In the concluding passages of Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory<\/em>, Seyla Benhabib offers a roadmap for a new conception of utopia. Benhabib traces what she calls \u201cthe demise of the philosophy of the subject\u201d and suggests that this demise \u201cchanges the meaning of utopia in our societies.\u201d[1]<\/a> Previously, the concept of utopia had been associated with the potentiality of one particular group in society, one collective singularity, one universal class\u2014the proletariat for instance for Marx, or art or philosophy for the early Frankfurt School of Horkheimer and Adorno. That changed, though, in the late twentieth century (with the Habermasian turn to communicative ethics), giving rise to what Benhabib identifies as a new politics of empowerment, new social movements, and a conception of difference and its value. These new social movements have formed \u201ccommunities of need and solidarity in the interstices of our societies.\u201d[2]<\/a> Of these, Benhabib writes:<\/p>\n Such utopia is no longer utopian, for it is not a mere beyond. It is the negation of the existent in the name of a future that bursts open the possibilities of the present.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Benhabib was writing in the mid-1980s and published her book with Columbia University Press in 1986. It was a very different time. The Berlin Wall still stood solidly. The Soviet Union was a superpower. The World Trade Centers in New York City were a major tourist attraction. There was no \u201cWar on Terror\u201d yet, no wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or now in Ukraine. There wasn\u2019t yet a rise in neo-fascism. We had no appreciation at the time of global climate warming. It was a different time indeed.<\/p>\n \u201cTo burst open the possibilities of the present\u2026\u201d Today, those possibilities are<\/em> burst open, and we have to seize them, now. Now<\/em>. We have run out of time to speak of a future. We cannot wait any longer. We need now to be immersed in the present, to create a history of the future.<\/p>\n Our task this year at Utopia 13\/13 is to explore what we are calling \u201cconcrete utopias\u201d: not just \u201creal utopias\u201d in the sense of articulated, formulated, well-thought-through blueprints of a utopian condition, but \u201cconcrete utopias\u201d in the sense of really-existing, functioning, already-working practices, institutions, models and exemplars of a just society.<\/p>\n Why return to a fraught concept like \u201cutopia\u201d in this late stage of history in the early twenty-first century, you may ask? The reason, paradoxically, is that we are so comfortable today using the term \u201cdystopia.\u201d We can so easily identify and label aspects of our present existence as dystopic.<\/p>\n The election in Italy, just this week<\/a>, of a new prime minister from the party of the Brothers of Italy\u2014an openly nationalistic, nativistic, xenophobic party, the direct descendent and heir to the National Fascist Party of the 1920s and 30s and to the Republican Fascist Party of the mid-1940s\u2014is clearly a dystopia.<\/p>\n The morning of our seminar, the New York City council Committee on Criminal Justice held hearings on a proposed bill \u201cIntroduction 549<\/a>\u201d which would ban solitary confinement in New York City jails. Our colleague, Jelani Cobb, spoke to protesters outside. Solitary confinement is <\/em>a dystopia. It is in fact a heterotopia, in Michel Foucault\u2019s words\u2014or what he called a \u201cheterotopia of deviation,\u201d one in which \u201cindividuals, whose behaviors are deviant in relation to the required mean or norm, are placed.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n We can easily and we do identify dystopias all around us. And they are concrete <\/em>dystopias, not imaginary, not possible, but actual, really-existing practices and institutions that are dystopic. That is what makes it so urgent today for us to identify really-existing, concrete <\/em>utopian projects. Because they too surround us. We need to be focusing on them to identify and expand them, grow them, support them, love them, embrace them.<\/p>\n And the fact is, there are concrete utopias taking place all around us\u2014not just dystopias. It is time, high time we start focusing on those. Not simply to trace the history of utopia, nor the history of what Karl Mannheim referred to, in Ideology and Utopia<\/em>, as \u201ccounter-utopias\u201d\u2014the history of what Mannheim called \u201cmutually antagonistic counter-utopias.\u201d[5]<\/a> Not to delve in some imaginary. But to \u201cburst open,\u201d in Seyla Benhabib\u2019s words, the reality<\/em> (in my words, not just the \u201cpossibilities\u201d) of utopian elements in the present.<\/p>\n But how then do we deal with the fraught theoretical luggage and anxious history of the term \u201cutopia,\u201d particularly within critical circles? The place to start is with \u00c9tienne Balibar.<\/p>\n \u00c9tienne Balibar has had a tense, but extremely productive relationship to the concept of utopia, in part because of his proximity to Louis Althusser and to Marx\u2019s critique of utopian thinking. Several years back, in a chapter titled \u201cAfter Utopia, Imagination?