"Although the exploitation of events is, of course, essential to revolutionary change it is not enough to simply wait on turbulence because it is clear that today turbulence is normal."

I. Political Surrealism

The aim of this paper is two-fold. In the first instance, I aim to explore the situation of the idea of utopia today. In order to fulfil this objective I offer a discussion of the classical form of utopia, what we might call the conservative utopia, exemplified by the politics of Plato, More, Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, and Bin Laden. Inter-related to this history I provide a consideration of the other mode of utopia, which I think is dominant today, the kinetic or hyper-active utopia of the liberal/neo-liberal tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Blair, and Brown. Thus the principle objective of the paper is to offer an analysis of what I think are the two strands of utopian thought operative in the contemporary world. Internal to this analysis I provide an exploration of the historical evolution of these two modes of utopian thought and a discussion of the impact of their symbiotic existence on contemporary global society.

The second objective of the paper, which involves a discussion of a theory of political surrealism, runs into this exploration of the nature of utopia in the contemporary world. The second objective of the paper is essential because it enables me to explain the radical nature of what I call our planet utopia and engage in a proper analysis of the two strands of utopia. For this reason I explore the theory of political surrealism in the first section of the paper in order show how our contemporary reality is symmetrical with the explosive nature of both utopian elements, so that in the second part of my discussion I can undertake a proper analysis of the nature of utopia in contemporary global society. My objective in the first section of the paper is, therefore, to both situate contemporary utopia in some kind of historical or post-historical condition and develop a political methodology to enable us to understand and critique its re-emergence onto the world scene.

In order to develop this objective, in the second section of the article I outline the state of planet utopia through reference to the works of two classic writers of endings, Fukuyama (1993) and Baudrillard (1994), so that I can show how the decline of historical narrative, most clearly evidenced by the innovations of the tradition of post-modern thought, has set the scene for the return of repressed utopian events to contemporary reality. As such, I want to be clear that my use of the term 'planet utopia' is not meant to suggest that we live in a perfect world. Instead my use of this terminology is meant to offer some sense of the ways in which contemporary processes of globalisation have contributed to the emergence of a convulsive world system which generates events on a scale previously unknown in the history of humanity.

In what follows I outline my methodological approach for the critique of contemporary utopia, make use of that perspective to enable a critical assessment of the emergence of what I call kinetic utopia, and finally return to my critical methodology, characterised by what I call political surrealism, to suggest potential escape routes from the new savage utopia that increasingly organises our world. First, let us think about the methodological, or perspectival, devices necessary to study utopia today.

I think that it is possible to say that the central consequence of the emergence of what Lieven De Cauter (2004) calls the entropic world system has been the return to the scene of utopian political thought committed to the total reconstruction of social, political, and economic forms outside of established or embedded cultural formations. Thus my term 'planet utopia' suggests that the contemporary over-production of events can, in many respects, be seen as comparable to the over-production of utopias, which have tended to be understood in terms of the ex nihilo emergence of impossible time-spaces from the normal, historical, flow of time through space. However, I am sensitive to the fact that our contemporary post-historical reality is not necessarily perceived in terms of the over-production of events or utopias on the level of everyday or common sense psychology.

Why is this the case? How is it that we come to think about the most extreme projects for social and political transformation, of which the Iraq War provides the most current example, in realistic terms based in means-ends connections and fail to perceive the nihilistic or utopian leap of faith required for such events to emerge into reality? I think that the answer to this question is rooted in the condition of everyday life itself, and more specifically the nature of the symbolic or cultural systems that order our lives, which domesticate extremity in order to enable us to live in the world with some sense of how we can first relate to the world on the basis of normal space-time co-ordinates and, second, control the trajectory of our lives on the basis of that relation. Thus it may be the case that today history returns on the level of everyday life to save the sanity of those people who cannot face up to the schizophrenic or fragmented reality of a post-historical world that translates macroscopic convulsions through the scaling of the world system to the microscopic level of the individual who is simultaneously transformed into a hyper-individualistic living God and a miserable piece of totally redundant excrement by what I call the neo-liberal kinetic utopia.

Given that it is hard for today's excremental Gods to live with events, it is possible to argue that such symbolic processes, which normalise terrible convulsions such as the Iraq War, should be understood as positive effects which enable people to cope with the turbulence of planet utopia. But we should similarly not underestimate the conservatism of processes of normalisation in the face of such turbulence. That the convulsions of the contemporary world system produce horrendous bi-polar effects, through the translation of utopian flights of fancy into hyper-realistic plans for social and political change that realise the production of enormous camps of winners and losers on a planetary scale, should lead us to conclude that regardless of the psychological value of processes of normalisation, it is necessary to confront people with the true horror of the entropic empire in order to generate the social and political energy necessary to effect revolutionary change.

There are two elements to this proposal that I think we need to explore. The first element of the proposal to generate the necessary revolutionary energy to transform what we might call our totally segregated world into a more socialistic civilized space entails the evolution of a new form of critique, which I propose to model through reference to first Dali's (Nadeau, 1989) idea of paranoia critique and Jarry's (Baudrillard, 2005) concept of pataphysics and, second, Virilio's (1983) theory of speed and Baudrillard's (2005) notion of integrated reality. The second element of the challenge to develop the vital energy to transform the contemporary world system, which has become a huge machine for the production of winners and losers simply because of the ways in which convulsive globalisation has evolved through the culture of kinetic utopianism, involves a recognition that socialistic projects for revolutionary change cannot simply turn off the exploitation of the over-production of events which has become characteristic of the entropic empire, but must also entail some constructive element.

