Critical Review of International Social and Political

Philosophy

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For Utopia: The (limits of the) Utopian function in

late capitalist society
Ruth Levitas
To cite this article: Ruth Levitas (2000) For Utopia: The (limits of the) Utopian function in late
capitalist society, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 3:2-3, 25-43,
DOI: 10.1080/13698230008403311
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698230008403311

Published online: 25 Sep 2007.

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For Utopia: The (Limits of the)

Utopian Function in Late Capitalist
Society
RUTH LEVITAS
This article is about the uses of Utopia, and the uses of Utopian studies,
in the present historical conjuncture: under conditions of late modernity,
at the start of a new millennium. It argues that these conditions
(particularly, but not only, what might be called the 'postmodern turn' in
social and cultural theory) pose very fundamental challenges to the
project and projection of Utopia. Responses to these emergent challenges
can be seen in changes in Utopian thinking, including Utopian texts, over
the past 30 years, and in the theorisation of Utopia, the stuff of Utopian
studies itself. These transformations involve a greater provisionally and
reflexivity of the Utopian mode, and a marked shift from an emphasis on
representation or content to an emphasis on process. While it can be
argued that these changes demonstrate the continuing strength of
utopianism, a strong case can also be made for an opposite view: that the
ways in which Utopians and utopists (those who study Utopia) have
responded to the condition of late modernity reflect a weakening of the
transformative potential of Utopia. Utopia survives, but at a cost, and
that cost is the retreat of the Utopian function from transformation to
critique.1
Why Study Utopia?
The article is also a defence of Utopia, and a claim for the necessity of
taking it seriously. The title begs several questions. The term 'utopian
function' raises the question 'what is Utopia for?'. 'For', here, carries the
sense of instrumentality or purpose attributed to Utopia itself. 'For
Utopia' asserts a commitment to Utopian studies, and to Utopia itself, on
my own part, and presumes such a commitment on the part of Utopian

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF UTOPIA

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scholars or utopists. Implicitly, therefore, it asks what Utopian studies is

for. This is dangerous ground: the April 1999 British Sociological
Association conference had the theme 'What is Sociology For?'. Laurie
Taylor (1999, p.56) wrote a (spoof) abstract of a paper by Doctor D.W.
Haberperson entitled 'What is "For" For?':
This convoluted paper examines the rhetorical assumptions
implicated within the interrogative formulation, 'What is Sociology
For?'. After an almost interminable introduction in which repeated
references are made to Derrida, Lacan and Foucault, the author
proceeds to delineate the socio-cultural circumstances and
epistemic regimes that are an essentialist precondition for framing
a question about an academic discipline that rests upon the implied
instrumentality of the word 'for'. No conclusions whatsoever are
reached.
There are different reasons why intellectuals and academics might be
interested in studying Utopia. First, since Utopia is the expression of what
is missing, of the experience of lack in any given society or culture,
understanding the Utopian aspirations generated by any society is an
important part of understanding that society itself. The study of Utopia
is an essential part of cultural anthropology or the history or sociology
of culture. Utopianism is proper material for historians, anthropologists,
sociologists, and for cultural studies. In so far as Utopia takes the form of
a literary text, it becomes material for literary criticism of various kinds.
Second, Utopia in the sense of a counterfactual model of all or part of a
social or political system, may be used as a heuristic device, as an
exploration of what might be possible or impossible, or in normative
social theory, as a regulative ideal against which the real world can be
measured. Third, we may study Utopia, in terms of its content or its
effects in the world, because we believe the aspirations of others, and
their attempts to articulate the features of a good society, constitute a
resource for us in our own pursuit of the good society.
My suspicion (and my experience) is that most utopists are also to
some extent Utopians. My own interest in Utopia (and, indeed, in
sociology) has always been driven by the conviction that the worid could
and should be other than it is. But this does raise questions about the
proper role of academics. Whereas the first two reasons for an interest
in Utopia are safe and uncontentious, because they do not require
commitment to political change, the third reason presumes political
engagement. More than that, it presumes that political engagement is a

