I hearby declare the right to imagine Utopia.
We need Utopia more than ever. We live in a time without alternatives, at “the end of history” as Frances Fukuyama would have it, when neoliberal capitalism reins triumphant and uncontested. There are still aberrations: radical Islam in the East, neo-fascist xenophobia in the West, and a smattering of socialist societies struggling around the globe, but by and large the only game in town is the global free market. In itself this might not be so bad, except for the increasingly obvious fact that the system is not working, not for most people and not most of the time. Income inequality has increased dramatically both between and within nations. National autonomy has become subservient to the imperatives of global economic institutions, and federal, state, and local governance are undermined by the protected power of money. Profit-driven industrialization and the headlong rush toward universal consumerism is hastening the ecological destruction of the planet. In short: the world is a mess. Opinion polls, street protests, and volatile voting patterns demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, but the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! No to dictators, No to corruption, No to finance capital, No to the one percent who control everything. But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system dominates not because people agree with it; it rules because we are convinced there is no alternative.
Utopia offers us a glimpse of an alternative. Utopia, broadly conceived, is an image of a world not yet in existence that is different from and better than the world we inhabit now. For the revolutionary, Utopia offers a goal to reach and a vision to be realized. For the reformer, it provides a compass point to determine what direction to move toward and a measuring stick to determine how far one has come. Utopia is necessary even for those who do not desire an alternative society at all. Democracy depends upon debate and without someone or something to disagree with there is no meaningful dialogue, only an echo chamber. Utopia offers this “other,” an interlocutor with which to argue, thereby clarifying and strengthening your own ideas and ideals (even if they lead to the conclusion that Utopia is undesirable). Without a vision of an alternative future, we can only look backwards nostalgically to the past, or unthinkingly maintain what we have, mired in the unholy apocalypse that is now. Politically, we need Utopia.
And Utopia is No-Place. Literally. It is a word invented by Thomas More, the author of Utopia, from the Greek words for No (ou) and Place (topos). WE can never reach Utopia because it isn’t a place, but an ideal: a loadstone with which to orient our compass, a motivation to imagine something better.
As the late, great Uraguan poet Eduardo Galeano, writes of Utopia:
She’s on the horizon….I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.
We do not declare the right to realize Utopia, that would be impossible. We declare the right to search for and walk toward, to envision and imagine, Utopia.
— Stephen Duncombe, Professor, New York University, Gallatin School & Department of Media, Culture and Communications, co-founder, Center for Artistic Activism
