principle for coordinating and ordering society: it is also an internalised ‘state of consciousness’ that underpins and guides all areas of social-political experience, including the psychological and the individual. Understood this way, hierarchy becomes ‘the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer’ (1991, p. 4). He traces hierarchy’s genealogy through the evolution of various hierarchical systems from gerontocracy, shamanism and patriarchy to, finally, the domination of nature. To thrive hierarchy thus has to encompass both external and internal ‘structures’; and to function to full effect, it has to be internalised psychologically so that the idea and practice of hierarchy becomes enculturated and hence ‘normalised’. This was realised by dividing ‘the individual . . . against itself by establishing the supremacy of mind over body, of hierarchical domination over sensuous experience’ (1980, p. 63). Thus for Bookchin, hierarchy proceeds through the material to the subjective (1991, pp. 89–118). Materially, hierarchy evolves to its pinnacle in class societies through the development of the city and the state, the social integration of an ‘authoritarian’ technics and a sophisticated market economy. Subjectively, the internalisation of a ‘command and obedience’ psychology proceeds through ‘epistemologies of rule’ that loosely approximate Foucault’s ‘disciplinary practices’ – despite Bookchin’s charged antipathy for post-structuralists. Through its gradual historical ‘politicization of social functions’ the state then inscribed the most ‘supreme political act of all’: the delegation of power, which was embodied both materially and subjectively in the individual. Bookchin contends that relief from such hierarchical incarceration lies in the individual recovery of the ‘polis’; of the reclamation of the direct and unmediated politics of the community or municipality that not only



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bypasses the state’s hierarchical form but also reverses hierarchism’s psychology to restore individual and community autonomy (2003). Direct participation thus has an important educative function that is also the means of ‘ethical character building in the most important social role that the individual can undertake: active citizenship’ (1991, p. 339). This interest in hierarchy is shared by Ricardo Blaug who is also concerned with ‘the personal effects of hierarchy’; particularly, how hierarchy affects individual thinking and hence shapes power relationships, personal autonomy and institutional structures (1999, 2007). He argues that the widespread penetration of the hierarchic paradigm generates a particular form of false consciousness: a ‘paradigm blindness’ that is self-reinforcing through its embeddedness in individual cognition and socio-cultural practice (1999, p. 39, 2000). He refers to this as ‘the tyranny of the visible’ or, after Scott (1990), ‘the hidden transcript’. Hierarchism is thus not only ‘the paradigm of sovereigns’ but also acts to deride allegedly impractical rhizomatic forms of (dis)organisation, even as these forms offer participative legitimacy as well as the capacity to ‘coordinate action’ (1999, pp. 44, 51). Since hierarchy is ‘institutionalised power’ that generates ‘interpersonal interactions characterized by marked asymmetries of power’, Blaug utilises the insights of cognitive psychology to illustrate the dominance of hierarchic thinking and organisational practice in social and political life; and hence the importance of paradigm interrogation to social change (2007, p. 26). Deleuze and Guattari (1988) are instructive here. They offer the alternative of rhizomatic organisational forms to both counter and highlight the operation of hierarchy. Acting as a metaphor for decentred networks, the rhizome’s invisible underground stem generates random roots and shoots which then surface as autonomously functioning separated plants/units. Their contention is that as a ‘subterranean stem’ a rhizome is ‘absolutely different from roots or radicles’; connection and heterogeneity are key since, unlike a tree or root, ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other . . . it has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ (1987, pp. 7, 27). This acts to sever the centralised, hierarchical form and replace it with a random, heterogenous and autonomous one: in many ways, a nascent utopian space as I discuss below. The notion of ‘biopower’ also offers important insights into the link between ‘the personal and the political’; of how the mechanisms of repression are internalised so that social life is regulated from within (see Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 23). Here the opposing of rhizomatic psychologies to hierarchical ones goes some way towards resisting such repressions.



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For all these theorists, then, social change requires both a psychopersonal and a political-social confrontation with forces that determine both internal subjectivities and external structures and people’s relationships with these structures. In short, social change does not happen in a vacuum: certainly not a political, economic or social vacuum but neither a psychological one; and the context in which social change occurs is shaped by prevailing values and paradigms. I contend that it is in its challenge to these prevailing paradigmatic ‘wisdoms’ that utopianism, as conceived below, can (temporarily) break this nexus.

The utopian psychology of social change The concept of utopia is of course diverse and flexible, and utilised to serve a range of different intellectual purposes; some find the utopian impulse embedded in human nature (see Bloch, 1986); others are wedded to detailed blueprints of possible futures; while for others still utopia acts as a ‘navigational’ compass for transformative decision-making in the present (see de Geus, 1999; Unger, 1987). The utopian impulse is also theorised in various forms of ‘spatial dialectics’ (see Lefebvre, 1991b). In his Spaces of Hope, Harvey (2000, pp. 182–196) argues for a form of ‘spatiotemporal utopianism’ that attempts to overcome the problems inherent in the two main utopian forms: those of spatial form and social process. His task thus becomes: . . . to define an alternative, not in terms of some static spatial form or even of some perfected emancipatory process. The task is to pull together a spatiotemporal utopianism – a dialectical utopianism – that is rooted in our present possibilities at the same time as it points towards different trajectories for human uneven geographical developments. (2000, p. 196) For Tormey (2005), ‘spatial politics’ permit the emergence of these ‘different trajectories’. Hence it is important to construct a horizontal ‘utopian space’ that ‘opposes vertical politics’ and renders possible a ‘local, particularistic, individual’ politics that is ‘non-denumerable’ and ‘minoritarian’ (Tormey, 2005, pp. 402–406). This is a position that ‘represents the dissolution of ideological politics’ since it ‘accepts, indeed celebrates, the desirability of developing spaces in which we can encounter others on terms that are not mediated’: a ‘dialogic’ politics that arises from the ‘critique of ideology’ itself (2005, p. 402).



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My notion of temporary utopian spaces responds, if in different ways, to calls for a ‘dialectical utopianism’, but it is particularly indebted to Hakim Bey’s conception of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) – that is, zones, or spaces, that permit ‘otherness’, celebrate autonomy and challenge hierarchy. The TAZ has proved to be particularly influential in some radical anti-globalisation politics and in informing the anarchical temperament of contemporary radical politics more generally (see Curran, 2006). The Reclaim the Streets (RTS) ethos that permeated much recent anti-globalisation politics echoed this notion – as I discuss below. For Bey, the TAZ is ‘like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it’ (Bey, 2002, p. 99). Organisationally rhizomatic, spontaneity and unpredictability are key to the ‘non-hegemonic particularism’, or ‘radical tolerance’, of these uprisings. Since spontaneity and autonomy challenge hierarchy, these uprisings are always preferred over the centralising logic of more permanent, organised forms. In this way, the TAZ ‘is a revolution that fails, but only because success would be the ultimate failure, the denial of future TAZs’ (Truscello, 2003, p. 13). For Bey, ‘chaos’ becomes central to the affirmation of life. Since ‘[a]ll mess, all riot of colour, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement – is chaos’, all attempts to corral this chaos, particularly the imposition of order by a hierarchical state, is to be actively resisted (Bey, 1996b). The state’s great fraud is its attempt to impose order where, existentially, there can be none: indeed, any ‘form of “order” which we have not imagined and produced directly and spontaneously in sheer “existential freedom” for our own celebratory purposes – is an illusion’ (1993). TAZs are thus initiatives in which individuals shape their own contexts and create their own desires, even ‘in the shadow of the state’. It challenges the alienation that drives consumer culture and disrupts subjectivity. These Beyian ideas, with their neo-Situationist influences, were particularly prominent in rave circles in the 1990s (see Luckman, 2001). Today, these ideas have infiltrated the growing movement for autonomous space within radical politics. These spaces range from RTS parties, Zapatista autonomous zones, Italian social centres to the autonomous political spaces hosted by World Social Forums. Key to these spaces is their autonomy and their plurality – autonomous spaces where ‘all worlds are possible’. Even so, while the chase for autonomy may be central, embedded hierarchic forms of ‘socialisation’ are difficult to undo. To this degree,



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temporary ‘escapes’ are probably more ‘realistic’ than blueprinted transformations. Autonomous, utopian spaces offer temporary escapes from this socialised closure, particularly through the educative and experiential forms of participation that can occur there. As I noted above, for Bookchin these educative forms of active citizenship help recover autonomy. Blaug (2000) calls these ‘escapes’ as ‘democratic outbreaks’: forms of democratic participation that transcend more conventional institutional expressions. Often arising from perceived failures in institutional forms to activate ‘real’ democracy, these civil society outbreaks occur outside and beyond the institutional realms complicit in the denial of inclusion. However, it is not just that they occur that is important; so too are the experiences they engender. These outbreaks are both ‘personal and political’ in their transformation of citizen passivity and separation into political activity and engagement. The history of developing democracy is of course littered with such outbreaks: from large-scale revolutionary events such as the Paris Commune through to more short-lived outbreaks such as Paris 1968 and Seattle 1999. All are social change actions enacted by volitional individuals who take participation seriously and who seek through it some transformation of existing structures – both internal and external. These outbreaks – or escapes – are diverse, both politically and temporally, with some ongoing, and others very temporary. Their promotion of a ‘messy’ democracy is not unintentional: participation, after all, is often an untidy and unpredictable affair. But while usually directed at a specific political goal, the experience they engender and the subjectivity they permit are also important. There are thus two related aspects to these outbreaks: one, the creation of an action targeted to the achievement of set political goals; and two – my focus here – the creation of a space outside dominant paradigmatic structures (both physical and political) that permits a different kind of political experience. So conceived utopian spaces offer a temporary release from the penetration of a capitalist psychology that has burrowed deeply into subjectivity. They permit a Stirnian ‘insurrection of the self’ that invites a reclamation of ‘desire’ through a temporary release of autonomous dreaming. They do not always set out to directly ‘change the world’; rather, they lay the psycho-political foundations for its renewal. These spaces encourage the temporary dissolution of the ‘personal effects of hierarchy’, hence ‘breaking’ and temporarily replacing prevailing imagery. They facilitate, in short, a temporary ‘escape to freedom’, as illustrated in the excursion into radical utopian politics that I turn to next.



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Radical politics is of course just that: plural. While acknowledging this plurality, here I focus on an expression, or tactic, of contemporary oppositional politics – the RTS ‘strategy’ – that I consider in many ways emblematic of what I mean by temporary utopian spaces and hence radical utopian politics. RTS encompasses several roles: it is a movement, a tactic, and an experience. As such it has offered radical politics an interesting tactical template, a form of utopian politics that many other radical players have incorporated in some form or other into their own oppositional armoury. Reclaim the Streets Reclaim the Streets utilises utopian space as political strategy. Born from the anti-car and anti-roads movement in Britain in the early 1990s, RTS soon widened its focus to include a range of oppositional politics. While largely anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist, its influence lay more as a strategy than as a political movement. First associated with radical ecology movements such as Earth First! RTS originally focused on protecting nature from the encroachment of cars and the expansive transport infrastructure that it demanded. It soon expanded its oppositional repertoire to resist the encroachment of a dominant market culture on public space more broadly. But it decided that this wider opposition would not be burdensome and tedious: it would instead be pleasurable. Furthermore, RTS refused to measure their impact in traditional terms of protest wins or losses: they would evaluate success in a more expansive way. While actions to protect the environment remained important, the experience of dissent, though the construction and enactment of temporary utopias, would be counted as equally important. Conceived this way, RTS sets out to activate and inhabit the political psychology of social change. It opposes its network organisational structure and its strategy of direct action to centralised mediated politics. Its oppositional tactics set out to recover autonomy from an external state that has corralled it, and hence to take back what rightfully belongs to the individual and the community. Using the street party as a key motif, RTS set out to create temporary autonomous zones in public places such as streets in order to inhabit them in counter-paradigmatic ways. RTS street parties thus seek to temporarily ‘liberate’ a street space from a market culture that has privatised it. Through the enactment of social alternatives, these temporary utopian experiences challenge dominant



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practices by temporarily dissolving them. To street party is thus to ‘begin reconstructing the geography of everyday life; to re-appropriate the public sphere; to rediscover the streets and attempt to liberate them . . . to oppose the free market with a vision of a free society’ (London RTS, 1997, p. 6). RTS success lay in actions that ‘reaffirmed life’, activated pleasure and reclaimed autonomy: The streets were covered in chalk, and the intersection . . . had been shut down for a good hour or two. Drums and dancing were heating up an already hot mid-May afternoon. There were people from community groups performing street sculptured plays, and urbanguerrilla types planting new flowers ritualistically in the middle of the road . . . there was not a car in sight . . . . A small part of the city had been reclaimed by its residents . . . . What seemed to matter was the celebration of community in the face of concrete conformity that shapes normal urban living. (Hirsh, 1999, p. 1) This new style of dissent, or ‘organised chaos’, set itself apart from more ‘traditional’ leftist protest (see Duncombe, 2002, pp. 221–223). A prime distinction was between what was labelled ‘proactive spectacle’ and ‘passive spectatorship’. In the latter, a centralised leadership organised a ‘standard’ demonstration with the customary placards and chanting. The objective was to garner sufficient numbers and colour to attract the attention of both their political targets and the media. By contrast, proactive spectacle embraced celebration rather than simply demonstration, launching a carnivaleque politics that in turn activated social change’s politico-psychological elements. The street party’s Do it Yourself (DIY) character marks its out as an autonomous event, with participation sitting at its core: Reclaim the Streets is a protest that only works if everyone participates. This is true not only for the organisers who have to create sound systems, train with tripods, build props and compose info sheets, but also for those who just show up on the day of the protest in costume, with radios, drums, or fire-breathing apparatus, and ready to dance . . . what happens at the action depends upon what people bring with them and what the do once they are there. (Duncombe, 2002, p. 220)



