“But something’s missing”. For Mathias Thaler, Berthold Brecht’s succinct formula constitutes the backbone of any utopian proposal: an inquisitive feeling of possibility, the sense that reality could always be otherwise, for better (eutopia) or for worse (dystopia). Conflating both strands in the term “utopia”, No Other Planet: Utopian Visions of a Climate-Changed World argues that this yearning for an alternative world operates as a valuable foil to console, critique or even change the status quo. But rehabilitating utopias requires challenging their widespread disavowal from across the political spectrum in the history of critical thought: Marx and Engels famously reproached utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier for reducing strategic emancipatory politics to useless wishful thinking, while twentieth-century liberals including Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper deplored utopian depictions of flawless societies as pernicious vehicles of domination. Taking on the dual critique of utopia as either a distraction or a form of manipulation, Thaler bridges the environmental social sciences and humanities to find instances of utopia in contemporary fiction. In doing so, he reveals their potential for navigating the climate crisis’ perplexing future. Focusing on theory building and storytelling as two sites of utopia, the book provides three distinct, yet intentionally porous, utopian ‘constellations’: utopias that aim to caution, to galvanize, and to estrange. As Walter Benjamin would have put it, Thaler’s aim hence consists in drawing a coherent image from otherwise unrelated texts.
Beginning with dystopian imaginaries, which have long pervaded the doom and gloom of climate media, Thaler resourcefully nuances them into a cautionary ‘If-this-goes-on’ plot line. Against both an apocalyptic perspective that warns against future extinction and a risk-management viewpoint that no longer believes in a future without crisis and simply attempts to mitigate an inevitable fall, these tales of the near or distant future tread the thin line between alarm and paralysis. But between ‘doomsayers’ like Rachel Carson or Paul Ehrlich and catastrophist defeatist like Roy Scranton, from whom, one wonders, can we find cautionary tales that push the reader to identify the perils of the status quo without falling into either defeatism or cruel optimism? According to Thaler, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy overcomes defeatism ‘by moving back and forth between the build-up to the apocalypse and the thorny reconstruction thereafter.’ In depicting a nearby future devastated by genetic engineering and examining the question of how our species can still flourish after the Anthropocene, this dystopia transforms into a ustopia, charting new routes towards a new beginning or, to paraphrase Anna Tsing, at least a way of living in the world’s ruins.
Thaler subsequently sketches the constellation that he calls ‘What if?’, a green growth entrepreneurialism that overcomes inertia and the ‘incapacitating grip’ of fatalism at the expense of falling into solutionism. The galvanising utopias of the ‘good Anthropocene’ are cross-partisan. They emerge both from the ecomodernist Right, such as pro-market Steven Pinker, and the Left, such as the pro-planning contributors of Jacobin. Jumping again from theory to fiction, Thaler argues that these two different facets of techno-optimism are blended in the writings of Kim Stanley Robinson, most notably in his Science in Capital trilogy, in which the author simultaneously attacks capitalism whilst revering forms of science and technology, namely nuclear and geoengineering. However, Thaler argues that, in veering towards ‘technocratic, even bureaucratic utopianism’, Robinson’s faith in science and proceduralism ‘downplays the political hurdles that any transformative movement would have to overcome’ and also ‘glosses over the risks and dangers inherent in the status quo.’
Neither cautioning nor galvanising strategies seem apt at critiquing the status quo in which we are embedded. But a third constellation of estranging theories and stories promises to do so insofar as it ‘strives to “dissolve” and “neutralize” the status quo [in Jameson’s terminology], prompting us to let go of, or at least provisionally bracket deeply held convictions about the real world.’ For Thaler, the more-than-human terrestrial politics of Bruno Latour and his reading of Lovelock’s Gaia theory act as such. Indeed, in seeking to strip humans of their monopolistic view of agency and belief of a mastery of nature, Latour invites us to be and live otherwise. Thaler also finds in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy a conception of Earth as a living being undergoing cyclical geomorphic changes and unsettling multispecies relations. Its planet-centred plot, consisting in a supercontinent populated by both human and non-human actants, estranges and defamiliarizes the reader. It offers the latter the chance to conceive of the world from different ontological angles.
