Utopia Matters: Theory Politics, Literature and the Arts 9789898265074, 9789728025403

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Utopia Matters Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts Ed. Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas PERSPECTIVE SERIES

Title Utopia Matters: Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts Edited by Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas Ist Edition Porto, June 2005 Publisher Editora da Universidade do Porto Address Reitoria da Universidade do Porto Rua D. Manuel II, 4050-345 Porto, Portugal Website www.up.pt Email [email protected] Design Studio Andrew Howard Print Norprint ISBN 972-8025-40-8 Depósito Legal 228 796/05

Utopia Matters Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts Ed. Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas PERSPECTIVE SERIES

EDITORA DA UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO 2005

PART 1

Utopia Matters 9

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Utopia(n) Matters: Introduction

James Edward Arnold

Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas



Utopia Matters: a personal testimony

23 What is your field? Vincent Geoghegan

27 On the exit from one’s cave: Utopian thoughts on language diversities Andreas Friedrich Halle & Herb Buchlowski

Index 33 Out to save the world: scholars and the utopian vision Timothy Miller

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Why I am a member of the “Party of Utopia”

Why utopia matters Lucy Sargisson

Tom Moylan

41 Utopia Matters? Ruth Levitas

47 Utopia Matters! Lyman Tower Sargent

55 Pourquoi l’utopie? Raymond Trousson

PART 2

Utopian Matters

Politics 109 The Intersection of Utopianism and Communitarianism Lyman Tower Sargent

Theory

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Holistic Organizations, Intentional Communities, and the Global Peace and Justice Movement: Gaia at Alcatraz, Italy

From Contemporary Utopias to Contemporaneity as a Utopia Adalberto Dias de Carvalho

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

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Criticism as Utopia

Utopia and Agriculture: Reconsidering the Reforms of the CAP from the Standpoint of Owen’s Communitarianism

Maria Elisa Cevasco

91 Postmodern Utopianism: Deleuze and Guattari and the Escape from Politics Millay Hyatt

101 Brief Notes on Utopia, Dystopia and History Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel

Kunihiko Chiken

153 “The Good Time Coming”: British Utopian Socialism in the Wake of 1848 Joe Phelan

169 Literature and Propaganda: The Socialist Utopia of Robert Blatchford Anna Vaninskaya

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Utopian Gesture in the Cold Climate of Thatcherism: Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Fen

Utopian Music: Music History of the Future in Novels by Bellamy, Callenbach and Huxley

Siân Adiseshiah

Literature and the Arts 199 The Dynamics of Space in the 20th Century Utopian/ Dystopian Fiction Hélène Greven-Borde

219 Art as Utopia in European Avant-garde Movements Vita Fortunati

229 Art and Aesthetics in Utopia: William Morris’s response to the challenge of the “Art of the People” Paola Spinozzi

Karl Traugott Goldbach

245 Music and Utopia: The European Anthem: Kant, Schiller and Beethoven Henrique Gomes de Araújo

251 Cyberpunk versus Empire: Constructing Technotopia in the New World Order Renata Koba

257 Images of Utopia and Dystopia: From the Sea to Hyperspace Feride Çiçekogˇlu

UTOPIA MATTERS

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Utopia(n) Matters: Introduction Fátima Vieira and Marinela Freitas | University of Porto, Portugal

It has been our belief, for a long time, that we are what we study. But how does what we study affect us? Can utopia really matter? And how does it matter? Asked to write a short paper on the motto “utopia matters”, the contributors to Part I of this volume testified to the importance of utopianism in their lives. Some reported the way utopia turned out to be a crucial and formative idea as they grew up in a disconcerting world. Others chose to stand up for utopia as a transformative tool of society, underlining both its political and moral value. And others spoke of the utopian authors they studied and of the importance of their work to their time and to ours. And all of them, crusaders of utopia, dreamers or scholars of the dream, have shown us that utopia does matter – it can change the world by changing our personal worlds every day. But if there is a place for utopia in the 21st century, what kind of place is it, and where are we to find it? In order to map contemporary utopianism, the essays in Part II of this volume focus on three different aspects of utopia, clearly showing that from each of them arises a different discourse. The section on theory problematizes the role of utopia; the section on politics examines the praxis of utopia; finally, the section on literature and the arts dwells on utopian/

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dystopian visions of our times. The three sections thus correspond to three different questions that are crucial to the understanding of today’s utopianism. The first question is what is the role of utopia in our society? According to Adalberto Dias de Carvalho, contemporaneity itself can be defined as a utopia. Central to his paper is the conceptual distinction between political utopias and philosophical utopias; the author pays particular attention to the latter, describing them as “thresholds of utopia”. Carvalho examines the idea of a “surplus” which, in his view, exists in philosophical utopias, where the fulfilment of ideals is not crucial to the definition of their identity, but a constant motivation for their reformulation. To the author, the role of an “education for solidarity” is the key to the understanding of utopia nowadays. Maria Elisa Cevasco puts forward the proposition of cultural criticism as utopia, departing from the analysis of Fredric Jameson’s theory of utopia. Jameson, whom she considers “the foremost Marxist critic of the present” and an example of “utopian criticism in the age of finance capital”, stresses the need for visions of radical difference and for radical alternatives to the present system. Cevasco takes those visions as part of a critique theory that presents itself as inextricably linked to political praxis and to systemic transformation, and argues for the importance of the utopian discourse as a transformative tool of society. Millay Hyatt disputes today’s prevailing contention that we live in an a-topian or dystopian reality, arguing that utopianism characterizes contemporary notions of the political. Elaborating on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, Hyatt shows that it shares with the utopian motifs a propensity for creating the desired state, i.e., freedom. She thus proposes a renewed integration of political desire in concrete practice. Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel provides us with a discussion of the concepts of utopia and dystopia, taking into consideration their relationship with the historical process. To Berriel, classical utopias are built on a historical and geographical fracture, whereas dystopia attempts to be in continuity with the historical process, formalizing the negative tendencies of the present. The second question is how can we practise utopia? Lyman Tower Sargent puts forward the idea that utopianism is primarily manifested in three concrete forms: utopian literature, intentional communities and utopian social theory. In his essay, he concentrates on the analysis of intentional communities and explores their relationship with utopian literature. Sargent

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particularly stresses the dynamic and changeable nature of these communities. According to him, intentional communities lasting for some decades are not informed by one project only but by a series of co-existing utopian projects that mirror the evolution of society and of human beings’ desires. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio sees holistic organizations and intentional communities as utopian laboratories for other possible worlds, advocated by the global peace and justice movement. She concentrates her attention on a case study, Alcatraz, a holistic community in Central Italy, describing both its theoretical tenets and its practices. Another case study is examined by Kunihiko Chiken, who considers the influence of Robert Owen’s ideals on the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Chiken argues that although Owen is known for his trust in science and technology, his concept of agriculture must also be taken into account. In Chiken’s view, Robert Owen’s utopianism implied the construction of a community that was not only a factory community but also an agricultural village. Joe Phelan questions two assumptions of the effect of the events of 1848 on British and political intellectual life: the notion that pre-1848 British socialism did not have a utopian element, and the idea that this British radicalism was not affected by overseas developments and theories. In order to examine his working hypothesis, Phelan looks at two key literary texts of the time written by the politically committed writers Arthur Hugh Clough and Charles Kingsley. Anna Vaninskaya’s essay, on the other hand, aims at re-establishing the importance of Robert Blatchford’s works to the promotion of socialist ideals. To Blatchford, the utopian genre was a means of political exposition, which provided the author with a fictional audience that could be moulded and controlled by him. Like many socialists of his time, Blatchford believed in education as the best way to reach a better society; in Vaninskaya’s view, he used utopia and propaganda with one and the same purpose: “proselytizing the socialist gospel”. Siân Adiseshiah discusses the utopian representations in two of Caryl Churchill’s plays in the context of the intensely anti-utopian political, economic and cultural climate of Thatcherism. According to Adiseshiah, Churchill’s work can be read as an engaged artistic response to that climate, an engagement that values the role of utopia in political struggle. The third question is what visions of utopia can we find in literature and the arts? Hélène Greven-Borde focuses on the representation of urban space and its surrounding areas in utopian fiction, tracing the evolution of the utopian genre

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up to the eve of postmodernism. The range of 20th century literary utopias examined in the essay (from H. G. Wells and George Orwell to Margaret Attwood and William Gibson) leads Greven-Borde to the conclusion that utopian and dystopian visions of space reflect their Western cultural and philosophical background, whose models they try either to transgress or escape from. Vita Fortunati analyses how the European avant-garde movements of the th 20 century became an ideological instrument manipulated by totalitarian regimes. In her view, the utopian elements of avant-garde poetics were exploited, perverted and used as political propaganda, and, in the process, the tension between ethics and aesthetics affected the definition of the role of the artist. Paola Spinozzi begins her essay with some theoretical considerations on the inextricable link that ties up art and utopia, giving particular attention to the utopian conceptions of aesthetic pleasure. She then focuses on William Morris’s ideal society, where the applied arts are perceived as creative activities practised and enjoyed by the whole community, mirroring Morris’s egalitarian socialist ideals. By looking at three utopian novels set in the future – Looking Backward, Ecotopia and Brave New World – , Karl Traugott Goldbach suggests that music can be seen as a sign of the utopists’ aesthetic disagreement with the society in which they live; and Henrique Gomes de Araújo elaborates on the idea that there is a close connection between the Europen Anthem and the utopian ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity for which Europe stands. Renata Koba analyses Body of Glass, by Marge Pierce, departing from the idea put forward by two cyberculture theorists – Donna Haraway and Chris Hables Gray – that technology should be used in order for human beings to develop their potential or liberate themselves from a dogmatic past. Finally, Feride Çiçekogˇlu’s essay dwells on the hyperspatial imagery of postmodernity, which is characterized by an urge to transcend the utopian concept of space. By comparing The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, and the Matrix trilogy, by the Wachowski brothers Çiçekogˇlu problematizes the supposed antinomy of utopia and dystopia, suggesting that there is a metonymic relationship between them. The essays and testimonies in this volume bear witness to the pervasiveness of utopianism in our lives and utopia’s centripetal force. As editors of the volume, we most certainly subscribe to the utopian theory put forward by James Arnold in his testimony: if we stay fixed in utopia, eventually the entire world will find its way to us.

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PART I

Utopia Matters

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Utopia Matters: a personal testimony James Edward Arnold | Director of New Lanark Conservation Trust, Scotland

I have spent most of my working life, now over 30 years, in the restoration and development of historic New Lanark, one of the great surviving examples of a particular form of utopian living. It is an industrial, cotton spinning village, located beside the River Clyde in rural Scotland. It is a dramatic place, virtually unchanged from its original foundation in 1785, and it is surrounded by beautiful countryside. Part of the reason for the village’s inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site is the utopian socialism introduced by Robert Owen in the period 1800 to 1825. I don’t know of any of the other 750 World Heritage Sites which have any similar justification included in their inscription. This is a reflection of the general historic importance of New Lanark, and its power as a beacon of utopia, however imperfect it might be. What has kept me engaged with the restoration of this example of utopia, over this period of time, is that it has been a deeply absorbing physical and intellectual challenge. It will be helpful to explain to readers that my first degree is in history, and that I come from a socialist and Scottish working family. Because of this background I have a pre-disposition to be interested in this particular area of study and this place. It is this coincidence of interests which continues to intrigue me, and it keeps me living and working here. What I had not appreciated 30 years ago was that the physical restoration of the site would prove so difficult, so time consuming, and that success was

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less than certain. In 1974, I arrived in utopia on the banks of the River Clyde; by coincidence I was the same age (29) as Robert Owen was when he embarked on his social experiment in 1800. The future for New Lanark at that moment looked very bleak. It remained a magnificent site. A factory with an elegant and classical 18 th century design, built in the wonderful rural landscape of the Clyde Gorge. The physical structure of the village was intact, but it was decaying and derelict. There remained the shadow and structure of previous greatness, but demolition was a real possibility. An initial pilot project to restore some of the village housing had run into severe difficulties after the closure of the cotton mills in 1968. The population, originally around 2,500, was in steep decline and was to dip to around 40 at the lowest point. The village was becoming deserted. The industrial buildings, including the famous School for Children and The Institute for the Formation of Character, were in the unsympathetic ownership of a scrap metal company. Collapsing buildings were all around, and this dilapidation could be seen most obviously in the School roof and the walls of Mill Number One. The odds were heavily stacked against the champions of restoration, as the battle raged between the conservationists and their opponents, who favoured the idea of bulldozing what was seen by many as a useless industrial slum. Also, industrial sites in Scotland have proved difficult to conserve, and this was already clear in the 1970s. This is despite Scotland being at the forefront of the industrial revolution, and the historic significance of industry to the national economy. Funding support has generally been allocated to country houses and palaces, art galleries and museums, and not to sites associated with coal or lead mining, or iron and steel manufacture, or maritime heritage. There was an intellectual and political element to the situation. Britain was about to start a period of right wing, conservative, government. There was a growth of Scottish nationalism; Owen was not a Scot, and he was an internationalist. Sometimes you could feel that the political and social opponents of Robert Owen, and there were many, had waited for nearly 200 years and were now able to take their revenge on the ideas and the place that had shaken their world. This had happened in other Owenite community experiments, where the forces of opposition had triumphed and erased the site of the community in order to guard against the regeneration of utopian ideals. However, I was encouraged to begin in the knowledge that I was working in one of the great sites of the world, and one which had provided inspiration to thousands of ordinary people, as well as distinguished individuals from every imaginable profession, from all over the world. This was a site which had at-

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tracted visitors and attention almost from the time it was first established, a site which, even in its dilapidated state, still attracted pilgrims who were interested in society and how it functioned. Also, I was convinced that failure to conserve and use the site would represent a real loss for the future of humanity. There are few easily accessible examples of the sites of utopian experiments, and few which are so magnificent and so large, and which provide explicit physical and architectural examples of how a society could be constructed. Success, perhaps even the effort itself, would provide a contemporary example of what utopian ideas could mean to our world community. It seemed important not to let the village, and the ideas it represented, slide into oblivion. The downside risk was that this would be an irrecoverable position. Losing it by physical demolition would mean that the loss was permanent. Physical restoration has meant that the tall sandstone buildings which rise dramatically from the wooded valley of the River Clyde have retained their visual impact, create a strong and distinctive sense of place, and are once again part of a living and developing community. The village is stunning, even to those of us for whom the sight is familiar. How much more so for the visitor who has known New Lanark only from textbook illustrations? There is a new population of 185 people living in 65 households. There is a community association to govern the housing. The industrial buildings are owned by a conservation trust and provide a visitor centre for the largest rural tourist attraction in Scotland, a hotel, self-catering units, and commercial space. Electricity is generated from the original source of power, water from the River Clyde. Interpretation of the site is popularist, and is focused on the ideas of Owen and how they relate to our future. Restoration is 80% completed, with programmes in place for the final phases. It has become a physical example of utopia of which we can be proud. My own view when contemplating these restored buildings is that they represent a lifetime of progress and achievement in much the same way as academics consider publications. These buildings represent intellectual commitment and dedication, and if World Heritage Site status works they will stand for all human time to represent the practical expression of a philosophy which sought to improve the human condition. The organisations and individuals involved with the restoration of New Lanark today exhibit a strong element of co-operation and shared responsibility. The Conservation Trust, which now owns the industrial buildings, is charged with revitalising the village, and works closely with the New Lanark Association which restores and rents out the housing. Together with other bodies such as the Village Group, to which over 90% of the New Lanark residents belong, and the more broadly-

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based “Friends of New Lanark” whose members are scattered worldwide, they combine to channel the help and support of the long list of public bodies and privately funded organisations which have contributed to the saving of New Lanark. Intellectually there have been some unexpected developments. In July 1988 Utopian scholars and community practitioners from around the world met in Scotland – at New Lanark and the University of Edinburgh, under the auspices of the International Communal Studies Association (based in Israel) and the National Historic Communal Societies Association (centred in the U.S.A). It was with some trepidation that the New Lanark Conservation Trust agreed to host this gathering – a partially restored mill village leaves something to be desired as the venue for an international conference – and around 200 delegates from all over the world arrived. To host such a distinguished academic gathering was a moment of great significance and a privilege for New Lanark. One of the results was that a group of the European delegates decided to establish the Utopian Studies Society. It seemed appropriate that the village had contributed towards the foundation of such a distinguished organisation. An additional intellectual benefit has been that the regeneration has created a focus for academics from a wide range of interests to visit the village. For me this has been a delight. I am working on the theory that if I stay fixed here at this utopian point, all the world will eventually find its way to me. Our most illustrious visitor has been our Queen, but the list includes UK Prime Ministers, virtually all of the Scottish National Government, as well as brilliant academics and distinguished foreign guests. Those readers familiar with the Owenite period will be aware that this is a continuation of the early 1800s when the world beat a path to New Lanark. We have been able to encourage the study of Owen and utopian thought by others, while we are diverted by the commerciality of regeneration. We help to fund books and publications on Owen and other significant elements of the New Lanark story. We attract groups of students, around 35,000 per annum, who are sometimes more interested in tourism and economic development, but we make sure they are exposed to the messages of utopia. We have worked to provide a beacon, and to remind visitors of Robert Owen’s inspirational words when he addressed the inhabitants of New Lanark on New Year’s Day 1816: What ideas individuals may attach to the term “Millennium”, I know not; but I know that so may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.

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As an example of utopia our project is as imperfect as it was in Robert Owen’s day. It is rather easier to achieve perfection in the recreation of an architectural historic reconstruction, than it is to create a new utopian village society in the context of our 21st century life. So far we have had to be content mainly with material prospects, though there are some elements of our community which provide the foundation of community action. That is for a separate paper and perhaps for the work of a separate life and a new generation. There is always some way to go in trying to achieve at least a momentary state of utopia, but perseverance and an unquenchable belief in the rightness of what we are doing – the spiritual legacy of Robert Owen? – will encourage us to persist. We hope New Lanark will always be an exciting and inspirational place to visit, as it was in the past. Then as now, we will welcome fellow utopians, theoretical or practical, to breathe in the inspiration of the past along with our pure, and usually cool and wet, Scottish air.

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What is your field? Vincent Geoghegan | Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland

“I see that you are a professor of Politics. No doubt you have lots of things to occupy you these days – September 11, the Iraq war, and, given your Belfast location, Sinn Fein and the IRA.” “Actually, I’m not a specialist on terrorism, or Middle Eastern politics, or Irish politics.” “What is your specialism then?” “I’m a political theorist.” A mistake – blank look, term suggests nothing. Decide to bite the bullet. “Much of my work has dealt with utopia.” The “u” word is now out! “Utopia” – a word coined to convey ambiguity, and one heavy with historical resonances. Most people can readily muster a response. “You study the impossible”; “The former Communist states”; “Waco?”; “Something to do with Thomas More?”; “You’re some kind of political idealist”; “You get paid to do that”. There’s a bit of a paradox here – you get the impression that most people consider your work as lying outside the mainstream, on the margins, the periphery, literally eccentric, and yet so many are familiar with the word, have clearly thought about its meaning, and are able to deploy the term in conversation. We

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do not seem to be in the territory of ignorance here, but of something more interesting – embarrassment, evasion, the lands explored by Marx and by Freud. Colleagues in different disciplines who are also interested in utopia have similar experiences: “A sociologist? Class?, Max Weber? Utopia!”; “Literature?, Dickens?…” Yet when these supposed margins come together they are able to generate inter-disciplinary conversations of great strength and vigour. In the shared capacious space of utopia that necessary component of innovation is very much in place – differing traditions and contexts in contestation and in dialogue. And this enrichment feeds back into respective disciplines. Sociologists working on utopia do know about class and Weber, and their interest is informed by the insights generated in their utopian research, likewise with the literature specialist and nineteenth century fiction, and I have written on terrorism, war and Ireland. Furthermore, at least partly due to the fluidity of boundaries encouraged in utopian studies, the sociologist and literature specialist have published on political matters, and I have just finished a piece on science fiction. That individuals from so many disciplines are attracted to work on utopia is indicative of the fact that exploration of the utopian is a particularly satisfying activity. There is a good deal of debate about whether or not one can sensibly talk about a utopian impulse, with opponents of the term worrying that it rests upon essentialist assumptions about a “human nature”. What is uncontroversial is that humans do dream in their waking hours, and fantasize about all manner of happy scenarios. The exploration of these realms is thus a singularly agreeable way of spending one’s time – and yes we do get paid for doing it! Amidst the play, however, a serious purpose can be discerned – the utopian is ultimately about the normative. This, of course, can be misunderstood. The experience of the authoritarian utopianism of twentieth century ideologies has rightly drawn attention to how norms can be malformed, socially unrepresentative, and frighteningly unaccountable. But this is an argument for the socially responsible production and control of norms, not an argument that norms can in some mysterious manner be dispensed with. Historically, utopias have been vehicles for envisaging the good society, and one of the advantages of studying utopias is that one can get a sense of the shifting patterns of norms over the centuries. More than this, the fact that utopias are relatively elaborate narratives means that one gets a much thicker conception of these norms compared to the relatively thin abstract conceptions in more conventional works of political thought.

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The normative need not be simply an object of analytical or historical study. Many utopian scholars reject the fact/value distinction implicit in certain conceptions of “scientific” research. Their own work therefore often embodies a strong normative element, either in the form of explicit commitment to certain values, or, more usually, through the selection and analysis of texts. The suspicion that an interest in the utopian might be linked to forms of political idealism thus has a degree of truth in it. One of the consequences of the experience of authoritarian utopianism has been that a distinction has been drawn between the utopian as better and utopian as best. This has partly arisen from reflection upon the terrible events of Stalinism and Fascism, and partly, in defensive mode, from a wish to defend a “realistic” and “sensible” utopianism from those who claim that the utopian inevitably leads to Auschwitz or the gulags. The risk here is that the best becomes a source of embarrassment, and one shies away from the furthest horizon of human hope and phantasy, and this, in turn, impoverishes the so-called politics of the possible. An advantage that does accrue from the idea of a “realistic” utopianism is that the old chestnut of realism versus the utopian becomes less and less credible. Utopians are often supreme realists. It is the self-proclaimed “realists” who tend to be in the grip of illusion and delusion – themselves forms of low-grade utopianism. All serious political actors have to confront the question of the right way forward – the real issue is the quality of the utopian intelligence and imagination displayed. Nor will the conservative “tradition” versus “utopia work”. Traditionalism as a political creed is suffused with a utopianism comprised of mythic misreadings of history, constructed to effect a political goal of “forwards to the ‘past’”. The very term conservatism gives the game away – a genuinely conservative society would have no need for such radicalism (hence the frantic efforts amongst conservatives such as Oakeshott to argue that conservatism is not an ideology). On the other hand any utopianism of depth will have very strong roots in the traditions and memory landscapes of their societies, and of humanity in general – here the phrase “remembering the future” does not seem inappropriate. My own current work attempts to explore the relationship between utopia, memory and religion, looking at both religion as a resource of utopian material, and religion as a space in which utopian material can be generated; and exploring the concept of memory in terms of the nature of religious traditions, and religions as communities of memory.

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The utopian is clearly an extensive field. But just how extensive? And where do the boundaries lie? This is a major question for those of us working on this land. Not surprisingly there is a good deal of disagreement about this issue. Some go for a highly inclusive definition which has the advantage of allowing one to roam hither and thither, amongst all manner of flora and fauna, but has the attendant danger of depriving the term utopia of real explanatory value. Others prefer a much more exclusive definition, focusing, for example, on specific literary forms, where greater precision is purchased at the price of a certain parochialism. Most of us just put on our boots and start walking! So that is my field, and it clearly matters a great deal to me.

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On the exit from one’s cave: Utopian thoughts on language diversities Andreas Friedrich Halle & Herb Buchlowski Directors of Zeit für Zeit, Germany

If one considers the title of this volume “Utopia matters: Politics and Theory” – it seems neither new nor original. One could easily substitute “Politics and Theory” with “Economy and Society”, or with any other conceptual pair commonly used in the field of Utopian studies. Yet it seems as though a spot of luck guided the initiators in the formulation of the volume’s title. A volume in which the title reveals a clear position is a testimony to its self-confidence. For it confidently and clearly states the initiators understanding of the need for utopias and the need to discuss the points raised. It would be nice for us readers to see more of these topics discussed against this refreshing background. The authors are grateful for the opportunity to participate in this endeavour. Join us now on a journey through the theoretical world of two utopian authors. Gain insights into two approaches to two theories and their relevant practical realisation and enjoy a little snack we offer in between. Have a nice time! From one into the other and back again Those of you who are English native speakers will have noticed that we, as German native speakers, understood and interpreted the title as an appeal: “Utopia does matter!” There are two other possible interpretations: “Utopia concerns all!” and “Utopian issues”. Having named these possibilities we asked our-

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selves what is meant here? Three interpretations, three possible meanings: according to the first interpretation there is nothing to discuss about the necessity of utopia. Let us deal with the contents. The second interpretation is not as definite as the first one. If “Utopia concerns all” – who are the possible recipients? The readers of utopias, in the hope of involving and encouraging them to participate? The academics, in the hope that they would extend their interests beyond the concern for their theoretical approaches? Or is it hinting to the “Createur de Utopia”, reminding them to find topics that rightfully concern all? And finally, does “all” really mean all? Worldwide? Does it include animals, or is it only in relation to whom or what? As you can see, this can lead to an infinite regress. Let us therefore turn to the last possible interpretation, that of “Utopian issues”. In our opinion, this interpretation was most welcomed, for it seems to be the intended meaning. And one can expect that most of the contributions in this volume, which is published by a university, could be read in this context. Some might think that the concern with various possible translations and interpretations of the title may lead nowhere – but the difficulties we have been experiencing as German native speakers lead us to the heart of the problem: language barriers, diversity of languages, communication and conflicts. Let’s take a brief look at these topics. Observations and first substrata All of us have one mother tongue and any new foreign language first needs to be learnt. Once one language becomes dominant, the other struggles to prevail as subdominant. The further down you go, one may ask whether the languages found there are therefore irrelevant. There is great potential for conflict in situations where another language threatens the dominance of a mother tongue. On the other hand, a chauvinistic struggle to hold on to a mother tongue ignores the fact that over the centuries languages have “disappeared”. In addition, no one would have understood Heine, Proust, Cervantes or Shakespeare in the third century A. C., for their languages did not exist yet. Generally speaking, a common language does not guarantee that conflicts will not arise. Yet it is, indeed, a necessary prerequisite to resolve conflicts.

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So much for the observations, let us now focus on possible substrata: 1) If something is of concern for all, then it may be useful to identify those factors that are proven to be relevant if not for all, then at least for the majority. 2) This holds true for languages.

ANDREAS FRIEDRICH HALLE & HERB BUCHLOWSKI

3) That common language is a mutually agreed prerequisite for a utopian society can be misleading – regardless of the time and place of the formulation of the utopia. 4) Utopias of today, i.e. the positive antipodes of globalisation, could offer a solution to this problem. For we know that language barriers bare an enormous potential for conflict. Several questions arise, new insights are gained and possible conclusions contribute to decision-making processes. As the attentive reader may have realized, one possible solution has already been touched upon: should Utopias preserve existing languages? Or should utopias leave languages to develop as they always have by means of self-regulation through evolution? Snack For those of you who deal with utopias on a scientific level, the approach itself might not be relevant. It is the result of the process, the solution each author offers that interests us. We agree, now here is a little titbit from the utopia “Time for Time” (watch: http://www.timefortime.net). The global and positive reconstruction of the world has long come to pass. Three humans of the present time have arrived there. The visitors are Paul, Sergio and Ution and they are accompanied by Mascha, an inhabitant of this new world. The following is a slightly modified extract from Ution’s account of the journey to her friend Revol. Paul, Sergio, Ution and their travel guide Mascha turn a street corner: (…) We meet with an ear-splitting racket as we step onto the plaza. Although a large posse of policemen occasionally obstruct the view, one can make out the disorder on the plaza: water cannons are shooting, stones are flying, cars are crashing into tanks, the sound of breaking bones and the smell of blood and sweat from the battered bodies fill the air. Despite the mayhem, people are trying to gain access to this battlefield, even facing the beatings of the policemen. Mascha tells us that this is the “Archaic Riot Mechanism” and leads us into a by-road. The blare of the battle dims. Only slowly do her words come to us: “Most human societies tend to bottle up aggression, which is sooner or later released through violence. It has been this way from the dawn of humanity, where human sacrifice released this pent-up aggression. The wars throughout the centuries, the family tragedies and the hidden victims of industrialism past – i.e. those killed in street traffic – all these are means to vent that aggression. We, like you, cannot avoid the Archaic Riot Mechanism. Although we have packaged it differently, we, too, have wrapped it up. What you have just seen is what we call Reality Role-Play. What you have just witnessed is the annual ‘Street fight’. It takes place in the city and lasts for three days. Each player is given a role to play, yet everything else, including the

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weapons, is real. The injuries suffered at the Reality Role-Play ‘Street fight’ are minor to the ones suffered at the Reality Role-Plays ‘Invasion’ or ‘Religious-war’. Those who wish to participate or think that they need to vent their pent-up aggression, look for other team-mates. One buys and builds everything that is needed on one’s own account, rents a place as well as the Mondarmeo. Because of the high risk of injuries, the Mondarmeo assures that the violence of the Reality Role-Play only strikes back at those who were willing to participate. Imagine we would still be waging wars about the right religion. Or somebody could convince us that a so-called evil has to be fought, whereas the true reasons for this war are about properties, resources and power as it was in your times. Now seriously – those who haven’t learnt their lesson from the Thirty Year War are not allowed to practice their religion here. And those who have not learnt that the concern should be for the solution of conflict causes are not allowed to take any public office.”

So much from our utopian travelogue with Internet-Connexion “Time for Time”. Do you feel betrayed? So you expected a solution for how to deal with language diversity and instead you got one about the issue of how to deal with violence? Not a single hint? Come on, you stumbled on one word in the text that appeared twice. Between self-regulation and protection of existence: Further observations Let us assume that we all feel at home in our mother tongue. It is the porter of the culture that we have incorporated within ourselves. The mother tongue is an essential tool for our social and corporate relations to the world. We want to express ourselves both in these relations as well as about these relations in the house that our mother tongue provides for us. The speculation of phone companies worldwide is based upon precisely this fact. In this house depending on the degree of our education, we know few or many rooms. The least of us know all rooms within it. But we do know that there is a basement, we know there is an attic, and most of us move in between these storeys. There is a front door, a front yard, a sidewalk, a street, the opposite sidewalk, the opposite front yard and my neighbour from across the street has, out of the same motivation as me, a house and his kids’ telephone bill. We both want to communicate. But in order to have a chat, he would either have to come into my house or I would have to go into his house. A chat just over the fence – such neighbours are seldom. And the further we go beyond our language barriers, our fence, the moment we look up or down the street in our global village, the less likely the communication becomes. Of course we learn new languages and explore new houses in that sense. Of course we get to know the rooms in this foreign house so that we can find our way around, at least on a basic level. We do realize then

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that there is no major difference between the various languages regarding the issues one deals with. But it is the number of languages one can study that is restricted, and we will mostly stay foreign in them. Comparing languages to houses is of course as useful as comparing apples and oranges. A house is an artefact. A complex object, constructed by men, that is not to be found in what we understand as nature today. Language, despite all its complexity, is only a limited something that came about through a conscious act of men. It is still more like a cave in which we live, for want of a proper house. Final observations and substrata And yet we rather accept all the adversities that come with the entering of every new cave than assimilate a language that resembles a house where everybody feels at home but nobody has the absolute domestic right. We would rather accept the consequences of misunderstandings, translation errors and mutual lack of understanding like mortification, mistrust and even violence, than become human through adopting a language that matters to all. The word that appeared twice was: Mondarmeo, translated: world-army. It is taken from a language that everybody would have to study. It is no one’s mother tongue because it is artificial, like a house, a car, a cardiac pacemaker. Since nobody had a prior claim to it, the people of the above-mentioned utopia had left their language caves and moved across this neutral bridge into a collective house called Earth. One foreign language for all and peace to the caves! Resumé We are far from accepting Esperanto as a world language. In fact, we do not accept any artificial language at all. But here we were asked for a theory that accounts for political action in Utopia. We offered you two that are directly linked. We have always lived with violence, we live with violence now and we will probably continue to live with violence in the future. But there is a demand for uninterrupted communication about how to deal with the open or subtle forms of violence in the future. The utopias of the past are eloquent witnesses for that. Yet none of us have found suitable means that proved to be sustainable. In fact, just the opposite is the case. And as long as nothing changes in this matter, we think it is therefore true that: Utopia Matters. Utopia Matters. Utopia Matters.

Sapere aude!

Translated by Judy & Bastian Smith-Höhn

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Out to save the world: scholars and the utopian vision* Timothy Miller | University of Kansas, USA

We live in a world that needs community and vision as never before. Especially in the “developed” countries of the Western world, egotism and selfishness have become paramount values, while traditional values, such as close, nurturing community, are in steep decline. We have a terrible irony in the contemporary world. On the one hand, we are drowning in our own material and cultural excesses, and an important root cause of that situation is a retreat from community and a lack of vision of something better – a utopian vision, in other words. On the other hand, the effort to chart a path out of our quagmire seems to be the province of only a tiny handful of scholars, communitarians, and preservationists. Yet despite our small numbers I am convinced that our work is vital. While I would not be so arrogant as to say that we utopians uniquely of all the world’s people have all of the answers the world needs, I do believe that we have some saving knowledge – some idea of how we can make human culture fulfill its promise in a better way. But how do we apply that knowledge? The malaise of the contemporary world is made up of elements familiar to all of us. Foremost is our continuing assault on our common global environment. For many decades we have known that our lifestyle is devastating the earth, but our excessive behaviors just get worse, not better. We continue to

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pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, making global warming an imminent environmental disaster. We continue to drive ever more cars ever more miles, consuming ever more petroleum, paving over farmland, and destroying the quality of the air we breathe. We spray endless tons of chemicals on our farmland, thus poisoning both the earth and the water that runs off the land. We cut down vast tracts of forest land, the lungs of the earth, and we destroy yet more land by strip-mining. The ozone that protects us from deadly ultraviolet radiation is vanishing due to our activities. We continue to create nuclear waste that will be with us for hundreds of thousands of years. But we know all that. We have crime. We have poverty. We have widespread social injustice. We have racism. Prejudice against women, against homosexuals, against certain ethnic groups, and against unpopular religions continues to thrive. War and other kinds of violence are never far away. These terrible, seemingly intractable, social problems stem from a variety of human activities. Industrial capitalism has led to a society in which a small elite controls enormous resources while vast numbers waste away in poverty. Urbanization has contributed to an unwholesome physical environment. Alienation is everywhere. Our technology has only fueled our race into dystopia. Our cars have given us sealed little anonymous environments in which we do not have to interact in a human and personal way with others. Television has taken us out of the public square and isolated us in our living rooms. The vast flow of information now coming through computers takes us out of libraries and has us sit alone in front of screens. Western culture glorifies rampant individualism of the worst kind – not the kind that embraces creativity and diversity, but the kind that promotes a “me first” attitude that puts the selfish interests of the individual ahead of the common good. The causes of our social and environmental situation are many and complex, but they are of our own making. Ultimately, perhaps, they arise from human nature itself. But certainly one prime element of the crisis is the lack of a utopian vision, of a search for a better world to come. Our dystopian world is crying for a utopian perspective at this difficult moment in its history. I would recognize at the outset that there are many types of utopian visions, so many that ultimately the word loses a great deal of its specific meaning. It can be simple idealism; it can be gestures of charity; it can be helping the downtrodden and unfortunate. But it can also be something much deeper, or at least more specific, than that as well. It can mean an overhaul of one’s lifestyle in which one not only

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tries to live a good and helpful life but also tries to use one’s life to bring about deep social change in concert with others. For those whose level of dedication to their ideals is especially high, living in intentional communities becomes an embodiment of the utopian vision. Although the number of persons living in intentional communities is small, such built utopian experiments do provide a crucial model of another way of life that the people of the world need to see. Or perhaps I should say “models”, in the plural, because communities take a wide variety of forms. Some today, as in the past, continue to be heavily communal, with all members living from a common treasury and giving up virtually all private property. Some are heavily centered in particular religious outlooks, or in similarly central secular philosophies. In the last few years two types of intentional community have seemed to emerge as especially appropriate to the spirit of our time: ecovillages and cohousing. At the same time, the traditional religious communitarians, such as the Hutterites, are still an enormous part of the overall communal scene. The kibbutzim of Israel remain world leaders in community. Many egalitarian communities founded during the last forty years or so are thriving. The world of community is a diverse one. Those of us who work as academics are as a matter of principle supposed to be impartial observers and analysts, not advocates. While I do believe we need to keep a good deal of objectivity in our work, I also think it eminently reasonable to believe that the focus of our studies needs encouragement as well as observation. The massive celebration of individualism of the destructive sort, of dystopia, of the last two or three hundred years has produced some dreadful consequences, and the return to community in its many forms, and the development of more intimate and supportive human relationships, can help us solve our social problems. And that is why the utopian vision matters, and why utopian scholarship matters. My many scientist friends have made huge contributions to human well-being through their work that has led to the wonders of modern medicine, among other things. I would only hope that utopian and communal studies scholars could have the same dedication to a socially beneficial outcome to their work. One final observation: scholars can contribute to the utopian vision through their understanding of history and their critical faculties. Utopian thinking and utopian communities have been around for thousands of years, and often the past has lessons that can be exceedingly useful to the present. After all, we

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don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time someone begins to have a utopian impulse. Furthermore, scholars can evaluate and criticize utopian ideas. Even (or perhaps especially) the most lofty thinking needs to be critiqued. One of the best known of the American utopian communes of the 1960s era was the Farm in Tennessee. Beginning as a loose group of spiritual seekers in San Francisco, the people who eventually became the residents of the Farm piled onto a long caravan of buses and finally, after months on the road, settled down to build a commune. They persevered and continue today to perform tireless work for social and environmental justice and reform. About three years after arriving in Tennessee they published what was one of the most evocative primary documents of the communes of that time, a colorful book called Hey Beatnik: This Is the Farm Book, written largely by the Farm’s charismatic leader Stephen Gaskin. One of the short articles in the book is entitled “This country needs in great numbers to become voluntary peasants”. I will conclude by quoting Stephen’s clarion call in that essay: That’s what I go around the country . . . for: to try to talk to lots and lots of people. . . . And it says on the front of our bus: OUT TO SAVE THE WORLD. That phrase is chosen from the old thing, “Well, I ain’t out to save the world, but . . .” We are. Out front. I don’t know anything else to do that seems worthwhile. I can already feed myself. I already was a college professor. Not as much fun as this. Want to help?

earlier version of this *textAnwas presented as an address at the 2001 conference of the International Commu-

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nal Studies Association at the ZEGG Community in Belzig, Germany, and a summary of it was published in the Newslet-

ter of the International Communal Studies Association.

Why I am a member of the “Party of Utopia” * Tom Moylan | University of Limerick, Belfast, Northern Ireland

It was a good thing that Giacomo Paradisi had reminded him not to be surprised. He kept careful hold of the knife, and put it down on the table before giving in to astonishment. Lyra was on her feet already, speechless, because there in the middle of the dusty little room was a window just like the one under the hornbeam trees: a gap in mid-air through which they could see another world. Phillip Pullman, The Subtle Knife

It seems I’ve always lived between worlds, looking from one world to another, finding ways to cut through the reality around me to see that other place that seemed to make more sense or at least be more interesting and maybe even satisfying. In that way, the method of Utopia, with its double move of negation and anticipation, has been with me for a very long time. I grew up finding my way across different cultures, different worlds. Son of Irish parents in Chicago, I lived between the Irish culture of my family at home and the new society of American promise in the postwar years of the 1940s and 1950s, happy in a nurturing home life yet often feeling it to be “old fashioned” when I went out and about in the city. Catholic, in that Irish immigrant way, I found a set of values and discipline (and repression) that offered an alternative to an increasingly consumerist culture, one that nevertheless offered enticement and stimulation not allowed by my parochial life. Working class, I found little in the sphere of the “rich” to interest me, and in fact I developed a nascent class antagonism as I saw my father patronized by his boss on the truck docks and stood there as the poor boy visitor as my dynamic and independent aunt was treated as a dutiful servant by the North Shore couple whose children she cared for.

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While my base in ethnicity, religion, and class gave me a solid sense of my self, I still looked outward to those other worlds as I found them to exceed all that I knew, thereby moving me to explore their ways, to consider their possibilities alongside the ones I knew so well. I came to see the dream in each of my parallel worlds, realizing that each opened up the other for me, that each brought me to a world, both intriguing and disturbing, much bigger than my own. This cultural tension gradually became more confrontational. That sense of committed difference that Catholicism gave me, that class anger I discovered, and that more distant sense of being of a people whose history had been one of occupation and dispossession segued into a more direct experience of assertion and contestation as I ventured out to the streets (as a child and later as that being called a “teenager”). In city parks, pizza parlors, and downtown avenues, I entered a youth culture that more immediately rejected the mainstream, conformist culture of the 1950s. In our all too innocent street gang baiting of the local police, in our clothing choice of blue jeans, combat boots, and black jackets, we stood for each other and against those who tried to tell us what to do. For me especially, in what was becoming our own, popular culture of comic books, B-movies, and race, then rock, music – it gave me and my friends a standpoint from which we garnered strength to be our selves even as we all negotiated our mixture of worlds crossed-hatched by our roots in class, ethnicity, and religion. And yet, that mainstream society offered its call to loyalty and commitment as the official culture of anti-communism took hold. In the heroism of re-run WWII moves, in the new TV programming with series such as “I Led Three Lives” (featuring a “communist” who was an FBI spy), in the TV ads that sang the norms of democracy and liberty, and in the broadcasts of the H-Bomb tests and McCarthy hearings, my already Catholic call to witness, to taking as stand in a valueless world was given an additional invitation to a moral, if not yet political, imperative to work for liberty and against oppression. What enriched these appeals to my knowledge and commitment was my own proclivity to read. Growing up in a loving home but one without books, I soaked up the book culture of Catholicism once I went to school, becoming both a “devout” Catholic as I read my way through liturgies and saints’ lives and a “good” student as I eagerly entered the world of learning. Not able to afford books and as a typical boy, I also bought hundreds of comic books and immersed myself in the exploits of superheros, the gore of horror stories, and the strange new worlds of science fiction. And, I remember how in an early visit to the library I picked my first volume of Robert Heinlein off the shelf, and

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so my mind was turned forever by the usefully escapist literature of fantasy and science fiction. But my reading life took another turn when I was ten years old. My Uncle John died, and my Aunt Catherine thought that I, as the studious lad, should be given his desk and books. As it happened, Uncle John was the only overtly political person in the family: a member of the Elevator Operator’s Union, he also was in what I later realized was a Trotskyist reading group, and what came down to me was his place of learning and his library. As so, to my readings of saints’ lives and science fiction, I added books such as Trotsky’s history of the Russian revolution and Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, along with an eight-volume atlas of the world. This infusion of politics and geography gave shape and depth to my ability to negotiate alternative, and oppositional, worlds. For me, then, reading became a “subtle knife”, that wondrous tool given to us in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. Reading gave me a means to cut through the barrier between worlds and to step inside that other place, and move back and forth as needed, personally or strategically. In my religious and secular reading, I began to see the value of a life of commitment and action, be it articulated in the religious language of vocation or the political language of activism. That this early understanding of such a life was for me wrapped up in Catholicism, anti-communism, a slightly more removed commitment to Irish freedom (seasoned with the frisson that life in the city added) was but the throw of the existential dice. That this amalgam lead eventually to a secularity that embraced a materialist spirituality, a broad communism, and an advocacy for freedom won by all oppressed people was but the result of a series of subsequent steps. By high school in the late 1950s, I had, through the Catholic Action movement, grown from an abstract anti-communist stance into the concrete work of the Catholic Interracial Conference, with its adult leaders who were already connected with the young Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and shortly thereafter to what would be the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. All this prepared me for my work in my college years in the civil rights movement. From there, as a member of what was becoming the Sixties generation, I joined the anti-war and – more insistently as I faced my own decision to become a conscientious objector and draft resister – the anti-draft movement. From there on, I affiliated with the New Left, with people who saw activism as their way of life, in whatever ways they took it further into their personal and working lives. And for me, that work life took me to graduate school and then teaching in a community college. If reading was an engine of change on a personal level, my informed values and activism (which now can

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be named as political and indeed utopian) led me to see teaching as a vehicle of socio-political challenge and transformation. My purpose in recalling this trajectory is to speak to why, for me personally, politically, and professionally, “Utopia matters”. It has given me an opportunity to write about how I came to value the utopian imaginary, as I wandered, curiously and critically, between worlds – like a character in Pullman or like Shevek in Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian novel of the 1970s, the Dispossessed. Ethnic/national aspiration, spiritual witness, class anger, youth energy, and intellectual hunger fed what grew into a utopian proclivity and no doubt set me up for life as a member of what Fredric Jameson has named the “Party of Utopia”, that long red line of those who will not settle for less than justice and freedom for everyone on (an ecologically healthy) earth, not via American imperialism (old or new) but through the work of a transformed and transforming humanity.

These are the opening *pages, slightly revised, of my essay, “Strong Thought in Hard Times: Utopia, Pedagogy, and Agency”, forthcoming in Utopia-Method-Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, Berne, Peter Lang, 2006. This collection grows out of the work of a group of international schol-

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ars in utopian studies who were invited to participate in a two-year research seminar at the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick. Between spring 2003 and winter 2004, the twelve participants were asked to address the ways in which they approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (under-

stood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work in general and their research perspectives in particular. My contribution here is the introductory section of my own essay for this project.

Utopia Matters? Ruth Levitas | University of Bristol, UK

Utopia: an imaginary perfect, and therefore impossible, place. Utopian: (adjective) impractical, unrealistic, over-optimistic; totalitarian; (noun) benevolent but misguided dreamer; malevolent schemer. Utopian Studies: sub-field of literary and cultural studies, sometimes extended to include eccentric lifestyles of marginal groups in society, i.e., subcultures. Utopist: harmless but irrelevant academic who studies the esoteric dreams and plans of utopians. Summary: Utopia does not matter. Yet utopia matters both existentially and politically. Ernst Bloch posited the existence of a utopian impulse, an anthropological given that underpins the human propensity to long for and imagine a life otherwise. The need always to historicise the idea of human nature should make us cautious about such a claim to universality, but such imaginings are braided through human culture. If utopia is understood as the expression of the desire for a better way of being, then it is perhaps a (sometimes) secularised version of the spiritual quest to understand who we are, why we are here and how we connect with each other. It is a quest for wholeness, for being at home in the world, or, as Bloch put it, heimat. Utopia, in this sense, does not require the imaginative construc-

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tion of whole other worlds. It occurs as an embedded element in a vast range of human practice and culture. In Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, Arthur Parker expresses his response to the popular songs of the 1930s: “It’s looking for the blue”. That blue is found, by Claude Monet, in his 1903 painting Charing Cross Bridge, brouillard sur la Tamise. The light at the centre – which makes both Turner’s and Monet’s paintings so utopian, so powerful – also gives the title to August Strindberg’s 1894 painting Wonderland; and appears as the horizon of hope in his darker seascapes. Utopia also entails refusal; the refusal to accept that what is given is enough; the refusal to accept that living beyond the present is delusional; the refusal to take at face value current judgements of the good, or claims that there is no alternative. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials has at its core the refusal of the idea of original sin (and, intertextually, the refusal of the tropes of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series). For Pullman, puberty is not a fall from privileged innocence and purity; the possibility of sexual love, experience and wisdom constitute a fall into, rather than a fall from, grace.1 Pullman also refuses (as Bloch does) the idea of heaven, or utopia, elsewhere. For us, there is no elsewhere, and the task before us is to build the Republic of Heaven. At this point, the existential passes to the political. Or rather, the dependence of the existential on the political becomes explicit. For if, to paraphrase John Ruskin, we are concerned with what kind of life is good for human beings and makes them happy, we are necessarily concerned with society as structure, not just with the realm of aesthetics. This, of course, is much more problematic, for it is here that the term “utopian” carries the undertone of totalitarianism: “bad” utopians are not those who dream of other worlds, but those who seek to enforce them. But the problem of totalitarianism is simply its totalitarianism. Its utopianism is not the issue. All political positions have embedded in them an idea of the good society and the principles on which it should be based. The designation of other people’s politics as utopian is a device to invalidate them, as both unrealistic and dangerous, and to claim that there is no alternative to the status quo. Politically, however, there is an urgent need for alternatives. Global politics is dominated by the utopia of growth, or “development”. This is even more fundamental than the domination of global capitalism by the United States, although the two are increasingly interlinked. Paul Wolfowitz, neo-conservative and major architect of the Iraq war, is nominated as President of the World Bank. The new President of Unicef is also, to the dismay of anti-poverty campaigners, committed to the “free” market. The twin processes of global warming as a result of excessive carbon dioxide emis-

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sions, and global dimming as a result of atmospheric pollution should puncture the obsession with growth. Resource depletion is, in the case of oil and water, already at the root of conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East. His Dark Materials insists on responsibility; yet current “official” politics across the globe is in this respect profoundly irresponsible. The refusal to take seriously the urgency of climate change is aptly portrayed in the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow. In a context where politicians and peoples are sleepwalking into catastrophe, utopia has never been more necessary, if by utopia we mean the ability to think about a different way of organising the production of our livelihoods and our social relationships – and about the agencies of transformation.2 Politics demands looking for the green, as well as looking for the blue. Neither the existential nor the political importance of utopia relates directly to the study of utopianism. Are utopists in fact harmless but irrelevant academics who study the esoteric dreams and plans of utopians? This is all too often true. Utopia has its place as the object of study, a kind of cultural anthropology of lack and desire. Such a study may, indirectly, feed the legitimacy of dreaming of a better world. It may provide, as Raymond Williams put it, resources of hope.3 It may even uncover or elaborate ideas we can use in looking for the green. There is a risk, however, that utopian studies can become another academic enclave in which careers can safely be built, a process that usually depends on not doing anything as professionally embarrassing as looking for the blue. Utopian Studies has, however, principally been oriented to utopia as object, whether in terms of content, form or function. Some, notably Fredric Jameson, have preferred to address Utopia as process. The process of imagining utopias throws us up against the limits of our imagination, revealing the ideological closure of the present. The blue lies beyond any attempt at representation. But in Jameson’s framework, utopia is necessarily beyond, or other than, politics.4 Looking for the green is “just politics”.5 The political edge of utopia within the academy is perhaps best preserved by thinking of utopia as a method, a method that involves the imaginary reconstitution of society (IROS).6 In its archaeological aspect, this entails uncovering the ideas of the good society embedded in political positions. My own work has included excavating the covert utopianism of the New Right, with its twin and philosophically contradictory utopias of the free market and the strong state; and exploring the meritocratic utopia at the heart of New Labour and its readings of social inclusion and exclusion. The purpose of this is to expose hidden normative assumptions and related social proposals to interrogation and

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debate. It is both deconstructive, in the strict sense of uncovering unspoken assumptions that may conflict with overt claims, and constructive in that it does this through a holistic modelling of the implied society. The method also has a second, architectural, aspect: the modelling of alternative social systems. Here I would, I think, go further than Vince Geoghegan, who describes the merits of utopian thinking in terms of “thick” rather than “thin” description,7 for I think a crucial characteristic of utopia as method is its holism. It takes the normative goals of political philosophy (equality, justice, freedom, and the like), and represents their concrete instantiation not just in political institutions, but in a whole social system. Utopias are exercises in joined-up thinking. They are not generated as blueprints, but rather as provisional hypotheses for debate and judgement about the Republic of Heaven. Through such modelling we might, for example, be able to think about the implications of global warming for social organization and human life, and the range of possibilities open to us. Thirdly, however, such a method must, if it is to escape the trap of utilitarianism, incorporate a third aspect: what kind of self is possible in the postulated society. What are the existential consequences? Where is the blue? It is, I think, such a method H. G. Wells intended when he argued that “the creation of utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and exhaustive method of sociology” (Wells, 1914).8 In the end, utopia can matter within the academy only for the reasons it matters outside. Because we have made a world unfit for life. Because it is our responsibility to build the Republic of Heaven. Because, in spite of all, many of us are still looking for the blue, and for the green.

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Notes 1 It might be thought that we live in a culture that is predominantly dystopian. Nevertheless, all the examples here are taken from sources available in late 2004 to early 2005, in London, Paris or Toronto, showing that utopian elements are also prevalent. Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven, originally shown in 1978, was re-shown on British television early in 2005. A major exhibition of TurnerWhistlerMonet toured Toronto, Paris and London between summer 2004 and summer 2005. August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer was exhibited at the Tate

Modern in Spring 2005. Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials achieved phenomenal sales among both children and adults, and was staged at the National Theatre in London in 2004/5. 2 On agency, see, for example, M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000; David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 3 See Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, London, Verso, 1989. 4 For a fuller discussion of utopia as process, see my “For Utopia: the (limits of) the Utopian function in late capitalist

society”, in Barbara Goodwin (ed.), The Philosophy of Utopia, London, Frank Cass, 2001. 5 From Jameson’s response to my question at the 4th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Madrid 2003. 6 See my “The imaginary reconstitution of society: utopia as method”, in Tom Moylan and Rafaella Baccolini (eds.), Utopia Method Vision, Peter Lang (2006;forthcoming). 7 Vincent Geoghegan, “What is your field?”, in this volume. 8 H. G. Wells, “The so-called science of sociology”, An Englishman Looks at the World, London, Cassel & Co, 1914.

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Utopia Matters! Lyman Tower Sargent | University of St. Louis, Missouri, USA

I discovered utopianism and communitarianism as an undergraduate. While I can no longer remember what works I read first, I found them deeply satisfying and recognized that in crossing disciplinary boundaries, they reflected my understanding of the world better than the classes I was then taking. More importantly, utopias say, “the world doesn’t have to be like this”, that it could be much better or, as I began to read dystopias, much worse. And, probably most important to me at the time, that as individuals we did not have to live the lives of previous generations, that we could make the choice to lead our own lives. My interests led the campus librarian to tell me about a set of unused documents from the Icarian communities at a library where he had previously worked. As a result, I ended up writing my doctoral thesis on Étienne Cabet and the Icarian movement in France and the United States and, with the encouragement of my mentor, reading much more widely in utopianism and communitarianism. Although I worked on ideological movements after I got my doctorate, I continued to read in these areas and when I got some free time for research I decided to spend it on utopian literature. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered there was little useful definitional literature and no decent bibliography. Not knowing at the time that others were also working on these problems, I de-

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cided to try to fill these gaps. I have spent the rest of my career working on the bibliography, which currently includes about 6,000 titles in English. Of course, my interest in utopianism extended beyond creating a research tool, and I have always been particularly interested in the way utopias both reflect and comment on important issues of the period. Initially, I got interested in the way that utopias dealt with issues of gender, where utopias provided a means for women to create worlds in which gender relations had been transformed. Joanna Russ argued in an essay entitled “Why Women Can’t Write” that science fiction allowed women writers to create worlds in which they could create women who were whole human beings, not people truncated by patriarchy, and many women took up the challenge, creating utopias for and by women. To me this is the most obvious case in the last half of the twentieth century showing that utopia matters. Feminist utopianism was a central part of the women’s movement. But utopias also reflect the dominant culture; as I noted in “Women in Utopia” and “An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia”,1 many utopias, even some written by women, did not see the need to change the position of women to bring about utopia. And it is striking that in the United States where it is such an important issue, race is simply ignored in most utopias. Also, there are utopias that are dystopias to some readers. Obvious cases include works that place women or racial or ethnic minorities in subordinate positions. More subtle problems arise with works like B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), which inspired many people to found communities based on the novel (some of which still exist) and others to label it as a dystopia. I have recently written a number of articles arguing for the importance of utopianism. They include “Utopische Literatur und die Schaffung nationaler und personaler Identitäten”; the forthcoming “The Necessity of Utopian Thinking: A Cross-National Perspective”; “In Defense of Utopia”; and “Choosing Utopia: Utopianism as an Essential Element in Political Thought and Action”.2 In all these essays, I argue that utopianism is absolutely necessary but potentially dangerous. Utopias with power and the willingness to impose their utopia are dangerous; we saw this in the Taliban in Afghanistan and we see it today in the United States. Most recently I have been interested in two themes. One, reflected in the essay in this volume, is to bring communitarianism clearly within the field of utopian studies. And it should be noted that intentional communities clearly reflect both the positive and negative potentials of utopias; charismatic leaders

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with too much power can distort the lives of community members; communities run by the members can greatly enhance those lives. The second theme, which I have been working out bibliographically and in a number of essays, is the national differences to be found in utopianism. Staying within one language, English, I have begun to study the ways utopias from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (and there seems to be separate Scottish and Welsh traditions), and the United States. Utopias, I am beginning to argue, are both shaped by and help shape the differences among nations. Benedict Anderson argues that nations are “imagined”, and utopias are clearly part of the process of imagining nations. In the world we currently inhabit, this could hardly be more important. In addition, utopias have always played a critical function, pointing out particular areas of concern. Aldous Huxley argued that Brave New World (1932) was simply an extrapolation into the future of trends he saw at the time, and in Brave New World Revisited (1957), he said that his extrapolated future was coming much faster than he had expected. This points to the positive function of dystopias; they warn us about issues and patterns that we can still change. Utopias, as I argue in the forthcoming essay mentioned above, can be chosen; they can help us create better futures. Therefore, utopias are of central importance, utopia matters! Notes 1 “Women in Utopia”, Comparative Literature Studies 10.4 (December 1973), pp. 302-16; “An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia”, Extrapolation 19.1 (December 1977), pp. 39-49. Reprinted with minor revisions in Marleen S. Barr (ed.), Future Females: A Critical Anthology, Bowling Green, Ohio, Bowling Green

State University Popular Press, 1981, pp. 88-99. 2 “Utopische Literatur und die Schaffung nationaler und personaler Identitäten”, in Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Annelie Ramsbrock (eds.), Die Unruhe der Kultur: Potentiale des Utopisten, Weilerswist, Germany, Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2004, pp. 12533; “The Necessity of Utopian Thinking: A Cross-National

Perspective”, in Jorn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger (eds.), Thinking Utopia, New York, Berghahn Books, 2005 (forthcoming); “In Defense of Utopia”, Diogenes, no. 209 (January-March 2005); and “Choosing Utopia: Utopianism as an Essential Element in Political Thought and Action” to be published in a volume edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan.

