The Need for Utopian Thinking

On October 24th 2017 Darren Webb gave a talk as part of Sheffield’s “Off the Shelf” literary festival. The title of the talk was “the need for utopian thinking now”, and Darren spoke to a packed audience (75 people in a venue that held 50!).

Using various examples drawn from the field of educational studies, Darren highlighted the ways in which “utopia” as a concept, process, orientation and project has entered mainstream discourse and become domesticated, i.e., tamed, neutered and rendered safe to roam free within capitalism. Against this harmless mode of utopian thinking, which is nothing more than piecemeal reformism, Darren defended a strong concept of utopia — an understanding of utopias as totalising, normative, prescriptive visions of alternative ways of being that can inspire and mobilise transformative political action.

Darren argued that the fears aroused by this understanding of utopia (in particular the sense that totalising visions somehow tend inevitably towards totalitarianism) are unfounded. The claim that the politics of utopia is necessarily elitist and at odds with difference, diversity and dissent is an ideological myth that needs dispelling. Borrowing a term from social movement studies — “convoking the radical imagination” — Darren outlined a process of grass-roots utopian construction that he presented as a shared, reciprocal, respectful, iterative process of collective learning.