Beyond Utopia?: Response from Amanda Ciafone
“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”

Saturday, May 26, 2012

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[On April 26 and 27, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for a conference, Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, and the Coming of “Spring.” The last of our three closing roundtable responses is by Amanda Ciafone, a professor of international studies at Macalester College]


“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”

Written by Amanda Ciafone (Macalester College)

To begin to open up a conversation between the papers of the last two days, I’d like to use Jameson’s argument for a pedagogical operation to read the Utopian impulse rather than the praxis of Utopia, and identify some of the dialectic and agonistic approaches we’ve seen during the conference.  And then I’d like to ask, quite sincerely (and not answer), why it is some of the most powerful theorists of the contemporary moment have seen neither Utopian impulse nor praxis in the “multitudes” and “horizontality” that has emerged in the recent social movements and Middle East "springs."

“Utopia,” Jameson writes in Valences of the Dialectic , “is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world,” except of course in the direction of dystopia and catastrophe. For Jameson, this operation, or “utopology,” is interpreting what he calls the Utopian impulse, which does not correspond to a plan or praxis, but instead “expresses Utopian desire and invests it in a variety of unexpected and disguised, concealed, distorted ways” (415).  It therefore calls for “a decipherment and a reading of Utopian clues and traces in the landscape of the real …[where even] the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfillments and Utopian gratifications” (416).  These “hidden traces and signs of Utopianism that lie in wait in the world about us” are much like what Raymond Williams would call “the emergent” of the future in the present and they become more visible in the disentangling of the negative from the positive in a process like Foucault’s “genealogy,” but instead uncovering the “genealogies of the future.”
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Beyond Utopia?: Response from Jan Vanvelk
"We Are Trying to Change the World"

Friday, May 4, 2012

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A sign from Occupy Oakland, taken from Zizek's essay in The Guardian
[On April 26 and 27, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for a conference, Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, and the Coming of “Spring.” Below is the second of three closing roundtable responses from Jan Vanvelk, a visiting graduate student in literature from Illinois’ sister university, K.U. Leuven.]

"We Are Trying to Change the World"

Written by Jan Vanvelk (Literature)

On The Guardian’s website, Slavoj Žižek makes an attempt to envision the future of the Occupy Wall Street movement. His concern is that the protestors display the attitude also present in May 1968, an attitude which, although inspired by the right ideals, threatens to succumb to the alluring idea of "having a good time" rather than an unequivocal commitment to purely political resistance. Žižek acknowledges, however, that “‘capitalism’ is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.” The protest movements seem to be discovering a new language, a new way to speak about problems otherwise trapped in a rhetoric that denies any extra-capitalist speaking. In opposition to a critique of the financial crisis based on personal greed and a general decline of individual morality stands the critique of the system itself. Žižek believes that it is possible to invent a language that is able to speak in the terms of such systemic critique. Therefore, art criticism – seen as an important aspect of the analysis of culture and of society’s formative role in constructing or maintaining the capitalist status quo – is charged with a double task: providing insight into these economic structures while also inventing a new language.

Criticism’s promise in this case is identical to the promise of theory. Now, do not ask me what either of these terms mean, precisely: for our present purposes, I think it will be fruitful to suggest that criticism sticks more to its "object", while "theory" tends to place more weight on the scale when it comes to general claims or patterns that are, ideally, more susceptible to a consideration of a wider range of "objects". However, in defining a "cultural object," we are always-already speaking with a crippled tongue: the restrictions of generic categorizations that rely on ideological mechanisms are tainting our "means of perception" from the very start. But, as turns out to be the case, this seems to be only a temporary set-back when it comes to critical and theoretical discourse. It is always able to recuperate exclusions (from the canon, for example) as the source of a kind of utopian power, one that nurtures the margin as the incarnated enclave of possibility itself.

