The Individual and Utopia: A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection 9781317027577, 1317027574

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The Individual and Utopia

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To my family and friends who continue to support me and make it possible for me to be successful in my personal and public endeavors. May you all, one day, realize you are perfect. For Nan

The Individual and Utopia

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A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection

Edited by Clint Jones Eastern Kentucky University, USA Cameron Ellis Trent University, Canada

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Clint Jones, Cameron Ellis and the contributors 2015 Clint Jones and Cameron Ellis have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Jones, Clint. The individual and utopia : a multidisciplinary study of humanity and perfection / by Clint Jones and Cameron Ellis. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-2894-3 (hardback) 1. Utopias—History. 2. Individualism—History. 3. Communities—History. 4. Perfection—History. I. Ellis, Cameron. II. Title. HX806.J66 2015 335’.02—dc23 2014030874 ISBN: 9781472428943 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315556758 (ebk)

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Contents List of Figures ix Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgmentsxvii Introduction1 Clint Jones and Cameron Ellis PART I  Contextualizing the Individual and Utopia 1

The Individual’s Place in Paradise: The Limits, Promise, and Role of Reason in Modern Conceptions of Utopia Charles Joshua Horn

2

Fundamental Oppositions: Utopia and the Individual Mark Jendrysik

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3

The Individual and the City: Abstract and Concrete Nathaniel Coleman

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4

“Between the Utopian and the Primitive Horns of His Dilemma”: Aldous Huxley’s Selection of Peter Kropotkin over T.H. Huxley for the Savage’s “Third Alternative” in a Revised Brave New World67 Clifford T. Manlove

5 6

Owenite Architecture and Urban Rationality: Notes and Reflections on Class and Utopia José Ramón Álvarez Layna, Andrés Maidana Legal and Iván Vélez Cipriano Mrs Atwood and the Utopian Tradition: A Nineteenth-Century Alchemist as Utopian Theorist Kerry E. Koitzsch

11

85

99

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PART II  Mind, Body, Soul, and the Utopian Individual 7

The Empathetic Turn: The Relationship of Empathy to the Utopian Impulse Nancy L. Nester

117



Solipsism and Utopia: Fredric Brown, Charles Yu, Ludwig Wittgenstein Frank Cioffi

133

9

Foucault, Film and the Utopian Body Alice Leroy

10

Etherotopia or a Country in the Mind: Bridging the Gap between Utopias and Nirvanas Christos Callow Jr.

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City of God: On the Longing for Architectonic Perfection, a Reminder by Uriel Birnbaum Kyle Dugdale

179

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Theosis: Between Personal and Universal Utopia Tamara Prosic

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8

11

149

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PART III  Marginalized and Alternative   Interpretations of the Individual and Utopia 13 14 15

Eutopias and Dis-Topias: Re-Imagining the Citizen of Ideal Societies Clint Jones and Jen Rinaldi

225

Abject Utopianism: On the Silence, Apathy, and Drifting of Psychic Life in Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg243 Cameron Ellis



The New Mobile Subject: Space, Agency, and Ownership in the Techno-Utopian Age Judy Ehrentraut

16

The Philosopher’s Solitude Marco Lauri

259 279

Contents

17 Ubuntu is Utopia: The Individual and the Community in the Work of Nelson Mandela Mark Malisa and Michelle McAnuff-Gumbs

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18

Religion and the Mental Utopia in Literature Mark S. Ferrara

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295 315

Index331

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List of Figures 3.1 Piazza del Campidoglio (view toward Palazzo del Senatore), Rome, Italy (1539–92). Architect: Michelangelo. Source: Photo by author.

47

3.2 Monument of Vittorio Emanuele II (the Vittoriano), Rome, Italy (1885–1911). Architect: Count Giuseppe Sacconi. Source: Photo by author.

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Notes on Contributors Christos Callow Jr., University of Lincoln, UK, has a BA in acting, an MA in playwriting and is currently studying for a PhD in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London, for which he’s working on a collection of utopian short stories. His fiction has been published in Cosmos, Polluto and the Mad Scientist Journal. His interview with science fiction writer Adam Roberts was published in Strange Horizons and he is currently co-editing an essay collection on Roberts’ work which will be published by Gylphi. He recently organized Stage the Future: the First International Conference on Science Fiction Theatre. Iván Vélez Cipriano, PhD, Gustavo Bueno Foundation, Spain, is an architect and a researcher. Ivan is a multi-faceted Spanish intellectual and researcher who has published regularly for very well-known online publications like “El Catoblepas.” Ivan has also published notable books such as Agua, Máquinas y Hombres en la España Pre-industrial. Frank Cioffi, PhD, Baruch College—City University of New York, USA, has taught at Princeton University, the Claremont Colleges, Indiana University, and elsewhere. He is currently an associate faculty member of Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, and he is Professor of English at Baruch College—CUNY. He has written Formula Fiction: An Anatomy of American Science Fiction, 1930–39 and The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers. Nathaniel Coleman, PhD, Newcastle University, UK, is Senior Lecturer and Degree Program Director, Master of Arts in Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the Design School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. His recent publications include “Building in Empty Spaces:” Is Architecture a “Degenerate Utopia,” The Journal of Architecture and “Recovering Utopia,” Journal of Architectural Education. Kyle Dugdale, Yale University, USA, is an architect and a doctoral candidate at Yale School of Architecture. A graduate of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, his current work examines the persistence of the Tower of Babel as a paradigm within the narratives of architecture, devoting particular attention to its twentieth-century resurgence as a figure that is tied to the peculiar anxieties of modernity. He has contributed to a forthcoming special edition of Utopian Studies, and is also working on a translation into English of Uriel Birnbaum’s Der Kaiser und der Architekt.

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Judy Ehrentraut, University of Waterloo, Canada, is a new media scholar examining the transformations of the human body in the posthuman digital era. Her research interests include agency and identity in cyberspace, virtual reality, spatial theory, simulated reality, the digitized body, and cyborgism. Her recent work focuses on the mobile phone as a technological extension of the human body, as well as issues surrounding digital dualisms. Judy is currently completing her doctoral work at the University of Waterloo and is affiliated with the Games Institute as well as the Critical Media Lab, where she conducts research on prosthetic devices. Cameron Ellis, PhD, Trent University, Canada, is in the Cultural Studies Department. His research interests are in literary cultural studies, science fiction and utopian studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, and autobiography. Mark S. Ferrara, PhD, State University of New York at Oneonta, USA, is an assistant professor of English at SUNY—Oneonta where he teaches writing and world literatures. The former director of the Chinese Cultural Exchange Program at Drake University, he has taught in South Korea, China, and on a Fulbright Scholarship in Turkey. Mark Jendrysik, PhD, University of North Dakota, USA, is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Dakota. Like Edward Bellamy, he is a native of Chicopee, Massachusetts. He is the author of Modern Jeremiahs: Contemporary Visions of American Decline (2008). His recent publications include “Back to the Garden: New Visions of PostHuman Futures,” Utopian Studies, Volume 22.1, 2011 (34–51) and “Egalitarian Populism on the High Plains. Or, Why Are There No Parking Meters in North Dakota?” with Dana Michael Harsell, The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 46.2, 2013 (394–410). He wishes to thank Carissa Green for her invaluable editorial assistance. Charles Joshua Horn, PhD, University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point, USA, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. He specializes in the history of early modern philosophy, especially on metaphysics and epistemology of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. In addition to active interests in modern philosophy, he maintains an interest in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of mind in the fields of modality, causation, free will, philosophy of religion, and cognitive science. Clint Jones, PhD, University of Kentucky, USA, is currently Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky University and Adjunct Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Communication at Transylvania University. His primary research focuses on the intersections of mimetic theory, justice, and utopia while maintaining active interests in queer theory,

Notes on Contributors

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environmentalism, and applied ethics. His most recent manuscript, A Genealogy of Social Violence, was published by Ashgate Publishing in 2013. Kerry E. Koitzsch, Independent Scholar, California, USA, is an independent scholar and software consultant with an abiding interest in the history of science and alchemy, the theory and practice of utopian thought, and the impact of historical ideas upon modern civilization. He was educated at MIT, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Interlochen Arts Academy, and served in the United States Army. He has presented many papers on social, utopian, and historical themes to the Society for Utopian Studies, Association for the Study of Esotericism (ASE) and ESSWE. He resides in Sunnyvale, CA, where he is currently working on an intellectual biography of Mary Anne Atwood. Marco Lauri, Università La Sapienza di Roma, Italy, obtained his doctorate in Islamic Studies at La Sapienza University of Rome in November 2012 with a dissertation on the tradition of utopian thought in Islam. His interests in research focus on construction of identity, political thinking, and representation of history in philosophical and literary writing on Muslim Middle Ages and Modern West. José Ramón Álvarez Layna, University of Alcala, Spain, has conducted research on Robert Owen for many years, and his main fields of interest are history, philosophy, religious studies, and liberal arts. At the present time, he focuses on Robert Owen and also on Anglo American thought and history. Publications like “Robert Owen entre la historia, el lenguaje y el pensamiento”—University of Rome—or “Lo Irracional en Donald Davidson”—Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid—are in unison with his intellectual interests. Andrés Maidana Legal, PhD, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is an architect. Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Buenos Aires, he is also a senior researcher at the Institute of Superior Planning, Territory and Environment—University of Buenos Aires. Andrés has worked extensively on issues concerning housing, urbanism and ideologies. Alice Leroy, French National Library (BNF), Paris, France, is a PhD candidate in film studies at the University of Paris Est and an associate researcher to the French National Library. Her research focuses on media archeology and film aesthetics, and examines in particular the concept of “utopian body” (Michel Foucault) in film. Intersecting art and science, her work has been published in Trafic, Critique and Esprit. Michelle McAnuff-Gumbs, PhD, The College of Saint Rose, USA, is the author of “Literacy for social justice,” Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching and Literature, 4(1) and “Using literacy theory and tools of technology to guide teachers in delivering culturally responsive instruction: An online urban teacher

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training example,” in V.C. Bryan and V.C.X. Wang (2013), Technology Use and Research Approaches for Community Education and Professional Development. Her research interests include culturally relevant pedagogy in the USA, and education in the Caribbean. Mark Malisa, PhD, The College of Saint Rose, USA, is the author of (Anti) Narcissisms and (Anti) Capitalisms: Education and Human Nature in the Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Jurgen Habermas (Boston and Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010), and “Songs for freedom: Music and the struggle against apartheid,” in J. Friedman (ed.), The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013). His research interests include Pan-Africanism, International Education and (Anti) Globalization. His current project is on genocide and European empire-building. Clifford T. Manlove, PhD, Pennsylvania State University, Greater Allegheny, USA, teaches twentieth-century literature/criticism, postcolonial studies, and film. He researches critical/film theory, utopian studies, reggae and Rastafari, and colonial/postcolonial narratives (especially from the Caribbean, West Africa, and American South). He has published in Cinema Journal, South Atlantic Review, minnesota review, College Literature, (Re-)turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, and Left Curve. He also has a chapter on Jackson’s use of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in King Kong in Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (Ohio UP). He is completing a book on The Harder They Come, “The Harder They Came: On Jamaica’s First Feature Film, Reggae, and Rastafari.” Nancy L. Nester, PhD, Roger Williams University, USA, teaches first-year writing as well as advanced courses such as Writing for Social Change. In addition, she is Chair of the University’s Interdisciplinary Core Curriculum Committee and teaches in the Core Program. Her work with her Interdisciplinary Senior Seminar entitled Visions of Utopia: Dreams and Delusions, a course she designed and began teaching in 1999, inspired her scholarship on empathy, work she has presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies in 2009 and 2012. Tamara Prosic, PhD, Monash University, Australia, is a lecturer at Monash University. She is interested in interdisciplinary studies of religion and political theologies, in particular the theology of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the ways it intersects with classical Marxism and modern Marxist theories. At the moment she is working on a project looking at Orthodox Christianity as the source of hegemonic cultural values during Russian revolution. Her recent publications include: “Between Support for the State and its Betrayal: The Contradictions of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Concept of Symphonia,” Political Theology, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2014): 175–87; “Of bodies and souls: Ecology and Orthodox Christianity,” in Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe, eds Andrew Milner, Simon Sellars and Verity Burgmann, Arena, North Carlton, Australia, 2011;

Notes on Contributors

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and “Schizoid Coitus: Christ and the feminine,” in Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible, eds Roland Boer and Jorrun Okland, Sheffield Phoenix Press, Sheffield, 2008. Jennifer Rinaldi, PhD, University of Ontario, Institute of Technology, Canada, is a Full-Time Academic Associate in the Legal Studies department. Her current interests include postmodern and feminist philosophy, philosophy of law, healthcare and bioethics, ancient and classic literature, science fiction and pop culture, as well as activism and advocacy.

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Acknowledgments From Clint— A project like this requires a concerted and focused effort on the part of everyone involved so I would first like to thank the contributors to this volume for sticking with the project from inception to publication. In spite of the difficulty inherent in an undertaking like this each author was willing to work with us to bring this volume to fruition and I appreciate their eagerness and effort throughout the process. Along with the contributors another person that I am indebted to is my co-editor, Cam Ellis. This project was born of his enthusiasm and excitement for not only the project but also for scholarship and understanding. Each of these chapters benefited immensely from his unyielding passion for what this project represents. He has been a supporter of mine and a steady friend throughout the project. Without him this text would not exist. A project like this also requires a lot of support that goes unnoticed on the pages and between the lines so I would also like to thank my family for making time in their lives for me to have the time and space in mine to work on this volume that will, I hope, expand our understanding of the world and the human element in it. Several of my colleagues have been forced to shoulder the burden of this project as well by virtue of the requirements of friendship. They have heard me complain, wonder, digress, and extol the positives of this text, each unfailing in their support and understanding. Thank you, one and all, for being willing to help me achieve my goals. I look forward to returning the favor. Lastly, but certainly not least of all, the editorial team at Ashgate. This is not my first opportunity to work with the wonderful people at Ashgate and I continue to be impressed by their creativity, commitment, and professionalism. The quality of this text is the direct result of their work as partners in the production of it. As a scholar no one could ask for better treatment or more pleasing results. From Cam— I would like to thank Neil Jordan and the editorial team at Ashgate for their patience and care in bringing this project to completion; the Cultural Studies department at Trent University for their guidance and resources; a special thanks to my mother and father, Heather and Craig Ellis, for their love and support since before I was born; and, of course, Tash without whom I would completely lack the wonderful world view that I have today.

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Introduction Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:22 15 April 2017

Clint Jones and Cameron Ellis

I A specter is haunting utopia … the specter of the individual. This allusion to The Communist Manifesto (1848) serves to contextualize the historical relevance, social significance, and personal meaning of our present volume, The Individual and Utopia, in three ways corresponding to the three meanings applicable to the idea of “specter”: apparition, ghost, phantom, revenant; danger, menace, threat, worry; anticipation, opportunity, possibility, risk. As with any volume of this kind the focal point, even when made clear, may not be so easy to nail down—just as a specter may be multiple things so the individual in utopia. This volume takes as its focal point the individual in, and individual experiences of, utopias. Each chapter included in this volume deals with individual experiences of utopia and, to some extent, the darker side of utopian dreaming, dystopias. For the purposes of this volume we have not held a strict line between the two recognizing that, for instance, in Orwell’s Oceania, for the citizens that enjoy life there, it is—or was at least planned as—a utopia. Because of this, and the fact that the individual has been too often and too easily lost in utopian studies, we treat each individual experience as worthy of study and as a possible point of entry for a better understanding of the utopian impulse. We recognize that utopia has hitherto been understood as what Lyman Tower Sargent calls “social dreaming,”1 which is to say a communally driven theory and practice displaced in time and oriented toward the future. The individual is always there (for without the individual there is no social), but always in the background, within the field of vision, but always just out of focus. For instance, when Raphael Hythloday discusses his visit to the island of Utopia with Peter Giles and Thomas More, he describes the social and communal structures and practices of the Utopians, not on their subjective or phenomenal experience of Utopia. We do not know what the Utopians think, feel, love, hate, conspire, resent, foresee, and lament as individuals; we are, instead, told of golden chamber pots, babies using jewels as toys, and a great deal about daily routines, social organization—including the shameless naked inspection of prospective marriage partners prior to committing to marriage—as well the treatment of slaves, warfare 1 Sargent, Lyman Tower, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.

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and trade, and a general collective or social identity and the maintenance thereof. Hythloday’s account is a typical barometer of visitors to utopia where the reports are of the place and its constitution and the necessities for its social continuation. It is not until Tom Moylan’s Demand the Impossible that we, as social dreamers, inherit the concept of the critical utopia and the idea of the “impact of the revolutionary person on the establishment and/or survival of utopia.”2 Chances are that the individual fighting to achieve, or struggling to maintain, utopia will never bear witness to it as such; at best the individual is forgotten, having succumbed to so much historical burial and interment; repressed qua unconscious recognition of utopia’s collective social life. The individual remains an apparition. A ghost. A phantom. A shadow. Our aim with this volume is to begin the process of re-cognizing the individual, to add three-dimensionality to the all too often one-dimensional figures that populate utopian spaces. This requires that the individual and utopia be analyzed not merely from the perspective of what an individual does or contributes to a utopian project, but also how that project comes to be in the mind of the individual, how the utopian project impacts, changes, or challenges the individual as it stymies or supports individual growth. Taking seriously the prospects and problematics of the individual and utopia requires that the individual as a spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, and social being be opened up to inquiry both prior to and at the intersections with utopia. E.M. Forster’s 1905 publication of The Machine Stops is widely acknowledged as the first literary dystopia, a sub-genre later explored and developed by Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood who, in their own way, dramatize social systems in which the desires of the one must be excised, in many cases, literally. In the dystopian analysis of the individual the treatment is all or none; the one must blend and cohere with the many. Failure to do so results in elimination from the system. But what do we learn from dystopias more than that the desires, imaginings, feelings, passions, and visions of one individual can be so powerful as to threaten to collapse or implode—strike fear in the heart of—an entire superstructure. Yet this has been one of the very few limited outlets for the individual within utopian studies; that is, the individual is discoursed almost exclusively, but not exhaustively, in terms of dystopia and not utopia—this volume attempts to redress this limited focus. What is the status of the individual under the social structures and rituals of an already established positive utopia; in preparation for it; in the practice of maintaining it? Could it be otherwise, or is the individual fated to remain a danger. A menace. A threat. A perpetual worry in utopia. Echoing Moylan’s idea of the “revolutionary individual,” Ruth Levitas calls utopia “the desire for a better way of being.” Which, following Ernst Bloch, means utopia is inherently material practices imbued with hope. Sympathetic to Bloch’s broad application of utopia to the practice of daily life (e.g., advertisements, 2 Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (London: Methuen, 1986), 161.

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Introduction

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applying lipstick, going to the circus, telling a joke, etc.), Levitas helps bring the individual in all his and her ambiguity, uncertainty, unreasonableness, aimlessness, and innocence, as well as transgressiveness, into the contemporary scope of utopian studies. Within this hopeful interpretation of humanity is also included a great deal of risk, as Sargent warns, “if used wrongly, and it has been, utopianism is itself dangerous.”3 There is always the possibility that, even if unintended to be such, one’s utopian drives might end up a horrible and catastrophic failure—for all individuals qua individuals not just the social systems of the utopia. The range of risking utopia is vast. Whether it is opening a lemonade stand at the age of six or genocidal thoughts about how the world would be a better place if only “They” disappeared, one could easily slip into conflict that boils out of control: in the neighborhood or across national boundaries. When the individual anticipates something better, a possibility, an opportunity, he or she risks having those same desires recoiling or backfiring leading the individual into his or her own private oblivion. The utopian individual is, then, a tremendous risk—to themselves and others, often solely for no other reason than that they inhabit a particular consciousness, that is, that they understand utopia from their own individual viewpoint. As time extends deeper into the new millennium, scholars of utopia are attempting to make sense of the proliferating methods of approaching and discussing the topic of utopia. The Individual and Utopia includes 18 chapters that examine the notion of the individual from a broad range of backgrounds, fields, and disciplines. Each chapter is tacitly aware that the individual is, in some sense, a specter in utopia. In short, without rejecting the social altogether or communalism entirely, The Individual and Utopia seeks to explore utopia beyond the typically limited scope of conceiving utopia as a purely communal, social, or globalized project choosing instead to focus on the individual experiences of utopia. The 18 chapters included seek to contribute to a conversation which entertains—what for now we will call—the “other side” of utopia: the private, inner, and/or psychic project—that is, the aspects of utopia that are typically treated sub-textually. This “other side” of utopia has roots in precursors such as Aristotle’s Phronemos or Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, where these conceived of individuals are themselves the locus of perfection. Yet, the individual as a site for utopian studies is a severely underdeveloped venue for investigating not only what it means to be human, but also to what extent our humanity can be understood in the communal relationship known as “utopia.” The cultural exchange seems to have reached an apparent stalemate: On one hand, critics applaud the efforts of those bodies who have eschewed matters related to identity politics and instead have promoted a globalized world view through international efforts (e.g., alongside the use of technology and social media); on the other hand, some critics argue against this globalizing trend by suggesting that a rapidly increasing technological realm reifies people into already existing 3 Sargent, p. 9.

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identities, exacerbating what they perceive as a destructive radical individualism. As such, the place of the individual can no longer be considered stable as the world moves further into the present century.

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II In order to address the concerns of the individual as a utopian we have organized the volume in such a way that the various aspects of the individual are subjected to investigations that parallel, intersect with, extend or support the analysis of the accompanying chapters in each subdivision. As such the present volume is divided into three parts, of six chapters each. Each part is an attempt to locate and expound upon the individual and utopia within certain parameters. So, for instance, instead of grouping all of the architecture papers together in one part they have been placed where the analysis is best suited to contribute to a broader understanding of the individual and utopia beyond the analysis of architecture’s role in shaping or influencing the individual. This was done to both make narrow readings less likely, but also to foster connections between the various chapters along the lines of broader concerns such as historical analysis. In Part I, “Contextualizing the Individual and Utopia,” Charles Joshua Horn opens the volume with a study of the relationship between the individual and utopian states through the lens of reason in early modern political theory—arguably where utopia got its start. Drawing upon Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, and Kant, Horn contextualizes the situation of the utopian individual leading up to, and through, the Enlightenment where the individual is located in the split between the notion of the ideal state on one hand and the virtuous life of the mind on the other. Horn’s analysis provides a glimpse of how the enlightenment projects made possible full scale utopian dreaming as part of a social conceptualization of both a better individual and a better society. Mark Jendrysik’s chapter on “Fundamental Oppositions” shifts our attention to more contemporary modern thought. He examines the claims made by various authors in the utopian canon about the need for the individual to subsume her own personal goals and desires to the overall good of the community. He traces a genealogy whereby individual and personal desires for happiness and comfort are seen as inherently selfish and anti-social to utopian theorists creating spaces that acknowledge the autonomy and liberty of the individual. By touching on very modern phenomena such as “seasteading” and genetic engineering Jendrysik frames new questions about the status of the individual in relation to emerging technologies and commodities. “The Individual and the City: Abstract and Concrete” by Nathaniel Coleman looks closely at two architectural projects in the heart of Rome: the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument and the Campidoglio, in terms of how they share a myth of Rome as representing an exemplary past and an ideal future simultaneously, in relation to the prospect of Utopia and individual experiences of the city.

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Coleman’s contribution to this volume offers a fresh and insightful reading of the “pathological” and “constitutive” functions that space and architecture holds with respect to the status of the individual and the social across history shaping how individuals conceive of their place in history and the future. Moving from philosophical, modern, and architectural foci Clifford T. Manlove raises questions about the interface between scientific and political ideologies. His examination deconstructs the debate over the social implications for evolutionary theory between Thomas Henry Huxley and Peter Kropotkin regarding the role of individual struggle versus that of mutual-aid. Manlove’s tight historical reading of the debate illuminates the significance of Aldous Huxley’s later choice of Kropotkin’s interpretation of evolutionary theory with respect to the individual’s relationship to other individuals, and to utopia. Bridging concerns raised in the four prior chapters, José Ramón Álvarez Layna, Andrés Maidana Legal, and Iván Vélez Cipriano examine, in their chapter on Robert Owen, the complications that exist between individuals struggling to build an actual utopia that responds to the individual’s socio-cultural milieu—in the case of Owen, Christian-Modern-Industrial issues. These authors unpack the difficulties inherent in attempts to negotiate the rational-irrational scales in an historical and practically sensitive way between the eras of New Lanark and New Harmony which demarcate Robert Owen’s attempts to construct a functional, viable, utopian alternative to the modern state. Though the backdrop of this piece is the construction of a utopian community the focus is the struggle of an individual to bring a utopian vision into existence. Drawing the first part to a close, and opening new lines of inquiry regarding the individual struggles of utopians, is Kerry Koitzsch’s chapter re-introducing an unfairly obscured figure in utopian history and discourse: Mary Anne Atwood, a practicing alchemist in the mid-nineteenth century. Koitzsch’s biography of Mrs Atwood’s nineteenth-century advocacy of social reforms, including feminism, antivivisection, animal rights, and religious toleration, combined with concepts and ideas such as rosicrucianism, pansophy, and theosophy, makes for an illuminating interrogation of a utopian theorist on the cusp of a late modern world trying to sell an idea of the future to her contemporaries. Koitzsch’s chapter serves as a welcome context within which to read an individual who struggled to integrate alternative belief systems alongside and into an otherwise secular modern agenda. Though he provides a poignant picture of Mrs Atwood, it should not be overlooked that her struggles parallel many of the struggles faced then and today by people seeking social reforms. Part II, “Mind, Body, Soul, and the Utopian Individual,” begins with Nancy Nester’s chapter “The Empathetic Turn.” Nester argues that empathy, the capacity to feel oneself into the situation of another, may be the precursor to utopian efforts. Her study includes a critical examination of the origin and usage of the terms empathy and utopia. For those seeking to better understand utopian individual relationships Nester’s examination of these terms establishes that empathy is a vital capacity that can catalyze the utopian impulse and sustain its momentum.

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The importance of Nester’s chapter is that it highlights the emotional infrastructure of utopian citizens and explores what would be required of individuals in utopian settings to sustain a utopian community—that is, she redresses what Thomas More omits in Hythloday’s account of Utopia. Frank Cioffi’s “Solipsism and Utopia” analyzes two science fiction novels, What Mad Universe (1949) by Fredric Brown and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010) by Charles Yu to argue that the subgenre of science fiction can dramatize the utopia of a self-created, solipsistic universe. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on solipsism as a philosophical underpinning for reading these novels, Cioffi suggests that these two novels interrogate the extent to which a privately held belief in solipsism, or utopia, can transform into a public belief. Cioffi’s chapter is integral in understanding how we translate our private utopian dreams into public social ones. Though the idea of solipsism is broadly approached the arguments for the transformation of private utopian dreaming into public activism parallels nicely the biopic of Mrs Atwood. Interestingly Cioffi’s analysis also creates space to question how the solipsistic utopian world conflicts with the shared community the individual is always already embedded in. While Cioffi’s chapter provides a controversial reading of the implications of the solipsistic mind via literary criticism, Alice Leroy’s chapter, “Foucault, Film, and the Utopian Body,” provides a provocative reading of the individual body through the medium of film. Applying Foucault’s concept of the “utopian body” to cinema, Leroy argues the film medium is a site of both sensory and fantasmatic experience, which transgresses the biological and symbolic limits of the individual body. Repositioning Foucauldian criticism in terms of utopia more properly speaking (i.e., away from heterotopia), the aim of her chapter is to show how the invention of the film medium coincided with a re-consideration of the human body through a double gaze—scientific and phantasmagoric—that redefined the body in utopian terms. Leroy’s analysis of the body as a utopian site specifically located with each individual—both in our striving for perfection and our limitations—parallels nicely with Clint Jones’s and Jen Rinaldi’s chapter on disabled bodies and the dysfunction of utopian design. Chris Callow’s chapter, “Etherotopia or a Country in the Mind: Bridging the Gap between Utopias and Nirvanas,” introduces the concept of “Etherotopia” and also bridges the ambiguous hybridization of Nirvana and utopia, ideal state of mind and society, respectively. Callow’s argument scrutinizes the rift between these two arguing that the perceived incongruities are nothing more than a false dichotomy. He claims that such theories of individual and social perfection are not only linked but can complete each other. The completion of individuals qua the loss of dichotomous thinking places the individual squarely at the center of utopian discussions about the formulation, implementation, and continuation of utopian projects. Kyle Dugdale’s analysis of Uriel Birnbaum’s Der Kaiser und der Architekt—a book conceived as a retelling of the biblical account of the Tower of Babel, and one that takes a strongly articulated position against promises of earthly perfection

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in the modern world—speaks to modernity’s disillusionments, but also offers a reminder that one of the most vigorous responses to contemporary culture’s dilemmas over the individual and utopia may yet come from within its longeststanding institutions: architecture. An incredibly well researched and composed contribution to the present volume, Dugdale’s argument is one that holds out the promise of humanity’s perfection throughout modernity’s trials and tribulations. Pitting individual concerns against community concerns Dugdale’s analysis considers the role of our most intimately shared spaces and sheds much needed light on the role architecture plays—albeit all too often in the background of utopian concerns—in utopian lives. Part II is rounded out with Tamara Prosic’s chapter “Theosis: Between Personal and Universal Utopia.” According to Prosic, theosis does not involve only individual salvation but also an eschatological process that encompasses the whole world. The chapter discusses the history of the idea of theosis, the differences between Western and Eastern Christian soteriology and the complex dialectics and dichotomous thinking involved in imagining theosis as both personal and universal utopia. In the third and final part of the volume, “Marginalized and Alternative Interpretations of the Individual and Utopia,” the chapters selected for inclusion directly confront perspectives regarding the individual and utopia that have typically been ignored, censored, or marginalized. In “Eutopias and Dis-Topias,” Clint Jones and Jen Rinaldi discuss the ways that the design of the built world influences our understanding of bodies and how those bodies are incorporated into conceptions of utopia. They call into question the notions that a perfect society would require perfect bodies where perfection is understood as adhering to the norms of physical and sensory ability as if being “other-abled” is somehow a limitation to perfection or inclusion in a perfect society. Cameron Ellis introduces the idea of “abject utopianism” in his chapter of the same name. Eschewing the more popular and arguably recognizably more utopian novels of Samuel R. Delany and employing the psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of Julia Kristeva, Ellis advances a productive reading of Delany’s violent pornographic novel Hogg. Not only does Ellis suggest that Kristeva can be read as a utopian theorist in her own right, but that Kristeva’s conceptualization of “abjection” is a vital tool through which to decipher the utopian potential of Delany’s novel. In this way Ellis advances an argument that challenges traditional understandings of the idea of utopia. Building upon the growing body of discourse in new media studies, Judy Ehrentraut’s chapter “The New Mobile Subject” advances debates in the area of techno-utopia in new directions. She examines the “post-human” as an emergent being within today’s techno-culture, with regard to the technological devices that allow us to extend our physical and mental capabilities. By examining technology as prosthesis in a techno-utopian framework, her chapter shows how mobile smartphone networks and their connective capacities are signifying the emergence of the post-human mobile subject, a being who can reclaim ownership of his/her

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body within digital spaces, but who can also reach levels of perfection hitherto impossible by the average person. In “The Philosopher’s Solitude,” Marco Lauri examines some aspects of the nexus between happiness, philosophical practice and social order in Medieval Arabic philosophy (falsafa). Here he provides an extensive analysis of the relationship between individual philosophical activity and the discursive epistemic space of society as was felt to be problematic in falsafa. Lauri’s chapter brings a largely muted utopian viewpoint to the fore of the discussion about the individual’s place in utopia and helps expand the western notion of utopia by giving primacy of place to the Arabic interpretative usages of utopia. Mark Malisa’s and Michelle McAnuff-Gumbs’ chapter “Ubuntu is Utopia” explores the relationship between the individual and the community in the work of the late South African President, Nelson Mandela. As a result of his struggle against apartheid, Mandela spent 27 years in prison. When apartheid was abolished, Mandela extended a hand of reconciliation to the same people that had dehumanized him and his fellow Africans. Mandela’s utopian approach to politics and social reform, Malisa and McAnuff-Gumbs contend, highlights that there are viable alternatives to models of exploitative capitalist utopian ideals and, as such, Malisa and McAnuff-Gumbs further challenge western notions of utopia. Bringing the volume to a close is Mark Ferrara’s chapter “Religion and the Mental Utopia in Literature.” Worldly in scope, Ferrara’s chapter develops an appreciation for transcendental experiences that are focalized through fictional characters in order to convey to the reader the centrality and immanence of the lived moment as something ultimately divine. The literary works and characters that he examines demonstrate a unifying thematic, spanning both East and West, that draws together the radical diversity and plurality of the positions offered in the present volume, always with an eye toward utopian nature of the individual and that individual’s experiences in utopia. We believe that this collection of chapters will set the stage for numerous conversations about individuality, social development, history, cultural understanding, and many other topics. Each chapter is an invaluable contribution to the project of understanding what it is about social dreaming that appeals to people as individuals seeking something better. It is our hope that the contributions contained in this volume might help us understand a little better what is necessary to make the future a little brighter for all the people that will populate it.

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PART I Contextualizing the Individual and Utopia

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Chapter 1

The Individual’s Place in Paradise: The Limits, Promise, and Role of Reason in Modern Conceptions of Utopia1 Charles Joshua Horn

Introduction The dominant theme during the enlightenment throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the use of reason rather than faith in establishing a foundation for how to create a better world. This theme manifested itself in science, politics, literature, art, and philosophy. In each case, rationality was touted as a superior guide to the betterment of humanity. Generally speaking, this is a fairly simple concept to grasp—scientists, political theorists, authors, artists, and philosophers all privileged the power of the intellect over the emotions, superstition, and dogmatism. In practice, this meant that if one desired to construct a better world, the tools one needed to use were those of which anyone could potentially have access. Thus, the authority of church and state, which traditionally had come from God alone, started to fade in favor of egalitarian beliefs that everyone should have access to knowledge and that reason ought to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and evil, and virtue and vice. An interesting consequence of the enlightenment was that their utopian ideals were forged in the fires of reason. Unfortunately, the use of reason in all intellectual endeavors, though ubiquitous during this period, was not a stable concept. It was not as if reason began to be privileged on a certain date in history, ran its course, and then fell out of fashion on another date. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the rise and fall of reason as the necessary guide for the creation of a better world. This chapter will trace the trajectory of the priority of reason by 1 Using the standard practice in the scholarship of each figure, texts will be cited using the following method. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford University Press. 2008. Cited by chapter, section. Locke, John. Two Treatises on Government. Cambridge University Press. 2004. Cited by treatise, section, and line. Spinoza, Baruch. Spinoza Opera, 4 vols., Gebhardt. 1925. Spinoza’s Ethics cited using the following format unless otherwise noted: E IIIp15c refers to Ethics, Part III, Corollary 15. Passages of Kant are cited by the volume and page number, given by Arabic numerals in the standard edition of Kant’s works, Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, edited by Academy of Sciences, 29 volumes.

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looking through the lens of some of the most important movements in political philosophy during the enlightenment. In the first section, I will articulate some of the major guiding principles of the Social Contract Tradition as it originated, developed, and was ultimately criticized, all on the grounds for what reason was capable, and ultimately, incapable, of understanding. In the second section, I will demonstrate how reason was taken to be the necessary epistemological condition for morality, and by extension, certain conceptions of the state. In the third section, I will explain how reason was importantly limited toward the end of the enlightenment and that despite these limitations, utopian ideals were still thought to be not only possible, but necessary. Natural Law and the Social Contract Tradition The first part of our journey begins with the single most important political theory to develop during the enlightenment, namely, the social contract tradition. Although this theory is much older than the modern landscape,2 there is little doubt that the ideas prevalent in the enlightenment helped the theory find a broad audience. Social contract theory is the tradition according to which justice, morality, and legitimate political authority are derived from the mutual agreement of rational agents. The theory is both complex and the details and the development is subtle as the system progressed from one thinker to the next; but, in each case, the agreement that the agents come to is one that is substantiated by reason. Needless to say, one of the intricate details which developed is an understanding of which particular rights that reason establishes. To understand which rights we have according to contract theory, we must begin on the most foundational level, that is, through human nature. Through human nature, we can begin to understand differing conceptions of utopia. Put simply, human nature establishes what reason demands; reason guides us to rights; and the protection of rights informs the organization

2 The theory traces back to Plato at least. In Republic, Thrasymachus asks Socrates why justice cannot merely be the advantage of the stronger. See 338c. In Book II, Glaucon adapts the view of Thrasymachus such that justice is pursued unwillingly as something necessary, but not good. See 358c. One might also find a criticism of the social contract in Plato’s dialogue, Crito when Socrates tries to justify why he must remain in prison. It is here that Socrates voices the concern of the Laws stating, “Surely, they might say, you are breaking the commitments and agreements that you made with us without compulsion or deceit, and under no pressure of time for deliberation. You have had seventy years during which you could have gone away if you did not like us, and if you thought our agreements unjust. You did not choose to go to Sparta or to Crete, which you are always saying are well governed, nor to any other city, Greek or foreign. You have been away from Athens less than the lame or the blind or other handicapped people. It is clear that the city has been outstandingly more congenial to you than to other Athenians, and so have we, the laws, for what city can please without laws? Will you not stick to our agreements?” 52e–53a.

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and obligations of the sovereign in utopia. The differences in each step will ripple down the line until we have variations in conceptions of the ideal world order. The first truly dominant defense of social contract theory came in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. He articulated, primarily in his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, that political authority derived from the consent of those governed. Based upon the natural progression to utopia, we should begin with his depiction of human nature. Hobbes held that humanity in its natural state would reside in a perpetual condition of fear. This fear, he argued, was a necessary consequence of the natural equality amongst humanity. Unlike Aristotle, who had maintained that humanity was in a natural state of inequality,3 Hobbes believed that the fear from natural equality was substantiated by our equal capacity to harm one another. He writes, Nature has made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.4

It is easy to imagine then why the perpetual condition of fear would lead to a state which he calls “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”5 It is precisely because this state of nature is so horrendous that Hobbes believed that humanity would pull together to consent to be ruled by a sovereign authority which could keep them safe. Reason, therefore, is the catalyst for removing oneself from the state of nature. Reason compels us to “seek peace, and follow it”6 and to “lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.”7 Without some form of political coercion to take us away from the state of natural inequality and fear, seeking peace and surrendering rights is impossible. According to Hobbes, there must be someone to enforce the contract. Therefore, sovereign authority is established to provide security to those who consent to be governed. To be sure, the sovereign could provide other sorts of protections, but at minimum, the role of the sovereign is to protect the life of the governed. Further, once sovereignty is established by the consent of the people, authority is irrevocable. There are no protections for breaches of contract, as it were. This must 3 Aristotle points to three different relationships to substantiate this claim: husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves. See Aristotle, Politics, 1253b1–23. 4 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. XIII, 1. 82. 5 Ibid. XIII, 9. 84. 6 Ibid. XIV, 4. 87. 7 Ibid.

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follow, Hobbes argues, because once the rights are surrendered, they can never be reclaimed. In other words, revolution against an unjust authority is simply politically impossible and morally impermissible. It is precisely the inability to justify revolution that we see one of the first major shifts in social contract theory. John Locke famously articulated in the Second Treatise on Government that revolution was justified if and only if there was a breach of contract between the sovereign and citizenry.8 It should not be overlooked that Locke is able to make such a claim because the contract is not between the citizenry alone, as it was in the case in Hobbes’s system. Instead, Locke maintained that no rational agent would consent to abandon all of their rights for the mere promise of protection. And certainly no rational agent would consent to be ruled by an authority that has no rules. Locke writes, “As if when men quitting the state of nature entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one should be under the restraint of laws, but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased with power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”9 So, for Locke, although the sovereign exists due to the consent of the governed, there is nevertheless a built in protection in that the contract exists between the ruler and the ruled. Locke could not be clearer; it is contrary to reason to consent to be governed when the resulting state of affairs would be more dangerous. Furthermore, Locke does not envisage a state of nature quite as perilous as that of Hobbes. Whereas Hobbes held that the original state was a war of all against all, Locke defended a view according to which the state of nature is merely “men living together according to reason, without a common superior on Earth with authority to judge between them.”10 To be sure, it would be incorrect to attribute to Hobbes a position wherein the state of nature is not governed by reason. For both Hobbes and Locke, reason is the guiding principle of the state of nature and ultimately the justification for the state. The difference is how each figure believed that reason would be used in the absence of an objective arbiter. Whereas Hobbes believed that human nature would compel us to be relatively independent because other agents are seen as potential threats, Locke believed that the state does not arise from fear, but instead from convenience. According to Locke, the state of nature is still governed by the law of reason. It just happens to be the case that it is undesirable to always be the executor of the natural law. 8 In the sometimes overlooked First Treatise of Government, Locke criticizes the long held doctrine of the divine right of kings. According to this theory, any action committed by a hereditary monarch was justified because he or she was the chosen sovereign of God. And since God was commonly believed to possess foreknowledge, He would not have allowed a particular monarch to rule without implicitly authorizing his or her actions. 9 Locke, John. Second Treatise on Government. II, §93, 26–32. 328. 10 Ibid. II, §19, 6–8. 280.

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Social contract theory is further developed and defended by many other thinkers in the early modern period, most notably by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Instead of providing even more details about the development of the view, it would more fruitful for our purposes to examine one of the most scathing criticisms of this popular political theory. David Hume, the famous empiricist and skeptic, is most well-known for his contributions to epistemology and moral philosophy. However, like Aristotle, Hume’s political philosophy is a natural progression from his ethical theory. Hume was adamant than any conclusions that we can draw about the world, whether they be metaphysical, moral, or political, must be on the basis of our observations in the world; put differently, all knowledge must ultimately derive from experience. Hume’s empiricism manifests most notably in his famous critique of causation and religion. Hume argued that, strictly speaking, we do not observe causation in the world. We merely observe a series of events and on the basis of that observation, we conclude that one event causes another event. For Hume, we judge causality by habit or custom—not by reason. Hume writes, “When it is asked, What is the nature of all our reasonings concerning matter of fact? The proper answer seems to be, that they are founded on the relation of cause and effect. When again it is asked, What is the foundation of all our reasonings and conclusions concerning that relation? It may be replied in one word, experience.”11 Similarly, Hume criticizes religion on empirical grounds too. He argued that traditional a posteriori arguments for the existence of God failed. The most influential a posteriori arguments for the existence of God are the cosmological and teleological arguments. Cosmological arguments all begin with observations of the world and then try to work backward to a first cause. Teleological arguments also begin with observations of the world, but then also try to demonstrate that the world was designed by a deity. Hume criticizes cosmological arguments on the grounds that we have no basis to conclude that everything has a cause. Perhaps the universe does not have a first cause at all. After all, we have never experienced the creation of a world, so the analogy that for every created thing there was a creator cannot be extended to the creation of the world. He criticizes teleological arguments primarily because the analogy that such arguments are built upon, namely that like effects prove like causes (there is a designer for everything designed we have perceived) is weak. Again, since we have never experienced the creation of worlds, we have no justification to believe that worlds have a designer just like other artifacts in the world. Philo, Hume’s voice in the Dialogues, writes “I have still asserted that we have no data to establish any system of cosmogony. Our experience, so imperfect in itself and so limited both in extent and duration, can afford us no probable conjecture concerning the whole of things.”12

11 Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Section 4, Part 2. 113. Ed. Tom Beauchamp. Oxford University Press. 1999. 12 Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hackett. 1998. 45.

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Hume’s criticism of social contract theory is based off of the very same motivation that he had against causation and religion. Since both Hobbes and Locke argue that legitimate political authority derives from the mutual consent of a group of people that desired to get out of a state of nature, Hume thought that the only way to prove that such authority was indeed justified could be if there were empirical grounds to believe that the state developed in such a way. Since we have no such evidence for how the first state developed, these hypothetical thought experiments are at best false, and at worst, utterly meaningless. It is important to note though that although Hobbes and Locke offer empirical grounds that the state of nature was (and possibly still is) an actual state of affairs, their arguments justifying the state only require the much more modest conditional statement that if societies developed from the state of nature, then political authority is only legitimate from the consent of the governed. Nevertheless, Hobbes argued that the empirical support for a state of nature can be found in the then relatively newly found and understood Americas. He also argued that the state of nature might still exist when understood in the context of the broader global atmosphere.13 Since it was (and still is) a matter of fact that the political states had not mutually consented to be governed by a further sovereign authority, then the state of nature still must exist internationally. In fact, although most states in the world have consented to be held to international law by bodies such as the United Nations and International Criminal Court, it certainly is not the case that every nation has submitted to their authority. And since any meaningful covenant requires the mutual consent of every party, it follows that the international community is still in a state of nature. So perhaps Hume’s first criticism is not as successful as he would have liked. Hume’s strategy for the second major objection against social contract theory is based on the idea of human nature. If we recall that for Hobbes (and possibly Locke), our human nature compels us to leave the state of nature by any means necessary, it would make sense that if one were to disagree with that view of human nature, then the origin of the state would also not necessarily follow. This is exactly Hume’s tactic. Since human nature is not naturally a competitive war of all against all, the state can develop in other ways. He criticizes Hobbes’s alleged psychological egoism, writing, “This principle is that all benevolence is mere hypocrisy, friendship a cheat, public spirit a farce, fidelity a snare to procure trust and confidence; and that, while all of us, at bottom, pursue only our private interest, we wear these fair disguises in order to put others off their guard and expose them the more to our wiles and machinations.”14 Further, he writes,

13 Hobbes presents an argument suggesting that since there is no overarching sovereign to rule the plurality of independent states, then the state of nature exists in the global sphere. See Leviathan. XIII. 11–12. 85. 14 Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Appendix II. 166. Ed. Tom Beauchamp. Oxford University Press. 164. 2011.

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“To the most careless observer there appear to be such dispositions as benevolence and generosity, such affections as love, friendship, compassion, gratitude.”15 What we have then in the political theory of Hobbes and Locke is a defense of what makes a legitimate state. But as much as their theories derived from their respective views of human nature, they were also inspired by the ideal state. For Hobbes, the ideal sovereign is one which is supremely powerful, that is, one in which the different political powers are centralized into one agent. Although a legitimate sovereign could also manifest in a small assembly of people, Hobbes was unyielding in his belief that the most efficient sovereign was one without divided powers. By contrast, Locke maintained that though an autocracy was legitimate, a safer and more ideal form of government is one wherein the legislative and executive powers are separated. We lose efficiency on this model, but we gain security against the possibility of tyranny. What is interesting given this analysis is how reason could compel two thinkers to desire such radically different expressions of sovereignty. It is precisely these incompatibilities of reason that inspire so many of Hume’s criticisms. Reason is simply ill-equipped to provide the proper rendering of the ideal state. Instead, the state develops naturally according to our emotions. As he famously remarked, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”16 In the next section, we will examine the extent to which our knowledge is related to the founding of the ideal state and how such knowledge is related to reason and the very same passions which Hume so ferociously defended. Knowledge and the Utopian State Baruch Spinoza derives his own conception of the ideal state through reason in much the same way as other prominent enlightenment figures. Spinoza’s political thought is grounded in his own metaphysical and epistemological theory. In this section, I will first demonstrate how reason is taken to be a necessary precondition for Spinoza’s conception of morality and how this, in turn, informs his political theory. Spinoza’s moral and political philosophy directly follows from the groundwork that he laid in his conceptions of the divine and freedom. In his famous Ethics, he argues that the good life can be attained by living a virtuous life, which is, living the life of reason. A true understanding of reality will inform the reflective thinker that God is identical with Nature or the whole cosmos and that everything is necessarily the result of prior causes. For Spinoza, absolutely everything is necessary, including the entire causal chain of existence. For this reason, the belief 15 Ibid. Section II. 166. 16 Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature. 2.3.3. 266. Eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford University Press. 2000.

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that humans have a robust sense of freedom in terms of the ability to do otherwise is metaphysically impossible. Instead, freedom is not the ability to do something, but the freedom from something. Freedom is properly understood as the liberation from one’s own bodily passions. With this proper understanding of freedom in place, Spinoza can develop his view of the good life. One lives well when we increase our perfection. By perfection, he means the ability to increase our own power. He writes, “the perfection of things is to be judged solely from their nature and power.”17 In other words, actions are good insofar as they increase our power and bad insofar as they decrease our power. Spinoza connects these ideas together succinctly writing, “By virtue and power I understand the same thing, that is … virtue, insofar as it is related to man, is the very essence, or nature of man, insofar as he has the power of bringing about certain things, which can be understood through the laws of nature alone.”18 Spinoza’s emphasis on the rationality and intelligibility of the world leads to a moral and political position which focuses on improving our powers as much as we are able. One way that this manifests is that he believes that one’s rights are determined by one’s power. This power is in turn explained by its own essence or nature. And since Spinoza is one of the fiercest defenders and followers of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the idea that everything has a cause or reason why something is the way that it is rather than otherwise, both individuals and the state determine their respective rights from their powers. Maintaining that the state has certain rules or obligations that individuals did not have in the way that Hobbes and Locke believed would have reeked of some arbitrary distinction, a violation of the PSR. Spinoza agrees with Hobbes, however, that because every individual has a right to do whatever is in their power, that man’s most fundamental state “must necessarily be most wretched.”19 Similarly, Spinoza agrees with Hobbes that the way to rid ourselves of this natural state is to submit to a sovereign authority. However, Spinoza’s ideal sovereign has concerns that Hobbes’s Leviathan does not have, namely, how to preserve itself. Because Hobbes sovereign is unconditionally legitimate, it has nothing to fear from its people. Spinoza maintains that an individual or the state only has the right to do something which will increase its power. Thus, the state must exercise a delicate balance between being too repressive and not repressive enough. If the state is too repressive, the citizens could remove themselves from the state. But if the state is not repressive enough, then the state might not be able to protect itself should factions arise which threaten it. Michael Della Rocca highlights this balance nicely writing, “the most powerful state is the one that accords its citizens the most freedom as is compatible with the existence

17 G. II. 83. 18 Ethics. 4d8. 19 G. III. 175.

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of the state itself. Thus a truly powerful state enhances the power of its citizens. Similarly, a truly powerful citizen enhances the power of the state.”20 Due to his complex metaphysical and epistemological system, Spinoza is able to secure a surprising amount of freedom for individuals within his conception of the state. Most notably, he maintains that freedom of thought is limitless since it is in the nature of individual minds to have the thoughts that they do. In other words, it is simply impossible for minds to have thoughts other than they do in the same way that it is impossible for bodies to act other than they actually do. He writes, “No one is able to transfer his natural right or faculty to reason freely and to form his own judgment on any matters whatsoever, nor can he be compelled to do so.”21 So, while Spinoza’s necessitarianism compels him to maintain that all thoughts and actions are necessary, he is nevertheless mindful that our thoughts can be inclined toward particular beliefs. And this fact, in conjunction with the existence of a state that has the moral obligation to increase its own power, seems to render a potentially chilling state of affairs. Put simply, the state can guide our very thoughts and beliefs. He writes, Although command cannot be exercised over minds in the same way as over tongues, yet minds are to some degree under the control of the sovereign power, who has many means of inducing the great majority to believe, love, hate, etc. whatever he wills. Thus, although it is not by direct command of the sovereign power that these results are produced, yet experience abundantly testifies they often proceed from the authoritative nature of his power and from his guidance, that is, from his right.22

Although the state has the ability to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of its citizens, Spinoza believes that doing so completely could undermine the state. His reasoning seems to be that the loss of freedom will be unacceptable to the citizens and therefore the state would crumble from the internal discord. Spinoza must be wrong about this though for at least two reasons. First, the state would only fail, according to Spinoza’s own terms, if the threshold for how much citizens are willing to endure is crossed. But recent history shows us that the figures of authority are extremely efficient at manipulating the beliefs of individuals in just the right amount that the authority will not be undermined. After all, the United States government has authorized the use of torture on American citizens, warrantless invasions of privacy, and drone strikes on its own citizens without the majority of citizens thinking that this threatens the government’s legitimacy. Second, there seems to only be a problem if the citizens know that they are being manipulated. But the best dystopian tales depict states wherein the citizens are not aware, for whatever reason, that they are being manipulated. We need not 20 Della Rocca, Michael. Spinoza. 214. Routledge. 2008. 21 G. III. 239. 22 Ibid. 202.

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have the explicit thought control found in Orwell’s 1984, for instance. A much subtler example of thought control can be found in Huxley’s Brave New World wherein the citizens do not seem to care about the extent to which their beliefs are manipulated because the state provides for the pleasurable life. Spinoza’s account fails at this point then precisely because he underestimates the ability of a sovereign to completely influence the beliefs of its citizens without them either knowing or seeming to care. Because Spinoza is adamant that the state should never restrict freedom of thought because it would ultimately be detrimental to the state itself, the related freedom to communicate is also sacrosanct. Thoughts which do not have the ability to be publically expressed are no free thoughts at all. While we might think that Spinoza’s protection of freedom of speech and thought might extend to other areas of public discourse, we should not be so quick in our assessment. Interestingly enough, Spinoza draws a sharp distinction between freedom of thought, which is inviolable, and freedom of action, which the state has every right and obligation to suppress in cases which might challenge its authority. He describes this difference clearly writing, While to act against the sovereign’s decree is definitely an infringement of his right, this is not the case with thinking, judging, and consequently with speaking, too, provided one does no more than express or communicate one’s opinion, defending it through rational conviction alone, not through deceit, anger, hatred, or the will to effect such changes in the state as he himself decides. For example, suppose a man maintains that a certain law is against sound reason, and he therefore advocates its repeal. If he at the same time submits his opinion to the judgment of the sovereign power (which alone is competent to enact and repeal laws), and meanwhile does nothing contrary to what is commanded by that law, he deserves well of the state, acting as do the best citizens. But if on the contrary the purpose of his action is to accuse the magistrate of injustice and render him odious to the multitude, or if he seditiously seeks to repeal that law against the will of the magistrate, he is nothing more than an agitator or rebel.23

Put simply, individuals do not possess the right to subvert unjust laws actively, but only passively through speech.24 As it turns out, not only is Spinoza’s distinction here problematic on his own terms, but it is also practically problematic for the utopian ideal. After all, it is perfectly conceivable that the only way to achieve a utopia is to exert more influence than mere speech alone, and yet, Spinoza’s account eliminates this possibility.

23 Ibid. 241. 24 Since thoughts are identical with actions though given Spinoza’s panpsychism, this distinction is ultimately inconsistent with Spinoza’s overall picture. For a helpful discussion of this, see Della Rocca, 224.

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Without a proper understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysical and epistemological views concerning God, freedom, and power, we cannot make sense of his political theory. In adhering to a strict version of the principle of sufficient reason which denies the possibility for arbitrary distinctions and holds that there must be a cause or reason why everything is the way that it is rather than otherwise, the very same thing which motivates his ethical theory also motivates his political theory. As Della Rocca writes, “just as power is the standard of goodness (and perfection and virtue), so too it is the standard of rightness, the standard of what we ought to do. We ought to do something to the extent that it makes us more powerful, just as something is good to the extent that it makes us more powerful.”25 Thus, our moral and political obligations are identical. We ought, insofar as we are able, to increase our power. And since the greatest power that we can have is to increase our knowledge, there is a necessary connection between reason and moral and political affairs. Sapere Aude and the Limits of Reason Immanuel Kant is one of the most preeminent figures of the enlightenment. Although this period in history is exemplified by the authority of reason, Kant is perhaps most well-known for limiting the scope of reason. Famously, he held that humans were not merely rational beings, but also sensible creatures, that is, human knowledge is confined to that which can be empirically grounded under the universal and necessary categories of the pure understanding. In this way, Kant attempted to reconcile the rationalist and empiricist traditions in modernity. The rationalists had maintained that reason was capable of discerning fundamental truths about reality such as the nature and existence of God, the identity and persistence of the self, and our relationship to the external world, independently of any sensory experiences. By contrast, empiricism demanded that all knowledge must ultimately derive from experience. In synthesizing these two traditions, Kant developed not only a radically new epistemological system, but one which would have profound implications for his political theory which aimed for a cosmopolitan utopia. In this section, I will show that despite Kant’s limitation of the authority of reason, utopian ideals were nevertheless critical in establishing a moral and political world order which was founded on the promise of reason. After the harsh violence that ravaged Europe in conflicts such as the English civil war and Thirty Years War, it became a common practice in intellectual circles to offer a utopian theory which sought to avoid such harsh realities in the future. Kant’s foray into this genre was exemplified in his 1795 pamphlet, Toward Perpetual Peace, which called for the cessation of treating states like property instead of collections of rational moral agents, the removal of standing armies, ending national debt to other states for the purposes of war, and the termination 25 Della Rocca, Michael. Spinoza. 184.

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of actions that would make future trust impossible such as the use of assassins, poisoners, and breaches of agreement.26 If states committed such actions, then even in times of ceased hostilities there could not be peace since peace, by its very nature, is a perpetual state of affairs. It would be perfectly reasonable to ask how practical it is to believe that states would begin to follow Kant’s guidelines here when they seemingly work against the state’s own self-interests. Interestingly enough though, Kant maintained that due to the limited amount of space on Earth and the necessity by which humans will come into contact with one another, it will actually be in our best interest to give up such possibilities for future war. Nature itself, he reasoned, seems to necessitate the possibility of perpetual peace. Kant writes, What affords this guarantee is nothing less than the great artist nature … from whose mechanical course purposiveness shines forth visibly, letting concord arise by means of the discord between human beings even against their will; and for this reason nature, regarded as necessitation by a cause the laws of whose operation are unknown to us is called fate, but if we consider its purposiveness in the course of the world as the profound wisdom of a higher cause directed to the objective final end of the human race and predetermining the course of this world, it is called providence.27

We should be careful to note here that though Kant seems to talk about the “guarantee” of perpetual peace, it would be incorrect to attribute to him the fatalistic view that perpetual peace will inevitably result and we must simply wait for it. He simply says far too much and far too often to suggest that perpetual peace, though it is an attainable goal, only will come about by rational agents working together. For instance, in the Doctrine of Right (rechtslehre), the first half of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, he writes, So perpetual peace, the ultimate goal of the whole right of nations, is indeed an unachievable idea. Still, the political principles directed toward perpetual peace, of entering into … alliances of states, which serve for continual approximation to it, are not unachievable. Instead, since continual approximation to it is a task based on duty and therefore on the right of human beings and of states, this can be certainly achieved.28

A better understanding of Kant’s utopian ideal of perpetual peace comes when considering his conception of radical evil in his religious writings. Kant maintains that human nature is radically evil and that “nothing straight can be constructed

26 8:344–6. 27 8:362. 28 6:350. Emphasis added.

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from such warped wood as that which man is made …”.29 It is precisely this conception of human nature which gives hope to the human condition. Paul Guyer makes this point exceedingly well, writing, “Kant does not argue for the radical nature of human evil as a counsel of despair, but precisely in order to demonstrate that the possibility of conversion from evil to good is always within our grasp. His point in the Religion is that if evil is always a product of our own choice, then we are also always free to choose what is right.”30 Right actions, for Kant, are determined not by our sensible natures though, but instead by appealing to the noumenal, that aspect of our being which, though it is unknowable, still must be assumed to exist. To know whether or not an action is moral, Kant asks us to consider whether or not the maxim by which we are acting is a principle which can be universalized. And while humanity might fail the vast majority of the time at legislating the moral law, what Kant calls the categorical imperative, we must nevertheless persist in trying. This exemplifies the dual nature of human agency, for Kant. Although our sensible natures might inform us that the state of perpetual peace is unattainable, our rational nature which is grounded in the noumenal compels us to hope and act in such a way as to bring it about. Guyer describes this nicely writing, In writing as if nature could guarantee perpetual peace, Kant is not appealing to our purely rational nature, which requires only that it be demonstrable that what we ought to do is also something we can do if our motivation to attempt to do it is not to be undermined, but is rather appealing to our sensible nature, where our wavering motivation to do what is right, which can always be tempted by deluded conceptions of self-love, may need to be buttressed by a sense that what we ought to do is in fact the aim of nature itself. As rational creatures, we need only the thought that nature makes it possible for us to do what we know we ought to do; but as sensible creatures, we may need the thought that nature will push us towards that which we ought to do even if we ourselves are tempted not to do that.31

Kant’s utopian ideals, manifested through his conception of perpetual peace, and grounded upon the dichotomous nature of human agents as both rational and sensible, are possible despite his limitation of the scope of reason. In this way, his views add something truly unique to early modernity not found in other thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza. In the preface to the B edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously declared that he needed to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” It is precisely this faith and hope, and not knowledge, which guided his political and utopian thought. Guyer summarizes this nicely, writing, “Kant’s aim is not to provide a natural guarantee of the actuality or even 29 Proposition 6, Universal History. 30 Guyer, Paul. Kant. 297–8. Routledge. 2006. 31 Guyer, Paul. Kant. 301. Emphasis added.

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the probability of perpetual peace, but rather a philosophical guarantee of the possibility of perpetual peace, by which it can be proven that such peace, no matter how remote it may seem, is in fact within our grasp, and therefore that it is rational as well as morally requisite for us to work toward it.” As such, the achievement of utopia is the responsibility of individual efforts to transform the world we do inhabit into the one which we want to live. Conclusion Although perhaps not explicit, political theory in modernity was shaped in many ways by ideas of the ideal, that is, through utopia. In this chapter, I have shown that reason was a guiding light in attempting to establish the foundations for the perfect political state. In the first section, it was shown that in the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, reason was used, albeit very differently, in defense of natural rights. For Hobbes, reason only went as far as to establish a fundamental right to life, whereas for Locke, reason extended to a fundamental right to property, that is, to one’s life, liberty, health, and possessions. In undermining the faculty and authority of reason as such, Hume also undermined the contract theory that it was grounded upon. In all cases though, it was the priority of reason which led to differing conceptions of the ideal state. In the second section, Spinoza’s political theory was shown to derive from reason too. His view was unique though in that the ideal state in this case is founded not on human nature, but instead on the similarity of the individual and state, which was grounded on the principle of sufficient reason. Reason dictates that both the individual and the state have the right to do whatever extends their own power. The result here is a state which protects individual liberties such as freedom of thought precisely because it extends the power of both individuals and the state. In the third Section, it was shown that despite Kant’s limitation of the scope and authority of reason, he nevertheless provided one of the most hopeful utopian theories in all of modernity. His conception of perpetual peace was not a necessary consequence, but was shown to only be a possibility for its existence. And for Kant, the possibility of living in a world governed by reason wherein we all respect the freedom and individuality of our neighbors was a world not only worth hoping for, but a world worth fighting for. But perhaps the overarching lesson that we can draw from these thinkers is that although reason might result in differing conceptions of utopia, we are fortunate that reason itself can help us adjudicate these disputes. In this way, reason is both the problem and also the solution for attaining any semblance of utopia that might await us on the horizon. And, as these enlightenment figures have shown us, it is our impulse to reason which will lead us to utopia or lead us astray.

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References Aristotle, Politics. Trans. and ed. Simpson, Peter L.P. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Della Rocca, Michael. Spinoza (Routledge, 2008). Guyer, Paul. Kant (Routledge, 2006). Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 2008). Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hackett, 1998). Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford University Press, 1999). Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2000). Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford University Press, 2011). Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften (Academy of Sciences, 1900–). Locke, John. Two Treatises on Government (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Plato. Plato: Complete Works. Trans. and ed. Cooper, John M. (Hackett, 1997). Spinoza, Baruch. Spinoza Opera, 4 vols (Gebhardt, 1925).

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Chapter 2

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Fundamental Oppositions: Utopia and the Individual Mark Jendrysik

Introduction Is utopia fundamentally at odds with the needs, desires, and liberty of the individual? For most of the history of utopian theory and practice, the answer has been a resounding yes. From Plato’s Callipolis to Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, utopia has required that the individual surrender her autonomy for the “common good.” While modern individualists look at this surrender with loathing, utopian thinkers see the abandonment of selfish personal desires as necessary for the good of the whole. While Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World as, among other things, a satire of the classical utopia, the statement “when the individual feels, the community reels”1 is one with which many utopian theorists would agree, implicitly, if not explicitly. We are faced with a basic opposition. Ideologies that direct themselves at the creation of communal happiness, order and prosperity must also limit, degrade and ultimately ignore the happiness and even agency of individuals. This is not to suggest a simple equation of utopian thought with totalitarian political ideologies. But it has long been argued that the annihilation of individuality has been a goal of some utopian authors and communities. The question of the individual in utopia revolves around whether or not individuals are free to leave the community or if they are free to change the community from inside. The fact is that classic utopias are not equipped to answer either part of the question. In the first place, who would wish to leave what is perfect? In the second place, in utopias from Plato’s to Callenbach’s the agonistic struggle of politics, whether by actual violence or by the sublimated violence of elections, is replaced with administration and managerial control, based on ideas from a single leader or previous age. More recent utopian works try to answer these questions. But in the end recent utopian theorists simply allow for free exit, an answer which avoids the question of political action by individuals or groups to effect change. Utopian hostility toward politics represents hostility to individual agency. Utopias may change, but not by conscious human action. The only change in utopia is decay. 1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989), 94.

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One critical point must be stressed: My concern in this chapter is with the individual not with individualism. Individualism, which I define as the unfettered pursuit of self-interest, is a modern ideology, but the place of the individual and her value in a political system and social order is a universal question addressed across time and space. I also do not simply believe that individual autonomy is an unalloyed good. If post-modernism has taught us anything, it is how to recognize false claims of liberation. Clearly there can be no fully autonomous, unconnected individuals. That being so, it does not follow that we should try to create, either in reality or in a thought experiment, fully connected beings who make no distinction, ever, between their good and the good of the whole, however defined. As Dan Sabia notes, “as long as individuals, in their manifest peculiarity are free, one must expect diversity and innovation … The ideal of complete harmony implies the death of freedom, and of life.”2 But utopian authors have long shown themselves as uncomfortable with the unpredictable nature of human beings. Individual desires for happiness and comfort were seen as inherently selfish and anti-social by classical authors and early and medieval Christians. However, the individual’s place in the social order remained something that had to be considered. We can take Plato’s Republic as an example. Socrates is loath to posit his just community, in part because of its rejection of any consideration of individual happiness. This fear of the individual and her desires continues throughout the canon of utopian fiction and theory. We can note More’s enforcement of the death penalty for adultery or Gerrard Winstanley’s call for the execution of those who refuse to work.3 The powers that be in all utopias face the temptation of defining non-conformity as crime. In utopias built around labor, like Thomas More’s and Edward Bellamy’s a refusal to work marks a person as a dangerous deviant. In a similar way, a refusal to consume or be sexually promiscuous in Brave New World is a crime worthy of exile.4 I believe it is fair to ask if utopian theory has advanced very far from these positions. In this chapter I will examine the often unspoken assumptions lying behind the surrender of personal autonomy in canonical utopian theory. I will consider how the basic assumptions of utopian theory work to devalue the individual in favor of the community. I will examine the claims made by a number of authors about the need for the individual to subsume her own personal goals and desires to the overall good of the community. I will also consider recent efforts in theory and 2 Dan Sabia, “Individual and Community in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,” in The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, eds. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005), 125. 3 Thomas More, Utopia, eds. George M. Logan and Robert Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 83. Gerrard Winstanley, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George H. Sabine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941), 734. 4 For a more in-depth discussion of how utopian authors see crime and criminality in their perfected communities, see my “The Snake in the Garden: Crime and Punishment in Utopian Thought,” Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review, 56 (2010): 1–12.

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practice to create utopian spaces that respect the individual’s goals and desires. Finally, I will ask, if in an age of bio-technology and genetic manipulation, our concerns about the individual have become anachronistic.

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What is Utopia? If, as Lyman Tower Sargent famously said, utopia is “social dreaming”5 then utopias must be more than mere “polises in words” or “cities in speech” as Plato has Socrates say. Ruth Levitas claims that utopian dreaming attempts to meet human desires in reality, not in fantasy.6 Robert Nozick echoes this when he says that “the ultimate purpose of utopian construction is to get communities that people will want to live in and voluntarily choose to live in.”7 Krishan Kumar notes that utopias invite us to participate in them.8 Sargent says, “Most utopias aim to improve the human lot not by repression but by enhancement, and as long as we do not aim for perfection or eliminate the possibility of change, such utopias can stand up to the all-to-prevalent dystopias of the present.”9 This is true, but we have to ask, how is “enhancement” achieved? Whose vision of what constitutes enhancement wins out? Clearly for one vision to be put forward, others must be rejected, if necessary by force. Utopia must try to better the human condition and improve the lives of individuals. However, as Plato so wisely noted, individual happiness can be an obstacle to communal happiness. Plato and most of his utopian successors are quite willing to sacrifice the individual on the altar of communal happiness. Utopian dreaming must provide a critique and program as well. “Utopianism is both and attitude and a method.”10 But it should also be more than that. “It must be attached to some reality in its own times and posit some new or improved mode of human existence which might, if conditions are right, be attained. Plato himself repeats several times that his model of man and state is only difficult, and not impossible.”11 Utopias must provide “a model for society and a guide for praxis.” Utopia “leads humanity towards hope, spurring it toward moral and structural 5 Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopia Revisited,” Utopian Studies, 5.1 (1994): 3. 6 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 221. 7 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 317. 8 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 28. 9 Lyman Tower Sargent, “In Defense of Utopia,” Diogenes, 209 (2006): 15. 10 Lucy Sargisson, Fool’s Gold? Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2012), 239. 11 Cosimo Quarta, “Homo Utopicus: On the Need for Utopia,” Utopian Studies, 7.2 (1996): 155, emphasis in the original. For a further discussion of this point see Costas Stratilatis, “Reading The Republic: Is Utopianism Redundant?” History of Political Thought, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 2008): 555–71.

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transformation.”12 For the all the flaws in the classic utopias, they still speak to that human desire for better things, for justice, security and equality. That is why we can take utopians seriously and not merely dismiss them as idle dreamers. Any utopia strives for unity. Unity in thought and action is required of all its subjects.13 The demand for unity forces the individual to subsume herself in the whole. Now, I want to be clear that I don’t believe this is always bad. But utopia, to function on its own terms, must require what modern people would consider a dangerous surrender of free will. As Aristotle noted a state that approaches unity in all things ceases to be a political community.14 “Utopia seeks to end the social debate, the struggle over sacrifice and reward, over opportunities and restrictions, over the distribution of justice, which is politics.” Because of this restriction “answers to the question ‘What is my ideal society?’ will invariably end up looking alike.”15 Utopia seeks to deny the political animal her nature. Blueprint Utopias require the individual to accept the self-evident goodness of the way of life of the community. The danger here should be obvious: those who do not or cannot conform are not just bad people, but threats to the very existence of the utopia. J.C. Davis says that “the utopian mode is one which accepts deficiencies in men and nature and strives to contain and condition them through organizational controls and sanctions.”16 The central goal in utopia becomes control over the individual. But he notes that utopia, whether we trace its origins to More or Plato, arose in a world of disorder and violence, a world in which law melted into privilege and governance into looting. Davis suggests that this world of chaos also describes Gilded Age America and leads Bellamy to conclusions similar to More’s. “Into this world of chaos, confusion, irregularity and incipient disorder the utopian injects images of a total and rational social order, of uniformity instead of diversity, of impersonal, neutrally functioning bureaucracy and of the comprehensive total state.”17 As H.G. Wells notes, “To the classical Utopists freedom was relatively trivial. Clearly they considered virtue and happiness as entirely separable from liberty.”18 The great works of utopian thought, from Plato to B.F. Skinner, arose in worlds of dangerous uncertainty where the individual’s power over her fate 12 Quarta, “Homo Utopicus,” 155, 156, emphasis in the original. 13 The authors of more modern utopian works, such as Ecotopia or Island claim that they allow more space for individual action and diversity, but close readings show that such divergences from the norms of the community such as drug use and sexual openness are minor and are designed to release tensions created by conformity. These seeming acts of liberation really just reinforce the norms of the community. 14 Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37. 15 J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 372 and 6. 16 Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, 370. 17 Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, 6 and 9. 18 H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 25.

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was limited. Ideas of individual liberty in thought and action were dismissed as impossible and dangerous fantasies. But utopia is a humanistic endeavor. Utopians believe that human beings can make “the world responsive to human control through the development and imposition of will-power—a power that is attributed to the individual, putatively autonomous human being.”19 This can even apply to pre-modern utopias such as those sketched out by Plato in the Republic and the Laws. Of course, the number of autonomous beings in those works is reduced to a tiny number of philosopher kings and to a single Legislator.20 In More’s Utopia King Utopus provides the original imposition of will power, seen most clearly in the creation of the island of Utopia by human action (digging a ditch to make an island from a peninsula). Like their historical antecedents the Spartans, the Utopians continue to mold and shape their world, but only within the limits imposed by the first lawgiver. Individuals have no say in the creation of the classic utopias. There can be no social contract between equals. Instead, the subjects of utopia are presented with a completed vision they can only accept or reject, not change. Kumar was correct when he said that the classic utopia takes the ancient Greek city state of Sparta as its model. Its “tightly regulated communal order” appealed to those seeking security in a world of anarchy. The fact that Spartan ideals served as a part of the foundation for Plato’s Callipolis only increased the appeal of such an example. “The Spartan model suggested pre-eminently the qualities of asceticism, order, communal life and public duty.”21 These qualities appeal across classical and modern utopias. A critical part of the Spartan utopia was the creation of a body of “equals” who sacrificed, to the point of death, individual desires for the common good. “In Lycurgus’ Sparta every person was to completely dedicate themselves to the country. They were to lose themselves in the whole.” Reflecting on Sparta’s caste system and the stability it has apparently provided, Plato implies in his “well-regulated city-state … each individual will be fitted into the vocation that best suits him or her. As a result, everyone will be happy.”22 Echoes of the Spartan ideal of the individual subsumed by the community can be seen in Bellamy’s Industrial Army and in the intense communal attachment in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. Even Huxley’s Brave New World contains a perverse echo of Sparta through the World State’s “conscription of consumption” and its creation of a duty to promiscuity. The male-only war games in Ecotopia are

19 David Knights and Hugh Willmott, “Autonomy as Utopia and Dystopia,” in Utopia and Organization, ed. Martin Parker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 63. 20 For a discussion of the “existential conditions of the Philosopher-Kings” see Stratilatis, “Reading The Republic,” 581–3. 21 Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, 4–5 and 37. 22 Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17.

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a (most likely unintentional) parody of the Spartan agoge.23 Skinner’s Walden Two is built around a subtle caste system in which Managers and Planners are exempt from certain rules and able to violate the “Walden Code” when they believe it serves the interests of the community.24 Because of this Spartan influence, and perhaps because of the intellectual’s usual aversion to anything common people enjoy, utopian theorists have rejected utopias of sensual pleasure or the “body utopia.” The pursuit of physical pleasure for its own sake has always been seen as a danger to the social order in any utopia. Skinner’s Walden Two provides an example. He defends sexuality among adolescents as normal and natural. But he reassures his readers that sexual activity among the youth of his community remains firmly under the control of the community.25 Davis suggests the critical problem faced by utopian authors lies in the fact that any social and economic order faces the problem of “limited satisfactions exposed to unlimited wants.” Davis sees the only solution to the problem as “discipline of a totalitarian kind.”26 Kumar notes that: the early modern utopia was an expression of the rational and critical spirit of the Renaissance and Reformation; but it also represented a reaction against the individualism of those movements that threatened to tear society apart. It saw its function as the reintegration of society around a new moral and social order. The threat, in these centuries of civil war and religious strife, seemed to come from the pace and pattern of innovation in all spheres of life: not too little but too much freedom.27

The experience of early modern Europe demonstrated that the step from individual liberation to anarchy is a small one. In this light, Hobbes’s Leviathan can be understood as a utopian project. Hobbes seeks to end all debate about the meaning of political and religious ideas by fixing such terms to a single meaning. To make this a reality he creates a single, final and authoritative arbiter of all such questions.28 In other words, he returns to the Spartan ideal of a perfect Legislator 23 Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (New York: Bantam, 1990), 77–82. In particular note the laconic dialogue that follows the war games, especially on pages 79–80. The men who take part say things like, “I have done a man’s thing” and “I feel like a man … once more I have survived.” 24 B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 150. 25 Skinner, Walden Two, 119–27. It is instructive to note that the Walden Two commune has a “Manager of Marriages” who is tasked with determining the suitability of couples. 26 Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, 37 and 39. 27 Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, 36. 28 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapters 17 and 18.

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who can fix in place all the vexing questions of political, social and religious order, once and for all. We can see the final echoes of this idea in Skinner’s Walden Two and Huxley’s Island. In both works, wise and benevolent leaders set the parameters of acceptable action in the community. In both, lip service is paid to diversity in thought and action. “Pala isn’t Eden or the land of Cockayne. It’s a nice place all right. But it will remain nice only if everyone works and behaves decently.” 29 The definition of “decent behavior” is narrow. In Walden Two the architects of the community “set up certain behavioral processes which will lead the individual to design his own ‘good’ conduct when the time comes. We call that sort of thing ‘self-control’.”30 Davis’s suggestion that More’s Utopians know no alternatives and therefore lack a capacity for free choice might also be applied to Skinner’s Waldenites. “If we mean by moral behavior a free choosing of the good rather than the bad … the Utopian’s area of choice is so limited that he is almost incapable of moral behavior.”31 Utopian Individuals/Individual Utopians Elisabeth Hansot claims that the key difference between classical utopias and modern utopias (mainly in the nineteenth century) lies in their approach to human beings. Classical utopia seeks to change “individual men and concerned itself only secondarily with the societal arrangements in which men live.” In contrast, “Modern utopias address themselves primarily to changing the arrangements of society and are only indirectly concerned with changing man.”32 Modern utopian authors claimed that people become better when their material and social conditions improve.33 But I believe this is a distinction without a real difference. In both cases humans change in utopia. Either their natures are changed by utopian training and indoctrination, or that same training or indoctrination reveals their true nature. So we are still faced with the question of the relationship between utopia and the individual in both cases. Modern understandings of the individual require autonomy. “Increased autonomy is regarded as desirable; conversely, reducing or restricting autonomy is construed as a negative, unappealing prospect.”34 If we apply a modern understanding to the term the citizens of utopia cannot have autonomy since they 29 Aldous Huxley, Island (New York: Harper Brothers, 1962), 224. 30 Skinner, Walden Two, 96. 31 Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, 54. 32 Elisabeth Hansot, Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1974), 9. 33 For a classic statement of this viewpoint see the “Rose in the Bog” metaphor in Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (New York: Signet Classic, 2000), Chapter XXVI. 34 Knights and Willmott, “Autonomy as Utopia and Dystopia,” 61.

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cannot be fully trusted to make “their own decisions about how to understand and manage their lives.”35 But simply applying a modern understanding of autonomy or of the individual to pre-modern works is, of course, pointless. Instead, we can fairly ask, do pre-modern utopias also limit autonomy, even within their own contexts and understandings? I believe the answer is yes. We become free, but only in the sense that we are free to do what we ought to do, as narrowly defined by the needs of the community.36 Consider the reactions of Glaucon and Adeimantus to Socrates’ ideal city, or the reactions of More’s listeners in Book One of Utopia to the suggestions of Hythloday. The aristocratic Athenians and Englishmen both see their freedom of action and their privileges under threat from the proposed reforms. Throughout human history men and women have had individual goals and desires that naturally come in conflict with what others see as the common good. Individuals will disagree and create conflict. Perhaps the critical example of fundamental disagreement lies in the area of religious difference. Individual liberty or simply individual agency leads to religious disagreement. A central question for utopia is how to deal with this. As Carrie Hintz notes, More “describes a society that tolerates religious difference without risk to political stability, provided doctrinal disputes are discussed in a rational and tolerant manner.”37 More seems to believe, despite all the evidence of his times, that rational and peaceful debate between holders of different religious doctrines is possible. For this to work the political powers of the community must be indifferent, or at least unwilling to support one particular doctrine. (We can ask how likely such an outcome might be, in More’s time or ours.) The more general utopian solution is enforced unity. Margaret Cavendish’s “New Blazing World resolves the question of the place of dissent in a stable society by concluding (perhaps a bit wistfully) that the pleasures of diversity must give way to the exigencies of unity.”38 In effect, the good utopian citizen/subject will agree, at least publicly, with the expressed doctrines and rules of the community. As established in the Republic, Plato’s parallel between the just man and the just state haunts utopian thought to the present.39 If we cannot separate the state and the individual, the individual becomes a product of the state’s actions (or inactions). If the individual fails to act in a just fashion, the state has failed in its key mission. But not only have the political structures failed, the social and moral structures and indeed that entire ideology of the state also have failed. Some will object here that I have made utopia “totalizing.” I agree, I have. Utopian communities, whatever their size must be places of shared agreement on ideology and on what constitutes 35 Knights and Willmott, “Autonomy as Utopia and Dystopia,” 61. 36 Goodwin and Taylor, The Politics of Utopia, 62. 37 Carrie Hintz, “‘But One Opinion’: Fear of Dissent in Cavendish’s New Blazing World,” Utopian Studies, 7.1 (1996): 25. 38 Hintz, “But One Opinion,” 25. 39 Quarta, “Homo Utopicus,” 157.

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the “good life.” An individual may find happiness in utopia, but that happiness is always defined by the utopia, and not by the individual. This causes the modern mind to recoil. We “fear that the postulate of a summum bonum places ends above means, overlooks human differentiation and the need for variety, and imposes an unchanging harmony and uniformity.”40 For good reasons we fear having final answers imposed on us, even if those answers result in material abundance and security. How can individuality be expressed in utopian conditions? In More’s Utopia, the people express their individuality in limited ways. The main way seems to be through gardening, which takes on a competitive aspect.41 But there seem to be few other outlets for individuality. The Utopians dress alike and all enjoy edifying lectures. I might add that we meet no individual Utopians during our visit. Apparently if you meet one Utopian, you have met them all. A similar observation can be made about the people in Bellamy’s Boston. “Bellamy’s city in Looking Backward is a cold place … Nothing points out the coldness of his city as much as the fact that Bellamy’s Mr. West interacts with no other Bostonian except under arranged circumstances.”42 The inhabitants of this cold place are surprisingly indifferent to this visitor from the past. Or perhaps they are too well-mannered to get too excited about much of anything. It is also possible they are too disciplined. They have been turned into cogs in the Industrial Army and no longer individuals. Instead they are units of production. Expressing one’s individuality through politics is constrained in utopia. William Morris in News From Nowhere explicitly states that “we are very well off without politics—because we have none.”43 It is instructive to note that his chapter on politics is a single paragraph long while the next much longer chapter is titled “How Matters Are Managed.” The inhabitants of Morris’s new England have no differences of opinion that really matter: “Among us, our differences concern matters of business and passing events as to them, and could not divide men permanently.” They have no disagreements that might motivate people to political action: “It is clearly not easy to knock up a political party on the question of whether haymaking in such and such a countryside shall begin this week or next.”44 In The Dispossessed Ursula Le Guin wrestles with the problem of how an anarchist society can function and what a freely directing individual would look like in such a community. The critical question is “how can a person act in complete freedom and yet for the mutual aid of others?” Daniel Jaeckle suggests 40 Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor, The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 114. 41 Philip Abbott, “Utopians at Play,” Utopian Studies, 15.1 (2004): 52. 42 John R. Mullin, “Edward Bellamy’s Ambivalence: Can Utopia Be Urban?” Utopian Studies, 11.1 (2000): 54. 43 William Morris, News From Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 116. 44 Morris, News From Nowhere, 118.

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“that to follow one’s will and be an individual is at the same time to fulfill one’s social obligations.”45 Jaeckle provides an elegant answer to the central problem of the anarchist utopia of Anarres. But I believe that it is an insufficient answer. The narrative suggests that Anarres does not live up to that high ideal and has become increasingly conformist. Anarres is indeed an ambiguous utopia, but not in the way most believe. Its ambiguity comes from the willingness of its inhabitants, including the apparently critical Shevek, to accept its central myth and ignore evidence that shows individual self-direction as under attack by conformity. In Walden Two Skinner limits freedom by conditioning. But what we call freedom Skinner sees as a delusion blinding us to the horror of the true nature of human society and to consoling us with the illusion of choice.46 All societies condition their subjects. This is true, but all societies allow, mostly by omission, alternative models to exist. Skinner’s conditioning would allow no way to “think outside the box.” In Walden Two the nature of conditioning raises serious intergenerational questions. While those adults who join the commune can be seen as exercising free and informed choice, what about children brought up in the community and conditioned to its norms from birth? Can they make informed choices about whether or not to continue as members when they become adults? Utopian authors have answered this question with a resounding yes. “Utopias rely on their citizens conforming voluntarily to whatever rules exist because happiness self-evidently lies that way—which leaves the rational process intact.”47 The presumption that the utopian regime is perfect, or at least so superior to other models, allows the author to assume general agreement, based on consensus, enforced and reinforced by education and social norms. True critical reflection on the nature of society and its goals and purposes is often placed in the mouths of straw-men, such as the ridiculous Professor Castle in Walden Two or the caricatured leftover capitalist holdouts in Ecotopia. In this light, perhaps the only intentional communities that allow individual liberty are those like the Shakers who were celibate and relied on co-option and not birth as the means of maintaining their numbers.48 Only such communities escape the difficult question of whether or not an individual who is conditioned to a community’s norms from birth can truly consent.

45 Daniel P. Jaeckle, “Embodied Anarchy in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,” Utopian Studies, 20.1 (2009): 79–80. 46 Skinner, Walden Two, 96. 47 Goodwin and Taylor, The Politics of Utopia, 112. 48 For a useful summary of the Shakers and their beliefs see Frederic J. Baumgartner, Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 161–3. When I was growing up in Massachusetts in the 1970s my elderly next-door neighbor would tell my brother and I amusing tales about how he had been taken in by a Shaker community after he was abandoned by his father. Mr Albee fled the Shakers after a short while, just as he previously had fled from a Baptist orphanage.

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Free choice to join a community does not imply freedom to disagree with the goals or actions of a community. Once we consent to enter Utopia we are disarmed. What can an individual do in utopia if he or she disagrees with its course? At the beginning of his classic Exit, Voice and Loyalty Albert O. Hirshman noted that, “Each society learns to live with a certain amount of dysfunctional or mis-behavior; but lest the misbehavior feed on itself and lead to general decay, society must be able to marshal from within itself forces which will make as many of the faltering actors as possible revert to the behavior required for its proper functioning.”49 Utopias have many devices to produce required behavior. But they seem to lack the means to loyally express dissent or even deal with dysfunction. They also seem to quite often lack a real means of expressing dissatisfaction short of exit. Frazer, who I take to be Skinner’s mouthpiece, calls leaving the Walden Two commune “defection.”50 In Walden Two individual exit is supposed to be free, but it carries an air of criminality. Robert Nozick attempts to get around this problem in Anarchy, State and Utopia by positing the creation of communities of shared interest, which would allow for easy entrance and exit. But Nozick’s work reflects the bias against protest and political activity that lies at the heart of classical utopia. As Malcolm Gladwell notes, “exit is passive. It is silent protest.”51 In all utopias, individual political activity is reduced to exit. This can perhaps best be seen in Le Guin’s classic short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Instead of freeing the child held in such terrible conditions and facing the consequences, those who are repulsed by the evil at the heart of the perfect community simply leave. There is much debate about what happens to those who “walk away.” I think this misses the real point, which is the refusal of those who walk away to take responsibility for the evil actions of their community. Because they fail to take action to end the injustice they see, they are just as complicit, morally, as those who stay. Their individual action is selfish. Is Small Really Beautiful? Any utopian project, large or small, on paper or in reality, requires that its subjects adhere to a single ideological vision. While this might not be much different than most human societies throughout history, utopia must grapple with the implications of this singularity. Thoughtful utopian theorists must grapple with the question of how to respect the individual while enforcing the ideological objectives of utopia. 49 Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1. 50 Skinner, Walden Two, 192. 51 Malcolm Gladwell, “The Gift of Doubt: Albert O. Hirshman and the Power of Failure,” New Yorker, June 24, 2013. Accessed July 1, 2013. Emphasis in the original. www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell.

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Utopian authors, since Morris, at least, tend to celebrate the small scale community as the least oppressive. But we should not accept the easy equation of small scale power with individual agency. Contemporary utopian theory faces the problem of trying to find “ways of maximizing individual autonomy and liberty and a humane social order without inviting either widespread forms of individual irresponsibility or of social oppression and stagnation.”52 Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) stands as a critical example of this effort. But even Nozick is willing to allow the creation of “stable associations” in which individual liberty is compromised, so long as this surrender is voluntary and exit is free. Nozick posits voluntary “stable associations” as a necessary condition of a utopia that seeks to produce the most minimal state apparatus possible.53 Nozick seeks a world of political associations entered into freely and freely abandoned. He says he must create, “A wide and diverse range of communities which people can enter if admitted, leave if they wish to, shape according to their wishes; a society in which utopian experimentation can be tried, different styles of life can be lived, and alternative visions of the good can be individually or jointly pursued.”54 Nozick notes that this is a model and that practical considerations in the actual world work against the creation and maintenance of such communities. But he goes on to claim that his “minimal state” would allow individuals to freely choose to join and, because of free exit, would prevent anyone from imposing a particular utopian vision on anyone else.55 Nozick’s stable associations are really just miniature blueprint utopias in which the individual must still contract away her autonomy, at least conditionally, to some communal ideal, however limited in scope. In modern times, with our concern for individual rights, perhaps these are the only utopias we can honestly design. John Gray claims that only small scale utopian communities can avoid oppressing the individual. “The pursuit of utopia need not end in totalitarianism. So long as it is confined to voluntary communities it tends to be self-limiting.”56 For the contemporary utopian small is beautiful, honest and perhaps practical.57 Of course, this mode of thought is a sad retreat from the grand blueprints of the past. But we should avoid mindlessly celebrating small communities as well. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed provides a good counter example. “Le Guin’s ambiguous utopia should be read as a convincing warning against the strong tendency among green theorists to celebrate the rural or small-town gemeinschaft, based on the 52 Sabia, “Individual and Community in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,” 113. 53 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 299–300. 54 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 307. 55 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, 307, 312. 56 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 39. 57 For a discussion of contemporary small scale intentional communities and how they deal with these questions see Rhiannon Firth, Utopian Politics: Citizenship and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2012), chapter 3 and Sargisson, Fool’s Gold?, chapter 9.