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With autonomy and participation its core ethic, the RTS event is spontaneous, rebellious, inclusive and non-hierarchical. The charge is that if there ‘is no place to freely assemble, there is no free assembly. If there is no place to freely express, there is no free expression’ (in Duncombe, 2002, pp. 220–221). The raison d’être for the street party thus becomes the staging of spontaneous, autonomous and participatory politics that mirror the utopian vision of a free society. Since a market culture has commodified both the notion and the practice of pleasure, the street party becomes a counter-appropriation of its privatisation. It resists, in short, the marketisation and commodification of entertainment. A street party is free: it has no admission costs, cover charges, subsidised bar or dress code. Furthermore, as London RTS (1997) claims, a mainstreamed commodified culture seeks to ‘keep everyone indoors’, separated and atomised, and confined to buying individual rather than shared pleasures. Instead, the street party provides an escape from social and materialist confinement: The street, at best, is a living space of human movement and social intercourse, of freedom and spontaneity. The car system steals the street from under us and sells it back for the price of petrol. It privileges time over space, corrupting and reducing both to an obsession with speed or, in economic lingo, ‘turnover’ . . . . The privatisation of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion of neighbourhood and community that defines the metropolis . . . . Community becomes commodity. (London RTS, 1997) Guerrilla gardening Parties come in all shapes and sizes, and utopian parties are no different. Just as not all RTS events are street parties, when they are they also assume a number of different forms. The ‘gardening party’, for example, has often attracted a vigorous crowd. ‘Guerrilla Gardening’ borrows from the toolkit of street politics to enact the temporary greening of utopian space. Guerrilla gardeners occupy diverse city streetscapes to plant vegetables, trees, flowers and grass in an effort to green and beautify what are often degraded spaces. These community gardens are thus not only ‘an attempt to address the lack of green spaces’ in the city but also ‘to engage with the local community’; they invite people to emerge from their isolated and fortressed living spaces to interact with others around the collaborative social space of the garden (in Millar, 2005, p. 11). In this way, green guerrillas help transform neglected city blocks



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into vibrant community gardens that encourage community regeneration through pro-active forms of participation. These guerrillas were a particularly successful New York operation in the 1970s and 1980s where they helped transform vacant city lots into green oases (Millar, 2005). This momentum ceased in the 1990s when the neoliberalist economic revival set out to ‘clean up’ the city against increasing crime and a diversity of ‘undesirables’. But as many previously ‘communal’, and now greened, urban blocks were sold off in a rapidly rising real estate market, outraged community residents, including RTS activists, formed a broad coalition to resist the accelerating neoliberal encroachment on community space (Duncombe, 2002, p. 223). In their diverse and widespread global actions, from New York and beyond, anti-globalisation protests took up this reclamation theme and tactic in earnest. In doing so, they reaffirmed their indebtedness to a Situationist-style carnivalesque and a ‘politics of pleasure’ as the protest genre, affirming the exhortation to participate rather than simply spectate. The carnival’s status as a utopian space lies in its enactment of a temporary participatory egalitarianism that dissolves social rankings and that enables all to interact in a spirit of shared pleasure. This space temporarily dissolves established patterns of behaviour and hence challenges paradigmatic expectations. Through the temporary suspension of ‘normal’ life, these utopian carnivals activate a different kind of political psychology through the breaking down of ‘social distance’ and the ‘construction of new forms of interpersonal relations’ (Morrow, 1998, pp. 158–159). RTS-type actions, and the utopian spaces they create, affirm the importance of the everyday, celebrating the ‘here and now’ as against the ‘there and later’. For RTS this became ‘a model of protest in which the action itself was symbolic of its demands’ – a melding of means and ends and of vision and experience (Duncombe, 2002, p. 222). For such radical utopian politics, and its associated ‘image breaking’, symbols matter and the juxtaposition of competing aesthetics thus become central. Viewed through a Situationist prism, rebellion should be both enjoyed and ‘tasted’ and revolution should be made ‘irresistible’ since ‘capitalism is boring’. For Bey, since ‘one cannot struggle for what one does not know’ and since rebellion must be for as well as against something, the action should mimic, even if fleetingly, the future that is struggled for (2002, p. 99).

Forums and encuentros The utopian space model has extended its roots into a number of other fora. The Zapatistas’ 1996 Encuentro ‘open space’ model prefigured, in



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a number of respects, the forum model that the World Social Forum (WSF) was to use. These different forums each sought the open dialogue, support networks and alliance building that such open meetings or encuentros could generate. In short, they wished both the content of the vision and the experience of dialoguing and organising for this other world to be different. To this end, the WSF’s meeting place is constructed as an autonomous space in which its diverse participants exchange ideas and proposals for the making of a better world. The forum thus offers an opportunity to create an acephalous, horizontal space limited only by the clamour of the visions it accommodates. One of the architects of the ‘open space’ forum model describes it as a space that ‘has no leaders’ and is ‘basically horizontal’, unlike a movement that ‘congregates people . . . to accomplish, collectively, certain objectives’ through an organisational structure that is ‘necessarily pyramidical’ (Whitaker in Callinicos, 2004, p. 107). Whitaker is here cautioning against what he claims is a risky return to vanguardism – the centralised oppositional hierarchy that has been largely responsible for bringing transformational leftist politics undone. He contends that the evolution of the Forum into a fully-fledged political movement risks the forum’s integrity and vigour, and with it oppositional politics in general. At issue then is what is often labelled the horizontal or vertical orientation of radical politics with utopian space clearly occupying a horizontal position (see Tormey, 2005). Tormey also points out that if the WSF becomes ‘majoritarian’ it would cease to be ‘a non-denumerable space’, a space of minorities, where ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’ and the celebration of ‘spontaneity’ is key (2005, p. 406). The Zapatistas’ protection of their autonomous, utopian spaces becomes emblematic of their determination to avoid the vertical institutional momentum. Long-standing Zapatista observer Gustav Esteva provides an interesting insight into the conception of utopian space ‘Zapatista-style’: Here is a new way of looking at the world. Take the Zapatistas. They call thousands of people down here to Mexico for the Encuentro, and when they get here the EZLN say ‘don’t follow us, we will not be your vanguard’. Why? Because they say they don’t have the truth, and they should not lead anyone else. Perhaps they have a truth – a truth for the Chiapas, but not a universal truth, that can apply everywhere. All over the world, there are other truths. In other places, perhaps the principles can be applied – radical democracy, at the grass roots,



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Zapatismo, the political philosophy of the Zapatista movement, is hence both a vision and a strategy for social change, with autonomy and selfdetermination its key political drivers and the dissolution of hierarchism at the centre of its utopian spaces. The experience of participation and the inhabiting of the vision are hence key to the Zapatista notion of social change – and to my notion of utopian politics more generally. What such participation yields is dignity, conceived by the Zapatistas as central to the political psychology of social change. For Marcos then social change seeks the restoration of dignity through the creation of ‘a space in which people can define’ and experience ‘their own power’ (2001, p. 46). But dignity, as both an indicator of socio-political and psychological health and a driver of social change, ‘cannot be studied; you live it or it dies’ (2001, p. 268). And it is often in autonomous utopian spaces that dignity is recovered and fortified – even if temporarily.

Conclusion The range of radical political actors I have considered help inform the notion and operation of (con)temporary utopian spaces. These actors aspire to a simple goal: the temporary reclamation of public space from the enclosures of market society. In doing so, they identify the experience and practice of autonomous envisioning as central to social change. They recognise, even if intuitively, that in a homogenised, vertical and circumscribed neoliberal polity, autonomy (to live other lives, think other thoughts, dream other dreams) is often the first freedom lost. Utopian spaces offer the (temporary) recovery of this freedom. Radical utopian politics thus suggests that to be successful, ‘revolution’ needs to be internal as well as external; to operate at the psychological as well as social-institutional level; and that it can be temporary and fleeting, as much as permanent and blueprinted. The utopia considered here is one that seeks to persuade rather than impose, that invites rather than directs, that expands rather than circumscribes and that fires rather than extinguishes. Hence, the reclamation and enactment of imagination becomes a radical utopian act, particularly in its juxtaposition of permitted, circumscribed activities with unfettered ones; that is, in its experience of another possible world, even if temporarily.



claimed by people who are linked together worldwide. But the way it manifests itself can be different everywhere. (Kingsnorth, 2003, p. 43)


So conceived, this form of utopian practice goes some way towards activating the dynamic of social change. There remains, of course, considerable resistance to, and cynicism about, the transformational efficacy of this kind of utopian politics within radicalism itself. In the WSF, for example – but generalisable across radical politics more broadly – this plays out as a debate between (utopian) space and (political) movement. For the latter, the view is that ‘other worlds’ are one thing, but only a pragmatic, disciplined and vertically structured political movement has any real hope of transforming highly resistant power structures. To this degree, utopian politics are of limited transformational utility. My defence has been that contemporary utopian spaces offer a critical, if fleeting, ‘escape to freedom’. But that is by no means the end of it. The politics of utopian space are not meant to substitute for the range of activities that contribute to the plural mosaic of social change. Rather they offer another oppositional piece to this mosaic – and often an absent but important piece. After their political play in utopian space, Reclaim the Streeters, guerrilla gardeners, Zapatistas, forum attendees and a plethora of others go back to their communities and work on a range of political projects on the ground. They chip away at social change piece by piece. But the hope is that they are politically and psychologically fortified in their long-standing struggles by the utopias they have temporarily travelled to and tasted.



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Glocalization and the New Local Transnationalisms: Real Utopias in Liminal Spaces Ronaldo Munck

Introduction ‘The defining characteristic of utopianism is that it is a political theory specifically directed towards the creation of human happiness’ (Goodwin and Taylor, 1982, p. 207). Today, the goals of utopian thinking seem somewhat more circumspect. Thus Frederic Jameson writes eloquently of how ‘[t]he desire called Utopia must be concrete and ongoing, without being defeatist or incapacitating’ (Jameson, 2005, p. 84). We are now confronting the pessimism of the 1990s and the widely held feeling that alternatives were impossible. But the language in which it is done tends to be practical and pragmatic. Thus, Erik Olin Wright argues that ‘[w]hat we need, then, are “real utopias”: utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waypoints’ (Wright, 2005, p. 1). The Rational Transformation of institutions under imperfect conditions for social change is a worthy, if limited, goal. It is also one deeply imbued with Western notions of rationality and pragmatism and thus rules out more outlandish, impetuous and seemingly impossible alternatives. The necessity for utopian thinking has recently come to the fore again in Western political theory. Jameson sees the utopian form as the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible. While this is a movement of massive protests and demonstrations, we cannot conceive of how globalized transformation might proceed. In that context, argues Jameson: ‘Utopia thus now better expresses our relationship to a genuinely political future than any current programme of action’ (2005, p. 232). To bring Utopia back into our political imaginary – as does David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000) – is of course 207



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extremely welcome. But we cannot avoid noticing Jameson’s particular positionality in terms of the political reference points and the textual basis of his arguments. As his reviewer Borojerdi (2007, p. 117) points out, these latter are very restricted: ‘nothing from the Third World, where some of the older anti-capitalist spirit persists and only two from the Second’. Where post-capitalism means as little as post-modernism these particular Utopias seem, well, parochial. The West-centric bias of most utopian thinking is revealed clearly in the burgeoning literature on cosmopolitanism and global civil society. What could seem more logical than to counterpose to the emerging global state of the US/IMF/WB/WTO a globalization from below articulated by a Gramsci-inspired ‘global civil society’? Yet in practice this approach has been irredeemably Eurocentric (see Munck, 2006) and has, arguably, helped legitimize the new imperialism and the notion that the once colonized peoples should once again be taught manners by the West. The current popularity in progressive Western political theory of the concept of cosmopolitanism promotes the notion of global citizenship, universalism and the worldwide community of human beings. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has, for his part, promoted the alternative notion of a subaltern cosmopolitanism (Santos, 2007) which would undermine the false universalism of cosmopolitanism as currently articulated. Subaltern cosmopolitanism is manifest through the various initiatives and movements of counter-hegemonic globalization. It assumes global social exclusion and unequal power relations. It values indigenous knowledge and understands that the world is considerably more complex than Western rational thought allows for. I propose to further subvert West-centric thinking through the development of liminality (and hybridity) as the critical lens to uncover the utopian potential in local/global transnational spaces. The liminal (from limen = threshold) state is one characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy. It is a space which is ‘betwixt and between’ or ‘neither here, nor there’. It is a place where boundaries fade a little bit and we can find ourselves on the threshold ready to move beyond the limits of where we were. For Victor Turner, a ‘liminal space’ was relevant to rituals and constituted a space of transformation, a period of ambiguity, a marginal or transitional state (1967). For Homi Bhabha, the liminal is that which is on the border or the threshold. To privilege liminality is to undermine familiar solid culture in favour of unexpected hybrid cultural formations. Hybridity points us towards a ‘third space’ which ‘displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom’ (Bhabha, 1991, p. 211).



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I will take the local/global transnational spaces and political practices to be liminal spaces where a new hybrid politics operate. This takes us beyond current ontological divides between the local and the global and assumes their hybrid nature. Globalization theory constructs the global as a dynamic, rational, cosmopolitan space. The new localism, in contrast, constructs itself as cultural, authentic and defensive. As a hybrid ‘third space’ the local/global new transnational spaces are inconceivable from one optic or another alone. We need to explore open-mindedly the potential of these universal-particular spaces. I will, furthermore, take the meaning of liminality as a threshold moving beyond the limits of what we are, into what we are to be as an analogy for utopian thinking and practice. Liminality can serve as a transitional space and programme to help us find our way, and motivate us around the realizability of our Utopian ideals in practice. The utopian project can thus be grounded in specific spaces and social practices.

