Work and Utopia's End

In this episode: Kathi Week’s The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Now, to be fair, we’re not going to examine the whole book, not yet anyway. Today we’re going to be looking at utopianism as a philosophical and political project, teleology and nonteleological utopian thinking. We're also going to run a bit of a who's who and what's what with Plato and Aristotle, Karl Popper, Francis Fukuyama, and Ernst Bloch as well as the logic of Rationalism and Intelligent Design. Even Star Trek makes a brief appearance. Engage!

Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011

Boldyrev, Ivan. “Ernst Bloch.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bloch/
Gorton, William. “Karl Popper: Political Philosophy” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/popp-pol/#SH1a

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other philosophical and socio-political questions regarding Work, Life, and Death. I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 10: Work and Utopias’ End?

Alright, let’s just jump right into it, shall we? Kathi Week’s The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Now, to be fair, we’re not going to examine the whole book, not yet anyway. Today we’re going to be looking at one major concept in the book, utopianism as a philosophical and political project, or, nonteleological utopian thinking. 

So, first things first, teleology: what is it, and what’s the difference between teleological and nonteleological utopia? 

The dictionary version is that teleology is the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose (the ends) that they serve rather than the cause by which they arise. This is also the Kantian version (without falling down the Kantian rabbit hole that I am, personally, ill-equipped to spelunk – I didn’t study much Kant in school and, while it is, I would think, impossible to escape Kant in a philosophy program, his work was never an area of focus for me (as was say Marx, Foucault, or Deleuze).

The Wikipedia entry on Teleology states it’s a branch of causality giving the reason or explanation for something as a function of its end, or its goal, as opposed to a function of its cause. Now this can, I think unfortunately, be extrapolated out as an argument for intelligent design or some arguments for ‘the end of history’ – not good ones though, if we’re going to require a good argument to be both sound and valid – by fudging causality as requiring some end or goal and dismissing the possibility of ‘happy accidents,’ whether we’re talking about massively beneficial mutations over the course of evolution or tertiary discoveries such as the invention of the microwave oven or the post-it note (which was in fact, the exact opposite of what it’s goal was). 

Or, looking back a little at the linguistics and semiology we were recently discussing, if you were to think about the concept of a chair, the telos (the end, goal, completion, etc.) of a chair is something to sit in. A chair is a chair if it fulfils the concept of a chair. If you can’t sit in it, well either it's not a chair, or (as value judgement) it’s a ‘bad’ chair. 

Okay, so, short version, teleology, whether we’re talking about phenomenology or aesthetics, or ethics, or what have you, concerns itself with ends, as opposed to causes. 

To be nonteleological though, it to be without ends, purposes, or goals. 

Now, given the common understanding of utopia as some kind of perfected state or paradise of some kind, nonteleological utopia sounds kind of absurd. How can you possibly have a utopia without a goal? Isn’t utopia the goal of utopian thinking? Enter Kathi Weeks. 

Kathi Weeks is a professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke, since 2016, per her University bio. (Shhh….  You hear that? That’s the sound of all the so-called anti-woke / anti-elitist wingnuts dying a just little more inside at the mention of ‘the hated enemy’) 

Now, as mentioned earlier, we’re not getting into the specifics of Marxism, Feminism, or Anti-work today, but if that’s something you’re interested in, I do recommend checking out her book. I’d also like to give a quick nod to Jessa Crispin’s Why I am not a Feminist as it also hits on some things in Feminist critical theory that the various waves of feminism get right and wrong (though my Feminist Ethics professor was not a big fan of this one). In keeping with Weeks’ nonteleological, utopian thought, I think Crispin adds an interesting layer in calling for a kind of feminism that, as opposed to merely appropriating Patriarchy and transforming it into Matriarchy, or compromising with Patriarchy through goals like representation or a ‘seat at the table,’ instead should offer a radical social alternative to either Patriarchy or Masculinism, that Feminism has, Crispin argues, so far, failed to do. 

