In today’s global order, for those seeking a just, equal, and healthy existence for humanity and nature, it is time to exercise the transformative utopian impulse. Yet, against such praxis, capitalism’s retrieval mechanism subsumes and consumes the potential of utopianism. Within this co-optation, an enclosure of “eutopian” sensibility within a resigned “dystopian” structure of feeling compromises the radical utopian project through practices of disciplined “improvement” within the “realism” of the existing order. Herein, this essay discusses two symptomatic texts that it argues are imbricated within this dystopian ambience. With great respect for its author, I read Dystopia: A Natural History, by Gregory Claeys, as a component of this hegemonic structure of feeling rather than a challenge to it; meanwhile, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Dystopias Now” as a negation of that negation, as the author takes an anti-anti-utopian stance that reasserts the radical utopian project.
This article reaffirms the utopian standpoint in transformative political culture and practice. Herein, it does not deploy utopia as a noun—an object—but, rather, an adjective, a modifier: as the utopian that identifies a triad—transgressive as it breaks with the status quo, totalizing as it analyzes the system that produces that status quo, and transformative as it moves social reality toward a horizon comprehensively better for all human beings and nature itself. This article develops this argument through a close reading of Book One of More's Utopia. In doing so, it works against the grain of More's ideological encapsulation of utopia within the remit of the state and its official policies by identifying the utopian surplus that exceeds the author's own (ex)position. Thus, Hythloday, itinerant and critical intellectual, emerges as the radical utopian subject, rather than the fictive character of More as a royal adviser.
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