Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought 9781501301421, 9780826420725, 9781441169211

Citation preview

For Lisete, Dinis, and Marina

9780826420725_Prelims_Finals_txt_print.indd v

10/17/2011 10:29:07 PM

9780826420725_Prelims_Finals_txt_print.indd vi

10/17/2011 10:29:07 PM

INTRODUCTION Utopia: A Political Ontology Michael Marder and Patrícia Vieira

Is there still any space, whether conceptual or practical, for the thinking of utopia— which from the outset announces a certain negation of place, topos —in a world marked by a chronic dystopian outlook? After more than a 100 years of what Nietzsche first diagnosed as “European nihilism,” dystopia has now firmly established itself as the current Weltanschauung, a lens through which we filter historical reality. In the West, the sense that all viable alternatives for a different political organization have been exhausted led to widespread voter apathy, resignation, and nonparticipation in the political sphere. Aesthetically, this dystopian mood has given rise to countless novels and films, the most emblematic of which is perhaps George Orwell’s 1984, that project into the future, or into an alternative reality, a society based on an exacerbation of the darkest traits and tendencies prevalent in the contemporary world. An interpretation of world history not as a triumphant march of Reason but as an unmitigated disaster has been a hallmark of some of the most influential currents of thought, including the writings of Walter Benjamin and of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. A veritable manifesto of an all-encompassing dystopia in this context is Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 bestseller One-Dimensional Man that thematized the flattening, impoverishment, and integration into a paralyzing totality of every sphere of life and human activity. Thanks to its insinuation into every facet of reality, dystopia turns into another name for social ontology, in that it becomes the default description of the world and gets identified with the totality of what is. And yet, dystopia heralds a promise of its own: in replacing the fake neutrality of social facts with a negatively charged value judgment, built into the very interpretation of the world, it evinces an intense sense of discontent with, and indeed a rejection, of the status quo. In this, it curiously shadows the utopian impulse, which is born of a similar negative valuation of actual existence but, unlike dystopia, is entwined with the hope of overcoming the oppressive actuality and constructing a perfect and just society. The supplement of redemptive hope in utopia is a part of the inheritance bequeathed to early modernity, when this concept first germinated, by the JudeoChristian worldview. As the process of European secularization unfolded, the belief

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd ix

10/17/2011 10:08:22 PM

X

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

in science and progress gradually replaced the idea of an other-worldly Paradise with the notion that the modern version of the Kingdom of Heaven could take root on earth, provided that the right social, political, and economic structures were created. The utopian impulse culminated in the nineteenth century, with thinkers such as Hegel, Fourier, Proudhon, and Marx imagining a utopian end of history, where a rational organization of human activity would create a world free of unnecessary suffering and conducive to human fulfillment. Nonetheless, the utopian imagination exhausted itself as faith in transcendental ideals waned in the aftermath of “the death of God,” the increasing irrelevance of divinity and of all its replacements that used to serve as the guarantors for the meaningfulness of reality. The historical significance of utopia turned out to be limited to a concrete period of Western history when God was dying but not yet dead , that is to say, when the closed system of theology lost its monopoly on the paradisiacal vision of salvation, which, extended to the immanent domains of human life, such as economics and politics, was transformed into the idea of social and scientific progress. The death of God, as a fait accompli constituting the first milestone of Western nihilism, spelled out the absurdity of externally imposed metaphysical standards for thinking and acting, be it in religion or in its secularized avatars. A feeling of disappointment with multiple injustices suffusing human reality remained, even as the hope for a better future faded; Kafka’s statement to Max Brod emphasizes this relegation of hope to the theological past: “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope— only not for us” (75). Dystopia is an apt instantiation of discontent without hope; it is, we might say, a utopia adapted to the age of nihilism. The project of overcoming nihilism and its attendant dystopian malaise does not mean that these negative phenomena are to be left behind; instead, this task would require deepening or working through them. To work through nihilism and dystopia is to harness their negative and critical energies for the project of social and political change, preventing their fossilization into a pessimistic and resigned outlook where all possibilities have been preemptively foreclosed. It is also to search for meaning and sources of hope that would not be tethered to metaphysical authorities but that would rather be embedded in the texture of existence. In this respect, we may envision, for the first time, a hope detached from its divine or messianic roots and placed in the hitherto unforeseen possibilities of human togetherness. It is this hope that fuels existential utopia , so dissimilar to the original utopian imagination of the early modern age, starry-eyed about the seemingly unlimited potential of scientific progress, and to the dystopia of the twentieth century. A post-metaphysical, existential utopia hinges upon a reconfiguration of the concept of truth, which is neither immutable nor transcendentally guaranteed but is, rather, the result of contestation and permanent struggle among competing interpretations. What is desirable—in other words, the Good and utopia itself—becomes a matter of dispute and political disagreement that, in the absence of an external arbiter (i.e., God or the teleological idea of progress), open the door to relativism and to a recasting of utopia in the banal guise of an individualistic and oft-times

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd x

10/17/2011 10:08:22 PM

INTRODUCTION

XI

hedonistic “private paradise.” Against this background, the challenge facing the thinking of utopia today is, on the one hand, to avert the traps of relativism, which occludes a common horizon for social action, and, on the other, to avoid falling into the temptation of the totalizing grand narratives of the past. Positively put, a revived utopian thought enjoins us to search for meaning in the immanence of collective life and to fashion a common space devoid of an overarching unity, a malleable and plastic space, where shared existence is interpreted each time anew. Far from being magically erased, hermeneutical tensions and an ongoing polemical and practical contestation of “truth,” “justice,” and indeed “utopia” would play a formative role in this version of post-metaphysical coexistence. This is because existential utopia discloses to us the unprecedented possibility—wholly compatible with the space of separation, difference, and dissensus— of being-together without the mediations of the sovereign body of the Leviathan, the State, or religious association. The dissolution of institutional and essential ties allows existential relations to come to the fore of sociality no longer incarnated in a determinate locale or body politic. It is this enabling placelessness, at the level of life itself and not of a transcendent ideal reality, that distinguishes the political ontology of existential utopia. Any political ontology presupposes an organization of the common topos spanning a national territory, social striation, and collective imagination. In the age of nihilism the transcendental grounding and justification of the political topos were eroded to such an extent that the danger of anomie, the loss of intellectual bearings in the shared space of coexistence, loomed large on the horizon of the West. The explosive potential of this sweeping experience of groundlessness had to do with putting into question the preset and ostensibly stable parameters of the political topos in its various instantiations: anarchism initiated a critique of exclusive sovereignty over national territory; communism prompted rebellions against the stratification of social space into classes; and the movement for radical democracy called for previously marginalized groups to reshape, beyond recognition, the topography of collective imagination. The unhinging of the political topos constituted the minimal condition of possibility for utopia, a glimmer of hope that the oppressive power formations of the past were about to crumble. Nevertheless, the tenacity of the status quo should not be underestimated: in the absence of metaphysical justifications, the increasingly unjust political topology was naturalized, presenting injustice as a mere and brute fact of life— as, indeed, our collective fate—to which there is no alternative. As defense mechanisms against the corrosive effects of nihilism, the forces of naturalization imparted to political subjects a sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly predetermined historical events, and so attempted to maintain the semblance of an unshakeable order immune to any concrete occurrence. In the course of the twentieth century, technocracy became the avatar of naturalization, having replaced, in this capacity, the natural law. It forged, above all, an illusion of depoliticization, whereby citizens were led to believe that there was no more place for meaningful political decisions suffocated under the piles of statistical data and that governance was a mere reaction to, and the management

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd xi

10/17/2011 10:08:22 PM

XII

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

of, the circumstances as they presented themselves— an illusion banishing the unavoidable acts of decision-making to a realm shielded from public scrutiny. Along with the utopian impulse, the political qua political was concealed, while the topos of communal life turned into a frozen landscape amenable to nothing more than cosmetic modifications. Utopia, on the other hand, discloses the structure of the political topos in all its artificiality by demonstrating that no political space must be the way it is (one of the possible meanings of the ambiguous prefix u- is “not,” and hence, a negation of any immutable topology). By de-constituting the formalized, institutionalized, and regimented arrangement of the public sphere and by representing, in the collective imagination, flashes of a better world, utopia takes us back to the drawing board and reactivates the constituting moments of politics when the possibility of reinventing the topos of our existence gains a new lease on life. The essays gathered in this collection envision utopia for the twenty-first century, in light of the shift from an essentialist notion of politics and of communal being to the priority of collective existence in its perpetual becoming and constituting character. Consequently, each author is mindful of the open-ended character of utopia, which would correspond to the changing nature of political life and which would, therefore, reconstitute itself in response to the events shaping the community. In opposition to a utopia understood in terms of a “trans-historical transcendence,” of a supra-temporal ideal that can never be realized in the time of human existence, the essays comprising this book hint at a utopian movement beyond history within historical temporality, an “intra-historical transcendence” that implies an existential conception of time as the opening up of the possible within the actual. This configuration of utopian transcendence that cuts across the texts of Existential Utopia arises as a fold in immanence itself, rupturing the continuum that extends from potentiality to its realization, from an abstract ideal to its teleological fulfillment. The chapters, therefore, represent snapshots of possible utopias and invite the reader to engage with the possibility of utopia inseparable from its existential grounding. The intra-temporal nature of existential utopia puts in flux the idea of universality, or, more specifically, the idea of a universal common Good, as it pertains to the possible and desirable ways of organizing social and political life. If existential universals are no longer abstract and eternal ideals, then their political analogues preclude blueprints for a perfect society, applicable everywhere and in every epoch. Such blueprints would merely reproduce the excessive formalization of politics, with its empty institutional molds, a posteriori filled with living content and translating abstract universality into the actuality of existence. Existential Utopia will, instead, put forth a series of fleeting and precarious universals, faithful to their singular context and amenable to being changed or scrapped altogether, once they overstep their limited usefulness. At the intersection of the two terms, this book stages an encounter, where the utopian impulse takes its cues and learns from the here-and-now, while collective existence gets liberated from the straightjacket of the present, orients itself toward possibilities that are not constrained by what is, and overflows itself, such that this excess constitutes the movement of utopia. If nihilism can only be

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd xii

10/17/2011 10:08:22 PM

INTRODUCTION

XIII

overcome from within by preserving its negative and critical edge, then the encounter of existentialism and utopia should not yield a rigid determination of new parameters for thinking and action but should rather serve as a compass for finding one’s bearings within the frequently disorienting landscape of contemporary politics. As a precondition for such an encounter, it behooves us to unbind the notion of utopia from its intellectual history, which, despite eschewing sociopolitical stasis and holding up the promise of social justice, rotated around a largely essentialist core and entailed a strict separation between the ideal and the real, as well as the intelligible and the sensible. A double inheritor of messianic theology and Platonism, utopian thought must strive to abandon the metaphysical legacy, to which it is irreducible, and take stock of what remains in the aftermath of metaphysics: the aspirations toward justice stripped of an ideal or transcendent dimension. At issue in the unbinding of utopia, a process that is interminable and that metonymizes the thinking of utopia today, is its very survival as a pertinent category for social and political change. The uncertainty surrounding the fate of this concept is attributable to the fact that, in the minds of some skeptics, it is indelibly branded by the tradition, wherein it originated and, therefore, should be discarded along with the other metaphysical illusions akin to it. If utopia is to survive the ceremonial proclamations of its demise, contemporaneous with the persistent announcements of the end of history, it will be only as a trace of its former self. The essays comprising this book put their faith in this self-transformative, self-reinventing potential of existential utopia, which is not merely another utopia but the other of utopia, rid of the weightiness of essence and tradition and thus allowed to permeate the fabric of life itself. In the interminable process of getting unbound from its provenance and from the tradition marked by its early modern origins, utopia—which is, in itself, unbound, in that it is dissociated from any given place— can, in turn, unbind political life and topos from the exigencies of institutionalization and formalization. This gesture of unbinding is not entirely negative, since it signifies the existential relevance of utopia to singular historical situations, where it is put to work. In this sense, the unbound existential utopia is simultaneously theoretical and practical, singular and universal, present and future, which is to say that it is put to work without any external mediations, without the need for bridging the apriori principles, maxims, or ideals and political actuality. What replaces the normative guidance, provided by traditional utopia, is the hermeneutical attention to existence that focuses on the lacks, lacunae, and deprivations, in the midst of life’s ostensible plentitude. Existential utopia resists the temptation to fill the gaps of existence and to project the image of fulfillment elsewhere, onto a reality that does not and could not take place. Instead, it lingers with and within these gaps, treating them as those instances of immanent possibility, where practical political interpretations are set to work for the purpose of reshaping the hereand-now. Deriving from a variety of theoretical backgrounds and intellectual traditions, the chapters of the present collection may, therefore, be seen as hermeneutical exercises that glean the living potential of utopia discernable in the interstices of existence.

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd xiii

10/17/2011 10:08:22 PM

XIV

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

The opening chapter of Existential Utopia , titled “In Place of Utopia” by Jean-Luc Nancy, sets a philosophical tone to the treatment of the subject by raising many of the themes that will recur in the rest of the book, such as “world,” “presence/absence,” “representation,” “finitude,” and “possibility.” This text is followed by a brief interview with the French philosopher, in which he reconsiders the relevance, or the irrelevance, of utopia today. In “Utopia, Counter-Utopia, Irony,” Gianni Vattimo links the dystopic cultural productions of the twentieth century to the dark underside of occidental rationality and of the metaphysical imagination subtending technocratic forms of government. Irony is then presented as a political-existential strategy to ward off the force of dystopic negativity and to project a future no longer committed to the metaphysical values of authenticity and objective truth but conditioned by an ironical-hermeneutic understanding of history. Alexandre Franco de Sá, in his “From Modern Utopias to Contemporary Uchronia,” also departs from a critique of modern, teleological rationality that has led contemporary societies to believe they have reached the end of history. The author argues that these societies seem to establish themselves in a time outside of time, which could thus be defined as “uchronic”, their only glimpse into the future being an indefinite continuation of what they already are, a situation that precludes the activation of the utopian drive inherent in collective life. To counter this tendency, de Sá calls for a rethinking of the experience of time at the individual and political levels in such a way that a future qualitatively different from the present would again become possible. “Existential Utopia— Of the World, the Possible, the Finite,” by Michael Marder and Patrícia Vieira, contrasts essentialist-prescriptive utopias, grounded in teleological, instrumental rationality, to the concept of “existential utopia.” The authors specify the latter in terms of the crucial categories of the world, understood in the phenomenological sense of a tense coexistence of diverse lifeworlds; possibility, removed from the continuum of potentiality and actuality; and finitude, acknowledging the absence of eternal and immutable truths or normative-transcendental ideals. In “Still / Encore ,” Márcia Cavalcante-Schuback explores the existential dimension of utopia in poetry, particularly in T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday.” She situates utopian place in the unidentifiable “in-between,” where absence inexorably percolates into the hidden core of pure presence. Understood in the terms of existential temporality, the utopian time of “Ash Wednesday” is, in turn, the coalescence of “before the beginning” and “after the end,” whereby the continual flow of time is disrupted. Cláudia Baracchi, in “The Theater of Utopia: Deleuze on Acting and Politics,” concentrates on a different aesthetic medium, namely theater. What Baracchi calls “the theater of utopia” is a double representation—theoretical and practical, theatrical and political— of that which does not exist: the collective subject, the people. Utopia is, once again, imagined here as the crossing, the placeless meeting point, or the conjunction of philosophy and art, where concepts are enacted and dramatic action puts thought in motion. In “Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique,” Douglas Kellner undertakes a close reading of Bloch’s masterpiece, The Principles of Hope , in an attempt to

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd xiv

10/17/2011 10:08:22 PM

INTRODUCTION

XV

demonstrate that even the most hegemonic and conservative social and cultural artifacts of late capitalism hold, despite themselves, the utopian promise of a new world. An immanent critique of ideology will, therefore, benefit from a thematization of the irrepressible utopian aspirations that always percolate into its object. Ruth Levitas uncovers another facet of Blochian thought in her chapter, “Secularism and PostSecularism in Roberto Unger and Ernst Bloch: Towards a Utopian Ontology.” She argues that the model of secular humanism involves a debased humanism, or what Bloch referred to as “stupid materialism.” In opposition to this debasement, which often leads to political and religious fundamentalism, Bloch insists on a deeper humanism that reclaims from religion matters of spirit and grace. Bloch, as well as Roberto Unger, prefers an ontology that is historicized rather than essentialist and that is centered on becoming and therefore existentially open to the future. In that respect, the author contends, Bloch and Unger put forth a utopian ontology. The three concluding chapters of Existential Utopia describe what has become of utopia in late modernity and what it could signify in the twenty-first century. Josep Ramoneda, in “At the End of Utopia—Indifference,” diagnoses the permutations of utopia in the age of nihilism. From the standpoint of power and domination, utopia turns into the invisibility of the victims of historical, social, and economic injustices, their erasure from the radar screens of the mass media and collective consciousness. In “History, Politics, and Utopia: Towards a Synthesis of Social Theory and Practice,” Laurence Davis continues the exploration of a contemporary contestation of utopia, with reference to the experience of radical democratic grassroots movements. According to Davis, we need to conceive of utopia not as a transcendent ideal but as an empirically situated feature of the world, representing the claims for justice of the dispossessed. Robert Albritton’s “A Practical Utopia for the Twenty-First Century” lays out the key principles of a practical utopia founded upon lived collective experiences and memories of failed political experiments, such as the Soviet Union. Albritton takes as his starting point one of the three basic tenets of the French Revolution, namely equality, transforms it into an existential scaffolding for the proposed utopia, and argues that the ideals of freedom and community are undermined unless all people are viewed as sufficiently equal as to have the material resources that make human flourishing possible.

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd xv

10/17/2011 10:08:23 PM

9780826420725_Intro_Finals_txt_print.indd xvi

10/17/2011 10:08:23 PM

CHAPTER 1

In Place of Utopia1 Jean-Luc Nancy

The word utopia has a very peculiar history. It is one of those considerably rare terms that entered language through an individual invention meant for a very circumscribed usage, which was not only literary but also came under the guise of a proper name. In this respect, it is similar to the name Robinson, to which utopia is, actually, not unrelated, if only due to its insularity. Utopia , the name of the imaginary island where Thomas More places his communitarian republic, ended up assuming the real existence of a common name or a concept, an existence that is as real as that of an earthly island. It is a very small island with a perfectly contemporary meaning that is active within language and thought. Moreover, this word imposed itself across many languages, and its meaning was imprinted at the heart of a thought that was henceforth recognizable at the world scale. A thought concerned with the reality of the world as such, with worldhood as awaiting and anxiety [angoisse ], as the necessity that one experiences, or as a desirable utopia.2 Let us recall that the word is composed of the Greek τοπος (a place, in the precise sense of a determined place, a location, a particular region) and the negative prefix ου, in the same way that ουτις means “nobody, not a someone.” This artificial Greek term forged by an Englishman in the fifteenth century is used today by everyone to designate a notion or a question, the absence of which from the world horizon of the philosophical and political reflection is unimaginable, regardless of the meaning and the specific values— sometimes opposed to one another—that particular kinds of reflection associate with it. (One might say that a world where utopia would be neither a notion nor a question is for our world . . . a utopia.) *** Utopia , a word that did not originate in ordinary language, that arose out of nothing in language as though by an act of creation ex nihilo, is given the task of designating a nothing-of-place [rien-de-lieu], a non-place [non-lieu], as though occupying the place of a wholly other place, or rather of an other in every place; a word that made concrete, within language, something that truly has a place in the space of meaning. It does not fail, at least, to occupy its place in all the dictionaries. From that place, it

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 3

10/17/2011 10:08:40 PM

4

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

does not cease, at the same time, to pierce language, since it is one of those terms where the given signification (a chimerical dream, foreign to the real) is always susceptible to being unhinged, or contested both by an interrogation of the very function of this “dream” or this “chimera,” which precisely wants to be or to signify something else than a “dream” or a “chimera,” and by a reflection about the ties that bind “utopia” to existence and to action. For, in the end, one asks oneself: To what meaning does this kind of extraterritoriality of language lay claim? Utopia , beyond a certain point of language and of thought, is a non-place of meaning through which, in fact, something else than a place among others in the configuration of meaning perhaps arises in thought. It is a place from which meaning escapes but in such a way that it also constitutes a non-place toward which it escapes (where it flees and takes refuge). But, in this manner, the totality of language and of thought, a totality understood according to its openness and its indefinite movement, would be utopia par excellence. Meaning only has a place within language, even though that which has such a place is always only a cross-reference [renvoi], or a sending [envoi] to the outside of language and of all places. In a word, meaning itself is the non-place or the outside-place [hors-lieu] (so that it can be interrupted by the taking-place [avoir-lieu] of truth, which announces, precisely, the impossibility of localizing meaning and of assigning to it a certain abode). This non-place or this outside-place (is it still a place outside all places, or merely their negation? is the negation of place a place and does it take place? utopia endlessly stirs these questions) should be understood here as an outside-there [hors-là], in keeping with one of the possible interpretations of that other proper name forged by another writer, the Horla of Maupassant. Horla is eponymous with a text, where it stands for an anguished creature that visits a familiar site from an unnameable outside, which lies beyond the human, beyond our senses and perception. Utopia and Horla would thus form a couple of names posited within the same presence of absence: a couple of inverted signs, where Horla is the terrible one, while Utopia always signals a harmonious presence, a trait to which we will return. (Robinson, to whom we will also come back, could be the child of this couple and the third character of this tragic-comic mythology, the one who restarts humanity while separated from other men, lost, and left to his own devices, but, therefore, perhaps, reduced to nothing other than his shipwreck.) The presence of absence, the taking-place of the non-place, or of the outside-place, as a condition of meaning itself—such is perhaps the profound and general nature of utopia, as well as the reason for the exceptional fate of its linguistic invention. A reason that is itself immersed in an originary constitution of history, which we have hitherto named Western but which is becoming global: the constitution of an unfamiliarity of meaning. History, in fact, is nothing other than the movement that commences with the suspension of a given truth (of the world of myth and of a mythic foundation) and proceeds to a truth to be discovered or produced. History, therefore, is both meaning and direction [sens]: signification and trajectory—the trajectory of a truth that is fulfilled or that ceaselessly transforms itself and escapes from itself. In its

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 4

10/17/2011 10:08:40 PM

IN PLACE OF UTOPIA 5

deepest sense, utopia is contemporary with history, and is, at bottom, its first effect. No doubt, Antiquity already evinces important features of utopia, even though they take the shape of dreams or of nostalgia, rather than the Judeo-Christian forms of awaiting and promise. Modern utopia simultaneously represents the fulfilled signification and this fulfillment as an outside of history, which, nevertheless, also presents itself as the extreme edge and as the subsumption of a historical process. Utopia is always suspended between a representation of progress and a representation of an imaginary or symbolic leap, in the course of which no progress would be attained. Consequently, utopia is the tearing of history and of historical meaning: at once its glorification, its mobilization, and its paralysis or discredit. This is why today, at our historical moment, utopia reaches a sort of extremity: we live in an age that was represented, in various ways, as the possible, or, rather, probable age of a fulfilled utopia (that of machines and/or that of fraternity, that of knowledge and/or that of the complete production of the human). As opposed to this representation, our age appears to itself as that of a derailing, which opens the path to the implosion of the world, or at least as the trigger for a mutation beyond which it would no longer be plausible to think in terms of history and/or of utopia, just as it would no longer be possible to return to myth (it is not by chance that the experiment of returning to myth was made in the past century and we all know where it led). If, as one might think, the mutation of our age is only comparable to that which engendered the West (the one that gave rise to a post-sacrificial world between the tenth and the sixth centuries before Christ, along an arch that stretched from the Mediterranean basin to the shores of the Ganges), then this mutation will make us leave behind history, utopia, and meaning or truth, such as they function in our configuration of thought. Utopia represents, therefore, something like a limit upon which we are touching today: as a figuration of a fulfillment, it becomes a thing of the past, but as a designation of the outside-place or of the non-place, it assumes, perhaps, a new value. *** To grasp more precisely what may be at stake here, one needs to characterize utopia more precisely, a task that can be best accomplished by noting the necessary links that bind it to two other concepts, namely representation and the world. 1) Utopia is always a fiction avowed as such. It fashions itself as representation, at least from a perspective, according to which it implies the irreality of the represented. The invention of the word already contains this feature: it is the name of an island that proclaims that this island does not belong to the earthly geography. It is not insular in the world, but in relation to the world. For the European world, “the Islands,” as one used to say in absolute terms and with a capital “I,” or the idea of an island in general, were for a long time a privileged figure of extra-territoriality, of a place situated at a distance both of desire and of isolation, a virgin and protected land where one staged the possibility of a new world. The fiction of an island turns utopia , from the outset, into a Ur-topia , a term to be pronounced in German: a place of origin, of a new and

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 5

10/17/2011 10:08:40 PM

6

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

pure origin (the prefix ur, so familiar to German metaphysics—Ursprung = primordial outpour, origin; Urteil = judgment, elemental division—means “outside of, coming out of”; it has been compared to the English out, and we could also link it to the privative Greek ου). Furthermore, this fictional function of an island could be followed through the movement of the Western world in its detachment from its Mediterranean archi-pelagic cradle, where there were, at first, multiple neighboring islands, still not lost in oceanic distances (even though there was already the idea of a far-away mythical island that was pre-utopian, such as the island of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey (with the gardens of Alcinous), the Atlantis of Plato, the islands mentioned by Euhemerus, or the Islands of the Sun in Diodorus Siculus). Utopia means that it exists nowhere, and that it has no other place than its own representation, which does not refer to a possible referent but, rather, represents an explicit non-reality using elements copied from the real. And yet, it is a place. This non-place is not simply a topic: if it is not another place, it is a place that is other, a place otherwise local and localized, and this outside-place is, in itself, a topos or a figure. In this sense, Utopia is a literary exercise: it is a fable or an allegory of the same type as the ones we define, sometimes all too hurriedly, as Platonic myths (among which are Atlantis and the Cave, which is also, in the end, a kind of island), because in this hasty definition we keep the Greek word, to which Plato attached, in this case, a very different connotation from the one he gave to the µυθοι of the priests and the poets. (The imitation of Plato is obvious in More’s book.) Thus Utopia is a double fiction and representation: first, insofar as it is the explicit invention of that which it presents (the utopian community) and, second, insofar as its spectacle is transparent (all the names are made up, following the model of the title: Without-people, for example, is the name of the king and, most importantly, the name of the traveler-narrator is “Teller of fables”). The spectacle of utopia unfolds, clearly, in order to translate an idea, which, as it happens, is the idea of a communitarian state free from tyranny and injustice. (Needless to say, one can find analogous traits in later utopias.) Thanks to this double characteristic, the representation of utopia announces that it does nothing but represent, but that it really represents what is desirable. It, consequently, states that the desirable is undoubtedly only the desirable (unrealizable), but that it is, still, no less desirable, namely something that would be worth looking for or inventing in the real and, at the very least, that its representation deserves to be opposed to an unsatisfactory and contestable reality. In fact, similarly to many other essays of the time (Rabelais or Campanella), More’s book aims first of all to criticize concrete politics, and its fictional presentation is also a means of dissimulation in the eyes of established powers (a method that is successful up to a certain point). With utopia, a decisive feature of modern political consciousness is introduced (already present in Plato, in a certain way), one that we could name the trait/trace [trait] of the impossible. Despite the fact that the ideal city is unrealizable, it is nonetheless this very city—its idea, its image—that we must resolutely oppose to the real city. Utopian spirit appears in its radical and revolutionary character: it demands the overturning of the established order so as to found a new one. But, at the same time,

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 6

10/17/2011 10:08:41 PM

IN PLACE OF UTOPIA 7

insofar as utopia appears qua utopia (and becomes neither a project nor a program, since that would change its nature), it demands that the established order be faced with a representation, the obvious impossibility of which does not diminish but, on the contrary, sharpens its critical virulence. Utopian representation appears as fictional but not as unrealistic: one should rather say, cum grano salis, hyperrealistic. It calls forth a real that would conform to the laws of this representation. Yet, this call is made, at the same time, in the guise of an injunction (“it is necessary”), in the guise of a wish (“it would be necessary”), and in the guise of a premise (“let us act as if”): in these three different modes, what we are talking about is a link between the unaccomplished and the accomplished, a link between a finite and an absolute being. Utopia is, in and of itself, an evidence of finitude: but not of finitude understood as simple limitation; on the contrary, of finitude insofar as the finite being exists precisely at its own limit, where it opens itself to the unlimited, to the simultaneously active and passive power of an unlimitation [illimitation]. Utopia is modern, precisely in that it encompasses this structuring of the finite around its infinity and/or around its finitude [finition]. In a sense, this is how Rousseau sees pure democracy and (despite certain differences) how Marx sees realized socialism: they view it in light of a demand, the regulatory character of which precedes and renders secondary the exigencies of feasibility. (One could come back here, on a long detour, to the Kantian, and, later, the Nietzschean motif of the regulatory idea or fiction.) Utopia does not simply set up its non-place in the imaginary, but, rather, in a polemical negation of the real, a negation that, in and of itself, represents the reality— or the “hyperreality”— of necessity (of justice). Utopia is the impossible, not rendered possible, but shown as necessary. Utopia is, therefore, doubly representative, according to the two meanings of this term. First, it is a figure or a painting of a possible, verisimilar, and recognizable reality (a place, a State, of laws and of mores): a representation in the sense of a reproduction with a monstrative or demonstrative function (one should recall, here, certain models of the utopian architects of the eighteenth century, as well as the scenes and narratives from Sade and Fourrier). Second, it is a presentation, evidencing that which is not in itself present (this is the first meaning of the word “representation,” its theatrical or politico-moral meaning); specifically, it puts on display and makes present the impossible itself, but the impossible insofar as it constitutes an Idea and, as such, a law, a principle, and an injunction. With the figure that has been put forth, it is, then, the unfigurable that takes shape (e.g., the communitarian Idea) and this shape, rather than outlining a scene, opens up, through that scene, a breach of thought and of desire in the real, a breach we could also name the absolute, the true, or the unconditional. In utopia, reason puts the rational above the reasonable, as the demand of an outside-place opened in and by reason: the infinite excess in reason of its own truth. Utopia is the representation—in the two senses of the word— of this infinity. 2) Second trait: utopia is always the representation of a world. The representations of technical accomplishment, such as those of da Vinci’s machines or others in science

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 7

10/17/2011 10:08:41 PM

8

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

fiction, are not utopias as long as they do not explicitly entail a world, that is to say, a totality of existence and of meaning. All this, furthermore, does not mean that technology does not entail such a totality; quite the contrary is the case. But it is necessary to represent this totality as such (for example, neither Star Wars nor 2001, Space Odyssey offers a utopia, for these works describe extrapolations from our world). Utopia is always, above all, social in the broadest sense of the word: it places itself in the order of a sharing/partitioning of meaning [partage de sens]—that is to say, of meaning itself, absolutely, given that meaning is nothing other than a sharing/partitioning [partage ]. It is “ur-topia” in a new sense, that of its novel apparition. It is always a world that is utopian: a regime of sharing/partitioning, of division, and of connection of those who exchange and convert meaning. If the model of utopia , at least in its broader sense, is political, it is because politics itself has been the name of a combination—that also began with the history of the West— of relations of force and of meaning, ever since those categories were set up as two distinct orders that had to be conjoined, rather than being given as a unity (a sacred power). It is this that determines the issue of “community” insofar as it is a “city.” In the world of the sacred, there is no place for utopia because there is no nonplace: the here and the elsewhere are clearly situated, separated, and reconnected. The sacred rite (the sacrifice) performs an ectopia : it expels to the outside something that belongs to the here, and that is not a utopia. But as soon as one attempts to find, to produce and, in the first place, to posit and to thematize the non-given conjunction of power and meaning (what we shall call “democracy”), politics at once gets defined as that which still has not taken place but rather demands its place at the point where the disjunction between power and meaning reigns. It is, therefore, not so much utopia that is first of all political, but, rather, it is politics that is always utopian. In fact, the Athenian πολις has presented itself, ever since its first appearance in the course of history, as already lacking its core, either by having already lost its truth, or by still having to reach it. And, at the same time, it has engaged in a philosophical inquiry into what the best πολιτεια should be. Perhaps the heart of every utopia is a fusion of power and of meaning in such a way that legitimacy is not under suspicion and authority is itself responsible for the well-being of the community. Utopia is, first of all, the non-place or the outside-place of community as such—I mean the community presented insofar as the “common” is not given or founded upon a certain principle, that is, when the community is not or when it is no longer the body or the conglomeration of a family or an empire. As the representation of progress— still relatively foreign to the epoch of Thomas More— became established, utopia went through a slow movement of torsion to adjust to a different understanding of time. Instead of being that which happens outside of necessity and according to contingency, time, or the order of the temporal in the sense this word acquired in Christianity, became the arrival of the necessary. As a result, that which was clearly not to be realized, or that which was to be realized only in an improbable future, in the uchronia of utopia, becomes that which, when eventually realized— even if only after a very long time—would define

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 8

10/17/2011 10:08:41 PM

IN PLACE OF UTOPIA 9

the horizon of a time that could no longer be understood as bygone without being at the same time realized , that is, accomplished according to the essence of its progression. (As a consequence, a “revolution” became the very demand to give a place to the outside-place. The trajectory of Marx best represents that future where utopia is subsumed under the mission of history.) Effectivity was thus attributed to time as the effectivity of the subject , in other words, of that which must become what it is, and therefore always constitutes itself simultaneously as an after-fact of itself and in advance of itself: ur-topia turns into a production of itself as origin and end. The utopian world becomes the task of producing itself as a world, and representation becomes will, that is, a representation that creates its own realization. The character of being world of utopia foregrounds two of its dimensions that have been hitherto barely visible: worldhood [mondialité ] and worldliness [mondanéité ]. Being world-wide [mondiale ], utopia cannot but represent a state of common sense, or a meaning, that is shared by all humanity, without any essential differences. No utopia can be relevant only for a part of humanity. Being worldly [mondaine ], it does not point toward another world or toward an other-worldly reality [outre-monde ] but, rather, toward the realization of this world in itself and by itself. Utopia is not paradise , at least in the sense of a beyond, but it retains from this notion the representation of an exceptional place within the world, thus opening the world onto its meaning (this is, no doubt, another way for utopia to be Western: to be the linchpin of a double closure of divine exception, that of the garden of Eden and the island of Hesperides, the garden being another figure for an island in Homeric culture, as well as in the cultures of Persia and Mesopotamia). *** Consequently, utopia harbors an antinomy. In fact, it can from now on assume two forms: — either its worldly and representational character leads to an intensification of the hollowing, of the breach that creates an outside-place in the world; not looking onto another world, it opens in the world a non-place that creates a kind of a scar, marking the absence of pre-given meaning; — or its character as a totality of meaning, instead of defining this totality as open and hollowed out, on the contrary, fills the breach and even erases the scar, suggesting nothing less than the regeneration of the world; in this case, the urtopia subsumes utopia — and this is called totalitarianism (in other words, always more than politics: the subsumption of politics and of its constitutive gap); this is why, moreover, an insistent and ambiguous theme circulates across various utopias: the theme of communitarianism with its eugenic complement. Consequently, utopia either gets imprisoned in a totalization conceived of as a saturation (and this is the crushing and domineering “vision of the world”), or it is reduced to the diametrically opposed condition of a lack that perpetually awaits its

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 9

10/17/2011 10:08:41 PM

10

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

remediation (and this is the “regulatory idea” or the “value” in their right-minded and hopeless formulations). Between a line of flight to infinity and a block, between flimsiness and thickness, between a pure negation of the u and the fullness of the ur, utopia seems to have lost today the fragile measure that kept it in balance. A possibility therefore arises that our “utopia” should be, from now on, an absence of utopia in the sense of a projection of a total fulfillment or of infinite perfectioning. The question seems to be, henceforth: What should come in place of utopia? A question to be understood in two possible ways: What should come in its place, in other words, as a replacement, a substitution, and what should come in the place that is its own, in other words, in this non-place or in this outside-place? What can replace, without displacing it, the non-place of utopia? Perhaps the answer has already been available for longer than we would have thought and for longer than utopia itself (or at least for as long as utopia has existed, if it is, in fact, a contemporary of the West). Perhaps the answer actually lies at the heart of representation and at the heart of the world. If representation is actually the presentation of that which is not present as such, and if the world is a totality of meaning that, as such, does not know how to close itself but that, on the contrary, is only sure of its infinite openness, then all representation is really representation of a world and every world is really the configuration of an unlimited expansion of meaning, the truth of which is nothing but the infinity of singular parts where meaning is interrupted only to be taken up somewhere else: in the birth and the death of everybody, in love and hate, in knowledge and ignorance, in image and force. “Utopia” becomes the name of an outside-place that operates at the heart of the real, not in order to explode and annihilate it, but, on the contrary, in order to clear the space for its pulsation. It is the play of a hinge that cannot be welded because it must undertake the sharing/partitioning and revival of meaning—from one singular existence to another, without assumption or subsumption of their singularities but, on the contrary, from one to the other, which is precisely the condition of meaning. If there is something that has not ceased to be of concern to the group of techniques that the West has called “the arts,” is this not, precisely, the care [souci] for such play? Is it not the care for a hinge that does not weld meaning to meaning (in the way language would tend to do) but that, in the presentation itself, and as its theme and its motive, facilitates the opening of an outside-place, a syncope of meaning? What constitutes a work of art if not the fact that neither its performance nor its outcome exhausts it and that it gives place, precisely, to that which has no place? What does a work of art do other than working, in itself, for something altogether different from the occupation and saturation of its place, and other than tracing its own contour, with the greatest precision, when its goal is to plot an escape right here, to give place to the other of place? Utopia has been the attempt— or the temptation—to put to work a representation that would locate the non-place. In this, utopia was close to the deeper structure or dynamics of the work of art (and, without a doubt, we could show that more than one utopian writer thought of her- or himself as an artist). However, utopia as such is

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 10

10/17/2011 10:08:41 PM

IN PLACE OF UTOPIA 11

determined by a program of completion. Art, on the other hand, only completes the work in order to open onto an outside that it harbors but that it cannot contain. One could say, in a word: the work of art is not an island and the one who inhabits it (the artist or her or his audience) is not Robinson: she or he does not restart a world of her or his own but engages with everyone’s world in the spacing that she or he opens. It is thus that, from now on, utopia, folding onto itself, finally designates, in place of itself, something that would unhinge all the places in order to create there innumerable suspensions and interruptions, innumerable releases or escapes: to be here, even when over there, and thus without an outside, to inscribe in eternity the instability of a moment, to replay every time a meaning of the world, without an end or without progress. We situate that “something” or that “somewhere,” approximately, as “art.” But this word itself is insufficient if it is to be defined according to an aesthetic insularity, that is to say, in fact, according to that which would make art its own utopia. We need, on the contrary, to think in this context the putting to work—the technique — entrusted with the task of doing justice to the nontotalizable infinity of that which puts us in the world and keeps us there, without letting us dream of another world but not without leaving for us the possibility, sometimes, in certain places, created as the beyond in the here—a painting, for example, a sentence, or a dance— of touching upon a reason without ground and without abidance.

Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy Michael Marder and Patrícia Vieira A note by Jean-Luc Nancy : I respond to your questions very quickly, between two trips, and I do not have the time to reread the old text to which you are referring. Maybe my responses distance themselves more or less from that text; I know, in any case, that for me today the notion of utopia is even more empty than it was when I wrote that text. Your questions make me think that this is not the case for you and that you would want to give “utopia” an actual power and a real chance. But that is not at all my point of view. I believe, on the contrary, that we need to reject all utopia and focus instead on the here-and-now! March 10, 2011. Michael Marder and Patrícia Vieira (Hereafter, MM & PV): As a sign necessarily lacking an actually existing referent, does utopia shed light on the routine operations of meaning-making? Does it teach us something about the conditions of possibility for meaning? Could we interpret utopia as a spacing or an opening, wherein meaning (in particular a set of new shared meanings of a community) sets itself to work? Jean-Luc Nancy (Hereafter, JLN): Well, I am not sure that there is no actual referent to “utopia.” If we think of the mere concept, the reference is the question about the way of conceiving the prefix “u”: “out,” “to come,” “never to come,” “in no place,” “in another place,” etc. That is the whole problematic of utopia. How to conceive of a topos beyond all topoi ? On the other hand, there are the utopias like the one of

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 11

10/17/2011 10:08:41 PM

12

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

More, the one of Fourier, and so forth, that have precise features even if it is not strictly possible to make them real. Therefore, it seems to me that utopia does not really help us to think, for thinking never goes out of the real but, on the contrary, penetrates deeper into the real. Utopia helps us to dream . . . MM and PV: Thank you for your thought-provoking response. The challenge, it seems, is to think (not to dream) about the dreaming facilitated by utopia. This is what we are experimenting with in our collection, Existential Utopia . Our next question is the following: Utopia co-emerges with political modernity in the absence of fixed truths. Does this mean that utopia presupposes a certain political anarchy, a lack of a unified arché ? JLN: Not an anarchy but the fact that the given “arché ”—that of the monarch or of God—is no longer experienced as truly certain. Utopia is the idea that another place should be possible in place of this place (and not as another world, a “paradise”). MM and PV: Is there a necessary disconnect between the idea of utopia and the historical experiments that have attempted to implement, or, at least, to flesh out and concretely outline, this idea? Would you agree to preserve the paleonym “communism” for the purposes of describing what you call the utopian “communitarian state free from tyranny and injustice”? JLN: Please, note the following. Historical “communism,” such as that of the USSR or of China, similarly to all the others (in Yugoslavia, for example), was not— or was to a very small extent— an experience that tried to “incarnate” the communist idea. There was very little movement in that direction and, instead, many attempts were made to create a particular type of domination and of efficiency (particularly a military one). Certainly, one can retain certain social or cultural traits of communism, but in a very specific sense: these traits would not be related to utopias but, rather, to the measures of immediate justice. MM and PV: With reference to utopia, how would you characterize the interconnection of the— at least—two senses of the world: the phenomenological and the political, the Husserlian lifeworld or the existential spatiality of Heideggerian Dasein, on the one hand, and the setting or scene of world politics, on the other? What would it mean, in each case, to define utopia as “a representation of the world”? JLN: Utopias are the representations of a transformed world, according to an imaginary projection and have nothing to do either with the lifeworld of Husserl or with the spaciality of Dasein. On the contrary, it seems to me that utopian worlds are deprived of life and of space. They are images. MM and PV: What is the place of utopia within the history of religions? Isn’t “the place outside all places” the name and function of monotheism, as opposed to the

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 12

10/17/2011 10:08:41 PM

IN PLACE OF UTOPIA 13

non-monotheistic divinities, embedded in concrete— albeit mythical—locales? Is utopia a secularized version of monotheism? JLN: Not at all. In monotheistic religions, in keeping with their deeper truth, everything happens here, in this world. It is here that God is present/absent. There is no other representation of the world and the “otherworldly” (the “paradise”) has nothing to do with a utopia; it is a state of grace and not a world. MM and PV: How would you articulate the non-place of utopia with the sense of placelessness or even homelessness marking political and philosophical modernity? Can invocations of utopia make any significant contributions to ameliorating the plight of displaced and dislocated populations all over the world? Does utopia still refer, in the words of Ernst Bloch, to “the principle of hope”? JLN: No, I don’t think so. I believe that utopia does not play an important role today. Our questions and our demands are here and for here, in our world and for our world. MM and PV: You mention that, from the vantage point of the past, we live in an age of fulfilled utopia, which we, nonetheless, perceive to be predominantly dystopian. How does this pervasive dystopian dimension of contemporary society, expressed in cultural productions (literature, film, etc.), fit within the framework of your reflections on utopia? JLN: Dystopia is the difficulty of being in our place or in our places. Yes, but that is what makes the “world” today: it is no longer a cosmos, but a place simultaneously open and closed; closed to all representation of an “other world” and open in itself to the questioning of its meaning. MM and PV: Is utopia another name for the event, given that you describe it as the introduction of the impossible into politics? Is democracy as the “non-given conjunction of power and meaning” a utopian political event? JLN: No, not at all. An event arrives/happens [arrive ] and utopia does not arrive/ happen. An event presupposes, rather, a negation or a forgetting of utopia. MM and PV: As you state in the end of your contribution, the promise of the artistic drive, and specifically of the playfulness inherent in art, supplements and supplants that of utopia. How would it be possible to transfer or to translate such artistic playfulness into political terms? JLN: One cannot transpose art into politics—not at all! Art can certainly raise questions and concerns, as well as effect ruptures, but it does not provide patterns to be “transferred” or “translated.” Art is untranslatable.

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 13

10/17/2011 10:08:42 PM

9780826420725_Ch01_Finals_txt_print.indd 14

10/17/2011 10:08:42 PM

CHAPTER 2

Utopia, Counter-Utopia, Irony1 Gianni Vattimo

It has been rightly noted (Verra 1004) that one of the essential characteristics of utopia today is the rise and dissemination of a literary genre that has been variously defined as anti-utopia, dystopia or counter-utopia. And maybe this is not one of the characteristics but the salient characteristic of utopia today, at least judging by the consistency with which literature and other forms of utopian art, especially cinema, have produced “perfectly negative” images of worlds that still keep all the “optimizing” [“ottimizzanti” ] features of utopia, in the sense that they imagine a reality where traits that are mere possibilities in the present situation are actualized in all their extreme implications. But, instead of giving rise to a perfectly happy world, all of this leads to the opposite condition, namely to complete and irreparable unhappiness. In relation to past models of counter-utopias, for example in works such as Gulliver’s Travels, the negativity of contemporary counter-utopia is more complete and radical; it does not assume the form of an exemplum that warns against the distortions and dangers inherent in the possible consequences of current facts and elements of the present. Works such as Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang (1926), as well as the famous 1984 by G. Orwell (1948; which has also been turned into a film), and, again, Brave New World by Huxley (1932) that are, finally, the emblems of counter-utopia, can be distinguished from all the counter-utopias of the past on the basis of the radicality of their theses. Can one attribute this radicality to the negative experiences of the last 100 years, namely those that took place at the level of politics, the militaristic applications of technology, as well as the failure and perversion of revolutions, such as the Communist one? It is well-known that all of these were decisive factors in the rise of counter-utopia: to be sure, the catastrophic mood of the counter-utopia of expressionist cinema deeply echoed the then recent experience of the First World War, which had determined, perhaps for the first time and in connection to the exigencies of military production, a very rigid, fragmented, and alienated organization of industrial labor and, consequently, of social structure and discipline. Thus, 1984 by Orwell reflects not only the experience of European fascisms of the 30s but also, much more gravely, the impact of Stalinist totalitarianism on the liberal consciousness of those years.

