Rethinking Utopia as Form: Failure, Time, and the Political Subject of Anti-Capitalism

Abstract: This essay theorizes utopianism as distinct from radical or revolutionary action and so capable of instantiating a desire for a world so different it cannot be represented. Asking whether "failure" is in fact a productive condition of possibility for utopianism, the essay considers a number of theoretical interventions including those of Fredric Jameson and Kathi Weeks. Drawing out the benefits and limits of these perspectives, the essay articulates utopianism's features and offers the demand for prison abolition as an example. Not only does this demand confront the impossibility of a different world, but it draws on the potentiality of past political agency and so posits what occupying the "no place" of utopia can be for those who have historically been denied the very temporalities upon which utopia has traditionally relied.