To get to what Weeks has to say about Utopia though, we do have to talk a little about Socialism. And, I should note, under terms that after having just gone through Barthes and Semiotics and myth, should sound pretty familiar. Weeks notes in her introduction, that one of the biggest problems in theorizing social change via postwork or antiwork or anticapitalism is the hurdle presented by the history of socialism. Specifically, she states, 

“Work is not only a site of exploitation, domination, and antagonism, but also where we might find the power to create alternatives on the basis of subordinated knowledges, resistant subjectivities, and emergent models of organization… The problem with these visions of radical social change [postwork imaginaries and antiwork politics] from a contemporary perspective is that they were most often conceived of as variations on a theme named socialism, even if some called for “a new kind of socialism” or a socialist revolution that would be equally feminist and antiracist. Today, however, it seems unlikely that socialism can serve as a persuasive signifier of a postcapitalist alternative. There are at least three kinds of problems with the term.” These are:

1. The name, or label, itself: Thinking back to Barthes, the associative baggage. The myth-sign “socialism” intervening in the language sign’s legibility and generativity. 
2. The “content of the vision, as Weeks states, “which has traditionally centered on the equal liability to work together with a more equitable distribution of its rewards.” While it aims at justice, it remains focused on work. It’s not a radical transformation, but, “a vision of the work society perfected.” 
3. The legacy of Socialism. Utopian speculation. The assumption of a future that can be named and predetermined. The telos of a utopian possibility. 

Alright, couple of things to unpack here. I’m going to leave the first point as is though. If you haven’t listened to episodes 7 and 9, they’re not strictly necessary to understand what I’m talking about in this episode overall, but they provide far greater clarity than I can sum up here; and, while the structure of the podcast is episodic, I am, largely, building on the ideas and concepts introduced earlier. Suffice to say, what Weeks is talking about here is that the connotations of the word socialism, in the United States specifically, interfere with or even prevent the word being understood in any kind of constructive context. Though, I disagree, at least in part, and credit outspoken, popular, modern American Democratic-Socialists, like Bernie Sanders, in doing a great deal to… reclaim the word and pivot to a context of fundamental egalitarianism in economics and politics, rather than bandying the word about in decontextualized, McCarthy-esque fearmongering. 

Now, as for the second point, the idea that socialism is “a vision of the work society perfected,” now this I find particularly interesting. Going back a few episodes, I previously described the utopian projects of Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism as such: Capitalism, the end of compulsory work via the accumulation of wealth; Communism, the egalitarian eradication of class distinction, the elimination of haves and have nots (to paraphrase Marx, the classless society, to each according to their needs, from each according to their capabilities); and Socialism, the transfer of the control of the means of production over to the worker. As a utopia, socialism does seem to offer the least to society. There is no promise of the end of work or the end of class conflict, only the ownership of ones’ own labor and thus the fruits of that labor. As a utopia, it seems almost excessively pragmatic. And, I’ll admit, I had never considered (or previously been referred to) the criticism of it as the perfect work-society; which, to my ear, sounds distinctly dystopian. 

Finally, and getting us back to the teleological/nonteleological point, just what is utopian speculation? Or, rather, what is a utopian project? I consider these to be functionally the same thing, taking different forms. On the one hand, utopian speculation, being a thought experiment as writing, either though philosophy (what if, how, and why) or fiction (pure imagination (queue the Willy Wonka music). A utopian project, on the other hand, I take to be the application of the thought experiment as politics, i.e. trying to transform the thought experiment into action. 

As thought, a major obstacle to dealing with any of society’s current problems is that it seems it must necessarily be met with current solutions, mechanisms, etc. (despite the fact that such current mechanisms are constitutive factors of those same current problems, and that imagining anything better is generally criticized as pure fantasy). It’s a criticism that upholds the status quo as both unchangeable and desirable. Which begs the question, if our current economic structure is such a massive problem, as it appears to be, for working people, that politicians on the right and left both argue that it needs to be ‘fixed,’ why are politicians of both flanks so committed to maintaining the fundamental status quo? Or, more accurately, who benefits most from portraying alternatives as pure fantasy?

Okay, Critique of Utopia: Right anti-utopian and left anti-utopian, which here both follow from classical liberalism, as opposed to totalitarianism, which is taken as a given that it’s just bad. 

Liberalism, as Weeks points out, is a bastion of anti-utopian critique. Modern Liberalism sets itself in opposition to socialism, following a tradition of anti-utopianism as anti-communism. Now, despite the longstanding conservative rhetoric, fine tuned from McCarthy to Reagan and espoused by nearly every conservative since, Liberals are, by definition, neither Socialists nor Communists. They are dedicated to the preservation of existing political institutions, market economics, piecemeal reform, and they are fundamentally anti-revolutionary. They are, in terms of political philosophy, the centrists. 

