Looking Forward to the Present
(IV) Utopianism within the presentist regime of historicity
This last piece (for now at least) from the series traces the genealogy of utopianism through Hartog’s latest regime of historicity, namely—presentism. If you haven't read the previous three parts, I suggest you pay attention to them first, as each successive stage is directly related to the preceding ones.
We must now ask, “Does presentism have a place in utopia?” However we answer, our understanding must first be reconciled with the question “Did presentism ever exist?” If yes, when and how; if no, why? François Hartog, as I noted at the outset, locates its genesis in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. On the other hand, it could be argued that we are talking here about a death foretold. Already in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many were skeptical of the concept of historical process, and therefore of the postulates of the philosophy of history, while also criticizing the politico-ideological utopias that depended on them.¹ If there is no such thing as historical process — or even more telos, — how are they possible?
Parallel to their decline, scientific-technological utopias appear on the scene. The space programs and sci-fi enthusiasm of the same period attest to a shift in the forms and the articulation of utopian thinking. From a substantive point of view, however, the difference is not particularly significant, insofar as the possibility of a just and equitable society (be it on Mars) is vindicated thanks to advances in technology and science. This discourse is alive and well right now — discussions about transhumanism, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, bioengineering, Space X, terraformation, and whatnot are an inevitable part of academic curricula throughout the world.
One can safely claim, then, that there are techno-ideological utopias, as new incarnations of the futurist regime, while the collapse of the Soviet bloc inevitably followed the collapse of the politico-ideological ones. The question that begs to be asked, however, is to what extent do such utopian aspirations have an actual impact on people, and to what extent do they succeed in addressing the problems of living life here and now? In what follows I argue that politico-ideological utopias have lost the battle within the confines of the futuristic mode of historicity and have not lost the war on historicity in general.
But let us first consider the specific characteristics of presentism. In this mode, the horizon of possibility and the space of experience, according to Hartog, align, identify, and permeate each other, and everything that can happen happens here and now. The individual — and especially the social being of modern man — is in a state of perpetual acceleration (Hartmut Rosa). This acceleration turns every experience into an experience of and for the present. Our existence within the digital requires constant vigilance, focus, and dedication to what’s present now, while everything exists and appears on the same stratum, which further helps to form the sense of simultaneity of the different modalities of time.
Such a temporal perspective, or rather its absence, cannot afford utopias, or at least not utopias of a modern (or futuristic) type. Yet they do exist, in abundance. This does not change the fact that none of them are quite popular and supported in our time, and, as it seems to me, too often this type of utopia fails to touch the essence of the problems that we, the inhabitants of the “Anthropocene” face, the consequence of which is what Hartog conceptualized as ‘presentism.’
Our networked, liquefied world, instead of opening up possibilities, actually functions as a propagator of systemic catastrophes, forcing us to “adapt” to global processes over which we have no control. Presentism, far from being the pleasure of the present moment, is therefore the dictatorship of the moment to come.²
This is precisely what is of essence and interests me here, and what can help us think through the possibilities and specificities before and of the new utopianism. Insofar as it is a moment, as it is a blueprint of the immediate future, presentism declares its ambitions for the present as the only possibility for change. If in the first regime the utopian imagination, the temporal attitude to time, and with them, the hope-for, were oriented towards the past; in the second — which in a sense is still present, practiced by those who can afford it — towards the future, in the present dominant regime, they ought to demand a different mode of dictatorship of the next moment.
