Anti-Anti-Utopia
Or: How to Reimagine the End of the World
If you look closely, you can see it—the first scant hint of dawn. The golden sun is just beginning to burgeon, unfolding lazily at the horizon. As the glowing orb yawns awake, the sun unfurls its rays like opening arms and stretches its light across the surface of the Earth. The horizon, illuminated, offers a striking image in and of itself. Horizons are latent with possibility, promising that even after the long tendrils of the night, there might still exist some possibility for warmth and light amidst the shadows.
But the world dawn reveals is often dark, disturbing, even heart-breaking. Beneath the unflinching light of a new sun, we can see a world beset on all sides by the horrors of social hierarchy. Increasingly, it appears that all the sun seems to touch is immersed in immiseration. As Gramsci famously remarked in his Prison Notebooks, “The old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Social hierarchy hides in the shadows these lumbering monsters cast, lurking quietly. At present, hierarchy appears as a natural way of life, cemented within our social spheres as the norm, the status quo. But there is an alternative world burgeoning, one in conflict with these systems of command and control that immiserate our lives.
In fits and starts, if we look close enough, we can see that world beginning to emerge like a fruiting vine uncurling around the rusted wreckage of a desiccated factory assembly line, reaching out for the warm embrace of the sun. Even now, a new world is growing as fungi on the rotting corpse of social hierarchy, gills gulping down their first bit of oxygen, mycellium reaching furtively forward to form a new, horizontal network of connection. If we accept that another end of the world is possible, what possibilities might blossom amidst the ruins? If Gramsci is correct, what might this new world look like if it were to be freed from the nightmare of social hierarchy?
Social hierarchy is anything but a new phenomenon. From the grotesque wealth of our capitalist society’s ruling class to the settler colonial, white supremacist history of the so-called United States to cisheteropatriarchy and anthropocentrism, social hierarchy has steadily ensnared much of the planet in its devious schematic throughout the course of human history. These structures of domination exacerbate the catastrophes of the modern world. While it may appear ironic to suggest hierarchy is the pox of our epoch in the midst of an ongoing global pandemic, if COVID-19 has proven anything it’s that these hierarchical modes of thinking and being compound crises. Pandemics, at present, are an inescapable fact of life, an evolutionary quirk on a microscopic scale. Yet, it was social hierarchy that demanded people be sacrificed at the altar of profit, social hierarchy which fostered paralysis and inaction in the early days of the outbreak, social hierarchy which suggested wearing a mask was somehow an infringement upon personal liberty rather than a collective step towards community healthcare.
Hierarchy is inextricably tied to the logic of ubiquitous surveillance, police repression, and the ongoing dispossession of poor, working communities. This is especially true in Black and Indigenous communities, which are disproportionately and systematically afflicted by the intersectional oppressions that emerge out of a networked web of overlapping systems bent towards coercion and control. Ableism afflicts the disabled and neurodivergent; patriarchy and heteronormativity foreclose any potential exploration of desire, gender expression, or selfhood.
In the midst of this interminable era, what pathways can we chart towards care, kinship, and joy? Alternatives to hierarchy manifest themselves both within popular fiction—in literature, in cinema, in the worlds we create in concert with one another at the gaming table—as well as the real world. The imaginative worlds built in speculative fiction, in particular, hint at possible ways to move beyond what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism.” Aimee Bahng observes speculative fiction is particularly “well-matched” to counter capitalist realism because it actively imagines alternatives to capitalist modernity’s anti-utopian assertion that we have reached an end of history, that any attempt to make the world better is doomed to fail. What is more, the material projects of real-world revolutionaries give us concrete examples of these alternatives in practice. Thus, the task of this dissertation is to see in what ways the fictional and material struggles of storytelling and worldbuilding are dialectically interlinked so as to bring about the sort of revolutionary ruptures in the existing superstructure necessary to inspire meaningful social transformation.
