Vol. 65 No. 2 (2021): BREAKTHROUGH–CULTURE–POLITICS
Review essays
Warnings for Utopians: Visions of Optimal Good in the History of Ideas in Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s Book
Abstract
The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.
References
- Appadurai Arjun, 1988a, Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value, w: Arjun Appadurai (red.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, s. 3–63.
- Appadurai Arjun (red.) 1988b, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- Appadurai Arjun, 2013, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, Verso Books, New York.
- Beckert Jens, Suckert Lisa, 2021, The Future as a Social Fact: The Analysis of Perceptions of the Future in Sociology, „Poetics”, t. 84, 101499.
- Bennett Jane, 2009, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham.
- Bijker Wiebe, 1999, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Csikszentmihalyi Mihaly, Rochberg-Halton Eugene, 1981, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- Dunne Anthony, Raby Fiona, 2013, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Dunne Anthony, Raby Fiona, 2018, Design for the Unreal World, w: Studio Time: Future Thinking in Art and Design, Z33.
- Friedman Milton, 1970, A Friedman Doctrine – The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, „The New York Times”, 13 September.
- Graeber David, 2001, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Palgrave, New York.
- Jackson Tim, 2017, Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London.
- Kopytoff Igor, 1988, The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process, w: Arjun Appadurai (red.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, s. 64–91.
- Latour Bruno, 2007, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Latour Bruno, 2011, A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk, w: Willem Schinkel, Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens (red.), In medias res: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, s. 151–164.
- Polanyi Karl, 2001, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 2nd Beacon Paperback ed., Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
- Szacki Jerzy, 2000, Spotkania z utopią, Sic!, Warszawa.
- Ticktin Miriam Iris, 2019, From the Human to the Planetary, „Medicine Anthropology Theory”, t. 6(3), s. 133–160.
- Waśkiewicz Andrzej, 2020, Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, w których rzeczy łączą, a nie dzielą, Universitas, Kraków.
- Wilkie Alex, Savransky Martin, Rosengarten Marsha (red.), 2017, Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London.
- Winner Langdon, 2020, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