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 15

10/17/2011 10:07:26 PM

16

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

But it would be misguided, in my opinion, to relate the dissemination of counterutopia in literature and in our collective imagination to these disappointments, to negative experiences such as the ones we have alluded to, that, at bottom, are always only partial explanations. By the same token, the present, tragically justifiable fear in face of the threat of atomic destruction or of the planet’s ecological devastation does not suffice to justify the radicality with which the utopian imagination produces its perfectly negative models. Rather, counter-utopia makes one think of more global explanations, qualitatively different from those referring to specific negative and particularly painful experiences of humanity. What is at stake and what manifests itself in counter-utopia can be defined as the coming to light of the counter-finality of reason [controfinalità della ragione] or, of what Adorno and Horkheimer called, in different words, the dialectic of Enlightenment, in their book from 1947. It is, therefore, not only the case that on the basis of certain negative experiences—the two World Wars and the innumerable local wars where ever more sophisticated deadly weapons are employed; the intensive exploitation of the resources of the planet up to the limit of their depletion; the new and unlimited possibilities of control and disciplining created by technology—we realize that “progress,” especially in terms of technology, can lead to catastrophic consequences for life. Such a possibility remains fully within tradition: the invention of new technologies has always entailed the possibility of their perverse application, or has led to the emergence of hitherto unknown risks. What seems to characterize our situation is, on the contrary, something more general that, though it is in front of everyone’s eyes, can only be seized upon thanks to a special reflective effort: it is the discovery that the rationalization of the world— insofar as it accomplishes its designs ever more perfectly and, therefore, not by mistake, by accident or by casual distortion— overthrows reason and its goals of perfection and emancipation. If true, such hypothesis retrospectively throws a different light over the history of utopia. For example, it leads us to recognize the close ties binding utopianism to the history of modern rationalism. To be sure, there have been, from Plato onwards, utopian experiments that do not strictly belong to the history of modern rationalism (although, in a broader perspective that encompasses Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is perfectly legitimate to also include Plato, above all, in this history). But, if we consider the more specific and historically precise meaning of utopia, that of the island described by Thomas More in the work that coined the term in the sense that it has for us today, we immediately find ourselves placed within the history of modern rationalist thought. Thomas More and Campanella, in his City of the Sun , represent a reality that is not “optimized” [“ottimizzata” ] on the basis of images inspired by an immediate and naïve desire for well-being and happiness; rather, in a certain way, the authors derive the features of their ideal worlds from a rational and systematic acknowledgment of the human essence, of its possibilities and of its calling. What is in More and, above all, in Campanella, a reason founded upon the identification of essences that, unfolding as normative ideals, give rise to what one might call metaphysical utopia, becomes in The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon (published

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 16

10/17/2011 10:07:26 PM

UTOPIA, COUNTERUTOPIA, IRONY

17

posthumously in 1627) a technological utopia, which makes use of all the possibilities made available to human beings by the machines known at the time. But there is a deep tie between these two types of utopia, namely their nature as an optimized reality mediated through rational planning. No one uses the term utopia to refer to the country of Bengodi, to an image of a happy world, as it were, retrospectively invoking a mythic golden age that would be at the origin of history. Strictly speaking, the term utopia has to do with the actualization of an optimal reality mediated through rational planning, be it metaphysically inspired (as in Campanella) or technologically oriented (as in Bacon). Considered in this way, utopia’s ties with modern rationalism, or with what Heidegger defined as desire for systematization [volontà sistematica] prevalent in metaphysics, become evident. As we know, from the Heideggerian perspective, metaphysics is a way of thinking that considers essence as a system of objects rigorously interlinked through the principle of causality. This linkage of all entities through a foundational nexus, which in ancient metaphysics—for example and, above all, in Aristotle—is only seized upon at the ideal level of the mind, is really actualized in modernity through the work of technology that becomes, therefore, concretized metaphysics. Now, considered in terms of its specifically modern origins, utopia is, in effect, part and parcel of the desire for systematization [volontà di sistema] inherent in metaphysics. One might consider it to be a metaphysical rationalism, or a Hegelianism directed to a futural dimension. It is in such a way that, for example, Ernst Bloch, the paramount “utopian” thinker of our time, conceives of utopia. In a famous book on Hegel,2 Bloch criticizes him neither for his desire for systematization nor for regarding the totality as the only possible truth, but, rather, for the anamnesis marking his thought, that is, the fact that, for Hegel, the totality, or the system, already appears as complete from the beginning. For Bloch, the truth is also the whole, or the totality, outside of which there is nothing but error and alienation. However, the totality does not lie behind us as something already fulfilled but is, instead, a utopian telos seized by an anticipatory consciousness. One could also think, along the lines of Adorno’s later and more radical formulation, that the utopian totality, thus understood, cannot even be represented. A sort of prohibition would thus be in place— analogous to the one that, in the Old Testament, forbids the making of images and invoking the name of God in vain— against forming a positive idea regarding the contents of the utopian telos. It is difficult to say whether such a radical iconoclastic conception of the utopian telos, characteristic of Adorno, conforms to the Blochian perspective. But it remains to be seen whether, even in its most radical form, namely the one espoused by Adorno, utopia is still bound up with a totality that can no longer be conceived of as fulfilled. Even if only by acting as a critical principle that warns against all claims of historical fulfillment, the utopian telos still reveals its connection to the totality and, therefore, to the metaphysical desire for systematization. If, following the thread of a rational argument, we then conclude that utopian imagination, at least in its strict sense and not in the sense of a pure and simple

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 17

10/17/2011 10:07:26 PM

18

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

imaginary escape into a happier world, is a constitutive trait of the modern metaphysical mentality—if this is the case, what is the meaning of the emergence of contemporary utopia and of its characterization, above all, as counter-utopia? With the discovery of the counter-finality of reason, announcing itself in the collective imaginary through the affirmation of counter-utopia, one can experience and identify something more than singular mistakes or risks of perversion. It is the very mechanism of rationalization that comes to be “suspended,” thrown into crisis, and globally placed under attack. Thus, it no longer appears to be an accident that counter-utopia emerges at a time when, at the level of collective consciousness, we notice a dissolution of the ideology of progress (a dissolution, which is also, to be sure, motivated by the experiences of “counter-finality” that undergird counterutopia; and, besides this, progress no longer makes sense as a dogma of the philosophy of history, because this history itself is no longer thinkable in terms of a linear and unitary course, unless such thinking proceeds at the price of serious ideological violence: one is reminded of this in the Theses on the Philosophy of History by Benjamin, as well as in Bloch’s “Differentiations in the Concept of Progress”).3 On the one hand, philosophy, starting with Nietzsche and, later, with Heidegger, as well as, at bottom, with a less “auratic” thinker, such as Adorno (with his insistence on the fact that everything changed, for human beings and for their thinking, “after Auschwitz”) understands itself as a witness to an epochal turning point in the history of humanity. And, on the other hand, the discovery of the counter-finality of reason, about which philosophers as different as Adorno and Heidegger are in agreement, is the distinguishing mark of this epochal turn. We are no longer talking about the possibility that one single mechanism invented by technology, or, even, an entire system of machines rebels against humans, the way the robots do in the expressionist phantasy. The counter-finality of reason consists in the fact that, even when it is fulfilled “correctly,” according to plan, reason turns against the very goals of emancipation and “humanization” that drive it. Clearly, one cannot respond to this discovery by taking yet another step on the path to a more complete and authentic rationalization, since it is, in fact, this very mechanism that has perverted its own calling. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that it would be possible to correct, so to speak, the perversion of reason by means of a “critique of instrumental rationality.” Indeed, reason was perverted, that is, it gave rise to a completely administered world, to the manipulation of consciousnesses, etc., because it assumed a scientific, objectifying, and calculative rationality as a model for rationalization. This prevalence of objectifying, calculative, and instrumental rationality was associated—from the Adornian point of view, which, in turn, harkened back to the Weberian theses—with the imposition of a capitalist order onto society. One could expect, in short, that the emancipation of society from capitalism would, in the same stroke, point toward a vision and an exercise of reason that would be less calculative and less instrumental, opening the path to a different mode of rationalization, capable of recovering its emancipatory meaning. Still, the developments in Adorno’s thought after the work of 1947, tended more toward this

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 18

10/17/2011 10:07:27 PM

UTOPIA, COUNTERUTOPIA, IRONY

19

critical-negative utopianism, to which we have already alluded. Hope in the emancipation of reason from its historical modern “form,” which blends social disciplining, repression, calculative objectification, and the technological applications of science, seemed to be less and less realistic, and, conversely, the utopian telos increasingly appeared as something one could affirm only in negative terms. Where, then, does the consciousness of the revealed counter-finality of reason, present ever more clearly in contemporary philosophy, lead us? And do the instances of utopian imagination, in their turn, give any indications about the path that thought should take, once we have acknowledged that the linear, progressivist mechanism of rationalization has gotten trapped, buried in a radical self-contradiction? Concerning this last point, the cinematographic utopia of the last few decades provides interesting material for reflection. Blade Runner, a famous film directed by Ridley Scott that came out in 1983, is universally considered to be a model for all those cinematographic genres, where the future, appearing under the guise of ruins, is created by the scenography and by the rhythm of the action (this genre had, in fact, already come into existence before this film, for example, in works such as Escape from New York, or in the different survival epics proliferating based on the last, unforgettable scene of The Planet of the Apes). Much more than the storyline itself, namely the hunt after the “replicants,” or robots who look like humans and rebel against the “expiry date” determined by those who constructed them, the strongest impression Blade Runner leaves in the viewer’s memory is the image of a city (Los Angeles?) that has all the architectural traits of an enormous archeological site replete with buildings from the twentieth century; with reason, this image has been attributed to a postmodern scenographic imagination. This scenography of ruins, featured more explicitly in other films, is justified by the fact that the often-banal events, displaying a very “traditional” violence, are imagined as taking place at a moment when the atomic apocalypse had already occurred. One can, thus, speak of a veritable post-apocalyptic thread in contemporary cinematographic utopias. There seems to be no doubt that this has to do with utopia, not only for the banal reason that the events take place in the future, and, especially, in a future resulting from the exacerbation of those elements of technological and scientific progress that define our present lives. Above all, it is a utopia because, paradoxically, the postapocalyptic condition these works describe is a condition that is happy in its way, at least if we take into account the fact that the atomic catastrophe, weighing on us as an impending threat, is there imagined as having already happened, bringing with it a sort of freedom for the survivors. This sense of liberation, albeit always a paradoxical one, also hinges on a distancing from technology and its products, which is typical of the post-apocalyptic genre. Such detachment is not necessarily motivated by ethical and rational concerns, which would be, obviously, justifiable by the fact that the catastrophe, located in the past from the standpoint of the survivors, was produced— one imagines—with the help of those technical apparatuses that constituted the world of rationalization. The distancing from all apparatuses of technology that still remain, despite the fact that they work poorly, in the general situation of

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 19

10/17/2011 10:07:27 PM

20

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

ruins, in which the apocalyptic world finds itself, is rather marked by a sense of irony, as in certain sequences from Woody Allen’s Sleeper (with the proviso that this film, probably, does not belong to the post-apocalyptic genre). Given all these characteristics— an apocalypse that has already taken place; the ruins of the “developed” world; ironic-nostalgic distancing from that world, which is also, often, a distancing from its rhythms; along with a general slowing down of the action—the counter-utopia we propose to call “post-apocalyptic” approximates, in a way that is not superficial, the contents of the preceding utopias stripped of any “progressivist” connotations. Such contents are present not so much in literature and theory but in the practices of oppositional groups from the late 60s. The “flower children” from the Californian campuses were moved by their desire to lead a life that would be close to nature and ecologically balanced; not repressed and, concomitantly, not aggressive; and, above all, subtracted from the means of production through an implicit choice of “zero growth,” displaying attitudes that, essentially, can often be found in the postapocalyptic genre. This genre represents a sort of a forced return to the “natural” condition, which, however, is neither a new version of the originary paradise on earth, nor a pure and simple return to barbarism, but, on the contrary, a return to nature that retains the traces of a fulfilled and finite “progress,” cultivated with ironic nostalgia. One could say that the atomic catastrophe, which, in this kind of utopia, “closed” the path of “progress” once considered to be unstoppable, is the condition for the development of an inventorial attitude [atteggiamento inventariale ] that ends up assuming—in a confrontation with the mass of objects produced in the technologically advanced world— a contemplative position of the kind described by Schopenhauer in terms of the aesthetic contemplation of ideas. It is worth trying to describe the state of mind experienced in the situations with which we are faced in these films, because doing so is probably more revealing than many theories dealing with the “post-historical” condition (an expression, which, as we know, originates in the work of Arnold Gehlen), a condition that seems to be the hallmark of humanity today. In sum, the meaning of post-apocalyptic counter-utopias is that they represent an existence, which is no longer historical, though not in the sense of a return to a happy nature typical of certain utopian phantasies of the past. Rather, this existence is no longer historical in the sense—more rigorously attuned to the event of utopia in modern mentality— of representing a completion, a passage to an extreme condition, founded upon the absolute fulfillment of that which, for now, presents itself as our (only) possibility. The ironic-nostalgic inventory of the fetishes of progress is, perhaps, the only “utopia” that is still possible, the only future condition imaginable, and, to a certain extent, desirable, for humanity in late modernity, which has witnessed with its own eyes the fading of hope for the rationalization of the world and, thus, for an ever more complete Aufklärung. The difficulty in describing this condition as a utopia—for example, in deciding whether we are dealing with that mix of predictions and voluntaristic, wishful anticipations, which utopia was in the past— depends entirely on the fact that we find ourselves, precisely, in a situation, wherein a “utopia” is delineated, for the first time, after the fulfillment of the history

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 20

10/17/2011 10:07:27 PM

UTOPIA, COUNTERUTOPIA, IRONY

21

of metaphysics and of its desire for systematization, outside any perspective of linear, and, therefore, potentially progressive temporality. Besides this, at the end of metaphysics and of the faith in progress, utopia cannot have any content other than the inventory, the nostalgia, the revival ; and, from the point of view of its emotional value, this post-metaphysical situation can no longer appear as a “completion,” an attainment (corresponding, therefore, to a course of events, to an active tension that is then resolved) of a condition that would be desirable, or, in any case, final, in the teleological sense of the word. The post-historical human being no longer observes the course of the world with that tension of hope or fear, which marked a humanity dominated by an experience of linear time. From this point of view, we can, perhaps, draw a different lesson for the interpretation of post-apocalyptic utopia and for the Adornian dialectic of Enlightenment. The recovery and the transformation that the notion of dialectics undergoes in Adorno until it turns into “negative dialectics” are not primarily determined by logical and systematic reasons. Dialectics, in its Hegelian form, is not abandoned because it is contradictory or, in some way, conceptually unsatisfactory. The only reason for Adorno’s conclusion—in opposition to Hegel’s belief that “the true is the whole”—that “the whole is false” depends on the observation of how, in the century and a half separating us from Hegel, the whole became real and the rational totalization of the world was fulfilled, at least in principle. Here, once again, Adorno is closer to Heidegger than one might think: the total organization of the world, the preponderance of an instrumental rationality ever more perfected and capable of disciplining society without leaving any significant residues is, by definition, what Heidegger described as the completion of metaphysics. As we have seen, Adorno still hoped that one could correct the flattening of reason in its instrumental and domineering configuration and that, through a total transformation of society, rationalization could point toward a new destiny of emancipation. More and more explicitly, this conviction gave way to his negativization of utopia and, at bottom, to a renunciation of any philosophy of history. However, in the idea that the whole is false even when it is accomplished, there is, in nuce , a new philosophy of history. This philosophy of history would be defined by the replacement of the linear model (of ascent or descent, in a progressive or regressive sense) typical of the Hebraic-Christian view of history, as well as of the cyclical model, which is, conversely, characteristic of the classical conception of time,4 by a model that may be termed “ironic-distortive” [ironico-distorsivo] and that may also draw upon certain “nihilistic” hesitations of hermeneutics in contemporary philosophy.5 In other words, historical development would be neither progress, nor regression, nor the return of the same but an “interpretation” always, to a greater or a lesser extent, falsifying the assumptions and the heritage of the past. Such a model is not only applied, at least according to our hypothesis, to the event of the rationalization of society and to the unveiling of the concomitant counter-finality of reason, but it also seems to be more deeply rooted in all modern history, which, not by accident, often presents itself in the form of “secularization.” This concept, the usefulness of

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 21

10/17/2011 10:07:27 PM

22

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

which for the possible reconstruction of a philosophy of history remains to be explored,6 rather, alludes—more than to the overturning of a sacred order that is no longer accepted, or the abandonment of this order as a mistake, which has been now recognized and corrected—to a relationship of recuperation-maintenance-distortion [ripresa-mantenimento-distorsione ], a relationship that is typical of the ties anchoring the modern profane civilization in its Hebraic-Christian roots. From this point of view, an exemplary secularization is the link established by Max Weber between protestant ethics, or, more broadly, the Hebraic-Christian monotheism, and the development of Western capitalism, that is, simply, of modernity itself. In modern capitalism, Christian ethics is not left behind as false and useless; rather, it is “fulfilled,” but in such a way that the first disciples of Jesus would have barely recognized it. Christian ethics “explains” the capitalist world, which cannot “do without it”; thus, it is more historically effective and, therefore, also, truer when it is no longer maintained as a group of precepts (and even these precepts, to what extent are they authentic?) that have become increasingly less “likely” because they have been frozen in obsolete forms, less and less applicable to life as it is. In its hitherto only barely sketched form of post-apocalyptic utopia, the utopian imagination of the last few decades seems to have found again, beyond the discovery of the counter-finality of reason, a possibility, if only a paradoxical one, of projecting itself into the “future.” A sui generis future that has to be redefined in the framework of neither a linear nor a circular conception of history, but in that of an ironichermeneutic-distortive [ironico-ermeneutico-distorsiva] one, which, with the help of utopian imagination, philosophy and culture have just now begun to explore.

9780826420725_Ch02_Finals_txt_print.indd 22

10/17/2011 10:07:27 PM

CHAPTER 3

From Modern Utopias to Contemporary Uchronia1 Alexandre Franco de Sá

The point of departure for the reflection we propose to undertake here is a contemplation of the changes that Western societies underwent in the last decades. Based on these changes, it is obvious that our societies are characterized by a substantial progress in the economic, social, scientific, and technological domains. On a social and economic level, for example, our liberal democracies have freed their political structures from a social organization that Emile Durkheim described as being based on “mechanical solidarities” and have, thus, progressively integrated, at least as a shared ideal, respect for all types of difference, culminating in the revolution brought about by professional and social equality between genders. On a scientific and technological level, in medicine or neuroscience, humankind is constantly overcoming previous barriers in regards to the knowledge of its genetic heritage, and, in the field of natural science, we have been increasingly augmenting our control over nature. The list is extensive and does not need to be expanded upon here. However, in light of the abovementioned examples, which are now the order of the day, we can examine the reasons why these current developments, in their varied forms, do not make fertile ground for the cultivation of new utopias or for the rebirth of what could be called a utopian way of thinking. This is the issue at stake here. How is it possible that our present situation does not generate a proliferation of new utopias and a new political and social enthusiasm? How can we explain that the formulation of social and political utopias in today’s society has become inadequate and anachronistic?

Modern Utopia as a Possible Place In order to answer the first question, the term “utopia” must be defined as precisely as possible. Such a definition is indispensable, when considering that today’s society has become oblivious to the possibility of imagining, even amidst its daily achievements, a different way of living. Here, we will refer to the term “utopia” in the restricted sense that emerges from its coining by Thomas More in 1516, whereby it

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 23

10/17/2011 10:07:31 PM

24

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

implies a type of political, social, and economic organization that, although not taking place in society as we know it, and having not yet found a space (therefore, being u-topian) in this society, does not otherwise pose any intrinsic contradictions and is, in this sense, humanly possible. It is as a description of a possible way of life in human terms that utopia acquires its distinctive character, developing the nuances that generate expectations about its potential as a mobilizing force. Therefore, utopia is based on a description of something that does not exist, as an exercise in imagination unrelated to the reality of what “is,” but, although not immediately connected to the reality of what “is,” it is, nonetheless, related to reality as a projection of what “should be.” It is this intrinsic allusion to what “should be” that inevitably binds utopia to reality: not to instantly verifiable reality, but to the attempt to overcome it on the basis of the advent of a new reality that could and should come into force. Utopia’s inherent allusion to “being,” or, more precisely, to the not impossibility of life as described in utopian terms, is where attempts to outline utopian projects by means of denying and transforming existing reality originate. It is in this sense that Karl Mannheim, for instance, distinguishes it from the concept of ideology: Utopias too transcend the social situation, for they too orient conduct towards elements which the situation, in so far as it is realized at the time, does not contain. But they are not ideologies, i.e. they are not ideologies in the measure and in so far as they succeed through counteractivity in transforming the existing historical reality into one more in accord with their own conceptions. (176) It is also in this context that Arnhelm Neusüss does not give utopia an unreal or chimerical meaning, but a real one, in the sense that utopia denies the reality which factually unravels before it: “It is not within the positive determination of what it wants, but in the denial of what it does not want, that the utopian intention becomes concrete. If reality as it is known is the denial of a possibility of something better, therefore utopia is the dissent to this denial” (33).2 Nonetheless, although utopia is to be defined by virtue of its specific ties to reality— even if in the form of denial of this reality—the fact is that utopia has often been accused of being connected with something that should be characterized as a merely imaginary possibility. As a brief example, we can look at the way in which Eric Voegelin described utopia: as a modern phenomenon that is created by removing one of the defining characteristics of human nature. For Voegelin, if, for example, the appropriation of nature was to be a particular characteristic of the relationship between man and the world, and if private property would be, as a result, an essential element of human nature, then utopian discourse would be the result of trying to imagine human nature as if there was to be no private property, that is as if human nature was to be different from what it really is. In this way, considering man not as he is, but as he could be if his nature were different, Voegelin interprets utopian discourse as the stage prior to what he described as the modern Gnostic revolt against

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 24

10/17/2011 10:07:31 PM

FROM MODERN UTOPIAS TO CONTEMPORARY UCHRONIA

25

the world and nature (249ff.). Considered in this perspective, utopia becomes the name for a social project whose very essence consists in negating reality itself. As John Gray put it: “A project is utopian if there are no circumstances under which it can be realized” (28). Doing away with utopia’s link to reality, such a discourse cannot help but simply identify utopian thought with political or religious fanaticism. Approaches to utopian thought such as the one put forth by Voegelin discard the intrinsic relationship between utopia and a place or a space in which it can exist, a dimension that is of particular interest to us. Utopian discourse does not eschew a link to reality: it is a description of a fictional place that is to be found within this very reality, a narrative form of fiction destined to highlight reality’s possibilities to be explored. These possibilities do not go against human nature; on the contrary, they originate from it. By virtue of portraying a way of living which does not yet exist, utopia not only describes a society which is not yet present, but above all a society that could come into being in a different space on earth, a space equal in nature to the one we currently inhabit. Far from being something impossible, it is from this strange place that reality itself becomes strange, revealing utopia’s potential and possibility as a changing force. As Paul Ricoeur put it: “From this ‘no place’ an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now often beyond that of the actual; it is a field, therefore, for alternative ways of living” (16). The origin of utopia, therefore, goes back to the allusion to another place on earth where it would be possible to create a different way of living. Utopia is thus linked to a representation based on the division of the globe into separate spaces, each of them subject to a distinct type of law and order. In this specific sense, utopia is an essentially modern theoretical construction, a product of the division of space that arose with Europe’s expansion overseas and, in particular, the discovery of America. It is, perhaps, Locke’s well-known sentence from the beginning of §49 of the Second Treatise of Government— “Thus, in the beginning, all the World was America, and more so than that is now” (301)—that best evokes this division: the European world, determined by a nomos belonging to the jus publicum europaeum , now faces the open, anomic, and indeterminate space of America. It could, therefore, be said that the modern world emerges with the primordial division of planetary space into a “here” and a “there.” Based on this division, it is possible to draw the boundary between the space of the Old World, ruled by jus publicum europaeum and represented by a European system of states, and a New World overseas, open to a new type of determination and situated on the other side of the frontier, beyond the limit set by law and order. Once these two distinct spaces are defined—the closed space of Europe and the open space of America—it is easy to determine a fundamental criterion of demarcation: the type of conflict or dispute that could occur on each side of the divide. While, in Europe, struggles were governed by the rule of law, or, in other words, war was still an engagement ruled by law, in the virginal space of America, that is, in the space situated beyond the territory governed by law, it was the opposite: any struggle was subject to the law of the

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 25

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

26

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

strongest. In the words of Carl Schmitt, the author who most profoundly expressed the relationship between nomos and earth : At this “line,” Europe ended and the “New World” began. At any rate, European law, i.e., “European public law,” ended here. Consequently, so, too, did the bracketing of war achieved by traditional European international law, meaning that here the struggle for land-appropriations knew no bounds. Beyond the line was an “overseas” zone in which, for want of any legal limits to war, only the law of the stronger applied. (93–4) Because of the unbearable thought of the existence of a space where lawlessness is the order of the day, the dividing line that separated a space determined by law and a space undetermined by any order, that is, the division between the “civil state” of the civilized world and the “state of nature” of the law of the strongest, began to disappear. This dissolution started already in the sixteenth century, when Spanish theologians such as Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria demanded certain rights for the indigenous population of America. Yet, it is only with the organization of the American states that the planetary division between an anomic and undetermined space, on the one hand, and a space ruled by jus publicum europaeum , on the other, collapsed, and was replaced by the division of the Earth into large closed spaces, each determined in its own right. The most significant indicator of this state of affairs is perhaps the United States of America’s proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, determining the American continent as a large republican, democratic space, to be shielded from any intervention that would emanate from Europe, united, in its turn, by the Holy Alliance. The division of the globe into the North American capitalist and Soviet socialist spheres of influence in the second half of the twentieth century, following the Second World War, represents the continuation of this division of the globe into large closed spaces. In response to this division there were attempts to unify planetary space, a “globalization” not necessarily achieved through the creation of an “open world,” but, rather, through the emergence of a unipolar world in which the single superpower defined the frontiers of forbidden or protected spaces on the basis of unilateral criteria. It is in light of the unification of space as a globalized territory, exposed to the universal intervention of the single superpower, that an initial explanation for the crisis of utopian thinking in today’s society could be put forth. It has been said that, as of the sixteenth century, utopia consisted in the representation of human possibilities that, although not accomplished in the European space, could (or even should) either be found in the New World or, at least, be tried out in this initially anomic and undetermined space. Therefore, utopia describes a state of affairs that is possible in human terms and not a fictional impossibility that would ascribe to humanity something it clearly is not. If utopias emerged in modern times from the separation between the spaces of the New World and the Old World, and if they depended on the existence of an anomic space where utopian experiments could be

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 26

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

FROM MODERN UTOPIAS TO CONTEMPORARY UCHRONIA

27

projected, then the crisis in modern utopian thinking could be explained, at first glance, by the emergence of a globalized planetary space and the implicit disappearance of old spatial divisions.

Modern Utopia as the Representation of a “New Time” An important factor to consider when reflecting upon the current crisis in utopian thinking is, indeed, the thought of a world, the space of which is entirely unified and interconnected, following the disappearance of all boundaries. Nonetheless, this point must be cross-referenced with another assumption that cannot be overlooked in the context of the present reflection, namely the idea that, throughout the course of the unification of modern planetary space, utopian thinking does not disappear, but rather changes, in a very particular way. The reason why utopian thinking continues even after the vanishing of the separation between spaces, is that, in the representation of utopia as a possibility, we are dealing not only with a spatial dimension but also with a crucial temporal dimension, according to which utopia is projected into the future. Utopia is, therefore, seen as the representation of a society that could find its own special location in the future, thus becoming an idea that could guide the construction of a world yet to be realized. Based on the line delimitating two places, dividing the world as we know it and the world as it could be, another frontier is erected, this time between two eras: a line separating time as we have known it until now and time which breaks away from it and develops beyond it. In other words: utopia emerges through the allusion to a space without a place, a space that is nonetheless possible and whose existence does not essentially contradict nature, and it does so by placing this space in the future. If the reference to space gives utopian thinking its essential link to reality, the dimension of time lends utopia its central meaning: the possible transformation of the future of humanity. In this way, far from being the description of a fantasy or the formulation of mere wishful thinking, utopia is defined by a decisive connection to effective reality: not to reality as a given fact, but to a reality to be constructed and reinforced factually on the basis of an anticipated future opened up by utopian thought itself. Yet, the anticipation of a future mediated by the lens of utopian thinking is always a dangerous game to play. One can succumb to the temptation of not only opening up the future, by anticipating it, but also of determining the past, transforming it into a history whose meaning is to be found only in the realization of the utopian experiment. In this case, utopia becomes synonymous with alienating ideology in which—using the well-known expression from George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour— the present controls the past so that, in turn, it can control the future. The identification of an ideological danger within utopian thinking lies at the core of the observations concerning utopia formulated by Hans Freyer. This author argues that the closed systems described in utopian thinking already anticipate the end point

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 27

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

28

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

where all history should culminate, and present themselves as a final state of being which would render any future impossible. In this context, referring to the utopian way of thinking, Freyer observes: “Any historical route ought and has to lead to utopia. Yet no historical route . . . should lead outside and beyond it. Utopia must remain a-historical. Therefore, it defends itself against history, and this fight will be lost” (38). Considering utopia as an ideological description of the end point at which history should culminate means manipulating history and, therefore, disrespecting the past. Hannah Arendt evokes the consequences of the said manipulation when she refers to the loss of the utopian ability to anticipate the future, the ability “to begin something new,” this loss being the inevitable result of the transformation of factual historical truths into constructions that hold weight and bear future relevance only in the hands of propaganda. As Arendt put it: If the past and present are treated as parts of the future—that is, changed back into their former state of potentiality—the political realm is deprived not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new. What then begins is the constant shifting and shuffling in utter sterility which are characteristic of many new nations that had the bad luck to be born in an age of propaganda. (258) Yet, in spite of the dangers inherent in anticipating the future through the lens of utopia, which can lead to a reduction of the past to the status of a mere potentiality of the future, it can be said that the opening of a future, its actual liberation and inauguration by a utopia that searches for a new place, cannot help but remain one of the crucial elements defining utopian thinking. Therefore, it is this intrinsic reference to a possible reality that makes utopian thinking, in its summoning of a future yet to be disclosed, irreducible to a simple ideological manipulation of history, whose temptation is an ever-present possibility. This irreducibility signals the presence of another inalienable possibility in utopian thinking, the possibility that, far from representing the inevitable conclusion to the course of history, utopia anticipates an open and yet to be determined future that encourages the emergence of hope. Ernst Bloch discussed the link between utopia and the “principle of hope” and elaborated on the connection between utopia and reality as an essential element of what he described as the “utopian function.” Such function attributes to utopias a double denial. On the one hand, as has been previously mentioned, utopias are not the mere expression of a wish removed from reality; rather, they are reality itself taking the shape of a project and presented in the form of its anticipation. For Bloch, therefore, a utopia devoid of all links to factual reality would be deficient and immature. As he expresses it: “Pure wishful thinking has discredited utopias for centuries, both in pragmatic political terms and in all other expressions of what is desirable; just as if every utopia were an abstract one. And undoubtedly the utopian function is only immaturely present in abstract utopianizing [. . .]”

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 28

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

FROM MODERN UTOPIAS TO CONTEMPORARY UCHRONIA

29

(The Principle, 1986b, 145). On the other hand, in Bloch’s view, just because utopia is linked to reality it does not mean that it should be hindered in its openness to what is new by a realism that lowers its expectations. Bloch adds, in continuation to the above: But what is important is the fact that the hope-charged imaginative glance of the utopian function is not corrected from a worm’s-eye view, but solely by the real elements in the anticipation itself. That is, from the perspective of that solely real realism which only is so because it is fully attuned to the tendency of what is actually real, to the objectively real possibility to which this tendency is assigned, and consequently to the properties of reality which are themselves utopian, i.e. contain future. (The Principle , 1986b, 145) In this way, far from positing itself against reality, utopia represents the anticipatory vision of a future reality, not by describing the final conclusion of a history that it has manipulated but by calling upon humans, through the medium of hope, to build this new reality by themselves. By virtue of projecting the future as the coming of a new era, utopia finds its own time to be a time divided into what has happened until now, on the one side, and the opening of a new time, on the other. It could be said that, if the space of utopia can be found by drawing a boundary between the Old and New World, then the time of utopia is based on the drawing of a division, where a new history breaks away from history as we know it. It is when facing the link between utopia and a radically new era, which must be created as the future of human history, that is a time whose advent, in the most extreme case, relegates all history until now to the status of mere prehistory of humanity—to use Marx’s words—that the question concerning the deficit in utopian thinking in today’s society acquires a more precise configuration. It can be translated into the question as to why there is an incapacity to anticipate the future. In other words: the question of why, despite all social, scientific, and technological developments, we, today, are incapable of thinking in an utopian manner, implies questioning our ability to think about the passage of time, in particular with reference to the future. For what reason is it no longer possible to distinguish and divide between what has happened until now (the German das Bisherige) and the advent of something effectively new? Why, under the current circumstances, do we not widen our perspective so as to include the representation of a new future, which is precisely what characterizes the utopian way of thinking? In order briefly to map out an answer as to why the prospect of opening up to a new era represented in utopian terms seems impossible today, we will evoke three different issues. The first point will take into consideration the way in which presentday societies—the democratic liberal Western societies in which we live—represent themselves in such a way so as to exclude the possibility of projecting a different future. A second point will consider the political experience brought about by this self-representation of society, such that it becomes understandable that its political structures are based precisely on this kind of representation. Finally, the third

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 29

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

30

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

argumentative thread will analyze the relationship between this society and the experience of time underlying it.

Modern Utopia Without Location: Contemporary Uchronia As to the first point, we would argue that contemporary liberal democratic societies close themselves off to the future since they believe they represent the end point in history after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Francis Fukuyama argued in The End of History and the Last Man , following Alexandre Kojève. This is done by presenting history as a simple, unilateral, and progressive trajectory, at the expense of sacrificing many of its “factual truths.” Modern societies have gone through a historical process of progressively conquering freedom, autonomy, and emancipation, a process that now seems to have come to an end. For this reason, history—the long fight to overcome natural obstacles that stand in the way of human desire—is considered as being at its end. This end point is represented, above all, by the reconciliation between humanity and nature, or by what Kojève, in his readings of Hegel, has described as the animalization of man. It is in this sense that, on the subject of the end of human history, Kojève says: The disappearance of Man at the end of History, therefore, [. . .] is not a biological catastrophe: Man remains alive as an animal in harmony with nature or given Being. What disappears is Man properly so-called—that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or in general, the Subject opposed to the Object. In point of fact, the end of human Time or History—that is, the definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called or of the free and historical individual—means quite simply the cessation of Action in the full sense of the term. Practically, this means: the disappearance of war and bloody revolutions. (158) The reconciliation between man and nature and the arrival of man at a post-historical state, therefore, corresponds to the most complex reversal of the world’s utopian experience. If utopia was the equivalent of the opening to a new time, where history as it had occurred until now contrasted with history as it could be, one of the most important bases for social experience within our contemporary societies resides in the representation of both a fulfilled history and of a future that indefinitely extends an achievement that has been already reached. A brief outline of human experience at the entry point into a post-historical life, and the conciliation of man with nature—the “animalization” of man— can be given here. Its first defining characteristic consists in what has been seen as the loss of human capacity for being oneself, a phenomenon that has frequently been regarded as the result of man’s immersion in mass culture. This loss is still best explained in the pages of Being and Time , where Heidegger analyzes the inauthenticity of man’s escape from himself and his becoming an impersonal “self”: “In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper,

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 30

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

FROM MODERN UTOPIAS TO CONTEMPORARY UCHRONIA

31

every Other is like the next. [. . .] We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking” (Being and Time , 1996, 164). Heidegger’s analysis of man’s conversion into something other than himself, into a mere version of the “they,” the analysis of his conversion into a mere “impersonal self” that thinks what is generally thought, that wants what is generally wanted, that says what is generally said and feels what is generally felt, is relevant today, in that it is not limited to criticizing mass culture, or to a political criticism of the loss of individuality within totalitarian phenomena, but highlights the characteristics of human life in a post-historical condition. The painless conversion of humans into a simple “they” leads to a second fundamental trait in the emergence of post-historical humanity. The human being who becomes an animal in harmony with nature, and who represents, in his singularity, an empty “self,” mainly comes into being by joining a public sphere, wherein she or he speaks, thinks, wants, and feels. If modern liberal democracy was the result of an effort to achieve human emancipation and of mankind’s endeavor to become more and more enlightened and educated by taking part in a political society guided by free and critical thought, then the post-historical status of this very democracy is based, precisely, on reversing the order in this relationship. Thought is now shaped as propaganda, which determines the opinions, wishes, and feelings of human beings. As Edward Bernays wrote in 1928, in the opening of his Propaganda : “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” (37) This painless experiencing of the world, where there is no place for conflicts and discord, where being oneself becomes identical with being what everyone is, or with feeling and talking as everyone feels and talks within the public sphere by increasingly avoiding the expressing of indelicate feelings or politically incorrect talk, points to a third fundamental trait of post-historical man, a trait that one could describe as increasing infantilization. It could be said that in the fundamental experience of post-historical humanity all that is wished for must come true, and must do so without any cost. We are dealing with the transformation of man into a child, whose instantly fulfilled wishes prevent him from representing himself as a temporal entity that must mature and develop. In this way, if contemporary liberal democratic societies represent themselves as being at the end point in history, the human beings who inhabit them are characterized not by the need of becoming or by the effort to develop, but by the simple desire to vindicate an “immediate authenticity,” pursuing their desire to be, here and now, everything they want to be. As Pascal Bruckner puts it, in his description of contemporary man’s experiences as an infantilized being: I do not “become” any more, I am all that I must be at every moment, I can stand by my emotions, desires, and fantasies, without second thought. Whereas freedom is

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 31

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

32

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

the faculty of breaking free from determinisms I, on the contrary, intend to wed them. I will not erect any barrier to my appetites, I do not have to build myself any more—that is, I do not have to introduce any distance between me and me; I have only to follow my inclinations, to become one with myself. (112–13) As to the second point, the representation of our contemporary societies as situated at an end point in history ties in with the organization of their political structure. These societies emerge as the inheritors of a modern tradition based on the rejection of absolutist power. In this sense, they are in concord with Montesquieu’s famous claim that power had to be limited by power itself, holding the separation of powers as the main source of political legitimacy. The three essential powers that make up the state in Montesquieu’s view—the legislative, executive, and judicial—were both separate and convergent as a unit. It is based on the unity within this divergence that a reference to a temporal dimension underlying the three powers can be made. In the practice of judicial power one would look to the past for law and jurisprudence references. The executive power, concentrating on the present, would rapidly adopt measures fit for current circumstances. In its turn, the scope of the legislative power, in the discussions undertaken during the process of legislating, would look into the future, a future whose profile could be imagined and prepared in the course of deliberations. Having in mind the temporal articulation between the three powers in question, it is possible to say that our liberal contemporary democracies are characterized by an acceleration of time, in which social, technological, and economic changes occur at such a rapid pace that the process of anticipating them and of thinking in terms of the future is impossible. This is why parliaments and assemblies, that is, the political structures whose function should be precisely that of deliberating and thinking prospectively, lose their original role of anticipating the future, while the very principle of the separation of powers fades away through a slow transference of legislative power to the decrees issued by the executive. As William Scheuerman wrote, accounting for this change: What classical writers failed to foresee is that social acceleration potentially undermines core features of the temporal separation of powers, disfiguring liberal democracy as initially conceived. In particular, social acceleration presents a direct threat to the notion of prospective, or future-oriented, legislation, tending to undermine the paramount position of legislative rule making in the traditional liberal democratic temporal division of labor. [. . .] Nonetheless, the most likely beneficiary of recent shifts in the temporal horizons of human activity is the unitary executive, whose contemporaneous and high-speed temporal contours appear to leave it especially well suited to decision making in a corresponding high-speed social environment. (45) The concentration of power in the executive, which has been defined by Clinton Rossiter as “constitutional dictatorship,” and the relegation of parliaments to the

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 32

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

FROM MODERN UTOPIAS TO CONTEMPORARY UCHRONIA

33

function of mere auxiliary agents of governments, in which real thinking, argumentation, and persuasion become more and more rare, makes for the political organization of a society whose fundamental characteristic resides in the impossibility of opening up to the future. As a result of positioning themselves at the final stage of the development of political institutions, our societies view the future as an indefinite continuation of what they already are. They establish themselves in a time outside of time, a time without time, which we could, thus, define as “uchronic.” If the concept of opening up to a future has found in the utopian ideal the most immediate way of expressing itself within modern thought, the impossibility of thinking in a utopian manner shows that our contemporary societies are postmodern in a very particular sense, in that their defining characteristic is the absence of the future. It is on the basis of this removal of the future, on the basis of what could be called a uchronic reaction against any type of utopia, that the experience of time in the societies we live in can be defined. On the one hand, these societies, by virtue of some sort of utopian nostalgia, cultivate feelings of enthusiasm toward the “other,” toward what is different and new, with an openness that is more “autophobic” than “heterophile” in nature, that is, an openness that expresses not so much a tendency for an approximation to the “other,” to what is different and strange, but, rather, emerges from a desire to become distant from one’s own “self.” This is why, in contemporary societies, the paradigm of the intolerable resides in xenophobia, an attitude found at the opposite end of the spectrum from what could be designated as a tendency for “autophobic ecophobia,” that is, the current disposition to free man from a representation of substantial identities and prejudices by placing him in a sort of selfless existence. “Political correctness” originates here, and does not necessarily entail openness toward the other or to what is different. Rather, it is based upon a simulation of this openness that tries to eliminate difference by means of erasing the disparities between “oneself” and the “other” or between what is the same and what is different. The erasure of all differences— described by Plato in the Republic as the essential meaning of democracy (562d– 562e)—is, therefore, the fundamental experience at the foundation of contemporary societies, reducing what is different to an indifferent sameness (already portrayed in the Platonic text), including the abolition of differences between those who are governed and their governors, between citizens and foreigners, between masculine and feminine, between teacher and pupil, knowledge and ignorance, competence and incompetence, or even the move away from a clear difference between men and animals.3 In all the specific differences mentioned, it is the fundamental differentiation between the “self” and the “other” that underlies the very possibility of difference. It is, therefore, the fundamental indeterminacy of sameness and otherness that defines the way time is experienced in our societies: time as opening up to a future that would not be, after all, different from the present. For our societies, it is no longer a question of inaugurating a different future, but, instead, of simulating this opening. This simulation legitimates contemporary societies by making them inherit the

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 33

10/17/2011 10:07:32 PM

34

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

legacy of modernity through permanently invoking the “other” or the otherness of what is to come, yet making this “other” vanish into sameness. On the other hand, if in contemporary societies the act of calling upon the otherness of the future becomes a mere expression of centrifugal dynamism, then that which is still to come (l’avenir) is reduced to a simple promise banished outside factual time. At the core, the experience of time in contemporaneity can be analyzed as a uchronic reconfiguration of the future as seen through the lens of modern utopias. Jacques Derrida’s concept of a “democracy to come” (democratie à venir) could be considered as the most expressive portrayal of experiencing time in uchronic terms in contemporary thought. This allusion to a “democracy to come” appears, for example, in The Politics of Friendship : “For democracy remains to come, this is its essence insofar as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-presentable concept” (306). It is here, in evoking a simple promise situated in a time which constantly subtracts itself from time, that contemporary uchronia finds its strength and its weakness, through, simultaneously, simulating and denying modern utopia. In its decentralization from itself and its fusion with the “other,” in the permanent allusion to something upcoming yet always subtracted, contemporary societies seem to belong, at first glance, to the perpetual movement of the uninterrupted opening up to a future that, far from being shaped through a normative idea or an ideal, remains always unfinished and perfectible, that is im-possible.4 Yet, since such a future can neither be corrupted by its realization, since this future cannot be made present but remains an essentially indeterminate promise, nor can it entail a description of a real place or a time to come—the contemporary equivalent of modern utopias— contemporary uchronia, the evocation of a time which evades time itself, ends up as the mere intellectual echo of the removal of the future. In this sense, in the same way in which utopia is a construction of the modern world, the emergence of contemporary uchronia, which encompasses a nostalgic celebration of its utopian past, is, in today’s terms, nothing more than an intellectual construction removed from the life experiences within societies notorious for the persistence of their status quo.

9780826420725_Ch03_Finals_txt_print.indd 34

10/17/2011 10:07:33 PM

CHAPTER 4

Existential Utopia: Of the World, the Possible, the Finite1 Michael Marder and Patrícia Vieira

If the plurivocal utopian aspirations resounding throughout history in different corners of the earth could be distilled into one slogan, this uncanny chorus of voices would announce, “Another world is possible!” From a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the present, this battle cry draws the energy to outline a new sociopolitical configuration in a performative gesture that strives to bring into existence the very future order it inaugurates in speech. But the utopian fervor, ignited by a righteous urgency, does not leave enough time for reflecting upon the meaning of the performative and, instead, prompts its adherents to adopt the prefabricated interpretation of these words imposed by the same hegemonic ideology it aims to overthrow; herein lies the tragedy of many utopian experiments of the past. To restore to utopia its radical edge, it behooves us to dispense with the certainties inherent in the consensually accepted meaning of “Another world is possible!” questioning not only its overall sense but also every single word comprising this expression. On the one hand, with a view to reassuring its supporters, imparting to them a feeling of hope, and gathering them around a common cause, the utopian slogan strategically presents the “other” world, the world to come, as undoubtedly better and more desirable than the “old” world. The formalism of “Another world is possible!” however, does not substantiate this implicit assertion, for the future it promises—if qualitatively different from the present—is always unpredictable and fraught with risk that dwells in all open-ended possibilities. On the other hand, the apocalyptic overtones of the phrase proclaiming the end of this world and the advent of the next one, based on the shaky foundations of a belief that the present can be reduced to a tabula rasa, upon which the infinitely malleable future will be inscribed, harbors extreme idealism: the utopian projection becomes a mere figment of collective imagination unless it takes materiality and resistance to idealization into account. In order to avoid the double trap of formalism and idealism, while retaining the utopian impulse, we put forth the notion of existential utopia that acknowledges, and even embraces, the risks of alternative futures; that replaces the empty form of

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 35

10/17/2011 10:07:36 PM

36

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

utopian hope with the figure of existence; and that recovers the material underside of utopian projections, even as it spells out their limitations. The outlines of existential utopia will only come into a sharper focus when each of the words making up “Another world is possible!” is submitted to close scrutiny. Revisiting utopian thought today entails registering the obvious theologicophilosophical connotations of “world,” “possibility,” and “otherness”—terms that are also crucial to phenomenology and existentialism—not only for the purpose of excavating the various semantic layers of the slogan but also for reorienting it back toward existence, wherein it has originated. First, the world, commonly understood as a unified structure inhabited by multiple individuals, is a concept presupposed by objectivist science, which reduces divergences in perspective to different points of entry into a reality, ultimately monolithic and the same in itself. Globalization, starting with the economic integration of world markets, and scientific rationality with its growing monopoly on thinking are the mutually reinforcing aspects of a single metaphysical outlook that raises the notion of one world to the status of a regulative ideal for lived actuality. But, as phenomenology shows, a plurality of worlds is intrinsic to the concept of the “world,” understood as a web of significations irreducible to an objectively true and, hence, unitary structure of meaning. The event of utopia would, on this view, be defined by a break in the coherent semantic network, a productive sense of worldlessness, or being in-between, that could give rise to a new framework of meaning—meaningless within the old coordinates of signification but carrying with it the possibility of rupture and delineating a path to a new world. Second, phenomenology and existentialism reject both an erroneous identification of possibility with something merely imagined, lacking any bearings upon actuality, and the quasi-Aristotelian approach that takes it to be synonymous with potentiality awaiting its inevitable realization. Rather, possibilities form the fabric of human existence, guiding our projects and actions in the world without standing for teloi to be fulfilled. In the context of existential utopia, they ought to be nurtured as possibilities, not converted into blueprints for the realization of a predefined political project. Uncoupled from a teleological worldview and the logic of productivity, possibility would not be annihilated by historical failures inherent in an existential modality of utopia. Third, in the mirror of a utopia that tears the continuum of the present, the subject sees herself as alien to herself, incapable of making sense both of the new world unraveling before her eyes and of her own place in it. This subjection to “otherness,” tied to the finitude of sense and of the world, highlights the frailty of meanings, that, rather than transcendental or transhistorical givens, are transitory existential fragments that arise and pass away in temporal immanence. If existential utopia is to heed the call of the Other, summoning us to our responsibility, it would need to come to terms with such finitude as its own enabling condition and, instead of insisting on the immutability of the project it enunciates, accept diverse possibilities, including those that do not coincide with its own vision for the future.

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 36

10/17/2011 10:07:37 PM

OF THE WORLD, THE POSSIBLE, THE FINITE

37

Between This World and Another: An Ex-Topic Overture A crucial insight of phenomenology is that the world is not set over and against the subject in a primordial confrontation and, therefore, is not an object to be apprehended and potentially dominated through the imposition of rigid forms onto unruly matter, leading to a technical subjugation of the natural environment or of other human beings, but is, rather, a milieu, wherein the I is a priori immersed. This conception reflects one of the four senses of the world put forth in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time , namely the world as Umwelt, or environment, which is the practical scene of Dasein’s (the German philosopher’s word for a human being) being-in-theworld. What is common to this and the remaining three aspects of the world—“the totality of things,” the modes of being of this totality as ready-to-hand or present-athand, and the worldhood of the world that coincides with Dasein itself—is that they refer, in various ways, to a web of meanings constitutive of the being of Dasein (Being and Time, 1962, 93). In this period of Heidegger’s work, the predominant question is one concerning the meaning of Being, and the philosopher’s forever provisional response is, in a nutshell, that the meaning of Being is meaning itself as it appears before Dasein in lived actuality.2 Yet, if being-in-the-world entails being posited within a network of significations, this does not imply that Dasein is the source of all meaning, in the way that a subject or consciousness, in idealism, determines the entirety of its object. Instead, Dasein is “thrown” into the world, passively carried into the midst of significations that precede it, all the while attempting to take over this thrownness and make it its own in a movement of projection that completes its temporal-ontological constitution. A decade after the composition of Being and Time , in a lecture course titled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger emphasized the projective character of Dasein, which he had already sketched before, in terms of its world-forming capacity, distinguishing it from inanimate beings and even animals (177). Within the framework of the earlier text, this world-forming capacity is tantamount to Dasein’s active ability to explicate the meanings that comprise its world as well as, more radically, to reinterpret and re-signify its thrownness. Hermeneutical activity should not be confined to a superficial and merely theoretical exercise that leaves unchanged the underlying architectonics of the world, since the latter, qua a set of meanings, is drastically transformed with every new interpretation and act of re-signification. In this light, Marx’s Thesis XI on Feuerbach ought to be reformulated to express the co-imbrication of interpretation and change, so that to interpret the world would already be to change it. Such insight is consistent with Heidegger’s criticism directed, at the same time, against the traditional distinction between theory and practice that has culminated in Husserlian theoreticism and against the technicalization of theory and thought itself, enslaved to the exigencies of making (“Letter on Humanism,” 218). To the extent that it appropriates and re-signifies the world of meanings, thinking or theory is eminently practical and, therefore, is one of the linchpins of Dasein’s world-forming capacity.

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 37

10/17/2011 10:07:37 PM

38

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Existential utopia is, precisely, this theoretical practice, re-signifying the lifeworld of a community and enabling the formation of a new world, that is to say, facilitating the emergence of a new set of shared semantic coordinates. But under what conditions is re-signification possible? What are the sites of rupture in the otherwise hermetically sealed totality of meanings, in which Dasein finds itself? In Being and Time parallel fissures are depicted in the two main divisions of the book: the first break occurs in the conglomeration of usable things (Zeuge ), when a piece of equipment fails to function as it should, while the second takes place when Dasein faces the ineluctability of its death, causing all other practical concerns to fade into the background. In both cases, Dasein reacts with shock to the deficiencies in the totality of its world, such that its sense of astonishment causes the displacement of what used to be familiar not to mention a total breakdown of previously established meanings. Thus, re-signification becomes possible where something loses its secure, preassigned place in the totality of significations, triggering a sense of meaninglessness and confusion that clear the space for the emergence of new meanings. Existential utopia begins, then, with the experience of displacement and dislocation, the realization that the world one inhabits is imperfect, or, in the words of Novalis, that “Die Welt ist der Inbegriff des unvollkommenen Lebens” [“The world is the essence of an imperfect life”] (72). It commences in an ex-topia, where parts of reality turn out to be no longer at hand, unusable, estranged, so that the whole world becomes uncanny, and where Dasein’s whole being is shaken by the anticipation of its death, which brings it outside of itself in an intimate and ecstatic relation to its future. The private ex-topia of Dasein is directly translatable into a ground-shift in the political topos, precipitated by the sense of injustice, a presentiment that the world is out of order and that time is out of joint. As Derrida put it in a tacit reference to Heidegger, “Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, disadjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows [. . .]” (Specters, 77–8). To make the world just and to set it aright it is not enough to make local adjustments in the network of meaning, while maintaining its overall structure intact; the dawning awareness of multiple localized wrongs, corresponding to the breaks in the totality of significations, is a catalyst for a replacement of the entire system of meaning. More precisely, the subjects thus politicized come to understand that the “dis-adjustments,” similar to the ruptures described by Heidegger, are not sheer accidental occurrences in an otherwise smoothly functioning totality, but are constitutive of the political and economic organization, dependent upon these very injustices. The ensuing disappointment, deemed by Simon Critchley to be the common beginning of philosophy and politics (2), is born from this massive loss of confidence in the world that marks a moment of crisis. If to be in the world is to rely upon the support of our surroundings and, politically, to trust in the basic fairness and minimal advantageousness of the sociopolitical arrangement in which we take part, then our being-in-the-world is shaken to its core when the world is revealed to be neither supportive nor trustworthy.

