Utopia

Social Justice Usage

Source: Giroux, Henry. On Critical Pedagogy. Continuum, 2011, p. 122.

Utopian thinking in this view is neither a blueprint for the future nor a form of social engineering, but a belief that different futures are possible. Utopian thinking rejects a politics of certainty and holds open matters of contingency, context, and indeterminancy as central to any notion of agency and the future. This suggests a view of hope based on the recognition that it is only through education that human beings can learn the limits of the present and the conditions necessary for them to “combine a gritty sense of limits with a lofty vision of possibility.” Educated hope poses the important challenge of how to reclaim social agency within a broader discourse of ethical advocacy while addressing those essential pedagogical and political elements necessary for envisioning alternatives to global neoliberalism and its attendant assault on public time and space.

New Discourses Commentary

“Utopia” is a complicated topic both within and outside of the Theory of Critical Social Justice (and its Theoretical predecessors). This complexity probably arises because it is highly sought after but does not (and cannot) exist. A Utopia, which literally derives from Greek root words meaning “nowhere,” is a perfect, or perfected, society or social order. In the Theory of Critical Social Justice, Utopia would be a social state in which there is no systemic power or oppression of any kind and thus no group conflict (see also, conflict theory), injustice, or inequity (see also, democracy). Throughout Theory and its intellectual predecessors (see also, Critical Theory, neo-Marxism, Marxism, Hegelian, and postmodernism), Utopia is variously described, criticized, held up as an ideal, and offered as a mischaracterization of their aims, depending on the writer and their operative definition of the term. This makes it hard to say definitively that Woke Theory is Utopian in character, though it plainly is.

For example, the father of Critical Pedagogy, Henry Giroux, sees the Critical project as Utopian but uses a nonstandard definition for the term. In Giroux’s 2011 collection of essays, On Critical Pedagogy, for example, he writes,

the utopian dimension of pedagogy articulated through the project of radical democracy offers the possibility of resistance to the increasing depoliticization of the citizenry, provides a language to challenge the politics of accommodation that connects education to the logic of privatization, refuses to define the citizen as simply a consuming subject, and actively opposes the view of teaching as market-driven practice and learning and a form of training. Utopian in this sense is not an antidote to politics, a nostalgic yearning for a better time or for some “inconceivably alternative future.” It is rather an “attempt to find a bridge between the present and future in those forces within the present which are potentially able to transform it.”

And also,

If educators are to revitalize the language of civic education as part of a broader discourse of political agency and critical citizenship in a global world, they will have to consider grounding such a pedagogy in a defense of militant utopian thinking in which any viable notion of the political takes up the primacy of pedagogy as part of a broader attempt to revitalize the conditions for individual and social agency while simultaneously addressing the most basic problems facing the prospects for social justice and global democracy

For Giroux, “higher education is aggressively shorn of its utopian impulses” by the logic of “neoliberalism,” which he describes as a kind of “market fundamentalism” that seeks to diminish the role of the state in public affairs, particularly education. So, for Giroux, higher education—and education more broadly—has an “impulse” toward the Utopia that the powers that be want to constrain and remove (see also, status quo). For him, Utopianism is a positive good encouraged by his own Critical Pedagogy project and thus the underlying goal of a Critical education. This seems to agree with the characterization given by the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” (see also, tolerance), where he complains from the very beginning,

The author is fully aware that, at present, no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice, but he believes that it is the task and duty of the intellectual to recall and preserve historical possibilities which seem to have become utopian possibilities—that it is his task to break the concreteness of oppression in order to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does.

Of course, Giroux has a distinct and specialized definition for “Utopia” here, which accords with that of the neo-Marxists like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, all of whom he cites in On Critical Pedagogy. Simply, Giroux says that Utopian thinking just means believing “different futures are possible,” meaning ones that escape the fundamentally oppressive logic of capitalism, of course. For Giroux, then, Utopia is aspirational, even as it remains an imperative for education—indeed, the point of education for Giroux is to train students to think beyond the existing society to new ones that point in a Utopian direction (see also, communism and equity). This “educated hope” (see also, critical hope) is to be achieved, he writes, “as Horkheimer points out, it is the contradiction between the existing society and the utopian promise of a better life that spurs an interest in both history and historical progress.” That is, it will take place dialectically, which is to say largely in line with updated Marxian and neo-Marxist thought, and the point of education, to Giroux, is to encourage this state of affairs.

We get a clear sense of what this society beyond the current society might look like by looking back to Herbert Marcuse, one of Giroux’s primary sources. In his 1969 “An Essay on Liberation,” Marcuse explains,

I believe that this restrictive conception must be revised, and that the revision is suggested, and even necessitated, by the actual evolution of contemporary societies. The dynamic of their productivity deprives “utopia” of its traditional unreal content: what is denounced as “utopian” is no longer that which has “no place” and cannot have any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming about by the power of the established societies.

Utopian possibilities are inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism and socialism: the rational utilization of these forces on a global scale would terminate poverty and scarcity within a very foreseeable future. But we know now that neither their rational use nor – and this is decisive – their collective control by the “immediate producers” (the workers) would by itself eliminate domination and exploitation: a bureaucratic welfare state would still be a state of repression which would continue even into the “second phase of socialism,” when each is to receive “according to his needs.”

That is, we’re talking about communism, which Marcuse in that essay describes as a kind of “liberated” socialism that isn’t a bureaucratic failure (see also, Bolshevism, Leninism, and Stalinism). Indeed, like Giroux, who cites him heavily, Marcuse is suggesting that the only thing preventing a Utopia from emerging is that “the power of established societies” is “blocking” it.

