3-5 July 2024 at Central European University, Budapest
Abstract of Thomas Telios' presentation
Utopia, as a concept, was declared obsolete. Yet, the politics and social reality of Neo-Liberalism as well as the theoretical threads of Political Ecology and most importantly Intersectionality succeeded in helping utopias resurface again. This came with the transformation of the concept of utopia from an exclusive, prescriptive narrative of what a better, future world should look like to a descriptive method and a normative benchmark that, first, describes what needs to be done in order for this better, future world to eventuate and, second, provides us with the normative evaluation mechanisms to assess whether this has been achieved. I call this new conceptualization of utopia a koinotopia and its valence, as I argue, lies in incorporating the Other as the condition and vector of the subject’s production. In this social-ontological framework, utopia cannot but forfeit its monistic character and be reconstructed to a necessarily collective and inclusive endeavour. In order to demonstrate the latter, I start (under I) by sketching the challenges that Neoliberalism, Political Ecology, and Intersectionality pose to the utopianism before moving on to argue (under II) for the advantages of utopia as a method leaning on Ruth Levitas’ canonical conceptualization of this matter. As I argue, however, Levitas does not provide an elaborate account of the constitutive role of the Other throughout the subject’s production. Therefore, I trace (under III) the conceptualization of the Other in three theories of the Topical found in Roland Barthes’ concept of atopos, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Ernst Bloch’s concept of ‘Not-Yet’. I conclude (under IV) by arguing that it is Bloch’s consideration of the Other that transforms utopia to a necessarily collective, plural, and inclusive koinotopia.