Utopian Project Research Articles

Escritores nahuas: utopías comunitarias y prácticas sobre los futuros posibles en la Sierra de Zongolica, México

Two Nahua writers’ collectives in Sierra de Zongolica are the topic of this article, which explores how language and literary creation are employed to build utopian community projects. As part of the ongoing struggle against extreme marginalization and discrimination, these writers have developed collective practices and forms of organization with an eye to future projects for social transformation in a historical and social context that is nearly always adverse. Through an oral history and ethnography, the article analyzes the trajectories of the two collectives and explores how utopias and futures are built. The focus here is on the creative practices of the groups and framed within a debate on the processes of building communities and utopian projects for the future.

No(w) future: Neo-farming and eco-anxiety in France

Studying how people relate to the future and how it shapes individual or collective affects is a way to grasp what motivates social practices. What would be the effect of the climate crisis and democratic disillusionments on social mobilisations? What impact does the disappearance of the horizon of progress have on individuals' lives? Based on long-term fieldwork among a dozen neo-farming anarchist libertarian collectives in the Massif Central (France), I analyse how the future horizon of despair, anxiety, or abandonment is necessarily intertwined with utopian projection. This interaction between antinomic futures creates a paradoxical and Camusian ‘absurd' present that resonates with a shared temporality emphasising the ‘here and now' and prefigurative politics. Through this study of the ‘back-to-the-land' movement, I will propose a broader epistemological discussion related to how anthropology has historically approached incoherence and contradictions. I advocate for deepening our understanding of the meaning of social practices by interrogating the intrinsic multiple representations of time that impel them.

Political protest landscapes in Catalonia: language choice, utopian/dystopian discourse and “Catalans”-“Spaniards” identities

ABSTRACT Catalonia has become a rich site to investigate minorised-language identity, with the reemergence of a movement calling for independence. Our case study analyses how pro-/anti-secessionist protests are (counter)-fought in urban Linguistic Landscapes. We approach LLs as identity-markers and place-makers delivering messages of political subversion/dominance where majority/minorised-language choice and utopian/dystopian discourse become crucial for understanding their meanings during social upheaval, with renewed nationalist protests linked to an independence Referendum. We employed a content analysis based on a semiotic/semantic interpretation and thematic categorisation of the data. We show that two antithetical “Catalans”/“Spaniards” identities reemerge which mobilise either utopian projects written in Catalan or dystopian visions in Spanish, through intertextuality. The former, categorised as pro-independence “political resistance LLs,” project a hopeful impossible to extend a liberating possible. The latter, pro-unionist “threats to Catalan protesters LLs,” reinstate order, enforcing the suppression of dissent. This reveals that ethnolinguistic identities are newly reconfigured/resignified, unpacking how a social-semiotics focus on language choice and utopia/dystopia can prefigure social conflict development.

Why politicize the cultural game? (Emil) Cioran’s ethos: mysticism, religion and ethnic philosophy

The present research aims at understanding some of Emil Cioran's spiritual positions in several of his writings. The tools of analysis are the philosophical and cultural approaches, but also elements of positivist determinism, such as climate, disease, etc. The oeuvres studied belong to different periods of creation. The working hypothesis is that the essayist remained a lifelong thinker oscillating between the extreme right and the extreme left, as well as a stubborn and metaphysically rejected progressive thinker, but always obsessed with metaphysics and the transcendent. Among the commonplaces of Cioran's artistic and geopolitical critique of reality and the real are narcissism, humor, victimhood and diatribe. His work is underpinned by intuition and Utopian projection and much less by logic. Cioran becomes dangerous if treated as a programmatic philosopher, but otherwise he is a spectacular source of artistic and literary-philosophical insights; an experimental essayist, dangerous as an influencer. The fate of his thinking has been heavily marked by the ideologies of his interpreters.

Идея «творящей формы» в эстетике русского авангарда 1920-х годов

The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s was a time of a utopian thinking crisis in theoretical aesthetics and in art. The utopianism of the avant-garde project consisted in the impracticability of the mission of art to totally transform reality and man through aesthetic means. The key idea of the avant-garde aesthetic concepts was the effectiveness of the creative form building the integrity of the life creative matter. The concept of the “creative form” was developed in different directions: from the concept of a single style in all spheres of life and the theory of synthesis of arts to the aesthetics of functionally appropriate forms of the objective environment. The symbolic language of style was a universal aesthetic translation of metaphysical ideas into sensual ontological image of the wholeness of being; synthesis of arts was seen as a means of expressing the initial wholeness of cosmic being; and a functionally appropriate form of the objective environment was understood as a means of direct involvement of man, spontaneously causing his active creative response. The utopianism of the idea of the “creative form” determined its rapid demise, which had a complex of philosophical, social, political and human reasons. The major of them included the totality of the wholeness project, the undervaluation of the individual artistic subject’s creative freedom, the rejection of a substantial spiritual and value-based interpretation of culture, the hope that the aesthetic influence might transform the masses into creative subjects, the narrowing of the potentialities of the utopian project by the attempt to turn it into a methodology of action, the pursuit of realization that limited the growth of its inner potential, and the undervaluation of the real conditions for its implementation.