Liberalism, states Weeks, takes three forms: traditional or classical liberal (open government and open markets), neo-liberal (the ‘it’s the economy stupid’ of Clinton and Obama and market-as-politics intellectuals like Judge Richard Posner), and neo-conservative (a reactionary wave of Democrat and Republican intellectuals and politicians traumatized by the failure of the Vietnam War, committed to overwhelming American military might, unilateral action on the world stage, and the triumph of liberal democracy through capitalism and free trade; amongst which you’ll find intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. and those that created the Heritage Foundation, (early writings by) Francis Fukuyama (he later ceased to consider himself among this group and even criticized liberalism and capitalism’s abilities to address societal problems), and, politically, basically the entire George W. Bush administration. Though, given what I’ve read of Project 2025, I suspect the Heritage Foundation has, at this point, generally abandoned any interest in either open government or open markets in favor of something more akin to a hybrid of theocracy (government by a religion) and plutocracy (government by a wealthy elite). 

As regards critics of utopian projects, specifically liberalist critics of utopian projects, Weeks points to some of the works of contemporary philosopher, Karl Popper – quick aside, as regards demarcating periods of Western Philosophy, Modern versus Contemporary can be a little confusing to the uninitiated. Contemporary points to basically the whole 20th century through today (though arguably including part of the 19th century as well and starting with Hegel in Germany and the first State establishment of “Philosopher” as a professional position. Modern, interestingly, covers pretty much everything from around the Renaissance to the Contemporary era. Basically, there’s a whopping 4 periods: Ancient (Greece and Rome – Egypt gets left out, despite its profound impact on both Greece and Rome, and everyone else, Persia, India, China, Japan, etc. all get lumped under “Eastern Philosophy”), Medieval (but what about everything between ancient Greece and Rome and Medieval Europe? Well, that’s just gets chalked up to the dark ages. That’s not to say there weren’t major advances in science, art, and philosophy, just that they all took place either in the ‘East’ or in the Church, where ‘philosophy’ was, to the Church, just bad theology or outright heresy), Modern Philosophy, once Decartes realizes he thinks, therefore he is, and Contemporary. Now, Contemporary can be broken into two major camps: Analytical (the dominant thought and method in Britain and the United States) and Continental, as it was the range of dominant methods in Europe – though it might more accurately be called Temporal or Historico-Material (to contrast with the rationalist methodology of analytical). Right, Popper. 

To be fair, we’re not going to be getting too deeply into Popper’s work, at least, not for a good long while likely, but I think it’s important to follow Weeks’ lead here and reference his critical position to utopian projects, and as best I can tell, (and this is also true for Fukuyama, whom we’ll get to in a minute) his problem lies with teleological utopian projects that uphold some specific end goal of a perfected state of some kind. 

Karl Popper, 1902-1994, is an interesting figure in both philosophy of science and political philosophy. Popper was briefly a communist, but rejected it and Marxism over the Marxists that thought spilling blood potentially (if not explicitly) necessary for ‘the revolution.’ He was a liberal and a democrat (little L, little D), but found democracy guilty of being too weak to stop the spread of fascism and totalitarianism. And considered psychology, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, non-scientific because you couldn’t experiment on it – which gets to his major role in philosophy of science as regards Rationalism, which, rough and ready version, means: nothing can be “proven,” only falsified through experimentation. If an experiment proves something doesn’t work, then it’s been proven false, but, otherwise, nothing can be proven true. Now, if this sounds at all familiar, it’s because it follows the long tradition of Platonic rationalism (essentialism, formalism, etc.), and without getting too deep in the weeds here, there’s a major epistemological (what is knowledge and how we can know things) divide here between Plato and his student, Aristotle. Where Plato postulates that existence and knowledge can be reasoned by mental faculties alone, Aristotle insists the material world is the real world, and that in order to know anything the physical reality of things must be taken into account. What Popper's combination of rationalism and experimentation does is try to reconcile the divide between Plato and Aristotle. 

