Utopian Impulse Research Articles

Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism by Eli Park Sorensen

Reviewed by: Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism by Eli Park Sorensen Troy Michael Bordun Unpredictable Blockbusters. Eli Park Sorensen. Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism. Edinburgh UP, 2021. 168 pp. $110 hc & ebk. A pandemic was always in our collective futures. It was also going to be an unpredictable event: we knew neither when nor how it would arrive. Nevertheless, our failure to prepare for the pandemic was due, in no small part, to neoliberalism and the assumption that should our post-political world encounter something so terrible, it could be well contained by the systems currently in place. Yet the pandemic has demonstrated liberalism's limitations. [End Page 591] For Carl Schmitt, politics is what occurs when the sovereign declares a state of exception (the suspension of legal norms) in an extraordinary circumstance in order to ensure an eventual return to the normal ordering of things. Since early 2020, we have lived in a state of exception. With Schmitt's definition of politics in mind, Eli Park Sorensen ends his recent monograph with the reminder that the authoritarian measures enacted in 2020 were otherwise unimaginable (to liberalism) before the pandemic. By enacting states of emergency, governments attempted to hold back the future, that is, a future that would look radically different from the pre-COVID era. Given the governments' authoritarian measures in the service of public health, however, Sorensen further reminds us that after such crises, the return to a former state often includes a few of those exceptional measures—emergency and normal become synonymous in the permanent state of exception (147). In Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism, Sorensen investigates politics in the extraordinary circumstances of six sf films. The author begins with Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, arguing that by the late twentieth century we could no longer think "beyond ourselves": we have "difficulty imagining anything coming after ourselves that will fundamentally improve today's political coordinates [Western-style liberal democracy]" (145, n.1). This is what Sorensen, after Schmitt, calls the post-political era. While much scholarship on sf cinema "is caught up in Fukuyama's … thesis" and posits that sf contains a utopian impulse, Sorensen understands the genre as capable of thinking the political proper, "that is, what it takes to create and ensure the survival of an autonomous political unity within which the normative situation of the present becomes a sustainable possibility" (4). In scenarios where aliens, artificial intelligence, advanced medical technologies, and clones are the norm, sf cinema imagines politics for unpredictable futures. Following Schmitt's critique of liberalism—a political system that refuses to acknowledge the future as unpredictable and that organizes itself as a bureaucratic machine with minimal state intervention—Sorensen asks what political life looks like after the end of (political) history. Each film in his sixchapter book reveals how the sovereign functions as the one who declares that the future has arrived (in the form of AI, aliens, or advanced technology), enacts the state of exception, then makes that state of exception permanent. In short, the sf films under discussion "rediscover the true face of power" (18). To start, the title of Sorensen's book is a bit misleading. Science Fiction Film suggests a broad overview of many works. Sorensen's selection of films ranges from 1979 to 2017 and falls within the contemporary genre of Hollywood realist sf (the future technology seems possible from our present era and is also coherent within the temporal setting of the film). Three of Sorensen's films involve Ridley Scott; Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford each star in two films; Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures each produce two films; Philip K. Dick's stories are source material for three films; five of the six films have white male leads; and no films have women at the helm as either directors or writers. Luckily for Sorensen, what matters for his short [End Page 592] volume is the political theory. What is intriguing about Sorensen's application of Schmitt's theory is that it allows him to pose original and sophisticated questions about these much...

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 ed. by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich

Reviewed by: Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 ed. by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich Viren Murthy (bio) Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949. Edited by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. ix + 323. Hardback $177.00, ISBN 978-90-04-42653-5. The essays in this volume edited by Axel Schneider and Thomas Fröhlich deal with a crucial topic, namely discourses around the concept of progress in China. Although numerous authors, including Prasenjit Duara, Luke Kwong and others,1 have dealt with this issue, this volume goes further by examining the details of the interpretation of ideas of progress and showing that the incorporation of linear time in China was far from linear. The book is divided into an Introduction, three parts, and nine chapters. The first part, "Initial Conceptual Encounters," consists of two chapters, Kai Vogelsang's "The Chinese Concept of Progress" and Takahiro Nakajima's "The Progress of Civilization and Confucianism in Modern East Asia: Fukuzawa Yukichi and Different Forms of Enlightenment." Part Two, "Tides of Optimism," consists of five chapters, Li Qiang's "The Idea of Progress in Modern China: The Case of Yan Fu," Thomas Fröhlich's "Prospect Optimism in Modern China: The Foundation of a Political Paradigm," Peter Zarrow's "An Anatomy of the Utopian Impulse in Modern Chinese Political Thought," Leigh Jenco's "The Optimism of Cultural Construction in the 1930s: Wholesale Westernization, Cultural Unit Theory, and Cultural Construction on a Chinese Base," and Rui Kunze's "Fantasizing Science: The Idea of Progress in Early Chinese Science Fiction." Part Three, "Margins of Skepticism," consists of two chapters: Axel Schneider's "Critiques of Progress: Reflections on Chinese Conservatism" and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik's "Playing the Same Old Tricks: Lu Xun's Reflections on Modernity in his Essay 'Modern History.'" Together the essays cover a wide range of topics and consequently, I will selectively deal with a few essays to bring out the philosophical contribution of the volume. From the perspective of comparative philosophy, one of the key points of interest will be the manner in which traditional Chinese philosophies continue to inform visions of time and progress during the modern period, after 1895. The editors' choice of 1895 is significant because it is the date of the Sino-Japanese War, after which Chinese began to translate Western texts related to linear history and evolution. Joseph Levenson famously contended that the modern period implied a radically new conception of history in which the [End Page 1] tradition merely became a symbol of national identity.2 Levenson's claim was later challenged by many, including Chang Hao and Thomas Metzger, who argued for the continuing relevance of tradition in ways that many overlooked.3 This book goes beyond this traditional response by showing how modern Chinese thinkers transcended any simple opposition between universality and particularity whether they affirmed or rejected the idea of progress. Moreover, the book takes readers beyond the opposition between China and the West. Fröhlich writes: Chinese calls for catching up with the industrialized countries in the West rarely comprised the idea of a complete Westernization of China. Most advocates of "catching up" expected that China would follow a special path to modernity as compared to Western countries. Such an outlook was by no means exclusively Chinese. Similar discussions about a special path (Sonderweg) of catching up with the West from the starting point of a "belated nation" had taken place in Germany, Russia and Japan since the mid-nineteenth century. (p. 21) The book places China within a larger global intellectual trajectory, where starting late could imply different historical trajectories. Some of these trajectories could point beyond modernity itself. In the Introduction, Fröhlich cites the Chinese anarchist Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉 to show belief in progress could be connected to a universal utopia. Wu writes: [W]hen the world of great uniformity is reached, all forms of labor shall have been replaced by machinery… When the time comes that each can take according to his need, every human being will have an exalted, pure, and exemplary character… This is not a utopian idealization. There is already some evidence of its realization in countries...

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's Solaris korrigert

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's <i>Solaris korrigert</i>

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

The Specter of the Amazon: FEMEN’s Utopian Reappropriation of the Female Breast

Abstract This essay will explore a different aspect of the meanings attributed to the activist group FEMEN that has hitherto been underexplored, the utopian. While critics question the effectiveness of its bare-breasted demonstrations, their assumptions remain based upon a logic of cultural dualisms that prevent an interpretation that may restructure the problem beyond an either/or logic of radicalism or co-optation. An application of the utopian, as theorized by Lucy Sargisson, will illuminate the import of FEMEN’s protests within the parameters of utopia as process rather than product, and a utopian impulse that erupts and threatens to disrupt accepted structures of thought based on binaries. This conceptualization of utopia allows a new type of consciousness-raising for both the feminist and nonfeminist audience because it shifts the perspective from a goal-oriented approach to one of social function by redirecting the issues raised by the analysis of results to a vision of a better world.

The Dialectics of Utopia and Utopian Impulse

This paper aims to offer a dialectical view of Utopia and utopian impulse in utopian theory. Politically, Utopia is associated with a reductionist leftist politics which overlooks essential human diversity and psycho-social conflicts by imposing harmony and progress through implicit violence. In aesthetic representation, Utopia is seen as an ideal society which offers a glorious transformation of mankind living in a society free of wants and conflicts. However, Utopian theory is essentially different from such meta narratives about Utopia and its pr-axis. Instead of focusing on the political or aesthetic concept of Utopia, it brings forth a dialectical analysis of Utopia and Utopian impulse to understand its aesthetic, political and theoretical dimensions. This paper claims that the utopian impulse is the central subtext of diverse utopian manifestations, which offers a narrative of critique and a continual process of theoretical sublimation and pursuit of an ideal society free of systemic ills.

