Political Uses of Utopia by S. D. Chrostowska James D. Ingram

Author:S. D. Chrostowska,James D. Ingram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

6

AFTER UTOPIA, IMAGINATION?

ÉTIENNE BALIBAR

It seems to me that the main problem facing us at the turn of the century consists of taking leave of utopia while setting free the powers of the imagination. This thesis is not original, I freely admit, but it could be that it would allow us to get beyond the sterile oppositions between an ethics of conviction and an ethics, or politics, of responsibility. My reason for this will be developed on three, tightly connected registers. First of all, utopia—be it individualist or collectivist—traps us and the imagination within the alternative of realism and unreality, whereas realism is profoundly unreal and in another sense the unreal, even the “impossible,” is that without which no reality can be tolerated in history. Next, we are obliged to observe that with the process today designated by the name of “globalization,” which for my part I prefer to call the “globalization of the globe,” the very bases of the classical utopia have been radically destroyed. On the other hand, the question of institutional change, with its inevitable fictional component (the invention of rights, new techniques for the expression and representation of the collective interest, the transmutation of values that articulate the “private” and “public” spheres), has become unavoidable. In particular it concerns the forms and content of “citizenship” beyond the crisis of the nation-state that we are experiencing today.

This allows me to make a detour by way of formulations we have inherited from Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, the incompatibility of whose philosophies at the end of the day renders their convergence that much more significant. Very early on, we know, Marx chose “utopian socialism” as his target. But the meaning of this critique has been obscured by the false alternative of “utopian socialism” and “scientific socialism,” with effects we all know. Scientific socialism, it must be said, is not the opposite of utopian socialism (just as scientific capitalism, that of the Nobel Prize for Economics, is not the opposite of utopian capitalism, in which individual interests naturally harmonize). The meaning of the Marxian critique of utopia must not be sought on the side of science (the interest in which is completely different, namely, knowledge), but on the side of practice and its revolutionary conception. It must be sought in the “transformation of the world,” or better still, in an alternative solution to the seemingly ineluctable evolution of the world as it is objectively inscribed in its contradictions and struggles, in the impossibility of the dominant tendencies being realized without intolerable constraints for larger and larger masses of people, and therefore in the resistance they provoke.

For his part, Foucault (for whom the thought of resistance was far from foreign) opposed to utopia not transformative mass movements, but what he called “heterotopia,” the very real varieties of which he sought to describe and classify. They are generally situated at the margins of society, but they in turn act on it and fulfill an essential function in its regulation of differences, on

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