Now, there are of course some pitfalls and potential dangers, I think, to this form of Platonic rationalism based on falsification. Especially as regards defending things that cannot be proven, such as the existence of god, creationism, or intelligent design. So, if we want to hold up falsification-rationalism, can we prove the existence of god by proving the complexity of the eye? Well, no. Even though some claim to do just this via arguments for intelligent design (ID).  Logically, this runs up against the non-sequitur fallacy (the premises do not support the conclusion). In the case of something like, ‘the complexity of the eye is proof of intelligent design,’ well, first of all, ID is creationism by another name seeking to appropriate the tools of science and logic, so that proposition is, phrased honestly, intelligent design is proof of the existence of god, the complexity of the eye is proof of intelligent design, therefore if the eye is complex, then god is real. Let’s break this down a little more. Premise A: The eye is natural and complex. Premise B: If something natural is complex, it was designed. If A, then B. A exists (A is true), A therefore B. Premise C: God exists. Premise D: If God exists, then God is the designer of complex, natural things. If C, then D. C exists (is true), C therefore D. The eye is natural and complex, therefore God exists. A, therefore C.

Well, first of all, C cannot be proven so we move the goalpost (special pleading fallacy) and argue instead for the complexity of the eye, that there is simply no way something could be that complex by nature (appeal to nature fallacy) and must therefore be designed by something or someone, like god (the false cause fallacy), and of course, the propositional fallacy, affirming the consequent, because you cannot get to A therefore C without C existing as the first cause of A, B, and D. So what you have properly is, If A, then C; C therefore C, which is, also, ultimately, the circular logic fallacy. >sigh< Okay, back to Utopianism and its critics. 

Following Popper, revolution (specifically though, violence) disproves Marxism and Fascism by elected government disproves Democracy. Now, important caveat here. First, as regards the “Marxian Revolution,” it cannot be forgotten that this period of Marx’ writing was co-written by Friedrich Engles, a fellow German philosopher and activist, and revolutionary socialist, that gets left out of both revolutionary and anti-revolutionary rhetoric on account of it just being easier to hold up one prolific writer and particularly distinctive looking person as their hero or boogeyman. It also needs to be noted, that while Marx and Engles claim revolution is necessary for the oppressed class to overthrow the shackles of the oppressor class, their condoning or condemning of violence as a tool of the revolutionary is complicated and addressed only vaguely. As it is the ruling class that possesses the economic and political power, including the primary power of the State (the monopoly on the use of force), it can easily be read that to the extent the revolution would necessarily be violent, it would be in the violence the ruling class exerts to preserve their power, and the violence the revolution exerts in self-defense. We will come back to this, but it’s going to be a little while. As a sneak peek of what’s to come, following this section on Utopia, I plan the next two sections to be on History and Power, and I think the discussion regarding revolution fits better in that section. Second, it’s important to note that despite his criticism of liberal democracy, Popper remained committed to a liberal, socialist democracy the rest of his life and even tried to integrate a kind of socialism when he would later join Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, two fellow London School of Economics guys and two of the principal authors of neo-liberal (now largely considered rightwing libertarian) economic and political theory, in the first meeting of the Mont Perlin Society in Geneva in ’47 (now also a neoliberal think tank in Texas). 

Popper’s big contribution to political philosophy regards his analysis of open (liberal) and closed (totalitarian) societies in The Open Society and its Enemies, which deals with Plato and Marx, liberalism, socialism, fascism, capitalism, historicism, and so on. He traces totalitarianism back to ancient Greece as something that has been with us as long as civilization has, and as a constant, reactionary threat to open societies. As people gain in rights and freedoms, there will always be a reactionary pull back to hierarchy, order, conformity, etc. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a great resource by the way, as is Stanford University’s online encyclopedia, plato.stanford.edu, I’ll leave links to both in the show notes), notes the following regarding Popper’s analysis of open and closed societies…

They [the reactionary forces] sought to turn back the clock and return Athens to a society marked by rigid class hierarchy, conformity to the customs of the tribe, and uncritical deference to authority and tradition—a “closed society.” This move back to tribalism was motivated by a widely and deeply felt uneasiness that Popper called the “strain of civilization.” The structured and organic character of closed societies helps to satisfy a deep human need for regularity and a shared common life, Popper said.  In contrast, the individualism, freedom and personal responsibility that open societies necessarily engender leave many feeling isolated and anxious, but this anxiety, Popper said, must be born if we are to enjoy the greater benefits of living in an open society: freedom, social progress, growing knowledge, and enhanced cooperation. “It is the price we have to pay for being human” (from Open Society Vol. 1).

So, um, any of this reactionary stuff sounding familiar? 

