JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1 (JANUARY 2009)

No Intentions? Utopian Theory

After the Future

Lisa Garforth
L.garforth@leeds.ac.uk
Journal
10.1080/14797580802674787
RCUV_A_367648.sgm
1479-7585
Original
Taylor
102009
13
LisaGarforth
00000January
and
&for
Article
Francis
(print)/1740-1666
Cultural
Francis
2009Research (online)

This article examines the question of utopia and un/intention in relation to

recent utopian theory and the changing socio-historical conditions of utopianism.
The notion of intentionality is rarely explicitly considered in utopian theory;
however, it offers to shed new light on debates about the concept, form and
function of utopia in late modernity. My principal argument is that intention has
become increasingly irrelevant to theories of utopia. In the last 20 years, utopia
has been reconceptualised as processual, critical, reflexive, open-ended, and
immanent. The utopics of heterogeneous spatialities have displaced temporal,
future-oriented utopianism; utopianism has been embedded in everyday life
rather than displaced into formal representation; the possibilities of transforma-
tive, collective programmes for social change appear to have ceded to the free
play of critique and desire. Insofar as intention implies a purposive orientation
to action in the name of a predefined goal or object, it seems to have little to do
with contemporary utopianism. I conclude by indicating some directions that an
explicit attention to intention promises to open up in relation to the concept and
politics of utopia.

Introduction

Utopia is difficult to define, characterised at every turn by ambiguity and contra-

diction. In commonsense or colloquial terms, it remains trapped between the twin
poles of, on the one hand, its dismissive association with impractical, fantastical
and totalitarian schemes for social improvement and, on the other, its unreflexive
use as shorthand for positive or hopeful orientations to the future, however vague
and unformed. Formal expressions of utopianism are conventionally identified in
the areas of (1) utopian (and dystopian) fiction, (2) social and political theory and
philosophy, and (3) practical utopian experiments or intentional communities
(see for example Sargent 1994). On the question of precisely what constitutes
utopia, however, theorists are routinely drawn back to the generative paradox
set up by the punning title of Thomas Mores (1516) Utopia, which signifies simul-
taneously the good place (eu-topia) and the no-place (ou-topia). The ability and
propensity of human cultures to imagine better places that are definitionally

ISSN 14797585 print/17401666 online/09/01000523

2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14797580802674787
6 GARFORTH

impossible to instantiate, then, constitutes a significant aspect of the framework

within which utopia has been analysed.
Traditionally the study of utopianism has been centred on fictional texts, and
as such utopia itself appears to come into being with Mores Utopia, which founds
and names the literary genre. Insofar as work on the literary utopia offers
definitions or conceptualisations (and these have historically been unusual; see
Levitas 1990), they have been formal ones, as in this example from sociologist
Krishan Kumar:

[utopia] is first and foremost a work of imaginative fiction in which, unlike other
such works, the central subject is the good society. (Kumar 1991, p. 27; emphasis
added)

A utopia does not simply tell but shows in operation and in narrative detail the
principles of the good society, whose nowhere-ness is implicit in its self-evidently
fictive form (Kumar 1991, p. 31; Garforth 2002). Within what Levitas (1990) calls
the liberal-humanist tradition of utopian studies, then, utopia has been iden-
tified exclusively with its literary form (see for example Morton 1978; Berneri
1982; Davis 1981; Kumar 1987). On this basis a canon of utopian and, latterly,
anti-utopian or dystopian texts has been established stretching from early
modernity to the present day. The progressive function of utopianism is here
simply assumed, as in the over-used Oscar Wilde quote:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,
for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when
Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias. (1891)

Outwith the literary tradition, however, debates about the social effects of a
much wider range of utopian thought have informed an approach to utopianism
defined primarily by its attention to function (Levitas 1990; Moylan 2000, 1986).
Here, utopia is not conceptualised in terms of the form of its expression what
it is but in terms of what it does. Superficially more interesting to social scien-
tists, theories of utopian function or effect work on the contested positive/
normative borderline of social theory, the point at which analytical models of
the way the social world is jostle up against visions of what it should or might
be, at which understanding the world blurs into the desire to change it. The
shared origins of contemporary sociological theory and utopian socialism
(Goodwin and Taylor 1982; Kumar 1987) reinforce this connection, as does the
more recent attention within utopian studies to critical social theory and philos-
ophy. From this perspective, utopia is clearly imbricated with modernitys ratio-
nal project of knowledge/power, and thus insinuates itself into the whole range
of social and political discourses that explicitly or implicitly articulate a vision of
a better world, with utopian fiction appearing as just one particularly elaborate
formulation of it.
Approaches to utopia as function originate in Marx and Engelss scathing
dismissal of utopian socialism as idealist, fantastical and compensatory. Robert
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 7

Owen, Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier, all of whom either
published detailed and broadly socialist utopian visions and/or established
utopian social experiments, were seen as competitors and threats to the materi-
alist and dialectical model of social change (Marx and Engels 1967; see also Levitas
1990; Geoghegan 1987; Jameson 2000). However, developments within post-war
cultural/humanist Marxism have tended to identify utopianism as a mode of
liberatory and critical thinking whose function is to open up the possibility of
apprehending another way of being, one that can just be glimpsed from within
the dominant social totality, and which forms a necessary condition for collective
emancipatory politics (see for example Benhabib 1986). Utopianism here, then,
functions at the level of consciousness as a heuristic device that might inculcate
the possibility of and desire for radical social change. For Marx and Engels, utopias
were fanciful pictures of a better society that functioned as escapist if wistful
distractions from the realities of proletarian struggle; ideological compensations
for alienation and exploitation. For Herbert Marcuse (see e.g. 1989, 1979, 1966),
Ernst Bloch (to whose work I will shortly return), and E. P. Thompson (1977),
utopianism could work in certain circumstances within but against the grain of
culture/ideology, its function the education of desire, a critical process that
works to:

open a way to aspiration, to teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire

more, and above all to desire in a different way utopianism, when it succeeds,
liberates desire to an uninterrupted interrogation of our values and also to its
own self-interrogation. (Thompson 1977, p. 792. Thompson cites M-H Abensour
1973, Les Formes de LUtopie Socialist-Communiste)

On this reading, then, utopianism might be defined, in terms of its function, as

those cultural forces which open us up to critical thinking and the possibility of
other ways of being.