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27

core element, even the core purpose, of this particular field of

intellectual enquiry. Academia, however, is inclined to justify its
existence and its call on the public purse precisely on the grounds of
being politically neutral and disengaged. There may, therefore, be a
tension between the demands placed on us as academics and those placed
on us as engaged intellectuals.2 This tension is not peculiar to utopists,
but may be peculiarly acute for us because of Utopia's 'radical otherness'
and because of the potential functions of Utopian thinking.
The Functions of Utopia
The three possible approaches to the study of Utopia are roughly
paralleled by the different possible functions of Utopia itself.
Distinguishing these functions depends on the definition of Utopia itself,
without which no sensible discussion can take place. There is a tendency
to think of Utopia as being one of two things: either a totalitarian
political project, or a literary genre of fictions about perfect societies.
Both these approaches are very different from that of Ernst Bloch
(1986), whose 1400-page Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope)
is the most important theoretical treatment of Utopia. Bloch's argument
was that the propensity to reach for a better life is manifest in everyday
life, in popular culture, in 'high' culture, and in religion. It is a way of
expressing the experience of lack, of dissatisfaction, of 'something's
missing', in the actuality of human existence. Expressions of Utopian
longing are not necessarily profound: at one point he wrote 'most people
in the street look as if they are thinking about something else entirely.
The something else is predominantly money, but also what it could be
changed into.' (Bloch, 1986, p.33.) Following from Bloch, it is possible
to develop a broad definition of Utopia which encompasses this range of
Utopian expression: namely, that Utopia is the expression of the desire
for a better way of being. Such a definition is analytic rather than
descriptive, that is, it enables one to look at the Utopian aspects of
cultural forms rather than classify them into Utopian or not Utopian (and
is thus singularly and properly unhelpful in setting boundaries for
'utopian studies'). But it enables us to ask questions about the historical
shifts in the content, form, location and function of Utopia, and the ways
in which specific social and historical circumstances encourage or block
different kinds of Utopian expression and sensibility.3
The suggestion that Utopia is expressive immediately calls into
question the idea that it is 'for' anything: is it, perhaps, expressive rather

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than instrumental? To talk about the function of ideas or institutions is

always to risk confusing purpose and effect, and there is some point in
separating these. For while the expression of lack and of desire may have
no purpose beyond itself, no deliberate instrumentality, it may
nonetheless have political effects. In this sense, we can think of Utopia as
potentially having three functions: compensation, critique and change.
'Nowhere, the place of our own',4 may simply be somewhere that we go
to as an escape: into our daydreams about winning the lottery, and thus
perhaps having the resources to escape physically. Most lottery winners
buy a new house - and this can be seen as the creation of a personal
Utopian enclave, as was Monet's garden at Giverny. On a smaller scale,
endless television programmes, such as Changing Rooms, Ground Force
and Charlie's Army, are dedicated to the transformation of homes and
gardens - programmes which have the additional fantasy element of
someone else doing the work. The other escape dreamed of by millions
and favoured by lottery winners is travel: the travel industry is probably
the most significant repository of compensatory Utopian dreams, and
advertises itself in explicitly Utopian, or at least paradisaical, terms. This
dreaming transforms only the dreamer's place in the world, not the
world itself - or not directly or intentionally, although of course both
the travel industry and the DIY industry have profound physical, social
and economic effects both locally and globally.
Utopia may be more critical than this. It is implicit in Bloch's
argument that even the most compensatory of Utopian fantasies has some
critical function, as it articulates the sense that the present is
unsatisfactory. But Utopia as critique (as, for example, in More's Utopia)
foregrounds this and makes it explicit. Identifying the problem as
somehow more general than one's own position in the world is a
necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for Utopia's third
function, that of catalysing change. Utopia's strongest function, its claim
to being important rather than a matter of esoteric fascination and
charm, is its capacity to inspire the pursuit of a world transformed, to
embody hope rather than simply desire.
Furthermore, if there is a tension between the intellectual and
political motivations of utopists, so there is a tension between the
expressive and instrumental functions of Utopia, between desire and
hope. Part of the appeal of Bloch's work is that he insists on the
importance of all forms of dreaming of a better life, all forms of thinking
beyond the present, including those that are pre-political expressions of
desire. But his major work was called The Principle of HOPE. Bloch, like