Perhaps surprisingly, this view of Utopia as a kind of liberated socialism or liberated communism diverges from Marxist views on Utopianism, which are more pessimistic despite Marx’s characterization of the communist stage of History (its last) as being essentially Utopian. This is because Marxists believe Marxism is scientific, not idealistic, and Utopianism is considered to be a kind of (Hegelian) idealism present in other approaches to socialism and communism (plus Hegelian philosophy) that Marx rejected as “unscientific.” As noted in the “Utopian Socialism” entry on the marxists.org glossary of terms,

The socialist movement prior to Marx and Engels was predominantly utopian in character, and it can be said that it was Marx and Engels’ principal contribution to make a critique of this utopian socialism and place socialism on a scientific basis. … While pre-1848 socialism was utopian, many would say that the socialism of the 20th century was seriously lacking in idealistic vision. The difficulty of imagining an “outside” to postmodern capitalism is as much a problem as the difficulty of finding a road to get there.

 Neo-Marxism could be understood to have emerged specifically to restore this more idealistic vision to socialist (and broadly communist) thought, largely by regaining much of the Utopian character of the dialectical approach and, as it could be phrased, taking Marx back to his Hegelian roots. It is in this neo-Marxist vein, informed by the Marxian and Gramscian writings of his mentor Paulo Freire, that Giroux comes to conceive of Utopia as a very pregnant and directed belief in the possibility of “different futures.” Indeed, under neo-Marxism, this vagueness about the Utopia is a built-in feature that, in Theory, is meant to help it avoid the errors of “20^th century socialism” (i.e., the catastrophes of Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism, inter alia). As the neo-Marxist Theodor Adorno had it, “[o]ne may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner,” It is in this regard that the following extremely Hegelian (and Hermetic) statement of Herbert Marcuse in “An Essay On Liberation” can be understood: “negative thinking is by virtue of its own internal concepts ‘positive’: oriented toward, and comprehending a future which is ‘contained’ in the present.”

The postmodernists, despite their post-Marxist despair, also shared this vague not-Utopia-but-Utopian vision while criticizing the “Utopian socialism” of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, and, eventually, Maoism, and like the neo-Marxists and Giroux (who derived his thought heavily from Derrida, at the least—see also, Derridean), they tucked it into a notion of dialectically perfected democracy. Jacques Derrida writes, for example, in Spectres of Marx,

At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being “out of joint”). That is why we always propose to speak of a democracy to come, not of a future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia—at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of the living present.

For Derrida, again, we see the idea that a (democratic) society with a fundamentally different character, which must break with the present course of society (the “future present”) that is “to come” that becomes a stand-in for utopianism, which he otherwise criticizes as unobtainable, even linguistically (say, in Of Grammatology). This approach is both consistent with Giroux and the overall argument here, despite the linguistics, and Derrida’s thought that language cannot adequately signify anything. A vague picture of a “democracy to come” (which is also similar to Giroux’s phrasing) that distinguishes his view from the catastrophic failures of “Utopian socialism,” is, for Derrida, sufficient.

This Utopianism as an aspirational belief in the possibility of a society without oppressive power dynamics is carried forward into the (post)modern Theories of Critical Social Justice as well, though with some disagreement. For example, Derrick Bell, the first Critical Race Theorist, indicates in some of his earlier legal review articles (collected, e.g., in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement) that we should be wary of utopianism even while keeping our hope situated toward what it implies. Meanwhile, another foundational Critical Race Theorist, Mari Matsuda, writes of its precursor, Critical Legal Studies,

The movement known as Critical Legal Studies is characterized by skepticism toward the liberal vision of the rule of law, by a focus on the role of legal ideas in capturing human consciousness, by agreement that fundamental change is required to attain a just society, and by a utopian conception of a world more communal and less hierarchical than the one we know now.

 The key features that stick out from Matsuda here are the same vague belief in better future possibilities in a different conception of the world, as with Giroux and the neo-Marxists, an indication that it will be “more communal and less hierarchical than the one we know now,” i.e., more “equitable” and communistic (see also, community), and that it requires “fundamental change,” i.e., sociocultural revolution, to achieve. All of this is in strong agreement with the Marxian intellectual predecessors (neo-Marxism, Hegelianism, and, to a degree, Marxism) of Woke ideology as well as with the Critical Pedagogy of Giroux (and Freire), rendering Critical Race Theory Utopian in its character, despite Bell’s pessimism and cynicism.

In character, then, the Theory of Critical Social Justice and the activism (praxis) that moves it is Utopian in character while carefully in denial of that fact (most of the time—sometimes it just defines the word vaguely as a kind of aspiration to new “potentialities” for society). This is a consistent feature of its intellectual precursors, which themselves ended in catastrophic failure because of their reliance upon Utopianism, a failure to understand human psychology, and “negative thinking,” i.e., Hegelian dialectical thought (see also, aufheben), which misunderstands the nature of reality, knowledge, and society at a fundamental level. We should expect similar dystopian outcomes from a sufficiently empowered Woke ideology, in that case.

Related Terms

Aufheben; Bolshevism; Change; Communism; Community; Conflict theory; Critical; Critical hope; Critical Legal Studies; Critical Pedagogy; Critical Race Theory; Critical Theory; Democracy; Derridean; Dialectic; Educated hope; Equity; Gramscian; Hegelian; Hermeticism; History; Ideology; Injustice; Knowledge(s); Leninism; Liberalism; Liberation; Maoism; Marxian; Marxism; Negative thinking; Neoliberalism; Neo-Marxism; Oppression; Post-Marxism; Postmodernism; Power (systemic); Praxis; Reality; Revolution; Science; Social Justice; Socialism; Stalinism; Status quo; Theory; Tolerance; Woke/Wokeness

Revision date: 7/13/21

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