Utopian agency at the end of progress

This paper explores kinds of agency that are available as alternatives to the agency inherent in progress ideology, which has for centuries shaped a fundamental framework for human action and ways of being in and with the world. The paper argues that progress is no longer viable as a way forward in a world damaged by what progress feeds on: resource exploitation, performance and economic growth. The paper therefore explores how alternative conceptualizations of agency might help imagine and enact alternative futures as well as presents and pasts, under the headline utopian agency. It brings together three different perspectives on agency, that in each their way challenge progress agency: Utopian theory as represented by Ruth Levitas (2013), American pragmatism as represented by Emirbayer and Mische (1998), and New materialism/eco-feminism as represented by Donna Haraway (2016). Across detailed explorations of the agentic forms inherent in these three perspectives, the paper discerns numerous ways of stepping outside progress-based agency. This involves a multi-temporal awareness, in which the limitless future of ‘progress’ is pulled into a thick present, as well as a radical relationality in which actors (human and more-than-human) care for each other and redeem histories of injustice towards new ways of organizing themselves. It also involves a recognition of the world as permanently unstable, which demands less a fixing of problems than an ability to be vulnerable, playful and attentive to how we are connected in and across these problems. Building on the details of the three perspectives, the paper finally contours four cross-disciplinary themes that manifest utopian agency, namely Letting the present disturb us; Being relations – working collectively; Untethering causality; and Respecting and rediscovering the past.