I have been interested in utopia for around three decades, and this interest has gone through three phases. At first, my utopian concerns were implicit, conditioned by my encounter with the Marxist critique of capitalism and by my consequent commitment to socialist politics. A second phase was shaped by reading Marxian thinkers who directly dealt with utopiaâErnst Bloch , Fredric Jameson , and Ruth Levitas âbut also by my growing realization of the gravity of Left defeat in the 1990s, the period of the end of history, when neoliberalism appeared to be âthe most successful ideology in world historyâ (Anderson 2000, p. 13). My feeling, here, wasâto quote Perry Anderson (2004, p. 71) againâthat utopianism had gone into âgeneral suspensionâ, bringing a âremorseless closure of spaceâ. Over time, though, after the close of the 1990s, I increasingly had a sense that something within the field of future-oriented thinking was changing. This sense, hardly dazzling, inclined me to revisit those Marxian utopians and to view utopia as interpretative method, as omnipresent and multivalent, and as diagnostically important, despite its still rather marginal place within the human sciences .
In what follows, I draw on the aforementioned thinkers in an effort to examine fragments of the present through a utopian optic. My data, here, is social- and politics-oriented intellectual production, intellectual understood in the deflationary Gramscian sense of those tied to social groups and involved in the production and circulation of knowledge. My next chapter is an orienting one, where I explore human scientific discussion of utopia, arriving at seven theses on utopia as investigative tool. In addition, within that chapter, I offer some broad suggestions about the periodization of modernist utopianism, as a backdrop to the three chapters that follow. In these chapters, I argue that, in the midst of todayâs crisis of intellectual and moral leadership, we are witnessing important transformations of the utopian constellation .
This concept, constellation , as I am using it, is found in the work of Walter Benjamin , Theodor Adorno , and Karl Mannheim . Across these usages, there are some important commonalities. First, all three thinkers deploy the notion as a way of approaching the broad realm of cultural production. Second, the concept is used in a way that marks an effort at a complexified approach to human scientific understanding of this realm, against positivist approaches to knowledge, say, that posit a simple, reflection theory as an answer to questions of representation, in which object and subject are cleanly separated, and in which ideological phenomena are conceived of in a static, complete, and ahistorical manner. Third, in all three thinkers, we see the joining together of a more culturalist Marxism (emphasizing totality , dialectics, contradiction, history, and a sophisticated departure from the straightforward causality of an orthodox base-superstructure model) with Weberian elements (ideal types , the critique of reification, an elevated role for interpretation).
More concretely, in Benjaminâs (2003) intriguing formulation from 1928, âIdeas are to objects as constellations are to starsâ (p. 34). As framed by Sahraoui and Sauter (2018), in Benjamin , constellation refers to âa configuration of phenomena under specific spatial and temporal circumstancesâ (p. ix), or an âinstantaneous, relational figure of epistemological, historico-political, and literary objectsâ (p. x). This figure, in both Benjamin and Adorno , is an attempt to deal with issues of representation and to grasp cultural-intellectual totalities in a way that avoids passive, linear, contemplative, âcompletedâ ways of seeing, including those one-dimensional scientistic appeals issuing from certain Marxist quarters. The constellation is a totality constituted of elements configured together in a âmomentary and provisionalâ system, apprehended in a âsnapshotâ (Jameson 1990, p. 51) fashion, in which past and present, as well as not-yet, anticipatory elements intersect (Cook 2014; Gilloch 2002; Sahraoui and Sautter 2018). Understood as a âcontradictory and mobile wholeâ (as Benjamin described his own thought in a draft letter of May 1934), constellation suggests the discernment of crystallized cultural-intellectual patterns or formations in their specificity, while acknowledging what Adorno labeled the âunavoidable insufficiencyâ (in Stone 2014, p. 58) of thought.
In Mannheimâs (1968 [1936]) work, the phrase âconstantly shifting total constellationâ (p. 187) is used with direct reference to utopia. Again, Mannheim shares with Benjamin and Adorno the influence of both Western Marxism (especially by way of Lukacs) and Weber (thinking utopian âstructures of mentalityâ [p. 189] as ideal types). Mannheim , though, attributes the concept to Alfred Weberâs 1927 work on cultural sociology , where the latter speaks of the âtotal constellationâ and of the âconcrete, unique constellation of a historical momentâ, using âphysiognomyâ and âlife-aggregationâ as alternatives (in Kettler et al. 2008, p. 18). Once more using âconstellation â to speak of cultural-intellectual totalities, or of a particular âconfigurational unityâ, free from dogmatic rationalism or Marxist economic determinism , as a âprovisional determination of the phenomena which are symptomatic of the present situationâ (Mannheim 1968, p. 227), Mannheim posits the existence of a number of historically specific utopian configurations, dominated by distinctive forms. These constellations conjoin what Williams (1977) conceived of as residual, dominant, and emergent phenomena, with each utopian conception (itself, a constellation of affinities, resonances, and coherences, in Weberian terms) also a âmutually antagonistic counter-utopiaâ (Mannheim 1968, p. 187). Here, Mannheim suggests the play, within any utopian constellation , of a host of utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian figures, in what Jameson (1981) describes as âa Homeric battlefieldâ (p. 13).
My object, in the chapters ahead, is to shed light on the contemporary utopian constellation . This âshifting total constellationâ (Mannheim 1968, p. 188), of course, contains multitudes , an array of particular, mobile constellations , which are characterized by processes of âmutual interpenetrationâ (Mannheim 1968, p. 223). This complexity has necessitated choices, and I do not focus on any number of important, world-shaping configurations of future-oriented thoughtâmost notably, perhaps, the revival of feminist and democratic socialist thinking, environmental thought, or discourses around the impact and possibilities of new technology . Instead, I attend closely to three broad configurations within the larger totality . At the center of todayâs utopian constellation is a liberalism that is increasingly splintered. I examine this fragmentation in Chapter 3, a fragmentation marked, variously, by post-hegemonic tendencies, by the significant wearing down of utopian significations, and by fear. On the far-Right margin, we are seeing the consolidation of a post-fascist intellectual formation. In Chapter 4, I explore this contradictory, synthetic body of thought and increasingly organized practice, which is both continuous with historic fascism and specific to the contemporary moment, drawing together a host of fears with utopic figures from the past, elemen...