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Ruth Levitas
To cite this article: Ruth Levitas (2000) For Utopia: The (limits of the) Utopian function in late
capitalist society, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 3:2-3, 25-43,
DOI: 10.1080/13698230008403311
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3
Society
RUTH LEVITAS
This article is about the uses of Utopia, and the uses of Utopian studies,
in the present historical conjuncture: under conditions of late modernity,
at the start of a new millennium. It argues that these conditions
(particularly, but not only, what might be called the 'postmodern turn' in
social and cultural theory) pose very fundamental challenges to the
project and projection of Utopia. Responses to these emergent challenges
can be seen in changes in Utopian thinking, including Utopian texts, over
the past 30 years, and in the theorisation of Utopia, the stuff of Utopian
studies itself. These transformations involve a greater provisionally and
reflexivity of the Utopian mode, and a marked shift from an emphasis on
representation or content to an emphasis on process. While it can be
argued that these changes demonstrate the continuing strength of
utopianism, a strong case can also be made for an opposite view: that the
ways in which Utopians and utopists (those who study Utopia) have
responded to the condition of late modernity reflect a weakening of the
transformative potential of Utopia. Utopia survives, but at a cost, and
that cost is the retreat of the Utopian function from transformation to
critique.1
to as an escape: into our daydreams about winning the lottery, and thus
perhaps having the resources to escape physically. Most lottery winners
buy a new house - and this can be seen as the creation of a personal
Utopian enclave, as was Monet's garden at Giverny. On a smaller scale,
endless television programmes, such as Changing Rooms, Ground Force
and Charlie's Army, are dedicated to the transformation of homes and
gardens - programmes which have the additional fantasy element of
someone else doing the work. The other escape dreamed of by millions
and favoured by lottery winners is travel: the travel industry is probably
the most significant repository of compensatory Utopian dreams, and
advertises itself in explicitly Utopian, or at least paradisaical, terms. This
dreaming transforms only the dreamer's place in the world, not the
world itself - or not directly or intentionally, although of course both
the travel industry and the DIY industry have profound physical, social
and economic effects both locally and globally.
Utopia may be more critical than this. It is implicit in Bloch's
argument that even the most compensatory of Utopian fantasies has some
critical function, as it articulates the sense that the present is
unsatisfactory. But Utopia as critique (as, for example, in More's Utopia)
foregrounds this and makes it explicit. Identifying the problem as
somehow more general than one's own position in the world is a
necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for Utopia's third
function, that of catalysing change. Utopia's strongest function, its claim
to being important rather than a matter of esoteric fascination and
charm, is its capacity to inspire the pursuit of a world transformed, to
embody hope rather than simply desire.
Furthermore, if there is a tension between the intellectual and
political motivations of utopists, so there is a tension between the
expressive and instrumental functions of Utopia, between desire and
hope. Part of the appeal of Bloch's work is that he insists on the
importance of all forms of dreaming of a better life, all forms of thinking
beyond the present, including those that are pre-political expressions of
desire. But his major work was called The Principle of HOPE. Bloch, like
UTOPIAN FUNCTION IN LATE CAPITALIST SOCIETY 29
all other utopists for whom the ultimate value of Utopia lay in its
transformative potential, was forced to make a distinction between
wishful and will-full thinking, between abstract and concrete Utopia,
which is ultimately a distinction between desire and hope.5 Raymond
Williams argued that the willed transformation of the social world was
an essential characteristic of the Utopian mode, and that without this
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there was the danger of Utopia settling into 'isolated and in the end
sentimental "desire", a mode of living with alienation' (1980, p.203);
one of his pieces was called Resources For A Journey Of Hope, and a
posthumous collection simply Resources of Hope.
by the prospect of new hope for the future symbolised by a baby (or two)
and a bit of new age music. Perhaps this does distinguish millennial
dreams from those of the 1980s. The last apocalyptic television drama
set in Sheffield was the post-nuclear Threads, which also ended with a
birth, but the final shot was of the mother's horrified scream at the sight
of her child. Cinema in the 1990s is replete with images of Utopia as
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The real problem with all Utopias ... is not only that they have
existed nowhere heretofore but that they seem to me, and to many
others, dreams of heaven that could never exist on earth. Utopias
have religious functions and they can also sometimes be
mechanisms of political mobilisation. But politically they tend to
rebound. For Utopias are breeders of illusions and therefore,
inevitably, of disillusions. And Utopias can be used, have been used,
as justifications for terrible wrongs. The last thing we really need is
more Utopian visions. (Wallerstein, 1999, p.l.)
