Against prophecy and utopia

Introduction

There is no denying the basic phenomenological insight that the present as experienced by human beings is inseparable from the projection of our intentions and expectations forward into the future. There are no shortages of predictions and fantasies surrounding the future which shape the present and, indeed, in turn, the future itself. While acknowledging that it would make no sense to criticize thinking about the future as such, we will here criticize two specific ways of thinking about the future, namely those designated by Michel Foucault as ‘prophecy’ and ‘utopia’. Prophecy, clearly one of the oldest ways of thinking about the future, is essentially a matter of making predictions without what we might today call an adequate empirical basis. Utopianism is rather different, since it is not a prediction per se. We will contend, however, that utopianism implies knowledge claims more modest than those made by prophets, but which ultimately suffers from similar faults.

Prophecy and utopia are both ways of situating our lives temporally, either as determined by an inevitable horizon, or as given meaning by the effort to produce a better world. I will, via Foucault, as well as Jacques Lacan and Yannis Stavrakakis, argue for the elimination of these visions in favour of a rigorous openness towards the future, both in relation to politics and personally, encompassing a reconception of the times of our lives.

The history of prophecy

Foucault invokes the concept of prophecy in two contexts. First, he uses the notion as an analytical category in relation to ancient thought, going back to his first engagement with Greek texts in the early 1970s. Second, he uses the concept in criticizing contemporary thought repeatedly from 1978 onwards.

Foucault’s treatment of prophecy in relation to ancient thought reaches its clearest formulation in his most final Collège de France lecture series, The Courage of Truth (2011). Here, he situates prophecy as one of four ‘fundamental modes’ of truth-telling, the others being sage wisdom, technical education, and parrhesia, the last of which is the main object of his study. Prophecy, according to Foucault, is a way of speaking in which a prophet speaks a truth that is somewhat opaque, and not on his own account, but rather acting in the capacity of a mouthpiece (Foucault 2011: 15). The prophet thus contrasts with the sage, a wise man who speaks from his own experience (Foucault 2011: 16–7); with the technical teacher, who has a special knowledge he or she has learnt from another and passes on (Foucault 2011: 24); and with the parrhesiast, who takes a personal risk to tell a dangerous truth to the powerful. Foucault (2011: 29) sees both parrhesia and prophecy as forms of telling a truth about the future.

Certain aspects of the practice of prophecy as Foucault describes it are clearly indexed to the context of ancient history. To some extent, however, his fourfold typology of truth-telling seems to be transhistorically applicable. He attributes the exemplary importance of antiquity to the fact that these four modalities happen to have been clearly separate from one another at that time. He thinks they have subsequently become mixed. In medieval Christendom, in particular, the functions of parrhesiasts and prophets were integrated in the figure of the preacher who tells the truth to the powerful while also prophesying the end of days.

This brings us to Foucault’s invocation of prophecy in relation to contemporary political thought. Today, Foucault sees himself as engaged in an active struggle against those who continue to assume the prophetic mantle (Foucault 2001: 288). His rejection of prophecy is sometimes couched in personal terms (he chooses not to prophesy), sometimes in descriptive terms (prophecy is no longer a possible function today), and sometimes prescriptive (we ‘should not’ prophesy) (Foucault 2001: 288, 384).

Foucault (2011: 29–30) tentatively suggests that the function of prophecy has today been taken over by ‘revolutionary discourse’. Again, we find here a mixture of parrhesia and prophecy: a critical-political mode and one in which we are told what is going to happen. Foucault, and I, following him, want to suggest that we should re-separate these two discursive modes, jettisoning the latter in favour of the former.

Foucault’s reference to revolutionary thought must primarily denote Marxism, qua the continuously dominant form of revolutionary thought from the end of the 19th century to the present. In Marxism, I think we can diagnose a mixture not only of critical parrhesia and prophecy, but also of technical truth-telling, in the form of claims to scientificity. The question of the scientificity of Marxism is, of course, contentious, but irrelevant to our purposes. Our question is rather to what extent Marxism can be said to be prophetic. Here, Marxism’s own claims to scientificity are relevant, inasmuch as they are prima facie incompatible with prophetic characteristics, since prophecy by its very nature is excluded from scientific epistemology. Indeed, it can be presumed that the possibility of prophetic discourse has been foreclosed by the death of God, inasmuch as it does not make sense for anyone who does not believe in a supernatural source of knowledge to believe in prophecy.

