ABSTRACT
We can begin to think about the relationship between imperialism and utopia by considering Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that philosophical thought has truly ourished in two specic historical epochs: the Greek city state and the world market (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 98). In both cases what is especially propitious for philosophical thought is “the connection of an absolute plane of immanence with a relative social milieu that also functions through immanence” (1994: 98). In the Greek city state immanence is constructed politically, in the market it is created economically. These in turn correspond to two versions of utopia: product or blueprint utopia corresponds as a mode of thought to the politically constructed immanence of the agora, where the thrust of utopian thought is to arrive at collective agreement about “the good” or “justice”, “the ideal society” and so on. Process utopianism,
on the other hand, corresponds to the deterritorialization and decoding characteristic of the world market, where agreeing on content is less important than identifying multiple forces of production of the new that are active in a given socio-historical milieu. The former is a matter of ideal representation, while the latter is diagnostic rather than representative.
