A Strategy for Ruination
An interview with China Miéville in Boston Review
"It is not as if the world has not long, long been one in which vast numbers live in dystopian depredation. The horizon is more visible now to many who had thought themselves insulated, if they thought about it at all. And dystopia for some is utopia for others. To repeat something I have said elsewhere, we live in a utopia: it just isn’t ours.
Certainly there are better and worse ways to hope and to despair. Despair need not—should not—mean surrender, as anyone who has read John Berger on Palestinians’ “stance of undefeated despair” knows. And hope, as Terry Eagleton insists, is not optimism. The former is necessary and (because the two are not coterminous) indicated; the latter is a hectoring vacuity, at least as often a fetter as a force for progress.
That is not to say optimism is never legitimate—I am considerably more optimistic since the Jeremy Corbyn Event, the unexpected consolidation of power by a principled socialist at the head of the British Labour Party, than I was scant weeks previously—but it has to be specific to the concrete. Optimism, like pessimism and hope, has to be earned."
READ THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW HERE
SALVAGE!
Certainly there are better and worse ways to hope and to despair. Despair need not—should not—mean surrender, as anyone who has read John Berger on Palestinians’ “stance of undefeated despair” knows. And hope, as Terry Eagleton insists, is not optimism. The former is necessary and (because the two are not coterminous) indicated; the latter is a hectoring vacuity, at least as often a fetter as a force for progress.
That is not to say optimism is never legitimate—I am considerably more optimistic since the Jeremy Corbyn Event, the unexpected consolidation of power by a principled socialist at the head of the British Labour Party, than I was scant weeks previously—but it has to be specific to the concrete. Optimism, like pessimism and hope, has to be earned."
READ THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW HERE
SALVAGE!
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