Planet Utopia

Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation

Mark Featherstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415997706
• eBook ISBN: 9781351815871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The key figure of the capitalist utopia is the individual who is ultimately free. The capitalist's ideal society is designed to protect this freedom. However, within Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, Globalisation, Featherstone argues that capitalist utopian vision, which is most clearly expressed in theories of global finance, is no longer sustainable today.

This book concerns the status of utopian thinking in contemporary global society and the possibility of imagining alternative ways of living outside of capitalism. Using a range of sociological and philosophical theories to write the first intellectual history of the capitalist utopia in English, Featherstone provokes the reader into thinking about ways of moving beyond this model of organising social life through sociological modes of thought. Indeed, this enlightening volume seeks to show how utopian thinking about the way people should live has been progressively captured by capitalism with the result that it is difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalist society today.

Presenting sociology and sociological thinking as a utopian alternative to the capitalist utopia, Planet Utopia will appeal to postgraduate and postdoctoral students interested in subjects including Sociology, Social Theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural Theory and Continental Philosophy.

1
Back to the Future

Utopia and Dystopia in Greece

I Hyper-Plato and Contemporary Utopia

In this chapter I propose to situate the first, classic, utopian imaginary, Plato’s (1991) Republic, in the context of the contemporary global crisis or, to use the Greek term which possesses a slightly different meaning that I will explore below, krisis. In order to read the Republic (1991) in this way, I will take Alain Badiou’s (2012) recent hyper-translation of Plato’s text and explore its relationship to the global crisis. My thesis here will be that Badiou’s hyper-translation reflects the ways in which the crisis has thrown utopian politics back to the future. In other words, I want to suggest that the crisis has thrown the utopian politics of the past, which many have suggested were dead and buried by the excesses of the 20th century and centrally the horror shows of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, back centre stage, where they come to represent future possibility. Moreover, I suggest that these politics represent a kind of sci-fi politics, a utopia to come, because they return in the context of a static, stagnant scene organised around a kind of zombified version of Fukuyama’s (1992) end of history paradigm. In this respect, the purpose of my chapter is to read Badiou’s (2012) Plato, a sci-fi Plato for the 21st century who we might call Hyper-Plato, in the bright light of the contemporary global scene ruled by the zombie politics of 1989, the year when the Berlin Wall came down and Fukuyama’s fantasy of global America came to pass. In order to set this reading up, I follow my exploration of Hyper-Plato with a discussion of collapse of the global economic system. Here, I rely on Yanis Varoufakis’ (2011) theory of the Global Minotaur because it captures the idea of the post-war utopian global order constructed by American policy makers. The idea of system-building is important here because I want to emphasise that in much the same way that Daedalus, the original architect of the Cretan labyrinth, designed the home of the monstrous Minotaur, the contemporary global system was the product of a plan to ensure the future of an American-led form of globalisation.

It is on the basis of this plan, which was executed over the course of the second half of the 20th century, that I suggest the global system might be understood in terms of a utopian strategy to create a world in America’s image. In tracking the collapse of this real fantasy, in the third, and final, section of the chapter, I seek to locate the collapse of the global utopia of the monstrous Minotaur in the original space of Plato’s Republic (1991), Greece. Here, I show how the crisis—or krisis to use the Greek term which refers to a moment of decision and thus emphasises the relationship between the economic collapse and the necessity of a leap to a new state or condition—found form in what we might call, following work in Radical Philosophy (2013), the Greek symptom. This means that the collapse of the global utopia of the Minotaur found symptomatic expression in the dystopian conditions of contemporary Greece, the ancient home of utopian thought. Thus, in order to conclude the chapter, I explore the ways in which the heirs of Hyper-Plato, those who recognise the utopian impulse in Plato that exceeds the authoritarian monster that inspired Robespierre, Lenin, and Stalin, have sought to oppose the global dystopia which has landed in Greece in the early 21st century.