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Memory of the Present

Memory of the Present Elana Gomel (bio) Carter F. Hanson. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future. Routledge, 2020. xvii + 199 pp. $160 hc. Utopia is about the future; memory is about the past. This seems so self-evident that the notion that memory can play a constitutive role in utopia appears far-fetched. If utopia is a vision of an ideal future, then it has to reject the less than ideal past. In many utopian texts, historical and individual memory is treated as a danger that must be regulated, contained, or expunged. Dystopia, utopia's dark twin, is generally hostile to memory, as in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the repression of historical memory is necessary to maintain the oppressive regime of Ingsoc. But can utopia and memory be reconciled? In this interesting book, Carter F. Hanson makes a case that they can. If I am not entirely persuaded by his argument, I still believe it opens up a new field of inquiry. Citing cognitive research, Hanson argues that memory is intrinsic to anticipation: "the conscious imagining or subconscious wish-dreaming of a better future must also draw on memories of our pasts" (xv). Thus, he posits that "memory is fundamental to and constitutive of utopianism, and that within the more specific domain of literary utopias, memory and forgetting often function as vital and complex components of a text's utopian impulse" (xvi). Of course, arguing that memory is constitutive of utopianism is not the same thing as showing that memory is an issue in literary utopias. Hanson's book does an admirable job of the latter, situating literary utopias in the context of the "memory wars" of modernity, in which individual and collective memories are contested by emerging ideologies. The claim that memory is necessary for utopia is more problematic, however, running into the thorny thicket of definitions and historical periodization. The book is wide ranging in its scope, covering texts from Thomas More's Utopia (1516) to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993), M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002), and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013). Not only are these texts written in different countries and in different historical periods, but they also embody incompatible views of what constitutes a perfect society. Bellamy's industrial and regimented socialism would be seen as a nightmare in Piercy's pastoral communitarianism; Le Guin's "ambiguous utopia" is saved by science, which dooms humanity in Atwood. [End Page 160] Moreover, half of the texts Hanson discusses are dystopias, presenting a future society that is considerably worse than the present. It seems that at least implicitly he adopts the view of Krishan Kumar, who argues in Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987) that the two genres are structurally the same, and that dystopias offer a critique of the utopian vision based on an anti-utopian ideology. Later in the book, however, Hanson distinguishes between utopia and the utopian impulse, which is an open-ended desire for something different from the present state of the world. The problem is that all the novels he discusses are utopias and dystopias in the formal sense: texts that represent a blueprint for the future rooted in a specific ideology. The book is somewhat uneasily poised between utopia and utopianism, just as it is uneasily poised between memory as a psychological faculty and memory as a collective praxis. To adapt Donald Spence's distinction between narrative and historical truth, the book deals with memory as cultural narrative, while conflating it with the cognitive ability to retain information about the historical past. In his discussion of Thomas More's Utopia, Hanson acknowledges that social perfection requires suppression or regulation of cultural memory: "Utopia largely dispenses with history and thus with the contingencies of memory" (19). This juxtaposition of history and utopia is a frequent claim in conservative critiques of the utopian project, as in Emil Cioran's History and Utopia (1960). Indeed, Nineteen Eighty...

On the problem of the structure-forming elements of Utopian Discourse and its specifics

The subject of the research is utopian discourse, which unites all the variety of concepts related in one way or another to utopia, utopian dimension of reality and understanding of the Future (utopian element, utopian impulse, utopian optics, utopianism, utopian consciousness, utopian thinking, dystopia, etc.). Special attention is paid to the study of the explanatory and predictive potential of utopian discourse, identifying its boundaries and analysis of the relationship with ideological discourse. The conceptualization of utopian discourse is based on an instrumental approach to utopia, which is complemented by the communicative approach and the interpretive concept of culture by K. Geertz, which justifies the possibility of considering utopian discourse as a semantic and symbolic matrix. The novelty of the research is to identify and substantiate the exaggerated dichotomy of thinking and otherness as the structure-forming elements of utopian discourse. This contributed to the assessment of utopian discourse as a peculiar but viable form of reflection of political reality and the construction, consolidation and comprehension of values. The proposed algorithm of thinking with dichotomies made it possible to trace the process of constructing utopian discourse on the basis of a pyramid of dichotomies, consisting of system-forming, key and peripheral dichotomies. The article clarifies that the otherness of utopian discourse is manifested in the historicity, radicality and inextricable connection of utopian discourse with the Present. The indicated specificity of utopian discourse has led to the clarification of the reasons for the negative and/or skeptical attitude towards utopia and utopian discourse, as well as to the definition of its strengths and weaknesses. The authors conclude that despite the identified shortcomings, which often lead utopias to periodic displacement from the framework of actual political life, utopian discourse can have a significant impact on the change and development of society.