I pointed out at the outset that the setting of hope-for and resistance-against is, in the former case, concerned with an as-yet nonexistent object, and in the latter case, for the only existing one. Here, in presentism, the objects of hope-for and resistance-against merge for the first time with the ontological merging of the horizon of possibility and the space of experience. Here we should no longer look for a possible present somewhere in the future, whose genesis we initiate here and now, associating, laying it down as an alternative to the now-present, because we already have the possibility of creating, at the moment, a new moment. The moment of the stagnant present is charged with momentum, not solely understood as particular — as the “acceleration” of Rosa insists — but as a charge and kinetic power that the technological and scientific condition brings no longer in potency but in actuality.³
Our openness to the future is a luxury we can no longer afford. In the past forty years alone, the Earth has lost half of its wildlife. In 2016, at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, a panel of experts chose November 1952 as the start of the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ for the first hydrogen bomb tests. This was also the time when, as we have seen, criticism of the foundations of the futurist regime first began to be voiced, whether this criticism came from the left or the right. The Austrian ethicist Clive Hamilton wrote:
In the Anthropocene, in addition to the past we are trying to break free from, we have a future we want to avoid. […] Nature has its own grand narrative, as we are only now understanding. A narrative against all (human) narratives… The time has come to figure out how to steer it, to adapt to whatever it sends at us; to figure out how to live on a planet less and less able to sustain life.⁴
The social acceleration is, of course, a consequence of the whole chain of accelerations that dictate our contemporary networked existence, as well as the socio-economic and political global intertwining. But it is also the result of a clear awareness that we are on the verge of a catastrophe of hitherto unimaginable proportions, for which, at the end of the day, we will have solely ourselves to blame. But this is not entirely true. It is undoubtedly true that some will be more guilty than others. That some live as the need for self-preservation dictates and others live as they please.
If the formulation of the Anthropocene brings us back to the essential and the preordained, it is only to ensnare us once again in the cyclical, mythologized narrative according to which the blame lies with all of us, even though only the consequences are for all of us. The destructive character of the human beings is to blame. That is, the mold as such, not the market. Not the system that creates, calls forth, and passes into the market and is essentially the market: not the particular mold, but the humans who — in order to survive — resort to the market, thus becoming its product.
The “Anthropocene” as a scientific concept and a purely objectivist generalization of our influence on nature is not a wrong direction, but it is a misleading intersection and somehow manages to bring with it the spirit of deception within a self-enclosed, as well as self-explanatory, chain. It mystifies in order to distribute the blame evenly, even though the market does not distribute the benefits of the system’s destructiveness equally, quite the opposite. It is characteristic of presentism, at least as we know it, that within it the blame is always distributed equally. Thus it is both knowledge of the inevitable and life despite it — knowledge and life imbued with guilt. But presentism can also be so much more. It can be a solution and a removal of guilt. It can also be a responsibility. We must finally acknowledge, then, that we live in a regime of historicity in which (almost) any utopia is possible.
Something like a conclusion, something like an afterword, something like nothing in the world
In the present series of articles I have tried to show that, on the one hand, we cannot speak of a distinct definition of utopianism, rising from some supra-historical conditions, unless we think of it through its manifestations as hope-for some change and resistance-against the state of things that imposes it. On the other hand, I have tried to think of utopianism as an accumulating phenomenon, involving a multiplicity of sub-phenomena, respectively as a kind of urge and longing, as an ambition, as something like nothing in the world.
Any attempt to speak about a given phenomenon as complex and multilayered as the one under study here is prematurely condemned to wander in the labyrinths of history while a sense of irreducibility and insufficiency, of displacement and dislocation, weighs over it. And any such phenomenon, observable as far as the eye can see, is, as a rule, examined to discover its meanings and its reducibility to the present. What is searched for is the heritage — the deterritorialization from the topos, an exercise to go beyond, into the non-place. Any attempt to think, through the notion of genealogy, is increasingly a pursuit of the non-place, a refusal of the one in which you find yourself for the sake of a place that is not. The search is for the signification of the inheritance and its succession, the ghost of history that is being, and the specter of it that is becoming.
Artog’s methodology, as it seems to me, was a particularly appropriate tool through which to locate utopianism in a more meaningfully oriented position vis-à-vis us. The knotty question was the extent to which the imagination has a place in our present, that is, the present of an overly aggressive reality, aggressive to some in one way, to others in another; for some far more aggressive than others.