By analyzing this dialectic in fiction, I hope (in some small way) we can simultaneously foster joy, kinship, and solidarity in the real world. Drawing on the insights of Fredric Jameson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Umberto Eco I call this hybrid of genre and political impulse anti-anti-utopianism. Anti-anti-utopia can be understood first as a subgenre of speculative fiction mutually informed by both utopia and dystopia, blending elements from both genres and synthesizing them into a new form with unique characteristics. However, this new term does not denote a total departure from utopian studies or the germination of a brand-new literary concept so much as an attempt to carry forward the kernel of an idea that has unfortunately been neglected and overlooked in the field of utopian studies for too long.
Anti-Anti-Utopia: A Genealogy
Anti-anti-utopia, as both a subgenre and a political impulse, identifies and subsequently names a certain tendency in speculative fictional projects to fuse elements of utopia and dystopia together into one joint narrative. Often, this creates a dialectical tension within the text and fosters a dynamic interplay between these disparate elements. While this has long been a tradition in utopian storytelling, anti-anti-utopia intentionally draws attention to this element as not a passing bug or idiosyncrasy but as a crucial, defining element that helps ground futuristic narratives. The shadow of dystopia is created by the light of utopia; the threat of dystopia is refuted by the promise of utopia. All these elements intermingle and in their various permutations, refutations, and sublimations generate something that is indelibly tied to both utopia and dystopia and yet also distinct. Anti-anti-utopia thus emerges out of speculative hopes and horrors about the future of our planet and all the lifeforms who reside within our shared biome.
Of equal importance, anti-anti-utopianism can be described as a political impulse, one which offers readers insight into building autonomy and community in the real world so we can prefigure new horizons for organizing joyful, directly democratic confederations of more-than-human life as the crises of our time become increasingly untenable. The political impulse of anti-anti-utopia manifests as a desire to remake society by first imagining how that new society might even be brought into being.
This theory of anti-anti-utopianism stemmed from my initial contact with the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, whose article Dystopias Now inspired the critical foundation for my dissertation. Though Robinson was not the first person to discuss the concept of anti-anti-utopia, Dystopias Now was the first text I encountered that articulated this subgenre and political impulse I had identified but was unable to give a name. Dystopias Now focuses primarily on reclaiming the word “utopia” and problematizing “dystopia” as a discreet generic category, which Robinson instead sees as the very real conditions of modern life. So far, so good. However, where Robinson passes off anti-anti-utopia as one facet in a broader analysis of dystopia and utopia as generic categories, my objective is to dig deeper and develop this concept further and flesh out its implications for both utopian and speculative fiction studies.
To do so, we must first look at the terms “utopia” and “dystopia” before examining how these are really opposites of the same coin. I have endeavored to explore these concepts in different subsections below in order to illustrate how anti-anti-utopia emerges out of utopia and dystopia. However, as my analysis shows, utopia and dystopia necessarily bleed together, mutually informing one another, and thus they should not be misunderstood as entirely unique and distinct. In the end, it is impossible to talk about utopia without also addressing dystopia and vice versa. The crux of anti-anti-utopian storytelling is directly addressing these tensions. Anti-anti-utopian narratives pit utopia and dystopia against each other. In doing so, these stories invite readers to examine what it might look like to reshape the world into a more egalitarian environ.
Thesis: Utopia
Utopias have a long history. While many scholars point to Thomas Moore’s Utopia as the progenitor of the concept, we can trace the idea of a “perfect world” back to Plato’s Laws, one of the final dialogues written by the philosopher. Arguably, the religious belief in paradise could be read as a utopia, which would launch the term’s origin even further back into human history, well before the rise of Greece’s city-states. Much has been made of the word’s Grecian origin: the play-on-words of ou-topos (“nowhere”) and eu-topos (“good place.”) Critics of utopia often point to the way utopian aspirations seem to invariably devolve to dystopias. One premiere example of this would be Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the initial veneer of an idealized society gives way to one that is highly regulated and controlled by the authorities from behind-the-scenes via a ruthless caste system. For all their limitations, utopias do possess a desire to manifest an alternative sort of world. The “utopian impulse” exists in most major political ideologies. All across the political spectrum, anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, and fascists yearn for their respective version of a perfect world—whether explicitly or not. As Frederic Jameson points out in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, “We need to distinguish between the Utopian form and the Utopian wish: between the written text or genre and something like a Utopian impulse detectable in daily life.” Utopia has a form: narrative and aesthetic qualities that make utopias a distinct subgenre of science fiction. Yet, in Jameson’s estimation, there is also an impulse in all of us to pine for and imagine a better world. Sometimes, these yearnings manifest as a religious faith in life after death; other times, this desire to remake the world can create transformative, revolutionary political movements.