Rethinking Utopia

Given these very different disciplinary origins and orientations of the formal and
functional approaches to utopia, it is clear that conceptualisations of the object
of study articulated from within either cannot do justice to the breadth of
utopian thought at work in modern culture. Moreover, the focus on utopia as an
exclusively modern phenomenon, generated respectively by the centrality of the
key figures of More and Marx, is problematic. Even those theorists like Kumar
(1991, 1987) and Lyman Tower Sargent (2001, 1994) whose primary concern is
with the self-conscious literary genre initiated by More cannot avoid having to
deal with utopias pre-history (Sargent 1994), or what Kumar refers to as forms
of the ideal society imaginary that lie outside the utopian genre proper. These
include, but are not limited to, the traditions of Edenic and Golden Age myths,
millennialism, Cockaygne fantasies, and the Arcadia or pastoral. Nor can classi-
cal models of the ideal society, foremost among them Platos Republic, be
8 GARFORTH

overlooked. And finally, intentional communities have increasingly come to be

recognised as a form of utopian social practice to which neither formal nor theo-
reticalcritical definitions do justice.
In acknowledging these disparate manifestations of utopia and traditions in
utopian studies and attempting to build bridges between them, Ruth Levitass
The Concept of Utopia (1990) made an enormous contribution to the field by
isolating a shared element desire as the key to the concept of utopia. Defin-
ing utopia as the expression of desire for a better way of living and being
(1990, p. 191), Levitas renders it an open and inclusive concept promoting a fully
interdisciplinary utopian studies. Her definition also provides a foundation from
which particular expressions of utopian desire, and arguments about its function,
can be read as culturally variable, socially constructed, and historically specific.
Utopian desire, whilst ubiquitous, is not universal or essential but rather rooted
in the socially constructed gap between the needs and wants generated by a
particular society and the satisfactions available to and distributed by it
(Levitas, 1990 pp. 181182), a definition echoed in Lyman Tower Sargents (1994)
concise formulation of utopia as social dreaming, which invokes both the
desire for better societies and the necessarily social context of utopian dreams.
On this basis, utopia may be a fully-blown fictional description of an alterna-
tive society in action; the anticipated ideal society on which political parties or
programmes are founded; or the moment at which an encounter with a piece of
music or a work of art stimulates the apprehension of and yearning for a better
way of being. The function of utopia can be escapist and compensatory (as in, for
example, conservatisms reification of a stable and pastoral social order); carni-
valesque and subversive (reading, for example, the oppositional play of the
Situationists as utopian; see Gardiner 2000); critical and estranging (this is
increasingly seen as the function of recent utopian and dystopian fiction, on
which more below); or transformative (see for example Eckersley 1992; de Geus
1999; and Pepper 2005 on the necessity of ecotopian visions to environmental
politics).
In formulating a concept of utopia around the element of desire, Levitas draws
on the work of Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, a key influence in recent utopian
studies. The rediscovery of Blochs three-volume theorisation of utopia, Das
Prinzip Hoffnung (translated into English as The Principle of Hope in 1986) has
contributed enormously to reframing utopian inquiry. Writing in East Germany in
the middle of the twentieth century, Blochs approach shares much with the
more familiar Frankfurt School model of critical theory (for more on Blochs biog-
raphy and theoretical antecedents and context, see Kellner and OHara 1976;
Kellner 1997; and Daniel and Moylan 1997). But where Adorno and Horkheimer
saw an emergent mass popular culture wholly articulated with commodity
capitalism, ideologically stifling the very possibility of reflexive or critical
thought, Bloch saw kernels of emancipatory utopian desires and anticipations
everywhere: certainly in social, political and fictional utopianism, but also in
daydreams and wishful thinking as well as in advertising, fairy tales, travel, film,
genre fiction, jokes, and other cultural phenomena dismissed as the fetishised
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 9

artefacts of the culture industry by the Frankfurt School. This abstract utopi-
anism, Bloch thought, worked dialectically with the concrete utopianism of
transformative collective politics (Bloch 1986, vol. 2, p. 580; vol. 1, p. 146). Both
individuals and the material social world are unfinished, unfulfilled (theorised
under the rubric of the Not-Yet-Conscious and the Not-Yet-Become respec-
tively), and emancipatory moments of anticipation as well as the hope for social
change are, for Bloch, not so much reflections on social reality as an intrinsic part
of the social itself:

The present moment is thus constituted in part by latency and tendency: the
unrealized potentialities that are latent in the present, and the signs and fore-
shadowings that indicate the tendency of the direction and movement of the
present into the future. (Kellner 1987, p. 81)

Thus Bloch offers a philosophy of hope and positions utopianism as a kind of

dreaming forward which works not in spite of but because of its rootedness in
the messy phenomenology of the everyday. Utopia is immanent and ubiquitous.
It may appear that the kind of flexible and inclusive definition found in the
work of Bloch and Levitas would tend to make utopia so heterogeneous as to
be empirically impossible or hermeneutically useless. In the last 20 years utopian
studies has opened out to embrace strands of utopianism across a rich range of
social and cultural thought and practice literary dystopias of post-genomic bio-
manipulation; eco-communities; utopian pedagogies; discourses of European
integration. Researchers have interrogated the utopian idealism of the Romantic
poets and the utopian practices of open-source software designers; explored
musical utopianism in relation to its signifying, aesthetic and embodied dimen-
sions; addressed the utopian symbolism of bridges both real and metaphorical;
and teased out unexpected and even perverse utopias in graphic novels,
computer games and figurations of the post-human.1 However alongside this
diversity has emerged a rigorous and reflexive approach to questions of what
utopia is and does under contemporary social and historical conditions. In partic-
ular, a core set of theories and theorists have sharpened the analysis of the
specific historical conditions and fate of utopia in late or post modernity. In this
article I examine some of the consequences of these new modes of theorising the
utopian. Utopia has shifted from a context of social theory wedded to rationality,
perfectibility, and progress to one characterised in terms of desire, anti-founda-
tionalism, and fragmentation. In that shift the link between utopia and the inten-
tion of securing a better future becomes problematic. Indeed, the articulation of
utopian visions and hopes with concrete prospects for future social improvement
or transformation might be seen essentially as a temporary product of the histor-
ical conditions and philosophical discourses of modernity. For a comparatively
brief period, reaching its apogee in the nineteenth century, utopian thought and

1. These indications of the scope of contemporary utopian studies are but a small selection from
conference abstracts of the Utopian Studies Society meeting 2008. These are online at: http://
www.utopianstudieseurope.org/abstracts.htm (accessed 10 October 2008).
10 GARFORTH

social practice were both informed and infused by the progressive currents of
Enlightenment epistemologies and aesthetics.
By the late twentieth century, however, the failures or perverse, violent,
and cruel successes of modernitys grand narratives or utopian ideologies
were all too evident in two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Gulag. John
Grays (2007) recent work points out, from a rather conservative perspective, the
debts owed by contemporary wars and terrorist campaigns to Enlightenment
discourses of general improvement progressive or revolutionary creations of a
better world. In such a social and historical context, the idea that utopianism can
have unwelcome material consequences both intended and unintended becomes
uncomfortable. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that, postmodern social and
cultural theory seems to suggest the possibility of forms of utopia without inten-
tions. Contemporary concepts of utopia stress the processual, the transgressive,
the estranging, and the critical. If the relationship between utopia and intention
has not disappeared in these times it has certainly become attenuated, frag-
mented, and strange. A brief example should give a flavour of this break. Ben
Andersons work has explored immanent utopias in a number of forms, drawing
on Bloch and relating the utopian primarily to the expressive, excessive and
performative dimensions of everyday life (see Anderson 2002, 2006 inter alia).
He explores how people use recorded music to feel better, enacting partial,
situated and sensual moments of utopian hope. Here utopia is positioned as an
affective force and music a medium through which it is possible to grasp a trace
or intimation of what utopia might feel like (Anderson 2002, p. 221; cites Dyer
1999). Utopia here is something fleeting, experienced in and of the moment and
created out of a unique juxtaposition of the self and its spatial and aural envi-
ronment. It seems to have everything to do with affective states of being in the
here and now, and very little to do with cognitive rationalities and intentions.

The Irrelevance of Intention?

