UTOPIAS: REAL AND IMAGINED
An Imaginary Space for Experimentation Vincent Greco
Utopia is a word, coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 in Utopia, that is an etymological pun derived from the Greek roots eu- (good), ou- (not), topos (place). As places that are good but not-places, utopias exist somewhere between desire and its realization. Desire is a sense of longing for a person, object, or outcome. Utopia is the instance of social dreaming, our universal human tendency toward something better. One could say that the ambiguous nature of our desire for something better is the nexus of utopianism, and utopias are its manifestations. Utopianism is the umbrella term under which utopias collect, but there are good utopias, ‘eutopias,’ and bad utopias, ‘dystopias.’ The qualification and differentiation between the two comes from their distinct treatments of desire, with eutopia drawing on positive desires for a better society, and dystopia drawing on the fears inspired by the ‘reality.’ This paper will focus on the pioneering work of More’s Utopia, and attempt at delineating its influence within the spectrum of utopianism. We will find that the pre-ordained utopian society was never meant for realization; from Plato’s Republic to More’s Utopia, the goal of utopian thinking has always been to bring change into purview, but not to bring utopia into actuality. The utopian imagination is transgressive, or in violation or transcendence of imposed boundaries because within it is a pre-loaded fictional element. Or perhaps we could say that the transgressive form is itself a form of utopian thinking?
The history of utopian thinking has undergone waves of both eulogization and criticism, manifesting in movements and counter-movements, pro-utopia and anti-utopia. Utopian thinking has been a major part of Christian philosophical reflection, as the construction of a utopia represents a return to Eden. The arc of utopian thought can be traced from Plato to the early Christian writers such as Augustine and Dante, and later Neoplatonism, a translation of Plato into a Christian system of thinking, and the resulting demystification of radical Christian monastic values in Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history. However, as history saw a succession of failed utopias in the twentieth century, the dystopian model rapidly gained relevance. The dystopian model is not necessarily anti-utopian, for inscribed somewhere within its criticisms is still a desire; dystopia functions through fear but its goal is not so nihilistic, it sees a dismal future and therefore attempts to redirect us. Anti-utopia on the other hand is usually a foul-smelling by-product of man’s faculty for reason, anti-utopianism itself being an unreasonable conservatism and fear of change. The argument for anti-utopia is primarily a twenty-first century concern and is usually drawn from the failed fascist and communist projects of the twentieth century. Against anti-utopianism stands anti-anti-utopianism, a collection of similar viewpoints with no truly universal belief. Anti-anti-utopian thinkers such as Darko Suvin claim that in the anti-utopian world of conservatism and fear, utopianism does not disappear but is substituted with ‘disneyfication,’ ‘commodification of desire,’ and mass ‘infantilization.’ For Suvin and other like-minded thinkers, the anti-utopian viewpoint resigns from activity to passivity, which in turn
gives complete control to the dominating ideology and allows for the economic system and political powers to proliferate. Lucy Sargisson, in her book Fools Gold: Utopianism in the Twenty-first Century, outlines a form of utopianism which she calls ‘transgressive utopia.’ This idea follows a lineage of the forms of utopia, from Ernst Bloch’s ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopias to Tom Moylan’s ‘critical’ utopia. Characteristic of Moylan’s ‘critical utopia’ is ambiguity, its positioned somewhere between eutopia and dystopia and juggles between the two. Sargisson, likely influenced by Moylan’s concept, argues that ‘utopianisms’ be dissociated from ‘perfectionism.’ In this way, we can say that More’s Utopia is an excellent example of a ‘transgressive utopianism’. The island of Utopia is ambiguous, certain aspects of its alternative lifestyle are eutopian and some dystopian, and the story itself is another instance of ambiguity, making its case through ‘outsideness’, as opposed to the perfect society of eutopia or the negative criticisms of dystopia. In both eutopia and dystopia, however, we recognize that there is a common thread, and that is a fictional or imaginative element. This element is purged from all particular instances of realized utopia, which leads to the inductive conclusion that utopia is meant to remain in the realm of the imagination. It is not a wonder then that the dystopia often takes the form of the novel or the film, and the eutopia manifests itself in these forms and others, including poetry and painting. The innovative transgressive form of More’s Utopia sits somewhere between literary fiction and philo-