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Why utopia matters Lucy Sargisson | University of Nottingham, UK

Utopias lie at the heart of politics and yet are often neglected, ignored, or vilified. Some people fear utopianism, associating it with fundamentalism. Others dismiss utopias, believing them to be trivial, fanciful wishful thinking. And yet others, within my discipline in particular, suggest that utopias are an inappropriate source for the study of social science. We should be concerned with hard facts and data, they say, not stories and imaginings. I disagree … I first got into studying utopias in 1990 whilst conducting PhD research on the state of contemporary feminism. My project aimed to address the dilemmas faced by feminism at the time. Many of these were centred around the problematic relationship between equality and difference. Crudely put, feminism had long called for equality with men but this call was increasingly problematised by a new politics of difference. I say “crudely put” because, of course, there have long been voices of dissent on the topic of equality from within the feminist movement. The radical feminists of the 1970s had challenged calls for equality, saying they did not want to be equal to men because this meant becoming the same as them. They wanted to the able to explore what it means to be a woman. However, in the late 80s and early 90s new voices were added to this debate. These were the voices of black feminists, queer theorists and the theoretical approaches of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Black femi-

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nism is not new but in the late 80s and early 90s we saw a number of key texts by such women as Bell Hooks and Patricia Hill Collins coming into mainstream bookshops and the wider (whiter) feminist movement seemed to begin to hear what they were saying. I certainly did, and became increasingly alert to the differences amongst women – ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, sexuality – identity politics seemed to be important and yet also to threaten feminist cohesion. Could feminism survive all of these calls for diversity? Should it? And so, I started to look at different forms of feminism and their different stories about the roots of oppression, and the routes to emancipation, or whatever their specific goal was. In so doing, I found myself focusing on the question: what do women want? Are there goals that we share? Are the differences amongst us too great and/or too significant to permit unity? Is the quest for unity inappropriate? Whereas former generations of feminists had been confident about this, many of us in the 1990s were less certain. Whilst working on this, I was struck by a synergy between a piece of theoretical work and a novel that I happened to be reading at the same time (Hélène Cixous’s “Sorties” and Angela Carter’s The Passion of a New Eve, both written in the 1970s). It occurred to me that this fiction had explanatory value. The news that a Politics PhD student was working with fiction disturbed my colleagues but I found that contemporaneous feminist novels and theory often addressed similar themes, albeit in very different ways, and that the novels added something extra to my understanding of these debates and issues. This was particularly apparent in novels that contained a utopia. I was drawn to them initially through the pragmatic desire to clarify this question, “what do women want?” I soon found however that utopias told me more than this – they created a space in which ideas and alternatives could be imagined, explored, and developed. They were testing grounds for ideas. They told me what their authors felt was wrong with their present world and suggested (usually radical) alternatives. They played with the impossible and made it manifest in an imaginary space. They allowed us to seriously consider the (apparently) unthinkable. Working with utopias helped me to begin to understand why the feminisms of the 1990s were so shy about what we want. It also led me to believe that we needed to articulate our goals. Our silence on the question, “What do women want?” invites others to speak for us, as the Freudian and Lacanian traditions have shown. Theoretical feminism had ceased to ask this question and was preoccupied instead with the problems of identity, equality and difference alluded to above. The intellectual and ethical difficulty of these issues had si-

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lenced us on the matter of our desires for a better world. Whilst understanding the importance of these issues, I felt that we had become overly introspective and self-critical to a point of self-indulgence. Academic feminism was becoming an increasingly critical body of thought, which lacked a sense of direction. It had lost its creativity. However, some women were struggling to imagine a world of difference – creating and exploring utopias that combined or negotiated equality and difference – and I wanted to bring this to the attention of the wider (academic) body of feminist theory. These feminist desires for a better place were, at the time, fragmented, multiple and partial. This was appropriate to the times – times of self-doubt and difficult questions. And so, in my book Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, I tried to suggest that even though these utopias looked different from what we might conventionally expect of a utopia, they were utopias nonetheless. They had something important to tell us and they could help us to begin to think about where we wanted to be. I have since moved on to work on green utopias and intentional communities – places where people try to live their utopian dreams. I firmly believe that utopias have important political functions and are a valuable resource for social scientists. We can learn much about any given time from its utopias. As texts engaged in contemporaneous debates, they offer hermeneutic lessons. Utopias criticise, in the enlightenment sense of critique. They are embedded and implicated in the now and are critical of it. Often their critique is radical and deeprooted, going to the heart of the political or economic infrastructure. Thomas More, for instance, was an establishment figure – later to become Chancellor of England – and yet Utopia offers a critique that undermined contemporary systems of property, law, ownership, value and punishment (More, 1516). Utopias are not just critical, however, they also offer us alternatives. Sometimes these are full-blown imaginary societies, complete with laws, governance, customs and culture, and sometimes they are mere glimpses of another way of being. Always, though, they gesture towards a better way of life, and a better way of being. As such, utopias provide points of inspiration, aspiration and debate. They permit us to imagine how our world can be better and that is the first step towards changing it.

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Pourquoi l’utopie? Raymond Trousson | Université Libre of Brussels, Belgium

Jusqu’au début des années 60, l’utopie littéraire a éveillé assez peu d’intérêt. Dès la fin du XIXème siècle, quelques travaux (R. von Mohl, F. Kleinwächter, A. Kirchenheim) s’en étaient bien préoccupés, mais surtout dans l’intention avouée de définir les œuvres, à partir de Thomas More, comme des symboles d’un socialisme éternel. Par la suite, d’autres enquêtes – celles de R. Blüher (1920), de J. O. Hertzler (1922), de L. Mumford (1923), de H. Freyer (1936), de V. Dupont (1941) pour l’utopie anglaise et surtout de M. L. Berneri (1950) – avaient déblayé le terrain, mais en s’en tenant le plus souvent aux “œuvres-phares” et en faisant peu de cas de la mise en situation historique. En revanche, le remarquable ouvrage de Raymond Ruyer (L’Utopie et les utopies, 1950) avait apporté une contribution essentielle en distinguant l’utopisme, mode de réflexion “sur les possibles latéraux”, et l’utopie, genre littéraire qui en procède sans l’absorber tout entier. On comprend que les utopies aient été longtemps reléguées au dernier rang des œuvres littéraires. Souvent pesantes, diffuses, didactiques, littérairement médiocres, souvent aussi productions d’auteurs oubliés, elles n’avaient pas grandchose pour séduire la critique formelle, davantage soucieuse de l’analyse de “l’œuvre en soi”, et la naïveté apparente de certaines d’entre elles faisait hausser les épaules aux historiens de la philosophie comme à ceux de la pensée politique. Pour ma part, c’est la lecture d’un ouvrage du dix-huitiémiste allemand Werner Krauss qui éveilla ma curiosité. Publiés en 1964 à Berlin-Est, comme on

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disait alors, les Reise nach Utopia proposaient une attachante anthologie des utopies françaises depuis Cyrano de Bergerac. Marxiste, l’auteur s’efforçait de distinguer les genres apparentés – robinsonnade, âge d’or, Cocagne, voyage imaginaire, etc. –, de replacer les textes dans leur environnement historique, social, philosophique, politique, et faisait une place aux minores trop longtemps dédaignés, du marquis de Lassay au chevalier de Béthune, de Desfontaines à Morelly, de Beaurieu à Reigny, en montrant, de Cyrano à Étienne Cabet, la continuité d’un genre et d’un mode de pensée. Dans cette perspective, le genre utopique se révélait un sujet privilégié dans le domaine de l’histoire littéraire et de l’histoire des idées et porteur des rêves de transformation de l’ordre social comme de la condition humaine. À mes yeux, c’est là que se situe l’intérêt d’un sous-genre romanesque qui, certes, a produit bien des textes de très médiocre valeur littéraire – l’Utopie de More ou les News from Nowhere de Morris resteront des exceptions, jusqu’au développement de la dystopie chez Wells, Huxley ou Orwell –, mais dans lequel se sont, siècle après siècle, réfractés les projets politiques et sociaux qui ne pouvaient trouver place dans la littérature officielle. L’utopie est, à ce titre, un genre oblique, qui permet la critique sous le manteau de la fantaisie, voire de l’invraisemblance affichée. Les contestations les plus virulentes de l’ordre social, les attaques les plus dures contre les religions révélées, la diffusion des philosophies les plus inquiétantes – le spinozisme, par exemple, ou l’athéisme – passent ainsi, dès l’époque de la crise de la conscience européenne, entre 1685 et 1715, dans les textes longtemps oubliés de Foigny, de Veiras, de Fontenelle, de Claude Gilbert ou de Tyssot de Patot. L’utopie est porteuse d’une vision du monde, d’une volonté de changement et de perfectionnement, lieu de réformes, sinon de révolutions. Au fil du temps, elle a imposé la conception d’un univers laïque, indépendant des Églises et de l’eschatologie traditionnelle, confiant dans l’effort humain. Synonyme de progrès, elle a cependant été confinée, des siècles durant, dans des mondes parallèles, que leur irréalisme même rendait peu vraisemblables. Le véritable tournant, dans la fonction critique de l’utopie, est marqué, en 1770, par L’ An 2440 de Louis-Sébastien Mercier. En s’inscrivant, non plus sur quelque île ignorée ou dans un passé mythique, l’uchronie se fait à la fois dénonciation des maux contemporains et anticipation d’un meilleur avenir. Le progrès n’est plus dans une perspective alternative, un monde imaginaire de rechange, sans prise directe sur le réel, mais tributaire du temps, de l’accroissement du savoir. Héritier de Francis Bacon et des doctrines de l’Encyclopédie, Mercier se fai-

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sait prophète et en revendiquait la qualité dans l’édition de 1799, où il écrivait: “Je réimprime (…) un rêve qui a annoncé et préparé la Révolution française, (…) une prédiction qui embrassait tous les changements possibles. (…) Je suis donc le véritable prophète de la Révolution”. L’ An 2440 se définit ainsi comme une sorte de matérialisation de la foi dans le progrès et la perfectibilité indéfinie de l’homme, caractéristique des Lumières et de l’esprit moderne. Non seulement Mercier renouvelait le schéma classique de l’utopie depuis More et même depuis Platon, mais surtout il donnait au genre une autre orientation et une autre portée. Rien de surprenant si sa formule devait dès lors s’imposer et si les avenirs – libéraux, socialistes ou communistes – devaient désormais remplacer les îles de jadis. À la limite, Mercier n’invente rien: il prétend construire par la pensée ce qui ne peut manquer d’être. Pour lui, l’histoire contient le principe du progrès, et c’est elle qui se charge d’assurer la transformation du rêve politique en réalité. Les changements annoncés ne se sont pas seulement produits dans le temps, mais grâce au temps, élément moteur de la perfectibilité, conception qui se retrouvera chez un lointain héritier comme William Morris. Si l’utopie traditionnelle est un monde statique, fixiste, Mercier, avant Wells, a imaginé l’utopie cinétique, en perpétuel devenir. De même coup grandit la crédibilité de l’utopie: déductive et non plus chimérique, elle n’est plus exercice mental sur un possible latéral et éternellement tangent à la réalité, mais supputation logique sur un probable ultérieur. Cette utopie constructive, reflet des aspirations des générations successives, accompagnera désormais toutes les révolutions de la pensée philosophique, politique et sociale. Peu importe si, en particulier à partir du XXème siècle, l’utopie positive devait faire place à des univers inquiétants. L’éclosion des grandes dictatures, les abus de la science et des techniques feront naître un pessimisme bien éloigné de la confiance d’autrefois, mais, négative ou positive, l’utopie conserve sa valeur de témoignage ou de mise en garde. Non seulement elle draine avec elle les expériences formelles du genre romanesque, mais elle est sans doute le champ où s’expriment le mieux la conscience que l’homme a de son destin et sa volonté souvent pathétique de le modifier et de l’orienter. C’est dans cette mesure qu’elle dépasse la fantaisie imaginative elle est le reflet de l’humanité devant sa hantise de la perfection et de l’absolu; ou encore, si l’on veut, l’incarnation de son rêve d’échapper à la contingence. C’est ce qui fait d’elle un genre privilégié, vecteur d’un esprit critique indispensable parce que principe de tout progrès. Oscar Wilde a pu dire qu’une carte du monde où ne figurerait pas l’utopie serait désespérément incomplète. Rien de plus juste: il n’y qu’en utopie qu’il n’y a plus d’utopie.

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58

PART II

Utopian Matters

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Theory

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From Contemporary Utopias to Contemporaneity as a Utopia Adalberto Dias de Carvalho | University of Porto, Portugal

It is sometimes said it would be rather troubling to live in a society without utopias but not in a world without ideologies. In any case, what would be really tragic would be to live in a society that is itself convinced of being a utopia – of being the embodiment of utopia – when in fact it outrightly rejects it by having fallen asleep under the veil of the illusion of having incarnated a state of utopia in the course of its historical present. An illusion, however, that has been permanently disturbed by a bad conscience caused by the shortcomings of that real utopia. Here lies the greatest risk in which we are living nowadays: I specifically mean the risk of being the inhabitants of utopia without having utopias. Given these conditions, dystopia is no longer an exterior element but something that is inside our own utopia. Generally speaking, from a sociological viewpoint, we are quite familiar with the factors that account for this situation. They take root in an economic, informational and mass communicative globalization without a fully-corresponding worldwide access to communication and resources. What is really dramatic is that we wonder at the virtual riches that are available to us, be they property or information, while, in a way, we hide and forget, for instance, the increase of real poverty and, in general, the effective exclusion in the world we live in. This

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verification means that, to begin with, the information and, even, communicative universality, alongside the economic, cultural, technological and educational utopias, is a delusion. In a way, we hear the echo of modernity in the continuation of an optimism that confounds itself with the illusion of the utopian realisation, which, having been the finality – the future of history – now would be its present. Then, as I have just said, the optimism of this ideal achievement is also faced with the recognition of a failure: the failure of a progress which was supposed to be linear, but which is found out to be doubled by the ruptures of a dual world, which is, in the end, its complex and finally imperfect product. This is clearly apprehended by what Salomon says: The era of the triumphant science is also the era of the absolute menace. (…) As men (…) find out that there are limits to the exploitation of natural resources, they find out that there are limits to the exploitation of their genius. (…) Capitalism runs the risk (…) of dying of its own success, as it was condemned, according to Marx, to die of its failures. (Salomon, 1992: 46, 21)

Shaken by these conclusions, contemporary men and women bear the perplexities of an existential drama which is lived as such because the experience of limits is maintained by a consciousness that hesitates between the pride of the modern subject, the fragmentation of this subject by post-modern rhetoric and the reflectivity of the contemporary subject, which is critical, situational and inter-discursive. In fact, man nowadays, as the subject which results from an analytics of finitude taken from modernity, starting from the instability of its outlines, questions, first of all, his place as the paradoxical author of a destiny which, if he takes himself into account, is profoundly tragic. The threat represented by the possibility of a vital extinction – as a supreme and contradictory expression of power and frailty – emerges, at the high point of his prediction, as a possibility of extinction of sense itself. A possibility which, rather than coming from a withering of the activity of signification by the radical achievement of the potentialities of consciousness and of knowledge, imposes itself, above all, exactly because of the failure of the former activity or the unsuccessfulness of the political application of its products.

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We acquire, then, the critical consciousness of limits (not as far as the infinity of God or history is concerned, but in relation to anthropological finitude itself), as well as the awareness of the need for the control of the social regulation of science, technology, economy and communication. Thus we encounter a new and decisive opportunity for educative utopia in the context of an advanced democracy – one that contributes to the dialogical construction of the human with solidarity, and one that actively contradicts, in our societies, a strong – but also very subtle – trend towards the establishing of “the unequal through knowledge” which used also to prevail as “the unequal through the social background”. Meanwhile, however, once the value of the revolutionary consciousness is lost as a form of anticipating consciousness capable of facing the coming together of its ideal emancipative aims under the form of projects of historical realization, we observe the emergence of a period when the outlines of an emptiness of hope are that much more evident. Now, we may even identify this emptiness of hope in the anthropological spaces of reinforcement of existential pessimism by an identical pessimism of the will. The paradox becomes acutely more critical when we perceive that, in spite of everything, we are living a historical period when everything is more possible, if we take previous periods into account as well as go through the remarkable accelerations of scientific and technical developments at our disposal. Furthermore, anxiety may result from the fact that, for ethical reasons, if everything is possible, therefore not everything should be possible. It is on this contradictory frame that, rather than a future, we often accept the virtual reality of an impossible present, in terms of an ontological, or simply human, reality. And this is exactly what happens when we reject, in an implicit but not intended way and as an absolute absence, the possibility of an ideal future turned superfluous regarding a present that is, in the end, itself revolutionary and ideal, if not impossible; a present that annuls the possibility, even the need of the prefiguring of a later and superior state inside a process which, despite all, would be progressive. The apparent realization of utopia implies the end of the utopian function and of the utopian spirit. If we try to interpret the complexity of the aforementioned phenomenon, we immediately need to make a clear distinction between the following two categories: the political utopia (close to the ideological one) and the philosophical utopia (in principle, the only one with a coherently utopian status). Nonetheless, we need to remember that common sense, conversely, reduces the utopian field to

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that of a political utopia – even when it refuses it, and tends to look at the philosophical interventions in this domain as being responsible for the speculative and, sometimes, supposedly pointless deviations in utopian thought. We think that the thesis of the end of ideologies has been contradictorily decisive for the refinement of their investment within our societies’ culture, since it has stressed the hiding of the denotative role of the ideological representations themselves. Moreover, this refusal of ideologies has often been assimilated to a refusal of utopias or, at least, the latter have been seen as potential ideologies. As it has already been noted, the utopias of a time are the ideologies of the following time. This frequent error of perspective comes from a considerable lack of appreciation concerning the nature of the relative evolution of utopias and ideologies regarding their status. In fact, while ideologies are justified to the extent that the humanistic subject acquires the right to the recognition of his institutional situation, utopias, on the other hand, have the opportunity to become expressions of the conflicting urgency of the actors who play an important autonomous role: the autonomy of the position of thought before the limits of knowledge and of an underlying historical reality. Utopia is defiance to the already existing order; it gives us the (imaginary) experience of the “contingency of this order” – as Ricoeur states. Ideology, in legitimizing the sense of the dominant order, has no problem in contributing to its plain realisation, as Ricoeur reminds us. It may then be said that, in a certain way, ideologies provide the structure which frames and agglutinates the synchronous axes of reality, even when it moves forward. In this particular case, evolution becomes deeper and gives place to tendencies already existing in the present. In this situation the present is the locus that opens up into the future, and also where the assimilation of a past takes place. In this way, the future is the next present and, keeping within the same logical principle, a future past. The Augustinian conception of time (presentpast, present-present and present-future) is the one which most coherently synthesizes the temporal prejudice of ideologies. Prejudices where the future and the past define themselves towards the present and even inside the present which, as such, crystallizes the past as memory and contains the future as expectation. Thus we come to the synchronous temporality mentioned by Lévinas (1972). Modern political utopias, taken as expressions of ideologies and turned towards the future, aim, first of all, at their historical realisation. Consequently, they try to interpret, to reunite and mobilize the aspirations of persons and communities committed by the (ideological) sense of progress they pretend to incarnate.

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Intellectuals like Popper question the pretensions of utopians who think they have the right to consider themselves protagonists of the finalities of history and, starting from these, of establishing and managing the means to reach them; pretensions which would imply autocracy, dogmatism, authoritarianism and violence over the other, that is to say, over the dissident. Be that as it may, have Popper and, generally speaking, the anti-utopians like Huxley or Orwell based their viewpoints on sufficiently solid and demanding epistemological grounds? I think not. The questioning of the parts that make up this problem implies that we take a closer look at some fundamental questions: • What presuppositions affirm the primacy of the idea that man is what he is always in resistance to his beliefs as to what he must be or even what he should be? • How are the conceptions of the real and of the ideal treated within the debate around the legitimacy of the critical limits of the utopian imagination? • Will there be acceptable criteria towards the ethical limits of utopian constructions? • What place should we reserve for the dimension of diachronical time inherent in the philosophical utopias proposed by Lévinas (1972), in opposition to the synchronous time of ideologies? In any case, diachrony would constitute the very centre of an immeasurable time full of otherness – a time beyond the limits of knowledge. Then again, when we consider one of these questions, we cannot avoid assuming a sense of all the others. As a matter of fact, utopian ideals, having a profoundly anthropological character, emerge from the conception of man as a subject who, in principle, submits all his projects of practical realisation within time and space to the master project of defining himself. If, by all means, we accept the perspective that makes man a being who searches for and builds the project of his realisation, we cannot, for that reason, limit this project to the outlines of synchronic temporality, or we run the risk of imprisoning man inside the increasingly narrow walls of what he himself is, implicitly or explicitly, concretely or potentially. We know of the human aspirations of going beyond the frontiers of the present – of which hope is the most evident psychological expression. Aspirations which, according to H. Jonas, shall be doubled by an investment in the responsibility of future generations, especially regarding their well-being, who have a priori rights even without claiming or managing to exercise them.

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Thence, utopia gains an inalienable ethical profile, although it is still under the perceptions of the anthropological principle. Utopia becomes the utopia of man (see Lévinas, 1972). The human becomes a utopia in relation to the peaks of inhumanity reached by the very peaks of humanity and of our present history. A present that offers – through science, technique and globalization – unsuspected and paradoxical possibilities of innovation, themselves previously unknown, despite having been promised, by modernity, as the pinnacle of the human. Notwithstanding, before delving into the uncertainties, we now wish to ensure the renovation of their human sense. Still, what is the human sense? Who demands the prerogative of drafting its outline? Currently, the fall of the notion of human nature has caused the disappearance of the metaphysical foundation of the human. In its place, the notion of human condition, with its cultural and historical precariousness, stands simultaneously as a defiance and a fragile frame of the human, drawing the attention of utopian reflections towards a construction and no longer towards the anthropological restoration of an ontological a priori. For Kant and, generally speaking, for modernity and humanism, the transcendental scheme of morals used to assure, in its formality, that man would always be the end and never a means of whatever project. Man (abstract man), in accordance to The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, is an end in itself and not merely a means “which this or that will may capriciously use”. The (rational) imagination is then led to participate in this effort where the transitivity of the present opens up to the imminence, assuring a future which makes itself legitimate by its metaphysically a priori foundation. The ultimate sense of the real will then be the one that, overtaking what we now know, seizes the plane of metaphysical immeasurability. All this comes into being on the imperative of the moral laws, and taking into consideration the defiance of an anthropological questioning which carries on a non-stop search for the sense. This is the field where the Enlightenment, on the foundations of practical philosophy, can increase a moral anthropology that is, in its turn, the foundation of education. In this manner, the idea of humanity precedes the individual and nature as values or, in other words, invests them with a greater value – itself – with regard to their realization and its own accomplishment. That is to say, the idea of humanity defines the possible future through the conformity between the ultimate finalities of nature and the rational destiny of moral man. The conjunction,

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in modern times, between teleology, optimism, progress and the purpose of an increasing humanization is then obvious. This is a type of conjunction favoured by nature but at the same time demanding its continuous overtaking with reference to the installation of the future on the past so as to allow for the deepening of liberty. In the end, man can only become truly free amid the order of reason, although encouraged by nature itself, i.e., by the metaphysics of nature. Meanwhile, the anthropological status of education comes from its central role in the achievement of the human sense of the rational universality. The anthropological inherence of education imposes itself precisely when it suits the realization of man as an end in itself. In fact, man can only become man through education, which is favoured by the configuration of practical liberty, which brings together transcendental liberty and phenomenal causality. Notwithstanding, Kantian rigour prevents any compromise between morality and experience, given that the object of morality is the ideal that nourishes rational hope without depending on the accordance of a great number of people. Besides, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant vividly rejects the criticism to Plato’s Republic justified “under the very miserable and annoying pretext that it is impracticable”. It is the conformity of the Republic to the moral rational ideal that, still according to Kant, gives it the dignity and allows it to inspire the will as a faculty to act in accordance with moral rules. It is important not to forget that this will, because of human imperfection, can obey the trends of sensibility and withdraw within the frames of reason, by menacing the plain establishment of duty along with the intelligible character of the subject. When, on the one hand, romanticism dissociates the heroic role from the individual subject, on the other, it stresses important reserves of the universalist and abstract idealism of the Enlightenment. Concurrently, romanticism values the concrete framing of the cultural contexts in contrast with the risks of inhumanity, which are paradoxically present in the Enlightenment statement which admits the possibility, through its affiliation in the idea of universal humanity, that man can escape from his concrete naturalization; naturalization which, in this case, means, in the end, taking root in the historical conjuncture of the society the person belongs to, and not in a rational and abstract nature. In spite of the divergences between the Enlightenment and the romantic currents, what emerges and is shared by both, in the course of the process of secularization occurred during modernity, is the figure of the subject as interpreter or author of revolutionary construction projects, a figure on the edge of history and of identitarian synthesis between what he is and what he must be.

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This subject, according to Larochelle, and noticeably after Hegel, represents a confluence of Cartesian immanentism and the pattern of Augustinian reconciliation. It also means “the discovery of an all-mighty subjectivity, opposite to the one of its tragic finitude, which implies anxiety”. Meanwhile, by “the paradoxical conjunction of a pretension and anxiety”, humanism appears as “an instrument of historicity” and man as the departure and arriving point of this humanism: “modernity divides, first, then reconciles, re-centres to structure an unknown dissemination” (Larochelle, 1995: 55). From the apprehension of the sense by an interior duplication that institutes conscience as a founding entity of the position of the subject of the active projection (through the projects of anthropological regulation of time/history/ space/nature), we progressively step from the idea that the identity of the subject is a conquest to the conviction that the conquest is, in itself, the expression of an identity that, for this reason, restricts doubt and imposes certainties. In this way, the epistemological ground of ideologies is affirmed. This gives a denotative character to the connotative rapport that utopias set up between interiority (taken as a locus of fictions, dreams, projections) and otherness of times and spaces. Ideology then sustains the revolutionary movements where the passing of the can-be to the must-be is engaged with a logic of necessity that makes the subject the author of his destiny, for he is what he is as far as he is what he must be. Furthermore, at this epistemological and historical turn of modernity, one observes the first stage of the fusion between ideology and utopia, where political utopias stem from. These utopias will be the achievement of glory of an (almost divine) subject – accomplisher of his identity as creator – and the critical impasse of an (almost devilish) subject, murderer of otherness because hallucinated under the effect of his glory. The subject of science and technology, man becomes, at last, as subject of politics, the ideologist of his utopia, of the power of the must-be. In fact, by means of political action, he thinks he could be the sole subject and object of utopia as totalizing totality by way of consuming his sense in the dogmatic fullness of a sense kept by conscience. A conscience that, accepted as the locus of sense, legitimates itself as well as the foundation of an influential radiating action that forms the real in an anthropologically significant manner. We thus nourish the reversibility of the complex game of application of the projects to praxis, and of the legitimation of these projects by this same praxis, a game where the recurrence of the logical rationality in relation to the axiological ra-

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tionality is expressed (see Bernard, 1989). This allows for the identity gliding of the utopian otherness, i.e., the reinforcement of the reductionism typical of political utopias through the weakening of the discrepancy between the fracturing intentionality of the proposal and the resistance of the instances of the real. Post-modernity will denounce both these strategies and the dichotomies and dilemmas they contain. It will announce the death of the subject which it considered the seat of humanist arrogance. However, the criticism it levels at modernity is once again founded on restless subjectivity, though it is scattered among the grammar of discursive games. In turn, our contemporaneity will follow its original track, taking advantage of and transforming the capacity of initiative contained in the matrix subjectivity of modernity. From here arise concepts/ figures such as the dialogical or conflicting subjectivity introduced by the Frankfurt School, or the relational person developed by Francis Jacques (1982). Thus, we try to overcome the impasse of post-modernity, which, using a reductionist representation founded on the individual, has fought against the subject as an epistemological category and as an anthropological entity. Postmodernity had believed it possible to destroy the voice of the subject, by using the ruse of an episteme dependant on the strength of an empty subjectivity. Thanks to this, political utopia was followed by an ideology without utopia, an epistemic project apparently deprived of an anthropological sense (the second stage of the rapport between ideology and utopia). Our era could well prove to be the source of a utopian ideology (the third stage of the fusion between ideology and utopia) when, through the ideological construct of transparency, and in the absence of reflective mediation, we use the power of attraction of utopia to impose – without resistance – specific values which have become universal and unquestionable realities. The gradual wiping out of the plurality of subjects is tantamount to the objectivity from where the annihilation of subjective resistance itself comes. In fact, mass communication, when it views human beings as objects of knowledge and action, deprives them of the privacy and the autonomy that should be the pillars of the subjective condition. H. Arendt (2000) had already denounced the dangers of the crushing of the private sphere under the weight of the public one, a situation of subjective weakness, where authoritarian regimes are easily implanted. Alain Touraine (2000) takes the same critical path to affirm the importance of welcoming the substitution of the notion of subject for that of the social actor. In his opinion, this actor will allow articulation between the private and the public. “The private – he says – protects the subject from

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disembodied and revolutionary idealism, which had become dangerous when the hope for enchanting tomorrows tried to make itself the logic of action. (…) This separates it from the exclusively public being, which was the ideal of the Enlightenment” (Touraine 2000: 21-22). Thus, situated in an anthropological space disputed by globalism and by localism or, frequently, by local assimilations of the global, contemporaneity also suffers from the disintegration of meaning, from the universal dispute of points of view and from the limits of concepts: here is the horizon of the universal without totalization, according to Pierre Lévy (1997), to which Jaspers’ notion of limit situations must be added (1973). With these two we can try to avoid the closing of the epistemological-anthropological circle, adopted by the ideological utopia of contemporaneity (which will be, in the last resort, an anti-contemporaneous violence) and explore the conflicts between what is embraced by the totalizations and what always exceeds totalities. So, by going past the anthropological emptiness of post-modernity, without going back to universal totalities or falling into despair, we discover that, in contrast to modernity, contemporaneity opens itself up to its limits, to the ephemeral, to a contingency and a precariousness that, instead of being regarded as lines marking the end of decadence, can be seen as moments of change and innovation or like opening up to alterity, to unexpected possibilities. Finally, as thresholds of utopia, but of a philosophical utopia… How can the latter be characterized? Unlike political utopia, philosophical utopia does not see its realization as its main priority, essential to its identity, but rather as a motivation for its reformulation. Besides, according to Maler (1995), the ideal must never limit the ability to idealize, thus safeguarding the existence of a surplus of utopia. When criticizing Marx, he states: If the ideal immanent to a social order does not reduce itself to its idealization, but carries a utopian surplus, not only can it become an ideal regulator of criticism, even though momentarily, but it can also be, even though provisionally, an ideal upon which to found a revolutionary praxis. (Maler, 1995: 351)

If we relate this epistemological proposition to some of Gilles Deleuze’s theses (1991), it is clear that the notion of utopian surplus must be brought back again to the concept of plane of immanence (plan d’ immanence), to the level of thought, where concepts affirm themselves as creative and resistant instances: Concepts (…) are events, but the level is the horizon of the events; the reservoir or the reserve of purely conceptual events: not merely the relative horizon that functions as a limit, chang-

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es with an observer and comprises the observable states of things, but the absolute horizon, independent of any observer, and taking the event as an independent concept of a visible state of things where it would take place. (Deleuze, 1991: 39)

Within this radical epistemological framework, placing these concepts in history and in a narrow political and cultural universe – reterritorialization – means a weakening of their critical power. In fact, these concepts, as authentic events in their self-positioning and in their becoming, escape history. Yet, when Deleuze radicalizes his perspective even more, he states that “utopia is not a good concept because, even when it opposes history, it refers to it and is inscribed in it as an ideal or as a motivation”. So, as an alternative, he proposes the concept of becoming for it is born in history and goes back to it, but is not it (Deleuze, 1991: 106). At the same time, following Nietzsche and Foucault, he introduces the notion of actual (actuel) in contrast to that of present, explaining that it is the current that really holds the new, since it represents “what we are becoming, i.e. the Other, our becoming-other; in fact, it is not the pre-figuration, even utopian, of a coming future of our history, but it is the now of our becoming” (idem, 107). In my opinion, however, it is not necessary to abandon the concept of utopia because of the demand that it should be seen as an absolute event of thought, as Deleuze proposes! In fact, it is enough to take it within the register of becoming, where it acquires a philosophical dimension which allows it to exercise the critical urgency precisely as a fundamental utopian function, as the essence of philosophical utopia. Situated in the register of becoming, utopia will benefit from the utopian surplus mentioned by Maler, which will allow it never to use up (through the coincidence between idealization and the ideal, even before the coincidence between ideal and reality) its capacity for alternative and differential meaning – its critical negativity. Thus, utopia confirms, particularly through the continuous exercise of conflicting questioning, its status of transcendental investigation, in this case, however, a transcendental feebleness, subject to repeated incursions of the historical processes, which, realizing segments of utopian propositions, instead of extinguishing utopia, trigger the renovation of the creative dynamic of alterity which is inherent to becoming. So, in spite of the decentring of utopia in relation to real, it does not become a sort of “stateless thought”, the risk of which is great when philosophy forgets its historical roots, according to Arendt’s reflections (Arendt, 2000) about Manheim. As Levitas reminds us, “when utopia is not expected to be realised, one is constrained only by what it is possible to imagine, not by what it is possible to

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imagine as possible” (...). The problem of limiting utopia to the “possible world” is that it conflates the categories of hope and desire” (Levitas, 1990: 190). In short, here lie the hazy limits of philosophical utopia, itself a thought of limit about limit, beyond the limits of knowledge, in dialogue with the limits of ethics and within a continuous tension with the revisable limits (dangerously fragile) of the human. Fernando Ainsa wrote that “the utopian function is propaedeutical” since “it must help start a moral tension between the subject and the historical time where it is immersed” and “motivate ethically ‘to conceive of other possible futures’ and to have a plural vision of liberty, and not a single one” (Ainsa, 1997: 83). To be afraid of the realization of utopias because they are “too realizable” does not make sense any more… permanent openness to what is possible always appeals to experiential transgression by rational imagination: the limit is no longer an end but always a challenge and a condition of and for the pursuit of meaningful and creative activity. So, what is really important and rich in utopian reasoning is not the construction of totalities, particularly in the shape of ideal communities taken as models with a universal reference value. In the last instance, they close the space of alternatives and impose a circular sense that we know in advance is the best and which we cannot question, precisely because it is the best. In it there exists a coincidence between the good and the true regarding their concretization as object, which prevents debate, the questioning of autonomous subjects. The confusion between the ideal level and the real level of utopias destroys utopian openness. In eschatological hope there was a dominant expectant attitude and in the political utopia a fundamental demiurgic hope; there is, however, in today’s anti-contemporaneous utopian ideology a gnosic hope, in contrast to the despair of the post-modern anti-utopianism: access to utopia is through the sharing of utopian representation. For that reason, there is no true relation with the incommensurable, an openness to what surpasses the limits of knowledge, the thresholds of the foreseen and of the foreseeable, challenges which would also be conditions for the full exercise of utopian radicalism. Morin wrote in The Method that the idea that our knowledge is unlimited is a limited idea. The idea that our knowledge is limited has unlimited consequences. Utopia, which emerges in the narrow gap between knowledge and thought, is therefore the expression of the restlessness – and of hopes – of man as an inhabitant of the limit, as subject of knowledge and of action but, also, as subject of thought and of imagination.

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Globalism and the ideological construct of transparency appear as pillars, par excellence, of anti-contemporaneity, for through the refinement of mutual interference between ideology and utopia, from where derives the imposition of an ideological, virtual and universal representation of this present, they slow down the universal access of people and communities to knowledge and to freedom of thought, that is, to effective fruition of the present. Philosophical utopia, by stressing the exercise of the utopian function and the dynamic of utopian surplus, promotes and even presupposes knowledge, the diversity of subjective interpretations and propositions, their conflicting claims and the recognition of the creative role of the subjects inside a contextual but also universal inter-subjectivity. To me, only in this way can contemporaneity acquire its status as an anthropological category. Only in this way will we be able to place participation in the reality of the present (though complex and multiple faced with the plurality of subjective representations) instead of the phantasmagorical sharing of an ideological (virtual?) representation of the present, presented, from the start, by political mediation, as alone being universal in its substance. But, of course, at this moment of rupture contemporaneity itself becomes the utopia of contemporaneity. Contemporaneity is thus sketched as a utopia which, by demanding a corresponding level of consciousness, that is no longer simply something revolutionary given or conquered, will first demand a coherent and enlightened engagement of education – an education recognized as an anthropological project. How then can contemporaneity as a utopia be defined? Is contemporaneity a simple utopia or is it, on the contrary, a composite utopia? More wrote that if the whole island were overcrowded with inhabitants, a general emigration would be decreed. However, what is seen today is a proliferation of utopias, which is not a mere multiplication of an original utopia but, in fact, the occurrence of a variety of utopian propositions. Here, we can of course speak about utopias recognized as such by common sense and which constitute, at the same time, slogans of political and social movements. For example at this level, we can distinguish urban utopias, ecotopias and intercultural utopias; we can also mention utopias which are more erudite in their formulation but which use very strong means for their universal development. Here, we are referring to cyber-utopias, the utopias of cyberspace, whose originality lies in it being a space that needs no place. A space where globalization might become the occasion for the construction of peace, for – according to the supporters of this vision – everybody there has

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the possibility of instantaneously communicating their opinions, doing away with the privileges of some people and of some territories. We are even invited to rethink thought because of hypermedia, hypertext, “networks that are both links of relationship and support of contents”. Derrick de Kerckhove writes: “If we need to dream about a supplementary utopia, it is about the one that will make available an instrument which will let us think together, to reach more and more satisfactory solutions, as democratically as possible, bearing in mind every difference, every ignorance, every resistance and even every reluctance”. And this author adds that “we live utopia because a convergence is being produced between our real powers over matter and over what is alive and the ability to turn information into realization” (Kerckhove, 2001: 9, 8). What is equivocal in this utopian conviction is the focus placed on the little value given to the link between the hypermedia and the democratization of human relations, forgetting the previous question of the economic and technical obstacles which arise with the use of these means of communication. The impasse arising from the interposition of these obstacles widen the gap between those who normally have access to the advantages of the media and information resources and those who, because of the resulting technological ostracism, find their voice less and less heard. On the other hand, the media should not mean the demise of the numerous networks that sustain our relations with others, especially by giving little value to face-to-face, community or neighbourly relations, at the risk of leading to an impoverishment of personal identities. Face-to-face communication is vitally important and it should gain and never lose with the increase of new means of communication. In order to truly take into account difference, ignorance and resistance, in order to think together (whether it be about e-utopias, interculturality, nature, urban life, etc.), the most important step is to consider the key concepts which are involved. The concept of solidarity is crucial here because it underlies – positively or negatively – all contemporaneous ideals and conflicts. For this reason, it is necessary to undertake philosophical reflection regarding its utopian (re)formulations and the foundation of an education based on a culture of solidarity. This concept of solidarity is always in evolution. Institutional systems diversify and widen more and more their fields of application. Nowadays, they move first of all, from relational solidarity close to the challenges raised by another culture, mainly planetary, cosmic and intratemporal, which is no longer restricted to human beings but embraces nature as a whole. This solidarity – which precedes and comprehends all contemporary uto-

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pian discourses, including that of contemporaneity itself – plays a utopian function, requires a philosophical radicalization at the level of becoming. However, the formation of structuring competences of divergent thought is the task of an education for utopia. So, the historical realization of solidarity, in order to sustain its dynamic regarding utopian radicalization without the illusion of the coincidence between the idealization, the ideal and the real, implies the construction, by means of educative utopias, of solidarity between people in the historical present but with openings to the actuel of becoming. This rapport is post-dialectical – because neither of the terms is contained in the reference to its opposite – and it necessarily arouses frustrations, due to the continuous renewal of the shifts between the process of the real and those of an ideal repeatedly regulated and transgressed by utopian surpluses. An education for solidarity – regarded as practical anthropology – presupposes a pedagogy of creativity and of effort, since one passes from the imminence of crisis (implicit in revolutionary dialectics) to the immanence of this crisis. On the other hand, the decadence of instrumental reason and the affirmation of dialogical and conflicting reason imply the demand for hermeneutic behaviours and a generalized reciprocity, alongside ethical trans-subjectivity. These dimensions are the dimensions of a political culture of solidarity. Indeed, the fact that democracy as a restricted political utopia has been overtaken makes the prejudices of normative democracy illegitimate and introduces the implication of solidarity with tolerance, from where emerges the need for a certain deinstitutionalization of education together with the reinforcement of the responsibility of the individual. As stated by Ruby (1997), solidarity is, accordingly, no longer determined by a model, but stands as an opportunity for men to open up over the space of the possible in the midst of political action, without submission to transcendent models. Indeed, solidarity culture, a condition for the utopia of contemporaneity, is a differential culture. Nobody attains the totality of a culture (regardless of the extension and nature of this culture), while each of us makes a certain representation of his own culture (Pretceille, 1999). The development of an education compatible with these claims will very much reduce the totalitarian risks inherent in the totalization of the sense from and around a given culture and of a certain vision of the world. In particular, as far as globalization produced by cyber-culture is concerned, we see that the latter can, in fact, induce totalitarian procedures as much as techno-science, by

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allowing universal control of communication by power, and can by itself turn communication into a power that, in this way, would certainly not be shared and used by other processes. In his turn, Lévy (1997) stated, that “utopia par excellence is the unity of humanity, it is humanity that finds common ground and stops waging war with each other”, this utopia being “from now on within our reach” because it is “within our hands’ reach, or rather within the reach of a computer”. But, in fact, cyberspace is not in itself a “universe without totality”. Everything will finally depend on the culture of the person whose hands are operating the computer: everything – or almost everything – depends on the solidarity and cohesion among all hands, whether it be those touching the computer’s keys, or between these hands and those touching the dry roots of famine. As has already been said, the deepening of a culture for solidarity has to do with education as practical anthropology – autonomous in relation to the slogans of political discourse. For this to happen, everything will have to be based on the development of educational projects supported by demanding conceptual references. …So, solidarity: does it mean accepting the other as a radically other other, or sharing oneself with the other? That’s the utopian function (of philosophical utopia) that constantly re-questions things. History, in its turn, will re-search for the sense of the realization of its utopian system… The political utopia of Human Rights, for example, must open up to this problematic, at the risk of sinking under the illusion of an identification between the universality of its application and the previous totality of a sense of human dignity, of which it will be the totally legitimate bearer. At the same time, to avoid relativism, Human Rights, as a coherent and consequent expression of tolerance, will first have to put universalization as an end instead of universalism as a founding principle. It must do this without losing its pragmatism but, on the contrary, by means of the opportunities of pragmatic solidarity. Habermas (1987) and Gadamer’s (1996) reflective contributions could be brought into play here. The former, when he defines the universal as a horizon in the space of an ethics of communication, confrontation and argumentation; the latter, when he defines the horizon of the sense as the expression of the frontiers of a finite present, open to interaction with other points of view and not merely as the result of a fundamental and absolute place. In this way, we avoid the confusion of totality with the idea of infinite as a founding principle.

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The conceptual characters of philosophical utopia try in the domain of reason to search for what is intelligible, what makes sense; while, in the course of history, the actors of history – who will probably be the same characters playing another role – will have to try to build up, as a complement to what is intelligible in reason, what is reasonable, in other words, what is simultaneously good, beautiful, useful and just! Here, educational utopias play their anthropological role. Still in a critical space situated between (philosophical) utopias and the proposals for the realization of ideals, these proposals destroy the coherence of utopias to assure the evolutionary coherence of the human. It is with this status that educational utopias must realize their pedagogical intentionality. This is the contemporaneous utopia par excellence, that which poses the greatest challenge to contemporaneity: the challenge of contemporaneity being itself a utopia – the utopia of universal solidarity, at a human level and beyond the human. The utopia on which all other dreams of humanity, nature, future, etc., finally depend. I will finish by sharing with you Socrates’ wise contention: “Do you not believe that the best among men is the one who expresses in the reality of consciousness the character of man in his dreams?” …and Hölderlin’s prudent warning: “Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he reflects”.

Works Cited Abdallah-Pretceille, M. (1986), Vers une pédagogie interculturelle, Paris, Publ. de la Sorbonne.

Gadamer, H. G. (1996), La philosophie herméneutique, Paris, PUF.

Ainsa, F. (1997), La reconstruction de l’utopie, Paris, Arcantères.

Habermas, J. (1987), Théorie de l’agir communicationnel, Paris, Fayard.

Arendt, H. (2000), La philosophie de l’existence, Paris, Payot.

Jacques, F. (1982), Différence et subjectivité, Paris, Aubier.

Baudrillard, J. (1991), As estratégias fatais, Lisboa, Estampa.

Jonas, H. (1990), Le principe responsabilité, Paris, Cerf.

Bernard, M. (1988), Critique des fondements de l’éducation, Paris, Chiron. Deleuze, G. / Guattari, F. (1991), Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris, Minuit.

Kerckhove, D. (2001), “Préface”, in Laurent Lavoie (ed.) (2001), Utopia: De quelques utopies à l’aube du 3ème millénaire, Paris, Syllepse.

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Larochelle, G. (1995), Philosophie de l’idéologie: théorie de l’intersubjectivité, Paris, PUF.

Maler, H. (1995), Convoiter l’impossible, Paris, Albin Michel.

Lévinas, E. (1972), L’humanisme de l’autre homme, Montpellier, Morgana.

Ruby, C. (1997), La solidarité, Paris, Ellipses. Salomon, J. J. (1992), Le destin technologique, Paris, Balland.

Levitas, R. (1990), The concept of utopia, New York, Philip Allan.

Touraine, A. / Khosrokhavar, F. (2000), La recherche de soi, Paris, Fayard.

Lévy, P. (1997), L’intelligence collective, Paris, La Découverte.

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Criticism as Utopia Maria Elisa Cevasco | University of São Paulo, Brazil

Taking inspiration from Fredric Jameson, whose work is fundamental to my proposition here, I would like to present an argument for the practice of criticism as utopia. One says this and immediately hears objections from all quarters, not least from our own comrades, who can easily rehearse again all the arguments against Utopia that run through the Marxist tradition at least since Engels’s 1880 “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” in which he diagnoses Utopian thinking as “a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future societies by the founder of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition” (Engels, 1880: 12). But one could always remember, as Engels no doubt does, the primacy of the situation: he treats Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen as thinkers of a time not yet ripe for revolutionary socialism, the solutions to social problems still “lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions”. Those facts determined their intellectual shortcomings just as surely as our times determine ours. Engels pays tribute to those forerunners and warns us not to feel too superior in our more developed situation: Those facts once established we need not dwell a moment longer upon this side of the question, now wholly belonging to the past. We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies that today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such “insanity”. For ourselves, we delight in

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the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thoughts that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering and to which philistines are blind. (idem, 13)

It is worth going back to Engels not only to be aware of the temptations open to small fry and philistines today, when Utopia seems farther way even than it apparently did in the 19th century, but also to remind us of our obligations as intellectuals to the future, which depends on our germs of thoughts just as surely as our present depends on theirs. And, alas, one of the germs that has not fructified yet is the one of the change of the capitalist world order. If anything, ours is a time of no alternatives. Writing in 1978, Raymond Williams quotes Engels, and then reminds us that the situation has now been reversed not only because the scientific character of the “laws of historical development” is cautiously questioned or skeptically rejected; to the point, indeed, where the notion of such a science can be regarded as utopian. It is also because the importance of utopian thought is itself being revalued, so that some now see it as the crucial vector of desire. (Williams, 1980: 199)

In case some of the most hardened among us begin to shudder at a notion anchored on desire, at a time when the word evokes Lord of the Rings more readily than Freud, thus reflecting a usage that is best described by Engels’s mish-mash, it is advisable to remember that for Williams, “we cannot abstract desire. It is always something specific, in specifically impelling situations”. Accordingly, Utopia as desire has to be evaluated “within that changing context, which itself determines whether its defining subjunctive mode is part of a grammar which includes a true indicative and a true future, or whether it has seized every paradigm and become exclusive in assent and dissent alike” (idem, 208). Part of our problem in early 21st century is that our grammar does not seem to include a subjunctive: we live in the perpetual present of the commodity, the quintessence of reification: past and future are fused in things, ours is the circular time of repetition, when assent and dissent are dissolved in the recurrence of more and more of the same. There is no need to rehearse again the sad consequences of the well-nigh uncontested victory of capitalism all over the globe. Suffice it to remember that one slogan has captured the Zeitgeist with such accuracy that it has become the shorthand to refer to all levels of present society, which we can range, at the risk of sounding facetious, from the work place to the working out: “There is no alternative”. This Thatcherite injunction has become so pervasive that it is sometimes referred to simply as TINA. We know that there is a sense in which TINA is no novelty: capitalism has

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always presented itself as inexorable, and the work of ideology has always been finding ways of naturalizing elective practices. Not for nothing one of the main tasks of historical materialism has been the effort to form an understanding of the true situation, of the actually existing historical connections, allowing us to view the present historically, “so that we can penetrate beneath the surface and perceive the profounder historical forces which in reality control events” (Lukács, 1971: 224). In the cultural field, the task has likewise been the unmasking of those illusions in the powerful forms of Ideologiekritik. But one of the specific injunctions of our impelling situation is that surface is all there seems to be. Contemporary depthlessness is overcrowded with portentous and false ends: of history, of change, of futurity, of illusions themselves. We can hardly read a single academic essay that does not quote, as I am doing right now, Zizek’s adaptation of Marx’s dictum to depict present cynical reason “They know what they are doing, but they do it anyway”. Summing up: ideology has always been an illusion, hence the need for demystifying cultural criticism, but today it seems to be more well-grounded in appearances than in previous times. Not only does it lead us to believe there is no alternative, but also that there is no desire which cannot be satisfied by commodities and that “we” are all very happy it is so, as long as we can consume. And nor should this surprise us: a purer form of capitalism, “more developed and less adulterated and amalgamated with survivals of former economic conditions” (Marx, 1981: chap.10), could only call into existence a more perfected form of ideology. If, in previous phases of capitalist development, it was believable to posit a separation between the realm of material production and consumption, and the realm of symbolic forms and of the formation of subjectivities, the fact that they are interconstituted elements of a single totality is made clearer in a mass-culture mediated social sphere intent on maintaining commodity fetishism at all prices. This situation poses a new problem for committed cultural criticism: ideas do not seem to function in the same way they did when Lukács could, with the confidence of a successful revolutionary, claim that “[by] laying bare the springs of the historical process historical materialism became, in consequence of the class situation of the proletariat, an instrument of war” (Luckács, 1971: 224). Then, the task for criticism was to “deliver a precise judgment on the capitalist social system, to unmask capitalist society”. Nowadays, the capitalist mask points to itself with its own finger, and the term mass, as in mass society and mass media, encompasses the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the ever-increasing number of the excluded from the productive process, but not neces-

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sarily from the baleful enchantment of the media and of consumption. Though only a minority can have access to a fully fledged consumer life style, its driving forces – mainly individualism and atomization – are at work throughout what used to be called the social fabric. In such situation, what should cultural critics do? Join the bourgeoisie in the theorization of their own crisis and condemn contemporary cultural products for being the opium of the people, mere degraded cultural trash – which, of course, a lot of them are? Isn’t there anything more productive for us to do? It is in this context that the proposition of cultural criticism as Utopia acquires significance. No system based on a contradiction can be as total and dominant as to effectively prevent the formation of emergent practices that challenge its hegemony. So it should be no surprise that the new ideological climate has created the conditions for the emergence, in the ranks of historical materialism, of the adequate form of criticism to suit the new requirements of class struggle. In what follows, I intend to present a reading of the work of the foremost Marxist cultural critic of the present as one example of Utopian criticism in the age of finance capital. How can we characterize this utopian aspect in Fredric Jameson? Once again, one can do worse than resorting to his own conceptions. He famously centered his theory of Utopia in the fruitful notion that a utopian text serves to “bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability” to imagine an Other of our system (apud Moylan, 1998: 1). In this sense, “utopia’s deepest subject, and the source of all that is most political about is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision” (Jameson, 1988a: 101). In The Seeds of Time, Jameson explains that the dialectical process of Utopia is not to imaginatively produce another world but to “neutralize what blocks freedom” (1994: 57). In this sense, [u]topia’s deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history. (Jameson, 1988a: 101)

In the same vein, I would like to argue that the central political task of theory as Utopia is to neutralize the process that blocks knowledge that prevents us from understanding the concrete determinants of our historical situation. In other words, and to use another of Jameson’s recurrent injunctions, it is a criticism that enables us to name the system.