Many Marxists could be accused of engaging in prophecy by treating Marx himself, or Marxism itself, as an inerrant source of knowledge. The ultimate question is, however, whether Marx himself made prophetic pronouncements. I think it is quite clear that he did, albeit that only a relatively minor element of Marx’s writings is explicitly in this direction. Marx’s prophetic dimension is the theory of history that predicts that a final revolution is coming that will finally supersede class society. This is a conclusion that cannot possibly have an empirical basis, but rather helps itself to a form of prophetic historical intuition inherited from Hegel. Hegel, by positing Geist, does give himself a supernatural basis from which to speak prophetically about history and the future. Marx rejects Hegel’s metaphysics, but this then means that he has no basis to predict the future unfolding of history. That he does so would seem to be a Hegelian holdover.

While most of Marx’s writings are analyses of historical situations, then, this prophetic dimension is always in the background. The prophetic dimension was built into Marxism by Marx, with regrettable historical consequences. Marx’s historiography is itself relatively unproblematic insofar as it is an interpretation of the past. I would argue, however, though I do not have the space to develop this argument here, that the prophecy of the supersession of class society in fact colours Marx’s entire account of history by leading him to put more weight on class than he otherwise would have. Even if we allow that Marx’s (Marx and Engels 1976: 482) thesis that ‘the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles’ is sustainable on empirical grounds, however, the natural empirical inference from this would be that history will continue to be marked by class division. To conclude, as Marx does, that class struggle will terminate in the supersession of class is not a scientific move. It may seem trite, but I think it is accurate to say that Marx has, from Hegel, assumed a Judeo-Christian eschatology, which still haunts us in the form of a theological-eschatological inflexion of Marxism to the present day.

The problem with prophecy is not merely epistemic but also political: prophetic claims are dangerous. This danger is twofold. Prophecy first encourages a groundless confidence about the prophesied outcome, when that outcome is in reality anything but assured. This confidence, second, licenses an attempt to force a prophesied outcome. Since it is going to come about anyway, it can be reasoned there can be no serious danger of going awry in efforts to bring the prophecy about. Of course, since this confidence is groundless, the danger is substantial that what this effort will produce has nothing in common with the prophesied aim. Moreover, even if the prophesied outcome is produced, this neither means that the prophecy was correct (it does not demonstrate that the prophet had an adequate epistemic basis for predicting it), nor does it, contrariwise, show that the prophecy was self-fulfilling (the fact that it followed the prophecy does not demonstrate that the prophetic utterance was decisive in the aetiology of the outcome).

The first basic danger of overconfidence can be found in general predictions of the type ‘capitalism will collapse’. The generality of this statement, the lack of specified timeframe or pattern renders it relatively harmless, but since we cannot guarantee the truth of the statement (though it seems a reasonable supposition, given the fate of past socio-economic systems), it engenders a false confidence that can lead people to act inappropriately, which may be in the direction of complacency (since the outcome is inevitable, we do not need to do anything) or of rashness (since the outcome is inevitable, we cannot fail).

However, if we say in addition that ‘capitalism will end only when the proletariat organize themselves as a dictatorship’, we have entered much more dangerous prognostic territory. Many good reasons have been given for believing that this is the form that any revolutionary supersession of capitalism must take. It is not, however, an absolute certainty, and it is dangerous to take it as a certainty because of the way that can lead us to act. The dangers of such detailed prognostication about revolution can be seen in various ways in the Soviet experience. Among the manifold problems that Marxism encountered in Russia were: 1) the success of a revolution in a country in which the proletariat was a small minority, coupled with an insistence that the proletariat alone was the truly revolutionary class; and 2) an historical schema that categorized any society that overthrew the bourgeoisie automatically as socialist, blind to the fact that the Soviet state was at no point a dictatorship of the proletariat or even of the people, and to the fact they had created a society of a new type (what a minority of acute Marxists have called ‘bureaucratic collectivism’). ¹ The Bolsheviks forged ahead against various kinds of contrary evidence, assured that the revolution would necessarily follow a basic set pattern, and that the contradictions of this pattern they experienced could only be temporary and local anomalies, hence that history would bear them out.

