Suvin-Utopia or Bust

Utopia or Bust: Capitalocene, Method, Anti-Utopia
Darko Suvin
Utopian Studies, Volume 32, Number 1, 2021, pp. 1-35 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/790682
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Utopia or Bust: Capitalocene, Method, Anti-Utopia
Darko Suvin
abstract
In the introduction to the 2015 reprint of her classical Partial Visions, Angelika Bammer
cites the pithy injunction of the American poet and feminist thinker Adrienne Rich:
“We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own
body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth . . . the visions,
and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence. . . .
Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will
develop new meaning; thinking itself will be transformed.” Based on sustaining, con-
soling, and radically altering the present dire state of human existence, the author
leads to two sets of initial arguments: Where Are We (in general), and What Are We
(in particular) Doing Wrong. What follows are samples of possible answers, perhaps
representative beyond themselves.
keywords: Utopia, dystopia, Anthropocene
As a classical philologist . . . I do not know what meaning classical

philology would have for our age if not to have an untimely effect
doi: 10.5325/utopianstudies.32.1.0001
Utopian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2021
Copyright © 2021. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
UtS 32.1_01_Suvin.indd Page 1 17/04/21 12:36 PM

Utopian Studies 32.1
within philology, that is, to act against the age and so have an effect on
the age to the advantage, it is to be hoped, of a coming age. . . . But
then let this explanation, which I offer with some doubt to be sure, be
replaced by better explanations.
Friedrich Nietzsche,
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Nun muss sich alles, alles ändern.

[Now all, all has to change]
Ludwig Uhland, “Frühlingsglaube”
[“Spring Belief,” also Lied by Schubert]
Part 1: Where Are We in Today’s Capitalocene
Take heed therefore how ye walk circumspectly, not as unwise but as

wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
Paul of Tarsus, Eph. 5:15–16
In the introduction to the 2015 reprint of her classical Partial Visions Angelika
Bammer cites the pithy injunction of the American poet and feminist thinker
Adrienne Rich:
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presid-

ing genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly
create new life, bringing forth . . . the visions, and the thinking
necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence. . . . Sexu-
ality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, commu-
nity, intimacy will develop new meaning; thinking itself will be
transformed.1
Based on sustaining, consoling, and radically altering the present dire state
of human existence, I am led to two sets of initial arguments: Where Are
We (in general), and What Are We (in particular) Doing Wrong. What
follows are samples of possible answers, perhaps representative beyond
themselves.2

darko suvin: Utopia or Bust
Where Are We: The Capitalocene
“What may I hope?” was Kant’s famous third question in the Critique of Pure
Reason, after asking “What can I know?” and “What should I do?”3 Indeed,
what can we know and what may we hope in the capitalocene, this over-
whelming anti-utopian tsunami we are drowning in, hoping to come within
sight of an island, which, as John Donne told us, is “a piece of the continent/
A part of the main/ . . . For I am involved in mankind.”4
Historically, capitalist corporations engaged from the mid-1970s in a
large-scale offensive to depress wages per unit of production and boost
profits. Using the slogans of free trade and globalization, the rich orga-
nized bundles of radical interventions by major states and organizations
of international capitalism (GATT, WTO, IMF, and the World Bank)
to make themselves vastly richer, while multiplying the poor in their
nations, eviscerating the middle-class prosperity based on stable employ-
ment, and upping the income gap between rich and poor countries from
10:1 to 90:1. A large class of chronically poor was created, politically neu-
tralized by creating fear of even poorer immigrants. In this top-down class
warfare, ca. 2.5 billion people, the “global reserve army of unemployed,
vulnerably employed, and economically inactive” struggle today to sur-
vive, failing fast, while more than half of them live in the most abject
poverty, more or less quickly dying of hunger and attendant diseases
(cf. Thomas Pogge); so that the hundred million dead and several hun-
dred million other casualties of warfare in the twentieth century seem
puny in comparison—though their terror and suffering is not. Add to this
hydra-headed marginalization and bureaucratic exclusion, in turn causing
violent individual and collective retaliations, as well as the “slow” struc-
tural violence caused by destruction of environment and the aftermath
of war (cf. Rob Nixon).5 Economic “growth” benefits only the rich, at
the expense of everybody else.6 I shall here insist only on two foci of the
perfectly sinful capitalocene: war and ecocide.
War
The Keynesian Welfare State of blessed memory finally succeeded only
in tandem with “military Keynesianism”: the heavy rearmament that in
the 1930s–40s primed the pump of business upswing and remained the

precondition of a relative affluence. Its price was the Nazi regime, World
War II, and High Stalinism. Imperialism today is healthy and thriving, an
embedded intellectual calling in the United States for global dominance.7
If radically anticapitalist and anti-authoritarian perspectives of exiting from
this predicament are not found, we shall have more ongoing wars in the
south (including northern ghettos) as well as refurbished fascism in the
global north.
As Subcomandante Marcos notes, war plays a structurally essential role
in state monopoly capitalism.8 War is based in the central forces of antago-
nistic competition, the “essential locomotive force” of bourgeois economy
and “generally the mode in which capital secures the victory of its mode of
production”; it is the surest way to realize capitalism’s “grow or die,” also
known as the GOD imperative.9 The political fallout is the spread of military
rule that subordinates the civil society to its barbarity even in times of official
peace—as today.
Since World War II armaments commodities are not only the source
of greatest extra-profit but also a system-pillar of capitalism. The capi-
talist market systematically favors armaments commodities because
of their uniquely high value-added price, their especially rapid rate of
obsolescence and turnover, the monopoly or semi-monopoly position of
their manufacturers, and the large-scale and secure financing of military
research, and production, and of massive cost overruns. This most prof-
itable part of global trade is the strongest factor of both international
violence and the colonization of life-worlds and ecosystems by the com-
modity economy.
American sociologist Eric Olin Wright’s verdict in 2004, when worse was
yet to come, was that capitalist class relations perpetuate eliminable forms
of human suffering as well deficits in human freedom and autonomy, largely
based on domination of work and large inequalities of wealth; capitalism vio-
lated liberal egalitarian principles of social justice.10 Going beyond Wright,
I contend that it is not only indifferent to mass middle-class democracy but
mostly inimical to mass plebeian democracy, where people—a Gramscian
civil society—control the State.
Ecocide
The capitalocene does not work for our ecological balance, sorely upset by
overconsumption of energy; to the contrary, to prevent collapse we need

a steady-state economy, with growth resulting from efficiency.11 It uses

nature as dead matter to make more dead matter, rather than as Spino-
za’s natura naturans, a permanently active ensemble of new potencies and
potentialities.12
A UN Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services was published on May 6, 2019.13 It was
compiled by 145 experts from fifty countries, with input from another 310
researchers and authors, it draws on over 15,000 scientific and governmen-
tal sources, and it incorporates the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge. It
should be taken seriously. It found three-quarters of the terrestrial envi-
ronment has been “severely altered,” more than 40 percent of amphibian
species and 680 vertebrate species have been driven to extinction; in the
oceans, almost one-third of the reef-forming corals and more than one-
third of marine mammals are on the edge of extinction. In sum: one million
animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within
decades.
The report identifies two main and related reasons for this catastrophe:
the “current limited paradigm of economic growth” and “climate change.”
The report’s language is cautiously nonpolitical but the first syntagm means
corporate capitalism, a system premised on private property and profit as the
only reason and horizon for existence. Its reliance upon fossil-fuel emissions
to power its engines is what has ruined the climate and mainly led to global
warming.
Massive changes are needed in the very design of our societies to reduce
global greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: “Market-based action will
not suffice even with a high carbon price.”14 In other words, capitalism cannot
solve the mass extinction of species and climate change, with ocean levels
rising by meters or possibly dozens of meters soon (see K. S. Robinson’s still-
optimistic SF novel New York 2140).15 Quite different ways to manage life on the
planet must be adopted and enforced.
The only possible conclusion is that capitalocene is a structured whole: not
only proudly global, but also instantaneous and capillary. The bind has how-
ever a name: Rosa Luxemburg’s “socialism or barbarism.”16 Alas, now this
choice will be much more painful than when she wrote it, in the horrible but
hopeful year of 1916. Thus we need to insist on an equally totalizing eco-uto-
pian thought, as persuasively addressed by Lisa Garforth in her Green Utopias:
Environmental Hope Before and After Nature.17

What Are We Doing Wrong
To narrow the focus to our professional affairs, yet keeping very much in
mind the above general context that shapes us all, I have three main problems
with what appears a successful tendency in much important utopology of the
last decade or two. I begin with an incident that shocked me and go on with
a plea flowing from an oral Yiddish anecdote.
Of course there is no god’s eye view on any textual (or other) event or
existent; any understanding or evaluation is historically delimited, “right” for
a given social class, nation, epoch, and so on. Nonetheless, if it is difficult to
say what is right, we can from collective experience often say what is wrong.
While I remain persuaded that without formal analysis we are bound to be
wrong, I am now increasingly concerned by any stance that hides its always
already presupposed value-judgments. It seems clear there are no utopian
studies without values: these can only be open or hidden, right or wrong.
My example stems from a large exhibition called “Utopia: The Search for the
Ideal Society in the Western World” at the New York Public Library and the
Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, 2000–2001, for which some of us were asked
to supply a short text online. I did so, too—though I was unhappy at the
NYPL questions, mainly interested in internet as utopia. I have recently been
alerted by several sources, the main written one being Jacoby’s book, to the
fact that the visitors could find in one and the same room photographs, docu-
ments, audiotapes, and other artifacts from the Israeli collective farms (kib-
butzim), from Martin Luther King and the US civil rights movement, and
from Nazi propaganda.18 I checked this also with the relevant pages of the
exhibition catalog, and it was confirmed by an e-mail to me by Professor
Lyman T. Sargent after the SUS conference.19 I gather that the exhibition also
presented photographs from the Auschwitz liquidation camp but I do not
know in which room. No information pointing out that any of these were
included as contrary to utopia or utopianism seems to have been included,
or Jacoby and Sargent would surely have mentioned it. I must therefore rue
even my marginal participation on the fringe of the exhibition. As we ought
to know, the kibbutzim, where a number of my friends lived for a brief time
or permanently, were a sterling example of egalitarian and non-State com-
munism, and were logically stifled by the surge of capitalism and militarism
in Israel. To couple them with Nazism is an example of the deep wrongness
of the totalitarianism concept that I discuss later.