Beyond Grammars of Utopia: Crisis of Imagination and Utopianism by Negation or Affirmation in James Joyce’s <em>Ulysses</em>

Do utopias emerge from envisioning where we want to live or where we do not want to live? According to Theodor Adorno, polarity, i.e. the grammatical distinction between affirmation and negation, is central to utopian thinking and showcases a crisis of imagination, as we can only conceive a utopian world by negating a given reality (Adorno in Bloch 1975, 68-70). My paper negotiates this idea through a grammatical-conceptual reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Specifically, it argues that Ulysses first lays out a negative utopianism following Homer’s Odyssey but in the course of the narrative tests out the logical necessity that precludes affirmative utopian thinking. Starting from episode 12, ‘Cyclops,’ the Homeric utopianism ‘by negation’ (De Jong 2001, 233-35) seems inadequate to erect a utopian project, for a negative dystopia need not amount to a utopia; the Joycean Ireland negates the Homeric dystopia without being a utopia either. Utopianism by negation proves exclusionary too, for a negative utopia is dystopian for the ones negated, like nationalistic Ireland is a dystopia for a Jew like the protagonist, Leopold Bloom. Bloom offers an alternative to negative thinking by envisioning a utopian state that affirms everyone. Climactically, in episode 18 ‘Penelope’, Molly Bloom answers ‘yes’ to the query ‘where’. This unsyntactical, absurd affirmation exposes the limits of imagination, as delineated by Adorno, since we cannot understand possible worlds that are ‘yes’ as a response to ‘where’. However, it also prefigures conceptual structures yet to come, structures that may build utopian worlds based on the affirmation ‘where one does want to live’. These conceptual mechanisms that underlie utopian world-making and are captured through grammatical structures are identified as ‘grammars of utopia’ and constitute the overarching theoretical project in which this paper is inscribed.

Mundo clásico y ciencia ficción o cómo construir una utopía feminista: The Gate to Women’s Country de Sheri Tepper

This paper offers an analysis of Sheri Tepper’s novel, The Gate to Women’s Country, through the lenses of Classical Reception and feminist reinterpretation, aligning with Hardwick’s theoretical framework and drawing upon the specific conceptual propositions of Ostriker, Keen and Durand. Tepper’s narrative comprises both utopian and dystopian elements. In her utopian projection, a Greek tragedy is reimagined as Iphigenia in Ilium, wherein she introduces a dialogue with the deceased to underscore the inherent violence of men and its consequences for women and children. In the dystopian projection, she indirectly utilises the myth of Persephone and Demeter, with a notable emphasis on the catabatis motif, implicitly employed to depict the harrowing and violent experiences faced by the central character, Stavia. This portrayal of Hades, transposed to Tepper’s envisioned society, serves as a cautionary tale highlighting the perils that women encounter when they lack control, influence or a voice.

Проблема цифрового распознавания поведения личности в условиях современных вызовов: социально-философский и теологический анализ

Introduction. The article examines the problem of digital personality recognition as one of the dimensions of artificial intelligence from the perspective of socio-philosophical and theological analysis. Theoretical analysis. One of the distinctive features of the scientific and technological development of modern society is that various artificial intelligence (AI) systems have moved from the category of science fiction, utopian projects, innovative developments, prototypes and market innovations to the category of familiar and little-noticed elements of everyday life. This technology, also known as the Internet of Behavior, involves identifying and assessing an individual’s behavior both from the point of view of compliance with requirements and from the point of view of identifying patterns of individual behavior that can become the basis for his identification. The prerequisites and conditions for the emergence of the phenomenon of “golemization” of the individual are analyzed, i.e. its reduction to a set of external physical actions and manifestations without taking into account internal motives as one of the risks that require social philosophical and theological reflection. Conclusion. Within the framework of socio-philosophical and theological discourse, digital recognition of personal behavior can have a positive meaning, because increases attention to responsibility for one’s actions and potentially leads to a decrease in crime rates, as well as a negative value due to the possibility of creating virtual identities that differ from a person’s true identity.