Glocalization The proponents of globalization can take comfort from the much earlier notion of the world as a single community expressed in utopian terms as the Kingdom of God on earth, for example. Many of those opposed to globalization, although by no means all, counterpose to this notion a pure, ultimately utopian local space. The local is where utopian communities can be built in the midst of a cold, impersonal, market-driven global domain. Here there is a long history of course, as Goodwin and Taylor put it in their study of the politics of utopia: ‘The image of utopia as a relatively small island or enclave jealously protected from contamination by the external world, has persisted throughout the history of Western civilisation’ (1971, p. 181). The question we need to pose now is whether these dual utopian imaginaries are based on a clear understanding of actually existing globalization. If the global/local domains are more dialectically intertwined and if we have many hybrid local/global social and political formations, where does it leave utopia? A particularly inventive solution to this dilemma came from the world of Japanese business in the term ‘glocalisation’ derived from the word dochakuka which means ‘global localisation’ more or less. The Japanese business gurus coined the term in the late 1980s to emphasize how the globalization of a given product would be most likely to succeed where the marketing of the product or service was adapted specifically to each local culture. Yahoo, McDonalds and Sony all now tailor their product or customize their service to cater for local so-called ‘cultural’ differences,



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in taste and so on. Roland Robertson sees ‘glocalisation’ as reflecting the general tension between the particular and the universal: ‘capitalism has to accommodate itself both to the materiality of the heliocentric global world, with its inherent space-time contingencies, and to the culturality of human life’ (1992, p. 173). Thus glocalization can be seen as a real world example of how capitalism has made sense of and adapted itself to a more globalized and hybrid world. Having taken on board the capitalist understanding of ‘glocalisation’, how might this concept translate into the world of subaltern politics? To move beyond the global/local optic we need to foreground the complex interplay of social scales in the construction of globalization. We cannot operate with the tacit rather simple divide between the global as smooth and the local as the place where difference is generated. Nor is it simply the case that the economy is always global and culture is situated at the local level. The cultural political economy of globalization needs to constantly bear in mind both inextricably linked elements. We also need to foreground all the scales including the regional, the still extremely relevant and the supranational that is not yet global. In terms of political practice, the same way that global managers may ‘download’ problems to the national level, so the agents of contestation may take local issues ‘upwards’ in an imaginative ‘jumping of scales’ as it were. In superseding the local/global divide we also bring back into the political equation the question of human agency. In its dominant form this divide between the local and the global carries a very strong image of the global as dynamic, thrusting and modernizing in contrast to a local seen as stagnant, passive and backward-looking. It also has a clearly defined gendered image of a male/female divide associated with it. But, to be clear, by foregrounding the local we are not idealizing it. As Probyn puts it, ‘the local is only a fragmented set of possibilities that can be articulated into a momentary politics of time and place’ (1990, p. 187). To be more specific, ‘in thinking of how locale is inscribed on our bodies, in our homes, and on the street, we can begin to loosen its ideological effects’ (Probyn, 1990, p. 187). In this way a focus on the local as nodal point of the work of globalization can be seen as a starting point for its deconstruction and not as the ready-made alternative localist critics of globalization see it as. In terms of the politics of the local as a constitutive element of the ‘anti-globalization’ movement, we can now be clearer why local/good and global/bad (or for that matter, vice versa) are poor guides to progressive political praxis. As Doreen Massey puts it: ‘Setting up the question



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as local versus global is to accede to spatial fetishism. That is, imagining that “space” or “spatial scale” has a political meaning, to assume that the local is always better simply because it is local’ (2000, p. 2). Not only is that the case but this perspective ignores the real geography of power developing across the world today. Some ‘locals’ are empowered while others are disempowered or marginalized, or some locals are more equal than others. These ‘locals’ are, furthermore, not simply geographical locations but the site of complex, historically derived social interaction and contestation. We cannot simply counterpose a vaguely progressive ‘local’ to the onward march of globalization that supposedly obliterates space and place. Finally with Boa Santos we might usefully distinguish between a ‘local that has been integrated in hegemonic globalization’ and ‘what in the local is not the result of hegemonic globalization’ (Santos, 2004, p. 21). Much of what has been referred to under the rubric of ‘glocalization’ can be seen to reflect that first tendency whereby the processes of globalization absorb the consuming power and creativity of local places. There is a logic here of assimilation that subsumes the local within a new hegemonic global scale of human oppression and emancipation. Yet the movement of contestation does not always, or even often, start at that global level. As Boa Santos recalls, most movements involved in the World Social Forum started as local struggles fighting against the social exclusion brought about or intensified by neoliberal globalization. Only later, often via the WSF, have they developed local/global linkages through which they reglobalize themselves in a counter-hegemonic way. (2004, p. 22) In conclusion then, the local is not a ‘pure’ place and ‘militant particularism’ is not the answer to ‘abstract universalism’. The local is itself multiscalar, penetrated by transnational economic social and cultural relations in a complex manner. The local provides a space for a new politics that transcends modernists or nation-statist conceptions of the local/global based on a simple inside/outside the nation-state parameter divide. The local is a site for struggle and the agents of neoliberal globalization continuously seek to colonize it, not least through the glocalization strategies of a Sony Corporation or a McDonalds. Those who lack power, or even a voice, may also in the local spaces of sociability and political interaction find a platform to contest the ‘localized globalization’ that is currently the hegemonic modality of local/global



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interaction. The politics of the local will continue to play a major role in the complex contestation of globalization’s current trajectory, dynamic and politics.

Against the a-spatial imagination of cosmopolitanism the new localism pits the particularity of place. Yet the politics of place in the era of globalization are neither obvious nor simple as we have seen above. For some analysts and activists there is a simple schema in which global is bad and local is good. Of course, the cosmopolitan may well look down on the place-bound political imagination of the local activist. But the local activist may also reject too quickly the abstract cosmopolitanism of the transnational fora of global civil society. Clearly we need to move beyond the binary opposition between the local and the global and examine whether there is a new local transnationalism emerging. The research/political strand seeking to reassert the power of place emphasizes the localizing aspects of globalization as a necessary counter to its ‘deterritorializing’ tendencies. Thus the transnational corporations need roots in particular places and societies and are not simply ‘footloose and fancy free’. Likewise, the local political context is an essential element in any movement seeking to contest the globalization project. This is particularly the case if one adopts the perspective of the ‘new’ social movements that address the particular grievances of identity-based social groups rather than the grand abstractions of class and nation. A general perspective of ‘localized resistance’ would take up the poststructuralist vision of Michel Foucault for whom repressive power/knowledge is always resisted in the particular rather than through grand narratives. David Harvey has, however, recently sought to critique ‘militant particularism’ as an adequate antidote to the abstract universalism of the ‘cosmopolitan’ social movements. Workers, peasants and environmentalists are often very ‘grounded’ in particular places and imbued with communal or cultural identities. The solidarities of place can often be extremely militant, hence the term ‘militant particularism’, first deployed by the cultural theorist Raymond Williams. While understanding both its appeal and its effectiveness, Harvey takes issue with the politics of negation he sees at its core. Thus for Harvey the political philosophy of a Foucault ‘urges us to revel in the fragmentation and cacophony of voices through which the dilemmas of the modern world are understood’ and can often end up ‘actually celebrating the fetishisms



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of locality, space, or social pressure group’ (Harvey, 1996, p. 399) that underlie localized resistance. Instead of lauding local discourses Harvey bids us to put ‘critical distance and detachment’ first so as to allow us ‘to formulate global ambitions’ (1996, p. 44). Paradoxically or not, the rise of globalization as dominant discourse and contested social reality has also led to what Arif Dirlik refers to as ‘the irruption of place consciousness into social and political analysis’ (1999, p. 151). A sense of place has always been with us and it certainly has a connotation of rootedness and groundedness, but places are not preordained, natural locations where humans simply inhabit. Rather we need to understand place as a product of complex interacting social relations. It is the relations between classes, genders, ethnicities and age groups that shape the ostensible timelessness and homogeneity of a place-bound ‘community’. In the era of neoliberal globalization, an ever-increasing commodification and ever-greater ‘freedom’ for the selfregulating market, places and communities are on the defensive. They only come to the fore when they are threatened by deindustrialization in the North or ‘development’ in the South. While it is necessary to recognize the continued and even accentuated importance of place in the era of globalization it is also important to understand the limitations of the ontological binary opposition often seen dividing the local from the global. Whether it is space versus place or global universalism versus local particularism we are dealing with debilitating binary oppositions based on an unsustainable ontological dualism. Smith refers in this regard to how ‘locality is still often assumed to be a space of nature springing from human sociability’ (2001, p. 121). If we move beyond naturalistic conceptions of the local we can understand how it is also a socially constructed category as much as class, race or gender. By treating the ‘global’ as an a priori category the local reacts to, these binary constructs also ignore the complex ways in which the global is always already local in its genesis, development and day-to-day maintenance as hegemonic project. We really do need to reconsider the common preconception that the contestation of globalization must necessarily occur at a global level. Indeed, we need to go further and deconstruct the traditional notions of spatial levels of social activity in the complex and hybrid nature of actually existing social contestation movements. Labour internationalism has always taken different forms and these have rarely followed the mythical injunction to ‘workers of all countries unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains’. In fact, from the period of the First International until 1968 it was, according to Marcel van der Linden, a ‘national



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internationalism’ (2003) that prevailed. That is to say it was based on a narrow and Eurocentric conception of the ‘international working class’ and it was a form of solidarity between national trade unions movements rather than a genuine transnationalism. In the period since 1968 we have seen the rise of the new social movements, the collapse of communism and the emergence of globalization as a dominant societal paradigm. What this means in terms of internationalism is that we have probably entered a transitional phase akin to that associated with the formation of the First International with new political and organizational forms emerging. Traditional models of internationalism ignore the complex contingencies at play and the very real contradictions underlying its practice. For example, we might have to recognize that there are often narrow sectional interests lying behind ‘internationalism’ as when US trade unions promote unionism in the South to dampen competition over wage levels with their own members. Also, we might find that the best way to combat globalization is through a form of national alternativist trade union strategy. So one of the new global unions ICEM, in a document arguing for ‘global unionism’, concludes that ‘priority must be given to supporting organizing at local union level’ (ICEM, 1999, p. 25) to build union strength on the ground. There is, in reality, no ‘one right way’ to practice internationalism and we need to recognize that it is a complex, shifting and transitional phase we are currently experiencing. The particular form of workers joint action and solidarity we explore here is that of ‘local transnationalism’. Our basic hypothesis is that articulated by Andrew Herod, namely that: The global should not be privileged a priori as the scale at which activities to confront global capital must be carried out. Whereas in many cases it may be necessary for workers to organize, globally, in others it is worker’s local activities that may give them purchase upon global political and economic interests. (2001, p. 52) This is not an argument in favour of the new localism or for labour to enter local ‘growth coalitions’ with capital and the state. It is simply a recognition that globalization impacts on a range of different social scales and so, likewise, social contestation and transnationalism may also benefit from moving beyond a stark local/global imaginary. We can now maybe move beyond what some observers call the ‘local-global paradox’. This refers to the fact that ‘while economic relationships



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have become ever more global in scope and nature, political responses to economic globalization are becoming more localized’ (Jonas, 1998, p. 325). The slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ originated in the environmental movement and it is thus an apposite case study of local transnationalism. The environment transcends national boundaries and issues such as ‘global warming’ are by definition transnational. Yet as David Held and co-authors put it: ‘Despite the global proclivities of the movement, much of the activity has been local and national in its focus’ (1999, p. 387). While international environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace have been highly visible, their national counterparts are usually much better resourced. Also, despite the early global governance focus on the environment at the Rio environmental conference of 1992, the international NGOs have not been particularly successful in terms of inserting themselves in the transnational environmental negotiations and institutions. Nevertheless, environmentalists with the bold mission to reclaim the Earth and transform humankind’s relationship to nature have been an effective component of the broad anti-globalization movement. The environmental movement is widely seen as an exemplar of the new internationalism. The ‘global environmental crisis’ is addressed through transnational political campaigns addressed to the United Nations and other global governance institutions. By challenging the dominant industrial mode of production and unbridled corporate interests, the environmentalists bring themselves to the centre of the anti-globalization movement. This is very much at the core of the ‘globalization from below’ strand that accepts fully the desirability of internationalization but seeks to turn it to people’s advantage. There is a strong focus on the desirability of local level small-scale production and local community politics. Grassroots environmental movements are often seen as exemplars of the new politics of trans-localism. Thus Friends of the Earth (FOE) according to Neil Washbourne’s study shows ‘the importance of translocal and translocalist action . . . that is decentred, connects to other places without having to go to centres, whether of power or geography’ (2001, p. 132). This empowered and empowering form of action helps us break from a single local/global opposition. FOE can thus be well networked globally while also facilitating a decentralized mode of organizing and campaigning at the local level. Information technology has, of course, been a key facilitator for this new mode of organization helping to bridge the gap between the different locals. Interestingly within FOE



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there was a strong debate on the rise of information technology that concluded that it was indeed congruent with environmental globalist views of the world. Another example of the local/global dialectic was the anti-dam movement in Southern Brazil during the 1980s, focused around local peasant mobilizations against the flooding of valleys by large hydroelectric dams. This movement had both local links (with the agrarian reform movement, the radical sections of the Catholic Church and so on) and global ones with the international environmental movement. A study by Rothman and Oliver of this particular movement highlighted the continuous interplay between the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’ actors, with resistance beginning locally and ‘interchange among activists and international organizations and movement was always two-way’ (2002, p. 128). The local activists and the needs of the poor peasants affected by the dams took up the framing ideologies of liberation theology first and then international political ecology but always in terms of their own very particular situation, traditions and political perspectives. The dialectics of globalization and local resistance are also played out in the dramatic struggle of the Ogoni against Shell in Nigeria. This was a classic case of a multinational corporation exploiting the ecosystem to the detriment of the indigenous population. Environmental expropriation and degradation in pursuit of oil created fierce local resistance from the Ogoni people of the area. The local resistance movement against Shell going back several decades became internationalized in the 1990s with widespread calls to make Shell accountable. In the aftermath of Ken Saro Wiwa’s execution in 1995 the issue gained widespread international attention but the local movement of resistance was crushed. The main lesson of this bitter local/global environmental struggle, according to Cyril Obi, is ‘the overestimation of the pressure that the global civil society could bring to bear on Shell and the state in Nigeria’ (2000, p. 291). Perhaps more solid local and national alliances might have prevented the debacle that followed but that is only the benefit of hindsight. Although the local/global environmental movement has advanced new models of organization and brought many activists into the antiglobalization movement it does suffer from severe limitations. For one, its ecological absolutism might constrain the project of global transformation. As Harvey puts it, ‘the right to be free of ecological destruction is posed so strongly as a negative right that it appears to preclude the positive right to transform the earth in ways conducive to the well-being of the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed’ (1996, p. 400). Whatever the merits of ‘deep’ ecologism in the terms of sustainable development, its tenets often contradict popular development in



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practice. This may well be part of a broader problem, which is the clearly Northern-centred perspective lurking behind the supposedly ‘global’ programme of environmentalism. Clearly we are not ‘all in one boat’ and all planetary images and globe talk will not dissolve the dilemma of underdevelopment in the majority world. Likewise the environmental justice strand of the global Green movement also brings politics to the fore in its discourse and debates. Whether it is the toxification of communities of colour in the United States or indigenous struggles of water rights in Andean America, it is the border or interaction between the environmental and justice elements that prevails and sets the tone of the conflict. It is the imbalance of global power that creates damaging environmental consequences for those who are marginal to or ejected from the capitalist development process in the era of globalization. This borderland also includes the very real tensions but also possibilities opened up when the environmental movement enters into dialogue with the worker’s movement, often perceived to be on the wrong side of the industrial society/sustainable ecology divide. The basic conclusion is that any appeals to ‘Mother Earth’ as a mystic entity in its own right will fail to address the basic social divisions between its human inhabitants. The contradictions of environmentalism’s local transnationalism are inevitable. But, as David Harvey puts it: ‘as a movement embedded in multiple “militant particularisms”, it has to find a way to cross that problematic divide between action that is deeply embedded in place . . . to a much more general movement’ (1996, p. 399). The issue is whether the solidarity based on place can extend and be generalized across space. The basis on which local experience and social interactions in one place build and sustain a particular local campaign may not be the same elsewhere. Whether it is always possible, or even desirable, to move to a higher level of abstraction is of course debatable. Harvey still clings to traditional socialist notions of universalism that may not translate readily into viable radical politics today. It might be better to accept the contradiction at the core of local transnationalism rather than to seek to ‘resolve’ it in favour of a universalism, abstract and transcendental politics.