The Foucauldian point to make about prophecy ultimately is that prophecy is not what it purports to be. It presents itself as telling the truth about the future, but it cannot be that, for there is no mechanism for it to know. What it is, in its reality, is a form of discourse that circulates in the present, which has effects in the present, and on the future, which cannot be regularly self-fulfilling. One might defend prophecy on the basis that it serves the purpose of inspiring people to make the prophesied vision come true. This in fact runs up against more or less the same problem epistemically, however: we cannot know whether this stratagem will have this putative effect, or rather occasion entirely opposite ones.

Utopianism

Foucault’s alternative to prophecy is to show problems ‘in all their complexity’ (Foucault 2001: 290). This is in effect a task of critical parrhesia, to point out unpalatable facts that are already discernible in a situation. The basic problem with prophecy for Foucault is, I think, quite simply that it does the opposite of showing complexity. It is, rather, a form of gross simplification.

When it comes to predicting the future, there is a major problem of epistemic opacity occasioned by the complexity of society. Indeed, this opacity applies even to the past and present: we do not have anything like the capacity to understand in its minutiae how society works now or has ever worked, because it is simply too complex. While it might exhibit predictable patterns, this is true only over a relatively modest time-span. It is in any case not possible to predict when or how significant changes will occur, or a fortiori to state in advance how we can change it. It should be acknowledged that Foucault does not explicitly formulate the problem of complexity in these terms, but I would argue that this formulation is at least compatible with his remarks regarding complexity, and that he is aware of and reacting to this basic problem of the indescribable complexity of social reality across his work. ² Foucault’s (2001: 288) response ‘is to raise questions … with the maximum complexity and difficulty so that a solution doesn’t spring from the head of some reformist intellectual or suddenly appear in the head of a party’s political bureau’. Foucault presents his position as a matter of two different imperatives, one relating to the inadequacy of off-the-peg solutions of politicians and technocrats to the complexity of social problems, and the other a matter of the profoundly undemocratic nature of such solutions from above.

Here, complexity and the democratic imperative are, I would argue, closely intertwined: complexity means that adequately complex solutions can only come out of the operation of social complexity itself, not from above. Foucault’s work tries to assist the evolution of social change from below by producing maximally complex accounts of society and its history. This is a necessary effort, despite the unavoidable inadequacy of any such theory to fully articulate what has taken place. When it comes to the future, however, the obstacles to analysis are massively greater, since we have no empirical knowledge of what will take place, attempts to prescribe ready-made social solutions cannot have any adequate basis, though speculation about various possible scenarios may be both necessary and helpful.

The denial of complexity is not the unique province of prophecy. Prophecy is a particularly crude form of the denial of complexity, but the basic problem afflicts a broader spectrum of claims to be able to predict the future, which are between them more or less coextensive with the political field today. Foucault speaks more than once in the same breath of silencing both ‘prophets and lawgivers’ (Foucault 2001: 288; cf. Foucault 1991: 159, 1990: 124). Both types are forms of prognosticator, I will argue: while prophets claim to know the future, those who offer us political solutions claim to know what is best for the future.

The putting forward of a contingent vision of the future as the best option is, in a word, utopianism. There are of course other definitions of utopianism, including one that is currently in vogue, in which utopias are taken to be a matter of literary images of the future that are supposed to inspire us, but are not meant to be brought about literally. We will use the term, however, to refer to utopian schemes that seek to establish what political society should look like, the sense of the term used, to very different effect, by both John Rawls and Robert Nozick. While prophecy is not a mission that many contemporary political thinkers would explicitly embrace, utopianism is taken up as such by these seminal figures of analytical political philosophy.

Foucault (1998: 178), in his 1967 essay on ‘heterotopias’, defines utopias as ‘emplacements that maintain a general relation of direct or inverse analogy with the real space of society. They are society perfected or the reverse of society, but in any case these utopias are spaces that are fundamentally and essentially unreal’. This is compatible with either definition of ‘utopia’ we have just outlined. It allows us to see, however, what is wrong with positing a utopia as the way things should be, rather than as a heuristic flight of fancy: if a utopia is ‘essentially unreal’, then it cannot be achieved, by definition. We will argue that this is a necessary feature of all utopias as such.

The epistemic problems and political dangers of utopianism have considerable overlap with those of prophecy. The danger of utopianism is obvious, namely the use of the utopian ends to justify political means. Like prophecy, utopianism can instil false confidence. As with prophecy, the danger from overconfidence is compounded by the lack of basis for positing this end in the first place. Of course, epistemically, utopianism differs from prophecy in that it does not claim to know how the future will unfold. It does, however, involve lesser knowledge claims, beliefs about what is both possible and desirable for the future.