MODERNISTIC CREATOR IN THE SPACE OF UTOPIA: YURI OLESHA AND VEN. EROFEEV

The paper is devoted to the problem of the legitimacy of the modernist creator’s statement in the field of the closed discourse of the Soviet utopian project. The main feature of the text that exists in the utopian project is the consolidation of accepted attitudes and cultural values, which is not consistent with the strategies of the modernist text. The modernist claims the right to create his own unique reality rather than follow the requirements of the new art. Yu. Olesha’s novel Envy (1927) and Ven. Erofeev’s Moscow - Petushki are illustrative material. The choice of literary works is justified by three reasons. Firstly, by the similarity of the fates of the designated authors. Secondly, by the diachronic correlation of the main characters of the texts - Nikolai Kavalerov and Venichka - as creators in the space of two versions of utopia (flourishing and dying). Finally, by the similarity of the narrative structures of both works, which indicates the possibility to consider them as examples of modernist self-tale (about oneself and a subjective version of reality). The authors of the paper suggest that Moscow - Petushki is a response to Envy, because it continues the development of that novel’s main intention. This paper concludes that the settings of Kavalerov’s and Venichka’s creative statements demonstrate their alienation from the project of utopia and the impossibility of self-fulfillment in it. For this reason, both characters and their demiurges find themselves in the zone of the marginal and taboo, in the zone of distance from utopia. At the same time, Kavalerov as an active modernist of the 1920s tries to become part of the new century, while Venichka as a passive modernist of the 1960s no longer expresses any claim to a place in the Soviet world.

Utopian constitutionalism in Chile

AbstractIn this article, we argue that the 2022 Chilean draft Constitution helps to articulate the distinction between a transformative constitutional project and a utopian one. Whereas a transformative project lays down markers for social change that will take time to achieve, a utopian project sets out goals that are unlikely to be achieved within any reasonable timeframe. Utopianism is a product of two relationships. The first is the internal relationship between the transformative goals laid out in a constitution and the institutional pathways through which changes will occur. The second is the external relationship between the goals in the text and the views and support of key groups. In Chile, both relationships were problematic. First, the Convention adopted a draft that was heavy on ambitious programmatic content but lacked a clear vision of how to implement it. Second, the Convention produced a draft that was supported by the ephemeral civil society groups galvanized by the 2019 protests but divorced from the vision of Chile’s parties and public opinion. Some of this was a product of the peculiar electoral context in which the Convention acted, which has already been corrected. But some of it reflects deeper tensions within transformative constitutionalism.

Political Doctrines of Neo-Pagans: from the Community of Equals to the State of the Selected Fewy

Since the emergence of the phenomenon of the Soviet (later Russian) new paganism, the ideologists of the movement set out to develop their own political programs, consisting of utopian projections aimed at the functioning of nativist religious groups in the reality of a hostile/neutral environment. These plans listed as their ultimate goals the raising of paganism to the level of the state ideology and even the complete reorganization of the Russian Federation into a new theocratic state headed by a formal cast of cult worshippers: magi and sacrifi cers. The purpose of this article is to examine the central political concepts of the leaders of the Russian pagan movement of the last third of the 20th — fi rst third of the 21st centuries. The experience of Dobroslav (A. A. Dobrovolsky), who laid the foundations of this worldview for decades to come, is taken as a biographical example of the pagan political development. Dobroslav’s concept received its further development, and underwent the transformation in the course of the quest of magus Velimir (N. N. Speransky) and subsequent ideologists of the Russian religious nativism. As a result of the research, the author of the article arrives at the conclusion about the continuity of the neo-pagan political doctrine and the constancy of the central strata. Those include the organization of “their own” space in the form of self-governing (veche) communities, independent of the “outside world” and aimed at the gradually expanding infl uence up to the complete seizure of power. This can be achieved either through the strengthening and development of diasporic pagan groups (a “peaceful” evolutionary option), or through the violent overthrow of an existing state institution (a “military” coup). Other goals include creating an ethnic hierarchical system subordinate to theocratic leaders as pagan leaders of the nation and strengthening contacts with representatives of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation, carriers of pre-Abrahamic beliefs and with “co-religionists” from abroad. In terms of the worldview, we can see a signifi cant infl uence of eschatological views and conspiracy theories; rejection of the off icial science, political and economic systems and reliance on the author’s constructs of community leaders and individual ideologists of the neo-pagan community. It should be noted that this “set” of neopagan constants is subject to modernization taking into account the current (topical) trends in the development of the political system in Russia and the world as a whole.