Intention, at its heart, is about the relationship between ends and means, and
the purposive action that seeks to bring them together. Intention posits specific
goals or objects, commits to particular outcomes, and suggests that action can
be oriented towards bringing them about. The primary definition of intentional
in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is done on purpose. Related definitions
include that for the noun intention thing intended, purpose, ultimate aim,
the verb form of intend purpose, design mean, and the adjectival form
of intent resolved, bent (on doing, on object); sedulously occupied (on);
earnest, eager. There is a clear relationship here between intention and
conventional understandings of utopia. If a utopia is a blueprint of a better soci-
ety, if utopianism indicates the social processes that help to bring that end or
goal into being, then utopia is saturated with intention. Words like design or
ultimate aim draw our attention to utopias association with an end state that
could or should be brought into being a (transcendent) vision of the good, the
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 11

object that is desired. Words like resolved resonate with ideas of utopian
commitment, the earnest, eager activity of utopians in the name of a better
world.
Contemporary understandings of utopia involve a number of shifts that
profoundly problematise that relationship with intention. As I will elaborate
below, current utopian theory stresses its immanence and not its transcendence;
its ubiquity and not its limited and distinctive formal expressions; its manifesta-
tion as a process and not a blueprint. The ubiquity and immanence of utopia, our
inclination to witness its location in a remarkable range of cultural and social
locations, embedded in the social and material world itself, suggests that utopia
might happen anyway, whatever the intentions of individual subjects or the
purposes of collective actors. Recent theory increasingly conceptualises utopia
in terms of desire and open-ended process. I argue in this article that conceiving
of utopia in this way problematises the link between intention and object that
seems to be embedded in older notions of utopia as hope and blueprint. Intro-
ducing the problem of intention into debates over the meaning and concept of
utopianism, then, sheds new light on old questions of form versus function, on
what utopia can be said to be and do. It also explicitly attends to an issue often
overlooked or glossed within utopian studies: that is, the relationship between
agency/subjectivity and utopia.
An acting subject is crucial to the notion of intention insofar as purposive
action links ends and means. In relation to utopia, two different kinds of (intend-
ing) subjectivity seem particularly important and particularly problematic in
the light of current theories and expressions of utopia. The first we might call
agential to characterise it in broadly sociological terms, and to indicate the ways
in which utopia has conventionally been linked to individual and collective social
action. The subject as agent is the rational actor of economic and some social
theory. In relation to agential subjectivity, utopia is precisely that which can
cause an individual, a movement, a society to act in the name of some concrete
end or good to create the better or different society. But must utopia as we
now understand it retain any necessary relationship to committed, purposive
action for social change (the question of function)? The concept of intention
brings explicit attention to the claims of postmodern theory that the notion of
coherent, rational intending individual subjects is at worst an illusion, at best a
partial truth. Such theories suggest that we live in a world characterised by frag-
mentation, differentiation and shifting, multiple identities. in which collective
agents for change can be difficult to identify. This is not to doubt that people can
and do act in the name of building a better world, whether through the radical
tactics of new social movements (anti-capitalism; ecocentric environmentalism)
or through more strategic and institutional processes (for example sustainable
development). It is perhaps to suggest that the intentions of agents might not in
and of themselves be stably linked to utopia. The second kind of intending
subject at issue we might call authorial. Here the focus shifts from the relation-
ship between utopia and social action to questions of the ways in which
expressions of desire for a better way of living and being (Levitas 1990) come
12 GARFORTH

to be formally manifested, and/or how and by whom their hopeful contents can
be interpreted as utopian. The questions raised by intention here include
whether the imagination or expression of a utopian ideal or vision of the good
requires an intending author. Further, does the interpretation of some aesthetic
expression as utopian requires the intention to receive it as such or can utopian
effects and affects work on and through us in some sense despite ourselves as
intending subjects?
I argue here that questions of intention can help us frame issues related to the
concept and theory of utopia in important ways. This paper provides a context
for these questions by outlining some of the ways in which the concept of utopia
has increasingly diverged from that of intention in recent utopian theory, and
indicating some of the consequences of this shift. The overview that follows is
inevitably a partial reading of contemporary utopian theory. It does not aim to
be comprehensive or definitive, and it focuses on theoretical positions at the
expense of grounded explorations of concrete manifestations of the utopian,
whether in literature or social movements. Indeed it is the very link between the
conceptual and the empirical that is at issue here. My goal is to elucidate some
of the reasons that un/intentionality might matter in relation to utopian theory
and consider the provocative questions that it might open up.

The Disappearance of the Future

Intention signifies an attitude or orientation towards action that is irreducibly

temporal. Intention could be conceived of as a claim on the future. It looks
forward to an anticipated state of affairs. At the same time, intention is a way
in which prospecting the future acts recursively on the present to motivate
purposive action. If intentionality is to some extent embedded in the temporal
mode, one reason for its decline in importance to utopianism is related to what
we might call the disappearance of the future within utopian studies. A key
contention in recent utopian theory is that utopias function transgressive,
critical, subversive should be considered in terms of what it does to the
present rather than by direct reference to the future (Sargisson 1996, p. 41).
Utopia does not so much plot or plan or envisage in concrete terms the content
of a desired future so much as it operates as a mechanism for acting critically on
the present.
I do not claim that utopianism has in the past been unproblematically or exclu-
sively about the future. Even perhaps especially Mores Utopia itself has
been persuasively read not as prediction, plan, or even desire, but as an exercise
in spatial play set up by the capacity of its formal paradoxes and ironies to
disrupt the spatial and semantic logics of the present (Marin 1984). Rather, the
argument might be that the strong association between utopia and the future is
the product of particular types of modern rationalities and a historical context
in which otherness was projected into the future within narratives of progress
and revolution. In this manifestation intention is crucial to utopia: in this
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 13

historical context alterity, the better world, is seen as contingent on the capacity
of human agents especially collective agents to change the present. This
orientation is possible only as a result of the Enlightenment and the scientific
revolution that saw the end of static, cyclical pre-modern concepts of temporal-
ity. Carried along by the optimistic, rational, future-oriented currents of modern
epistemologies, nineteenth-century utopianism in practice and in fiction
looks forward with hope and expectation as well as desire to another way of
being. In this incarnation, utopia is replete with intention: it anticipates the
future in the present alongside a concrete utopian politics, which connects the
present to the future via models of collective transformative/materialist praxis.
However, the relevance of a future conceived as a determinate or concrete
idea of the good society, a vision or ideal to be realised in the imaginable future,
has undoubtedly waned. Since the mid-1970s Jameson has been exploring the
thesis of the impossibility of imagining the future. As prisoners of cultural
and ideological closure, he argues, we are unable to grasp the social totality in
which we are embedded, and hence powerless to authentically imagine or project
outside or beyond it. Utopian fiction figures of the transfigured future cannot
represent a future possibility but only reveal the impossibility of grasping for
it, instigating a process of neutralization and critique (negation of the ideo-
logical conditions underpinning collective social representations which invisibly
organise experience of everyday life) (Jameson 1982). Utopias do not stake out
visions of a preferred or intended future, but testify rather to the impossi-
bility of imagining authentic otherness (although this remains vital to social
critique).
A broader recession of the future runs alongside/behind these currents. For
Bauman (2000), late or liquid modernity is characterised above all by the
decline of the illusion of the telos of historical change an attainable future
state of perfection. According to Baumans framework, early/solid modernity
indicates a set of social conditions in which the future good society can be
conceived of in terms of human knowledge and mastery over the natural and
technological world, such that telos implies the end of the unintended conse-
quences of human undertakings (Bauman 2000, p. 29). Change in this phase of
modernity is directed towards bringing about some new solid state; it is about
rational ends and intentions. In contemporary liquid modernity, change for its
own (or merely for capitals) sake ceaseless, quick, unable to rest becomes
the norm, and the relationship between ends and means is fundamentally
disrupted (discussed further below). Similarly, for Jameson, postmodernity
denotes a kind of depthless present which involves the slipping away of teleo-
logical and linear models of history. The past diffuses into pastiche and simula-
tion and the future becomes cognitively unmappable, unthinkable. With the
decline of modernitys analytical depth models (psychoanalytic, Marxist,
structuralist) there are no foundations from which to identify the truth of the
present or on which to build the outlines of a better future (Jameson 1991).
The consequences of the disappearance of depth might be seen in terms of the
production of a slippery, uncommitted handle on the present for contemporary
14 GARFORTH