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 38

10/17/2011 10:07:37 PM

OF THE WORLD, THE POSSIBLE, THE FINITE

39

An analogous “limit experience” is narrated by Jean Améry, who pinpoints the most lasting consequence of torture, resulting from the “first blow” inflicted upon the victim, as the total loss of confidence in the world and in the benevolence of others, a trust which can never be regained (40). The victims of torture and of politicaleconomic injustice are expelled from the world, or, better yet, the world as a meaningful set of significations is withdrawn from them, inscribing the idea that it “is going very badly” right on their bodies. Devoid of the mediations of mundane concerns and put face-to-face with death, which, aside from intimating a certain worldlessness, is perceived as the utmost injustice, they embody an ex-topic existence, are placeless and reduced to the status of worldless things, according to Heidegger’s classification in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (177).3 Elsewhere, Heidegger considers such homelessness to be the negative condition of modern humanity par excellence, an evidence for the forgetting of Being, which is an offshoot of an instrumental approach to the world: “Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world. [. . .] [T]he estrangement of man has its roots in the homelessness of modern man” (“Letter on Humanism,” 243). Ex-topic uprooting, nevertheless, does not end in the impasse of alienation but effects a denaturalization of uncritically accepted meanings surrounding Dasein in everyday life, and this loss of home and world—the fact that they have become unusable and uninhabitable—is an occasion to problematize and reinvent them. In contrast to Heidegger’s position, it could be argued that the state of homelessness, the absolute evacuation of the world, leaves in its trail Being in its mereness, to which Dasein is abandoned, vulnerable to every injustice, exposed to its impending death, and, as a result, prompted to redefine the very meaning of “home.”4 The predicament of homelessness, the ex-topic “ground zero” of modernity is, then, the sine qua non for any positive formulations of utopia anchored in finite human existence. In the depths of a crisis, be it purely political or economic, a community arrives at the ex-topic “ground zero,” when its entire world is put on the verge of collapse. Even when it comes as a surprise, the crisis is a phenomenalization, making evident the already existing disadjustments in the res publica that can no longer be circumscribed or obfuscated. Yet, what follows the exacerbation of the constitutive injustices fissuring the world does not necessarily include a complete systemic overhaul that would amount to a utopic displacement of the “old” world; on the contrary, a slew of minor changes are frequently introduced in an attempt to salvage and keep essentially unchanged the existing web of significations, even if, on the long run, these patchwork modifications generate greater injustices. A paradigmatic ex-topic situation unfolded in U.S. politics at the height of the latest economic crisis, when, in September 2008, the Congress rejected the bailout package endorsed by the White House, due to a vociferous opposition to a measure that meant an increase in economic inequalities and an unprecedented allocation of public funds to banks and large private companies. When the Congress reconvened some days later, it approved the bailout bill with minor changes, succumbing to the pressure of conservative lobby groups and of the most emblematic figures of the political establishment. On a

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 39

10/17/2011 10:07:37 PM

40

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

deeper level, however, the congressional decision was motivated by the fear that, in case of an economic collapse, the existing framework of meaning would suffer an irreversible blow, heralding what Heidegger called “world-withdrawal” and “worlddecay” (“Origin of the Work of Art,” 166). The loss of trust in the quasi-miraculous capacity of capitalism to renew itself put the system as a whole into question but failed, in this case, to guide the displacement to its utopian climax, in a recodification of the meaning of the economy as an activity that, in the last instance, should be pursued for the benefit of the community. Once again, the communist specter was conjured as a scarecrow to frighten the public away from real alternatives to the status quo. Ex-topic dislocation is a temporary suspension of this world, with all its rules and semantic-ontological formations, that propels the subject into a gap between worlds, where utopia may finally be thought: a rupture that is spatial but also temporal, separating the bygone world from the one yet to come. This in-between region, where old meanings are no longer valid, while new ones have not yet been found, is not accessible from the standpoint of ontological experience, lacks phenomenal clarity, and withholds the possibility of naming (hence, of determining and mastering beings) from the ex-topic subject. To submit oneself to the terrifying namelessness, to unlearn the old set of meanings and names, is already to be on the path to a utopic reconfiguration of the world: “But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless” (Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 223). The “nearness of Being” is Heidegger’s designation of utopia, the promise of a new name that, instead of replicating the old semantic power-structures of the world, would keep its existential-utopian commitment to a name without mastery, retaining a modicum of namelessness. Far from a dialectical synthesis of the name and its other, the survival of the nameless in a web of meaning signals a capacity for deformalization, in other words, a fluidity of semantic-ontological complexes and their readiness to dissolve as soon as they have been brought into existence in the new world shaped by the utopian impulse.5 Both methodologically and ontologically, deformalization is predicated upon an exercise of power without domination— an aspiration inherent in all utopian thought—that embraces its own precariousness and opens itself to the possibility of its own undoing. In accepting its fragility, existential utopia avows its temporal character, leaving behind the illusion that it would be able to transcend history and to lay claim to an immutable idea of justice. In this sense, utopia is neither limited to this-worldly immanence nor bound to an other-worldly transcendence; it discloses the temporality and the finitude of the world, as much as of the “truth” that is born and that dies with every new set of meanings. Its post-metaphysical thrust consists in a dethroning of the objectivist notion of eternal truth, so that the guiding thread for political praxis is not a normative ideal, against which the imperfect world would be measured, but an appeal to justice, which contends with the unbearable senselessness of hegemonic meanings, proliferating in the current world dis-order.

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 40

10/17/2011 10:07:37 PM

OF THE WORLD, THE POSSIBLE, THE FINITE

41

Reality’s Fantasy: A Utopian Ontology of the Possible Ex-topic meaninglessness, freed from the signifying framework of the bygone world, holds in store two mutually exclusive possibilities: the dead-end of utter resignation, nihilism, and the foreclosure of all meaning-making, or the utopian promise of the emergence of a new world. Including in equal measure the possible and the impossible, such meaninglessness is the source of existential utopia and the prototype of possibility itself, which, if it is to avoid being reduced to a predetermined plan awaiting actualization, must be coupled with impossibility, with what resists the logic of fulfillment. Resignation and nihilism are the side effects of one’s abandonment to impossibility, while existential utopia envisions the possibility of a new meaning, which is not safeguarded against the risk of sliding back into meaninglessness. Attuned to impossibility even in the midst of exploring the horizons of the possible, existential utopia inherits from ex-topia the capacity of deformalization, precisely because possibility as possibility would be betrayed if it were to solidify into a preordained course of action. It follows that the distinction drawn by Fredric Jameson in Archaeologies of the Future between the idealized utopian impulse and a more concrete utopian program is not applicable to a utopia that has eschewed the Aristotelian emphasis on the actualization of potentialities in favor of possibilities comprising the nuclei of human existence (1–9). Its impulse, deformalizing all programmatic overtures, renders existential utopia self-deconstructive: plastic and agile thanks to its accedence to self-disruption. Possibility, the self-deconstructive element of existential utopia, is subtracted from the continuum of potentiality and actuality, where the present is the point of reference for the past, as well as for the future, transformed, under its sway, into pastpresent and future-present. As the purely futural modality of time, possibility does not coincide with a point of the Now that has not yet arrived, that is to say, it is not exhausted by the Aristotelian conception of the future formulated in Physics (Bk. IV, Chs. 10–14). Specifically, it parts ways with Aristotle’s understanding of the future, insulated from that which is unpredictable and unexpected, because this future-Now is a potentiality on the brink of actualization, a fixed essence whose self-presence is only temporarily deferred on a predestined route toward its fulfillment. A closer look at the Greek words for potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia), converted by Aristotle into rigorous philosophical terms, demonstrates that the latter is truer to utopian possibility than the former, in that energeia , which literally meant “puttingto-work” in a perpetual reactivation of an essence, defies formalization by commencing every time anew and, thus, constituting a recurrent starting point for human action. Existential utopia is, precisely, this energeia , a putting of possibilities to work, without postulating an underlying essence and without any guarantees for a successful outcome; it is the energy and capacity for a fresh start that still remains after everything has been actualized. Unlike a utopia beholden to essentialism (that is, an essential utopia), the one wedded to the concerns of existence does not foretell a happy resolution of the human drama at the end of history, when all potentialities

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 41

10/17/2011 10:07:37 PM

42

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

have fully blossomed, given that it subscribes to a view of the human as a crossroads of volatile possibilities. In his thought, Heidegger revised the relation between the Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality, as well as their conceptual connection to Being. In doing so, he launched an overarching critique of post-Aristotelian philosophy that, from Scholasticism to the late nineteenth century, saw in actuality nothing more than the seat of full presence (and, hence, of objective Being), having erased the connotations of energeia as “putting-to-work” and having turned this process into a finished product of essence’s self-actualization. In order to revitalize that lost sense of energeia , a loss that exacerbated Aristotle’s demotion of potentiality to a deficient mode of Being, Heidegger’s version of phenomenology ascribes Being, in the existential sense, to possibilities, privileged over the continuum of potentiality-actuality and standing “higher than actuality” (Being and Time , 1962, 63). Correlatively, Heideggerian phenomenology avoids molding existence after a meta-physical ideal of essence cast in terms of pure presence: “Concealed in its [Western thinking’s] essential provenance, the differentiation of essentia (essentiality) and existentia (actuality) completely dominates the destiny of Western history and of all history determined by Europe” (“Letter on Humanism,” 232). An existential approach to existence, advocated by Heidegger, distances itself from the traditional determination of existence by essence and, instead, distills human essence from that existence, which takes place in a constant tension between past and future possibilities, configuring Dasein in terms of a “thrown projection.” Such re-elaboration of existence requires a hermeneutics of possibility that would tease out the tacit connotations of this term: the German words for the “possible” and “possibility,” “möglich ” and “Möglichkeit,” respectively, are etymologically associated with “liking” and “enabling” (“Letter on Humanism,” 220). While to like or to favor something is, for Heidegger, to let it be in the unfolding of possibilities proper to it, to enable is to allow these possibilities to be put to work and, so, to retrieve the sense of energeia in Aristotelian philosophy, occluded by the subsequent history of metaphysics. According to this double etymology, then the activation of possibilities is possible thanks to an underlying receptivity that precedes and displaces the beginning of any work, utopian or otherwise. Existential possibility diverges from potentiality, also, insofar as it is not a matter of potency or power, the ability to bring into effect one’s sovereign will. Such differentiation is applicable even to instances of the autonomous subject interrupting itself, as it were, and choosing its own impotence. It is by underlining the negative and disruptive aspects of potentiality, the “potentiality to not be” (Potentialities, 183), that Giorgio Agamben endeavors to redeem this Aristotelian term. On Agamben’s reading, potentiality hinges upon the proclamation “I cannot,” or Bartleby’s “I prefer not to,” and is, therefore, a decision not to exercise one’s power or capacity, a withholding that distinguishes humans as such. What this formulation leaves out, however, is the existential condition of possibility for the possibility of action, the infra-potential favoring and enabling that necessarily precede any

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 42

10/17/2011 10:07:38 PM

OF THE WORLD, THE POSSIBLE, THE FINITE

43

“I can” and “I cannot.” In the terms of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, any potential capacity of the subject is invested by the Other, who is the precondition for my being able to be able, since the Other is the heteronomous origin of my autonomy, as much as of my subjectivity (198). This first assent to otherness, before any explicit affirmation or negation of the power of the I, is the unchosen and unpredictable grounding of existence and of the very possibility of the future. Existential utopia, oriented toward possibilities, is a liking and an enabling of (indeed, an opening unto) a future that would be eventful—not predicated on a choice between potentiality and impotentiality still tethered to the hegemonic framework of signification— and that would impel the construction of new worlds in response to the appeal of others, those victim to injustice, who prompt the search for a new structure of meaningfulness. The victims of injustice are the embodied conditions of possibility for existential utopia, which always carries with it the possibility of failure, as it aims to respond to the call of the Other, the heterogeneous source of the utopian project. The most prevalent criticism of utopia faults it for being an instance of wishful thinking, in that it fails to acknowledge the constraints of reality and, reduced to an unviable dream in the world of Realpolitik , a priori invites failure. There is, however, no contradiction between the real, reinterpreted in an existential key as a point of intersection of various possibilities, and utopian aspirations that make explicit the possibilities comprising reality itself. That, in its temporal unfolding, reality is nothing but a conglomerate of possibilities has been observed by Novalis, who stated: “Alle Wirklichkeit hat ein Vor und ein Nach— beides sind Möglichkeiten— Nach ist Möglichk[eit]. Vor war Möglichkeit. In ihr ist aber alles zugleich” (“All reality has a before and an after— both are possibilities—After is a possibility. Before was a possibility. In it [in reality], everything, therefore, exists simultaneously”) (16). Consequently, numerous possibilities, precisely because they are not identical with potentialities awaiting actualization, will fail, that is, they will not come to pass and will not be thrust into the light of the present and of presence. In the Aristotelian logic governing the continuum of the potential and the actual, failure is inscribed as a lacuna in the teleological ordering of the world, a lack to be filled by perfecting human knowledge of the immutable hierarchy of ends. From an existential point of view, however, failure is not equated to negativity, given that it betokens the non-actualization of possibilities, which does not preclude their efficaciousness in the existential reality of Dasein.6 If, following Novalis, reality is the aggregate of temporal possibilities, then some of these will surface at the expense of others in a dynamic aleatory process, devoid of prior determinations, that weaves the fabric of history. What is commonly regarded as failure is the underside of the historical fabric, where marginalized possibilities, rejected on the grounds of being unrealistic at a given sociopolitical conjuncture, have been eclipsed. Utopia shifts the spotlight onto these sidelined possibilities and fleshes out the existential core of history that, as Jameson has it, “progresses by failure rather than by success” (Postmodernism, 209).

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 43

10/17/2011 10:07:38 PM

44

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

In the post-Aristotelian paradigm, history strives toward a telos to be fulfilled in accordance with the logic of actualization, while failure stands for a merely temporary setback on this path. But a consideration of history from the standpoint of existence discloses that failure is an integral part of its becoming, where historical experiments reconfiguring the world in radically new ways lead to unpredictable outcomes. The recent controversies surrounding the fate of the Euro and, by extension, of the European Union, aptly illustrate the divergence between these competing models for interpreting history, as well as their implications for the thinking of utopia. On the one hand, at the ideological level, the philosophy of history underlying the utopia of European integration has drawn heavily on the Kantian teleology of perpetual peace, postulating the absence of conflict between members of the European community as a measure for the successful actualization of this ideal. Although, from its inception, the European Union has been, in the first place, designed as an economic association, the ideology buttressing it has downplayed the economic underpinnings of “cooperation” and “peace”—ideals, predicated, at the origins of political economy, on free trade that would contribute to the augmentation of the wealth of nations. The utopian project of the EU is, accordingly, presented as primarily political and as rooted in a common cultural heritage that, presumably, gave birth to the idea of a shared European destiny. The ideological account of the European telos explains failures— such as, most notably, the Second World War—in terms of a temporary blindness plaguing some actors on the European political stage, and preventing a complete realization of the Kantian ideal, which should continue to shepherd the efforts at “conflict resolution.” In light of this ideological construction, the current crisis in the Euro zone, provoked by the global economic downturn and intensified by the danger that some members of the EU would default on their sovereign national debts, represents the failure of peripheral countries, most of them located in the South, to conform to the call of the common European destiny and to live up to the Spirit— of Protestantism, capitalism, and Hegelian idealism—born in the center of the continent. The actualization of the Spirit’s potentialities demands that the particular, that is, the poorer nationstates of Europe, be sacrificed to the will of the core countries that wears the mask of universality; unless such sacrifices are performed, thus filling the lacunae (or the failures) in the teleological project, the deviant countries are to be immolated on the altar of History, thereby paving the way for the nations that remain true to the European ideal to achieve its fulfillment. As it is the case in Hegel’s dialectics, the self-sacrifice of the PIGS—a racialized and animalistic abbreviation referring to Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain—would allow them to get back into the human fold, molded in the image of the frugal and, at the same time, more prosperous North. On the other hand, an existential perspective on failure suggests that crises, like the one unfolding in the Euro zone, expose the fault-lines around which the entity in crisis is organized, namely the profound economic inequalities not only among European countries, but also within each EU member state. The failure—exacerbated by the economic slump—to approximate the ideals of peace and prosperity for

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 44

10/17/2011 10:07:38 PM

OF THE WORLD, THE POSSIBLE, THE FINITE

45

all is, in this case, an occasion for voicing and redressing the dormant utopian demands for social and economic justice, rendered all the more urgent in this predicament. Following the precepts of existential utopia, Europe is neither an ideal to be actualized, nor a placeholder for a preexisting collective identity, but a set of possibilities underwritten by the appeal of the sacrificial victims of economic “progress.” If it is to heed the call for justice, Europe will need at least to entertain the possibility of a radical transformation, at the end of which it might no longer recognize itself. The utopian Europe, stripped of a fixed identity, would bear its name as a promise of justice, uncoupled from all demands for the actualization of an essence, whether historical or transhistorical. The possibility of failure, ensconced in the task of reimagining the European project, is part and parcel of utopian imagination as such: “It is the failure of imagination that is important, and not its achievement, since in any case all representations fail and it is always impossible to imagine” (Jameson, Postmodernism , 209). Considering that existential utopia is a performative that endeavors to give rise to what it announces and, therefore, does not have in view an ideal against which its truth claims could be assessed, the vocabulary of failure may not be entirely appropriate for discussing its outcomes. No longer following the compass of objective truth, utopian thought inaugurates a space of freedom for imagining reality otherwise and, thus, matches the vocation of philosophy itself: “[. . .] philosophy is an art, striving to break through a logical chain of conclusions and carrying man into the shoreless sea of fantasy, of the fantastic, where everything is equally possible and impossible” (Shestov 40, our translation). Shestov’s philosophy searches for alternatives to the narrow prescriptions of formal logic and assigns to fantasy the role of exploding the prevalent webs of signification that set the ontological and epistemological parameters for existence, thus avoiding the constraints and exigencies of conclusions: “He [human being] starts to look for darkness since darkness gives freedom, in that, in darkness, the ruling principle is not logic, forcing one to reach conclusions, but fantasy, with its arbitrariness [proizvol ]” (Shestov 118, our translation). Contravening the logical principle of noncontradiction, the Russian thinker holds the possible and the impossible to be simultaneously valid, emphasizing, once again, the inherence of failure in all acts of imagination. Fantasy, usually reduced to an ephemeral adornment of or, worse yet, an escape route from a harsh reality, is, in existential terms, the mainstay of this very reality, to the extent that it displaces the petrified contents of the present and enlivens it with possibility. Like the existence it always accompanies, fantasy, devoid of closure, explodes rigid identities and neatly drawn conclusions, freeing utopia from the calculative rationality of means and ends. Husserlian phenomenology takes a first step in identifying fantasy with the foundation of social reality, since it is fantasy that permits the phenomenologist to reach the eidetic core of the practices shaping society. So much so that, in Ideas I, Husserl bestowed upon “feigning” (“Fiktion”) the honor of serving as “the vital element of phenomenology ” and as “the source from which the cognition of ‘eternal truths’ is fed” (160). Such

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 45

10/17/2011 10:07:38 PM

46

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

“truths,” deriving from fantasy, are the main targets of eidetic phenomenology, which discloses the pure essences built into phenomena themselves: The Eidos, the pure essence , can be exemplified for intuition in experiential data [. . .] but it can equally well be exemplified in data of mere phantasy. Accordingly, to seize upon an essence itself [. . .] we can start [. . .] from intuitions which are non-experiencing, which do not seize upon factual existence but which are instead “merely imaginative”. If we produce in free phantasy [. . .] social practices, [. . .] we can see various pure essences originarily and perhaps even adequately: [. . .] the essence of [. . .] any social practice whatever [. . .]. [F]ree phantasy should lead to the imagination of data [. . .] of an essentially novel sort [. . .] that would in no respect alter the originary givenness of the corresponding essences. (Ideas, 11) A free variation of the data of mere fantasy destroys the illusion of necessity that chains us to things as they appear in the present and prevents us from envisioning a different order of reality. Outside the grip of factual existence restricted to the present, when the weight of the perceptual world is lifted and empirical details shed their mask of immutability, alternative social practices no longer seem impossible, in that both feasible and unrealistic (from the standpoint of the intuitional present) examples of sociality become equal partners in the task of outlining the essence of social practices. In the spirit of the Scholastic quodlibet ens, or “whatever being,” “any social practice whatever” fuses freedom and universality by vacating its object of all determinations and eventually becoming an indifferent receptacle for any sociopolitical arrangement. Politically, the receptivity of eidetic fantasy, with its rejection of necessity and its exercise of free variation, announces the utopian kairos and espouses unlimited possibilities otherwise suppressed in hegemonic reality. Despite paying utmost attention to lived experience and the minutiae of the data it yields, however, Husserl remained entrapped in an essentialist position (beholden to “pure essences”) that precluded an existential treatment of fantasy. If, inspired by phenomenology, the production of social practices in free fantasy is to live up to utopian demands, it must trace its provenance back to human finitude and precariousness, supplementing Husserl’s philosophical breakthrough with a thinking steeped in the vicissitudes of existence.

Finitude Without End: From Death to the Other on the Way to Utopia Among existential possibilities, the possibility of death occupies a special place, since, after the decline of the theo-onto-metaphysical model of human beings endowed with an immortal soul, unsurpassable finitude became the hallmark of the human condition. Post-metaphysical philosophy examines the ramifications of finitude not only in its multifaceted thematizations of death but also by focusing on the vulnerability of the human body and the material conditions for its survival, symbiotically entwined with the ethical and political implications of a finite human

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 46

10/17/2011 10:07:38 PM

OF THE WORLD, THE POSSIBLE, THE FINITE

47

ontology. As a result, existential utopia needs to grapple with the constitutive finitude of its subjects, as much as with the limits of it own political project. Heidegger’s writings of the 1920s were part of an effort to overcome traditional metaphysics, demonstrating that, for Dasein, the meaning of Being is finite time. As he states in Being and Time : Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. [. . .] When it stands before itself in this way [in facing death], all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone. [. . .] Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [unüberholbare ]. As such, death is something distinctively impending. (1962, 294) The possibility of death ruptures the world of Dasein, permitting it not only to question its own Being, thanks to a disruption of its being-in-the-world (i.e., of its heedless immersion in the network of significations from which it generates meaning), but also, placed in an ex-topic position, to reconfigure the world from the existential standpoint of being-toward-death. If Dasein “has to take over” the possibility of its death, then, according to Heidegger, every human should be able to undergo a loss of meaning ensuing from the collapse of her “old” world and, thus, be existentially prepared for the task of utopia. In everyday life, however, Dasein evades the unsettling confrontation with the futurity of its death and, instead, submerged in the world of mundane concerns, anesthetizes itself to the thought of its finitude and, consequently, forecloses the possibility of utopia. Driven by the fear that their individuality would be dissolved in the impersonality of death, human beings shore up the old, reassuring webs of signification, but, in doing so, they undergo a deeper loss of self, since they do not seize upon the possibility of death, which, for Dasein, is the individuating factor. The fear of utopia—the affective dimension of anti-utopianism—is attributable, like the terror in the face of death, to the looming threat of depersonalization. In this regard, Jameson observes that “the existential fear of Utopia” is raised by “the possibility of a loss of self so complete that the surviving consciousness cannot but seem an other to ourselves, new-born in the worst sense, in which we have lost even that private unhappiness, that boredom and existential misery (‘je mein eigenes,’ as Heidegger might say), which constituted our identity in the first place” (Archaeologies, 191). No matter how oppressive existence may be, human beings cling to the shreds of their Being, since they dread losing whatever little they have, first and foremost what they take to be their “identity.” This fear, instilled in the subjects by the hegemonic ideology, ensures the maintenance of the status quo and precludes the possibilities of utopia. Those who “have nothing to lose but their chains” are conditioned by ideology to be affectively invested in the source of their unfreedom and to derive their identity, indeed their very Being, from this identification. The fear of a “complete loss of self” is, therefore, the common root of the evasion of death and of the

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 47

10/17/2011 10:07:38 PM

48

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

aversion to utopia, even though both are possibilities that cannot be superseded (unüberholt). While it is hard to dispute Heidegger’s characterization of death in terms of a possibility that cannot be outstripped, his qualification of it as “one’s ownmost” and “non-relational” lends itself to intense criticism, especially because being-towarddeath and, by implication, utopia, are inconceivable without a call emanating from the Other. For Heidegger, Dasein derives its authenticity from a temporal relation to its futural self, which is experienced as Other: Dasein’s ownmost core, for which conscience furnishes phenomenological evidence, is formed when it faces death and is put on the verge of an absolute dispossession. But Heidegger’s claims of authenticity and non-relationality in the face of death are undermined if, in the footsteps of Levinas, one takes their premises to the extreme. The thrust of Levinas’s philosophy may be interpreted along the lines of such a radicalization, insofar as it substitutes for the self-othering of Dasein the “wholly Other,” another human being to whose call the I responds and for whom it dies. Being-toward-death becomes meaningful only when it is shown to be, at bottom, a dying for the Other that reaffirms, rather than negates, the ethical bond; that makes the concern for one’s own existence irrelevant; and that exceeds the scope of personal authenticity in deriving meaning from alterity. It is in this context that Levinas’s formulations in “Dying For . . .” should be read: “The humanness of dying for the other would be the very meaning of love in its responsibility for one’s fellowman [. . .]. The call to holiness preceding the concern for existing, for being-there and being-in the-world [is] utopian , a dis-interestedness more profound than [a concern with] ‘one’s things’ and vested interest” (216, emphasis added). Existential utopia is as heteronomous as one’s relation to death, since it responds to the appeal of the victimized Other, taking into account, above all, the finitude of the human condition. It does not claim to be authentic— an immutable, transcendental blueprint for the best conceivable mode of organization applicable to all future societies; on the contrary, it avows its historicity and transience, establishing itself on the same plane of fragility and finitude as human beings. Whereas many traditional utopias evince a desire either to defer or to suspend death altogether, to the point of wishing to prevent or reverse ageing, erasing the imprints time leaves on the body (cryonics and stem cell injections for the purpose of tissue rejuvenation are just two examples of this utopian ambition), a utopia grounded in our ephemeral existence and, consequently, exposed at every moment to the possibility of death, is convoked by the responsibility to ameliorate the conditions of precarious life, precisely because life, in its constitutive relation to death, is precariousness. As opposed to strands of utopian thinking that are amnesiac of death, finite existential utopia is entwined with ethics, in keeping with Levinas’s implicit reference to the ethical relation as a “no-place prior to the there of being-there , prior to the Da of the Dasein, prior to that place in the sun that Pascal feared was ‘the prototype and beginning of the usurpation of the whole world’ ” (“Dying For . . . ,” 216). The “no-place,” synonymous with what Levinas, in Otherwise than Being, calls the “null-site,” is a common

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 48

10/17/2011 10:07:38 PM

OF THE WORLD, THE POSSIBLE, THE FINITE

49

denominator of ethics and utopia, which are excluded from the space of sameness not only because they are entirely beholden to the eventfulness of time, first announced in the encounter with the Other, but also because they steer clear of the “usurpation of the world,” the imperialistic ascription of an objective meaning to reality. The ethical relation of the I to the Other and the political project of utopia are here shown to be the mutually complementary places of what has no place in the current world order, which they put into question, bracket, or reduce from the standpoint of human finitude.7 For utopia to preserve its elemental bond to ethics, it needs to ventriloquize the suppressed voices emanating from the victims of past injustices, to keep the memory of previous utopian aspirations alive, and to nourish its own impulse from the productive failures that always accompany the radical politics of “re-making the world.” Utopian hope without memory is senseless; utopian memory bereft of hope is empty —in this double assertion the finite temporality of Dasein, which Heidegger construed as “thrown projection,” gets transcribed into the future of the past, that is, the memory of hope shaping a community of those who, throughout history, have raised the demand for justice. In utopian memory, past possibilities are cherished and allowed to survive as possibilities, outside the closed circuit of potentiality-actuality, so that utopia would entail, in a certain sense, a work of mourning8 or, better yet, the melancholic incorporation of these possibilities into the horizons of its future. Inspiring an ethically responsible utopia that refuses to betray unfulfilled promises, the melancholic accounting for losses in the ongoing struggle for justice prevents utopian action from lapsing into a “euphoric suspension of the self,” a private “illusion of bliss,” a pleasure devoid of responsibility, akin to that of the Lotus-eaters in the Homeric Odyssey (Adorno and Horkheimer 26, 49). Utopia’s finitude is palpable in the way it retains the unhealing scars of past traumas on its collective body, even as it nurtures future possibilities without crumbling under the weight of history. Spurning the language of power and an attitude of domination that dictate the necessity of mustering these possibilities into a coherent and rigid formation, existential utopia turns itself into a channel, a medium, or a passageway for the unforeseeable event of justice.

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 49

10/17/2011 10:07:39 PM

9780826420725_Ch04_Finals_txt_print.indd 50

10/17/2011 10:07:39 PM

CHAPTER 5

Still / Encore Márcia Cavalcante-Schuback

The question is about existential utopia. It is about the place of utopia in existence, not about the existence or inexistence of the place or places of utopia. But how do we draw the lines of this place in existence? The first figure of utopia was drawn by Ambrosius Holbein and printed in the original edition of Thomas More’s famous work. In this figure, utopia is an island and, as such, it lies within the open space of an ocean. As an island, it is a place that limits the open sea. The figure in the book is followed by the alphabet of utopia, where letters are transcribed as symbols, forming utopia’s symbolic language. In Holbein’s figure, the island of utopia is a place in the ocean, a place that is seen by talking men. It is not seen by an observer who contemplates distances, but by men talking to one another about this place, pointing at it, and moving their gazes toward it through words. In this figure, utopia is a place of words and, therefore, only a promised place. It is a place of the words inscribed in human existence, words promising good places and good words for the sake of existence. Discussions about whether the place of utopia exists or not, whether it can exist or not, whether it should exist or not, forget, for the most part, the way utopia can be seen as utopia. It is seen as utopia from the place of a certain word, the telling word, the word in which places are displaced and displacements take place. Utopia, the limiting place drawn within the open sea that connects different earthly places, is a language within language, a word within the word. This place within the place, language within language, word within the word is a non-place, a non-language, a nonword—utopia—not necessarily in the sense that it would be the negation of all places, languages, and words, that is, the negation of worldly existence. It is not necessarily in this sense that it would be the contrary of places, languages, and words, an affirmation of existence out of and beyond the world. It is rather a displacing place, the tensional place of language and the word, within language and the word, where ends and beginnings coincide, where language and the word are pronounced at the edge of existence. In this sense, utopia, this placeless place within the place, this lack of language within language, this absence of the word within the word, appears when human existence is exposed to the concurrence of end and beginning, of the onceupon-a-time and the time of the only-once.

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 51

10/17/2011 10:07:42 PM

52

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Understood by way of the word, where it can be seen as such, utopia is not necessarily a future or a possibility never to come that could disable the living forces of the present or enable the present to emancipate itself from the dead forms of the past. As worded, the time of utopia is indeed neither past nor future. It is coincidental, transitional, and gerundive: the time of a turn where the after-the-end and the beforethe-beginning meet each other. It is the time of “existing” rather than of existence. Heidegger called the time of existence “ecstatic,” underlining the way the already having been is still becoming and the still to come is already enduring. “Ecstatic temporality” names how the end and the beginning coincide in existence. Considering, however, that existence, in Heidegger’s account, is nothing but a “between,”1 the ecstatic temporality of this between appears as meanwhile , in which the having been delays and the yet to come advances, revealing an end that does not end which coincides with a beginning that does not begin. This coincidence of an after death and a before birth exposes the gerundive character of existence, existence as existing, and its ecstatic structure. The time-place of utopia in existence is defined by a delaying past and an advancing future. It is a coincidence that takes place, indeed, every day, and, thus, the day is the place and time where after the end and before the beginning meet. But there is also a day that exposes this daily coincidence in a very clear phenomenological and existential sense. This day is Ash Wednesday, the day of an end that does not end and a beginning that does not begin: the utopia of a day. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the period that leads to Easter, to resurrection, to the chance of being born again from ashes. It inaugurates a time of purification through penitence and lack; a time of regression where almost nothing is allowed. Being a “day” it is, however, not only the first day, the day of what comes after, but, at the same time, the last day, the day of what came before. Ash Wednesday is the last day of Carnival, the feasting period of abundance preceding the Lent to come. It then also names this day: a time of transgression when almost everything is allowed. Thus, what has been is still there and what hasn’t been is already there. In some languages, such as Portuguese and Greek, Ash Wednesday is also called the fourth day, recalling the fourth day in which God created the sun and the moon, following the biblical narrative: the day in which the coming about of the world and the absence of the world coincided. “Ash Wednesday” is likewise a long poem by T. S. Eliot that names the utopian place of a poem, the place of a word within the word, where that which is after the word coincides with that which is before the word. “Ash Wednesday” is a long poem composed of six poems.2 The first one begins with the verses: Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 52

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

STILL / ENCORE 53

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign? [. . .] The last poem begins with similar verses: Although I do not hope to turn again Although I do not hope Although I do not hope to turn [. . .] In its form, the whole poem is constructed as a series of echoes and variations. Verses from the beginning echo throughout the whole poem and, in this echoing, new verses sound and resound. There is no progression or development of thought, but only enduring echoes of the having been said, in which the lost word is delayed, and the word to come advances and goes ahead. The form of the poem is the poem and, therefore, “Ash Wednesday” is a poem of the “wavering between” the first and the last day, “the profit and the loss”; it is a poem of the “dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying,” of “the time of tension between dying and birth.” “Wavering between,” “brief transit,” “dream-crossed twilight,” “time of tension” are all names for a certain place, the certain place of a day. Almost at the end, this place of a day is called “the place of solitude where three dreams cross between blue rocks.” This wavering and brief place, the place of a day, the place of solitude, is “always and only place.” It is nothing else and nothing more than the twilight crossed by three dreams. What are these three dreams? Listening to the last part of the poem, we hear about the “yew-tree” shaking away voices, the oldest sacred tree of transformation and rebirth. The proximity of the sounds of “three” and “tree” makes us think about the proximity between the three crossing dreams and the oldest yew-tree, the elusiveness of dreams and the longevity of roots. Here, the crossing and the staying are connected in order to describe the place of solitude in a day, the place where what disappeared is still there and what is still there disappears. In the place of a day where “wavering between” occurs, the past, as what has disappeared without return, the present, as what never remains, and the future, as what is still to come, intersect with one another. The still-here is already-there; the already-here is still-there, interlacing reality with non-reality, being with nonbeing. Past, present, and future cross one another in the day. They are the three crossing dreams between blue rocks, and, in their dream-crossed twilight, emerges the place of solitude and the solitude of a place— a strange non-place in existence, the place of utopia.

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 53

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

54

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

When past, present, and future appear as crossing dreams, when the “time of tension between dying and birth” appears as the “always and only place” of existence, what happens to existence? More specifically, what happens to the human meanings of existence, always betraying ways or modes of this existence? When the place of existence is experienced as the place of the day’s solitude, where the “three dreams” of past, present, and future cross the “blue rocks,” human existence discovers itself as “the years that walk between,” as “one who moves in the time between sleep and waking,” as a gerundive between; it discovers itself as existing. After a certain experience of the day’s solitude, human existence appears as the place of solitude, and the human appears as the one who is this place, this “time of tension between dying and birth.” Such is the experience of Ash Wednesday, the last day of abundance and the first day of loss, the place where abundance and lack coincide, where the ashes of death and the oil of birth mix. In the fourth poem, “this” Ash Wednesday experience is described as The token of the word unheard, unspoken Till the wind shakes a thousand whispers from the yew And after this our exile The necessarily larger spaces between the lines show the ineluctable silence and nothingness that must be heard and that must say the unheard and unspoken. Let the first of these verses resound in such a way that it advances the opening verses of the fifth poem, according to which: If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word. O my people, what have I done unto thee. The word unheard and unspoken is a “token,” the sign and evidence of “this Ash Wednesday experience” of the “un-stilled world still whirled about the centre of the silent Word,” in which the “lost word is lost and the spent word is spent.” The verses describe not simply the end of a world and of a word but an end without an end, an end that is still whirling and living further. Here, we find verses of a certain

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 54

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

STILL / ENCORE 55

experience of the end of hopes for new beginnings or better places, where the word could be heard and spoken. “Where should the word be found? Where will the word resound?” “Not here; there is not enough silence.” The word cannot be found. It will resound. There is nothing to find “here,” in the here measured by the there, or in the “there” measured by the “here.” In this end without an end, still un-stilled and whirling, the distinction between here and there, immanence and transcendence, is not enough to grasp this place called Ash Wednesday, the name of the utopian place of a poem, of existing existence. The loss and exhaustion of the world and of the word is the experience of the “word without a word,” of the world without a world. What is lost and spent is the very hope for a revolutionary other: either a better place or a new place, either the other beyond our world or the other beyond the dreams of a beyond. Spent and lost is the force of revolutionary energy, leading to an exhaustion that appears in modern history as a “scheme of betrayal,” as Jean-Luc Nancy described it.3 In this end without an end, where it becomes impossible to mourn (“Why should I mourn/ The vanished power of the usual reign?”) and to hope (“I cannot hope to turn again”), the categories of “the usual reign” reveal themselves as a “scheme of betrayal.” Thus, in this endless end, time and space betray their usual meaning of succession and exteriority. Time betrays itself as the “before” that still remains and the “after” that is already there. No mourning and no hope: this means un-stilled stillness, a whirling within a no-way out, in which time “betrays” itself as the time of existing, as existential facticity. In the end without end, space betrays itself where the “there” is already here and the “here” is already there. No mourning, no hope. A “scheme of betrayal” that shows the structure, wherein the end without end, “Ash Wednesday,” coincides with a beginning that does not begin; where the opposites coincide and the coincidence opposes (itself): Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 55

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

56

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible Speech without word and Word of no speech Grace to the Mother For the Garden Where all love ends. The “scheme of betrayal” is a scheme of phenomenalization. It shows and reveals through suspension. It shows appearances in their appearing which is only possible when a caesura, a space of nothingness, emerges holding together separations without dissolving them in any kind of synthesis. In this place of a day—“Ash Wednesday,” the place of an end without end, the place without places for mourning and hope, “still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within the world and for the world.” The caesura holding still the un-stilled world shows and reveals that precisely the unspoken word is the spoken word, that exhaustion is life-giving, that the end without end is incipient. Nietzsche would say Incipit tragoedia (Werke, vol. 3, 571). Here another meaning of otherness is pronounced as “whispers from the yew.” Thus, the other is nothing, but the still-being word of the unspoken and unheard word, the still-being word of the word without a word. No mourning for the lost and spent word. No mourning for having lost the word and no hope for a new redemptive word. No mourning for the past, no hope for the future insofar as the past and the future are already and still in this place of solitude, in this place of a day: Ash Wednesday. Suspending the chronology of time, time itself is redeemed in appearing as a coincidence of dying and birth. Therefore, there is no longer need for striving to strive toward such things (“I no longer strive to strive . . .”) as the pure past and the pure future, for “desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” The crude tautology of a word without a word still-being the word without a word presents “things as they are” and shows how the un-stilled whirling speeches about a “there,” the nostalgic “there” of the past and the intrepid “there” of a future, blend into the “there is.” But Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is Nothing again Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 56

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

STILL / ENCORE 57

And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again [. . .] In the crude tautologies that emerge in this end without end, the “there” appears (betrays itself) as the “there is,” as a scheme of phenomenalization, as a way of selfappearing. In these verses, the expression “there is” is at the end of the verse and it makes us take a new breath. The verse coming right after begins with a blank space and only then it is said: “nothing again.” “There is,” without qualifications or conditions, coincides with “nothing again,” in which time can be known as being always time, still time, and place as always and only place, still place. There is / nothing again: this coincidence makes it possible to rejoice in the fact “that things are as they are.” The crude tautology of “things as they are,” where the nothing that comes after approaches and where everything that came before delays, exposes “the vanished power of the usual reign.” It exposes how nihilism betrays itself in revealing (i.e., betraying) that “nothing is the force/ that renovates the World,” to recall a verse by Emily Dickinson (650). “Nothing” appears in the poem, “Ash Wednesday,” as stillbeing, as un-stilled stillness, challenging the logic of causes which grounds both nihilistic denials of future and its utopian affirmations. The power of the usual is the power of causal logic, the language of because. This language is one of causal relations. It speaks in the following terms: because I cannot hope there is no hope; because I cannot speak and hear the word there is no word; because I cannot believe there is no belief. It is the language that reasons and speaks at the basis of a “because I,” insofar as the “I,” the “self,” the “human self” is assumed as the only possible foundation of the world. This “because I” explains the whole world on the basis of the human identified as the self-positing subject, taking the human as the cause of itself, causa sui , and thereby assuming for itself the qualities of the divine. “Because I” is an inverted image, in which the belief that I cause the world interprets the human as the subject of the world it institutes, of the modern world as the reign of power. From within the logic of the “because I cause the world,” the modern world is the world of re naissance, re form, re volution, the world of turning again and again (= said in the prefix “re ”), the “there is” against itself, driving it beyond itself into a there—either past or future, either nostalgic or utopian, either retrospective or prospective—, into the “deceitful face of hope and of despair.” The power of usual reign is that of self-causation, the reign of isolation that encloses freedom in self-determinacy, autarchy, and autonomy. This reign signals the dissolution of place as “always and only place,” a dissolution that can be considered “the most important and painful testimony of the modern world,” insofar as it is “the testimony of dissolution, of dislocation or of deflagration of community,” to

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 57

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

58

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

quote Jean-Luc Nancy (11).4 Self-causation and self-enclosure of the human, the human detached from the community with the nonhuman, nature or gods, the human as “absolute immanence,” une immanence absolue de l’homme à l’homme , (14) testifies to the way the modern world has untethered utopia from human existence, transforming the meaning of utopia into the dissolution of existentiality.5 The end of utopias, this eloquent postmodern trope, indicates, in a nihilistic mood, the utopia of the end, of isolation, when dissolution betrays itself, when the “communism” at the basis of absolute immanence of the human betrays itself, revealing itself as the dissolution of community, to follow Nancy once again (13). When the dissolution of place—utopia—becomes so absolute that it betrays itself in a dissolution of dissolution, it is, nevertheless, possible to experience how this “scheme of betrayal” is a scheme of phenomenalization, the scheme in which the same appears as already other in its still-being. So understood, utopia betrays itself, showing its existential character and, thereby, showing how the placeless place of utopia is an existential place. In this sense, “the Word without a word,” the lost and spent word of the “unstilled world still whirled about the centre of the silent Word” appears as still-being the word within the world and for the world. Hence the “because I,” the dissolved place of the self-caused subject, the absolute immanence of the human, appears as still-being the already-having-been-given of the “there is,” of the inexorable gratuity of existence. Saturation and exhaustion of the omnipotent subject’s absolute immanence is still human existence; exhaustion is life-giving. The poem shows, at the very beginning, this strange life-giving meaning that arises in the exhaustion of meaning. The first verses say “Because I do not hope to turn again”— a “scheme” that resounds again and again (“the word will resound,” as it is said later on in the fifth poem) in other verses such as “Because I do not hope,” “Because I do not hope to turn,” “Because I do not hope to know again,” “Because I do not think,” “Because I know I shall not know,” “Because I cannot drink.” In this resounding, the “Because I. . . .” begins “fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair.” Exhaustion is life-giving and repetition leads to a caesura, to the breath of an interruption. And when the omnipotent subject, used and abused by his absolute immanence (the subject habituated to hope, the hope of turning again and again, of knowing again and again, the subject sure of itself as the thinking thing, never admitting that it should not know, and this in such a way that her/his words without a word always imply a “because I cause the world”)—when, in its immanence, this subject becomes absolute as the human only referred to itself, it betrays itself as not knowing that “I cannot drink, there, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is/ nothing again.”6 It betrays that “I do not think” and “I do not know,” that “I shall not know” because “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality,” reiterating a verse from another poem of Eliot, from “Burnt Norton,” the first of his Four Quartets (Collected Poems, 175). “Human kind” cannot drink there where springs flow, cannot bear too much reality, existing as “those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between/ Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait/In darkness,” between hope and despair.

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 58

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

STILL / ENCORE 59

This way of existing in-between, of existing as the between, must still be learned. But it can only be learned when human existence learns to listen to the still time and place of the still-being, the time that is always time and the place that is always and only place, neither here nor there: the still time and place of the “there is.” In the end without an end of Ash Wednesday, where “wings are no longer wings to fly/ But merely vans to beat the air,” where “The air (. . .) is now thoroughly small and dry/Smaller and drier than the will,” precisely the wings turned into vans and the air turned into dryness “teach us to care and not care,” “teach us to sit still,” to become what we are: existence in-between. Again and again, meanings are exhausted and fade away, opening places for breathing in exhaustion. “Because I do not hope to turn again”—this verse resounds again and again until a new verse emerges at the end saying “although” instead of “because”: “although I do not hope to turn again.” Instead of “because,” “although”; “although” in “because”; “because” “turning in stairs, fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair.” This is a kind of initiation, where one has “to learn to unlearn” (evoking a verse of Fernando Pessoa),7 unlearning the lessons of utopia and of nostalgia, of the utopia of nostalgia and of nostalgia of utopia, while learning “to sit still/ even among these rocks” (of hope and despair), to listen still to the still-being in “words without a word,” in “empty forms between the ivory gates,” in “the lost heart,” “in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices.” This initiation of learning through unlearning is pronounced in the fourth poem through a quote from Dante’s Purgatorio in the Divina Comedia that reads “Sovegna vos.” “sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor” Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina. (Dante, XXVI, verses 147–8) Eliot translated these verses in his essay on “Dante” from 1929 as follows be mindful in due time of my pain. Then dived he back into that fire which refines them. (Selected Prose , 250) Be mindful, sovegna vos, learn to listen still to the still-being of the “there is,” when all constructions of a “there” on its way to becoming a “here,” and of a “here” to becoming a there betray themselves, says the poem. This is the “token of the word unheard, unspoken/ Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew.” And after this our exile. After this, listening still to the still-being in the end without end, on Ash Wednesday, existing existence exposes and becomes exposed to its meaning as “exile.” The existing existence is the exposed existence and in this sense not only exile but “our exile,” our common exile.

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 59

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

60

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Explaining the “scheme of betrayal” that structures the testimony to the dissolution of the community in the modern world, Jean-Luc Nancy observes how the notion of the individual is the residue of the evidence for this dissolution, the residue of the absolute immanence of a “for-itself absolutely separated taken as origin and certitude of the totality of beings” (16). But, inasmuch as absolute immanence betrays itself as the totalitarian besiegement of a “no-way out,” the individual, too, betrays itself, if to be an individual means to be the only one one should be, or even the only one who can be the only one (16). Here, it becomes clear that “the logic of the absolute violates the absolute,” (16) the logic of the “because I” violates the “because I,” the logic of separations and oppositions makes violence to separation. In the scheme of betrayal, violence shows how this scheme is a scheme of phenomenalization, of the how of an appearing. The most extreme testimonies of dissolution, of dislocation, and of deflagration betray being as a relation. Nancy says as “community,” communauté , and defines it as “ecstasy,” extase , following the traces left, above all, by Schelling and Heidegger. Far from meaning effervescence or effusion, ecstasy is defined as the “epistemological and gnoseological impossibility of absolute immanence” (16). Defining the impossibility of absolute immanence either as the whole or as the individual, the impossibility of being as self-positing and causa sui , “ecstasy” shows the very way in which this impossibility appears: how being in itself is outside and beyond itself. Being is ecstasy, community is in such way that “ecstasy” (being as community) “arrives to the singular,” arrive à l’être singulier (16). The question is, however, how to describe the being-ecstasy of being, how to describe its way of arriving and coming-toward. It arrives in the experience of Ash Wednesday, the place of the day’s solitude, which is the place and the time of “between the profit and the loss,” of “this brief transit where the dreams cross,” of the “dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying,” of the “time of tension between dying and birth,” “the place of solitude where three dreams cross.” “Solitude” is Eliot’s name for the ecstatic experience of what Nancy called “the ecstatic being of Being itself” (l’être-extatique de l’être lui-même). Solitude, as ecstatic experience, is the only place that is always place and the time that is always time for one time and for one place of the between. This “place” is an experience, the ecstatic experience of “our exile.” Ecstatic experience means here existing as exilic existence.8 Exilic existence finds its phenomenal residue in existence in exile. In exile, not only “life changes” but the meaning of existence is transformed to such an extent that it becomes impossible to envisage existence as self-causation, as one being one’s own root. It is the discovery of oneself as an in-itself outside and beyond itself, of being rooted in the absence of roots, grounded in groundlessness.9 Exilic existence is existence exiled from existence: in exile, one thus begins to live a sort of lack of life for the sake of not dying (as Seneca explained in his dialogue On Consolation). Thus, in exile, one “lives as no one and stands nowhere” (Vallega x). It is an existence in continuous estrangement, where one becomes strange in one’s own home and never

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 60

10/17/2011 10:07:43 PM

STILL / ENCORE 61

feels at home in strangeness. It is existence existing as illegal in the disquietude of the between. It is a loss without return but also without arrival, insofar as the naturally constructed identification with the current modern representation of a self is broken and the identification with the other never becomes natural. Exilic existence exists in a space— and time—in-between. It is an existence in which one experiences simultaneously the suspension and the intensification of proximity and distance in time and space. A person in exile is never here or there, being always here and there, in the presence of the no longer and of the not-yet. Exilic existence exists in the place and time of a day, where every day is Ash Wednesday, being with and without the past and the future. In English, we can say simply that we are without . Exilic existence is existence without past and future, existence with the “without” and without the “with,” without our and the others’ others. In this being with the being-without, in this being without the being-with, without the “where from” and the “where to,” exile is never “mine” but always “ours.” Thus, in exile, we are without no longer being and not yet being, as we are without our dead and the unborn. Exilic existence is always “our exile,” because in it community is not simply a community of “living beings” and “existing things” but a community that includes our dead and the unborn, the experience of existing after death and before birth. Exilic existence exposes, while being exposed to, both placeless places and the place of placelessness, both times, time after time and times before time, worldlessness in the world and the world of absent worlds, wordlessness in words and words without and within the words. In this experiential meaning, utopia is not the name of a non-placed place but of this “withoutness,” where and when the not-ending of an end and the not-beginning of a beginning coincide. Being without the being-with and being with the being-without define the utopian spatial temporality and temporal spatiality of existing existence, discovering itself as exilic existence. Utopia is here not seen as utopia from the worded word but as the way another meaning of the word, another meaning of human existence, appears within the loss of meaning of words and of existence. What appears here is neither a new meaning nor a better meaning but another meaning, an other that neither denies nor affirms but displaces and unlearns, an other as non-other, as Ash Wednesday. The whole poem “Ash Wednesday” indicates this strange sense of otherness when describing how If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 61

10/17/2011 10:07:44 PM

62

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

This other meaning of otherness is named in the poem with the expressivity of “still is.” Still-being is the core of the poem, showing the coincidence of endless ends and beginnings not yet begun, of life after death and life before birth, still already and already still, the utopian place where the still-being of things manages to Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still Even among these rocks, The unspoken and unheard word is still unspoken and unheard. This still-being teaches us to sit still, to be still in the core of existence, be still, encore , listening “among these rocks” to how the exhaustion of still-being gives birth to a listening still, to where from and where to things are going as they are. When still-being coincides with being still, the “scheme of betrayal” reveals the work of resonance through which the exhausted meaning of utopia as a place without place in existence can become the birth-giving meaning of the non-place of coexisting with the “existing without” and existing without coexisting. This non-place is the here of a day, of an Ash Wednesday, betraying that Here are the years that walk between, bearing Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, Wearing White light folded, sheathed about her, folded. The new years walk, restoring Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem The time. Redeem. In the Ash Wednesday of a poem, existence exists “in the light of utopia,” as Paul Celan defined it (54). Years of exhausted words and worlds can still restore, “through a bright cloud of tears,” through another verse, a silent word within the lack of word, an open world within the absence of world, and in-between places within places of dissolution.