sophical theory. Ernst Bloch points out that the genre that More establishes already contains within it the insistence on the inseparability of utopia from fiction and philosophy, keeping utopia moving in the realm of the imaginary: Indeed, the utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary (a sometimes almost forgotten totality) to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia. (Bloch, 45)
The concept of utopia was present in works of literature before More ever coined the term. Plato’s Republic is an obvious example, but the mythological and biblical representations of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei and Dante Alighieri’s De Monarchia and Divina Commedia were also influential to More. In each of these examples there is an element of the transgressive utopian form that we outlined above, yet no two transgressive genres are exactly alike. The form of More’s Utopia is an imaginative space, a fictional island thought somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, but portrayed as real. This form renders More’s island of Utopia to be at once a ‘good-not-place’ and also ‘some-place-good.’ In the blurring of fiction and reality, Utopia is acting against the tyranny of the possible. This act of blurring is what Viktor Shklovsky would call defamiliarization [ostranenie] or estrangement. More’s portrayal of some place other rather than some place not, results in a sort of perceptual dislocation and provides Utopia with the leverage of ambiguity. The dialogic form provides a ground for the testing of philosophical ideas, but the extraordinary or carnival quality brings the imaginary into the real, while
reflecting the individual in the imaginary, the exotopia, the outside-non-place of desire. The realm of desire is a realm which escapes the limitations and restrictions of society or its dominant system of representation. It is a realm where concepts can be created, and tests measuring the validity or truth of these ideas can be conducted. Ideas can be formed through open-ended communication, liberated from the oppressive regimes of social discourse. The nature of More’s wordplay (Raphael Hythloday, utopia, etc.) is ambiguous and satirical, and, following the Socratic form, utilizes the devices of syncrisis in the dialogical style of the writing and also anacrisis in its expectation of and provocation to a response. Viewing Utopia in the context of Bakhtin’s concept of exotopy will bring light to More’s creation. The theory of exotopy posits that man becomes self-conscience only through reflection and by the mediation of others. The Socratic dialogue or the Menippean satire form implicit within Utopia are what Bakhtin calls ‘serio-comical’ or ‘carnivalized’ gestures, a glimpse of the post-modernist tendency to break down philosophical and aesthetic hierarchies. Both Bakhtin and Shklovsky insist that art has this ability, though Shklovsky argues from a formalist standpoint that art has the capacity to unveil that which has been hidden beneath our nose through habitualization, through what he calls estrangement or defamiliarization. The reallocation of More’s political thought to an imaginary, fictive space in the form of a novel allows for the free assessment of his own theories of the state from a dehabitualized perspective. Bakhtin asserts that there are two stages in every creative act: the stage of empathy and
identification, the a reverse moment, a reflection, where the novelist or artist returns to his own position with a new self-conscientious perspective. More’s work is transgressive in that it violates the limits of the genre and remains open-ended. Open-endedness is the key to More’s Utopia and thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and Stephen Duncombe would attest to this. The twenty-first century has reclaimed Utopia for its transgressive qualities. Deconstructing and decentering hierarchies, without the dogmatism of certain post-modern theory, the transgressive utopia is a vehicle for the promotion of hope and facilitation of the desire for change. If, as Gilles Deleuze wrote, “utopia is what links philosophy with its own epoch,” then the form that we analyzed above puts it in the world through art, making the possibility of change into a collective vision (Deleuze, 99). Its democratic methods evade totalitarian proclamation, and map an imaginary space for experimentation.
social dreaming:
.1
Oscar Wilde said, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias” (Wilde, 1891, pp.303-304). It is the perpetual dream of a people, a vision of a better society, that Utopia is founded upon. Utopia (good-not-place) is positioned in a sort of noman’s land between desire and its realization. The utopian vision is relative, each sail towards new horizons is along an orientation of current needs or desires, always to change the present. The direction of true utopia is ineffable, it always escapes us or corrupts. What Lyman Tower Sargent calls the human tendency toward social dreaming is, in general, a perpetual game, where Utopia is never reached but always in the distance. It is a dialectical play where the alternative, the ‘better society,’ which we so desire seems to be pushed off further with each step we take.