Trans Failure

AbstractThis article explores potentialities for experiencing trans joy via creative praxis, which the author coins “trans failure.” As the author defines it, trans failure builds on examples set by queer failure, such as casting off limiting cultural norms (like binary gender and oppressive framings of what identities should look like), and incorporates new strategies such as deploying play as a means of self-articulating beyond the bounds of what is currently available. Trans failure's use of play has a utopian impulse often achieved via alternating strategies of theatricality, pleasure, collaboration, and experimentation in a mode of enacting alternative worlds and experiencing joy. The article discusses how play, a strategic mode of trans failure, is used to intervene in consumer culture and to work toward self-articulation and the procurement of joy. First, an explanation of gender as we understand it today is sketched out. Then, issues around representations of trans constituencies are discussed as problematically informed by dominant conceptions of gender and perpetuated in mainstream consumer culture. Then two distinct contemporary projects that disrupt the space of consumer culture are analyzed, deploying what the author names a praxis of trans failure in search of creating joy.

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Measuring the transformative utopian impulse for planetary health in the age of the Anthropocene: a multi-study scale development and validation

Transformative utopian impulse for planetary health is people's propensity to have thoughts and engage in actions of which the purpose is to transform the current society into a better one in the future by addressing existing global issues. We aimed to develop a well-validated scale that can measure the transformative utopian impulse for planetary health and uncover its role in societal transformation. We developed a scale to measure the transformative utopian impulse for planetary health across 11 studies with 6248 participants from the USA (from the MTurk database) and the UK (from the Prolifico.co database). Participants were eligible take part in the studies if they completed the consent form. Participants who did not pass the seriousness check or did not accurately answer all instructed response items were excluded from statistical analyses. We used exploratory factor analyses (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) to determine the factor structure of the Transformative Utopian Impulse for Planetary Health Scale (TUIPHS). Then we analysed the TUIPHS' nomological network (ie, the relationships between TUIPHS and various constructs ranging from personality traits and values to economic, social, and political attitudes and beliefs). We then examined the scale's incremental predictive validity by testing whether it predicts various attitudes and behaviours relevant to social change beyond scales that measure competing constructs (this part of the study is registered at OSF Registries [https://osf.io/ztj2f]). Finally, we examined the TUIPHS' longitudinal predictive validity by probing whether it predicts people's future support for social change. Data were collected between Oct 8, 2018, and July 6, 2020. We established that TUIPHS has a four-factor structure and can also be scored as a single general factor, indicating that it captures an overarching theoretical construct (ie, the transformative utopian impulse for planetary health). We then showed that the scale is related to various specific individual difference measures that capture diverse aspects of people's propensity to actively engage in thoughts and actions oriented toward the betterment of society. Moreover, TUIPHS predicted, above and beyond 20 competing scales highly correlated (r ≥0·50) with it, a series of 19 self-reported behavioural and attitudinal constructs pertaining to social change. Finally, participants' past TUIPHS scores predicted their support, a few months later, for social movements that aim to build a more just and resilient society than in the current day. This research lays the groundwork for future theoretical and empirical research into the psychological and behavioural processes attached to the transformative utopian impulse for planetary health as a source of transformative social change toward a better way of being and living. The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Утопия в поисках субъекта, субъект в поисках утопии