Although the exploitation of events is, of course, essential to revolutionary change it is not enough to simply wait on turbulence because it is clear that today turbulence is normal. Instead efforts to produce new forms of socialism to repair the deep wounds of what we might call our anti-social global society must evolve new symbolic or cultural frameworks to control the kind of radical uncertainty we currently struggle to normalise in our everyday lives. Before I expand upon this point about the necessity of the suspension of radical uncertainty in new socialistic cultural systems, let us return to the first element we might consider essential for the production of the energy for social and political transformations, the need to shift the perspective of the mass in order to enable them to confront the true pathology of our contemporary situation. How will we achieve such psychological re-orientation on a mass scale?

The problem that confronts us here is that the neo-liberal kinetic utopia, which evolved through processes of globalisation and emerged fully formed into the light of what Baudrillard (2005) calls our integral reality of endless events, shocks, and convulsions, has been progressively normalised, first by the mass media, which has over-loaded us with information about our catastrophic situation to such an extent that we no longer identify normality with stability but instead equate disaster with routine everydayness, and second by the adaptive qualities of the symbolic, or cultural, systems wired through our collective psychology, which have shown a remarkable ability to adjust to the new radical uncertainty of the world system in order to keep people in a state where they are more or less able to function in everyday life.

Beyond the effects of institutionalisation, medicalisation, and narcotisation meant to catch those who simply cannot cope with the necessity of schizophrenia today, it is clear that the gravity of normalisation is particularly powerful in the contemporary entropic empire because everybody occupies a relatively similar position in the savage state of second nature that appears more or less entirely democratic in the ways in which it sorts winners from losers. How can we expect people to care about the state of others when they themselves feel totally insecure about their position in the world? Under these conditions it has become normal for the excremental God of the neo-liberal kinetic utopia to regard the other as at best a competitor, who is set on possession of the same piece of pie he coverts, and at worst an enemy, who will usurp his position and turn him into a loser if the opportunity presents itself, simply because it seems rational to think this way in a state of radical insecurity. In light of this condition, which we might call the rationality of suspicion, how can we solve the problem of the normalisation of entropy in today's global society?

Perhaps the answer to this question resides in the old situationist strategy, culture shock (Raunig, 2007). I believe that in order to generate the critical energies necessary to problematise the neo-liberal hegemon, which is utopian in terms of its ambition to colonise the entirety of life, we must find ways to shock people out of the post-modern capitalist symbolic systems that tend towards completion. The reason we must try to undermine these cultural systems is because they construct the passive mass who normalise the horrors of the entropic empire through their fearful commitment to conformity. Given that mass conformity is premised on the state of fear that the excremental God must endure on an everyday basis, so the value of the mass is to offer the fearful individual some sense of protection from the convulsive world system; it may be that what we require to properly critique the neo-liberal utopia is the construction of new cultural forms which reflect the reality of total segregation in the neo-liberal kinetic utopia and show why the rationality of suspicion is an irrational response to radical anxiety, only ever likely to translate psychological insecurity into real social, political, and economic uncertainty.

What we need today, then, is a new form of cultural critique able to derange or dislocate neo-liberal psychology through attacks on the processes of normalisation embedded in the symbolic form of the kinetic utopia. The central objective of this strategy would be to show why the kinetic utopia, which sells itself to the mass through the American myth of meritocracy, is in reality a dystopia, which produces inequality, violence, and misery on an enormous scale, and that even for the haves who believe that they can somehow evade the terrible effects of the new state of second nature through the machinations of the political economy of total segregation, there is really no way to escape the fate of the multitude of have nots forced to live in absolute poverty and total insecurity, simply because they must occupy the same biosphere. As such, what our new critical constructions would have to make clear is that the neo-liberal kinetic utopia is in reality a dystopia for both those cast out of the new ideal city, the mass of human waste that has no place in the new world dis-order other than to fuel the relentless production of surplus value required by the manic kinetic utopians, and the kinetic utopians themselves who, regardless of their total commitment to the production of profit and the power of money, will never really be able to buy their way out of the Hellish situation they have sought to create in pursuit of wealth and luxury.

It is clear that the nature of our planetary utopia should make such critical work possible, since the collapse of history and the rise of the world system of events means that it is no longer true that people are caught in cultural systems for life, but instead must be able to transform their psychology in line with the endless turbulence of global capitalism (Dufour, 2007). However, the opposite is equally true. That is to say that the deep psychological effect of such turbulence has been to tie people to neo-liberal culture, which is a term that we must use in the loosest possible sense because what neo-liberal culture entails is a form of anti-cultural symbolism devoid of commitment to the creation of significance beyond the grim determination to translate every concrete quality into financial quantity, in ways that extend further than cultural notions of familiarity and tradition to more natural Hobbesian fears about self-preservation and the brutal law of survival.

For this reason I think that in order to make the situationist critique of the horror of the entropic empire really disturb the processes of normalisation, which currently weds people to neo-liberal culture, we would have to try to reveal the irrationality of the rationality of enmity, that characterises social relations in the kinetic utopia. What would this critique comprise? I think that what such a critique would entail is a representation of the systemic violence of the entropic empire, which currently presents human catastrophe as an effect of the vicissitudes of a quasi-natural economic system which works for the benefit of nobody in particular, comparable to Salvador Dali's paranoid critical method, the theory of perspectival systematisation the master of surrealism evolved through the 1930s (Nadeau, 1989).

My reference to the surrealist notion of paranoia critique over the Neo-Marxist practice of ideology critique is important for a number of reasons. Although the value of paranoia critique for the project set on the derangement of neo-liberal culture might appear similar to that of ideology critique in the sense that both would entail a recognition of systemic connections invisible from the perspective of hegemonic, capitalist culture, which systematically screens out these relationships thus ensuring their invisibility to those caught in its cultural constellations, I think that the extension of this programme to the level of the global network society suggests a level of extreme connectivity which recalls Freud's (2003) notion of paranoid reaction-formation. Despite our initial response to this identification of radical critique with psychopathology, which might be that it is madness to say that the systemic critique of the neo-liberal kinetic utopia is paranoid simply because such an equation will only strengthen the gravity of the technologies of normalisation operative in savage capitalism and render critique even more pathological than it is today, we must resist this temptation, which is itself premised on our own attachment to the idea of the norm, because the entire point of paranoia critique is that it appears to be insane.