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all other utopists for whom the ultimate value of Utopia lay in its
transformative potential, was forced to make a distinction between
wishful and will-full thinking, between abstract and concrete Utopia,
which is ultimately a distinction between desire and hope.5 Raymond
Williams argued that the willed transformation of the social world was
an essential characteristic of the Utopian mode, and that without this
there was the danger of Utopia settling into 'isolated and in the end
sentimental "desire", a mode of living with alienation' (1980, p.203);
one of his pieces was called Resources For A Journey Of Hope, and a
posthumous collection simply Resources of Hope.
Challenges to Utopia: 'Old' Anti-Utopianism
Where are we now placed in relation to these possible functions of
Utopia, and the distinction between desire and hope? The year 1999 saw
the publication of at least three anthologies of Utopias: John Carey's
Faber Book of Utopias; a Penguin volume, simply called Utopias (Kelly,
1999); and Claeys and Sargent's The Utopia Reader. The Centre for the
Human Sciences at Durham and the Critical Theory Group at Bristol
conducted seminar series on Utopia and the millennium. There was an
international conference called 'A Millennium of Utopias' at the
University of East Anglia in June. Despite this upsurge of interest in
utopianism, and despite much millennial hype, popular social thought
does not appear to be filled with Utopian hopes for the future apocalypse, yes; Utopia, not so obviously. Apocalyptic fears were
attached to the 'Y2K bug', although in the event, disaster failed to
strike;6 and the survivalist movement (especially in the USA) had a new
lease of life as people stockpiled supplies for the millennium. In April
1999, there were two apocalyptic and dystopian series running on
British terrestrial television. One was The Tribe, in which all adults are
wiped out by a mystery virus, leaving young people to form themselves
into scavenging bands and warring gangs, or simply to hang out
streetwise in semi-derelict shopping malls. The other was The Last Train,
in which the world is destroyed by a meteorite. A group of passengers in
a train in a tunnel between Chesterfield and Sheffield are cryogenically
preserved thanks to a canister of gas released by one of them, and thaw
out 50 years later for an action-packed journey through ruins.
Admittedly, Utopia is resurrected right at the end, since the protagonists
discover that 'the ones we were running from are the ones we were
looking for', and hostilities (including a couple of crucifixions) are ended

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by the prospect of new hope for the future symbolised by a baby (or two)
and a bit of new age music. Perhaps this does distinguish millennial
dreams from those of the 1980s. The last apocalyptic television drama
set in Sheffield was the post-nuclear Threads, which also ended with a
birth, but the final shot was of the mother's horrified scream at the sight
of her child. Cinema in the 1990s is replete with images of Utopia as
dystopia, as in The Truman Show and Pleasantville, or straightforward
dystopias such as Dark City and The Matrix - the latter being the cult
video sold in huge numbers for Christmas 1999 in the UK.7 True, the
hugely popular film Antz has a Utopian theme, but 'insectopia' is a
rubbish heap, and the clear reference to Metropolis in the ant world itself
is satirical. These trends need not reflect unremitting pessimism: as
Rafaella Baccolini (1999) argues, 'the critical dystopia is the preferred
form of resistance at the end of the century'; but resistance and survival,
rather than transformation and redemption, are the best that can be
hoped for. Despite the millennium, we may be said to live in dystopian
times, in that both reality and most projections for the future are deeply
depressing or downright terrifying.
These are also anti-utopian times. Russell Jacoby (1999) deplores
The End of Utopia, the absence of any transforming imagination or
energy in contemporary political culture. Anti-utopianism involves an
active denial of the merits of imagining alternative ways of living,
particularly if they constitute serious attempts to argue that the world
might or should be otherwise. Political anti-utopianism was intensified at
the end of the 1980s. When the communist regimes of eastern Europe
collapsed, there were repeated references to the 'end of Utopia'. The
discourse of Anglo-American news coverage contained implicit (and
sometimes explicit) equations:

Utopia = Totalitarianism = Communism = Marxism = Socialism

and
Communism = Totalitarianism = Fascism.

Some ten years on, the spate of television programmes representing

those events as history was framed within the same discourse. The BBC's
War of the Century argued that the massive loss of life (both military and
civilian) in the nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was as much Stalin's
fault as Hitler's, despite fascinating archive footage and contemporary
testimony which suggested rather the reverse. In addition, almost on the
eve of the millennium, Channel 4 broadcast Hitler and Stalin: Twin

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Tyrants, a lengthy interwoven parallel biography - although this did

mention in passing that some people still thought that there were
important and substantive differences between the two. Partly as a result
of this discourse, capitalism is widely held to be the only game in town,
and the range of political alternatives in much of Europe has narrowed
to disputations about the true third way: Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder
versus Lafontaine and Jospin. Post-1989, it might be said that we live, in
an almost biblical sense, after the fall, but with no hope of redemption.
On the other hand, it is arguable that this kind of anti-utopianism is a
constant feature of the dominant ideology, even if its targets change, and
that Utopian currents are identifiable in the growth of nationalism, in
green ideas and movements, and elsewhere. The third way might be
analysed as a Utopia, and is occasionally represented by its proponents as
such (Giddens, 1995; 1998). However, this is best understood as the
incorporation and suppression of utopianism, rather than an opening up
to its radical and transformative potential. What is asserted here as
permissible, for instance in Rorty's (1998) endorsement of 'romantic
utopianism', is a pragmatic, limited reformism - the very pragmatism
which is essentially anti-utopian in its rejection of radical Utopian
otherness or fundamental social transformation. Even Immanuel
Wallerstein rejects utopianism in favour of what he terms 'utopistics'
(that is, possible, 'realistic' futures), although his pragmatism is less
reformist than Rorty's since he still apparently believes in some kind of
cataclysmic collapse of global capitalism. The terms of Wallerstein's
rejection of Utopia are conventional:
The real problem with all Utopias ... is not only that they have
existed nowhere heretofore but that they seem to me, and to many
others, dreams of heaven that could never exist on earth. Utopias
have religious functions and they can also sometimes be
mechanisms of political mobilisation. But politically they tend to
rebound. For Utopias are breeders of illusions and therefore,
inevitably, of disillusions. And Utopias can be used, have been used,
as justifications for terrible wrongs. The last thing we really need is
more Utopian visions. (Wallerstein, 1999, p.l.)