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conviction that in a strongly integrated small-scale society, the use of formal political or legal authority may be reduced to a minimum.”58 History shows us that small groups can oppress just as effectively as the largest state, sometimes more so. Keeping these ambiguities in mind, we can consider a contemporary effort at creating utopian spaces that protect individual choice. “Seasteading” stands out as one recent effort to square utopia with individual desires and liberty though the creation of small communities with shared beliefs and goals. Seasteaders would build moveable platforms in international waters and would attach them to platforms built by other like-minded people.59 Inspired by libertarian ideas, the leaders in this movement have produced a manifesto outlining the history and goals of seasteading. They explicitly reject the idea that what they are proposing is utopian, perhaps because so many efforts at creating new political or intentional communities have failed in embarrassing fashions.60 Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich begin Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas by informing the reader that “far from being dreamy-eyed utopians, we are serious planners with realistic principles for bringing this strange vision to life. This realism dictates an incremental approach, modest political goals, reliance on mature technology, self-financing, and a willingness to make compromises.”61 Friedman’s key insight is the idea of “dynamic geography” in which individuals and groups link and unlink their seasteads from platform to platform thereby freeing themselves from the need to make a final irrevocable choice of where to live and do business. This echoes Nozick’s insight. Of course, it also substitutes exit for political action. In this vision thousands of new mirconations will spring up. Freed from regulation, innovations will come quickly, and the economics of the seastead will be bolstered by allowing activities states find objectionable and earning income from them. Seasteading enthusiasts have suggested these communities might engage in: “Fish farming and aquaculture. Prisons. Med schools. Gold warehouses. Brothels. 58 Werner Christie Mathisen, “The Underestimation of Politics in Green Utopias: The Description of Politics in Huxley’s Island, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Callenbach’s Ecotopia,” Utopian Studies, 12.1 (2001): 71. 59 A serious examination of seasteading in fiction can be found in Neal Stevenson’s Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Books: 1992, 367–404). In the novel, a vast structure called “The Raft” moves about the Pacific Ocean. The retired aircraft carrier Enterprise forms the center of the structure and is surrounded by an ever growing and ever changing mass of ships and platforms inhabited by refugees, criminals, pirates and other human refuse of the modern age. 60 See Erwin S. Strauss, How to Start Your Own Country (Boulder: Paladin Press, 1999), for a number of interesting examples of attempts to create new political forms, some utopian and some not. 61 Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich, Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas (2008), accessed May 1, 2011. http://seasteading.org/seastead.org/ book_beta/full_book_beta.html.

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Cryonics intakes. Gene therapy, cloning, augmentation, and organ sales. Baby farms. Deafeningly loud concerts. Rehab/detox clinics. Zen retreats. Abortion clinics. Ultimate ultimate fighting tournaments.”62 We can debate whether or not these activities are really utopian or dystopian. Whether existing governments will tolerate these sorts of things happening off their shores is an open question as well. The Seasteaders have received their fair share of derision. A quick Google search will reveal many blogs declaring that the floating platforms of the Seasteaders’ dreams will devolve into Hobbesian states of nature as the rich import slave labor and those slaves rise up. Clearly the creation of lawless zones invites exploitation. However, if the principle of free exit is maintained exploitation through force should have limited effect, at least in theory. A deeper critique is that Seasteading is simply an extreme version of classical liberalism and individualism pretending to utopian aspirations. As Rhiannon Firth notes, “that ‘autonomous communities’ are able to flourish under neo-liberal governance might be seen as a manner of legitimizing its authority; that they take steps toward self-sufficiency might be seen as a justification for further retreat of state welfare provision and social functions.”63 This new utopian dream might simply serve to reinforce existing structures of injustice. The End of the Individual? Before I complete this study of the individual and her place in utopia, I would also like to consider the potential for the post-human. The end of contemporary humanity and its replacement with the superhuman or the post-human is a recurrent theme in dystopia. We are attracted to the idea of an escape from the mundane limits imposed by our humanity. “Posthumans are far more exciting, far sexier than humans.”64 We should ask whether concern for the status of the individual is an artifact of modernity and whether this concern has become quaint in the face of biotechnology and the cyborg. In Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood makes a powerful statement about the attractiveness of the post-human in a world in which “we are tired of man …”.65 The title character Crake designs a new race of beings that look human but have none of the dangerous aggressive, individualistic traits that have destroyed the world. They are impervious to most disease and simply drop dead at thirty. 62 Chris Baker, “Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap,” Wired Magazine, 17.02 (2009), accessed July 10, 2011. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/ magazine/17–02/mf_seasteading. 63 Firth, Utopian Politics: Citizenship and Practice, 111. 64 Neil Badmington, “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique, 53 (Winter 2003): 15. 65 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 24.

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They are beautiful but effectively non-sexual, mating only once a year, and have no capacity for sexual jealousy.66 “In this dystopia, Atwood has created the space in which to imagine a new and improved species.”67 Crake ends that “pitched battle” between humans that so annoyed Skinner. In effect, the “Crakers” are not individuals in any real sense. Although they are given names, they lack any means to express political or social ideas beyond that of the herd. The “Crakers” are super-human and less than human at the same time. The Crakers can be compared to the Alphas of Brave New World. Both are genetically engineered to fit within a particular social/ecological niche. Both are designed to not be individuals, the Crakers in their very DNA and the Alphas through conditioning. They are beautiful but vacant. Both Atwood and Huxley warn us of the seductive dangers of the post-human. They warn us that the sacrifices inherent in the post-human, such as the death of the vast majority of humanity in Oryx and Crake or the creation of human machines in Brave New World, are simply too much to bear. Where does this leave us? We are faced with a fundamental opposition between utopia and the autonomous, self-directing and political individual. But we must allow ourselves to dream of better worlds. In an age in which individual happiness is raised to the level of dogma, utopian theory had to move beyond simple and simplistic blueprints. In doing so, utopia fragmented into the diverse and unfocused collection of ideas it is today. The Spartan model of total selfsacrifice and the omnipotent lawgiver simply cannot stand in the face of modern experience. Nor, given the dangers of the post-human, can we simply place our trust in technology. At best, utopia has become a micro-level pursuit, its dreaming reduced to a small-scale enterprise or cultural critique. In effect, in an age where the individual is the measure of all things, utopia cannot be large scale and allencompassing. (And this might just be a good thing.) References Abbott, Philip, “Utopians at Play,” Utopian Studies, 15.1 (2004): 44–62. Aristotle, The Politics. Edited by Stephen Everson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. Badmington, Neil. “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique, 53 (Winter 2003): 10–27. Baker, Chris. “Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap,” Wired Magazine, 17.02 (2009), accessed July 10, 2011. http://www.wired.com/tech biz/startups/magazine/17–02/mf_seasteading.

66 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 302–6. 67 Sargisson, Fool’s Gold?, 230.

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Baumgartner, Frederic J. Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000–1887. New York: Signet Classic, 2000. Callenbach, Ernest. Ecotopia. New York: Bantam, 1990. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1710. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Firth, Rhiannon. Utopian Politics: Citizenship and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2012. Friedman, Patri and Wayne Gramlich. Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas (2008), accessed May 1, 2011. http://seasteading. org/seastead.org/book_beta/full_book_beta.html. Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Gift of Doubt: Albert O. Hirshman and the Power of Failure,” New Yorker. June 24, 2013, accessed July 1, 2013. www.newyorker. com/arts/critics/books/2013/06/24/130624crbo_books_gladwell. Goodwin, Barbara and Keith Taylor. The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. Gray, John. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Hansot, Elisabeth. Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1974. Hintz, Carrie. “‘But One Opinion’: Fear of Dissent in Cavendish’s New Blazing World,” Utopian Studies, 7.1 (1996): 23–37. Hirschman, Albert O. Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Huxley, Aldous. Island. New York: Harper Brothers, 1962. ———. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. Jaeckle, Daniel P. “Embodied Anarchy in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,” Utopian Studies, 20.1 (2009): 75–95. Jendrysik, Mark Stephen. “The Snake in the Garden: Crime and Punishment in Utopian Thought,” Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review, 56 (2010): 1–12. Knights, David and Hugh Willmott. “Autonomy as Utopia and Dystopia,” in Utopia and Organization. Edited by Martin Parker. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Mathisen, Werner Christie. “The Underestimation of Politics in Green Utopias: The Description of Politics in Huxley’s Island, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and Callenbach’s Ecotopia,” Utopian Studies, 12.1 (2001): 56–78. More, Thomas. Utopia. Edited by George M. Logan and Robert Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Morris, William. News From Nowhere and Other Writings. Edited by Clive Wilmer. London: Penguin Classics, 2004. Mullin, John R. “Edward Bellamy’s Ambivalence: Can Utopia Be Urban?” Utopian Studies, 11.1 (2000): 51–65. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Quarta, Cosimo. “Homo Utopicus: On the Need for Utopia,” Utopian Studies, 7.2 (1996): 153–65. Sabia, Dan. “Individual and Community in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,” in The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Edited by Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopia Revisited,” Utopian Studies, 5.1 (1994): 1–37. ———. “In Defense of Utopia,” Diogenes, 209 (2006): 11–17. ———. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sargisson, Lucy. Fool’s Gold? Utopianism in Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Skinner, B.F. Walden Two. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005. Stevenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books: 1992. Stratilatis, Costas. “Reading The Republic: Is Utopianism Redundant?” History of Political Thought, 29.4 (Winter 2008): 555–71. Strauss, Erwin S. How to Start Your Own Country. Boulder: Paladin Press, 1999. Wells, H.G. A Modern Utopia. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. Winstanley, Gerrard. The Works of Gerrard Winstanley. Edited by George H. Sabine. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941.

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Chapter 3

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The Individual and the City: Abstract and Concrete Nathaniel Coleman

Utopia and the City In what follows, the role utopia plays in the imagination (and imaginary appropriation) of buildings and cities is discussed. As the setting upon which individual and social life unfolds, the city in general, and specific works of architecture in particular, provides the context for solitude and sociability alike. The built environment is not neutral; it can evidence either the inscription of engagement or alienation. Although urban settings are inevitably bound to the time of their creation (and thus to the social and political conditions of that time), all works of art are also future-directed, oriented toward reception by experiencing subjects not yet born. In this sense, a work of art—an individual building, an urban setting, or a monument—may project either a future perfect, or future imperfect conception of the time of its creation as a foundation for as yet unimagined possibilities. In this way, works persist through time as commentaries on their own moment and the future alike, which becomes the work’s fugitive context in a shifting present (so long as it is not destroyed, or even then, so long as it is remembered). Arguably, this is the potentially utopian dimension of all creative projects (for cities and buildings alike); a claim based on the notion that projecting, as inevitably prospective, ever entails a fundamental re-description of reality of a utopian kind. But unlike literary utopias, designed projects, in particular those that enter into and alter concrete reality, promise to transform conditions here and now, for individuals and collectives alike. Affirming this possibility, it seems to me, also begs for some criteria for distinguishing between those architectural and urban projects that might alter the real for the better from those that might enter and alter it for the worse. Consideration of such criteria in relation to individual experience is the central aim of this chapter. The aims of this chapter, as introduced above, are pursued in two ways: first through development of evaluative criteria that is arguably generally applicable—constructed upon a foundation of subjective experience and more objective evidence, and second, via application of these criteria to the interpretation of two constructed examples of urban architecture. The two works to be considered are the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument (known also as the Altare della Patria, or simply as the Il Vittoriano, designed 1881, completed

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1925) and the Piazza del Campidoglio (atop the Capitoline Hill, designed 1538). Together, the two are proposed as parallel utopias occupying parts of the same hill that interpret the same foundation myth differently. The civilizing purpose and dominance of Rome, the myth these two projects interpret, is dual—it transacts in both an exemplary past and an ideal future. Although both constructions co-divide a shared site and mythos, I will attempt to show how one is pathological while the other constitutive in relation to the prospect of Utopia and, inevitably, in relation to individual experiences of the city. In the reading that follows, the human body as a shared inheritance is asserted as a link between past lives and current ones alike. As such, individual experience is representative inasmuch as it is bodily, and bodies provide a shared structure and condition amongst billions of persons, living, dead, and not yet born. Constitutive and Pathological Utopia: the Campidoglio and the Vittoriano The Campidoglio was designed by perhaps the greatest of all Renaissance artists, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, better known simply as Michelangelo (1475–1564), who excelled as a painter, sculptor and architect (Figure 3.1). The Vittoriano was designed by Giuseppe Sacconi (1854–1905), and is dedicated to Victor Emanuel II, the first modern King of the then newly united Italy. The Vittoriano also comprises the altar of the Italian Fatherland, and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier1 (Figure 3.2). Each, in its own way, embodies an interpretation of ancient Rome as a golden age that in turn is in conflict with the other. The construction of the Campidoglio and the Vittoriano on different parts of the same hill was an attempt by each to appropriate and interpret the same mythopoetic content that the Capitoline Hill—the most sacred of Rome’s famous seven hills—embodies and transmits; not least Rome as Caput Mundi, head, or top, of the world—the first place among all others. As works of art, the Campidoglio and Vittoriano are clearly unequal, yet their relative aesthetic merit is not the primary concern of the comparison developed here, any more than the relative talent of the artists is (although both do come into play). It is what these projects share—in terms of location, arrangement, and 1 Initiated by Michelangelo, The Campidoglio, constructed between 1539–92, was completed by others (with the current pavement and paving pattern—after a design by Michelangelo—only being set in place in 1940). Initiated by Count Guiseppe Sacconi, the Vittoriano, constructed between 1885–1911, was also completed by others. My interpretation of the Vittoriano is primarily based on firsthand experience, though my historical understanding of it has been influenced by: Daniele Manacorda and Renato Tamassia, Il piccone Del regime (Roma: Armando Curcio Editore, 1985), pp. 128–35; Luigi Barzini, The Italians (New York: Atheneum, 1964), pp. 85–8; and Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect—in which the Vittoriano is cast as a dystopia (or as a pathological utopia, in Paul Ricoeur’s sense).

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Figure 3.1

Piazza del Campidoglio (view toward Palazzo del Senatore), Rome, Italy (1539–92). Architect: Michelangelo.

Source: Photo by author.

Figure 3.2

Monument of Vittorio Emanuele II (the Vittoriano), Rome, Italy (1885–1911). Architect: Count Giuseppe Sacconi.

Source: Photo by author.

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content—that recommends them for comparison, in particular the notion of Ancient Rome as a kind of golden age that is intrinsic to both. Considering these two works together offers an opportunity to begin discovering what constitutive utopian projects share that pathological ones do not, while shedding light on the status of individuals in the conceptualization of positive, as opposed to negative, utopias. French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur’s (1913–2005) ideas about the pathological and constitutive dimensions of Utopia provide a convenient framework for considering the Campidoglio and Vittoriano as qualitatively different sorts of Utopia: the Vittoriano pathological, and the Campidoglio constitutive. Because both projects exist, and inevitably influence the social life and spaces of Rome, Karl Mannheim’s (1893–1947) criterion of utopian realizability is an obvious adjunct of this discussion: an individual project has the potential to become a limited Utopia that begins to surpass the present by manifesting the first signs of a transformed future. Head of the World Although Rome is frequently described as caput mundi (head, top, or summit of the world or universe) it has also been described as the orbis caput (summit of the earth conceived of as a circular plane or disc). Descriptions of Rome as an apex expresses what Romans always knew: Rome was destined for greatness from the start, a promise confirmed when “a man’s head with the features intact was discovered” on the Capitoline by workmen in c. 510 bc “who were digging the foundations of the temple” Jupiter Capitolinus. The omen was interpreted to mean that “without any doubt … on this spot would stand the imperial citadel of the world.” 2 The Marvels of Rome, a guide to the City for Pilgrims published in 1143, illustrates the Capitoline’s position in the psyche of Romans and visitors alike: The Capitol is so called because it was the head of the world where the consuls and senators met to govern the world. … It was all covered over with glass and gold and marvelous carved work. … It was called the Golden Capitol because it surpassed all the realms of the whole world in wisdom and beauty.3

The Marvels is as much history as fantasy; it demonstrates how Roman history and myth, and in particular the Capitoline Hill, provides a setting of utopian distanciation for rethinking the present (here in terms of an idealized past), in order to construe an ideal future. As described in the Marvels, the Capitoline

2 Livy, The Early History of Rome, Books I–V, trans. Aubrey De Sélincourt (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 95. 3 Benedict (?), Mirabilia Urbis Romae (The Marvels of Rome) (1143), 2nd ed., trans. and ed. Francis Morgan Nichols (1889) (New York: Italica Press, 1986), pp. 38–9.

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(pre Michelangelo’s Campidoglio) appears as an ideal and crystalline city on a hill—not unlike the New Jerusalem described in Revelations 21. Among historians of Roman myth, Livy (59 bc–ad 17) stands alone. His History of Rome is based on the premise that return to the virtues of the first Romans—an uncorrupted model from the past—could be used to correct moral decay.4 Livy presented ancient Rome, from 1200–386 bc, as an unfolding story of triumph over adversity and of movement toward fulfillment of a divinely ordained destiny. For him, Rome is that rare nation deserving of the right to claim divine ancestry: no country has ever been greater or purer than ours or richer in good citizens and noble deeds; none has been free for so many generations from the vices and avarice of luxury; nowhere have thrift and plain living been for so long held in such esteem. Indeed, poverty, with us, went hand in hand with contentment.5

Livy traced the steps toward “the founding of the mightiest empire the world has known—next to god’s,” from Aeneas’s exile from Greece through the twins Romulus and Remus’s “urge to found a new settlement [c. 753 bc] on the spot where they had been left to drown as infants and had been subsequently brought up.”6 According to Livy, Remus taunted his brother by jumping over the half-built walls of the city, an act serious enough for Romulus to punish his twin with death. Livy wrote that while he killed Remus, Romulus vowed, “‘So perish whoever else overleap my battlements’.”7 The founding of Rome thus rests upon the renunciation of blood ties, emphasizing the town as sacrosanct: an individual’s first obligation is to the City. In honor of Romulus’s fortitude, the new town took his name. Though it began as a small settlement, Rome would become great. To increase population, Romulus threw open the walls of the city to refugees from all over. A rag-tag mob arrived as “the first real addition to the City’s strength, the first step to her future greatness.”8 Early in Rome’s history, Romulus focused attention on the Capitoline by making it a sacred precinct dedicated to Jupiter, which included the first temple consecrated in Rome, and the Citadel.9 Upon his own death Romulus became a god of sorts, his immortality being further assurance of Rome’s unique promise. In an attempt to console a gathered assembly shortly after Romulus’s death, a wise man, Proculus, told a story of the founder’s divinity: “Romulus,” he declared, “the father of our City, descended from heaven at dawn this morning and appeared to me.” … “Go,” he said, “and tell the Romans that by heaven’s will my Rome shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be 4 Livy, p. 33. 5 Ibid., 34. 6 Ibid., 39. 7 Ibid., 40. 8 Ibid., 43. 9 Ibid., 45.

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soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman arms.”10

With their purpose confirmed by Romulus, Romans set out to make their city the capital of the world. First they became Romans (Quirites), in honor of Romulus (who gained the name Quirinus after his death and deification). Nearly four centuries later, Rome’s purpose was again renewed. After defeating the Gauls (c. 386 bc), Marcus Furius Camillus (c. 446–365 bc)—honored as the second founder of Rome—urged his fellow citizens to rebuild their city rather than abandon it. Rome, he argued, is a city with a great destiny located where it is because gods and men had selected the site, a divinely ordained selection in recognition that “of all the places in the world [it is] the best for a city destined to grow great,” to become the head of the world (Caput Mundi), as foretold in the occult token of the human head found there long ago.11 Camillus recalled this fortuitous find as a challenge to Roman citizens to take hold of their special land and enroot themselves there as they could in no other place: Not without reason did gods and men choose this spot for the site of our City ... Here is the Capitol, where in the days of old, the human head was found and men were told that on this spot would be the world’s head and the seat of empire.12

As head of the world, and ceremonial, governmental and religious center of Rome in antiquity, the Capitol was the focus of activity organized around the renewal of Rome as city, nation, and empire. The Capitol is a metonymic figure in a eurythymic relation to the whole of which it is part, analogous to the relationship between the body and the social organization. Conceptualization of the Capitol as a microcosm of Rome persists from Livy to Cola di Rienzo (1313–54), and from Michelangelo to Italian unification, and even through Fascism to the present.13 The interchangeability between citizen, city, and nation in Rome parallels a correspondence between history, myth, and biography. What Rome teaches is that a city’s greatest assets are its citizens. In this confluence of history and myth, and individual and state, Rome persists as its own Utopia (and as a Utopian figure of reference beyond the city as well). The Vittoriano and Campidoglio both draw upon the Golden Age of Ancient Rome (the past) to figure an ideal future (a Utopia). Although by now highly mediated, or softened, the status of the Capitoline endures.

10 Ibid., 51. 11 Ibid., 401. 12 Ibid., 401–2. 13 For more on Cola Di Rienzo, see Anonymous, The Life of Cola Di Rienzo, translated with an introduction by John Wright (Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1975).

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Parallel Utopias Occupied as early as the Bronze Age, the Capitoline forms the northwestern edge of the Roman Forum. Michelangelo’s Campidoglio rests in the hollow between its two summits. The south summit, or Capitolium (which gives its name to the United States Capitol on Capitol Hill), was the location of the capitol proper, so named because the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus was sited there, the oldest and most revered temple in Rome. Dedication to Jupiter, principal protector of Romans and their city lent special significance to the temple and its site. The Vittoriano is lodged into the north summit of the Capitoline, former site of the Citadel of Rome. The pre-seventh century church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, located on the edge of the north summit, separates the Campidoglio from the Vittoriano. The Capitoline also sits along the Via del Papa, the route of papal procession, the possesso, that a newly coronated pope would make from St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican (symbolically the most important church of Roman Christianity) to the Lateran (the pope’s cathedral). The possesso was the ritual by which a pope would take possession of Rome as its temporal caretaker, importantly by traversing the symbolic center of the city and seat of its local government since the twelfth century.14 Michelangelo’s Campidoglio changed the orientation of the Hill by turning it to the northwest, away from the Forum, the ancient pagan center of Rome, and the Lateran, toward St Peter’s and the developing Christian city. The main access to the Hill also shifted from the Forum to the stepped ramp, the Cordonata, leading from below the Campidoglio to its platform. Michelangelo’s work on the Capitoline began with a commission to provide a base for an ancient bronze equestrian statue that survived the Christianization of Rome, only because popular belief held that it depicted a triumphant Constantine the Great, who made Christianity the state religion in ad 312. In actuality, the statue is of Marcus Aurelius; even so, it serves as a vital link between pagan and Christian Rome. The Vittoriano, because of its color, size, and imposition into the Hill, changed the orientation of the Capitoline again; this time redirecting it toward an enlarged Piazza Venezia and Piazza del Popolo beyond, just within the northern gate of the city. This effectively shifted the axis of the Capitoline away from both the pagan and Christian city toward the secular (modern) city. The Vittoriano terminates the Via del Corso, which links Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo. Significantly, the Vittoriano establishes a symbolic wall that severs the link between the Vatican and the Lateran, effectively blocking the Via del Papa, and symbolically obstructing the possesso, an important gesture for a monument heralding the rise of the then newly unified Italian state, with Rome as its capitol, and liberated from the temporal powers of the pope.

14 For further detail, see Charles Burroughs, From Signs to Design. Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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Although largely abandoned during the middle ages, the Capitoline remained the civic and symbolic center of Rome since antiquity, a status reconfirmed during the fourteenth century, when on 8 April 1341, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74) was crowned as poet laureate at the Capitoline.15 Petrarch was convinced that the only way for an Italian renaissance to take shape would be for classical virtues centered on Rome to be reanimated.16 Just over six years later, on 15 August 1347, Cola di Rienzo was made tribune of Rome at the Capitoline. He envisioned the return of republican rule to a city freed of papal temporal powers, which popes continued to wield even during their “captivity” in Avignon (1309–77).17 The events leading to renovation of the Campidoglio began to take shape in 1420 when Pope Martin V took possession of Rome and brought it completely under papal rule. This change of status made Rome a management concern for a long succession of popes who wanted to glorify the city as a symbol of church confidence and temporal power. Nicholas V, Pope from 1447–55, actually initiated restoration of the Capitol, which included renovation of the Palazzo del Senatore (constructed beginning in the mid-twelfth century, and completed at the beginning of the fourteenth) and the addition of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, established at an oblique angle to the existing building. Although these renovations predate Michelangelo’s project, they set the conditions he would later respond to and clarify. Paul III, Pope from 1534–49, engaged Michelangelo to complete the renovations of the Capitoline in 1536. Although it was by then customary to integrate the (physical and cultural) remains of pagan antiquity within a Christian present, Michelangelo was particularly aware of the symbolic importance of the Capitoline. Indeed, the past provided him with a ground of radical architectural invention that analogized his own desires for a different kind of governance (often out of step with his times and patrons). Pope Paul III envisioned the Campidoglio as the culminating destination for triumphal processions through Rome, a tradition with ancient origins. In 1536 he 15 For further detail about Roman topography, see Alta Macadam, Blue Guide: Rome and Environs, 3rd ed. (London: A. & C. Black, (1985) 1975), p. 55, and Christopher Woodward, The Buildings of Europe: Rome (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 80. For further detail about the Capitoline during the Middle Ages, see Richard Krautheimer, Rome. Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 16 For Petrarch’s role in the emergence of Italian humanism, see Aldo Scaglione, “Italy in the Middle Ages,” in The Culture of Italy, Mediaeval to Modern, ed. S. Bernard Chandler and Julius A. Molinaro (Toronto: Griffin House, 1979), 59–62. 17 For an account of Cola di Rienzo’s life and activities in Rome, see Anonymous, The Life of Cola Di Rienzo, trans. John Wright (Toronto, Ontario: Pontificate Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975). For a discussion of Petrarch’s association with Cola di Rienzo, see Aldo Scaglione, “Italy in the Middle Ages,” in The Culture of Italy, Mediaeval to Modern, ed. S. Bernard Chandler and Julius A. Molinaro (Toronto: Griffin House, 1979), p. 53. See also, Peter Bondanella, Roman Images in the Modern World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 31–5.

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was making preparations for such a procession. Crucially, Michelangelo’s design imaginatively interpreted the full history of the site, while anticipating its insertion within this continuum. Actually, the renovations were not ready in time for the triumphal visit that inspired its current state. Work continued under Sixtus V, Pope from 1585–90; Giacomo della Porta succeeded Michelangelo, who died in 1564, by the time della Porta died in 1602, the site was substantially complete.18 When the umbilicus mundi (naval of the world)—brought to Rome from Delphi in antiquity—was shifted to the Capitoline from the Forum by medieval Romans, the Capitoline Hill came to represent the very center of the world for Romans.19 At this point, the Capitoline evolved into a metonym for Rome’s civilizing mission. It also became a trope for Roma Quadrata (Rome’s earliest settlement on the Palatine Hill), which was the model for subsequent ancient Roman provincial cities and colonies.20 Remembrances of this idealized original Rome developed into the basis for visions of Rome as a realizable Utopia. Conceptions of the ideal city prefigure the potential city by inspiring attempts to represent and realize both in a Rome as it ought to be.21 Thus, as Rome becomes its own utopia, its residents and visitors become residents of, and visitors to, Utopia.22 The mythic virtues of the early days of Rome have long been fertile territory for the imagination. Roman emperors, Augustus for example, Renaissance artists and humanists, as well as later nationalists and fascists, especially Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (1883–1945), have all traded in the economy of Roman myth.23 The multivalent mining of the Capitoline Hill for its symbolic content has guided and justified Republican, Imperial, Fascist, and Democratic conceptions of Italian destiny. 18 For more detail on the interplay between Popes and architecture at the Capitol, see Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985). 19 James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (1960), 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 169. 20 As with much about Rome, Roma Quadrata resists easy explanation; for a compelling explanation, see Joseph Rykwert, Idea of a Town (1976) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 97–9. See Rykwert on town founders as well, Joseph Rykwert, “preface to the paper edition,” Idea of a Town (1976) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 21 For descriptions and examples of this ought, see Ronald S. Cunsolo Italian Nationalism: From its Origins to World War II (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger, 1990), p. 13 and Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 3. 22 For descriptions of Rome with a utopian flavor, see Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 73. 23 For discussion of some reasons for the periodic return to Rome’s humble origins as a golden age and source for renewal, and examples of this, see Ronald S. Cunsolo, Italian Nationalism: From its Origins to World War II (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger, 1990), pp. 9, 11, 10, 18. For an outline of the force, and purpose, of Roman myth, see Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 72.

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Identification with Ancient Rome by reform minded Italians increased in direct relationship to the growing desire for a unified nation state, particularly during the nineteenth century. Two principal models of Rome developed alongside this emergent desire for reform and unification: the first bases Italian purpose upon Republican virtues; the second envisions a new Empire as grand and influential as that of Caesar or Augustus.24 In designing the Campidoglio, Michelangelo was inspired by a model of Republican virtue, as were nineteenth-century reformers including Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82)—who ultimately forged the new unified Italian state, and Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72)—who theorized it as a new democratic republic. Mussolini and Italian Fascism were inspired by Imperial Rome, as were Camillo Cavour (1810–61)—principal engineer of the Risorgimento, and Victor Emanuel II (1820–78)—first king of the unified Italian state.25 It is thus not altogether surprising that the Vittoriano/Altare della Patria memorializes imperial rather than republican Roman virtues, even though this was not the norm for Risorgimento architecture.26 In short, while an idealized vision of Roman antiquity, especially Republican Rome, is the intended model for the Campidoglio, imperial Rome is the model for the Vittoriano.27 Each in turn projects a possible destiny for Rome and Italy into the future that the physical presence of these structures goes some way to confirming.28 Given its ancient and persistent status, the Capitoline was the obvious choice of a site for parallel utopias. Although the Campidoglio and Vittoriano both employ 24 For more on the two most prevalent models of Rome, see Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City Roman Images in the Modern World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 4. For more on Rome’s habit of mythologizing itself, see John E. Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 3. 25 For detailed discussion on how the four fathers of the Italian risorgimento—Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour and Victor Emanuel II—differ from one another politically, see Ronald S. Cunsolo, Italian Nationalism from its Origins to World War II (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Kreiger, 1990), pp. 9–21, 53–74. 26 Carroll L.V. Meeks considered the Vittoriano an anomaly of the Stile Umberto (1865–1900) because rather than drawing upon Renaissance (or humanist) models, it draws upon “the Italy of Imperial Rome,” and, instead of being brought “into harmony with … existing older buildings it stands apart by having nothing to do with its neighbors.” Carroll L. V. Meeks, “Stile Umberto 1865–1900: Cinquecentismo,” in Italian Architecture 1750–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 287, 306. 27 For a sense Rome’s seductiveness for Renaissance occupants, see Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 82. For some reasons why Republican Rome remains a virtuous model, see John M. Roberts, A Short History of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 129, 131–3, 155. 28 For both it was to be a future as much universal as local, derived from the objectives of Roman common law, Pax Romana, and the Roman Catholic Church; models of virtue for the whole world that these two projects ostensibly embody.

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similar content in formulating a future through the past in present constructions, one results in a felicitous retelling of the city’s virtues, the other is ultimately abstract and alienating. Michelangelo’s optimistic representation of the republican sentiment and deep commitment to the virtues and purpose of ancient Rome in the Campidoglio is in stark contrast to the Vittoriano’s representation of a vision of emergent Italian nationalism in Imperial guise. How each interprets Roman myth as a basis for the immanent society it proposes ultimately separates these examples, while shedding light on the status and experience of individuals in Utopia. Vittoriano There are few sympathetic words for Sacconi’s Vittoriano. It has been called a monstrosity and is known as the wedding cake and Mussolini’s Typewriter.29 Its status as a utopian figure may even be questionable. But to nineteenth-century Romans it was a source of civic pride and a sign of the new nation’s health, an insertion within a long story of Italian genius and cultural renewal, and an emblem of the unified Italian state’s destiny. Over time, sympathy for the monument has mostly dried up, as giddy nineteenth-century nationalism fell out of favor. Few Romans or visitors have much sense of its original purpose. Instead, the structure dominates the city, an over-large monument to the Unknown Soldier where human beings are ornamental at best. Architectural historian David Watkin gives the Vittoriano one of its few notices in recent English language histories of Western architecture.30 He defends the monument by praising its architect’s handling of the Classical orders of architecture, and blames its assertiveness not on Sacconi but on the executant architects who altered the scheme, especially by facing it with a blinding white Brescian marble instead of a more local honey hued travertine—the stone associated with Rome. Watkin’s first defense situates the monument outside of its location by lauding it as an effective academic exercise. His second defense serves to emphasize at least one crucial difference separating the Campidoglio from the Vittoriano: executant architects also altered Michelangelo’s project and others completed it after his death, yet neither condition appears to have diminished the force of his ideas. Interestingly, the Vittoriano shows up quite conspicuously in Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect. It provides the setting for much of the film’s 29 For discussion on the Vittoriano, see Terry Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy: Volume I, The Challenge of Tradition 1790–1900 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) pp. 231–9; John Dickie, “La macchina da scrivere: The Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome and Italian nationalism,” The Italianist, No. 14 (1994), pp. 261–85; Carroll Louis Vanderslice Meeks, Italian Architecture1750–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 344. 30 David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996), pp. 428, 430.

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action, which includes the defeat and death of an American architect abroad in Rome to stage an exhibit in honor of his French neoclassical architect hero ÉtienneLouis Boullée (1728–99), who made striking paintings but built very little.31 As a neoclassical visionary architect best known for his architectural fantasies, Boullée appealed to Greenaway as a fitting obsession for the architect protagonist who is drawn towards death and the idealization of unrealized architecture.32 In its preternatural pompousness and schematizing abstractness, the Vittoriano was as close as Greenway could come to a constructed work that captures what a realized Boullée monument might actually be like, especially his un-built visionary project of a Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton (1784). It is less shared appearances that attracted Greenaway than a shared atmosphere. Like a Boullée project, the Vittoriano is a monolithic, stripped down neoclassical behemoth, which is, in its way, visionary. As a memorial, it is especially important for the equation the film makes between Boullée, Rome and death. As a memorial “seemingly independent of the activities and time scale of man,” the Vittoriano analogizes Boullée’s vision.33 It recollects Boullée’s lack of interest in human experience and transformation of the physical presence of human beings into ornamental adjuncts to architectural settings. Whereas Boullée could only dream of such a setting, the Vittoriano succeeds in defeating individual identity and experience through the abstracting propensity of its grandiose scale, and unyielding imposition into the existing city, which literally, as well as figuratively, obliterates individual and collective memory and experience (by erasing the sites of both). The Vittoriano also parallels Boullée idealization of geometry for its own apparent perfectness and sublime effects.34 This crucial difference between the Vittoriano and the Campidoglio explains the use of Sacconi’s monument as a wall seemingly intended to hold back the complexity embodied by the Campidoglio, the

31 Set design for the mock Vittoriano exhibit of Boullée’s work in the film was approached as a real project of exhibit design, much of it designed by Italian architect and exhibition designer, Costantino Dardi (1936–91). See Costantino Dardi [Archive online]; available from http://oberon.iuav.it/dardi/dardi02.html; Internet; accessed 4 September 2013. 32 Peter Greenaway, The Belly of An Architect (Paris: Dis Voir, 1998), p. 11. 33 Ibid., 11. 34 Greenaway establishes the Boulleé-Rome connection in The Belly of An Architect script as follows: “There now follows the first of eight shots that make a formal record of the eight Roman buildings or groups of buildings mostly tombs or memorials—that influenced Boulleé, or ironically, in the last case, that Boulleé influenced. These are: the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Baths of the Villa Adriana, the Piazza and Dome of St. Peter’s, the Forum, the Piazza Navona and the EUR Building.” Peter Greenaway, The Belly of an Architect (Paris: Dis Voir, 1998), p. 11. For more on Boulleé, see Joseph Rykwert, “The Nefarious Influence on Modern Architecture of the Neo-Classical Architects Boulleé and Durand,” in The Necessity of Artifice (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), pp. 60–65.

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Capitoline, the Forum and the ancient city behind it, even as it spills out towards the nineteenth-century secular and bureaucratizing city it faces. In comparative terms, the Vittoriano is an idealization and inflation of the Campidoglio that schematizes the original through rationalization of its arrangement: a backdrop with pavilions, flanking buildings extending out from this that encloses a central space centered on an honorific statue, and individual elements: river gods with fountains, an equestrian statue on a pedestal, and a flood of steps, instead of a gentle stepped ramp. The regularization manifested by the Vittoriano is a re-presentation of the Campidoglio that transforms it into academicized nineteenth-century history. Whereas Michelangelo’s project settles into the Capitoline Hill in an attempt to enhance it, implementation of the Vittoriano entailed destruction of ancient remains rather than their incorporation, and alteration of the site instead of its accommodation, interpretation, and clarification. Rationalization of the site included preparing it for distant viewing of the monument, which required demolition of many buildings, a small number of which were reconstructed, though mostly partially, in different locations. Most of the buildings demolished were either constructed before 1400 or were thought to be undistinguished. Decisions to conserve or demolish a structure were based on two criteria: a structure’s apparent historical importance or the specific period of its construction.35 When plans for enlarging Piazza Venezia in front of the Vittoriano were first drawn up, the area was associated with Venice, then still occupied by Austria. Reconfiguration of Piazza Venezia was thus an attempt by the incipient Italian State to assert its power over Rome and to lay claim to Venice and other parts of the Italian homeland (including Trieste and Trentino), still held by Austria at the time. Equally, the grandiosity of the Vittoriano and its disruption of existing Rome inscribe attempts by a foreign power—the Piedmontese King (Emanuel II) and his prime minister (Cavour)—to assert their dominance over all of Italy, beginning with the capital. Although Sacconi’s Vittoriano and Michelangelo’s Campidoglio both play with the past, they do so differently, Michelangelo plays with it as a fluid presence, recollecting memories of it into the present. In its attempt to rationalize the myths of Rome, the Vittoriano transacts in history rather than memory. It instrumentalizes a mythic past in order to manifest the destiny of an uncertain present; to fix it as if it were some sort of objective quanta. In this way, the Vittoriano is the Campidoglio of the “third Rome,” following after antiquity and the medieval Roman Church. Author Luigi Barzini (1908–84) describes the Vittoriano as a spectacle that obscures reality through representation. In doing this, the monument takes on a double outline: what it represents through size and appropriation is deceptive, arguably make-believe, and yet this representation is likely also a presentation of 35 Daniele Manacordia and Ranto Tomassia, Il Picone del Regime (Roma: Armando Curcio, 1985), pp. 132, 134, includes a list of the buildings demolished and relocated. See also Alta Macadam, Blue Guide, Rome (London: Black, 1998), pp. 74–5.

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genuine national desire. Barzini asserts that the Vittoriano is both “the massive tribute of a grateful people to the king and military leader responsible for their liberation and the foundation of the Italian unified national state” but it is also an attempt to mask “the insecurity which surrounded the patriotic minority who managed to achieve Italian unity and tried to strengthen it against almost overwhelming opposition.”36 However genuine its core sentiments may be, the Vittoriano is a necessary distortion, imaging an assured hold on power that was not secure. Its surprising size and choice of Imperial Roman architecture for a monument dedicated to (shoring up) the new Republic are explicit expressions of the distortions it embodies. Barzini explains such choices as follows: Why does it conceal and practically swallow the Campidoglio? … Why is the style so self-consciously imperial? …They clearly wanted to celebrate a National Hero to cancel out many of the heroes of the past, a patriot to obliterate all nonpatriotic Italians, a king to annul all partisans of the Risorgimento. … In the end, one concludes that the monument is not only a sincere tribute of a grateful people to the memory of their great king, but also the theatrical representation of such a tribute.37

Fair points, but Barzini misses the role the Vittoriano plays on the symbolic topography of Rome in another way: if nothing else, Mazzini and Cavour (and Victor Emmanuel II and Garibaldi) would have agreed that the Roman Church must relinquish its temporal powers over Rome and Italy, a demand that made it difficult if not impossible for the Church to support Italian unity, which it saw as essentially secular if not atheist. On the other hand, the Church presented one of the most significant obstacles to the Risorgimento. Tensions between the Vatican and the Italian State (and monarchy) endured from unification until 1929 when Mussolini established a concordance with the Vatican, which, among other concessions, formally established Vatican City.38 Physically and symbolically, the Vittoriano stands as a permanent obstruction to the Via del Papa, and the possesso, effectively blocking Papal repossession of Rome by separating the Vatican from the Lateran. Perhaps bombast was the only way imaginable at the time for the Vittoriano to counter the Pope’s dominion over Rome. Although Barzini’s interpretation of the Vittoriano does not acknowledge it as also an affront to the Pope, he does support a reading of it that calls to mind Mannheim’s ideas of conservative utopia and Ricoeur’s about its pathological dimension. Mannheim defined conservative utopia as a vision embedded in existing reality that justifies itself as an inevitable growth out of the past. This locates the idea of Utopia in the past after the fact; a past employed to justify 36 Luigi Barzini (1964), The Italians (New York: Atheneum, 1977), pp. 86–7. 37 Ibid., p. 86. 38 See Ronald S. Cunsolo, Italian Nationalism: From Its Origins Until World War II (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger, 1990).

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the present and defend it against other claims on it. Imperial Rome’s ancient imperial grandeur and stability is the past the Vittoriano draws upon to defend its present (patriots and royalists) against opposing claims to power (partisans of the Risorgimento). The grandiosity of the Vittoriano places it outside of the lived experience of its setting, identifying it as an alien idealization of a present not yet achieved (or unachievable); such qualities also align it with Ricoeur’s conception of pathological utopia. The Vittoriano is utopian because, as Barzini suggests, it is a fiction—the story may not be pleasant, but it remains prospective even in its rigid identification with museological pastness. In sum, site preparation for, and construction of the Vittoriano permanently deformed the Capitoline Hill, altering its size, shape and disposition. Preparations also entailed destruction of temple ruins and other structures that were a bona fide record of the full extent of human occupation at the location. Medieval neighborhoods were also demolished to provide access to the construction site and the eventual monument. To facilitate speedy construction no time was given over to study or document what was destroyed. The very memory supposedly celebrated by the Vittoriano—the Capitoline Hill and its persistent symbolic occupation since Roman antiquity—was partially erased by it and reproduced as a confection; a bombastic yet mute and distorted telling of the myth of Rome. Such disregard for the specificity and significance of the intended location of the Vittoriano demonstrates a superficial understanding of the Campidoglio and the Capitoline as civic symbol and civic setting. More so, the exclusion of individuals’ unconscious attachments to specific places necessitated by its construction makes the Vittoriano depersonalizing as well. As such, it articulates an anti-social space of blueprint utopias (that spreads outward from it), in which time and necessity must be denied for the schema to be implemented. Individual experience is inevitably devalued in such spaces of near total closure, in which social process has been either truncated or banished. Accepting that the Vittoriano is a sort of Utopia, perhaps writ small, or embodies the utopian aspirations of the Italian State (at least at the time of its inception), the monument provides us with a concrete expression of pathological Utopia as a place (ideal?) in which the anomaly of individuals cannot be accounted for, or given a place. If the Vittoriano is conceptualized as a space that precedes the emergence of the sort of life it suggests, the experience of individuals as excluded, which it projects, does not recommend it. As an alternative, Michelangelo at the Campidoglio arguably made all that is unsettling about the Vittoriano good nearly four centuries earlier. Campidoglio If the Vittoriano, despite its size and prominence, is peculiarly invisible through the lens of architectural history, the Campidoglio remains conspicuously visible as a considerable human achievement, even though the newer monument now hides it

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from the north, and Mussolini’s treacherous Via del Teatro di Marcello separates it from the City. The unevenness of attention paid to the two structures is a symptom of what distinguishes them from each other: the Vittoriano distorts, whereas the Campidoglio clarifies. Art historian Charles De Tolnay describes the constitutive potential of the Campidoglio as follows: “Anyone coming from the narrow streets of the city and climbing slowly up the majestic cordonata would find at the top of the hill not chaos but a world ruled by order.”39 De Tolnay recognizes that Michelangelo’s central aim at the Campidoglio was to elucidate the venerable story of the Capitoline Hill nesting in it: Michelangelo wished to embody the very essence of the Capitol, which signifies caput mundi. The convex oval in the middle of the piazza seems to be the top of the terrestrial globe, while the palaces beyond rear above it in a higher sphere, a second world inhabited by the statues of ancient divinities.40

Although Europeans have known that the world is spherical since the early seventh century, it is more likely that Michelangelo conceived of the Capitol as the more ancient top of the world disc rather than as the more modern top of the terrestrial globe.41 Although the slight convexity of the Piazza does suggest the top of a sphere, it is akin to a skull rather than a globe. The central space of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio thus most likely refers to the occult token of a man’s head found onsite nearly 20 centuries earlier. In this way, Michelangelo fixes a permanent reference to the good beginnings of Rome, at once emphasizing association of the site to Rome’s special place among all others, but also the relationship between it and the social, as well as the individual, body of citizens. De Tolnay observes that Michelangelo emphasized the Capitoline’s cosmic significance through a restatement of the “universal notion attached to the Capitol,” which persisted from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, and perhaps still obtains.42 Michelangelo’s ability to balance local significance with universal import as the Campidoglio locates it as both a result and progenitor of history. In support of this view, architectural historian James Ackerman describes the Campidoglio as “one of the most imposing architectural compositions of all time,” which invests it with a unique status among subsequent

39 Charles De Tolnay, Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1975), p. 158. 40 Ibid., p. 158. 41 For example, St Isidore of Seville (560–636) posited that the Earth is spherical in his encyclopedic Etymologies. For further detail, see Ernest Brehaut, An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967). 42 Charles De Tolnay, p. 159.

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and previous urban settings.43 In this way, the Campidoglio is a model for later analogous efforts (including the Vittoriano): This crescendo of forms was destined to become archetypal in civic planning; though the vigour and ingenuity of the Campidoglio have rarely been equalled, the U-shaped plan, the convergence of low wings toward a dominant central accent and the double ramped stairway and the centralized monument were to become characteristic components of urban and villa designs in the following centuries.44

Ackerman’s description above affirms Michelangelo’s project as an exemplar of architectural virtue that is constitutive of urban orientation far beyond its temporal and spatial Roman location. If subsequent projects rarely equal the vigor and ingenuity of the Campidoglio, it is because most architects do not really attempt to understand the topographical stories of where they are working, so they rarely clarify them. Through an imaginative re-statement of preexisting conditions and patterns of life—perceptible now as then—Michelangelo interpreted a unique location on its own terms, and although he fixed its meaning to the setting through emphasis, he neither relinquished his own desire nor the availability of the place to stand as a potential solution to analogous problems far off in space and time. Michelangelo’s tenacious attachment to his own will, in the service of an offering, contributed to the establishment of a setting in which individual will and choice are permanently accessible to the individuals who appropriate it, and who refresh it through their presence. While Michelangelo’s invention is the result of choice, he was persistently preoccupied with making a virtue of existing (or found) physical, social, and symbolic conditions at important locations. On the other hand, architects, such as those who planned the Vittoriano, generally view challenging existing conditions as obstacles to be overcome, usually by erasing them. Herein lies a clear association with the register of Utopias that turns on whether or not their accommodation of individual human action and difference is felicitous or infelicitous. Whereas the Vittoriano mostly excludes both individual bodies and the city, the Campidoglio is an accommodating spatial concatenation of existing stories amenable to the continuous elaboration of individual and collective narratives across generations. In harmony with the above, architectural theorist, Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000) was intrigued with the Campidoglio as a field of human action. Like De Tolnay and Ackerman, he assigns the Campidoglio a special (utopic?) status because of its location “above the city,” which, he argues, engenders “a particular kind of expectation.” Arrival upon this high place introduces the visitor to a setting that, according to Norberg-Schulz, reveals a “unified spatial composition [that] seems to concretize a highly significant content”; particular to its setting, and made 43 James Ackerman, “The Capitoline Hill,” in The Architecture of Michelangelo (1960), 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 136. 44 Ibid., pp. 141–2.

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present by the constructed elements that form it. 45 In agreement with other writers, he also believes that Michelangelo’s project has a universal significance as well: The Capitol is more than a particular case of symbolic architecture. Because of the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the space it becomes one of the greatest concretizations of the concept of place ever created by man. At the Capitol we are at the centre, not only of the world, but of the departures and returns which give our own individual life meaning and content.46

The condition described by Norberg-Schulz is presented by the tense play between enclosing structure, dynamic platform, centrally located statue, and the multiplicity of choices confronting embodied persons as they move freely throughout the setting of the Campidoglio. The Campidoglio tells its story in the tension between its parts, a story analogized by the comings and goings of human beings struggling with multiple options presented to them by the setting, a condition of choice analogous to life in the world. Through a web of analogies—bodily as well as political—invention and enactment of numerous stories of human (moral) choices can occur at the Campidoglio. The complex, though, presents moral action as meaningful only when it occurs within a social setting. Norberg-Schulz argued that this is the Campidoglio’s significant content: “Here man experiences his existence as a meaningful, although, problematic relationship between his individual self and the world he belongs to.”47 De Tolnay, Ackerman, and Norberg-Schulz situate Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in a local-universal web with cosmological implications; it is a place proposed as world, as archetype, and as analogous to the problem of human moral action generally. The projection of utopias always includes these very considerations; whether a Utopia is pathological or constitutive turns on how much difference can be accommodated without extinguishing its vision. Of the numerous attempts to get at the Campidoglio, architectural historian Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) comes closest to the idea of Utopia I would like to emphasize. Giedion described Michelangelo’s accomplishment as the creation of “a sublime spatial symphony out of a jumble of medieval remains.”48 Sensitive to Michelangelo’s position within the flow of time, Giedion claimed that the artist was,

45 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Meaning in Western Architecture (1975) (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), p. 139. 46 Ibid., p. 141. 47 Ibid. 48 Sigfried Giedion Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th ed., Revised and Enlarged (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1967), p. 65.

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an admixture of Gothic and Baroque. He connects the worldly universality of the Baroque with the spirituality of the Gothic. … [H]e was always powerfully attracted to the problems of movement, had the urge to experiment with its artistic and physical potentialities, which, being inherent in Western man, permeates the Gothic just as it does the Baroque.49

As a persistent theme for Western man, movement, which is such a central element of the Campidoglio may explain the achievement of its special—archetypal—status in the history of architecture and urbanism. Mannheim also acknowledged movement as fundamental to social imagination, suggesting also that Utopia—as the motive force of social imagination—adds vitality to the flow of history. In the absence of documentary evidence, the Campidoglio provides the primary source for understanding Michelangelo’s intentions. As such, Giedion encourages, “a free scope for conjecture as to what was in his mind when he planned this proud civic monument to the purely nominal remnant of autonomy which the citizens of Rome could lay claim to.”50 Over time the Campidoglio has elicited a constancy of response too broad to be blamed on orthodoxy alone. And although Giedion was surely influenced by prior readings of the Campidoglio, as am I, he illuminates content that others have missed. Giedion sees in the Campidoglio “a passionate longing to retrieve the lost freedom of his [Michelangelo’s] native Florence,” a loss that prompted Michelangelo to leave his native Florence permanently in 1534 for Rome, four years after Florence lost its status as a city-republic.51 He sees in the Campidoglio a reflection of Michelangelo’s active defense of the former Florentine republic and also a dream of renewed republicanism “wrought out and made in stone.”52 As a built dream of an altered social and political condition, the Campidoglio manifests a realizable program for change situated in the present. Giedion’s interpretation is quite specific in this regard: Even in his planning and layout he knew how to give succinct expression to the conflicting motives that actuate every human being and every true democracy—the needs to preserve the rights of the individual while safeguarding those of the community.53

By identifying the Campidoglio as a setting for democracy analogous to life in a democracy, Giedion situates it as a locus between what is and what ought to be, a status brought to the fore by it being a constructed presence with an apparently 49 Ibid., p. 69. 50 Ibid., p. 70. 51 Ibid., p. 71. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid.

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limitless potential for emergent occupation and interpretation; an unstable condition the Campidoglio has paradoxically sustained with great stability for over 400 years. In fact, the way I am writing about the Campidoglio in this chapter—as suggestive of a superior setting in Utopia attuned to the individual—is but one more testament to the nearly inexhaustible utopian potential of the Campidoglio, which is not so much an adjunct of its status as a great work of art, but is arguably confirmation of this. Giedion illuminates the fundamentally in-between nature of the Campidoglio –in the interstices of memory and dream—in the following: What he had derived from his youthful experience in Florence was brought to reality in the Rome of the Counter Reformation, a Rome in which there was no freedom and no democracy. So his Capitol is both a symbol of the vanished liberties of the medieval city-republics and a memorial to the tragic dream of its creator.54

Emphasizing the Campidoglio as potential, as grounded in dream and memory, reveals Giedion’s interpretation of it as a corollary of Sir Thomas More’s critique of the modern in Utopia, which, with its presentation of medieval community as more just and humane than present conditions, is a utopian figure similar to the one taken up by nineteenth-century reformers including John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–96), and arguably in somewhat different forms by Le Corbusier (1887–1965), and Henri Lefebvre (1901–91). Medieval—pre-modern, pre-capitalist—life represents an ideal past that an inadequate present can still appeal to as a model for a reformed future. As such, the avenue of critique that informed Michelangelo arguably persists as a viable strategy for resisting the conditioning perspectives of the present. Giedion’s understanding of the Campidoglio recollects the capacity of utopians to give form to the often unconscious and unsatisfied desires of their community, which he acknowledges as crucial to an architect’s ability to frame the human environment, though he does not call it utopian. For Giedion, the Campidoglio acts as an exemplar of this capacity, which he uses as a vehicle to admonish contemporary architects for their apparent inability to analogize life in the social settings they ostensibly provide for it: The supine imagination evinced by our contemporary attempts to devise new features in town planning, such as civic centers, is invariably condoned on the plea that we no longer have a manner of life it would be possible to express. What Michelangelo has mirrored in the Area Capitolina is the baffling irrationality of historical events and the enigmatic omission of any direct relation between effect and cause. Once more we realize that a great artist is able to create the

54 Ibid.

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artistic form for a phase of social history long before that phase has begun to take tangible shape.55

The constitutive ability of great artists that Giedion describes is certainly reminiscent of utopian imaginings. Inventing settings for transformed conditions, and imagining the form of such conditions, are the first steps in the direction of their potential realization. Consequently, artists and utopians share a worldmaking vision that responds to what is by attempting to surpass inadequate present conditions through an appeal to exemplary past ones that affirm the potential of invented future results. When constitutive, such imagined places can accommodate time and necessity, as well as the anomalies of individuals, and will be well suited to shifting occasions. As such, emphasis will be on the qualitative. References Ackerman, James. The Architecture of Michelangelo (1960), 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Anonymous, The Life of Cola Di Rienzo. Trans. and Intro. John Wright. Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1975. Barzini, Luigi D. The Italians (1964). New York: Atheneum, 1977. Benedict (?). Mirabilia Urbis Romae (The Marvels of Rome) (1143), 2nd ed. Trans. and ed. Francis Morgan Nichols (1889). New York: Italica Press, 1986. Bondanella, Peter. Roman Images in the Modern World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Brehaut, Ernest. An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville (1912), including Seville’s Etymologies. New York: Burt Franklin, 1967. Burroughs, Charles. From Signs to Design. Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Cunsolo, Ronald S. Italian Nationalism: From its Origins to World War II. Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger, 1990. Dardi, Costantino. Archive online. Available from http://oberon.iuav.it/dardi/ dardi02.html; Internet; accessed 4 September 2013. De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Dickie, John. “La macchina da scrivere: The Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome and Italian nationalism,” The Italianist, No. 14 (1994): 261–85. Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th ed., Revised and Enlarged. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1967. Greenaway, Peter. The Belly of an Architect film. Directed by Peter Greenaway. United Kingdom and Italy: Callender Company, 1987. ———. The Belly of an Architect. Paris: Dis Voir, 1998. 55 Ibid.

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Kirk, Terry. The Architecture of Modern Italy: Volume I, The Challenge of Tradition 1790–1900. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Krautheimer, Richard. Rome. Profile of a City, 312–1308. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Livy. The Early History of Rome, Books I–V. Trans. Aubrey De Sélincourt. London: Penguin Books, 1971. Macadam, Alta. Blue Guide: Rome and Environs, 3rd ed. London: A. & C. Black, 1985. Manacorda, Daniele and Renato Tamassia. Il piccone Del regime. Roma: Armando Curcio Editore, 1985. Meeks, Carroll L.V. Italian Architecture 1750–1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Meaning in Western Architecture (1975). New York: Rizzoli, 1980. Roberts, John M. A Short History of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Rykwert, Joseph. “The Nefarious Influence on Modern Architecture of the Neo Classical Architects Boulleé and Durand.” The Necessity of Artifice. New York: Rizzoli, 1982, pp. 60–65. ———. Idea of a Town (1976). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Scaglione, Aldo, “Italy in the Middle Ages.” The Culture of Italy, Mediaeval to Modern. S. Bernard Chandler and Julius A. Molinaro, eds. Toronto: Griffin House, 1979, pp. 44–67. Stambaugh, John E. The Ancient Roman City. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988. Stinger, Charles L. The Renaissance in Rome. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985. Watkin, David. A History of Western Architecture, 2nd ed. New York: Barnes and Noble 1996. Woodward, Christopher. The Buildings of Europe: Rome. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995.

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Chapter 4

“Between the Utopian and the Primitive Horns of His Dilemma”: Aldous Huxley’s Selection of Peter Kropotkin over T.H. Huxley for the Savage’s “Third Alternative” in a Revised Brave New World Clifford T. Manlove

It has become a truism to believe that the characteristic that differentiates human beings from the rest of the natural world is self-reflection, leading to the ability to objectively explore, observe, use, and represent the surrounding world(s). The theory of natural selection simultaneously helps to explain the existence of this human distinction and, ironically, the relative scarcity of sentience in nature. In addition to explaining how biological changes occur in a given species over time, the theory of evolution also raises the question of whether human beings have a distinctive nature and, if so, whether they have a common nature. Since the Enlightenment, biologists, criminologists, philosophers, economists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and others, have been exploring the evolutionary and ethical implications for the “progress” of civilization. One window on these implications can be seen in an intellectual exchange that Aldous Huxley alludes to in his 1946 preface to Brave New World between Professor Thomas Henry Huxley and Prince Peter Kropotkin that took place during the late 1880s and early 90s. Critics who engage with Huxley’s preface tend to focus on his discussion of the technological deficiencies in Brave New World, like the absence of nuclear technology. I argue in this chapter that Huxley was more concerned with an ethical and political absence in his novel, especially with respect to the impact of the biological sciences and evolution on individual subjectivity. Three Responses to the Utopian Dilemma Posed by the Theory of Evolution Writing a preface to the 1946 edition of what many have called one of the three great negative utopias of the twentieth century, Brave New World (1932), Aldous Huxley speculates on the vexed relationships between art, science, and ethics, and on what he would change:

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If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma, would lie the possibility of sanity—a possibility already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian,1 politics Kropotkinesque co-operative.2

This point of dissatisfaction with the widely read dystopian novel is a reference to the debate between Aldous Huxley’s grandfather, T.H. Huxley and Peter Kropotkin in the pages of The Nineteenth Century over the theory of evolution, and its sociopolitical implications. While explicitly lauding the theories of Henry George (“The Single Tax”) and Peter Kropotkin (“anarcho-syndicalism”), the two “horns of his dilemma” that Aldous Huxley says he explores in Brave New World are represented best by the “Social Darwinist” arguments of his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, and by Jean Jacques Rousseau. On the one hand, it is precisely the politics involved in a scientific approach to advancing civilization advocated by Professor Huxley that will lead to “dystopia” and World State in the not so distant future Brave New World argues.3 On the other hand, it is the relatively peaceful and natural life of the “Noble Savage” that Aldous Huxley also critiques through the life of the protagonist, John Savage, evoking the radical “optimism” of Rousseau. As Aldous Huxley describes in his preface, written 14 years after the novel, “The Savage is only offered two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal.”4 Ironically, Aldous Huxley’s “third alternative” also lionizes his grandfather’s chief scientific antagonist of the late 1880s and early 90s, Prince Peter Kropotkin. Aldous Huxley’s invocation of Kropotkin is doubly ironic given published comments about, and his own scholarly analysis of his grandfather, Thomas Henry. A familial living legend, the “Grand-Pater” and “Professor” would inspire every male member of the Huxley family to intellectual greatness (and even celebrity). Thomas Henry’s own scientific career inaugurated the dynasty that would make the family a part of Britain’s “intellectual aristocracy.”5 Although Thomas Henry 1 Huxley ably turns the name of Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty (1879) and the “Single Tax,” into an ironic adjective suggestive of a “third alternative” political aesthetic sensibility that would also be in stark contrast to the Georgian style. In a letter of 14 December 1889 to James Knowles, Huxley asks, “Did you ever read Henry George’s book ‘Progress and Poverty’? It is more damneder nonsense than poor Rousseau’s blether. And to think of the popularity of the book!” To that end, Huxley published an essay refuting George, “Natural and Political Rights” (in February, 1890, in The Nineteenth Century), for his rejection of Malthus. 2 Huxley, Brave New World, ix; emphasis added. 3 Woodcock, The Anarchist Prince, 32. 4 Huxley, Brave New World, ix viii. 5 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 19, 251; Murray, Aldous Huxley, 18.

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died in 1895, nearly a year before the birth of his grandson, Aldous felt his presence from his earliest memories and knew his grandfather’s body of published work thoroughly by 1932.6 Indicative of Huxley’s recurring penchant for comparing the epistemologies of science and literature, it is the same year that he publishes Brave New World, 1932, that Aldous is invited to give the Huxley Memorial Lecture, in which he argues for reading his grandfather as an “artist,” entitled, “T. H. Huxley as a Man of Letters.”7 George Woodcock, author of biographies on both Aldous Huxley and Peter Kropotkin, comments on Aldous’s ability to simultaneously respect science while embracing spirit: “By that aspiration towards gnosticism, he introduced an element completely alien to his grandfather’s view of existence; he implicitly condemned as insufficient in the direction of wisdom, and as excessive in the direction of uncontrolled power, the pursuit of science without spiritual illumination.”8 While biographer Nicholas Murray is correct in seeing Huxley’s lecture as a great homage to his grandfather, Aldous also clearly relegates Thomas Henry’s role in modern biology to that of history. Aldous opens his lecture by quoting G.K. Chesterton’s appraisal of Thomas Henry’s contributions to biology in The Victorian Age in Literature: “‘Huxley especially, was much more a literary than a scientific man’.”9 Although Aldous criticizes this assessment of his grandfather, his principal disagreement with Chesterton is over the use of the past tense, not that his grandfather’s writing is relevant only as “literature” rather than as living science. “As a scientific man, [T. H.] Huxley, like all his great contemporaries and predecessors, is now a mere historical figure.”10 Using the metaphor of extinction, a staple of Social Darwinism, Aldous describes his grandfather’s place in the present: “By what seems a strange paradox, the older scientists survive mainly as artists. … Science is soon out of date, art is not.”11 While the knowledge that science and literature produce are profoundly distinct, the two practices nevertheless share many methods, such as reliance on figurative language and narrative to represent that knowledge. Aldous praises his grandfather as a “man of letters,” while questioning the applicability of science “as the means to producing a race of free individuals.”12 6 Murray, Aldous Huxley, 260. 7 Ibid., 18. This lecture was invited to be the 1932 contribution to a series of lectures about the work of T.H. Huxley, “founded by the Governing Body of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1925, following the celebration of the Centenary of Huxley’s birth,” according to a notice on the inside of the front cover of the lecture, originally published as a pamphlet by Macmillan in 1932. Aldous Huxley republished the lecture as part of his essay collection, The Olive Tree, changing the title slightly from “T. H. Huxley as a Man of Letters” to “T. H. Huxley as a Literary Man,” emphasizing literariness over the nineteenth-century cult of the great writer sense that the original title infers. 8 Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour, 32. 9  G.K. Chesterton quoted in Huxley, “Man of Letters,” 1. 10 Huxley, “Man of Letters,” 4. 11 Ibid., 3. 12 Huxley, Brave New World, xvii.

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It is precisely this point that is at the heart of T.H. Huxley and Peter Kropotkin’s argument: the role of science as a tool to advance civilization, and the individual. Or, as Aldous puts it in his preface when describing his “third alternative”: “Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man should be adapted and enslaved to them.”13 Like so many of his contemporaries, T.H. Huxley believed that a community of individuals— a nation—would function (“struggle” or “compete”) best when it “adapted” to the primacy of scientific knowledge. In stark contrast to this modern norm, Kropotkin used science and the scientific method as a tool in the service of humanity and (ideally) the many communities of freely associating individuals that constitute it. These two figures stand in stark contrast to one another. Professor Thomas Henry Huxley: famed English biologist and Defender of Darwin before Bishop Wilberforce, educator and advocate for national public science education, Trustee of the British Museum, Fellow of the Royal Society. And Prince Peter Kropotkin: Russian aristocrat and distant relative of the Tsar, military officer, anarchist intellectual and political prisoner, geographer, geologist, zoologist. Yet, despite their personal, political, and scientific differences, T.H. Huxley and Peter Kropotkin both championed the rights and freedoms of the individual to resist mass culture, whether religious, political, or scientific. In the case of Huxley, in addition to his project to democratize science education in Great Britain, he coined the word “agnostic” to denote the power of individual subjectivity. In the case of Kropotkin, in addition to being the father of modern intellectual anarchism by way of his theory of anarcho-syndicalism, he also trekked across Siberia to make the observations leading to his theory of mutual-aid. Huxley and Kropotkin in The Nineteenth Century While debates over the social dimension of “Darwinism” raged most fervently between 1850 and 1950, and beyond to some degree, the period of 1885 to 1905 saw a distinctive and distilled polarization between those who saw competition and those who saw cooperation as the scientific cause and consequence of the “progress” of “civilization.” Many of these debates took place in the pages of the most widely read and quoted scientific and cultural periodicals of the day in both Europe and North America. One periodical notable for attracting contributors of vastly differing positions on evolution was the London journal, The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, run by long-time editor, James Knowles. In the pages of The Nineteenth Century during the 1880s and 90s, many scientists, scholars, theologians, politicians, and “workingmen” were able to follow a lengthy and multifaceted debate over the social implications of the theory of natural selection. Both Huxley and Kropotkin also had long relationships with The Nineteenth 13 Ibid., ix.

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Century prior to the publishing of their views on evolution; both were avid readers of the academic and cultural journal, both would have been familiar with the scientific and political positions of the other published there and elsewhere. Besides social and ethical implications of evolutionary theory, Huxley also published widely in The Nineteenth Century on issues of economics, anthropology, religion, and ethics; Kropotkin also published on economics, geography, conditions in Russia, and his own theory of anarcho-syndicalism. Nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) was among the foremost scientists to pursue the social implications of nineteenth-century biology, lecturing and publishing widely in issues of race, anthropology, religion, economics, culture, and the origins of human civilization. Huxley was also among the first scientists to make contributions to the advancement of science education for the public in Great Britain. In 1854, Huxley became Professor of Biology and, from 1881 until his death, was also the Dean of the Royal College of Science and Royal School of Mines. In 1888, Huxley published one of the pivotal essays on what has come to be seen as “Social Darwinism” in The Nineteenth Century entitled, “The Struggle for Existence: A Programme.” Professor Huxley’s son, Leonard (father of Aldous), describes the importance of the essay in The Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley: “on the one hand [“Struggle for Existence”] ran counter to some of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s [Social Darwinist] theories of society; and on the other, is noticeable as briefly enunciating the main thesis of his ‘Romanes Lecture’ of 1893.”14 Chosen by James Knowles to be the lead essay in the February number, “Struggle for Existence” is Huxley’s argument that society is not only like nature, but that nature also, though orderly, is “non-moral.” Destruction and change observed in nature over time should be viewed as neither good nor bad, but as a “material,” scientific fact with both positive and negative effects. Despite disparate biographies, histories, politics, nationalities, and scientific fields, Huxley and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) both lived for considerable portions of their lives in London. Prior to living in London, Kropotkin lived in St Petersburg, Russia and in France. Following scientific, military, and political careers in Russia, Kropotkin made his first visit to Britain in 1876, where he worked to support his family as a journalist and free-lance writer. Upon returning to France in December, 1882, Kropotkin was arrested and imprisoned for “belonging to the International Working Men’s Association (the First International), and with being 14 L. Huxley, Life Letters of T. H. Huxley, 199. While considering Herbert Spencer a friend, both Huxley and Darwin were afraid to have their work associated with him, and Huxley especially worked to differentiate his views from Spencer; Spencer not only popularized Social Darwinism, he coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” The Romanes Lecture Series was originally endowed by British psychologist and evolutionary theorist, George John Romanes (1848–94); the inaugural lecture was given in 1893 by T.H. Huxley at Oxford University. Huxley’s son, Julian, was invited to give the Fiftieth Anniversary Lecture in 1943. Both lectures were published by Julian as Touchstone for Ethics 1893–1943. The Romanes Series continues to this day.

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concerned in the revolutionary demonstrations at Lyons.”15 Soon after, a petition was circulated within the British intellectual community calling for the French government to arrange for Kropotkin’s early release, more humane treatment for him while he was in prison, and for permission for him to see his wife.16 While many notable scientists and “men of letters” signed, Huxley refused, “and stated that in his opinion, Kropotkin was too well off as he was.”17 According to John Hewetson, in Mutual Aid and Social Evolution, “It is an open question whether Kropotkin knew of Huxley’s attitude to him in this personal matter.”18 Ashley Montagu takes a more sympathetic view of Huxley’s refusal to support Kropotkin: “This has been reported as evidence of Huxley’s ‘churlishness’. It was nothing of the kind. In 1883, Huxley had been elected President of the Royal Society.”19 Huxley responded to “one correspondent” on this point, “So long as I am President of the Royal Society, I shall feel bound to abstain from taking any prominent part in public movements as to the propriety of which the opinions of the Fellows of the Society differ.”20 Known for being a political activist for so many other issues, being president of the Royal Society offered Huxley convenient cover for refusing to assist a popular and well-respected colleague whose politics he detested. While he was never openly critical of Huxley’s refusal to sign the petition, Kropotkin did record in his Memoirs that even Herbert Spencer signed.21 “Struggle for Existence” Versus “Mutual Aid” Huxley makes the argument that human “nature” must be innately and intensely competitive as a consequence of the Malthusian relationship between an environment that features scarcity and a population that desires “to multiply without limit.”22 The purpose of civilization is to mitigate this “struggle” with a moral aim in sight, realizing nevertheless that “struggle” is “natural” and inevitable.23 Kropotkin counters that nature and man are both innately capable of competitive and ethical acts, with the “instinct” for “mutual aid” dominating the “instinct” for “mutual struggle.”24 Kropotkin admits that struggle against nature, 15 Hewetson, Mutual Aid & Social Evolution, 3. 16 Hewetson, Mutual Aid & Social Evolution, 3; Woodcock and Avakumović, Anarchist Prince, 193. 17 T.H. Huxley quoted in Hewetson, Mutual Aid & Social Evolution, 3. 18 Hewetson, Mutual Aid & Social Evolution, 3. 19 Montagu, Foreword, n. pag. 20 T.H. Huxley quoted in Montagu, Foreword, n. pag. 21 According to Woodcock and Avakumović, the original petition on behalf of Kropotkin stored in the French National Archives does not show the signature of Spencer (194). 22 Huxley, “Struggle for Existence,” 166. 23 Ibid., 165. 24 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, vii–viii.

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rather than within species as Huxley argues, is also part of nature and a “factor in evolution,” but that “cooperation” is a more essential and powerful instinct, imperative to the survival and success of an individual, a species, or a community that can be seen throughout the natural world.25 With the success of Charles Darwin’s work at attracting the acceptance of most scientists, Huxley published his manifesto on the competitive nature of natural selection believing that only theology and philosophy offered any real resistance worth addressing in his argument. And, in fact, it is the religious counterargument that has been loudest and is best remembered.26 As a result, Huxley was unprepared—before and after the publishing of his manifesto—for Kropotkin’s reversal of his argument from a scientific point of view. Huxley opens “The Struggle for Existence” by challenging those “who have made a study of the phenomena of life as they are exhibited by the higher forms of the animal world, the optimistic dogma that this is the best of all possible worlds will seem little better than a libel upon possibility,”27 an appeal to scientific reason naturally at odds with any religious ontology. Huxley argues that human beings are distinct from nature and the animal kingdom by virtue of the ability to build “civilization,” and the evolution of ethics that comes with it. Nature is, at best, amoral and, in practical terms, nature behaves as if it had conscious, evil intent for human beings.28 Finally, in supporting the idea of human progress and attaching it to the idea of making the world a better place for human beings, Huxley also positions himself as an advocate for scientific necessity, and therefore as a (negative) utopian from Aldous Huxley’s point of view. It is the use of science to improve social and individual life that Aldous Huxley simultaneously warns against in Brave New World and lauds as art in his 1932 memorial lecture on T.H. Huxley. Each of these implications for Huxley’s caution at seeing the natural world in an optimistic light, are attempts to head off spiritual and religious objections to evolutionary theory. It is not until he reads Huxley’s, “The Struggle for Existence,” that Kropotkin realizes he must address the role of natural selection in the relationship of the individual subject to a “population” based on his own scientific observations. In the introduction to Mutual Aid, Kropotkin assesses the various works that combine sociology and “Darwinism”: I could agree with none of the works and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They all endeavored to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the means of existence, … of every man against all …, was “a Law of Nature.” This view … I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless 25 Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” 335. 26 Hewetson, Mutual Aid & Social Evolution, 4. 27 Huxley, “Struggle for Existence,” 161. 28 Ibid., 167.

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inner war for life within each species, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.29

Far from rejecting the sociological implications of Darwin’s discoveries, Kropotkin seeks to temper the elitist and racist readings most scientists of the late nineteenth century draw from The Descent of Man. Kropotkin does not find the story of a primordial and universal struggle for existence plausible scientifically, despite the commonsense narrative elegance of that theory. One of Kropotkin’s chief criticisms of the Social Darwinists, and Huxley in particular, was their blanket assumption, with little hard evidence, of a universal, prehistoric struggle of “each against all” that continues to this very day. A debate between Huxley and Kropotkin over the nature of and social implications for natural selection would center on four principal questions that I address in the rest of the chapter. What is “Nature”? and How to Define “Natural Selection”? A certain level of disagreement and discomfort has accompanied the naming of the theory that explains biological change in a species over time that was co-discovered by Charles Darwin (1809–82) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). This difficulty was the inevitable result of the need to name something that has never been seen before, something that could be difficult to see or count, and something that is complicated still further by a grand theory having universal implications (and applications). Or, as Raymond Williams, puts it, “‘Nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the language.”30 And when examining arguments over the social dimension of “evolution,” how nature is represented in the theory is reflective of its politics, and its view of the future. Historically, four phrases/terms have been used to name or describe Darwin and Wallace’s theory: “evolution,” “survival of the fittest,” “struggle for existence,” and “natural selection.” While each of these terms or phrases emphasizes different aspects of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of biological change over time, there are patterns as well. To begin with, there is some disagreement over how the term “evolution” came to be used and whether it accurately describes the effects of natural selection. Although Darwin does use the words “evolve” and “evolves” in references to how species change over time in The Origin of Species, both Darwin and Huxley were troubled by how the term was used by Huxley’s critics (like Kropotkin) and Social Darwinist competitors, especially Herbert Spencer (who is said to have coined the term in 1852). While he accepts that “evolution” has come to be the name of Darwin and Wallace’s theory, and uses that term in his “struggle for existence manifesto,” Huxley also rejects any association of evolutionary changes with any moral or ethical value in nature, or human progress. More acceptable to Darwin and Huxley were “survival of the fittest” and “struggle for existence,” both of which Kropotkin challenged because 29 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, ix–x. 30 Williams, Keywords, 219.

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he felt they did not emphasize the primary implication of Darwin and Wallace’s theory. Also coined by Spencer, “survival of the fittest” was recommended to Darwin by Wallace. “Struggle for existence” is evidence of the high degree of influence Malthus’s population theory had on Darwin and Wallace; this is the preferred term of Huxley, given the title of his manifesto. Finally, “natural selection” was a term Darwin himself coined to highlight the role of nature in the mechanism of evolution. Defining “nature” usually requires a consideration of whether it has a moral or ethical component, and whether it can include sentience. In Huxley’s “struggle for existence” theory, nature is seen as simultaneously “non-moral” yet murderous; though lacking consciousness (“sentience”), as seen in his use of Tennyson’s poetic phrase from the 56th stanza of “In Memoriam” (1850): “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”31 Nearly all of the metaphors and hypothetical narratives Huxley uses in “The Struggle for Existence” make this point, for example: “the goodness of the right hand which helps the deer, and the wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the wolf, will neutralise [sic] one another; and the course of nature will appear to be neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.”32 Huxley’s point is that while nature might appear evil, it is actually responding to a blind instinct and sense of necessity that humanity and civilization stand apart from. Kropotkin counters that human ethics and morality mirror what can be already observed in nature. Based on his own scientific observations, humanity and civilization must be seen as part of nature, which is why several chapters of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid focus on human beings at various stages of social development. A major point of contention between Huxley and Kropotkin concerns whether natural selection necessarily implies the possibility of “progress,” whether in nature or humanity. What connection is there between survival and progress (or success)? Indeed, Darwin and Huxley were never comfortable with the term “evolution” being applied to the theory of natural selection because they felt that not all changes a species might undergo in response to the forces of natural selection might prove good ultimately, as the term “evolution” implies. Actually, it makes sense for Huxley to downplay the connection of natural selection to progress because of the great emphasis he places on the “non-moral” essence of nature. Indeed, many of Huxley’s philosophical, theological, and scientific critics attack him for a perceived obsession with a brutal view of progress. According to Huxley in his manifesto: it is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant re-adjustment of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those

31 Tennyson, “In Memorium,” Line 1087. 32 Huxley, “Struggle for Existence,” 162.

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conditions whether the direction of modifications effected shall be upward or downward. Retrogressive is as practicable as progressive metamorphosis.33

It is on this point that Huxley moves to both dissociate nature from morality and to reduce the social stakes for natural selection. While science may be about progress, natural selection itself is about separating the wheat from the chaff; according to Huxley, individual survival in and of itself does not necessarily improve civilization. Unlike Huxley, who relies more upon “natural selection” and metaphors of “struggle,” Kropotkin makes frequent use of the term “evolution” in arguing that the practice of mutual aid leads to social and biological improvement in a species: “when we see that in the animal world, progressive development and mutual aid go hand in hand, while the inner struggle within the species is concomitant with retrogressive development.”34 Contrary to Huxley’s implication that active, “individual” struggle is more likely to lead to progress than the pursuit of “peace,” Kropotkin argues, based on observations rather than anecdotes, that individual actions and choices can be made to promote “progress,” sociably. Does Sociability Exist in Nature? Given their training in the natural sciences, it makes sense for both Huxley and Kropotkin to support many of their generalizations about the social dimension of natural selection with evidence gathered from observations of animal behavior (and remains) in nature, and from anthropology. According to Huxley, critics of evolutionary theory—especially religious critics—mistake the struggle for existence for a moral contest: “From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.”35 Using Imperial Rome as an extended metaphor meant to appeal to common sense, Huxley is making several points, besides underscoring his own observations of competition in nature. Firstly, it is a mistake to see nature through the eyes of morality, as many (lay) observers are wont to do; nature is a “non-moral” arena. Secondly, competition is universal in nature; all individuals are subject to it and must participate or else parish. Finally, nature is far harsher on its “creatures” than “civilization” could ever be. Conducted in Siberia during the early 1860s—with Darwin’s recently published Origin of Species on his mind36—Kropotkin’s field observations directly contradict those of Huxley: “even in those spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find—although I was eagerly looking for it—that bitter struggle for the 33 Ibid., 163. 34 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 296; emphasis added. 35 Huxley, “Struggle for Existence,” 163. 36 Montagu, Foreword, n. pag.

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means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.”37 In Kropotkin’s view, the main sources of “struggle for life” arise from the various conditions that can be found in nature itself (such as weather, fire, etc.) and, of course, among different species. And so while Kropotkin might be critical of the interpretation of natural selection as principally engendering competition, he is not using his observations to refute the theory itself—as religious moral critics do—rather, he is seeking to reinterpret the causes and consequences for it and complement the theory of natural selection. What is Individual and Human “Nature”? Huxley’s approach to the competitive nature of natural selection relies heavily upon the notion of the individual existing prior to any social organization (with the origin of society in the family), while Kropotkin’s emphasis on cooperation puts individuality strictly within the context of membership within a community that co-exists with individual subjectivity. Yet, in Kropotkin’s approach, it also seems to be up to each individual to choose to opt for mutual aid despite its instinctive nature. Whether the individual or the community is the essential driving force of human progress is also a debate of importance to postcolonial studies, and one influenced by the theoretical methodologies at stake. For example, in postcolonial studies interested in a social science or cultural studies perspective, progress is measured with respect to social and cultural capital/knowledge. Whereas, what have come to be collectively and variously known as the “poststructuralist” or “postmodern” approaches to postcolonial studies see progress as a function of building individual freedom in a social context, understanding the vexed relationship between subjectivity and identity. Today’s postcolonial interest in identity, at both the individual and community levels, is at stake here. The economic and political beliefs of Huxley and Kropotkin in particular have some bearing here as well. In Huxley’s narrative society and civilization are formed by individuals seeking to mitigate the struggle for existence that produces natural selection. Unlike Kropotkin’s understanding of the individual, who identifies with the humanity around her, individuals in Huxley’s view of natural history are motivated by self-interest and immediate survival. From Kropotkin’s point of view, social evolution is at its best when individuals are motivated by the progress of humanity as a community, diffusely organized around syndicalism rather than centrally administered by a government (no matter how scientific its methods). While it might seem that love and personal altruism would provide a more literal narrative than that of the relation of individual to society, Kropotkin challenges altruism as a motive for practicing mutual aid: 37 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, vii.

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it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of everyone’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.38

Admittedly tautological—as is the mechanism of mutual struggle—mutual aid arises and progresses from both “instinct” and, increasingly, identification (or counter-identification): visually, historically, and spiritually. The sort of individual “man” (read subject) Kropotkin is describing (and which Aldous Huxley would advocate) would be characterized and defined by humanity rather than by secondary characteristics of identity like race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender and sexuality, or disability. Is Colonialism a Factor in Natural Selection? What is called the struggle for existence is really a struggle for space. —Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes” (1992)

Akin to the question about the nature of progress is the distinction between and comparison of prehistoric to modern life, a distinction crucial to understanding the persistence of the colonial impulse. Just as nineteenth-century scientists, philosophers, and historians hypothesized about prehistoric man, Huxley and Kropotkin are both concerned with the issue of how prehistoric individuals and societies functioned in order to explain human nature and behavior in the present. Early in his manifesto, Huxley paints a commonsense picture of primitive society that must still rings true to many: However imperfect the relics of prehistoric men may be, the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the conclusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, before the origins of the oldest known civilisations [sic], men were savages of a very low type. They strove with their enemies and their competitors, they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyæna.39

Prehistoric humans were strictly animals and fully creatures living in a “state of nature.” Huxley’s description of the world of prehistory—based on the “clear evidence” of archaeology and biology—sounds here like the fictional “onceupon-a-time” narratives of fantasy. The word “savages” implies something more 38 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, xiii–xiv; emphasis added. 39 Huxley, “Struggle for Existence,” 165.

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than a scientific attitude; it hints at both a “Western” sense of cultural identity and superiority, and a distinctly class-conscious sense of social order. Also the metaphorical connection of “enemies” and “competitors” benefits from its association with prehistoric “evidence.” A key question raised by the study of primitive culture concerns the history of the growth of “community” and broader social organizations. Which came first, the individual or family (or other social groupings)? Huxley’s view of prehistory is very much one of individual struggle, mitigated only by family associations: “the weakest and the stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and the shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.”40 Huxley is making an observation based on supposition, not evidence. Not only is the idea that prehistoric life “was a continuous free fight” mere speculation, it is speculation developed simply to support a theory undergirding a competitive present, the result of perpetual natural selection. In contrast to Huxley, Kropotkin was surprised and impressed by “The number and importance of mutual-aid institutions which were developed by the creative genius of the savage and half-savage masses, during the earliest clan-period of mankind and still more during the next village-community period, and the immense influence these institutions have exercised upon the subsequent development of mankind, down to the present times …”41 Just like many other writings that touch on the issue of colonialism, Rousseau’s “noble savage” enters the arguments of both Huxley and Kropotkin; each uses Rousseau as a means of attacking what both see as optimistic counter-arguments. While Huxley openly argues that human beings living in a state of nature would be forced by natural selection to compete individually and violently, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid “institutions” must have been developed by even the most primitive of humans.42 Kropotkin rejects Huxley’s claim (based on Hobbes) that the family was the first social group developed by primitive humans, “the family is a very late product of human evolution.”43 Kropotkin argues further that contemporary primitive peoples do not represent “degeneration” in evolutionary terms, despite their putative primitivism.44 40 Ibid., 165. 41 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, xv. 42 Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid among Savages,” 540. 43 Ibid., 79. 44 Ibid., 542. In a footnote in Totem and Taboo, Freud speaks to the logical flaw in seeing the origins of modernity in the primitive: “primitive races are not young races but really are as old as the most civilized, and that we have no right to expect that they have preserved their original ideas and institutions for our information without any evolution or distortion. It is certain, on the contrary, that far-reaching changes in all directions have taken place among primitive races” (133).

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Given the technological and cultural distinctions to be found between the “great” modern nation-states of the nineteenth century and much of the rest of the world, it is not surprising that colonialism turned to evolutionary theory for support. Using a metaphor that found purchase both in Europe and the American South (for the plantation and for political economy), Huxley compares the colonial enterprise to gardening: “The process of colonization presents analogies to the formation of a garden which are highly instructive.”45 While Huxley intended that this extended metaphor should be “instructive” of the relationship between ethics and evolution, it is also highly instructive about the way colonialism viewed its modern mission at the turn of the century, and perhaps is instructive of the relations between the developed and the developing worlds 100 years later. “Considered as a whole, the colony is a composite unit introduced into the old state of nature; and, therefore, a competitor in the struggle for existence, to conquer or be vanquished.”46 Would Huxley insist that the results of this colonial struggle should be seen as “non-moral”? Huxley extends his metaphor of the garden as an example of how civilization blunts the trauma of natural selection to the goals of the colony seeking to displace the “state of nature”: “Supposing the [colonial] administrator to be guided by purely scientific considerations, he would, like the gardener, meet this most serious difficulty [of colonial growth] by systematic extirpation, or exclusion, of the superfluous.”47 It should be noted that the land that Huxley sees as being in a state of nature also includes “primitive” peoples and “races.” While much has been made of the use that nineteenth-century capitalists made of Social Darwinism to legitimate their ruthless economics, the same can be said for the vast expansion of colonialism during the nineteenth century. Homi Bhabha makes this very point, “colonial societies … were the proving grounds for Social Darwinist administrative discourses all through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”48 And Sven Lindqvist sums up the Social Darwinist defense of colonialism this way: “By displacing the lower races, man is only doing what the better organized plants do with the less well organized, and what more highly developed animals do with the less developed.”49 This summation of the Social Darwinist defense of colonialism echoes Huxley’s comparison of a modern colony to garden. The debate over the social dimensions of evolution at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is relevant to postcolonial questions arising more than 100 years later because the argumentative positions are largely the same: competitive models of postcolonial social organization versus models advocating cooperation; national and international “governmentality” versus local, NGOstyle organization and syndicalism.

45 Huxley, “Prolegomena,” 48. 46 Ibid., 48. 47 Ibid., 51. 48 Bhabha, Location of Culture, 248. 49 Lindqvist, “Exterminate the Brutes,” 148.

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In his preface to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes how adding a “Kropotkinesque” third alternative for his protagonist would change the narrative of the novel: Brought up among the primitives, the Savage (in this hypothetical new version of the book) would not be transported to Utopia until he had an opportunity of learning something at first hand about the nature of a society of freely cooperating individuals devoted to the pursuit of sanity. Thus altered, Brave New World would possess artistic and (if it is possible to use so large a word in connection with a work of fiction) a philosophical completeness, which in its present form it evidently lacks.50

Huxley’s Brave New World (and its preface) dramatizes the debate (the competing narratives) about whether human nature is competitive or cooperative that is emblematic not only of the way that America feels about its place with respect to the rest of the world but also of debates over the rights of the individual versus globalization (and the various scientific practices it represents). What is human nature; does it exist in common? To whom do individuals owe their primary loyalty, to their families or local communities, to their nations or governments, to humanity and the earth, or to themselves? What is the place of the individual within a community; which is more essential? Unfortunately, a more public debate over defining the factors of evolution (and their social consequences) has been obscured by the older, more simplistic argument—as dramatic as it might be—over the particular facts associated with scientific observations of biological change in individual species over time. While the science of both Huxley and Kropotkin has been “superannuated,” as Aldous Huxley would have put it in his 1932 tribute to his grandfather, their rhetorical moves and political investments remain with us. References Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. N.p.: Basic, 1984. Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley, A Biography. New York: Knopf-Harper, 1974. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. 1859. Reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1993. ———. The Descent of Man. 1874. Reprint, New York: Prometheus, 1998. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. 1913. Translated by A.A. Brill. Reprint, New York: Random House, 1946. 50 Huxley, Brave New World, x.