What does this mean? Let me explain. The potential of paranoia critique resides, firstly, in its ability to turn its pathological nature to its advantage through the enactment of a series of dialectical reversals which occur when it first deranges normal culture through the production of negative cultural forms; secondly, it confirms the similarity of those negative cultural forms to the positive, or normal, view of reality; and, finally, it replaces the positive view of reality with a new negative, or paranoid, image of reality which is no longer considered reflective of madness, but rather a true expression of real conditions. Thus our normal perception of capitalism becomes the kinetic utopia which becomes the kinetic dystopia through the cultural practice of paranoia critique.

The central objective of paranoia critique is, therefore, to expose the paranoia of reality, which is usually covered by a veil of normality, through the construction of a paranoid vision of the world, which initially appears insane, but later comes to rival the hegemonic notion of reality by virtue of the evident self-reflexivity of the paranoia critic. Thus the value of the paranoia critic's self-reflexive madness turns off his deep appreciation of both his own psychopathological condition and the wider problem of insecurity, suspicion, and paranoia operative in the entropic empire. That is to say that he understands that it is precisely because the radical anxiety caused by the entropic empire resolves itself in the emergence of paranoid world views, which then lead those conditioned by these paranoid world views to enact their fear of others in everyday violence, that the paranoia of ideology critique is an accurate reflection of the very real paranoia of capitalism.

For this reason I think that it is clear that we should render ideology critique through Dali's notion paranoia critique if we want to emphasise the strange situation of the entropic empire which is rooted in paranoid psychological responses to the anxieties generated by the turbulence of what might call neo-liberal, or pure, capitalism (Featherstone, 2007). If we choose this strategy then I think that it is apparent that the initial appearance of the madness of paranoia critique is not only not problematic, but rather essential to its effective operation. Perhaps the fundamental advantage of the surrealistic theory of paranoia critique over ideology critique is, therefore, that it can undercut the old critique of ideology critique, which is that it is essentially a reflection of a conspiratorial mindset, through the recognition of exactly that point. In other words, there is no pretence with paranoia critique. It embraces its own madness. If the ideology critic starts off with the claim that his view is rooted in his ability to perceive the truth of reality, which simply enables supporters of the hegemonic norm to proclaim his madness and as a consequence confine him to the realm of psychopathology, the practitioner of paranoia critique not only recognises, but practically exclaims that his ideology critique is a paranoid reaction-formation to the radical anxieties caused by his situation in the world. What does it mean for the paranoid critic, the madman who knows himself, to be able to reflect on his situation in this way? The precise answer to this question is that the paranoia critic's reflexive knowledge of his own status, and as a result the status of his critique, enables him to control his own identity, prevent the experts of psychological normalisation from proclaiming his madness, and most importantly provides him with a space to enact a dialectical reversal based on the fact that the madman who recognises his own madness is no longer mad, but rather somebody who is able to step outside of the constellation of normality and reflect upon it from a quasi-external position (Featherstone, 2007).

My reference to the quasi-external position of the paranoia critic is important. The paranoia critic's quasi-external situation is essential to his project because it is vital that there is no sense in which he is able to step completely outside of normal culture. In fact, the value of his insane critique relies on his ability to experience the world through common cultural frames, respond to the world in common terms, but centrally fail to recognise his experience in hegemonic cultural forms. Herein resides the paranoia critic's separation from normal culture, the origin of his madness, the root of his reflexive self-knowledge, and the source of his critical intelligence. If he loses his relation to the real world then he spins off into solipsistic insanity and his vision of his situation has no critical edge. As such, relationality is essential to the paranoia critic's work. In the particular instance of the entropic empire the paranoia critic's intuitive response to his situation in the world enables him to understand how radical anxiety before the turbulence of the global market resolves in paranoia. Thus it is the paranoia critic's refusal of the neo-liberal cultural norm, which tells us that radical anxiety in the face of total uncertainty is a sign of absolute freedom that we must embrace regardless of our archaic attachments of traditional ways of life that must be overcome if we want to live in kinetic utopia of the future, and his comprehension of the origin of his own paranoid condition in the radical anxiety caused by the totally unstable world system that simultaneously confirms his madness, his self-reflexive intelligence, and his critical genius.

What the paranoia critic practices is, therefore, a form of political surrealism, in the sense that what he offers in terms of critique seems entirely fictitious, hyperbolic, or mad in relation to normal understandings of reality. But that is precisely the point. The paranoia critic's political surrealism disturbs the function of normal reality in much the same way that Duchamp's Fountain was able to disturb the space of the gallery. In this respect he offers a new form of realism, or super-realism, which transgresses the boundaries of the neo-liberal culture that ensures that we perceive reality in particular ways suitable for the continuation of capitalism. Whereas classical ideology critique suggests that what is necessary to over-turn processes of normalisation is a thorough critique of the ideational framework that capitalism throws over everyday practices that inform life in capitalist society (Althusser, 2001), the notion of paranoia critique expands upon this insight by rooting the critique of capitalist thought and practice in a theory of psychologically informed responses to the reality of life in a world system that transforms everybody into a nobody.

Otherwise, we know that the origin of Dali's thesis in the surrealistic school is important. What is the paranoia critique of our paranoid reality if it is not a heightened or super realistic vision of the world we inhabit that lifts us above the everyday, common sense, view of events transposed into narrative form? This is, of course, not to say that the paranoia critique of the entropic empire could be content to simply smash the normative structure of neo-liberal culture in order to render events in their singularity because this would not enhance critical practice very far. This is precisely the problem with Derrida's (1984) project and the wider post-structuralist effort to undermine totalitarian systems of signification. It is true that the deconstructive effort achieves the destabilisation of dominant cultural forms, but the problem is that because the hegemonic cultural form of the kinetic utopia is endlessly transformative it is resistant to such attacks.