SPATIAL ARCHETYPES IN THE ARTISTIC WORLD OF V.E. SAVKIN AND YU.D. DEEV

The language of naive painting, like verbal, is a universal communicative system, which gives reason to use a diachronic approach to explore its content arising from the depths of human nature. Being a combination of historical experience and psychological energy, the archetype becomes a symbolic unit of the analysis of naive paintings. The universality of the archetype is manifested in its ability to be realized in different time contexts, which makes it a very attractive subject of research in the works of naive artists of the second half of the XX century. Repeated reference to the archetype of the “ideal city” accelerates its adaptation to new cultural realities, becoming a method of interaction of a self-taught artist with the world. The relevance of the research is related to the interest in the implementation of the utopian project of the city within the framework of modern art space. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the archetype of the ideal city will be considered in the works of naive painting by artists V.E. Sakiyan and Yu.D. Deev. The research is aimed at studying the diachronic aspect of the creative interpretation of the «ideal city» archetype in the images of Russian artistic culture.

From the “Land of the Future”: how Latin American Jews became global

ABSTRACT In this dialogue, the authors discuss what Latin America has meant to Jewish immigrants, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, and what place Jews and Judaism occupy nowadays in this part of the world. While trying to establish some general traits, the authors focus specific historical and chronological contexts, such as late 19th. Century Argentina or Brazil in the 1940s. The importance of such contemporary issues as globalisation, neo-liberalism and the end of ideologies in Jewish Latin-American life and future are also discussed. The utopian projections connected to Latin America, once seen as a kind of paradise in the imagination of Jewish immigrants, gradually has given way to a more realistic and skeptical assessment of reality, while the increasing importance of economical power in the contemporary seems to determine, more than anything else, the future of Jewish presence in Latin America.

Pädagogik der Hoffnungslosigkeit

Abstract Pedagogy of Hopelessness. After the End of Utopia The end of utopia, of which Herbert Marcuse speaks in 1967, means both: the illusory, because false, realization of the ›better life‹ in and as capitalism as well as – therefore – the suspension of a concrete utopia as a dream of a human world. As culture-industrial spectacles, utopian social ideas turn into dystopian visions of the future; social, even socialist fiction becomes mere science fiction. In a world of accumulated crises that threaten humanity, utopia is now missing. To learn to hope again would be – not only pedagogically – necessary the utopian project of ›delearning‹ hopelessness. There is no alternative. utopia – critical pedagogy – principle of hope – critical theory – Herbert Marcuse

«Новая женщина» или «сверхженщина»? Проект Серебряного века

The article analyzes literary texts and critical speeches of women and men-writers of the turn of the 19th – early 20th centuries, where the gender role models of the “new woman” and “superwoman” received the most vivid and original embodiment. Both models of femininity reflected the breaking of the usual gender order and the formation of a new system of values, in literature itself as well. The complex of feminist ideas associated with these types of models interested not only representatives of “high” literature. The creators of products for the mass reader, which absorbed both realistic traditions and the discoveries of modernism, also responded to the problem of women’s emancipation. N. M. Minsky in the play Alma and V. Bryusov in The Last Pages from the Diary of a Woman tried to present the model of the “superwoman” based on the Nietzschean vision. The field of activity for the “new woman” was outlined by E. A. Nagrodskaya and A. A. Verbitskaya in the novels The Wrath of Dionysus and The Keys of Happiness. Nevertheless, in all these works, the heroines failed, because they either became criminals, or faced an insuperable problem: actualizing the reproductive function or creative self-realization. Alma lost strength in the struggle for personal freedom, Bryusov’s Natalie became a murderer, Nagrodskaya’s Tatiana returned to the family shelter, Verbitskaya’s Manya, having achieved success in the art of ballet, committed suicide. And only M. Gorky in the novel Mother offered a solution: he put his Nilovna past the childbearing age and made her a freedom fighter for others. Thus, he managed to outline ways to rescue women from the snares of gender inequality. Nilovna can really be considered a “new woman”. And this utopian project turned out to be possible to implement in Soviet times by ignoring the real issues of gender controversies.

THE CRISIS OF LANGUAGE IN THE POETICS OF MODERNISM

The article deals with the topic of linguistic skepticism in modernistic literature, using works of German, Austrian and Russian literature as examples. The crisis of rationalistic thinking at the turn of the 20th century led to an extensive discussion about the functions and role of language. The reaction to the crisis of faith in the power of language was the search for ways to overcome this crisis - from the demand for voluntary poetic silence to the utopian project of creating a perfect language of poetry. Numerous avantgarde linguistic experiments resulted from the recognition of the inconsistency of former poetic forms. The anarchist rebellion against conventional language and its conscious deformation are paradoxically combined with innovative artistic projects that set the transformation of the world with the help of the revived word as their ultimate goal.