social actors. This has been characterised variously in terms of schizophrenia,

irony, and waning of affect. We may play with possible futures, this analysis
suggests, but we dont really mean it. We dont really mean it: in postmodern
terms, language/signification means us, of course. And this disruption,
dispersal, dislocation of meaning seems to make any straightforward notion of
intention deeply problematic (recall the OED definitions above intention as the
earnest, eager pursuit of an end; to intend as in to purpose, mean). It is
perhaps no surprise, then, that this is a period in which intention is less than
relevant to utopia: the future towards which intention orients us might itself be
meaningless. Commitment and intention in the temporal register fail; or, as
Kumar asks: can one portray the good society in the terms of irony, scepticism,
playfulness, depthlessness, ahistoricity, loss of faith in the future? (2003, p. 74).

Utopia Here and Now (1) Spatial Utopics

As Jamesons analysis of the postmodern suggests, and many contemporary

analyses of utopianism make clear, the recession of the future brings spatial
dimensions and analyses of utopianism to the fore recall Marins utopics of
spatial play. Foucaults heterotopia identifies the only authentically critical/
disruptive potential for utopianism in the spatial. On this analysis, utopia as a
projection of a perfect future realm only confirms by inversion the logics of
the dominant discourse closure and order around rationality. Utopias
colonise and run with the very grain of language. The alternatives are
heterotopias zones of otherness that challenge, contest and subvert the
spaces of the now and the everyday in the very moment of the production and
reproduction of spacings and orderings. The notion of heterotopia indicates
those shifting, ephemeral spaces of alterity operating within circulatory
systems of disciplinary power. Otherness here does not depend on its transcen-
dence or projection into a future realm, but promises to open up spaces
against the grain in and of the here and now to shatter taken-for-granted
discourses and representational systems (Foucault 1994, p. xviii). Heterotopias
are spaces of alternate ordering (Hetherington 1997):

places of otherness, whose otherness is established through a relationship of

difference with other sites, such that their presence either provides an unsettling
of spatial and social relations or an alternative representation of social and
spatial relations. (Hetherington 1997, p. 8)

They function to reveal the process of social ordering to be just that, a process
rather than a thing (p. ix, cites Law 1994). This stance is echoed by Ursula K. Le
Guin in a simultaneously more conventional and more ecologically-minded
critique of the futuristics of the traditional utopia as linear quests for static
perfection. The future-oriented utopia, she argues, has no habitable present
and is imposed by decree (Le Guin 1989, p. 67). Postmodern utopics should focus
on the imagination of habitable spaces, not colonise the future with our own
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 15

expansive values. In her own work this is exemplified in the complex utopian
novel Always Coming Home (Le Guin 1986), which narrates a future already
inhabited, an/other space/place outside the aggressive, linear, progressive,
creative, expanding, advancing press of history (Le Guin 1989, p. 67; see also
Garforth 2005).
In both these accounts, future-oriented utopian intention is the heart of the
problem. It is precisely our plans for our designs on the future that
threaten to colonise its potential openness and otherness with a replication of
the logic of the present. In the face of such analyses, the exploration of utopia
in terms of subversive, critical, or transgressive currents at work within the
logics of the present spatial order make sense. A future-oriented utopianism
a utopia heavy with intention makes way for a lighter, less committed
utopianism as spatial play to be located in the heterogeneity, the diversity,
the ineradicable differences at work in the present moment. Attention is
directed towards the idea that there are abundant spaces of alterity always
already at work within the social world the imagination of alternatives is not
predicated on the wholesale imagination of a utopian figure or wholeheartedly
intending hope.
The spatial utopianism indicated here is not the classical utopia of spatial form
that Harvey discusses in Spaces of Hope (2000) the attempt to design a perfect
form of social organisation that will unchangingly resist history (literally set in
stone), wherein spatial form controls temporality, an imagined geography
controls the possibility of social change and history (p. 160). Rather, these
approaches to spatial utopianism conceive of it as dynamic and located in the
interstices of social and spatial processes. Utopia is positioned not as the end of
history but as becoming, process, non-teleological change:

Productive heterotopias will always embark on oceanic voyages with no destina-

tion mapped out in advance, voyages of intensity and intimacy, of experimenta-
tion, leading away from the hierarchical structures of organized life. (Arnott
2001)

As this quote might suggest, one of Foucaults favoured examples of a heteroto-

pian space was the ship a vessel moving through time and space to connect
other disparate spaces (colonies, brothels) and embodying in itself the juxtapo-
sition of difference and the potential for disrupting taken-for-granted catego-
ries. Alice Jenkins picks up this theme in her analysis of train journeys as
transgressive heterotopias in childrens writing from Narnia to Harry Potter
(2002). In both cases, utopian intention appears to be displaced in favour of the
spatially unsettling and disruptive. If the decline of the future in utopian theory
relates to the dissolution of the temporal aspect of intentionality in utopianism,
the reinvention of utopia as spatial play has also done away with the perfection/
closed ends of utopias of spatial form i.e. the possibility of a finished utopian
object or blueprint that we can intend to bring into being. Ideas of utopia
beyond the blueprint suggest that utopianism is already here and now in
everyday life.
16 GARFORTH

Utopia Here and Now (2) Unsettling the Everyday

In a similar move, recent work on utopia and everyday life locates a processual,
immanent utopianism outside the future and representation. Here, the break
with intention is even more evident. Gardiner, for example, seeks to locate the
embryonic forms of transformative social change within the hidden recesses of
daily life itself or spatialised utopian moments that critique the status quo
without projecting a full-blown image of what a future society should look like
(Gardiner 2000, pp. 1920). In an approach to utopianism that draws heavily on
the spatially-oriented social theory of de Certeau, Debord, and Lefebvre
(amongst others), Gardiner wholly severs utopianism from intentional visions and
future ideals and conceptualises it instead in relation to critical, emancipatory
moments of daily life. A daily, materialist utopianism is cut free entirely from
transcendence (although it might remain open to the momentarily transcending/
transcendent) and from intended or even desired outcomes. Utopia is bottom up,
a momentary possibility of transgression, difference, or liberation conjured up
from the mundane materials to hand in the experience of the everyday, from
unsettling language and jarring social spaces.
Gardiners readings of the utopianism of the Situationist International and of
Bakhtin in particular take another step away from the intentional in utopianism
(the purposive, the serious, the rational, the earnest) and emphasise the triv-
ial, the playful, and the carnivalesque as sources of utopianism. Utopia arises
from daily struggles that are not necessarily articulated to some ultimate end.
Maffesoli (in Gambacorta 1989) characterises utopian resistance in terms very
far from intentionality and the coherent, rational, sovereign subject who
intends:

an active passivity, behaviour which is yielding and receptive, founded on the

rhythm of passions, little daily gestures, tiny imaginary or fantastic productions,
lies lived as if they were real by provoking the nonsensical and the illogical
in the simultaneous and the immediate. (Gambacorta 1989, p. 121)