As a consequence the kinetic utopia is, in many respects, formally comparable to the deconstructive machine itself. This is problematic precisely because there is no real sense of how the deconstructive project would evolve new cultural forms to replace the neo-liberal system. I think that the reason there is very little about the deconstructive project that is radical today is because it spoke to the 1960s, a historical period before the rise of the madness of neo-liberalism, hyper-real globalisation, and the kinetic utopia. The truth is, then, that the Derridean project is perfectly symmetrical with the requirements of contemporary neo-liberal culture in that it values form over content, seeks to attack all cultural sedimentations in the name of its own brand of transgressive politics, and refuses the truth that its own brand of transgressive politics is in many respects the most totalitarian of all cultural systems.

This is not to say that demolition work is not essential to political surrealism, because even though planet utopia is a planet of events, which might lead us to imagine that the edifice of neo-liberal capital will simply collapse before our eyes, we must remember that these events take place largely within the bounds of the neo-liberal kinetic utopia, which is in itself totally inflexible with regard to its ability to tolerate other social, political, economic, and cultural formations. However, what we must insist upon is a recognition that even if the paranoia critic was able to undermine neo-liberal culture, which I think it is fair to say largely underpins the practice of the kinetic utopia in much the same way that the lie of communism conditioned the practice of Soviet Communism for more or less half a century, the cultural construction of a realistic alternative to the social, economic, and political formations of the entropic empire is essential. In this respect it is vital to remember that paranoia critique is not simply about critique in the negative sense of the term, but that it also contains a tendency towards the construction of an alternate view of the world on the basis that the negative apprehension of the violent connectivity of the neo-liberal order which refuses its systemic nature provides a platform for the imaginary construction of new positive, socialistic, world systems.

My use of the term imaginary is important here, because I think that what the method of paranoia critique entails is the construction of a visual, or imaginary, taken in the Lacanian (Althusser, 2001) sense of the term to imply a total vision of a figure – critique of the normal culture of the kinetic utopia that turns through the symbolic transformations of, first, normal everyday life into the neo-liberal utopia of freedom, second, the neo-liberal utopia of freedom into the violent neo-liberal dystopia of (un)freedom and total segregation and, third, the violent neo-liberal dystopia of (un)freedom and total segregation into a new socialistic utopia that translates the negativity of the vision of the neo-liberal dystopia into a new, positive, social, political, economic, and cultural imaginary. It is in this respect that I see paranoia critique in terms of a larger project, what I call political surrealism, set on the production of cultural forms meant to effect perspective shifts in the symbolic systems of people caught up in the bleak world of the totally segregated neo-liberal kinetic utopia-dystopia.

II. Kinetic Utopia

The value of the idea of paranoia critique to political surrealism is that it can offer a framework for the critique of the contemporary entropic empire that refuses its own systemic nature, and thus reveal the truth of the neo-liberal kinetic utopia set on the complete transformation of global space into a factory for the production of surplus value, and provide a structure for the reconstruction of a new socialistic utopia on the basis of the recognition of the horrors of the new surreal capitalist utopia-dystopia. However, it may be the case that paranoia critique itself will not be enough to suggest positive contents to fill out the frameworks set-up by the paranoia critique of neo-liberal capitalism simply because paranoia critique is itself entirely critical in functional terms, and that what will be required is recourse to another surrealistic theory, Alfred Jarry's pataphysics (Baudrillard, 2005), in order to suggest new forms of social, political and economic organisation to replace the kinetic utopians' surreal fantasy of a global factory. What is the importance of pataphysics, the surrealistic science of imaginary solutions to concrete problems, to the practice of political surrealism?

The import of pataphysics to political surrealism is that it may be able to inspire the endless events that characterise the kinetic utopia with new political significance, so that they are not simply transformed into further convulsions in the capitalist process of creative destruction, but instead come to threaten that process through contributions to efforts to find social, political, economic and cultural alternatives to the globalisation of neo-liberal capitalism. Of course, it would not be enough to celebrate the endless production of redistributive fantasies if there was no sense that such schemes could ever translate into real practice. Although there is little chance that the practitioners of political surrealism could enact the translation of theory into practice themselves, what the paranoia critic could provide is the logical structure to show how the fantastic schemes of the pataphysicians could translate from fantasy to theory to practice in order to create real cultural opposition to the kinetic utopia. In other words, the paranoia critic could provide the ideational structures for praxis through the insertion of the pataphysician's ideas into paranoid frameworks that might rival the kinetic utopians' own fantastic ideology about the transformation of global space currently enacted through the channels of the world market, various international organisations and military force.

There is, of course, no way in which the political surrealist could marshal these forces to oppose the enactment of the kinetic utopia in a material sense, but I think that the combination of paranoia critique and pataphysics in political surrealism enables us to imagine a situation where a viable opposition to the cultural domination of neo-liberal capitalism could emerge. Upon the emergence of a true alternative to the neo-liberal project the next step would be to think about the ways in which cultural politics, which in this instance would relate to the ideational struggle between the utopias of neo-liberalism and political surrealism, translate into material power, the maintenance of the status quo, or the explosion of revolutionary change. However, I think that for now we must concern ourselves with the construction of cultural forms that might oppose the neo-liberal project, simply because the rise of the kinetic utopia over the course of the last thirty years has witnessed a proportionate decline in the critical and imaginative energies of the intellectual elites, who might have opposed and continue to oppose this new brand on savage capitalism on a cultural level. I think that this is where we must start.

