Keeping Good Time by Avery Gordon Angela Davis

Author:Avery Gordon, Angela Davis [Avery Gordon, Angela Davis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317257066
Google: hSMeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T05:05:13+00:00

A Different Reality Principle

Social theory is concerned with the historical alternatives which haunt the established society as subversive tendencies and forces. The values attached to these alternatives … become facts when they are translated into reality by … practice.

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

To summarize, Wallerstein’s Utopistics relies on systemic contradiction to generate and warrant a rationalistic will to change. Marcuse and many theorists subsequent (and prior to) him have rightly found this model of social change and its historical materialism deficient, for some of the reasons I’ve already given. Marcuse offers a richer and more insightful conception of the utopian because he insists that changing “the system” requires deeply changing people. The subjective factor—the instinct for freedom—is neither residual nor epiphenomenal; it’s part of the historical material. But, Marcuse’s approach has been criticized for not explaining very well how it is exactly that an instinct for freedom can organize a new way of existence if our current existence is thoroughly contaminated by the “aggressiveness, brutality, and ugliness of the established way of life.” Critics have found Marcuse’s claims unrealistic because they seem to rest on an unevidenced and theoretically unwarranted libidinal individualism.

Both Wallerstein’s and Marcuse’s models of utopian thinking are important ones. But their limitations have fueled a suspicion towards the utopian, even among those sympathetic to it, which must, in my view, be overcome. Here is Frederic Jameson describing this sympathetic suspicion: “If you know already what your longed-for-exercise in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom after all but only repetition; while the fear of projection, of sullying an open future with our own deformed and repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat to the indulgence of fantasies of the future collectivity.”45 Jameson captures quite elegantly the contradictory feelings that generate reservations about the autonomy of the utopian project. I say autonomy because utopian thinking is not dismissed out of hand, but its relative autonomy is. By autonomy, I mean independence, capacity for leadership, self-determination. Even under sympathetic conditions—your longed-for-exercise—an inevitable complicity takes intellectual and emotional precedence. At the core of these reservations and anxieties is the presumption, as Jameson goes on to state, that “freedom … virtually by definition and in its very structure, cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified.”46 Freedom is what we fight for, but not what we possess now. Freedom is what we will acquire at some future time when the battles are won and when the systemic supports for new needs, desires, people, and institutions are established. What Jameson is saying is that the utopian is always paralyzed—spooked, some would say—by what represses and oppresses us. Inevitably trapped by that which presumably motivates it in the first place—the need for a freedom that’s missing or that there isn’t enough of—the utopian drags the suspicion along with it that it is never really itself.

This is a very sophisticated and persuasive position, especially since it is usually accompanied by the sine qua

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