Incommunicado: Utopias, Systems and the Impossibility of Dialogue

Political debate or, rather, debate about politics can resemble the labor of Sisyphus – nothing particularly new about that. However, what if we would claim that in present circumstances, with chatter jamming all communication channels, conversation is in fact impossible on principle?

It is a truism that what is, somewhat misleadingly, called contemporary Left is beyond communication. Yet what about assumptions of those who challenge it? Are their principles so different so that they cannot really have dialogue with their opponents, or the communication breaks down precisely because they share the same principles in different guise?

In this podcast we analyze how utopian thinking became the only acceptable form of political theory, even on the level of local politics, and that as such it makes political action in the traditional sense – political dialogue included – impossible.

We use an example of sustainable development doctrine to demonstrate how system based thinking – something that contemporary political utopianism amounts to in the end – cannot admit any kind of communication or dialogue in the traditional sense of the word.

By contrasting it with traditional understanding of political action as well as with the traditional understanding of reality which makes it possible, we conclude that premiere totalitarian political idea of our time is based precisely upon inability to act and inability to communicate.

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Branko Malić

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