Utopia as Akairological Rupture

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a reconceptualization of utopia as akairological rupture. Its central thesis disputes the conventional reading of utopia as a teleological goal to be realized by a social collective. Thus rather than viewing the potentiality of utopia as a prescribed ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants live in harmony, I argue that it should be seen as an akairological rupture, manifested through a determinately negative, individual, approach. In this reading, utopia is primarily a social condition within culture, and perennially opposed to any ideal telos. This temporal and qualitative reconceptualization of utopia as disruptive is anathema to the positive reading that sees it as feasible through social reform and rational discourse. This reconceptualization argues for the importance of developing a reading of utopia that can transcend any reified, fixed conception that seeks to domesticate it in the service of a contingent political aspiration, however noble and humanitarian it may appear to be. Herein lies its critical potentiality under neoliberal conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• utopia
• chronos
• kairos
• aión

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, 51.

2. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 198.

3. Geuss, A World Without Why, 114.

4. Ibid.

5. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2.

6. See Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom.

7. See Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

8. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect, xiv. Whilst a comprehensive welfare state is at odds with neoliberalism’s minimal state, such opposition to neoliberalism cannot think beyond Keynesian (mass welfare state) capitalism as a viable alternative.

9. TINA (There Is No Alternative) was a slogan often employed by Margaret Thatcher to justify deregulation of national services.

10. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect, xiii.

11. Levitas, “Looking for the Blue,” 300.

12. Ibid. Attempts at radical political change have led to totalitarianism. Neoliberalism, however, exploits the awareness of this history, in order to create a fear of radical change. My defence of negative readings of utopia may be seen as responding to this problem, because historical examples of radical political change projected positive, but ultimately unrealizable, images of utopia onto the future, rather than treating utopia negatively.

13. Ibid., 300.

14. Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” 46.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 83.

18. Jacoby’s (and my) students should not then be encouraged to image ever wilder and more radical utopias, but rather to reflect upon their very inability to do so.

19. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect, xiv.

20. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 149.

21. Jameson, Late Marxism, 35.

22. Tillich, The Interpretation of History, 275.

23. Comte, The Essential Comte, 20.

24. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 14.

25. The legacy of proto, as well as fully fledged, utopian socialists such as Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, can be found through the new left movements that emerged in the United States and United Kingdom during the 1960s counterculture, which structured utopia by age and logistics. See Jewusiak, “Retirement in Utopia,” 249–50.

26. Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, 20.

27. Cooke, “Redeeming Redemption,” 423.

28. Ibid., 413.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 423.

31. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, 3.

32. Cooke, “Redeeming Redemption,” 424.

33. White, Kaironomia, 87.

34. Arguably, having entered the well of Adorno, in sadomasochistic vein.

35. Mayr, “When is Historiography Whiggish?” 301–9.

36. Tillich, The Interpretation of History, 129.

37. Marramao, Kairós, 7, 10, 9.

38. Theunissen, “‘Metaphysics’ Forgetfulness of Time,” 15.

39. Ibid., 7.

40. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 252.

41. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89.

42. Marramao, Kairós, 58.

43. Ibid., 32, 14.

44. Rovelli, The Order of Time, 39, 40.

45. Ibid., 59.

46. See, for example, Lukács’s criticism of “regressive literature” in “Realism in the Balance,” in Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics, 33.

47. Newman, “Anarchism, Utopianism and the Politics of Emancipation,” 218.

48. Tillich, History of Christian Thought, 1.

49. Onians, Origins of European Thought, 343.

50. Thompson, “Kairos Revisited,” 81.

51. Trapani and Maldonado, “Kairos,” 278–79.

52. Ibid., 279.

53. See Boer, “Revolution in the Event.”

54. Benso, “Marramao’s Kairós,” 227.

55. Marramao, Kairós, 71: Marramao notes that Émile Benveniste related kairós (deriving from the Indo-European roots *krr-) to the verb keránnymi, ‘to mix,’ ‘to temper,’ and concluded that “tempus corresponds, in its different meanings to kairós.”

56. Ibid., 71–72.

57. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, 74.

58. Shew, “The Kairos of Philosophy,” 53.

59. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” 48.

60. Wood, The Deconstruction of Time, 350.

61. Tillich, The Interpretation of History, 129.

62. Boer, “Revolution in the Event,” 117.

63. Sipiora, “Rhetoric and Kairos,” 121.

64. Tillich, The Interpretation of History, 280.

65. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 47, 48.

66. Marramao, “Messianism without Delay,” 397, 401, 403.

67. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 149.

68. Boer, “Revolution in the Event,” 118.

69. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 158.

70. Whilst this secularized, revolutionary reading of the messianic is instructive for mobilizing political action, it falls foul of the problems of the limited reading of Kairos, which, according to Boer, popular Western Marxists are guilty of. As he asserts in “Revolution in the Event,” 117: “various positions of major Marxist thinkers on revolution may be gathered under the common framework of kairos, understood as a resolutely temporal term relating to the critical time.”

71. Leston, “Unhinged,” 35.

72. Boer notes that the Tillichian juxtaposition between chronos and kairos unwittingly reflects a logic of “domination,” whereby “the universal law of kairos becomes the claim of a particular perspective to universal status at the expense of others.” See Boer, “Revolution in the Event,” 125–26.

73. Leston, “Unhinged,” 47.

74. Boer, “Revolution in the Event,” 124.

75. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect, xvii.

76. Ibid., 1.

77. Ibid., 145.

78. Hudson, The Reform of Utopia, 25.

79. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, 58.

80. See Antonio, “Immanent Critique.”

81. See Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History.”

82. Levitas, “Be Realistic,” 92.

83. Ibid., 93.

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Sunny Dhillon

Sunny Dhillon, PhD, is a lecturer in Education Studies at Bishop Grosseteste University, UK. His research interests include Critical Theory (the first iteration of the Frankfurt School), Nietzsche, Krishnamurti, Utopian Studies as well as Academic Literacies. His latest research explores the mythical archetype of the Trickster, and the role of transgressive humour in contemporary marketized Higher Education learning environments.