Utopia in the Age of Globalization

Space, Representation, and the World-System

Robert T. Tally Jr.

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230391901
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The idea of "Utopia" has made a comeback in the age of globalization, and the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for novel forms of utopia. Tally argues that a new form of utopian discourse is needed for understanding, and moving beyond, the current world system.

1

The End of Utopia at the Present Time

Abstract: Drawing upon Herbert Marcuse’s consideration of the “end of utopia,” this chapter examines the paradoxical timeliness of utopian theory at the moment when any utopian alternatives to the current political and economic systems seem utterly impossible. Recent protests, including the Occupy Wall Street movement, represent examples of the renewed utopian impulse, as various groups struggle to imagine and create new spaces of liberty. Although the present world system does not allow for the older sort of “blueprint” utopias, the critical project of utopia as a form of opposition is all the more vital.

Tally, Robert. Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9780230391901.

Utopia is commonly imagined as a far-off place, an ideal society set off from the rest of the world like Thomas More’s famous island Utopia, or perhaps a world away like H. G. Wells’s alternative planet, or closer to home, like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. In whatever form, the utopian space stands apart from the debased or imperfect world that it expressly or implicitly criticizes. In these versions, utopia lies literally outside of the mainstream of social experience, where it offers a remote glimpse of another way of life. In what might be considered the heyday of modern literary utopianism, the late-nineteenth-century epoch of somber social critique leavened with hopeful visions of progressive solutions to societal problems, writers such as Edward Bellamy and William Morris imagined utopian social formations in the not-too-distant future. In Looking Backward, 2000–1887 and News from Nowhere, utopian societies were but slightly removed from the present condition, uchronias separated by a brief lapse of time rather than a great expanse of space. By the mid-twentieth century, however, neither vision of utopia, the island paradise geographically removed from the degenerate real world nor an idealized future version into which our own society may evolve, held much cachet. Especially after world wars, genocides, and nuclear weapons, any serious attempt to imagine utopia seemed ludicrous to many thinkers, and utopianism in general fell out of favor by the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, the most pervasive form of quasi-utopian narrative was the literary dystopia. Following the Second World War, utopia was understood as an impossible, and also likely undesirable, condition, in which any ostensibly utopian society must reveal itself to be dystopian after all. By the late twentieth-century, it seemed that utopia had no place in the world.

In the era of globalization, any space “outside” of the political economic system appears almost inconceivable, and radically alternative places and futures are almost invariably cast in dystopian terms. A defining characteristic of late capitalism appears to be a profound sense of inevitability concerning the status quo. The inalterability of the world system has become a kind of fact, as it now seems to be far easier to imagine the apocalyptic end of the world than a real alternative to the political or economic system in which we are immured, as Fredric Jameson famously suggested.¹ In fact, as the aftershocks of various financial crises continue to reverberate throughout the world, we are reminded of just how inextricably linked the political and economic forces are, and how such forces are capable of affecting even the most quotidian aspects of our lives, from the price of fuel for one’s daily commute to the near total collapse of continental economies. At such a moment, utopia seems even more fanciful or irrelevant, and we can once again imagine the end of utopia.

However, perhaps surprisingly, recent events have disclosed what might be thought of as a return of utopia. As the seemingly spontaneous protests of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the Arab Spring, student demonstrations in California, Quebec, and the United Kingdom, along with other restless movements agitating for change, all demonstrate, the utopian impulse remains powerfully vital today.² Especially in its critical vocation, as it highlights the failings of the present system rather than sketching the concrete parameters of a future alternative, this utopian impulse is a forceful response both to an intolerable status quo and to the anti-utopian strictures upon the imagination. That is, even within the apparently total system of globalization, other spaces are still possible. In order to consider utopia in the age of globalization, then, the task of critical theory is to aid in imagining such spaces. And the positive project of the utopian imagination goes hand in hand with a negative project, what the young Marx called “the ruthless critique of all that exists.” To put it another way, the critique of the world system in its totality requires the utopian imagination, since this world system as a whole cannot be comprehended using the older representational methods. Utopia today is not so much the imaginary reconstitution of society, to employ Ruth Levitas’s influential formulation,³ as it is the critical projection of the world system itself.

