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Notes Preface 1. In Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Seyla Benhabib defines these two impulses in critical theory as the "explanatory-diagnostic" and the "anticipatory-utopian." 2. My intention in this book is not to explore all of the manifestations of Utopian thought in all its historical and social forms. For a more general history of Utopian thought, see Manuel and Manuel, UtopianThoughtin the Western World; Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias; Joyce Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought; Krishan Kumar, Utopianism. 3. See, for example, Tom Moylan's Demand theImpossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. 4. Nineteenth-century feminist Utopias include Mary Griffith, Three Hundred Years Hence(1836); Mary Bradley, Mizora (1890); Mary Agnes Tinker, San Salvadore (1892); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland(1915). 1. Locational Hazards: The Utopian Impulse and the Logic of Social Transformation 1. Iris Young argues that "the desire for community generates borders, dichotomies , and exclusions, as does the desire for identification in social relations . . . [and] relies on the same desire for social wholeness and identification that underlies racism and ethnic chauvinism on the one hand and political sectarianism on the other" (301,302). 2. Marxism's critique of Hegelianism is connected to its critique of the way liberal humanism attempts to derive harmonious society from consciousness. In liberal ideology, this attempt takes the form of encoding the isolation and alienation of the individual in capitalist society as the self-sufficiency of the rational individual, and compensating for the necessity of deferring one's material needs with a transcendence of the mind. This false move constituted what Ernst Bloch calls an "ideological harmonization," merely an embellishing move by the existing culture designed 211 Notes to Chapter 1 to convince the individual that Utopia was contained in "Man's" ability to transcend his social and bodily situation through rational thought. In Negations, Marcuse critiques this isolated rationalism of the individual, arguing that freedom is reduced to the ability to transcend one's conditions through the application of reason, and is designed to reconcile individuals to existing conditions; regardless of how bad existing conditions remained, individuals could find freedom from them through selfcontrol of the rational mind. 3. Recently, the social logic informing Utopia's projection of a unified totality has been rejected by critical Marxists for its naive conception of social progress as the suturing of divergent interests into a unified whole, in favor of a social model that focuses on the transformative potential of antagonisms and disjunctures within social relations. See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towardsa Radical Democratic Politics. Even when it is rejected within the Marxist tradition, however, the goal of harmonization is not viewed as inherently oppressive but rather as an untenable goal in light of the contemporary proliferation of interests. 4. Louis Althusser discusses this paradox surrounding the position of the Marxist intellectual in Lenin andPhilosophy. 5. Herbert Marcuse in fact celebrates the social alienation created in bourgeois society to the extent that it aids bourgeois intellectual efforts to theorize goals by making possible the abstract freedom of the thinking subject (1968: 150). In attempting to theorize an objective position for the intellectual that is at the same time organic to his social position, Marcuse thus ends up tying the vision and goals of Marxist theory to the very bourgeois alienation of the thinking subject that lies at the heart of the Marxist critique of capitalism. 6. Most recently, issues of authenticity and subject position are being theorized and debated within the field of postcolonial studies. Here, the debate about authenticity foregrounds more aggressively the tools of representation, and focuses in particular upon questions of voice and language. With her concept of the mestiza, for example, Gloria Anzaldiia envisions a culturally specific location from which to construct a strategic (although not sutured or self-contained) identity (see chapter 5 for a brief discussion of Anzaldiia). Gayatri Spivak, who is influenced more strongly by poststructuralist logic, views marginality as a strategic place from which one may reveal the points of crisis within the "master narratives" of individual and national identity. See Spivak, In OtherWorlds: Essays in CulturalPolitics, Outside in the TeachingMachine , and ThePost-Colonial Critic. 7. For commentary on this "unnatural division," see Bonnie Kreps, "The 'New' Feminist Analysis," and Ti-Grace Atkinson, "Radical Feminism." 8. For examples of a romanticization of Africa in a black feminist context, see Jean Noble, BeautifulAlso Are the SoulsofMy Sisters, and Gloria Joseph, Common Differences. For a critique of African cultural...

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