Antiutopianism

Utopia is endangered today! Such a sentence seems redundant: utopia—the shape of the possibility that things could be better—is always in danger. But the present danger is something distinct from the dangers that historically have attended utopia. These have not gone away but, added to them, and largely superseding utopia’s other perils in our twenty-first century, is the disappearance of utopianism from the culture and politics that dominate our collective sense of any future. Politically, this is a conscious and unconscious erasure serving the interests of ecocide and the present mass killings of poverty and declared or undeclared wars. Our axiom is that the unchecked drive for profits will necessarily continue serving such interests, so that we cannot take seriously either presumed new “green” interests as today enforced, or group “identities” unless they challenge that drive.The collection of essays that make up the following “bloc” contains an argument that there is a need, political and historical, to disentangle our understanding of antiutopianism today from the overt “anti-utopianisms” of previous epochs, giving weight if not shape to the Cold War identification of utopia with authoritarianism or uniformity under the fake sign of “totalitarianism.” Where such older predecessors still linger, they have been turned to face the past, as if those past models of tyranny themselves buried not just particular utopias but also the need for utopia. We now have antiutopianism as a thing in itself, antiutopianism without utopia. It deserves to be taken very seriously, without the hyphen.This argument was first put forward by Darko Suvin in the final essays of his most recent collection Disputing the Deluge (Bloomsbury, 2022). The editor of that collection, Hugh C. O’Connell, glossed Suvin’s use of the unhyphenated term “antiutopianism” as follows: “we might think of antiutopianism today as the blurring of the boundaries between a stalwart negation of all utopian thought . . . and the hallucinatory proclamations of the End of History accompanying the triumph of the global capitalist world system.”Following the release of Disputing the Deluge, Suvin took up a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Research in Narrative, History and Memory. He developed the materials for a two-day workshop on antiutopianism in early April 2023. After conversation with Patricia McManus, that workshop was titled “Antiutopia as an Enforced Dominant Horizon of Mass Culture,” and it proposed to investigate the causes and consequences of this dominance for personality and utopianism today. It adopted the TV series Game of Thrones as its concrete exemplum. The first day of the workshop was introduced by Suvin’s presentation on the theory of antiutopia(nism), with a response by Antonis Balasopulos; the second day by McManus’s reading of Game of Thrones with a response by Lazar Atanasković. All of these presentations were rewritten for this volume of Utopian Studies. We were happy with the interest generated, which ran to over seventy registrants from all over the world.Suvin’s contribution, “On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative,” sets the scene for the interventions that follow it. It engages with two aspects of our present in some detail, the self or woebegone “personality” of late or catastrophic capitalism, and the gathering signs of “neofeudalism,” possibly issuing into a Fascism 2.0, as a way of probing the historical horizon of this capitalism.In his response on the first day, “Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation,” Balasopoulos picked up Suvin’s focusing on the “personality” in relation to both utopia and the bourgeois revolutions. That concept is here subjected to an analysis that traces its filiations with both Social Darwinist and Marxist conceptualizations of “survival.”The two essays from the second day of the workshop move from the explorations opened by Suvin and Balasopoulos to focus on analysing HBO’s hit TV series Game of Thrones. Following up a suggestion by Suvin, McManus makes the case for understanding the series as articulating antiutopianism and thriving on so doing. Atanasković, in “On the Antiutopian Effect in Game of Thrones,” examines the series’s use of an aesthetic of “Fantastic history,” and a mode of representation that is “eclectic” as it fragments history in the name of an ambiguous “realism.” He proposes also a hypothesis that the ideal reader of Game of Thrones is the class fraction of white-collar corporate employees.These four contributions are but the beginning of what we hope will be a longer project involving many more scholars of utopian studies. To this end we are thinking of a conference on antiutopianism, to be held in the early Spring of 2024. If it proves feasible, a call for papers will be forthcoming

Mathematics education · Sociology · Computer Science · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · History · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction