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Time and Again, No Longer, Not Yet

 

The Utopian Urge of Capitalism: Promised, Deferred, Distributed Life Power

In what ways might critical(ly) situated knowledges – operating necessarily from the inside (i.e. the very meshes of subjectivation and knowledge/power) and hopefully beyond the limit – induce potentialities for ‘our times’ despite and against the biopolitical timescapes of present and future? This question calls for critical epistemologies and imaginaries of alternative differing and deferring temporalities, capable of engaging the present contingencies and producing possibilities for anti-fascist cultural criticism and political life, in a present structured through what Lauren Berlant calls ‘crisis ordinariness’ (2011).1

Although the neoliberal doctrine of ‘there is no alternative’ has been sedimented as the normalised paradigm of governance and self-governance in this historical Geist we call the present, the trope of utopia is not incompatible with capitalism. In fact, capitalism is driven (or better put, inspirited) by a certain utopian imagery and imaginary. The utopian urge of capitalism is imagined and enacted through ‘promises’ of effectivity, productivity, success, security, property, profit, flexibility, mobility, connectivity, creativity, (self-)knowledge, self-actualisation and (opportunities for) fulfilment and consumptive enjoyment. A constitutive component of this incitement to fantasise for an ideal future is, however, rational administration and ‘responsible’ (self-)regulation of desire and enjoyment.

The capitalist utopia that is implicit here (meaning the ‘free market’ utopia) is geared to the theological aura of consumerism as a nodal point of interpellation and subjectivation, which in turn is produced through socially sanctioned attachments and ‘appropriate’ desires. And so the late capitalist utopia as a dispositif of the manageable future repeats and sustains the desire for plenitude and surplus, and, at the same time, generates the regulated and

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