The context for this resistant utopianism is the irreducible chaos and complexity
of the everyday the differentiation and heterogeneity of daily life and the
varied, always changing experience of sociality in which intentions are only a
small part of the flux of experience, and agency and culture are endlessly
creative, affective, and partially realised. This, rather than programmes, plans
and intentions, is the fertile seed-bed of an everyday utopianism although it
must work in and through life routinised, reified and constrained by discourses of
rational modernity. Gardiner identifies two key sites of utopian resistance to the
regimentation and ordering of daily life: the spatial (discussed above) and the
body, which manifests sensuous, inarticulate desires and impulses that cannot
be fully colonised by rational systems (Gardiner 2000, p. 16). As in Bakhtins take
on the Rabelaisian figure of the grotesque, the body is read here as potentially
utopian in its literal and figurative openness to the other, nature and the non-
self, via corporeal processes of eating, drinking, and sex. Gardiner also explores
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 17

the ways in which Agnes Hellers work situates the possibilities of the utopian in
relation to comfort, care, love and physical intimacy. At issue here is the bodys
potential refusal to be restricted to rational intentions, plans and orderings, in
whose unintending, excessive desires the possibility of dis-alienation is discern-
ible (compare this body with the disciplined bodies of an anti-utopian rationality
in Foucault).
Spatial and everyday utopias do not function entirely without reference to the
future in functional terms, utopia remains linked to hope and the possibility of
an unalienated existence, which can only take place in the future. In this sense
we might turn again to Bloch and think in terms of the utopian surplus created
by the excess of utopian possibilities branching out from present moments (Bloch
1986; Anderson 2002). Nonetheless, this is a future beyond intentions: outside
linear temporalities and teleological ends. Here, as elsewhere in utopian theory,
process is the hallmark of the non-authoritarian utopia. Process change that
does not stop at some ultimate end or goal requires at the very least a rethe-
orisation of intention away from ends and means; and the immanence of utopia-
nism and heterodoxy of daily life in this model suggests that intentions per se are
largely irrelevant. As I have already indicated, this shift to a processual model of
utopia has also been extensively worked out in relation to literary and formal
utopian expressions and the utopian text.

Representing Utopia: Post-Structuralism, Effect, Process

From the period of high modernity mentioned above and lasting well into the
twentieth century, we might argue that for many it was taken for granted that
literary utopias could and did stake out a future vision of the good, and express
serious intentions for social change or at least that utopian writing was part of
the cultural mechanism through which modern societies steadily progressed, as
in Levitass discussion of the liberal humanist approach to utopianism (Levitas
1990). Fitting argues that the shift in analysis of literary utopias from this period
to the late twentieth century has been one from understanding them as modes
of representation to an analysis that sees utopian fictions as types of praxis
(Fitting 1998, p. 11). The critical, subversive, estrangement functions or reading
effects of utopia have to some extent displaced utopian content the ultimate
intention or goal, the transcendent moment of otherness as the main focus of
analysis. Formal utopias as artefacts are less important than the dialectical,
processual aspects of their reading and interpretation.
Jamesons work (mentioned above) has been crucial to this shift, as has
Moylans (1986) notion of the critical utopia. Since the 1980s, utopian criticism
has focused on the ways in which the dialectical narrative relationship between
present and future, real and ideal in utopian texts provokes a critique of dominant
ideologies and the exploration of oppositional, alternative ways of living and
being. It is the capacity of the process of reading to dislocate/disembed subjects
from taken-for-granted, commonsense nature of ideological and discursive
18 GARFORTH

frameworks that is crucial, rather than utopian content itself (see also inter alia
Suvin 1979; Ruppert 1986; Ferns 1999). The utopian text therefore becomes posi-
tioned as a site of cultural resistance predicated less on the particular content
of any particular utopian society and more on the act of utopian imagination
itself.
In Moylans critical utopia the temporal means/ends logics implied in intention
are in some ways foregrounded especially the ways in which in intention the
future acts recursively on the present to initiate (political) action. The complex
temporal dynamics of the utopian fictions Moylan discusses all highlight the ways
in which pasts, futures, and presents are linked together in narrative knots of
dystopian threats, utopian desires, harsh realities and political agency. In
Piercys Woman on the Edge of Time, for example, Moylan describes present and
future co-existing in the narrative in a pattern of mutual influence that spirals
like a double helix (1986, p. 142). But in other ways, intention and means/ends
logics are disrupted and destabilised: Moylan goes on to specify that the helix is
beyond binary closure (1986, p. 142) that is, the relationship of means to
ultimate ends implied in intention is opened up endlessly, indefinitely in these
critical utopian works.
In contemporary utopian theory effects or function are key. At issue is the
production of an orientation of estrangement and/or critique in the reading
subject. Utopia is first and foremost understood as a processual matter of subver-
sion. While they may stimulate and nurture intentions to change the world,
formal utopian figures/texts cannot easily be positioned as in themselves intend-
ing in the agential sense or intended in the authorial sense. It might be more
accurate to say that in the analysis of the critical utopia intention is present but
partial, temporary, and provisional. Of course this shift in the analysis of literary
utopia is broadly analogous to the general shift in literary theory away from
uncovering authorial intentions the meanings put by a coherent subject in
literary form towards deconstructing systems of signification and semiotic
effects achieved in or through texts. The capacity of the text to represent this
world or other worlds is problematised; texts and other semiotic systems create
or construct reality; and intention becomes less relevant than the play or
congealing of signifiers.
However, although post-structuralism indicates a crisis of representation, the
notion that texts and other significatory systems are still somehow involved in
making or expressing or concealing the world at the level of meaning is still
relentlessly present. That is, the crisis of representation (as it relates to utopian
fiction) is still a crisis of representation. Similarly, although in approaches
related to the critical utopia the utopian figure the content of the alternative
society, the end or goal, the intention is problematised, made flawed and
provisional and processual, the utopian figure is still (vividly) present. There is
still a text that imagines and describes a society we can choose to call utopian.
Finally, the effects that are central to critical or functional approaches to the
literary utopia are assumed to take place at the level of consciousness (see e.g.
Sargisson 2003); they are profoundly cognitive in nature. If we look at what the
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 19

turn to affect in cultural theory might imply for utopianism, a very different story
emerges, and the troubled intentionality of the critical fictional utopia is
abandoned altogether.