1_
desire:
.2
Desire is the nexus, and the most ambiguous quality of utopianism. In Lucy Sargisson’s book, Fools Gold?: Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century, she references Ruth Levitas’ theory that utopias inspire change and educate desire for a better future (Sargisson, 2012, p.8). Desire is a sense of longing, or hoping for a certain person, object, or outcome. There are put in place societal systems of ‘desire management,’ systems that describe the qualia of desire in society. The main desire management systems are mythologies and religions, aesthetics, science, and the modern entertainment industries in the technocratic society. These management systems are very much a social superstructure, becoming the framework for ideological constructions and thus the producer of culture, as well as the censor of cultural productions.
2.1
eutopia/dystopia:
.3
Desire, as explained above, distinguishes between eutopia, which imagines and desires a better alternative, and dystopia, which imagines a worse society. The difference between these two distinct forms which exist under the umbrella term utopia, is the difference between desire and hope, and fear and hopelessness. In the section below on psychoanalysis, we describe Freud’s model of the human psyche and its divisions of the id, ego, and super-ego. In comparison with the eutopia/dystopia dichotomy, we see a thread linking the pleasure-principle and the instinctual desires of the id with concepts of eutopia, and the dystopian, exaggerated fear of the future drawn from reality in connection with the super-ego. It is important to keep in mind that eutopia for some is dystopia for others and a non-oppressive, universal utopia will remain an impossibility. What Tom Moylan has posited, along with other scholars in utopian studies, is a third form of utopia, or critical utopia. Critical utopia, we could say belongs to the realm of the ego, as the mediator between the desires of the eutopian id and the dystopian super-ego. The critical utopia is ambiguous, a product of post-structuralism, it balances multiplicities of binaries, juggling between them, in search of an alterity that is opposite to the cultural hegemony of capitalism.
2.2
psychoanalysis:
.4
Psychoanalysis is modern phenomenon, residing on the periphery of the fields of religion, philosophy, and science proper, psychoanalysis essentially created its own niche which is practiced and judged with its own unique set of values. An important axiomatic theme in any psychoanalytic theory is what is called the ‘psychoanalytic division.’ First formulated in full by Sigmund Freud, this is a dualistic split between the pleasure principle, or the instinctual seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain, and the reality principle, the mind’s capacity to access the reality of the external world. Comprehension of the two principles of mind allows one to act accordingly. What causes us to act on either the instant gratification of the pleasure principle or the sober lucidity of the reality principle is contingent on Freud’s
structural model of the human psyche and its divisions in the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The Freudian model is very tightly connected to the concept of desire as well as explaining the differences in primal and instinctual trends of desire (id), realistic desires on the level of the individual’s self-interest (ego), and the critical decision-making of a conscious, communal ethics (super-ego). Psychoanalysis was also used later, by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, to coerce or persuade people en masse. Bernays is mostly known as the father of ‘public relations’ (PR). Putting Freud’s psychoanalytic theories to practice allowed Bernays the power to manipulate the desires of the citizen on each level of their psyche. Manipulation of the psyche and coercion to submit to certain manufactured desires on the ideal level i.e., the ‘American Dream’, or to purchase the new and mostly unnecessary material commodity as a social symbol of power or sexuality. This was an example of capitalism’s utopian reification of social relations. This sort of psychoanalytic practice was also the foundation for the production of state propaganda and even the endemic spread of hyper-nationalism and anti-semitism that occurred in Hitler’s Germany.