Another world/another knowledge In an increasingly rare note on the current conjuncture – what would have been called ‘the way forward’ once upon a time – Perry Anderson argues that ‘[i]n this becalmed universe [the present conjuncture], the cry “Another World is Possible” risks sounding increasingly desperate’



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(2007, p. 28). Be that as it may, what is most remarkable about Anderson’s survey is how geographically and socially limited his examples of ‘strategic alternatives’ to the status quo are: Robin Blackburn’s Global Pension and Philippe Schmitter’s Eurostipendium (Anderson, 2007, p. 28), with Roberto Unger’s experimentalism getting an honourable mention. Whatever their merits, these schemes are squarely Eurocentric, speaking to the needs of only a small minority of the world’s population. The majority population do not live under a welfare state, do not receive a statutory minimum wage and do not receive a state pension. Of course, the term ‘Eurocentrism’ can be abused as a rude epithet and we also should not for one minute neglect the lessons to be learned from the European Union’s attempts to carve out a social development path, distinct from that of the United States. A prior task to constructing ‘another world’, I would argue, is to uncover the other forms of knowledge that have been buried by hegemonic Eurocentric thinking. The Western European understanding of rational knowledge is inseparable from the colonial experience. To even contemplate the validity of non-European or indigenous forms of knowledge has appeared, literally, unthinkable. Knowledge has been irredeemably marked by what Aníbal Quijano has called the ‘coloniality of power’ (2000). This has not only privileged scientific over ‘nonscientific’ forms of knowledge, but has coloured the way the rest (which are not the West) have been able to conceive of nation-building, revolution and last but not least, utopia. Thus, on the one side the Marxist Second International at the last turn of century had no problem incorporating colonialism into its utopian projects. Conversely, there are few revolutionary or utopian projects in the majority world that did not have to centre a decolonization of ‘race’ as part of its undoing of the old order and the construction of a new utopian, and thus necessarily post colonial, order. What we need to carry out to construct a utopia fit-for-purpose in the majority world is a shift from the centre to the margins. Not only should we talk about alternatives and other worlds but also about alternative ways of thinking about alternatives. The dominant epistemologies remain marked (if not trapped) by their European origins and this includes arguably all the various ‘post’ epistemologies. Any new paradigm of emancipation needs to focus on the unequal economic/political/social/cultural power relations that were generated by colonialism and created the Third World, the South’s dependency and even the worthy Millennium Development Goals. Santos argues clearly and persuasively that ‘Habermas’s [for which read European]



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universalism turns out to be an imperial universalism, in full control of the decision about its own limitations, hereby imposing in an unlimited way both upon what it includes and what it excludes’ (Santos, 1995, pp. 995, 508). To not put too fine a point on it, the non-European subaltern is missing from rational universalism, Western non-nationalist forms of emancipation and, by and large, from dominant utopian thinking. We seem to have recovered from the pessimism of the 1990s when ‘there is no alternative’ seemed a realistic verdict and not just propaganda. Utopian thinking is back and the role of the South in reenergizing alternative strategies has been clear ever since the first World Social Forum in 2001. My argument has been that we need to develop a glocalization of the left which is fully cognizant of the complexity and potential of the local/global interface or liminal spaces. We need to explore the various ways in which the economy has become decentred and the dominance of capitalism deconstructed (Gibson-Graham, 2006) thus opening up livelihood strategies that go beyond calculative rationality. The societal reactions against what Karl Polanyi (2000) called ‘the stark utopia’ of the self-adjusting market are creating non-capitalist social relations in the liminal spaces betwixt and between the global and the local. We need to seek out the waypoints to make the utopian destinations many, espouse a viable prospect with a transitional programme to bridge the gap between the here and the now, and the better place we want to be.



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The Grandchildren of Marx and Coca-Cola: Lefebvre, Utopia and the ‘Recuperation’ of Everyday Life Michael E. Gardiner

In the wake of the failure of the 1968 May-June events to jump-start the widely expected revolutionary transformation of French society, Situationist Guy Debord unleashed a venomous assault on his former friend, mentor, and fellow imbiber Henri Lefebvre. Debord accused him of lifting the idea of the ‘festival’ from the Situationist International (S.I.) – somewhat ironically, in light of the fact that Situationist détournements can be read as elaborate plagiarizations of a wide range of theoretical and pop culture texts. And not to mention that Lefebvre, in a 1983 interview, claimed that Debord and company had cribbed, without attribution, his own research into the festive qualities of the 1871 Paris Commune. But, more ominously, Debord argued that Lefebvre had rendered this concept ‘useful’ for academic scholarship, thereby divesting it of any radical import vis-à-vis the immediate political situation. Lefebvre, in Debord’s eyes, was guilty of the primal sin of ultra-leftism: that of functioning effectively, if perhaps unwittingly, as an ‘agent of recuperation’. Lefebvre remained thereafter on the S.I.’s ‘blacklist’ until the organization’s demise in 1972. It is tempting to dismiss Debord’s rant as yet another symptom of his paranoid and schismatic nature, and his oft-repeated tendency to turn on erstwhile comrades if they did not cleave with sufficient rigour to his world-view through all the arcane twists and turns of 1960s and early 1970s revolutionary agitation and struggle. However, he does voice an uncomfortable truth, one that also bothered Lefebvre – namely, that what the latter called the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ has an enormous capacity to absorb and even profit from the subversive forces that, at least ostensibly, oppose it. This is neatly 220



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summarized in Debord’s pithy epigram: ‘There is no gesture so radical that ideology will not try to recuperate [it]’ (cited in Plant, 1992, p. 188). Arguably, this recuperation of the subversive energies of myriad oppositional movements can today be viewed in its most blatant form in what John Leland (2004) calls ‘hip capitalism’. Whereas whitecollar employment during an earlier phase of industrial capitalism, as described by Siegfried Kracauer in The Salaried Masses (1998), was marked by soul-destroying conformity, mindless routine, and rigid hierarchies, the hip capitalism of cutting-edge software, information technology, and graphic-design companies is steeped (allegedly) in creative rebelliousness, egalitarian-minded informality, spontaneity in dress, attitudes and behaviour, and consensual decision-making. Insofar as the line between work and play seems to be more and more blurred, fused into an endless series of ‘lifestyle choices’, the counter-cultural values trumpeted since the 1960s are realized successfully – not only in the work environment, but also in the marketing and consumption of commodities and services. In this brave new world, the Lefebvrean festival, its intellectual lineage notwithstanding, is ‘always-already’ here, infusing and invigorating daily life. This chapter will focus on the problem of ‘recuperation’, with especial reference to Lefebvre. It will address such issues as: Are there any limits to processes of co-option? What are the possibilities for intellectual and political dissent in the context of privatized consumerism, and especially hip capitalism (or such cognates as ‘punk marketing’), in an increasingly consumerist, globalized world? How can we distinguish between, on the one hand, a recognizably Lefebvrean-inspired cultivation of an integral ‘style of life’ understood (à la Nietzsche) as an artwork, and, on the other, a commodified and aestheticized ‘lifestyle’ rooted in what Michel Foucault once, and presciently, referred to the ‘California cult of the self’? Finally, what is Lefebvre’s conception of utopia, and how does it connect up with all the aforementioned, especially the notion of ‘totality’?

‘Hip capitalism’ and its discontents Although the notion of hip capitalism is associated with John Leland and developed at length in his popular 2004 book Hip: The History, similar ideas can be found in books by Alan Liu (2004), Andrew Ross (2003), and Richard Sennett (2006). However, the most sustained treatment of this issue can be found in the collaborative work of French



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social scientists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, especially their massive 1999 book The New Spirit of Capitalism, published recently in English translation by Verso. In a nutshell, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that what Max Weber identified as the ‘spirit of capitalism’, which is both a value system and a distinct mechanism of legitimation, has developed through several discrete stages, although they make it clear this does not imply historical inevitability. The spirit that Weber claimed to have detected in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was essentially bourgeois, with primary emphasis on entrepreneurialism, conventional middle-class morality, and an idea of ‘fairness’ based on personal charity. But, for Boltanski and Chiapello, this was supplanted by a quite different ethos roughly between 1930 and 1960. During the latter period, the economy is dominated by large, centralized firms integrated into the welfare state, run by salaried managers with a belief in life-long employment and duty to the corporation, and legitimated by reference to a meritocratic credentialism. The most recent transition concerns the post-1968 era, most intensively in the 1980s, which will be examined shortly. Boltanski and Chiapello’s specific methodology, which involves discourse analyses of a wide range of management literature from the 1960s to the 1990s, is not our concern here. However, we might highlight an aspect of their argument that is especially relevant vis-à-vis the present discussion: the notion that capitalism needs legitimating mechanisms that are not merely superstructural adornments, but integral to its day-to-day economic functioning. That is, capitalism must convince its managerial cadres that it is an economic system that can vouchsafe personal fulfillment, inculcate a sense of justice, and contribute substantively to the public good. The new, post-1968 spirit of capitalism is marked by an administrative structure that is ‘very flexible; organised by projects; works in a network; features few hierarchical levels; [and] where a logic of transversal flows has replaced a more hierarchical one’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005, p. 165). In terms of ideological legitimation, there is new concept of merit that values permanent change, mobility and adaptability as ends to themselves, the ability to participate in and nourish vital interrelations, and overarching ideals of personal growth and fulfillment. So, not only has capitalism evolved into a new form, but it has a distinctive mode of legitimation, or what Boltanski and Chiapello call a ‘justificatory regime’ (2005, p. 168). But where does this new legitimating function come from? For Boltanski and Chiapello, a justificatory regime must not only promote a minimal level of agreement around general principles. It must also be capable of addressing, and



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indeed accommodating effectively, external criticisms that call into question the validity of such value systems. They propose two main types of anti-capitalist ideological criticism: first, ‘social’ critiques; and, second, what they call ‘artist’ critiques, but, because this phrase is somewhat infelicitous, will be referred to here as ‘aesthetic’ critiques. The former involves such familiar social-democratic and Marxist preoccupations as exploitation, suffering, and the destruction of human solidarity through the industrialization process. The aesthetic, by way of contrast, sees capitalism ‘as a source of disenchantment and of inauthentic goods, persons, and lifestyles, [and also] as a source of oppression that is opposed to freedom, autonomy, and creativity’ (Chiapello, 2004, p. 586). Not only do these critiques differ in terms of form and content; they emerge out of the life-conditions of distinct sociological groups. The social critique, that is to say, is a product of the direct experience of workers, and, more obliquely, intellectuals and writers of the day who were concerned about the deleterious effects of industrialization (Fourier, Marx, Saint-Simon, and so on). The aesthetic critique was formulated, initially at least, by artists and other bohemian groupings at roughly the same time, in the early to mid-Nineteenth century. Some commentators who are otherwise sympathetic to this account, such as Michael Löwy, point out that the aesthetic critique is really part of a much more expansive cultural formation that Löwy himself has characterized as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, and which goes well beyond specific groups of artists who lived during the fairly narrow historical period identified by Boltanski and Chiapello (see Löwy, 2002, p. 98). Such criticisms are important and generally well-taken, but the key distinction between the social and the aesthetic is a useful one, particularly as it bears on the aftermath of the events of May 1968. To wit, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that, at crucial historical moments, the social and aesthetic critiques dovetail and mutually support each other. May 1968 is the best-known example in recent history of such an articulation: it represented one of those rare instances of quasi-revolutionary upheaval that occurred in the almost complete absence, at least initially, of economic or political crisis, and involved the emergence of a surprisingly broad and overtly counter-hegemonic social movement that, for a time at least, seemed to transcend class, occupational or regional lines. France was then at the height of its post-war consumer boom, and the de Gaulle government was firmly in control, with little if any overt political instability on the horizon. Student demands for ‘authenticity’ and ‘self-management’ overlapped with a call from organized labour (but





also myriad technicians and managers) for better working conditions, less authoritarian work structures, and so forth (see Kurlansky, 2003; Ross, 2002). The events of May 1968 and its after-effects, which reverberated across France and eventually around the globe, are familiar to academics and intellectuals of a critical orientation. What is considerably less wellknown, argue Boltanski and Chiapello, is how capitalist organizational culture in France, and to a certain extent elsewhere, responded to these criticisms. Initially, in the years roughly between 1968 and 1973, employer organizations rejected the aesthetic critique, but responded positively to the social – negotiating with trade unions at the national level to raise wages and increase job security, for example. The result, combined with the energy crisis of the early 1970s, was a precipitous fall in profit margins. This prompted the business sector to embrace with increasing fervour the aesthetic critique instead, especially as it concerned the everyday organization of work. The workplace was reordered to accommodate a counter-culture that privileged the pursuit of autonomous projects in the context of decentralized networks of face-to-face interaction and information flow, rather than to subordinate work to goal-oriented outcomes, the latter now viewed as antiquated and indeed dehumanizing. The new spirit of capitalism places high value on creative urges and inspiration. It includes the idea that a person can be inventive each and every day of his/her life; and that she/he can be detached from any of the material and temporal powers that undermine the holiness of freedom. It is a way out from the prison of instrumental reason. (Chiapello, 2004, p. 588). Boltanski and Chiapello are radical leftist critics, and they make it clear that the Bastille of technocratic capitalism has not yet been stormed successfully. The shift from the social to the aesthetic had the effect of displacing, and hence neutralizing effectively the central thrust of the social critique (see Boltanski, 2002, p. 10). This is echoed by Andrew Ross, who points out in his book No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs that the apparent egalitarianism and informality of new office life blurs the work/non-work distinction, insinuating the pursuit of ‘excellence’ and other vague corporate non-sequiturs into the space of leisure and everyday life (Ross, 2003; also Moran, 2005, pp. 29–60). The result is that private corporations are even more effective at squeezing surplus value out of their employees than in earlier stages of capitalism,