Beyond Signification Utopia and Affect

The recent turn to affect in cultural studies offers to break even with the prob-
lematised account of representation/signification indicated in both post-struc-
turalism and analyses of the critical utopia. The idea that art and literature,
culture and aesthetics, are about affect emotion, felt intensity, experience
rather than primarily about signification raises questions for understanding
utopianism in the formal realm. Affect suggests a different approach through
which we might identify the core of utopianism (the desire for alterity/other-
ness) and explore how such desires come to be expressed and received in
aesthetic media. For Deleuze and Guattari, aesthetic objects are positioned not
in terms of signification or intention, but in terms of the creation of affects and
percepts on a plane of composition (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). The emphasis is
on the body, on feeling and sensible experience. Percepts and affects are not
tied to subjectivity (especially not the individual subjectivity of a coherent
subject) or to objective form, and cannot be contained or captured in significa-
tion/representation (indeed, one of the problems of the turn to affect in
cultural theory has been the reproduction of a cognition/affect or signifying/
feeling binary see for example Hemmings 2005). Art, according to theorists of
affect, offers intensity, the thrill of an experience that crosses thresholds, trans-
gresses limits and shatters and (re)produces subject and object, self and other
in unanticipated ways in a specific moment of becoming. Artistic productions
thus cannot be deconstructed to reveal some inner ideological or discursive
ordering experience is more important than signification. Meaning in the
sense both of intention and signification cedes to affect, which is as much
bodily as it is cognitive. Art affects happen to us; its intensities and experiences
work to disengage the ordered flow of experience (representation) into singu-
lar, specific, situated moments. Certain kinds of art are able to present affects
freed from organising and purposive viewpoints (Colebrook 2001, p. 36).
Utopian affect and feeling promise (or threaten) to disrupt or reorganise from
the bottom up who we think we are. In his work on the affective dynamics of
music, for example, Anderson (2002) emphasises the ways in which the utopian
might work through excess and emotion to open a specific listener in a particular
moment to the possibilities of a utopian not-yet. The music does not bring
forth emotions already existing within the listener but rather creates afresh a
new conjunction of self and sensual/aesthetic experience.
Deleuzes work thus takes us underground and further into the unconscious and
the desires which constitute culture itself and which need to be liberated from
congealed structures and orderings of all kinds. The trajectory of Deleuzian
affect is the pursuit of multiplication and difference without ends (the resort to
20 GARFORTH

resolution through dialectics, for example, is precisely what is rejected). The

postmodern fiction and art valued by Deleuze and Guattari, like contemporary
critical/processual readings of utopian fiction, offer to shatter or undo the way
we think (trapped inside the capitalist machine/ representation); alienate the
reader; force open an imaginative space of freedom understood in terms of radi-
cal indeterminacy (OSullivan 2001). But unlike the terms of critical utopianism,
Deleuzian art-affects function not by revealing ideological/discursive limits or by
uncovering some totality, or by imbuing the subject with a new consciousness
and hope for a changed world. Rather, they work by decentring or deterritori-
alizing the ego by (temporarily) dissolving identity and refusing representa-
tion, including the figure or content of any determinate utopian world or end.
Both intending subjects (authorial and agential) and utopian ends are utterly
refuted.
What is valued here (as utopian?) is becoming itself, severed from outcomes
or goals change and difference and process (means) become endless ends in
themselves. The point for an art understood in terms of affect is not to cultivate
new kinds of intention, but to release desire from intention/subjectivity alto-
gether to let desire fragment and flow in all directions at once seeking out
new connections and pathways, new worlds. If there is a utopia here it is wholly
non-linear becoming, rhizomal a potentiality without a predetermined
outcome (Rodowick 2001, p. 68). What is utopian are indeterminate lines of
flight, not where they might lead. The capacity of art to instigate new lines of
flight mutations and differences that generate not a historical or linear
progression but disruptions, breaks, endless new beginnings is not seen as a
precursor to envisaging or intending something else, but part of an ongoing
process. The utopianism suggested by Deleuzian philosophy and the aesthetics of
affect (see OSullivan 2001) shifts the field decisively away from intention. In their
Deleuzian manifestation, affects are trans-personal rather than agential;
expressive of trans-individual or trans-subjective connectivities between irreduc-
ible differences. Desire is depersonalised or inhuman. The refusal of representa-
tion is simultaneously a refusal of any kind of closure. Utopia is endlessly dynamic
and rampantly generative of the new and the potential.

Openness and Closure

to materialize a space is to engage with closure (however temporary) which is

an authoritarian act. (Harvey 2000, p. 83)

As I hope the discussion of utopia and affect implies, a theme running through all
the ways in which current utopian theory displaces, neglects, and problematises
intentionality is that of openness. I will argue here that intention is about closure
around an object, an aim, an ultimate good or goal. Contemporary approaches
to utopianism, by contrast, wish to hold onto notions of the good, the better, the
ideal, the hopeful, but simultaneously refuse closure in relation to signification
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 21

and desire, to the social and the subject. Closure is associated with the totalis-
ing, the authoritarian, the static, the final. The lessons of the twentieth century
have produced a resistance to closure, teleology, and identity and an insistence
on irreducible difference and openness to change. Bauman conceives of the
wider social shift in which this takes place as a move from solid to liquid
modernity. In liquid (post)modernity, questions of identity are primarily how to
avoid fixation and keep the options open (Bauman 1996). Experience is charac-
terised by the transitory, the complex and the ambiguous; the promise of multi-
ple and open-ended choices opened up by capitalism in its consumption phase.
In liquid modernity nothing comes to rest. Its hallmark is radical provisionality
and a short dure of intention. In postmodern theory, the fixed, the closed and
the structured are precisely what is constraining and ideologically suspect. If we
(as postmodern actors and postmodern theorists) value anything it is that which
is disruptive, unsettling, subversive, dynamic openness for its own sake, as an
end in itself. And these are precisely the terms used to characterise utopia in its
postmodern incarnation.
Precisely this problematic of openness and closure has been raised in an espe-
cially interesting and pertinent way by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000) and
Levitass critical discussion of Harveys analysis (Levitas 2003). Harvey compares
the limits of two modes of utopianism the fixities and closures of the spatial
mode (perfection materialised, decided on, intended and executed) versus the
open-ended, dynamic utopias of social process. In many ways contemporary
utopian theory has resolved this dilemma in favour of the temporal or processual
mode; as I have argued above, even the new spatialities of utopian theory are
fluid, mobile, and processual. Harveys analysis highlights the ways in which
intention is problematic because it is in some sense necessarily related to a
degree of closure around a set of desired and determinate ends. Intention risks
closure, risks fixity, risks an end. Instead we celebrate openness/difference/
otherness per se without any necessary commitment or intention to the pursuit
of one particular kind.
But as both Harvey and Levitas argue, in different ways2, closure (however
provisional) is necessary to direct social change for the good. This is most visible
in the spatial sense that Harvey highlights the utopianism of the built environ-
ment but holds true for the aims of any individual or collective utopianism. If
we do not want to live in a world of unintended consequences, we must act in
the name of something, and such closure depends on intention which cannot be
endlessly held off: To do so is to embrace an agonistic romanticism of perpetu-
ally unfulfilled longing and desire (Harvey 2000, p. 183). For Levitas, this state
represents the dangerous prospect of a pathological pluralism (2000, p. 40):

