LIAS Workshop: "Critical Utopia: Capital, Nature, Desire"

Date: Wednesday, 14 January, 7–9 p.m. | Thursday, 15 January, 9:30 a.m.–6 p.m.
Location: Wednesday: Scala Arthouse Cinema, Apothekenstraße 17, 21335 Lüneburg 
Thursday: Leuphana Campus, Central Building, C40.601
 

Against the backdrop of the failure and impasses of twentieth-century revolutions, “Critical Utopia” explores the intersections of utopian thought, political economy, ecological crisis, and the libidinal investments that sustain – or undermine – imagined futures. In an ever-expanding global capitalist system, a system marked by the heightening tensions of climate catastrophe, new apartheids, and growing surplus populations, we interrogate the role of speculative futures and utopian impulses today. Is it possible to think of a utopian form that avoids the hope industry of the present, while simultaneously not reverting to a despair that only serves to reaffirm the status quo? How might the spectre of emancipatory utopian desire be shaped by our libidinal economy and the catastrophic consequences of the capitalist organization of “nature”, both human and nonhuman?

The first part of the “Critical Utopia” workshop focusses on the effects of capitalogenic environmental destruction on utopian rationality. On the one hand, more and more scholars and writers are voicing the need to re-activate utopian rationality in the search for sustainable forms of existence. On the other, the advancing climate catastrophe challenges the very possibility of utopian form. “Critical Utopia” stands in this tension and asks: How can we cultivate utopian rationality on an already damaged planet? How might we retain emancipatory utopian desire without re-introducing various idealized notions of “nature”?

The second part of the workshop addresses the relationship between desire, critique, and utopia today. Beyond the well-worn May 1968 formulas of unhindered enjoyment (jouissez sans entraves), total liberation, and de-alienation, it asks: What forms of material struggle, mediation, or critical aesthetics are capable of interrupting the libidinal and economic circuits that sustain the present? What kinds of utopian enjoyment – or the rejection of it – can open up space for new modes of collective life and political imagination? And how might these material and libidinal economic elements force us to rethink the role of speculative and critical aesthetics today? 

“Critical Utopia” thus aims neither to blindly reproduce idealist escapism, nor to sustain a foreclosure of the future, but rather to map the “perpetual present” and locate transformative possibility within the space of contemporary sociopolitical failures and catastrophe itself. It sets out the challenge of rethinking the role of speculation and enjoyment in an era of stagnation, foreclosure, and false optimism – an era in which norms and transgressions overlap.

With: Carl Cassegård, University of Gothenburg, Sweden | Joe P. L. Davidson, Loughborough University, UK | Lisa Garforth, Newcastle University, UK | Egidijus Mardosas LIAS Fellow | Gregor Moder, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia | Anna-Maria Murtola, University of Eastern Finland, Finland | Barbara Ulrich Straub, Switzerland | Benjamin Studebaker, independent scholar, USA

Programme:

14 January 
7–9 p.m. LIAS Film Series, Scala Arthouse Cinema, Apothekenstraße 17, 21335 Lüneburg 

Operai, contadini, directors: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, France, 2001
Introduction and discussion: Barbara Ulrich Straub and LIAS Fellow Egidijus Mardosas 

15 January 
Central Building, C40.601

9:30 a.m. Introduction to the workshop

Part I – Ecology and Utopia 

9:45–11:15 a.m. Session 1 
Lisa Garforth, Newcastle University, UK: “Modest Climate Utopianism: Desiring, Describing, Decentring”
Joe P. L. Davidson, Loughborough University, UK: “After the End of the World: Utopian Fiction Confronts the Climate Catastrophe”

11:30 a.m.–1 p.m. Session 2
Carl Cassegård: University of Gothenburg, Sweden: “Two Models of Freedom: Marcuse, Adorno, and Planetary Ecological Catastrophe”
Egidijus Mardosas, LIAS Fellow: “Climate Crisis and the New Utopian Spirit”

Part II – Utopia, Enjoyment, and Critique 

2–4 p.m. 
Gregor Moder, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia: “Against Utopia: From Marx to Lenin and Beyond”
Anna-Maria Murtola, University of Eastern Finland, Finland: “Waste, Subsistence, and Social Reproduction: Back to Basics”
Benjamin Studebaker, independent scholar, USA: “Beyond ‘Work Hard, Play Hard’: Cultivating Alternative Sources of Motivation”