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By trying to neutralize what blocks the way to theoretical practice, utopian cultural criticism fulfills the role assigned to intellectuals in our days. Speaking on the task of the political intellectual at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2003, Jameson said that one lesson remains effective in our days of cynical reason, universal knowledge and equally universal degradation and that is the lesson of the relevance of making connections, of drawing the lines between zones of life that our society systematically separates and keeps apart. We are not necessarily surprised, he goes on, “by this or that mass grave; nor by this or that financial scandal, but it is the intrinsic… relationship between these things that can suddenly jolt us and cause the whole world system to appear before our eyes in all its monstrosity” (Jameson, 1988b: 11). This naming of the system – a slogan that Fredric Jameson of course took not from books but from the student politics of the sixties – is particularly relevant in recent years when the system has developed new structural originalities. “This system of globalization has been rewired in all kinds of new ways: only when we trace those connections and global interrelationships will our task as intellectuals become effective”. “Making connections” is a deceptively simple way of describing one of the central operations of theory as Utopia. There is the sense in which theory itself may be the name of the desire to find a way of explaining why we do things the way we do. Of course most of us know the answer, which can be either uttered in the Hegelian language of the synthesis of many determinations, or in the Marxist one, whose pop version was unexpectedly formulated, in memorable and recurrent shorthand, by James Caville, political strategist in the 1992 Clinton campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid”. The fact that even ideologues have been convinced of the primacy of the economic has not entailed the wide acceptance of the related conclusion that it is ultimately capitalism that exacts the heavy collective price we have to pay for its maintenance: if capitalism could speak, it would continue saying that it is nothing but the natural way of doing things, which hardly needs being named. This is a particularly difficult and necessary task at a time in which we are ceaselessly taught that materials are “disparate”, events are “random”, history is “un-explainable”… Of course one of the forms of concealment of actually existing domination is through the discrediting of any notions of determination. Facing the complexities, and also the possibilities, of contemporary society, Raymond Williams famously adapted the classic Marxist notion of determination away from the infamously reductive conception of a predicted, prefigured and controlled content and towards an awareness of determination as the

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setting of limits and the exertion of pressures. This notion takes into account the objective limits of the mode of production, the negative sense in which new “social relations, and the new kinds of activity that are possible through them, may be imagined but cannot be achieved unless the determining limits of a particular mode of production are surpassed in practice, by actual social change” (Williams, 1977: 86). It also takes into account the more activist and positive sense that the pressures, though no doubt often exerted so as to maintain and renew the existing social order, can also be directed against the limits: “they are also, and vitally, pressures exerted by new formations, with their as yet unrealized intentions and demands” (idem, 87). Both senses are anathema to current ideology. It works incessantly to conceal limits, most glaringly under the incantation of the endless possibilities of choice in capitalism – ranging from the choice of governments in democratic elections (yes, Bush in Florida is the irresistible counter-example) to the enhanced choices of… actually existing cable television. As for the pressure of new social formations and new aspirations, TINA ensures us that there are no more social classes and no aspirations beyond consumerism. In this situation, the practice of criticism as Utopia includes both rendering visible the points of inflection of the limits and monitoring the cultural landscape for signs of emergent forms of pressure. In other words, and to use another of Jameson’s recurrent injunctions, it is theory that enables us to recognize the system that organizes the connections and looks for ways of overcoming its many restrictions. Criticism as Utopia does not necessarily present the opposite number of what is, but it does conjure the critique of actually existing conditions and of the practices they determine. It renders visible the limits of current ways of thinking. That is precisely one of the modes of criticism as practiced by Jameson himself: the obvious examples would be his critique of the ideologies of literary interpretation in The Political Unconscious, of postmodernism in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, or of modernity in A Singular Modernity. This would be the negative side of the hermeneutical process in the time-honored tradition of Marxist cultural criticism. Our time, as Jameson is well aware, requires a complementation. This is how he put it, speaking of “Cultural Intervention”: But in a society that has lost the sense of a future and even the very possibility of historical change, which has become convinced that the current order of global capitalism is the only social form that can exist henceforth, being profoundly anchored in human nature – in such society we once again need visions of radical difference and of radical alternatives to the

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present system. These visions are what I call Utopia, and far from constituting a flight from politics as in traditional Utopias, they are an integral part of politics today. For a productive and well-developed politics must operate on the macro level as well as on the micro level: its local forms and immediately concrete struggles must always be accompanied by some ultimate vision of an overall systemic alternative, of a new system, better and ultimately radically different from what we have today. (Jameson, 2003)

The theoretical precedent for this sort of hermeneutics, one that makes us aware of the dynamic possibilities of history, is again to be found in the Marxist tradition: for Jameson, Ernst Bloch’s main contribution is the working out of a hermeneutic technique which enables the restoration of a genuine political dimension to all the texts and objects preserved in our culture. Bloch has succeeded in combining both sides of the hermeneutical process: the negative hermeneutics, or, what Jameson calls, following Paul Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of suspicion, of the destruction of illusions, and the affirmative hermeneutics of access, the one that restores an original or forgotten meaning. For Bloch, every object, no matter how degraded, retains traces of Utopian identity, in such a manner that “wherever we look everything in the world becomes a version of some primal figure, a manifestation of the primordial movement toward the future and toward ultimate identity with a transfigured world which is Utopia, and whose vital presence, behind whatever distortions, beneath whatever layers of repression, may always be detected, no matter how faintly, by the instruments and apparatus of hope itself” (Jameson, 1971: 120). One of the accomplishments the Utopian character of Jameson’s work is to develop the apparatus that enables the recognition of such figures. Whenever theory enables comprehension, it pushes the limits of ideology and counteracts its ban on thinking real thoughts and on imagining transformation. That, I think, is one of the main contributions of Jameson’s work to an understanding of the present as itself historical and thus subject to change. Jameson is the first global intellectual to come from the headquarters of the new version of the old world order. Denning (2003) has rightly observed that, unlike previous American Left thinkers, Jameson was not a red-diaper baby. His Marxism did not have to reckon with the fights or the strengths of the American Left – his is a Marxism free of the Old Left controversies and obligations to “forecast the past”. But he had to invent a Marxism that must face a particularly recessive moment of class struggle in America and progressively, as his formation was taking place, in the whole world. He was faced with the difficult task of inventing a Marxism without recourse to a strong class move-

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ment and the keen sense of dispute concrete socio-political options lends to theoretical work. His production, unlike that of so many other Marxist thinkers – suffice to recall Thompson on Althusser for a recent example – has been free of head-on collisions with foes or comrades: I can only recall Ahmad’s critique of Jameson’s totalizing view of the Third World1 and Mike Davis’s objections to his description of the Bonaventure Hotel in the book on postmodernism. He also had to face the new realities of the world-wide “triumph” of capitalism. The result is what Denning calls a visionary Marxism, constantly invigilating the cultural landscape for the shape this yet to come global Marxist Left will look like. In the terms discussed here, Jameson’s criticism as Utopia marks a space from which such Marxism may come about. If I may end on a personal note, this makes translating Jameson in Brazil a crucial contribution to the ideological debate. His negative hermeneutics, though a powerful descriptive device, acts more as a confirmation of our experience than as an unmasking of its many illusions. The naturalization of actually existing globalization does not hold in places like Brazil, where its ugliest faces are visible in everyday life and experience. But the imperative to think beyond what is resonates with great force in our context. Jameson closes his latest book, A Singular Modernity, urging critics to displace the thematics of modernity by the desire called Utopia. In a country like Brazil, which is not yet thoroughly modernized, a place where the future may still be in the making, a critical theory that presents itself as inextricably linked to political praxis and to systemic transformation must well be counted among our meager resources for a journey of hope.

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Note 1 See in this respect Ahmad (1992) and also Szeman (2001). Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz (1992), In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London, Verso.

Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.

Denning, Michael (2003), The Future of Utopia, Duke University, April.

Max, Karl (1981), Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach, Harmondsworth, Penguin/New Left Review.

Engels, Friedrich (1880), “Socialism Utopic and Scientific”, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works Jameson, Fredric (1971), Marxism and Form, Princeton, Princeton University. Press _ _ (1988a), The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, vol. 2, London, Routledge. _ _ (1998b), “On Cultural Intervention”, Unpublished Manuscript. _ _ (1994), The Seeds of Time, New York, Columbia. _ _ (2003,), “On Cultural Intervention”, paper delivered at the January 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Moylan, Tom (1998), “Introduction: Jameson and Utopia”, Utopian Studies.vol. 9, no. 2. pp. 1-7. Szeman, Imre (2001), “Who’s is afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100. 3, pp. 803-826. Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press. _ _ (1980), “Utopia and Science Fiction”, Problems in Materialism and Culture, London, Verso.

Lukács, Georg (1971), “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism”, in History and Class

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Postmodern Utopianism: Deleuze and Guattari and the Escape from Politics Millay Hyatt | Humboldt University, Germany

The notion that we in the early 21st century – perhaps since 1989 – have left utopian thinking behind us for an a- or even dystopian world of Realpolitik, where utopias, if they surface at all, are of a private and non-political nature, seems to enjoy wide acceptance. I would like to dispute this with the contention that a certain kind of utopianism increasingly characterizes contemporary notions of the political. Political hope in the era of global capitalism, I suggest, is ever more relegated to the non-space of utopia, where radical but impotent desire and harmless flights of fancy replace concerted action anchored in historical consciousness. I read the influential post-structuralist authors Deleuze and Guattari as symptomatic of a contemporary kind of “utopian imaginary”, which considers political institutions and collective practice to be moribund and even oppressive constructs. Their notion of political liberation as flight from cohesion and collectivity sacrifices the productive working through of conflicts for a radical disengagement. In this paper I will contrast the implicit utopianism in their political thought, with its notions of limitless space and nomadic dispersal, with the critique of utopia put forth by Hegel and Marx, who instead advocate transformative labor as the producer of freedoms. In the following I will be referring to something I call the “utopian imaginary”. This is mildly preposterous, since, as we all know, there is not simply the

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utopian imaginary, but many utopian imaginaries. When I refer to “the” utopian imaginary however, I am effecting a diagnosis of a certain tendency in political thinking, which has found its most vivid articulation in what are generally understood to be utopian texts from the early modern period to the present. In my analysis, this tendency also marks other systems of thought or modes of thinking that do not consider themselves, and are not considered by their audiences, to be utopian. One of the purposes of this paper is to identify this mode as utopian and put forth an argument for why I consider it to be a politically unhelpful and even ruinous tendency. The first characteristic, then, of “the utopian imaginary” I would like to address is its isolation of, and investment of hope in, the functioning of a mechanism, or the characteristics of a particular place. Early modern utopias tended to imbue the geographical distance and isolation of remote islands with the necessary prerequisites for an ideal society, while the mechanism of a strict legal framework and organization of daily life was the guarantor fulfilling the requirements of the ideal. By the 19th century, the utopian imagination had shifted away from the more or less naturally given islands on which to locate their visions of social harmony. In the wake of industrial revolution, the agent of perfection is increasingly the machine, both in the metaphorical sense of a smoothly functioning system (as in the early modern utopias), as well as in the literal sense of fantastic machines whose superior effectivity was to both alleviate the drudgery of work as well as to provide abundance for all. While the island model sought to eradicate corruption from the influence of other societies by avoiding contact with them as much as possible, the machine model seeks to eliminate social injustice and economic disparity by transforming society into a smoothly functioning mechanism, where every member participates without causing loss or disrupting the whole. This fantasy is predicated on an automatic functioning of a system designed to produce the desired effects, thereby structurally eliminating the risk of the kinds of unpredictable contingencies that complicate less rational societies. To quote Fredric Jameson from The Seeds of Time: The mechanism itself has nothing to do with freedom, except to release it; it exists to neutralize what blocks freedom, such as matter, labor and the requirements of their accompanying human social machinery (…). [Q]ua mechanism, the Utopian machine may be expected to absorb all that unfreedom into itself, to concentrate it where it can best be worked over and controlled (…). Thus the Utopian mechanism by embodying the necessary – labor, constraint, matter – in absolute and concentrated form, by way of its very existence, allows a whole range of freedoms to flourish outside of itself. (Jameson, 1994: 57)

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It will seem far-fetched to look for such a privileged agent in Deleuze and Guattari. Their profound suspicion of any kind of guarantee – be it for political stability, mental health, or philosophical truth – imbues their entire work together, and Deleuze’s individual work as well. The idea of utopia as a dogmatic and air-tight blueprint for the perfect society certainly seems infinitely removed from their evocations of spontaneous, temporary encounters, events, and productions of desire, their refusal of all totalizing systems and conclusive prescriptions for societal well-being. Their intense criticism of orthodoxies (on both the political left and the right), however, is motivated by a desire that invests certain mechanisms and processes with a weighty, even redemptive, promise. I contend that the movement of deterritorialization shares significant characteristics with the privileged utopian agents I have been referring to. Deterritorialization, one of the most powerful concepts Deleuze and Guattari came up with together, is understood as a generalizable thrust or basic tendency of life itself. It is the performative desire to move from fixed necessity to mobile flux, from cohesive organicity or structurality to molecular disintegration. This impulse is read and affirmed across a wide variety of social, philosophical and scientific phenomena, and is finally equated with the quest for and the production of freedom itself. Deterritorialization can certainly not be confused with the utopian mechanism as a producer of predictable, desired effects, or with the utopian voyage away from corrupt reality into an idealized state. What I am arguing rather is that the Deleuze-Guattarian concept shares with the utopian motifs a kind of inevitable propensity, an unambiguous capacity for creating the desired state – a state that could, for simplicity’s sake, be called freedom. Deterritorialization infallibly – even axiomatically – produces incalculable and unharnessable liberation, ecstatic lines of flight. Reterritorializations may follow on the heels of deterritorializations, fascist desire may haunt revolutionary desire, but these counter-revolutionary tendencies are, precisely, neatly separated from the pure flux of desire by designating them as reactionary and attributing them to the nefarious forces of anti-production. “[L]e désir n’est jamais trompé” [“Desire is never deceived”], they write in L’Anti-Oedipe (Deleuze / Guattari, 1972: 306). And while most deterritorializations are, as it were, brought back down to earth, reterritorialized in some way, the authors insist on an “absolute deterritorialization” that is beyond any reactionary reduction to a particular territory. A more conventional utopia might think in terms of the ultimate or final territory; Deleuze and Guattari postulate a complete absence of territory, the ultimate freedom from all territorial restraints, a total

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lack of fixity, what they call flux. This conjuration of a pure state of detachment is frequently accompanied by explicitly political formulations, evoking, for instance, “une nouvelle terre, (…) un nouveau peuple” [“a new earth, a new people”] (1991: 95). While the authors consistently insist that this new earth is here and now, not in some elusive future or in some unattainable locale, it is the investment of a particular function with the capacity for producing absolute freedom that has them participating in the “utopian imaginary”. When, in L’AntiOedipe, the authors accuse psychoanalysis of misunderstanding the fact that reterritorializations occur onto people and places, whereas deterritorializations occur onto machines (Deleuze / Guattari, 1972: 378), it is evident that, for them, not all objects are subject to the potential ossification of a reterritorialization, but that, as befits the “utopian imaginary”, certain kinds of objects are immune from reactionary coding. It remains then a matter of identifying or deploying these objects or forces to achieve the desired ends, no matter how much the authors polemicize against any kind of determinism or calculability. Their incalculability, I’m suggesting, is calculable. Why does a system of thought invest a particular object or function with utopian potential? For Deleuze and Guattari, one answer could be found in the authors’ decisive rejection of dialectics, particularly in the sense of the work of history. If history and the relationships between events, people, and things are not understood as being bound up in continuous reflexivity and mutual determination, in a process that is best understood by seeing it as a continuously developing system, then any particular element within it can be elected to escape the overall logic, and function as a redeeming agent. Unhooked from the complex but interconnected trajectory of historical development and contingency, this function or object can take on an extraordinary vocation; it can exceed and transgress its historical context without being limited or relativized by it. Hegel and Marx and Engels, in their different ways, analyzed this attempt to bypass the work of history as the reduction of politics to morality and/or technics. Engels accused utopian socialism of only being able to judge political and economic conditions morally. Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier, etc., according to his analysis, responded to the evident injustices and catastrophic societal effects of capitalism by devising theories in which the destructive parts of capitalism and industrialization were to be removed, while its useful and positive elements were to be maintained. Instead of a rigorous evaluation of the capitalist system as a whole, an analysis of the forces operating within it that produce both the “good” as well as the “bad” effects, these thinkers remain on the level

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of the effects alone. The problem with capitalism, in their view, is to be found in its injustice at certain points. Charles Fourier for instance felt that the principle of private property was too restricted and should be expanded to include workers and shareholders (Dagognet, 1997: 149), while Saint-Simon wanted industrialization to be technically improved to the point where it could overcome scarcity and social disparity. Marx and Engels characterize this selective sifting of the freedoms produced by a system from its unfreedoms as the moral perspective, and diagnosed it among the liberal democrats of their time as well as among the utopian socialists. When Walter Benjamin discussed Fourierism in his essay “Paris, capital of the 19th century”, he was on to something similar: he suggests that a society eager for change will regard new technologies or means of production – often the very things that are causing the economic and social upheavals – as images of utopia, beckoning with the promise of the overcoming of class divisions. So it was that Fourier seized upon the Parisian arcades, spectacles of consumerism and technological innovation, and transformed them into his phalanstères, which were to function as the basis of a harmonious and egalitarian community (Benjamin, 1977: 171). Again the lack of a historical critique invites the fetichization of a particular technology, which comes to be seen as the harbinger of a new age. In Hegel we also find a criticism of the insufficiency of the moral perspective in politics, and its association with utopianism. A particularly interesting moment in his work occurs when he follows the stage of absolute freedom in the Phenomenology of Spirit with the moral stage. After the brief and radical institution of “Himmel auf (...) Erde[n]” [“heaven on earth”] (Hegel, 1970a: 431) by the French Revolution – i.e. absolute equality and total sovereignty of the people – the hierarchies and differentiations of the division of labor and class become reestablished in French society. Total equality and freedom turn out to be too abstract to achieve the work of the community, which thus settles back into the established divisions and particularities that, while reneging on the promise of equality, allowed the concrete work of political and economic life to be accomplished. So far, this is not very surprising, as the development Hegel describes in the Phenomenology generally moves at the rhythm of two steps forward, one step back. The crucial moment comes next: the evidently persisting contradiction between freedom and private property and class divisions (for which “difference” is a code word in this section) never does come to the fore, is never sharpened enough to reach a crisis of resolution. While all the preceding conflicts in the Phenomenology have found some sort of political or

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social solution alongside their logical Aufhebung, this one is left to fester unresolved, while Hegel follows the work of the dialectic into the a-political, spiritual spheres of morality, religion, and absolute spirit. The contradiction between the individual and society now becomes a question of morality, no longer a question of politics or economics. Perhaps Hegel, in his own historical context, had no choice but to take this route, and he is, as I mentioned, a stringent critic of the moral perspective, but regardless of Hegel’s view on the trajectory he puts forth, for us the point remains that the avoidance of political analysis and confrontation seems to invariably lead to a moral perspective, which positivistically (rather than dialectically) divides phenomena into good or bad, productive or anti-productive, imputing the choice between them to be free, and this freedom to be a given. Again, it will seem severely counter-intuitive to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari analyze society from a moral rather than from a political perspective. That is also not exactly what I am claiming. I rather want to suggest that the refusal of a dialectical analysis of society rooted in a historical understanding of the forces operating within it and producing its myriad effects tends to lead to a misunderstanding of the relative autonomy of these effects. Rather than grasping them as reflexively produced by their others, their opposites, certain effects (such as deterritorialization) are taken out of their historical contexts and elevated as agents of absolute escape, or freedom. Those forces that counter these privileged entities – reterritorialization in this case – are dualistically maligned as “reactionary” or “anti-productive”, without a consistent reckoning with the interdependency, reciprocal causation and shared origins between the two “sides”. This, I am arguing, bears a family resemblance to the “moral perspective” theorized and criticized by Hegel and Marx, and attributed to the utopian position. Perhaps there is a faint echo of this in Foucault’s introduction to the English translation of L’Anti-Oedipe, in which he calls the work a “book of ethics” (Foucault, 1983: xiii). For Marx and Engels, the “utopian imaginary” designs non-exploitative social systems without a recognition of the concrete, historical and economic conditions which brought about the undesirable, alienating structures in the first place, an understanding of the necessity with which these evolved, or the attendant practice that would transform these conditions and produce new, more free and just ones in their stead. As against both the reactionary and liberal rhetoric of his time, which dismissed socialist plans as utopian because of their alleged dogmatism and repression of liberty (Maler, 1994: 26), Marx

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accuses liberal ideology of utopianism, and the utopian socialists of the same only insofar as they participate in the liberal mode by emphasizing theoretical equality and underestimating economic necessity. Theirs is a moral approbation, a refusal without a program responding to real conditions. Thus, somewhat surprisingly, the refusal to think in terms of necessity is targeted as utopian. The familiar argument that the utopian imaginary stifles freedom, banking on the necessity of its perfect organization to order society, here recedes behind another diagnosis. The utopian machine or mechanism is brought back into communication with the larger context it so attempts to escape, which, Marx and Engels allege, turns out to be insufficiently reflected upon, despite, or perhaps even because of, the utopian thinker’s seemingly immense faith in science and theory. Blueprints are drawn up that are programmed to be self-sufficient, to function with internal necessity, but they are launched into a world that is poorly understood, left to run on their own in a context whose own necessary laws are not reckoned with. In this sense the utopist is like the constructor of a perpetual motion machine, which, according to its own logic works perfectly, if it weren’t for the law of friction that exerts its inevitable necessity in the world in which the machine finds itself. As Hegel pithily puts it in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte [Lectures on the Philosophy of History], “Aber eine Regierung ist immer vorhanden. Die Frage ist daher: wo kam sie hin?” [“A government is always in existence. The question then is, where did it go?”] (Hegel, 1970b: 532). The context is again his discussion of the French Revolution and its overthrow of the old regime. Hegel insists that the abolition of a certain set of power structures does not abolish power; that there is a necessity to the political anatomy, which has to be taken into consideration and consciously responded to. As we saw earlier, the abstract declaration that the government was now “by the people” was promptly confronted with the necessity of the actual effectuation of power, which, in the French context, was in reality wielded by a select number of men, not by “the people”. Hegel’s insistence on necessity here is not the cynical claim that true equality and freedom are “unrealistic”, but, on the contrary, an affirmation of the discovery of the French Revolution that man’s will was capable of designing and constructing his own destiny – no longer in the hands of divine omnipotence or blind nature, the political future comes to be seen and, crucially, enacted, as an object of the community’s choice and the product of society’s active labor. This last is however the decisive point: it is not enough for man to imagine what he would like his society to be, nor to proclaim

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absolute freedom in a constitution, nor to abolish power by severing the neck of the king. Rather man has to create his freedom by intrepidly gazing into the face of necessity and responding to its demands with his own will and activity. This entails the recognition that, as Foucault will later formulate, power does not leave a vacuum, and as such the questions of government and agency have to be organized and solved, rather than wished away, or demonstratively invested in an abstract and de facto powerless entity such as “the people”. Avoiding the confrontation with the complicated and messy negotiations that any political organization entails, and imagining freedom to be achieved with its declaration, is to give necessity free reign, which, in Hegel’s reading of the French Revolution, meant the reign of terror and death. Hegel and Marx and Engels make the same argument as concerns necessity: the failure of utopias is to be found precisely in their denial of historical patterns larger and stronger than the particular imagination and desire of the utopist and the mechanisms of freedom he or she develops. The refusal to recognize these forces does not make them go away, but instead gives them the widest berth to function, unobstructed by the concerted engagement of politically conscious struggle. “Utopians” misrecognize the limits enforced on them by the historical situation and therefore remain subjected to them. Deleuze, of course, regards necessity with the greatest suspicion. He takes necessity, along with dialectical contradiction, representation, truth, etc., to task for foreclosing the manifold differences and potentialities of thought, which is straight-jacketed by these constructs that would reduce thinking to serve the interests of the dominant, and hence conservative, paradigm. I would now like to look a bit more closely at what Deleuze and Guattari substitute for these notions of necessity, limits and confrontation in the context of the political. In an article Deleuze wrote in the 1950s entitled “Causes et raisons des îles désertes” [“Origins and causes of desert islands”] he claims the following: “Reconnaissons que les éléments se détestent en général, ils ont horreur les uns des autres (…) [Q]u’une île soit déserte doit nous paraître philosophiquement normal”. [“Let us acknowledge that the elements in general detest each other; they are horrified by each other. […] [T]hat there be desert islands should appear philosophically normal to us”] (Deleuze, 2002: 11). Deleuze insists that isolated, self-sufficient entities, such as desert islands, are primary in relation to organically linked or coherent entities. And, furthermore, that the essence of life is to flee any such coherence in an elementary move of displacement. Deleuze will go on to work this notion of the disgust of the elements into a

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theory of what he and Guattari will call deterritorialization. As I have already indicated, deterritorialization is the detachment from territoriality and is equated with freedom. To seize life, to be free, to be active and powerful, is to break away from any ties that impose themselves, from any prescriptions or responsibilities, from any sort of integration into a larger order. The organic pull of the body itself in its efforts to function as a unit is read as restraint against which the “Body without Organs” revolts in disintegration and schizophrenic flight. In terms of the social, political institutions and the organization of people for political aims appear as oppressive constructs, from which a real desire for liberation will flee. Thus freedom is interpreted, in the classical liberal way, as the absence of restriction and the unfettered ability to unfold one’s capacities, to enact one’s will without the impingement of outside control or the interference of others. Of course the liberal notion of the subject is absent, but that is because the subject itself is submitted to the same logic, and rejected as a reduction of the manifold fluxes of the body and the psyche, which rush to escape its limitations. Necessity and limits (even insofar as they are recognized in order to be overcome in Hegel and Marx) are thus replaced by the notion of displacement and flight, which, I submit, tacitly relies upon a limitless horizon for expansion. Perpetual deterritorialization, the potential for an indefinite avoidance of necessity or opposition, requires infinite space in which to proliferate. Only if there is room to move out of the way can an encounter or struggle with limits or opponents be avoided. While early modern utopians could always evoke a far off, as yet uncolonized territory on which to found their ideal cities (or 20 th century writers could posit new, infinitely distant planets), Deleuze and Guattari reject a confrontational and collaborative politics for one that foregrounds flight by presuming the unrestricted possibility of escape. In Différence et répétition [Difference and Repetition], Deleuze notes that the word “nomad” derives from the Greek verb “to pasture”. He argues that nomadic pasturing does not imply a partition of the earth, but rather the distribution of peoples and animals on the unlimited expanse of the earth [“un espace ouvert illimité”] (1968: 54). The necessity of confrontation with obstacles and the wearying work of the political are foregone by this principle of limitlessness, of endless space in which to disperse. Whether such a concept of space is helpful for political thought and practice in the complicated, globalized, crowded world we live in, is, at the least, questionable. The seemingly ever greater complexity of global politics, its simultaneously increasing abstractions and outrages, its apparent hopelessness and imperviousness, all these coalesce to reduce political desires and hopes in millions of

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people to fantasies of liberation ungrounded in effective political practice or historical consciousness. While these fantasies can produce fascinating effects in art and thought, and themselves bear testimony, even in their rawest forms, to the potential for political change, they should not solidify theoretically into emblems of political promise. The desire of the multitude – if there is such a thing – is neither sufficient to bring about conditions of freedom, nor should it be taken at face value, as a prescriptive recipe. The codification of desire tout-court into a program for political solutions remains blind to its own historical condition and conditionings, incapable of collaborating with different contingencies to confront limitations and obstacles both outside of and within itself, and thus ultimately unable to produce actual, effective modes of freedom. While Deleuze and Guattari’s – and Hardt and Negri’s – invitation to joy and play is certainly welcome, it is, I am insisting, false to oppose this attitude to work and responsibility. The collaborative and intentional political work of freedom, which does not flee from hindrances but faces them resolutely and openly, is itself a joyful and unpredictable process, and one that we cannot afford to forego. There are neither pristine islands to which to escape, nor will a new world miraculously emerge if we drive our deterritorializations to an extreme (Deleuze / Guattari, 1972: 384). There is however the potential that our creative, communal work can transform conditions of oppression into conditions of possibility and freedom, for ourselves and for each other. Ultimately the choice is between this labor and succumbing to the severest kind of necessity. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter (1977), “Paris, Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in Illuminationen, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp. Dagognet, François (1997), Trois philosophies revisitées: Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Fourier, Hildesheim, Georg Olms. Deleuze, Gilles (2002), “Causes et raisons des îles désertes”, in L’île déserte et autres textes, Paris, Les Editions de Minuit. _ _ (1968) Différence et répétition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Deleuze, Gilles / Félix Guattari (1972), L’Anti-Œdipe, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit. _ _ (1983), Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley,

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Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. _ _ (1991), Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1970a), Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke 3, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp. _ _ (1970b), Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke 12, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp. Jameson, Fredric (1994), The Seeds of Time, New York, Columbia University Press. Maler, Henri (1994), Congédier L’utopie?: L’utopie selon Karl Marx, Paris, Harmattan.

Brief Notes on Utopia, Dystopia and History Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel | University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil

As far as I see it, utopia (mainly in its initial century, when the genre was still being established and its outlines composed) is generated by two distinct principles: 1) a historical experience, as a metaphor (More’s utopia being the paradigmatic metaphor of the real England of his time); 2) an Idea, an abstract construction that descends from Heaven to Earth (Civitas Solis being the best example, as the formalization of the restrictive Trinitarian rationality). From this hypothesis emerges the idea of dystopia as primordially originating from the second principle: the dystopian series deriving from those utopias which are not related to the empirically concrete world. It is well known that dystopia was born of utopia, and that both expressions are intimately related. There is, in each utopia, a dystopian element – expressed or tacit –, and vice versa. Utopia can be dystopian if its essential presuppositions are not shared. On the other hand, dystopia can be utopian, if the caricatural deformation of reality is not accepted. Dystopia, which reveals the fear of a totalitarian oppression, can be seen as the specular reverse of utopia itself. We must consider the relativity of what Margareth Mead once referred to, when she warned that one’s dream could be the other’s nightmare. After all, one’s dream can be perfectly innocuous to the other. Essentially, this idea

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maintains that one’s perfect “dream”, when originating from an abstract constructo (which is ephemeral, though aspiring to be eternal; which is singular, though presuming to be universal; which intends to proclaim the end of History for believing that it is, indeed, the arrival point of human life), this dream is the one which generates the nightmare of dystopia. Bronislaw Baczco considers that utopia does not guide the course of History. According to its context, it is related to the collective desires and hopes. Nevertheless, it does not bring with it the historical scenery for whose realization it has contributed. No utopia foresees its own future (Baczco, 2001: 14). In other words: the utopias, by emerging from real elements, reconstruct all possible Histories, all sceneries not accomplished by History. This idea has its roots in Aristotle’s Poetics, where it is said that poetry is wider than history, once it carries out, till the end, what History only has sketched. Hegel defines a notably rich reality, wherein the existent being has many dimensions at his disposal – all of them real. Everything that arises as a real tendency, even if it is not concretely fulfilled, also acquires the statute of reality. Here is the point where utopia is philosophically legalized. It is an active and effective tendency of reality, although it’s not realized as a State. It inhabits the ethical dimension. Its condition as a genre is in the items tendency of reality and non-accomplishment. The relation between the illusory and the real is extremely intimate in utopia as well as in the accounts of the voyages of discovery. The imaginary organizes the real experience, while this later serves as a base for inner elaborations: the boundaries between real and illusory are, thus, indefinite. In utopia, the ideal subordinates the real with the same commitment with which, in the voyages of discovery, it unites real and illusory: the boundaries between true and false are diluted. Very different are the perspectives by which the authors of utopias and dystopias build their constructions; both, however, are ruled by the same laws, just as tragedy and comedy are, according to the classical Aristotelian judgment. We may consider that: a) the classical utopia is built from a hiatus (never suppressed) between real History and the space reserved for the utopian projections; the discovery of a distant country, until then ignored (as we may find in the plots of More, Campanella and others) became the symbol of a fracture, which is not only geographical, but, above all, historical; b) dystopia attempts to be in continuity with the historical process, by enlarging and formalizing the negative tendencies which are active in the present,

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and may conduct, almost inevitably, if they are not obstructed, to the perverse societies (dystopia itself). In utopia, the society, cultural and politically constituted by History, is absorbed with the aim of being surpassed by the image of the established ideal City. The adoption by many utopians of the tale of an adventurous voyage in which the narrator disembarks in an unknown land is paradigmatic of this situation. Such a presence plays a fundamental role in utopia: it constitutes that space-temporal fracture which permits the proper existence of the utopian representation; the long extension of the trip allows the narrator to leave behind him his own social, political, religious and economic experience, to live in a world whose geographical, and, consequently, historical and cultural isolation, created institutions and uses which have nothing in common with the original reality of the traveler. Thus, we are placed in front of a radically diverse society; but such a differentiation in utopia becomes specular contraposition: the negative structure of the existent human organization is subjected to that positive structure of the imagined New City. In this manner, the author attempts to surpass the contingent reality by proposing, as an alternative, a perfect society rationally founded. On the other hand, in dystopia not only is reality assumed the way it is, but also its negative practices and tendencies, developed and enlarged, provide the material for the edification of the structure of a grotesque world. In short, the determination of the difference between utopia and dystopia is proper to the historical dimension: the imagined happy place is, indeed, a non-place, in the sense that it is not spatially located in its author’s own world; for what the utopian wants to “show” us is the image of a rational and happy world, and, by means of this demonstration, admonish us to feel moved to energetically imprint on History a different sense from the one that was predominant, until then. As it is already known, More’s utopia has a real base, which is the actual England, severely studied in his text. Utopia is not the result of a delirium, but it was born out of the concrete necessities of fighting destiny, of founding a “second nature” for man – History. This is the generous face of utopia. Not all the examples of the genre were like this one. The utopias of the Counter-Reformation period, which were transfigurations of actual societies, did not originate from a society used as a reference. On the contrary, they conceived a polis and a collective life from abstract concepts, formulated by an intensely defensive Church. They are metastasis of convents

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and monasteries, wherein the necessary practices of extra-monkish life (work, coexistence, marriage, reproduction, political participation, etc.) are submitted to a complete set of rules which removes the civil spontaneity from these same activities, being finally rendered in clerical discipline.1 Dystopia, therefore, is the prolongation of the profile of those utopias which are built of abstract propositions, and not of metaphors or allegories. The absolute social control, born of the Counter-Reformation, led to a variant of utopias, which achieves its full expression in Civitas Solis, its best example, and the one which will provide the elements for the future dystopia. This did not emerge unexpectedly, like a lightning in a blue sky, but it already breathed in the former utopias of the Counter-Reformation (Agostini, Patrizi, Buonamico). The notion of social perfectibility, therefore, is not, nor could it be, born of a concrete human experience, generator of resolvable problems. Instead, it arises uncontaminated by History, as an ideal constructo, from where man’s empiric dimension is removed. The solitude that emanates from the paintings of Piero della Francesca concerning the ideal city tells us very much about this disposable humanity; those are not cities built for the actually existent man, but a complex in which architecture and urbanism leave place and substance to sculpture, and human presence unbalances and stains the whole. Its rationality becomes rough, and its capability of leading to the emancipation of the associated living is mixed with its opposite, its own denial: like Oedipus at Colonos, the individual ends up purged from the same polis which he freed from the enigmatic chimera. There were two central moments in History marked by intolerance, and which possibly provide the founding elements of dystopia, two frail, unstable, defensive social conjunctions – the Trinitarian Catholic Church and the Soviet State. These institutions, in their affirmative process, created the illusion of being perfect for having been, in fact, incapable of enduring dissension – something that could certainly destroy them. The illusion of being perfect forms, already-accomplished utopias, generated, although involuntarily, the material which would be formalized in dystopia. The Trinitarian social abstraction may have a similar element in Soviet hyper-rationalism, which derived from Lenin and reached its full meaning with Stalin. Utopia, or its imagetic resource, came across a virtual obstacle in the manifestations of the ordinary Marxism. The Soviet States disallowed, and, implicitly, inhibited the utopian reflection, considering social perfection an aim already attained by the perfect disposition of the State to reach perfectibility. The

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official desideratum should be enough to discourage utopian cogitations. The hyper-rationalism makes prevailing a conception judged as rational (while it is, indeed, an abstract equation, engendered by political engineering) even when it presents disturbing symptoms, mainly in the form of a disintegration of individuals – that are removed from the problematic universe. Sixteenth-century blazes and modern gulags ended up forming a symmetry. When Campanella edified his perfect city as a hypostasis of monkish life, he was implicitly considering the Church as the perfection of collective life; when twentieth-century Left considered utopia a non-subject, it was considering Soviet collectivism as the unsurpassable summit of the associated living. Dystopia derived from these attitudes. The great question that constitutes the hidden face, the utopian interdict, is that perfectibility lies in the complete foresight of all human actions and desires, which are fulfilled even before they are thought. The State presumed them in advance, having accomplished them afterwards. Or forbade them.2 In ampler terms, History should not be effected by man’s concrete experience. On the contrary, it should be seen as the product of an omniscient State; it should appear as a sub-product of human will, filtered by the state strainer. Where would the obstructed residue be accumulated? The answer will be dystopia: it is the residue obstructed by a completely rational State. Dystopia is, after all, the mirror of History’s suspension; its image is the humanity’s exile, a humanity turned into residue by a maddened reason. Notes 1 This is central and con­ stitutive in Orwell’s 1984, for instance. 2 The movie Minority Report, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel, presents a

society in which the crimes are foreseen by mutant creatures, and the virtual criminal is detained before the execution of the offense, being kept in metabolic

suspension eternally. This movie illustrates what is ab ovo in the nature of the paradigmatic utopias.

Works Cited Baczco, Bronislaw (2001), “Finzione storiche e congiunture utopiche”, in B. Bongiovanni & G. M. Bravo (eds.), Nell’ anno 2000: Dall’ utopia all’ ucronia, Firenze, MMI, Leo S. Olschki editore.

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The Intersection of Utopianism and Communitarianism Lyman Tower Sargent | University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA

I hope to do two things in this essay, argue for a particular conception of utopianism and defend the importance of utopianism. As Lucy Sargisson and I wrote our book, Living in Utopia: Intentional Communities in New Zealand (2004), we tried to make a clear statement that utopianism and communitarianism are closely related. The word order is intentional. I see communitarianism as a subcategory of utopianism, which is reflected in John W. Bennetts’s statement about the basis of communitarianism that “For twenty centuries, beginning with the Qmran community in the Dead Sea, people in the Western tradition have sought to escape from the tensions of acquisitiveness, amorphous freedom, and social hierarchy, toward the sharing of possessions, decisions, and brotherly love” (Bennett, 1975: 64). The basic idea goes back to my first thinking on the subject. Simply put, I argue that there is a phenomenon that I call utopianism and characterize as “social dreaming” (the best analysis of this phenomenon is Levitas, 1990). Utopianism is primarily manifested in three concrete forms, utopian literature, intentional communities, and utopian social theory (see Sargent, 1967). Today I want to make clear how communitarianism is part of utopianism and how utopian literature and intentional communities are related.1 To do so I have to say more than I have before about the nature of utopianism, my most general category. And

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I have to say something about the nature of communitarianism. In so doing, I may manage to say something about the third face, utopian social theory. Many times, I have been asked what I study and, when I say utopias, people ask me about communes. But when I talk to people living in such communities, they tell me not to use the word “utopia”. As one member of a community once said to me, “It sets too high a standard”. And the most recent book on the Twin Oaks community by a member, a community explicitly founded on Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), is entitled Is It Utopia Yet? (Kinkade, 1994) and is, among other things, an attack on utopian expectations for intentional communities. The problem is that the erroneous identification of utopia with “perfect” or “perfection” suggests that the communities should always work well with no problems. Since communities are composed of human beings, this will not be the case. In the West the connection between utopianism and communitarianism clearly goes back to the middle ages and monasticism or, as Bennett suggests, even earlier and the withdrawn Jewish communities of the pre-Christian era.2 And it is possible to draw a direct connection between monasticism and the early heretical sects that ultimately gave rise to the first Protestant withdrawn communities (see Cohn, 1957). Today, various forms of Eastern monastic orders have migrated to or been imported to the West and in some cases consciously connect themselves to the Western communal tradition. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, with communities throughout the world that clearly meet the definition of intentional society used here, is an obvious case of the connection between Eastern traditions and Western communalism.3 There are also direct connections to literary utopianism. The Cockaigne is often seen as a reflection of monasticism either satirically or as a statement of how the poor believed monks lived; Thomas More was clearly influenced by monasticism in his description of Utopia; and similar influences are obvious through the eighteenth century.4 In most cases the prospectus for an intentional society that was never founded is readily labeled a utopia, and fiction about intentional communities both actual and fictional is frequently listed among utopias. In the late nineteenth century, after the publication of Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy (1850-98), at least one community was founded based on Bellamy’s novel, albeit over Bellamy’s strenuous opposition. In the twentieth century, intentional communities were founded based directly on the utopian novels Walden Two (1948) by B. F. Skinner (1904-90), Stranger in a

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Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), and The Harrad Experiment (1966) by Robert Rimmer (1917-2001), among others. Thus, in part I think that the intersection is simplicity itself. Part of why I find the connection so simple is that I find utopianism pervasive, and I find it difficult to imagine people choosing a radically transformed lifestyle without the assumption that it will be a better one. Also, I have never found an intentional community where that was not in fact true.5 Think of the decisions that must be made when writing a utopia, at least one that fits my definition and describes “a non-existent society described in considerable detail” (Sargent, 1994: 9). Then think of the decisions that must be made when considering the creation of an intentional community. They are much the same and include such basic questions as how decisions will be made; how will food, shelter, housing, etc. be provided and distributed; how will work be distributed; if there is a religion, what sort; how will children be raised and educated; and so forth. I have worked through utopias, communities, and other sources to try to develop a list of these questions, and they are of course a description of human life in its tremendous variety. My point here is that they are the same for the book and the community. I expect that all of us have been asked what utopias we would feel comfortable living in. Think of the parallel questions, which are very real ones for a person considering whether to join a community and for communities in trying to decide whether to accept a new member. It can be devastating if you get the answer wrong.6 To me the most basic point to be made is that all utopias are created by human beings and all human beings need to eat, and have some clothing and shelter as well as more complex matters like personal security, sex and reproduction (which can of course be avoided), and means of dealing with death (which so far can’t be avoided). We seek to explain our surroundings, and we produce myth, religion, philosophy, science, etc., and we develop means of passing on that understanding and create education and other means of socialization. It would be surprising if there were not basic similarities in utopias; all utopias are concerned with doing some of those things better than is currently being done. That is why I have always been interested in what I think of as the most basic utopias, the myths of golden ages, earthly paradises, millennial dreams, cockaignes, and so forth. They meet the basic needs of food, shelter, security, sex and reproduction, and death by having the gods or nature provide them or, with sex and death, in some cases avoiding them altogether. They do not deal with the more complex issues of socialization, economics, social struc-

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ture, and politics because they do not need to, but to me this is where utopia begins, in dreams of needs fulfilled or in some way not needs at all because, for example, you don’t need rituals around death if you don’t die. Of course, these simple eutopias are ultimately unsatisfying because we are not simple people. Think of the first eutopia in Plato’s Republic, the one before the division of labor, the one Socrates calls ideal, in good health, before moving on to the one we generally think of as the eutopia of the Republic. In this first eutopia, Plato has moved utopia from the gods or nature to a utopia of the simple agricultural life, later to be called the Arcadia. This is, I think, a central theme of utopias, even many of the most complex ones because they still simplify life. And, as illustrated by the centrality of simplicity to the worldview of the Shakers, for example, it is common in intentional communities. If you want a charge against utopia, it should be over-simplification, not perfection. The desire for simplicity, unity, the all-encompassing right answer, is, I believe, a constant temptation, and a dangerous one. And, of course, utopias have commented on and satirized this tendency. The Colleges of Unreason in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) is a prime example. A less well-known text, Ford Madox Ford’s The Simple Life Limited (1911), depicts the both hilarious and sad results of trying to create a commune devoted to the simple life.7 I believe that it would be possible to write a history of much of Western civilization as a search for unity or simplicity. But that history would also have to take into account the conflict between that search and the ever-increasing complexity of actual experience. This is reflected in the utopias of human contrivance that I have also called city utopias. They are not descriptions of perfect social orders; they are, for the most part, descriptions of what their authors believed to be desirable patterns of social and personal behavior. And that is precisely the same thing that communitarian experiments have historically tried to do, to find a pattern of life that reflected the vision that the founders/members had of a better life. There is a continuing tension, which can be seen particularly well in some intentional communities, between the simplicity of the pattern of the vision, the eutopia, and the variety and complexity of human identity. For example, there is an intentional community in New Zealand called Gloriavale. It is a local creation by a charismatic leader now known as Hopeful Christian. It is extremely successful, numbering around 350 people and putting something like 350,000 New Zealand dollars into the local economy per month. A child born and raised in the community, and, since they do not practice

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birth control, there are quite a few children, will be educated in the community school. The school has the approval of the New Zealand government, which has a policy of adapting regulations to local conditions. As a result, the education will be limited and gender specific.8 Growing up, the child will never handle, and may never see, money. The community is extremely isolated, and most community members will rarely, if ever, leave the community and interaction with those on the outside is carefully controlled. Those chosen to so interact will, of course, be among those believed to be least likely to be corrupted by such contact. The famous and respected Shakers had similar restrictions. Such repressive utopian visions are not found just in religious communities. For example, More’s Utopia (1516) is authoritarian and patriarchal, and practices slavery. Most of the utopias from the 16th century are the same, and there are examples of repressive utopias based on gender, race, religion, or other such characteristics found throughout the history of the genre. One of the central issues with a community like Gloriavale, which is successful enough to have a second and even third generation of members and can provide socialisation that excludes outside influences, is the degree of choice available to these later generations regarding their future. This was one of the central issues in a US court case, Wisconsin v. Yoder (406 U.S. [1971]) and the discussions that followed it:9 who should decide what sort of education children should be given, the parents or the state. In a recent novel, Ellie and the Shadow Man (2001), Maurice Gee includes a brief vignette about Gloriavale based on a visit that he and his wife made to the community. The vignette is brief but poignant; a young woman thinks she wants to leave the community and manages to do so, but she discovers that she cannot bring herself to remain outside, even briefly, and returns knowing that she may be punished if her defection has been noticed. While this does not directly reflect any known incident, it does, I think, reflect the reality of growing up in such a community. Gloriavale is like many sixteenth and seventeenth century utopias. There is no outside, no way of pursuing contrast or difference so as to make choices. Marry young, stress the joy and pleasure of sex in marriage, and do not use birth control. Children come early and often; everything you have comes from the community; leaving is almost literally unthinkable. And yet it is utopia; it provides, I am told, a full and satisfying life. You are completely secure physically and economically; you will be at one with your god and have all your big questions answered; and so will your children and their children. Utopia indeed. But not for me.

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The point is, of course, choice and variety. The community I might have been able to live in when I was twenty, I would find less appealing, probably even unappealing, today and vice versa. I am simply not the same person as I was at twenty. On the other hand, in interviewing people in New Zealand for our book, Lucy talked with a woman who had lived quite contently in the same community for something like sixty years, except in major ways it wasn’t the same community and wouldn’t have been, given the changes in society, even if the community itself had not decided to change from a religious one to a secular one. Today the communities founded in the heyday of communal growth are, despite significant turnover in population that keeps the average age down, experiencing aging and death. At the utopia conference in Norwich a few years back, a well-known scholar of communities criticized utopian literature for ignoring issues like aging and death, issues that communities have no choice but to face. While he did not have the knowledge of the literary tradition needed to support his argument, he had a point. Some of this is the result of the “picture at a moment in time” nature of utopias – it is hard to depict aging when you are talking about a visit of a few weeks; utopias tend to be about life and death is ignored.10 But a utopia that is going to effectively speak to us should not avoid hard issues. Communities show us leaders who have been corrupted by power, but they also show us that it is possible to create structures where such corruption is somewhere between difficult and impossible either because there are no leaders or leadership is temporary. One of the most interesting developments in communitarianism in the recent past is the temporary community. While there are clear connections to the Sixties urban communes that were intentionally temporary because it fit the life patterns of their members, the more recent communities fit a pattern described by Hakim Bey [Peter Lamborn Wilson] as Temporary Autonomous Zones or T.A.Z, or by George McKay as “Do it Yourself Culture” and include protests, squats, festivals, and movements like the Rainbow People and New Age Travellers.11 Neither utopias nor communities are as stable as we sometimes think they are. Think of the history of the longest surviving communities in the West, convents and monasteries. They have changed immeasurably in the twentieth century, but they also changed regularly throughout their history, most often by some reformer creating a new order to correct the perceived faults of the dominant orders of the time. St. Francis is an excellent example; he and his original followers were much closer to the Buddhist mendicants than to the

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dominant forms of monasticism at the time, and after the Church found this too radical and forced the development of a more traditional order, The Spiritual Franciscans held out against them for some time. That pattern of radical renewal followed by consolidation and compromise followed by a new round of radical renewal is the pattern of monastic change. Eutopia becomes dystopia and is challenged by a new eutopia. Communities also show us people who become followers too easily, but they also show us that it is possible to create situations where that cannot happen because the entire community is empowered. At a meeting of the International Communal Studies Association, much of the discussion focused on issues of what might be called “drift” in communities, and many of the participants from current communities argued that drift was often associated with the loss of awareness of the vision of what the community should be, the utopia. They argued that the vision must be revisited regularly, as must the details of how that vision is put into practice; that people need to remind themselves of why they are there. Eutopias in practice require renewal. Communitarianism is an expression of utopianism and a particularly interesting and important expression because the founders and members of intentional communities are themselves trying to create a better life. They are trying to find better ways of living together, making decisions about all the important aspects of life, whether it is political, economic, religious, or sexual. For example, they are trying to find better ways of distributing work, raising children, and, if rural, caring for the land. In other words, they are actually doing with their own lives what literary utopias describe in words. Intentional communities have visions, some that come from some utopia, some that come from a charismatic leader; some make it up as they go along with the vision based simply on the desire to live collectively. Even if they take the vision from a utopia, they generally find it must be modified. If they take it from a charismatic leader, the death of the leader often causes the collapse of the community because the members cannot go along without direction or simply because the leader was the glue that held them together (see Miller, 1999). There are exceptions where the communities continue successfully, usually because they have learned how to deal with community life. Most intentional communities fail, but so do most small businesses, and building a community is harder than building a business. Many communities succeed in that they fill the needs of the members.12 The success and failure of intentional communities should tell us a lot about how to think about uto-

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pianism. Not all utopias are workable; but given a chance, human beings can bring a wide range of utopias into existence. And utopias require attention, care, and revision. We can create a better life if we choose to, but it will not happen overnight; it is not easy; and it takes commitment. And, as Gloriavale demonstrates, one size does not fit all. Intentional communities suggest that we need to revise our notion of utopianism. We need to think of a utopia composed of utopias, and utopias that themselves are evolving, changing, growing. Intentional communities suggest that the utopian project should be thought of as a series of coexistent utopian projects. Notes 1 The definitions I use are as follows: Utopianism – social dreaming. Utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space. In standard usage utopia is used both as defined here and as an equivalent for eutopia (below). Eutopia or positive utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived. Dystopia or negative utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived. The first use of this word is usually ascribed to Negley and Patrick’s “Introduction” to their anthology. While this certainly appears to be the first modern use of the term, I once came across it in a sev-

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enteenth century text. I sent a note regarding it to Alternative Futures, but it collapsed before publication, and my note got lost in the cleaning up process. I had stupidly not kept a copy, and I’ve yet to find the reference a second time. A history of terms used to describe negative futures (John Stuart Mill used “cackatopia”) would be useful. See Köster, 1983: 65-66. First used in 1782. Mill used “dystopian” in 1868. Utopian satire – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of that contemporary society. Anti-utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia. Critical utopia – a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that

the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as better than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve and which takes a critical view of the utopian genre. Critical dystopia – a nonexistent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as worse than contemporary society but that normally includes at least one eutopian enclave or holds out hope that the dystopia can be overcome and replaced with a eutopia. Intentional community – a group of five or more adults and their children, if any, who come from more than one nuclear family and who have chosen to live together to enhance their shared values or for some other mutually agreed upon purpose. The term appears to have been first used in 1948 or 1949 with the founding of the Fellowship of Intentional Communi-

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ties (with the exception of “Critical dystopia” these definitions are from Sargent, 1994: 9, 14-15). 2 On monastic utopianism, see Horn / Born, 1979; Braunfels, 1972; and Hillery / Morrow, 1976. 3 Less well known are the various Buddhist monasteries that have been established in the West and have attracted Western members. Some, such as the Tibetan monasteries, were in the first instance established by refugees fleeing their countries and then attracted local support. Others were established by Westerners who had traveled to learn from religious leaders, primarily in India and Japan. And yet others were founded by such religious leaders who traveled themselves. Thus, in addition to traditional Western forms of monasticism, there exist monasteries (sometimes called that, sometimes called communities, and sometimes called Ashrams) that clearly fit many definitions of intentional societies. 4 See, for example, Astell, 1694; and Scott, 1762.

5 I can think of one exception to this generalization, second and third generation members of ideologically or religiously based communities who have been socialized from birth to accept their lives and beliefs as normal. 6 Today, communities, at least the secular ones, often urge a prospective member to try a number of different communities and almost all of them, religious and secular, have trial periods before full membership is accorded. Over the last year, a member of the Hutterian Brethren has sent me a series of articles on how not to behave when joining a Christian community. They show real insight into the problems of living in community and, suitably modified, could be applied to secular communities. 7 There are many studies of simplicity in utopianism. See, for example, Andrews, 1940; Shi, 1985; and Tinker, 1922. 8 The Hostetler Papers at Pennsylvania State University contains John Hostetler’s correspondence with Gloriavale, a video made by Gloriavale, and reports on a visit

he made to Gloriavale plus some additional material. In its earliest days, there were some favourable newspaper reports on the community, but after a few controversies, the reporting, based almost entirely on statements made by those who left during the controversies, changed dramatically. 9 See Arneson / Shapiro, 2002; and Burtt, 2002. 10 There are, of course, exceptions, even among well-known utopias, such as Read’s The Green Child (1935). There have also been a number of utopias that have dealt with the question of death as a means of population control; the best known is undoubtedly Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period (1881-82). 11 In the US, what might be called “old age travellers” or senior citizens living in mobile home who settle temporarily in the Winter might also be included. 12 For a discussion of the problem of “success”, see Sargisson / Sargent, 2004: 161-63.

Works Cited Andrews, Edward Deming (1940), The Gift to be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers, New York, J.J. Augustin. Rpt. New York, Dover, 1962. Arneson, Richard J. / Ian Shapiro (2002), “Democratic Autonomy and Religious Freedom: A Critique of Wisconsin v. Yoder”, in Ian Shapiro / Russell Hardin (ed.) (2002), Nomos XXXVIII: Political Order, New York, New York University Press, pp. 365-411. Astell, Mary (1694), A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, London, R. Wilkins.

Bennett, John W. (1975), “Communes and Communitarianism”, Theory and Society, vol. 2, nr. 1, pp. 63-94. Braunfels, Wolfgang (1972), “The St. Gall Utopia”,in Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders, London, Thames & Hudson, pp. 37-46. Burtt, Shelley (2002), “In Defense of Yoder: Parental Authority and the Public Schools”, in Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin (eds.), Nomos XXXVIII: Political Order, New York, New York University Press, pp. 412-37.

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Cohn, Norman (1957), The Pursuit of the Millennium, London, Secker & Warburg [2nd ed. with the subtitle Revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern totalitarian movements, New York, Harper & Row, 1961]. Hillery, George A., Jr. / Paula C. Morrow (1976), “The Monastery as a Commune”. International Review of Modern Sociology, vol. 6, nr. 1, pp. 139-54 [Rpt. in Cavan, Ruth Shonle / Man Singh Das (ed.) (1979), Communes: Historical and Contemporary, New Delhi, India, Vikas Publishing House, pp. 152-69]. Horn, Walter / Ernest Born (1979), Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 vols., Berkeley, University of California Press. Kinkade, Kat [Kathleen] (1994), Is It Utopia Yet? An Insider’s View of Twin Oaks Community in its 26th Year [Louisa, VA], Twin Oaks Community. Köster, Patricia (1983), “Dystopia: An Eighteenth Century Appearance”, Notes & Queries, nr 228 [n.s. 30, no. 1] [February], pp. 65-66. Levitas, Ruth (1990), The Concept of Utopia, Hemel Hempstead, Philip Allan/Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press.

