ABSTRACT
The demise of utopia after the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated an era where alternatives to the current social order were increasingly seen as either irrelevant or redundant by most people. The underlying belief was that liberal capitalism was the most sensible social, political and economic arrangement for sustainable and good society. Though not without shortcomings, it was to be preferred to the historical experiments (predominantly communist and socialist), which had been neglectful of individual freedom for the sake of totality or the collective. The history of the 20th century seemed to indicate beyond dispute that utopianism is a definitive cul-de-sac. Commenting on the fate of utopia in the post-1989 climate of opinion, German sociologist Wolf Lepenies claimed that ‘[t]wo years of unbelievable political change in Europe have been sufficient to proscribe the use of the word “utopia”. No one talks about utopia any more’ (Lepenies 1991: 8). Despite the fact that utopia was now largely discredited, there were still doubts about what the world of unfettered capitalism would turn out to be like. Scholars sympathetic to utopia like Indian sociologist Krishan Kumar argued that market-centred globalisation could seriously undermine culture and life-support systems on the planet. The question of social change would then emerge as a result of the planetary repercussions of capitalist development (Kumar 1993: 79). In hindsight, the concerns raised in the 1990s social thought about the fate
of societies deemed to be beyond history and ideology is something of an understatement. As John Gray (1998) anticipated before the turn of the millennium, the Brave New World of global capitalism was a false dawn. Its claim to equilibrium and prosperity was giving way to disillusionment in the face of upward redistribution and disenfranchisement of a large section of societies. The economic crisis of 2008 represented a new low for the legitimacy of systems based on individualism and consumerism. The damage done to the ‘life world’ was equally significant, as the remarkable acceleration of social life has led to self-alienation and alienation from others. And, true to the spirit of the time, now individuals have to overwhelmingly bear the burden of failure for their own actions and choices, which are perceived to have very limited
implications for institutional settings (Rosa 2010). Both meaning and fulfilment are found to be in short supply in an era where society is no more than the sum of its parts. Ernst Bloch and Zygmunt Bauman, whose views on utopia will be the topic
of this chapter, both vehemently reject the idea that we live in the best of possible worlds, and that we should settle for what currently exists (see Jacobsen 2003). Things could be different and above all better because as Bloch, going to the heart of his utopia, once stated: ‘The world is full of propensity towards something, tendency towards something, latency of something, and this intended something means fulfilment of the intending. It means a world which is more adequate for us, without degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation, nothingness’ (Bloch 1986: 18). It is exactly this strange and intoxicating ‘somethingness’ that is at the very heart of utopia and which sets utopia against degrading suffering, anxiety, self-alienation and nothingness. Social orders are therefore neither immutable nor fixed for good. Utopia for Bloch and Bauman is indispensable for navigating the social dynamic and purposefully creating life conditions worthy of humans. The leitmotif in the case of both is the idea of hope – an unquenchable hope for something else, something different, something better. The aim of this chapter is to probe utopia and the problems and potentials
of the concept in the works of Bloch and Bauman. We will begin with the ontology of the ‘Not Yet’ utopia in Bloch’s philosophy and his distinction between ‘concrete utopia’ and ‘abstract utopia’. Then we will turn to socialism as an ‘active utopia’ in Bauman’s early work Socialism: The Active Utopia (Bauman 1976a). Bauman’s cultural understanding of socialism as utopia in the 1970s will then be discussed in relation to Bloch’s dialectical materialism. Thereafter, the chapter will engage with art/music and morality, realms that Bauman and Bloch identify as utopian. This serves to illustrate the reality of utopia beyond (but not separate from) considerations of a better society and as being present in heterogeneous spheres of current reality. Finally, the chapter will engage with Bauman’s recent utopian thought in his liquid-modern writings. The transformation of utopia according to Bauman will be outlined as well as his political ideas to address excessive liquidity and one-sided individualisation. Despite strong overlapping concerns between Bauman’s recent thought and Bloch’s views, certain important differences remain between them, which will also be highlighted and discussed.