2.3
what if?:
.5
What if Plato never meant for the Republic to be realized? What if the State was ever only a metaphor for the true nature of our reality. What if each successive attempt at utopia is actually a step away from our true goal, a spiritual Utopia in which we return to the gates of Eden? What if Utopia is not the result of progress, but a condition which can only be reached when we return to our original stasis?
3.1
criticism:
.6
Criticism in utopian thinking is an important concept in two significant ways; on the one hand, the author or thinker’s development of utopia and its criticisms aimed at the current society, and on the other hand an acute awareness of the resulting criticisms aimed at the proffered utopia. In Stephen Duncombe’s introduction to Thomas More’s Utopia, he analyzes the ‘closed’ critical mode in a contemporary setting. Using the example of neoliberal capitalism, Duncombe explains that the all-penetrating ideology of neoliberalism will not be changed by criticism, and it has, in fact, assimilated criticism as a functioning part of its own system. Closed criticism which offers no alternative becomes an empty threat, ignored by the system which retains power and control. In Utopia, we listen as Raphael Hythloday’s criticisms are devalued. More, as a character in the plot, agrees with Hythloday. “One is never to offer propositions or advice that we are certain will not be entertained […] Discourses so much out of the road could not avail anything, nor have any effect on men whose minds were prepossessed with different sentiments” (Duncombe, xvii, xxv).
3.2
disasterbation:
.7 Disasterbation is a term found in Stephen Duncombe’s Open Utopia: “Finally, the desire encouraged through dystopic spectatorship is perverse. We seem to derive great satisfaction from vicariously experiencing our world destroyed by totalitarian politics, rapacious capitalism, runaway technology, or ecological disaster; and dystopic scenarios 1984, Brave New World, Blade Runner, The Day After Tomorrow, The Matrix, 2012 have proved far more popular in our times than any comparable Utopic text. Contemplating the haunting beauty of dystopic art, like Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones’s recent “London Futures” show at the Museum of London in which the capital of England lies serenely under seven meters of water,18 brings to mind the famous phrase of Walter Benjamin, that our “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”19 While such dystopic visions are, no doubt, sincerely created to instigate collective action, I suspect what they really inspire is a sort of solitary satisfaction in hopelessness. In recent years a new word has entered our vocabulary to describe this very effect: “disasterbation.” (Duncombe, xix, emphasis original)
Dystopianism, and to some degree anti-utopianism, and its utilization of fear and hopelessness as tools to inspire change, becomes in reality the perverse desire for fear and hopelessness itself. Dissatisfaction is considered an innate characteristic of the human condition, according to John Gray’s anti-utopianism. Gray believes that there is an impossibility in realizing our dreams, “the paradox of the human condition. We may dream of harmony, for example, but we are unable to live without conflict” (Sargisson, 2012, p.28-29). This propensity for conflict and dissatisfaction is one of Gray’s arguments for anti-utopianism. “If humans differ from other animals, it is partly in their conflicts of interests. They crave security, but they are easily bored; they are peace-loving animals, but they have an itch for violence; they are drawn to thinking, but at the same time they hate and fear the unsettlement thinking brings. There is no way of life in which all these needs can be satisfied. (Gray, 2002, 116)”
Dissatisfaction and discontent could be the cause of our tendency toward disasterbation. Slavoj Žižek, in his argument for anti-anti-utopianism, states that “we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes; the whole life of earth disintegrating because of some virus, because of a meteorite hitting the earth and so on” (Sargisson, 2012, p.31-32). Žižek is here arguing for a reinvented utopianism; citing this sort of ‘disasterbatory’ behavior as a symptom of our complacency in a flawed societal structure.
