Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Ian Buchanan According to Sylvère Lotringer, Deleuze and Guattari loathed the idea of utopia. While his position is demonstrably false – there are numerous favourable references to such noted utopian thinkers as Fourier as well as countless references to SF authors like Asimov, Bradbury, Lovecraft and Matheson throughout their work – it does nonetheless pose an interesting question: what does utopia mean for Deleuze and Guattari? Not much can be made, I think, of the tantalising suggestion that utopia might be what Adorno meant by negative dialectics, though it is an intriguing enough starting point. Rather, I think we need to track through their work and interrogate the various ways by which they argue the world could or will become a ‘better’ place. At the centre of this discussion must be the notion of ‘becoming’, because as they make clear, it is the constant process of becoming that ensures that no political situation, no matter how intolerable, will ever be completely unendurable. Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Anti-Oedipus and Deleuzism: A Metacommentary and editor of the journal Deleuze Studies.
