Chapter 6 - Sober Realism and Radical Imagination

Summary

Chapter 6 concludes the book by reconstructing both the pitfalls and the horizons of contemporary utopianism. Based on a comparative reading of my three constellations, my final point is that utopianism remains structurally pervaded by the following three fault lines: indeterminacy, wishful thinking and defeatism. Since these fault lines derive from enduring features of utopianism, the best manner of coping with them would be to openly avow their pervasiveness and prepare for the eventual traps that any form of social dreaming might fall into. If we conceive of utopianism as the education of our desire for being and living otherwise, we should, the chapter insists, also remain constantly alert to the multiple respects in which these pedagogical efforts may go awry. Critical self-reflexivity is therefore pivotal to the orientative function that all utopias in the Anthropocene seek to perform. The book ends with a discussion of how such a self-reflective attitude could be cultivated so as to accommodate the failures that social dreaming succumbs to. The anti-hero of Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities can assist us in gaining valuable insights into this issue.