Journal Article

Theorizing Utopian Agency: Two Steps Toward Utopian Techniques of the Self

McManus, Susan

2007

Overview

Utopian agency seeks, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney, the \"rhyming of hope and history\"; that is to say, the politics of utopian agency embody a transformative function against the bad present and toward the better and more just world and life that might be possible.4 But the contemporary experience of agency is vexed, marked by what Felix Guattari and Toni Negri discern as the \"unraveling\" of the \"connecting threads of desire and hope\" in the very \"fabric of human feelings\" itself.5 My core concern in this essay is to explore the dynamics of political agency: specifically, I trace certain reflexive maneuvers that have the potential to reorient subjectivity in politically significant directions to enhance and affirm utopian political agency, thereby making possible the reconnection of the threads of desire and hope, and making palpable the movement of utopian hope within history. Drawing theoretical sustenance from the modern altercanon, in which Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Foucault and Deleuze, among others, are vital, contemporary engagements with the politics of agency have been increasingly concerned to theorize a subject both within the world (and so resisting the abstract rational subject that has been dominant in the liberal tradition), and capable of reshaping an engagement with, and effects upon, that world (thus speaking to a potentially transformative and poststructuralist mode of agency).6 While at some level still committed to a polity shaped by forms of procedural justice, radical liberal theory engages the affective agency of the subject in various ways. In its predominantly post-Foucauldian forms, a (late-)modern subjectivity capable of challenging subtle, menacing, and enveloping forms of modern power is theorized by means of a critique of the political dynamics of ressentiment, a life-denying, ascetic, reactive mode of being in the world.7 In its post-Spinozist forms, \"affective attachment\" to and within the world is theorized as \"a mood with ethical potential\" that can \"lend energy to political struggles\".8 And key post-Nietzschean engagements with the political subject speak to an \"ethos\" of the political that carefully theorizes the subject's affective and \"visceral\" registers in order to lend sustenance to a polity shaped by liberal pluralism where relations between self and other might no longer be seen as oppositional and thus exclusionary.9 The affective is thus deployed as a means of reflexively engaging with political orientations of the subject. 3. Experienced as a disabling, immobilizing disconnection between self and world, blocked consciousness signals a freezing of the keynotes of utopianism (creativity, play, curiosity, exploration); exhaustion, as anti-utopian malaise, enervates, saps ethico-political energies to explore, and to create, alternative futures.16 The central affective symptom of blocked consciousness and exhaustion is a dual loss: loss of agency and of a motivating, energizing alterity (the sense that it can be otherwise).

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Griffin, Michael