Utopian Project Research Articles

Biafra: the Revival and Proliferation of Separatism

The weak cohesion of African societies, predetermined by their ethnic, linguistic and religious heterogeneity, leads to a great propensity for the spread of separatist sentiments in Africa. The overwhelming majority of existing scholarly works note the continent's tendency towards separatism and irredentism. Indeed, the number of separatist movements in Africa is constantly growing; currently there are more of them than there were in the first postcolonial decades, although only a few of them have been “successful”. The present paper analyzes the reasons for the revival of a secessionist movement in southeastern Nigeria several decades after the end of the 1967-1970 Biafran War. The authors consider activities of separatist organizations that emerged in Biafra in the 2000s-2010s, the reaction of the government of Muhammadu Buhari, and factors hindering the establishment of a new “sovereign state” in the region. The relevance of the present paper is determined both by the growing threat of separatism in Africa and by the lack of research on the current situation in Biafra in Russian-language literature. The authors employ theoretical-analytical and systemic-historical methods to analyze the threat of separatism in Nigeria and conclude that the creation of a new “Republic of Biafra” will remain a utopian project for at least the next decade, yet separatist sentiments will spread and hinder the achievement of internal political stability in the country, which is already experiencing conflicts due to the activities of Boko Haram, tensions between farmers and pastoralists, and militancy in the Niger Delta.

The Metaphysics of Decolonization

Decolonization is synonymous with liberation. It is invoked in multiple overlapping geopolitical projects that demand both the undoing of imperial-colonial structures and the amelioration of their effects. In his essay “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/ Building Decolonial Options,” Walter Mignolo describes decoloniality as a double-faced concept. Decolonization is a geopolitical project while decoloniality is an epistemological, political, and ethical process that enables decolonial futures (Mignolo 2011, 20). In this way, decoloniality is an analytical that critiques coloniality but also a generative utopian project that relies on decolonial epistemologies to materialize these futures. Like settler colonialism, coloniality is a structure that exceeds colonization and capitalism, expressing itself as modernity. It is the epistemic and hermeneutical processes of decoloniality that reveal ways of living and being—what Mignolo calls “living in harmony and reciprocity”—that ultimately build a nonimperial, noncapitalist world (Mignolo 2011, 25). In this article I put decolonial theory in conversation with Indigenous articulations of decolonization and religious life to illustrate what Indigenous decolonial futures may look like. I argue that reclamations of Indigenous metaphysical life regenerate Indigenous ontologies (intersubjective personhood) in ways that not only secure decolonial futures but also heal historical trauma, which can be understood as ontological dispossession.

Идея русского символизма о синтезе культурных форм в контексте культуры постмодерна

The relevance of the topic is due to the attention to trends in the development of culture. The synthesis of cultural forms is one of the important factors in the dynamics of culture. The teaching of Russian symbolism about the synthesis of cultures was analyzed in the scientifi c literature of the entire twentieth century. The novelty of the research is to compare the idea of art synthesis in the early twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Two aspects of the idea of synthesis are considered: 1) the relevance of the idea of art synthesis in the postmodern era; 2) music and the visual series as organizing centers of art synthesis in the era of information technology. The purpose of this article is to examine the teaching of Russian symbolism about the integration of various forms of art and the features of synthesis in the postmodern era. The idea of integrating cultural forms was one of the key elements in Russian symbolism at the beginning of the twentieth century and was interpreted as a real prospect for the development of culture. In a broad sense, synthesis in symbolism meant the integrity of life, the integration of all spheres of human activity, the “organic connection” of cultures of the past and present. The synthesis can be realized on the basis of the art of symbolism, which can create a new culture. The synthesis of arts was understood as the beginning of the formation of a new culture. The core of the synthesis of arts, the symbolists saw music. Postmodern art is characterized by synthetism. Computer and information technologies create new forms of synthetic media art. The video series becomes the center of integration construction of postmodern audiovisual culture forms. The symbolist idea of the synthesis of arts as the beginning of cultural change in the postmodern era remains a utopian project. But the creation of new art forms in postmodern culture i s based on integration. New technologies are becoming a factor that determines the specifi cs of the synthesis of arts and infl uences the dynamics of culture. Both in Russian symbolism and in modern art, the goal of art synthesis is to present an integral image of the world, to form a system of worldview attitudes.

Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Pastoral Experiments and Environmentality

Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Pastoral Experiments and Environmentality

‘유토피아적 기획’으로서 ‘생애주기자본금’

‘유토피아적 기획’으로서 ‘생애주기자본금’

Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure

AbstractImportant scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it ‘realistic’, whereby ‘failed’ utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constructs a self-reinforcing relationship between change and realism, whereby only ‘realistic’ interventions can affect normatively desirable change, and therefore only interventions that are possible under current social and political conditions are normatively desirable. Drawing on the idea that the quest for utopia must always fail, the paper suggests that IR theory should be far more attuned to ‘failure’ than as simply a phenomenon that helps define the boundary between the realistic and unrealistic. The paper draws on non-canonical literatures from utopian studies and anarchism, to furnish an alternative ‘no-point’ form of utopianism that dissolves the chronos/kairos binary and thus engages neither in universalist and violent end-point, nor institutionally compromised ‘mid-range’ utopianism. This acts to reconceptualise ‘failure’ in excess of itself, a productive site for IR scholarship, and a political archive for movements and struggles to learn from.

What is resonance? What is alienation? How do the two relate? Reflections on Rosa’s theory of resonance and alienation

ABSTRACT This article explores the concepts of resonance and alienation. Resonance is the phenomenal core of the relationship between social subject and the recreation of meaning. This is normatively neutral concept . Normatively desirable resonance involves enchantment Alienation derives from a particular relationship between subject and object, whereby the object controls the social subject. This is normatively objectionable because the subject becomes a means to the ends of the object. There are two form of alienation, means-ends alienation, (consumerism or exploitation) and end-state alienation(acceleration, reification, and utopian projects). In end-state alienation the social subject loses all capacity for living in the present, thus enchanted resonance disappears.

Literature from the perspective of interpretative anthropology

Kryminalna odyseja oraz inne szkice o czytaniu i pisaniu [Criminal Odyssey and Other Essays About Reading and Writing] by Wojciech J. Burszta and Mariusz Czubaj is not the first text written together by the two scientists. Their other joint work was, for instance, published over a decade ago in 2007 Krwawa setka. 100 najważniejszych powieści kryminalnych [The Bloody Hundred. The 100 Most Important Crime Novels]. What is more, together with the two above-mentioned texts, Czu-baj’s monography published in 2010, Etnolog w Mieście Grzechu. Powieść kryminalna jako świa-dectwo antropologiczne [An Ethnologist in the City of Sin. The Crime Novel as an Anthropological Testimony], creates a thematically consistent cycle devoted to “the stories of crime and punishment” whose key to interpretation is Clifford Geertz’s concept of interpretative anthropology.The authors of the “Criminal Odyssey…” admit that the choice of the literary examples pre-sented in their work was subjective. Thus, one could accuse the authors of incompleteness resulting from the choice of these particular texts as well as their contexts. However, it seems that the authors did it purposefully, which also complies with Greetz’s attitude, as he believed that a complete study of any cultural phenomenon is a utopian project. Paradoxically, it is the very incompleteness that induces the reader to inquire further, which is the subject of “Czytanie” [Reading] (pp. 17–58), the first essay of the “Criminal Odyssey…”. It serves as an “introduction to reading”, complemented with the following essays which focus on specific problems and which, if examined separately, seem to be subject to the case studies of literary phenomena, poetics of specific writers, or motives. One could also examine Burszta and Czubaj’s work from another perspective and read it not as an anthropological interpretation of literature, but as a literary conceptualisation of anthropology.