2. Levitass critique of Harvey stresses, among other things: that what is fixed in realised utopia is
not so much spatial as social; and that utopia has become more concerned with process as part of its
content (process-as-utopia; albeit unable to not specify content), and less concerned with historical
process in relation to the transition to utopia. Nonetheless, the broad framing of the problem
around the tension between openness and closure is central to both Harveys analysis and
Levitass response.
22 GARFORTH

Utopian proposals which are provisional, temporary and reflexive, or which

celebrate the act of imagining rather than what is imagined, also eschew
commitment and reject the challenge of literal criticism. (Levitas 2003, p.148)

With Harvey, Levitas argues that the open-ended celebration of utopian open-
ness of provisionality, the dynamic, the disruptive is a political evasion: The
idea of utopia as spatial play or social play may be appealing, but we do not
have time to play with it (2003, p. 150).
But if Bauman is right, and we live in an age of liquid modernity, this lack of
intention is not simply a problem of weak political commitment on the part of
individuals, but the product of a particular set of social conditions. Despite press-
ing social, environmental, and political problems from acute material global
inequalities to the looming threat of climate change, playing with possibilities
and keeping the options open is a defining hallmark of contemporary culture.
Liquid modernity involves the absence of any Supreme Office; that is, the
dissolution of foundational discourses of right and wrong that might guide deci-
sions about appropriate ends and values to be pursued (either at the individual
or collective level). In such circumstances:

the world becomes an infinite collection of possibilities: a container filled to the

brim with a countless multitude of opportunities yet to be chased or already
missed. There are more painfully more possibilities than any individual life,
however long, adventurous and industrious, can attempt to explore, let alone
adopt. (Bauman 2000, p. 61)

Although the distribution of such possibilities is of course deeply unequal, it is up

to individuals to decide not just how they will act (what means are appropriate
to what ends), but what to do. In the exhilarating and risky conditions of liquid
modernity, ends and intentions themselves are ambiguous and obscure; and they
must be temporary and provisional:

For the possibilities to remain infinite, none may be allowed to petrify into ever-
lasting reality. They had better stay liquid and fluid and have a use-by date
attached, lest they render the remaining opportunities off-limits and nip the
future adventure in the bud The state of unfinishedness, incompleteness and
underdetermination is full of risk and anxiety; but its opposite brings no unadul-
terated pleasure either, since it forecloses what freedom needs to remain open.
(Bauman 2000, p. 61)

In liquid modernity, where capital and therefore its human instruments and
beneficiaries must remain instantaneous, mobile, light, unfixed, quixotic, and
unpredictable, the problem of ends and means fundamentally mutates away
from the model and the problems (iron cage closure and consequences
intended or unintended) of instrumental rationality as set out by Weber in
conditions of solid modernity. The issue for us now, Bauman suggests, is not
how to marshal the means to achieve self-evidently desirable ends and intentions
(framed and shaped by forces and structures beyond the individual), but how to
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 23

choose the ends. In the face of infinite choice and provisionality, intention
dissipates and disperses, fragments and dilutes. It is in these circumstances that
keeping the options open becomes (apparently) paramount. For all utopian
theorys insistence that utopia gives us a critical handle on the totality of the
present, utopia/nism remains, as always, inflected and shaped by its own histor-
ical circumstances. Whether (politically, normatively) we like it or not, our
utopias and our concepts of utopia may be formed in conditions of liquid moder-
nity. What are we to make of these liquid utopias?

Unintentional Utopia/nism?

I want to finish by arguing in two ways for the value of attending to the problem
of intention in relation to utopia, even if at first glance the very notion of an
unintentional utopianism looks unappealing. The first is to do with how this
discussion of (the irrelevance of?) intention relates to issues of the concept of
utopia in contemporary utopian studies, and I begin by revisiting Levitass influ-
ential distinction between desire and hope. The second indicates some of the
directions opened up by the notion of the unintentionally utopian.

Hope, Desire and Intention?

Levitass work has been crucial in introducing the distinction between hope and
desire in conceptualising utopia (see Levitas 1990). For Levitas, it is the desire
for a better way of living and being (1990, p. 17; emphasis mine) that is defini-
tionally utopian; hope, which involves the expectation (or intention?) that the
better world can and will be realised, is important but conceptually and analyt-
ically a separate and secondary issue. These terms have shaped and informed
invaluable debates about relationship between utopian visions, moments, ideas
and ideals on one hand, and the prospects for concrete, material change on the
other. However, questions of intention offer to return us to Levitass concept
with further questions or possibilities for considering what utopia is, what it
does, and where we might find it. It is well worth considering the relevance of
intention to Levitass concept, and more specifically the relationship between
desire and intention. In Levitass work the term desire in relation to utopian/
nism operates as a kind of definitional black box it squares conceptual circles
arising from the abandonment of formal and content-based definitions (utopia
beyond the full-blown ideal vision or blueprint), and clarifies the nature of utopi-
anism in functional terms. However, elsewhere (in social theory, in cultural stud-
ies, in post-structural and postmodern theory, in psychoanalytic theory) desire
itself is opened up as a complex, contested, ambiguous concept. Desire is made
problematic and generative from postmodern perspectives it is fragmented,
pluralised, dislocated from coherent, intending subjects, often dispersed into
texts and other semiotic systems. Indeed this notion of postmodern desire has
24 GARFORTH

been deployed in relation to utopia in ways that precisely dislocate utopianism

from intention (see for example Siebers 1994). From a postmodern perspective,
desire mutates from the conventionally understood notion of desire of/for
something (an object related to intention) and is celebrated as desire per se; it
is the free-floating desire for something other at work in postmodern culture that
is utopian. In cultural studies, desire, and the problematic pleasures of the popu-
lar return us to Bloch and Jameson and the double-sided utopianism of mass
culture which may articulate or inspire utopian desire for something other at
the same time as it reconciles us to what is and smothers the intention to act
otherwise.
From psychoanalytic perspectives, desire is necessarily to some extent
unknown/unknowable; a driving force at both social and individual levels, albeit
unconscious, subconscious. From this point of view we might want to ask whether
intention is a product of desire, or vice versa, or whether indeed the two might
act against each other. For Deleuze, desire is a matter of transpersonal intensi-
ties bound up in indeterminate becomings; desire is precisely that which shatters
coherent intending subjects and ultimate ends and goals, wipes out intentions.
In sociology and feminist theory, the return of the body and the increasing weight
given to corporeality and emotions foregrounds desire as a crucial element of the
social and final nail in the coffin of nave models of individual action/agency
which take rational intention as their starting point. In all cases the relationship
between desire and intention is framed as an indeterminate one. An enriched
understanding of desire might offer new ways in to utopia. In particular, the
possible irrationality of desire its resistance to being fully and determinately
articulated with concrete intentions may be crucial.