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George, Henry. Progress and Poverty. 1879. Reprint, New York: Schalkenbach, 1979. Gould, Stephen Jay. “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot.” Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton, 1991. Hewetson, John. Mutual Aid & Social Evolution: Mutual Aid and the Social Significance of Darwinism. London: Freedom Press, 1946. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932. Reprint, New York: Perennial-Harper, 998. ———. T. H. Huxley as a Man of Letters. London: Macmillan, 1932. ———. “T. H. Huxley as a Literary Man.” 1932. The Olive Tree and Other Essays. 2nd ed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937. 46–81. Huxley, Julian. “Evolutionary Ethics.” T.H. Huxley and J. Huxley, 113–66. Huxley, Leonard. The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley. 2 vols. London: Appleton, 1900. Huxley, T.H. “Evolution and Ethics.” J. Huxley, Touchstone, 67–112. ———. “The Struggle for Existence: A Programme.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 23 (February 1888): 161–80. ———. “To Sir Edward Frankland.” 6 Feb. 1888. L. Huxley, 199. ———. Letter to James Knowles. 1 June 1888. T.H. Huxley Papers. Wellcome Library, London. ———. Letter to James Knowles. 3 June 1888. T.H. Huxley Papers. Wellcome Library, London. ———. “To James Knowles.” 14 Dec. 1889. L. Huxley, 260–61. ———. “Natural and Political Rights.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 27 (Feb. 1890): 173–95. ———. Letter to John Tyndall. 15 Oct. 1892. Huxley Collection. Imperial College Library, London. ———. Letter to James Knowles. 9 Nov. 1893. T.H. Huxley Papers. Wellcome Library, London. ———. “Prolegomena.” 1894. T.H. Huxley and J. Huxley, 38–66. Huxley, T.H. and Julian Huxley. Touchstone for Ethics 1893–1943. New York and London: Harper, 1947. Knowles, James. Letter to T.H. Huxley. 2 June 1888. Huxley Collection. Imperial College Library, London. Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. 1902. Boston: Extending Horizons Porter, n.d. ———. Modern Science and Anarchism. London: Freedom Press, 1912. Kropotkin, Prince. “The Coming Reign of Plenty.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 23 (Jun. 1888): 817–37. ———. “Mutual Aid among Animals.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 28 (Sept. 1890): 337–54. Pt. 1 of a series of 8 on Mutual Aid. ———. “Mutual Aid among Animals.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 28 (Nov. 1890): 699–719. Pt. 2 of a series of 8 on Mutual Aid.

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———. “Mutual Aid among Savages.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 29 (Apr. 1891): 538–59. Pt. 3 of a series of 8 on Mutual Aid. ———. “Mutual Aid amongst Ourselves.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 39 (Jun. 1896): 914–36. Pt. 8 of a series of 8 on Mutual Aid. ———. Ethics: Origin and Development. 1924. Translated by Louis S. Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff. New York: Tudor, 1947. Lindqvist, Sven. “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. 1992. Translated by Joan Tate. New York: New Press, 1996. Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798. Reprint. New York: Norton, 2004. Montagu, Ashley. Darwin: Competition & Cooperation. 1952. Westport: Greenwood, 1975. ———. Foreword. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. By Peter Kropotkin. Boston: Extending Horizons-Porter, n.d., n. pag. Murray, Nicholas. Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. London: Little, Brown, 2002. Paradis, James G. T. H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “In Memoriam.” Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 1976. Reprint, New York: Oxford, 1983. Woodcock, George. Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley. New York: Viking, 1972. Woodcock, George and Ivan Avakumović. The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin. London: Boardman, 1950.

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Chapter 5

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Owenite Architecture and Urban Rationality: Notes and Reflections on Class and Utopia José Ramón Álvarez Layna, Andrés Maidana Legal and Iván Vélez Cipriano

Introduction Town planning is relatively recent in history. Town planning must deal with different issues: life style, territory occupation, legislation, continuous building patterns, and variations in the use of land and convergence of networks, etc. The most outstanding feature of the current society is the concentration of population in cities. However, despite it being a universal phenomenon, town planning is not a uniform phenomenon. If we examine history from the point of view of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, we can see how Greece, Rome or The Middle Ages of the West, bind their political crisis to the crisis in their cities. That is why we can also say that utopianism was useful for those civilizations to rethink both their spatial and their developmental problems. An architectural approach to civilizing crises has been usual in the West. Both architecture and utopianism have proposed solutions in the contexts of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Modernity or Modern Industrialism to the problems faced by populations. Dealing with the impact and the crisis of modernity in this particular architectural field, some solutions already proposed lead to further reflection: Namely, those proposed by the so called utopian socialists—Owen, Fourier, Saint Simon or Cabet1 for a modern–industrial nineteenth century. We propose some 1 Robert Owen, Fourier, Saint Simon and Cabet have traditionally been labeled as “utopian socialists.” These thinkers were between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and between the Enlightenment and the Romantic Era, but they based their evolution on different cultural backgrounds and on different traditions as well. Robert Owen (1771–1858) was a Welsh social reformer and the father of “utopian socialism” and the cooperative movement. Saint Simon (1760–1825) was Owen’s French counterpart somehow, and he influenced the foundations of various nineteenth-century philosophies. Saint Simon thought that the direction of society should fall to the men of science. Fourier (1772–1837) was another “utopian socialist,” more linked to feminism, who founded many communities in America. He was essential to thinking about modern societies between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Last but not least, we must say that Cabet (1788–1856) was another intellectual in the same tradition that fled Europe because of his problems with the House of Bourbon.

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considerations related to utopia, space and time based on some brief notes on architecture, urbanism and Robert Owen’s attempted utopian communities. Taking the already classic classification by Gideon2 as a basis, we can distinguish several types of cities depending on eminently technological criteria. Pre-industrial societies, at least those placed at the zenith of the ancient world, do show very specific political and structural characteristics. It is a prominent formalism planned by or through power: palaces, barns and temples are usually strongly interrelated. If we examine history from the point of view of Ortega y Gasset, specifically his Around Galileo in particular, we can see how Greece, Rome or the Middle Ages of the West, do bind their political crises to a spatial crisis in their cities.3 Those crises had to do with those civilizations’ spatial, urban and architectural concepts. And that is why we state that those spatial crises have also been connected to utopia, because utopianism tends to promote revolutionary changes that do eventually point towards a possibility of resolution of those recurrent western crises. In addition, we must say that architecture has traditionally been considered a total art—as far as western architects have worked on issues like space, time, reality and rationality.4 Authors such as Ebenezer Howard worked on utopianism in the twentieth century,5 and architects such as the Italian Aldo Rossi do work on spatial issues and a New Rationality, between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. It is through the above mentioned proposals, disregarding the various avantgardes of the beginning of the twentieth century, that the West plans its revival from the assumption of tradition. The American author Robert Venturi had already worked on similar concerns in the 1960s culminating in his influential Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries—between Robert Owen and Aldo Rossi—we have seen idealistic proposals which have ended up trying to solve the problem by breaking any compromise with tradition and the individual: via authoritarian, if not openly totalitarian, policies. It is commonplace to state that in post-industrial cities, town planning does not achieve its objectives because of the clash of the architectural and spatial approaches with other narratives. Rossi pointed out a solution between modernity 2 Gideon Sjoberg was a Swedish author who worked extensively on social research methodology, on theoretical foundations of human organizations and also on human rights. His most important book is The Pre-Industrial City: Past and Present. 3 Crisis is a Greek concept usually linked to dramatic or negative changes for thinkers, philosophers, religious figures, politicians, sociologists or economists. Anyway, historians do normally prefer to understand “change” instead. 4 Cf. Ramírez, J.A. Gaudí: La arquitectura como obra de arte total: Madrid, Anaya, 1992. 5 Cf. Freeston, R. From the industrial revolution to sustainability development: the enduring relevance of the peaceful path to real reform?: Sydney, University of South Wales, 2008.

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and tradition on the threshold of the twenty-first century, just as Ebenezer Howard had tried the same thing in the twentieth century. Robert Owen is one, if not the primary, nineteenth-century predecessor for both though to varying degrees. The exploration of the relationship between ideological and urban forms will be of interest due to the intense relationships that are perceived when dealing with this issue. However, even though we are dealing with urban forms, when dealing with the word “ideology,” we are going to use the sense which Gustavo Bueno gives to it in Democracy as Ideology. Following Bueno, ideology will be understood as: A set of confused ideas, not to say wrong, which feature as contents of a false conscience, linked to the interests of certain groups or social classes.6

The city will be the result of a way of being, and proceeding according to the latter which, like a mold, is emptied and gives shape. We should also bear in mind the ambiguity of the semantic field which deals with the city. If the city is the place where exchange of goods, information and relations take place,7 this does conform two different spheres: a visible one and an invisible one. What in Rome was called “Urbs”—the physical territory of a city—is always related to the term “Civitas”—the inhabitants who dwell in it. In this manner, architecture and ideology are placed together since the inhabitants of Rome, surrounded by the Imperial City buildings, will also become different from the barbarians. The Roman model would become so powerful that it was the model for Saint Augustine, who laid out his thoughts in his now famous Christian Civitate Dei. If we think of this space as the place where citizens interrelate as a society, then molding and giving shape to the city is very important. So, it becomes obvious that men can eventually proceed in a “rational” and regulatory manner around spatial issues. It is at this point when the importance of an analysis of the intervention of any form of power—whether it is the state, religion, or the market, following J.K. Galbraith,8—becomes apparent in relation to town planning and architecture. Being forms of power, already linked to our questions, politics, ideologies and markets seem to find a way through in our approach. The establishment of any form of power, whether it is over the state, over religious issues or over the market, tends to generate patterns of discourse supported by rules, regulations, laws or any other tool that contributes to bring the message to fruition. Therefore, the city is an important means of conveying the contents of any ideology, and the city is also relevant in order to materialize ideologies and power-related narratives in history.

6 Cf. Bueno, G., “La democracia como ideología,” Ábaco, 12/13, Madrid, 1997. 7 Cf. Choay, F., El reino de lo urbano y la muerte de la ciudad. See also: Martín Ramos, A., Lo urbano en 20 autores contemporáneos: Barcelona, UPC—University Press, 2004. 8 Galbraith, J.K., La anatomía del poder: Barcelona, Plaza & Janes,1983.

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The notion of ideology that we use in this text, clearly takes us in the direction of two influential philosophers: Hegel and Marx. The German Ideology9 provides us with elements to understand the process of social consciousness production, and The German Ideology also explains how conscience can be generated in a given period, linking the process to economic production. In this manner, ideology will be, as it was denounced in The Star of Redemption, a metaphysical illusion for men who define both themselves and their relations with others in very illusory terms. It is therefore clear that ideologies and certain idealistic elaborations were essential for us to understand some philosophical bases around town planning and architecture in the pre-industrial past.10 Something similar can be seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where these structures offered to the individuals are going to find their expression through the Socialist, Fascist and Communist states, as well as through the Nazi Regime.11 Ideologies, urbanism and architecture were so extreme that buildings and styles could be exchanged between regimes that self-portrayed as contrary. By the early twenty-first century we can still see the ultimate legacy of modernity as part of a strongly ideologically loaded discourse: so-called non-places.12 The city will result in an ever-changing entity transformed by ideological, political, economic and social factors. Confronting some of the ideologies of which their effects are already known to us, we can see that the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have come to propose a revision of modern and industrial architectural urban utopias. Ideologized cities, like ideologies themselves, seem to be just mirages. Those ideologized cities seem to be unable to handle problems like: the relocation of production and services, the autonomy that alternative energy resources provide, the impact of the Internet, the reaction to the growth of the city, the attempt to rebalance the systems of production with the social relations, and ultimately the people’s pursuit of happiness. In these Icarian journeys of the twenty-first century,13 we try to think about ideologies, spatial issues, rationality and empiricism, just to say that rational choices have got much to do with reality, technology and history. The actions taken by Robert Owen—his redefinitions of tradition, science and religion—could well be analyzed in the context of the twenty-first century.

9 Marx, K. and Engels, F., La Ideología Alemana: Moscow, Foreign Languages, 1951. 10 Maravall, J.A., La Cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica: Barcelona, Ariel, 1986. 11 Cf. Arizmendi, L.J., Albert Speer, arquitecto de Hitler: Pamplona, EUNSA, 1978. 12 It is an ideologically loaded discourse on economic and demographic fluxes. Cf. Augé, M., Los no lugares, espacios del anonimato: Barcelona, GEDISA, 1992. 13 Cabet, E., Voyage en Icarie: Paris, Adamant Media Corporation, 2002.

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The Pre-Industrial City Let us now consider the city as the most complex type of interdependence between human beings and their actions, with no regard to having a physical impact or not. Cities as a complex type of interdependence between human beings can be seen through history since agriculture and stock-breeding made it possible for human groups to settle down, as we would say in remembrance of Gordon Childe.14 In the pre-industrial period, towns were developed with a strong connection to the countryside.15 This relation would be taken up by the nineteenth-century “utopian socialists.” Another characteristic of the pre-industrial city was its low demography. Without a doubt, immigration from the countryside makes those town projects even more closely bound to tradition and to the land.16 Pre-industrial settlements in the middle ages, with a few exceptions, were hardly planned. Religiosity definitely defines medieval cities, and finds its architectural expression in the city.17 In fact, as far as tradition is concerned, the new city builders of the nineteenth century, will take many elements from the medieval town: an enclosed place although with several entrances on each side, towers, the height of the buildings inside will be directly related to economic power or to the productive power, etc. About the Industrial City Overcrowding and unhealthy conditions became the typical features of a spreading town during the Industrial summit period. The organization of large processes, such as the production of textiles and iron, transformed cities from that pre-modern and pre-industrial medieval network into sometimes dark and unhealthy spaces. Both of the most commonly acknowledged European traditions, those which could be named the Continental and the British tradition, are going to pose confronting arguments for the matter which is our concern. We will pay attention to the British tradition here, not just because we must read Robert Owen in the British tradition, but also because the same British tradition mixed reformed Christianity, modernity and industrialism very efficiently. 14 Gordon Childe (1892–1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialized in European prehistory. He was an academic in Edinburgh, and he was renowned for his emphasis on revolutionary technological and economic developments in human societies, such as the “Neolithic Revolution” and the “Urban Revolution,” in this manner being influenced by Marxist ideas on societal development. 15 Cf. Mumford, L., The City in History: London, Penguin, 1966. 16 Cf. Dutour, T., La ciudad medieval. Origen y triunfo de la Europa urbana: Barcelona, Paidós, 2004. 17 Cf. Bertini Guidetti, S., Iacopo da Voragine, Cronaca Della cittá di Genova dalle origini al 1297: Genoa, ECIG, 1995, p. 436.

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The Manchester which Made Robert Owen: a British Note The Enlightenment will be essential to understanding the earlier Lanarkian Robert Owen. Of course, references to the city of Manchester and to Scotland are also unavoidable when our concern is the consequences of the Industrial summit in the United Kingdom.18 The Manchester which made Robert Owen helps us understand modernity and industrialism in Robert Owen’s work. We can say that, to a certain extent, Manchester is very important for understanding Robert Owen’s Scottish eighteenth-century coinage proposals of New Lanark. The living conditions of Manchester in the eighteenth century were increasingly complex. As for the environment, the chimneys’ pollution made the air unhealthy. The pollution that came from the massive industrial progress covered everything, and this context is when the first gardens detached from the typical geometrical gardening style of the eighteenth century start to appear. In our Manchester there appear gardens inside receptacles that were designed to protect plants from soot: those receptacles were there to protect nature, not to set an order on it. Those ideas around roots and nature are very relevant for understanding British “utopian socialism” with Robert Owen as the figurehead. Manchester, in Lancashire, is probably the first and ultimate modern industrial center.19 On the other hand, it is a settlement with an old enough tradition to claim representation in British Parliament. Manchester was an historical settlement where new industries had been introduced in a massive way, not a newly planned space. Traditional privileges were not abolished until 1845 in Manchester.20 So the remains of the Ancien Regime resisted disappearance. From that Manchester it is possible to already see tradition, modernity and industrialism being put together. Robert Owen, Architecture, Town Planning and Rationalism Acknowledging we are taking some risks, we will proceed to present an outline of Robert Owen’s contribution to Urbanism taking into account the context described above. It is very difficult to pinpoint the response offered by the “socialists,” since the followers of Robert Owen resisted the label of “socialists” because of questions and concerns pertaining to that ideological identity. Sometimes, they also refused to be labeled as “socialists” because of the repression that their programs eventually

18 Cf. Engels, F., La situación de la clase obrera en Inglaterra: Moscow, Foreign Languages, 1952, p. 379 et seq. 19 Anyway, we should not only mention Lancashire to describe the situation. Cf. Hobsbawm, E., Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution: New York, New Press, 1999. 20 Cf. Palmer and Colton, Historia Contemporánea: Madrid, AKAL, 1985, p. 170.

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faced.21 As far as Robert Owen is concerned, when he eventually considered himself a “socialist,” he expressed a clear cut distinction between his “socialism” and Continental “socialism”.22 As for urban concerns, New Lanark can be dealt with, by taking into account two fundamental aspects of its planning: on the one hand there is a boom in the number of concentration points, and on the other hand, the increase of the population.23 There was a sense of awareness, at least from the perspective of that time, that thinkers like Robert Owen were offering solutions to problems from a kind of vague Enlightened European left standpoint. However, betterment of human beings through education and the improvement of their surrounding environment24 is central to Robert Owen’s discourse. Space morphology plays a fundamental role in Robert Owen’s work. Robert Owen paid attention through different intellectual stages to: possibilities around spaces and activities, differentiation through spatial intervention, order uses and spaces, different uses and settlements, etc. All of these will become Robert Owen’s concerns from as early as the change of the century. As for the political panorama, at that moment, there were two different leftist stances, which would have significant influence on future events. Firstly, we must study a Continental Left clearly marked by a Christian deep layer, and with an eighteenth-century bias, that will have Saint Simon as figurehead on philosophical history. Secondly, we can mention a British left, between the Scottish Enlightenment and Romanticism, that was more pragmatic by far. Obviously, we have to highlight Robert Owen as a figurehead of this branch. It is this latter branch which will be our concern. We will focus on some of their theoretic and practical contributions on town planning and architecture which have survived until today. Robert Owen in particular worked extensively on urbanism and settlements. It is characteristic of our “utopian socialists” to settle down away from the city, as a clear rational alternative to it. This is why they favored the United States, a plain that was perceived as a virgin land without historical burden. As for the morphology of the complex, they conceived the community as if it was threatened by outside dangers. These ephemeral boundaries chosen of their own will, protect and contain the new civilization. As for the architectural 21 Podmore, F., Robert Owen, A Biography: Honolulu, University Press of the Pacific, 2004, p. 522. 22 Robert Owen evolved throughout the years, and his Scottish and enlightened views became sometimes more romantic and sometimes more modern. Between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries his philosophy and also his language changed, pre-figuring a useful social reform for the United Kingdom. Even though Robert Owen was eventually called a “socialist” by some of his enemies during the 1830s, he was always aware of his British cultural roots that were different in mind and also in practice from those of most Continental thinkers. 23 Hope Eldridge T., “The Process of Urbanization”: Cambridge, Social Forces, 10, 1942, 1964. 24 Cf. Santos Redondo, M., Robert Owen, pionero del Management: Madrid, Sociología del Trabajo, 45, 2002, pp. 97–124.

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morphology, there were not great innovations on this field. Whenever it comes to functionality, it is a clear example of functionalism in both production and in the division of other spaces, such as kitchens, living-rooms, playgrounds, workshops, etc. Technology played a role too: shorter working hours were possible in New Lanark thanks to the development of technology. The steam engine was a key element for the protection of the workers. Last but not least, we must say that urbanism and spatiality were carefully studied by Robert Owen himself here, as far as he offered his workers spaces and buildings in New Lanark that were also a part of the project. And all those characteristics can be found in some of the communities that Robert Owen designed. From now on, we will examine how Robert Owen’s proposal began and developed as far as its architectural and spatial expression is concerned. New Lanark after 1802 David Dale and the Scottish traditions are essential for an understanding of both New Lanark and Owen. We can describe here the way in which the management period of New Lanark takes us to 1806. Such a period meant an improvement of the productive apparatus of New Lanark. It also meant that the living conditions of the community in that period (1802–06) improved progressively. It is here that Robert Owen’s proposals find a material expression through architecture. It is the people who work in the complex that are the target of these proposals. The year 1806 is a year of diplomatic disagreement between the United Kingdom and the United States of America. This dispute culminated in an embargo on cotton which, for Owen, meant the price of cotton upon which New Lanark was dependent was going to rise inconveniently.25 At that moment, Robert Owen refused to buy cotton at the price it had reached. As a consequence, the number of staff members should have diminished very fast, making the community at New Lanark much smaller. However, Robert Owen’s solution consisted in stopping the machines, slowing production but saving jobs. Workers were paid their full salary in exchange for maintenance work and the building of facilities. The attempt to make economic and social processes more moral would find fewer obstacles now. To Robert Owen, letting more than 500 families off would have meant both a step back for his productive, educational and social projects, and also a sad loss of trained and coordinated staff—a qualified, fully fledged work force that in conceptual terms was as important as the machines themselves. Some of the changes Robert Owen achieved for the workers of his textile factory were: he reduced working hours from 14 to 12, he decided that apprentices would have to be at least 10 years old or older, and he tried to change the behavior of workers in the factory through supervisors who assessed every job by means of a system

25 Cf. Kinard Latimer, M., “South Carolina. A Protagonist of the War of 1812”: The American Historical Review, Vol. 61, 4, 1956, pp. 914–29.

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of colors.26 As for education, Owen promoted the learning of natural history, music, dancing, games and fine arts. In New Lanark, new teaching methods and materials were also introduced. And after 1816, an “Institution for the Formation of Character” was founded, where kindergartens were created for children to play together before the school age. So as we can see, the improvements introduced by Robert Owen meant modern industrial reflection on the importance of space in a radical way. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Robert Owen thought that if youths were positively influenced by healthy habits, the outcome for their living conditions would be different. This concern is what links Robert Owen to the architectural proposals of the time. Let us now return to Robert Owen’s project. New Lanark had been founded during the Industrial summit, and it did not undergo large scale reforms, at least physically, after the arrival of these new partners. Robert Owen: New Harmony, the United States, and the Aesthetics of Romanticism The difficulties that Robert Owen faced between 1821 and 1823 to develop his projects forced him to try to carry out his plans27 far away from the United Kingdom.28 In 1824, Robert Owen traveled to the young, but prospering nation, the United States of America.29 He looked for a clean context30 where he would really be able to establish his ideas and develop his projects.31 He left his son Robert Dale Owen in charge of the situation at New Lanark.32 26 Gordon, P., “Perspectivas: revista trimestral de educación comparada”: París, UNESCO: Vol. XXIV, 1–2, 1993, pp. 279–97. 27 Cf. Taylor, A., Visions of Harmony. A Study in Nineteenth Century Millenarianism: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 115. 28 Cf. Owen, R., A Letter to the Moderator of the General Assembly, Requesting His Attention to the Complexity of the Times, to the Late Attack of the Christian Instructor upon Mr. Owen: Edinburgh, Robert Owen, 1823. 29 Robert Owen’s efforts around reform and origin take into account every previous religious tradition. Cf. Combe A., The Religious Creed of the Nueva System with an Explanatory Catechism, and an Appeal in Favour of True Religion, to the Ministers of all other Religious Persuasions and Denominations, Edinburgh, 1824. This text mentions some ideas around religious dialogue, and launches some critics against strict religious dogmatism. 30 McCabe, J., Robert Owen: London, Watts & Co., 1920, p. 60. 31 Many scientific developments achieved in the United Kingdom looked interesting from the United States of America. That was something good for Mr Owen, as far as his efforts around education would also eventually find a good atmosphere in the United States of America. Cf. Bestor, A.E., Education and Reform at New Harmony. Correspondence of William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot 1820–1833: Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1948, p. 311. 32 Cf. Donnachie, I., Robert Owen. Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony: Edinburgh, Tuckwell Press, 2000, p. 206. Information extracted from Robert Owen Correspondence Collection.

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In the new world, it would be possible to acquire a lot of land at low cost. This possibility would be tempting in itself, since Robert Owen would be able to work in an autonomous way without having to compromise with third parties. Furthermore, and more importantly, he would not meet great legal difficulties. In April 1825 an acquisition agreement for a tract of land was formalized.33 The 30,000 acres34 that Robert Owen decided to buy were between the states of Indiana and Illinois, along the Wabash River, approximately 50 kilometers from its mouth. There had already been previous settlements in the area, and from this previous knowledge, the place was considered appropriate for human settlements as it showed low mortality rates.35 The land was bought from a pre-existing community of 700 Germans who were led by prophetic pietist John George Rapp,36 who called the land Harmony.37 As for the structure of the settlement, the houses were regularly placed around a center where public buildings and two large churches were set.38 As for industry, we have to mention some breweries and the factories were the machinery and the tools that were necessary for the works that were made, together with those for making building materials. Besides, the settlement was very romantic, and covered with vegetation. The ground was already adapted for agriculture and energy could be provided by the river.39 And we can probably say that the place seemed bucolic to Robert Owen, who looked at it as if it had been designed on purpose for his plans, since the possibilities it offered for agriculture and industry were in line with his utopian conception of society. Robert Owen bought both the settlement and the land which surrounded it in his own name; meanwhile, the very Christian Germans decided to move farther out on the frontier since the state of Indiana was beginning to show signs of the great growth of civilization. For the Welsh thinker, the radical difference between those 33 Cooperative Magazine, I.12. 34 One acre comes to mean 0.4 hectares. 35 This stage has been studied very well by Bestor. Cf. Bestor, A.E., Backwoods Utopias. The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of the Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829: London: Oxford University Press, 1950, p. 164 et seq. 36 John George Rapp and Robert Owen crossed in their lives more than once, as far as John George Rapp had already been in touch with Scotland in the past through his commercial activities. Cf. Donnachie, I. and Hewitt, G., Historic New Lanark. The Dale and Owen Industrial Community since 1785: Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1993, p. 124. 37 Our Harmonians were a religious separatist group from Wirtemberg. Rapp and his group of followers had further distanced themselves from mainstream society. They built Harmony, and they had some really interesting religious views around modernity, life and death. Cf. Lockwood, G.B., The New Harmony Movement: New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1905, p. 15. See also Arndt, R. and John, K., The Indiana Decade of George Rapp’s Harmony Society: Worcester, American Antiquarian Society, 1971. 38 Cf. Cooperative Magazine, I, 13. 39 Ibidem., II, 415.

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free United States of America and the Continent is obvious, and he shows signs of favoring the arguments of the by far more liberal Americans.40 Thus, freedom and notions around it will be the way in chosen by Robert Owen on this occasion.41 In Owen’s opinion, the United States of America were particularly attractive because of their novelty, because of the possibility they offered to get rid of the ruins of the Ancien Regime, and to endeavor on a new adventure based on the revolutionary notions of freedom of thought, conscience and religion.42 From an Owenite point of view, the construction of a truly free world was only possible if we based that construction on principles prior to any historical teachings of religion and belief. And the first step to build the new society would have to do with choosing the people for the experience. That society, in Robert Owen’s opinion, could not be led by just anyone. Therefore, a distinction between individuals should take place. This new original society would include two types of people based on economic criteria: those who could contribute to the community with an amount of money and those who could not. Those who could, would be supported and looked after in Harmony in exchange for an annual payment, and those who could not would carry out different tasks in the building industry, the farms, and in other agricultural chores or in any tool factory. Of all the benefits that the members of New Harmony received, old age and health protection are noteworthy. As for education, children’s education would be comprehensive. It was taken for granted that the New Harmony experience had to be sustainable, therefore, a family’s consumption should be smaller than their economic contribution to the community. Robert Owen started up the project as soon as he left Washington for Indiana. It was in the Old Harmony church that Robert Owen gave a speech naming the steps which would be the route from the old society to one ruled by a New Moral Order. The constitution of a preliminary society, in which Robert Owen had a key role, was marked for 1 May 1825.43 This constitution dealt with specific issues, such as the entrance in the community or how private property was regulated. Membership was open to people of all kinds except for black people. People would live where the committee would determine, and the community would have to provide protection for the dependent and education for the children. Freedom of religious belief and conscience would be guaranteed. Everyone should contribute depending on their possibilities to the community welfare, and the community would credit people for food. Credit would depend on the number of useful members in each home. Therefore, economic equality would not be absolute. New Harmony inhabitants would initially agree on romantic ideas such as reconciling 40 Cf. Owen, R., First Discourse at Washington: London, Heywood, 1825. 41 Cf. New Harmony Gazette, I, 102. It is possible to find information about Robert Owen and his ideas around Theology. We must emphasize that America was a free territory, while the rest of the Restored West was not. 42 Owen, R., First Discourse at Washington: London, Heywood, 1825. 43 Cf. Cooperative Magazine, I,16.

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man, space and nature. Robert Owen’s most liberal thinking during the American period is apparent in several documents like the one of 4 July 1826.44 This date was when Robert Owen’s Declaration of Mental Independence took place.45 In it, Robert Owen condemns historical religion as evil, and condemns marriage as property and not as a source of happiness. … Prior to achieving our aims, we are preparing the means to make your children grow with industrious and useful habits, with natural and obvious and rational ideas and stand points, with honesty in all their dealings, and with affectionate and kind feelings for one another, with charity in the widest sense of the term … —Robert Owen, in Declaration of Mental Independence46

As a consequence, Robert Owen’s American period is defined by the materialization of his romantic turn that can be noticed from the years 1815–16 and before.47 This turn towards romanticism involved aspects of social organization, economy and aesthetics. References Arizmendi, L.J., Albert Speer, arquitecto de Hitler: Pamplona, EUNSA, 1978. Arndt, R. and John, K., The Indiana Decade of George Rapp’s Harmony Society: Worcester, American Antiquarian Society, 1971. Augé, M. Los no lugares, espacios del anonimato: Barcelona, GEDISA, 1992. Bertini Guidetti, S., Iacopo da Voragine, Cronaca Della cittá di Genova dalle origini al 1297: Genoa, ECIG, 1995. Bestor, A.E., Education and Reform at New Harmony. Correspondence of William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot 1820–1833: Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1948.

44 Many followers had already abandoned their faith, because they were very sure about the obsolescence of many of the principles that were being taught. Cf. Bestor, A.E., Education and Reform at New Harmony. Correspondence of William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot 1820–1833: Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, 1948, pp. 396–7. 45 Post, A., Popular Freethought in America, 1825–1850: New York, Octagon Books, 1974. 46 This topic, and the above mentioned discourse itself has much to do with the American and romantic radicalization that we can read in the American Owenite phase. Cf. Taylor, A., Visions of Harmony. A Study in Nineteenth Century Millenarianism: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 150. 47 It is very important to point out that Robert Owen worked on the previous Rappitist settlement. Some British and American scholars are working on this issue at this point in time, trying to find further evidence to differentiate both the Rappitist and the Owenite periods properly.

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———, Backwoods Utopias. The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of the Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829: London, Oxford University Press, 1950. Cabet, E., Voyage en Icarie: Paris, Adamant Media Corporation, 2002. Choay, F., El reino de lo urbano y la muerte de la ciudad. See also: Martín Ramos, A., Lo urbano en 20 autores contemporáneos: Barcelona, UPC—University Press, 2004. Combe, A., The Religious Creed of the Nueva System with an Explanatory Catechism, and an Appeal in Favour of True Religion, to the Ministers of all other Religious Persuasions and Denominations, Edinburgh, 1824. Donnachie, I., Robert Owen. Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony: Edinburgh, Tuckwell Press, 2000. Donnachie, I. and Hewitt, G., Historic New Lanark. The Dale and Owen Industrial Community since 1785: Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Dutour, T., La ciudad medieval. Origen y triunfo de la Europa urbana: Barcelona, Paidos, 2004. Engels, F., La situación de la clase obrera en Inglaterra: Moscow, Foreign Languages,1952. Freeston, R. From the industrial revolution to sustainability development: the enduring relevance of the peaceful path to real reform?: Sydney, University of South Wales, 2008. Galbraith, J.K., La anatomía del poder: Barcelona, Plaza & Janes, 1983. Hobsbawm, E., Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution: New York, New Press, 1999. Lockwood, G.B., The New Harmony Movement: New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1905. Maravall, J.A., La Cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica: Barcelona, Ariel, 1986. Marx, K. and Engels, F., La Ideología Alemana: Moscow, Foreign Languages, 1951. McCabe, J., Robert Owen. London, Watts & Co., 1920. Mumford, L., The City in History: London, Penguin Books, 1966. Owen, R., A Letter to the Moderator of the General Assembly, Requesting His Attention to the Complexity of the Times, to the Late Attack of the Christian Instructor upon Mr. Owen: Edinburgh, Robert Owen, 1823. ———, First Discourse at Washington: London, Heywood, 1825. Palmer y Colton, Historia Contemporánea: Madrid, AKAL, 1985. Podmore, F., Robert Owen, A Biography: Honolulu, University Press of the Pacific, 2004. Post, A., Popular Freethought in America, 1825–1850: New York, Octagon Books, 1974. Ramírez, J.A. Gaudí: La arquitectura como obra de arte total: Madrid, Anaya, 1992. Taylor, A., Visions of Harmony. A Study in Nineteenth Century Millenarianism: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987.

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Periodical Publications AA.VV., Cooperative Magazine. AA.VV., New Harmony Gazette. Bueno, G., “La democracia como ideología”. Ábaco, 12/13, Madrid, 1997. Gordon, P., “Perspectivas: revista trimestral de educación comparada”: Paris, UNESCO: Vol. XXIV, 1–2, 1993. Hope Eldridge T., “The Process of Urbanization”: Cambridge, Social Forces, 10, 1942, 1964. Kinard Latimer, M., “South Carolina. A Protagonist of the War of 1812”. The American Historical Review, Vol. 61, 4, 1956. Santos Redondo, M., Robert Owen, pionero del Management: Madrid, Sociología del Trabajo, 45, 2002.

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Chapter 6

Mrs Atwood and the Utopian Tradition: A Nineteenth-Century Alchemist as Utopian Theorist1 Kerry E. Koitzsch

Introduction In the middle of the nineteenth century, a remarkable woman, Mary Anne South, later Mary Anne Atwood (1817–1910), published a book which was to change the study of the occult forever. Originally published anonymously, A Suggestive Inquiry Into the Hermetic Mystery, with a Dissertation on the More Celebrated of the Alchemical Philosophers being an Attempt towards the Recovery of the Ancient Experiment of Nature,2 has had a dramatic impact upon how we think about occult studies: especially the spiritual aspects of alchemy and related forms of mysticism. The Suggestive Inquiry has been a key formative influence on occult groups such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,3 Theosophical

1 I would like to acknowledge the help of the librarians and staff at Brown University’s Hay Library for their invaluable, friendly, and professional assistance with the Atwood Correspondence and Manuscripts, as well as the assistance of Mr Charles Sale. I would also like to thank the participants in the Association for Esoteric Studies and Society for Utopian Studies conferences for lively interaction and discussion on alchemical and historical themes, particularly the late Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who was kind enough to discuss many of the themes of this chapter with me at an ASE conference, and give much needed commentary and encouragement. Finally I would like to acknowledge the encouragement of my parents, without whom this work would not have been possible. I would also like to thank Sarvnaz Jedari for her invaluable comments and critique of the manuscript. 2 A Suggestive Inquiry Into the Hermetic Mystery, with a Dissertation on the More Celebrated of the Alchemical Philosophers being an Attempt towards the Recovery of the Ancient Experiment of Nature, first edition published anonymously in 1850. All references to the Suggestive Inquiry are to the 1918 second edition reprint by Yogi Publication Society, which is the most available version. 3 The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1887, is an occult society dedicated to the study of metaphysics, esoteric, and paranormal phenomena. More information may be found at http://www.hermeticordergoldendawn.org.

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Society,4 and Anthroposophical Society5—these organizations continue to exist in the twenty-first century with international membership, periodicals, and a strong internet presence. Acting as a formative catalyst in the early twentieth century, many occultists, scientists, and esoteric students have been influenced by the principles of the Suggestive Inquiry, and interest in the study, preservation, and analysis of alchemical records persisted long after the mid-nineteenth century: for example, Madame de Steiger, Herbert Redgrove, and Arthur Edward Waite founded the Alchemical Society, an alchemical study group, in the early twentieth century, about 1913.6 The Creation—and Destruction—of “A Suggestive Inquiry” The story of the creation and subsequent destruction of the Suggestive Inquiry by its authors is a fascinating story, well known to students of the occult.7 Kathleen Raine, the historian of William Blake and Thomas Taylor, says of the Suggestive Inquiry: “This rare book (reprinted in 1920 by the theosophical publisher J.M. Watkins) is a work of quixotic learning compiled from long extracts from the Hermetica, Dionysius, Aquinas, Boehme, Saint-Martin, Henry More, Paracelsus, the alchemists, and Thomas Taylor.”8 It was to be Mary Anne South’s magnum opus and the source of a lifetime of ambivalence, confusion, and regret on the part of its author. W.L. Wilmshurst describes the Souths’ enigmatic book-burning of their own newly published Suggestive Inquiry: A few copies—something under one hundred in all—had been either sent to public libraries or sold to purchasers, when the further issue of the book was abruptly stopped by Mr. South. The entire residue of the edition was called in, under considerable protest from the publisher and at a cost of 250 pounds to Mr. South, and was brought from London to Gosport. There, upon the lawn of Bury House, the volumes along with the uncompleted manuscript of Mr. South’s poem were stacked and a bonfire made of them.9

How is this destructive act to be explained? Many competitive theories exist, but perhaps W.L. Wilmshurst’s explanation is adequate: “No sooner was the 4 The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, is a society dedicated to the study of theosophy and related subjects. For more information, see http://www.theosophical.org. 5 The Anthroposophical Society, http://www.anthroposophy.org. 6 See Mark Morrison, Modern Alchemy, for a thorough treatment of the Alchemical Society. 7 See, for example, Colin Wilson, Mysteries, pp. 401–20. 8 Thomas Taylor the Platonist, p. 10. 9 Introduction to the Suggestive Inquiry, p. 6.

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volume completed, and made publically available than an inhibition of conscience greater in intensity than the emotional urge which had prompted the compilation of the book overtook Mr South and perhaps in a lesser degree, his daughter. They were seized by a moral panic.”10 The esoteric historian Joscelyn Godwin says of this, “However, for all their scruples, Mary Anne was not unwilling to lend a few survivors of the original hundred copies to friends and confidants.”11 Elsewhere Godwin quotes Thomas South, in a letter to Christopher Walton,12 a fellow esoteric student, as saying “the whole edition of the book is now withdrawn into my own hands for private circulation only, having had reasons to fear the consequence of indiscriminate publication .”13 While this secretive trend in the writings of Thomas South and his daughter is often perceived as a veiled hint at the practice of sexual alchemy, there are more prosaic explanations at hand for the covert language of Thomas South and his daughter.14 Towards a Definition of Utopian Alchemy In human history there have been few words with as much mystery—and suggestive associations—as the word “alchemy.” Today, the term means many things to many people: yet, despite more than 2,000 years or more of alchemy’s history, the exact nature of what alchemy is—its essential nature and definition—remains elusive. What are the ultimate goals of the alchemical enterprise? Who are the alchemists, and what materials do they use to perform the Great Work? Is the alchemical process of a spiritual, or strictly material, nature? Many questions about the nature of the alchemical art, and its practitioners, remain to be answered. However, that alchemy is a utopian exercise of the imagination is certainly one interpretation meriting further investigation. Mrs Atwood’s utopian conceptions are perhaps the ultimate examples of an individualist conception of utopia, based as they are on the Rosicrucian15 and pansophic16 “disruptive” philosophies. 10 Introduction to the Suggestive Inquiry, p. (7). 11 A Behemenist Circle in Victorian England, Hermetic Journal 1992, p. 56. 12 Christopher Walton (1809–77): for a thorough discussion of Walton and his studies, see Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, pp. 237–9, or Behemenist Circle in Victorian England, Hermetic Journal 1992, pp. 58 to 60. 13 Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 235. 14 For the contending views on this issue, see Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, pp. 235–7, or Arthur Versulis, Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism, pp. 96–8, for the sexual alchemy interpretation; and see Colin Wilson, Mysteries, p. 411, or Kerry Koitzsch, Mary Anne Atwood, p. 137, for relatively straightforward alternative explanations not involving sexual alchemy. 15 Vide Karl Frick, die Eleuchteten for a complete treatment of Rosicrucianism and Pansophy, and in particular see the interesting treatment of “hermetic pansophy” by Ackerman, Rose Cross Over the Baltic. 16 Will-Erich Peukert, Pansophie.

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Instead of, as in the case of the more well-known utopian theorist Charles Fourier, “hiding behind the mask of a conscientious employee,”17 Mrs Atwood was free to develop her intellectual position from within the insulated world of the English countryside, as part of her fathers—and later, in 1859—her husband’s household. She was under no obligation—as was her friend Isabelle de Steiger—to work at a conventional occupation, or publish in a conventional sense. However, Mrs Atwood’s intellectual influence was immense—lasting well into the twentieth century and beyond. Her conception of modern civilization and the dangerous path modernity had embarked upon were very much present in her correspondence. Mrs Atwood did not assert her utopian views explicitly in either Early Magnetism or Suggestive Inquiry, but the telltale signs of a formative utopian thought exists in her unpublished manuscripts, published and unpublished correspondence—particularly with Charles Carleton Massey,18 a London barrister with an interest in the occult and a strong connection with “practical utopians” Thomas Lake Harris19 and Lawrence Oliphant,20 and, in particular, in the writings and correspondence of Mrs Atwood’s long-time friend and disciple, Madame Isabelle de Steiger. Mrs Atwood’s utopian thought is intimately related to the process of spiritual transformation—or transmutation—described in the works of Bohme and the Renaissance alchemists, but also informed by a new kind of scientific thinking stemming from Goethe, Lorenz Oken, and the other German Naturphilosophen—including Gottfried Leibniz.21 Mesmerism and the alchemical process, that is, the dynamics of spiritual alchemy, were a combination of hermetic principles with the principles of mesmerism or “magnetism.” Israel Regardie claims of this, “It is only in an indirect way that we are here concerned with animal magnetism as a therapeutic agent. My reasons for this outline are that Mrs. Atwood, whose theory I am to delineate and expand, held that the practice of Mesmerism might be considered as the first step to the solution of the alchemic Mystery.”22 This view was developed and extended by Isabelle de Steiger. An accomplished linguist, Madame de Steiger translated Ekhartshausen’s mystical volume The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary from the French in 1896—this was to influence generations of esoteric students, 17 The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, editors. 18 Charles Carelton Massey (1838–1905): barrister and correspondent with Mrs Atwood, author of Thoughts of A Modern Mystic, published posthumously in 1909. 19 Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906): an American mystic, spiritualistic prophet and poet. 20 Lawrence Oliphant (1829–88): British author, traveler, diplomat and mystic. 21 Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716): German mathematician and philosopher. This group also included Anton Mesmer and his school, including de Puységur, John Elliotson, and James Braid. Lorenz Oken, in particular, exerted a strong influence over Mrs Atwood’s intellectual development throughout her life. 22 Israel Regardie. The Philosopher’s Stone, pp. 121–2.

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and was one of the formative works in shaping the young Aleister Crowley’s magical investigations.23 Madame de Steiger, as a member, not only of the Golden Dawn, but, later in life, as an ardent disciple of Rudolf Steiner, was able to bridge the philosophical gap between the early brand of “theosophy” studied by Mrs Atwood and her circle, the “theosophy” of Madame Blavatsky, and finally, the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. Alex Owen says of Madame de Steiger’s predilection for joining occult societies: “The redoubtable Madame de Steiger herself, who passed from spiritualism to Theosophy, and thence to the Christian Hermeticism of Anna Kingsford before joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and ultimately A.E. Waite’s breakaway group, wrote on the subject of alchemy with Waite and others in 1912.”24 Another key element of Mrs Atwood’s world view is what the historian Georg Nicolaus (1962–), Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), and Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) call sophiology: the study of the female principle of divine Wisdom. Mrs Atwood herself says of this, “Alchemy is philosophy: it is the philosophy, the seeking out of The Sophia in the mind.”25 Informed by the Gnosticism of Paracelsus and Boehme, Mrs Atwood extends some of the ideas of the feminine divine principle by recounting the legends of Isis, Horus, and Osiris several times throughout the Suggestive Inquiry,26 and even in the pages of Early Magnetism we find Thomas South referring to the legends of Isis and Osiris,27 in which he quotes the famous description of Isis, identifying her, in this case, with Nature, “In fundamental principles, Nature has ever been the same, yesterday, to-day, and tomorrow, ‘I am what was, and is, and shall be’.”28 The recognition of the female principle as fundamentally co-equal with the male principle is a key concept of Mrs Atwood’s utopian thought. Mrs Atwood as a Utopian Theorist The utopian aspects of Mrs Atwood’s hermetic philosophy become clearer when we examine the historical context of her time. By the mid-nineteenth century, a wide range of formative social movements were well underway. A reaction against the dehumanizing and brutal aspects of the industrial revolution, the “disenchantment of the world,” regimentation and conformity, loss of religious faith, and the mechanization—and trivialization—of the human dignity, art, 23 Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, pp. 41–7, for the influence of Ekhartshausen’s work on the young Crowley. 24 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p. 123. 25 Suggestive Inquiry, p. 597. 26 See, for example, Suggestive Inquiry, pp. 483–5, and p. 401. 27 See for example, Early Magnetism, p. 29. 28 Early Magnetism, p. 105.

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and spiritual pursuits—as well as the ongoing investigation of mesmerism, spiritualism, and “theosophy,” resulted in a wide range of utopian agendas. These were often combined within a philosophical or mystical framework. These reactionary philosophies, competing or cooperating with contemporary mainstream scientific principles, covering a vast array of religions, foci, and scope, have been described by the esoteric historians Joscelyn Godwin29 and Alfred J. Gabay30 as the “Theosophical Enlightenment” and the “Covert Enlightenment,” respectively. As they developed, these esoteric organizations were responsible for creating a fascinating intellectual climate in which intellectual contributions could be evaluated without gender or racial prejudice—this was due to the tradition of anonymous publication. Both the Suggestive Inquiry and Early Magnetism were initially published anonymously. Many of the occult secret societies of the time, such as the Order of the Golden Dawn, had an explicit commitment to gender equality, and, particularly in the Golden Dawn, publications were made under the assumed “magical name” of the author: for example, some of the alchemical commentaries of Florence Farr on the “Suggestive Inquiry” and similar literature were published using Farr’s magical name (or initials) S.S.D.D.31 An often overlooked factor in the success of these female authors is the extremely high level of erudition and quality of their published work, having the inevitable result of making their works impossible to ignore, even by their most strident critics. The considerable intellectual contributions of Dr Kingsford, Madame de Steiger, and Madame Blavatsky were often more coherent, intelligible—and more popular—than their male counterparts,32 and Mrs Atwood—although her convoluted style in the Suggestive Inquiry was anything but straightforward—was perceived by her fellow hermetic students as the ultimate authority on the subject of spiritual alchemy.33 Thomas South and Mrs Atwood were radical anti-establishment thinkers when it came to the subject of alchemy. Although they did not reject the mainstream scientific thinking and methodology of their time—they were well aware of current developments in physics, chemistry, and biology—they did not consider alchemy 29 Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment. 30 Alfred Gabay, The Covert Enlightenment. 31 Collectanea Hermetica, an anthology by W.W. Wescott, contains some examples of these works by Florence Farr as S.S.D.D. See also The Magical Writings of Florence Farr, edited by Darcy Kuntz, Austin, TX: Golden Dawn Research Trust, 2012. 32 This is sometimes perceived as motive for Thomas South’s destruction of Mary Anne’s Suggestive Inquiry and South’s own poetic fragment The Enigma of Alchemy. For differing views on this see, for example, Colin Wilson, Mysteries, p. 410, and Koitzsch, Mary Anne Atwood, p. 130. 33 This is shown by the respectful mention of the Suggestive Inquiry in the work of Dr Kingsford and virtually every work of Madame de Steiger, as well as Mrs Atwood’s most virulent critic, Arthur Edward Waite, who began as a passionate Atwood supporter in his younger days, only to completely reject her world view in his later work, The Secret Tradition in Alchemy.

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as an anachronism or eclectic variety of “pseudo-science.” Rather, they perceived alchemy to be part of a new science of the future, part of the natural philosophy expressed by Mesmer, Schelling, and Lorenz Oken,34 a scientific theory and practice which would encompass the “hermetic wisdom,” preserved for centuries in alchemical text and tradition, and leading to the utopian transformation of society and the individual into a more evolved state of being. The Souths considered themselves to be part of the venerable “hermetic tradition,” the “golden chain” of alchemists going back to the seventeenth century and earlier, and they therefore believed themselves to be bound by the strictures of “hermetic secrecy.” As a result, throughout the Suggestive Inquiry and elsewhere in her correspondence, the insinuation that Mrs Atwood is privy to more information that she is permitted to reveal is a continual background theme of her expository text.35 Continually immersed in the contradictions implicit in the polarization between the activities of mystic and scientist, Mrs Atwood was divided, throughout her life, between the impulse to reveal the important discoveries she felt she and her father had made, and to respect the sanctity of the hermetic wisdom, concealing it from the profane and only communicating hints of the “true secret” to fellow initiates of proven sincerity. Mrs Atwood says of this, “[it] appears to have been a religious principle with the ancients to withhold the means of proving their philosophy from an incapable and reckless world.”36 A.E. Waite was to refer to the supposed “hermetic secret” in jeering terms in his autobiography.37 Mrs Atwood’s formulation of utopian ideals—mostly expressed as therapeutics—began with the early experiments in spiritualism she conducted with her father, culminating in the publication of Early Magnetism, she says of this: “It was written when we were greatly excited with mesmerism and were mixed up with Dr. Elliotson, Engledue, Ashburner and the rest that were then active in their activity through the Zoist and elsewhere; … a mere enthusiastic production at a crisis.”38 Women like Mary Anne Atwood achieved a dominant role in the conduct of spiritualistic experiments, and their consequent offshoots in the nineteenth and early twentieth century—including the members of the Golden Dawn and Alchemical Society. Utopian ideals were developed along the way, including associated feminist and social agendas, as noted by the historian Alex Owen.39

34 Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), a German biologist. Mrs Atwood derived much of her scientific knowledge from his magnum opus, Principles of Physiophilosophy (London, Ray Society, 1847) which is quoted extensively in the Suggestive Inquiry. 35 See, for example, in the Suggestive Inquiry, pages 499 and 536. 36 Suggestive Inquiry, p. 146. 37 See A.E. Waite, Shadows of Life and Thought, pp. 91–4. 38 Introduction to the Suggestive Inquiry, p. (4). 39 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment.

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Mesmerism, Shamanism, and “Privileged Consciousness”

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Alchemy, then, is an exercise in mystical perception, and the alchemist is a shaman participating in a kind of privileged consciousness. Utopian principles are never far removed from divine or demonic principles, as is the world view of the shaman or magus. Mircea Eliade says of shamanism, We consider it advantageous to restrict the use of the words ‘shaman’ and ‘shamanism’ precisely to avoid misunderstandings and to cast a clearer light on the history of ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’ for, of course, the shaman is also a magician and medicine man; he is believed to cure, like all doctors and to perform miracles of the fakir type, like all magicians, whether primitive or modern. But, beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be priest, mystic, and poet. In the dim ‘confusionistic’ mass of the religious life of archaic societies considered as a whole, shamanism—taken in the strict and exact sense—already shows a structure of its own and implies a ‘history’ that there is every reason to clarify.40

Oliver Sacks says of privileged consciousness in relation to the visions of Hildegaard of Bingen, Invested with this sense of ecstasy, burning with profound theophorous and philosophical significance, Hildegaard’s visions were instrumental in directing her towards a life of holiness and mysticism. They provide a unique example of the manner in which a physiological event, baneful, hateful, or meaningless to the vast majority of people, can become, in a privileged consciousness, the substrate of a supreme ecstatic inspiration.41

The shaman, magus, and later, the spiritual alchemist, were the recipients of a supernatural enhanced perception of the mundane and supernatural worlds. Hereward Tilton says of this, [Heinrich] Khunrath spoke of the mystical perception of a universal, external, and visible fire of Nature, and its complement in a universal, internal, and invisible fire—that is to say, in terms of both a knowledge and a life-imparting entity that transcends the apparent division between the interior and exterior worlds.42

As time progressed, the figure of the shaman metamorphosed into that of the magus—whose historical progress, as historian E.M. Butler notes, “The rise of the medicine-man to the status of a Persian mage, the upward evolution through magician and magus to super-magus in our day, all this forms a cyclic movement 40 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, p. 4. 41 Oliver Sacks, Migraine, revised edition, p. 115. Emphasis added. 42 Hereward Tilton, Michael Maier, pp. 240–41. Emphasis added.

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continually revolving both in the history of individuals and of the type as a whole,”43 and, in turn, into the Rosicrucian archetype—physician, scientist, and social reformer—each archetype sharing some common historical and fictive characteristics, made up of elements of myth, such as those connected with Faust, Paracelsus, St Germain, and even Mary Anne Atwood, but with additional elements of personality and history informed by the science and philosophy of the times. “The Rosicrucian fiction,” as described by esoteric historian Susanna Ackerman, contained an incomplete utopian agenda: “Rosicrucianism emerged as a mixture of popular eschatology and Paracelsian ideas that seemed to hold the promise of a fundamental change in Protestant culture—a fundamental social change, to be sure, that never fully materialized.”44 An “anonymous and fictive” mythological system were the seeds of Rosicrucian thought, and some elements passed into what Ackerman calls the “imaginal realm”45 while others became part of a “hermetic tradition” to future generations of esoteric philosophers, and eventually to the German Pietists who inspired Goethe such as Fraulein von Klettenberg in 1768.46 Books by Leade and other members of the Philadelphian sect were collected in Thomas South’s library, and the Philadelphian world view heavily influenced the utopian conceptions of Mrs Atwood and her followers, particularly Madame de Steiger. Conclusions Thomas South and Mrs Atwood did not consider alchemy as an anachronism or some variety of “pseudo-science”: rather, they perceived alchemy to be part of a new science of the future which would encompass the “hermetic wisdom,” preserved for centuries in alchemical texts and traditions. They considered themselves to be part of the “hermetic tradition,” the “golden chain” of alchemists going back to the seventeenth century and earlier, and they believed themselves to be bound by the strictures of “hermetic secrecy.” As a result, throughout the Suggestive Inquiry and elsewhere in her correspondence, the insinuation that Mrs Atwood is privy to more information than she is permitted to reveal is a continual backdrop to the expository text. Putting Mrs Atwood’s intellectual forerunners in context is also particularly difficult. For example, we now know that Rene Descartes’ so-called “secret notebook,” written in cipher, was dedicated to the German Fraternity of the Rose-Cross,47 and decoded by Gottfried Leibniz—whose Rosicrucian affiliations were described by Mrs Atwood in her unpublished 43 E.M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus, p. 266. Emphasis added. 44 Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 2. 45 Rose Cross over the Baltic, p. 239. 46 Gray, Goethe the Alchemist, p. 4. 47 See Aczel, Descartes’ Secret Notebook and Susanna Ackermans Rose Cross Over the Baltic.

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manuscripts and correspondence. The presence of these unpublished and littleknown documents lends credence to the assertion that, in order to understand Mrs Atwood’s intellectual development in a comprehensive way, an organized study of the unpublished documentation would be essential. Tracking down the contents of Thomas South’s library, and the various collections of correspondence, particularly the Atwood-de Steiger correspondence at Brown University, are also useful future areas of research remaining to be explored. In this the twenty-first century, those individuals still interested in history are faced with a daunting—and sometimes paradoxical—choice: to ignore those seeming eccentrics and “outsiders” on the fringe—or completely off—the path of “mainstream historical analysis,” with its emphasis on science, war, and religion, or, alternately, to attempt to form a broader, synthetic view of history, which includes these supposed outsiders as part of a greater, more encompassing historical process—involving unique and individual perspectives, such as Mrs Atwood and her father—on the arts and sciences of their time. These outsiders are not afraid to confront history with their own imaginings, and to leave the path of historical fact for a more seductive re-imagining of how “things might have been.” The Souths’ extended utopian fantasy of initiated wisdom and a hermetic-scientific Utopia is an example of this “outsider history”: passing through many incarnations prior to its arrival in the twenty-first century, books, articles, manuscripts, web sites, and music videos have paid homage to Early Magnetism and the Suggestive Inquiry,48 and the published works of the Souths are still studied by esoteric groups and historians world-wide. The Souths’ world-view is often perceived by mainstream historians to be an aberrant and quirky deviation from the mainstream history of modern scientific thought. However, do we have enough information to objectively evaluate the Souths’ intellectual contributions? Does Mrs Atwood’s utopian philosophy persist in the twenty-first century? Is it realistic, studied, and viable? Are current philosophers and historians aware of the Souths’ contribution, and are they analyzing and promulgating elements of the Souths’ world-view? The answer is a qualified “yes”—within limits, and in very specific ways. Given that the world view of the Souths has been fragmented and never fully articulated—even the Suggestive Inquiry was not a complete or mature statement of Mrs Atwood’s later philosophical thought, and caused Mrs Atwood to hesitate on allowing the reprint of the Suggestive Inquiry; as expressed by Mrs Atwood herself in 1881—“It is my abiding wish that so crude an attempt to rehearse the old method of philosophy should not be re-issued but allowed to remain in the oblivion it deserves”49— indicate the challenges that await the inquiring historian. However, many of the

48 See, for example, the rock artist Pink’s music video ‘U and Ur Hand’ which features a protagonist reading from Mrs Atwood’s Hermetic Mystery in the red-covered Yogi Publications edition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_%2B_Ur_Hand. 49 Introduction to the Suggestive Inquiry, 2nd edition, p. (21).

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obstacles in researching the Souths’ work are being made easier by the Internet, including copies and catalogs of relevant research materials.50 Utopian thinking is often a proposed solution for the insanity of the times: after all, in Thomas More’s day the originating concept and motivation for “Utopia”51 may have been to express some of the humanistic yearnings aspiring to a more evolved human consciousness and society. My intent here is not to offer the last word in the interpretation of Mrs Atwood’s thought, or its relevance to the twenty-first century—but to propose a next word, that is, to suggest one particular extension of the constellation of utopian ideas bequeathed to us from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originating in Mrs Atwood’s contribution to spiritual alchemy. Mrs Atwood’s achievement was not merely an exercise of the imagination, but a logically rigorous synthesis, summarization, and crystallization of eight philosophical systems into a uniquely individual, integrated world view, as typified by the extension of certain scientific methodologies, Christian theosophy, traditional Western alchemy, Mesmerism and magnetism, Neo-Platonism, spiritualism, Christianized Kabbalah and other psycho-spiritual mysticisms. The Souths’ world-view deserves respect as a cohesive and comprehensive pansophic—and thus utopian—vision of the universe, in the best traditions of Jakob Bohme, Paracelsus, Francis Bacon, and others of the Souths’ intellectual forebears—including the original Jewish Kabbalists52 (as opposed to the later Christianized mutation of Kabbalism), but also partaking of the Rosicrucian tendencies of Dee, Khunrath, and Michael Maier. Definitive conclusions about the Souths’ world-view—and its ultimate impact upon mainstream historical thought—is difficult. Is it even possible to form a coherent and consistent interpretation—understandable by modern thought and modern philosophy—of what Mrs Atwood was trying to articulate, given that more than 150 years have passed since her formulation of the “hermetic mystery”? Only continued research into the clues left behind by Mrs Atwood and her circle of followers can provide the answer to this question. To quote the final lines of Early Magnetism, in which Thomas South expresses a poignant philosophical question: “But let us hesitate in awe and diffidence, and ask, is the time yet rife, for such a bursting, dazzling, deep, devotional blaze of revealment? Are we in this latter time prepared? We ask and pause for a reply; and in the busy darkness all around, the faithful monitor within, but echoes the response, Pause for a reply.”53

50 For example, the catalog of the South library at the University of Wisconsin, http://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/ocm30382670. 51 Thomas More. Utopia, and The Last Letters of Thomas More. Edited by Alvaro de Silva. 52 See Gershom Sholem, Alchemy and Kaballah, as well as his earlier magnum opus, Kaballah. 53 Early Magnetism, p. 120.

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References Aczel, Amir D. Descartes’ Secret Notebook. New York: Broadway Books. 2005. Akerman, Susanna. Rose-Cross Over The Baltic: The Spread of Rosicrucianism in Northern Europe. Leiden: Brill. 1998. Allen, Paul M. ed. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology. Edited by Paul M. Allen. Blauvelt, New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications. 1981. Atwood, Mary Anne. A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, with a Dissertation on the More Celebrated of the Alchemical Philosophers, Being an Attempt towards the Recovery of the Ancient Experiment of Nature. First edition. London. 1850. Second edition. Belfast. 1918. Third edition. Belfast. 1920. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1972. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. New York: Cornell University Press. 1981. Blake, William. “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time,” (1808). Complete Poems and Prose of William Blake. Internet link: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/ book/complete-poetry-and-prose-william-blake. Bronowski, J., Mazlish, Bruce. The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel. New York: Dorset Press, Marlboro Books. 1986. First Published 1960. Butler, E.M. The Myth of the Magus. New York: Macmillan Company. 1948. Chappell, Vere. Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock. San Francisco, New Buryport, MA: Weiser Books. 2010. Cockren, Archibald. Alchemy Rediscovered and Restored. London: Rider and Co. No date. Circa 1940. Corrington, Robert S. Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2003. Coudert, Alison. Leibniz and the Kaballah. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1995. Couliano, Ioan P. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Translated by Margaret Cook. Forward by Mircea Eliade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1987. Craddock, Ida. Lunar and Sex Worship. Edited with an introduction by Vere Chappell. York Beach, ME: Teitan Press. 2010. Eliade, Mircea. The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy. Second Edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1962. ———. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. English translation by Willard R. Trask. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bollingen Series LXXVI. 1964. Franck, Adolphe. The Kaballah: The Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews. English Translation. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, Lyle Stuart. 1967. Copyright, University Books, Inc.

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Frick, Karl R.H. Die Erleuchteten. Gnostisch-theosophische und alchemistischrozenkreutzerische Geheimgesellschaften bis zum Ende des 18.Jahrhunderts —ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit. Graz: Akademsche Druck u. Verlagsanstalt. 1973. Gabay, Alfred J. The Covert Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Counterculture and its Aftermath. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation Publishers. 2005. Godwin, Joscelyn. “A Behemist Circle in Victorian England” In The Hermetic Journal, Edinburgh: 1992. ———. The Theosophical Enlightenment. New York: State University of New York Press. 1994. Gray, Ronald D. Goethe the Alchemist: A Study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe’s Literary and Scientific Works. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2002. Hall, Manley Palmer. Codex Rosae Crucis: A Rare and Curious Manuscript of Rosicrucian Interest, Now Published For The First Time In Its Original Form. Kila, MT. Kessinger Publishing (originally published 1938). Hitchcock, Ethan Allen. Alchemy and the Alchemists. Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society. 1976. Original edition published in 1857. Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Perennial Classics. Originally published 1951. Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy. Second edition. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Bollingen Series XX. 1953. ———. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Second edition. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Bollingen Series XX. 1963. Kennedy, Gerry, Churchill, Rob. The Voynich Manuscript: The Mysterious Code that has Defied Interpretation for Centuries. New York: Orion Publishing. 2005. Koitzsch, Kerry. The C.R. Manuscript: Photographs and Transcription of A Twentieth-Century Rosicrucian Document. Forthcoming. ———. Mary Anne Atwood, Her Life, Work, and Legacy. Forthcoming. Lanier, Sidney. The Symphony, in The Poems of Sidney Lanier, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/579/pg579.html. de Leon-Jones, Karen Silvia. Giordano Bruno and the Kaballah: Prophets, Magician and Rabbis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. First published 1997. Maitland, Edward. The Life of Anna Kingsford, parts I and II. Kila, MT. Kessinger Publishing. Published in 1913. Manuel, Frank E. and Manuel, Fritzie P. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press. 1979. Third Printing, 1982. Massey, Charles Carleton. Thoughts of A Modern Mystic: A Selection from the Writings of the Late C.C. Massey. Edited by W.F. Barrett, F.R.S. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company. 1909.

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McIntosh, Christopher. The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: EighteenthCentury Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment. New York: SUNY Press. 1992. ———. The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order. San Francisco: Weiser Books. 1998. More, Thomas. The Utopia of Sir Thomas More. Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand Company. Copyright 1947 by Walter J. Black, Inc. Morrison, Mark S. Modern Alchemy. Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Newman, William R., and Grafton, Anthony, eds. Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. 2006. First published 2001. Nicolaus, Georg. C.G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation and the Person: A Critical Comparison. London and New York: Routledge Press. 2011. Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Penny, Anne Judith. Studies in Jacob Boehme. Kila, MT. Kessinger Publishing. First published in 1912, John M. Watkins. Pert, Alan. Red Cactus: The Life of Anna Kingsford. Watsons Bay, NZW. Australia: Books & Writers Network Pty Ltd. 2006. Peukert, Will-Erich. Pansophie. Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der Weissen und Schwartzen Magie. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. 1956. Regardie, Israel. The Philosophers’ Stone. Third edition. Edited by Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero. Llewellyn Press. 2013. Reich, Wilhelm. Character Analysis. Third, enlarged edition. Translated by Vincent R. Carfagno. Edited by Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael, M.D. New York: Farar, Straus, and Giroux. Paperback edition, 1990. Rossi, Paolo. Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. London and New York: Continuum Press, an imprint of Athlone Press. 2000. First published, Italy 1983, Societas Editrice il Mulino, Bologna as Clavis Universalis: Arti Della Memoria e Logica Combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz. Sacks, Oliver. Migraine: Revised and Expanded. New York: Vintage Books, Putnam House. 1992. Scholem, Gershom. Kaballah. New York: Dorset Press. 1987. Originally published in 1974. ———. Alchemy and Kaballah. Putnam, CT: Spring Publications. 2006. Originally published in Eranos Yearbook 46, 1977. Schuchard, Marsha Keith. William Blake’s Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. 2006. Silberer, Herbert. Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts. Originally published as Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism, in 1917, by Moffat, Yard, and Company. Translated by Smith Ely Jelliffe, M.D. Ph.D. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1971.

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South, Thomas (writing as THUOS MATHOS). Early Magnetism, in its Higher Relations to Humanity as Veiled in the Poets and the Prophets. London: Bailliare. 1846. ———. “The Enigma of Alchemy”—poetic fragment. Published in the “Essential Alchemical Readings” anthology, Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Originally published, from recovered proof-sheets, by G.R.S. Mead in “The Quest,” Volume 10 (2) Jan 1919. Also contains an interesting introduction by Walter Leslie Wilmshurst of the history of how part of the poem was recovered after having been presumed to be destroyed. De Steiger, Isabelle. On a Gold Basis: A Treatise on Mysticism. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Originally published in 1907 by Philip Welby Publishing. ——— Superhumanity: A Suggestive Enquiry into the Mystic and Material Meaning of the Christian Word Regeneration. London: Elliot Stock. 1916. ———. Memorabilia: Reminiscences of a Woman Artist and Writer. London: Rider and Sons. 1927. Introduction by A.E. Waite. Steiner, Rudolf. Christian Rosenkreutz: The Mystery, Teaching, and Mission of A Master. Andrew Welburn, series editor. Sophia Books, Rudolf Steiner Press. East Sussex, England. 2001. Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. New York: St Martins’ Griffin Press. 2000. Taylor, Thomas. Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings. Edited by Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1969. Trinick, John. The Fire-Tried Stone: An Enquiry into the Development of a Symbol. First edition. Great Britain: Wordens of Cornwall Limited, Marazion and Penzance. 1967. Versluis, Arthur. The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism: Sacred Practices and Spiritual Marriage. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books. 2008. Villeneuve, Crispian, editor. Rudolf Steiner in Britain: A Documentation of his Ten Visits. Volume 1 (1902–1921). Forest Row, East Sussex, England: Temple Lodge Publishing. 2009. Waite, Arthur Edward. The Secret Tradition in Alchemy: Its Development and Records. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Originally published in 1926. ———. Shadows of Life and Thought: A Retrospective Review in the Form of Memoirs. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Originally published in 1938. Waldo-Schwartz, Paul. Art and the Occult. New York: George Braziller. 1975. Webb, James. The Flight from Reason. Volume I of the Age of the Irrational. London: Macdonald. 1971. Weeks, Andrew. Jacob Bohme. An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth Century Philosopher and Mystic. New York: State University of New York Press. 1991. Wescott, William Wynn, editor. Collectanea Hermetica. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing. 1992. Originally published in 1897. Wilson, Colin. The Occult. New York: Vintage Books. 1973. First published 1971.

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———. Mysteries: An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal, and the Supernatural. London: Watkins Publishing. 2006. Yates, Francis. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1964. ———. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Routledge Classics. 2002. First published, 1972, by Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1972.

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PART II Mind, Body, Soul, and the Utopian Individual

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Chapter 7

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The Empathetic Turn: The Relationship of Empathy to the Utopian Impulse Nancy L. Nester

Introduction In the Empathetic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin makes the bold claim that “the [e]mpathetic consciousness would be strangely out of place in either heaven or utopia.”1 Interestingly, he levels this assertion in the midst of an impressive analysis of the primacy of empathy in human life and contends that when we empathize, we employ a capacity for which we are genetically soft-wired.2 “A world without empathy,” he writes, “is alien to the very notion of what a human being is.”3 One could reasonably infer from the entirety of his argument that the utopian impulse—the propensity to strive to better the world as one knows it, in the ways that one knows—is predicated on empathy. Nevertheless, at certain junctures, Rifkin explicitly discourages readers from drawing such a conclusion, especially in a chapter that explores the attitudes and events leading up to the Industrial Revolution. In this section, he specifically refers to a “utopian vision.”4 He mentions both a “material utopia”5 situated in the temporal world as well as an abstract, idyllic site free of woes, outside of time. In these sections, he pronounces empathy and utopia to be antithetical.6 “Empathy,” he maintains, “does not exist in utopian worlds, where suffering and death are eliminated.”7 In Rifkin’s view, utopia is an otherworldly place—edenic—certainly, where pain is atavistic and death vanquished, a place inhospitable to change, static in ideology, and limited in practice. Any deviation might tip the delicate balance, opening Eden, anew, to angst, contempt, and misery. But in the historical and imaginary utopian spaces I study with my students, whether it be Plymouth Colony or the Twin Oaks Community, the conceptual city of the Republic, the mystical Herland, or the 1 Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathetic Civilization: the Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Penguin, 2009), 168. 2 Ibid., 167. 3 Ibid., 142. 4 Rifkin, 322. 5 Ibid., 317. 6 Ibid., 168, 317, 322, 345. 7 Ibid., 345.

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pastoral but practical Walden Two, the potential for suffering and the reality of mortality are very much on the minds of the individuals who populate them, the fear of which often impels the inhabitants to pursue and sustain communitarian practices to lesson pain and stave off death. Such behavior, whether in the temporal world or the utopian spaces, is consistent with anthropological evidence that indicates the individual’s relationships with other human beings, both contingent and long-term, accounted in no small measure for the ability to endure over time. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, anthropologists, observe that “any factor tending to bind individuals more closely together contributed to the eventual success of the species.”8 Empathy has such binding properties. Robert Plutchik, biologist, notes that “from an evolutionary point of view, empathy has important survival value.”9 Thus, its pervasiveness may have tilted the evolutionary scale not only in favor of the species but also toward a desire, in humans, for broad scale social well-being. Empathy intensifies human perception of what others are feeling and can serve as a catalyst for an array of emotions. We see such tendencies prominently in the wake of catastrophic events as people respond to one another—because they have experienced the pain or can empathize with those struck by the tragedy. The context determines the trajectory of their efforts: medicine, food, shelter, protection; yet these alliances are testaments to human resilience—the will to persevere and to bring others along—even if these emerge out of a sense of duty. Rifkin’s insistence on the superfluous nature of empathy in utopia, though, has the potential to take hold, especially in the easily accessible, highly influential virtual world where the claims appear out of context and disproportionate to the argument in toto. Of particular interest is a clever RSAnimate video posted on YouTube10 that distills Rifkin’s book to an 11-minute piece that includes his claims regarding empathy and utopia, even though these allusions occupy relatively little textual space in a 674 page text which, as I have noted, effectively makes the argument for the synergistic relationship of empathy and the utopian outlook. But the reach of the video is great: as of June 10th 2013, 2,125,050, have viewed it. Because the video is so popular, when you “Google” the search terms “empathy and utopia,” you will find Rifkin’s claim that “empathy does not exist in Utopia” embedded in most of the entries (June 10, 2013). From an interdisciplinary perspective, this chapter challenges his claims by establishing empathy as an integral habit of thought in individuals as they seek and sustain the good society, a faculty that can operationalize the utopian impulse, a capacity vital to a utopian praxis. Critical to the analysis are definitions of two terms—utopia and empathy—the former broadened and the latter narrowed. 8 Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977), 151. 9 Robert Plutchik, “Evolutionary Bases of Empathy.” In Empathy and its Development by Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 45. 10 RSAnimate: The Empathetic Civilization. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. On-line video. YouTube. May 6, 2010. Web.

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The exploration draws not only on the work of utopians who write narratives of better places or those who study them but also on the labors of scholars who research the impact of empathy on human behavior, policy, language, and the arts.

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It Begins with a Question In Spring of 1999, I taught the interdisciplinary seminar I designed entitled Visions of Utopia: Dreams and Delusions for the first time. At the end of the semester, with a group of students, I conducted a panel at the 24th annual meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies that focused on the structure and outcomes of the course. Texts and topics in the curriculum have changed over the years, as has my methodology. Yet each semester, as we study the various historical and literary utopian attempts, I find some constants. Interestingly, we continue to be inured to the supra normal capacities of parthenogenic or time-traveling characters, if we come upon them in our survey, perhaps because reports of cloning and black holes abound in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Instead, our curiosity and, at times, frustration are evoked by something that seems illusive—the “God matter,” or “stuff”—that inclines people to seek, sometimes selflessly, the greater good (a term that should be defined contextually and not as a universal). In fact, the more cooperative and communal the arrangement we examine, the less conceivable appear the outcomes. When I ask students whether the narrative is a blueprint to be followed or a caution to be headed, they are quick to attach qualifiers to their responses, e.g. though the equalitarian arrangements are admirable, they lack verisimilitude. Humans are competitive by nature; thus, systemic happiness is impossible, even in the ideal habitat. The consensus is that collectives, engined by benevolence and sustained by distributive justice, would result in mediocrity— a failure to thrive. We reach for the shibboleth “survival of the fittest,” often employed as a tough love maxim with respect to the weak, the sick, the old, and, especially, the lazy. The latter group is the most disconcerting, for sloth seems to be an adaptive condition, one stemming from complacency. Popular wisdom holds that competition is its antidote, vital in an atmosphere where champions are bred and progress made. Yet competition rarely provides the impetus for betterment in the utopian milieus we analyze, a conundrum that takes us back to questions of what constitutes human nature. Theories of human nature are many and provocative, threading through conversations that cut across knowledge domains such as philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and biology. Most show tensile strength around the question of whether nature or nurture determines the dominant human characteristics. When too heavily stretched, to one end or the other—hypothesizing about whether our behavior is governed by our genes or the company we keep—the theory is deemed reductive. Frans de Waal, in The Age of Empathy writes, “Every debate about society and government makes huge assumptions about human nature which are

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presented as if they come straight out of biology. But they almost never do.”11 Yet, within the wide-ranging research, he finds common ground: “[W]e are group animals, highly cooperative, sensitive to injustice, sometimes warmongering, but mostly peace loving,” an assessment, he insists, we should carefully consider.12 In my classes, we do consider this perspective as we analyze what moves individuals to cooperate, to invest energy in the betterment of the collective, a question many utopianists address—to lesser or greater degrees—of readers’ satisfaction. Edward Bellamy, for example, probes the concept of “inducement.” When Julian West challenges Dr Leete’s idealism regarding an individual’s capacity for selflessness, Leete responds with a question of his own: “Does it then really seem to you … that human nature is insensible to any motives save fear of want and love of luxury?”13 Objectives such as “honor, gratitude, patriotism, and the inspiration of duty”14 are named as powerful drives for the people in Bellamy’s Boston, amplified by a “passion for humanity.”15 In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, the spirit of familial relationships, predicated on an all-encompassing outlook of care toward others, drives the individual’s public and private decisions. The narrator explains: “You see, they had had no wars. They had had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together—not by competition, but by united action.”16 This desire, in the individual, to join his or her lot to that of others, to act en masse for a socially constructed or intuited common good, may well be engendered by empathy. Michael Franz Basch, physician, explains that empathy is “first and foremost a capacity” that develops at a certain level of cognitive maturity, an aptitude that helps build knowledge.17 Understood as such, empathy may quicken awareness and deepen understanding of one person toward the situation of another. Martha Nussbaum, philosopher, characterizes empathy as the “mental preparation” for other emotions, the cognitive conditioning that “underwrites” or makes possible the judgments necessary for assessing the severity of suffering.18 The capacity to recognize and appreciate the profundity of another person’s feelings may be the precursor to all meaningful encounters. Carl Rogers, psychologist, for example, makes such a point when he attributes our interpersonal perceptual abilities to 11 Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Three Rives Press, 2009), 4. According to deWaal, the phrase “survival of the fittest” comes from Herbert Spencer, British political philosopher, 28. 12 de Waal, 4. 13 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Penguin Books, 1960), 78. 14 Ibid., 78. 15 Ibid., 79. 16 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Signet Classics, 1992), 61. 17 Michael Franz Basch, “Empathetic Understanding: A Review of the Concept and Some Theoretical Considerations,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (1983), 31: 119, 123. 18 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 327, 331.

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empathy. He describes empathy as a “fundamental mode of human relatedness,” one that may “constitute the very matrix of man’s psychological survival.” Empathy, he explains, is a tool for “observation: without which human behavior might be ‘unintelligible’.”19 This idea is echoed in the work of scholar Louis Agosta, who explains that without the capacity for empathy “the constitution of our psychological life does not even make sense … .”20 Robert Katz adopts an essentialist stance, too, claiming empathy is a “sixth sense” of sorts, a state of mind for which we are genetically predisposed. “We are born to understand,” he asserts. Understood in this way, empathy does seem elemental to our humanness.21 In some texts that take a dystopian twist, in fact, empathy is the measure of humanity. In Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for example, empathy distinguishes humans from their mechanized counterparts. “Organic androids,” as Dick calls them, hunger and thirst, injure and wail, reason and act. But regardless of their clever design, the one capacity androids cannot mechanically feign is empathy, an attribute depicted as both virtue and frailty in a person. Empathy here is the propensity to “fuse”—cognitively and emotionally—with the other; it “blur[s] boundaries” and leaves one vulnerable. In one scene, the character John Isidore exercises his empathetic skills by using a dark box that sits in his living room programmed to allow users to conjure images that evoke strong feelings. To underscore the intensity of these sessions, Dick describes his character as literally bruised at the end of one.22 Yet, Isidore will endure these effects in order to retain this capacity. In Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind, a breed of telepaths suffer from an abundance of empathy, rendering them monstrous, tormented by what they feel. In one scene, Mary, the daughter of the reincarnating Doro, is so viscerally affected by the pain she senses an accident victim feeling, that she curls into a fetal position. In a later scene, depicting the final battle to overthrow her now fiendish father, Mary draws strength from those members of the community who can intuit her pain and dispense their strength to her: “She was still alive because she was connected to all those people.” 23 Empathy is evidently at play as an individual establishes connections—wittingly or unwittingly.

19 Carl Rogers, “The Psychoanalyst in the Community of Scholars.” The Search for The Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1950–1978 (New York: International Universities Press, Inc, 1978), 704, 705. 20 Louis Agosta, Empathy and Intersubjectivity. Empathy I. Edited by Joseph Lichtenber, et al. (Hillsdate: The Analytic Press, 1984), 40. 21 Robert Katz, Empathy: Its Nature and Uses (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 1, 62. 22 Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: DelRey, 1968), 16, 31, 22. 23 Octavia Butler, Mind of My Mind (New York: Warner Books, 1977), 38, 213.

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A Multi-faceted Utopia Empathy assists people as they navigate relationships with others and formulate a utopian vision, even if that vision is a located, general sense of what the society of which they are a part should offer. One source of confusion regarding whether empathy in utopia is oxymoronic may be that Rifkin’s claim seems pinned to a limited denotation of utopia as “paradise.” In “Where is Utopia in the Brain?,” Daniel S. Levine refers to the “‘heated swimming pool of eternal life’” to describe such peril-free utopian habitats and observes that “[P]eople on the whole do not achieve lasting happiness in such a society … . We prefer a different kind of utopia that includes risk, adventure, and humor.”24 Contemporary Utopian Studies theorists envision the term “utopia” as an expansive one, encompassing a concept and theme, theory and practice. Lyman Tower Sargent, for example, reminds us that the word “utopia” now has broad application, far beyond what is sometimes derived from the “no place” Sir Thomas More described in his classic text. Sargent includes a range of interpretations for utopia: a “literary genre,” “a mentality,” “a philosophical attitude,” “the desire for a better way of being” and his own reference to utopianism as “social dreaming.” In fact, as Sargent explains, the subject commands serious study and refers to “many types of social and political activity intended to bring about a better society and, in some cases, personal transformation”.25 Samuel Moyn, in The Last Utopia, an exploration of human rights in relation to morality and politics, particularly in the twentieth century, alludes to utopia as “a place that has not been called into being” and later to utopianism as “the heartfelt desire to make the world a better place.”26 Utopian thought, then, is aspirational, not consigned to a fixed, unchanging locus of eversatisfying activity. Empathy as Exigence Whether utopia is conceived of as a viewpoint, a type of dreaming, a longing, an attitude, or desire, the inclination to hope for the better depends on a combination of physical, logical, emotional, and ethical capacities. Levine, in his effort to 24 Daniel S. Levine, “Where is Utopia in the Brain?” Utopian Studies, 20, no. 2 (2009): 251. 25 Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5, 7, 24. The “desire for a better way of being” is a definition of Utopia that Ruth Levitas problematizes in the concluding chapter of her book, the Concept of Utopia, for it, too, implicitly disregards issues of criteria when trying to delineate a field of study and, perhaps, a canon. She argues that the desire for betterment be guided by the questions one is trying to answer. 26 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Belknap Press: 2010), 1, 225.

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pinpoint utopia in the corporal body, observes that a striving of that nature may grow out of physiological processes that trigger the receptors for cooperative behavior and reciprocal exchanges. His research in neuroscience, as well as the anthropological research mentioned earlier, finds that the “tend and befriend” impulse is as responsible for our enduring nature as the “fight or flight” response.27 In other studies that use imaging to map human reactions, acts of reciprocity and cooperation consistently stimulate certain portions of the brain, a finding which leads researchers to conclude that “the altruistic drive to cooperate is biologically embedded—either programmed or acquired through socialization during childhood and adolescence.”28 One could infer, then, that to the degree reciprocity and cooperation are integral to a utopia, empathy is, as well, functioning as the exigence for the betterment derived from interacting with other human beings, creatures, and nature in mutually beneficial ways. Empathy can activate the impulse, which will then involve multiple affective and cognitive processes. For Daniel Choderkoff, a utopian impulse involves discernment and judgment as well as vision. He characterizes the impulse as a “response to existing social conditions and an attempt to transcend or transform those conditions to achieve an ideal.”29 Ruth Levitas, in the Concept of Utopia, challenges the notion of a fixed ideal, a universal conception of perfection, instead stressing that the impulse is driven by desire, as noted above, but one that is socially constructed rather than innate, a response to a “gap” between the wants and needs endemic to a society and the available means of satisfying them.30 Nonetheless, empathy may foster the recognition of those spaces of perceived lack or scarcity. These are discerned as threats to well-being because individuals understand that they do not want to share those reduced circumstances or, if they are found in them, they realize that others are better situated and they strive to be, as well. With that awareness, people can work to mitigate problems. As many have noted, empathy is a capacity that needs to be tapped and nurtured. In his A Theory of Justice, John Rawls suggests that when deliberating the terms of justice, it may be best if interlocutors remain “unattached,” suspended in a position where they must use a form of probability theory as they envision or empathize with those in a multitude of situations. Policy makers, he maintains, should conceptually extricate themselves from their social markers and don a “veil of ignorance,” unsure of whether they might be struck by the blunt edge of a policy they enact. In this frame of mind, they would legislate for the advantage 27 Daniel S. Levine, “Where is Utopia in the Brain?” Utopian Studies, 20, no. 2 (2009): 250, 251. 28 “Emory Brain Imaging Studies Reveal Biological Basis for Human Cooperation.” Science Daily (2002): 2. 29 Daniel Choderkoff, “The Utopian Impulse: Reflections on a Tradition.” The Journal of Social Ecology, 1.1 (Winter 1983), 2. 30 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia. Ralhine Classics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 209–10.

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of the many rather than the privilege of the few. A heady conceptual task—to comprehend what it might be like to be rich, poor, educated, illiterate, well, ill, powerful or disenfranchised—but Rawls requires it of us, for without such a capacity, he maintains, one cannot draft and prosecute just laws. This conceptual state is mediated by empathy: it is in the state of empathy that we gather insights of the intolerable situation. In Empathy and Democracy, Michael E. Morrell expands on this line of reasoning, drawing on scholar Michael Frazier who explains: “actors in the original position ‘cannot rely on instrumental reason alone for the purposes of the relevant deliberations, but also must possess the emotional and imaginative capacity of well-developed empathy’.”31 Empathy provides fodder for the reasoning process, especially involving decisions with respect to the degree of suffering that people will tolerate in a society before, individually or collectively, they will administer aid. Nussbaum issues a challenge when she states: “Every society, then, needs to decide what struggles people should not have to fight for themselves without social support.”32 In a society with utopian aspirations, the individual must appreciate the level of threat or enhancement to human flourishing a set of conditions presents; one must recognize the suffering or gain someone differently situated might experience. The resulting understanding may involve a visceral reaction in the beholder, or at least a perception of what that visceral response might entail. Consider, for example, a scene in With Her in Ourland, the sequel to Herland. Ellador, wife of the narrator Van, has traveled to the United States with her husband and with Terry, who was convicted of rape and banished from Herland. Early in her orientation to the country and its ills, Van explains: “you are sent from your upland island, your little hidden heaven, to see our poor blind bleeding world and carry news of it to your people. … And you cannot afford to feel our sorrow—you’d die of it. You must think—and talk it off, remorselessly, to me.” Here Van acknowledges that an empathetic response can evoke strong feelings, which need not translate into observable, measurable action. The mitigation can, and in certain situations, must be conceptual in the observer but make no alteration in the circumstances of the oppressed. Ellador, on the other hand, cannot accept this reasoning. From her vantage point, the empathetic reaction spurs amelioration of problems, eases and erases suffering. Once made aware of issues, and having the capacity to appreciate the pain caused, one has a duty to act, to stay the cause rather than remain satisfied by abating its effects: “If there is a house on fire,” Ellador explains, “the only true way to check the destruction is to put the fire out.” Van admits that many in his society recognize the fire of injustice but do little to bring about change. “There are

31 Michael Morrell, “The Elusive Concept of Empathy.” Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2010), 72. 32 Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 20.

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plenty more who see it,” he assures Ellador, a response to which she is aghast.33 For Ellador, empathy sets in motion a physical response to the intolerable situation.

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The Measure of Empathy Nonetheless, we must be mindful that though empathy may render the utopian impulse actionable, or even invoke pity in the perceiver, an effect we see in Ellador, it does not—as many researchers caution—necessarily equate to benevolence or altruism. Thus, empathy can occur but not precipitate restorative or palliative action. Here, then, is where the narrowing of the term’s definition in common usage gains import. Until the early twentieth century, the state of mind that the word “empathy” captures was conveyed by words such as sympathy, compassion, and pity. Though these words continue to function in colloquial language as synonyms for empathy, they are not. They promise much more than what empathy offers. The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines sympathy as “A (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence … .” Compassion is explained as “Suffering together with another, participation in suffering; fellow-feeling,” and pity is described as “The disposition to mercy or compassion; clemency, mercy, mildness, tenderness … .”34 Pity is connotatively more hierarchical, also. One seems to pity from above. But empathy requires merely the recognition, the comprehension of the other’s plight or boon, whichever the case. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Violet Page, who wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, introduced the word “empathy” to the English language, in a journal entry dated February 20, 1904, included in a book published in 1912.35 She used the term “aesthetic empathy” as a translation for the German word “Einfühlung” or “feeling into.” Einfühlung, she notes, is motivated by basic “interest” and leads people to ask questions, to make analogies: “What is this like?”36 While the words “compassion” and “sympathy” have positive connotations and imply feeling with and a movement toward, empathy—alone—may not stir the soul. Volition remains the prerogative of the empathizer. The townspeople of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas, for example, all know that in a dark, dank basement, an abused child languishes in its own filth. They understand that the child is in a state of being that they want to avoid, and avoid they do at the cost of the child’s 33 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland (Wesport: Praeger Publishers, 1997), 76–7. 34 “sympathy” n., “compassion” n., “pity” n. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, 1989. Continuously updated. 35 “empathy.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, 1989. 36 Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty & Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, 1912): 359, 338.