Thaler acknowledges the paradox of using Latour, given his ‘resounding plea for more realism and more common sense, for us to finally get back “down to Earth”, to stop hallucinating of escape, to once and for all jettison the quest for other worlds.’ But Thaler argues that Latour misinterprets the function of utopias. Asking ‘What if?’ does not entail prescribing a perfect blueprint and rigid template of an alternative society to escape towards. Rather, it allows the author ‘to defamiliarize an audience from deeply held beliefs, to render unfamiliar what often appears to be entirely natural and normal’, and to reject the assumption that the future is foreclosed. Estrangement for, rather than from, the world. With Michel Abensour, Thaler therefore argues that the main value of utopia is its ability to ‘educate our desire’ for a better world, to give form to our yearning for alternatives, and consequently to respond to the crisis of imagination we are living. With Ruth Levitas, Thaler makes the case that the essential component of utopia is not hope but desire, since hope ‘constrains social dreaming due to its orientation towards the realistically achievable.’ Still, if we are to insist on hope, Thaler prefers Jonathan Lear’s notion of radical hope, a ‘steadfast belief that something good (yet undefinable) will eventually happen.’
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In discussing utopian fictions written since 2001, No Other Planet differentiates itself in its chronological focus when compared to other genealogical monographs such as Ecological Utopias (1999) and Green Utopias (2017), which map the genesis of utopia in environmental thought since the sixteenth century and the 1960s respectively. Thaler is most successful in his ability to systematically situate a multitude of environmental thought and fiction within a coherent trinity of utopian constellations. But although Thaler is able to help the reader grasp utopia’s potential for our time, his understanding of utopia may be too expansive, stretching the word to the point that readers wonder whether any and all forms of engagement with climate futures in environmental studies is ‘utopian.’ The question being not what is, but what is not utopia. As a result, the book’s conceptual inflation of utopia may overreach its aim by prompting us to see utopias everywhere. After all, as Mike Hulme’s work on the role of science in future-making suggests, are the hypothetical scenarios presented by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) not a blend of cautioning and galvanising world-building attempts? Daunting upward slopes caution us as to what will happen ‘if this goes on’, whereas modelling exercises integrating alternative carbon abatement strategies fall in the trap of ‘if only’ wishful thinking. It is precisely the politics of the IPCC’s ‘world-making power’ that Silke Beck and Martin Mahony criticise, particularly the way experts shape the world in their own image and create new political realities.
Furthermore, while Thaler skilfully explores two sites of utopia, that is, theory and fiction – albeit largely from the Global North, as Joe Davidson points out – something else is missing. A third site of utopia, utopian practices, is only offered an ‘intermezzo’, in which Thaler briefly engages with Davina Cooper’s ‘everyday utopias’ and Erik Olin Wright’s ‘real utopias’, namely social movements, experiments in communal living, welfare policies such as universal basic income or post-pastoral conservation through rewilding. By mainly exploring alternative ways of organising the world in imaginary timelines projected towards the future rather than in ‘real’ spaces, Thaler falls victim to the temporal bias of utopian studies, which he himself decries. Critically interrogating the present by inferring lessons from distant pasts or futures ‘may have the unintended consequence of leaving the reader in the dark about what should concretely be done about our climate-changed world, here and now.’ Can anchoring utopias in practice avoid this fault line?
Extending Thaler’s bifocal scope of theory-fiction to a triptych that includes practice would allow him to spatialize or re-territorialise the analysis. Not only would it further his project – allowing him to develop on the utopian taxonomy of Arcadia he glossed over – it can also help to address the magnetic pull of the world-as-we-know-it that constrains our desire to negate reality and conjure alternatives. Lived practices of utopia encapsulate this desire, particularly in experiments of communal living in the margins of capitalism. But Thaler sparsely engages with galvanising fictions of Arcadia and has therefore missed the opportunity to link utopia with ‘return to nature’ movements, both past and present. These movements are replete with fault lines, but they nonetheless spatialize this yearning for something else. ‘Fail again, fail better’, writes Thaler quoting Beckett, to push the reader to see the ups and downs of utopian projects as ‘temporary stations on a continuous, yet rocky journey.’
Finding in current practices windows to the future has a name: prefigurative politics. For instance, where Arturo Escobar’s Pluriversal Politics grounds a ‘politics of the possible’ in Latin American social movements against extractivism, and Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories materialises black storytelling when forging urban black futures, Jason Cons sees in individualistic adaptation responses to flooding in Bangladesh prefigurative signs of dystopian climate futures, playing with Foucauldian terminology to coin ‘heterodystopia.’ While Mathias Thaler has made a valuable contribution by offering us many of its ingredients, only the right mix of theory, fiction and practice can make utopia possible on our planet.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 12: Utopia.
Wallerand Bazin is a first-year DPhil student in working on the nature recovery politics of UNESCO cultural landscapes, particularly the post-pastoral futures of rewilding in the Lake District (England) and the Cévennes (France).