Weeks also identifies Francis Fukuyama as a major critic of utopianism, though for different reasons – and, interestingly, here’s another neoliberal theorist who later changed his positions in response to the neoconservative movement his early writing contributed to – and we’ll get more deeply into Weeks on Fukuyama after we get to Weber and the Protestant Work Ethic. Essentially, Weeks pairs Fukuyama with Weber over his “resignation to a disenchanted world…” A criticism I find somewhat ironic as Fukuyama is principally known as a neoconservative – or at least was – identifying free market capitalism as the end point of history. Fukuyama identified the end of the Cold War and ‘victory’ of liberalism and capitalism as the end of the class struggle. It’s almost an anti-utopia of, ‘what are you talking about utopia for? This is utopia!’ Fukuyama’s defense of anti-utopianism takes the following positions; either a. liberalism is under threat (and, as history has proven (though this is inductive, and fallacious, logic) the only alternative, and therefore the only threat to liberalism is totalitarianism. Or, b. liberalism was victorious. 

Woo-hoo! We made it guys! Utopia is now! Don’t you feel victorious? 

Weeks criticism of Fukuyama here is that he’s taking acquiescence for realism, that his analysis is a kind of economic fatalism. Consider one aspect of Marxist thought, the idea of the complete subsumption of capital – capital’s ability to take anything and everything, including that which is most profoundly anti-capitalist, and turn it into a money-making commodity. If you’ve ever seen a Marx was Right bumper sticker, a Soviet Union emblem coffee mug, a Che Guevara t-shirt for sale, the kitschier the better, you’ve seen ‘complete subsumption’ in action. If you’ve ever seen any popular media based on counter cultural ideas or aesthetics, you’ve seen complete subsumption. What capitalism can do, that anti-capitalism cannot, or, at least, not do well, is identify what people like about anti-capitalism and turn it into profit. Sure, an anti-capitalist, nonprofit, activist organization could produce a tshirt or bumper sticker and distribute it for free as messaging or for sale to raise funds for activism, but capital can produce faster, cheaper, exploit the labor that did so, and turn a profit on it. You may be driving around with your Marx was Right bumper sticker, but somewhere there’s a capitalist laughing their way to the bank to deposit the profit from that sale into their account. So, as far as economic fatalism, Weeks’ point regarding Fukuyama is that his holding up of capitalism victorious isn’t victorious or celebratory at all, but rather a submission to the idea that capitalism is somehow inevitable, predetermined. Fukuyama’s end of history, circling back to Barthes, is capitalism as myth. The conversion of capitalism from historical to natural. 

This also brings us back to the idea of teleological and nonteleological. Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ is explicitly teleological. The ontology (what something is in its Being) and the epistemology of liberalism is teleological. The ends, the purpose, determines the phenomenon. For Fukuyama, capitalist liberalism, and for Popper, the Open society, are the telos of human civilization. There is no point in further utopian thinking, we know what the telos is, we’re here, we just need to defend it. Alternatives can only lead to totalitarianism. 

Alright, Weeks also looks into Feminism as utopian and utopia-critique, but I’m going to save this for our later discussion of Weeks larger postwork imaginaries argument. It’s a pretty rich section and entirely too much to unpack in the middle of what we’re already discussing. So, let’s pivot and take a look at defending utopian projects. To do so, Weeks turns to Ernst Bloch and our old friend Nietzsche – whom she quickly admits, she doesn’t think he’d be much pleased with being considered a utopian philosopher of hope, but, I think she makes a good argument for it. And, I’ll bet you’ve guessed what I’m going to say next… yeah, we’re going to get to that later. This is another area where there’s just so much to unpack, and I find really interesting, so we’ll take a look at Weeks on Nietzsche when we get to the Violence of Hope in a few weeks. 

Alright, at a quick glance, Ernst Bloch was a utopian, Marxist philosopher, whom, for good or ill (or both) was a proponent of Sovietism, orthodoxy, and Marxism as Faith. He wasn’t opposed to religion or the idea of God, but rather saw both as an essential drive toward a utopian, radical freedom on Earth, or, the Kingdom of Heavan as a utopian Human future. But what’s really interesting here (and, yeah, I apologize, I think I’ve said interesting entirely too many times this episode, but I think presenting a breadth of examples of ideas and criticism of utopia helps to get a better grasp on teleological versus nonteleological than simply defining the two terms and moving on. I presume if that’s what you were looking for, you’d probably just do a quick Google search yourself anyway), what’s really interesting is Bloch’s ontology of the ‘not yet.’

