Böcker av Mark Featherstone

Following the collapse of communist and socialist utopianism in the twentieth century, the global economic crisis has foreclosed the promise of a neoliberal consumerist utopia in the twenty first. This issue considers what happens when people believe that the system they currently inhabit does not work, but they see few viable alternatives, and wide-scale change seems impossible in any case. Considering history, fiction, art, and economic theory, the contributors think about the ways in which a vital future might emerge from an exhausted culture. Topics include narratives of catastrophe and escape in Cold War fiction, the narcotic haze of amusement culture in China, an interview with autonomist Paolo Virno on social individualism and imagination, and the meaning of protest and utopian critique in contemporary art. These essays seize a critical opportunity for new forms of cultural politics to emerge. The contributors explore how the current dystopian worldview points toward alternative utopian futures.

In the 1850s, the social and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of 'a virus of a new and unknown kind' to explain the inexplicable failure of the French Revolution. This book uses Tocqueville's idea of the virus to explore the fatal relationship between the concepts of utopia and dystopia in western social and political thought.