File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2004/bhaskar.0403, message 15


Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:53:44 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Concrete utopianism


Hi all,

Some spectacularly (so-o-o erudite) pessimistic musings on utopia by 
Jameson and Anderson in the last two New Left Reviews prompts me to post 
the following draft dictionary entry (proffered as a pick me up should 
you read the twin-stepping maestros; it might also serve as a gentle 
wake-up call to any contributor who might have repressed the deadline of 
July 31) (cross references in capitals, emphases italicized):

*concrete utopianism*  ‘consists in the exercise of constructing 
MODELS of alternative ways of living on the basis of some assumed set of 
resources, counterbalancing ACTUALISM and informing  hope’ (DG 395). 
The concept is introduced in the course of elaborating the DIALECTIC OF 
FREEDOM, where it is a vital component of totalizing depth praxis 
(EMANCIPATORY AXIOLOGY), and it reverberates throughout Bhaskar’s 
later philosophy. Gramsci’s slogan is amended to read, ‘Concrete 
utopianism, not pessimism, of the intellect, optimism of the will’ (P 
215). CONCRETE is intended in its positive meaning of well rounded and 
appropriate for the purposes in hand, and links the concept to the 
CONCRETE UNIVERSAL; if it is not concrete, utopianism is taken in a 
pejorative sense, as not being ‘naturalistically grounded in a  fully 
four-planar analysis of human being’ (D 350) and so not satisfying 
principles of ACTIONABILITY and *prefigurationality*. Concrete 
*utopianism* is grounded in, among other things, a keen sense of the 
reality and ontological primacy of unactualized possibility  -- 
‘there is another world, but it is in this one’ (Eluard) --, and of 
the creative power of imagination, which plays a crucial role in 
constructing MODELS in all science, and in neo-Blochian hope; the later 
Bhaskar’s theory of the transcendentally real SELF stresses that in 
many areas of our lives we already act in ‘the way social utopians 
have believed we could act’, or, ‘SPIRITUALITY is a concrete 
reality, here and now’ (RM1,15-6). CR’s demonstration of the 
openness of the world and the insistence of the pulse of freedom leads 
it to reject the ENDIST postmodern post-utopian pessimism of writers 
like Jameson (2004, 46) who defend the ‘essential reasonableness’ of 
the view that the function of utopianism ‘lies not in helping us to 
imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity 
to imagine such a future—our imprisonment in a non-utopian present 
without historicity or futurity—so as to reveal the ideological 
closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined.’ 
As Eagleton avers (2000, 174), ‘the truly starry-eyed utopian ... is 
he who imagines that the future will be pretty much like the present.’
See also EUDAIMONIA, UNIVERSALIZABILITY

Mervyn



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