Thus, how is one to understand that room? My question is simple:

Why put Nazism into a Utopia exhibition at all? Why in the name of all
that is holy (including scholarship) put propaganda of the Nazi stance,
which notoriously enabled Nazi practices of mass civilian murder and war
crimes, into an exhibition called “Utopia”? Is a perverse permissiveness in
order that draws no limit to what is Utopia as long as a group believes it is
searching for its “ideal society”? Or is it not rather that, as the Bible told us,
“by their fruits ye shall know them”? First of all, this is hardly a “search,”
but usually a strongly held certainty. Second, can you call utopia the vio-
lent infliction of torture and murder on huge masses of people (possi-
bly even on one single person)? I believe you can NOT: direct or indirect
mass murderings are always anti-utopian. If indeed, as even the great Ernst
Bloch is guilty of sometimes inferring, utopia is equivalent to all dreams of
any heart’s content, then we do not need the term of utopia because we
have imagination or dreams or search, and you and I in the Utopian Studies
are out of business.
To the contrary: we ought to think seriously about polar incompatibilities
of horizon, stance, and value within utopia/nism, updating and sublating the
dated dichotomies of Karl Mannheim into ideology vs. utopia as well as of Ernst
Bloch into abstract vs. concrete utopia, yet retaining their razor edge (quite
compatible with Occam’s). While I cannot do this here, a tentative approxima-
tion to these decisive incompatibilities informs this essay.
Since I was as a child, I was told I was Jewish, though this didn’t mean
much to me—but it meant a lot to Hitler who wanted me dead at age eleven,
and was foiled by my very clever mother and the help of a sterling communist
called Tito—I’ll introduce my focus with the Yiddish anecdote of Rabbi Sean
Fergusson:
A new rabbi arrived to a mid-West USA community. After the first

celebration of shabbes, an excited community member approaches
him: “Rabbi, how wonderfully you led this celebration and how
happy are we that you came to us! But tell me, how come your name
is Sean Fergusson?” The answer: “Well, when my family landed at
Ellis Island, we had to be vetted singly, so my parents told me ‘Now
don’t forget your name is Yitzhak Katzenellenbogen!’ But our wait
was long and hot, and when I came to have my name inscribed, tears
running down my four-year-old face and trying valiantly not to sob,

I said: ‘Schon vergessen (I have already forgotten it)’. And he wrote

down Sean Fergusson.”20
So here is what I am against, lest we forget:
1. The pseudo-professional censorship or Denkverbot against “total”

and “totality”: The Denkverbot is crudely identified with the Cold War
notion of totalitarianism, anyway outdated and abandoned by most
scholarship. We cannot analyze anything unless it’s understood as a
unit/y, a provisionally closed structure for given purposes (see below). In lan-
guage semantics this is what Barthes called a mega-text, which could for
example be all the rhymed distichs in Shakespeare’s plays or, as I tried
out once, the endings of half a dozen famous SF novels as the place
where truth will out.
No doubt, the suffering and degradation of millions, from world
wars and economic “depressions” through Dachau, Kolyma, and Abu
Ghraib to those bombed out today all over West Asia, remain and must
be taken most seriously as our measuring rods. I myself, whose grand-
father and grandmother plus dozens of further relatives were butch-
ered at Auschwitz and Jasenovac, have taken antifascist prevention of
such suffering and bestiality as the ground bass for my life’s work. But
we can for no cause abdicate from the disalienating dialectics of weigh-
ing the pros and cons, for we would degrade both our memories and
ourselves should we replicate the butchers’ horizons. Surely we should
backstage, say, fascist rants against liberty, equality, and the pursuit of
both individual and collective happiness for everybody, but even there
one should be guarded: I would not like to be without some passages
from Pound’s Pisan Cantos or (to return to utopias) from Jünger’s On
Marble Cliffs, and even the violent and genocidal racism of Heinlein’s
Farnham’s Freehold and Starship Troopers must be weighed in the bal-
ance with his brilliant New Deal beginnings. There I would be near to
Orwell who utterly condemned Ezra Pound “as a Fascist, a war crimi-
nal and a most foul anti-Semite and racialist” while still affirming the
merit of his poetry.21
And when we consider the great Leninian season of Russia and
many other places beginning in, say, 1917–28, and ranging from Blok,
Zamyatin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Platonov to Brecht—or should

I mention Miroslav Krleža, Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet, Hugh Mac

Diarmid, and a dozen other great opuses from the United States to
China?—then what Bakhtin called monophonic and I would call
pseudo-liberal mutilation of the contradictorily rich and stunted com-
munist polyphony of those times is quite untenable. As Darren Webb
reminded us: “Anyone reading the utopian writings of Charles Fourier,
William Morris or Ursula Le Guin will agree . . . that ‘the good can
accommodate difference.’”22 Lucien Goldmann, Raymond Williams,
and Fredric Jameson, whom I would claim as informal teachers, cer-
tainly recognized this. Conclusion: it’s better to refute than to ignore, for
this means articulating your own presuppositions.
The Webb quote leads into our particular utopological concerns—
already present in the distinguished Russian and other names above—
pinpointed by Phillip Wegner’s review of Jameson’s Archaeologies of the
Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions: “It is the ‘pas-
sion for totality’ . . . which distinguishes the radically original invention
that occurs in Book Two of More’s text from the more tentative sketches
we find in Book One. . . . And finally, it is the passion for totality that
accounts for the great fear of Utopia expressed in the anti-Utopia.”23 I
shall return at length to the anti-utopia.
2. The split between narratology and ideology: On the one hand, I’ve
written enough about narrative and poetic form to be perhaps for-
given if I say it is by itself never enough to centrally characterize a
piece of writing without taking into account the reader’s normative
presuppositions from the current societal encyclopedia. A famous
example from SF is “They landed in the light of the blue Sun,” which
when filled out by the presupposition that our sun is yellow, means
“They landed in another galaxy.” No amount of formal inquiry can
establish this. I am reminded of a disciple of Leo Spitzer in analysis
of poetry who in my youth found a famous poem’s metrics to repro-
duce heartbeats. While this is in itself a logical fallacy, confusing the
particular heartbeat with the general possibility of rhythmic beating
that could arise out of a dozen other sources, the main problem for me
is: given the how, whose heart beats for whom or what?—which rhythm
analysis can never tell you.
On the other hand, ideology in the wide and nobler sense of stance
toward human existence and its determinants is our daily bread, without

which we would starve; yet if it is simply the critic’s opinion, without

feedback and probably complicated modification from texts and their
contexts, then it is authoritarian propaganda—in which case it is impos-
sible to decide whether its effects are worse when done consciously or
unconsciously.
I arrive at this from my basis in literary-cum-theatre studies and
should face the objection that utopian philosophies and colonies are dif-
ferent animals. I would answer yes and no: of course there are serious
differences, primarily in how you establish your mega-text and whether
it won’t have to deal with semiotic systems other than language, but in
all cases you willy-nilly must have a text to analyze, be it document and
reports about colonies, or even more clearly the rhetoric of utopianism
as a concatenation of concepts or notions. We have sufficiently brilliant
analyses of, say, the form of Darwin’s Origin of the Species to know that
without the highly metaphorical “tangled bank” and “survival of the fit-
test” passages it would not be understandable as the readers have under-
stood it. Conclusion: a plague on the split between formal and ideational
analysis of any such narratives—don’t use one without the other! For then you
do not isolate the text from its o\inly informing context—people, society,
and ongoing life.
3. A denial and foreclosure: The denial is of—or more hypocritically
and insidiously, a domesticating lip-service only to—Great Ancestors in phi-
losophy: To my mind, philosophy asks what are we and how are we to
live. Particularly epistemology asks how do we know what we think we
know?24 Of course in a way the more the merrier, and I really should
but cannot here go back to the greatest of our ancestors: Marx, Diderot,
Rousseau, Aristotle. . . . However, to sideline for example Ernst Bloch,
Fredric Jameson, or Raymond Williams will much help the desertifica-
tion of utopian studies into a wasteland of unargued presupposition plus
empirical data. This also means castrating Thomas More’s great inven-
tion—at the same time as Machiavelli—of conceiving society as a holis-
tic system, not to speak of his applying communism for the first time
to a whole population instead to a ruling elite.25 Conclusion: as several
famous people have said, whoever does not want to learn from history is con-
demned to relive it—and in our days this is the clearly open path to racist
and macho Fascism 2.0.26
10