Robinson’s essay Dystopias Now borrows its title by inverting the introduction to Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future, a clear homage to Jameson’s scholarly contributions to the field of utopian studies from one of the genre’s most popular modern authors. In Jameson’s introduction, titled “Utopia Now,” Jameson navigates the tension between the perfection utopia promises and the real-world political consequences that often stem from the utopian imaginary. “Utopia has always been a political issue,” Jameson begins, “an unusual destiny for a literary form: yet just as the literary value of the form is subject to permanent doubt, so also its political status is structurally ambiguous.” This ambiguity has led to atrocities committed across the political spectrum in the name of pursuing that “good place” which is “nowhere.” Jameson writes at some length about the political, ideological, and literary history of utopia. He takes to task Marxists who uncritically regurgitate Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific before ultimately wrestling with the same tension within the utopian imaginary that Robinson presents in his own essay. On the one hand, Jameson believes we must defend utopia from its critics. On the other hand, the literary genre—and its political impulses—necessitate that we investigate utopia with all the scholastic rigor we can muster to disambiguate the implications of utopia.
Robinson’s essay also draws on the scholarship of Robert C. Elliot, whose 1970 work, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre, appears to have been the first time the phrase “anti-anti-utopia” was coined. The book in turn draws its title from a paper Elliot penned in ’63, which explores the work of Thomas Moore’s Utopia at some length and challenges the conventional “Roman catholic” literary interpretation of Moore’s work which prevailed in the scholarship of the time. In the opening lines, Elliot discusses how utopia is a land “born to controversy,” one claimed by many: “Catholics and Protestants, medievalists and modernists, socialists and communists.” As we’ve seen from Jameson, the ideological desire to claim utopia is certainly a potent one. The desire to craft a perfect society animates all political projects as Saul Newman points out in Postanarchism. “There is no problem with utopian imaginaries,” Newman writes, “indeed, a certain utopian impulse is central to all radical politics in the sense that it punctures the limits of our current reality.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ability to call one’s vision of the future “perfect” holds much allure. For better or worse, though, I am not exactly interested in reimagining perfection, but rather in grappling with what happens when people try to build a better world in the ruins of the old one. That is a messy prospect, a process that is iterative and constantly in-motion. “Perfection” feels sterile, detached, clean. Anti-anti-utopia, one way or another, is messy.
Antithesis: Dystopia
Part of this messiness entails an engagement with dystopia. After all, the horrors of social and material inequalities will not vanish without a struggle. The ongoing systems of hierarchy that plague society and confront us every day make utopian aspirations incredibly difficult for people to imagine. “We should hold a steadfast orientation toward the open ocean of possibility,” Suvin thunders. “True, terrors lurk in that ocean: but those terrors are primarily not…the terrors of the not-yet-existing, but on the contrary simple extrapolations of the existing actuality of war, hunger, degradation, and exploitation of people and planets.” According to Suvin, the detractors of utopia—who Robinson would deem “anti-utopian”—look at the tragedies of our contemporary moment and insist there is no way out of this collective nightmare. Dystopias often seem to suggest that the future is just as hopeless and depressing as the present.
Perhaps this helps explain the prevalence of dystopian narratives today. After all, literature, media, and culture are reflective of our social fabric. Just as utopias tend to reflect our best impulses, our desires for a more just, egalitarian, communal society, dystopias reflect the opposite. Dystopia is here and now, prevalent in the material reality of racialized capitalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and settler colonialism. Mark Fisher calls this capitalist realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative.” I fear dystopias tend to create anxiety and paralysis about the future rather than a spirit of revolutionary optimism. When left alone, dystopia as a concept tends to monopolize our collective political imaginary, stifling the potential of emancipatory social movements by inculcating potential revolutionary subjects with a reactionary ideology that suggests there is no alternative to modern society and the various social hierarchies it manifests.
