Utopian Demands
Kathi Weeks, Duke University
My paper aims to explore the potential utility of what I call utopian political demands—those that call for fundamental change and involve speculation about alternative social forms. Rather than hopelessly naïve or merely impractical, utopian political demands are, I argue, both potentially effective tools for political mobilization and means by which to advance critical perspectives. The demands that specifically interest me here are those that emerge from and point towards anti-work politics and post-work social forms, including demands for shorter hours and basic income. In rethinking the nature and function of these political demands, I highlight their performative effects, the ways in which they serve to produce modes of critical consciousness that they seem only to presuppose and to elicit the subversive desires they appear only to reflect. Thus I am interested in both fleshing out the concept of “utopian demand” and evaluating the extent to which specific utopian demands could serve to advance both the critical and imaginative dimensions of a post-work politics. Such demands are often dismissed as unrealistic and, as such, potentially dangerous distractions from what are typically understood to be the inevitably modest and small-scale possibilities of political reform. That is to say, their utopianism is usually presented as a fatal flaw. Here I want to pursue an alternative line of argument, namely that it is only by way of a more complex understanding of their utopian dimensions that we can appreciate their potential power.
To develop a framework for thinking about the nature and function of utopian thinking and practice I draw on the work of Ernst Bloch. Bloch defends a process ontology of being, the genealogies of which trace complex patterns of historical emergence in ways that are not uncommon to the philosophical tradition, but that include as well—and here his contribution remains rather less familiar—leading edges and open possibilities. The ontology of the “Not-Yet-Become” and the “Not-Yet-Conscious” affirms reality as process that not only extends backwards but also stretches forward; everything real has not only a history but also a horizon. Bloch’s alternative thus strives to grasp the present in relationship to both its genealogies and its fronts. Bloch’s categories, not only of the Not-Yet, but also of the Novum and Hope, can help me to construct an alternative ontology and epistemology of utopian realism.
I then turn to the two major political functions of utopian thought and practice. One of these is to generate critical perspectives on the present; the other is to provoke the desire for, imagination of, and movement towards a different future. I want to illustrate the ways in which utopian demands can perform these functions by considering how post-work demands can act as a catalyst for the political imagination and a means by which to promote movement toward post-work structures and ethics in the present context.