Planet Utopia The key figure of the capitalist utopia is the individual who is ultimately free. The capitalist’s ideal society is designed to protect this freedom. However, within Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, Globalisation, Featherstone argues that capitalist utopian vision, which is most clearly expressed in theories of global finance, is no longer sustainable today. This book concerns the status of utopian thinking in contemporary global society and the possibility of imagining alternative ways of living outside of capitalism. Using a range of sociological and philosophical theories to write the first intellectual history of the capitalist utopia in English, Featherstone provokes the reader into thinking about ways of moving beyond this model of organising social life through sociological modes of thought. Indeed, this enlightening volume seeks to show how utopian thinking about the way people should live has been progressively captured by capitalism with the result that it is difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalist society today. Presenting sociology and sociological thinking as a utopian alternative to the capitalist utopia, Planet Utopia will appeal to postgraduate and postdoctoral students interested in subjects including Sociology, Social Theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural Theory and Continental Philosophy. Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, UK. 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 1 10-12-2016 8:17:22 PM Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT 112 Jürgen Habermas and the European Economic Crisis Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered Edited by Gaspare M. Genna, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Ian W. Wilson 113 Genealogies of Emotions, Intimacies, and Desire Theories of Changes in Emotional Regimes from Medieval Society to Late Modernity Ann Brooks 114 Modernity and Crisis in the Thought of Michel Foucault The Totality of Reason Matan Oram 115 Crisis and Critique On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life Rodrigo Cordero 116 China in Early Enlightenment Political Thought Simon Kow 117 Elementary Forms of Social Relations Status, Power and Reference Groups Theodore D. Kemper 118 Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy Omedi Ochieng 119 Theories of the Stranger Debates on Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Cross-Cultural Encounters Vince Marotta 120 Deciphering Goffman The Structure of his Sociological Theory Revisited Ramón Vargas Maseda 121 Planet Utopia Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation Mark Featherstone 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 2 10-12-2016 8:17:22 PM Planet Utopia Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation Mark Featherstone 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 3 10-12-2016 8:17:23 PM First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business © 2017 Mark Featherstone The right of Mark Featherstone to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in- Pub lication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP data] ISBN: 978- 0- 415-99770- 6 (hbk) ISBN: 9781- 3- 152- 1250- 0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 4 10-12-2016 8:17:23 PM For Paddy 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 5 10-12-2016 8:17:23 PM 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 6 10-12-2016 8:17:23 PM Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction: On the Seashore: Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Politics 1 1 Back to the Future: Utopia and Dystopia in Greece 23 2 The Origins of the Capitalist Utopia 52 3 The Late Capitalist Utopia in Power 81 4 Global Finance, Utopia of Beautiful Numbers 109 5 The Minor Utopia 138 6 The Lost Child of the Dystopian City: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Only God Forgives 171 7 Dis- United Kingdom: Division, Encounter, and Utopianism in Heterotopic Britain 198 Conclusion: The Spectre of Sociology 220 Index 240 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 7 10-12-2016 8:17:23 PM Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the support of Siobhan and Paddy, who put up with me wrestling with reading and writing when I might have been spending time elsewhere. 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 8 10-12-2016 8:17:23 PM Introduction On the Seashore: Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Politics I On the Seashore On the seashore of endless worlds, children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, Ships are wrecked in the trackless water, Death is abroad, children play (Tagore in Kuhn, 2013: Front Matter) In his essay ‘The Location of Cultural Experience’, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (2005) quotes the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in order to frame his discussion of the emergence of culture in play and playfulness. In his work on children, Winnicott was never interested in notions of utopia or dystopia, but rather the ways in which kids play, imagine, and create in secure spaces defined by their parents. In his view this experience, the experience of creativity, which we first encounter in the potential space set out by Mom, is a model for later cultural development. In other words, we learn to create through childhood play, which opens onto the infinite expanse of the human imagination and allows us to imagine entirely new worlds, and then take this forward into our adult life, where we continue to play, imagine, and create in secure spaces where we feel able to think new thoughts without penalty or punishment. Reading Winnicott’s (2005) work, and thinking through his use of Tagore, we might suggest that the seashore represents the liminal space of imagination and creativity, the borderland between feelings of security and containment where we know what is what and everything remains the same, and the experience of insecurity and otherness where we encounter anxiety, but also possibility, newness, and the future. While the sandy beach represents the safety of land, the sea is the infinite space of possibility, mystery, and monstrosity. We know we can live on land. We can breathe. The sea, on the other hand, is the space of the shipwreck, disaster, and drowning. It represents endless expanse, the infinite that threatens to envelope us and dissolve our fragile sense of self in its vast, dark, waters (Hamilton, 2013). Despite— or perhaps more precisely because of— this risk, we know that without the sea and the possibility of exploration, we would miss and never encounter the 15037-0096-FullBook.indd 1 10-12-2016 8:17:23 PM 2 Introduction hope of the new and the future. As we gaze out from the land over the vast expanse of water towards the horizon, what we see is possibility, potential, and utopia. In order to understand Winnicott’s reference to Tagore, then, we might consult Gaston Bachelard’s (1994) book on water, and particularly his idea of the Charon complex. Here, water, and the endless ocean, is simultaneously a repre- sentation of death but also hope, the future, and the possibility of peace. Recalling Freud (2003), who talks about the oceanic experience in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Bachelard links the idea of the ocean to the bind between the endless peace of death and the infinite promise of the future. By positioning his children on the seashore, Winnicott (2005) avoids the worst excesses of the Freudian ocean, where men drown and are consumed by monsters emerging from the abyss, and instead allows his kids to look out over the vast expanse of water with their feet planted firmly on dry land. Thus, the seashore is Winnicott’s safe place which allows creativity and imagination to happen. The seashore is Winnicott’s spatial metaphor for imagination played out under conditions of psychological security. But why introduce this work with reference to Winnicott’s paper and particularly his use of Tagore’s seashore? What does any of this have to do with notions of utopia and dystopia? I begin with reference to Winnicott’s (2005) work, and his reference to Tagore, because I want to argue that we have lost touch with the experience of the seashore in contemporary social and cultural life, especially under con- ditions of neoliberal capitalism where everything is defined by its cost or quantifiable benefit, and that this has impacted upon our possibility to imagine other worlds which might improve or enrich our own. In this way my view is that we have lost our sense of the value of imagination, creativity, wonder, and the kind of naivety that is inseparable from the experience of childhood, simply because kids are not entirely integrated into the world. Before they are fully socialised into the world, kids retain the ability to look upon life through strange eyes and see things otherwise, on the basis of how they might look in some other imaginary universe. This is a situation, and an experience, which I think we need to rediscover in order to reopen the horizon of the future, a future that is beyond the narrow confines of neoliberal capitalism, where obsession with economy makes everything seem absolutely predictable.