3.3
The aesthetic pleasure of our own self-destruction comes directly out of the ability to enjoy images on a scale made possible by mechanical reproduction.
fiction/fact:
.8
The mechanism of utopian thinking is a kind of imagining-machine. Utopia exists in the realm of imaginative space, rendering it not a ‘good-not-place,’ but a ‘some-placegood.’ Utopia is acting against the tyranny of the possible and imaginative utopian thinking challenges the current society, presenting an alternative in a consumable fashion, and avoids the pitfalls of criticism by developing its own aesthetic form. The imaginative space of utopia is often a work of drama, a tragedy which blends and blurs fact and fiction, opening utopia up to consideration and possibility. Blurring and occupation of the ‘neutral place’ are some of the primary actions of the great utopian texts, Dante’s Inferno, More’s Utopia, and some of the imaginative works of contemporary science fiction are good examples of this. To ‘open’ utopia is to encourage participation. Garnering enough participation amounts to real change, even if the original vision exists in the imagination.
3.4
vessel:
.9
The vessel is a container implying both an encompassing and an accommodating. The vessel is also a carrier, a tool and a method of mobilization. Much like the old adage about the glass half full, the vessel is a subject of our perceptions. As the optimist sees the glass half full, so the utopian thinker sees the vessel, and hopes for the future. The dystopian thinker, on the other hand, sees the vessel heading for disaster. The other, the transgressive utopian thinker, the anti-anti-utopian thinker, sees the vessel as one of difference. This type of thinking recognizes both sides of the argument, but instead of occupying a ground of indifference, attempts to reconcile the vessel, to shift from a conflict of perspectives to a respect for difference. This type of thinker takes a stance separate from the right or the left wings, and instead attempts to construct a framework for a ‘third way.’ The role of the neutral vessel in reconciling disparate opinions also brings together the symbolic and the social, art and not-art, fact and fiction. The vessel is an opportunity for bringing the imaginary to the real, and putting the now in relation to the future. We as human beings, as the hand through which the imaginary can come to life, are also vessels and our differences proves each of us to be unique. It can be said that our past must be taken into account at each instance of the present, for if the past is forgotten, we are empty.
4.1
art/activism; art/politics:
.10
Art and activist art play a part in the manifestation of utopias by intervening in the collective social management of desire. Management of desire describes the qualia of desire in society, imposing alongside of it general guidelines or norms that one is expected to follow. The artist-activist is effective, if not in forming a communication between otherwise disconnected entities, then at least in exposing the discursive foundations of their own society; they can expose the main systems for collective ‘desire management’ and open desire up to more democratic methodologies. The management systems are generally a society’s mythologies and religions, its metrics of aesthetic value, science, and modern entertainment industries in the technocratic age. The artist is supposed to create, the activist is to debate. The creation of artworks that have elements of what Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as carnival, spectacular, or extraordinary are artworks that attack morals, biases, and pre-conceptions. The artist-activist is clearing away society’s machinic restrictions of desire.
4.2
sustainability:
.11
“When they have thus taken care of their whole country, and laid up stores for two years (which they do to prevent the ill consequences of an unfavorable season), they order an exportation of the surplus, both of corn, honey, wool, flax, wood, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle, which they send out, commonly in great quantities to other nations” (More, 110).
We see in More’s Utopia a form of early communism, an economic system of production that is generally founded on a mindfulness of their own community and a sustainable approach to the production and distribution of resources. Of course, More’s Utopia predates the systematic philosophy of Karl Marx, and therefore most likely influenced the Marxist program. More’s critique of the capitalist system is one which examines the surplus of goods, after the community is cared for. If the stores of these goods are enough to provide the people with a healthy, happy life, then any sort of monetary system stands only as an aid to those people who were not able to grow enough corn, or used up their stores of wool in an especially frigid winter. The bond system which More expounds is “A method by which money could become worthless” (More, 111).
