Stage L1
17:30 - 18:00
English
Talk
Everyone
The Utopian Impulse & Its Trouble With Postmodernity

Kurzthese

One might argue that the collapse of communism is the loss of the future that really never was, but the fundamental source of fear of Utopianism is rooted in its formal necessity of Utopian closure and its origin in the idea of an idealized settlement and colonization. Can we reclaim Utopia to help us generate new ideas for how to survive and transcend postmodernism?
Here's an idea: anti-anti-Utopianism.

Beschreibung

We seem to drown in dystopias reflecting our surrender to the idea that there really is no alternative to capitalism or neoliberalism in particular. All these critical dystopias seem to extrapolate our current situation and what the persistence of this system (the economization of everything) holds in store for us in the future to come. It seems clear that if we want to escape this hopeless outcome we need new ideas for how a future globalized world might work differently. Yet, to generate those ideas using the Utopian impulse seems to be a door closed shut. So how do we get out of this dilemma? I will present to you Fredric Jameson's vision of how to burst that door wide open, with one of the oldest, archaic utopian ideas ever stated.