La crisis constructiva del sueño europeo en Metrópolis, de Fritz Lang. Un estudio contextual comparado de los mitos de Prometeo y Atlas

Metrópolis de Fritz Lang es una película de enorme complejidad que casi cien años después de su estreno sigue provocando polémica en torno a las posibles interpretaciones ideológicas que propone. En este artículo, se estudia la película en paralelismo con otros usos ideológicos que se hicieron de los mismos mitos clásicos y bíblicos en ese contexto histórico. Especialmente aporta mucha luz sobre el complejo significado de Metropolis la comparación con el proyecto iconográfico del Rockefeller Center de Nueva York, que sigue una estética similar y hace también un uso simbólico de los mitos clásicos de Prometeo y Atlas que aparecen en la película. Sin embargo, mientras que Metrópolis supone una cierta premonición distópica -y preventiva- de la crisis del sueño europeo que presagiaba, por ejemplo, el uso simbólico que de esos mismos mitos se hacía entonces tanto en la URSS como en la Alemania nazi, el Rockefeller Center simboliza -todavía hoy- el proyecto más utópico del sueño capitalista americano. El estudio comparativo entre estos usos diferentes de los mismos mitos griegos muestra que la película de Fritz Lang -ya superados los prejuicios metodológicos heredados de la guerra fría académica- se nos descubre como una obra de arte abierta, considerablemente universal e intemporal.

The transient museum: Or a vision of the not-yet-here

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.

Mythopolitics of “community”: an unstable but necessary category

PurposeThe authors engage a set of critical discussions on key concepts in disaster studies with attention to recent critiques of the concept “community,” which decry the term's imprecision and problematic insinuation of consensus. The authors’ objective is to explore for enduring and redeeming merit in the use of the term in disaster prevention, response and recovery and in collaborative social science research more broadly.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on case studies drawn from the authors' ongoing, longitudinal studies of community-based work with Spanish-speaking community leaders in San José, California and rural Indigenous communities in Alaska.FindingsThe authors synthesize unromantic critiques of the community concept that surface important matters of inequality that complicate efforts for decolonizing disaster work with a view of community as an often utopian project servicing redistributions and relocations of the loci of power. It is a term not only invoked in scholarship and the work of governmental and nongovernmental agencies but also one with deeply symbolic and contextualized meaning.Originality/valueThe authors’ interpretation is that we must at once be critical and unromantic in studying and working with “community” while also recognizing its utopian fecundity. Abandoning the concept altogether would not only create a massive lacuna in everyday speech but also we fear too strong a language in opposition to the community concept metaphor telegraphs a hostility toward those who use it to mobilize scarce social, political and material resources to confront power and contest structural violence.

Unconditional Basic Income and the Future of Labor

The article examines one of the many philosophical problems that arise in the discussion on the prospects of unconditional basic income implementation. The author believes that the question of the future of labor should be reviewed in a social-philosophical perspective. The analytical potential of philosophical thinking can be useful in predicting the consequences of implementing the basic income initiative. The article proceeds from the premise that in the 21 st century the idea of basic income application turns from a utopian project into real measures roadmap. The economic well-being provided by the widespread use of technical means makes it possible to seriously plan the transfer of many workers employed in the sector of services and non-material production to basic income. The author points out that first of all it is necessary to assess the consequences of such a measure for the people. Traditionally, capitalist society has been built around a narrative that hard work is well rewarded. The opposition of labor and free time has shaped consumption patterns and life strategies for several generations. In the conclusion, the author suggests to consider whether, by removing such a system-forming element from the social structure, the society itself will be put under threat. It may turn out that an initiative aimed at changing society for the better will actually turn out to become a personal disaster for many people who will not be able to find a use for themselves in the new world, which is already not built around labor. Among other things, the author draws attention that contemporary capitalism, by actualizing the idea of basic income, abolishes the very opportunity of human choice. Virtually all human activity transforms into alienated labor.