Indeed, in his well-known valuation of the genre of science fiction, Fredric Jameson (following Herbert Marcuse) speaks of the utopian imagination as,
This passage appeals to "SF"’s ability to succeed by failure in the sense that it is always unable to fulfil its own promise: it will never be able to imagine the future, yet with this a priori acknowledgment comes extraordinary signifying power, the ability to articulate our own intellectual, imaginative and epistemic boundaries. This truly subliminal moment of contemplation is, in my view, also a source for concern. Theoretical or critical practice itself displays an enormous power in prefiguring its own observational limits, a power that allows the aesthetics of utopia to speak about its own boundaries, attributing to the hermeneutic extraction controlled by the utopian impulse, a potential for totalization, the possibility that it has set the terms of its own critique.



A photograph from Tahir Square, provided by Mohammed Bamyeh.
The double task of criticism entails on the one hand engaging with the discovery of the already-there, to say something about the "reality" of cultural practices. But insofar as criticism is enable to comment on the real, a normative dimension is ultimately unavoidable because the descriptive moment opens up, even promises, to supply an alternative discourse in which we could talk about politics, about the contemporary crises in our society. Whether on the level of the utopian aesthetic or on the critical-theoretical practice, the stakes with which our game – my apologies for the word – is played, only increase the political danger that our own ideological aberrations pose.

If the utopian aesthetic is not kept in check, it will make us blind precisely to the things Jameson warns us about in his article, such as the historical nature of utopian texts. If we engage with the questions of our time, as Žižek and many others have done following the Occupy movement and the events of the Arab "spring," it is of great importance to accept the necessity for a new language to be "invented", but the sheer power of our political promise that is delivered through scholarly or academic criticism all the more enforces the imperative that we scrutinize our own project rigorously. This can only be achieved, in my opinion, by reading in a truly utopian fashion, that is, “to succeed by failure”: a reading that always accepts its own hermeneutic limitations, that takes in the raw materiality of the text – and I mean "text" in the broadest possible sense. This practice, one that could just as well be called “rhetorical reading”, might be the best treatment – but never cure – for ideological aberrations we have.
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Emanuel Rota, Riz Khan - Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the future of Egyptian politics

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

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[In this post, Emanuel Rota, a Unit for Criticism affiliate and Assistant Professor of Italian, writes on a recent debate over events in Egypt.]

"Riz Khan - Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the future of Egyptian politics"

Written by Emanuel Rota (Italian)

History is on the move in the Middle East. The elections in Iran, the riots in Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt: can Libya and Morocco be immune?

Personally, I hope they are not. The dictators of these countries, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Ben Ali, Mohammed Hosni Moubarak, had names unknown to the vast majority of the inhabitants of the West. Their ferocity, their violence, their corruption was kept invisible in the name of the stability of the region. Now, we are learning their names in the hope that what we learn are the names of past ferocity, past violence and past corruption. Of course, we no longer believe that the future will necessarily be a better place, but we can say, with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”

In the meantime, we can learn from what is happening. All the talk about democracy in the Middle East will come back to haunt those who wanted to use democracy as an ideological weapon to maintain the region in a permanent state of submission. Israel is the only democracy in the region; I hope that Israel will be surrounded by other democracies, so that the peace process can move forward. I also hope that Europe and the United States will be forced to accept that democracy is a universal aspiration, even when those who threaten it are their allies. Today, questioning democracy in the region in the name of cultural relativism would mean choosing an alliance with the coryphées of constituted power. Personally, I am with the rebels, and I hope that they will teach me something new about democracy.

In the embedded video, two intellectuals, Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Žižek, discuss the events in Egypt. At the center of their discussion, even at this early stage, is the significance that the events have for our understanding of democracy. Not what we can teach, but what we can learn, not as neutral observers, but as partisans of democracy, equality, and freedom. They disagree more than it is apparent in the interview, but they agree on the fact that these events are not staged. It is not the spectacle of politics that is represented, but a revolt that, so far, has no representatives. So far, the multitudes revolting in the Middle East, without pre-constituted leaders and political programs, seem to have only the desire to act in history and to retain this power --in other words, a desire for democracy. Cairo, the largest city in Africa and one of the largest cities in the world, can certainly teach us something for the future.

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