Utopian Rhetoric Has a Pleasure Problem

Abstract

By tracing rhetorical arcs of time, political leaders paint a promised future. Leaders whose interests lie in a status-quo-future use process-frames, such as cycles or progress. But leaders who promise a radically new future may use a utopian stasis-frame, such as eschatology. They promise an ultimate arrival, an eschaton. Arrival means no more need of violence and domination. This is Utopia’s promise. But for Utopia to last, to remain still and stable at this destination, change-driving conflict must cease. Without recourse to violence and domination to manage conflict, utopians must prevent it from arising in the first place. To do this, it is necessary to control conflict’s driving source: desire and pleasure. Utopia thus confronts a pleasure problem. This problem—I argue through a typology of pleasures—it cannot resolve. The pleasure problem means the same rhetoric of final arrival—which sparks energetic political activity in the present—renders Utopia an impossible future.