Jožef Poklukar’s Universal Alphabet: A Utopian Project to Solve Notation of Special Slavonic Sounds

ABSTRACT This article describes the utopian alphabet project of Slovenian clergyman Jožef Poklukar, in which he tried to establish a universal alphabet for the notation of the Slavic languages in the 19th century. Despite the fact that Czech diacritical marks were accepted in Slovenian orthography in the late 1840s, he wanted to start another reform due to his view that diacritics were not satisfactory. Poklukar began working on the project in the 1820s, but published the first version of the alphabet only in 1851. After that, he intensively developed his alphabet and published numerous updated versions of lithographic tables in daily newspapers and as a publisher. Printed material sources were used as the core material of the research. Although his project was interesting from a linguistic and typographic point of view, it had no influence on the orthography and remains an example of a utopian project.

‘Sleeping dogs and rebellious hopes’: anarchist utopianism in the age of realized utopia

ABSTRACT After the tragedies of the twentieth century, the utopian impulse was subject to searching criticism by a host of liberal intellectuals including Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon. Looking to history and political philosophy, these thinkers impugned utopianism for so frequently destroying the freedoms it appeared to pursue. Defined by its theoretical contradictions, the utopian project, rooted in the politics of the Enlightenment, bore some responsibility for the totalitarianism and genocide that had shaped their lives. As this critique became liberal orthodoxy, a heretic group of anarchist thinkers challenged these conclusions. While travelling some distance with the liberal critics, for Paul Goodman, Marie Louise Berneri, and Herbert Read, the twentieth century, rather than invalidating the utopian urge made its boldness and experimentalism all the more vital. Their act of heresy was defending utopianism as a central component of their anarchist critique of the present.

Motifs of Death and Immortality in Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit and in Christian Patristics

ABSTRACT Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit contains its own interpretation of the interaction between life and death. Scholars are usually focused on the influence of Nikolai Fedorov’s philosophy, but resurrection is an ancient symbol important for all of Christian tradition. Platonov’s novel has several parallels with ancient Patristic texts, including St. Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Making of Man and St. Ambrose of Milan’s Death as a Good, both written in the fourth century CE. The personal soul and resurrection of the body that Christians accept conflicts with the incorporeal ideal of true reality important for Greek philosophy. The Soviet ideological utopian project conflicts with the personal being of man in a similar way.

Translation in Ireland: Afterword

ABSTRACTIslands are often utopian sites and Ireland has been no exception in this respect. A crucial dimension to the utopian project is not only space but time. The article discusses the specific nature of time in modernity and how this is challenged by the practice of translation in Ireland and elsewhere. Insularity as a material and ecological reality has implications for the political destinies of islands such as Britain and Ireland which have existed in close geographical and historical relationship with each other over time. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and his differentiation of island types, there is consideration of how different paradigms produce different translation outcomes in changing political circumstances. The writings of the author and essayist Amitav Ghosh on climate change and improbability are drawn on to suggest that the seemingly utopian promise of translation from an ecological standpoint may be the only realistic way of proceeding to create sustainable societies on the island of Ireland and beyond.

The Necessity of Hope in Dystopian Times: A Critical Reflection

In today’s global order, for those seeking a just, equal, and healthy existence for humanity and nature, it is time to exercise the transformative utopian impulse. Yet, against such praxis, capitalism’s retrieval mechanism subsumes and consumes the potential of utopianism. Within this co-optation, an enclosure of “eutopian” sensibility within a resigned “dystopian” structure of feeling compromises the radical utopian project through practices of disciplined “improvement” within the “realism” of the existing order. Herein, this essay discusses two symptomatic texts that it argues are imbricated within this dystopian ambience. With great respect for its author, I read Dystopia: A Natural History, by Gregory Claeys, as a component of this hegemonic structure of feeling rather than a challenge to it; meanwhile, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Dystopias Now” as a negation of that negation, as the author takes an anti-anti-utopian stance that reasserts the radical utopian project.