For instance, in Lord of the Flies, the boys stranded on a deserted island don’t build a meaningful life of social connection and mutual aid. Instead, chaos and conflict erupt in the boys’ attempts to recreate the same social paradigms that lead their world to an implicit atomic bomb. By the end of William Golding’s novel, a British naval officer finds the stranded boys and berates them for behaving in such a feral, belligerent manner before sheepishly glancing over his shoulder at the warship behind him. Golding’s novel seems to cement the idea that civilization can only ever be bellicose and violent. Yet, as Ursula K. Le Guin once declared during a speech at the National Book Awards, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of king. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” Every social hierarchy is a human power. They all must, in turn, be resisted and defeated. Anti-anti-utopian stories answer Le Guin’s call-to-arms.
Unfortunately, it should come as no real surprise that dystopias saturate popular culture in the United States. Wander the young adult (YA) section at any corporate bookstore and you’ll see novels like The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent—all serialized stories assuring kids that, as bad as things are, they could always be much, much worse. In their essay on “female empowerment” (or the lack thereof) which performs a queer reading of dystopian YA novels, Nora Peterman and Rachel Skrlac Lo describe how the heteronormative structures of these stories often end up replicating the very patriarchal structures that they ostensibly oppose. “These books offer critiques of social order,” Peterman and Skrlac Lo write, “but only particular aspects of society are challenged.” Katniss is permitted to challenge the hegemony of the state, but only through performative gestures. Even the ostensible “revolutionaries” in Collins’ series are interested in using the novels’ hero as a propaganda figure. The end-result, Peterman and Skrlac Lo contend, is a half-baked social critique, one typically divorced from the intersectional frameworks of oppression nascent in different social hierarchies. Only by deliberately and willfully misreading Divergent and The Hunger Games could Peterman and Skrlac Lo tease out positive, productive social commentary with sociopolitical ramifications in these YA texts.
But YA authors are not the only purveyors of dystopia that appear, at least to me, to offer insufficient social commentary. The so-called literary canon is rife with dystopian immiseration, inundated with examples of repressive, totalitarian regimes: 1984, A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451. Turn on the television and you’ll find multiple seasons of The Walking Dead, West World, and Black Mirror striving to convince viewers that the real problem, all along, has been humankind. Of course, this is a convenient answer to the complicated question of why contemporary society appears to be so immersed in abject suffering. To say that the root problem is solely capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, or any other distinct hierarchy at play today in the social body is to provide a reductive, lopsided analysis. Grappling with the ways anti-Black racism intersects with settler colonialism and patriarchy requires dynamic critical engagement with the intersections of domination and exploitation that exist in the world today. Not either/or, but both/and simultaneously.
Two decades into the twenty-first century, dystopia continues to be virtually ubiquitous within popular culture, domineering all forms of media—novels, television, motion pictures, games. But dystopia is not merely an aesthetic form or artistic setting. Dystopias, both implicitly and explicitly, reflect contemporary politics. While these political implications are often hyperbolized, the creators of dystopian projects are nonetheless informed by our current moment. As Frédéric Claisse and Pierre Delvenne point out, dystopias are “depictions of a dark future based on the systematic amplification of current trends and features.” Dystopian writers take the oppressions of the modern day, then dial them up to eleven. From these hyperboles, dystopias emerge kicking and screaming.
For better or worse, dystopias have a habit of holding up a mirror to society and reflecting the worst human impulses right back at us. In some ways, this can allow us to identify real, material issues in the world. In other ways, I fear dystopias trap us into a self-replicating pattern where we’re incapable of imagining any alternative to the repressive modes of social hierarchy that inundate our world today. As Kyle P. Whyte illustrates, one of the premiere issues of today—climate change—is routinely presented in dystopian narratives in quite a reductive manner. Indigenous stories about climate collapse, Whyte shows, “challenge linear narratives of dreadful futures of climate destabilization with their own accounts of history that highlight the reality of constant change and emphasize colonialism’s role in climate change.” Dystopias routinely overlook the ways settler colonialism intersects with climate catastrophe, whitewashing these intersecting oppressions and impoverishing our ability to fight back. Dystopian writers who fail to account for the Indigenous perspective on time, Whyte argues, end up constructing narratives that imagine collapse as a titanic one-off event rather than a protracted series of crumbling disasters slowly eroding society. What these indigenous scholars and community-organizers remind us is that the apocalypse is now—it’s ongoing.