Challenges to Utopia: Postmodernity and Utopia

The political case against Utopia is not new. It argues that where there is
vision, the people perish. It imputes to Utopia both a claim to perfection,

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which is then dismissed as impossible, and the imposition of uniformity

on Utopia's inhabitants, rejected as immoral. It argues that Utopia can be
realised only by violence and maintained only by political repression.
Utopia is totalitarian. These arguments are familiar, and the responses to
them have been frequently rehearsed. Utopian writers do not all claim
that their systems are perfect; usually, just that they are considerably
better than those actually prevailing at the time of writing. Not all
Utopias are totalitarian; some, indeed (and William Morris's News from
Nowhere is conventionally cited here, but Marge Piercy's Woman on the
Edge of Time would be a more recent example) are quite the reverse.
Furthermore, Jacoby argues strongly that the attribution of the genocidal
consequences of nazism and Stalinism to 'utopianism' is historically
sloppy, not to say ideological.
A much more interesting set of challenges (more interesting
because more ambiguous, and both theoretical and political) arises
from the condition of postmodernity. Here, the negative consequences
of Utopia are attributed to the pitfalls of modernity, in particular,
to the post-Enlightenment insistence on reason and universal values,
which is potentially totalitarian. The challenges revolve around
questions of hope and desire, and the distinction between them.
Postmodernity and postmodernism are such broadly used terms that a
little clarification may be in order. The term 'postmodernity' can be
used to refer to a structural change in the nature of the society we live
in, or a broad cultural, political and theoretical condition which results
from this structural change, or a narrower artistic or aesthetic
movement more properly termed 'postmodernism', or any combination
of these. The question of the relationship between postmodernity and
modernity, or postmodernism and modernism, has occupied many
hours of scholarly time and will doubtless figure prominently in many
RAE returns (the RAE is the British university system's 'Research
Assessment Exercise', on the basis of which state funding is distributed)
as well as having caused the destruction of a large number of trees. In
all three senses, and especially at the structural level, what is called
postmodernity can be seen to be an intensification and continuation of
trends within modernism, as much as a sharp break from it.
Furthermore, especially at the structural level, it may be preferable to
talk about late modernity or even late capitalism. Thus postmodernity
in the broad cultural sense, and postmodernism in the narrower sense,
can be seen, as Fredric Jameson (1984; 1991) argues, as the cultural
logic of late capitalism.

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To say that postmodernity presents a challenge to Utopia is not an

uncontroversial statement. Tobin Siebers, for example, argues that far
from this being the case, postmodernism embraces Utopia, that indeed
'utopia has emerged as the high concept of postmodernism' (1994,
pp.2-3). Utopia is essentially about desire, and 'postmodernism turns on
questions of desire'. Aesthetics is central to postmodern theory because
objects of art are 'allegories of desire'. Desire is central to
postmodernism. This is certainly born out by Deleuze and Guattari's
Anti-Oedipus (1984), one of postmodernism's founding texts, which was
first published in 1972. Deleuze and Guattari object to both Freudian
and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The Oedipal triangle, they argue, is
a formulaic representation which does not describe the 'natural'
development of desire, frustration, and healthy transcendence or
otherwise. Rather, Freudian psychoanalysis demands that we understand
our blocked desires in terms of the Oedipus myth, which both constrains
and denies our experience, and proves our desires to have been
illegitimate in the first place. Desire should be understood as a much
more various complex of libidinal flows, and indeed substantive flows of
milk, shit and semen (it is a very androcentric text). Desire is not
oriented solely sexually, nor is it oriented to parental figures, but to
fragmentary, partial objects. Their argument also differs from Lacan in
two ways. The centrality of the phallus, like the Oedipal triangle, is a
totalising myth, which denies the fragmented character of flows of
desire. Moreover, it intrinsically links desire to lack, a formulation which
Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly oppose (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984;
Goodchild, 1996).
Desire is also central to utopianism. But Williams (1980, p.200)
argues, perhaps in implicit response to Deleuze, 'We cannot abstract desire.
It is always desire for something specific, in specifically impelling
circumstances.' Bloch does connect desire with lack. 'What is missing' is
central not only to Bloch, but to most of critical theory. For Bloch, the
importance of Utopian imagining, even abstract Utopia, is precisely that it
is difficult to identify a lack, a desire, other than in terms of what
might fulfil it. Representation is thus the first step to fulfilment, although
representation is also usually (and perhaps necessarily) misrepresentation.
Arguably, Utopia requires the representation, the objectification, of
desire. In Siebers' collection, Utopia is focused on the body as the locus
of desire and human happiness. One might argue that this is a kind of
utopianism which is expressive of desire (despite the fact that Deleuze
and Guattari specifically argue against conceptualising desire as

