ABSTRACT
The twentieth first century arrived with the death of the future. It had been invented in 1789, with the French Revolution. Later, the October Revolution gave hope and the utopia of emancipation. It all ended in tragedy. The collapse of the Communist bloc marked the end of the ‘short’ twentieth century and the eclipse of political utopias. Fast forward to the year 2008 with the sudden collapse of the world financial markets, the consequent return of Keynes in economic and political discourse, and the re-emergence of the question of architecture and utopia today, the chapter explains that unlike what Tafuri had argued for the state of modern architecture around 1930, there is no question of a direct correspondence between the current architectural Restoration and Keynesianism today. In exploring the idea of Utopia, the chapter discusses Ernst Bloch’s definition that ‘utopia is prefiguration, the realm of “not yet” (noch nicht)’. In our time of Restoration, we stand inside a nontransparent ‘darkness of the lived moment’ that prompts us to ask: What notion of utopia might be appropriate to the Manifesto form in this work? I follow Žižek’s suggestion that utopia is the ‘gesture’ which changes the ‘co-ordinates of the present’.
