Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect by David M. Bell (review)

It used to be that a book on utopia that did not quote Oscar Wilde's homily about a map of the world without utopia was itself not worth glancing at, for it left out the one thing we thought we could all agree on. But what if the world map only serves to reinforce the systems of domination inherent to colonialism, racism, capitalism, and patriarchy? And why should the quest for utopia take us to the high seas anyway, rather than surveying those existing social formations that resist oppression?

For David Bell, Wilde was wrong. Utopia is on the world map, but it lies neither in the unexplored place on the horizon for which humanity is forever setting sail nor in some nonexistent linear future: following Tom Moylan's use of the slogan Demand the Impossible to a logical conclusion, Bell argues that the demand for utopia must be articulated precisely as a demand for a concrete place in the here and now.¹ Against an understanding of utopia as only nonexistent and imaginary, Bell argues for the "ambiguous consistency" of the topos (place) of utopia that contains both affirmation (good) and negation (no). This "means that utopia can never settle into a final form" (7) but must instead remain dynamic and open to continual change and rethinking. The result is an extraordinary book. In Re-thinking Utopia Bell balances nuanced engagement with conceptual detail across a variety of disciplinary areas with a wider coherence of purpose so that the guiding aims of the volume are never far from view. This is a closely worked argument for a radical and critically self-aware politics. It is inclusive, conceptually ambitious, and broad in scope. Bell poses fundamental challenges to utopian studies that will likely help shape the subject's future direction of travel. This is all the more so as he astutely perceives the natural limits in scope and (at times necessary) ambiguities of his discussion. Thus the "rethinking" of the title is not an attempt to reinvent the wheel but, rather, to regard utopian scholarship in the context of wider political issues and create a dialogic route through some of the most important recent debates in the discipline.

The book is organized around a substantive introduction and five chapters, with a brief two-page conclusion to tie the whole back together. As Ibtisam Ahmed has noted, while Bell calls for a certain ambiguity in utopianism that might justify the relatively open nature of the conclusion, this final section could be profitably extended.²

In his introduction Bell aims to pay "subversive fidelity" to the concept of utopia to reach "beyond the dichotomy between placeless utopia-as-process and place-bound dystopia" (5). Utopia is for Bell more than a critical method because the centrality of place provides what he has previously termed "utopia's conceptual specificity."³ Explaining this, Bell applies feminist science writer Karen Barad's concept of "intra-actions" to the tripartite structure of the concept of utopia (i.e., no + good + place), arguing that these three elements "modify and affect each other rather than remaining discrete" (6). At the same time, he contends that a utopian politics must avoid what, drawing on John Proveti, he terms "hylomorphic" forms of utopia, or the colonial "imposition of 'Good place' on otherwise empty or chaotic space" (12). Such a critique may be leveled at many literary utopias in the Western canon (including that of Thomas More), in addition to elements of political theory, intentional communities, and other areas of interest to utopian scholarship.

Chapter 1 surveys contemporary political forms. Here, Bell identifies an issue in contemporary political discourse in which "we inhabit the bottom of a slippery slope of equation and conflation, where opposition to totalitarianism becomes opposition to utopianism becomes opposition to ideology becomes opposition to the political" (23). This is an expressly political disavowal of politics, in which opposition...