#ruth levitas

[jacobwren]

For those who still think that utopia is about the impossible, what really is impossible is to carry on as we are, with social and economic systems that enrich a few but destroy the environment and impoverish most of the world's population. Our very survival depends on finding another way of living.

Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method

[perkwunos]

Freud regarded the unconscious as a rubbish bin of repressed material that was no longer conscious; Bloch argues that it is also a creative source of material on the verge of coming to consciousness. The creativity that derives from this is expressed in a variety of ways, from simple day-dreams to the heights of artistic activity. And in so far as these expressions are expressions of hope for a better world or a better way of being in it, they are expressions of utopia. The utopian impulse is therefore a fundamental human faculty, which may take a wide variety of forms, many of which are discussed in the second volume of The Principle of Hope and which range from alchemy to opera.

For Bloch, however, these dreams of a better world are not simply a matter of compensatory fantasies, but a venturing beyond the present to a possible better future. Here, the Not Yet Conscious is linked to the Not Yet Become. Fundamental to Bloch's argument are certain assertions about the material world. It is essentially unfinished, the future is indeterminate and therefore is a realm of possibility: 'the world is full of objective real possibilities, which are not yet actual possibilities because they have not yet fulfilled all the conditions of their possibility, and may or may not ever become fully possible.’ It is the notion of real possibility which provides the link between utopia and Marxism. Bloch is critical of versions of Marxism which present it as a deterministic philosophy:

It is not sufficient to speak of dialectical process and then to treat history as a series of sequential Fixa or even closed 'totalities'. A narrowing and diminishing of reality threatens here ... and that is not Marxism.

Since the world is in a constant state of becoming, and what it is becoming is not determined, there are always many real possible futures - not all of which are desirable, since they include 'devastatingly, possible fascist Nothing' as well as, and above all, 'finally feasible and overdue, socialism'.

Ruth Levitas, “Marxism, Romanticism and Utopia: Ernst Bloch and William Morris”

[nextwavefutures]

Making change

Making change: connecting Three Horizons with other approaches to imagining different futures. New post.

I recently found a note I’d written—but never written up—as a result of the Three Horizons course I did with Bill Sharpe and Daniel Wahl at Schumacher College in the autumn of 2017. I enrolled because, although I had been involved early on in developing Three Horizons, and had used it a lot, I was aware that Bill’s practice of it had evolved, perhaps in different directions, and I wanted to get a…

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[perkwunos]

Ruth Levitas, “Marxism, Romanticism and Utopia: Ernst Bloch and William Morris”

[jacobwren]

Utopia's strongest function, its claim to being important rather than a matter of esoteric fascination and charm, is its capacity to inspire the pursuit of a world transformed, to embody hope rather than simply desire.

Ruth Levitas 

[thedarksideoflight89]

Plainly, Bloch was practically as well as theoretically committed to Marxism. The project of The Principle of Hope is not to revise Marxism by the insertion of utopia (though it is arguable that this is in fact what Bloch does), but to rehabilitate it as a neglected Marxist concept. The key concept in this process is the Not Yet, which has two aspects, the Not Yet Conscious and the Not Yet Become - an ideological and a material aspect. The Not Yet Conscious is developed through a critique of Sigmund Freud. Freud regarded the unconscious as a rubbish bin of repressed material that was no longer conscious; Bloch argues that it is also a creative source of material on the verge of coming to consciousness. The creativity that derives from this is expressed in a variety of ways, from simple day-dreams to the heights of artistic activity. And in so far as these expressions are expressions of hope for a better world or a better way of being in it, they are expressions of utopia. The utopian impulse is therefore a fundamental human faculty, which may take a wide variety of forms, many of which are discussed in the second volume of The Principle 0f Hope and which range from alchemy to opera.

“Marxism, Romanticism and Utopia: Ernst Bloch and William Morris,” Ruth Levitas