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happiness. Yet, they comprehend that child’s pain. All who are impelled to view the child are “sickened at the sight” but not compelled to act. They rationalize: their actions would exacerbate the misery for either the child or themselves. They are conditioned to believe that their happiness is contingent on the child’s suffering. To achieve didactic effect, Le Guin accentuates their impotence. Nonetheless, the disjuncture between the empathy and pain abatement is plausible. De Waal explains that there is “no obligatory connection between empathy and kindness.”37 “[E]mpathy is first and foremost a capacity. Strictly speaking it is value free,” he writes; “it neither prescribes nor proscribes behavior any more than does the knowledge gained from logical reason alone.” “It lays the groundwork …”38 Consider the spouse who fully appreciates the pain infidelity can cause but continues to conduct an affair. Conceptually, he or she understands the causal links and that awareness may be accompanied by emotion. Yet envisioning the heartache likely to ensue does not amend behavior. Similarly, the assailant who understands the hurt the impending assault will impose can experience empathy but persists with the crime. Importantly, the capacity for empathy can be present but empathy, alone, does not ensure that the empathizer will be affected by what she or he has “felt into” in a way that will translate into action. Ambivalence, fear, ignorance, moral strength or convictions may be factors. Such a perception of empathy is not easily embraced. Basch offers a rigorous examination of those difficulties, particularly in light of the connotations that, over time, have been attached to the term; “altruism and other-directedness” are two such associations.39 It is worth noting, here, that in some disciplines speculation abounds as to whether empathy is present if it does not culminate in action. Sociologists who study empathy stress the importance of “empathy-driven actions.” In “Measuring Empathy in the 21st Century,” Karen Gerdes and co-researchers developed a framework that includes “the conscious decision making to take empathetic action.” In their view, “The imperative to act differentiates a social work model of empathy …” In order to “be” empathetic one must “experience an affect, process it, and then take action.”40 Others such as Jesse Prinz, philosopher, argue against empathy as a precondition of moral judgment because empathy can be “partial,” preferential toward those close to and like us; he prefers that we get “fellow-feeling” from concern. “Concern” he explains “is a cousin of empathy, … a fellow-feeling that arises when we consider another’s plight.” “[C]oncern is a car pulled by the moral horse.”41 He worries that empathy is a catchall term, misleading in the assumptions 37 de Waal, 45. 38 de Waal, 119, 123–4. 39 Basch, 119. 40 Gendes, Karen E., Cynthia A. Lietz, and Elizabeth A. Segal, “Measuring Empathy in the 21st Century: Development of an Empathy Index Rooted in Social Cognitive Neuroscience and Social Justice.” Social Work Research, 35, no. 2 (2011): 85–6. 41 Jesse Prinz, “Against Empathy.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Spindel Supplement. 49 (2011): 223, 230–31.

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we attach to it, encompassing much more than what is originally denoted by the definition Lee provides. Understandably, because of the unpredictability of empathy, many scholars remain wary of it. Nussbaum, like Prinz, selects a word she senses is more appropriate. For her, compassion is the response that “promotes an accurate awareness of our common vulnerability.”42 She deems empathy unreliable—it alone does not ensure solace or aid. Still, she concedes empathy may “underwrite” other emotions: “[T]here is something correct in the contention that empathy is psychologically important as a guide. … [W]ithout it, we are likely to remain obtuse and unresponsive, not even knowing how to make sense of the predicament we see … .”43 The ambivalence of empathy is evident in B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two as Frazier describes the field trips children take to witness the poverty and strife in the materialist society that surrounds the settlement. The contrasting lifestyles are intended to thwart their desire for the worldly pleasures that the population at large so slavishly pursues. In order for these jaunts to serve as deterrents to defection, the children must have the capacity to see themselves similarly situated.44 Empathy attunes them to the feelings of those afflicted, helps them to process the images set before them, or those invoked by games. Empathy is caught up in the reasoning process. Without it, humans would arrive at their conclusions in a mechanistic way, much as the feared androids in Dick’s novel. But Skinner, as other utopianists, offers us an instance where empathy does not lead to mitigation of a problem. The afflicted see no change in their material circumstances as a result of the children’s appreciation of their predicament. The poor remain in the cities visited and Walden Two residents return to their compound, forewarned of what awaits them beyond the borders. Ann Jurecic issues a caution relating to this complacency when she writes that “social emotions” such as empathy can obscure the observer’s or feeler’s complicity in the pain of others. In those cases, empathy is the end and not the means for betterment. What betterment is experienced is private, internal, and unlikely to change the plight of others unless it sparks deep consideration of the factors that contribute to another’s pain or misfortune and culminates in action that leads to social change.45 42 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 91. 43 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 331, 330. 44 B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1948). Similarly, the causal analysis practiced in the “detective game” they play, from time to time, helps the children identify the toll luxuries exact. Frazier explains, “The game is to establish a connection in the shortest possible time between any given bit of luxury and some piece of poverty or depravity” (192). The children use their cognitive abilities to make the link, but it may be empathy that precedes the judgment of whether the consequences of materialism or greed are tolerable. 45 Ann Jurecic, “Empathy and the Critic.” College English, 74, no. 1 (2011): 11.

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Perhaps it is Plato who best depicts the complexity of empathy as he nuances it in critical, oft discussed areas of the Republic. He implies that the effects of empathy are threatening. For Plato, empathy must be carefully calibrated. He betrays his fear that the Guardians will be unable to regulate the effects of empathy, that the thumos might not constrain the mimicry or outpouring of emotion that may follow empathy. Aristotle would later call this catharsis and deem it therapeutic. To thwart unbridled reactions, Plato suggests that stories depicting the gods, goddesses, and even heroes, feeling strong emotion—atè and spite, jealousy and licentiousness—be expunged from the verse of Homer and the drama of Sophocles. These are the stories that confuse mothers and frighten children, e.g., the quagmire of Agamemnon and Achilles, involving their consorts, and the subsequent brooding of Achilles, the slaughter of Hector, and the desecration of Hector’s body, an act tantamount to sacrilege in Greek tradition of the times.46 Ironically, Plato devotes substantial textual space to the telling of these stories in his description of the perfect city, committing to the record the very tales he purportedly decries. We can infer that he recognizes that humans must take in and, at times, conceptually take up the situations of others. Otherwise, ostensibly, he would not fear the stories so. In fact, in these lines, he asks the reader/listener to envision the effect of these stories on the malleable youth. By doing so, he underscores the idea that empathy, in practice, is necessary to comprehend the consequences of prudence supplanted by appetite. Ironically, Plato is asking readers/listeners to empathize with him, first, hoping that they will then view favorably the conclusions he has drawn for the disposition of the ideal city. They will, then, experience the utopian impulse, as well. Thus, the ambiguity of empathy increases the plausibility of its compatibility with utopia, especially its confluence with the utopian impulse. In his research, Basch stresses that interpreting empathy as “feeling with” emphasizes affect rather than cognition while the word Einfühlung accommodates reasoning. He writes, “‘empathy’ has led to a confusion of ‘feeling with’ with the much broader concept of Einfühlung or ‘feeling into,’ i.e., ‘finding’ or ‘searching’ one’s way into the experience of another without specifying or limiting the means by which this occurs.”47 That empathy, alone, does not spur the moral compulsion to act is evident. Still, even while Skinner depicts Frazier’s primary interest as fanning loyalty to the community rather than cultivating civic responsibility in his residents, the scene does demonstrate the efficacy of educating for empathy. Carl Rogers explains that though one is not born empathetic, an individual can develop this capacity when schooled in an empathetic environment by empathetic people.48 Nussbaum, too, identifies as teachable, a capacity akin to empathy, the “narrative imagination,” one of the three aims of a well-structured liberal education. 46 Plato, The Republic. Transl. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Books, 1987): 381d; 391b. 47 Basch, 110–11. 48 Carl Rogers, “Empathetic: An Unappreciated Way of Being.” The Counseling Psychologist, 5, no. 2 (1975), 2–10.

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This capacity involves the putting of oneself in another’s shoes.49 Though she does not label this aptitude as “empathy,” it does seem to function in much the same way. Nussbaum’s hope is that this aptitude will allow individuals to recognize common ground regarding human flourishing, to appreciate the degree to which a condition threatens or enhances another person’s efforts to attain physical, emotional, and intellectual prosperity. We can recognize this faculty in the mature citizens of Herland. Tempered and calm, the inhabitants are vigilant of threats to well-being. Though the country is relatively free of the forces that exact pain from humans, they remain attuned to potential harm. One could argue that the vigilance is an atavistic trait, triggered by embedded knowledge of the revolt their ancestors mounted against oppressors. Regardless of the catalyst, the Herlanders have achieved, and continue to nurture in their young, the power of feeling into, comprehending, and recognizing threats to their well-being. After the initial unsuccessful attempt to woo the arboreal young Herlanders with jewelry and flattery, the male visitors are confronted by a group of mature women who sense the threat that especially Terry presents to the young women. Van observes “They had the aspect of sturdy burghers, gathered hastily to meet some common need or peril, all moved by precisely the same feeling, to the same end.” That likemindedness may be catalyzed by empathy. Perhaps it is empathy that leads to their “far-reaching judgment and strong well-used will.”50 From this analysis, we can infer that the ability to envision social configurations beyond and better than those that determine prevailing conditions is often an effect of empathy and critical to the utopian Weltanschauung. The process of feeling into another’s plight can operationalize the drive to betterment. According to Rifkin, when humans recognize and acknowledge one another’s vulnerability—their mortality—they can “embark on the quest for self-realization.”51 Might it be empathy that allows the Guardians, for example, to appreciate the implications of a life bereft of knowledge of the pure forms—of justice untempered by the vagaries of human frailty? Is it what provokes the Guardians to return to the cave after their initial ascent to the light? Plato writes: “Our job as lawgivers is to compel the best minds to attain what we have called the highest form of knowledge … .” The training process, which begins in infancy, may nurture the empathetic capacity so that it is attuned, more acutely, to injustice and suffering. Plato has Socrates explain, “[W]e have bred you both for your sake and that of the whole community to act as leaders … You must therefore each descend … and live with your fellow in the cave and get used to seeing in the dark; once you get used to it you will see a thousand times better than they do … ”52 Once such knowledge is acquired, the Guardians return to the servitude of shadows, carrying the knowledge of the better place. Margaret Sutherland explains that education for empathy encourages 49 Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 85. 50 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Signet Classics, 1992), 19, 91. 51 Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathetic Civilization, 167. 52 Plato, The Republic, 519d, 520c–d.

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the habit of emotional decentering, of trying to enter into the feeling of others … but not [the] losing of self.53 The Guardians are to remain possessed of the wellintegrated soul—“wise,” “valiant,” “temperate,” and “just.” Vernon Lee ventures that “empathy exists or tends to exist throughout our mental life. It is indeed, one of our simpler, though far from absolutely elementary, psychological processes, entering into what is called imagination … .”54 Richard Rorty struck the same chord when he stressed that to his mind, utopia is “achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.”55 If empathy is a function of the imagination, then it may find its best expression in the utopian impulse. From this point of view, Rifkin sells utopia short, for utopia, in practice, is not perfection, but persistence and potential. As Oscar Wilde described it, utopia is the place for which we are always “striving,” the place for which the hope of betterment keeps us searching, “set[ting] sail … .”56 One researcher who studies survival and resilience observes that sometimes—sails torn and listing ourselves—all we might have to offer up is empathy, itself.57 References Agosta, Louis. “Empathy and Intersubjectivity.” Empathy I. Edited by Joseph Lichtenber, et al. Hillsdale: The Analytic Press, 1984, 43–61. Basch, Michael Franz, M.D. “Empathetic Understanding: A Review of the Concept and Some Theoretical Considerations.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 31 (1983): 101–26. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. New York: Penguin Books, 1960. Butler, Octavia E. Mind of My Mind. New York: Warner Books, 1977. Chodorkoff, Daniel. “The Utopian Impulse: Reflections on a Tradition.” The Journal of Social Ecology, 1, no. 1 (1983): 1–18. http: www.mindfully.org. “compassion” n. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, 1989. De Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009. Dick, Philip. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: DelRey, 1968.

53 Margaret Sutherland, “Education and Empathy.” British Journal of Educational Studies, 34, no. 2, (1986), 151. 54 Lee, “Empathy,” Book of Esthetics: An Anthology. ed. Melvin Rader (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1973), 360. 55 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xvi. 56 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 141. 57 Laurence Gonzales, Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 180.

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“Emory Brain Imaging Studies Reveal Biological Basis for Human Cooperation.” Science Daily (2002). sciencedaily.com. Accessed April 21 2005. “empathy.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, 1989. Continuously updated. Gendes, Karen E., Cynthia A. Lietz, and Elizabeth A. Segal. “Measuring Empathy in the 21st Century: Development of an Empathy Index Rooted in Social Cognitive Neuroscience and Social Justice.” Social Work Research, 35, no. 2 (2011): 83–93. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. New York: Signet Classics, 1992. ———. With Her in Ourland. Wesport: Praeger Publishers, 1997. Gonzales, Laurence. Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Jurecic, Ann. “Empathy and the Critic.” College English, 74, no. 1 (2011): 10–27. Katz, Robert L. Empathy: Its Nature and Uses. London, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. Leakey, Richard E. and Roger Lewin. Origins. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. Lee, Vernon. “Empathy.” Book of Esthetics: An Anthology. Fourth edition. ed. Melvin Rader. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1973, 357–60. Lee, Vernon and C. Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty & Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane, 1912. Levine, Daniel S. “Where is Utopia in the Brain?” Utopian Studies, 20, no. 2 (2009): 249–74. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Ralhine Classics. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Morrell, Michael. “The Elusive Concept of Empathy.” Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2010, 39–66. ———. Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2010. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010. Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. ———. Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. “pity” n. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, 1989. Continuously updated. Plato, The Republic. Transl. Desmond Lee. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Plutchik, Robert. “Evolutionary Bases of Empathy.” In Empathy and its Development by Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Prinz, Jesse. “Against Empathy.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spindel Supplement, 49 (2011): 214–33. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1971.

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Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathetic Civilization: the Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: Penguin, 2009. Rogers, Carl. “Empathetic: An Unappreciated Way of Being.” The Counseling Psychologist, 5, no. 2 (1975): 2–10. ———. “The Psychoanalyst in the Community of Scholars.” The Search for The Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1950–1978. New York: International Universities Press, Inc, 1978. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. RSAnimate: The Empathetic Civilization. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. Online video. YouTube. May 6, 2010. Web. June 13, 2013. Sargent, Lyman Tower. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Skinner, B.F. Walden Two. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1948. Sutherland, Margaret. “Education and Empathy.” British Journal of Educational Studies, 34, no. 2 (1986): 142–51. Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Chapter 8

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Solipsism and Utopia: Fredric Brown, Charles Yu, Ludwig Wittgenstein Frank Cioffi

Introduction Although “solipsism” might seem to be a rare word, one unfamiliar to people outside of the fields of philosophy or psychology, the MLA International Bibliography—which indexes articles about literature—reveals (at the time of this writing) 142 books or articles with the keyword “solipsism,” and 47 with “solipsistic.” This is perhaps no longer an arcane or recondite concept; in fact, many literary critics in the last decade are finding it a helpful construct through which to look at fiction and our lives. As might be expected, many of the works such literary critics write about thematize solipsism. For example, Arlen Hansen, in “The Celebration of Solipsism: A New Trend in American Fiction” looks at writers such as Richard Brautigan, William Gass, and Robert Coover. He emphasizes how the figures in these novels embrace a solipsism that engages and encourages the creative “act of making [one’s] own, new stories.”1 Other critics, such as Harold Kaplan, see as less positive the solipsistic bent of many literary characters, such as those in the novels of Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Conrad (Nostromo and Lord Jim), Joyce (The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man), Faulkner (Sound and the Fury), and Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea). In this chapter I will examine two less well-known writers, Fredric Brown and Charles Yu, whose works, separated by over half a century, share many of the concerns of “mainstream” fiction. Brown’s What Mad Universe (1949) and Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010) represent two visions of solipsism that show the utopic potential of such a world view. By looking at one character’s ideal, self-created world, the novels problematize the concept of the ideal, and question the relationships among fiction making, other minds, and complex social structures. Fredric Brown, an American writer of genre fiction whose works have drawn little literary-critical attention, provides an excellent definition of “solipsism” in his 1954 story “Solipsist”: “A solipsist, in case you don’t happen to know the word, is one who believes that he himself is the only thing that really exists, that 1 Arlen Hansen, “The Celebration of Solipsism: A New Trend in American Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (1973): 15.

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other people and the universe in general exist only in his imagination, and that if he quit imagining them they would cease to exist.”2 Most people—both professionals in mental health care and laypersons—would likely assert that the genuine solipsist is actually insane or afflicted with a narcissistic or dissociative disorder. Philosophers, for the most part, dismiss solipsism as an explanatory theory of the universe, though the pre-Socratic philosopher Gorgias claimed, “(1) that nothing exists, or that there is no being at all; (2) that if anything exists it cannot be known; and (3) if anything can be known, it cannot be communicated in language,”3 a radical nihilism that resembles belief in something similar to solipsism, though “belief” itself is a concept Gorgias and the other sophists would likely reject. In his multi-volume history of philosophy, Frederick Copleston makes several mentions of solipsism, in connection to his discussions of Sartre, Royce, Berkeley, Russell, and others. Not surprisingly, he is basically dismissive of the notion: [T]hough solipsism might be logically possible, it is hardly credible. If it is taken as involving the dogmatic assertion that “I alone exist,” nobody really believes it. If it is taken to mean simply that there is no valid reason either for asserting or denying anything except one’s own experiences, consistency demands that one should doubt whether one has had a past and whether one will have a future. For we have no better reason for believing that we have had experiences in the past than we have for believing in external objects.4

That is, if a person is a genuine solipsist, he or she does not believe in an external world, nor in a past or a future. A solipsist inhabits an eternal present, in what René Descartes calls “a solipsism of the moment.” Nothing exists but the single mind, that of the knower/creator; there is no past or future—only that moment, as that single mind imagines and creates all of reality. Such a position could hardly have many sane or serious followers, one would think, and in Brown’s short story quoted above, the main character, named Jehovah, essentially wills the entire universe out of existence, only to be confronted by the being that had initially willed it into existence. That being confers authority over the universe to Jehovah, who promptly sets about creating a new world in just seven days. Brown’s cosmic Vorgeschichte (or back-story) about our own universe ends up parodying worldcreation myths. Like Copleston, modern philosophers for the most part do not believe in this kind of “strong” solipsism, but they nonetheless value modified (“weak”) versions of the concept. In his book on Husserl, for example, David Andrew Bell writes, 2 Fredric Brown, “Solipsist,” in From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, ed. Ben Yalow (Framingham, MA: NESFA, 2000), 563. 3 Charles H. Kahn, “Gorgias,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4, Genealogy to Iqbal, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), 145. 4 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 8, Modern Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, pt. 2 (Garden City, NY: Image, 1966), 214.

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The term “solipsistic” I shall use in a weak sense, to describe any theory in which ultimate primacy, or priority, or independence, is ascribed to mental acts, states, or abilities of individuals considered in isolation. I shall not be concerned with, and I shall not use the term “solipsism” to mean, the stronger and more specific doctrine that “I alone exist or am known to exist; the theory that there are no other minds or persons.”5

In short, the solipsistic world-view is valuable only in a metaphoric, non-strong sense. This does not mean that the whole concept is to be thrown out, but maybe that it ultimately functions better as a Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) than as a metaphysic. The American Novel and Solipsism In contrast to the idea informing Brown’s “Solipsist,” David Bell-esque, that is, weaker, versions of the concept appear in a great deal of American mainstream fiction. Many works of fiction depict characters who have embraced a solipsistic point of view, though this adoption is only partial and resembles compartmentalization, in which characters can see the world and their place in it one way within some contexts and quite a different way within others. That is, characters “try on” or “don” or “give in to” the paradigm of solipsism, from time to time, when they need or want to, or when they are alone with themselves. Hence many characters in literature embrace what might be called a “moral solipsism,” a “quasi-solipsism,” or an “intermittent solipsism.” Many of these characters even engage in an Orwellian “doublethink”—steadfastly believing two completely contradictory states of affair. Some, for example, seem to play along with the “others” and pretend that there’s there is a big world out there, while actually believing that the only true world is their own private one. Other characters live so apart from ordinary social reality that a belief in solipsism as much as coincides with their ordinary routine. To make matters more complex, the author him or herself, while creating the world of the fiction, also adopts a solipsistic status insofar as she or he establishes an alternative, complete, and autonomous other world. In fact, American fiction all but overruns with protagonists who epitomize Bell’s concept of solipsist: they are lonely, isolated, iconoclastic types—men and women who do not “fit” into any society and who choose to “create” a world rather apart from that of most men and women. Rip Van Winkle, Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, Ahab, Isabel Archer, Jay Gatsby, and Ralph Ellison’s eponymous protagonist from Invisible Man are just a few of the many isolated protagonists populating “classic” American fiction, and I would maintain that many of these characters—and some from popular fiction as well—exhibit solipsistic belief, and 5 David Andrew Bell, Husserl (London: Routledge, 1990), 156.

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that, in addition, the solipsism they assume, which might be a “weak” solipsism, shares important features with the stronger philosophical position. Perhaps most striking, though, is the fact that these characters’ solipsism forms a positive, admirable feature of their personalities. To revert to Hansen’s idea mentioned earlier, these characters’ solipsism emerges as a creative expression of individuality, of personal difference. They separate themselves from society so much that they might be called “bad citizens” (as novelist Don DeLillo was called by the pundit George Will). But ultimately, even though they detach themselves from the world, establishing themselves as separate from it, and, in effect, bad citizens on a civic or social level, these fictive quasi-solipsists are more than merely creative types: they represent a vital, admirable oppositionality. As DeLillo himself puts it: being called a “bad citizen” is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we’re writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.6

All the aforementioned solipsistic characters are (or would be for George Will) “bad citizens,” some of course worse than others. And that bad citizenry stems from these characters being individuals who believe more strongly in their own imaginatively projected landscapes than in a “reality-based,” shared universe. Science Fiction and Solipsism Science fiction writers do not have to worry so much about “reality”: they can invent their own realities in ways that mainstream writers cannot. Thus while the characters of mainstream novels such as The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, and Invisible Man inhabit and work within (or against) a fundamentally realistic social landscape, science fiction’s characters do not inhabit a fully mimetic or realistic landscape. For example, science fiction as a genre can dramatize an individual’s problems of world creation (as “Solipsist” does). The main characters from Brown’s and Yu’s novels must face such problems, for they seek to create worlds—utopias-of-one, one might call them—that they themselves inhabit but that still allow for the existence of others. Solipsism and utopia overlap, possibly even inevitably co-exist. I am aware that comparing the two is something of a “category error,” since solipsism is an epistemology or metaphysic, and utopia a literary genre or a social organization. 6 David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld,” New Yorker, 15 September 1997, 48.

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But I am looking at two works that inhabit what I see as a distinct literary subgenre, the “solipsistic utopia,” so I will risk the category error. Utopia usually refers to the imagination of a plausible, internally consistent ideal world or society, but it simultaneously refers to a “no place,” a place outside of time and space: a logical impossibility. A fictive utopia would certainly fall under the category of an “imagined world,” of which Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “it is obvious that … however different it may be from the real one, an imagined world must have something—a form—in common with it.”7 Yes, it is obviously different, but it is different within some sort of recognizable framework or “form.” Like solipsism, utopia is something that most people at once suspend belief in but also might secretly believe in the possibility of; it is something about which they might be said to hold two very different kinds of belief. To use Wittgenstein’s terms, private belief is belief in the “however different” elements of the imagined world; communal or public belief is belief in the “form.” Private belief in the utopia usually remains in tension with public belief in it, and makes for a conflict that drives the story forward, or at least allows for some interesting dramatic confrontations within it. Both solipsism and utopia impose an order on the universe—one, an internal self-ordering; the other, an “ideal” social order. There is no necessarily logical inconsistency to a private belief in either of them. Convincing others of the truth of this belief, however, usually proves difficult. In fact, no one will publicly believe in solipsism, since if they believe in it, publicly or privately, they are really believing in their own solipsism, not yours. Similarly, no one communally or publicly believes in the attainability of utopia, given the ordinary experience of human motivations, desires, predilections, and foibles. Not even creators of imagined utopias fully believe in them. Hence, virtually all utopias constructed by writers of fiction tend to contain negative or dystopic features as well as utopic ones—are Walden Two, Looking Backward, The Crystal Age, or Herland dystopias or utopias? Finally, it’s hard to say. Though having some dystopic elements themselves, Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe have underlying structures that are simultaneously utopic and solipsistic. By conjoining these two elements, the novels demonstrate how solipsism and utopia rely on a certain bifurcated, possibly disjunctive, belief structure. Specifically, private belief—in the possibility, say, of a solipsistic explanation of the universe, or the possibility of a utopic world—clashes in these works with the more public “consensus based” belief that solipsism is an inadequate (“mad” or “not safe”) worldview, and that utopia is neither possible nor likely, at least not in the foreseeable future.

7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness (London: Routledge, 1961), sec. 2.022.

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Solipsism and Wittgenstein It seems fair to ask at this point, is solipsism viable? Let us break this down into constituent parts. “Solipsism,” or the notion that I create the world as a projection of my own mind, is not something that we can really argue for. It might be one of those beliefs that Nöel Carroll characterizes as things that people cannot be talked out of, cannot logically defend, but still maintain: “We cannot will our beliefs. Just try … Belief is something that happens to us.”8 Vis-à-vis solipsism, any argument for its truth works in some ways against the arguer: why bother to argue if there is no audience but oneself? What might one hope to accomplish or effect? This “full blown” or “strong” solipsism, were that at issue, is not really “viable” in the sense of being an explanation of a universe with more than one person in it: there is no such thing as a “consensus of one.” But “viable,” to examine the question’s adjective, can have other meanings than “acceptable as a consensus based truth.” Wittgenstein, almost always invoked in philosophical discourse on the subject, seems to be somewhat sympathetic to the idea of solipsism. In his Tractatus, he argues for the viability or validity of what might be termed a “limited,” weak solipsism, or for the value of a metaphoric understanding of the concept, even asserting, “What the solipsist means is quite correct.”9 Interestingly, using the definite article here (“the” solipsist) seems to set such a person apart, as in “the mad man,” “the visionary,” or “the genius.” It might even suggest a special class of person, a definite “group” from which the philosopher self-consciously distances himself. However, Wittgenstein does see some value in the position. He might be called a “wannabe solipsist” or a “would-be solipsist,” or possibly a “linguistic solipsist.” He writes, “The world is my world: this is manifest in the facts that the limits of language (of that language which I alone understand) mean the limits of my world.”10 For Wittgenstein, then, a person’s language creates for him or her the world as it is experienced. I can, for example, look around my office and see the usual things—chair, desk, lamp, computer, walls—but those things for which I have no language simply do not exist (for me). If there is a certain pattern of dots or bumps or imperfections in my wall (e.g., the encroachment of a microbial invasion or an imminent roof collapse), and I have no words, no language, for this pattern, it simply does not exist; it is not part of my world. Wittgenstein goes on, though, further supporting a solipsistic metaphysic, declaring famously: “Solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without expansion, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.”11 That is to say, 8 Nöel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 65–6. 9 Wittgenstein, sec. 5.62. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., sec. 5.64.

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solipsism has an attractive explanatory power because the subject genuinely knows only that which he or she experiences through the senses and has a language for. What Wittgenstein calls “the metaphysical subject” represents the “limit of the world—not a part of it.”12 In that sense, the subject projects an entire universe, and that is “pure realism”: there is no apodictic order of things. The purest of realism is our own consciousness: that, at the very least, we know is real. Of course to live with others requires the rejection of this “pure realism.” But that does not make it any less viable or real. To finish Wittgenstein’s assertion that I started above: “For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.”13 This indicates at once a private belief in solipsism and an admission that public belief in it cannot happen, or at least “cannot be said,” is perhaps socially unacceptable, possibly even non-sayable, non-articulable. This private-public tension lies at the heart of most critiques of solipsism, even the weak variants. What Mad Universe Fictively depicted solipsisms dramatize the tension between private and public belief. What Mad Universe posits a multiverse, a totality of universes in which all possible arrangements of events and matter exist, including that universe that represents one’s own imagined ideal. To privately believe in this differs radically from publicly believing in it. Here in brief is the story: A rocket falls to earth and explodes near Keith Winton, a character from a world closely resembling earth circa mid twentieth-century, and this explosion somehow transports Keith to another earth, another universe, one similar—but not identical—to his own. In his original world, Keith had been a science fiction pulp magazine editor, and he has landed in a world (we find out later) that is his idea of what an avid science fiction fan might construct. At the time of the explosion, Keith had been thinking about a reader and fan named Joe Doppelberg, who had been beleaguering Keith with letters to the editor. Keith’s recollection of Doppleberg’s concerns and interests help shape the world that he, Keith, lands in as a result of the explosion. Brown’s novel is at once a surprising anticipation of quantum theory—the theory of simultaneous co-existence of multiple universes—and a comic sendup of science fiction conventions. The “mad” universe includes nine-foot tall entities called “Lunans”; a “mistout,” in which the large cities of the world are wholly blackened at night so they will not be visible from space; and an ongoing, bitter war with the inhabitants of Arcturus, a star about 37 light years from earth. And Keith finds himself in one difficult situation after another, partly because the earth he is on is almost but not quite exactly like his (or our) earth, and partly 12 Ibid., sec. 5.641. 13 Ibid., sec. 5.62.

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because he has no real place in this world—on the alternate earth there is already a man named Keith Winton who works in publishing. The protagonist Keith’s love interest from “our” earth, Betty Hadley, also exists in the “mad” universe, but she has rock-star status there, as she is the girlfriend of Dopelle—a handsome, athletic super-genius upon whom earth relies for victory in the ongoing war with Arcturus. (In our universe Dopelle is only Joe Doppelberg, the avid, geeky, letter-to-theeditor-writing science fiction fan.) Many of the problems Keith faces result from “negative transfer”: his previous experience with a very similar world interferes with his ability to learn or understand how things work in the “mad” one that he suddenly has to negotiate. One additional feature of the “mad” universe, Mekky, a flying, super intelligent robot sphere created by none other than Dopelle, somehow perceives what’s happened to Keith and explains the situation, telepathically; there are in fact many universes, more than one can imagine. Mekky’s metaphysic, which lies at the heart of Brown’s novel, is as follows (this is a public belief explanation, I should add): There is, for instance, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated except that you—or the equivalent of you—are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones. There are an infinite number of permutations of this variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger and one in which you have purple horns. … … There is a universe in which Huckleberry Finn is a real person, doing the exact things Mark Twain described him as doing. … … And infinite universes in which the states of existence are such that we would have no words or thoughts to describe or imagine them.14

Presumably there is also a What Mad Universe universe—or perhaps Brown is implying that that is our universe. At any rate, Mekky tells Keith that if they can re-create an explosion similar to the (accidental) one that landed him in Mekky’s universe, Keith can simultaneously save humankind in the “mad” universe and jump out of it to get back “home.” But Mekky warns Keith, “concentrate on the universe you wish to get back to, remember things about it.”15 It’s a major task, trying to fix in one’s mind the precise universe, with all its complexities, anfractuosities, and details—or even to attempt to keep in mind all of those things that one actually does know and has experienced. Yet seconds before Keith enters the planned explosion, he has an “aha!” moment. He thinks, “It doesn’t have to be exactly like the world I left. It can be better! I’m missing from an infinity of

14 Fredric Brown, What Mad Universe (New York: Dutton, 1949), 238–40. 15 Ibid., 245.

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universes; I can pick one that will give me at least as few improvements.”16 He therefore concentrates on imagining and creating an ideal place for himself—where the woman he loves is also madly in love with him, where he is not just an editor but a magazine publisher who is rich and well-known. Brown’s novel dramatizes an exciting impossibility: a merging of privately believed and publicly shared solipsism. Keith imagines such a place, and, fortunately, that’s the place he ends up: “This, he thought, was a universe he’d really settle for.”17 A happy ending to a physical/metaphysical quest, it seems, but in fact, Brown’s novel leaves a residue of uncertainty. For example, it’s not completely certain that the final universe is an “actual” one. It might exist only in Keith’s own mind. The novel initially appeared in Startling Stories, but in its book publication a year later, Brown made some modifications that subtly trouble that ending’s happiness. The uplifting though perhaps trite notion of having the very universe that you can imagine—or the idea that solipsism can become utopia—comes under some pressure in the book version. In part, Brown sows doubts in the actuality of the final universe by modifying the wording of the ending, duplicating an expression that had appeared earlier in the novel. In an episode that did not appear in the Startling Stories version, Keith is at a bar having a drink with an acquaintance, Joe. They are drinking “Moon Juice,” which temporarily paralyzes the drinker while he or she feels mentally transported to another world—in fact, to a self-created fantasy world. Quaffing this concoction for the first time, Keith experiences flying to the moon, crashing painlessly on it, and then meeting his love interest, Betty Hadley: “She had come through the door, apparently, without noticing he was there. Now she saw him and her face became radiant. She raised her white arms toward him and said, ‘Darling—oh, my beloved!’”18 This is a significant phraseology, because in the book version, in addition to including the “Moon Juice” episode, Brown also modifies the wording of Keith’s phone conversation with Betty at the novel’s conclusion. In the magazine version, Keith jumps to the “new” universe at the end, and he telephones Betty, who is delighted to hear from him, since he had somewhat mysteriously disappeared: “You’re coming right to New York?” “As soon as a plane will get me there. Want to meet me at La Guardia field?” “Do I want to? Oh, darling!”19

The book version of the episode subtly modifies Keith’s phone conversation with Betty:

16 Ibid., 249. 17 Ibid., 255. 18 Ibid., 201. 19 Fredric Brown, “What Mad Universe,” Startling Stories, September 1948, 71.

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“You’re coming right to New York?” “As soon as I can get there. There’s a small airport here—I’m pretty sure—and I’ll take a taxi there right away and charter a plane for New York. Should be there in an hour or so. Want to meet me at Idlewild Airport? “Do I want to? Darling—oh, my beloved!”20

While it is not clear to me why Brown shifted from La Guardia to Idlewild, it is clear that the book version’s Betty from the Moon Juice vision and Betty of the final, Keith-imagined “new” universe use exactly the same expression, which makes one wonder if both Bettys are imagined, moon-juice generated. It also raises doubts about to what extent this whole new universe is new after all. Perhaps Keith is still in the “mad” universe he’s experiencing through the extended Moon Juice vision. In short, in a novel and genre with so many reversals, how can we trust the durability of the end vision? Even more, how can we be sure that Keith’s “universe he’d really settle for” is one we would settle for, much less find ideal? Is it—how could it be?—sufficiently complete and complex? Does Keith deal with the problem of chronic disease? Of tyrannical governments? Of human rights? Of pollution? Of war? Does he eliminate poverty? In short, can a single person’s vision of utopia be sufficiently comprehensive and informed? Though certainly resourceful and well-intentioned, Keith does make a few serious errors in the alternate universe—errors in logic and lapses, perhaps, in judgment—and while he is ultimately a positive if slightly “flat” character, he does not fully inspire confidence in his ability to create or imagine an ideal (or ideal for me) universe. Maybe that is the point, though: the universe created by solipsistic imagining can be ideal only for the imaginer. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe Charles Yu’s novel tells the story of a man living in a science fictive world in which he repairs time machines, travels through time himself, and tries to piece together a personal life, despite his sense of alienation from his parents and his absence of carbon-based friends. But at the same time it is a story about writing science fiction. The time travel vessel uses a “narrative drive.” One of the planets the protagonist visits is divided up not into countries or neighborhoods but into genres. And Charles Yu is the name of the protagonist. By creating a world in which time travel exists, the author Charles Yu has written a novel that structurally reinforces a solipsistic worldview. People can go back in time but cannot change what happened. Still, they try. They want to reconfigure their past life. What the inhabitants of this universe typically do seems at first counterintuitive but then exactly right: people go back to witness the worst 20 Brown, What Mad Universe, 254.

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day in their life. Yu is showing how a privately believed-in solipsism can make people do destructive things, but the main character Yu embodies to an extent the public side of solipsism within this fictive universe: as a time machine repairman, his job is to stop people from trying to tamper with or alter the past: acting like a sort of metaphysical time cop, he puts brakes on people’s solipsistic desires. There are a number of pleasant elements in Yu’s imagined world, but it is by no means ideal: it is a “science fictional” universe, since people move back and forth through time and, to an extent, space as well. Life is overall okay, though from the protagonist’s perspective, it is strange. It is not like the pre time-travel universe. Not only can people time travel, but technological marvels abound. “Sexbots” exist, so that there is no sexual tension, which may or may not be a good thing. The main character spends much of his time in a spaceship of sorts, one run by a computer operating system that he has named TAMMY, for which he has “a thing” (a “thing,” I hasten to add, that is also at the center of the popular 2013 film Her): Is TAMMY’s curvilinear pixel configuration kind of sexy? Yes it is. Does she have chestnut-colored hair and dark brown eyes behind pixilated librarian glasses and a voice like a cartoon princess? Yes and yes and yes. Have I ever, in all my time in this unit, ever done you know what to a screenshot of you know who? I’m not going to answer that.21

While this is certainly solipsistic, it seems no worse than this character’s relationship with living entities: Probably goes without saying, but time machine repair guys don’t get a lot of action. Had a one-night stand with something cute a couple of years ago. Not human exactly. Humanish. Close enough so that she looked awesome with her shirt off. We hung out a few times, tried messing around but in the end I couldn’t quite figure out her anatomy, or perhaps it was the other way around. There were some awkward moments. I think she had a good time anyway. I did. She was a good kisser. I just hope that was her mouth. Or at least her mouth-analogue.22

In his relationship with this creature, the character Yu experiences a perpetual uncertainty. He evidently had to use a lot of imagination, but it ultimately does not work out: “I don’t think she had the brain chemistry for love. Or maybe that was me,” the character Yu remarks.23 For a solipsist, brain chemistry would have to be of paramount importance. One option available to people in this universe is to live out a favorite period of time over and over, in an endlessly repeating loop, so that one can always 21 Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 6. 22 Ibid., 52. 23 Ibid.

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experience an ideal interval, a pleasant hour or two, of one’s life. The character Charles Yu visits his mother, who lives in such a time loop, serving dinner to her family and going through a comfy domestic routine: “She’s in the prepaid time loop, living the same stretch of her life, over and over again. It’s only an hour, which is what she can afford.”24 Ironically, there are financial limits to consumer solipsism. The utopic aspect of the “science fictional universe,” in Yu’s vision, is that people have access to their pasts, to an interval of time that they think of as ideal, and can thus view or re-create their own “safe” reality. Going through their own routines and positive experiences again and again is tantamount to inhabiting privately projected ideal universes. Meanwhile, the author Yu stimulates in readers a solipsistic creativity, one might call it, what with his many literary/metafictional devices such as leaving pages blank, erasing words so that they are just a smear on the page, and even including instructions on how to write a novel. The reader is urged or perhaps I mean required to assemble this odd, alternative world, and to determine whether it is science fiction, the story of writing, or an autobiographical piece of creative nonfiction. Throughout, though, it is clear that there is something flawed about this alternative world: it has dystopic as well as utopic elements. The characters’ solipsistic ontologies prevent real, human interaction. Wittgenstein’s remarks, worth repeating, can themselves time travel to Yu’s novel, which was written over half a century after the philosopher’s death: “Here it can be seen that solipsism,” Wittgenstein remarks, “when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.”25 “A point without extension” is a fitting way to describe many of the characters in Yu’s novel. Their sphere of influence has diminished down to nearly nothing, to just the tiny world created and inhabited by they themselves. The whole universe, Yu reveals, is in fact the size of a shoebox. Though the inhabitants seem satisfied if not delighted with their situations—in fact, have engineered it to happen—life is not perfect: Yu’s mother, when she briefly comes out of her “prepaid time loop,” does not seem especially happy. She seems tired and bored. And Charles, when he encounters his past self and gets shot, feels “the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my life,” but it “feels really good,”26 he adds, because it indicates that he has broken out of a time loop he had inadvertently become trapped in. He has broken out of solipsistic imagining into a real world. Thus life, with its reality shrunk down to a Wittgensteinian “point without extension,” is not ultimately especially rewarding or pleasant.

24 Ibid., 80. 25 Wittgenstein, sec. 5.64. 26 Yu, 231.

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Extrapolations of the Science Fictional Visions: A Conclusion These novels’ solipsistic yearnings might be symptomatic of, or metaphoric for, something else. In his article “Congenital Transcendentalism and ‘the Loneliness Which Is the Truth about Things,’” my late uncle, the philosopher Frank Cioffi, looks at many literary examples of solipsistic belief (Tolstoy, Twain, Lawrence, Pater) and decides that these don’t emerge so much from a belief in the metaphysic proper but from a sense of our perplexity about “the incongruity of our existence as beings both isolated and accompanied, as simultaneously just ‘one other among others’ and yet the hub around which everything revolves—of our perplexity that, as Wittgenstein puts it, though ‘what solipsism means is true … it cannot be said.’”27 He goes on: [T]he utterances in which the problem of solipsism finds expression are precipitates of something else, more cloudy and indeterminate—the feeling of having stumbled on a momentous but deeply hidden significance. … The solipsism I am talking about requires oxymoron for its expression—it might be called universal solipsism. The feeling of a profound and irremediable solitude which finds expression in solipsistic fantasies transcends skepticism and is unaffected by its refutation.28

In fact, the protagonists in both Yu’s and Brown’s novel have no friends, few companions, no human lovers. They exist in solitary states of perpetual yearning; the worlds they create perhaps stem as much from their desire for contact with other people as from a desire to find a suitable place and occupation for themselves. These two works interrogate the extent to which a privately held belief in solipsism or utopia can be moved to a public belief. Keith only accidentally acquires the agency to transform his solipsistic, privately believed-in dreams into a public large scale “personal utopia.” He is swiftly transported deus-ex-machinalike to the universe of Mekky, and from there to his own “ideal” one. The character named Charles Yu works more self-consciously for his own emotional/intellectual well-being and invents himself anew as the novel progresses. He actively seeks out his father and mother—his own past. He even works hard to establish positive relationships with computer personalities of TAMMY and of his boss, Phil. Though he does not end up with the material rewards or the power Keith Winton evidently has at the close of What Mad Universe, he finds something else: enlightenment. Toward the end of the novel, he tells himself:

27 Frank Cioffi, “Congenital Transcendentalism and ‘the Loneliness Which Is the Truth about Things,’” in Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 239. 28 Ibid., 239–40.

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Step out into the world of time and risk and loss again. Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don’t turn the last pages yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside it.29

This is an abandonment or at least a vast modification of the private solipsism that the Yu character had inhabited. Fredric Brown’s novel posits a solipsism wrought hyper-galactic: a universe that can be structured such that each consciousness in it can be in the position of inhabiting his/her/its self-created universe. Yet in Brown’s multiverse, finding that ideal universe proves tricky. While Yu’s utopic vision is one in which technological marvels allow everyone to live out or in an individualized, solipsistic world, Brown’s consists of a world in which the reality that an individual ends up inhabiting can (in at least one case, anyway) coincide with an imagined ideality. Having such quasi-God like power sounds good but gives pause: will any imagination of the universe be perfect down to every detail? One would hardly think that, in the case of Keith Winton, his experience as an editor of science fiction pulp magazines will have prepared him for his next career jump, i.e., to being a God. Furthermore, the changes that the novels’ main characters bring about in their own universes are personal, rather small-scale and local ones. Winton is a publisher, promoted from being just an editor; Betty loves him. Yu has found his father, made contact with his mother, and has broken out of a time loop. Are these moves toward utopia “scalable,” to use a term from a recent article on medical innovation; can they ramify and carry over on a wider scale?30 I do not mean to suggest, I hasten to add, that if they are “not scalable,” they are valueless. While it is certainly true that a single solipsistic-utopian vision likely will not change the problems with the world—it’s still a start. Yu and Brown both seem to be arguing that a small start, a single human’s vision and belief in that vision, might build into something larger. But in fact the worlds these protagonists imagine and create never appear in a fully dramatized form. We never get a picture of their utopias. The last page of Yu’s novel has only the following: “[this page intentionally left blank].” And while Keith’s final thought, of “a universe he’d really settle for” seems quite positive, it leaves one wondering why Brown used the verb “settle,” as if there were compromises that had to be made. Maybe Keith is not a god after all. Or perhaps, being confronted with something like heaven inspires litotes, as in “Oh, I’ll settle for heaven.” Why authors would be so interested in and appreciative of such solipsistic characters remains open to speculation. Setting aside the narcissism explanation—authors admire solipsists because novelists themselves create 29 Brown, What Mad Universe, 233. 30 Atul Gawande, “Annals of Medicine: Slow Ideas,” New Yorker, 29 July 2013, 41.

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worlds—leaves one searching for a positive value to solipsism. It seems to me that the authors offer us solipsist-heroes because such individuals represent a socially responsible oppositional stance, a stance that has a utopic impulse or direction. These solipsist-heroes reject not just a status quo, not just other people, but the entirety of the outside world, at the same time as they reject past and present. This might on the surface seem simply mad. But in the hands of the authors I have been discussing, such a wholesale rejection is not really so insane at all. Brown and Yu seem to be arguing that if one can re-imagine the world, can see it in new ways or in a new light, in a way so radically different that it essentially usurps as it destroys the status quo, great things can emerge, things that, writ larger, spread out among a population, could lead in the direction of utopia: a “grassroots utopia,” a utopia that “begins at home,” in the mind of a single person—maybe, now that I think of it, of a writer. It is true that not all utopias are solipsistic, but some can be built on the basis of a “universal solipsism,” one that acknowledges the essential solitariness of each individual but also the need to search for a worldform that can accommodate them all. References Bell, David Andrew. Husserl. London: Routledge, 1990. Brown, Fredric. “What Mad Universe.” Startling Stories, September 1948, 11–71. ———. What Mad Universe. New York: Dutton, 1949. ———. “Solipsist.” In From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown, ed. Ben Yalow, 563. Framingham, MA: NESFA, 2000. Carroll, Nöel. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cioffi, Frank. “Congenital Transcendentalism and ‘the Loneliness Which Is the Truth about Things.’” In Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vol. 8, Modern Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, Part 2. Garden City, NY: Image, 1966. Gawande, Atul. “Annals of Medicine: Slow Ideas.” New Yorker, 29 July 2013, 36–45. Hansen, Arlen. “The Celebration of Solipsism: A New Trend in American Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (1973): 5–15. Her. Directed by Spike Jonze. With Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, and Scarlett Johansson. Los Angeles: Annapurna, 2013. Kahn, Charles H. “Gorgias.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 4, Genealogy to Iqbal, ed. Edward Craig, 143–6. London: Routledge, 1998. Kaplan, Harold. The Solipsism of Modern Fiction: Comedy, Tragedy, and Heroism. 1966; rpt., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011. Remnick, David. “Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.” New Yorker, 15 September 1997, 42–8.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness. London: Routledge, 1961. Yu, Charles. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. New York: Pantheon, 2010.

Chapter 9

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Alice Leroy

Introduction Although Foucault dedicated many of his writings to painting or literature, he seldom wrote about film. Certainly, he discussed with Serge Daney and Pascal Bonitzer—both editors of the Cahiers du cinéma during the ’70s—films which reflected his own philosophical concerns; those of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marguerite Duras, Werner Schroeter or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.1 Other movies, like René Allio’s Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère (1976) were directly inspired by some of his own books. Foucault nonetheless never went as far as to propose a general theory of the film medium. His conceptual toolbox has nonetheless provided fruitful notions to film theorists: during the seventies, Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz for instance referred to his concept of apparatus to qualify film as an ideological machine or an imaginary signifier. More recently, his definition of heterotopia has been largely applied to the film medium: challenging the coercive aspects of the apparatus theory, it suggests that the film projection can no more be conceived in terms of mass alienation but as a displacement of the subject, insofar as it transports the viewer (“voyager” as Giuliana Bruno2 calls him or her) into “other spaces.”3 However, none of these approaches account for a discrete but pervasive motif in Foucault’s thinking which emerges when he addresses movies: the body.4 This is not the least of paradoxes that such a contradictory notion has a crucial role in my examination of a Foucauldian perspective on film. Being both a site of discipline and emancipation, it holds a delicate position in his writings, insofar as 1 Foucault dedicated a number of articles to cinema, among which a long interview with—at the time—film journalists Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana for Les Cahiers du cinéma in 1974—cf. “Anti-Retro,” Les Cahiers du cinéma 251–2 (July–August 1974). Foucault’s articles on cinema have been collected and republished in France in 2010, cf. Patrice Maniglier and Dork Zabunyan, eds., Foucault va au cinéma [Foucault goes to the movies] (Paris: Bayard, 2010). 2 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002). 3 See, Michel Foucault, “des espaces autres,” in Dits et écrits, and Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002). 4 See Maniglier and Zabunyan, Foucault va au cinéma.

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Foucault never actually wrote a general theory of the body, though his entire work revolves around the individual body as a place of application for a microphysics of power (that he conceived in terms of discipline and resistance). From The Birth of the Clinic (1963)—where the body is objectified by the medical gaze—to The History of Sexuality (1976–84)—where its social and cultural nature is revealed through its so-called sexual emancipation—and through Discipline and Punish (1975)—which marks the historical shift from the physical punishments to a softer but more efficient control of the body – Foucault never stopped deconstructing the presuppositions of a homogenous body. He certainly did not aim at producing a unified theory of the body: on the contrary, he constantly denounced the participation of such theories in the individualizing process of the human body in Western cultures. Mathieu Potte-Bonneville5 insists on the plurality inherent to the body in Foucault’s thinking: there is not one but several bodies each one acting as an operating modality of knowledge and power. However, he remarks: “we do not face … a circular argument of which the same body would constitute at the same time both the starting point and the destination, but a layered analysis where Foucault distributes, in several distinct registers, the acceptations ordinarily confused with the general notion of the body.”6 This is not to say that Foucault sustains a phenomenology of the body as Merleau-Ponty does: in fact, he criticizes MerleauPonty for ignoring that the phenomenological body, as a body of experience, is a necessary condition for the elaboration of a positivist knowledge and thus cannot be opposed to the anatomical body of sciences.7 The mechanical corporeality of modern medicine does not contradict the authenticity of a lived body, and as PotteBonneville puts it: “Foucault makes positivism, which apprehends the body as exteriority, and phenomenology, which claims on the contrary to install it at the very centre of experience, opposing slopes of the same historical configuration.”8 This paradoxical articulation between positivism and phenomenology leads PotteBonneville to re-examine the genealogical turn that Foucault takes in the 1970s, when his archaeology of knowledge associated with the treatment of bodies in institutional spaces such as the clinic or prison gave way to “a history of the individual” which “establish[ed] how the individual, far from being an infrangible given, is the result of the exterior intersection of historical determinations and political operations.”9 As such, the body acts as a heterogeneous and contradictory reference pointing to singularities rather than regularities in Foucault’s political history of the individual. Though, with this genealogy of power, the body now 5 Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, “Michel Foucault’s Bodies,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 43, 1 (2012): 1–32. 6 Ibidem, 7. 7 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique (Paris: PUF, 1993 [1963]), 202–3. See also Potte-Bonneville, “Michel Foucault’s Bodies,” 8. 8 Ibidem, 9. 9 Ibid., 17.

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appears as an operator rather than an object of discourses (as in The Birth of the Clinic), it still fulfils the same epistemologic requirements for Foucault, as it forms a counterpoint to essentialism and dualism. The conference he gives in 1966 in a series of radio broadcasts, entitled “The Utopian Body,”10 then requires a couple of qualifications. First, it comes a few years before Foucault’s genealogical turn, and is therefore not immediately concerned with a historical perspective. Rather, it privileges a cultural approach through its convening of literature, myths and bodily rituals—fairies, gnomes, genies, magicians are convoked, as well as cultural practices like dance and tattoo. Second, it seems to adopt a vocabulary and angle more common to phenomenology than to archaeology. Actually, at first reading, one might even be surprised by the intimacy of Foucault’s style and inflection in this text—an oral conference which was not intended to be published during his lifetime. Foucault begins by delivering a Proustian description of his own body, looking at it from the distance of a reflection in the mirror,11 and ends by evoking the sensual experience of sexuality as a way to escape one’s own body. Nonetheless, this move from the physiognomic to the sensual does not account for a phenomenological conversion. If he first delimits two polarities, utopia and the body, as two irreconcilable opposites, the first one being “a place outside of all places”12 and the latter, “the absolute place, the little fragment of space where I am, literally, embedded [faire corps],”13 Foucault soon reverses his position as he realizes that the first and strongest utopia, one of “an incorporeal body,”14 is deeply rooted in the body itself: indeed “the great myth of the soul”15 which in Western cultures has been conducted to dissociate the corruptible flesh from a pure and imperishable mind, is nothing but an attempt to overcome death, disease and the course of time. To be content with a dualist conception of the body, as if the latter needed to be transcended to overcome death, is to ignore the body’s “own phantasmagoric resources.”16 That is, if the biological fragility of the human body has generated so many myths of eternal life and incommensurable 10 Later published under the title “Utopian Body and Heterotopia”—cf. Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique—les hétérotopies (Paris: Lignes, 2009). For an English translation, see: Michel Foucault, “Utopian Body,” trans. Lucia Allais, in Sensorium. Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art, ed. Caroline Jones (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 229–34. 11 Foucault, “Utopian Body,” 229: “Every morning: same presence, same wounds. In front of my eyes, the same unavoidable images are drawn, imposed by the mirror: thin face, slouching shoulders, myopic gaze, no more hair—not handsome at all. And it is in this ugly shell of my head, in this cage I do not like, that I will have to reveal myself and walk around; through this grill that I will have to speak, look and be looked at; under this skin that I will have to rot.” 12 Foucault, “Utopian Body.” 13 Ibidem. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 230. 16 Ibid.

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strength, then it cannot be comprehended in a topological way as a place where one would be prisoner, but rather in a utopian way, as a medium which constantly projects the subject into other worlds. As a matter of fact, all of the utopias that strived to transcend the limits of human condition were, according to Foucault, “born from the body itself.”17 The evidence lies in the fact that legends and mythologies are filled with chimeras, giants, fairies, mermaids, etc., so that “the human body is the principal actor in all utopias” assesses Foucault.18 And this is not confined to literature and oral traditions, as cultural rituals like masks, makeup and tattoos also impress “a fragment of imaginary space” into the flesh, as do dance, possession or drugs. When Foucault argues that the body “is tied to all the elsewheres of the world,” and that it is “the zero point of the world,”19 it is not so much from a phenomenological perspective than an anthropological one. Indeed, Foucault is not interested in the presence of the subject to the world, mediated through his or her body. He aims at discovering how the body techniques register it in fantasmatic spaces. Foucault, whose concept of “utopian body” is situated at the antipodes of Western philosophy, shows how the body is essentially ambiguous. In opposition to dualist ontological theories, his conception of the body articulates its organic and symbolic nature in such an intricate way that not only does it allow to think of the body in terms of images but also to think of (cinematic) images as the site of corporeal utopias. The utopian body does not separate utopia from the body as a Cartesian dualism of the soul and the body would. On the contrary, it articulates them in an anthropology of the body which is both indebted to a cultural history of sciences on the one hand and of myths and rituals which (literally or symbolically) transfigure the body on the other. Had he pushed his analysis to contemporary Western cultures and the new mediums of myths and rituals, e.g., film, Foucault may have mentioned cinema as a dispositive which takes the full measure (and excess) of the utopian body. Utopia and Heterotopia Foucault’s choice of the term ‘utopia’ echoes his notion of ‘heterotopy’ to such an extent that it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between the two. In a conference given in 1967—a year after the conference on the utopian body—and later published under the title “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,”20 he defines 17 Ibid., 231. 18 Ibidem. 19 Ibid., 232. 20 Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres,” in Dits et écrits, II (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1571–81, originally published in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5 (1984): 46–9. For an English translation, see: “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” accessed September 10, 2013: http://www.foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html.

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heterotopia in contrast to utopia, the latter characterizing “fundamentally unreal spaces,” the former being related to “places … outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”21 Although Foucault appears to think utopias and heterotopias are fully and completely distinguishable from one another, I claim that the conceptual articulation he provides is inadequate and ambiguous, as Foucault also indicates that heterotopias may well be considered as “enacted utopia[s]” which are to be found “in every culture” and acts as counterspaces in which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”22 Thus, the main difference between utopia and heterotopia would derive from the latter’s anchorage in reality, whereas utopia breaks away from any temporal or geographical referent. Nonetheless, Foucault draws a line between the two through a “joint experience”23 which reveals their fundamentally contrasting nature: the experience of the mirror. Reformulating Lacan’s mirror stage in a rather unexpected way, he argues that mirrors may be looked at as both utopian and heterotopian sites. On the one hand, the mirror is “a placeless place” since it pictures me in a place where I am not: “in the mirror” Foucault asserts, “I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”24 On the other hand, the mirror composes a counterspace, “a heterotopia insofar as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.”25 Ultimately, the mirror exemplifies a dialectic of presence and absence since I am simultaneously present in and absent from a place where I know I am not but where I can see myself. From there, is the body in film to be conceived in utopian or heterotopian terms? One might be tempted to see the film medium as a heterotopia, as to see a film is to go and sit into a dark room, inside a film theatre, where a film is projected and features animated bodies whose gestures, movement and possibly voice, were recorded by a camera. However, contrary to the body reflected by the mirror, the body projected on screen does not need a referent in reality to exist. Not even mentioning cinema’s own creatures (pure montage of images or virtual effects), a body in film may continue to exist long after the actor or person who embodied it has disappeared. This might be why, from Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmagoria shows to ghost movies, the projected image of the body has so much to do with death, or rather, with blurring the lines between life and death. Both anatomical and phantasmagoric, imprint and projection, the film body fundamentally belongs to a utopian order: utopia of transparency—as the film medium materializes both scientistic and popular phantasma of rendering the human body perfectly transparent; utopia of reversibility—as the scrolling images 21 Ibidem, 1574. 22 Foucault, “Des espaces autres,” 1574. 23 Ibidem, 1575. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.

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on screen just as the physical movement it pictures may be reversed, decelerated or accelerated, thus defeating the course of time; utopia of hybridity—as cinema, mixing visual regimes of analogy, video and digital, invents new types of corporeality. Reshaping the Body, Remapping Reality: The Film Medium and “the Utopian Body” The utopian body offers an interesting alternative to the equivocal notion of heterotopia which has prevailed in visual and film studies. It is not so much the movie theatre as a heterogeneous space in which real and fictional worlds overlap, that holds a critical stance here than the film medium itself—a photographic imprint and a projected image in motion—that echoes the ambiguous nature of the utopian body: physical and nonetheless fantasmatic. As Foucault’s text on “the utopian body” suggests, corporeal utopias have long belonged to the symbolic order of myths, rites and tales. They achieved a new materiality with the invention of cinema, a medium which suddenly allowed to open, divide, clone, transform, and regenerate the body in a manner no other artistic or scientific technology had ever offered. Neither a pure pictorial form, nor a pure incarnation, cinema explored new modes of physicality and sensoriality. Hence the mechanical pantomime of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or W.C. Fields, and later John Cleese’s “silly walks” in Monty Python’s The Ministry of Silly Walks, which mimicked the movement of walking or the athletic jumps and gestures that Marey or Muybridge had recorded with chronophotography 40 years earlier. In College (1927), the slender Buster Keaton, a bookish student mocked by his comrades for his poor performances on the sport field, turns into an accomplished athlete as soon as he needs to rescue the girl he is in love with. During the film’s last sequence, Keaton runs wildly through the campus, successfully passing all sport tests in which he had so poorly failed. The camera which follows him from the side in a lengthy travelling evokes the chronophotographic views Marey made with athletes and soldiers at the physiological station in Paris in the 1880s. The same ironic diversion of cinema’s mechanical reproduction of movement occurs in a film by Gregory La Cava, Running Wild (1927), with William Claude Fields playing a cowardly employee and husband, who diligently but clumsily tries to fulfil the expectations of his boss and of his wife. Going to work in the morning, Fields’ walk along the pavement irresistibly turns into a childish dance as he tries to avoid obstacles or plays with the grid drawn on the ground by the paving stones. Certainly, these satirical hijackings cannot be confined to the silent performances of slapstick, as evidenced by Monty Python’s Flying Circus: in a 1970 sketch, John Cleese portrays a diligent government servant who vigorously and obediently tries to fulfil the requirements of an extravagant Ministry of Silly Walks, by developing the most absurd ways of walking.

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The Monty Python, as well as Fields and Keaton, remind us that the first chronophotographic studies of human movement by scientists like EtienneJules Marey pictured athletes or soldiers in an attempt to capture and depict the most rational and well-executed gestures. Unsurprisingly, these scientific studies were sponsored by the Ministry of the Army and the Ministry of Education in France, where they were conceived as means to discipline bodies and promote collective efficiency. To these techniques of the body which chronophotography depicted, cinema and the burlesques in particular soon opposed their irreverent and exuberant movement, unburdening the body of social conventions, throwing it off its limitations. As such, cinema may not be so much of an ideological apparatus as theoreticians like Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz following Louis Althusser conceived it in the seventies, than a medium through which the body achieved utopian possibilities. Film, Phantasmagoria and Physiology Let us now formulate a couple of hypotheses which will be developed throughout the following pages. First, the invention of the film medium at the end of the nineteenth century marks the achievement of a reconfiguration of the body in scientific and cultural discourses and practices which opened utopian possibilities for cinema and science to explore. It is only because new ways of looking at the human body were inaugurated between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century that cinema could happen. Second, the body in films is not to be thought of in univocal terms. Just as we experience a number of different bodies in reality, the body in films is essentially plural and ambiguous. Foreshadowing the composite bodies of a biotechnological reality where machines would infinitely be grafted to human and animal anatomies, cinema, in its very essence, consisted from the start, in cutting, fragmenting and editing, literally or temporally, the bodies it screened. Thus, the invention of the cinematographic medium, inherently concerned with the notion of a utopian body, emancipated the human body from its contingency and limitations. As I will argue according Foucault’s definition, the film medium, more than any other medium, reveals the utopian nature of the body. Through Foucault’s notion of utopian body, I aim at understanding the way cinema looks at reality and at the human body, remapping the former and reshaping the latter. If cinema, more than any other medium, invented a utopian body, it is insofar as its development was concomitant with a reconfiguration of the body in the scientific and cultural fields. From the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, anatomical sciences and physiology on the one hand and optical techniques of projection on the other redefined the regimes of the visible and the invisible. Through projected spectra and recorded bodily movements, the techniques of vision that would later become cinema invented a body at the crossroads of fantasy and reality. While Eadweard Muybridge’s and Etienne-

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Jules Marey’s chronophotographic studies deconstructed human movement and highlighted the disclosure of an invisible body by the anatomical and analytical eye, Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmagoria summoned bright animated ghosts. The former’s were interested in the idea of an inner body and its invisible mechanics, whereas the latter’s called for its sepulchral becoming. Robertson, whose adventurous life is recounted in his Mémoires,26 was a showman, half-scientist and half-quack, during the eighteenth century who improved the technology of magic lanterns to invent a new spectacle of light and shadow, projecting images which seemed like moving ghosts. He took advantage of the chaos brought by the French Revolution in Paris to establish his show in the former convent of the Capucines, which offered perfect settings for his hallucinatory projections and necromancy. His machinery, the “fantascope,” was far more elaborate than a simple magic lantern—a rear projection system kept the dispositive invisible to the audience while wheels and a rail mechanism could create changing scales as well as an illusion of movement. These improvements deeply modified the nature of the spectacle, as underlined by Robertson in the patent he filed in 1799.27 No other optical machine has indeed invested, with such uncanniness, the ambiguity specific to these evanescent bodies ghosts on a thin canvas or a smokescreen whose density looked so real that the spectators believed these were the phantoms of their recently disappeared relatives. Though Robertson claimed to “break down the altars of superstition,”28 in the show he inaugurated in 1799 and introduced as a “lesson of phantasmagoria, science which deals with all physical means which were employed in all eras and with all people to suggest the resurrection and manifestation of the dead,”29 his spectacles were soon famous for convoking the dead during necromantic sessions. In a troubled period such as the French Revolution, the hundreds of victims of the Guillotine filled Robertson’s show with its quota of specters and revenants. People would come to the convent of Capucines in the hope of seeing a deceased husband or son, when they did not literally call for a prominent actor of recent history, like the revolutionary Marat, the philosopher Voltaire and even the beheaded King Louis XVI—an apparition 26 Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques, two volumes (Paris: De Wurtz, 1831–33), accessed September 10, 2013: http://archive.org. 27 “Brevet d’invention de l’appareil nommé fantascope, et que son auteur annonce être le perfectionnement de la lanterne de Kircher, vulgairement appelée lanterne magique, procédé propre à transporter sur le verre l’impression d’une gravure en taille-douce, déposé par le citoyen Etienne Gaspard Robert, dit Robertson, le 27 ventôse l’an 7,” accessed September 10, 2013 on the database of the French National Institute of Industrial Property: http://bases-brevets19e.inpi.fr/index.asp. 28 My translation, cf. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques, 1, 206. 29 “Cours de phantasmagorie, science qui traite de tous les moyens physiques dont on a abusé dans tous les temps et chez tous les peuples pour faire croire à la résurrection et à l’apparition des morts” (my translation), cf. Laurent Mannoni, Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1999), 145.

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which nearly cost Robertson his own head as the times were not conducive to resuscitate monarchy. Whereas optical sciences and medicine tried to streamline the phenomena of illusions and hallucinations, phantasmagoria initiated an uncanny game with the limits of scientific rationality by adorning the same appearance as scientific experiments. According to Max Milner, phantasmagoria could only be successful during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries insofar as it was able “to dig into the visible … gaps conducive to the manifestation of another visible, eluding the constraints of the principle of reality.”30 From there, the efficiency of Robertson’s specters certainly derives from the Freudian fetishist mechanism that places phantasm in the double scope of reality and fantasy.31 However, through its parody of scientific experiments and its reenactment of occultism and spiritism, phantasmagoria combines contradictory spaces and knowledges: the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead, science and fantasy. A New Scientific Gaze Considering now the scientific field, I suggest to re-evaluate a teleological approach to the film medium which has often been circumscribed to a technological enhancement. Instead, I propose that the invention of film resulted from the transformation of the scientific and aesthetic gazes on the body through the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century. A dispositive of projection, cinema inherited from the magic lantern and phantasmagoria shows. A device for recording sounds and images, it derived from physiologists’ photographic measure of movement. In differentiated spheres of knowledge, scientific culture and popular culture, these processes inaugurated new regimes of vision and sensoriality. As Giuliana Bruno puts it, since the beginning of the moving image, the body was caught in a double gaze, one “analytical” and the other “spectacular.”32 Bruno finds earlier evidence of this in the view paintings (vedutismo) of urban landscapes in Italy during the sixteenth century, as well as in Giambattista della Porta’s colossal book Magiae Naturalis (first published in 1558) which interweaves human anatomy sketches with occultism and black magic studies. But this double gaze certainly owes a debt to the perceptual transfer from a decorporalized and geometrical space (epitomized by the camera osbcura) to an embedded vision that

30 Max Milner, La fantasmagorie. Essai sur l’optique fantastique (Paris: PUF, 1982), 12—my translation: “creuser au sein du visible … des lacunes propices à la manifestation d’un autre visible, échappant aux contraintes du principe de réalité.” 31 A paradoxical mechanism that Octave Mannoni has phrased in the way: “I know very well, but nevertheless” (“Je sais bien, mais quand même”), cf. Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969). 32 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 143.

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Jonathan Crary33 discerns during the first half of the nineteenth century. Robert Michael Brain34 develops Crary’s argument in favor of a revision of scientific and aesthetic modernism which, contrary to “modernism’s founding myths” of “a deterministic effect of modernity or a reaction to or negation of it,”35 involves a consubstantial transformation of the perception of the body in one and other fields. Brain challenges Clement Greenberg’s36 essentialist definition of modernism as the moment when an artistic medium would achieve its irreducible core. On the contrary, he argues that not only does modernism exemplify the intermedial and interdisciplinary circulation of tools and concepts, but physiologists and artists partake together in the creation of a new “sensorium”37 which in many ways suggests utopian possibilities for art and science to reinvent the human body. The measuring and self-recording instruments developed by physiologists caused a double break. On the one hand, with the representation of the body as it is no longer described from an external viewpoint but transcribed through a system of sensors—directly attached to the animal or human subject in Marey’s graphic method which precedes his use of photography. The “self-recording apparatus” thus appears as a technological duplication of a sensory organism.38 And, on the other hand, these measuring tools contested the mediation of language: Marey, in favor of a non-hermeneutic science, criticized the inaccuracy of empirical observation and advocated the formalism of a graphic (and then photographic) method which enabled the body to elaborate its own language through technology. To some extent, we may look at graphic and chronophotographic methods as an “automatic writing” of the body, released from the mediation of language. In other words, these technologies offered to inscribe the corporeal movement on wax or smoke blackened cylinders, on sensitive plates or film, and consequently they achieved a technological utopia, the one of “the self-recording apparatus as a projection of the senses.”39 Instruments were not more descriptive but constitutive of the body’s sensoriality, which they express in graphics, chronophotographs and automatisms. Technologies, Brain argues, began to act not as “prostheses” but as “autonomous sensory agents.”40 33 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 34 Robert Michael Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 39 (2008): 393–417. 35 Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism,” 394. 36 Cf. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 37 Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism,” 394. 38 Its layout in a multiplicity of tubes and sensors seems to Brain like a reproduction of the body blood structure. Cf. Ibid. 401. 39 Ibid. See also: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999[1986]). 40 Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism,” 402.

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Lisa Cartwright,41 whose work is oriented towards a study of medicine’s visual culture, contends that: the qualitative and empirical gaze of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century anatomoclinical perception that Foucault describes [in The Birth of the Clinic] overlapped with and was ultimately challenged by the relentlessly analytical and quantitive gaze, … a mode of perception carefully incubated within the laboratories of physiologists and medical scientists and finding its expression in an unlikely range and mix of institutions and practices, including the hospital, the popular cinema film, the scientific experiment, and the modernist artwork.42

Cartwright’s argument tends to reread cinema’s early history through the light of physiology and medicine in order to reveal the close relationship between science and culture. In other words, she intends to “demonstrate how cinema, an instrument of popular entertainment, functioned as a part of a social apparatus through which the cultures of Western science and medicine shaped and built the life they studied.”43 Pushing forward her thesis, I assert that cinema, an instrument which emerged from a double gaze, scientific and spectacular, not only reflected reality but recreated it through, in particular, its depiction of bodies, which were able to define their own materiality, temporality and nature. However, the emergence of this new sensory regime cannot simply be confined to the experimental surface of the laboratory. Benjamin44 described its manifestation in society as well as in Baudelaire’s prose which portrays the rhythmical beat and dazzling movement of modernity. For Benjamin this aesthetic of shock in the rhythm of Baudelaire’s poems signaled a new sensorium of the human body: “technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film.”45 Though Giuliana Bruno identifies tracks of this new gaze as early as the late sixteenth century, it certainly finds its most relevant expression in the modernist architecture of the city which confounds motion with emotion.46 During the 1850s, with new means of transports, architectures favoring mobility and capitalism determining new working rhythms, the disruptive perception of the body did not only affect aesthetic language and practice but also the whole sensory regime. Crary’s, Bruno’s, Cartwright’s and Brain’s approaches all reveal the collusion of science and art, of laboratory ethos, artistic avant-gardes and popular culture, in 41 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 42 Ibidem, xiii. 43 Ibid., xviii. 44 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 170–212. 45 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 191. 46 Cf. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 6.

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the definition of this new sensoriality. Interestingly enough, the development of these technologies of vision, transport and measurement, paved the way for an archaeology of the film medium. Phantasmagoria and chronophotography both partake in what is usually called—despite anachronism—pre-cinema history. Through this double prism, one is thus guided to the underlying ambiguity which qualifies the body image in films: fragmented and hallucinated, half real and half fantasized, it directly interrogates the nature of the film medium. Indeed the invention of the film medium mirrors a new conception of the human body, which comes into contact with Foucault’s definition of the utopian body, recorded absence and projected presence, both immanent and transcendent, real and fantasized, ordinary and mystifying, profane and sacred. Cinema and the Utopian Body: Transparency, Reversibility, and Hybridity A question remains unanswered from my first reading of Foucault’s text: why does he use the term “utopian” instead of “fantastic,” “mythical,” or “chimeric”? And how is this notion of “utopia” to be understood in Foucault’s perspective? Considering that he is better known for the concept “heterotopia,” it is unusual enough to convene such a notion in regard to the study of the individual’s body. Neither indebted to Thomas More’s literary fantasy nor dependent upon Charles Fourier’s political communities—neither of which Foucault makes reference to—this conception of utopia applied to the human body is at the same time antiuniversalist and anti-dualist. But Foucault does not only assess the singularity and heterogeneity of the body, he disrupts its physical and symbolic boundaries. On the one hand, ‘utopia’ does not have the value of an imaginary or unconscious world, but rather offers to break free of gender and social identities; Greek mythology is filled with hermaphrodites and chimeras whereas possession rituals transform human bodies into animal ones. On the other hand, “utopia” as Foucault intends it is not to be confused with any ideal corporeal modality. In other words, it cannot be conceived in positive or negative terms: it is not an antagonism of dystopia, as a new version of a metaphysical dualism in which utopia idealism would contrast reality materialism. Leaving aside the insular spaces of literature or political communities, utopia becomes in Foucault’s mind both a fantasmatic and sensorial geography of the body. Consequently, the political question intended in utopian discourses finds itself inverted: it is no more an imaginary form which must find the ways of its accomplishment in reality, but rather a critical transfiguration of the body, a way to escape one’s own body. To the fundamental problematic of societal utopias raised by Fredric Jameson47 which could be summed up as follows: “how these imaginary forms can pass the ‘political test’ of their accomplishment,” Foucault 47 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London, New York: Verso, 2005).

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offers the following question: how does the body elude its own materiality and determinisms, how does it transgress its physical and symbolic boundaries? Through which devices and rituals does it blow the distinction between reality and fiction? This is not to say that utopia should be understood as a synonym of fiction, but as a pivot between reality and fiction on the one hand, and between science and art on the other. As a result, utopia neither accounts for reality, nor for pure fiction. Utopia can either be a retrospective projection of reality in critical or ideal terms; another side of reality which finds its mode of expression in fictional forms; or a way to overcome the limitations of the human condition. In associating the terms “body” and “utopia,” Foucault does not contrast fiction and reality, he articulates them as a possibility to constantly reinvent the body through the powers of projection or ritual. Towards an Archaeology of the Utopian Body in Film There is not one, but several bodies in film. Just as the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner used to draw a lexical and conceptual distinction between the body as an object or anatomical body (Körper) and the body as an experience or lived body (Leib), we may differentiate between the actor’s body, the film’s body (which does not necessarily coincide with the character’s body) and the spectator’s body. Both of them go through a remarkable process during the film screening: they no longer exist in an unambiguous mode of incarnation. One might even say that they somehow leave their own bodies. Regarding the way this process affects the spectator, a significant amount of literature has developed a phenomenology of perception of films. It finds a significant elaboration in Jean Louis Schefer’s L’homme ordinaire du cinéma (Cinema’s Ordinary Man),48 when he describes the film theatre as “an experimental room … floating somewhere out of the world and in an artificial night.”49 Beyond this formula, the description makes clear that cinema projection is not only a matter of contemplation: it involves a corporeal commitment of the viewer. This “spectator’s body, that his vision of each film affects, like the index of a theatre of memory with immoderate proportions” writes Raymond Bellour,50 does not receive the film, it projects itself upon it. The actor’s body is also affected by a similar process of abstraction, as it becomes a projected image on screen. A flux more than a delimitated anatomy, a moving image in a scroll of photograms, it escapes the actor’s identity who gave it a face and shape. In films, the character’s body cunningly avoids the identity of the actor’s body (e.g., there may be a number of actors playing James Bond, they will always appear as 48 Jean Louis Schefer, L’homme ordinaire du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 49 Schefer, L’homme ordinaire du cinéma, 109 (my translation). 50 Raymond Bellour, Le corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009), 16 (my translation).

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variations of the same character), just as it can exist without a bodily origin: in fact, there may even be a character’s body without any actor’s body, as ghostly presences or invisible threats prove in fantastic movies like Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People. Lastly, the film’s body may as well designate the materiality of the film medium itself, insofar as its digital or analogical nature may account for different types of images’ corporeality. This essentially paradoxical nature of bodies in film may prevent us from embracing a reductive conception of the body which has often been exemplified in the two polarities: either it is conceived in pure aesthetic terms as the fantasmatic figuration of beauty or the monstrous, or it is represented through a realistic and a more or less mimetic depiction. These two conceptions, one aesthetic and the other objective, both carry two regimes of oppositions, between the ideal and the grotesque, and between reality and fiction, which elude the ambiguity of the body in film. Following Hume, the philosopher Jean-Marie Schaeffer has called fiction a “cognitive illusion”51 which enables us to grasp reality. More generally, a reevaluation of positivism in social sciences has challenged the ethics of objectivity which appears to amount to a wishful thinking more than a certainty.52 In cinema as in social sciences, the body’s singularities and contradictions need to be reassessed against a binary logic of dialectics. A long tradition of dialectics in Western philosophy has conceived the body as being in opposition to the mind. The latter is pure and immortal whereas the body is conceived as bound to trivial carnality and decay. Body and mind, two antipodes, have long been the two faces of a human ontology. One belongs to the material world and the other to the world of Ideas in Plato’s terms; one is irremediably condemned to death while the other is promised eternal life according to Christian anthropology; one being mechanical and animal and the other standing like ‘a pilot in a ship’ in Descartes’ perspective. Though one could find contrasting examples of this dualist ontology and though, before phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche contributed to the reexamination of this antinomy, it is striking to observe how it has influenced conceptions of the body in other domains, such as cinema. Considering a one-sided history of cinema through bodily presences in films, one might be tempted to assess the progressive disappearance of corporeality in films. This deficiency would find a decisive turn in 1927 when the “talkies” placed dialog before gesture and thus annihilated the expressive power of the body during the silent era of cinema. This historical perspective however, opposing a non-linguistic subject (pure corporeality of silent films) to one endowed with the faculty of speech, reiterates the canonical dichotomy between body and mind. If the body, as flesh, raw material, is nothing more than the sign or representative of 51 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction? (Paris: Seuil, 1999). 52 For an historical and epistemological account of the concept of objectivity through the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, cf. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

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the mind and the repository of language, then a study of bodies in film is confined to a semiology of gestures and postures. Hence, this unsatisfying historical partitioning of bodies in film according to their semiotic virtues: a “primitive” state of silent film would have provided the first ones with a raw poetics; classic Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s would have been the Golden Age of the second ones; before a certain modernity in the 1960s reassessed the primacy of sensation over narratives and thus destitutes the preeminence of language over the body in film. However, giving way to this semiological approach amounts to the ratification of dualist ontology that the social sciences—especially Nietzsche’s philosophy, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, or Freud’s psychoanalysis—have called into question in many different ways. Maintaining this antagonism between the body and the linguistic—e.g. the mind—in films, one might also risk continuing endless analogies between matter and meaning, gesture and language, sensation and narration, image and narrative, performance and literary heritage, and so on. To escape such a dichotomous structure, the body in cinema must be redefined, not as the only and ultimate condition and horizon of the individual, but as a knot of contradictions. Real, but at the same time, fictional, anatomical and phantasmagoric, this new conception of the body in film, a utopian one, corresponds to a variety of norms and constantly challenge its biological and discursive limits. References Bellour, Raymond. Le corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités. Paris: P.O.L, 2009. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006, 170–212. Brain, Robert Michael. “The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes circa 1900.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 39 (2008): 393–417. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Foucault, Michel. Naissance de la clinique. Paris: PUF, 1993 [1963]. ———. “Des espaces autres.” In Dits et écrits, II. Paris: Gallimard, 2001, 1571–81. Originally published in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5 (1984): 46–9.

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———. Le corps utopique—les hétérotopies. Paris: Lignes, 2009. Translated by Lucia Allais as “Utopian Body,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline Jones, 229–34. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London, New York: Verso, 2005. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999[1986]. Maniglier, Patrice, and Dork Zabunyan, eds. Foucault va au cinéma. Paris: Bayard, 2010. Mannoni, Laurent. Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma. Paris: Nathan, 1999. Mannoni, Octave. Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre scène. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Milner, Max. La fantasmagorie. Essai sur l’optique fantastique. Paris: PUF, 1982. Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu. “Michel Foucault’s Bodies.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 43, 1 (2012): 1–32. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Pourquoi la fiction? Paris: Seuil, 1999. Schefer, Jean Louis. L’homme ordinaire du cinéma. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

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Chapter 10

Etherotopia or a Country in the Mind: Bridging the Gap between Utopias and Nirvanas Christos Callow Jr.

Utopia Here and Now Joyce Hertzler concludes his History of Utopian Thought with the phrase ‘Utopia is not a social state it is a state of mind’.1 Other utopian scholars would argue that the truth is exactly the opposite, that utopia is a purely social matter. There seems to be a false dilemma here where one must choose between two, seemingly conflicting, schools of utopian thinking: social utopias and private ones. In John Carey’s words, ‘Whereas most utopias reform the world, some reform the self’.2 He says of the later that these ‘solitary utopians are Robinson Crusoes of the mind, inventing islands for themselves to inhabit’ and that they are very unlike ‘normal, public-spirited utopians’.3 Note here the distinction between the ‘normal, public-spirited’ utopianism and the solitary one; the kind that takes place within the individual’s mind and, for doing so, is denied any social value. In his work, Hertzler notices this problem when comparing utopianism to religion. He writes: ‘Among the various Utopians …, two ideals reigned – ideals seemingly negations of each other. … The first ideal is the future of the human race in this world; the other is the future of the individual in another world hereafter’.4 Hertzler however believes those are essentially the same in everything but the end: ‘the specific end alone is different, and that is of minor significance’.5 It seems to me that an inner, personal utopianism is commonly presented as a false alternative to the ‘proper’ social utopianism; when it is not, it is preached in the form of a religion. But these two perspectives are not necessarily the only options. In my view, there is no reason to exclude the possibility of a combination; a third 1 Joyce Oramel Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1965), 314. 2 John Carey, ed. The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), xix. 3 Carey, Faber, xx. 4 Hertzler. History, 262. 5 Hertzler. History, 262.

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school of utopianism that would reform both the world and the self. Speaking of a utopianism that functions on both levels, personal and social, Hertzler mentions Jesus’ idea of the Kingdom of God where ‘to separate the inner lives of individuals from the social order was really impossible, for they react upon one another always and inevitably’.6 Should we accept this argument – and I think it would be illogical not to, unless we believe that society doesn’t consist of individuals – we would come to realise that there never was a dilemma in the first place. That being said, it should be clarified that by a utopianism that demands both social and personal reconstruction to be fulfilled, one does not necessarily refer to a religion, but rather to a utopianism that functions as religion. This would be a more advanced theory than social utopianism. Perhaps this is closer to what Levitas defines as utopia when she says that ‘Utopia entails not just the fictional depiction of a better society, but the assertion of a radical change of values’.7 This ‘radical change of values’, this transformation, if you like, is an essential element of a mature utopian vision. Another problem with the strictly social utopianisms is that the individual, especially the theorist, is unable to put the theory into practice in his or her everyday life. As a result, the social utopian scholar’s work ends at entertaining the idea and justifies Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who calls scholars people who ‘want to be mere spectators in everything’ and ‘like those who stand in the street and stare at the people passing by, so they too wait and stare at thoughts that others have thought’.8 On the contrary, the religious utopian scholar’s work merely begins with the theory and continues with their activity in the actual world. That is because this school of thought is founded on the principle that the individual’s relationship with him- or her-self is in fact a social issue, as it defines their role in society. I will return to this later. In Something’s Missing, a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, Bloch argues that: At the very beginning Thomas More designated utopia as a place, an island in the distant South Seas. This designation underwent changes later so that it left space and entered time. Indeed, the utopians, especially those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, transposed the wishland more into the future.9 Here Bloch refers to utopia as a place and utopia as a time but one could respond that a much older idea is that of utopia as a person – more accurately, a state of mind – which may also be described as nirvana. It is this utopianism that I explore in this chapter: a utopia that does not require an alternate space or time, and may thus be created – or at least start its development – right here and now. 6 Hertzler, History, 71. 7 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (London: Philip Allan, 1990), 124. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 147. 9 Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 3.

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From a purely social perspective, the quest for nirvana might seem irrelevant to utopia. That is, if in our mind, consciousness does not occupy social space. There is good reason however why nirvana has been depicted in Buddhism as a city; Hallisey refers to a ‘conventional metaphor that “defines” existential conditions as “places”’,10 much like the Kingdom of God is described, symbolically of course, as a kingdom.11 In what way then, it may be asked, would either nirvana or the Christian Kingdom apply to society? Again such a question would imply a total disconnection between the personal and the social. In the religious utopianist’s view, the personal issue is social and vice versa. In Buddha, Marx and God, Trevor Ling explains why this is the case (at least for the case of Buddhism, though this applies to Christian utopianism as well): The only thing that Buddhism can never be is a private affair, since in the Buddhist view there are no private individuals. The aim of Buddhism is inherently social in its concern; it is to bring all men to nirvana; this objective concerns society as a whole.12 Nirvana First In my view, utopia is the nirvana of society and nirvana is the utopia of the person; in the sense that the two concepts can be read as synonymous, since we have established that nirvana is as social a goal as utopia. Since nirvana is more suitable a concept when referring to a utopian state of mind, I will be using this parallel throughout the remainder of this chapter. It would be useful here to give a definition of nirvana, in order to avoid misinterpretation. The following quote is from Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction by Damien Keown: ‘Nirvana’ literally means ‘quenching’ or ‘blowing out’, in the way that the flame of a candle is blown out. But what is it that is ‘blown out’? Is it one’s soul, one’s ego, one’s identity? It cannot be the soul that is blown out, since Buddhism denies that any such thing exists. Nor is it the ego or one’s sense of identity that disappears, although nirvana certainly involves a radically transformed state of consciousness which is free of the obsession with ‘me and mine’.13

10 Charles Hallisey, ‘Nibbānasutta: An Allegedly Non-Canonical Sutta on Nibbāna as a Great City’. Journal of the Pali Text Society, Vol. XVIII (1993), 113. 11 See Luke 17:21 (Authorised King James Version): ‘Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you’. 12 Trevor Ling, Buddha, Marx and God: Some Aspects of Religion in the Modern World. 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1979), 83. 13 Damien Keown, Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 51.

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That would be the ideal state of mind for a utopian theorist, as it is difficult to even imagine utopia without having been liberated first – or, if you prefer, un-blinded – from personal obsessions, desires, addictions, traumas and so on. Otherwise, the result will be the continuous spread of more and more separatist utopias that favour one race over the other, one culture over the other, one gender over the other, one nation over some or all others. At this point, I would like to draw a parallel between the wish to achieve utopia – social or personal or, ideally, both – and the wish for another type of perfection, immortality. Stephen R. L. Clark’s response to the wish of immortality, in How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy, adds another level of complexity to utopian theorising. Clark says: The wish to be immortal, if it is to be rational, must be a wish to merit, or be capable of, such immortality. It would be a disastrous idea for the wicked, including the ‘ordinarily wicked’ (which is most of us). So if we wish ourselves immortal we must in reason wish ourselves ‘deserving’ of immortality. Conversely, if we wish ourselves thus ‘deserving’ we must wish ourselves immortal: it would make little sense not to want what we have wanted to deserve.14

To translate this to utopian terms, it follows that a) before we demand utopia, we must first deserve it; in other words if we find ourselves in a utopian society without being utopian ourselves, we would be but parasites – quite possibly we would also be unable to appreciate that utopia; b) in order for our minds to become of the same quality as their utopian product, we must aim to achieve that ‘radically transformed state of consciousness’, nirvana. In his analysis of nirvana, Clark states that ‘the term is popularly used, in newspapers, simply to mean the fulfilment of desire. In Buddhist origin it means the extinction of desire’.15 The same should apply to utopianism: it is the extinction of desire, not its fulfilment that is utopian. Otherwise, the utopian citizen would be as dependent on utopia for their frequent dose of satisfactions as a dystopian16 would. I would therefore argue that utopia itself cannot be a direct fulfilment of desire or need: it ought to be a new condition that comes almost automatically as a natural result of individual and, subsequently, cultural evolution. I will come back to this near the end of the chapter. I have so far presented the quest for nirvana and the quest for utopia as parallel paths to the same direction. Once the parallels have been drawn, it seems almost impossible to think of them as two conflicting objectives. At the same time, there 14 Stephen R. L. Clark, How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1995), 20. 15 Clark, Live Forever, 23. 16 Here I refer to a Huxleian, rather than an Orwellian, dystopia that is sustained by keeping its citizens satisfied. It seems to me that those who ask for a utopia that would merely keep them entertained might as well welcome a dystopia that would do the same.

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is the problem raised by Bertolt Brecht in his play The Good Person of Szechwan: ‘the impossibility of being good in a corrupt world’17 – or, in utopian terms, to be a utopian citizen in a dystopian city – and so to achieve nirvana one would have to wait for the social utopia.18 On the other hand, if a social utopia can only be brought by those who have a proper utopian vision and thus the necessary clarity of mind to host that vision, then maybe it is the other way round after all. It seems hard to argue with Brecht, but the two religions I am referring to here would claim not only that being good in an evil world is possible, but to be good in an already good world would hardly be an achievement. It is a complicated situation and one can never be entirely sure about which is the right place to start, utopia or nirvana. The only answer, it seems to me, is that, unlike the social utopia, the personal utopia may be achieved right here and now. The person that seeks a social utopia may end up waiting forever but the one who is after the personal utopia can start practicing right now. Maybe that person, like another Buddha, would have the conceivability to spot the path to the social utopia while those still ‘blinded’ by ‘the obsession with “me and mine”’19 may not. I would argue that in our quest for a universal utopia, our own nirvana must be our first priority. My argument is that ‘Nirvana First’ is the starting point of the religious utopianist. Just as Buddha started preaching nirvana after achieving nirvana, it follows that the utopian’s first task is to become a utopia themselves before preaching it. This logic is common sense in Zen Buddhism. In his classic work, Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel warns that ‘Zen can only be understood by one who is himself a mystic and is therefore not tempted to gain by underhand methods what the mystical experience withholds from him’.20 The same applies to utopianism. As we have not experienced utopia, we are not in the position to provide arguments from experience. Arguments must therefore come from logic and in order to have access to logic, the self must go; more accurately, the selfish ambitions, desires, preoccupations and everything else that adds to prejudice. The Zen Koan, A Cup of Tea, may be of use here. According to it, the Japanese master Nan-in ‘received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen’. (In our case, a utopian scholar who would inquire about utopia.) Nanin serves him tea, pours his cup and keeps pouring even after the cup is filled. The professor complains and Nan-in replies that, like this cup, ‘you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty 17 Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 118. 18 Brecht’s message, I understand, is that to be good one must first struggle for a society which will allow its members to be good. The paradox is that to bring ‘good’ social change, those who revolt against the corrupt society must be un-corrupted already or the utopian struggle might lead to yet another dystopia. 19 Keown, Buddhism, 51. 20 Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 20–21.