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when different, and perhaps more transparent justificatory regimes were in effect. What is particularly noteworthy here is the central role played by the intelligentsia in facilitating this transition, many of them veterans of the heady days of the late 1960s. As Boltanski argues in his essay ‘The Left After May 1968 and the Longing for Total Revolution’, the new mode of capitalism would not have been as successful at displacing the social critique in favour of the aesthetic, and absorbing the latter into the daily organization of the corporate workplace, if writers, critics and academics had not helped to formulate an ideological ‘grammar’ appropriate to the new regime. Many spokespersons for radical change during May 1968 were ‘satisfied with the changes in the organisation of work and, more generally, of society, while sometimes being even integrated themselves into the new mechanisms of power, in support of the Socialist government in France’ (Boltanski, 2002, p. 10). (Oddly, this view seems to have been endorsed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the current occupant of the French presidency. During the 2007 election campaign, on the 39th anniversary of these events, Sarkozy blamed the ‘immoral’ and rootless nature of global finance capitalism squarely on the ethos of May 1968.) To give an example of this shift in management philosophy and practice, one of the central metaphors employed by the new spirit of capitalism is that of the ‘network’. It supposes that people working within capitalist firms are no longer individuals with discrete occupations marked by limited skill-sets and located in a distinct hierarchy of functions and powers. Rather, they are best understood as actors immersed in a decentred and non-hierarchical field characterized by continuous flow and transformation, designed to maximize personal freedom, innovation and creativity. For Boltanski, it was no accident that key French poststructuralists who emerged in the post-1968 period, such as Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Foucault, drew extensively upon linguistic analogies, as well as concepts drawn from biology (rhizomes, flow) or politics and warfare (strategies, mobilizations), so as to theorize society as an immanent and inchoate field constituted by the ineluctable play of differences and fleeting instantiations of desire. These forces are registered in perpetual agonisms and criss-crossing forces that never coalesce into stable structures or discernable patterns of historical progression, what Félix Guattari (1984, p. 77) calls a ‘semiotic polycentrism’; or, more succinctly, a network. One might be tempted to dismiss the presence of such terms and metaphors across two apparently distinct fields as mere coincidence, or else as elements of the broader cultural climate that management





literature has drawn upon in a selective and non-reflexive manner. Yet, this is not the sort of claim that Boltanski and Chiapello make: they argue for a direct symbiosis between the aesthetic critique discussed above and the main ideological constituents of the new spirit of capitalism. In a review of the French edition of The New Spirit of Capitalism, New Left Review editor Sebastian Budgen suggests, somewhat cheekily, that Boltanski and Chiapello come close to portraying Deleuze as a management guru rather than the anti-establishment philosopher he is usually taken to be (Budgen, 2000, p. 153). This seems implausible, but it takes only a few seconds to locate, via an Internet search, a business course taught at the University of Copenhagen entitled ‘Management Consultancy: What Is It?’, which features numerous works by Deleuze prominently on the required reading list. It might be equally surprising to learn that Deleuze and Guattari as well as Foucault worked as private consultants in the early 1980s, not for the business sector directly, but as part of the Socialist government’s drive for economic and technological modernization. Another example is Jean-François Lyotard’s epochal study The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, published in 1979, which was commissioned originally by the Quebec government to help it formulate cultural and communications policy in the context of the emerging information age.

Lefebvre and the problem of recuperation The previous discussion raises, in the starkest possible terms, the fraught issue of recuperation. To put the matter bluntly, if Boltanski and Chiapello are correct to argue that if the corporate sector has been so remarkably successful at appropriating the revolutionary qualities of the 1960s counter-culture, the latest incarnation of a romantic or aesthetic anti-capitalist critique, what genuinely utopian possibilities remain in the era of twenty-first-century global capitalism? It is important to note that this is not simply a matter of the sublimation of subversive energies into the marketing of commodities and lifestyles, which has been documented at length by others (see Frank, 2001; Heath and Potter, 2004; Niedzviecki, 2004). Rather, what is distinctive about Boltanski and Chiapello’s analysis is that it focuses on how anti-capitalist sentiments are absorbed into the day-to-day organization of the capitalist workplace itself. In other words, if yesterday’s critique of everyday life has become, in some respects at least, today’s management ideology, where does that leave the work of Lefebvre and his aspirations for a revolution of, and in, the everyday?



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One might begin tackling this problem by noting that the process of recuperation, and the role the intelligentsia has played in it, was well-known to Lefebvre (see Kofman and Lebas, 1996). This begs the question: what, more precisely, did Lefebvre understand by recuperation, and how can we develop a firmer grasp of the limits and possibilities of critique and transformative change that follows in the wake of this knowledge? Lefebvre’s comments on recuperation are scattered throughout his voluminous works, but the closest he comes to a sustained discussion is a brief section in the third volume of Critique of Everyday Life, originally published in 1981, which appeared in English translation in 2005. Here, he characterizes recuperation as the use of any critical doctrine, ideology or strategy by ‘different social or political forces from those in whose name it was advanced’ (Lefebvre, 2005, p. 106). Radical ideas and practices always present officialdom with a myriad of opportunities to fine-tune their mechanisms of control, if they can be reintegrated successfully into the existing order. Hence, not only can virtually anything be recuperated: strategies of cooption have had long histories in the service of power – which, as an aside, helps to explain Guy Debord’s fascination with the likes of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli and the time-honoured arts of trickery, deception, and so on (Debord, 2004). At the same time, Lefebvre thought it was only after 1975 that recuperation became an ‘official’ strategy of state and capital, and organized systematically. French technocrats during this period were acutely aware of the sclerotic and moribund nature of the Gaullist state, and the increasingly dysfunctional nature of an industrial system dominated by inflexible Fordist principles. The best way to deflect and harness the creative energies and new thinking that flowed from the ‘generation of 1968’ was to give this cohort the resources and organizational opportunities to be able to work up such radical (if still largely inchoate) ideas into formalized knowledges and practices that were eminently useful to bureaucratically driven projects, initiatives and pronouncements. This was not only true of the various forms of official Marxism, which Lefebvre believed were already thoroughly compromised. Even the very ‘critique of everyday life’ he helped formulate in the post-war era was vulnerable. For example, in the late 1970s and 1980s, the French state pursued a policy of ‘social inclusion’ vis-à-vis marginalized and deteriorating urban and suburban areas (many of them ethnic enclaves), through city planning measures, beautification, the establishment of green belts, and so on. The justificatory rhetoric for such policy and planning initiatives evoked explicitly Lefebvre’s own concepts of the




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adopted and adapted on all sides, banalized, recuperated by advertising as well as various political parties, and ended up being blunted and flattened into ‘quality of life’. This reduced it to signs of transformation and discourse on transformation, before it ended up in so-called concrete proposals concerning holiday periods and working hours. In lieu of changing life, the image of life was changed! (Lefebvre, 2005, pp. 107–108) This sentiment is echoed by Boltanski in the aforementioned essay ‘The Left After May 1968’, where he suggests that one of the central reasons the social critique was sidestepped in favour of the aesthetic, and why the latter is much more amenable to recuperation than the former, is that collectivist aspirations for ‘total revolution’ had become channelled into what social theorist Anthony Giddens (1991) calls ‘life politics’, in which an individual’s life is framed increasingly as a reflexive project of self-stylization vis-à-vis the cultivation of cultural taste, body image, and so forth. Presumably, this reflexive self is much more vulnerable to what Zygmunt Bauman (1992, 2007b) calls the ‘seduction’ of consumerism, which provides most of the integrative mechanisms of late capitalism, at minimal cost to the state and in an elegantly self-policing way. Boltanski, following Foucault (and anticipating Hardt and Negri, 2000), advances a somewhat narrower concept of ‘biopower’, suggesting that the counter-culture of the post-1968 era is concerned mainly with personal control over biological reproduction rather than the socialization of economic production, and he insists the former is ‘wholly compatible with the maintenance of property rights under their present form and with the expansion of global capitalism’ (Boltanski, 2002, p. 19). At this point in our discussion, it is tempting to follow the dualistic conceptual lines that have been set up explicitly: social (good) versus aesthetic (not necessarily ‘bad’, but misguided and politically compromised) critique; collective (good) versus individual (bad) proscriptions for change; and so on. This is a common line of argumentation; see, for instance, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut’s influential book French Philosophy of the 1960s, which is well-nigh contemptuous about May 1968 and its dire impact on the French left (Ferry and Renaut, 1990). Tempting, but as might be anticipated, wrong-headed and largely inaccurate.



festival and the ‘right to the city’ (see Kipfer, 2008, p. 205). In addressing this issue, Lefebvre suggests that the Rimbaudian injunction to ‘change life’, originally a compelling and subversive demand, in the post-1975 era was

As Peter Wagner asserts in his carefully reasoned piece ‘The Project of Emancipation and the Possibility of Politics, Or, What’s Wrong with Post-1968 Individualism?’, the apparent dichotomy between individualism and collectivism, the former recuperable into consumer-friendly and ideologically ‘safe’ forms and the latter ‘authentically’ emancipatory, does not hold up to scrutiny. His key argument is that a desire for a collective subject was, in fact, at the heart of the politics of May 1968, and that the strand of individualism that emerged in its wake was the result of the failure to identify a viable collectivity that could spearhead transformative change. Individualism, in other words, was not ‘essentially’ part of May 1968 from its inception, and nor it gives birth in any direct way to the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, as Boltanski and Chiapello seem to argue. Rather, it was a somewhat inadvertent by-product of ‘the inability [of the generation of 1968] to successfully address the question of rebuilding social and political forms’ (Wagner, 2002, p. 41).

Totality, utopia, everyday life Which brings us back to Lefebvre. One of the reasons he became highly critical of budding postmodernists like Baudrillard, who was actually part of the Lefebvre circle in the mid-1960s (see Baudrillard, 2006; also Plant, 1992), was because they confused the ideological appearance of the system, its idealized self-image as projected through a proliferation of signs, discourses, and images, with the totality of bureaucratic neocapitalism, its deeper interconnections, histories, and dynamics. The contradictions of neo-capitalism, especially as it concerns the colonization of urban space, can only be papered over at the ideological level, an obfuscation that is reinforced actively by such typically Baudrillardian flourishes as the ‘end of the social’. By remaining at the level of the free-floating sign, and postulating the irreversible fragmentation of the social world, theorists like Baudrillard were unable to envisage a form of critique that went beyond the quasi-aesthetic celebration of desire, jouissance, or transgression for its own sake. For Lefebvre, transgressive desire was a necessary but not sufficient condition for societal transformation. Although it might seem that in privileging the concept of the ‘festival’, Lefebvre is prone to some of the limitations of the aesthetic critique, which is precisely what John Roberts argues in his recent study Philosophizing the Everyday (2006). The festival does have an inescapably poetical character for Lefebvre, involving the cultivation of a distinctive ‘style of life’. Yet, ultimately the aesthetic is dissolved into, or at





least mediated by, specific social and institutional settings, and hence part and parcel of a much broader field of interacting forces and relations – in short, a totality. As such, Lefebvre realized that it is necessary to go beyond the festival per se and its purely stylistic qualities, so as to effect a move from an ‘abstract’ to a ‘critical’ humanism by way of a global transformation that indulges and enriches all the vital needs and propensities of what he called the ‘total man’ [sic]. ‘A break with the everyday by means of festival – violent or peaceful – cannot endure. In order to change life, society, space, architecture, even the city must change’ (Lefebvre, 1987, p. 11). Such a project, as he put it in greater length in The Survival of Capitalism, expressly proposes a radically different way of living. Transgressions can point towards such a project, but they cannot realise it; they leave it in the realms of ideality (as opposed to reality) and of desire, which turns out to be ‘mere’ desire, i.e. verbal desire. [The] aim of this project is to produce a ‘difference’ which is different from any that can be inferred from the existing relations of production. [O]nly a global project can begin to define all the rights of individuals and groups, by determining the conditions of their entry into practice. (Lefebvre, 1976, pp. 34–35) To clarify this point requires a more extended discussion of Lefebvre’s understanding of ‘totality’. To begin with, he did not regard totality as a homogeneous and sui generis whole, akin to the belief of the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides that reality was monolithic and indivisible, and hence did not contain any hint of its negation and supersession. Totality is more analogous to the flowing river of Heraclitus, which travels along certain discernible conduits even as it erodes its banks or forges new channels, than the inert sphere of Parmenides. It is therefore radically pluralistic, and in a constant state of ‘becoming’, inasmuch as the world is generated out of the ceaseless alterity of opposing forces and processes, consisting of multiple determinations and diverse levels and elements, a fractured mosaic of positive and negative forces that does not evolve towards some final synthesis. Hence, the Lefebvrean totality is more like a Surrealist montage than a Hegelian telos (see Jay, 1984, p. 287). We grasp totality, furthermore, not in some strictly cognitive or ideational sense (Lefebvre was always much too suspicious of abstract philosophizing and the hyper-specialization of knowledge to believe this), but in and through an embodied and poetically infused mode of praxis, a ‘dialectical’ mode of reason that engages the full



