"Suffer a Sea Change": Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and the Politics of Utopia

Abstract

I am not unaware that a threat of instant obsolescence looms over the present essay. To speak of the "politics of utopia" in the current conjuncture is to speak at a time when the waning of political investment in "the still unbecome" (Ernst Bloch, 1:202) threatens to deprive the phrase of any substantive meaning. Indeed, the kind of dialectical procedure through which the speculative fantasies of the past could be mined for traces not only of the rankly ideological but also of the persistently anticipatory has for some time been left to the labor of an obstinate few, bringing utopia to the sorry state of appearing either as a merely taxonomic category or, worse, a pejorative shorthand for what, from the viewpoint of late-modern sensibilities, are the all-too-modern shortcomings of Marxian dialectics: the teleological faith in "reason" and "progress," the unwillingness to open thought up to the injunction of irreducible difference, the insidiously authoritarian investment in what Zygmunt Bauman recently described as "the modern idea of designed and managed order" (Society, 231). The poststructuralist revolt against such articles of high modernist faith rendered "utopia" an unsavory means of describing the desire for alternatives to existing social life and experience. To the extent that it remained possible to speak of such desire amid the emerging sense that the mesh of relations in dominance was all-enveloping, it was preferable to draw not on the ostensibly consolatory and untroubled tradition of utopias but on the existence of real places where social norms could be "simultaneously represented, contested and inverted," to evoke Foucault's description of heterotopia (24).