9780826420725_Ch05_Finals_txt_print.indd 62

10/17/2011 10:07:44 PM

CHAPTER 6

The Theater of Utopia: Deleuze on Acting and Politics Cláudia Baracchi

This thought does not lie in the future, promised by the most distant of new beginnings. It is present in Deleuze’s texts— springing forth, dancing before us, in our midst; genital thought, intensive thought, affirmative thought, acategorical thought— each of these an unrecognizable face, a mask we have never seen before; differences we had no reason to expect but which nevertheless lead to the return, as masks of their masks, of Plato, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and all other philosophers. This is philosophy not as thought but as theater— a theater of mime with multiple, fugitive, and instantaneous scenes in which blind gestures signal to each other. This is the theater where the laughter of the Sophist bursts out from under the mask of Socrates; where Spinoza’s modes conduct a wild dance in a decentered circle while substance revolves about it like a mad planet; where a limping Fichte announces “the fractured I // the dissolved self ”; where Leibniz, having reached the top of the pyramid, can see through the darkness that celestial music is in fact a Pierrot lunaire. In the sentry box of the Luxembourg Gardens, Duns Scotus places his head through the circular window; he is sporting an impressive mustache; it belongs to Nietzsche, disguised as Klossowski. (Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”) These words reach us from another world, another time. 1970: undoubtedly that day seems remote today. In the conclusion of his dazzling review essay of Gilles Deleuze’s Différence et répétition (1968) and Logique du sens (1969), Michel Foucault salutes “philosophy not as thought but as theater”—philosophy as act, in action, unfolding in the world with the disruptive force of embodied performance. In Deleuze’s theater, Foucault points out, a subversion of categorial thought is enacted, which frees difference from the logic of conceptual differentiae and repetition from subjection to a model. But if repetition is illuminated as other than the work of indifference, indeed, as the taking place of difference, that which repeatedly returns demands to be understood as other than the replica of an unmoving script— altogether foreign to the play of copy and original, object and subject.

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 63

10/17/2011 10:07:48 PM

64

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

In such a movement, being is affirmed as becoming. Deleuze’s action disarticulates being, relieves being from the categorial articulation that would partition it. Being becomes, recurs (revient), turns and returns at incalculable speed, in vibrating luminescence and guises “never seen before.” At stake is nothing less than an ontological revolution, a turn from metaphysics to a physics of the singularly evanescent: “the repetitive revolution of being around difference [. . .] the condition for thinking the phantasm and the event” (Foucault, “Theatrum,” 187; translation slightly modified). *** The theater of philosophy opens up a space where life is comprehended—neither imitated nor represented, nor yet analyzed, but rather echoed in its truth and performed in its illuminative reiteration. Philosophy as a place of reenactment entails a manifold destabilization of boundaries. It demands crossing and retracing the lines of demarcation between the philosophical and the non- or pre-philosophical, between contemplation and creativity, reflection and action, action and production, and therefore between ethics and aesthetics, politics and sensibility, thinking and body, discourse and the registers of the material (the anonymously living, the nonverbal, the non- or un-speaking—which need not mean nonlinguistic, let alone inarticulate). At stake, then, are borders, territorial and not—in fact, those frontiers, most labile and unstable (though never simply dissolving), between the earth and territory, the European, the oriental, the bastard, the animal, the stammering, the silent—frontiers that, in their mobile delineations, configure the living. In what follows, I will focus on Deleuze’s thinking as it turns to theater and the arts. The turn to theater and, more broadly, to the phenomena of creativity, unfolds theatrically and creatively, that is to say, lays out the theme performatively. The theme is not approached in the mode of aesthetic fruition, let alone art criticism. Rather, Deleuze’s discourse relates to creative acts as if by resonance, allowing philosophy to become manifest as a creative act, while at the same time reaffirming the irreducibility of the philosophical performance to other modes of bringing forth and enactment. Thus, Deleuze incisively develops both the precariousness and the vitality of the distinctions among the fields broadly designated as philosophy, the arts, and the sciences. Accordingly, for philosophy, the encounter with the arts becomes, at once, a self-reflective moment and the occasion for a refined tracing of differences. The political undertones of such a mode of acting are evident in the transgressive language already evoked. The contestation of conventions as well as the striving to touch the real traverse Deleuze’s thought from the early texts celebrated by Foucault to the latest works—with consistent dismantling energy. A text by Jerzy Grotowski, first published in 1968, captures the mood of the time and the interruptive potential of the archaic art of the stage, evoking the “shock,” “the shudder which causes us to drop our daily masks and mannerisms” (“Statement,” 257).

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 64

10/17/2011 10:07:48 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 65

We see theater— especially in its palpable, carnal aspect— as a place of provocation, a challenge the actor sets himself and also, indirectly, other people. Theatre only has a meaning if it allows us to transcend our stereotyped vision, our conventional feelings and customs, our standards of judgment—not just for the sake of doing so, but so that we may experience what is real and, having already given up all daily escapes and pretenses, in a state of complete defenselessness unveil, give, discover ourselves. (“Statement,” 257)1 In the attunement to the systemic implications of radically singular operations, responsibilities, and actions, is announced the convergence of ethics and politics, the private and the public. Here lies a visionary thrust that is less a programmatic statement than the work of relentlessly clearing the space for the arrival of what may arrive—what is not yet and (perhaps) yet “to come.” As we shall see, Deleuze himself repeatedly resorts to this phrase, and occasionally to the noun “utopia,” to designate the possibilities that his discourse evokes, provokes, and calls forth. Again, a political manifesto is not at stake. As Grotowski will have said in a lecture entitled “Tu es le fils de quelqu’un,” delivered in Florence (Italy) in summer 1985, “I work not to make some discourse, but to enlarge the island of freedom which I bear; my obligation is not to make political declarations, but to make holes in the wall. The things which were forbidden before me should be permitted after me; the doors which were closed and double-locked should be opened. . . . Bad artists talk about the rebellion, but true artists do the rebellion” (294–5). The work of the theater, then, is to keep open, to puncture the ordinary, methodically attacking ideological fixations in order to protect the openness to come. *** Thus, Deleuze’s frequentation and understanding of philosophy are at odds with traditional, rationalistic systematizations as well as the phenomenological perspective. Indeed, philosophy is neither the hegemonic account of beings by reference to eidetic/ideal determinations nor the discourse authorized by the things themselves to unlock their truth. It is neither the discovery of truth through objectification and conceptual representation nor the disclosure of what is through receptiveness and letting be. In fact, philosophy is not a matter of discovery, disclosing, and uncovering. Rather, we see Deleuze outline and enact philosophy as a mode of inventiveness. Not to be reductively confused with the arts, philosophy is, still, no less a matter of production. This is exposed methodically and with unusual pedagogical sensibility in What Is Philosophy? (1991), written with Félix Guattari. However, in the lecture “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?” (1987), Deleuze anticipates, limpidly and often word for word, what will have been articulated at length in the later book.2 “Philosophy,” he says, “is not made (n’est pas faite) for reflecting on something else [. . .] in treating philosophy as a potentiality for reflecting on [something], one seems to concede a

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 65

10/17/2011 10:07:48 PM

66

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

great deal to it, but in fact one is taking everything away from it.” Deleuze continues: For no-one needs philosophy in order to reflect. . . . [Those involved in moviemaking and criticism] absolutely do not need philosophy in order to reflect on cinema. The idea that mathematicians would need philosophy in order to reflect on mathematics is a comical idea. If philosophy should have to reflect on anything whatsoever, it would have no reason for being. If philosophy exists, that is because it has its own content. If we ask ourselves: what is the content of philosophy?, the reply is simple. Philosophy is a discipline as creative, as inventive as any other discipline. Philosophy is a discipline involving the creation or invention of concepts. And concepts do not exist ready-made, in a sort of sky where they would wait for a philosopher seizing them. Concepts have to be fabricated. (“Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”) What is urgently conveyed here is a renegotiation of the relation between philosophy and other modes of human enactment: philosophy does not enjoy the status of the discipline of all disciplines, taking the other disciplines as its content and object. This is indeed a “worthless (indigne) idea.” Philosophy is a mode of creation alongside others, exposed to common perils and vicissitudes. This is the case for the sciences as well. They are no less creative. “There, too, one invents; one does not discover” (“Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”). Philosophy, then, emerges as a kind of fabrication. Deleuze employs here the language of artful production, artistry, even craftsmanship. Nietzsche is evidently a source of this insight— although Nietzsche goes even beyond the juxtaposition of philosophical and other creations, and indeed suggests art (most notably, the arts of the image) as the paradigm operative in properly philosophical making. Consider, for instance, his portrait of Plato as an artist, in the following posthumous fragment: An artist cannot endure actuality (Wirklichkeit); he looks away, back: his serious view is that the value of a thing lies in that shadowy residue one derives from colors, form, sound, conceptions, thereby he believes that the more attenuated, rarefied, volatile a thing or human being is, the more its value increases : the less real, all the more value. This is Platonism, which however was endowed with yet another audacity in its turning: Plato measured the degree of reality (Realität) by the degree of value and said: The more “idea,” the more being. He turned around the concept “actuality” and said: “What you take for actual is an error, and the nearer we come to the ‘idea’, the nearer to ‘truth’”—Is this understood? It was the greatest re-baptism : and because it was taken up by Christianity we do not see the astonishing thing. Plato, as the artist he was, fundamentally preferred appearance (Schein) to being: thus lie and fiction (Erdichtung) to truth, the non-actual to the present—but he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 66

10/17/2011 10:07:48 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 67

attributes “being,” “causality” and “goodness,” truth, in short, everything to which one gives value.3 (Nietzsche, Werke , vol. VIII 1, 261; my translation) Here we are called to witness the work of the philosophical theater or, rather, work in the theater of philosophy, as if we were allowed into its secret operations. Nietzsche stages the philosopher in act and casts light on the usually dimly lit laboratory where conception, incubation, and bringing forth take place. This is the scene of the genesis of the Platonic idea out of a distancing, an attenuation of phenomenality. As Deleuze and Guattari will have said, “Plato said that one must contemplate the Ideas, but beforehand he had to create the concept of Idea” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 11).4 Of course, Deleuze specifies in the 1987 lecture, neither the philosopher nor the painter tell themselves: “Very well, now I’m going to make such and such a concept . . . now I’m going to make a painting like this.” “There must be,” he says, “a necessity”— and this is a “very complex” matter, “if it exists” (“Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”). Thus, we assume that when philosophy turns to the other disciplines, it is never in order to “reflect on them” and disclose them to the philosopher and to themselves. When philosophy speaks of the other disciplines, say, of the arts, we will have to expect that it is showing something about itself, putting itself into focus. *** Sovrapposizioni (“Superimpositions,” if one were to translate it into English) is the title of a short book originally published in Italian in 1978. It contains a script by Carmelo Bene, an essay by Deleuze on theater (entitled “Un manifesto di meno,” “One Less Manifesto” in English), and a response by Carmelo Bene. The volume, as such, was never published in English.5 It is equally remarkable that this text by Deleuze is rarely addressed in scholarly and strictly philosophical discussions alike.6 More broadly, the theatrical element and the pervasiveness of dramatic figurations in Deleuze’s thinking are seldom considered in their deeply structuring, dynamic operation (and not merely, in fact not at all, as extrinsic presentational devices). It may thus prove fruitful to linger for a moment with the text “One Less Manifesto” and explore the performance of Deleuze’s approach to the question of performance, the movement of his thought hovering between the encounter with this theme and the glimmers of self-reflection sparked in such an encounter. Far from a mere curiosity (a divertissement) on a peripheral topic, this essay reveals theater and theatricality at the heart of Deleuze’s thinking. It is not a philosophical reflection on theater, but philosophy staging itself, carrying itself out as the discussion of performance: philosophy in deed, performing its creative task, taking the theme of theater as the scene of its own conceptual configuration. Thus, the discussion of performance takes us into Deleuze’s philosophical constructivism, even into those aspects of creativity most akin to craftsmanship and technical skill. Filtered through this apparently marginal theme, and illuminated by

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 67

10/17/2011 10:07:48 PM

68

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

its uncanny light, we shall encounter preoccupations that are central to Deleuze’s creation: the questions of presence and the real, of movement and variation in their ontological as well as political range, of the interpenetration of inside and outside, the proximate and the uncontrollably nomadic. Again, you will not fail to notice resonances with early as well as late texts— beyond those mentioned above, let me simply recall Nietzsche and Philosophy, Kafka , and A Thousand Plateaus. “Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and in relation to each other,” Deleuze and Guattari will have said. “And this is why everything resonates instead of following or corresponding” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 28). *** Sovrapposizioni is the result of the encounter of Deleuze and Carmelo Bene, an actor, writer, and a rather singular agitator in the landscape of Italian culture in the last decades of the twentieth century. In addition to a note in response to Deleuze’s essay, Bene contributed the script Richard III: Or, The Horrible Night of a Man of War, a rewriting of Shakespeare’s play and the basis of one of Bene’s productions. As Deleuze suggests in “One Less Manifesto,” Bene’s rewriting should be considered a “critical essay,” but not in the sense of a text “on” Shakespeare: “the critical essay is itself a theatrical work” (Sovrapposizioni , 69). “This critical theater,” Deleuze adds, “is a constituent theater, Critique is a constitution” in the sense that at first the work revolves around “the fabrication of the character, its preparation, its birth, its stutterings, its variations, its development” (Sovrapposizioni , 70). The character is not found, ready to be infinitely replicated, but must be brought forth, in a gesture that is genuinely creative, that is to say, founding. Deleuze had been provoked by Shakespeare’s Richard III even before seeing Bene’s play, or, at any rate, before discussing Shakespeare’s text with Bene (see Cull 4 and Bogue 117). In Dialogues (1977), he briefly lingered on the figure of the treacherous king, emphasizing his uncontrollable becoming and the destructiveness he unleashes against the State. Here we find the parallel contrasts of the “man of the State” or “courtier,” vs. the “man of war (not a marshal or a general),” the deceiver vs. the traitor, the quest for power vs. the dynamic of total treason leading to the “assemblage of a war machine” (41–2, 141). It is such an enactment of ruinous betrayal, of treachery sparing nothing, which sets Richard III apart from a number of other Shakespearian kings, “trickster-kings” who may have conquered power deceptively, but wield it effectively, expediently. In his extreme venture, Richard III allows us to glimpse the disquieting mechanism of power stripped of any mitigating and stabilizing factors—power unadulterated, deprived of its embellishments, whether theological or prosaically related to administrative skill. This is a figure of self-consuming power, not at the service of the state’s self-assertion, not convertible into an apparatus, but, in fact, threatening all institutions. As such, it is simultaneously a figure of becoming, out of control and disordered.

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 68

10/17/2011 10:07:48 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 69

In line with the suggestions in Dialogues, in “One Less Manifesto” Richard III is the “man of war,” shown in his unadorned bareness by Bene’s strategy, which involves the subtraction of the paraphernalia (textual and scenic) of regal power. What remains is a man conspicuously “different from the King or the Statesman”: “deformed and gloomy,” the man of war who “always comes from elsewhere” (Sovrapposizioni , 71)— a nomad, figure of restless agitation and foreignness. A cri de guerre of sorts, “One Less Manifesto” addresses those who “operate” in theater, as well as the witnesses variously exposed to such operations and in complicity with them (I shall not call them “spectators”). The characterization of the theatrical operation is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s vision of artistic creation taking place in the workshop of destruction: “The man of theater is no longer author, actor or director. He is an operator. By operation, one must mean the movement of subtraction, of amputation, but already covered over by the other movement, that lets something unexpected be born and proliferate, as in a prosthesis” (Sovrapposizioni , 70). We have here the exposition of a question carrying ethical no less than aesthetic implications. The questions concern what the dramatic art has become under the empire of representation: the current domain of the machinery of the spectacle, which has demoted the theatrical event to uneventful entertainment. We are well familiar with the conventionality of theater and the indifference of its “seasons”; with its crystallized banality; with the matter-of-fact administration of art as a welloiled engine, alternating between empty production and distracted reproduction; and, above all, with the reduction of art to a consumable product, at once infinitely reproducible, stripped of the mystery in its midst, the object of evaluation and economic transactions (there is such a thing as a cultural marketplace!). Furthermore, it hardly needs to be underlined that theater, as the luminous locus of action, enactment, becoming and disappearing, is a cipher of the conditions of action—the theater of the world. Indeed, at stake are no less the place, time, and plots into which our singular lives are inscribed. Deleuze’s rejoinder to current convention may sound imperative, even martial, and yet it is the most tentative and vulnerable of hypotheses: if theater has become an empty shell, a desert paced by prosaic appearances neither living nor dying (though arguably more dead than alive), then it is imperative to empty the emptiness, or to clear the theatrical space from what clutters it and voids it of life, from the accumulated incrustations that have turned radiance into opacity, fluidity of motion into dead mannerisms. The imperative is to clear the space, freeing it from paralyzing encumbrances, so that dance, unexpected life, and unbound repetition may again take place, and so that becoming may unfold, unimpeded, or with least resistance. But letting that space vibrate again bespeaks an invocation and evocation of presence. The imperative, then, entails the creation of a theater (i.e., of conditions for action) fostering presence in the sense of attention to the “line of continuing variation” (Sovrapposizioni , 71), to “the subterranean work of a free and present variation” (Sovrapposizioni , 88)—presence as vibrant alertness, adherence, and attunement to becoming (to the revolution of being, the event, the phantasm).

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 69

10/17/2011 10:07:49 PM

70

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

This reappropriation, reclaiming of the word “presence” deserves the closest attention: for at stake is not the presence of what is present, of being in its fixity, but the presence of what is always in the process of becoming; the presence of and in the speed of becoming, in the constant transition of what does not abide; presence as the site of dissipation and rearticulation, the site that is not a site, of ongoing deterritorialization, traumatic passages across discontinuities. At stake in presence thus understood is the quality (perhaps the discipline) of attentiveness, the “saturation” of each moment, the intensification of life that leaves nothing unchanged. It is inevitable to perceive the tension between the terminology here outlined and the elaborations on presence in phenomenological discourses in Heidegger, and later in Derrida. In its culmination, the latter lineage thinks presence as self-presence and as always already divided from itself by an affirmation of itself that is unavoidably representational in tenor. The unsustainable paradox of presence as non-difference lies in the fact that, precisely in its self-assertion (in presenting and representing itself), presence draws away from itself, differs from itself, and reveals itself contaminated by absence. In its quest for power, presence renounces its purity. In this perspective, a theater of pure presence, that is, a theater without representation is strictly speaking impossible.7 As we shall see, however, Deleuze outlines a thinking of theatrical presence as presence to another, presence outside oneself, as the dispersion of subjective structures in the becoming of difference, in the movement and variation of repetition at unrepresentable velocity. This would be presence disengaged from the plays of power and, far from asserting itself, constantly dissolving. The same word turning differently. In this gesture lies Deleuze’s rejoinder to the regime of representation and communication. *** Echoing strategies and formulations found in Bene, Deleuze develops the question of presence in terms of what he calls becoming minor: Bene is very interested in the notions of Major and Minor. He gives them a lived content. What is a “minor” character? What is a “minor” author? First of all, Bene says that it is silly to be interested in the beginning or end of something, in the points of origin or termination. What is interesting is never the way in which someone begins or ends. What is interesting is in the middle, what happens in the middle (au milieu). It is not by chance that maximum velocity is in the middle. . . . What matters, instead, is becoming: becoming-revolutionary, and not the to-come or the past of revolution. . . . Becoming, movement, velocity, whirlwind are in the middle. The middle is not an average, but rather an excess. Things grow from the middle. (Sovrapposizioni , 73) The key in the thinking of the Minor, then, is an understanding of becoming not so much by reference to initial and ending points, but rather in terms of what is in

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 70

10/17/2011 10:07:49 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 71

between. The privilege of origin (the originary and originality) and teleology is radically called into question, along with the conceptual configurations to which it gives rise. What is crucial “happens in the middle”: unmoored from the beginning and with no end in sight, becoming pushes through the middle and vastly exceeds the determinations that filiation and destination would impose. Being in the middle means becoming beyond the representations that hold us captive: seizing around oneself times and modes of unfolding infinitely more comprehensive or infinitely more minute than one’s own, in short, infinitely other than oneself, and sensing them (the cosmos, the molecule, the animal) converge and coexist in oneself. It means, becoming a “particle” that “infinitely meditates on the infinite,” thus attuned to the “hour of the world” (291, 342–3).8 Again, Deleuze repeats these indications in Dialogues, after emphatically recalling Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway : “‘I spread myself out like fog BETWEEN the people that I know the best’ says Virginia Woolf in her walk among the taxis.”9 He then continues: “The middle has nothing to do with an average, it is not a centrism or a form of moderation. On the contrary, it’s a matter of absolute speed. Whatever grows from the middle is endowed with such a speed.. . . [T]he absolute is the speed of movement between the two, in the middle of the two, which traces a line of flight” (Dialogues, 30–1). The understanding of presence in light of relentless variation, repetition unsecured, not fastened to terminus a quo and terminus ad quem, clearly involves a radical turn away from the dialectical exercise and the logic of mediation. It involves having departed from the binary two and their result, from their communication, commonality, conversations, debates, and economy, which acknowledge a between only to the extent that it is sublimated into a third—a higher synthesis. What Deleuze is gesturing toward here is entering the between without seeking to reach the other shore: entering the middle uncountable and unaccountable. It could also be called immediacy. Needless to say, the Minor and becoming minor have to do with the question of minorities only to the extent that these are not defined by quantity and identity. The Minor is uncountable and unaccountable from the perspective of the majoritarian state and its communicative/representational apparatus. Therefore, the Minor hardly counts, even though it should be the case that “everyone is minoritarian” (Sovrapposizioni , 88).10 In “One Less Manifesto” as well, precisely when adumbrating the question of presence (presence in becoming) in terms of becoming minor, Deleuze refers to Virginia Woolf. Woolf embodies most vividly, for Deleuze, the incandescence of becoming: the presence of becoming with no reference to departure and arrival; presence as inhabiting the moment in all its imperviousness; presence in entering the speed of things, seizing them in their indefiniteness, in their passing from one state to another, in between one state and another; presence in coming into contact with the real, whatever risks may be folded into this exposure. Her writing surfaces from this living, unfolds like a “line of flight” traced across an incessant flow, and thus gives word to that which flows in the middle, overpowering and sudden, without routinely resorting to the tricks of technique and the tools of mastery.

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 71

10/17/2011 10:07:49 PM

72

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

And in this risk, in this lability of forms that is also an instability of psychic structures, the threat of disease is also announced—precisely there where the most extreme adherence to life coincides with unease, and the intensity of being “only a sensibility”11 verges on dismemberment. Virginia Woolf’s writing often evokes the coincidence of saturation and dissolution, concentration and dispersion. The following pages are from The Waves, a text that Woolf, signaling her uncertainty regarding genre and proper literary taxonomy, called a “play-poem.” It is a stage for intertwining inner monologues with no narrator— a work that Deleuze’s thinking absorbs in important ways: With intermittent shocks, sudden as the spring of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures.. . . [S]ilence closes over our transient passage. This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.. . . One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You did not see me come. I circled around the chairs to avoid the horror of the spring. I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do—I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view . . . your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly, or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back. (64–5, 130–1) Such, then, is the arduous crossing of a “minor author”: “without future and without past, she has only a becoming, a center, through which she communicates with other times, other spaces” (S 73). She has (she is) only a present into which converge, unmediated, times and spaces that always threaten to tear her apart. A “minor” author, then, is altogether other than secondary, let alone negligible. Rather, she is extemporaneous, in the etymological sense of the term. Indeed, “the center does not at all mean belonging in one’s own time, belonging to one’s own time, being historical; on the contrary. It is that in virtue of which the most diverse times communicate. It is neither the historical, nor the eternal, but the untimely” (Sovrapposizioni , 73). Out of time, she lives at the “time (heure) of the world” (Mille Plateaux , 343).

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 72

10/17/2011 10:07:49 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 73

Presence in becoming requires a kind of athleticism, Deleuze and Guattari observe in What Is Philosophy? —here, too, in connection with Woolf. “An athleticism that is not organic or muscular,” they specify, but rather “‘an affective athleticism,’ which would be the inorganic double of the other, an athleticism of becoming that only reveals forces that are not its own”—what Artaud called “plastic specter,” they conclude (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 163). Such an agility, or plastic availability, is required in order to sustain that which is no mere sensory experience, but rather an undergoing of the ultimate violation: “Affect is not the passage from a lived state to another, but the becoming non-human of the human. . . . It is rather an extreme contiguity, in a crush of two sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the receding of a light that captures both of them in the same gleam” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 163–4). The response of theater to the empire of representation, thus, would have to be in this register. Theater would assume as its own the task of cultivating presence as the experience of “saturation” (the saturation of “every atom” [“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 163] or even that which Woolf called incandescence). It is important to underline that this response is no mere boycott or situationist gesture (after Guy Debord, the Internationale situationniste, had aimed precisely at this: actions of disturbance and attempts at ripping apart the fabric of the dominant phantasmagoria). Rather, it is a response appealing to a creative resourcefulness, to the ability to discern that the machinery of the theater as spectacle does not exhaust the possible. The point is manifestly neither to passively undergo the theater of representation, nor to devise strategies for deserting and sabotaging it. The call is for doing theater otherwise. And this concerns both those who act onstage and those who look at them—those absorbed in the theorein constitutive of the theatron as such (again, I do not dare to call them “spectators”). Indeed, the very separation of the scenic space (skene , space of shadows) and that of onlookers should be renegotiated and, if not altogether fade, remain mobile and porous, with lasting consequences concerning the status of the human (of the world) and its phantasmatic character.12 *** But Deleuze, in his close interaction with Carmelo Bene in Sovrapposizioni , provides even more detailed (more concrete, intimately technical, “molecular”) indications regarding how those who “operate” in the theater (those who live in the world) are to carry out a response, saturating the present. Indeed, how do the suggestions in this text relate to apparently proximate gestures, such as those of certain members of the avant-garde, as well as those of a politically militant theater à la Brecht? Representation, and most notably the “representation of conflicts” (conflicts “between individual and society, between life and history, all sorts of contradictions and oppositions that traverse a society, but also the individuals” [Sovrapposizioni , 87]), is a crucial means of control through codification and normalization. “Institutions,” Deleuze continues, “are the organs of representation of recognized

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 73

10/17/2011 10:07:49 PM

74

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

conflicts, and theater is an institution, theater is ‘official,’ even if avant-garde, even if popular” (Sovrapposizioni , 87). Brecht himself, according to Deleuze after Bene, does not nearly go far enough in the overcoming of the representational hold. He seems to limit himself to the task of providing the spectator with instruments for the comprehension and possibly the “solution” of conflicts. As Bene notes, Brecht’s “critical operation” presents outstanding features, to be sure, but is carried out “on the script and not on the stage,” and in this way it surreptitiously reinscribes the supremacy of the text over the act and reasserts those dynamics of power that it purports to destructure (Sovrapposizioni , 79). Thus, we observe the phenomenon of “a popular theater that is like the narcissism of the worker” and shares the same structures and operative assumptions with “classical” (bourgeois) theater. The “epic pole of popular representation” and the “dramatic pole of bourgeois representation” (Sovrapposizioni , 87) only stand in a rhetorical contraposition. “Even the rich and the poor, Bene describes them as belonging in the same system of power and domination which divides them into ‘poor slaves’ and ‘rich slaves,’ and in which the artist has the function of intellectual slave” (Sovrapposizioni , 88). Along these lines, we could say that Brecht falls short of thinking through the question of form; concentrated on the content of the representation, he fails to address the question of representation and the power harbored therein, the question of form as such, indeed the question of the very distinction between form and content. And it is in such an oversight, in such an inability to recognize the problematic nexus of form and content, that power is left alone, functioning undisturbed. Paradoxically, then, such a theater, focused on content as it may be, remains essentially formalistic. And that means superficial. But “art is not a form of power” (Sovrapposizioni , 89). If this is the case, however, “how can theater free itself from this situation of conflictual, official, and institutionalized representation?” Deleuze asks. “How are we to support the underground work of a free and present variation that slips through the net of slavery and overflows the whole?” (Sovrapposizioni , 88). How can the representation of conflicts be replaced with “the presence of variation” (Sovrapposizioni , 87)? Again, Bene’s suggestions toward a “complete critical operation” in theater are crucial, precisely because they point beyond the textual work (which still remains robust) to embodied strategies, to the functions and dysfunctions of the phantom onstage, and to the becoming of acting. Deleuze recalls the moments of the elision of the “elements of Power” (Sovrapposizioni , 72): “1) withdrawing the stable elements, 2) thus placing everything in continuous variation, 3) then transposing everything equally in minor (it is the function of the operators, corresponding to the idea of ‘smaller’ interval)” (Sovrapposizioni , 79). The latter passing remark is noteworthy, for it illumines the question of the minor in yet another way: the transposition in minor corresponds to the enactment (“the function of the operators”), the taking place of theater in its materiality, in its material vicissitudes, formations, deformations, and dissolutions—theater in ebb and flow. The minor, with its “smaller” interval, indicates a precipitation into the body, sinking into its molecular structures and

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 74

10/17/2011 10:07:49 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 75

variations. It is this emphasis that makes the operation thorough and “complete”— not merely declared and scripted, but acted out and lived, with the dangers of unscripted movement. The theater without representation is risky indeed. It is the presence here cultivated that presents risks. We already mentioned the double movement of subtraction and creation that characterizes this theater. Speaking of Bene’s dramaturgy, and in particular of his Richard III, Deleuze notes from the start the political inflections of such an operation: “[w]hat is here amputated, subtracted, is the entire princely and regal system. In fact, only Richard III and the women remain” (Sovrapposizioni , 70). But he also notes that subtracting the elements of power, the elements representative of political power at large (“Romeo as representing the power of the families, the Master as representing sexual power, kings and princes as representing State power” [Sovrapposizioni , 72]), means at once subtracting power from theater, detracting the power that theater enjoys in its institutional complicity: . . . the elements of power in theater are at the same time that which ensures the coherence of the subject treated and the coherence of representation onstage. They are at the same time the power of what is represented, and the power of theater itself. In this sense, the traditional actor has an ancient complicity with princes and kings, and theater with power. (Sovrapposizioni , 72) Let this be repeated. Detracting representations of power means detracting the power of representation, the power that the representational machinery deploys, the power that representation itself is, in other words, power as such— ordering and stabilizing: Eliminating the constants or invariants, not only in language and gestures, but also in theatrical representation and in what is represented on the scene; thus, eliminating everything that “makes” Power, the power of what the theater represents (the King, the Princes, the Masters, the System), but also the power of the theater itself (the Text, the Dialogue, the Actor, the Director, the Structure). . . . (Sovrapposizioni , 86) Detracting this from theater means making theater vulnerable, unjustifiable. It means leaving it shattered, unreliable, incoherent, unauthorized—minor, in short. Manifold, taking on many forms, following diverse lines of flight, the theater without representation is not one. It is no manifesto. *** It is in this way that, with Bene, we catch sight of an “operator” who is “less narcissistic than an actor, less authoritarian than a director, less despotic than a text” (Sovrapposizioni , 86). Accordingly, in such a theater we witness the renunciation of a representation of “the masses” (as if the masses were one) and, in turn, the one

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 75

10/17/2011 10:07:50 PM

76

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

becoming the mass: “at once text, author, and actor . . . I am a mass . . . ‘the mass of my atoms . . .’” (Sovrapposizioni , 86). Thus, this becoming minor of theater, this extreme operation of deprivation is far from impoverishing. Rather, privation clears the space for the unpredictable and the free, in a dynamic that reveals the interplay of lack and superabundance, poverty and (re)sources, a dynamic that is the cipher of eros :13 Thus one detracts or amputates the story (la storia), because History (la Storia) is the temporal mark of Power. One subtracts the structure, because it is the synchronic mark. . . . One subtracts the constants, the stable or stabilizing elements, because they belong to the major use. . . . One amputates the text, because the text is like the domination of language over the word. . . . One suppresses the dialogue . . . (linguists try to determine the “universals of dialogue”). Etc., etc. . . . . [O]ne subtracts even diction, even action. . . . But what remains? Everything remains, but in a new light, with new sounds, new gestures. (Sovrapposizioni , 77–8) In this movement, among other things, politics becomes erotic (Sovrapposizioni , 85). And I, not doing theater for “the people,” doing theater neither “popular” nor “official” nor yet avant-garde, am in the midst of costumes and props falling apart, machinery not responding to my commands, present in and to becoming. Through the contact with Bene, and not altogether removed from a constellation of theatrical thinking including Artaud, Peter Brook, and Grotowski, in his own way Deleuze gestures toward an understanding of art as a vehicle— performance as a study, machine or channel making possible a contact with the real. And we should underscore the diversity of operators he mentions, held together only by the most imperceptible alliances— alliances in searching and not amounting to a program: “Artaud, Bob Wilson, Grotowski, the Living [Theater] . . .” (Sovrapposizioni , 72). And here we can only mention the discussion in Difference and Repetition , where Deleuze presents Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as theatrical operators dedicated to “the highest theatrical problem” of how to create “a movement which would directly touch the soul” (Difference , 9).14 Nonrepresentation is no formula, no method, but a genuinely open horizon, itself varying, and a theater of the possible. *** Not unlike What Is Philosophy?, and indeed anticipating several movements of the later text, “One Less Manifesto” culminates and closes with a piece of political imagination. The visionary (if not utopian) thrust appears to be a genuine and longstanding element in Deleuze’s thinking, even aside from the collaboration with Félix Guattari. “The whole problem,” Deleuze observes, “hinges on the majoritarian datum. Since the theater for everyone, popular theater, is somewhat like democracy,

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 76

10/17/2011 10:07:50 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 77

it appeals to the majoritarian datum” (Sovrapposizioni , 88). And yet, Deleuze will have interjected from another time, the time of What Is Philosophy?, “[d]emocracies are majorities, but a becoming is by nature that which always subtracts itself from majority” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie,” 104) or even reconfigures the thinking and concept of majority. In fact, Deleuze continues in the earlier voice, [m]ajority does not designate a greater quantity, but, first of all, this specimen in relation to which the other quantities, whatever they may be, will be said to be smaller. For instance, women and children, blacks, Indians . . . etc., will be minoritarian in relation to the specimen constituted by the Christian white Man anymale-adult-urban-American or European of today (Ulysses). But, at this point, everything is turned upside down. For, if the majority refers to a model of power, historical or structural, or both at the same time, it should also be said that everyone is minoritarian , potentially minoritarian.. . . Isn’t continuous variation perhaps everyone’s becoming minoritarian, in opposition to the datum of majority belonging to No-one? (Sovrapposizioni , 88–9) Here then could be found the function of the theater: nurturing the condition and possibility for the cultivation, the exercise of consciousness in a minor mode, of a minority consciousness, as “everyone’s potentiality.” “In this sense, it is evident that the minority is much more numerous than the majority” (Sovrapposizioni , 91). And, of course, “making a potentiality present, actual, is altogether other than representing a conflict” (Sovrapposizioni , 89). For, as Deleuze and Bene stress, art is not power, “it becomes a form of power only when it ceases to be art” (Sovrapposizioni , 89). The authority of the “operator” is a strange authority, if any: it is “the authority of a perpetual variation, in opposition to the power or despotism of the invariant . . . the authority, the autonomy of one stuttering, one who has conquered the right to stutter . . .” (Sovrapposizioni , 89); the authority of the foreigner— of one who has become a foreigner “in one’s own language” (Sovrapposizioni , 79) (“we speak the same language, yet I do not understand you . . .” [“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 105]); finally, the authority of the nomad, the bastard, the animal. In its uncanny authority, art, as infinite variation, as perpetuation of unsustainable instability, would endure. It would display a “strict affinity” with the “act of resistance.” “[A]rt is that which resists,” Deleuze intimates from yet another time, that of the lecture “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?” And the act of resistance is twofaced: “it is human, and it is also the act of art”: Only the act of resistance resists death, both in the form of the work of art and in the form of a struggle of human beings. And what relation is there between the struggle of human beings and the work of art? The closest and, to me, most mysterious relation. Exactly what Paul Klee meant when he said: “You know, the people is lacking (Vous savez, le people manque).” The people is lacking and, at the same time, it is not lacking. The people is lacking, this means that . . . this funda-

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 77

10/17/2011 10:07:50 PM

78

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

mental affinity between the work of art and a people that does not yet exist, is not and will never be clear. There is no work of art that does not appeal to a people that does not yet exist. (“Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”) Deleuze said it and will have said it, will have repeated this at different speeds, at different times, each time with infinite precision. In the earlier text echoing Bene: “Everyone claims to be part of the people, in the name of majoritarian language, but where is the people? ‘It is the people which is lacking’” (Sovrapposizioni , 90). Here the response to such a diagnosis is a vision: “Theater will rise as that which does not represent anything, but presents and constitutes a minority consciousness, as universal becoming” (91). And again, in What is Philosophy? : “The creation of concepts in itself appeals to a form of future, calls for a new earth and a people which do not yet exist.. . . Art and philosophy converge on this point, the constitution of an earth and a people which are lacking, as the correlate of creation” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 104).15 The people, thus, “does not yet exist” and is envisioned to come. Utopia may or may not be the word to designate this auroral effort, but at stake is the present that is coming, becoming new. Utopia may be the word for designating this, if understood in the context of the Frankfurt school and of Adorno’s “negative dialectic” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 95). But one must be careful not to revert to a “restoration of transcendence” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 96), to keep the “No-where ” also “Now-here ”: utopia not as “a dream, something that never realizes itself or realizes itself only in betraying itself,” but rather as “revolution,” as “a plane of immanence, infinite movement,” understanding that “these traits are connected with what is real here and now” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 96). In this sense, the word “utopia thus designates this conjunction of philosophy or of the concept with the present environment (milieu)” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 96). And here it is “a question of becoming. The thinker is not acephalous, aphasic, or analphabetic, but becomes so. . . . One becomes animal so that the animal as well may become something else,” and in this “zone of exchange between the human and the animal . . . something of the one passes into the other. It is the constitutive relation of philosophy with non-philosophy. Becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 105). In this ongoing exchange, a people is not created, not brought forth, and Deleuze writes rapturously about the community of the thinker (or of the artist) and the people: The people is internal to the thinker because it is a “becoming-people,” just as the thinker is internal to the people, as a no less unlimited becoming. The artist or the philosopher are unable to create a people, they can only invoke it with all their resources. A people can create itself only in abominable sufferings, and cannot

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 78

10/17/2011 10:07:50 PM

THE THEATER OF UTOPIA 79

occupy itself with art or philosophy. But the books of philosophy and the works of art also contain in turn their unimaginable amount of suffering which allows for the presentiment of the advent of a people. They have in common the fact of resisting, resisting death, servitude, the intolerable, shame, the present. (“Qu’estce que la philosophie?” 105)16 *** Philosophy shares the relational structure with its other (nonphilosophy), with art and science. Each of them needs such a “non-,” not as a point of departure or arrival, in which it would finally be resolved and realized, but in each moment of its unfolding. What Is Philosophy? ends by evoking the merging of these three modes of “non,” of alterity. Out of such an absorption emerges a shade: In this immersion, we could say one draws from chaos the shadow (l’ombre) of the “people to come,” as art calls it, but also philosophy, science: the people-mass, people-world, people-brain, people-chaos. Non-thinking thought that dwells in all three, like the non-conceptual concept of Klee or the inner silence of Kandinsky. It is here that concepts, sensations, functions become undecidable, just as philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible, as if they would share the same shadow, which extends across their different nature and does not cease to accompany them. (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 223) This was not to have been a “reflection on” theater. This would be the theater of Deleuze’s thinking—skene , a place where shadows come to play.

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 79

10/17/2011 10:07:50 PM

9780826420725_Ch06_Finals_txt_print.indd 80

10/17/2011 10:07:50 PM

CHAPTER 7

Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique1 Douglas Kellner

The great utopian Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch developed a method of cultural criticism that expands conventional Marxian approaches to culture and ideology and provides one of the richest treasure houses of ideology critique found in the Marxian tradition. In this essay, I suggest that Bloch provides a method for discerning and criticizing ideological content in theories, philosophies, and cultural artifacts whose ideological nature and effects are often overlooked. Bloch’s practice of ideological criticism discerns emancipatory utopian dimensions even in ideological products, ferreting out those aspects that might be useful for radical theory and practice. Bloch therefore provides exciting methods of cultural criticism, a new approach to cultural history, and novel perspectives on culture and ideology. He also contributes uniquely distinctive utopian perspectives on Marxism, socialism, and revolutionary theory, though that will not be my focus in this study.2

Reading The Principle of Hope Since Bloch’s magnificent magnum opus The Principle of Hope has been translated, his mature philosophy is accessible to English-speaking readers.3 Problems in appropriating Bloch and using him for cultural and political analysis and critique remain significant, as Bloch’s text is extremely difficult, elusive, and extremely long (over 1,400 pages in the English translation). Consequently, if Bloch is to have any real impact on political and cultural analysis in the English-speaking world, efforts must be made to explain and interpret what he is up to, and convincing arguments must be provided by us to persuade people that reading Bloch is worth the time and effort. The Principle of Hope contains three volumes, divided into five parts, and fiftyfive chapters. The three volumes roughly correspond to Hegel’s division of his system into interrogations of subjective, objective, and absolute spirit. The first volume entails “Little Daydreams” (Part One), “Anticipatory Consciousness” (Part Two), and “Wishful Images in the Mirror” (Part Three). The latter studies analyze the utopian dimensions of fashion, advertising, fairy tales, travel, film, theater,

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 83

10/17/2011 10:07:54 PM

84

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

jokes, and other cultural phenomena. The second volume (Part Four) depicts “Outlines of a Better World,” focusing on social and political utopias, including technological, architectural, and geographical utopias, as well as quests for world peace and a life of leisure. Volume three (Part Five) discusses “Wishful Images of the Fulfilled Moment,” including morality, music, images of death, religion, morning-land of nature, and the highest good. Just as Hegel’s philosophy articulated the odyssey of spirit through history and culture, so too does Bloch’s philosophy chart the vicissitudes of hope. He believes, hope permeates everyday consciousness and its articulation in cultural forms, ranging from the fairy tale to the great philosophical and political utopias. For Bloch, individuals are unfinished; they are animated by “dreams of a better life,” and by utopian longings for fulfillment. The “something better” for which people yearn is precisely the subject-matter of Bloch’s massive The Principle of Hope, which provides a systematic examination of the ways in which daydreams, fairy tales and myths, popular culture, literature, theater, and all forms of art, political and social utopias, philosophy, and religion— often dismissed tout court as ideology by some Marxist ideological critique— contain emancipatory moments which project visions of a better life that put in question the organization and structure of life under capitalism (or state socialism). Bloch urges us to grasp the three dimensions of human temporality: he offers us a dialectical analysis of the past which illuminates the present and can direct us to a better future. The past—what has been— contains both the sufferings, tragedies and failures of humanity—what to avoid and to redeem— and its unrealized hopes and potentials—which could have been and can yet be. For Bloch, history is a repository of possibilities that are living options for future action; therefore what could have been can still be. The present moment is thus constituted in part by latency and tendency : the unrealized potentialities that are latent in the present, and the signs and foreshadowings that indicate the tendency of the direction and movement of the present into the future. This three-dimensional temporality must be grasped and activated by an anticipatory consciousness that at once perceives the unrealized emancipatory potential in the past, the latencies and tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes of the future. Above all, Bloch develops a philosophy of hope and the future, a dreaming forward, a projection of a vision of a future kingdom of freedom. It is his conviction that only when we project our future in the light of what is, what has been, and what could be can we engage in the creative practice that will produce a world in which we are at home and realize humanity’s deepest dreams. In his magnum opus, Bloch carries though both a thorough examination of the ways in which hope and visions of a better world exist in everything from daydreams to the great religions, and of cultural studies that trace throughout history anticipatory visions of what would later be systematized, packaged, and distributed as socialism by Karl Marx and his followers. Consequently, Bloch provides a critical hermeneutic of the ways in which cultural history and socioeconomic developments point to socialism as the realization of humanity’s deepest dreams and hopes, and that encourages us

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 84

10/17/2011 10:07:54 PM

ERNST BLOCH, UTOPIA, AND IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE

85

to look for the progressive and emancipatory content of cultural artifacts (rather than the merely ideological and mystificatory).

