ABSTRACT
Utopia has been criticised as a place unrealistic and unsustainable by conservative commentators determined to deny the imagination of the visionary on behalf of a seemingly more sober estimation of the real and the possible. In the light of the ecological crisis, however, it is the dominant paradigm of production and consumption itself that looks like the manifestation of an impossible dream. The fantasy of the transnational capitalist utopia is generally fudged in the haze of white noise along with which it is extended and marketed; yet it is as startlingly simple – and wholeheartedly as mythic – as any great vision of clarity, hope and purpose. The dominant paradigm represents an unceasing dream of eternal youth in a city of unending plenty. The spectacular successes of industrialised modernity bear this front along like the crest of an ever-breaking wave, while the foundation upon which its materialism is built – the empirical verifiability of stuff – helps to cement an aura of reasoned argument. That this success comes at a high ecological cost, we all know – so why is it so hard to arrest the malignant aspects of postmodern development while maintaining the benign? Exactly because of the combination of material success and fanciful ideal, the satisfied bodily and social desires and the mythic realm of wish fulfilment that accompanies them; in short, because the pleasure principle and its unboundedly selfish craving precedes the reality principle and continually strives to spring past it. But while a psychoanalytic interpretation of the dominant paradigm’s utopian dreaming would doubtless yield insightful results, it is Ernst Bloch and his sprawling epic The Principle of Hope (1995 [1959]), that most saliently presages this recognition: that the really unsustainable utopian dreaming of today is expressed in the growth and profit model of capitalistic production and consumption.
