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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

a neo-liberal utopia « Previous | |Next »
August 16, 2009

Mike Featherston in On Critical Paranoia: Political Surrealism and Kinetic Utopia in State of Nature refers to the kinetic or hyper-active utopia of the liberal/neo-liberal tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Blair, and Brown. He says that this new kinetic utopia is secured by high speed communications across a more or less totally connected world that ensure that the symbolic system of post-modern capitalism, which tells us that goodness resides in the ability to transform all natural qualities into financial quantities in the most efficient ways possible, infects the lives of a large proportion of the world's population.

The problem that confronts us here is that the neo-liberal kinetic utopia, which evolved through processes of globalisation and emerged fully formed into the light of what Baudrillard (2005) calls our integral reality of endless events, shocks, and convulsions, has been progressively normalised, first by the mass media, which has over-loaded us with information about our catastrophic situation to such an extent that we no longer identify normality with stability but instead equate disaster with routine everydayness, and second by the adaptive qualities of the symbolic, or cultural, systems wired through our collective psychology, which have shown a remarkable ability to adjust to the new radical uncertainty of the world system in order to keep people in a state where they are more or less able to function in everyday life.

There is no sense that the ideal society of liberal capitalism would occur sometime in the future. The ideal society was here and now. According to the official symbolic order of utopia realised we must take the view that if there is a problem with society it is because we have not fully purified the system, that our political legislation has not properly ordered social space for the individual pursuit of profit, and that what is required is minor reform to ensure the proper organisation of the economy of desire. The new kinetic utopia is secured by high speed communications across a more or less totally connected world that ensure that the symbolic system of post-modern capitalism, which tells us that goodness resides in the ability to transform all natural qualities into financial quantities in the most efficient ways possible, infects the lives of a large proportion of the world's population.

Featherston adds:

What we need today, then, is a new form of cultural critique able to derange or dislocate neo-liberal psychology through attacks on the processes of normalisation embedded in the symbolic form of the kinetic utopia. The central objective of this strategy would be to show why the kinetic utopia, which sells itself to the mass through the American myth of meritocracy, is in reality a dystopia, which produces inequality, violence, and misery on an enormous scale, and that even for the haves who believe that they can somehow evade the terrible effects of the new state of second nature through the machinations of the political economy of total segregation, there is really no way to escape the fate of the multitude of have nots forced to live in absolute poverty and total insecurity, simply because they must occupy the same biosphere.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:18 PM |