A basic premise of utopianism in our sense is that it is possible to bring one’s utopia about. Utopianism is often challenged on the basis that a given utopia is not possible. My objection is in effect a variant of this challenge, but significantly different from its usual form. I do not claim that it is impossible a priori for the utopian vision to be realized in the details provided by its advocates. I deny rather that they can definitely know that it is possible to produce their utopia. I furthermore deny that their utopian vision can constitute an adequate description of any social arrangement, hence even achieving their aims will not count as achieving utopia.

On the first count, we cannot know in advance whether it is possible for a society simultaneously to exhibit all the characteristics laid out in any given utopian vision. The epistemic opacity here is again due to the complexity of a society: we cannot model society with enough accuracy to know what features can obtain simultaneously. It is an inadequate conception of social possibility simply to say, as we are used to saying in philosophy, that if we can imagine such a society, it is possible, since I deny precisely that we can adequately imagine society. It is a fortiori impossible to know whether we can realistically produce a given utopia from the starting conditions that actually obtain.

Now, it may be objected that it is not necessary to be certain that it is possible to realize a given utopian vision to subscribe to the utopian cause. That is, one might say that the point is not so much to realize the vision as to get as close to it as possible. It is in precisely this sense that Foucault (1997: 298) criticizes utopianism as such, however, using the term ‘utopia’ pejoratively to refer to Jürgen Habermas’ concept of an ideal speech situation (Habermas 1984: 25, 26, 42). Habermas posits this situation only as a regulative ideal, that is, an idea that is supposed to regulate our conduct in non-ideal situations, rather than as something we must try to realize. It is precisely as such that Foucault rejects Habermas’ concept. From Foucault’s point of view, the problem is the same whether the utopia is posited as a concrete goal or merely as regulative. Either way, the goal functions in the present in a way that is quite distinct from its intentions. From Foucault’s earlier definition of utopia as a vision of a ‘society perfected’, we can extrapolate a general condemnation of the way utopias operate by providing a vision of the way society should operate, to motivate behaviour, while remaining ‘essentially unreal’. From a Foucauldian point of view what is important about such utopias is not the thing they aim for, but what practices they actually produce in the here and now. Most utopians are blind to this consideration. Habermas does seem to grasp it, however.

Yet, even Habermas’ position runs up against the second epistemic problem for utopias, relating to the desirability of the utopia. While the criterion of desirability itself must be normative and hence not purely epistemic, the assertion that a utopian vision is desirable implies the ability to know that the society our utopianism will produce will meet one’s normative desiderata. I deny, however, that it is possible to know this. The features we posit a utopia having cannot be enough to tell us how the whole society would operate under the posited conditions, because of the complexity of interactions entailed, and the great portion of society and its interactions that are missing from the description of the utopian society. Thus what might seem an attractive state of affairs could be a nightmare in practice because of all kinds of unimagined side effects. It is certain that it will involve all kinds of effects not projected by its designers.

One reason that utopias can be defined as essentially unreal is that no vision of an alternative society is ever a complete description, since it is impossible entirely to describe a social totality at all, still less in advance of its existence. Utopian thinkers may indeed admit this, and own rather that the point is to isolate certain salient social desiderata, things that are desirable all things being equal. However, all things will not be equal, and hence we should not trust any utopian vision, no matter how apparently attractive.

This is true not only of a fully realized utopia but any attempt to move towards one, even asymptotically, inasmuch as we cannot know in advance that any change we will bring to society is good (by whatever standard of the good we adopt) before it occurs. Moreover, it is impossible to know that positing such a goal will lead us closer to it at all. Indeed, it is not clear how one knows whether one is actually approaching a goal, unless it is defined in simply quantitative terms. If one’s utopian goal is simply that all children should be able to read, then this progress can reasonably be charted. Such a goal is not in itself utopian, however. A utopia is a multifarious vision, not merely a key indicator.

The difficulty here is encapsulated in a maxim attributed to Foucault that we know what we do, but do not know what we do does (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 187). We are quite certain to produce effects we never intended. I may claim that my political activity is aimed at abolishing capitalism, but this claim, no matter how sincere, guarantees no effectuality. Any connection between actions of persons and large-scale social change is contingent and unpredictable.

