Michael Hviid Jacombsen & Keith Tester, eds. (2012) Utopia: Social Theory and the Future.

Ashgate: Farnam.
Introduction: Utopia as a Topic for Social Theory Utopia is not a destination, it is an orientation, as Austrian novelist Robert Musil once mused. Utopia is thus a way to approach the all too human being-in-the-world. It is a journey to that which is not-yet, a commitment to the possible even when only the probable or even impossible might seem overwhelming. As Polish philosopher Leszek Kalokawski once poignantly put it: It may well be that the impossible at a given moment can become possible only by being stated at a time when it is impossible. Utopia is an ambition which puts question marks against the everyday inevitability of this world and, moreover, motivates thought and action praxis aimed at transforming what is through the lever of what could be. [] utopia is a journey which can never end. Utopia does not involve living in the racially pure polity, the paradise of the proletariat, the free market or the rational city. Utopia is not the end. It is the perpetual and ongoing moment of the beginning. It is always the first step towards that which is and remains not-yet. (1) Henk de Berg Utopia and the End of History Never particularly popular to begin with, today Francis Fukuyamas suggestion that we have reached the end of history tends to meet with outright derision. His ideas, everyone seems to agree, represent a prototypical example of misguided utopian thinking. I wish to argue that, in fact, the opposite is the case and that the theory of the end of history can only properly be understood as a warning against utopianism not because Fukuyama exemplifies a naively optimistic belief that is mistaken, but because he provides a realistically sober view that is correct. [] social and political utopianism is actually a danger [] and the theory of the end of history needs to be embraced. (7) Peter Thompson What is concrete about Ernst Blochs Concrete Utopia? [] Ernst Bloch suggests that what all of us are seeking is a way to find our way back to somewhere we have never been; namely, Heimat (homeland) and that actually the desire to return to this as yet unattainable home is the root of all utopian thought. For Bloch, therefore, Heimat is not synonymous with a programmatic blueprint of Utopia but exists as the processual and motoristic drive which will take us back to the very thing that we anticipate from our future. [Concrete Utopia is used for two distinct reasons:] firstly, it is because he believes that Utopia always already exists. It is all around us in what he called the largely unconscious Vorscheine (preilluminations/glimpses) of a better world. Secondly but in dialectical alliance rather than logical contrast it is because is existence is only an as yet impossible potentiality. I shall argue that the synthesis of the simultaneous existence and non-existence of utopia is to be found in Blochs Hegelian approach which gives precedence to becoming, process, unfolding and creation. (33) Bloch argued that utopia would emerge as a concrete product from the process of its own creation and that it therefore represents the filling of the dialectical gap between contingency and necessity, between what has happened and what might happen.

For Hegel [] the concrete was the point of overall totality at which we had arrived at any given moment, whereas the abstract is an abstraction from this concrete or accrued totality. A concrete utopia is therefore one which would emerge out of the process of its own attainment and precisely not a real existing thing, either as reality or blueprint. Traditional utopian projects from Thomas More onwards are therefore in effect abstract utopias, abstracted from process and presented as real things which are to be simply arrived at. Bloch and Hegel both try to demonstrate that the process of the growing together of contingent events into a concrete point of existence is determined by a delicate balance of contingency and necessity, determinism and voluntarism. (34) Necessity becomes therefore only retrospective and any utopia attained would, in the Blochian sense, represent only a retrospective telos built on the latent possibilities within the real. In terms of the emergence of utopia, the question therefore is to what extent voluntarist intervention into the world creates the conditions which otherwise would not have come about. In the age old argument between determinism and voluntarism, Bloch took a decidedly dialectical line which located the possibility of utopia within that which is already possible and that which might become possible. [Bloch] sees the construction of utopia as a process of transcendence without the transcendental. Contrary to most views of Marxism, which see it as a deterministic and teleological approach arguing for the inevitability of a communist utopia, Bloch instead sees it as a way of understanding and mobilizing the latent potentialities within reality and in doing so creating the very thing which it propounds. (35) Within any given moment there exists, therefore, both the agglomeration of past processes as well as the potentiality of future ones. Using the Aristotelian pairing of kata to dynaton (that which is possible) and dynamei on (that which might become possible) Bloch used the terms Tendency and Latency to describe this processual utopia. This Tendency-Latency process in Bloch states that Utopia is not an empirical fact in a transcendental, noumenal or dualist sense (i.e. it does not exist in a separate realm as a pre-given telos) but is the as yet non-existent Big Other towards which all of our individual and collective efforts as humans are taking us, consciously and unconsciously. The endpoint reached will be the outcome of the process of getting there. [this Lacanian big other is unknowable] Blochs view of utopia is therefore essentially a praxis-oriented processual philosophy based in an application of Marxs famous 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.