With this in mind, I shall divide the rest of this article into a brief
general discussion of method I’d find useful for our (and any other) pur-
pose of understanding sign-systems, and a main focus on anti-utopia,
which has lately persuaded me to abandon some cherished beliefs about
utopias and utopianism.
Part 2: Theses on Method for Utopian Studies
While we do not know what` the correct thing would be, we know
exactly . . . what the false thing is.
Adorno in a 1964 conversation with Bloch about utopias27
Premise: Here are some reflections on keystones for a usable epistemology. They
are an amendable initial view and stance. These presuppositions and positions
are divided into general or methodological approaches and approaches to
“science” (here omitted). They re-produce—that is, both repeat and advance
from—some of my writings of the last quarter century, in which all references
can be found.28 The subdivisions are for analytical convenience. They do not
necessarily imply a mapping of terrain but only of stances. Example: any Pos-
sible World must be acceptable for an empirical reader and thus deals also in
Values.
In both presuppositions and positions, a double cognitive movement
is necessary: destruction (deconstruction) of old ways of thinking, focusing
on useless interpretation of key terms; construction of dialectically flexible,
usable meanings of such terms, having a constant denotative core yet pul-
sating—expanding and shrinking—periphery of connotations. The rhythm
and direction of the pulsations are historically contingent and situational,
subject to phronesis (Fingerspitzengefühl, practical wisdom) rather than
theoria.
Our tools are no doubt notional, they are regulative ideas. However, in all
richer cases they repose on a metaphor (in the widest sense of a trope). They
are all initially located in the imagination, but imagination becomes reality
when it enters the belief of masses, to paraphrase Marx.
An axiom: the survival of Homo sapiens sapiens has precedence over the
profit principle.
11

Thesis 1: Dialectical Totalities
Old totality was stable; it could accommodate slight or, at any rate, nonstructural
changes in the fashion of Lampedusa’s slogan in Gattopardo: “everything changes
[in politics] in order to remain the same [in economics].”29 Such totality was
then perverted by Gentile and Mussolini into the ideology of “totalitarianism,”
meaning total organization of society by the State from above, fusing the
politics and economics; Stalinism largely came to follow a kindred, equally
bloody if more productive, idea. Both were centrally aspiring to a kind of divine
perfection, perhaps relevant to times before the Industrial Revolution and its
huge changes within one lifetime, beginning with the Napoleonic Wars (not to
speak about the following revolutions in technology and cognition). Shocked by
all these politics, Arendt and the liberal doxa of post-modernism not only rightly
refused them but also threw the baby out with the bathwater, logically ending
in “weak thought.”
It is much more economical to wash the baby, that is, to retain the con-
cept of strategic, flexible, and imperfect totalities as the only possible objects
of cognitive acts.30 “Strategic” means shaped by deep and cognitively argued
situational necessities; “flexible” means changeable in extension and inten-
sion; “imperfect” means not only unfinished but in principle unfinishable
dualities and multiplicities. No image or notion is graspable except as such a
(provisional) totality.
Total does not mean all-exhaustive, or that everything is to be planned
from above and violently enforced. Many major utopian writings are
open-ended totalities. Any totality has inbuilt contradictions that make for
changes, glacially slow or explosively sudden. The art or phronesis of plan-
ning, of being ready for the unforeseeable future, is to find the dominant
contradiction.31
Thesis 2: Possible Worlds
A Possible World is a provisional notional totality with a defined spacetime or

chronotope entailing existents and agents as well as relationships between all
of these—all else is open. Rather than pertaining to logic à la Kripke, or the
rigid semiotics following logics, a useful Possible World is epistemological:
modeled on our historical world (that is, on dominant conceptions thereof or
12

on its imaginary encyclopedia) yet significantly different from it. The possible
cognitive increment lies in the difference and its applicability, direct or very
indirect, to our common world.
All art and all planning deals implicitly with Possible Worlds. This is fore-
grounded for example in science fiction or five-year plans. It is the raison d’être
for utopias of all kinds.
A Possible World must explain to the reader any significant deviation
from his/her/our current encyclopedia as coherent; it is believable and
esthetically successful in precise relation to how clearly and fully it manages
this explanation. However, it contains in principle no guarantees of success—
or failure—for the agents and actions in it: you commit yourself and then see,
said Napoleon (on s’engage et puis on voit). Some variants may have inbuilt feli-
cific rules (for example fairytales or Sun-hero myths à la St. George, or official
optimism about a plan); some may have inbuilt horrorific rules (for example,
horror fantasy after Poe and Lovecraft, much Kaf ka, apocalyptic pessimism,
Orwell’s 1984), but these are protocols superadded to its fundamental neutral-
ity. These protocols are therefore special cases, very limited in epistemic rele-
vance and spacetime applicability. The wholly rosy and wholly bleak horizons
can still be used as suggestive hyperbolae, first, for extreme situations (when
they may be extremely relevant), and second, for propaedeutic exaggeration
in various other limited situations.
Thesis 3: Value as Polar Star and Ground
3.1. Homo sapiens knows s/he will die, and asks: What is it all for? The answer is
digital—either nihil or reliance on some value. Being a value-bound creature
defines homo’s exit from the purely animal world of infinite contingency and
instinctual reaction.
Our personal and collective lives are little barks, or at best sailboats, buoyed
by the ocean of values, with conflicting cold and warm currents traversing it
and us (most fish are to be found at their meeting points). Even if they were
transoceanic liners or super-aircraft carriers, a tsunami groundswell is stronger.
Remember the Titanic, the USSR, and Lehman Brothers! The Roman republic
seems to have wisely decreed any triumphator should be accompanied by an
official whispering to him “Memento mori! (Remember thou shalt die!).”
Since we must use the long wave-roll of values, let’s pick one main one
wisely. Surf it.
13

3.2. “If God and Communism are dead, anything is permitted” (extrapolation
from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky for today). Yet people either live with values
of freedom and friendliness (solidarity), or with values of violent domina-
tion and exploitation. These may be more conscious in intellectuals, who
articulate them in language or other sign systems, but operate and act just
as strongly in everybody else. In that sense, as Gramsci and Brecht argued,
everybody is an (at least latent) intellectual.
Positive value is co-extensive with productivity or creativity in the widest
sense, encompassing almost all human action. A mother cares for the child
because she values it, and herself for it. A worker cares for the work insofar as
it and he are not alienated. A learner (such as most of us are through most of
our lives) cares for her learning because it multiplies his strengths and delights.
A lover cares for his beloved because the love enriches both their beings.
Given that human nature and sense abhor vacuum of value, there are
after the Industrial Revolution, and with increasing insistence, two possi-
ble clusters of nonperverted value: traditional and new, known or not yet
existing (Bloch). Creativity may be rule-governed or rule-changing; often,
both interpenetrate in different proportions.32 In good times rule-governed
values are to be preferred, in bad times—such as ours—the rule-changing
values are.
3.3. My axiom and presupposition is that value gets formed and expands
where there are more chances for and experiments with comprehensive
self-determination—in exact inversion of Nietzsche’s proposition that value
increases where there are “more favourable preconditions for more com-
prehensive forms of domination.”33 The locus of self-determination is in
each individual personality, but its actualization and forms are only possible
through collective actions of production, circulation, and/or use. A believ-
able collective project always lurks in the background, shaping the horizons
of one’s individual life (or we are in anomie and pathology). This constella-
tion results in nonviolent meanings, meaningfulness.
Domination or lording it means enjoying the loss of self-determination
in others. This inevitably perverts one’s own self-determination. In today’s
inverted world most people in power follow this Satanic practice in relation
to other people and our natural environment. This is why we have to find and
favor the exact contrary.
14

Thesis 4: Locus, Horizon, and Orientation
Locus is the place of the agent who is moving.

Horizon is the furthest imaginatively visible goal-line toward which that
agent is moving.
Orientation is a vector that conjoins locus and horizon, the direction of
the agent’s glance and movement.
Locus or situation is where a personal or collective body is pragmatically or

contingently at; it is a given that must be understood as to its potentialities
and cannot be argued away. It can, however, be subject to orientated projec-
tion and change.
It is characteristic of horizon that it moves with the location of the
moving agent (as argued by Giordano Bruno); it can therefore never be
attained.34 Obversely, it is characteristic of orientation that it can through
all the changes of locus remain a constant vector of desire and cognition.
A utopia is a text that is itself emblematic for its intended signification of
permanent movement through various loci in a fixed direction that is also a
movable, expanding horizon.
In the ideal case of a dynamic utopia, locus constantly tends toward
and yet never fuses with the horizon (as, for example, the end of Brecht’s
Caucasian Chalk Circle).35 After the Industrial Revolution, static utopias turn
quickly reactionary and into an impediment to disalienation. For the readers
of those times, Plato’s Republic, Campanella’s City of the Sun, and similar uto-
pias stressing order over freedom are, retroactively, also such.36
These are spatial metaphors. Caution and flexibility are much needed for
their temporal use, with periodical reappraisals — corroborative or agoniz-
ing, as the case may require.
Part 3. What Existential Anti-Utopia Means for Us
God has chosen things which are not (tà mè ónta) to abolish those
which are.
Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 1:28
15

What these Utopian oppositions allow us to do is by way of negation,

to grasp the moment of truth of each term. Put the other way around,
the value of each term is differential, it lies not in its own substantive
content but as an ideological critique of its opposite number.
Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia”37
On Theory of Utopia and the Event of a Mega-Novum: The What
History: Advent of Alternative Totality