Quick aside, Deleuze and Guattari really pick up this ball and run with it in what they describe as “becoming,” in a truly nonteleological ontology, in which we never “are,” the present is a kind of illusion, we are always only becoming and we never become anything fixed, we are always in flux. Their works are a fascinating, if kind of esoteric read. There’s a lot of dense conceptual and metaphorical language based in Philosophy and Psychology. But, it’s one where if you’re willing to do the work, I think, is a really intellectually inspiring road to travel. And despite his being a contemporary and kind of an intellectual frenemy of Foucault’s (and, like Foucault, following on the right heels of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and Bataille), you’re probably not going to see Deleuze in a curriculum until you’re already pretty deep in a Philosophy, Film Studies, Psychology, or Art History program. 

For Bloch, the future is an unenclosed possibility, open to hope. It is the not-yet-become, the not-yet-conscious. And this is really the heart of a nonteleological utopian project. 

So, how do we define utopian reason in terms of an ontology of becoming, or an ontology of the not yet? 

Utopian reason challenges the rationalist denial of the intellectual productivity of the imagination. 

Another version of this can be seen in the advocacy for Basic (or Pure) Research. Scientific research driven not by a commercial, political, military, or otherwise practical need to solve some problem – whether it’s the cure for cancer or landing someone on mars, or just building a more efficient minivan – but scientific research for the purpose of expanding human knowledge. Now, utopianism is likely to be a pretty poor argument for research funding, especially in a capitalist economy where the owners of the capital and resources demand RoI estimates and specific timeframes for ‘deliverables.’ Investment in pure research, as regards specific projects, could change the world, or it could go nowhere. It’s like betting on a specific set of numbers in the lottery. The odds of winning are astronomically low, but the only thing that is certain, is that you can’t win if you don’t play. And someone always wins… eventually. With pure research, the winner is, more often than not, everyone. 

Okay, Weeks, Bloch, and the Project of Hope. 

Now, I try to avoid large quotation blocks beyond 2 or 3 sentences in this format, but, and I’ve been going over this and staring at it for more than a hot minute now – like, literally, I was trying to figure out how to best paraphrase this section and wound up leaving to join some friends for a couple of beers, only to come back to this, and, well, I still can’t think of a better way to put this than Weeks does because, well, she’s just really on point in her analysis. So, since I’m not about to just read you all 3 pages from her book, here’s the really abridged version, interspersed with my commentary. And, if you want to see where I’m directly quoting, paraphrasing, editing, etc., please check out the transcript of this episode. Save for the Happy Hour episodes, these transcripts are not AI or app generated from what I’m saying, but what I am actually writing, bracketing, and citing before I read it. 

so, per Weeks, who is also in part here quoting Bloch, quote and paraphrase:  

Hope is, by this measure [intellectual and political projects] not something one either has or does not, but rather something that can be fostered and practiced by degrees – although, as [Bloch and Nietzsche] suggest, not [done] easily or without risk. 

…hope, as [Bloch] explains it, is both a cognitive faculty [a mode of thinking through time that works, though mediated through, imagination and reason, “the counterpart of which is memory” … and it is] an emotion – or, perhaps, more accurately, an affect. Whereas hope as a cognitive capacity is analogous to the faculty of memory, and what we might call “hoping” is a practice comparable to remembering or historicizing, hope as an affect – or what [Weeks] will call “hopefulness” – can best be grasped, Bloch claims, in contrast to fear and anxiety. [Recall the earlier episodes regarding anxiety and turning toward death in the meaningful work argument] Hope as a political project… is something that can be trained and cultivated. [Now, if anxiety is the reaction to something like turning toward death, hope, as opposed to resentment and nihilism, can be the mechanism by which action can be taken to rectify, or at least mitigate, the cause of the anxiety. But, to be effective, hope must take the form of action.]

The greatest challenge facing hope as a cognitive practice is our difficulty thinking beyond the bounds of the past and present. [We need to be able to think both backward and forward, to both reflect and project.] Hence, part of the project of “learning hope” involves developing the cognitive capacity to think through time in both directions.

Now, Weeks continues: 

“In order to be both a useful intellectual exercise and a politically effective force, utopian hope must be based in analyses of the present conjuncture [the sum of the circumstances producing the current crisis] and in relation to existing tendencies and credible possibilities. [A concrete utopia conceived from feet on the ground, rather than an abstract one from heads in the clouds. As regards abstract utopias, their] contents are fantastic and their function compensatory. [They also run risk of doing real harm, which we’ll get to soon enough with the violence of hope in a few weeks. Concrete utopias, in contrast, are] more anticipatory then compensatory.” Note, here Weeks is referring to Ruth Levitas’ essay “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch.