Bloch’s Concept of Ideology Critique In my view, Bloch is most useful today in providing a model of cultural theory and ideology critique that is quite different from, and arguably better than, dominant models that present ideology critique as the demolition of bourgeois culture and ideology, thus, in effect, conflating these two. This model—found in Lenin and most Marxist-Leninists like Althusser, but also to some extent in the Frankfurt School— interprets dominant ideology primarily as an instrument of mystification, error, and domination that is contrasted to science, Marxist theory, or “Critical Theory.” The function of ideology critique on this model is simply to demonstrate the errors, mystifications, and ruling class interests within ideological artifacts, which are then smashed and discarded by the heavy hammer of the ideology critic. Such a model is, of course, rooted in Marx’s own texts since, for Marx, ideology was the ideas of the ruling class, ideas that legitimated bourgeois rule, ideas that mystified social conditions, covering over oppression and inequality, and ideas that thus produced false consciousness and furthered bourgeois class domination.4 Within the Marxian tradition, there is also a more positive concept of ideology, developed by Lenin, which sees socialist ideology as a positive force for developing revolutionary consciousness and promoting socialist development. Bloch, however, is more sophisticated than those who simply denounce all ideology as false consciousness, or who stress the positive features of socialist ideology. Rather, Bloch sees emancipatoryutopian elements in all living ideologies, as well as deceptive and illusory qualities. For Bloch, ideology is “Janus-faced,” two-sided: it contains errors, mystifications, and techniques of manipulation and domination, but it also contains a utopian residue or surplus that can be used for social critique and to advance progressive politics. In addition to reconstructing and refocusing the theory and practice of ideology critique, Bloch also enables us to see ideology in many phenomena usually neglected by Marxist and other ideology critiques: daydreams, popular literature, architecture, department store displays, sports, or clothing. In this view, ideology pervades the organization and details of everyday life. Thus, ideology critique should be a critique of everyday life, as well as critique of political texts and positions, or the manifestly political ideologies of Hollywood films, corporate and state television, or other forms of mass-mediated culture that serve interests of domination.5 Previous Marxist theories of ideology, by contrast, tended to equate ideology with texts, with political discourses, and with attempts to mystify class relations and to advance class domination. Ideology critique then, on this model, would simply expose and denounce the textual mechanisms of mystification and would attempt to replace Ideology with Truth. Bloch would dismiss this merely denunciatory approach to ideology critique as “half-enlightenment,” which he compares to genuine enlightenment. Half-enlightenment “has nothing but an attitude,” that is,

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 85

10/17/2011 10:07:54 PM

86

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

rationalistic dismissal of all mystification, superstition, legend, and so on, that does not measure up to its scientific criteria. Genuine enlightenment, on the other hand, criticizes any distortions in an ideological product, but then goes on to take it more seriously, to read it closely for any critical or emancipatory potential. Halfenlightenment deludes itself, first, by thinking that truth and enlightenment can be obtained solely by eliminating error, rather than offering something positive and attractive. Indeed, Bloch believes that part of the reason why the Left was defeated by the Right in Weimar Germany is because the Left tended to focus simply on criticism, on negative denunciations of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, whereas fascism provided a positive vision and attractive alternatives to masses desperately searching for something better. Against merely negative ideology critique, Bloch urges us to pay close attention to potential progressive contents within artifacts or phenomena frequently denounced and dismissed as mere ideology. For Bloch, ideology contained an “anticipatory” dimension, in which its discourses, images, and figures produced utopian images of a better world. Utopian elements, however, coexist with “merely embellishing ones” (The Principle, 1986a, 148). In some cases, this amounts to a “merely dubious polishing of what exists” (149). Such apologetic functions “reconcile the subject with what exists” (149). These purposes appear above all “in periods of class society which are no longer revolutionary” (149). Even in this situation, however, ideologies may contain embellishing elements that anticipate a better world, that express in abstract and idealist fashion the potentialities for a better future. If such ideologies deceive individuals into believing that the present society has already realized such ideals, they serve mystificatory functions, but Bloch’s method of cultural criticism also wants us to interrogate these ideologies for their utopian contents, for their anticipations of a better world, which can help us to see what is deficient and lacking in this world and what should be fought for to produce a better (i.e., freer and happier) future. Bloch therefore restores to radical theory a cultural heritage that is often neglected or dismissed as merely ideology. Critique of ideology, Bloch argues, is not merely unmasking (Entlarvung), or demystification, but is also uncovering and discovery: revelations of unrealized dreams, lost possibilities, abortive hopes that can be resurrected, enlivened and realized in our current situation. Bloch’s cultural criticism thus accentuates the positive, the utopian-emancipatory possibilities, the testimony to hopes for a better world. As Habermas dramatically puts it: What Bloch wants to preserve for socialism, which subsists on scorning tradition, is the tradition of the scorned. In contrast to the unhistorical procedure of Feuerbach’s criticism of ideology, which deprived Hegel’s “sublation” (Aufhebung) of half of its meaning (forgetting elevare and being satisfied with tollere), Bloch presses the ideologies to yield their ideas to him; he wants to save that which is true in false consciousness: “All great culture that existed hitherto has been the foreshadowing of an achievement, inasmuch as images and thoughts can be projected from the ages’ summit into the far horizon of the future.” (Habermas 63)

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 86

10/17/2011 10:07:54 PM

ERNST BLOCH, UTOPIA, AND IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE

87

Bloch believed that even ideological artifacts contain expressions of desire and articulations of needs that radical theory and politics should heed to provide programs and discourses which appeal to deep-seated desires for a better life. Ideologies also provide clues to possibilities for future development and contain a “surplus” or “excess” that is not exhausted in mystification or legitimation. And ideologies may contain normative ideals whereby the existing society can be criticized and models of an alternative society. For example, the notion of the citoyen (citizen) in bourgeois ideology, with its individual rights, civil liberties, and actively engaged autonomy, expressed something more than mere legitimation and apologetics for bourgeois institutions and practices. Bloch takes seriously Marx’s position that the task of socialism is to fully realize certain bourgeois ideals. Throughout his life, Bloch argued that Marxism, as it was constituted in its Social Democratic and other leading versions, was vitiated by a one-sided, inadequate, and merely negative approach to ideology. For Bloch, the problem of ideology “is broached from the side of the problem of cultural inheritance , of the problem as to how works of the superstructure progressively reproduce themselves in cultural consciousness even after disappearance of their social bases” (154). Such notions contain a cultural surplus that lives on and provides a utopian function whereby the ideal can still be translated into a reality and thus be fully realized for the first time. Although for Bloch the primary site of ideology is the cultural superstructure—philosophy, religion, art, and so on—the superstructure contains a surplus and thus cannot be reduced to mere ideology. For Bloch, this surplus preserves unsatisfied desires and human wishes for a better world, and because such wishes are usually not fulfilled they contain elements which remain relevant to a future society that may be able to satisfy these desires and needs. In other words, ideology contains hints as to what human beings desire and need that can be used to criticize failures to satisfy these needs and to realize these desires in the current society. Ideology critique thus requires not only demolition but also hermeneutics, for ideology in Bloch’s view contains preconscious elements, or what Bloch calls the “Not-Yet-Conscious.” Properly understood, the Not-Yet-Conscious may point to real possibilities for social development and real potentials for human liberation. Bloch tends to present the theory of utopian surplus along historical-materialist lines in terms of the rise and fall of social classes. Utopian surplus generally appears when a class is rising: the ascending class criticizes the previous order and projects a wealth of proposals for social change, as when the bourgeoisie attacked the feudal order for its lack of individual freedom, rights, democracy, and class mobility. Bourgeois critiques of feudalism proliferated, as did revolutionary proposals for a new society. Some of these ideas were incorporated into bourgeois constitutions, declarations of rights, and some were even institutionalized in the bourgeois order.6 Thus culture ranges, for Bloch, from an ideal type of pure ideology to purely nonideological emancipatory culture. Purely ideological artifacts embellish or legitimate an oppressive existing reality, as when Bloch speaks of ideology as that which

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 87

10/17/2011 10:07:54 PM

88

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

excludes all progressive elements (9). Most cultural artifacts, however, contain a mixture of ideology and utopian elements. Since ideologies are rhetorical constructs that attempt to persuade and to convince, they must have a relatively rational and attractive core and thus often contain emancipatory promises or moments. Drawing on Bloch, Fredric Jameson has suggested that mass cultural texts often have utopian moments and proposes that radical cultural criticism should analyze both the social hopes and fantasies in cultural artifacts, as well as the ideological ways in which fantasies are presented, conflicts are resolved, and potentially disruptive hopes and anxieties are managed (“Reification” 130–48). In his reading of Jaws, for instance, the shark stands in for a variety of fears (i.e., uncontrolled organic nature threatening the artificial society, big business corrupting and endangering community, disruptive sexuality threatening the disintegration of the family and traditional values, and so on). In Jameson’s reading, Jaws tries to contain these fears through the reassuring defeat of evil by representatives of the current class structure. Yet the film also contains utopian images of family, malebonding, and adventure, as well as socially critical visions of capitalism, which articulate fears that unrestrained big business would inexorably destroy the environment and community. In Jameson’s view, mass culture thus articulates social conflicts, contemporary fears and utopian hopes, and attempts at ideological containment and reassurance. In his view: [W]orks of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated. Even the “false consciousness” of so monstrous a phenomenon as Nazism was nourished by collective fantasies of a Utopian type, in “socialist” as well as in nationalist guises. Our proposition about the drawing power of the works of mass culture has implied that such works cannot manage anxieties about the social order unless they have first revived them and given them some rudimentary expression; we will now suggest that anxiety and hope are two faces of the same collective consciousness, so that the works of mass culture, even if their function lies in the legitimation of the existing order— or some worse one— cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have given voice. (“Ideology,” 144) Films like Jaws, for instance, might use utopian images to provide a critique of the loss of community and its destruction by commercial interests. Popular texts may thus enact social criticism in their ideological scenarios and one of the tasks of radical cultural criticism is to specify utopian, critical, subversive, or oppositional meanings, even within the texts of so-called mass culture. For these artifacts may contain implicit and even explicit critiques of capitalism, sexism, or racism, or visions of

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 88

10/17/2011 10:07:55 PM

ERNST BLOCH, UTOPIA, AND IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE

89

freedom and happiness that can provide critical perspectives on the unhappiness and unfreedom in the existing society. The Deer Hunter, for instance, though an arguably reactionary text, contains utopian images of community, working class and ethnic solidarity, and personal friendship that provide critical perspectives on the atomism, alienation, and loss of community in everyday life under contemporary capitalism. Avatar provides an allegorical vision of ecological harmony and peace, interrupted by Western military technology and colonial invasion. The utopian elements of getting high and horsing around in the drug hootch in Platoon constitute visions of racial harmony and individual and social happiness that offer a critical perspective on the harrowing war scenes and that code war as a disgusting and destructive human activity. The images of racial solidarity and transcendence in the dance numbers of Zoot Suit provide a utopian and critical contrast to the oppression of people of color found in the scenes of everyday and prison life in the film, while the transformation of life in the musical numbers of Pennies From Heaven give critical perspectives on the degradation of everyday life due to the constraints of an unjust and irrational economic system that informs the realist sections of the film. Ideologies thus pander to human desires, fantasies, anxieties, and hopes, and cultural artifacts must address these, if they are to be successful. Ideology and utopia are thus interconnected and culture is saturated with utopian content. On the other hand, ideologies exploit and distort this utopian content and should be criticized to expose their merely embellishing, legitimating, and mystifying elements.

Everyday Life, Human Beings, and Psychology Certain versions of Marxist ideology critique and half-enlightenment err, Bloch believes, by failing to see the importance of culture in everyday life. A rationalistic ideology critique believes that simply by exposing mistakes and pointing to the truth it can motivate people to action. Such a belief, on Bloch’s account, is mistaken both in its overestimation of rationalistic enlightenment and in its underestimation of sub-rational desires, fantasies, beliefs, and so on. Properly understanding human motivation and psychology, Bloch believes, requires taking fantasy, imagination, wishes, and desires more seriously. Bloch’s thought is rooted in a humanist anthropology that grounds his critique of oppression and emancipatory perspectives. Bloch always begins with the wishing, hopeful, needy, and hungry human being and analyzes what impedes realization of human desire and fulfillment of human needs. Thus, humanism for Bloch is revolutionary and provides standards for critique and impetus for political action and social change. Unlike most Marxists, Bloch thus takes human needs, desires, and psychology very seriously. Here Bloch’s thinking runs parallel to that of Wilhelm Reich and the Freudo-Marxists, though in significant ways it also differs from this tendency.7 For Reich and others urged the communists to pay more attention to sexual needs and desires and unconscious wishes and fears. But they tended to overestimate the role of sexuality in constituting human psychology and motivation, and downplayed such

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 89

10/17/2011 10:07:55 PM

90

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

things as hunger, needs for security, home, community, and many other issues that Bloch believes the fascists addressed with more success than the Left.8 In The Principle of Hope , Bloch carries out an extremely interesting appreciation and critique of Freud, and develops his own psychological theories of imagination, needs, and hope against Freud. In fact, I would think that Bloch could productively be used to develop a Marxian anthropology and social psychology today and that his own anthropological and psychological perspectives are deeper and more illuminating than Freudo-Marxist approaches associated with the Frankfurt school or French theory like that of Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and so on. Briefly examining Bloch’s critique of Freud will enable us to perceive how he is able to point to ideological tendencies in thinkers and theories often not perceived by standard Marxist ideology critique, as well as to articulate Bloch’s own distinctive anthropological-psychological perspectives. This discussion will also show how Bloch is, if anything, more critical and devastating in his attack on ideologies, like psychoanalysis, than many Marxist critics. Given Bloch’s emphasis on the importance of the subjective dimension in the constitution of human experience and for radical theory and politics, it is necessary that he distinguish his theory of subjectivity from psychoanalytic theories. He does this, first, by rooting psychological tendencies in the body and in human needs, primarily hunger, rather than in instincts and the unconscious à la Freud (The Principle, 1986a, 45ff.). He also conceptualizes “man as a quite extensive complex of drives” (47ff.) and constantly emphasizes cravings, wishing, desiring, and hoping for a better life, opposed to Freudian emphases on castration, repression, and the conservative political economy of the instincts that are more characterized by repetition, excitation-release, and ultimately entropy (the death instinct) than the development of new drives, impulses, tendencies and possibilities for change and transformation such as one finds at the center of Bloch’s theory (Freud tends to present a fixed view of human nature). At the end of the first stage of his critique of Freud, Bloch concludes: “In short, we realize that man is an equally changeable and extensive complex of drives, a heap of changing, and mostly badly ordered wishes. And a permanent motivating force, a single basic drive, in so far as it does not become independent and thus hang in the air, is hardly conceivable.” Rather there are several basic drives that emerge as primary at different times in social and individual life, depending on the conditions prevailing at the time (50). In a discussion of “Various Interpretations of the Basic Human Drive,” Bloch carries out critiques of Freud’s notion of the primacy of the sexual drive and Freud’s notions of the ego drive and repression, repression and the unconscious, and sublimation (51ff.). The key point is that: The unconscious of psychoanalysis is therefore, as we can see, never a Not-YetConscious , an element of progressions; it consists rather of regressions. Accordingly, even the process of making this unconscious conscious only

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 90

10/17/2011 10:07:55 PM

ERNST BLOCH, UTOPIA, AND IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE

91

clarifies What Has Been; i.e. there is nothing new in the Freudian unconscious . This became even clearer when C. G. Jung, the psychoanalytic fascist, reduced the libido and its unconscious contents entirely to the primeval. According to him, exclusively phylogenetic primeval memories or primeval fantasies exist in the unconscious, falsely designated “archetypes”; and all wishful images also go back into this night, only suggest prehistory. Jung even considers the night to be so colorful that consciousness pales beside it; as a spurner of the light, he devalues consciousness. In contrast, Freud does of course unhold illuminating consciousness, but one which is itself surrounded by the ring of the id, by the fixed unconsciousness of a fixed libido. Even highly productive artistic creations do not lead out of this Fixum; they are simply sublimations of the self-enclosed libido. (56) In his analysis, Bloch positively valorizes Freud’s enlightenment rationalism over Jung’s irrationalism, and while he carries through a rehabilitation of what is sometimes dismissed as “the irrational,” he also carries out a devastating critique of obscurantist, reactionary, irrationalist tendencies, especially those connected with fascism. Indeed, continuing to examine his critique of Jung and his critique of Freud’s disciple Alfred Adler,9 who claimed that the will to power was the primary human drive, should help differentiate Bloch’s theory of the subjective from more reactionary variants with which he might be wrongly identified. This exercise will also illustrate what a sharp and powerful critique of ideology Bloch undertakes, how he discerns ideological tendencies in phenomena often overlooked, and is able to connect ideological theories to sociohistorical tendencies. Bloch discerns, for example, how Adler’s Will to Power is related to competitive capitalist drives to move from the bottom to the top, and how his theories of inferiority complex and neurosis reproduce the feelings of those strata of capitalist societies who have failed economically and who thus blame themselves for their failures (57ff.). Bloch concludes: Because Adler therefore drives sex out of the libido and inserts individual power, his definition of drives takes the ever steeper capitalist path from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and reflects this path ideologically and psychoanalytically. Freud’s concept of libido borders on the “will to life” in Schopenhauer’s philosophy; Schopenhauer in fact described the sexual organs as “the focal points of the will.” Adler’s “Will to Power” conversely coincides verbally, and partly also in terms of content with Nietzsche’s definition of the basic drive from his last period; in this respect, Nietzsche has triumphed over Schopenhauer here, that is to say, the imperialist elbow has triumphed over the gentlemanly pleasuredispleasure body in psychoanalysis. The competitive struggle which hardly leaves any time for sexual worries stressed industriousness rather than randiness; the hectic day of the businessman thus eclipses the hectic night of the rake and his libido. (58)

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 91

10/17/2011 10:07:55 PM

92

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Bloch then points out that the hectic life and the structural anxiety that permeates life in capitalist society—which submits the underlying population to the vagaries and uncertainties of the market—produce tendencies toward escape and regression, especially among the middle and lower petit-bourgeois strata. Thus Adler’s celebration of a Will to Power—which implicitly summons one to muster one’s energies for production and competition—loses appeal as it becomes increasingly difficult to succeed in the marketplace. “Above all the path to the so-called heights lost some of its interest and prospects, in exact proportion to the decline of free enterprise, as a result of monopoly capitalism” (59). The class strata that had previously responded to follow the calls by Nietzsche, Adler, and others to scale the heights of competition and worldly success began to look backward toward “the so-called depths, in which the eyes roll instead of aiming at a goal” (59). Consequently, the appeal grew of Carl Jung, “the fascistically frothing psychoanalyst” who “consequently posited the frenzy-drive in place of the power drive” (59). I cite the following passage in its entirety to provide a sense of Bloch’s power as a critic of ideology: Just as sexuality is only part of this Dionysian general libido, so also is the will to power, in fact the latter is completely transformed into battle-frenzy, into a stupor which in no way strives toward individual goals. In Jung, libido thus becomes an archaically undivided primeval unity of all drives, or “Eros” per se: consequently it extends from eating to the Last Supper, from coitus to unio mystica, from the frothing mouth of the shaman, even the berserker, to the rapture of Fra Angelico. Even here, therefore, Nietzsche triumphs over Schopenhauer, but he triumphs as the affirmation of a mescaline Dionysus over the negation of the will to life. As a result, the unconscious aspect of this mystified libido is also not contested and there is no attempt to resolve it into current consciousness as in Freud. Rather the neurosis, particularly that of modern, all too civilized and conscious man, derives according to Jung precisely from the fact that men have emerged too far out of what is unconsciously growing, outside the world of “elemental feel-thinking.” Here Jung borders not only on the fascist version of Dionysus, but also partly on the vitalistic philosophy of Bergson. (59–60) Those who might be inclined to dismiss Bloch as an irrationalist should read his critique of German irrationalist thought and fascist ideologies. After critiquing Adler and Jung, Bloch goes after Bergson, the “sentimental penis-poet,” D. H. Lawrence, the “complete Tarzan philosopher,” Ludwig Klages, the celebrator of Neanderthal man, Gottfried Benn, and the petit bourgeois mystifier Martin Heidegger (60ff.).10 While Bergson’s vitalism contained some progressive moments, by contrast D. H. Lawrence, “and Jung along with him, sings the wildernesses of the elemental age of love, which to his misfortune man has emerged from; he seeks the nocturnal moon in the flesh, the unconscious sun in the blood. And Klages blows in a more abstract way on the same bull-horn; he does not only hark back like the early Romantics to

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 92

10/17/2011 10:07:55 PM

ERNST BLOCH, UTOPIA, AND IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE

93

the Middle Ages, but to the diluvium, to precisely where Jung’s impersonal, pandemonic libido lives” (59–60). Bloch continues his provocative critique of German irrationalism (61ff.), that rivals his friend Lukàcs’ critiques,11 and then presents his own theory of subjectivity, hope, the preconscious, the Not-Yet-Conscious, and so on (65ff.) discussed earlier in this study. Bloch’s anthropological analysis of the elements in subjective experience that strive for a better life far surpasses the theory of the subjective dimension of Lukàcs, or almost any other Marxist. Indeed, The Principle of Hope offers a treasure house of insights into many topics neglected in standard Marxism, and provides an extremely useful concept of culture and ideology critique. In the next section, I thus want to examine some of the richest sections of The Principle of Hope, which I believe are most productive for cultural criticism today.

Bloch’s Cultural Criticism and the Panorama of Culture I have stressed how Bloch’s theory of cultural criticism is rooted in his anthropological and philosophical perspectives, which are delineated in the first two parts of The Principle of Hope.12 Part three contains explorations of “Wishful Images in the Mirror,” in which Bloch decodes traces of hope permeating everyday life and culture. No philosopher since Hegel has explored in such detail and with such penetration the cultural tradition, which for Bloch contains untapped emancipatory potential. Yet, Bloch concentrates not only on the great works of the cultural heritage, but on familiar and ordinary aspects of everyday experience, within which he finds utopian potential. Fashion, grooming, new clothes, and how we make ourselves appear to others exhibit the utopian potential of transforming us into something better. Perceiving this potential in advertising, Bloch recognizes that it invests magical properties into commodities, which will produce allegedly magical results for the customer. “Shopwindows and advertising are in their capitalist form exclusively lime-twigs for the attracted dream birds” (344). To be sure, the promises of advertising and consumer culture are often false promises and often produce false needs, but their power and ubiquity shows the depth of the needs that capitalism exploits and the wishes for another life that permeate capitalist societies. Moreover, many people wear masks, often derived from magazines or mass cultural images, to transform themselves, to attempt to invent a more satisfying life. Thus, do youths join subcultures, even fascist ones like the Ku Klux Klan. Criminals and crime provide powerful attractions to oppressed youth, promising transcendence of their everyday misery.13 Similar motivations lead individuals to join the Klan and other racist groups, to try to get a new and more satisfying identity through immersion in violent subcultures. Magazines, best-selling novels, film and television also offer advice and models for self-transformation and how to achieve romance, success, and wealth. Fairy tales celebrate the courage and cunning, whereby ordinary individuals achieve their dreams. The realization of wishes is the very substance of fairy tales and

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 93

10/17/2011 10:07:55 PM

94

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

images of artifacts like Aladdin’s lamp provide powerful fantasies of wish-fulfillment. Travel to exotic far-away places enables individuals to dream of better lives, while the circus provides access to a “wishful world of eccentricity and precise dexterity” (364). Adventure stories are vehicles of escape to a world of excitement and often show ordinary individuals defeating evil villains and oppressors. These are “immature, but honest substitute[s] for revolution” (368) and expressions of deep-seated desires for more power and satisfaction in their daily lives among ordinary people. These forms of popular culture thus demonstrate desire for change and transformation and contain utopian energies that can make individuals yearn for a better world and attempt to transform themselves and their life. This culture is not, however, completely innocent or positive in its effects. Travel stories and images are exploited by travel agencies, promoting colonialism and the decline of everything, “with the exception of the West” (376). Much culture simply expresses and furthers the decadence of capitalist societies. In an attack on American popular music and dance that out-does Adorno, Bloch writes: Where everything is disintegrating though, the body also contorts itself effortlessly along with it. Nothing coarser, nastier, more stupid has ever been seen than the jazz-dances since 1930. Jitterbug, Boogie-Woogie, this is imbecility gone wild, with a corresponding howling which provides the so to speak music accompaniment. American movement of this kind is rocking the Western countries, not as dance, but as vomiting. Man is to be soiled and his brain emptied; he has even less idea amongst his exploiters where he stands, for whom he is grafting, what he is being sent off to die for. (394) Against this “American filth,” however, Bloch claims that “a kind of movement of purification emerged” in the new schools of dance developing from Isidora Duncan which attempted “to demonstrate a more beautiful human image in the flesh” (394). Bloch also celebrates the Russian folk-dance which expresses a “joy beyond the day of drudgery. The calmness and boisterousness both say: Here I am human, here I am entitled to be” (395). Expressionist dance, however, is more ambivalent, rebelling against “the spirit of gravity,” but also flowing into “the local bloodlake of fascism; for which this kind of roaring of wings was already foreseeable in its imperialist premises” (398). These examples show that Bloch carries out a differentiated critique of cultural forms, tending to attack those which he sees involved with fascist culture, or a decadent capitalism, and praising those which rebel against capitalism and bourgeois life, or celebrate a healthy socialism. He contrasts, for example, the “incomparable falsification” of Hollywood film, with the “realistic film in its anti-capitalist, no longer capitalist peak performances” (408). While Bloch is sharply critical of Hollywood film (see especially The Principle of Hope, 1986a, 410), he believes that film per se contains much utopian potential in its ability to project images of a better life, to explore and redeem concrete reality, and to transmit utopian dreams and energies.

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 94

10/17/2011 10:07:55 PM

ERNST BLOCH, UTOPIA, AND IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE

95

In sum, Bloch finds utopian traces throughout the field of culture, demonstrating that “[m]ankind and the world carry enough good future; no plan is itself good without this fundamental belief within it” (447). Even though it is beneficial to affirm Bloch’s methodological imperative of searching for utopian and emancipatory potential within all forms of culture, while also attending to embellishing and mystifying ideological elements, one might quarrel with his specific evaluations and judgments. As my presentation makes clear, he tends to attack culture that affirms capitalism, fascism, and philosophical idealism, and to praise culture which promotes socialism. The limitations of his evaluations, I believe, derive from his overly dogmatic Marxism and his exile experiences that provide consistently negative depictions of the United States.14 The Principle of Hope was written while Bloch was a relatively emphatic Marxist and his political hermeneutic deeply influenced his readings. His discussion of theater, for instance, celebrates Brecht (413ff.) and progressive German and Soviet theater, and exalts theater that promotes “defiance and hope” rather than the catharsis of pity and fear of Greek theater (429ff.). He also constantly attacks the enemies of utopia, such as the French artist Grandville and Greek playwright Aristophanes (434, 435ff.) and above all attacks American culture. Utilizing Bloch for cultural criticism thus requires distancing oneself from some of his specific judgments and analyses while making use of his double-coded concept of ideology and his method of cultural criticism. Cultural studies, for Bloch, should reject distinctions between high and low culture, seeing utopian potential in cultural artifacts ranging from advertising and department store displays to Beethoven and opera. Bloch’s politicization of cultural critique forces one to make political evaluations of cultural artifacts, though one may make different judgments, and have different political perspectives than Bloch. Indeed, cultural studies for Bloch was intimately bound up with his social and political theory, so that cultural criticism for him was an important part of political practice.15

Socialism, Revolution, and the Red Arrow In conclusion, Bloch offers a paradigm of “intra-historical transcendence,” in which utopian elements are grounded in a cultural tradition and historical situation, and thus point to a better future in which long-held wishes and dreams for freedom, happiness, and justice can be realized. For Bloch, hope is thus always grounded in concrete historical conditions and struggles and there is always future potentiality for a better life and society. In the Obama era, hope has become part of the political discourse of the day, and in my view Ernst Bloch provides a particularly rich philosophical and political grounding of hope in his theory of utopia.16 Part Four of The Principle of Hope interrogates the “Outlines of a Better World” in a variety of utopias. Bloch finds utopian dreams not only in the social and political utopias of the great utopian theorists, but also in a variety of technological, architectural, and geographical utopias, as well as in painting, opera, literature, and other forms of art. Part Five describes “Wishful

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 95

10/17/2011 10:07:56 PM

96

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Images of the Fulfilled Moment,” in which morality, music, religion, and philosophies project images and visions of supreme fulfillment, culminating in the figure of an individual who “has grasped himself and established what is his, without exploitation and alienation.” In this situation, “in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland” (1376). Culture for Bloch contains traces of what he calls red arrows that migrate through history looking for realization in socialism. Bloch finds a red path weaving through history, revolting against alienation, exploitation, and oppression, struggling for a better world. The social and political utopias present imperfect yearnings for what was more fully developed in Marxism and socialism. Thus Bloch develops an explicitly political hermeneutic that interprets certain cultural artifacts and residues from the past as pointing toward socialism. Certain aspects of the bourgeois revolutions, for instance, were never realized and contain a surplus of critical and emancipatory potential that can be used to criticize bourgeois society on the grounds that it was not realizing its own potentials and ideals. One of Bloch’s more productive ideas is that the ideological surplus or cultural surplus is not just an expression of the socioeconomic base or the dominant mode of production but is Ungleichzeitig, describing what is noncontemporaneous or nonsynchronic with the present.17 This concept points to the fact that residues and traditions from the past continue to be effective in the present, even though it might appear that they are completely archaic and historically surpassed (i.e., fascist primitivism, or the ultra-market capitalism and conservatism in the Reagan and Bush administrations in a technologically advanced United States). But Ungleichzeitigkeit also points to elements from the past that anticipate future developments, which appear before their time and point ahead to a time to come (i.e., earlier anticipations of socialism). However, the utopian surplus contains the potential to project long-term goals for an individual or society and for political practice that provide alternatives to the status quo that are far-seeing and future oriented. For Bloch, ideology and utopia are therefore not simply opposites because utopian elements appear in ideology and utopias are often permeated with ideological content and mystification. Cultural surplus, for Bloch, has the potentiality of utopian surplus that anticipates, previews, and points to a better organization of society and everyday life, and it is the task of the cultural critic to discern and unfold this progressive potential and to relate it to the struggles and possibilities of the present. Bloch’s cultural hermeneutic is thus deeply political and cultural studies for him is intimately bound up with political practice.

9780826420725_Ch07_Finals_txt_print.indd 96

10/17/2011 10:07:56 PM

CHAPTER 8

Secularism and Post-Secularism in Roberto Unger and Ernst Bloch: Toward a Utopian Ontology1 Ruth Levitas

Introduction In 2007 I wrote an article on the relationship between pragmatism and utopianism, contrasting the avowedly anti-utopian position taken by Roberto Unger in his 2007 book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound with the self-styled “realistic utopianism” of Richard Rorty (Levitas, Pragmatism). I argued that the former is effectively utopian in its opening to the future, while the latter is effectively anti-utopian in closing down the possibility of radical alterity. That article originated in a workshop on social hope held at Queens University, Belfast. Several participants responded by locating Unger’s argument as part of the post-secular turn in social theory, a view that is repeated in the critical literature. For example, Gregor McLennan argues that Unger’s “relatively secular re-imaginings are overwhelmed at times by standardly religious intuitions” (98). This article chapter examines the case for and against that suggestion, concluding that it is a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding arises partly because of Unger’s focus on the self, which may be (mis)read as a retreat from the social. Moreover, a language of divinity, godlikeness, prophecy, and grace pervades the text. Yet, to associate the views in The Self Awakened with the post-secular turn is to neglect the fact that the arguments, and to some extent the language, are present in Unger’s earlier work, notably his 1984 Passion: An Essay on Personality. A close reading of both texts, informed also by Ernst Bloch’s recently reissued Atheism in Christianity, reveals a militantly secular argument and an intrinsic connection between these accounts of the self and Unger’s commitment to social reconstruction. The last part of the chapter argues that the use of quasi-religious language derives from the absence of evidently secular language to address questions of ontology, especially in normative and prescriptive terms. This in a sense echoes Christopher Hill’s contention that the use of religious, apocalyptic imagery, and language by radical sects in the English Revolution occurred at least in part because of the absence of an available adequate political language. I contend that an adequate secular language is absent in part as a result of the current polarization between

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 97

10/17/2011 10:07:59 PM

98

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

secular and religious positions. The model of secular humanism at work in these debates involves a debased humanism, or what Bloch referred to as “stupid materialism.” The most prominent proponent of this is Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion , but many popular accounts of evolutionary biology are implicated here. The only way to stem the rise of pathological fundamentalisms of all kinds (including Dawkins’s) is to insist on a deeper humanism that, as Bloch would insist, reclaims from religion matters of spirit and grace. Such matters are not eliminated from secular culture, but sequestered in art, poetry, and music, and they are a source of deep embarrassment to most secular social scientists. Unger, like Bloch, effects this reclamation. He shares with Bloch an ontology which is historicized rather than essentialist, and which is centered on becoming and therefore open to the future. In that respect it is a utopian ontology.

Ernst Bloch Bloch himself is of course the most important theorist of utopia, and especially its relationship to Marxism. In that context, the most central work is Das Prinzip Hoffnung, translated into English in 1986 as The Principle of Hope. The arguments of this 1,400-page work are complex, and can only be briefly summarized here. Bloch does not equate utopia with a blueprint or plan for the future. Rather, it is the product of lack, longing, and desire, and the imagination of what would meet that lack. Expressions of this are suffused throughout culture, from alchemy and myth, through art, literature and especially music, into social and political action. Bloch endorses even the most unrealistic fantasies as an expression of the wish that the world might be otherwise. He also makes a distinction between “abstract utopia,” or wishful thinking that is merely fantastic, and “concrete utopia,” the outcome of wishful thinking passed into will-full action. For Bloch, the world is essentially unfinished, and the future must be brought into being by human agency: our participation in this process is inescapable. The world is intrinsically and necessarily in process of becoming. The path of development is indeterminate and contains multiple possibilities—possibilities that are not set against the real, but are part of it. The anticipation or forward-dawning of a world transformed, of possibility on the horizon, attests to a utopian process. Bloch’s key concept of the “not-yet” encompasses both absence and anticipation. The not-yet is characteristic not only of the external world but of the human condition. The idea of a transformed, or more accurately self-transforming, humanity is reflected in such concepts as the Not-Yet-Conscious and the Upright Gait. The later parts of The Principle of Hope discuss religion as a repository of utopian imagination. Bloch’s arguments here echo Marx’s assertion that religion is not simply the opium of the people, but “the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions.” He insists that the necessary move to atheism is one which reclaims the essentially human characteristics that have been projected onto God and Christ because they cannot be expressed or encountered in the constraints of the world as it is.2

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 98

10/17/2011 10:08:00 PM

SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM

99

In 2009 Bloch’s later work Atheism in Christianity (first published in English in 1972) was reissued with an introduction by Peter Thompson. It is an exercise in biblical criticism, exegesis and theological critique directed to supporting a rebellious and utopian reading of both Old and New Testaments. The date of the book suggests it is a contribution to the contemporaneous “Christian-Marxist dialogue,” although Bloch describes this as “grey and compromising” (Atheism, 256). He discusses both Feuerbach and Marx, supporting their arguments about religion as alienation. But he does argue against the simple interpretation of religion as the opium of the people, by insisting on considering the wider context of that phrase. Of course “one cannot expect miracles from a consideration of the opium-quotation in its entirety (instead of just half of it), but it might at least open the way, as they say, to conversations between believers purged of ideology and unbelievers purged of taboo” (Bloch, Atheism, 51). Bloch quotes Marx: Religion is the fantastic realization of human nature, inasmuch as human nature has no true reality . . . Religious misery is at once the expression of man’s real misery and the protest against it. Religion is the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The suppression of religion as man’s illusory happiness is the demand for their real happiness . . . The criticism of religion has plucked the imaginary flowers from their chains, not so that man may wear a dreary unimaginative chain, but so that he may throw off the chain and pluck the living flowers . . . The critique of religion ends with the doctrine that the highest being for mankind is man: with the categorical imperative, therefore, to overthrow every state of affairs in which man is degraded, enslaved, abandoned and despised in his very being.3 (Atheism, 50) Bloch argues that there are two different narratives running through the Bible: “a Scripture for the people and a Scripture against the people” (Atheism, 70). One story is that of a creator-god, a law-giver from above, nonhuman, utterly transcendent and other. Bloch argues that mistranslations, corruptions, and deliberate redactions of biblical texts accentuate the potential for religion to support repressive political agendas, by promoting compliance and submission to both secular and religious authority. He alludes in this context to Church support for dictators such as Franco (still in power in Spain when the book was written) and to collusion with anti-semitism and the burning of Jews, heretics, and Lutherans. Theologically, the characterization of Christ as Son of God stresses his divine rather than human character, while the representation of humanity involves descriptive subalternity and prescriptive self-abnegation. The Kingdom of God is placed outside time and history, inaccessible to human experience and impervious to human action. Bloch discusses the treatment of transcendence by theologians, especially Karl Barth, in which the human/God distinction is absolute and bridged only by the Word (of the Bible, which is thus de-historicized) and by Christ. He claims that Barth’s eschatology is one that ends the world: there is no

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 99

10/17/2011 10:08:00 PM

100

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

redemption of this world. Bloch argues that in Barth “The taboo of God’s otherworldliness and the sovereignty of his revelation minimize every achievement of man’s spirit” (Atheism, 36). The atheism of the book’s title is the rejection of the creator-God in favor of the God of Exodus. This de-theocratizing is necessary because “the Bible only has a future inasmuch as it can, with this future, transcend without transcendence” (Bloch, Atheism, 70). There is an alternative eschatological story of Exodus into the Kingdom. This is a half-buried plebeian element, a narrative of rebellion against injustice, which recurs in the story of the Fall and the desire for knowledge that precipitates it. It appears par excellence in the Book of Job, which reveals Job as morally superior to God (and to his so-called comforters who preach subjection and compliance), and in which Job appears as a Hebrew Prometheus. It is there, says Bloch, in the Prophets who point toward freedom of choice and the power of human decision so that the future is not an immutable category. It is there in Jesus’ own political orientation, and is taken up by writers such as William Blake, and religious movements such as the Anabaptists. In this, the emphasis is on Jesus as Son of Man. This restores human agency, brings the Kingdom within historical time, opens the future to a process which is a double exodus into human and social transfiguration. Transcendence is not removal from or beyond the world, but its immanent and imminent transformation. The ontology that is involved here is an “ontology of Not-yet-being” (Bloch, Atheism, 55), just as the cosmology is one that has not-yet-become. And this leads back to Marxism: Implicit in Marxism— as the leap from the Kingdom of Necessity to that of Freedom— there lies the whole so-subversive and un-static heritage of the Bible: a heritage, which in the exodus from the static order, showed itself far more as pure protest, as the archetype of the Kingdom of freedom itself. As the abolition of every On-High which has no place for man; as a transcending with revolt, and equally a revolt with transcending— but without transcendence. (Bloch, Atheism, 57)

The Self Awakened Reading Unger through Bloch may have historical as well as conceptual resonance. For Bloch’s work was hugely influential on liberation theology in South America in the 1960s and 70s; and Unger, born in Brazil in 1947, lived there throughout the 1960s, leaving for graduate studies at Harvard in 1969. There are echoes of Bloch’s language and concerns, although differences of interpretation, throughout Unger’s work. Unger’s 1998 book, Democracy Realised: The Progressive Alternative , is a summary statement of his hopes for a gradual move from the global status quo to a world that is more democratic and more economically just, through a process he describes as democratic experimentalism. Here Unger’s arguments are pitched in terms of the

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 100

10/17/2011 10:08:00 PM

SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM

101

institutional structures of society, and a process of change of those economic, social, and political structures and processes through step by step improvisation and collective learning. The Self Awakened is not pitched at this institutional level. Its central trope is “to represent and raise up our humanity” through the medium of imagination and hope (Unger, Self, 2). It entails a radical pragmatism because it is focused on step by step becoming which is both open to, and opens up, the future. For Unger, possibilities are not hypostatized or reified blueprints “out there” between which we choose and toward which we work. The supposition of the externality of alternatives Unger regards as highly dangerous. Indeed, he shares some of Karl Popper’s concern about the dangers of revolution, which in Unger’s view arise from the erroneous perception of social change as the substitution of one indivisible totality for another. His position is explicitly gradualist and anti-necessitarian. But if it rests on tinkering with the system, it is “motivated, sustained and cumulative tinkering” (Unger, Democracy, 16). It is not a refusal to challenge fundamental aspects of the existing system, since his political goal is an alternative to neoliberalism. The defining feature of radical pragmatism is its project “to associate the idea of discontinuous structural change with the practical attitudes of the person who forever asks: What is the next step?” (Unger, Democracy, 19). Imagination plays a central role. This does not demand the construction of utopias in the sense of detailed blueprints, but is deployed in the practical activity of social improvisation: “The master tool of democratic experimentalism is institutional innovation, practised not from on high, with fanciful blueprints and perfectionist designs, but with the materials at hand and in the situation of the moment” (Unger, Democracy, 165). The importance of a “visionary” element in sustaining and directing political change is a constant theme: The visionary intimation of a reordered social world, with its poetic attempt to connect present personal experiences to hidden social possibilities, helps right the scales of risk by enlarging the imaginative terrain on which the debate takes place. As the consequences of reforms for the understanding of interests and ideals become manifest, the boundary shutting the instrumental off from the visionary begins to open. Then history makes more room for imagination. (Unger, Democracy, 12) Changing the world does demand a changed subjectivity. But whereas the conventional appeal to a brave new world that has such people in it carries always the risk of demanding that historically determined human nature force itself into Procrustean systems, Unger asks only that this change in who we might be happens slowly, and with our consent: it involves “the intimation of a different world, in which we would become (slightly) different people, with (slightly) revised understandings of our interests and ideals” (Democracy, 12). Subjects are also agents, and the development of individual and collective capabilities and capacities—which have a material basis— should include the capacity to engage in debate about

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 101

10/17/2011 10:08:00 PM

102

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

possible futures: “A set of capacity-ensuring rights and resources must find their counterpart in practices and institutions that keep society open to alternative futures and inspire in politics and culture a contest of visions” (Unger, Democracy, 168). The Self Awakened develops themes of what amounts to a utopian ontology, in a framing of questions of transcendence and connection. True, as McLennan observes, Unger refuses the category of ontology, both in relation to individuals and the ontology of hypothesized (and hypostatized) possible worlds. But this is a rejection of a timeless ontology. And just as Norman Geras has shown that there is a concept of human nature in Karl Marx despite the historicization which rejects the fixity of human nature, so too Unger is concerned with a nonessentialized ontology. If “[t]he legitimate successor to ontology is a history of nature, historicizing the laws of nature as well as the kinds of things that arise in the course of history” (Self, 85), the whole argument of the book is about what it means and could potentially mean to be human, and the implications of this for creating a world adequate to the project of human flourishing. The emphasis on capacity and capability (which, certainly, as inflected by Marx and Amartya Sen, are not quite the same thing) means that human identities also need to be more strongly articulated in terms of what people individually and collectively might become, rather than in terms of where they come from: thus he argues we should “call on prophecy more than upon memory” (Unger, Democracy, 181). We should also educate our children to be prophets, through the development of their capacities, which—like all education— entails hope, transformation, and a move beyond what now is and what we now are. This leads to a “remaking of our understanding of the actual by the imagination of the possible” and “requires a large measure of detachment from the now dominant culture” (Unger, Democracy, 231). Conversely, action creates possibility, both imaginatively and institutionally. What is regarded as real— and what is actually possible—is defined both by imagination and by praxis. Unger argues further that when we imagine things otherwise, we normally assume that causal processes and relationships remain essentially unchanged. But he argues that time and change “go all the way down,” such that even the laws governing processes of change may themselves be subject to change, indicating a greater possibility of novelty, of openness (Unger, Self, 86). This does not mean that anything is possible, but that step by step changes of ourselves and our world might lead to a transformation of social structures and of the capacities and capabilities of those who inhabit, produce, and reproduce them. There is a fine line between abstract utopia, wishful thinking, hoping for the unattainable; and imagining, hoping for, and claiming too little, and there is no certainty that we will draw the line in the right place: We lack the metric with which to measure the proximity of our programs to our circumstances. We must walk, in relative darkness, the narrow path between wishful thinking and the denial of the pragmatic, prophetic residue in our understanding of transformative possibility. (Unger, Democracy, 237)

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 102

10/17/2011 10:08:00 PM

SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM

103

This is an entirely secular argument, deeply informed by Marxism, even if the focus on the self by someone who is primarily known for a focus on legal, political, and economic institutions may come as something of a surprise, and the very idea of raising up our humanity may also raise up a few eyebrows. So what grounds could be adduced for seeing it as post-secular? Post-secular, like postmodern, post-Marxist, postfeminist, post-Freudian, may have a multiplicity of meanings or no precise meaning at all. “Post” may imply supersession in the sense of moving on from something completed and no longer necessary, as in some uses of postfeminism; or it may, as in the case of post-Marxism, imply the rejection of the discourse in question; or it may at least pose as a more neutral characterization of dominant discourses. In all cases, these “post” terms involve an implicit characterization of what went before, and one which is often misleading. Thus Raymond Williams challenged the construction of modernism in the postmodern in “When was Modernism”? Similarly, “post-secular” raises the question of the imputed character, as well as periodization, of the secular itself. The last section of this chapter returns to this issue. At this point, however, it is useful to distinguish several possible meanings of “post-secular” that might bear on the current argument. First, it can refer to a personal trajectory from a secular to a religious position. An example of this would be Terry Eagleton’s recent move from an assumedly atheist and Marxist position to at least sympathy for the Catholicism in which he was raised. Of course, given the hegemony of atheism among professional intellectuals, some of these moves may be more apparent than real, a “coming out” of closet religious sympathizers. Here, the question would be whether Unger has suddenly either acquired, or revealed, a religious orientation that is expressed in his recent work. The second and third meanings are the fracturing of this hegemony in the discourse of social theory itself and in wider public discourse. One version of this would be Charles Taylor’s characterization of the post-secular age. An era when “belief” could be taken for granted gives way to secularism, where “unbelief” at least in public and intellectual discourse may dominate. What characterizes the post-secular is a background assumption that neither belief nor unbelief may be taken for granted. Here, the question would be whether The Self Awakened implicitly or explicitly takes religious faith (whatever that might mean) as seriously as secularism and thus as a possible epistemological position. The fourth meaning is the greater recognition in the public sphere of religious faith and its practitioners and institutions, and the contention around such issues. There are manifold examples of this, including the European equalities legislation that defends against discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief, the rise in faith schools at least in the United Kingdom, the contestation in France over the wearing of the hijab and naqib in schools and public places. This has less bearing on characterizing Unger’s position, although aspects of it are important to its implications. There is no doubt that the language Unger uses is at times explicitly theological and for that reason somewhat perplexing. If The Self Awakened opens with a prospectus of raising up our humanity, it closes with the claim that while we cannot become God, ‘we can become more godlike’ (256), and this claim is repeated in various ways throughout. His central theme, he says, is “the single idea” of “the infinity of the

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 103

10/17/2011 10:08:00 PM

104

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity”; its “wonderful and terrible disproportion . . . to everything that would contain and diminish it”; its belittlement and enslavement in the realities of the world that exists and therefore “its need to create a world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself” (Unger, Self, 26–7). He refers to raising up the individual to “godlike power and freedom,” the “godlike powers of ordinary humanity,” the “divinization of the person,” the “divinization of humanity,” the “path of divinization” (Unger, Self, 28–9, 130, 181, 217). He talks of spiritualizing society, of the need for a “world revolution that is spiritual as well as political” (Unger, Self, 145). He writes of the struggle between “spirit and structure” as “the revolt of the infinite within us against the finite around us” (Unger, Self, 124). He writes repeatedly and at length about transcendence. Less centrally but nevertheless throughout there are references to prophecy, vision, and to the awakening of the self.

Passion: An Essay in Personality The Self-Awakened does not, however, represent a shift in Unger’s concerns that can be read as part of the post-secular turn, in the sense of a renewed sympathy for religion. The first reason why such an interpretation of Unger’s position is simply wrong is a historical one. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, Unger addressed very similar themes in Passion: An Essay in Personality. Here too the questions of transcendence and the link between personal and social transformation, are central. As so often in Unger’s work the echoes are precise: “We ask of one another more than any person can give another: not just respect, admiration or love, but some reliable sign that there is a place for us in the world” (Self, 13) is a reiteration of earlier claims that “there is no end to what people want of one another” (Passion, 95); people “want a sign that there is a place for them in the world” (Passion, 97), and “We seek in others more than an opportunity to live out our sense of longing and jeopardy; we seek an answer to the enigma of our existence or a way to forget this enigma altogether” (Passion, 123). The extent to which Self is revealed as a reprise of Passion establishes that there has not been a fundamental shift in Unger’s thought that could be tied to either a personal conversion or some general postsecular turn in social theory. Unger describes Passion as “a speculative and prescriptive view of personality from the standpoint of a single but pervasive aspect of our experience; our desire to be accepted by one another and to become, through this acceptance, freer to reinvent ourselves” (vii); and as “a modernist criticism and restatement of the Christianromantic image of man” (vii). The main essay begins “The world is real and dense and dark” (Unger, Passion, 95) recalling Bloch’s repeated references to the darkness of the lived moment.4 Unger characterizes the human condition in terms of unlimited mutual need and unlimited mutual fear— our need of acceptance, love, and connection with the other, and our fear of the vulnerability this need imposes, leading to a tension between longing and jeopardy. From this issues a quest for freedom,

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 104

10/17/2011 10:08:00 PM

SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM

105

“for the basic freedom that includes an assurance of being at home in the world” (Unger, Passion, 107). Again, there are echoes of Bloch and the concept of heimat. The Principle of Hope ends: But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has ever been: homeland. (Bloch, The Principle , 1986b, 1376) For Unger though the reshaping and overhauling of the given facts include— and in the context of this essay center on—the facts of self and character. Specifically, the flexible potential of self as someone who could act, experience, and be otherwise must resist and overcome the ossification of character, the accretion of habits and dispositions limited by specific historical circumstances. For Bloch, “[w]e have in us what we could become” (Principle, 1986b, 927). For Unger, the basic features of selfhood are “embodiment, contextuality and the grasping for the supra-contextual” (Passion , 123). In Passion , the issue of connection is central, and especially connection in faceto-face encounters. Passion, as redefined by Unger, is not contrasted with reason. It refers to “the whole range of interpersonal encounters in which people do not treat one another as means to one another’s ends” (105–6). The ability to imagine ourselves otherwise and the possibility of being otherwise entail remaining open to our vulnerability and jeopardy in encounters with others. Here too, as in Self, the argument is political as well as personal, for the reflexivity and flexibility of self is intrinsically bound up with the possibilities of social transformation: The readiness to experiment with different kinds of encounters, and with their distinctive styles of vulnerability, is akin to central features of the practical, transformative political imagination: its refusal to take any established set of alliances and antagonisms for granted, its effort to mobilize people in ways that are not predefined by the existing order, and its capacity to make these essays in mobilization the means for building new varieties of collaboration and community in the practical affairs of society. (Unger, Passion, 110) Unger argues for this flexibility of self, in which you “experience yourself as an identity that is never wholly contained by character and that grows to greater selfknowledge and self-possession by the willed acts of vulnerability or the accepted accidents of fortune that put a character under pressure” (Passion, 109). Such flexibility depends, he says, upon material welfare, but develops also the practical qualities for safeguarding and developing that welfare, which is a political matter. Freedom from rigidity and from compulsion enables political action by allowing “people to identify opportunities but resist the temptation of importunate action,” and

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 105

10/17/2011 10:08:01 PM

106

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

encouraging them (again with echoes of Bloch) to “wait when the moment is not yet”(Passion, 110). Conversely, the political opening up of the social imaginary “has a spiritual as well as a practical significance” (Passion, 266). Unger’s argument is unashamedly prescriptive about the “best” way of being in the world. Passion addresses “negative” emotional states and orientations of hatred, vanity, pride, envy, jealousy, lust as well as compulsion and addiction— all viewed as responses to the primary predicament of unlimited need and unlimited fear in relation to the other. But hope, love (both sexual and asexual), and faith are also possible responses to and outcomes of our common predicament. Hope and its “anticipatory power” are described in Blochian terms: “hope differs from expectation. . . . It is a predisposition to action rather than merely a foretaste of pleasure. It instantiates a conceived future rather than merely looking to it” (Unger, Passion, 245). The goal of “patient and hopeful availability,” Unger’s “moral perfection,” is a combination of ardour and gentleness (Passion, 269). Gentleness, or sympathy, involves a particular orientation to the other: “It is to see and to treat the other as a person always incongruously caught in finite and conditional worlds and situations, character and body, and thus entangled in circumstances disproportionate to the context-transcending capacities of the self ” (Unger, Passion, 269). The integration of this with ardor, with engagement in life, prevents the treatment of the other as a means to an end, and thus facilitates a connection closer to Buber’s I-Thou than I-it. This is particularly so since we understand ourselves also to be in the same predicament as the other. Yet throughout the argument, Unger also stresses that our knowledge of the other is “inescapably and radically incomplete” (Passion, 210), perhaps placing his account of moral perfection closer to Levinas’s ethic of grace. Importantly, although it may involve risk, it is not sacrificial. Like Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor stressed in On Kindness , we are driven to the other not out of duty but our own need, and love and kindness are an expression of our inherent sociality, not of altruism. For Unger, actual relations with real persons in the here are more important than abstract relations with groups or in possible future scenarios. Nevertheless, nothing “excuses us from the need to imagine an alternative human world and to imagine it in a way that enables us to act in the present as if this alternative had already begun to emerge and its anticipated norms had already begun to bind us” (Unger, Passion, 247). Quasi-theological concepts run through the text of Passion , even leaving aside the probably inadvertent Christological resonance of the title. Hope, love, and faith depend upon grace. There is overt reference to the New Testament in the aspiration to being in the world but not of it. Unger writes of “revelatory events” (Passion, 247). There are references to redemption including a “redemptive impulse” (Unger, Passion, 254), to salvation and to “spiritual corruption” (Unger, Passion, 237). And again, there are repeated references to transcendence. Both the arguments and the language are consistent across the two works, although there are additional elements in The Self Awakened about the nature of time, reality, and possibility that are absent from the earlier work.

