The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

by Kathi Weeks

Finally the utopian form can also provide moments of disidentification and desubjectivization: depictions of the inhabitants of other worlds that can serve as figurations of future models of being might present us with the means to make ourselves strange as well. In this respect, as Vincent Geoghegan argues, the utopia's "unabashed and flagrant otherness gives it a power which is lacking in other analytical devices" (1987, 2), an otherness that not even the genealogist's use of the historical past can often match. Beyond providing opportunities for dereification and disinvestment that can encourage openness to possibilities of new and different futures, this first broadly deconstructive function of the utopia also serves to incite and enhance our more specifically critical capacities. By estranging us from the engrossing familiarity of the everyday, the utopian form can provide us with a standpoint in the new from which to assess the present critically.24 In some instances, for example, one might be able to see the presence of social problems and the extent of their impact more clearly by imagining their absence.