Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 18:48:58 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere7.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Concrete utopia


Hi all,

Just to say that I've revised the *concrete utopianism* dictionary entry 
in the light of Howard's and Phil's comments (for which many thanks) and 
taken on an additional point or two. Only problem is the entry's now too 
long! But it's an important concept, so I might cut back elsewhere 
instead of it. I paste the revised (but still draft) entry in below in 
case anyone's interested. (No time to reformat it I'm afraid).

I found the comments stimulating and might repeat the exercise from time 
to time if no one objects.

Mervyn

concrete utopianism  was introduced to the world by ‘the philosopher 
of utopia’, Ernst Bloch (1986/1959), who contrasted it with abstract 
utopianism. The Bhaskarian concept is in some respects similar, as are 
the systems in which the concept is located, and Bhaskar himself may be 
entitled to join Bloch in Adorno’s list of ‘the very few 
philosophers who [do] not recoil in fear from the idea of a world 
without domination and hierarchy’ (cited in Geoghegan 1996, 162).

For Bhaskar, 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). This is by no means the exclusive prerogative of 
(participatory) social science; it is a freely flowing energy inscribed 
in the processes of transformation themselves (and indeed it is 
consciously established practice in sections of the current Green and 
Red movements). The Bhaskarian 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 the later philosophy. As in all model building, ‘creative 
fantasy’ (cf. Bloch) plays ‘a constitutive role’, ‘identif[ying] 
“the positive in the negative”’, yielding ‘at once hope and 
possibility to ... totalizing depth praxis’ (D 294, 209) – a process 
in which praxis educates fantasy, and fantasy praxis. 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 
‘naturalistically grounded in a  fully four-planar analysis of human 
being’ (D 350) and so not satisfying principles of actionability and 
prefigurationality. (In Blochian terms, this distinguishes the 
‘objectively-real possible’ (concrete) from the merely ‘formally’ 
possible (abstract) (Geoghegan 1996, 4, 32)). Concrete *utopianism* is 
grounded philosophically in, among other things, a keen sense of the 
reality, ontological primacy and boundlessness of unactualized 
possibility; and the theory of the transcedentally real self in the 
later philosophy stresses that in many areas of our everyday lives we 
already act in ‘the way social utopians have believed we could act’, 
or, ‘spirituality is a concrete reality, here and now’ (RM1,15-16). 
At a meta-philosophical level, Bhaskar engages in an exercise of 
‘metacritical (metatheoretical) concrete utopianism’ which attempts 
to articulate the tendential rational directionality of the historical 
process (D 279).

CR’s demonstration of the openness of the world and the insistence of 
the pulse of freedom, which has a positive as well as a negative moment, 
leads it to reject the endist postmodern 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.’ 
Jameson’s endism is itself a negative utopianism. As Eagleton avers 
(2000, 174), ‘the truly starry-eyed utopian ... is he who imagines 
that the future will be pretty much like the present’; for the 
stupendous dynamic of capital accumlation is running up against absolute 
ecological constraints and other contradictions.
See also eudaimonia, universalizability





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