The best example of this effect in Foucault’s work is that of the prison in Discipline and Punish (1977). The prison system is supposed to reform criminals, to combat crime, but it doesn’t. Rather, as Foucault details, it produces a stable layer of criminal recidivists, a criminal caste. This is well evidenced, but it is never fully acknowledged. Though Foucault does not quite say as much, the reason for this blindness to the objective functioning of the prison is that reality is screened by a utopia. A utopian image of the prison, not as it is, but as it should be, in which only the guilty are punished, proportionately and appropriately, such that they are rehabilitated, is what sustains the prison system. This does not mean that the reality particularly resembles the utopia, still less that it is oriented towards its final production. The utopia rather serves as the excuse for its own nonexistence: the imperfection of the system is allowed on the basis that the utopia is being tendentially produced, but since the existing reality does not tend in this direction, the utopian vision in effect acts against its own production. This does leave an unresolved tension between reality and the utopian vision, the persistence of which is explained below in relation to Stavrakakis’ work on utopias.

Communism similarly functioned as a utopian excuse in the Soviet Union: a real excuse that was unreal as a prospect, though it was posited as right around the corner. (That said, neither I nor Foucault accuse Marxism in general of being utopian. Marx himself rejected utopianism explicitly. I would argue that his concept of communism is not utopian, since it is defined essentially as the negation of class society. My claim here, then, is only that Marxism came contingently to have a utopian function in the Soviet Union.) It is also how microeconomics functions as a guarantee of contemporary capitalism: the market ultimately will benefit everyone, once the kinks have been ironed out (please ignore the man lying in the gutter).

We can thus conclude that we should reject utopianism because there is an immanent contradiction in it. Utopianism posits a goal as the basis for action, but it is impossible to link action adequately to that goal. Rather, the utopian goal is apt to serve as justification in the present for something entirely different. Indeed, this effect is inevitable: any given utopianism is an artefact of the present, existing in the present as part of a strategy of power.

The alternative

It could be objected that, by this point, I have rejected not only utopianism and prophecy but politics itself. If we do not know what we do actually does, if we cannot know how we affect the future, how can we engage in political activity at all?

There are non-utopian and non-prophetic forms of politics that do not involve epistemological wantonness, however. Most obviously, there are forms of political action involving no determinate vision of the future. These are, namely, immanent struggles aiming at the negation of certain features of the present. (We will leave aside the question of whether these struggles might be oriented towards positive values, such as truth, peace, or justice. My suspicion is that any such value is at least the kernel of utopianism, hence why Marx and Foucault refuse to invoke them.) In such cases we are concerned solely with what we are doing, not with what we are doing actually does, although such struggles must aim at a futural outcome, inasmuch as the negation will not occur immediately. Clearly, it is possible for such efforts to come to nought. Moreover, such changes will lead to a society that is different in unpredictable ways, a changed society that will inevitably have new problems that we cannot predict in advance. However, there is no contradiction produced by any of this: we experience something we do not like, we try to get rid of it. Our arguments above imply that we cannot weigh up the future versus the present according to some kind of objective calculus, because it is hard enough to have a decent account of the present where society is concerned, let alone the future we would compare it to. We act then according to what seems apt now, which is to say, according to available evidence and analysis.

We can certainly allow various kinds of public policy too on Foucauldian grounds. Foucault walks a tightrope when it comes to the question of public policy. This is palpable in a 1977 interview, where Foucault begins:

My position is that it is not up to us to propose. As soon as one ‘proposes’ – one proposes a vocabulary, an ideology, which can only have effects of domination. What we have to present are instruments and tools that people might find useful. By forming groups specifically to make these analyses, to wage these struggles, by using these instruments or others: this is how, in the end, possibilities open up. (Foucault 1990: 197)

To reject ‘proposal’ indeed seems to reject policy formation as we know it tout court. Foucault goes on in the same interview, however, to say that:

in the end, I’ve become rather irritated by an attitude, which for a long time was mine, too, and which I no longer subscribe to, which consists in saying: our problem is to denounce and to criticize; let them get on with their legislation and their reforms. That doesn’t seem to me the right attitude. (Foucault 1990: 209)

Foucault at this very time was giving recommendations by invitation to a French committee for the reform of laws relating to sex (Defert 2001: 70).

It is possible to discern a coherent position between these two comments, however. It is one that abstains from policy formation, yet refuses simply to leave this ground to politicos, to ‘render unto Caesar’. Rather, Foucault advocates challenging them directly. Foucault forswears the activity of looking at a problem from afar and then prescribing the solution, but insists that we should not yield the arena of policy formation as a space of contestation to others.

