The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Satish Poduval’s class The Utopian Imagination—Brave New Worlds in Contemporary Fiction and Film (winter semester 2020/21), which introduced students to some of the theoretical writings on utopia/dystopia and made them explore some of the brave new worlds depicted in modern fiction and films.

---

Etymologically, the word utopia describes ‘a good non-place’, being made up of the Greek words Eu (good), Ou (not), and Topos (place) (Sargisson “Utopianism in the twenty-first century”). Frederic Jameson argues that utopia should not be thought of as representation, so as an actual (non‑)place in the future that is free of all problems, but rather as “an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world” (23). It is an alternative to the widespread, seemingly intuitive response to any proposal of change, summarised in the Thatcherian “there is no alternative”-attitude. Today more than ever, in a time of a global pandemic that exacerbates and discloses many of the social inequalities faced by numerous people all over the world, it still seems easier “to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (Jameson “Future City”).

Utopianism, then, is a way to overcome the limits of our imagination. Through this method and thought experiment, we[1] can try and find a common ground, perhaps not so much about what we want the future to look like but rather what we have in our present that we, collectively, need to overcome to get to a better future. As Jameson notes, it is clear by now that the inevitability of the modern idea of progress has dissolved. Instead, it seems that we need to come up with a way to get to this future ourselves (and I suspect that on the way there we will realise that it is not this system, call it capitalism, nation states, Western modernity, that will lead us there).

I distinctly remember a conversation that I had with my dad in his car when I was about fifteen. He introduced me to the idea of a universal basic income, which can be summarized as follows: “give all citizens a modest, yet unconditional income, and let them top it up at will with income from other sources” (Van Parijs 4). Born in the GDR in the 60s, my father feels, to put it mildly, sceptical toward capitalism and was thus in favour of the concept. My past self was not convinced: who was going to pay for that? And what about all the lazy people who would take advantage of the system? I did not dismiss the concept as ‘utopian’, but that might only have been because I did not know the word (I certainly would not have been the first person to deem it that (cf. Bregman)). I had reached the limits of my imagination, and a basic income for everyone was not included in it.

About ten years later, and after having begun to reflect some of my internalised prejudices, I wonder if the utopian element to universal basic income is not its apparent impossibility but rather the ways in which it discloses negative elements of our present (Homer 474), and poses an opportunity to think about what we want for our future as well as a possible way to counter some of “the four fundamental threats to the survival of the human race today—ecological catastrophe, worldwide poverty and famine, structural unemployment on a global scale, and the seemingly uncontrollable traffic in armaments of all kinds” (Jameson “Utopia”, 22).

Universal basic income could surely help to tackle the problem of structural unemployment as well as worldwide poverty and famine–if it was installed on a global scale irrespective of national borders. If part of the basic income was financed through an increased taxation of natural resources, a fortunate side effect could be rethinking the way that we currently exploit the planet. All of these points still exclude the manifold freedoms that people would attain if they would not have to work in jobs they do not actually like. Thus, imagining a world with a universal basic income may be one way to engage in utopian imagination.

Anni Fender

 

Works Cited

Bregmann, Rutger. “Utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty.” The Guardian, 6 Mar 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/06/utopian-thinking-poverty-universal-basic-income. Accessed 9 Jan 2021.

Homer, Sean. “Anti Anti-Utopianism: Imagining Alternative Spaces.” Playgrounds and Battlefields: Critical perspectives of Social Engagement, edited by F. Martinez & K. Slabina, Tallinn University Press, pp. 468–480.

Jameson, Frederic. “Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future.” Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, edited by Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 1-44.

Jameson, Frederic. “Future City.” New Left Review 21, 2003. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city. Accessed 9 Jan 2021.

Sargisson, Lucy. “Utopianism in the twenty-first century.” Robert Chapman Lecture, University of Auckland, 28 August 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkndZUWp1Hk&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=FacultyofArts. Accessed 9 Jan 2021.

 

[1] Here, I am acknowledging Jameson’s emphasis on collectivity (22).

 

---

---