Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Abstract

Tom Moylan is perhaps most famous as a literary critic of science fiction: his two most well-known collections of reviews were Demand the Impossible, published in 1986 and reissued in 2014 with a number of critical reactions appended, and Scraps of the Untainted Sky, originally published in 2000. At any rate, the topic with Becoming Utopian is utopia, utopia as an abstract notion, influenced by the writings of Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas, Fredric Jameson, and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Moylan’s focus in these books is consistently upon the defamiliarization promoted by certain ideas of utopia, opening to the reader the possibility of conceiving different subject positions. As the preface to Scraps of the Untainted Sky says, “the risk of venturing into the web of popular science fiction is worth it when readers discover new and challenging works that, as the Quakers say, speak to their own condition and speak truth to power” (xvii). Moylan thus chooses to write about science fiction with radical content: his Demand the Impossible highlighted Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and Samuel Delany’s Triton.Becoming Utopian focuses specifically upon how utopian thought can situate itself in this era, and in so doing it performing a series of intellectual rescues. For the first part of the book Moylan dives into the work of Ernst Bloch and the thoughts of various liberation theologians (with an important nod to the educator Paulo Freire). The introduction summarizes what is to come; the initial chapter on “Strong Thought: Utopia, Pedagogy, Agency” sets a tone, first autobiographical, Moylan having participated in the US civil rights and antiwar movements, and then academic, with thematic table-setting for chapters 2 through 4. There is a tentative optimism to the writing of Becoming Utopian that persists despite the degradation of the political scene: To be sure, Jameson is right to note that an indulgence in matters of practical politics in their own right has little place in the anticipatory utopian project for, in times of outright revolution there is, for the moment, little room for utopian speculation; and in times of growing tension caught in a “reality paralysis,” such reductions tend to produce reformist plans and constraining maneuvers. However, at least since that historical/ formal turn marked by Williams and Abensour, the utopian persuasion reveals, over and over, that something must indeed be done to begin to change a prevailing, apparently closed, system in order to assert that not only can an alternative exist but that a political capacity exists to achieve it. (31) To be sure, the primary purpose of any anticipatory utopian project would be radically educational; yet nonetheless I think it could have been argued here that “indulgence in matters of practical purpose” is necessary to find out, for each generation of political actors from Saul Alinsky to Greta Thunberg, whether or not (as Jameson argues) “when it comes to politics, utopianism is utterly impractical in the first place.” (Jameson 2004)Chapters 2 through 4 are about Bloch and also about some liberation theologians with whom I was unfamiliar. Arguably, Bloch is interesting for his inversion of Freud’s obsession with the past: Bloch instead created a psychology of anticipation, with Freud-sounding (but not Freudian) concepts like the “Not-Yet-Conscious.” Moylan correctly identifies the awesome Bloch concept of the “utopian function,” in which (according to Vincent Geoghegan’s Utopianism and Marxism [1987]) the “ubiquity of utopia” in human attitudes and culture is realized in the creation of utopia. For Bloch, the light drawing us to utopia was lit and maintained everywhere. It is with these themes that Bloch counts as a writer deserving of intellectual rescue. For Geoghegan, Bloch (along with Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Bahro, and Andre Gorz) counted as a writer who rescued Marx against charges of his irrelevance through a discussion of utopianism.In fact, writing about Bloch in this era, in looking for relevance in the poetry of (most temptingly) Bloch’s magnum opus The Principle of Hope, is an act of bravery. By “intellectual rescue” I mean that ideas of the past are rescued from their negative or irrelevant-sounding connotations and re-presented as appropriate ideas. There are intellectual rescues everywhere in Becoming Utopian.The first and most obvious of these rescues is the one attempted in the book, the one that tries to explain why Bloch, as a critical Marxist of the most conscious order, endorsed Stalinism and moved to a Stalinist regime, that of