In his contemporary reconstruction of the Republic, Badiou (2012) creates a new utopian figure adequate to the political situation of the 21st century—Plato who is more than Plato, Hyper-Plato. Emerging from the cave of the distant past into the banal wreckage of the present, Hyper-Plato looks towards the future. Against the deeply depressive atmosphere of the contemporary moment, where we realise there is no alternative but know that change is absolutely necessary, Hyper-Plato confronts his reader with a discussion of fundamentals. Akin to his ancient brother, his theory is modelled on an appreciation of Spartan order and organisation. Regarding the Spartan origins of Hyper-Plato, we might consider Plutarch’s (2008) portrait of perhaps the very first utopian statesman, Lycurgus, and note his key reforms—the redistribution of land and resources, equality, and rule by elders. I think that we find this basic appreciation of the importance of the communal in Badiou’s (2012) Hyper-Plato. Similarly, he supports the Spartan approach to socialisation, though he may not extend his theory of child rearing to the lengths found in the ancients. However, he recognises the value of the Spartan view that kids are part of the city, rather than the property of their parents, and that they should be educated in the name of discipline and obedience to community. Centrally, Hyper-Plato supports the Spartan opposition to elaborate ways of saying very little—the Spartan utopia was, of course, entirely opposed to the use of nonsense in language, because this obscures discussion of fundamentals, and what we find in Hyper-Plato is a concern for fundamentals that is strangely antithetical to contemporary political debate, which simply confirms that there is no other way but what we have today.

What matters in Sparta is always community, and the Spartan group and Spartan city would be a kind of hive. In this sense the Spartan is an insect-man who lives, works, and dies for the good of the group. As Elizabeth Rawson (1991) points out in her study of Sparta in history, the Spartan focus on collectivity was, in the ancient context, a novelty because traditional Greek heroism, based in Homer, had always insisted upon individual glory. Although he is keen to reject the image of the insectoid, because of the insect-man’s appearance in Kafka (2007), Burroughs (2010), and others, and wants to support ideas of individual realisation, Badiou’s (2012) Hyper-Plato opposes the search for fame and glory for its own sake. He associates this excessive desire for recognition and the need for adventure with contemporary celebrity and suggests that these are the psychological traits that we find along the road to the emergence of tyrannical, fascist man. One need not be Freud or a psychoanalyst to understand that the root cause of the need for fame and glory is weakness and a diminished sense of self, and Hyper-Plato supports this view in his psychosocial theory of the political self. While he does not explicitly support the Spartan commitment to war as a way of life, what he finds in the warrior’s orientation to life is a vision of truth beyond the contemporary bondage to economy that ties people to a miserable materialism defined by meaningless metabolism. Indeed, I think that we can find the Spartan hatred of money in Hyper-Plato’s account of his utopia, simply because of the ways in which money breaks ranks and creates inequality, envy, and jealousy. For Badiou’s (2012) Hyper-Plato, true social life is impossible without equality because inequality produces hatred between self and others. In the Spartan case this is why the famous battle of Thermopylae is so important and remains such a vital myth in Western culture, because what the symbol of the three hundred reflects is the spirit of communal transcendence in the face of the immense gravity of material forces of opposition.

Although Badiou’s (2012) Hyper-Plato is no warmonger, he links the idea of order and control to justice. Where he departs from the Spartan fantasy of his ancient brother is in his attempt to save some sense of Athens, and its principles of openness and newness, from the sheer functionalism of the hive model of communism, which ironically re-emerges in the late capitalist utopia. Hyper-Plato’s city is not simply a camp, where the soldier is ideal and function is all that matters, because he understands the need of people to realise their potential outside of their allotted place in the social order. Place of birth cannot be everything, and Badiou’s (2012) Hyper-Plato disagrees with his ancient ancestor on this issue. Where Plato advances the need to tell lies, and achieve order through the myth of metals, Hyper-Plato does not seek to link his utopia to some natural system. However, it would be a mistake to say that Hyper-Plato has no sense of order, because I think that he remains indebted to Platonic cosmology, and the notion of quasi-divine symmetry which we find in Timaeus and Critias (2008), on the grounds that cosmological order supports his idea of justice. The challenge of Hyper-Plato is to escape the history of the unfolding of this idea of orderly, functional justice and beauty. This idea has, of course, played out across modern history, and the history of the idea of utopia named by Thomas More (2008). Beyond the French Revolution and the Nazi utopia, the idea of a cosmic utopia of perfect order and symmetry found its global form in the American-led empire which appeared on the scene in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this respect, I think that Hyper-Plato’s unlikely interlocutor is Francis Fukuyama (1992), because Badiou has brought Plato back to intervene in the decadent dying days of this global utopia-cum-dystopia. In throwing Plato into the present, Badiou transforms him into Hyper-Plato, the philosopher of the future shorn of the authoritarianism Karl Popper (2002) found so disagreeable. Hyper-Plato is thus Plato more than Plato. He is the idea of Plato, who Plato would have been if he had not been a Greek aristo, committed to the defence of class power and so on.