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your cup?’21 In the same way, the utopian mind must be ready to give up one’s own vision of utopia should a better one appear (even if that utopia wouldn’t include him or her). This means that our utopian vision must develop along with ourselves. The more we’d approach nirvana or our own utopia of the mind, the closer we’d be to understanding what utopia should be like. Another point that I find of interest here is one of Nietzsche’s arguments against theism, but this applies to other absolutes and ideals as well. He writes in Zarathustra: God is a supposition: but I want your supposing to be bounded by conceivability. [As a thought-experiment, replace the word ‘God’ with utopia.] Could you conceive a god? But may the will to truth mean this to you: that everything shall be transformed into the humanly-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly-palpable! You should follow your own senses to the end!22

One of the main problems with the above approach is that instead of asking his people to expand their mind to include ideas they cannot currently conceive or comprehend, Zarathustra asks them to limit their minds to the humanlyconceivable, the humanly-evident, etcetera; so if there is something one cannot grasp, they are advised not to try to understand, but to give up the effort and ‘follow [their] own senses to the end’. The same problem affects utopianism and everything that seems to go beyond the familiar experience; this is the fear of the unknown labelled as reason or common sense. Logically speaking, Nietzsche’s argument can easily be proven false: for instance, the earth was round even before people conceived its roundness and natural laws like gravity do not rely on our conceivability either. Furthermore, this school of thought excludes the possibility of nirvana which demands that the mind changes radically and develops the ability to conceive truths previously impossible to grasp. The reason why this argument is nevertheless useful, even though anti-utopian at its core, is that it is based on an objective truth; supposing is indeed bounded by conceivability. For Nietzsche, this means no more supposing, but perhaps it should mean that conceivability requires practice. This is why I argue that nirvana or inner utopia is the necessary first step towards a social or outer utopia. It is impossible to build utopia if we have not already conceived it and to conceive it we must first reach that state of mind that is capable of such conceiving. As Kateb writes: ‘we need bold utopian thought that is general and radical, that builds on novel capacities and takes the measure of novel problems, but goes beyond them in its exploration of the human condition and the requirements

21 Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, eds. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings (Boston: Tuttle, 1998), 19. 22 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 110.

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for at least approximating utopia’.23 The key concept here is that this utopian thought goes beyond solving our own current problems and deals with the human condition itself. This is why we need nirvana or enlightenment or, if you prefer, the ‘kingdom within’. The problem with social utopianism is its expiry date. Supposedly, after it would solve poverty, hunger, inequality and so on, it would simply expire. True utopianism, it seems to me, cannot have an expiry date. It should struggle not merely to solve temporary problems, but to continue to greater depths and deal with existential issues. This is why I believe that nirvana may not only bring utopia, but also sustain it; in other words, nirvana is meaningful after Utopia as well. After Utopia The question ‘after utopia, what?’ can be used as an argument against utopianism in two ways: firstly, to claim that utopia, even if achieved, cannot be maintained and secondly – as Eugene Ionesco sees it – as certainty that the social utopia, once achieved, will create more chaos than there ever was before. Ionesco’s argument is very strong (here he refers to his play The Bald Prima Donna): The ‘society’ I have tried to depict in The Bald Prima Donna is a society which is perfect, I mean where all social problems have been resolved. Unfortunately this has no effect upon life as it is lived. The play deals with a world where economic worries are a thing of the past, a universe without mystery, in which everything runs smoothly, for one section of humanity at least. … I believe that it is precisely when we see the last of economic problems and class warfare … that we shall also see that this solves nothing, indeed that our problems are only beginning. We can no longer avoid asking ourselves what we are doing here on earth, and how, having no deep sense of our destiny, we can endure the crushing weight of the material world.24

This is an interesting response to utopianism in general but it has mainly to do with social utopianism’s expiry date. It is also to do with conceivability and whether we are able now, before utopia, to imagine our post-utopian condition. It is paradoxical, but this would be like a pre-nirvana Buddha trying to answer questions that only the post-nirvana Buddha is supposed to understand. To put it in simpler terms, it would be like a researcher decided the outcome of their research before it even began.

23 George Kateb, ed. Utopia: The Potential and Prospect of the Human Condition (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 23–4. 24 Eugene Ionesco, ‘The World of Ionesco’ (The Tulane Drama Review, 3.1, 1958), 46.

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However, I claim that Ionesco is not wrong. Indeed, when all the secondary social problems are resolved, humanity will have to deal with the primary, permanent ones. This is not necessarily a negative outcome, because inevitably we have to address the issues of our existence. In that, utopia can function like a collective nirvana; just like nirvana is supposed to clear our mind from our everyday troubles so that we can understand our lives in depth, so should utopia resolve the social problems in order for people to be able to focus on the age old questions. This is the stage when social utopianism proves insufficient. For Ionesco this would be the most difficult phase of mankind, but he gives no answer here on where this path might ultimately lead. Another writer, much grimmer in his vision, offers an answer to this post- realisation problem. In his famous story, The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft declares: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.25

I would like here to refer to the following statement by Paul Tillich: ‘we discovered that all utopias are negations of negation – the denial of what is negative in human existence’.26 It follows that if we accept Lovecraft’s view of the cosmos, utopianism would only work as deception, since in this case human existence would be a negative condition. This is yet more evidence that utopianism is bound by conceivability. I want here to discuss this in more depth. I will use as an example the last chapter of the History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes, as analysed by John Carey in The Faber Book of Utopias. Here the character – and first-person narrator – finds himself dead, waking up in Paradise. This version of Paradise is a literal interpretation where an angelic woman who introduces herself as ‘room service’27 brings the character everything he desires, starting with the breakfast of his life.28 Carey describes it as ‘a heaven where every wish is instantly gratified’, where the protagonist ‘cruises on an electric buggy round heaven’s commoditycrammed supermarket, buying up vast cargoes of luxury, with no spending limit. 25 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft. Ed. Stephen Jones (London: Gollancz, 2008), 201. 26 Paul Tillich, Political Expectation (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), 168. 27 Quoted in Carey, Faber, 483. 28 Carey, Faber, 483.

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He meets all the famous people he wants. He has sex every night with beautiful women. When he plays golf, he can hole in one every time’.29 When asking for God, he learns that God exists if he wants him to exist and doesn’t if he doesn’t want him to.30 Predictably enough, in this version of Heaven the dead eventually get bored and ‘miss things going wrong. Some of them ask for pain’, others for bad weather and so on. They even have ‘the option to die off if they want to’.31 The narrator asks: ‘And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me levelly, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later’.32 Needless to say, this school of thought is anti-utopianism at its core. I find this to be flawed on many levels. First of all, it is a literal interpretation of Heaven as physical space. Secondly, it is an over-simplistic interpretation where Heaven is merely that place where all wishes come true. Thirdly, a soul that plays golf, has sex every night and enjoys the breakfast they serve in Heaven, while somehow maintaining the same senses and desires he/she/it had in life, is an example of poor conceivability. Poor conceivability creates problems in social utopianism too. Would we not be bored in utopia, asks the anti-utopian, unable to accept that in utopia we would be different people with different needs with different perceptions of time, space, life and so on. We don’t know what nirvana or utopia is like because we haven’t been there yet. It is not shameful to admit that our conceivability is limited by our experience, our five physical senses, etcetera; but it is unreasonable to follow Zarathustra in denouncing everything we’re unable to conceive. Even worse, as in the above example, is to have the arrogance to bring utopia down to our level when we should be attempting the opposite. It should be easy to understand that Paradise has to be interpreted as a place due to our imperfect conceivability and yet that it is not. It is often not helpful to interpret religions literally (in which case ‘thy kingdom come’33 would come by means of transport and ‘love thy neighbour’34 would refer to the people of the same neighbourhood). Of course Paradise cannot be a ‘place’ in the sense that a kitchen or a cinema is a place. Paradise is supposedly a place for souls – souls that are without bodies, and therefore spirits that don’t occupy physical space, that are infinite. It would make more sense if Paradise, though necessarily conceived as a place, is something entirely different; more like a condition of the spirit. It follows that bodiless spirits would not feel hunger, for instance, but would have different needs which we are not in the position to imagine. Of course this is mere speculation, but to present Heaven as a big white cloudy room where an 29 Carey, Faber, 484. 30 Carey, Faber, 485. 31 Quoted in Carey, Faber, 486. 32 Quoted in Carey, Faber, 487. 33 Luke 11:2 (Authorised King James Version). 34 Matthew 19:19 (Authorised King James Version).

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angelic genie fulfils the sensual needs of spirits without sensual needs is at least an unsuccessful metaphor. This again affects utopianism. The anti-utopian will argue that after utopia we would be terribly bored, since there would no longer be any problems to solve and thus, nothing to do. However, like the allegory of Paradise, we are not in the position to conceive after utopia as we haven’t yet had it. A different situation means different needs and life after utopia must surely be a very unfamiliar situation. I would like here to return to the discussion of that religious utopianism which for both etymological and aesthetical reasons I define as Etherotopia. Defining Etherotopia Etherotopia, or Aetherotopia, etymologically means Αιθέριος Τόπος (Ethereal Place). I imagine the metaphysical side of the concept would be a place defined not as a form and by its limits, like a physical space would be, but as an existential condition. Speaking metaphysically then, the Christian Kingdom would be an Etherotopia or, if you like, a ‘country in the mind’. But the focus of this chapter is the paradise on earth which would be, what I previously described, the kind of utopianism that is not limited to the social aspect but deals with the personal as well as the universal; this is what is meant by Etherotopia. I should note that by a religious utopianism (and, to be clear, this concept is not the same as a religious utopia35), I am simply referring to a system of utopian thought that would function as a religion. How, one may ask, could this actually come to life? It’d be tempting to assume that a system whose first priority is the development of the individual mind towards nirvana or other such seemingly theoretical conditions, could be nothing more than a theory. Yet I would argue that more than any social utopianism, the Etherotopian approach would be the most practical. Consider Hertzler’s comment on More’s Utopia: More’s happy land is based, not upon desire, but upon the disdain of desire. He would have complete detachment from all our pre-occupation over mine and thine, for then much of the occasion for theft, envy and ambition would be banished and all could devote themselves to that which is best.36 This ‘detachment’ is identical with what Keown describes as being ‘free of the obsession with “me and mine”’.37 This would then be a philosophy of life that deals with the source of social injustice itself, rather that its symptoms. It would be impossible to maintain a utopia of non-utopian thinkers either way and it follows that only utopian thinkers could create utopia in the first place. As to how such a philosophy would secure utopia, it is easily explained by Hertzler. He adds in his analysis of Utopia that ‘because of this 35 A religious utopia would necessarily be a religious utopian society while a religious utopianism need not have religious content. 36 Hertzler, History, 135. 37 Keown, Buddhism, 51.

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education and healthful life, ignorance, the great cause of crime and misery, is banished’.38 This makes most laws unnecessary, thus ‘the laws in Utopia are few, because it is against all right and justice that men have imposed on them laws’.39 But apart from preserving utopia (and I would like to think that utopia can only be a work-in-progress; Hertzler is being realistic when he mentions that ‘Humanity’s perfection will never be attained; it is only possible to work toward it’40 and thus preserving is not the right word; the right word would be ‘improving’), this school of thought could efficiently construct it. Here it is useful to repeat that Etherotopianism functions as a religion and to explain in more detail the reason. Ling claims that ‘religion always implies action of some kind’41 and more importantly, adds that: ‘what is done has significance. A meaning has been perceived, in the world and in human existence, and the way a man relates his own life or the life of his people to this meaning is religion’.42 The Zen Master Taisen Deshimaru provides another insightful point. He states: ‘True religion means harmonizing with what is outside, with society, with everything around us. That is the right place for the bodhisattva, the monk’.43 I would like to develop this further. A typical argument against religious systems is that they are mere escapisms.44 But the Buddhist concept of bodhisattva, ‘the person who remains in “the world” by choice, to help other people rather than to devote himself or herself to a personal salvation’,45 demonstrates that traditional religion wants its followers to contribute to society’s utopian development. This is essential in Christianity as well. Jesus emphasised ‘the sense of individual responsibility. … He would have none of that flimsy fatalism which regards character as the creature of circumstance, but appealed to the will of men’.46 Speaking on individual responsibility, one of the main themes of this chapter is the utopian theorist’s responsibility to the practice of their theory. Religion has its bodhisattvas and so should utopianism. An excellent approach to how this utopian apostle would go from studying and lecturing to practicing utopianism is described in Book Nine of Plato’s Republic. Here Socrates responds to the argument that his ideal society could be found nowhere on earth with the following statement: 38 Hertzler, History, 142. 39 Hertzler, History, 142. 40 Hertzler, History, 307. 41 Ling, Buddha, Marx and God, 208. 42 Ling, Buddha, Marx and God, 209. 43 Taisen Deshimaru, Questions to a Zen Master: Practical and Spiritual Answers from the Great Japanese Master (London: Rider, 1985), 25. 44 This applies mostly to western society. There’s an interesting observation by Deshimaru: ‘Westerners like to be on one side or the other; either they are all for religion or they detest it – always the same old story of oppositions. What we must do is harmonize religion with communism, American assets with the Arab spirit. … there needs to be a theory in between’ (Deshimar, Questions, 7–8). 45 Deshimaru, Questions, viii. 46 Hertzler, History, 82.

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‘But in heaven … perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other’.47 The argument here – and clearly in disagreement with Brecht – is that regardless of whether utopia exists, the utopian must live in this world here and now according to that utopia’s philosophy. This way, at the very least, Etherotopia gains one citizen. Here I would like to return to Hertzler’s interpretation of the ‘Kingdom of God’. This is how Hertzler introduces Jesus’ utopianism: Jesus was both sociological and revolutionary in his point of view. He was interested in folks and their relationships and not in theology or ritual or ecclesiastical orders. … He intimated that there was to be a church, but he gave almost no instructions respecting its constitution or its laws. He fought all that belittles and degrades human beings, all that breaks up society into opposing classes and clashing creeds, and attempted to cultivate all that makes for the realization of self and the knowledge of the divinely ordained social order, with its pure, noble and beneficent life.48

Hertzler later focuses on the socio-political aspect of Jesus’ teachings, namely that he ‘gave full recognition to the law of development in human life’ and that he ‘had caught the vision of a gradually established regenerated society, looking not only to personal perfection, but also to the establishment of a Society, pure, blessed and world-wide’.49 It is this synthesis of personal and social perfection that is the essence of the Etherotopian theory presented here. More importantly, the main reason Etherotopia functions as a religion rather than as a socio-political system is the path it takes. A socio-political system reconstructs society from the outside; it begins working inwards, from the system itself towards the individual, thus forcing a utopian model in a dystopian, Procrustean, manner. It is also possible that social utopianism misses – or postpones ad infinitum – the perfection of its individuals. This utopianism is doomed to fail as the individual cannot tolerate it, being unable to understand it due to lack of relevant utopian education that would need to occur before the enforcement of the utopian system, which is impossible. Instead, Etherotopia would change society from the inside outward, from the particular to the universal. Consider the Christian approach as explained by Hertzler: ‘for Jesus the Kingdom was to come not by outward force, or social organization or apocalyptic dream, but by the progressive sanctification of

47 Bloom, Allan. The Republic of Plato: Translated with Notes and an Interpretative Essay by Allan Bloom. 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991). IX, 592b. 48 Hertzler, History, 68. 49 Hertzler, History, 71.

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individual human beings’.50 This school of thought aims to create the utopians prior to building the utopian city; rather it starts building the city by creating the utopians. As previously stated, this is the first priority of Etherotopianism: nirvana first, utopia later. I understand this approach goes against the flow of traditional social utopianism. This means that we start by imagining the utopian citizen, then construct the utopian city around that model. It also means that we can begin doing this now. Our first utopian experiment would then be our own selves. Utopianism is too serious a subject to be merely theorised. Consider the example of Marxist studies: arguably nothing postpones, weakens or even prevents revolution more efficiently than teaching it. There needs to be a way to go beyond theorising utopia, beyond the limits of academic conceivability. Utopianism is, inevitably, in the hands of utopian theorists who are, more than any other citizen, responsible individually and as a group for society’s potential transition to utopia. Action is required and what Etherotopianism demands is that it starts exclusively as individual responsibility. If utopianism as a vision of mankind, as wisdom even, may function as another type of nirvana, then its aim would be to bring all people to utopian conceivability (to paraphrase Ling’s quote ‘the aim … is to bring all men to nirvana’51). To speak of changing the world without changing ourselves is at least hypocritical, let alone impractical. This can only work as a religious procedure, because a religion is a school of thought that can be practiced at both personal and social level. The way this actually works is best described by Hertzler’s example of the Kingdom of God: The Kingdom of God is thus seen to be an evolving – a gradual process of social and spiritual progress. It begins in the hearts and lives of men and does not end until the spirit of God rules in every institution and relation of life. It is both a subjective state of the soul and an objective social order. It is a growth, a development, the unfolding of a principle of life, in its subjective as well as its objective phases.52

This then is the bridge between utopia(s) and nirvana(s); a utopianism that is both that ‘subjective state of the soul’ (or you may replace the word soul with mind) and ‘an objective social order’. And thus it is clear that utopia and nirvana complete each other and are part of the same vision for an ideal society that consists of ideal people. And since this utopianism is both a private and a public quest, it follows that Etherotopianism, as a procedure, begins the moment we start thinking about it.

50 Hertzler, History, 71. 51 Ling, Buddha, Marx and God, 1979, 83. 52 Hertzler, History, 71–2

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References Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Bloom, Allan. The Republic of Plato: Translated with Notes and an Interpretative Essay by Allan Bloom. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Carey, John, ed. The Faber Book of Utopias. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Clark, Stephen R.L. How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1995. Deshimaru, Taisen. Questions to a Zen Master: Practical and Spiritual Answers from the Great Japanese Master. London: Rider, 1985. Hallisey, Charles. ‘Nibbānasutta: An Allegedly Non-Canonical Sutta on Nibbāna as a Great City’. Journal of the Pali Text Society, Vol. XVIII (1993): 97–130. Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Hertzler, Joyce Oramel. The History of Utopian Thought. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1965. Ionesco, Eugene. ‘The World of Ionesco’. The Tulane Drama Review, 3.1 (1958): 46–8. Kateb, George, ed. Utopia: The Potential and Prospect of the Human Condition. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008. Keown, Damien. Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. London: Philip Allan, 1990. Ling, Trevor. Buddha, Marx and God: Some Aspects of Religion in the Modern World. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1979. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft. Ed. Stephen Jones. London: Gollancz, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Reps, Paul, and Nyogen Senzaki, eds. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings. Boston: Tuttle, 1998. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments. Authorised King James Version. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Thomson, Peter, and Glendyr Sacks, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Tillich, Paul. Political Expectation. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971.

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Chapter 11

City of God: On the Longing for Architectonic Perfection, a Reminder by Uriel Birnbaum Kyle Dugdale gloriosa dicta sunt de te civitas dei1

It is hardly a well-known book, even today. It has been described as one of the most attractive and idiosyncratic publications of its kind; but remaining copies tend to reside in the vaults of rare book libraries, where archivists struggle to know how best to categorise them.2 Published in Leipzig and Vienna in 1924, it was printed under the artist’s close supervision, in lavish full colour, using the latest offset press technologies, and each of its plates is layered in rich, fully saturated, almost translucent hues. Its subtitle advertises 50 such plates, each one individually arresting, yet contributing to the perfection of a whole that aims to combine both word and image into a single, spectacular, ambitious work – a work that challenges the orthodoxies of contemporary culture.3 But it proved too challenging, too ambitious, too idiosyncratic. The book is thought to have contributed, through the sheer extravagance of its printing, to putting its publisher out of business; and it is unclear whether it ever reached its full print run. Its content proved equally untimely. Its author, Uriel Birnbaum, had won Austria’s coveted Bauernfeld prize for literature just one year earlier, and had exhibited his artwork to critical acclaim both in Vienna and further afield.4 When a selection of his drawings was displayed in the Vienna Secession’s Ver Sacrum room as part of the 1918 Expressionism exhibition, the reviewer for the monthly 1 Psalm 87:3, Vulgate. 2 ‘Mit “Der Kaiser und der Architekt” hat der Thyrsos-Verlag gleichwohl eines der eigenwilligsten und zugleich attraktivsten Architekturbücher der zwanziger Jahre hinterlassen’. Roland Jaeger, Neue Werkkunst: Architektenmonographien der zwanziger Jahre; Mit einer Basis-Bibliographie deutschsprachiger Architekturpublikationen 1918– 1933 (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 1998), 27. 3 Uriel Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern (Leipzig and Vienna: Thyrsos-Verlag, 1924). 4 For a listing of exhibitions in Vienna, Brünn, Stockholm and Czernowitz between 1916 and 1924 see Arthur Polzer-Hoditz, Uriel Birnbaum: Dichter – Maler – Denker (Vienna: Heinrich Glanz, 1936), 48.

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journal Deutsche Arbeit singled out his work for particular praise alongside the drawings of Alfred Kubin.5 But very soon he would descend into a profound obscurity. Engagements, commissions, and opportunities would dry up, and within a few years the artist could be found in a Vienna café offering unsold copies of his books at discount so as to be able to afford the cost of the tram-ride home.6 Youngest son of the Jewish thinker Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), who is remembered especially for coining the term ‘Zionism’ but who later turned fully towards Jewish Orthodoxy, Uriel Birnbaum (1894–1956) had spent the years leading up to World War I in Berlin, and had subsequently published poems in the left-wing journal Die Aktion, champion of German Expressionism.7 After signing up with enthusiasm for military duty in 1914, like many among the Expressionists,8 he was sent first to the Russian front and then to the Italian front, was wounded in action at Isonzo, and emerged from the war both an invalid and a decorated hero. But he soon found himself increasingly at odds not only with the Expressionists, but also with the Socialists, with the Orthodox Jews, with the Zionists, and with the anti-Semites, until in 1939, at the last possible minute, he fled Nazi Austria on a train to Holland. To date, his most widely circulated text is, ironically, an excerpt from a 1929 newspaper article, reproduced in Theodor Fritsch’s virulent Handbuch der Judenfrage, which reached its 49th edition in 1944 and still appears to sustain an 5 ‘Die phantastischen Tuschzeichnungen von Uriel Birnbaum und Alfred Kubin verdienen besondere Erwähnung’. Walther Schmied-Kowarzik, ‘Die ExpressionistenAusstellung in der Wiener Sezession’, Deutsche Arbeit (Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen), 17, no. 10 (July 1918): 422. 6 Friedrich Weinreb, ‘Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes’, Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgenland (Eisenstadt, Austria) 1983, no. 2–3: 21. Birnbaum himself noted: ‘Seit 1933 nahm die Not ständig zu. Ich verkaufte meine Bilder zu Schleuderpreisen’. Lee van Dovski [Herbert Lewandowski], ‘Uriel Birnbaum’, in Eros der Gegenwart (Geneva: Neuer Pfeil-Verlag, 1952), 198. The 1936 biography by Arthur, Count Polzer-Hoditz, former chief of cabinet to Emperor Charles of Austria, laments Birnbaum’s anonymity as the fate of a rejected prophet. Polzer-Hoditz, Uriel Birnbaum, 10. 7 For an animated description of Nathan Birnbaum as ‘ideological father of Zionism’ see Charles Raddock, ‘The Uncompromising Birnbaums, Pere et Fils’, Jewish Forum (New York), 35, no. 9 (October 1952): 166–7. For a more extensive study see Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 8 For an account of the high hopes, soon dashed, held by Wenzel Hablik, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, and others in their circles, see Wolfgang Pehnt, Die Architektur des Expressionismus, 3rd ed. (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998), 20–21; for Pehnt’s discussion of Birnbaum see ibid., 34 and 291–2. Hablik and Mendelsohn, like Birnbaum, served on the Isonzo front, as did, on the opposite side, Antonio Sant’Elia. For an account of the differences between Birnbaum’s attitude to the outbreak of war and that of his Expressionist and intellectual contemporaries, see Georg Schirmers, ‘Nachwort’, in Uriel Birnbaum, Ein Wanderer im Weltenraum: Ausgewählte Gedichte, Vergessene Autoren der Moderne 47 (Siegen, Germany: Universität-Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1990), 41.

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online readership as a neo-Nazi sourcebook.9 Birnbaum himself never recovered his former standing within public favour, and to this day his name is largely unknown.10

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Turris usque in caelum The book’s full title is Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern: ‘The Emperor and the Architect: A Tale of Fifty Pictures’. It sounds almost like a children’s story; and at first glance its images might support that impression. The figuration has a child-like, perhaps even childish quality to it – deftly-sketched black outlines containing fields of bold, bright colour, with an enigmatic character that resides somewhere between that of a comic strip and that of a stained glass window. Both of these media fall, as it happens, within Birnbaum’s interests, and the book has occasionally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, found its way into collections of children’s literature.11 Most of its 50 pictures 9 The text, clearly intended by Fritsch to be self-incriminating, is listed as ‘Uriel Birnbaum im “Neuen Wiener Journal”, 31. Oktober 1929, Nr. 12 911’, in Theodor Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage, 49th ed. (Leipzig: Hammer-Verlag, 1944), 298–9, and is included in a sub-section entitled ‘Jüdische Selbstbekenntnisse’ (293–310). Birnbaum is quoted as criticising Jewish radical Marxist, revolutionary, idealistic and utopian tendencies. 10 For a first-hand account of the ‘untimely’ (unzeitgemäß) nature of Birnbaum’s work see for instance van Dovski, ‘Uriel Birnbaum’, 195–9; for another account of his precipitous fall from public favour see Thomas Biene, ‘Uriel Birnbaum, ignoriert, emigriert, vergessen: Stationen im Leben eines prophetischen Dichters, Denkers und Zeichners’, in Hans Würzner, ed., Österreichische Exilliteratur in den Niederlanden 1934–1940 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), 127–43. See also Hans Rochelt, ‘Leben und Werk Uriel Birnbaums’, Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgenland, 1983, no. 1: 22–3. 11 For comparison of Birnbaum’s technique to stained glass see Kitty Zijlmans, ‘Jüdische Künstler im Exil: Uriel und Menachem Birnbaum’, trans. Sofia Rodriguez, in Würzner, Österreichische Exilliteratur, 149, or Schirmers, ‘Nachwort’, 40. The frontispiece to Der Kaiser und der Architekt is in fact a representation of a stained glass window. This is also true for the frontispiece to Birnbaum’s Moses, also published by Thyrsos in 1924, and in some respects a companion volume to Der Kaiser und der Architekt. Plates from this work were indeed later translated into stained glass: see Zijlmans, ‘Jüdische Künstler im Exil’, 149. Princeton University’s copy of Der Kaiser und der Architekt is held in the collection of the Cotsen Children’s Library; the Canadian Centre for Architecture categorises it in the genres of ‘writings’, ‘allegories’, and ‘fairy tales’; and when a copy is advertised for sale, which is seldom, it is as likely as not to be listed in a catalogue of children’s literature. In 1923 Birnbaum illustrated German editions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; and in the following years he was a regular contributor to the Viennese children’s magazine Der Regenbogen, banned by the Ministry of Education in 1927. For more on Birnbaum’s work for children see Friedrich C. Heller, Die bunte Welt: Handbuch zum künstlerisch illustrierten Kinderbuch in Wien 1890–1938 (Vienna: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2008).

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describe cities: colourful, fantastic, utopic cities, formally inventive, materially adventurous. But the cities seem curiously empty; and the graphic content of the last few plates, towards the back of the book, suggest that this is not intended for children. The accompanying text is set in Peter Behrens’ severe Antiqua typeface, black on white, a densely printed counterpart to the lucid colour images. In fact, what sounds and looks, at first, like a picture book, proves in reality to be a critique: a vigorous, uncompromising critique not only of modernity’s aspirations to the construction of a contemporary utopia, but of the very foundations of modernity itself, measured in their architectural, political, and spiritual dimensions, and found wanting. It is a definitively anti-utopian work by an author who is explicit, in other texts too, as to his rejection of utopian ambitions.12 Yet once again, the book’s first impressions might suggest otherwise. Both text and images are articulated in the vivid language of German Expressionism, adopting vocabularies typically associated with the most ambitious and fantastical of that period’s utopian schemes. Birnbaum’s imagery has been compared to that of Paul Scheerbart, of Bruno Taut, of Wenzel Hablik, or of Hermann Finsterlin,13 and the 12 Alongside Birnbaum’s novel Die Errettung der Welt, discussed later, see also his loose-leaf lithographic folio Weltuntergang (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1921), in which a seemingly utopian opening (‘In der goldenen Zeit’) soon proves ephemeral at best. For more explicit discussion at different points in Birnbaum’s life see for instance Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst (Vienna and Berlin: R. Löwit Verlag, 1919), 13; Birnbaum, ‘Über den Utopismus’, Der Freihafen: Blätter der Hamburger Kammerspiele 7, no. 6 (1924): 1; and Birnbaum, ‘Wesen und Geschichte der Utopie’ (unpublished and undated manuscript), now in the Uriel Birnbaum Archive of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam (catalogue number birn 1/119). The reference at page 20 to Hans Hutten’s Der Arzt der Welt: Durch Gewalt zum Völkerfrieden (Leipzig: Grethlein, 1931) suggests a date not earlier than 1931; the reference at page 16 to the League of Nations suggests a date not later than the dissolution of the League in 1946. Handwritten annotations change the phrase ‘dem Völkerbund’ to read ‘der UNO wie dem verschollenen Völkerbund’, suggesting that the manuscript was typed before but revisited after the establishment of the United Nations at the end of World War II. The absence of any major modifications to Birnbaum’s text reflects the resilience of his position in the face of the experience of the war, despite its devastating implications for his immediate family. 13 See for instance Roland Jaeger, ‘Nachforschungen zum Wiener Thyrsos-Verlag (1922−24)’, Aus dem Antiquariat: Beilage zum Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel, 87 (October 31, 1995): A372–3, or Jaeger, Neue Werkkunst, 22–33. Birnbaum’s library includes on its shelves Taut’s 1919 Die Stadtkrone, as well as a number of Scheerbart texts, among them Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß, its bibliography annotated to suggest that Birnbaum had read at least 18 of Scheerbart’s works. For reference by Birnbaum to Hablik in an October 13, 1916 letter to his parents (‘Laßt Euch mal bei Heller … die Mappe von Wenzel Hoblik [sic] zeigen: das ist der Futurismus ohne Irrweg’) see Armin A. Wallas, ‘“Gläubige Kunst”: Zivilisationskritik als Gottes-Offenbarung’, in Georg Schirmers, ed., Uriel Birnbaum, 1894–1956: Dichter und Maler (Hagen, Germany: Fernuniversität-Gesamthochschule, 1990), 74n21. For a fully illustrated study of that ‘Futurismus ohne Irrweg’, see Axel Feuß, ‘Wenzel Hablik (1881–1934): Auf dem Weg in die Utopie’ (PhD diss., University of Hamburg, 1989).

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correspondences are not difficult to identify. Indeed, the architectural schemes presented by Birnbaum are suggestive not only of the previous fabulations and confabulations of the Expressionist imagination, but also of the later and more earnestly edifying schemes of orthodox Modernism. But where those accounts are inclined to champion the transformative and even redemptive potential that is deemed inherent to the conditions of modernity, Birnbaum’s account takes a strongly voiced position against any promises of earthly perfection in the modern world.14 It is, as its title suggests, the story of an emperor and his architect. One night the emperor has a dream – a dream of a beautiful, shining, heavenly city. The dream haunts him, feeding an insatiable longing for that wonderful but evanescent city. He turns to his physician and to his priest, but neither can supply what he demands. Finally, in perplexity, he turns to his architect, a great artist whose talent is matched only by his self-confidence. The architect recognises the commission of a lifetime, and over the course of the story both he and a multitude of hired workers exhaust their energies to fulfil the emperor’s desire. And yet their efforts fail. They fail repeatedly, and they fail in consistently beautiful, spectacular ways. They build 33 cities, products of astonishing architectural creativity, each more extraordinary than the last – but none lives up to the memory of the emperor’s vision. They exhaust not only their energies, but also their resources, their materials, their formal techniques, their colours. They build new workshops and factories to exploit modernity’s most advanced technologies; they harness the capacities of modernity’s most powerful machineries. All other duties and responsibilities are sacrificed to this one end; lives, fortunes and families are spent; and yet the dream remains unrealised. Captivated by the architect’s prodigious plans, the emperor approves the imposition upon his people of increasingly onerous taxes, and the broader concerns of public welfare are, more and more, forfeited to the emperor’s single-minded pursuit of the architectonic perfection embodied in his dream. As each successive city is completed, and announced in all its geometrically perfect emptiness, the emperor visits the construction site for an inspection; but as each successive city is deemed to fall short of the ideal, so his initial longing is gradually overwhelmed by a conviction of inexorable futility. Finally, despairing of success, the emperor calls an end to construction and returns in resignation to his palace. But the architect refuses to surrender the cause. On his own initiative, he makes one last attempt. He builds a tower, a thing of immensity and beauty, a tower of towers, a tower of cities, heaped up to reach the sky; a tower at a scale that dwarfs 14 For the utopian correspondence of a group of architects representative both of Expressionism and of an emerging Modernism, itself understood as a reaction to materialism and positivism and as an attempt to fill a postwar ideological vacuum, see Iain Boyd Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). See also Timothy O. Benson, ed., Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993), with brief discussion of Birnbaum at 177 and at 259.

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the individual, and yet a tower that will crown his own lifetime’s achievements: an enduring monument to the architectural project, and simultaneously an act of architectural assertion, of artistic autonomy, of one man’s defiance in the face of the emperor’s submission. Duae istae civitates In due course it becomes clear that for Birnbaum the construction of this great tower is intended to represent something greater still: it stands as a monument to all promises of earthly perfection in the modern world, and in particular to those that are built on a foundation of human endeavour.15 And for Birnbaum these promises are to be contrasted with older promises of other-worldly perfection: promises of which the ultimate fulfilment is to be sought not in this world but in a world to come – promises of biblical origin. The architect’s tower, the tower of cities, the city of man, is thus contrasted with the city of the emperor’s dream, the heavenly city, the city of God. Indeed, one might well be reminded of the Augustinian opposition between the City of Man and the City of God, noting that for Augustine the City of Man is one that is devoted to the pursuit of individual temporal pleasures – and to the satisfaction of earthly longings. Certainly Birnbaum was familiar with Augustine – Augustine’s Confessions and City of God are both included in a handwritten list of ‘great books’ that forms a part of his personal archives, now held in Potsdam, and both titles are represented in the surviving volumes of his personal library,16 with his 1911 edition of City of God quoted in a later essay which describes Augustine as ‘a powerful voice’ of censure directed towards his contemporary culture.17 Indeed, Birnbaum’s autobiographical recollections note that Augustine was among the authors who accompanied him into the trenches of World War I; and his adjacent comments suggest that his wartime reading did little to boost his utopian sympathies.18 15 That this includes (but is not limited to) dreams of a Zionist state (‘Jewish dreams for the establishment of a political utopia on earth’) has been noted, for instance, in Bernhardt Blumenthal, ‘Uriel Birnbaum: Forgotten Angel of the Sun’, Modern Austrian Literature, 29, no. 1 (1996): 57. 16 ‘Die großen Bücher’ (catalogue number birn 1/158, undated) is one of many bibliographies within the Uriel Birnbaum Archive. 17 ‘Eine mächtige Stimme’: Uriel Birnbaum, ‘Die Jüdischen Quellen des Reichsgedankens (1934)’, Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgenland, 1983, no. 1: 25–6, identified at 31 as a reprint of an essay first published in the Austrian Jewish-monarchist journal Der Legitimist, with quotation of Augustine, De civitate Dei 4.4 as translated in the Bibliothek der Kirchenväter edition. For the fate, under Nazi occupation, of the larger work of which this essay was a fragment, see the coda at 31. 18 ‘Lektüre im Feld: Bibel, Dante, Augustinus, Dostojewski, Carlyle, Pascal, Stifter. Immer schärfere Einstellung gegen jegliche utopistische Denkweise und alle Weltverbesserungspläne’. Uriel Birnbaum, ‘Selbstbiographie’, in Die Exlibris des Uriel

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It seems likely that City of God was first studied by the young Birnbaum during the three years of intense reading that constituted his residence in Berlin in the runup to the war.19 This was also a period marked by a broader dissatisfaction with the conditions of modernity, both political and intellectual, and this appears to have provoked in Birnbaum the beginnings of a critique of contemporary culture’s commitment to what he understood as a simplistic mechanistic-materialist positivism built upon a substructure of human self-confidence. In this Birnbaum was not alone – there were many others, not least among the Expressionists, who might have sympathised with his frustrations; but for him that dissatisfaction – a disillusionment which might have led him to sympathise with the experience of the young Augustine – fuelled an inner turmoil which in due course prompted a turn to the God of Israel and an oath of allegiance not to the city of man but to the city of God.20 For Birnbaum, as for Augustine, the longing for earthly perfection is a poor substitute for the longing for heavenly perfection. And in Der Kaiser und der Architekt this contrast is expressed in terms of architecture: the architect’s aspirations to the construction of a perfect world are presented as surrogates for older, now abandoned, hopes that were once directed towards the world’s creator God, deus architectus mundi. But Birnbaum insists that the gap left by a loss of faith in the creator cannot be filled by an expanded confidence in the promises of the constructor. Be they scientific, political, cultural, or more broadly ideological, no human structures are sufficient to the task, however skilfully designed. Their promises prove false, the architect’s constructions exposed as mere fabrications. Approaching the climax of the story, the architect is himself suddenly faced with the vision of the heavenly city. But he is a modern man, who shares the prejudices of modernity; and he rejects this vision:

Birnbaum: Gefolgt von einer Selbstbiographie des Künstlers, ed. Abraham Horodisch (Zurich: Verlag der Safaho-Stiftung, 1957), 90. 19 This assertion is based on connecting various bibliographic details. The edition of City of God quoted in Birnbaum’s 1934 essay is represented on the shelves of Birnbaum’s library by the first volume, published in 1911, of the Bibliothek der Kirchenväter edition of Augustine’s collected works, comprising books 1–8 of De civitate Dei. The fact that this appears to be the only volume from that multivolume edition in his library may be explained by the observation that subsequent volumes were published incrementally, with the second volume appearing in 1914, around the time when Birnbaum signed up for military duty. Birnbaum’s typescript autobiographical notes state, using a familiar architectural metaphor: ‘In dreijährigem fast ununterbrochenem Lesen eignete ich mir damals den Grundstock des Wissens an, auf das ich später mein Schaffen aufbauen konnte’. Uriel Birnbaum, ‘Mit Bild und Wort: Ein Essay über mich selbst’ (Vienna: unpublished manuscript, early November 1929), 3, Uriel Birnbaum Archive, uncatalogued. 20 ‘Nach vieljähriger Beschäftigung mit und Beeinflussung durch die materialistischmonistische Naturwissenschaft unter Seelenkämpfen rasche Entwicklung zu jüdisch eingestelltem Gottesglauben’. Birnbaum, ‘Selbstbiographie’, 88.

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The Individual and Utopia His wild heart rose in angry defiance. … Even if what he was seeing was true, even if it came from heaven as a sign from God – still he would deny it. The eyes that were seeing should not see. … That city before him was mere lies and deception, its beauty and size unfounded pretence. There existed no heaven where it might truly stand; there existed no God to have created it. This, here, was truth: the granite beneath his feet, the city that he had built himself, which stood on earth, established for all ages according to great valid undeviating mathematical laws.21

A tower established by man in defiance of God … a desire for the architectonic expression of permanence … a project that is not, in the end, destined for a happy end … It is difficult to avoid comparisons to that other tower, that biblical tower, the Tower of Babel. One might recall that for Augustine, too, the City of Man was represented most vividly by Babylon, in opposition not just to Jerusalem, but above all to the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem. Augustine, too, writes about Babel, understood as a monument to humanity’s pride, its aspirations to an all-tooearthly self-sufficiency framed in the absence of any reference to God. He writes of Babel as a type, as a figure for subsequent enterprises conceived in the same spirit; and he writes of a tower that is destined to fall.22 For Birnbaum, too, the comparison to Babel is valid; the connection is drawn both implicitly, within the text of Der Kaiser und der Architekt, and explicitly, in other texts.23 Der Kaiser und der Architekt is ultimately nothing less than a retelling of the biblical account of the Tower of Babel, articulated in a contemporary vocabulary that is designed to speak to the conditions of modernity. De terrena civitate, quae dominari adpetit Utopian thought at its most ambitious has almost always led, in the end, to the demand for spatial and architectural elaboration. Within that long tradition, the account of the Tower of Babel is already familiar. Babel, in other words, is already a well-worn utopian motif, one that operates at multiple levels within the contemporary consciousness of utopia’s history; and it is no coincidence that the literature and representation of utopia should intersect so frequently with that of 21 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 28; my translation. 22 For this figure (‘casuram turrem in altum’) see Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 109.19. 23 For references in the work of others see for instance Arpad Weixlgärtner, ‘Der Maler-Dichter Uriel Birnbaum’, Die Graphischen Künste (Vienna: Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst) 50, no. 1 (1927): 93, or, more recently, Jaeger, ‘Nachforschungen’, A373, and Blumenthal, ‘Uriel Birnbaum’, 57. The 1936 biography by Polzer-Hoditz also lists among works then in progress a manuscript entitled ‘Der Aufstand Babylons’, described as a ‘Weltgeschichte der Gegenwart’. Polzer-Hoditz, Uriel Birnbaum, 50.

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Babel over the course of so many centuries. Bruegel’s two surviving Tower of Babel paintings are perhaps among the most common and the most direct of the standard tropes of utopian imagery;24 but it is similarly unremarkable that artists’ renditions of Babel should, by way of illustration, grace the covers of so many subsequent editions of Thomas More, or, more generally, that the figure of the tower should play so persistent a role within the utopian imagination of Filarete.25 Conversely, one might trace the contrasting role of the figure of the garden, with artists’ visions of Paradise used, not least, to adorn the cover of copies of Augustine’s City of God. This much comes as no surprise within the context of any culture for which biblical precedent serves as primary and authoritative point of departure. What is perhaps more remarkable is that in the early decades of the twentieth century, just at the moment when one might expect such biblical figures to be fading from the pages of architectural influence, Babel seems instead to reassert its presence with greater insistence than ever before. In fact, a new Babelic fever finds outlet in exactly those places where the anxieties of architectural modernity seem to play out with the greatest intensity: in the architecture of German Expressionism and of Russian Constructivism, in the visions of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, in Le Corbusier’s project for the Mundaneum in Geneva, or in the towers of Manhattan as represented by Hugh Ferriss. One cannot help but be struck by the persistence with which the figure of Babel recurs within the architectonic consciousness of modernity. And often that resurgence is tied to a new consciousness of the general absence from modernity’s plausibility structures of the figure of God. Babel’s presence, in other words, is tied to God’s absence. If God is no longer held to be the architect of the world, then who is to take his place? Indeed, in this light the text of Genesis 11 itself begins, upon closer examination, to take on a curiously modern cast. It seems to address problems that suddenly appear newly pertinent: the anxieties of an alienated, mobile society, its perceived loss of centre prompting a turn to human artifice; the troubled yearning for an architecture that might provide its builders with spiritual shelter, to be pursued through the embrace of mass production and the application of contemporary technologies; dreams of the communicative potential of a shared language denied by the destructive effects of a confusion of tongues – all read into the story of a culture that no longer seeks its security in the God of its earlier chapters but turns

24 For Bruegel’s ‘symbolic representations of an ideal community’ see Steven A. Mansbach, ‘Pieter Bruegel’s Towers of Babel’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (Munich), 45 (1982): 54. 25 For a nuanced analysis of the treatise of the Florentine architect and theorist Antonio Averlino (ca. 1400–1469), better known as Filarete, see Jonathan Powers, ‘Building Utopia: The Status of the Ideal in Filarete’s Trattato’, in Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia, ed. Nathaniel Coleman, Ralahine Utopian Studies 8 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 29–56.

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instead to the constructions of human reason: a story within which any reference to God is, at first, conspicuously absent. What is more, the account of Babel resonates, as many of its adoptions over the past century might suggest, with modern anxieties over the status of the individual. The Genesis account seems to speak of the construction of a unified group identity, one that is literally designed into its architecture: Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. … And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly’. And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’.26

Not only is the completion of the tower’s construction dependent on the existence of a monolithic language and culture – as is clear from the consequences of God’s subsequent intervention – but the preservation of that culture is the very thing that prompts the project in the first place. In the broadest terms, the tower might be understood as humanity’s attempt to redeem itself from the effects of its mortality – and above all, from the forgetfulness of history; but more specifically, it is also intended as protection against the perceived dangers of dispersal, of diversification, and of individuation. What is more, that abstract and immaterial objective has very real material and technical implications. The dimensions of the project demand that its builders operate at a massive scale to which, we may presume, only the efficiencies of mass production can do justice. Its construction in fired brick masonry takes for granted the ability to exploit prodigious quantities of malleable raw material, torn from the earth and processed into a standardised product of identical individual components. Indeed, the successful production of a masonry tower such as this demands both economies of scale and structures of vertical integration at their most systematic and comprehensive. The massive stockpiles of baked brick at the base of the larger of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel paintings, now in Vienna, are a reminder of the smoothly operating logistics and mechanisms of production that must be set in place to enable such technologically ambitious development. And although the Genesis account does not dwell on such details, what is in fact specified is the identity of the commodity that is to hold the entire structure together: bitumen. This, of course, has gone unnoticed neither by observers of the modern oil-based economy nor by critics of the global forces that have been marshalled for its preservation and maintenance. Indeed, the sceptre-wielding figure in the foreground of Bruegel’s painting, typically assumed to represent Nimrod, and the anonymous smaller figures that lie prostrate before him, serve as reminders of the structures of authority, power and oppression that 26 Genesis 11:1–4. All biblical translations are drawn from the New Revised Standard Version.

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can facilitate the delivery of such large-scale ventures.27 A similar logic is at work in the gradual degeneration of Birnbaum’s emperor from beneficent sovereign to unjust oppressor, for whom the subjects of his realm are no more than a means to an architectonic end. Closer analysis of these specifics is absent from the account in Genesis 11. The presence of Nimrod, tying the construction of Babel to the archetypal representative of oppressive and destructive power, is an interpolation from Genesis 10:8–10, developed by Josephus and by Talmudic tradition and noted also by Augustine.28 But even without these elaborations, it is hardly surprising that the account of Babel should be invoked as a warning against the neglect of the individual in favour of the collective, and against the prioritising of the universal over the particular. After all, even in its strictest interpretation, the Genesis passage opens with the utopian aspirations of a people unified by a universal language, but closes with a world of multiplicity, of diversity, and even of confusion. Artists’ reconstructions of Babel have represented this distinction in different ways, focussing on the tower either as a structure of unremitting uniformity or (taking some liberties, perhaps, in the interpretation of biblical sequence) as a structure of extraordinary linguistic diversity.29 The imposition of this confusion of tongues has, in turn, been understood in two ways: as an act of judgement on the part of a jealous God, or, more enigmatically, as an act of grace. Indeed, there is good reason to prefer this latter interpretation, wherein the imposed confusion not only protects humanity from the dire consequences of its own self-reliant folly, but is itself that which permits the flourishing of a richer, more diverse individuality: a linguistic richness for which a parallel can also be found in the diversity of architectural vocabularies across space and time – a diversity which has seemed, to some, to be threatened by the universalising tendencies of contemporary modernity. Despite their differences, both of these interpretations share a critique of the monolithic impulses that open the account of Genesis 11; both interpret the lesson of Babel as a denunciation of any utopia that would do violence to the individual by relying, for its success, on the prioritisation of the universal over the particular. Both positions, in other words, interpret Babel as an essentially anti-utopian 27 For a glimpse of a few of the many variant interpretations of Bruegel’s Babel, which becomes in itself a site of disagreement and confusion, see Roger H. Marijnissen, Bruegel: Tout l’œuvre peint et dessiné (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1988), 210–22, with bibliography. 28 Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.4. 29 Examples of the former might be found in the ongoing, never-finished work of the German artist Annette von der Bey, collected under the title ‘Turmbau’, which draws, in turn, on the precedent of Bruegel’s tower; see the artist’s website, http://www.annettevon-der-bey.de, or the description at ‘Annette von der Bey: Installationen’, Kunstaspekte, http://www.kunstaspekte.de/annette-von-der-bey. Examples of the latter can be found in a series of late sixteenth-century paintings of the Flemish school. Both categories are well represented in Helmut Minkowski’s monumental Vermutungen über den Turm zu Babel (Freren, Germany: Luca Verlag, 1991).

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account – if, that is, the project of utopia is understood as a longing for a strictly earthly perfection. In this, it seems, Birnbaum would agree. Evidence of Birnbaum’s position is provided by the story of his later acquaintance with the Dutch modernist critic Menno ter Braak (1902–40), an acquaintance made shortly after Birnbaum’s escape to Holland from Nazi Vienna, and overshadowed by the impending catastrophe of World War II. Indeed, it is perhaps against the backdrop of the Third Reich – itself understood as a distinctly modern enterprise founded upon its own carefully-constructed articulations of group identity, with its own preciselydefined promises of security and belonging, and with its own ambitious projects for architectonic expression – that this story can be read most poignantly. Ter Braak’s biographer writes of a 1939 meeting with Birnbaum: The artist told him of an epic-scaled project for a novel entitled The Redemption of the World, which he had planned as a great anti-utopia. In it he denounced those who promise to improve the world, who gain power and control over humanity with the help of abstract slogans, but who ultimately overwhelm them with torrents of blood and tears. Precisely because it destroys that part of the individual that is most personal and intangible, said Birnbaum, a world striving for efficiency and material prosperity manifests, at its core, a terrible and deadly numbness. Birnbaum showed him, among other things, a cycle of ink drawings entitled Der Kaiser und der Architekt.30

Simul omnes et singuli There is perhaps a risk, here, of appearing to conflate what might otherwise seem to be unrelated enterprises. The clarity of hindsight may be deceptive. And yet the work of another author on Birnbaum’s bookshelves has suggested similar associations. Alfred Döblin was an acquaintance of the Birnbaum family from 1934 onwards.31 The comparison in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz between Weimar 30 Léon Hanssen, Menno ter Braak (1902–1940): Leben und Werk eines Querdenkers, trans. Marlene Müller-Haas, Niederlande-Studien 21 (Münster, Germany: Waxmann, 2011), 336; my translation. Die Errettung der Welt was originally conceived of as part of a larger anti-utopian trilogy entitled Der Mann, der alle Macht besaß, and was eventually published in 1969, after Birnbaum’s death, as Uriel Birnbaum, Die Errettung der Welt: Eine utopische Novelle (Zurich: Efhag-Presse, 1969); in this connection see especially Friedrich Weinreb’s introduction, i–ii. The original manuscript is dated to 1927 by Weixlgärtner, ‘Der MalerDichter Uriel Birnbaum’, 102. For further discussion see Polzer-Hoditz, Uriel Birnbaum, 26. 31 For the friendship between Döblin and Nathan Birnbaum, see Georg Schirmers, ed., Menachem Birnbaum: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen Künstlers (Hagen, Germany: FernUniversität Hagen, 1999), 28, and the obituary reproduced as Alfred Döblin, ‘Zum Tod von Nathan Birnbaum’, in Schriften zu jüdischen Fragen, ed. Hans Otto Horch (Solothurn, Switzerland: Walter-Verlag, 1995), 344–7, first published in Yiddish as Alfred Döblin, ‘Zum toit fun Nosn Birnboim’, Naie Stimme (Warsaw), 2 (1937): 12–13.

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Berlin and Babylon is familiar; less fully appreciated is his 1934 Babylonische Wandrung, oder, Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall, which has prompted the statement that ‘the rise of Nazi Germany is merely a symbol of the march of Babylon through history’, an escalation, among other things, of a persistent refusal ‘to see people as individuals rather than as instruments of power’.32 Conversely, Döblin himself recognised the group attraction, the collective intoxication (Rausch) of the German people’s allegiance to an individual, to a strong Führer – an intoxication to which artists were not insusceptible.33 More generally, it is no doubt possible to connect the attractions of Nazi party membership to a contemporary disillusionment with modernity’s perceived loss of centre: to a perceived need to build a new identity. The association with Babel, once again, seems disconcertingly apt.34 Indeed, it is clear that Birnbaum’s picture-book is a product of that same distrust of the abusive potential of utopia’s architectonic instincts35 – particularly 32 Patrick O’Neill, Alfred Döblin’s ‘Babylonische Wandrung’: A Study (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1974), 76–7. O’Neill develops these associations further in chapter 7, ‘Babylon’, and in chapter 10, ‘Babylonische Wandrung and the rise of the Third Reich’. 33 ‘Mit fliegenden Fahnen ging man zu Hitler, nämlich zum Machtrausch und anderen Räuschen, – und was hat also unsere Literatur geleistet? Ich finde (ich nehme mich nicht aus): wir haben unsere Pflicht versäumt’. Alfred Döblin to Thomas Mann, May 23, 1935, in Alfred Döblin, Briefe (Olten, Switzerland: Walter-Verlag, 1970), 206. For Birnbaum’s own earlier correspondence with Thomas Mann, itself providing a further link to Josef Ponten’s 1918 Der Babylonische Turm, see Thomas Mann, Briefe II: 1914–1923, ed. Thomas Sprecher, Hans Vaget, and Cornelia Bernini, Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe 22 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2004), 22: 396–8. The editors’ notes at 934–6 draw attention to Birnbaum’s perception of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire as an instance of a diverse unity, described as a ‘Protest gegen den Versuch der westlichen Vernunft, die vielfältige, historisch gestaltete Welt – Gottes wilde und farbenreiche Welt! – zu schematisieren und in alleinseligmachende Formeln zu pressen’ (935). Birnbaum adds: ‘Hier, in meinem Österreich, sah ich einen Anfang dessen, was ich ahnte und ersehnte, nicht einer ‘pazifizierten Esperanto-Erde’, sondern einer Erde von bunter und vielfältiger Einheitlichkeit, sah den Anfang, sah die Möglichkeit gemeinsamer Arbeit ohne Unterdrückung der Besonderheiten einzelner Teile’. 34 For more directly architectural observations see for instance Yasmin Doosry, ‘Wohlauf, laßt uns eine Stadt und einen Turm bauen …’: Studien zum Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2002). For Albert Speer’s interest in reconstructions of Babylon see also Anthony Vidler, ‘The Space of History: Modern Museums from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier’, in The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts, ed. Michaela Giebelhausen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 178. 35 An otherwise unidentified clipping in Birnbaum’s archives, filed with the manuscript of ‘Wesen und Geschichte der Utopie’, excerpts a description, possibly from the book jacket, of the anarchist Mary Louise Berneri’s 1950 Journey Through Utopia: ‘In her account of Utopias, Mary Louise Berneri has emphasised the intolerant and authoritarian nature of most of these visions, the exceptions, such as those of Morris, Diderot and Foigny, being only a very slight minority’ (Uriel Birnbaum Archive, catalogue number birn 1/119).

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when those instincts seem to be untethered from other constraints, such as those that might follow from a belief in a divinely-mandated respect for justice towards the individual. Birnbaum’s assessment of Augustine’s merits is supported by a passage from City of God in which the author denies the fundamental legitimacy of power exercised without justice.36 For Birnbaum, the earthly state must indeed be modelled on the heavenly, with the ruler’s authority derived only from that of a just God.37 But the earthly must not pretend to usurp the heavenly, for when the recognition of God’s supreme authority is removed, the opportunity for human despotism is increased. Birnbaum compares Augustine’s condemnation of human tyranny to the prophet Nathan’s condemnation of King David for the murder of Uriah – an act of violence in which disregard for God’s law is mapped onto a subordination of the subject’s wellbeing to the ruler’s selfish interests. The extraordinary visual, material, and conceptual richness of the 33 cities described in Der Kaiser und der Architekt would support the contention that the earthly may indeed be modelled on the heavenly if the one remains properly subordinate to the other. But the book’s ultimate purpose is cautionary. Indeed, the account of Babel here performs its traditional didactic role, as a warning against human pride and folly, and as a reminder that there exist legitimate limits that cannot be overstepped with impunity. The figure of the emperor is a faint reminder, perhaps, of Nimrod, and a reminder that schemes for the construction of earthly utopias must ultimately, like all massive architectonic enterprises, depend for their execution upon equally massive structures of power. And the figure of the architect serves as a reminder that claims for human self-assertion are often at odds with the recognition of any prior claims held by God; that the legitimacy of the project for the construction upon earth of a heavenly city is often premised on the assumption that notions of the heavenly city are themselves human fabrications: the heavenly imagined in the image of the earthly, God imagined in the image of man.38 This would seem to suggest a comprehensive indictment of the utopian project. But there is more to it than that. Birnbaum’s tale also suggests the possibility of a further interpretation: one that seeks to preserve the validity and value of utopian longing by prescribing and circumscribing its legitimate ends – and in so doing One might compare the more recent statement in Ruth Eaton, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 2001), 17: ‘It is a sad truth that diversity, pluralism and tolerance, the essence of democracy, are frequently sacrificed in utopian societies, an almost inevitable result of the painful, eternal conflict between the collective and the individual, between equality and fraternity on the one hand, liberty on the other’. 36 Augustine, De civitate Dei 4.4, quoted in translation at Birnbaum, ‘Jüdischen Quellen des Reichsgedankens’, 26. 37 ‘Darum heißt es im Talmud: “Die irdische Regierung ähnelt der himmlischen Regierung”’. Ibid., 27. 38 See also Kyle Dugdale, ‘Die Materielle Richtung der Utopieen: Uriel Birnbaum’s Contribution to Sloterdijk’s Spheres’, in ‘Architecture and Utopia’, ed. Nathaniel Coleman, special issue, Utopian Studies, 25, no. 1 (2014): 194–216.

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preserves a place for the individual within the dehumanising and universalising thrust of modernity. Towards the close of Der Kaiser und der Architekt, Birnbaum’s readers witness the comprehensive failure of the architect’s ambitions to build the heavenly city upon earth. Yet the story does not end there. It ends, instead, by reinforcing the validity of the vision that first provided the occasion and impetus for the architect’s exertions. It ends with the re-appearance of the heavenly city itself; and, as before, it is this city that provokes the artist’s most vivid colours and the writer’s most poetic language. As ter Braak is said to have observed, Birnbaum’s distrust of earthly utopias did not foreclose on artistic expression, or even on architectonic expression – far from it. But utopian longing, he insisted, is ultimately to be directed towards a real, heavenly city, not towards an earthly surrogate. Birnbaum was himself, after all, both an artist and a believer, a critic of materialism, of positivism, and of a godless modernity.39 In this regard, Birnbaum’s text provokes comparison to a tradition of thought that associates the figure of Babel with other, refigured counterparts within JudaeoChristian thought, in a long line of archetypes and architectures that begin with the non-architectural Garden of Eden but lead on towards the Promised Land and its architectural counterparts: the city of Jerusalem and its temple on the one hand, or, on the other, the New Jerusalem – a prospective figure of Babylon redeemed. Throughout this sequence one may find indications that align the longings of the individual with those of the community, precisely because both are aimed in the same direction.40 Just as the expulsion from Eden had consequences both for Adam and Eve and for their descendants, so the Torah makes it clear that faithful possession of the Promised Land will safeguard the welfare both of the individual and of the nation more broadly. And the language of the Book of Psalms typically maps the individual’s longing for Zion onto that of the community, the people of God. Both, after all, share a similar longing, the longing for perfection, for permanence, for security, for identity. And what is it that distinguishes this from Babel? The longing is directed not primarily towards human self-assertion, but towards God. A case in point might be Psalm 66, which in its brief 20 verses moves seamlessly between the individual and the corporate body, a whole composed of 39 For Birnbaum as believer see Biene, ‘Uriel Birnbaum’, 129: ‘Birnbaum war nach einer Phase materialistisch und naturwissenschaftlich bestimmter Weltanschauung … im orthodox jüdischen Sinne gläubig geworden’. To Birnbaum’s experience one might contrast accounts of transformative revelations, hallucinations, visions of cities and towers, and mountain-top experiences, sometimes quite literal, among architects in and around the circles of Expressionism (Hermann Obrist, Otto Bartning, Erich Mendelsohn, Hermann Finsterlin), discussed at Pehnt, Architektur des Expressionismus, 28. Birnbaum’s experience is similar in kind but different in orientation; for his own account (‘1913 über Nacht gläubig geworden’) see Birnbaum, ‘Selbstbiographie’, 88. 40 For discussion of shared longings as constitutive of genuine community see Augustine, De civitate Dei 19.24.

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fully integrated parts. The psalmist’s attention shifts from a picture of communal artistic endeavour, with the people of God understood as a choir proclaiming God’s praises in joyful unison (66:1, 4, 8), to the experience of the individual at its most personal. By the same token, the language of the psalm shifts from universal injunctions (to ‘all the earth’, to ‘mortals’, to ‘the nations’, to the ‘peoples’, 66:1–8), into an expression of devotion that is articulated in the first person singular (66:13–20) and which culminates in the synthesis of verse 16: Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me.

Not insignificantly, the psalmist speaks of a God ‘who rules by his might forever, whose eyes keep watch on the nations – let the rebellious not exalt themselves’ (66:6–7). This language of attempted self-exaltation, observed by a God who looks down upon a rebellious people, might well remind the reader of the account of Babel in Genesis 11:4–5. The comparison is perhaps strengthened further if the reader remembers another familiar figure of the psalmist’s language, in which God himself fulfils the role that is envisioned, in Genesis 11, for Babel’s tower.41 In Psalm 71, for instance, it is God who is identified as the psalmist’s dependable rock of refuge: ‘for you are my rock and my fortress’ (3). It is not man’s constructions but God’s power and righteousness that ‘reach the high heavens’ (19), and it is God whose might endures to subsequent generations (18). For the human is not commensurable with the divine: ‘You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?’ And here too the psalmist speaks of his God in the most individual of terms (5–6): ‘For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth. Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you’. And it is ultimately the praise of this God that provokes the artist to exercise his art (22–4). Indeed, Augustine would insist that the trajectory of this archetypal series can readily be extended from the Old to the New Testament. In his commentary on Psalm 72 he argues that Old Testament promises of an earthly kingdom and of an earthly Jerusalem were essentially ‘provisional promises, promises that were not meant to last’, serving ‘as signs of other, future promises that would endure. This whole collapse of temporal promises was itself a sign, a prophecy of what was to come’.42 In other words, he understands the figures of the Promised Land and of the earthly Jerusalem as temporary and imperfect placeholders that point forward to a future permanence and perfection. In this he follows the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who argues that even Abraham ‘looked forward to 41 For God as high rock, as dependable refuge, and as strong tower, see also Psalm 61; for the name of God as a strong tower, juxtaposed to false confidence in manmade structures, see Proverbs 18:10–12; for the tower as a figure of pride, see Isaiah 2:12–19. 42 Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 51–72, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001), 472.

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the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God’, desiring not an earthly homeland but ‘a better country, that is, a heavenly one’. That desire is a counterpart to the intrinsic alienation of the human condition: ‘for here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come’.43 The Christian longs for the establishment, by God, of a heavenly city, deemed more real, more permanent, more beautiful than any earthly city, a city that contains and fulfils within itself the promise not only of Eden but also of Babylon, a city with a unified language, prefigured at Pentecost. All previous earthly figures are mere imperfect images of that heavenly figure.44 De felicitate paradisi What of it? If Birnbaum’s book was intended as a critique both of modernity’s materialist and distinctly godless individualism and of its perceived counterpart, the imposition of a false collective utopia, his argument may in turn be juxtaposed to more recent arguments against modernity’s radical individualism. As such, it offers a reminder that one of the most vigorous responses to the dilemmas of contemporary attitudes towards the individual and utopia may yet come from within its longest-standing institutions. It is a response that begins to appear increasingly new, fresh, and radical precisely because of its continued neglect in the face of the positivist tendencies of contemporary modernity. After all, Birnbaum’s argument still seems heretical when measured against the orthodoxies of contemporary culture. It is not a timid proposition; after all, it contends that the utopian ambitions of Babel were not too big, but rather too small. Birnbaum’s emperor recognises, in due course, that the life of his architect ‘had wasted away in a craving for the unattainable, in a longing that was directed all too narrowly towards a specific end. … And, as in a mirror, the emperor saw that he himself, just like his artist, had wasted his life, frittering it away on desires that were all too narrow’.45 His confession of individual human finitude and folly is tied to a bolder conviction, to a faith in a proposition that still holds out the promise of nothing less than humanity’s ultimate perfection. And the dimensions of that perfection are 43 Hebrews 11:10, 11:16, 13:14. For a discussion of this text with reference to Augustine, see Gervase Corcoran, OSA, ‘We Have Here No Lasting City’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 83, no. 332 (Winter 1994): 384–92. 44 For analysis of the ‘utopian projection’ (53) of a heavenly city that closes the biblical account, and for discussion of the ways in which the biblical description of the New Jerusalem subsumes earlier accounts of Babylon, see Dieter Georgi, The City in the Valley, Studies in Biblical Literature 7 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), especially chapters 4, 10 and 12. See also the analysis of the role of Babylon in relationship to the city of God offered by Augustine, Enarrationes 87.5–7. 45 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 21–2; my translation.

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staggering. Similarly, in his commentary on Psalm 72, Augustine speaks of the eternal nature of the felicity that is promised to those who long for things heavenly, and not earthly; and in City of God he writes explicitly of the perfection that is promised to the believer at the end, redeemed from human mortality.46 Augustine’s vision, too, is expressed in architectonic terms: he elaborates on the language of Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians to assert that God’s people constitute nothing other than his dwelling-place – his holy temple – both collectively and as individuals.47 Just so, the final paragraphs of Birnbaum’s story are, like his drawings, fully saturated with a longing for an ultimate perfection that is fuller, more real, and more permanent than that which can be offered by human architectures. The story of Der Kaiser und der Architekt ends with an expression of patience tied to a sustained confidence in the ultimate reality of the city of God: But now he knew what he knew: that the heavenly did not belong upon earth – that he himself would have been destroyed, just like the architect, had he not come to his senses on time, and recognised God’s will, and submitted to God; just like the architect he would have been crushed for the crime of storming the heavens. Now he knew; and he would wait, patiently. It would not be long now. And then this new night would be over too. And he believed – and he knew – that he would then see the heavenly city once again in the dawning light of a new morning. This time he would see it close by – forever …48

References Alter, Robert. The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Augustine. Expositions of the Psalms, 51–72. Translated by Maria Boulding, edited by John E. Rotelle. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001. Benson, Timothy O., ed. Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993. Biene, Thomas. ‘Uriel Birnbaum, ignoriert, emigriert, vergessen: Stationen im Leben eines prophetischen Dichters, Denkers und Zeichners’. In Würzner, Österreichische Exilliteratur, 127–43. Birnbaum, Uriel. Gläubige Kunst. Vienna and Berlin: R. Löwit Verlag, 1919. 46 ‘nondum enim sumus in illa perfectione sapientiae beati, quae nobis ab hac mortalitate liberatis in fine promittitur’. Augustine, De civitate Dei 8.17. 47 ‘huius enim templum simul omnes et singuli templa sumus, quia et omnium concordiam et singulos inhabitare dignatur’. Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.3. Compare 1 Corinthians 3:10–17. 48 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 30; my translation.

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———. Weltuntergang. Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1921. ———. Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern. Leipzig and Vienna: Thyrsos-Verlag, 1924. ———. ‘Über den Utopismus’. Der Freihafen: Blätter der Hamburger Kammerspiele, 7, no. 6 (1924): 1. ———. ‘Selbstbiographie’. In Die Exlibris des Uriel Birnbaum: Gefolgt von einer Selbstbiographie des Künstlers, edited by Abraham Horodisch, 85–106. Zurich: Verlag der Safaho-Stiftung, 1957. ———. Die Errettung der Welt: Eine utopische Novelle. Zurich: Efhag-Presse, 1969. ———. ‘Die Jüdischen Quellen des Reichsgedankens (1934)’. Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgenland, 1983, no. 1: 25–31. Birnbaum, Uriel, Archive. Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam. Blumenthal, Bernhardt. ‘Uriel Birnbaum: Forgotten Angel of the Sun’. Modern Austrian Literature, 29, no. 1 (1996): 53–65. Corcoran, Gervase. ‘We Have Here No Lasting City’. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 83, no. 332 (Winter 1994): 384–92. Döblin, Alfred. Briefe. Olten, Switzerland: Walter-Verlag, 1970. ———. ‘Zum Tod von Nathan Birnbaum’. In Schriften zu jüdischen Fragen, edited by Hans Otto Horch, 344–7. Solothurn, Switzerland: Walter-Verlag, 1995. Doosry, Yasmin. ‘Wohlauf, laßt uns eine Stadt und einen Turm bauen …’: Studien zum Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2002. Dugdale, Kyle. ‘Die Materielle Richtung der Utopieen: Uriel Birnbaum’s Contribution to Sloterdijk’s Spheres’. ‘Architecture and Utopia’, edited by Nathaniel Coleman, special issue, Utopian Studies, 25, no. 1 (2014): 194–216. Eaton, Ruth. Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment. Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 2001. Feuß, Axel. ‘Wenzel Hablik (1881–1934): Auf dem Weg in die Utopie’. PhD diss., University of Hamburg, 1989. Fritsch, Theodor. Handbuch der Judenfrage. 49th ed. Leipzig: Hammer-Verlag, 1944. Georgi, Dieter. The City in the Valley. Studies in Biblical Literature 7. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Hanssen, Léon. Menno ter Braak (1902–1940): Leben und Werk eines Querdenkers. Translated by Marlene Müller-Haas. Niederlande-Studien 21. Münster, Germany: Waxmann, 2011. Heller, Friedrich C. Die bunte Welt: Handbuch zum künstlerisch illustrierten Kinderbuch in Wien 1890–1938. Vienna: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2008. Hutten, Hans. Der Arzt der Welt: Durch Gewalt zum Völkerfrieden. Leipzig: Grethlein, 1931.

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Jaeger, Roland. ‘Nachforschungen zum Wiener Thyrsos-Verlag (1922−24)’. Aus dem Antiquariat: Beilage zum Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel 87 (October 31, 1995): A369–75. ———. Neue Werkkunst: Architektenmonographien der zwanziger Jahre; Mit einer Basis-Bibliographie deutschsprachiger Architekturpublikationen 1918– 1933. Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 1998. Mann, Thomas. Briefe II: 1914–1923. Edited by Thomas Sprecher, Hans Vaget, and Cornelia Bernini. Grosse kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe 22. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2004. Mansbach, Steven A. ‘Pieter Bruegel’s Towers of Babel’. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (Munich) 45 (1982): 43–56. Marijnissen, Roger H. Bruegel: Tout l’œuvre peint et dessiné. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1988. Minkowski, Helmut. Vermutungen über den Turm zu Babel. Freren, Germany: Luca Verlag, 1991. Olson, Jess. Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. O’Neill, Patrick. Alfred Döblin’s ‘Babylonische Wandrung’: A Study. Bern: Herbert Lang, 1974. Pehnt,Wolfgang. Die Architektur des Expressionismus. 3rd ed. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998. Polzer-Hoditz, Arthur. Uriel Birnbaum: Dichter – Maler – Denker. Vienna: Heinrich Glanz, 1936. Powers, Jonathan. ‘Building Utopia: The Status of the Ideal in Filarete’s Trattato’. In Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia, edited by Nathaniel Coleman, 29–56. Ralahine Utopian Studies 8. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Raddock, Charles. ‘The Uncompromising Birnbaums, Pere et Fils’. Jewish Forum (New York), 35, no. 9 (October 1952): 166–7. Rochelt, Hans. ‘Leben und Werk Uriel Birnbaums’. Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgenland 1983, no. 1: 22–3. Schirmers, Georg, ‘Nachwort’. In Uriel Birnbaum, Ein Wanderer im Weltenraum: Ausgewählte Gedichte, 40–46. Vergessene Autoren der Moderne 47. Siegen, Germany: Universität-Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1990. ———. ed. Menachem Birnbaum: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen Künstlers. Hagen, Germany: FernUniversität Hagen, 1999. Schmied-Kowarzik, Walther. ‘Die Expressionisten-Ausstellung in der Wiener Sezession’. Deutsche Arbeit (Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen), 17, no. 10 (July 1918): 421–3. Van Dovski, Lee [Herbert Lewandowski]. ‘Uriel Birnbaum’. In Eros der Gegenwart, 188–208. Geneva: Neuer Pfeil-Verlag, 1952. Vidler, Anthony. ‘The Space of History: Modern Museums from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier’. In The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban

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Contexts, edited by Michaela Giebelhausen, 160–82. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Wallas, Armin A. ‘‘Gläubige Kunst’: Zivilisationskritik als Gottes-Offenbarung’. In Uriel Birnbaum, 1894–1956: Dichter und Maler, edited by Georg Schirmers, 37–82. Hagen, Germany: Fernuniversität-Gesamthochschule, 1990. Weinreb, Friedrich. ‘Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes’. Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgenland (Eisenstadt, Austria) 1983, no. 2–3: 20–24. Weixlgärtner, Arpad. ‘Der Maler-Dichter Uriel Birnbaum’. Die Graphischen Künste (Vienna: Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst), 50, no. 1 (1927): 87–103. Whyte, Iain Boyd. Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Würzner, Hans, ed. Österreichische Exilliteratur in den Niederlanden 1934–1940. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986. Zijlmans, Kitty. ‘Jüdische Künstler im Exil: Uriel und Menachem Birnbaum’. Translated by Sofia Rodriguez. In Würzner, Österreichische Exilliteratur, 145–55.

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Chapter 12

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Theosis: Between Personal and Universal Utopia Tamara Prosic

Introduction It is often said that the first image a novice Orthodox iconographer will attempt to paint is that of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ on Mount Tabor.1 This event in Jesus’ life describes how James, Peter, and John followed Jesus to a mountain summit where his face and clothes started radiating light, how he then conversed with Moses and Elijah, and how God himself spoke to the disciples.2 In Western Christianity the episode has been regarded as ‘misplaced resurrection account’3 or anticipation of Jesus’ resurrection4 and has consequently played only a minor role in its theology, liturgical year and art. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, however, it is of unparalleled significance. To Orthodox believers this event speaks about the past, the present and the future of the notion, the way, and the fulfilment of theosis or deification, the Orthodox understanding of salvation and rendition on the Christian ‘principle of hope’. To them it confirms the truthfulness of the tantalising, but agonisingly vague verses of the Book of Genesis and the Psalms, in which, at the very beginning of the world, humans were created in the image and likeness of God and proclaimed to be Gods.5 It is also a pointer towards the dystopian present, revealing the means of overcoming its fragmented nature and alienation from God. Finally, it is also an indicator of the future, substantiating the hope about the establishment of the utopian kingdom of God.6 The message that is communicated to the believers is analogical: like Jesus, whose humanity 1 Andreas Andreopoulos, Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 75. 2 Matt. 17.1–9; Mar. 9.2–8; Luk. 9.28–36; 2 Pet. 1.16–18. 3 Charles Edwin Carlston, ‘Transfiguration and Resurrection’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 80, no. 3 (1961): 233–40. 4 Ján Majerník, Joseph Ponessa, Laurie Watson Manhardt, The Synoptics: On the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke (Steubenville: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2005), 121. 5 Gen. 1.26. Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’; Ps. 82.6. I say, ‘You are Gods, sons of the Most High, all of you’. 6 John Chryssavgis, ‘Icons, Liturgy, Saints: Ecological insights from Orthodox Spirituality’, International Review of Mission, 99, no. 2 (2010): 183.

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was divinised on the Mount, human ultimate destiny is also to become divine; like the disciples who were able to look at the divine light with their mortal eyes and communicate directly with God, heaven is also not a matter of afterlife, but of this life; like the ascent to the summit before Jesus’ transformation, the path towards the kingdom of God is also a challenging journey. Finally, like the fellowship that was established at the moment of Jesus’ transfiguration between humans (both living and dead), nature and God, the destiny of the whole world is to be transfigured in the light of the coming perfect and unending communion by overcoming various divisions and separations that in present reality exist between the divine, the human and the natural. However, the reasons for painting this icon or any icon for that matter do not end with conveying messages about one or another aspect of Orthodox theology. Although important, that is just one side of iconography. The other side is more complex and no artist in the West would dare to have a claim on it. It is an act of faith on the part of the iconographer to actually deliver on theosis. In contrast to the West, where the role of religious art is limited to supporting and promoting the tenets of the Christian faith, in Orthodoxy, where only two-dimensional images on wooden boards (icons) and walls (frescoes) are allowed, its role is to open ‘windows to heaven’, to create conduits ‘between the earthly and the celestial worlds’7 where the divine and the human meet and which enable men to have unmediated knowledge of God and allow the iconographer and the worshippers to overstep the boundaries of the immanent and directly participate in the transcendent and the eternal. They are middle grounds between this world and the kingdom of God in which the dystopian present and the future utopia find their reconciliation by removing ‘any objective distance between this world and the next, between material and spiritual, between body and soul, time and eternity, creation and divinity’.8 These ‘windows of eternity’ are thus both an attempt to remind fellow believers that ‘there is no double vision, no double order in creation’, that the whole world is destined to be deified, but it is also a personal attempt on behalf of the iconographer to remove the distance between the two worlds by actualising ‘in this world the language of the age to come’.9 By creating an icon, the iconographer unifies the natural, the human and the divine, the same elements that were brought into communion in the event of transfiguration: in this way he creates what could be called fleeting moments of theosis, moments that are ‘in the world, yet not of the world’,10 which contribute both to his own personal salvation and through their use by his fellow believers to the advancement of the eschaton as well.

7 Ernst Benz, The Eastern Orthodox Church: Its Thought and Life (New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2009), 6. 8 Chryssavgis, ‘Icons, Liturgy, Saints’, 183. 9 Chryssavgis, ‘Icons, Liturgy, Saints’, 183. 10 John Chryssavgis, In the World, Yet Not of the World: Social and Global Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

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To Western Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, these statements about Orthodox views and the role of icons might sound utterly strange and very difficult to reconcile with their own knowledge and understanding of Christian soteriology and eschatology. Western theology teaches that salvation is about God’s legal favour and judgment upon souls. The relationship between God and humans regarding entrance to heaven is understood in a contractual manner and is couched in legalistic terms such as ‘payment of debts’, ‘justice of God’, ‘human’s guilt’, ‘necessity of satisfaction’, ‘justification’, ‘standing before God in his court’, and the like.11 It also has nothing to say about people becoming divinised either in this life or the afterlife. Salvation is seen as a condition into which God places humans and its two dimensions, the individual and the eschatological, are independent from each other. The salvific dynamics revolve only around humans and God, while nature is a complete non-entity. In comparison to these, Orthodox ideas on salvation seem to inhabit a parallel universe. Theosis is described in terms of ‘communion’, ‘union with God’, ‘way of perfection’, ‘fellowship with God’, ‘regeneration’, ‘ekstasis’, and ‘partaking of God’s nature’.12 It is mainly a process13 in which both humans and God participate,14 individual and universal salvations are intertwined and interdependent15 and which, in addition to humans and God, also involves the natural world.16 However, regardless of how alien these views might sound to Western Christians, and regardless of how convinced they might be that the word theosis does not feature in the Scriptures, deification was actually one of the most widespread ways in which salvation was understood in the early centuries of Christianity.17 It played part in the numerous theological debates happening during this formative period that were at the time frequently erupting regarding the problematic question of Jesus’ human/divine nature or the Trinity, although in many cases theosis was used as an idea that was self-evident and self-explicatory and which did not require much exposition regarding its precise meaning.18 Its history stretches back to the early Church Fathers, Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) and Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–c. 202), who were the first to refer to Psalm 82.6 and write about humans becoming Gods, 11 James R. Payton Jr., Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press: IVP Academic, 2007), 121–2. 12 Donald Fairbairn, Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 68–73. 13 Kallistos Ware, How are we Saved? The Understanding of Salvation in the Orthodox Tradition (Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing, 1996), 6. 14 Ware, How are we Saved?, 34. 15 Ware, How are we Saved?, 68–75. 16 Ware, How are we Saved?, 80. 17 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 153–7. 18 Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1

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something that they took more or less for granted on the authority of this verse and St Paul’s teaching that through baptism humans are incorporated into Christ (and his divinity) and thus given a potential to achieve immortality.19 The first to use the verb ‘to deify’ (theopoies) was Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), who in contrast to the sacramental (through baptism and Eucharist) participatory understanding of Justin and Irenaeus, looked at deification through the lens of Platonic philosophy and wrote about it as ethical and spiritual transformation. For him, ‘becoming Gods’ also meant participation, but more by way of imitation, based on Gen. 1.26 which speaks about humans as the ‘image and likeness’ of God. Participation in God was the achievement of ‘likeness’ through askesis, contemplation and a mastery of one’s passions.20 These two ways, which Norman Russell calls the realistic and the ethical approach, were the main ways in which deification was articulated for the next few centuries.21 The sacramental, realistic approach by Justin and Irenaeus was followed by Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–298 – 373), while Clement’s ideas were taken up and further developed by Origen Adamantius (184/185–253/254), Basil of Caesarea (c. 329–330 – 379), Gregory of Nazianzus (329 – c. 389–390) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395) with many variations as to what constitutes a veritable likeness of God. The realistic and the ethical stream began to converge in Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444), for whom deification had both sacramental and ethical dimension and who for the first time employed the Trinitarian aspect of the Christian God in relation with the idea of theosis. For Cyril theosis has two aspects. One is static, ontological and involves the creation of humans in the image of God. The other is dynamic, processual and begins with baptism and continues through reception of the Eucharist and acquisition of virtue by exercising free will, the primary way in which humans are the image of God. By choosing the Good, humans participate in God who ‘is in everything that is beautiful, and is the very source, root and origin of all virtue’.22 While exercise of free will is the spiritual side of theosis, of advancing from createdness and immanence to uncreatedness and transcendence, baptism and Eucharist are the corporeal side of deification. Through the Spirit (in baptism) and the Son (via Eucharist) humans are also brought into contact with the third person of the Trinity, the Father. According to Cyril, this is tantamount to participation in God’s nature because in his view the Son is born from the Father and thereby shares in the substance/nature of the Father.23 This retrojective link thus allows also people to fully participate in the Trinitarian nature of God. Cyril’s ideas were further developed through Dionysius the Areopagite (sixth century), who strengthened the ecclesiastical side of theosis by using the language 19 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 113. 20 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 121–40. 21 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 14. 22 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 191. 23 Hans Van Loon, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 147–8.

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of deification in connection with liturgical life and added a mystical twist to it by describing the union with God in erotic terms. Theosis begins with baptism, it is nurtured by sharing in the liturgical life and by reception of the Eucharist and is achieved through opening the mind to divine illumination which leads to ecstasy and a union of love between the believer and God.24 To describe the nature of this ecstatic love-embrace between God and humans Areopagite did not use the word agape, which denoted a kind of benevolent, brotherly love – and was at the time almost exclusively employed in connection with God – but eros, the word that had fleshier connotations, was associated with physical, sexual love, and was used as agape’s opposite. In Areopagite’s vision of participation in God, however, the brotherly love implications of agape were not adequate to communicate the intense nature of theosis as an event of ek-stasis, ‘of self-transcendence and personal communion’, and ‘the ‘passion’ of personal relationship’ with God.25 Only eros with its connotations of unreserved union between two beings could convey the full range of meanings intrinsic to the Trinitarian existence of the divine and properly articulate the idea, not simply that God had love, but that God was love, ‘the mode with which God is is love’.26 However, it is only in the writings of Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) that the idea of deification, in addition to its ontological (sacramental), ethical and social side, nascent in Areopagite’s relational understanding of God, gains also a clearly universal, eschatological dimension; that it becomes not just a way of salvation reserved for humans, either individually or collectively, but God’s plan for the whole universe and the very purpose for which humanity is created and towards which it naturally strives. Theosis ‘is the encompassing and fulfilment of all times and ages, and of all that exists in either’.27 Maximus achieves this cosmic dimension by building on Areopagite’s relational divine ontology to which he adds an immanentist, historical, dimension. Until him, Christian ontology – whether related to humans, God or nature – was mostly articulated in the static terms of the Platonic ontology of pure forms and its main characteristics were immutability, immobility and immateriality. Diversity, movement and transiency, and thereby the impermanency of constantly changing historical conditions as well, were considered as consequences of the original sin28 and were excluded from any mode of salvation which was to recreate the absolute stillness of the prelapsarian condition. Maximus reverses this pattern and claims that God’s first quality is ‘becoming’ and ‘movement’ and only after them comes ‘rest’.

24 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 248–61. 25 Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite (London, T&T Clark International, 2005), 99. 26 Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 100. 27 Quoted in Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 14. 28 John Meyerndorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 37

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In constructing this vision Maximus draws on Areopagite’s relational Trinitarian God, but his God, unlike Aeropagite’s who, even if relational, is essentially a spiritual being which resides only in its own transcendent sphere, is also a being which is an endless becoming, a process, and a movement in the world.29 And that movement is an expression of the ultimate will and aim of God to be embodied through his creation.30 The realistic side of theosis, thus, becomes an even more important element in salvation, so the corporeality of the Eucharist is strengthened with the very conception of physicality and the material. The cosmos is now not just a creation, but also an unending display of God’s presence, will and work in the world. For Maximus, God is both present and absent from the world and while nothing can be learnt about the transcendence of God, his material aspect, which he calls energies in order to preserve God’s transcendent essence and its unknowability, can be known and experienced in the world. Modelling his views on the co-inherence of three persons in the Trinity and Christ’s human/divine nature, he claims that God and the world partake in each other, but without, however, being subsumed into each other, as various teachings about Christ’s nature at the time claimed.31 In other words, as the nature of the Trinity is essentially a communion of ‘three persons in one essence’ and Jesus Christ’s nature is equally divine and human, the creation and the creator, the eternal and the historical, also interpenetrate each other without conflation. Deification, thus, becomes a ‘becoming’, a process of change that will bring all things in God by overcoming ‘the evil powers of separation, division, disintegration and death’.32 Maximus’ views on salvation became the authoritative tradition in Byzantium on the question of theosis and were the starting point from which, in the fourteenth century, Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), an Athonite monk, defended the possibility of unmediated, sensory experience of God (through his energies) against the Western type of scholastic rationalism and intellectualism espoused by Barlaam of Calabria (c. 1290–1348). The so-called Hesychast controversy was the last big theological polemic that rippled through Byzantium, it lasted for a decade and necessitated summoning three councils to Constantinople (in the years 1341, 1347, and 1351) before the dispute was finally settled. All three councils endorsed Palamas’s views and the distinction essence/energies of God, one unknowable the other knowable, has been since then part of the official Orthodox doctrine. These decisions, even if Orthodox theology, after the fall of Constantinople a 29 Meyerndorff, Byzantine Theology, 37. 30 ‘For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to effect the mystery of his embodiment’, quoted in Adam G. Cooper, The Body in St Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 74. 31 Elena Vishnevskaya, ‘Divinisation as Perichoretic Embrace in Maximus the Confessor’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Tradition, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 134. 32 Meyerndorff, Byzantine Theology, 38.

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century later, went into hibernation mode for more than 300 years, were of utmost significance for the preservation of the distinct character of Orthodoxy and even more for the preservation of theosis as a way of salvation in which the material and the physical aspect of humanity and the world, which is often forgotten in Western views on salvation, matter in a positive manner. This very broad recapitulation of the doctrinal history of theosis, however, does not do justice to the whole spectrum of implications deification has on a personal and social level. Salvation is a central tenet of Christianity and each of its teachings and dogmas in some way contributes towards its construction. So, behind theosis there are also teachings about the original sin, sin in general, humans, God, the nature of the Trinity, free will and many other categories, which are, like theosis itself, very dissimilar to those in Western Christianity. In the West, the initial interpretation of these important elements and the general theological framework was not provided by the Greek Church Fathers, but by the Latin Church Fathers, most prominently by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who was the real founder of Western theology.33 Insisting on this distinction between Latin and Greek Church fathers, between Augustine and the Greeks, might seem as some kind of purism, but it is actually very important because it is with Augustine and his theology, rather than with the infamous filioque clause, the official reason for schism in 1054, that the differences between Western and Eastern theology become insurmountable. And in order to appreciate the distinctiveness of theosis it is necessary to look to the other way in which Christian utopianism is articulated. Within such context at least a cursory glance at Augustine’s theology is unavoidable given the authority his views have enjoyed for the past 16 centuries. So, let me look at some important points in his theology, before I turn to theosis in more detail. One of the most significant aspects of Augustine’s theology is that it is the point from which the universal utopian condition, the eschaton, closes off in Western theology.34 Salvation becomes a radically individualised affair, focused on saving only the soul, the abstract, immaterial part of humans, which Augustine regarded as eternal and closest to God because the divine was incompatible with anything physical.35 In addition to becoming immaterialised and individualised, salvation also becomes something that is completely taken out of human hands. According 33 Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Religion (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press), 292. Justo González, A History of Christian Thought, vol. 2, From Augustine to the Eve of the Reformation (Nashville: Abigdon, 1987), 15. 34 Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology. Translated by David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 80. Colin Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 43. no. 1 (1990): 53–4. 35 ‘We reject everything that is material. Even in the world of spirit, nothing that is changeable must be taken for God’. Augustine of Hippo, Later Works by St. Augustine. Translated by John Barnaby (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1955), 40. Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity’, 47.

