Urgency and utopia

Posted on by November 26, 2009 by jon.brunberg

I have previously mentioned the notion of utopia as one of the starting points for my exploration of the alternatives to today’s society, with the viewpoint that even the simplest idea for change has to be imagined, evaluated and planned before being brought into play. In this video, which was recorded at the University of Buenos Aires at an unknown date and uploaded to Vimeo, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds me of another aspect of this classical term in much need of re-invention; “The true utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way to resolve it within the coordinates of the possible, that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not a kind of a free imagination. Utopia is a matter of innermost urgency. You are forced to imagine it, as the only way out.” Utopia, in other words, has to grow out of, not only the possible, but also the limitations, the situation at hand. In many situations the ideas that will change a part of the world can not even be imagined. It has, by necessity, to be created here and now, as when Argentinian workers saw it necessary, as a means to survive, to take over and cooperatively run their workplace after its owner had abandoned it as a result of the country’s grave economic crisis in 2001.

Jon Brunberg