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 106

10/17/2011 10:08:01 PM

SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM

107

Words and Meanings A second reason for reading the argument as consistently secular lies in the close examination of the texts themselves. Unger’s own account in both works of what these “quasi-religious” concepts mean returns them unequivocally to the secular, and to a secular humanism which is processual but not thereby lacking in content. Indeed, the introduction to Passion asserts that it is “possible to develop an account of identity that is neither trivial nor context-bound” (21). In this introduction, Unger suggests that there are two routes to a reading of talk about God in the Christianromantic tradition. One follows Feuerbach and treats theological terms as metaphors. This, he suggests, poses a simple process of translation, after which no surplus meaning remains. The alternative is an analogical reading, in which “the psychology of personal encounter prefigures the theology of redemption” (Unger, Passion, 28). But “[f]or the purposes of a secular view of human identity we have no need to choose between . . . Feuerbachian and . . . analogical readings” (Unger, Passion, 28). Unger’s own explanations of his concepts tend to the Feuerbachian, precisely because a secular argument that does not include God (although it does include human yearning for the absolute) cannot be analogical in the sense he describes. Thus faith can be given “a purely secular interpretation” (Unger, Passion, 237). It entails either or both emotional and cognitive risk, in going beyond what can be rationally justified. One can neither be sure of the veracity of some cognitive beliefs nor that one’s vulnerability, especially in loving another, will not be exploited. Faith and grace are linked, for in the secular form this refers to acts of grace by other people, specifically that they refrain from attacking your exposed or heightened vulnerability. And Unger goes on to comment that it is in the absence of such grace that another, implicitly non-secular, grace would be needed or appealed to (Passion, 99). “Spiritual corruption” means turning occasions of vulnerability into “devices of dependency, withdrawal, and self-delusion” (Unger, Passion, 239). The same secular translation is provided in The Self Awakens. “Spirit,” for example, translates as “the resistant and transcending faculties of the agent” which enable us to “spiritualize society” (Unger, Self, 38); spirit is only another name for this transcendent capacity. Transcendence here is more akin to what Bloch describes in Atheism in Christianity as the need to transcend without transcendence. That is, it is about a context-transcending capacity which Unger attributes to the human condition. It is an emergent property of the human mind to create the infinite out of the finite; one innate characteristic of the mind is its nonmechanical character, its capacity to outrun and subvert the given, in short, to imagine. While we are always and everywhere constrained and constructed by historical circumstances, these circumstances vary in the extent to which they permit and enable human agency, and they never shape us fully. There is always left over “a residue of unused capability for action, association, passion, and insight worth having” (Unger, Self, 209). Transcendence is the capacity to imagine ourselves beyond, and to act upon rather than simply react to, the external structures around us. We become more “godlike”

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 107

10/17/2011 10:08:01 PM

108

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

here because less suborned, more creative, freer; we simultaneously become more human, in the exercise and development of this essentially human characteristic. Our godlikeness lies therefore in a “quality of context-transforming spirit” (Unger, Self, 217). Again, the object of Unger’s project is a transformation of social relations and personal experience in the material world: The hope held out by the thesis that we can change our relation to our contexts will remain hollow unless we can change this relation in biographical as well as historical time, independent of the fate of all collective projects of transformation. It will be hollow as well unless that change will give us other people and the world itself more fully. That the hope is not hollow in any such sense represents part of the thesis implicit in the idea of futurity: to live for the future is to live in the present as a being not fully determined by the present settings of organized life and thought and therefore more capable of openness to the other person, to the surprising experience, and to the entire phenomenal world of time and change. It is in this way that we can embrace the joy of life in the moment as both a revelation and a prophecy rather than discounting it as a trick that nature plays on spirit the better to reconcile us to our haplessness and our ignorance. (Unger, Self, 150) It is, says Unger, perfectly possible to “devise institutions and practices that, by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves by which we reproduce them and the extraordinary moves by which we change them, make us greater, freer and more human” (Self, 165). The claim seems interchangeable with the way in which we make ourselves “more godlike” as we become in the process the people that we are not yet: for that full humanity is something which has been alienated from us. Where it is not alienated into religion, spiritual intensity is sequestered into the field of art, emptying philosophy and social science and the politics of our being in the world: “the human spirit as portrayed in the humanities— escapes from the stifling structure of everyday life. Having escaped it, it then floats above, disembodied, unwilling and unable to infuse and reanimate the spiritless world of routine and repetition” (Unger, Self, 123). The treatment of the transcendent human spirit in art, music, literature, and responses to (evolved) nature is precisely the subject of The Sunrise of Wonder, an autobiographical anthology arranged as letters to his grandchildren by Michael Mayne, one-time Dean of Westminster. Mayne articulates the spirit infusing these often secular passages in a religious, Christian direction, suggesting that wonder is the fundamental religious category. But this is not a necessary move. Susan McManus argues that wonder is the fundamental utopian category. Phillippa Bennett, writing about the thought of the atheist and Marxist William Morris, argues that it is the fundamental human category. She notes, as does Mayne, Gradgrind’s hostility to wonder in Dickens’s Hard Times . Bennett argues:

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 108

10/17/2011 10:08:01 PM

SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM

109

[Wonder] is best defined less as a response than an attitude towards the world. To wonder is not so much the ability to experience the occasional spontaneous epiphany as the willingness to be perceptive and receptive to the opportunities for wonder that present themselves to us on a daily basis. And, just as importantly, it is willingness to allow those opportunities and experiences to affect, and perhaps even transform us—to allow them to challenge our preconceptions and renew our vision. To do so is to recognise the most fundamental and radical aspect of wonder—its revolutionary potential. (13) Bennett suggests that Morris’s whole work is driven by the desire to reclaim wonder, just as Bloch and Unger seek to return sequestered spirit to the social world in unalienated form. The awakening of the self is not, then, a religious matter in the conventional sense, although Unger does use the term transcendence to talk about it. Rather, it is “a continuation, without the theological backdrop (my emphasis), of some of the moral and psychological beliefs most characteristic of the narrative of salvation” (Self, 222). Such a narrative, for Unger, is an “attempt to provide grounds outside us for what can have grounds only within us” (Self, 222). The awakening is twofold. The first awakening is an awakening to consciousness. The second awakening may be existentially similar to that figured in conversion experiences as being “born again” (although Unger does not draw this parallel): The second awakening of the self is the discovery within us of the demand for the infinite, for the absolute. Once discovered it must be lived out. Its living out changes the meaning of everything we had experienced before. The second awakening is therefore a revolution in the experience of consciousness and distinction. (Self, 225) But again here it is unequivocally secular: “it is not a miracle but an accomplishment” (Self, 227), and one which thrives more in conducive environments of thought and social structure, and is therefore a collective as well as an individual achievement. It is a discovery, or awareness, of our “infinity,” our context-transcending character— and therefore something which disturbs and disrupts the status quo. For Unger, through democratic experimentalism and radical pragmatism, this awakened self pulls spirit back from the realms of art and religion into a transformative politics of next steps that opens out to a better future.

Against Stupid Materialism The positions taken by Unger and Bloch are of clear contemporary relevance. They stand in stark contrast to current debates in the public sphere between the religious and the secular, which discursively polarize religion and belief against atheism and unbelief. What Unger and Bloch offer is secular and atheistic, but scarcely unbelief. The importance of their arguments is more evident when contrasted with current

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 109

10/17/2011 10:08:01 PM

110

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

versions of atheism. In characterizing post-secularism less as a return to religion than as a state in which neither belief nor unbelief can be taken for granted, Charles Taylor reproduces a profoundly problematic contrast between belief and unbelief which structures public discourse. The dichotomy is repeated by Bloch himself, and by Thompson, referring to the reemergence of religions “against a background of unbelief” (ix), as well as by Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great and Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. These books are certainly post-secular in Taylor’s sense, since their purpose is to defend atheism against the increasing incursion of religion in the public sphere; they only make sense in a context where both religion and secularism are contestable and contested. Discursively, the term “unbelief,” like atheism, operates as a negative in which theism and belief have dominant status. This leaves little space for the potentially positive content of secular humanism, or indeed for subtle and non-fundamentalist forms of religion, nor for the possibility that these have more in common with each other, and are more common, than the debased character of contemporary public discourse suggests. Nor is there space for a serious enquiry into what those defining themselves as religious or nonreligious actually believe, and why. The declaration of atheism is currently dominated by writers like Dawkins and Hitchens. Both The God Delusion and God is Not Great claim religion to be not only wrong, but immoral— a position supported by biblical exegesis and reference to the professed beliefs and actions of adherents of fundamentalist religions. Religious believers are portrayed as either weak-minded and deluded or malign and manipulative. Both writers conduct their arguments by sleight of hand. Religion is defined as belief in supernatural beings, principally Bloch’s creator-God, and is treated as fundamentalist belief in scripture. Both use at one point the example of cargo cults, though neither has apparently read Peter Worsley’s excellent The Trumpet Shall Sound , still less its careful discussion about what religion is, which establishes that not all religions involve a belief in supernatural beings. Both then explicitly exclude religious beliefs that do not fit their definition as not really religious: Dawkins thus declares that Buddhism is not a religion and that Spinoza’s pantheism was really atheism. Hitchens claims that the Lutheran Pastor Dietriech Bonhoeffer, whom he commends for his political opposition to the Nazis, was not really religious, but an adherent of “an admirable but nebulous humanism” (7). Dawkins at least concedes Bonhoeffer’s belief as religious, arguing that they are on the same side, and that “science finds itself in alliance with sophisticated theologians like Bonhoeffer” (153). However, apart from this aside, The God Delusion attacks religion in general as fundamentalist and creationist. Both Dawkins and Hitchens struggle with Einstein’s references to God, claiming that his disavowal of a personal God renders these purely metaphorical; Dawkins, indeed, describes this as something “we can all trivially subscribe to” (183). If the target is bad religion, it is opposed by bad science. Dawkins is primarily concerned to argue the case against creationism and intelligent design, in favor of natural selection and evolution. The latter are, of course, not challenged by many

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 110

10/17/2011 10:08:01 PM

SECULARISM AND POSTSECULARISM

111

people who regard themselves as religious. But he puts forward a bizarrely mechanistic view of the human mind and human condition, in which the level of the social is almost entirely absent. “Genes for refusing to be martyred,” for example are likely to dominate, leading to a decline in “tendencies towards martyrdom” (Dawkins 199). The brain is a collection of modules, in which “there is a module for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, . . . and for discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers” (Dawkins 208–9): perhaps, as in the film Matrix , we could upload a few more. Religion is a “virus,” to which children are particularly vulnerable, since Dawkins posits a selective advantage in this: unquestioning belief and trust in and obedience to adults “is a generally valuable rule for a child” (203). However, the evidence from most 2-year-olds is that obedience is not preprogrammed, and the evidence from most teenagers is that neither is unquestioning belief. Dawkins also posits the existence of memes, units of cultural inheritance which are analogous to genes, but for whose actual existence there is scarcely more evidence than there is for the existence of God. While in theory allowing that there may be emergent properties of mind, the argument as popularized and presented in The God Delusion embeds an entirely reductionist view of the human condition, the mind and the brain. Both Hitchens and Dawkins claim that their own positions do not constitute belief or faith, claiming that all their opinions are in principle open to revision by evidence. This is an idiosyncratic use of the term belief. Dawkins argues religion is accorded superior moral status in public discourse. He is right: the claim that “my principles require this” or “it is against my principles” will not generally be met with the same respect as the claim that “my religion requires this” or “it is against my religion.” Dawkins points out the conscientious objections to war by Quakers were readily accepted, whereas those whose pacifism had nonreligious grounds found it much harder for these to be accepted. It seems hard to make this argument without conceding that the moral commitments of atheist pacifists involve beliefs. And indeed, the British courts have recently accepted that belief in climate change may be as deeply held as a religious belief, and therefore subject to the legislation against discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief. To claim atheists do not have belief(s) but only a thought-through consequentialist morality presumes— as is implicit in Dawkins’s argument—both the theoretical possibility of perfect causal and consequential knowledge and a reduction of normative judgment to knowledge. In contrast, Unger uses the term faith in relation to a practical and existential need to go beyond what we can rationally justify. This is not necessarily the same as saying it is in principle beyond rational justification; indeed, the risk in our encounters is always that we may be proved false. But we do necessarily act on the basis of belief, despite the doubt that is implicit in faith. And moral choice cannot be reduced to (theoretically possible) knowledge. The outcome of this is a public discourse in which fundamentalist religion and strident atheism based on bad science stand opposed. As Karen Armstrong argues in The Case for God , where she also rejects the meaning of belief as assent to a cognitive

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 111

10/17/2011 10:08:02 PM

112

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

proposition and draws attention to the mystical traditions that have always regarded any representation of God as necessarily erroneous, bad science meets bad religion. Bloch refers to reductionist scientism as “stupid materialism,” and quotes Lenin: “Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism is” (Atheism, 247). Bloch’s own dialectical materialism has “the notice above the door: No mechanists allowed” (Atheism, 224). For any intelligent debate about the human condition and our possible future to take place, the space of intelligent materialism and intelligent religion needs to be expanded. For religion to lose its appeal as “the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions,” the positive content of secular humanism needs to be asserted. Yet metaphors of God, faith, grace, spirit, and transcendence are necessary because of the difficulty of finding a language and substance for these within the dominant polarized discourse. Hitchens reproduces the sequestration in art and literature of which Unger complains, appealing to “the study of art and literature, both for its own sake and the eternal ethical questions with which it deals” (283). In the very last paragraph, he refers to Ian McEwan’s “ability to elucidate the numinous without conceding anything to the supernatural” (Hitchens 286). In the end even Bloch declares: “But enough of this religious imagery” (Atheism, 247). He concludes in Atheism in Christianity that there is a need to “retain the depths of the Kingdom of Freedom as the real content of revolutionary consciousness on the road to becoming true substance” (Bloch, Atheism, 256). It is a matter of a hope which “is able to inherit those features of religion which do not perish with the death of God” (Bloch, Atheism, 250). What both Unger and Bloch seek to do is to counter “stupid materialism” with a view of humanity which has moral and existential depth, which is construed in terms of becoming rather than an essentialized ontology, and which remains open to possibility at the level of the individual and the social.

9780826420725_Ch08_Finals_txt_print.indd 112

10/17/2011 10:08:02 PM

CHAPTER 9

At the End of Utopia—Indifference1 Josep Ramoneda

Bellisima città ma ti pare de non essere in nessun luogo Hermann Bahr on Trieste

Being Has No Meaning Jan Patočka, a Czech philosopher and the first spokesperson for Charter 77, who died in Prague in that same year, 1977, as a consequence of police interrogations, was a disciple of Edmund Husserl who intensely lived through the bloody contradictions of Central Europe during the twentieth century. In his books, he did not skirt the central themes of his time and civilization: Europe, the war, the meaning of history, technology, totalitarianism, and intolerance. The chapter “Does History have a Meaning?” in his Heretical Essays includes two fragments that I will gloss at length. The first fragment says the following: “The antinomy of meaning and meaninglessness, of meaning and being, seems so to suggest that life is only possible thanks to the perennial illusion of total meaning which certain experiences show precisely to be an illusion. Truth would thus prove fundamentally hostile to life, in an irreconcilable opposition and conflict with it” (59)2. And a few lines below, Patočka adds: “In its practical unfolding, life cannot rest on a relative meaning which itself rests on meaninglessness, since no relative meaning can ever render the meaningless meaningful but, rather, is always dragged into meaninglessness by it” (59). Based on these fragments, we can infer that, according to Patočka, a life truly lived in absolute nihilism, in the full conscience of the meaninglessness of the whole, is not possible, or rather, it is only possible through an illusion. That is to say, absolute nihilism is also an illusion. But Patočka also tells us that “life is only possible thanks to the perennial illusion of total meaning” (59). The total meaning that makes life possible is, then, presented as an illusion. This illusion is far from reality; it is an effect of our capacity for selfdeception, for which we are so well prepared. It is an illusion that derives from an antinomy—that of meaning and meaninglessness; that of meaning and of being— which, as Patočka tells us, presents itself in certain moments as completely evident.

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 113

10/17/2011 10:08:05 PM

114

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

At the same time, Patočka makes another striking statement: “Truth would thus prove fundamentally hostile to life . . .” (59). We stand before two basic oppositions: truth/life; meaning/being. The relationship between truth and life is that of an irreconcilable opposition and permanent strife. The antinomy of meaning and meaningless is equivalent to the antinomy of meaning and being. We can, therefore, state: a. Being has no meaning. b. Meaning is necessary for life.

This double affirmation establishes a fundamental nihilism—being has no meaning— and delineates the idea of an opposition between being and life. I am talking about life in the Nietzschean sense: life as a meeting point between biology, conscience, and the surroundings, between the will to power and the external world. I base myself in Aphorism 121 of the Gay Science, titled “Life not an argument,” which states: “We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we were able to live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error” (117). The words of Nietzsche and the arguments of Patočka are not very different, even though their configurations might lead us to the opposite conclusion. As I said before: meaning is necessary for life. Meaning corresponds here to the articles of faith that Nietzsche mentions. Who established these articles of faith? They are the world that “we have arranged for ourselves.” Therefore, meaning, as life itself, develops in relation to us and emanates from our own inconsistency. Those who have a life— and, for Nietzsche, life is, above all, the will to power— are those who have the ability to give meaning to things. Meaning and life go hand in hand. Meaning emanates from power: “the conditions of life might include error.” We should, then, not confuse life with truth. Life can find a better foundation in error than in truth. Is it then truth itself that needs to be reconsidered? The meaning we ascribe to the world is necessary for life and, at the same time, it is an illusion, “articles of faith,” as Nietzsche calls them. It is a necessary illusion. What do we understand by a necessary illusion? If we follow Nietzsche, a necessary illusion is the truth as he presents it to us in his “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” He tells us that truth is an illusion that forgot about its illusory status, an illusion without which a certain kind of living beings— ourselves—would not know how to live: “If he [man] could escape from the prison walls of that faith for just a moment, his consciousness of himself (Selbstbewusstsein) would be crushed instantly” (36; translation slightly modified). It is a necessary illusion for life: human beings create it and believe in it. It is “[a] mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms” that people end up considering as “fixed, canonical and binding” (29–30). Meaning gets its foundational dimension from language, of which Nietzsche performs a radical critique.

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 114

10/17/2011 10:08:05 PM

AT THE END OF UTOPIA

115

The other category that shares this characteristic of presenting itself as a necessary illusion is ideology, according to Louis Althusser. In the last chapter of “For Marx ,” Althusser describes ideology as an indispensable mechanism for us to relate to the world. We can explain it thus: reality is unbearable; we need a sieve, a veil that hides the most unbearable parts of reality. This sieve is called ideology and no society can elude it. Later, Althusser will say that ideology is eternal in the same way that Freud tells us the unconscious is eternal. Ideology represents the most apparent dimension of meaning, the tip of the iceberg of meaning piercing through the social and political web. The necessary illusions of Nietzsche and Althusser are two aspects of the enormous systems of illusions that we call meaning: one of them—language—is the foundation of the system and therefore has the aura of truth; the other one— ideology— completes the system and, therefore, is apparently more vulnerable and in constant mutation.

Meaning is Necessary for Life What is the nature of meaning? It is an illusion. I have contrasted this illusion with truth both in the Platonic sense of adequation to an ideal order and in the positivist sense of correspondence to a fundamental universal order. What am I trying to signal with this contrast between meaning and truth? Very simply, that our desires and illusions do not necessary correspond to the modest, monotonous, and boring truth of the natural order of things. They are our way of being different, our form of rebellion. By asking about meaning we ended up touching upon the secret of life: life is a differential factor in the order of the universe. Human life is made of two mistakes: reason and truth, or, in other words, the capacity to establish goals and to choose the paths to reach them. This is the exceptionality of our species in the general order of the world. The cause for the development of meaning is then the illusions that constitute a necessity for men: to build one’s own world. Its cause is the general ways of identifying the world—language and its constructions— and the rationalizations that bedeck each specific social articulation. If being has no meaning but meaning is necessary for life, then the origin of meaning is a convention. But it is a convention that has forgotten its conventional origin: one that functions as fundamental and that aspires to be absolute. Meaning is, in consequence, the belief and the wager that correspond to each concrete model of rationalizing the social. Hence, the importance of the critique leveled against the modes of rationalization—the mechanisms created to establish meaning and to make it work. Patočka raises the critique of meaning from the perspective of anguish. But, in fact, anguish signifies only the moment of crisis. From its standpoint, from the standpoint of a lucid, radical nihilism, there are only two paths: either a return to the world and to the universe of meaning, or the immobility of foundational meaninglessness. Meaning has its direct source in the will and in power relations. In my

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 115

10/17/2011 10:08:06 PM

116

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

book El Sentido Íntimo I resorted to the notion of the suspension of power in order to delineate the possibility of the revelatory experience, at the limit of meaning and of power, but not outside meaning and power: artistic creation, scientific intuition, and the experience of love. These are singular moments that are immediately followed by a return to order, namely to style, scientific proof, and social customs. From the instantaneous, fleeting perspective of the suspension of power, the possibility of reflexive meaning opens up. It results from the acceptance that meaning is necessary for life and from the lucid acknowledgment that this meaning is not an absolute truth, even though it functions as one. Probably, it is for this reason that Michel Foucault conceived even the experience of oneself as a perspective, in order to question its modes of rationalization and of problematization. In the prehistory of humanity there is no problematization of meaning: the world seems to human beings— so Patočka tells us—to be in good order and to be justified, in spite of everything. One needs to enter history, that is to say, a critical view of one’s destiny, in order for a cataclysm in accepted meaning to take place. Meaning becomes a problem. Utopia is born. Reflexive meaning is the challenge in this problem. One needs simultaneously to question the structures of meaning—to perform a critique— and permanently to create meaning, since there is no life without it. One needs a reflexive and a constructive meaning. But is constructive meaning compatible with a critique? Utopia is the answer to this riddle. If there is no preestablished harmony or a final promise, the interpretation of meaning leads us to a different understanding of truth and to another conception of life. The nihilistic critique of meaning is certainly a radical critique of truth and of values. In these circumstances, we either assume the creative virtuality of a reflexive meaning or we inevitably condemn ourselves to the stagnation of life because of the loss (anguish as our situation and silence as our answer) or the petrification of meaning (religions as our destiny and mysticism as the only critical alternative).

The Excess of Reality Jean Améry is the pen name of Hans Mayer, who was born in Vienna in 1912. He was a Jewish writer, philosopher, and resistance fighter who was arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. In 1978 he committed suicide in Salzburg. Before that, in 1966, he published Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältingen, where he narrates the uselessness of intellectual experience in the concentration camp. Améry writes: “if the intellect was not centered around a religious or political belief it was of no help, or of little help” (15). And he adds: “nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so real. In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy” (19). In other words: “In the camp the intellect in its totality declared itself to be incompetent” (19). Améry describes the experience of an intellectual placed in a situation at the limits of the mind. A situation where, precisely, all powers conspire to negate every

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 116

10/17/2011 10:08:06 PM

AT THE END OF UTOPIA

117

movement that tries to overcome the weight of brute reality. What is the use of an intellectual in the empire of Evil? What is the use of culture, of all the imaginary accumulated in books or in the exercise of creative intellectual faculties in these circumstances? What is the use of the word when open, bare force rules and when it becomes clear that Evil is the abuse of power? Améry’s answer is devastating: they are worth nothing. The intellectual strives to overcome reality. But nowhere does reality possess such operative force as in the concentration camp: “In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy” (19). No, the concentration camp is no utopia, it is not a no-place; rather, it is the most brutally real place, where no veil remains to soften reality for our subjective experience. Overwhelmed by reality, by the force of a reality that obscenely shows death as the only destiny, as the immediate horizon— death that does not present itself as a problem but as a concrete presence—the intellectual becomes immobilized and the word, useless even as a consolation, dies between his hands. What does Améry realize? a. That the intellect capitulates when faced with the abuse of power. b. That the intellect is paralyzed when faced with the excess of reality.

He tells us that the intellect is only worthwhile on those occasions when it is linked to a religious or political experience, in other words, when it capitulates and gives in to a concrete and closed referent in order to make the intolerable ontological solitude bearable. Only those who believe in a religion or in an ideology have enough support to face that overdose of reality. In fact, they were the only ones who had a veil with which to separate that reality from themselves and, thus, were able to place that experience in their world: to give it meaning. For Christians, as well as for communists, Auschwitz was horrible but also a step toward salvation. Be it as it may, Améry says, “at no time could I discover within me the possibility for belief” (12), even though the overwhelmed intellectual tends to capitulate when faced with power and to become paralyzed when faced with the excess of reality. In fact, the two are the same: the excess of reality is the manifestation of totalitarian power. They are the moments when the will to power unfolds without any kind of limitations, that is to say, without meaning. Faced with the excess of reality, there are only two possibilities: to give in to reality or to domesticate it. To give in is a useless submission since the enemies are enemies for structural, irreversible reasons. To give in is to detach oneself from the rest of humanity, which was the main goal of the concentration camp. To domesticate reality means to integrate it, to find a place for it in one’s own narrative; only a totalizing vision can deal with totalitarian power. Those who have faith can integrate the camp itself in the number of incidents that are a part of a global and hopeful view of history. Only definitive meanings can resist when reflexive meaning fails. And what about the meaning of the concentration camp? Evil. It is evil as an apotheosis of the process of domination. Evil as an unbearable dose of reality, as if

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 117

10/17/2011 10:08:06 PM

118

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

suddenly we had lost centuries of civilization and found ourselves face to face with primordial chaos: power without limits. Under the appearance of absolute order, there is always chaos. The intellect has always struggled to overcome reality—this is the Sisyphean task we have as a species. And this task has a name: the attribution of meaning. The paralysis experienced by the intellect when faced with the absolute expression of reality does not mean that the intellect is useless but, rather, that truth is overwhelming. Because in these circumstances there is no meaning (intellect), but rather truth (reality), the horizon of nothingness, that is to say, of absolute order, takes shape before us. There is no order more radical than nothingness. The other orders have to be filled and, therefore, they have fissures. It is not in vain that God created us out of nothing. “Nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power” (19), says Améry. When all veils have been lifted, when everything is manifest, what remains? Not even death is a problem. There where everything leads to death, it becomes merely a concrete event—the tragic truth of life rendered banal by the camp. The labyrinth that is our life, leading us to death through the intricate path of meaning and civilization, is demolished by totalitarianism. There is no labyrinth, but a simple line that goes through the path leading to the gas chambers.

Meaninglessness as Utopia Totalitarianism is the elimination of meaning. And without meaning there is no life; only the horizon of being remains: meaninglessness. “In no other place,” says Améry, “did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy” (19). To overcome reality is to stamp our mark onto it, to add to it the emblem of meaning, and to make it ours. There are two ways of relating to this illusion of overcoming reality: to believe in the possibility of overcoming it or to accept this possibility in a critical manner and, as such, tinged with fragility. In the first instance, one conflates truth and meaning. In the second instance, one distinguishes meaning from truth. This is the difference between the definitive meaning and the reflexive meaning. We build our world with meaning— such is our necessary illusion. We occupy the space between the consciousness of reality and the desire for autonomous survival. For this we have language: “The word always dies where the claim of some reality is total,” warns Améry (20). To recover language is the intellectual’s only response to Evil. This is the reason why, at any given moment, Améry decided to write, beyond guilt and expiation. Language is cultivated in this space that we call culture, between the meaninglessness of being and the meaning of life. The camp made Améry realize: a. That it is necessary to hide basic reality. It is illusion that makes life possible. b. That culture is useless when reality prevails, since this reality is the presence of nothingness.

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 118

10/17/2011 10:08:06 PM

AT THE END OF UTOPIA

119

Consequently: a. To create meaning is to create our world. b. To deny meaning is to renounce our world. Totalitarianism represents the most complete negation of meaning.

We move in this space: if we lean too far on the side of meaninglessness, paralysis ensues, together with absolute domination, and life ends. To overcome reality is not denying it; rather, it entails accepting the uncomfortable position of reflexive meaning that consists in creating meaning, while knowing that it is only meaning. This precarious balance is the tension that illuminates life. And it carries an ethical principle: Evil, understood as the abuse of power, is meaning at the service of domination, that is to say, the deceit underlying the utopian promise. It is something necessary for life at the service of the destruction of life. Utopia is, then, really a nonplace in its relation to life. Are we beings that must be deceived? No, provided that we know that illusions are necessary but, at the end of the day, are only illusions: our modest footprints in the universe of meaninglessness. They are the pieces of bread left behind on the path by a lost being who has no other value but her/his ability to mark things with signs, that is to say, with meaning.

The Culture of Indifference If totalitarianism is the annihilation of meaning, then the shape totalitarianism takes today is the culture of indifference. Indifference is the state of mind in which we feel neither inclination nor aversion toward a particular person, object, or situation, according to the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy. Indifference is, then, the loss of empathy, the slow dissolution of social bonds, and the reduction of the libido accompanied by an increase of the drive. What does indifference mean in advanced contemporary societies? It means four things: a. A-politics. Man is a political animal who lives, even if in a forced way (Kant’s “unsociable sociability”), in society and who finds fulfillment in the shared space of the polis. If humans detach themselves from politics, they amputate an essential part of their human condition. They start to abandon their humanity. And for power to encourage this distancing of citizens from the res publica is an abuse of power that leads to the totalitarianism of indifference, in which public life is suspended, hijacked by a political-economic-mediatic elite that recognizes no other meaning except for individual interests. This is the first figure of indifference. b. De-hierarchy. It means the indistinction of values and ideas, the loss of meaning of truth, the Good and beauty, as well as the looming disappearance of philosophy, unless it accepts its circumscription to the ancillary role of analytic philosophy.

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 119

10/17/2011 10:08:06 PM

120

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Audiovisual mass culture entails a banalization of life. When bodies accumulate every day in TV news, they become routine images that are unable to convey their profoundly real significance. This inevitably leads to an escalation of images, so as to draw the attention of the ordinary spectator: violent events have to be more spectacular; images have to be more obscene and cruel. A dangerous cultural construction of indifference thus takes shape. Here, only shouts stand out, favoring the irruption of populist discourse—the discourse that promises with impunity that which it knows it cannot deliver and that legitimizes any means to reach those goals— and the trivialization of anticultural, antipolitical discourse. The Berlusconization of Europe—the legalization of the privileges of a few and the audiovisual control of citizenship—is a manifestation of this banalization of meaning. It is the second figure of indifference. c. Irresponsibility that denies the possibility of social change. The ups and downs of the economy become the expression of natural laws that cannot be countered by actions intended to bring about social change. Politics can thus only be in the hand of economy experts. With the dissemination of this idea three goals are achieved: responsibility is denied; the idea of social change reached by means of political action is annihilated; and citizens are removed from decision-making. If meaning is derived, in Nazism, from the natural laws of the race and, in Communism, from the inescapable laws of history, then, in today’s corporate state, which results from the subsumption of politics to financial power, meaning derives from the laws of the economy. There is room neither for the creation of other forms of meaning nor for acknowledging the complexity of the human economy of desire. Politics withers at the hand of the economy, with obvious consequences for the political situation of citizens, who are reduced to being competitors, consumers, and taxpayers. This is the third figure of indifference. d. The refusal to acknowledge the other. Difference lays the foundations for indifference. The profile of the other is sketched with sharp contours in order to deny her or him the right to be one of us, and, therefore, to reject any duty of hospitality, aid, or respect. Indifference is a subtle crystallization of the old racism and xenophobia. The denial of alterity is the fourth figure of indifference.

The Excess of Fiction Indifference is a crisis of meaning, as much as it is a form of domination. As a crisis of meaning, indifference is based upon a blurred future: there is no promise for the future but only the uncertain nightmare of a catastrophe in a society that multiplied risks because it was convinced that everything was possible. “Everything is possible” is the basis for all totalitarian thinking. To give meaning to the everyday? It is inevitably a pure exercise of survival. And this is why indifference becomes the utopia of power. This is, then, the dimension of domination present in the culture of indifference. But indifference is probably also the response to an inversion of the question of meaning: the move from an excess of reality to an excess of fiction. In the Introduction

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 120

10/17/2011 10:08:06 PM

AT THE END OF UTOPIA

121

to his novel Crash , James G. Ballard writes: “The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction— conversely, the one small kernel of reality left to us is inside our own heads” (11). Ballard, then, approaches a world whose primary and fundamental characteristic he diagnosed, namely the radical inversion of the mechanisms of meaning. “In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes and ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination” (11). These roles are inverted now: According to Ballard, “Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality” (11). Fiction populates our external universe. Television permanently dumps tons of fiction into our homes and touches it with the magic wand of fantasy. Advertising also easily incorporates politics, together with food and clothing, into the realm of fiction; science and technology expand the confines of possible dreams with such vertiginous speed that one loses sight of the distinction between the real and the fantastic. These three major vehicles for hallucinations show that Ballard is right when he says that “we live inside an enormous novel” (11). Since the external world is filled with fiction, it appears to us as a fantasy, which, albeit an absurd one, is a fantasy nonetheless. The episodes follow one another rapidly in our consciousness and we have no time to follow their true line of argument; they progressively limit our right to get an answer. This is a curious situation where a market of illusions that places within our reach almost all of our childhood fantasies competes with a repeated frustration when we realize that, in fact, we very rarely manage to take pleasure in the fulfillment of our desires since we realize that pleasure is also a complete fiction. Ballard immediately concludes: “It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. Fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent reality” (11). That is to say, the task of the writer is to create meaning. Meaning happens in a very restricted area, always in danger of being absorbed by the excess of fiction or the excess of reality. The lesson of Ballard can be extended to another major mediator of the real, that is, politics. In fact, some would say that politics already recycled itself and moved from modern utopianism to postmodern pragmatism. And they would assure us that precisely in order to deflate the limitless balloon of fantasy that envelops the external world—the social stage— one chose realism— a politics close to the ground, with no concessions to illusion— as a means to recover the balance between fantasy and reality. But it does not seem that, in practical terms, the pragmatism of our time responds to the logic of creation of the real. On the contrary: it is a pragmatism of television, advertising, and institutional fictions. It is a pragmatism that takes mere fiction as reality—the fiction of money and its bubbles, above all— and tries to legitimate it using fundamental criteria. Postmodern politics believes in the novel that was forced upon it. And, instead of creating reality, it confuses reality with fiction. This

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 121

10/17/2011 10:08:06 PM

122

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

pragmatism is an ideal; it is, in fact, the most radical of idealisms. Not only does it think in terms of an ideal truth but it also raises conventions to this condition. “Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves,” writes Ballard. “Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and of the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by an all-voracious present” (10). These are the times of a present continuous. In order to master the present it is necessary to restore the balance: to create reality. In fact, during the crisis of modernity, in the shape of what we call postmodernity, there is a double inversion of roles. To be sure, the external world is increasingly transformed into pure fiction— a political fantasy, a fantasy of communication, a techno-scientific fantasy— and, when faced with this monumental artifice that surrounds us, we progressively rediscover the inner world as a possible refuge from reality. Freud is right: in the inner silence hides the only solid ground for human beings. And Foucault is equally correct in observing that the central question is the question of the subject. But this subject is a relational being, who only stands on her or his feet when she or he gets recognition from others. It is only by rethinking that subject that we will be able to break the spiral of fantasy starting with the individual as a fiction created and fed by the state and with the blind submission—voluntary servitude (La Boétie)— of our subjectivity to this condition. This change in roles becomes manifest, second, in the creation of social, moral, cultural, or political forms. The scene of modernity was dominated by the activity of the creator: from the politician to the artist, to be a protagonist meant to have the ability to challenge the “great book” and to create meaning (reestablishment of institutions; normative innovation; and stylistic breaks); it meant the power to formalize and the will to build a world. This scene was surrounded by a great reserve of fantasy, from the obscure zones of intimacy to the territories where rationality lost its shapes. These outlaying areas were the intrigues of a great scene with which they maintained a necessary but problematic relationship and in relation to which, in the end, the represented reasons were defined. The creator sought to expand the confines of intelligibility and to extend the zones of transparency. The preoccupation with the question of meaning was the motor of the project of modernity. Literary and artistic fictions could not escape the exigency to search for the understanding of things. The logic of the time spurred a continuous discovery of new perspectives that would allow the penetration of our gaze into the secrets of reality (the idea of the disclosure of nature as the meaning of technology and as the goal of modernity). When time came to show the results of this endeavor, concealment was more powerful than the art of unveiling. And thus a great cloud of perverse imaginary was formed. During the postmodern holiday, the roles changed: the public scene was invaded by clouds of fiction coming from the abovementioned intrigues, which left the cultural universe afloat in the midst of a perverse imaginary. It is an imaginary, that is, a fable and a space of fantasies and illusions; and it is perverse insofar as it is a novel

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 122

10/17/2011 10:08:07 PM

AT THE END OF UTOPIA

123

of confusion and of concealment that dangerously mixes the two distinct orders of experience and of knowledge, progressively downgrading the subject to the role of a mere spectator. The external world progressively takes the shape of an immense novel and it is lived as a fantasy in which it is hard to believe because it is missing precisely that which necessarily ties the subject to the collective cultural universe: meaning. This is the root of the malaise of the postmodern urban culture. And in the absence of meaning, indifference grows. The new utopia is precisely this: the possibility of living without meaning. The project is that I do not make projects; only technological change remains. This change becomes an end in itself, insofar as it is a harbinger of the great financial bubbles. If there is no meaning, politics as a space of shared meaning disappears. Given that there is no alternative, there is also no political debate. The corporate state, in which the big financial companies impose their law upon elected officials, replaces democratic politics. The democracy of indifference is reduced to a vote every four years that chooses between increasingly indistinguishable programs. And society unravels: where there used to be a community of citizens, we have now a plethora of consumers. And the consumer, who, as Bernard Stiegler points out, has all of her or his libido absorbed by the alienation of consumption, loses the capacity for social empathy. Interpersonal relations become relations of consumption and fellow human beings turn into completely disposable objects. The Berlusconianism that consumes everything, from the bodies to the institutions, is the most salient characteristic of this culture. If the totalitarianism described by Jean Améry is the excess of reality, the totalitarianism of indifference, toward which we are led by the postmodern parenthesis, is that of the excess of fiction. But utopia is that which has no place, and so the question arises: Can the present society of indifference be a utopia? Or, rather: Are citizens able to render the utopia of indifference impossible, or are they too trapped in it already?

Nihilism and Indifference The events of September 11 were, in a certain sense, the paramount icon of this postmodern fantasy. It was where this fantasy culminated, because it was incredible, because it was like a story that astonished spectators seeing it from a distance on television, and also because it was hard to believe that it was true. And it is the culmination of a fantasy because the modesty of the great power extends fiction by censuring the images of the victims, to a point where the image remaining from September 11 is that of the collapse of the two towers that symbolize a way of life with no human figure, as if one were afraid to let the horrible reality of the thousands of dead be glimpsed. This concealment of those who should have been the object of our solidarity and empathy is profoundly postmodern in its fear to show reality in all its harshness. It highlights the difficulty in clearing up the clouds of fiction. But, at the same time, it is a terrible shock that makes the fantasies of the end of history and of a reconciled world crumble in one stroke. Reality does not

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 123

10/17/2011 10:08:07 PM

124

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

accept postmodern fabulation. The great nihilistic blow is only the prelude to a nihilistic crisis. The key to the present economic crisis lies in the dismantlement of the notion of boundaries. Minimal morality contains a principle, the destruction of which opens the doors to nihilism and its hidden face, totalitarianism. This principle is that “not everything is possible.” Just before the crisis exploded, we had destroyed all notions of limits, until we reached the catastrophic point where all the financial garbage was dumped over the heads of citizens. Simultaneously, at the level of politics, the Bush administration had broken all limits with the legalization of torture. Nihilism as a concept entails two aspects: on the one hand, it means the end of values, that is to say, the end of limits; on the other hand, it means the adoption of the destructive drive as the only logic of salvation, according to which one kills for the sake of killing, deploying violence as a means of purification. “In the beginning of the millennium,” Claudio Magris wrote in 1996, “much will depend upon how our civilization solves the following dilemma: whether to fight nihilism or to take it to its last consequences” (8). The attacks of September 11 and the crisis of 2008 are a double confirmation of the nihilistic hypothesis. And this is the common ground shared by the suicide terrorists who destroyed both people and symbols and the speculators who destroyed the savings of people and of countries. Thus, the question is: Are we going to follow the path of nihilism that inexorably leads us to the totalitarianism of indifference, to a society without a soul, and to the rule of money and of death (of which Asian despotism is giving a peculiar example in China) or is this an opportunity to fight and overcome nihilism, and again to follow the path of limitations, of taking the individual into account, and of respecting the other? At this point in the crisis, when financial speculators determine our political response, Magris’s dilemma takes a concrete shape: we either continue to accept that everything is allowed for economic power and that political power has a strictly ancillary role, and we keep moving toward a soft form of totalitarianism based upon fear, corruption, and power’s isolation from individuals; or we create forms of governance that are able to impose limits on economic power based upon the demand for the autonomy of politics and upon an active defense of democracy. Economic progress is founded upon technological progress. Moral progress is not. The abuse of power is a structural problem. But we have juridical progress that allowed us to abolish slavery and to make torture illegal before it was reinstated by Bush. In order for the law to be a weapon in the hands of citizens against the abuses of power, as Karl Polanyi noted, we need politics to be autonomous, something that is completely negated by the present nihilistic crisis. For 30 years now, according to Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, we have been adopting a form of existence that places each of us “in an economic universe of generalized competence, forces populations to go into an economic struggle against one another, organizes social relations according to the model provided by the market and transforms individuals themselves, who are called upon to conceived of themselves as a company” (5). The current crisis has done nothing but to consolidate this way of life, while the impotence of politics gave it an

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 124

10/17/2011 10:08:07 PM

AT THE END OF UTOPIA

125

aura of irreplaceability. Consumption works as a culture of resignation. The “union of corporate power and governmental power,” says Sheldon Wolin, “heralds the American version of a total system” (111). We are the markets, the most cynical among us point out. That is to say, no one is responsible for anything: the apotheosis of nihilism. There is NO responsibility: there is no meaning. This is the utopia of meaninglessness.

Invisibility as Utopia This crisis has a very surprising feature: it lacks icons. From the crisis of 1929 we retained the images of people committing suicide in Wall Street; from the 1973 crisis we remember the ads on British television in which a soccer player and his wife explained that there were more fun things to do at home during the night than watching television, and without spending any electricity. Yet, from this crisis, we basically have cold statistical data: the thousands of Euros lost here and there, the enormous debts accumulated, and the millions of unemployed people. And, maybe, a few images in the style of Ballard of the skeletons of large unfinished construction sites and neighborhoods in California with strings of closed houses fitted with signs saying that they are under court jurisdiction. It is a financial crisis in which money is about to reach the privilege of invisibility: it travels from one place to the other, crossing borders, by the mere hit of a computer key. But, above all, this crisis does not have images of discomfort because there is barely any contestation. It is a crisis that corresponds to the culture of indifference which brings us closer to the great utopia of power: submission and servitude. The crisis of the 1980s in Spain produced icons of rebellion such as the quinquis that had an impact in popular culture through cinema. And resistance struggles linger in the memory of the regions that were most affected by the great industrial restructurings of the past century. Not now. In these days what stands out is, on the contrary, the fact that the antiglobalization movements have even abandoned the usual sites of large meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. Pessimism weighs on the social sphere. But discomfort does not emerge, as if it were repressed by the fear of worse evils. In countries such as Spain, where the unemployment rate for the younger population is 40 percent, not even the youth—which had emerged as a political subject in the second half of the twentieth century—make themselves heard. Are they also afraid? The mediatic invisibility of the victims of the crisis makes us wonder: who are they? Sociologist Fermín Bouza states that unemployment affected qualified workers the most, but also the new middle class and unqualified workers. Owners of small companies that collapsed are also victims of the crisis, together with parts of the upper middle class that suddenly saw themselves swallowed by precariousness, which they never imagined could become their problem. Within this group, there are certainly many people who are ashamed of showing their situation, who are frightened because they never thought they would reach such a state, and who are afraid that

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 125

10/17/2011 10:08:07 PM

126

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

things might get worse if they protest. And there are also many immigrants who prefer to go unnoticed because of the instability of their situation. Probably, these psychological features and the social situation explain why there is so little social conflict. There are no signs of unrest or protest, nor is there an increase in crime, which one would expect to come out of so much desperation. There is, rather, the desire to adjust. The silence of young people is particularly surprising. Maybe it signals a crisis where conventional forms of struggle are already obsolete and new ones, such as social networks, have still not completely taken shape. But without the icons of protest in our society of the image, the losers are condemned to being forgotten. At the end of the crisis, many people will never have looked in the eyes of an unemployed. No even on television. This is the crisis of a society that has forced itself to accept the idea that there is no alternative. And where there is no alternative, the utopia of indifference and the totalitarianism of indifference rule. For, what if the utopia of those in power is the final invisibility of the losers, that is to say, a system where these have no place in which they can be acknowledged?

9780826420725_Ch09_Finals_txt_print.indd 126

10/17/2011 10:08:07 PM

CHAPTER 10

History, Politics, and Utopia: Toward a Synthesis of Social Theory and Practice1 Laurence Davis

The term “utopia” derives from the title of Thomas More’s classic book Utopia , published in 1516. More’s neologism connotes a place that is both good and nowhere , playing on the similarity between the Greek words for “good” (eu) and “not” (ou). The concept of utopia is thus from the moment of its inception an elusive one, insofar as its relationship, if any, to the empirical concerns of history and politics is ambiguous and so open to debate. Among the puzzling questions raised by this conceptual ambiguity are the following. First, how might one reach such a good place if it cannot be located on a map of the world? Second, is utopia accessible only by means of the faculty of imagination, and if so, what possible political function(s) can it perform in the very imperfect “real” world in which we all must live? Third, must utopia entail a rejection of history or transcendent movement beyond it, or can we instead conceive of utopia as an integral part of history which ensures that the past never assumes a final shape and the future never shuts its doors? In this essay I propose to analyze the relationship between utopia, history, and politics in a way different from how it has traditionally been conceived by defenders and critics of utopia alike. My argument is that whereas both have tended to conceive of utopia primarily as a transcendent and fixed “ought” opposed to the “is” of political reality and the “was” of social history, it may also be understood as an empirically grounded, dynamic, and open-ended feature of the “real world” of history and politics representing the hopes and dreams of those consigned to its margins. I contend, moreover, that this latter interpretation of utopia is the one best suited to contemporary, radical democratic grassroots social movements seeking to reclaim control over the conditions of their existence from capitalist, market-driven globalization. The plan for the chapter is as follows. First, I analyze influential liberal and Marxist criticisms of utopia, and suggest that the common core of their critique is an aversion to what they take to be utopia’s quality of ahistorical and antipolitical abstraction from existing reality. Second, I consider briefly some problematic definitions of utopia proffered by its contemporary defenders that, however unintentionally, provide ammunition for this anti-utopian critique. Third, I challenge such

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 127

10/17/2011 10:08:10 PM

128

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

reductive conceptions of utopia, both by tracing their historical roots and by excavating an alternative minority utopian tradition grounded in a very different understanding of the relationship between utopia and history. Fourth, I draw on this historical perspective in order to formulate an analytical distinction between what I refer to as “transcendent” and “grounded” utopias. Fifth, I examine the explanatory power and political relevance of the concept of “grounded utopias” with respect to contemporary grassroots movements opposed to the dominant global transcendent utopia of endless material progress. Finally, I conclude with some brief reflections on research gaps and open questions.