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Miller, Timothy (ed.) (1991), When Prophets Die: The Postcharismatic Fate of New Religious Movements, Albany, State University of New York Press. Read, Herbert Edward (1935), The Green Child, London/Toronto, William Heinemann. Sargent, Lyman Tower (1967), “The Three Faces of Utopianism”, The Minnesota Review, vol. 7, nr. 3, pp. 222-30. _ _ (1994), “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited”, Utopian Studies, vol. 5, nr. 1, pp. 1-37. Sargisson, Lucy / Lyman Tower Sargent (2004), Living in Utopia: Intentional Communities in New Zealand, Aldershot, Ashgate. Scott, Sarah (1762), A Description of Millennium Hall, London, s/n. Shi, David E. (1985), The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, New York, Oxford University Press. Tinker, Chauncey Brewster (1922), Nature’s Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Holistic Organizations, Intentional Communities, and the Global Peace and Justice Movement: Gaia at Alcatraz,Italy Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio | University of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico

The adage “another world is possible”, also phrased, Latino style, as “¡Sí, se puede!, is being used by activist groups in the global peace and justice movement to condemn the so-called “new” world order in which savage capitalism and the one-superpower system reign supreme.1 This order, activists declare, is not only morally wrong, but also self-destructive and stupid, as it puts our entire species at risk of no longer being welcome on our hostess planet Gaia. My contention is that the global peace and justice movement is largely inspired by the utopian visions that animate today’s numerous holistic organizations and intentional communities, especially the ones that focus on new spiritualities and ecologies.2 Many of these organizations develop their own utopian tools in their effort to impact the lives of their guests and participants.3 From my experience as a participant in holistic organizations and intentional communities based in the US West-Coast and East-Coast regions, in Central Italy, Portugal, and India; in anti-war demonstrations in Washington D. C., Assisi, Italy, and Puerto Rico; and from my online counter-information activism, I believe that a vital exchange of energies occurs between activist groups in the movement and the holistic intentional communities committed to actualizing a shared, alternative vision. I claim that participants in both groups are learning how to invent the other possible worlds we need. These exchanges can eas-

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ily be theorized as Deleuzian fluxes produced by the intersecting energies of the deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes active therein.4 As the collective energy of a flux traverses the inner and outer landscape of a group of participants, it transforms their aural bodies and energy fields. Alcatraz, an intentional community and holistic organization based in central Italy, and one for which, due to my background and origins, I feel a special affinity, contributes to elaborating the tools of this invention in the utopian spaces that host its experimental practices and thinking. Due to its legacies and location, Alcatraz seems to me especially well positioned to enable an analysis of how intentional and political fluxes intersect and flow together in the collective efforts to invent a new future. Through an analysis of the Alcatraz’s staple workshop, its books, and the observed practices in the community, this article intends to articulate the affinities between the alternative worlds imagined by the global justice movement and the vision shared by the core members of the Alcatraz community. I will also emphasize the significance of Alcatraz’s proposals within the context of other holistic organizations and intentional communities, as well as the limitations inherent with its location and position. Finally, my work presents the regenerative effects of the group’s work on the surrounding territory and guest participants, and traces the spiritual legacy of Alcatraz through two generations of creative performers and writers in the Fo family and its work in popular theater. Theory The global peace and justice movement regards each part of the whole as valuable and meaningful, including Gaia’s resources, species, cultures, and people, thereby encouraging the kind of holistic thinking that is also popular in intentional communities.5 Today’s most thriving intentional communities, including Alcatraz, are associated with holistic organizations that invite guests to share in their experimental practices and thinking, thereby expanding the scope of their influences. In the process, they elaborate their own utopian tools, including workshops, books, websites, and email networks that signpost their presence and disseminate their vision. The global peace and justice movement came into being as a response to global capitalism from the multitudes that have been displaced by corporate globalization and its financial interests; it is the positive flux their deterritorialization has produced, with the world-wide web and the Internet system as its utopian tools. The growth of intentional communities also

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depends on the elective displacements of individuals who choose to belong in an alternative group rather than pursuing other available paths of acculturation. At least initially, an intentional community is indeed the sum of its deterritorialized individuals plus the vision that holds them together. Inevitably, in the process of actualizing this vision, a process of Deleuzian reterritorialization occurs, as the new group’s impact local cultures and surrounding ecosystems. The flux produced by this process, I claim, is also rich with positive transformative effects as the local and intentional groups learn from each other and impact their environment together.6 Movement activists urge political and financial empires to curb down the self-destructive violence that characterizes our species and ominously manifests in these imperial forces.7 They demand that more serious attention be paid to the voice of our hostess planet, and her potential ability to free herself of us if the threat humans pose to its intertwined biological system becomes too serious. In intentional communities members tend to live as if, according to the Gaia hypothesis put forth by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the biota, or sum of biosphere and atmosphere, was an organism with a life and will of its own.8 As a result, they encourage concerted efforts to regenerate their bioregions through environmentally savvy use of water and energy systems; they endeavor to reduce human impact on their ecosystems; and they provide spaces for guests to heal from the impact of adverse environments and learn about possible alternatives. For example, in Tamil Nadu, India, the community of Auroville uses solar-panel systems to produce much of its electric power. In the past 40 years, it has made a concerted effort to fertilize and forest the long-term impoverished region north of Pondicherry, once covered with dry tropical forest. Also with the help of workers from the local villages, the red-clay desert where the first Aurovilians arrived in the late 1960s has turned back into a forest as luxuriant as the climate allows it to be.9 Tamera is a younger community in south Portugal, another region impoverished by long-term overgrazing and burning. Members face this legacy by committing to being vegans who only eat vegetable food, and by creating a water cycle system capable of putting the little available water to good use through local wells, and an autonomous purification and composting system. This community also uses solar-panel electricity exclusively, thus modeling a biotope in which humans become mimetic of an ecosystem’s natural metabolism instead of controlling it, as in most territories impacted by our species.10 Members of these communities feel a spiritual solidarity with the global peace and justice movement.

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They occasionally participate in its activities and often host seminars and study groups designed to organize its strategies and shape its visions. Alcatraz also developed on an impoverished region, the high hills of northeast Umbria, which were abandoned in the mid-twentieth century because they could not yield high-income crops like wine and olive oil due to their altitude. Before the hyper-development of the 1960s, these kinds of hills in central Italy were terraced by local villagers who grew subsistence crops like potato and other roots. Later, their value went down and they were considered useless. Fortunately, the soil was held in place by the resilient shrubs of the macchia mediterranea which still cover the hills. Today, the cultural and healing center based at the Alcatraz community attracts guests and collaborators who bring new vitality to the region, even as the community itself has not yet focused on agricultural renewal projects.11 As intentional communities design lifestyles that emphasize sharing and reduce a community’s impact on the biota, they also elaborate and teach the ideas and belief systems that resonate with their commitments. Knowledge acquired in these communities is often playful and subversive of accepted truisms. The Alcatraz cultural center is a case in point as it unabashedly calls itself Libera università di Alcatraz. This self-ironic name inscribes the gruff humor typical of the center’s rhetoric. A free university in the middle of some abandoned hills? The paradox foreshadows the possibility that many of today’s prestigious institutions of higher learning may live under the illusion of being free, while in order to think out of the box it is often necessary to step out of the system. The type of learning functional to holistic organizations and intentional communities is one where participants’ aspiration to knowledge equals their commitment to changing the status quo of their outer and inner landscape. As a result, they propose styles of learning that enhance the body’s ability to absorb knowledge at the cellular level, with the intended result of replacing self-punishing reflexes and belief systems with healthier and more life-enhancing ones. Many holistic organizations have found that this style of learning is most suitable to a workshop format, in which facilitators guide participants to practice on each other based on a structure that reflects a community’s foci and vision. For example, the Human Awareness Institute (HAI) is a holistic organization based in Northern California that often uses the facilities of the Harbin Hot Springs intentional community. HAI’s work focuses on creating loving, empowering personal relationships between partners of any gender and orientation. Its staple workshop, “Love, Sex, and Intimacy”, is a perfect utopian tool for their vision.

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Landmark Education is another holistic organization structured as an intentional community.12 A descendant of EST, Landmark takes on Werner Erhard’s legacy of “gestalt theory”, first theorized in Wilhelm Reich’s Character Analysis as a way to break down defensive armors and resistances. Landmark promises its workshop participants the freedom to be at ease regardless of circumstances, and the power to be effective in the areas of life that matter most to them. Its staple course, the Landmark Forum, focuses on personal growth through integrity and self-knowledge.13 Most staple workshops can be theorized as utopian tools designed to reflect a community’s belief system and transform the lives of guest participants. They function as vehicles of the Deleuzian fluxes that move energies between personal and political arenas. Facilitators offer guests spiritual guidance too, as they have experienced a community’s utopian tool and believe in its effectiveness, and often offer their services as volunteers. Areas most workshops focus on include self-esteem, health practices, nutrition, creativity, socialization, erotic expression, family and professional relationships. At Alcatraz too learning is a subversive experience that deeply impacts participants. The vision the Alcatraz core group is committed to includes the development of soft, non-aggressive forms of masculinity, the pursuit of erotic forms of spirituality, and the integration of feminist and feminine principles. Members emphasize the benefits of more naturist and pluralistic views of the sacred than those prevalent in most organized religions, with a special attention to the healing quality of waters. Also important is an awareness of the alternative narratives of the past that tend to be erased by official history, and of the cultural manipulations implied in current distinctions between civilization and primitivism.14 The Alcatraz utopian tool is the workshop Yoga demenziale, a five- to sixday applied course in the philosophy of life that also includes watsu, massage, belly-dancing, tai-chi, and a variety of rough and tumble games to amalgamate the groups. Its title can be roughly rendered as yoga for airheads, or insane, demented people, as it puns on the Milanese use of the word demenziale as an exclamation meaning “terrific!”. The workshop integrates many features from personal-growth courses, as it helps participants enhance their responsiveness to external stimuli and ability to perform in a variety of challenging situations. Yet its program involves a discursive reintegration of insane forms of wisdom, as the pun inscribes the paradox that connotes what is demented as terrific. The implication is that in imagining other possible worlds less unjust and selfdestructive than the one we’re in, some insanity is necessary. As paradox is brought to bear on the learning process, laughter softens the impact of the

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psychological material, and allows depths to be reached with little pain. Complementary services Alcatraz offers include training, individual therapies, books, and health products, mainly designed for Italian-speaking guests from a variety of regions, social venues, and age groups. The center often hosts workshops organized by other groups with an affinity for its core vision. Alcatraz also takes its mission as a free university very seriously, and offers books in various interdisciplinary fields that broaden participants’ perspectives on the issues at stake in the main utopian vehicle, including how-to manuals, synergistic research treatises, and theory books. Manuals like Guarire ridendo [How to heal with laughter], Lo Zen e l’arte di scopare [Zen and the art of having good sex], and Diventare Dio in dieci mosse [How to turn into a god in ten moves], propose ways to live in better harmony with our surroundings and loved ones, and in better health. La grande truffa delle piramidi [The big swindle of the pyramids], Schiave ribelli [Rebellious slaves], and Il libro nero del Cristianesimo [The black book of Christianity], are applied research treatises that provide synergistic information in areas of general interest, such as Egypt, Africa, and Christianity. They make good use of findings from research published in more conventional scholarly venues, including well-known studies by Marija Gumbutas, Riane Eisler, Gilbert Bauval, and Graham Hancock. By connecting the dots between concepts established by a host of scholars well-respected for their eclecticism, they propose highly logical yet defiantly unorthodox conclusions. For example, La grande truffa delle piramidi points to the insanity of thinking that the Egyptian pyramids were built as mausoleums, since no culture can focus most of its energies on burials. Schiave ribelli emphasizes the failure of the African-American slavery system to achieve its goals completely, and teaches how resilient groups always managed to remain free. Il libro nero del Cristianesimo emphasizes the history of corruption that typifies the Catholic Church, and shows how, through the centuries, heresies inspired people to access authentic faith. More theoretical books like Sulla naturale superioritá della donna [On the natural superiority of women], and La dimostrazione chimica dell’esistenza di dio [The chemical demonstration of god’s existence], demonstrate a logical principle by proving how absurd its opposites might be. The first claims that women must be really superior, for nothing else can explain men’s constant need to assert their own superiority. The second insists on mathematical correspondences between life systems that prove the world’s cohesiveness in some form of divine global energy, or embedded universal principle, be it in the form of a Deleuzian flux, a Jewish Cabbala, or a Chinese chi.

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Practices In the 1970s, Dario Fo and Franca Rame, two major actor-playwrights in Italian political theater whose work was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997, bought the Santa Cristina estate with the idea that they might some day need a safe place to hide from the hustle and bustle of their life in the theater. The estate was one of the most impoverished in its region, for, while most valleys between north Tuscany and Umbria are covered with high quality vineyards and plantations of olive trees, the Santa Cristina hills, at an altitude of about 1800 feet (600 meters), are not hospitable to these rich crops for frost bites them in the winter. The Fo’s have one son, Jacopo, raised partly by his grandma and partly in his parents’ theater, as their shows moved from city to city. A few years after his parents bought the estate, Jacopo moved in.15 As he explains in his Yoga demenziale lectures, he was shy, had cystitis, and was unhappy and sick because he had not yet found the ecological and nutritional balance he needed. Self-exiled on the abandoned hills, this fils d’art from the theater had no other choice but starting a community. So, from Jacopo Fo’s elective deterritorialization the story of Alcatraz begins. Over the years, the center has attracted numerous valuable collaborators, including Jacopo’s wife Eleonora Albanese, and his editor and co-writer Gabriella Canova. Working with them on an equal basis, Jacopo has developed a wellequipped cultural and healing center that hosts hundreds of participants each year. As happened with Tamera and Auroville, Alcatraz brought new energy to a depleted territory that had been abandoned and was believed useless. In two past articles, I explained how, in the past 50 years, Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s long series of plays have used paradox and wry humor to identify readily accepted absurdities. I also emphasized how the couple’s adeptness in building community granted the success of their fiercely independent theater. In its names, titles, decorations, and books, the work of the Alcatraz group displays a strong affinity for the Fo-style humor, yet it takes its use of paradox one step further. For example, the community’s name, Alcatraz, is said to allude to the fact that, like the former San Francisco Bay Area prison, the centre is not quite easy to reach – or escape from. As one leaves the main freeway of east Umbria, the road uphill is poorly paved and curvy. This discourages hasty travellers especially as it freezes in the winter, and prepares those willing to continue for a destination perhaps not quite desirable for conventional tourists. Yet, it also foreshadows the possibility that this undesirability might be the reason for wanting to stay, since utopian elaborations require a space free of competition and lateral hostility. As befits good holistic thinking, the abandoned hills

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turned out to be useful. Most core members of the Alcatraz group claim they never planned to stay as long as they did, Jacopo Fo included. As for me, my first visit was planned for one day and I stayed for one week, which is not uncommon for other guests too. The paradox of escaping to an elective prison inscribed in Alcatraz’s name produces a transformative Deleuzian flux as core members, volunteers, and guests step in and out of the utopian space. The deterritorializations and reterritorializations therein included well up the energy to generate the utopian thinking from which the new future springs. The common area is the heart of the community. It opens on a meadow with a view on the hills and surrounding bushes, a small wooden office building, and an activity room called palestra. A few steps down the hill, more paved open space equipped with canopies, board tables, and canteen-style benches to eat. To the left one enters a café followed by more canteen rooms, an open buffet space that looks onto the open counter of a well-equipped kitchen. To the right, a small mart or emporio, and the short path leading to the watsu pool, one of the largest and best equipped in Italy, appropriately heated for this lifeenhancing water massage treatment. The staple workshop comes in a package with lodging and the legendary Alcatraz food, for fees varying between 350 and 600 Euros, depending on the type of accommodation. The decorations speak of the family legacy of creative expression in the style of a people’s art and theater. Mural paintings decorate the outside wall of the palestra’s building overlooking the meadow area, and the activity-room interior. Here the influence of Dario Fo’s work is visible in the improvised, impressionistic style of the murals that mix flamboyance with caricature. Especially significant is the legacy of Fo’s political period, with the backdrops for his pupazzi, or cardboard puppet theater. The main new theme the Alcatraz group introduces is a mixture of naturism and primitivism, as human bodies fly in the nude in the mural painting under the palestra’s eaves, in a sort of communal Garden of Eden, and as other mock-heroic scenes from Christian creation myths reprise this theme in the interior. More imaginative decorations bring good cheer to the canteen where food is served next to the kitchen. Here the style is a bit more surrealistic, with Eleonora Albanese’s series of acrylics where a fork appears instead of a character’s fingers or in other similar positions, and with small installations representing Man Ray-style lips or the tarot series. Also, the mouth of the fireplace is turned into a dog’s open muzzle by the mural decoration around it. In the summer, the outdoor meadow area serves as a place for guests to meet and for informal activities with its garden chairs and hammocks.

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Guests leave their shoes outside the wooden-floor palestra, or gym, which functions as a multi-purpose activity room. Yoga for Airheads includes a variety of activities. Its structure reflects the influences of lateral thinkers who challenged the mainstays of conventional psychoanalysis. As in other workshops with elements of group therapy, the central idea is that a collectivity is more than the sum of its individuals due to similar marks in the inner landscape of each person, and to the merging aural energies that shape the group. In looking past both Freud and even his successor Lacan, these workshops revisit the psychoanalytical thinking proposed by Wilhelm Reich, which anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal theories inasmuch as it takes the focus away from the family. They also inscribe Roberto Assagioli integration of Eastern philosophical principles within psychoanalytical discourse. Respectively, Freud and Jung established the idea of an individual and a collective unconscious. But they never agreed on how the individual and the collective interact and complement each other. Wilhelm Reich, from the Freudian left, and Roberto Assagioli, who may be described as a voice from the Jungian left, contributed to this integration by challenging the paradigm on which Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis are respectively based. In instituting individual psychotherapy Freud implicitly assumed that psychoanalysis heals the body by healing the mind. Many of today’s healing-arts practitioners consider individual psychotherapy a normalizing system and dub Freud’s system “the talking cure”. Even as it is made of body, they claim, the mind is more reasonable than the body; hence the talking cure only helps individuals fit in the world as it is. In a very radical move for the 1950s, Reich reversed Freud’s assumption by proposing to heal the body by causing a full expression of its repressed wishes and trust that the mind would heal too. Reich’s “Orgone Theory” emphasized orgasm as the ultimate healing release (Reich, 1990: 285-398). In his view, a repressed and hence asocial or unhappy individual suffers from body armor, an accrued rigidity of the physical system articulated in a series of blocks. To get past these blocks, the structure of a person’s socially-formed character must be broken down until a semi-vegetative, worm-like state is reached (idem, 372). At that point the healing organic energy is unleashed. Reich’s theories became influential in the 1960s, at which time many groups who practiced his principles ran into violent conflicts and problems ensuing from each individual’s desire to actualize the impulses of his or her id. Compounded with Reich’s own mental imbalance, this discredited his ideas.

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However, in utopian spaces where elements of group therapy are used to experiment with the creation of the possible new worlds auspicated by the global peace and justice movement, some usage of Reich’s principle is indispensable. In today’s healing-arts and holistic-health movement, body-workers around the globe have taken up Reich’s proposal to intervene on the body and its blocks. They perceive these blocks as active at the cellular lever and located in areas corresponding to the Hindu Chakra system, with the most important one located in the solar plexus area. Bodywork that helps dissipate this armor includes forms of individual massage and healing touch in which the therapist is the giver and the patient the receiver; more interactive bodywork styles in which participants in a group work on one another and vice versa; and various forms of biofeedback that enable regression to a pre body-armor past. Hence, by reversing Freud’s mind/ body order, Reich’s move empowered today’s healing arts practitioners and placed individual psychotherapy on the backburner. In Yoga for Airheads, the body armors of group participants dissolve under the healing touch of fellow participants. The group gets more in touch with subconscious desires as each singularity in it finds respectful and considerate ways to act on them. The day ends with a watsu session in chest-high, body-temperature water, where participants cradle and lull each other while the water massages their bodies. This regression to infant or prenatal life mollifies body armors and prepares for the overcoming of blocks and taboos. As the body heals the mind heals too but becomes more aware of the repressive systems and taboos that had caused the armors to begin with. The group and each singularity in it want to transform these taboos instead of being normalized to them. Assagioli’s theory is helpful in understanding how group therapy in Alcatraz’s utopian space operates too. Jung constructed the collective unconscious as a series of complementary archetypes to which each individual would refer. However, this theory assumes a fixity in the archetypal figurations that discourages utopian or radically transformative projects. Assagioli’s theory of the collective unconscious is more apt to envisage the aural and energetic transformations possible in group therapy. In his view, the collective unconscious is an energetic element that surrounds us, a bit like the Chinese chi. Within each person, this energy is configured as higher, middle, and lower unconscious, with the higher level corresponding to what is usually called the higher self in Eastern belief systems, and the will in more conventional terms (Assagioli, 2000: 15, 170-197). In describing the collective unconscious as an aural en-

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ergy, Assagioli anticipates the more flexible view of collective awareness as flux elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari, and positions the will as a factor in a person’s psychological system. This explains the effectiveness of group therapy in collectively transforming aural energies. The temporary deterritorialization of each participant wells up in a transformative flux that reterritorializes the group in the utopian space, enhancing collective awareness and activating each singularity’s will. The structure of Yoga for Airheads is paradoxical too, inasmuch as Jacopo Fo’s lezioni, or lectures, argue against versions of the traditional “talking cure” while they are the most traditional part of the course – mostly requiring mental participation. The contents of these lectures are also accessible in his books. Zen e l’arte di scopare focuses on aspects of one’s amorous and/or sexual erotic life, while Come diventare dio in dieci mosse focuses on aspects of practical life and well being. Both integrate thinking from Zen Buddhism and the Chinese martial art of Tai-Chi, as Fo insists that beyond the surface things are surprisingly simple and that meditative exercise empowers one to see this. Fo’s central idea of pensiero laterale, or sideways thinking, has an affinity with Deleuzian rhizomes, which unlike upwardly developing trees and their downward roots, also expand sideways and form networks that enable communities to bring down the powers that lord over them.16 Fo insists that by emphasizing the context of a target problem rather than the problem itself, lateral thinking produces holistic solutions that resolve the problem by transforming the context from which it arises. In practical life, these include a healthy skepticism and sense of humor that help see through power systems and get beyond their intimidating tactics; an interest for nutritional solutions to health problems; and a willingness to experiment with awareness-enhancing techniques that involve various degrees of body interaction with other participants. The paradox of Fo’s Diventare dio is that instructions on how to become god-like come from a person who rejects organized religion, which empowers participants while demystifying the whole idea of monotheism. In the sexual and amorous aspects of life, Fo applies sideways thinking too. The central idea is that the art of loving can be learned, and learning it is both ecologically sound and in everyone’s best interest, because people with a happy amorous life tend to be more gentle with others and respectful of environmental resources. Fo claims that one’s capability for happiness in amorous relationships is proportional to one’s awareness of one’s own multiple potential for pleasure and those of one’s partners. For men this means getting past

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the premature ejaculation and quickies that alienate so many women, and be empowered to explore their own multiple pleasures, including L-spot pleasure and anal pleasure. Also for men, this means exploring relationships with older women who are aware of their pleasures and can be good love teachers. According to Fo, male frigidity is very common as many men ejaculate without orgasm, and are strangers to penetrative pleasures. Fo empowers women as teachers, who don’t suffer from premature ejaculation, and can explore their own pleasures with more tranquility, including clitoral, anal, vaginal, and G-spot pleasures, as well as the less known female ejaculation. Unlike Reich, Fo does not emphasize orgasm tout court, but rather the shared and consensual fruition of multiple pleasures between men and women. He has much respect for what he calls “downstream” orgasms which couples advanced in the art of lovemaking can share together, and which imply a long prelude where a tantric plateau of ecstasy is shared. While Fo does not recommend bisexual, polyamorous, or in other ways queer experiences, his idea of pleasure is rather inclusive and certainly challenging to most conventional concepts of masculinity and femininity. The rough and tumble games facilitated by Eleonora Albanese and others are designed to amalgamate the group and mollify the body armor of individual participants. In tapis roulant participants sit on the floor in a row, with their legs extended sideways. Their hands up form a rolling rug, as the first person in the row gets up and lies down on them, with a facilitator on each side for safety. As the participant is moved to the end of the row by hands rolling on his or her backside, the next in line begins. Body armor is mollified by the game’s tossing and pushing about. Capoeira is a dance/wrestling game from Brazil. It was allegedly invented by slaves with chained legs who wanted to feel alive and learned to play with each other this way. It consists of various body-againstbody moves in which one player lifts a leg to kick and the other ducks the blow under it. This game kindles participants’ familiarity with unusual body parts and positions. In vagina urlante, or screaming vagina, participants sit on the floor in two facing rows, their arms and legs forming a birth-channel-shaped tunnel. Facilitators help each person at the beginning of the tunnel enter it and come out at the other end. Again, tossing from side to side mollifies bodies and amalgamates the group. Other rough and tumble games involve jumping, running, and dancing, with blindfolding sometimes used to enhance touch in games that involve hugging or stroking. Also included are classes in the rudimentary principles of martial arts and beginning tai-chi; spontaneous and improvised art produc-

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tion on white paper and acrylic; and the giving and receiving of applause. The bambola massage, and the watsu classes are especially conducive of regressions to a pre-body armor state. The first is practiced in the activity room, in a special candle-light atmosphere, where five people practice healing touch on a person’s hands, head, and feet, facilitating a light hypnotic state. The watsu style practiced at Alcatraz is said to trigger memories from life in the womb and, according to some, from previous lives too. It was developed by holistic health facilitator Harold Dale at the intentional community center of Harbin Hot Springs, in California. In Yoga for Airheads, it is a daily complement to the other activities, with its rudiments taught to participants who practice on each other. The games’ bodily activity interacts with the Fo lessons’ intellectual stimulation, as the two integrate to break up participants’ conventional thinking, mollify their body armor, and enhance their awareness. The art of challenging with pleasure is practiced in the Alcatraz kitchen too. It is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a variety of foods and beverages that enhance the mixture of paradox and synergy typical of Alcatraz. Since most guests are Italians with a fine taste in food, quality is to be expected in the ingredients used and their preparation. Even when not organically grown, food products in Italy are of good quality because Italians tend to eat what is locally grown and in season, which enhances food quality by shortening the distance between producer and consumer. However, and partly because they want to know what they eat, Italians tend to be conservative in their food taste, as is evident from the slow development of the ethnic food industry. The Alcatraz kitchen uses many organically grown foods, including vegetables, wines, and meats, while the quality of its cuisine competes with any restaurant in the region. However, it also challenges Italian conventionalism in food taste and the bad eating habits that go with it. For example, it serves an abundant breakfast with brewed rather than espresso coffee, and with a variety of cakes, fruits, and juices, which is a gentle way to correct the bad habit of having no breakfast which is still typical in Italy. Lunch and dinner are served as buffet meals, and guests are encouraged to fill their plates from a choice of entrées and side dishes. This challenges the conventional distinction many Italian make between primo (a first course made of pasta, rice, or soup) and secondo (a second course made of meat and vegetables), which is believed to be the cause of much overeating. Furthermore, the menu of entrées and side dishes proposed by the Alcatraz kitchen does not correspond to any established culinary tradition, Italian, for.

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eign, or regional. For example, the Alcatraz pumpkin raviolis in a butter sauce bring together ingredients from Mediterranean, European, and American cuisine not seen together before.17 Another speciality is corn fritters with fried banana sticks, which uses as a vegetable an ingredient most Italians consider fruit. Wine is a staple of Italian meals, and Alcatraz integrates this by serving bottled wine as an extra at lunch and dinner. The wine menu includes Sesso selvaggio [Wild sex], Scopata intergalattica [Intergalactic fucking], and other such Dionysian vintages which de-normalize wine by enhancing its ability to produce altered states like most drugs do. By alluding to sexuality, the labels warn users of the old adage that a little bit helps but too much of it causes impotence. The recipe book produced by the community, unabashedly entitled La cucina leggendaria di Alcatraz, attributes a legendary status to the Alcatraz kitchen, which may be justified by its unique ability to combine elements from various cuisine traditions and sublimate them in new synergies that marry health with taste and honor the almost erotic pleasure Italians take in good convivial eating. Texts The Alcatraz books place the principles that inform the center’s activities in a wider context, also enabling interested participants to trace their genesis and further reflect on their experience. For example, Schiave ribelli emphasizes the resistance to slavery of which the società acefale of pre-modern Africa were capable. Having no head (acefale) or individual leader, these societies operated by unanimity and were, therefore, cohesive enough as to fend off alien attempts to break up their unity (Fo / Malucelli, 2001: 48-52 and passim). Interestingly enough, Fo’s description of these societies anticipates Hardt and Negri’s description of a fully-developed and aware multitude whose “swarm intelligence” and “distributed networks” will form the basis for the authentic democracy of the future (Hardt / Negri, 2004: 91-93, 54-62, 217-18, 229-263, and passim). This made it impossible for European slave traders to recruit assistants to their trade from among them. The book opens by pointing to the deep and condoned ignorance about Africa in the Western world, beginning with geographic maps that represent it as smaller than it is due to the geometrical system used to flatten the globe. Africa, Fo claims, is the most ancient home for all of today’s human cultures and races, and by destroying it we are destroying a part of ourselves. The book is organized as a saga that celebrates Africa’s pantheistic pre-colonial exuberance and its resistance to Muslim and Christian penetration, leading up to Fo’s declara-

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tion that today “Africa is poor for a very simple reason: it is the richest continent on the globe” (Fo / Malucelli, 2001: 255). This paradox points to Western predatory mentalities, of which Africa is only one among many victims. Gesù amava le donne e non era biondo uses information from the apocryphal Gospels to humanize Jesus and debunk Roman Catholic dogmas like the immaculate conception and the celibacy of priests. The apocryphal Gospels, the book claims, have been declared false because, if it was better known that Jesus had brothers and sisters, people would no longer believe that his mother was a virgin (Fo, 2000a: 27-31, 67-71, and passim). If people also knew that Magdalena was his lover and that he loved women, the celibacy vows Catholic priests are forced to take would sound ridiculous too (idem, 56-57, and passim). The book situates early Christianity in the context of the Orphic mysteries and their legacy from the Neolithic Goddess religion, and traces back the gradual exclusion of the feminine from the sacred that occurred as Christianity consolidated as an organized, monotheistic religion (idem, 31-34, 57-95, and passim).18 By placing Jesus’ personal story in the context of the early Roman Empire and the new spiritualities that sustained its rebellious multitudes, the book offers tools for change to activists in today’s Christian cultures too. Sulla naturale superiorità della donna is a multi-author book that unabashedly celebrates women’s cultural and biological differences from men as that which proves them superior in the ability to think and act holistically, even as it lists the forms of oppression women have endured in many ancient and modern cultures. The authors, including Fo, his editor Gabriella Canova, and other collaborators, claim that women “think in global terms. [Their] vision of things embraces, contains, envelopes, a situation as a whole. For women, there are no individual difficulties, individual moments, but a continuous flux, a constant effort to overcome a current’s resistance” (Fo et al., 1994: 26 – my translation).19 Evidence for this alleged superiority, the authors claim, comes from the study of matriarchal civilizations of the Neolithic, which were peaceful, worshipped feminine principles, and considered lovemaking a sacrament. Prehistory teaches a different story from history. Since the onset of male dominance about 10.000 years ago, the authors claim, violence has increased because men think with their penises: They see anything as an object to be penetrated. Be it a woman or a commercial enterprise, men see only one thing at a time. Men isolate issues and try to sneak inside them by breaking every resistance. (ibidem – my translation) 20

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Aware of their biological and cultural inferiority to women, men have incessantly tried to hide this by demonstrating their superiority in oppressive and violent ways, and then they’ve called this horrific story history. The authors conclude that we need more “thinking with the vagina” because “humanity’s life must be healed as a whole, just like a sick infant, with patience, dedication, and love, just like women do” (idem, 27 – my translation).21 This celebration of the healing powers of femininity resonates with the Gaian awareness and holistic thinking that animate the global peace and justice movement. The book is also visually interesting as it displays the affinities between soft female shapes like a woman’s round breasts with architectural symbols like the twin domes typical of early modern Italy (idem, 56-57). This passage to the symbolic, in a feminist/ feminine style, is a healthy antidote to Lacan’s insistence on the association between the symbolic and the phallic symbols. In a mock s/m tone, the cover shows a playful dominatrix, well formed and in the nude, riding a somewhat scrawny man on all four, also in the nude, with her hands holding the reins he bites in. The picture, Fo style, symbolizes the Gaian order in which phallic energy is marshaled in to accomplish an all-embracing, feminist femininity. The Alcatraz books also display the various ways in which Fo and his collaborators work together. For example, Fo appears as sole author for Diventare dio and Lo Zen e l’arte di scopare, which clearly are emanations from his Yoga for Airheads lessons. Due to its size, detail, and depth of argumentation, Schiave ribelli requires the kind of serious scholarly apparatus that from his base, in Alcatraz, Fo is not likely to be able to put together. Here the authorship is shared equally with his collaborator and research assistant Laura Malucelli. Similarly, Gesù amava le donne is coauthored with Maulcelli and offers appendixes that document its claims. Sulla naturale suepriorità della donna is a more popularizing type of book intended to challenge the last resistance of macho types on their way to redemption by mocking them and amusing them. The authorship here is multiple, with three authors besides Fo, and with Gabriella Canova using the first person in some pages of the book. Finally, La grande truffa delle piramidi, the book I will discuss in most detail due to the interest of its theory, is by Fo alone, and reflects his wish to take on himself the entire risk of its rather far fetched conclusions. La grande truffa begins by dismantling belief systems that are commonly accepted but detrimental to the possibility of creating the new possible world we need. For example, Fo claims that what we believe about the Pyramids is absurd, for it implies that an entire people, the Egyptians, invested the majority

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of their energy in building immense graves. This paradox flags some political distortion for Fo, who intends to challenge the established idea. Another established idea around pyramids is that to build them in the era before fuel-burning technology slave labor must have been used. This idea causes people to believe that a world with less pollution will require more slave labor, whereas the fact is that corporate globalization produces both slavery and pollution. Fo wishes to dismantle this belief-system, so that Alcatraz and movement participants can begin to think of ways to minimize both labor and pollution (Fo, 1998: 18-37). Based on his lateral thinking method, he compares the pyramids in Egypt to those in Colombia, Mexico, and Nubia, all of which are shaped like Mastabas, or pyramids with a flat top. He also observes that Egyptologists have been puzzled by the signs of water erosion on the Sphinx, which is right next to the so-called big mausoleums of the three pharaohs Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus. This erosion indicates possible construction date in prehistory. At this point Fo examines the hypothesis that the bases of these three major pyramids might have been built by the black matriarchal agricultural civilizations of the Neolithic during the Subpluvial Period, namely between 15,000 and 10,000 B. C., and in any event way before the invasions of white warrior-shepherds, which, around 4,500 B. C., gave rise to patriarchal history. Several practical reasons corroborate this hypothesis which archeologists have never completely ruled out (idem, 22-48). The matriarchal civilizations of the Neolithic did not worship death and therefore would have had no use for big mausoleums; they were agricultural and formed by black people. However, they were very advanced in their management of waters, since agriculture and hydraulic systems were their mainstay. The mastabas or flat pyramids provided an elevated space when the Nile flooded, and functioned as water condensers in drought periods. Therefore, they had plausible uses in both flood and drought times (idem, 49-64). This surmise encourages Fo to inquire further into the possibility of using a pyramid for condensing water. Even today, he claims, desert people like the Berbers arrange stones in small heaps so that, when the desert wind passes through them, its little moisture condenses into water due to the lower temperature inside the heap. The flat pyramids, Fo claims, could have been a much bigger version of these heaps (idem, 77-86). The implications of this hypothesis are significant. They include a valorization of the black matriarchal agricultural civilizations of the Neolithic, which had no war, were egalitarian, holistic, and also had remarkable hydraulic technol-

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ogy and high land-stewardship and ecological management skills. The interest of studying these civilizations in a time of water wars and alleged scarcity of resources prompts a reconfiguration of the boundary between history and prehistory, with the mark placed not at the onset of literacy but at the onset of advanced water managements and hydraulic technologies.22 Finally, it includes the implication that black and not white people built the pyramids, thus confirming Fo’s claim that people of color are often denied credit for their contributions. There is a hopeful message in the idea that the pyramids were built not to worship death but rather to create more stability in the lives of Neolithic communities. Fo goes even further in drawing a philosophical conclusion that is consonant with the intent of the Alcatraz community and the global peace and justice movement. For people in the Neolithic communities, he claims, “God was a glass of water” (idem, 74). Water is a life-enhancing liquid that resembles the amniotic liquid in which each human develops. It is a source of life, and the basis for the biosphere, atmosphere, and biota, as well as the element in which the first forms of life developed. The respect Neolithic communities had for it proves that perhaps their knowledge was superior to that of their patriarchal successors. This encourages Fo to think that perhaps Neolithic communities even knew how to get mastabas built with a reasonable amount of labor. He then moves to address the constructed dichotomy between slave labor and fuel-engine pollution. As he explains, Neolithic communities had advanced water management skills, and they could have developed a system of water elevators and floaters placed around the big stones used to build the mastabas. These water elevators would have looked like water pits in the middle of the structure to be built, connected with a tunnel water channel at the mastaba’s base. Stones would have been equipped with inflated floaters made of animal skin, and, placed in the elevator, they would automatically have risen the top of the pit. From there, they would have been manually placed in the correct position, and so on and so forth until the mastaba was completed. This method of construction, Fo claims, is more consonant with the philosophy of egalitarian Neolithic communities, than slave labor is. And, as Fo presents it, the elevator system would have required equipment within their reach. Fo wonders why more specialized Egyptologists have not investigated this hypothesis seriously, and suggests that their belief system might have stopped them from formulating this hypothesis to begin with. This proves the point that to think out of the box one has to step out of the system. We need to look at the past with fresh eyes if we wish to invent a new future. To those who claim that pollu-

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tion is a modern necessity, Fo responds that, if primitives in the Neolithic knew how to make water do all the work, so certainly can we. Fo suggests that in order to reinvent these lost skills, we stop focusing on what has been heretofore called history and should actually be called cronaca nera, or crime news. Indeed, in the wider perspective that includes the Neolithic and its black matriarchal hydraulic civilizations, the period we call history, from about 4,500 B.C. to our days, is but a saddening laundry list of wars, dynasties, rivalries, and devastations. The knowledge we need lies back with those civilizations that have been dismissed as “black”, “matriarchal”, and “primitive”. “Another world is possible”, says the global justice movement. The call to action resonates with Alcatraz and Fo answers, “let’s find out how by revisiting prehistory!” Conclusion Holistic organizations and intentional communities can be considered the utopian laboratories for the other possible worlds advocated by the global peace and justice movement, with Alcatraz, in Central Italy, as a case in point due to its multidimensional work in the community’s practices, in its open activities, and in theory, including its numerous books. The transformative energy of holistic organizations and intentional communities wells up from the Deleuzian fluxes of deterritorialization and reterritorializtions active therein. Members and guest participants in these communities experiment with living as if the biota, or sum of atmosphere and biosphere, including humans, was an organism with a life and will of its own, a symbiotic system made of interconnected singularities. Gaia, or she who is gay – cheerful, is the right name for it as it enhances the hopefulness this mantle teeming with life inspires in its creatures. Holistic organizations also develop utopian tools, often in the form of workshops designed to impact their guest participants with the community’s alternative practices and belief systems. The knowledge one acquires is playful and subversive of accepted truism, as it resonates with Gaia’s original meaning. An enhanced awareness of Gaia as our hostess plant inspires a community’s commitment to regenerating a degraded area, to using renewable energy sources, to sharing resources, and to providing good land stewardship. The utopian spaces activated therein reflect a sense of the sacred which is both very old and quite new, as it embraces the feminine and pluralizes the love and reverence due to it to include the biota as a whole. For example, Alcatraz celebrates women as “superior” for they can think from their loving, embracing, and plural “vaginas”, and choose not to compete with macho guys who

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can only think with their penises. Likewise, it celebrates the black matriarchal cultures of the Neolithic for honoring the feminine as a community love principle, for respecting water as a life principle, and for their good land stewardship and high water management skills. Fo even claims that these “primitives” built the bases of the Egyptian pyramids using the force of water and their high collaborative skills. In Multitude, political scientists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim that a fully aware, self-cognizant multitude is the agent of the new possible worlds advocated by the global peace and justice movement, based on its “swarm intelligence” and “distributed networks” systems. I submit that the sense of the sacred Gaian awareness encourages might be necessary for the multitude to actualize its potential and replace savage capitalism and the one-superpower system with the global, sustainable democracy of the future. The work of Alcatraz reflects this effort in its multi-centered organization and authorship system; in the design and intent of Yoga for Airheads, its utopian tool; and in the numerous books produced by the community that disseminate its vision and reflect the ideas that circulate in and out of it, in conjunction with the participation in the global peace and justice movement of its members and guest participants. Notes 1 See Starhawk’s Webs of Power (2002). This is a field report of her participation in and training for the movement. It offers detailed accounts of how these groups are organized as “distributed networks” that, as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have suggested, have “swarm intelligence”. For Latino slogans see Starhawk, 2002: 25-26; for Hardt and Negri’s points see Multitude, 2004: 54-59, 93-94, and passim. Another useful source is Collettivo Malatempora, 2003. 2 A comprehensive listing of intentional communities is available online thanks to FIC, the Fellowship for Intentional Communities (http:// directory.ic.org/geo/).

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Holistic organizations include study and/or retreat centres and/or practice groups whose core members share holistic visions and are committed to fulfilling them together. They may have their own base and their activities may be hosted by the facilities of other communities. 3 The idea of utopian tools or utopian machines comes from classical Marxist utopian theory. Here it is applied to tools of inner transformations such as workshops and other participatory events and rituals hosted by holistic organizations and intentional communities. For a discussion of utopian tools in a postmodern context, please see Millay Hyatt’s, “Postmodern Utopi-

anism: Deleuze and Guattari and the escape from politics”, in this volume. 4 Deleuze and Guattari discuss fluxes of deterritorializations and reterritorializations within the capitalist system in Anti-Oedipus, sections 2/9 and 4/9-10 (130-138, 220-261), and passim. Even though Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work dates back to the 1970s, these tropes apply very productively to the demographic movements of the globalization era. For today’s relevance of the two collaborators’ treatment of capitalism and schizophrenia, see Massumi, 1992, Zizek, 2004, and Colebrook 2002. 5 This aspect of the movement is especially well-de-

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scribed by Starhawk’s Webs of Power. She is a leader in the new-spirituality movement, a practitioner of permaculture and other eco-regenerative agricultural systems, and a participant and founder in numerous holistic and intentional communities. Also important is Cavanagh / Mander (2004). 6 In Deleuze and Guattari’s initial formulation, deterritorializations have a revolutionary potential, while reterritorializations are generally conservative, and can even be connoted as despotic and fascist. I disagree, and, in view of today’s higher concern with environmental issues, I believe these authors would acknowledge that a sense of place is necessary as a basis for community – even as, as singularities, we continue in our nomadic existences – so that the “multitude’s swarm intelligence” Hardt and Negri celebrate in Multitude can also generate good land stewardship. The recent scholarship by Walter Mignolo on transculturation in early modern history and its relations to Gnosticism and other unorthodox ideas also moves in this direction. 7 For the concept of empire as the emerging configuration in the post-Cold-War period, I refer to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, which claims that the onesuperpower system is empire, while the French, British, and even the Cold-War American colonial dominations were simply forms of “imperialism”, namely a striving process to achieve seamless control. As they claim, though, this very

achievement is the beginning of the end. 8 Classics on the Gaia Hypothesis are Lovelock, 1982 and 1988; Margulis, 1998; and Margulis / Sagan, 1997. Margulis and Lovelock’s perspectives are complementary, and, one could even add, symbiotic. Margulis focuses on life’s microcosms, like bacteria, cells, and symbionts, to conclude that the whole of the biota, with all its evolved organisms, can be considered a superorganism evolved by symbiosis. Lovelock focuses on life’s macroscopic aspects, and notes that while Gaia’s neighbors Mars and Venus look like logs, Gaia looks like a tree green with leaves. These are two different ages in these planets’ respective lives. Lovelock warns that Gaia too could enter the log age if we continue to mess with it. 9 Factual information about Auroville is available in the 2002 Almanac, Auroville, Universal Township. I also refer to the photographic and testimonial documentation I collected as a participant observer in my 2004 research trip, which has been presented at the October, 2004 CEA Conference, Caribbean Chapter, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. 10 I report information gathered through observation and interviews with community members, during my informal visit in July 2004. Tamera’s website is at http:// www.tamera.org/english/. 11 The premises where guests stay and where workshops and activities are held have a deceptively simple homeliness. There are no excessive comforts or luxuries,

but the space is articulated in such a way that participants have many opportunities to come together in large and/ or small groups, to develop friendships, to have fun, and to become amorous and intimate if they so choose. The lodgings where guests stay vary from roughly refurbished country houses that were on the property before the purchase, to prefabricated bungalows that abide by the restrictive construction laws of the region. Accommodations vary from doubles that share a bath with another double to three- to six-bed dorm rooms for men or women. The small, unobtrusive buildings are scattered on the hills and connected by dirt roads. Most Alcatraz core members also live in refurbished houses on the far ends of the estate. 12 The link to HAI’s informative website is http://www. hai.org/. 13 The link to Landmark Education’s rather complex website is http://www. landmarkeducation.com/. 14 The link to Alcatraz’s informative website is http:// www.alcatraz.it. 15 My sources are a holographic interview with Jacopo Fo conducted in the summer of 2001, and an informal conversation with Franca Rame, whom I met again at Alcatraz on New Year’s eve, 2003, many years after my first extensive interview with her published in Feminist Issues in 1991. 16 Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome is in Thousand Plateaus, 1987: 3-25 and passim. 17 They tasted delicious at the 2003-04 New Year’s Eve

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dinner I participated in, even as my thoughts went to typical Italians who would cringe at this postmodern replacement of the traditional lasagna entrée. 18 For more information on recent studies about female deities and the rise of monotheism see Lucchesi, 2002; and Pistoso, 1998. 19 “La donna pensa in termini globali. La sua visione delle

cose abbraccia, contiene, prende, l’insieme delle situazioni. Per la donna, non esistono singole difficoltà, singoli momenti ma un fluire continuo, uno sforzo costante per superare la resistenza della corrente” (Fo et al., 1994: 26). 20 “Egli vede in tutto qualcosa da penetrare. Si tratti di una donna o un’impresa commerciale egli vede solo una cosa per volta. Isola le questioni

e cerca di infilarcisi dentro vincendo ogni resistenza” (Fo et al, 1994: 26). 21 “La vita dell’umanità va curata tutta assieme, come un neonato ammalato. Con pazienza, dedizione e amore. Proprio come fanno le donne” (Fo et al, 1994, 27). 22 About water as cause for conflict and about the privatization systems that cause water scarcity, see Shiva, 2002.

Works Cited Anderlini-D’Onofrio, Serena (1985), “Franca Rame: Her Life and Works”, Theater, 17.1, pp.32-39 [trans. into Italian as “Franca Rame donna e attrice”, Il Ponte: 65.6, pp. 99-110, 1990]. _ _ (1991), “When Is a Woman’s Work Her Own? An Interview with Franca Rame”, Feminist Issues, 11.1, pp.22-52. _ _ (1998), “From The Lady is to be Disposed of to An Open Couple, The Theater Partnership of Dario Fo and Franca Rame”, Atenea: XX, 3.1, pp.31-52 [Reprinted in Walter Valeri (ed.) (2000) Franca Rame: A Woman Onstage, West Lafayette, Indiana, Bordighera]. Assagioli, Roberto (2000), Psychosynthesis: A Collection of Basic Writings, Amherst, Mass., The Synthesis Center. Auroville Foundation (2002), Auroville, Universal Township, Auroville, Auroville Press. Bauval, Robert / Adrian Gilbert (1995), Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids, New York, Crown, Cavanagh, John / Jerry Mander (eds.) (2004), Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Colebrook, Clare (2002), Gilles Deleuze, New York, Routledge. Collettivo Malatempora (2003), Movimento: da dove viene, cos’è, cosa vuole, cosa farà, Rome, Malatempora.

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Deleuze, Gilles / Félix Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. _ _ (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Fo, Jacopo (1996a), Diventare Dio in dieci mosse, Varese, Demetra. _ _ (1996b), Lo Zen e l’arte di scopare, Varese, Demetra. _ _ (1997), Guarire ridendo, Milan, Mondatori. _ _ (1998), La grande truffa delle piramidi, Alcatraz, Nuovi Mondi. _ _ (2000a), Gesù amava le donne e non era biondo, Alcatraz, Nuovi Mondi. _ _ (2000b), La dimostrazione chimica dell’esistenza di dio, Alcatraz, Nuovi Mondi. Fo, Jacopo / Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio (2001), “Intervista”, [August 3], Holograph. Fo, Jacopo et al. (1994), Sulla naturale superioritá della donna, Varese, Demetra. _ _ (2000), Il libro nero del Cristianesimo, Alcatraz, Nuovi Mondi. Fo, Jacopo / Laura Malucelli (2001), Schiave Ribelli: 500 anni di vittorie africane censurate dalla storia, Alcatraz, Nuovi Mondi. Gimbutas, Marija (1989), The Language of the Goddess, New York, Thames and Hudson.

_ _ (2001), The Living Goddesses, Berkeley, University of California Press. Hancock, Graham (1996), Fingerprints of the Gods [with Santha Fajia photographer], New York, Random House. _ _ (1999), Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization, vol. 1 [with Santha Fajia photographer], New York: Crown. Hardt, Michael / Antonio Negri (2004), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York, Penguin. _ _ (2000), Empire, Cambridge/Mass., Harvard Universiy Press. Labellarte, Angela (1995), La cucina leggendaria di Alcatraz, Alcatraz, Nuovi Mondi. Lovelock, James (1982), Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford, Oxford University Press. _ _ (1988), The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Planet, New York, Commonwealth Fund. Lucchesi, Nadia (2002), Frutto del ventre, frutto della mente: Maria madre del Cristianesimo, Ferrara, Tufani. Margulis, Lynn (1998), Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, New York, Basic Books. Margulis, Lynn / Dorion Sagan (eds.) (1997), Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution, New York, Copernicus.

Mignolo, Walter (2000), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Reich, Wihelm (1990), Character Analysis, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, New York, Noonday Press. Shiva, Vandana (2002), Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, Cambridge/Mass., South End Press. Starhawk (2002), Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, Gabriola Island, New Society Publishing. Pistoso, Giuliana (1998), Erodiade e Gesù, Ferrara, Tufani. Zizek, Slavoj (2004), Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, New York, Routledge. Web Resources Alcatraz home page, http://www.alcatraz.it FIC, Fellowship for Intentional Communities, http://directory.ic.org/geo/ Human Awareness Institute home page, http://www.hai.org/ Landmark Education home page, http://www.landmarkeducation.com/index. jsp?top=20 Werner Erhard and EST – the Rick Ross Institute, http://www.rickross.com/groups/est.html

Massumi, Brian (1992), Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari: A Users’ Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Cambridge/Mass., The MIT Press.

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Utopia and Agriculture: Reconsidering the Reforms of the CAP from the Standpoint of Owen’s Communitarianism Kunihiko Chiken | Chuo University, Japan

At first sight, the ideas comprising the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) seem to bear little similarity to the ideas of Robert Owen, one of the great utopian socialists of the 19th century. However, a reconsideration of the CAP in the light of Owen’s ideas will demonstrate their pressing relevance to the contemporary debate. 1. From Agricultural Policy to Agri-environmental and Rural Development Policy The Reform of 1992 After the Second World War agricultural policies focused on increasing agricultural production and supplying the market with an ever larger availability of foodstuffs. The Treaty of Rome set as a goal for the CAP to ensure a fair standard of living for agricultural production, particularly by increasing the individual income of farmers. One of the fundamental objectives of the CAP is to combine a secure supply of food at reasonable prices, with a reasonable return for the producer. The pricing mechanism of the CAP has two main features. Firstly, farmers are guaranteed a minimum price by Community purchasing on the market. Secondly, a levy is imposed on imports, so that products cannot be sold in a

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European country at prices below those guaranteed to farmers. While this policy has prompted EU farmers to promote intensive farming and overproduction, it has caused significant environmental problems and incurred severe criticism from GATT. In addition, there are considerable benefits for large-scale farmers and no increase in income for small-scale farmers. The main aspects of the reform of 1992 are as follows: • instead of subsidies for prompting production, a decoupling of keeping price policy including guarantee price cut is introduced. This is called “Set-aside”; • new subsidies are created for farmers who have a “management agreement” with the government and these subsidies are now called “management payments”; • environmental requirements are made obligatory. This is called “Cross compliance”; • agri-environmental policy is reinforced. Agri-environmental Policy (AEP) in the UK The AEP was foreshadowed in the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, under which farmers could not prevent access to their land under stated conditions, being notorious for having gaping loopholes. The agri-environmental schemes arose from the failure of the available policy mechanisms of the early 1980s to deal with the pressure on the rural environment. Policies seeking to support farm incomes shifted to land-based payments, many of which aimed at securing appropriate public goods. Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) and The Countryside Stewardship Schemes (CSS) are the two largest Schemes in England. ESAs were launched in areas of high environmental value, through the encouragement of appropriate agricultural practices in 1987. ESAs are concentrated areas of sensitivity, which are particularly suitable where the environmental benefits for participant has a positive effect upon a neighbouring participant or group of participants. The CSS is directed at producing positive changes in the countryside and the ESAs are designed to protect what is already there. The CSS applies to all areas not covered by the ESA’s. The CSS pays for grazing extensification of semi-natural habitats, arable reversion to herb-rich pastures, moorland and heath restoration from grass or arable, and restoration of traditionally managed field boundaries. There is a huge diversity in the different policy measures which may be implemented under the AEP umbrella, ranging from the promotion of organic farming, woodland planting on farms and Nitrate Sensitive Areas (NSAs) to cross-compliance. However, the share of expenditure on AEP remained at less

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than five percent of the total CAP expenditure for the period 1993-97. The 1992 reforms just mean that farming areas are divided into two parts: one is the market oriented agricultural area, the other is the designated and environmentally friendly agricultural area. Intensive farming still dominates in spite of introducing the price cuts, management payments and agri-environmental policies. Agenda 2000 The 1992 reforms have not significantly changed the agricultural situation and they have certainly not resolved the problems of overproduction, environment and small-farmers’ low income. Once again, in Agenda 2000, large price cuts (market price) were offset by an increase in direct payments which strengthened the EU position for the new WTO negotiations. A comprehensive rural development policy was introduced as the second pillar of the CAP, and agrienvironmental policies were included and reinforced by it. Rural Development Policy The social objective of maintaining farmers’ standard of living was vital to the goal of the CAP, namely to preserve the family farm as the major feature of agriculture that in turn was the condition for the continuation of rural society. In order to achieve the aim of social equity and to preserve the localities, the CAP adopted market-intervention schemes to support the prices of agricultural products. However, these mechanisms have contributed to a rural decline and have led farmers to adopt intensive but ecologically damaging methods of agricultural production. By the mid 1980s, environmental and rural issues were becoming increasingly conspicuous in the CAP debate. The 1987 Green Paper states that the aim of the CAP is to maintain the social tissue in the rural regions by ensuring continued employment opportunities in agriculture. Moreover, the paper presents the Community’s image of rural space. Agriculture on the model of the USA, with vast spaces of land and few farmers is neither possible nor desirable in European conditions in which the basic concept remains the family farm. John Gray maintains that family farming creates the kind of space where rural society can flourish, sustaining not just rural society, but society as a whole, a society characterized by the ideas of stability, justice and equality (Gray, 2000: 35). The “Future of Rural Society Report” published by the European Commission in 1988 foreshadows a shift in EU policy making away from agricultural production to multi-dimensional rural development. This is a shift away from a

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sector based approach to assisting agriculture to a territorial approach which supports agricultural, infrastructural, social and economic development in specific localities. In Agenda 2000, the objectives for a reformed CAP combined Treaty of Rome’s original aim of achieving social equity for farmers with the new aims of environmental management and multi-dimensional rural development. An Overview of the Mid Term Review of Agenda 2000 The Mid Term Review of Agenda 2000 is the latest reform of the CAP. One key element is the introduction of a single payment to farmers which no longer links subsidies to what a farmer produces, and is conditional on good agricultural and environmental farming standards (cross-compliance). Another new element is “Modulation” which is the mechanism for the promotion of rural development, whereby money gets shifted from Pillar 1 (direct payments to farmers) to Pillar 2 (payments for rural development). On the whole, these reforms can be considered as a small step towards a sustainable model for supporting the environment and for the development of rural districts. 2. From the Failures of Rural Development Programs to the Adoption of LEADER Failures of Rural Development Several Integrated Rural Developments were initiated in the late 1980s by the Commission and the Member States working in partnership. However, the programs were bureaucratic, centralised in character and not participatory. A further problem is institutional arrogance. Local people are viewed as inarticulate and unable to represent themselves effectively. It has to be recognised that indigenous growth requires active involvement at the local and regional level. Centralised control is remote and ill informed (Asby / Midmore, 1995: 333). No sustained economic development is possible without simultaneous human development. Economic behaviour cannot be understood without taking fully into account the whole set of relationships – social, political and cultural. Economic action should be embodied in social practices and institutional arrangements. A New Framework for Rural Development As the deficiencies of agricultural policies have become increasingly apparent,

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a parallel set of rural development policies have evolved. In 1987, the debate over the most appropriate style of Structural Policy intervention for the EU resulted in the adoption of a territorial, endogenous model for rural development, responding to budgetary pressures, environmental and equity arguments to reform the CAP, and the apparent failure of Structural Policy. At the time of the 1988 reform, the European Commission acquired the power to introduce its own pilot intervention version called LEADER (Liaisons Entre Actions de Developpment de l’Economie Rurale). LEADER was announced as a pilot to stimulate innovative approaches to rural development at a local level through essentially small-scale actions. Existing or ad hoc local organisations (Local Action Group- LAG) could apply for LEADER funds. As a result of the LEADER initiative, policy makers are increasingly incorporating the terms “bottom up”, “endogenous”, “local”, “capacity building” (“social capital”), and “participatory”. 3. The Rationale for Rural Development Development and Democracy According to Christopher Ray, though the “bottom up” approach seems to have only recently established itself in the vocabulary of rural development, the idea emerged in the socialist utopian experiments of the 18th and 19th centuries (Ray, 1999: 524). Rural development policy must follow the principle of subsidiarity. It must be as decentralised as possible and based on a partnership and cooperation between all levels concerned. Ray also argues that, theoretically, endogenous developments are concerned with the transfer of power to the level at which endogeny is thought to be most appropriate, namely, a shift of some power upwards (EU) as well as downwards (to the local level) (Ray, 1997: 527). Capacity Building (Social Capital) In the discourses of endogenous development the capacity building of communities and individuals is emphasized. No sustainable economic development is possible without enlightened simultaneous human activities and ready social capital. By involving local people in the analysis of local issues and in the decision-making process, there is greater likelihood that they will make the best possible use of the range of resources available (Asby / Midmore, 1995: 329). It is generally accepted that one of the obstacles might be the local people’s powerlessness and unwillingness to take part in rural development. This can be

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achieved only by capacity building in the local community through the development of the communication skills. First of all, the strategy is to build capacity through the development of strong local groups which are properly constituted and open to everyone in the community. The second step involves the initiative playing a coordinating role between itself, funding partners and local people. The mechanism for identifying local needs is “community appraisal” a locally-determined questionnaire devised mainly by local groups. Cultural Identity and Localism Localism and Europeanization seem to be oppositional but Ray says this relationship is dialectical (Ray, 1997: 346). Each side helps to reinforce the other through the “hollowing out of the nation-state”. Ray argues that as neo-liberal capitalism polarizes economic power, the response in rural areas is to pursue some form of endogenous development in which economic activity is re-formulated so as to be based more on local resources and local cultural systems (Ray, 1998: 3). Those cultural resources are seen as the key to improving the social and economic well-being of local areas, exemplified by traditional foods, regional language, arts and drama, historical sites and their associated flora and fauna. The vibrancy of a local identity is stronger and produces more local development resources when local people are anxious about the trends of modernity, economic centralization and AngloAmerican culture. Let us now examine the connections between the ideas of the CAP and Robert Owen’s Communitarianism. 4. The CAP and Robert Owen The Attachment to Agriculture For Owen, agriculture lay at the heart of the community’s economy and successful farming was central to his strategy of constructing a new moral world (Royle, 1998: 157). Although Owen trusted that science and technology would increase the availability of products, in practice, he and his followers seemed to have an “attachment to agriculture”. In theory, Owen was not an agricultural fundamentalist but in practice, he promoted self-sufficiency in staple foods and essentials. The community was constructed not only as a factory community but also as an agricultural village.

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The Unification of Agriculture and Industry Owen’s plan of constructing a community implied the following ideas: • abolition of the separation (or conflict) between town and country; • the harmony of agriculture and industry. In Owenite villages, the advantages of both mechanical industry and rural life could be preserved in a more healthy, moral and co-operative environment. Owen argued that villages of this sort will comprise all the advantages that city and country residences afforded, without having any of the inconveniences and evils which necessarily attach to both modes of society. A Small-scale Cooperative Community Owen recommended the establishment of a small co-operative community around��������������������������������������������������������������������� a building named the “���������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������� parallelogram��������������������������������� ”�������������������������������� surrounded by farmland and forest in a rural area. He strongly denied the system of free competitive principle, though affirmed self-interest���������������������������������������������������� . I������������������������������������������������� dealistically, he longed for economical independence on mutual help and harmony. His co-operative community implied the following three ideas: • co-operative human relationships (including co-operation in production and consumption); • the holding of property in common (Owen’s position was inconsistent); • a belief in communitarianism. Owen’s model society seemed to be ecological, environmentally friendly and sustainable. Fair Price The notion of “equitable exchange” was the most significant aspect of Owen’s economic strategy. He argued, in accordance with the theory of labour value, that the value of goods should be measured by the amount of manual labour needed to make them, and that the market was created only by the spending power of the working classes. In order that the producer should acquire a fair proportion of all the wealth produced, he proposed to adopt a “labour note” based on “the natural standard of value” as a means of “equitable exchange”, instead of a monetary system based on “the artificial standard of value”. Symbiosis with nature Owen seemed to believe in ecological ideas; a symbiosis of man and nature. He

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sometimes stressed that people should live in a well-reserved natural environment where every living thing is respected. His plan for the community is in harmony with nature. Education in Owenite schools emphasised the interconnections between man and nature. Owen said that nature has provided the means by which populations may at all times be maintained, giving the greatest happiness to every individual, which implied the idea of eco-centrism. Democratic governance of the community Owen was a successor to the Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, who argued (somewhat idealistically) that people should live in freedom and equality and that human character would be determined by the circumstances of their environment. His idea of “the community governance” was so ethical and democratic in aiming at community self-management that could be described as all members’ sovereignty. His deterministic account of human character meant that his first priority was education. People would be taught how to become accountable members of an improved cooperative society. In spite of his paternalis���������������������������������������������� m��������������������������������������������� , Owen is proper����������������������������� ly �������������������������� said ��������������������� to be ��������������� one of the pioneers of ethical corporate governance (Hijikata, 2003: 246-247). Owen’s radical notion of social reform embraces not political power but economical power, believing that people have the ��������������������������������������������������� abilit����������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������� y ��������������������������������������� to attain������������������������������ this������������������������� by themselves����������� ,���������� independently and locally, as long as some support is given from the upper classes. In other words, reforms started within a local community can be developed not only to enlighten a central government but also to accomplish the world revolution. In a sense, he combines localism with globalism. Many concepts associated with local development are strongly connected to the matter of “democratic governance”. The concepts of “bottom up”, “subsidiarity”, “decentralisation” and “the transfer of power” in local development seem close to those of “direct democracy” and “self-management” in Owen’s communities. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the latter is the developed stage of the former. Secondly, the system of community appraisals in a LEADER programme1 using “animators” and “resource workers” is clearly participatory and seems to lean in the direction of “direct democracy under the all member’s sovereignty”. Thirdly, in terms of localism, both in Owen’s community and in LEADER, the word “local” does not simply denote the concept of a rural space but has connotations which are opposed to political, economic and cultural centralizations.

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We can appreciate the strong sense of “rootedness” which generates a contrast with modernity and contemporary “laissez faire” economics. “Community” values are contrasted with cosmopolitan values of urban modernism (Ray, 1997: 351). From this localisation is created a strong unity and participatory awareness of local people. Fourthly, the success of rural development depends on the capacity building of local people and local groups. WISL LEADER pursues capacity building, especially in “collective” social capital like LAGs, by placing it at the centre of a strategy, wherein the main aim of the LEADER is “to change the way people think” (Shucksmith, 2000). Lastly, in many cases of LEADER Programs, the evaluation of endogeny is measured by the growth of new employment. Having said that, this might be considered a rather short term measure rather than long term capacity building. The evaluation should be based on the extent of capacity building of local people and local groups. Conclusion Not all of the various efforts aiming at the co-operative society have failed. Indeed, whether we realise it or not, they gave birth to such fruits as the public welfare, democracy and workers rights, equal opportunity for both sexes, and so on. It should be especially noted that the shift in the CAP policy away from the agricultural emphasis������������������������������������������������������ �������������������������������������������������������������� to agri-environmental and rural ��������������������� emphasis has contrib�������� uted to the ability of local areas to develop from within. This process shows an evidence of the revival of Owen’s ideas. But there is another significant theme common to both Owen’s community and the local society of the CAP, the discussion of the best way to regulate the excesses of exploitative “laissez-faire” capitalism and to embed it in a society. As we have seen, consideration of the CAP from the standpoint of Owen’s communitarianism can be both relevant and enlightening. Notes 1 An example of such a programme is the WISL LEADER (The Western Isles, Skye and Lochalsh LEADER). It was implemented in two different moments: LEADER1 (1991-1994) and LEADER2

(1995-1999). An evaluation of WISL LEADER1 undertaken by the Arkelton Trust in 1994 described the programme as one of the most successful in Scotland and one which has many lessons for other rural

areas in Europe. With the advent of LEADER2 the role of the community animators was changed to “community resource workers”. Ray emphasizes the importance of the territorial identity, “the

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Gael” and “the Crofter”, which strengthens the unity of local people and their participation in the LEADER program (Ray,

1997: 351). We can confirm that the main reason for the success of WISL LEADER is due to the application of

concepts such as “bottom up”, “endogenous”, “capacity building” and “localism”.

Works Cited Asby, Joan / Peter Midmore (1995), Human capacity-building and planning: Old ideas a future for marginal regions?, www.bl.UK/services/document/edd.html Bruckmeier, Karl (2002), The Agri-Environmental Policy of the European Union, New-York, Peter Lang. Bryden, J., et al. (1994), WISL LEADER Evaluation: Final Report, Aberdeen, Arkleton Trust. Claeys, Gregory (1991) (ed.), Robert Owen: A New View of Society and Other Writings, Harmondsworth, Penguin. _ _ (1993), Selected Works of Robert Owen Volume1-2, London, Pickering. Daugbjerg, C. (1999), “Performing the CAP: Policy Network and Broader Institutional Structure”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 37 (3), pp.407-428. Gray, John (2000), “The Common Agricultural Policy and the Re-Invention of the Rural in the European Community”, Sociologia Ruralis, vol.40, pp.30-51. Harrison, J. F.C. (1969), Robert Owen and the Owenties in Britain and America, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hijikata, Naobumi (2003), Robert Owen, Tokyo, Kenkyusya. Midmore, Peter (1998), “Rural Policy Reform and Local Development programs”, Journal of Agricultural Economics, vol. 49, pp.409-425. North, Richard A. E. (2001), The Death of British Agriculture, London, Duckworth.

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Pretty, Jules (2002), Agri-Culture Reconnecting People, Land and Nature, London, Earthscan Publications. Ray, Christopher (1997), “Towards a Theory of the Dialectic of Local Development within the European Union”, Sociologia Ruralis, vol.37, pp.345-362. _ _ (1998), “Culture, Intellectual Property and Territorial Rural Development”, Sociologia Ruralis, vol 38, pp.3-19. _ _ (1999), “Towards a Meta-Framework of Endogenous Development: Repertories, Paths, Democracy and Rights”, Sociologia Ruralis, vol. 39, pp.521-537. _ _ (2000), “The EU LEADER Programme: Rural Development Laboratory”, Sociologia Ruralis, vol. 40, pp.163-171. Royle, Edward (1998), Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Shucksmith, M. (2000), “Endogenous development, social capital and social inclusion: perspectives from LEADER in the UK”, Sociologia Ruralis, vol.40, pp.208-218. Scottish Office (1997), Evaluation of LEADER, Isle of Skye, Skye & Lochalsh Enterprise. Winter, Michael (1998), The Effects of The 1992 Reform of The Common Agricultural Policy On The Countryside of Great Britain, Vols. 1-3, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, Community Research Unit.

“The Good Time Coming”: British Utopian Socialism in the Wake of 1848 Joe Phelan | De Montfort University, UK

Utopian Socialism has had a very bad press. This is, to a large extent, the legacy of the Marxist tradition; like every belated faith, Marxism needed to portray its precursors as false or flawed prophets in order to bolster its own claims to legitimacy. For Friedrich Engels the “crude theories” of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen corresponded to the “crude conditions of capitalist production” of the early nineteenth century. These theorists, anachronistic artisans in an age of mass production, thought they could evolve a new social reality out of their own brains, and impose it on the world by “propaganda” alone. They believed that the self-evident truth of their ideas would guarantee them a favourable reception, but their new social systems were, according to Engels, “foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies” (Marx / Engels, 1977: III, 119). The demise of the grand narrative of Marxism has, of course, undermined the legitimacy of Engels’s distinction between “scientific” and “utopian” Socialisms – one might, indeed, say that the claim to “scientific” status is one of the distinguishing features of a genuinely Utopian scheme of thought – but the pejorative connotations of the term “Utopian Socialism” have been difficult to eradicate. Even chroniclers of the tradition in question (like Jonathan Beecher) prefer the term “Romantic Socialism” in order to sidestep these connotations.1

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This lingering hostility towards Utopian Socialism has produced two assumptions in accounts of the effect of the events of 1848 on British political and intellectual life, both of which I want to question, or at least re-examine, in this paper. The first is the notion that British radicalism in the years leading up to 1848 does not have a Utopian element, or at least that this Utopian element is relatively insignificant. Many accounts of the period draw a sharp dividing line between the period of the Charter, with its clearly articulated political demands, and the period following its defeat, when radical aspirations were either displaced onto “international” causes, or sublimated into Utopian visions. In her influential study Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Anne Janowitz suggests that in the writings of the Chartists and their followers “[the] voice and valence of hope grow more elegiac through the late 1840s and 1850s”, eventually becoming a mere “utopian aspiration” (Janowitz, 1998: 152). Utopianism is construed here, in the British context at least, as one moment in the process of disillusionment, the index of a disastrous dissociation between an ideal realm of social improvement and human happiness, and a real world which relegates such desires to the status of dream and fantasy. And the second, related, notion, is that British radicalism of this period is a home-grown product, relatively unaffected by overseas developments and theories. The work of two of the most sensitive and politically committed writers of this period, Arthur Hugh Clough and Charles Kingsley, calls both these assumptions into question. Both were broadly in sympathy with the aims of the revolutions of 1848 – Clough as a wry observer in revolutionary Paris, Kingsley as an activist and propagandist in England – and both wrote literary texts in the immediate aftermath of their experiences in 1848 which contain significant traces of an Utopianism of French manufacture. Their work enables us to reclaim something of the breadth of vision and sense of boundless possibility which animated the radicals and activists of the 1840s; it contains inspiring visions of universal social love, endless self-transformation and harmonious co-operation which can be called Utopian in the most positive sense of that word. But their narratives also enable us to see the fracturing of this Utopian configuration in the wake of 1848 into a set of discrete and sometimes contradictory discourses. Miles Taylor, in his recent biography of the Chartist leader Ernest Jones, highlights “the interrelationship between the style and content of later romanticism and the emergence of mass politics” during the 1840s and 1850s (Taylor, 2003: v). He draws attention, in other words, to the central role of literary production, and in particular of poetry and song, in developing and promot-

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ing the political programme of Chartism. Jones himself was a poet as well as a political activist, and Chartist publications routinely featured songs, usually modelled on the hymn-tunes familiar to their audiences, to be sung at open-air meetings. One of the most successful of these songs was Charles Mackay’s “The Good Time Coming”, to which both Clough and Kingsley refer in their respective texts.2 Something of its popularity can be gauged from the fact that it sold around 400,000 copies in England in 1846 alone; that it remained popular enough to become a battle-anthem of the Union cause in the American civil war; and that it inspired numerous parodies and imitations: There’s a good time coming, boys, A good time coming: We may not live to see the day, But earth shall glisten in the ray Of the good time coming. Cannon-balls may aid the truth, But thought’s a weapon stronger; We’ll win our battle by its aid; Wait a little longer. (...) There’s a good time coming, boys, A good time coming: Little children shall not toil, Under, or above the soil, In the good time coming; But shall play in healthful fields Till limbs and mind grow stronger; And every one shall read and write; Wait a little longer. There’s a good time coming, boys, A good time coming: The people shall be temperate, And shall love instead of hate, In the good time coming. They shall use, and not abuse, And make all virtue stronger. The reformation has begun; Wait a little longer.

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There’s a good time coming, boys, A good time coming: Let us aid it all we can, Every woman, every man, The good time coming. Smallest helps, if rightly given, Make the impulse stronger; ‘Twill be strong enough one day; Wait a little longer.

Mackay’s song provides us with an insight into the lost world of popular idealism behind the rather prosaic political demands of the Chartist movement. Its view of a “good time” in which children “shall play in healthful fields” and mankind shall “love not hate” envisages a radical social transformation rather than just an extension of the franchise. In this respect it reflects the popular Utopianism of the time, which can also be seen in the various agrarian communities founded by Chartists during the late 1840s. Several were established during the period 1846-8; they consisted of workers’ cottages, luxurious and spacious by the standards of the day, communal schools, and allotments of land. Part of the motivation behind these communities was undoubtedly opportunistic; the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor wanted to increase the number of people who qualified for the franchise by owning land, and the founding of agrarian communities was one way of achieving this end. But there was also unquestionably a strain of idealism behind the establishment of “Charterville”, “O’Connorville” and the rest.3 These were intended to be model communities in which all children would be educated and all adults would participate in work on the land. When the pioneers of these new settlements marched out from the cities they felt that they were turning their backs on a failed society based on competition and “devil-take-the-hindmost”, and helping to promote by example a new and “harmonious society, governed by cooperation rather than competition – a society where true freedom would be possible” (Hardy, 1979: 22). Mackay’s song also illustrates the indebtedness of British radicalism of this period to French models and methods. Mackay was very interested in the work of the French songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger; he wrote an article on the poet for Bentley’s Magazine as early as 1838, and “The Good Time Coming” was no doubt Mackay’s attempt to do for England what Béranger had done for France.4 The French chansonnier was widely credited with having helped to generate a climate of popular disaffection with the restored monarchy which eventually led to the Revolution of 1830.5 British Utopianism is usually referred

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back to an indigenous tradition deriving from radical Dissent; but French Utopian Socialism also played a considerable part in the intellectual formation of radicals, and more especially of middle-class radicals like Mackay himself with easy access to French literature. This indebtedness to France was, however, often concealed for reasons of respectability; it was simply not acceptable for tutors at Oxford colleges (like Clough) or married clergymen (like Kingsley) to admit to an interest in forms of thought usually represented in Britain as “indecent and profane, immoral and communistic” (Scott, 1976: 3); and both writers in fact revised their texts in ways designed to eliminate any trace of their youthful flirtation with Utopian Socialism. But there is enough evidence, both from the texts themselves and from letters and other biographical records, to indicate a strong interest on their part in the ideas of Saint-Simon, Fourier and their followers. Some of the constraints felt by Clough are apparent in his response to George Sand’s novel Jeanne; after having praised it as “cleanly” and even “pure”, he adds: “If I knew French well enough and was not a college tutor I would translate it” (Mulhauser, 1957: I, 159). It was, in fact, the novels of George Sand which provided the most important conduit for French Utopian Socialist thought for Clough and his immediate circle at Oriel College Oxford, which included Matthew Arnold. During the 1830s Sand came under the influence of Pierre Leroux, a Saint-Simonian who attempted to reconcile the radical humanitarianism of the Enlightenment with the “true” message of the gospel, and looked forward to the appearance of God’s Kingdom on earth: Dieu régnera sur la terre quand le but final qu’il s’est proposé dans sa théodicée, en faisant l’homme à son image, et en créant, non pas des hommes, mais l’homme, c’est-à-dire l’humanité, quand, dis-je, ce but final sera atteint, par le développement de la charité humaine, de l’activité humaine, de la connaissance humaine, c’est-à-dire par le développement de l’homme, ou des hommes, ou de la conscience humaine. Que ce but soit reculé dans un lointain indéfini et tout à fait mystérieux pour nous, celà est certain: mais doit-il moins pour cela régner dans nos âmes, et n’est-il pas évident d’ailleurs qu’à mesure que nous marcherons vers ce but, de plus en plus aussi se réalisera ce règne céleste sur la terre évangélisé par Jésus, et qui, dans la forme où le christianisme l’a présenté, n’était qu’une prophétie?6 (Leroux, 1840: vi-vii)

Clough read Leroux (as indeed did Kingsley), but it seems to have been Sand’s concrete realisations of his abstract speculations, her visions of social harmony and dignified labour, which affected Clough and his circle most deeply. One of the clearest insights into the impact of Sand on this group is given by

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the letters that Tom Arnold, brother of Matthew and a close friend of Clough’s, sent to Clough and other friends during the period immediately preceding his emigration to New Zealand. Arnold’s decision to emigrate was prompted by despair at the apparent immutability of the current world order; a few months before leaving he wrote to Clough: “I do not really believe that I shall ever live to see... such a society as we were discussing the other day” (Bertram, 1966: 1). The society in question clearly went beyond the communal and agrarian experiments of the Chartists and Fourierists, as he goes on to reject what he calls “the Chartist allotments” as an alternative to emigration. His letters make clear just how deeply and comprehensively Arnold rejected a society based on class division, competition and self-interest, and how central love was to his vision of a new and regenerated social order. After outlining his discovery that the divisions of contemporary society lead to “unhappy love”, Arnold finds healing relief in the work of George Sand: Gradually, thanks be to God and to George Sand, the interpreter of His truth, I found that this misery, which I had been so anxious to alleviate on the assumption that it could not but exist, was altogether an outrage and an offence in the sight of God. I found that it was not God who had destined the greater part of mankind to a life of ignorance and wretchedness, but that man had done it, by force of iniquitous laws and social customs, but chiefly through the absence of the spirit of Love. With inexpressible joy I read and pondered upon the sacred symbol, “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood”. And then I looked upon society as it was... and saw the falsehood, the injustice, the inequality, which are the only props of that unstable fabric which we call modern society... (Bertram, 1966: 217) 7

This emphasis on love and the passions is very characteristic of French Utopian Socialism. Fourier, it will be remembered, thought of himself as the discoverer of the laws of “passionate attraction”, and protested against the psychological damage inflicted on humanity by the need to force natural instincts and desires into unnatural shapes. And Marx notes with scorn the idea prevalent amongst the Utopian Socialists of this period that social love between the classes might act as a remedy for the “selfishness” of current society: “They [the Utopian Socialists] reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action... They endeavour... to deaden the class struggle, and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated phalanstères, of establishing ‘Home Colonies’, of setting up a ‘little Icaria’ – duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem” (Marx / Engels, 1977: I, 135-6). Given these views it is not difficult to account for Tom Arnold’s enthu-

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siasm for the French Revolution of February 1848, news of which belatedly reached him in June of that year. “[What] allows us to be hopeful of their [i.e. the French’s] success”, he wrote to his sister, “is that they seem to love each other. It is not a class triumphing over a class, but a whole people getting rid of a sham, trampling under foot a lie” (Bertram, 1966: 69). But ironically, at the very moment when Tom Arnold was proclaiming the advent of the millennium, Arthur Hugh Clough was actually in Paris watching the revolution disintegrate into competing factional and class interests. His first response to it was, like Arnold’s, extremely enthusiastic: “Vive la Republique, vive le Drapeau Rouge!” – though even at this early stage (26 Feb 1848) he anticipated “trouble in getting any Constitution into Marching order” and worried that “our friends the Communists” might be “unreasonably eager to introduce the millennium”. Once in Paris, which he reached in April, he deplored the “shopkeeperish and merchantish” character of the Assembly – “it won’t set to work at the organisation of labour at all, at all”. He even records the opinion of a “distinguished St Simonian” that “the Bourgeoisie, to shirk the Organization-of-Labour question, are eager for war”; and concludes that “[the] Socialist people are all in the dumps” (Mulhauser, 1957: I, 205-6). These insights were borne out by the conflicts of June 1848, in which the forces of order finally crushed the last remnants of popular insurrection, and cemented the triumph of the “Bourgeoisie”. It was on his return from Paris that Clough set to work on his mock-epic narrative poem The Bothie, which he wrote at great speed and published in November 1848. Given the way the events of 1848 had turned out one might expect a work of recantation, and in certain respects the poem gives us this. It follows the adventures of an Oxford “reading party” (of the kind Clough himself used to organise before he resigned his Fellowship at Oriel College Oxford in 1848), and in particular of a young radical and poet called Philip Hewson. Hewson engages in earnest debate with his tutor Adam on the “question of sex” – that is, the role of women – and finds himself attracted to the Highland girls because their physical labour gives them a vital connection to the earth and the sources of life. This fetishisation and indeed eroticisation of work on the land leads Philip into a brief flirtation with a Highland girl called Katie, before he realises that their relationship is not founded on mutual attraction but on abstract principle. He reacts against this by taking up with a shadowy “Lady Maria” before finally realising his ideal in the person of Elspie Mackaye, an inhabitant of the eponymous “Bothie”, and emigrating with her (after taking a first-class degree in his finals) to New Zealand.

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In projecting his beliefs onto a twenty-year-old undergraduate, Clough is clearly distancing himself from them, and portraying them with a certain amount of comic detachment, as the incongruous jumble of Philip’s hatreds makes clear: Philip Hewson the poet, Hewson the radical hot, hating lords and scorning ladies, Silent mostly, but often reviling in fire and fury Feudal tenures, mercantile lords, competition and bishops, Liveries, armorial bearings, amongst other things the Game Laws [.] (Clough, 1976 [1848]: I, 130-4)

Moreover, the poem’s dialogical form allows other voices to undercut and satirise Philip’s idealism, presenting it as other-worldly and naive. Yet the ending of the poem attempts to recuperate some of that idealism. The triumph of Philip and Elspie’s inter-class marriage provides us with a glimpse of that world of social harmony and “happy love” envisaged by Sand in her novels. Philip finds himself reconciled to what he calls “the whole great wicked artificial civilised fabric” by the love of Elspie (idem, IX, 134), and their emigration is prompted by a desire to achieve something like Fourier’s “harmony” in which love is “no longer, as it is with us, a recreation which detracts from work; [but] on the contrary... the soul and the vehicle, the mainspring of all works and of the whole of universal attraction” (apud Beecher, 1971: 59). But it is Philip’s satirical friend Hobbes who has the last word, and in doing so he remembers Mackay’s song: “So the last speech and confession is made, O my eloquent speaker!/ So the good time is coming, or come is it? O my chartist!” (Clough, 1976 [1848]: XI, 177-8). Hobbes’s doubt about whether or not the “good time” promised in the song has arrived highlights the compromise involved in offering a purely individual solution to a social problem. Philip himself may have achieved a measure of “harmony” in his own life, but in emigrating to New Zealand he is (like Tom Arnold) sidestepping rather than resolving the problems of society. Moreover, in proposing (however obliquely) emigration to the colonies as a solution to the problems of England, Clough is connecting his version of Socialism (or “Democracy” as the poem more coyly calls it) with an emergent colonialist language. There was a lengthy tradition of emigration to America, the land of promise and the future, on the part of frustrated European Utopians; but emigration to Australia, New Zealand and other settler colonies elides the question of the ownership of those colonies, and indeed the status of the indigenous

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inhabitants, who do not seem to exist in this fantasy of an empty country available for European social experiment. Charles Kingsley wrote to Clough shortly after the publication of The Bothie in December 1848 asking his permission to review the poem in Fraser’s Magazine, and hinting at the “Fourierist and Aesthetic” line he was intending to take (Kingsley, 1877: i 191). Kingsley seems to have recognised in Clough’s work a counterpart to his own response to the events of 1848. But if there is a problem in recovering the “secret history” of British Utopianism in the case of Clough, this problem is magnified many times in the case of Kingsley; as a married clergyman he was subject to the full force of British respectability, and this has led to a systematic distortion and underplaying of the extent of his knowledge of French Socialist and revolutionary thought during the late 1840s. There are severe problems with the chronology of his life and letters, for example – edited, as was the usual practice at the time, by his wife – which seem designed to distance him from the events of 1848.8 And biographies of him still talk as if his decision to go up to London on the eve of the great Chartist demonstration of 10 April 1848 was a kind of spontaneous gesture, his first conscious or active involvement in the political process (Chitty, 1974). Yet, as his letter to Clough indicates, he knew enough about French Socialist thought to recognise the “Fourierist” tendencies in Clough’s poem; and indeed a careful examination of his own fictional response to 1848, the experimental novel Yeast, demonstrates a familiarity with, and even an allegiance to, some of the most radical strands of contemporary Socialism. In looking at Yeast it is important to distinguish between the 1848 version serialised in Fraser’s Magazine and the revised 1851 version.9 This earlier version has never to my knowledge been republished; but in its optimism, ambition and open-endedness, it is a very different novel from the later version. One of its most radically experimental features is that it is a self-consciously provisional book. When Kingsley brought it to a rapid conclusion at the request of the magazine’s editor, he suggested in a letter that he would let it “lie and ferment for a few years” before returning to it (Kingsley, 1877: i 191); as the title of the novel suggests, he saw it very much as a living organism, capable of transforming itself and others. By 1851 Kingsley thought that this process of fermentation was complete, and that he now had a finished product to present the public with. But in finding answers to the urgent personal and social questions addressed by the novel, Kingsley also closed off, as we shall see, a number of its more interesting suggestions and connections, and in particular the frankly Utopian aspiration towards a new and better world which is so prominent a feature of the first version.

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The story concerns a young man of good family, Lancelot Smith, who espouses vaguely radical opinions but lacks a coherent system of belief. The name Lancelot Smith is designed to indicate his emotional and intellectual ties to an idealised world of medieval chivalry, and also his ordinariness or representativeness; he is in this respect an ancestor of the “Winston Smith” of George Orwell’s twentieth-century dystopia. The plot is the usual sequence of melodramatic improbabilities. Smith falls in love with an angelic girl called “Argemone”, but his radical opinions do not impress her family, and when he loses his fortune in the collapse of a bank he is forced to become a manual labourer and banished from her sight. He is, however, reunited with her on her deathbed, and eventually leaves the country in the company of a mysterious prophet who promises to provide him with some insight into the spiritual malaise of the age. This plot, and especially Lancelot’s change in status, provides Kingsley with the opportunity for some stringent social criticism. Lancelot, for instance, interprets the bank’s failure as a judgement on his unproductive way of life: “[No] more pay without work for me”, he states immediately afterwards. “I will earn my bread, or starve” (Kingsley, 1994 [1851]: 141). And the subplot involving Lancelot’s friendship with a sturdy Cornish labourer called Tregarva – like Clough’s Elspie, a mysteriously wise peasant from the Celtic fringes – enables Kingsley to talk about the degradation and poverty of rural life.10 This social criticism is complemented by glimpses of a new and better social order in which differences of rank will be abolished, and all human beings will be able to live happy and fulfilled lives. Part of this vision is straightforwardly “Fourierist”; this, at least, is what Lancelot calls his friend Claude Mellot’s attempt to realise in his art a vision of the world “not as it is, but as it ought to be, and will be, when the vices of this pitiful civilised world are exploded, and sanitary reform, and variety of occupation, and harmonious education, let each man fulfil in body and soul the idea which God embodied in him” (idem, 37). But it also, especially in the 1848 version, uses a more prophetic or apocalyptic language culled from the Bible which looks back to the attempted synthesis of Christianity and Socialism offered by Leroux, and at the same time forward to Kingsley’s own programmatic “Christian Socialism” of the 1850s. The most striking instance of this apocalyptic vocabulary is found in Argemone’s death-bed scene, a scene which Kingsley removed almost completely from the revised version. In the original text, she is transfigured just before her death into a kind of prophetess of the New Jerusalem, anticipating the Comtean priestesses of George Eliot’s fiction:

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Then she grew calm once more. A soft smile crept over her face, as it grew sharper and paler every moment. She drew him faintly to her, and in a low, musical voice, almost chanted, –“Lo! He cometh quickly! You will not see Him, but He will be very near you, my beloved. Work for Him, and be strong! Bless Him that you were born into a blessed time!” “He shall judge the people with judgment, and the poor with righteousness. He shall save the children of the needy, and break in pieces the oppressor. He shall come down like rain on the mown grass; as showers that water the earth. All kings shall fall down before Him; all nations shall serve Him. For He shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper! He shall redeem their lives from deceit and violence: and precious shall their blood be in His sight. There shall be an heap of corn, high on the mountain-tops: And the city shall be green as the grass of the earth.” Thrice she repeated the last verse with intense significance. Her soul seemed struggling with some deep mystery. Lancelot watched her lips as those of an inspired prophetess. “Blessed be His glorious name for ever; and let the whole earth be filled with His glory. The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended.” As well they might, after that vision! “He saw it, Lancelot, and I see it. I have bought the vision with my life-blood, for myself, and for you. Every letter of it will be fulfilled. Beloved! will you not bear your part in the glorious battle? As you help Him, even so will He help you.” Her voice died away, but not her words. They rang on still in Lancelot’s ears, like Aeolian music – say rather, like the harmony of the spheres. New vistas opened before him, of social perfection, more rich and pure than all the Utopian dreams of sages. Old homely words, heard at his nurse’s knee, seemed to leap up into life and body, to explain and make possible his most daring hopes of the future. A centre of harmony for heaven and earth, a name of universal hope, a fountain of universal science, an example of infinite self-sacrifice, revealed themselves to him, as he sat rapt away in his imaginations, even from that death-bed of his beloved! (Kingsley, 1848: 704)

This apocalyptic vision is both “Fourierist” and Christian at the same time, and highlights the intermingling of these two languages in British Utopian Socialism of the period. The reiteration of the Fourierist word “harmony” in the last paragraph suggests that Lancelot’s vision follows Leroux’s in seeing the paradise envisaged by the Psalmist as a concrete reality in this world rather than a vague aspiration for the next. Moreover, Argemone’s version of Psalm 72 does not exactly match the version in either the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. There is a particularly striking divergence in the italicised verse (Kingsley’s italics, not mine): “There shall be an heap of corn, high on the mountain-tops: And the city shall be green as the grass of the earth”. In the Authorised Version, this reads: “There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains; the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon: and they of the city shall flourish like grass of the earth” (Psalms 72: 16). Kingsley substitutes the Prayer Book’s phrase “heap of corn” to imply a world of abundance;11 but his vision of a city “green as the grass of the earth” represents a significant rewriting of the Biblical

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text. In hinting at a world in which cities have been reclaimed or replaced by nature, Kingsley looks forward to the agrarian Socialist Utopia of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, in which London, with all its ugliness, squalor and physical degradation, has been (in the words of Clough’s Philip Hewson) “resumed to Primal Nature and Beauty” (Kingsley, 1994 [1851]: IX, 137). This version of Yeast also, however, illustrates the extent to which Kingsley, like Clough, distances himself from the potentially embarrassing Utopianism of his youthful hero. At this climactic moment of the section cited above, the narrator interjects with a comment – “As well they might, after that vision!” – which acknowledges the response of the sensible, even cynical reader – the average reader (one might say) of Fraser’s. The 1848 text is characterised throughout by this very Carlylean mixture of earnestness and cynicism, and the tonal ambivalence introduced into the narrative by such interjections reflects Kingsley’s divided response to the events of that year. His narrator is aware of his hero’s frequent absurdity but does not completely disown his Utopian aspirations towards a better society. Moreover, the 1848 version of the novel indicates some of the ways in which Kingsley’s unstable Utopianism would decay over the succeeding decade. The anti-urbanism of Argemone’s death-bed speech and the idealisation of the sturdy Cornish peasant Tregarva imply that city life is weakening the race both physically and mentally, and that a return to healthy physical labour on the land is the only way of saving both race and nation. This incipiently eugenicist argument anticipates Kingsley’s later interest in racial language and classification, and more specifically the thinly-disguised anti-semitism of his next novel, Alton Locke (1850).12 It also contains the seeds of that characteristically late-Victorian mystical English nationalism which produced enterprises like Ruskin’s Guild of St. George. In addition, the ending of the 1848 version of Yeast provides another link between disappointed or postponed Utopianism and colonisation already seen in the departure of The Bothie’s hero and heroine for New Zealand. The novel ends with a peroration reminding us that “in this state of society” the characters “will... most probably, remain till their dying day more or less stunted, thwarted, inferior to themselves”, and illustrates this statement in the fate of Tregarva, who “is fast turning into a Chartist lecturer”: He cannot end there; he will take to field preaching. Three years more will most likely find him a Mormonite, ready to live or die for the New Jerusalem, setting off for Nauvoo itself; and finding no perfection there, why should he not push on as missionary to some Red Indian

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tribe, struggle hopelessly against whisky and Hudson’s Bay Company clerks, and sink gradually into a solitary trapper, wandering moonstruck and alone? What hope of fulfilling his capabilities has such a man in these days? (Kingsley, 1848: 710)

Nauvoo Illinois was the site of a Mormon community until 1846; and was, remarkably, the spot chosen by Etienne Cabet and his Icarians for their new community early in 1849 – just three months after Kingsley sent his disappointed idealist there. The failure of the new society to materialise in Europe provides the impetus for Tregarva’s journey to the wilds of Canada, and indeed also for Lancelot’s own search for the more mythical “Atlantic islands” and “Arcadian shepherd Paradises” of his vision. Kingsley seems to have thought about making Yeast a trilogy during the early stages of its composition, with the third and last part being given over to an explicitly Utopian vision of “the society of the future”; but this third part was never written (Kingsley 1877: I, 220). In fact, when he came to revise the novel three years after its original publication he made changes which have the cumulative effect of undermining rather than bolstering its Utopian dimension. These changes indicate the separation of the discourses which had been interwoven up to and during the events of 1848, and in particular a disentangling of Christianity and Socialism which privileged the former over the latter, indeed subsumed the latter into the former. For the Kingsley who was prepared to rewrite Scripture in order to bring it into line with his own apprehension of the kingdom of God on earth, Christianity was a provisional language, a prophecy of the full and harmonious development of the human spirit. For the Kingsley of 1851, however – the Kingsley of the formalised Christian Socialist movement – Christianity in its Protestant form contains the truth, and Socialism is only to be sought insofar as it coincides with this truth. It is this emphasis on dogmatic Christianity which explains, for example, the inclusion in the 1851 version of some tedious anti-Catholic polemics.13 The mysterious prophet-figure, oddly christened “Barnakill”, is now allowed to dominate the final chapter; in place of Lancelot’s earlier perplexity we have an explicitly Christian recommendation of the message of “Jesus Christ – The Man” as the way to salvation. And lastly, and perhaps most revealingly, Tregarva is no longer allowed to trudge off into the wilderness. Instead he becomes Lancelot’s faithful companion and assistant, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote; and their relationship encapsulates the new paternalism of Kingsley’s Christian Socialist movement.

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This drift in the direction of orthodoxy is also apparent in Kingsley’s use of Mackay’s Chartist anthem, both in Yeast and in the novel which appeared between its two versions, Alton Locke. In pointing out the hopeful aspect of the “infinite falsehoods and confusions” of the present, the mysterious Prophet-figure refers to the fact that “[your] very tavern-singer trolls out his belief that “there’s a good time coming”, and the hearts of gamins, as well as millenarians, answer ‘True!’” (Kingsley, 1848: 179). In 1851 this was changed, in a small surrender to respectability, from “tavern singer” to “costermonger”. And by the time of Alton Locke the message of the poem has been explicitly Christianised: Hark to the grand lilt of the “Good Time Coming”! – Song which has cheered ten thousand hearts, which has already taken root that it may live and grow for ever – fitting melody to soothe my dying ears! – Ah! how should there not be a Good Time Coming? – Hope, and trust, and infinite deliverance! – a time such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the mind of man to conceive! – coming surely, soon or late, to those for whom a God did not disdain to die! (Kingsley, 1983: 389)

The “Good Time Coming” has here become the promise of salvation for all Christians, a salvation which hovers uneasily between the individual and the social. In using it as Alton’s death-bed song, Kingsley postpones the promised Utopia to an indefinite future, and indeed to another world. Mackay’s song was useful for both Clough and Kingsley because it sums up some of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the Utopian Socialist movement of the late 1840s. Like The Bothie and Yeast, “The Good Time Coming” is a product of the rather uneasy alliance between middle-class activists and the working-class movement they claimed to represent in the period leading up to 1848; and alongside its message of hope it also contains a message of benign inactivity and acquiescence. Its chorus – “Wait a little longer” – is scarcely incendiary; and if the “reformation” has begun, and is secretly fulfilling itself through the work of “thought”, then there is no need to bother with direct action. Indeed, Mackay’s use of the term “reformation” for this process of moral and social renewal telescopes the Protestant Reformation and the future Utopia in ways which directly anticipate the Christian Socialism of Maurice and Kingsley. The structure of feeling represented by the song is, then, typical of middle-class British radicalism of the 1840s – genuine in its engagement, but always attempting to co-opt and redirect the working-class movement to which it was giving a voice – and this is the reason why both Clough and Kingsley found in it the embodiment of their confused feelings in the aftermath of the defeats and disappointments of 1848.

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Notes 1 In the title of his recent book Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Beecher, 2001). 2 Mackay was a journalist, activist and temperance campaigner; he is best remembered now for his wonderfully eccentric book Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852). 3 The remnants of O’Connorville are now known as “Heronsgate”, an affluent commuter village just off Junction 18 of the M25; it’s difficult to imagine a less likely setting for the earthly paradise. 4 “Popular and National Poetry – France”, Bentley’s Miscellany 3 (1838); see also Littell’s Living Age 27 (Dec 28 1850); “Burns and Beranger”, The Nineteenth Century 7 (1880), p. 464. 5 For a full account of Béranger’s life and career, see Touchard, 1968. 6 “God will reign on the earth when the goal which he envisaged in his theodicy, in creating man in his own image, and in creating, not men, but man, that is to say mankind; when,

I say, that final goal will be reached, by the development of human charity, human activity, human knowledge, that is to say by the development of man, or of men, or of human consciousness. It is certain that this final destination is placed at an infinite and mysterious distance from us; but should it for this reason reign any less in our souls, and is it not moreover obvious that the more we walk towards this goal, the more that heavenly kingdom on earth foreseen by Jesus (which was, in the form in which Christianity has presented it, simply a prophecy) will come into being?” (my translation). This preface is, incidentally, addressed to Pierre-Jean de Béranger. 7 See John Goode’s brilliant analysis of these letters, in Goode, 1995: 1-26. 8 Mrs Kingsley dates a letter referring to The Bothie (published in November 1848) to July of that year; and has Kingsley keeping himself “busy” writing Yeast (published late 1848) in a letter dated November 1849. 9 The original version began

to appear in Fraser’s Magazine for July 1848 as Yeast; Or, the Thoughts, Sayings, and Doings of Lancelot Smith, Gentleman, nr 38, pp.102-115, and runs in successive issues until December. Textual differences between the two versions are examined in Uffelman / Scott, 1976: 111-119. 10 See esp. ch. 13, “The Village Revel”. 11 Kingsley’s version is in fact a little closer to The Book of Common Prayer, which has: “There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills: his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city like grass upon the earth”. 12 In Alton Locke, Jews are blamed for inventing the “sweatshop” system in the tailoring industry which is causing misery and hardship amongst the urban poor. 13 The subplot involving Lancelot’s cousin Luke, who follows John Henry Newman and other members of the Oxford Movement into the Roman Catholic church, is greatly expanded in the 1851 version.

Works Cited

Beecher, Jonathan (2001), Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Bertram, James (ed.) (1966), New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold the Younger, London and Wellington, Oxford University Press.

Beecher, Jonathan / Richard Bienvenu (1971), The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love and Passionate Attraction, Boston, Beacon Press.

The Bible: Authorized King James version with Apocrypha, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997.

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The Book of Common Prayer: and administration of the sacraments and other rites and ceremonies of the church according to the use of the Church of England: together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. Chitty, Susan (1974), The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley, London, Hodder and Stoughton. Clough, Arthur Hugh (1976), The Bothie: The Text of 1848, ed. Patrick Scott, St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press. Goode, John (1995), “1848 and the Strange Disease of Modern Love”, in Charles Swann / Terry Eagleton (eds.) (1995), Collected Essays of John Goode, Keele, Keele University Press, pp.1-26. Hardy, Dennis (1979), Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England, London, Longman. Janowitz, Anne (1998), Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kingsley, Charles (1983), Alton Locke, Oxford, Oxford University Press [1850]. _ _ (1848), Yeast; Or, the Thoughts, Sayings, and Doings of Lancelot Smith, Gentleman Fraser’s Edinburgh Magazine nr 38, July-December. _ _ (1994), Yeast, ed. Julian Wolfreys, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Alan Sutton [1851].

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Kingsley, Mrs. (ed.) (1877), Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his Life, 2 vols. London, Henry King. Leroux, Pierre (1840), De l’humanité, Paris, Perrotin. Mackay, Charles (1852), Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Marx, Karl / Friedrich Engels (1977), Selected Writings, 3 vols., Moscow, Progress Publishers. Mulhauser, F. L. (ed.) (1957), The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, 2 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press. Scott, Patrick (ed.) (1976), “Introduction” to The Bothie: The Text of 1848, St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press. Taylor, Miles (2003), Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819-1869, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Touchard, Jean (1968), La Gloire de Béranger, Paris, Librairie Armand Colin. Uffelman, Larry K. / P. G.Scott (1976), “Kingsley’s Serial Novels: Yeast”, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter nr 9, pp.111-119. Wolfreys, Julian (ed.) (1994), Yeast, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Alan Sutton.

Literature and Propaganda: The Socialist Utopia of Robert Blatchford Anna Vaninskaya | Oxford University, UK

If one were asked to name an influential and best-selling utopia of the late nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) would probably spring to mind, but few people now remember that in Britain the most significant work by far – with a record-breaking two million copies sold – was Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England (1894). If bookstores stocked utopian literature in a separate section, Merrie England would not be likely to find its way there. It would be shelved with the socialist polemical tracts, alongside such forgotten specimens of the Movement as A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884) by H. M. Hyndman and William Morris, which precipitated Blatchford’s conversion to the Cause. Possibly, if our hypothetical bookstore favored a quirkier system of generic classification, the book would end up under the heading of epistolary fiction, because it is, after all, a series of letters written by someone called Nunquam to “John Smith, of Oldham, a hardheaded workman, fond of facts” (Thompson, 1951: 96). A slightly more daring leap of the imagination and we might even slot it next to Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859): Blatchford was an autodidact who achieved success by his own industry, and the work places a heavy emphasis on self-reliance1 and selfimprovement,2 helpfully providing lists of books at the end of every chapter that the diligent reader would do well to consult.

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This taxonomical exercise could be continued indefinitely, but there is no need to belabor a point that has become virtually commonplace. Generic boundaries are indeed porous and shifting, and the number of possible classifications of a text like Merrie England, which partakes of discourses ranging from the social documentary and the government report to the parable and the sermon, is understandably large. But behind this variety one can still discern the ultimate identity – in function and technique – of utopia and propaganda. Both are instrumental genres: their success is measured by the degree of their effect upon the intended audience, by their ability to convince, persuade, and convert. Both attempt to achieve this end by presenting dichotomies: painting the status quo black and their particular favored alternative white. Of course, the closer utopia approaches to this minimal definition, the lower its literary value is perceived to be. William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891) is often praised precisely because it manages to transcend the supposed limitations of a genre that is liable to degeneration into “mere” propaganda for some idiosyncratic scheme of social reconstruction. But the peculiar virtue of “literariness” is notoriously hard to pin down, and as this examination will show, propaganda has its own possibilities of open-endedness that utopias cannot lay claim to. What is significant is that the symbiosis of the two defines the nature and effect of Blatchford’s book and the wider repercussions of his activities as a journalist and writer, for in Blatchford’s case the generic impinged upon the practical, recreating in life the melding of utopia and propaganda on the page. Before passing to the historical narrative and the comparison of particular texts, however, it is necessary to establish the ideological context of Blatchford’s practice. Repetition was one of Blatchford’s most frequently employed rhetorical devices, and the clearest refrain to emerge from his writings is the necessity of “making socialists” – what may be called the proselytizing impulse. The religious diction is not accidental. Early socialism, according to a number of historians, had many of the characteristics of a religious movement: “In 1900 we got converted to socialism (…) We used that term just as the Methodists did, to express a keen sense of moral and spiritual rebirth”, says one autobiography (apud Samuel, 1980: 47). “Preaching the socialist word”, as Raphael Samuel puts it, was an activity with heavy religious overtones, and one in which utopian millenarian visions played an integral part (idem, 48). Socialist street-corner orators, competing with revivalists and Salvationists for the attention of the working class, resembled nothing so much as missionaries fishing for the souls of the unbelievers (and offering them a choice of sects as well). No examination

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of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century socialist propaganda can consider itself complete until it addresses the issue of religion in this larger sense. It is not sufficient to say that Merrie England was the most successful and influential piece of propaganda produced by the British socialist movement (see Smith, 1978: 17): one must recall the Manchester Guardian’s famous formulation that “for every British convert to socialism made by Karl Marx’s book Kapital there were a hundred made by Merrie England” (apud Marcus, 1982: 91; see also Thompson, 1951: 101). And making converts was indeed Blatchford’s avowed goal throughout his active political life: I think that the best way to realise Socialism is – to make Socialists. I have always maintained that if we can once get the people to understand how much they are wronged we may safely leave the remedy in their own hands. My work is to teach Socialism (…). (Blatchford, 1895a: 197)

And since the best way “to get recruits for the Socialist Army” was to devote all effort to propaganda, in the internal rivalry between educationalist and parliamentary versions of the doctrine Blatchford naturally stood with the educationalists (ibidem). According to Blatchford’s biographer Laurence Thompson, as well as historians like Samuel, the split pitted the adherents of legislative palliation, of the kind pursued by the Independent Labour Party, the Labour Representation Committee, and eventually the Labour Party, against the idealistic believers in the efficacy of “ ‘making socialists’ and preaching the word” (Samuel, 1980: 49). The dichotomy may be summed up as follows: on the one hand were the pragmatic gradualists, interested in securing municipal and parliamentary seats, on the other, the “impractical” propagandists, concerned with social morality rather than short-term expedients for political advancement. But though it is tempting to see this as a reenactment of the earlier conflict between William Morris’s purist vision of wholesale social transformation and the utilitarian methods of his State socialist rivals, the matter was never so clear-cut. Neither Blatchford nor his opponents gave any countenance to the idea of revolution that was central to Morris’s thinking, and Blatchford was not actually averse to the parliamentary process as such. He had on at least one occasion agreed to stand for Parliament himself (see Thompson, 1951: 72-6), and according to Thompson, would probably have approved of the ILP had it declared itself socialist and pursued the goal of educating public opinion without fixating on the political machinery: “Fight elections by all means, but for educational purposes, as evangelists of the New Religion” (Thompson, 1951: 134).

