From the Imagined to the Real: What Can Utopian Reasoning Reveal About Our Reality?

This paper considers utopia not as a fixed ideal or dystopian warning, but as a processual–relational method for generating critical inquiry. Moving beyond traditional eutopian and dystopian models, which depict closed and internally coherent societies, the paper foregrounds utopias as open-ended and self-reflexive imaginaries in which the process of meaning-making is more important than the achievement of a perfectly good or catastrophic end state. Meaning, in this framework, is understood as emerging within mutually constitutive relations. The argument draws on three complementary approaches: Deleuze’s ontology of difference, Laclau’s account of metonymic chains of equivalence, and Levitas’s understanding of utopia as a tool for question-generation: what utopia can reveal about our present reality. Deleuze’s principle of difference, which treats difference as primary and generative, together with Laclau’s concept of metonymic reasoning, supports a shift from substantialist to relational thinking. Social entities are thus understood not as stable units, but as temporary stabilisations within ongoing processes of becoming. Utopia, in this sense, is not a blueprint but a dynamic field in which meanings, relations, and possibilities are continuously reconfigured. Methodologically, the paper advances backward abductive reasoning as a tool for analysing utopian narratives. This approach begins with imagined or extreme endpoints and works backwards to uncover the meanings and dispositions that would render such worlds intelligible, by identifying the metonymic chains that sustain them. Using the example of meritocracy, the paper discusses how seemingly self-evident claims, e.g. the idea that individuals ‘did not try hard enough’, are sustained through metonymic linkages. Ultimately, the paper argues that deconstructing utopian thinking by moving backwards through relational associations can expands the scope of empirical research by generating new questions, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions, and foregrounding the contingent, relational nature of social reality.