This chapter explores the paradox of the timely untimeliness of utopia in the present world-historical moment. As discussed in the Introduction, utopia fittingly belongs to modernity. In fact, following Phillip E. Wegner,⁴ I maintain that utopia is central to modernity itself, that modernization and utopianism go hand in hand. Hence, utopia would appear a bit out of place in postmodernity. And yet, a powerful reassertion of utopian discourse coincided, perhaps not coincidentally, with the developments of multinational or late capitalism in the 1960s, just as postmodernism in the cultural or aesthetic sphere also emerged. Whereas the postmodern age of globalization would seem particularly inhospitable to utopia, a kind of new utopianism has emerged. However, it is also true that utopia remains an ill-favored concept in most mainstream social, political, and cultural discourse, so the advocates of utopian thought understandably find themselves situated at the margins. The present moment is thus critical for utopia, as the concept struggles for a certain legitimacy within the world, while also maintaining its distinctiveness as a radically alternative way of imagining the world. The utopian moment signifies both the occasion of utopia at the present time and the importance of utopia for our time. Drawing upon the insights of such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse, Henri Lefebvre, and Fredric Jameson, I argue that the age of globalization and of postmodernity, which was to have marked a definitive end of utopia, has instead disclosed the reinvigorated power of utopia for the critical theory today.

The functions of utopia

Even leaving aside the much earlier history of utopia as a genre or a discursive mode, the utopianism that emerged in the 1960s must appear somewhat old fashioned in the twenty-first century. That is, if there was some justification of the hopefulness and revolutionary potential of utopian thinking then, surely post-Vietnam, post-Thatcher and Reagan, post-perestroika and post-Cold War, post-Enron and post-9/11, and so on, only the most pie-eyed optimists could embrace utopianism today. Yet, precisely because we are at a historical conjuncture at which utopia appears to find no place whatsoever, where utopianism is or ought to be at a dead end, utopia needs to be thought now more than ever. The utter closure of the late capitalist world system, which appears to render impossible and maybe inconceivable any utopian projection of radical alternatives, also makes the absence of utopia noteworthy. At such a moment, revisiting the utopianism of an earlier moment of this stage of capitalism may enable us to rethink the utopian project in the world today. Thus, the present moment offers a perfect occasion for returning to the theory of perhaps the most significant utopian thinker of the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s own ruminations on the end of utopia present a surprisingly timely argument for our own postmodern condition.

In the concluding lines of his powerful and eccentric 1967 lecture titled “The End of Utopia,” Marcuse announces that philosophy, if it “does not wish to stop at merely improving the existing state of affairs,” must embrace its utopian vocation.⁵ Of course, that is not exactly how he puts it, since the meaning of the word utopia as used there is deliberately ambiguous. In his employment of the term, Marcuse manages to include the sense intended by those dismissive, anti-utopian critics, both of the right and of the left, while dialectically countering their argument by positing a post-utopian utopianism in the form of what he calls “the scandal of qualitative difference.” In the course of his brief argument, Marcuse demonstrates how the utopia as conceived by most anti-utopians has indeed ceased to exist, and he offers an alternative image of utopia that retains vitality, while also positing a utopian end, in the sense of aim or goal, for critical theory itself. Thus, even as he maneuvered around the sticky problems associated with the word and concept, Marcuse’s meditation on utopia’s “end” in technologically advanced, industrial societies becomes a call to action, an action fittingly called opposition. This oppositional action takes place not only in the streets, but in the arena of critical theory itself, which also maintains its utopian function today.

Amid an increasingly technocratic, rationalized, and one-dimensional society, Marcuse championed utopian thought, especially as it can be recognized in productions of the imagination or in the aesthetic dimension, as a powerful countervailing force. For Marcuse and others in the Frankfurt School tradition, broadly imagined—most visibly in Ernst Bloch, but the utopian rumblings may also be found in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and others—the seemingly pervasive triumph of the capitalist mode lay not only in the processes of production, distribution, and consumption, but in an ideological appearance of hermetic closure or totalization that it promulgates and fosters, which inevitably results in viewing the status quo as natural, inevitable, immutable, and perhaps eternal, at least from the limited perspective of the present. If this condition obtained in the one-dimensional societies of the immediate postwar and Cold War period, it seems altogether intractable in the postmodern, post-Cold War era of globalization. Famously, for example, Jameson has pointed out that “[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.”⁶

Far less famous, perhaps, is Jameson’s indispensable clause following this observation: “perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”⁷ For Marcuse, the diminution of the power of the imagination, particular of its power to imagine alternatives to the status quo, was one important and baleful effect of living in a one-dimensional society. Power to the Imagination! was one of the memorable slogans of the Parisian militants of May 1968, and, as I discuss in Chapter 3, a crucial aspect of that short-lived utopian movement was its commitment to imagining such alternative ways of living. Jameson, himself a former colleague and scholar of Marcuse, embraces this position with respect to the value of utopian thought, and in his writings he locates the problem of utopia, simultaneously, both in the systematic totality of the capitalist mode of production itself and in our ability to make sense of such a system. Th...