I agree with Ruth Levitas: “Utopia is born out of a conviction and two
questions. The conviction is ‘it doesn’t have to be like this.’ The questions
are ‘how then should we live?’ and ‘how can that be?’”38
It is of utmost significance that in the Renaissance utopianism under-
went a sea change or metamorphosis from Platonic philosophical argument
and blueprint, and then Augustinian theological devaluation of mundane
existence, to a narrative genre. Within the belly of the new, increasingly total-
izing and dynamic Leviathan, bourgeois democratic and, if you wish, capital-
ist storytelling—that is, the imagination of alternative actions by agents in an
alternative Possible World—developed a key novum with two aspects:
The first aspect was the freedom inherent in relatively wide—eventually
mass—reading, from the very beginning structured as a more-or-less free-mar-
ket competition for the readers’ attention and choice. This was accompanied
by a rise of published utopian items in a generally faster society. On the down-
side this was always for books countered by illiteracy, misery, and repression of
publishing and circulation, down to Nazi book burning, Stalinist censorship,
and post-1989 book destructions (the State-ordered mass book destruction in
Croatia happens to be documented in Lešaja, but it is surely not isolated); and
for mass media it is countered by high costs, oligopoly, and severe top-down
controls in TV and movies.
The second aspect was a flexible use of narrative as cognitive means to
convey a “thicker” overview of life and its experiences with, against, and in
lieu of Leviathan. Such narrative amalgamated notionality and sensual evi-
dence centered on deputized protagonists moving and learning in realistic
spacetime. From More on, all utopianism reposes on two central, cognate,
and imbricated imaginative activities and formal procedures: map-making and
nomination or naming. Utopianism is a space-creating machine, inconceiv-
able before the space-eating inventions of economic enclosure of lands and
16

transoceanic ships, and in some ways a desperate attempt to use these huge
weapons of domination for freedom (as can be clearly seen in some first stir-
rings of air-travel notions). Consubstantially, space becomes a sense-making
machine by means of nomination, turning imperial conquest and coloniza-
tion into a possibility of humanizing power relationships. There might be
additional general procedures or devices, such as a deviant listing or catego-
rizing of main human relationships under power, but I think these too func-
tion by way of the first two.39
For example, Morris’s taking over in News from Nowhere the names and
map first of London city and then of the Thames valley serves his purpose of
palingenesis, the rebirth of human simplicity and esthetic joy in classless soci-
ety, but it also marks his proximity to Earthly Paradise rather than to utopia
proper which needs a strategically believable politico-economical overview.40
Thus utopian texts—and following them, all utopianism including
attempts at philosophy and colonies—were born as political animals wedded
to a possibility of freedom, to be negotiated between the individuals and vari-
ous power currents in the collectivity. At times, “utopia is a matter of inner-
most urgency, something we are pushed into as a matter of survival, when it
is no longer possible to go on within the parameters of the ‘possible.’”41 True,
there were authoritarian utopias galore, most significantly the early ones by
Bacon and Campanella, and even More oscillated between democracy and
patriarchy, but these were particular choices within an epistemologically
open horizon: if America exists, all is possible!—all kinds of freedom and
even a new elite authoritarianism. I have been insisting now for almost half a
century that “though formally closed, significant utopia is thematically open:
its pointings reflect back on the reader’s ‘topia’” and I cited Barthes to the
effect that the utopian écriture must mobilize at the same time an image and
its contrary.42
It is also to my mind incontrovertible that all such Possible Counter-
Worlds are modeled upon our everyday Possible World as a totality, a how-
ever provisional and experimental world: despite modest early avatars as an
island or colony, the space and its meaning is always an exemplary and radical
counterproject aiming at a different way of human existing. Near the begin-
ning of the best modern survey, Jameson’s Archaeologies, he writes that “total-
ity is then precisely this combination of closure and system . . . that presides
over the forms of Utopian realisation: the Utopian city, the Utopian revolu-
tion, the Utopian commune or village, and of course the Utopian text itself.”43
17

By means of the “passion for totality” the utopian impulse blossoms into the
utopian alternative project, sprung forth full-blown from the pen of Thomas
More, as Athena from the brain of Zeus.44 The paradigm can be grasped,
Jameson argues, in the qualitative jump from the preliminary sketches of
strange countries in Book One of Utopia to the radically original, totalizing
invention of Book Two: “The [countries in Book One are] . . . imagined as
enclaves within our existent world; whereas, despite the positioning and the
supplementary explanations, Utopia is somehow felt to replace our world
altogether.”45
Amid our age of “weak thought,” let me disambiguate: here total does
not mean all-exhaustive (though it is a temptation some utopographers suc-
cumb to, witness Campanella—as well as some pernicious bureaucratic med-
dlers in many capitalist or pseudo-socialist agencies); nor does it mean that
everything is planned from above and violently enforced, as in Mussolini’s
favorite adjective of “totalitarian.” Rather it entails a radically different
Possible World—that is, a notional totality that for the cognitive purposes of
feedback resembles our encyclopedic idea of our world. No image or notion
is graspable except as a (provisional) totality. Yet finally, many major utopian
writings are in curious and ingenious ways open-ended totalities, from More’s
final sentence and Bacon’s unfinished fragment to, say, the multiplicities of
choice in K. S. Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and I have been worrying at open-end-
edness since reading Bloch, who tied his “concrete utopia” to an open system,
for example in my essay “Brecht vs. Ibsen: Breaking Open the Individualist or
Closed Dramaturgy.”46
Modern Times: The Politics of Generic Forms

On top of these two aspects, the strategic factor for grasping the readability
of modern utopias is their division into subgenres, beginning with the mega-
split between eutopia and dystopia. This came about under the existential pres-
sure of the division in and after the three main bourgeois revolutions—in
England, America, and France—between the eutopian citoyen face and the
dystopian bourgeois face of the new rulers. It was recognized by a group of
scholars within a theory of literary genres, astraddle between humanities and
sociology, only after the additional shocks of the Russian Revolution and fas-
cism were being digested amid the youth or New Left revolt of the 1960s–70s,
most notably by Lyman T. Sargent, Fredric Jameson, and Tom Moylan; it is
by now an accepted presupposition.47 The good meaning of eutopianism is a
18

presentation, orientation, and striving toward the horizon of radically better

forms of relationships among people, an affirmation and annunciation. The
bad meaning of dystopianism is a presentation of radically worse forms of
relationships among people, a negation and denunciation. I defined eutopia
as the construction of a particular community where sociopolitical institu-
tions, norms, and relationships between people are organized according to
a more perfect principle than in the author’s community, and symmetrically,
for dystopia “more perfect” is to be changed into “less perfect.” In both cases,
what is radically better or worse is judged from the point of view and within
the value-system of a suffering and discontented social group or fraction, as
refracted through the writer (if you are content, you enjoy or rhapsodize).48
This duo of eutopia plus dystopia, which was up to the last decades the factu-
ally and axiologically main body of utopian writings and horizons, is on the
whole Jeffersonian: an affirmation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-
ness—but as we all know, it had small but sometimes significant wings to the
right and left of such bourgeois democracy.
The dystopian Possible Worlds show and show up the horrors of human
relationships becoming more repressive, exploitative, and alienating; in
Hegelian language, dystopia as an ideal type is a denunciation and negation
of negating eutopian orientation and strivings. If we follow Sargent, as I do,
then anti-utopia as an ideal type is precisely the opposite: a denunciation and
negation of affirming eutopian orientation and strivings. It is of two kinds, rosy
and black, both of which share a switch from politics or history to ontology
or “nature.” I shall develop this at length below.
No doubt, dystopia, so powerful from Zamyatin, Čapek, Pohl-Kornbluth,
and early Heinlein to Piercy or K. S. Robinson and still alive, needs more dis-
cussion. I have a feeling Jameson is on the right track when he pleads for a
subgenre of apocalyptic fiction: however uncouth and internally contradic-
tory, its huge popularity in fiction and all media demands to be taken seri-
ously.49 However, what I am now concerned with is to disentangle the generic
model of dystopia from that of anti-utopia: for while dystopia is an unruly
or boomerang-flight brother of eutopia, anti-utopia is the enemy or family
wrecker.50 What is literary anti-utopia? As above, it is a significantly differ-
ent locus explicitly designed to refute a currently proposed eutopia. It is a
polemic nightmare that proposes to reveal how an eutopia pretended to a
more perfect organization than any thinkable alternative, while our narrative
“camera eye” and value-monger finds out it is significantly less perfect. It was
19

written to warn against utopias, not (as dystopias do) against the existing sta-
tus quo, and perhaps culminated, if that’s the word, in Ayn Rand’s Anthem.51
As Tom Moylan discussed at length in Scraps of the Untainted Sky, dystopia’s
mobilizing pessimism entails that the reader should do something about it
while now anti-utopia’s demobilizing pessimism entails that nothing could or
should be done.52
The pedigree of anti-utopianism has been little explored, but my
hypothesis would be that, except for possible precursors like Aristophanes’s
Women in Parliament, it began in ideological horror at the French and simi-
lar revolutions, in England by Burke and the conservative romantics.53 Such
reactions in part rightly sensed the dangers of State-worship among both
capitalists and communists, but then used it to oppose the horizon of human
disalienation and radical democracy in the nineteenth century; this became
neuralgic especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution and its direct or indirect
fallout, within which utopianism was often wedded to communism or social-
ism: the Welfare State.
In terms of literary history and narration, anti-utopia was mainly
confined to two reactionary clusters, the anti-Bellamy one in the 1890s
and the anti-Leninist one in the 1920s–30s, reprised from the 1950s on.
As a rule, it was poor. The writer and style were less important; absent
were all the usual qualities by which, first, not only the great ancestors,
from More to Percy Shelley, but also Wells or Zamyatin or Lem or Le
Guin or the Strugatsky Brothers were great writers tout court. But second,
those qualities also characterized a thick supporting substratum of what
I’d call a “2a class” of considerable writers supplying stimulating ideas,
alternatives, and plots—from Jack London, A. T. Wright, Olaf Stapledon,
Stanley Weinbaum, Aldous Huxley, the US 1940s–50s “new maps of hell,”
and Orwell to (say) Brunner, Russ, Mitchison, Callenbach, Piercy, Dick,
Atwood, Macleod, and a dozen other SF writers. Anti-utopia gets its force
outside fiction, from obsessive repetition of its ideological points in all
aligned media and think-tanks and from the whip of obscurity and hunger
(where not drone liquidation) for dissenters. However, I am concerned
with its existential embodiment rather than its narrative form here.
The Event of Existential Anti-Utopia

