The Future of Utopia

The Future of Utopia

There is hope, but not for us.

—Franz Kafka

Part I

However we traditionally define the figure of the intellectual, and god only knows how many ways this has been done, it seems that the intellectual today is defined primarily by virtue of discouragement. The reasons for this discouragement are, no doubt, the subject of a number of the essays collected in this journal, but I want to begin here by remarking on the condition itself—on what it means not just for anyone, but for the intellectual, to have lost hope. The quietly devastating fact, so widespread that it often goes unspoken, is that we can no longer muster the peculiar optimism with which the intellectual traditionally laid claim to another, different, or better world. As Frederic Jameson writes in his recent book on science fiction, the most crippling aspect of intellectual existence today is "that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available" (xii). Indeed, our cultural affinity for science fiction narratives in which humanity capitulates to vast extraterrestrial occupations seems, finally, to have been displaced by the sad revelation that we don't need any aliens to render our resistance futile—that we can no longer imagine a future that differs from our present.

Hence, the title of this essay should already suggest the troubles of the intellectual, no less the troubling paradox we now confront, for the intellectual today grapples with the loss of that very aptitude on which hope rests. Traditionally, the power of utopia constitutes one of the most enduring means of intellectual critique, since the capacity to imagine another place (topos), however different or because it is different (utopos), conditioned the means to intervene in the present, in the here and now. Far from being one narrative among others, then, utopia historically corresponds to something like our faculty of political imagination, but what happens when we can no longer invoke that faculty, when the trope of political hope is no longer available? Ironically, this is precisely the kind of bleak moment when we would be inclined to invoke utopia in order to conjure a hope for the future from the ashes of our despair—except for the fact that what makes this moment so depressing in the first place is that we no longer have recourse to utopianism. Whereas utopia traditionally concerned the fabulation of another world, we seem to have reached a point where or when we can no longer imagine the radical transformation of our own circumstances without a paroxysm of self-loathing, as though we should all know better by now than to indulge in impossible dreams.

Of course, we've all heard the admonishments against utopia—"get over your far-flung hopes, stop fantasizing about a better world, and above all give up on all that Marxist blather . . ."—but rather than internalize them, we could just as well take them as the inducement for a reckoning with utopia itself. If "we have lost the utopian function of criticism,"¹ as Hayden White has recently argued, how can we grasp this loss, and how can we address it? Is it possible to resuscitate the figure of the utopian intellectual? These are daunting questions, but I want to suggest that the constituents of a response have been rehearsed by a previous generation for whom the problems of the utopian intellectual already loomed large. We might even go so far as to suggest that our discouragement represents the recognition of a state of affairs that has been preparing itself for some time but that we are only now able or willing to acknowledge. Hence, this essay revolves around a "conversation" about the fate of the intellectual which brought together Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, both specifically and more generally, in the wake of the events of May 1968. Unlike many of their contemporaries, for...