Utopias are totalitarian; some, indeed (and William Morris's News from
Nowhere is conventionally cited here, but Marge Piercy's Woman on the
Edge of Time would be a more recent example) are quite the reverse.
Furthermore, Jacoby argues strongly that the attribution of the genocidal
consequences of nazism and Stalinism to 'utopianism' is historically
sloppy, not to say ideological.
A much more interesting set of challenges (more interesting
because more ambiguous, and both theoretical and political) arises
from the condition of postmodernity. Here, the negative consequences
of Utopia are attributed to the pitfalls of modernity, in particular,
to the post-Enlightenment insistence on reason and universal values,
which is potentially totalitarian. The challenges revolve around
questions of hope and desire, and the distinction between them.
Postmodernity and postmodernism are such broadly used terms that a
little clarification may be in order. The term 'postmodernity' can be
used to refer to a structural change in the nature of the society we live
in, or a broad cultural, political and theoretical condition which results
from this structural change, or a narrower artistic or aesthetic
movement more properly termed 'postmodernism', or any combination
of these. The question of the relationship between postmodernity and
modernity, or postmodernism and modernism, has occupied many
hours of scholarly time and will doubtless figure prominently in many
RAE returns (the RAE is the British university system's 'Research
Assessment Exercise', on the basis of which state funding is distributed)
as well as having caused the destruction of a large number of trees. In
all three senses, and especially at the structural level, what is called
postmodernity can be seen to be an intensification and continuation of
trends within modernism, as much as a sharp break from it.
Furthermore, especially at the structural level, it may be preferable to
talk about late modernity or even late capitalism. Thus postmodernity
in the broad cultural sense, and postmodernism in the narrower sense,
can be seen, as Fredric Jameson (1984; 1991) argues, as the cultural
logic of late capitalism.
UTOPIAN FUNCTION IN LATE CAPITALIST SOCIETY 33
body', reflecting 'a belief that the only valid remaining space of
perfection lies ... in our own individual flesh: a paradise of curves and
muscle' (Siebers, 1994, p. 152). If Utopian thought of all kinds is
expressive of a desire for a better way of being, its projection onto the
body, rather than the body politic, may be seen as an important retreat
from hope, at least social hope, to desire. Furthermore, it is a retreat
from understanding desire, as Deleuze and Guattari, Reich, and Marcuse
did, in terms of a libidinal energy suffusing the realm of the social, and
thus fuelling capitalism and fascism as well as their potential Utopian
alternatives. For these writers, desire may emanate from the body in an
essentialist, vitalist way, but it does not stay there.
The suggestion that postmodernity challenges Utopia itself rests on
certain assumptions about what we mean by Utopia. It arises from the
essentially anti-foundational character of postmodern culture, an anti-
foundationalism which is epistemological and moral, but it constitutes a
challenge in so far as Utopia entails claims about truth and about
morality. For example, Lyotard's challenge to 'grand narratives' does not
augur well for projecting into the future wholesale schemes of social
transformation (if that is how we understand Utopia). The
'deconstruction of the subject' undermines the possibility of discussing
interests beyond the self-defined identity and identification of
individuals, so that collectivities are theoretically disintegrated into
selves, and further into fragmentary selves. Moral and ethical absolutes
are impossible; the claim that one society is better than another (a claim
perhaps fundamental to the Utopian project) is undermined. Even the
idea of society itself as in some sense a totality, a concept which
underpins the whole notion of social science, as well as Utopia as a
society transformed (if that is how we understand Utopia), is called into
question. There is not just a loss of hope in the sociai, but a loss of belief
in it. Krishan Kumar commenting on this anti-utopian character of
contemporary social theory, argues that if postmodernists are right, 'it is
not simply that "there aren't any good or brave causes left" to fight for
anymore', but that there cannot be (1996, p. 135). The quest for Utopia
in this reading is an irretrievably modernist project (compare Clark,
UTOPIAN FUNCTION IN LATE CAPITALIST SOCIETY 35
All these features are present in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge
of Time. So, too, is a cultural pluralism, deliberately and actively
separated from any connection with 'race'. This aspect of pluralism is a
little unconvincing, in that culture appears as an optional add-on to a
whole way of life, rather than an intrinsic part of it, but it is very much
more present than in Nowhere. The political process is also presented as
more contested than in Nowhere, for here there may be differences of
interest to resolve. Argument simply continues until agreement is
reached, and after a major dispute, the winners have to feed the losers
and give presents. The response to a question about how differences are
resolved is 'we argue - how else?' (Piercy, 1979, p.153.)
