Utopian Thinking
6:48 pm in articles by Alan Dearling
An essay by Stevphen Shukaitis
The problem is that you can’t study utopia. The study of utopia is the ethnography of nowhere. There is no ready made existing liberatory society which one can go and study, takes notes on, and then return and try to recreate here. It is also debatable even if one could find such an existing situation that trying to recreate such out of the context where such emerged would be the best of ideas. And that’s the problem of utopian vision, is that it doesn’t exist anywhere – that’s implicit in the word. But there have existed a multitude of examples of cooperative structures and non-hierarchal social practices that have existed through out history. Little slices of liberation and non-alienated experience – what Pierre Clastres describes as the “vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without power; where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchal subordination.” (1977: 5) And that’s the starting point of reformatting a non-vanguardist approach to the creation of utopian social theory…
The alternative approach that I would put forward for creating a radical visions would be to look at the existing forms of cooperative economics and social practice that have existed through out human history and around the planet, and to try to draw out their underlying logic into a more generalized pluralistic vision. Such an approach draws from an ethnographic practice and approach (though trying to dispense with the more noxious forms and tendencies that such has exhibited by the less ethical of researchers). This would not be just a shift in one’s approach, but the beginning notes of what very well could be an extensive and on-going project. Thus instead of asking “how can we run the economy so that it creates solidarity?” or “how can we manage individual interests and communal interests?” the question becomes looking at different existing forms of practice and drawing from them, rather than trying to impose upon them. The role of vision through this becomes not declaring what should be based upon utopian abstraction, but trying to figure out what could be based upon the experiences contained within existing forms of social relations.
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