The necessity of hope in dystopian times: A critical reflection

n the face of the dire conditions of today’s global order, for those aiming to transform this reality in the spirit of a just, equal, and ecologically healthy existence for all of humanity and nature, it is time for the political exercise of the transformative utopian impulse. Yet, in the face of such utopian praxis, capitalism’s retrieval mechanism “subsumes and consumes” (Mark Fisher) the radical potential of utopianism. A key component of this apparatus can be seen in the contemporary upsurge of “dystopian” expression (especially in literature, film, and television). While this indulgent cooptation flourishes on the dark side of the neoliberal street, a concomitant enclosure of “eutopian” sensibility further restricts utopia’s anticipatory impulse by managed innovations that shrink this energy into a resigned “dystopian” structure of feeling as the radical utopian project itself is compromised through practices of disciplined improvement within the declared “realism” of the existing order. In this essay (writing as a utopian, and especially a teacher, and in the spirt of collegial utopian discourse), I discuss two symptomatic texts which I argue are imbricated within this dystopian ambience by way of a critique that enables me to examine such works as they play out within this current sociocultural order. On one hand, and with great respect for its internationally-recognized author, I read the text of Dystopia: A Natural History, by Gregory Claeys, as a (however unintended) component of this hegemonic structure of feeling rather than a challenge to it. On the other hand, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Dystopia Now” as a negation of that negation, as the sf author and public intellectual takes up an anti-anti-utopian stance that refuses the containment field of a “seemingly omnipresent reality principle” that informs today’s “fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism” and reasserts the radical utopian project (Robinson).