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Baccolini / Moylan, Preamble Ralahine Utopian Studies 1 Utopia Method Vision The Use Value of Social Dreaming von Raffaella Baccolini, Tom Moylan 1. Auflage Utopia Method Vision – Baccolini / Moylan schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG Peter Lang Bern 2007 Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 912 8 Inhaltsverzeichnis: Utopia Method Vision – Baccolini / Moylan TOM MOYLAN AND RAFFAELLA BACCOLINI Introduction: Utopia as Method Utopia Since the millennial year of 2000, there has been a growing attention to Utopia and its uses. In the names given to products and services, this traditional appeal to a better world is associated with the pursuit of immediate, material satisfaction and happiness. With a Utopia bank loan (Ireland), Utopia jewelry line (Italy), Utopia clothing store (Aus- tralia and New Zealand), Utopia financial service (Ireland), Utopia adult entertainment shop (Ireland), Utopia fitness and well-being (U.K.), Utopia trailer park (U.S.), Utopia yarn (U.S.), Utopia security (Italy), Utopia furniture (U.S.), Utopia night club (U.K.), Utopia as an acronym for Universal Test and Operations Physical Interface for ATM (U.S.), and Utopia computer games and toys, such as Dinotopia and Barbie Fairytopia, we see this once-denigrated notion alive and well in the commercial imagination. More overtly, we see appeals to a better world embedded in political initiatives ranging from the George W. Bush administration’s “Project for a New American Century” to the World Social Forum’s claim that “Another world is possible.” This utopian revival in popular and political spheres has, simul- taneously, been paralleled by a series of challenges to the legitimacy and efficacy of utopian anticipations. In both the apocalyptic preach- ing of religious leaders and the pragmatic planning of policy makers, the idea of a utopian alternative in this world is condemned as sinful hubris, useless speculation, or dangerous intervention. On a theoretical level, utopian thought and practice has been rejected by studies as diverse as Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Oliver Bennett’s Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World. 14 Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini In a significant development, however, this twinned revival and renunciation of Utopia has been countered at a more substantial level in theoretical works such as David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope, Zyg- munt Bauman’s Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, and Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions; and in creative works such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt, and Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World, and films such as Michael Bay’s The Island and John Sayles’s Limbo. As it investigates both theory and creative practice, our 2003 collection, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, traced this persistence of Uto- pia in recent dystopian fiction, film, and politics. In a series of essays by scholars from different countries and in different fields, the stubborn presence of utopian hope was examined in a range of works in the new dystopian writings and films of the 1990s as well as in the political practices that came alive in that decade. In what we called the critical dystopia, we examined a series of texts in which a militant or utopian stance “not only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure of the text’s alternative world but also self-reflexively refuses the anti- utopian temptation that lingers in every dystopian account” (Baccolini and Moylan, “Introduction” 7). Whereas the traditional dystopia main- tains hope, if at all, outside its pages, the new critical dystopias preserve hope inside their pages as they “allow both readers and protagonists to hope” by imagining resistant utopian enclaves within the dystopian world and by proffering – through a strategy of “genre blurring” – ambiguous open endings that resist closure (7).1 In so doing, we affirmed the importance of utopian critique in scholarly studies of culture and society and in political life. While this utopian renaissance is relatively recent, the paradigm for scholarly investigations of utopian thought and practice developed 1 Examples of critical dystopias include print works such as Le Guin’s The Telling, Robinson’s Antarctica, Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and films such as Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, James Cameron’s Terminator, and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy. Introduction 15 in the mid 1960s and has since been elaborated within the field of utopian studies. Organized in professional societies in both Europe and North America, and in Research Centers such as those in Limerick and Bologna, and furthered by publications (book series – Syracuse University Press, Longo, and Peter Lang – bibliographies, monographs, collections, and essays in the journal Utopian Studies and elsewhere), international conferences, and an increasing number of taught courses, the scholarly articulation of Utopia has grown in archival, theoretical, and pedagogical sophistication. Working with this current utopian turn, several leading scholars have broken new ground in the field. Among recent studies, Phillip E. Wegner’s Im- aginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity brings the utopian problematic to bear on our under- standing of the production of modernity and of nation. In Living in Utopia: Intentional Communities in New Zealand, Lucy Sargisson and Lyman Tower Sargent extend the utopian ethnographic gaze beyond traditional western parameters as they study the rich array of utopian communities in this Pacific state. In Utopian Audiences: How Readers Locate Nowhere, Kenneth M. Roemer delivers an important new theoretical and methodological approach through the first fully devel- oped analysis of utopian texts by way of reader reception. Finally, Hoda Zaki’s Civil Rights and Politics at Hampton Institute: The Leg- acy of Alonzo G. Moron deploys a utopian framework in her study of the U.S. civil rights movement. Utopia Method Vision Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming grows out of the work of these scholars and others. Between spring 2003 and autumn 2004, the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies of the Uni- versity of Limerick invited twelve international scholars in utopian studies (from Canada, England, Ireland, Italy, Northern Ireland, and the United States) to participate in a two-year research seminar. In 16 Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini parallel meetings at the Ralahine Centre in Limerick and the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, the participants addressed the ways in which they approached their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experi- ments) and how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work in general and their research perspectives in par- ticular. In so doing, the participants helped to develop a larger, self- critical look at the limits and potential of the entire paradigm by which utopianism is known, studied, critiqued, created, and received. Thus, this collection that grows out of these seminars has a unique focus on researchers themselves (as intellectuals, as citizens), while it also concerns itself with the substance and impact of utopianism in its examination of the object of study, and of the purpose, method, and impact of that research. Utopia Method Vision (UMV) therefore intervenes in critical and cultural studies as it encourages a productive self-reflexivity that we hope will expand the substance of utopian research, critique, and practice. This focus is informed by feminist, Marxist, ethnographic, and post-structuralist theories on the standpoint or positionality of researchers and the impact of that standpoint on the objects and practices of study (and vice versa); however, the collection does not stop at the register of self-assessment. Rather, the self-reflexive moment opens into an interrogation of current research in utopian studies and an exploration of new research directions on objects and practices freshly approached in terms of the utopian process. Method Coming from different academic disciplines as well as different national traditions, the UMV contributors engage in a shared ex- ploration of their method and vision. In this regard, they enter a general conversation on research method that is of current concern in Introduction 17 the social sciences and in cultural and literary studies.2 Beginning with a look backward at the individual contributor’s particular standpoint and early engagement with utopianism, each essay moves forward to identify and explore new areas of investigation and intervention. Focusing on both textual and experiential versions of utopianism and on the question of its political future, the contributors address larger historical and theoretical issues even as they identify further opportunities for textual, ethnographic, and political studies. In the course of this discussion, specific objects analyzed include political phenomena such as the U.S. civil rights movement, the anti-glob- alization/alter-globalization movement, the intentional community movement, fundamentalist utopianism, the World Conference Against Racism, and the World Social Forum; literary texts such as Thomas More’s Utopia (Eng.), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (Eng.), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (U.S.), Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (U.S.), Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia (U.S.), Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (U.S.), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt (U.S.); and films such as John Sayles’s Men with Guns (U.S.) and Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte (Italy). The volume opens with Lucy Sargisson’s essay, “The Curious Relationship Between Politics and Utopia.” Sargisson begins with definitions of both Utopia and politics, and she moves into a theor- etical interrogation of the nature and practice of politics.
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