Politically and ideologically, anti-utopianism is an embattled adoption of the
point of view and value-system of globally ruling capitalism and the class—or
20

classes—bearing it. Anti-utopia is a targeted and openly ideologico-political use of a

closed horizon not simply to refute or ridicule, but to render unthinkable both the euto-
pia of a better possible world and the dystopia as awful warning about the writer’s
and readers’ present tendencies, thus to stifle the right to dissent and to strive for
radical novelty, to dismantle any possibility of plebeian democracy. It is always
“a political reply to the political project of realizing utopia.”54 The intertext
of anti-utopia has historically been antisocialism and anticommunism, as
this was the strongest “currently proposed” eutopia after ca. 1915–75. It is no
longer, as heretofore, consubstantial with radical criticism of the intended
reader’s present but celebratory of it, so that criticism is only perfective and
marginal—though often touted as “revolutionary”—amounting to: how can
we or I profit more?
My central socioformalist and historical thesis is that a world-historical
novum or Badiouan mega-event hit humanity after the end of the Cold War,
like the Yucatan comet that extinguished the age of dinosaurs: in a ruse of
history, the ideologico-political development of capitalism (that had all along
produced fake novums galore) morphed into an encompassing monster—
the existential anti-utopia. This is in our scholarship a scandal, in the original
biblical sense of a stumbling stone to be disbelieved into, for any theory of
utopia/nism worth its oats after ca. 1968 made it crystal clear that utopia is an
epistemological and not ontological beast.55 The argument that an approxi-
mation to eutopia (or even dystopia) may be found or constructed in reality,
as in blueprints or colonies, disregarded why they all necessarily fail—as Marx
told Cabet when the latter was founding his US colony. We all concluded
utopia cannot be either realized or not realized; it can be only imagined as a
contrast and/or yardstick, a Fata Morgana in the desert of the oppressively
real, a memento for the downtrodden or a stick for beating one’s ideological
opponents. But history is slyer than any theory yet invented by poor human
singletons, and in our stress on values we should have remembered that axiol-
ogy also entails finality (telos), so it spills over from epistemology to ontology.
We were right to oppose Stalinist and right-wing simplifications by insisting
that meaning is conveyed only through forms, yet I have to acknowledge we
were finally wrong that utopia/nism cannot have a political embodiment. A
powerful approximation to anti-utopia, armed to the teeth, can and is being
globally realized by present-day capitalism, its banks, States, and ideologies.
This unprecedented emergency, whereby we are living in and being existen-
tially shaped by this most corrupt or “perfectly sinful” form of utopia/nism,
must be considered and articulated.56
21

Given the very small role and poor quality of anti-utopia in literature,
I earlier thought it was a weird variety of the “black” utopia, but this turns
out to be wrong. All of us now live within a leaden existential global clo-
sure where we are threatened by anti-utopia as Destiny of subjection within
a long-duration collapse of capitalist structures of accumulation—Lehman
Brothers, Trump, or Brexit, anyone? This introduces a radical reversal, or
more precisely eversion, from a situation in which interested readers looked
from outside at utopia/nism as a choice of freedom, an exhilarating Possible
World, to a situation whereby all of us are willy-nilly inside anti-utopia in
our empirical, more and more decaying Zero World. This anti-utopian world
functions rather like the mathematized models in capitalist financial specula-
tion designed to make the modeled state of affairs more like the model. In
it, imaginative understanding is being pre-empted by myopic and malevolent
doing, while our choices are diverted from root—that is, radical—problems
to fickle fashion. We are being forcefully and often forcibly lived by anti-uto-
pia, a growing restriction of possibilities to work for life-enhancing change.
This is physically obvious when entire parts of the world are being thrust into
destruction by capitalist and/or its complementary nationalist armies, and
even for the richer enclaves (just so nobody should be spared) in the capitalo-
cene climate change. This changes all—including utopia/nism, its theory and
practice. And our analytic tools have to be adjusted to this victory of ideol-
ogy over utopia. One guideline: this cannot be done unless accompanied by
thorough and explicit analysis speaking against the central features of anti-
utopia—that is, today’s capitalism sliding into more or less fascism: sexism,
racism, terror, ecocide, and perpetual mega-warfare. To use critical dystopias
and eutopias in order to roll back anti-utopia is a matter of life and death for
most of us, possibly for humanity as a whole.
On Anti-Utopia as Ptolemeian Counterrevolution: The How and the

Why
So what happens when, in a most radically bad novum, all of us find ourselves
thrust inside anti-utopia, a kind of demented Tron or Matrix movie we can-
not get out of, increasingly more bitter if not impossible to live in? If we are
to think about getting out, what are the events behind the events (Brecht) or
some approximation to deep causes? Whence the rise of anti-utopia as closed
horizon to politico-existential dominance or hegemony, beginning with the
breakthrough of Thatcher and Reagan and fully affirmed by the 1990s?
22

As suggested above, there is a central existential difference between a

life-world one is necessarily inside of and a secondary creation one is as a rule out-
side of. In any really existing situation people willy-nilly live, work, die, and
(often) get children: their body and psychophysical interest is fully engaged
in their location. To the contrary, a piece of utopian fiction, a Fourierist
blueprint or even a Disney World does not fully enclose a person: one may
visit it, but not live in it, one may dwell on but not in it, one is never com-
pletely inside. Utopian colonies attempting to span this abyss regularly
cracked up. The Book of Nature is not really a book, in whatever hiero-
glyphs it may be written; the Theater of the World (or of Society) is not
really a theater, whatever plays or games may on it come and go, for we
are not an audience but on the stage. The relationships and traffic between
virtual and actual reality, between the Life World and secondary virtual
creations or Possible Worlds, are multiple and complex since all of them
partake of human imagination in differing ways, but most of the time the
entities themselves remain distinct; as Freud noted: “nobody can be killed
in absentia or in effigie.”57 Traffic piles up unless it proceeds between two
distinct places.
Centrally, marketed fiction’s contract with the reader is “not just egalitar-
ian . . . [but constitutive of] the story-teller’s art itself. The moral of the very
act of fabulation was the equality of the intelligence.”58 I would further argue
that every significant work of art is a kind of (nonnotional) truth that opens
up both its own possibility and “the formal possibility of other possibilities,
ones as yet u suspected by us.”59 Both egalitarianism and possibility are the-
matized and foregrounded in utopia/nism’s overt appeal to critical reason.
Anti-utopia pre-empts and enforces denial of these contracts.
However, there are two ideological variants of anti-utopianism, both
violent. The cheery one is peddled by think-tanks and governments supported
by billionaires and most of their world media; it is as a rule gung-ho, pretend-
ing we live in Social-Darwinist eutopia. It says, “We live in the best of all
possible worlds, you just gotta be competitive!” However, among intellectu-
als that usually hate eutopia and dystopia, one often finds the gloomy one; it
says, “Life is hell and nothing can be done, we live in the best of all possible
bad worlds.”60 The black horizon can often pose as opposition to the idiot
smile of the first one, but they are Siamese twins inasmuch as both propagate
acquiescence in what obtains. In practice a number of “black” texts meld crit-
ical dystopia and various kinds of unsurmountable anti-utopia, to my mind
at the expense of their quality, most prominently Orwell’s 1984.
23