\u201d in a collected volume titled Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives <\/em>(2017), Balibar took a somewhat negative view of utopia: \u201cutopia\u2014be it individualist or collectivist\u2014traps us and the imagination within the alternative of realism and unreality.\u201d[6]<\/a> At the time, Balibar mostly embraced the pejorative meaning of the term\u2014the one associated with the unreality and complacency of distant utopian futures. Balibar concluded his discussion in the following terms: \u201cIt seems to me that the main problem facing us at the turn of the century consists of taking leave of utopia while setting free the powers of the imagination.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n A few years later, Balibar returned to the topic in his essay \u201cR\u00e9gulations, insurrections, utopies: Pour un \u00ab socialisme \u00bb du 21\u00e8me si\u00e8cle<\/a>\u201d which we discussed at Revolution 3\/13<\/a>. The essay would form the conclusion to his collection of writings, Histoire interminable<\/em>, Ecrits I, Editions La D\u00e9couverte, 2020.[8]<\/a> There, Balibar took a far less pejorative view of utopias, even embracing the concept of \u201cconcrete utopias\u201d\u2014\u201cconcrete\u201d being the term Balibar used.<\/p>\n In that essay, Balibar set forth different modalities and conceptions of socialism, and noted that they all had a utopian element: \u201cAll the preceding hypotheses\u2014whether they are “programs”, “regulations” or “insurrections”\u2014include a utopian dimension,\u201d Balibar wrote; and he emphasized: \u201cnot so much in the current, largely pejorative sense, evoking a future so harmonious or perfect (a citt\u00e0 ideale<\/em>) that it immediately appears as unattainable, which leads to political practices oscillating between impotence and dictatorship; but in the sense that they would go against the current of the dominant social relations.\u201d[9]<\/a><\/p>\n Balibar embraced a notion of concreteness:<\/p>\n \u201cthe essential thing is not the anticipation of the future, but, in the present, the exercise of a concrete<\/u> thought of difference and of an imagination that invents counter-conducts, makes a counter-culture emerge following “paths that branch off” (Borges), experiments with alternative ways of living, of relating or of working. From this point of view, there is no opposition between utopias, especially those which are well and truly at work in history, and what Foucault called “heterotopias”, freeing up “other spaces” on the margins of conventional spaces. The resistances or the struggles in so far as they imply a dissidence in relation to the norm that imposes the State and the market (but also the family, the religion, the school) are carried by utopian (and poetic) forces to which they give body.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The future of socialism, for Balibar, included \u201cthe development of concrete utopias<\/em>, that attempt new modes of life and of communication.\u201d[11]<\/a><\/p>\n So it is only fitting that, for our inaugural seminar, we begin in discussion with \u00c9tienne Balibar and lay some theoretical guideposts for this year\u2019s exploration of concrete utopias.<\/p>\n Welcome to Utopia 13\/13!<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 351.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Benhabib, Critique, Norm, Utopia<\/em>, 353.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Benhabib, Critique, Norm, Utopia<\/em>, 353.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Michel Foucault, \u201cOf Other Spaces,\u201d trans. Jay Miskowiec,\u00a0Diacritics\u00a0<\/em>6, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 22-27, at 25.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge<\/em>, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt, 1936 [1929]), at 187.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> \u00c9tienne Balibar, \u201cAfter Utopia, Imagination?\u201d in Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives<\/em>, eds S.D.\u00a0 Chrostowska and James Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Balibar, \u201cAfter Utopia, Imagination?\u201d<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> \u00c9tienne Balibar, \u201cR\u00e9gulations, insurrections, utopies : pour un \u00ab socialisme \u00bb du xxie si\u00e8cle,\u201d in Histoire interminable<\/em> (Paris : La D\u00e9couverte, 2020), pages 264 \u00e0 298.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Balibar, \u201cR\u00e9gulations, insurrections, utopies,\u201d 292 (my translation).<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Balibar, \u201cR\u00e9gulations, insurrections, utopies,\u201d 292 (my translation).<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Balibar, \u201cR\u00e9gulations, insurrections, utopies,\u201d 278 (my translation).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Bernard E. Harcourt In the concluding passages of Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, Seyla Benhabib offers a roadmap for a new conception of utopia. Benhabib traces what she calls \u201cthe demise of… Continue Reading \n
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Notes<\/h1>\n