Mark Rifkin echoes Whyte’s exhortations, adding there is a need to examine “the principles, procedures, inclinations, and orientations that constitute settler time as a particular way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing temporality” (viii). Thinking beyond settler time is critical to the project of decolonization, but dystopias often seem inextricably bound up in the ongoing process of settlement and containment. For instance, Cormac McCarthy’s searing novel The Road pits its unnamed father and son against a cast of increasingly diabolical characters: bandits, raiders, cannibals. McCarthy’s text seems to suggest that, in the wake of catastrophe and societal collapse, no one can be trusted. In McCarthy’s rugged, hyper-masculine post-apocalypse, only the discrete nuclear family can be a source of safety. By contrast, Indigenous literatures and the project of decolonization are a necessarily destabilizing force, one which ruptures tidy conceptions of linear time, narrative, and place. As Tuck and Yang argue, “decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone” (7). Dystopias, on the other hand, often assert with grim finality: this is the end of history, there is no alternative.
I argue alongside Stuart Hall that our political imaginary is captured by the interplay of resistance and containment. Alone, both utopia and dystopia are incomplete. Only when they are in conversation with one another can these stories truly bear fruit. This is why anti-anti-utopia is so vital. “There are points of resistance,” Hall argues, “there are also moments of suppression. This is the dialectic of cultural struggle.” The hegemony of cultural power is concentrated within the state. As we will explore throughout this dissertation, the state is the centralized locus of social hierarchy, so it should come as no surprise that there is an emphasis in popular culture on containing and sidelining narratives that resist social hierarchy. “Anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism,” Fisher points out. “Far from undermining capitalism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it” (12). At their worst, dystopias can play the role of capture, containment, and control quite elegantly. Unchallenged, dystopias seem to insist that resistance is futile, that we are doomed. Only when we put these dystopias in conversation with utopias can we begin to see how we might extricate ourselves from the miasma of our shared reality.
Claisse and Delvenne eventually argue that dystopias can allow readers to “anticipate the future and eventually empower political communities to engage in further action.” The scholars trace this discursive phenomenon from George Orwell’s 1984 to the contemporary struggles of activists, lawyers, and social scientists against the ubiquity of the US surveillance apparatus in an attempt to illustrate that literary dystopias can provide modern audiences with frameworks to understand the world and shape the science and technology of the future. Another premiere example of this might be the way in which Gibson’s Neuromancer inspired Silicon Valley’s current fixation on the Metaverse. The trouble with Claisse and Dalvenne’s analysis, as I see it, is that these trends don’t actually empower activists and community-organizers to fight back. Anticipating darker times ahead and imagining technological trends before they come to fruition does not meaningfully provide us with the ability to combat social hierarchy’s interconnected facets. A warning may prove prophetic, but it is not a weapon in and of itself. In their interpolation of both utopia and dystopia, anti-anti-utopias present concrete ways to dismantle the social hierarchies that subjugate us. In Chapter 2, for example, we’ll examine how The Dispossessed encourages constant vigilance against domination even in a society that has ostensibly liberated itself. Meanwhile, Chapters 3 and 4 will explore methods we can use to develop solidarity with nonhuman lifeforms in order to combat oppression.
The proliferation of dystopian narratives in recent years begs the question: who benefits from (solely) dystopian visions of the future? How does dystopia trap us within the totalizing structures of capitalist modernity? Perhaps most importantly, how could a genuinely liberatory literature confront the material might of the ruling class and galvanize a revolutionary spirit rooted in militant joy? Dystopias are a rich and storied subgenre, it would be a shame to discard them, a disservice to all those creative minds who’ve endeavored to warn us about what might happen in the future if we do not drastically remake the world of today. Anti-anti-utopian stories are critically informed by the warnings and prophecies of dystopia. Where they differ, however, is that anti-anti-utopian narratives make every effort to show alternatives to a purely dystopian future of misery are imminently possible.