In grim Post-Fordism, where compromise with the ruled by means of

co-opted consumerism is no longer very necessary, the welfare measures—
developing public health, education, housing, and other services for the
people as well as controlling savage capitalism—are replaced by measures to
monitor, penalize, and sequester the poor.61 The Ayn Rand supermen oper-
ate by means of either direct physical killing or total precarization with a
permanent threat of hunger and destitution. The totalized control as well as
the intensification and celebration of being commodified are extended over
the whole globe, a new Borgesian map identical to the territory. As in the
“American Dream“ picket-fence appearance of The Truman Show movie and
in similar fakely ideal sets in a number of SF stories by Philip K. Dick, anti-
utopia can only be maintained if the inhabitants are persuaded it is the only
reality. The utopia of personal-cum-collective freedom, as ideal or protest, is
simply made unintelligible. As Debord told us, “Modern economic produc-
tion extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively”; there is no different
present or future, time duration has for almost all of us shrunk to the next
financial deadline for survival.62
Most briefly, this is my hypothesis: Capitalism has by now grown fully
parasitic—profit is no longer accompanied by rising accumulation or produc-
tivity, it comes increasingly from political manipulation of “rents” rather than
from production (except in China). The system survives only by continuously
increased extortion of surplus labor from the 95 percent of lower classes and
nations to the rulers. It is by far the biggest manmade threat to liberty, cogniz-
ing, and creativity invented by our species. Or simply to survival.
The existential anti-utopia was historically brought about as a global
ruling-class counter-project to the post-1917 Welfare-and-Warfare State, which
first lost its welfare wing and was as of the 1970s rapidly devolved to Warfare-
and-Bamboozlery State. Warfare was exported outside the State system of
the metropolitan (capitalist, patriarchal) North, represented at the end of the
twentieth century by the “trilateral” group of North America, West-Central
Europe and Japan plus a smattering of their outcrops—the “little tigers” of
East Asia, the “White dominions” of ex-British Empire. And warfare grew
into a new norm in strict parallel to the dismantling of the (sometimes spotty
or unwieldy) solidarity and justice that had brought about and sustained the
Welfare State in its Leninist as well as—reactively—in its Keynesian wing; thus
violence as war abroad also meant increasing violence as repression within,
needed to quell the rising despair over, and possibly protests against, the sabo-
tage of public health, education, housing, and all other services for people and
24

controls over savage capitalism without a human face, spearheaded by the

rising exploitation of immigrant workers without civic rights.
Beside warfare, the new supertechnological capitalism is centrally
developing through a depth attack on life. The pulsating heart of capitalism
was always the unequal exchange of life (people’s time and labor-power) for
money, well compressed by Ben Franklin 250 years ago as “Time Is Money.”
Now private property, having exhausted things, annexes also relationships—
prominently including vital relations between things, to which people are
reduced (reified) as equally strip-mined “human resources.” A strategic link
is private property on the knowledge that exploded with the right to patent
living matter for profit, from genes to species, as decided by the US Supreme
Court in 1980; it is estimated there are by now more than 100,000 such pat-
ents. The true owners of life today are, besides the armed forces, the phar-
maceutic companies, agrochemical monsters, and information profiteers, all
connected through international mega-banks.
In sum, the specter haunting us today is the Police State or indeed a reborn
Fascism 2.0, where bamboozling is replaced by outright Social-Darwinist
cynicism—the Warfare-and-Repression State. As a rule these repressions
returned from US-organized dictatorships around the world to roost in the
native soil, first hypocritically and then openly as of the second Bush admin-
istration’s “war on terror”; the old imperialist nostalgias of France and the
United Kingdom, and then the rising State capitalist power of China and the
somewhat reconstituted Russia follow the same oppressive pattern, while
providing some opportunities to maneuvering for smaller States and groups.
Each listener can fill in the list of moral and political reasons for our indigna-
tion at such a huge impoverishment and militarization of our lives.
This poses an epistemological problem. Since I do not believe in Original
Sin, and especially not that the Devil rules on Earth, I have to—all of us have
to—explain this slide from epistemology to ontology, from a thirst for under-
standing to a fetishism of the oppressively existing. At stake is after all what
Ernst Bloch called “the principle of hope.”
Anti-Utopia as Constituted Absence: The Deeper Why
As to our theory of utopia/nism, we could salvage it by assuming eutopia is in

anti-utopia latently present as a constituted absence: the sinister hollow is defined
by a possible threatening plenitude—as in the constitutive relation between
death and life.63 This is an all-pervasive absence, it determines all defining
25

traits of anti-utopia: not only the usual fake novums foreclosing radical
ones, but also quantity instead of quality, closure instead of openness, fake
ontology instead of modest epistemology, point-like inescapability instead
of fertile traffic between past present and future, monologism instead of
contradictoriness, impotent horror instead of intervening hope and indigna-
tion, cynicism instead of belief, vertical leadership and horizontal identities
instead of polymorphic diversity enforced by recall democracy—Mussolini,
Carl Schmitt, and von Mises as Great Ancestors instead of Rousseau, J. S.
Mill, and Marx. Such traits culminate in the subsumptive unholy trinity of
anti-utopia—hatred of plebeian creativity and roaming intelligence (Denkverbot),
the State as repressive violence instead as public power, and annihilating warfare
instead of creative emulation. These traits amount to an anti-utopian “mytho-
logical machine” ( Jesi), blending degraded numinosity, power, and commod-
ity esthetics. It does not aim for truth—indeed truth is repressed and left in
obscurity, somewhere far behind—but for performativity, a fascistoid effect
on corruptible masses. In relation to the light of a disalienated humanity, it is,
to cite Milton, “No light, but rather darkness visible.”64 Sociologically, it is an
imperious reality concretized as capitalist mass media shaping mass opinion
and militarized violence enforcing it. It entails a thoroughgoing abolition of
free choice, on which any worthwhile culture, and within it the system of
literature and its genres, reposes—quite analogous to the lack of meaningful
choice in elections for the US presidency or the Council of Europe or the
Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, or in the fate of bombed-out
millions. Its ultimate horizon is not freedom but a police State, kept up by
what cannot be thought of.
As Foucault never tired to argue, despite some central waffling on
neo-liberalism, governing in his time comports “a formidable extension of
the control and coercion procedures . . . [of] the major disciplinary tech-
niques that take in and take care of (reprendre en charge) the individuals’
everyday behaviour up to the smallest detail.”65 The pretense at inclusion
of people into power and meaning is in fact a most frustrating exclusion,
where the body or “naked life” is the final and often only “capital” left.
The brunt of denial is aimed at the category of revolution and any claim
to fertile universality or open-ended totalization.66
A surface example: Rancière notes that “the pseudo-European
Constitution testifies to [hatred of democracy and egalitarianism] a contrario”;
the absence of “the irreducible ‘power of the people’” is then constituted
26

as ultra-elitist “expert management of monetary and population flows.”67 In

sum, democracy as freedom for individuals how to choose meaningful lives
and pursue happiness is evacuated.
A middle-range glocal example: the global neoliberalist market imposes
its “intelligibility grid” on all non-economical human affairs, so that whatever
cannot be used as “human capital” and subjected to “cost-benefit” and “sup-
ply-demand” criteria becomes simply nonintelligible—irrational and indeed
inhuman—and is ruled out of court by power.68 Its perfect local complement
are the carefully manipulated mini-nationalisms of globalization that mean,
most clearly in Africa and Eastern Europe, “linguistic unhoming, the deacces-
sion of archives [including their physical destruction], the eradication of his-
torical memory, internal colonization”—a creeping version of Newspeak.69
A central depth example: the frantic interlocking planning, usually for
a year if not less, of all capitalist bureaucracies—financial, political, military,
corporative—with the goal of maximum profit is the absenting of a plebe-
ian, workers’ control system of flexible planning extending to long-duration
coordination, where human welfare overrides profit. To generalize: the ideal-
type eutopia does not know the categories of profit or servitude, dystopia
shows them as crazy and inhuman, anti-utopia argues how to get more profit
through servitude. Its mantra is There Is No Alternative; its biggest fear is
freedom—while hypocritically invoking it in a castrated version: “like unto
white[washe]d sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are
within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”70 In sum, Marx’s
“profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation,” once
nakedly visible only in colonies, has now been globalized.71 Where he identi-
fied the reduction of the working day as the prerequisite for the realm of
freedom, anti-utopia is a whirling turbine of unceasingly frenzied activi-
ties on pain of instant failure: no wonder the German term for our age is
“Turbokapitalismus” (turbocapitalism).
Finally, what about affects? I see around me in late capitalocene two
opposed main ones: the officially required manic cheer on the road to suc-
cess is always threatened by the much vaster reservoir of naked reactive fear,
which when shunted off by the hegemony into the grey matter of subaltern
brains becomes fear for naked survival. At the genetic and structural core of
anti-utopia, in my feeling, lies the rulers’ fear of radical change that would
mean plebeian self-empowerment (that is, revolution in and around produc-
tion). Wegner noted that it is the passion for totality that accounts for the
27

great fear of utopia that engendered the anti-utopia.72 Only the panic fear,
rage, and loathing at the supposed Leninism—communism come to power—
can explain the last forty-odd years of finally triumphant capitalism. Its alle-
gorical emblem is the “terminator gene” introduced by mega-corporations
into seeds to ensure they cannot be renewed, thus constituting the absence
of thousands of years of human crop cultivation, of the utopian horizon of
“bread for all.”73 Fear, as Bloch repeatedly explained, was the negative affect
we share with animals, to which hope, only present in humans, is opposed;
furthermore, hope “allows for logical and concrete correction and sharpen-
ing,” it is an “act of cognitive orientation (Richtungsakt).”74
Today we are blithely returning to the mere animality in us. Centrally,
the whole emancipatory panoply of capitalism’s radical bourgeois begin-
nings—from humanist culture and Enlightenment through revolutions and
Romanticism—is being ruthlessly and systematically scrapped, up to the
shark-like liquidation of traces of welfare for (the) people. As Marx piercingly
observed: when events force upon the bourgeoisie a democratic constitution,
this helps the proletariat “and threatens the very foundations of bourgeois
society.”75 To give one weighty example: the abolition of torture, the favorite
feudal and Church tool against rebelling lower classes, was the crown jewel
of Enlightenment and bourgeois liberalism; it is now taken back.76 Rewinding
history à rebours, the revolutionary and liberatory citoyen (citizen) aspect is
being thoroughly expunged. The result is the relentless deepening and broad-
ening of the “zone of non-being” identified by Fanon for the racialized and
colonialized subject.77 As Le Guin’s protagonist in The Dispossessed, to my
mind the best piece of utopian writing since Wells, if not More and Swift,
tells the ambassador from a totally anti-utopian Terra: “You would destroy us
rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope!”78
Notes
My warmest thanks for indispensable bibliographic guidance go to Lyman T. Sargent and
Tom Moylan; for clarifying discussions and sending me their works to Fredric Jameson
and the first two names, without whom part 3 could not have been written; last not least,
to Raffaella Baccolini, Antonis Balasopulos, John Clute, Zorica Đergović-Joksimović,
Peter Fitting, Saša Hrnjez, Richard Ohmann, Patrick Parrinder, Tamara Prošić, Bülent
Somay, Victor Strazzeri, Pavla Vesela, Darren Webb, and Phil Wegner. I couldn’t have
done this without the kind and efficient help of the Clare College and Cambridge
University Library staff, also of Jake Culank from Cambridge. For the invitation to
28