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As has been hinted already, however, no single sect had the monopoly on “religiosity” and its accompanying propagandistic/utopian associations, especially if one takes into account all the possible forms that the interface between socialism and religion could assume. The territory thus opened up is vast and to a large extent still uncharted; at any rate, modern historians have yet to succeed in dispelling the confusion that surrounds the concept of the “religion of socialism”. As employed by Stephen Yeo, it can encompass everything from Labour Churches and Socialist Sunday Schools, to Anglican Christian Socialism and ILP Nonconformism. Certainly the atheist Blatchford had no better claim on “religion” in this traditional sense than his Scottish Covenanter enemy Keir Hardie. The ILP may have been pragmatic, but it also had its origins in Methodism; while the anti-Christian Marxists wrote catechisms3 and were more entitled to be considered “religionists”, as Samuel shows, than their gradualist adversaries (Samuel, 1980: 48). Nor is it a matter of the theological and ritualistic aspects of the movement only: Chris Waters, for example, uses the phrase to designate the general atmosphere of enthusiasm for the Cause experienced by political converts to any of the numerous sects of nascent British socialism. In this respect also there need have been no discernible difference between the followers of Blatchford and the branch members of organizations that had explicit electoral agendas, from the Social Democratic Federation to the ILP. The spirit of utopianism that pervaded the entire movement in its early years has been sufficiently documented, and J. Bruce Glasier, the second chairman of the ILP, was no less of a “Socialist evangelist” than Blatchford himself, as even a brief look at his writings will demonstrate (Thompson, 1951: 162). In fact, even a strictly ordered classification of various socialist responses to Christianity like Vincent Geoghegan’s “Socialism and Christianity in Edwardian Britain: A Utopian Perspective” – one of the only attempts to get rid of the ambiguity and provide a taxonomy of the phenomenon – fails to iron out all the difficulties associated with the concept. E. B. Bax, the SDF historian and philosopher who theorized about the “religion of socialism” in countless articles from the 1880s onward – even entitling his much-reprinted collection of essays The Religion of Socialism: Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism – is classed with the a-religious Marxists, while the “socialism as religion” category is reserved exclusively for the Socialist Sunday School Movement and H. G. Wells. Neither do the authors of another publication to have availed itself of the phrase in question come under this heading: The Religion of Socialism: Two Aspects, a pamphlet written by Katharine and Bruce Glasier and published by Blatchford’s

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Clarion Newspaper Company is not even mentioned in Geoghegan’s article. Although they hailed from the opposite ends of the socialist spectrum, and had virtually incompatible ideological perspectives, Bax and Glasier could sound surprisingly alike when dealing with this issue: “Hence I, for my part, stick to the old word ‘religion’ (…) i.e. the ideal of Socialism, of human solidarity”, wrote Bax (1901: 6); “Socialism, therefore, is religion”, echoed Glasier (1925: 173): And by implying that Socialism has, or is, a religion – what must we be understood to mean? This, and no more: that Socialism gives us our highest ideal of the conduct of life (…) that it is our aim and prophecy, and to it is due the utmost and gladdest devotion of all our gifts and powers. This, the religion of Socialism, is, I hold, an all sufficing religion of itself – so far as concerns the doings and relations of men and women in the visible world. (...) It is important, it seems to me, that its independence of other creeds be clearly recognized (…) that it derives its authority from no other religion (…). (Conway / Glasier, 189?: 10)

Although Geoghegan allows for the possibility of overlap, his definitions may still be too restrictive: certainly excluding the very people who attempted to recast socialism as a religion independent of Christianity from the eponymous category (Blatchford is classified as an “ethical humanist”) does not help to resolve the confusion. My own use of the term depends upon a different analytical breakdown. “The religion of socialism” in the form in which it was applicable to Blatchford had no relation to traditional Christian belief, either of Keir Hardie’s or of Stewart Headlam’s kind.4 Instead, it referred to an ethical-utopian end to be attained by educational-propagandistic means. William Morris phrased it as follows in 1890: Therefore, I say, make Socialists. We Socialists can do nothing else that is useful, and preaching and teaching is not out of date for that purpose, but rather for those who, like myself, do not believe in State Socialism, it is the only rational means of attaining to the New Order of Things. (Morris, 1994: 494)

Blatchford’s entire output was merely a series of (some would say unoriginal) variations on this theme, but he was not the only one to strike up the Morrisian notes of preaching and teaching towards the New Order. Bax and Glasier, each in his own way, speculated about the nature of the New Socialist Ethic,5 and by casting their formulations in religious terms anticipated the rhetoric of the Socialist Sunday School Council. The Council’s Aims, Objects and Organisation document affirmed that “Socialism is essentially a religion” which, denying the

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afterlife, focuses on the “Kingdom of Love and Happiness to be set up here on this earth, based on just or righteous social economic conditions” (apud Geoghegan, 1999: 47-8). Glasier observed the distinction as well: socialism is “not that part of religion that relates to our beliefs concerning God, immortality … but that part … that concerns the right state of our present lives, the right state of our relation to our fellows” (Glasier, 1925: 173). “Socialism has solely to do with the weal of society upon this planet” (Conway / Glasier, 189?: 10); “it is time we were setting ourselves to the realization of our fullest hopes of life upon earth” (idem, 16). In “Socialism and Religion” Bax also rejected the “other world”, claiming that socialism “brings back religion from heaven to earth” and looks “to another and higher social life in this world. It is in the hope and the struggle for this higher social life (…) that the Socialist finds his ideal, his religion. (…) the reconstruction of society in the interest of all” (Bax, 1886: 52). And to achieve the Kingdom of Socialism on earth it was necessary to make socialists by teaching the new creed. This was the fundamental article of belief, though beyond it tactical paths diverged: Marxists like Bax and Morris cleaving to the idea of revolutionary transformation, labourites like Glasier pinning their hopes on Parliament, “Socialist pressm[e]n” like Blatchford expecting that voters, once educated in socialism, would automatically get the needed reforms from the existing parties by sheer pressure of public opinion, or simply bring to power a new socialist party of their own (apud Thompson, 1951: 162, 194, 164). But whatever their doctrinal differences, the object of all believers in the “religion of socialism” was succinctly expressed by William Morris in the mid 1880s: “The work that lies before us at present is to make Socialists” (Morris, 1994: 100); “our business is more than ever Education” (idem, 125). And whether they reacted against Morris, like Wells, or considered him a mentor, like Blatchford and Glasier, these words remained a guiding principle. In “The Faults of the Fabian” (1906) Wells wrote: “Make Socialists and you will achieve Socialism” (apud Partington, 2003: 37), and in Socialism and the Family: “Socialism is still essentially education (…) a profound change in the circle of human thought and motive” (Wells, 1906: 7). And his “Unless you can change men’s minds you cannot effect Socialism, and when you have made clear and universal certain broad understandings, Socialism becomes a mere matter of science and devices and applied intelligence” (apud Partington, 2003: 39) is not that different from Blatchford’s “Give us a Socialistic people, and Socialism will accomplish itself” (Blatchford, 1895a: 198). According to John Partington, Wells believed in a socialist education for a socialist consciousness, and

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his placement by Geoghegan in the “socialism as religion” category is not as incongruous as it may seem, for the object of his devotion was “the collective spirit of an evolving humanity” (Geoghegan, 1999: 49). Socialism “is to me (…) the form and substance of my ideal life, and all the religion I possess” were words that prominent activists in any one of the socialist factions at the turn of the century could have subscribed to (Wells, 1906: 5). But despite this community of feeling – which allowed anti-Marxists like Glasier to admire Morris the revolutionary without a hint of reservation – fault lines opened up as soon as it came to the issue of methods: for Blatchford propaganda was the be-all and end-all; for most of his opponents it was one necessary but insufficient factor. Blatchford himself summarized the conflict in a pamphlet entitled “Real Socialism” (1898), which later provided the basis for several chapters of Britain for the British (1902), the follow-up to Merrie England: “Some (…) hope to bring Socialism to pass by means of a reformed Parliament; others hope to bring it to pass by means of a newer, wiser, and juster public opinion” (Blatchford, 1902: 75; Blatchford, 1898: 89). Although revolutionary Marxism is left entirely out of the account, there is no doubt about which side Blatchford is on: Let us once get the people, or a big majority of the people, to understand Socialism, to believe in Socialism, and to work for Socialism, and the real revolution is accomplished (…) the first thing to be done is to educate them (…) our method is persuasion. (idem, 76, 90)

And Blatchford threw all his energies into preaching the political gospel: “I hold that the chief work for Socialists is the work of propaganda (…) Our great hope is to bring the Socialist ideal before the people” (Thompson, 1951: 190). In other words, propaganda is assumed to fulfill the traditional function of utopia: the presentation of an ideal. And the corollary applies as well: when Blatchford finally came to write a proper utopia – 1907’s The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance – he took it for granted that the genre was a means of “political exposition”, and a way to “show what might be done (…) by a united and cultured English people” (Blatchford, 1907: xiii-xiv). In Blatchford’s hands both utopia and propaganda – by providing a moral and economic critique of capitalist society as well as a picture of the desired alternative – would serve the same purpose: the conversion of the reader to socialism, to quote Britain for the British.6 The method of that book was applicable to all of Blatchford’s output, and when he asserted in the Author’s Note

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to The Sorcery Shop that “to indicate the possibilities of communal efforts (…) and to meet the common arguments brought against Socialism (…) was the purpose I had in view” (idem, xiv), he was merely repeating the prefatory material of the earlier tract. That was not all he chose to repeat. Large parts of The Sorcery Shop were taken verbatim from Merrie England and Britain for the British, even to the extent that statistics, quotes, and documentary examples first used in 1893 were allowed to stand unchanged fourteen years later, despite the detrimental effect their outdatedness may be supposed to have had on the efficacy of the argument. The utopia, like Merrie England, was first serialized in Blatchford’s newspaper The Clarion (of which more later), and the pressure of competing commitments may go a long way towards explaining his recurrent practice of recycling entire passages, if not chapters, from article to pamphlet to book. But generic identity entails something more than the mere repetition of arguments and supporting evidence. The fundamental structuring principle of temporal utopias:7 the contrast of present misery with future happiness was also the device employed most frequently in the propaganda of the religion of socialism. Blatchford’s short story “The Rioters”, printed in the 1897 collection of Impressionist Sketches, provides a vivid illustration. “A poorly paid, middleaged clerk in a Lancashire cotton factory” dreams of a great strike: his starving family, the murder of a grocer, the soldiers shooting at a mob of colliers, the narrator’s wife – a “demoniacal red-handed figure of revenge” – and finally his suicide, are all described with a naturalistic intensity that borders on the phantasmagoric (Blatchford, 1897: 55, 63). But the winter scene, with its background of blazing buildings and dead bodies gives place suddenly and without explanation to a May day paradise, a bowdlerized Morrisian Merrie England of dancing “craftsmen and artists” (idem, 67), beautiful maids and bronzed men inhabiting a garden-city Wigan. Two pictures are simply juxtaposed, no means of transition from the one to the other are ever specified, except the vague indication by the utopian alter-ego of the narrator’s wife that – echoing News From Nowhere – it “shall all be true for others because that you have dreamed it” (idem, 68). Blatchford was adept at juxtapositions of this sort. In The Sorcery Shop the technique of alternation between the positive and the negative poles becomes wearyingly mechanical: here is how women are treated under capitalism, and here is their position under socialism; this is how workers use their leisure in utopia, and this is what they must resort to for amusement in reality; consider the demographic data and the crime, housing, and disease statistics for London

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and Glasgow and then cast your eyes over the “blossoming woods” and “flowery meadows” of the new England (Blatchford, 1907: 188); admire the health and beauty of the dancers in the elegant ballroom of socialist Manchester, and gaze in disgust at the drunken habitues of the dingy and vulgar dancehall in the Manchester of the present (idem, chapter 8). The same oscillation may be observed even at the rhetorical level – in the wizard guide’s constant invitations to his guests to “compare the Socialist ideal” with the “modern British fact” (idem, 179): “And now, gentlemen, let us turn our attention to our England” (idem, 102) – so that the book becomes merely an extended elaboration of two opposing statements: “With these people, in this new England, life itself is beautiful. With us life is sordid, ugly, and monotonous” (idem, 104). But this, of course, was also the entire thrust of the propaganda: “to convince” the reader, as Blatchford wrote in Britain for the British, “that the present system – political, industrial, and social – is bad (…) and to prove to him that Socialism is the only true remedy” (Blatchford, 1902: 2). With that purpose in mind, the utopia no more than the propaganda needed to provide any account of the actual process by which the transition to socialism would be effected: whether by Fabian permeation, winning byelections with the ILP, or fomenting the class struggle with Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. “The establishment and organisation of a Socialistic State are the two branches of the work to which I have given least attention”, Blatchford confessed in Merrie England (Blatchford, 1895a: 104), though he also made it clear that personally he was against revolution, and it was widely known that he had quarreled both with Shaw and the leadership of the ILP. All that was necessary, he maintained, was to make socialists and to wait for Evolution to bring about the inevitable millennium; the single most important duty was proselytizing the socialist gospel. To be fair, Blatchford did have a more practical side. He tried, though unsuccessfully, to bring together the trades unions, the ILP, and the various socialist societies into a single socialist party; he always cited Fabian gas and water municipal programs as prototypes of viable collectivism; and he concluded Merrie England and Britain for the British by calling on his readers to become activists, join socialist societies, and elect Labour representatives (idem, 200-1). Nevertheless, as he said in a Christmas 1895 editorial for The Clarion, “The greatest and most persistent (…) Worker on our side is Time. Though we lose an election here, though we get a set-back there, though a dozen gallant champions die, Time silently, steadfastly, irresistibly pushes on towards the cure of ills unendurable” (Blatchford, 1895b: 409).

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To a certain extent, however, it was not even necessary to wait on Time to do its job. Utopia could be had in the here and now, and experience of life under socialism was available to all converts: “Their eyes”, said John Trevor, founder of the Labour Church, “shine with the gladness of a new birth” (Thompson, 1951: 101). For Blatchford, to his contemporaries, was not so much the author of Merrie England, as the leading light of The Clarion newspaper; and The Clarion was much more than the socialist newspaper with the largest circulation in the years prior to World War I. It was the center of a movement, a state of mind, and a way of life for its readers: the Clarion Fellowship��������������� – ������������ “an association for social intercourse” – brought them together (idem, 159); the various Clarion clubs provided a framework for their activities, political and recreational. It was, as his biographer put it, “what Blatchford meant by Socialism” (idem, 160), an alternative socialist culture that, according to Chris Waters in British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, flourished briefly in the interstices of the growing commercial leisure industry. There were Clarion Vocal Unions and socialist choirs performing songs from the Clarion Songbook, National Cycling Clubs, Field Clubs and Clarion Ramblers, Dramatic Societies, Handicraft Guilds, Camera and Swimming Clubs, Clarion Clubhouses and summer camps for cooperative holidays, Clarion Scouts who did propaganda work and were in part responsible for the huge sales of Merrie England, and the Clarion Propaganda Vans that traveled across the country spreading the message, and were immortalized in a memorable episode of Robert Tressell’s classic The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The purpose of these various organizations was to provide fellowship for those who shared in the socialist faith, to further the Cause, and to offer a foretaste of life under socialism, an experience of communal participation, comradeship, and new forms of association for all enthusiastic Clarionettes (see Waters, 1990: 189). The National Clarion Cycling Club was perhaps the model of all such groups. Its motto: “Fellowship is Life, Lack of Fellowship is Death”, was taken from William Morris’s socialist romance A Dream of John Ball; its letterhead was designed by the socialist artist Walter Crane; its mission was “mutual aid, good fellowship and the propagation of the principles of Socialism”, and, more pragmatically, the dissemination of the newspaper after which it was named (Pye, 1995: 26). The Club’s founder once defined the Clarion Cyclist as “a Socialist utilising his cycle for the combined purposes of pleasure and propaganda”, and though these two purposes were often at odds, and the cycling societies eventually went the way of the vocal unions and the handicraft guilds by becoming es-

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sentially apolitical bodies, in the beginning, at least, it was “The Clarion [which] had made Socialists of us; it was the Clarion which had brought us together” (idem, 10). So Blatchford’s propaganda fostered a short-lived socialist utopia in the midst of capitalist society, in which clerks, skilled workers, and sympathetic members of the middle class could come together to enjoy their leisure in each others’ company and to engage in further propaganda activities, distributing tracts and leaflets, pasting stickers, and addressing public meetings. The circle was complete: if the Clarion cyclists were indeed the “travelling prophets of a new era”, as Blatchford called them (idem, 32), and if it was “the aim of Socialist missionaries in the Clarion movement to awaken workers to the ideal of a new life”, as one reader of the Clarion Scouts’ monthly journal phrased it, then utopia and propaganda were linked in practice into one indissoluble whole (idem, 31). Such an ideal state of affairs did not last long however, if indeed it had ever existed outside the glowing memoirs of its participants. The decline of the religion of socialism, according to Chris Waters, could have been due to a variety of factors: the triumph of a narrow political labourism at the expense of the vision and rhetoric of educationalism, the erosion of the autodidact culture that provided the social base for the movement, the exclusiveness of socialist club life exacerbated by the rise of the commercial leisure industry, and, finally, disillusionment on the part of the leaders who, like Blatchford, lost faith in the capacities of the working class (Waters, 1990: 174-9). The evolution of Blatchford’s views is telling: already in Merrie England he let show his exasperation with the intended audience: “Is there any logic in you, John Smith? Is there any perception in you? Is there any sense in you?” (Blatchford, 1895a: 200). To his friend and Clarion cofounder Alexander Thompson he wrote: “Are these creatures worth fighting for; are they fit to fight alongside of? By God, Alec, I feel ashamed. I do. I feel degraded. We cannot win battles with such a rabble rout” (apud Thompson, 1951: 137). And he did not feel obliged to hide his doubts from the Clarion readership: “I am beginning to think the British working man just a little bit more stupid than I had imagined” (ibidem). In 1900 the newspaper carried the following words: “I have now come to the belief that the great mass of workers are too apathetic and selfish to be moved” (apud Waters, 1990: 179); and in 1910 he asked: “Are the people sufficiently educated and intelligent to desire Socialism?” (ibidem). It seemed that the real-life John Smith of Oldham, to whom Blatchford strove to impart his wisdom, was not as easily convinced by “the hardest of hard facts, and the coldest of cold reason” as he should have been (Blatchford, 1895a: 9).

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But if the responses of the real-life John Smiths did not always yield to the persuasion of propagandistic preachers, utopia, as a literary genre, not only allowed the satisfaction of the expository urge, but provided a fictional audience that could be molded and controlled by the author. The socialist utopia, like the socialist tract, was essentially a question and answer session, but whereas in utopia the authority figure was the undisputed fountain of truth, and struggle as the unenlightened guest might, he had to yield in the end to the superior reason of his guide, in the tract such an outcome was by no means guaranteed. The reader may have been present in the text in the form of an addressee, like John Smith, but his agreement could not be assured by a simple narrative dictat, the author could not dispense his advanced brand of knowledge unchallenged: he had to supplicate and leave the audience to decide for itself. Blatchford was quite conscious of this limitation: When I began these letters, Mr. Smith, I promised to put the case for Socialism before you as clearly and as plainly as I could, asking you in return to render a verdict in accordance with the evidence. I have now done the work as well as I could under the circumstances; and I leave the matter in your hands. (idem, 201)

This humble attitude was very much in line with Blatchford’s insistence on democratic, grass-roots action by the workers, and reflected his invariable resistance to party hierarchies and to what he called “Carlyle’s doctrine of heroworship and follow-my-leader” (Thompson, 1951: 135). He often concluded his pieces by saying: “I hope you will be good enough to think about it, for yourselves” (Blatchford, 1898: 101); “So, now then, you other fellows, what are you going to do?” (Blatchford, 1895b: 409); “The Socialist begs you to form a party of your own, and to do your work yourself” (Blatchford, 1895a: 200). The implicit open-endedness of propaganda suited his purposes much better than the generically-imposed authoritarianism of utopia, and it is not surprising that he made his name in the former field of endeavor and regarded the work of propaganda as the most important a socialist could engage in: Hitherto I have devoted my efforts to teaching the principles of Socialism, and to disproving the arguments brought against it (…) But on one point I am quite certain, and that is that the first thing to do is to educate the people in Socialism. Let us once get the people to understand and desire Socialism, and I am sure we may very safely leave them to secure it. The most useful work which Socialists can do at present is the work of education and organisation. (idem, 104-5)

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Propaganda allowed the reader to make up his own mind. But when, after the clearest possible case had been presented, Mr. Smith still continued to vote for Tories and Liberals, Blatchford could only conclude sadly that though “the People [were] neither base nor foolish; they lack[ed] self-reliance” (Thompson, 1951: 135). “Convince the people and never mind the parties” was a good enough strategy in theory, but not always in practice; and where propaganda failed to convince, a utopia which was nothing more than a didactic tract could not hope to succeed (apud Smith, 1978: 17). Just as the two had come together in the creation of an alternative socialist culture around The Clarion, they were eclipsed together with the inevitable fading of the enthusiasm generated by the religion of socialism. Notes 1 “The man who wants his own advantage secured will be wise to attend to it himself” (Blatchford, 1902: 165). 2 “It is necessary not only to improve your conditions but to improve yourselves. Moreover, you must begin with yourselves” (apud

Thompson, 1951: 134). 3 See Bax / Quelch, 1903; and Samuel, 1980: 48. 4 The Rev. Stewart Headlam was the founder of the Anglican Guild of St. Matthew. 5 See Bax’s “The New Ethic” in The Ethics of Socialism (1889). 6 “The purpose of this book

is to convert the reader to Socialism” (Blatchford, 1902: 2). 7 Spatial socialist utopias (and utopian propaganda) only became possible after the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Works Cited Bax, E. B. (1886), The Religion of Socialism: Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism, London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co. _ _ (1889), The Ethics of Socialism, London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co. _ _ (1901), “Religion v. Ethics”, Justice (21 Sept.), p. 6. Bax, E. B. / H. Quelch (1903), A New Catechism of Socialism, London, Twentieth Century Press. Blatchford, Robert (1895a), Merrie England, London, Walter Scott, Ltd. _ _ (1895b), “By the Way”, The Clarion (28 Dec.), p. 409. _ _ (1897), Impressionist Sketches, London, Walter Scott, Ltd. _ _ (1898), “Real Socialism”, in Edmund and Ruth Frow (eds.) (1989), The Politics of Hope:

The Origins of Socialism in Britain 1880-1914, London, Pluto Press, pp. 85-101. _ _ (1902), Britain for the British, London, The Clarion Press. _ _ (1907), The Sorcery Shop: An Impossible Romance, London, The Clarion Press. Conway, Katharine St. John / J. Bruce Glasier (189?), The Religion of Socialism: Two Aspects, London, “Clarion” Newspaper Company Ltd. Geoghegan, Vincent (1999), “Socialism and Christianity in Edwardian Britain: A Utopian Perspective”, Utopian Studies, vol. 10, nr. 2, pp. 40-69. Glasier, J. Bruce (1925), The Meaning of Socialism, London, Independent Labour Party Publication Department [1919].

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Hyndman, H. M. / William Morris (1884), A Summary of the Principles of Socialism, London, Democratic Federation.

Samuel, Raphael (1980), “British Marxist Historian, 1880-1980: Part One”, New Left Review, nr. 120, pp. 21-96.

Marcus, Jane (ed.) (1982), The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-1917, London, Virago.

Smiles, Samuel (1859), Self-Help; With Illustrations of Character and Conduct, London, Murray.

Morris, William (1891), News From Nowhere, London, Reeves & Turner. _ _ (1994), Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883-1890, in Nicholas Salmon (ed.), Bristol, Thoemmes Press.

Smith, David (1978), Socialist Propaganda in the Twentieth Century British Novel, Totowa, Rowman and Littlefield.

Partington, John S. (2003), Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells, Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Pye, Denis (1995), Fellowship is Life: The National Clarion Cycling Club, 1895-1995, Bolton, Clarion Publishing.

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Thompson, Laurence (1951), Robert Blatchford: Portrait of an Englishman, London, Victor Gollancz Ltd. Waters, Chris (1990), British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914, Manchester, Manchester UP. Wells, H. G. (1906), Socialism and the Family, London, A. C. Fifield.

Utopian Gesture in the Cold Climate of Thatcherism: Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Fen Siân Adiseshiah | University of Lincoln, UK

None of Caryl Churchill’s plays are utopias in the traditional sense of the word, the sense that indicates an artistic form that simulates the good place that is at the same time no place. Churchill’s drama, however, shows a persistent alertness to the role of utopia in political struggle as well as its capacity as an escape from, and a way of coping with, individual and collective despair. Her commitment to the potential of human emancipation, often leads to a representation of social activity where individuals employ various forms of non-compliance, disobedience and resistance in the most intransigent and repressive of contexts, as well as more confident displays of solidarity, confrontation and collective uprising. Aspects of utopian theory – such as William Morris’s education of desire, Henri Lefebvre’s “moments of presence”, and feminist (critical) utopian engagements – facilitate the exploration of the interaction between different modes of non-cooperation with, and challenge to, oppressive networks of power. The first section of this paper will consider some of these aspects of utopian theory and the second will open up Churchill’s plays Top Girls and Fen in light of this discussion. Persistent preoccupations in Churchill’s work are the themes of yearning, desire, and choice, or lack of choice. Writing of Morris’s utopianism, Edward Thompson praises his avoidance of blueprinting the future structurally and

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celebrates the tendency of his utopian imagination to denaturalise bourgeois values and foreground an enlightened choice. He emphasises Morris’s aim of representing a different set of ethical considerations in an alternative vision of society. Thompson considers this a distinctive project due to what he calls “its open, speculative, quality, and its detachment of the imagination from the demands of conceptual precision” (Thompson, 1977: 97). He makes reference to Morris’s absence of “precise solutions” in News from Nowhere as well as in his lectures “A Factory as it might be” or “The Society of the Future”. Morris is less concerned with endorsement or rejection of his speculations since the emphasis is on encouraging the imagination to explore alternatives. When engaging with News from Nowhere, Thompson suggests firstly that “our habitual values (the “commonsense” of bourgeois society) are thrown in disarray” and secondly that “we enter into Utopia’s proper and new-found space: the education of desire”. Achieving this elevated state of social progress is impossible without the development of desire. Morris induces people to discover their desires, “to encourage them to want more, to challenge them to want differently, and to envisage a society of the future in which people, freed at last of necessity, might choose between different wants” (ibidem).1 The twentieth century can be characterised by a growth of dystopian art forms and the appropriation of utopia by dominant forms of power with the ideal state of happiness repackaged in the guise of socialist realism in the Stalinist Soviet Union, Aryan mythology in Nazi Germany and the fetishisation of commodity consumption in Western capitalism. In relation to Western commodification of utopian aspiration, Tom Moylan describes utopia as “reduced to the consumption of pleasurable weekends, Christmas dreams, and goods purchased weekly in the pleasure-dome shopping malls of suburbia” (Moylan, 1986: 8). Consumption becomes the panacea for unfulfilled desires, whilst yearning in excess of, or outside of, these consumer-focused requirements is stifled and recoded as socially abnormal. Although dystopia competes more vigorously with utopia as a dominant cultural form in the twentieth century, there is a revival of interest in utopianism, both as an aesthetic mode, and as political practice in the aftermath of the global worker and student uprisings of May 1968. The counter-culture defines itself largely in terms of its immediate transcendence of the dominant culture as well as of mainstream Left culture, this practice located as both an object of desire in itself, and as the most effective political strategy. Coterminous with this is the resurgence of “critical” (often feminist) utopian art.2 Moylan describes the

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critical utopia as responding to “the negation of utopia by the forces of twentieth century history: the subversive imaging of utopian society and the radical negativity of dystopian perception is preserved” but at the same time “the systematising boredom of the traditional utopia and the cooptation of utopia by modern structures is destroyed”. He concludes, “utopian writing in the 1970s was saved by its own destruction and transformation into the “critical utopia’” (Moylan, 1986: 10). Jennifer Burwell, whose study is concerned with feminist utopias, describes critical utopias as including a “dialogic relation between subject and social space” that is “expressed in a structural and ideological permeability that characterises the boundary between utopia and dystopia” wherein “‘dystopian’ moments of dissatisfaction and conflict occur within utopian space, and female protagonists move back and forth between dystopian and utopian social space, both altering and being altered by their social environment” (Burwell, 1997: xv). Burwell views this as a response to the impasse created by the gap between utopian and critical approaches. The utopian, due to its transcendent and escapist tendency, is vulnerable to losing an engaged position from which to undermine the dominant order, and the critical is susceptible to inescapable and repeated implication by the dominant order, which it constantly but inadvertently reinstates as it deconstructs. The popularity of utopian modes for feminist writing can be explained in part by the utopian form’s tendency to privilege non-traditional practices such as the process of re-membering, the projection of fantasy and desire, and the elevation of the imagination, all of which have been associated with the marginalized subject’s struggle to assert herself and communicate within a hostile and exclusive signifying system. Utopianism relates to women’s specific association with domestic and private spaces, isolated from each other and from the public sphere; the utopian elevation of desire and the imagination facilitates what Frigga Haug has argued is an overlooked form of utopian resistance, that of daydreaming (Haug, 1987: 51-66). The flexibility of utopian expression and its offer of a multiplicity of possibilities that help to resist and to transcend antiutopian contexts imbue it with great appeal for a feminist discourse. Lefebvre, a key theorist influencing the radical environmental movement, applies Marx’s theory of alienation to every aspect of life.3 Alienated from our work, our activities, from each other and from ourselves, we barely experience authenticity in life. He develops a “theory of moments” where “moments” of “presence” interrupt the banality of alienated everyday life. “Moments” characterise the profound and abrupt recognition of something or the feeling of per-

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ceiving the signification of something outside of the usual frame of understanding. They are utopian sparks of a broader implication of a phenomenon, that in turn reframes its formulation and repositions our sense of ourselves vis-à-vis our place in the social formation (Lefebvre, 1991). Top Girls, which was written in 1980-82, performed in 1982 and directed by Max Stafford-Clark, is focused on female engagements with power and subjectivity, and is firmly grounded in an inescapable discourse of class politics. It requires an all-female cast; with sixteen female characters played by seven actors in the original production. The all-female productive context gestures towards a feminist utopian practice, locating women at the centre of both production and representation. Unlike several of Churchill’s 1970s plays however, Top Girls was not a collaborative venture, and the sense of collectivity that joint projects tend to produce is perceptibly – and appropriately given the subject matter – lacking. It is also written, performed and set in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s election victory, hence a sense of “degenerative utopia” or “Hobbesian dystopia” saturates the material relations of the play’s production as well as its content. In addition to the economic and political assaults that had begun to take effect in Thatcher’s first term on public and municipal bodies including the National Health Service, Local Government, trade unions and law centres, the rapid intensification of monetarism had also started to affect the economic structure and to a debatable extent, the ideological freedom of theatre. David Edgar argues that these cuts in the arts can be characterised as “steady” and “undramatic economic shrinkage”. But in conjunction with “gentle but consistent political pressure”, they “prised open the cracks sufficiently to let the sap of Thatcherism seep through” (Edgar, 1988: 19). This “economic shrinkage” is responded to sardonically by Stafford-Clark at the Royal Court Theatre who comments in the mid-1980s, “I now run a commercial business that occasionally puts on plays” (apud Peacock, 1999: 50). The critic Frances Gray, regards Top Girls as contingent upon, as well articulating, the dystopian. She comments in relation to Top Girls, as well as with respect to some of Churchill’s other 1980’s plays (Serious Money [1987] and Hot Fudge [1989]): “the focus is dystopian: language is not charged with the potential to embody and achieve a better world but a rigid discourse imposing as well as expressing monetary values” (Gray, 1993: 56). The language in Acts 2 and 3 of Top Girls is characterised by a sense of limitation and restriction, and thus the communication of dissatisfaction with contemporary oppositional dis-

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courses is effectively implied. Act 1 however, as Gray notes, offers a “far more complex” (ibidem) language from historical, literary and mythical women, and it is this Act that complicates what might be a more straightforward application of the deployment of Burwell’s idea of the critical pole in political analysis against a ruthless anti-utopian landscape. Top Girls lacks the aspirational vision and the political confidence that inspires the campaigning force of Churchill’s two 1976 plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Vinegar Tom. It is more self-reflexive in its critique of the lack of an engagement with class oppression within the feminist movement. In this way, it speaks directly to feminists and socialists about the importance of pursuing anticapitalist and feminist goals in tandem. It is not, however, an introspective play and equally addresses a wider audience both in terms of its critique of Thatcherite Britain and the depiction of the strained relationship between two sisters, the “choices” and absence of choices that they contend with, and their relationship with their niece and daughter. Whilst politically more defensive, it nevertheless contains a formidable energy that gestures forward in its sustained and forceful demonstration of the unacceptability of the contemporary moment. It may not offer tangible alternatives, but in its imaging of the absolute intolerability of the status quo, it intimates that a push for change is essential. The first Act complicates what might be a more straightforward and naturalistic rendering of a political and social complex. It is both hyper-realist in its staging of overlapping speech which more naturally reflects dinner party conversation, and fantastically contrived with its hosting of historical, mythical and literary female figures from different historical periods. In effect, the central figure (who is celebrating her promotion to Managing Director of an employment agency) is Marlene’s fantasy of an all-female trans-historical space where female achievement can be appreciated and celebrated. Indeed, this act powerfully connotes a utopian space of femininity with its representation of a genealogy of women resisting their banishment to private spaces and no longer discrete from history. The carnivalesque characterises the undulating movement of the polyphonic exchanges, with heightened moments of carnival release illustrated in such instances as the stage direction’s imperative that “they are quite drunk” and that “they get the giggles” (Churchill, 1982: 73). Another example is the story told by the obedient wife in Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” – Patient Griselda – which is of her husband’s request that she give up her daughter to test her obedience, to which Marlene retorts, “Walter was bonkers” and Dull Gret – a figure fighting devils in hell in a Brueghel painting – exclaims, “bastard” (idem, 77).

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A (feminine) utopian impulse is located to some extent in the desire to travel and escape. Marlene self-confessedly finds it difficult to sit still, and has moved from the Fens to London in order to escape her restrictive environment leaving her daughter, Angie, to be brought up by her sister, Joyce. The Victorian Scottish traveller Isabella Bird comments “I always felt dull when I was stationary” with Lady Nijo (a thirteenth-century Japanese Emperor’s courtesan turned Buddhist nun) concurring, “yes, that’s exactly it. New sights. The shrine by the beach, the moon shining on the sea” (idem, 67). There are also anarchic moments of utopian release in the humorous recognition of the social construction of gender. Isabella recounts: “Rocky Mountain Jim, Mr Nugent, showed me no disrespect. He found it interesting, I think, that I could make scones and also lasso cattle” (idem, 63). The story of Pope Joan (who is thought to have disguised herself as a man and been Pope in the ninth century) describes giving birth, which comically demythologises pregnancy and childbirth as she explains: “I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was getting fatter, but then I was eating more and sitting about, the life of a Pope is quite luxurious”, to which she adds the caveat that she “wasn’t used to having a woman’s body” (idem, 70). These amusing instances indicate a momentary break in the dominance of patriarchal signification and could be likened to Lefebvre’s “moments” of “presence” where a utopian flash of non-alienation is fleetingly experienced. As several critics have observed, however, this act is not an idealised and uncritical celebration of female solidarity. The all-female utopian space is more akin to Burwell’s discussion of critical utopias where dystopian moments occur within the utopian space, and a structural and ideological permeability characterises the boundary between utopia and dystopia. The limitations of the commonality of female subjectivity are gently but explicitly established. There is the frequently commented on “silent waitress” who is a constant visual reminder of a multitude of voiceless working-class women, some of whom labour for middle-class women; the echo of this situation is manifested later in the play in the figure of Marlene’s sister Joyce who cleans for middle-class women in the village. Isabella’s complicity with colonial discourse additionally blunts the romanticism of a trans-historical/cultural/”racial” and classless female solidarity: “I said, Hennie we’ll live here forever and help the natives” (idem, 55). She later claims: “there are some barbaric practices in the east”, to which Nijo responds: “barbaric?”, and the qualifier from Isabella is: “among the lower classes”, with Nijo retorting: “I wouldn’t know” (idem, 60). Griselda similarly remarks in response to Marlene’s criticism of her submissiveness to her husband that she would

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“rather obey the Marquis than a boy from the village”, to which Marlene concurs, “yes, that’s a point” (idem, 75). Hence, the tension effected in the canonisation of a genealogy of extraordinary women is unapologetically suggested within this utopian projection. The historical specificity of each character’s subjective context is expressed and shown to be not easily assimilable to a progressive feminist identity. This Act includes a sophisticated and intricate matrix of paradoxical and contradictory sites of struggle and submission over gender, class, and “racial” identities. It also postures towards a utopian transcendence via the pooling together of uneven historical subjectivities and thus threatens to supersede existing terms of categorisation. It teeters on the brink between utopia and dystopia as it holds in the balance both a productive celebration of feminist space, and an unrepentant critique of the universality of the category “woman”. Elaine Aston reads the complex ending of the scene as a climactic revulsion at the (dystopian) Symbolic Order (Aston, 1995: 47-48). But the sense of deterioration and chaos that the drunkenness, crying and vomiting connote, is also poised against the triumphant speech of Dull Gret, the significance of which is magnified since it is the first time the audience hears her speak more than a few words. The last line of her account of leading the fight against devils in hell is, “oh we give them devils such a beating” (Churchill, 1982: 82). Notwithstanding the tragedy of losing children in the battle, she nevertheless finishes her speech on a victorious note. The battle occurring in a mythical place that is represented in a painting connects again with the “no-place” of utopia, and of art. Hence, the potential pathos induced by the actions of other characters does not necessarily colonise the final interpretative possibilities of the Act, and the audience is left instead with the dynamism of contradictory postulations. Acts 2 and 3 foreground as anti-utopian the relations that construct the everyday spaces of work and home in late capitalist society. The Thatcherite values of Marlene become increasingly evident through a subtle satire on the glorification of individualism, and monetary and managerial “success”, that characterises the performance of the scenes in the employment agency. Comparatively, Joyce’s loyalty to her working-class identity and to the importance of locating class politics as central is represented as politically necessary. However, the absence of a specifically gendered critique within that formation not only underlines the fact that Joyce’s life (like her mother’s and father’s) seems to have been wasted, but also that her political discourse falls short of offering alternatives that might make a difference to a new generation of working-class women, such as her niece/daughter Angie.

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In this sense Top Girls operates predominantly along the lines of the critical mode of political analysis; a muffled anger perceptibly informing the dissatisfaction with the restrictive and anti-utopian terms of contemporaneous political debate, and only checked by the impact of Act One which offers a wider range of interpretive modes. This does not result, however, in surrender to a cynical complicity with the contemporary political moment. Rather it implies that the question of whether Marlene is morally abhorrent for gaining her “independence” at the expense of her sister (or “sisters” generally) is only partially relevant, and that the equally pertinent silent absence that demands consideration is the question of how do both sisters (all “sisters”), as well as their niece/ daughter achieve liberation, independence and freedom. Fen was “written after a workshop in a village in the Fens” (Churchill, 1987: ix) in 1982 and was first performed by Joint Stock and directed by Les Waters at the University of Essex in January 1983. It then opened at the Almeida Theatre in London the following month. Churchill said that it is “a play with more direct quotes of things people said to us than any other I’ve written” and that it is “a play where I have a particularly lively sense of how much it owes to other people” (ibidem). It overlaps in its political preoccupations with the concerns of Top Girls, particularly in its representation of the rural working-class and in its reconstruction of predominantly female relations in the family, workplace and the wider social landscape. It also continues to interweave naturalist representation with the surreal, supernatural and mythical in the form of folklore, the staging of ghosts and the supranormal appearances of Shirley ironing the field, and Nell, “a fully realised Fen tiger”, crossing the stage on stilts (Gray, 1993: 56). It is however, starkly dissimilar to other Churchill plays, and particularly to Top Girls in its political engagement with utopian modes. Whilst its construction of the conditions of the characters’ lives is shrouded in a dour and depressing imagery, the characters in Fen simultaneously embrace utopian expression as a mode of survival and cathartic release, in the context of a dearth of critical discourse. The play’s construction of an unyielding sense of a harsh environment is conveyed more acutely through the repeated representation of poverty and hard manual labour. The physically strenuous, low paid and exploitative work that the women undertake on stage constructs the set of productive relations that largely determines the “choices” available to them. This is reinforced dramaturgically in the first London production wherein the uncomfortable experience of watching, in a middle-class space of leisure, the endemic unhappiness that pervades the community and the backbreaking labour that the women perform,

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is heightened by the deliberate sensual effect of a cold Almeida theatre. Michael Coveney’s review of Fen includes the comment that “the penetrating cold of the fens is appropriately, if uncomfortably, complemented by the temperature in the Almeida’s auditorium” (Coveney, 1983: 113). Rob Ritchie comments: For the first time, the Almeida Theatre, still in the process of refurbishment, hosted the London run. Bare walls, freezing temperatures and a mist that slowly engulfed the auditorium were conditions that would not have suited many plays. It was, in all senses, a chilling evening. (Ritchie, 1987: 27-28)

Hence, in this production, the peculiarly hostile landscape penetrates the play through to the physical conditions of the auditorium. Out of this unforgiving landscape grows a utopian dramatic discourse that takes several forms. Story-telling and the (re)production of oral history passed down generations through the act of re-membering is one such form. A poetic utopianism characterises the somewhat mystical register of communication that the characters at times participate in. May (the mother of the central character Val) tells her grandchildren: “when the light comes down from behind the clouds it comes down like a ladder into the graveyards. And the dead people go up the light into heaven” Churchill, 1983: 158). Non-verbal performance contributes towards utopian signification as illustrated when Val and her lover Frank dance together in scene five “old-fashioned, formal, romantic, happy” (idem, 153), and May sings at the end of the play; the Production Note reads “she stands there as if singing and we hear what she would have liked to sing. So something amazing and beautiful – she wouldn’t sing unless she could sing like that” (idem, 145). A moment of perfection and fulfilled desire is ephemerally signified. Utopian desire is a prevalent expressive mode operating in Fen. It informs the crux of Val’s tragic inability to “choose” between Frank and her children. After Frank kills her in the way that she urges him to, Val’s ghost consoles him with the assurance that she wanted him to kill her, but he replies, “you should have wanted something different” (idem, 189). She did, of course, want something different but it didn’t seem possible. Recalling Moylan’s reference to the branding of desire in excess of commodity fetishism as socially aberrant, Val’s yearning for something different is viewed as subversive in the village, and her mother churlishly taunts her for presuming to want more: “what you after? Happiness? Got it have you?” (idem, 159). May’s challenge is both an attempt to trivialise Val’s desire and a pessimistic acknowledgement that her

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pursuit of happiness is doomed. Val retorts, “don’t start on me. Just because you had nothing” (ibidem). For May, repressing desire and turning away from the pursuit of happiness is a necessary mode of survival; hence her refusal to sing signifies her fear of failing to fulfil her idea of singing; Val says: “my mother wanted to be a singer. That’s why she’d never sing” (idem, 190). The most militant character, Nell, a single woman in her forties, also expresses utopian desire. In response to the young girls Becky, Deb and Shona who are taunting her with being a witch or a hermaphrodite, she counters, “nasty, nasty children. What will you grow up like? Nasty. You should be entirely different. Everything. Everything” (idem, 157). Nell’s implication of the possibility of an alternative to the status quo is a utopian yearning that is grounded in a critical discourse. But her grasp of trade union principles frequently expressed during work, is not matched by her friends and fellow workers, and thus leads to her frustrated but insightful interrogative of “am I crazy? Am I crazy? Am I crazy?” (idem, 150). This is an ironic insight; a kind of Lefebvrian “moment” of “presence” wherein to experience relations objectively, produces a brief and paradoxical flash of insanity at the very moment of non-alienation. Political ambiguity characterises the play’s engagement with the utopian modes of dreaming, folklore culture and the representation of ghosts. For instance, the intervention of the ghost in nineteenth-century rags who challenges the farmer Tewson’s exploitative role is both symbolic of non-traditional forms of village resistance and serves as part of the collective consciousness or political unconscious of the agricultural workers. The physical presence of the ghost from the past on stage destabilises the Enlightenment narrative of progress (as well as rebuffing the hasty retreat from theorising social class in both political and academic circles in the 1980s) through its exposure of the similarities in working conditions of past and present labourers. Whilst this gestures towards a radical critique of existing structures, a possibility remains however, that the subversive potential is prone to evaporation by the practice of fantastical and supranormal activities. Evoking Morris’s emphasis on the need for the education of desire, the critic Ann Wilson speaks of “the community’s powerful mechanisms of regulation, including self-regulation” which include “a failure to imagine life other than the one being lived; the regulation of dissident voices and the repression of historical consciousness”, a repression that results in “violence which pervades the community and frequently erupts as self-abuse” (Wilson, 1997: 162-163). Wilson certainly counters Gray’s somewhat complacent conclusion that “the physical expression Churchill gives these dreams and desires

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stresses that they are still a real force with the possibility of accomplishing real change” (Gray, 1993: 56). But Wilson, while critically alert to the negative connection between fantasy and self-regulation, nevertheless neglects the more nourishing aspects of this politically ambivalent and contradictory culture. The political ambivalence can be located in the contradictory applications of different utopian strands. Memory, for example, on the one hand is used progressively to keep alive a radical history, but on the other hand it operates as a conservative mechanism that promotes the status quo. Shirley’s husband Geoffrey states, “we had terrible times. If I had cracked tomatoes for my tea I thought I was lucky. So why shouldn’t you have terrible times?” (idem, 170). Although this is articulated by one of the overtly reactionary characters, it resonates in others such as May and Shirley, and competes against the more subversive discourses of Val’s grandmother Ivy, Nell and the ghost. The characters dream and imagine through the media of songs and stories but this is also a prominent source of tension in the village. May’s desire not to desire is the circular and paradoxical force that bubbles under the surface and erupts at the climax of the play with the uncontrollable spilling over of emotion. Fen dramatises utopian modes within a grim landscape and in this sense challenges the conventional construct of the countryside as an idyllic panacea to the city. Churchill describes Fen in the following terms: It’s a complicated world … incredibly remote and backward in some ways – in the way the workers are very badly paid and yet still feel loyal to the farmers, at the same time it’s entirely of the present, because the land they’re loyal to is owned by multinational corporations. The English have an idea that the real England is the countryside, and that it’s a beautiful retreat, completely separate from the corrupt values of people living in cities … But it’s a pastoral fantasy. (apud Fitzsimmons, 1989: 67)

Fen successfully deconstructs the Arcadian utopia projected onto rural areas. However, It also stages a community to a large extent devoid of the critical impulse that so powerfully informs the political signification of Top Girls. The utopian modes located in the play become a means to survive, a network of ruses, in the context of a harsh and unorganised working community, but they also threaten to discourage change via the escapist space they offer. A consciousness of self-worth is achieved in the final scene of the play with fantasies played out in a visionary climax that could be considered a prerequisite to collective action, but the absence, or at least the muffling, of a critical operative mode threatens to diffuse the transformative possibilities that are intimated.

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Notes 1 Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) was revised in 1976 with a new foreword and postscript. The New Left Review article became the basis of the postscript. It is worth noting that Thompson reappraises the first edition as something written “in an embattled mood, from a position of strong political commitment, addressing

an audience in the adult education movement and in the political movements of the Left rather than a more academic public” (Thompson, 1976: ix-x). The postscript to the revised edition functions, in part, as Thompson’s story of rehabilitation from what he sees as an orthodox Marxism, or an entrenched location within the Communist Party, to a more flexible and open

post-Communist Party engagement with Marxism and utopianism. 2 See Le Guin, 1996; Russ, 1985; Piercy, 1979; and Gearhart, 1988. 3 Lefebvre draws on Marx’s theory of alienation but uses it in spatial terms and emphasises displacement and distance.

Works Cited Aston, Elaine (1995), An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre, London, Routledge. Burwell, Jennifer (1997), Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation, London, Minnesota UP. Churchill, Caryl (1982), Top Girls, in Caryl Churchill (1987), Caryl Churchill Plays: 2, London, Methuen, pp. 51-141. _ _ (1983), Fen, in Caryl Churchill (1987), Caryl Churchill Plays: 2, London, Methuen, pp. 143-192. _ _ (1987), Caryl Churchill Plays: 2, London, Methuen. Coveney, Michael (1983), Financial Times, 17 February 1983, reprinted in London Theatre Record, vol. 3, nr. 4, 12-25 February 1983, pp. 112-113. Edgar, David (1988), The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times, London, Lawrence and Wishart. Fitzsimmons, Linda (1989), File on Churchill, London, Methuen. Gearhart, Sally Miller (1988), The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, London, Women’s Press [1979]. Gray, Frances (1993), “Mirrors of Utopia: Caryl Churchill and Joint Stock”, in James Acheson (ed.) (1993), British

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and Irish Drama since 1960, London, Macmillan, pp. 47-59. Haug, Frigga (1987), “Daydreams”, New Left Review, 162, March/April 1987, pp. 51-66. Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell. Le Guin, Ursula (1996), The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, London, Harper Collins [1974]. Moylan, Tom (1986), Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, London, Methuen. Peacock, D. Keith (1999), Thatcher’s Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties, London, Greenwood Press. Piercy, Marge (1979), Woman on the Edge of Time, London, Women’s Press [1976]. Ritchie, Rob (ed.) (1987), The Joint Stock Book: The Making of a Theatre Collective, London, Methuen. Russ, Joanna (1985), The Female Man, London, Women’s Press [1975]. Thompson, Edward (1955), William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, London, Lawrence & Wishart. _ _ (1977), “Romanticism, Moralism and

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Utopianism: the Case of William Morris”, New Left Review, 99, September/October 1977, pp. 83-111. Wilson, Ann (1997), “Hauntings: Ghosts and the Limits of Realism in Cloud Nine and Fen by Caryl Churchill”, in Nicole Boireau (ed.) (1997), Drama on Drama: Dimensions of Theatricality on the Contemporary British Stage, London, Macmillan, pp. 152-167.

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The Dynamics of Space in 20th Century Utopian/Dystopian Fiction Hélène Greven-Borde | Stendhal Grenoble University, France

The graphic artist rearranges natural space by privileging a number of interrelations and creating a network of elements offered to the modern viewer’s interpretation; a continuous picture may thus emerge from the otherwise fragmented perception of objects. In a similar fashion, representations of utopia emerge from a spatial set up inspired by, and inspiring, a specific world vision. As our interpretations of space are learned, and influenced by culture in a large sense, a study of the literary utopia and its subgenres calls for analysis of the interference and association of cultural modes within the “picture” of an alternative world. Focusing on a few texts chosen within a largely British corpus that reveals the evolution of the genre from tradition to the eve of postmodernism, the present essay focuses on the representation of urban space and its surrounding areas. Its dynamic relation to the structure and imagery of the utopian and dystopian tale will draw attention to the dichotomies of chaos and order which have inspired strategies of totalization, fragmentation, and transgression from the models of classic utopian realism. 1. Environment and anti-environment: power and constraints of the spatial construct We know that the author’s approach to the other world or system can work “top down”, as the presentation of the rationalized institutions imposed on a com-

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munity, and “bottom up”, as an illustration of individual characters’ reactions to sociocultural stimuli; in both cases utopian narratives can be seen as interpretations of this world and that other world (both being figments of the author’s and the reader’s imagination) which are each other’s anti-environments. Difference between the historic world and the fabled land of desire must be perceived in terms of wishful social thinking (which author and reader may or may not consider legitimate and rational1) and in terms of non rational, idiosyncratic – but culturally dated – fantasies of alternative geographical and human environments. The classic device of the voyage of discovery, inspired from myths of initiation, Renaissance accounts of travels over the seas or reports on distant civilisations and exotic lands, was adopted by Thomas More in the 16th century and developed by many authors through time and well into the 20th century. The corpus of over 200 works of utopian and dystopian fiction (published between 1918 and 1970) which informed my earlier study of the genre and its subgenres2 testifies to the relevance of the journey through, or over, land sea and air, prior to the discovery of an isolated island or secluded valley, of some underground locus, remote planet or parallel world. Inhabited places are described in my British corpus either as small towns (mostly in works written before World War II) or, in later fiction, as large clusters of highrise buildings; in a few communities of the remote future, villages may symbolize a return to the feudal clan. The large urban areas imagined from the fifties onward are mainly related to dystopian visions which the reader understands as reflections of the contemporary evolution towards the disruptive megacity. Representations of these alternative worlds extensively rely on spatial imagery, either by means of detailed descriptions of the imaginary locus or as discrete complements to the human experience on which the tale is focused. The vision of space, in anthropocentric utopia/dystopia, is a product of ethics, ideology (and politics) as well as aesthetics, referring to the Western cultural and philosophical background. The inhabited regions of utopia can be perceived in terms of transgression or escape (from objective reality) inspired by disagreement with the Western model and dependent on a desire to make proposals for an improved system. The fact of illustrating this transgression by establishing physical or temporal distance between the here-and-now and the there-andthen, once it no longer serves the purpose of protecting an author from censorship or retaliation, can allow for an escape into the pleasurable sphere of a better world, as counterbalanced by the assessment of a disappointing present or the nightmarish contemplation of a frightening future. The comparisons gen-

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erated by the genre’s reliance on spatiotemporal (and other) dichotomies help the reader to identify the conscious and unconscious norms that rule daily lives, feed mankind’s resistance to change or yearning for experimentation. Hence that feeling of estrangement frequently considered resting on an author’s ability to “make the familiar strange”. Darko Suvin regards estrangement as “a cognitive and creative attitude” which, “in SF has grown into the formal framework of the genre”.3 Suvin refers to Bertold Brecht’s comment on this term translated from the Russian Formalists: “a representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (Suvin, 1979: 6, 7).4 When applied to spatial dynamics, estrangement as process is to produce effects which, derived from the various meanings of the term, extend from denotation to connotation. In violation of the alienation effect mentioned above, estrangement can suggest positive or negative associations as potential signs of adherence or rejection common to much mainstream fiction, and basic to the didactic utopian genre. Complementary to this, estrangement from denoting alienation, antagonization, disaffection, separation, division, pertains to the character’s behaviour in negative utopias and critical utopias, while also applying to eutopia in a reverse way, when the visitor and his host express feelings of estrangement from the historic world. Estrangement then results from a combination of responses generating – or generated by – the imaginary environment. But let us again contend that this feeling, whatever its origin, is largely related to the reader’s personal and instinctive approach to, or perception of, space which Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Durand extensively analysed long after Schopenhauer had claimed in the opening paragraph of Die Welt (1819): Alles, was für die Erkenntnis da ist, also die ganze Welt, ist nur Objekt in Beziehung auf das Subjekt, Anschauung des Anschauenden, mit einem Wort, Vorstellung. (apud Lalande, 1968: 702) [Everything that stands for knowledge, everything, the whole world too, is but object in relation to subject, vision by the seeing subject, in other words, representation. – my translation]

The Western humanist-liberal tradition has long stressed the power of the seeing subject over the inanimate object but perceptions of the latter can serve various ends, and modes of representation vary according to the author’s sociocultural background and aesthetic purpose. Darko Suvin differentiates what he calls naturalistic fiction – where authors endeavour “faithfully to reproduce empirical textures and surfaces vouched for by human sense and common

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sense” – from estranged fiction where an endeavour is made “to illuminate such relations by creating a radically or significantly different formal framework” (Suvin, 1979: 18). Within the former category, the constraints formerly related to classical realism remain basic to many utopian narratives, whose rational claim to verisimilitude may nevertheless be at odds with the author’s desire to rouse astonishment. So, while the feeling of estrangement is posited as a structural necessity, the traditional monological narrative can appeal to the resources of a “significantly different formal framework” by simply suggesting a process of separation / transition / incorporation5 illustrated through static and dynamic episodes: the traveller leaves the historic world, goes on a journey, discovers an unknown land and learns about the new world, then may or may not travel back home to tell his tale. Inspired by the paradigm of initiation, the – culturally familiar – allegorical sequence of events points at the complementarity of empirical observation, rational discourse and symbolic imagery. It may thus generate perceptions, evaluation or commitment within or outside the world of fiction, while supporting the duality of chaos and order central to the Western debate on civilization. 2. Perceiving the new environment: the rationalization of utopian space From doubt to certainty This structural framework is explicitly represented in much classic utopian fiction concerned with providing a credible justification for puzzling surroundings and events. Thus in H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923) the characters do not agree that they have left the “real” world until experimentation provides visual proof of the “move” from the English environment: Are we to judge by appearances or are we to judge by the direct continuity of our experience? The Maidenhead Road led to this, was in continuity with this, and therefore I hold that this is the Maidenhead Road. (Wells, 1923: 18)

A well-constructed argumentation supported by a sound philosophical tradition can help towards rationalizing the characters’ resistance to estrangement, despite their having already admired the strange new world: The road itself, instead of being the packed together pebbles and dirt smeared with tar, with a surface of grit, dust, and animal excrement, of a normal English high road, was apparently

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made of glass, clear in places as stillwater and in places milky or opalescent, shot with streaks of soft colour or glittering richly with clouds of embedded golden flakes. It was perhaps ten or fifteen yards wide. (idem,16)

The reader may perceive the puzzling contrast between the two worlds by studying the stylistic approach that reflects the process of separation / transition / incorporation mentioned above. The reference to the familiar Maidenhead Road had created expectations gradually destroyed by the perceptions of a high road whose characteristics question the conventional wisdom of the time. The long chaotic interpolated clause comprising an unusual enumeration of unexpected details conjures up a negative assessment of the old world while delaying information on the new. Then, in sharp contrast with the first two lines of the text, the description of the strange road surface relies on fluid syntax and luminous imagery to suggest an impression of otherworldly harmony. The final statement restores verisimilitude by reverting to the safety of arithmetics and testifying that this intriguing place lends itself to empirical observation. The perfect sphere A. C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956) testifies to the tradition that made urban discovery the prominent purpose of utopian narratives illustrating a new, totalizing worldview. The vision of urban space and its environment was initially revealed through the central figure of the traveller supported by an official guide a device that helped bridge the gap between ancient myth, Virgil’s Orpheus, Dante’s Inferno and the modern, secular visits to strange lands. In utopia, estrangement would then be related to the novelty of the sociopolitical set-up and would stem from the contemplation or superficial exploration of space, a décor exhibited on stage. Like the European panoramic views painted in Canaletto’s time, the utopian cityscape had – from the 17th into the 20th century – the measured clarity of scientific diagrams or scale models, apparently leaving no room for personal interpretation, and constructed so as to please the eye with a sense of balance and harmony indicative of man’s dreamed mastery over nature and eagerness to turn the unfamiliar into the familiar. But the 17th century dream turned into the 20th century’s nightmare, hence the recontextualization of estrangement: the process of familiarization related to the aesthetic of cognitive mapping (to adopt Fredric Jameson’s phrase, 2003: 51) still inspires a few eutopias (Greven-Borde, 1984: 448-450); yet it is denounced in anti-utopia whenever it inspires architectural design resulting in tightened control of the population and threats to personal freedom. The “top down” (as the phrase

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goes) vision of the orderly utopian space conceived by an élite has led to a concern with “bottom up” reactions against the social stimuli it has engineered. Associated with the dialectic of the familiar vs the unfamiliar, cognitive mapping also relates, in another fashion, to the large spectrum of human experience revealed in terms of the cultural and religious symbols attached to the worldview. Geertz notes that “religious symbols formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain each with the borrowed authority of the other” (2000: 90). A large number of utopian narratives support such an interpretation by relying on spatial representation to suggest that basic congruence, as we shall see below. The first view of Diaspar in A. C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars echoes the ancient vision of the universe as a coherent, self-contained cosmos which has remained, well into our times, the utopian’s answer to threatening chaos. Estrangement stems from an inside vs outside dialectic accounting for the architectural and institutional choices inspired by the worldview. The distinctive features of the scenery contemplated by Alvin, the young man born in Diaspar, then, exist as so many figurative symbols associating aesthetics and ethos: From this central vantage point, Alvin would look clear across the park, above the screening trees, out to the city itself. The nearest buildings were almost two miles away and formed a low belt completely surrounding the park. Beyond them, rank after rank in ascending height, were the towers and terraces that made up the main bulk of the city. They stretched for mile upon mile slowly climbing up the sky, becoming evermore complex and monumentally impressive. (Clarke, 1979: 28)