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expressive), rather than instrumental and transformative, although it

would be more true to say that the shift is in what is to be transformed
(compare Sargisson, 2000), since postmodern aesthetics involve the
willed transformation of the body by ornament, diet, exercise and
surgical intervention. As David Morris argues, 'utopia in the postmodern
era has largely fixed its new location in the solitary, private, individual
body', reflecting 'a belief that the only valid remaining space of
perfection lies ... in our own individual flesh: a paradise of curves and
muscle' (Siebers, 1994, p. 152). If Utopian thought of all kinds is
expressive of a desire for a better way of being, its projection onto the
body, rather than the body politic, may be seen as an important retreat
from hope, at least social hope, to desire. Furthermore, it is a retreat
from understanding desire, as Deleuze and Guattari, Reich, and Marcuse
did, in terms of a libidinal energy suffusing the realm of the social, and
thus fuelling capitalism and fascism as well as their potential Utopian
alternatives. For these writers, desire may emanate from the body in an
essentialist, vitalist way, but it does not stay there.
The suggestion that postmodernity challenges Utopia itself rests on
certain assumptions about what we mean by Utopia. It arises from the
essentially anti-foundational character of postmodern culture, an antifoundationalism which is epistemological and moral, but it constitutes a
challenge in so far as Utopia entails claims about truth and about
morality. For example, Lyotard's challenge to 'grand narratives' does not
augur well for projecting into the future wholesale schemes of social
transformation (if that is how we understand Utopia). The
'deconstruction of the subject' undermines the possibility of discussing
interests beyond the self-defined identity and identification of
individuals, so that collectivities are theoretically disintegrated into
selves, and further into fragmentary selves. Moral and ethical absolutes
are impossible; the claim that one society is better than another (a claim
perhaps fundamental to the Utopian project) is undermined. Even the
idea of society itself as in some sense a totality, a concept which
underpins the whole notion of social science, as well as Utopia as a
society transformed (if that is how we understand Utopia), is called into
question. There is not just a loss of hope in the sociai, but a loss of belief
in it. Krishan Kumar commenting on this anti-utopian character of
contemporary social theory, argues that if postmodernists are right, 'it is
not simply that "there aren't any good or brave causes left" to fight for
anymore', but that there cannot be (1996, p. 135). The quest for Utopia
in this reading is an irretrievably modernist project (compare Clark,

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1999). Notably, the Penguin Utopias collection (Kelly, 1999) is subtitled

Russian Modernist Texts 1905-1940. One does not, in fact, have to be
particularly sympathetic to postmodernism to recognise the essential
contingency of our moral and conceptual frameworks; we are all
pluralists now. If we see Utopia as intrinsically evaluative about ways of
life, then pluralism and the recognition of cultural difference certainly
pose a problem. The kind of Utopia implied, though, in this reading of
postmodernism as anti-utopian is a totalising (though not therefore
totalitarian) representation which is holistic, social, future located,
unequivocally better and linked to the present by some identifiable
narrative.
This is, I would argue, a mistaken view of Utopia, but it is not wholly
mistaken, so these are quite fundamental challenges to the project and
projection of Utopia. I used to think that the changes in utopianism itself,
illustrated both by changes in Utopian literary texts and in critical
responses to these over the past 30 years, demonstrated that Utopia could
answer these challenges. A move from representation to process has
marked both the texts and the way in which Utopia is understood (as, in
Miguel Abensour's terms, heuristic rather than systematic) so that Utopia
in the former sense is either dead or on the point of disappearance. But
if, as Thomas Osborne suggests is the case for postmodernists, 'hope is
heuristic not telic', does it really qualify as hope at all?8 To put it another
way, do the ways in which Utopians and utopists have responded to the
conditions of postmodernity reflect a weakening of the transformative
potential of Utopia?
The Utopian Mode
Abensour argued in the 1970s that after 1850 there was a significant
disjuncture in Utopian thought. The 'systematic' mode, which involves
constructing blueprints was replaced by the 'heuristic' mode, in which
Utopias become exploratory projections of alternative values merely
sketched as an alternative way of life. The dating and the completeness
of the shift is questionable. Abensour was primarily making a point about
the reading of William Morris's News from Nowhere, written in 1890,
but Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) approximates more
closely to the systematic approach. However, the fact that such claims
can be made about late nineteenth-century Utopias underlines the point
that postmodernity develops, rather than contradicts tendencies present
in modernism itself - or else suggests that postmodernism started very