‘Proposal’ for Foucault refers to a form of policy-making that is high-handed, the proposal of a ready-made solution from above, one which doesn’t emerge from below on the basis of experiences. Such proposals are at least typically utopian or prophetic, for reasons I will explore to some extent in the next section.

Possible objections

It might be said that such a position is itself utopian, positing a utopian vision of a world devoid of utopianism, by which to condemn the present, predicting, without knowing it, that things will work better without utopianism. Neither Foucault nor I do this, however. We offer no vision of how a world without utopianism might operate, no claim that it will lead to any particular practical consequence. We only identify a certain form of practice existing in the present that we advocate, over other practices in the present that I argue are immanently self-contradictory. I make no claim about the dangers or lack thereof in non-utopian procedures, only that they avoid the specific dangers of utopianism and prophecy.

Another possible line of objection is that anti-utopianism is associated today with reactionary politics. Alain Badiou (2001: 13) points out that today any positive political project is attacked as utopian, which is to say as unrealistic. It is true that such criticisms are widespread, but they are often incorrect. While there are utopianisms on the left, revolutionary thought is not generically utopian. Revolution is compatible with my position, in the form of an immanent revolution from below, in which the participants attend to and deal with the radically new and unforeseeable conditions as they emerge in a revolutionary situation. The point is to prevent revolution being utopian or prophetic.

The critique that castigates left-wing politics in general as utopian is the inverse of our critique of utopianism. Where we claim that utopianism fails because it attempts to say how society should work, critiques of left-wing thought as utopian tend to claim that left-wing positions are insufficiently articulated, hence ‘utopian’ because they cannot offer an alternative vision. We would argue that utopianism is marked not by the absence of a utopian vision, but by its presence. According to my argument, the inability to imagine how something would work is no argument against its possibility, just as the ability to imagine how something would work does not adequately demonstrate that it is actually possible, since the complexity of the social outstrips our ability to model society in our minds.

There is nothing utopian about saying that ‘another world is possible’, where this slogan is raised without detailing what this world would look like. Badiou’s own position is utterly non-utopian, because it is a matter of fidelity to a truth event in the past that is neither about reviving the past situation nor aiming at producing any particular future situation. Badiou’s philosophy is one of profound openness which is inimical to utopianism as I have described it. Conversely, however, it is problematic to say that another world is not possible, that ‘there is no alternative’. Such pronouncements are prophetic. The claim that communism is impossible has the same flaw as the claim that communism is inevitable: we cannot know whether a determinate form of social organization is either inevitable or impossible, possible or desirable, in advance. Grand historical claims are prophetic, even if they are negative, like Fukuyama’s famous neo-Hegelian diagnosis of the end of history.

The heart of the problem with liberal and conservative positions is not that they prophesy their own success, although they do. It is that their positions are utopian. Indeed, it seems to me that it is centrist and right-wing thought, and not revolutionary thought, that is generically utopian, in both its liberal or conservative forms. Social liberalism posits an idealized version of society as its goal, as in Rawls’ (1999) ‘realistic utopia’. Right-wing versions of liberalism are also utopian, if in a different direction. Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia wears its utopianism clearly on its sleeve. All liberalisms find their utopia in the market, with or without a sizeable state to support it.

Conservatism, which is of course these days normally encountered fused to liberalism, is also utopian. Conservatism traditionally rejects grand schemes for the improvement of society, even ones based on the market. One may refer here to Edmund Burke’s classic mistrust of abstract ideas. Now, such a position does seem anti-utopian, but it is clearly different from Foucault’s, inasmuch as he certainly is not averse to new abstract concepts. Conservatism forbids novelty because it goes against its own utopia, which amounts to an idealized version of either a past it aims to restore or of a present it aims to preserve. The idealization of the past as something that can be returned to implies the same epistemic difficulties and political pitfalls as any utopianism: an inadequate account of how a real society works, and, even to the extent things ever worked like the conservative thinks, the lack of any guarantee of either the possibility or desirability of realizing this again in the future. Even a conservatism that simply consists in defending the status quo would have the similar problem that maintaining the status quo against the forces of change risks changing it in quite unpredictable but other ways. Moreover, conservatism never defends the status quo based on a faultless understanding of its variety, but rather on an idealized image of it to which it does not correspond. As such, far from being a genuine defence of things as they are, it inevitably becomes a matter of suppressing elements of the status quo that it does not like on the basis that these elements are peculiarly novel and threatening.

