Destination unknown

If we disagree about the future, what can we still imagine together?

We ask Professor of Anthropology, Paul Basu and Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, Peter Boxall to share their thoughts on whether we need to know what utopia looks like if we are to create a better future…

As an anthropologist, I’m hesitant to think in terms of ‘universals’, but it is remarkable how, in many societies, we find this notion of an imagined elsewhere. Whether it’s something which is projected back into a past as a kind of a dream time, or a projection into the future, such imaginings are expressive of a dissatisfaction that we’re all too aware of in the here and now.

Although negative, that discontentment can provide the prompt, giving rise to the sense that things have to change. We have to find ways of creating a better balance with the environment, and with each other. Faith in the human imagination is crucial if we are to find better ways of living. We must first imagine a better world before we can take steps to making it a reality. This underlines the importance of the arts and creativity – the possibility of thinking otherwise.

Starting from a position of epistemic humility is, I think, crucial. To acknowledge all that we do not know. To recognise that our system of knowledge – how we know the world, how we understand the world – is just one way among many. There is so much to learn from attending to other ways of knowing and being in the world.

It is something we explore in the On Paradise exhibition, part of the Utopia Now! series, by incorporating insights from different academics. There are, for example, quite distinct conceptualisations of paradise within Islamic and Christian traditions, while in Hindu and Buddhist thought, the emphasis is on transcending such human imaginings that tie us to the world.

Working as a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, I am surrounded with things that represent the diversity of human creativity. These collections were often made with a very particular purpose: to know and, in many cases, to control the world. The Museum is sometimes thought of as a site of violence, but today it is also a site of hope as communities are increasingly able to access and retrieve their own histories, knowledges and ways of being.

These are places that can expand the imagination and help us to think differently about how we live in the world.

I am not a believer in technology as a panacea for the ills of the world we have created. The answers must come from changing ourselves, from being humble in the world rather than seeking mastery over ever more things.

I struggle personally with what human beings do to the world and to each other, but nevertheless, there is that notion that things could be otherwise, and that’s precisely where utopia and notions of paradise are relevant. We need to invest our energy into thinking about simple things: sharing resources, living together, creating sustainable futures.

I’m a utopia sceptic. But it’s about the imagining of possibilities – that’s the important thing.

“ The answers must come from changing ourselves, from being humble in the world rather than seeking mastery over ever more things.”

Professor Paul Basu

Head to head

Utopian art and politics tend to get a bad press. In 1964, the great twentieth-century utopian thinker Ernst Bloch had a conversation with the Frankfurt school Marxist Theodor Adorno entitled ‘Something’s Missing’. Their conversation turned around the perception that ‘today the word “utopia” is used primarily in a negative sense.

There are three main objections to utopian thought. First, that utopian hoping or dreaming is politically ineffective: it offers impractical imaginary solutions to real political problems and distracts us from a world that is actually on fire. Second, that attempts to realise social utopias can end in absolutism and unfreedom: if society has reached perfection, change itself becomes a threat. And third, perhaps most fundamentally, that it is very difficult to conceive of a better world when we have no fixed idea, and certainly no consensus, about what that world would be. What is utopian for you could be a kind of hell for me.

But these concerns are really about building utopias rather than imagining them, which is the kind of utopian thinking we are exploring in the Utopia Now! season at the Schwarzman Centre. The series does not set out to draw up a manifesto for a perfect world. It is alive to the utopian principle that Bloch and Adorno agreed on: that one should not cast a picture of utopia.

What drives utopian thinking is something much simpler: the recognition, alive in every hopeful act of the imagination, that the world we live in – the world we can see and touch – is not perfect. What we find when we think about the world, what we feel when we experience it, is the deep certainty that the just and the good are not yet here and remain to be thought.

It is precisely this unknowing that drives utopian art and literature. The beautiful thing about aesthetic representations is that they don’t simply give us pictures of the world as it is, but also of the world as it is not.

This is what gives art and fiction their political power. They can imagine possibilities that are already latent in the world around us – possibilities we might not yet be able to see, but which might one day come to fruition. This is what Adorno means when he says utopia emerges from “the determined negation…of that which merely is”: from the recognition that the world can be different.

Now is not the time for fiddling while Rome or the forests burn. The need for alternative ways of seeing and inhabiting the world could hardly be more pressing. But because the aesthetic imagination is bound only partially to the real, art can help us to see the world differently. It looks to the future – to what has not yet been seen – as a guide to our hopes.

When we call for Utopia Now, it is to this not yet imagined world that we direct our gaze.

“ …art and fiction have political power. They can imagine possibilities that are already latent in the world around us – possibilities we might not yet be able to see…”

Professor Peter Boxall

Utopia Now! is a season of events drawing on long histories of utopian thought to ask how we might live, imagine and create differently. It is at the Schwarzman Centre from October – December 2026. You can also watch videos exploring the ideas and perspectives of artists and academics from the season: www.schwarzmancentre.ox.ac.uk/theme/utopia-now-tycr