The Problem of Utopia: Capitalism, Depression, and Representation

Abstract

Contemporary globalized capital presents particular difficulties when it comes to mapping its dynamics, such that imagining what might lie beyond it becomes even more challenging than in earlier stages of capitalist development. For instance, one of the tendencies of contemporary capital is to “stall” a certain perceptual-representational faculty on the part of the collective subject that would otherwise encourage the enunciation of a collective identity-for-itself and a utopian imaginary of a formation “beyond capitalism”—one of the ingredients for social transformation.