Utopia and Time: Conservative and Radical Utopias in the Age of the Anthropocene

Featherstone, Mark

Abstract

My objective in this chapter is to develop a Freudian-Heideggerian understanding of the concept of utopia that conceives of the impulse to imagine ideal societies in terms of a modern tendency to both think about possible futures and create new worlds and a pre-modern inclination to look back into the past with a deep sense of loss about the passing of what has gone before. Considering the history of the idea of utopia through a discussion of Plato, More, and Marx, in the first part of the chapter I develop a theory of the temporality of utopia concerned with, on the one hand, experimentation, dynamism, and the future and, on the other hand, haunting, longing, and melancholia, which I suggest can be understood through reference to Freud’s theory of trauma, Heidegger’s philosophy of being and time, and Lacan’s fusion of these two perspectives in a psychoanalysis of lack and excess. In the second part I seek to apply this economic theory of utopia as lack/excess to contemporary global capitalism—which I argue might be understood in terms of the realisation of the American consumerist idea of utopia where excess and loss meet in the idea of the Anthropocene and looming threat of ecological devastation—in order to save the possibility of the future from the catastrophism of the present. Although the idea of utopia is no longer fashionable in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene simply because it has, in a certain sense, already been realised in the consumerist excess that masks the profound sense of loss at the heart of this vision of civilisation, my thesis is that it is only by looking back and rediscovering the loss at the heart of the original idea of utopia that we will be able to escape our catastrophic present.

Citation

Featherstone, M. (2024). Utopia and Time: Conservative and Radical Utopias in the Age of the Anthropocene. In Rethinking Democracy for Post-Utopian Worlds (3-15). London: Springer Nature [academic journals on nature.com]. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53491-1_1

• Acceptance Date: Apr 8, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jun 7, 2024
• Publication Date: Jun 7, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jun 28, 2024
• Publisher: Springer Nature [academic journals on nature.com]
• Pages: 3-15
• Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Utopianism
• Series ISSN: 2946-448X; 2946-4471
• Edition: 1st
• Book Title: Rethinking Democracy for Post-Utopian Worlds
• Chapter Number: 1
• ISBN: 978-3-031-53490-4; 978-3-031-53493-5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53491-1_1
• Keywords: Utopia, History, Time, Radical, Change, Anthropocene
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/858630
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-53491-1_1
• Related Public URLs: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-53491-1; https://link.springer.com/series/15242