10-11 September 2024
Henry Daysh Building, Newcastle University
Abstract of Thomas Telios' presentation:
Do utopias really fail? Don’t they always leave a rem(a)inder every time – or, even if – they are not completed? Aren’t they shifting horizons rather than blueprints? Last but not least, what does this tell us about the temporality underlying utopias? These questions notwithstanding: Isn’t the refusal to accept that utopias can fail indicative of a progressivist and futurist mindset that has always haunted utopias, if not condemned them to failure? Shouldn’t we rather stop considering utopias as images of a prospective, better world and transform them into methods of how to achieve such a better, prospective world? What are the goals that utopias should strive to achieve in order not to fail? And ultimately, which are the normative criteria that allow us to judge whether the goals of utopian projects have been achieved?In my paper, I take off from José E. Muñoz’s understanding of utopia as an open, queer “performativity [that] suggests another modality of doing and being that is in process, unfinished” (Muñoz 2009, 99). As I argue, this unfinished processuality is not to be understood as being inherent to the utopian thinking that, as such, should be assumed as being linear and teleological. Rather, this openness ought to be regarded in a relational and collectivist way, i.e., as the result of the utopian goals of the ones are being intercepted, reconfigured, and reoriented thanks to the utopian goals of the others. The latter invites us to rethink the temporality underlying the ontological parameter of utopian methodology that Ruth Levitas differentiated and, as she puts it, is concerned “with the subjects and agents of utopia, the selves interpellated within it, that utopia encourages or allows” (Levitas 2013, xvii). As collectivist and relational, utopia should be understood henceforth, first, as the coefficient of the utopian projections of the more than group that are entangled within the social nexus, and second, as the coefficient of the more than one utopian desire that intersect with each other within the subject’s body. This recalibrates utopian temporality to a multitemporal matter that has severe repercussions on the normative evaluation of the utopian objectives. If, as Adorno puts it in their legendary discussion with Ernst Bloch, “whatever can be imagined as utopia, this is the transformation of the totality” (Adorno/Bloch 1989, 3), then the achievements or failures in one battle front should be evaluated (cherished and reflected) accordingly leading neither to the abandonment of the concept of utopia whatsoever nor to the exaltation of teleological progressivism, respectively. The latter renders one certain: That the realization of utopias can be either inclusive and holistic or cannot be at all.