On Communism, Science Fiction, and Utopia: The Blagoevgrad Theses

  • Darko Suvin McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Keywords: Communism, Science Fiction, Utopia/nism, Anti-utopia, constituted absence

Abstract

Following Hesiod’s proceeding of splitting the good and bad Eris, in the three parts of these Theses, Communism, Science Fiction, and Utopia/nism are split between the two poles and examined. In SF the role of Estrangement and the Novum is revisited; both are now seen as subject to encroaching fakery. Most articulated is Part 3 on good and bad utopianism, with a discussion of anti-utopia, defined as a targeted and openly political use of a closed horizon to refute, ridicule, and render unthinkable both the eutopia of a better possible world and the dystopia. Entropic closure and the early Disneyland and disneyfication are explored to understand the anti-utopia that lives us. As different from all earlier variants of utopia/nism, people are now wholly and permanently inside this fake utopia. The theory of utopia/nism, axiomatically postulating utopias are not realizable, can be salvaged by assuming eutopia is in anti-utopia latently present as a constituted absence.

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Published
2021-07-01
Section
Contexts