AFTERUTOPIAA small research on utopian thinking in

a time of crisis and pessimism. Can Utopia be redefined?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia

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First of all utopianism is not ‘wishful thinking’. We should get rid of the negative connotations from the past. We need new fresh stories, drawing horizons not yet seen, offering new perspectives. We need a creative and free way of thinking to have a vision of how it can be or should be. A horizon to contextualize the present. To have a humble idea what is to come or what can be done.

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And Polo said: “The hell of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is what is already here, the hell we live in every day, that we make by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell, and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

THE LIFE COURSE OF ‘UTOPIA’

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THE LIFE COURSE OF ‘UTOPIA’

PARADISE IS

HISTORY

HISTORY PRESENT

ATLANTIS360 BC

THE REPUBLIC380 BC

PLATO427 BC - 327 BC

CITY OF GODEARLY 5TH CENTURY

THE PEACH BLOSSOM SPRING421

THE GOLDEN AGE700 BC

GARDEN OF EDEN6TH CENTURY BC

700BC - 1516

“Utopia has not always been a revolutionary idea or even one that is overtly political. In many cultures and throughout most of history, humanity has been haunted by the thought of a perfect society; but it has interpreted this asa memory of a lost paradise rather than a glimpse of an achievable future. Plato placed his ideal republic in a Golden Age before history, and until around two hun-dred years ago perfect societies were imagined as being situated in an irrecoverable past or else in distant places not recorded on any map. “John Gray, Black Mass

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PRESENT FUTURE

HISTORY PRESENT

PARADISE IS THE FUTURE

1516-1980

PRESENT FUTURE

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With the publishing of Utopia a huge shift in the perception of paradise was being made. Paradise wasn’t a historical event but became a future foresight, something that would be realised in the near or far future. Utopia was a start of many utopian and dystopian narratives, collec-tives, communities etc. Through the Age of enlightenment a even bigger belief in the power of science, technologies and the future emerged with it’s eruption in the shape of the science fiction genre.

UTOPIA1516

NEW ATLANTIS1627

NEWS FROM NOWHERE1890

EL LISSITZKY1890-1941

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO1848

FUTURISM1909-1916

PRESENT

END OF

HISTORY

1991-2001

PRESENT FUTURE

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THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN

1992

EUROPIAN UNION

ATLAS SHRUGGED1957 NEO-LIBERALISM

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Francis Fukuyama

“Neo-liberals believed a global free market was on the horizon; when it triumphed, peace and prosperity would be universal. […] Several different schools of economic theory were represented in the neo-lib-eral movement. Heavily influenced by Positivism, the Chicago School maintained that economics was a science containing universal laws just like the natural sciences.” John Gray, Black Mass

HISTORY PRESENT

END OF THE

FUTURE

2001 - ...

PRESENT

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“Capitalism has destroyed the conditions of recompo-sition, and society has become un-recomposable. The noncomposability of society means that the process of subjectivation cannot take place. This is why the future has lost its zest, and people have lost all trust in it, because the future no more appears as the object of a choice, and of collective conscious action, but is a kind of unavoidable catastrophe that we cannot oppose in any way.” Franco Berardi

AND THE

DEAD

OF UTOP

IA

To be honest, Utopia is dead. Utopia represents the idea of a single and non-parallel reality, a truth without multitudes and therefore has no legitimacy. It’s legitimacy lies in the need for alternatives, not in representing a new truth which is destroyed by our postmodern society.

AND THE

DEAD

OF UTOP

IA

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“While every Utopia claims to embody the best life for all of humankind, it is never more than one ideal among many. A society without private property or money may seem idyllic to some people but to others it looks like a vision of hell. For some it may seem obvious that a world ruled by altruism would be best, while for others it would be insufferably insipid. All societies contain divergent ideals of life.” John Gray, Black Mass

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REV

EALING T

HE

NEG

ATIVE

PROPERTIES

OF UTOPIA

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REV

EALING T

HE

NEG

ATIVE

PROPERTIES

OF UTOPIA

“...that the central problems of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle soluble; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole … this is common ground to the many varieties of reformist and revolutionary optimism” John Gray, Black Mass

NEGATIVE PROPERTIES

MAKEABILITY

ESCAPISM

POST-REVOLUTIONARY

ESCHATOLOGICAL

TOTALITARIAN

A

B

C

D

E

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GEOGRAPHICAL NON-PLACE

SERENITY

ONE-DIMENSIONAL

EGALITARIAN

F

G

H

I

CONVERTING THE NEGATIVEQUALITIES INTO A

NEW REALITY

“The artistic imagination, since 9/11, seems unable to escape the territory of fear and of despair. Will we ever find a path beyond the limits of the Dystopian Kingdom?” Franco Berardi, After the Future

CONVERTING THE NEGATIVEQUALITIES INTO A

NEW REALITY

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Utopia is damaged, obsolete. But content-wise most valuable. Utopia is misused and exploited in different ways. That is why we need a new narrative, a new context to build upon.

I see Utopia as ‘Untapped Reality (UR)’, ‘onbenutte werkelijkheid’. Redefined by the opposites of it’s negative properties. UR is not a new word for a perfect society but a framework for thinking of ways to create a better environment. Not by creating the one true narrative but to zoom out and to understand it’s context.

CONVERTEDQUALITITES

SERENDIPITY

OPEN SOURCE

EXISTENT

CONSTANT DISCOVERY

BORDERLESS ENTITIES

A

B

C

D

E

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UNTAPPED REALITY

VARIABLE

MULTIPLE

DISPARATE

F

G

H

I

“A dissenting vote shows the potential, the

untapped reality. In everything that happens,

there are heaps of things that do not happen,

that remain part of the fear, the desire, the

question that unofficially persists in the

limbo of opportunities. It is this reality that

never makes it to the newspapers because it

remains ambiguous. It’s meaning remains

unclear, it interlocks without having to fit,

these truths dissapear when someone

approaches them.” P.F. Thomese,

Het Raadsel der Verstaanbaarheid

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“Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion. The process of autonomization has not to be seen as Aufhebung, but as therapy. In this sense it is not totalizing and intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoana-lytic therapy it is rather to be considered as an unending process.” Franco Berardi, After the Future

11OOOOO1OOO1“Duality between the virtual and the real.”

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“Wave–particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties. A central concept of quantum mechanics, this duality addresses the inability of classicalconcepts like “particle” and “wave” to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects. A qubit in this case is not 0 or 1, but both 0 and 1!”

“The present ignorance has to be seen as the space of a possibility.”