East Germany, after the end of World War II. Here is what Moylan does with it: Although a long-range vision enables humanity to move beyond the darkness of the lived moment, unless that vision includes an immediate and engaging critique of the ideological appropriation of the “utopian” achievements along the way, that vision alone can betray the very processes that are meant to lead toward it. If a given situation produces a fixation on the long-range goal by either the arrogance of a triumphal Marxism or the fear of an impending defeat by opposing powers—or, in Bloch’s case, in a complex mixture of both—that stunted application of the power of hope can readily destroy the utopian function. (59) By identifying the flaw in his political vision, perhaps Bloch can be rescued from our identification of him as an apologist for Stalinism. But Bloch’s political problem, at least judging from Jack Zipes’s biographical sketch of him, appears to have been this: he thought he could make something better of life in East Germany than he in fact could. He thus failed and, facing a political crackdown upon his circle of allies, he was “for all intents and purposes silenced and isolated by 1958” (Zipes 2019, 16). Perhaps moving to Leipzig after the war was a bad idea in the first place.In the present-day era of neoliberalism a rescue of Karl Marx, Bloch’s hero, will also be necessary. For our time, Peter Hudis did a salutary job in his book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (2012), at least as regards rescuing Marx the thinker. What was at issue with Hudis (and thus also with Marx) was the matter of “value” in capitalist economics as dictating to each of us how our adult lives would be spent. Moylan does not explicitly rescue Marx in that way. Instead, he begins his discussion of “Bloch against Bloch” by engaging readers in Bloch’s reception at Tubingen University: The reception of Bloch’s “Esoteric Marxism” (Moltmann 1968), with its extensive and sympathetic analysis of religion and utopia, began at Tübingen in conversations between Bloch and theologians such as the Lutheran Jürgen Moltmann and the Catholic Johannes Metz. (44). Thus Moylan credits liberation theology, and the efforts of Gustavo Gutierrez and Franz Hinkelammert and others (and ultimately of Paulo Freire, fortunately!) for employing the “social space of religious discourse” (54) toward some sort of Blochian “utopian function,” and thus potentially toward the liberation of Latin America from dictatorship and from capitalist exploitation. The theme of annunciation and denunciation, familiar to readers of Paulo Freire’s Cultural Action for Freedom (2000) is underlined in this chapter. But I am not entirely sure Bloch is rescued by his appropriation by liberation theology. Wasn’t the problem with Marxism, the set of ideas encompassing both Bloch and the liberation theologians, that it became a (civic) religion, and that a social imaginary based upon critical reflection was replaced by the “teachings of a gospel” (Castoriadis 1997, 64) of which Cornelius Castoriadis complained in his essay titled “The Pulverization of Marxism-Leninism”? In considering Moylan’s portrayal of Bloch, we may also wish an intellectual rescue of religion as well.The reason for all of this intellectual rescuing should appear in critical reflection upon the world’s current situation, which can be described as “neoliberalism unto death.” Climate change will devour everything; yet the problem of value, which Karl Marx unearthed in his critique of political economy, has metastasized into a global economy ruled individually by a very few super-rich and collectively by a few thousand controlling super-rich, the inordinate owners of value. This situation is the outcome of repeated efforts to rescue capitalism on the backs of nearly all of the 7.8 billion of us. Some rescues, it must be considered, aren’t appropriate. With the average individual’s solvency in doubt, the sum of industrial efforts is to insert another 2.3 parts per million of carbon dioxide to Earth’s atmospheric endowment each year. At some late point it will be evident to all that the wrong rescue of the wrong things has been attempted whereas only the right rescue of the right things will do. In this regard, Moylan shows in example after example that his heart is in the right place.Chapter 5 is about science fiction in general, and Chapter 6 is about the science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson. Chapter 5 is written in meta-language about “the pedagogical potential of science fictionality” (107), and chapter 6 is an overview of ecological and utopian themes in Robinson’s work, which perhaps would have been strengthened had Robinson’s (October 2020) book The