However, it would be a mistake to say that Badiou (2012) simply wants to preserve the idea of Plato, the utopian thinker who imagined a new society, because he is also keen to insist on the need for Hyper-Plato to overcome the classical dualism of his ancestor—the absolute separation of the forms and sensible world. Centrally, Hyper-Plato is never simply about the assertion of the utopia idea, because Badiou wants to show how the idea can participate in the sensible, in the real world, through a process of subjectivisation. In this way Hyper-Plato’s objective is to reach a view of the utopian truth and universalise this vision through a process of subjectivisation which takes in Plato’s original psychology of the five types of political man. Thus Hyper-Plato is no longer simply a philosopher, but also a psychoanalyst, who understands that we can find the truth of a social system in the psychology of its people. We can see this thesis in operation from the very start of Hyper-Plato’s Republic (2012), where his Socrates debates the meaning of justice with Thrasymachus. While Thrasymachus takes the view that might is right and that justice serves the interests of the powerful, Socrates insists that inequality can only produce discord and hatred and that any idea of justice that advances these conditions is not worthy of the name. While inequality produces hatred between people, and thus destroys the social system, Hyper-Plato’s Socrates also notes that this condition tears the self apart and creates a state of schizophrenia, because the reason of unjust man is no longer in charge of its own house but has instead become subordinate to other psychological forces emerging from the libido.

But is this idea, where the self is controlled and disciplined, really a recipe for freedom? Glaucon’s response to Socrates suggests that freedom resides in behaviour driven by the appetites. True individuals, capitalist individuals, do what they want. They may pretend to be good in order to gain favour from others who respect their higher values, but this is little more than a cynical nod to social necessity, and the truth of their behaviour is driven by the principle of desire and the desire for advantage over others. According to this miserable vision of social life, Glaucon notes that injustice is the complaint of the weak who never get what they want out of life. It turns out that this is a key debate in Hyper-Plato’s work, because it opens out into his Socratic discussion of the idea of justice which structures the new Republic’s theory of utopia. In this account Socrates’ first question is to ask his interlocutors about the identity of society. What is society? His response is that society is essentially a division of labour where individuals specialise in the performance of particular tasks. Of course, the problem with this theory of the division of labour, which Durkheim (1984) would revisit in the modern period of history, is that eventually the division of tasks becomes so complex that the social system starts to collapse under its own weight. The relationships between individuals break because they have little in common. They fall into a state of anomie where they have no sense of their part of the collective. Against this problem of specialisation, Socrates suggests that it is better for people to remain closer to nature and live more basic lives because this enables them to remain part of a common social system based in their common being on the earth. Although Glaucon baulks, and proposes that what Socrates suggests is a primitive city of pigs, Hyper-Plato’s (Badiou, 2012) Spartan utopia of a division of labour organised around basic needs is attractive because it frees his citizens to think about fundamentals rather than navel-gaze and vanish into solipsistic obscurity.

Beyond this advantage, the appeal of Socrates’ city of pigs is, of course, always supported by its difference from the catastrophic dystopia of Atlantis, which casts a dark shadow over Hyper-Plato’s Republic. Here, we should recall that Atlantis was Plato’s original dystopia from Timaeus and Critias (2008) which reflected the likely injustice, inequality, and disaster that would result from urban hubris, excess, and expansion. Against the uncontrollable desire, and eventual hate, which came to characterise Atlantis, Hyper-Plato’s Socrates suggests that his ideal city would teach kids to be good citizens who would display active thought. He tells us that they would investigate, create, and make decisions not because they thought they could gain personal advantage but because they want to discover the truth, which refers to ideality, symmetry, or the beauty of phenomena. In order to achieve this, the kids would need to learn courage, self-restraint, concentration, and disinterestedness. In short, Hyper-Plato’s Socratic educational philosophy becomes about moving beyond self-interestedness towards a universalistic attitude to the discovery of truth and meaning able to inform social policy on the ground. However, there is no more basic social policy than this educational policy designed to produce citizens who are balanced, moderate, stable, and self-disciplined, because these people would grow into those who would design the ideal city in their own image. In Hyper-Plato’s view, these universal citizens would be capable of producing a universal city—a city without borders, a city without otherness—and ensuring that the beauty of their creation would not slide back towards division and fragmentation. But unlike his ancient ancestor, whose city was famously immobile and timeless because he sought to cut it off both temporally and spatially, Hyper-Plato seeks to evade limitation. This evasion of limitation, or allowance for change and development, is most clearly reflected in the way he cuts into the original text’s vision of the allocation of essential tasks.