5.1
definition of luxury:
.12
More’s anti-capitalistic economic thinking is especially utilitarian, also predating those thinkers, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, who are regarded as founding the ethical system of utilitarianism. In a society where the symbolic value of money (at least as in the standard of gold and silver) is worthless except as a provision of wealth when measured within the metrics of others’ symbolic value systems, then the material of precious metals for the Utopians becomes more utilitarian and its use value outweighs its exchange value. The definition of luxury is the by-product of an unfair system; without the differentiation between high and low, rich and poor, there would be no symbolic exchange value to assign to any sort of commodity. More revels in the erasure of symbolic value from the ‘precious metals,’ explaining that “they make their chamber-pots and close-stools of gold and silver,” and of the same metals “make chains and fetters for their slaves” (More, 113). And on that we exclaim, “O magnificent debasement of gold!”
5.2
Plato’s Cave:
.13 The shadow game as ‘disneyfication’ (Darko Suvin), a convincing show which tries to convince its spectators that shadows are reality (as opposed to an imitation of an imitation). The prisoner’s forced removal from the cave is an example of his ascent toward education. His release [λύω] from the cave symbolizes man’s ascent into the realm of pure forms. There is a liminal state, in which the prisoner’s eyes must adjust to true reality, which Plato metaphorically describes as sunlight. This is the transition from the false reality of deception and imitation within the cave, to the true reality of the light. The transition is characterized
by a sort of groping for the truth, a condition in which the ‘sights and sounds’ of physical things stand as surrogates to the truth, or imitations of pure forms. Eventually, with the adjustment of the eyes, the rational mind, through education, man can truly see the light and thus feels compelled to bring the Truth back into the cave. This process is one of recollection, in which the prisoner is only ‘remembering’ the way things were before birth; in other words, through education the prisoner is exposed to the reality of pure forms, and can know Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, things of which he saw only imitations of before. Of course it must be noted that the epistemological starting point for the prisoner’s education of the pure form realm is aporia according to Plato. On his release from the cave, the prisoner is struck with aporia, the irresolvable contradiction of knowing nothing, shocked even. This is the first step toward knowledge, necessarily leading to the recognition of its limits. This shocking of the epistemological limits of what is true promotes active perception of natural reality through reason, as opposed to the passive acceptance of un-natural imitations [See the entry on Defamiliarization]. This is also the recognition of the dividing line between true knowledge [episteme] and opinion [doxa]. As Jason Wirth notes in his book on Schelling, man is afflicted with Sensucht, or the aporia of desire for the nameless Good. Taking this into account in an analysis of Plato’s cave, Sensucht, in all its ambivalence, may represent the pull of man towards the sun, towards knowledge [noesis], and also man’s tendency towards ignorance and his complacency with torture. More on that later.
6_
habitualization v. defamiliarization:
.14 The unexamined life is not worth living. Viktor Shklovky said, “Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” The habitualization of life goes back innumerable years. We catch a glimpse of our fate in Plato’s Republic in which the discourse of labor is manipulated in a Soviet-styled twist: where the ‘slaves’ of other states are called ‘maintainers.’ Plato’s slaves may still be slaves even if they are not named slaves per se. So-
ciety itself is an unnatural structure, the product of language, and we, a product of society. Habitualization works to retain power within the dominant ideology of the society, as well as repress all threats to that power. It is not a process specific to any one society but a general symptom of all societies. The habitualized subject is like the prisoner in the cave, bound and blind to the outside, but complacent, and probably happy, in their ignorance. Defamiliarization or estrangement is comparable to shocking one out of their habits. Art as realism can act as a platform for repeating lived experience (imitation of imitation) and assigning the perceptions of the everyday. In the same way that language in discourse can invoke a habitualized perception, so too can the recreation of life in art invoke habitualization. It is believed by some that this sort of recreation molds people toward obedience. Viktor Shklovksy coined the term defamiliarization as a method of counteracting habitualization. Mikhail Bakhtin, a contemporary of Shklovsky, writes, “There is a tendency to create the extraordinary situation, one which would cleanse the word of all life’s automatism and object-ness, which would force a person to reveal the deepest layers of his personality and thought� (Bakhtin, 1984, p.111). What he is proposing is the possibility for dialogue to defamiliarize the subject from his/her own habitualization, to shock them from their blindness. It is to provoke them out of their complacency within the cave. It is the pull from the outside, the aporia of testing ideas, the ideas of truths, the aporia of attempting to see what cannot be seen.
