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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 105 I emphasize that freedom understood in this way is a long-term “problem” that reemerges forcefully at crucial turning points in the history of colonial emancipa- tion (i.e., the 1790s, 1848, 1945). This refractory problem compelled Césaire, Schoelcher, and Louverture to develop self-reflexive and experimental approaches to colonial emancipation. They refused to presuppose the political forms through which freedom should be instituted. Such arrangements would have to be imagined, invented, and attempted in relation to existing and emergent conditions in any given conjuncture. A prag- matic spirit led them to use forms that worked and to move on when they were no longer effective. A utopian spirit led them to imagine unprecedented alternatives and to pursue the unimaginable concretely. Their examples illuminate a politi- cal orientation that we might call “strategic utopian.” Strategic utopia, as I try to develop the concept, entails concrete interventions that enact (envision, perform, pursue) and anticipate (precede, foresee, call forth) a transformative set of coordi- nates. This imagined alternative order appears to have no evident relation to actual conditions even as it is already immanently discernible and embodied, however fleetingly or spectrally, in existing consciousness, practices, or institutions. Strategic utopia thus describes an antinomy between potentially transforma- tive acts that must in some way presuppose an already transformed world, on the one hand, and an envisioned transformation that could be realized only through such transformative acts, on the other. This seemingly irreconcilable opposition is mediated precisely by the concrete historical acts that I refer to as utopian. Act here should be understood in the triple sense of performance, action, and law or juridical intervention. Such acts are thus situated on the almost imperceptible line between the possible and the impossible, the actual and imagined, the existent and emergent, the immanent and transcendent — a boundary that is often both infinitesimal and impassable. Strategic utopia is not simply about claiming the impossible instrumentally to make moderate gains today. But it does indicate the political effectivity of acting “as if” — as if the future was imminent, as if a seem- ingly impossible order already existed — to rework existing coordinates (by antic- ipating alternative arrangements) and to bring forth “utopian” alternatives (by awakening immanent possibilities in the present). Here we see the indispensable temporal dimension of strategic utopia; such utopias are necessarily untimely.6 6. I thus seek to embrace the radical potential of political imagination while respecting Karl Marx’s critique of historically ungrounded and politically unmediated utopian fantasies. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International, 1948), 39 – 42. This understanding of utopia resonates with, though differs from, more minimal or formal attempts