After Utopia: Notes on an Ethics of Newness

Abstract

In recent years the ideas of global ethical and social transformation commonly associated with utopianism have found fresh articulation under the sign of ‘the new’. Whilst tropes of ‘newness’ commonly occur within utopianist lexicons (witness the profusion of ‘new’ things at the scene of 1890s socialist utopianism, as in ‘new ethic’, ‘new species’, ‘new age’, ‘new sex’, ‘new woman’ and so on), they seem to have achieved a certain semantic and conceptual autonomy in the work of some recent theorists. For instance, Alain Badiou’s various accounts of the new as a de-suturing, inaugurating, all-inclusive effect evoke the field of utopian inventiveness without properly naming utopianism itself (Badiou, 1999, pp. 6, 67, 107, 2003, p. 42).¹ A kin modality informs the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose invocations of a new philosophy and politics to come demand rigorous suspension of messianic thinking (see Agamben, 2004). Utopian taxonomies are, similarly, repressed in Homi Bhabha’s politics of neologism. This chapter makes an effort to pay closer attention to this subtle separation of the spheres of utopia and the new, out of the conviction that the breach between these former lexical allies might yield productive materials for a re-thinking of utopia as an art of the possible. Believing projects of newness to be the most resonant utopia-substitute for our own troubled times, furthermore, I hope to clarify the structure of the new through closer attention to one historical moment in the early decades of the twentieth century where it underwent exquisite refinement as an ethical response to the crisis of those times.