Personal anti-utopianism

Thus far, we have been discussing politics. However, it seems to me that the arguments developed above on the basis of Foucault’s remarks in relation to politics are also applicable to personal life.

We can be utopian or prophetic in our personal life as in our political thinking: we can act according to a belief in a personal fate or according to an idiosyncratic vision of a perfect life. I would argue that such thinking has similar dangers for us personally as it does for us politically.

Prophecy has been discredited at a personal level much as it has been politically, even if many people continue to believe in fate and fortune-telling. Belief in a foreknown personal fate runs the same broad risks as political prophecy: it may make us overconfident, may push us to do things that we would be wiser to avoid, may lead to disappointment.

Utopianism, on the other hand, is normal, in personal life as in politics. We develop personal goals, visions of the life we want to lead, and work towards these. Such personal utopias seem to me to be amenable to the same criticisms as political utopianism. Our attempts to produce a desired-for personal future never turn out as planned. As in politics, the desirability of one’s vision cannot be assured in advance. As in politics, utopianism in personal life functions as a screen that allows us to lead a life not conforming to our desire on the basis that it will one day lead to the outcome we want.

This leads us to recommend an ethical anti-utopianism that recapitulates the political version outlined above. The ethical and political are indeed closely intertwined here. The existence of political utopianism surely relies on individuals taking a political utopia to be their own goal, in seeing in utopian politics the answer to their personal problems. Thus, the two questions are intertwined ineluctably: if we are seriously to oppose political utopianism, we must explain how we can get along without personal utopianism.

It seems to me that we can, personally and politically, follow desire toward specific objectives without a larger teleology. Doubtless, realizing our immanent desires will lead to all kinds of unexpected and even undesirable effects, but so will any course of action.

Foucault (1978: 157) himself is hostile to desire, famously preferring pleasure for political reasons, but this is because he sees desire as attaching to determinate content. Pleasure is more immediate and knowable than desire, which is by contrast conceptual, deferred, never satisfying. His rejection of desire is also in the direction of anti-utopian immanence in personal life.

In rejecting desire, Foucault was disagreeing with much of his French intellectual milieu, most notably perhaps with Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. I do not follow Foucault’s rejection of desire, precisely because I follow Lacan in holding that desire is not something we can do without. Indeed, Foucault does not himself argue we can do without desire, only that we should emphasize pleasure to combat the machinations of power that our desire harbours.

Lacan’s position is a particularly useful contrast to Foucault’s here, because it offers a possible challenge, by positing fantasy as the necessary corollary of desire. On Lacan’s account, fantasy provides us with the object of desire: we do not desire real objects, but fantasized versions of objects. Disappointment with the object of our desire is thus more or less inevitable from a Lacanian perspective, as the truth of the real object continually threatens to break in on our fantasy. Moreover, for Lacan our desire is premised on wanting to fill a lack within us that no object, fantasized or otherwise, can actually fill, since this lack, which can be identified with desire itself as such, is constitutive of our subjectivity. This does not amount for Lacan to an objection to desire, however, but rather tells us why desire is necessary. Forming fantasies to pursue desire is all we can do given our incurable lack, hence Lacan’s (1992) ethical injunction is that we should never give up on our desire.

If Lacan is right – and I think he is – it would seem that any political or personal desire must organize itself around fantasies which contradict reality. This might be taken to imply that utopianism is the necessary lubricant of politics and human life in general. According to Lacan, we cannot exist without imaginary, fantasy, ideological relations to the bare existence which he calls ‘the real’. We cannot simply exist in the real world as it is, without ideas about it that distort it. Foucault and Lacan are united on this point (see Kelly 2009: 21–23). For Lacan, we need the mediation of imagination between us and the dangerous, unsettling real, since it is not cognizable. Lacan indeed takes it that this imaginary mediation is so necessary that he refers to it as ‘reality’. Reality is in this sense for him a protective fantasy of coherence and comprehensibility imposed on the real (Miller 1995: 12). From a Lacanian perspective we cannot condemn utopianism simply because it is an inaccurate fantasy, because for Lacan much of what we believe is necessarily fantastical, or even in a sense delusional.