Utopia and its Critics According to the critics of utopia, it is precisely its “defining” quality of ahistorical and antipolitical abstraction from existing reality that renders utopias either hopelessly impractical, or dangerously idealistic, or both. The latter objection (dangerous idealism) has been expressed with particular vehemence by influential post-Second World War liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski, Michael Oakeshott, and Friedrich Hayek, all of whom equated utopia with the quest for impossible perfection and then concluded from this premise that it raised the specter of totalitarianism. Kolakowski, for example, warned in his Tanner Lectures on Human Values that “the victory of the utopian dreams would lead us to a totalitarian nightmare and the utter downfall of civilization” (145). Berlin, for his part, declared that “no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure” (48). Of particular concern was the gap that utopian abstraction necessarily opened up between ends and means. Berlin expressed the point by posing the following rhetorical question: if it is possible to attain a final solution to all human ills, then what price could be too high to pay for such a goal? Those convinced they had discovered the only true path to ultimate salvation would also believe they had a licence to do away with the liberty of choice of others provided they did so in the name of utopia. This, according to Berlin, was the faith of Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, and the justification for the slaughter of millions in wars or revolutions: “gas chambers, gulag, genocide, all the monstrosities for which our century will be remembered— are the price men must pay for the felicity of future generations” (16). The former objection (hopeless impracticality) was articulated most forcefully and influentially from a very different political perspective by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. In Part III of the Manifesto, under the heading “CriticalUtopian Socialism and Communism,” Marx and Engels lampooned utopian socialists such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen for conjuring up utopian castles in the air abstracted from the realities of the modern class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie: “[H]istorical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 128

10/17/2011 10:08:10 PM

HISTORY, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

129

gradual, spontaneous class-organization of the proletariat to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors” (244). Marx and Engels acknowledged that the utopian socialists deserved praise for articulating imaginative criticisms of existing society that contributed to the enlightenment of the working class. But they also contended that the significance of these socialist visionaries bore an inverse relationship to the historical development of the working class. In short, like their anti-utopian liberal counterparts, Marx and Engels condemned utopianism because of its apparent quality of abstraction from existing historical and political reality. Insofar as these criticisms are valid, then it would appear that utopia has very little value for contemporary political practice. Moreover, whatever value it does have would be more than outweighed by its potential dangers.

Perfectionist Defenders of Utopia Ironically, many contemporary scholarly defenders of utopianism have, however unintentionally, provided theoretical ammunition for this line of anti-utopian critique by defining utopia in terms of the quest for a state of impossible perfection. The sociologist Krishan Kumar, for example, argues that utopia, however open-ended it aspires to be, must in principle be bounded. This is so because it is by definition “the perfect society,” or a “state of impossible perfection,” and its organization is the embodiment of such perfection. This is no less true of utopian social theory than it is of utopian literature, for what links More’s Utopia to, say, Robert Owen’s A New View of Society (1813), and separates both from say Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s Two Treatises, is the conviction that humanity is “perfectible.” What unites utopians, in short, is the assumption that there is nothing in human being, nature, or society that cannot be so ordered as to bring about a more or less permanent state of material plenty, social harmony, and individual fulfillment. There are no fundamental barriers or obstacles to human earthly perfection: scarcity can be overcome, conflict eliminated, and moral dilemmas and psychological frustrations resolved. Humans can, in other words, “become gods (if not God)” (Kumar 3, 29, 55, 77). Other contemporary defenders of utopia have defined the concept in similar perfectionist, static, or abstractly idealistic terms. The historian J. C. Davis, for example, contends that “the dynamic utopia is a myth,” inasmuch as utopia is by definition a society without change. In a similar vein, the political scholars Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor claim that utopia is an elaborate version of the “good life” in a “perfect society” which is viewed as an integral totality. Hence the “static quality” of utopian writing referred to in so many commentaries about them, and their critical political functions of imaginatively “transcending the ubiquitous, seemingly unassailable present,” helping us to “escape from the existent,” and suggesting an instant or immanent transition from the present system by means of a “break with history.” In an influential earlier account, Manuel and Manuel point to the “changeless character” of utopia, and define it as a “perfectly reconstructed society.” And in his particularly influential sociological account of ideology and utopia, Karl Mannheim

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 129

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

130

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

defines utopia as an idea that is necessarily “situation transcending” or “incongruent with reality” (all quotations in this paragraph cited in Hoffman 28, 33, 36–7). To be sure, it is possible to reference abundant evidence in the long history of utopian writing lending support to such claims. As even those who are most sympathetic to the utopian tradition are now likely to concede, the vast majority of literary utopias have been static states, seemingly devoid of processes tending to upset them or change their design. Naomi Jacobs, for example, suggests that this is no less true of many progressive utopias written in the nineteenth century than it is of the bulk of those produced in the Renaissance period or (avant la lettre) Greek antiquity. According to Jacobs (and Lewis Mumford, on whose scholarship she relies to support this particular point), the stasis and symmetry of many classic utopias was a conscious product of the attempt to imitate an elegantly balanced and stable divine creation. While some utopias, such as Campanella’s, attempt to incorporate progress by importing new ideas and technologies, their only movement is “that of a spinning wheel, a kind of stasis” (Jacobs 34). Even the so-called dynamic utopias of such latenineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century utopian writers as Bellamy, Gilman, and Wells are unconvincing, because no future can be projected for them other than a larger or purer version of what they already have. This content-driven stasis is matched by the narrative stasis of the standard utopian form. As Jacobs rightly points out, the familiar narrative resolution of the conflict between the visitor to utopia and his or her utopian guide, in which the visitor’s doubts are all quickly overcome, seems to promise a disturbingly final resolution of all residual conflict, questioning, and unhappiness. Having said this, one might also cite abundant historical evidence to the contrary. Moreover, I contend, the character of this contrary evidence is such as to establish beyond a shadow of doubt that the utopian tradition is far richer and more complex than the above scholarly accounts would appear to suggest.

Utopia and/in History Consider, by way of an entrée into this history, the way in which time is commonly perceived in the modern era, even by many of its most philosophically sophisticated analysts. As Friedrich Kümmel has observed in a thoughtful but largely neglected paper on the subject, modern philosophers of time have tended to conceive the nature of the relationship between past, present, and future as essentially one of vanishing succession. They have assumed, in other words, that while a particular time exists at present, there is a time which is “not yet,” but which will sometime come into being, as well as a time which, already having been, “no longer” exists. From this perspective, time is never present as a whole, but is divided into the elements of a succession. It consists of two periods delimited by the present and continually passing into one another, so that what was previously a future is “now” a present and will soon be a past. The problem with this view, as Kümmel points out, is that it fails to do justice to time’s real, abiding quality. If something is to endure, then its past may never be

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 130

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

HISTORY, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

131

simply “past,” but must in some way also remain “present.” It follows that an alternative theory of time is required, and specifically one which accounts for duration without negating temporal succession. Toward this end, Kümmel proposes a conception of time as a correlation of future, past, and present in which past and future may coexist with the present conjointly. Granted their independent individual nature and determination, the coexistence of past and future is no longer in contradiction with the present. All periods may be conceived of as existing at one and the same time. This incessant interweaving of the “times” does not however, as in Bergson’s philosophy, imply their fusion. For only the past as past and the future as future are able to make the present, entering into it and giving it foundation. Being primarily concerned with metaphysical questions, Kümmel does not offer much in the way of social theory. He does, however, help to lay the foundations for such theory by speculating on the implications of his “life-sustaining” conception of time for a theory of human freedom. As he observes more than once, “man” is unique among organic beings in his ability to condition the order of his time himself. Indeed, the “main difference” between animal and human life is the complete lack of time consciousness in the former. The animal remains always limited to its spatial situation, living the strict correlation of organism and environment. Unable to put a distance between the past and its own being, or to imagine a future that might enable it to transcend itself, it is forever bound to the present. A human being, by contrast, is able to transform his or her environment into a world in which he or she can act freely. Being a time-conscious organism, he or she is able to relate himself freely to both his or her past and his or her future. He or she is thus also able actively to mediate the present. The exercise of this freedom is by no means a precondition for his or her survival. He or she may, for example, struggle to “emancipate” himself or herself from time by attempting to live only in the present moment. Ultimately, however, such efforts are self-defeating. They are products of a compulsive reaction rather than free agency, and invariably end in subjection to the tyranny of time. The alternative is to work with time rather than against it. This one does by accepting the reality of past and future, and by recognizing the interconnections between them. What, specifically, does the latter of these conditions entail? Most importantly, it entails recognition that no act of a human being is possible with reference solely to the past or solely to the future, but is always dependent upon their interaction. Thus, for example, the future may be considered as the horizon against which plans are made, the past a source of the means for their realization, and the present the time in which these plans and means are mediated and actualized. From this perspective, the future represents the possibility, and the past the basis, of a free life in the present. Both, according to this view, are always found intertwined with the present. As Kümmel memorably puts it, “in the open circle of future and past there exists no possibility which is not made concrete by real conditions, nor any realisation which does not bring with it new possibilities. This interrelation of reciprocal conditions is a historical process in which the past never assumes a final shape nor the future ever shuts its doors” (50).

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 131

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

132

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Turning from Kümmel’s essay to the history of the relationship between utopia and history, we can see that in historical terms the prevalent conception of time as essentially vanishing succession criticized by Kümmel is in fact a distinctive product of the modern Western world without significant precedent in the wider scope of human history. As Antonis Liakos, among others, has observed, until the seventeenth century it was impossible to think about the past without a framework comprising the future. This understanding of history was challenged at the end of the seventeenth century, when the modern structure of three historical time periods (ancient, medieval, and modern) was introduced. In the new historical thinking, historical time was quantified and measured. Thinking historically, from this new perspective, meant that the past should be considered as a “closed” case, as something complete that would not threaten the established order. The task of the historian was no longer to interpret the entirety of human history from Genesis to the Second Coming, as it was in Christian eschatological thinking, but simply to recount what already happened in the past (Liakos 26–7). Ironically, even as it endeavored to distance itself from this slavish focus on a closed past bereft of the possibility of a qualitatively different future, the flurry of utopian writing that followed the publication of More’s Utopia in 1516 subscribed to a similar conception of history as a homogenous plane beyond the reach of promise and fulfillment. More specifically, early modern European utopian writers from More to Bacon and Campanella strove to imagine qualitatively different futures cut off from the useless burden of the past. Although the formation of utopian expectations, values, and norms was historically embedded in the background of utopian thinking, history as a continuing concern for the past was rejected because of a belief that the new ideal world had to emanate from reason, nature, or morality (Liakos 28). Like their ancient Greek forebears, most utopian writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to assume that utopian ideals occupy a fixed space outside time and history. Influenced, no doubt, by ever-accelerating processes of capitalist globalization that drive a wedge between the present and the past, between, on the one hand, such spatially unifying forces as capitalism, science, and technology and, on the other hand, the diversity and particularity of the local, the dominant trend of subsequent Enlightenment and Industrial era utopian thinking has been to postulate a break between the dynamic present of modernity and its comparatively “primitive” static past. One thinks, for example, of the many so-called progressive or dynamic utopias of the nineteenth century, which acknowledge the extent to which utopian ideals are bound up with time and history, but only insofar as history is conceived in linear, law-like, and necessarily progressive terms as a set of fixed and hierarchical stages leading ultimately to perfection. Interestingly, however, alongside and in opposition to these dominant utopian trends, the attentive scholar of utopian thought may also detect the traces of an alternative minority utopian tradition grounded in a very different conception of the relationship between utopia and history. Almost without exception, this

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 132

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

HISTORY, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

133

alternative tradition has a distinctively anarchist(ic) or libertarian socialist character. It is also much closer than its statist counterpart to contemporary ecological, feminist, and anti-imperialist perspectives. While the scholarly literature on the subject is still in its infancy, the existing evidence is sufficiently compelling to suggest the need for a much broader conception of utopian studies than many of its proponents would allow. Consider, for example, Chris Ferns’s helpful but relatively neglected study Narrating Utopia (1999), in which he traces some of the connections between ideology, gender, and form in utopian literature from the Renaissance to the present day. The main body of the work is organized in two sections, roughly chronological in sequence, which are structured primarily in terms of the content of the utopias under discussion. The first, under the heading “Dreams of Order,” comprises a set of chapters dealing with utopias whose character is centralized and regimented— among them More’s Utopia , Campanella’s The City of the Sun , Bacon’s New Atlantis, Bellamy’s Looking Backward , and Wells’s A Modern Utopia . The second, entitled “Dreams of Freedom,” critically examines a range of attempts to imagine utopias based on libertarian rather than authoritarian premises. Among the works considered are Morris’s News from Nowhere, Bogdanov’s Red Star, Huxley Island , Gilman’s Herland , Gearhart’s The Wanderground , Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home and The Dispossessed . While Ferns’s conclusions are largely critical—he acknowledges the extent to which even many of the more libertarian utopias remain constrained by the limitations of the traditional or dominant utopian narrative paradigm—he also argues, with particular reference to Piercy and Le Guin, that utopia is “still capable of pointing the way, however hesitantly, toward something new” (Ferns 236). It does so in part, he suggests, by experimenting with novel narrative frameworks that serve to foreground the relationship between utopia and the reality from which it stems—yet to which it proposes an historically conditional radical alternative. These conclusions are confirmed and considerably developed in more recent scholarly studies of the relationship between the anarchist and utopian traditions. In 2005, for example, Peter Stillman and I published the first collection of original essays devoted to the new utopian politics of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed . In my own contribution to the volume I focus on the subtle, sophisticated and highly creative literary ways in which Le Guin attempts to do justice to both the enduring and successive aspects of the cosmos by playing with an open conception of time in which past and future are always found intertwined with each other, and with the present. I argue that the primary political aspiration animating Le Guin’s innovative treatment of time in the book is to illuminate the ways in which different conceptions of the relationship between utopia and existing reality may either enrich or constrain the possibilities of free human choice and meaningful action. In the course of the novel, I suggest, the reader is exposed to two very different conceptions grounded in two very different understandings of the nature of time. The first is the static assumption that utopian ideals occupy a fixed space outside time and history. On this view,

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 133

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

134

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

time is but a trifling and ephemeral element of human life. The second is the dynamic recognition that utopian ideals are intimately bound up with time and history. According to this point of view, time is an integral and enduring part of human life. The psychological, ethical, and political consequences of choosing one or the other of these abstract positions is clarified for the reader by Le Guin in her concrete, literary description of the changing relationship between the novel’s two central worlds. Considered as a whole, I conclude, the novel is an example of something that defenders and critics of utopia alike have difficulty even imagining: namely, a genuinely dynamic and revolutionary utopia premised on an acceptance of the enduring reality of social conflict and historical change. Some of these same themes are reprised in a much more wide-ranging edited collection that Ruth Kinna and I published in 2009, Anarchism and Utopianism . In this book we assembled the first collection of original essays to explore the relationship between anarchism and utopianism, and in particular the ways in which their long historical interaction from the Warring States epoch of ancient China to the present time has proven fruitful for emancipatory politics. Among the literary case studies examined in the book are the Daodejing of Lao Zi, Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville , Morris’s News from Nowhere , J. A. Andrews’s The Triumph of Freedom , Florence Huntley’s The Dream Child , Henry Olerich’s A Cityless and Countryless World , William Windsor’s Loma, a Citizen of Venus, Rosa Graul’s Hilda’s Home: A Story of Woman’s Emancipation , Pierre Quiroule’s trilogy Sobre la ruta de la anarquía , B. Traven’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Robert Nichols’s Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai , Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home , P. M.’s bolo’bolo, and Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing. Beyond this literary focus, the book also excavates the rich and extensive history of the relationship between anarchist and utopian ideas, movements, and communal experiments. It illustrates the remarkable range of instances in which the two traditions converged, be it in dissident spiritual philosophies, anthropological studies, unorthodox lifestyles, self-consciously political expressions of gender and sexuality, experiments in alternative education, ecological communities, or revolutionary social movements. Among the most notable findings of this wide-ranging analysis is that nearly all of the anarchist or anarchistic utopias examined are open, dynamic and organically linked to actual social practices. There is a consensus among the contributors that in stark contrast to the rationally fixed and transcendent utopias associated with escapism and/or domination, the largely anti-perfectionist and antiauthoritarian utopias they examine do not represent a form of abstraction from the world. On the contrary, such utopias are focused, first and foremost, on transforming the present as part of an organic process in which already existing historical tendencies are actively engaged with, nurtured, and built upon. Most of them call into question modern conceptions of progress, and recall the organic communities of the premodern past and the dissident present in order to inspire and inform contemporary libertarian struggles for a more humane future. They affirm the reality and worth of those natural and cultural forces that are the devalued and rejected “other” of civilized

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 134

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

HISTORY, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

135

domination, and in their nonliterary forms frequently exemplify a prefigurative form of direct action politics demonstrating that libertarian utopias are not only eminently desirable but also immediately realizable. Generalizing from this and related research, I am inclined to agree with Antonis Liakos that we may well be witnessing a paradigm shift in utopian thinking at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Consistent with the increasing skepticism expressed by social critics in the twentieth century toward the idea of progress and theories of modernization, contemporary utopianism is increasingly taking the form of a reenactment of the possibilities of the past in juxtaposition to the present so as to open the way to a qualitatively different future. This reevaluation of the relationship between past, present, and future is particularly evident in the field of utopian social history. The pioneering work of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Barbara Taylor, among others, is paradigmatic in this regard. It clearly illustrates a renewed appreciation of the past as a series of presents, each open to more than one possibility, and a consequent problematization of the relationship between the present and past. From this perspective historical time is no longer conceived as continuous and homogenous, the present is no longer understood as the linear evolutionary result of the past, and historical testimonies and memories are pregnant with living dreams for another and better life (Liakos 48; see also Varikas).

Transcendent and Grounded Utopias: Defining Features and Functions The practical political implications of the above historical, philosophical, and literary analysis are, I suggest, profound. First and foremost, they suggest a need at the level of conceptual social and political theory for a clear analytical distinction between transcendent and grounded utopias. As should now be evident, some utopias are indeed constructs of the perfectionist ethical imagination that abstract from existing reality in a transcendent fashion. They thus posit a dichotomous opposition between the ideal and the real, ought and is, in which utopianism and realism confront one another as irreconcilable opposites. In her excellent essay “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” Ursula K. Le Guin refers to such utopias as “Euclidean” utopias. A reaction of reason and will against the here-and-now, the Euclidean utopia is quite literally “nowhere.” A purely abstract and static end, or goal, it ceases to be utopia as soon as we reach it. It can thus speak only in the future tense—the language of progress— and is inherently uninhabitable (Le Guin, Dancing, 81). As the histories of capitalist, industrial, and colonial “development” make all too clear, it is also potentially destructive of what is. The focus of the “non-Euclidean” utopia, by contrast, is on the temporally extended present, the “right here, right now” inhabited by living, breathing human beings. Paradoxically, it is such that if it is to come, then it must exist already. In fact,

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 135

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

136

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

according to Le Guin it has existed already, as a feature of many of the so-called primitive societies crushed under the wheels of European capitalism and technological “progress.” Its essence was and is a form of society in which human beings are at peace with themselves and their natural environment. Animated by a generous Spirit of Place rather than an exclusive and aggressive Spirit of Race, Le Guin’s habitable utopia is concerned primarily not with the continuous advance of technology and ever-expanding economic growth, but with preserving its existence. It has a modest standard of living, is conservative of natural resources, and features a political life based upon consent (Le Guin, Dancing, 93, 84, 96). The distinction I wish to draw here between “transcendent” and “grounded” utopia is similar in many ways to the one formulated by Le Guin. In particular, I want to emphasize the difference between utopias associated with the imagination of and/or quest for perfection in some impossible future (transcendent utopia), and those associated with the encouragement of greater imaginative awareness of neglected or suppressed possibilities for qualitatively better forms of living latent in the present (grounded utopia). Rather than abstracting from the ostensibly irredeemably corrupt social practices of our world in order to pass final moral judgments on them, the latter helps to shape existing social practices by converting the given confines of the here-and-now into an open horizon of possibilities. It does so in part by illuminating the heterodox and the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary, and by reminding us that past, present, and future all contain multiple possibilities far in excess of seemingly fixed actualities.

Another World is Possible: The Grounded Utopianism of Contemporary Grassroots Subsistence Movements From the point of view of contemporary, grassroots social movements seeking to reclaim democratic control over the conditions of their existence, transcendent utopian imagination or theory is of little value. This is because it depicts or conceptualizes a static vision of society in which change seems neither desirable nor possible. It thus reproduces the dichotomous division between the actual and the real, on the one hand, and the impossible and the ideal, on the other that it seeks to challenge, and so disempowers those who engage in protest precisely in order to reject predetermined assumptions about what should be desired and what can be attained. By contrast, grounded utopias both emerge organically out of, and contribute to the further development of, historical movements for grassroots social change. As a result, they are emphatically not fantasized visions of perfection to be imposed upon an imperfect world, but an integral feature of that world representing the hopes and dreams of those consigned to its margins. Part and parcel of dynamic and open-ended processes of struggle, and grounded in immediate everyday needs, such utopias challenge dominant conceptions of reality not by measuring them against the transcendent ethical standard of a fixed vision of an ideal society, but by opening a utopian space for thinking, feeling, debating, and cultivating the

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 136

10/17/2011 10:08:11 PM

HISTORY, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

137

possibility of historically rooted (and thus historically contingent) alternative social relations. Grounded utopias may take a variety of forms. In their fictional literary guise, they are intended to fire the imagination by engaging the reader in a complex dialogue about what is, what might be, and the relationship between the two. They are thus neither purely escapist fantasies, nor narrowly didactic constructions meant to secure the reader’s unquestioning assent to a particular sociopolitical agenda, but thought experiments that invite the reader to participate in a time-sensitive journey of the utopian imagination complete with fundamental moral conflict, meaningful choice, and continuing change, by the end of which she or he may return to the nonfictional present with a broader perspective on its latent emancipatory possibilities. In their most grounded literary forms—notable recent examples of which include Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing and Le Guin’s Always Coming Home— such utopias evoke a strong sense of place and recall the lived experience of active participants in social movements resisting systems of oppression and domination. They may also serve as a source of inspiration for, and function as a catalyst for critical reflection by, these same movement activists, as in the case of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (itself inspired by the rebellions of 1968) and the anarchist-influenced contemporary global anticapitalist movement. Grounded utopias are by no means restricted to fictional literary creations, however, nor even to the other species of written work typically analyzed by students of utopian social and political theory. They find expression in an almost endless variety of cultural practices, from unorthodox lifestyles to experiments in alternative education. Within the context of protest cultures, one may detect the distinctive traces of grounded utopianism in upsurges of social creativity ranging from neighborhood assemblies and climate camps, to direct actions arising out of participatory democratic campaigns, to high points of revolutionary struggle. What all such instances of grounded utopianism share in common is their creation of utopian spaces in concrete social or political practices intended to cultivate the possibility of alternative social relations. Consider by way of an illustrative and particularly salient example the case of contemporary grassroots movements of farmers or landless people (such as the Zapatista in Mexico, the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, and the Mukti Sangarsh in India) seeking to reclaim their right to use common land to meet their subsistence needs. In the face of the prevailing “common sense” that “there is no alternative” to market-driven corporate globalization, these very diverse grassroots social movements demonstrate by their very existence that “another world is possible.” Their grounded utopianism consists not in some sort of blueprint-style embodiment of the way the world should be—few if any movement participants would make such extravagant claims— but rather in stubbornly living lives at odds with the relentlessly homogenizing and destructive logic of global capitalism. By daring through collective action to reclaim the power and responsibility for organizing their own lives, such movement activists contest dominant understandings of

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 137

10/17/2011 10:08:12 PM

138

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

what is possible and open up utopian spaces for imagining and practising peaceful, ecologically sustainable, egalitarian, and radically democratic alternative ways of living. Consider, more specifically, the case of opposition to mega-dam construction projects in India. Ever since their inception these projects have consistently been opposed by strong people’s movements composed primarily of peasants, tribals, and others whose ancestral lands and livelihood bases would be flooded or submerged by the dams. One such movement, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement), has attracted the support of middle-class social activists and concerned urban dwellers, and conducted a widely publicized campaign against the Narmada Valley Project, a massive undertaking (originally financed by the World Bank) to construct two mega-dams and numerous large dams on the River Narmada. Proponents of the ongoing project point to its potential contribution to modern industrial development by means of land irrigation, production of electric power, and the supply of drinking water. Opponents argue that all the benefits of the project will accrue to people and interest groups outside the flood areas, while the costs have been and will continue to be borne by the environment and the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the flooding of their ancestral land. By way of an alternative to the mega-dam projects, numerous grassroots social movements have emerged seeking different solutions to the water and energy problems of drought-prone regions, solutions that would restore both ecological and social balance without sacrificing the future for short-term gains. In Khanapur in Sangli district in Maharashtra, for instance, an organization of workers and poor, landless peasants—the Mukti Sangarsh (the name means Liberation Struggle)—was formed in order to protect people’s livelihoods and study the reasons for the recurring droughts in the area. Their investigations revealed that until the 1970s three rivers flowed perennially through Khanapur Taluka, and there were sufficient wells and drinking water. Starting in the mid-1970s, however, the area was transformed from more or less subsistence-oriented agriculture to Green Revolution capitalist farming. Old subsistence crops such as bajra and jowar were replaced by commercial crops like sugar cane, which not only require chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but also vast quantities of water. As a result, the peasants became dependent on seed, fertilizer, and chemical companies, as well as on banks and market fluctuations. Small peasants became increasingly indebted and many had to migrate to the city in search of work. The big farmers survived and used up most of the water. Moreover, in the 1980s private contractors began excavating sand from the dried-up riverbeds in order to sell it to construction firms in the cities. Water percolation was thus further reduced and the wells dried up (Mies and Shiva 306–8). Drawing on the neglected resources of local history, the Mukti Sangarsh and the People’s Science Organisation of Maharashtra organized science fairs and discussions in the villages during which people studied water management from an historical perspective. The old cropping methods, the geological conditions, and the vegetation in the area were also examined, and viable schemes for an alternative

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 138

10/17/2011 10:08:12 PM

HISTORY, POLITICS, AND UTOPIA

139

agriculture proposed. In addition, in the mid-1980s peasants of two villages produced a plan to build a small people’s dam, which eventually was completed in 1990. The water collected from the dam was to be distributed equally, with every person— including landless people and women—receiving the same share. Thus the people struggled not only to regain control over their own resources, and to restore the ecological balance in the area, but also to change unequal social relationships between the classes and genders. They organized themselves democratically, recovered their subsistence knowledge and skills, developed eco-friendly alternative technologies, and created at the local level a genuinely participatory, egalitarian, and sustainable “grounded utopian” alternative to the dominant transcendent utopia of capitalist globalization (Mies and Shiva 308–12).

Research Gaps and Open Questions In closing, I want to acknowledge the need for extensive additional theoretical and empirical research on the subject matter that I have explored in this essay. To date the now well-established scholarly field of utopian studies has focused primarily on three broad varieties of utopianism: literary utopias, utopian social thought, and communal experiments. By comparison, the study of the dynamic relationship between utopia and historical and contemporary grassroots social movements has been relatively neglected. There is, in particular, a pressing need for interdisciplinary research that successfully combines philosophical and historical analysis of the concept of utopia with an empirical understanding of social movement processes. In any such research, the student of utopia will need to steer a careful course between two epistemological extremes: on the one hand, the Scylla of capitulation to dominant understandings of political possibility; and on the other hand, the Charybdis of reinforcing the prevailing association between utopia and deeply problematic ideas about human perfectibility. One of my primary aims in this essay has been to facilitate balanced scholarship of this sort, by excavating the hidden history of the relationship between utopia and history; drawing a theoretical distinction between transcendent and grounded utopias; and arguing the case for the far greater explanatory power of the latter with respect to contemporary grassroots subsistence movements opposed to market globalization.

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 139

10/17/2011 10:08:12 PM

9780826420725_Ch10_Finals_txt_print.indd 140

10/17/2011 10:08:12 PM

CHAPTER 11

A Practical Utopia for the Twenty-First Century1 Robert Albritton

In historical periods when radical changes are required, utopias may free the mind from the despair of remaining entrapped by seemingly unalterable reified structures of thought and practice. When existing systems begin to break down or unravel, a practical utopia can serve the need to consider and to debate a broad range of alternatives.2 Believing that the existing system of global capitalism has been in a process of unravelling for some time and that in the future there likely will be powerful global mass movements for change, I offer this utopia as food for thought in the coming period of transformation.3 I recognize the host of meanings given to “utopia,” and the resulting negative or positive connotations that attach to it. In this essay, it is not my intention to bury or praise the concept, to analyze the relative merits of more temporally oriented (as in Sorel’s [1961] “myth”) as opposed to spatially oriented utopias, or finally to grapple with the difficulties of outlining some future direction that is too radically different to be describable in existing languages, except when used poetically. Instead, I want to present an initial sketch of a few ideals and some possible socioeconomic relations that could help us move toward them. What I write is not particularly original, and it is not impossible (practical), though it is difficult to achieve (utopia). For purposes of this chapter, a utopia is a cluster of concepts that overlap or are mutually supportive in their approach toward future ameliorations of current social problems. This is clearly a positive take on “utopia,” as a practical utopia. And let me add, that when the current capitalist system really starts to break down, radical changes that may have seemed quite impossible (utopian?), may suddenly become real possibilities.4 While currently there is no global agent of change that could conceivably bring about many policies that I shall advocate, the mobilizing potentials of new communication technologies have only just started to become manifest. Further, local organizing has succeeded in bringing about important changes, particularly in the food sector, and it is always possible for local movements to link themselves to create larger movements. Common sense suggests that in phases of transition between one social order and another, there would be more utopias written, and they would have greater impact.

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 141

10/17/2011 10:08:16 PM

142

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Considering the economic crisis, the health crisis, the ecological crisis, and the food crisis, to mention a few of the current mutually exacerbating crises, many observers of the present as history would conclude that we are now in a phase of transition away from the capitalist order that has been more or less hegemonic for the last two centuries. Moreover, we seem to be approaching an ecological turning point in human history that will impact upon life on earth much more radically than any previous turning point. One would expect, then, to see an outpouring of highly original and imaginative utopias. The need may be there, but from where I stand, utopian thinking seems to be blocked by an excessive emphasis on “pessimism of the intellect.”5 Perhaps the reason lies in the unparalleled accumulation of power that has accrued to enormous economic, political, and ideological structures— structures that seem to have too much inertia to change direction. These immense corporations and states have a vested interest in maintaining the system within which they are powerful; and they have the capacity to reproduce and enlarge themselves while they maintain or expand the system. As we have recently witnessed, the larger the economic entity the more it cannot be allowed to fail for fear of bringing down the whole system. The current bailouts have similarities with paying bribes, ransoms, or “protection money.” Another reason for a lack of utopian thinking is the failure of past efforts to construct utopias. In many cases the pursuit of impractical utopias has landed in dystopia. I believe that there are two main reasons for this. First, the more or less religious zeal that is often unleashed by utopian movements substitutes fanaticism for open and reasoned debate. Second, this religious zeal has often been focused on a charismatic elite that, despite initial good intentions, ends up crushing democracy. The chief opposition to the dominant capitalist structuring of power over the past century and a half has come from socialism, but the primary center of global “socialism,” the former Soviet Union, tried to beat out capitalism by creating a monstrous caricature of it. The Soviet aim was to outgrow the United States through economies of scale and the technological domination of nature. From the point of view of today’s looming ecological disasters, the USSR’s effort to outgrow U.S. style capitalism places both systems in the camp of unsustainable economies. By being more capitalist in some respects than the United States, the Soviet-Union simply accelerated its own demise and discredited socialism. One result of this is the relatively unopposed hegemony of neoliberalism, whose market fundamentalism (neoliberalism displays aspects that make it similar to both a religion and a utopia) posed the basic option as one between a free market economy and a totalitarian command economy seen as a choice between good and evil (Albritton, Let Them Eat Junk, 202). Such starkly dualistic thinking has perhaps proceeded the furthest in the United States, which remains the hegemonic capitalist power. Given the extent to which it is dependent upon some of the world’s most powerful corporations and is beholden to market fundamentalism, the United States will likely be one of the least able of the world’s powers to deal effectively with the deepening crises that will unfold in the twenty-first century. The power of U.S. corporations and special interests is great

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 142

10/17/2011 10:08:16 PM

A PRACTICAL UTOPIA 143

enough to block the substantial changes that will be required. The ensuing paralysis is likely to increase polarization, resulting in political instability and uprisings. In such circumstances, the possibility of a revolutionary uprising, military coup, or civil war in the United States cannot be ruled out. It is likely that any hegemonic socioeconomic order will be backed by at least one utopia or integrated set of ideals. Since the French Revolution’s utopian slogan “Liberté , Egalité , and Fraternité ” (henceforth I shall replace “fraternité” with the more gender neutral “community” and the French concepts with the English), the most influential global utopias can be considered as expanding on this slogan more or less in line with the ideals of capitalism or socialism. In The Great Transformation , Karl Polanyi argues: “Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society” (3). I mention Polanyi because central to neoliberalism is the idea of competitive markets regulating themselves in accord with the inner preference schedules of individuals, such that ultimately individual consumers are sovereign. Polanyi thinks this is a “stark utopia” in the sense that no economy could ever come close to operating in this way, and that if it did, it would destroy social life. Clearly, he has a very negative take both on “utopia” and market-governed societies.6 It was in the 1970s that neoliberal utopias gained ideological traction in opposition to the previous Keynesian utopias. Keynes had introduced a degree of concern for equality into capitalist thinking, represented ideologically and institutionally by social democracy and the welfare state. To a large extent, the mild egalitarianism of neokeynesianism was made possible and even necessary by the “community” required to successfully pursue the Second World War. When citizens of all classes, races, and sexes are mobilized to the point that they are willing to give their lives to the pursuit of a war, a certain communitarian and egalitarian thrust must also be created. The unravelling of welfare state capitalism began with the serious stagflation of the early 1970s and continues to this day.7 Neoliberalism is the utopia inspiring this unravelling, and arguably it is the most extreme dominant utopia in the history of capitalism. It is extreme in its one-sided emphasis on radically possessive individuals and the freedom of such individuals, and its nearly total neglect of the other two ideals of the French Revolution. But it is also extreme in other ways. Its true believers seem to think that reality can approximate their utopia, and that nearly all problems will be solved when such an approximation occurs. These beliefs are held in a world which is rapidly moving away from neoliberalism— a world capitalist economy that is in part unravelling precisely because of attempts to implement a neoliberal utopia. As the crisis of their utopia deepens in the real world (becomes ever more unworkable and divorced from reality), some neoliberals have become more strident in turning their market utopianism into an ever more rigid religious fundamentalism that denounces all nonbelievers.8 “Liberty, Equality, and Community” was a utopian slogan that expressed the deep aspirations of the hungry masses as they rose up to overthrow a feudal order.

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 143

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

144

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Marie Antoinette’s infamous “Let Them Eat Cake” symbolizes the contempt for the masses held at the highest level of Louis XVI’s monarchy. Today may not be so different. Nearly half the world’s population is living in a state of food insecurity, in the sense that they are already hungry or that any significant rise in food prices will increase hunger (Albritton, Let Them Eat Junk). Further, to the extent that global food corporations are expanding in poor countries, it is as purveyors of junk food. It is as if they were saying “Let Them Eat Junk.” What particularly interests me about the slogan of the French Revolution, is how little the capitalist world order has been able to realize the Revolution’s ideals. Capitalism’s main achievement with regard to the slogan of the French Revolution has been to advance, to some degree, forms of individual freedom, and shallow degrees of equality for a minority of the world’s population. Freedom has primarily been the freedom to compete against one another in an economic game, a game, the outcome of which is to continually expand the huge number of losers and to increase the wealth differential between winners and losers (Raventos 2007). On a global scale this means that for well over a billion people, “freedom” means the freedom to feel continual hunger and to be free to desperately scrounge for food. What many neoliberals fail to see is the extent to which both freedom and community are based on equality. Given the possessive individualism that capitalism tends to produce, capitalist states must go to extremes when it is necessary to mobilize the population. The cost of creating a sense of community then becomes the demonization of the other: the other state, the other nation, the other ethnic group, the other gender, the other sexual orientation, the other religion, the other political party.9 That which unites people becomes hatred. Capitalism is not the first socioeconomic order to resort to such unifying tactics, though its technological achievements give it greater means to indoctrinate people. Having made such advances in technology, a core mantra of capitalism has become “progress,” yet it seems as if a real sense of community achieved without negating the other has escaped it altogether. In this chapter I want to present a few basic principles of a practical utopia, a utopia that in principle is achievable in this world. Though achievable, I still call it a utopia, because the deep structural changes required would take great effort over a considerable period of time. Further, it is my belief that the key to the slogan of the French Revolution is the middle term, equality. The ideals of freedom and community are undermined unless all people are viewed as sufficiently equal as humans to have access to and support from those humans, other life forms, and material resources that make a flourishing life possible.10

Current Crises Utopias are usually constructed against a background of severe problems or crises that the utopias are meant to at least partially address.11 The main problems that motivate this utopia are: the health crisis, the environmental crisis, the crises of

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 144

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

A PRACTICAL UTOPIA 145

social justice, the crises of democracy, and the crises of “externalities” as social costs. Increasingly these are not separate problems, but instead feed into one another, each exacerbating all the others. I will give examples of each. Obesity rates are skyrocketing globally as are the 30 or so conditions or diseases for which obesity is a major risk factor. Given current trends, one in three children born in the United States after 2000 will get diabetes (Pollan 102). Already 14 percent of the population in Mexico have diabetes and 11 percent of the urban population over 15 in India (Popkin). Risk factors for heart disease and strokes, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol, are becoming ever higher at younger ages. According to the American National Institute for Mental Health, in any given year, 25 percent of Americans can be diagnosed as mentally ill. While no doubt part of the reason for this is the expansion of the definitions of mental disorders, which not so incidentally gives a huge boost to the pharmaceutical industry, in many instances there is a very real behavioral impairment. One could speculate on many reasons for this high incidence of mental disorders but, whatever the reasons, such statistics indicate a sick society.12 Three ecological problems stand out: global warming, pollution, and the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources.13 These problems have been apparent for at least 25 years, and yet the United States, the hegemonic capitalist power in the world, has taken little initiative to address them either nationally or internationally.14 Global warming will increasingly lead to extreme weather, the destruction of life in the oceans, the decline of food production, mass extinctions, rising oceans, and desertification. The world will become a much less hospitable place for human survival, much less for human flourishing. The exhaustion of fossil fuels will make everything much more expensive, and will lead to very high prices for the commodities dependent on these fuels. Severe shortages of food and other commodities are likely unless renewable sources of energy can be harnessed to a much greater degree than is possible now or in the foreseeable future. The third crisis, that of social justice, has to do with the obscene degree of inequality in the world, an inequality that also impacts upon human and environmental health.15 Forty-five percent of the world’s children live in poverty, and 50 percent of the 1 billion young people between 15 and 24 live in poverty (State of the World , 153). It is not surprising, then, to find that, as of 2004, 50 percent of the world’s unemployed are persons under 24.16 Were accurate statistics available, we would have also found a much higher percentage of persons under 24 doing part-time or lowpaid work. An entire generation must start their careers starring into the emptiness of unemployment and poverty. Poverty nearly always means malnutrition and all the health problems that follow, including physical and mental stunting. Sixty percent of the malnourished worldwide are women, and on average 300 women die each day in childbirth as a result of being anaemic (Pinstrup-Andersen and Cheng 98). Every 30 minutes 360 children under the age of 5 die primarily from malnutrition (Pinstrup-Andersen and Cheng), and it is estimated that by 2020 1 billion people will have impaired mental

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 145

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

146

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

health due to malnutrition (Lang and Heasman 61). Over 40 percent of the world’s population tries to live on $2 or less a day, such that if food prices go up significantly (as is already happening), malnutrition and starvation will shoot up at a high rate of increase. Finally, “between 1998 and 2003, net transfers from poor to rich countries were from $51 to $132 billion per year” (Kohonen and Mestrum 37). This means that rich countries have extracted far more wealth from poor countries than they have given back as foreign aid. These transfers take the form of debt repayment, terms of trade, repatriation of profits, tax evasion, and the flight of dirty money (Kohonen and Mestrum 189). Democracy is being undermined by the powers of large corporations, by the powers of large wealth, and by the powers of large states. For example, these powers to a large extent shape political policy, legal policy, media policy, and scientific research in the United States. Later in this essay, I will argue that we need radical changes in order to democratize corporations, democratize markets, and democratize governance. Finally, there is the problem of “externalities,” a problem that can remove from a market whatever rationality it may possess. Capitalists have always tried to privatize profits and socialize costs. If capital needs trained workers, they can increase their profits if a publicly supported educational system will do the training, thus saving them the money of doing it themselves. Similarly, it saves them money if they can simply dump a toxic effluent into a stream, rather than paying for some safe and possibly expensive ecological means of getting rid of it. Recently, rainforests have been cut down in order to grow palm oil, which is primarily used for producing bio-diesel. The costs of losing much of the remaining rainforests in South East Asia are far greater than any profits that can be made. Now we are in a period of history when ecological costs have become so enormous that profits pale into insignificance in comparison, and yet the small profits are still pursued even at the cost of placing enormous social and environmental burdens on future generations.17 For example, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, if the social costs (externalities) of a hamburger made from beef raised on a clear-cut rainforest were added to the price of the burger, it would cost $200 (qtd. in Patel 44).

Economics and Utopia Mainstream academic economics has played a central role in developing and promulgating the utopia called “neoliberalism” complete with its competitiveness, totally informed consumer sovereigns, market equilibriums, and Pareto optimalities.18 In this chapter, my aim is to take a few steps toward a counter political economic utopia. A first step is to move away from fundamentalist dualisms. For example, instead of the dualism: nationalized property versus private property, we can think about different types of property with degrees of control and degrees of accountability tailored to its uses and the consequences of its uses (see Diane Elson in Panitch and Leys

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 146

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

A PRACTICAL UTOPIA 147

[1999]). Even under capitalism private property is seldom absolute. For example, the private owner of a piece of land in an area zoned for residential use is not free to build a factory on this land. Similarly, a publically owned National Park would not normally be sold to a mining corporation planning a major strip mine operation within the Park. Finally, no one would advocate the public ownership of tooth brushes. All depends upon the type of property, its uses, and the needs for public input or accountability. For example, in the utopia I am proposing, state controlled land might be leased free of charge to a farmer, as long as it is farmed in ways that enhance both human and environmental health. The family would have the use of the land, but that use would be conditional, such that they could not, for example, sell the land to a developer or farm in ways that destroy the fertility of the land or result in chemical run-off. Another move beyond simplistic dichotomies is to use the pair “commodification versus decommodification” as two processes that are a matter of degree (Albritton, Economics Transformed ). This enables us to consider many types of property and many types of commodity as partially governed by markets and partially governed by various types of public input and democratic planning. The commodification of labour-power, land, money/finance, and innovation are particularly difficult for the market logic of capitalism to manage (Albritton, Economics Transformed ). If we take Marx’s conception of land which includes all natural resources, then the current crisis of global warming, pollution, and the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources has and will show the utter futility of trying to rely on markets alone to deal with problems of land use. For example, a market-based way to reduce the dependency on petroleum is to make it very expensive through the use of surtaxes, but as long as food production is as dependent as it is on petroleum, the cost of food would skyrocket creating mass global starvation. It follows that such taxation would need to be at least accompanied by a significant increase in a basic income for everyone, a partial decommodification of food (e.g., subsidized to keep prices low), or a much more organic food system (less dependent on petro-chemicals) than we now have. Increasingly, markets have become manipulated by large corporations and powerful states, but usually through behind-the-scene manoeuvres to increase profits, and not to advance human flourishing (sometimes there is an overlap between these two, but in the current era they are increasingly at odds). Policy makers need to get over the mental block that commands them not to interfere in markets except in extreme situations. The Second World War resulted in massive state intervention into markets, and after the war, the “cold war” justified continued intervention but at a lower level. The idea that markets might be deficient in ways that invite us to intervene for our own good, and not simply to combat some enemy, was rarely articulated in the United States during the cold war, for it could place one in the camp of the enemy. Recently, financial markets have proven to be very deficient, but this is to be expected when the primary driver of the global economy has become debt expansion (Jackson 22).

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 147

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

148

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

In the discussion that follows, I shall propose four basic principles that might guide the construction of a practical utopia in the twenty-first century. They are: The Principle of Human and Environmental Flourishing; The Egalitarian Principle; The Cooperative Principle; and The Democratic Principle.

The Principle of Human and Environmental Flourishing Those modern ethical theorists who utilize the concept of human flourishing derive it primarily from the Ancient Greeks—Aristotle in particular (Nussbaum). Implied by the concept is a social and natural environment that would enable the human species to become the best that it can be in all the diverse ways that are praiseworthy and can be sustained indefinitely (Albritton, Economics Transformed, 163–4). Flowers grown in the right conditions thrive and achieve their best blossoms. The similarity of the verbs “to flower” and “to flourish” suggests a very close connection between environmental and human flourishing, a similarity that we need to fully appreciate before it is too late. It is all too apparent that capitalism achieves luxury for the few at the cost of the many and at the risk of leaving behind a far less inhabitable planet. Insofar as capital’s unbridled profit orientation overrides all considerations for the environment and all other human values, capital cannot help but become the bull in our “china shop” of a planet. It has become increasingly clear that human genes by themselves only determine some limits and some possibilities as compared to the natural and social environments, which together largely determine whether or not an individual will flourish. Environments that are toxic to humans, that lack the basic resources needed for human development, that indoctrinate people with ideas that undermine the possibilities for dialogue and peaceful problem solving, that are violent or extremely unstable, such environments can play a huge negative role by limiting the possibilities for human flourishing. Many ethical theories would claim that all human beings should in some initial sense, in their very being as humans, be viewed as equal. This is well and fine as an abstract ideal, but what does it mean when translated into material institutional forms? Surely, it must at least imply that all citizens of a society should have access to the basic necessities that can make human flourishing possible— such things as a good diet, shelter, clothing, health care, education, and sanitation. These things can be viewed as basic economic, social, and cultural rights, but viewing them this way is desirable only to the extent that we actually put them in place as material realities. All too often declarations of rights are ghettoized in some abstract formal space and then ignored, or they are restricted to political rights (e.g., free speech) while ignoring social rights (e.g., right to education). As for environmental flourishing, global warming threatens life as we know it, and yet political leaders are for the most part so beholden to large corporations that they are paralyzed when it comes to taking the sort of decisive steps required to slow

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 148

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

A PRACTICAL UTOPIA 149

it down and stop it before it is too late. While global warming is a world-historic threat to human life, there are also many other forms of pollution that are making the environment more toxic and less supportive of all life forms. For example, nitrogen fertilizers can damage the environment in a number of ways. Their run-off into bodies of water causes “dead zones” (between 2004 and 2008 dead zones in oceans increased from 149 to 400, see Venkataraman). When they run off into drinking water the nitrates that result can cause miscarriages and premature births (Roberts 216). When nitrogen fertilizers break down, they give off nitrous oxide, a powerful and persistent green house gas. Not only is the world as a whole seriously threatened by global warming, but also some areas of the world are becoming so polluted that humans are getting sicker as a result. The other main ecological problem is the using up of both the life forms and materials that nature offers. This can include the drying up of fresh water sources, the breaking down of hydrological cycles, the degradation of oceans, the degradation of land, deforestation, species loss, and the exhaustion of fossil fuels and of mineral resources. The very difficult problem that we face is how to establish a stewardship over the planet that will protect what needs to be protected in order for species and bio-regions to have healthy and sustainable life cycles. Our aim should be to pass on the planet to the next generation in a healthier state than our generation found it. Clearly, there is a great need to redirect huge amounts of public funding toward dealing with well-known ecological problems and toward advancing human and environmental flourishing.

The Principle of Equality The principle of equality flows immediately from the principle of human and environmental flourishing. In order for humans to flourish, they need a secure floor that will ensure them access to the basic necessities of life. If we truly respect and care for our fellow humans, then it follows that each individual should receive a basic income well above a reasonable poverty line, whether they work or not. The right to exist in ways that do not block the possibilities of flourishing is the most basic of all rights (Raventos 60). In other words, every person, because they are human, is owed this floor to stand on, regardless of anything they do or do not do. Unless some such basic practical measures accompany the ideal of equality, it will remain a purely formal and empty ideal. I agree with Robespierre, one of the leaders of the French Revolution of 1789, who claimed that inequality is the root cause of the destruction of freedom (Raventos 59). And so it is with capitalist ideologies. Capitalist ideologies have largely taken the idea of equality and emptied it of meaning. Often the notion of capitalist equal opportunity is taken to be proven by the relatively few that rise from “rags to riches.” While the old overdeveloped rich capitalist countries have achieved some equality through the rule of the law, and this is important, radical economic and social inequalities undermine the rule of law even within these countries.