Alvin then explores the highest reaches of the city and looks down toward the central area: The view was the obverse of the one that Alvin had obtained from the center of the park. He could look down upon the concentric waves of stone and metal as they descended in long sweeps towards the heart of the city. Far away, partly hidden by the intervening towers, he could glimpse the distant fields and trees and the eternally circling river. Further still, the remoter bastions of Diaspar climbed once more towards the sky. (idem, 36)

The twin visions of Diaspar (from its central plain and from its elevated rim) stress the implicit complementarity of objective reality and symbolic interpretation. Sealed into a perfect ovoid (an illustration of Plato’s cosmogony in Timaeus) Diaspar exhibits the beauties of the panoramic and the panoptic vision, and of-

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fers to the onlooker’s gaze the upward/outward as well as the downward/inward views covering the totality of its mapped environment. Within its hollow sphere the vertical towers, reminiscent of church steeples, and the circular river – an engineering feat symbolizing the eternal cycle of life, a metaphor of biological, intellectual and cultural reproduction – offer a vision of inner space dominated by the ramparts protecting the city from the desert. Yet, rather than encouraging a quest for meaning beyond obvious perceptions of reality, figurative symbols here confine the human mind within a closed system of static emblems from which there is no escape except into the hidden, as yet unexplored, heart of the city. The mind-lifting images thus deny transcendence: the upper part of the sphere conceals the natural sky, the towers harbour the conservative, computer-led council and the eternal return illustrated by the circular river mocks the notion of rebirth, potentially leading Diaspar to a slow death (which Alvin, the culture hero from another myth, will refuse by going on a new voyage of discovery and reaching an anti-environment; home of Hilvar the symbolic twin, the garden city of Lys is protected from intrusion by a circle of Alpine peaks). Beyond the rationalizing discourse of the classic utopian fable, symbolic correspondences can be perceived here as stable or shifting spatiocultural landmarks. In The City and the Stars the confrontation between conservative and dynamic impulses is revealed through the experience of the subject’s peaceful rebellion, while the reader’s evolving perception of spatial symbols supports an allegory of initiation and successful appeal to change. Dependent on its wealth of detail and intimations of suspense, estrangement in The City and the Stars arises in response to diverse strategies that contribute to the totalizing effect of utopian space: • Making the familiar strange. Different, yet not strange? A. C. Clarke’s vision of the remote future generates a specific spatial and sociocultural arrangement which correlates a compulsive sense of geometry with a rigid psychological make-up feeding on illusions of permanence and a fear of Time. Contrary to tradition, this utopia-in-transition reveals hidden meanings suggesting both positive and negative responses to Man’s yearning for the higher dimensions of consciousness. However, moved by the utopian dream of the subject’s hopeful control over the object, the author reaches out to the unknown by means of a transparent allegory that makes no appeal to other formal resources, thus remaining close to the utopian models’ reliance on classic form and style. • Allowing for the rational study of the worldview. The exposition of Diaspar’s problems as perceived by the adolescent hero, yet ignored by the bulk of the pop-

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ulation, rests on an all-encompassing rhetoric sustained by the logic of cause and effect. Whether the well-constructed argumentation stimulates the reader’s own analytic vigour or dazzles him into agreement is left to personal appreciation. 3. From order to chaos: the marvellous and the fantastic Acceptance of an alternative norm rests on balanced perceptions of the human environment, while displacement illustrates access to a new world. As fables or quest novels, 20th century utopian/dystopian narratives emphasize strategies of discovery focusing on descriptions of “inside” (the comforting grace of the hidden retreat or the mentally satisfying beauty of the vast urban panorama) and “outside”: the chaotic wilderness generally rouses fear and horror, but it can also reflect romantic fascination with the natural forces that will either protect utopia from alien intrusion, or allow the rebel to escape from the dystopic worldview (Joseph O’Neill, The Land under England, 1935). In keeping with the old myth, the subject’s initiatory voyage through forest, sea, desert or mountain allows the writer to enhance the contrast between man-made order and the unpredictable chaos, at the same time equating discovery with self-discovery. In the classic utopian tale, order – when achieved thanks to urban technological progress as Diaspar celebrates it in The City and the Stars – can be assessed positively, and so can order in Nature as the expression of a diffusely perceived divine arrangement (C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 1938) both being potentially beneficial to man’s progression. This moral standpoint finds an expression in a type of marvellous tale which associates, in utopia and in science-fiction, the human and the supernatural ordering of the universe. In an appeal to the reader’s sense of wonder (Out of the Silent Planet6 and some “lost” worlds like E. Winch’s 1928 The Mountain of Gold) order is revealed through characters who are not agents but exist as impersonations of a collective moral aspiration. The quest for order as image of a better world is clearly related to the +/– dialectic of fables concerned with strange spatial environments remote from our own (on our planet or elsewhere) in the present time or in a distant future. As an allegory of human behaviour, the scenario of progress towards adult awareness, while hinting at possible comparison with the Bildungsroman, does not merely relate to the vision of a self-contained, impeccably constructed world; it also stresses the side-effects of the totalizing human dream by exemplifying the need for individual and collective rebellion against subdued or open

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manifestations of authoritarianism. From the nineteen thirties onwards, British dystopias and critical utopias form an abundant corpus testifying to the turn towards the fantastic, as strange settings and events reveal the dubious nature of the wonderful eutopian panorama. The superficial discovery of the public sphere is now followed by an individual exploration of the space concealed behind the scenes. The turn from the marvellous to the fantastic is aptly sketched in Vincent King’s Light a Last Candle (1969) where the perceptions of the dazzled hero, making his way up to the Fathers’ mountain retreat, may foster a change in the reader’s assessment of the spatial arrangement. Here, realism and symbolism are meant to complement each other and the accumulation of suspension marks reflects the climbers’ panting progression while allowing for the evolution of thought and meaning: Six-sided. The tops like six-sided pyramids. They were transparent… light echoed and reflected in them… there were flashing rainbows and pure colors… it was wonderland. “Aching beauty”, said Cristan. “Who would live but under the light of this place? The words of God carved in the pure crystal of reality… our Fathers gathered order there. The ordering and alteration of crass nature… the ordering of made things… the making of man to conform to happiness […]” There was a path up there, a stairway rather, the steps formed by horizontal crystals. (King, 1969: 125) Altogether it took most of the day to get anywhere near the crest. There was only the one way to go, there were no alternatives… just the one stairway hemmed in by big crystals. We staggered on, half blinded, sweating… confined in those glassy thirty-foot walls. (idem, 126) It was so hot. Hot and somewhat constricted… Even under that great sky it felt constricted. It was neverland. Rainbows and all illusions. Glimpses of landscape… mirages and visions… angular lights and splitting shadows. There was nothing alive up there… no birds… no animals. Sometimes we tried to talk – to make it more bearable… it was the empty chatter of monkeys so mostly we said nothing. I suppose in the end there’s never much to say. (idem, 127)

From the eutopian wonderland to the disturbing neverland, from “pure” to “glassy” crystal, the marvellous “ordering and alteration of crass nature” gives way to perceptions of discomfort and hostility, leading to assessment of ambiguities and meaninglessness. The sacred mountain, with its crystals and pure light – the transparent imagery of truth in religion and utopia alike – is significant as a textual construct informed by myth and folklore, and by its modern intertextual background.7 But in Light a Last Candle the battle with the moun-

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tain turns the initiate into the rebel hero of the Romantics intent on destroying the Fathers’ rule. The fantastic narrative, if we accept here Tzvetan Todorov’s (1970) restrictive concept,8 involves “an unresolved hesitation between the supernatural explanation available in marvellous tales and the natural or psychological explanation offered by tales of the uncanny” leaving the reader with “no consistent explanation for the story’s strange events” (Baldick, 1990: 81). We are here considering the disturbing (and politically significant) break between the rational and the irrational which can, in post-WWII fiction, be revealed by descriptions of natural landscapes as well as by visions of urban space. Chaos is threatening everywhere and affects the stability of the +/– dialectic while the formally positive image of urban coherence is superseded by intimations of totalitarianism or descriptions of urban havoc. With regard to the dynamics of urban space, the ancient figure of the labyrinth is called to mind as the protagonist physically and symbolically loses his way in search of the sense of cognitive mapping mentioned above in relation to the eutopian panorama. Fredric Jameson’s remark in “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” supports my own earlier claim that the fantastic in modern dystopian allegories reflects an ambiguous attitude to the city (manifest in British literature, at least since the 18th century) as well as a fundamental interest in the quest for lost order: In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves (…). Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory. (Jameson, 2003: 51)

The same questions can arise in relation to the sophisticated cityscapes of the future, whose real meanings initially defy the hero’s understanding, then reveal themselves thanks to the author’s focus on latent interpretations. As a consequence, harmony is felt to conceal dangers that contradict the positive images traditionally associated with the inner city. The “urban jungle” can be further devalued by contrast with positive (or at least neutral) assessment of the wilderness: remembering the virtues of a rough path, Louis Charbonneau’s The Sentinel Stars (1963) sees it as an ordeal commanding another vision of freedom. Thus the classic +/- dialectics of space can be inverted, even though the symbolic contrast between light and darkness is preserved: the rebel’s journey through the night, or through the dark recesses of an underground chaos

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frequently precedes the discovery of natural light – in E. M. Forster’s pioneer story of The Machine Stops (1909), as in Jon Hartridge’s Earthjacket (1970) and A. Alban’s Catharsis Central (1968) – and safeguards the rationality of dystopian fables illustrating the recovery of the central character’s perceptiveness after confrontation with an hostile environment. The dystopian scenario, especially when staged in a near future that requires new modes of distanciation, relies – so as to express the character’s estrangement from his community – on the unresolved ambiguities inherent in the human being, in the spatial environment and in the system that contributes to shaping it. J. B. Baronian, referring to Kafka and Borges in Un Nouveau Fantastique (1977) remarks on the specificity of the fantastic in the politically troubled 20th century: Ce fantastique-là, au rebours de celui qui ne vise qu’à atteindre l’effet panique et qui somme toute cherche principalement, sinon exclusivement, à créer une surprise (…), ce fantastiquelà répond bien, semble-t-il, à l’état de crise psychologique perpétuelle dans lequel est englué l’homme d’aujourd’hui (…). C’est dire qu’il ne peut jamais être (…) un objet de jeu. (Baronian, 1977: 26) [Contrary to the fantastic that aims at rousing panic and mainly, if not exclusively, endeavours to create a surprise (…) this fantastic appropriately responds, it seems, to the endless state of psychological crisis in which today’s individual is engulfed (…) so it can never be (…) there for play. – my translation]

4. Inner vs outer space: the self as “other” Allegory as structural framework for modern rebellion against a dystopic system can easily lend itself to visions of distant lands or remote future times, when estrangement arises from descriptions of an intrinsically different environment. But the tale of the near future cannot so freely rely on altering ordinary details almost out of recognition, although passages from The City and the Stars (in a remote, undated future) and A Very Private Life (Michael Frayn’s 1968 anticipation of a time close to ours) both testify to the possibility of “making the familiar strange” and requalifying urban space, even if it results in merely duplicating episodes from the reader’s everyday existence – such as stepping on to the underground railway in The City and the Stars, or coming across a statue during a night stroll in the park (A Very Private Life).9 What concerns us here is to know in what way modern utopian/dystopian encounters with the historical present succeed in escaping incorporation with-

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in the mainstream realist novel, when staged in today’s familiar surroundings thinly disguised as representations of the near future. Can empirical description remain convincing in such a context? Obviously, complex narrative strategies can contribute to transforming reality, but they are not specific to the tale of the near future. Nor are the internal factors that create estrangement through attempts to concentrate on behaviour – rather than spatial environment – even though in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, (1969) the enigma of shifgrethor is convincingly presented as the key to a better understanding of councillor Estraven’s “difference” and partly accounts for the adventure over the glacier range. On the other hand, post-modern science-fiction like Gibson’s Neuromancer deconstructs human behaviour and fragments space without apparent concern with the utopian desire perceived even in the darkest dystopias. Linguistic innovation could be another, more important, matter. In our present age of shifting lexis and syntax it is difficult to consider as more than quaintly attractive the newly coined words, phrases or slogans occasionally ornamenting Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice (1960). Much more convincing, if we consider that spatial estrangement should foster cognition, is the invention of a more complete language identifiable with the inner self as focus of representation. The re-creation of language can indeed initiate a new “space”, as in A Clockwork Orange (A. Burgess, 1962) where a mix of linguistic influences provides Alex and his group with a private lingua franca and a personality that estranges. If language makes the man, Alex’s use of Nadsat accompanies his fascination for the sublime as experienced in Beethoven’s music, Shakespeare’s syntax, and the Dyonisian orchestration of hooligan violence. Perceived as social prophecy, the negative utopia of the near future eventually appears less as an exercise in extrapolation than as a sociocultural duplicate of the reader’s historic world of the 1960s, with its rebellious teenagers trying to “act” upon their environment in an attempt to refuse the conformity of working-class life (and, as far as Alex is concerned, resist institutional healing therapies). Out of the world of childhood, which many of its words reflect, Nadsat – different in lexis only – defies integration into Lacan’s “symbolic order” of language, law, morality and all social existence… A simulacrum of resistance from which Alex, in the last pages of the book, will turn away in order to entertain a new dream of domestic patriarchal felicity: “There was your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to the hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa all welcoming and greeting like loving” (Burgess,

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1962: 147). Ironically, the anti-environment now perceived by the teenager as desirable mirrors the common middle-class surroundings of his time. After making the familiar strange, a strategy which the reader has had to accept almost to the end of the book, the final pages of A Clockwork Orange suggest the extinction of the child’s “imaginary state” (long preserved through identification with the peer group) by taking the reverse option. Back to normal: an ironic way of creating a new, peaceful urban space? Back to normal: in terms of cognition this also means revitalizing the liberal-humanist subject, notwithstanding the fact that “your Humble Narrator” Alex is, against all odds, an unreliable one. The 1960’s décor of A Clockwork Orange unexpectedly modifies our vision of the subject as “a rebel for a good cause” who would struggle in dystopia to bring new life to the threatened ideals of individual freedom and collective rationality. Though he is representative of a group, a generation caught in the throes of growing up, Alex exists as a unique focus of contradictory perceptions; now tormentor, now victim, now wrong, now pitiable, and endowed with a shifting – if any – sense of values. Defamiliarization, here, is an effect of language, a product of the artist’s ability to create the illusion of distance by evoking a problematic character, whose alternative (space) is a mirror to his age. The ambiguous breach from the classic utopian convention of the responsible traveller and hosts sharing Enlightenment values familiar to the reader induces a new form of doubt-producing confrontation with the environment. Proposed as a further challenge to evaluation, the final suggestion of Alex’s domestic aspirations is the author’s whimsical answer to our concern with social control of the individual in a democratic society. The achievements of the city are thus questioned: if the space created by institutional decision shapes the human environment – which, apart from the traveller is composed in early utopias of insignificant figures – what does its modern avatar make of the autonomous, freedom-oriented subject? Common sense and the liberal-humanist tradition upon which it is founded suggest that every individual possesses an unchanging essence of subjectivity. Consciousness is thought to be a continuous stream rather than the fragmented and contradictory effect of a discursive battle for the subjectivity of the individual. (Weedon, 1997: 101)

The unified spatial vision is meant to celebrate order or condemn chaos, and common sense is supposed to assist both traveller and reader at any given. Yet Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) does not follow

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the logic of common sense. Or does it? In a disruptive stream of probing and reminiscent thoughts, the Handmaid – reflector, analyst and passive protagonist – will insist on the difficulties of making sense of herself as subject, and assessing meaning by remembering the old world as different from the new. The city of Gilead’s version of a future community which sees women as “others” – in the fixed patriarchal sense of objects controlled by the male élite – is based on the assumption of a radicalized symbolic order produced by extrapolating on, and magnifying, America’s Puritan fundamentalist predicates. Representations of urban space (a replica of Cambridge, Massachusetts) inform the dialectics of the old and the new, potentially assessed against the moral values of “faith, hope and charity” or the mundane preoccupation with personal safety. They also contribute to revealing the protagonist as an illustration of Kristeva’s “subject-in-process” who gradually redefines herself, and privately defies the totalizing doctrine enforced in the republic of Gilead and illustrated by its monuments. The concept of totalization can refer to the Western worldview as a coherent thought system opposing the threat of chaos. Totalizing, as Sartre, Hutcheon and Jameson see it, also leads to anti-utopian accusations of totalitarianism causing the subject to feel estranged (Jameson, 2003: 332-4). But the fictional subject’s critical analysis of the alternative world may have to struggle between the established liberal-humanist code and the postmodern options of deconstruction and fragmentation. Here lies the dilemma faced by contemporary readers of utopian/dystopian fiction: to what extent can they accept the unstable postmodern stance while at the same time yearning for the coherence of ethical values and the freedom of individual cognitive experience? How can spatial representations contribute a significant answer to the search for meaning which implicitly inspires authors (or their readers) even when representations suggest the loss of meaning? The Handmaid’s Tale is a revealing example of this difficulty. Margaret Atwood seems to distance herself from the radicalized feminist pamphlet by relating to the larger issues facing the community of Gilead. A passage from chapter 6 of The Handmaid’s Tale will illustrate this as we study the main protagonist’s vision of “the Wall” where freshly executed traitors are currently exhibited: We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies (…) What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways.

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It’s the bags over the heads that are the worst, worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes them look like dolls on which faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to scare. Or as if their heads are sacks, stuck with some undifferentiated material, like flour or dough. It’s the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there’s no life anymore to hold them up. The heads are zeros. Though if you look and look, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth, like grey shadows. The heads are the heads of snowmen, with the coal eyes and the carrot noses fallen out. The heads are melting. But on one bag there’s blood, which has seeped through the white cloth, where the mouth must have been. It makes another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. A child’s idea of a smile. This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all. The men wear white coats (…) (Attwood, 1996: ch. 6)

Evoking a heavily contextualized space (numerous are the walls of symbolic fame in our historic world) the central Wall at Gilead is represented by means of connected images that progressively command repulsion in spite of the author’s unemotional style, short clauses and sober qualifiers. Echoing Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900), which can be regarded as a comment on the workings of the artist’s imagination, textual strategies of “displacement” – accounting for simile in literature – and “condensation” accounting for metaphor strengthen a matter of fact association with toys and children, suggesting by extension the people’s loss of self-sufficiency and dignity as human adults. To illustrate the status of the presumed traitors, the text opens up a network of connotations (hooks / butcher’s shop; armless / dis-abled), then offers a series of approximations ranging from objective detail (bags over the heads; heaviness of the heads, their vacancy; no life anymore; there’s blood) to simile (like dolls; like grey shadows; child’s idea of a smile) and metaphor (the heads are scarecrows…sacks…zeros…snowmen), until the final statement is issued (These are not snowmen after all) and completed by a delayed, impersonal clue (The men wear white coats). It does not escape the reader’s attention that the scientists’ coats go together with the headbags: science, when not government-controlled and manipulated, can be condemned on grounds of treason. From creation to cognition, the denial of human status and the reification of the bodies exhibited on the Wall have magnified the imaginary locus into an emblem of institutionalized terror. Working from the geometric “reality” of the objects to be represented, the artist has fashioned a new space by exploiting the potential relations between factors dependent on context and dramatic situation.

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This is what the dynamics of space is meant to achieve, so as to support a utopian discourse that relies on the significant arrangement of landmarks understood in terms of values still claiming for recognition, in spite of the contemporary temptations of deconstruction. In this light, it remains for the reader of utopian/dystopian fiction to agree (or disagree) with a statement leading to recognition of the balanced construction of space as central to the quest for meaning: Any one clue is subject to the effects of certain types of interference which, if we depended on this clue alone, would give us an incomplete picture. It is the interrelationship of these many clues which gives us a clear and well structured space world. (Alfred A. Strauss, a psychopathologist, apud Mc Luhan, 1968: 4)

This work, as “a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style (…) a revolving ball of mirrors” (Chapter 1), deconstructs space by relying on interferences such as word play (scarecrows, above) or, in Chapter 2, the sentences “this could be a college room… or a room in a rooming house, of former times, for ladies in reduced circumstances. (…) The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances”. As for the locations remembered from her former life, the Handmaid associates them with painful events that are shown to privilege the ambiguity of her memories. Space, then, at the core of experience, is the basis upon which language works, but it does not reflect the old dichotomies of time and values. The Handmaid attempts to reconstruct her own self through successful approximations but the space world, once invaded by interfering clues, never reaches the stage where “the interrelationship (…) gives us a clear and well-structured picture”, even though the reader is confronted with recognizable issues that have shaped utopia from the start. While the Handmaid’s staged arrest leads her to “the darkness within; or else the light”, the Historical Notes at the end of the book fail to suggest a significant change in the patriarchal routine of a country eventually freed from totalitarianism. The reader may indeed work out his/her own interpretation, but common sense and acquired Western values prevail in the assessment of the pessimistic vision of the near future. Exercises in ambiguity cannot destroy utopian desire. Do they, however, spell the end of faith in utopia?

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Notes 1 The expression of utopian desire is not limited to authors and fictional characters: the readers’ and critics’ own partisan approaches may clash with the utopian options expressed in the narrative. Some related issues are evoked in Peter Fitting’s “Positioning and Closure: On the reading effect contemporary utopian fiction” linking the reading effect with the evolution of the genre (see also Greven-Borde, 1984: chapter 5). 2 Much of the information in this essay has been inspired by chapters 9 to 12 of my earlier work on Formes du roman utopique en Grande Bretagne 1918-1970: Dialogues du rationnel et de l’irrationnel (1984), a study focused on the aesthetics of the literary utopia. The last part of the book proposes analytical tables bearing on demographics, politics and character motivation as they appear in three lists of works selected by reference to the overall requirements of the utopian/dystopian genre. Lyman T. Sargent suggests that “(…) a utopia must contain a fairly detailed description of a social system that is nonexistant but located in time and space. At least one of the foci of the work must be such a description” (1979: XVII).

3 For more recent studies related to utopia and estrangement, see Moylan, 2000; Parrinder, 2000; and Levitas, 1990. 4 Any other world may, on second thought, wear a few familiar colours, as anthropologists – like Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage – have been drawn to acknowledge after visiting the most remote communities: Quand une coutume exotique nous arrive en dépit (ou à cause) de son apparente singularité, c’est généralement qu’elle nous présente, comme un mirroir déformant, une image familière que nous reconnaissons confusément pour telle, sans réussir encore à l’identifier. (Lévi-Strauss, 1962: 318) [When an exotic custom becomes known to us because, or in spite of, its apparent singularity, it generally presents, like a distorting mirror, a familiar image which we obscurely recognize without being able yet to identify it. – my translation]

5 Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, apud Greven-Borde, 1984: ch. 6. 6 See Bessière, 1974. It can be argued that Out of the Silent Planet is not so much a utopia as a fantasy of religious initiation. The marvellous is probably better accepted as a feature of eutopia once it is understood to relate to the old form of the idyll. See Bakhtin, 1978; and Greven-

Borde, 1984: 304. 7 Jules Michelet (La Montagne, 1868) and many romantic poets in Europe associate the mountain setting with a lesson in courage, self-control and perceptiveness, while the political undertones of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924) are strengthened by the contrast between the thought-enducing mountain retreat and the conflict-ridden plain. Added to the Freudian murder-of-the-father theme, such influences concur in building a network of connotation and denotation. 8 See also Bessière, 1974; Bozetto, 1992; and Duperray, 2001. 9 Ordinary situations can generate estrangement when placed in an unusual context. That context however remains to be created. To inform readers that they have entered an alternative future world, the first paragraphs of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) introduce the “detail that estranges”: a date (A. F. 632) in the former; a slogan in the latter (“Big Brother is watching you”). But the latter is more likely to lose its capacity for estrangement if the reader gets acquainted with a similar – and, unhappily, not so unusual – system in real life.

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Works Cited Alban, A. (1968), Catharsis Central, London, Dobson. Atwood, Margaret (1996), The Handmaid’s Tale, New York, Vintage [1986]. Bachelard, Gaston (1978), La poétique de l’Espace, Paris, PUF. Bakhtine, M. (1978), Esthétique et théorie du roman, Paris, Gallimard. Baronian J. B. (1977), Un nouveau fantastique, Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme. Bellamy, Edward (1888), Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Boston, Ticknor. Bessière, Irène (1974), Le récit fantastique, Paris, Larousse. Bozetto, Roger (1992), L’obscur objet d’un savoir, fantastique et science-fiction: deux littératures de l’imaginaire, Aix-en-Provence, Publications de l’Université de Provence. Burgess, Anthony (1962), A Clockwork Orange, London, Heinemann. Charbonneau, Louis (1963), The Sentinel Stars, London, Transworld. Clarke, Arthur C. (1956), The City and the Stars, London, F. Muller. Duperray, Max (2001), La folie et la méthode: essai sur la déréalisation en littérature, Paris, l’Harmattan. Durand, Gilbert (1969), Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, introduction à l’archétypie générale, Paris, Bordas. Elliott, R. C. (1961), The Shape of Utopia, Chicago, Chicago U.P. Fitting, Peter (1987), “Positioning and Closure: on the ‘Reading Effect’ of Contemporary Utopian Fiction”, Utopian Studies, vol. 1, pp. 23-36, Lanham, MD, University Press of America.

Forster, E. M. (1928), The Machine Stops, in The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, London, Sidgwick and Jackson [1909]. Frayn, Michael (1968), A Very Private Life, London, Collins. Geertz, Clifford (2000), The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books [1973]. Gibson, William (1984), Newromancer, New York, Ace. Greven-Borde, Hélène (1984), Formes du roman utopique en GrandeBretagne (1918-1970): dialogue du rationnel et de l’irrationnel, Publications de l’Université de Rouen, P.U.F. _ _ (1999), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Paris, Didier-Érudition. Hartley, L. P. (1960), Facial Justice, London, Hamish Hamilton. Hartridge, Jon (1970), Earthjacket, London, MacDonald. Hutcheon, Linda (1988), The Canadian Postmodern, a Study of Canadian Fiction, Toronto, O.U.P. Huxley, Aldous (1932), Brave New World, New York, Doubleday. Jameson, Fredric (2003), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke University Press [1991]. _ _ (1975), “World-Reduction in Le Guin: the Emergence of Utopian Narrative”, ScienceFiction Studies, vol.2, nr.3, pp. 221-230. King, Vincent (1969), Light a Last Candle, London, Rapp and Whiting. Lalande, André (1968), Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, Paris, PUF [1928]. Le Guin, Ursula (1969), The Left Hand of Darkness, New York, Ace. _ _ (1974), The Dispossessed, New York, Harper. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1962), La Pensée Sauvage, Paris, Plon.

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Levitas, Ruth (1990), The Concept of Utopia, N.Y., Syracuse U.P. Lewis, C. S. (1938), Out of the Silent Planet, London, The Bodly Head. Mc Luhan, Marshall (1968), Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, New York, Harper Collins. Moylan, Tom (2000), Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Oxford, Westview Press. O’Neill, Joseph (1935), The Land under England, London, Gollancz. Orwell, George (1949), Nineteen Eighty-Four, London, Secker and Warburg. Parrinder, Patrick (ed.) (2000), Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press

Spencer, Kathleen (1983), “ ‘The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low’: Towards a Stylistic Description of Science Fiction”, Science-Fiction Studies, vol.10, nr.1, pp. 35-50. Suvin, Darko (1979), Metamorphosis of Science Fiction: on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale, U.P. Todorov, Tzvetan (1970), Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris, Seuil. Van Gennep, Arnold (1960), Rites of Passage, London. Weedon, Chris (1997), Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Oxford, Blackwell [1987]. Wells, H. G. (1923), Men Like Gods, London, Cassell. Winch, Edgar (1928), The Mountain of Gold, London, Hurst and Blackett.

Sargent, L.T (1979), British and American Utopian Literature, 15161975, Boston, G. K. Hall. _ _ (1994), “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited”, Utopian Studies, vol. 5 nr.1, pp. 1-37.

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Art as Utopia in European Avant-garde Movements Vita Fortunati | University of Bologna, Italy

Lucky are those who will be able to convince themselves that culture can vaccinate a society against violence. Even before the dawn of the 20th century, artists, writers and theorists of modernity showed the opposite... From Paris to Saint Petersburg, the fin de siècle intelligentsia went arm-in-arm with terror. The earliest Expressionists invoke war with all their hearts, just like all the Futurists... In large countries, the cult of violence and the “nostalgia for mud” in favour of the industrialization of mass culture have become an integral part of heritage. Because the notion of the avant-garde took an unfortunate turn its first supporters would never have imagined. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Aussichten auf den Burgerkrieg (1993)

Bearing witness to the relevance of utopian thought today involves, in my opinion, re-considering the concept of art as utopia and, more specifically, questioning the artists who set to themselves the utopian task of alerting individuals to homologation and the mass media and who take up the responsibility of arousing self-consciousness through political denunciation of totalitarian regimes. It is undeniable that the belief in the artist’s capability to construct a new world was loaded with a powerful utopian tension in the European avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. However, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger provocatively contends, the artist’s deconstruction of capitalist, mass society involves controversial implications with the established power system. Re-reading the theoretical premises expressed by the exponents of the historical avant-garde movements in the manifestos, the artworks and the architectural projects means drawing attention to utopian elements which were translated into dystopias in contact with power: tragically, avant-garde poetics became an instrument for right-wing and left-wing totalitarian dictatorships (see Celant, 2004; and Lista, 1973). This perversion can be accounted for by delving into what can be defined as the double soul of avant-garde movements: on the one hand, they are the heirs of Enlightenment reason which believes in the ideology of social progress

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and of Reason as logos which gives form to a chaotic reality. In this sense, the avant-garde artist is like a scientist in the laboratory who discovers and creates new forms for founding a new society, free of the biases of past ages. The avant-garde, then, is the laboratory of modernity which aims to accomplish the Enlightenment project. On the other hand, its roots are to be found in the romantic Weltanschauung, which exalts the omnipotence of individual genius who does not hold back from espousing the most obscure and irrational causes. Artists who raise up their own ego and issue their demands with a hybris which eludes the nomos share the utopian belief that they can avoid the rules presiding over the exchange of artistic products in a democracy and pursue the childish dream that their works can be comprehended by the people. These contradictions and antinomies are present in the term “avant-garde” itself, a military term which, as Renato Poggioli (1962) explains, was used for the first time by Gabriel Désiré Laverdant, an ardent supporter of Fourier’s utopian socialism, in De la mission de l’art et du rôle des artistes (1851), which examines the engagement of the artist with politics and society. The avant-garde artist hopes for radical changes and for a renewal of society; the marriage of art and politics, then, is intrinsically present within the term avantgarde, even if the aesthetic element appears to be primary, while it will be later tragically exploited by the totalitarian regimes, as pointed out by Mario de Micheli (2000). A close critical scrutiny of the European avant-garde movements is in progress, as Jean Clair makes clear (Clair, 1997). Nonetheless, while Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism have been examined thoroughly as political regimes, there has been no comprehensive study yet into why the totalitarian regimes exploited the utopian elements of the avant-garde movements, perverting them to consolidate the ideology of their regimes (on this topic, see Schaer, 2000: 278-297). Here, I will first try to pinpoint these utopian elements and then show how they have been used and manipulated. In doing so, I do not wish to question the artistic validity of the works of art nor indeed condemn in any way the artists involved in this tormented, disquieting complicity with the regime, but I want to once again underline how the artistic manifestations of the twentieth century are not without contradictions and antinomies. My intention, then, is to re-evaluate the utopian projects expounded by the artistic avant-garde movements while deconstructing certain pervasive myths, especially the myth of the rebel artist, always opposed to the regime because, in reality, the artist sometimes co-operates with this regime, whether aware of this or not.

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The manifestos of Futurism and of Suprematism and some writings by Expressionist painters like Franz Marc and Wassilij Kandinski still retain their utopian potency. Contemporary readers can be but struck by a radicalism which is aesthetic as well as political and aims at creating a new man and a new society. Indeed, the fighting spirit and rebellion are accompanied by the need to break with the past to create a new beginning. Pound’s phrase “to make it new” becomes emblematic of the palingenetic spirit which marks out the artistic activity of the avant-garde. A palingenesis which ends up, as with Futurism and Expressionism in their initial phase, justifying violence. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s phrase, “9. Noi vogliamo glorificare la Guerra – sola igene del mondo – il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei libertari” [“9. We want to glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destroying gesture of freedom bringers” – my translation] (Marinetti, 1909: 19), epitomizes the typical fighting desire of the avant-garde, which was appropriated by the rhetoric of interventionist intellectuals: only through war would it be possible to redeem the future from the past. War was seen as an apocalyptic event, both destructive and creative. Marinetti’s call for war shows disconcerting affinities with the beliefs expounded by George Sorel in Réfléxions sur la violence (1906), where violence becomes a necessary condition for the advent of the “new man”. In this respect, the fire metaphor used by Aldo Palazzeschi in his collection L’incendiario (1910) reveals a dual meaning, where fire is an element which both destroys and purifies. Within the avant-garde, the utopian element presupposes a new vision of history, no longer a continuous line in which progress proceeds by accumulation, but a degree zero which implies a violent break, a truce-less antagonism between past and future. The new becomes a value per se and can only be implemented through a radical break and an iconoclastic attitude towards the past. Poggioli rightly states that the tension towards the future belongs to and is typical of all avant-garde movements: the prophetic and utopian phase is intimately related to the artists’ awareness of being the precursors of future art, an aspect which Leon Trotzky understood well when he examined the historical mission of Russian Futurism: “Futurism forecasted all that (the imminent social and political crises, the explosions and catastrophes of history to come) within the sphere or art” (Poggioli, 1962: 85). In this sense, the avant-garde artists live in an “age of transition”, because the present prepares the future and is valuable because of its potential. As Poggioli says, “the present is a matrix of the future, as it moulds a history which undergoes continuous metamorphosis and is conceived as a permanent spiritual revolution” (idem, 89). The tension

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Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International Tower (1919-20)

towards the future is combined with youthfulness and the love of adventure and heroic action and takes shape in the systematic attack against a tradition which is considered to be pedantic, academic and encumbering. It is easy to understand how these utopian elements could then be manipulated to consolidate regimes which do not hold back from making instrumental use of them for their political propaganda. Perhaps the most disconcerting expression of such ideological manipulation is German Expressionism: the Nazis, after 1919, created a weapon of violent prevarication out of the desire for breaking with the system, out of Expressionist gesturing and of the new repertoire of forms and symbols which the artists used to express horror at the regime they saw approaching. In Apocalyptic Landscape (1913) Ludwig Meidner paints homes which twist out of their foundations and crazy people running with their hands raised in front of the enormous explosion of the sky: it is an apocalyptic event represented with incisive, violent signs such as thunder and lightning. These very fragmented, cutting forms will then be used with altogether different purposes in the shape of the swastika. Another contradictory expression of the avant-garde is the cult of the machine associated with the exaltation of the metropolis and contrasted with the nostalgic feeling of a return to nature as a return to our origins. The machine becomes the symbol of human creativity, a metallic animal which can spark off instinctive powers and wide-ranging energies. The machine, as is well known, will become one of the dominant themes of the utopian imagination of the twentieth century. One well-known phrase is from the Futurist manifesto on L’Art méchanique (11 January 1923):

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Nous autres futuristes imposons à la Machine de surpasser sa fonction pratique pour s’élever dans la vie spirituelle et désintéressée de l’Art, et devenir ainsi une sublime inspiratrice. (Prampolini et al., 1923: 4) [As futurists, we call for the Machine to overcome its practical functionality and ascend to the spiritual and disinterested life of Art, so as to become a sublime muse. – my translation]

It is interesting, when we read the manifestos of Malevicˇ and the Constructionists Tatlin, El Lissitzkij and Rodcenko, to note how the machine and, above all, industrial and technological development are seen as instruments which create progress and well-being for the people. A clear example of this is Tatlin’s 1920 project called Monument to the Third International, a tower higher than the Eiffel Tower, in which solid forms like the cylinder, cone and cube are made with highly-technological materials like steel and glass. Since the body of the monument had to rotate around an axis, Tatlin uses the spiral form to symbolise the utopian dream for a new dynamic Soviet society. L’architettura futurista (11 July 1916), the Manifesto written by Antonio Sant’Elia, expounds the idea of the new dynamic Futurist city, visualised by Virgilio Marchi as well as by Sant’Elia himself in drawings and projects of multiple super-elevated cities which recall the utopian cities imagined by H. G. Wells in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and painted by Umberto Boccioni in La città che sale (1910-1911).

U. Boccioni, La città che sale (1910-11)

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A. Sant’Elia, La Città Nuova (1914)

Architecture becomes the art which best reveals the involvement of the artist with power. Strong regimes need to legitimise their power through artistic representation. The architect uses his plastic forms to translate the system of signs which the ideology intends to celebrate. This is especially evident in Germany, Russia and Italy, where the various dictatorships want to involve the architects so that they become their spokespersons. It was no coincidence that Marinetti, after his early experimental stage, understood to what extent the regime wanted to exploit the role of architecture and the applied arts for the Fascist revolution. Actually, the regime did not realize all the new architectural perspectives outlined by the Manifesto of Aerial Architecture (1934). The aeroplane is the vehicle which changes the world, as it can create a new system of social, artistic and political relations. Noi poeti, architetti e giornalisti futuristi abbiamo ideato la grande Città unica a linee continue da ammirare in volo, slancio parallelo di Aerostrade e Aerocanali larghi cinquanta metri, separati l’uno dall’altro mediante snelli abitati rifornitori (spirituali e materiali) che alimenteranno tutte le diverse e distinte velocità mai intersecantisi. Le aerostrade e gli aerocanali (che uniranno i fiumi retificati in armonia con le linee aeree) muteranno la configurazione delle pianure delle colline e delle montagne. (Marinetti et al., 1934; see also Francesca / Castelvetro, 1997: 25) [We Futurist poets, architects and journalists have conceived the large single City with continuous lines to admire in flight, parallel thrust of Aeroways and Aerocanals fifty metres wide, separated from one another by slender habitation/suppliers (spiritual and material) which will feed into all the different and distinct never intersecting speeds. The aeroways and the aerocanals (which will link the rivers straightened in harmony with the air lines) will change the shape of plains hills and mountains. – my translation]

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In the Programme of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Walter Gropius, the first Director of the Bauhaus, expresses elements which appear to be equally utopian: Bilden wir also eine neue Zunft der Handwerker ohne die klassentrennende Anmaßung, die eine hochmütige Mauer zwischen Handwerkern und Künstlern errichten wollte! Wollen, erdenken, erschaffen wir gemeinsam den neuen Bau der Zukunft, der alles in einer Gestalt sein wird: Architektur und Plastik und Malerei, der aus Millionen Händen der Handwerker einst gen Himmel steigen wird als kristallenes Sinnbild eines neuen kommenden Glaubens. (Gropius, 1919) [Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith. – my translation]

Walter Gropius’s words sum up the progressive utopian hopes common to many modernist architects: the great utopian hope was that their art could take hold of the proletariat and that they could get rid of the social injustices of the past with the help of new architectural structures. It is then disquieting to discover that Fritz Hertz, an active member of the Bauhaus, designed in 1941 the plans for the huts used for the Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz, and that many Russian avant-garde artists put themselves at the service of Socialist realism to push the propaganda of the Stalinist five-year work plans. The machine, which in the imagery of avant-garde artists is a tool of progress, also generates the enslavement of man. Major industrial development requires mass enlistment, every individual becomes a worker within this global order. As Heidegger recalls, “techne is a reality on a planetary level, a reality which controls the life of men and imposes its meaning” (1998: 129-145). The nightmarish aspect of the machine is a central motif of 20th-century anti-utopias by Zamjatin, Huxley and Orwell. In counter-position with the hymn to technology is the return to nature, the fascination with the archaic and the primitive, the nostalgia for a pre-technical world, a return to our origins. The return to nature and the fascination with natural events of all kinds very problematically coexists with the beguiling of the city, with its lights like tentacles and its fast and impressive exalting movement. Just read the Manifesto of Futurism: 11. Noi canteremo le grandi folle agitate dal lavoro, dal piacere o dalla sommossa: canteremo le maree multicolori o polifoniche delle rivoluzioni nelle capitali moderne; canteremo il vibrante fervore notturno degli arsenali e dei cantieri incendiati da violente lune elettriche …

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i ponti simili a ginnasti giganti che scavalcano i fiumi, balenanti al sole con un luccichìo di coltelli … (Marinetti, 1909: 11) [11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multi-coloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals. We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violet, electric moons... bridges that stride the rivers like giants gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives... – my translation]

Expressionist artworks are characterised by the same kind of dualism. In many paintings, such as in Striding into the Sea (1912), Kirchner portrays landscapes in which naked men and women dance in forests of trees or sunbathe beside lakes. Or he portrays various places in Berlin by revolutionising perspectives and making them aggressive through compositional elements and lines characterised by violently counterpoised colours. The return to nature is dictated not only by a rebirth of forms of religious mysticism but also by new exoteric cults and the new society of nudists. Paintings which portray the essential forms of nature to render a dynamic idea of it are charged with a tension that arouses from the contrast between an exaggeration of nature’s rhythms and the use of powerful lines and bright and bold colours. The artist’s desire to be inter-fused with the natural world is well expressed by Franz Marc: “I seek pantheist sympathy with the vibration and flood of the blood of nature in the trees, in the animals and in the air” (apud Barron / Dube 1997a: 24; see also Barron / Dube, 1997b). The Nazi regime will later manipulate both the desire of Expressionist artists to be free of conventions and their search for a primordial innocence with the ideology of the purity of the Arian race. Perfect examples are the words of Goebbels when talking about Munch: rigorous and singular spirit, heir of Nordic nature, he frees himself of all naturalism to return to the eternal fundaments of the racial art (Clair, 1997: 34). The demiurgic desire of the artist hosts dark sides which are shared with the utopian writer who wants to create a new world. The challenge is precisely that of affirming the autonomy of art compared to the real, an autonomy which is continually questioned by the historic and social context in which the artist lives. To my mind, two autobiographical statements vividly express the dual nature of the modernist artist. The first one, written by El Lissitzkij in 1926 under the heading of “The New Reality” is a positive statement which confirms the role of the artist as a creator of other worlds:

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new inventions, which will enable us to move about in space in new ways and at new speeds, will bring about a new reality. The static architecture of the Egyptian pyramids has been superseded – our architecture revolves, swims, flies. We are approaching the state of floating in air and swinging like a pendulum. I want to help discover and mould the form of this reality. (Lissitzky-Küppers, 1980: 329)

Nonetheless, while a great work of art projects itself beyond its own time, it is always marked by its historical context, it is a shocking testimony of painful historical facts. A good example is Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a high expression of the experimentation of modern art but also an artwork which had a strong impact on the historic conscience of intellectuals in every country. The Spanish Civil War is the struggle of the reaction against the people, against freedom. My entire life as an artist has not been anything except a continuous struggle against the reaction, against the death of art. How could you think for just one moment that I could agree with reaction and death?... In the picture I am painting, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my hatred of the military caste which is now plundering Spain into an ocean of misery and death. (apud Micheli, 2000: 177; see also On-line Picasso Project, 2001)

Picasso’s reaction to the civil war exemplifies the existential parable experienced by avant-garde artists: if at the beginning they saw the First World War as a palingenetic event pouring out new energies and new vitality, gradually they became aware of the tremendous destructive effects of the machine of war. In this perspective, the historical events leading to the tragic world conflicts exemplify the paradoxical antinomies of modernity, which means that radical changes and progress inevitably involve technologies instrumental to aggression and violence. The artists’ works are the most lucid testimonies of the dialectical tension between the aesthetic and ethical issues incessantly raised by the re-workings and representations of war.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)

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Works Cited Barron, Stephanie / Wolf-Dieter Dube (eds.) (1997a), Espressionismo tedesco: arte e società, Milano, Bompiani. _ _ (1997b), German Expressionism: Art and Society, London, Thames and Hudson.

Thames and Hudson [El Lissitzky. Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Schriften, Übergeben von Sophie Lissitszky-Küppers, Dresden, VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1967].

Celant, Germano (ed.) (2004), Arti & Architettura 1900-2000, Ginevra Milano, Skira.

Lista, Giovanni (1973), Futurisme, Manifestes, Proclamations, Documents, Paris, L’Age d’Homme, Paris.

Clair, Jean (1997), La responsabilité de l’artiste: les avant-gardes entre terreur et raison, Paris, Gallimard.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1909), “Manifesto del futurismo”, Le Figaro, 20 February 1909.

Franchini, Francesca / Maurizio Castelvetro (1997), “La città futurista di Filippo Tommaso Marinetti”, Paesaggio Urbano: rivista bimestrale di architettura, urbanistica e ambiente, special issue on Città, utopia, progettualità: bilancio del XX secolo, 4-5, Luglio-Ottobre ‘97, Rimini, Maggioli Editore.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso et al. (1934), Manifesto Futurista dell’architettura aérea (http://www.futurism.org.uk/manifestos/ it-manifesto04.htm)

Gropius, Walter (1919), “Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar”, in Hans M. Wingler (ed.) (1962), Das Bauhaus, Gehr Rosch, Bramsche. Heidegger, Martin (1998), Traditional Language and Technological Language, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research, Volume XXIII, 1998, pp. 129-145 [Überlieferte Sprache und Technische Sprache (1962), herausgegeben von Hermann Heidegger, St. Gallen, Erker, 1989]. Lissitzky-Küppers, Sophie (ed.), (1980), El Lissitzky; Life, Letters, Texts, introd. by Herbert Read, translated from the German by Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall, London,

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Micheli, Mario de (2000), L’arte sotto le dittature, Milano, Feltrinelli. On-line Picasso Project (2001), “Guernica: Testimony of War”, http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/ archives/2001/opparch01-174.html. Poggioli, Renato (1962), Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia, Bologna, Il mulino. Prampolini, Enrico et al. (1923), “L’art mécanique, Manifeste futuriste”, Le Futurisme, nr. 7, p. 4. Schaer, Roland (2000), “Utopia and Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes”, in Roland Schaer et al. (eds.), Utopia; The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 278-297.

Art and Aesthetics in Utopia: William Morris’s Response to the Challenge of the “Art to the People” Paola Spinozzi | University of Ferrara, Italy

When I started to think about the status of the arts in a utopian society, I soon realised that, far from being a minor issue, the creation and enjoyment of artworks challenge the very concept of utopia in ontological terms. While utopian thought places the acquisition of philosophical knowledge beside the advancement of science as one of the main aims of the ideal society, aesthetic research does not appear to be fundamental. This leads us to ask ourselves about the importance of Beauty and Art in the utopian project. What is art in utopia? raises more problematic issues: What is the function of art? What purpose does it pursue? Are there writers who have theorised Art as Utopia? Is the utopian world an aesthetic world? The history of utopia re-viewed through the history of art opens up research perspectives which affirm, once more, the relevance of utopian thought in contemporary cultural debate, since the conceptions of art in utopia are inextricably linked with the aesthetic theories which have marked the evolution of philosophical thought in Western culture. As a matter of fact, for utopian writers who pose themselves the problem of the aesthetic, the arts do not belong to a sphere separate from society but imply the involvement of the artist in a particular historical situation and in social or class dynamics. For thinkers who are acutely aware of the close relationship between art and society, the formulation

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of utopian programs and the designing of ideal societies also involve aesthetics and the role of the artist. In utopia, art does not manifest itself in great artistic personalities. It mainly originates from a strong common urge and testifies to a collective ethos. The notion of art as expression of a taste shared and spread at various levels of culture maintains the established order and does not allow the artistic temperament to develop traits of genius which could transform the artists into subversive individuals. It is difficult, therefore, to admire masterpieces in utopia and even more difficult to meet great artists. Utopia fears the artistic process in its essence because, although it always involves craft, it is never learned and repeated mechanically but actually presupposes the expression of emotional drives that are dangerous for a rationally ruled world and, therefore, inadmissible. In utopia, then, art is basically moral and didactic. Investigating utopian conceptions of aesthetic pleasure enables to gain an insight into different utopian attitudes towards 1. art as mimesis and allegory; 2. artistic creativity as utopian activity; 3. the artist as a maker of alternative worlds (Spinozzi, 2003: 385-404). In this perspective, specific focus will be laid on aesthetic doctrines based on socialist ideology, which raise the problem of popular art and of aesthetics for the masses. 1. Art as Mimesis and Allegory Renaissance utopian writers developed their views on art and aesthetics by re-working on classical theoretical sources. Plato condemned mimetic art as anti-pedagogic (Republic, X, 605 a-c), but praised artistic forms which could be useful to education (Republic, III, 395 c). Aristotle re-evaluated imitation, defined not as the description of “things occurred”, which is the historian’s task, but of “things possible”, which can occur “according to the laws of verisimilitude or necessity” (Poetics, 1451 a-b). Such laws shed light on the world of passions and lead to “catharsis” (Politics, VIII, 7, 1341 b, 35). Platonism in More’s thought sustains his choice not to consider art as the foundation of society and culture in Utopia (1516). Indeed, the Utopians’ high life standard and morality are attributed to attitudes and customs in which artistic inclinations are not at all relevant. The City of the Sun (1602) by Tommaso Campanella stands out as an original expression of the principle of beautiful and pedagogic art. The Ministry of Wisdom has decreed that painting is to decorate the inner and outer walls of the six rings of walls surrounding and

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protecting the ideal city. While being pleasantly decorative, the intermingling of figurative art and architecture brings forth an analytical description of the world as well as a vivid allegory of the cosmos. 2. Artistic Creativity as Utopian Activity The utopias in which art does not reproduce reality but evokes another world have their roots in the conception of divine inspiration, Plato’s ϑεíα μανíα (Ion, 534). By means of inspired, thus non-imitative, poetry, painting, sculpture, music and dance, the artist can reach a super-rational world of harmony and divine rhythms. During Humanism, aesthetic inspiration was transformed from a manifestation of the mysterious divinity of art into the highest expression of human creativity. Leonardo da Vinci celebrates the artist who does not imitate but who creates. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries fantasy and imagination are behind the creation of a purely subjective and poetic dimension while science and reason lead to knowledge of the objective reality of nature and its laws. The world is once again a “poem” in the idealistic aesthetics of Romanticism. The identification of art with the creative activity of the Absolute, expressed in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), bears witness to the romantic idea of Art as Utopia. The idea of artistic creativity as creation of worlds implies that human art is a continuation of the creative work of God, especially through genius. With the theory of the genius, Romanticism reconciles the two aspects of art: art as beauty and art as truth. 3. The Artist as a Maker of Alternative Worlds: William Morris’s Challenge The concept of art as construction, which identifies a type of synergy between the work of man and the work of nature within aesthetic activity, becomes crucial following the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Utopian thinkers living in Victorian England are acutely aware that massive manufacture spoils the uniqueness of artistic creation, as conceived by romantic idealism, and that industrialisation disfigures art and architecture. The Lesser Arts (1878), The Art of the People (1879), Art and Socialism (1884), The Aims of Art (1887), Art and Industry in the Fourteenth Century (1887) and News from Nowhere (1890) disclose William Morris’s project of

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a utopian socialist society in which the Arts and Crafts are creative activities practised and enjoyed on a large scale. None among Morris’s scholars could dispute that the abolishment of industrial labour and its replacement by diverse forms of artisanship which produce aesthetic pleasure are fundamental stages in the utopian process aimed at transforming a capitalist society into an equalitarian one. Nonetheless, Morris’s project of revitalising the romantic concept of artistic creativity as a utopian faculty is affected by a deep preoccupation with crucial issues such as artistic creativity in everyday work, the aesthetic quality of popular art, and popular art and the genius. Artistic Creativity in Everyday Work Morris’s reappraisal of the Arts and Crafts, based on the assumption that medieval gilds of artisans had fulfilled a fruitful interaction between project and manual work, was aimed at deconstructing the deeply rooted hierarchical notion that architecture, painting and sculpture create original aesthetic experiences, while crafts and industrial work can but produce material objects. The individual creativity of the artist-artisan overcomes the gap between the cognitive, inventive “artes liberals” and the repetitive “ars mechanica”. Morris firmly believed that the applied arts can transmit cultural history: in News from Nowhere, Henry Morsom explains how ancient traditions and skills have been learnt by successive generations during the transitional stage from the industrial work of the Victorian age to handicraft in 2002: [Morsom] told us a great deal … of those arts of life which they had each lost; which loss, as he told us, had at one time gone so far that not only was it impossible to find a carpenter or a smith in a village or small country town, but that people in such places had even forgotten how to bake bread … On the other hand, the old men amongst the labourers managed to teach the younger ones gradually a little artisanship, such as the use of the saw and the plane, the work of the smithy, and so forth. (Morris, 1890a: 184-185)

Even more importantly, while Roman and Norman feudalism had a strong impact on the process of formation of North European countries in the Middle Ages, the guilds testified to an autochthonous history, characterised by the constitution of proto-socialist, equalitarian communities: the spirit of association (...) had never died out of the peoples of Europe, and (...) in Northern Europe at least had been kept alive by the gilds which in turn it developed; the strong organization that feudalism could not crush. (...) the history of the gilds is practically the history of the people in the Middle Ages. (Morris, 1887b: 98) the history of the guilds is the true history of the Middle Ages. (Morris, 1890b: 119)

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While Morris explains why the future society ought to grow on the historical and cultural memory of pre-industrial England, he strives for a medieval country tinged with romance. The Middle Ages in which he envisages an aesthetic ideal as well as a social model for the Victorians is undeniably too similar to an Arcadia blended with the Pre-Raphaelite cult of Beauty (Spinozzi, 1998: 231-253). Not seldom I please myself with trying to realize the face of mediæval England; the many chases and great woods, the stretches of common tillage and common pasture quite unenclosed (...) the little towns, well bechurched, often walled; the villages just where they are now, but better and more populous; their churches, some big and handsome, some small and curious, but all crowded with altars and furniture, and gay with pictures and ornament; the many religious-houses, with their glorious architecture; the beautiful manor-houses, some of them castles once, and survivals from an earlier period; some new and elegant. (Morris, 1885: 30)

The Aesthetic Quality of Popular Art In Nowhere, art is popular, it is made by the people and for the people. On the one hand, it produces objects connected to the cycles of life, to human activities, to rites and symbols. Such an art possesses a mythopoietic power enhanced by legends and folklore and appealing to all people. On the other hand, embroidery and woodcarving, tools and objects for the house are non-profit, unique, handmade pieces which express individual human creativity and enhance life quality (Fortunati, 1979: 119-149). Morris’s art is communitarian, because aesthetic creation and enjoyment are shared by all, but it is also individual, since it allows for the development of one’s own specific creative inclinations. Popular art is constantly opposed to the degradation of the arts in capitalist Victorian England. However, the grumbler raises objections which become central for the detractors of Marxist thought: can a non competitive society be creative? Can art and creativity develop in a society where class conflicts have been overcome and suffering has been healed? Which aesthetic parameters can be adopted for popular, communitarian art? Popular Art and the Genius The most lucid account of Morris’s strenuous attempt to grasp the nature of human creativity is his conceptualisation of the “mood of energy” and the “mood of idleness” in The Aims of Art: When the mood of energy is upon me, I must be doing something, or I become mopish and unhappy; when the mood of idleness is on me, I find it hard indeed if I cannot rest and let my

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mind wander over the various pictures, pleasant or terrible, which my own experience or my communing with the thoughts of other men, dead or alive, have fashioned in it; and if circumstances will not allow me to cultivate this mood of idleness, I find I must at the best pass through a period of pain till I can manage to stimulate my mood of energy to take its place and make me happy again. And if I have no means wherewith to rouse up that mood of energy to do its duty in making me happy, and I have to toil while the idle mood is upon me, then I am unhappy indeed, and almost wish myself dead... Well, I believe that all men’s lives are compounded of these two moods in various proportions, and that this explains why they have always, with more or less of toil, cherished and practised art. (Morris, 1886: 588-589)

The fulfilment of the artist-worker’s daily activities involves pleasure as well as fatigue. Rest, far from being a state of indolence and inertia, is a form of re-creative inactivity which Morris deems necessary to the contemplation and enjoyment of the fulfilled artistic act. However, if the dialectics between labour and rest sounds convincing when applied to Morris himself, it proves problematic when generalised: the artist-artisan who should stand for the ordinary man is actually a genius, a creator of total works of art. Morris projects a socialist society where art is for all but the endowments he focuses on are those of exceptional individuals. The Story of the Unknown Church (1856), written during his twenties, recounts the life of an artist-artisan who ends up choosing to live in a religious community where he can freely express his artistic inclinations: I raised a marble canopy that reached quite up to the top of the arch, and I painted it too as fair as I could, and carved it all about with many flowers and histories, and in them I carved the faces of those I had known on earth technical skill and individuality, (for I was not as one on earth now, but seemed quite away out of the world). And as I carved, sometimes the monks and other people too would came and gaze, and watch how the flowers grew; and sometimes too as they gazed, they would weep for pity, knowing how all had been. So my life passed, and I lived in that abbey for twenty years (…) till one morning, quite early, when they came into the church for matins, they found me lying dead, with my chisel in my hand, underneath the last lily of the tomb. (Morris, 1856: 282)

Clearly enough, Morris’s enquiry into human nature encompassed highly personal issues. His confidence in the ontological potentialities of mankind led him to believe that everyone could master technical tools and express creativity; his own multiple talent testified to his belief. We, up till now, still keep wondering whether in an equalitarian, communitarian society all human beings would be able to express inventiveness and originality, or whether such an extra-ordinary creative individuality could but belong to the late Romantic Morris himself.