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to Augustine, the original sin did not result only in separation between God and humans, but also in a loss of God’s grace in Adam’s heirs, who were after the fall capable only of sinning. Virtue and doing good was possible only through the free gift of grace of God,36 whom he imagined in intellectual terms as some kind of a ‘supermind’,37 and whom he, despite writing a whole treatise on the Trinity, nevertheless, understood as oneness.38 Although it is not widely known, Augustine was not unfamiliar with the idea of theosis, but his idea of deification is far from what it was for the Greek fathers. His proclivity towards dualistic and disjunctive thinking, which ‘require[s] a choice between this world and the next, rather than seeking a realisation of the next in the materiality of the present’,39 associated deification with the eschaton, which he re-directed beyond human reach into the otherworldly time beyond and outside history.40 However, even within the completely new conditions that the eschaton will bring, humans will not be able to become Gods. ‘The creature will never become equal with God even if perfect holiness were to be achieved in us. Some think that in the next life we shall be changed into what he is; I am not convinced’.41 Neither will they be able to commune with the divine directly and without mediation42 because Augustine cannot conceive the relationship between humans and God in any other way than as complete otherness. Augustine’s one, all-determining, omnipotent, completely transcended and immaterial God could not be in any sense reconciled with material, feeble and diverse humanity. Along with other theophanies from the Bible,43 the light and the voice that the disciples witnessed on Mount Tabor,44 which among the Greek fathers were always evidence that direct communion and equality with God is possible, for Augustine become only signs and symbols of God’s presence, ‘a created matter being used as an instrument of communication’.45 With the loss 36 T. Kermit Scott, Augustine: His Thought in Context (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1995) 181. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology, 273. 37 ‘We may say then neither that we shall have the image of God in that trinity which does not exist in present, nor that we have it now in the trinity which then will exist no longer. We must find in the rational or intellectual soul of man an image of its Creator planted immortally in its immortal nature’. Augustine of Hippo, Later Works by St. Augustine. Translated by John Barnaby (Westminster John Knox Press, 1955), 102. Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity’, 47. 38 Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity’, 41–5. Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 326–7. 39 Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity’, 54. 40 Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 80. 41 Quoted in Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 332. 42 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 332. 43 Gen. 18–21. Exo. 3.1–15. Exo. 13.17–14.29. 44 Matt. 17.1–13. 2 Pet. 1.16–18. Mark 9.2–9. Luke 9. 28–37. 45 Michel Rene Barnes, ‘The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400’, Modern Theology, 19, no. 3 (2003): 346.

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of these unmediated dialogical points, God and humanity in Augustine part ways and, instead of a joint effort and journey towards individual and universal salvation along Irenaeus’ view that ‘life is found in fellowship with God’,46 become antithetical, disbalanced and self-referential entities, completely estranged from each other. Humans become nothing more than a ‘single mass of sin that owes a debt of punishment to the divine and loftiest justice’,47 while God, apart from his judging role, assumes the mantle of remoteness towards this world, something that would later echo in the deus absconditus of Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Luther.48 It is frequently claimed that the legalistic framework and language of Western soteriology and its focus on individual salvation are an inherited mindset from the highly developed legal system and language of ancient (Latin) Rome, while the Eastern holistic view is something that is typical of Greeks and their longstanding fascination ‘with the quest of the soul to gain union with God’.49 That, however, is a very poor explanation which overlooks the fact that Byzantium was the successor of the ancient Roman Empire, including its laws and legal system, that its citizens considered themselves Romans, that the official government language was until the seventh century Latin and that in the sixth century the inherited Roman laws were collected as the Corpus Juris Civilis to which new laws, the Novellae Constitutiones, reflecting the new conditions, were added. Byzantium was one of the longest lasting empires that ever existed – another fact that is easily overlooked by Western intellectuals who tend to look at the East Roman Empire through lenses coloured by Western medieval experience – and it is hardly imaginable that it would have survived for such a long period without a proper legal system. The legalistic language of Western soteriology, rather than being some kind of unavoidable uniquely Western genetic heritage, is a direct result of Augustine’s theology. All of the aforementioned elements, the disassociation of the eschaton from this world, Augustine’s extremely negative view of humanity, the focus only on the fall-redemption part of the Christian narrative, the objectification of all powers in the divine, the complete otherness between humans and God, which combine in what might be called an anthropology of depravity, is what leads to the Western juridical, forensic understanding of salvation focused on judgment of individual souls.

46 Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Accessed 5 January 2013. http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/0103420.htm. 47 Augustine of Hippo, Selected Writings on Grace and Pelagianism. Translated by Ronald Teske (New York: New City Press, 2011), 59. 48 Thomas Hibbs, Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 121–5. Orrin F. Summerell, The Otherness of God (Charlottsville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 79–82. 49 Fairbairn, Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes, 6; Payton, Light from the Christian East, 134.

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After Augustine, deification disappears from Western theological discourse and it is only in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century that its theologians begin to re-engage with it in a more substantial manner. The first assessments were negative,50 but in recent decades the reception has been more positive and various attempts have been made to incorporate theosis into Western theology.51 The path, however, is wrought with many obstacles. Theosis simply sits awkwardly with much of Western terminology on salvation. Its emphasis is on wholeness, on the collective, on personal, mystical and universal participation in the divine, on meaning found through text, image and liturgy, on life and salvation as processes and spirituality guided by anticipation of the future.52 The Western emphasis is on ‘justification’, ‘payment of debts’ and ‘court of justice’, on the individual and the particular, on legalism, on life and salvation as conditions, on finding meaning mainly through reflection on text and spirituality which is backward orientated and focused on the past.53 How can these two visions be reconciled is still widely debated and no consensus has been reached as yet.54 Augustine’s views, which so dramatically shaped Western Christianity, on the other hand, never gained any popularity in the East. During Byzantine times, he was famous for his sainthood, not for his works, which mainly remained untranslated until the twentieth century. The only time Byzantine theologians encountered Augustinianism in any shape or form, was through the Palamas/Barlaam debate and the rationalism espoused by Barlaam. The debate lasted for a decade, but the notion that knowledge of God is possible only indirectly, through rational inferences, which also derives from Augustine’s tendency to frame everything in 50 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 3–5. 51 Anna Nigaire Williams, The Ground of Union: The Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Myk Habets, ‘Reforming Theōsis’, in Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, ed. Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2006), 146–67; Robert Puchniak, ‘Augustine’s Conception of Deification, Revisited’, in Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, ed. Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2006), 122–33; Nathan R. Kerr, ‘St. Anselm: Theoria and the Doctrinal Logic of Perfection’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 175–88; Jonathan Linman, ‘Martin Luther: “Little Christs for the World”; Faith and Sacraments as Means of Theosis’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature, Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 189–99. 52 Fairbairn, Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes, 5–8. 53 Fairbairn, Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes, 5–8. 54 Gösta Hallonsten, ‘Theosis in Recent Research: A Renewal of Interest and a Need for Clarity’, in Partakers of the Divine Nature, Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 281–93.

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terms of reason and intellect, was firmly rejected. In modern times Augustine’s works became widely available, but his views were once again met with staunch opposition, with some theologians even claiming that he is responsible for all the ‘heresies’ of the West.55 One of those ‘heresies’ includes the doctrine on the original sin which early Greek fathers and Orthodox theologians who followed in their footsteps interpret in a completely different light. Irenaeus, for example, saw it as a result of man’s immaturity. ‘Man was a little one, and his discretion still undeveloped, wherefore he was easily misled by the deceiver’.56 He did not deny that Adam’s childish act resulted in grave consequences for all subsequent humanity, but his inheritance was limited to mortality and sin was related to personal acts.57 Humans continued to be the image of God, while the fall provided a new setting in which they could grow to adulthood, follow freely their destiny to achieve communion with the divine mystery58 and prepare for the eschaton by ‘gaining a deeper understanding of good through experience of the contrary’.59 Orthodox theologians inherited these views and for them, like for Irenaeus, the event of the original sin, which they prefer to call ‘ancestral’ in order to point out the difference to Augustine’s interpretation,60 provides an explanation for the dystopian reality. However, the Orthodox views on salvation are shaped and directed by the view that human nature, after Christ, was indeed redeemed, that they are still the image and likeness of God and that they are, therefore, destined to be united with God, as was the case before the fall. In other words, their salvation is not about escaping from damnation through ‘payment of debt’ and ‘justification of one’s righteousness’, which have nothing to do with the parameters of the future utopian condition itself, but about growing into and realising the utopian future. Righteousness and admittance to the kingdom of God is not decided according to the standards of the past, but according to the vision of final unity and communion, while the main question regarding salvation is not about escaping hell, but striving towards the perfection that is the image of God. Another matter that, according to Orthodox theologians Augustine incorrectly interpreted, is the role humans play in salvation. As mentioned, in his view, Adam’s sin changed the very nature of humans, who were after the fall not just 55 George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Augustine and the Orthodox: “The West” in the East’ in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 11–40. 56 Quoted in Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 108. 57 David Weaver, ‘The Exegesis of Romans 5:12 Among the Greek Fathers and Its Implications for the Doctrine of Original Sin: The 5th–12th Centuries’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 29, nos. 2 and 3 (1985): 133–59. 58 Tatha Wiley, Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings (New York: Paulist Press, 2002), 40–41. 59 Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 108. 60 John W. Morris, The Historic Church: An Orthodox View of Christian History (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2001), 135–6.

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heirs to their ancestor’s sin and guilt, but were also innately inclined towards sinning. In forming this conclusion, Augustine, who could not read Greek, the original language of the Christian Bible, relied on a very poor Latin translation which wrongly rendered a single conjunction in Paul’s Epistle to Romans 5:12 as ‘in’ instead of ‘because’,61 leading him to think that humans all sinned in/through/ via Adam. Relying on this mistranslation and his own experience of conversion in which, according to The Confessions, all was God’s work,62 he advocated a very rigid monergism which argued that after the fall humans had the free will only to sin, while remaining free of sin or doing good was possible only by the grace of God. For him the notion of free will did not mean the capacity to choose between virtue and sin, but doing what one wanted to do.63 As Roger Olson remarks, such a view is quite different from ‘the ability to do otherwise’,64 which was the primary way free will was understood by the Greek Church fathers. For them, as it is for Orthodox theologians, free will is a gift from God which allows humans to decide whether they wish or not to cooperate with grace in the pursuit of goodness.65 Cyril, for example, stated that each human ‘had the power to do what it wishes. For you do not sin by your birth’.66 Salvation or achieving perfection akin to God’s goodness and righteousness is a matter of synergy between grace and humans’ free will. It is an interactive process between them and in this ‘Human free will is an essential condition, for without it even God himself does nothing’.67 Furthermore, it is precisely the possession of the free will faculty that was referred to in the Genesis verse about humans being created in the image of God.68 The work of grace or God’s call to humans to become like God is a constant in history, but the

61 Stephen W. Need, Paul Today: Challenging Readings of Acts and the Epistles (Lanham: Cowley Publications, 2007), 118–19. Arland J. Hultgren, Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 221–3. 62 Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions. Translated by E.J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 2006), 159–60. 63 Scott, Augustine: His Thought, 181. 64 Olson, The Story of Christian Theology, 273. 65 ‘God made man a free [agent] from the beginning, possessing his own power, even as he does his own soul, to obey the behests of God voluntarily, and not by compulsion of God. For there is no coercion with God, but a good will [towards us] is present with Him continually’. Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.newadvent. org/fathers/0103437.htm. 66 Cyril of Alexandria, Cathesis, iv, 18, quoted in Ware, How are we Saved?, 32. 67 Macarius of Egypt (ca. 300–391), Fifty Spiritual Homilies, xxxvii, 10, quoted in Ware, How are we Saved?, 36. 68 ‘… man, being endowed with reason, and in this respect like to God, having been made free in his will, and with power over himself, is himself the cause to himself, that sometimes he becomes wheat, and sometimes chaff’. Irenaeus, Against Heresies. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103404.htm.

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decision whether to respond to it or not is in individual hands.69 This, however, does mean that God plays a secondary role in salvation, but the connection between him and salvation on one side and humanity on the other is seen as reciprocal, even if asymmetrical, and is understood as communion,70 rather than as an escape from God’s wrath as it is the case with Augustinian theology. Orthodox theologians also point out that in addition to the misinterpretation of the original sin, Augustine’s lack of knowledge of the Greek language led to another incorrect rendition of a fundamentally important doctrine, the doctrine of the Trinity.71 The Trinitarian formula is ‘three persons, one substance’ (treis hypostases, homoousios), but because he did not fully understand the semantic spectrum of ousia and hypostasis,72 he identified the ontological principle of God with ‘substance’ (ousia), rather than with person (hypostasis). Hypostasis, however, does not simply connote a distinction between the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit as such, but between ‘concrete particulars in relation to one another’.73 Thus, the one substance referred to in the formula does not mean that the ontological principle of one God is one substance, but a ‘person in relation’; more precisely, the person of ‘the Father who is the “cause” both of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit’.74 In this way the ontological principle of one God is not one, but ‘one in relation with others’ or ‘being in relation’.75 For Augustine, however, hypostasis and ousia are nothing more than a linguistic convenience. In explaining the reasons for the formula he writes: ‘this formula was decided upon, in order that we might be able to give some kind of answer when we were asked, what are the three’.76 As a consequence, his God is a true individuum, an indivisible, auto-referential entity. For the Orthodox, on the other hand, this relational ontological nature of God has far-reaching consequences. If one is to be an image and likeness of this relational God, then the salvific axis is not just vertical, aiming for a communion with God alone, but horizontal as well, aiming for communion with the whole world. Salvation is thus by necessity ‘social and communal, not isolated and individualistic’.77 The best articulation of this ‘individual through communal’ aspect comes from Dorotheus of Gaza (505–565): ‘Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw 69 John Norman Davidson Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New York: Continuum, 2006), 348–52. 70 Paul M. Collins, Partaking in Divine Nature: Deification and Communion (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 49–51. 71 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 41n. 72 ‘I do not know what distinction they wish to make’ quoted in Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity’, 43. 73 Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity’, 42. 74 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41. 75 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 88. 76 Quoted in Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity’, 43. 77 Ware, How are we Saved?, 68.

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an outline of a circle. The centre point is the same distance from any point on the circumference … Let us consider that this circle is the world and that God himself is the centre; the straight lines drawn from the circumference to the centre are the lives of men … The closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another the closer they become to God’.78 According to Donald Fairbairn, these differing interpretations between Western and Eastern theologies are ‘differences in emphasis, not absolute differences’,79 but I disagree with him. Religion might be today a separate social sphere, but it was for a millennium and a half the only framework within which intellectual and everyday life developed and as such Western theology, as many political, social and cultural analysts demonstrated,80 was instrumental in the formation of many aspects of modern Western culture. One of those aspects is its overemphasised individualism, which constructs the self in absolute, non-relational categories, such as ‘autonomous’, ‘independent’ and ‘sovereign’ and which is not hard to recognise as a secularised version of Augustine’s equally indivisible, autonomous, independent, sovereign, non-relational, self-referential God. When it comes to the possible theological origins of the extremely individualistically orientated social, economic and political framework in which we live today, it was certainly not bequeathed to the world by simple ‘difference in emphasis’. However, according to cross-cultural research, all the countries with Orthodox heritage are still staunchly collectivistic, while all European countries with Catholic or Protestant legacy are firmly in the embrace of individualism81 which indicates that the reasons behind this individualism/ collectivism division between nations with nominally the same Christian background go much deeper than simple ‘difference in emphasis’ would suggest. Following Max Weber’s famous thesis, individualism with a Christian theological cloak is most often associated with Protestantism and its proclamations 78 Dorotheus of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings. Translated by Eric P. Wheeler (Kalamazoo: Cistercan Publications, 1977), 138. 79 Fairbairn, Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes, 7. 80 Max Weber and Richard Henry Tawney connected it with the development of capitalism; Carl Schmitt with modern concepts of state; Karl Löwith with modern understanding of history; Jacob Taubes with modern philosophy, history and politics; Rodney Stark with science, technology, politics and capitalist economy. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001); R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005). 81 Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, Michael Minkov, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 95–6.

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of sola scriptura (only scripture) regarding theological truths or sola fide (only faith) and sola gratia (only grace) regarding salvation. On the other hand, the French anthropologist, Louis Dumont, associates it with the development of scholasticism and in particular with the nominalism of William of Ockham who argued that universals are constructions of the mind and that the reality consists only of particulars (humans and things).82 I, however, believe that the first impetus towards the Western brand of individualism was provided by the theology of Augustine, who provided the initial interpretative framework of Western Christianity and was, therefore, the common source for both the scholastic epistemological and Protestant ethical individualism. This, however, is not to say that Augustine is the only person responsible for modern Western individualism, but he certainly was the first to roll the ball in that direction. Orthodoxy’s accent on wholeness and the collective, on the other hand, does not mean that its theology is divorced from any kind of individualism. After all, its God is one as much as it is three. But, its individualism is of a different kind and follows the paradoxical dialectics of Orthodox theology in general in which nothing is ever on its own, absolutely separated or isolated, and in which the boundaries between the body and the soul, the material and the immaterial, the creator and the created, the human and the divine, the utopian past of the garden of Eden, the dystopian present after the fall, and the utopian future of the kingdom of God are never stable. Attempting to explain the character of Orthodox teachings, John Chryssavgis says that ‘any definition of the proper Christian attitude towards the world must involve some form of synthesis, a dialectical approach that reflects the nature of reality as a world of opposites’,83 adding, however, that this teaching is ‘always experienced paradoxically, and never simply philosophically’.84 Father Lev Gillet, a convert from Catholicism, confirmed that paradoxical experience when he opened his homily in 1938 with the words: ‘O strange Orthodox Church, so poor and weak … at the same time so traditional yet so free, so archaic and yet so alive, so ritualistic and yet so personally mystical, a Church where the great price of the Gospel is preciously preserved, sometimes beneath a layer of dust … a Church which has often proved so incapable of acting, yet which knows, as does no other, how to sing the joy of Easter’.85 Perhaps the expression that best captures the paradoxical nature of Orthodoxy would be ‘dialectics of ontology and existence’, since the world and humans, in analogy with God, are primarily seen in relational categories, as synthesising 82 Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 62–6. 83 John Chryssavgis, Beyond the Shattered Image (Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing, 1999), 41. John Chryssavgis, Light through Darkness: Insights into Orthodox Spirituality (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2004), 16–17. 84 Chryssavgis, Light through Darkness, 16. 85 Quoted in Kallistos Ware, foreword to The Jesus Prayer by Lev Gillet (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 13.

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developments of contradictory processes that lead to and become part of a higher form of knowledge, but which also necessarily involve the development of an existential dimension. To some extent this dimension is similar to Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein as being-in-the-world,86 but it is also fundamentally different, especially when it comes to its social aspect. While for Heidegger the authenticity of Dasein is under threat of falling into inauthenticity in its engagement with other people,87 which is something that ultimately reduces Dasein to a desperately lonely and isolated subjectivity, as was, one might say, God in Augustine’s theology, in Orthodox theology, true existence is understood in terms of analogy with its views on God as a relational being and theosis, both of which are understood as communion, as sharing, exchange and fellowship between people, nature and God.88 A human, however, becomes a unique human being or an individual as it is often understood in the West, only through growing dialogic engagement with the alterity of other people which on one side affirms everyone’s uniqueness and yet on the other also affirms their shared sameness. Thus, instead of ending as lonely individuals essentially threatened by society, in Orthodoxy people are ‘a unique image of the whole’;89 in other words, their personhood, their individuality, is shaped only through awareness of the unique ways in which people express their shared humanity. Theosis, as a way of salvation, however, requires more from an individual than just leading a righteous life and making a conscious choice between right or wrong. It requires ekstasis, a deliberate egressing and overcoming the spatio-temporal and every other boundary of the self. This self-transcending does not mean losing a personal self, but a desire for and communion with the other (of nature, of other human beings and finally of God), which is in Orthodox theology the only way to a unique personal self90 and a restoration of one’s self to full integrity and wholeness.91 What is lost in ekstasis and communion is the egotistical centredness of the individual self, the obsession with one’s own ‘egocentric, acquisitive and exploitative priorities’.92 It is this willingness to be free from individualism in every sense that defines humans as beings of freedom in Orthodox theology; and this is a very different perspective from the Western, in which the freedom humans 86 Martin Heidegger, Time and Being. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 33. 87 Heidegger, Time and Being, 167. 88 J. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 15. 89 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 105–7. 90 John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 53, 212–13. 91 Russell, Fellow Workers with God, 21. 92 Christos Yannaras, ‘The Environmental Issue: An Existential not a Canonical Problem’, Religion Science and Environment, Aegean Symposium, 1995. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.rsesymposia.org/themedia/File/1151633155-Existential_VS_Regulative. pdf.

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enjoy is only ethically determined as the choice between right and wrong. In this context sin or in other words the conditions, actions and behaviours that prevent the realisation of utopia are differently construed from the one in the West which conceptualises sin in a legalistic manner as violation of the contract God made with humanity. Orthodox Christianity conceives sin, like it defines God and humans as well, in much more fluid fashion.93 There is no particular list of behaviours that constitute a sin and depending on circumstances everything (and nothing) can be a sin, which is in accordance with the Greek word for it, hamartia, understood as ‘missing the mark’, or in theological terms as dimming the image of God in oneself. There are of course more and less serious failures to live up to the goal of being like God, but like everything else in Orthodox Christianity, sin is a relational category and is always understood in terms of the adverse effects it has on relations either in terms of divine/human relations or social relations. Furthermore, it could be claimed that it is the latter that ultimately defines the Orthodox understanding of sin, since man is never seen as an autonomous being. ‘Man is never alone in the world. He stands, above all, before God, but also before people. Therefore in the Bible man’s transgression before God is always related to one’s neighbour, and this means that it has social, public dimensions and consequences’.94 The same idea of interconnectedness, but on a much wider scale, is echoed by Chryssavgis: ‘The truth is that all things are so intimately interrelated, cohering in each other beyond our imagination. Nothing living is self-contained. There is no autonomy – only a distinction between a sense of responsibility and a lack thereof’.95 It is obvious that from this perspective in which, to quote Markel, the brother of the elder Zosima from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, ‘everyone is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything’,96 that Western individualism and Orthodox utopianism are not very compatible, given that individualism is most often described as a viewpoint which considers people as autonomous and independent from their in-groups and wider collectives, which gives priority to personal goals, and which encourages individual behaviour on the basis of one’s own attitudes rather than the norms of their in-groups or wider collectives.97 If Orthodoxy is compatible with any view regarding relationships between individuals and community than it is with Marx’s statement from German Ideology that ‘Only in community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is 93 Benz, The Eastern Orthodox Church, 51. 94 Atanasije Jevtic, ‘Repentance, Confession, and Fasting (Part I)’, 19 May 2009, Orthodoxy and the World, Russian Orthodox Church Website. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.pravmir.com/article_616.html. 95 Chryssavgis, Light through Darkness, 29. 96 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by C. Garnett (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976), 268. 97 Harry C. Triandis, ‘Individualism-Collectivism and Personality’, Journal of Personality, 69, no. 6 (2001), 909.

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personal freedom possible’98 and the VI Thesis on Feuerbach where, in a manner reminiscent of the Orthodox definition of God and humans in relational terms, he also speaks of man as ‘an ensemble of social relations’.99 Within this context of Orthodoxy’s compatibility with Marxism there is a historical coincidence that easily comes to mind. Ernst Bloch famously claimed that ‘Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist’,100 which if we look back to the beginning of the twentieth century adds a new ingredient to the bag of reasons as to why the 1917 revolution in Orthodox Russia succeeded against all odds, even against Lenin’s own judgment,101 while its Western counterparts faded away. Was the revolution in Russia successful because people were hungry, cold and exhausted (like the people in Germany, Hungary, Austrian, Finland, Italy or for that matter whole Europe were as well)? Or was it also because Orthodoxy regards the verse from Matthew 11 where it says that ‘kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force’102 as a metaphor for the central idea of deification: that the realisation of the future utopia and participation in it does not exclusively depend on God’s will, but mostly on the resolution and unwavering commitment of people to be with God by actively removing the main obstacles leading to him, their own individualistic and selfish urges and desires. References Andreopoulos, Andreas. Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005. Augustine of Hippo, Later Works by St. Augustine. Translated by John Barnaby. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1955. ———, The Confessions. Translated by E.J. Sheed. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 2006. ———. Selected Writings on Grace and Pelagianism. Translated by Ronald Teske. New York: New City Press, 2011.

98 Karl Marx, German Ideology. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm. 99 Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. 100 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Translated by J.T. Swann (London: Verso, 2009). 101 ‘It is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed’. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) March 6–8, 1918. Accessed 5 January 2014. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/7thcong/01. htm. 102 Matt. 11.12. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force.

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Barnes, Michel Rene. ‘The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5:8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400’. Modern Theology, 19, no. 3 (2003): 329–55. Benz, Ernst. The Eastern Orthodox Church: Its Thought and Life. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 2009. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity: The religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Translated by J.T. Swann. London: Verso, 2009. Carlston, Charles Edwin. ‘Transfiguration and Resurrection’. Journal of Biblical Literature, 80, no. 3 (1961): 233–40. Chryssavgis, John. Beyond the Shattered Image. Minneapolis: Light & Life Publishing, 1999. ———. Light through Darkness: Insights into Orthodox Spirituality. London: Darton Longman and Todd, 2004. ———. In the World, Yet Not of the World: Social and Global Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. ———. ‘Icons, Liturgy, Saints: Ecological insights from Orthodox Spirituality’, International Review of Mission, 99, no. 2 (2010): 181–9. Collins, Paul M. Partaking in Divine Nature: Deification and Communion. London: T&T Clark International, 2010. Cooper, Adam G. The Body in St Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Demacopoulos, George E. and Papanikolaou, Aristotle. ‘Augustine and the Orthodox: “The West” in the East’. In Orthodox Readings of Augustine, edited by George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, 11–40. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008. Dorotheus of Gaza. Discourses and Sayings. Translated by Eric P. Wheeler. Kalamazoo: Cistercan Publications, 1977. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by C. Garnett. New York: Norton and Company, 1976. Dumont, Louis. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Fairbairn, Donald. Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. González, Justo. A History of Christian Thought: From Augustine to the Eve of the Reformation, vol. 2, Nashville: Abigdon, 1987. Gunton, Colin. ‘Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’. Scottish Journal of Theology, 43, no. 1 (1990): 33–58. Habets, Myk. ‘Reforming Theōsis’. In Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, edited by Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, 146–67. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2006. Hallonsten, Gösta. ‘Theosis in Recent Research: A Renewal of Interest and a Need for Clarity’. In Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development

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of Deification in the Christian Traditions, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung, 281–93. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Time and Being. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. San Francisco: Harper, 1962. Hibbs, Thomas. Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Hofstede, Geert, Hofstede, Gert Jan and Minkov, Michael. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Hultgren, Arland J. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A Commentary. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2011. Irenaeus. Against Heresies. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. Accessed 5/1/2014, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103420.htm. Jevtic, Atanasije. ‘Repentance, Confession, and Fasting (Part I)’ 19 May 2009. Orthodoxy and the World. Russian Orthodox Church Website. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.pravmir.com/article_616.html. Kelly, John Norman Davidson. Early Christian Doctrines. New York: Continuum, 2006. Kerr, Nathan R. ‘St. Anselm: Theoria and the Doctrinal Logic of Perfection’. In Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung, 175–88. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Lenin, Vladimir, Ilyich. Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) March 6–8, 1918. Accessed 5 January 2014. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1918/7thcong/01.htm. Linman, Jonathan. ‘Martin Luther: “Little Christs for the World”; Faith and Sacraments as Means of Theosis’. In Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung, 189–99. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Majerník, Ján, Ponessa, Joseph and Manhardt, Laurie Watson. The Synoptics: On the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke. Steubenville: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2005. Marx, Karl. German Ideology. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm. ———. Theses on Feuerbach. Accessed 5 January 2014. http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. Meyerndorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. Morris, John W. The Historic Church: An Orthodox View of Christian History (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2001).

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Need, Stephen W. Paul Today: Challenging Readings of Acts and the Epistles. Lanham: Cowley Publications, 2007. Olson, Roger E. The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Religion. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1999. Payton, James R. Jr. Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2007. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Puchniak, Robert. ‘Augustine’s Conception of Deification, Revisited’. In Theōsis: Deification in Christian Theology, edited by Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, 122–33. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2006. Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Scott, T. Kermit. Augustine: His Thought in Context. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1995. Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005. Summerell, Orrin F. The Otherness of God. Charlottsville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Taubes, Jacob. Occidental Eschatology. Translated by David Ratmoko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Tawney, Richard, Henry. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008. Triandis, Harry C. ‘Individualism-Collectivism and Personality’. Journal of Personality, 69, no. 6 (2001): 907–24. Van Loon, Hans. The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Vishnevskaya, Elena. ‘Divinisation as Perichoretic Embrace in Maximus the Confessor’. In Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Tradition, edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffrey A. Wittung, 132–45. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. Ware, Kallistos. Foreword to The Jesus Prayer, by Lev Gillet, 5–20. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. ———. How are we Saved? The Understanding of Salvation in the Orthodox Tradition. Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing, 1996. Weaver, David. ‘The Exegesis of Romans 5:12 Among the Greek Fathers and Its Implications for the Doctrine of Original Sin: The 5th–12th Centuries’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 29, nos. 2 and 3 (1985): 133–59. Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge, 2001. Wiley, Tatha. Original Sin: Origins, Developments, Contemporary Meanings. New York: Paulist Press, 2002.

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Williams, Anna Nigaire. The Ground of Union: The Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of the Church Fathers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956. Yannaras, Christos. ‘The Environmental Issue: An Existential not a Canonical Problem’, Religion Science and Environment, Aegean Symposium, 1995. Accessed 5 January 2013. http://www.rsesymposia.org/themedia/File/115163 3155-Existential_VS_Regulative.pdf. ———. On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite. London, T&T Clark International, 2005. Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985. ———. Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church. London: T&T Clark, 2006.

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PART III Marginalized and Alternative Interpretations of the Individual and Utopia

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Chapter 13

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Eutopias and Dis-Topias: Re-Imagining the Citizen of Ideal Societies Clint Jones and Jen Rinaldi

Introduction In a pioneering work published in 1987 Raymond Lifchez challenged architects to re-think architecture. His inspiration for doing so is similar to the motivation we have for writing this chapter addressing the issue of disability and utopian architecture. Lifchez’s concerns were more pragmatically oriented toward the experience of disenfranchisement built into the architecture of society and our focus aims to build upon that concern by teasing out the problematic nature of utopian socio-architectural design for disabled bodies, especially in spaces shared by all, that is, a context of utopian inclusion. Lifchez argues, Building forms reflect how a society feels about itself and the world it inhabits. A community’s ideas, hopes, and fears can be read in the structures that line its streets. Valuable resources are given over to what is cherished—education, religion, commerce, family life, recreation—and tolerable symbols mask what is intolerable—illness, deviance, poverty, disability, old age. Although architects do not create these social categories, they play a key role in providing the physical framework in which the socially acceptable is celebrated and the unacceptable is confined and contained. Thus when any group that has been physically segregated or excluded protests its second-class status, its members are in effect challenging how architects practice their profession.1

Our research parallels Lifchez’s concerns because architects are often guilty of not designing to meet the needs of inhabitants but for satisfying managers and owners, and for privileging concerns that prioritize commerce, function, and aesthetics rather than comfortable, accessible, and affordable accommodation. In many versions of utopian futures it is often the case that the individuals who will inhabit utopia are of, shall we say, a certain ability that is taken for granted in the design of a utopian city or space. There are relatively few accounts of how 1 Raymond Lifchez, Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 1. Emphasis added.

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exactly a utopia might accommodate differently abled people into its conceptual framework. Yet, beyond the artifice of the assumption that everyone in a utopia would be, somehow, perfectly capable of functioning in the created space of the utopia are critical and wholly underdeveloped cross-sections of social utopian planning. Namely, other than the absurd notion that each utopian inhabitant would be “normal” and that each individual would be able to meet and overcome the challenges presented by the built environment, utopian architecture fails to acknowledge the reality of other-abled bodies which will come into contact with the constructed environment. The aim of this chapter is to question the architectural utopian assumptions that have led to the building of utopias that are, by their very design, exclusionary. Of course, utopias can be, and some are, exclusionary at a social level, but the idea of utopian architecture is to foster a sense of community within the utopia proper. Charles Fourier, for instance, was committed to such an idea when he conceptualized his phalanxes as ideal communal models. The driving idea behind these ideally constructed environments was to foster social harmony and personal fulfillment. However, while Fourier made allowances for senior and sick residents he made no mention of the possibility of disabled persons except to lump them into the categories of infirmity along with the ill and elderly. Fourier’s insistence on the mutual sharing of the workload of the phalanx is immediately exclusive of the otherwise healthy, but disabled resident. In Fourier’s vision of these model communities, individuals would voluntarily form ‘groups’ and then ‘series’ of groups oriented around one task, such as carpentry, education, household work, or gardening. Working in teams and alternating jobs about every two hours, community members would be stimulated to greater productivity and at the same time develop the various aptitudes of their personal makeup. Cooperation would be ensured by guaranteeing everyone a minimum wage and maintenance in sickness and old age.2

Fourier is not alone in his quest to conceive of the ideally constructed social environment. He is also not alone in his complete lack of concern for individuals that are not able bodied in the same way as the typically conceived utopian resident. This is made clear, in Fourier’s case, by his rapidly shifting workload which encompasses all of the necessary functions of maintaining the phalanx. Working in groups would require a further level of accommodation within this structure that goes wholly unanalyzed. This, of course, means that individuals expected to use the spaces generated by the architects of utopia must meet some idealized notion of bodily functionality which may not be within the scope of the abilities 2 Carl Guarneri, “Brook Farm and the Fourierist Phalanxes: Immediatism, Gradualism, and American Utopian Socialism,” America’s Communal Utopias, ed. Donald Pitzer (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997): 163.

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of certain persons. In a revealing exchange, with a gifted but unnamed architect, Lifchez is able to expose a deeply held conviction of architectural design that infects not only the actual built environment, but also the utopian conceptual one as well. Discussing the design of a library for blind persons Lifchez queried the designer about her experience working with clients who were blind. However, “no blind people had been consulted during the design process … after all, she asked, what possible use could blind people have been to her, an architect, in the design of a building they would never see?”3 Yet, utopian theorizing, short of arguing that there would be no disability in utopia, must find ways to accommodate differently abled persons in social futures if they are to live up the ideal of utopia. An easily accessible gateway into the problem of disability and utopian architecture may be found in the conclusion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” where he addresses the broken remnant of a once glorious statue of a Grecian god. Rilke, commenting on the broken state of the statue, does not despair at being unable to know the full work of art because the torso is enough to convey the greatness of the god. In fact, the torso is made more perfect by its deformity. Rilke’s concern is that, were the statue whole, we would lose sight of the elegance and flawlessness of the torso which would otherwise be lost as a mere piece of the whole. Rilke says we cannot know the body in its unbroken state, but the torso is enough because, Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt under the shoulders’ transparent plunge and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur and not burst forth from all its contours like a star: for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.4

“For there is no place that does not see you,” is the idea that best links the concepts of architecture, utopia, and disability. While we may “see” many places through many different sensuous mediums each place is able to “see” us as well. How well we are seen by a place depends on how well suited we are to interact with that place, that is, how our bodies function in a place. To be seen by a place is to be incorporated into the functions of a place; when we are unseen, or overlooked, by a place we are incapable of navigating, utilizing, or inhabiting that place. For most people with disabilities, many places not only fail to see them but are built to see past, see through, and see beyond them. Our own society often fails to address the concerns of other-abled persons in communities and until very recently architectural accommodations were only grudgingly provided, though some might argue the grumbling has not subsided. 3 Lifchez, 11. 4 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Art of the Sonnet, ed. Stephen Burt and David Mikics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 230.

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Approaching an intersection today one is likely to encounter curb cuts, tactile sidewalk cues for the blind and visually impaired, and crosswalk signs that vocalize warnings which are all design features of public spaces. In utopian design, however, street layouts and ADA compliance are a minimal standard which rarely faces up to the problem of the myriad ways in which architecture ignores or exacerbates deviations from the norm around which design is developed. Architecture, to achieve the utopian ideal, must be responsive to the needs of disability because “when the study of disability is reduced to rehabilitative and compensatory technologies—the planning of grab bars and wide doorways—it becomes a subject of little human interest, relegated to technicians … Yet physical disability is a social idea as much as it is an objective fact.”5 As such, disability must be afforded the same level of concern as other utopian ideals when considering the design of a city, building, or public space. With alarming regularity, we argue, this has not been the case. Going back to Sir Thomas More, for instance, the possibility of blemishes in bodily perfection exist in Utopia but his account of this is brief and given only in conjunction with highlighting the undesirability of the imperfect body. Prior to marriage the potential spouses present themselves to one another naked so as to determine whether there are any disqualifying imperfections. Such a measure is aesthetic, to be sure, but it is also, perhaps, a function of the collective familial lives of the Utopians since a disabling physical feature might prove limiting to the further or future provision of the household. More himself makes no such claims, but neither does he explain why such a practice should exist outside the long-term desirability of one’s mate. In fact, the problem of the disabled body in More’s utopian context is actually further complicated by the requirement that families regularly switch households and alternate between urban and agricultural settings. This means that a disabled person, living in More’s Utopia, would have to reaccommodate themselves regularly at their own expense and fail to contribute to the functioning of society, at least at certain times. Our position is that if it is true that the relationship between utopia and architecture is under-theorized, then the relationship of disability to both as a subset of the general theme of utopia is even more so. Design Flaws Because disability is undervalued as a means for articulating the relationship between the utopian spaces constructed in and around communities, and because the very idea of utopia seems to preclude a fair account of a perfect society that accommodates the natural limitations of individuals, it is important to raise the issue in spite of a lack of such concern in the mainstream academic record. It is possible to say that in a utopian future disability will have been rooted 5 Lifchez, 20. Emphasis in the original.

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out through selective genetic modification as it is in, say, Gattaca, or, perhaps, through more conventional eugenics programs. However, our position is that such fanciful approaches to the relationship between utopia and disability fail to acknowledge both that “utopian architecture” exists today and that for those with disabilities “rooting” them out is tantamount to the destruction of their particular individual existence. For these reasons we find that utopian architecture, that is, the constructed world, if it is to be truly utopian, must account for the many types of ability that are likely to exist in a utopian future. We reject the notion that eugenics is a viable path to achieving utopia—in fact, any utopia that eschews variety among its inhabitants has already lost its claim to utopianism. A history of indirect concern for human frailty, rendered variously as handicaps ranging from mild to severe, encompassing both bodily and mental abnormalities, pervades philosophical discourse, and, given the infrequency with which it is considered, one easily imagines that being free of, or overcoming, such disabling aspects of humanity is a prerequisite for admittance into utopia. Too often people think of achieving utopia as a moment when society will throw off its chains—be they social or commercial—and everyone will live happilyever-after. But society is bound not only by chains but also by crutches and we often, via our utopian dreaming, imagine throwing off the former entails the abandonment of the latter. Only in some superficial way is this true, for a large majority of people entering utopia would require special accommodations. Discussing the trials and tribulations of Carl Unthan, an armless violinist, Peter Sloterdijk muses that the “philosophical anthropology of the twentieth century ignored the contributions of special education—but nonetheless arrived at related observations from similar conceptual points of departure.”6 Paralleling Sloterdijk, we argue that utopian architectural theory ignores the needs of the differently abled only to draw conclusions about the viability of utopian architecture by envisioning utopian citizens who are able bodied—or, perhaps, able to fully experience utopia through their embodiment without acknowledging how that is possible, without articulating, carefully, the design features that will accommodate the needs of the differently abled. The incorporation of the body into the design of utopia has long been rendered necessary to the productivity of the utopian individual. The placement of housing, the layout of streets, the type, size, and location of factories, farms, and businesses have all been built with human use in mind—that is, how to get the most out of humans not how beneficial it was to humans. Thomas Markus argues, the human body was regarded, in the Renaissance and earlier, as possessing perfect and harmonious forms and proportions which could be discovered and then applied [to utopian design] … These neo-Platonic ideas caused artists to place the body in such perfect forms as the square and circle, and to seek 6 Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), p. 57.

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proportional relationships between the body and its parts. Many town and building plans reproduced those ideal forms and proportions.7

Le Corbusier’s Le Modulor is an example of the use of the ideal body for determining architectural design. Hence, it is no surprise that the “deformed” body be written off or accounted for by marginalizing it under a specious category of illness requiring hospitalization. As Markus further argues, a characteristic feature of utopian town and building plans is the high degree of zoning, classification and functional definition. Each person, group and activity has its specifically defined and fixed location. These locations represent the classification system of the society and its activities which the designer assumes in his or her universal scheme. The most evident expressions of the drive to perfect order can be seen in organisations or institutions where there is the largest gap between controllers and the controlled.8

Utopian architecture has long been focused on containment rather than accommodation. Considering the historical narrative of inequality that has plagued disabled members of societies it is imperative to know and understand for whom architecture, especially utopian architecture, is being designed and constructed. Bearing in mind that the design of utopias is centered around the usefulness of the human body, it is necessary to examine the context of design as exclusionary. If inequalities exist prior to design, and designers are not focused on limiting or eradicating those inequalities, then the architecture that is constructed will, in various ways, exacerbate the inequalities that already exist. Orhan Esen, detailing the problems of the utopian design in the “Open City” claims, “the cities of the core economies are no longer only the places where inequalities are sustained and accommodated; rather, the very production of these cities is what produces inequalities in the first place. Today, our regime of capital accumulation is based on the production of a built environment that is designed to produce sustainable inequality.”9 To better articulate the inherent problem of sustainable inequality in utopian architecture it will be instructive to understand the role of the institution and the utopian response of the disabled community struggling to deal with their collective disenfranchisement in the aftermath of social recognition that their concerns need to be taken seriously by designers.

7 Thomas Markus, Visions of Perfection: Architecture and Utopian Thought (Glasgow: Third Eye Center, 1985), p. 12. 8 Markus, 15. 9 Orhan Esen, “Producing Inequalities by Producing Built Environment: Just in Case: Istanbul,” Open City: Designing Coexistence (Amsterdam: Martien de Vletter, SUN, 2009), p. 175.

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The Impact of the Institution Our ideological lens for interpreting disability is modern in character, modernity representing a shift in attitudes toward and treatment of disabled bodies. With the development of scientific and technological expertise, disability became a medical priority,10 which, granted, was an improvement upon practices of infanticide, relegation to leprosy colonies, and accusations of demonic possession.11 Nevertheless, medicalization meant that the causes investigated and treatment regimens applied were grounded in the premise that the problematic of disability is located entirely in “individual pathology, and associated deficits, abnormalities and functional limitations.”12 Physiological variation from the more valued, more common versions of human functionality has since been largely framed as biological impediment in need of correction. Medicine offers the promise that we might fix, cure, or at least manage those conditions that deviate from standards of normalcy, from what we imagine to be the full range of human capacity. This process of medicalization has paternalistic overtones: if the role of medical institutions is to repair broken bodies, the beneficiaries of this benevolence are locked into a role of created dependence. At the heart of this relationship is the expectation that disabled people cannot function or enjoy a full life without the aid and good will of a professional. Modernity represents a perceptual shift inasmuch as the physically disabled person, once feared as a threat to social order and treated with due hostility, has come to be understood as inadequate and in need of management. Further, those who dole out charity to vulnerable populations tend to set the mandate regarding what those populations require or deserve. Paternalism has the effect of infantilizing those swept up in and subject to its provisions, such that the paternalistic state or institution acts in their best interest, without consultation or consent. A powerful example of the paternalistic treatment of disability are the institutions of management designed to process, contain, or cure the disabled—facilities that have historically been used to house people diagnosed with physical, intellectual, and psychiatric disabilities. A particularly prominent practice during the modern age, these institutions were sometimes staffed with medical practitioners, while 10 Michael Oliver, Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (London, UK: Macmillan, 1996); Michael Priestley, The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and The Disability Alliance Discuss Fundamental Principles of Disability (London, UK: Macmillan, 1976); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008). 11 Robin L. Anderson, Sources in the History of Medicine: The Impact of Disease and Trauma (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007); Brendan Gleeson, Geographies of Disability (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999); Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 12 Colin Barnes, Geof Mercer, and Tom Shakespeare, Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MPG Books Group, 1999), p. 1.

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others were originally residential schools that employed educators.13 The purpose was not always to provide medical attention, but rather to engage in practices of attendant care, compounded with strategies of surveillance and discipline.14 Often disabled persons were left in institutional settings because families from lower income brackets lacked the funding, and adequate social welfare provisions, to provide support.15 Within these various institutions, we might consider the more overt discriminatory treatment that took place—the physical, sexual, and mental abuse; the dehumanization and diminishment; the privacy violations and theft—but for the purposes of this research we have a more specific focus in mind. While disabled people were out of sight, out of mind, they were subjected to practices that reflect what were once utopian aims. Inmates were controlled through physical and chemical restraint, segregation from communities and one another, disciplinary measures and power imbalances, all for the purpose of reshaping and rendering docile their unruly embodiments. For, the idealized body is the docile one, the interchangeable one, the one that demands no special favors. Public spaces only lacked a disability presence at the expense of those persons who were pushed out of communities and into prison-like facilities, and who saw their bodies violently managed throughout the duration of their imprisonment. In the case of lost causes, those disabilities that have yet to be cured, the solution has historically been to control for the possibility of reproduction. Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland enacted mass sterilization programs, and the practice certainly had a home in both Canada and the US.16 The procedures typically took place in institutionalized settings, at times offered as a pre-condition for release. The most recent instantiation of the practice has been dubbed the Ashley Treatment, finding its namesake in Ashley X from Seattle, whose parents opted for her to undergo a hysterectomy (to prevent menstrual discomfort and the possibility of pregnancy), bilateral breast bud removal (because breasts are a sexual feature that may invite abuse), and continued estrogen therapy (to attenuate her growth). In defense of the procedures, her parents argued in 2007 that due to her cerebral palsy Ashley’s motor and intellectual capabilities will never exceed 13 Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (London, UK: Routledge, 2003); James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). 14 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009). 15 Brendan Gleeson, Geographies of Disability (London, UK: Routledge, 1999); Stephen Humphries and Pamela Gordon, Out of Sight: The Experience of Disability, 1900–1950 (Tavistock, UK: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 1992). 16 Barney Sneiderman, John C. Irvine, and Philip H. Osborne, Canadian Medical Law: An Introduction for Physicians, Nurses and Other Health Care Professionals, 3rd ed. (Scarborough, ON: Thomson, 2003).

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those of a three-month-old’s, and the Ashley Treatment forever renders her their “pillow angel.”17 Anne McDonald writes in response, in an op-ed for SeattlePi: “my ongoing concern is the readiness with which Ashley’s parents, doctors and most commentators assumed they could make an accurate estimation of the understanding of a child without speech who has severely restricted movement.”18 McDonald self-identifies as a fellow pillow angel, with the same medical diagnosis and physical limitations as Ashley X; she spent her childhood confined to a bed in an Australian institution, saw her growth attenuated through starvation, and was not taught communication strategies until adolescence because it was assumed she would be incapable of learning them. Her contention is that invasive surgery and involuntary sterilization may not be in Ashley X’s best interests, not when McDonald’s experiences illustrate the trouble with making sweeping assumptions about a disabled person’s best interests. Though best interests have long been invoked as the flagship rationale for the procedure, sterilization campaigns have underlying eugenic motivations—a term Eugene Galton coined when referring to the preservation and betterment of a gene pool. Eugenics as a socio-biological movement reflects a utopian mandate, albeit an unsettling one, for it imagines a world where defective bodies have been weeded out and the resulting social order is better off as a result. Lennard J. Davis critiques this utopian impulse: “if individual citizens are not fit, if they do not fit into the nation, then the national body will not be fit. Of course, such arguments are based on a false notion of the body politic.”19 That is, eugenic practices are rooted in a state interest to render its citizenry uniform. When understood to be solely a biological phenomenon, disability falls into the lower tiers of a biological hierarchy, and the devaluation justifies its elimination for the sake of a populace that needs not be bogged down by inferior stock. The paternalistic rhetoric used to frame especially invasive medical approaches to disabled bodies seems to belie troubling ideas around an exclusionary and regulatory social good. When wide spread reports of abuse and neglect within institutional settings were unearthed in the 1960s and 1970s, a trend toward de-institutionalization began. The process of de-carcerating people has proven difficult, however, as no networks of support exist in communities to which once-institutionalized 17 S. Matthew Liao, Julian Savulescu, and Mark Sheehan, “The Ashley Treatment: Best Interests, Convenience, and Parental Decision-Making,” Hastings Center Report, 37 (2007): 16–20. 18 Anne McDonald, “The other story from a ‘Pillow Angel’: Been there. Been there. Done that. Preferred to grow,” Seattle Pi, last accessed July 31, 2013, http://www.seattlepi. com/local/opinion/article/The-other-story-from-a-Pillow-Angel-1240555.php#page-2, para. 20. 19 Lennard J. Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006): p. 9.

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people return. The implications have been impoverishment, homelessness, and criminalization—conditions which continue the cycle of created dependency, for people who have been historically deemed incapable of taking care of themselves may well experience a material deprivation which renders them incapable of doing so in the absence of support networks designed to reverse the effects of institutionalization.20 Communities have proven ill-equipped to welcome this new demographic because they were not built to anticipate physical disability, for disabled people were omitted from participating in the original building process on the assumption that they have nothing to offer as Lifchez argues. According to Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames: The trend in the late 1950s and early 1960s toward deinstitutionalization allowed people with severe physical disabilities to begin entering the mainstream, bringing a new population to the developing disability rights movement. Nearly all people with serious physical impairments had trouble coping with a physical environment so ill-adapted to their needs, and many were spurred into activism by the discrimination and lack of understanding they encountered.21

De-institutionalization has not been enough, then, to correct the problem of exclusion, not when utopian projects have been taking place in the absence and at the expense of disabled persons in rigorous, systemic, and sustained ways for centuries. But how should disabled people be included? Perhaps the question of what to do about disability is easier to resolve if it is framed as a response, that is, as a civic responsibility to citizens rather than a philanthropic gesture. Disability organizations, activists, and scholars have their own ideas on utopia, after all, that might just shift the conversation. A Dis-topian Response to Utopian Design Situated in the climate of the 1960s civil rights movements, disability politics developed as a response to the need for independent living support in the face of increased de-institutionalization;22 advocates and activists were thus engaged in projects of imagining utopian landscapes for variant bodies. A primary catalyst for activist confrontation was the architect of America’s Independent Living Movement, Ed Roberts. Roberts fought for admission rights at the University of California, then struggled with arranging for housing. These arrangements were 20 Andrew T. Scull, Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant: A Radical View (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1977). 21 Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011), p. 33. 22 Frank Bowe, Handicapping America: Barriers to Disabled People (New York, NY: Harper and Rose, 1978).

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difficult because his campus was ill-equipped and incapable of accommodating the machinery he required as a result of polio. He and other physically disabled people were relegated to a hospital on the fringes of campus—a functioning institution, in an age that declared the end of institutionalization. In his own words: They [the university administrators] didn’t know where to put me. The dorms weren’t accessible, and we had to find a place that would accommodate my eight hundred-pound iron lung. They finally decided that I would live in a certain ward of Cowell Hospital, on the edge of the campus. Soon there were a bunch of us crips at Berkeley.23

Roberts responded by developing a community that would facilitate independent living. This community was the disability rights movement’s first largely recognized disability utopia, and would serve as a model for independent living movements that were emerging throughout the US and Britain. Carr Massi, who organized the Center for the Independence of the Disabled in New York, visited Berkeley in 1977 and described her experiences: Some people have the impression that CIL [Center of Independent Living] is a “village” of people with disabilities. It is not. It deals in services, counselling, and training … There is peer counselling, legal assistance, job development, training in independent living skills, and health maintenance. The CIL degree program is the only one in the United States that focuses on the psychology of disability, using the peer counselling approach practiced at the center. All this is funded by private foundations and by the government.24

What Massi was describing is not simply a geographical location but the human networks that constitute what was meant to be a more just society. The political mandate binding this community together—the mandate to provide the conditions that would enable agency—stands as a striking alternative to more paternalistic mandates to the extent that independent living supports begin with the presumption of personhood. When communities begin with the presumption that disabled people will never be capable of participation, can be nothing more than pillow angels, those communities construct the conditions that confine people to their pillows. The movement developed a new understanding of disability as a social and political phenomenon. This means that disability is located outside the body, in exclusionary institutions and the discriminatory physical environment. Bodies are disabled, their range of function and capability limited, not by internal difference 23 Jon Oda, “Highlights from Speeches by Ed Roberts,” unpublished manuscript, as cited in Fleischer and Zames, 38. 24 Carr Massi, “National Paraplegia Foundation News,” as cited in Fleischer and Zames, 39.

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but by a world that has been built up around them without anticipating difference. The constructed environment instead envisions only one kind of body, and in so doing privileges a singular mode of living in the world. This singular mode of living is one that privileges a body capable of production at maximal potential within the contexts of commodification of the body as a performative tool. That is, not only has the built environment been constructed without anticipating difference, but the utopian visionaries responsible for driving the design and construction of the built environs anticipated a rejection of difference at the level of bodily non-conformity. Key to articulating this new social modelling of disability, Britain’s Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) developed a manifesto entitled Fundamental Principles of Disability in 1976. In it was the call to change the “conditions of life [to overcome] the disabilities which are imposed on top of our physical impairments by the way this society is organised to exclude us.”25 UPIAS differentiated between impairment (a condition internal to the individual) and disability, reinterpreting the latter term to mean “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments.”26 UPIAS co-founder Vic Finkelstein explains the social model by describing a hypothetical utopia consisting of wheelchair users who have given up on ableist environments. He claims that social context is constructed for those bodies held to be benchmarks. A body that does not require a wheelchair would thus be rendered disabled due to difficulties navigating a context that does not suit it. For example, a person who stands in a community of sitters may sustain multiple head injuries from standard low ceilings. Finkelstein speculates, tongue in cheek, over how such a society might react: “special aids were designed by wheelchair-user doctors and associated professions for the able-bodied disabled members of the village. All the able-bodied were given special toughened helmets (provided free by the village) to wear at all times.”27 The purpose of his fable is to demonstrate that people are disabled, their functionality limited, by their surroundings, not by internal limitations, for social institutions are designed to accommodate and extend specific functions: “the moral of the story is that when living in a community specifically structured to facilitate one mode of mobility, the well-adapted majority becomes complacent and resistant to alter an environment for the needs of an already stigmatized minority.”28 An implication to Finkelstein’s hypothetical might be that utopia is impossible, because if we place disability at the center when designing an ideal society, we 25 Priestley, 1. 26 Priestley, 14. 27 Vic Finkelstein, “To Deny or Not to Deny Disability: What is Disability?,” Independent Living Institute, last accessed April 30, 2013, http://www.independentliving. org/docs1/finkelstein.html, para. 7. 28 Peter Joseph Mackey, “Crip Utopia and the Future of Disability,” Critical Disability Discourse, 1 (2009): p. 11.

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run the risk of creating new categories of disability for those who do not fit the new mold. A similar point—albeit without disability politics in mind—was made in H.G. Wells’s 1904 Country of the Blind. The story is told from the perspective of an outsider who initially assumes that his capacity to see is advantageous in a country built by and for a population that is entirely blind. But in a space that is not designed to accommodate eyesight, he finds he is clumsy, stumbling about in pitch black darkness. He cannot move about freely because he cannot see; his context renders eyesight a disadvantage. Nor can he put into words that he possesses a skill the citizenry lacks, for his vocabulary holds no meaning in their community, and so it is dismissed as the mingled words of a newly formed man. His eyes become such an impediment to him that village elders recommend their surgical removal.29 So human functions like vision and bipedal mobility only have utility in particular contexts, and could just as easily become disadvantages depending on the particular system of values that motivates social organization. Should blind people become the architects of their own libraries, non-blind people become the misfits in that space. It is not necessarily the case that an ideal society conceived by and for disabled persons (or at least developed in collaboration with disabled persons) would stigmatize other embodiments. We might look to disability studies for critiques of utopian projects that ignore or seek to efface disability, but surely this is not all that disability studies has to offer, for at the heart of Roberts’s work at Berkeley was an impulse to create an ideal world that accounts for disability; but not the exclusion of able bodies or those unencumbered by the necessities of medical apparatus. The field may have not only critiques but also suggestions, strategies, and solutions, where disabled embodiments are taken to be our launching points for reconstructive efforts. One approach within disability studies has been universal design (UD), a “worldwide movement that approaches the design of the environment … with the widest range of users in mind.”30 UD has been posited as a response to exclusionary physical spaces because the problem, so theorists claim, lies in the ableist values and assumptions that operate at the level of design: “the geography of towns and cities is often experienced as oppressive for many people not just because their needs for accessibility are neglected, but because ableist values are positively asserted in the socio-spatial patterns created by planners and designers.”31 Proponents consist of architects, engineers, and researchers who while planning how to re-structure physical space commit to the following principles:

29 H.G. Wells, “Country of the Blind,” The Literature Network, last accessed April 30, 2013, http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/3/. 30 Barbara Knecht, “Accessibility Regulations and a Universal Design Philosophy Inspire the Design Process,” Architectural Record, 1 (2004): p. 145. 31 Tim Blackman, et al., “The Accessibility of Public Spaces for People with Dementia: A New Priority for the ‘Open City,’” Disability and Society, 18 (2003): p. 358.

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the design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities; the design communicates necessary information effectively, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities; the design can be used efficiently and comfortably, and with a minimum of fatigue; and appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation and use regardless of user’s body size, posture or mobility.32

For all the promise of UD, however, its implementation has proven difficult: “the ‘Design for All’/‘Universal Design’ movement has been very valuable in raising the profile of disabled users of products, and has laid down some important principles. In its full sense, however, except for a very limited range of products, ‘design for all’ is a very difficult, if often impossible task.”33 The difficulty lies in anticipating every possible accommodation, when the different kinds of disabilities that exist are vast, as are the needs within any particular disability category. And there is a touch of hubris built into those designs that suppose every possible variation in the human condition can be accounted for and collapsed into the national identity. Total theories can only truly claim to “work” if the minority that stands outside the totality is silenced, so universal design is doomed either to fall into paternalist patterns or to fail without a serious reconception of its purpose and goals. If not through universal design, then, how might we construct a disability utopia? Which values might we use to supplant current conceptual and practical obstacles to inclusivity? And how might we avoid the tradition of naturalizing and normalizing certain ways of functioning? Since our current paradigms tend toward standards that inevitably result in marginalization, perhaps it would be best to begin at the margins. That is, we propose that utopian design begins with a presumption of difference rather than sameness, or an emphasis on the particular needs of a citizenry rather than their watered-down commonalities. We suggest beginning with a politics of difference, where difference is accepted as “basic to the world.”34 Jeff Noonan elaborates: If universal definitions of human nature are always the products of the exercise of power, if every universal definition is made possible by the forcible exclusion and subordination of nonconforming differences, then it follows … that a radical politics must somehow do away with the idea of human nature. There is simply no underlying identity shared by all human beings. That identity … is an illusion whose real function is to justify the remaking of the world according to the 32 Sheryl Burgstahler, “Distance Learning: Universal Design, Universal Access,” Dissertation (Seattle, WA: University of Washington, 2003), p. 12. 33 Alan F. Newell and Peter Gregor, “‘User Sensitive Inclusive Design’: in search of a new paradigm,” ACM Conference on Universal Usability (2004): p. 4. 34 Jeff Noonan, Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference (Montreal QC: McGill-Queen UP, 2003), p. 23.

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definition of human nature that suits the ruling power. Only by breaking with the belief that all human beings share an essence can differences speak in their own voice.35

Such a shift in perspective might acknowledge that we cannot anticipate the entire range of human functions, capabilities, and needs. Our utopias might instead be open and responsive to otherness rather than built to service a privileged embodiment. And in so doing, we may just open up our imaginative limits around what it means to be human, and what sorts of interactions with our environments we might cultivate. In her exploration of deviant embodiments, Donna J. Haraway claims, “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.”36 If any body is to be understood as cybernetic, tied up in technology and medicine and variation, it would be the disabled body. Haraway insists that we need a new body politic to match this age of cyborgs, this reaction to the interchangeable, idealized bodies imagined by the modern age. If we cannot build a community that anticipates every possible difference, as UD promises but fails to deliver, we can at least build a community that is informed by its members. Our cultural cyborgs and monsters may contain within them new human potentialities, and may well force us to question traditional understandings of human limitations. Recall that Roberts demanded we rethink what it takes—what sort of human and technological supports we might develop—for physically disabled people to live independently. His utopian landscape provided the means by which its inhabitants might be seen, and therefore, fully included, in the vision of utopian places, because that is the very purpose of utopian design. If our utopias began with a body politic that embraces difference, we would find we need not be so restrained by oppressive, and, dare we say, uninteresting, limitations to the human condition. Conclusions If we conceive of architecture as playing a vital role in framing not only the lived experience of those that are disabled, but also their philosophical selfunderstanding, what we might, following Peter Sloterdijk, term their “crippled existentialism,” then “the implications of these observations are as diverse as the diagnoses themselves. They have one thing in common, however: if humans are cripples, without exception and in different ways, then each one of them, in their own particular way, has good reason to understand their existence as 35 Noonan, 4–5. 36 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), p. 127.

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an incentive for corrective exercises.”37 We might, taking the critical project of utopian architecture seriously, interpret this to mean that utopian architecture is impossible. However, it is also possible to render this as meaning that the primary impediment to achieving something like utopia via architecture is only possible when places are built to “see” everyone as equally deserving of a place in utopia. As Raymond Lifchez aptly remarks, “To make a place accessible takes more than a ramp. Not only is a ramp not enough, at times one can be inappropriate, an indicator that sitting issues may not have been resolved in the best manner. But the ramp has become a symbol of access in a way, so let us conclude simply that where it is necessary, it may not be sufficient.”38 We, as dreamers and designers of utopias, owe it to everyone to ensure that each inhabitant of utopia is supported by their surroundings, capable of functioning in their space—to include deriving benefits and producing contributions—and able to experience all that a utopian construction has to offer. Given the dearth of resources, especially in more mainstream outlets for theory, our position is that engaging the disabling of utopian architecture is not only timely, but necessary, to achieve actually utopian architecture. While it is too limiting a space to fully address what is absent from the literature—utopian and architectural—our focus has been to bring to the fore the problematic nature of the types of bodies that utopian architecture envisions, the productive capabilities of the built environment and its impacts on differently abled bodies, and the default assumption regarding the predictability of the utopian (or actual) body. It is our position, further, that utopian architecture—the intentional design of public or private spaces—has no claim to such a title so long as it excludes people from living a better life. References Barnes, Colin, Geof Mercer, and Tom Shakespeare. Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MPG Books Group, 1999. Blackman, Tim, et al. “The Accessibility of Public Spaces for People with Dementia: A New Priority for the ‘Open City,’” Disability and Society, 18 (2003): 357–71. Bowe, Frank. Handicapping America: Barriers to Disabled People. New York, NY: Harper and Rose, 1978. Davis, Lennard J. “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006.

37 Sloterdijk, 59. 38 Lifchez, 33.

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Esen, Orhan. “Producing Inequalities by Producing Built Environment: Just in Case: Istanbul,” Open City: Designing Coexistence. Amsterdam: Martien de Vletter, SUN, 2009. Fleischer, Doris Zames and Frieda Zames. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011. Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception. London, UK: Routledge, 2003. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009. Guarneri, Carl. “Brook Farm and the Fourierist Phalanxes: Immediatism, Gradualism, and American Utopian Socialism,” America’s Communal Utopias ed. Donald Pitzer. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991. Knecht, Barbara. “Accessibility Regulations and a Universal Design Philosophy Inspire the Design Process,” Architectural Record, 1 (2004): 145–50. Liao, S. Matthew, Julian Savulescu, and Mark Sheehan, “The Ashley Treatment: Bests Interests, Convenience, and Parental Decision-Making,” Hastings Center Report, 37 (2007): 16–20. Lifchez, Raymond. Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1987. Mackey, Peter Joseph. “Crip Utopia and the Future of Disability,” Critical Disability Discourse, 1 (2009): 1–29. Markus, Thomas. Visions of Perfection: Architecture and Utopian Thought. Glasgow: Third Eye Center, 1985. Noonan, Jeff. Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference. Montreal QC: McGill-Queen UP, 2003. Priestley, Michael. The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and The Disability Alliance Discuss Fundamental Principles of Disability. London, UK: Macmillan, 1976. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Art of the Sonnet, ed. Stephen Burt and David Mikics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010. Scull, Andrew T. Decarceration: Community Treatment and the Deviant: A Radical View. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1977. Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Sneiderman, Barney, John C. Irvine, and Philip H. Osborne. Canadian Medical Law: An Introduction for Physicians, Nurses and Other Health Care Professionals, 3rd ed. Scarborough, ON: Thomson, 2003.

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Chapter 14

Abject Utopianism: On the Silence, Apathy, and Drifting of Psychic Life in Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg Cameron Ellis

Introduction As the terms ‘abject’ and ‘psychic life’ in the title of this chapter might suggest, I am interested in the work of cultural critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva just as much as I am interested in the work of author and critic Samuel R. Delany. To my knowledge these two figures have not been brought together in any significant and sustained engagement. Delany acknowledges, in passing, the importance of Kristeva’s ‘radical question for literature, “Who speaks?”’ in the final pages of his essay on Wagner and Artaud;1 he includes Kristeva in a short list of ‘so many feminists … that have found the phallus a useful concept for analyzing the workings of the patriarchy in our society’ in his essay on French theory for SF readers;2 and aside from Deirdre Byrne’s astute observation that Delany’s ‘many-layered representations of gendered subjectivity has affinities with Kristeva’s account of the subject’s insertion into the symbolic order’3 only a few foot/end notes connect the two thinkers. Kristeva, for what it is worth has never made reference to Delany. In this chapter I make an effort to remedy the apparent lack of connections between these two wonderfully prolific and important thinkers by means of the concepts of abjection and utopia. Using Kristeva’s theories of subjectivity and psychoanalysis (especially the concepts of the abject, love, and psychic life) and using them to read Delany’s pornographic novel Hogg, I argue that Delany projects a literary narrative depicting one individual’s abject utopian struggle to connect with the social in a meaningful way, one that is marginalized in our contemporary late modern culture. The apparent abject silence, apathy, and drifting of Delany’s 1 See ‘Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions’ in Delany’s Longer Views: Extended Essays (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), pp. 1–86. 2 See ‘Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Semiotics for SF Readers’ in Delany’s Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), p. 155. 3 See Byrne (1999) ‘Samuel Delany Writes Difference: Desire and Style in Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand’ Journal of Literary Studies 15(1–2): 160–75, p. 161.

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protagonist, Cocksucker, can be interpreted as potentially subversive behaviours and strategies emblematic of what I call abject utopianism.

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Kristeva, Psychoanalysis, and Utopia Commenting on her own body of work, Kristeva has stated, ‘It was an archeology … An archeology in search of utopia’.4 In contrast to psychoanalysts influenced by Freud, who had nothing pleasant to say about the ‘oceanic feeling’, written of by Romain Rolland,5 Kristeva identifies an apparent utopian potential to such preOedipal ‘experience’. The traditional recalcitrance was due to the understanding that in order for the child to become part of the symbolic realm (i.e., a language using/ speaking being) the primary relationship between the Mother-Child (i.e., ‘oceanic’ and pre-Oedipal) had to be severed and repressed. It was understood up until and including Lacan, that that which is repressed must remain repressed, for if this were to fail, wildly destructive psychosis would ensue, abjecting the subject outside the symbolic, rendering the subject functionally dead. Following Lacan, this oceanic/ pre-Oedipal aspect of subjectivity was viewed as a mysterious and unknowable – impossible – Real void. However, Kristeva, and other so-called French Feminists of the 1960s onward made it a significant part of their agenda to rescue the potential of this hitherto repressed and defamed pre-Oedipal Mother-Child relationship, forgotten or ignored by a field significantly dominated and sculpted by patriarchal thought. Kristeva’s contribution to this branch of poststructuralism was and remains le semiotique. Le semiotique is the term Kristeva gives to denote the non-signifying musicality of speech, what is otherwise interpreted as the meaningless intonations and rhythms of infantile gibberish, or ‘baby-talk’. This is situated in contrast to the symbolic realm as elaborated in Lacan, which speaks to the rules and grammar that dictate meaningful linguistic codes necessary for social intercourse. Le semiotique is important to Kristeva because according to her it is a means by which the individual speaking being is able to return to the site of their primary trauma – the loss of the pre-Oedipal Mother – and thereby work through their psychic and/or somatic symptoms. The affective nature of le semiotique causes a rupture from within the symbolic code forcing the latter to reconstitute itself in unexpected ways.6 This is the reason why I view Kristeva’s psychoanalysis 4 Quoted in Jonathan Reé (1997) ‘Revolutionary Archeology: Julia Kristeva and the Utopia of the Text’ Paragraph (Modern Critical Theory Group) 20(3): 258–69, p. 267. 5 See Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989), p. 11. 6 One of the first examples Kristeva provides in her work of such a symbolic rupture is the poetry of Lautréamont and Mallarmé. At the end of the nineteenth century, Kristeva argues, the poetry of these two artists forced a radical break in the style and form of expression; putting the body back into the act of writing. See Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974/1984).

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as utopian: by way of le semiotique, a better way of living is made possible. I acknowledge that psychoanalysis generally can be interpreted using a utopian lens insofar as the goal of treatment is to help the analysand live a better life (‘learn to walk with a limp’); however, Kristeva embraces the impossible world of the Real from which many previous analysts steered clear. The theory is that not only can analysis work toward helping the analysand learn to walk with a limp, but by returning to the pre-Oedipal stages of psychic development, analytic treatment allows for a radically new voice to be born as though it was being born for the first time. This ‘post-analytic’ subject is certainly not cured – Kristeva agrees with this basic psychoanalytic premise – but they are imbued with a ‘newborn’ state of energy, curiosity, and hope. I do not wish to be mistaken for romanticizing this return to the pre-Oedipal. Such a return to the primordial stages of psychic development is horrifying and at times disgusting, incurring what Kristeva says is a ‘catastrophic abolition of the self’. The process leading up to analysis – and even including analysis itself – is extremely painful and disturbing. What is disturbing is the thought or feeling of having to confront the Phallic Mother: the imaginary figure of the pre-Oedipal scene unscathed by the pangs of desire and that is fully endowed with traits proper to both sexes. This imaginary figure haunts the individual subject at the limits of their un/conscious mind, capable – in her all-powerful nature – of both bestowing and annihilating life. This last point is due, in part, to the fact that during preOedipal development the infans (prelinguistic being) is completely dependent on the Mother for survival; the moment whereby it becomes evident to the infans that the Mother is not always present to meet its every need (i.e., castration) marks the primordial trauma that catapults the infans into symbolic subjectivity qua speaking being. One important point that differentiates Kristeva from Lacan is that for the former, castration is not only characterized by trauma but also by love. The pre-Oedipal Mother infuses the infans with creative potentiality via a loving and caring ‘apprenticeship of language’: ‘[T]he progenitor inhabits the mouth, the lungs, the digestive tube of her offspring and, in accompanying the echolalia, guides them toward signs, phrases, tales: infans becomes infant, a speaking subject’.7 Which is to say, the acquisition of language is also pleasurable at the affective, visceral level. The ambivalence of the pre-Oedipal Mother is both a figure of allure and disgust, attraction and repulsion. It serves the subject as a liminal figure that promises the individual with both life and death. During analysis the analysand is lovingly and carefully led by the analyst through the frightening and painful process of psychic re/birth, i.e., separation from the pre-Oedipal Mother. In her essay on abjection, Powers of Horror, Kristeva articulates this process: ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. … “I” am in the process of becoming an other at 7 See Kristeva’s This Incredible Need To Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 43–4.

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the expense of my own death. During that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit’.8 The vulnerability of the infans amounts to a great risk – unconscious in itself – so great that is it unlikely any rational conscious being would venture to make such a journey voluntarily. And yet, the process of confronting and working through the abject itself harbours within it the possibility of hitherto untold of pleasures and happiness but only at cost of wagering such a risk. The pleasures to be gained from having worked through these hardships is akin to ‘an “oceanic feeling”, as a jubilant osmosis of the subject in the common flesh of a “not-yet oneself” swallowed up in a “not-yet world”’.9 Here Kristeva echoes Ernst Bloch’s notion of the not-yet-conscious developed in the latter’s Principle of Hope. Similarly, Kristeva’s statement that ‘significance is indeed inherent in the human body’10 seems to reiterate Bloch’s idea that hope functions at the core of what constitutes the human being, much the same way Freud proclaimed the human being to be constituted by the pleasure principle.11 However, in contrast to Bloch who viewed psychoanalysis as a negation of futurity, Kristeva sees psychoanalysis as one of the few surviving means of preserving any possibility of a future in the otherwise ahistorical culture of late-capitalism. The promise of a hopeful futurity in Kristeva is witnessed in her interpretation of the events of May ’68: ‘[F]undamentally, I think, May ’68’s radicalism bears witness to an indefinite sense of mutation in the essence of man, the search for other forms of the sacred’.12 Earlier in the same text: ‘I am going to use a vocabulary that may shock people … Infinite jouissance for each person at the intersection of happiness for all … is it anything else but the sacred’.13 May ’68 was a historical event that witnessed the utopian potential (both constructive and destructive) of confronting/embracing the pure negativity of that which is in excess of the symbolic order: le semiotique. The potential good to emerge from such a radical wager is complicated by the potential harm it serves to inflict upon both individuals as well as groups. However, like the tired-out desire of Kristeva’s melancholy woman who knows no bounds, the analysand – once brought to their psychic limits – ‘wants everything, to the end, until death’.14 8 See Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 3. 9 See Kristeva’s 2006; p. 8. 10 ‘Significance’ is the process of bringing le semiotique into symbolic expression through works of art, literature, religious practice, dance, and so on. See Kristeva 1982, p. 10. 11 See Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1954–59/1995). 12 See Kristeva’s Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keefe, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002), p. 37. 13 Ibid., p. 34. 14 See p. 86 of Kristeva’s ‘Illustrations of Feminine Depression’ in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987/1989), pp. 69–94.

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For Kristeva, a better world – and I will be bold and claim such a world to be utopian – becomes manifest in the form of what she calls Psychic Space. Kelly Oliver, philosopher, clarifies the nature of psychic space: ‘psychic space is not just an inner drama or psychological interior … Constant and free-flowing negotiations, transference, and translations between the bodily drives and cultural language are necessary to sustain robust psychic space’.15 In other words, psychic space implies connections to others mediated through language. Without access to language – i.e., the symbolic – psychic space collapses, reducing itself to either a closed interiority of private narcissism and fantasy or to pure exteriority/culture (i.e., finding refuge and placation in the entertainment industry or the spectacle). From Tales of Love Kristeva writes: ‘The psyche is one open system connected to another, and only under those conditions is it renewable. If it lives, your psyche is in love. If it is not in love, it is dead’.16 Love is central to a healthy vibrant psychic space. However, compared to cultures in the past that have imagined love in terms of Eros and Agape, Kristeva claims that today ‘we lack a code of love’,17 thereby suggesting that our psychic life is in crisis. Kristeva finds hope for the psyche in psychoanalysis, art, literature, and religious culture. I affirm her hope in the futurity of the psyche as a positively utopian philosophy, for not only is it socially oriented – radiating outward from the individual – it is explicitly directed toward opening a space of experience that is intended to be better than ‘space’ we currently inhabit; that is, it seeks a better way of being emerging from within the distasteful and repugnant detritus of contemporary culture. As will be demonstrated below, Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg portrays an individual’s – Cocksucker’s – utopian struggling toward an open healthy psychic space from within the abject milieu of his surroundings. Cocksucker’s efforts are expressed through a striving to knit together private drives with social coherence and thereby speaks to a living transference situation whereby only through delving into murky dangerous abjection – and learning to love it – can the promises for a renewed psychic life – i.e., utopia – become realized in the here and now. Abjection and the Utopianism of Silence, Apathy, and Drifting in Delany’s Hogg Although not named as such, ‘abjection’ has its roots in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, wherein Douglas interprets the meaning of social relations in terms of bodily functions and fluids; how these functions and fluids operate – i.e., the cleansing rituals practiced to ‘control’ them – regulate the relations between the 15 See Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 217n4. 16 See Kristeva’s Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983/1987), p. 15. 17 Ibid., p. 6.

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sexes. In her work she notes that there are certain bodily fluids that are esteemed and valued (e.g., tears and semen) while others are abhorred (e.g., excrement and menstrual blood). Furthermore, this imbalance at the level of tolerance for various bodily fluids accounts for the social disparities and attitudes held with respect to the sexes. Kristeva’s import was to bring abjection, as a tool for critical theory, from the social into the psychological. Judith Butler – especially in works such as Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter – returns abjection to the social. In each case, abjection can be read as serving a productive function, which is to say abjection can be interpreted as forming subversive, dangerous, or threatening pockets of potential within or among an oppressive social régime.18 Samuel R. Delany can be safely added to a list of those that have borrowed from and developed the critical use-value of abjection. In Delany’s fiction, mostly in his literary pornography (but also in many of his SF works) there is an extremely positive and productive engagement with abjection. Jeffrey A. Tucker notes that many of the aggressive, seemingly violent, and apparently lascivious sexual encounters in Delany’s fictions are ‘commenced and concluded with an earnest gratitude and politeness;’19 not abhorred and rejected. Indeed, Delany develops what Mary Catherine Foltz calls an ‘excremental ethics’: Refusing the standard liberal discourse that bemoans the litter of consumer culture, bleeds sympathy and longs for the re-incorporation of the wounded city scavenger … Delany reveals the pleasure of reveling in the flotsam of late capitalism. For him, ethics is not prohibition, nor does it revolve around the normalizing impulse … Instead, Delany’s ethic of waste calls for the late capitalist consumer to turn to the landfill, to eat of the leftovers, to enter the anus, and to do something different with shit.20

Darieck Scott echoes this sentiment in his book Extravagant Abjection with the thesis that empowerment (black power, for Scott) ‘is found at the point of the apparent erasure of ego-protections, at the point at which the constellation of tropes that we call identity, body, race, nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary’,21 which is to 18 This is, in fact, Kristeva’s intention behind the French title of her book, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. ‘Pouvoir’ in the sense of ability and capacity to act; not be stifled by fear, but motivated and invigorated to move. For more on the productive connection between abjection and power (i.e., pouvoir) see Elaine Hoffman Baruch’s interview with Kristeva in Julia Kristeva Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996b), pp. 113–21, p. 118. 19 Jeffery A. Tucker. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), p. 259. 20 Foltz, Mary Catherine (2008) ‘The Excremental Ethics of Samuel R. Delany’ SubStance, 37(2): 41–55, p. 43. 21 Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), p. 9.

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say, at those very sites that the abject is thought to perpetually haunt the individual subject. In this section of the chapter I seek to demonstrate how a utopian psychic space is worked toward in Samuel R. Delany’s pornographic novel Hogg. My argument is that despite the remarkable social and psychological distortions which accompany the novel’s protagonist, Cocksucker – distortions that are viscerally and intimately violent and unsettling – a utopian psychic space can be described and thus worked toward at the limit zones of experience where the ego and other forces of protection are lost, discarded or forgotten. This narrative can be told through the sub-headings silence, apathy, and drifting. The Silence of Utopia Hogg tells the story of Franklin Hargus, a.k.a. Hogg, a dirty (both physically and mentally) truck driver, who never showers, who shits and urinates his pants while driving the truck he operates, and who is contracted out as a ‘rape artist’ for disgruntled ex-lovers wanting to decimate certain other individuals (e.g., wives, women, and children). In the opening scene of the novel the reader is introduced to a silent 11-year-old boy, the narrator of the text, known only as Cocksucker. He is performing oral sex on strangers in the basement of a shelter where he is living. There he encounters a man, Hogg, who takes a liking to him and who subsequently assumes the boy for his own pleasure. Hogg takes the boy on his journeys to witness and participate in his contract brutalities. Where one might expect Cocksucker to respond in a shocked or overtly reactive way during any one of the horrifying scenes to which he bears witness, he cannot help but want to do nothing but suck Hogg’s penis, as well as eat and drink the latter’s faeces and urine. There is a long sequence during the latter third of the novel when Cocksucker is misplaced from Hogg’s possession and instead comes under the ownership of a black tugboat captain known as Big Sambo. By way of Big Sambo, Cocksucker encounters two garbage men, Red and Rufus. He spends time with these three, walking around the docks and, of course, participating in various less violent sex acts. Later he is found by Hogg and is remitted to the latter’s ‘ownership’. While travelling in Hogg’s truck, the reader is made aware that Cocksucker prefers the environment of the docks and the company of Sambo, Red, and Rufus. It is to be understood that Cocksucker seeks to return to the latter arrangement and sets out planning how to do so. In a final scene, again lecturing Cocksucker (as he does throughout the novel), Hogg suddenly pauses and asks, ‘What’s the matter?’ Cocksucker neutrally responds, ‘Nothing’.22 There are a number of points of entry into a discussion on the utopian potential of Hogg. I want to first address Cocksucker’s silence. I contend that silence is utilized in Hogg as a rhetorical strategy, whereby revolution is anticipated in 22 Delany, Samuel R. Hogg (Boulder: Black Ice Books, 1994), p. 219.

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the form of a new language. That is to say, because silence falls ‘outside’ the symbolic, it is aligned with the ambiguous forces of le sémiotique. In the ‘Poetry Project Interview’, included in Delany’s self-help book for creative writers About Writing (2005), Delany is asked by the interviewer to define ‘silence’. Delany responds, ‘I won’t try … because silence – at least in the way it interests me – is one of those objects that resists definition’.23 He does, however, provide some ‘descriptive statements’ so that it might be more easily recognized the next time it is encountered. Delany mentions that, today, silence is: in a beleaguered state; is the necessary context in which ‘information can signify’; is the opposite of ‘noise’; seldom if ever ‘neutral’; is pervaded by assumptions, expectations and discourses. Deeper into his response Delany observes that since Richard Wagner, silence has been considered ‘the proper mode in which to appreciate the work of art’.24 This, Delany adds, ‘aligns art more closely with death: it moves us formally toward a merger with the unknown’.25 Despite Cocksucker’s observation of, and sometime participation in, the horrible acts of rape and murder committed by Hogg and his partners, Cocksucker’s embodiment of silence suggests that he is the locus of hope within such desultory social arrangements. Since for Delany ‘silence’ as such resists definition, Cocksucker can likewise be interpreted as incapable of being defined in terms of the dominant symbolic. With regard to Delany’s proscription of silence’s privileged acquaintance with death, Cocksucker’s silence may also speak to the inability of an old and dying symbolic self, to speak the language of a new arising symbolic. As Kristeva stresses, the forces of le sémiotique pressure the individual subject, such that these perpetually shifting presymbolic forces need new social symbolic structures with which to connect, and through which to speak. Cocksucker might be ‘part’ of Hogg’s gang, but he is not ‘with’ Hogg’s gang. His silence disposes him to being symbolically disaffected enough such that if a better opportunity were to present itself, he is not precluded from entering into that new social arrangement. In fact, this is exactly what is alluded to at the end of Hogg when, after being taken back by Hogg, Cocksucker fantasizes about returning to live with Sambo, Rufus, and Red in the docks. If it was the case that Cocksucker was fully engaged and enmeshed in a complete symbolic relationship with Hogg and company, he would be unable to disentangle himself from the tethers of desire that bound him to that symbolic order. Recall that for Lacan, desire is implicit to the chain of signifiers of which language is constructed and that constitutes the symbolic order. One always desires that which one does not possess. In other words, desire is a synonym for being jealous, jealous that one does not possess that which the Other possesses. In Hogg, violent or not, the remarkably active sexual life that Cocksucker enacts 23 Delany, Samuel R. About Writing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), p. 308. 24 Ibid., p. 309. 25 Ibid.

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actually protects him from the fates of the symbolic, e.g., desire and jealousy, insofar as he is sustained in a sémiotique state of open fluidity and exchange, not tied down to one particular arrangement. ‘Only the strongest egos can occasionally break through this mental stricture – at the behest of sex, say – and even that usually leads to a restructuring of an ethical discourse’.26 The ‘Apathy’ of Utopia Strangely, one might say ‘dialectically’, the strongest egos (in Delany’s sense) are the ones that are in fact the most vulnerable, or at risk. This is the potentiality of le sémiotique, the subversive dynamism inherent to the structure of the ego. This brings me to the second point I wish to address with regard to the utopian potential of Hogg, Cocksucker’s apparent apathy. According to my reading, Hogg attempts to blur the ready-made categories of ‘victim’ and ‘monster’ by telling the story from the perspective of the people caught up in such acts.27 This is one of the virtues of violent literary fantasies, particularly pornography that speaks to the utopian potentials of the genre broadly speaking. Speaking on the topic of female S&M paperbacks, in her essay ‘Pornography for Women by Women, With Love’ (1985), Joanna Russ states, ‘[I]t seems to me that such fantasies may be a kind of half-way house out of violence rather than into it’.28 The same analysis can be applied to a reading of Delany’s Hogg. Later in the same essay, Russ, now speaking on the raw sexual and emotional starvation with which certain S&M fan-fiction is written so openly, states that such literature forces the reader to question established notion of identity: ‘[W]ho is the man and who is the woman, who’s active and who’s passive, even who’s who, cannot even be asked’.29 Literary pornography, and perhaps pornography broadly speaking, entails this deconstructive critique of identity, acting toward undermining stable social arrangements and hierarchies. Similar to his close friend and colleague Russ, Delany, writing on the topic of cinematic pornography, makes the argument that pornographic movies are far less sexist than non-pornographic commercial cinema: they have a higher proportion of female to male characters; they show more women holding more jobs and a wider variety of jobs; they show more women instigating sex; they show a higher proportion of friendships between women;

26 Freedman, Carl (ed.) (2009) Conversations with Samuel R. Delany (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), p. 126. 27 Delany, Shorter Views, p. 307. 28 Russ, Joanna (1985) Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Feminist Essays (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press), p. 91. 29 Ibid., p. 96.

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and they show far less physical violence against women than do the commercial films made for the same sociological audience.30

While this latter critique of pornographic cinema does not necessarily reflect or represent the structure-of-feeling specific to Hogg, it does nonetheless speak to the deconstructive mode in which the narrative of the story functions: dislodging preconceived notions of what it is to be an active agent. With this in mind, I return to Hogg and Cocksucker’s apparent apathy. I claim that Cocksucker is indeed not apathetic, but instead actively engaged in feeling his way toward a better world. This is pursued by means of what I call a ‘power of passivity’. In order to convince the reader of my position, I must have the reader understand that when I refer to ‘passivity’ I am making reference to the hitherto undervalued side of a dichotomy proper to phallogocentric Western metaphysics that has propped up a self-serving understanding of ‘activity’. As such, I align activity – conventionally understood – with le symbolique and passivity with le sémiotique, insofar as the latter has remained unacknowledged. But because le symbolique is nothing without le semiotique and vice-versa, these distinctions are, in fact, not rigid; rather, they are contaminated and inverted. Cocksucker’s ‘apathy’ is noticed, as such, only because he is constantly juxtaposed to the dominant verbosity of Hogg. Hogg’s constant orations and pontificating on various matters render Cocksucker virtually powerless. Consider Hogg’s following soliloquy to Cocksucker proclaiming the silver-lining morality to the atrocities he has been part of: ‘It’s a good profession, boy’, Hogg said. ‘Like the man says, ain’t nothin’ you can do in this world today – go to the pictures, buy some food, or even throw away the package it come in – that don’t bring somebody closer to hurt. At least this way you know that you ain’t makin’ your money by makin’ them pictures or packages. And when you’re hurtin’ someone, you’re hurtin’ ’em. You look ’em right in the eye and do it … You ain’t droppin’ no bombs on five hundred people you ain’t never seen. You ain’t signin’ no papers that’s gonna put a thousand people who ain’t never heard your name out of a house and a job … you got more sense of duty than they do’.31

Hogg argues that his actions are morally justified compared to the rampant automation and herd mentality that drive the majority of acts in mass culture. However, the reader must not be lured into assuming that Cocksucker is a passive receptacle into which Hogg’s propaganda is deposited. Cocksucker refuses to engage the symbolic speech-act of his master. By not participating in symbolic exchange, Cocksucker is ‘active’ in resisting Hogg’s ideological hegemony. He does not echo the master’s discourse to the master. From this it follows that an 30 Delany, Shorter Views, p. 66. 31 Hogg, pp. 47–8.

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averbal individual subject does not recognize the master as master, and thereby disorganizes the dominant structures of power. Delany remarks, ‘Hogg has his monologues; but has he ever really listened to anyone in his life?’32 In contrast to Hogg, Cocksucker can be read as actively listening, especially for the proper moment to present itself when the dominant symbolic (focalized through the character of Hogg in my reading), is at its weakest. This moment of weakness is when Hogg pauses a rant of his to Cocksucker in order to ask the latter ‘what is the matter’. At this moment the power relation involutes in favour of Cocksucker. Cocksucker’s reply ‘Nothin’’ can be read as the single most promising – i.e., utopian – speech-act in the entire novel, for it contains within it a double edge: in one sense it speaks to Cocksucker’s own utopian horizons, signified by a conscientious desire to return to Sambo, Rufus, and Red; in another sense, it masks this emancipatory potential from Hogg, so that the latter will never suspect it when Cocksucker chooses to leave. Delany regards this subterfuge to be part and parcel of the empowerment language allows the individual subject: ‘That language can be used to dissemble – and particularly to dissemble to adults who, at the moment, would seem – like Hogg himself seems, just then – to be sincerely concerned for you’.33 By choosing this moment to interject into the symbolic realm, Cocksucker begins the process of carving out a space for himself within the symbolic that had previously been foreclosed to him. Delany states that ‘part of this is, of course, the project of the novel – that is, the absence of any view of such a space’,34 whether it is what the latter calls ‘relational space’ or ‘negotiating space’, or what Kristeva calls psychic space. The Drifting Towards Utopia The dialectical turn implicit to Cocksucker’s apathy brings me to the third point I wish to address: Cocksucker’s drifting. I claim that such aimless drifting is capable of demonstrating utopian properties, in terms of its affiliations with abjection and borderline ego loss. Kristeva says in Powers of Horror, ‘A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines … constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. … He has a sense of danger … but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved’.35 For virtually the entire narrative, Cocksucker is a passenger on Hogg’s truck, seemingly going with the flow of the open road. Kristeva bestows utopian salvation upon those who drift, for they are the ones who are, in the fashion of Oscar Wilde, always arriving

32 Freedman, p. 142. 33 Ibid., p. 143. 34 Quoted in Freedman, p. 141. 35 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 8.