Mothers reproducing the social: Chodorow and beyond

In The reproduction of mothering, Nancy Chodorow laid the blueprint for understanding mothers and daughters in their intricate psychosexual identification and differentiation. Synthesising object relations theory with feminist sociological concerns regarding gender equality, and the psychosocial reproduction not just of mothering but also of misogyny, Chodorow brought together complex psychoanalytic theory with feminist utopian projects. The mother–daughter relationship had been hitherto dismissed in orthodox psychoanalysis as irrelevant to the central Oedipal drama. In situating mother–daughter relations both within the classic ‘family romance’, and also prior to and constitutive of it, Chodorow bequeathed a critically important legacy. She provided a new psychological language for understanding female subjectivity, inclusive of yet differentiating the mother’s and the daughter’s subjectivity. This article reviews Chodorow’s classic work, The reproduction of mothering, while also extending her original formulation to a contemporary understanding of changing gendered social relations. Drawing on the recent work of Alison Stone, I elucidate the process of not only reproducing but also reinventing mothering. From here, I tentatively explore how mothers are symbolically and actually ‘reproducing the social’; or, taking their maternal identities into civil society and transforming that society to incorporate and reflect their interests. Citizen mothers, I argue, have the potential to transform human relations, economies and polities, integrating an ‘ethic of care’ with an ‘ethic of justice’. The last section of this article explores the emergence of ‘autonomous mothers’ and their impact.

Heterotopien des Feierns

Abstract In so far as Arthurian narrative can be considered to be a utopian project, it converges in the festival motif at the Arthurian court. However, the festival ideal in particular is in danger of losing grip on reality as the process of literalizing Arthurian Romances advances. In this context the final festivities in the Arthurian Romances of the Pleier serve as a mediating principle. By connecting the leitmotifs of the histoire with his depiction of festivity scenes, the Pleier conceptualizes them as a space in which courtly norms are negotiated in a lively fashion. The festival scenes thus serve as venues for representation and reflection, thereby becoming ›heterotopias of celebrating‹.

The Modern Form of Cultural Cosmopolitanism

The article deals with interaction of transculturalism as the ideology of uncertainty with a cultural version of cosmopolitanism. In the cosmopolitan in its ontic plane, today’s thinking is not just universal and global. The emphasis is predominantly on the unidentified, in particular, the deprived of national attributes or opposed to national ones. Thus cosmopolitanism represents itself as an alternative to identification, that is, as uncertainty, incertitude in the conditions of a cultural homogenization of the world. This emphasis is connected to the idea of the possibility of an individual’s existence at once in several cultures or coexistence in a cultural mix, expressed in the concept of transculturality. The application of principles of cosmopolitanism in the realm of culture initially causes a certain contradiction through which radical cosmopolitans reject the very idea of culture. After all, this idea asserts human pluralism: culture as the attribute of the human by definition is something plural – a variety of ways to be human; so it can`t be abstractly-human. While the principle of cosmopolitanism consists of the oneness of humanity, and therefore indistinguishability within it. The overcoming of contradictions is sought in the justification of the purely private relations of a single person-nomad with world culture, his or her devotion to it. Such devotion in the vision of transcultures is achieved by an individual’s refusal from one’s own (local, national, etc.) culture and by endless journeys through cultures, that is, a cosmopolitan identification of both individual and culture. In an escape from the “captivity” of a specific culture, that is, in confirming the principles of uncertainty, transculturalists perceive almost the only path to cultural freedom. The article describes how transcultural ideology is formed and unfolded in the framework of modernized cosmopolitan trends. The author shows that transculture now is not an accomplished feat, it remains a kind of utopian project, a projective construct of cosmopolitan-oriented culturological thought.