Some do indeed argue that Lacan’s position implies that politics must be utopian (Stavrakakis 1999: 112). At a minimum Lacan’s ethics seems to imply that if we have a utopian desire, we should not give up on it. I contend, however, that one can meaningfully distinguish between fantasy simpliciter and utopia from a Lacanian perspective. In this, I follow Yannis Stavrakakis (1999), who has articulated a Lacanian anti-utopianism, arguing that Lacanian principles lead to anti-utopian conclusions. As will become clear in what follows, Stavrakakis’ sense of ‘utopia’ is entirely compatible with the Foucauldian sense of the word I have been utilizing.

The Lacanian objection to utopianism is not that it is a fantasy, since our conception of reality is always phantasmic, hence always doomed to disappointment. It is rather that utopianism is immune to disappointment. Where ordinary objects of desire can be achieved, inevitably disappointing us with their failure to live up to our fantasized expectations, utopian fantasies are articulated in such a way that they are eternally deferred. This is because, in ways we have already discussed, utopias are impossible. Where a desire for another person, for example, has a clear, obtainable object, utopia is of a different order. It is not an object that exists to be acquired. Rather, it is something that must be made to exist. Thus, rather than accepting we have reached our object and that the object has not turned out as we wanted, utopians claim that the object still remains yet to be produced. Utopianism is thus eternally frustrated, but never properly disappointed or disillusioned. Rather, it insists that someone else is to blame for its deficiencies.

Stavrakakis claims that utopianism’s central problematic feature is the constitution of ‘scapegoats’. Utopia is posited as the perfect state we ought to be in. This then leads to the question of why we are not there yet. Since we are never in a perfect state, this means that someone or something must be to blame. For Stavrakakis this entails an explanation in terms of an agent who is preventing us from reaching utopia, who can therefore be blamed for all the problems of our society. Anti-Semitism is the case that he takes up most clearly to explain his theory. In our example from Foucault, the prison system, depending on one’s perspective, one blames the failures of the method either on the liberal reformers who make it too soft, or on the conservatives who do not implement proper rehabilitation programmes.

From a psychological point of view, the problem with utopianism is that, where ordinary desires have the real as a kind of limit beyond which they can only be pushed by a psychotic subject, utopia acknowledges no limit. Utopianism rather seeks to reconfigure the real to match the fantasy (Stavrakakis 1999: 107). The real can be expected to resist this process, which leads to inevitable frustration, experienced not as a problem with the utopian vision but a problem with the real. Of course, in some sense all politics involves some attempt to alter the way things are. Utopianism implies the wholesale negation of the real, however, in favour of itself.

Stavrakakis (1999: 111) affirms hope against utopia, an appropriately open-ended solution. This should not be taken as an endorsement of the vacuous slogan of hope, as raised so successfully by Obama in 2008. Hope is not a political programme but an attitude which allows us to engage in more concrete political commitments. I do not advocate the substitution of abstraction for politics. This essay is an exercise in political philosophy, rather than politics, for this reason.

More dubious is Stavrakakis’ connection of this hope to Derrida and Mouffe contra Habermas, with the implication that radical democracy escapes the utopianism of the ideal speech situation (Stavrakakis 1999: 112). ³ While it is true that radical democracy lacks the determinacy of Habermas’ utopianism, it is still amenable to a thinking of ‘if only we had true democracy’, and thus enables the identification of a scapegoat. Even if it does not breach the Lacanian injunction against attempting to negate the real, I think it falls afoul of various objections to utopianism made above. It moreover means restricting our hope to the limited horizon of the radicalization of democracy.

Lacan (1992: 293–4) rejects a psychoanalysis of adaptation to existing conditions in favour of following our desires. For Lacan, desire is something that fantasy strives to capture, but which is itself beyond encapsulation, which serves only to continually provoke us in producing specific demands. From this point of view, utopianism means believing in a wonderland in which we will actually understand and realize our real desire itself. For Lacan, this attempt is impossible: the only meaningful way to follow desire is through following the metonymy by which one demand leads to another. Contra Foucault, I think desire qua the basis for the continual emergence of new and unpredictable demands is a suitable grounding for politics.

From both Lacan and Foucault, however, we can draw broadly the same conclusion. From both their perspectives, the problem with utopias is their essential unreality, that they remain essentially unfulfilled and operate instead as a powerful motivator to engage in actions not ultimately connected to the production of the proposed utopia. From either perspective, the appropriate prophylactic to utopianism is a more immanent form of practice.