7_
exotopy or ‘outsideness’:
.15
Breaking from the historico-philosophical fantasy of autogenesis, or the total self-sufficiency and autonomy of man, Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy and especially his theory of exotopy posits that man becomes self-conscience only through reflection by the mediation of others. If utopia is the ‘good-not-place,’ then exotopia is the ‘outside-notplace,’ the product of the fragmented mind and the imagination. Compare exotopia to Michel Foucault’s conception of heterotopia. If the primary role of the ‘carnivalesque’ is to overthrow the imposed one-sided discourse, then exotopia is the horizon towards which these methods are oriented. A subversion of the system of representation into which we are born, the fantasized real, the daydream or the psychotic vision, overthrows the dominant superstructures of society by existing both here and nowhere. Exotopia (outsideness) positions the subject experience on the boundaries, externalized and decentered. At the same time, the subject is positioned in-between allowing that place “over there” to simultaneously be here.
8_
body politic:
.16 In The Leviathan, Hobbes describes the State as a “living form,” and the first edition of the book illustrates this formation as an anthropomorphic aggregate of individual people. If the State, in the development of its Sovereign authority and state apparatuses and by extension of the ‘social contract’ theory, had the power to demarcate “coherent living forms” out of individual bodies, than the design of the State is machinic, forming assemblages of people to carry out specific tasks. The role of these tasks were mostly of maintenance, maintaining the system that the machine has prescribed and metaphorically keeping that machine alive. The machine (hereon referred to as ‘the Machine’) of Lang’s Metropolis is a lucid depiction of Hobbes’ Leviathan seen through the lens of Karl Marx’s conception of the bourgeois State. Hobbes wrote that the ‘art of man’ is “…that it can make an artificial animal.” ‘The Machine’ is envisioned as a living form, an ‘artificial body,’ existing as a complex as-
semblage of smaller machines like organs, interconnected by tubes and valves not unlike the system of veins and tendons in the human body. ‘The Machine’s’ life-blood is the sacrificial labor of the working class, synchronized and choreographed movements that keep the ‘artificial body’ alive and in the process alienate the person from their own labor. As Eda Cufer points out in The State and Its Double, “the principles of secular governing which were set into practice in early modern times and eventually developed into various modern forms of government, sprang out of Middle Age imaginaries and their dialectic of sacrifice.” The principle of sacrifice here reminds of the figure of Moloch. The word Moloch is derived etymologically from the root word mlk [king] which corresponds to the centralized Sovereign authority of the Leviathan, the king with two bodies, the mortal body and the superhuman ‘body politic.’ The god Moloch was often depicted as a statuary idol for child sacrifice. We see the biblical imposition of Moloch in Metropolis, when the character Freder enters the factory and watches the meltdown of ‘the Machine,’ the result of a worker’s debilitating exhaustion. Unlike the biblical Moloch however, ‘the Machine’ does not require child sacrifice but instead the sacrifice of the proletariat, the individual worker is dehumanized and man becomes machine. The individual’s physical body is reduced to a piston, its purpose becomes only the self-preservation of itself and of the machine. Walter Benjamin, citing Marx, writes that “workers learn to coordinate their own ‘movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton.’” ‘The Machine’ of Metropolis is the artificial body of Moloch, it is the body politic of the modern Sovereign State.