The central concept of this article is the idea of utopia as an optimistic image of a societal order achievable in the distant future. Tracing the process of gradual decline in the emergence of new positive utopias through examples of literary dystopias over the last century, the author proceeds to discuss the topic of the end of utopia. The idea is that, despite its long existence, it is only recently that the absence of new models for a happy future becomes critical, that utopia begins to be recognized as a problem. In this regard, the author proposes to temporarily shift researchers' attention from the already fairly well developed matters of the characteristic features, signs, and functions of utopias of past centuries to factors contributing to the formation of social utopias in culture. Most theorists point to active transformational processes in societal structures and relationships as a factor stimulating the emergence of new utopian ideas, which the author admits to being true, but insufficient. An equally important factor is the obligatory presence of a certain subject of utopia. At closer examination, it seems that the status of the subject of utopia in the contemporary world is largely problematic for many reasons, unlike the subject of classical utopias of the modern era. Firstly, the idea that any utopian project could be brought to fruition raises serious concerns. Secondly, the tendency to perceive utopia as a naive project significantly reduces the degree of its possible influence on the way of thinking and the direction of social change. Thirdly, the lack of clarity about the subject's qualities required to create utopias hinders active creativity regarding new utopian projects. This, in turn, is directly related to the ongoing unresolved problem of the “death” of the subject, brought forth by postmodern philosophers. Against this background, there is a notable inconsistency of contemporary attitudes, which are focused, on the one hand, on the debunking of the subject as an exclusively rational being, and, on the other, on the rationalization of utopian impulses. In conclusion, the author puts forward a thesis about the need to regard the absence of utopia and the absence of a subject as causally interrelated situations. Finally, an idea is proposed about the priority of solving the problem of the subject in comparison with the problem of the end of utopia, or, in other words, about the impossibility of starting the process of forming new utopias until there is clarity about the figure of the new subject and the image of the new person.

Breece D’J Pancake, peripheral modernist

In this essay I discuss the short stories of the Appalachian and West Virginian writer Breece D’J Pancake (1952-1979) in order to reflect on the ways in which the experience of peripherality comes to be registered in literature. Taking the cue from recent articulations of world literature as the literature of the capitalist world system, I argue that Pancake is a peripheral modernist: the formal oscillation between a realism traditionally associated with regionalist writing and “irrealist” elements stands as a mark of his peripherality. Both the class focus of Pancake's stories and their broad environmental theme may be regarded as symptoms of the region’s structural position within the processes of capital accumulation. I maintain that there is a utopian impulse permeating Pancake’s fiction. It can be located in Pancake’s descriptions of the environment and the temporal disjunctions present in his stories. Keywords: Breece D’J Pancake, literary regionalism, capitalism, peripherality, modernism, utopia

Climate Crisis and Writing in the Anthropocene

America faces a crisis it shares with the rest of the world: the ecological crisis of accelerating climate change caused by human activity in the Anthropocene. I interviewed renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson who has been thinking about possible ways to address global warming for decades. His work, which comprises novels like Ministry of the Future, New York 2140, and the Mars trilogy, prominently engages with late capitalism, ecological crises and how complex systemic problems might be addressed through exist- ing technologies and regulatory mechanisms that are already within reach. Though his novels feature darkly cataclysmic moments, his writing does not predominantly dwell on the dystopian but is remarkable for a distinct utopian impulse and a pragmatic search for technoscientific solutions.

Dystopia-En-Abyme: Analysis of "The Lobster"’s Narrative

The paper analyzes the dystopian narrative of the film The Lobster (2015, dir. Y. Lanthimos) as a political act. Rather than strictly focusing on what the film exposes as problematic (romantic and sexual relationships, emotional intelligence, and love in general), the analysis examines how this problem is presented through its dystopian vision, its narrative’s trajectory and characters’ actions, with what kind of critical potential these are endowed and consequently, what kind of political message the film communicates. It does so by looking more closely at three important narrative elements of the textual dystopia: the space of the film, the protagonists, and the language. Lastly, it examines the interpretative possibilities of its open-ended structure. The analysis aims to show that the film resembles abysmally looping narrative structures through which it acquires an enclosed mythological quality that debilitates any agential potentials of the narrative, fails to provide a utopian impulse, and consequently ends up supporting status quo.&#x0D;

The 1960s, Always

The 1960s, Always

Transhumanism, Utopia, and the Problem of the Real inReady Player One

Ann Taves’s argument about “special things” permits religion scholars to analyze secular texts fruitfully. Notably, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One speculates about humanity’s possible future and how technological advancement could reshape it. Although the narrative assumes an atheistic stance, its central, conceptual tensions are categorically religious. Cline’s imagined cyberworld sensorily immerses users into an alternative kind of space and allows them to inhabit bodies of their own choosing; this represents a kind of transhumanist, utopian impulse similar to shamanism. However, Ready Player One problematizes this created world ontologically and questions whether relationships formed in such a place can be authentically meaningful. Contrasting the book, the film adaptation, and fan fiction illustrates the controversial stakes at play.

On Second Thought

On Second Thought