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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
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.
Challenges to Utopia: 'Old' Anti-Utopianism
Where are we now placed in relation to these possible functions of
Utopia, and the distinction between desire and hope? The year 1999 saw
the publication of at least three anthologies of Utopias: John Carey's
Faber Book of Utopias; a Penguin volume, simply called Utopias (Kelly,
1999); and Claeys and Sargent's The Utopia Reader. The Centre for the
Human Sciences at Durham and the Critical Theory Group at Bristol
conducted seminar series on Utopia and the millennium. There was an
international conference called 'A Millennium of Utopias' at the
University of East Anglia in June. Despite this upsurge of interest in
utopianism, and despite much millennial hype, popular social thought
does not appear to be filled with Utopian hopes for the future apocalypse, yes; Utopia, not so obviously. Apocalyptic fears were
attached to the 'Y2K bug', although in the event, disaster failed to
strike;6 and the survivalist movement (especially in the USA) had a new
lease of life as people stockpiled supplies for the millennium. In April
1999, there were two apocalyptic and dystopian series running on
British terrestrial television. One was The Tribe, in which all adults are
wiped out by a mystery virus, leaving young people to form themselves
into scavenging bands and warring gangs, or simply to hang out
streetwise in semi-derelict shopping malls. The other was The Last Train,
in which the world is destroyed by a meteorite. A group of passengers in
a train in a tunnel between Chesterfield and Sheffield are cryogenically
preserved thanks to a canister of gas released by one of them, and thaw
out 50 years later for an action-packed journey through ruins.
Admittedly, Utopia is resurrected right at the end, since the protagonists
discover that 'the ones we were running from are the ones we were
looking for', and hostilities (including a couple of crucifixions) are ended
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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
dystopia, as in The Truman Show and Pleasantville, or straightforward
dystopias such as Dark City and The Matrix - the latter being the cult
video sold in huge numbers for Christmas 1999 in the UK.7 True, the
hugely popular film Antz has a Utopian theme, but 'insectopia' is a
rubbish heap, and the clear reference to Metropolis in the ant world itself
is satirical. These trends need not reflect unremitting pessimism: as
Rafaella Baccolini (1999) argues, 'the critical dystopia is the preferred
form of resistance at the end of the century'; but resistance and survival,
rather than transformation and redemption, are the best that can be
hoped for. Despite the millennium, we may be said to live in dystopian
times, in that both reality and most projections for the future are deeply
depressing or downright terrifying.
These are also anti-utopian times. Russell Jacoby (1999) deplores
The End of Utopia, the absence of any transforming imagination or
energy in contemporary political culture. Anti-utopianism involves an
active denial of the merits of imagining alternative ways of living,
particularly if they constitute serious attempts to argue that the world
might or should be otherwise. Political anti-utopianism was intensified at
the end of the 1980s. When the communist regimes of eastern Europe
collapsed, there were repeated references to the 'end of Utopia'. The
discourse of Anglo-American news coverage contained implicit (and
sometimes explicit) equations:
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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
constructive comments and stimulating disagreements.
2. As Thomas Osborne (1998) observes, there are different ways in which
'engagement' can be construed, not all of which are overtly political, while
Forrester (1999) similarly insists that thinking itself is a political act. The
argument that academics, and sociologists in particular, should be 'engaged
intellectuals' has been made forcibly in relation to sociology (in answer to the
question 'What is sociology for?'). See McLennan (1999), Giddens (1998), Rorty
(1998), and Bourdieu (1998).
3. I have argued this at greater length elsewhere. See Levitas (1990a).
4. 'Nowhere - a place of our own' was the title of an interdisciplinary conference
on the uses of Utopia at the University of Warwick, May 1999.
5. The importance of this distinction is discussed in Levitas (1990b), reprinted in
Daniel and Moylan (1997).
6. The British government, which had spent huge sums of money combating and
encouraging others to combat the Y2K bug, argued, of course, that this was why
nothing had happened. They would of course. But sceptical respondents
wondered why, if this were indeed the case, Blair's government was so insistent
that throwing money at problems was not the solution, as is persistently argued
in relation to poverty, education and the collapsing National Health Service.
7. See Moylan (1999). For an analysis of these films, and a theorisation of the
character of 1990s dystopianism, see Fitting (1999) and Moylan (2000,
forthcoming).
8. I am grateful for this formulation in response to an earlier version of this paper.
9. Irigaray's utopianism is exemplary here. See Sargisson (1996).
10. Fitting (1998) provides an excellent account of Jameson's use of the concept of
utopia.
11. The importance of perspective, of the 'vanishing point', and of 'horizon' is a
common theme in Bloch, Jameson and Marin. John Berger argues that the
absence of perspective and horizon are fundamental to the effectiveness of
Hieronymous Bosch's depiction of Hell: this visual strategy removes continuity
between actions, between past and future and creates a 'spatial delirium' in which
'nothing flows through, everything interrupts'. Hope, he argues, 'is an act of
faith, and has to be sustained by other concrete actions. For example, the action
of approach, of measuring distances and walking towards' (Berger, 1998/99,
pp.1-4), and therefore depends upon perspective.
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