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.Can we come any closer to defining and narrowing down such somewhat elusive trademarks of Bauman’s utopianism? Lewis Mumford (1968), in a relatively similar fashion to Bloch’s (1970) distinction between ‘utopistic’ and ‘utopian’, once differentiated between ‘utopias of escape’ and ‘utopias of reconstruction’.Whereas the former are concerned with momentarily relieving those indulging in cerebral escapism from their present plight by way, for example, of science fiction dreamworlds or by building ‘impossible castles in the air’ thereby leaving the external world as it is, the latter are concerned with radically changing existing reality, for example by transforming the physical appearance of that reality through architectural and social planning.Bauman’s utopianism clearly belongs to neither idealtypical camps.He presents utopia not as escapism, as so many literary writers, but as activism.Moreover, he is utterly unconcerned with concrete architectural designs or social engineering as expressions of the ‘good society’ – to him they take us further away from what the good society may possibly be.Also Raymond Williams, in his classic prophetic book Towards 2000, differentiated between two types of utopianism –utopia depicted as ‘systematic’, meaning that all-encompassing idea of the ideally planned society or an equally all-encompassing critique of or alternative to existing contemporary society on the one hand, and utopia as ‘heuristic’, meaning an‘imaginative encouragement’ to feel, relate and act differently on the other (Williams 1983:12-15).There is little doubt that Bauman’s utopianism primarily belongs to this latter category in its insistence on encouraging imaginative and active involvement without proposing a nostrum for curing all the illnesses of society.Thus, Bauman’s utopia, not as a specific physical place but as cultural imagination, as immanence and transcendence, has a lot in common with Italo Calvino’s wonderful description of the ‘utopia of fine dust’:Certainly, in recent times, my need to come up with some tangible representation of future society has declined.This is not because of some vitalistic assertion of the unforeseeable, or because I am resigned to the worst, or because I have realized that philosophical abstraction is a better indication of what may be hoped for, but maybe simply because the best that I can still look for is something else, which must be sought in the folds, in the shadowy places, in the countless involuntary effects that the most calculated system creates without being aware that perhaps the truth lies right there.The utopia I am looking for today is less solid than gaseous: it is a utopia of fine dust, corpuscular, and in suspension (Calvino 1986:254-255).Despite his lack of interest in concrete utopias and support of ‘gaseous, corpuscular and suspended utopia’, Bauman is concerned with contemporary social and political arrangements and his work contains certain elements of the systematic utopia because he, at least in In Search of Politics, comes up with some suggestions, howeverBauman on Utopia225embryonic, on how to improve current social reality such as a basic income and how to inspire a revitalization of the public sphere, the agora.Williams moreover claimed that there “is an obvious relation between this revival [of utopianism]and the recurrent disappointments and despairs of orthodox politics” (Williams 1983:12).Such disappointments and despairs are mirrored in Bauman’s position and are probably the main reasons behind the recent resurgence of utopianism in his work.He echoes Paul Ricoeur’s (1986) insistence that utopia must become our culture’s main warning against invisible systems taking over the human world and as a weapon against cultural, political and intellectual closure.Although his work signals an unconditional support for utopia as critical counter-cultural imagination, Bauman remains ambivalent about utopia – an ambivalence equally reflected in the uneasiness of the surrounding academic culture regarding the usefulness of utopianism, as I illustrated above.Tom Moylan captured this inner tension or ambivalence by coining the term ‘critical utopias’ and stating that “a central concern in the critical utopia is the awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as a blueprint while preserving it as a dream”(Moylan 1986:10).This is an apt characterization of the work of Bauman who is simultaneously critical and yet supportive of certain aspects of utopianism.Often utopians have been suspiciously stigmatized as futile nostalgics or day-dreamers, romantics or futurists, either way as idle idealists whose suggestions for a better present or future merely shrugged the shoulders of authorities as well as ordinary people.Other utopians have been criticized on the grounds of their feverish urge to turn idle dreams into flesh and their obsessive search for ordering or modelling the real world after some obscure blueprint or master plan.George Steiner once claimed that the main reason for our culture’s suspicion of and ambivalence towards utopians stem from the fact that what they say is so evidently true but often so offensively and annoyingly true because it always remains immediately out of reach: “We hate most those who hold out to us a goal, an ideal, a visionary promise, which, even though we have stretched our muscles to the utmost, we cannot reach, which slips, again and again, just out of range of our racked fingers – yet, and this is crucial, which remains profoundly desirable, which we cannot reject because we fully acknowledge its supreme value” (Steiner 1971:41).Moreover, Steiner claims that especially the Jews, the continuous ‘bad conscience of Western history’, have performed this specific role of critical and idealist utopians holding out goals, ideals and visions immediately out of reach.Bauman has, as the outsider, the Jewish intellectual in exile, throughout the years embraced this role with uncompromising consistency.Another and related reason for our culture’s contempt for utopias and utopians is their often far-fetched ideals or fanciful descriptions and therefore “criticisms for‘unreality’ are the price that must be paid” (Bailey 1988:63).According to one of utopias’ staunchest critics, Karl Popper, one of the main reasons why utopianism must be countered and castigated is because it exclusively focuses on ‘ends’ instead of on‘means’.We cannot, according to Popper, be rational about ends, the main concern of Wertrationalität, and therefore utopianism must be deemed utterly irrational (Popper 1945) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]