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early indeed. There is a difference, though, between even Morris's

heuristic Utopia and what Tom Moylan (1986) has called the critical
Utopias of the 1970s.
There is a sense in which Morris's Utopia (unlike Bellamy's) is
provisional, reflexive and pluralist. But it is provisional and reflexive
largely in the sense that Morris understood this to be a necessary feature
of Utopian speculation. He thought it both necessary and ultimately
impossible to have a vision of the future. It was, he said, 'essential that
the ideal of the future be kept before the eyes of the working classes, lest
the continuity of the demands of the people be broken, or lest they be
misdirected' (Morris and Bax, 1893, p.278). He understood that all such
constructions must be provisional, since our capacity to imagine the
future is socially limited: 'It is impossible to build a scheme for the
society of the future, for no man can really think himself out of his own
days.' (Morris and Bax, 1893, pp.17-18.) Morris is very clear about the
contingency of his own vision and of Bellamy's, and warns against literal
readings. 'The only safe way of reading a Utopia is to consider it as the
expression of the temperament of its author.' The danger is that Utopias
will not be read in this way, since 'incomplete systems impossible to be
carried out are always attractive to people ripe for change, but not
knowing clearly what their aim is' (Morris, 1984, p.248). News from
Nowhere endorses pluralism too. Nation states have been abolished, we
are told, allowing for the flourishing of cultural diversity between
peoples. But although the endorsement takes place within the text, the
diversity itself is placed outside the England of Nowhere: 'Cross the
water and see. You will find plenty of variety: the landscape, the building,
the diet, the amusements, all various.' (Morris, 1924, pp.99-100.)
Political difference is accommodated through a system of direct
democracy, but it is a system which essentially works because there are
only differences of opinion about the nature of the common interest, not
differences of interest themselves.
In the Utopian texts of the 1970s, reflexivity and provisionality about
the status of the Utopian text become features of the text itself. As
Moylan argued in Demand the Impossible, these Utopias have a different,
more fragmented narrative structure than earlier Utopias. The discrete
register (which concerns plot and character) is foregrounded, and the
iconic register (which describes the social structure of both the Utopian
society and its foil) recedes. The societies portrayed are decentralised
and differentiated. There is a process of self-interrogation within the
Utopian society, so that its values and institutions are less unequivocally

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endorsed. Many novels contain possible dystopian futures, as well as

Utopian ones, breaking down the sense of a necessary, determined move
toward Utopia, the dependence on a grand narrative. As Williams said of
Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, originally subtitled 'an ambiguous
Utopia', 'the Utopian impulse now warily, self-questioningly, and setting
its own limits, renews itself (1980, p.212).
All these features are present in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge
of Time. So, too, is a cultural pluralism, deliberately and actively
separated from any connection with 'race'. This aspect of pluralism is a
little unconvincing, in that culture appears as an optional add-on to a
whole way of life, rather than an intrinsic part of it, but it is very much
more present than in Nowhere. The political process is also presented as
more contested than in Nowhere, for here there may be differences of
interest to resolve. Argument simply continues until agreement is
reached, and after a major dispute, the winners have to feed the losers
and give presents. The response to a question about how differences are
resolved is 'we argue - how else?' (Piercy, 1979, p.153.)
Jurgen Habermas (1989) argues that the shift to late modernity
produced a shift in Utopian thought such that it is no longer possible to
say anything about the nature of Utopia itself, but only the
communicative processes by which it may be negotiated. Thus the only
kind of Utopia which is possible is the processual and communicative. In
practice, such claims tend to sneak assumptions about the actual
character of Utopia in by the back door, in so far as they explicitly or
implicitly posit the conditions under which such dialogue may be
possible. But the problem with 'we argue - how else?' (especially in a
society which is not, as Piercy's Utopia is not, culturally homogeneous) is
that it presumes that argument will result in resolution. There is, it
seems, not only an assumption that shared interests dominate over
conflicting ones, but also no dispute over the terms of the debate, the
procedures of discussion, and the frame of the argument.
A more radical challenge to the Utopian imagination arises if this
frame is contested. How can Utopia handle the possibility of
fundamental conflicts of interest, or absence of agreement on the rules
of the game? Perhaps it cannot. Incommensurability enters into the
Utopia largely as a dystopian shadow. Arguably, it can only enter in this
way, if Utopia is a space for the fictional resolution of problems that
humankind has not (yet) solved. The first volume of Kim Stanley
Robinson's Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), presents a picture of
incommensurable cultures and value positions within cultures. The issue

