What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?
What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?
Political economy, Social theory, Utopias
What is to be done when the future's already ablaze?
With the international spread of right-wing "populism," widening inequalities, precarious forms of labor becoming normative, surveillance capitalism, and a worsening ecological crisis, the future is bleak. One issue in particular, the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, coupled with the lack of a global movement with the organization and vision to effectively challenge our suicidal social order, yields the crushing awareness that future generations will be trapped in prehistory, one in which humanity continues to be dominated by its own creations instead of shaping the historical process in line with reason.
Expanding upon the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Lucien Goldmann, and others, Ryan Gunderson examines the modes of action and thought through which we react to the likelihood of a catastrophic future in ways that reproduce instead of challenge the status quo, and how we can, instead, productively sustain the search for a better world against all odds.
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“The passage from radical theory to transformative practice may seem today more strewn with obstacles and bereft of guideposts than ever before. And yet, as Ryan Gunderson urges in his unsentimental account of ‘hothouse utopianism,’ the challenges we face in pursuing it should not lead us down the opposite path to quiescence and resignation. There are still genuine possibilities for transcending the status quo worth our efforts, despite everything, to realize their promise.” - Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016) and Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (2020) ~
"The possibility of dialectical thought has never been more hopeless, the need for it never more pressing. Revisiting the negative utopias of the Frankfurt School in the blood-red light of global ecological catastrophe, Gunderson works critical theory against the grain in a careful, painstaking effort to save philosophy from nihilism, hope from fatuity, and pessimism from despair. Hothouse Utopia is a timely, useful, and important contribution to the impossible yet necessary project of thinking a human future in the Anthropocene." - Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) and We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018) ~