We know that the function of paranoia critique would be to ensure that the surrealistic solutions produced by political surrealism's pataphysician could find a place in the critical framework put in place by the paranoia critic in order to establish the systemic critique of the neo-liberal kinetic utopia. In this respect it is possible to recognise the practicality of political surrealism. What the fusion of pataphysics and paranoia critique in political surrealism would achieve would be some imaginary, taken in both the everyday use of the term and the technical Lacanian sense of the word, socialistic alternative to the kinetic utopia, rooted in both the pataphysical fantasy of a new world order and the paranoid critical vision of total connectivity/sociability, which could rival the neo-liberal utopia in terms of its paranoid mastery of scaling. What I mean by this phrase, the paranoid opposition of the neo-liberal mastery of scaling, is that political surrealism could oppose the neo-liberal mastery of the various levels of the entropic empire, which we might term the global, regional, national, local and individual, through its paranoid socialistic vision, which would similarly infect every level of the world system from the quasi-instantaneous financial markets to the microscopic worlds of the billions of individuals who cower before the convulsive world system like so many primitives fearful of some vengeful God. In this way we can see how political surrealism could offer a new socialistic politics, which would no doubt appear evil from the point of the neo-liberal utopians (Baudrillard, 2005), who continue to suggest that what they celebrate is the free market when it is abundantly clear that their world market is the product of endless political interventions, set on a new form of social and economic management.

What would this brand of politics suggest for the construction of a new socialistic future? In the dialectical spirit of political surrealism and its component parts – paranoia critique and pataphysics, which seek to first translate our view of our contemporary reality into a terrible Dante-esque vision of the world, in order to then convert that negative image into some new positive representation – I think that the new socialism would need to translate the neo-liberal kinetic utopia's commitment to manic hyper-activity, which is, of course, premised on the need to generate ever more surplus value, into a determination to ensure considered action on the basis of contemplation, deliberation and communication (Scheuerman, 2004). Where the neo-liberal kinetic utopian's have been able to advance the value of money at the cost of a recognition of the value of human life through policies of de-regulation, privatization and individualization, largely because there is no time for contemplation, deliberation and real communication today, the new socialism would emphasise the importance of human life, through the globalisation of a human right to existence or a minimum social wage, and undermine the anal obsession with money characteristic of the kinetic utopians through waves of regulation, nationalisation, and socialisation.

In many ways I think that it is possible to find a philosophical exemplar for this socialistic project in Virilio's (1997) notion of grey ecology, which opposes the light speeds of the contemporary dromocracy through a politics of slowness meant to enable us to see human qualities, rather than simply monetary quantities, and that we might use this concept to reflect upon potential problems with the surrealistic solution to the totalitarianism of the neo-liberal kinetic utopia. Where I think that my concept of the kinetic utopia advances Virilio's theory of dromocracy is in its emphasis on the ways in which the contemporary turn to speed and movement is bounded by both a particular ideological formation and the limits of the biosphere. The commitment to speed and movement in the contemporary entropic world system is, therefore, not absolute but rather conditioned by the requirements of neo-liberal ideology, which demands that every movement produces some form of surplus value, and the spatial-temporal limitations of processes of globalisation, which ensure that beyond a certain point, which Virilio sums up through the notion of light speed, networks for quasi-instantaneous communication will collapse under the weight of their own complexity.

At this critical point communicative networks will start to oppose the progress of movement through the promotion of either inertia, which would be bad enough for the kinetic utopia, or total stasis, which would be even worse for everybody on the planet (Baudrillard, 2005). As such, it is because the neo-liberal commitment to speed and movement is totally bounded in terms of its Friedmanite ideological form and the limits of global space-time that I make use of the concept of kinetic utopia to explain the new post-modern capitalism. That is to say that the new world order is not characterised by radical new freedoms to choose this, that, or the other path through life, but rather entirely conditioned by capitalism in its novel high speed form, which, incidentally, is called neo-liberalism because its commitment to high velocity productivity has led it to shed all liberal conceptions of freedom, apart from the basic quantitative freedom to make money (Luttwak, 1998).

My view is, therefore, that the neo-liberal world order is kinetic in terms of its obsession with the movement necessary to increase productivity and utopian with regard to both its closure to other ideological forms and the boundaries of planetary space-time. The latter point about the closure of the kinetic utopia to the boundaries of planetary space-time is particularly incisive because what this recognition confirms is that first the speeds and movements within the kinetic utopia are always relative, since we have now run into the spatial-temporal boundaries of our biosphere, and that second this is precisely what makes the kinetic utopia comparable to the ancient utopian-tyranny of Plato's (1991) Republic, which enclosed people within philosophical idealism and the walls of the ideal city, and the modern utopian-totalitarianism of Stalinism, which imprisoned people in the iron cage of ideological communism and the super-national Gulag, the Soviet Union (Walicki, 1997). The irony of this position, which could lead one to the conclusion that the neo-liberal kinetic utopia is the most successful totalitarian project the world has ever seen simply because of its mastery of the scalings of the world system from the macroscopic networks of the global economy through to the microscopic cultures of everyday life throughout the world, is that it is precisely today that we are told that utopia is dead and buried by serious political philosophers such as John Gray (2007). Why is this the case?

I think that the answer to this question resides in the ways in which the kinetic utopia has reconstructed our reality so that we now occupy a planetary utopia but cannot fully comprehend the fact. Let me explain through a short history of the utopian form. I believe that the concept of utopia was born in the wake of Herodotus' (1998) invention of the concept of history. That is to say that the Ancient Greeks, who had previously occupied a static world, or more properly a world understood on the basis of a cyclical cosmology, could not easily accept Herodotus' monstrous invention, which suggested that time moved in a linear fashion through space and that that which had passed over into the past would never return to some future present. In response to the emergence of this new conception of time the conservative thinker Plato (1991) envisaged his master plan for a timeless space, the ideal city, or Republic, which would repulse history. Even though the Republic's citizens would pass over to the other side the iron laws of the polis would see to it that the city itself would never change. Of course, Plato knew that his eternal city would be endlessly battered by history. This is why he invented the concept of history as decline or decay, which would later be taken up by critics of modernity such as Adolf Hitler and Walter Benjamin, in order to suggest that change was evil and that what was required of a good society was the strict management of time through the total control of space (Popper, 1992). Herein we witness the invention of the cultural form of utopia. I emphasise the phrase cultural form here because it is important to remember that what Plato invented in the 4th century BC was an idea, an idea which translated into hard policy recommendations and violent political action, but an idea nonetheless. Akin to his beautifully bounded, perfectly symmetrical, conceptual forms which could never find realisation in the world of things, Plato's utopia was a thought-experiment which largely remained within the sphere of culture, the sphere of ideas, symbols, and other representations, until the onset of modernity in the 16th century.

