Exodus

Real Utopia as a Method? Utopian-Sociological Paths from Jameson’s Universal Army to a Postcapitalist Post Office

“…Bloch also uses concrete utopia in an ontological sense, with utopia conceived as a fundamental aspect of consciousness and of matter. For Bloch, this is an as-yet materially incomplete universe, being steerable either to entropy or utopia through human efforts, with our sense of utopian possibility arising in part from a kind of yearning for self-realisation common to all matter (Bloch, 1995a(Bloch, , 1995bHudson, 1982). This speculative-materialist take on concrete utopia has been shown to run into something of a philosophical glitch, as Bloch apparently provides no means of demonstrating that his utopian reality-process would necessarily explain human actions or feelings one way or the other (Hudson, 1982), although recent work goes some way to rebutting some of the traditional challenges levelled against this aspect of his thought (Moir, 2020).…”

“…Again, this phrase has two identifiable poles of meaning – although the second is less often discussed – both arising from different senses Ernst Bloch imbued it with when outlining his utopian philosophy. This first sense describes engagement in action – or praxis – which is felt to be in alignment with what is sensed as necessary in order to bring closer the genuine realisation of a utopian situation (Bloch, 1995b; Hudson, 1982). This is juxtaposed to ‘abstract’ utopias, where an ideal society is described without any adequate sense offered that the means of setting out for such a society are concretely available to us in the here and now (Bloch, 1995a: 145).…”

“…Part of this sketching-in of the gaps occurs through applying our sense of what is good counterfactually to the unsatisfactory state of the world as we sense and imagine it to be. This yearning at the edge of consciousness for things to be marvellously otherwise imbues art, music, myths, daydreams, religion and so on with much of their profound content (Hudson, 1982). This matters when it comes to left praxis, because neglecting to address this aspect of consciousness in the ways the left organised for and imagined the future – neglecting the ‘warmth’ of the implied future brought about through Marxist praxis – risked ceding this territory’s inspiring power to reactionary forces.…”