Synthesis: Anti-Anti-Utopia
So, we turn now fully to the concept of anti-anti-utopia—a double-negation or, in a roundabout way, a sort of affirmation. While the double prefix may prove cumbersome to write and say, this rhetorical interplay is one that provides valuable insights into how anti-anti-utopia is distinct from its utopian and dystopian interlocutors, while simultaneously tied to them. Definition through negation is a useful rhetorical tool which can defamiliarize a subject and, in the process, recontextualize that subject in order to establish something fresh and new. Moreover, definitions through negation enjoy a storied political history. Perhaps it should prove unsurprising that anarchy (“no rulers”) often serves as one of the critical facets of anti-anti-utopia. Just as “utopia” is defined by negation (“nowhere,”) anti-anti-utopia is interested in the power of this rhetorical turn, one which is simultaneously a denunciation and an affirmation. If the antithesis of utopia is dystopia, then anti-anti-utopia is a fitting term to provide a synthesis of the two. The very title of this dissertation, Another End of the World is Possible, suggests this same overall trend. Ours is an epoch of mass suffering, rife with worlds ending on both micro- and macrocosmic scales. Yet, anti-anti-utopia imagines not our end, but an end to the destructive forces of social hierarchy, where social suffering is mitigated and care, kinship, and joy become central to multispecies justice. We will attend each of these themes carefully throughout this dissertation. For now, though, Jameson’s defense of utopia proves a useful jumping-off point for a discussion of anti-anti-utopia.
“Perhaps,” Jameson writes in Archeologies of the Future, “for those only too wary of the motives of [Utopia’s] critics, yet no less conscious of Utopia’s structural ambiguities, those mindful of the very real political function of the idea and the program of Utopia in our time, the slogan of anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy” (xvi, emphasis added). Sadly, Jameson does not appear to take his own proposal seriously as this is the only time the term “anti-anti-utopia” appears in all 448 pages of Archaeologies of the Future. Indeed, Robinson also seems interested primarily in salvaging and protecting the concept of utopia. While defending utopia from its detractors is a worthwhile goal in and of itself, this dissertation takes Jameson’s anti-anti-utopian proposal to heart. If anti-anti-utopianism is the best strategy for combatting anti-utopian critics and the dystopian realities of our contemporary moment while holding onto the utopian possibility of a better world, then it stands to reason we should delve into this idea of anti-anti-utopianism in earnest. This dissertation is the culmination of my efforts to illuminate the ways in which anti-anti-utopia presents a unique and urgent interplay between utopia and dystopia, a synthesis that is both a subgenre and a political impulse simultaneously.
Anti-anti-utopia fuses utopia and dystopia, placing these genres not as polarities but as a dialectical force in synthesis. For instance, as Mark A. Tabone notes in his discussion of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, “The Broken Earth is a meaningful refusal of despair amid a decade marked by political hopelessness, in addition to dystopian racial strife and environmental threats, subject matter with which Jemisin’s trilogy engages.” Tabone identifies the manner in which both utopian and dystopian elements comingle in anti-anti-utopian narratives. While the world Jemisin describes is one marked by a horrifically stratified racial caste system which uses orogenous children as pawns in its imperial schemes, the series also takes great liberty describing a pirate utopia where queer, polyamorous relationships flourish. Tabone focuses his analysis on Meov, as well as the community of Castrama, which is founded in the wake the global natural disaster The Fifth Season is titled after. Jemisin’s work acknowledges the racist and classist horrors of today while simultaneously offering glimpses of a better tomorrow. This is an essential facet of anti-anti-utopian storytelling, to create what Ursula K. Le Guin called “an ambiguous utopia,” where the tensions between utopia and dystopia are not so easily resolved. In each of the primary texts we will examine throughout this dissertation, it is not immediately clear whether they are utopian or dystopian in nature. My contention is that the blurring of clearly demarcated lines between the promise of utopia and the agony of dystopia is a hallmark of anti-anti-utopian fiction. These texts present worlds-in-motion, anti-anti-utopian in nature because of these overlapping facets of dystopia and utopia simultaneously.