Unintention/Utopia: New Directions

Levitass position also has a political, normative aspect. She argues that desire is
the baseline for defining utopia, but that utopian hope with a transformative
function (utopia replete with intention) is its most elusive and important form
(see e.g. Levitas and Sargisson 2003). But the question of what we are to make
of unintentional utopian desires remains, and their further exploration might be
particularly pertinent in social circumstances in which formal and intending
(collective and material) utopias are relatively few and far between, in a culture
(see for example Moylan 2000) arguably dominated by dystopias and even anti-
utopian feeling. In such circumstances, and in the interests of the fullest possible
theoretical and empirical picture of utopianism, questions of accidental or
unintentional utopia are both interesting and important.
As I hope the discussion above makes clear, utopian theory has already
seriously questioned the extent to which utopia can be defined in terms of the
intentions of social actors and authors, and suggested a number of ways in which
utopianism might be bigger (or perhaps smaller) than intention. In this context,
it seems that some explicit attention to unintentionality to what we call in this
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 25

special issue the accidentally utopian or ideal is both timely and potentially
useful. At an abstract level this raises a series of provocative questions. Can
utopia be to do with unintended or accidental events, effects, affects, and
perceptions? That is, does utopia happen (to us) rather than being something we
mean or intend? If so, what makes something utopian? Is it only (retrospective)
interpretation or analysis, or is there something immanently and presently
utopian in some texts, practices and materials?
The idea of utopia without intention appears to concede to those anti-founda-
tionalist currents of post-structural thought which undermine the possibility of
positive action in the name of a better future and abandon us to suffering
or revelling in an inadequate present, with only spontaneous currents of desire
for something other and escapist fantasist dreams for comfort. But seen from
another angle, dislocating the utopian from intention especially from its
capacity to act in determinate ways on or in the future, and by relocating desire
in less-than coherent agential subjects and in plural, mixed-up cultures utopia
can be recognised as more insistent, more ubiquitous and perhaps more impor-
tant than ever before. I have suggested here some of the ways in which the
present social/historical moment seems especially hostile to utopias of inten-
tion. If we want to keep hold of and pursue the better, the good, the purposive
desire for transformative social change in circumstances not of our own choosing,
we might need to think more seriously about the relationship between utopia and
unintention, between accident and ideality.

References

Anderson, B. (2002) A Principle of Hope: Recorded Music, Listening Practices and the
Immanence of Utopia, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, vol. 84 B,
no. 34, pp. 211227.
Anderson, B. (2006) Transcending Without Transcendence: Utopianism and an Ethos of
Hope, Antipode, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 691710
Arnott, S. J. (2001) Liminal Subjectivity and the Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm of Felix
Guattari in Limen, vol. 1. http://limen.mi2.hr/limen1-2001/ (accessed 01 April 2006)..
Bauman, Z. (1996) From Pilgrim to Tourist or A Short History of Identity, in Hall, S. &
du Gay, P. (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage, London.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Policy, Cambridge.
Benhabib, S. (1986) Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical
Theory, Columbia Press, New York.
Bloch, E. (1986) The Principle of Hope, trans. Plaice, N., Plaice, S. & Wright, P., MIT,
Cambridge, 3 vols.
Colebrook, C. (2001) Gilles Deleuze, Routledge, London.
Daniel, J. O. & Moylan, T. (1997) Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, Verso, London.
de Geus, M. (1999) Ecological Utopias: Envisioning the Sustainable Society, International
Books, Utrecht.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, New York.
Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric
Approach, State University of New York Press, New York.
Ferns, C. (1999) Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature, Liverpool
University Press, Liverpool.
26 GARFORTH

Fitting, P. (1998) The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson, Utopian Studies,
vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 817.
Foucault, M. (1994) The Order of Things, Vintage, New York.
Gambacorta, C. (1989) Experiences of Daily Life, Current Sociology, vol. 37,
pp. 1140.
Gardiner, M. (2000) Critiques of Everyday Life, Routledge, London.
Garforth, L. (2002) Ecotopian Fiction and the Sustainable Society, in Parham, J. (ed.)
The Environmental Tradition in English Literature, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 223248.
Garforth, L. (2005) Green Utopias: Beyond Apocalypse, Progress and Pastoral, Utopian
Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 393427.
Geoghegan, V. (1987) Utopianism and Marxism, Methuen, London.
Goodwin, B. & Taylor, K. (1982) The Politics of Utopia: Studies in Theory and Practice, St
Martins Press, New York.
Gray, J. (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Macmillan,
New York.
Harvey, D. (2000) The Spaces of Hope, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Hemmings, C. (2005) Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,
Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 548567.
Hetherington, K. (1997) The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering,
Routledge, London.
Jameson, F. (1982) Progress vs Utopia: or, Can We Imagine the Future?, Science Fiction
Studies, vol. 27, pp. 147158.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso,
London.
Jameson, F. (2000) Introduction/Prospectus: To Reconsider the Relationship of Marxism
to Utopian Thought, in Hardt, M. & Weeks, K. (eds.), The Jameson Reader, Blackwell,
Oxford.
Jenkins, A. (2002) Getting to Utopia: railway trains and heterotopia in contemporary
fantasy fiction, in Hintz, C. (ed), Youthtopia: Utopia and Dystopia in Literature for
Children and Young Adults, Routledge, London, pp. 2338.
Kellner, D. (1997) Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique, in Daniel, J. O. &
Moylan, T. (eds), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, Verso, London.
Kellner, D. & OHara, H. (1976) Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch, New German
Critique, vol. 9, Fall, pp. 1134.
Kumar, K. (1987) Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Kumar, K. (1991) Utopianism, Open University Press, Milton Keynes.
Kumar, K. (2003) Aspects of the Utopian Tradition, History of the Human Sciences,
vol. 16, no. 1.
Le Guin, U. K. (1986) Always Coming Home, Gollancz, New York.
Le Guin, U. K. (1989) Dancing at the Edge of the World, Grove, New York.
Levitas, R. (2000) For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist
Society, in Goodwin, B. (ed), The Philosophy of Utopia, Cass, London.
Levitas, R. (2003) On Dialectical Utopianism, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 16,
no. 3, pp. 137150.
Levitas, R. & Sargisson, L. (2003) Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and
Utopia/Dystopia, in Baccolini, R. & Moylan, T. (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction
and the Dystopian Imagination, Routledge, London.
Marcuse, H. (1966) Eros and Civilization A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Beacon
Press, Boston.
Marcuse, H. (1978) The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics,
Beacon Press, Boston.
Marcuse, H. (1989) Liberation from the Affluent Society in Bronner, S. & Kellner, D.
(eds), Critical Theory and Society, Routledge, London.
 UTOPIAN THEORY AFTER THE FUTURE 27

Marin, L. (1984) Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, Humanity Books,
Amherst, NY.
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1967 [1848]) The Communist Manifesto, Penguin, London.
Moylan, T. (1986) Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination,
Methuen, London.
Moylan, T. (2000) Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, West-
view Press, Boulder CO.
OSullivan, S. (2001) The Aesthetics of Affect, Angelaki, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 125135.
Pepper, D. (2005) Utopianism and Environmentalism, Environmental Politics, vol. 14,
no. 1, pp. 322.
Rodowick, D. (2001) Reading the Figural, Duke University Press, Durham and London.
Ruppert, P. (1986) Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias,
University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.
Sargent, L. T. (1994) The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited, Utopian Studies, vol. 5,
no. 1, pp. 137.
Sargent, L. T. (2001) Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations in Schaer, R., Claeys,
G. & Sargent, L.T. (eds), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western
World, Oxford University Press, New York.
Sargisson, L. (1996) Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, Routledge, London.
Siebers, T. (1994) What Does Postmodernism Want? Utopia, in Siebers, T. (ed.), Hetero-
topia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic, University of Michigan Press, Michigan,
pp. 139.
Suvin, D. (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Liter-
ary Genre, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Thompson, E. P. (1977) William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Pantheon Books,
London.