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spectrum of human capacities, and which is inherently transformative. Purely intellectual totalities for Lefebvre are monolithic, closed and static postulates, and conceptualizing phenomena from this perspective, which is symptomatic of dominant strains in Western philosophy going back to ancient Greece, tends to ‘absorb particularities and specificities, and therefore to neglect differences and types’. Genuine totalities, by contrast, are ‘perpetually in the process of being transcended’, and a given totality (such as the city) is not autonomous and self-contained but partial in nature and which must be related dialectically to wider entities, up to and including ‘the world, history, “man” ’ (Lefebvre, 2002, p. 185, 1969, p. 111, 1996, p. 92). And finally, totality, as Lefebvre never ceased to emphasize, is linked constitutively to everyday urban life. The everyday is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which make the human – and every human being – a whole takes its shape and its form. In it are expressed and fulfilled those relations which bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a certain manner which is always partial and incomplete: friendship, comradeship, love, the need to communicate, play, etc. (Lefebvre, 1991a, p. 97) Thinking about (and with) totalities in this Lefebvrean sense is not about the production of grand abstractions in which concrete specificities and distinctions are lost, but represents instead a ‘meditation on differences’, which is not surprising inasmuch as Lefebvre describes totalities as ‘ensemble[s] of differences’ (1996, pp. 88, 109). Indeed, it is worth stressing here that Lefebvre makes a key distinction between ‘minimal’ and ‘maximal’ differences. Minimal differences concern symbolic distinctions (artefacts, styles of dress, building designs) that can be co-opted and commodified with relative ease. This neatly characterizes poststructuralist approaches, which tend to equate difference with particularity or uniqueness per se, or symbolic contrasts that can be transgressed with little consequence. But maximal differences are not merely signified. They are produced through active and ongoing struggle in the context of the urban everyday, and demand (and point towards) transfigured social conditions. Mere particularities, in other words, are not maximal differences in a Lefebvrean sense; the former are atomized





and sui generis, whereas the latter emerge out of specific sociohistorical conditions and conflicts of a constitutive sort. Differences, in other words, cannot be simply presumed to exist. They are always part of a larger ensemble, or series of ensembles, and hence not isolated but relational; they have to be fought for, against the forces of homogenization (especially abstract space); and they involve crucially the realization of alternative ways of living and being, which are not reducible to the production of signs and discourses (see Kofman and Lebas, 1996, p. 27; also Kipfer, 2008, p. 203). As Lefebvre writes, One might suppose that little argument would be required to establish that the ‘right to be different’ can only have meaning when it is based on actual struggles to establish differences and that the differences generated through such theoretical and practical struggles must themselves differ both from natural distinguishing characteristics and from differentiations induced within existing abstract space. The fact remains that the differences which concern us, those differences upon whose future strength theory and action may count, can only be effectively demonstrated by dint of laborious analysis. (Lefebvre, 1991b, p. 64) What Lefebvre is hinting at here is the possibility of a revivified utopianism that extends the realm of the possible by ‘proclaim[ing] and desir[ing] the impossible’ (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 36). Again, because recuperation takes place primarily at the level of alienated, fragmented experiences and the ideological forms that correspond to (and bolster) them and offer up the possibility of only minimal rather than maximal differences, it leaves the essential structural forms of the production and reproduction of social life intact. Hence, there might well be a ‘new spirit of capitalism’, but, because it projects a ‘false coherence’ rather than a genuine totality, it cannot satisfy the perennial human desire for individual and collective fulfilment and self-determination. This is particularly true of the human body itself, which, although it lies ‘at the very heart of space and of the discourse of Power’, will ‘not allow itself to be dismembered without a protest, nor to be divided into fragments, deprived of its rhythms, reduced to its catalogued needs, to images and specialisations’ (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 89). The subversive potential of maximal differences persist; they live on, sub rosa, and erupt again and again, in the most unlikely of times and places. They hove into view especially in the context of what Lefebvre calls the



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moment. In such moments, we are able to glimpse, in however fleeting and incomplete a fashion, the possibility of a transformed social world. Not unlike Ernst Bloch’s novum, they are manifestations of what I have called elsewhere everyday utopianism (see Gardiner, 2004, 2006). As Rob Shields astutely puts it, such moments represent ‘those times when one recognizes or has a sudden insight into a situation or experience beyond the merely empirical routine of some activity [and hence into] the wider significance of some “thing” or “event” – its relation to the whole, and by extension, our relation to totality’ (Shields, 1999, p. 58). Moments constitute a crucial point of linkage between the immediacy that inheres in the ‘vital productivity’ of everyday life and the broader sweep of sociohistorical change: ‘The moment is born of the everyday and within the everyday. From here it draws its nourishment and its substance’ (Lefebvre, 2002, p. 351). By temporarily disrupting the relatively unreflective and ‘distracted’ state that generally marks our being-in-the-everyday, such moments bring to consciousness the rich and manifold potentialities that are presented to us at given points in time, and we begin to grasp the dialectical relation between historical contingency and concrete possibilities. It is a tragic consciousness because most of these potentials, of course, will remain tantalizingly unfulfilled or only partially realized. There is no ultimate synthesis of these fragments or moments into some unified whole that is purged of opposition or difference. But, the essential point is that there will always remain an unrecuperable residue of a desire for a different and better world, or what Bloch calls a ‘utopian surplus’ (see Varikas, 2002). Although the specific conjunctures that generated particular critiques and utopian visions, such as the Paris Commune or May 1968, have passed away, and the possibilities for transformative change reduced drastically in the horizon of the present moment, they are not lost altogether. Lefebvre also makes the important point that because a radical idea is vulnerable to recuperation does not mean it is itself recuperative (a key distinction), and nor is it thereby invalidated. A concrete example he adduces, one that is highly pertinent to our time, is that of the concept of ‘human rights’. Of course, this notion can be twisted and utilized to bolster repressive forces. Recent events provide us with proof positive of that: apologists for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq justify military intervention and neo-colonialism by reference to the need to vouchsafe human rights, to end of the oppression of Muslim women, and so on. But it is a serious political error to ‘to regard these rights as political tools permanently in the service of those who are dominant’ (Lefebvre,





2005, p. 108). The distinct possibility remains that the ‘rational kernel’ of a thoroughly and consistently emancipatory concept of human rights can be extricated from this ideological shell, and extended to encompass a myriad of new and irreducibly collective rights: the right to dwell in a liveable city, the right to genuine as opposed to commodified difference, the right to foster ecological sanity through the recognition of natural limits to economic growth, and so forth. Another example is that of ‘self-management’. Autogestion for Lefebvre is not a slogan or mere gesture but a demand for thorough-going democratization and spontaneous mass participation that has no fixed agenda or clearly defined set of short-term goals, and which is open-ended, conflictual and ultimately unpredictable. Self-management in this radicalized sense cannot be easily absorbed into the organization of the capitalist workplace, because, despite the rhetorical tropes of inclusion and creativity evoked by the corporate world, such environments continue to fragment and compartmentalize life, and hence frustrate the full efflorescence of human intersubjectivity and collective self-realization. As Lefebvre said in The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution, written in the aftermath of May 1968: Self-management indicates the road toward the transformation of everyday existence. [B]ut life is not changed magically by a poetic act, as the surrealists believed. Language liberated from its servitudes plays a necessary role – but it does not suffice. The transformation of everyday existence also involves institutions. [The] social practice capable of transcending dissociations and creating new institutions beyond those that affirm dissociations – this social practice has a name, but cannot be reduced to language. (Lefebvre, 1969, p. 90)

Conclusion In a recent essay, Phillip E. Wegner has argued convincingly that there is a strong, perhaps necessary connection between utopia and totality. In a sense, of course, utopia has always been about the conceptualization of alternative worlds understood as integrated totalities, which rules out of court a timid and gradualist ameliorism that is prone to the sort of recuperation that Lefebvre sought to theorize. That this connection has also been grasped by various poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches explains why they have been so unremittingly hostile towards both ideas. In any event, the collapse of the distinction between inside and



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outside inaugurated by globalization, as Hardt and Negri (2000) have also suggested, brings forth a vision of the revolutionary transformation of totality. As Wegner writes, there is a ‘fundamental need in our present, with the full realization of a new kind of reality, to re-invent Utopia as much as we need to re-imagine our collective belonging to a truly global community’ (Wegner, 2007, p. 128). This chapter has focussed on Lefebvre’s penchant for an everyday utopianism that addresses precisely the relation between the global and the transformative social change that Wegner is concerned with. That we must grapple with the complexly mediated totality that the world through dialectical thinking and praxis does not, as I have tried to demonstrate here, lead necessarily to conceptual totalitarianism and the erasure of difference à la Lyotard, or the foreclosure of historical possibilities. As Lefebvre puts it in volume two of Critique of Everyday Life, dialectical reason seeks to grasp the central aspects of the ‘total human phenomenon’ as a series of ‘practical relations and interactions [that] will constitute the basis of a process of becoming; and a historicity’. From such a vantage point, we are able to ‘observe active differences, relations and conflicts. By determining them we will be able to define historical and social particularities without assuming the supreme (and always illusory) power of capturing the universal and of exhausting “being” ’ (Lefebvre, 2002, p. 189). But, although totality is always open towards the future, Lefebvre does not advance a teleological view of history in which the ‘fallen’ present is redeemed in toto, and at a stroke, at some imagined post-messianic time. There is no final closure to the historical dialectic, which manifests itself in unpredictable and often unfathomable ways, and no overarching goal of liberation or self-realization towards which it is necessarily propelled. As such, we cannot engage in facile optimism here: just because radical possibilities never entirely die, conjunctures do change, and it does not mean these ephemeral revolutionary ‘moments’, such as May 1968, can be effectively reactivated, at least in their original incarnation. Perhaps conceiving of totality in more Lefebvrean terms might help us to break definitively with theological (and teleological) thinking and embrace something more akin to Walter Benjamin’s ‘weak messianism’ – which, Hardt and Negri (2002, p. 188) remind us, is marked by the belief that ‘resistance precedes power’. In staking out such position, we might be more inclined to eschew the prevailing mode of ‘left pessimism’ which supposes that power is always one step ahead, or believes that the very fact of recuperation undermines completely the possibility of negation and the activation of the latent utopian potentialities that continue to




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The creation (or production) of a planet-wide space as the social foundation of a transformed everyday life open to myriad possibilities – such is the dawn now beginning to break on the far horizon. This is the same dawn as glimpsed by the great utopians (who, inasmuch as they demonstrated real possibilities, are perhaps not properly so described): by Fourier, Marx and Engels, whose dreams and imaginings are as stimulating to theoretical thought as their concepts. (Lefebvre, 1991b, pp. 422–423)



inhere in the everyday. As Lefebvre once wrote in his masterwork, The Production of Space:

Concluding Reflections

As we discussed in the Introduction, social and political events following the Second World War generated a wave of anti-utopian reactions and, by the 1970s, unleashed a widespread demise of utopia narrative. The demise of utopia narrative does, however, stretch back farther than the late twentieth century, and is complexly entwined with critical traditions of socio-political thought – though often tinted by misunderstanding and ill-advised denigration. Hence, we believe that a brief reflection on the broader historical trend of critique and utopianism is necessary at the conclusion of this book. While utopianism can of course be traced back to classical Greece, as Rorty (1999) suggests it came to prominence as a central feature of modernity, spurred on by the political-religious debates of the sixteenth century, the ideals of Renaissance humanism, and the conquest of the Americas. Utopianism figured in many of the Enlightenment discourses concerning the improvement of humanity through civilization, which informed the Atlantic revolutions and the aspiration of emancipating society through the political action of free and equal citizens. The fusion of critique and social hope reached its most romantic heights in the work of the European utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century. Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Owen, Babeuf, Morris, and others developed visionary plans for the reconstruction of society on the principles of equality, social progress, harmonious collaboration, and communal production and distribution – principles which later reverberated through the Revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 (Geoghegan, 1987, pp. 8–21). Although the utopian socialists were inspirational precursors to the Communist League consolidated in 1847, they also became targets of Marx and Engels’ desire to establish revolutionary politics upon a 237





‘scientific’ basis. As they argue in the Communist Manifesto, the ‘purely Utopian character’ of pre-Marxian socialism can be seen in its desire ‘to improve the conditions of every member of society, even that of the most favoured’ by ‘peaceful means’ and ‘small experiments’. For Marx and Engels, the ‘fantastic pictures of future society’ proposed by the utopian socialists ‘lose all practical value and all theoretical justification’ because they are divorced from the objective reality of class antagonism and the historical development of the proletariat (Marx and Engels, 1978, p. 498). As later summarized by Engels, the ‘pure phantasies’ of utopian socialism were thoroughly refuted by Marx’s discovery of the materialist conception of history and the capitalist mode of production via surplus value. These discoveries, he insists, provided a ‘real basis’ for scientific socialism and signalled the inevitable demise of utopianism within modern socio-political theory and practice (Marx and Engels, 1978, p. 700). According to Lenin, the demise of utopianism diagnosed by Engels was confirmed by the success of the October Revolution. On this basis, Lenin brashly criticized the efforts of utopians as ‘a diversion from socialism, a pastime of well-bred ladies and not politically serious’ (quoted in Stites, 1989, p. 44). Throughout much of the twentieth century the demise of utopia narrative was mirrored by the proliferation of ‘dystopian’ visions of bureaucratism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism, exemplified by the joyless life depicted in Orwell’s 1984. Ironically, these dystopian visions then contributed to the renewal of utopianism in the 1960s and 1970s, as dissatisfaction with the ‘one-dimensional’ social orders of both the Soviet Union and the United States provoked, on the one hand, a rethinking of progressive socialism throughout much of the Third World and, on the other, a critique of alienating consumerism in the West and the formation of ‘post-capitalist’ communes, ‘ecotopias’, and alternative lifestyle communities (see Marcuse, 1964, 1969a). This renewal of utopianism continued to gain pace throughout the 1980s and 1990s, stimulated by the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’ and the global transformation of capitalism. Nonetheless this renewal remained marginal to much socio-political thinking. Taking centre stage was the ‘end of history’ triumphalism occasioned by the Soviet Union’s collapse and the accepted wisdom that only neoliberalism’s combination of capitalism and democracy could resolve the various ills faced by modern societies (see Fukuyama, 1992). The exaltation of neoliberalism by powerful economic and social elites on the global stage thus filled, in part, the symbolic and ideological space that had been occupied by Marxism, dismissing all other socio-political