deliver the keynote speech at the Utopian Studies Society in Prato 2019 and much
friendly help my thanks go to Andrew Milner. The editor of the journal thanks Chelsea
Haith, University of Oxford, for her editorial work on this keynote speech.
Epigraphs: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History
for Life (1874), trans. and with an introduction by Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1980), 8; lines from Johann Ludwig Uhland’s “Frühlingsglaube,” trans. Richard Wigmore
as “Faith in Spring,” https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/1541#:~:text=Nun%20
muss%20sich%20Alles%2C%20Alles,Das%20Bl%C3%BChen%20will%20nicht%20enden
(accessed June 3, 2020).
1. Adrienne Rich, cited in Angelika Bammer, Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in
the 1970s (New York: Routledge, 2015), 52. Emphasis by Bammer.
2. I read China Miéville’s article “The Limits of Utopia” culpably late, but entirely
agree with most of his article (except the final reflections on what to do about it). He
rightly points out that “the very term ‘Anthropocene,’ which gives with one hand,
insisting on human drivers of ecological shift, misleads with its implied ‘We.’ After all,
[what warranted] a new geochronological term [was] a shift in the political economy by
which it and we are organised, an accelerating cycle of profit and accumulation. . . .
Which means . . . standing directly against military power and violence. Three times
as many land-rights and environmental activists were murdered in 2012 than a decade
before,” and he points to Jason W. Moore’s 2017 coinage of the term “capitalocene.”
China Miéville, “The Limits of Utopia,” Salvage, August 1, 2015, https://salvage.zone/
in-print/the-limits-of-utopia/ (accessed June 3, 2020); Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or
Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, abridged with
introduction by Eric Watkins (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 209.
4. John Donne, John Donne: Selections from Divine Poems, Sermons, Devotions, and Prayers
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990), 58.
5. John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “The Global
Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism,” Monthly Review, November 1, 2011,
https://monthlyreview.org/2011/11/01/the-global-reserve-army-of-labor-and-the-new-
imperialism/ (accessed June 3, 2020); Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the
Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
6. Darko Suvin, “To Explain Fascism Today,” Critique 45, no. 3 (2017): 259–302; Darko
Suvin, In Leviathan’s Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time (Cabin John, MD:
Wildside Press, 2012).
7. John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism: The US Pursuit of Global Dominance (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).
8. Subcomandante Marcos, The Zapatistas’ Dignified Rage: Final Public Speeches of the
Subcommander Marcos, trans. H. Gales, ed. N. Henck (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018).
9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (New York:
Penguin in association with New Left Review, 1993), v; Stuart C. Aitken and Gill
Valentine, eds., Approaches to Human Geography: Philosophies, Theories, People and Practices
(London: SAGE, 2014).
29

10. Erik Olin Wright, “Introduction” and “Foundations of a Neo-Marxist Class

Analysis,” in Approaches to Class Analysis, ed. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 1–30.
11. Michel Chossodovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty and the New World Order, 2nd ed.
(Pincourt, Québec: Global Research, 2003); Herman Daly and Joshua C Farley, Ecological
Economics: Principles and Applications, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC.: Island Press, 2011); David
Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010).
12. Benedictus de Spinoza, Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man & His Well-being, trans.
Abraham Wolf (London: Black, 1910).
13. S. Diaz et al., Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services, UWE Bristol, n.d., https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/
output/1493508/summary-for-policymakers-of-the-global-assessment-report-on-
biodiversity-and-ecosystem-services-of-the-intergovernmental-science-policy-platform-
on-biodiversity-and-ecosystem-services. I acknowledge the stimulus of the Tricontinental
Institute for Social Research’s newsletter “We Are the Shadow-Ghosts,” Tricontinental,
May 16, 2019, that led me to these two reports, and from which I have appropriated, in
my own way, many formulations. https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/
we-are-the-shadow-ghosts-creeping-back-as-the-camp-fires-burn-low-the-twentieth-
newsletter-2019/.
14. BIOS Research Unity, “Governance of Economic Transition: A Scientific
Background Document for the UN Global Sustainable Development Report 2019,”
BIOS, August 21, 2018, https://bios.fi/en/economic-transition-governance-a-scientific-
background-document-to-the-un-global-sustainable-development-report-2019/?utm_.
15. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (London: Orbit, 2017).
16. Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy: The “Junius” Pamphlet
(New York: Socialist Publication Society, 1919).
17. Lisa Garforth, Green Utopias: Environmental Hope Before and After Nature (Cambridge:
Polity, 2018).
18. Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
19. I have been queried by the Utopian Studies editor, Professor Nicole Pohl, about the
passage beginning “My example stems from a large exhibition called UTOPIA . . .” as
to the correctness of the Jacoby quote, and asked why didn’t I ask the curators of the
exhibition, either Lyman T. Sargent and/or Gregory Claeys,”if this indeed was correct
and the intention.” She also contacted Professor Lyman Sargent, who responded to me
in a longish e-mail from which I excerpt two central passages. First, he wrote, “I find
it hard to believe that anybody who actually saw the exhibit could say that either the
kibbutz or National Socialism were presented as viable ideals. The name of the exhibit
was Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, and ALL the exhibits were
about the search with no implication that any of them were viable. . . . Since we included
photographs of Auschwitz, I simply can’t believe that anyone actually at the exhibit could
use the phrase viable utopia.” Second, he clarified that “In NY both the kibbutz and
National Socialism were in a room that also had listening posts so that people could hear
30

King’s I Have a Dream speech while view[ing] photographs and artifacts from the Civil
Rights Movement.”
My answer is that as a critic and scholar I am not at all interested in an author’s -- or
a group of curators’ – intent or personal belief; that is the business of their friends and
relatives (or political friends and enemies). I am interested exclusively in what is actually
written or presented for others to see – on the effect of any work on its consumers. To
understand this, one must know first, what was being presented, and second, what that
presentation strongly implies in semantic terms. Thus I do not wish to proceed further
with Jacoby’s take, which was not clearly phrased, but to take direct responsibility in the
matter. This necessarily involves being longer -- apologies. However, please remember
that my paragraph begins by saying that it seems clear to me “there are no utopian
studies without values.” What is at stake here is first of all axiological: can scholarship
be without values, which turns it into a pure affirmation of the status quo? Not to my
mind. But secondly, more deeply, it is also epistemological: how can we have a unified
field of studies if it is unlimited, and anybody can put into it whatever he or she pleases?
The answer is, I’m afraid, no how – not a valid field of studies, anyway, either in terms of
intellectual success or of categorical clarity or of professional and civic ethics.
20. Oral source.
21. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 1982), 20.
22. Darren Webb, “Educational Studies and the Domestication of Utopia,” British
Journal of Educational Studies 64, no. 4 (2016): 431–48.
23. Phillip E. Wegner, “Jameson’s Modernisms; Or, the Desire Called Utopia,” Diacritics
37, no. 4 (2007): 3–20; Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia
and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 202.
24. See Webb, “Educational Studies and the Domestication of Utopia,” 431–48.
25. Richard Strier, “Taking Utopia Seriously,” Moreana 54, no. 2 (2017): 141–48.
26. See Suvin, “To Explain Fascism Today.”
27. Adorno, in conversation with Bloch, quoted in Maggie O’Neill, Adorno, Culture and
Feminism (London: Sage, 1999).
28. The works can be found on my sites www.darkosuvin.com and https://
independent.academia.edu/DarkoSuvin/Papers under the rubric Epistemology.
29. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (1958), 1st ed. (Milan: Feltrinello,
2004).
30. Darko Suvin, “Two Cheers for Essentialism and Totality: On Marx’s Oscillation and
Its Limits (As Well as on the Taboos of Post-Modernism),” Rethinking Marxism 10, no. 1
(1998): 66–82.
31. Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1952).
32. Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
33. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901; London: Penguin, 2016), 960.
34. Bruno referenced in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, ed.
Tom Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini (New York: Routledge, 2013), 191.
35. Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, trans. Frank McGuiness (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014).
31

