The Necessity of Hope in Dystopian Times: A Critical Reflection

Abstract

In today’s global order, for those seeking a just, equal, and healthy existence for humanity and nature, it is time to exercise the transformative utopian impulse. Yet, against such praxis, capitalism’s retrieval mechanism subsumes and consumes the potential of utopianism. Within this co-optation, an enclosure of “eutopian” sensibility within a resigned “dystopian” structure of feeling compromises the radical utopian project through practices of disciplined “improvement” within the “realism” of the existing order. Herein, this essay discusses two symptomatic texts that it argues are imbricated within this dystopian ambience. With great respect for its author, I read Dystopia: A Natural History, by Gregory Claeys, as a component of this hegemonic structure of feeling rather than a challenge to it; meanwhile, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Dystopias Now” as a negation of that negation, as the author takes an anti-anti-utopian stance that reasserts the radical utopian project.