Against utopia
I’ve written on a number of ocassions about utopianism without really considering the concept of utopia itself, so I was interested to read this post from k-punk on the darker side of utopias. Maybe it provides some ontological backing for my earlier criticisms in the description of “utopia as a fear of inability to project a desire and utopia as paraniod exclusion of everything outside its foundation desire.”
Sort-of related is infinite thought’s condemnation of smug, ignorant atheism and the reaction to the newly-discovered human species:
“There have always been myths about small people - Ireland has its Leprechauns and Australia has the Yowies. I suppose there’s some feeling that this is an oral history going back to the survival of these small people into recent times,” said co-discoverer Peter Brown, an associate professor of archaeology at New England.
This kind of dumb positivism, which sees all fiction as fictionalisation (and all metonymy as allegory) is directly related to the utopian impulse, because they both depend on the premise that, in reality, there is no alternative. My politics depends precisely on the claim that there is an alternative, and a practice that makes this alternative actual; in other words, on a belief in the reality of fiction.
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