Jurgen Habermas (1989) argues that the shift to late modernity
produced a shift in Utopian thought such that it is no longer possible to
say anything about the nature of Utopia itself, but only the
communicative processes by which it may be negotiated. Thus the only
kind of Utopia which is possible is the processual and communicative. In
practice, such claims tend to sneak assumptions about the actual
character of Utopia in by the back door, in so far as they explicitly or
implicitly posit the conditions under which such dialogue may be
possible. But the problem with 'we argue - how else?' (especially in a
society which is not, as Piercy's Utopia is not, culturally homogeneous) is
that it presumes that argument will result in resolution. There is, it
seems, not only an assumption that shared interests dominate over
conflicting ones, but also no dispute over the terms of the debate, the
procedures of discussion, and the frame of the argument.
A more radical challenge to the Utopian imagination arises if this
frame is contested. How can Utopia handle the possibility of
fundamental conflicts of interest, or absence of agreement on the rules
of the game? Perhaps it cannot. Incommensurability enters into the
Utopia largely as a dystopian shadow. Arguably, it can only enter in this
way, if Utopia is a space for the fictional resolution of problems that
humankind has not (yet) solved. The first volume of Kim Stanley
Robinson's Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), presents a picture of
incommensurable cultures and value positions within cultures. The issue
38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF UTOPIA
genre, such as A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower (1997) and Paul Auster's The
New York Trilogy (1987).
Theorising Utopia
The shift to a greater pluralism, provisionality and reflexivity in the
substance of Utopia has been paralleled by a theorisation of Utopia which
treats it as heuristic rather than telic. This, like the texts themselves,
focuses on process rather than content, but the process in question is one
of dialogue with, rather than within, the text. It sees the function of
Utopia as poised between expressive and instrumental functions. There is
a convergence between neo-Marxism, critical theory, postmodernism,
and feminism' in thinking about Utopia in terms of desire, in terms of
process rather than content, in terms of how the text works rather than
(simply) what it means.
Abensour, for example, argues for understanding the function of
Utopian texts in terms of desire, not expressively or instrumentally in the
sense of desire for the object portrayed in the text, but in terms of how
the text acts on the act of desiring. This was taken up both by Edward
Thompson and Raymond Williams, who remarks that Bellamy's Utopia
is 'in a significant way a work without desire' (Williams, 1980, p.202).
To read a Utopia is to embark on an adventure:
And in such an adventure two things happen: our habitual values
(the 'common sense' of bourgeois society) are thrown into disarray.
And we enter into Utopia's proper and new-found space, the
education of desire. This is not the same as 'a moral education'
towards a different end: it is, rather, to open a way to aspiration,
to 'teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and
above all to desire in a different way' (Thompson, 1976,
pp.790-91).
Utopia here, even the Utopian text, is not a naturalistic representation of
the good society, but the catalyst of a process in which the reader is an
UTOPIAN FUNCTION IN LATE CAPITALIST SOCIETY 39
NOTES
1. I have been helped and forced to clarify my argument by utopists and others on
several occasions in 1999, including by participants in the conferences on
'Nowhere: A Place of Our Own' at Warwick and 'A Millennium of Utopias' at the
University of East Anglia, and by members of the Critical Theory Seminar at the
University of Bristol and the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex.
I would particularly like to thank Vincent Geoghegan, Gregor McLennan, Tom
Moylan, Thomas Osborne, Lucy Sargisson and Carolyn Wilde for perceptive and
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REFERENCES
Auster, P. 1987. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber.
Baccolini, R. 1999. Feminist open/critical dystopias. Paper presented at A Millennium of
Utopias: The Theory, History and Future of Utopianism, University of East Anglia,
23-26 June 1999.
Bellamy, E. 1888. Looking Backward. Boston: Ticknor.
42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF UTOPIA
Berger, J. 1998/99. Against the great defeat of the world. Race and Class, Vol.40, No.2/3,
pp.1-4.
Bloch, E. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Oxford: Blackwells.
Bourdieu, P. 1998. Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Byatt, A.S. 1997. Babel Tower. London: Chatto and Windus.
Carey, J. 1999. The Faber Book of Utopias. London: Faber and Faber.
Cavalcanti, I. 1999. Utopias of(f) language in contemporary feminist Utopias. Paper
presented at Nowhere: A Place of Our Own: Exploring the Uses of Utopia, University
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