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on the shore of a new land. But should such aimless drifting be imbued with such utopian potential? The fact is that aimless drifting, that is to say action-without-vision, can equally lead to complete annihilation of the individual, that is, lead to extreme torture, pain, and even death. Take the example of Xavier Gen’s Frontière(s) (2008), an example from contemporary new extreme cinema.36 After participating in riots, following the French election of a conservative candidate into power, a small group of youths seek to escape police detention by fleeing to Amsterdam via Frontier. They leave Paris in two cars: Tom (David Saracino) and Farid (Chems Dahmani) leave in the first, while Alex (Auréien Wiik), Sami (Adel Bencherif), and the latter’s sister Yasmine (Karina Testa) rush to the hospital to drop-off Sami who has been shot in the riot. While the latter group deals with the hospital – Sami dies waiting and Alex and Yasmine run away to avoid the police – Tom and Farid drive to Frontier. However, they are both on drugs and take a wrong turn away from Frontier and instead toward a less-than-dodgy bed and breakfast operated by a family of neo-Nazis led by Le Von Geisler (Jean-Pierre Jorris), a deranged father figure and a former SS officer. Before discovering this, however, Tom and Farid have given Alex and Yasmine directions over the phone, and the rest of the film charts the group’s experience as they are each murdered, except for Yasmine, who manages to escape and make it back to the outer limits of Paris, only to be met by police cruisers blocking her re-entry. The film captures the visceral horrors that, in many instances, await those who act without vision – be it political, utopian, or otherwise. In psychoanalytic terms (à la Kristeva), this signifies the decline of the symbolic function, leaving the semiotic function to run rampant. Kristeva writes: [T]he ferment of collective hysteria in which crowds abdicate their own judgment, a hypnosis that causes us to lose perception of reality since we hand it over to the Ego Ideal. The object in hypnosis devours or absorbs the ego, the voice of consciousness becomes blurred, ‘in loving blindness one become a criminal without remorse’ – the object has taken the place of what was the ego ideal.37

The group seeks to make it to Frontier (here metaphorical for utopia insofar as it is a better place in which to live than Paris at present) but does not. Instead, because they are under the influence of drugs, their ability to form a coherent route to Frontier and follow through with it is distorted. Their aimlessness leads them straight into the lair of a group of neo-Nazis, or the abject remainders of a horrific 36 Also consider Adam Rehmeier’s The Bunny Game (2010), another example of new extreme cinema. Rehmeier’s film is practically a cinematic rendition of Delany’s Hogg insofar as it tells the story of a trucker (named Hog, with one ‘g’) that picks up a prostitute, and throughout the course of the film subjects her to all kinds of unspeakable torture. 37 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 25.

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and failed utopian enterprise. According to my reading, the film suggests that so long as political and utopian demands are expressed through unmitigated rage and protest, without any access to the symbolic (i.e., the Ego Ideal), humanity is bound to repeat the failed attempts of yesteryear. Vision, in the form of the symbolic cultural resources, must be present in order for those otherwise destructive drives to be transformed into something creative and renovating. This latter point is what I think Hogg allows the reader to see happen, and in a sublimated way, allows the reader to experience this while saving them from not having to endure it themselves. Cocksucker’s narrative is an organic one, a painful and horrifying narrative, but organic nonetheless. It is also, I contend, an allegory for every individual’s psychological journey toward utopia. More precisely, and in accordance with Kristeva’s position, Cocksucker’s narrative is the story of the necessary affective experience that late modern humanity will have to endure if they wish to be saved from the nihilistic Western world, covered as it is with so much cultural abjection. I do not mean that such an experience entails the participation in murder/rape, as these are metaphors within the novel of some of the most atrocious crimes against humanity. As metaphor, Cocksucker’s experience conveys the psychic state of development – i.e., presymbolic and semiotic – that is necessary in order to re-boot both personal and cultural utopian imaginations. Cocksucker remains silent throughout the novel, right up until the very end of the story. Likewise, he appears to have no wilful or active agency or subjectivity of his own. He is silent/presymbolic and constantly engaged in sexual acts with Hogg including eating and drinking the latter’s excretions. Cocksucker is the infans. His drifting is not so much aimless as it is drawn toward ‘strange attractors’ (e.g., Hogg as well as Sambo, Rufus, and Red) that make subjectivity possible. The reader is led to believe that during the last sequence of the novel, where Hogg enquires into Cocksucker’s state of mind, that the latter is planning his return to Sambo, Rufus, and Red. He has found a relationship that he Loves (big ‘L’, to signify Law). However, according to Kristeva, such symbolic Love identification is only possible because of the presymbolic imaginary love (small ‘l’, to signify the law-before-the-Law), or Kristeva’s notion of the ‘imaginary father’: One is thus led to conceive of at least two identifications; a primal one, resulting from a sentimental … archaic, and ambivalent affection for the maternal object … and the other, which underlies he introjection into the ego of an object itself already libidinal … The first is closer to depersonalization, phobia, and psychosis; the second is closer to hysterical lovehate, taking to itself the phallic ideal that it pursues.38

Hogg functions in terms of Kristeva’s imaginary father, a loving and noncastrating version of Freud’s father of individual prehistory – complicating the nature of the pre-Oedipal scene beyond that of, merely, the Phallic Mother. 38 Ibid., p. 33.

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One may object to this interpretation of Hogg insofar as he is exactly the embodiment of the murderous and castrating father by way of his raping and murdering. I am, however, thinking more in terms of Hogg’s relationship to Cocksucker, which, despite its social distortion, is one of personal love. Cocksucker could not make the transition into symbolic ‘Love’ (i.e., to desire Sambo, Rufus, and Red), without the presymbolic ‘love’ of Hogg. The challenge for humanity today is to find a ‘loving father’. But in a post-secular society, this challenge becomes all the more difficult. This simultaneous source and inhibitor or desire is implicit to the generation of a new utopian frontier. Kristeva writes, ‘You see it today with the resurrection of the sacred. Look at those crowds at World Youth days in search of a good father, kneeling before the Pope who enables millions of people … to “fix fatherhood”, i.e. to console themselves in the shelter of a paternal figure who is neither absent nor tyrannical but simply present and loving’.39 Finding such a loving father is not guaranteed and in fact requires a certain amount of drifting, wallowing in abjection, aimlessly, before a loving father presents itself. Thus, echoing back to Kristeva’s commentary on the deject (‘the more he strays, the more he is saved’), one can read into such aimless drifting a definite utopian potential similar to the notion of the lotus in Henry Miller’s Sexus (1965) referenced in the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: ‘If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit’.40 Delany’s pornographic novels, even at their most vulgar and unpleasing, are ‘works of love’ (or, histoire de l’amour). Pornography is, at times – and I believe this is how Delany is using the sub-genre – a way to explore and question the ‘nature’ of desire, both from an individual as well as a social standpoint. Internal to this examination is the questions, ‘what is desired?’ and ‘why?’ Returning for a moment to the ‘critical utopia’, the reader is encouraged to recall that in the sub-genre itself utopia is never guaranteed, but rather something that must always be worked toward. Tom Moylan declares that in the ‘critical utopia’, utopia is preserved as an impulse, dream, and/or desire. What I take from Moylan, on the other hand, is that not only is the utopia to which the desire is directed impure, so too is the impulse/dream/desire for utopia itself. Like Kristeva’s commentary on the literary genius of Proust, Delany ‘can also give us a glimpse of the way that a psychic life can possess and expose its own unprecedented complexity: a life that is at once painful and ecstatic, sensual and spiritual, erotic and pensive’.41 The desire for utopia is not pure. It is fundamentally impure. The impulse is violent,

39 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, p. 23. 40 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1972) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Seem Mark, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. xxiii. 41 See Kristeva’s (1994) Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 198.

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aggressive and reparative. The sensual dream segues seamlessly into a terrifying nightmare, and back again … At its core utopia is fundamentally sadomasochistic, emblematic of the trace of the lovehate identification that primary narcissism leaves upon the psyche of the infans-turned-speaking-being. As Kristeva writes, extrapolating again from Proust, ‘Time can only be truly regained if it recuperates this sort of violence – a violence that is essentially one of archaic loss and vengeance. What gives me pleasure and abandons me also kills me, yet I am capable of putting to death that which gives me pleasure’.42 If utopia is never guaranteed, like the critical utopians argue, then it is not solely because desire can be hi-jacked by corrupt corporate powers, but also because that desire is constitutively abject from before the beginning. References Baruch, Elaine Hoffman. ‘Feminism and Psychoanalysis’, in Julia Kristeva Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 113–21. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1954–59/1995). Delany, Samuel R. Hogg (Boulder: Black Ice Books, 1994). ———. Longer Views: Extended Essays (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). ———. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). ———. About Writing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006). Foltz, Mary Catherine. ‘The Excremental Ethics of Samuel R. Delany’, SubStance, 2008, 37(2): 41–55. Freedman, Carl. Conversations with Samuel R. Delany (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989). Gens, Xavier (2008) Frontière(s), Film. Guberman, Ross Mitchell (ed.) Julia Kristeva Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Hemmingson, Michael. ‘In the Scorpion Garden: “Hogg”’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer 1996), 16(2): 125–8, p. 126. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). ———. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 42 Ibid., p. 181.

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———. Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). ———. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). ———. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). ———. Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keefe, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002). ———. This Incredible Need To Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986). Oliver, Kelly. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Reé, Jonathan. ‘Revolutionary Archeology: Julia Kristeva and the Utopia of the Text’, Paragraph (Modern Critical Theory Group) 1997, 20(3): 258–69. Rehmeire, Adam (2010) The Bunny Game, Film. Russ, Joanna. Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts: Feminist Essays (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1985). Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010). Tucker, Jeffery A. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).

Chapter 15

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The New Mobile Subject: Space, Agency, and Ownership in the Techno-Utopian Age Judy Ehrentraut

Introduction The digital devices we carry around with us have a unique way of defining our practices of embodied space throughout the day, particularly if they are devices that allow us to connect to others. In Natural Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark argues that humans have always had a natural proclivity towards tool-based human extension, beginning with the first uses of speech and language.1 With the development of recent smart technologies, he sees us resembling cyborgs, though not through the merging of flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being “human-technological symbionts”2 that are starting to accept machines as tools for overcoming human limitations. Some posthumanist thinkers tend to look at emerging technologies as enhancing the body, with the eventual goal of transforming the human into the posthuman, which relates to Donna Haraway’s rendition of the cyborg.3 The terms “cyborg” and “posthuman” have been used in the media to suggest that our relationship with technology is precarious, and that as our technologies evolve, we in turn become more and more reliant on them. For the purposes of this study, I will be using “posthuman” to refer to a progressive cyborg entity that embraces technology as a tool for human enhancement without sacrificing its agency and identity. Like Haraway, I reject traditional notions of the science-fiction cyborg that provoke images of a being ruled and overtaken by technology, and acknowledge that humans and machines have always overlapped. In viewing the cyborg as a natural step towards our posthuman progression, what I call the “new mobile subject” is part of an evolving balance between the human organic body and its technical self. Throughout this chapter, I will examine the posthuman as a speculative, transient being that is constantly seeking to re-define

1 Andy Clark, “The Naked Cyborg,” in Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10. 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

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itself in the wake of technological developments, while representing a utopian framework for man’s acceptance of technology as a tool for extension. Utopian desires fulfill an important function, in that they serve to remind us that the world does not necessarily have to be exactly as it is.4 From a utopian standpoint, technology has been one of our foremost tools for engineering change, from the invention of the wheel to the first networked computer. Every day, new technological tools are developed to enhance our lives, and just as they continuously change in order to serve our needs, our ways of living continue to shift the more we utilize them. Before the creation and accessibility of portable productivity devices such as laptops and mobile phones, areas of business and leisure were clearly defined and restricted to specified locations. The original telephone (and desktop computer) forced users to remain geographically fixed, either at home or at the office, yet the mobile phone, a highly familiar, user-oriented device, has been hailed as a crucial part of “the needs and hopes of the modern individual.”5 The word “hope” comes up repeatedly in utopian language, and for Ernst Bloch, it connotes a form of anticipation within the “not-yet-conscious,” the place where utopian impulses are born.6 In thinking about how mobile technology has been shaping our levels of connectivity, I view the advent of the mobile device as the start of a dramatic cultural shift that sees individuals exercising more control over their spaces of communication and productivity. According to Timo Kopomaa, mobile devices, through their networked capabilities, allow us the luxury of “enhancing both temporal and social efficiency”7 through the re-organization of time and space. In this study, I aim to explore how developments in userresponsive mobile technologies are progressively helping us re-define our spaces of engagement and communication. When we use our mobile phones to communicate with others, I believe that our bodies enter into a new, digitized space where they connect with other digital bodies, but this does not necessarily mean that our physical bodies are being left behind. There has been a tendency for cyberspace to be regarded as a platform for the body’s abandonment of its physical flesh and re-materialization in a virtual form, as described by William Gibson in his 1980s cult novel Neuromancer.8 Outside of fiction, cyberspace theory has seen radical interpretations of René Descartes’ thinking that illustrates how the body serves to spatially limit the

4 Michael Hauskeller, “Utopia in Trans- and Posthumanism,” in Posthumanism and Transhumanism, ed. Stefan Sorgner et al. (Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2013), 1. 5 Timo Kopomaa, “Mobile Phones, Place-centred Communication and Neocommunity,” Planning Theory and Practice, 3, no. 2 (2002): 241. 6 Ernst Bloch, “Introduction,” in The Principle of Hope Vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 4. 7 Kopomaa, “Mobile Phones,” 242. 8 William Gibson, Neuromancer, 54.

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self.9 For example, cyber theorist Michael Heim suggests “in cyberspace minds are connected to minds, existing in perfect concord without the limitations or necessities of the physical body.”10 In cyber-discourse, there has been the increasing acceptance that our minds separate from our bodies, and that cyberspace provides an escape for the mind from the body’s containment. This dualist ontology has been challenged by theorists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argues that the mind and body are not reducible to their parts,11 and later by N. Katherine Hayles,12 who makes the distinction between the body and embodiment, but acknowledges that the body and mind can still be unified. I suggest that rather than view the physical and the digital as separate entities, it is through networked devices like the mobile phone that the body is able to create a hybrid space for itself that acts as a bridge between the physical and the digital. The fantasy of existing elsewhere does not have to be escapism, but rather a powerful tool for re-imagining one’s self in a new space. Furthermore, the body’s identity can be re-defined not only by its mobility, but also by its capacity to extend itself beyond physical limitations. As emerging posthumans, I argue that we can use our personal devices to re-define and augment the spaces we occupy through the practice of integrative digital spatial embodiment. Thus, I am interested in how mobile smartphones generate a new understanding of subjectivity and the recreation of the body, rather than the disappearance of the body and the dissolution of the self. Throughout this chapter, I intend to show that mobile phones and their connective capacities are making way for a “new mobile subject,” a being who can reclaim ownership of his/her body within a digital space of self-propelled productivity, leisure, and sociability. Posthumanism vs. Transhumanism Before moving forward with the discussion surrounding mobile phones as technological tools for human enhancement, it is necessary to establish a theoretical framework through which to develop the new mobile subject with respect to utopia. Utopian thinking comes up in both transhumanism and posthumanism debates, though the term “posthuman” is regarded very differently in each. As Michael Hauskeller argues, transhumanism is generally motivated by a desire to create a better world through the use of already existing or future technologies for human 9 Ingrid Richardson and Carly Harper, “Corporeal Virtuality: The Impossibility of a Fleshless Ontology,” Body, Space and Technology Journal, 2, no. 2 (2002): np. 10 Ibid. 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Spatiality of One’s own Body and Motility,” in The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 114. 12 N. Katherine Hayles, “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments,” Configurations, 10, no. 2 (2002): 298.

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enhancement.13 The idea is that by improving the capabilities of humans, we will eventually change into superior beings known as “posthumans.” Nick Bostrom, a leading transhumanist academic, suggests that posthumans will know neither ageing nor death,14 while William Sims Bainbridge states that technological progress can eventually lead to a higher evolutionary model in “a golden age of prosperity.”15 These are fairly common utopian outlooks shared by those who see humanity being saved by converging technologies. For Hauskeller, the one thing that unites transhumanists is their belief that humans are free to invent themselves and are unconfined by natural boundaries. In essence, underneath the surface of a transhumanist is a humanist.16 In contrast, for theorists such as Cary Wolfe, posthumanism is an anti-humanist philosophy that seeks to overcome the prejudices of humanism. While humanism represents the will to control so-called nature, Wolfe’s rendition of posthumanism does not regard humans as superior beings because they are not ontologically distinct from animals. 17 Thus, the posthuman in this sense is not an entity of an imagined future, but an entity that has existed so long as we have been connected to our technologies. Donna Haraway’s declaration that “we are cyborgs”18 assumes that the human is merely a myth, an ideological construct that suggests a distinction between the human and the non-human, which there is not. Thus, this ideology of the human, born out of humanism, is what posthumanism seeks to deconstruct as it intercepts the traditional cultural narrative of the human as it has been theorized by modernity.19 From a posthumanist perspective, transhuman enhancement enthusiasts make the “mistake” of endorsing technologies because they provide far-ranging possibilities for future human progress.20 Posthumanists promote these technologies as well, but with the understanding that technology has been something we have incorporated into our lives and bodies since the discovery of our early tools. Whether people embrace it or not, technology confuses boundaries between human and non-human, organic and biological, human and machine.21 Yet, this confusion between boundaries should not be seen as a threat, but as an opportunity to embrace the ever-changing concept of what it means to be human.22 13 Hauskeller, “Utopia in Trans- and Posthumanism,” 2. 14 Nick Bostrom, “Letter from Utopia,” Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology, 2, no. 1 (2008): 4. 15 Hauskeller, “Utopia in Trans- and Posthumanism,” 3. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2010), xii. 18 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150. 19 Hauskeller, “Utopia in Trans- and Posthumanism,” 5. 20 Ibid. 21 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, np. 22 Ibid.

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With respect to the posthuman debate, I am more interested in how individuals can use technology to gain more control over their embodied spaces than whether or not we should be seeking to master technology. Hauskeller points out that posthumanism champions the redistribution of power through the re-definition of identity,23 so rather than resisting and fearing the increasing levels of technicity that invade our lives, we need to accept that we have always had a natural inclination towards technology. In looking at the shift from what we have come to define as the conventional body to the digitized body, I hope to evaluate how our engagements with digital devices provide us a new measure of embodied autonomy and freedom in our increasingly technologized culture. The Reception of the Mobile Phone There has been much excitement in the past decade surrounding the communicative potential for interactivity, and even more excitement for the products that have made it possible for people to connect to others with such ease. For all of the praise that these technologies have received, there has also been a subsequent backlash of critics who fear that we are becoming too dependent on and attached to our personalized mobile devices.24 Today, mobile phones allow us the luxury of being constantly connected to people, information, and events that would be otherwise inaccessible to us, so much so that we feel a personalized connection to the medium. Yet, mobile phones were not originally designed to be used in this way. In the 1990s, the newly developed mobile phone was often shared among family members as a portable phone, used primarily for emergencies when one was not within the vicinity of their landline. Over the years, a more individualized relationship with mobile devices has developed, turning the mobile phone from a household possession into a personalized possession. Sherry Turkle argues that near-ubiquity of handheld mobile devices are “objects for psychological projection” in which one can experience a “second self.”25 Of course, this has been the case ever since personal computers could connect to the Internet, but Turkle points out that the newfound intimacy we have with our devices in the last several years suggests a “tethered self,”26 as we are constantly connected/reachable through the communication device on our person. Similarly, Richard Ling puts forth that mobile phone services are largely focused on individual consumption: one’s address book, their sent and received private text messages, and personal

23 Hauskeller, “Utopia in Trans- and Posthumanism,” 7. 24 Amber Case, “We Are All Cyborgs Now,” filmed Dec 2010, TedWomen. 25 Sherry Turkle, “Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self,” in Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, ed. James F. Katz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 121. 26 Ibid.

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preferences such as ring tones, wallpapers, and even the specific model of the phone itself.27 Furthermore, as Timo Kopomaa points out, the stimulation of digital life in public space allows individuals to escape the physical space of their homes without actually ever leaving home. In utopian terms, “to be mobile is part of the coveted freedom offered by the city life.”28 When re-negotiating workspace from leisure space, the mobile phone gives people a broader range of movement as they are able to choose when and where to conduct their business. Since they afford continuous connectivity and accessibility while on the move, life is no longer structured by the defined rhythms of leisure time and work time.29 People can arrange their schedules, communicate with others, search for information, and reprioritize tasks according to their individualized conception of personal mobility. It is this individualized identity formation that I am most concerned with when it comes to what technology can offer us. Certain functions of a mobile smartphone can be read as stand-alone signifiers for how people are using these devices to shape their digital identities. E-mail, social media and texting can be emblematic of community and representation, while alarms and calendars are functions of schedule regulation.30 For this study, I will focus on how various methods of communication via mobile devices, whether through email, text, phone calls, or video chats, speak to a connectivity between humans that is always proximate, always accessible, and always on. Mobile smartphones have propelled a cultural shift that is shaping our progression into utopian digital entities developing alongside technology. Aside from a desire to alter our environment, I suggest that part of our shared utopian impulse is to seek the stability of our individual identities and to control how we exist within our own spaces. Through the popularity and accessibility of mobile technologies, we have been granted access to a multitude of social mediums with which to formulate different identities. These identities are digital versions of ourselves that exist across various media platforms not dictated by our biological makeup. Here, I am referring to our fragmented identities while at work, in social situations, during leisure time, with loved ones, or while alone. I believe that through mobile usage, we broadcast our intellectual selves to a multitude of receivers in a communicative cyberspace, regardless of where our bodies actually are.31 27 Richard Ling and Leslie Haddon, “Mobile telephony, mobility and the coordination of everyday life,” in Machines That Become Us, ed. J. Katz (Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 2003), 247. 28 Timo Kopomaa, “Mobile Phones, Place-centered Communication and Neocommunity,” Planning Theory and Practice, 3, no. 2 (2002): 242. 29 Ibid. 30 Anandam P. Kavoori, “Cultural Criticism and the Cell Phone,” in Digital Media Criticism (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 88. 31 Sherry Turkle, “Introduction,” in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 2.

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According to Raul Pertierra, cyberspace has frequently been regarded as a utopian space in which users are able to project not only their imaginations, but also the multiple versions of themselves that have been created in response to cultural demands that fracture identities.32 Sherry Turkle’s discussion of cyber identities suggests that mobile technology pushes us to think about how we would like our digital selves to be presented and seen by others, which results in entirely new identity formations.33 In order to establish the new posthuman mobile subject as an entity that embraces the convergence of technology with the body and mind, it is crucial to look at how our physical and intellectual selves are being affected by mobile technologies. Thus, for the remainder of the chapter, I will survey several ways in which mobile phones allow us to extend ourselves beyond our physical capabilities. I will examine topics such as physical and intellectual transcendence through telepresence, the ability to influence socially constructed time through micro-coordination, and control over one’s environment through embodiment in a hybrid space, which sees the body merge with technology in cyberspace. Humans as Natural Cyborgs Since long before today’s technological advancements, our bodies have been a source for technology. The first tools used by mankind are ultimately technologies that are linked to bodily enhancement. Machines may be external or foreign to the organic human body, but once they are incorporated into the body, the divide is not so clear. Clark argues that a distinctive characteristic of humans is that their tendency to accept objects into their cognitive systems creates a distributed functionality he calls the “extended mind.”34 He believes that the joining of technology with the organic body has perpetuated the mind’s intrinsic desire for transformation and expansion, leading to a more self-aware human being. Similarly, as Pierre Levy argues, we as humans have always been driven by the desire to enhance our capabilities and “to exceed physical limits.”35 Our utopian impulse is dictated by the need to consistently improve

32 Raul Pertierra, “Mobile Phones, Identity And Discursive Intimacy,” Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, 1, no. 1 (2005): 25. 33 Turkle, “Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self,” 122. 34 Andy Clark, “Cyborgs Unplugged.” Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31. 35 Pierre Levy, “The Virtualization of the Body,” in Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 42.

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and renegotiate our place within the world, which relates to our ability to extend ourselves beyond physicality through technology.36 Debates surrounding technological mastery have spurned the term “technological utopianism,” which refers to the belief that technology is the means through which we will achieve a perfect society.37 This society would, hypothetically, be a melding of new tools and machines created by man for man’s enhancement. It should be stated that often, utopia will be associated with words like “perfect” or “perfection,” yet these terms imply something finished, completed, and most importantly, without future change. As Lyman Tower Sargent points out, even in early utopian literature, authors such as Thomas More did not imply that his society in Utopia was perfect, nor did Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward.38 For this study, I would like to approach utopia with the recognition that it was never meant to be a depiction of unchanging perfection. Utopia should seek to be more than an ideology, and should not insist on conformity to one model. Additionally, utopia must be looked to for enhancement, not perfection, and must not eliminate the possibility for change.39 Thus, technological utopianism should not be viewed as a formula for the perfect society, since it suggests that with the creation of the right kind of technology, a more desirable model of the human will emerge. If techno-utopian visions are systems that seek to control the world via technology, this advocates a mastery over nature that falls more in line with transhumanism than posthumanism. The problem with seeing nature as a binary opposition of technology that should be controlled, is that it disregards the fact that nature is and always has been technical and mediated, and made available to us via our technological tools. If we are to believe Haraway’s argument that we have always been cyborgs, then the body, a natural, organic entity, is inherently technological. Clark comes at this from a distinctly different perspective than Levy and is convinced that the potent cultural icon known as the cyborg is actually a disguised version of our ever-present biological nature. For Clark, one of the distinctive elements of human intelligence and the human brain are their ability to enter into complex relationships with artificial constructs.40 This ability does not always depend on technological implants merging with flesh, but often with humanity’s openness to information-processing mergers where machines do not need to 36 Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers our lived experience of perceptual “reach” as always already extendible through tools and artifacts, or “technologies.” He sees the coupling of technologies and bodies as articulated through what he calls “intercorporeality,” which describes the constant relationship between our bodies, space, and the surrounding environment that we seek to control. As Merleau-Ponty claims, the body “applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument” (The Primacy of Perception, 5). 37 Howard P. Segal, “The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism,” in Technological Utopians in American Culture (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 10. 38 Lyman Tower Sargent, “In Defense of Utopia,” in Diogenes, 53, no. 1 (2006): 12. 39 Ibid. 40 Clark, “Cyborgs Unplugged,” 33.

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physically intrude on the body. He believes that we have been designed from birth to exploit our deep neural plasticity in order to merge with our tools, however they may enhance our daily experiences. Clark’s position is very much influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose iteration of the “body-subject” recognizes that one’s own body is the result of a perceptual openness to the outside world. Even prior to the development of online networks and mobile devices, the line between the biological, organic self and the technological world has never been clearly defined. Merleau-Ponty believes that bodies have never truly been “natural,” for they are and have always been categorized by their technics.41 Clark regards humans as “creatures whose minds are special precisely because they are tailor-made for multiple mergers and coalitions,”42 which lends itself to the idea that our minds are inherently geared towards self-transformation and enhancement. When looking at the brain’s tendency towards plasticity and open-endedness, it is no surprise to a cognitive scientist like Clark that we are willing to see non-biological mechanisms as extensions of ourselves. With many of our day-to-day interactions being facilitated by our ability to write e-mails, send text messages, or make phone calls, it is little wonder that we feel as if we have lost a part of ourselves if our smartphones go missing, or our laptops crash. This being said, Clark is not entirely celebratory of our natural cyborgism, or our inclination to develop such close relationships and reliance on our tools. As humans, our tools have consistently been developed in service of our needs, but this has come at the expense of our minds being shaped by those very same tools. For McLuhan, all tools are media that are considered extensions of our bodies, while “media can be viewed as artificial extensions of our sensory existence.”43 As a result, technologies have become more like a part of our mental apparati and less like tools altogether. Clark argues that these only remain tools when they are being operated unconsciously by us, but as our cognitive systems are constantly changing, so are our needs.44 Mobile Smartphones in Culture There is no doubt that developments in mobile telephony have engineered the smartphone with respect to the changing needs of consumers. In recent years, 41 Clark, “The Naked Cyborg,” 8. The term “technics” was first used by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934), and is defined as the human tendency to control and direct forces of nature. Bernard Stiegler, in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998), sees technics as a process of the exteriorization of the human through extensions such as prosthesis, among other things. 42 Ibid., 7. 43 Marshall McLuhan, “Communication and Communication Art: A Historical Approach to the Media,” Teachers College Record, 57, no. 2 (1955): 105. 44 Clark, “The Naked Cyborg,” 7.

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smartphones have been playing a major role in our communication revolution, bringing forth significant transformations in personal identity, embodied spatiality and virtual public spaces. Raul Pertierra, in an attempt to gauge the effects of mobile smartphones on notions of subjectivity and identity, surveys mobile phone users in the Philippines. I cite this study because of Pertierra’s insistence that even in rural areas of a country as large as the Philippines, mobile phones are extremely pervasive in a way that is comparable to North America.45 In the Philippines, cell phone usage is referred to as “mania,” with reference to the manic psychological need to have a mobile phone on hand or nearby, signifying an attachment to the device.46 Similarly, Mimo Ito’s body of work focuses on the mobile phone’s cultural significance amongst Japanese youth. Known as “keitai,” the mobile phone’s Japanese term can be roughly translated to “something you carry with you.”47 This is slightly different from the way in which the West names its “cellular” phones, a term that relates to technological infrastructure, and the UK’s term for “mobile” phone, which implies freedom of movement. In Japan, it seems as though the “ketai” is less indicative of notions of freedom of motion and new technical capabilities and more related to the personal connection one has with a device that supports communication, while being a mundane, lightweight presence in everyday life. Ito comments that the Japanese in particular see their mobile smartphones as personal and intimate devices (hence the popularity of customized phone charms) that are used at all times, even in the home.48 Japan has long since been a leading developer of mobile phone technology, which has resulted in the prevalent “keitai culture” that emerged some years earlier than the equivalent in North America. Clark’s research has led him to investigate mobile phone usage in Finland, where Finnish youngsters commonly call their smartphones “kanny,” an extension of the hand, which suggests that it too is a tool used with one’s hands as well as a technological addition to the hand.49 In looking at the mobile phone as an extension of the body, it is not difficult to relate it to a kind of prosthetic limb to wield and to control, and on which we come to rely on for carrying out daily tasks. Given this, I believe that the cyborgian overtones present in “mania,” “keitai,” and “kanny” as extensions of the hand, both psychologically and physically, suggest that the optimal operation of such devices requires a melding of the body and mind with technology.

45 Raul Pertierra, “Mobile Phones, Identity And Discursive Intimacy,” Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, 1, no. 1 (2005): 25. 46 Sanaz Mani, “Mobile Technologies and Public Spaces” (Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2005), 19. 47 Mizuko Ito et al., “Introduction,” Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, ed. Mizuko Ito (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1. 48 Ito, “Introduction,” 2. 49 Clark, “The Naked Cyborg,” 9.

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In recent years, we have been reformulating our lives around the possibilities that mobile phones provide, especially the enhanced ability to coordinate activities with others independent of our physical location. Mobile phones allow us to initiate communication with an individual in whatever space we are occupying, and we are not limited to calling their geographical location. From the perspective of the receiver, the “communicative space” of the mobile phone user is only created once he/she decides to enter into it. As Pertierra states, “the emergence of nomadic interfaces makes possible mobile imaginary spaces to be enacted and constructed within physical space. Hence, nomadic technologies have a role in the construction of narrative spaces. They allow virtual spaces to be mobile, bringing them into the physical world.”50 In essence, since mobile phones do not require us to be in a specific location to receive and send information, our everyday efficiency is drastically increased. With a quick swipe of our fingers, we can arrange and re-arrange meetings, all while engaged in other tasks. The tasks that we manage via our mobile phones may seem mundane, but the fact is, the mobile phone has given us the opportunity to exercise greater control over our “micro-coordination.”51 For Ling, this refers to the flexibility that the mobile phone grants its users when they are able to conveniently schedule and reschedule events as they are happening. For example, if one gets out of a meeting earlier than expected, he/ she can easily renegotiate the previously agreed-upon time of their next meeting. Hence, the mobile phone promotes bodily extension, as people are able to be in several places at once, yet we must not forget the mind’s part in the re-negotiation of space and time. As Clark states, mobile phone users are not just investing in new gadgets when they purchase new smartphones; they are opting for “mindware upgrades” in the form of “electronic prostheses capable of extending and transforming their personal reach, thought, and vision.”52 Bodily Extension and Telepresence Mobile phone usage seeks to replicate face-to-face communication through physical and intellectual extension, which is made possible through telepresence. Frank Biocca argues that the desire to achieve telepresence comes from the human need to use media to experience “physical transcendence” over the space that the body is grounded in.53 For Biocca, telepresence facilitates a sense of immediate proximity to people, places, and events via technology. In essence, “telepresence 50 Pertierra, “Mobile Phones, Identity And Discursive Intimacy,” 25. 51 Ling and Haddon, “Mobile telephony, mobility and the coordination of everyday life,” 2. 52 Clark, “The Naked Cyborg,” 10. 53 Frank Biocca, “The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3, no. 2 (1997): 11

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emphasize[s] the use of communication media for transportation” or “a sense of transportation to any ‘space’ created by media.”54 What is important to remember is that telepresence affords “the illusion of ‘being there’ whether or not ‘there’ exists in physical space or not.”55 In order for this to occur, mobile technology needs to afford human-machine symbiosis, or, when advanced communication interfaces are specifically designed to allow users to feel like they exist in another space. To project oneself through a mobile device is to experience telepresence, which is a harmonious melding of the body, the mind, and a technological apparatus. Once this is established, cyberspace is a platform, “a three-dimensional consensual locus or, in the terms of science fiction author William Gibson, a ‘consensual hallucination’ in which data may be visualized, heard, and even felt.”56 Thus, I propose that mobile smartphones allow one both the experience of telepresence through an interface, and the entrance into cyberspace upon engaging in communication of any kind. The mobile phone introduced instantaneous communication while removing the element of the fixed location for the sending and receiving equipment.57 Once we became accustomed to the idea of telepresence, we accepted that networked devices such as mobile phones, laptops, or even desktop computers could bend time and space in order to bring people thousands of miles apart into face-to-face interactions instantaneously. In On the Internet, Hubert L. Dreyfus points to the “Net enthusiasts” who have promised that through telepresence, “each of us will be able to transcend the limits imposed on us by our body.”58 Dreyfus differentiates himself from these theorists who believe that through technology, we are on our way to discarding our situated bodies and becoming ubiquitous and eventually immortal.59 Though there is a utopian element to the merits of disembodiment and human extension via technology, Dreyfus points out that our relationship to the world through technology can affect our overall sense of reality in detrimental ways; telepresence may give one the appearance and feeling of being present and influential in cyberspace, but this phenomenon can be quite dystopic. He argues that much is lost when human beings relate to each other by way of teletechnology, for our interactions with distant objects are mediated by a transmission across a network. He reminds us that we should “remain open to the possibility that, 54 Biocca, “The Cyborg’s Dilemma,” 12. 55 Ibid. 56 Allucquere Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. M. Benedickt (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994), 83. 57 Ling and Haddon, “Mobile telephony, mobility and the coordination of everyday life,” 2. 58 Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Introduction,” in On the Internet (Second Edition) (New York: Routledge, 2009), 4. 59 Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real,” in On the Internet (Second Edition) (New York: Routledge, 2009), 49.

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when we enter cyberspace and leave behind our … selves, and thereby gain a remarkable new freedom never before available to human beings, we might, at the same time, necessarily lose some of our crucial capacities.” 60 It should be noted that Dreyfus’ arguments about telepresence are not with direct reference to mobile phones, yet if we are to consider mobile devices as mediums that promote telepresence, the connectivity that we experience while operating these devices has the potential to alienate us from what we are actually engaging in. The assumption is that the more interactivity and feedback teletechnology allows us, the more we will have a sense of being fully present with distant objects and people.61 When we use a mobile phone to communicate with someone in another city via videoconference and voice chat, a representation of our bodies is communicating in cyberspace across a network, and we are receiving a transmission in return, albeit a skewed and mediated one. Dreyfus insists that “even though interactive control and feedback may give us a sense of being directly in touch with the objects we manipulate, it may still leave us with a vague sense that we are not in touch with reality.”62 Dreyfus’ points call forth some problems associated with instruments that extend our bodies, since “along with such indirect access comes doubts about the reliability … by means of such prostheses.”63 At the same time, the continuous development of mobile smartphones suggests that telepresence will be a continuously dynamic enterprise, and the more the technology is able to reproduce our bodies to carry across networks, the more we will feel as if we are truly existing in multiple spaces simultaneously. Today, mobile devices are no longer used solely for voice conversations; with the popularity of videoconferencing applications such as Skype and Google Hangouts, any kind of interaction, whether casual or professional, can be conducted across a mobile platform in which users can broadcast their live image and voice instantaneously. Dreyfus mentions that our sense of being “in touch” with reality is contingent upon whether we can control distant events and receive perceptual feedback of things as they are happening. Full, harmonious telepresence is supposedly only possible through a completely transparent display system, high resolutions images, multiple feedback channels, and most importantly, consistent, instantaneous information processing throughout all of these.64 If this is the future goal of telepresence, I believe that with further development of real-time, multi-channel teletechnology, we will eventually get even closer to experiencing the ideal. However, this is not to say that our current technology has not allowed us to experience some form of telepresence, especially in cyberspace via computers. Considering the prevalence of avatars, second-selves and self-made identities that exist in cyberspace, it is worth looking 60 Dreyfus, “Introduction,” 6. 61 Dreyfus, “Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real,” 56. 62 Ibid., 53–4. 63 Ibid., 52. 64 Ibid.

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at how individuals have come to exist in environments that are outside of their physical selves.

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Cyberspace Frederic Durieu, in his discussion of the body’s disappearance and its reinvention and reshaping in cyberspace, postulates that the body is a visual metaphor for identity in the physical world. For him, cyberspace is a doorway to “identity tourism,” where it becomes possible to rebel against biological body concepts because as cyborgs, we are not defined by physicality.65 On the Internet, the physical body seems as though it is of no consequence, and communication is reduced to a body-free representation of the digital self. Though this opportunity to leave the body behind may feel like liberation, Durieu reminds us that the relationship between body and self is not eliminated.66 When our bodies are inserted into cyberspace, it is difficult to determine whether the body is still distinct from the machine, and whether the new electronic body can be linked to the natural organic body. With the growing popularity of applications, online games, and social media platforms, there is a stronger need now more than ever to theorize the human body’s existence within cyberspace and its communities. Historically, the utopian impulse has focused heavily on the planning of idealized communities and societies, particularly between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.67 With respect to this study, I am less concerned with the formation of idealized communities insofar as urban planning and infrastructure, for my interest lies with how mobile technology has encouraged users to renegotiate their existence within virtual micro-communities. Part of what makes the utopian impulse effective is that it fundamentally rests on the concept of a future that we cannot currently imagine because it is not yet realized. 68 If utopia is predicated on the idea that dreams of a better future are possible so long as they are not limited by current infrastructure, we must be able to think beyond the world at present. Cyberspace is a virtual environment detached from the physical world, a place we can use to create new types of communities and identities for ourselves that were not previously available. Through mobile phone usage, I see the body as entering into a newly augmented cyberspace the moment the user interacts with their device. Through engagement with social media, email, texting and/or phone calls, the user is transported into cyberspace and is able to interact with others through their cyborg body, but again, this does not mean that the physical body disappears. 65 Roberto Simanowski, “The Body in Cyberspace: Invented, Morphed, Generated, Dismissed,” Paris Connection (April 2003). 66 Ibid. 67 Mia Reinoso Genoni, “The Utopian Impulse,” 12 June–7 September 2009. 68 Bloch, “Introduction,” 4.

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Mark Hansen is another theorist who does not believe that cyberspace fully separates the physical body from its digital counterpart. He states that this view of cyberspace is a “functionalist fantasy” that perpetuates the dualism of real vs. virtual, and does not think of the virtual world as a total simulacrum, or as a fully immersive, self-contained world.69 Instead, Hansen proposes what he calls the “mixed reality” paradigm, which is predicated on the idea of the body existing in a space that is neither wholly virtual nor physical.70 When an individual makes a call on their mobile phone, for example, the mixed reality paradigm assumes that they have instantaneously created a new space that does not require them to abandon their physical body in order to enter the virtual space of the telecommunication interaction. In mixed reality, just as the body is still the primary access to the “real” world, it is also used as the vessel to access the virtual. The role of the body, argues Hansen, is based in the sensation, ability and perception of tactility and visual perception,71 while the mixed reality paradigm suggests that cyberspace is not an exclusively technical/virtual ecosystem. Rather, cyberspace is a mixed reality that combines real and virtual space that the body can exist in without the user experiencing disembodiment, or without the need to give up the physical body. Cyborgs Anne Balsamo argues that when technology and the body are joined, “machines assume organic functions and the body is materially redesigned through the use of new technologies of corporeality.”72 Balsamo’s study does not specifically address mobile phone usage, but focuses more heavily on how media such as television refashions the “natural” body. By the end of the 1980s, the West was introduced to the idea of biological and technological merging, which has been a significant figuration in postmodernity. In redefining the conception of man, it has been necessary in postmodernism to let go of the idea that the body is no more than an organic, fixed part of nature. The body, argues Balsamo, is a boundary figure that is both organic/natural and technological/cultural.73 Like Haraway’s “cyborg body” which serves to break barriers, the cyborg body can be freed from its pre-meditated constraints of identity such as woman, black, heterosexual, etc. Moreover, the cyborg model can be used to discuss utopian fantasies of disembodiment and the escape from the flesh, as the opportunity to exist in a space other than that of one’s 69 Mark Hansen, “Introduction: From the Image to the Power of Imaging: Virtual Reality and the Originary Specularity of Embodiment,” in Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 5. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 6. 72 Anne Balsamo, “Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture,” Body & Society, 1, 3–4 (1995): 214. 73 Balsamo, “Forms of Technological Embodiment,” 215.

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physical body has always been very appealing, especially in literature. In Gibson’s Neuromancer, the hero is able to escape his physical “meat” body by entering cyberspace or virtual reality, and it is with this image that the cyborg in fiction becomes an object of transcendence. According to Howard Rheingold, early users of virtual reality technology would report feeling as if their bodies were re-materializing in different places, and that they were no longer where their physical bodies were, but inside a virtual world.74 In cyberspace, the environment comes to surround the user’s body, enveloping them in a new space even though their body is still situated in the old space. Digital bodies within cyberspace have often been seen as unnatural because they occupy multiple spaces, yet if we look at the cyborg body as a posthuman body, “a hybrid of machine and organism,” 75 this form of transformation and transgression dissolves the boundaries between human and machine, natural and artificial. I suggest that the individual transcends into a hybridized electronic body that exists within the convergence of the real and the virtual, symbolizing a hybridity model. The New Mobile Body In our society, a digitized body is one that is connected to a virtual space by means of “jacking in,”76 which calls to mind an electrode plugged into the brain, or a large pair of VR goggles. In his chapter on cyborgs, Pramod Nayar talks about the human body interfaced with machines, not via flesh merged with wires, but through linkages made by computer networks. Mobile devices are not surgically attached to the organic body, but they do place the body into a feedback loop within a network and ultimately merge the physical body with an interface.77 This kind of cyber body is technologically modified or networked so that it can transcend its physical capabilities by moving beyond its immediate physical, geographic location. Once this cyber body transcends into one or multiple new spaces, it is able to affect those spaces as if it were there physically. This becomes, as Nayar states, a form of disembodiment while simultaneously providing the opportunity for re-embodiment, which refers to the convergence of technology and the body that allows one to extend into other dimensions and overcome physical limitations.78 When the body exists in cyberspace via the mobile phone, users negotiate how they will be represented in that new space. If features such as email, text and social media promote self-representation, it is through the creation of these personal narratives that users can control their virtual identities as others 74 Pertierra, “Mobile Phones, Identity And Discursive Intimacy,” 14. 75 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150. 76 Gibson, Neuromancer, 74. 77 Pramod Nayar, “Bodies,” in An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 66. 78 Ibid., 67.

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will see them. I see mobile smartphones as capable of allowing individuals to write themselves into hybrid spaces that are nomadic, which is different than what desktop computers offer their Internet users, as such interactions exist in fixed spaces. This flexibility has done much to alter people’s understanding of embodied space, and as technology becomes more integrated into everyday life through wearable computing and ubiquitous computing, it becomes necessary to make the distinction between what we know as the cyborg and the new posthuman mobile subject. I have already stated that cyberspace supports the fragmentation of identity, and supports the space of performance for multiple components of the self. Thus, the posthuman created through telepresence comes to represent the convergence of the mind and body in a hybrid space does not require a separation of the two. Conclusion I began this chapter by claiming that the media has sensationalized our relationship with the technologies we have developed, to the point where individuals who carry their mobile phones with them at all times have effectively been deemed “cyborgs.”79 Of course, we cannot dismiss the deep infiltration of digital information that has slowly saturated each moment in our lives. When it comes to mobile smartphones, social media as well as texts, e-mails, video chat and photo sharing are mediating many experiences for those who operate what are anachronistically still called “phones.” Smartphones present us with a multitude of options for connecting with others, giving us the freedom to explore vast universes outside of our physical selves as we command our personally crafted utopian worlds by the swipe of our fingertips. Of course, the notion of constant connectivity has created a backlash where critics complain not only of youths, but of scores of people who are trading “real” connection with virtual connections and experiences. As Nathan Jurgenson argues, with our lost “reality” at stake, more and more people are being told to resist technological intrusions and “aspire to consume less information.”80 Similarly, Turkle’s Alone Together as well as William Power’s Hamlet’s Blackberry all but beg us to shut off our phones and go out into the “real” world, which, without technological mediation, is all of a sudden brighter, cleaner, and with more potential for true connection than ever before. Yet, in viewing “offline” and “disconnected” as the only way to be real and authentic with others and with ourselves, we create what Jurgenson calls a “digital dualism,”81 which is not unlike the dualistic thinking mentioned earlier via 79 Richardson and Harper, “Corporeal Virtuality: The Impossibility of a Fleshless Ontology,” np. 80 Nathan Jurgenson, “The IRL Fetish,” last modified June 28, 2012, The New Inquiry. 81 Ibid.

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Hayles.82 If digital information is portrayed as something that must be absorbed from elsewhere, albeit cyberspace, then what we consume while online and offline becomes largely distinct, and we tend to view our time as divided between being “jacked in” to our devices, or not. As a result, the most common, portable device for jacking in, the mobile smartphone, has become a symbol for leaving the “here and now” for someplace else. As I have argued, both mixed reality and the hybrid space are platforms that support the merging of the physical and virtual body, as well as the mind. By viewing the online and the offline as distinctly different, we miss the fact that, as Jurgenson states, “our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of online and offline.”83 The real and the virtual may not be the same, but we need to be open to the fact that our reality is made up of our relationships to various combinations of technology, in various spaces. The fact is, we are living in an augmented reality that exists “at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online.”84 If this is true, then there is no need to distinguish our experiences as being mediated or unmediated by our mobile phone screens, for we are interacting, broadcasting, and re-identifying ourselves within the hybridized space that comprises real people with their already technologized bodies. Undeniably, we have come to understand more about ourselves and our connections to other people, places and events through digital means. These interactions are more fully realized, controlled and mediated not by our devices but by how we use said devices to experience reality. When we operate our smartphones, we are participating in a repetitive feedback loop of simultaneously consuming information and broadcasting our new posthuman bodies across cyberspace. Again, this does not imply that we are losing our physical bodies to cyberspace or even that we are escaping them, but rather that we are progressing into a species that can exist in a hybridized space. The posthuman new mobile subject is as much about the future as it is about the present, and though to some extent we live for our utopian dreams of the future, the utopian impulse could not exist without some desire to improve our existence in the present. Overall, I do not believe that our reception of developing technologies comes from a desire for that technology to let us bypass our weak human bodies, in the hopes of elevating into creatures that command nature. Rather, I view posthuman progression as a natural transformation of what we know as the cyborg that sees the technical mind and body continuing to merge with technological tools. The posthuman should be looked at as a metaphor for a changed, or changing perspective of the human, rather than a radically enhanced replacement for an outdated human model. If we can accept these changes, mobile technologies will 82 Hayles, “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments,” 298. 83 Jurgenson, “The IRL Fetish.” 84 Ibid.

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transform our lives if we are prepared to abandon our preconceived notions of the duality of the human mind and body. The emergence of the posthuman depends on our own self-understanding, and while technology grants us new opportunities, it can be a powerful tool for re-imagining new spaces, where the subject’s identity can be re-defined not only by its mobility, but also by its capacity to extend itself beyond physical limitations. References Balsamo, Anne. “Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture.” Body & Society, 1, no. 3–4 (1995): 215–37. Biocca, Frank. “The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3, no. 2 (1997): 1–29. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope Volume 1. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. Bostrom, Nick. “Letter from Utopia.” Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology, 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–7. Case, Amber. “We Are All Cyborgs Now.” Filmed Dec 2010. TedWomen, 7:53. Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Dreyfus, Hubert L. On the Internet (Second Edition). New York: Routledge, 2009. Genoni, Mia Reinoso. “The Utopian Impulse.” Yale University: Sterling Memorial Library. 120 High Street, New Haven, CT 06511. 12 June–7 September 2009. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Hansen, Mark. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, 1–23. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hauskeller, Michael. “Utopia in Trans- and Posthumanism.” In Posthumanism and Transhumanism, edited by Stefan Sorgner and Robert Ranisch, 1–9. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. ———. “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments.” Configurations, 10, no. 2 (2002): 297–320. Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, edited by Mizuko Ito. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Jurgenson, Nathan. “The IRL Fetish.” Last modified June 28, 2012, The New Inquiry.

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Kavoori, Anandam P. “Cultural Criticism and the Cell Phone.” In Digital Media Criticism, 87–112. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Kopomaa, Timo. “Mobile Phones, Place-centred Communication and Neocommunity.” Planning Theory and Practice, 3, no. 2 (2002): 241–5. Levy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Translated by Robert Bononno. New York: Plenum Press, 1998. Ling, Richard and Leslie Haddon. “Mobile telephony, mobility and the coordination of everyday life.” In Machines That Become Us, edited by J. Katz, 244–66. Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 2003. Mani, Sanaz. “Mobile Technologies and Public Spaces.” Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2005. McLuhan, Marshall. “Communication and Communication Art: A Historical Approach to the Media.” Teachers College Record, 57, no. 2 (1955): 104–10. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Translated by William Cobb. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures. UK: WileyBlackwell, 2010. Pertierra, Raul. “Mobile Phones, Identity And Discursive Intimacy.” Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments, 1, no. 1 (2005): 23–44. Richardson, Ingrid and Carly Harper. “Corporeal Virtuality: The Impossibility of a Fleshless Ontology.” Body, Space and Technology Journal, 2, no. 2 (2002). Sargent, Lyman Tower. “In Defense of Utopia.” Diogenes, 53, no. 1 (2006): 11–17. Segal, Howard P. “The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism.” In Technological Utopianism in American Culture, 10–18. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005. Simanowski, Roberto. “The Body in Cyberspace: Invented, Morphed, Generated, Dismissed.” Paris Connection, April 2003. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures.” In Cyberspace: First Steps, 81–118. Edited by M. Benedickt. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. ———. “Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self.” In Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies, 121–37. Edited by James F. Katz. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2008. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2010.

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Marco Lauri1 Knowledge without action is arrogance. Attributed to Imām Šafi‘ī2

The Quest for Happiness Medieval Arabic philosophical reflection about the ideal social and political order, rooted in Platonic legacy, saw itself, ultimately, as a quest for happiness encompassing both individual and societal levels.3 Tension, if not conflict, between these levels appears to have been a focus of philosophical thinking, at least since Socrates. In general, philosophers have been often interested in ways to reduce conflict and harmonize tension. In Classical and Medieval thought, this tension was commonly understood as relating to contrasts between individual and collective goals. A similar problem comes at the forefront in utopian traditions of thought. Utopian thinking, like many trends of political philosophy, can be said to be looking at ways to ideally harmonize individual and collective goals. Utopian traditions tend, as discursive practices, to differ from other political philosophies in their tendency to question the possibility or desirability of this harmonization within extant social and political order, whose structure and goals are often assumed to be inherently unsatisfactory. This feature has been pointed out in Karl Popper’s well-known critique of utopianism,4 which is, like Classical philosophical ethics and politics, based upon an analysis of social and individual ends. According to Popper, utopian ends would represent the best possible collective ends, but 1 The author wants to thank Elisabetta Benigni, Elisa Freschi, Sara Barchiesi, Lyman Tower-Sargent and Rossella Lupacchini, whose advice has been useful in writing the present chapter. 2 I have not been able to trace either the Arabic original or the exact locus of this quote. I thank Jonathan Edelstein for having brought my attention to it. 3 Erwin Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam, Cambridge University Press, 1968. Gerhard Endress, ‘La via della felicità’ in Storia della filosofia nell’Islam medievale edited by Cristina D’Ancona, Torino, Einaudi, 2005, pp. XXIII–LII. 4 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies. The Spell of Plato, London, Routledge, 1966, ch. 9. Id., ‘Utopia and Violence’ in Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, 1969, ch. 18. See also Lyman Tower-Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5, 1, 1994, pp. 1–37. Id., Utopianism. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 103–14.

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ends are beyond the scope of rational inquiry and determination; thus, divergent individual or collective ends would necessarily be rooted out through violence and tyranny in order to achieve the utopian end; in Popper’s analysis, a utopian project would not able to see legitimate pursuits outside itself.5 Popper sees Plato’s thought as the historical foundation of this form of utopian totalitarian approach; quite convincingly, he charges Plato of having betrayed his master, Socrates.6 As far as Socratic thought is accessible to us, it seems to have been founded on discursive, public inquiry; Plato’s Apology claims this as a merit of Socrates, who, in his words, would be attached to the city by the god as though to a horse that’s great and noble though somewhat sluggish because of its size and needing to be provoked by a sort of gadfly, which is just the way, I think, the god attached me to the city, the sort of person who never ceases provoking you and persuading you and reproaching each one of you the whole day long everywhere I settle.7

Regardless of the historical accuracy of Plato’s portrait of Socrates, he presents Socrates as holding that truth can and should be sought by means of socialized discursive practice. It is this sort of discursive inquiry that Popper himself sees the basis of his own socialized epistemology. Later Platonic dialogues, however, such as Republic and Laws, appear to come to the conclusion that unchecked public use of discursive reason is politically dangerous; after all, Socrates was sentenced to death, an event that Plato must have felt very deeply. Truth is then presented by Plato as a fixed ideal, founded not on the moving ground of public discourse but on an immutable, transcendent reality. Subsequent Platonic thinkers would frequently focus on the individual soul’s path toward this ideal; a theme that also resonates within falsafa. Plato’s writings, most notably the aforementioned Republic and Laws, partake of both political philosophy and utopian thinking, in the sense outlined above;8 in the West and in the Islamicate world, they would have a lasting and widespread impact. Plato explicitly puts the well-being and cohesion of the State as whole far above any concern for the individual, although it would be unfair to follow Popper in accusing the utopian method at large of the same.9 Arabic philosophy, largely shaped in the Platonic and Aristotelian mould, would likewise inherit, and originally elaborate, this set of problems; falāsifa would ask questions about the proper relationship between individual and collective goals,

5 Popper, ‘Utopia and Violence’. 6 Popper, The Open Society, pp. 170–73. 7 Plato, Apology, 30e. Translated by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack. 8 Tower-Sargent, ‘The Three Faces’. 9 Tower-Sargent, ‘The Three Faces’. See also Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, Hemel Hempstead, Philip Allan, 1990.

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individual and collective happiness, and ideal political organization.10 Like its Platonic root, falsafa would usually give its political discussions a marked epistemological and ethical bend; but it tends to refrain from the strongest of antiindividualist Platonic stances. Until recently, the main traditions of Orientalist scholarship have tended to frame their analysis of Arabic philosophy in a vision that put the religious element – Islam – at the forefront, frequently in unsympathetic terms. Early Orientalist studies tended to conceive Arabic philosophy almost as an historical anomaly, assuming that philosophical thought does not fully belong to an alleged ‘Islamic’, ‘Arabic’ or ‘Semitic’ spirit. This essentialist framework can be seen in the stress important scholars like Ernest Renan and Léon Gauthier would put on the social isolation of philosophers like Ibn Rušd (Averroes) or Ibn Ṭufayl. Such analyses singled out the Christian West as the place where philosophical work would really find fertile ground. An example of how influential these kind of views have been can be found in the unfair treatment that even an enlightened soul like Bertrand Russell gave the Arab philosophers: Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry – in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches. Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization, education, books, and learned leisure.11

To be fair to Russell, this passage reports what at his time passed for common academic wisdom, or prejudice; and actually he treats Medieval Western Christian philosophy almost as dismissively. The idea of Arabic philosophy that many general historical introductions in the West tend to convey has not changed very much from presentations similar to Russell’s. This unfortunate situation is not without consequences for the general tone of culture and politics in Western countries, where ‘Islam’ has been the object of media debates, often very confusing 10 Michael Marmura, ‘The Philosopher and Society: Some Medieval Arabic Discussions’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 1, 4, 1979, pp. 309–23. 11 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, Woking, Allen & Unwin, 1947, pp. 447–8. Emphasis mine.

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and grossly ill-informed. While reflecting deeper attitudes, this has been especially the case in the aftermath of 9/11. Two main scholarly traditions dealing with Arabic philosophy emerged around the second quarter of the twentieth century. They are best represented by Henri Corbin and Leo Strauss respectively.12 They would keep some elements of the preexisting essentialist readings, although in a more sophisticated form, recognizing falsafa’s original contributions. Corbin’s approach stressed the Iranian (thus, ‘Aryan’) contribution to Islamic thinking, following Ernest Renan in implying that Iranians brought much of the ‘creative’ component into it. It is well known that Persian individuals and Persian culture played a very important role in the development of Medieval Islamicate culture in all its aspects, including philosophy, but their intellectual endeavours hardly ever had any ‘racial’ connotation. At the same time, Corbin underlined the otherworldly, mystical and illuminative dimension of Islamic philosophy, making it something akin to an esoteric sect. Corbin’s general view of the Muslim philosopher could be broadly summarized in the portrait of a mystic, a stranger to this world who yearns for a higher, transcendent reality, striving for an individual, ineffable intellectual communion with the Divine. Leo Strauss, himself a German Jew who had fled Nazi persecution, was uncomfortable with any openly racial notion; rather than an ‘Aryan-Semite’ polarity, he pointed to a ‘Philosophy-Law’ or ‘Reason-Revelation’ one, grounded in cultures and modes of thought, rather than historical or biological phenomena. In turn, these polarities could be traced back to an ‘Individual-Society’ one. Still, this outlook is open to essentialist readings where religious denomination may become the overarching determining factor of intellectual history: as a prominent disciple of Strauss’s puts it: we tend to assume, with some justification, that the religious tradition in not only an independent factor but in some sense the fundamental and determining one; that it motivates philosophers to reinterpret earlier thinkers and philosophic traditions so as to agree with or justify their own religious tradition.13

Straussian approaches tend to regard the relationship between religion and philosophy in the political realm as a central concern for philosophers. Arabic philosophy is portrayed as caged into an intellectual and social environment hostile to its critical practice, incompatible with Islam (and Judaism) as a religion on a political level; the philosophical message has therefore to be concealed and subtracted from the public discursive ground; in this way, only the qualified, philosophically trained reader could grasp its full meaning. This leads to a 12 Gutas, ‘The Study of Arabic Philosophy’. 13 Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 37.

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strategy of shrouding true philosophical ideas in metaphor and to a stress on the philosopher’s isolation. Straussians would find textual evidence to support some of their views; Arabic Medieval texts in general routinely make use of allegory, metaphor, ellipse and allusion (ramz, iḍmār, išāra); Arabic philosophers often adhere to hierarchical representation of the world which are reflected on their conception of the body politic; their readers are often suggested to be among the select few who can understand philosophical argument. Moreover, Straussian reading of the isolation of the philosopher posits, somewhat anti-historically, that it is an inherent feature of the endeavour of intellectual research, prominently featured in Islam, but not limited to it: philosophy is, at some level, bound to a non-social outcome; the conflict between Revealed Law and Reason Strauss sees highlighted in Medieval Islam and Judaism expresses a difficulty to philosophical practice of any time and place. As a critical, rational debate pursuing the truth in itself, philosophical practice may represent a potential threat to any social order; it is, at a level, subversive in itself. Thence, philosophers should always be cautious in expressing their views and, more critically, the ways they have arrived at them; wise philosophers should only share their methods with qualified fellows, lest they meet the fate of Socrates. In Straussian reading, Socrates’ epistemology of discursive publicity is not a feature of Arabic philosophy; interestingly, Arabic sources tend to portray Socrates himself as a solitary, even asocial figure, conflating him with Diogenes the Cynic.14 The Straussian perspective poses significant problems: texts where philosophers explicitly pinpoint the contrast between philosophy and revealed law are not common. More frequently, philosophical criticism addresses the society’s inadequacy to its own revealed standards. Even for Straussians, harmonization between philosophy and religion, rather than conflict, is the most frequent concern, at least on the surface. The works discussed here address problematically the relationship between religion, society and philosophy; it should be remembered that they form a relatively small portion of Arabic philosophical thought; even in them, this relationship is only part of broader concerns about ethics, epistemology and happiness. As argued convincingly by Gutas,15 contrary to what Strauss and his disciples hold, political thinking at large does not seem to have been a central focus for Arabic philosophy as a whole. Logic, physics, biology, epistemology, were more frequented areas of discussion, although not necessarily socially safer ones: logic, that most falāsifa held to be the epistemic foundation of knowledge, would meet bitter attacks;16 some important implications of Aristotelian physics 14 Marmura, ‘The Philosopher and Society’. 15 Gutas, ‘The Study of Arabic Philosophy’. 16 Cleophea Ferrari, ‘La scuola aristotelica di Bagdad’, in Storia della filosofia nell’Islam medieval, edited by Cristina D’Ancona, Torino, Einaudi, 2005, pp. 352–79. Wafaa Nahli, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī sulla differenza fra la logica greca e la grammatica araba, Studia Graeco-Arabica, 1, 2011.

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challenged core religious tenets, such as bodily resurrection and temporal beginning of the world, proving to be more contentious than political discussions. In both Corbin’s and Strauss’s views, falsafa is seen as largely over-determined by the structures and strictures of religion; Islam, in its outwardly, exoteric aspect, tend to be presented as opposed to philosophical practice. The relative scholarly success of these paradigms has put the analysis of philosophical reflection on isolation and society and the uneasiness of Muslim philosophers in their society at the forefront of extensive investigation. Works of al-Fārābī, Ibn Bāğğa and Ibn Ṭufayl have been the main foci of scholarly interest in this regard.17 This chapter will examine their writing together with the one by Ibn al-Nafīs.18 All these authors have also received some consideration as expressing forms of utopian thinking.19 In all texts considered here, what we call today political philosophy and epistemology are closely intertwined and cannot be meaningfully understood separately. A Place in the City Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī is among the most important and influential representatives of the falsafa. Born in Central Asia, he spent most of his life in the culturally lively schools and courts of tenth-century Baghdad and Syria, where he died. His ‘utopian’20 treatise Mabādi’ Ārā› Ahl al-Madīna al-Fāḍila (The Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, ca. 940 ad) examines philosophically the bases of an ideal polity. Not unlike Plato’s Republic, the work is more concerned with outlining the epistemic, ethical, physical and metaphysical grounds of such a state than with actually describing it in detail, as a modern Western utopian text normally would. Again following Plato, significant attention is given to the rulers of this state, who are, in the ideal case, philosophers and prophets at the same time, endowed with the ability to grasp intellectual truths and to convey them to their fellow citizens through appropriate truthful prophetic imagery, that is, however, divine in 17 Al-Fārābī died in 950 ad, Ibn Bāğğa (Avempace for the Latins) in 1150, Ibn Ṭufayl in 1185. For a discussion of the present topic in their work, see especially Marmura, ‘The Philosopher and Society’. 18 Died in 1288 ad, this author has received less scholarly attention as a ‘philosopher’. 19 Heinrich Simon, ‘Arabische Utopien im Mittelalter’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität, Gesellschaft und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, XII, 3, 1963. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, ‘Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān as Male Utopia’, in The Worlds of Ibn Ṭufayl. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on ‘Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’, Leiden, Brill, 1996, pp. 52–68. Sargent, Utopianism, pp. 77–9. Jacqueline Dutton, ‘“Non-western” Utopian Traditions’ in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. by Gregory Claeys, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 223–58. Marco Lauri, ‘Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages: Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn al-Nafīs’, Utopian Studies, 24, 1, 2013, pp. 23–40. 20 Alireza Omid Bakhsh, ‘The Virtuous City: The Iranian and Islamic Heritage of Utopianism’, Utopian Studies, 24, 1, 2013, pp. 41–51.

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origin, unlike Platonic ‘noble lies’.21 It is in such a city that happiness and eternal salvation can be pursued through enlightened guidance offered by a philosophical rule. In accord with the aforementioned connection between political and epistemic reflection, al-Fārābī presents philosophical wisdom (ḥikma) as politically necessary for collective virtue; socialized knowledge is for him a central requirement for happiness and salvation. According to al-Fārābī, there are two modes of knowledge, both politically relevant. The demonstrative one, based on syllogistic reasoning, conducts to certain knowledge and precise attainment of the Intelligibles as they are whereas its premises are correct. This is the way of philosophers. Its bases are to be carefully taught, but at its highest level, its pursuit is individual. The other mode is the imitative (miṯālī) one, based on metaphors created by the prophet-philosopher’s imaginative faculty (as opposed to the intellectual one) that mirror the truth, but do not identify with it. This is the way through which those who are unable or unwilling to question things philosophically by themselves are directed toward the truth. It must be based on the teachings of a philosopher-king expressing the appropriate images. While the demonstrative method is clearly better to al-Fārābī, both seem to be valid paths to happiness if they occur together in the same community. Both appear socially necessary and both necessitate teaching, society and communication. In the social arena, both should work, ultimately, on the basis of notions originating from true philosophers; both would be cause of disagreement, perdition and confusion otherwise. True to typical Aristotelian views, al-Fārābī seems not to consider the possibility of happiness or wisdom obtained outside the polity. Language and logic, the sciences of social communication, are the foundation of his epistemology, as it emerges from the classification of the sciences he presents in his Iḥṣā’ al-‘Ulūm (Enumeration of the sciences). Al-Fārābī sees the virtuous polity as a hierarchically ordained body ruled by philosophers; like in Plato, it is not important whether it is an individual philosopher or a selected group that governs, as long as they are learned, wise and virtuous. The whole social fabric is bound by religion and law. Al-Fārābī gives the image of the ideal city only in very broad strokes, without detailing the contents of the laws and truths to live according to; in al-Fārābī’s opinion, these may vary legitimately on the fine points, provided that some basic goals and features are firmly established. Philosophical inquiry leading to perfect, contemplative happiness is possible in such a polity, indeed it is a requirement for its rulers that cannot be dispensed with. Those unable to grasp its rational truth are guided by the philosophical leadership, through metaphors they can understand, toward an orderly, harmonious life in this world according to their intellectual station. In this way, people would finally 21 Michèle Broze, ‘Mensonge et Justice chez Platon’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1986, pp. 38–48. Alberto Ghibellini, ‘La nobile menzogna’, Giornale di Metafisica-Nuova Serie, XXVI, 2004, pp. 301–34.

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attain eternal bliss and perfect happiness in the afterlife as incorporeal souls, although it is implied that there are different levels of happiness according to the degree of intellectual understanding. This picture is contrasted with the dystopian depiction of the ignorant, strayed and sinful cities; their rulers either don’t know the truth, or purposefully chose not to act accordingly, giving priority to lesser, mundane goods such as material wealth, glory, or power; these inferior pursuits would in turn bring the soul of the inhabitants of such misguided cities to either oblivion for the ignorant or eternal suffering for the wicked who refuse to act upon the truth they know. Social order and harmony are among al-Fārābī’s main concerns. While we can assume that, in the virtuous polity, philosophers are free to rationally question things within a Socratic discursive space, the ordinary citizen is bound to follow them without questioning the imagery they offer through prophecy, seen as a function of philosophy. Citizens who lack formal philosophical training, but still raise critical questions, may either enter the ranks of the elite, if they are willing to be guided toward this, or fall astray to eternal damnation, victims of their own doubts, if they do fail to accept the truth and conform to it in their acts and opinions. In another work by al-Fārābī, the Siyāsa Madaniyya, (Political Regime) these sort of individuals are called ‘weeds’ (nawābit) as they come out spontaneously, without education.22 Corrupt individuals, the ‘weeds’ who sprout in a virtuous city must be uprooted as potential dangers for the flock, unless they correct themselves.23 Conversely, virtuous individuals who emerge in a misguided polity are ‘worse than dead’,24 presumably with no hope to attain salvation. The Farabian philosopher is then a king, a prophet, and a teacher. Like Plato’s philosopher-king, he25 lives in and for a political community, not just for a personal quest. The pursuit of happiness is presented as collective undertaking in its process and result: teaching and training is assumed to be as central as Plato portrayed it in the Republic, although the highest level of philosophical awareness is implied to be arrived at individually by one’s self reason; in the afterlife, happiness of every individual soul adds to the bliss of the others, so that the more virtuous people are there, the happier will each be in the afterlife. Al-Fārābī’s model then puts a strong 22 Ilai Alon, ‘Fārābī’s Funny Flora. Al-Nawābit as “Opposition”’, Arabica, 37, 1990, pp. 56–90. Michael Kochin, ‘Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60, 3, 1999, pp. 399–416. 23 This vaguely echoes Plato, Laws, Book 10. 24 Marmura, ‘The Philosopher and Society’. 25 Al-Fārābī never rejects explicitly the notion that a woman can rule the virtuous city. He clearly says that women are not different from men in their intellectual abilities, so that a woman can be a philosopher exactly as a man can. However, philosophical competence isn’t the only requirement for a ruler; physical fitness for example is considered. Overall, it is very strongly implied that the philosopher who rules the city has to be a male. I believe that using the masculine pronoun for the philosopher who rules while refraining do so for the philosopher in general would faithfully translate al-Fārābī intentions into a non-sexist linguistic code. Predictably, al-Fārābī uses masculine forms in both cases.

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emphasis on the collective dimension of life: a correct political order is here, according to an assumption shared by Plato and many Muslim sects, essential to individual goals. The correct political order is in turn defined by its virtuous goals, intellectual knowledge (ḥikma) being the foremost among them. Fārābī apparently treads Plato’s footsteps closely in establishing equivalence between individual souls and polities as carriers of moral agency. Correct philosophical practice is only possible in the virtuous city where the whole community is guided by the philosophical elite, or at least by philosophical teachings, and the general populace has no part in this activity. The philosopher’s place in the city should only be at the top of the hierarchy; the hierarchy appears to be based on merit and intelligence, dispensing with the hereditary component hinted at by the Myth of the Metals of Plato’s Republic.26 Al-Fārābī would have a large influence on subsequent thinkers, both in the Islamicate world and the Christian West, as he would come to be seen as an authoritative commentator of Plato and Aristotle, whose philosophies he meant to reconcile. While his legacy was arguably more significant in cosmology, metaphysics and logic, many elements of his social and political thinking would be retaken and critically reexamined by his successors. The Path of Loneliness Ibn Bāğğa from Saragossa lived almost two centuries after al-Fārābī. He would discuss the possibility that some degree of happiness can be reached outside the Farabian ideal polity in his incomplete treatise, al-Tadbīr al-Mutawaḥḥid (The Regime of the Solitary). Al-Fārābī had thought that only a virtuous political order could allow proper philosophical activity, whose practice is interwoven with political rule. The main subject of Ibn Bāğğa’s Tadbīr is the philosophical foundation and description of a strategy to pursue intellectual happiness under a non-philosophical political regime, taking no part in the government at all. Even in such non-ideal polity, where, far from ruling, they live isolated and estranged, philosophers can master their life and actions to uplift themselves to the truth. This solitary pursuit is presented as a lesser evil: Ibn Bāğğa recognizes, if only in principle, the validity of the Farabian/Aristotelian social ideal. Philosophicallyminded individuals are motivated by their superior, intellectual goals, which are shared by the Farabian virtuous polity, but would estrange them from in any other community, where the society is geared towards different, mundane goals. These philosophers emerge spontaneously in the non-philosophical polity and

26 Plato, Republic, Book III. See Omid Bakhsh, ‘The Virtouos City’ and Lauri, ‘Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages’.

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owe nothing of their intellectual nurturing to it; thus, reversing the Farabian terminology, Ibn Bāğğa calls these individuals ‘weeds’.27 In their despicable situation, Ibn Bāğğa suggests these philosophers should seek to emigrate to a Farabian virtuous city if one can be found. Failing that, they should conduct an isolated, self-controlled, retired life, in order to reach what amount of happiness is possible under these sub-optimal circumstances. Interestingly, Ibn Bāğğa notes in passing that the spontaneous appearance of these philosophically-minded people in non-virtuous polities can be a cause of political change toward the virtuous regime; he references to another treatise of his, unfortunately lost to us, where he says to have detailed the topic. This reference supports28 that Ibn Bāğğa basically shared al-Fārābī’s ‘utopian’ outlook to society; collective happiness should be sought after beyond the standing social reality, and isolation should be understood as last resort against dystopian actual societies; not a resignation from the philosopher’s political role, but the problematic statement of the utopian character of political philosophy. However, stating that happiness can be reached through self-imposed isolation, outside and against social reality, Ibn Bāğğa shifts the focus from collective to individual level, providing an important precedent for the ‘self-taught’ characters found in Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn al-Nafīs. Telling the Truth The philosopher and physician Abū Bakr Ibn Ṭufayl lived in Spain a generation after Ibn Bāğğa, under the Almohad caliphs. Ibn Ṭufayl is mostly known for his well-studied narrative treatise, Risālat Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān fī asrār al-ḥikma almašriqiyya (Epistle of Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān on the secrets of Eastern philosophy).29 The epistle is presented by an introduction where Ibn Ṭufayl, addressing a friend, states his willingness to explain the philosophy of Ibn Sīnā as presented in the book called al-Mašriqiyyūn (The Easterners)30 pointing at its truths ‘shrouded in a thin veil’ as they have to be arrived at autonomously. In this introduction he makes reference to previous thinkers and philosophers including, among others, al-Fārābī, Ibn Bāğğa and, predictably, Ibn Sīnā.

27 Alon, ‘Fārābī’s Funny Flora’. 28 Contra Kochin, ‘Weeds’. 29 The book is also widely known in the West with the title of its Early Modern Latin translation by Edward Pococke, Philosophus autodidactus (1671), which spurred remarkable interest among European Early Enlightenment circles and was followed by translations in English, Dutch and other European languages in the following decades. 30 Dimitri Gutas, ‘Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā’s Eastern Philosophy’, Oriens, 1994, pp. 222–41. Taneli Kukkonen, ‘Ibn Ṭufayl and the Wisdom of the East: On Apprehending the Divine’, in Late Antique Epistemology, Palgrave, 2008, pp. 87–102.

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Then Ibn Ṭufayl proceeds to narrate the story; a feral child called Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān (the Living, son of the Awake) lives and grows up alone in a desert island, initially fostered by a doe. As he ages, his intellectual faculties develop and he progressively discovers higher philosophical truths through sensible evidence and unaided reason. Through relentless intellectual effort and self-discipline he attains communion with the First Intellect; this contemplation is the loftiest state of happiness and knowledge a corporeal being can reach, a glimpse of the eternal bliss of afterlife. In the final, shorter part of the narrative Ḥayy meets a kindred soul, Asāl, who reaches the desert island to seek his own spiritual elevation in solitude. In this way, Ḥayy discovers the existence of other rational beings; he sets out with Asāl to the latter’s home island, where he tries unsuccessfully to awaken other people there to his own degree of inner illumination and happiness. After this setback, Ḥayy and Asāl return to isolation in the pursuit of their own individual self-elevation. Al-Fārābī’s trust in the political nature of humankind would not be fully shared by his successors. Ibn Bāğğa postulates isolation as a way out of a not-ideal polity; Ibn Ṭufayl presents isolation in more radical and problematic terms. While Ibn Bāğğa’s theorized loneliness is willingly and consciously self-imposed, operating at an ethical level, what Ibn Ṭufayl narrates is epistemic loneliness; his character comes to know in solitude. His happiness fails to be socialized; society seems actually an unwelcome epistemic distraction to him.31 Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān presents the metaphysical truth within an epistemic framework that is non-verbal and, consequently, non-social. Ḥayy can be no citizen; his knowledge and his goals are entirely non-discursive in their origins. He is not concerned with material ends, much less political ends. This epistemic stance is puzzling, and has raised considerable interest. Scholars have been divided as to whether the main subject matter of the Risālat Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān lies more in the first, longer part reporting the progressive discovery of truth by Ḥayy’s use of senses and reason, or in the shorter conclusive account of his largely frustrated attempt to relate it to others.32 The earlier epistemic focus and subsequent socio-political one are deeply intertwined in Ibn Ṭufayl’s view, as they are in al-Fārābī. The difficulty in conveying philosophical truths directly to unqualified listeners should also be traced back to al-Fārābī’s views, which Ibn Ṭufayl pushes to radical conclusions.33 31 Marmura, ‘The Philosopher and Society’. 32 George Hourani, 1956, ‘The Principal Subject of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1, 1956, pp. 40–46. Lawrence Conrad, 1996, ‘Through the Thin Veil: On the Question of Communication and the Socialization of Knowledge in ‘Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’, in The Worlds of Ibn Ṭufayl. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on “Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān”, Leiden, Brill, 1996, pp. 238–66. Nadja Germann, ‘Philosophizing without philosophy? On the concept of philosophy in Ibn Ṭufayl’s “Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān”’, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales, 74, 2, 2008, pp. 271–301. 33 Marmura, ‘The Philosopher and Society’. Germann, ‘Philosophizing’.

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Solitary life may lead to happiness, appears indeed to be a requirement for it; but it would not provide the intrinsically social, discursive ability required to guide others to their own happiness: philosophical truth and societal life are in tension, partly, because truth is beyond communication. There may be truths and experiences that are ineffable, and would be debased and tainted if put into a discursive game of exchange; as their very nature transcends discourse, they are likely to prove ineffective in the social arena, where different epistemic rules apply.34 Arguably, Ibn Ṭufayl’s idea of the philosophical endeavour as bound to an ineffable individual goal may point to truths of kind.35 However, Ibn Ṭufayl’s utopian ideal is not the ‘one man show’ it may seem. The society Ḥayy meets and fails to steer towards contemplative philosophy is still, by Farabian standards, a well-guided and virtuous one, which follows a revealed divine law taught by a true Prophet. It is properly ruled and people are offered that amount of truth they can safely grasp. We should note as well, with Marmura, that while Ḥayy returns to his desert island with Asāl, they would not form a society among themselves; rather, they concentrate once again on their singular, ineffable quests for otherworldly contemplative happiness. Marmura suggests seeing in the last part of Ḥayy’s narrative a cautionary tale about the limits within which philosophy can be or should be communicated to the general public.36 I would argue that the point is broader: Ḥayy is completely set apart from his human kin by his non-social upbringing, not just his philosophical insight; Ḥayy’s epistemic and semantic isolation would have no purpose otherwise.37 Ḥayy undergoes absolute experience of truth, that is direct, rational and ineffable; but he lacks the social ability to translate it into the shared political realm of discursive discussion.38 After he is taught human language, however, Ḥayy proves able to functionally offer Asāl some pointers and hints of his path to the transcendent truth, although the experience in itself remains communicatively inaccessible. This appears to mirror what Ibn Ṭufayl himself states he wants to do for his friend in the introduction. Asāl, alone, manages to make use of Ḥayy’s teaching. He had been actually seeking isolation to attain superior truth to begin with, and he proves to be uninterested in rulership or the social arena altogether; he is thus set apart as a willing and well-disposed follower of Ḥayy, the philosopher, he who has the ability to see beyond the limits of the discursive screen of our common knowledge. Asāl’s epistemic trust gives him its non-social rewards. With other people, Ḥayy is put into an uncomfortable epistemic position, quite similar to the one Plato describes in his myth of the Cave.39 Plato argued that a 34 Christopher Yorke, The Mystic and the Ineffable: Some Epistemological, Political, and Metaphilosophical Concerns, MA dissertation, Montreal University, 2006. 35 See Germann, ‘Philosophizing’ 36 Marmura, ‘The Philosopher and Society’. 37 Kochin, ‘Weeds’. Lauri, ‘Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages’. 38 Kochin, ‘Weeds’. 39 Lauri ‘Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages’. Yorke, The Mystic.

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philosopher-king is allowed to lie to the flock, constructing myths endowed of an ethical and political function within the community; but for his philosopher, the Cave is still a familiar place; on the contrary, Ḥayy can be said to have never known the Cave at all. A ‘cave’ that may be, here, not just the physical, perishable world of matter, but the discursive realm of society and its shared imagery for which Ḥayy finds no common epistemic or experiential ground.40 Al-Fārābī maintained that different levels of understanding of the same ultimate truth can legitimately exist, and stem ultimately from the same unfailing source; the philosopher can operate politically using those levels appropriately. For Ḥayy, however, this option is not available, as he has no mastery of metaphorical discursive imagery: to keep faithful to the truth obtained through isolation, he has to return to it; his truth cannot be told and believed, it has to be experienced subjectively, as finally does Asāl. The perfect state of the philosophers appears progressively further removed from reality into a realm of intellectual abstraction. Straussian readings see the ‘veil’ that Ibn Ṭufayl claims to have shrouded truth with in his tale as political expediency; I see the author as closer to his character; their truth transcends communication by its very nature, and thus transcends the notion of utopia as discursive construction of the Farabian virtuous polity. Reconciling History A plot similar to the one of Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān is used by the Syrian-Egyptian physician Ibn al-Nafīs in his al-Risālat al-Kāmiliyya fī al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (ca. 1274).41 Here, a spontaneously generated solitary character called Kāmil (‘Perfect’ or ‘Complete’) learns, by himself, Orthodox Muslim beliefs rather than philosophical, contemplative truths. He too meets an organized society that appears to mirror the community of Muslim believers. Kāmil is not at odds with society in any apparent way. At a first reading, individual intellectual research in the Risālat Kāmiliyya seems to be reconciled with happiness obtained socially within the extant historical order culminating in resurrection, as described by the Qur’an. This order can be subjected to rational investigation, and it is presented as providential and necessary. Unlike the three works previously discussed, which have been long taken as pivotal points in the development of Arabic philosophy, Risālat Kāmiliyya has not been a major focus of study until recent years; while highly recognized for his medical work, Ibn al-Nafīs has not usually been considered a major philosopher, partly because he lived in an age where earlier Orientalist scholars saw a ‘decadence’ of Islamic thought. In contrast with Ibn Ṭufayl, Ibn al-Nafīs

40 Kochin, ‘Weeds’. 41 Max Meyerhof and Joseph Schacht, The Theologus Autodidactus of Ibn al-Nafīs, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968.

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justifies a communicable, socially valid truth rooted in history and experience, whose validity is shown through the tale of a solitary character. Key features set Ibn al-Nafīs’s work apart from rationalistic philosophers before him: the historically defined nature of his ideal polity, which comes to coincide with the actual Islamic states, and its purported real perfection. Utopia is thus taken into the realms of language and history, and is no longer conducive to individual isolation and estrangement, but out of it. Unlike Ḥayy, Kāmil has neither a message to offer nor a superior vision of his own. Interestingly, in in the account of his solitary epistemic endeavour, focused on the understanding of religion and historical reality, we are not told of moments of dialogic, discursive confrontation. Society just provides material for his lonely reflection, ending in a positive evaluation of its general venture, which is thus rationally legitimated. Conclusion None of the works described above is a literary utopia featuring a fully fleshed out description of an ideal society; but, as I discussed elsewhere, all of them show prominent utopian features.42 The concept of utopia, as political ideal and discursive practice, is a relevant category in their understanding: the relationship between individuals and societies lies at the core of the texts considered, and some kind of societal ideal, specifically one inspired by Plato, underpins them all in some way. In all texts considered, philosophical understandings of societal life rely largely on al-Fārābī as their point of departure; in turn, al-Fārābī makes extensive use of Plato and Aristotle, although he probably did not have direct knowledge of Aristotle’s Politics. The epistemic and social role of isolation facing society in the four books considered forms a chronological progression that could be schematically summarized as follows: Al-Fārābī: the philosopher rules and guides the ideal polity; isolation unnatural; individual happiness depending on virtuous society. Ibn Bāğğa: the philosopher estranges himself from the polity; ethical isolation desirable as a lesser evil; individual happiness achieved abandoning society. Ibn Ṭufayl: the philosopher has no part in the polity; epistemic isolation, probably desirable; happiness reached in solitude. Ibn al-Nafīs: the isolated philosopher integrates the polity; isolation as an epistemic tool, not a desirable end; individual happiness is historically situated in society. 42 Lauri, ‘Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages’. See also Simon, ‘Arabische Utopien im Mittelalter’.

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The question of the relationship between individual and collective visions of the social reality, which worried the Medieval Muslim philosophers considered here, has not lost its relevance to the present world. Questioning extant social structures, as utopia usually does, can be dangerous. Put into the discursive arena, these questions may be confronted with hegemonic regimes of discursive power and fail their critical purpose, as it happened to Ḥayy; self-disciplined isolation, as postulated by Ibn-Bāğğa, can be an expedient reaction that ensures epistemic and ethical safety for the individual, but it comes at the price of social agency. Through the rational analysis of history, Ibn al-Nafīs offered an attempt to a synthesis of individual and collective goals; but his utopia appears to end up as an intellectual justification of extant social reality. References Alon, Ilai, ‘Fārābī’s Funny Flora. Al-Nawābit as “Opposition”’, Arabica, 37, 1990, pp. 56–90. Broze, Michèle, ‘Mensonge et Justice chez Platon’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1986, pp. 38–48. Conrad, Lawrence, ‘Through the Thin Veil: On the Question of Communication and the Socialization of Knowledge in ‘Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’, in The Worlds of Ibn Ṭufayl. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on “Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān”, Leiden, Brill, 1996, pp. 238–66. Dutton, Jacqueline, ‘“Non-western” Utopian Traditions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. by Gregory Claeys, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 223–58. Endress, Gerhard, ‘La via della felicità’, in Storia della filosofia nell’Islam medievale, edited by Cristina D’Ancona, Torino, Einaudi, 2005, pp. XXIII–LII. Ferrari, Cleophea, ‘La scuola aristotelica di Bagdad’, in Storia della filosofia nell’Islam medievale, edited by Cristina D’Ancona, Torino, Einaudi, 2005, pp. 352–79. Germann, Nadja, ‘Philosophizing without philosophy? On the concept of philosophy in Ibn Ṭufayl’s “Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān”’, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales, 74 (2008), 2, pp. 271–301. Ghibellini, Alberto, ‘La nobile menzogna’, Giornale di Metafisica-Nuova Serie, XXVI, 2004, pp. 301–34. Gutas Dimitri, ‘Ibn Ṭufayl on Ibn Sīnā’s Eastern Philosophy’, Oriens, 1994, pp. 222–41. ———. ‘The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 29 (2002), 1, pp. 5–25. Hourani, George, ‘The Principal Subject of Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1, 1956, pp. 40–46.

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Kochin, Michael, ‘Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999), 3, pp. 399–416. Kukkonen, Taneli, ‘Ibn Ṭufayl and the Wisdom of the East: On Apprehending the Divine’, in Late Antique Epistemology, Palgrave, 2008. Lauri, Marco, ‘Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages: Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn al-Nafīs’, Utopian Studies, 24 (2013), 1, pp. 23–40. Levitas, Ruth, The Concept of Utopia, Hemel Hempstead, Philip Allan, 1990. Mahdi, Muhsin, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, ‘Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān as Male Utopia’, in The Worlds of Ibn Ṭufayl. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on “Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān”, Leiden, Brill, 1996, pp. 52–68. Marmura, Michael, ‘The Philosopher and Society: Some Medieval Arabic Discussions’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 1, 4, 1979, pp. 309–23. Meyerhof, Max, and Schacht, Joseph, The Theologus Autodidactusof Ibn al-Nafīs, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968. Nahli Wafaa, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī sulla differenza fra la logica greca e la grammatica araba, Studia Graeco-Arabica, 1 (2011). Omid Bakhsh, Alireza, ‘The Virtuous City: The Iranian and Islamic Heritage of Utopianism’, Utopian Studies, 24 (2013), 1, pp. 41–51. Popper, Karl, The Open Society and its Enemies. The Spell of Plato. London, Routledge, 1966. ———. Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge, 1969. Rosenthal, Erwin, Political Thought in Medieval Islam, Cambridge University Press, 1968. Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, Woking, Allen and Unwin, 1947. Simon, Heinrich, ‘Arabische Utopien im Mittelalter’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität, Gesellschaft und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, XII, 3, 1963. Tower-Sargent, Lyman, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5 (1994), 1, pp. 1–37. ———. Utopianism. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2010. Yorke, Christopher, The Mystic and the Ineffable: Some Epistemological, Political, and Metaphilosophical Concerns, MA dissertation, Montreal University, 2006.

