Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society by Ruth Levitas (review)

Elysium (Blomkamp US 2013) and Sleep Dealer (Rivera US/Mexico 2008) represent two poles in recent dystopian film, despite their similarities. The former is a Hollywood film that resorts to racist stereotypes and a White Saviour hero, while the latter is an independent film whose main characters are people of colour who resist imperialism on their own. Still, both imagine western-style imperialist governments and express fears of increasing state repression and violence, while highlighting technologies of control. Together they represent the fact that utopian societies are not imaginable in contemporary film (no matter the degree of progressive politics a film may espouse) beyond hopeful gestures or glimpses, usually at the end of dystopian narratives. Utopian studies offers an antidote to this otherwise depressing fact: it posits dystopia not as the antithesis of utopia but as a critical method of revealing and reflecting upon the social problems of society, and attempts to uncover the alternatives contained in the utopian impulses underlying dystopia. Often, this impulse is found in resistance – in the kinds of people fighting the dystopia, who serve as models for the people who can create a better world. Of course, such impulses/suggestions are not always free of their own racist and imperialist implications, thus compounding the difficulties of imagining utopia in our moment.

This failure of imagination does not mean that utopia should not be imagined, and utopia as a method (rather than a goal or a blueprint for a perfect society) is precisely the subject of Ruth Levitas’s newest book, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Levitas argues that utopia ‘entails holistic thinking about the connections between economic, social, existential and ecological processes in an integrated way’. After we have done this, ‘we can then develop alternative possible scenarios for the future and open these up to public debate and democratic decision – insisting always on the … contingency of what we are able to imagine’ (19). Additionally, she states that ‘utopia also entails refusal, the refusal to accept that what is given is enough’ (17). This refusal is where one could argue that the aforementioned dystopian films are located. They are a beginning step, if sometimes a deeply problematic one, yet still an opportunity for the audience to imagine possible futures with the knowledge of what they do not want. In a way, Levitas’s book itself is a sort of beginning step towards what I see as the next generation of utopian studies: that is, a postcolonial move that looks at utopia from beyond the First World and views films such as these from a multidisciplinary context of film studies, postcolonial theory and utopian studies.

For Levitas, Utopia as method has three aspects: the archaeological, the ontological and the architectural. The archaeological mode looks at our current moment and seeks the ‘images of the good society that are embedded in political programmes and social and economic policies’ (153). These images are not necessarily leftist, for example the myths of ‘meritocracy’ or economic growth as essential to progress, and such ideas need to be challenged. Though more sociological in nature (Levitas is a sociologist herself) than concerned with fictional imaginings, ‘utopia as archaeology’ complements the aims of fictional dystopian works, as Levitas outlines in a brief discussion of satirical dystopia. Though Levitas acknowledges that the three modes overlap, less readily apparent in this analysis is the fact that fiction – especially in this case dystopian film – is quite often a political project in itself for the work’s creators, one meant to perform the same sorts of critical examinations of society that Levitas rightfully calls on sociology to do.

The ontological and architectural modes have even deeper implications for sf film studies scholars interested in utopia/dystopia. The ontological mode brings us by way of example to Max (Matt Damon) in Elysium. Levitas asks, What kinds of people might comprise a better society, and how do we educate the population such that their desires are conducive to...