60s Utopian impulses fragmented into micropolitical movements and spatialized visions

Evidence

If one inserts the sixties into this historical narrative, everything changes; “Marcuse” virtually becomes the name for a whole explosive renewal of Utopian thinking and imagination, and for a rebirth of the older narrative form. Ursula K. LeGuin The Dispossessed (1974) was the richest literary reinvention of the genre, while Ernest Callenbach Ecotopia (1975) provided a summa of all the disparate sixties Utopia impulses and also revived the (itself property Utopian) ambition to write a book around which a whole political movement might crystallize, as was the case with Edward Bellamy Looking Backward and the mass movement around his Nationalist party in the analogous earlier stage of North American political Utopianism. … The Utopian impulses of the sixties did not, however, coalesce in that way, but rather produced a vital range of micropolitical movements (neighborhood, race, ethnic, gender, and ecological) whose common denominator is the resurgent problematic of Nature in a variety of (often anticapitalist) forms. … On the other hand, it also seems to be plausible to return to the phenomenon of spatialization already mentioned here, and to see in all these varied Utopian visions as they have emerged from the sixties the development of a whole range of properly spatial Utopias in which the transformation of social relations and political institutions is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the human body. Spatialization, then, whatever it may take away in the capacity to think time and History, also opens a door onto a whole new domain for libidinal investment of the Utopian and even the protopolitical type. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 380

Categorization

• XREF: The spatialization vs. historicity dichotomy echoes Jameson’s earlier point about postmodernity’s loss of the capacity to think time; ties to reader’s goal of mapping position in world system. — connects to: Utopian visions historically served as critical distance rather than action blueprints — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 840; Sixties radical thought was still committed to totalized utopian master narratives — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 669
• ADDENDUM: The claim that sixties Utopian energy dispersed into micropolitical movements rather than a single party parallels the fragmentation thesis in ‘On Sacrifice’ about one consolidating institution dissolving.