Radical politics, utopia, and political policing

Abstract

This paper reviews contemporary Marxist uses of the concept of absence as an analytic strategy for rejuvenating utopian thought. It finds them at risk of reifying the concept on account of a range of prescriptive impulses that accompany the use of political, philosophical, scientific, and ethical registers to imbue ‘absence’ with positive cognitive form. As an alternative to that positivising idiom, the paper mobilises absence as a utopian analytic by way of an enlargement from within itself such that the concept ‘modulates into identical yet distinct spaces’ (Jameson, see footnote 12 below). The interiority brought into play to effect this enlargement is not the content of the concept but its affective economy, particularly as that economy comes under the decentring impress of the cultural logic of late capitalism. Consideration of utopian responses to political policing in the New Zealand context draws out the socio-political implications of absence's deployment in this manner.