Ministry for the Future (which suggests a future in which climate change might actually be mitigated) come out before Moylan’s own publication deadline. Chapter 6 starts with the bald truth: capitalism is destroying ecosystems and must therefore be put to an end. Moylan then goes through Robinson’s catalog of work, identifying themes of post-capitalism and of ecological stewardship.Chapter 7, “On the Utopian Standpoint of Nonviolence,” goes through the utopian aspirations of prominent nonviolent activists through the fine art of biography. In reading this chapter one thinks of Malcolm X’s pronouncement on nonviolence: “Nonviolence is fine as long as it works.” Perhaps the most utopian aspect of nonviolence is that nonviolent direct action anticipated, and anticipates, a world in which nonviolent direct action works. The awesome thing about nonviolence, in other words, is that it anticipates a global nonviolent social imaginary, in which it is commonly assumed that violence is pointless.Chapter 8, perhaps the conclusion, is about “utopian method” and mostly stays close to Ruth Levitas’s Utopia as Method (2013), though Moylan also spends some pages trying to puzzle through some of Fredric Jameson’s discussions of utopia, and so for instance there is some ink expended in Becoming Utopian upon where Jameson “argues that Marxism is an economic philosophy and not a political one” (185). This discussion of Jameson is an especially annoying illustration of why I think Moylan would have done well to use less space discussing him. Readers who think that “Marxism” is a multiple affair constructed around Karl Marx, who famously said three years before he died that “I am not a Marxist” (Engels and Marx 1993, 356), readers who think that Marx’s critique of political economy was anti-economic (the beginning of volume 1 of Capital suggests a rejection of microeconomics, and the “Critique of the Gotha Program” suggests a rejection of macro) are likely to be baffled by statements like this.Ruth Levitas, on the other hand, is rightly credited in Becoming Utopian with arguing things such as “the achievement of utopia requires the closure of a given program, a given set of transformative structures and practices” (190). Indeed, if utopia is to be credited with being something dreamed-of out of a wish to fulfill desires, then people will actually want to fulfill those desires. The rest is dramatic suspense, fun for a time, but not indefinitely.Oddly enough, it is within this discussion that Moylan provides readers with his simplest statement of what it is he wants to do with Becoming Utopian: We can sharpen Jameson’s argument by opening up that space in which we can discover the persistence of the utopian impulse in the trajectory from alienation and passivity to radicalization and activism. (189) The coda, “’68 and the Critical Utopian Imagination,” is an intellectual rescue of the Sixties, a topic dear to Moylan’s heart, though it seems as if the Sixties need to be rescued from the dystopian implications of “hip capitalism” as Moylan mentions it. Moylan says: In the work of Marge Piercy, Butler, Le Guin, Robinson, and others, we discovered a formal and political maneuver analogous to but different from that of the critical utopia. Such works took seriously the terrible times and exposed that new order in a dystopian mode, but they did so in a way that exposed the limits of the traditional dystopia, especially its tendency to lapse into anti-utopian resignation and even complicity. As a result, they helped to save dystopia from its own anti-utopian tendencies and to hold it available for radical utopian expression and intervention. (222–23) All of this is good except that Moylan might have shed some light on why we should single out the “traditional dystopia” (in particular) for its anti-utopian tendencies, when such tendencies are in fact everywhere. Today we swim in anti-utopian complicity and co-optation like fish in water—it’s as normal as paying the bills or participating in major-party politics. Serious works of dystopia (as opposed to popular teen dystopia, which dramatizes angst) were written to warn whoever would read them that if we were to continue along our current path, worse things would happen. They are cautionary tales.In Becoming Utopian Moylan puts forth a certain position upon the rescue of the concept of “utopia” from the dystopian zeitgeist, sometimes worth arguing against, other times straightforward, always coming out of a lived perspective and generous intentions. The book moreover addresses the serious issues of how utopia is to be rescued, always finding relevant texts to dramatize its perspectives. It is in that vein that it is a welcome addition to the literature on “utopia.”