Where Plato (1991) allocates roles on the basis of birth and the myth of metals, Hyper-Plato’s universal man is Marx’s (1988) polymorphous worker, who can work everywhere but also has special talents which the city should look to foster. In this respect Hyper-Plato’s (Badiou, 2012) utopian city would be universalistic in its openness and provision of opportunity to workers, who would be able to realise their particular talents across a range of fields. Centrally Hyper-Plato is concerned to maintain this dialectical complex, where the division of labour remains open enough to foster individual talents, across the key functions of society—production, defence, and government. This democratic openness is essential to the goodness of his utopian city because it means that the distribution of roles will never become caught in a rigid class stratification system based upon inheritance and a tradition of normalised inequality. In seeking to avoid the corruption of roles, Hyper-Plato insists that his people should be self-disciplined, courageous, wise, and essentially live selflessly for their community. It is here that education becomes central to the postmodern Greek’s theory, because it is education that ensures the production of proper psychological development and organisation. While the original Plato (1991) called the three parts of the self: reason, spirit, and passion, Hyper-Plato translates these terms into thought, affect, and desire in order to better situate his vision of the ideal person within a post-Freudian universe. However, in much the same way that his ancient brother insisted upon the importance of reason in the governance of the self, Hyper-Plato explains that his ideal self would be organised around thought, which would ensure his participation in the universal idea. On the basis of this participation in the idea, his person could then relate to others in a fair and equal manner and thus create a just society based upon unity and collective psychology, rather than discord and selfish individualism.

For Hyper-Plato (Badiou, 2012), this is what justice means—symmetry, balance, and unity—and injustice resides in the collapse of this beautiful form. Thus injustice refers to excess, inequality, fragmentation, and the dark confusion these conditions produce in both social relations and individual psychology. This distinction between the just and the unjust is key to understanding Badiou’s (2012) futuristic version of the first utopia. For example, in order to ensure justice and equality in what he calls his fifth form of government, or communism, Hyper-Plato also insists upon the classical Spartan principle of gender equality because talents and abilities are always distributed evenly across genders. Although his society is no patriarchy in this respect, Hyper-Plato is keen to escape from the totalitarianism of his ancestor, who abolished the family and passed kids over to professional child carers, by explaining that private life and family is necessary to provide shelter from public life and the space of the state. In this respect, he seeks to balance the principle of universalism, where equality reigns, with a recognition of the need to allow particularity and private life choices room to breathe. Of course, the balance between these states is not easy to find, which is why Hyper-Plato (Badiou, 2012) emphasises the importance of thought and the need for philosophy to inform politics in the creation of a dialectic of theory and practice. Everything starts with thought, and the ideational sense of beauty and totality, because it is only this that can resist the perversion of endless opinion, babble, and confusion Hyper-Plato links to contemporary democracy which has no sense of direction. Against this tyranny of opinion, where everything tilts towards the needs of the rich and famous, Badiou’s (2012) postmodern Greek waits on the appearance of some Event-God that would shake this nonsensical system to its core and open up a space for the rediscovery of the beauty of truth.

It is in this context that Badiou’s (2012) Hyper-Plato returns to his ancestor’s famous cave myth, which becomes a movie theatre in the contemporary postmodern global society. In this new scene the ancient prisoners of the cave who sat transfixed before the flickering images on the cave wall become slack-jawed kids caught in the warm glow of the screen that captures their attention in the name of orientation towards the consumer lifestyle. The purpose of the Event-God is thus to break the spell of the screen and recapture the attention of kids who need to turn back towards the beauty of the idea. If he can encourag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On the Seashore: Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Politics
• 1 Back to the Future: Utopia and Dystopia in Greece
• 2 The Origins of the Capitalist Utopia
• 3 The Late Capitalist Utopia in Power
• 4 Global Finance, Utopia of Beautiful Numbers
• 5 The Minor Utopia
• 6 The Lost Child of the Dystopian City: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Only God Forgives
• 7 Dis-United Kingdom: Division, Encounter, and Utopianism in Heterotopic Britain
• Conclusion: The Spectre of Sociology
• Index