Déclin et célébration du vivant dans l’écriture d’Émile Verhaeren

This article is an ecopoetic reading of a selection of works (poetry and theatre) of the Belgian symbolist Émile Verhaeren. Its aim is to highlight the critical discourse and the constructive discourse of the author about the environmental question and the relationship between culture and nature. We will start with his “social trilogy”, Les Campagnes hallucinées, Les Villes tentaculaires and Les Aubes, and analyze the representation of the pollution and the transformation of the countryside landscape which was triggered by unbridled industrialization in the late nineteenth century, while focusing on the materialist writing and the decadent imaginary.We will then examine his vitalist collections, Les Visages de la vie, Les Forces tumultueuses and La Multiple splendeur, and analyze how the poet imagines the return of harmony between humans and nature and also see how his thinking was close to his contemporaries’ utopian projections. We will lastly demonstrate that his poetic art celebrates the living world from an internal and sensitive vision.

Ad Salutem Publicam: public health and pastoral government in More’s Utopia

ABSTRACT Discourses of health and disease pervade More's Utopia. The text insistently plays upon the ambiguities of salus, a term with a wide semantic range including spiritual salvation, the physical health of the individual body, and the wider welfare of the commonwealth. More's text draws on this network of metaphors of health, disease and medicine to transfigure forms of Christian pastoral government in a radical experiment in state governmentality. The Utopian hospital is a microcosm of the Utopian project, yet its prominence in the spatial structure of the ideal republic reveals tensions between individual and collective forms of care. More's text can be productively put into dialogue with Foucault's analysis of the Christian pastorate as a significant precursor to liberal governmentality and modern medical institutions. More and Foucault illuminate the long pastoral legacy of medical institutions, including the hospital as a governmental space with utopian and dystopian possibilities.

Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona

Afropean anthropologist, philosopher, and art curator Dénètem Touam Bona is an original “border thinker” and “crosser” of geographic and conceptual boundaries working within a tradition of Caribbean historical poetics, notably represented by Édouard Glissant. He explores ideas of “fugue” and “refuge” in light of the experience of maroons or escaped slaves, key actors of the simultaneous expansion of freedom and industrial-scale chattel slavery in the Americas. In “Freedom as Marronage” (2015), Neill Roberts defines freedom itself as perpetual flight, and locates its very origins in the liminal and transitional spaces of slave escape, offering a perspective on modernity that gives voice to hunted fugitives, defiant of its ecology, enclosures, and definition, and who were ultimately excised from its archive. Touam Bona’s “cosmo-poetics” excavates marronage as a mode of invention, subterfuge and utopian projection that revisits its history and representation; sacred, musical, ecological, and corporeal idioms; and alternative forms of community, while also inviting contemporary parallels with the “captives” of the global border regime, namely fugitives, nomads, refugees, and asylum seekers who perpetually evade norms, controls, and domestication. He deploys the metaphor of the liana, a long-stemmed tropical vine that climbs and twines through dense forests, weaving relation in defiance of predation, to evoke colonized and displaced peoples’ subterranean evasion of commodification, classification, control, cultural erasure, and ecological annihilation. This article frames his work within an Afro-diasporic history and transnational cultural criticism that envisions fugitivity and exilic spaces as dissonant forms of resistance to the coloniality of power, and their relevance to understanding racialization, representations of the past, and narratives of freedom and belonging across borders.

Esotericism and Politics in Early Post-Soviet Russia: Forms of Political Participation

The political orientation and participation of esoteric groups and movements remain under-researched and restricted by many stereotypes. There is an oversimplifying tendency to classify all esoteric groups as extreme right-wing and proto-fascist or, by contrast, as counter-cultural, left-wing, anti-authoritarian, and progressive. An equally persistent stereotype, often expressed by insiders, is that esotericism is beyond politics, immersed in thinking only about eternal or spiritual issues. In this paper, analysing the practices and discourses of Russian esotericists of the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we will show that the forms of interaction between the esoteric and political spheres are much more complex and ambiguous. What were esoteric groups like in the times of political cataclysms, namely during the Soviet collapse and subsequent turbulences of the 1990s? Which political participation and exclusion forms were practised inside Russian esoteric communities? Analysing the 1990s esoteric biweekly newspaper Anomaly, published in St Petersburg (1990–2019), we have identified two types of esoteric civic activity, which we call esoteric citizenship (actions and political statements performed by esotericists) and metaphysical politics (esoteric forms of political participation, such as predictions, divination, channelling, and utopian projection). We consider these concepts helpful in describing different variants of esoteric civic participation while being aware that the boundaries between both are rather flexible.