Although I began with the attitude that utopianism, insofar as it is associated with the future in the modern sense, could not successfully fit into presentist and contemporary structures of collective consciousness of time and history, during the process I concluded that it is just the opposite — as long as we alter, model and redefine the boundaries, and the charge, of the concept⁵ of utopianism, and in a way that is consistent with the mode of historicity in which we find ourselves. Utopia thus does not simply fall within the horizon of possibility and experience, but is that very horizon and experience itself. If not enough, then at least to some extent, I have succeeded in laying the groundwork for a study that engages directly with the problem of post-utopianism in our present situation.
Ursula Le Guin, in her already cited essay, hypothesizes that the utopias that have come before are much more Yang than Yin, much more masculine than feminine.⁶ Perhaps it is time, in our presentist mode, to think of a Yin utopia of care, a “feminine” utopia — read a long-repressed one — that combines the best of what is manifest in the two previous modes: a utopia of care for the “primordial,” which is all nature itself, for man, but also one that strictly controls technology. The lack of the latter could be thought of as one of the main reasons we are in this threatening situation in the first place.
Yet this feminine utopia must also carry the revolutionary fervor, ready to sift and burn; to abolish repression in the name of imagination freed from the imperatives of reality. The manufacture of progress stopped anyway and stopped precisely because of the fear that excessive progress might finish us. The arresting of technology and its return to the bosom of simple instrumental performance is what we need, and no longer in the greed for a superfluous quantitative accumulation in the hands of the few, but in the need for a qualitative realization of the immediate taking-giving both with others and with the scene of our relations.
All this may not help. But then again, the modes of historicity, at least as seen from here and now, and from the modus operandi of time, seem to have run out of steam. We have gone through them all — the most important one remains, the one that unites in itself all the other “six directions,” spatial but also temporal, and which is everywhere — the center.
“Knife-like, flower-lie, like nothing at all in the world,” William Saroyan christens one of his stories. He has well dug, though not intentionally, something of great importance in respect to utopianism. It might be a knife, or a flower, but it may also be something like nothing in the world. And each of these, as I have tried to show, can happen — or has already happened? — in different ways, at different times, under different pretexts. Which will we choose? The knife, the flower, the nothing?
I started with Le Guin and I’ll end with her:
A society with a modest standard of living that conserves natural resources; with a low and constant birth rate and a political life that is based on mutual consent. A society that has successfully adapted to its environment and learned to live without destroying itself or the people in its neighborhood. This is the society I want to imagine and must imagine, for without hope one is lost.
Notes
Adorno and Horkheimer with their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and the position that the rational onslaught against nature we have been carrying out since the Enlightenment is, in reality, an onslaught against our own nature — a suppression of our impulses, feelings, and desires. The principle of oppression (something that Marcuse also speaks of) is precisely a consequence of our distance from nature and the belief that — through the historical process — man will reach a state of security beyond its threats. On the right, on the other hand, is Karl Popper’s critique in The Misery of Historicism (1957), et al.
C. Bonneuil, op. cit., translation mine.
Take, for example, the plethora of so-called ‘hard science fiction’ novels and stories that remained within the realm of scientific possibility at the time they were written. Authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian M. Banks and others, drawing on advances in science and technology, paint alternative societies here and on other planets without falling into the realm of ‘pure’ science fiction. Their work is essential to any exploration of contemporary utopian thought insofar as they are leading blades in the battle against the present and present-generated impending problems facing humanity, and therefore insofar as the alternative present is precisely alternative.
Clive Hamilton. Utopias in the Anthropocene; Plenary session of the American Sociological Association, Denver, 17 August 2012; p. 8.
Which, in a way, should be the ambition of any exploration of the historical continuum of an idea, or thought, while setting in relation to the world and its genealogy.
“Utopia has always been ‘Yang’. In one way or another, since Plato, utopia has always been a masculine “Yang-journey” by motorcycle. Bright, dry, clear, strong, solid, active, aggressive, linear, progressive, creative, advancing and hot. Our civilization today is so excessively ‘Yang,’ that any notion of righting its wrongs or escaping its self-destructive urge must involve a reversal in the direction of earlier versions.” p. 21.
great series of posts, thank you for the read, friend.