Chapter 17

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Ubuntu is Utopia: The Individual and the Community in the Work of Nelson Mandela Mark Malisa and Michelle McAnuff-Gumbs

Introduction In this chapter we examine the nature of utopia in the work of Nelson Mandela, paying particular attention to the way that Ubuntu and the African context shape his outlook on the relationship between the individual and the community. Here, utopia encompasses different aspects of life, including land, economics, politics, and culture. His utopian vision, in brief, attempts to capture how life ought to be lived outside of capitalism/racism and other forms of oppression, especially in South Africa. We begin by giving a summary of the life and work of Nelson Mandela,1 then describe the nature of Ubuntu, tying it to African cultures, issues of land and economics, and conclude with an analysis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. We contend that although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave a hint of a rebirth of utopia, it was a still-born utopia, partly because of the failure to implement any of the tenets of the Freedom Charter,2 including economic, land, and resource redistribution so as to improve the lot of dispossessed Africans. In its failure to uproot capitalism, it also ensured that the promised utopia would not materialize. A distinguishing characteristic of Ubuntu is that there is little distinction between the individual and the community. The expression “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (a person is a person because of other persons) reveals the extent to which there is an almost seamless link between the two. This does not mean that there is no individual freedom or right to self-determination. Rather, the interests and wellbeing of the individual are tied to those of the community. Although we write about Ubuntu and utopia in the work of Nelson Mandela, it would be false to the nature of Ubuntu to identify thought/philosophy and work only with one individual, even if that individual is Mandela.

1 See Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. 2 Ibid., p. 172–5. The Freedom Charter, written in the 1950s, contained some of the principles on which a democratic South Africa would be built.

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Nelson Mandela Nelson Mandela is probably one of the world’s most celebrated former prisoners from South Africa, or worldwide, for that matter. His autobiography also reads like the story of the African continent, and yet extends beyond the borders of the continent. Although he was imprisoned and declared a terrorist by the White settler government (with the complicity of Western Europe and the United States), upon his release he willingly forgave the people who imprisoned him, and extended a hand of reconciliation and unconditional forgiveness to all, while inviting all to participate in rebuilding a new South Africa, free of racism. Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 in Transkei, South Africa, the year the 1914–18 European World War ended. He was born into the Xhosa tribe, and credits tribal life and Ubuntu with shaping his values and outlook on life. He describes the Xhosa as “a proud and patrilineal people with an excessive and euphonious language and an abiding belief in the importance of laws, education, and courtesy.”3 In his autobiography he chronicles not only the conditions under which he grew up, but gives glimpses of what life was like in South Africa before the arrival of European settlers. Consequently, it is possible to grasp the nature of utopia within the context of pre-colonial Africa, during the apartheid era, and after the legal end of apartheid following his release from prison and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Lynn Schler points out the many ways in which histories and geographies of language and culture change and yet remain permanent in the context of Africa, particularly with regard to the fluidity between pre-colonial to post-colonial.4 We should make it clear that for the most part, this chapter examines utopia within the context of Bantu cultures of Southern Africa, but to a certain extent, tribal cultures generally. In his autobiography Mandela describes his life as representative of “the history, culture, and heritage of my people … I felt myself to be the embodiment of African nationalism, the inheritor of Africa’s difficult but noble past and her uncertain future.”5 After the death of his father, Mandela records that he spent his childhood at Qunu, a place he credits with what he saw as the best of democracy and the struggles that blacks faced in South Africa. As a child and young adult he had a rebellious and independent streak, a disposition he attributes to his father and his African name, Rolihlahla.6 After secondary school, Mandela studied law. Upon discovering that his guardian had chosen a bride for him, he ran away to Johannesburg and took up various jobs at a time when apartheid was the official policy in South Africa. Although he attributes his political awareness and sense of 3 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 4. 4 Lynn Schler. Ambiguous Spaces: The Struggle over African Identities and Urban Communities in Colonial Douala, 1914–45. The Journal of African History, vol. 44, no. 1 (2003), pp. 51–72. 5 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 325. 6 Rolihlahla is the name Mandela used, and was known as while growing up.

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justice to the village courts, it was in Johannesburg that his horizon expanded and his political activism led him to embrace the African National Congress (ANC) and the formation of uMkhonto weSiwe, the military wing of the ANC in an effort to militarily overthrow apartheid. In 1952 the ANC considered, and for a while used satyagraha or nonviolent resistance to challenge the legitimacy of apartheid. Among those consulted was Manilal Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi’s son) who at that time was a member of the South Africa Indian Congress. In 1956 Nelson Mandela was arrested for treason and consequently driven into living a life of an outlaw in his own country. By 1960 an armed struggle was seen as the only alternative to undoing apartheid, and Nelson Mandela traveled to African and Asian countries to explore the logistics of training guerrillas. He was the commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe.7 Upon his return he was arrested (perhaps with the aid of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and spent 27 years in prison for fighting for the freedom of all South Africans.8 He was released in 1990, and became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994. In 1993 he was awarded the Nobel Price for Peace together with Frederick De Klerk.9 What Nelson Mandela accomplished just a few years after his release from prison, according to Fintan O’Toole, “has defied all abstractions by which humanity is reduced: black and white, master and slave, our tribe and their tribe. He has shown … the uniqueness of a man living in and through his times and his people.”10 The struggle for freedom cost Mandela a lot in terms of time with his family, particularly his children as well as his marriages to Winnie Mandela and Evelyn Mase.11 It could be argued that he sacrificed the life of his family and his own personal happiness for the cause of the nation. According to Adrian Hadland, “few politicians in the history of the world have attracted such widespread veneration as is now bestowed on the figure of Nelson Mandela … Mandela has become synonymous with the triumph of the human spirit.”12 To a great extent, a study of the life of Mandela, or aspects of his life, makes it possible to glean his depiction of human nature and the role of utopia in creating a world free of racism. Although, like Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X, he was exposed to Western and other cultures, Mandela states that he “did not envy them … I was still, at 7 The armed wing of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s political party. 8 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, pp. 319–20. 9 Frederick De Klerk was the last president under apartheid South Africa (1989–94). He is credited with realizing the futility of maintaining apartheid and the importance of releasing anti-apartheid political prisoners in South Africa. See Fredrik De Klerk, The Last Trek—A New Beginning. New York: Saint Martins’ Press, 1999. 10 Fintan O’Toole. Prometheus unbound. In N. Mandela, Nelson Mandela in his Own Words. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. xli. 11 Evelyn Mase was Mandela’s first wife. Afterwards he married Winnie, whom he later divorced and then married Graca Machel. See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom. 12 Adrian Hadland. Nelson Mandela: A life. In Nelson. Mandela. Nelson Mandela in his Own Words. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. xxix.

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heart, a Thembu, and I was proud to think and act like one. My roots were my destiny.”13 He stayed true to his tribal roots and identity in a rapidly changing world. However, his utopian worldview was not dismissive of other worldviews or the non-African world. By the time the reader has gone through the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, they have witnessed the transformation of a village boy in rural South Africa as that boy goes through rites of passage, seeks to find a balance between personal freedom and the norms of a tribe, as well as the challenges of an intensely global world in which the odds are against him. Armed with a rich utopian philosophy infused with Ubuntu, Mandela reveals what constitutes a utopian world in the face of apartheid, in encounters with Muslims, Hindus, Jews, whites, Afrikaaners, Capitalists, Communists, Indians, African Americans, and Inuits (Native Americans). Deeply rooted in the practice and philosophy of Ubuntu, in the works of Nelson Mandela, utopia is revealed as being at peace with the universe while creating a world in which there is peace and justice. Ubuntu Mandela credits his worldview and perceptions of a better world to the philosophy of Ubuntu.14 He takes it for granted that Ubuntu guided the ways African people lived and related to each other. He contends that Ubuntu firmly held societies together until the coming of Europeans. In many ways Ubuntu is an answer to those who ask whether it is possible to write or talk about utopias from an African perspective, or whether Africa has any philosophies.15 It is important for the reader to know that it is not the only African philosophy that exists. Mandela observes that in general “African people lived in relative peace until the coming of abelungu, the white people, who arrived from across the sea with fire-breathing weapons …

13 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 36. 14 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 11. 15 From the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, most of European scholarship deliberately portrayed Africa as devoid of any philosophy. With regard to Africa and Africans, for example, Hegel states “The realm of the Absolute Spirit is so impoverished among them and the natural Spirit so intense that any representation which they are inculcated with suffices to impel them to respect nothing, to destroy everything … Africa … does not have history as such. Consequently we abandon Africa, to never mention it again. It is not part of the historical world; it does not evidence historical movement or development. … What we understand properly as Africa is something isolated and without history, still mired in the natural Spirit, and therefore can only be located here at the entrance gate of Universal History.” See Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity, Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures,” Boundary, 1993, p. 71. Post-colonial scholarship rejected such views and the philosophy Ubuntu disproves Hegelianism with regard to Africa and philosophical reflection.

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The white man shattered the ubuntu, the fellowship, of the various tribes.”16 The invasion of Africa by Europeans caused a dystopia. Perpetual war and violence on the non-European are a result of the encounter with modernity. Like other panAfricanists, Mandela views Ubuntu as a philosophy or way of life common to Bantu peoples across sub-Saharan Africa. It is not very easy to describe Ubuntu to a mind only familiar with European categories of conceptualizing human relations or one that depends on empirical verification of results. In many ways the linguistic tools for critiquing and interpreting utopia within the academy have been a preserve of the European world. At the same time, we would advise against assessing one philosophical construct with preconceptions that come from another. Language adds an additional dimension to the difficulties in describing Ubuntu to a European audience that might not be familiar with African languages and philosophies. What further complicates such attempts is that Ubuntu is part of an oral culture with no concrete or definitive definitions and no single authorship. Desmond Tutu describes Ubuntu as characterized by a communal existence in which people affirm each other’s humanity.17 Although Ubuntu is generally associated with sub-Saharan Africa, Tutu contends that its traces can be found in almost every culture and different historical periods when humankind has attempted to create a better society with justice for all. He uses the German word Weltsanschauung, as well as other words that approximate what can be described as Ubuntu. The post-conflict reconciliation efforts in independent Kenya, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa are described by Tutu as evidence of the spirit of Ubuntu.18 As such, Ubuntu is not limited to nation or race. While Desmond Tutu also describes Ubuntu as an “African Weltsanschauung,” it also approximates what is called Soul in African-American life. Like Soul,

16 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 23. Abelungu is the Xhosa word for Europeans. For discussions on Ubuntu and African philosophies, see also Christian B.N. Gade, “What is Ubuntu? Different Interpretations among South Africans of African Descent,” South African Journal of Philosophy, 2012, 31(3), 484–503. 17 According to Tutu, “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.” See Desmond Tutu. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, p. 31. 18 Tutu also observes that “Now and again we catch a glimpse of the better thing for which we are meant … when the world is galvanized by a spirit of compassion and an amazing outpouring of generosity, when for a little while we are bound together by bonds of a caring humanity, a universal sense of Ubuntu … we experience fleetingly that we are made for togetherness for friendship, for community, that we were created to live in a delicate network of interdependence.” See Desmond Tutu, No Future, pp. 264–5.

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Ubuntu defies empirical investigation.19 In describing Ubuntu as an African weltsanschuung, Tutu accords it the highest status in what embodies African culture. Again, it would be false to attribute definitions of, or the concept of Ubuntu to any one person, be it Tutu or Mandela. While the West gives the impression that ideas belong to individuals and can be copyrighted, the communal nature of Ubuntu is skeptical of anyone who claims authorship of wisdom and traditions that predate any forms of modernity. Kwame Nkrumah notes that most people in Africa “did not know of private ownership in the strictest sense as it is known in Europe.”20 Be it in the work of Tutu or Nkrumah, the ideas around Ubuntu reveal an attempt to define an all-encompassing African humanist quest for freedom. According to Julius Nyerere it affirms the plurality of human life (beyond Africa) in a universal ideal not based on military conquest or any forms of violence.21 Although rooted in an African worldview, some contend that Ubuntu has the potential to build bridges to and with other cultures or worldviews. It has an inherently polyversal and universal understanding of humanity.22 The expression ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ not only points to the compatibility of personal and communal interests, but a democratic ideal that differs markedly from the Enlightenment that originated in Europe. For African cultures, according to Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu, the spirit and practice of utopia cannot be limited to any one people or nation.23 What is apparent in the thought of Julius Nyerere is the potential that African worldviews have for altering human relationships on a global scale so as to counter capitalism and ethnocentrism. Although Ubuntu places emphasis on community and communal relationships, it respects the freedom of the individual. As young adults, for example, Justice and Nelson Mandela found a way to reject arranged

19 See also Mark Malisa, (Anti) Narcissisms and (Anti) Capitalisms: Education and Human Nature in the Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Jugern Habermas. Boston and Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010, for a detailed comparison of the ideal life from different perspectives. 20 Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonisation. Richmond, VA: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 193. 21 Julius Nyerere. Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968. Nyerere is also credited with re-introducing cooperative economics in post-colonial Tanzania. 22 See also, Zillah Eisenstein. Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West. New York: Zed Books, 2004, p. xv 23 According to Julius Nyerere, “no true African … can look at a map and say, ‘The people on this side of that line are my brothers, but those who happen to live on the other side have no claim on me.’ … Our recognition of the family to which we all belong must be extended yet further—beyond the tribe, the nation, or even the continent—to embrace the whole society of mankind.” Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism, p. 72.

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marriages.24 At the same time, Nelson Mandela’s decisions to take up a life of struggle and his refusal to compromise with apartheid were personal choices rooted in his convictions. Wholesomeness with oneself and the community, or fellowship, is one of the characteristics of Ubuntu. For Mandela, it was a life that, like “most Xhosas at the time, was shaped by custom, ritual, and taboo. This was the alpha and omega of our existence. Men followed the path laid out for them by their fathers, women led the same lives as their mothers had before them.”25 However, within the customs, taboos, and rituals, there was room for individual freedom. (Marriage might have been the norm, but divorces happened very rarely). Arranged marriages sometimes occurred, but individuals found a way to marry people of their choosing. Sometimes children were groomed for one role, and yet found a way to pursue their own dreams. However, more often than not, there was an attempt to reconcile with those who had been wronged or whose trust had been betrayed. To a great extent Ubuntu as a utopian philosophy made it possible for human beings to transform themselves from “being objects of history to being subjects of history … conscious creators of their own history.”26 As such, it had a close resemblance to Black Consciousness.27 Like Black Consciousness, Ubuntu never made blackness a fetish. However, Ubuntu affirms the humanity of those who also recognize the humanity of others, including non-blacks. Consequently, through Ubuntu, Mandela was able to create relationships across different racial, political and religious communities in the struggle against apartheid. At the end, those who joined him in the struggle included Africans from different tribes, Jews, Indians, Muslims, Christians, observers of African Traditional Religions, Communists and all those dedicated to the freedom of all South Africans. Mandela argued that a radical critique of the rationale given for the colonization of Africa, for example, would make it possible for descendants of European settlers to realize that they could choose to side with freedom and justice for all instead of holding on to ideas of white supremacy. That umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (we get our sense of humanity from other human beings) might give the impression that the source of knowledge related to what it means to be human comes only from mortals. Taboos and rituals were part of the norms related to human relationships. Within Ubuntu humanity is often tied to the metaphysical, and uMdaliwabantu (Creator of human beings) is the name and attribute of God. The oneness of God also presupposes the oneness of humanity. In calling for a new beginning in South Africa, Mandela saw religion as playing a crucial role in creating a new ethos that affirmed the humanity of 24 Justice appears in chapters 8 and 9 of Long Walk To Freedom. His last name is not given, but he was a relative of Nelson Mandela. See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom, 53–75. 25 Ibid., p. 11. 26 Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 11. 27 Associated with Steve Biko. See also Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 486–8.

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all. His challenge to South Africans was “to reach deep into the wells of our human faith as we approach the new century. No less than in any other period of history, religion will have a crucial role to play in guiding and inspiring humanity to meet the enormous challenges that we face.”28 While pre-colonial Africans might have fought or raided each other over food and land or cattle, I am not aware of any battles over religious differences. In the oneness of the Creator was implied the oneness of humankind, and humankind was part of, but not lord of the universe. The taboos and other customs provided a source of moral, ethical and behavioral codes. Again, the existence of Ubuntu as a guiding principle and philosophy does not mean, nor should it be taken to imply that the problems that plague Africa have ceased to exist. Ubuntu provides a rough blueprint of how life can be lived, but its existence does not mean that all people abide by its spirit or principles. A shared sense of the divine binds the individual to the community, and the community to the individuals. Utopia and Communal Ownership of Land and Resources To a great extent, the economic structures have an impact on the making of a just or utopian world. While land was the basis of wealth even in Europe, many scholars point out that in sub-Saharan Africa there was no concept of feudalism or private ownership of land. Many of the structures of the economy belonged to the community. Insight into the nature of the economy also makes it possible to study what constitutes the sources of knowledge of what is claimed as truth as well as the ways people lived. But understanding the role of land and economics also grounds Mandela’s understanding of human and political processes in a materialist dialectic which in turn reveals the real conditions in South Africa. In pre-colonial South Africa, families could and did own livestock and grew crops, but land belonged to the tribe or the community. There was private property, but the ownership of land, without which private property could not thrive, was communal and collective. Reminiscing on life in pre-colonial Africa, Mandela observed for the most part there was no private ownership of land.29 It can thus be argued that pre-colonial African societies were classless, in other words, the distinctions that obtain by virtue of socio-economic class and status were not the norm. But the communal ownership of land also facilitated 28 Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 357. 29 Mandela observes that “The structure and organization of early African societies in this country fascinated me very much and greatly influenced the evolution of my political outlook. The land, the main means of production, belonged to the whole tribe and there was no individual ownership whatsoever. There were no classes, no rich or poor and no exploitation of man by man. All men were free and equal and this was the foundation of government.” See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 330.

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the interaction and cooperation between and among different tribal groups. To a certain extent mobility was limited because the means of earning a living were dependent on access to land, different tribes related with each other. Even though sometimes they fought or raided each other, they also cooperated and intertribal marriages were not unheard of. Feudalism, profit making, and exploitation of man-by-man, which were taken as a norm and necessary historical rites of passage in the West, were alien to most African cultures. Even as a young adult with a relatively unsophisticated political analysis, Mandela was able to see that with regards to Africa and other tribal or ‘pre-modern’ civilizations. John Bodely argues that the major problems they faced were “that their cultural heritage of community-level resource management, high levels of local self-sufficiency, and relative social equality is the antithesis of how the commercial world was developed and is currently organized.”30 It was not that tribal structures were inefficient, but rather that they had a different paradigm. In many respects, African societies revealed that successful crop and animal husbandry, or different forms of agriculture and production do not always require private ownership of land or the means of production. Communal ownership of land need not mean people did not have private property. While land belonged to the community or the tribe, families owned and controlled the use of their own livestock. Such property was not only a source of individual wealth but also revealed how communities and individuals related to nature and to each other. There was a peaceful balance and coexistence between private and communal property as well as individual autonomy and collective responsibility. For African societies, as reflected in the work of Mandela, common property was not only possible and desirable, it also made it possible to reduce problems brought by class division of society. It was in the process of looking after his family’s livestock that Mandela says he learned more about the ways of his own people, including the importance of self-defense and sustainable living without harming the environment.31 Again, the boundaries between the personal and the communal, the sacred and the secular appear blurred and when and where they are constructed, appear arbitrary. Cattle, for example, could be easily seen as a gift from God as well as good animal husbandry. While people owned private property, there were not subject to oppressive taxation by any of the indigenous government or administrative branches. At the same time, tribal structures had enough mechanisms that made efficient distribution and redistribution of resources possible.

30 John Bodley. Victims of Progress. Lantham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2008, p. 7. 31 Mandela notes that he “discovered the almost mystical attachment the Xhosa have for cattle, not only as source of food and wealth, but as a blessing from God and a source of happiness. It was in the fields that I learned how to … gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots … catch fish … stick-fight-essential knowledge to any rural African boy.” See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 9.

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For most Africans, and those familiar with indigenous African structures of government, it would appear as if local institutions had inbuilt mechanisms to ensure the survival of even the weakest among the tribe as well as for preventing and negating the effects of poverty. Although they might have appeared unsophisticated to the Western or foreign eye, Mandela contends that indigenous forms of administration were very democratic, with a major shortcoming being the relative absence of women’s voices. His observations on pre-colonial forms of government left him with the impression that “it was democracy in its purest form … The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in value as citizens. (Women, I am afraid, were deemed second-class citizens).”32 It was in such forms of structures that issues related to the community and the tribes were discussed. The communal ownership of land and other natural resources also had a bearing on how people related to each other even across tribal lines. Mandela acknowledges the existence of many tribes in South Africa, including the Zulus, Xhosas, Shangaans, Sothos, etc. While here and there, tribal sentiments and hostilities might have arisen, the impression one gets is of peaceful coexistence. Regarding the nature of tribalism he witnessed, he writes that the form of tribalism he “observed as a boy was relatively harmless. At that stage, I did not witness nor even suspect that violent rivalries that would subsequently be promoted by the white rulers of South Africa.”33 However, the relatively harmonious relationship among the different tribes cannot be attributed solely to the communal ownership of land, good governance, a classless society and relative absence of poverty. The philosophy or worldview that made such an existence possible is “the spirit of Ubuntu- that profound African sense that we are human only through the humanity of other human beings-is not a parochial phenomenon, but has added globally to our common search for a better world.”34 As a utopia, Ubuntu is relevant even to the world outside Africa. Utopia and Nature The cultural background that Mandela grew up in prepared the way for him to experience being human as being one with the universe, and nature as a playground. This might appear to be a bold statement to many, but Mandela’s cultural, political, academic, and religious worlds span the globe. He credits his openness and acceptance of the world to the Xhosa way of life. According to Mandela “the traditional religion of the Xhosa is characterized by a cosmic wholeness, so that there is little distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the natural

32 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 21. 33 Ibid., p. 12. 34 Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 324.

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and the supernatural.”35 The cosmic wholeness also translated into seamless relationships with peoples from across the world, as well as different tribal and racial groups in South Africa. After his prison experience Mandela acknowledged the extent to which not only was he a part of the universe, but forces from across the world had shaped him. Without belittling or ignoring Africa he claimed that he was “a product of the people of the world who have cherished the visions of a better life for all people everywhere … I am the product of Africa and her long-cherished dream of a rebirth.”36 For Mandela, the sources of knowledge on what constitutes human nature are part of the living traditions of the people, are rational and intelligible. While humankind might have authority over many things, humankind is not meant to dominate or destroy nature. The two are co-constitutive. If Mandela’s political ideas bridged or traversed the world of capitalism and communism and beyond, his religious views were equally, if not more inclusive. Not only was he steeped and well versed in African Traditional Religions, but he celebrated and fellowshipped with, Hindus, Zionist Christians, Methodists, Ethiopian Christians, Muslims, Jewish Traditions, and various world religions he saw as represented in South Africa or the human experience. In a way reminiscent of the message of Mahatma Gandhi that all people could attain their human potential within the context of their faiths and traditions, he saw a humanizing nature as present in every religious cultural and ethnic tradition, especially in South Africa.37 Mandela’s metaphysical world encompasses as broad a spectrum of humankind’s religious experiences. In many ways, it is a metaphysical worldview that reflects the boundless nature of family relationships that is part of Ubuntu and Bantu culture. The contributions of each religion are seen as valid to the making of “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”38 In a way, the validity of each religion is viewed in relation to its contribution to the emancipation of all people as well as a peaceful co-existence among the different religions. Even at a time when most of the non-Islamic countries had distanced themselves from Islam, Mandela asserted that Islam had a home in South Africa by proclaiming that South Africa “can proudly claim Muslims as brothers and sisters, compatriots, freedom fighters and leaders, revered by our nation … Africa has made Islam its own.”39 To a great extent, while each religion by itself can be a totality, Mandela 35 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 13. 36 Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 174. 37 In Mandela’s words, “The struggle for democracy has never been a matter pursued by one race, class, religious community, or gender among South African. In honoring those who fought to see this day arrive we honor the best sons and daughters of all our people. We can count amongst them Africans, coloreds, whites, Indians, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews-all of them united by a common vision of a better life for the people of this country.” See Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 66. 38 Ibid., p. 70. 39 Ibid., p. 337–8.

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moved towards detotalization and believed that all contained truths related to the quest for justice in a shared universe. It is possible to argue that Nelson Mandela is one of the few people whose worldview approximates “the polyversal humanity that inhabits truly democratic” praxis.40 Within South Africa, he had encompassed and harmonized most worldviews, whether it was creed, tribe, or race. But, Mandela saw a connection between South African blacks and African Americans. Not only did he draw inspiration from Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement in general, but at a speech at the Yankee Stadium Mandela told the audience that “an unbreakable umbilical cord connected black South Africans and black Americans … To us, Harlem symbolized the strength and the beauty of black pride.”41 However, he was also sensitive to the plight of other victims of civilization in North America in general, and took time to educate himself about Native Americans, and upon meeting the Innuit, saw them as sharing the same humanity as South Africans, noting that “the Innuit are an aboriginal people historically mistreated by a white settler population; there were parallels between the plights of black South Africans and the Innuit people.”42 And, even as a young boy herding cattle in the pastures of the Transkei, he knew that “like the people of the East, Africans have a highly developed sense of dignity, or what the Chinese call ‘face’.”43 There was definitely something unique about African cultures, but they were also part of global cultures. In his utopia worldview, Mandela rejected all forms of apartheid including intellectual, religious, and, ideological. Utopia, Capitalism and Anti-Capitalism Although within the work of Mandela human nature strives for a balance between opposites, he was adamant that capitalism did not have a future in South Africa, and he observed that “the possibility of a liberal capitalist democracy in South Africa is extremely nil.”44 The link between capitalism and apartheid/racism/ violence/colonialism made it undesirable to most Africans or those working for a qualitatively better life not based on racial discrimination. Instead of entrusting the liberation of the country to the bourgeois, the intelligentsia and the upper echelons, he saw the peasants and the working class as carrying the hope of the nation, frequently describing it as “the most dependable force in the struggle to end exploitation and oppression.”45

40 Eisenstein, Against Empire, p. xv. 41 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 583. 42 Ibid., p. 584. 43 Ibid., p. 10. 44 Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 60. 45 Nelson Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 13.

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Mandela notes that traditional African societies and cultures had a structure that was built to maintain and ensure order while affirming the humanity of all. To a great extent the type of society envisioned in the work of Mandela is one that is anti-capitalist. Chiefs and kings existed, but their power was meant to be for the protection of the common people. It was a society designed to reject and prevent the creation of both exploitation and domination as well as the existence of poverty. In such societies, there was communal ownership of property, and economic, social and political powers were in the hands of the people and the state. Perhaps another indicator of Mandela’s stance with regard to capitalism is reflected in the way he viewed peasants and working classes as the engine for remaking a new society. The upper and middle classes, as well as the intellectuals appeared to be mostly concerned with upward mobility, rather than creating a nonracial society and the alleviation of poverty. For Mandela, the “real leaders of the world are those who for 24 hours a day think in terms of the poorest of the poor. It is those men and women who know that poverty is the single most dangerous threat to society in the world today.”46 The solution to poverty is not presented as coming in the form of capitalist ventures or enterprises, but rather, cooperative work (masakhane). It is possible that the success of capitalism/apartheid also contributed to the destruction of a life that had made Africans thrive. The success of capitalism meant a continued pillaging of the nation, and the general European vision was that a new South Africa would be other than capitalist. Mandela hoped that under a new dispensation “these great masses will have turned their backs on the grave insult to human dignity which described some as masters and others as servants, and transformed each into a predator whose survival depended on the destruction of the other.”47 The philosophy and practice of masakhane precluded all forms of exploitation. Bodley describes one aspect of capitalism as “a complex division of labor-involving a few capitalist landlords and manufacturers against a great mass of landless renters and laborers.”48 The struggle against apartheid/capitalism was for the purpose of correcting this and other pathologies associated with capitalism and apartheid. Masakhane runs counter to the Hegelian idea that “the real aim is objective conquest … that each consciousness seeks the death of the Other” through its insistency on reciprocity and mutual affirmation of each other’s humanity.49 Another trait associated with capitalism, according to John Bodley is that “commercialization has surpassed both humanization and politicization as dominant cultural processes in the world.”50 In other words, the measure of human worth and human life is reduced to, or rather superseded by monetary worth. 46 Ibid., p. 356. 47 Ibid., p. 509 48 John Bodley, Victims, p. 6. 49 Jean-Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1. London and New York: Verso, p. 113. 50 John Bodley, Victims of Progress, p. 6.

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Money, rather than community and communal relationships, begins to determine what constitutes a utopian world. For Mandela, however, human life and dignity had inherent worth in and of itself. In celebrating South Africa’s independence he also said he looked forward to a time when “the value of our shared reward will and must be measured by the joyful peace and triumph, because the common humanity that bonds both black and white into one human race, will have said to each one of us we shall live like the children of paradise.”51 There was optimism that the oppressor and the oppressed would work together, would reconcile, and an unstated hope that resources would be redistributed to make a utopia possible for all living in South Africa. We will return to this theme in our discussion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and post-apartheid South Africa. Utopia, Narcissism, and Anti-Narcissism It is difficult to find in Ubuntu or Mandela any aspects of what would pass for narcissism, or the elevation of the self above the community. The ever-widening circle and unconditional acceptance of the humanity of all people is, rather, an indicator of the anti-narcissism in the work of Nelson Mandela and the philosophy of Ubuntu. There is no claim to any form of supremacy, or being better than the Others. Even in the quest for freedom from apartheid Mandela observed that “the normal condition of human existence is democracy, justice, peace, nonracism, nonsexism, prosperity for everybody, a healthy environment and equality and solidarity among the peoples.”52 He did not limit the good life to any society or tribe. On the other hand, he was cognizant of the fact that Europeans who invaded Africa created their utopias on the backs of Africans. That is, European utopias, in general, meant the subjugation of the non-European. Apartheid itself was a white utopia, and even the utopia of Thomas Moore allowed for slavery, while the idea of ‘manifest destiny’ which was central to the foundation of the United States was predicated on genocide and slavery.53 While it could be argued that some cultures and people display traits of ethnocentrism or a total rejection of other worldviews, Mandela stated that when it 51 Nelson Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 509. 52 Ibid., p. 510. 53 For a detailed analysis of slavery in Thomas More’s Utopia, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. For genocide and slavery in the making of the United States, see Deanna Spingola, The Ruling Elite: A Study in Imperialism, Genocide and Emancipation. New York: Trafford, 2011. See also Robert Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis Clark, and Manifest Destiny. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Hegel argued that Europe remains “the center and end of universal history … [Europeans] are the carriers of the world spirit, and against that absolute right, the spirit of other peoples has no right to exist.” See David Smith, Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruths: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006, p. 59.

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came to insights into the world, Ubuntu and Africans in general he declared that as a culture and as a people Africans “have never claimed that we have a monopoly of wisdom and that only our views and policies are legitimate.”54 Although he was aware that apartheid and the encounters with the West had led to the marginalization of all things African, he saw the validity and contributions of African worldviews to the creation of a better world for all. Not many personalities or philosophies simultaneously personalize and universalize human nature and human identity. Instead of exerting retribution or vengeance on white South Africans, the new nation humbly offered its model of reconciliation, the philosophy of Ubuntu, as a gift to be used by other nations if they so desired. Mandela saw Ubuntu as South Africa’s contribution of a “new life to the world’s hopes that peace and unity will everywhere prevail over division and conflict, and that justice, freedom, and dignity will everywhere prevail over oppression, poverty and discrimination.”55 If, as Sartre contends, “relations between men are always the dialectical consequence of their activity to precisely the extent to which they arise as a transcendence of dominating and institutionalized human relations,” (emphasis in original) Mandela’s quest for a utopia or an inclusive humanity smashes the forts and fortresses that make dehumanization possible.56 Unfortunately when it came to issues of economic justice, land and resource redistribution, the structures that existed during apartheid were, for the most part, left intact. The Still-Born Utopia: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Perhaps the crowning achievement of Nelson Mandela and South Africans in general was the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Process as a model of justice that would heal the wounds of apartheid and affirm the humanity of all in South Africa. One can reasonably argue that the Truth and Reconciliation Process also reflects on Ubuntu’s philosophy of history and human relations. As such, what constitutes progress in this context involves reconciliation and forgiveness and the establishment of mechanisms that ensure peaceful co-existence in which there is justice for all. In many respects, it is also an acknowledgement of the reality that the alternative to reconciliation is mutual self-destruction. On a different level, the Truth and Reconciliation Process is also a philosophy of statehood and nationhood, as well as the achievements and limitations of political and individual emancipation. A significant amount of literature exists on the Truth and Reconciliation Process of South Africa.57 Initially the European world was skeptical of a process 54 Nelson Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 105. 55 Ibid., p. 89. 56 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique, p. 97. 57 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has generated a lot of scholarship in and outside Africa.

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and system of justice that was not created for the sake of retribution in the manner of the Nuremberg trials. Yet, in searching for a lasting peace that would work in South Africa, the nation opted for a reconciliation based on the indigenous concept and philosophy of Ubuntu. After the African National Congress had won the national mandate to rule South Africa, it found itself faced with the challenge of creating peace with the apartheid National Party, the Inkatha Freedom Party, countless other parties, as well as rethinking the role of uMkhonto weSizwe. In setting up the need for a truth and reconciliation process, the ANC sought not only to end the violence, but to lay the foundations for a lasting peace. Many, particularly those writing from, and living in the West, have been quick to write off the Truth and Reconciliation Process as a failure. Some have given it grudging acceptance of the way it has changed human relationships.58 Has it been successful? In terms of creating a peaceful environment in South Africa, without post-conflict recriminations, it was one of a kind worldwide. Many had feared that South Africa would plunge into a civil war like other countries in Africa and beyond. Some white South Africans left the country for a variety of reasons, including the fear of a possible interracial war. Would blacks do to whites what whites had done to South African blacks? Instead of recreating or crafting a policy of vengeance for the crimes of apartheid, Mandela used the philosophy of Ubuntu and masakhane to invite all South Africans to help in rebuilding South Africa. Instead of being vindictive and punitive, he called upon all citizens to meet the challenges posed by the legacy of apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation Process was seen as a way to “defeat the primitive tendency towards the glorification of arms, the adulation of force, born of the illusion that injustice can be perpetuated by the capacity to kill, or that disputes are necessarily best resolved by resort to violence.”59 While the initial focus was on South Africa, there was hope that other countries would opt for peaceful conflict resolution. Africa and its wisdom had become part of the human family and world philosophies. However, there are many ways in which the gap between the rich and the poor persists, and in some cases has even worsened in South Africa. In this matter, South Africans have been upfront about urban and rural poverty that disproportionately affects black Africans. While the end of apartheid was a major victory, Mandela was also quick to point out “that hundreds of millions of these politically empowered masses are caught in the deathly trap of poverty, unable to live life in its fullness.”60 Mandela was, and has always been quick to point out how and why poverty poses the gravest threat to human security, life, and dignity. Indeed, the Truth and Reconciliation Process has not meant an end to the problems South Africans face. 58 See, for example, Heribert Adam and Kanya Adam. The politics of memory in divided societies. In James Wilmot and Linda van de Vijver (eds), After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. 59 Nelson Mandela, In His Own Words, p. 528. 60 Ibid., p. 520.

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But that there are many failures with regard to the economic aspects of the Truth and Reconciliation process is evidenced by the failure to address the issue of land and resource redistribution in South Africa. At present, it is estimated that about just over half a million white farmers own over 75 percent of the best arable land, thereby leaving the African population out of the means of agricultural production. The slaughter of the African miners who were on strike at Marikana61 in 2012 highlighted the extent to which the nation had drifted far from the promised utopia. It is evident that the poverty that exists under liberal capitalist democracies strips both the individual and the community of their dignity as human beings. Conclusion Our analysis of the relationship between the individual and community in the utopian thought of Nelson Mandela shows the role that African thought and philosophy play in the construction of a qualitatively better world with economic and political justice for all. The overall guiding philosophy which shaped Mandela’s consciousness and understanding of human relations was Ubuntu. While apartheid and other European utopias were based on the exploitation of the non-European, utopian thought, in the work of Mandela, seeks to end the practice of racism. Instead of segregation, it promotes the collective interests of the oppressed and the oppressor so that the humanity of both is affirmed. In other words, the exercise and possession of power does not necessarily lead to the oppression of the other. The example of Mandela’s leadership and the philosophy of Ubuntu, in many ways, are an answer to those who question whether Africa and Africans are capable of ruling themselves without the ‘leadership’ role played by colonial powers. This was the intent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was created by Mandela. While South Africa attained political reconciliation during the presidency of Nelson Mandela, the nation has yet to attain economic justice, close to 20 years after the legal abolishment of apartheid. It would be easy to fault Mandela with failing to implement policies related to land and resource redistribution. Such a diagnosis misses out on many issues related to economic justice and reconciliation in post-colonial countries. The examples of Cuba, Uganda, and Zimbabwe reveal that, left to their own devices, those who benefited materially from apartheid and colonialism are unlikely to work for economic justice. We contend that to the extent that Nelson Mandela gave political reconciliation to those who benefitted from apartheid, the same racial group that benefitted from apartheid should extend economic justice and reconciliation to the victims of apartheid. Without any meaningful economic reconciliation in South Africa, Mandela’s vision of an 61 It is estimated that 30 African/Black miners were shot to death as they protested low wages and poor working conditions in South Africa. For many in, and outside South Africa, the massacre was reminiscent of the apartheid days when state police often shot to death unarmed Black/African civilians.

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ideal society in which the individual and the community are in harmony is bound to flounder.

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References Heribert Adam and Kanya Adam. The politics of memory in divided societies. In James Wilmot and Linda van de Vijver (eds), After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. John Bodley. Victims of Progress. Lantham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2008, p. 7. David Brion Davis. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Fredrik De Klerk. The Last Trek—A New Beginning. New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1999. Enrique Dussel. Eurocentrism and Modernity, Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures. Boundary, 1993, p. 71. Zillah Eisenstein. Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West. New York: Zed Books, 2004, p. xv. Christian B.N. Gade. What is Ubuntu? Different Interpretations Among South Africans of African Descent. South African Journal of Philosophy, 2012, 31(3), 484–503. Adrian Hadland. Nelson Mandela: A life. In Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela in his Own Words. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. xxix. Mark Malisa. (Anti) Narcissisms and (Anti) Capitalisms: Education and Human Nature in the Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Jurgern Habermas. Boston and Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010. Nelson Mandela. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. Robert Miller. Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis Clark, and Manifest Destiny. Westport: Praeger, 2006. Kwame Nkrumah. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonisation. Richmond, VA: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 193. Julius Nyerere. Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press. 1968. Fintan O’Toole. Prometheus unbound. In Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela in his Own Words. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2003, p. xli. Jean-Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1. London and New York: Verso, p. 113. Lynn Schler. Ambiguous Spaces: The Struggle over African Identities and Urban Communities in Colonial Douala, 1914–45. The Journal of African History, 2013, 44(1), 51–72. David Smith. Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruths: Globalization, Empire and the Crises of Pedagogy. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006, p. 59.

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Deanna Spingola. The Ruling Elite: A Study in Imperialism, Genocide and Emancipation. New York: Trafford, 2011. Desmond Tutu. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday, 1999, p. 31.

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Religion and the Mental Utopia in Literature Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 16:22 15 April 2017

Mark S. Ferrara

The chapters that make up this book attempt to move utopian studies away from their political, social, and environmental permutations (thoroughly explored over several decades) and instead find focus around the individual. As the title of this chapter suggests, the discussion of the individual and utopia that follows will take place at the intersection of religion and literary studies. The “individuals” that we will be discussing are characters, and some of the literary texts reviewed below neatly fit Lyman Tower Sargent’s influential definition of utopian literature “as species of prose fiction describing in some detail a non-existent society located in time and space” that falls into one of three types: the eutopia (“good place”), dystopia, or utopian satire.1 For Glenn Negley, a utopia is foremost a fictional work (as distinguished from a political tract and dissertation) that describes a particular state or community. Its theme is the political structure of that fictional society.2 Because of its emphasis on the mental experiences of fictional characters, this study challenges traditional distinctions between utopian and non-utopian literatures. The experiences in the private, inner world of the individual character, I argue, provide another measure by which to evaluate whether a literary text is utopian. A literary utopia need not depict a “good place,” a dystopian society, or feature social satire designed to critique the ills of the day. Rather, the utopian impulse in literature may arise within the individual character regardless of the nature of the fictional community that he or she inhabits. To illustrate these central points, an analysis of several literary works follows after a brief explication of the paradigm of the mental utopia.3 In a rare and insightful application of his own ideas to literary studies, Karl Mannheim writes: “When the imagination finds no satisfaction in existing reality, it seeks refuge in wishfully constructed places and periods. Myths, fairy tales, other-worldly promises of religion, humanistic fantasies, travel romances, have

1  Lyman Tower Sargent, “Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells,” Science Fiction Studies, 3.3 (1976), 279. 2  Glenn Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), xii. 3  This chapter, being a culmination of reflection on the mental utopia literature, draws briefly upon my published work in the journals Utopian Studies and Mosaic.

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been continually changing expressions of that which was lacking in actual life.”4 This gap between the ideal world, and the actual one, defines utopia. Mannheim asks, from what should “the new be expected to originate if not from the novel and the uniquely personal mind of the individual who breaks beyond the bounds of the existing order?”5 His recognition of the centrality of the individual to the utopian project opens the way for a new understanding of mental experiences in literature that smash the boundaries of the status quo. Ernst Bloch likewise recognizes the significance of the individual consciousness to utopia when he notes that in the Hellenistic ideal of Panchaea “utopia and religious enlightenment become one and the same.”6 Both of these philosophers of utopia point to an erasure of primary bifurcations of self and other at the root of human consciousness. Not surprisingly, the experiential and epistemological dimensions of the mental utopia present unique challenges to the literary scholar, not only since the mystical experience in question is utterly subjective and ultimately fictionalized, but because the immanence of the lived moment, the eternal moment, the absolute presentness of the here and now, radicalizes narrative temporality. Therefore, in mental utopias, a narrative refiguration of temporality occurs at the level of character focalization. According to narrative theory, the subjective experiences of time by characters in the world of the text (focalization) can include dream sequences, ecstatic experiences, memories, and are all broadly termed “anachronies.” When indicative of mystical experience, these anachronies help to define the mental utopia. The striking of clocks in a narrative for instance serves as a reminder of chronological time, whereas in their internal experiences characters may actually be “pulled back by memory and thrust ahead by expectation.”7 In The Magic Mountain (1924), for example, abolishing the sense of the measurement of time becomes a major feature of the narrative.8 Likewise in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), Ricoeur identifies “the very suspension of time” in which can be found the immanent “character of eternity that mysteriously circulates between the present and the past, out of which it creates a unity.”9 Ricoeur sees these “extratemporal” experiences as “contemplative moments” that help to illuminate the essential religious dimensions of temporal experience in literary texts. Because of their focus on subjective interior experiences, time measured by the clock in mental utopias is eroded as a profound singularity of religious experience 4  Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, 1936), 205. 5  Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 206. 6  Ernest Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 489. 7  Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 105. 8  Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 2:112. 9  Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 2:112.

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transcends linear temporality. This absolute presentness of the moment subverts any notion of becoming or future time. Utopia is realized in a perpetual moment shot through with meaning rather than as something promised in the future or idealized in the past. Characters who experience the ground of being as divine, and those through whom this religious experience is focalized, perceive the earth transformed into heaven by way of an utterly subjective mystical apprehension of the unity of being. What one might call the Chiliastic, mystical, or transcendental experience is therefore central to the mental utopia. In displacing all notions of progress and future redemption, time experienced at this level may be termed experiential time, both for its radical subjectivity and transformative effect on fictional characters. Examples of mental utopias, which posit the absolute presentness of the religious experience, the absence of any idea of becoming, and the transcendence of reality include Plato’s Republic (c. 370–5 bc), Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1306–07), Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), and Huxley’s Island (1962)—in addition to texts not traditionally associated with the genre of utopian literature, such as Cao’s Dream of the Red Chamber (1791), Blake’s Jerusalem (1804), Melville’s Mardi (1849), and Mahfouz’s Journey of Ibn Fattouma (1983). In fact, one can trace the contours of this religious philosophy that seeks unity with the divine through collapse of the ego in Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, Shamanism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, Mahayana Buddhism, and Native American religious traditions, among others too numerous to list. In the Western tradition, this philosophy is expressed metaphorically in Plato’s Parable of the Cave, while Blake employs symbolism and language heavily indebted to Christianity and Neoplatonism to give it voice. Because of this diversity of expression, the term “mental utopia” or “perennial utopia” is preferable to “transcendental utopia” or “chiliastic utopia,” for ‘transcendental’ recalls the American movement that Ralph Waldo Emerson helped to inaugurate, while ‘Chiliasm’ smacks of Christian millenarianism. The phrase “mental utopia,” by contrast, is broader, and thereby more in keeping with the universal nature of the fictionalized religious experience in question. In literature, what we understand as the mental utopia expresses itself, in part, by emphasizing the need for self-annihilation. In many cases, a sudden collapse of the content-laden ego leads to a non-dualistic apprehension of the world, a Divine Vision Blake calls it, in which each being is seen to contain in itself the whole intelligible world. In other words, when one “ceases to be an individual,” one “penetrates the whole world.”10 Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, discoursing on the Buddhist doctrine of anātman, explains why the self, as the unenlightened person knows it, must be transcended. He writes, “the self we ordinarily talk about is psychological, or rather logical and dualistic. It is set against a not-self; it is a subject opposing an object or objects. 5.

10  Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper Colophon, 1945),

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It is full of contents and very complex. Therefore, when this complexity [of the self] is dissected and its component factors are set aside not belonging to it, it is reduced, we think, to a nothing or an emptiness. And it is for this reason that Buddhism upholds the doctrine of anātman, egolessness, which means there is no psychological substratum corresponding to the word self (ātman).”11 This ultimate realization of the fundamental emptiness of the self, expressed here in Buddhist terms, is tantamount to self-annihilation. Bloch agrees that the deepest desire of the self is paradoxically for its own annihilation, for with it comes identification with the ground of becoming, the field of emptiness, in the “utterly immediate nearness” of the now. This complete surrender of the self transcends subject-object bifurcation through identification with the very stream of becoming. The mystic experience, in which the body and mind drop-off and trigger a state of samâdhi (a Buddhist term for a penetrating concentration that gives rise to the supraconscious state), suddenly transforms the world, once mundane and meaningless, before one’s eyes into a golden jewel by which one is astonished. In Ch’an Buddhism, this state of heightened concentration to the moment leads to a state of perception called ‘suchness’ or ‘tathatā’ that may be triggered by almost anything, including “the way a leaf turns in the wind … a girl’s glance … the beauty of a melody rising up from nothingness.”12 In the Buddhist Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, 18 forms of emptiness (śūnyatā) are enumerated, including: abhāva-śūnyatā, the emptiness of self-nature; svalakṣaṇaśūnyatā, the emptiness of selfhood; and abhāva-svabhāva-śūnyatā, the emptiness of the non-being of self-nature.13 These “inner things” are empty because, according to the Buddhists, all of our psychological activities have “no ego-soul behind them, as is commonly imagined by us.”14 As Keiji Nishitani observes, “it is impossible for the self on the field of śūnyatā to be self centered like the ‘self’ seen as ego or subject. Rather, the absolute negation of that very self-centeredness enables the field of śūnyatā to open up in the first place.”15 This annihilation of the self (sometimes troped as transcendence) is a common theme in mental utopias. The Republic, the earliest and most influential utopian text in the West, offers a well-known parable of perception that promises attainment of the highest Good to those who break the chains of limited vision and rise to apprehend the expansive upper world. Simply put, the parable illustrates “the degrees in which our nature

11  Teitarō Daisetz Suzuki, “Self the Unattainable,” in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School, ed. Fredrick Franck (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 16. 12  Ernest Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 1179. 13  Teitarō Daisetz Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: Third Series (New York: Rider and Company, 1953), 236. 14  Suzuki, Essays, 236. 15  Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 158.

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may be enlightened or unenlightened.”16 The assent to see things in the upper world marks entry into the world of knowledge, which “is the last thing to be perceived and only with great difficulty” and it “is the essential Form of Goodness.”17 Just as one might turn his body around so that one eye may see the light emanating from the upper world, so for Plato the “entire soul must be turned away from this changing world” until its eye can bear to contemplate “the supreme splendor” of the Good.18 This emphasis on subjectivity and perception in attaining to a religious vision of the Good aligns this short parable with the paradigm of the mental utopia in literature. In mental utopias steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, self-transcendence is often expressed in terms of surrendering to the will of God. Dante’s utopian journey to the Beatific vision culminates in an experience of the perpetual present of eternity. While undoubtedly Dante’s conception of perfect illumination involves progress toward that realization (as does Blake’s and Huxley’s), the fact that the moment of ultimate attainment comes suddenly and erases formerly held linear conceptions of time and bifurcated perception lends Paradise its utopian character. Discernment comes to the persona of Dante suddenly as the last vestiges of ratiocination and selfhood are annihilated, time and space are abolished, and the fact of oneness with God is realized as “a sleeper wakens to a piercing glare.” When Dante enters the Empyrean, a flash of light temporarily blinds him before he can behold the saints of heaven forming the petals of a white rose. The Empyrean, a state of being more than a place, contains no time and exists within no space.19 The ultimate bliss that the persona of Dante attains cannot be expressed in words. His final vision is a revelation in which he perceives in the Divine Light the form of all creation, and he recognizes every aspect of being as sharing in that ultimate unity of God.20 This apprehension of the unity of God transforms all that exists, “the entire complex, incomprehensible fabric of reality,” and “fuses into one simple flame.”21 Paradise is achieved through self-abandonment, and utopia, itself a state rather than a place, arrives. William Blake’s Jerusalem features a similarly radical shift in individual perception. In this dense prophetic poem not often associated with the genre of utopian literature, Blake rallies the reader to find enlightenment in the eternal moment, rather than in some ensuing peaceful millennium. Around the character of Albion, the primordial man, Blake creates an epic inner myth of psychic 16  Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 227. 17  Plato, The Republic of Plato, 231. 18  Plato, The Republic of Plato, 232. 19  Dante, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine: Cantica III Paradise (New York: Penguin, 1988), 322. 20  Dante, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, 347–8. 21  John Saly, Dante’s Paradiso: The Flowering of the Self (New York: Pace University Press, 1989), 189.

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disintegration and re-integration. As Albion falls asleep, his mind begins to divide, first into four main principles (or “Zoas” representing ratiocination, imagination, emotion, and bodily sensation) that battle with each other for dominance over the mind of Albion. This intrapsychic war, in which the Zoa Urizen (ratiocination) usurps the proper place of Urthona (imagination) and creates a cold mechanized world with laws that enslave, can only be ended when Albion apprehends the Divine Vision and awakens to the truth of the fundamental unity of the Four Zoas. We find at the heart of Blake’s Universe, affirms Helen White, “a very comprehensive unity” throughout which “runs a series of gigantic correspondences, for after all, all things are one in God.”22 The integrated vision that Albion achieves upon awakening “is a condition of complete union with God” when the self disappears in the wonder of Divine Mercy.23 “In Great Eternity, every particular Form gives forth or Emanates / Its own peculiar Light, & the form is the Divine Vision.”24 Hence, the God that once stood afar in the distant heavens becomes closer than one’s own skin. Recognizing the Divinity in each minute particular transforms fallen time into eternity. Leaving behind historical notions of apocalypse, Blake suggests that each individual may experience the end of time and eternal life at any moment by awakening to the Divine Vision, just as Albion does. In this sense, Blake frees salvation from historical time, works, and grace. The fallen world of time ends in a personal apocalypse focalized through Albion. Time opens to eternity when Albion awakens from his deathly slumber and perceives the “Visions of God in Eternity.”25 Since Blake discards linear notions of time and moral law (represented by Urizen), the founding of the New Jerusalem in the future does not interest him. Utopia need not be relegated to some future time, or worse satirized as unachievable, because the New Jerusalem is realized at the subjective level of the individual. As Swearingen notes, apocalypse or millennium can have no place in Blake’s time schemes since it is experienced linearly.26 Blake rejects the error of consciousness, which is dual or divided perception, and offers in its place a vision of unity in which dialectical opposition between such states as innocence and experience, or heaven and hell, are transcended through utopian synthesis. From this standpoint, there can be no slipping back into the duality and fragmentation that characterizes Albion and the Four Zoas at the beginning of the poem.

22  Helen White, The Mysticism of William Blake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1927), 184. 23  J.G. Davies, The Theology of William Blake (Connecticut: Archon, 1966), 63. 24  William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 54.1–2, 203. 25  Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 96:43, 256. 26  James E. Swearingen, “Time and History in Blake’s Europe,” CLIO, 20.2 (1991): 116.

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In my quest to trace the universalism of the mental utopia, we turn now to two novels from the world tradition, one from eighteenth-century China and the other from twentieth-century Egypt. The enormous Chinese masterwork (both English translations exceed 2,500 pages) Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng, 红楼梦)27 recounts the ill-fated love affair of its protagonist Jia Bao-yu and the moral and economic decline of his once prominent Banner family. In adolescence, Bao-yu lives in luxury with his female cousins in the specious Prospect Garden compound. Together they create an aesthetic space where they write poetry, paint, read, play music, drink wine, and enjoy nature. However, their garden society proves short lived as one by one his female cousins are married off (most often tragically), and his family suffers the consequences of a series of immoral acts that come to the attention of the Chinese emperor. All clan property is subsequently confiscated, and its members endure humiliation, sickness, and death before Baoyu earns them some measure of redemption by scoring seventh on the imperial civil service examinations. However, rather than return to the professional and familial obligations that await him after the examinations, Bao-yu departs leaving behind a wife (the product of a poorly arranged marriage) and unborn child. As a result, Dream of the Red Chamber (like Jerusalem) is not frequently associated with the utopian genre, although the novel contains utopian dimensions grounded in the subjective mental experiences of its hero. It is the inevitable collapse of the utopian world of Prospect Garden that paradoxically facilitates Bao-yu’s ultimate attainment of enlightenment. Through a process of interpreting and rereading dream ledgers predicting the fate of his beloved female cousins, Bao-yu moves from the spatial utopia of Prospect Garden to a mental one informed largely by Chinese Buddhist epistemology. John Minford, in the introduction to his translation of chapters 81–120 of Honglou meng, notes that Cao Xueqin shared the predilection for Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism with many Bannerman of the time, including Gao E who had a hand in editing the novel.28 The “essential discipline of Zen consists in emptying the self of all its psychological content, in stripping the self of all those trappings, moral, philosophical, spiritual, with which it has continued to adorn itself since the first awakening of consciousness.” This identification of self and other yields a kind of metaphysical formula: selfºzero, and zeroºInfinity; hence selfºinfinity.29 In the same manner, Bao-yu experiences a shift from the fleeting garden utopia to the more enduring inner space of enlightenment as he deciphers the registers in the Land of Illusion and the Paradise of Truth. If the decay of Prospect Garden is a soteriological instrument, then Honglou meng as “essentially a Bildungsroman in 27  The Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone (红楼梦). I use both the Hawkes and Minford translation of Honglou meng (referred to hereafter as SS) and the Yang translation (hereafter HLM). 28  SS 4.25. 29  Teitarō Daisetz Suzuki, “Self the Unattainable,” in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School, ed. Fredrick Franck (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 15–16.

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which the protagonists embark on a pilgrimage, a cosmic grand tour—or ‘a little trip’ in the Buddhist mahāsatva’s understanding—of learning and development.”30 Salvation for the deluded mind must involve the removal of illusion (māyā) and purging of all sorts of undesirable attachments.31 The central allegory of Honglou meng therefore is a quest for salvation. In addition to the recognition that Prospect Garden serves as a soteriological space that facilitates the enlightenment of the protagonist, Dream of the Red Chamber contains other utopian elements as well. The Confucianism in the novel, for example, emphasizes the positive values of striving for academic excellence and the attainment of official position not for self, but for social amelioration. Indeed, the primary concern of Confucius was “a good society based on good government and harmonious human relations” and so he stressed filial piety and proper conduct (li).32 By contrast, Daoism opposes Confucian conformity by insisting on a transcendental spirit and a fundamental unity that is eternal, nameless, and indescribable. By valuing simplicity, naturalness, non-conformity, non-action (wu-wei), Daoism provides a severe critique of Confucian worldliness33 and an alternate vision of utopia grounded in the subjective mental experiences of the individual. In the novel, Jia Bao-yu has a second self, named Zhen Bao-yu, who looks like him in every way, and whose family and property seems to be a mirror image of his own. Thoroughly convinced of this own uniqueness, Jia Bao-yu is incredulous at the prospect of having an identical twin. His cousin Shi Xiang-yun teases him mercilessly about it, even suggesting that the next time he is beaten by his father that he “run off to Nanking and get this other Bao-yu to stand in for you!”34 As the conversation turns more serious, they try to recall historical and literary precedents for persons who had the same name and looked exactly alike. “It isn’t possible,” Bao-yu finally concludes. Yet, when he drifts to sleep, Bao-yu finds himself in a dream space remarkably similar to Prospect Garden. He even meets maids that look like his own Aroma, Patience, and Faithful. They mistake him for Zhen Bao-yu but treat him disdainfully when they discover their error. Overcome with a sense of impurity, he wanders alone into a replica of his own garden. Once there, he has a dream encounter with his second self, Zhen Bao-yu. Zhen remarks aloud (in Jia Bao-yu’s dream): “Just now, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was in a big garden in the capital, where I met 30  Qiancheng Li, Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 134. 31  Anthony Yu, “The Quest for Brother Amor: Buddhist Intimations in The Story of the Stone,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 49.1 (1989): 83. 32  Wing-tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 15. 33  Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, 136. 34  SS 56.84.

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some girls who called me a stinking wretch and refused to talk to me. When at last I found his rooms he was asleep. Only his empty form was there—his real self had gone, I don’t know where.”35 As Anthony Yu explains, this trope of the dream within a dream suggests the difficulty of distinguishing dream from reality and harkens back to the ancient Daoist text the Zhuangzi. Questions of “what is and is not a dream, of who is the dreamer and who the dreamt” is common in Daoist philosophy and, by offering a sense of the brevity and mutability of the world, it “participates in certain elemental traits of dream literature from China and elsewhere.”36 Comparing Cao Xueqin’s technique to Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and Philip Roth (b. 1933), Yu concludes that the dream of the double points to the proposition that “there is the real in the false, and the false in the real.”37 He is in good company, for “all the traditional commentators read the additional Bao-yu in the context of the novel’s play on real and fake.”38 For instance, Wang Xuexiang, a representative of the nineteenth century “small details school,”39 argues that the reader of Honglou meng “ought to know that the real is really unreal, the unreal is really the real; there is unreal with the real and real within the unreal; the real is not real, and the unreal is not the unreal. To understand this destiny and purpose, Zhen Bao-yu and Jia Bao-yu are one and are two.”40 When the two finally meet in waking life, Jia Bao-yu is “sorely disillusioned” with his second self, and he realizes “from their conversation that the two of them were really poles apart, as far removed from each other as the proverbial ice and coal.” He tells his wife Xue Bao-chai that Zhen Bao-yu is “a fool” and that “there was nothing the slightest bit profound or illuminating in what he said.”41 When he expresses a desire to differentiate himself, to “look different” than Zhen Bao-yu, Bao-chai chides him by asserting that Zhen’s ideas about “literary compositions and public affairs,” “loyalty and filial piety,” are right on the mark. The encounter with his second self, combined with the rebuff by his new wife, results in Jia Baoyu’s complete mental collapse. Wai-yee Li rightly observes that Bao-yu’s dilemma, represented by both Zhen Bao-you and his mismatch with his wife Bao-chai, is really one between “Confucian 35  HLM 1169. 36  Anthony Yu, Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 138. 37  Yu, Rereading, 149. 38  Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Later Imperial Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 235. 39  For more on the Small Details School, see: Edwards, Louise P., Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 18–21. 40  Edwards, Louise P., Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 19. 41  SS 115.277.

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responsibility and Taoist-Buddhist renunciation.”42 Jia Bao-yu must reject his second self, and his wife, in the quest for the “real” Bao-yu. In keeping with larger motifs in the novel, what was “false” (jia) and once shrouded in ignorance has become “true” (zhen). This most concrete expression of Jia Bao-yu’s attainment of self-knowledge also brings “final clarification to the reader” concerning the origin of the Stone and his story “in both worlds” as the “preincarnate rock, then the Divine Luminescent Stone-in-Waiting, and finally the incarnate Bao-yu.”43 What we have then are two Chinese traditions with utopian notions of betterment in the novel that are at odds with each other: Confucianism with its real-world pragmatism and Daoism with its transcendental metaphysics. For Pingleung Chan, this presentation of Bao-yu’s “inner struggle in terms of dualism,” and the utopian quest to transcend that duality, becomes a valid symbolic formula for the deciphering of what seems like an insolvable paradox.44 This insight explains why Jia Bao-yu insists that reaching enlightenment is a great accomplishment (albeit a spiritual and not worldly one). “The great question,” Bao-yu argues, “is how to rise above all this, how to escape the net of this mortal life.”45 The answer lies in his cultivation of an ideal state of consciousness rather than an embrace of the socially bound Confucian moral code that Zhen Bao-yu, Bao-chai, Aroma, Jia Zheng, and a host of other characters try to hoist upon him. By way of conclusion, I offer a brief reading of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Journey of Ibn Fattouma through the lens of the mental utopia. In it, traditional forms of Islamic social order are critiqued as the status quo by contrasting it with alternate modes of living. As Raymond Stock observes, Mahfouz has always disliked the role of the clergy “that imposes itself in Islamic form in modern times.”46 His work consistently addresses the “political, social, cultural and moral aspects of Egyptian life,” and the themes of socialism “permeates his novels, short stories and interviews.”47 At first glance, Mahfouz’s novel Ibn Fattouma might seem like just another utopian satire, since it features a protagonist who journeys via caravan through lands meant to invoke social models ranging from an Islamic republic to pre-monotheistic paganism, from secular democracies to fascist regimes. In fact, it is a mental utopia. 42  Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 246. 43  Anthony Yu, Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 156. 44  Ping-leung Chan, “Myth and Psyche in Hung-lou meng” in Critical Essays on Chinese Fiction, eds. Winston Yang and Curtis Adkins (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980), 168. 45  SS 118.329. 46  Raymond Stock, “Naguib Mahfouz: A Translator’s View,” Kenyon Review, 23.2 (2001): 141. 47  Fauzi M. Najjar, “Islamic Fundamentalism and the Intellectuals: The Case of Naguib Mahfouz,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 25.1 (1998): 142.

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The criticism of Islam begins in the novel’s opening chapter. Qindil, known derisively by his half brothers as “Son of Fattouma” (Ibn Fattouma), is forced to flee his homeland after the Sultan’s chamberlain takes his fiancée for a wife, and his sheik teacher marries his mother and moves into his deceased father’s home (thereby all but disinheriting him). Disgusted by the corruption in his homeland, he sets out on what is expected to be a one-year caravan journey to find wisdom in the fabled land of Gebel, the very idea of which fired his imagination “like some much-loved star mounting its throne behind other stars.”48 Filled with “an unlimited scope for hope,” Qindil begins his journey believing it will lead him to a utopian society. By the end of the novel, he is on the way to discovering that Gebel is not a place, but a state of mind cultivated through suffering and honed in meditation. There is no greater contrast in social orders than that between Qindil’s homeland and Mashriq, the first caravan stop. In Mashriq, none of the Judeo-Christian Islamic moral codes aimed at curbing bodily sin are observed. Rather, its citizens practice pagan worship of the moon and participate in orgiastic ceremonies marked by dancing, singing, and group lovemaking. Though Mashriqians are enslaved and have no houses or no medicines, and are summarily fed to the birds at death, they nevertheless remain “content and cheerful most of the time.”49 Qindil falls in love with Arousa, a young woman whose name connotes forbidden sexuality at this point in the text. After a few sexual encounters with her, he forgets “completely” the “projects and dreams of the journey and Gebel.”50 Although privately bothered by the free love practiced in Mashriq, Qindil stays and has four children with Arousa. Yet, once he is discovered teaching Islam to his son Ram, he is forced out of Mashriq, and he seeks refuge in the fascist military state of Haira. In Haira, the God King owns all the land and factories, and his palace is decorated with the decapitated heads of the enemies of the state. Their social order is top-down with a small group of elite privy to power and wealth, while obedience and compliance are demanded of the exploited commoners.51 Soon after his arrival, Haira attacks his former home ostensibly “to free the slaves of Mashriq.”52 Qindil manages to buy Arousa back for 30 dinars when she is sold as war booty, but for his troubles he discovers that her father has been killed, and their four children are likely dead as well.53 In a scenario that recalls the abduction of his fiancée in his homeland, Sage Daizing in Haira forcibly takes Arousa, and Qindil is wrongly imprisoned underground for ridiculing state religion.54 In a stunning reversal of political fortune, 20 years later Daizing is jailed, and Qindil is 48  Naguib Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (New York: Anchor, 1983), 15. 49  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 28. 50  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 34. 51  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 61. 52  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 57. 53  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 66. 54  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 68.

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released and rehabilitates himself. Shortly thereafter, he continues his journey to the promised land of Gebel. The caravan carries Qindil to the Land of Halba, a secular democracy replete with separation of church and state, religious plurality, and even gay rights.55 Predictably, Qindil falls in love, now with a doctor’s daughter named Samia—and he forgets Arousa altogether again.56 Qindil has three more children, and though generally happy, a nagging urge makes him continue his journey for wisdom as war (which follows him everywhere) looms large. He travels next to Aman, a surveillance state that uses propaganda to create an apathetic contentment substituting for true happiness. All workers dress alike, and those who control the means of production are considered the enemies of the people.57 Qindil, like all visitors, must be followed everywhere—even to the lavatory—by a monitor.58 When Qindil unexpectedly discovers that Arousa “continued her journey to the land of Ghuroub” following the death of her Buddhist husband,59 he leaves Aman hoping to find her (and the wisdom she comes to symbolize). As he does so, his monitor Fluka sneers, your pursuit “is nothing more than a journey to nothingness.”60 As I have noted, in the context of Asian religious traditions like Buddhism, nothingness has positive connotations, particularly in the pursuit of enlightenment. Arriving in Ghuroub, a limitless forest where aspirants practice mediation in preparation for the final trip to Gebel, Qindil begins to realize that his mistake all along was to believe that utopia is spatial, and that his journey would end in the discovery of a place better than his Islamic homeland. As if to reinforce this understanding, he finds no ruler in Ghuroub, only a lone teacher who practices life “in conformity with truth and withdrawal from humankind.”61 From this holy man, he learns that Arousa has “gone already to the land of Gebel” by “virtue of the pains she suffered in her life.”62 Indeed, despite her upbringing in a culture that promotes promiscuity, Arousa’s spiritual achievements make her an “empowered and positive” female character mirroring that of “several female prostitutes in his novels.”63 Inspired again by his young love, her name now connoting devotion to divine rather than sexual love, Qindil practices meditative concentration. The teacher counsels him that by “concentration man merges into his essence.” With some 55  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 83. 56  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 101. 57  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 122. 58  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 116. 59  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 131. 60  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 130. 61  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 138. 62  Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, 141. 63  Michelle Hartman, “Re-Reading Women in/to Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘al-Liss wa’l kilab (The Thief and the Dogs),” Research in African Literatures, 28.3 (1997): 6.

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effort, Qindil “forgot time” and learned to “ignore the fruits and the rewards” of his actions (a point that recalls a central teaching of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita). As the army of Aman enters to occupy Ghuroub and expand its own territory, Qindil opts to take the final caravan to Gebel. As Fauzi Najjar observes, Ibn Fattouma demonstrates to the reader that “salvation is in our hands; we are what we make ourselves.”64 The conclusion of Journey of Ibn Fattouma is open ended, for the closer Qindil gets to the Promised Land of Gebel, the farther it recedes in the distance. The allegory, however, is clearly a spiritual one. Fluka was correct that the journey to Gebel is a journey to nothingness, but not in the empirical and existential manner that he suggested. Qindil sends his travel journal home with the caravan driver for the benefit of his countrymen, and he continues “the final adventure with unabated determination.”65 In this novel, what might appear to be a failure to find a utopian society, and thereby to cast suspicion over the whole utopian project as chimerical, becomes intelligible when read through the lens of the mental utopia. As I have shown, the mental utopia occupies a unique place in the genre of utopian literature, and it includes such disparate texts as The Republic, Paradise, Jerusalem, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Journey of Ibn Fattouma. Notwithstanding the inherent shortcomings of typological studies like this one, the paradigm of the mental utopia expands traditional notions of the genre and points to a universalism that offers an alternative to assumptions of utopia as a purely Western and spatially-oriented construct. Indeed, when construed as a mental process rather than a fictionalization of an alternate society, utopia in literature may take many forms. To be utopian, therefore, a literary text need not fictionally portray an idealized state or community, but may instead feature a utopian vision focalized through an individual character—even one like Bao-yu who inhabits a dystopian world. Thus, the paradigm of the mental utopia provides another means of measuring religious experience, for when utopia in literature becomes a matter of perception and attitude, it can exist anywhere and at any time. This focus on the perpetual moment shot through with meaning gives mental utopias a non-linear temporality. Rather than bemoaning the loss of some idealized past, or waiting on some promised future, characters through whom this experience is focalized are transformed by their encounters with the divine (whatever form that it takes). And because these characters practice some form of self-annihilation, all traces of the ethico-religious conception of progress (and achievement) in the text are displaced by a notion of immanence. As a consequence, these works call into question historical and dialectical notions of progression traditionally associated with utopia (for in a state of timelessness, all becoming has ceased). The mental utopias analyzed in this chapter emerge from different cultures and time periods, and draw upon diverse 64  Fauzi M. Najjar, “Islamic Fundamentalism and the Intellectuals: The Case of Naguib Mahfouz,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 25.1 (1998): 168. 65  Naguib Mahfouz, The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (New York: Anchor, 1983): 148.

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religious traditions in their formulations of the philosophia perennis, yet they all locate the utopian impulse firmly in the subjective religious experiences of the individual.

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References Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Bloch, Ernest. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. Cao, Xueqin. The Story of the Stone. Trans. David Hawkes and John Minford. 5 vols. New York: Penguin, 1986. Chan, Ping-Leung. “Myth and Psyche in Hung-lou meng.” Critical Essays on Chinese Fiction. Eds. Winston Yang and Curtis Adkins. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980. 165–79. Chan, Wing-tsit. A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Dante, Alighieri. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine: Cantica III Paradise. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. New York: Penguin, 1988. Davies, J.G. The Theology of William Blake. Connecticut: Archon, 1966. Edwards, Louise P. Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Eliav-Feldon, Mirian. Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Hartman, Michelle. “Re-Reading Women in/to Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘al-Liss wa’l kilab (The Thief and the Dogs).” Research in African Literatures, 28.3 (1997): 5–16. Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper Colophon, 1945. Li, Qiancheng. Fictions of Enlightenment: Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004. Li, Wai-yee. Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Lu, Tina. Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Later Imperial Chinese Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Journey of Ibn Fattouma. New York: Anchor, 1983. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt, 1936. Najjar, Fauzi M. “Islamic Fundamentalism and the Intellectuals: The Case of Naguib Mahfouz.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 25.1 (1998): 139–68.

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Negley, Glenn. Utopian Literature: A Bibliography. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Trans. Jan Van Bragt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Plato. The Republic of Plato. Trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Saly, John. Dante’s Paradiso: The Flowering of the Self. New York: Pace University Press, 1989. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells.” Science Fiction Studies, 3. 3 (1976): 279. Stock, Raymond. “Naguib Mahfouz: A Translator’s View.” Kenyon Review, 23.2 (2001): 136–42. Suzuki, Teitarō Daisetz. Essays in Zen Buddhism: Third Series. New York: Rider and Company, 1953. ———. “Self the Unattainable.” The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School. Ed. Fredrick Franck. New York: Crossroad, 1991. Swearingen, James E. “Time and History in Blake’s Europe.” CLIO, 20.2 (1991): 109–13. White, Helen C. The Mysticism of William Blake. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1927. Yu, Anthony. “The Quest for Brother Amor: Buddhist Intimations in The Story of the Stone.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 49.1 (June 1989), 55–92. ———. Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

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Index

A Suggestive Inquiry 99, 100, 104, 105, 107 A Theory of Justice 123 abjection 243, 245–8, 253, 255–8 Achilles 128 Adam (and Eve) 193 Adorno, Theodor W. 166 agape 205, 247 agnostic 70 Ahab (Captain) 135 Alchemical Society 100, 105 alchemy 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106 Altare della Patria 45 altruism 77 anarchist utopia 36 anarcho-syndicalism 68, 70, 71, 77, 80 Anarchy, State, and Utopia 37, 38 Anthroposophical Society 100 anti-dualist 160 anti-humanism (see posthumanism; transhumanism) 262 anti-universalist 160 anti-utopia; anti-utopian 170, 173, 174, 182, 189, 190 Babel as 189 Apology 280 Archer, Isabel 135 architecture 45, 185, 187, 193, 196, 225–35, 239–41 Canadian Centre for 181 archetype; archetypal 189, 193, 194 Aristotle 13, 15, 30, 128, 281, 287, 292 Politics 292 Athanasius of Alexandria 204 Atwood, Margaret 40, 41 Atwood (South), Mary Anne 99, 100, 102–5, 107, 108, 109 Augustine of Hippo 184–7, 189, 192, 193fn, 194, 195fn, 196, 207–16, 218, 219, 221

City of God (De civitate Dei) 184, 185, 187, 192, 196 Confessions 184, 212, 218 Averroes (Ibn Rušd) 281 Babel, Tower of 186–95 Augustine on 186 Babylon 186, 191, 193, 195, 198 Bacon, Francis 109 bad citizens 136 Barlaam of Calabria 206 Barnes, Julian 172 Basil of Caesarea 204 Baudelaire, Charles 159 Bellamy, Edward 28, 30, 31, 35, 120, 266 Benjamin, Walter 159 Bingen, von (of), Hildegaard 106 bio-technology 40, 155 Birnbaum, Nathan (see Zionism) 180 Birnbaum, Uriel 179–86, 189–99 Der Kaiser und der Architekt 179, 181, 185, 186, 190, 192, 193, 195fn, 196 Die Errettung der Welt 182fn, 190fn, 197 Gläubige Kunst 182fn, 196, 199 Weltuntergang 182fn, 197 Blake, William 100, 317, 319, 320, 328, 329 Bloch, Ernst 166, 178, 218, 219, 246, 257, 260, 272, 277, 316, 318, 328 Atheism in Christianity 218fn, 219 The Principle of Hope 246fn, 257, 260fn, 277, 316fn, 318fn, 328 “not-yet-conscious” 246, 260 Bloom, Allan 176fn, 178 blueprint utopias 30, 38, 41, 59 body utopia 32 Bond, James 161 Boullée, Etienne-Louis 56

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Brave New World 20, 27, 28, 31, 41, 67, 68, 73, 81 Brecht, Bertolt 169, 176, 178 The Good Person of Szechwan 169 Brown, Frederic 133, 136, 137, 139–42, 145–7 Bruegel, Pieter 187–9 Bruno, Giuliana 157, 159 Buddhism 167, 169, 317, 318, 321, 326 Anātman 317, 318 Atman 318 Bodhisattva 175 Māyā 322 Śūnyatā 318 Bueno, Gustavo 87 Bumppo, Natty 135 Butler, Octavia 121

conservative utopia 58 constitutive utopia 46, 48, 62, 65 contemporary utopian studies 122 Corbusier, Le (Charles-Édouard JeanneretGris) 64, 187, 191fn, 198, 230 Corinthians 196fn Paul’s epistle to 196 cosmological arguments for God 15 Crito 12fn Crowley, Aleister 103 Crystal Age, The 137 cyberspace 260, 261, 264, 265, 270–76, 278 cyborg 40, 239, 259, 265–70, 272–7 “A Cyborg Manifesto” 259fn, 262fn, 274fn, 277 Cyril of Alexandria 204, 212fn, 221

Cabet, Étienne 85fn Callenbach, Ernest 27, 32fn Camillus, Marcus Furius 50 Campidoglio (see Piazza del Campidoglio) Cao, Xueqin 317, 321, 323, 328 Dream of the Red Chamber 317, 321–4, 327–9 The Story of the Stone 321, 322, 328, 329 Callipolis 31 Capitoline Hill 46–8, 50–53, 57, 59, 60–62 Carey, John 165, 172, 173, 178 categorical imperative 23 Cavendish, Margaret 34 children’s literature 181 chiliasm 317 chimera (see disability; hybrid; monster) 239 Christianity 167, 174–6, 181, 193, 195, 197, 201–15, 217–21, 281, 287, 299, 301, 305, 312, 317, 319, 325 Chryssavgis, John 201, 202fn, 215, 217 Cioffi, Frank 145 civil rights 234, 306 Claeys, Gregory 284, 293 Clement of Alexandria 204 “cognitive illusion” 162 colonialism 79, 80 Confucianism 322–4

Dante, Alighieri 317, 319, 328, 329 Paradise 319, 327 Daoism 322–4 Darwin, Charles 73–7 Davis, J.C. 30, 32 Delany, Samuel R. 243, 247–54, 256–8 Deleuze and Guattari 256 Della Rocca, Michael 18, 20fn, 21 Descartes, René 107, 134, 162 Deutsche Arbeit 180 Dick, Philip K. 121 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 121 Die Aktion 180 disability (see chimera; UPIAS; hybrid; monster) 225–41 in More’s Utopia 228 Dispossessed, The 35, 38 Döblin, Alfred 190, 191 Doctrine of Right 22 Dorotheus of Gaza 213, 214, 219 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 217 The Brothers Karamazov 217, 219 double gaze 157, 159 “doublethink” 135 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 270, 271, 277 Dutton, Jacqueline 284fn, 293 dynamic geography 39 dystopia 168, 169, 176, 201, 202, 211, 215, 270, 286, 288, 299, 315, 327

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Index Ecotopia 30fn, 31, 32fn, 36 Einfühlung 125, 128 empathy 125 empiricism 15, 16, 21 enlightenment 11, 21, 67, 90, 104 covert 104 theosophical 104 Eros 180, 198, 205, 247, 273 eschatology (see salvation) 203 occidental eschatology (Taubes) 207, 208fn, 221 etherotopia 165, 174–7 Eve (and Adam) 193 Exit, Voice and Loyalty 37 expressionism (German) 179, 180, 182, 183, 187, 193, 198 “fantascope” 156 fantasmatic spaces 152, 162 Fārābī, al-, Abū Naṣr 284–94 Farr, Florence 104 feudalism 302, 303 First Treatise of Government 14fn Foucault, Michel 232fn, 241 Fourier, Charles 85fn, 102, 160, 226, 241 Freedman, Carl 251fn, 253fn, 257 Freud, Sigmund 79fn, 157, 163, 244, 246, 255, 257 Garden of Eden (see also New Jerusalem) 193, 195, 215 Gasset, y, Ortega 85, 86 Gatsby, Jay 135 Gedankenexperiment 135 German Fraternity of the Rose-Cross 107 Gibson, William 260, 270, 274, 277 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 31, 120 Gnosticism 103 “God matter” 119 Goethe, von, Johann Wolfgang 102, 107 Gorgias 134 Gregory of Nazianzus 204 Gregory of Nyssa 204 Guilded Age America 30 Guyer, Paul 23

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Handbuch der Judenfrage 180 Haraway, Donna 239, 241, 259, 262, 266, 273, 274, 277 Harris, Thomas Lake 102 Hayles, N. Katherine 261, 276, 277 Hector 128 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 88, 298fn, 307, 308 Heidegger, Martin 205fn, 216, 220, 222 Dasein 216 Herland 31, 117, 120, 124, 129, 137 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 99, 103, 104, 105 hermetic-scientific utopia 108 Hertzler, Joyce Oramel 165, 166, 174–8 heterotopia 149, 152, 153, 160 Hibbs, Thomas 209, 220 Hirshman, Albert O. 37 History of the World in 10½ Chapters 172 Hobbes, Thomas 13, 17, 18, 23, 32, 40, 79 Holy Bible, The 178, 208, 212, 217 Genesis 187–9, 194, 201, 212 Luke 167fn, 173fn, 208fn, 220 Matthew 173fn, 218, 220 Psalms 193, 201 Homer 128 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe 133, 137 human nature 12, 13, 16, 67, 72, 77, 78, 81, 117, 119, 120 Hume, David 15, 162 Husserl, Edmund 134, 163 Huxley, Aldous 20, 27, 31, 33, 41, 67–70, 73, 78, 81, 317, 319 Huxley, Thomas Henry 67, 68, 70–80 hybrid; hybridity (see chimera; disability; monster) 239, 261, 265, 274–6 hypostasis 213 Ibn Ṭufayl 281, 284, 288–94 Il Vittoriano 45 individualism 28 Infans 245–6, 255, 257 International Working Men’s Association 71 Invisible Man 135, 136 Ionesco, Eugene 171, 172, 178

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Irenaeus of Lyons 203, 204, 209, 211, 212, 220 Islam 279–84, 287, 290–93, 305, 317, 324–8 Island, The 30fn, 33, 317 Jainism 317 Jameson, Fredric 160 Jesus of Nazareth 166, 175, 176, 201–3, 206, 215fn, 221 Judaism 282, 283, 317 Justin Martyr 203 Kabbalah 109 Kant, Immanuel 21 Kateb, George 170, 171fn, 178 keitai 268 Kristeva, Julia 243–8, 250, 253–8 Kropotkin, Peter (Prince) 67–79 Kubin, Alfred 180 Kumar, Krishan 29, 31 Lacan, Jacques 153, 244, 245, 250 Laws, the 31, 280, 286fn Le Guin, Ursula 35, 37, 38, 125, 126 Lefebvre, Henri 64 Leibniz, Gottfried 102, 107 Lenin, Vladimir 218, 220 Leviathan 13, 32 Levitas, Ruth 29, 122fn, 123, 166, 178, 280, 294 Livy 49 Locke, John 14, 17, 23 Looking Backward 35, 137, 266 Lovecraft, H.P. (Howard Phillips) 172, 178 The Call of Cthulhu 172 Necronomicon 172fn Luther, Martin 210fn Luther, Thomas 209 Mahatma Gandhi 297, 300fn, 305, 312 Mahfouz, Naguib 324–9 Malcolm X (see civil rights) 297, 300, 306, 312 Mandela, Nelson 295–312 In His Own Words 312 Long Walk to Freedom 312

Truth and Reconciliation Commission 295, 296, 308, 309, 311 Mann, Thomas 191fn, 198 Mannheim, Karl 48, 58, 63, 315, 316, 328 Marx, Karl 88, 217 German Ideology 217, 218fn, 220 Theses on Feuerbach 218 Marxism; Marxist 177, 181fn, 218 masakhane 307, 310 material utopia 117 Maximus the Confessor 205, 206fn May ’68 246 McLuhan, Marshall 267, 278 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 150, 163, 261, 266fn, 267 mesmerism 102, 104, 109 Metaphysics of Morals 22 Michelangelo 46, 52–5, 57, 59, 60–64 microphysics of power 150 millenarianism 317 mind; minds 172, 174, 205, 209, 215, 218, 245, 261, 267, 269, 270, 274, 276, 277, 299, 316, 320, 322 philosophically minded 287, 288 relationship to body 261, 265, 268, 275, 277, 318 relationship to soul 177 state of mind 165–8, 255, 325 supermind 208 utopian mind; utopia of the 170 Mind of My Mind 121 mobile phones (see keitai; smartphones) 260, 261, 263–5, 268–71, 274, 275 modernism; modernity 183–91, 193, 195, 231, 262, 298fn, 299, 300 architectural 187 Jewish modernity 180fn and utopia 182 monster (see chimera; disability; hybrid) 239, 251 More, Thomas 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 64, 109, 122, 160, 166, 174, 187, 228, 266 Morris, William 35, 37, 64 Moylan, Tom 256, 258 Moyn, Samuel 122

Index

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mysticism; mystic 99, 169, 205, 210, 215, 281, 282, 303fn, 317 experience 169, 316, 318 narcissism 247, 257, 308 Native American 298, 306, 317 Naturphilosophen 102 nazi; nazism 191, 282 in Austria 180 in Germany 191 neo-nazi 181, 254 occupation 184fn in Vienna 190 necessitarianism 19 Negley, Glenn 315, 329 Neo-Platonism 109, 229, 281, 317 New Blazing World 34 New Harmony 95 New Jerusalem (see also Garden of Eden) 49, 186, 193, 295fn, 320 New Lanark 90, 91, 92, 93 News From Nowhere 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich 162, 163, 166, 170, 178 Nimrod 188, 189, 192 Nineteen Eighty-Four 20 nirvana 165–74, 177 “Noble Savage” 68 Noonan, Jeff 238, 239, 241 not-yet-conscious (see Bloch) Nozick, Robert 29, 37, 38 Nussbaum, Martha 120, 124, 126, 128, 129 Oken, Lorenz 102, 105 Oliphant, Lawrence 102 Oliver, Kelly 247, 258 Origen Adamantius 204 Orwell, George 20, 168 Oryx and Crake 40, 41 ousia 213 Owen, Robert 85fn, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96 Owen, Robert Dale 93 Palamas, Gregory 206, 210 panpsychism 20fn pansophic 101, 109

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paradise 172–4, 183fn, 187, 196, 308, 319, 321 parthenogenic 119 pathological utopia 46, 46fn, 48, 58, 59, 62 Perennial Philosophy, The 317fn Petrarch 52 Piazza del Campidoglio 45, 48, 50–52, 54–7, 59–64 Plato 12fn, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 128, 129, 162, 175, 204, 205, 279–81, 285–7, 290, 292, 319 Plessner, Helmuth 161 Plymouth Colony 117 Popper, Karl 279, 280, 294 pornography 248, 251, 256 postcolonial 77, 80 posthuman(ism) (see also anti-humanism; transhumanism) 40, 41, 260–66, 277, 278 postmodernism 28, 77, 273 poststructuralist 77 Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu 150 “practical utopians” 102 pre-Oedipal 244, 245, 255 Principle of Sufficient Reason 18, 21 Prinz, Jesse 126 privileged consciousness 106 Proust, Marcel 256, 257, 316 Prynne, Hester 135 psyche 247, 257, 328 psychic life; space 243–7, 249, 253, 255, 256 psychological egoism 16 Rapp, John George 94 rationalists 21 Rawls, John 123, 124 reason 11, 14, 17, 124 Redgrove, Herbert 100 Republic 12fn, 28, 31, 34, 117, 128, 175, 280, 284, 287, 317, 319fn Revelations 49 Revolution (1917) 218 Ricoeur, Paul 48, 58, 59, 316 Rienzo, di, Cola 50, 52 Rifkin, Jeremy 117, 118, 122, 129, 130 Rilke, Rainer Maria 227 Rogers, Carl 120

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Roma Quadrata 53 Rome 46, 48, 53, 54, 58, 60, 64, 76, 87 Romulus and Remus 49, 50 Rorty, Richard 130 Rosicrucian 101, 107, 109 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15, 68, 79 Ruskin, John 64 Russ, Joanna 251 Russell, Bertrand 281 Russian Constructivism 187 Sacconi, Giuseppe 46, 55, 56 Saint-Simon, de, Henri 85fn, 91 salvation (see eschatology; Taubes) 175, 201–3, 205–7, 209–13, 215, 216, 221, 253, 285, 286, 320, 322, 327 Sargent, Lyman Tower 29, 122, 266, 279fn, 284fn, 315 Sartre, Jean-Paul 307fn, 309, 312 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 162 Schmitt, Carl 214, 221 Seasteading 39, 40 Second Treatise on Government 14 Semiotique, Le (see Kristeva) 244–6, 250–52 “sensorium” 158, 159, 160 sexual alchemy 101 Shakers 36 shamanism 106, 317 Skinner, B.F. 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 41, 127, 128 Sloterdijk, Peter 192fn, 197, 229, 239–41 smartphones 261, 264, 267–71, 275, 276 Snow Crash 39fn Social Contract Tradition 12 “Social Darwinist” 68, 69, 71, 71fn, 73, 74, 80 Society for Utopian Studies 119 solipsism 133 moral also quasi or intermittent 135 universal 147 utopia 136, 146 sophiology 103 soul (see also Ubuntu) 167, 173, 177, 202, 203, 207–9, 212, 215, 280, 281, 286, 287, 289, 299, 318, 319

South Africa (see Mandela; Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Ubuntu) 295–9, 301, 302, 304–12 Apartheid 296–8, 301, 306–11 South, Thomas 101, 103, 104, 107 Sparta 31 Spinoza, Baruch 17, 23 spiritual alchemy 102, 104, 109 spiritual transformation 102 state of nature 13, 14, 78–80 Steiger, de, Madame Isabelle 100, 102, 103, 107 Steiner, Rudolph 103 supernatural enhanced perception 106 supranormal 119 Talmud 189, 192fn Taubes, Jacob 207, 208, 214, 221 Taylor, Thomas 100 technological utopia 158 teleological arguments for God 15 Tennyson, Lord, Alfred 75 Ter Braak, Menno 190, 193 “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” 37 theosis 201–10, 216 Theosophical Society 100 therapeutics 105 Tillich, Paul 172, 178 totalitarianism 27 Toward Perpetual Peace 21 transhumanism (see anti-humanism; posthumanism) 260fn, 261, 262, 266, 277 transmutation 102 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (see Mandela) Turkle, Sherry 263–5, 275, 278 Tutu, Desmond 299, 300, 313 Twin Oaks Community 117 Ubuntu 295, 296, 298–302, 304, 305, 308–11 Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) 231, 236, 241 urbanism 90, 92 Utopia 31, 64, 109, 122, 174, 266, 308fn utopian alchemy 101

Index

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utopian impulse 117 “utopian socialists” 89, 90, 91 Van Winkle, Rip 135 Vatican City 58 “veil of ignorance” 123 Vittorio Emanuele II 45, 48, 50–61 Vorgeschichte 134 Waal, de, Frans 119 Waite, Arthur Edward 100, 105 Walden Two 32, 33, 36, 37, 118, 127, 137 Wallace, Alfred Russel 74, 75 Weber, Max 214, 221 Wells, H.G. 30, 237, 315fn Country of the Blind 237

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What Mad Universe 133, 137, 139, 140 Wilde, Oscar 130 William of Ockham 215 Winstanley, Gerrard 28 With Her in Ourland 124 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 136, 138, 139, 144, 145 World Youth Day Kristeva on 256 Yu, Charles 133, 136, 137, 142–7 Zen 169, 170fn, 175, 178, 318fn, 321, 329 Zionism; Zionist (see Birnbaum, Nathan) 180, 184fn, 193, 198, 305