Utopia as politics: discussing future mobilities

DHAN ZUNINO SINGH

Lancaster

Congreso; Mobile Utopia: pasts, presents, futures.; 2017

Cemore, University of Lancaster

Utopias and mobilities are closed related in many ways. The journey and the traveler are key in the classic Utopian narratives, epitomized by Thomas Moore: the story about the Utopian place is told by the traveler who has returned. The trip can be spatial but also temporal as the protagonist of ?News from Nowhere? who dreams about the future during an underground railway journey. The new worlds depicted by Utopias imagine social orders but also alternative spaces and ways to move. The Utopian experiments have involved a physical mobility of communities towards remote places -like in different parts of the Americas. If physical, temporal, experienced, represented mobilities are associated to Utopia, there is a more metaphorical way to think this relationship: Utopia as a driver, impulse, movement towards future, or a process of becoming as stated by Ernst Bloch in his Principle of Hope -a politics of hope revisited by Nigel Thrift?s Non-representational Theory. Bloch brings back utopia to rethink Marxism -which had neglected the Utopian tradition to set up a scientific approach (historical materialism). If Utopias imagine every aspect of the new (ideal) world -even dystopian narratives depict the future in detail-, utopia for Bloch is about what it is latent but not yet articulated, a begin, something to come. It is more a horizon rather than a narrative about how society must be.This paper discusses the relevancy of this notion for a political and philosophical debate about the meaning of Utopian Mobilities: whether Utopia implies a set of possibilities, an open future, or it is planned ?perfect? world that invariably relies upon, for example, smart cities, technological innovation, a strict spatial and social order. I argue that the latter is closer to policy (based on an idea of order, transparency, frictionless) while the former is closer to politics (conflicts, friction, and becoming).