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Works Cited Fortunati, Vita (1979), “Utopia e Romance in News from Nowhere di William Morris”, La letteratura utopica inglese: Morfologia e grammatica di un genere letterario, Ravenna, Longo, pp. 119-149. Morris, William (1856), “The Story of the Unknown Church”, in G. D. H. Cole (ed.), William Morris. Stories in Prose, Stories in Verse, Shorter Poems, Lectures and Essays, London, The Nonesuch Press, 1949 [1934]. _ _ (1878), “The Lesser Arts”, in G. D. H. Cole (ed.), William Morris. Stories in Prose, Stories in Verse, Shorter Poems, Lectures and Essays, London, The Nonesuch Press, 1949 [1934], pp. 494-516. _ _ (1879), “The Art of the People”, in G. D. H. Cole (ed.), William Morris. Stories in Prose, Stories in Verse, Shorter Poems, Lectures and Essays, London, The Nonesuch Press, 1949 [1934], pp. 517-537. _ _ (1884), “Art and Socialism”, in G. D. H. Cole (ed.), William Morris. Stories in Prose, Stories in Verse, Shorter Poems, Lectures and Essays, London, The Nonesuch Press, 1949 [1934], pp. 624-645. _ _ (1885), “Hopes for Civilisation”, in Nicholas Salmon (ed.), William Morris on History, Sheffield, Academic Press, 1996.

_ _ (1887a), “The Aims of Art”, in G. D. H. Cole (ed.), William Morris. Stories in Prose, Stories in Verse, Shorter Poems, Lectures and Essays, London, The Nonesuch Press, 1949 [1934], pp. 588-602. _ _ (1887b), “Art and History in the Fourteenth Century”, in Nicholas Salmon (ed.), William Morris on History, Sheffield, Academic Press, 1996. _ _ (1890a), News from Nowhere, ed. Krishan Kumar, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1995. _ _ (1890b), “The Development of Modern Society”, in Nicholas Salmon (ed.), William Morris on History, Sheffield, Academic Press, 1996. Spinozzi, Paola (1998), “Figurazioni del passato nella saggistica di William Morris: la storia dell’Inghilterra preindustriale, un ‘discorso’ sul socialismo”, in Adriana Corrado (ed.), Pellegrini della speranza (Scritti in onore di E. Schulte), Napoli, CUEN, pp. 231-253. _ _ (2003), “Arte ed estetica in utopia”, in Vita Fortunati et al. (eds.), Dall’utopia all’utopismo. Percorsi tematici, Napoli, CUEN, pp. 385-404.

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Utopian Music: Music History of the Future in Novels by Bellamy, Callenbach and Huxley Karl Traugott Goldbach

Many literary utopias have their setting in their respective future. Thus, by reversing the idea of the historian being a prophet looking backward (Schlegel), some authors become historians looking forward. Their task includes the transfer not only of technological and social developments, but also of cultural phenomena of their times to the future. In most cases these representations hint at the time they were drawn up. This can be demonstrated by looking at the role of music in the utopian novels Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Looking Backward Julian West, the protagonist of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, falls asleep in 1887 and awakes 113 years later in an America converted to socialism. Not only are the economy and the social welfare perfect, but the culture has its golden age, too. In the world Julian knew, there were “even among the cultured class (...) some who did not care for music” (Bellamy, 1995: 83). In 2000 this has changed. West’s hostess, Edith, offers to present him some of the music of the new time. To his surprise, she neither sings nor plays an instrument but explains: Of course, we all sing nowadays as a matter of course in the training of the voice, and some learn to play instruments for their private amusement; but the professional music is so much

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grander and more perfect than any performance of ours, and so easily commanded when we wish to hear it, that we don‘t think of calling our singing or playing music at all. All the really fine singers and players are in the musical service, and the rest of us hold our peace for the main part. (ibidem)

Here, the desire for art to be accessible to everybody has become reality. Boston has got a number of music rooms perfectly adapted regarding acoustics to the different sorts of music. This music is broadcast into the houses of the city. This, however, does not take place via wireless waves as we know it, but via telephone line (idem, 84). The radio was invented some time after the publication of Bellamy’s book, but the telephone was a brand new medium. In 1887, a year before the publication, the first telecommunication between New York and Boston, the novel’s scene, was installed (Brooks, 1976: 90). Some years before, the inventors of the telephone experimented with the diffusion of music; an outstanding example was Elisha Gray, one of Alexander Graham Bell’s competitors in developing a marketable telephone, who organized a number of telephone concerts. For instance, on April 2nd 1877, a Concert in Philadelphia was transmitted to an audience in New York (Sterne, 2003: 253).1 Actually in some European and American cities the telephone broadcasting of news and music was established for some time. For example, the most successful network, the Hírmondó in Budapest, founded in 1892, existed till the end of World War II in 1945 (Ruschkowski, 1998: 21; Sterne, 2003: 193). Indeed, although broadcasting via telephone was commercially successful, it had nothing to do with Bellamy’s intentions. Bellamy was looking for a democratic access to music for all. In opposition to this, the telephone broadcasting was a kind of an ancestor of modern pay TV: to hear music one had to pay via telephone bill (compare Ruschkowski, 1998: 22-23). Ecotopia Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, published in 1978, but set in the not so far year of 1999, suggests a quite different idea about a democratic access to culture. While the people in Looking Backward appreciate the perfection of their contemporary music, the Ecotopians “have a near provincial disregard for the very highest achievements, a kind of ultrademocratic shrinking of the scale of creative excellence” (Callenbach, 1978: 134). According to this, citizens do not leave the practice of arts to professionals; instead, they are all engaged in this field. In the description of Ecotopian music which “seems the most important [art]

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to Ecotopians” (ibidem), it is obvious that the various Californian music scenes of the 60s and early 70s influenced Callenbach. Like Otis Redding was celebrated at the rock festival in Monterey, and Carlos Santana belonged to the musical staff in Woodstock, Callenbach stresses that there are Black bands playing music with roots both in the jazz and blues we know from Chicago or New York and in the Caribbean music. There are bands from Spanish backgrounds who “play with an obvious Latin American influence”, white bands whose music “sounds (…) like Balinese gamelan music”, and also “groups using classical instrumentation (...) who play an unearthly improvised music” (ibidem).2 The different musical styles are reflected in the instrumentation. At the mentioned rock festivals in Monterey and Woodstock, on the one hand, folk groups like Stills, Crosby, Nash and Young accompanied their vocals just with acoustic instruments, especially acoustic guitars. On the other hand, rock bands like the Who amplified their electric instruments via loudspeaker towers. Although the scandal Dylan is reported to have provoked at the folk festival in Newport 1965 seems to be a legend (Jackson, 2002), he was, indeed, attacked by folk fans, for instance at a concert on 17th May 1966 in Manchester (UK), where he was accused to be “Judas” (Dylan, 1998). This conflict smoulders still in Ecotopia in the year of 1999: The burning music issue in Ecotopia at present concerns electrification. At the time of Independence, rock music was entirely electronic and groups carried around with them a whole truckload of heavy amplifiers. They soon came under attack from “folkies,” musicians who used only traditional instruments such as the recorder, banjo, guitar, piano, and antique types such as the sitar. Folkies argued that music could not be a truly people’s art, accessible to all, if it depended on high-cost electronics; and they also maintained that music should not depend on the artificial aid of electricity. Their final argument was that amplified music was a biological offense because it damaged eardrums. The development of small, inexpensive amplifiers undermined their first point, and the last didn’t seem to impress young Ecotopian musicians any more than it had our own. And so the debate rages on. (Callenbach, 1978: 135)

Brave New World Both Bellamy and Callenbach describe a democratic access to music. While in Callenbach’s novel the music is a spontaneous product of the musicians, in Bellamy’s novel music is planned and performed by a public music service. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World gives another kind of planning. Here, all areas of human life are arranged, not only the economy, the social system and the culture such as in Looking Backward, but also the people’s breeding and growing up.

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Both feelies (feel films) and music are not created by artists but constructed by emotional engineers (Huxley, 1972: 55-56). Synthetic music accompanies both life and death. Linda, the hero’s mother, for instance, dies in a hospital consummating the drug soma and synthetic music (idem, 167). Huxley states clearly what he thinks about this when he describes a typical Brave New World’s film music with sounds called “hyper-violine”, “super-cello” and “oboe-surrogate” (idem, 136). In fact, a lot of things in this society are surrogates: embryos grow up in “blood surrogate” (idem, 9) – for lower class embryos, this is mixed with alcohol (idem, 37); cartridge belts are made of “morocco-surrogate” (idem, 64); a meal is composed of “a carotene sandwich, a slice of vitamin A pâté, a glass of champagne-surrogate” (idem, 143); from time to time, people need a “Violent Passion Surrogate” (idem, 142, 197) – additionally, women need a “Pregnancy Substitute” (idem, 30, 153); and the motto “MY LIFE AND WORK, BY OUR FORD” is “bound in limp black leather-surrogate” (idem, 178). The lack of originality and individuality determines also a dancing scene in Brave New World, where music plays the most prominent role in the novel. Henry and Lenina, two of the novel’s characters, visit a dancing party in the former Westminster Abbey. Four hundred couples were fivestepping round the polished floor. Lenina and Henry soon became the four hundred and first (ibidem). Here, Huxley makes clear that the homogeneous movements of the crowd symbolize the de-individualization owing to the dance. In other novels by Huxley there are descriptions of de-individualizing dances, too. The dancers in a night club scene in Antic Hay, for instance, “stepped and stepped with a habitual precision, as though performing some ancient and profoundly significant rite” (Huxley, 1973: 169). In both novels, the dancing scenes are accompanied by the saxophone; and even the saxophones in Brave New World are spelled with an “e” instead of an “a”. This word is obviously a blending of “sexuality” with “saxophone”. Further specifications show that Huxley parodies a dance band of his time. The number of “Calvin Stopes and his Sixteen Sexophonists” corresponds to the number of musicians in a big band (Huxley, 1972: 63).3 The fact that this band exclusively consists of sexophones is certainly surprising. In spite of that, in his further description Huxley keeps to his model: when “the sexophones (...) moaned in the alto and tenor registers” (ibidem). In the same way, in big bands most saxophones are alto and tenor saxophones. Later on, Huxley writes that the musicians play in “A flat major” (ibidem). This is an often used key for saxophones, because these instruments are tuned in B flat and E flat.

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While in Antic Hay the saxophone “pierced like a revelation from heaven” (Huxley, 1973: 168), in Brave New World it is said that “[t]he sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them” (Huxley, 1972: 63). Probably only convinced cat lovers will be able to enjoy the musical recitals of love-sick cats as “revelation from heaven”. What Huxley here blames as caterwauling is, in his opinion, true for most music since Beethoven. According to Huxley’s essay “Popular music”, this composer “is responsible for all the languishing waltz tunes, all the savage jazzings, for all that is maudlin and violent in our popular music. He is responsible because it was he who first devised really effective musical methods for the direct expression of emotion” (Huxley, 1974: 248). But popular music does not only express vulgar emotions; it also neglects the formal, architectural side of music. Huxley complains in Antic Hay about the weak playing together of the musicians (see Enkemann, 1970: 67f.): “And the piano hammered and rattled away unmindful of the sensibilities of the other instruments” (Huxley, 1973: 168). In Brave New World, the dance takes the role of this piano. Its name, five step, is borrowed from the two step, a popular dance of the 1920s and 30s. It is likely that Huxley thought that the five steps of this dance would prevent any gliding movement.4 Moreover, Huxley plays with the two step’s notorious reputation. In his book Illustrierte Sittengeschichte, the German sexologist Eduard Fuchs described this dance as follows: Der Tanz beginnt mit innigster Umschlingung der beiden Tanzenden und endigt in einer Art aufgelöster Verschmelztheit, ähnlich der, wie sie nach einer wirklich vollzogenen Umarmung zweier Liebender sich einstellt. Beim Tanzen öffnet die Frau die Schenkel, erst leise, dann immer mehr; in gleicher Weise drängt der Mann ein Bein zwischen die Schenkel seiner Partnerin. In derselben Steigerung pressen sich die Leiber der beiden Tanzenden aneinander, wobei die Frau, um ihr Verlangen nach einer Begattung zu symbolisieren, ihrem Tänzer möglichst auffallend ihren Unterleib entgegendrängt, während sie sich ebenso stark mit dem Oberkörper nach rückwärts neigt; der gedämpfte Rhythmus der Bewegungen (...) symbolisiert schließlich den gegenseitigen Vollzug des Geschlechtsaktes. (Fuchs, 1912: 434-435) [The dance begins with the most intimate hug of the two dancers and ends in a kind of relaxed merge like a really consummated embrace of two lovers. In the course of the dance the woman opens her thighs, at first softly, then more and more. Likewise the man edges a leg between the thighs of his partner. In the same climax the bodies of the two dancers squeeze together. The woman shoves her belly against her dancer as strikingly as possible, while she bends her torso likewise strongly backwards. With this, she symbolizes her desire for copulation. The soft rhythm of the motions (...) finally symbolizes the reciprocal accomplishing of the coitus. – my translation]

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More clearly than this subtle reference to the two step, is the sexuality stated in the obvious changing from saxophone to sexophone. But the sexual sphere is not only touched by the dance and the instruments; the music itself is important. In “Popular Music”, Huxley blames the Italian composers of the nineteenth century for having introduced “a certain vibrant sexual quality” in music, especially in popular music (Huxley, 1974: 248). We just have to think about how Lenina and Henry got from the dance floor to the bed. The fact that Lenina takes a contraceptive before the dance scene, following the Malthusian drill and the birth control regulations, is noteworthy; so is the song that Calvin Stopes and his musicians sing.5 The lyrics of this song seem to parody a popular song called “That coal black mammy of mine”, which in Huxley’s essays is also cited as “Mammy of mine”. The subject of motherhood would be impossible for a Brave New World’s song because in that world of the future artificially inseminated embryos grow up in bottles and even the thought about parents is obscene. So Calvin Stopes’s song underlines the separation of sexual intercourse from reproduction. Instead of singing “Mammy of mine”, Stopes and his musicians gush “There ain’t no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine” (Huxley, 1972: 63; cf. Bloom, 1936: 44). All three discussed novels write excerpts of a music history of the future, but focus on different aspects. Bellamy concentrates on the technological development which should lead to a democratic access to music. Callenbach too describes a technological development, but it serves to transfer a present aesthetic disagreement to the future. In Huxley’s novel the role of technological development of music is clearly subordinated to the author’s criticism of the popular music of his time. In all of them, music pervades the lives of the characters, echoing the utopian ideals set forth by the authors.

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Notes 1 It is interesting that Bellamy thinks about the transmission of live concerts only and not of the transmission of records. In “With the eyes shut” he speculates about the use of records in a utopian society (Bellamy, 1889: 736745). However, in this story records do not contain music but spoken texts, literary works as well as text books for schools.

2 Here Callenbach refers to psychedelic music, whose improvisations often were too long to be pressed on LP. 3 As a rule, a big band is composed of 5 saxophones, 3-4 trumpets, 3-4 trombones, piano, drums, bass and guitar. 4 It is interesting that the five quarter time was also the basis of the Lipsi. This dance was fruitlessly designed in the

GDR to turn away the youth of the real existing socialism from rock’n roll. 5 The name of the bandleader Calvin Stopes may be related to Marie Stopes, who, in 1921, founded a birth-control clinic in London and published the book Contraception: It’s Theory, History and Practice in 1923 (reprinted in 1931).

Works Cited Bellamy, Edward (1889), “With the eyes shut”, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 79, October, pp. 736-745 [facsimile at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/ cgi_bin/moa/sgml/moa_idx?notisid=ABK4014_ 0079_89]. _ _ (1995), Looking Backward: 2000-1887, edited with an introduction by Daniel H. Borus, Boston and New York, Bedford/St. Martin’s. Bloom, Eric (1936), “The Musician in Aldous Huxley”, in The Chesterian, vol. 17, November, pp. 37-45. Brooks, John (1976), Telephone: The first hundred Years, New York, Harper & Row. Callenbach, Ernest (1978), Ecotopia: A novel about ecology, people and politics in 1999, London, Pluto Press. Dylan, Bob (1998), The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4. Bob Dylan Live, 1966. The “Royal Albert Hall Concert”, Sony [1 audio CD]. Enkemann, Jürgen (1970), Die satirische Darstellung gesellschaftlicher Desintegration bei Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh und Angus Wilson. Untersucht am Motiv der Party und an ähnlichen Gruppensituationen, PhD thesis Technical University Berlin.

Fuchs, Eduard (1912), Illustrierte Sittengeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Das bürgerliche Zeitalter, München, Albert Langen Verlag für Literatur und Kunst. Huxley, Aldous (1972), Brave New World, London, Chatto & Windus. _ _ (1973), Antic Hay, London, Chatto & Windus. __ (1974), “Popular Music”, in Aldous Huxley, Along the Road. Notes and Essays of a Tourist, London, Chatto & Windus. Jackson, Bruce (2002), “The myth of Newport ‘65. It wasn’t Bob Dylan they were booing”, Buffalo Report, 26th August [http://buffaloreport.com/020826dylan.html. buffaloreport.com/020826dylan.html Ruschkowski, André (1998), Elektronische Klänge und musikalische Entdeckungen, Stuttgart, Reclam. Sterne, Jonathan (2003), The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham and London, Duke University Press.

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Music and Utopia The European Anthem: Kant, Schiller and Beethoven Henrique Gomes de Araújo | Catholic University, Porto, Portugal

In this paper I will look into the relationship between music and utopia, in the context of the discussion surrounding the European Constitution and the political agreement that it implies. I will try to discover how far the community aspect of Europe is observed in this Constitution and will take into consideration the importance given to another aspect of that Constitution, its political organisation. I will therefore be using two kinds of category: the category of structure (political structure) and the category of community. Departing from the idea that an anthem can be considered the counterpoint of a Constitution, in that the former is the voice of a society’s community and the latter is the juridical expression of a society’s structure, I will enhance the utopian traits of the European Anthem. The origin of Utopia In every kind of society, at all times, all ritual processes, in Victor Turner’s theory, reveal two powers: gift and liberation. Gift refers to horizontal dimension, that is built around the metaphor of birth, based on strength, wealth, authority and tradition, in order to destroy injustice among men and in the eyes of God and revive the identity and the existence of community. Liberation, on the other hand, is a vertical, hierarchical power, based on God, spirits and ancestors and

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using the metaphor of death to reconstruct a purified order. Why do I refer to gift and liberation in the origin of utopia? Because gift, as I explained before, revives the identity and the existence of community and, in this way, tends to create utopia: from this anthropological point of view, certain kinds of utopia, like that of Thomas More, are the result of a conceptual reduction of society to community, ignoring its structure. This is the answer to the question: how is the utopian discourse produced? In fact values like solidarity, fraternity, cooperation, self-respect and respect for others, are born with and in the community. The utopian vision of an anthem A community could be described as a body of human beings that recognise in each other similar ways of facing birth, love and death. On this basis, they play the game of non-violent reciprocal relations, which are a guarantee of a community’s survival and reproduction. But human beings wear masks that represent different gender, age, class, status, race, etc. They express different kinds of language – verbal, non-verbal, body mimic – that are the outward expression of thought and knowledge as the basis of power. So, actors with their masks and speech form a society’s structure, a political organisation. But, if the speech is the particular language of the structure and its actors, what is the language of community and its human beings? The answer is music. In fact, music is the universal language of the human beings that are behind the masks, which they wear. Music is a language without words, without masks, without representation, without acting. It is the pure sound of the human being’s heart and the community’s essence. So, from an anthropological point of view of music, the question is: when a community choose an anthem, is their vision a utopian one? And the answer is yes; the choice of an anthem is based on utopian ideals, because this type of music is the voice of community, regardless of political structure. Kant, Schiller and Beethoven: the European anthem The final movement of Ludwig Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in 1823 is a dramatic piece of music because, in fact, what we hear is not a pure piece of music without words, as he had written up until then, but music with poetry. Lessing (1729-1781), who wrote about drama, had influenced Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) thought and, through him, Friedrich Schiller’s (1759-

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1805) verses. The great discussion was about the dialogue between music and poetry. Which of them was the main language? The final movement of the Ninth Symphony expresses Beethoven’s point of view regarding Lessing, Kant and Schiller’s discussion about drama: for him, poetry had to serve music. And the reason was that music is the only universal language, because it is the language of the community of all human beings, while speech, however beautiful it may be, always belongs to particular actors with their own mask. For many years, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) had hoped to compose music for the Ode to Joy written in 1785 by Friedrich von Schiller. Freude, schöner Gotterfunken Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken Himmlische, dein Heiligtum

Joy, lovely divine spark, Daughter of Elysium Drunk with fire, we approach Your sanctuary, O holy one!

Deine Zauber binden wieder, Was die Mode streng geteilt, Alle Menschen werden Brüder Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt

Your magic reunites those whom custom sternly separates; All men shall be brothers Where ever you gentle wings tarry.

Listening to these two verses from the Ode of Joy (An die Freude),�������� our attention is called to this “Joy, lovely divine spark”, “O holy one!”. And we understand this emotion of “joy” as a positive power, leading individual and collective behaviour in order “to reunite” those that “custom sternly separates”. Joy is born and grows just when all human beings, “all men” feel that they shall be brothers in a great community. I would like to highlight the future tense of the verb “to be” because utopia is something expected in the future; it has not happened yet.

Al

-

le

Men - schen

wer - den

Brü - der,

Schiller’s verse Alle Meschen werden Brüder expresses a utopian ideal that is in harmony with Beethoven’s score (see above). Undoubtedly, poetry serves the voice of a community seen as brotherhood (gr. “philadelphia”). We can thus well understand why the European community chose this music as its Anthem.

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On the website of the European Union, one can read the official interpretation of the Anthem: it expresses “Schiller’s idealistic vision of the human race becoming brothers – a vision Beethoven shared (…). Without words, in the universal language of music, this anthem expresses the ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity for which Europe stands. (…) It is not intended to replace the national anthems of the Member States but rather to celebrate the values they all share and their unity in diversity” (www.europa.eu.int). This context certainly suggests a possible counterpoint between an anthem and a Constitution. As we know, an anthem is the voice of human beings that are united in a community; on the other hand, a Constitution is a fundamental set of laws governing the relations between social actors, the European citizens. The European Constitution As we all know, there are two legitimate powers in the European Union. The first is the official representative of Member States (members of the government). The second power, which is as legitimate as the first, is the power of the people, citizens, and communities. The first is structural and vertical, whereas the second, the people, is horizontal and community-oriented. How does this work in decision-making? A qualified majority requires the support of 55% of the Member States representing 65% of the population. As we know, this Constitution defends the idea of a Federal Europe, following the ideas of Saint-Pierre and Rousseau and later Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace (Zum Ewigen Frieden), whose political thought, born in the American and French revolutions, defended federalism as a model for international order. This federal government, according to Kant, would be a federation for peace (foedus pacificum), which would try to put an end to wars forever. As Kant said, “The federation must spread over all the States and may lead to everlasting peace”. The question is to know if this political structure has a counterpoint in the social and cultural expression of the various European Communities. Music as the utopian voice of a community Music, the universal language of humans, is the voice of a community. It is my thesis that the European Anthem, whose universality goes beyond the frontiers of Europe, associated as it is, even without the words, to the idea of the brotherhood of men, gives expression to the utopia of a harmonious life in community.

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Works Cited Beethoven, Ludwig van (s/d.), Ninth Symphony (Choral), Op. 125 in D moll in Eulenburg’s Kleine Orchester – Partitur – Ausgabe, Leipzig, Ernest Eulenburg [1823]. Kant, Immanuel (2002), A Paz Perpétua e outros Opúsculos, Lisboa, Edições 70 [1795-/96].

Schiller, Friedrich von (1974), “An die Freunde”, Schiller Werke, Berlin, Aufbau-Verlag [1785]. Turner, Victor (1995), The Ritual Process, Chicago, Albine, Publishing Company [1969].

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Cyberpunk versus Empire: Constructing Technotopia in the New World Order Renata Koba | University of Rovira i Virgili, Spain

The nature and complexities of the 21st century society offer a good opportunity to rethink many of the basic concepts of what we understand as human or humanism. For example, the mass media constructs and deconstructs our desires and offers illusory visions of reality which, as a result, interpellate us, and form our ideologies. According to Althusser, everything is ideology: the clothes we wear, the books we read, the food we eat, the religion we follow. Conflicts between nations are artificially created and wars are being simulated by the leading governments, thus giving us a false perception of the world. However, there are still those who remain aware of the fallacious politics of post-industrial states and who dream of a better future and a fairer society. I am one of those dreamers and that is why I chose to talk about a cyberpunk novel, Body of Glass, also known under the title He, She and It (1991). This utopian vision of society was written by Marge Piercy. My analysis of the novel will focus on two cyborgisation theories concerned principally with the anarchist, and thus utopian, aspect of cyberpunk. Body of Glass compares and contrasts two distinct types of societies of the near future illustrating the dystopian or dark realities or subjectivities which might inspire readers to think critically about the times they are living. Let me point out just the main issues of the novel briefly. Piercy’s novel, which takes place in the United States in the year 2050, is about a love story between a

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female human, Shira Shipman, and a male cyborg, Yod. Yod has been created to defend the free enclave of Tikva. Parallel to the main plot Malkah (Shira’s grandmother) narrates a story about a golem, Joseph, and Chava, his beloved, which takes place in the Jewish ghetto of Prague in the 17th century. While focusing on the golem, whose aim according to the myth was to defend the Jewish people, Piercy offers a deep insight of Jewish cabalistic culture. The stories of the golem and the cyborg are apparently very similar although they are set in two different contexts. These stories lie at the centre of the novel and they both focus on the process of educating and humanising artificial beings illustrating how technology deconstructs concepts such as “nature”, “humanity” and “culture”. Thus the metaphor of a cyborg might be used to demonstrate how subjectivity is changing in the age of information. Not only does the novel narrate a love story, but it also shows up some of the amazing technological advances within futuristic societies. One might take Yod as one of the outstanding inventions of the future. Additionally, the newest inventions in medicine offer numerous possibilities of changing, augmenting or improving human physiques. A new field in medicine called “psychoengineering” depicted in the novel enables people to interface with different forms of artificial intelligence. The bodies of most of the protagonists are altered through the use of “nanotechnology” which makes use of microscopic implants or various types of prosthesis to cure different diseases. Since Body of Glass represents the advanced world of the future it also demonstrates its defects: the corrupt world of enterprises with an excess of information pirates or other dissidents trying to set up their own businesses by infiltrating into hidden and confidential data. The novel is thus about the struggle for power between dominating post-industrial corporations. At the heart of the novel lies an opposition between two societies, Yakamura-Stichen and Tikva. Both places might be taken as a representation of two distinct ideologies. The first would be that manifested by the cyberfeminist Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (Haraway, 2000). This work suggests a new type of politics. The contradictory enclaves, Yakamura-Stichen and Tikva, might be taken as an example of “how to get from here to there”: that is, from the White Capitalist Patriarchy into a New World Order of Informatics of Domination. Piercy’s novel discusses how science and technology influence social relations, the construction of subjectivity, ideology and history. The changes suggested by Haraway are reflected in the novel in terms of class, race and gender.

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In her cyborg manifesto Haraway proposes a set of dualisms transcended by the societies of the Informatics of Domination. Let me recall some of her dualisms: representation/simulation, organism/biotic component, reproduction/ replication, scientific management in home or factory/global factory (electronic cottage), labour/robotics, public or private/cyborg citizenship, sex/genetic engineering, mind/artificial intelligence. According to Haraway, the figure of a cyborg transgresses this system of binary oppositions and might serve as an alternative to the Western patriarchal power apparatuses. She uses the cyborg figure as a metaphor of a possibility to overcome the established system of meaning upon which Western culture has relied on for centuries. Chris Hables Gray (2001), another cyberculture theorist, also focuses on a cyborg metaphor and celebrates the possibility of integrating cyborgs into natural systems and hence transforming the nature of societies. Gray rewrites the 17th century mechanistic vision of a society as seen by Thomas Hobbes and announces the cyborg body politics of the technoscientific society. Thus the societies of the New World Order depicted in the novel might be represented as a cyborg based on “cyborg power” because they are thoroughly cybernetic; that is, based on information and mass-media. Gray asserts that the cyborg body politics is just a metaphor implying that people are learning to inhabit this utopian/dystopian, ambiguously constructed cyborg body. He believes that metaphors are used to describe real-world phenomena and the term “cyborg power” is used to describe the evolution of democratic politics of recent times. The cyberpunk dystopian (rather than utopian) post-industrial atmosphere of late capitalism illustrated in Body of Glass is characterised by the proliferation of megalopolis. These enterprises are all involved in open competition, exploitation, and as Piercy puts it, “A certain amount of industrial espionage was part of the system, multi versus multi (…)” (Piercy, 1991: 74). Computer information is highly valued. The urban context, very much resembling that of Manga production of The Ghost in the Shell (1998) or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) with the streets full of little stalls selling food, drugs, bodies, implants or computers where the polluted air and the proliferation of viruses as well as uncommon diseases are killing people, produces a stifling sensation. As in most cyberpunk stories, a catastrophe occurred in the past and it caused the Great Famine period. Owing to natural disasters caused by technological changes in the enclaves, the general feeling is that the population and the nation are endangered. In the light of Gray’s theory one might conclude that the nation as such does not exist and there are no national boundaries or defence systems.

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As has already been suggested, the novel celebrates a clash of ideologies in the creation of the society of the future. Yakamura-Stichen is patriarchal, competitive and hierarchical with mega-corporations controlling the global economy. Its society is not unitary but bisected into “execs” and “techies”. This reflects Gray’s fear of a possible division of a cyborg society into two contradictory strata: “technopeasants” and the powerful elite called “technocrats” (Gray, 2001). Gray advocates that technologies might prove to be authoritarian and hence real citizenship might be assigned only to the privileged with access to, or control over, complex technologies. The division of society into these categories points towards the real dangers of cyborgisation according to Gray. Not only are the citizens of Yakamura-Stichen marked by a strict code of behaviour, they are also forced to wear uniforms for they are all classified and thus controlled within a particular social stratum. Also, the architecture of YakamuraStichen is strictly defined and designed. Uniformity as well as prevailing blackness makes the enclave look sombre and threatening and this discourages any kind of inspiration or creativity. Not only buildings are designed in a characteristic way to suit the needs of the enclave; people’s bodies and faces are surgically modified too in order to resemble Yakamura-Stichen’s ideal: “faces [were] as much like the one on the view screen as each could afford” (Piercy, 1991: 4). Moreover, the citizens’ attire in each mega-corporation reflects people’s status as well as the politics of each enclave. The rigorous code of dressing is based on the prevailing discourse which imposes the standard black and backless business suits to show both men’s and women’s strong and fit bodies. Tikva, on the other hand, depicts the utopian blueprint of a society offered by Haraway: it is non-patriarchal, non-competitive and non-hierarchical. In contrast to Yakamura-Stichen’s capitalist mode of production the free town is characterised by “libertarian socialism with a strong admixture of anarchofeminism, reconstructionist Judaism (…) and greeners” (idem, 383). The space to express one’s freedom here is illustrated in the casual way of dressing as well as in its varied architecture. Yakamura-Stichen represents Gray’s idea of a cyborged society based on the image of Leviathan since it is a hierarchy ruled by the head, whereas Tikva demonstrates Haraway’s cyborged liberating vision of humanity. Its politics is based on active democracy where citizens participate fully and openly in its policies and budget (such as in the already existing community of Porto Alegre in Brazil). It also favours posthuman beings constructed through biotechnology and nanotechnology in order to improve or lengthen human life and potential. In this technosociety, technologically-modi-

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fied humans live side by side with 100% robots. Apart from cleaning robots labouring everywhere, artificial intelligence constructs in bodiless forms are a common presence. Shira’s house is such a construct; it is an enhanced stationary computer and she has quite intelligent conversations with it at times. As Gray claims, cyborgisation is not only about the technological enhancement of people’s bodies, it also affects human subjectivity. Thus one of the essential aspects of technotopias is the fact that people become more closely related or emotionally involved with machines or computers and, paradoxically enough, Shira perceives her house as her biological mother. As a consequence, this excessive contact with machines in the posthuman age results in an underrated natural/biological mother-daughter relationship. This is reflected in the novel in the lack of a relationship between Shira and her biological mother. Furthermore, Shira’s father (and fathers in general) is totally neglected in the New World Order. There is no father in Shira’s family. All the women protagonists of the novel are single or divorced and thus independent. It can be concluded that in this technoscientific era the Western concept of a nuclear family is destabilised and hence the significance as well as the nature of the term “family” is open to contingency. This is further illustrated in the relationship between Shira, her son, and Yod. In the information age the “family” unit is open to revision, to re-arrangements or re-definitions. The utopian society of Tikva has no ideal or uniform image but welcomes variety in all senses. Supporting Haraway’s theory, it rejects any dominating or demagogic discourse claiming that: “Cyborg politics is the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentricism” (Haraway, 2000: 81). As a final remark Tikva might be interpreted as a necessary struggle for a new language or rather a manifesto for re-definitions of old and fixed terms used in the Western system of meaning. In this context, Yakamura-Stichen can be seen as a metaphor of the capitalist societies of the present with “the one code that translates all meaning perfectly” favouring a “Big Brother” presence controlling every aspect of life where, as Piercy claims: “Everyone [is] too conscious of being observed, of being judged” (Piercy, 1991: 59). As both Haraway and Gray propose, technology should be used in order that human beings may develop their potential or liberate themselves from the past and not to regress to previously held dogmas. It’s people’s choice; unfortunately, it’s up to those in power to determine whether technotopia is possible at all and what cybernetics really stands for and for whom. By putting into

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practice certain values of the cyborgisation theories suggested above, no matter how utopian they might seem, we could make the communities of the New World Order a site of truly promising posthuman beings. In order to achieve this, we should have in mind what Haraway once claimed in her manifesto: “So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (Haraway, 2000: 74). Works Cited Haraway, Donna J. (2000), “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Neil Badmington (ed.) (2000), Posthumanism: Readers in Cultural Criticism, Houndmills, Palgrave, pp. 69-84.

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Piercy, Marge (1991), Body of Glass, London, Penguin. Gray, Chris Hables (2001), Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age, London, Routledge.

Images of Utopia and Dystopia: From the Sea to Hyperspace Feride Çiçekogˇlu | Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey

The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel. William Gibson, Neuromancer

The opening sentence of William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer is the image of a dead sea under a greyish sky, reflecting each other in hollowness. This single sentence is almost a full image of the lost nature, a vanishing sea and a lifeless sky. It becomes a mental vision of technology having devoured the seas and the heavens, the sources of life and faith from eternity. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in Neuromancer which was published in 1984. Cyberspace denoted the dystopian vision of a new kind of space where the key elements of nature had disappeared from human experience. Looking back after two decades, one can see a dramatic turn in the fate of dystopian fiction in 1984 when George Orwell’s vision of the modernist dystopia (or the dystopia of modernism) seems to have fulfilled its mission in the year of its premonition. It may or may not be a coincidence that an analytical expression of this turn also came in 1984, in Fredric Jameson’s famous essay on “Postmodernism and the Consumer Society”, where he proposed the term hyperspace, encompassing in its ontology a notion of space beyond that as we have known of it (Jameson, 1998: 1-20). A decade later Jameson would sum up the essence of the turn by saying: “Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and the nature is gone for good” (Jameson, 1991: ix).

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In this quest from the dystopian to utopian imagery, I propose to focus on the sea – the main element of nature “gone for good” – as the catalyst of the change. I would like to start with the epigraph from Neuromancer as a snapshot while launching on an anachronistic analysis from the threshold of the twenty-first century back into history. Naturally, the film Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) inspired by Neuromancer becomes an emblematic moment of visual expression at the start of our voyage, projecting the spatial dystopia of the loss of nature to its utmost limit, the loss of the human body. At the turn of the previous century we meet Joseph Conrad whose writing appears to us today “not [as] a reflection of the sea and a worldwide experience of it so much as an anxious premonition of its disappearance as a key element of nature from human experience” (Taussig, 2000: 250). We have to travel three more centuries, to the turn of the sixteenth century, to encounter a unique visual expression inspired by the discovery of the sea as the vista to utopia: Hieronymus Bosch’s enigmatic triptych, the Garden of Earthly Delights. Although it has seldom been discussed in the context of utopia, what makes this example particularly interesting for us is precisely this overlooked aspect. Its source of inspiration, which is the same milieu that inspired Thomas More to write Utopia, is none other than the discovery of an imaginable unconquered space beyond the sea. In contrast to the dystopian imagery in the film Matrix, Garden of Earthly Delights is a complete spatial utopia, depicting not only a utopian vision of place and landscape but also of the human body. In this essay, I focus on the relation of utopia and dystopia by way of an anachronistic analysis of two emblematic moments of visual expression: the film Matrix, as a reflection of our present epoch characterized by dystopia, and the Garden of Earthly Delights, reflecting the aspirations of the dawn of the sixteenth century, enhanced by utopia. The main line of argument derived from this visual odyssey to the arcades of the sea – akin to Benjamin’s search for the flâneur in the arcades of Paris – is simple: utopia came into being with the possibility to imagine a non-existing space beyond the sea and was transformed into dystopia with the disappearance of the sea as a key element of nature from human experience. The framework of analysis will unfold along two interrelated dimensions, the spatial and the narrative turns. The spatial turn, which has often been considered as a crucial manifestation of the transformation from modernism proper to postmodernism, will be problematized in the context of the sea and the conceptual shift in this respect will be analyzed, arguably, as the catalyst of

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the narrative turn from utopia to dystopia. Consequently, the relationship of utopia and dystopia will be assessed to the extent that it can be conceived as metonymic, with implications for the broader understanding of the modernpostmodern divide.

The Spatial Turn It is the unique provision of Baudelaire’s poetry that the image of the woman and the image of death intermingle in a third: that of Paris. The Paris of his poems is a sunken city, and more submarine than subterranean. Water Benjamin, Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935)

As far back as 1935, Baudelaire’s genius joins the intuition of Benjamin in the image of Paris as a sunken city under the sea. This image is a premonition of the vanishing sea, the loss of the vista which opens up to new space. The sea is no longer the horizon beyond which lies a New World for discovery but merely an implication of death, a lifeless shell which covers up the remnants of what has already been lived and exhausted. The awareness of a phenomenon is often a sign of its extinction and so is the case of the sea: “For it is by virtue of the separation and loss that the sea acquires a new magnificence, as when Benjamin, sensing the demise of storytelling in European cultures, notes that at that point it is ‘possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing’” (Taussig, 2000: 258). If the obsession with temporality, which finds its classical literary expression in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at the dawn of the twentieth century, is seen as a distinction of the high modern, so is the concern with space for what follows modernism proper: “A certain spatial turn has often seemed to offer one of the more productive ways of distinguishing postmodernism from modernism proper, whose experience of temporality – existential time, along with deep memory – it is henceforth conventional to see as a dominant of the high modern” (Jameson, 1991: 154). The spatial turn finds its analytical expression only in the second half of the twentieth century, most extensively in Henri Lefebvre’s colossal work, The Production of Space. Its poetics comes earlier however, as is usually the case. The image of Paris as a sunken city under the sea is a premonition of not only the vanishing sea but also the melting of the physical into the virtual reality.

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While the sea as a physical reality is lost, a new kind of space emerges as the ghost of the sea. This new kind of space, which will be called cyberspace or hyperspace in the 1980’s, has its seeds in the 1940’s because it is during the Second World War that its conceptual and technological framework is constructed. The key concept here is cybernetics. The etymology of the word goes back to ancient Greek, kybernetes meaning helmsman, from kybernan, meaning to steer or to govern. Cybernetics originated in 1940’s as the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. The 1960’s witnessed the emergence of another concept from the same origin, cyborg, which is a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body. In the 1980’s, came cyberpunk, coined most famously by William Gibson. The key to these concepts is the core notion of cyber, a back formation from cybernetics, relating to electronic communication networks and virtual reality. 1 The notions of cybernetics, cyborg and cyberpunk have paved the way to a new conception of space, the cyberspace, which borrows its distinctive characteristic from a concept peculiar to the sea, namely steering. However, the “helmsman” of the cyberspace no longer sets on voyages towards new horizons of Oceans but towards the mysteries and horrors of a new realm where the limits of the human are extended beyond the physicality of the body. The loss of nature as we know it – the irresistible attraction of the unknown, yet the uncanny space awaiting beyond – is the catalyst, I claim, which ignited the narrative turn.

The Narrative Turn The dystopia is generally a narrative, which happens to a specific subject or character, whereas the utopian text is mostly nonnarrative and (...) somehow without a subject position, although to be sure a tourist-observer flickers through its pages and more than a few anecdotes are disengaged. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Postmodernity

Drama requires death, literally or metaphorically. Murder is drama, a happily married couple is not. No story can be stagnant. No narrative can proceed without contradictions or so is our conception, maimed by modernity. Benjamin puts this in a nutshell when he says: “Death is the sanction of everything

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that the storyteller can tell” (Benjamin, 1973: 93). Thomas More’s imaginary island of Utopia, inspired by the news from the New World, which was yet uncolonized, named the genre on the eve of capitalism. The collective memory of Western consciousness has passed this episode on to us as the opening scene of our contemporary narrative. We have to remember that utopia is part of the Western agenda and that it cannot be generalized as a universal aspiration for “non-place”. The historical context of utopia implies the wishful thinking for some kind of consensus, without necessarily making the naive assumption that the consensus is the result of the free will of all participants. The threshold of the nineteenth century is the heyday of utopia: this was the era of individual projects of great utopians like St. Simon, Fourier and Owen, who invested all they had in some blueprint of consensus. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the end of the dream. It seems that the exhaustion of the nondiscovered space around the world exhausted the aspirations for a society of consensus in some imaginable distance. This was the time when Joseph Conrad’s writing was already an echo of the disappearing sea. The First World War may be interpreted as the performance of Conrad’s literary premonition, executed for redistribution since there was no new horizon. It is no coincidence that the classics of dystopia made their first dramatic appearance in the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s, in expectation of a decade which was probably the most dramatic in the history of collective human experience. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis dates from 1926 and Aldoux Huxley’s The Brave New World dates from 1932. Walter Benjamin is the dramatic character par excellence, who not only witnessed this dramatic turn from utopia to dystopia but performed his own life as a modern Oedipus, quitting the stage at the end of the decade, on September 26, 1940. So we reach the decade of the 1940’s, when cybernetics becomes the key to a new kind of space, which is the sanction of death for nature and thus is capable of more narratives than any preceding age.

Garden of Earthly Delights Bosch stood between the generations that met at the threshold of the sixteenth century, and he gained personal freedom by his stance which was both “no longer” medieval and “not yet” modern.

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The utopian vision of a perfect society formed a literary counterpoint to Bosch’s vision of paradisaical humanity. (...) More’s island is no more a part of this world than Bosch’s paradise. Hans Belting, Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights

In his recent book on the Garden of Earthly Delights, Belting interprets the central panel of the triptych as an earthly paradise, as “painted utopia”. He suggests that, while the side panels portray heaven and hell in biblical fashion, the central panel reflects the aspirations of early sixteenth century, and he touches upon the zeitgeist of the period as the link to Thomas More’s Utopia. Belting finds the explanation for the involvement with the verbal and visual expressions of a perfect society in the feelings of wonder and terror triggered by the age of discovery: The conquest and charting of the world irrevocably pushed the existence of a terrestrial Paradise into the realm of dreams. Paradise could not be turned into a colony without destroying it. Colonisation meant the disappearance of those imaginary places so long surmised in the unknown parts of the world. The realisation began to dawn that such places had existed only in the imagination. Imaginary space was devoured by empirical space. (Belting, 2002: 99)

The imaginary space being devoured by empirical space was reflected in the patronage of imagery. The secularization of the patronage of imagery is concretized in the example of Bosch’s triptych in a unique way. The triptych makes no sense as a religious icon. Posing this as a question, Belting determines the owner of the triptych as Hendrik, the Count of Nassau-Breda, who came into possession of Garden of Earthly Delights as a young man, after he inherited the estate of the House of Nassau in 1504.2 Particularly interesting to our subject is Belting’s description of an imaginary banquet by Hendrik who had his Breda residence transformed into a Renaissance Palace:3 After the first glass of wine, [the host] leads his guests to the work, which is closed. Although they have heard many wonderful things about it, they are disappointed at the sombre, empty exterior which is not even colored. Seeing their faces, the Count instructs a servant to open these huge, gloomy doors. When the wings open, there is a cry of surprise from the assembled party. In an explosion of color, the Garden of Earthly Delights appears as a sensation – something never seen before in painting. Hendrik enjoys the astonishment of his guests and laughingly calms their fears that they have enjoyed a view of something forbidden by the church. (Belting, 2002: 77-78)

Although this scene is fictitious, Belting claims that Bosch’s work “was surely destined for just such a form of presentation if its format as an altarpiece was to make

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any sense” (idem, 78). He further emphasizes that “it must surely have been intended for a theatrical presentation in which the triptych would appear as a wunderding (marvel), to quote the term used by Dürer to describe the trophies from the New World in the adjacent residence of the House of Burgundy” (ibidem). A theatrical presentation intended as a spectacle and linked to the New World beyond the sea: these are the points we have to keep in mind, before we focus on the iconography of the central panel. I propose to delineate a particular aspect of this iconography, which will be my main axis of comparison with the dystopian visuality: the human body. I suggest looking at the imaginary paradise of Bosch as the painted utopia of the human body, in perfect harmony with its natural setting. This scene of naked people, where “humankind lives in nature and at the same time a part of nature” is an apex in erotic visuality (idem, 47). Yet, even in the acts of erotic play, the men and the women seem almost androgynous, or childlike, apparently spared the labors of childbirth and the burden of earthly life. This is sexual play with no risks, erotic adventure with nature as a whole, or even the erotic adventure of nature itself, where the human body seamlessly merges with the rest of nature. I will not go into the details which consciously unsettle this utopian vision, details like the glass cylinders or the only clothed man looking at the spectator like a silent commentator – possibly a self-portrait by Bosch (Belting, 2002: 57) – from behind the test tube with ebony base, pointing to the woman with an uneaten apple. Let it suffice for the moment that these details are all man-made products, like splinters of technology in nature, as the seeds of dystopia which still have about five centuries for their own heyday. At this point, I suggest looking at Bosch’s envisioning of the earthly paradise as a visual counterpart of the intellectual milieu at the turn of the sixteenth century. The critical literature of the past decades has often traced the change in the representation of the body to the dawn of modernity. The radical difference between the representations of the body in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1588) and René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), for example, is highlighted by Dalia Judowitz: “Considered from a historical perspective this span of time appears relatively short, yet it marks one of the most significant turns in the conception of the body in the European tradition” (Judowitz, 2001: 67). In Montaigne’s Essays, “fully embedded in the fabric of the world, the body functions as the horizon of subjective being and becoming” while “Descartes’s elaboration of the duality of the mind and body will relegate the body to an autonomous entity” (ibidem).

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Cartesian view of mind and body associates a person “with his or her thought processes and not with his or her bodily existence” (Burkitt, 1999: 9). The Cartesian claim that we cannot know anything about ourselves or about the external world through our bodies and bodily sensations, that only the ability to think is the certainty of existence, is criticized by many as an essential aspect of deconstructing modernity. Ian Burkitt, for example, points out that in the contemporary Western world the historical experience of being divided between mind and body, thought and emotion, is part of the reality, but it does not prove the correctness of Cartesian dualism; on the contrary, it proves to what extent “this extremely radical” and “very wrong idea of the body” has impaired our wholeness and wholesomeness (idem, 8-9). Although there has been extensive work in the critical conceptualization of the body in the last two decades or so, the same is not true concerning the representation of the body as a pictorial metaphor. Bryan S. Turner’s preface and introduction to the second edition (1997) of his book The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (which was first published in 1984) points out both the increasing interest in the sociology of the body during the last two decades and the requirement for a similar involvement in the visual culture of embodiment (Turner, 1997: xi-2). This essay is a step in that direction, suggesting anachronistic ways of looking at familiar visual examples. Such an analysis of Bosch’s iconography in the Garden of Earthly Delights reveals it as a final documentation of the body before it fell prey to the Cartesian duality of the mind and body. Now it is time to look at a contemporary example where this duality is taken to its extreme in the dystopian imagery of the Matrix.

The Matrix All the speed he took, all the turns h’d taken and the corners he’d cut in the Night City, and still he’d see matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void. Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. William Gibson, Neuromancer

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept

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the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake from. Which is why the Matrix was designed to this: the peak of your civilization. AGENT SMITH, Matrix

The body cannot live without the mind. MORPHEUS, Matrix

I chose the film Matrix not because it is the most sophisticated example of dystopia, but because it is a pastiche of everything, from religion to science fiction, including features from some of the classical dystopias such as The Brave New World and Neuromancer. Thus, its form both reflects and reinforces its content, which is the fragmentation inherent in postmodernity. The story of the film is probably familiar to most of us. Nature is defeated by the artificial intelligence of the computers and the human body is used as a source of energy for the machines. Since “the body cannot live without the mind”, the human mind is programmed as a mental projection of the digital self. Thus, a simulated life goes on in cyberspace for the minds of the human beings whose bodies are no longer born but grown in fields. A group of people, the last surviving human beings led by Morpheus, fight the Matrix. They are in a hovercraft named Nabucadnezzar and the last human city, named Zion is a sunken city. A computer programmer who spends his nights in the Internet using the name Neo as a hacker is chosen by Morpheus as the Saviour. Agent Smith represents the machines and fights for the Matrix. Trinity, from Nabucadnezzar, is the closest one to Neo, fighting against Agent Smith and falling in love with Neo. Not only the sea as the vista to utopia has totally vanished, but the sun is also non-existent. While the human mind is confined to a dreamworld, the body is tormented, sucked up as a source of energy and abused by technology. The Matrix is a nightmare (Night City) for the body. There is no eroticism, no sexual play and the body is subject to all kinds of intrusions and extrusions as a battlefield between the machines and the crew of Morpheus. The scene where Agent Smith bugs Neo by sending a creature through his navel is the most iconographic expression of the intrusion of technology into the human body. Trinity then debugs Neo, extracting the creature from his na-

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vel. During bugging and debugging, both Smith and Trinity use tubes similar to the ones Bosch uses in the Garden of Earthly Delights to create the alienating effect of technology. If Bosch’s painting is the visual utopia of the human body, the Matrix is the dystopian vision stretched to its extreme: an illustration of what Baudrillard has referred to as the “end of the body and of its history: the individual is henceforth only a cancerous metastasis of its basic formula” (apud Denzin, 1991: 32-3).

The Metonymy of Utopia and Dystopia That weakening of the sense of history and of the imagination of historical difference which characterizes postmodernity is, paradoxically, intertwined with the loss of that place beyond history (or after its end) which we call utopia. Fredric Jameson, The Politics of Utopia

Now I would like to go back to my suggestion of cyber as the key word for the spatial turn in mid-twentieth century. Although we often use the genealogical counterparts of this concept, we seldom think about the connotations of the Greek origin of the word: kybernetes, which means “helmsman”, and kybernan, which means “to steer”. Cyber is related to the sea, like other terms, such as navigation and surfing, but in our present jargon we have come to associate these words more with the Internet than with the sea. I suggest that we have transferred and transplanted these concepts from the sea to the hyperspace with the vanishing of the sea. Thus, I believe that “the loss of space beyond history” is due mainly to the spatial turn, and that the relation of hyperspace to utopian space is similar to the relation of postmodernism to modernism proper. Akin to the threshold of the sixteenth century, not medieval “any more”, but “not yet” modern, our present age is a threshold, not modern “any more”, but “not yet” what we don’t know. It seems that we can no longer talk about utopia as a contemporary concept without falling into nostalgia. This is my impression when I read the recent New Left Review article by Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia” (Jameson, 2004: 35-54). Although I understand the urge for “the conception of systemic otherness, of an alternate society”, I find it difficult to agree that this can be kept alive (“however feebly”) by “only the idea of utopia” (idem, 36). It is my impression that implicit in the unwillingness to give up the idea of utopia is the assumption that the concept is ahistorical.

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In his essay on “The Antinomies of Postmodernity”, Jameson cautions about “the facile deployment of the opposition between Utopia and dystopia” and he suggests “disjoining” the pair utopia and dystopia in a definitive way (Jameson, 1994: 55). I dare propose a metonymic relation rather than a definitive disjoining. Metonymy highlights utopia and dystopia as the genealogical counterparts of modernism and postmodernism, enabling us to coherently analyze verbal or visual expressions at different moments in history, rather than to de-contextualize them. Metonymy could be the clue to explain why the film Blade Runner failed to grasp the audience in the early 1980’s, but became a cult film later when the cyberculture of postmodernity evolved into an experiential reality. As “a nightmare vision of the futuristic postmodern society”, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner did not enjoy the popularity of the Matrix largely because it was too early (Denzin 1991: 33). Similarly, whether we like it or not, it seems too late now to engage a concept like utopia for our contemporary aspirations of “systemic otherness” or of “an alternate society”. As a final word, I would like to add that it was the New World which both triggered utopia as the dreamland beyond the sea and which transformed it to dystopia. I am tempted to go into the politics of it, by referring to “the American Empire”, but I will not. It is probably no big secret for anyone among us anyway. Notes 1 The definitions, which are based on The New Oxford American Dictionary, have been taken from the glossary of an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Kacmaz, 2004: 136).

2 Belting also notes that “there is much to indicate that Hendrik was in fact the patron who commissioned the work” (Belting, 2002: 71). 3 Hendrik was known to often hold banquets and enjoy

seeing his guests drunk. If they drank so much wine that they could no longer stand, he would have them thrown onto a huge bed, reported by Dürer to be as large as to host fifty people (Belting, 2002: 73-77).

Works Cited Belting, Hans (2002), Hieronymus Bosch / Garden of Earthly Delights, Berlin, Prestel Verlag.

Burkitt, Ian (1999), Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity & Modernity, London, Sage.

Benjamin, Walter (2002), The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. _ _ (1973), “The Storyteller”, Illuminations, London, Fontana, pp. 83-109.

Denzin, Norman K. (1991), Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, London, Sage.

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Gibson, William (1995), Neuromancer, London, Voyager / HarperCollins [1984]. Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, Verso. __ (1994), “The Antinomies of Postmodernity”, The Seeds of Time, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 50-72 [1991]. __ (1998), “Postmodernism and the Consumer Society”, The Cultural Turn, pp. 1-20 [1984]. _ _ (2004), “The Politics of Utopia”, New Left Review 25, pp. 35-54. Judovitz, Dalia (2001), The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press.

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Kacmaz, Gul (2004), Architectural Space in the Digital Age, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Istanbul, submitted to the Istanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology. Taussig, Michael (2000), “The Beach (A Fantasy)”, Critical Inquiry, nr. 26, pp. 249-277. Turner, Bryan S. (1997), The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, London, Sage [1984].