The role of the negative is to expose the cracks in their fantasy—that’s key to change the frame of political possibility without falling for the tyranny of policy comparison.

Such critique of critique has only multiplied in recent years in the face of the increasingly daunting range of social and environmental problems confronting us.3 Yet one must also remain careful not to move too quickly down the path from defining and analyzing problems to prescribing solutions. Despite his expressed opposition to this latter position, even Foucault could not resist the temptation at times, as exemplified by his curious if fleeting celebration of the progressive possibilities of the 1979 Iranian Revolution (e.g., Foucault 1999). With hindsight, it is easy to understand the seduction of this stance. At that historical moment, standing on the brink of the neoliberal onslaught he himself so presciently foretold (Foucault 2008), having witnessed the bitter failure of previous efforts to cast the Soviet Union in a progressive light as well as dissipation of the ’68 euphoria, it must have appeared, as it did to Horkheimer and Adorno (1998: xi) some three decades earlier in the midst of World War II, that humankind “instead of entering into a truly human condition, [was] sinking into a new kind of barbarism” once more. At that point, it would have been difficult not to succumb to the siren song of any movement that might offer a ray of hope in the gathering darkness. Similarly misplaced optimism has afflicted otherwise even-keeled critical analysts time and again, from disavowal of Soviet atrocities by Cold War communist sympathizers to Žižek’s (2008) praise of Chavez’s Venezuela despite growing evidence of that regime’s mounting totalitarian impulses.

Dynamics like these warn us to be wary in our eagerness to start celebrating ostensive alternatives too quickly. Pushing back against this growing trend, Konings, for instance, echoes Foucault in asserting:

A major factor luring progressive intellectuals into the game of making policy proposals is the tyranny of “what is your alternative?”—that is, the notion that public intellectuals only behave responsibly if they do not only offer criticism but also put forward alternative policy proposals. However, in situations where we find ourselves at many removes from the levers of public authority, to prescribe policy alternatives is bound to be either presumptuous and pointless (because the political actors that we would like to carry our programs are nowhere to be found) or conservative in its political implications (because after many radical calls in the desert we learn to ratchet our ambitions down to a level where they can easily be taken up by existing agencies). Once we buy into the game of making policy proposals we can only sound ridiculous and irrelevant or end up participating in the legitimation of prevailing relations of power. We may be able to find a trade-off between these two extremes, but we will have structurally hobbled our capacity for the production of critical knowledge. (2009: 355)

Rather than succumb to this lure, Konings follows Hegel via Žižek (1993) in advising us to “tarry with the negative,” suggesting that, “For the time being, the most productive role that progressive intellectuals can play is to . . . trace and publicize the inconsistencies between prevailing practices of power and their idealized representation in the official institutions, narratives and symbols of our polity” (2009: 356).

I agree that this type of critical analysis has utility in its own right, and that to be effective it must be followed through to the point that one is certain one has fully understood the contours of the problem at hand—what Haraway (2016), as previously noted, calls “staying with the trouble.” But I also agree with Haraway that we need not stop at that point; we can instead attempt to tread the “fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference” (2016: 4). While avoiding Konings’ twin pitfalls of either vacuous utopian fantasizing or outlining politically pragmatic proposals—or alternately pursuing a diluted “trade-off between these two extremes”—we can, I believe, still continue to point toward the type of more radical change that would get us closer to the sort of world we truly want to inhabit.

In the passage (quoted in full in note 6 of chapter 2) made famous by Klein’s (2007) analysis of his perspective as a “shock doctrine,” Milton Friedman claimed that the “basic function” of his cohort of neoliberal ideologues was “to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable” (Friedman 2002: xiv). In pointing to this function, Friedman highlighted the interrelationship between ideational and material dimensions of social change, asserting, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around” (2002: xiv). It is astounding how prescient this prognosis now appears, looking back upon the neoliberal ascendance Friedman himself helped to orchestrate: how the 1973 accumulation crisis indeed created the space for Friedman and colleagues to promote the ideas they had been nurturing for decades prior as the basis of the new world order, and in this way transforming a philosophy that had indeed seemed “politically impossible” only a short time before into what has now been able to assert itself as the inevitable outcome of a teleological development.

In a parallel yet opposite strategy, therefore, we might follow Friedman’s lead in our own promotion of “vital alternatives” (Dressler et al. 2014) to neoliberal conservation. 4 For the reality, as outlined in chapter 8, is that there is already a wealth of alternative “transition discourses” in development throughout the world, via both on-the-ground practice and more abstract conceptualization. The main current impediment to fully realizing these is that, from the perspective of a persistent neoliberal hegemony, they do appear politically infeasible at present. Yet as Friedman among others has taught us, such perceptions can be subject to dramatic transformation over time (see also Yurchak 2013). After all, one of the main functions of hegemony, noted in chapter 1, is precisely to “define . . . what is realistic and what is not realistic, and to drive certain aspirations and grievances into the realm of the impossible, of idle dreams” (Scott 1990: 73). A main strategy of both socialist and anarchist politics has thus been to make “impossible demands” of the current social order so as to challenge this hegemony and sustain the idea that, as the World Social Forum asserts, another world is possible beyond the impoverished horizons of neoliberal capitalism.

In addition to highlighting already existing alternative practices and proposals and helping to flesh out the contours of the alternative world(s) to which they point—the focus of the previous chapter—another productive role for critical scholarship beyond critique may be to explore the conditions of possibility that would allow such alternatives to become first imaginable and then realistic. This is my aim in the following.