Looking laterally: The literary utopia and the task of critical social theory

Abstract

This article is focused on exploring the value of literary utopias for social theory. The literary utopia, at first glance, appears irrelevant to sociology, its imaginative descriptions of social worlds both radically different and substantively better than our own seeming to skip over the central task of sociological enquiry: the diagnosis of society as it exists. In this article, the author aims to demonstrate that this is mistaken: the tradition of literary utopianising has much to contribute to sociology. Utopian authors, from Thomas More in the sixteenth century to Ursula K Le Guin in the twentieth, have developed a sophisticated and original mode of social critique. The utopian text, in bricolating and remixing aspects of actually existing society, creates something both new and astonishing. In looking laterally at the world from the perspective of utopia, consciousness of the contradictions and repressions of the dominant relations in contemporary society is sharpened. The literary utopia achieves this in two ways: first, it demonstrates how the not yet realised norms of the author’s society can be fulfilled and, second, it discloses the hidden possibilities for new ways of living that are present but denied in the social world.