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of language and translation is a common vehicle for such questions

(Cavalcanti, 1999), as in Suzette Elgin's novel Native Tongue (1985), or
the Irish singer Christy Moore's (1994) lament 'Natives', which begins
'For all of our languages, we can't communicate; for all of our native
tongues, we're all natives here...'. The biblical figuration of this is the
Tower of Babel, which seems to be recurring with increasing frequency
even in novels which are not part of an explicitly Utopian or dystopian
genre, such as A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower (1997) and Paul Auster's The
New York Trilogy (1987).
Theorising Utopia
The shift to a greater pluralism, provisionality and reflexivity in the
substance of Utopia has been paralleled by a theorisation of Utopia which
treats it as heuristic rather than telic. This, like the texts themselves,
focuses on process rather than content, but the process in question is one
of dialogue with, rather than within, the text. It sees the function of
Utopia as poised between expressive and instrumental functions. There is
a convergence between neo-Marxism, critical theory, postmodernism,
and feminism' in thinking about Utopia in terms of desire, in terms of
process rather than content, in terms of how the text works rather than
(simply) what it means.
Abensour, for example, argues for understanding the function of
Utopian texts in terms of desire, not expressively or instrumentally in the
sense of desire for the object portrayed in the text, but in terms of how
the text acts on the act of desiring. This was taken up both by Edward
Thompson and Raymond Williams, who remarks that Bellamy's Utopia
is 'in a significant way a work without desire' (Williams, 1980, p.202).
To read a Utopia is to embark on an adventure:
And in such an adventure two things happen: our habitual values
(the 'common sense' of bourgeois society) are thrown into disarray.
And we enter into Utopia's proper and new-found space, the
education of desire. This is not the same as 'a moral education'
towards a different end: it is, rather, to open a way to aspiration,
to 'teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and
above all to desire in a different way' (Thompson, 1976,
pp.790-91).
Utopia here, even the Utopian text, is not a naturalistic representation of
the good society, but the catalyst of a process in which the reader is an

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active agent. The central characteristic of this process is the disruption

and transgression of the normative and conceptual frameworks of
everyday experience, and the provision of a space within which it is
possible to imagine not just the satisfaction of familiar wants unmet by
existing society, but to envisage wanting something other than the
satisfactions which that society endorses and simultaneously denies:
above all, to desire in a different way.
Anglophone utopists, notably Moylan and Jameson, develop a
similar argument. The function of Utopian fiction is no longer to be seen
as providing an outline of a social system to be interrogated literally in
terms of its structural properties, and treated as a goal. The Utopian
function is estrangement and defamiliarisation, rendering the taken-forgranted world problematic, and calling into question the actually
existing state of affairs, not the imposition of a plan for the future.
Again, what is most important about Utopia is less what is imagined than
the act of imagination itself, a process which disrupts the closure of the
present. For Jameson,10 as for Abensour, this process circles around the
question of desire: 'we might think of the new onset of the Utopian
process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention
of the desire called Utopia in the first place' (Jameson, 1994, p.90) - a
passage bearing a remarkable similarity to Abensour's.
One of the consequences of this reading of Utopia as heuristic rather
than systematic, exploratory rather than prescriptive, is that it provides
an alibi for what otherwise might be seen as the weaknesses, absences
and failures of the iconic register of the Utopian text - the limitations of,
for example, both Morris's and Piercy's treatment of cultural and
political pluralism. Jameson goes further and suggests that these failures
do not need an alibi. Failure is less the characteristic of particular
representations of Utopia, more an inevitable part of the process of trying
to think Utopia itself. It is habitual to think of Utopia as that which is
imagined, but Jameson argues (like Marx and Morris) that Utopia is
literally unimaginable. That which can be imagined always falls short of
Utopia, so that Utopian texts, for example, 'bring home in local and
determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our
constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself (Jameson, 1982, p.153);
they enable the exploration of the structural limits of what we can
imagine 'in order to get a better sense of what it is about the future that
we are unable or unwilling to imagine' (Jameson, 1998, p.76). The
function of the Utopian text is 'to provoke ... to jar the mind into some
heightened but unconceptualizable consciousness of its own powers,

