It is surely fitting that one of my last few academic publications should have a title so verbose that it’s almost autoparody1.
Talk about the slow grind of academic publishing, though. My records suggest I sent the abstract for what would eventually mutate into this chapter toward the end of summer in 2021… and I’m surprised to note that the abstract as published has hardly changed at all from that original pitch:
The starting point for this chapter is the late Mark Fisher’s work on nascent postcapitalist desire, as a curtailed exploration of the anxiety and melancholy of the Anthropocene as seen from within, and as the basis for the (re)construction of a postcapitalist desire in opposition to the neoliberal death-drive. The story turns to critical utopian praxis in science fiction and futures work, and to the theoretical frameworks, nurtured in utopian scholarship, which provide a guiding rubric for techniques of futuring which might avoid not only dystopian despair, but also the false promise of techno-utopian optimism. This critical-utopian paradigm is then illustrated by the example of the Museum of Carbon Ruins, a project which demonstrates not only the collaborative production of utopian futures in the academic context, but also the manner in which such creative co-production can also serve to enact utopian moments—however fleeting—in the present.
Raven, P.G. (2024). “The Way Out Is Through: Co-produced Critical Utopia as an Antidote to Anthropocenic Academic Melancholia”. In: Urabayen, J., León Casero, J. (eds) Post-Apocalyptic Cultures. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
As for the chapter, well, I think I had hoped that there would be more stuff from my Marie Curie postdoc at Lund to talk about by the time the deadline dropped, but for various reasons that wasn’t quite the case. And so the word “academic” got inserted into the original title, because that meant I could make a more specific argument about some of the performance-centered futures work that I and others had been doing, and claim it—not unreasonably, I think—as a form of utopian praxis: there is the utopia that you make, and there is the utopia that you enact in that process of making.
Of course, it’s very obvious in hindsight that the titular academic melancholia is mostly my own. I do think it’s much more widespread—to say the least!—but as we we’re getting into the edits and revisions of this piece in the late summer of 2023, I was coming to terms with my inevitable drift out of the academic airlock… hence the final footnote, in which I concede that I have failed to find a way to stay in the system and enact the praxis that the chapter advocates for.
Well, no regrets; I’m still very much feeling that academia is best thought of as a bullet dodged. (Though regular readers are likely thinking back to previous examples of my retrospectively relitigating failures into success… perhaps that’s my true intellectual superpower, eh?)
I was no longer funded by the time this chapter made it to press, so it’s not open access. I invite anyone who is interested in reading it to contact me directly, and take advantage of the best and simplest loophole regarding the academic paywall: just email the author and tell them you want to read it! That counts as direct dissemination, and means they can legitimately send you some pre-print version of the thing… and it’ll make their day to know that someone actually wants to read it.
- That said, I’m pretty chuffed at having finally gotten a Nine Inch Nails title onto my academic publications list, after many years of having used it as a section title in presentations and talks. Someone recently told me that “the way out if through” is actually one of many minor mantras from the sprawling family of twelve-step programs… and given I ganked it from The Fragile, which was Reznor’s working-through-his-shit album, well, I guess maybe it is? That may even explain its subconscious appeal to me, too. ↩︎
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