Planet Utopia

Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, UK

• Introduction - On the Seashore: Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Politics  Chapter 1 - Back to the Future: Utopia and Dystopia in Greece Chapter 2 - The Origins of the Capitalist Utopia Chapter 3 - The Late Capitalist Utopia in Power  Chapter 4 - Global Finance, Utopia of Beautiful Numbers  Chapter 5 - The Minor Utopia  Chapter 6 - The Lost Child of the Dystopian City: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Only God Forgives  Chapter 7 - Dis-United Kingdom: Division, Encounter, and Utopianism in Heterotopic Britain  Conclusion - The Spectre of Sociology  Index

We live on planet utopia. The very ideas of utopia and dystopia, how we understand cultural politics, the means by which we historicize capitalism, comprehend global finance, the city, and the state, Mark Featherstone’s extraordinary Planet Utopia argues, have all become invested in, and developed through utopianism. Yet, in many ways, he suggests, multiple utopias have replaced utopia as the defining feature of our broken national identities, and together they have become a global specter that haunts contemporary sociology. Featherstone’s creation of what might be called "spectral social studies" is thus set to become a key area for examining the issue of utopia.Professor John Armitage, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Planet Utopia is a truly lucid and prophetic analysis of contemporary society symbolized in all its spirit of negation and rage by the new revolt of the masses that is politics in the age of Brexit and Trump. For Featherstone, the sudden collapse of the savage utopianism of the frictionless economy of the neo-capitalist imaginary results in a future that is as undecided as it is consequential. Thinking philosophically, seeing cinematically and interpreting sociologically, this important book inquires whether the future will be caught up in a nativist trajectory of murderous violence and revenge-taking or something else entirely, namely a vision of human creativity and imagination that takes root in the very bleakest ruins of the present. Arthur Kroker, author of Exits to the Posthuman FutureWe live on planet utopia. The very ideas of utopia and dystopia, how we understand cultural politics, the means by which we historicize capitalism, comprehend global finance, the city, and the state, Mark Featherstone’s extraordinary Planet Utopia argues, have all become invested in, and developed through utopianism. Yet, in many ways, he suggests, multiple utopias have replaced utopia as the defining feature of our broken national identities, and together they have become a global specter that haunts contemporary sociology. Featherstone’s creation of what might be called "spectral social studies" is thus set to become a key area for examining the issue of utopia.Professor John Armitage, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.