Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 00:02:37 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Concrete utopianism


Hi Howard,

Yes, it's intended to invoke the pejorative meaning of 'utopian' as 'not
naturalistically grounded', and it's aimed at the bourgeois
triumphalists who not only imagine that there can be an end to history,
but that we've already arrived -- whether in the positive and heavenly
version of endism a la Hegel, Fukuyama etc or in the negative and
hellish version apparently accepted by Jameson. I also very much had in
mind Bhaskar's saying that the real 'pipe dream' is the notion that we
can continue as at present; the defenders of the status quo are the ones
with the real explaining to do, not those who want to change it in a
responsible way. Just look at the crazy reaction to 'global terrorism'
-- why don't they change the world and address the root causes? Yes,
because they imagine we're in the dreamtime (the best of all possible
eternal presents) -- which happens to coincide with their own
(vulnerable) sectional interests. This is utopian thinking in the
negative sense gone 'starry eyed', or, stark raving mad.

I'm not sure how to make this clearer without expending more precious
words. Perhaps your problem arose from the fact that I called Jameson
'post-utopian' and then went on to imply that he's accepting utopianism
in the pejorative sense. I'll probably take out 'post-utopian'. I think
if you're an endist of any ilk, that probably makes you a (negative)
utopian.

Thanks,

Mervyn


 Howard Engelskirchen <howarde-AT-twcny.rr.com> writes
>
>Hi Mervyn,
>
>The reference to "starry-eyed" is unclear to me.  'Starry-eyed' is not to be
>emulated, is that it?  In other words you are saying that the utopian who is
>grounded in reality imagines a future different from the present, but the
>utopian who dreams in the clouds without that anchor can get no further than
>a future pretty much like the present.  Or have I more or less got it
>backwards?
>
>Howard
>
>
>
>
>> As Eagleton avers (2000, 174), ‘the truly starry-eyed utopian ... is
>> he who imagines that the future will be pretty much like the present.’
>
>
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Mervyn Hartwig" <mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk>
>To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
>Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2004 5:53 PM
>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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>
>
>
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