LIAS Workshop: After Utopia. Futurities and Fictions face to the Crisis of Imagination

In one of Benjamin Labatut’s novels, an anonymous character approaches Werner Heisenberg in a bar and confronts him: “And to whom do we owe this marvelous hell if not to you? Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease understanding the world?” (Un verdor terrible. Anagrama, Barcelona 2020.) If these questions strike such a chord today, it is because there is something in the intertwining of politics and technocentric ideals which, from modernity onwards, has fused science and fiction with messianic and evolutionist imaginaries oriented towards utopian aspirations that have only ever plunged deeper into failure.

Our present is shaped by a series of technical mediations embedded within a capitalist world-form: a totalising immanence that excludes the possibility of an ‘outside’. Social reality is increasingly structured by presentism, sustained by a regime of immediacy that permeates the entire social body, intensifying its contradictions, mechanisms of control and forms of violence. This accelerationist condition is organised around certain Western technocentric narratives that emerge at the intersection of politics, science and fiction. Narratives that are frequently underpinned by evolutionary and futuristic assumptions, cloaked in messianic imagery and intertwined with mythologised pasts, often marked by colonial nostalgia.
Within this framework, totalising capitalism inhabits a presentism that erodes the historical constitution of the present itself. Competition appears as both the means and object of progress, yet offers no meaningful futurity beyond an endless daily struggle governed by algorithmic datafication and quantified forms of fulfillment. At the same time, presentism generates visions of technocentric futures in which rationality and messianism converge to negate the existing world — and with it humanism — in the name of a transhumanist sublime that seeks to transcend humanity and death itself.
The path towards this imagined conquest is entrusted to a select few who embrace the timelessness of capitalism and its hierarchies in order to secure their own immortal permanence, as illustrated by the increasingly close alliance between the new right-wing movements and the leading global tech elites. The immediacy characteristic of presentism further intensifies social stratification through promises often articulated in quasi-revelatory terms—of a future in which both humanism and temporality are effectively nullified in the name of a progress that seems to defy modernity itself.

What, then, becomes of the notion of the future? What remains of utopia? How do hierarchy, control and violence operate within this convergence of presentism and messianism? And how might fiction help us to imagine futures other than those determined by the dominant paradigm, or possible alternatives to the current order as a whole? What kind of speculative narratives aimed at “understanding the world” are emerging at this juncture? These are the questions this workshop aims to explore.

Participation is possible without registering. For the session with the writers, we recommend the following reading:

Avanessian, Armen, and Daniel Falb. Planeten Denken: Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit. Leipzig: Merve, 2024. 
Recommended reading: “Introduction” (draft English translation by the authors).

Falb, Daniel. Earth Spirits. Notations on AI Animism. Hamburg: Textem Verlag, 2026.
Recommended reading: “Intro” and “Earth Spirits II.” 

Nieva, Michel. Technology and Barbarism: Or, How Billionaires Will Save Us from the End of the World. Translated by Rahul Bery and Daniel Hahn. New York: Astra House, 2026.
Recommended reading: “Capitalist Science Fiction,” “Communist Science Fiction,” and “Epilogue.”

Wednesday, 4 November 2026

Campus | Central Building C40.704
12–12.30 p.m. Welcome
Paula Bertúa | Verena Adamik | Adrià Alcoverro
12.30–2 p.m. Writers’ Session: “Creativity and Imagination after Utopia” with Daniel Falb und Michel Nieva
Moderated by Paula Bertúa | Adrià Alcoverro
2.30–4p.m. Session 2: "Predicting Futures“
Diana Klinger
From Swift to Hassabis: An Unorthodox History of Algorithmic Imagination
Laura Hille
NOASIS
4:30 – 5:30 p.m. Session 3: “Multitude and Heterotopias” 
Roberto Nigro and Chiara Stefanoni (conversation)
7–9 p.m. LIAS Film Series Brown Girl Begins (directed by Sharon Lewis), followed by a discussion
SCALA Arthouse Cinema | Apothekenstraße 17 | 21335 Lüneburg
Adyam Tesfamariam
PostUtopia/Afrofuturism?
Response by: Verena Adamik

Thursday, 5 November 2026

Campus | Central Building C40.704
10–11.30 a.m. Session 4: »On (Dis)Imagination«
Hernán Gabriel Borisonik
Owning the Future? Standardisation and the Regime of Disimagination
Adrià Alcoverro
The Image of Futurization Without Image: The Fabrication of Transcendence from Popular Culture to the Extreme Right
12–1.30 p.m. Session 5: »Structures of the Future«
Maddalena Fragnito
The Privatisation of Futurity: Preparedness, Tech Elites, and the Crisis of Imagination
Ezequiel Gatto
Moving Image: Post-utopia, Orientation, and Political Inventiveness
3–4.30 p.m. Keynote
Gregory Claeys
The ‘Failure’ of Utopianism
Response by: Verena Adamik
5–7 p.m. Session 6: »Alternative Times for Other Utopias«
Verena Adamik
Utopia on Neither Side: Afrofuturism and White Supremacist Propaganda in Early 20th Century USA
Paula Bertúa
“This Is a Transmission from a Future That Will Not Happen”: Unsettling Futures in Contemporary Latin American Cultures
Egidijus Mardosas
Utopia Against Progress: Reading Abensour and Le Guin in the Anthropocene

Adrià Alcoverro, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Verena Adamik, University of Potsdam, Germany
Paula Bertúa, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hernán Gabriel Borisonik, University of San Martín, Argentina
Gregory Claeys, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom
Daniel Falb, Berlin, Germany
Maddalena Fragnito, LIAS, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Ezequiel Gatto, University of Rosario, Argentina
Laura Hille, University of Siegen, Germany
Diana Klinger, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil
Egidijus Mardosas, Vilnius University, Lithuania
Michel Nieva, New York, USA
Roberto Nigro, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Chiara Stefanoni, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Adyam Tesfamariam, Berlin, Germany