Anti-anti-utopian fiction invites readers to consider how utopian pathways of thinking and being are essential to the project of world-building and collective liberation. At its core, anti-anti-utopia grapples with the prevalence of dystopia—the real ramifications of a world in dire crisis—all while refusing to lose hope that we can build something better in the wreckage. Whereas Robinson wants to ultimately reclaim “utopia” as a genre, I seek to build anti-anti-utopianism as its own unique subgenre at once informed by dystopia and utopia while remaining distinct. Anti-anti-utopianism does not accept the dewy-eyed romanticism of a socialist utopia and rejects the cynicism of authoritarian dystopias. When we bridge the divide between utopia and dystopia and place the two genres in conversation with one another, we find works of fiction capable of not only imagining better worlds than our own, but pieces of media that can inspire us to prefigure those alternatives in the real world.
To the uncritical eye, many of the worlds we explore in popular fiction may appear at first to be dystopian in appearance. Only when we dig deeper can we see the fusion of utopian and dystopian elements, which suggests there is more to these works of media than first meets the eye. Anti-anti-utopia emerges from this cross-contamination, bearing a whole host of questions. What lingering scars of trauma persist in the wake of a successful revolutionary struggle? How do we avoid replicating hierarchical social relationships? If we cannot defeat capitalism outright in some grand historical Revolution, how do we carve out revolutionary posthumanist spaces to respect the dignity and autonomy of nonhuman animals and more-than-human biosynthetic organisms? These are just a few of the questions provoked by anti-anti-utopian texts. But, as you can see, each revolves around a crucial problem: anti-anti-utopia exists in a state of being and becoming. Because of anti-anti-utopia’s prefigurative political orientation, it sees the project of building a better world as constantly in flux, an unending struggle against the forces of dehumanization, exploitation, and domination in favor of solidarity, community, and self-actualization.
Anti-anti-utopia must be understood as a crucial intervention, an affirmation that—if art truly is political—then it must knowingly and meaningfully engage with possible alternatives to the misery and hardship that accost us at every turn. It cannot be said enough: this dual nature, existing simultaneously as both a subgenre and as a political impulse, is essential to anti-anti-utopia. Anti-anti-utopias are not content to merely imagine a better world, they seek to change the one we are living in today.
Ultimately, Anti-anti-utopias are destructive. Anti-anti-utopias engage in what Marx called in a letter to Arnold Ruge “the ruthless critique of all that exists.” As a rule, anti-anti-utopias are both unflinching and unsparing in their trenchant social commentary. In this fusion of dystopia and utopia, anti-anti-utopian narratives hold no punches when it comes to critiquing social hierarchy. We are, after all, living in apocalyptic times. Anti-anti-utopias do not shy away from the horror of our dystopian reality and retreat into the purely utopian dreamscape—they engage, they enter the fray, but they do so with a song of joy on their lips and in kinship with all those who struggle for a better world.
Yet, anti-anti-utopias are also creative, generative. They insist, courageously, that we can do things differently. Even against insurmountable odds, we can make the world a better place. This is the political impulse of anti-anti-utopia, a pining for a world that is still burgeoning, gaining energy with each passing moment like a solar panel soaking up the light of the sun. Anti-anti-utopian fiction suggests it is up to us to bring a new world into being. In times like ours, the task of cultivating new horizons, new possibilities, often seems monumental. The creative process of telling anti-anti-utopian stories allows us to imagine alternatives to the pervasive forms of social hierarchy that inundate the world and then build those new forms of solidarity and kinship with our own hands. Yes, this world is dying. Our planet is choked by the vise-grip of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and every other vestige of social hierarchy which privileges one group over all others. But anti-anti-utopia is emerging amidst the ruins, between the cracks and the fissures, unfurling in the sunrays at dawn, continuously insisting another end of the world is possible.
Works Cited
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