Other Pleasures: The Attractions of Post-consumerism

Even those who today hold a despairing view of the chances of the global capitalist order being replaced by some democratic socialist mode of production will yet recognize the differential impact of different policy options, and the need to encourage support for those more conducive to social justice and ecological sustainability. This is to work to a rather more gradual and modest agenda of political improvement than some revolutionary Marxists would think definable as 'socialist'. But it is nonetheless the most realistic option at the present time, and also the programme within whose framework a certain form of utopian projection can enter as a constructive and efficacious force for change. It is in this context that utopian thinking can figure as something more than a regulative ideal or transcendental gesture to the needed but impossible 'beyond' of the place and time of the actual. It is where a certain form of utopian blue-printing or elaboration of a new 'political imaginary' can have a shaping impact on political objectives and motivations in the present. At any rate, in what follows I want to elaborate on my sense that utopian visions are 'necessary' not only as the sublime 'other' to those insisting, Fukuyama-style, on the 'end of history'; and not only as a logical counter or implication of any socialist critique of capitalist modernity; but also as stimulants of desire, and hence as contributing to the development of new forms of political subjectivity. In support of this claim, I shall in the first instance offer some reflections on my conception of the links between desire, agency and utopian imagining