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 149

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

150

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

Historical analysis demonstrates that, if not strongly resisted by human agency, capitalism, by itself, generates ever deepening inequalities. The principal underlying reasons for this are low wages and unemployment: profits require cutting costs, including labour costs, and labour-saving productivity adds to unemployment, which places a downward pressure on wages and impoverishes the unemployed. For example, not long ago the wages and working conditions were so poor in Florida sugar plantations, that in response to criticisms, the sugar companies switched to machine harvesting. At the same time, some of the same companies were paying 600,000 Haitian workers $2 for a 12-hour day cutting cane in the hot sun of the Dominican Republic. Here there was little pressure to switch to expensive harvesting machinery. In one instance the workers became unemployed, and in the other they were so cheap that they were kept on. Precapitalist inequalities based on differences in social status often get translated into economic inequalities under capitalism. Patriarchy, racism, and religious forms of oppression far predate capitalism, but once capitalism gets into gear, its powerful directionalities tend to reshape precapitalist forms of discrimination to fit its needs. For instance, women have made some headway toward equality in some parts of the world, yet as long as women hold only 1 percent of the wealth worldwide, our commitment to women’s equality seems pretty hollow (Schönpflug 171). Claims by capitalist ideologues that existing inequalities are simply the result of the best rising to the top, do not stand up to even the most basic cross-examination. Few existing inequalities can be rationally justified from the point of view of distributive justice (Baker 61). I believe that any society committed to human flourishing must be able in principle to justify any significant economic inequalities, and that any such inequalities need not be great to serve as a basis for motivation and for rewarding efforts and achievements. For example, a difference of ten to one between highest and lowest income might be useful as an initial goal .19 I am proposing this not simply as a goal within rich countries, but as a long-term goal globally. I would envision most of the redistribution of wealth to take place gradually through progressive taxation, a redistribution that would give people a chance to adjust to changes that, in some cases, would be quite radical (Kohonen and Mestrum). A second policy of economic equality is that every individual should receive a basic income indexed to the cost of living and set significantly above a reasonable poverty line (Raventos).20 In response to those who might think that this would remove the motivation to work, the minimum wage for those who work full time (say a minimum of 25 hours a week) could be at least twice the basic income. Further, it should be noted that, at this time in history, the problem is not that people are lazy and do not want to work, rather they cannot find work. Capitalism is failing to provide jobs for the majority of young people who would like to enter the work force. It should therefore either pay them not to work, or it should find ways and means of expanding the job market. A basic income would enable people not to work, which they may choose to do for any number of good reasons. Maybe they have always wanted to learn

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 150

10/17/2011 10:08:17 PM

A PRACTICAL UTOPIA 151

carpentry skills. Maybe they are poets whose work has yet to be discovered. Or maybe they just want to think or rest for a while. Whatever the case, a basic income for all would remove the stigma from unemployment, would end welfare altogether, and it would realize a right to an adequate standard of living for everyone (Buitenweg 51). Limiting income differentials combined with providing a basic income: these two policies together would be a huge step toward decommodifying labour power and realizing the ideal of equality.21 Income differentials could be decided through trial and error and democratic debate. For example, it may be that society can only get enough people to collect garbage by rewarding them with a wage that is three or four times the basic income. The discoverer of a cure for tuberculosis or malaria might receive ten times the basic income for life in recognition of their immense contribution to human flourishing. The existing system of patents that gives discoverers exclusive rights to monopoly profits from a discovery for a period of time (often 15 years) needs to be scrapped for a number of reasons. First, all discoveries are essentially social in the sense that they largely rest upon previous discoveries by countless other persons. Second, discoveries that so obviously advance human flourishing should be made available to all at the lowest possible prices or even free of charge as quickly as possible. Yes, discoverers or inventors should be rewarded, but not by artificially creating the high prices and the huge profits that come from a patent monopoly, a monopoly that is likely to make the scientific breakthrough available only to the relatively rich or those lucky enough to live in a health care system that subsidizes expensive drugs. Indeed, the existing U.S. system of drug patenting works against finding a cure for tuberculosis or malaria because, as diseases mainly of the poor, such a drug would not yield profits.22 Why would pharmaceutical corporations invest millions in trying to discover an unprofitable drug? In other words, the current system of patents promotes inequality by rewarding discoveries, such as lifestyle drugs, that the well-to-do can afford, rather than cures for malaria, tuberculosis or other infectious diseases, mainly of the poor, that kill millions every year. A person who is a skilled neurosurgeon might make seven or eight times the basic income in recognition of their years of training and as a reward for a widely recognized health enhancing ability. These examples are simply meant to give an idea of the sort of criteria that society would need to debate in deciding upon a just distribution of income and wealth according to the need for motivation or for contributions to social life. Currently, existing differences in accumulated wealth are enormous, but even these differences can gradually be reduced by steeply progressive taxation on wealth, such as taxes on inheritance. A third economic policy promoting equality is that involuntary unemployment should become minuscule. The capitalist labour market has always been a very ineffective way of connecting human capacities with human needs. In a system geared for private profit, education needs to distance itself from the private sector for fear of being simply used to expand someone’s profit.23 The exposure to particular lines of work now occurs rather late, and the connection between supply and demand in the

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 151

10/17/2011 10:08:18 PM

152

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

labour market becomes haphazard. But the separation between education and work is much less needed in an economy geared to advance human flourishing rather than private profit. Assuming that social needs will always exceed the resources and capacities to meet them, there should never be substantial involuntary unemployment. As long as there are unmet needs (and they will always exist), work can be organized to meet them. Markets are supposed to equilibrate demand and supply, but when the demand for workers exceeds supply, there is no capitalist industry that can meet this demand by developing an assembly line for producing workers of a particular type. As a result, wages can be bid up to the point that capitalism itself could be threatened. To avoid this threat, capitalism has always tried to maintain some sort of industrial reserve army of unemployed workers. However, if this army becomes very large, it may also threaten capitalism itself unless there is an effective and costly safety net, costly military, or costly prison system. Computer technology offers new and much more effective ways of connecting social needs with both human and material resources. Social needs can be prioritized and networks that involve educational and training institutions can help to mobilize persons to form networks of resources to meet needs whether local, regional, national, or global. Financial institutions such as banks can be transformed so that, instead of just offering money to finance new projects, they can offer expertise and facilitate networking as well. Within capitalism it is often difficult for individuals to start a needs provisioning operation or what is called a “business.” For the most part, they need to be independently wealthy or to have the wherewithal to convince banks or other investors that they can make a profit. In the system that I am proposing, it could be much easier to be an “entrepreneur.” Banks, for example, could facilitate networking among individuals who have similar proposals or who have previous experience or expertise in a particular area of endeavor, whether it’s running a restaurant or finding ways of reducing the fossil fuel dependency of various industries. Banks might lend money to networks that profit because they advance human or environmental flourishing, but there might also be public sector banks for provisioning that is so beneficial that its goods or services become completely subsidized. For example, assuming publically funded preschool day care for all, someone may have ideas that could improve day care, or may want to start a day-care facility that would put some of these ideas to the test. Given that in a society dedicated to advancing human flourishing the quality of early child care and education would be high priorities, meritorious proposals for improvement would have high priority for public funding. As presently constituted, labour markets place workers in an insecure position. Losing a job can be a very depressing and even devastating experience. Under the system that I am proposing this would not be the case. The basic income would provide a floor placing everyone well above the poverty line, whether employed or not. The basic income would provide the security that would enable people to retrain or pursue their dream. People who wanted to contribute to needs

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 152

10/17/2011 10:08:18 PM

A PRACTICAL UTOPIA 153

provisioning, could join a network, could retrain in order to join a network, could do their own provisioning, or start their own network. In short, anyone who wanted to “work” could either do so or prepare themselves to do so through education or networking. The increasingly endemic problem of unemployment can also be dealt with by shortening the work week. Efforts to shorten the work week can be attempted on a trial and error basis, starting with a 30-hour work week and eventually attempting a 25-hour work week. Similarly, paid holidays could start at one month a year. Generally, the goal would be to slow down the pace of consumption, the pace of work, the pace of life, and the throughput of the economy.24 The result may be a leisure time less committed to escape from the pace and pressures of work and more committed to meaningful sociality or creativity. Under capitalism a good deal of caring work is either underpaid or not paid at all. Whether the work is domestic labour, parenting, caring for sick relatives, or helping out a friend in need, income differentials should be the same as so-called productive labour. For instance, pay could be adjusted according to stress level or difficulty. Caring for a severely disabled child, for example, would receive more income that caring for a less demanding child. The equality that is being imagined here might be funded in various ways. First, would be a sharply progressive tax on wealth (and inheritance) income, and profits (Kohonen and Mestrum). Second, money would be shifted away from military spending, as the acceptance of difference and more meaningful global citizenship moves us toward peaceful modes of conflict resolution.25 Third, money would be shifted from health care, as a result of proactive cradle-to-grave preventive medicine and the end of poverty (poverty is the primary predictor of ill health). Fourth, as the economy becomes more transparent through the use of computers, and as we develop more effective modes of global governance, the estimated $500 billion annual income tax evasion could be redirected toward meeting social needs.26 Fifth, a steeply progressive tax placed on all forms of speculation could increase revenues. Sixth, a surtax placed on commodities such as junk foods that have high social costs not included in their market price could also be a basis for raising money to redistribute wealth. Seventh, in a less commercialized society far less need be spent on advertising and marketing.

The Cooperative Principle Capitalism fosters intense competition for money, and when good jobs are not available it fosters fraud and criminality. Human capacities for cooperation and generosity still appear, but it is against a dark background of obscene inequality that by way of contrast makes acts of “charity” shine forth. For the charitable one, this can mean a great boost on the goodness scale. Charity becomes a great way for corporations or politicians to get “good” press that can serve to increase profits or votes. Of course, charity is better than nothing when inequalities are obscene, but in a world where

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 153

10/17/2011 10:08:18 PM

154

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

wealth and social status tend to go together, receiving charity can be demeaning or patronizing. Unless something like a major war brings people together, capitalism promotes an every-person-for-themselves mentality resulting in a decline in cooperation and in a sense of community (Putnam; Albritton “Marx’s Value”; Albritton, “Socialism”). Doubtless there is a connection between these tendencies and increases in forms of alienation that give rise to mental disorders. To propose a more cooperative world is not to do away with competition, but rather it is to make cooperation the more fundamental of the two. Capitalism tends to crush or discourage the closely connected strong human capacities for cooperation and generosity. Competition is so deeply entrenched in our upbringing and our daily lives that it is rather difficult to imagine a society in which cooperation is given a greater emphasis. Yet, we face immense global problems that require global solutions, while at the same time there is a lack of strong traditions of global cooperation. Instead, there are intense feelings of nationalism that feed and feed off of imperialism and war. Territorial sovereignty and the nation-state are by themselves no longer adequate to the tasks of security in a warming world that is running out of many basic natural resources and that has to deal with an increasingly polluted and toxic environment. A strong sense of global citizenship based on cooperation and generosity is needed to generate both thought and action that really engage with the problems of human and environmental flourishing at a global level. This is already happening to some extent, but because nation-states still cling to an outmoded “sovereignty,” the UN must proceed on the basis of unanimity, something difficult to achieve even when faced with such a severe global problem as global warming.

The Democratic Principle Democracy exists to the extent that those most affected by a decision have at least some opportunity to influence the making of it. It is likely to be enhanced by at least some institutionalization of the previous three principles. Another important dimension of democracy would be equal access to a secular education that prepares students to be knowledgeable about global problems. As a result, we will be able to begin addressing the relative vacuum of democratic governance that too often emerges at the international level. I want to emphasize the importance of a “secular” education. The idea of the separation of church and state going back to the sixteenth century has perhaps become more important today than at any other time in human history. Any kind of fundamentalism, but particularly the religious kind, places great obstacles in the path of peaceful conflict resolution and of a sense of truly global citizenship. As long as we cling to the degree of state sovereignty that continues to exist, it will be difficult for the UN to move beyond the extreme difficulties associated with problem solving that currently requires something close to unanimity. A good example is the problem of global warming and the Kyoto Accord, which was never signed by

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 154

10/17/2011 10:08:18 PM

A PRACTICAL UTOPIA 155

some great powers and was simply ignored by others. At the time of its proposal, the Kyoto Accord seemed like a weak and minimal step forward, but in retrospect even it appears to be utopian. It stipulated that by 2010 green house gas emissions should be 5 percent below 1990 levels, when in fact they are now 40 percent above that level (Jackson 12). While state sovereignty is certainly a serious obstacle to the development of democratic global governance, it would be misleading not to point out that state sovereignty is exacerbated by a corporate sovereignty that usually pulls the strings that produce state policy. As a result, state policy is often confined to a narrow range that major corporations, major industrial sectors, or wealthy special interest groups find congenial to their interests. As previously mentioned, the cold war opposition between “free market economies” and “command economies” is outdated, for today corporations have become so powerful that to a large extent we live in highly manipulated market economies that have essentially become corporate command economies. The intervention of planning into markets is already widespread, but it is largely undemocratic and one-sidedly advances the interests of the largest corporations and industries. It follows that we need ways to break up the corporate dictatorship. In many cases, small is not only “beautiful” but also it is more facilitating of democracy (Schumacher). A first step could be to break up corporations into much smaller units, unless there are significant economies of scale, or there is a need for natural monopolies (e.g., urban subways). It would be easier for workers, communities, and democratic political units from the local level to the global level to hold corporations accountable, were they smaller. Accountability would also be enhanced by utilizing computer technology and legal reforms to make important corporate decisions and transactions transparent and open to democratic public oversight and input. Basic legal reforms might include: to no longer consider corporations to be like private legal persons with all the secrecy implied by “private,” and to alter the law that makes the primary legal responsibility of corporations to advance profits for share-holders. Transparency also could be enhanced by ending tax havens, by laws inhibiting the use of “transfer payments” to hide profits, by ending numbered bank accounts, ending shell corporations, and by finding other means not only to stop tax evasion, but also to open up corporations to much greater democratic control. Corporations would then become quasi-public institutions, and we could avoid the situation in which small groups of unaccountable corporate elites can make decisions with enormous impact on the future of the planet. The larger the corporation and the greater impact its decisions have, the more important democratic controls become. Market fundamentalists think that markets are the ultimate democratic institutions in which shoppers cast dollar ballots to reward corporations that produce what the consumer wants. Certain small-scale, local markets may operate this way if there is substantial equality among consumers; however, as previously pointed out, we live in a period of history in which externalities—particularly those social costs that impact heavily on social justice and on human and environmental health, and those

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 155

10/17/2011 10:08:18 PM

156

EXISTENTIAL UTOPIA

that impact heavily on future generations—for the most part far exceed the profits of large corporations that derive from market prices and subsidies. In other words, markets now primarily serve the function of shifting every kind of debt—financial debts, ecological debts, and health debts— on to the backs of future generations, who will have to pay them back in a world far less supportive of human flourishing. What a difference it would make if markets became planning mechanisms subject to democratic intervention whenever necessary in order to advance environmental and human flourishing. Surtaxes could discourage those forms of economic activity that add to social costs, and subsidies could be used to reward economic activity insofar as it contributes to human flourishing. I have referred to my suggestions as a “practical utopia,” while they must appear as thoroughly utopian to many people. In response, I would say that the ideas put forward here did not originate with me, but rather have a history that in some cases is quite long. What is different is simply the way I have patterned them to draw out certain interrelations and emphases. Further, I did not want to simply write about the four principles in the abstract and in general without some concrete policy suggestions. I am only too well aware of the fact that most of the concrete policy suggestions that I have made would be ferociously opposed by the powers that be. Yet the dominant powers are looking worse by the day. A time will come when they are so discredited that radical alternatives will become realistic alternatives to hundreds of millions of people around the world. When that occurs, perhaps some of these proposals will be debated and will influence the transformative thought and action that must take shape if we are to flourish.

9780826420725_Ch11_Finals_txt_print.indd 156

10/17/2011 10:08:18 PM

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Translated from French by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. This text was published in French as “Au Lieu de L’Utopie” in a collection titled, Les Utopies et Leurs Représentations: Colloque Franco-Japonais, Tokyo, 2000 (Paris: Le Quartier, 2000) and is made available here in our English translation with the permission of the author. 2. In January 2000, one could find on the Internet at least 100 sites that included the word “utopia” in their title (and this is limited to the word in Latin or English) and that were dedicated to activities as varied as tourism, lesbian associations, or graphic design, not to mention also the availability of the complete Latin text of Thomas More.

Chapter 2 1. Translated from Italian by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. This text was first published in Italian as “Utopia, Controtopia, Ironia” in a collection titled Etica dell’Interpretazione (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1989, 63–73). It was subsequently published in our English translation in the special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought on “Utopias Today!” (Summer 2010), coedited by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. It is reproduced with the permission of the author and the chief editor of the journal. 2. See Ernst Bloch’s Sogetto-Oggetto. Commento a Hegel , pages 495 and following. 3. About these issues, see also my essay “Il Tempo nella Filosofia del Novecento” (“Time in the Philosophy of the Twentieth-Century”). 4. I follow here the reflections of K. Löwith, in his work Significato e Fine della Storia . 5. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, also in connection with the notion of Verwindung (recuperation-maintenance-distortion [ripresa-mantenimento-distorsione ]) in Heidegger, please refer to my book The End of Modernity. 6. For an introduction to the history of the term “secularization” see H. Lübbe’s study La Secolarizzazione . Storia e Analisi di un Concetto.

Chapter 3 1. Translated from Portuguese by Alexandra Ionescu. This chapter has been previously published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought on “Utopias Today!” (Summer 2010), coedited by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. It is reproduced with the permission of the author and the chief editor of the journal. 2. The quotes of books and articles cited in this chapter and listed in the Bibliography in the original version in German were translated into English by the author. The page numbers following these quotes refer to the German edition. 3. See Jacques Rancière’s extremely interesting description of the concept of “democracy” based on the disappearance of differences: “The republican schoolmaster, conveyor of

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 157

10/17/2011 10:08:26 PM

158

NOTES

the universal knowledge that renders virgin souls equal simply becomes, then, the representative of an adult humanity in the process of disappearing at the hands of a generalised reign of immaturity; the schoolmaster becomes the last witness of civilization, vainly opposing the ‘subtleties’ and ‘complexities’ of his thought to the ‘impenetrable wall’ of a world doomed to the monstrous reign of adolescence [. . .] Before him stands, ‘the adolescent punk who, against Kant and Plato, demands the right to his or her own opinion’ that is, the representative of the inexorable spiral of democracy [. . .]” (Hatred, 26–7). “Democracy is not a type of constitution, nor a form of society. The power of the people is not that of a people gathered together, of the ‘majority’, or of the working classes. It is simply the power ascribed to those who have no more entitlements to govern than to submit” (Hatred, 46). 4. This “im-possible” is described by Derrida as follows: “This im-possible is thus not a (regulative) idea or ideal. It is what is most undeniably real . And sensible. Like the other. Like the irreducible and non-appropriable différance of the other” (Rogues, 84). However, as this im-possible future remains always “to come,” its reality does not allow any projection or deliberation. Far from being an anticipative representation of what shall come, it emerges as essentially criticism and protest: “The expression ‘democracy to come’ does indeed translate or call for a militant and interminable political critique. A weapon aimed at the enemies of democracy, it protests against all naïveté and every political abuse, every rhetoric that would present as a present or existing democracy, as a de facto democracy, what remains inadequate to the democratic demand [. . .]” (89).

Chapter 4 1. This chapter has been previously published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought on “Utopias Today!” (Summer 2010), coedited by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. It is reproduced with the permission of the authors and the chief editor of the journal. 2. The initial formulations of hermeneutics in Being and Time firmly ground it in a phenomenological ontology: meaning-making and interpretation are not abstract theoretical activities but functions of our being-in-the-world, down to the levels of perception itself. Since all stimuli from the environment already reach us with a “pre-interpretation” (for instance, the sound I am hearing now is that of a passing train, not mere undifferentiated noise), meaning presents itself as soon as— and in the shape of— beings that appear before me in everyday life. Whether Dasein is satisfied with this “automatic” preinterpretation, or whether it takes the next step in the direction of the explicitation and thematization of meaning is another question. 3. According to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Aristotelian metaphysical categories, the thing, such as a stone, is “worldless,” the animal is “poor in the world,” while human beings are “world-forming.” It follows that, if meaning-making acts are no longer available to humans, they are deprived of the world and, at the height of alienation, demoted to the status of worldless things. 4. Following the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, in Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben casts the abandonment and extreme vulnerability of Dasein in terms of “bare life,” propelled outside of the order of legality by a sovereign decision on the exception.

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 158

10/17/2011 10:08:26 PM

NOTES

159

5. On “deformalization,” see Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time , 200–4. 6. On the “productiveness” of existential failure, see Michael Marder’s “Heidegger’s ‘Phenomenology of Failure’ in Sein und Zeit ” (2007). 7. Mutatis mutandis, we borrow these terms from the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, for whom the ideal of equality is effective only if it paradoxically demands the “part of those who have no part” in the current political order (Disagreement, 65). 8. The work of mourning, for Derrida, “can only displace, without effacing, the effect of a trauma” (Specters, 91). The promise of “The New International” is empty in the absence of such work.

Chapter 5 1. See §72 of Being and Time . 2. Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent quotations from T. S. Eliot are drawn from the text of this extended poem (Collected Poems, 83–96). 3. “Le schéma de la trahison.” Jean-Luc Nancy refers here to Georges Bataille who in 1933 observed that “Le moindre espoir de la Révolution a été décrit comme le dépérissement de l’Etat: mais ce sont au contraire les forces révolutionnaires que le monde actuel voit dépérir et, en même temps, toute force vive a pris aujourd’hui la forme de l’Etat totalitaire” (quoted in Nancy 12). 4. The quotes of books cited in this chapter and listed in the Bibliography in the original version in French were translated into English by the author. The page numbers following these quotes refer to the French edition. 5. See also Blanchot 1983, in particular the chapter “La Communauté Negative,” 10–12. 6. This “nothing” written after the “nothing” again (and before the next verse) is very important. 7. “Mas isso (triste de nós que trazemos a alma vestida!), /Isso exige um estudo profundo/ Uma aprendizagem de desaprender” (151). 8. For a discussion about “exilic existence” developed from Heidegger’s concept of ecstatic temporality, see Vallega 2003. 9. On the political dimension of groundless existence see Marder 2010.

Chapter 6 1. The “Statement of Principles,” translated by Maja Buszewicz and Judy Barba, contains ten principles elaborated in as many short sections, and was meant for the students training at Grotowski’s Theater Laboratory. It was eventually published in Towards a Poor Theater (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 255–62. 2. “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de creation?” (“What is the Act of Creation?”) was delivered on May 17, 1987 at the Fondation Femis (Fondation européenne des métiers de l’image et du son). The transcription of the recording is published online at www.webdeleuze.com (there is no pagination). A slightly edited transcription appeared in Trafic 27 (Fall 1998). Here and throughout the present essay the translation is my own. 3. A parallel statement is to be found in a notebook entry from 1870–71, cast in a language reminiscent of Schopenhauer: “That the world of representation is more real than actuality

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 159

10/17/2011 10:08:26 PM

160

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

NOTES

is a belief which Plato, as an artistic nature , has theoretically laid down. Practically it is the belief of all productive geniuses: this belief is the view of the will. These representations, as the births of instinct, are in any case just as real as things; hence their unheard-of power” (Nietzsche, vol. III 3, 114; my translation). This and all subsequent translations of “Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” are mine. The French edition, Superpositions , appeared in 1979 (Paris: Editions de Minuit). The essay by Deleuze appeared in English as “One Less Manifesto,” trans. E. dal Molin and T. Murray, in T. Murray, ed., Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 239–58. A previous translation (“One Manifesto Less”) by Alan Orenstein was included in Constantin V. Boundas, ed., The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 204–22. Throughout the present essay I translate from the original Italian edition. There are a few noteworthy exceptions, and they are in the area of performance studies. Let me mention a volume edited by Laura Cull, Deleuze and Performance throughout but especially the editor’s Introduction; an essay by Mohammed Kowsar, “Deleuze on Theatre: A Case Study of Carmelo Bene’s Richard III ”; and a book by Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature , especially chapter V. In “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” on Artaud, Derrida discusses “the idea of a theater without representation” as “the idea of the impossible,” and therefore states that such an idea “does not help us to regulate theatrical practice.” And again: “Artaud kept himself as close as possible to the limit: the possibility and impossibility of pure theater. Presence, in order to be presence and self-presence, has always already begun to represent itself, has always already been penetrated. Affirmation itself must be penetrated in repeating itself” (Derrida, Writing and Difference , 314). See also the discussion in Pierre Montebello, Deleuze: la passion de la pensée , especially chapter VI. Woolf’s text reads: “Did it matter, then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of trees at home . . . part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself” (Mrs. Dalloway, 11–12). Here I am importing into English the adjectival forms “majoritarian” and “minoritarian” to translate the Italian pair “maggioritario” and “minoritario,” corresponding to the French “majoritaire” and “minoritaire.” In both Italian and French, the terms designate belonging in or pertaining to: belonging in a majority or minority, but also in something major or minor, greater or lesser, of higher or lower profile, etc. The adjective “maggioritario” (“majoritaire” in French) also refers to the way of calculating the correspondence between number of votes and number of elected representatives in an electoral system. The phrase is Woolf’s, from a journal entry dated August 22, 1922 (The Diary, 193). The Greek skene (“scene, stage”) is related to skia “shadow, shade.” The glow of the stage is the place of shadows. But, in turn, skia must be referred back to the proto-IndoEuropean base ska(i), “to shine, flicker, glimmer” (consider in fact the Sanskrit chaya , which designates both “brilliance, luster,” and “shadow,” all the way to the O. E. scinan ,

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 160

10/17/2011 10:08:27 PM

NOTES

13.

14.

15.

16.

161

“to shine”). The shining and the shadowy share the same root. That which is luminous is, from another point of view and in another relation, opaque, shadowy (the most splendid phenomenon is but the shadow of light). Conversely, that which appears dense and dark is traversed by light. After all, it is that which appears, the radiant, the phenomenon, which casts a shadow. It is that which shines that is pervaded by a shadow, that which shows itself (i.e., shows some facets of itself) that also withdraws (i.e., withdraws other facets of itself), that which is living that is also dying. And if this body is to be understood in terms of the vibrating revolutions and intermittences of being, then we are pointed in the direction of the proximity of physics and phantasmatics. This erotic dynamic is lucidly acknowledged and developed by Jerzy Grotowski, among others, to the point that his entire line of research (from the “poor theater” to the “theater of sources”) can be seen as a variation on this theme. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Deleuze says, in their movement away from Hegel, “want to put metaphysics in motion, in action. They want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts. It is not enough, therefore, for them to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation . . . of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind. This is the idea of a man of the theatre. . . . They no longer reflect on theater in the Hegelian manner. Neither do they set up a philosophical theatre. They invent an incredible equivalent of theatre within philosophy. . . .” They speak “the language of a director who poses the highest theatrical problem, the problem of a movement which would directly touch the soul, which would be that of the soul” (Difference and Repetition, 8–9). Deleuze will have returned to “the people which is lacking” in a number of other contexts (with and without Guattari), which we cannot examine closely at this time. Let us merely mention Mille Plateaux , already cited; Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure ; and with Guattari, Critique et clinique . But then, again, utopia may not be “a good concept” (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 106). For it remains too implicated in history, reinscribed within it in terms of the “ideal” or “motivation.” “But becoming is the concept itself. It is born in History, and falls back into it, but is not a part of it. In itself, it has neither beginning nor end, but only a middle (un milieu). In this way, it is more geographical than historical.” As revolution, the concept is a “pure event,” and history is constitutively unable to capture it (“Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?” 106).

Chapter 7 1. This chapter has been previously published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought on “Utopias Today!” (Summer 2010), coedited by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. It is reproduced with the permission of the author and the chief editor of the journal. 2. For my reflections on Bloch’s Marxism, see Kellner and O’Hara’s “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch” and Kellner’s “Introduction to Ernst Bloch, ‘The Dialectical Method’.” 3. This study will mainly focus on the use for cultural criticism and ideology critique of Bloch’s magnus opus, though I also draw on some of his other writings and my previous research into Bloch’s thought.

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 161

10/17/2011 10:08:27 PM

162

NOTES

4. There is, of course, a library of books on Marx’s concept of ideology, not to mention the heated debates over which aspects of this ideology to emphasize and its relative merits and limitations. For my position within these debates, which I will not rehearse here, see Kellner, “Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism.” 5. Bloch’s starting point is always the everyday life and existential situation of the individual. Thus his approach is similar to Henri Lefebrve and the French situationists who also undertook a critique of everyday life and were concerned with the existence of concrete individuals. 6. Bloch’s Natural Law and Human Dignity expands on this notion. 7. See Reich’s Sex-Pol and, on French Freudo-Marxism, see Poster’s Existential Marxism in Postwar France. 8. See Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times. 9. Wikipedia has a detailed and well-sourced entry on Alfred Adler at http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Alfred_Adler (accessed on March 12, 2010). 10. Bloch was an early and consistent critic of Heidegger, perceiving the link between his philosophy and fascism which later historiographic and ideological critiques discovered. See, for example, Faye’s Heidegger. The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. 11. Compare this, for example, to Lukàcs’s The Destruction of Reason . 12. For further discussion of Bloch’s philosophy, see Hudson’s The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. 13. This is a motif of many films dealing with the dilemmas of black youth, including Straight Out of Brooklyn, New Jack City, Boys N’ the Hoods, Juice , and the earlier cycle of blaxploitation films that celebrated drug dealers and gangs. The other utopia offered for young black audiences is that of success in the music industry, as evidenced in the films of Prince and the ubiquitous rock videos of Michael Jackson, various rap groups, and others. 14. An exile from fascist Germany, Bloch lived in the United States from 1938–49. Yet he learned little English and mainly immersed himself in the writing of his major works and in German exile politics, while he was supported by his wife who worked as an architect (interviews with the Blochs during the summer of 1974). Like the Frankfurt school exiles, he thus had a predominantly negative view of American culture. 15. For my own concept of a multi-perspectival cultural studies, see my recent books Media Culture and Cinema Wars. 16. For my take on the Obama phenomenon, see Kellner’s “Barack Obama and Celebrity Spectacle.” 17. See Bloch’s “Nonsynchronism and Dialectics.” The text is now also translated in Heritage of Our Times.

Chapter 8 1. This chapter has been previously published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought on “Utopias Today!” (Summer 2010), coedited by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. It is reproduced with the permission of the author and the chief editor of the journal. 2. For more extended discussions of Bloch, see Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch , and Levitas, The Concept of Utopia .

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 162

10/17/2011 10:08:27 PM

NOTES

163

3. There are of course different translations of the quotation from Marx (which appears also in Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great 9–10). In particular, the “suppression” of religion is often translated as “abolition,” and “soul” may be translated “spirit,” giving “the spirit of spiritless conditions.” 4. These recur throughout Bloch’s work. For a discussion see Geoghegan (36).

Chapter 9 1. Translated from Spanish by Patrícia Vieira. 2. Translator’s note: The quotes of books or essays cited in this chapter and listed in the Bibliography in their English translations, are reproduced according to the English version of these texts. The page numbers following the quotes also refer to the English version. The quotes of books or essays listed in the Bibliography in other languages, have been translated into English by me based on the Spanish quotes in the original article. The page numbers after these quotes refer to the editions listed in the Bibliography.

Chapter 10 1. This chapter has been previously published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought on “Utopias Today!” (Summer 2010), coedited by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. It is reproduced with the permission of the author and the chief editor of the journal.

Chapter 11 1. This chapter has been previously published in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Thought on “Utopias Today!” (Summer 2010), coedited by Patrícia Vieira and Michael Marder. It is reproduced with the permission of the author and the chief editor of the journal. 2. See Panitch and Leys (1999) for more on practical utopias. 3. For more on the twenty-first century as the century of transition away from capitalism see my article in Albritton et al. (2001). 4. Five years ago who would have thought that we would hear proposals to nationalize the banks coming from the mainstream media. 5. “Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will” comes from Gramsci (Letter from prison, December 19, 1929). 6. See Schönpflug for a more extended discussion of this point. 7. See Albritton (1991) for a fuller discussion of the post-Second World War phase of capitalism. 8. This is particularly the case in the United States where religious fundamentalism has to some extent hooked up with the ideas of Milton Friedman and their populist rendering by Ann Rand. 9. A good example is the disastrous invasion of Iraq. 10. I recommend Baker as a general text on equality.

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 163

10/17/2011 10:08:27 PM

164

NOTES

11. One concern of St. Thomas More’s Utopia (published 1516) was the enclosure of commons, which led to fat sheep and hungry humans. Biofuels today feed petrol hungry SUVs while over a billion people in the world go hungry. In short, there is a striking similarity between at least one major problem that St. Thomas More dealt with and today’s world. 12. For more on health problems see Panitch and Leys (2009). A toxic environment, hyper commercialization, extreme competitiveness, lack of good jobs, junk food, a declining sense of community— all of these probably contribute to the rising incidence of mental illness. 13. It has been estimated that within 40 years there will be severe shortages of many of the most important minerals utilized by industry (Jackson 10). On environmental health see Albritton (2009) and Panitch and Leys (2006). 14. Some European countries have made headway in addressing them. 15. For more on this issue see The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) “Human Development Reports.” Also see Albritton (2009). 16. See recent statistics from the International Labour Organization. www.ilo.org/global/ Themes/Youth_Unemployment/lang--en/index.htm 17. “If humanity had to pay for the consequences of a degraded ecosystem, the bill could, according to one recent study, run to about $47 trillion” (Patel 49). 18. According to Pareto, an economy in a state of equilibrium will allocate resources to optimally meet social demand. The problem with this is that social demand may be hugely unequal so that “optimal” refers to efficiency relative to a given demand and not social justice. Indeed, one might argue that the whole problem is really not optimality at all, but instead distributive justice, which would require a fairly equal distribution of wealth (Kohonen and Mestrum 25). 19. It is a pragmatic issue whether it is three to one or ten to one. Were it ten to one, the basic income might be $25,000 per year, and the highest income $250,000 per year. In time the ratio between highest and lowest might be further decreased. 20. The idea of a Basic Income or Guaranteed Annual Income has been around for a long time, but it has never been fully implemented for any length of time. 21. For more on the importance of decommodifying labour-power see Albritton, Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx . 22. Malaria alone kills over one million Africans a year (Patel 75). 23. It is now being so used as private sector marketing penetrates education because it is underfunded. See Albritton, Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity, 172–7. 24. These are some of the aims of the slow food movement. 25. The United States spends on average $1 trillion on the military annually, or nearly onehalf of the global total (Patel 79). 26. One-third of global assets are held off shore and one-half of global trade passes through tax havens (Kohonen and Mestrum xiii). An estimated $11.5 trillion in private assets are held in off-shore tax havens (Kohonen and Mestrum 15).

9780826420725_Notes_Finals_txt_print.indd 164

10/17/2011 10:08:27 PM

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. —. Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Albritton, Robert. A Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development . Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1991. —. Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx . London: Pluto Press, 2007. —. Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity. London: Pluto Press, 2009. —. “Marx’s Value Theory and Subjectivity.” Value and the World Economy Today. Ed. Richard Westra and Alan Zuege. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003: 205–24. —. “Socialism and Individual Freedom.” New Socialisms: Futures Beyond Globalization . Ed. Robert Albritton, et al. London: Routledge, 2004: 17–32. Albritton, Robert, et al. Phases of Capitalist Development. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Althusser, Luis. For Marx . Trans. Ben Brewster. New York and London: Verso, 2006. Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Andrew, Geoff. The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure. Montreal: McGill Queens Press, 2008. Arendt, Hannah. “Truth and Politics.” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought . New York: Penguin Books, 1993: 227–64. Aristotle. The Physics. Vols. I–IV. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005. Armstrong, Karen. The Case for God: What Religion Really Means. London: The Bodley Head, 2009. Baker, John. Arguing for Equality. London: Verso, 1987. Ballard, J. G. Crash . Barcelona: Minotauro, 2008. Bammer, Angelika. Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Bene, Carmelo and Gilles Deleuze. Sovrapposizioni . Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992: 245–55. Bennett, Phillippa. The Last Romances and the Kelmscott Press. London: William Morris Society, 2009. Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Ed. Henry Hardy. London: Fontana, 1991. Bernays, Edward. Propaganda . New York: Ig Publishing, 2005. Blanchot, Maurice. La Communauté Inavouable . Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity. London and New York: Verso, 2009. —. “Differentiations in the Concept of Progress.” A Philosophy of the Future . New York: Herder and Herder, 1970: 112–41. —. Heritage of Our Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. —. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986. —. “Nonsynchronism and Dialectics.” New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22–38. —. The Principle of Hope . Three Volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986. [referred to as Bloch 1986a] —. The Principle of Hope . Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. [referred to as Bloch 1986b] — . Sogetto-Oggetto. Commento a Hegel . Trans. R. Bodei. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975 (1949). Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Literature . London: Routledge, 2003.

9780826420725_Bib_Finals_txt_print.indd 165

10/17/2011 10:08:35 PM

166

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography. Trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston. New York: Schocken Books, 1960. Brown, Peter G. Ethics, Economics and International Relations: Transparent Sovereignty in the Commonwealth of Life . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Brown, Peter G. and Geoffrey Garver. Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. San Francisco: BK Currents, 2009. Bruckner, Pascal. The Temptation of Innocence . New York: Algora, 2000. Buber, Martin. I and Thou . London: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Buitenweg, Rob. Human Rights, Human Plights in a Global Village . Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2007. Celan, Paul. Collected Prose: Paul Celan. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. New York: Routledge, 2003. Cox, Laurence. “Building Utopia Here and Now: Left and Working-Class Utopias in Ireland.” Ecopolitics Online Journal 1.1 (Autumn/Winter 2007): 123–32. Cox, Stan. Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine . London: Pluto Press, 2008. Critchley, Simon. Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature . London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Cull, Laura, ed. Deleuze and Performance . Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2009. Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Henry Longfellow. Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books, 2008. Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. La Nouvelle Raison du Monde . Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 2009. Davis, Devra. The Secret History of the War on Cancer. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Davis, Laurence. “Isaiah Berlin, William Morris, and the Politics of Utopia.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3.2–3 (2000): 56–86. Davis, Laurence and Peter Stillman, eds. The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Davis, Laurence and Ruth Kinna, eds. Anarchism and Utopianism . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Black Swan, 2007. de la Boétie, Étienne. Discours sur la Servitude Voluntaire . Paris: Payot, 2002 [1549]. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition . Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. —. Kafka. Pour une Littérature Mineure . Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975. —. Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1991. —. “Qu’est-ce que l’Acte de Création?” www.webdeleuze.com. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Critique et Clinique . Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993. — . Mille Plateaux . Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980. Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason . Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International . Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. —. Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009. (1854) Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1960. Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems , 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963. —. “Dante.” In Selected Prose . Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Ferrar, Staus and Giroux, 1975. Elson, Diane. “Socializing Markets, Not Market Socialism.” Socialist Register 2000. Ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1999: 67–86. Engels, Friedrich. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Tucker, Robert C. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978: 683–717. Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger. The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

9780826420725_Bib_Finals_txt_print.indd 166

10/17/2011 10:08:35 PM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

167

Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature . Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “Theatrum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-memory, Practice . Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977: 165–96. Fournier, Valérie. “Utopianism and the Cultivation of Possibilities: Grassroots Movements of Hope.” Utopia and Organization . Ed. Martin Parker. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Freyer, Hans. Die Politische Insel: Eine Geschichte der Utopien von Platon bis zur Gegenwart . Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1936. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man . New York: Avon Books, 2006. Gehlen, Arnold. “Die Säkularisierung des Fortschritts.” Einblicke . Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 7. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978: 403–12. Geoghegan, Vincent. Ernst Bloch . London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Geras, Norman. Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend . London: Verso, 1983. Gray, John. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia . London: Penguin, 2008. Grotowski, Jerzy. “Statement of Principles.” Towards a Poor Theater. Ed. Eugenio Barba. New York: Routledge, 2002. —. “Tu es le Fils de Quelqu’Un.” The Grotowski Sourcebook . Ed. Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner. London: Routledge, 2001: 294–305. Habermas, Jürgen. Über Ernst Bloch . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time . New York: HarperCollins, 1962. —. Being and Time . Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. — . The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. —. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena . Trans. Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. —. “Letter on Humanism.” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins, 1993: 213–65. —. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins, 1993: 139–203. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Hitchens, Christopher. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. London: Atlantic Books, 2007. Hoffman, John. John Gray and the Problem of Utopia . Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Hudson, Wayne. The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. New York: Saint Martin’s, 1982. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenology of Philosophy. Book I. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. Jackson, Tim. Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. London: Earthscan, 2009. Jacobs, Naomi. “Beyond Stasis and Symmetry: Lessing, Le Guin, and the Remodelling of Utopia.” Extrapolation 29.1 (Spring 1988): 34–45. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso, 2007. —. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. —. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130–48. Kellner, Douglas. “Barack Obama and Celebrity Spectacle.” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): 1–20. http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/559/350 (accessed on March 12, 2010). —. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush/Cheney Era . Malden, Mass. and UK: Blackwell, 2010.

9780826420725_Bib_Finals_txt_print.indd 167

10/17/2011 10:08:35 PM

168

BIBLIOGRAPHY

—. “Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism.” Socialist Review 42 (November–December 1978): 37–65. —. “Introduction to Ernst Bloch, ‘The Dialectical Method’.” Man and World 16 (1983): 281–4. —. Media Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern . London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Kellner, Douglas and Harry O’Hara. “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch.” New German Critique 9 (Fall 1976): 11–34. Kohonen, Matti and Francine Mestrum, eds. Tax Justice: Putting Global Inequality on the Agenda . London: Pluto Press, 2009. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel . Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Kolakowski, Leszek. Modernity on Endless Trial . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Kowsar, Mohammed. “Deleuze on Theatre: A Case Study of Carmelo Bene’s Richard III.” Theatre Journal 38.1 (1986): 19–33. Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Kümmel, Friedrich. “Time as Succession and the Problem of Duration.” The Voices of Time . Ed. J. T. Fraser. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1968. Lang, Tim and M. Heasman. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets. London: Earthscan, 2004. Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001 (1985). —. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989. —. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia . London: Millennium, 1999 (1974). Levinas, Emmanuel. “Dying For . . .” Entre Nous. Thinking-of-the-Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998: 207–17. —. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia . Hemel Hempstead: Philip Allan, 1990. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. —. “Pragmatism, Utopia and Anti-Utopia.” Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 9.1 (May 2008): 42–59. Liakos, Antonis. “Utopian and Historical Thinking: Interplays and Transferences.” Historein 7 (2007): 20–57. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government . Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Löwith, K. Significato e Fine della Storia . Trans. F. Tedeschi Negri. Milan: Comunità, 1963. Lübbe, Hermann. La Secolarizzazione. Storia e Analisi di un Concetto. Trans. P. Rossi. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1970 (1965). Lukàcs, Georg. The Destruction of Reason . London: Merlin, 1980. Magris, Claudio. Utopia y Disencanto: Historias, Esperanzas y Ilusiones de la Modernidad . Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia . London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Marder, Michael. Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt . London and New York: Continuum, 2010. —. “Heidegger’s ‘Phenomenology of Failure’ in Sein und Zeit .” Philosophy Today 51.1 (Spring 2007): 69–78. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto (1848).” Karl Marx: Selected Writings . Ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977: 221–47. Mayne, Michael. This Sunrise of Wonder: Letters to My Grandchildren . London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008. McLennan, Gregor. ‘Postsecularism: A New Global Debate.’ Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays. Ed. Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009: 82–98.

9780826420725_Bib_Finals_txt_print.indd 168

10/17/2011 10:08:36 PM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

169

McManus, Susan. ‘Theorizing Utopian Agency: Two Steps Toward Utopian Techniques of the Self.’ Theory and Event 10.3 (2007). McNally, David. Another World is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism . 2nd ed. Monmouth: The Merlin Press, 2006. Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism . London and New Jersey: Fernwood Publications and Zed Books, 1993. Montebello, Pierre. Deleuze: La Passion de la Pensée . Paris: Vrin, 2008. Nancy, Jean-Luc. La Communauté Désouvrée . Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1999. Neusüss, Arnhelm, “Schwierigkeiten einer Soziologie des utopischen Denkens.” Utopie: Begriff und Phänomen des Utopischen . Ed. Arnhelm Neusüss. Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968: 13–122. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. —. “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense.” On Truth and Untruth. Selected Writings. Ed. Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2010: 15–49. —. Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe . Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–. Notes from Nowhere, ed. We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism . London and New York: Verso, 2003. Novalis. Fragmentos de Novalis. Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 1992. Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Panitch, Leo and Colin Leys, eds. Socialist Register 2000, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias. Suffolk: Merlin Press, 1999. — . Socialist Register 2007, Coming to Terms with Nature . Suffolk: Merlin Press, 2006. —. Socialist Register 2010, Morbid Symptoms: Health under Capitalism . Suffolk: Merlin Press, 2009. Patel, Raj. The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think . Toronto: HarperCollins, 2009. Patočka, Jan. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Ed. James Dodd. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996. Pessoa, Fernando. “O Guardador de Rebanhos.” Obra Poética . Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1983. Phillips, Adam and Barbara Taylor. On Kindness. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009. Pinstrup-Andersen, P. and F. Cheng. “Still Hungry.” Scientific American . Sep. 2007: 96–101. Plato. The Republic . Trans. Paul Shorey. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation . Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin, 2006. Popkin, B. “The World is Fat.” Scientific American . Sep. 2007: 92–5. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and its Enemies. London: Routledge, 2002. Poster, Mark. Existential Marxism in Postwar France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Putnam, R. D. Bowling Alone . New York: Touchstone Press, 2000. Ramoneda, Josep. El Sentido Intimo: Crítica del Sentido Común . Barcelona: Muchnik, 1982. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. —. Hatred of Democracy. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2006. Raventos, Daniel. Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom . London: Pluto Press, 2007. Reich, Wilhelm. Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934 . New York: Vintage, 1972. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia . Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Roberts, Wayne. The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food. Toronto: New Internationalist Publications, 2008. Rorty, Richard. Achieving our Country. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Rossiter, Clinton. Constitutional Dictatorship. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2004.

9780826420725_Bib_Finals_txt_print.indd 169

10/17/2011 10:08:36 PM

170

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Scheuerman, William. Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time . Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2004. Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth . Trans. G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press, 2003. Schönpflug, Karin. Feminism, Economics and Utopia: Time Travelling Through Paradigms. London: Routledge, 2008. Schumacher, Friedrich E. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered . London: Abacus, 1974. Shestov, Lev. Apofeoz Bespochvennosti [The Apotheosis of Groundlessness ]. Moscow: ACT, 2004. Singer, Daniel. Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? . New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997. Smith, Rick and Bruce Lourie. Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health . Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence . New York: Collier Books, 1961. Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1993. State of the World 2004, Worldwatch Institute. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age . Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Thompson, Peter. “Introduction.” Ernst Bloch. Atheism in Christianity. London and New York: Verso, 2009: ix–xxx. Unger, Roberto. Democracy Realised: The Progressive Alternative . London and New York: Verso, 1998. —. Passion: An Essay on Personality. New York: The Free Press, 1984. —. The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound . Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. Vallega, Alejandro. Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2003. Varikas, Eleni. “The Utopian Surplus.” Thesis Eleven 68 (February 2002): 101–5. Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture . Trans. Jon Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. — . “Il tempo nella filosofia del Novecento.” Il Mondo Contemporaneo. Enciclopedia di Storia e Scienze Sociali . Ed. Nicola Tranfaglia. Vol. 10, Bk. 2. Florence: La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1983: 881–95. Venkataraman, B. “Ocean ‘Dead Zones’ on the Rise.” New York Times . Aug. 15, 2008. Verra, V. “Utopia.” Enciclopedia del Novecento. Vol. 7. Roma: Institute dell’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 1984: 988–1066. Voegelin, Eric. “Science, Politics and Gnosticism.” Trans. William J. Fitzpatrick. Modernity Without Restrain: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Ed. Manfred Henningsen. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin . Vol. 5. University of Missouri Press: Columbia and London, 2000: 249–313. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner, 1958. Williams, Raymond. ‘When was Modernism?’ The Politics of Modernism : Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989: 31–5. Wolin, Sheldon. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism . Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: CRW Publishing, 2003. —. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2: 1920–1924. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1980. —. The Waves. New York: Harcourt, 1978. Worsley, Peter. The Trumpet Shall Sound. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

9780826420725_Bib_Finals_txt_print.indd 170

10/17/2011 10:08:36 PM

Contributors

Robert Albritton is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at York University, Canada. Some of his most recent publications are Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx (2007) and Let Them Eat Junk: How Capitalism Creates Hunger and Obesity (2009). Cláudia Baracchi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, USA. A specialist in Ancient Greek Thought and Contemporary Philosophy, she is the author of Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic (2002) and Aristotle’s Ethics as First Philosophy (2007). Her main research interests pertain to the ethico-political ground of Ancient Greek thinking. Márcia Cavalcante-Schuback is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Södertörn, Sweden. The translator of Heidegger’s Being and Time into Portuguese, Professor Cavalcante-Schuback works in the fields of German Idealism, Hermeneutical Phenomenology, and Contemporary Philosophy, with special interest in the relationship between philosophy, poetry, and the arts. Her monographs include O EspaçoEntre Poesia e Pensamento (The Space Between Poetry and Thinking, 1986), O Começo de Deus (The Beginning of God, 1998), and Para Ler os Medievais. Ensaio de Hermenêutica Imaginativa (Reading Medieval Authors: An Essay in Imaginative Hermeneutics, 2000). Laurence Davis teaches Politics and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His recent publications include Anarchism and Utopianism (2009), coedited with Ruth Kinna, and The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (2005), coedited with Peter Stillman. He is a series editor of the Contemporary Anarchist Studies Series published by Continuum, and the author of numerous articles and book chapters on utopian and anarchist thought, democratic and revolutionary theory, as well as the politics and sociology of art, work, ecology, and love. Douglas Kellner holds the George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the UCLA, USA. He has most recently published Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre (2008) and Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (2009). Ruth Levitas is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. Some of her publications include The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour (2005) and The Concept of Utopia (2010). She is the co-founder and immediate past Chair of the Utopian Studies Society—Europe.

9780826420725_Contributor_Finals_txt_print.indd 171

10/17/2011 10:08:45 PM

172

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. The author of The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism (2009) and Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt (2010), he published widely in the fields of phenomenology, deconstruction, and political philosophy. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Telos . Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, France, and at the European Graduate School, Switzerland. One of the leading French philosophers today, he has published over 40 books, including, most notably, The Inoperative Community (1983), The Experience of Freedom (1988), Corpus (1992), Being Singular Plural (1996), The Creation of the World or Globalization (2002), and Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity I (2005). Josep Ramoneda is the Head of the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona), Spain. He contributes regularly to various newspapers and TV programs, including the Spanish newspaper El País. He is the author, among others, of Después de la Pasión Política (After the Political Passion, 1999) and Contra la Indiferencia (Against Indifference, 2010). Alexandre Franco de Sá is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. A specialist in Political Thought and twentieth-century German Philosophy, he is the author of Metamorfose do Poder (The Metamorphosis of Power, 2004), O Poder pelo Poder: Ficção e Ordem no Combate de Carl Schmitt em Torno do Poder (Power for the Sake of Power: Fiction and Order in Schmitt’s Confrontation with Power2009), as well as articles on the issues related to human rights, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, philosophy of life, and political theology. Gianni Vattimo is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy, and a member of the European Parliament. Professor Vattimo’s original philosophy, known as “weak thought,” pensiero debole , has been influential in the fields of contemporary theology, ethics, aesthetics, and radical political thought. His numerous books include, among others, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (1991), Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (1997), Art’s Claim to Truth (2008), and the forthcoming Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (2011), coauthored with Santiago Zabala. Patrícia Vieira is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of Georgetown University, USA, and a Research Fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has published Seeing Politics Otherwise: Vision in Latin American and Iberian Fiction (2011) and Cinema no Estado Novo: A Encenação do Regime (Cinema in the New State: The Staging of the Regime , 2011).

9780826420725_Contributor_Finals_txt_print.indd 172

10/17/2011 10:08:45 PM