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alternatives as hopelessly unrealistic, irrational, and prone to violence and fanaticism. Yet, as argued both in the Introduction and in many of the preceding chapters, neoliberalism itself relies upon a certain idealist inclination, namely, an unwavering faith in its singular ability to ensure the rational realization of genuine freedom. As with orthodox Marxism, however, this utopianism is totalizing, wilfully blind to its own flaws yet supremely confident in its complete truth, so much so that all other modes of socio-political thinking are disqualified from the start. Still, the global unpopularity of neoliberalism became evident following the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle, and the subsequent intensification of the alternative globalization movement has given passionate expression to hope for a better world beyond neoliberalism (see Touraine, 2001). With all of this in mind, we want to emphasize once more the aptness of adopting the interpretive tendency regarding the ubiquity of utopia implied by an open conceptualization of the term. Indeed, we believe that the contributions in this book demonstrate clearly that this approach can provide a productive methodological path for social scientific investigation. First, it counters the previously mentioned social scientific neglect of the imaginative, fictive, normative dimensions of theory construction and social life. Already within some contemporary cultural studies, and within the work of thinkers such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, we see demonstration of the relevance of foregrounding utopian significations contained within popular culture. Žižek (1997), for instance, emphasizes, against orthodox Marxist ideology critique, that the ruling ideas of an age are precisely not the ideas of the ruling class. On this score, attention to the play of contemporary utopian significations within, say, ultra-Right, Islamist, cyber-enthusiast, and body-modification discourses offers important analytical and political purchase. In particular, it underscores the point made by Karl Mannheim (1968, pp. 187–188) in his classic work Ideology and Utopia – that we always need to read utopianisms within a ‘total constellation’ as always ‘mutually antagonistic counter-utopias’ – and thereby suggests the development of utopia as an analytical strategy, a guide to crucial social scientific questions. Such an orientation also provides the basis for a reasonable scepticism about the pervasive demise of utopia narrative. While, again, the contributors to this book would not necessarily agree with us, we have argued that in the period 1970–1999, when this narrative of decline is so prominent, what in fact happens is not so much the retreat as the transformation of utopianism, including the relative contraction of certain




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• The relative decline of the historic anti-systemic movements, most notably communism, social democracy, and national liberation (Wallerstein, 2002). • The collapse of the social democratic consensus and the consensus around the idea of ‘development’, along with the concomitant rise of neoliberalism and the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Wallerstein, 2005). • The implosion of ‘really existing socialism’ and the end of ‘third worldism’ (Alexander, 1995; Dirlik, 1999; Jameson, 2002). • The impact of economic crisis and transformation, encompassing informationalism, flexibility, changes in production, consumption, class composition, financialization, global networking, and the reconfiguration of the international division of labour (Bell, 1999; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Castells, 1997; Harvey, 1989; Lash and Urry, 1987; Sennett, 1998, 2006). • The complex dimensions of political changes, such as the crisis of the state, democracy, the public sphere, and the arrival of what some have called ‘post-democratic politics’ and mediatized politics (Bauman, 1999; Beck, 1997, 1999; Castells, 2000; Crouch, 2004; Giddens, 1991; Martin and Schumann, 1998; Mair, 2006). • The rapid pace of cultural and intellectual transformations, including the ‘diversification of constituencies of oppression’ (Levitas, 1993, p. 263), the ‘pluralisation of social lifeworlds’ (Boggs, 1993, p. 173), the rise of ‘new social movements’, ‘detraditionalization’, individualization, and the post-modernization of the structures of knowledge. All of these changes coincide not only with the transformation of utopianism but with the central developments associated with globalization as well. It is often noted that contemporary globalization, viewed by some as a wholly new world and set of experiences, demands, in turn, a rethinking of the fundamental analytic units of social scientific thinking. Thus, Ulrich Beck (2002b) contends that social scientists must now cast off ‘methodological nationalism’ in favour of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’, reconceptualizing household, family, class, inequality, power, community, justice, law, politics, and commerce beyond the frame of the state. Similarly, Sylvia Walby (2003) maintains that



utopianisms and the rise of others – especially consumerist, neoliberal, and globalist utopias (Steger, 2005). This might be viewed as signalling a host of significant social changes post-1968, which we can summarize as follows:

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the classical social scientific assumption that culture, politics, and economics neatly map onto each other within a bounded territory needs to be jettisoned, and that we might fruitfully, in political terms, turn to a consideration of overlapping polities and the idea of ‘societalization’. And Goran Therborn (2000, p. 50) suggests that the social sciences are now ‘entering a fourth location in the space of predominant imagination and investigation . . . into globality’, where ‘global variability, global connectivity, and global inter-communication’ become the significant foci. While the ‘globalization turn’ across the social sciences has, overall, been very fruitful in moving beyond some of the impasses and problems in debates around post-modernity, much of the literature has tended to be overblown, embracing generalizing claims about a completely new global economy, a fundamentally reconfigured global politics, a fullyfledged global culture (Held and McGrew, 2002a). In contrast, we would instead follow a more recent corrective to this view in emphasizing, after Mann (2001, p. 51), that globalization ‘is not singular but multiple, and it disintegrates as well as integrates’. Perhaps the pairing, globalization–utopia, can offer some means of entering into questions of world interconnectedness in a way that remains informed by and attentive to specific perspectives and experiences, their continuities as well as discontinuities. That, at least, has been the task attempted in this book. Not long ago Joel Whitebook (1995, p. 75) observed that the recent history of social and political thought seemed to indicate that ‘utopia has been exhausted as a project and discredited as a body of thought’. We believe that this depressing ‘post-mortem’ motif has been dramatically challenged over the past decade or so by those taking seriously the meaningful role for utopianism in thinking through the connections between, and implications of, globalization, society, and politics. While some interpreters of the globalization–utopianism relationship argue that the widespread effects of globalization are mostly negative and that the devastating consequences of globalization (at least in its neoliberal form) require a radically imaginative rethinking of the way out of this situation, others view globalization as replete with positive potentials for the fundamental transformation of the world, which may be realized if politics is able to overcome the presently existing limitations of imagination. What is significant is that both approaches conceive of the utopian imagination as a crucial component of sociopolitical theorizing in the global age. However, these reaffirmations of utopianism tend to appeal to the utopian imagination in ways that are somewhat more circumspect or modest than earlier utopian theories, acutely aware, for instance, of the disasters of the twentieth





century occasioned by totalitarianism’s incredible certainty of purpose or, as Hannah Arendt (1973, p. 437) put it, the boundless sense that ‘everything is possible’. In distancing themselves from such absolutist legacies the new utopian thinkers adopt broadly critical theoretical approaches to the politics of globalization. By this we mean that their theories are selfreflexive, pluralistic, explicitly politico-normative, and wary of foundationalism and determinism while remaining committed to the utopian desire for radical social change, human emancipation, and the expansion of possibilities for world-creation beyond the strictures of ‘presentism’ and realism. What we see appearing are ‘relative utopias’ (Camus, 1991), ‘dialectical utopias’ (Harvey, 2000), ‘open utopias’ (Heller, 1984), and ‘iconoclastic utopias’ (Jacoby, 2005) that seek to critically imagine the forces, movements, and configurations of a different future for a globalizing world in order to contest, resist, and ‘disrupt’ the limits of existing politics (Jameson, 2005, p. 211 ff.). Consequently, while the new utopianism aims to reclaim Bloch’s ‘principle of hope’ – the counterfactual imagination of the not-yet and the desire or longing for a different and better way of living – it also eschews the paradigm of prescribing any final, perfect, and fully imagined future society to be imposed upon reality from the ‘outside’. Rather, the new utopianism regards the present as harbouring a multiplicity of potentially radical yet fragile transformations, and this openness remains the immanent animating force towards the future.



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268

Adorno, Theodor, 67, 95, 114, 116, 192 adtopia, 114 advertising, 114, 116, 119, 126, 136 Afghanistan war, 233 Africa, 112 Agamben, Giorgio, 68, 78, 175 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 149 Ahmed, Akbar, 137 al-Afghani, Jamal ad-Din, 154 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 6, 7, 40, 41, 44, 95–6, 113 al-Kindi, Abu Yaghub, 139, 153 al-Qaeda, 151–2 alternative-globalization, see anti-globalization al-Zarqawi, Abu-Musab, 152 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 152 America, 7, 16, 19–20, 33–4, 48, 96–7, 109–10, 117–36, 238 Amin, Samir, 141 Amnesty International, 58 anarchism, 156–75, 181, 194 Anderson, Benedict, 54 Anderson, Perry, 3, 92, 217–18 Anheier, Helmut, 39 anti-Americanism, 35, 39 anti-civilization, 159 anti-globalization, 7, 8, 58, 107, 198, 203, 210, 215–16, 239 anti-systemic movements, 7, 45, 46, 47, 49, 240 anti-utopianism, 80, 97 arborescent, 170–1 Arendt, Hannah, 74, 80, 242 Aristophanes, 79 Arkoun, Muhammad, 144, 146 Armitage, John, 163 Arojomand, Said, 6 Arrighi, Giovanni, 41 Aurobindo, Sri, 69 authoritarianism, 112, 150, 190–1, 193 autonomism, 159

autonomy, 5, 45, 53, 60, 61, 63, 193, 196, 198–9, 202, 205 Averroes, 139–40, 144, 153 Avicenna, 139–40, 144, 147, 153 Babeuf, François-Noël, 237 Badiou, Alain, 45, 46, 49, 68, 80 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 175 Barlow, John Perry, 178 Barthes, Roland, 187 Baudrillard, Jean, 225, 229 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 7, 26, 41, 49, 50, 103, 105, 186, 228 Beck, Ulrich, 28, 38, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 62, 67, 102, 106, 127, 240 Beilharz, Peter, 49 Bellamy, Edward, 13, 14–16, 22, 25–6 Benhabib, Seyla, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 95, 113, 175, 235 Berger, Peter, 83 Berlin, Isaiah, 179 Berlin Wall, 7, 103, 156 Bernstein, Eduard, 41 Bey, Hakim, 160, 162–3, 198, 203 Bhabha, Homi, 68–9, 208 bin-Laden, Osama, 146 Blaug, Ricardo, 196, 199 Bloch, Ernst, 5, 51, 95, 161, 162, 168, 175, 186, 233, 242 Boggs, Carl, 43 Boltanski, Luc, 8, 45, 222–9 Bonanno, Alfredo, 157, 160, 163–8 Bookchin, Murray, 158, 163, 195, 199 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8 branding, 126 Buck-Morss, Susan, 141 Bunche, Ralph, 34 Burke, Jason, 109 Bush, George W., 35–6 Cabet, Etienne, 237 caliphate, 152 Call, Lewis, 175

269



Index

Index

Camus, Albert, 242 capitalism, 8, 22, 41, 44, 48, 55, 56, 70–1, 73, 75, 84, 103–4, 118–20, 132–3, 147, 156, 163, 220–36, 238 Carpenter, Edward, 74 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 5, 41, 42, 45, 50, 67, 172 censorship, 147, 183 Chiapello, Eve, 8, 222–9 Chomsky, Noam, 158 Christianity, 91–2, 139 Cicero, 52 citizenship, 37–8, 44, 47, 52, 55, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 126, 179, 199, 208 civil society, 32–9, 62, 64, 66, 95–6, 150, 199, 208, 212, 216 civil sphere, 32 clash of civilizations, 39, 48, 108 class, 42, 55, 122, 240 Clinton, Bill, 35 Cold War, 34–5, 103, 106, 109–10 colonialism, 52, 55, 218, 233 commodification, 193, 202, 213 commodity, 114, 117, 133 communism, 32–3, 49, 104–7, 115, 214, 240 Communist League, 237 Comte, Auguste, 1 Connolly, William, 67 conservatism, 24, 101, 110 consumer democracy, 124–6 consumerism, 17, 20, 83, 106, 117–36, 163, 198, 200, 228, 238, 240 consumption, 18, 25, 114, 117–36 corporations, 126–7, 129, 222 cosmopolitan democracy, 51–67, 86–7 cosmopolitanism, 6, 32–5, 46, 51–67, 72, 208–9, 212, 240 crisis, 45, 70–4, 80, 136, 240 culture industry, 183, 193 cyberspace, 176–89 Day, Richard, 158 Debord, Guy, 220, 227

Deleuze, Gilles, 41, 165–6, 172, 196, 225–6 democracy, 4, 6, 29, 32–6, 43, 44, 47, 86, 88–9, 106, 117, 179–80, 189, 199, 238 deregulation, 117, 124, 127, 135, 184 Derrida, Jacques, 41, 72, 85, 161, 175 desire, 71, 125, 133, 168–71, 173–4, 199, 225, 230 Deutscher, Isaac, 156 Dewey, John, 37 digital media, 176–89 Diogenes, 51–2 Dirlik, Arif, 213 discourse, 176–7, 222 Docherty, Thomas, 50 Dubb, Henry, 75–6 Durkheim, Emile, 1, 30 dystopia, 6, 13, 17–20, 52 Eagleton, Terry, 3 East, the, 20–1, 105, 137–8 East Asian crisis, 7 egalitarianism, 203, 224 Eisenstadt, S. N., 38 Elias, Norbert, 30, 52 emancipation, 4, 90, 211, 218–19, 242 empire, 8, 35, 39, 46, 48, 70–1 Engels, Friedrich, 74, 98, 236, 237–8 England, 24–5, 120 Enlightenment, 55, 56, 85, 103, 141, 147, 193, 237 environment, 58, 120, 131–3 environmentalism, 215–17 equality, 32, 159, 167–8 essentialism, 5, 42, 44 Esteva, Gustav, 204 ethical socialism, 73–80 ethics, 69–80, 167 Eurocentrism, 67, 218 Europe, 33–4, 37, 64, 66, 72 European Union (EU), 32, 64, 65, 66, 103, 108, 110–11, 208, 218 false consciousness, 143, 196 Farabi, Abu Nasr, 139, 144–5, 148, 153



270

Index

Gandhi, Leela, 67 Gandhi, M. K., 71, 73, 80 Gardiner, Michael, 103, 113 Gates, Bill, 185 Geertz, Clifford, 30 Gellner, Ernest, 85 genocide, 37 Geras, Norman, 50 Ghannouchi, Rachid, 146 Giddens, Anthony, 29, 38, 102, 104, 107, 228 Gingrich, Newt, 185 Glasius, Marlies, 39 global capitalism, 84, 188, 226 global civil society, 8, 47, 58, 59, 61, 208, 216 global governance, 6, 59, 61, 65 globalism, 48, 50 globalist, 7, 49, 240 glocalization, 207–19 Goffman, Erving, 30 Goodwin, Barbara, 209 Gramsci, Antonio, 166, 173, 208 Greenpeace, 58

