Lecture Response: Utopia in the Expanded Field

Response to Hal Foster: “Utopia or Extinction”

In the spirit of a multi-voice, utopian methodology, the following piece was written by the three authors in alternating sentences, in the style of an “exquisite corpse”¹ drawing.

One needed not be an expert on Asia to notice that Foster’s lecture on “utopia or extinction”—with “global” as a heavily implied epithet to both—made scant reference to the continent that makes up over half the world’s population. Nor did it even try to unpack when and how utopian thought emerges in the West ² . While Foster’s regurgitation of the Western canon fell flat on non-Western ears, his concluding call to produce utopias anew indicates the latent potential of bringing insight from past failures into the contemporary world.

The question is exactly what pasts (and presents) are worthy of consideration. The call for a global “Ministry of the Future”³ opens up that problem—yes, we need accountability and action, but global standardization has always referenced the West as the blueprint that everyone else must follow. Utopia and its methodologies cannot be standardized because every context is different. In order to act on a planetary scale, we need a multitude of approaches to and definitions of utopia. In other words, utopia not as a unitary global project but as an heterogenous amalgamation of diverse utopian actions.

At what scale, then, can these multitudinous utopias exist? And what is the method of their representation? Are they static moments or open to interpretation?

While Foster proposes a “multinational federation of socialist states” to replace Trumpian nativism, Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy in New York counterposes that the metropolitical may once more become the space for utopia. More than the image of his candidacy, his defiant disposition and collaborative methodology embodies Antonio Gramsci’s ethos of “pessimism of intellect, optimism of will.”⁴ We can’t not talk about the image and use of media in his campaign though—the virality of his form of politics.⁵ The new political landscape requires its own social medium.

Foster’s utopian references—constructivism, Corbusian modernism, Superstudio and Archigram, multinational treaty organizations—are forms already extinct or appropriated by capital. But while his forms and references seemed outdated and insufficient, his linking of utopian ideals to protest sites⁶ was inspiring. Those protests reinforce that a utopian vision can (must?) be temporal, and that it doesn’t require a tabula rasa. They call to mind Gramsci once again: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” Trump as Ubu Roi.⁷ Dick Cheney dies the day before Zohran Mamdani gets elected as mayor of New York; the old world is dying indeed.

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