9_
The Principle of Hope:
.17
In “The Principle of Hope,” Ernst Bloch writes that “now that the creators of fear have been dealt with, a feeling that suits us better is overdue” (Bloch, 42). Bloch explains that hope is an active emotion, and to hope for a new horizon, to desire a new horizon, is to look toward the new and the better; to hope is not to allow oneself to be overcome by fear. To hope is to take enjoyment out of the aesthetic experience of beauty rather than that of fear or destruction. Hope is the feeling that Bloch assigns to utopian thinking: always looking up toward new horizons. Action rather than passivity. By hoping for a better future we can develop our utopian consciousness, ‘polish’ it as Bloch says, and with our polished utopian consciousness we can “penetrate precisely the nearest nearness” (Bloch, 43). We hope to be-there in order to better be being-here. The principle of hope leads to the manifestation of our utopian images in reality. “There is also a lot of abstract escapism here, but great works of art essentially show a realistically related pre-appearance of their completely developed subject-matter” (Bloch, 43). Hope is transgressive, hope situates itself between desire and reality, hope is the primary drive of art, “presupposes possibility beyond already existing reality” (Bloch, 44). Hope is the emotion of the Not-Yet and therefore hope will never be destroyed.
10_
heterotopia:
.18
These are utopias and heterotopias. Utopia (good-not-place) is a site with no real place. For Foucault, utopias either represent society in a ‘perfected form’ (direct analogy with the real space of Society) or ‘upside down’ (inverted analogy, dystopia). Foucault believes that in every culture there are “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault, 3). The analogy of the mirror is used to differentiate between the utopia and the heterotopia. The utopia of the mirror is that is a placeless place, it displaces the beholder in an “unreal, virtual space […] that enables me to see myself there where I am absent.” The mirror of heterotopia is different in that the mirror exists in reality, it is showing the beholder’s absence from the grounded space of reality because how could they be where they believe they stand if they are shown that they are elsewhere? When the beholder perceives themselves as existing in a particular place they become aware of the reality in which they stand, that site which is connected to other sites, and at the same time “in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.” Heterotopia and utopia each function like a mirror, however utopia must have an unreal orientation, the image of utopia always exists in a virtual space. The heterotopia redirects the eye back upon itself, it is a site that is both here and nowhere.
11_
hyper-reality:
ART
“The specific pre-appearance which art shows is like a laboratory where events, figures and characters are driven to their typical, characteristic end, to an abysmal or a blissful end; this essential vision of characters and situations, inscribed in every work of art, which in its most striking form we may call Shakespearean, in its most terminalized form Dantean, presupposes possibility beyond already existing reality.� (Bloch, 44).
12_
notes: Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited by Caryl Emerson. Vol. 8. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Bloch, Ernst. “The Principle of Hope.” Utopias: Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Richard Noble. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009. 42-45. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Duncombe, Stephen. “Introduction: Open Utopia.” The Open Utopia. Accessed February 13, 2016. http://theopenutopia. org/full-text/introduction-open-utopia/. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité. October 1984. Originally published “Des Espace Autres.” March 1967. Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London: Granta, 2002. More, Thomas. Project Gutenberg eBook, Utopia. Translated by Gilbert Burnet, edited and with additional translation by Henry Morley (London: Cassell & Co, 1901). Transcribed by David Price. Release Date: April 22, 2005. Sargisson, Lucy. Fool’s Gold?: Utopianism in the Twenty- First Century. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Wilde, Oscar. “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” Fortnightly Review 291 (February 1891): 292-319.
plates: 1. Giorgio de Chirico, The Disquieting Muses, 1918 2. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Seasons, date unknown 3. Wyndham Lewis, The Surrender of Barcelona, 1934-7 4. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leeches, 1983 5. Burning Man festival, credit unavailable 6. Peter Bruegel, Parable of the Blind, 1568 7. Burning of the witches, credit unavailable 8. RenÊ Magritte, The Human Condition, 1935 9. Exekias, Amphora with Ajax and Achilles, 6th c. 10. Richard Lindner, Boy with Machine, 1954 11. Unknown artist, Women of the Kolkhoz 12. So it goes, even Lenin contemplated the golden loo. 13. Fernand Leger, Composition, 1924 14. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 15. Peter Bruegel, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559 16. Abraham Bosse, ill. for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, 1651 17. Alex Grey, Gaia, 1989 18. J.W. Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891