It was at this historical juncture, most clearly symbolised by Thomas More's classic Utopia (2004), a text which in many respects defined the coincidence or collision of utopia as cultural form and utopia as political reality through its etymological equation of the textual no place and the material good place and its symbolic confusion of the fictional island utopia and the factual new world America, that it seemed possible for the utopian form to crossover into utopian reality through the machinations of science, technology, and the Enlightenment idea of progress. Herein we encounter the paradox of modernity, the historical period Peter Sloterdijk (Darby et al, 1989) calls the kinetic utopia, which is that it was from the very start caught between a commitment to infinite progress and a desire to realise the ultimate community, secular Heaven on Earth. Although modern social and political theory was largely defined by the innovations of Machiavelli and Hobbes, which tended to suggest that there was no place for the ideal forms in the modern world beset by endless change (Strauss, 1995; 1996), I think that the entire modern tradition was tainted by the idea of utopia in some shape or form. Consider Hobbes' political theory. By the time Hobbes (2007) wrote his Leviathan in the mid 17th century he no longer felt the need to pander to Plato's ideal society. Whereas More's utopia was nascent in its modernity, in that the new ideas of progress, change, and positive value of movement through time and space where still shackled to the desire to eventually arrive at a timeless, bounded, telos, Hobbes' political society was thoroughly modern in its fusion of the principles of progress, change, and movement, and the idea of bounded space, in one social form. In other words, there was no sense of the classical static utopia in Hobbes' Leviathan (2007), but rather an attempt to control the forces of modernity through legalisation in what we might call the original liberal utopia, the first model for what would later become the post-modern kinetic utopia.

While Hobbes' liberal utopia was never situated in a particular place, and as a consequence remained a thought-experiment founded on the principles of Euclidean geometry, the other great 17th century English liberal thinker, John Locke (1980), rooted the modern theory of freedom, progress, and movement in America, the real representation of empty Euclidean space. Thus Locke took Hobbes' abstract political science, which showed how men could pursue their individual desire but still live together in relative peace, and transposed it onto what was thought to be a really existing tabula rasa, the new world, America. In this way Locke closed the space, which More had opened up between the fictional ideal society, utopia, and the real new world, America, and reinforced the bounded nature of Hobbes' utopia, which had previously been controlled by the power of the Leviathan, through the process of spatial location. What we find in Locke's Two Treatises on Government (2003), then, is the primal scene of kinetic utopia, the moment when the modern utopias of More and Hobbes fused in a new synthetic form, a monstrous utopia founded on the union between fiction and fact, theory and practice, and fantasy and reality and the collision of the modern principles of progress, change, and movement and the classical idea of a bounded timeless space. In order to properly understand what Baudrillard (1989) means when he talks about America as 'utopia realised' I think that it is, therefore, essential to reflect upon how the works of More, Hobbes, and Locke shaped American culture, taken in its broadest sense to mean the ways in which humans attach significance to their world, rather than to start with post-modern theories about the tendency to light speed and the explosion of communication and signification, which symbolise the terminal state of kinetic utopia. There was, of course, a extensive period of history between the birth of the new baby in Locke's vision of America and its mature emergence onto the world stage at the end of the 20th century that we must recount before we say any more about the final form of the neo-liberal kinetic utopia.

We know that the Hobbesian-Lockean concern for the modern utopia of movement was not one necessarily shared by continental Europeans who were in many respects out of touch with the English futurists who better understood the world to come. In the late 18th century Robespierre and the French Jacobins struggled to install a new utopia of the people to replace the old feudal monarchical system, but only really managed to re-produce the English class system through a Napoleonic detour. The rest of the story of the old world is really about the class struggle between the new kinetic utopians, who wanted to defend the Hobbesian-Lockean conception of competitive struggle in the Euclidean space of the market, and the successors of the classical utopians, who wanted to evolve new timeless spaces that could enable men to realise their true potential. The classic example of this struggle is, of course, the ideological battle between the thought of Adam Smith (1998) and Karl Marx (1990), which later evolved through the Soviet communisms of Lenin and Stalin, what we might loosely call the third world Marxisms of Mao and Che, and the ideology of pure capitalism expressed by Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Thatcher, Reagan, Bush, Blair, and today Brown. The fact that both utopias strived for universalism, evidenced by Trotsky's (2007) notion of permanent revolution and Hayek's (2006) idea of movement for movement's sake, but more especially by the Cold War confrontations of the mid to late 20th century, shows that in many ways the communists and capitalists similarly thought through the symbolic structures of the thoroughly modern utopian form.