Gross, Jan, 112 Grossman, Lev, 179 Guattari, Felix, 41, 165, 172, 196, 225–6 guerrilla gardening, 202–3 Gulf War, First, 149 Habermas, Jürgen, 41, 46–8, 50, 52, 53, 61–7, 85–8, 89, 96, 102, 105, 113, 156, 218 Hardt, Michael, 8, 46, 47, 48, 49, 137–42, 144, 235 Harvey, David, 102, 114–15, 197, 207, 212, 217, 242 Hegel, G. W. F., 82, 98, 138 hegemony, 39, 109–10, 137, 143, 153 Heidegger, Martin, 72 Heine, Heinrich, 153 Held, David, 33, 38, 47–8, 50–3, 58, 59, 60, 62, 66, 67, 215 Heller, Agnes, 41, 42, 44, 46, 50, 160, 242 Heraclitus, 230 Herod, Andrew, 214 hierarchy, 96, 171, 195–6, 198–9, 225 historical materialism, 142–3 Hobbes, Thomas, 33, 35, 39, 66 Hobsbawm, Eric, 38 Holloway, John, 157, 164, 172, 174 Holocaust, 37, 112, 115 Horkheimer, Max, 116, 143, 192 humanism, 76, 82–4, 90, 94, 98, 237 human rights, 6, 29, 32, 34, 53, 58, 63, 65, 66, 233–4 Huntington, Samuel, 39, 108 Hussein, Saddam, 142, 149 Husserl, Edmund, 70, 73 Huxley, Aldous, 13, 17–22, 25–6, 76, 101 identity, 2, 42, 54, 69, 193–4 imperialism, 7, 45 individualism, 80, 89, 111, 113, 128, 194, 229 individualization, 64, 102, 128, 240 industrialization, 223



fascism, 4, 17, 24, 32 Faun, Feral, 160 Feher, Ferenc, 46, 50 Ferry, Luc, 228 First International, 213–14 First World War, 16, 34, 70, 73 Ford Foundation, 39 fordism, 17–20 Foucault, Michel, 115, 141–2, 146, 193, 195, 212, 225–6, 228 Fourier, Charles, 14, 236, 237 France, 223–4 Frankfurt School, 144 freedom, 6, 32, 111, 146, 159, 187, 193, 225 free market, 64, 106, 118, 120, 124, 127–8, 132–3, 180 Freidman, Thomas, 106 Freud, Sigmund, 156, 193 Fromm, Erich, 192–3 Fukuyama, Francis, 106–8, 238 fundamentalism, 83, 85, 137, 151–2, 187 Furet, François, 104

271

Index

inequality, 118, 127–8, 183–4, 189 intellectuals, 3, 8, 43, 45 International Criminal Court, 50 internationalism, 49, 213–14 international law, 32, 34, 59 Internet, 106, 176–89 Iqbal, Muhammad, 141 Iran, 105, 138, 141–3, 145–52 Iraq, 36, 105, 142, 233 Iraq war, 36, 105, 233 Islam, 8, 137–55, 239 Jacoby, Russell, 4, 5, 8, 190, 242 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 41, 44, 96, 186–7, 207–8, 239, 242 Jordan, Chris, 131 Judaism, 139, 153 justice, 30–1, 53, 65, 67 Kaldor, Mary, 38–9 Kant, Immanuel, 32, 65 Kapor, Mitchell, 178 Karagiannis, Nathalie, 7 Keane, John, 38 Keohane, Robert, 66, 67 Keynes, John M., 124 Keyworth, George, 178 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 143, 150–1, 155 Koestler, Arthur, 24 Kolakowski, Leszek, 4 Kosovo, 35 Kruger, Barbara, 131 Kumar, Krishnan, 4, 177 Labriola, Antonio, 75, 80 Lacan, Jacques, 175 Laclau, Ernesto, 41, 42, 44, 45, 50, 80, 186, 189 Landstreicher, Wolfi, 159, 162 Lang, Fritz, 101 Latvia, 111 League of Nations, 34 Lebergott, Stanley, 125 Lefebvre, Henri, 115, 220–1, 226–36 Lefort, Claude, 41, 43, 50, 187

Leftism, 24, 34, 97, 156, 159, 169–70 Leland, John, 221 Leninism, 42, 160 Lenin, Vladimir, 238 Levinas, Emmanuel, 161 Levitas, Ruth, 2, 4, 37, 40, 101, 106 liberal democracy, 108, 156 liberalism, 32, 43, 44, 49, 110 libertarianism, 176, 178–81, 184, 188–9 liberty, 178–81, 189 lifeworld, 62, 64, 240 liminality, 85, 207–19 Linden, Marcel van der, 213 Liu, Alan, 221 Löwy, Michael, 223 Lyotard, Jean-François, 41, 226, 235 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 227 Maharishi, Sri Ramana, 69 Malcolm X, 146 Mannheim, Karl, 48, 102, 110, 113, 115, 186, 239 Mann, Michael, 45, 241 Marcos, Subcommandante, 205 Marcuse, Herbert, 144, 162–3, 167, 193 market, 31, 47, 54, 55, 56, 62, 64, 66, 117–20 marketing, 126, 136, 184 Marxism, 40–50, 74, 80, 83, 97, 104, 143, 159, 193, 227, 238–9 Marx, Karl, 14, 30, 41–2, 45, 56, 74, 82, 110, 137–8, 143, 144, 146, 236, 237–8 Massey, Doreen, 210 materialism, 70–2, 83–4 May 1968, 41, 199, 220, 223–5, 228–9, 233, 235, 240 Mazrui, Ali, 146 McLennan, Gregor, 8, 43, 49 Meltzer, Albert, 158 metaphysics, 72, 143 Metzger, Thom, 162 Mignolo, Walter, 52 Mises, Ludwig von, 125



272

modernity, 5, 6, 13, 16, 20, 22, 26, 29, 41, 43–4, 49, 52–8, 61–4, 66, 67, 70–4, 82, 84–7, 89, 101, 105, 137–40, 145, 148–51, 192–3, 237 modernization, 58, 104, 127 morality, 30–1, 37, 83–4, 86–8, 94, 114 More, Thomas, 4, 13–14, 25–6, 51, 52, 101, 186–7 Morgan, Arthur, 15 Morris, William, 74, 237 Mouffe, Chantal, 41, 42, 44, 50, 80, 188 Mouzelis, Nicos, 44, 50 movements, 2, 3, 5, 6, 36, 57, 83, 107, 137–8, 156–75, 200–4 Muhammad, Prophet, 141, 144 multiculturalism, 83, 96 multitude, 46, 137–55 Mumford, Lewis, 190 Napoleon, 32 nation, 30–2, 34, 54 nationalism, 16–17, 32, 34, 49, 57, 83, 109, 143, 148, 240 nationalization, 31 nation-state, 53–6, 59, 62, 63, 65, 67, 83, 148, 151–2, 195 NATO, 35 naturalism, 90–1 Nazism, 17, 24–5, 112, 192 Negri, Antonio, 8, 46, 47, 48, 49, 182, 235 Negroponte, Nicholas, 184–5 neoconservatism, 35, 39, 124–6, 156 neoliberalism, 7, 66, 118, 124–7, 156, 184–5, 190–1, 203, 238, 239, 240 networks, 107, 176–89, 225 Newman, Saul, 175 new social movements, 42, 240 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 141 1968, see May 1968 1989, 7, 101, 103, 110 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 36, 58, 66, 215 Nussbaum, Martha, 93

273

Obi, Cyril, 216 Offe, Claus, 105 ontology, 97, 139–43 Orage, A. R., 73 orientalism, 38, 138 Orwell, George, 13, 17, 22–6, 74, 101, 238 Owen, Robert, 237 Paris Commune, 199, 220, 233, 237 Parsons, Talcott, 30 peace, 6, 33–5 Penty, Arthur, 120 phenomenology, 73, 80 Plato, 79–80 pluralism, 83, 86–7, 200 Poland, 111 Polanyi, Karl, 219 political economy, 143, 177, 181–5, 188, 210 political psychology, 75, 191–7, 203, 205 Porritt, Jonathan, 129 postcolonialism, 67n. 3, 68–9, 82, 154 post-communism, 101–16 post-Marxism, 34, 40–50, 143, 176, 189 postmodernism, 6, 8, 42, 43, 44, 57, 82, 85, 161, 234, 240, 241 postmodernity, 137–40, 142, 154 post-political, 7, 188 postsecularism, 82–98 post-socialism, 49 poststructuralism, 82, 97, 192–5, 225, 231, 234 poverty, 32, 118, 122–3 power, 2, 193–6, 211 primitivism, 160, 162–3 privatization, 124, 135 prosumer, 179–80, 184 protest, 36, 201 public sphere, 54, 61, 62, 64 Putin, Vladimir, 109–10 Quijano, Anibal, 218 Qu’ran, 141, 145–6 radicalism, 73, 83, 156–75, 206 Rahman, Fazlur, 137



Index

Index

Ramadan, Tariq, 146 Rawls, John, 86 realism, political, 149, 157, 174 really existing socialism, 6, 42, 45, 238, 240 Reclaim the Streets, 158, 198, 200–3 recuperation, 220–1, 226–9, 232 reflexivity, 86, 93, 102 reform, 49, 169 religion, 4, 32, 82–98 Renaut, Alain, 228 representation, 28–9, 33–4, 39 revivalism, 83–4 Revolution 1848, 237 revolution, 49, 101, 105, 164, 194, 203, 205, 237 industrial, 55 Islamic, 138, 141–3, 145–52 Revolution, October, 238 rhizome, 157, 168–71, 173, 196, 198 rights, 32, 44, 60, 65, 67, 168 risk, 56, 57, 63 Robertson, Roland, 210 Rorty, Richard, 1, 7, 8, 43, 50, 96–7, 237 Ross, Andrew, 221, 224 Rossetto, Louis, 184 Rumi, Jalaledin, 137, 148, 156 Rushdie, Salman, 149, 155 Russell, Bertrand, 34 Russia, 16–17, 109–10 Sabsovich, Leonard, 104 Sahlins, Marshall, 160, 170 Said, Edward, 98 Saint-Simon, Henri, 237 Santos, Bonaventura de Sousa, 67, 208, 211, 219 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 225 Sayyid, Bobby, 137 Schmitter, Phillipe, 218 science, 1, 2, 17–18, 42, 83, 87, 90–1, 144 Seattle 1999, 1, 7, 199, 239 Second International, 80, 218 Second World War, 17, 24–5, 34, 70, 121, 237 secularism, 55, 82–6 Sennett, Richard, 221

September 11, 2001, 35, 86, 107–9 Shah, 148 Sharia, 151 Shariata, Ali, 145, 149, 154 Shia, 145, 151 Shields, Rob, 233 Simmel, Georg, 84 Sim, Stuart, 43, 50 Situationist International (SI), 158–60, 172, 194, 198, 203, 220 social democracy, 42, 46, 47, 49, 97, 104, 240 socialism, 7, 24–5, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 73–9, 103–4, 237, 238 Soroush, Abdol-Karim, 146 South, the, 83, 213–14, 218–19 sovereignty, 53, 55, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 75–8, 124–7 Soviet Union, 24–5, 103–6, 238 Spanish Civil War, 24 spectacle, 182 Spencer, Herbert, 1 Spinoza, Baruch, 156 Stalinism, 24, 43 state, 26, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 108, 188 Steffens, Lincoln, 104 Steger, Manfred, 48, 50 Stirner, Max, 160, 172, 194 Stoics, 52, 53 subjectivity, 72, 85, 198 surveillance, 183–4 Tamdgigi, Mohammed, 46 Tawney, R. H., 73–80 Taylor, Charles, 54, 62, 67, 85–7, 89, 93 Taylor, Keith, 209 technology, 21, 71, 135–6, 159, 180, 216 temporary utopian spaces, 207–19 Therborn, Goran, 2, 40, 41, 48, 49, 241 third world, 143, 148, 208, 218, 238 Toffler, Alvin, 179, 185 Toffler, Heidi, 185 Tolstoy, Leo, 160 Tormey, Simon, 41, 46, 197



274

totalitarianism, 3, 4, 22–6, 34, 114, 186–7, 193, 235, 238, 242 totality, 44, 73, 186–7, 193, 235 Touraine, Alain, 7 Townshend, Jules, 41, 46 trade unions, 73–4, 214 transnationalism, 212–17 Turner, Victor, 208 Twitchell, James, 125 Tzu, Sun, 227 ultra-Left, 45, 220 ultra-Right, 239 Unger, Roberto, 46–8, 85, 89–98, 218 United Nations Security Council, 34–5 United Nations (UN), 34–5, 50, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66, 215 universalism, 30–2, 34, 37, 87, 193, 208, 217, 219 Valery, Paul, 70–1 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 15 Vattimo, Gianni, 46, 50 Veblen, Thorstein, 119–21, 134 Vico, Giambattista, 90 Vietnam War, 34 Vogt, Henri, 107, 110, 113 Wagner, Peter, 7, 41, 229 Walby, Sylvia, 240 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 7, 8, 41, 50, 52, 55, 56

275

war, 34, 36, 48 Washbourne, Neil, 215 Washington Consensus, 7, 48, 108, 240 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 104 Weber, Max, 30, 38, 101, 222 Wegner, Phillip E., 234–5 Weil, Simone, 71 Weimar Republic, 76 Welfare State, 43, 47, 63, 127, 222 Wells, H. G., 1–2, 16–17 West, the, 20–1, 51, 69, 84, 89, 105, 138–9, 147, 153, 208, 218 Western Marxism, 41 Westphalia, Treaty of, 32, 56 Whitebook, Joel, 241 Whitman, Walt, 97 Wilde, Oscar, 79 Williams, Raymond, 103, 143, 212 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 50 World Social Forum (WSF), 156–7, 198, 204, 206, 211, 219 World Trade Organisation (WTO), 143 Wright, Eric Olin, 46, 50, 207 YouTube, 179, 182 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 17, 101 Zapatistas, 198, 203–6 Zerzan, John, 162 Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 49, 141, 183, 185, 188, 239



Index

Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays

Essays Critical and Clinical

Utopia Of Usurers And Other Essays

Globalization: A Critical Introduction

Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays

Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays

David Mitchell: Critical Essays

Aristotle's Ethics: Critical Essays

Bernini's Biographies: Critical Essays

Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays

Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays

Essays Critical and Clinical

Utopia Of Usurers And Other Essays

Globalization: A Critical Introduction

Berkeley: Critical and Interpretive Essays

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Art and Culture: Critical Essays

Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays

Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays

David Mitchell: Critical Essays

Aristotle's Ethics: Critical Essays

Bernini's Biographies: Critical Essays

Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays

Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

Utopia

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