« On vit dans une utopie ; ce n’est juste pas la nôtre. » De More à Miéville : activisme, spatialité et métamorphose du registre utopique

Since the 1960s, it is more common to encounter criticism rather than praise for utopian ideas. In 1964, while moderating a debate between Ernst Bloch et Theodor Adorno, Horst Krüger stated that « [today] the word ‘utopia’ does not have a good sound to it ». Twenty years later, art historian Robert Hughes goes even further by saying that the xxth century was full of utopian propositions: « drawn, designed, sometimes even built, and in the process it was shown that ideal cities don’t work […]. It seems that like plants we do need the shit of others for nutriments ». However, after decades of rejection, in the work of some writers like China Miéville this mode is being reborn, albeit in a modified form often called « radical fantasy ». Considered by some as the direct descendant of utopia, it similarly puts front and center the figure of the activist searching for progressive social justice and economic equality, but treats the future as an indeterminate and unpredictable topic. This article takes advantage of this apparent resurrection and interest, in order to attempt to decipher our seemingly secular obsession for this shape-shifting genre. Our investigation will briefly summon Michael Gazzaniga’s research in neurobiology, followed by the works of Francesca Polletta in the sociology of social movements field, in order to draw a direct relationship between the act of storytelling and the birth and rise of new collective actors. The critical theory of science-fiction, formulated by the croato-canadian researcher Darko Suvin will allow us to dig deeper into the inner mechanisms of utopia, and to show how this rhetoric device sometimes manages to persuade its audience that its dream-like imagery either is or it should be real. This theoretical framework will be accompanied by two case studies, two utopian examples dating to the beginning of the XXth century: on one hand we will delve into the belligerent manifest of futurist architecture — born in 1914 from F. T. Marinetti’s words and Antonio Sant’Elia’s lines — and on the other, into the vulnerable and pacifist glass worlds imagined by the expressionist writer Paul Scheerbart and architect Bruno Taut. By putting these historic works in parallel with Miéville’s contemporary novel The City & The City (2009) — a reference point in radical fantasy — we aim to unveil the continuities and discontinuities between our historic understanding of the utopian mode and this new contemporary form.