Although there is a temptation to try to separate the communist and capitalist models on the basis that the latter does not define a telos, or utopian moment, for humanity, but rather places its emphasis solely on the value of movement, I think that what this view misses is the way that the ideology of pure capitalism defines the state of the market in terms of both ideational totality and its refusal to admit other spatialised social, political, economic, and cultural models that might impede its commitment to the freedom of movement. In terms of its commitment to universalism the capitalist utopia is, therefore, similar to the communist model. Where we might want to separate the two Cold War utopias is in the ways that they sought to negotiate the relationship between the static classical form and the kinetic modern principle, in that the communist model was never really able to properly fuse the two modes together, but instead chose to understand the latter as a kind of pathway to the realisation of the former. Unlike its red opponent, the capitalist utopia was never plagued by the problem of its future realisation, the 'not yet' of Bloch (1995) or the 'messianic time' of Benjamin (2003), because it continued to function on the basis of Locke's social and political theory. In this fusion of the classical utopian form, which controlled time through bounded space, and the modern principle of movement, which suggested that motivated change was eternal, there was no sense that the ideal society would occur sometime in the future. The ideal society was here and now. According to the official symbolic order of utopia realised we must take the view that if there is a problem with society it is because we have not fully purified the system, that our political legislation has not properly ordered social space for the individual pursuit of profit, and that what is required is minor reform to ensure the proper organisation of the economy of desire. However, there is no sense in the capitalist model that the ideal society has not been realised in principle. In essence this is why the American utopia, which has never really been subject to revolutionary critique, simply because it is already realised, out-lived its Soviet rival, which was never able to sufficiently close the space between what its ideology said about the utopia to come and life in the communist present.

The complete realisation of the American utopia was complete when the Eastern Bloc collapsed in the late 1980s-early 1990s. At this point Locke's baby, which had for so long been held in check by the existence of its ideological twin, the utopia of the people, evolved to dominate global space. For excited supporters of the American model, such as Frances Fukuyama (1993), the fall of communism signalled the end of history, Herodotus' monstrous invention, which had produced the very first ahistorical utopia in the 4th century BC, and the rise of a new utopia of global proportions. Unlike Plato, who proposed to control his Republic through philosophical idealism, strict hierarchy, and urban design, the new kinetic utopia is secured by high speed communications across a more or less totally connected world that ensure that the symbolic system of post-modern capitalism, which tells us that goodness resides in the ability to transform all natural qualities into financial quantities in the most efficient ways possible, infects the lives of a large proportion of the world's population. The unintended consequence of the global network which realises the space of kinetic utopia in real time is that the world becomes too fast, too inter-connected, and too enamoured with weightless information, slimed down signification, and simple spectacle for humans to continue to make informed decisions about their lives and change their situation in line with those decisions. The properties of the global network, which comprises the space of the kinetic utopia in real time, ensure that rationality set on the transformation of reasoned thought into motivated practice is useless. The kinetic utopia is simply too fast for humans to keep up with the speed of change, too complex for people to be able to understand the significance of situations, and too spectacular for them to comprehend the hyper-rational construction of events.

The value of this situation for the kinetic utopians is, of course, that it is nigh on impossible for individuals, who are lauded as totally free before a monolithic system that at best treats them like beasts unable to make a rational decision about their own lives and at worst regards them as some kind of excremental remainder of a totally productive system that has no time to care about the situation of those who cannot stick to the programme, to find their feet and reflect upon the state of their world. Even if people could reflect upon their situation the kinetic utopia, which produces events on an everyday basis simply because the political masters of post-modern capitalism have cut the monster loose, the last three decades of what we might loosely call history have shown that traditional oppositional politics are inadequate, unable to offer any kind of global critique of a convulsive world system that has destroyed our ability to situate our world in narrative frameworks. This is why it is a mistake to dismiss Fukuyama's (1993) famous theory, which suggests that the end of history reflects to the end of ideological struggle, on the basis that history is clearly alive and well in Iraq and Afghanistan, because what the end of history really means is the end of the human ability to make culture, map the world, evolve theory, and produce change on the basis of those thought processes (Baudrillard, 1994). We know that there is a surfeit of events today, but these events are not historical occurrences, since they flash across the TV screens of the world's connected people, only to vanish a moment later, leaving those who were the raw materials of the media event to simply pass over to the other side without any kind of symbolic marker to register their existence.

Although such events could be considered utopian, because they seem to explode onto the scene from out of nowhere, and thus appear perfectly formed entities, totally bounded in both space and time, their apparently miraculous nature is not enough to make them utopias. Despite initial appearances these events are never miracles, since they are always rooted in the infinite complexity of the global network, but perhaps more importantly they are rarely meaningful occurrences, because they erupt from what we might call the social unconscious of the global network. What this means is that even though events have their roots in networks of occurrences, the complexity of these networks in today's inter-connected world means that they largely happen behind the backs of even their protagonists, thus taking on the appearance of either quasi-natural events or miracles in the minds of the world's population. Under these conditions the truth is that all rational action is utopian action from the perspective of humanity. In the contemporary world of the kinetic utopia, which emerged from the perfect fusion of fantasy and reality in the 17th century, realism is utopianism and utopianism is realism.

There are two consequences of this situation that the contemporary exponents of the utopia of the people have been slow to recognise because they are too caught up with the old French idea of rational religion. The first consequence of our new utopian reality, the condition I summarise through the term 'planet utopia', is that utopian social and political change is possible today, precisely because small leaps of faith tend to reverberate through the global network to become enormous events with massive structural implications. Although this is surely a positive recognition for the new utopians of the left, the problem is that other utopians, who realised this situation upon its inception, have been faster off the mark in their efforts to try to transform their own cultural utopias into social, political, and economic realities.

This is, of course, exactly how we must understand the situation in Iraq and the Middle East. The Iraq War represents the confrontation between the kinetic utopians, who have occupied a fantastic reality since the 17th century and were thus quick to adjust to the new post-historical reality of the late 20th century-early 21st century, and the Islamic utopians, who have correctly understood that in today's networked world 'the war of the flea' can carry the enormous weight of global utopian ambition. This situation, the reality of the bloody war of utopias, is simply too much for old style realists to take. Gray's (2007) recent book Black Mass is a case in point. He suggests that the utopian ambitions of the protagonists of the Iraq War will never survive the bloody violence of the conflict and that both sides will be forced to return to political rationalism in order to extract themselves from a suicidal struggle without end. I disagree. The problem with this view is that the rival utopias in Iraq, the post-modern kinetic utopia in power, and the Islamic utopia, which has evolved in response to the neo-colonialism of the kinetic utopia and a related resurgence of belief in the possibility of the realisation of an Islamic empire, are entrenched cultural systems, that cannot accommodate alternative utopian models because their very utopianism means that they must tilt towards the total colonisation of potentially bounded space. Given the reality of the global network today, it is clear that the ambitions of both these utopias must be adequate to the dimensions of global space and that any retreat from the attempt to meet these expansive dimensions would result in the realisation of their total failure.