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functions, aims and structural limits' (Jameson, cited in Siebers, 1994,

p.94). Clark similarly stresses the importance of failure as a crucial
feature of modernism (rather than postmodernism!) in art, a movement
which he sees as intrinsically Utopian, claiming that 'the courting of
failure and indescribability is one main key to ... the visual culture of the
last two hundred years' (1999, p. 164). His reasons are perhaps similar to
Jameson's: 'It is only in discovering the system [of representation's]
antinomies and blank spots - discovering them in practice I mean - that
the first improvised forms of contrary imagining come to light.' (Clark,
1999, p.165.) For Jameson, referring back to Louis Marin (1984), Utopia
is always 'organised ... around a blind spot or a vanishing point'
(Jameson, 1998, p.75), a point of disappearance."
These appealing formulations may show how Utopia and Utopian
interpretation have adapted to the postmodern requirement for
provisionality, reflexivity and pluralism. On the other hand, these
adaptations themselves have dangers and limitations. One danger is the
adoption of a kind of pathological pluralism, in which the
acknowledgement of the positions and standpoints of others effectively
undermines the capacity to occupy, even critically and provisionally, a
ground of one's own, so that commitment is impossible. It is unclear that
Utopia thus understood can move beyond the function of critique, the
disruption of the ideological closure of the present. But the
transformative function of Utopia requires the disruption of the
structural closure of the present, and it requires us to imagine both what
this might mean and how it might be possible, in order that we may be
able to hope. A 'heightened but unconceptualizable consciousness' of the
mind's own powers will not do. Perhaps forms of Utopian thought which
are more than expressive of desire are intrinsically holistic, totalising and
evaluative. Perhaps prescription is necessary. As Raymond Williams once
said, we must define ourselves in terms of what we are for, not just what
we are against. Content, not just process, remains essential. It is, of
course, also essential that Utopia embraces provisionality, reflexivity and
pluralism, and that Utopians recognise the contingency of their hopes
and desires. This is not incompatible with commitment, with taking
responsibility in conditions where there can be no cpistemological,
moral or historical certainty. The effective synthesis of provisionality and
responsibility may be the condition of keeping Utopia open as a space in
which to reach out to the real possibility of a transformed future.

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NOTES
1. I have been helped and forced to clarify my argument by utopists and others on
several occasions in 1999, including by participants in the conferences on
'Nowhere: A Place of Our Own' at Warwick and 'A Millennium of Utopias' at the
University of East Anglia, and by members of the Critical Theory Seminar at the
University of Bristol and the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex.
I would particularly like to thank Vincent Geoghegan, Gregor McLennan, Tom
Moylan, Thomas Osborne, Lucy Sargisson and Carolyn Wilde for perceptive and
constructive comments and stimulating disagreements.
2. As Thomas Osborne (1998) observes, there are different ways in which
'engagement' can be construed, not all of which are overtly political, while
Forrester (1999) similarly insists that thinking itself is a political act. The
argument that academics, and sociologists in particular, should be 'engaged
intellectuals' has been made forcibly in relation to sociology (in answer to the
question 'What is sociology for?'). See McLennan (1999), Giddens (1998), Rorty
(1998), and Bourdieu (1998).
3. I have argued this at greater length elsewhere. See Levitas (1990a).
4. 'Nowhere - a place of our own' was the title of an interdisciplinary conference
on the uses of Utopia at the University of Warwick, May 1999.
5. The importance of this distinction is discussed in Levitas (1990b), reprinted in
Daniel and Moylan (1997).
6. The British government, which had spent huge sums of money combating and
encouraging others to combat the Y2K bug, argued, of course, that this was why
nothing had happened. They would of course. But sceptical respondents
wondered why, if this were indeed the case, Blair's government was so insistent
that throwing money at problems was not the solution, as is persistently argued
in relation to poverty, education and the collapsing National Health Service.
7. See Moylan (1999). For an analysis of these films, and a theorisation of the
character of 1990s dystopianism, see Fitting (1999) and Moylan (2000,
forthcoming).
8. I am grateful for this formulation in response to an earlier version of this paper.
9. Irigaray's utopianism is exemplary here. See Sargisson (1996).
10. Fitting (1998) provides an excellent account of Jameson's use of the concept of
utopia.
11. The importance of perspective, of the 'vanishing point', and of 'horizon' is a
common theme in Bloch, Jameson and Marin. John Berger argues that the
absence of perspective and horizon are fundamental to the effectiveness of
Hieronymous Bosch's depiction of Hell: this visual strategy removes continuity
between actions, between past and future and creates a 'spatial delirium' in which
'nothing flows through, everything interrupts'. Hope, he argues, 'is an act of
faith, and has to be sustained by other concrete actions. For example, the action
of approach, of measuring distances and walking towards' (Berger, 1998/99,
pp.1-4), and therefore depends upon perspective.
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