From Solid Modern Utopia to Liquid Modern Anti-Utopia? Tracing the Utopian Strand in the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman (Essays‪)‬

Where Do we Go From Here, Nowhere? UTOPIA LITERALLY MEANS 'NOWHERE'. Most often, however, utopian thought and practice have pointed to a 'somewhere', a tangible and definable expression of the 'nowhere' and have often been presented as a positive mirror image (a eutopia) or a deliberately distorted and negative picture of contemporary reality (a dystopia or anti-utopia), the 'here and now', but today these previously flourishing 'somewheres' everywhere appear to be gradually dismantled, dissolving, or disillusioned. Thus, as Bruce Mazlish recently and poignantly pointed out, "utopian thinking, except in the form of messianic or fundamentalist aspirations, appears either to take other shapes or be in the tepid condition or non-existent" (43). His description of the vanishing or transformation of utopias is correct in as far as it pertains to the recent development in and destiny of social or political utopias because within literary or filmic genres such as science fiction or virtual reality, utopian ideas are indeed still very much made available by different agencies and individuals. Therefore, the demise of utopia is primarily associated with the spheres of either politics or science, and particularly social science, which have become disenchanted in the process of 'de-utopianisation' and have lost the visions and utopias which for centuries guided the founders, pioneers and practitioners of these domains and pointed in the direction of 'the common good', the 'just society', etc. At the same time especially the social sciences may very well have lost their own raison d'etre and the justification of its own practice in the process