This is why the war in Iraq will never really end. It represents a desperate zero-sum game for both protagonists. Neither side can constrain its efforts to close the space between what its cultural utopia requires and real social, political, and economic, and cultural transformation without throwing its symbolic system into doubt in a nihilistic world devoid of significance. The choice for both sides is, therefore, a stark one: either fight for the realisation of their utopian model or witness the final realisation of the gap between what the cultural model requires and the reality of the world and the consequent collapse of the utopian model in an uncivilized world where significance is more or less non-existent. The rub is, of course, that this zero-sum fight to the death, which neither side can afford to lose on pain of the total collapse of their utopian cultural system, has totally destroyed any sense of culture, civilization, or human significance in the cradle of human civilization itself. One is, therefore, tempted to conclude that if the world, taken in Hannah Arendt's (2005) use of the term to mean civilization, was born in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, then it has met its death in the same place seven millennia later. We could heap savage irony upon savage irony and note that the original name of Baghdad, the current epicentre of the war of utopias, was Madinat-al-Salam, the city of peace, but the effect of this reference would be to simply reinforce what we already know about the War in Iraq, which is that its significance is far greater than one more episode in the kinetic utopia's endless War on Terror.

The true significance of the War in Iraq resides in its reflection of the potential collapse of human civilization, not in the sense portrayed by the kinetic utopians Bush and Blair, who would have liked us to believe that the Islamic utopians threaten all civilization, but rather through the endless war between two utopias that can effectively have only one winner. The truth is that the Islamic utopians could never really win the war of utopias because their model of the ideal society is inadequate to the post-modern reality of our world, but what they can produce is ever more violence on the battlefields of the world's urban centres. Although I think that it is also unlikely that the Islamic utopians will ever lose the violent struggle between utopian systems, because they will never give up on their terror campaigns, it is likely that the technologies of normalisation operative within the kinetic utopia will overcome the threat of terror to enable the marketisation of global space to progress without further impediment. The reason terror tactics are unlikely to trouble the inhabitants of the kinetic utopia for too long is because they already occupy a terroristic system. They already live with total insecurity, in a world that seems meaningless, impervious to human reason, and the possibility of transformation. Needless to say that the world's poor, the human waste of the capitalist machine, suffer these conditions on top of the kind of extreme material depravation that threatens their very existence on a daily basis.

If the world's rich must struggle to find significance in the endless consumption of luxury, which ironically takes place in the face of total insecurity in the labour market, then it is nigh on impossible for the global poor to attach wider significance to their everyday struggles to survive. This is why I think that contrary to what Bush and Blair would have liked us to believe about the threat to civilization of the Islamic utopians, the kinetic utopia is the real menace to our world. Remember that the objective of the post-modern, global, kinetic utopia is to transform all natural qualities into monetary or financial quantities in the most efficient manner possible in pursuit of the only good, the God of the bottom line, surplus value. There is no real significance here, no real culture, no recognition of humanity, only more or less simple calculations of profit and loss. That we have fallen into this abyss of calculation and continue to normalise the wholesale immiseration of large portions of the world's population for the sake of benefit of the few who would be better served by psychoanalysis than the endless consumption of luxury is truly intolerable. This is why I think that the problem of the kinetic utopia is the problem for cultural politics today. In my view it is this system, the machine Bourdieu (1998) calls the utopia of unlimited exploitation, rather than the Islamic utopia, that we must oppose through new cultural forms, such as political surrealism, that might enable us to properly understand the savagery of our contemporary world and begin to think about ways to move towards a new more civilized form of global society.

Mark Featherstone is Programme Director in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, Keele University, UK.

Bibliography

Althusser, L., Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).

Arendt, H., The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005).

Baudrillard, J., America (London: Verso, 1989).

---------- The Illusion of the End (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).

---------- The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

Benjamin, W., 'On the Concept of History' in his Selected Writings: Volume 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005).

Bloch, E., The Principle of Hope: Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

Bourdieu, P., Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).

De Cauter, L., The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2004).

Derrida, J., 'Difference' in his Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Dufour, D-R., The Art of Shrinking Heads: The New Servitude of the Liberated in the Era of Total Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

Featherstone, M. Tocqueville's Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Freud, S., The Schreber Case (London: Penguin, 2003).

Fukuyama, F., The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1993).

Gray, J., Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin, 2007).

Hayek, F., The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge, 2006).

Herodotus, The Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Hobbes, T., Leviathan (London: Penguin, 2007).

Locke, J., Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1980).

---------- Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (London: Yale University Press, 2003).

Luttwak, E., Turbo Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998).

Marx, K., Capital: Critique of Political Economy: Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1990).

More, T., Utopia (London: Penguin, 2004).

Nadeau, M., The History of Surrealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Plato, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

Popper, K., The Open Society and its Enemies: Volume 1: The Spell of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Raunig, G., Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (2007).

Scheuerman. W. E., Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Sloterdijk, P., 'Eurotaoism' in T. Darby, B. Egyed and B. Jones, eds., Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language, and Politics (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989).

Smith, A., Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Strauss, L., Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

---------- The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Trotsky, L., The Permanent Revolution: Results and Prospects (London: IMG Publications, 2007).

Virilio, P. Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993).

---------- Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997).

Walicki, A., Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).