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

Date: 4. – 5. NOV 2026
Location: Campus Centralbuilding, C40.704
With LIAS Alumni Adrià Alcoverro (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Verena Adamik (Potsdam University, Germany), Paula Bertúa (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)

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.