36. Plato, The Republic of Plato, ed. James Adam (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1902); Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun, ed. A. M. Elliot and R. Millner
(London: Journeyman, 1981).
37. Frederic Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review, January 25, 2004,
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II25/articles/fredric-jameson-the-politics-of-utopia
(accessed June 3, 2020).
38. Ruth A. Levitas, “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society,” in Utopia as Method:
The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffella Baccolini (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 48.
39. The full survey that Lyman Tower Sargent insists upon in “Utopia—The Problem
of Definition,” Extrapolation 16, no. 2 (1975): 140–41.
40. William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890), introduction by Rowan Williams
(London: Thames and Hudson, in association with the Victoria & Albert Museum, 2017).
41. Slavoj Zizek, cited in Lucy Sargisson, Fool’s Gold: Utopianism in the Twenty-First
Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 32.
42. Darko Suvin, “Locus, Horizon and Orientation,” in Suvin, Defined by a Hollow:
Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 120;
Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 51.
43. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 5.
44. Tom Moylan, “Transgressive, Totalizing, Transformative: Utopia’s Utopian
Surplus,” Utopian Studies 29, no. 3 (2018): 312.
46. Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), 54; Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars trilogy (Glasgow: Harper Voyager, 1992–96);
Darko Suvin, “Brecht vs. Ibsen: Breaking Open the Individualist or Closed Dramaturgy,”
in Suvin, To Brecht and Beyond (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), 56–79.
47. For the group of scholars, see Darko Suvin, “Introduzione sui generi letterari e la
Fantascienza,” Sincronie [Roma] no. 20 (2007): 217–27; forthcoming as “Kick Off ” in my
book Disputing the Deluge.
48. Here I part company with the inclusiveness of the most useful Sargisson, from
which I have learned a lot: for at the most, Dubai architecture, for example, can be used
as a typical component or indeed paragon of our existential anti-utopia, akin to the
Iron Heel’s super-cities in Jack London, so that calling it utopia (in either eutopian and
dystopian senses) means repeating Ernst Bloch’s major mistake, the desire to equate
utopia/nism and reality. I should add that to accept the use of “utopia” as a swearword—
as in the massive anti-Obama campaign referred to by Sargisson—is the symmetrical
obverse of accepting utopia as perfection.
50. Anti-utopia was brilliantly diagnosed in part 1 of Jameson’s The Seeds of Time in the
early ‘90s, but those were still early days. I note that one characteristic differentiating
anti-utopia from dystopia may well be the battle over language, memory, and expression
that usually develops in dystopia vs. the monophonic refusal of intricate contradictions in
32

favor of black-and-white adversariness in Ayn Rand or, for example, on all world media.
See Rob McAlear, “The Value of Fear,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 27, no. 2 (2010): 24–42,
on how dystopia and anti-utopia share the urgency of a de facto near-future story—
whatever their ostensible spacetime—but remain incompatible because the former is
to be understood as preventable, resistance is possible even if it fails in the plot, and the
latter “seeks to shut down a discussion of alternatives” (though I should mention that he
sees hope in the Newspeak segment of 1984, where I do not).
51. Ayn Rand, Anthem (London: Cassell, 1938).
52. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (New York:
Avalon Publishing, 2000).
53. Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 20. For the emblematic case of Wordsworth, see the richly argued
Kantor, who finds “liberal ideology . . . a process by which we recover a way of seeing
after we have been disabused of its utopian character”; Jamison Kantor, “Immortality,
Romanticism, and the Limit of Liberal Imagination,” PMLA 133, no. 3 (2018): 517.
The Immortality Ode registers the defeat of visionary revolution and opts for
“incremental reform”: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the
glory and the dream?/ --- /… relinquish[ing] delight/ To live beneath your habitual
sway” (Kantor, “Immortality, Romanticism, and the Limit of Liberal Imagination,”
519). Even in this early ancestor one finds essential characteristics of liberal abstract
utopianism—order stemming out of disillusion and compensatory turn to timelessness
(in Wordsworth: nature, childhood, and deism).
Another interesting ancestor to anti-utopia, Jameson suggests in Archaeologies of
the Future, would be Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton, where the eponymous planetoid
harbors a plethora of changing varieties of physical appearance, gender, and sexual
orientation. It is unfortunately a much oversimplified and rather intolerant wish-
dream of homosexual and cognate gender counterculture opposed to what he wrongly
felt were Le Guin’s totalizing sociopolitical tendencies—and her foregrounding of
heterosexuality—in the “critical utopia” of The Dispossessed. On the one hand Triton deals
only with lifestyles, and one can sympathize with its quest for freedom of experiment;
on the other it presents a simple negation of however rainbow-like unity, and therefore
of positive utopianism as such, in favor of enclave diversity within a magnified version
of the 1960s New York and London yet without economics—characteristically, even
a mega-war is treated as peripheral. The undoubted verve and acuity of Delany is
therefore sectarian, choosing ephemeral and co-optable quasi-utopian enclaves—if sex
and jouissance is your utopia—within the never-shown “reigning dystopia of the system”
( Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 144).
54. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect, 81.
55. Darko Suvin, “Parables and Uses of a Stumbling Stone,” Arcadia 5, no. 2 (2017):
271–300.
56. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, quoted in Darko Suvin, “Lukács: Horizons and Implications
of the ‘Typical Character,’” Social Text, no. 16 (Winter 1986–87): 97–123.
33

57. Sigmund Freud, “Dynamics of Transference,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud and Carrie Lee
Rothgeb (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 12:107.
58. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron (London: Verso, 1995), 82.
59. Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism,” in The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas
Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2010), 12.
60. Søren Baggesen, “Utopian and Dystopian Pessimism: Le Guin’s The Word for World
Is Forest and Tiptree’s ‘We Who Stole the Dream,’” Science-Fiction Studies 14, no. 1 (1987):
34–43.
61. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
62. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), www.marxists.org/reference/archive/
debord/society.htm (accessed November 15, 2018).
63. I came to the concept of constituted absence by being reminded of the role
of the Baroque God in Pascal and Racine, whereof Lucien Goldmann speaks in Le
Dieu caché—with thanks to Michel Loewy—or indeed of the Mbuya tribe’s father
god Ñamandu in Pierre Clastres (see my essay “Power Without Violence: A Lesson
from Tribal Communism”). This absence was in history positively sublated by the
appearance of a revolutionary wave of rich personalities like Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, or Tom Payne. Alas, the constitutive absence of value signaled by anti-utopia
is a repressed and anal-retentive obverse of the Baroque tragicalness. It flows out of
triumphant counterrevolution and it is carried by impoverished Übermenschen like Ayn
Rand and the Donalds, Rumsfeld and Trump. The return from bourgeois democracy
to a semi-masked (and often open) bourgeois tyranny adds to cynicism and it is also a
confession of weakness: as Marx noted in the 18th Brumaire, true or plebeian democracy
would work against capitalism.
64. John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), ed. Alastair Fowler, introduction by Michael
Prodger (London: Folio Society, 2015), 1:63.
65. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique (1979), ed. M. Senellart (Paris: Gallimard,
2004), 98.
66. Wegner, Imaginary Communities, 121–28.
67. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. S. Corcoran (London: Verso, 2014), 95.
68. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 249, 252, and 272.
69. Emily Apter, “Untranslatability and the Geopolitics of Reading,” PMLA 134, no. 1
(2019): 195.
70. Matthew 23:27, King James Bible.
71. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, K. Marx and F. Engels on Colonialism (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1959), 88.
72. See Wegner’s essay, “Jameson’s Modernisms; or, the Desire Called Utopia,”
Diacritics 37, no. 4 (2007): 2–20. I have been much stimulated by Jameson’s chapter
“Journey into Fear” and the general horizon of Archaeologies of the Future.
73. Pedrag Matvejević, “Levantine Legends and Histories of Bread,” in Our Daily Bread
(Kruh naš), trans. Russell Scott Valentino (Zagreb: Ambrozija, 2009).
74. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959), 10, 83, 126.
34

75. Karl Marx, “Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” first published 1850, www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch02.htm (accessed
November 15, 2018).
76. Eric Hobsbawm, “Public Order in an Age of Violence,” in Hobsbawm, Globalisation,
Democracy and Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008), 138–54.
77. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann (New York: Grove,
1967), 7.
78. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (New York: Harper Prism, 1994), 350.
35

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Utopia or Bust: Capitalocene, Method, Anti-Utopia

Utopian Studies, Volume 32, Number 1, 2021, pp. 1-35 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 2 Aug 2021 19:17 GMT from University of Cyprus ]

As a classical philologist . . . I do not know what meaning classical

UtS 32.1_01_Suvin.indd Page 1 17/04/21 12:36 PM

Nun muss sich alles, alles ändern.

Part 1: Where Are We in Today’s Capitalocene

Take heed therefore how ye walk circumspectly, not as unwise but as

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presid-

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Where Are We: The Capitalocene

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a steady-state economy, with growth resulting from efficiency.11 It uses

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What Are We Doing Wrong

UtS 32.1_01_Suvin.indd Page 6 17/04/21 12:36 PM

Thus, how is one to understand that room? My question is simple:

A new rabbi arrived to a mid-West USA community. After the first

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I said: ‘Schon vergessen (I have already forgotten it)’. And he wrote

So here is what I am against, lest we forget:

1. The pseudo-professional censorship or Denkverbot against “total”

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I mention Miroslav Krleža, Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet, Hugh Mac

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which we would starve; yet if it is simply the critic’s opinion, without

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Part 2: Theses on Method for Utopian Studies

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Thesis 1: Dialectical Totalities

Thesis 2: Possible Worlds

A Possible World is a provisional notional totality with a defined spacetime or

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Thesis 3: Value as Polar Star and Ground

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Thesis 4: Locus, Horizon, and Orientation

Locus is the place of the agent who is moving.

Locus or situation is where a personal or collective body is pragmatically or

Part 3. What Existential Anti-Utopia Means for Us

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What these Utopian oppositions allow us to do is by way of negation,

On Theory of Utopia and the Event of a Mega-Novum: The What

History: Advent of Alternative Totality

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Modern Times: The Politics of Generic Forms

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presentation, orientation, and striving toward the horizon of radically better

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The Event of Existential Anti-Utopia

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classes—bearing it. Anti-utopia is a targeted and openly ideologico-political use of a

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On Anti-Utopia as Ptolemeian Counterrevolution: The How and the

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As suggested above, there is a central existential difference between a

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