Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation by Tom Moylan (review)

Tom Moylan is perhaps most famous as a literary critic of science fiction: his two most well-known collections of reviews were Demand the Impossible, published in 1986 and reissued in 2014 with a number of critical reactions appended, and Scraps of the Untainted Sky, originally published in 2000. At any rate, the topic with Becoming Utopian is utopia, utopia as an abstract notion, influenced by the writings of Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas, Fredric Jameson, and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Moylan's focus in these books is consistently upon the defamiliarization promoted by certain ideas of utopia, opening to the reader the possibility of conceiving different subject positions. As the preface to Scraps of the Untainted Sky says, "the risk of venturing into the web of popular science fiction is worth it when readers discover new and challenging works that, as the Quakers say, speak to their own condition and speak truth to power" (xvii). Moylan thus chooses to write about science fiction with radical content: his Demand the Impossible highlighted Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Samuel Delany's Triton.

Becoming Utopian focuses specifically upon how utopian thought can situate itself in this era, and in so doing it performing a series of intellectual rescues. For the first part of the book Moylan dives into the work of Ernst Bloch and the thoughts of various liberation theologians (with an important nod to the educator Paulo Freire). The introduction summarizes what is to come; the initial chapter on "Strong Thought: Utopia, Pedagogy, Agency" sets a tone, first autobiographical, Moylan having participated in the US civil rights and antiwar movements, and then academic, with thematic table-setting for chapters 2 through 4. There is a tentative optimism to the writing of Becoming Utopian that persists despite the degradation of the political scene:

To be sure, Jameson is right to note that an indulgence in matters of practical politics in their own right has little place in the anticipatory utopian project for, in times of outright revolution there is, for the moment, little room for utopian speculation; and in times of growing tension caught in a "reality paralysis," such reductions tend to produce reformist plans and constraining maneuvers. However, at least since that historical/formal turn marked by Williams and Abensour, the utopian persuasion reveals, over and over, that something must indeed be done to begin to change a prevailing, apparently closed, system in order to assert that not only can an alternative exist but that a political capacity exists to achieve it.

(31)

To be sure, the primary purpose of any anticipatory utopian project would be radically educational; yet nonetheless I think it could have been argued here that "indulgence in matters of practical purpose" is necessary to find out, for each generation of political actors from Saul Alinsky to Greta Thunberg, whether or not (as Jameson argues) "when it comes to politics, utopianism is utterly impractical in the first place." (Jameson 2004)

Chapters 2 through 4 are about Bloch and also about some liberation theologians with whom I was unfamiliar. Arguably, Bloch is interesting for his inversion of Freud's obsession with the past: Bloch instead created a psychology of anticipation, with Freud-sounding (but not Freudian) concepts like the "Not-Yet-Conscious." Moylan correctly identifies the awesome Bloch concept of the "utopian function," in which (according to Vincent Geoghegan's Utopianism and Marxism [1987]) the "ubiquity of utopia" in human attitudes and culture is realized in the creation of utopia. For Bloch, the light drawing us to utopia was lit and maintained everywhere. It is with these themes that Bloch counts as a writer deserving of intellectual rescue. For Geoghegan, Bloch (along with Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Bahro, and Andre Gorz) counted as a writer who rescued Marx against charges of his irrelevance through a discussion of utopianism.

In fact, writing...