ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some thoughts on the character of utopian thinking at the twilight of Western modernity. It suggests that the topography of utopia is now projected into the space of the virtual, an other worldly realm in which the most extravagant of possibilities are imagined. The social, political, philosophical, literary and artistic imaginaries of Western culture have long had, as a recurrent preoccupation, a concern with the utopian. Our culture imagines the Internet as a space in which either the unfulfilled promises of modernity might finally be realized or one in which such dreams find their final dissolution as the humanist vision is lost in a realm of technological hybridization, alienation, and domination. Beginning with the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, typified by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, techno-scientific dystopias remain a recurrent and increasingly dominant feature of modern cultural production. Gregory Claeys and Lyman T. Sargent give us useful insights into utopias as modes of cultural production.