Now, here’s the kicker. In addition to the challenge facing hope as cognitive project, Weeks notes that “the epistemological challenge” of thinking a concrete utopia is that we must think a “real-possible” future that “is grounded in present possibilities.” So, sure, we can imagine a Star Trek socialist utopia where everyone and anyone, on earth anyway, has free and equal access to energy and the means of production and where sexism, racism and scarcity no longer exist, so everyone can make of their life whatever they want and have the capacity and talents to do, but this vision isn’t grounded in present possibilities. There’s no such thing as dilithium or replicators or Starfleet. Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t try to address sexism, racism, and scarcity, by trying to imagine a world in which they don’t exist, nor does it mean Star Trek can’t give us hope, only that, in the first case, we need to address these problems based on what can be done now and then continue to think how to do better, and in the latter to know that it’s ultimately escapism, however better it makes us feel in the moment. 

Side note, I seriously cannot wait for the next season of Strange New Worlds. That show is just… chef’s kiss. 

Alright, to wrap this long section of citing Weeks, as she also identifies what we need to avoid, and what we need to aim for, in concrete utopian thinking. 

“… whereas concrete utopianism is grounded in present possibilities, it should not be confused with either idealism or futurism. In terms of what we might think of as the idealisms of the status quo, any number of dreams of change come to mind: from neoconservativism’s ideal of national solidarity anchored by the work, family, and religious values of its citizens, to neoliberalism’s vision of the world made free and fair by the unhindered reign of market logics or the post-neoliberal vision of a postracial city on the hill that was often attached to the Obama campaign’s signifiers of hope and change. Although such dreams of national destiny fulfilled or redemption achieved may tap into utopian longings, they remain for the most part better versions of the present rather than visions of radically different worlds.”

In order to keep the focus on a radically different possibility, Weeks borrows another concept of Bloch’s, the novum. The novum is something “qualitatively new” and the project of concrete utopianism is the drive toward that which is both real-possible and qualitatively new.

And this is, essentially, what nonteleological utopianism is. It’s open ended, there is no fixed goal or end of history to be achieved, only an ongoing project of making the world both better and better in a way that is radically different.

To, again, turn back a little to my Toward Meaningful Work project, there was no specific end point to achieve. Even if meaningful work for all workers could be achieved, there’s no reason to stop there, nor do I believe it’s an idealistic project. It think it’s a highly practical, and ethically critical project to place greater value on thriving than merely having a job and working for the sake of work. Now, of course, I find it exceptionally unlikely something like meaningful work for all, under the present economic structures, can equate to full employment for all. The economy itself would likely have to evolve into something radically different itself, and this is where the project of utopian thinking comes in. First, we need to embrace the anxiety that comes along with recognizing there’s a problem, and rather than pathologizing that anxiety, sanctifying or medicalizing the status quo and preserving it by treating ourselves with drugs, alcohol, religion, media, or, worse, nihilism; but to do so, we need to have hope that a better future is possible, and the imagination to try to conceive a radically different, possible, and ever evolving future. 

Alright, as I mentioned, we’ll be coming back to Weeks, along with James Livingston, later to address the details of antiwork and postwork imaginaries. But, next up, we’re going to pivot into some of the problems utopian thinking faces. Next episode, we try to tackle the violence of hope, how hope can be deeply conservative in preserving the status quo, the dangers posed by progressive narratives, and we start to unpack some Nietzsche. From there, why thinking about anything beyond capitalism is so difficult with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.

Now, given recent events and the political timeline for this, I’m changing things up a little in the schedule for the remainder of this arc. The Republican campaigns this cycle have pivoted their anti-abortion rhetoric of the past decade to one of the importance of the child, spearheaded by VP candidate J.D. Vance and his past and recent comments about childless cat ladies and adults without children being sociopaths and deserving no say in the future of the country. Given the upcoming VP Debate on Oct. 1st, which would be an episode drop day, I’m going to shuffle Lee Edelman’s No Future and the child as myth and political rhetoric up a bit. I’ll post updates on that episode to the socials, as of right now, I’m not sure if it makes more sense to get that episode out ahead of the debate, or wait until after the debate and see how much needs to be responded to – right now I’m leaning toward the latter.  

I hope you’ll join me. 

‘til then. 

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